This is going on and on and on and you simply are not getting any of it. Can I beg you to have a go at answering your own questions. Just do a bit of thinking, and perhaps a bit of research for yourself.

@ Peter Lang,
thanks for that. Let’s just say at this stage I’m very sympathetic to nuclear power.

One last exercise. I’m not saying the following is costed and competitive with today’s nuclear, but I’d question the synergies you suggest. Why 100% wind + gas backup? The papers coming out at the moment suggest that they build enough wind to be around 40% of the grid as baseload, and then the solar thermal operates with biogas backup.

The thermal turbines on the solar plant are already there. Just turn on the bio-gas taps and cook up the steam and the plant keeps operating. It prevents needing to build a whole new biogas plant & turbine, which would otherwise be necessary in the 100% wind + biogas system you have suggested above. (If the biogas actually comes from biochar it’s a carbon Negative system as well). Sure after the growing season’s you’d probably have to brew up one heck of a lot of biogas for storage, but that storage would probably not have to make 100% of the storage we use.

Don’t forget the V2G cars are coming that can charge whenever the wind is blowing, and then sell back when the grid demands it. If we use Better Place battery swap systems, the price is gratis of Better Place… they have included the batteries in the price / km of their public charging points and battery swap charges (which are already almost half the price of oil).

As my car sticker says, “My next car will run on the wind”. (Free Better Place propaganda sticker… if you want them to go nuclear, have a chat with Shai Agassi and I’ll put one of those on my car instead. My focus is Better Place and Australian independence on oil. I like the wind idea, but not if it really is distracting from the debate we NEED to have on nuclear).

Lastly, some are saying wind is cheaper than coal, IF we don’t have to cost a backup system.

Say we have a baseload nuclear capacity with wind power mainly charging our cars. Could that be economically competitive?

Suppose you are building a house. You have a variety of construction materials to choose from – timber, brick, steel beams, glass, tile, etc. You obviously expect to use a mix of these materials. But you can’t begin to design that mix unless you understand the characteristics of the individual materials. How strong are they? How much do you need? How much do they cost?

Peter is trying to build an energy system. On his design palette, he has fossil fuels, wind, solar, hydro, nuclear. But he can’t design with these design elements unless he understands their individual characteristics. How much power can they provide? How reliable are they? How much do you need? How much will it cost? And, in this case, how much CO2 will they produce?

To understand his design elements, Peter has done the equivalent of designing a glass house to understand the limits of using glass as a building material. He’s done the same with wood, and steel. These design exercises have probed the qualities and limits of the design elements.

He has then followed up with a further design exercise where he builds from various combinations of materials, and compared the different structures in terms of strength, cost, build time, and waste.

By analysing each renewable technology individually, he’s also thrown light on the characteristics of an integrated system. Unfortunately the wind and solar components turn out to be the equivalent of wet cardboard and cured ham, and he’s found that if you build a house out of these materials, you’re still going to need just about as much brick and steel as a normal house, if you want it to stay standing, even if you use a combination of ham and cardboard.

Do you know what I think? They are afraid of nuclear energy because its acceptance will show everyone the magnitude of their error. They know that their followers will realize that they have been backing the wrong side, and as always in these cases will turn on their leaders like a pack of dogs.

And when that happens, I’m going buy beer and popcorn.

@27 April 2010 at 8.09 Said
Mate: I’m not very technical, but even I am left wondering if some of your article above is a straw-man debunking strategies none of the renewables guys are proposing?

28 April 2010 at 8.54 Said
I don’t see how debunking something no-one ever proposed helps clarify the situation.
…
Critiquing a completely unrealistic, exaggerated strawman of the renewables plans does as much for the credibility of these arguments as Dr Caldicott does for her anti-nuclear cause. I’m amazed at the obfuscation from both sides.

@ 28 April 2010 at 9.47 Said:

Sorry mate but you’re the one avoiding the issues. Maybe you need to actually review an actual renewables plan, and not debunk nonsense that no-one is proposing.

@ 28 April 2010 at 12.57 Said:
Some commenter at BNC occasionally act as high level priests initiated into the arcane arts and snubbing their noses at those who aren’t. But if you wish to communicate to non-technical activists like myself and have the nuclear power debate move forward, then maybe answering those questions in an intelligible manner for the uninitiated might help.

The issues you are raising have been discussed at length in the comments on these threads. I note you’ve bookmarked the paper but haven’t yet read it. I’ve responded to your comments and question, but understand that my explanation may not have made sense to you. I’ll make another attempt to answer your question below. If this is not sufficient, can I persuade you to read the article, and the preceding articles that it build on, and also perhaps follow through the discussion on the threads as these discuss the points you are raising.

The reason for the limit analysis – that is, looking at just solar power rather than a mix of renewable energy generators – in the first instance is so we can get an understanding of the mistakes and misinformation that is being propagated by the solar power advocates.

One of the most important mistakes is doing calculations on the basis of the average capacity factor over a year. Using an average capacity factor instead of the minimum capacity factor, under-estimates the cost by a huge amount.

Here is the explanation, in layman’s language

The average capacity factors from an actual solar farm are: annual = 13%, 3 months of winter = 9.6%, the worst days in winter = 0.75%, at night = 0%.

We need electricity to be generated at the instant we demand it. To achieve this when the solar thermal plants are not generating we need either energy storage, back up generators, or a mix of other renewables (such as you proposed http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/09/10/solar-realities-and-transmission-costs-addendum/#comment-60061 ).

The “Solar Power Realities” paper considered the option of all power being generated by solar power and using energy storage to supply the electricity when the sun is not shining. No one is suggesting this is a scheme that would be built (other than advocates like David Mills), but this is a way to look at the real costs of solar. You can downscale from providing all electricity to providing just 1 GW or 1MW or whatever you like. The principles apply generally. The principle is that you cannot use average capacity factors. You must look at how you will provide the power when the solar plant is generating at its minimum capacity factor.

As I mentioned, the ‘Solar Power Realities” paper looked at the situation with solar generators and energy storage. It considered two storage options: pumped hydro and NaS batteries. NaS batteries are the least cost battery option at the moment.

The “Emission Cuts Realities” paper considers a simple mix of renewable energy technologies together with gas back-up for wind power.

Lastly, let’s consider, in a really simple way for clarity, the situation with a mix of renewables to provide our power needs. We must remember that the power must be provided at the instant we need it. Let’s say we need to deliver 1GW of power on demand (just to keep this simple).

Let’s start with 1GW of solar PV. The capital cost is around $10 billion. We find we have no power at night and almost no power at some times on some days (heavily overcast). So we need to add something else to provide the 1GW power when it is demanded.

So we add 1 GW of wind power. The capital cost is about $2.6 billion. But we find the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

So we add 1GW of wave power. I don’t remember the capital cost but let’s say $10 billion. But then we have times when the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing and the sea swell is small.

We are now up to $22.6 billion

To link all these dispersed generation systems, we need a massively expensive electricity grid and we still don’t have dispatchable power (power that can be supplied when the user demands it).

So we have to add either: energy storage, or fossil fuel back up, or a dispatchable generators like biomass, geothermal or nuclear.

Biomass is expensive, requires enormous land area and has its own environmental problems.

The type of geothermal energy that Australia is attempting to develop has not been developed anywhere in the world yet. It may or may not eventuate as a commercial proposition. The world has been working on it for nearly 40 years and we have not advanced much in that time. There are still no commercial power stations anywhere in the world.

So why not simply skip all this nonsense and go straight to nuclear. The capital cost of the 1 GW would be around $4 billion, with all the impediments to nuclear remaining in place, or perhaps around $2 to $2.5 billion if the imposts were removed and we had a genuine level playing field for electricity supply.

Given that nuclear is about 10 to 100 times safer than our current electricity generating system, and is far more environmentally benign than any (including wind and solar), why don’t we just cut through all the irrational arguments and go straight to nuclear – preferably by removing all the impediments to it?

Also, just wanted to get this link in:
http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/nuclearsafety/webpptMay07.pdf
:-)

The ‘official’ null hypothesis for LNT is the one I stated in the first paragraph of my previous comment. It’s official, because it is the only one that can be set looking at the LNT in isolation. This is where the politics comes in.

Any rational examination of the problem would reject the whole damned hypothesis as ill-formed, and strike another one similar to the one you stated. However the radiation health sector, for any number of reasons, (none of them logical or scientific) cannot do this.

I have three hypotheses for exposure to radiation levels that are consistent in magnitude with natural background levels:

1: Increasing benefit
2: No effect
3: Increasing harm

Which of these should I select as my null hypothesis? It seems obvious to me that hypothesis #2 is the correct choice. The data is consistent with this, so this should be the basis for any further action.

If I use the same three hypotheses for radiation in the range of 100-1000 times natural background, I would still select #2 as my null hypothesis, but now the data would disprove it and support hypothesis #3, so that becomes the basis for future action.

Threshold is a concept borrowed from toxicology, in which a human being can accept a certain amount of a potentially toxic substance up to a certain dose without harm, and then after a “threshold” dose, harm occurs. “Linear” simply means that for a given increment of additional dose, a fixed amount of additional increased risk occurs.

A broad look at the available data demonstrates that there appears to be certain levels of radiation exposure that confer no harm to human beings, but then at some point the risk of cancer rises precipitously. In other words, there appears to be a finite threshold, and beyond that threshold there appears to be an increased risk for cancer according to a nonlinear quadratic function. Therefore, the Null hypothesis to the LNT model remains yet to be disproved.

Note that this is essentially a Catch-22 situation, because the hypothesis is poorly formed, since there is no stated lower bounds at all.

It is, however not necessary to prove or disprove the LNT null hypothesis if the hormesis null hypothesis can be disproved, and that IS possible.

One thing life did not apparently do was to evolve an organ that can detect radiation. This lack of a radiation sense points to the fact that living organisms have no need to detect such a low risk phenomenon. Indeed, ionizing radiation only seems exotic and mysterious to some people because it was not discovered until relatively recently, unlike light and heat say.

It is nevertheless nothing more than another form of energy. The perceived distinction has serious negative consequences but has no scientific basis. However, for statistical reasons the LNT cannot be falsified and so the precautionary principle has been adopted at an unacceptable societal cost .

(I know it will come as a huge shock to you, but I’m just being honest as to how completely I’m not wired in that direction.)
;-)

I lose patience with my spellchecker when it keeps insisting that there’s no such word as ‘GWe.y’.

I don’t know where that extra ‘e’ came from.

It fell off the French side of Concorde