Despite what some may like you to believe, the nuclear renaissance is upon us. Don’t let anyone get away with telling you otherwise — they are badly misleading you. Indeed, given that the the real-world facts are so readily available, one really does have to wonder how long these ideologues imagine they can pull the wool over the eyes of the public? Do they really care about fixing climate change?
What is happening now
The bastion of atomic energy over the next two decades will be Generation III reactors, despite the enormous medium- to long-term promise of Generation IV (as I recently explained, here). This is not idle speculation -– it is already happening in the world’s fastest-growing economies. At the time of writing this blog post, over 65 of these modern nuclear reactors are under construction (or nearly so). Twenty-three new nuclear power plants are being built in China alone, which is targeting 70 gigawatts of extra nuclear power by 2020. In addition, there are serious plans in China for two sodium-cooled fast reactors (BN-800) of the “Generation IV” design, following the completion of the first Russian unit in 2012 — the sort of reactor that some people think ‘don’t exist’.
How about this for some supporting statistics: 29 new reactors, totalling 26 gigawatts of electricity output (operating at high capacity factors without the need for energy storage/backup), will start operation in 13 different countries in the 2010 — 2012 period – that’s within the next 3 years (average reactor size is 880 MWe). Of course, this new-generation nuclear deployment rate must continue to accelerate if we’re to have any realistic chance of completely replacing fossil fuels by 2050, but it’s a great beginning!
Justifying assumptions of lifespan and capacity factors
If nuclear energy was too costly and slow to deploy, as some (such as Prof Ian Lowe in his section of the book Why vs Why: Nuclear Power), why would China, South Korea, India, Russia and other rapidly developing nations risk their precious finances on such foolhardy ventures? The answer, these governments say, is that their investment in nuclear power is both prudent and timely, and so they are willing to put their money where their mouths are. This is reality and trumps the hand-wringing concerns of disengaged critics.
With regard to the economics of new nuclear power, Prof Lowe argues (in the Why vs Why book) that my estimates of the economics of nuclear power are “unrealistic” and represent nothing more than “wishful thinking on a grand scale”. He says this is because I assume that a nuclear power station will last for 60 years and deliver power 90 per cent of the time. Let me allay his concerns with some examples from real-world experience.
For the period 2006 to 2008, the 104 reactors operating in the United States reported an energy availability factor of 91.4 per cent. In Korea, Finland and Switzerland, it was 91.9, 93.3 and 92.8 per cent, respectively. Even the Chinese, who are still accumulating experience in optimal operations, reached 86.6 per cent. Furthermore, while the reactors built in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s had a nominal design lifetime of 40 years, more than 60 of them have since been granted licence renewals, extending their operating lives out to 60 years. Others are expected to apply for similar extensions. This is actual performance data, not speculation.
Current construction costs
As I explained above, nuclear power is being most actively pursued today in China (23 reactors currently under construction), India (4), South Korea (6) and Russia (8), and in terms of forward projections through to 2020, China plans to expand its nuclear generation capacity to 70 GW (up from 8.6 GW in 2010), South Korea to 27.3 GW (up from 17.7 GW), and Russia from 43.3 GW (up from 23.2 GW). Looking further ahead, India’s stated goal is 63 GW by 2032 and 500 GW by 2060, whilst China’s 2030 target is 200 GW, with at least 750 GW by 2050. These nations are heavily focused on rapidly overcoming first-of-a-kind (FOAK) costs and establishing standardised designs based around modular construction and passive safety principles. By contrast, the country with the most installed nuclear power – the United States, with over 100 commercial reactors – has announced loan guarantees to support new plants, but has not yet started construction of any Generation III reactors.
It is therefore in the rapidly developing Asian countries that current real-world costs can be most reliably established. The two leading reactor designs now being built in China are the indigenous CPR-1000 and the Westinghouse AP-1000. Reported capital costs are in the range of $1,296 to $1,790/kW. Korea has focused attention on its APR-1400 design, with domestic overnight costs of $2,333/kW. A recent contract for $20.4 billion has been signed with Korean consortium KEPCO to build four APR-1400 reactors in the United Arab Emirates, at a turnkey cost of $3,643/kW. This price is notable considering that it is offered under near-FOAK conditions, because these will be the UAE’s first nuclear plants.
Alternatives are not stacking up
Prof Lowe touts a crystal-ball-gazing exercise by some Stanford University researchers as offering a pathway to a renewable energy solution. I have critiqued that study heavily elsewhere , but the bottom line is this:
If non-hydro renewable energy were truly as cost-effective and could be built on the scale these authors would like you to believe, why has no nation yet followed this energy pathway?
Denmark has done the most in this respect, with 18 per cent of its average energy coming from wind power. Yet, despite this investment in non-hydro renewables, the carbon intensity for electricity production in Denmark is 650 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. By contrast, the figure for France, which draws 77 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, is 90 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. This is more than 7 times lower than Denmark, per unit of delivered electricity. This is the stark reality, not the spin.
Yet again, real-world experience says far more about energy truths than any ivory tower speculation. Importantly, this is an energy truth that is actually great news for carbon emissions reduction and our pursuit of a sustainable society. It’s now urgent that this message to be understood by the classic environmental movement.
Conclusion
Allow me to quote the conclusion of my recent book:
It’s time to embrace nuclear energy as a core technology in the carbon-free revolution that the world needs to address climate change.
Many environmentalists believe the best low-carbon solution is for governments to guide us back to simpler, less energy-consuming lives, a vastly less consumer-oriented world. That is unrealistic. The world will continue to need energy, and lots of it. But fossil fuels are not a viable option. Nor are renewables the main answer. There is no single solution, or “silver bullet”, for solving the energy and climate crises, but there are bullets, and they’re made of uranium and thorium, the fuels needed for nuclear plants.
It is advanced nuclear power that provides the technological key to unlocking the awesome potential of these energy metals for the benefit humankind and for the long-term sustainability of our society and the environment on planet Earth.
Brave New Climate 
264 replies on “The 21st century nuclear renaissance is starting – good news for the climate”
@P. Lang: a weed is merely a herb growing in the wrong place (compare: stinging nettle tea, dandelion wine. etc.); a weed is a plant that has learned all survival techniques bar how to grow next to itself in a straight line.
Apart from that, it may well be that is you who are distracting, not me.
Because the safety record of NPPs since 1945 compared to coal or oil hydro or natgas is not the point. It is nevertheless this red herring that you are seemingly evidencing.
By contrast, I am addressing the resilience of any all-electric economy obtaining all its power from uranium, thorium or derivatives thereof. It is not clear how many people are needed to keep running a given NPP and whether they can be replaced by eg unskilled soldiers at short notice in a pandemic. My question is whether the staffing requirement of an NPP has fallen over time since 1945 and what the nature of that staffing expertise is.
Between 1900 and 2000, men under orders were used by States in civil and other wars and emergencies to perform various industrial processes for which they had not been trained when the skilled workers were not available (death/illness, desertion, captivity). But the power production sources in those societies will not have been all-nuclear-electric, so there will have been a certain redundancy.
I am trying to envisage a similar, because realistic, scenario for nuclear. In other words, for how long and in what way can an NPP run itself?
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The deal with the danish wind grid is actually not very relevant for the overall carbon intensity of the danish grid – mostly, the danish utilities export zero carbon wind to Norway/Sweden during high production periods, and then import about as much zero carbon hydro power back during low output – so the net effect on carbon intensity is very small. The economics are, of course, horrid and as a practical matter, it implies that anyone without extremely large amounts of hydro power in the vicinity would find it very difficult to get nearly as much wind online as Denmark has without frying their grid. (you could, alternatively, back the wind with open cycle gas, but this is a horrible idea from a carbon perspective.)
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” Finrod, on 19 June 2010 at 4.40 Said:
Well, Alain is a real peice of work. Rarely have I recently seen so many of the tired old renewables myths presented in one package like that. I don’t really have the energy to critique each point in detail now, but for nuclear plant construction it is indeed clear that we need to educate and train many scientists, engineers, technicians and construction workers to meet the demands for those skills. So what? Ten years, fifteen, then we’ll be ready to roll out hundreds of plants each year. It’s not magic, just proper planning.
Presenting Denmark as a poster child for efficiency is just too laughable. After decades of wasting resources on wind power, they have the highest electricity costs with the highest carbon intensity in the EU. Compare them to France to see what is really possible. ”
Finrod,
You are a joke. Ten years, fifteen years from now, we won’t be ready to roll out hundreds of plants a year. The USA took 30 years to build it’s own 104 NPP’s, that’s 3.5 NPP’s per year. China is planning to spend 40 years over the same target. And India even longer. That rest my case that you are a joke.
As I wrote earlier, we need to roll out 3 NPP’s a MONTH for the next 60 years, to increase NPP’s share of global primary energy supply from it’s current 5% to a needed 25%, just to curb the GHG emissions in a relevant way, which of course you help increase with your mammoth fuel guzzling SUV, and wasteful living habits.
To stay in topic, Finland is now 2 years over time with it’s only NPP being built. Why ? Construction manpower issues, not enough capable design engineers at the general contractor Areva due to too many sold NPP projects at the same time, global special steel supply issues, winter weather issues and so on. The relationship between the general contractor Areva and the Finnish government has soured so much that they do not talk to each other anymore, because Areva wants to increase the price tag very much halfway the project, to cover all the encountered issues. And Finland’s (or for that case Australia’s) salaries and work regulations aren’t China’s or India’s , where you can find a dude willing to work for $ 500 a month, working 6 days a week on 12 hours a day shifts.
If you had bothered to read what I posted here up, which of course you conveniently forgot to do, you would have seen that Denmark is NOT my poster child, YOU made it sound like that.
Just relying on 100% wind power as your solution is simply nuts, since wind power is a variable energy resource, and needs to be used right away, or stored in pumped up water storage or other relevant storage technology for later dispatching, if not used right away. By the way, Denmark is exporting most of its wildly fluctuating wind power to larger neighbours while finding other solutions for supply and demand at home, so there goes you national Denmark carbon footprint.
Click to access sharman-winddenmark.pdf
Let’s talk again in a decade, when the 800 million people European Union will have mostly achieved it’s intermediary goal to reduce energy consumption by 20%, increase it’s electricity supply from renewables from current 7% to it’s target of 20%, while reducing it’s CO2 emissions by 20% from 1990 levels. We will use biogas digesters, biomass cogeneration, wind, solar thermal CSP, solar PV, geothermal, nuclear, heat pumps, near zero energy passive housing, combined heat an power coupled with district heating and cooling, hydropower, electric trains, electric cars, PHEV, hybrid car and truck technology, reduce fossil fuel subsidies, tax FF use to pay for increasing RE penetration, already implement high ceiling prices on petroleum consumption, cap & trade on CO2 emissions, force stringent fuel consumption standards on truck & car manufacturers, push for more public mass transportation systems, forbid the production of incandescent lighting bulbs, allowing only energy efficient lighting and appliances to be sold, and so on, till we get where we want to be.
I am pretty sure that by then, you still we be whining about a nuclear solution to all energy problems, conveniently forgetting that you need a few thousand people per NPP to be built, and you need to built 3 NPP a month just to avoid global warming, starting from NOW.
And if you knew a bit about nuclear power, you would also point out that France has serious summer time operational issues with it’s 85% nuclear power plants power park : since most NPP’s are designed to work in a baseload cycle to obtain their 65% energy efficiency levels and 90% plus operation record, France has discovered that this is draining their rivers and inland lakes so much during the summers due to cooling water over consumption, that they are forced to shut many of those inland built NPP plants down to save their rivers and lakes. Of course they then have to rely on their backup coal or hydro power plants to complement the daily peak power loads that cannot be supplied by their own shutdown NPP’s, since there is simply not enough water available to keep them operating in a safe way, for the NPP’s that are built inland and not near the sea.
So my point is that NPP’s are great as a baseload electricity solution WHEN USED IN AN APPROPRIATE SETTING, but ISN’T a panacea for every power production issue, as you want me to believe.
Yeah, indeed, you are a joke.
Regards,
Alain Verbeke
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/04/women-solar-entrepreneurs-transforming-bangladesh
Women Solar Entrepreneurs Transforming Bangladesh. Dipal Barua is implementing renewable energy solutions that empower women, create jobs, facilitate rural development and protect the environment. By the end of 2009, more than 300,000 solar home PV systems had been installed, bringing electricity to more than two million people.
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/_a/project_focus_morocco_secures_agreements_for_9billion_solar_plans/
Morocco has now reportedly secured agreements with the World Bank, the European Commission and Germany in connection with its large-scale US$9 billion solar project, which is expected to produce 38% of the country’s power by the year 2020. The project consists of five power generation sites that will produce 2000MW of electricity, with a combined surface area of 10,000 hectares, in Ouarzazate, Ain Bni Mathar, Foum Al Oued, Boujdour and Sebkhat Tah.
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/_a/spainish_government_outlines_plans_for_reduced_installed_capacity_for_solar/?utm_source=PV+Tech+-+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a97dbf5396-PV_Tech_Newsletter_16_06_2010&utm_medium=email
The Spanish government plans to reduce the country’s installed capacity targets for both wind and solar power. Despite the cuts, the government still plans to generate over 20% of its total electricity output from renewables by 2020, reports Dow Jones.
However, the Renewable Energy Plan draft – which needs to be submitted to the European Commission before June 30 – outlines that the government now expects installed capacity of 13446 MW of solar power by 2020, down 14% from its previous estimate.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/09/solar_plant_will_power_3_million_homes_in_china.html?src=rss
US-based First Solar will build a 2000 MegaWatt solar plant in China that will power three million homes. The plant will cost about $6B and will start sometime next year. As part of the deal, a plant will open in China to make the panels over there. This is currently the biggest project of that kind, although expect the record to be broken soon.
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/2082/power-stations-can-solar-power-join-the-big-hitters/
Spain is roaring ahead with plans for additional CSP. The government has approved more than 50 projects and by 2015 total capacity should be over 2 GW. Torresol Energy alone intends to have 1 GW installed within a decade. When finished, the Seville complex should be capable of generating more than 300 MW, providing power for some 180,000 homes – meeting most of the city’s domestic needs. Almost a third of a gigawatt represents genuine utility scale and the complex should, moreover, prevent emissions of some 600,000 tonnes of CO2 over its intended 25-year life.
Assuming that the California Public Utilities Commission gives the green light, the first 100 MW units could be operating by 2013 at a site near Ivanpah, delivering some 286,000 MWh of electricity per year to Californians. The full 1300 MW of projects, when completed, should deliver enough clean energy to serve nearly 845,000 homes, avoiding more than 2m t of CO2 emissions annually. Solar power towers will contribute about 900 MW of this.
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Alain,
“The USA took 30 years to build it’s own 104 NPP’s, that’s 3.5 NPP’s per year”
Given that the world’s population is about 6.9 billion, and the U.S. is approx 310 million, the U.S. is approximately 1/22 of the world’s population (6.9 * 10^9 / 3.1* 10^6 = ~22). Given that, the world could build 3.5 * 22 = 77 reactors per year, or ~6.5 per month, at that exact same rate per capita. That doubles what you see as a necessary 3 NPPs per month. (NOTE – that’s a very conservative figure as the U.S. population was considerably less than 310 million when it was constructing those reactors).
Modern nuclear power plants also have much better standardised designs than most of those that are currently operating in the U.S., meaning construction times could be considerably less. And given that we are facing a climate emergency, we have all the more incentive to roll these plants out at a rate far faster than the U.S. did when it constructed its 104 plants.
“which of course you help increase with your mammoth fuel guzzling SUV, and wasteful living habits”
I agree that we do live in a wasteful society, and things do need to change. You can’t consume indefinitely without reaping the consequences of breaking the machine. That said, most of the increase in global consumption now is coming from the developing world, especially energy demands. And that’s not going to just stop. So that brings us to our options: a fossil fuel powered future, or a nuclear powered future.
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Alain, you’re drivelling on about matters which have already been covered here in-depth. Try reading up before flying off the handle and posting whatever nonsense comes to mind.
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” That doubles what you see as a necessary 3 NPPs per month. That said, most of the increase in global consumption now is coming from the developing world, especially energy demands. And that’s not going to just stop. So that brings us to our options: a fossil fuel powered future, or a nuclear powered future. ”
Well, we can continue to argue till we both see blue, however I do not see 3 NPP’s a month being built anywhere in the world, and it apparently won’t change a bit for the foreseable decades, so I rest my case by saying that your argument is based on pure wind, given the realities on the ground . . .
A proper balanced grid needs nuclear as 20% base load, given that peak load following isn’t NPP’s strong suit. 15% of global electricity now being generated by NPP’s mirror that assumption.
And apparently, there are many people out there who don’t share your opinion, and they are voting with their own money, which of course you cannot change one bit even if you wanted, which is very satisfactory for me . . .
Have a nice day. Enjoyed stirring up your honey pot. Hope you did learn a bit about decentralized energy generation possibilities, and I certainly enjoyed the discussion . . .
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/05/taking-grid-energy-storage-to-the-edge
Taking Grid Energy Storage to the Edge, by Brad Roberts, S&C Electric Co.
In the U.S., large-scale storage projects flourished in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s as utilities added 18 GWs of pumped hydro facilities to support the rapid build out of the fleet of nuclear power plants across the nation. Nuclear plants run best at higher power ratings, so pumping water in these hydro plants presented ideal off-peak loads during nights and weekends when customer demands are lowest.
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/_a/samsung_will_invest_21bn_in_future_growth_drivers_including_solar_cells/?utm_source=PV+Tech+-+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0418f98cb1-PV_Tech_Newsletter_12_05_2010&utm_medium=email
Samsung has announced that it will invest US$21bn in renewable energy and healthcare over the next decade, identifying solar cells as one of its future growth drivers. Samsung expects that between its key growth developers, which include; solar cells, rechargeable batteries for hybrid cars, LED technology, bio pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, it will generate US$44bn of annual sales by 2020. Samsung will invest approximately $10bn in solar cells and rechargeable batteries, while Won8600bn will be spent to expand S-LCD’s LED business.
Lee indicated back in March that Samsung’s future would be tough if it didn’t rethink its business model, forecasting that most of the group’s current businesses and products would disappear in 10 years.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/03/solarworld-jumps-in-mena-solar-market-opportunities-to-grow-in-2010?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-March3-2010
MENA Solar Market, Opportunities To Grow in 2010. In 2009 the potential for the region really started to heat up with some of the following announcements:
* Qatar Solar Technologies will invest a total of more than $500 millions in construction of a production facility with a planned annual capacity of around 3,600 tons of high-purity polysilicon in its first stage of expansion. Start of production is planned for the third quarter of 2012.
* Egypt: Cycle Power Island, which will use a 20-MW CSP system was contracted, is currently under construction and expected to start operation in the year 2010.
* Tunisa: Government outlined plans to develop 40 solar projects planned between 2010 and 2016 and 29 will be financed by private sector
* Morocco: Undertaking a US $9 billion solar energy project, with five solar power generation sites throughout Morocco producing 2,000 MW of electricity by 2020.
* Jordan: The JOAN1 project is expected to enter operation in 2013 and will be the largest CSP project in the world using direct solar steam generation.
* Saudi Arabia: Kingdom’s Minister for Petroleum and Mineral Resources says solar will be a major contributor to energy supply in the next 5-10 years and has begun building the first solar-powered water desalination plant.
* Masdar & Abu Dhabi: 1.5 GW of CSP is slated for development by 2020, with the first 100 MW already under construction at Madinat Zayed and due for completion in 2011.
* Abu Dhabi: Made $2 billion investment in photovoltaic manufacturing.
* Algeria: Set goal to provide for 10 percent of the energy demand with renewable energy by 2025. One solar thermal plant is under construction.
* Syria: Increase in investment, especially foreign, in non-fossil fuel electricity sector.
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/7092/wind-power-tops-new-eu-electricity/
The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) says 39% of all new capacity installed in 2009 was wind power, followed by gas (26%) and solar photovoltaics (PV) (16%). Europe decommissioned more coal and nuclear capacity than it installed in 2009. Taken together, renewable energy technologies account for 61% of new power generating capacity in 2009.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/news/986517/Iberdrola-outlines-renewables-expansion/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH
Spanish electricity giant Iberdrola has announced plans to invest €9 billion in renewables over the next three years, after recording a €2.8 billion profit last year. In total, the company plans to invest 18 billion up to 2012, consolidating its international expansion and strengthening its involvement in renewables generation. Its focus for growth will be the US, which is in line to receive 39% of the company’s total investment. Much of this will go towards wind farms and electricity transmission and distribution, the company said. The company already has 3,500MW of installed wind capacity in the US, and a project pipeline of 23,500MW, reflecting the $577 million of US Treasury grants it secured last year for renewables. Meanwhile, the UK is set to receive the second largest share – 25% – of Iberdrola’s planned investment, with the bulk again earmarked for renewables.
Iberdrola already has 802MW operational and a further 5,200MW projected. Along with Sweden’s Vattenfall, Iberdrola is also in line to develop a possible 7,200MW, having successfully bid for one of the UK’s round 3 offshore zone licences. Spain will receive 24% of Iberdrola’s investment, and Latin America and other parts of the world 12%.By business area, renewables will account for the largest share of Iberdrola’s planned investment – €9 billion – while €6.3 billion and €2.7 billion will be invested in networks and generation and supply respectively.
http://www.electroiq.com/index/display/pv-wire-news-display/1188868528.html
iSuppli: Solar thermal to supplant PV in four years. According to iSuppli, the global concentrated solar power (CSP) installations will outpace photovoltaics in terms of growth rate, soaring to 10.8 GW in 2014, up from just 0.29 GW last year. Meanwhile, PV installations are projected to reach 45.2 GW from 7 GW in 2009.
Even though the market for CSP is currently limited with the US and Spain dominating, the segment could very well see high growth in North Africa, China and Australia as well.
The solar thermal technologies use mirrors to reflect the sun’s heat energy onto collectors filled with fluids or gases that drive a turbine. A strong advantage of the technology is the ability to store the energy for release to steam generators at night.
“About 10 CPS projects are online at present, but by the end of 2011 the number of projects will grow to 40 and another 100 are in the planning phase from 30 vendors”, Greg Sheppard, chief development officer at iSuppli pointed out.
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/10186/intersolar-solar-pv-conversion-and-storage-project-in-field-testing/
http://solarcoaster.blogspot.com/2008/09/solion-energy-storage-solutions-for.html
Critics of renewable energy and the fossil/nuclear energy establishment like to highlight the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, e.g. click here. I will leave it to the words of Hermann Scheer, one of the most forceful and eloquent advocates for renewable energy, for a insightful rebuttal in his book, Energy Autonomy:
In a strongly centralized and internationalized nuclear/fossil energy supply system, this simultaneity [of production and utilization of energy] is, on principle, not possible. The storage warehouse for petroleum is the oil tanker, for coal it is the coal heap, for natural gas the major storage caverns and the gas tank, for nuclear energy the fuel rod store, and for water power (if necessary) the reservoir. Transport and distribution systems–pipelines, tanker ships and trucks–take on supplementary storage function. Or else it is the power plants themselves that operate as steam power plants, that is, they produce steam, which they must then keep holding in side the power plants as a reserve in case there is a rapid increase in production. All nuclear power plants and all large fossil power plants are of this type…
In its campaign against renewable energy, the energy business never mentions its own storage capacity, as if this were not as easily usable as a reserve for solar- and wind-based electricity…The possibility that the sun might not be shining or the wind might stop blowing just when these sources are most needed to produce electricity is presented as an insurmountable obstacle–as if, by way of contrast, extra coal or uranium could be hauled out of the mines at the very moment there is a spike in demand for coal- or nuclear-based electricity.
The role of energy storage in an on-grid application—such as that of a residence with solar panels connected to the grid—is to store excess PV energy until it is needed. Effectively, energy storage will ‘time-shift’ PV energy produced during the day, peaking at noon, to make it available on demand. This will both maximize local consumption and enhance the efficiency of the PV system. Surplus energy can also be fed back into the grid, for which the owner of the PV system would be remunerated at a higher tariff.
Energy storage will also increase security of supply while making individual consumers less dependent on the grid and help to boost the development of energy self-sufficient houses and buildings and contribute to the continuous growth of PV as part of the global energy mix…
The main benefit of on-grid energy storage for utilities is that it will reduce the peak load on their grid while at the same time making PV a source of predictable, dispatchable power that they can call on when needed.
The Sol-ion kit has been developed to accommodate solar PV energy production of 5 kWp with a battery rated from 5 to 15 kWh and a nominal voltage of 170 V to 350 V. The Sol-ion battery is based on Saft’s high energy Li-ion modules, with a nominal voltage of 48 V and 2.2 kWh capacity. The compact, maintenance-free modules can easily be connected in series or parallel to create the desired voltage and capacity for each installation. Saft’s Li-ion technology has already proven a 97% energy efficiency in a recent 2-years field demonstration in residential solar PV systems in Guadeloupe.
The part that upsets me the most is the profits the damn electric companies are making!!!
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” Alain, you’re drivelling on about matters which have already been covered here in-depth. Try reading up before flying off the handle and posting whatever nonsense comes to mind. ”
And what exactly have you been adding to the discussion ?
Oooh, yeah, anything out of your well established viewpoint is to be discarded : energy efficiency is for losers, being thrifty with our earth resources is drivel, NPP are the silver bullet to energy supply, anything goes excepted baseload renewable energy supplies, of which hydro power already contribute 20% on a global scale. Yeah, let’s destroy all hydro power dams, and replace them by NPP’s !!!
Happy to rattle your cage. The world will prove you wrong, even if you don’t like it. Learn to adjust, Hitler.
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Alain, did you read my post about nuclear power in France:
Yes, a lot of new NPP’s are needed, as well as other zero-emission solution, a huge amount of them also. And a lot of improvements in energy efficiency (= less consumption). I don’t see them either in a required amount at the moment or in the foreseeable future. The focus should always be on the reduction of CO2-emission. Is it done by renewable energy source or not is just a secondary issue. NPP’s discussed here is mostly for electricity production but that’s only a part of the problem. Most of the energy is used in some other way than electricity.
If you read and understand all 35 pages in this paper from IEA , “Scenarios and strategies to 2050”,
Click to access Taylor_ETP2008.pdf
you should have a quite good image of the challenge in your mind.
This blog of Barry is among the most realistic ones I ever seen on the net. It’s about to be green but without any illusions.
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@Peter Lalor – I see that the term nuclear power plant operators needs some clarification. A nuclear plant operator is any worker that involved in the day-to-day functioning of the plant, they are not just the crew on watch in the control room, in fact that position is one that is aspired to by those on the floor. They normally begin their careers in the plant as labourers, even though they were selected by competitive examination and survived several courses, prior to being hired.
They spend a fair amount of time doing things like inspection checks, and working on fuelling crews, before they even have a shot at a seat in the control room, where another long training period occurs before they can write for their licence.
The other path to the control room is via engineering, and again the candidate spends a lot of time at the bottom (qualifying latches for the loo doors, and such, as one guy described it) before moving up.
Thus there is generally a block of skills that could in an emergency moved up, and backfilled by lesser trained people in a pinch.
Like everything in a modern NPP there is very high redundancy in operators as well at every level, so it would take quite a hit, in terms of manpower losses to make SCRAMing down the reactor the best option. One would suspect that should such conditions ever occur so widespread that significant number of reactors would have to shut down due to lack of people to man them, the loss of electric power would be of secondary importance.
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I love ranting like this from doctrinaire Greens, because it only comes from those lashing out in the knowledge that they have lost. Forced, lest they be dismissed as cranks, that nuclear power is acceptable in some cases, they are fighting hard to keep their pet technologies from being dismissed outright. This in the hope that they can still win the war in the end by proving those systems superior to nuclear in the field, However their real fear from nuclear is that it will render needless the infrastructure they believe will make renewables competitive like smart metering (aka rationing) and low power lighting.
They are left with dropping into pages like this that are saying the nuclear renaissance is upon us, and discharging their load of built-up bile, and insisting that they will prevail in the end. It’s pathetic really, and tragic when you thing of how much of their lives they have spent backing what, to their horror, may have been the wrong side.
Typical too, are the insults thrown at power companies, and other large capitalist institutions, and insinuations that all pronuclear supporters are Fascists and Nazis
Alan, the only one who looks like they have had their cage rattled, and is having trouble adjusting to the new reality is you, son, and your rants only make you look like the looser you are.
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“Yeah, let’s destroy all hydro power dams, and replace them by NPP’s !!!”
I don’t recall advocating the destruction of hydroelectric facilities. Why would I? They’re the one form of ‘renewable’ energy that actually deliver worthwhile results.
“Happy to rattle your cage. The world will prove you wrong, even if you don’t like it. Learn to adjust, Hitler.”
Given the degree of social control which would be required for the anti-nuclear green renewable energy paradigm to work, I should be careful about appying the ‘Hitler’ label to anyone else.
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“And apparently, there are many people out there who don’t share your opinion, and they are voting with their own money, which of course you cannot change one bit even if you wanted, which is very satisfactory for me . . .”
There are plenty of people who are using their wealth to exploit the feed-in tarrifs for solar power, the cost of which is passed on to less wealthy electricity utility customers., so it’s not exactly their own money theey’re voting with. I’m sure this is very satisfactory to Alain and his green fascist friends who want to see the masses forced to use less power through exhorbitant costs and regressive social policies.
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“Have a nice day. Enjoyed stirring up your honey pot. Hope you did learn a bit about decentralized energy generation possibilities, and I certainly enjoyed the discussion..”
This whole ‘decentralised energy generation’ business is doubletalk. Fascist greens such as Alain like to talk about how everyone having a PV panel on their roof will somehow ’empower’ them in some abstract democratic sense, but what people really want, what really empowers them, is to have their electrical appliances ready to work whenever they chose, rather than having that access be a privilege granted by some ‘smart grid’. Big centralised power stations release people from the burden of having to be their own personal electric utility managers, and provide them with the power they really want, when they need it, and in whatever quantity they desire.
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Peter Lang, on 19 June 2010 at 11.25 — Thanks for the correction. I was mostly just commenting on the picture, where a goodly wind looks like it would produce surge highr tthan allowed for.
A combination of increasing frequency of severe storms and SLR (about double the average along east coasts) means mocing uphill for an installation which is expectedd to last until the concrete crumbles (a long time indeed).
Of course proper engineering does account for all these factors and the locally designed dams (from Grand Coulee on) show no sign of needing replacement.
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I forgot to mention that engineers in Britian, The Netherlands and California are planning on about 1.3–1.5 m SLR by century’s end.
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Just looking briefly over the many links Alain has provided, a good many of them seem to be discussing investment plans for production facilities making ‘renewable’ infrastructure. This does not really prove much concerning the effectiveness of ‘renewable’ technology, but it speaks volumes about the malign influence the ‘renewables’ lobby has had on government planners worldwide, that such investments are likely to pay off. A factory producing aphrodesiacs made from rhino horns could also be quite profitable if enough fools fall for the con.
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I think in practice the function of the ‘smart grid’ will not be to accommodate intermittent generation as that will never become a major component of the energy mix. The real purpose of the smart grid will be to enforce energy rationing particularly as gas fired electricity becomes more prominent. LCD meters will lay on a guilt trip every time you want coffee or toast unless it’s 3 a.m. No doubt aluminium smelters will get off lightly.
ABARE or some other research group should do a scenario analysis of future energy affordability for different sectors. One scenario should be moderate efficiency gains say of the order of 20%. Another scenario would be painful energy cuts of say 50% which I note David Mackay says will be necessary for the UK. Additional factors will include population growth, desalination, electric transport, CO2 emissions and investment capital requirements. Some belt tightening seems inevitable medium term.
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Got it in one John, but the renewable crowd has bought into the fantasy that the smart grid will make their problems go away, and they have bought into it uncritically. This, of course is because the purveyors of smart grid technology have been tell them as much.
In this fantasy, flexible rates are just the beginning. They paint a picture of all the refrigerators in the neighbourhood talking to one another so they don’t start all at once, the same with hot water heaters, and so on. They see micro-generation from rooftop solar, and backyard windmills, seamlessly switching loads on the local mini-grid. This is what they hope will support renewable energy.
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I’m not sure all these fights about energy use are productive … it’s materials where the fights should
be. e.g. Suppose I can use X GWe to create furniture from
plastic (using recycled materials) rather than X/4
GEe creating it from wood. Which is preferable? Given
the reforestation imperative (we will be 50ppm over
safe CO2 levels even with a total phase out of
coal by 2030), the extra energy may be a better
option. A world of cheap energy gives us such choices.
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“Given the reforestation imperative (we will be 50ppm over safe CO2 levels even with a total phase out of
coal by 2030), the extra energy may be a better
option. A world of cheap energy gives us such choices.”
Well said, Geoff. Let me add that if major geoengineering projects become necessary to fight climate change, we’ll need high-power systems with some grunt to run them as well.
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The thinking seems to be that in most parts of the USA up to 30% of power demand can be met by so-called renewables. Of course also considerable energy efficiency is possible; in this region the NPCC 20 year plan, updated every five years, calls for a rather amazing 50% of new power needs to be met via energy efficiency measures.
We shall see.
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@Geoff Russell – Of course it is about energy usage – that is why Alain showed up on a thread titled The 21st century nuclear renaissance is starting spitting blood and fire: (practically) unlimited energy cuts every single renewable/low energy argument off at the hips. The whole ideological foundation of their movement’s philosophy, is that we have consumed too much and now we must pay for our sins through self-denial. Nuclear energy is their worse nightmare come true, and the web lies they told the public for years to keep nuclear at bay is becoming unravelled, no wonder they are lashing out in blind fury.
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Kaj,
Thank you for pointing out the apparent error with the emissions intensity for Denmark’s electricity. And thank you Barry for your calculations that give a figure of 650g/kWh.
I would really like to see a table of figures that have been prepared on a properly comparable basis by an authority such as IEA. I do not trust the EIA’s figures on this because they contain obvious errors. I believe they used CARMA’s figures, which are clearly wrong.
I would still like to know where David MacKay got his figure of 880g/kWh from. I am also very interested to know what are the IE figures in the 2009 IEA report: http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=36.
For the moment, I tend to agree with Kaj and Barry that the 880g/kWh figure seems too high.
Barry, I am not sure about this statement:
We have clear evidence that most of Denmark’s wind energy is exported (as you state). However, we cannot say what proportion of Denmark’s electricity imports is from nuclear or hydro. I believe we have to assume that the imported electricity has the average EI for the grid from which the energy is imported. West Denmark is connected to the Scandinavian grid and East Denmark through Germany to the European grid.
Having said all this, I suspect your figure of 600 to 700 is probably in the right ball park.
Kaj, thank you for pointing out the probable error.
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DV8: When we use energy for heating and cooling, that’s
pretty close to pure energy use, but mostly, we use
energy to consume other things. Cheap energy will make
recycling of some of these other things feasible, but
some will continue to be in short supply … is there
enough aluminium on the planet to allow western
levels of consumption for 9 billion? Is there enough
wood? Is there enough land? soil? I think we need to
live in a way which is sustainable for 9 billion and I
don’t think the lifestyles “of the rich and famous” will
scale to 9 billion people with or without nuclear power.
Nuclear will enable far more people to live a reasonable
life and give us a fighting chance to avoid the
worst climate instability, but it will not solve
all the problems caused by super affluence
and greed. E.g., How will nuclear power prevent
the agony of sharks who have their fins sliced off
to provide $450-a-bowl shark fin soup for rich
gourmet sadists? Nuclear power won’t stop the
suffering or save the at-risk-species. Nuclear power
may allow wider trawler rigs to destroy more ocean
bottom quick and cheaper … not a good thing. Will
nuclear power stop slave labour coltan mining in
the Congo? No. Cheap energy doesn’t solve all
our problems … just a few of the easier ones. We
have indeed consumed too much and would benefit
from a lifestyle rethink. It isn’t all about energy, but
also about the broader consequences of our choices.
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Geoff Russell, – To start off with most of the really serious environmental damage that is being done is driven by poverty and the poor practices that follow from it. That is particularly true of land use, and bad soil management.
The worst deforestation is caused by those harvesting wood for fuel. If slave labour is being use to mine, then it is only because it is too expensive to use machinery.
Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, and the third most abundant element therein, after oxygen and silicon. It makes up about 8% by weight of the Earth’s solid surface. It is found combined in over 270 different minerals. To win it requires energy, for some compounds more than others, but nevertheless they can all be reduced.
Population growth can be shown to slow as standards of living rise in every instance.
As for the sharks, what can I say? Let’s all pour ashes on our heads, and take vows of perpetual poverty, because a world freed from human poverty will mean everyone will want shark-fin soup.
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Unethical treatment of animals cannot of itself be solved by cheap power, but cheap power is a necessary prerequisite for so much that is essential to worthwhile survival that it must be pursued until the victory is won. The two issues don’t connect directly.
On the other hand, I believe that a well-off humanity will have the energy to look at these other issues to a degree a more impoverished world will not.
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Geoff Russell,
We cannot get your message to the vast majority of the world’s population until they are literate, have the time and inclination to worry about more than staying alive, and have computers and internet access.
All that comes with electricity. In fact, it all comes with cheap electricity. We cannot communicate with the vast majority until they have electricity and jobs and education. The cheaper electricity can be delivered the faster the poor will be lifted out of poverty. It is all related.
Free trade (as opposed to aid hand-outs) must also be pursued. The EU is the greatest block to progress on free trade.
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Barry,
Thanks for the figures and the Weisser reference – sounds useful and when looking at the link you can see that Denmark has no chance against France with its nuclear infrastructure.
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“ We cannot get your message to the vast majority of the world’s population until they are literate, have the time and inclination to worry about more than staying alive, and have computers and internet access. All that comes with electricity. In fact, it all comes with cheap electricity. We cannot communicate with the vast majority until they have electricity and jobs and education. The cheaper electricity can be delivered the faster the poor will be lifted out of poverty. It is all related.
Free trade (as opposed to aid hand-outs) must also be pursued. The EU is the greatest block to progress on free trade. “
I lived some time in Qatar, working in Ras Laffan on a $ 800 million process plant that converted natural gas into liquid ethylene, that then got piped 110km to Messaieed, to be transformed in another process plant into HDPE granulates for export. HDPE is the basic stuff for which much of plastic pipes are made off.
During some nights, I watched TV at the hotel. I got lucky in that French speaking TV5Monde got piped in through satellite technology and that I do understand it, because it was a channel of the same quality a National Geography or Discovery Channel, which I also watched in that same hotel. A documentary about renewable energy was shown on TV5Monde, and the small difference it could make for the world, if we continued to invest in it.
The first slice was about France. And more specifically during a serious winter night storm that flew over south west France at wind speed of up to 160km/h (100mph). There was a 2000 MW NPP operating on the sea shore near Bordeau. The sea surge and wind speed caused by the storm resulted in fallen tree logs hammering the protecting inlet grate screen of the pipeline, that served to suck up cooling water towards the NPP. The protection grate screen got destroyed because of the sea fury and hammering tree logs. The result was that log parts got sucked in, and jammed the inlet cooling pumps, red lighting up some part of the visualisation screens in the control room. Operators started to ‘panic’ : shut down a 2000MW plant ? They called their supervisor to cover their ass. He called the plant director to cover his ass. The plant director called his boss in Paris to cover his ass. The boss in Paris was asleep, and didn’t pick up the phone. Finally, the situation got so worse that operators had to shut down the 2000MW plant or risk a core meltdown. They were lucky, in that the fury of this storm caused a few million trees in the area to be blown over, falling on transmission lines, and cutting ten of thousands home off the electricity supply grid, in december freezing temperature. This result rendered most of the 2000MW power supply not necessary, given that the demand was not there anymore. Well, the demand was there, but could be supplied because the centralised grid was off line. The only ones left with some juice were home solar PV panel owners. It took 2 weeks to get the 2000MW NPP back online, because the millions of felled trees caused a national emergency plan to be activated, and it took that time to clear the roads full with fallen trees, rewire the transmittion grid and clean up the place in sufficient manner, to get to the part were repairing the inlet suction pumps that were jammed with tree logs could be done safely, given that the NPP wasn’t producing one milliwatt in power anymore.
Luckily for France, Spain had decided a decade ago not to invest in NPP’s, instead giving building permits to any private investor who was willing to build wind turbine parks using his own bank loans. The result during that winter period, was that Spain had strong winds blowing over their country, ample spare electricity capacity from wind turbine parks, that were partially shutdown due to low electricity demand. The French bought a 500MW block from Spanish windturbine parks, that got transmitted over the Pyrenees mountain ridge, towards the disaster zone in France, to help alleviate the emergency shutdown of the 2000MW NPP. I found it pretty ironic to discover that wind turbine parks could act as a backup for a baseload NPP during winter times . . .
The second slice was about Africa, and more specifically Kenia. The camera was filming the energy minister, a fat negro with very smart eyes. ‘Why did you have black outs in Nairobi and Mombasa?’ . ‘Well, we are a developping African country, and a such do not have the tools to monitor properly our energy needs. So we were caught off guard when we got a tourist sector surge filling up our many hotels, coupled with an indigenous population growth spike that exacerbated our electricity demand. So we had the choice : install controlled black outs, or face a global shutdown of our grid. We couldn’t fall back on our neighbors, they have the same problems as we have, so we had to find another solution. We signed a contract with Aggrekko, who air lifted from Europe diesel power plants installed in 40 foot container block units. Aggrekko installed in one month all those containers in 50MW blocks around Nairobi and Mombasa to temporary alleviate the situation. So we solved our problem in one month thanks to the Europeans. We rapidly discovered that the diesel fuel consumption was very costly to Kenia, since we have to import 100% of our diesel. So we decided that this wouldn’t become a permanent solution to our problems”. ‘What energy alternatives did you consider ? ’. “ Well, we looked at NPP’s, and ruled it out rapidly. We couldn’t wait 5 years to have the electricity supplied to us, and we couldn’t get a World Bank loan for such a big project, given our financial situation. So we then looked at coal. It takes 2 years to get it running. And a 1000MW plant consumes 10 000 ton of coal a day. Our rail network is almost non-existant, so we have to build this plant near mombasa, given that we then can import our coal through our mombasa port. But we were again faced with having to spend our few financial resources to import coal from Australia for the next 40 years, and we therefore rejected this solution. We looked at natural gas, given that it was the cheapest capital investment cost for us, but again Kenia doesn’t have any indigenous natural gas reserves. So we had to spend our financial reserves to import liquid natural gas from Qatar, which means we also had to invest in a LNG terminal to regasify the gas, and building a LNG terminal takes 2 years, and we couldn’t affor to pay for that. So we couldn’t use natural gas. Then we looked a wind. We have a large plateau in Kenia, with strong steady winds blowing for many hours a day, a very regular breeze that start around 10AM till 18PM. We decided to buy 300MW in windturbines, and the contractor assured us that it would be operational in one year, and it was financially interesting, given that we had to pay $ 1.5 million per installed MW all-in, which Kenia can afford to pay without having to go to the World Bank. Then we looked at other indigenous energy resources. Kenia is located on the African great rift, and as such has pretty strong vulcanic activity. The Kilimandjaro is in Kenia, you know. We found out that we could install 50MW and 100MW geothermal plants rapidly, it was expensive, but once installed, we wouldn’t have to import fuel to keep it running, and as such it was a good solution to our long term energy supply issues. We ordered several 100MW’s in geothermal plants, that are now operating to our satisfaction 24h per day. Aggrekko’s contract was not renewed at the end, and Aggrekko air lifted their gear to Oman, given that Oman is now facing the same problems that Kenia faced 2.5 years ago’.
It is therefore clear that NPP’s are a great tool to combat global warming, but that NPP’s have strenghts and weaknesses. A properly designed electricity supply network takes into account the locally found situation, and makes sure that the weaknesses of one power system are compensated by the strenght of another power system, to mimic Mother Nature’s biodiversity and redundancies. That is why I find it great that NPP’s are being built in greater numbers, but I find it laughable to say that 100% of our needs MUST be covered using ONLY NPP’s, as some people here up are advocating. That is putting us all into a corner. And if I see underneath stated figures, I think many decision makers in the world are getting to the same conclusion as I am, which is that we need to develop alternatives to fossil fuels, and it would be stupid to just bet on NPP’s. After all, the greatest NPP is located 95 million kilometers from earth, the nuclear waste stays 95 million kilometers from the earth, and the lifetime of that machine is rated at around 4 Billion years. I still have to see how Big Utility will manage to meter incoming sun rays, but I am pretty sure they will find a way.
Global installed wind turbine capacity in 2000 : 5 000 MW
Global installed wind turbine capacity in 2010 : 158 000 MW (great)
Current global installed NPP capacity in 2010 : 372 000 MW (Fantastic)
China foresee to get to 150 000 MW in new windturbine capacity by 2020
Europe foresee to install 100 000 MW in new windturbine capacity by 2020, to add up to it’s current 75 000 MW that is already operational.
China foresee to expand his NPP capacity to a total of 70 000 MW by 2020, South Korea to 27.3 GW (up from 17.7 GW), and Russia to 43.3 GW (fantastic).
Of course you have to understand that a baseload NPP provides 3 time more power than a wind turbine per same MW in installed capacity, given that a wind turbine has a capacity factor of only 30%, while an NPP achieves 90% plus.
And for the ones arguing that renewable energy is expensive, maybe they can add the subsidies lavished on fossil fuels and nuclear to understand that there is no such thing as a free balanced energy supply market, and that the game is rigged from top to bottom. As such I do not have any problems with greens lobbying to have more renewable energy being installed globally, at the cost of other polluting resources. And NPP’s fall in that polluting category, untill someone invent a solution to the nuclear waste issue that has to be stacked for thousands of years, like finally getting a commercial IFR plant operating to the satisfaction of their owners.
Click to access energy_subsidies.pdf
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-06-07-iea-stunner-global-subsidies-dirty-energy-top-550-billion-year/
IEA stunner: global subsidies to dirty energy top $550 billion a year. The IEA estimates that energy consumption could be reduced by 850m tonnes equivalent of oil — or the combined current consumption of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand — if the subsidies are phased out between now and 2020. The consumption cut would save the equivalent of the current carbon dioxide emissions of Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, and Spain. Fossil fuel subsidies average out to 2.1% of GDP of the 37 countries surveyed.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/02/global-wind-installations-boom-up-31-in-2009?cmpid=WNL-Friday-February5-2010
The Global Wind Energy Council this week announced that the world’s wind power capacity grew by 31% in 2009, adding 37.5 gigawatts (GW) to bring total installations up to 157.9 GW. A third of these additions were made in China, which experienced yet another year of over 100% growth. The main markets driving this significant growth continue to be Asia, North America and Europe, each of which installed more than 10 GW of new wind capacity in 2009. “The Chinese government is taking very seriously its responsibility to limit CO2 emissions while providing energy for its growing economy. China is putting strong efforts into developing the country’s tremendous wind resource. Given the current growth rates, it can be expected that the even the unofficial target of 150 GW will be met well ahead of 2020,” said Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/10203/ewea-predicts-10-gw-of-wind-to-be-installed-in-europe-during-2010-/
EWEA predicts 10 GW of wind to be installed in Europe during 2010. Total installed wind power capacity by the end of 2009 was 74 767 MW.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/12/brazil-conducts-first-wind-only-power-auction?cmpid=WindNL-Tuesday-December29-2009
December 17, 2009
Brazil Conducts First Wind-only Power Auction
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]
Brazil this week held its first wind-only power auction. More than 1,800 megawatts (MW) of wind power capacity was contracted. The average selling price for electricity from these projects was US $84.88/megawatt-hour. The auction will allow for the building of 71 wind power plants located in five states of the northeastern and southern regions of the country. In the 20 year period in which the contracts will run, the projects are expected to drive investments of more than $11.2 billion.
“This auction shows that the price difference between wind and thermoelectric sources of energy is diminishing and today they are closer than ever. It also shows that from both an economic and environmental perspective, wind energy is viable option for complementing Brazil´s hydraulic generation,” said Mauricio Tolmasquim, president of the Brazilian Energy Research Company, Empresa de Pesquisa Energética (EPE).
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Because it wouldn’t have worked if that power had come from Spanish NPPs. right?
We have covered the fact that there are already solutions to the ‘nuclear waste’ issue being applied right now in the real world many times on these pages. You should go back and read some of them, you might learn something.
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” We have covered the fact that there are already solutions to the ‘nuclear waste’ issue being applied right now in the real world many times on these pages. You should go back and read some of them, you might learn something. ”
Well, I now live in Belgium, a country that produce 55% of it’s electricity from NPP’s. Our Energy Minister decided to invest 350 million euro into a research program to find a solution to our plutonium and uranium wastes. They managed to get an operational prototype producing a few kWh, and need 350 million euro to try to scale it up to megawatt class. I was all shown up on TV big time, with great fanfare. As such I concluded there is actually no real solution to degrade the nuclear waste radioactivity from a few thousand year to let’s say 500 years right now in the world.
Maybe you can show me the dough and were those solutions are applied right now in the world, outside of labs, on a megawatt class size, operating for at least a few years without any issue. Always happy to learn. And no, I won’t spend time wadding through this site, you of course can rapidly supply the missing information, given your knowledge of the matter.
http://myrrha.sckcen.be/en/MYRRHA_in_brief/Purpose
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Features/UndergroundLabs/Mol/mol.html
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Unfortunately I am tied up with activities pertaining to Father’s Day (being both a father and a son) and I cannot give your post the response it deserves at this time.
However the French have been reprocessing for some time now, and CANDU reactors burn fuel so efficiently that the SNF emissions become reasonable in a relativity short time.
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” Unfortunately I am tied up with activities pertaining to Father’s Day (being both a father and a son) and I cannot give your post the response it deserves at this time.
However the French have been reprocessing for some time now, and CANDU reactors burn fuel so efficiently that the SNF emissions become reasonable in a relativity short time. ”
Well, I hope you can give me the information later on. Always interested to learn more.
The French are reprocessing nuclear wastes in their The Hague plant, but the final end waste product is still highly radioactive and really nasty stuff, that has to be kept away from dubious users. The French reprocessed nuclear end waste still needs to be stored in very special conditions, and this for thousands of years.
During the same TV5monde documentary that I mentioned here up, the reporters went to Canada, to view some Candu NPP’s built in Quebec. The corporation that designed the Candu system promised an operation of 30 years without any problems to the Canadian government. Several got built. And Canadians being serious folks, they monitored everything like the true professionals they are. After 10 years of flawless operation, they started to discover issues with the high pressure piping circuits going from the core to the heat exchangers, that powered the turbines. Apparently, microscopic parts of the core fission material had been transported with the fluid, depositing on the various HP pipes, reacting with the stainless steel and causing wall metal brittleness. The investigations showed that if the plant continued to operate at the foreseen high pressure, pipes would rupture, causing core meltdown. The solutions were twofold. Either close down the plant, take out the pipes, and replace them with new ones with much thicker wall thickness, to guarantee the 30 years lifetime. Price tag = CAD$ 1 Billion per core. The second alternative was to reduce the pressure on the piping circuits to 60% of design capacity, therefore decreasing the nominal power plant rating from 1000MW to 600MW, allowing to continue operate the plant in a same manner without having to spend CAD $1 Billion per plant.
Canadians being financial conservatives, they decided to reduce the power plant rating to 600MW, so that the payback period of 25 years on investment could be achieved, and decided to close the plant down before reaching it’s forecast 30 year lifetime, once the investment had been paid off with electricity sales, to avoid having core piping circuits leaks.
With the saved CAD $ 1 Billion per Candu NPP plant, they invested in new hydro power dams providing more than 400MW in capacity per CAD$ 1 Billion. The ironic Canadian commentator stated that there is not much difference between an hydro power dam and a Candu NPP, given that they both consists of a lot of concrete and some metal connected to spinning turbines, but that with the hydro power dam, they were at least certain to have electricity without any problems for decades to come. I therefore wonder why the Canadians bothered to invest in Candu plants anyway, if you pursue this logic to it’s logical end. I guess that the Candu design corporation greased some wheels in the government, and that building hydro power dams required new transmission lines that added to the final price tag.
I assume that the Candu concept flaw in the meantime has been solved, given that China is investing in Candu NPP’s. Of course, I hope that the same story won’t happen with newer generation NPP’s, but I am not holding my breath on that one, knowing how mankind operates in the real world . . .
That’s why Brazil is investing in hydro power dams and some wind turbines, both are renewable energy, as far as I know . . .
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Alain,
As DV8 is busy may I draw your attention to various emerging nuclear technologies that have the potential to consume most of the so called “Waste” from Gen I & II nukes.
Specifically, fast spectrum reactors such as Phenix & Super-Phenix (France). More recently, Russia and China are building BN-800 family reactors.
A prototype LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) was operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory for five years. Designs based on this concept are “on the drawing board”. A solid fuel Thorium reactor is under construction in India. LTFRs have integrated (closed cycle) fuel reprocessing with the capability of eliminating higher Actinides. They also have the ability to consume higher Actinides produced by Gen I nukes.
Rubbia (CERN) has proposed Accelerator Driven Nuclear Reactors (also known as Sub-Critical Nuclear Reactors). Prototype reactors have been built by the ADNA corporation and testing has been carried out at Virginia Tech, the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory and at Los Alamos National Laboratory. These reactors have great potential for achieving dry nuclear waste reprocessing.
If you are wondering why these technologies are so late into the field, the simple answer is that they are not useful for producing weapons. It is impossible to use them to produce more than tiny amounts of Plutonium. Fissile materials produced such as U232 are not suitable for bomb applications.
The tremendous depth and breadth of materials relating to nuclear technology available through this site are daunting so I understand your reluctance to wade through it. At least take the time to look at the following fun video:
http://energyfromthorium.com/2008/11/21/joe-bonomettis-tech-talk-at-google/
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DV8, Finrod, Peter Lang and the rest of you,
Please don’t jump all over me because I buy at least one of Alain’s arguments. I have not been seduced by the “Dark Side”.
Until recently I lived in a part of the USA that is notorious for unreliable power distribution. In the winter ice storms would cause huge outages and in the summer hurricanes had similar effects. Power could be out for up to 2 weeks.
As my water was from a deep well and my sewage went into a septic field, all that was needed to achieve that rosy feeling of being totally independent was a local source of electricity. As average wind velocities were low, windmills were not an option so I concentrated on photo-voltaics. It looked really promising until I realised how much storage capacity would be needed.
In the end I bought a generator driven by an IC engine running on natural gas connected to a 1,000 gallon liquid gas tank. From then on my neighbours were able to get water and other services until power was restored. The crazy thing was that the cost of generation was only slightly higher than what my local utility was charging (but that is another story).
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I still haven’t the time for a full post, however I will note that Alain’s ignorance about both the French reprocessing efforts (all the long lived waste they produce can be stored under the floor of one room at Le Hague, and it has been immobilized in as a vitreous solid) .Your understanding of CANDU’s (it is an acronym, and is properly spelled all caps) and the Canadian power market,is breathtakingly shallow and shows that you have not done the least bit of research on the subject. I suspect that you are parroting some antinuclear propaganda you read somewhere.
There were never any early CANDU rated at 1000MWe particularly those that required re-tubing, the only working ones that come close are the CANDU 9 at 950MWe. There was never any de-rating. There is only one CANDU in Quebec, and it’s running very well thank you, and Ontario, where most of the nuclear plants are, has very little hydro. Large hydro has all been built in Quebec. Quebec and Ontario are served by separate electric utility companies, that compete in the sale of power to the States, They do not co-ordinate on generation projects, and nether are under control of the federal government.
I am a Canadian, and I have followed the industry here for years. You are not impressing anyone with your poorly researched, half-baked ideas.
And now I am off for dinner with my Dad
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With regards to emissions intensity, the CARMA figures are not credible for three reasons.
1. Real emissions are only obtained for US power plants. For others, they are calculated based on the technical specifications of the plant and some theoretical assumptions. More details about the methodology can be found here.
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/16101/
2. Emissions from backup generators are omitted, otherwise nuclear and hydro power plants would have small but non-zero emissions.
3. The database contains obvious errors. For example Seinajoki, a small peat-fired combined heat and power station in Finland, is listed as the largest power station of any kind in the world. This dramatically distorts the figures for Finland.
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“The first slice was about France. And more specifically during a serious winter night storm that flew over south west France at wind speed of up to 160km/h (100mph). There was a 2000 MW NPP operating on the sea shore near Bordeau. The sea surge and wind speed caused by the storm resulted in fallen tree logs hammering the protecting inlet grate screen of the pipeline, that served to suck up cooling water towards the NPP. The protection grate screen got destroyed because of the sea fury and hammering tree logs…” And so on.
Is anyone able to confirm whether or not this alleged event ever actually occured?
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DV8/Peter: Agree entirely that electricity will be a huge boon and that it can ease pressure on deforestation but not that it a global nuke network will (or can) be rolled out
fast enough or cheap enough to make energy efficiency a redundant goal. It is also simply false that most deforestation is carried out for fuel biomass by the
poor, nor is this the most important consideration for
reforestation. Some 70% of previously forested Amazon was
cleared for a variety of reasons but is currently under
cattle. It can’t be reforested without dietary change.
Ditto 70 million hectares in Australia. Some of the 1 gigatonne of biomass used for fuel wood (Krausmann, see Boverty I) causes deforestation but far more
important is the 2.5 gigatonne of burning in annual
pastoral fires.
I agree with DV8 and Peter about many things, but I
don’t understand DV’s somewhat biblical gnashing of teeth at those who advocate reduced consumption.
Sure it’s over-hyped, but it can help if done intelligently.
My view of over-consumption is of
course is biased by daily experiences with
people driving 3 or 4 tonnes of gas guzzling metal who
drive with all the arrogance of people who know they
will win any confrontation with me and my
8 kg of carbon fibre and aluminium … but without any apparent care.
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Alain, on 20 June 2010 at 22.27 — Great reporting! I especially liked the Kenya solutions.
Finrod, on 21 June 2010 at 6.31 — The extreme event windstorm certainly did and the rest is highly plausible.
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David, can you provide any details or a link to a report of the event? There’s no mention of when this occured.
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Finrod, on 21 June 2010 at 8.37 — I learned about last winter’s(/) extreme wind event in Spain & France from reporting on
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html
where the report will now be many threads back. I’m assuming that is the event in question, but I suppose there might have been an eariler one…
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Geoff Russel,
On the short comments we can post on a blog site we have to simplify. I, nor you, can include every needed caveat for every statement we make. I agree we need to improve energy efficiency and reduce wasteage. However, I’ve been involved in this at all levels from policy development to implementation. At the policy level we had true believers advocating major government interventon with regulation and subsidies to force industry, building owners and vehicles to improve energy efficiency. We had the arguments between the advocates who think much more is feasible than is, to the ‘hard heads’ who pointed out that most is not practicable. ABARE did the modelling. That was 20 years ago. Then I was involved with the actual implementation of some of these schemes to reduce energy use in existing buildings. Most of what is theoretically achievable is not commercially viable.
We have the McKinsey reports showing that energy efficency improvements, such as adding insulation in buildings, is the ‘lowest of the low hanging fruit’. So then our government conducted a $2.5 billion program to insulate homes. Then we find out that this program is avoiding GHG emissions for a cost of $200/tonne CO2 avoided. That’s about 10 times the cost of reducing emissions by changing coal fired power stations to nuclear.
We have David Mackay’s ‘Plan C’ which includes massive energy enfficiency improvements to the point of collecting your own wood and burning it for heating, and riding bicycles, etc. This is way beyond what I believe people are prepared to do. And the question needs to be asked: “Why go to these lengths when we could have the energy we want?”
I agree we need to avoid waste and improve energy efficency. But I believe energy efficiency improvements will provide a small component of what we need to do in the next 20 years. Energy efficiency improvements are already included in the ABARE projections for the next 20 years and I believe the amounts they include will turn out to be about right – given that they got it about right 20 years ago.
Importantly, I see our focus being distracted from where it should be. We are being distracted from what we need to do to get cheap nuclear energy in Australia. We are being distracted by discussions on: energy efficiency improvements are important, renewable energy is important, safety is important, management of used nuclear fuel is important, and so on and on and on.
We are being distrracted from what is really important which getting low cost nuclear power in Australia.
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Peter: Assuming that my message is about
compassion for animals, then it isn’t just a province of the well to do. I don’t have
first hand experience in developing countries but know a few people with
very long term experience and they all say the same thing. Compassion and
cruelty both cut across boundaries, the desperately poor will
volunteer in a dog shelter in Cairo while the rich will organise dog fights …
and the reverse. Similarly in India, Bangladesh (or Adelaide).
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Geoff Russel,
If we cannot achieve the desired rate of CO2 reduction with nuclear, than we have no hope at all with anything else. Kaj’.s excellent article shows that the rate of nuclear build in the 1970’s and 1980’s in single countries (eg France) is about the same as the rate of RE build in the whole world now. And renewables provide only 1/3 of the energy of a nuclear power plant. We”d need equivalent amounts of energy storage to make renewables equivalent to nuclear. The idea of renewables doing anything useful is ridiculous.
If France could build Gen II plants at the rate of 3 NPPs per year for two decades in the 1970’s and 1980’s, then surely Australia could do this with Gen III’s if we wanted to. Don’t forget, the existing power stations we’ve been building have to be replaced. We’ve been replacing them with coal up until now. We have to change what we build from coal to nuclear from now on.
If Australia can, so can the rest of the world. It won’t happen over night. It will take many decades. But there is no point saying that isn’t fast enough. If nuclear isn’t fast enough then nothing will be faster. Wasting time on things that have little effect is actually diverting focus and slowing us down.
The sort of discussion we are having about all the other things we need to do is exactly what has stopped Australia making any real progress for the past 20 years. And there is no sign of any policy change coming in Australia at the moment.
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Peter Lang, on 21 June 2010 at 8.53 — What about using ground heat pumps for heating/cooling? I have a colleague here who found the installation cost highly affordable with short payback time.
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David, that may well be true, but it’s nibbling around the edges. With nuclear we can address the core of the problem in one fell swoop. It is the obvious first step, and energy efficiency/conservation is a sideshow.
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Thank’s Peter for those interesting links about wind power in Denmark. It’s just the kind of information I have been looking for.
Barry:
Ok. Did you take into account the large use of district heating by CHP plants in Denmark. Some of the emission is allocated to the heat thus reducing emission of electricity.
You may find this interesting:
Click to access energy%20statistics%202007%20uk.pdf
On page 23 it says:
At the moment I have no time to read through the paper, so I cannot tell how these numbers are calculated. Anyway, the main point here is crystal clear: Denmark + wind is far from France + nuclear and will never come even close. It is simply impossible.
Germany is another case. They once “decided” to get rid of nuclear power. There is about 20 GW of operating nuclear power in Germany. They have a lot more wind power in Germany than in Denmark. But they are also building new coal plants, and guess how much? Yes, about 20 GW. What a coincidence!
See this:
It’s a scan from McCloskey’s Coal Report, December 2007.
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A little OT, but interesting:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/7840035/Firms-paid-to-shut-down-wind-farms-when-the-wind-is-blowing.html
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Alain,
Spain is nearly broke. They are having to massively reduce their subsidies for renewable energy. The irrational RE subsidies have driven business and investment out of Spain. Spain lost 2.2 real jobs for every “green job’ created by the government.
The idea of distributed generation with solar panels is believed by people who have never thought it through. The transmission grid for distributed generation would be ten or 100 times more costly than for centralised power, if it was possible at all. Have a look at this: https://bravenewclimate.com/2009/08/16/solar-power-realities-supply-demand-storage-and-costs/
I suspect it is a waste of time discussing any of this with you. Your mind is shut.
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“I suspect it is a waste of time discussing any of this with you. Your mind is shut.”
What else can you conclude about someone who thinks that wind power would fare better than nuclear power in a 160km/h windstorm?
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I think the problem with energy efficiency/usage avoidance is not that it is wrong, but that raising it in this context can bwe grossly misleading.
The amount you can cut demand for stationary and transport energy is never going to be enough to retire any significant quaintity of capacity. At best, it can defer the day when new capacity is needed and perhaps allow us a smoother transition to clean energy.
Such benefits are not to be sniffed at, especially if they can be had cheaply, and they can build the kind of community engagement that will support the serious structural changes needed. Yet it would be wrong to suggest, as sime imply, that it is a substantial solution to the problem even in first world countries. And in the developing world, it is not even a minor one. They are already using a tiny fraction of the energy we are using and suffering for it.
Their primary need is to radically ramp up their capacity to produce clean power. Doubtless, for other reasons, regard should be had to good design in cities and non-wasteful use of energy — especially liquid fuels — since most LDCs are net importers. The idea though that first worlders can be ascetic enough in their lifestyle choices to defeat the impact made by LDC-inhabitants gearing up to live in dignity is simply fanciful — almost a new iteration of eating your veges because people in “Biafra” were starving — (my own personal recollection). There’s simply no connection.
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Ewen Laver, on 21 June 2010 at 9.51 — Portland, Oregon, has an ambitious plan to cut electricity consumption by 40%, enough to retire the Boardman 600 MWe coal fired plant. I hope that works, since that plant is (a long ways) upwind of me.
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Good luck with that David. Unless the plan involves economic contraction or is relative (some sort of per-capita extrapolation) it’s not achievable.
To shut Boardman (which they are discussing doing by 2014 or possibly 2020) and cut by 40% on the same timeline would be impossible. About 3% of Oregon’s power comes from nuclear and gearing that up would make more sense.
Apparently about 10% of Boardman’s output goes to Idaho, and that is going to be covered by gas.
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The whole consumptionn reduction idea is complete nonsense from start to finish. Even to get up to a basic decent living standard, the majority of the world’s population has to increase consumption of power, and any attempt to prevent this is an exercise in genocide.
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The other bizarre thing about it Finrod is that the only form in which it could begin to make sense is if the savings in energy here were transferrable in greater energy consumption over there.
Of course hardly anyone here says: let’s all economise on our energy here so that poor people can burn more dirty energy over there. In fact, they resent the whole notion that poor people might “copy our mistakes” or that there might be such a thing as “fugitive emissions” or that companies meeting enviornmental and OHS standards here might locate to low wage dirty countries over there. So all of the benefits (whatever they are) are necessarily stovepiped over here.
What is inevitable is that if poor people are to live at standards we would find minimally acceptable, they will have to use a lot more energy per capita than they are now — perhaps not as much as we are now, but still — a hell of a lot more. You need new capacity to meet this — either dirty or clean. Energy savings can’t supply this.
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Yes Ewen, and I reckon that just underscores the emotive/religious nature of the reduced-energy-consumption doctrine. It is an irrational meme which contributes nothing to the real solutions we need to embrace to overcome the problems facing humanity. Still, we’ll be battling this nonsense for a long time to come.
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Not only that but political terms it would be next to impossible. Geoff how do we stop Brazil from converting jungle to farmland? By threatening them? Do we do the same to those living in the central North American plains, and tell them to stop growing wheat and let natural succession reclaim the Parries?
Questions like this are outside the debate on nuclear energy. That is why I get upset when people say that we have to make conservation part of the solution – it is no solution to the energy issue, and the areas that is the solution too are never going to be helped until there is widespread energy security, that will grant us the luxury of looking at other options.
I’m not sure that there is anything left from Alain’s postings uncovered, but I’m sure he’ll get back to us if there is.
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Further to the UK Telegraph link upthread on negative prices for windpower some googling shows it is a widespread practice in continental Europe and in Texas. The grid operator has to pay for privilege of refusing obligatory wind power or the wind operator pays the grid to take it in order to keep the subsidy coming , either a feed-in tariff or production tax credit. Negative pricing for wind power is the counter argument to those who say off-peak pricing is an artefact of coal and nuclear baseload. However the latter is a discount while the consumer still pays twice when there is a subsidy. The defence given in the Tele article shows how self-righteous renewables advocates have become in the belief they have the moral high ground.
If the world is now roughly 3.5bn each of haves and have-nots I don’t see that continuing. By the time we hit 8bn it might pan out at say 6 bn Cuba style middle class and 2bn underclass.
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In 1941 America had a fraction of todays industrial capacity producing 3.7M automobiles compared to 2007 America when America produced 10 million vehicles. In 1941 American tank production was almost zero and yet by 1945 we had produced 80000 tanks weighing in at 30 tons each. Auto production was essentially zero 1943 to 1945.
While perhaps only part of the solution, a total fossil fuel elimination with the hot tub size factory produced 30 Mwe Hyperion unit weighing in at about 15 tons illustrates the small amount of industrial capacity required. Two units – made almost 100% of steel with a few pounds of enriched uranium weigh about the same as 20 automobiles or a Sherman tank and are lot less complex. 50000 of them would be needed to convert American from fossils to nuclear about the equivalent of a half million vehicles – .5% of American’s 2007 auto production per year for 10 years.
There is a lot of unemployed autoworkers and mothballed auto factories just waiting for orders.
Not a trivial thing certainly but well within our capacity. What would work best is a giant public national power authority like the Bonneville (Grand Coulee) Power Commission or TVA one time national technical and environment certifications – no lawyers allowed – charged with replacing all the nations coal plants efficiently on budget and on time just like Asian countries are doing.
Big nukes are 99% steel and concrete and today’s much smaller units require about the same materials as a bridge or building. They can be largely mass produced in factories. Labor is a relatively small part of nuke cost but we sure have a lot of that available. With orders for 10000 nukes worldwide, colleges would have hundreds of thousand of graduates ready for the big push three or four years now the road.
10000 big mass produced nukes worldwide costing $10 trillion is well within our industrial/financial capacity to build within the next ten years. It is paid for by and ends fossil fuel use, saves millions lives every year from toxic radioactive waste from coal plants and ends global warming. Reasoning progressives (most I hope) and almost all Neocons and Deniers will go along with this at least part way as momentum builds.
Alains way.
Thirty years from now some new tech renewables we’ve been waiting for are now less than 10 times the cost of nuclear. Apparently attaching a microprocessor making them “smart” helps with the cost. Unfortunately, the “opinions” of those silly scientists were right and most of the worlds coastal cities are flooded, the gulf stream has stopped, billions are dead and starving from toxic radioactive coal plant emissions flooding and bad weather. Europe and eastern North America are frozen solid. Deniers and Republicians still refuse to spend on renewables because the treasury is empty feeding the starving, CO2 is plant food and we need lotsa that. The new age renewable “religion” with High Priest Al Gore wants to start culling humans because we produce too much CO2. Jesus and Mohammed have been seen walking together.
You Pick
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Great post Barry. Lots of useful contributions and some less so from the usual anti-nuclear brigade. Some of them are just totally immovable. Forget them. On wind and Denmark, to the best of my understanding, the Danes are not building any more wind farms. They have done nought to reduce their emissions and have given them the most expensive power in the EU. They are however continuing to produce the technology to sell to unsuspecting dills like us in South Australia. We can’t really blame them for maintaining an industry which employs 30,000 can we? Surely everyone knows that the capacity factor of wind might average 20% around the world. Why do people still delude themselves into thinking that dilute, discontinuous wind will ever meet more than a fraction of the increasing amount of energy we’ll all need. The same is true of solar. Energy authorities around the world are saying things like “no person can be serious about climate change without being serious about greatly expanding nuclear power” etc. The Chair of the World Energy Council study group reported that there was no way the world would clombat climate change without “a strong dose of nuclear power.” As Barry pointed out at the beginning, nuclear power generation is growing rapidly around the world with new reactors bobbing up all over the place especially in China and india. And why? Because those and other countries want a secure, clean, safe cost competitive source of power. I’m assuming that all of those countries have considered many of the questions raised by many of you on this thread. They’ve decided that nuclear is the way to go. We need to convince our governments that it is indeed what we should do here in Australia. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m becoming a bit anxious about the future of offshore oil and gas, not to mention the new onshore coal mines in Queensland. Nigeria last year, Gulf of Mexico disaster on right now, and offshore fire in the Timor Sea last year should make us all think about putting a halt to all fossil fuel exploration leading to a gradual phasing out of fossil fuels over coming generations and replacing them all with a rapid and massive uptake of nuclear generation. And here’s a thought for the undeveloped countries who are daring to take up valuable land to feed themselves by clearing their forests etc. Give them electricity by, for a decade or so, giving them aid [0.7% of GDP from all developed countries] in the form of appropriately sized nuclear reactors. There are plenty of options in size from 165Mw PBMR’s to newly marketed Hitachi-GE 400- 600 -900 Mw reactors.
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seth,
Me too! I want this:
The Australian equivalent of the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) is the Snowy Mountains Authority (SMA).
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Peter: I agree entirely that nothing will be faster than nuclear and that
we should get on with it. But the “we” here is Governments and those in
the nuclear industry. What can everybody else do? Elect the right Government,
lobby politicians, and live in a way that reduces the size of
the infrastructure required … plus
all the things I normally talk about … the other side of the problem. If a country
needs 40 GW and people+companies make 20% savings, that’s 8 fewer
1GW nukes that need to be built … that’s significant and 20%
isn’t tough to do and
it makes people feel involved and they need to be involved because the
other side of the problem … reforestation+non-co2 forcing reductions,
doesn’t have a silver bullet and will require behavioural change.
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Geoff, in a post not so long ago you yourself openly questioned the primacy of energy conservation over materials conservation, and rightly so. We should be prepared to use whatever amount of energy is needed toensure the sustainability of the natural world, and we should be educating the public of this necessity. This does not sit well with a home-rationing of power.
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And while that is true in principle, Geoff one doesn’t get the saving, whatever it is, in one nice neat bundle delivered before you make the decision on how much capacity you need. We find this out retrospectively, and, as per Heisenberg, the game changes because of what we do in the game.
Nobody can guarantee that if we don’t build that 1GWe of capacity we will get the requisite savings, nor is it clear that even if we do that we are in fact better off, and even if we are, for how long that will remain true. Maybe we just get to wait another five years before we have to build more capacity, when, if we had just built it, the marginal cost would have been more modest. If there really are low hanging fruit in energy efficiency and other measures to reduce demand, then by all means, let us pursue them but they aren’t an alternative to new capacity, because sooner or later, we are going to need it, no matter how succesful energy usage avoidance turns out in practice to be.
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Think conservation can make a difference?
Think again.
There are 151 new conventional coal-fired power plants in various stages of development in the US today.
Home Depot
Home Depot is funding the planting of 300,000 trees in cities across the US to help absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions…
The CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized (500 MW) coal-fired power plant, in just 10 days of operation, will negate this entire effort.
Wal-mart
Wal-Mart is investing a half billion dollars to reduce the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of their existing buildings by 20% over the next seven years. If every Wal-Mart Supercenter met this target…
…the CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired power plant, in just one month of operation each year, would negate this entire effort.
California
California passed legislation to cut CO2 emissions in new cars by 25% and in SUVs by 18%, starting in 2009. If every car and SUV sold in California in 2009 met this standard…
the CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired power plant, in just eight months of operation each year, would negate this entire effort.
Every household
If every household in the US changed a 60-watt incandescent light bulb to a compact fluorescent…
the CO2 emissions from just two medium-sized coal-fired power plants each year would negate this entire effort.
The Campus Climate Challenge
The Campus Climate Challenge calls for all college campuses in the US to reduce their CO2 emissions to zero. If every college campus building in the US met this challenge…
the CO2 emissions from just four medium-sized coal-fired power plants each year would negate this entire effort.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a cooperative effort by 11 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce their CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2014…
the CO2 emissions from just 13 medium-sized coal-fired power plants each year will negate this entire effort.
THERE IS A ‘SILVER BULLET’ FOR SOLVING GLOBAL WARMING…
NO MORE COAL
Without eliminating coal, none of the positive efforts underway can make a difference.
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“Without eliminating coal, none of the positive efforts underway can make a difference.”
And if you do eliminate coal, none of them will be necessary.
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Eliminating just coal is not enough. Oil and natgas has to be eliminated as well. And destruction of rain forests and much more.
How do you evaluate the cost curve at page 7 in this McKinsey report?
Click to access WWFBinaryitem11334.pdf
According to the curve there is potential of a reduction for about 10 Giga tons of CO2 at negative costs.
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My last post was only to illustrate that conservation efforts, decoupled from source selection was too little to matter. The WWF paper makes many assumptions, the most telling is that many of their carbon mitigation schemes assume that combustion will be reduced and that this reduction can be prorated into savings. However with a move to nuclear, thus eliminating the source carbon to begin with, many of these savings disappear.
For example a switch to low powered lighting only saves carbon, if carbon is being burned to produce this energy in the first place. Highly sophisticated natural gas fired generators don save any carbon, if the generators themselves are not needed, and so on.
The problem is that every penny spent on these other initiatives, is not being spent on building nuclear power plants, where the gain across the board will be the greatest.
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Your request question, and underneath my response. I will stop replying, too much work to do, concluded we will waste our time if we continue down this road on this subject. Thanks for the nice comments.
** As DV8 is busy may I draw your attention to various emerging nuclear technologies that have the potential to consume most of the so called “Waste” from Gen I & II nukes. If you are wondering why these technologies are so late into the field, the simple answer is that they are not useful for producing weapons. It is impossible to use them to produce more than tiny amounts of Plutonium. Fissile materials produced such as U232 are not suitable for bomb applications.
The tremendous depth and breadth of materials relating to nuclear technology available through this site are daunting so I understand your reluctance to wade through it. At least take the time to look at the following fun video:http://energyfromthorium.com/2008/11/21/joe-bonomettis-tech-talk-at-google/ **
Thanks. Watched the video. The guy confirmed my pro’s and con’s against nuclear : Huge capital investment requirements + lot’s of long lived really nasty radioactive wastes for current conventional NPP’s. LFTR technology is great, now only works in labs, no megawatt scale proven commercial application, can’t say how much costs per kWh, how much for a 1000MW plant, Uncle Sam isn’t ready to fund such a plant to discover the price costs, and no one else in the world does want to invest in it. Conventional NPP’s are ‘cheap’ coz the military footed the $ Trillion research bills for decades.
Here some other reaction snippets from other people found on this blog :
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-11-09-do-we-need-nuclear-and-clean-coal-plants-for-baseload-power/#comments
I don’t know that most progressives are anti-nuke, not any more. Of those who were anti-nuclear power a year ago, quite a few told me that they changed their mind after reading this article: with footnotes: http://www.quaker.org/fep/FJ-Nuclear-Energy-Debate.html
What I see is that awareness of the cost of nuclear and time to build nuclear is rapidly lowering its popularity. I think Lester Brown has it about right when he says that nuclear plants won’t be shut down before their “normal” lifetime, which is a shift of progressives because of global warming concerns. In other words, it’s easier to build up to a billion or two dollars in wind farms, by just adding a few here and there, then to say you’ll spend so many billions on one nuclear reactor. Nuke has higher capex, but also much higher capacity factor, and nearly comparable fuel costs (that is to say, near zero). That said, nuclear has a pretty robust history of cost overruns while wind is much more predictable, so my guess is that on a completely level playing field, nuke would still lose out. 40 years ago nuclear looked unbeatable. Too cheap to meter, we were promised. By 30 years ago, even before Three Mile Island, the reality of what nuclear really costs had already soured the market.
Here’s a bit from Wikipedia…
Notable Breeder Reactors
Experimental Breeder Reactor I (U.S., decommissioned 1964, world’s first electricity-producing nuclear power plant)
BN-600 (Russia, end of life 2010)[12][13]
Clinch River Breeder Reactor (U.S., construction abandoned in 1982 because the US halted its spent-fuel reprocessing program and thus made breeders pointless)[14]
Monju (Japan, being brought online again after a serious sodium leak and fire in 1995)[15]
Superphenix (France, closed 1998)[16]
Phenix (France, operational since 1974, stopped its grid electricity production as of March 2009, prior to decomissioning)[17][18][19]
And Britan’s breeder is being decommissioned as we speak…. http://www.dounreay.com/news/2009-11-09/fast-breeder-was-britains-man-on-the-moon-moment
They’re kind of like pebble bed reactors, sounded good on paper, but not so good when tried in the real world….
Lots of things we haven’t yet done. Some of them will probably happen, some most likely not. Like pebble bed reactors, the true believers have a lot of faith but that faith hasn’t exactly yielded a lot of results.
To argue that anything built by the socialist Soviet Union is proof that “it can be done commercially” is highly suspect. Just as suspect as saying that nuclear energy is cheap because China is building some.
China also has been working on pebble bed reactors and recently sort of admitted major problems. Again, just because someone is going to give it a try does not mean that it is something proven. We can’t afford to base our transition away from fossil fuels on something that might work. We need to move forward with what has already been proved to work.
Concerning ‘The SuperPhenix reactor’ : From Wikipedia. And make sure you read the last sentence…
“Power production was halted in December 1996 for maintenance. However, following a court case led by opponents of the reactor, on February 28, 1997 the Conseil d’État (Supreme State Administrative Court) ruled that a 1994 decree, authorizing the restart of Superphénix, was invalid. In June 1997, one of the first actions of Lionel Jospin on becoming Prime Minister was to announce the closure of the plant “because of its excessive costs”. Jospin’s government included Green ministers; pro-nuclear critics have argued that Jospin’s decision was motivated by political motives (i.e., to please his Green political allies) rather than rational considerations. However, the reactor did not produce electricity most of the time in its last ten years because of malfunctions[4] (in fact it was consuming substantial power to maintain sodium above melting temperature).”
IFR technology makes it a new ball game. There’s always a new solution just over the horizon that is going to change the world. Fusion is only 20 years away. And has been for the last 50 years.
And do remember, even if IFRs can be made to work they only deal with spent fuel. They do nothing to clean up the 91 million gallons (345 million liters) of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing, millions of cubic feet of contaminated tools, metal scraps, clothing, oils, solvents, and other waste. And with some 265 million tons (240 million metric tons) of tailings from milling uranium ore—less than half stabilized—littering landscapes.
If we continue down the nuclear pathway we simply create more and more of this dangerous stuff for which we have no solution. We are currently “storing in place” hoping that someone will think of something. For every nuclear plant we build we create one more rot in place dangerous problem for those who follow us.
** I still haven’t the time for a full post, however I will note that Alain’s ignorance about both the French reprocessing efforts (all the long lived waste they produce can be stored under the floor of one room at Le Hague, and it has been immobilized in as a vitreous solid) .Your understanding of CANDU’s (it is an acronym, and is properly spelled all caps) and the Canadian power market,is breathtakingly shallow and shows that you have not done the least bit of research on the subject. I suspect that you are parroting some antinuclear propaganda you read somewhere.**
Dude, you should get off the vinegar. I told you from the beginning that I am a Belgian, I am not a nuclear engineer, and that I only related what I saw on TV5Monde TV channel. Go piss on your wife or son. Belgium does spend every year 3.5 million euro to store it’s nuke wastes in special protected custody, given that our 10 million people country produces 55% of it’s electricity from NPP’s. What is the price tag for 7 Billion people ? Here under what we do in Belgium to stay safe. I don’t care what you canuks do over there, we have 6000 km of water between us to dillute eventual spills.
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Features/UndergroundLabs/Mol/mol.html
** “The first slice was about France. And more specifically during a serious winter night storm that flew over south west France at wind speed of up to 160km/h (100mph). **
**Is anyone able to confirm whether or not this alleged event ever actually occured?**
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101314376-la-tempete-dans-le-sud-ouest-heure-par-heure
1.3 million homes cut off from the grid. 22h32 Quelque 1,3 million de foyers sont toujours privés d’électricité dans cinq régions de la moitié sud de la France, à la suite de la tempête.
Wind gust above 184km/h. On a enregistré des pointes de vent de 184 km/h à Perpignan, Biscarosse (Landes) de 172 km/h dans les Landes et 161 km/h à Bordeaux (Gironde).
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=92327
EDF launched internal emergency plan, to protect the NPP against flooding. EDF a par ailleurs déclenché un Plan d’urgence interne (PUI) à la centrale nucléaire du Blayais (Gironde) pour faire face à une éventuelle inondation, a annoncé l’Autorité de sûreté nucléaire.
http://www.dissident-media.org/infonucleaire/news_0_1.html
3 NPP incidents in three months in France. Closure of suction inlet for alimentation of cooling system of one of the 4 reactors. Quelques heures après l’obturation d’une prise d’eau alimentant le système de refroidissement d’un des quatre réacteurs de la centrale nucléaire de Cruas en Ardèche
The reason for all those problems is the demand load following that the French NPP have to do to cover the national electricity demand, using prematurely the NPP’s, compared to the USA, where only 20% of NPP’s are used in a baseload mode, allowing them to run at constant speed and load capacity, avoiding tear and wear. Contrairement aux Etats-Unis, comme 80% de l’électricité consommée en France est produite par des centrales nucléaires, le parc est obligé de suivre la courbe des variations de puissance, ce qui l’use énormément. Une centrale nucléaire nécessite un usage le plus linéaire possible, ce qui peut se faire aux Etats-Unis avec seulement 20% de l’électricité produite par le nucléaire.
**ABARE did the modelling. That was 20 years ago. Then I was involved with the actual implementation of some of these schemes to reduce energy use in existing buildings. Most of what is theoretically achievable is not commercially viable. But I believe energy efficiency improvements will provide a small component of what we need to do in the next 20 years. **
Peter, you are a smart man, but you need to gear up to current building technology. We in Europe have been issued a Directive from the European Union, forcing anyone that wants to build after 2020, to stay below a certain energy consumption per square meter of flooring. It will allow us to reduce our CO2 emission by 70% from 1990 levels, this in a $ 15 Trillion economy. This can be done in a financially very easy way, it is called Passive Housing or near passive housing and only cost 5 to 10% more than current home building, extra outlay being won back in 10 years with the energy savings. Belgium imports all it’s oil and natural gas and coal. Our only free resource is the 850kWh in sunrays per square meter per year. We already build such homes right now in Belgium, it is basically a fantastically well insulated fridge (30cm roof and wall insulation, 20cm floor insulation). The high insulation grade allows us to simply use a very very low kW heat pump that convert one kWh in electricity into 3.5 to 4 kWh in heat, being powered by the grid or your own solar PV panels. The alternative to a heat pump is a micro combined Heat and power system. Or simply a 3kW furnace. Or some log wood. Once your extra heat requirements are very low, you do not need to add much energy into the sealed buidling to be confortable. A human being produces 70W per hour on it’s own, and that amount increases exponentially with torid sex . . .
Here some examples to illustrate my point, please go thru it all, it is really great material.
http://www.bostoen.be/Bostoen/Nederlands/Ons-aanbod/Passief-huis/Wat-is-Passief-wonen-/page.aspx/89
Belgium is already now building PassivHaus accommodations, given that in 10 years time, it will be mandatory, according to the E.U. Directive legislation hereup.
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1733&format=HTML&aged=0&language=en&guiLanguage=en
The agreement will strengthen the building codes and energy performance requirements for buildings across the EU and fixes 2020 as deadline for all new buildings to be nearly zero energy buildings. It is estimated that, by strengthening the provisions of the Directive on energy performance, the EU could achieve a reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 70% of the current EU Kyoto target. In addition to this, these improvements could save citizens around € 300 per annum per household in their energy bills, while boosting the construction and building renovation industry in Europe.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/03/passivhaus-comes-to-california.php?campaign=th_weekly_nl
Passivhaus Comes To California, Shattering Stereotypes
http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2010/01/go-passivhaus.php?page=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivehouses#Space_heating_requirement
http://www.azsolarcenter.org/tech-science/solar-architecture/passive-solar-design-manual/passive-solar-design-manual-cooling.html
Passivhaus is The Real Standard for a Real Green House.
** We”d need equivalent amounts of energy storage to make renewables equivalent to nuclear. The idea of renewables doing anything useful is ridiculous. **
Well, other people have other ideas, and you won’t be able to change one thing about that.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/go/windalert/article/1007939/?DCMP=EMC-WindpowerWeekly
World’s second biggest offshore project gets green light, the 576MW Gwynt n Môr project off the Welsh coast. The project will significantly aid Wales ambition to supply a third of its electricity through wind. Installation of the 160 3.6MW Siemens turbines will begin late next year. These are expected to start producing electricity by 2013. Overall completion is set for 2014. The project will cost € 2 billion with € 1.2 billion of this going to Siemens, which has a five-year O&M contract. The budget also includes grid connections and two transformer platforms. (Investment of € 3.5 per Watt). Permission to build Gwynt n Môr was agreed in late 2008. Gwynt n Môr will the second biggest wind farm in the world, however it falls some way short of the 1GW London Array project that is currently being build in the Thames Estuary.
**Spain is nearly broke. They are having to massively reduce their subsidies for renewable energy. The irrational RE subsidies have driven business and investment out of Spain. Spain lost 2.2 real jobs for every “green job’ created by the government.**
Spain is broke because they did spend way too much on social welfare programs to buy votes from disgruntled seniors and women. Spain never had a big industry, their main sectors are tourism, building construction for tourists and farming under glass to supply us all with tomatoes and cucumbers during winter.
** What else can you conclude about someone who thinks that wind power would fare better than nuclear power in a 160km/h windstorm? **
The germans are planning to erect 980 wind turbines offshore, in wind gust territory. I am pretty confident that they will shut down their wind turbines in that event, and will power up some other inland backup system.
http://www.fino3.de/joomla15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=229&Itemid=459
Planned 980 units wind turbine park offshore Germany. 3MW , 3.6MW and 5MW machines
**The amount you can cut demand for stationary and transport energy is never going to be enough to retire any significant quaintity of capacity. At best, it can defer the day when new capacity is needed and perhaps allow us a smoother transition to clean energy.**
EXACTLY !
**Further to the UK Telegraph link upthread on negative prices for windpower some googling shows it is a widespread practice in continental Europe and in Texas. The grid operator has to pay for privilege of refusing obligatory wind power or the wind operator pays the grid to take it in order to keep the subsidy coming , either a feed-in tariff or production tax credit.**
China is doing the same.
http://featured.matternetwork.com/2009/12/china-requires-utilities-buy-all.cfm
December 27, 2009
China Requires Utilities to Buy All Available Renewable Energy
By Susan Kraemer
This weekend the main Chinese legislature adopted an amendment to the renewable energy law, requiring that utilities must buy all the electricity produced by renewable energy generators. Utilities refusing would be fined up to an amount double that of the economic loss of the renewable energy company.
The big question is: for how much? Whether this would create a boom in renewable energy in China will depend on how much money companies could earn in the sales. So far, this figure is not in the news reports. This amount paid per kilowatt-hour produced is the key to the success or failure of Feed-in Tariffs to generate more renewable energy.
**There are 151 new conventional coal-fired power plants in various stages of development in the US today.**
Let’s talk again once the USA has done his power plants selection. By the way, China build and started up one coal power plant a week, since 2000 . . . While you guys were endlessly blahblah thing about nuke power plants.
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-15-time-to-bury-cheap-coal/
Time to bury cheap coal. In 2009, nearly 15,000 megawatts of proposed coal fired power plants were canceled. To put that in perspective, that would represent about a third of all electricity generating capacity of a state the size of California. This is not a consequence of a slow economy alone; eight years ago, 36,000 megawatts of new coal plants were on the drawing boards and a mere 13 percent of those were actually built. The cheapest new power plant is the one you don’t build. California is 40 percent more energy efficient than the rest of the nation — and Denmark is a third more energy efficient than that — so real savings can be achieved while stimulating the economy with projects that replace inefficient appliances, machinery, and even simple doors/windows with modern versions that save energy. While electricity appeared cheap, little was done to be efficient. Now that we know better, efficiency can be the major source of “new” supply for a decade.
http://www.grist.org/article/death-of-a-thousand-cuts
Click to access eeg_kosten_nutzen_hintergrund_en.pdf
A messy but practical strategy for phasing out the U.S. coal fleet : Death of a Thousand Cuts.
I would propose, as “Knife #10,” something like feed-in tariffs.
Look at what Europe and China are doing. For example, in 2000 Germany set a 12.5% renewables target for 2010, which they achieved by 2007 with a feed-in tariff. In 2006 the renewables price subsidy was 10.9 cents/kWh, which corresponds roughly to a $100/ton carbon price incentive. The cost to ratepayers amounted to 0.75 cent/kWh, or about 1.1 euro per person per month. Economic benefits exceed costs by about a factor of three.
Using a similar approach, carbon fees of order $10/ton could finance price subsidies for new renewables equivalent to a $100/ton carbon price — immediately, not years or decades in the future. As renewables gain market share, fees would increase and subsidies would decrease, maintaining revenue neutrality and maintaining the relative price advantage of renewables.
What impact would an immediate and sustained price incentive of order $100/ton have on the electricity market?
Congress should consider this kind of approach in their quest for a politically viable carbon pricing mechanism.
http://ecohustler.co.uk/2010/06/16/the-biggest-no%E2%80%93brainer-ever/
The biggest no–brainer ever, June 16, 2010. The World Bank estimates that over 150 billion cubic metres of natural gas are flared or vented annually, an amount worth approximately 30.6 billion dollars, equivalent to 25 percent of the United States’ gas consumption or 30 percent of the European Union’s gas consumption per year.[5] This flaring is highly concentrated: 10 countries account for 75% of emissions, and twenty for 90%.
http://www.grist.org/article/chinas-changing-energy-economy/
China’s changing energy economy. These ambitious projects are just scratching the surface; a study published in the journal Science calculates that China could generate more than seven times its current electricity consumption from the wind alone.
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Ewen Laver, on 21 June 2010 at 11.46 — I think the planners in Portland OR know what they are about although 40% does seem high.
As for NPPs in the Pacific Northwest, forget about adding any for several more decades; the memories of the WPPS (pronounced Woops!) will persit that long.
But maybe that attitude will change as
http://www.nuscalepower.com/
is an Oregon based company with a passively safe 45 MWe module coming up for NRC review.
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DV82XL, on 22 June 2010 at 0.51 — Measures to achieve energy efficiency often result in net savings for households and especially businesses (where the savings then flow to the bottom line). Such measures, if properly administered, don’t interfere in the slightest with promoting NPPs. In fact the resulting savings can help with one of the hardest aspects of building NPPs; obtaining the capital at reasonable finance rates.
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David B. Benson I refer you to my post on 21 June 2010 at 23.20 – The actual amount of savings are very small to the point of being counter-productive in some cases. It’s not clear to me how Wal-Mart, investing a half billion dollars to reduce the energy consumption of their existing buildings by 20% over the next seven years eliminating the CO2 emissions from one medium-sized coal-fired power plant, for just one month of operation each year, is cost effective, or indeed how it frees up capital, as you suggest.
Much of the major energy efficiency gains have already been made – by industry, because they had a financial interest in doing so. While certainly building codes should mandate more energy efficiency in new construction, the pay-back for major retrofits of existing dwellings simply have too long a global pay-back period (both in money and carbon) to make anything but a token contribution in the long run.
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Tu peux bien aller chez le diable, Alain. Alors ta mère doit être fière
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Alain, It seems you are eager to publish your book on BraveNewClimate.com, but don’t you think this is not an appropriate place to achieve your goal. Just a suggestion, why don’t you get your own blog and publish your book, chapter by chapter, there. And then you can reference your book, on other sites, like this one.
Do you really think anyone is going to wade through page after page of your rather dubious material? Are you really interested in engaging in debate?
Maybe, you might just take one point at a time, write your position, include a few links, and let others critique that point.
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Alain suckered us into believing he did not have a clue about NPPs and then he produced a compendium of NPP problems. While most of you will not accept his arguments you should be gracious enough to admit that some of them are weighty matters.
For example what is the real reason for junking Super-Phenix? Was it fundamental design flaws as Alain suggests or political pandering?
It is hard to explain why MSR research has so little support at high levels in most countries. Even advocates such as DV8 admit that there are some unresolved issues with the materials required to contain high temperature cores and blankets.
I used to build equipment used in fusion research yet I regard Alain’s comments on fusion power to be spot on. It took me a while but I now hold the same opinion that he does.
I could go on but I would like the brighter bulbs on this blog to take his criticisms seriously. Please be nice to him; I lived in Brussels for long enough to have some sympathy for Belgians (e.g. what dismal weather).
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I for one will not engage with someone that uttered such a crude statement as he did to me. I have no issue with fielding insults, any more than I have handing them out, but there is a line, and he crossed it.
Others may chose to interact with him, I will not.
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gallopingcamel, you give him far too much credit. It is easy enough to critique fusion [and what did he say, other than regurgitate the old joke that has been told around nuclear circles, in one form or another, for decades??], or indeed to ‘machine gun’ us with the critiques of others on any number of variants of nuclear technology. Alain has delivered to me no obvious evidence that he understands energy — at least in any practical technological sense — or he would not have deluged this comment thread with so many reams of irrelevant, uncontextualised or downright wrong ‘spin-formation’ about renewable projects.
As to:
Alain offered nothing more than a cut-and-paste from a Wikipedia entry. For goodness sake! If you wish to know the actual reasons for this, I strongly suggest you read Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons. There is an excellent section on this topic, presumably written by Georges Charpak, one of the co-authors and a Frenchman.
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I’m sure if Crazy Al had anything worthwhile to say he’d find a way of saying it a bit more succinctly than with his flood-the-thread writing technique. That’s just a cover for lack of relevent content.
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The technical term for that Finrod is, ‘bullshit baffles brains’
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DV82XL, on 22 June 2010 at 9.55 — Actually, in at least the USA there is still lots of room for enhanced energy efficiency irrespective of the coal plant figures. So I fear we’ll just have to disagree on that small matter.
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David, of course you are free to hold your own opinions on the matter, however it as you say, you will hold them irrespective of fact-based quantifiable arguments to the contrary, then indeed we will have to remain in disagreement on this subject.
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DV82XL, on 23 June 2010 at 10.03 — I try to stick to the facts. For example, there a numerous opportunities to use ground heat pumps to provide HVAC, at least as suppliments. Etc.
The electrical power plan from NPCC for this region includes a considerable amount of energy efficiency which then lessens the requirment for new generation in the face of increasing population. They work with PNNL and I suspect that all of them, doing this full time, know better what is achievable than either of us.
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http://www.globalwindpower.com/en/greenfield/markets/france.aspx
The French government’s objective is for wind power to reach a level of 25000 MW by 2020. This is equivalent to seven times the level at the end of 2008. It is expected that 6000 MW of this will be developed offshore, leaving 19000 MW to be implemented onshore. This goal should ensure that France achieves its overall EU target of 23% renewable energy in 2020.
It is not difficult to work out that this would require the installation of around 1500 MW annually. We feel that this is unrealistic within a very short period (2010/2011), since it would involve an annual installed power level approaching that which currently exists in Germany.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/go/windalert/article/1010844/?DCMP=EMC-WindpowerWeekly
Spain’s central government intends to cut its 2020 (40GW) installed wind capacity target by 5% (2GW). In terms of energy, the draft NAP earmarks 78254GWh for wind in 2020, a 6.51% drop on the Zurbano Pact target. The reduction is in spite the NAP’s 6% increased estimate in total electricity consumption in 2020, to 317944GWh. It means wind will cover 24.61% of electricity demand, down from 27.89% under the Zurbano Pact.
Still, renewables will provide 40% of total electricity, as previously targeted. Furthermore, the objective for renewables to cover 22.7% of primary energy consumption remains unchanged. That is 2.7 percentage points above the EU target.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/go/windalert/article/1010514/?DCMP=EMC-WindpowerWeekly
Map of present and future UK offshore wind projects.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/go/windalert/article/1006702/?DCMP=EMC-WindpowerWeekly
America’s Export-Import bank has seen both the volume and monetary amount of requests for loans skyrocket since the wind industry downturn at the end of 2008. He says recent solar photovoltaic applications have hovered around a cost of $4 million per installed megawatt compared to $1.2-$1.3 million for wind. “Wind energy is becoming recognised as more affordable,” says Guthrie. “Maybe it doesn’t work everywhere, but where it works, it works very well.”
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-06-21-is-a-utility-only-cap-and-trade-bill-worth-passing/
It is good to start examining the huge spread of prices paid for ‘clean energy’. For everyone’s edification, not one of the 260 energy recycling projects built by companies I have led have ever received more than 6.5 cents per kWh in external power sales. A few backpressure turbine projects in small facilities displaced more than 10 cents per kWh, but our major projects pencil at 6.5 to 8.5 cents per kWh, and there are no line losses or need for standby generation. All of the approaches that use energy twice including Biomass CHP, gas fired CHP and recycling of industrial waste energy pencil at under the 9.9 cents per kWh.
Re nuclear, we repeat the assertion that all new nuclear will raise the current rates. Amortize $5,800 per kW over 25 years at 11% all in costs, assume the plant operates 8,000 full load hours per year, and you need 8.6
cents per kWh just for capital. Add labor, O&M, fuel, and reserves for decommissioning and spent fuel disposal and the owner will need 12 to 13 cents per kWh for the investment to pencil. I am not aware of any evidence
that the $10,300 per kW estimate is high, and it is in the middle of the Vogtle Georgia NPP estimates.
Bottom line: There are options that cut or eliminate CO2 and lower the cost of power. They all involve generating both heat and power – using energy twice.
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http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/06/chilling-out-in-the-sun-solar-cooling?cmpid=SolarNL-Tuesday-June8-2010
by 2008, a total of only 450 to 500 solar cooling systems had been realized worldwide, the vast majority of which are in Europe, where the market has increased in the last five years by 50%–100% annually.
SorTech AG develops, manufactures and distributes adsorption chillers for cooling and air-conditioning applications in the small and medium scale performance range up to 75 kW cooling capacity. Using heat as the primary energy source for cold production, including solar or waste heat, the company’s adsorption chillers – available with a nominal cooling capacity of 8 kW (ACS 08) and 15 kW (ACS 15) – are suitable for air-conditioning and cooling of one- or multi-family houses as well as smaller commercial and office buildings. The machines use water as refrigerant, and the company claims innovative coatings, compact design, and an optimized subsystem including the re-cooler as key advantages.
An absorption chiller manufacturer headquartered in Kulmbach, Germany, AGO AG was founded in 1980 as a specialist in the area of energy supply and facilities and focuses on the three business segments. AGO offers absorption chillers in a range of 50–500 kW cooling capacity and also markets the ammonia/water absorption chiller developed by the Dresden Institut für Luft und Kältetechnik (Institute for Air and Refrigeration Engineering). For 2009 AGO AG reported a turnover of about € 50 million, some 36% up on the previous year.
A developer and producer of adsorption heat pumps driven by waste energy or solar heating, currently InvenSor GmbH offers two types of chillers: LTC with 7 kW and HTC with 10 kW of cooling capacity respectively. InvenSor High Temperature Chillers (HTC) are particularly adapted for solar cooling in a warm climate, operating at a typical ambient temperature of more than 30°C and driving temperatures of 65–95°C. In cooling mode the water chiller unit has outlet temperatures of 6–18°C depending on specification. The compressor of a conventional chiller is substituted by a thermally driven adsorption reactor which is regenerated by solar energy. The evacuated reactor is operated without any active components like pumps or valves inside. Therefore maintenance is limited to the peripherical parts of the machine. The adsorption process operates using water instead of volatile or corrosive fluids that are typically used in many other chilling devices.
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http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/06/foster-wheeler-to-supply-torresol-steam-generators?cmpid=SolarNL-Tuesday-June22-2010
June 18, 2010. Foster Wheeler AG announced that a subsidiary of its Global Power Group has been awarded a contract to design, supply and provide site advisory services for two sets of solar steam generators, including preheaters, kettle type evaporators, superheaters and reheaters, as well as low pressure and high pressure feedwater heaters. The equipment delivery is scheduled for the first quarter of 2011.
The plants will use Seners’s concentrated parabolic trough technology (SENERtrough) and will have energy storage capability by means of molten salt tanks that is designed to provide up to seven hours of plant operation without sun radiation. The plants are expected to operate approximately 3,500 hours/year. The equipment will be integrated into the Valle 1 & Valle 2 Solar Thermal Power Plants, located in San José del Valle, Spain. The plants, which are owned by Torresol Energy, a company created by Spain-based Sener (60%) and the Abu Dhabi-based company Masdar (40%), will have an installed power capacity of 50 megawatts (MW) each.
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http://www.grist.org/article/2010-06-16-local-power-tapping-distributed-energy-in-21st-century-cities
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=distributed-energy-urban
In many ways the evolution of centralized energy into distributed energy parallels the evolution of computers from central mainframes to PCs and smart phones, and it may have many of the same democratizing effects. Though it takes many forms, distributed energy boils down to two basic strategies: The first is to harvest as much power as possible locally, close to where it is consumed, from small-scale, low-carbon sources. The second is to wring the maximum amount of useful work out of every unit of energy available. The overarching goal is to create resilient, self-reliant cities prepared for the economic and political volatility ahead in the 21st century. Residents of Hammarby Sjöstad, a district on the south side of Stockholm, Sweden, don’t let their waste go to waste. ……………. After they are done district authorities hope Hammarby Sjöstad will produce about half its power independently, a task made easier by the fact that residents, thanks to a broad range of efficiency and conservation measures, will consume half the energy of the average Swede (who already consumes only about 75 percent as much as the average American).
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Alain, please cease and desist from spamming this thread with cut-and-paste slabs of text from web articles. It is impossible to determine what you have written/thought versus what you are regurgitating or straight out copying. You are on moderation until you can show more restraint and comment in the spirit of this blog, i.e. with an ounce of personal responsibility.
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It doesn’t matter how often or with what vigour your incontinent postings are made Al, nonsense is still nonsense. You are impressing no one.
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http://www.grist.org/article/death-of-a-thousand-cuts
Click to access eeg_kosten_nutzen_hintergrund_en.pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.12.044
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/06/an-embarrassment-of-riches?cmpid=SolarNL-Tuesday-June22-2010
A messy but practical strategy for phasing out the U.S. coal fleet : Death of a Thousand Cuts.
I would propose, as “Knife #10,” something like feed-in tariffs.
Look at what Europe and China are doing. For example, in 2000 Germany set a 12.5% renewables target for 2010, which they achieved by 2007 with a feed-in tariff. In 2006 the renewables price subsidy was 10.9 cents/kWh, which corresponds roughly to a $100/ton carbon price incentive. The cost to ratepayers amounted to 0.75 cent/kWh, or about 1.1 euro per person per month. Economic benefits exceed costs by about a factor of three.
Using a similar approach, carbon fees of order $10/ton could finance price subsidies for new renewables equivalent to a $100/ton carbon price — immediately, not years or decades in the future. As renewables gain market share, fees would increase and subsidies would decrease, maintaining revenue neutrality and maintaining the relative price advantage of renewables.
What impact would an immediate and sustained price incentive of order $100/ton have on the electricity market?
Congress should consider this kind of approach in their quest for a politically viable carbon pricing mechanism.
The nations that have led the way on renewable energy in the last decade have used robust “feed-in tariffs” to create entire new industries. Germany, Italy, Spain, Ontario (a province in Canada) and now China have all seen growth go from low levels to record levels practically overnight right after they started requiring that utilities buy power at a set price from third party developers of wind, solar and other renewables. Under an auction system, financiers may require 12-15% return on equity, which is pricey. But with a true feed-in tariff, financiers are happy with less than 10% because they know they’ll actually make this money year in, year out, without a lot of money wasted on speculation or failed projects.
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“In many ways the evolution of centralized energy into distributed energy parallels the evolution of computers from central mainframes to PCs and smart phones, and it may have many of the same democratizing effects.”
This is a vicious lie designed to delude people into surrendering their rights and their access to useful power in order to satisfy the lunatic demands of a small band of anti-freedom, anti-democracy radicals who lust to control the human race through control of the power grid. Green fascists such as Crazy Al are trying to prime the populations of the advanced nations to welcome power rationing and reduced living standards with the eventual aim of a mass population cull. They are being aided and abbetted in this by fossil fuel interests who see this ridiculous agenda as a neat method of extorting more money from their helpless clients. Nuclear power can smash this nightmare vision if we embrace it soon enough.
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This guy is out of control Finrod, best to ignore him until he runs out of steam. I doubt anyone has the zits fleisch to read his ravings anyway.
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” This is a vicious lie designed to delude people into surrendering their rights and their access to useful power in order to satisfy the lunatic demands of a small band of anti-freedom, anti-democracy radicals who lust to control the human race through control of the power grid. Green fascists such as Crazy Al are trying to prime the populations of the advanced nations to welcome power rationing and reduced living standards with the eventual aim of a mass population cull. They are being aided and abbetted in this by fossil fuel interests who see this ridiculous agenda as a neat method of extorting more money from their helpless clients. Nuclear power can smash this nightmare vision if we embrace it soon enough.”
Well, the French and the Spaniard obviously disagree with your radioactive crap, so to speak. And you won’t be able to change that.
http://www.globalwindpower.com/en/greenfield/markets/france.aspx
The French government’s objective is for wind power to reach a level of 25000 MW by 2020. This is equivalent to seven times the level at the end of 2008. It is expected that 6000 MW of this will be developed offshore, leaving 19000 MW to be implemented onshore. This goal should ensure that France achieves its overall EU target of 23% renewable energy in 2020.
It is not difficult to work out that this would require the installation of around 1500 MW annually. We feel that this is unrealistic within a very short period (2010/2011), since it would involve an annual installed power level approaching that which currently exists in Germany.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/go/windalert/article/1010844/?DCMP=EMC-WindpowerWeekly
Spain’s central government intends to cut its 2020 (40GW) installed wind capacity target by 5% (2GW). In terms of energy, the draft NAP earmarks 78,254GWh for wind in 2020, a 6.51% drop on the Zurbano Pact target. The reduction is in spite the NAP’s 6% increased estimate in total electricity consumption in 2020, to 317,944GWh. It means wind will cover 24.61% of electricity demand, down from 27.89% under the Zurbano Pact.
Still, renewables will provide 40% of total electricity, as previously targeted. Furthermore, the objective for renewables to cover 22.7% of primary energy consumption remains unchanged. That is 2.7 percentage points above the EU target.
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“Well, the French and the Spaniard obviously disagree with your radioactive crap, so to speak. And you won’t be able to change that.”
Typical of doctrinaire anti-nuclear luddites is the assumption that there are certain magical words such as ‘radioactive’ which contain some kind of curse which can be used as a substitute for reasoned discourse. It’s true for some people, but more of the public are waking up to these dishonest tactics and are not reacting like the pavlov’s dogs the antinukes want them to be.
Sorry DV82XL. You are right, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.
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” Typical of doctrinaire anti-nuclear luddites is the assumption that there are certain magical words such as ‘radioactive’ which contain some kind of curse which can be used as a substitute for reasoned discourse. It’s true for some people, but more of the public are waking up to these dishonest tactics and are not reacting like the pavlov’s dogs the antinukes want them to be.
Sorry DV82XL. You are right, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. ”
blah blah blah blah blah. What have you to say about the fact that Spain will provide 40% of total electricity and 22.7% of primary energy from renewable energy in just ten years time, this is a country of 40 million people, twice Australia’s.
You should go into politics, all wind and no content.
At least I try to stick to FACTS : new nuclear is NOT cheaper than current RE technologies per produced kWh, when being built in western high salaries, 50 hours workweeks, stringent regulations environments. And the inherent flexibility provided by spread out RE energy supply harvested close to home, allow us to have a more spread out and thus more resilient energy supply infrastructure, making our western civilization stronger against major exporters of energy like Australia and OPEC countries, who can cut us all off our energy needs in case of disagreement.
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-06-21-is-a-utility-only-cap-and-trade-bill-worth-passing/
It is good to start examining the huge spread of prices paid for ‘clean energy’. For everyone’s edification, not one of the 260 energy recycling projects built by companies I have led have ever received more than 6.5 cents per kWh in external power sales. A few backpressure turbine projects in small facilities displaced more than 10 cents per kWh, but our major projects pencil at 6.5 to 8.5 cents per kWh, and there are no line losses or need for standby generation. All of the approaches that use energy twice including Biomass CHP, gas fired CHP and recycling of industrial waste energy pencil at under the 9.9 cents per kWh.
Re nuclear, we repeat the assertion that all new nuclear will raise the current rates. Amortize $5,800 per kW over 25 years at 11% all in costs, assume the plant operates 8,000 full load hours per year, and you need 8.6 cents per kWh just for capital. Add labor, O&M, fuel, and reserves for decommissioning and spent fuel disposal and the owner will need 12 to 13 cents per kWh for the investment to pencil. I am not aware of any evidence that the $10,300 per kW estimate is high, and it is in the middle of the Vogtle Georgia NPP estimates.
Bottom line: There are options that cut or eliminate CO2 and lower the cost of power. They all involve generating both heat and power – using energy twice.
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“What have you to say about the fact that Spain will provide 40% of total electricity and 22.7% of primary energy from renewable energy in just ten years time, this is a country of 40 million people, twice Australia’s.”
I would advise you not to boast about yet-unachieved achievements, to reconsider iron-hard ideological positions based on government projections concerrning dubious programs, and to examine the actual state of the Spanish economy, the demonstrable fraud which has resulted from the Spanish RE policy, the collapse in employment resulting from their skyrocketing power bills and the economic studies which have revealed the Spanish policy for the unmitigated disaster that it is.
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“If non-hydro renewable energy were truly as cost-effective and could be built on the scale these authors would like you to believe, why has no nation yet followed this energy pathway?”
Because it becomes effective and cost effective on a supranational scale with wide area distribution and that kind of collaboration is only just coming about.
Just for the sake of balance on this renaissance thing…:
What plant capacity is projected to be decommissioned this decade and based on the figures quoted in the article, what is the net change in capacity?
Figure 5 of this publication:
Click to access iaea-rds-2-30_web.pdf
Suggests very roughly that there might be about 10-15 being decommissioned each year in the coming decade and 20-30 per year in the next (based on a lifetime of 30 – 40 years)
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JohnP – First of all most of those plants will be give life extensions, as many already have been. Life expectancy was set very low at the beginning, but as more is learned, and as inspections have determined, the live of most plants may well be extended to 60 – 80 years.
Newer builds, in most places, are moving at a much faster pace than was the case in the past, thus it is unlikely that there will be a net drop in nuclear capacity in the next decade.
Second, while the engineering has been proven for nuclear generation, particularly for the Gen III and Gen III+ that will make up the majority of new builds for the next ten years, the same is not true for wide-area distributed generation. Nor is the infrastructure in place.
A nuclear plant can be built on the same spot as a coal plant, and hooked to the grid forthwith, massive non-hydro renewables will require a vast upgrade of the network before it can be deployed. Even then, just how this network would function has not been worked out down to the command and control level. Software needs to be written and tested, safety and security protocols will have to be developed, and new apparatus installed on a unprecedented level before this would work. Unfortunately the nature of working on a supranational scale precludes doing this by stages, it would have to all be in place, and then a grand cut-over staged, again a non-trivial task.
In the end, however because of the nature of the sort of generation you envision, this network would still not meet current standards for reliability without the deployment of vast amounts of storage, again impossibly expensive with current technology, and no guarantees that newer methods would be significantly less costly.
This idea of a vast distributed generation network is simple much more expensive,more time consuming, and much harder to build than new nuclear plants.
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Barry, DV8, Finrod and Co,
Sorry about what I said earlier. It seems that sympathy got the better of my good judgement.
The consequences of the investments in wind/solar in Denmark, Germany, the UK and Spain are becoming clearer with every day that passes; even the “Main Stream Media” are beginning to realise that there is “something rotten in the state of Denmark”.
Taking the long view, there is an inevitability about nuclear power so I think of these large scale “renewables” projects as field trials that need to be monitored carefully to make sure we have the facts when governments in our countries try to pick our pockets to pursue crackpot energy “solutions”.
In the meantime, I appreciate your efforts to educate the general public about the pros and cons of nuclear power.
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gallopingcamel, that’s very much the way I view the mandatory renewable energy target of 45,000 GWh/pa for Australia by 2020. As we pursue this pre-ordained target — if we do — and the evidence on cost and scalability emerge from these ‘field trials’, then the question of sensible and pragmatic energy solutions will inevitably rise in the public consciousness. At that point, everyone will be wanting to talk about energy and electricity, and this is, I suspect, the time that nuclear power will get its fair run. It seems almost a necessary evil to have this next decade of piecemeal progress and trial-and-error tinkering, alas. This is true of Australia, and likely also true of the US, Canada, and any number of other OECD nations. Meanwhile, Asia powers on.
DV82XL — the problem you describe for supranational grids strikes me as a classic chicken-and-egg problem, or perhaps a catch-22. If only it could all be in place and massive economies of scale could kick in, well, then it would all be built and it be cost effective! If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, if turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side…
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The beginnings of the infrastructure for continental-scale deployment of renewables is under construcion in Europe as we type, although perhaps not strategicaly linkd at the moment (although I’m sure it’s onlya matter of time). Plenty of work still to do, of course, but it’s on the way.
I’d be interested to see analyses that point to the need for vast amounts of storage as well as a comprehensive HVDC grid.
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DV8,
With regard to extending the operating life of nukes, I have been told that Germany has been forced down this road owing to inability of wind power to cope with the base load. True? False?
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According to this I like to recommend this masterpiece of George Monbiot:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/01/a-great-green-rip-off/
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