Fukushima Philosophical Discussion Open Thread

John Newlands, on 5 April 2011 at 1:53 PM — One pence/kWh for wind backup implies to me thay expected cold thermal coal burners as the backup; Germany currently does that.

I’ve been attempting to estimate LCOE for a power grid which has no fossil fueled compopnent whatsoever; discouragingly expensive.

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Here is one of the more amazing pieces of historical writing I’ve come across:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-like-this-will-be-buil.html
—- excerpt —-

“Nothing like this will be built again”

I’ve just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. ….
… Cameras were verboten — not because of security, but as an operational precaution. For starters, some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past, triggering a generator trip…
… two Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors…. an unusual, British reactor design; only half a dozen have been built…. the core of an AGR is filled with carbon dioxide, circulating at a temperature of 700-800 degrees celsius.
… They’re sensitive thoroughbreds, able to reach a peak conversion efficiency of 43% — that is, able to turn up to 43% of their energy output into electricity. By comparison, a PWR peaks at 31-32%. However, the PWRs have won the race for commercial success: they’re much, much, simpler…. … although it’s one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it’s a a technological dead-end … collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing ….”

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@ Chris Warren, on 5 April 2011 at 5:09 PM.

I find it offensive that Chris Warren has come to this thread and made an outrageous claim which which is not based on fact. It is even more offensive when this same CW returned to fire with another grossly wrong interpretation of a simple statistics.

The fact remains, that CW provided a common example of statistics – the birthday dilemma – and demonstrated a failure to understand it. I called that for what it was. The probability of event B happening is about 140 times greater than that of event A. Chris had said “about ten times”.

His response referenced at the head of this comment indicates not that a factor of 14 is close enough to a factor of ten for discussion purposes, but that there is a basic misunderstanding afoot re this most basic of statistics, and that this error is sufficiently significant as to throw doubt on the assertion which it purported to support.

For this reason, if no other, I suggest that Chris Warren’s statistics should be checked before they are trusted.

So, to recap, the second event is not about 10 times more likely (as stated), but closer to 140 times more likely. The difference is not a comparison between “approximately 10” and 14, but between “approximately 10” and 140.

One of us had his statistics badly wrong and thus has failed to make his point.

The other was me.

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@Neil Howes – And how many aluminium smelters do you know that run on wind?

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What happens if you’re running a wind-powered aluminium smelter and the wind suffenly frops while you’re in the process of rolling out some aluminium sheet? How long will it take to reheat the Al to molten temperature? Is the semi-rolled sheet salvageable without having to feed it back into the melt? What sort of efficiency penalty is exacted by the unreliability of the power source?

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Why German Nuclear Worries Are Both Wrong and Harmful
By Robert Peter Gale
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,755267,00.html

Dr. Gale is an authority worth reading. I’m some amazed that Der Spiegel actually published this article (online).

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There is a debate going on at the Economist… http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/682#
“This house believes that the world would be better off without nuclear power.”
Please go and post your support and vote against this motion.

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The current generation of power reactors is capable of burning weapons grade fissile material. Most of the ex-USSR’s stock of HEU has been downblended and sold as fuel for US power reactors. Pu can be burned as MOX, if there was a need. However weapons grade Pu represents a huge investment by the countries that produced it, and is stockpiled accordingly.

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Finrod
What happens if you’re running a wind-powered aluminium smelter and the wind suffenly frops while you’re in the process of rolling out some aluminium sheet?
This is as silly as asking what happens if your running a nuclear powered aluminium smelter and have an unplanned reactor shutdown.
Both wind and nuclear provide electricity to the grid, presently hydro, pumped hydro and OCGT provide fast back-up in case of sudden demand spikes or wind or coal or nuclear dropping out.

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@Neil Howes, Finrod and DV82XL:
C’mon, kiddies, play nice. Of course aluminium smelter operate with capacity for short (up to 1 hour, I have heard) total blackouts, and perhaps capacity for indefinite 50% loss of power. That is similar to many other industries which use heaps of energy.

The real issue is what steps are needed to accommodate the anticipated loss of supply fom any of the available sources.

The hypothetical aluminium smelter I would like you to consider is fed by duplicated transmission lines, which themselves are connected to many generators, each with its own reliability factor.

The loss of one transmission line is easily taken care of by the other. Problem solved, except for the unpleasant and very rare case of two going out together. Not nice. Cold pot lines and a huge bill.

The loss of power generation plant is conceptually different. Initially, it comes down to the cost of replacement power… until the system limit is reached. Then load shedding, perhaps including that first 50% which is available to the generator as an option, for which a price has been agreed.This was certainly the case for the generation company I worked with for many years.

It is only when spinning reserves and available load shedding options have been exhausted that the smelter becomes threatened.

So, it is an exercise in probability functions. Nuclear and coal fired stations are m ore reliable than, say, solar PV and wind, so they statistically are less exposed to the risk of having to pay to reduce by 50% the supply to the smelter. That is bad enough.

What is worse, is the similarly greater risk that the smelter may receive too little power, for too long, and may suffer real damage to its pot lines. That is something which will be covered in the contract between generator and the smelter.

The unreliable power sources are exposed to hugely higher risk of having to pay the smelter for actual damage. That is the difference between the two.

Reliability is king when continuity of supply is essential, as is the case with aluminium smelters.

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open tag
MODERATOR
Fixed. Italics tag not closed.
Not you Finrod – other person who shall remain un-named ;-)

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@ Neil Howes, 4:57pm:
“China for example is building 15GW hydro capacity, 18GW wind and 2-4GW nuclear PER YEAR, but using hydro at a low capacity factor.”

Like you, I have no authoritative reference to cite, but isn’t China’s coal fired generation capacity increasing at a rate which is greater than all of the three you mention? Table 10 of the following suggests that current Chinese build rate is above 50MW/year.

Click to access coal-firedpowerplants.pdf

It appears to me that the elephant is Coal, at 3 times the size of third-running Wind, which itself is handicapped by a much lower capacity factor of another factor of 4 or so. Neil, after adjustment due to capacity factor, wind might even run fourth in China, behind New Nuclear.

Assuming a CF of 90% for Coal and Nuclear, the additional capacities from these are of the order of 60GW continuous.

The total of Wind (CF 25%) and Hydro (CF? 15%), is of the order of 8 or 9 GW continuous.

If your point was that China is moving towards reliance on wind with hydro support for base load power then I disagree that this is so. China is still very strongly attached to coal, followed by nuclear. Hydro appears to me to be for peaking, with wind and solar in their customary roles as providing opportunistic power when conditions permit.

I wish that this was not so, but the real world options for wind and solar PV and, to a lesser extent, for solar thermal are very much constrained due to their intermittency and unreliability. At the huge capacities required to turn around our carbon emissions, it is not possible to envision hydro at the scale required to back up tens or hundreds of GW (continuous) wind power.

In the long run, those who support wind and hydro as a no-nuclear option end up condemning us to a coal future, with or without CCS.

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@Neil Howes – Any statements concerning potential solar energy are worthless as the issue is how much of this can be converted.

Also the U.S, installed hydro capacity is some 95 GW (U.S. Department of Energy )
and 13GW average out of 43GW is ludicrously inefficient .

You cannot even begin to replace coal and gas with such a pathetic ratio

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John Newlands
recent increases in wind and solar might be driven by decree in China and by generous subsidies in the West. Take those mechanisms away and I suspect the increases would not be so large.
I totally agree, but it is also true that no nuclear would have been built without direct government financing or loan guarantees and or insurance coverage.
The point about China is that its adding renewable(wind and hydro) at a much faster rate than nuclear, but ALL are needed to prevent even more coal fired power.
I also agree that there are many issues with wind and solar in Australia, but they are not that wind and solar resources are too small, or too diffuse. Until we start building nuclear in Australia renewables are the only way we are likely to reduce burning coal, and will be significant contributors for the next 30 years even if we go all out to build nuclear power as fast as possible( for example as fast as Canada or Korea did over the last 30 years).

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Douglas Wise,
I dont see replacing the non-grid energy (oil and NG) with an equivalent amount of electrical energy because EV are about X5 more efficient in energy use.Replacing NG used for hot water and heat with heat pumps would use about one third the energy.
Unless CSP becomes a lot cheaper I see most electricity generated by wind with possibly some nuclear and NG and hydro providing peak demand(as it does now). The difference would be that daytime peak would be lower because of EV charging overnight, some daytime PV and CSP and electric heat pumps for hot water and heating would be off-peak. Thus hydro, pumped hydro and NG generation would be used when nation wide wind and solar power generation is lower than demand, but used at a low capacity factor(10%). This would require additional OCGT(is being built now), and higher hydro capacity(more turbines at existing dams) and some additional longer term pumped hydro(able to operate 5-6 days rather than 5-6 hours).
NG would seem to be the best feed-stock for ammonia, keep wind power electricity for re-charging EVs and heat pumps where it can replace a lot more oil, coal and NG. Building 5 GW of nuclear could displace 13 GW of wind capacity but would also require considerable back-up(2-3GW), for times when several reactors are off-line, in addition to providing for peak demand. 13GW less wind capacity would save about 3GW of back-up.

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Neil Howes,

Thanks for your reply. Are you dismissive of the claims made in the two links I provided, namely that carbohydrate transport fuels and ammonia made from air/electricity and water could be competitive with fossil sources? Certainly, many such similar “green” claims turn out to be bogus, but these seem to be more soundly based than many.

Heat pumps are fine in new buildings, but retrofitting in existing housing stocks is not without considerable problems. Equally, one wonders whether mass switching to EVs will really be that simple. Staying with our existing propulsion systems and using “green” liquid fuels in place of fossil fuels might not be as efficient in energy terms but could be the economic approach of choice.

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The following was inspired by a comment from Ted Rockwell in the “Lessons on nuclear power from Fukushima… thread. Perhaps my response is more appropriate here, and I fear I might be annoying the Moderator (My apologies, if so). I fear it may be considered provocative since I repeated some of the Moderators words in a previous admonishment that their patience on the topic of LNT was exhausted on that thread, and incorporated those words into my comment… repetitively.

So that I’m not misunderstood, I would point out that I consider it a fundamental truism that any serious attempt at nuclear advocacy must gird itself for the tedium of repetition… it goes with the territory.

Anyway, I submit the following for your consideration.

Hence the necessity of exposing the fatal weaknesses and logical fallacies of LNT… and begging the Moderators’ forgiveness… even at the risk of tedious circularity and repetition. After all, those are precisely the tools the anti-nukes have used so successfully to establish LNT as the Mt. Olympus of anti-nuke mythology… it is the safe harbor where all radiation fear-mongering finds unassailable credibility.

To my mind, the most pungent comment in Mr. Rockwell’s excellent post is “We shouldn’t have to mention it at all.” Too true. The reason we must “mention it at all” is not because the raw information to explode rank popular misconception of these events was unavailable, but because the anti-nuclear voice was loud, repetitive, circular… and most of all, persistent.

The genius of the anti-nuke approach (as much as it galls me to string those words together) was that they correctly perceived their task as one of mass psychology rather than sterile education… indeed, they recognized up front that an honest approach to the latter was counter-productive to their purposes.

The individual contains genius, but the collective is a brute… subtlety is lost on the brute as the anti’s know well. They correctly guessed that repeated blows from a blunt object was the most effective way to make an impression on such an unruly beast.

Their goal is fear, their method half-truth, outright lies, and speculation, and LNT was handed to them by their opponents as the inexhaustible sink where their unsupportable claims could linger eternally with maddening, poisonous legitimacy. And there they remain, to be trotted out with perfect complacency and convenience… repetitive, circular, persistent… and effective.

Since our goal is reason, and our method honesty… we hold the high ground… we disdain a proven tactic at our risk.

John Rogers

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[Comment deleted. Violation of the citation policy]

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Douglas Wise,
While NG is available it doesnt make sense to use valuable electricity to make hydrogen for ammonia synthesis or for operating motor vehicles.

Heat pumps are fine in new buildings, but retrofitting in existing housing stocks is not without considerable problems.
I do not agree with this statement, I just replaced on old wall A/C and old gas heater in a 50year old house with an LG split heat pump, very simple instillation total cost <$3,000. Similarly replacing NG or electric resistance hot water heaters with heat pumps is very simple providing ventilation is available.

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While BNC debates nuclear and renewables it seems the powers-that-be have quietly decided the future is natural gas. I was puzzled how SA could build a new gas fired power station expanding to 1000 MW
http://elementalpower.com.au/news/?tag=cherokee-gas-fired-power-station
since local gas supplies should be near peak.

It seems there is great confidence in fracking and horizontal drilling to free up nearly four times as much shale gas as conventional gas. See Australia in Table 1 in this global assessment
http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/
However critics point to groundwater damage and the fact most fracked wells peak after 18 months.

A potted energy history of the 21st century might read
2005 CCS will save us
2010 geothermal will save us
2015 shale gas will save us
2020 ?

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@Neil Howes, – You keep trying to move the goal posts. Smelters and other very heavy users of electric power do indeed have direct contracts with individual power stations. This is particularly true for aluminum and steel works which were the initial point of contention here.

Also the grid does not supply dispatchable power, I suggest that you look-up the meaning of the term. It is the property of generators to be scheduled to assume load at some fixed time, for some fixed interval and to do so reliably enough that forward contracts are possible. Wind and solar generation lack that ability.

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> keep hammering at LNT at every opportunity

I suggest you model your approach after the climatologists who urgently want to update the IPCC consensus, as you want to update the National Academies consensus.

You know the cutoff date for the National Academies work; do what the climate scientists are doing, in the interval before the next consensus statement will be put together.

Look at the research cited by the current consensus statement.
Follow up each of those papers, reading the subsequent papers that have cited it.
Read the footnotes.
Assess the research.
Write your own suggestions for what should be added to the consensus when it is next released.

The climatologists brought the entire issue of sea level rise up to date after the last IPCC statement explicitly failed to consider it because the then available science was inconclusive.

You want to update the hormesis section of the National Academies book since its cutoff date, because they said the available science was inconclusive.

Or, if your idea is to claim that the consensus statements are corrupt, or deceptive, or part of a conspiracy — well, good luck with that.

Seriously — citing sources is the way to do this.

Remember, the argument you are trying to defeat is not that radiation is always dangerous — it’s this:

“very low doses of radiation have only marginal impacts on individual health outcomes. It is therefore difficult to detect the ‘signal’ of decreased or increased morbidity and mortality due to low-level radiation exposure in the ‘noise’ of other effects. … ‘The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial.'”
http://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Radiation_hormesis.html

There’s the key point — “harmless or beneficial” — neither can be demonstrated to have a threshhold.

Yet. Look to the research. Try to find papers that actually statistically or observationally do show what you want to find. Then figure out how to disprove them — that’s the scientific approach.

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Gwyneth Cravens, in her book “Power to Save the World”, described in some detail the “parasites” DV82XL describes whose incomes depend on the continued acceptance of the ‘thoroughly discredited” LNT model:

“I found the scientists who spend their days considering the best way to understand excess radiation exposure and to protect people from it to be careful, compassionate, and dedicated; they have been relieved to discover that the outcomes of of radiological catastrophes have demonstrated much better survival rates than early calculations had predicted” – page 130

Evan Douple, director of the BRER that oversaw BEIR VII, is quoted by Gwyneth on the subject of how he became one of these horrible parasites making their living issuing enforcement orders for an LNT model they all know is invalid:

“I was trying to understand radiation damage and improve the use of medical radiation to treat cancer”.

Note how he evaded even mentioning his criminal intent.

Dr Fred Mettler is another of these evil people Gwyneth talked to. He is US representative to UNSCEAR. He is an Academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. He is on the CDC committee on guidelines for terrorist incidents involving radioactive materials. He has held positions on NCRP, and Homeland Security. He has won numerous awards and a listing in “The Best Doctors in America”.

Gwyneth nailed him in his perfidity: She wrote: He “spends almost all of time saving lives”.

It is unimaginable that types like this should be respected figures in American science today.

What would Mettler say about radiation if he could appear on TV before millions? Gwyneth asked him.

Mettler: “I would tell them that radiation has risks related to dose level, and that many of the things we use radiation for have undetectable risk. Some have higher levels. People have to make decisions about benefits versus risks. Is the benefit of nuclear medicine greater than its risks? Is the benefit of nuclear power greater than its risks?”

Notice how this con man who wouldn’t have a tin cup to beg on the streets with if his cherished LNT model was ever recognized as the fraud that it is completely avoided the known fact that low levels of radiation are completely without risk, as they are good for you.

Gwyneth wrote this about BEIR VII:

“BEIR VII… was not asked to recommend whether there should be changes in the permissible dose levels for the general public, for those receiving medical radiation, or for nuclear workers.”

Rather than insist that people like Douple or Mettler are motivated by nothing other than financial gain as they insist on enforcement of a discredited model they know has nothing to do with reality, i.e. that they are criminals, it seems obvious that what pro nuclear advocates ought to do is lobby to have Congress finally put the question to the NAS NRC BRER, so they can set up another BEIR, i.e. BEIR VIII, tasked with answering the question, what exposure limits should society impose on all its activities, i.e. in the power generation sector, what radiation limits should coal plants have to conform to, what about the gas that is being “fracked” out of what the Atomic Energy Commission identified as the largest uranium resource the US has, etc.

But, why not, continue on attacking science. Everyone else is doing it.

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I hate to break it to you Lewis but BEIR VII is one document only, and while you [deleted ad hom] may want everyone to believe it is the last word on the subject, those of us that actually have a background in science, can see it for what it is: the avoidance of a conclusion. They set an impossibly high bar by asserting: “”the presence of a true dose threshold demands totally error-free DNA damage response and repair.” which is idiotic, since such a result is impossible to isolate from background noise.

This is a deeply flawed study that was designed not to rock the boat.

Furthermore, endless appeals to authority of the sort you and others defending LNT are pointless: if you want to argue the science, then show the science – don’t just hold up a few selected workers in the field that happen to agree with your opinions, and claim that their qualifications alone prove they are correct.

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A simple model of radiation damage and repair (probably too simple)

After tissue recives a damaging radiation hit it undergoes repair for a time T set equal to one, T=1. If not hit during the repair time, it completely recovers. If hit at least once more while under repair, it becomes morbid. The probability then depends upon the radiation dose rate, r, as

P(r) = 1 – exp(-r)(1+r)

being the probability of at least two hits during time T=1.

For r near zero, the exponential is approximately 1 – r + r^2/2 resulting in the approximation

p(r) = r^2(1-r)/2

which is almost a quadratic. Note that P(r) is never well approximated by a linear formula, so this doesn’t look like the quadratic-linear model discussed in the BEIR VII summary.

—-
I first worked this out in the 1980s and then noticed this Double Whammy hypothesis in a subsequent conference paper write-up. It is certainly straightforward and I suppose someone actually proposed it quite a long time ago. So I further suppose that the Double Whammy model does not agree well with controlled experimental evidence on lab rats?

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David Lewis, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. I judge everyone on what they write and on nothing else. The comment you posted above at 10:27 was a classic appeal to authority, and I called it for what it was. I also don’t take it for granted that any body set up by or in any way beholding to some part of the U.S. government is necessarily without bias.

I also judge the conclusions of any study or scientific paper on the quality of the work, not the standing of the authors, and I clearly stated above what the flaw in BEIR VII is: they set an unmeasurable null hypothesis, which automatically renders a no threshold result by default.

Perhaps you might address this rather than claiming that I appealing to authority as well.

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DV: I really appreciate your comment about appeals to authority, debate as dueling experts.

But getting beyond “dueling experts” for the non expert requires so much work, work many don’t have the time or training to do: “appeals to authority” are not so easy to avoid.

The BEIR Vii quote you cite strikes me (non expert) as awfully strange. It seems as if it says that anything but LNT requires error free DNA repair. I would have thought the inverse: that LNT only assumes no or little DNA repair, much less other mechanisms like apotoposis.

At any rate, I understand the tendency to polarization here, nearly all in my opinion driven by anti nuclear rhetoric.

This isn’t about LNT (rather it’s about Fukushima), but look at how crazy this is and it’s pretty typical:

http://www.counterpunch.org/hoffman04062011.html

In a prior article (I looked at his blog), in a diatribe against Monbiot’s insufficiently anti nuclear stance, Hoffman (?) duels with repeated references to the mantra of gofman, sternglass and the tooth fairy guy.

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@Gregory Meyerson, Yes the wording is a bit obtuse in that quotation. This is an artifact of the convention is scientific literature wherein a hypothesis is not directly accepted as much as the alternatives are rejected, or not rejected.

Thus they are rejecting the the hypothesis that a threshold exists below which no totally error-free DNA damage response can be seen. The the non-threshold hypothesis cannot be rejected.

The problem is that such a determination (of error-free damage response) is impossible to make as an absolute, to start off with DNA damage can occur spontaneously, and indeed there are internal cellular mechanisms that deal with this. These events would represent experimental noise, making any attempt to isolate low-level radiation damage from the background impossible. On top of which such a determination can only be made by detailed examination of cells in vivo while the BEIR VII committee based their conclusions on epidemiologic data.

Keep in mind I have stated that the issue is not linear response,per se – that has been well established for high-dose exposure. Nor is it linear response vs hormesis, rather it is linear response vs threshold response. It is on this question that BEIR VII loaded the deck in favor of LNT.

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Today’s ABC Landline program contained some curious disconnects between emitting, capturing and pricing CO2. No transcript yet. The lead item was about making diesel via Fischer Tropsch processes from underground gasification of coal. A car powered by synthetic diesel (UCG-GTL) drove around Australia and was apparently welcomed by State resource ministers and in Canberra by Ferguson.

The problem is this; the fuel creates three levels of emissions and will pay heavy carbon tax unless exempted or partially captured and sent down another well. The underground gasification creates wanted CO and H2 but then separates unwanted CO2. The FT process then creates some more CO2 to generate internal heat and pressure then more CO2 comes from the tailpipe of the vehicle using the fuel. If say the process created 5 kg of CO2 per litre of finished fuel (normally 2.5 kg from petro-diesel) a $30/t carbon tax if applicable would add 15c to the price.

The program then showed the new CSIRO head calling for a carbon price then a farmer planting a crop alleged to be a net carbon sink. If we are going to prolong the days of happy motoring using coal derived liquid fuel then we must burn a lot lot less in power stations.

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@John Bennetts on 10April 11.27am.
The reference you cited shows that retail electricity prices excluding taxes in Denmark (11euro/100kWh) is very similar to France(9.5 euro/100kWh). Since 80% of Denmarks electricity comes from coal this doesnt really say much about wind wholesale prices.
On the other hand in the US wind power receives an average price of 6cents/kWh, similar to the cost of CCGT. In Australia, the largest wind operator(Infigen) receives 8cents/kWh including income from RECs. I am in favor of replacing as much coal fired power with nuclear and wind, but both are going to need very large OCGT capacity to handle peak demand which is often 100% higher than off-peak demand.
It is true that wind output across the present NEM grid in SE Australia can vary greatly over 12-24 h period, but not over 1-2 hours, unlike coal fired or nuclear plants that can drop out in less than one minute.The critical factor for OCGT backup is the operating capacity factor, NOT the total OCGT capacity.
SE Australia has excellent potential to greatly expand hydro capacity beyond the 4GW reliable capacity and 2.2GW pumped hydro capacity, even though average output is only 12,000GWh/year. With 25GW coal-fired, and 8GW of mainly OCGT, there hasnt been a need for more hydro capacity.
If CSP with thermal storage can compete on price with OCGT on supplying peak demand , this could reduce the need for as much new OCGT or new hydro capacity.

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Neil I think expanding pumped hydro will be more of a case of keeping existing dams topped up not building new ones. I declined a bus trip today to the 442 MW Strathgordon dam as I’ve been there a few times but some day I’m hoping to get a look at the turbine hall normally off limits. That room has vacant slots for two more turbines. Of course the Gordon-below-Franklin of 180 MW never got built due to the efforts of Bob Brown, Bob Hawke and the High Court in 1983. That effectively put an end to large hydro in Australia. When I last looked the RET excluded anything built before 1997.

Talk of a 2nd underwater HVDC cable under Bass Strait comes up from time to time. Apart from finding the cash (scrap the NBN?) I think that means the average residence time of water in existing Tas dams must be shortened ie quicker outlow and re-pumping.

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Anti nukes must laugh as they see pro nukes attack scientists, the National Academies, and anyone who would rather support the conclusions of independent expert panels repeatedly set up over several decades by the NAS rather than the ideas of individual scientists.

The anti nukes will be laughing because this shows how well they’ve succeeded with their tactic of convincing the public that because LNT is accepted by authorities that it means that the nuclear industry and no other industry should be hamstrung by it.

I’ve read the paper Rod Adams is recommending on hormesis, some of its references, and as usual, some other references, and posted a comment on his blog.

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> fetal alcohol
> wine with meals … French … no evidence

Have you heard the phrase “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?” It’s pertinent.

Aside on fetal alcohol, a good reference is:
http://dionysus.psych.wisc.edu/Lit/Lectures/RSALectures/riley.pdf.

The symptoms (facial shape, basically) are associated with binge drinking, but the mechanisms as understood so far have no lower limit.

The pattern was first described “in the French
medical literature in 1967 by a French physician
,,, Lemoine, P., Harousseau, H., Borteyru, J.-P., & Menuet, J.-C. (1968). Les enfants de parents
alcooliques: Anomalies observees. A propos de 127 cas [Children of alcoholic parents:
Abnormalities observed in 127 cases]. Ouest Medical, 21, 476-482.”

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@David Lewis, your refusal to address the points I have made demonstrates clearly that you cannot. Falling back on an argument from authority, does not make the case for LNT.

@Hank Roberts Yes I know the concept. The point I am making is that there is, in fact a threshold for alcohol consumption in pregnant women below which the risks of damaging the fetus approaches zero. Commonsense indicates this is so because there is lots of evidence of normal children born to mothers that did have a glass of wine or beer with meals, yet who were not chronic alcohol abusers. That there is damage at higher doses is not in question. The lower limit has not been determined, and likely never will be, thus the obstetrics nurse’s insistence in asserting no safe level as the governments policy.

I am not arguing the policy, or how it is administered in this case, because when it comes to alcohol, abuse is always a risk and it is good social policy. But it is not science.

As I have pointed out twice up thread the BEIR VII set a very high bar, in fact an impossibly high bar, to reject LNT. Given this, it is no wonder that none of the research that they reviewed met that standard. I believe that the reason LNT persists is that to accept a threshold will require that some regulator set an upper limit, and this is what they all desperately want to avoid. This is particularly true in the States where civil litigation has become a national sport, and everyone recognizes the can of worms that they would be opening there with such limits.

The obvious problem here is that LNT as applied to radiation has created a situation where there is more harm being done, than harm being avoided, and that is wrong.

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John Bennetts, on 10 April 2011 at 12:57 PM — Yes, wind is a bit player at 1–2% of nameplate around here. And even at that level, because of the incentive plan for wind power combined with the operating restrictions on Columbia river system dams for fisheries reasons the wind operators are searching for other sources of backup; one company found some.

With current incentives in the USA wind competes directly with CCGTs right now in terms of LCOE and has less risk of price increases which might happen for natgas. But wind, however backed, appears unlikely to displace coal burners. For exmple the AltaViata units will eventually be replaced by CCGT and I assume the same will happen at the Boardman plant as the certificate of public convenience for that coal burner will not be renewed.

However, neither compnay is interested in building an NPP; there is zero interest in more nuclear here in the Pacific Northwest.

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I hope Barry will address Hank’s last point.

The thing is, climate deniers may make this argument, but CO2 DOES make a detectable difference. The signal does emerge from the noise. The cases are not analogous.

This is a terrible example and should be dealt with unequivocally.

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@Hank Roberts, Of course there is no study showing a threshold for alcohol in the placental bloodstream below which there is no effect on the fetus. Such an experiment wouldn’t make it past an ethics committee, and long baseline studies wouldn’t pull anything out of the noise given many FAS victims display very subtle changes even when the mother is a chronic alcoholic.

Thus the authorities are forced to take a no safe limit position, but that is a policy decision based on factors other than the science of FAS.

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Just to correct the mathematics of the Double Whammy model of radiatin damage, the correct formula for the probability of morbidity from a dose rate of r is

P(r) = r(1-exp(-r))

which is asymtoptic to linear for large r and for small r, where exp(-r) is well approximated by 1-r, one has the approximation

p(r) = r^2.

So this model then is a form of the quadratic-linear model which appears in the BEIR VII summary.

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@ John Newlands, on 11 April 2011 at 8:03 AM:

The paper cited by John is interesting in that it is the first I have seen which attempts to wrestly with the generation and storage capacity of clifftop hydro in conjunction with the heroic task of constructing HVDC links across the continent to link the power to the loads.

Well done.

I have heard that Eraring Power in NSW has already done something similar, with a double payback – the water pumped up hill at off peak rates at night can be recovered at daytime peak rates.

The second string to the bow is the temperature attenuation effect of the additional water in the outfall canal, which acts to reduce the temperature of the water leaving the condensers. For environmental compliance purposes, the power station is bound by limits on discharge water temperatures. The additional flows via the CW system permit proportionately larger loads on Units 1 – 4 than would otherwise be achievable, thus increasing the availability figure for the station.

Anybody out there with actual references? I have no drawings or performance figures with which to put flersh on the bones of this system. My guess is that the Eraring installation is approx 1/2 the size of a generating unit, ie 300MW, plus or minus.

NB: it uses salt water, thus addressing several of the parameters listed in the Japanese study and the Great Australian Bight as being unknowns.

Rather than rushing straight into the full sized scheme, costing tens of billions of dollars, there may be smaller, lower hanging fruit to savour as trials. A few sites close to existing transmission lines in SE Australia would be nice for, say, a 2GWH trial. How about somewhere along the Pacific Ocean escarpment between Broken Bay and Wollongong?

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@John Bennetts

There are 2011 European electricity prices here:

http://www.energy.eu/#Domestic

Looks like Denmark is the winner for domestic prices, with Germany a close second.

For industrial prices, Denmark comes about fifth and France seems to be the cheapest.

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