This post continues directly on from Part 1 (please read that if you’ve not already done so!). I also note the flurry of interest in the new IPCC WGIII special report on renewable energy prospects through to 2050. I will have more to say on this in an upcoming BNC post, but in short, it fails to address — with any substance — any of the significant problems I describe below, or in the previous post. What a disappointment!
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Renewables and efficiency cannot fix the energy and climate crises (part 2)
Renewable energy cannot provide reliable 24-hour, 7-day-a-week power to meet baseload demand
The minimum amount of power that a city or country demands usually occurs at night (when most people are asleep); this is called the electricity ‘baseload’. Some have claimed that it is a fallacy to argue that all of this demand is needed, because utilities tend to charge cheap (‘off peak’) rates during these low-use periods, to encourage more uptake (by everything from factory machinery to hot water systems). This is because some types of power stations (e.g., coal and nuclear) are quite expensive to build and finance (with long terms to pay off the interest), but fairly cheap to run, so the utility wants to keep them humming away 24 hours a day to maximise returns. Thus, there is some truth to this argument, although if that energy is not used at night, extra must instead be supplied in the day.
Some critical demand, however, never goes away – the power required to run hospitals, police stations, street lights, water and sewerage pumping stations, refrigerators and cold storage, transport (if we are to use electric vehicles), and so on. If the power is lost to these services, even for a short while, chaos ensues, and the societal backlash after a few such events is huge. On the other side of the energy coin, there are times when huge power demands arise, such as when everyone gets home from work to cook their meals and watch television, or when we collectively turn on our air conditioners during a heatwave. If the energy to meet this peak demand cannot be found, the result can be anything from a lot of grumpy people through to collapse of the grid as rolling blackouts occur.
Two core limitations of wind, solar and most other renewable systems is that: (i) they are inherently variable and are prone to ‘gambler’s ruin‘ (in the sense that you cannot know, over any planning period, when long stretches of calm or cloudy days will come, which could bring even a heavily over-compensated system to its knees), and (ii) they are not ‘dispatchable’. They’ll provide a lot of power some of the time, when you may or may not need it, and little or none at other times, when you’ll certainly need some, and may need a lot. In short, they can’t send power out on demand, yet, for better or worse, this is what society demands of an electricity system. Okay, but can these limitations be overcome?
Large-scale renewables require massive ‘overbuilding’ and so are not cost competitive
The three most commonly proposed ways to overcome the problem of intermittency and unscheduled outages are: (i) to store energy during productive times and draw on these stores during periods when little or nothing is being generated; (ii) to have a diverse mix of renewable energy systems, coordinated by a smart electronic grid management system, so that even if the wind is not blowing in one place, it will be in another, or else the sun will be shining or the waves crashing; and (iii) to have fossil fuel or nuclear power stations on standby, to take up the slack when needed.
The reality is that any of these solutions are grossly uneconomic, and even if we were willing and able to pay for them, the result would be an unacceptably unreliable energy supply system. Truly massive amounts of energy would need to be stored to keep a city or country going through long stretches of cloudy winter days (yes, these even occur in the desert) or calm nights with little wind and no sun, yet energy storage (batteries, chemical conversion to hydrogen or ammonia, pumped hydropower, compressed air), even on a small scale, is currently very expensive. A mix of different contributions (solar, wind, wave, geothermal) would help, but then we’d need to pay for each of these systems, built to a level that they could compensate for the failure of another.
What’s more, in order to deliver all of our regular power demand whilst also charging up the energy stores , we would have to ‘overbuild’ our system many times, adding to the already prohibitive costs. As a result, an overbuilt system of wind and solar would, at times, be delivering 5 to 20 times our power demand (leading to problems of ‘dumping’ the excess energy that can’t be used or stored quickly enough or in sufficient quantity), and at other times, it would deliver virtually none of it.
If you do some modelling to work through the many contingencies, you find that a system which relies on wind and/or solar power, plus large-scale energy storage and a geographically dispersed electricity transmission network to channel power to load centres, would seem to be 10 to 40 times more expensive than an equivalent nuclear-powered system, and still less reliable. The cost to avoid 1 tonne of carbon dioxide would be >$800 with wind power compared with $22 with nuclear power.
The above critiques of renewable energy might strike some readers as narrow minded or deliberately pessimistic. Surely, isn’t it just a matter of prudent engineering and sufficient integration of geographically and technologically diverse systems, to overcome such difficulties? Alas, no! Although I only have limited space for this topic in this short post, let me grimly assure you that the problem of ‘scaling up’ renewable energy to the point where it can reliably meet all (or even most) of our power needs, involves solving a range of compounding, quite possibly insuperable, problems. We cannot wish these problems away — they are ‘the numbers’, ‘the reality’.
Economic and socio-political realities
Supporters of ‘100% renewable energy’ maintain that sunlight, wind, waves and plant life, combined with vast improvements in energy efficiency and energy conservation leading to a flattening or reduction in total energy demand, are the answer. This is a widespread view among environmentalists and would be perfectly acceptable to me if the numbers could be made to work. But I seriously doubt they can.
The high standard of living in the developed world has been based on cheap fossil (and nuclear) energy. While we can clearly cut back on energy wastage, we will still have to replace oil and gas. And that means a surge in demand for electricity, both to replace the energy now drawn from oil and gas and to meet the additional demand for power from that third of the world’s people who currently have no electricity at all.
Critics do not seem to understand – or refuse to acknowledge – the basis of modern economics and the investment culture. Some dream of shifts in the West and the East away from consumerism. There is a quasi-spiritualism which underpins such views. Yet at a time of crisis, societies must be ruthlessly practical in solving their core problems or risk collapse. Most people will fight tooth-and-nail to avoid a decline in their standard of living. We need to work with this, not against it. We are stuck with the deep-seated human propensity to revel in consuming and to hope for an easier life. We should seek ways to deliver in a sustainable way.
A friend of mine, the Californian entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, has put the climate-energy problem succinctly:
The most effective way to deal with climate change is to seriously reduce our carbon emissions. But we’ll never get the enormous emission reductions we need by treaty. Been there, done that – it’s not going to happen. If you want to get emissions reductions, you must make the alternatives for electric power generation cheaper than coal. It’s that simple. If you don’t do that, you lose.
Currently, no non-fossil-fuel energy technology has achieved this. So what is stopping nations replacing coal, oil and gas infrastructure with renewable energy? It is not (yet) because of any strong, society-wide opposition to a switch to renewables. No, it is economic uncertainty, technological immaturity, and good old financial risk management. Despite what ‘100% renewables’ advocates would lead you to believe, it is still far from certain in what way the world will pursue a low-carbon future. You have only to look at what’s happening in the real world to verify that.
I’ve already written about fast-growing investment in nuclear energy in Asia. China, for instance, has overcome typical first-of-a-kind engineering cost overruns by building more than 25 reactors at the same time, in a bid to bring costs to, or below, those of coal.
In December 2009, there was a telling announcement from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which wish to sell their valuable natural gas to the export market. Within the next few years, the UAE face a six-gigawatt increase in demand for electricity, which includes additional power required by an upgraded desalination program. Despite being desert-based with a wealth of solar resources, the UAE decided not to build large-scale solar power plants (or any other renewable technology). In terms of economics and reliability, the numbers just didn’t stack up. Instead, they have commissioned a South Korean consortium to build four new generation III+ APR-1400 reactors, at a cost of $3,500 a kilowatt installed – their first ever nuclear power plants.
Conclusion
Nuclear power, not renewable energy or energy efficiency, will probably end up being the primary global solution to the climate and energy crises. This is the emergent result of trying to be honest, logical and pragmatic about what will and will not work, within real-world physical, economic and social constraints.
If I am wrong, and non-hydro and non-combustible renewables can indeed rise to the challenge and ways can be found to overcome the issues I’ve touched on in these two posts, then I will not complain. After all, my principal goal — to replace fossil fuels with sustainable and low-carbon alternative energy sources — would have been met. But let’s not play dice with the biosphere and humanity’s future on this planet, and bet everything on such wishful thinking. It would be a risky gamble indeed.
Brave New Climate 
184 replies on “Renewables and efficiency cannot fix the energy and climate crises (part 2)”
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In the US, grid electricity accounts for about 10% of overall energy use, the rest being fossil fuels used for transport, and a few other energy-intensive applications. All these applications must eventually be taken over by non-fossil fuel thermal and/or electrical power, and most of them can be run in baseload mode. So, sooner or later, a far greater portion of gris power will need to be feficated to baseload, with only a few percent fluctuation in consumption due to the diurnal cycle of residential and commercial use. That few percent fluctuation should be easily accomodated by nuclear plants.
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I just posted this on the part 1 thread but it should be here I see:
Comparing real German wind output of january 2009 (january is supposed to be a fairly windy month) with nuclear output of a grid area in the US shows the big picture:
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2010/03/uptime-downtime_07.html
And standard issue Greenpeace bunk debunked:
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/07/greenpeace-on-wind-variability.html
And this one has a nice graph on geographical spreading for offshore wind farms across thousands of kilometers of coastline showing that its not nearly enough just to spread out the wind farms…
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-spin-transmission-line.html
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In the case of electric cars, we can see strong synergy between nuclear power and efficiency. The electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion and facilitate nuclear plants to dump excess cheap nighttime electricity in commuter car batteries. Also uses the grid at a higher capacity factor. Very efficient, effective, and economical. Unreliable wind can’t be used to charge your car. The wind didn’t blow tonight, oops guess I’ll stay in bed today. See if the boss likes the excuse ;)
We can also see that nuclear plants have considerable room for efficiency improvements. The reactors can be more efficient (higher conversion rates) and have higher temperature steam/gas cycles. The enrichment plants can also be made more efficient:
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/12/french-enrichment-plant-reduces-energy.html
Take that, efficiency advocates: 3 GIGAWATTS of electricity saved, in one project, as early as 2016! That’s enough to power *all* households in my country!
Clearly nuclear works well with all sorts of efficiency improvements.
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I consider myself an ardent environmentalist– and I envision an energy-rich future for humanity. I dream of the sustainable society we can build with superabundant energy. An all-electric transportation system (with jets flying on liquid hydrogen), fresh water for everyone, recycling materials instead of mining them. And vast areas of natural wilderness and ocean under strict protection.
Yep, I think we need to increase our energy supply to acheive these things, not reduce it. Most people can recognize a leverage point, but they tend to push in the wrong direction!
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barry:
what relation can you draw between your figure two, where wind and nuclear appear similarly costed per kwh and your key claim that a renewables system is 10 to 40 times more expensive?
are these two points contradictory? if you are correct, what sense should we make of figure two? what is it leaving out?
For others, when models like De Carolis and Keith claim that wind can achieve hi penetration, albeit with higher costs, though not seemingly astronomical, apart from problems people have already raised about such studies, what happens when you turn to electrifying nearly all power production (see Finrod above)?
what happens to all renewables cost curves at this point? hi penetration for a current electrical grid is one thing; hi penetration for one which takes over all other energy production is another.
I just looked up electricity consumption in U.S. for 2008: 3.9 trillion kwh. But that’s just a fraction of total power consumption. about 1/6.
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I will reiterate what I wrote in comments to part 1: Wind, solar, and hydro, scaled to meet current energy demands, have a very large environmental footprint that cannot be ignored.
Thus even if efficient storage was developed, the impact of these forms of generation would be serious.
This is a major factor that has slowed the growth of hydro, as there is vast amounts of unexploited potential in many parts of the world.
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gregory: The interval chart is for nominal power, so far as I can tell. However, renewables can never reliably stay within +/-10% of nominal. When you factor in energy storage, emergency backup power, 5% redundancy etc the cost rises dramatically. There are also the grid interconnects to be considered.
A fuel-based facility (whether fossil, bio or nuclear), can operate at nominal power more than 90% of the time. All facilities may produce a number in excess of nominal power on demand, so there are no additional generating stations required for redundancy when a plant is undergoing repairs.
So, the author’s case is that renewables require much more redundancy measures and a more complex balancing system to assure continuous power. And in an emergency you’ll still need fuel-based facilities to provide additional capacity. And assuming you replace dozens of nuclear sites with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, all of those turbines will need to be monitored and maintained. The travel and shipping costs for that must also be considered.
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There appears to be an argument circulating that cheap night-time power is unnecessary. However, this overnight electricity is being used for something useful, and moving that demand from the night into an unpredictable period during the day would actually increase the variability – and the need for responsive generation – of the demand profile. So this argument fails, unless there is some attempt to show that the use to which night electricity is put is entirely frivolous – which I do not believe for an instant.
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Another slice of uncommon sense from Barry.
Perhaps Ian Lowe would like to write a guest post in refutation.I’m sure he could fit in the tried and tested “If nuclear is the answer then it was a bloody stupid question”.
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@Joffan – You are right. Many fabs working with metals run deep heat treatment cycles at night. One place that I know well did so because their daytime power use for other processes would not allow for the running of the ovens during that time. many others did so because of preferential rates offered by the power company.
Electric smelters too must run continuously as a powerdown necessitates a relining of the pot.
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I still think that the nuclear power industry needs to address the problem of– totally eliminating– the need for fossil fuels for the electric power industry by supplying peak-load energy through the nuclear production of carbon neutral methanol.
Dedicated nuclear power plants could be utilized to produce hydrogen from water and to extract carbon from the atmosphere or from biowaste to produce carbon neutral methanol to meet all of our peak-load electric power needs.
Methanol, of course, can also be converted into gasoline for automobiles by using the MTG process. So future plug-in-hybrid automobiles could someday be using electricity from nuclear power plants in combination with carbon neutral gasoline from nuclear power plants.
Utilizing nuclear power in such innovative ways could be one of the keys to capturing the imagination of the public and the politicians.
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Barry Brook — Well done.
But a minor correction. I’m under the impression that the UAE NPPs have been bid a US$3.8/kWh. Also, the UAE is building a small solar project, but I don’t have the details.
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Currently, no non-fossil-fuel energy technology has achieved this.
That is a true statement in the US.
Steam coal prices in the US are quite depressed because the Powder River Basin in Wyoming(with 100 million tons of inexpensively extractable coal) is effectively landlocked which makes large scale exports impracticable.
A ton of steam coal in Wyoming is $13/ton.
Coal prices in Asia and Europe are almost 10 times as expensive.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-10/coal-price-to-rise-as-japan-rebuilds-standard-chartered-says.html
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I should note that methanol can also be used in current natural gas power plants after some relatively easy and inexpensive modifications. General Electric did some successful test using methanol in gas power plants during the last energy crisis in the 1970s.
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gregory Meyerson, on 12 May 2011 at 4:31 AM — It is the case that using just LCOE that wind can now generate at less cost than NPPs in suitably windy locations. Indeed, it is predicted that solar PV costs will lower to about the same LCOE as wind but in suitably sunny locations. However, wind and solar operators have to have a market for those times they are actually generating. This suggests some form of storage scheme with pumped hydro being probably the most cost effective (if one has suitable terrain and ignores the sacrifice of that terrain to this purpose. However, most of the siutable terrain in Europe and North America is already used for pumped hydro or bespoke for other purposes.
Estimating a grid largely reliant upon wind and solar with biomass backup always ends up being fabulously expensive once the required storage is accounted for. The more NPPs one throws into the estimate the lower the overall LCOE. This goes on until wind and solar become quite minor players as does pumped hydro.
Cost drivers favor NPPs, although I’ll admit I don’t have full costing data (externalities and incenttives) for all aspects of any form of generation or storage.
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harrywr2, on 12 May 2011 at 9:24 AM — Yes, but Powder River coal is both lower BTU/ton that other sources of steam coal but alos lower sulfur. As you may know there are plans afoot to export more than the current three trainloads/day to Asia.
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The Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan published by The University of Melbourne shows that wind, solar and biomass resources could make Australia carbon emission free within 10 years with a supportive regulatory framework. It might not be cheaper than nuclear power given the same regulatory support. It is possible that Australian geothermal resources might fill the prospect opportunity for nuclear, as geothermal would gain much greater community acceptance.
It is misleading and pre-emptive to say that renewables cannot fix the climate crisis. In the end they will have to because even the uranium will run out eventually, after the oil and gas are depleted and the atmosphere is loaded with CO2.
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MFW it has been claimed that spilled wind power could also be used to make hydrogenated biocarbon ‘wind fuels’ http://www.dotyenergy.com/
and the production efficiency could be increased from a current 25% to 60%. Certainly methanol or synthetic methane will safely fuel existing mass produced engines unlike ammonia. Then there is another layer of inefficiency using the fuel in the engine to power a tailshaft or generator.
However I see little alternative to expensive hydrocarbons in passenger planes or long haul trucks. Perhaps we should conserve the ‘meth” fuel we have now, namely natural gas, and not burn it in power stations.
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http://www.longshoreshippingnews.com/tag/powder-river-basin/
Plans and proposals for West Coast port shipping
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@ Ross Gawler:
The ZCA plan has been analysed and critiqued at length here. If you have not heard about this from the plan’s promoters, then that’s hardly suprising, but the plan has pretty much been shown up as fantasy.
You should bring yourself up to speed on these issues. Check out technologies such as IFR and LFTR. See the following:
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-nuclear-power-sustainable.html
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If the analysis here of renewables is basically right, it seems to me that the IPCC report could do great damage even though it is not all that rosy, judging by some of the early criticisms (referred to by F. Jablonski).
There’s a lot of damage to go around but this report, insofar as it delays recognition of the real problems with renewables and reinforces ignorance and misinformation about nuclear power, should be thoroughly subject to scrutiny. If BNC energy analysts put all that work into ZCA 2020, this would seem to carry far greater importance.
Weren’t previous IPCC energy reports much more favorable to nuclear? what is the history behind this report? clearly it precedes Fukushima.
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@harrywr2 — You probably meant 100 billion tons…
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2008/1202/
Not really true that export is impractical — in fact they’re already building large export terminals on the West Coast. It’s shipped there by rail (a lot of coal in the US is shipped by train, even long distances like Powder River to New England).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703399204576108640399166816.html
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Great article, Barry. I think a good summary article like this was well and truly due for BNC, and you delivered right on time.
I actually think this (pt. 2) reads really well as a stand alone article too. Passing it ’round!
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Selling coal to China is a proven recession busting technique. What irks is that both Australia and the US have made a lot of noise at climate conferences but it seems they had a memory lapse by the time they got home. I suggest Australia should carbon tax coal exports say $50 a tonne on top of $150 or whatever is the latest FOB spot price for export thermal coal. Pay the tax into a green fund in China so our conscience is clear. If instead China gets more coal from the US then put a carbon tariff on Chinese goods. Do something, anything.
The big question is whether imports can keep Chinese coal consumption at 3.2 Gtpa. There was a link in the sidebar a day or two ago that suggested not. There goes our iron ore exports and other commodities.
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It’s articles like this that leave me feeling quite depressed.
While I think renewables have a role to play, I also think that the necessary (and urgent!) carbon emission reductions wont be achieved without nuclear power, and that, especially post-Fukushima, seems to be completely off the table in many countries.
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@ seamus, on 12 May 2011 at 4:20 AM
You can include me as one of a growing number of people who share your brand of environmentalism. Good stuff.
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Barry,
Over last 20 years nuclear has expanded by 1.3% per year. We know that in the 1970’s and 1980’s nuclear expanded by >10% per year( up to 15GW per year additions to capacity). If China completes the 25 reactors under construction and the 45GW planned to be completed by 2020 it will have added 5-10GW per year. If the rest of the world has the capacity to complete another 15-20GW per year by 2020 we could be looking at 20-30GW per year new nuclear or enough to replace most of present capacity much of which will need to be retired, with about 100GW of additional new capacity. If we are really optimistic we can project that world growth in nuclear will continue in the 2020’s, at 10% so we would have 1050GW capacity (adding 100GW per year) by 2030. This is still only supplying about 18% of the expected 6TW world demand by 2030.
Lets look at the track record of renewables. Hydro provides a similar amount of energy as nuclear and has been expanding only slightly faster than nuclear, and although only 10% of world capacity has been developed, projects are very expensive and take a long time to complete so it is unlikely that hydro would provide more than 700GWav by 2030. Solar is expanding very rapidly but the total capacity is small similar to wind energy 10years ago. None the less it is reasonable to expect it to grow to 200GW capacity in 10 years ( present wind capacity) and to 500GW capacity(160GW av) by 2030( ie a growth rate similar to nuclear in 2020’s).
Wind power has grown at 35% over last decade(to 200GW capacity), and as China again has demonstrated capacity can be expanded very rapidly, so it is reasonable to expect a growth rate in next decade of at least 20% per year or 1600GW capacity by 2020(500 GW av) and if growth rate is similar to nuclear in 2020’s would have 4,000GW capacity(1200GW av) by 2030.
So by 2030, of the 6TW of demand, nuclear could supply 1TW, solar hydro and wind an additional 2TW,with the balance (50%) from FF or efficiency gains.
You may be correct that by 2060, nuclear is supplying >75% of worlds energy, or it may be only 25%, I think many would agree that its probably too late to wait for big reductions in 2040-60 if we cannot make very significant reductions in 2020’s.
We really do need to expand nuclear much faster than present rates( or even what is presently planned), but equally we need to reduce unnecessary wast of energy and also continue with the very rapid expansion of renewables. The statement that “efficiency and renewables cannot fix the energy and climate crises” is missing the point, efficiency and renewables can make a very significant contribution but even with nuclear it may not be enough and certainly nuclear alone is not going to be soon enough.
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Neil, you’ve got it all backwards and quite confused, but I can’t justify that statement in detail right now. Go re-read the two posts, and stop providing your personal projections as though they bore a resemblance to reality. Your Chinese projections are utterly fantastical; indeed, I’m amazed you’re willing to even post them. But that avoids the most fundamental point:
No, it is NOT missing the point, it is precisely THE point. I won’t try too hard to pre-judge what contribution renewable will or won’t make — the more the merrier. What I’m quite clearly saying is that the ‘100% renewables’ meme is a dangerous fantasy and nuclear power must be allowed to play its appropriate role. So I strongly suggest you go torch those strawmen and cease to erect them here again in the future.
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Steve Kirsch, puts the climate-energy problem succinctly:
“The most effective way to deal with climate change is to seriously reduce our carbon emissions.”
Even if this was true, it carries zero weight with the general public.
So what gets Joe Sixpack’s attention? What matters is service interruptions or as Barry puts it:
“If the power is lost to these services, even for a short while, chaos ensues, and the societal backlash after a few such events is huge.”
You can lecture Joe Sixpack about climate change until you are blue in the face and you will be ignored. Cut off his power for a few days or even a few hours and you have created a “Teachable Moment”.
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Barry,
Your comment to Neil Howes is harsh but right on. Anyone who believes in a 100% RE (Renewable Energy) future needs to do an “Agonising Re-appraisal”.
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Gregory Meyerson,
There is plenty of good science in the technical contributions to the IPCC reports, especially in the first two. The trouble is that the writing of the “Executive Summaries” has been hi-jacked by people with a political agenda.
I am hoping that folks like Barry Brook and Hank Roberts will find the time to read the full IPCC report on renewables. They may be able to tell us whether the “Executive Summary” truly reflects what the 1,000 pages of technical studies show.
I remember AR2 with its paleo-temperature reconstruction that clearly showed the Medieval Warm Period. Hubert Lamb would have loved it.
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Barry Brook – “Critics do not seem to understand – or refuse to acknowledge – the basis of modern economics and the investment culture. Some dream of shifts in the West and the East away from consumerism. There is a quasi-spiritualism which underpins such views. Yet at a time of crisis, societies must be ruthlessly practical in solving their core problems or risk collapse. Most people will fight tooth-and-nail to avoid a decline in their standard of living. We need to work with this, not against it. We are stuck with the deep-seated human propensity to revel in consuming and to hope for an easier life. We should seek ways to deliver in a sustainable way.”
You have mentioned this in the article so replying is completely on-topic and deserves to be here.
It is not quasi-spiritualism that underpins my views but peer reviewed research and computer modelling done by professional scientists. The science of population ecology is as least as well grounded climate science and population models at least as good as the climate models that you rely on. Both have major limitations but despite these still give workable results.
Our way of life is not sustainable. Renewable energy will not make is sustainable nor will nuclear energy. We risk collapse by pursuing the lifestyle we lead.
BTW your dismissal of Neil Howes was uncalled for. He is one of the few people with real knowledge that are left on this blog. He is quoting fact. The nuclear growth you speak of will just cover retirements and not much more. China is building a lot of nukes however with 10% growth their demand by 2030 will be 16000GW after 2 doublings of their present demand. Currently it is about 400GW so after 2 doublings it will be 1600GW. If as you say they will have 25 more reactors operating then that is clearly a drop in the ocean. Additionally as the French found mass produced reactors have mass produced problems that can take out the whole fleet at the same time.
By contrast wind HAS been growing at 29% for at least the last five years. You can look up the figures however they are quite true. Solar PV has dropped drastically in price and is approaching grid parity.
You seem to be getting increasingly shrill and dismissing someone as knowledgeable as Niel the offhand way you did will just confirm that you are becoming myopic on the subject.
Neil and I were here from the start of this blog and while I only very occasionally visit now I think that Neil especially has earned far more respect than you have shown him.
Certainly you show far more respect to someone you have banned from the site by insisting on quoting his error filled articles. Errors which both Neil and I tried to point out at the time they were posted.
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Ender, you are far worse than Neil. I don’t bother to respond to you or your ilk indetail because it’s utterly pointless. I learned that lesson long ago on BNC — 2009 was it? — and have moved on. I’d rather be talking to the great majority of folk with an open mind on this matter rather than banging my head incessantly against a brick wall and refuting spurious or deceptively couched statistics repeatedly, only to have them regurgitated all over again some time later on a new thread. Bleh.
Oh, and I’m not claiming that nuclear is already well on the way to displacing the global dependence on fossil fuels. It’s another straw man. The hard fact is that nuclear was running up that possibility in countries like the US until the 1970s and then stopped dead due to fossil fuel interests and anti-nuclear action, and only sprinted to the first finish line (not the liquid fuels one) in a few cases like France. Other than that, as Geoff Cameron said, it’s pretty well renewables + nuclear 0, fossil fuels 10. Nuclear has failed. Renewables have failed. Fossil fuels have won, and the grinning, boyish young gas man looks to take over from old grandfather coal.
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Barry,
Having read BNC over the years, I get that France demonstrates that nuclear can provide a modern society with reliable power at affordable cost.
I get that the waste disposal issues are solvable.
I get that the non-proliferation argument is largely irrelevant (banning nuclear power plants in Australia won’t stop arms production in Nth Korea).
I get that the pro-nuclear lobby has taken a hit recently and progress is frustratingly slow.
What I don’t get is why you would go out of your way to pick a fight with renewables at this time. The fossil fuel lobby seems to be doing a perfectly good job of this without you.
It seems to me the scoreboard in Australia over the past 20 years looks like this:
Nuclear: nil
Renewables: nil
Fossil: 20
Given the above, the sight of nuclear and renewables fighting over the crumbs must give the fossil lobby a good deal of amusement.
I suggest that nuclear needs your sensible and steadfast support now more than ever. The fight with renewables is a distraction that doesn’t help either side and, frankly, the article above is not your best work.
OK, there may be an argument that in a small market such as ours there is a limit on the number of technologies which can be built in numbers giving economies of scale – however I believe we are still a long way from being at that point in time for either nuclear or renewables.
Barry, why not keep our eyes on the goal, see where we have common ground and remember who the real opposition is.
Kind regards,
Geoff Cameron
BZE NSW
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Geoff, few arguments there, though your criticism that the above is ‘not my best’ work would run a litter better if you’d be specific rather than go all hand wavy on me.
I’m not trying to pick fights with renewable advocates, just the ‘100% renewables with NO NUCLEAR’ zealots. If such folk, which I’m afraid includes most BZE people, can modify their stance to a ‘let the best low-carbon technology(ies) win”, then I’ll stop harping on these points. But they won’t, so I won’t give up on this.
One big problem is that the immediate ‘enemy’ in Australia, of all alternatives, is natural gas, and yet many renewable energy advocates are the ‘best buddies’ (explicitly or implicitly) of the gas industry. That can only end in tears (or laughs, depending on which side of the renewables/gas side you like to sit on).
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I doubt that the recent build rate for wind and solar will continue in the West because of cost concerns. I think the next 20 years will feature gas for everything and finding excuses to keep the coal industry going. Strangely I think much of China’s motivation to build cheap wind turbines and solar panels has been to sell them to subsidised buyers in the West.
My challenge for renewables enthusiasts is to renounce subsides and quotas and just rely on CO2 constraints for market uptake from now on. That growth could stall then again so could the whole economy. I see no way that NSW for example could afford to bring back PV subsidies when petrol costs $3/L or build new wind farms when Sydney has 45C summers. But that could be just a few years away.
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@Barry 12 May 2.55pm,
“Your Chinese projections are utterly fantastical”
I was using the link you provided; projection of 80GW nuclear capacity by 2020, 200GW by 2030.
Thus 11GW operating in 2011, 25GW under construction and 45GW planned(total 81GW), 70GW/9 years = 8GW/year. If this continues to increase at 10% per year after 2020, China will have 206GW by 2030.
What is wrong with your article is that you are saying we need to almost completely remove FF emissions, but project this as happening as late as 2060. You must be aware that what is important is the total CO2 emissions between now and 2060.
Requiring a massive surplus renewable capacity would only be valid if no FF or biofuel was available, and if almost no hydro /pumped hydro storage was available. Neither of these assumptions are likely to be valid for the next 50 years. Hydro and wind costs are similar to nuclear and solar ( with storage) costs are likely to decline with larger manufacturing capacity. You say massive amounts of renewable energy would have to be stored for low wind cloudy periods. We already have massive amounts of hydro storage and building very large pumped hydro storage is only slightly more expensive than small amounts, most of the cost is for operating capacity. Further, very small(compared with present FF use) amounts of NG are required to provide partial back-up for several weeks/year.
Thus the real issue is how quickly can efficiency gains, renewable and nuclear be expanded not by 2060, but during the next 50 years, so that total CO2 emissions over the next 50 years are kept as low as possible.
China seems to have got the message, relying mainly on nuclear to replace FF is going to be too slow, in 20 years nuclear will be providing <15% electricity demand in China, but wind is adding 1% per year and growing at 40% per year.By now or within a year wind and solar will be providing more GWh of energy in China than nuclear, and will continue to do so for at least the next 20 years..
The 100% renewable meme may be incorrect, but this is not the title of your post, what you are saying is that renewables and efficiency gains will only make a small contribution to solving the energy and climate crises, when in fact they are likely to make the major contribution.
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Neil, I’m not talking about the official numbers for nuclear in China through to 2030 — on the current pathway, they seem quite reasonable — no, I’m talking about your renewables ‘projections’ for the same period. I thought that was pretty obvious.
You are correct that in the short term emissions could be reduced by a switch from coal to gas, but the question of whether adding large amounts of wind to that mix is still rather… uncertain. The rest of your comment is very difficult to understand. Do you imagine I’m advocating doing nothing until 2059, and then magically switching everything over to the proposed 2060 energy mix in the following year? Of course not, that’s nonsense.
Did you actually look at the main table in this post? It shows nuclear growing at 6.3% pa when averaged over the next 50 years, and wind/solar growing at an average of 7.7% of that same period. Of course the growth rates will be much greater when the installed capacity is very low — that’s hardly relevant. If you imagine that the 40% increase would continue each year then every square metre of the Earth’s surface would be occupied by a wind turbine by about the year 2038, give or take a few years. So let’s get real, hey?
The title of my post says renewable energy and energy efficiency won’t solve the climate and energy crises. They may or may not make a major contribution, but you’ve said nothing to change the fact that without nuclear, decarbonisation by 2060 or thereabouts will not happen, nor that wishing for all the problems of large-scale high-penetration technosolar renewables to go away will make it so. As such, the title is entirely accurate, and as I noted previously, you’re the one building and burning straw men on my behalf.
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@ Neil Howes – Barry is away from the blog until late tonight.I have moved your comment to Pending until Barry has had a chance to read and reply. I have inserted the comment you inadvertently deleted.
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I actually think this is a pretty weak post for you Barry; the argument seems to be ‘it will probably be really hard to deliver electricity with renewables; ergo it is impossible.’
Against this, your nuclear advocacy contains some fairly heroic assumptions about decommissioning costs, fuel availability, safety and waste storage. I remain unconvinced and will continue to advocate for renewables in Australia.
Ev
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You are quite within your rights, evcricket, to dislike this post — after all, I know the message is confronting. So be it. You are also welcome to keep advocating for renewables in Australia — best of luck with that, I’ll cheer your successes. Just don’t, at the same time, go out there advocating against nuclear, eh? At least not if you’re serious about decarbonisation.
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@ Geoff Cameron
BZE NSW
What I don’t get is: if you get all of the above, why don’t you get that nuclear power is a zero emissions baseload electricity generator which if combined with our current renewables can take us beyond zero emissions faster, cheaper and more certainly than if it were excluded.
Why exclude nuclear power? I’m perplexed.
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@evcricket -And your ‘problems’ with nuclear are nothing more than a laundry list of the old saws against this technology that have been argued and dismissed over and over again in this blog and elsewhere. These have been addressed to everyone’s satisfaction other than the most doctrinaire and ill-informed of the antinuclear zealots.
Come up with something new or find yourself, and your opinions dismissed as irrelevant.
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Wow. This is just exactly how I think. It is shocking how many people fail to see what is at stake, even very smart people and even such with kids.
I live in Europe and I can tell you it is not pretty here. Nuclear would have had a chance before Fukushima but now it’s impossible probably for another decade at least if not for good.
Even if it sounds cynical but the world can actually be glad China is not a democracy.
It’s a little sad because whatever my country does, it will have 0 effect on global climate.
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Ender said:
“Our way of life is not sustainable. Renewable energy will not make is sustainable nor will nuclear energy. We risk collapse by pursuing the lifestyle we lead.”
If he is right we might as well curl up in a ball and give up.
In the meantime, the majority refuse to plan for failure so we proceed on the assumption that better technology will help sustain our vibrant civilization.
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@uvdiv, on 12 May 2011 at 10:44 AM said:
>>harrywr2 — You probably meant 100 billion tons…
Yes, my bad.
>>in fact they’re already building large export terminals on the West Coast
The west coast export coal capacity in the ‘grand scheme’ is trivial. There is about 30 million tons existing and most of that is consumed exporting ‘metallurgical coal’.
The Longview terminal will add maybe 5 million tons initially if it ever gets built. To put it in perspective a 1 GW coal fired plant will burn in the neighborhood of 4 million tons per year.
Delivered prices of coal by US State vary widely..mostly based on the distance from Wyoming.
EIA coal price per BTU by state. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table4_10_a.html
Powder River Basin coal has a low BTU content..so shipping costs become prohibitive with distance…which is why steam coal from West Virginia can command $70/ton mine mouth price but steam coal from Wyoming is stuck around $12-$13 ton.
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The UAE is a dictatorship, they could be building Gen I reactors and there is little the population could do about it.
“would seem to be 10 to 40 times more expensive than an equivalent nuclear-powered system, and still less reliable.”
Oy… why not 100? I can give off grid solutions TODAY and without subsidies at
http://sunelec.com/index.php?main_page=pv_systems&id=1251&type=OFFG
$1.79 a watt in storage + $1.18 a watt in storage and inverters= $2.97 a watt in nameplate capacity.
You multiply the first number by the capacity factor so lets do some normalizations.
If you are at a Lagrange P1, you would not need storage but lets do it anyhow.
$1.79 / 1 + $1.18 = $2.91
Arizona
$1.79 / .19 + $1.18 = $10.86
Germany
$1.79 / .11 + $1.18 = $17.45
Olkiluoto is 5.6 billion euros or 8 billion dollars / 1.6 MW is $5/watt normalized for a .9 capacity factor and it is $5.55/watt.
So it is almost exactly 3 times more expensive if it were in Germany, and 2 times in Arizona.
We all know where I think prices are going with Solar (0.5-0.75 $/watt) and how pumped storage is so much cheaper in the long run than lead acid storage (not to mention you can store in summer and release in winter in the case of Germany). Also storage kwh needs drop if you add wind into the mix.
Look I understand that fossil fuels are the real enemy, but nuclear also has local pollution, it would be like fighting the old boss just to meet the new boss. Renewables can work and are getting cheaper each day. I felt the same way about solar until I realized just how cheap it was becoming each day. ~100% renewables is possible.
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Thanks Barry, I realised over night that mine was probably an abrupt post.
You have actually convinced me of the merits of nukes in previous posts, hence the disappointment in this one. As mentioned by others, it seems odd to pick a fight with renewables at this time; more information saying ‘renewables can’t do it’ is unlikely to encourage confidence from the public in decarbonising the economy. That is surely the first step? How to do it is the second and if we never get through the first the 300 years worth of brown coal we have will keep coming out of the ground.
I’ll be the first to admit the task of running Australia, and I am only talking about Australia, on renewables is a difficult one, but I know that it is _possible_.
You know the ins and outs of the comparison, so there’s no need to re-iterate them here, but I see the future risks of renewables (mostly that it will be expensive and maybe not work) to be less than the future risks of nuclear.
Future risks of nuclear? That widespread use will drive up, significantly, the cost of the fuel and the already difficult economic analysis gets even worse. Add to this the component of the fuel cost that is predicated on world oil prices. I’ve got a pretty good handle on the drivers that affect resource extraction in Oz and doubling the cost of diesel would be a really, really big problem.
So apologies for the abruptness; I am a giant fan of your work in general and you have brought sanity to a difficult argument in Australia. You’ve convinced me that if renewables fail Gen 4/thorium nukes would be a pretty good fall back position. However until we’ve invested the same sort of money that nukes have received for the past 70 years, I still think that energy supply that doesn’t rely on a fuel source is a far safer option; economically, environmentally and strategically.
Ev
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BNC commenting rules require that references be supplied to support personal contentions. Further comments which violate that rule will be deleted and you will be asked to re-post supplying same
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“In the case of electric cars, we can see strong synergy between nuclear power and efficiency. The electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion and facilitate nuclear plants to dump excess cheap nighttime electricity in commuter car batteries.”
i am 100% sure, that this will not work. nuclear power and electric cars will not work together well.
i have seen calculations that show, that at current night time prices it will cost 1/3 to 50% to run your car, in comparison with gas. this price difference has not promoted a move to EVs in the past, and it also will not do so in the future.
the reason is simple: with an electric car being a lot more expensive still, a rather small price difference on fuel will only make a difference, when you use your car a lot. but this is difficult with electric cars, as they lack range and have long refuelling times.
the situation is a completely different one with renewables like wind and PV solar. these will cause spikes, that drive prices down to zero or beyond. people will profit from a big price difference in fuel, even if they use their cars not that much. and they can make use of the battery by selling electricity back at a high price difference.
and then there is the psychological factor of refuelling your car for free..
————–
a big percentage of wind and PV solar will promote the switch to electric cars and will cause massive synergy profits.
the combination of nuclear and electric cars will be much slower.
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Sod – don’t forget you need to supply references to support your contention. What you are 100% sure of doesn’t count otherwise. Future violations of this BNC Commenting Rule will be deleted and you will be asked to re-post supplying same.
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@evcricket, You do understand that the cost of nuclear fuel could rise by several orders of magnitude and it would still be competitive with coal and gas on a MWe per Kilo bases. The cost of fuel is a very, very small part of the cost of running a nuclear reactor.
If you disagree with the above, you should post references to support your contentions, otherwise they will be dismissed as a product of your imagination.
MODERATOR
Thanks DV8 – I have appended warnings to several new commenters contributions to remind them.
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Uranium mining to be powered by renewable energy? It seems the Olympic Dam expansion is to go ahead
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/d-day-for-olympic-dam-expansion/story-e6frea6u-1226054951428
The article omits the figures of 690 MW power requirement and 187 megalitres a day of additional fresh water supply. The preferred desal site on a landlocked gulf already has elevated salinity and is a marine reserve.
However the article says BHP Billiton have promised that 40% of the energy will be renewable, or about 700 X .4 = 280 MW. To do this a mix of wind and solar thermal or PV would have to have a nameplate capacity over 1 GW. Maybe Bob Brown will approve.
I suspect that if the expansion goes ahead the most likely energy source will be from a new gas pipeline that is ultimately connected to the Qld coal seam gas fields over 500 km away. The whole concept seems slightly bizarre, generating more CO2 in Australia so other countries can have uranium.
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DV8 – Umm, post references to the fact that I suspect there is risk in committing heavily to a fuel source? Does oil count as an example?
You don’t seem to understand how this works; for nuclear to be accepted in Australia, you guys need to convince the Australian public that it is a safe, fast and cost effective solution. If you don’t, all the rhettoric, even if it’s correct, achieves absolutely nothing. You need to convince ME, not the other way around. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. The public education job in front of nuclear is gigantic and telling people who raise concerns that they ‘will be dismissed as a product of your imagination’ probably doesn’t help your cause. I could be a policy maker in the Dept of Energy for all you know, in which case your dismissal means you’ve missed a pretty big trick.
Ev
MODERATOR
Personal opinion presented as fact requires references. An example in your last comment is:
“That widespread use will drive up, significantly, the cost of the fuel and the already difficult economic analysis gets even worse.”
There are plenty of references on BNC alone to demonstrate that is not the likely outcome – so what are the sources for your alternative opinion. Please check the BNC Commenting Rules for clarification.
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Some new commenters apparently have not read the BNC Commenting Rules – I will post append them here.Please read and abide by these rules if you do not wish your comment to be edited.
COMMENTS POLICY — I welcome comments, posts, suggestions and informed debate, from a wide range of perspectives. However, personal attacks, insulting/vulgar posts, or repetitious/false tirades will not be tolerated and can result in moderation or banning. Trolls will be warned, and then banned.
CIVILITY – Clear-minded criticism is welcomed, but play the ball and not the person. Rudeness will not be tolerated. This includes speculation about motives or what ‘sort of person’ someone is. Civility, gentle humour and staying on topic are superior debating tools.
RELEVANCE – Please maintain focus on the topic at hand. Do not attempt to solve big problems in a single comment, or to offer as fact what are simply opinions about complex matters.
CITING LITERATURE AND OTHER SOURCES — appropriate and interesting citations and links within comments are welcomed, but please DO NOT cite material that you have not yourself read, digested and understood. As a general rule, please introduce any and every link or reference with a short description of the material, your judgement on its quality, and the specific reason you are including it (i.e. how it is relevant to the discussion).
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@ evcricket:
How many times has this song been sung before? No, we don’t need you. Not even if you are a senior policy advisor. We need to concentrate on signing up the bulk of the population who already passively support nuclear power, not waste time trying to convince people whose main strategy is to try to convince pro-nukes that anti-nuke renewablists somehow represent a key demographic. You do not, and time spent pretending otherwise is time wasted.
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Thanks for this post Barry. Succinctly put. I know you’ve been making these arguments for some years now but I think this puts the case effectively while striking the right tone as well.
As an occasional ‘drive by’ reader/commenter I don’t think this has always been the case… there’s an important distinction to make between ‘going for 100% renewables is a dangerous, innumerate gamble’ (hard to disagree with that) and ‘renewables are a complete waste of time’.
evcricket,
A year or two ago many posts and comments on this site implied, if not explicitly stated, the latter argument, that all renewables are a waste of time. I found this quite alienating, particularly having observed renewables being used very effectively in remote/low income settings. But these are niche applications. Barry is being quite nuanced here. Do you really believe renewables can supply 100% of energy demand in developed, urbanised settings? If yes, you need to make the argument with numbers. If not, is nuclear worse than the realistic (fossil fuel) alternatives?
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Okay Finrod, good luck with that.
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Matt, I actually do think renewables can supply 100% of our energy needs; Australia’s that is.
The numbers are rubbery and time consuming, so I won’t spell it out, many others have, like the BZE report.
And no, nuclear is FAR better than fossil fuels, I would never dispute that.
I’ll see if I can summarise my position in a few lines: We’re talking about the 2050 scenario here, really and a lot could change between now and then. Pursuing a nuclear industry in Australia is a massive commitment; 20 reactors, possibly more, distribution networks and expanded mining. I don’t have inherent problems with that, but it means we’ve spent a lot of money committing to a FUEL source. Then, any impacts to that fuel supply affect the cost and viability of the power supply. There’s plenty of research that supports the notion that resource extraction is getting harder and more energy intensive, this means that despite fuel costs being a low contribution now, there is a genuine risk they could blow out significantly in future. Check out oil prices in the last 20 years for an example of what demand and geopolitics can do.
Addressing climate change is a matter of inter-generational equity, and I think nuclear fails this test. Committing to nuclear, commits future generations to a series of risks which could be avoided if we use renewables instead. Give us 20 years to see if HDR geothermal and Solar Thermal can do the job. If it can’t, call me and I’ll be straight onto the Gen 4 band wagon advocating with all my strength.
I think a society not wedded to fuel sources is a lower risk society than one that is. I admit it is a broadly Utopian vision, but I hope that everyone would strive for their Utopia, despite the difficulties.
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Please read Comments Policy and abide by those. Unsubstantiated personal opinion is just that and not useful on a science based site.
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@ evcricket:
Nuclear power requires less mining eddort than renewable power options.
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/05/mining-of-nuclear-fuel.html
Also, the vast availability of nuclear fuel means that running the world with gen IV reactors will never take more mining than we currently put into coal mining.
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-nuclear-power-sustainable.html
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galloping camel – “If he is right we might as well curl up in a ball and give up.
In the meantime, the majority refuse to plan for failure so we proceed on the assumption that better technology will help sustain our vibrant civilization.”
No we need to change not give up. However I guess you can just deny the science and keep going full steam ahead. Again Barry says that he wants to talk with people with an open mind. Yet so far the people here have closed minds and blinkers on, refusing to even consider the possibility that we are on the wrong track and the science behind this might be right.
As Barry says also we need to do it my way or the highway so its me on the highway again.
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On HDR geothermal if I recall a 20 MW pilot plant was going to lead the way in 2009 as a forerunner to massive baseload output. Now in a different location there is a chance that a single 4 Mwe generator may be up and running in 2012. I’d say geothermal, CCS and wavepower have had their chances yet failed to deliver. Wind and solar work as niche contributors but they seem to need permanent subsidies which we can ill afford in the tough times ahead.
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(deleted comment – violation of citation rule)
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@ evcricket
You say you have been convinced of the merits of nuclear power, but your post indicates that you’ve overlooked perhaps the most fundamental benefit of all. Energy density.
The world runs primarily on the rather pathetic (from a pro-nuke perspective) chemical energy in fossil fuels. Pound for pound, the potential energy in nuclear fuel is on the order of a million (!) times as dense.
As a result of the dominance of fossil energy, we’re used to thinking of fuel as an important driver in the overall costing calculation… just filling the tank on your car drives this point home… painfully and acutely. This is not the case with nuclear.
To understand why this is the case, just turn the scenario around. Assuming todays prices, what if we were able to get the same amount of energy from one millionth the amount of coal? Fuel costs make up a huge fraction of coal fired electricity costs (40 – 50 – 70%? Somebody help me out…) How much could the price of coal have to rise before it would create probems if that fraction was reduced by one millionth? 10X? 100X? 1000X?
These nice round numbers are drawn from the recesses of a poor memory, but they are close enough to make the point even if I’m off by an order of mag or two either way. (no doubt someone here will kindly correct me if my conclusions are egregiously in error) Most importantly, for the end user, fuel costs are a non-issue for nuclear. For the producer, the least cost options will be exploited first, and as advanced waste management techniques become necessary and/or mandated, the added expense can be absorbed with little to no “pain at the pump”, so to speak.
I consider your “doubling” of the price of diesel a likely, impending, and quite optimistic scenario… it is the nature of weak, chemical fossil energy to be volatile, finite, and increasingly scarce. These are precisely the problems that nuclear power avoids. Rest assured, such a paltry complication would have essentially no measurable effect on nuclear electricity costs.
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No I did not ask you to post references for that. I specifically asked you to answer for this statement:
Which implied directly that there was a risk of the cost of nuclear fuel becoming a limiting factor for the deployment of nuclear energy.
It is this assertion you need to post references for, because it is categorically wrong. I suspect that you realize this, which is why you are prevaricating.
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First John, excellent work, thanks for taking the time to post that. Certainly food for thought. Anyone else reading, that was a model response.
DV8, given John’s comment above, yes, fuel costs are probably not going to be a limiting factor in future and I’m prepared to admit I was wrong.
One future risk down.
So, there are still a few more, keeping in mind my Intergenerational Equity requirement;
– future cost of waste disposal. We don’t have much to go on with that yet and giant public opposition means this could blow out significantly
– future cost of decommissioning. I’ve got a feeling this is a giant risk, given the experiences of decom work going on now
And I’ve got vague concerns about the strategic risks; it is this reason the US Dept of Defense is pursuing renewables so vigorously for their bases. No fuel, no chance of cutting off the supply.
Ev.
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@ evcricket
You seem to be concerned about the use of a fuel in energy production. As has already been pointed out the cost of nuclear power is relatively insensitive to fuel cost so from that point of view, your concerns are relevant but only some decades in the future and only for a once through fuel cycle.
Should the cost of nuclear fuel rise sufficiently due to the cost of mined uranium, the incentive to deploy closed fuel cycle nuclear power would be substantial. For a closed fuel cycle it can be easily and conclusively shown that there is no possible scenario of energy use where the cost or availability of nuclear fuel is limiting on economic or sustainability grounds for thousands of years at least.
As always, there many compromises to be made. Renewables are characterized by significant land use. Biofuels are absolutely terrible in that respect but it applies to all renewables. In densely populated countries land use is a major issue. Perhaps in Australia not so much, but even then such things as desert ecosystems have their own intrinsic worth and their destruction over significant areas is yet another insult to an already stretched biosphere.
So, how do the balance the issue you have with fuel against the land use issue with renewables? Nuclear is and always will be a slam dunk winner when it comes to land use because of it’s very high energy density. And land use will always be an Achilles heel for renewables by their very nature of being a diffuse source of energy.
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On the issue of waste storage, nuclear power has the smallest waste stream of any power source, and the radioactive component has both a built-in reason for society to mandate keeping tabs on it and an inherent ease of doing so as a mainly solid remnant, as well as a built-in means of locating it if it goes missing. What’s not to like?
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The first thing to keep in mind is that the only true waste from fission is a very small amount of transuranics for which no use is currently known. Stripped from the recyclable components of used fuel these would amount to a golf ball sized mass for a person in a Western economy total lifetime energy use, including transportation.
In short the ‘waste issue’ is a fabrication largely driven by American politics both domestic and international. As well the issue is confounded there by lumping waste from nuclear weapons programs in with used fuel which distorts the issue.
In most jurisdictions, nuclear plants must pay for their own decommissioning by contributing to a fund for the life of the plant. There is no other form of energy that must do this despite the fact that it has been proven easier and cheaper to greenfield an ex-nuclear plant than a coal plant of similar output. In fact coal plants are decommissioned to brownfield status because of the cost of further remediation. This doesn’t even begin to address the ash ponds that these plants create, and the costs of stabilizing them.
The strategic risks of nuclear energy, even for the U.S. with poor uranium resources, are overblown. The expense of extracting uranium from marginal deposits would still not push the costs above unmanageable levels, and thorium fuel cycles are not yet competitive because uranium is so cheap and this element is widely available.
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“On the issue of waste storage, nuclear power has the smallest waste stream of any power source, and the radioactive component has both a built-in reason for society to mandate keeping tabs on it and an inherent ease of doing so as a mainly solid remnant, as well as a built-in means of locating it if it goes missing. What’s not to like?”
… Because we have to pay for it? That said my main criticism is that nuclear waste will outlive any government, maybe civilization itself. Even if you believe breeders could work (and I remind you they have been as commercially successful as tokamaks). They still produce useless fission products that must be guarded, protected, and let to decay for hundreds of thousands of years.
Australia has a solar capacity of .148 in Sidney and .168 in Darwin.
http://mapserve3.nrel.gov/PVWatts_Viewer/index.html
Suffice to say it is vastly better than Germany. Not to mention less seasonal variability.
“So, how do the balance the issue you have with fuel against the land use issue with renewables? Nuclear is and always will be a slam dunk winner when it comes to land use because of it’s very high energy density. And land use will always be an Achilles heel for renewables by their very nature of being a diffuse source of energy.”
Partly yes it uses less land, but that land cannot be reclaimed and that means it is not environmentally friendly. Not to mention it is the energy density of fossil and nuclear that led to the rolling blackouts after the Japan earthquake, The distributed nature of solar, wind, and storage would have resisted the shock/tsunami a LOT better.
I would like to ask Barry a question, if you do not like renewables for X reason, would you be willing to support fusion instead of fission? The Sierra Club also rejects D-T fusion because tritium has a half life of ~13 years. However since this is the only isotope worth worrying about and it is fuel instead of waste, then aside from accidents (which are not self sustaining like with fission) and tokamak decommissioning there is minimal radioactive release into the environment. I am equally split in between support and opposition. D-He3 is the panacea however, no radioactivity period.
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I’ve got a couple of comments & questions.
Regarding the cost of nuclear fuel – I understand that it’s a very small part of the cost of electricity produced, but for clarity – how much does it cost to extract Uranium from seawater? I know it’s been demonstrated to be possible, but seeing the cost compared to digging ore out of the ground would be interesting.
RE nuclear waste – certainly the transuranics can be ‘recycled’ to generate more energy, but we’re still left with non-useable fission products, some of which are quite active (if only for relatively short periods of decades to centuries). Can they be locked up in synrock or stabilised by similar chemical means, before being safely stored?
A secondary concern is the ‘low level’ waste, being items that become contaminated and must be disposed of – as I understand it, this is several times the volume of high level waste. Obviously, stabilisation of the contaminant particles is going to be much more difficult, but I assume it can be done in some fashion (embed in concrete blocks?).
Is there a good article someone can point me to that sets out how nuclear waste is dealt with safely? If not, it’d be a great topic for a post here on BNC, because that’s one of the biggest objections to nuclear power that I see.
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@Bern, – Pertinent questions
Our good friend Charles Barton has written on the costs of seawater extraction here:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/03/cost-of-recovering-uranium-from.html
The (currently) unusable fission products could be locked up in synrock, or in pressed zeolite ceramics, or given the small volumes, transmuted away by a special particle accelerator. My feeling is that they should be stockpiled, as one never knows.
Low level waste is not a big issue. Commonly, LLW is designated as such as a precautionary measure if it originated from any region of an ‘Active Area’, which frequently includes offices with only a remote possibility of being contaminated with radioactive materials. Such LLW typically exhibits no higher radioactivity than one would expect from the same material disposed of in a non-active area, such as a normal office block.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
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@ Ender
Why do you keep repeating this? I suspect most people who regularly post on this blog acknowledge we have some massive problems ahead of us. Personally, I see declines in ecosystems services due to overpopulation, poor land use, over exploitation, invasive species and climate change as hugely threatening to civilisation. And I’m not that optimistic about future outcomes it either.
What I don’t buy is the argument that energy use in itself is a major part of the problem. If something can be made out of plastic, steel, ceramics, whatever else, but requires (say) five times more energy than if wood were used instead, I’d rather that than deforestation. I’d rather energy-intensive vertical-farming than clearing biodiverse land to make way for more mono-crops. I’d rather efficient fission energy than inefficiently burning important vegetation (“biofuels”) or burning fossil fuels. There are many ways in which we can shift our reliance away from the biosphere which ultimately require a lot of energy.
And for goodness sake get the terminology right – the study of human populations and population growth is demography. This is different to population ecology which is a sub-field of ecology dealing with the dynamics of species populations and their interactions with their environment. Modeling human populations is substantially different to other species, for a whole host of reasons.
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evcricket,
It seems to me that Barry is not at war with renewables. He seems to like them (as I do) but he has says that renewables cannot be dominant players in the electricity business.
Taking that to the extreme (100% RE), is nonsense and you should not fault Barry for pointing that out.
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@Bern,
The MIT Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle report is a very good resource for both understanding uranium reserves and supply and options for management of spent fuel.
http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/nuclear-fuel-cycle.shtml
It touches on cost of recovery of uranium from sea water and calls for further research. It certainly does not dismiss it.
Even if one does not agree with all of the recommendations this is still a very valuable document to read.
On the subject of waste management, IMHO the US government should shoulder a fair bit of blame for it’s dithering which has probably contributed to some public perception that “nobody knows what to do with spent fuel”. US NPP plant operators pay $0.001 per kWh into a waste management fund which now sits at something like $24 billion. It’s time to be far more proactive and demonstrate a credible waste management strategy which is a little better than just storing it on site until we come up with a better idea.
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Ender,
You say that we need to change. Am I right when I assume you want us to cut our per capita energy consumption?
There are plenty of prominent people who advocate this. For example Prince Charles and Al Gore.
Prince Charles’ main residence is Clarence House in London with a heated area of 40,000 square feet. He also has three other residences in the UK and one (how appropriate) in the Silly(sic) Isles.
Al Gore has only four residences but he compensates for this frugality by using executive jets for personal transportation.
I really hope you are not one of those elitists who tell us little people to turn down our thermostats in winter and get rid of our SUVs.
If cutting down our individual carbon footprints is so wonderful, our leaders could show us a good example by emulating Mahatma Ghandi. Now there was a real leader.
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I don’t know how the following fits with Environmentalist’s solar costs. My friend from Jamaica recently spent 14,000 dollars all told on a system that is supposed to give her 235 kwh/month, but her maximum has been 150 kwh/month.
If we take the max as the average, that’s 14,000 for .2 kw average power. She is happy with this arrangement, but cheap it ain’t. 1 KW of average power would cost 70,000 dollars.
This is the real world I’m familiar with.
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quokka,
You are a long term denizen of this site so you should know that there is very little nuclear waste in the world and over 95% of it can be consumed by Generation IV reactors.
In Yorkshire they say “Where there’s muck there’s money”. What we call today call “Nuclear Waste” or “Bomb Grade Material” is fuel for tomorrow’s reactors.
Moderator,
Before you jump on me I can back these statements up using nothing but links from this site.
MODERATOR
Statements which are already supported by information on this site are taken as having supplied references.
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Wow, some excellent stuff in here. Better do some work now, but will be back later.
Thanks guys, most productive debate I’ve had for ages.
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Gregory Meyerson,
Some kinds of local solar power make perfect sense. For example, solar is often cost effective for heating swimming pools and domestic hot water.
I know this because my electric water heater burned out in late August but I did not notice for over a month.
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@ DV82XL:
A minor point here. Current synrock technology has been optimised for present nuclear waste, including the U-238 component. This waste is much less radioactive than the kind of concentrated fission products we would get out of a Gen IV reactor. I’m not certain, but if synrock is to be used for storing such waste, it may need to be modified, or the waste itself may need to be diluted. I suspect personally that since it will be largely gone in a few centuries, vitrification might not be the best storage tech anyway.
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@gc
Can be, but isn’t. The point is that nuclear waste management is a bit like justice. Not only must it be done, it must be seen to be done. And the US government deserves criticism for not being more proactive. I’m hardly the first person to make this point.
The theme of “Gen III+ reactors are too expensive because they are too safe” that was being pushed for a while here is analogous. The Fukushima accident is not a catastrophe, but it is something of a disaster for the accelerated roll out of nuclear power. The “too safe” meme looks a little ridiculous in retrospect. I always thought that it was politically suicidal.
All issues of energy are acutely political and recognizing that and adjusting one’s narrative to respond to popular concerns is imperative. As part of that, I see no problem with criticizing current practices if such is deserved. It is part of being seen to be both competent and honest.
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@Finrod – From what I understand different types of Synroc waste forms (ratios of component minerals, specific HIP pressures and temperatures etc.) can be developed for the immobilisation of different types of waste. What limitations there might be have not been discussed in the material I have seen. Good description here:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/default.aspx?id=476&terms=synroc
However I agree that this is not the optimal path to take because I hold out some hope that new and important applications may be found for these isotopes.
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I consider the “Intergenerational Equity” angle to be the most persuasive argument for nuclear power.
evcricket overarching concerns (and the general public as well) involve questions of “risk”. It is well established that the most dire risk of all to humans is poverty. (See “Chapter 8 – Understanding Risk” of Bernard Cohens excellent book “The Nuclear Option” for a great breakdown on this topic http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html) The most dire risk to the non-human biosphere is the contamination/destruction of habitat.
The drivers behind human habitat destruction is poor resource management and overpopulation.
Historically, there are only four mechanisms that effectively bring down human populations: war, pestilence, starvation… and prosperity.
The fertility rate in the developed (ie; relatively prosperous) world has effectively stabilized, and in some cases gone negative. Population growth in these areas is primarily a function of immigration from less advantaged areas, often at great “risk”… evidence in itself that folks in the third world are not satisfied with their circumstance.
There are a billion people on this planet without access to any electricity. There are billions more who have some access, but are still desperately energy deprived. The fertility rates in these areas is high.
Modern economic prosperity is a function of access to energy. Even the most robust economies can be brought to their knees with breathtaking speed if energy deprived.
Every generation has its problems to solve… often dealing with the unintended consequences of the gifts of their predecessors. Even the toxic soup of widespread combustion products in the atmosphere is a gift in the sense that it has provided us the platform and the technological tools to move on to a better solution… because we are energy rich.
The worst thing we could pass on to our descendents is an energy poor, impoverished situation.
The “renewable only” route is a recipe to bankrupt entire economies for an anemic result at best, and a complete failure at worst. Whether it be touted by doomsayers or utopians, and whether they are conscious of it or not, it’s consequences betray a callous disregard for “Intergenerational Equity”.
Sometimes this conversation needs to be brought back to fundamentals… common sense. Speaking of which, here’s a quote from the man who wrote the book on “Common Sense”… Thomas Paine.
“When a man in a long cause attempts to steer his course by anything else than some polar truth or principle, he is sure to be lost.”
Our polar truth/principle should be to make the improvement of the human condition our cause. By leaving our posterity an energy rich, prosperous circumstance, we mitigate population growth while giving them the liberty to make their own choices. By opting for the safest, densest, least polluting, least habitat/resource consumptive choice now is an ethical imperative and a priceless gift.
BTW.. Doomsayers be damned! I have children, and I will neither give up, nor consign them to live under a rock.
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Finrod,
Most of the reactors in use today consume only 0.6% of the Uranium. The other 99.4% ends up as “Nuclear Waste”. I realise that you know this but some of the other readers may not.
U238 is usually the dominant component of “Nuclear Waste” so we need reactors that can convert it into fissile isotopes. There are plenty of options; Barry Brook likes fast reactors (e.g. IFRs), Bill Gates likes TWRs while I like LFTRs. It remains to be seen which approach will work best.
While I expect that over 90% of our nuclear waste will be consumed to generate electric power it is possible that this will be seen as uneconomic at least in the short term so we may need ways to store such materials until mined Uranium becomes scarce.
We are not talking “Geologic” time here. Just a few hundred years, so don’t waste any more money on Yucca Mountain.
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evcricket,
and
Others have pointed out that the uranium consumable is a very small component of the cost and materials of nuclear power. I’d like to look at the renewable side of the equation.
The reason fuel is raised is because its a consumable, and the idea seems to be that renewables are good because they don’t require a consumable to produce power.
But they do require vast quantities of consumables. Whats the consumable? The infrastructure – the concrete and steel to construct the devices to harvest the energy from wind and sun. And these devices wear out.
Compare, say, the steel inputs for wind and nuclear – about 500 tonne/MW for wind (GE2 2.5XL)and 15 tonne/MW for nuclear (AP1000). Then consider the typical wind plant lifetime of say 20 years, and the expected nuclear plant lifetime of say 60 years, and calculate the material consumption rate*:
A 1 GW wind plant would consume 25000 tonne steel per year.
A 1 GW nuclear plant would consume 250 tonne steel per year – 1% of the wind consumption of steel.
The concrete consumption works out at 92000 tonne/GW/year for wind, and 4000 tonne/GW/year for nuclear.
I invite you to do these calculations for solar. These numbers are generously weighted in favour of renewables as they ignore the required redundancy, storage, and transmission inputs.
I think of the steel consumption and concrete consumption of renewables as their “fuel”. If you are concerned about the economics of fuel (consumables) extraction in a time of oil depletion – and you should be – renewables are a terrible investment We would indeed be spending a lot of money committing to a “fuel” source.
* The reference here is TCASE4, where Barry estimates concrete and steel consumption per MW for wind, solar and nuclear, and I’ve converted to annual rates.
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Barry
Did you actually look at the main table in this post? It shows nuclear growing at 6.3% pa when averaged over the next 50 years
A growth rate of 6.3% per year gives a doubling every 11.4 years, so would expect 350GW of todays capacity to be 1100GW in 2030( what I estimated).. Here is the problem,. that would only be providing 18% of energy consumption, and by 2040 only 30%. I think we can agree that hydro can only provide 6-8%, so that means without very substantial wind,solar and geothermal, CO2 emissions are going to remain close to present levels for the next 30 years, and would not really dramatically decline until about 2050.
I didnt make any predictions of wind capacity in China by 2020, but based on world capacity increasing by >30% per year in last decade, 20% increase seems reasonable. China was planning 100GW capacity by 2020, but if they continue to build at last years 18GW they will reach this target in 2014, and be producing more GWhs than the 35GW of nuclear. We should expect some growth in wind manufacturing capacity in China, whether that translates into greater build rates locally or internationally doesnt really matter.
Returning to one of your major issues about renewable
The three most commonly proposed ways to overcome the problem of intermittency………….The reality is that any of these solutions are grossly uneconomic, and even if we were willing and able to pay for them, the result would be an unacceptably unreliable energy supply system.
(1) storage; N America, Europe, China all have very large existing storage in hydro and Africa and S America have great potential to develop similar storage. The cost of pumped hydro using existing dams or lakes is mainly the cost of pipelines or tunnels and turbines( pumping capacity) not storage capacity(costs $1000-2000/kW).Uprating existing dams is the lowest cost($70/kW). Sorry I dont have the web links on this lap-top, they have been recently provided on BNC.
(2) a diverse mix of energy sources doesnt eliminate need for storage but does reduce total storage required. Oz-energy-analysis.org has a good simulation of wind plus solar showing this(3rd story).
(3) If we are going to be using substantial amounts of FF well into 2050’s( ie nuclear growing at 6.3%), there is going to be lots of natural gas fired peaking plants( in fact we have lots already). Even with 100% OCGT back-up of all low carbon sources, but used at <0.1 capacity factor is still going to generate a lot less CO2 than the 75%nuclear 18% renewabe scenario well into the 2050's and in no way would prevent nuclear eventually providing 75% energy. But with hydro, pumped hydro and a mix of wind, solar and geothermal(and nuclear) we will never need to have 100% FF back-up, not even 50% back-up(possibly 25% back-up used at 0.05 capacity).
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It’s pointless, Neil. Every dollar spent on renewables would be better spent on nuclear. I have to disagree with Barry seeing any potential of an important role for renewable power in the main energy mix. It will be a niche player at best, a side story to the epic tale of energy development in the 21st century.
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Solar is just very unproductive as an energy source. In my country a solar Watt installed produces 17x less energy thann a nuclear Watt installed. Even in the desert with good tech maintained by professionals its still 6x less productive as a nuclear Watt. Micro wind and solar bike lanes are completely pathetic.
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/download/file.php?id=972&mode=view
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@Finrod, 13 May 4.51pm,
I have to disagree with Barry seeing any potential of an important role for renewable power in the main energy mix. It will be a niche player at best, a side story to the epic tale of energy development in the 21st century..
So far in the 21st century, renewable energy has provided more GWh than nuclear(hydro 3,000TWh in 2006, 343GWav; wind 220TWh), in last 5 years a small amount of hydro has been added( an additional100TWh), wind more than doubled(500TWh) but nuclear has declined.as aging plants have been shut down faster than new plants are opened. Unfortunately it appears that in the next 10 years new nuclear openings will only slightly exceed old plant closings, while hydro will increase by 10%, wind increase by >200% and solar perhaps by >1000%. These numbers may be conservative if Japan becomes a major new developer of wind and solar.
Its very hard to predict what role nuclear will play in 2060, it should be significant but I think its going to be a very long wait before nuclear contributes more energy than renewables. Did you meant to say renewables will be niche players at best in the 22nd century?
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@Neil Howes – Hydro, and hydro alone of all renewable modes will continue to make a significant contribution to the energy supply for the foreseeable future. It is the only really viable renewable energy because it can be built to very large scale, and it is dispatchable. Wind, solar and others like wind and wave power will always be a sideshow.
The thing is that no utility has ever built a thermal plant where they could have economically built hydro. It is these plants that need to be replaced by nuclear energy. Plants that cannot, for reasons discussed at length in this forum, be replaced with variable sources like wind and solar.
The only other option, other than burning more coal and gas, is the development of more hydro, and long transmission. This is possible, but at such great expense that it will still make nuclear a better choice.
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Neil, marginal talk won’t deceive anyone on this site. 1000% increase over insignificant levels is still insignificant.
500 TWh is less than 3% of world electricity use.
Its not about that 20% solution, its about the other 80%.
If you want to convince people of renewables usefulness you must come up with a realistic plan to get to 80% renewable electricity, world-wide.
Keep in mind:
1. energy growth and CO2 growth trajectories we’re on right now.
2. large scale realistic (not arbitrary) intermittency analysis based on real system output and real grid demand.
Lets see how you will supply 5-10 TWe of reliable clean energy flow and cut greenhouse gas emissions to only a few billion tonnes CO2 equivalents.
I have actually done these things and concluded only nuclear and hydro are non-marginal (useful!) electricity supply technologies. Its not that wind and solar can’t supply the kWhs, it just can’t supply them when they are needed. With wind and solar, every kWh you add means adding multple kWhs of fossil fuels to back it up, violating our 80% criterion. In fact it would be quite rediculous to call it fossil back-up, because its mostly fossil burning and a little solar and wind for greenwashing.
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Here are the production numbers behind renewable energy:
http://www.energies-renouvelables.org/observ-er/html/inventaire/Eng/conclusion.asp
Solar is ~0.1 percent of global electricity use. Ten times that by 2020 makes it 1%. Ooooh!
Here’s the IEA pro-solar projection: 11% PV electric by 2050. Oops! Thats not much at all!
http://desertec-mediterranee.over-blog.com/article-a-solar-revolution-at-the-iea-51810347.html
So the no nukes solar (ad hom deleted) are fine with fossil fuels killing tens of millions of people and emitting a trillion tonnes of CO2 over many decades to come. Great.
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quokka,
I can’t argue with your last post, as there is not much going on right now to get us to a dry, on-site reprocessing or closed cycle future.
As you imply the problems are more political than technical. Freeman Dyson has a clearer vision than almost anyone I can think of and he is very good at communicating too:
“The fundamental problem of the nuclear power industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are. The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors. It is inconceivable under present conditions that a group of enthusiast could assemble in a schoolhouse and design, build, test, license and sell a reactor within three years. Sometime between 1960 and 1970, the fun went out of the business.”
Freeman Dyson, “Disturbing the Universe”
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“Neil, marginal talk won’t deceive anyone on this site. 1000% increase over insignificant levels is still insignificant. ”
please learn something about exponential growth.
here are the numbers for germany:
Jahr 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010[20]
Erzeugung in GWh
64 116 188 313 557 1282 2220 3075 4000 6200 12000
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaik
produced electricity increased from 64 GWh in 2000 to 12000 GWh in 2010.
and neither is Germany the best place for photovoltaics, nor is photovoltaioc the best form of alternative energy, when you want to approach 100% alternatives.
PV is a good technology to supply increased daytime use. without serous storage, we will not have above 10-20% PV..
PV also does a good job, in delivering electricity when there is little wind.
and it is a fantastic technological solution for many small problems (like electricity without grid access) and for those who seek “independence”.
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@Neil Howes, on 13 May 2011 at 8:41 PM said:
So far in the 21st century, renewable energy has provided more GWh than nuclear(hydro 3,000TWh in 2006, 343GWav; wind 220TWh)
Hydro is a very location specific resource and seasonal.
On the US Northwest Grid we have 33 GW of hydro. More then enough for our needs. Unfortunately the ‘average production’ is only 15 GW. To make matters worse, peak production occurs in the spring when demand is lowest.
So we also have 15 GW of coal,gas and nuclear to supplement the hydro.
US Northwest Generating Statistics.
http://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/powersupply/Default.asp
Then to top if all off, the last serious drought year we had we ended up pulling the plug on our aluminum smelters.
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gc: I’m fine with solar power. I just don’t know what to make of the “price is coming down all the time” rhetoric when what my experience is shows solar installations to be very expensive. My Jamaican friend had the money for a very modest system and is very conservative in her energy use.
Still, her system averages out to 70 grand per kw. You read some solar enthusiasts who disconnect the watt price from the whole system to make it sound cheaper, and then act like the future is already here– well, it seems misleading to me.
My nephew has installed a solar heating system, with pipes running thru the floor. very cool. It cost 20,000 bucks but he will have to pay only 8 grand due to federal and state subsidies.
Very cool, but not the basis for a rational energy solution. My nephew is knee jerk anti nuclear and talks about how expensive it is: this before Fukushima.
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@ Neil howes:
What DV82XL, Cyril R and Harrywr2 said.
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How can anybody in their right mind dismiss 1000% growth…
I don’t care if you give me a single hydrogen atom, if it grows geometrically at 1000% within 60 units of time (say a year is an unit of time) I will give you our very own sun.
“and neither is Germany the best place for photovoltaics, nor is photovoltaioc the best form of alternative energy, when you want to approach 100% alternatives.
PV is a good technology to supply increased daytime use. without serous storage, we will not have above 10-20% PV..
PV also does a good job, in delivering electricity when there is little wind. ”
I think 100% solar + storage is inevitable, perhaps not in the near term (20 years) but if prices keep dropping at the current rate it will simply make it to cheap to not use. Sadly wind has kind of hit a floor on $/watt, the question is if solar/watt+ storage is cheaper than solar/watt + wind/watt +smaller storage after 20+ years. Since wind, solar, and storage are all basically just capital intensive with very little in operational costs the LCOE should be a fair comparison. Let me see if its true and if I can quantify it.
This is the graph from the recent IPCC report.
“gc: I’m fine with solar power. I just don’t know what to make of the “price is coming down all the time” rhetoric when what my experience is shows solar installations to be very expensive. My Jamaican friend had the money for a very modest system and is very conservative in her energy use.”
Look at the graph on this post, your perception is anecdotal, and even if by a few years, outdated, my graph is scientific since it comes from the IPCC itself.
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A solar project here just initiated involves 33 rooftop installations, 150 kilowatts-peak, at a cost of 360000 euros. It is designed to give almost 130000 kilowatthours of electricity per year which makes it an average of 14,8 kilowatts of electricity flow installation.
So that’s 24.4 euros per Watt electrical average capacity.
Compare this to the most expensive nuclear project in Europe, Olkiluoto, hated for its cost overruns, going for 5 billion for a 1.6 GW electrical reactor, with 92% design capacity factor.
So that’s 3.4 euros per watt electrical average capacity. Now add in the fact that the design lifetime for Olkiluoto (60 years) is 2x longer than the design lifetime of the solar installation (30 years).
If you think ‘but the sun is free and uranium costs money’ well the inverter and battery replacement alone (battery costs were not even included for the solar installation so I’m being very very kind to solar) are at least 5 cents per kWh which is twice the total cost of uranium ore+fuel fabrication+enrichment+dry storage.
These are not complicated calculations, anyone that has had basic math classes can do them. So why don’t most people do these simple calculations?
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@ Sod. Please learn something about fundamental limits to exponential growth. Please learn something about the implications of non-dispatchable solar systems that are not there 90% of the time. All that grid connected PV is going to do in Germany is lock you guys in fossil fuels indefinately.
You Germans need to start doing the math.
Or keep rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Never mind that iceberg, Sod. Just handwave it away.
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Harry:
fabulous graph you cite.
wind has five times the generating capacity of nuclear for the region. but when you get down to actual electricity produced, they’re a wash.
and as you note, natural gas, coal and nuclear fill in the gap between wind’s generating capacity and what it delivers.
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All that grid connected PV is going to do in Germany is lock you guys in fossil fuels indefinately.
why can’t anti nuclear people see this?
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cyril: inverter and battery are 5 cents/kwh?
can I get a source for that?
that’s a useful statistic.
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Gregory, energy expert Bill Hannahan has a paper which has tons of useful numbers:
http://www.coal2nuclear.com/energy_facts.htm
He comes to 6.5 billion dollars battery replacement for a 0.9 GWe flow 10 years. So 6.5 billion for 9 gigwatt-years, which is about 8 cents per kWh.
Replacing the inverter adds a cent at this cost. Then we have the battery charger and the cost of cleaning the panels. 10 cents per kWh total for replacement and operations/maintenance would be reasonable for this system. I’m being kind in assuming much cheaper batteries and inverters, so am using half this cost. Its very unlikely though that deep cycle batteries can be made for under $ 70/kWh of capacity.
For my area, even the 0.15 capacity factor that Bill Hannahan uses is optimistic. So far 0.09 is more appropriate. With improvements in installation and greater use of diffuse energy harvesting cells, we could get 0.11 eventually for a fleet average.
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“A solar project here just initiated involves 33 rooftop installations, 150 kilowatts-peak, at a cost of 360000 euros. It is designed to give almost 130000 ”
Cyril those prices may be because it was financed just a few years ago, I made a good post here.
I think the math is solid, and depending on where you live, today’s prices puts 24/7 Solar at 2 or 3 times more expensive than pure baseload Olkiluoto, Of course this works much better in Arizona and Australia than in Germany simply because of seasonal variation mainly. This pits the most expensive baseload nuclear vs the most expensive solar (24/7 and p-Si instead of CdTe from First Solar).
As for Olkiluoto its technically 5.6/8 billion euro/dollars which means its 5$/watt.
http://www.nuclearpowerdaily.com/reports/Areva_reports_profit_surge_from_sale_of_asset_999.html
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