Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant

[Ziggurat]

Yeah, well I'm sure we can replace every petroleum product with something equivalent, but why would we want to get to that point ?

I'm not saying we want to (it's obviously preferable to make plastic out of something that's much closer to it already, namely petroleum), only that it's possible.

 

[Lonewulf]

In my opinion, we could work harder to get rid of over-creation of plastic products. In Germany, many containers are made of glass, and are easily recycled; you give it back to the people that sold it to you, they clean it out, and refill it. They do this with plastic too, I think.

 

[Belz...]

I'm not saying we want to (it's obviously preferable to make plastic out of something that's much closer to it already, namely petroleum), only that it's possible.

I know, I know.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

I agree. When we talk about fossil fuels people often say "when we're out of oil we'll find something else."

And then how do we make plastic ? We kind of use it a lot.

See post 386. You don't need oil to make anything that's made out of oil. We're talking hydrocarbons here. Hydrogen and carbons.

Oil contains the chain sizes and ratios already that are good for plastic/gasoline/diesel and such.

You can make it out of other stuff, such as natural gas, coal and water, peat, biomass or people.

It's just an issue of energy. You have to do stuff like hydrogenate and reformat (add hydrogen atoms to the molecules) do destructive distillation (Basically vaporize the organic material under high pressure and break it apart) shaping of the stuff, cracking (basically breaking apart hydrocarbon chains)...

That stuff generally takes a lot of energy. You could do it reasonably for plastics. Doing it for fuel is a bigger issue, because it's energy intensive and it leaves a lot of crap behind (coal is full of mercury, sulphur and other trace nasties).

It's been proposed for a long time to get the US self-suffecient. Oh it could be done, but doing it on the scale of national fuel production is a bit much. Generally, the end cost of energy and the chemical processes and refining make it more expensive than even $65 a barrel forign oil.

I had heard a while ago that if forign oil stayed at 75 bucks a barrell it would be competitive. But nobody wants to build a major operation because the market is volitile.

Imagine the price of oil goes down to $60 due to an economic slowdown or russia pumping more. Now you've lost the ability to make anything. Imagine you spend billions on a coal to gasoline plant and then China has a recession and the OPEC nations start cheating: Oil goes down to less than $50 a barrel: Now you're ruined!

 

[Hindmost]

Or why nuclear with breeder technology isn't considered a renewable, since it is.

Breeder technology can't really be considered renewable. A reasonable fast reactor--fueled with uranium 235 and uranium 238 blanket to breed with--will have a breeding ratio of about 1.25. For every uranium it fissions, it will breed 1.25 atoms of plutonium. However, eventually we would run out of fissionable fuel and uranium238 to breed into plutonium. Thorium232 can be used to breed uranium 233, however, the breeding ratio is very low almost non-existant.

Breeding can extend the useful life for fission technology for quite some time. Hopefully, fusion become feasible in the meantime...it just hasn't shown any real chance of working yet.

glenn

 

[Rob Lister]

That stuff generally takes a lot of energy. You could do it reasonably for plastics. Doing it for fuel is a bigger issue, because it's energy intensive and it leaves a lot of crap behind (coal is full of mercury, sulphur and other trace nasties).

which, ironically, ends up in the air instead of 50gallon drums nobody wants to deal with.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Okay. But it's a false dichotomy to pick one over the other, instead of having both technologies. You have to demonstrate that:

A) One technology is not worth having at all, and/or
B) The other can replace A.

As it stands, I fail to see why nuclear and renewables can't coexist.

We've moved well away from the claim that renewables cannot even in theory replace non-renewables. Now we seem to have transitioned into discussing whether nuclear and renewable technologies can coexist, which is an odd thing to discuss because they coexist right now.

Good luck with that. If renewables can produce enough energy to meet all requirements, we should rely solely upon them if they are environmentally, technologically, or economically feasible within the short time span needed to erect them, and the long time span of keeping them running (nothing lasts forever). I'm still waiting for the evidence that should make us fix the belief that this is necessarily the case.

Now I'm confused. Throughout this thread you have seemed to be strongly pro-nuclear, but now it seems like you have no idea whether or not renewables are actually a better idea or not.

You claimed earlier that it was "magical" to think that renewables could replace non-renewables. Suppose we decided that instead of spending money on new non-renewable power stations we would spend the same money on putting the best value-for-money solar installations on the roofs of buildings. I'm thinking about sufficient solar hot water systems for places that use hot water, and photovoltaics on the rest of the space. How far would that get us in terms of replacing non-renewable energy sources? How much money would we have to spend, to get x% of our energy needs just from solar this way, and what would x be for a reasonable investment? How much net carbon dioxide would this save (or cost)?

If you don't know the answers, don't bother trying to push the burden of proof back over my way. Just admit you have no idea whether or not renewables could actually replace non-renewables or not.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Breeding can extend the useful life for fission technology for quite some time.

I was under the impression that breeding ratios had exceeded that 1.25 rate you cite. I was also under the impression that, even though no reactor was even close to doing it, there was a conceivable cycle that could breed the feedstocks you cite from lighter elements. It was a very long cycle IIRC.

 

[luddite]

Psssshhh. Don't worry about running out of oil. For one thing we've got lots and lots and lots and lots of coal. We can burn coal for hundreds of years.

Before I start, I want to stress that this is not my opinion. I'm not a geologist, and among geologists there is vast disagreement. But I will explain the argument as I understand it.

As far as I can tell, there is very little difference between geologists in terms of how much stuff they believe is in the ground. The difference is in how quickly they believe it can be extracted and/or delivered.

The best resources are always mined first. When oil was discovered, there was a 10:1 energy return on investment in wood. At 100:1, oil looked great. It was very energy dense. It burned more cleanly than coal. The average for oil is now approaching what wood was. The EROI for tar sands oil is something like 2:1. President Bush and our Prime Minister want to expand tar sands production 5-fold. Meanwhile the Athabasca River is already down to 1/4 of its flow from current operations. There are ideas about how to use less water, but they involve using even more energy to extract the oil. I haven't seen the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if tar sands oil even now had a lifetime emissions value worse than coal. But the point is the cost and the rate at which it can be economically recovered and delivered.

In terms of coal, you run into similar problems. The best North American coal was Appalachian coal. It's gone now. The most productive seams now are plentiful but of much poorer quality. Whole rail lines are diverted to carry as much coal as possible. Can that be expanded? Perhaps. But it's instructive that investors are actually looking at things like offshore coal and the US is already a net importer. It's a good economic indication that it's getting hard to extract the stuff fast enough.

You start running into more and more hurdles to extract poor resources. Location, lack of running water, unstable soils, political instability, etc.

And eventually you hit a technological hurdle when the EROI falls below 1:1. At that point, either the extraction technology has to change or the resource cannot be economically recovered at any price (for the energy, that is -- David Hughes points out that a million years from now, we will always still have enough oil to lubricate our bicycle chains).

So, the optimistic geologists believe that price signals will spur the required technological breakthroughs that are required to push off the crisis for a while. Pessimists don't.

David Hughes is one of the pessimists. He's been assessing North American coal reserves for Canada for 37 years. He's also on the Canadian natural gas potentials committee with Natural Resources Canada. He is trained as a petroleum geologist. The Mackenzie Valley pipeline was dreamed up when he started. It's still not built today. He's seen "advanced oil recovery" techniques being introduced, and hoped they would improve the picture. What they've done is, at great expense, temporarily increase the flow. The total productivity is unchanged or lower. Other advances have only marginally improved the picture. So he thinks that technological breakthroughs have already done what they can. That doesn't mean there won't be further breakthroughs. But at this point, he thinks they will be slowing the slide rather than forestalling the peak.

There is a classic bell-curve to any resource extraction. Once you've passed the peak, it gets harder and harder to extract the resource. It also takes more and more energy. This is problematic enough when you're talking about granite or oak trees, but it can be crazy with energy resources. With copper, for example, you might get to the point where you're using 10 times the energy and 10 times the manpower to extract the same amount of copper. With oil, you only end up with a fraction of the resource at the end as well, because so much oil has been used in the extraction process.

So oil companies tend to portray the situation as "70 years at current rates". Well, that's nice. We could all keep using oil at the same rate for 70 years and then abruptly stop. Except that even that's wrong because we'd be using more and more of the oil just to extract more oil. And unfortunately the 70 years running till you stop abruptly is not how resources work. You peak somewhere around where 40% of the oil has been extracted, then you go down fast and level off to a long tail lasting hundreds of years. Oil will still be extracted for my great-great-great grandchildren, well past the "70 years" quoted, but in tiny amounts.

The petroleum geologists do not disagree on this fact. Optimists and pessimists alike understand this. The only difference between them is when they believe the peak will occur. The most optimistic say 2032, but there's reason to doubt their credibility. Looking at those whose work is not tied to oil companies, realistic estimates give us an optimistic outlook of about a decade.

This would change dramatically if we started addressing global warming, or otherwise interfered with the oil market as it stands. This is not written in stone.

My understanding is that there are over 200 years worth of coal remaining at current extraction rates. However, if we attempt to use coal to replace oil and North American natural gas as well, it will be a lot less. First of all because the amount of energy required is several times that which comes from coal now, and secondly because you lose some energy in the conversion process. Rather than convert coal to a liquid fuel, it's actually better if we make our cars electric. The emissions profile of electric cars, even when fueled by coal, is more favourable than the current engines.

In addition, that 200 years of coal will have the same bell curve I described for oil. It will not be extracted in 200 years.

As I said, I'm certainly not going to count on the pessimists being correct. However, it is clear to me that whether or not we deal with global warming, we're going to have an energy crisis in the near future.

I suspect Hindmost agrees with me on this.

 

[luddite]

I would like to see about 50% from nuclear in the US, however, It is not going to happen. We don't have the engineering capability or the industrial capacity to make it happen. It would take about 50 years to get there as it would mean building over 100 plants...that just won't happen. Oil and natural gas should not be used as they are just too valuble to use for electricity.

If demand goes down enough, you may get your wish

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Breeder technology can't really be considered renewable. A reasonable fast reactor--fueled with uranium 235 and uranium 238 blanket to breed with--will have a breeding ratio of about 1.25. For every uranium it fissions, it will breed 1.25 atoms of plutonium. However, eventually we would run out of fissionable fuel and uranium238 to breed into plutonium. Thorium232 can be used to breed uranium 233, however, the breeding ratio is very low almost non-existant.

Breeding can extend the useful life for fission technology for quite some time. Hopefully, fusion become feasible in the meantime...it just hasn't shown any real chance of working yet.

glenn

If you want to take it as far as is theoretically possible then you can (in theory) get an energy return through the fission and decay of anything that starts off heavier than iron-57. If after a few million years we run out of uranium, thorium and such we could start neutron-bombarding other heavy things until they become heavy enough for fission.

But eventually I suppose we could run out of matter in general..

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Breeder technology can't really be considered renewable. A reasonable fast reactor--fueled with uranium 235 and uranium 238 blanket to breed with--will have a breeding ratio of about 1.25. For every uranium it fissions, it will breed 1.25 atoms of plutonium. However, eventually we would run out of fissionable fuel and uranium238 to breed into plutonium. Thorium232 can be used to breed uranium 233, however, the breeding ratio is very low almost non-existant.

Breeding can extend the useful life for fission technology for quite some time. Hopefully, fusion become feasible in the meantime...it just hasn't shown any real chance of working yet.

glenn

???????

Thorium-232 has a pretty decent neutron capture ratio in the thermal range.

Actually I'm all about the throium cycle reactors...

Now where's that PDF... I have a great article somewhere..

 

[luddite]

And why should we trust the pessimists for nuclear OR oil ?

I don't. As I said.

But I do think prudence would suggest we hope for the best and plan for the worst. And these are fairly mainstream people at the conservative end of the opinion spectrum among experts.

 

[luddite]

You can make plastic out of corn. Nobody does it because it's energy inefficent (and therefore more expensive) compared to making it from petroleum, but it can be done.

Not only that, when we run out of oil for energy, it may still be extracted economically for plastics (when it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil contains, it may still be economical for plastic). If petroleum products were left in this relatively stable form (plastic) or recycled for other plastics, they wouldn't add to our emissions. They do add to emissions if they're incinerated.

 

[luddite]

If you deny any of the above, you're free to question the owner of the website. "He supports nuclear, so therefore he can't be trusted", like what Luddite's been saying, isn't very convincing to me. It's possible to support something because you find the research convincing.

I'd like to point out that that's not what I said. What I've said all along is that there is an enormous gulf between those who support nuclear and those who oppose it. So you can sometimes get data on the same thing which seem completely off scale. I don't doubt that there are a lot of honest people who support nuclear power who believe their numbers. I don't think that discounts the fact that when nuclear opponents say "Hey, your numbers don't include x, y and z" that they may have a point, too.

 

[luddite]

I've mentioned the net-zero movement before. Now California wants to make it standard for homes after 2020. For those who think conservation/renewables is impossible, it's something to think about:

http://www.thedailygreen.com/2007/10/19/california-aims-for-zero-energy-homes/7949/

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Yeah. They want to make it the standard and hell... I'd like a standard like that. Actually they ought to make it a standard that the houses not only produce as much energy as they consume but also a million billion times more. And that they cure cancer too.

That's all easy to set as a standard. State laws area easy to make. Just introduce a bill that says "all homes should be xxx by 2020" and if you get the votes there's your law.


But damnit! The laws of thermodynamics don't seem to work that way. I've been lobbying the the repeal of the second law for a year and I'm not getting anywhere! I don't even have any congressmen willing to introduce draft legislation.

Damnit. It's 2007! I PanAm promised express service to the moon by now!

 

[Lonewulf]

You claimed earlier that it was "magical" to think that renewables could replace non-renewables. Suppose we decided that instead of spending money on new non-renewable power stations we would spend the same money on putting the best value-for-money solar installations on the roofs of buildings. I'm thinking about sufficient solar hot water systems for places that use hot water, and photovoltaics on the rest of the space. How far would that get us in terms of replacing non-renewable energy sources? How much money would we have to spend, to get x% of our energy needs just from solar this way, and what would x be for a reasonable investment? How much net carbon dioxide would this save (or cost)?

Hey, Dr. Buzz0, can you help me out here? I did some of the math myself, based on some quoted figures, but as such I had to make some simplistic assumptions. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

Okay, first of all, Dr. Buzzo says that, on average, we receive 200 watts per square meter with current solar technology. So I make the assumption that we cover every single roof in all of New York with these solar panels, and they have the same efficiency (they may have less, considering the weather in New York City). Then, I took the square kilometers of the Urban areas of New York City (not the overall Metropolis area, as there's less rooftops to factor in there, I believe).

So...

According to an article I found with google:

New York passed the 2005 record for peak energy usage at least twice on Monday afternoon as temperatures hit the 90s across the state.

The peak load for the summer of 2005 came on July 26, when energy users across the state consumed an average 31,741 megawatts of electricity during an hour-long period.

Between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. on July 17 the average peak load registered at 32,316 megawatts, while between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. the peak load was 32,519 megawatts of electricity.

As such, I'll use that peak load as a starting point. I'm not sure what the average energy requirements would be.

from: http://albany.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2006/07/17/daily14.html

8,683.2 km^2 area for Urban Area of New York City

The continental US receives about 200 watts per meter squared average solar power concentration. Do the math and you'll find problems.

Assuming that this figure can be exported to New York City solar panels (not sure if it can be)...

31 741 000 000 watts needed for the state (okay, that's a big state, but I can't find energy use needed by city quickly enough; if someone else can find it, that would be lovely)

8 683 200 square meters for the Urban area of New York City

(That last one from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City)

*200 watts per square meter = 1 736 640 000 Watts created

That's significant, I'll admit. However, that's 1.7*10^9 watts vs. 31.7*10^9 watts needed. That cuts down on requirements for all of New York State (again, I'm not sure about New York City itself), but it's a far cry from replacing them. I'm not sure how much wind energy could help, though.

One thing is, New York City is very big and has a lot of energy consumption requirements... however, it's also very environmental in that it uses

New York City's dense population and low automobile dependence help make New York among the most energy efficient in the United States.[34] The city's greenhouse gas emission levels are relatively low when measured per capita, at 7.1 metric tons per person, below San Francisco, at 11.2 metric tons, and the national average, at 24.5.[35] New Yorkers are collectively responsible for one percent of the nation's total greenhouse gas emissions,[35] though comprise 2.7% of the nation's population. The average New Yorker consumes less than half the electricity used by a resident of San Francisco and nearly one-quarter the electricity consumed by a resident of Dallas.[36]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City

So this would lower the overall energy requirements of the state of New York. Something like San Francisco would get about as much bang for their buck, but need more bucks.

Now, for cost...

Meh, I'm giving up on looking up the details for cost. Some of it goes over my head, and I would rather an expert handle it.

However, I did find this link: http://www.dmme.virginia.gov/de/chap7c.html It seems that the more solar energy has to handle, the higher the costs per kilowatt hour rises.

The Table shows that it is difficult for even high-performance solar water heaters to be cost-effective when displacing inexpensive natural gas: systems must cost $25 or less per sq.ft. in residential applications, and $21 or less per sq.ft. in commercial applications. When displacing electricity, however, the situation is much different: even lower performance systems can be economical if costing less than $50-52 per sq.ft. in residential and small commercial applications (in Virginia Power's service area). The large general service rate case in Table 1 assumes that demand charges (costs for on-peak power) are not avoided. Where demand charges are paid by a facility, the solar system design should include a peak-load reduction strategy (including summer-daytime shutoff on the auxiliary heater), so that these charges can be avoided and system cost-effectiveness can be improved."

The three small to moderate scale systems that were evaluated in detail in the study had installed costs that ranged from $44 to $74 per square foot of collector, with an average of $59. Their average annual performance ranged from 550 to 770 Btu per sq.ft. per day, with an average of 650.

To use the Table as a decision guide, you read it from right to left. First, you must know the type and rate of energy saved. For example, let's say you have residential electricity at $.078 per kWh or $22.85 per million Btu. Second, you assume (or get a guarantee from the contractor of) the system's energy performance (let's say 600 Btu per day per square foot of collector area). Finally, you simply read from the first column the maximum cost of the system to be cost-effective. In our example, the maximum cost (or break-even point) is $67 per square foot of collector area. If a contractor bids a cost under the maximum (say $40 per square foot), the system should be cost-effective; if it is over the maximum, it will probably not be. It should be noted that this guide includes only economic benefits and not the other benefits provided by solar energy systems, such as reduced air pollution emissions, enhanced energy self-reliance, and conservation of non-renewable resources.

Now, the cost per kilowatt hour for nuclear energy... using this chart, it seems that nuclear energy costs a little under $2.50 per kilowatt hour, including fuel costs, operation and maintenance, general overhead, system integration, carbon emissions (how do they factor that as a "cost"?), and capital expenditure.

As for energy itself for nuclear energy...

The remaining worldwide energy resources are large, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 1024J) and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ. Fossil fuel range from 0.6-3 YJ if estimates of reserves of methane clathrates are accurate and become technically extractable. Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW (8,000 times 2004 total usage), or 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources. Even that amount is also only a minute amount of the sun's total energy output, due to the small solid angle the earth's outline makes with the sun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

Of course, this means that solar energy is quite significant; however, it costs quite a bit of money to export it over long distances, and would have to have methods of storing said energy when it's dark. The batteries required for such a thing would be extremely wasteful...

Also, factor in the 20% efficiency to 40% efficiency of the most top-notch (and thus much more expensive) solar panels... I think that cuts down on the usable energy actually usable, if that's not factored in anyways. I may have to retract my claim about solar energy powering the world being far fetched. The question is, is it economically or environmentally feasible? Can we create all of these solar panels, throughout the world, place them, and have little problems sustaining such a system economically or environmentally? Will exporting said power be easy over large distances?

If we store that energy into batteries, so we could use that energy even during the night time or for exporting, then that would definitely increase the amount of waste produced by such a system...

Hmm... found something rather interesting, about "low level waste":

The nuclear industry also produces a volume of low-level radioactive waste in the form of contaminated items like clothing, hand tools, water purifier resins, and (upon decommissioning) the materials of which the reactor itself is built. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has repeatedly attempted to allow low-level materials to be handled as normal waste: landfilled, recycled into consumer items, et cetera. Most low-level waste releases very low levels of radioactivity and is only considered radioactive waste because of its history. For example, according to the standards of the NRC, the radiation released by coffee is enough to treat it as low level waste.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power

Lol. Careful of that coffee!

I bumped into that last one quite by accident, and thought I'd share it.

 

[Lonewulf]

I just want to add that the last post is not definitive, and was just based on data that I could quickly gather; it's also not quite edited for purtiness. I'm rather pressed for time overall, so I'm not capable of giving a definitive extensive post. However, I feel that the last post is at least a way to start in on a reasonable discussion involving cost expenditure and overall energy efficiency of solar energy vs. nuclear energy.

 

[luddite]

Lonewulf, I think you're mistaken in one detail.

Dr. Buzzo claimed an average of 200 watts per square metre of solar panels on average. This was based on a solar panel that generated 1 kw, but only operated 20% of the time, or 40% of the time at reduced capacity. Then you compared that to peak capacity.

The beauty of solar is that it correlates almost perfectly with peak, especially for residential uses where air conditioning is involved. So at the peak, you'd be getting close to that full kilowatt of power. That's five times more power, delivered when electricity is most expensive and necessary.

You do have to counterbalance that with the times that solar produces nothing, like the middle of the night. It would be slightly more reasonable to compare Dr. Buzzo's 200 watts to the average load, which is about 2/3 of the peak. But that's not really fair either for residential solar, because the bulk of the baseload comes from industry which operates 24/7. Residential solar panels serve homes, where middle-of-the-night electricity demands are next to nothing. If you wanted to, you could even set your refrigerator to chill somewhat more when the panel was operating, and let things warm up a little overnight.

The big problem would be winter evenings when people are cooking warm soup in the dark. But the overall picture is a lot more favourable than you present.

The other beauty of solar is that it's delivered where it's needed as well. Apart from the giant solar farm projects, which I'm not especially enthusiastic about, most solar panels produce on site for the end user. So it effectively nullifies transmission losses and costs. A good assessment of solar should account for this cost reduction. It should also give fair credit for the fact that the environmental/health impacts from solar generation are much lower than the alternatives.

In Toronto, there is a movement of solar enthusiasts doing bulk buys. Given current incentives, payback times are about 10 years. Now, this is subsidized somewhat. But so is nuclear, and the payback times are much longer. And at least with solar, the risk is totally absorbed by the purchaser. See here:

http://www.ourpower.ca/portals/default/ourpower.aspx

The best part is that almost without exception, people who install solar panels start to watch their electricity use. Now that they're producers, they are much more interested in matching supply and demand. And there's a thrill when the meter starts going backwards and they're paid for producing. So they turn off anything that isn't needed. 1 kw is enough to power many homes even before that happens. That's easily doable on the average rooftop.

There are limitations. Silicon supplies are tight. The capital cost is significant. There wouldn't be enough installers currently to put solar panels on every roof without a lead time of a decade or so. Solar power is still inefficient.

But I sense a grumbling reluctance to admit even the potential. And that's troubling. You have, in the past, suggested that solar panels could be dangerous. Let's try to establish some realistic pros and cons.

Solar pros are that generation is safe, with few environmental and health concerns, well (but not perfectly) correlated with peak, well (but not perfectly) correlated with residential uses, and generated on site.

The cons are that availability is limited, costs are high, energy efficiency is low and there are always times when it does not match demand.

Any disagreements?