Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant

[Kevin_Lowe]

Sure. Solar works alright. That 4 kw a year in the largest solar panel in Germany, equivalent to a train running it's motor, is REALLY efficient.

My understanding is that there's this claim that if we just invest and scale it up, that it will automatically go from providing .4% of the world's electricity to not only surpass the 6.5% of nuclear, but also surpass that into 80%, or even somehow, magically, 100%.

(By the way, that .4% may not include hydroelectric, but it also includes geothermal, which can only be built in certain areas)

I'm sorry, but just claiming it won't make it so. But if you hope hard enough, maybe it will work.

What, exactly, do you think is the problem that makes this a "magical" proposition?

You want more power, you build more of the things that generate power. If you build ten times as many, you get ten times as much power. If you build 250 times as many, you get 250 times as much power and hey presto, "magically" 0.4% becomes 100%.

Obviously you think I have just glossed over some kind of impossibility, but what exactly is it?

 

[sts60]

...For better or worse, most terrorists aren't dumb enough to try accessing high level nuclear waste. There are dozens of truly lethal chemicals around that any terrorist with an IQ of 80 and access to simple hardware tools could use to kill hundreds to thousands of people. And no, I'm not about to provide a list for the curious!

No need to... It's been a matter of public debate for a long time. Right now, I am thinking of the tank cars full of chlorine and other "ethyl-methyl-bad stuff" that roll, unguarded and unprotected, through my first-due area. A much more attractive target for terrorists than heavily reinforced transporters accompanied by bulky fellows with automatic weapons and itchy trigger fingers.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Customers are encouraged to conserve from the utilities. Building any kind of plant is risky and the utilities try to avoid it whenever possible. Electric plants don't cause demand--people buy stuff and demand increases. Plasma TVs are a perfect example. They use about 4 times the electricity of an ordinary CRT. The utility is not out there actively promoting people to buy them. Utilities are promoting compact flourenscent bulbs.

Utilities encourage using power at off peak time to smooth out the load curve. This would limit the amount of swing units that would have to change with that power--which is generally inefficient from an energy point of view. The utility has to have enough reserve for their largest plant to trip without taking down the grid. By encouraging people to shift things like laundry to the weekend and evenings, the utility needs less peak/expensive electricity.

I'm aware of all of this. If most of our power came from solar panels, utilities would encourage people to do their laundry and heat their hot water tank at midday instead.

"nuke people" didn't apply the concept of base load. Base load was around long before nuclear plants existed. There is nothing artificial about it. For base load to be reduced, hospitals would have to shut down in the evening. Refineries would have to stop producing petroleum products. Everyone would have to shut off their refrigerators, home heating, computers etc. 40% of the power use is industrial. As factories shutdown for the weekend, the load is reduced. However, it never goes below about 35-40% of the total. US comsumerism was in no way developed because utilities build power plants. Show me one utility advertisement that encourages people to buy energy wasting products.

I think you totally missed the point, because you are responding to claims I never made.

The percentage of power usage which is "base load" is inflated by utilities encouraging people to use power at times which (in your words) smooth out the load curve. When a nuke activist quotes a certain percentage of current electricity use as being the "base load", it's a dead certainty that a chunk of that "base load" could actually be shifted around to some other time of day or week with no drama.

Since I specifically said some of the base load is real, I have no idea why you think I said otherwise or why you think I said utilities encourage people to use more power overall.

I suggest you look up how much energy we use in the US alone and then see what it would take with solar and wind power and geothermal. With the exception of geothermal, solar and wind are just not reliable sources--in the past, they were never competitive.

The world needs to use a diverse source of power...we need it all.

Fossil and nuclear fuel facilities have their place, certainly. The question is what proportion of our power generating capacity in the future should come from them.

 

[luddite]

I'm pretty sure that 200 years' worth of energy is a Good Thing (tm), and gives us enough time to come up with better energy solutions.

Yes, but that's the most optimistic assessment. It involves some nuclear expansion, perhaps a doubling. It still doesn't replace fossil fuels. Not even close.

And at the other end, the most pessimistic projections say we're going to start feeling squeezed within a decade, and run out of uranium completely in 70 years.

The truth is likely somewhere in between. If the nuclear industry is anything like the oil industry, the truth is likely closer to the shorter end.

And if oil is any indication, we wouldn't use the 200 years if we had them to come up with smarter solutions. We'd use them to become even more wasteful and energy dependent while wreaking even more havoc with the planet. 200 years from now we'd be sitting around trying to figure out the next big energy fix to keep allowing us to commute halfway around the world in personal jets. Meanwhile our forests would be gone, our oceans would be dead, much of the world would be a desert and we'd be wondering why all children were now asthmatic and everyone had cancer. Not that I'm proposing any solution. Just pointing out that even if uranium could fuel anything we dreamed of, it would not necessarily be particularly reassuring.

I do wish we had more time to transition. But we'd really need to commit to transitioning to something sustainable. So far we've spent most of the time since 1990, when AGW was declared to be an immediate and dire threat, dithering and dreaming and coming up with clever new ways to use the energy that's killing us.

 

[Belz...]

And at the other end, the most pessimistic projections say we're going to start feeling squeezed within a decade, and run out of uranium completely in 70 years.

And what do the pessimists say about our oil reserves ?

 

[Lonewulf]

What, exactly, do you think is the problem that makes this a "magical" proposition?

Local solar conditions, space required, placement, costs, relatively low output (of solar panels, at least), etc.

You want more power, you build more of the things that generate power. If you build ten times as many, you get ten times as much power. If you build 250 times as many, you get 250 times as much power and hey presto, "magically" 0.4% becomes 100%.

Sure, if that 249 times are all in places that have the exact same output as the .4%. I somehow don't see all places all over the world as being all good for solar or wind or geothermal.

Obviously you think I have just glossed over some kind of impossibility, but what exactly is it?

You obviously have facts and data to support that setting up all of these solar panels and windmills are economically, technologically, and environmentally feasible, right?

 

[luddite]

I think realistically, we have to accept that our grid is going to be a lot leaner if we deal with GW.

Whether or not we maximize investment in nuclear now, we're going to have to drive down demand before any new reactors get built, and even from a construction standpoint, it will be a challenge to replace all the existing aging reactors within a 2-decade timeline.

I'll agree with Lonewulf that renewables won't expand 250-fold, primarily because it's cheaper to reduce what we use than invest in new generation of any type. So we'd be idiots to put in that kind of infrastructure, renewable or not.

The truth is, Lonewulf, that renewables are actually up now in mediocre areas. Europe has crappy sun. Germany's wind is nothing to brag about. And with DC cables, we can put solar panels in the Sahara, maybe even create a nice microclimate where camel caravans can rest under their shade.

Good news today, Ontario has lowered peak demand from last year through conservation measures:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071018.wenergydemand1018/BNStory/National/home

 

[Corsair 115]

If it's good for anything, I'd say that "beaming" power would be good for giving power to ships or space stations, and that's about all the use I can really see out of it. I'm willing to be proven wrong, of course.

Professor Gerard K. O'Neill, in the wake of the Energy Crisis of the early 1970s, began writing a series of extensive proposals for the establishment of space-based solar power stations. Since in space the solar panels can capture 100% of the sunlight 100% of the time, they'd be much more useful and efficient than ground-based ones. The energy would then be beamed back, in the form of microwaves, to receiving stations on the Earth.

It's very interesting reading if nothing else. I'm not sure how the numbers he came up with in the late 1970s would compare to the current economic conditions though.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

It's hardly fair to blame everything on the USSR. America and Britain have had some fun problems of their own, although are generally better now. Japan's safety record is an absolute joke, and shows no sign of improving. There's no doubt that the USSR was by far the worst offender, but there are enough problems still around for safety to be a legitimate concern, if not as bad as most opponents make out.

The Japanese system ain't so bad compared to the USSR. The USSR wasn't just by far the worst. It's in a totally different league.

There's an excellent documentary "Disaster at Chernobyl" if you want to get your feet wet in what happened there. Deplorable the sheer disregard for the most basic safety standards.

The Soviets used kilocuries of Sr-90 in remote RTG's with poor shielding and containment. Some were lost in the 1970's and are missing to this day. Others contaminated large areas.

The US Lost two nuclear submarines, the Thresher and Scorpeon. Neither due to a nuclear reactor problem. One was a torpedo malfunction and the other a broken weld coupled with a balasting problem,

The soviets have had "at least 10" major accidents involving damage to the reactors of nuclear submarines. They've lost at least 6 boats completely.

The soviet union experienced other nuclear accidents besides chernobyl, including Tomsk-7. The Mayak Chemical Combine was a plutonium production facility that dumped huge amounts of waste into the enviornment. The Chelyabinsk facility released a hundred times more radiation than chernobyl, but over decades.

The soviet northern fleet currently has dozens of rusting hulks, some dating back to the 1960's and partially sunk which have not even had their reactors or spent fuel removed.


US nuclear tests have been accused of exposing civizens to unacceptable risk. The tests conducted in the nevada desert were only 75 miles from populated areas. In some tests soldiers were relatively close to the explosion and precatutions were limited to dust masks and basic protection.

The soviet nuclear tests were, in some cases, conducted so close to inhabbitted areas that a few citizens were killed by the blast wave collapsing homes.

The "Mayak" accident in the 1960's was a reactor explosion that killed at least 200 and possibly a couple thousand if later deaths from cancer are factored in.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Local solar conditions, space required, placement, costs, relatively low output (of solar panels, at least), etc.


Sure, if that 249 times are all in places that have the exact same output as the .4%. I somehow don't see all places all over the world as being all good for solar or wind or geothermal.


You obviously have facts and data to support that setting up all of these solar panels and windmills are economically, technologically, and environmentally feasible, right?

Hang on sport, your claim, your burden of proof.

You should be pointing to the facts and data to support that setting up all of these solar panels and windmills is not economically, technologically, and environmentally feasible.

I don't know whether it is feasible or not, not having any such data, but you were the one claiming the idea was magical. It's up to you to support that claim.

 

[Lonewulf]

Heh, nice job shifting the burden. I was responding the idea that we can do without nuclear power altogether, and use "green" energy purely as an alternative, and YOU are the one that claiming that I need to back up my "claim", even though I was responding to a claim.

So you don't have any evidence to demonstrate that nuclear power is entirely unnecessary on the energy grid, then? That was the original claim, after all.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Alright. Solar power. I wrote a whole long thing about this some time ago.

http://depletedcranium.com/?p=86

Solar cell efficiency:

Current Commercial solar cells: <20%
Really really high grade solar cells (such as used on satellites) 30% tops
Highest efficiency achieved in a laboratory: ~40%
Highest reasonably possible efficiency <50% (past 50 you hit some major thermodynamic issues)

Solar cells will have a lifetime of up to a few decades. They are semiconductor devices. No technology has ever been demonstrated that has an "unlimited" lifespan. Organic dye solar cells and nano-technology may improve effeciency some, but there are limits. Also price has limits. You can't make solar cells out of just anything.

It's unlikely that organic solar cells will ever have the lifespan of silicon. They may be cheaper. Degridation starts within a few years. Even if the cost is cut by a lot there are still issues


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

Here's a real world example:

Waldpolenz Solar Park in Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldpolenz_Solar_Park_in_Saxony,_Germany


The Wikipedia article quotes it at 130 million euro. I've heard more than that, as it has gone way overbudget. Last figures i've heard were half a billion US dollars. That might not be acurate, but in any case: We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. It takes up 220 hectares of land

They say it's a 40 megawatt power plant. As power plants go, that's damn small. But that's it's maximum output. It produces 40,000MWh a year.

What we're talking is the equivelant of about 4 megawatts of continuous power.

Lets put that in perspective: ONE SINGLE LARGE DIESEL GENERATOR

This half-billion dollar plant is the equivelent energy savings of taking ONE SINGLE SOLITARY DIESEL LOCOMOTIVE OFF THE TRACKS AT ANY GIVEN TIME.

The backend costs may make it more energy to build than it ever produces.


Solar-Thermal power generation is even worse for effeciency. Spain is working on a three billion dollar solar-thermal power plant. Rated capacity is 90 megawatts. Puny.

THREE BILLION US DOLLARS. And the thing is HUGE

Wind power Somewhat better.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12654
http://ezinearticles.com/?Wind-Farms---Limitations-as-Energy-Platforms&id=200914


Massive land requirements. MASSIVE. Low energy density per land area. Only certain areas are suitable for wind in large scales. Therefore there's transmission if those areas are not near population centers.

Wind power is inherantly grid-destabalizing. You have more than about 4% wind power and you have a major problem: If the wind slows down then the grid is in trouble, because you could have major brownout problems. It takes time to start generators.

Thus, the energy must be stored if you want to use wind for anything more than a small amount. Dams can be opened. Boilers can be fired. These can be adjusted for demand. NOT WIND. It blows when it wants to.

Energy storage in flywheels, pumped storage, or even huge batteries is inherently VERY lossy.


The second article I linked to I severely disagree with, although it highlights the shortcomings of solar and wind. "Corporations bombarding everyone to consume like americans" is bull. America and other energy-intense countries have the highest standard of living in the world. I don't think it's ethical to demand that those who live in africa or southasia cannot live with modern safe transport, with refigeration, water treatment, television, street lamps and air conditioning.

It's bull because conservation can only get you so far. Living a modern, safe, comfortable life requires energy. And the more energy a society has the more it can do to improve life.

Conservation can only do so much. It may be able to decrease the amount of energy demand incrase, but it won't lower demand. Not with an incrasingly technology-driven world with an expanding population.

We need energy. In the US we need hundreds of gigawatts. Worldwide we need dozens of terawatts, maybe hundreds in the near future.

 

[Lonewulf]

Good post, Dr. Buzz0. I have copy/pasted it into a word document for future use.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Good post, Dr. Buzz0. I have copy/pasted it into a word document for future use.

I would have fixed all the spelling and grammar errors if I had known that :-/

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Heh, nice job shifting the burden. I was responding the idea that we can do without nuclear power altogether, and use "green" energy purely as an alternative, and YOU are the one that claiming that I need to back up my "claim", even though I was responding to a claim.

No. You were not responding to such a claim.

I refer to post #295. You were responding to a remark that JoeEllison didn't trust Americans to run a nuclear plant safely. Since there was literally no other content to that post I cannot see how you could have been responsing to anything else. You said:

So far, I've seen a lot of claims that wind and solar can somehow magically fulfill the majority of power requirements, and that it can replace coal or nuclear somehow.

I've yet to see any evidence for such a thing.

I am asking you to explain why you think it is a "magical" proposition that wind, solar and presumably other renewable sources can eventually replace coal or replace nuclear sources.

So you don't have any evidence to demonstrate that nuclear power is entirely unnecessary on the energy grid, then? That was the original claim, after all.

No it was not.

 

[Hindmost]

I'm aware of all of this. If most of our power came from solar panels, utilities would encourage people to do their laundry and heat their hot water tank at midday instead.

The sun is not predictable enough for people to adjust there schedules unfortunately. Solar still has efficiency issues...the most efficient cells cost a bunch.

I think you totally missed the point, because you are responding to claims I never made.

The percentage of power usage which is "base load" is inflated by utilities encouraging people to use power at times which (in your words) smooth out the load curve. When a nuke activist quotes a certain percentage of current electricity use as being the "base load", it's a dead certainty that a chunk of that "base load" could actually be shifted around to some other time of day or week with no drama.

No one inflates base load data and loads that can be moved to other time periods are swing loads. Base load varies only with seasonal changes. Utilities track their power usage constantly and can determine to very accurately. Utilities have online power graphs if you want to look at how the load change. There is nothing related to nuclear power or nuclear proponents about load variation with the exception of nuclear plants (along with large coal units) are cheaper to run at base load conditions.

Since I specifically said some of the base load is real, I have no idea why you think I said otherwise or why you think I said utilities encourage people to use more power overall.

Cut and pasted from your other post:

Things like factories running 24/7 create a real base load which is insensitive to changes in how we supply power, but a lot of what pro-nuke spokspeople call "base load" is no such thing.

I may have inferred something, however, you seemed to relate base load as having something to do with pro-nuke spokespeople and then stated there is no such thing as above. As I stated above, base load has got nothing to do with nuclear plants. Nuke plants can swing or provide base load quite well.

Fossil and nuclear fuel facilities have their place, certainly. The question is what proportion of our power generating capacity in the future should come from them.

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.

glenn

 

[Hindmost]

My guess is the percentage would be higher. I actually asked that question on a "nuclear poll" back when I was teaching Radiological Monitoring courses for the VT Emergency Management Office. (Other questions asked about the chances of nuclear war or nuclear terrorism in future years). Students were primarily firefighters, law enforcement people, Civil Air Patrol folks and local government officials. The question was, "What is the likelihood of a nuclear power plant blowing up like the atom bombs dropped on Japan in WWII?" Choices ranged from, "Very likely", to "Impossible". Not that many picked "Impossible." I have the results of several years of polling around here somewhere if anyone is interested.

To be fair, the poll originated with Jack Greene, an HP who co-wrote "Would the Insects Inherit the Earth? and Other Subjects of Concern to Those Who Worry About Nuclear War" His original poll may have been published in the Health Physics Newsletter back in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

BTW, the nuclear industry isn't helping matters by resorting to "nuke speak": Years ago a friend was appointed Social Welfare Department Liaison to the State's nuclear plant. As a non-scientist he was concerned about nuclear explosions and kept asking about the odds of the plant "blowing up". After correctly repeating several times that this was "impossible" to his persistent question, a plant engineer did allow that there could be a, "High pressure steam dissasembley". My friend said that sure as Hell sounded like an explosion to him.

As you probably know: When France put there program together, they took surveys and found people were not in favor of nuclear plants...so, they instituted a program to educate the population. It worked as now the majority of people are pro-nuke. I am a bit depressed now..

glenn

 

[Hindmost]

Professor Gerard K. O'Neill, in the wake of the Energy Crisis of the early 1970s, began writing a series of extensive proposals for the establishment of space-based solar power stations. Since in space the solar panels can capture 100% of the sunlight 100% of the time, they'd be much more useful and efficient than ground-based ones. The energy would then be beamed back, in the form of microwaves, to receiving stations on the Earth.

It's very interesting reading if nothing else. I'm not sure how the numbers he came up with in the late 1970s would compare to the current economic conditions though.

I remember that....It would cook a bunch of birds though. The concept had other environmental issues as well, but it still is very feasible.

glenn

 

[tracer]

Why on earth would you think that? Chernobyl had an exposed and ongoing chain reaction, with radioactive isotopes being continually generated by that reaction and thrown into the air by a raging fire from the burning graphite moderator. Waste containment isn't undergoing any chain reaction.

While the material in the Chernobyl reactor was certainly much "hotter" than the stuff in a reactor's waste-containment facility, a waste-containment facility contains many many times more radioactive material than the reactor does. Particularly if the reactor has been in operation for a few decades or more.

Note that I'm talking about the high-level waste (i.e. spent nuclear fuel) that has to be stored on-site at the reactor complex here, not the low-level waste.

As such, other materials which come into contact with that waste will not get activated to any significant degree.

Then why does equipment that's exposed to high-level waste have to be treated as "low-level radioactive waste" when it's disposed of?

 

[Hindmost]

Again Glenn, I think you're missing the concern.

First of all, I doubt anyone is proposing that we expand our coal program.

Secondly, you're talking about emissions during normal operations. Whereas most people are concerned about radiation emitted in screw ups. There's also the radiation in tailings and spent fuel.

So we're not talking about the same things. It's more an argument about whether the lower fuels costs of nuclear justify public investment in the industry given the known hazards of tailings, the unknown but probably small risk of serious catastrophes and the unknown risks and costs of dealing with spent fuel. There are also risks in transportation.

I don't know how we measure these things, and honest men may disagree.

When I see a statement that is incorrect, I have the need to correct it I guess. A large coal plant will burn 100 to 200 tons of coal an hour. About 20 percent of that is ash. Even with precipitators, it releases uranium, mercury and other junk. The ash is not exactly environmentally friendly. Coal yards spontaneously catch fire occasionally. And still it is needed world wide as it is still vitally needed and things can be engineered to make them better.

So many people do not understand what happens in heavy industries. They hear nuclear and associate it with nuclear weapons....so I am a bit zealous in my defense. A reactor about the size of a large bedroom can supply enough electricity for 1.5 million people for 24 months...assuminmg a US style PWR. That is just efficient.

Catastrophes have such low probabity...even a TMI accident won't be possible with inherently safe fuel. And TMI was truly and economic accident and proved the safety analysis was very conservative. Lets assume we do have annother TMI...which was very close to worst case. No one gets hurt and we have another economic disaster.

Reprocessing technology exists...we've been doing it for years.

Transportation of nuclear waste has been occuring for 50 years or so. The transport carriers have been subjected to fire, collisions from trains etc...A good track record and system exists.

I have to admit, I am not aware of the hazard from uranium mining...I do know that uranium is far more of a chemical poison problem than a radiation issue. Chemically it causes kidney failure.

It is possible to hypothesize just about any problem...but that hypothesis should be based within the parameters of what is possible.

glenn