Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mainiac]

I heard that Ken Bone was polling better than Stein in Florida, 4% vs 1% and that is amazing.

best immediate option

I'm sorry, you were talking about nuclear, the only power source where you have to plan in decades, and then you started talking about "immediate option".  What is this immediate option you are talking about?

Immediate option as in "one which should have been pushed for since people started realizing dependency on fossil-fuels was a mistake" but it could also be a much shorter process if it wasn't for all the ridiculous NIMBY legal hoops to jump through.

If we are going to assume that we are time travelers who can go back to the 70s and tell them what to do, it would be better to tell them to invest in solar and wind then invest in nuclear.

I wish people had spent more time pushing it as "radioisotope powered steam generation" or "hot rocks boiling water" instead of letting the "ZOMG IT IS NUCLEAR, THAT MEANS BOMBS" people win out by trying to be reasonable and fight with facts.

Sure, let's think of it as rocks boiling water.  In fact let's even just forget the rocks and focus on the boiling water because the boiling water is where most of the cost is.

You need a giant concrete building to hold your huge steam turbine.  Big concrete buildings and steam turbines aren't very new ideas.  Steam engines were emerging technologies 200 years ago and 200 years ago they were rapidly improving.  But around the 30s or so we had steam turbines and were getting very close to the thermodynamic efficiency limit.  There just isn't that much room to improve in steam technology.  Concrete is even more old hat.

A very mature industry isn't going to get that much cheaper.  If it was possible to do it really really cheap then that would have happened decades ago.  Wheat farming can be done really really cheap.  That's why since the 70s most of the cost of your breakfast cereal isn't the wheat, it's the shipping and handling.  Nuclear as we know it will never be like that.  Maybe small nuclear or fusion technology will pan out.  But that would be essentially a new technology not nuclear as we know it.  They nuclear we know is as good as it's gonna get.  And the nuclear we know isn't good enough.

Solar power on the other hand is a technology that is really, really rapidly maturing.  The solar panels you can buy today are way better then the ones you can buy 5 years ago which are way better then the ones from 10 years ago.  So it makes sense to expect solar costs to fall.  It makes sense to subsidize solar so that the technology matures and the costs fall faster.

Wind is a bit less radically changing then solar but is also not quite mature.  They didn't make wind turbines on the same scale as modern designs just a couple decades ago.  It's not as radical as solar but it is reasonable to expect some more improvement there.

[Max™]

The sad truth is that nuclear power came into the game which had long since been bought out by coal and oil.

Solar power needs some sort of energy storage during the nights, and is not quite as optimal in sites outside of say, 30 N to 30 S. Yes, you can do a lot to mitigate this in various situations, but they just aren't as ideal a solution as plunking down panels and plants in the Mojave. Remember always, I'm a huge fan of solar, I want the solar road thing to work, and don't think there should be any use of oil besides plastics... fuck coal straight up.

Somewhere like my area, we could do pretty well with solar here in Memphis, I've done the calculations on it, and even here at 35 North you find yourself looking towards the equator and lusting for the clear sky numbers you can get down there.

We would still need something to handle the rest, either you use something like molten salt storage, which is indeed an option (for solar and nuclear, actually) plus distribution, or you set up buffering systems.

Why do I think something like a breeder reactor is the obvious choice? They turn high level super dangerous waste into low level waste with several decay paths involving half lives of under a century. Solar can't do that, literally only a breeder reactor can do that, and it could keep doing it until we deplete our waste stockpiles if we had enough of them. Oh and in the process we'd be able to buffer a solar system wonderfully.

Nuclear plants are a base load system, you figure out the bare minimum needs over a given period and install that amount, you include other systems which can be (or must be) ramped up and down to handle additional load.

Relying on solar for a base load system is a hell of an idea, and the idea that we could get away from any sort of base load power production to a purely solar/wind energy generation system is a neat idea... but you want to talk about scary accident ideas? Energy density is the key to how exciting an accident is, and energy storage sufficient to handle nightly baseload will either be MASSIVE, or dense, I don't wanna know what a molten salt spill would do, but at least it would be fairly contained as long as it didn't catch on fire. Batteries and stuff? Lemme pull up some numbers about that on my Note 7... oh well shit, would you look at that?

[DJ]

Isn't solar kinda screwed by the ever-growing copper prices? If it we were to start producing solar panels in the quantities needed to replace fossil fuel plants, wouldn't all that demand for copper make it's prices skyrocket to like silver levels?

Also I thought wind is a joke in terms of turbine cost / power production. Wasn't tidal a lot more effective?

[mainiac]

The baseload thing is mostly a red herring though.  We can start reducing carbon emissions right now without dealing with baseload stuff.  If we are in the position that 10, 15 years from now we are just starting to get worried about baseload we would be lucky to have that problem.  And the initial steps are easy it's just a matter of diversifying your green portfolio and market driven demand smoothing.  The technology for storage doesn't start to come into play even with a massive surge of investment until like twenty years from now.  I'm not going to tell you what the best technology is going to be twenty years from now.  Maybe it's even small nuclear as a baseload.  But it's clear what we need to do right now and that's pour tons of money into wind and solar so we get economies of scale to improve.  That makes it more attractive to invest in demand smoothing and energy storage.

Isn't solar kinda screwed by the ever-growing copper prices? If it we were to start producing solar panels in the quantities needed to replace fossil fuel plants, wouldn't all that demand for copper make it's prices skyrocket to like silver levels?

Also I thought wind is a joke in terms of turbine cost / power production. Wasn't tidal a lot more effective?

I haven't heard of a copper bottleneck before.  Sounds strange to me.  The world is not exactly in a copper shortage.

And wind is way cheaper then tidal.

[Max™]

The baseload thing is mostly a red herring though.  We can start reducing carbon emissions right now without dealing with baseload stuff.  If we are in the position that 10, 15 years from now we are just starting to get worried about baseload we would be lucky to have that problem.  And the initial steps are easy it's just a matter of diversifying your green portfolio and market driven demand smoothing.  The technology for storage doesn't start to come into play even with a massive surge of investment until like twenty years from now.  I'm not going to tell you what the best technology is going to be twenty years from now.  Maybe it's even small nuclear as a baseload.  But it's clear what we need to do right now and that's pour tons of money into wind and solar so we get economies of scale to improve.  That makes it more attractive to invest in demand smoothing and energy storage.

Wait wait wait!

You get to quote 20 years for what we should be looking at, but when I bring up moving to nuclear and building more plants over the next 20 years...

Isn't solar kinda screwed by the ever-growing copper prices? If it we were to start producing solar panels in the quantities needed to replace fossil fuel plants, wouldn't all that demand for copper make it's prices skyrocket to like silver levels?

Also I thought wind is a joke in terms of turbine cost / power production. Wasn't tidal a lot more effective?

I haven't heard of a copper bottleneck before.  Sounds strange to me.  The world is not exactly in a copper shortage.

And wind is way cheaper then tidal.

Well, you'll note I never bring up wind as a serious option, I like birds, I like open skies, solar only kills birds when it's a collector system and the dumb little fuckers fly in from of the main collection mirror, FOOMPH! It's too iffy for not enough juice and consistency.

Hell, there's an idea, would you rather live within a mile or two of a solar plant capable of handling daytime load+a breeder reactor busily cleaning up nuclear waste for base load, or a significantly larger solar plant capable of collecting enough extra energy for base load needs+the energy storage needed to do that?

A panel on your roof is handy, but the real solar power is from the big farms with single targets, concentrated solar power I think is the term?

Copper is cheap because it's everywhere with a fairly steady demand, jacking that up means prices go up.

How is base load a red herring btw? That is the reality of the energy distribution system, it's a huge factor in plant output design and lifetime estimates, it's why there are certain plants which are always near full output, and it's why solar is best suited to step in as the additional load component rather than base load: there ain't no sunlight at night.

[Neonivek]

Prior to the Fukushima accident, in 2004 the Japanese government had calculated the cost of nuclear power at 5.9 yen/kWh. A recalculation was made after the accident to include social costs, such as accident settlement, compensation and area decontamination. This new estimate was 8.9 yen per kWh, but it excludes the costs of nuclear waste storage, decommissioning of nuclear reactors and indemnification insurance. Estimates have shown that if these are included, then nuclear power costs would exceed 100 yen/kWh. This compares with 9.9 to 17.3 yen/kWh for wind and 33.4 to 38.4 yen/kWh for solar.

Yeah, I'm kinda dubious on the actually cost-effectiveness of nuclear, regardless of the environmental pros and cons. From what I've heard before and just read here, it's only economical if you don't take into account the full life-cycle of the plant, waste, etc and all the other costs. As you can see from the estimate above, almost all the actual costs are in the stuff they hand-wave away.

The reason they "Hand-wave" a lot of it away is because some of the costs no longer apply or are significantly reduced (nuclear waste for example, we have found a way to recycle a lot of it, and cheaply store another)... Other costs do not apply if it is functioning correctly and aren't a "occupational hazard" so to speak... And other costs are imaginary made up numbers that they applied a dollar sign to.

It is actually what is so amazing about nuclear power is that it keeps advancing at an astounding rate. (to those who say nuclear power hasn't advanced... PFFFFT!)

Other costs aren't equally applies to other forms of electricity anyhow... and if you believe Wind has no "other costs" then... well...

---

As for "Fusion" power...

Right now those are our kind of "magic bullet" so far... Given that they are completely non-polluting, take no resources to continue working (well outside air), and produce tons of electricity.

But we haven't worked out the kinks... at all... So I don't consider that viable just yet... especially since we don't know EXACTLY how it will work just how it will theoretically work.

---

Hell, there's an idea, would you rather live within a mile or two of a solar plant capable of handling daytime load+a breeder reactor busily cleaning up nuclear waste for base load, or a significantly larger solar plant capable of collecting enough extra energy for base load needs+the energy storage needed to do that?

You wouldn't want to live a mile or two near either of these...

Of course the real answer is that the worst is the wind farm

[Frumple]

... at the moment, from what I recall the "real" solar power is just through thermal, at least so far as cost and effectiveness and whatnot goes. Those aren't so much farms (though they can be, presumably) as sodding gigantic mirrors pointing at something to heat up.

Thaaat said, fuck birds. I like them well enough but if they're too stupid to stay away from the giant spinning blades of death it's time to let evolution take its course.

[Neonivek]

Honestly I have no idea how wind has this unnatural great reputation.

But hopefully people are a bit more realistic now that people are actually trying wind...

Basically when they started doing a serious wind power initiative they thought it was "silent" (like it was a pinwheel) but wind generators produce a lot of noise, break catastrophically, and require regular maintenance... So lets just say a lot of people were annoyed when they found they were 400 feet from one.

[DJ]

Copper is cheap because virtually all of it gets recycled and the demand is increasing fairly slowly so it's not outpacing the supply. But making enough panels to replace fossil with solar would increase demand by orders of magnitude. And supply is set to decrease in future, as Chilean copper mines are running out within the next 50 years (at current rates, mind you, increasing production to meet the new demand will cut that even shorter) and Chile produces almost a third of all the world's copper.

Also, a thing with solar is real estate. How much land would you need to cover in panels to replace fossil plants? Using industrial and agricultural land is a no-go, obviously, so what do you do then? Cut down forests on massive scale and generally infringe on what little wilderness we have left?

[Neonivek]

Solar definitely eats up space like no tomorrow... But we are not hurting for places to put them.

They aren't as reliant as Wind generators (Seriously Wind you suck! )

Note: If your wondering why I am so harsh on Wind... it broke my heart! Dang it! you were supposed to be good!

[Starver]

I don't get those who decry wind-turbines ("will no one think of the birds!") but praise tidal-power, just as likely to cause problems with fish/cetaceans/etc (but out of sight, out of mind?) and where barrages are created, rather than using natural tidal races, disrupting the very mud flats often relied upon by waders...

[Neonivek]

I don't get those who decry wind-turbines ("will no one think of the birds!") but praise tidal-power, just as likely to cause problems with fish/cetaceans/etc (but out of sight, out of mind?) and where barrages are created, rather than using natural tidal races, disrupting the very mud flats often relied upon by waders...

Hey I never said one nice thing about Tidal!

Though you are right it is a "out of sight out of mind" like Hydro often is

No one even cared about Wind until they started to build them too close to people (and... they killed a few people >_>)

[DJ]

Also, how much area do you need to cover with solar panels before it really starts fucking up the local microclimate? Combine that with solar being a horrible eyesore, and you're pretty much limited to areas nowhere near population centers and of little to no ecologic value.

[Frumple]

... even if that is a problem, it's not nearly (and won't be for a long bloody time) a large enough one to worry about much. We've got a lot of areas that fit that criteria. Bonus points, if desertification and whatnot continues in areas it's becoming a problem, we'll have even more :V

[Neonivek]

Also, how much area do you need to cover with solar panels before it really starts fucking up the local microclimate? Combine that with solar being a horrible eyesore, and you're pretty much limited to areas nowhere near population centers and of little to no ecologic value.

Isn't that where we put them?