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[Reelya]

https://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/electric-generating-costs-a-primer/

On average, in 2011, nuclear power had the lowest electricity production costs at 2.10 cents per kilowatt hour, and petroleum had the highest at 21.56 cents per kilowatt hour.

First issue is that production costs do not cover the cost of the plant itself:

production costs do not include capital costs or financing charges, production costs are much lower than levelized costs. As noted above, levelized costs represent the total costs of constructing new power plants including their capital and financing charges. A new nuclear power plant, for example, has one of the highest levelized costs, particularly compared to coal and natural gas-fired plants.

Second issue is that those production costs are based on 2011 pricing, while the cost of solar fell by 85%, and wind down 66%, from 2009-2016. So the production costs of nuclear in 2011 don't include construction costs, and they're also very out of date compared to competing sources.

[Kagus]

...well, that said, if you build solar panels now and the price to build solar panels drops by 85% over the next 20 years, you still paid the cost of setting them up today. You're not paying the discounted costs of 20 years from now. Just a quibble.


I feel that at least some of it has to do with how well-established certain industries are, both in a sense of capitalistic pressure/support and in a sense of how much attention the field gets by prospective researchers (and grants, not to mention) in order to refine the technologies and processes involved.

Of course, for as cool as I think nuclear power is, I'd prefer solar/wind/hydro at the moment, if only because we don't really have any particularly good methods of dealing with nuclear waste products. Which bothers me. Untapped potential, I say!


As an aside, I think more of us should follow Kenya's example and just, like, burn shit.

[Reelya]

You're not paying the discounted costs of 20 years from now.

... but you'd also then get 20 years worth of extra power out of them. So that's apples and oranges of whether you need the extra capacity now or later. If you need the additional power now, then building additional nuclear plants isn't one of your available choices to cover that.

The point is, if you need additional capacity in 20 years you plan ahead. e.g. if a nuclear plant takes 20 years and solar takes 5 years, then a fair comparison is to estimate the price to start the solar plant in 15 years vs the price to start the nuclear plant today. From a business point of view it would make no sense to base that on today's price of solar panels rather than a good projection of the price for when you actually need to purchase the parts.

Plus, if you're not spending that money for 15 years, you avoid locking up capital or taking on debt for that amount of time, all of which accrues interest. 15 years worth of compound interest saved/earned on billions of dollars works out to be a lot of money.

[EnigmaticHat]

I imagine the disaster with the tsunami in Japan has also dampened interest in nuclear power (much like Chernobyl did temporarily).

[bloop_bleep]

...well, that said, if you build solar panels now and the price to build solar panels drops by 85% over the next 20 years, you still paid the cost of setting them up today. You're not paying the discounted costs of 20 years from now. Just a quibble.

The problem with that statement is that solar panels are a effectively instantaneous investment, while nuclear plants get built over many years; if the price for concrete, etc. decreases while you're still building a plant, you can take advantage of that.

[Bumber]

The problem is that discarded solar panels are basically toxic waste. They contain lead, chromium, and cadmium, which can leach into water. Solar produces 300 times as much waste per unit energy compared to nuclear.

http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis

[Reelya]

"environmentalprogress.org" is a bit suspect. One of their directors runs a group "mothers for nuclear". That got me thinking "Astroturf!" so I started going through the list of people they have working for them.

EDIT: Expanded the list. I managed to find pro-nuclear advocacy connections for 14/19 people who have photos that work there. As for the rest they are made up of a recent Berkeley graduate with a liberal arts degree (somehow, she comes in third out of 19, just after the main directors) but she looks like an American-Indian hippy girl, so she's all good, and the other four are all interns who are current students at Berkeley doing a range of generally bullshit degrees, none of which are science related. But they have, like, long hair and, like, care about the environment, and stuff, dude. So shit's all good, bro.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Michael Shellenberger is President and Chairman of Environmental Progress, and a leading energy and environmental researcher.

He's also a pro-nuclear campaigner, campaigning not to close Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant among others

Madison Czerwinski, Executive Vice President and former Senior Researcher at Environmental Progress, explores the factors driving the construction and cancellation of nuclear power plants and the politics of energy deprivation and development in impoverished countries. She also oversees EP's historical analysis, creating comprehensive timelines of all cancelled or constructed nuclear power plants in the United States.

Mark Nelson, Senior Analyst, oversees EP's ground-breaking Energy Progress Tracker, the most comprehensive review of nuclear power plants planned, under construction, and at-risk of premature closure. Mark's research into the environmental impacts of nuclear closures in Germany and California has been cited in the New York Times and other publications. Mark completed his graduate work in nuclear engineering at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Tony Roulstone, and studied aerospace and mechanical engineering at Oklahoma State University. Mark is a competitive runner, musician and photographer.

Courtney Sid is a senior video editor and producer at Envirionmental Progress. He previously worked at Discovery Digital Networks/Seeker Media where he was the primary editor on DNews

"DNews" which I hadn't heard of does seem to have a lot of stories about nuclear power being the thing, although I'd have to check more to see if that's a thing.

Rasheed Auguste, originally from New York, is a Master in Public Policy Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated from MIT as a double major in Nuclear Science and Engineering and Physics with a minor in Energy Studies in June 2017. He contributed to MIT’s report on "The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon Constrained World”.

Arun Ramamurthy, Research Fellow, Environmental Progress. Arun develops models and visualizations of energy trends on global, national and local scales, using data analytics to study the levers and effects of climate mitigation and energy policy.

While no nuclear stuff is listed here, he's on twitter bad mouthing solar and wind power saying "If climate change is to be mitigated with wind and solar, we should expect to have seen those effects by now. But we haven't". So clearly, yay nuclear! fuck wind and solar!

Steve Kirsch founded Mouse Systems Corporation is 1982. Then he went on to co-found Frame Technology Corporation in 1986 to market publishing software called FrameMaker. In 1994, he founded a web portal company called Infoseek Corporation.

Yeah, and you can google him and find out he's also a, guess what, huge fan of nuclear power.

Frank Jablonski, founder of Progressive Law Group LLC, acts as EP’s lawyer.  He has, since the 1980’s, been involved in many environmental and energy lawsuits, as well as legislative, and other advocacy efforts.  Along the way he had some success, collected some compliments from clients and organizations, and got his name in some law books.  Following a couple of years of intensive study in the early ‘00’s he changed his mind on nuclear energy, and, after giving a speech about it, lost his institutional environmental and renewable energy clients.  Eight years later, after hard work with bi-partisan allies ended Wisconsin’s nuclear moratorium and resulted in advanced nuclear energy being added to the State’s energy priority list ahead of fossil fuels, he joined with Environmental Progress.

Kristin Zaitz is a licensed professional civil engineer who works in nuclear energy, supporting the production of over 20% of California’s emission-free electricity at Diablo Canyon Power Plant. Kristin is a co-founder of Mothers for Nuclear

Norris McDonald is president of the Center for Environmental Hope and Justice.  An award-winning researcher and writer, McDonald co-founded the environmental justice movement in the 1980s when he helped lead the fight to create the EPA Office of Environmental Justice, advocated for green jobs programs in poor and minority communities, and oversaw the first comprehensive study of pollution in Washington, D.C.

This is the first one where I had to look on Sourcewatch, where I found out that "McDonald is also the the co-chair of the Nuclear Fuels Reprocessing Coalition, which champions the use of "highly enriched uranium and plutonium from nuclear warheads as fuel in new nuclear power plants".

Dave Hervol is a mechanical engineering contractor working in support of NASA’s Glenn Research Center. A native of Wadsworth, Ohio, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Akron and was initially fascinated by the possibility of a solar- and wind-powered economy. However, after touring the Perry Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 with a group of engineers from school, Dave’s opinions began to slowly change, culminating in research and training on the effects of radiation. He believes that nuclear power will allow a cleaner future without decimating the Ohio landscape with tens of thousands of windmills and countless millions of solar panels.

Robert Stone is New York Coordinator of Environmental Progress and the documentary filmmaker behind “PANDORA’S PROMISE,” which premiered at Sundance in 2013 broadcast on CNN.

... surprise: Pandora's Promise is "A feature-length documentary about the history and future of nuclear power. The film explores how and why mankind's most feared and controversial technological discovery is now passionately embraced by many of those who once led the charge against it. "

John Lavine is Senior Advisor to EP on Digital & Data Journalism. Lavine is former Dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and is a professor of media management and strategy at Medill and the Kellogg School of Management.

Well this guy's clearly got no pro-nuclear agenda going. Let's google him. Well he's a signatory to a letter to president Macron of France to keep nuclear going.

Cesar Penafiel is EP's Director of Analytics and Operations. Cesar served as CEO of Engineerica Systems, Inc, a software development company. He recently received his Master's in Policy from Columbia University where he concentrated in energy and the environment and was research assistant to Former IEA Executive Director, Nobuo Tanaka. Cesar's publications include a report on the New York electricity capacity markets for Bloomberg New Energy Finance and co-chaired the Columbia University Coalition for Sustainable Development student organization.

... and then you go to the Columbia University Coalition for Sustainable Development website, https://cucsd.wordpress.com/ and then you discover that his big thing was pushing nuclear power.

[Bumber]

Yet the point remains: What do you do with all those broken solar panels? You need a whole lot of them to compete with other forms of energy.

You can recycle parts of them, but that takes energy and resources to do. It's analogous to reprocessing nuclear waste, except that's at least still energy-dense.

[wierd]

I feel compelled to point out that ORDINARY SAND often contains radioactive uranium. So much so, it is the primary contributor to radon gas in basements.

If your argument is that "It contains some potentially, maybe toxic material!!", without justifying that against normal background sources (LIKE FUCKING SAND!!), then I feel a great disturbance in the force, M'Kay?

As for what you can do with the broken assed bits:

Acid wash, then recycle the silicon. 
The acid wash can go through a reclamation process.

[Bumber]

The article in question links this about recycling solar panels:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Tech/Japan-tries-to-chip-away-at-mountain-of-disused-solar-panels?page=1

I guess the point being that you'd need the necessary infrastructure for recycling it all. None of this is accounted for in the current economy.

[Reelya]

I'd have to see other studies backing that one up. One's not authored by a pro-nuclear lobby group. That's my main problem, I can find other articles citing the "300 times" thing, but all of them point to Environmental Progress as being the author of the report, and many of them, I look at the name on the article, only to discover it was actually written by someone on their list of directors. e.g. one of their articles starts with a big picture pile of eWaste with a kid sitting on top of it, then slams solar. But that's not a picture of solar waste, it's general electronic waste. Then it goes on about how terrible solar is, and ends by pointing out how the poor starving orphans burn the e-waste to get copper, causing plastic fumes. But again, that's not specific to solar waste products. So they keep flipping between talking about a general eWaste problem and a solar problem, as if getting rid of solar and going nuclear solves the entire eWaste problem and saves the orphans. e.g. if we want 100% clean we wouldn't make or use anything. But of course, they're not out there campaigning against electronics in general, which make most of that e-waste-burning problem, now are they?

So sure, we need to do something about the solar waste, but EP's article just isn't something you'd put your trust in as the go-to source for unbiased information.

[wierd]

Here's a quick and dirty proposal for a process to work with these panels.

Phase 1 recycling:
Dissolve metal backing: Alkaline solution soak.

Phase 2 recycling:
Separate glass from silicon, dissolve EV layers:

Soak in sealed pressure tank filled with supercritical CO2. "Pop" layers apart by rapidly releasing pressure on tank. (Rapid reduction of pressure on tank will rapidly phase-change the solvent into a gas, which will have migrated through the EVA layer through diffusion. This mechanically pries the layers apart.)
Return pressure on tank to dissolve remaining EVA.

(See useful paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.498.7978&rep=rep1&type=pdf)


Phase 3 recycling:
Divert saturated CO2 into reclamation system, reclaim EVA resin.
Use density based sorting to seperate glass from silicon wafer bits, recycle accordingly.

[Reelya]

edit: also a closer look at the original EP "study", and then running some rough maths myself based on their statements:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis

Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.

Okay, fair enough. Now, how does the article define "toxic waste" then?

The study defines as toxic waste the spent fuel assemblies from nuclear plants and the solar panels themselves, which contain similar heavy metals and toxins as other electronics, such as computers and smartphones.

e.g. they're equating spent nuclear fuel rods with the entire mass of the "solar panels themselves", not the quantity of heavy metals contained therein. It's just noted that they contain heavy metals, but the heavy metals aren't what they're weighing. Solar panels actually consist of less than 0.1% heavy metals, e.g. they're out by a factor of 3000, and that's going off their own numbers.

EDIT e.g. I looked up their footnotes and found that they used this panel as their basis
http://static.trinasolar.com/sites/default/files/PS-M-0474%20A%20Datasheet_Duomax_PEG5.XX_US_Feb_2017_A.pdf
and

EP estimated that a typical 1 GW nuclear reactor produces 27 tonnes of waste annually.

1GW of nuclear would make 365*24 = 8760 GWh per year. So, it makes 27,000 kg of nuclear waste for each 8760 GWh produced. e.g. the rate of waste for nuclear according to their study is 3 kg of waste per 1 GWh.

Ok, lets see how much power the cited panels should make and how much they weigh. Each panel is 24 kg, and there are 60 panels. The whole system is rated as a 270 Watt system.

Google states that a 1000 Watt system will make ~500 KWh per year. So 270 W * 500/1000 = 135 KWh per year. But, let's also assume that by 25 years the panels have worn out, e.g. they're at zero% left, which means we halve the average output, meaning ~70 KWh per year. This means over 25 years it make 1750 KWh, or 1.75 GWh. Dividing the weight by the amount of energy produced and we get 822 tons of solar panels for each GWh produced, which is right on top of their "300 times" figure. e.g. what they're classifying as "toxic waste" here is obviously the entire mass of the solar panels.

But here's the big "but". I had to make a big error to get the figure to work out like theirs: I needed to assume that the 24 kg was per-cell, not per-panel. If you take that assumption out, then the weight of the entire panel goes down by a factor of 60. Meaning their entire math only works out if you make a huge math error, inflating the weight of the panels by a factor of 60, while also assuming that the panels degrade quickly and/or have a very low conversion rate of power.

Running some proper maths, a 23.5 kg panel consisting of 60 cells generates 270 Watts. Assuming 1% deterioration per year and that they're replaced at 25 years, then you have ~90% power, and the conversion factor that 1 KW of capacity generates about 500 KWh per year. Meaning you expect 270 * 500/1000 * 0.90 * 25 = 3037 KWh ( e.g. 3 GWh) of power for a 25 year lifespan panel weighing 23.5 kg. The total kg per GWh is therefore about 8 kg, not 800. And then, if you want to calculate the "toxic" part, you actually need to divide by 3000, meaning about 3 grams of toxic materials per GWh vs the 3 kg of the same for a nuclear plant, plus the stuff that comes out of nuclear plants is worse. Meaning that they were probably out by an actual factor of 300,000, not 3000

tl;dr - complete bullshit from the master bullshit artists.

[smjjames]

Unless it’s tangentially related to energy policy, maybe move to the engineering/tech thread? Dunno.

[Kagus]

Unless it’s tangentially related to energy policy, maybe move to the engineering/tech thread? Dunno.

Engineering thread is busy talking about octopuses though.