331–340 of 619 posts
BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/14/just-a-m...
A few numbers: the projected cost is $20 billion. The nameplate capacity is 10GW. The most efficient solar plant in the world (located in Arizona) has an efficiency of about 30%, and I think we can assume similar efficiency for the Australian one, which translates to a 3GW average output, assuming it includes enough giant batteries to stabilize the output. The size of the array, in one of the most favourable places in the world by climatic conditions, is 150Km^2 (more or les the size of Amsterdam). Note that in the Australian desert we can assume the cost of the land to be almost zero.
Always according to WP, the cost of nuclear per GW should be about $6 billion. So a 3GW nuclear power plant should cost about the same as the 3GW (in average output) solar array. The difference is that the power output of a nuclear plant is steady and entirely predictable, it occupies a minimal fraction of the space needed by the solar array, and it can work anywhere in the world- from Australia to the coldest and rainiest regions. Transferring the Sun Cable project from the Australian desert to Germany is simply impossible due to the climate and the cost of land; while it's perfectly possible to build in Germany ten or twenty 3GW nuclear plants.
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Solar radiation that is absorbed by a solar panel will either heat the panel or generate electricity, which will also mostly become heat in the end. Reflected radiation will hopefully leave the earth. The things that cool the planet are mostly white — reflective. Clouds, white roofs, etc. Trees cool their local area by performing endothermic reactions creating carbohydrates and lignans.
> Trees cool their local area by performing endothermic reactions creating carbohydrates and lignans. Let's not forget shade. How much are they cooling the air above them?
Though most of that would be evaporation, not chemistry.
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Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goes down. A big part of why renewable generation is so high in Germany is because they mostly heat their homes with gas (which emits carbon, but doesn't factor into electricity generation statistics). Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental…
Eletrifying heating helps a lot if you integrate it with a smart grid. People generally don't care whether their home is 21 or 23 degrees warm, but the difference enables a lot of load shifting. I know people who take advantage of this today. This is btw, also true for many industrial processes. You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary…
And again, car batteries being used or not, we wouldn't have enough battery storage fulfill the storage requirements for decades or even centuries, and by then the first batteries we built will have long since worn out.
Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…
Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the…
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Just looked up some numbers from Wikipedia: "Japan had 282 GW of total installed electricity generating capacity in 2010" "A 2010 study by the Japanese government (pre-Fukushima disaster), called the Energy White Paper,[citation needed] concluded the cost for kilowatt hour was ¥49 for solar, ¥10 to ¥14 for wind, and ¥5 or ¥6 for nuclear power. Masayoshi Son, an advocate for renewable energy, however, has pointed out…
10 years ago? It's 2020, wind/solar have dropped by significant percentages every year since then. Wind/solar are cheaper (LCOE) than everything except natural gas, which it is on parity with right now, and shortly will pass even for installed generation (meaning it will be worth it for electric companies to invest in replacing the natural gas generators)
If it doesn't match expectations and the price doesn't significantly drop further from today (seems unlikely), going nuclear would be a good decision. If renewable continues to drop, we have a bit more expensive power depending on the percentage of nuclear to renewable power. However, if we don't build nuclear, I'm really not sure how much CO2 we're adding to the air and how many more people had to die from pollution before we managed to build enough renewables. If it's ballpark reasonable I don't see that we can afford to wait.
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The enormous capital costs demonstrates how expensive it makes solar and wind in simple terms. Even if we measure in terms of cost per watt hour stored and drawn over the lifetime of the batter it's still hugely expensive. Most batteries can support 300 to 1,000 charge and discharge cycles. So in terms of overall cost of storage, that's still in the range of $200 to $700 per MWh of energy stored and drawn over the li…
US oil consumption increased by almost 100x from 1900-1970. In 1850 it was just a few thousand barrels annually! That orders of magnitude more batteries are needed is not in itself an issue, as long as the solution itself is sound. NMC chemistry (as used in Hornsdale) is good for 3000-4000 cycles, although it's about 50% more expensive than LFP, at least if you buy them from CATL. This isn't going to be cheap. But it…
How about we use the carbon free method of generating electricity that France has used to generate most of it's electricity for close to half a century?
We don't have to wait for a miracle that makes batteries cheaper, we don't have to scale up battery production by several orders of magnitude. If we built ten nuclear plants for every one that exists in the US today, that's enough for 100% carbon free electricity generation. It'd also provide enormous amounts of water if we use the waste heat for desalination. It also wouldn't involves consuming massive areas of land for solar panels. It would only involve technologies that currently exist and that we have decades of experience working with.
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How thick? Check out these, with humans for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_dry_storage.jpg
Some 70 cm. That's right, about half of diameter of these cylinders are concrete walls. For comparison, Schwerer Gustav shells weighed about the same as A380 engine, were mostly hardened solid steel, arrived on target at about Mach 2 and could penetrate some 7 meters of concrete (including the explosive charge). You can help yourself to a F-4 vs concrete test that doesn't really make a dent in about 1m of concrete.
So let's calculate the kinetic energy for the 3 things mentioned: the Phantom F4 II kinetic energy, the Schwerer Gustav shell kinetic energy (I don't know the energy in the explosive charge though) and the A380 kinetic energy:
E = 1/2 * m * v * v (not sure how to use caret in markdown)
Phantom F4 II: 1/2 18,824 kg (770 / 3.6 m / s) (770 / 3.6 m / s) = 430 MJ
Schwere Gustav shell: 1/2 7000 kg 343 m / s 343 m / s = 412 MJ EDIT: this should be 4 x 412 MJ = 1.6 GJ since I forgot to double the speed of sound.
A-380: 1/2 500000 kg ( 945 / 3.6 m / s ) ( 945 / 3.6 m / s ) = 17.226 GJ
where I used 500 tonnes instead of max takeoff weight of 575 tonnes, and V MO of 945 km/h
so thats 40 x more energy than the F4 test...
the F4 test resulted in a 6 cm deep scratch, so naively multiplying by 40 gives 2.4 m , i.e. substantially more than 70 cm (to see it's not that naive, just consider crashing 40 F4's sequentially, they'll dig deeper and deeper)
Everyone is pro nuclear energy untill the government decides to set up a plant near your neighborhood.
It is used for research, and produce Technetium-99m that is used for nuclear medicine for scintigraphy.
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This thread is a quintessential anti-nuclear circular argument. Sorry for bad paraphrasing, but basically: A: Nuclear is dangerous because bad things happen if a jumbo jet crashes onto it. B: Is there anything that doesn't cause bad things when a jumbo jet crashes onto it? A: Irrelevant, these things aren't as dangerous as nuclear. I get that there are issues with nuclear. This isn't one.
did you read my comment about Southern Airways Flight 49? its not just about things being bad when an airliner crashes, but about the additional risk incurred. if I can choose between a nuclear power plant getting hit 10km from me, or some silane also 10km from me, I'd know what I'd dissaprove of most. if I can choose between leaving for the next generations a location where surface storage was hit by an airliner, or…
Nuclear waste is measured in the tens of thousands of tons. Solar waste is in the tens of millions of tons. Most of it just dumped in landfills.
If your concern is about wanting to minimize the amount of waste left to future generations, then there is absolutely no reason to choose solar over nuclear power. The energy density of nuclear power is such that it generates orders of magnitude less waste.