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The Great German Energy Experiment

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Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#91

Post by onli »

scarmig wrote: post #85
onli wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>made up for by coal plants, which are much worse for the environment This is exactly the point the article is missing. According to the german public, for the environment and the whole humanity the risks from nuclear plant are that high that coal plants, even though they are now used more and are unhealthy, are way less dangerous. Keep in mind that the plan is to shutdown all nuclear plants, substitute them with gre…

Funnily (or sadly?) enough, coal plants emit more radiation per year into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants. That's excluding all the other pollutants they send out, from mercury to lead to carbon, which are far worse.

That is a disputed fact (when taking into account the radioactive waste and thinking about what "into the atmosphere" means, at least that is what I remember from the reports about the last study concerning this), on one hand, but even if it were right: It's less than the radiation generated in the event of a disaster and not bundled into a pile of radioactive waste you can't place nowhere.

Edit: For the downvoters: http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410 - It IS disputed, I didn't say what is right. Stay fair.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#92

Post by ars »

skore wrote: post #47
lmm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. There's one obvious alternative: Build and run nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries, and the overall environmental impact is bet…

> We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries That's incredibly short sighted. And not just the measure of 'centuries' (even if that were true, it's still arguably just postpone the problem). Energy demand is going up, sharply, as more countries join our standard of living. We will , definitely, need technologies that are as clean as possible to meet the demand, eventually. No amount of pollution…

> Energy demand is going up ... no amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable

Exactly. And renewables produce HUGE amounts of pollution compared to nuclear. It's not even close. Nuclear wins the pollution battle by such a large amount that's it's not even a race. Everything else is a joke.

Do you know how much waste nuclear produces? Very very little - it's tiny. The entire waste from a person's lifetime of energy use could fit in a teacup. Do you know how much waste every other energy source produces? Huge, huge, staggeringly large amounts.

> letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel

Horrifying? Really? You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you realize how little uranium you need? Compared to just mining iron, (never mind coal, or oil, or natural gas) the amount is a rounding error globally. Everything you do has consequences, the idea is to pick the best one.

We don't have to solve the storage problem. What we will eventually do is burn the waste, and gain energy from it. You burn the nuclear all the way down to iron and lead. We can't do it today, no, but if people would stop running screaming from nuclear we could. The technology is known, we just need the engineering.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#93

Post by ars »

skore wrote: post #78
mbq wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nuclear plants are not the only source of highly toxic nuclear waste -- medicine, science and industry have also a fine share, and they are often dealing with much more dangerous isotopes that are in the nuclear waste. The storage problem comes fact any attempt of reason immediately sinks in an overall panic; and the by-design scaleable long-run solution is pretty simple -- to put them from where we have mined th…

Absolutely agreed - but we can "solve" energy differently. Not so much for other applications. So nuclear waste in energy is completely avoidable. Not sure I understand your second paragraph.

> but we can "solve" energy differently

Really? How? Just about every other technology is net negative on energy, so how do you plan to solve energy?

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#94

Post by [deleted] »

pkteison wrote: post #87

Can somebody explain to me the part of the article where it says you have to convert AC to DC to travel long distances (for far offshore wind power)? I understood it to be the exact opposite, that AC could go long distances without major loss and DC needed a new station every few blocks.

[deleted]

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#95

Post by rmccue »

eigenvector wrote: post #90
pkteison wrote: post #87

Can somebody explain to me the part of the article where it says you have to convert AC to DC to travel long distances (for far offshore wind power)? I understood it to be the exact opposite, that AC could go long distances without major loss and DC needed a new station every few blocks.

You don't 'need' to convert it, but HVDC transmission is emerging as more efficient and cost-effective than conventional HVAC transmission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

From what I gather from the Wikipedia page, it's due to the transmission cables being underwater and hence having a much larger capacitance, which is a larger loss than normal DC loss. (Correct me if I'm wrong on that.)

So, while AC is still more beneficial for transmission via cables in air/ground, DC appears to have less overall loss for underwater transmission.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#96

Post by marvin »

ars wrote: post #88
skore wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false on a number of levels. A) It's not just solar. B) A lot of the manufacturing actually happens in Germany. It's just that recently, China is spinning up the competition. Market at work. C) "costs more energy than it produces for decades". Even if that were true, it would still be a better deal. You provide no source for proof because there is none - Particularly considering technological progress, this wi…

A: Yes, and wind. Wind has a reasonably good energy ROI, but it's not possible to collect enough energy from it without covering the country in turbines, and people don't want that. Offshore is interesting, but the costs (financial and energy invested in building them) are much higher. B: Market at work, sure, but the end result is the same: They are claiming low CO2 by simply sending the CO2 to China. C: It is true…

Your claim about 20 years required to return the energy to produce a solar panel is false. Googling a bit after "energy returned on energy invested" (EROI) indicates that there aren't really any reliable ways to measure this number. Wikipedia quotes 1.5 for the US, which seems ridiculously low.

This study (http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796/pdf) from 2011 indicates an average EROI for solar panels of 6.5, and this does not take into consideration that this number appears to be rapidly increasing for newer and cheaper panels. See article from the Oil Drum at (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3910).

A conservative EROI of 6.5 would indicate that it takes about 4.5 years to earn back the energy to produce a panel, assuming static energy output and panel lifetime of 30 years. In short, the data I can find indicates that you are wrong.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#97

Post by vecinu »

LockeWatts wrote: post #86
onli wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have not a single working endlager for the waste the nuclear plants are producing. Historically, there have been several large accidents, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile, and several more smaller ones which would almost been fatal. I know that people on HN obviously like technology, and noticed that many people who like technology like nuclear plants. Maybe because they see them as great technology and are able…

>Historically, there have been several large accidents, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile, and several more smaller ones which would almost been fatal. So what? Those accidents are miniscule in comparison to the everyday operation of a coal plant. The damage caused by the worst nuclear accidents in human history is still less than the every day operation of a coal plant. Hell, we've lost more people to coal mine cav…

onli's response is spot-on. He is definitely not insane. I agree with his views.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#98

Post by cygx »

orangecat wrote: post #73
onli wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>made up for by coal plants, which are much worse for the environment This is exactly the point the article is missing. According to the german public, for the environment and the whole humanity the risks from nuclear plant are that high that coal plants, even though they are now used more and are unhealthy, are way less dangerous. Keep in mind that the plan is to shutdown all nuclear plants, substitute them with gre…

According to the german public, for the environment and the whole humanity the risks from nuclear plant are that high that coal plants, even though they are now used more and are unhealthy, are way less dangerous. Yes, and the German public is flat-out wrong.

I disagree. The current generation of nuclear plants needs to be shut down as the technology is irredeemably flawed (nuclear waste, no disaster-proof emergency shutdown).

Accidents have happened, will happen again and carry a cost that's hard to accurately quantify (death toll among the hundreds of thousands of Chernobyl liquidators is approaching 10% according to their Union and still on the rise; a new sarcophagus is being built right now, and I won't even guess at the cost to public health).

Thorium reactors can help with some of the issues, but are decades away from being viable in Germany. Investing in a smarter European grid seems to me the most rational choice.

And to all these people talking about the environmental cost of coal plants - there are two things you should take into account: They are intended as a short to medium term solution, and only about 45% of the total C02 emission of Germany is due to energy production.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#99

Post by cygx »

LockeWatts wrote: post #86
onli wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have not a single working endlager for the waste the nuclear plants are producing. Historically, there have been several large accidents, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile, and several more smaller ones which would almost been fatal. I know that people on HN obviously like technology, and noticed that many people who like technology like nuclear plants. Maybe because they see them as great technology and are able…

>Historically, there have been several large accidents, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile, and several more smaller ones which would almost been fatal. So what? Those accidents are miniscule in comparison to the everyday operation of a coal plant. The damage caused by the worst nuclear accidents in human history is still less than the every day operation of a coal plant. Hell, we've lost more people to coal mine cav…

> The damage caused by the worst nuclear accidents in human history is still less than the every day operation of a coal plant.

Citation needed.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#100

Post by LiamMcCalloway »

toemetoch wrote: post #77
adam-a wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea too much electricity could be a problem? I was trying to read more about this effect but google has no answers for me. Also, surely the obvious thing to do would be turn off some of the turbines in that situation?

- It's not just wind (turbines) but also solar. - You don't have centralized access to all the facilities. E.g. small and medium-scale solar falls under the control of the owner AFAIK. Large scale wind also has other parties involved that don't want to miss out on income. - Control of energy production on a national or regional scale follows prediction models, not only for demand but also price of resources such as g…

As per the 2003 E.U. directive on renewable energy, renewables have priority access to the rid to offload their production. This is makes sense because it ensures full utilization of the assets and helps reduce their costs.

EDIT: grammar

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