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The Great German Energy Experiment

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Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#121

Post by ars »

onli wrote: post #113
ars wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No wind uses more. You need to mine for the raw materials used to build the wind turbine. For the equivalent amount of energy wind turbines use hundreds of times as much raw materials as nuclear - even including building the nuclear power plant, not just the uranium.

Do you have a citation for that? The only source for that I found is http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/comparativeco2.html , which is most probably biased. Most other sources seem to rank wind better - but not sun (maybe you are mixing those two up?).

http://www.vattenfall.co.uk/en/kentish-flats.htm

500 tons of materials for 1MW (actual) wind turbine.

That would imply a 1GW reactor should be less than 500,000 metric tons in order to use less materials, and while I can't find figures for the weight of a nuclear reactor, they certainly are not that large!

A proposed thorium reactor: http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_reactor/thorium_reactor_1.p...

500 tons, for 100MW - meaning 100 times as much material is used for a wind turbine compared to thorium. Uranium uses larger buildings, but still much less than wind.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#122

Post by sjwright »

onli wrote: post #89
LockeWatts wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

1. No modern coal-plant leads to waste areas of uninhabitable land. Nuclear Plants do. 2. We do coal mines way longer. Even if the number is right, that "we've lost more people to coal mine cave ins than we have to nuclear accidents", (which is hard to agree with, cause it is statistically a hard problem to count the ones still dying from cancer years later because of Tschernobyl for example), that number would be me…

Chernobyl: a monumental cock-up by incompetent morons in charge of a badly designed and badly built scrapheap. With so much cocked up, a disaster was surely inevitable.

Fukushima: a series of cock-ups magnified by one of the world's most destructive tsunamis. This nuclear plant should never have been built where it was, and its old technology should have been decommissioned years ago. Yet the death toll due to the accident is still, what, five?

Three Mile Island: injured fewer people than a single typical high speed road accident.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#123

Post by sjwright »

sneak wrote: post #53
onli wrote: post #20

The article has a heavily biased view. Some points it gets wrong: >"If you close eight nuclear plants, which were carbon-free, overnight, you will increase carbon emissions," Nuclear plants are not carbon free. Getting the uranium, transporting the nuclear waste, transporting the people who run the plant costs a lot of carbon emissions. You need to look at the whole picture. >Inevitably, some hot July week will come…

> The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don't have air conditioners (in general) Germans are always saying this. It was 90F in Berlin yesterday. That is air conditioner weather, period. The part about most people not having them is true, though. This US expat is hooking his up this week, despite power costing twice here what it does in California.

Fahrenheit? What is this, the nineteenth century?

(90F = 32 degrees Celsius)

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#124

Post by cygx »

Symmetry wrote: post #111
onli wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. No modern coal-plant leads to waste areas of uninhabitable land. Nuclear Plants do. 2. We do coal mines way longer. Even if the number is right, that "we've lost more people to coal mine cave ins than we have to nuclear accidents", (which is hard to agree with, cause it is statistically a hard problem to count the ones still dying from cancer years later because of Tschernobyl for example), that number would be me…

About 6,000 people die from coal mining every year in China alone. By contrast, 6,000 is the median estimate of the total number of people who would die from cancer from Chernobyl. Now, Greenpeace managed to come to an estimate of almost 100,000 by making certain unusual assumptions, but if you make those same assumptions when looking at the pollution that comes out of the stacks of coal power plants you would find a…

While claims of up to 2 Million deaths related to Chernobyl[1] are probably not credible, the 6,000 figure is bullshit as well:

The estimates on radioation related deaths of infants is of the same order, and there are Russian claims that 90% of liquidators (at least 747,000 people according to the German Gesellschaft für Strahlenschutz) are invalid.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/50890761/Nuclear-s-Endless-Nightma...

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#125

Post by sjwright »

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…

Q: What do you call dangerously radioactive nuclear waste?

A: A fantastic source of energy.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#126

Post by mkaltenecker »

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…

Modern solar cells produce the energy that was needed to make them in about three to five years, that’s well below their lifetime.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#127

Post by ClHans »

cturner wrote: post #35
macavity23 wrote: post #2

Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and engineering project speaks volumes about why the Germans are where they are, and why we're where we are, economically speaking. From an engineering point of view I think it's foolish to turn off the nuke plants, but public opinion is what it is, and this caus…

Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine. Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like…

"Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient" [citation needed]

"Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving." [citation needed]

Oh, it was all opinion.

That's fine.

In my opinion, government is as efficient as the private sector (ever seen the waste and mismanagement going on in these huge megacorps? it's insane!), and by definition can be _more_ cost-effective than the private sector because there is no need to turn a profit. Private businesses have, built in, a bit of skimming off the top for the owners (and there's nothing wrong with that, of course--that's part of why people start businesses), and government-run services by definition do not. They're not profit-seeking services. They're public services.

(You may disagree on what ought to be a public service, but once we're all on the same page that the government ought to do some things, it's just a matter of hashing out what those ought to be...)

Also...wait... NASA has grown into an organization that works for the glory of its leadership? what? sorry...again...what?

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#128

Post by ClHans »

WalterBright wrote: post #118
nihilocrat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think government dilutes the effectiveness of the experts it employs, but at the same time the private sector is amazingly, exceedingly incapable of seeing benefit from anything but immediate profits. Investing in highly risky pilot programs which have high costs and uncertain benefits is something the private sector, except perhaps a few optimistic billionaires, would never do. If we had never supported diffi…

I think you're overlooking the age of exploration, funded mostly by private interests, and things like the first transatlantic cable.

Ah, but maybe he's not overlooking, for one example, the broadband monopoly or (essentially non-competitive) duopoly that exists in contemporary American society.

Compare what we've got with countries where the government owns the physical medium and leases it to a variety of bit-carriers--it's tough to argue against that kind of observable evidence.

There are plenty of cases where government stewardship of the playing field--with private companies competing on that playing field--works out for the great benefit of the citizenry.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#129

Post by skurry »

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…

Coal and nuclear power are both dangerous, just in different ways. And there are incidents that don't get much international coverage, but still have a lasting impact. For example there has been a small fire at a German nuclear plant in 1986. Officials say no radioactivity was released. But still, 20 years after the event, cases of childhood leukemia are three times more prevalent in the surrounding area than normal. How many children died because of this small accident? How many other adverse effects exist that we can't see or link to nuclear power? http://www.oh-strahlen.org/docs/ableukkome.pdf [PDF]

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#130

Post by ars »

revelation wrote: post #117
ars wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misreading that number. It's not years, it's how much energy is returned compared to invested. i.e. 6.5 times as much energy returned as invested over the entire life of the device. For comparison hydrocarbon fuels have numbers in the 30 range, and nuclear is 60 and up (depending on how long the plant lasts). So 6.5 is quite poor. And they list no numbers on expected lifespan - lifespan is the number one thin…

Thats an overly useless calculation. The whole point of this exercise is: not all energy is created equal. You can waste many many millions of kWh of Norways free power and then ship the panel to Germany where it will replace energy generated through coal or nuclear. It might not make up for the energy you wasted back in Norway, but that was never the point to begin with.

> Norways free power

Mind explaining what you are talking about?

I mean if you have free power, then yes converting it into something else even inefficiently is good. But what free power?

I know there are some geothermal plants in Iceland that capture otherwise wasted power and use it to refine aluminium, but I've never heard of countries with free power.

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