Just a quick pointer to anybody looking for discussions of low-carbon energy to have another look at Barry Brook’s Brave New Climate.
Barry’s latest post, for instance, tackles an issue that has been widely made here on LP every time that the topic of nuclear energy comes up – that the steel and concrete requirements of nuclear plants result in such a large quantity of greenhouse emissions in the construction phase that it will take years and years to get a carbon “payback”. Barry’s analysis suggests that a solar thermal plant is likely to require 15 times more steel and 75 times more concrete than a nuclear plant of equivalent capacity.
The entire T-Case series is worth a look for anyone seriously interested in the feasibility of renewables, microgeneration and related issues.
The sad thing for me, is that I long thought that if any place would be suited to renewables, it would be Australia, but even here, at industrial scale, they can’t really compete with nuclear on cost-benefit or environmental feasibility grounds.
Really, the only domain in which renewables are ahead is the “feel good factor”. Culturally, it seems a lot nicer to imagine windturbines, tidal and wave machines, heliostatic solar thermal, perhaps buttressed by vanadium flow batteries, molten ssalt and pumped storage and so forth supplying us our industrial power, but the overbuild and redundancy needed would imply costs orders of magnitude larger than any non-authoritarian state would dare conjure, and which therefore could only be built on timelines that would utterly foreclose plans for sharp early emissions cuts.
The time has arrived IMO, for those of us who are serious about deep early cuts in emissions in the here and now to embrace the case for nuclear, and to devise plausible vehicles for reconciling its rapid rollout with environmental best practice.
It may be true that massive structures like solar thermal plants are that materials intensive. But construction is just one part of any equation. With nuclear power another major energy loss/cost comes with the de-commissioning. It’s my understanding that properly disposing of all of that contaminated material uses more energy than the the plant produces in 30 years. Of course, we can always leave that to future generations, like we are with so many others of our messes.
I also understand that when it comes to fuel grade uranium ores we are coming very close to having “picked all the low hanging fruit”. And that the energy used to mine and process lower quality ores also has the potential to turn nuclear from a positive to a negative energy equation. Especially when nuclear proponents try counter worries about uranium stocks by pointing out that it can be extracted from sea water, but again, the amount of energy used to do the extraction is HUGE.
There is so much we can do simply by eliminating waste from our current energy use. Easily a third of what we currently use could be cut with fairly simple and relatively inexpensive retrofits of our homes, businesses and industries. But that’s clearly not as “sexy” as massive infrastructure projects with all of the high-paying project managers, finance officers, and get-some-rich-white-guy-even-richer payouts that such make such mega-projects attractive with The Powers that Be.
Besides, there are lots of de-centralized options that we haven’t even begun to explore. Which have the potential to give individuals and communities much more control (gasp) over their energy use. As long as we stick with the Massive Projects paradigm, than we’ll be forcing upon ourselves and our kids more of the same self-serving clowns who got us into this problem in the first place. Simply put, one of the best way of dealing with entrenched interests is to not create them in the first place.
Dyslexic said:
I’d like to see the modelling on that, but it sounds prima facie ludicrous. Decommissioning costs are set aside as a levy on the operators during the life of the plant. Assuming that there were a proper carbon price, one would cost this out.
Again this is silly. Firstly, the enormous payback per unit of uranium ore makes the cost of fuel a tiny portion of the cost of supplying power, so that even if it required three times as much energy to extract a kg of uranium oxide, this would make no difference to the threshhold feasibility of nuclear power. Secondly, uranium can be extracted from fly ash or seawater, we could easily resort to that. It’s too costly at the moment but not particularly energy-intensive. Thirdly, we could and should have resort to IFR technology which requires no further uranium but can use MOX and other fissile hazmat to generate power. Fourthly we have thorium which is about three-times as abundant as uranium in the Earth’s crust.
Look
here
for a through discussion of the feasibility of nuclear power (as well as at BBs blog).
There is and it is certainly worth doing, but these “negawatts” won’t power any substantial share of industry. At most, they might put off the day when new capacity is needed. They would reduce our CO2 intensity but they wouldn’t affect our total emissions very much at all. Those coal plants still have to be available for use. Only cutting our total demand (or substituting retired fossil demand with low emissions sources) can do that.
Micro generation
ekid, the first two paras are tired old bulldust that should have long since have been composted away. Go searching on this blog, let alone anywhere that actually professes technical expertise, for rebuttals of both those myths.
You’re third para’s right though – most of the carbon abatment needed can come from serious conservation measures rather than radical change to the way we produce power. Those brown coal plants “need” compensation from an ETS less because they’ll face competition from renewables (including nuclear) and more because demand for their product will decline.
Unfortunately I think your fourth para’s wrong too. I truly wish it were otherwise because small really is beautiful. But wishes don’t change facts; the physics of power generation – renewable or otherwise – give a huge efficiency advantage to big plants.
I’m ambivalent enough about nuclear power these days to see it be allowed to compete. But I am pretty sceptical that nuclear power can compete with smaller, more agile renewables any time soon.
The Australian electricity industry is affected by significant policy uncertainty, to do with carbon pricing and AGW policies, but also uncertainty about energy pricing in general, and challenges about getting development approval for such big, controversial infrastructure as a power plant. Even little power stations like wind power and gas generators face a lot of challenges relating to development approval and associated costs.
It is pretty difficult to get a new coal-fired power station built, despite it being the cheapest power around. This is because they are such a huge investment, with correspondingly huge risk due to uncertainty about future policy.
So, even with a carbon price sufficient for nuclear to be nominally price competitive with coal, nuclear will still need huge government support for a streamlined approval process, and probably a big up-front capital grant for it to happen. Because even if we get a carbon price, i think climate change policy will still be pretty fluid for years to come.
Smallness, modularity, and agility are fantastic advantages in a market dominated by uncertainty.
Derrida, I’m willing to accept that my science is questionable, but I’d also suggest that I and many others have a very different take on total decommissioning and remediation than most people running the numbers. Having lived for years in New Mexico, ground zero for nuclear science and disposal in the US, I have a much more personal take on what constitutes the proper handling of uranium – since my experience was that the “proper” (i.e. cheap and easy) way to deal with it was to dig it out of and ultimately park it back on some poor and mostly brown people’s door step. And, to drive the 30mph rated containers right down the major highway where it was “accepted” that there would some day be an accident and no way in hell to properly respond to that eventuality.
“The World Without Us” is a good read for looking at the ways in which we are incapable of, and clearly never planing to, re-mediate much of the toxic environments we create.
And as for small is beautiful, so is not living a life-style that accepts the misery and privation of much of the world’s population, as ours currently does. Yes, based on replacing inputs to keep us at current levels of consumption, small and distributed will not work. But, imho, nothing short of a paradigmatic shift will stave off Global mass suicide. If only because when other people around the globe are pushed to their utmost limits they are going to bomb the shit out us. And won’t that be even more fun if we provide nuclear plants to serve as clear targets and dirty bombs.
I’m glad we can agree on economizing.
OK then. Whenever nukes are mentioned as an option the argument needs to be taken up.
First, the dangerousness of radioactive material is elemental. Nuke proponents never, repeat never, draw attention to the seriousness of occupational health and safety issues for the workforce. That is because they are not intending to work in one of, if so, it will be a long way from the floor.
Second, Australia lacks a management culture of sufficient skill and sophistication to safely run one. Occupational accident and injury rates in Australia are a significant pointer to the resistance of Australian management to work safe procedures. The major employers are better than the small scale but the degree of contract outsourcing minimizes the exposure of major employers. Overall, however, Australian management is characterized by short cutting, lack of worker consultation, cover up of errors and bullying. Think James Hardie and asbestos and you are approaching the right frame work of understanding.
Then there are factors to do with human error, design fault. The following is a very mundane part account of the Three Mile Island near miss:
“The accident began about 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, when the plant experienced a failure in the secondary, non?nuclear section of the plant. The main feedwater pumps stopped running, caused by either a mechanical or electrical failure, which prevented the steam generators from removing heat. First the turbine, then the reactor automatically shut down. Immediately, the pressure in the primary system (the nuclear portion of the plant) began to increase. In order to prevent that pressure from becoming excessive, the pilot-operated relief valve (a valve located at the top of the pressurizer) opened. The valve should have closed when the pressure decreased by a certain amount, but it did not. Signals available to the operator failed to show that the valve was still open. As a result, cooling water poured out of the stuck-open valve and caused the core of the reactor to overheat.
As coolant flowed from the core through the pressurizer, the instruments available to reactor operators provided confusing information. There was no instrument that showed the level of coolant in the core. Instead, the operators judged the level of water in the core by the level in the pressurizer, and since it was high, they assumed that the core was properly covered with coolant. In addition, there was no clear signal that the pilot-operated relief valve was open. As a result, as alarms rang and warning lights flashed, the operators did not realize that the plant was experiencing a loss-of-coolant accident. They took a series of actions that made conditions worse by simply reducing the flow of coolant through the core.
Because adequate cooling was not available, the nuclear fuel overheated to the point at which the zirconium cladding (the long metal tubes which hold the nuclear fuel pellets) ruptured and the fuel pellets began to melt. It was later found that about one-half of the core melted during the early stages of the accident. Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment. But this did not occur as a result of the three Mile Island accident.”
Finally, there is the environmental racism involved in the blase attitude of proponents towards plant location and waste disposal. E-n-v-i-r-o-n-m-e-n-t-a-l r-a-c-i-s-m. And thank you EKID for raising your direct experience on this issue.
While I think nuclear needs to be properly considered as part of our response to global warming and broader energy sustainaibility challenges, I don’t think the conclusions drawn from an analysis of this kind can be usefully extrapolated. Andasol is just one solar thermal installation, and its materials requirements cannot necessarily be extrapolated to other designs, let alone all. Ditto for the materials requirements of nuclear plants.
Unfortunately, it seems impossible to produce an “objective” comparison of the costs and benefits of nuclear and the various renewables – analyses like Barry’s (and those of renewables advocates) are highly dependent on the initial assumptions, many of which are values based. Invariably, studies of this kind produced by renewables advoctaes show an advantages for renewables, and those produced by nuclear advocates like Barry show an advantage for nuclear.
It seems to me that a preference for each type of energy (and there does seems to be quite strong polarisation) is too tied up with underlying values assumptions about the kind of society we want for an “objective” technical comparison to be truly possible.
Fran and Derrida – you are very polite to these deniers. Carry on – keep up the good work.
For starters, Barry Brooks lifespan assumption is incorrect. CSP installations have an indefinite life span, baring technological obsolescence. The experience to date is that there is a 1% per annum replacement rate for the collector infrastructure. This is a direct quote from the equipment builders. Having failed to check that assumption, the thrust of the rest of Brooks’s assessment has to be taken casually.
One issue for the solar/nuclear argument has to deal with life from another point of view. I have been doing some probing to see what science says about the connections between global warming and cloud cover. Here are some studies
http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/presentations/Caltechweb.pdf
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/Information_2/Cirrus_clouds_5sw.html
There is much research yet to be undertaken.
My concern is that full on global warming might trigger an increase in cirrus clouds, themselves a global warming accelerant. If this were to be a possible risk then this has significant impact on energy options, their uses and the timing of such uses.
One thing that I have noticed in this whole debate is that people assume that there is a safe bounce back to the current life style that we are enjoying at present. I think that we assume too much.
Even if the 1% replacement figure turns out to be about right BilB, it is unlikely that we would want to be using the same technology in 60 years — and that applies both to nukes and to CSPs. In any event, the upfront cost in embedded energy/emissions is nevertheless dramatic, and it’s that cost now that is significant.
Fran, to date we have happily plastered the globe with concrete and steel simply for comfortable transport. The amount of additional concrete and steel required to supply all of the world’s energy need from CSP………….converting the free …..eternal…..energy from the sun, is just a small percentage of that. Please get real.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that our world is facing
peak population,
peak energy consumption,
passed peak oil availabilty,
and peak climate disruption,
all due for collision in the next few decades.
This is a time for full on integrated strategic thinking.
Run for the hills!!
This like being back in a Methodist Church as a 9 year old – back then I thought the Minister was effing nuts, too.
BilB @ above: we’ve been accused of being deniers by Razor @9 which, in the current situation, would be an inflammatory label if it had any traction. But it doesn’t. There is denialism going on here and it lies with the sort of technophilic solutions proposed by people who think that all of the factors you nominated @12 can somehow be managed by the introduction of new technology alone. People are living in hope that i) the problems are not so large as they appear and ii) that the way they live will not be disrupted. My own view is that the future is more Cuban than anyone imagines by which I mean that the management of scarcity will be the major political problem of the intermediate future.
Argue about the science of human caused climate change – deniers.
Argue about the science of nuclear power generation – not deniers.
WTF???
Razor@15: uuum. Now I’m confused too. Never mind.
You are all too correct AN @ 14. There is a very narrow window of opportunity to prepare for “management of scarcity”. Few will. I personally find it completely offensive when peoples of Australia’s “living standard”, soon to be redefined as “level of excess”, demand energy restraint of other peoples for whom living with very little is and has always been a permanent reality.
Ultimate reality us will not hit, until the global insurance system collapses.
Anthony, radioactive stuff is potentially dangerous. So is strapping yourself inside a metal tube and flying from continent to continent. Or the electric current powering the computer you are using right now. Or the drugs doctors prescribe.
The question is whether technology, regulation, and culture can mitigate those dangers sufficiently to make the risks worth taking.
We now have several decades worth of evidence to suggests that the risks are piddling compared to a variety of other technologies that don’t attract one-thousandth of the controversy of nuclear energy.
On the day that an owner can take out a normal non subsidised non government backed insurance policy on injury and death caused to the general population by a nuclear accident I will shout hooray and embrace the green glowing side. http://www.npec-web.org/Essays/DRAFT-20071105-Froggatt-NuclearThirdPartyInsurancePaper.pdf
One more Chernoble or 3 Mile Island and it will be entirely over for the nuke dupes.
Huggy
Fran Barlow wrote:
HERE HERE.
With the proviso that the solutions be allowed to compete on a full lifecycle (construction, operation, decommission) basis based on experience.
We have to know whether any of the lower carbon energy sources are feasible on a 1st world scale and we needed to know about 15 years ago. We no longer have the luxury to choose at leisure.
HB
How many people have had their lives shortened by
a) Chernobyl?
b) TMI?
c) Your average coal plant of equivalent output?
d) Use of crude oil in transport?
How soon can equivalently sized facilities to those of coal plants we’d like to replace on a world scale be rolled out as a matter of practice?
What will be the footprint of these plants?
If they will take longer to deploy than nuclear power at the same scale, what do we do in the interim?
UTE MAN
Agreed. Let the highest net public utility suite of options prevail.
That’s easy, Fran. For CSP it is 3 years for the first gigawatt facility with another gigawatt being completed each year after that if they are in the near vacinity of each other. That is assuming that the grid connection cables are handled under seperate contract to co-ordinate.
Robert Merkel:
“the risks are piddling compared to a variety of other technologies that don’t attract one-thousandth of the controversy of nuclear energy.”
The issue is acceptable risk. The sociologist Ulrich Beck has reframed the issues extensively. One of his better comments (somewhere) is that entering into dialogue with pro-nuke scientists meant accepting the terms of reference of science and that the experience was akin to “arm wrestling yourself”. In other words it was an unwinnable struggle because in accepting a scientific framework of understanding you abandoned the political authority you have as a citizen and must subordinate that authority to scientific expertise.
I find the risk of nukes unacceptable. You may not but you (and others)will only convince me of the sincerity of your arguments about acceptable risk if you also commit now, on public record, to live real close to one, in fact, real close and downwind. Also, you must commit to spending some time working in a nuke waste storage facility.
Charles Taylor had a lot to say about the ethics of authenticity. Time to cough up. Ethical advocacy of nukes means that you must expose yourself to the risks that you think are acceptable else you risk being seen as someone who thinks that the risks are acceptable for someone else to take.
OK BilB
Now you get to put a cost on that plan.
Take into account:
1. How many GW of power at any time of the day are currently supplied by fossil fuel sources
2. How the output of CSPs/Wind/Geothermal can be efficiently matched to current load curves (base, intermediate and peak) using installed capacity or storage
3. What this combination of storage and capacity will cost, bearing in mind the best locations for such capacity, and the cost of grid connections.
4. The timelines for the rollout and the debt service costs implied year on year
I will be thrilled to read your analysis.
Personally, if I were doing a no-nuke plan for Australia, cost alone would put a premium on early rollout of geothermal in as many places where this were feasible, since that is at least going to save you the need for significant redundancy/storage. A complicating factor is going to be the cost of grid connection, but since this also applies to wind, wave, tidal and CSPs this isn’t a dealbreaker.
I’d be keen on pumped storage since this can also be used to do desal and you can spread the costs across water utility and because it can also help buffer our existing power supply system (or even a future one that did have nukes) meaning that we get pay off immediately it comes online. Anyway you slice it though, it isn’t going to be cheap.
“The time has arrived IMO, for those of us who are serious about deep early cuts in emissions in the here and now to embrace the case for nuclear, and to devise plausible vehicles for reconciling its rapid rollout with environmental best practice.”
Why do we need to give special preference to nuclear? Just in principle allow it and let it compete – let it take advantage of carbon pricing, and perhaps even let it access MRET (or else phase out MRET as a carbon price comes in). Let nuclear run the gauntlet of development approval just like every other technology. Let it get the same access to subsidies as renewables. If it can compete, then fine. Why does it need or deserve a special effort beyond that to make it happen?
Sorry, that last comment from Steve should have been from SCPritch. Changing my name to differentiate myself from the other Steves.
Steve@25
While I can see why my form of words may have prompted your inference, your description of the context in which energy solutions were rolled-out sounds reasonable.
That said, I firmly believe that if a technology-neutral greatest utility per unit of outlay approach were adopted, then nuclear power would be a key component of any energy system supplying major urban centers.
There’s no point in hiding that reality.
Razor, you try above to make an amalgam between anthropogenic climate change naysayers and those who dispute the utility of nuclear power …
It’s not convincing, because where as the basic science informing AGW is compelling, the case for resort to nuclear power depends in part on subjective questions — what risks we think are worth accepting, and at what price, questions of aesthetics and culture etc.
Nobody can prove that nuclear power is “better” in a cultural sense than any other fortm of power. For some people, the anxiety over the technology is itself, (including diffuse fears of nuclear meltdown, the aesthetics of localised environmental contamination, connection with terrorism and nuclear weapons and so forth) is such a factor, that it trumps all other arguments.
While I don’t share these anxieties, finding them grossly overweighted, it’s no more wrong to object on such grounds to nuclear power than to object to 4WD because they seem to embody arrogance and anomie. One is entitled to one’s own cultural preferences.
Interestingly, much of the objection to action on mitigation does seem, fundamentally, to be an argument over culture, and if the objectors were candid about this, while I’d strongly disagree with them, I’d at least respect their position. The trouble is that they pretend their opposition is based on science, believing no doubt, that this makes them sound less nutty.
Anthony: If you’ll excuse the snark, it seems that you’re peeved about losing arguments with scientists when they have pesky things like data to back them up, and have this strange notion that arguments should be backed by it rather than whatever the hairs on the back of your neck tell you.
As for living and working with nuclear power, I find this kind of gotcha game rather annoying but, for the record, I would be quite happy to live downwind of a nuclear plant, and work in a waste storage facility.
RM: you just made my day. And no, I don’t lose arguments with scientists. Plenty of scientist mates are equally opposed to nukes as I am. Scientific data and expertise is one thing. Scientists offer advice. Risk calculus, however, is the preserve of the people being asked to take the risk. When it comes to generalisable risks like nukes that decision is subject to the rules of democratic decision making and they don’t privilege a scientific viewpoint.
I admire your conviction. Fran and the other proponents: what about it?
Fran @ 24,
That is easy, Fran. I will give a detailed revision later, but for the moment please download
http://www.solar-thermie.org/hintergruende/documents/cspnow.pdf
, this document has been available for some years now. I have glossy brochures I can send if necessary. Go to item 9 and there is some starting information on costings there. The document also explains how CSP achieves base load on its own. Tried a true technology, non delay installation.
As I say I will expand on any information there that you find difficult. I have spoken at length with this organisation as well as with David Mill’s organisation and can satisfy most enquiries.
Fran: you’ve given us such a farrago of disinformation about the anti-nuke position that untangling it would be a day’s task. Your suggestion that objection to nukes is “cultural” is laughable as is the argument that the anit-nuke movement ascibes to a position founded on “the aesthetics of localised environmental contamination”. Aesthetics? What a hoot.
I’m sure you don’t suffer the sorts of “anxieties” that you attribute to others but maybe they don’t either. Perhaps their arguments are informed by things like maps of the distribution of radiocative material over the UK and Europe in the wake of Chernobyl? The Germans don’t have anxieties either but have you ever read their totally rational local area instructions for dealing with the dispersal of radioctive plumes?
Referring to those who oppose the inclusion of nuclear power in the energy supply mix, Anthony Nolan proposed …
Doubtless they are, at least in some cases. The question remains — how should one respond to that and evaluate its significance? Unless someone were proposing new iterations of the Chernobyl reactor and the management structure attending it — which would surprise me — I’m missing the substantive relevance. Chernobyl was dreadful — horrible proof that when humans become reckless really serious harm can result. But the sapiens part of our species name reminds us that we are capable of learning from past mistakes. Does anyone think of the Hindenburg when taking a joy ride on a balloon? Some perhaps, but they go ahead anyway. I think it plain that no matter how much one hates what happened at Chernobyl, no position on nuclear power now can alter it. Sometimes though it does seem that people see Chernobyl as some trancendent thing which should taint all things connected with nuclear power for all time.
Yet if Chernobyl had had the standard concrete housing, no release to the atmosphere would have been possible. If the first responders hadn’t been required, nobody would have died. It still would have been a poor badly managed plant with people doing things outside the plant’s specifications, but the harm would have been minimal. Accordingly, my view of the matter as being cultural in character seems justified, this side of showing that that event is pertinent in risk assessment.
Did you study the Solar-Thermie document, Fran?
Reading it today BilB. I will respond in due course.
Fran:
“when humans become reckless really serious harm can result”.
Who couldn’t agree with a motherhood statement like that? A political analysis notes that particular classes of humans seek to externalise the costs of their institutional (read corporate) recklessness onto others as they seek to take a profit.
The issue at stake is social trust and, for mine, there is none for the nuke industry. Its track record is dirty, to say the least.
Anthony noted:
I’m not going to disagree with that, obviously, but in the case of Chernobyl, the principal purpose of the plant was to produce weapons-grade materiel. Producing energy was a sideline. Profits were not a factor as it was a state institution and was almost certainly running at a loss, or would have been had we been able to devise a robust ledger. You will never hear me deny that when it comes to transferring externalities onto others in order to make a profit, the Americans are in the front rank, but the fact remains that Chernobyl could not have been built in the US. The Americans were offered that design and passed it up as being poor even in the 1970s.
Energy Farming
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/6021
Australia’s next big export.
BilB
I finished reading the solar thermie document. Although it is a useful entry level discussion of some of the technical and cost feasibility assumptions, it really doesn’t address the cost-implications of delviering on demand power at scale. Examingin the implications of inserting an 80MW plant into a large grid may be interesting, but pleaase bear in mind we are talking about it doing the job currently being done by fossil thermal sources.
There’s no mention in the document of likely installed costs for each of the configurations they discuss — although one reference was made to a cost of 425million Euro for a 200MW hybrid plant i.e. one combusting fossil fuels.
As I understand it though the figures for installed cost for CSP are currently about $100 per square meter of insolated area, so although the potential energy to be captured is vast across the entire Earth’s surface, the cost in steel and glass is similarly so. The document also makes no mention of the grid connection or storage costs. This latter in particular will apply even where one can set up CSPs near enough to the grid for that cost to be negligible. Self-evidently, you are going to need the rated output of the competing fossil energy sources 24/7 regardless of night and cloud cover. In the end, it doesn’t matter what the average collection is, or its efficiency — its the minimum collection that determines the storage requirement. Remember too that if you do have to use storage to deal with a slew, then atb some point the CSP system must exceed demand so as to top up the system for the next deficit. The longer that negative slews will concivably persist, the bigger your storage need.
How much storage will one need to meet average power requirements in a grid like Australia’s for, for example, one week? Clearly it depends on which week that is, but using the 15GW average * 168 hours = 2520 GwH. Allowing that pumped storage can supply 0.272KwH per kilolitre of water falling 100 metres, if our average head pressure is 100metres on all our pumped storage we’re going to need 685.44 gigalitres of water held in pumped storage at an average 100m head, or the equivalent of a giant cube of water with sides of roughly 881.7m. I’m going out on a limb here but I’d say by the time you spread that capacity around the country and have the pumps needed you’re not getting any change out of about 2 trillion dollars — or about twice Australia’s GDP. Now admittedly, you could get some pretty fancy desal out of that because a lot of the time you aren’t going to need most of it, but even so — think of the concrete and steel.
You can buy a hell of a lot of nuclear power for that kind of money, or, more reasonably, you just buy the 15GW at somewhere between 20 and 60 billion and use our existing hydro (somewhat augmented) to do the load following. That still leaves scope for renewables such as geothermal or wind or biomass to top up the system, assuming we want that.
Anyone who woulf like to look at some of the other issues of integration of solar thermal energy systems might be interested in this post by Ted Trainer, who, as people will know, is not an advocate of nuclear energy, but rather, someone whose focus is on “powering down” as he sees the principal problem as being the unsustainability of consumer society, and takes the view that resort to renewables as a vehicle for sustaining the kinds of growth people expect is not realistic.
Solar Thermal Questions
anthony nolan, the only reason I wouldn’t want a nuke power plant in my backyard is because it’s a large unsightly industrial facility, and I live in a residential area that shouldn’t have that visual and amenity impact. And I wouldn’t work in a waste decommissioning plant because I have no relevant skills and enjoy my office job.
But in principle, I would more happily go picnicing with my children there than I would near Loy Yang or Yallourn.
Nuclear power plants have demonstrated through the last 50 years of operation that they are far safer than houses. People mention three mile island. Hmm, how many people died there, in the 1970s? They also mention Chernobyl, which I find somewhat odd, as if we are to draw a relevant lesson from 1950s soviet technology. Barry Brook’s analogy to that one is to say that the Hindenberg disaster was so terrible that we ought not to fly. Coal fired power stations are responsible for more radioactive releases and direct pollution-caused deaths than nukes ever have.
The level of actual, demonstrated risk for modern nukes is so low as to make those sorts of arguments a complete joke. Perceptions are bullshit.
Doesn’t matter how manys time the Chickenhawk retort gets slam dunked, it still gets rolled out.
Crack on Fran et al – doing a marvellous job.
Fran @27:
Interesting semantic shift there, Fran. I also see you’re up to your usual trick of demanding that others properly cost their proposals while you engage in flights of fancy including geothermal rollouts and your favourite, and most bizarre, building pumped storage facilities all over the place, with nary a costing in sight. Slight double standard, don’t you think?
wilful @ 41 and Fran Barlow @ all over the place. Yeah, nukes are so safe that they haven’t constructed a new one in the US since 1979. This of course is totally irrational policy a captive of lunatic greenies and won home do gooders. Or do either of you have another explanation?
Neither of you bother at all to address the other elements of my argument which are, to repeat, i) we don’t have a safe management culture adequate to the task of running a nuke and ii) there are unacceptable oh+s risks associated with them.
To advance discussion beyond technobabble the following is an account of events in France in July 2008 which prvides evidence to support my concerns:
“LYON, France — French authorities ordered Friday the temporary closure of a nuclear treatment plant in a popular tourist region of southern France after a uranium leak polluted the local water supply.
But site operator Socatri, a subsidiary of French nuclear giant Areva, said it would permanently shut down the facility at the Tricastin nuclear plant in Provence as part of a previously-planned upgrade.France’s ASN nuclear safety authority cited a “series of faults and human negligence that is not acceptable” when it ordered the closure following an inspection at the plant on Thursday.
Residents in the Vaucluse region have been told not to drink water or eat fish from nearby rivers since the leak on Monday night, in which 75 kilogrammes (165 pounds) of untreated liquid uranium spilled into the ground.
Swimming and water sports were also forbidden as was irrigation of crops with the contaminated water.
ASN said it would recommend to local councils that the precautionary measures remain in place for at least a week.
Part of France’s popular Provence summer tourist destination, the Vaucluse draws legions of holidaymakers to its picturesque towns.
One of France’s 58 nuclear plants, Tricastin is located in Bollene, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the city of Avignon, which is currently hosting a major theatre festival.
Socatri said it would shut down the facility — one of two at the nuclear treatment plant — in the coming weeks.
“We take note of the ASN’s decision,” said Socatri spokesman Hugues Blacher. “We will take steps to ensure that this type of incident does not happen again.”
The ASN severely criticised Socatri’s handling of the crisis, saying it had been too slow to inform authorities following the incident, local ASN head Charles-Antoine Louet told reporters.
A safety inspection carried out on Thursday found that “security steps aimed at preventing any further pollution were not completely satisfactory,” according to an ASN statement.
The ASN also detected a series of “irregularities” at the site’s operations at the time of the incident, and has ordered Socatri to implement “a reinforced surveillance plan including analysis of the surrounding rivers and ground water.”
The ASN said its report would be handed to the state prosecutor for possible legal action against Socatri, which was singled out by the safety body in May over “repeated leaks” last year in the site’s waste water evacuation system.
The leakage this week occurred when liquid was transferred from one container to another at the Tricastin site, which has a nuclear reactor as well as a radioactive treatment plant.
Socatri said Wednesday that tests carried out on the groundwater, three local wells and the rivers had shown “no abnormal elements” and French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo insisted Thursday there was “no imminent danger” to the local population.
But the ASN this week found abnormal levels of radiation in several rivers and lakes in the region although these were found to be decreasing.
The incident at Tricastin ranked as a level-one incident on the seven-point scale to rank nuclear accidents.
French anti-nuclear group Sortir du nucleaire (End nuclear power) had accused Areva of withholding information about the spill and “deliberately putting the population at risk.”
On Thursday, it said it would lodge a complaint against the ASN for failing to quickly notify the population of the incident.
The 75 kilogrammes of untreated uranium amounts to 6.26 cubic metres of liquid containing 12 grammes of uranium per litre, according to Socatri.
© 2008 Agence France Presse”
So who is bullshit now baby?
Fran,
Australia’s peak electricity generation capacity is around 37 gigawatts, which would mean to replace the entire amount with CSP would require around 70 gigawatt collector capacity, half being for night time storage. A recent “back of the envelope” estimation put CSP, if installed in multi gigawatt installations, at around 2 billion dollars per gigawatt. This would put the total cost at $140 billion and cover an area of 1400 square kilometres (or a land block 37 kilometres by 37 kilometres). Nothing like the 2 trillion dollars you seem have arrived at.
It is impossible to build that much infrastructure in a short time span but it is realistic to complete 3 gigawatt per year over a 30 year time frame to achieve the capacity required. Such a programme would be costing 6 billion dollars per year for up to 5 years at which point income from the operational plants would be contributing to the investment programme.
Now before you get all hot an sweaty and declare that 1400 square kilometres of infrastucture is impossible to imagine, you should be aware that the Hunter Valley open cut coal mine is a 600 square kilometre massive hole in the ground. And it is one of many massive holes in the ground created with the use of fossil fuels and material resources at a scale that makes a CSP installation seem fairly light by comparison.
As for the “massive amounts” of materials in CSP installations, the greatest material quantity in the construction of CSP is glass. For a multi gigawatt installation the mirror making facility is built on site and its main energy infeeds are electricity and natural gas. The main material required is sand.
The hybride feature of a CSP plant is for non solar back up. For extended cloud periods gas is used to fire the boilers. No storage is required. The 2 billion dollar price includes on site heat storage for night time operation.
On the hydro remarks, you appear to be unaware that our mainland hydro is running out of water. When it was able to operate at capacity it added 6 gigawatts to the grid. Its main use these days, I believe, is for energy storage for load balancing. ie water is pumped up to storage ponds when grid load is light, this keeps the coal plants operating more efficiently, then the water is drawn down to generate electricity when load exceeds the coal fire capacity. This system also helps improve the use of wind power which generates electricity on an unpredictable time frame.
Going back to your figure of $100 per square metre of mirror area, this is correctish in gigawatt sized installation, but say $170 per square metre. There are about 270,000 square metres of mirror area per square kilometre, if I recall correctly, for the 50 megawatt generated. This puts the price at 46 million dollars per square kilometre and $920 million for the 20 square kilometres of the gigawatt sized facility. The rest of the money is in the turbine houses, site work, piping, etc. Please compare this to your conclusions.
It is most important to keep in mind that the primary fuel for CSP is absolutely FREE. Grid connection is a seperate issue.
How ever did you came up with a 2 trillion dollar price tag?
Here is an (edited by me for brevity) account of another accident from the UK, 2005. We are talking real world events here:
“A leak of highly radioactive nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, enough to half fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, has forced the closure of Sellafield’s Thorp reprocessing plant.
The highly dangerous mixture, containing about 20 tonnes of uranium and plutonium fuel, has leaked through a fractured pipe into a huge stainless steel chamber which is so radioactive that it is impossible to enter.
Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes will take months and may require special robots to be built and sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the £2.1bn plant.
The leak is not a danger to the public but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer since income from the Thorp plant, calculated to be more than £1m a day, is supposed to pay for the cleanup of redundant nuclear facilities.
A problem at the plant was first noticed on April 19 when operators could not account for all the spent fuel that had been dissolved in nitric acid. It was supposed to be travelling through the plant to be measured and separated into uranium, plutonium and waste products in a series of centrifuges. Remote cameras scanning the interior of the plant found the leak.
Although most of the material is uranium, the fuel contains about 200kg (440lb) of plutonium, enough to make 20 nuclear weapons, and must be recovered and accounted for to conform to international safeguards aimed at preventing nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands. The liquid will have to be siphoned off and stored until the works can be repaired, but a method of doing this has yet to be devised.
The Thorp plant produces uranium and plutonium from spent fuel in such large quantities that only a tiny proportion of it can ever be reused for reactor fuel. Its critics also claim it is uneconomic because it has never operated to design capacity since it opened 12 years ago, and is years behind schedule in fulfilling orders.
This has angered some customers and the British Nuclear Group is embroiled in a court case with one of its customers, the German owners of the Brokdorf power station, which is withholding fees of £2,772 a day for storage of spent fuel, claiming it should have been reprocessed years ago.
In 12 years Thorp has reprocessed 5,644 tonnes of fuel from its first 10-year target of 7,000 tonnes. Last year it failed to reach its target of 725 tonnes, achieving 590.
Martin Forwood, of Cumbrians Opposed to Radioactive Environment, said the NDA had been “naive” in placing trust on income from Thorp, given its track record. “Reprocessing is blatantly incompatible with the official cleanup remit of the NDA, which will now find itself out of pocket as a result of the latest Thorp accident. The new owners would do the taxpayer the greatest service by putting Thorp out of its misery and closing it once and for all.”
The managing director of British Nuclear Group, Sellafield, Barry Snelson, who ordered the plant to be closed down, said: “Let me reassure people that the plant is in a safe and stable state.”
Please note: this happened not a terrible old ‘actually existing socialism’ job like Chernobyl but at an absolutely spiffing market model re-processor. State of the art. All shiny new pipes and stuff. Lots of modelling beforehand and huge government supervision. And so on.
Fran,
I have read through some of your “brave new climate” link, and have quickly found conflicting information. Most of the conclusions there are easily challenged.
The intermitency comment does hot take account of the hybride construction which uses natural gas for non solar periods. CSP’s demand ramping is comparible to coal boiler power generation. CSP can be made instantly responsive with a relatively small vanadium redox battery system designed to bridge the boiler lag time. Beyond that the article makes no recognition that the Australian grid uses the Snowey Mountains hydro as a rapid response facility.
The water preheating item is a red herring. The Liddel steam saver was built where it is simply because that was the only available situation to take advantage of a 3 million dollar government grant to build a test facility of some sort.
Renewables are additive if the system is designed appropriately.
The costs information is important to address properly. The age of the Sargent and Lundy report suggests that it is an extrapolation from costings of the research facilities operational to that time. Such costs are not representative of grid scale installations. I have phoned and spoken to Sean Hagen at Sargent and Lundy to determine the basis of their earlier report and how that relates to their current understanding of costs for CSP. I will be engaging in an email exchange to obtain a definitive evaluation which I will then check against Dr Franz Trieb’s organisation. At present the costing informations are apart by a factor of 3. This simply means that the Europeans (2 billion) would get the contract over the Americans (6.5 billion).
There are a lot more doubtful looking comments in this lengthy (Ted Trainer) post which will need time to debunk.
BilB said
The last figure I read for peak was 27.5GW peak … but let’s say you’re right.
Firstly, you assume a capacity factor of above 52%, which you will surely be hardpressed to get. The 354MW SEGS plant at Kramer Junction, Harper Lake and Daggett has for example a CF of 21%.
Kramer Jct and others
I’d be interested to know how your SEGS plant design gets a CF 2.5 times as high. Failing that, your overbuild on your figures would be 185GW or 370 billion.
You exclude matching storage from that cost, because you are happy for a hybrid plant, but before we examine that let’s see how storage could work if you have a straight non-fossil plant. How many days of storage at full rated capacity are needed? Unless you are going to keep fossil plants sitting idle and have storage only for their time from blackstart to maximum output, you are not going to be able to get away without significant storage. Even in highly insolated locations, you do get cloudy periods that can last several days. Yet it’s common to price for part of a day’s storage only. (see for example, this NREL link
My own inquiries on pumped storage have tended it to put it at about $800 per KwH stored, though of course, in pumped storage, site cost is a huge variable. If you have ideal geography — perhaps a coastline with a massively elevated granite structure adjacent to it where you can build a large reservoir not far from a major demand centre … then a lot less. Retrofitting existing hydro facilities would also be a lot cheaper, water resources permitting. If you have strongly flowing rivers that you don’t mind messing with, then again, this can be cheapish. But if you have to do brownfields development, then it’s going to cost plenty.
You seem to be happy with a hybrid plant, but again, at 21% CF a lot of the energy is going to come from NG — nearly 80% of its output, and this will be true no matter how big your SEGS-hybrid is. Sure it will be a lot cleaner than equivalent coal or even straight gas facilities, but it’s going to be a lot more expensive and not reduce GHGs in stationary energy by anything like 100%. And as I said, you still have to connect these plants to the grid. This may be why, despite the evident utility you see, they haven’t taken over from even the most expensive gas capacity. Why wouldn’t WA have gone this way?
Now don’t get me wrong. I spent quite a bit of time being enthusiastic about solar thermal. Bearing in mind the controversies over nuclear power, especially here in Australia, if solar thermal could be rolled out here and do the job of coal at an installed cost that was even triple that of coal, I’d be for it in a heartbeat. At a cost likely in practice to be ten times that of coal and which is gas fired in substantial part I don’t see that proposal, even here, making an early impact on emissions at an acceptable cost.
Fran: the suggestion that concern over nukes is peculiar to australia is misleading. The people of Spain, as the following article (edited by me for brevity) illuustrates, have a few issues with nukes as well:
“MADRID, Apr 15 (IPS) – Failure to inform the authorities and take safety measures after a radioactive leak at a Spanish nuclear plant nearly five months ago has alarmed people in nearby towns, environmentalists and civil society organisations.
One of Spain’s eight nuclear power plants at Ascó, a village in the northeastern region of Catalonia, leaked radioactivity on Nov. 29, 2007, but those responsible failed to inform nearby residents, thus preventing them from taking remedial action to protect themselves.
The Spanish branch of environmental watchdog Greenpeace International, which on Apr. 5 was the first to report publicly that the leak had taken place, said on Tuesday that among the protective measures that had been omitted because of the plant’s silence was the essential step of cancelling all visits to the premises.
In fact, children from several schools toured the plant after the leak had occurred.
Robert Serra, head of the Maristas school in Girona, told IPS that his greatest concern is that “they let visits by schoolchildren continue, even though they knew what had happened in November.” That is why his school has determined that all pupils who went on the visit to the nuclear plant undergo medical checks to prevent any health problems.
Given the secrecy that still shrouds the incident, on Tuesday Greenpeace Spain sent the state Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) 50 questions which, under current legislation, must be answered within 30 days.
Greenpeace wants to know what regulations are in force at the Ascó-Vandellòs Nuclear Association, the owners of the reactor, for procedures within the unit and for the actions of its operators, for the design and fulfilment of its safety systems and for notification of public authorities of safety-related incidents.
“Knowing what really happened is necessary so that citizens can demand that sanctions be imposed according to nuclear legislation, and to initiate criminal and civil actions, if there is evidence of harm to persons or the environment caused by radiation,” Carlos Bravo, head of Greenpeace Spain’s Nuclear Campaign, told the press.
After Greenpeace reported the leak at the plant, the CSN issued a press release, but it contained few details.
On Tuesday, in a new announcement, the CSN said that the radioactive leak was in fact 100 times greater than the amount initially declared by the company, so it has decided to open an investigation, as well as have medical checks performed on over 700 people who have been in contact with the plant.
Based on a report it received on Monday, the CSN accused the power plant on Tuesday of exercising “inadequate control of radioactive material” and of providing “incomplete and deficient information.”
The leak, which according to the company was Level 1, is now classified by the CSN as Level 2, on a scale of one to seven. This makes it one of the four most serious mishaps in the history of Spain’s nuclear industry.
The CSN’s deputy director of radiological protection, Manuel Rodríguez, said that the agency had given out “inadequate” information because it had itself been misinformed, and added that “the radioactivity leaked outside the plant is estimated to be 100 times more than what the plant declared a week ago,” although at that time the company already knew the facts.
On Apr. 4, the company told CSN that 235,000 becquerels of radioactivity had been leaked, whereas in its latest report it put the number at 19.5 million becquerels.
The CSN met with the 13 mayors of the neighbouring municipal districts on Apr. 7 to inform them of the event, but the power plant’s managers did not reveal the true facts even then.
Greenpeace activist Bravo insists that this lack of information is serious.
The company that owns the plant, in which Spanish transnational companies Endesa and Iberdrola are the main shareholders, issued its own communiqué on Monday stating that “analysis of the particles that were found and removed confirm that the radiation is of scant significance and will not affect people’s health or the environment.”
“Once the clean-up work, which was given top priority, was completed, precise laboratory analyses on the particles, and the necessary calculations, were carried out,” it added.
But according to Bravo, this was “totally inadequate as a logical explanation of the origin and causes of the event, as well as for evaluating its radiological consequences.”
Moreover, he said, “there is no minimum threshold for the stochastic (random) effects of ionising radiation, even if the radioactivity were below regulation levels, which remains to be proven.”
Given what it calls the “irresponsible operation” of the nuclear plant, Greenpeace is demanding that the CSN and the government cancel its licence and suspend the activities of Ascó and another plant owned by the same company, as a precautionary measure.
Quantifying the level of radiation is essential to assess the radiological risk to persons and the environment, and also to establish whether any laws were broken at the nuclear plant.
While the debate goes on, the nuclear plant is continuing to operate, concern in civil society is rising and the government is waiting for a detailed report from the CSN to come to a decision. The head of CSN, Carmen Martínez Ten, will be appearing before the lower house of Congress to explain what has happened, on an as-yet undetermined date. (END/2008)”
I love the bit where the company employee says that “the radiation is of scant significance and will not affect people’s health or the environment”. I know I’m being idiosyncratic but I always take the view that those who have nothing to hide, hide nothing.
anthony nolan, saying that the US public has an irrational fear of nuclear power doesn’t really get you very far. But yeah, they are still building ‘em, even in the politically dysfunctional USA, with 26 new ones currently planned.
Your examples seem to show how safe the systems are – what was the net environmental or human health impact? I mean, waht a beat-up, spurred by irrational fears.
Fran,
You’re inventing information. Storage in the CSP concept is purely for night time running. Heat is stored in large concrete blocks (in the prefered form) for use during the night following the collection period. There is no attempt to store energy over a number of days. In this model the experience (in the northern hemisphere) is that 13% of the energy comes from natural gas firing in the hybride system. That figure is expected to be lower for Australia. The output figures that are quoted are based on the net output per facility (generally based on 50 megawatts per square kilometre) and are verified here
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/power_plant_data.html
, they can also be verified by taking the megawatt/hour figure from your link and dividing it by 365 and 10.
What is your “21% CF” figure? The output figures in the links are final annual energy output values after all inefficiencies are accounted for. It seems to me that you are derating that information a second time to come to your conclusions.
Once this perception has been corrected you can again confidently enthuse over CSP because it adds up to be cost effective against coal fired electricity generation just on the basis of the primary instalation itself before taking into account the cost of the associated coal mining facility, which for Munmora power station for example is a 47 square kilometre mine facility.
I encourage you to find a current costing for a 1 gigawatt coal fired power station.
Just looking down through the NREL link, they indicate that the SEGS installations are mostly all hybrides and they use the gas firing for over demand capacity as well as for non solar firing.
wilful, you write:
“Your examples seem to show how safe the systems are”.
I’m afraid you are going to have to unpack that for me because the examples don’t read that way to me. The examples I’ve cited so far highlight leaks of radioactive material and a culture of cover up. That I haven’t cited any sources of harm to humans so exposed doesn’t mean that there is no harm. Moreover, the ecological harm (remember that?) from radiocative and associated toxic leakage is unquantifiable at this point. If there were zero risks of harm either directly to humans or ecologically over the long term then I reckon that the coporate scientists and managers would operate on a basis of total transparency. To suggest, as it seems to me that you are, that the nuke industry’s lack of transparency is a necessary response to the irrational fears of uneducated people really is buying into coporate stratgies. Remember tobacco?
You write:
“with 26 new ones currently planned” which is about as reliable as an announcement from the NSW government about new rail links. Planned? Wiki (from where I assume you got yr info) states that:
“As of March 9, 2009, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had received applications for permission to construct 26 new nuclear power reactors”.
Not approved, though. Six may have been approved but construction commencement is unclear to me. I reiterate: none have actually been built since 1979.
Just a quick look at the cost of new coal fired power stations. It is not pretty.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/renewables-may-cost-less-than-coal-power-20090702-d6ki.html
http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/analysis-clean-coal/207
The article on coal fired power doesn’t show how they arrive at the “cumulative” $30 billion. Most installed cost estimates work out at about $US850-1100 per Kw nameplate for coal — which at the scale we are talking (more than 1GW) works out at about $US850m–>$1.1bn.
You might look at this for example.
You might note that in an Australian context, the supercritical 750MW coal reactor at Kogan Creek deployed by Siemens in 2007 cost $AUS1.1bn
To map my point, if someone could show me how we might have delivered a 750MW zero-emissions SEGS or other facility that should supply the same load at even $3.3 billion, I’d think that excellent value for money, even though as coal plants go, Kogan Creek would be one of the lesser polluters. (That said, it’s air cooled which probably subtracts substantially from its efficiency)
Doubtless of course, any facility for “clean” coal would be much more expensive than above.
Could we build one to replace Hazelwood in Victoria at anything like that cost? Hazelwood is so filthy it would be worth paying a lot more than Kogan Creek to lose it.
What you get when you divide the actual output by the theoretical or nameplate capacity given optimal conditions 100% of the time and express as a percentage. If something is rated at 100MW and yet averages only 21MW over the year, then it’s 21%.
The rating is their nominal output. You would have to be calculating for 24 hour operation to arrive at the figure that you are using. And to be fair you would have to apply the same test to all other power production facilities, few to none of which ever operate at rated capacity (especially nuclear) for a huge variety of reasons. The other issue is that energy demand is not flat. As they discovered in California in a higher temperature environment the demand very much tracks with the sun. With only basic adjustments energy demand can be encouraged to fit the with the flow of a solar based system, just as demand was earlier made to fit the operation of coal fired plants.
The 35 gigawatt figure includes the Snowey’s 6 gig potential output which I imagine explains your 27 gig figure, probably the coal power content. I talk about 140 gig CSP system because by the time it is fully in place a large section of transport energy will come from the grid.
At the end of the day, Solar Power is the only energy source that is free at source forever. That is cost stability built in.
BilB@55
That’s exactly what is done. Coal and nuclear come in at between 85% and 95% though sometimes one speaks of these in terms of “availability” i.e. how much capacity would be available, demand permitting. Of course periodic maintenance means that even these have to be taken off-line. By contrast with intermittent sources like SEGS and wind/wave the bulk of these periods off-line are scheduled meaning that the most efficient alternative can be brought online rather than having a much more expensive source on standby.
What time of the day do you think it most likely that people will be drawing down this power? Conceivably (and ideally from a SEGS POV, you’d want them doing this during the day, perhaps while they are at work, but you have to think that in many cases, unless they leave their cars at home, they will be doing this overnight i.e. drawing down the storage you were talking about or using the gas hybrid back up.
At the end of the day solar insolation will be unavailable for harvest
Sorry I couldn’t resist the pun.
More seriously though wind and tidal and wave are also free at source for ever, but what is most salient is the fully levelized cost and the environmental footprint of the collection equipment and their ability to match the output curves of our existing systems of energy generation. For those of us who want deep early cuts in emissions, the cost per unit of cut is important, because the higher the cost of a system per unit of emissions avoided the less relatively rational it is to use it.
Alright, here is the correct way for calculating it out. Australia uses 220 million gigawatt hours of electricity annually. To achieve that with CSP will require the proven output of 1594 SEGGS VIII Harper Lakes. I will fudge a little and assume that Harper Lake is 1 square kilometre requiring 20 such facilities per gigawatt of nominal output. Therefore Australia needs 80 off 1 gigawatt CSP facilities to achieve all of its current electricity needs, with all inefficiency factors accounted for.
So that is the bottom line. 80 times what ever the cost per gigawatt cost. It is wrong to just multiply out the Harper Lake cost as these are innefficient constructions. The optimum CSP field size is 250 megawatt. This is determined by the length of pipe to the turbine house. Above this size and the pressure and heat losses start to outway the economies of size. The Turbine house is the single biggest cost in a Solar field so we attempt to have the minimum number of them. But for the lowest cost installation there needs to be a commitment to at least 4 gigawatts in any one location. This is why the US costings a not a correct indication of optimal cost. The other factor is local costs which make up the largest part of the entire construction.
So there you have it. 80 times somewhere between 2 billion (the European formula) and 6 billion (the US formula).
OK BilB … lets take the lower figure of 2 billion, just so we don’t have to argue the toss. You’re saying 160 billion then. But you aren’t doing any storage and we still have to pay for inverters and HVDC lines at maybe 2 million per Km.
When you add that up and factor in the gas, the concrete, the steel and the glass and the cost of water supply, amortized over the 30 years specified in the solar thermie document, how many dollars does it cost to avoid 1 tonne of CO2?
Then of course there are the costs of the toxic effects of radiation which need to be factored in I would suggest. Dr Rosalie Burtell has made serious attempts to calculate global mortality and morbidity data from nuke power. Her CV includes:
United Nations Environment Programme,
Global 500 Laureate – 1993
Alternative Nobel Prize:
Right Livelihood Award – 1986
World Federalist Peace Award – 1988
Ontario Premier’s Council on Health:
Health Innovator Award – 1991
Rosalie Bertell, PhD, GNSH, is President of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH), and Editor in Chief of International Perspectives in Public Health.
Dr. Bertell served four years as Co-chair for Canada on the Ecosystem Health Workgroup of the Science Advisory Board to the US – Canada International Joint Commission (IJC) on the Great Lakes, and currently serves on the IJC Nuclear Task Force. She also serves as advisor to the Great Lakes Health Effects Program of Health Canada, and to the Environmental Assessment Board of Ontario.
Dr. Bertell Directed the International Medical Commission – Bhopal which investigated the aftermath of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, and of the International Medical Commission – Chernobyl, which convened the Tribunal on violations of the human rights of victims in Vienna, April 1996.
She has received numerous awards and five honorary Doctorate degrees since launching the IICPH in 1984.
Dr. Bertell is a member of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart.
Dr. Bertell earned a Doctorate in Biometry at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, in 1966, and has been working ever since time in environmental epidemiology. She has collaborated in analyses undertaken in the US, Canada, Japan, the Marshall Islands, Malaysia, India, Germany, Ukraine and other countries.
Author of Handbook for Estimating the Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation (1984, 1986) and the popular non-fiction book: No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a radioactive Earth, together with more than a hundred articles, book chapters and poems, Dr. Bertell has reached medical, scientific, and popular audiences around the globe.
No Immediate Danger, has been translated into Swedish, French, German and Finnish. A Russian translation is in process.
By choice, Dr. Bertell works with indigenous people and economically developing countries as they struggle to preserve their human rights to health and life in the face of industrial, technological and military pollution.
She was a founding member of IICPH, an attempt to institutionalize her growing concern for human survival on an intact planet.
Her calculus of nukes mortality and morbidity (power plants not bombs):
“Up to 1,300 million people have been killed, maimed or diseased by nuclear power since it’s inception. The industry’s figures massively underestimate the real cost of nuclear power, in an attempt to hide its victims from the world.”
It is easy to find her work extensively published on www.
The grid connection is the problem of Trans Grid and their equivalents. These businesses own and maintain the connection between the power generators and the distributors. The connection is their investment responsibility. Storage is being done in what ever proportion of the 80 gig CSP units are required for night time power supply. The European figure includes storage (heat storage not electricity storage), and this model includes no gas consumption for non solar as the input figures (138,000 megawatt hours) only included solar energy content. Although in practice there would be some natural gas being used. This model also makes no allowance for the hydro, wind and geothermal content. The real figure required is obviously significantly less than 80 gigawatts of capacity.
On the second question. Don’t know don’t care. This has to be done, there is no true alternative with an indefinite life.
On the Amortization issue I maintain that the entire programme can be funded from a 20% electricity retail price levy over a 40 year period. This is around 3 cents per unit and will yield 6.6 billion dollars per year. In this model the facilities are fully funded. Their only equity need is to fund their perpetual maintenance. Without the need for investment payback the electricity price is kept very low. Every Australian should be angry that the government forced the electricity distributors to raise their prices by 20% this year. So this 6.6 billion dollars has become a windfall for the electricity retailers with no benfit to the nation.
Calculation. 220 billion kilowatt hours times 3 cents.
Then of course there are the social issues around support for nukes being highly dependent on location as Andrew Macintosh’s 2007 survey for the Australia Institute shows. The results showed that better education equated to higher levels of opposition to having a nuke built near you. why would that be, I wonder?
Actually, Fran, the second question can be better answered another way. Australia’s total stationary energy emissions over the 30 years, which would amount to 8.250 billion tonnes of CO2, can be eliminated with a cost to the average family of 4 of just $5 per week this being the 20% levy on their electricity bill.
I think that that is worth shooting for, don’t you?
If the question was compare the construction CO2 emission footprint of 80 gig of CSP installations, I would be inclined to suggest that for all of the energy infrastuctures there would not be an appreciable difference when all parts of each operation was fully accounted for.
The solar field for SEGS IX turned ou to be 1.7 square kilometres (small adjustment to the plan required.
But here is some back ground information on CSP from the experts:-
Ten facts about solar thermal power
Solar thermal power plants are a lot like conventional power plants – with one major difference
Solar thermal power plants, often also called Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants, produce electricity in much the same way as conventional power stations. The difference is that they obtain their energy input through concentrated solar radiation, rather than fossil fuels, and then convert it to high-temperature steam or gas to drive a turbine or motor engine. This difference means that no pollutants are emitted in producing the electricity.
A solar thermal power plant built on about 1% of the surface of the Sahara Desert would be sufficient to satisfy the entire world’s electricity demand.
Solar energy arrives on the earth at a maximum power density of about 1 kilowatt per square meter. However, solar “productivity” is limited by certain geographical factors, including cloud cover and atmospheric humidity. In sunny, arid locations, one square kilometer of land can generate as much as 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year using solar thermal technology, enough power for 50,000 households..
Solar thermal power plants reduce air pollution: The solar energy falling on an area the size of a basketball court is equivalent to 650 barrels of oil a year
…or, in other words, each square meter of CSP concentrator surface is enough to reduce annual consumption of 200 to 300 kilograms (kg) of carbon dioxide. In addition, the “energy payback” time of CSP systems, taking into account the energy expended in their manufacture, is about five months, which compares well with their useful life of approximately 30 to 40 years. Most of the CSP solar field materials can be recycled.
Solar thermal power is reliable and available when needed most – during peak demand hours
In most developed countries, the peak demand period – during the hottest part of the day, when air conditioners are running in the office and home – coincides with the period of time when the solar thermal power plant is at peak production. In addition, solar thermal power, as predictable and reliable as the sun shining in the desert, is a renewable alternative to natural gas “peakers”, as opposed to other forms of renewable energy, which are either baseload or intermittent.
Solar thermal power plants can be built (relatively) quickly
Solar power plants can generally be built in their entirety within a few years and can follow demand more closely than most conventional power projects. This is primarily because solar plants are built almost entirely with modular, commodity materials and thus have short development and construction times. In contrast, many types of conventional power projects, especially coal and nuclear plants, require long lead times, and this causes significant disparities between the demand and the supply.
Solar thermal power plants are big – but relative to other types of power plants – they’re space efficient
CSP plants seem to use a lot of land, but when looking at electricity output versus total size, they use less land than hydroelectric dams (including the size of the lake behind the dam) or coal plants (including the amount of land required for mining and excavation of the coal). While all power plants require land and have an environmental impact, the best locations for solar power plants are on land, such as deserts, for which there might be few other uses.
Solar thermal power can be used with energy storage systems or combined with other energy sources to provide all day power
CSP plants can be designed for solar-only or for hybrid operation, as in California where gas-fired boilers provide steam to back-up solar-generated steam. Thermal energy storage systems, including molten salt, can extend the operational time of solar thermal power plants, sometimes with six to 12 hours of storage. In addition, solar thermal power can complement other renewable energy sources, such as wind, which are available during off-peak hours.
Solar thermal power plants create permanent jobs and are good for the local economy
There are two main reasons why solar thermal power plants offer an economic advantage: (1) they are labor intensive, so they generally create more jobs per dollar invested than conventional electricity generation technologies, and (2) they use primarily indigenous resources, such that most of the energy dollars can be kept at home. Most importantly, there is no need to import the energy source (i.e., sunshine) and spend local funds outside of the region.
Solar thermal plants produce electricity whose current and future costs are known with certainty
Electricity produced from solar thermal power plants is a fixed-cost generation resource, generally sold through long term (20 or 30 year) power purchase agreements in which the cost to the consumer is known in advance. Additionally, a diversified portfolio of energy sources, including solar thermal, decreases consumers’ exposure to market fluctuations, including the volatile cost of natural gas (which solar thermal typically replaces in the portfolio). The reduced demand for natural gas itself will lead to lower prices.
Solar thermal power can be cheaper than power from fossil fuels when all cost externalities are considered (and even when they’re not)
While many of the costs of fossil fuels are well known, others (pollution related health problems, environmental degradation, the impact on national security from relying on foreign energy sources) are indirect and difficult to calculate. These are traditionally external to the pricing system, and are thus often referred to as externalities. According to the Stern Review, published in October 2006 by H.M. Treasury, global warming is the result of colossal market failure, i.e., failure to price fossil fuel’s externalities correctly. A corrective pricing mechanism, such as a carbon tax, could lead to renewable energy, such as solar thermal energy, becoming cheaper to the consumer than fossil fuel based energy.
Even without pricing cost externalities, the cost of solar thermal power is going down. Currently, the cost of solar thermal produced energy can be close to 12 cents (US) per k/Wh. However, many economists and investors predict that this price will continuously drop over the next ten years with increased installed capacity, to 6 cents per kW/h, as a result of technological improvements, economies of scale and volume production.
Well, how do you react to that, Fran?
There is a believable proveable plan with certain results, base on the 20 year operation of running CSP facilities, that can be banked on. Had this been implemented 12 months ago when it was first put forward there would now be a green fund with 6.6 billion dollars, sufficient for 2 or 3 gigawatts of clean solar electricity, and the first installation would have been cutting ground right now. By the time the first installation was ready for connection the green fund would have risen to 18 billion dollars minus the cost of the first plant and a proportion of the cost of the HVDC cables to connect it to the eastern grid, and the cost of some wind plants as well. And Australia would be proveably proactive in the effort to reduce global warming.
All of that for less than the cost of a Big Mac per week per family, and a cost that business can write of a a marginal cost increase. There are only a few Australian business who would find this difficult and those business could be accommodated in various ways.
Furthermore, this plan would allow time for a true emissions reduction environment to be developed to work on the many other forms of CO2 release, that the CPRS wrote off as too hard, in the myriad other parts of the economy.
Perhaps you see a better plan?
BilB said:
That sounds impressive, but I’m wondering at what cost. You seem to want to exclude grid connection and storage costs but these are ultimately part of what must be paid by end users, one way or another. Assuming your 100 GwH figure produces 86KwH per day — but unless you can store this efficiently at manageable cost or use it immediately, whether you collect it or not is beside the point.
If CSPs could be used to supply the heat and energy to turn waste biomass into syngas (from which through FT processes one could supply the liquid fuel for the night load, this might prove economically viable). To do this though you would want to place the CSPs close to the existing grid and a source of large volumes of waste biomass, or at worst, on a transport link to the source that had minimal carbon footprint. Even so, it won’t be cheap.
This plant for example, is only 290Mw and is going to cost $1.5 billion, which implies that at 1.1Gw it’s going to be closer to $6 billion, not including connection costs. Personally, I’d be OK with this cost and maybe a little more — maybe 9 billion — if this could provide a 24/7 system included grid connection and could supply at a cost of about 10 cents per KwH. Still, if you multiply that by Australia’s baseload demand, we are talking very big bickies — certainly around 250 billion — much bigger than the cost in nukes. The next problem would be how to sell doing this in the kind of time frame needed. And don’t forget, you have to retire coal as it comes online. But if we are ruling out nuclear, then this would probably be the next cleanest thing.
You might also be interested in this document:
CSP Outlook 2009
As to funding, I still think funds from an ETS would be the easiest option, especially since it can accelerate the phase out of coal.
That CSP Outlook link is a good document.
Any autority on CSP will tell you that you cannot translate from one country to another the cost projections of CSP. There are far too many variables. CSP plants are not a “buy in”, they are predominately a build on site. On the Arizona project it is a small block costed as such rather than being part of a rolling development. This makes a massive difference in cost, from as much a $270 per mirror sq mtr to as little as $120 per mirror sq mtr, for example. As I said before reality lies somewhere between 2 billion dollars and 6 billion dollars per gigawatt. I am putting my best guess at 2.something billion dollars for the early installations.
As far as grid connection is concerned, there is an argument for a national HVDC connection for other reasons. This is not a specific cost to CSP. There are parts of Australia suitable for CSP that are beside suitable cables for grid connection at minimal cost. This is not a defining issue.
You seem to be missing the point on storage. CSP stores energy as heat, rather than as electricity. The heat is stored in concrete blocks or, as the ten points above suggest, in molten salt. So when there is plenty of solar energy in the system, at a time of reduced demand, the oil transporting the heat is channeled through the storage blocks. This heat is tapped off at a later time, as much 10 hours later. The national HVDC grid allows for electricity to be used on both sides of our continent, thereby extending the solar collection time by as much as 4 hours.
This is 24/7 power supply. To see this you need to grasp how solar energy is collected to heat oil which in turn melts tanks of salt, with the heat to be drawn upon many hours later. That is why I doubled the required capacity. Half of the system is storing heat to be used to power the country during the night. The hybride system has additional gas burners to power the boilers during extended non solar periods (a cloudy week for instance). This is true baseload capability, but in a more demand reactive form than coal power, because the CSP system does not have furnace lag.
Waste biomass will not need to be converted. There is an Australian developed gasifier now being commercialised which converts pretty well any source bio material into a burnable gass and biochar. This is a very promising new technology.
In the model as outlined above, the electricity cost will be less than 5 cents per unit. Principally because the model provides a “paid up” system. The CSP installations are not carrying a payback plus interest cost. Therefore at the time when the country is entirely dependent on low cost electricity, this system provides it, and in a totally fair way because the system is paid for in advance by the consumer. The consumer therefore gets the benefit in continued low cost clean electricity on a time frame that meets the global need for carbon reductions.
This is the most direct and universally fair method possible which in no way conflicts with ETS iniatives.
BilB
The problem here is round trip efficiency. How much do you lose moving between the storage and the electricity you want to generate, since this is the primary constraint on how much out put during the post-harvest (or low insolation) periods you can output. The less efficient it is, the more it costs to store enough to do the 24-hour job 365 days each year.
The other problem is this. While enthusiasts for mitigation like me aren’t bothered at paying a lot more for near zero energy, one suspects that many others will be leary of doing so. It’s considerations such as this that keep coal in the game — and it shouldn’t be. That for me is why nuclear appeals. I am primarily interersted in getting rid of coal with as little fossil NG in replacement as possible.
The storage and recovery process I believe is near 100%. I do not ever recall seeing it mentioned as carrying a loss of efficiency. Non issue.
I have gone to pains ot point out, Fran, that the public is currently paying the same amount as the programme requires now, but with out any benefit. Your last 2 electricity bill carried a 20% increse that was forced upon distributors by government. At the Integral Energy web site they actually stated that they did not wwnt to apply the increase, but had no choice. I doubt that the public at large even realise that they was a rate increase. Most people if those who I know are any indacation thought thet the higher bill was because they had been using more electricity. So now the distributors are accruing a wind fall cash injection.
The real plan seems to have played out when the NSW government tried to force the distributors just recently to buy into the power generation infrastructure in some way (at least I think that that is what was happening), but the distributors did not want to have any part of it.
Nuclear power is the “fast food” thinking of the energy world. It can only be glossed up to look good if you ignore realities. One question that I need to have answered is where have France been hiding their nuclear waste all of these years. I am guessing that they have been using the caverns created in Muroroa Attol from those “weapons tests” that they were so insistant on concluding. This I suspect is a little secret for future generations to discover and have to cope with, long after all economic benefits from the energy created have passed.
The energy possible from Uranium is energy left over from the formation of the planet. It is absolutely finite. Other than from the possibility of burning plutonium down to nothing. But that technology is as equally available as nuclear fusion energy at present.
The other issue with nuclear power is using it at the wrong time. Global warming may yet have some surprises such as increased cirrus cloud which could exacerbate global warming while reducing the effectiveness of solar energy conversion systems.
If that were to be an outcome in 70 or 80 years, then full on use of nulcear power may be the only future option. But if all of the uranium has been used inefficiently in the early part of the century, then that could be a death blow for large scale human civilisation. You should also take careful note of the comment in the ten points earlier that solar energy is a fixed cost, zero plus the cost of conversion (a steadily declining cost). Nuclear power is guaranteed to be an increasing cost as it will follow the same path as oil, as uranium resources become streatched with increasing demand.
Solar energy is the only energy source which cannot be over utilised.
Fran Barlow makes the point of the political impact of dollar costs for the end user as an objection to non-nuke alternatives to coal. It is an effective strategy to slide backward and forward between an informed account of the technical issues around various forms of power generation and political constraints.
I raise only one political constraint which is that the Australian public is adequately informed about the history of the nuclear power industry in its handling of highly radiocative (read toxic) material along the entirety of the nuclear cycle – mining to waste storage. The data shows thtat people are generally willing to support a transition to nuclear until someone suggests that they might be living near one.
There is a technical issue that needs to be raised which is the availability of water on the driest continent on earth. Nukes use significant amounts of water for cooling. Less or more than coal, I don’t know although with some effort could probably find out but that is not the point here. The issue is that they use so much that the range of available sites has already been assessed and limited to coastal venues.
Andrew Macintosh’s Australia Institute Research Paper No. 40, January 2007 lists recommended sites. He notes that siting issues are limited by localism:
“In Australia, half of the population opposes nuclear energy and two thirds say they would oppose a nuclear power plant in their local area. Given this, in order for there to be a thorough and full-blooded debate about nuclear energy, it is necessary to identify the sites that are best suited to nuclear power plants.”
Preferred general locations:
· in Queensland – Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, Gladstone, Bundaberg,
Sunshine Coast and Bribie Island;
· in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory – Port Stephens,
Central Coast, Botany Bay, Port Kembla and Jervis Bay/Sussex Inlet;
· in Victoria – South Gippsland, Western Port, Port Phillip and Portland;
· in South Australia – Mt Gambier/Millicent, Port Adelaide and Port
Augusta/Port Pirie.
I don’t know about other states but the chance of building a nuke at any of the locations in NSW is nil except for, and even this is a long shot, Port Kembla as it is already a heavily industrialised area. All of the others are too ecologically sensitive to be acceptable to local populations. Port Stephens (entrance to Myall Lakes Ntional Park) and Jervis Bay? Not a chance. Botany Bay? Even less. Southern Sydney residents have had enough trouble with the Lucas Heights already. The central coast? Fishing and ecological lobbies too strong to even start to contemplate it.
Want one near you?
BilB said:
I’d be very happy (but surprised) if round-trip efficiency were 80% (i.e. about what you get with pumped storage.) I suspect if there were any substantial delay in using the stored heat RTE would fall dramatically. I’d be thrilled if good evidence said otherwise.
AIUI they store almost all of it in France, and some has been sent to Russia for reprocessing. You should know that the Indians reprocess to remove fission products and so they have substantially improved the relationship between the volume of waste, the violume of uranium needed and the amount of power produced.
The vast majority of what may be called high-level or transuranic waste is reusable with reprocessing. There’s actually a good article about this just posted at BNC.
There is no problem with the supply of uranium, since it can be extracted even from seawater and as the post at BNC points out, the IFR is about 150-200 times as efficient in its use of uranium as LWRs and can use that hazmat. All of Australia’s annual baseload energy (quoted at 30GwYe) could be supplied from about 30 tonnes of uranium as compared with 150,000,000 tonnes of coal. And then there is the even more abundant thorium.
Transmuting this waste is very attractive, because it makes no call on new uranium or thorium, degrades waste beneath the point at which it is potentially weaponizable, and reduces the volume of the most dangerous hazmat. Given that ther is an existing problem to deal with, which will continue to exist whatever we think of nuclear power, this seems a win-win. More energy and less hazmat.
Anthony Nolan said:
That’s true, but I wonder if the question were, would you prefer to live within the footprint of a nuclear reactor or a coal reactor? What the answer would be. What would people you lived along the path of the coal trucks say? It’s all very well for the majority of us who fairly obviously, aren’t within the footprint of coal mines or coal transport or coal reactors to think that this is preferable, but the human calculus doesn’t recommend coal.
It should be. A detailed discussion of the issues is Here. The water used for cooling is re-used repeatedly — only the losses should be counted and these are
a) modest
AND
b) apply to all thermal power plants that use steam i.e. most CSPs, geothermal, coal, gas etc. As this article notes: the tradeoffs in water for CSPs are not inconsiderable. With air cooled, you lose efficiency so you need more mirrors.
And geothermal may well turn out to be the thirstiest of them all.
Nuclear plants can be sited at the coast of course, where they can make use of seawater and use waste heat to do flash desal. Nuclear plants need not be water cooled of course. At some loss in efficiency, they can be air cooled. Alternatively, and much better still in some locales, Molten salt and gas cooled reactors do not require water.
Why wouldn’t you use the ocean? In the case of coal, you want your plant as close to supply as is consistent with the position of the grid connection as the petatonnes of feedstock costs a lot to transport, and that is a constraint. Ditto with gas. Given the comparatively trivial mass of the fuel for a nuclear plant — an IFR outputting one GwYe would need about a milkcrate-size quantity of fuel — you can put the plant anywhere it suits that is near the grid. And as noted, you can use waste heat to do desal as a bonus.
There’s also a discussion here at BNC under TCASE6
Now personally, I’d be perfectly relaxed to have one at, say, Maroubra or North Head, and I’d have no objection to moving next door. In fact, if a bargain in property came up there, based on fears of the plant, I’d be down there to snap it up. I don’t like the idea of them interfering with the delicate ecology of rivers through heat rejection — that applies to coal and gas as well — so using the Lane Cove River just down the road wouldn’t be good.
As I’ve said a number of times, I regard it as improbable that we will be seeing nuclear plants here in Australia anytime soon. No party is going to let itself be wedged fighting out at campaign with this in the platform, and so, I regard discussion of the the NBT (next best thing) as simply pragmatic. That will probably turn out in the short term to be a combination of CCGT, wind, CSP and some pumped storage/hydro and tidal, wave and biomass on the side.
The rest of the world of course, will use nuclear, and hopefully we too will finally lose our angst over this long enough before we have gone as far as we can with the above to bring them online.
Here are some answers from the those in the know:-
http://social.csptoday.com/industry-insight/molten-salt-magic-ingredient
This article highlights a trend. And that is that CSP efficiency is steadily increasing lending credible support to the claims in the CSP Outlook 2009 publication.
Fran: the ecological issues with saltwater cooling appear to fall be: i) death of marine life from being sucked into intake pipes; ii) transformation of microecology at the point of discharge of warm water; iii) occasional leakage of radioactive material into marine environment. I note that you’ve proferred a desalination capacity as a bonus for salt water cooled nukes. Honestly, if opposition to nukes wasn’t already stiff enough then throwing in the additional ecological nastiness of a desal plant ought to send opposition through the roof. A nuke/desal plant on North Head? Port Stephens Bay? Jervis Bay? Do you ever go to these places?
Anthony Nolan said:
That ought not to be a problem that is beyond the wit of designers to mitigate.
A more significant problem but again, one must consider the balance. What are the implications associate with the discharge of megatonnes of coal or gas combustion effluent? If masses of concrete must be laid and steel used for wind farms or solar plants, doesn’t this have a footprint?
Got a cite for that? How often? With what consequences?
Fairly regularly, yes. I have family who live at Sanctuary Point. North Head is a regular visit. And I generally head up to Port Stephens once very other year.
The bottom line is this. Every day that a coal or gas plant does the work that some other near zero emitter could do, is a blow to the ecology. The reality is that the argument is not really between renewables and nukes but between nukes and coal/gas. As Three Gorges Dam shows, even hydro isn’t that clean a source, in environmental terms.
“The reality is that the argument is not really between renewables and nukes but between nukes and coal/gas. ”
That has to be the bizarre statement of the week.
Put another way it reads to be, our future is not a choice between safe/clean and poison, it is between one kind of poison or the other.??
How can anyone seriously look at the numbskull politicians that this country throws up and then imagine that these flakes could properly regulate the type of marginal business that the nuclear industry is. There’d be people mixing nuclear fuel in buckets all over the place in no time at all. There must be some kind of emotional insecurity that drives some people to think that “the nuclear club” is something that must be joined. And then there is the mindnumbing blind faith that nuclear waste can easily cared for over the hundreds or thousands of years required. And further, that future generations are going to want to look after this generation’s nuclear poop. How pissed off are they going to be to have that responsibility when it serves no useful purpose for them in their time?
BilB@74
The intemperate venting you offer above really does your claims no credit. “Nuclear poop”? Oh dear …
As I’ve acknowledged above, the prospect of nuclear power coming to Australia anytime soon is near zero if not actually zero. On the other hand, no amount of venting amongst those with serious aesthetic objections to nuclear power is likely to restrain much of the developed world adopting what is, after all, likely to be the cheapest near zero emissions energy technology available, especially when it is now clear that even the waste of LWRs can be harnessed as fuel and a serious effort to curb emissions at the least possible cost is upon us.
Luckily for the planet’s people, Australia’s reluctance to adopt nuclear only bears upon a modest slice of the world’s carbon dioxide management problem. I’d like to believe that if as seems certain, we are ruling out nuclear here, we will instead spend the cash needed to rapidly replace coal with CSPs and other renewables and ancillaries needed, but I have to say that I’m almost as skeptical about that happening between now and 2020 as I am of nuclear stepping into the breach. Most of the people raising nuclear (not me of course) only do so in order to make business-as-usual look good by comparison. They know that unlike nuclear power, renewables are no threat to their business or the value of fossil fuel assets.
Fran, you’ve characterised opposition to nukes several times as “aesthetic” which puzzles me. Could you unpack what this means for you? As it is this characterisation is an obstacle to understanding. To assist this process I’ll offer two broad definitions from the New Shorter Oxford:
i) pertaining to the perception by the senses (L18);
ii) of or pertaining to the philosophy of the beautiful or of art.
Anthony Nolan asked:
Certainly. While your citatetion of the most common or literal usage is right, I’m enlarging the usage to include things that seem culturally objectionable, reragrdless of whether there might alsom be some measurable criterion of utility that something also fails.
For example, I find those large urban four-wheel-drives aesthetically objectionable. I react viscerally when I see them, and have to fight the urge to do them mindless vandalism. When I hear of kids being backed over in driveways or some horror smash, I find myself asking whether it was one of those urban assault vehicles involved, but objectively they probably aren’t any worse than other kinds of vehicle. It just seems like they ought to be.
So my objection is essentially aethetic, and would be even if I could support my predisposition with some measurable data about how they obstruct the vision of other drivers, use too much fuel, or were more hazardous to pedestrians.
Similarly, as BilBs post attests, the objections to nuclear power have deep cultural wellsprings in notions of naturalness and cleanliness that exclude processes that seem not to be biological — and heat from the deacy of radioactive substances seems not only unnatural but beyond the comprehension of most people.
Humans have deemed the sun “natural” as a matter of axiom from the time we achieved consciousness of self. It is part of our iconography — existential — all the best gods control the sun — and so when one asks — what is better, “solar” or “nuclear” it verges on being contrary to culture to not prefer solar energy, and wind is not far behind. Nuclear is bound up with things we feel dreadful about — the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with death by insidious and hard to comprehend means — cancer. Little wonder that even its proponents have reservations.
And accordingly, the idea that even a flyspeck of the Earth’s surface might have to house this waste, seems like anathema. Most unpleasing — and thuis copntrary to aesthetics.
Fran: seems OK to enlarge common usage of a word to me as that is how language lives and breathes. What you offer is an explanation of “aesthetic objection” rather than just “aesthetic”. That is your “aesthetic objection” may be to something that you find culturally objectionable regardless of the utility of the thing (or process or whatever). Well, there appears to be an incommensurable difference here: I object to large 4WD’s for non-commercial purposes precisely on the grounds that they are designed to crush the occupants of other vehicles in the event of head on crashes thus saving the gene pool of the owner/occupants from extirpation. That, at least, is the way they are subliminally marketed. My objection, as a non-4WD armed driver, is therefore totally pragmatic.
In so far as non-commercial 4WD’s act as public statements of the mind state of the owner/drivers I don’t find them offensive so much as laughable. I recall that a decade or so ago Jeep put out a Cherokee model called ‘Rebel’. What a hoot. No-one with an ounce of rebellousness in them would ever buy into a corporate trick like that. I cannot control the mind states of others so there is no point sitting in aesthetic judgement on them except and until their mind state actually threatens my safety or security. Hence my objection to 4WD’s.
Notwithstanding the above there remains the fact that your characterisation of anti-nuke opinion as primarily aesthetic appears designed to marginalise the real science that underpins such objections. As if our issues with nukes are a matter of mere aesthetics. Moreover, I think that Blake, along with other Romantics, not least William Morris, may have detected with their own sense perception exactly what ails us today:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
In other words even if our objections were only aesthetic, and they are not only that, denying aesthetics a rightful place in public discussion is too limiting. The groups likely to object to having a nuke buit near them would do so (in Jervis Bay and Port Stephens for example) on aesthetic as well as health and other grounds.
I agree with you on the sketicism, Fran.
Nuclear should be an “if there is no other option” resource, in the first instance, and in the second a “when there is no other option”. In Australia’s case, we have every possible other option available. So to flick to Nuclear because it appears to have some of the properties of a global warming solution is very shallow thinking. For some countries it may be the solution of best fit. Not Australia.
Your comment about boundless Uranium resources is largely false, I believe. The comment about uranium from sea water, for instance, is akin to CCS logic. It is not OK to spend most of what is gained to feed a process simply because it is possible. People have been talking of extracting gold from sea water for as long as I can remember. Does any one do it? No.
It is beyond belief that our government is determined to maintain using coal at all costs. One way or another. While using every possible excuse or argument to fool the public into thinking that this is responsible government. So if I fly off the handle, it is a symptom of the intense frustration arising from our situation. I expect that there will a steadily increasing incidense of out bursts from many commenters as we move forward here.
Here is an interesting perspective of…. It is a little subtle. See what you think.
http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6039#more
Anthony Nolan said:
You misunderstand. I don’t intend to marginalise those who object to nuclear power on aesthetic grounds. Although I’m personally keen on deriving public policy from questions of utility, I’ve never derided those who attach weight to what I’ve described as falling under the rubric of aesthetics. I only begin to take umbrage when someone presents what is clearly an aesthetic-cultural question as if it were one based on objective considerations. While many of us like to imagine ourselves as driven purely by reason, if we are candid, at the margins, all of us have a sense of what we like that is informed by our sense of what would be culturally pleasing. With this in mind, I can perfectly understand why someone might like quarter-acre free-standing suburbia and/or hate the idea of nuclear waste potentially sitting in some containment facility for several thousand years. As Mr Horse was given to saying “No Sir, I don’t like that.” You can’t and probably shouldn’t argue with that. It makes no more sense to object to that than to ask someone why they like Mahalia Jackson and hate Oasis.
In relation to nuclear, I would simply say — OK, you don’t like nuclear power — give me a plan without nuclear power that would underpin the kind of society on a world scale you’d think the best of all possible worlds. And if they come up with one that can’t work without, sooner or later, imposing serious misery on others or which would demand things that would never be accepted by others I am going to object on grounds of utility.
I know you believe that serious prospective harm attaches to resort to nuclear power, but as yet I see nothing comparable in scale to that attaching to existing energy systems. All energy systems that can deliver power in the volumes needed have a footprint. All of them affect ecosystem services. It’s simply not possible for 6.8 billion going on 9 billion people to live with as little work as we all hope to surrender without making major demands on that system. Renewable energy systems require massive expenditure in systems to harvest and store the energy we need to power the machines to replace the labour we are no longer surrendering. The reason that they do is that unlike the fossil store — which is a huge supply of capital — we are wanting to gather incoming energy in something like real time — and this energy is disparate, rather than concentrated and intermittent rather than ready-to-hand. Back in the 1500s people worked a lot harder and drew much less comfort from the environment — so much less that they would periodically die in large numbers, and most didn’t survive much past about 50. It seems that at that time in the UK, they lived on about 20KwH per person per day, almost all of it renewable. And although their harvest techniques would be comical by today’s standards because there were far fewer of them and each had a lot more land to exploit, it worked, after a fashion. There were no pensions, infanticide and infant mortality was common, people died in large numbers from unremarkable ailments or changes in the weather, but the ecosphere was in balance. The capacity to harness fossil fuels was the alchemy that opened the door to the wealth we first worlders take for granted. Freeing many of us from attachment to the land, meant that science and engineering could flourish and that we had the largesse to invent notions like childhood and the sanctity of human life, and could support people who were aged and infirm. Today, the average Briton has a fraction of the land on average her/his mediaeval forebears had, but consumes on average about 5-6 times as much energy, not including the energy embedded in stuff that is imported. Unless one can bridge 105-130 kwH per person per day gap, not only in the UK but everywhere, without fossil fuels, our choice is misery or fossil fuels. And we know that fossil fuel combustion at industrial scale will sooner or later lead to misery, so the choice will be misery sooner or later. One might not like nuclear power, but on a world scale, I see no other plausible option, particularly if one agrees that the health of the developing world will entail them using something comparable to the average energy used by the average European. I find misery most unaesthetic. And I also find the idea of coal plants underpinning third world development unaesthetic, because as we see in China, it will lead to radically diminished health, relative to what nuclear power would deliver.
BilB said:
No it isn’t. Recovering uranium from seawater would not prejudice EROEI by very much at all. Depending on the process, it might diminish it by 1-2%. Estimate put the break even cost of this at about $120-200 per pound — well above current prices, but not really a significant factor in the cost of energy, given the trivial mass of fuel needed for each unit of output. Conceivably, if one combined this with desal, the cost could decline. Then again, there’s lots of uranium (and thorium) in coal slag and fly ash, and we aren’t short of that.
They don’t not because they can’t but because it is uneconomic. If uranium were in short supply, then it would become economic. Of course, we would reprocess waste if it came to that, or use thorium or MOX.
Really, what we should be doing is rolling out IFR or Thorium plants, since these could feed on the waste to which most people take such strong exception, reducing its volume and its degree of proliferation/contamination hazard. You don’t even need to mine uranium to do this. Best of all, if all reactors were IFR, the reason for doing PUREX would vanish and you could ban it, since the only reason would be for the building of nuclear weapons. If you really hate nuclear waste, and you think there’s already too much, the IFR and thorium reactors like the LFTR should be on your wishlist.
BilB linked above to an imaginary speech by Obama retreating from the consumer culture of contemporary America.
This reminds me of a 1966 speech I posted in part here some while back by Bobby Kennedy.
Today’s headline
http://www.smh.com.au/national/electricity-prices-set-to-rise-by-62-by-2013-20091215-ksv6.html
As this ridiculous situation sets in you might think back to the plan that I have outlined above. What makes more sense, a flat 20% increase in electricity prices with a certain outcome, or a progressive increase in electricity prices to 62% with out any discernable plan at all?
BilB@83
Well to be fair to the CPRS (and I really don’t want to be fair to the CPRS but I suppose I must be honest) low to middle-income households are to receive between 100 and 120% compensation for any CPRS-related rises.
SOme of these are rises in costs associated with infrastructure which would, presumably, have applied regardless of whether we had other energy systems. Any costs associated with those would have been additional.
Fran@ 81: I’ll cherry pick your comments if you don’t mind.
“I only begin to take umbrage when someone presents what is clearly an aesthetic-cultural question as if it were one based on objective considerations.”
Aesthetic issues are subject to objective considerations. aesthetics, properly approached, is amatter of rational experience and is not entirely confined tom the spaces “wehre the wild thing s are” ie the irrational. The point of me citing Blake @ 78 was that the poem reflected the lived experience of the British working classes so well that it became the hymn of the working classes. This was because Blake beautifully captured their despair at their (objective) living conditions and their aspirations for something a whole lot better.
“I know you believe that serious prospective harm attaches to resort to nuclear power, but as yet I see nothing comparable in scale to that attaching to existing energy systems.”
No, I domn’t believe that nuke are harmful. It is not a matter of faith. It is a matter of objective fact. I’ve cited data above to that extent.
“Back in the 1500s people worked a lot harder and drew much less comfort from the environment…”
Well, I’m a modernist too and am definitely not some nature romantic with a vision splendid of everyone eating pulses after reciting catechisms to Gaia while living in hippie run “age of the feral” year zero re-education communes. You present the issue as if there might not be alternative ways to organising industrial production except along lines that we have already experienced with their attendant externalisation of costs (onto working people and the peoples of the periphery) and their excoriating impact on the natural world.
In short it appears to me that you are yearning for a plug and play solution: unplug coal, plug in nukes and off we go. I want greater change than that type of solution allows.
I also take the view that renewables will probably work well enough with sufficient capital investment. They haven’t been trialled sufficiently and they are opposed by the major energy companies because as they are either free (solar, wind, wave, rocks) or relatively cheap compared to oil and coal then the rate of profit from them is considerably less.
In the end it looks as if I have convinced you as little as you’ve convinced me.
The difference between the 20% plan and the 62% (it is actually more than that more like 76%) is that at a 20% electricity price increase the increase in goods and services prices will be nil or neglible because it represents a marginal increase in a marginal cost to most businesses. A 62% increase on the other hand is a significant increase in a marginal cost which will need to be adjusted for. The compounding effect of this adjustment will cause an increase in everyone’s living expences. More importantly the areas where the 62% increase will be most felt is in educational institutions, governemnt offices, administrative offices local council offices and street lighting. These are all areas beyond the compensations offered by the CPRS.
The question that should be being asked here is where is the money from the electricity price increases going? There has already been a 20% price increase (6.6 billion dollars per year nationally), where will the further 56% (from the article above) go? We are talking about a further 18.5 billion dollars each year for a total of 25 billion dollars a year every year. Or 750 billion dollars to 2040. This makes what I was talking about seem like pocket money, doesn’t it Fran??? And for that $$$750 billion there is still no clear plan other than that the government wants to keep extracting and using COAL. WTFfff?
And does anybody seriously believe….
“If the CPRS is not implemented or is delayed, regulated prices will be updated to reflect that policy. Therefore, customers will not pay for the CPRS if it is not implemented. Additionally, if the CPRS is implemented in a different form we will consider the new arrangements in setting the prices.”
Anthony said:
What you have cited is either not relevant to contemporary nuclear power or exaggerates the extent of the measurable problem at least, realtive to the near certain alternatives.
Not at all. There are other ways of meeting energy demand that would, given suffficient resources, be technically feasible, but the high cost of these resources and the timelines along which they’d need to be built would make them incompatible in practice with contemporary needs. If you are going to pull a coal plant out of service you need to have new equivalent capacity ready to operate from Day 1 or be prepared to accept load shedding, which, is not politically sustainable. It must be able to duplicate the load curves of the retired plant, at least during the main part of the day. To do that with intermittent sources requires investment significantly greater, which is why so little of load is borne by intermittents on a world scale. In Denmark, which is the poster child for wind, the system is underpinned by Swedish nuclear, Norwegian hydro and German coal.
Now don’t get me wrong — I’m all for energy-efficiency foreclosing demand for new thermal capacity, but this is not going to get us anywhare near being able to abandon fossil thermal.
You’re simply wrong on this. Major energy companies are involved in wind and solar — AGL being case in point. While it is fair to say that the big fossil fuel asset holders are trying to protect the value of their assets in opposing a cost on carbon, the main threat to the value of these assets comes from nuclear power, which can do a job that renewables, at comparable cost, cannot do. The hard reality is that even putting a suitable cost on carbon dioxide emissions is not going to make renewables as cheap to use as coal. The immediate beneficiaries would be gas and nuclear — although a combination of hydro/gas + wind/solar is obviously a possibility.
You might wonder, if you were right, why the Chinese would use coal at all if renewables were of roughly comparable cost. They can decide what suits them, and what suits them is rapid development. Right now they are expanding all sources of energy, but coal still comprises 80% of their load, and that won’t change greatly by 2020. Do you really think that energy companies are controlling the Chinese government?
It’s not merely a question of what could be done
PS
It’s not merely a question of what could be done in theory, but what would be done in practice. In practice, in Australia, a no nukes policy with a high carbon price would mean an energy system based largely on gas and coal — more gas than now, but with renewables an adjunct rather than the central feature of the system.
That all comes down to political will and insight. I’ve just had an extensive conversation with my buddy BK (who is an economist, had been a ministerial aid in the Whitlam government, has done some pretty amazing things commercially, now retired) and he maintains that the market approach is the best method for promoting renewables. I disagree, and asked what environment created the Snowey Mountains scheme (6.5 gigawatts of base load capability before water supplies started to decline) the very backbone of Eastern Australia’s electricity stability for the last 50 years? It wasn’t market forces. And what was the environment that created the quango that bought up all of the NSW coal reserves in the early 80′s (I know that this happened because a good friend from high school was part of the geology team charged with assessing the reserves) which created the stable low electricity prices that have maintained Australia’s commercial edge for the last 25 years. It was not the market. It was political will.
That same political energy is about to launch Australia down the most disterous path possible. What is it they say in business? “It is always the third generation that is the undoing”
Baby James, baby Kevin,……
Fran @ 87 writes:
“What you have cited is either not relevant to contemporary nuclear power or exaggerates the extent of the measurable problem at least, realtive to the near certain alternatives.”
I’ve cited evidence @7, 44, 46 and 49 in support of one of my arguments which is that there is no social trust of the nuke industry becuase of an extensive history of accidents followed by cover up. Your claim that the leakage of radioactive material into the environment is not or has not been shown as harmful flies in the face of the available evidence regarding radioactive materials which is that the time frame for assessing harm is beyond several lifetimes. Your approach discounts the future as well as ignoring the work of a scientist who I cited @59 who calculates nuke related human mortality at 1.3 billion so far.
Your suggestion that my evidence doesn’t relate to “contemporary” nukes is disingenuous. Three Mile Isalnd is contemorary unless you want to descend to the absurdity of suggesting that something that happened in 1979 is non-contemporary. On the same point: the nuke industry is always arguing that future plants will be better behaved but I think it important to deal with (to borrow from Bahro) actually existing nuclear power rather than future fantasy of perfect outcomes. Actually existing nuclear power is a failure in health and safety terms at every point in the cycle from mining to storage.
As to the unwillingness of the major fossil fuel vendors to pursue renewable energy sources I’ll stick to my point that they haven’t so far made much of a transition because the rates of profit will be less. Indeed, their opposition to renewables over the last thirty years can only be understood in those terms. Nothing else makes sense.
Sharp rises in power prices appear inevitable. This will force austerity on all types of energy consumers. So what? People can and will adapt to sharply higher electricity prices. That adaptation will be made more readily if people can see that the source of their electricity is an ecologically benign renewable rather than deadly coal or nukes.
Finally in writing that “the Chinese would use coal at all if renewables were of roughly comparable cost” you are imputing to the totalitarian Chinese state a level of rationality that it does not possess and has not possessed since the Cultural Revolution purged China of its intellectuals. China’s ecological management is a minor matter to the Han imperialists who run the place and they are caught up in so much middle kingdom hubris that the entire place can effectively be written off for the foreseeable future.
For those interested, a debate on nuclear power between Scott Ludlam for the Greens and Liberal Senator Cormann can be heard in full here. There are other speakers as well I believe. I’ve not had a chance to listen to it myself but thought others here might like to.
Thanks for that, Myriad. This is a debate that should not be happening in a country with more solar energy applied to it than any other in the world. It is just another obfuscative side show to mask the expansion of coal consumption. How gullible we are!!
I have to say the exchanges between Anthony Nolan and Fran Barlow are drop dead fascinating given both these sublime oppositional souls come from and are partly influenced by a Marxist tradition, correct me if I am wrong.
It would be wonderful to have a third party meta commenting on their positions re nuclear, philosophically and politically, as this is a deep, rich lode they are mining.
Thanks Vanessa. Don’t hesitate to offer the meta-commentary. How does it pan so far – Fran from a particular form of technologically infomed left utopianism and, as I read back, me from a reflexive post-Marx humanism. Clearly superior. But, like I said, don’t wait at the edge. Get wet.
Myriad: thanks as well for the link – lsitening as of now.
Thanks again, Myriad.
That pretty well puts an end to any sensible debate on the subject of nuclear power for Australia.
Dr Irene and Scott Ludlum slammed home the message that “safe” abundant nuclear power is a complete myth. The blossoming industry is actually a wilting violet (coincidentally the energy glow colour from a critical mass accident).
This is certainly recommended listening for Fran.
And the price of such a disaster starts at $7 billion US for a one gigawatt facility, if you could infact build one.
The Rumm Jungle information was interesting. Hadn’t heard that before. I wonder how many other nuclear secrets we have.
myriad74 – wot BilB says above re the discussion. Over and out, eh? BilB – there are numerus other dirty secrets in Oz especially around mining but there is also the recent history of leaks and failures at Lucas Heights which is a mere research reactor but it is run by ANSTO which is the organisaton tah would be responible for regulating the running of power generators. Google “radioactive leakage lucas heights” to get coverage of recent issues (ie, 21C).
ANSTO’s proud account of the last disposal of fuel is here: http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/41842/ANSTO_continues_removal_of_used_reactor_fuel_from_Lucas_Heights.pdf
Note that they say “The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, ANSTO, last night continued its program of removing more than 40 years of research reactor spent fuel from its Lucas Heights site.”
40 years of safe storage. Yeah, right.
For anyone interested, Barry Brook’s blog has a post up on the possible rollout of an LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor)
LFTRs use a fuel three times as abundant as uranium, and can use waste from existing LWRs as their fertile material. Australia has about 18% of known RARs of thorium.
The article notes in part:
Worth a read.
An erratum
LFTRs use a fuel three times as abundant as uranium, and can use waste from existing LWRs as their
fertilefissile material.Apologies …
Anthony Nolan: “How does it pan so far – Fran from a particular form of technologically infomed left utopianism and, as I read back, me from a reflexive post-Marx humanism.”
No contest Anthony, your take on this wins with me every time though your attempts at taxonomy are less convincing, e.g. I don’t know that Fran’s pro-nuclear stance could be described as utopian so much as brutally instrumental and yours (and mine) as pantheist and spiritual while also remaining materialist and dialectical.
You also have problems with taxonomy, Vanessa.
Spiritual, pantheist AND materialist? I doubt Anthony would attest to that.
I’d self-describe as a humanist and materialist who draws on Marxism.
Geez Vanessa:
“pantheist and spiritual while also remaining materialist and dialectical.”
That is a totally accurate characterisation and no small achievement as it appears that you are aware. Nevertheless that’s a genuinely spooky capacity to read into and between the lines. Are you a sort of Jonathon Cainer of blogs? Reading the entrails of e-debates?
I wouldn’t/couldn’t self describe myself as anything, Fran.
But I draw on lots of things from the Upanishads to John Muir, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Romantic poets, Thomas Hardy. Joel Kovel, Barry Lopez, indigenous cultures, especially but not exclusively Australian and generations of anti-nuclear and ecological writers, activists and poets.
oops, and Marx and Engels and contemporary practitioners.
Anthony, I’m the person Casey once mistook you for.
I’m banned here because of my views but I am so glad that you two are able to post and I can read what you say.
Rock on comrades!
Anthony Nolan @59 quotes Rosalie Bertell:
“Up to 1,300 million people have been killed, maimed or diseased by nuclear power since its inception. The industry’s figures massively underestimate the real cost of nuclear power, in an attempt to hide its victims from the world.”
This has to set some sort of record for anti-nuclear nonsense. A billion people?
Here’s the source. Let’s start with the final paragraph:
“This gives a grand total of 1,200 million victims of the nuclear age. About 1,156 million are military related, 36 million are related to nuclear reactors, and 4 million are related to nuclear medicine use.”
So it turns out that, even apart from the fact that this head count of victims is complete nonsense, 95% of it refers to the (alleged) consequences of atmospheric nuclear testing, and not “nuclear power” in the sense of energy generation.
How does she actually arrive at her numbers? She has a few figures relating level of radiation exposure to medical effects, and then says she will apply them to estimates from a UN agency (UNSCEAR) regarding radiation exposure of the world population, but doesn’t actually present calculations. I suspect there is some profound methodological flaw here, but for now I can’t even say where the numbers come from.
I see she also writes about HAARP and chemtrails, two other favorites of conspiracy theorists. So Anthony, she’s not a reliable source.
Fair enough Mitchell. I had some doubts but cited it any way in the absence of any other electronically citeable intertube source.As to chemtrails – I had no idea that people thought that contrails were malignant until juts now. I blame the popularity of conspiracy theories on past conspiracies that were beyond cognition (remember the Pentagon Papers?). Some people cannot cope.
For those who made some excellent points here that were pro (or at least not anti) nuclear, well done.
Oh god, the anti-nuclear religion crowd (the ‘useful idiots’ for coal/gas/oil companies) are still around. Please go away and work for BHP … at least then you’ll get some money for all your efforts to maintain coal/gas burning for electricity.
Here is the hard sorry facts: renewables of any kind cannot replace all coal/gas fired power stations everywhere. Some regions are lucky and you could see 50% to nearly 100% (Australia is definitely in the 50%+ class, maybe even 70%+).
But I always use the example of Finland … solar .. your joking. Wind .. waste of time. Geo … none. Hydro … none. Tidal … none. They burn coal/gas for electricty, or they burn their forests or they go nuclear.
Lots of countries in that basket (some places are actually cold, have little sun, little regular winds, have no easy to tap geothermal resources and are not near the sea … like a heck of lot of the World and its population, look at a map sometime).
I really believe the anti-nuclear crowd to be as culpable as the coal/gas/oil companies for our climate crisis .. and despite the irrefutable evidence that we are warming at an incredible rate they are still at it, this cult (and it meets all the criteria for that) would rather we burn coal than have nuclear reactors, never ever noticing that coal power stations release more radiation into the environment than nuclear ones do.
If you care to look here OldSkeptic,
http://cleantechnica.com/2009/07/30/renewable-energy-on-the-rise-fossil-fuels-declining/
In April of this year (2009), renewable resources accounted for approximately 11.1% of total U.S. energy production. At this level, renewable resources have now passed up nuclear power in energy production. Nuclear power accounted for approximately 10.4% of total energy production during that month.
you will see that renewables are not only replacing fossil fuel energy, they are doing it at a greater pace than Nuclear. That is to say that the Nuclear content is static and the Renewable content is blasting forward.
Finland is indeed a special case even though it is connected to the Trans European grid. But I grant your that Antartica you would think as a solar basket case until I read
http://cleantechnica.com/2009/01/22/antarctica-turning-to-solar-wind-power/
Culpability is in the mind of the grief holder.
Bilb @ 108 fails to mention that fully 85% of that 11% renewable resources he mentions are made up of hydro, wood burning and biofuels. Only a pathetic 1% of total energy production is wind and 0.1% is solar.
Last time I heard, bio fuels turned out to be a pretty bad idea and burning wood ‘waste’ is stuffing up the very useful MDF industry.
Peter,
“Last time I heard, bio fuels turned out to be a pretty bad idea and burning wood ‘waste’ is stuffing up the very useful MDF industry”
I would have to suspect that you only heard what you wnated to hear. Fact is that Bio fuels have Shell oil dumping petrochemical assets to change their focus to renewable energy. The city of Edmonton now have an up and running plant converting non recycleable carbon based waste into ethanol, and there is now a process that looks solidly able to convert a broad range of biomass directly to jet fuel. But maybe you are basing your opinion on the corn ethanol debarcle which was a vested interest beatup of massive proportion. The fact is that Brazil’s whole economy is underpinned by biofuel, and here in Australia we are producing shiploads of the stuff.
You have to avoid trying to determine the outcome of a game from the direction of the first kick. Woodwaste? MDF industry? Where ever did you find that obscure connection. I just had a look there and cannot find a single reference to such a threat.
As to the comment on content, the US does have a problem. Here is an article that compares attitudes between the US and Europe
http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/article/26927/europe-energy-solar-wind-germany-pioneer.html
It is not about what will or won’t work, it is about what will be done and what won’t.