Renewables vs. Nuclear: Do We Need More Nuclear Power?

[kristopher]

Renewables vs. Nuclear: Do We Need More Nuclear Power?


...Let’s take a look at the last 10 years and the next 10 years…

New U.S. renewable and nuclear capacity added the last 10 years (output):

55 GW utility wind (22 GW)
17 GW rooftop PV solar (3.5 GW)
10 GW utility PV and solar thermal (2.5 GW)
15 GW biomass and biogas (12 GW)
3 GW Geothermal (2.5)
Total renewables: 100 GW (42.5 GW)
Total nuclear: Marginal increase from existing plants
(2004-2014 = approx 2.6MWe of up-rated nuclear generation - K)

.....

U.S. renewable and nuclear plan the next 10 years capacity and (output):

130 GW utility wind (52 GW)
75 GW rooftop PV solar (15 GW)
35 GW utility PV and thermal solar (9 GW)
60 GW biomass and biogas (51 GW)
5 GW Geothermal (4 GW)
Additional renewable power next 10 years: 305 GW (131 GW)
Additional nuclear power next 10 years: 5.6 GW (5.1 GW)

The above output numbers for renewables assume no advances in wind or solar efficiency and no grid storage. Both assumptions will become completely false, so the 131 GW number should be considered a minimum number....

There is much more to the discussion: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2015/04/renewables-vs-nuclear-do-we-need-more-nuclear-power?page=all

Now, about that minimum number and storage:

Tesla-Powered Wal-Mart Stores Attest to Musk's Energy Storage Ambitions

...

...

While companies like Coda Energy, Green Charge Networks and Stem have also applied for SGIP funds, Tesla accounts for almost half of all storage applications, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in an April 2 report published for clients. BNEF also said Tesla accounts for about 70 percent of SGIP storage projects connected to California’s grid.

Jackson Family Wines, based in Santa Rosa, has a new partnership with Tesla involving battery storage and several vehicle charging stations, according to the February issue of Wine Business Monthly. The winery declined to comment.

Mack Wycoff, Wal-Mart’s senior manager for renewable energy and emissions, said the company is intrigued by energy storage. “Instead of pulling electricity from the grid, you discharge it from the battery,” he said. “Ideally you know when your period of peak demand is, and you discharge it then.”

Mike Martin, Cargill’s director of communications, declined to provide details about how the company plans to use Tesla batteries at the Fresno plant. The 200,000-square-foot facility, one of the largest of its type in California, produces nearly 400 million pounds of beef each year.

Janet Dixon is director of facilities at the Temecula Valley Unified School District in southern California, which plans to install solar panels at 20 of its 28 schools this summer. Dixon said that SolarCity is the solar provider, and five of the facilities will have Tesla batteries.

...

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2015/04/tesla-powered-wal-mart-stores-attest-to-musks-energy-storage-ambitions?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-April29-2015

[mackdaddy]

1. Nuclear Plants: 50 years of Energy, 10,000 years of Deadly waste

If the ancient Egyptians had used nuclear power to build the pyramids, we would still be having to manage the spent nuclear waste.

Every current nuclear plant has a pool of "spent" fuel rods that must be constantly cooled or they will burst into flaming nuclear kabobs spewing out microscopic particles of death. If these plants loose power from the grid for more than 3 days they start melting down like Fukushima. Hopefully no one will attack ups with an EMP weapon or a CME solar storm takes out the grid.

The long term storage they have tried so far at Yucca mountain, and the WIPP site in New Mexico with the exploding barrels of nuclear waste have been less than impressive.


Nuclear has too many LONG term externalities that if ever accounted for would never even be considered.

[NNadir]

2. Only if we don't give a rat's ass about climate change or human lives.

Last edited Wed Apr 29, 2015, 11:22 PM - Edit history (1)

And it's very clear we don't, and as such we don't need nuclear.

As Jim Hansen pointed out irrefutably in a widely read and cited paper in Environmental Science and Technology (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895) Nuclear Energy saves lives while saving the environment from the clutches of fear and ignorance: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power

But we don't care about human lives; we don't give a shit about future generations, and thus we don't need nuclear.

We don't care very much about current human poverty either, which is why we wasted more than one trillion dollars on so called "renewable energy" in the last five years, with climate change gases accumulating faster than ever.

The disturbing figures about how much money this useless solar and wind exercise has soaked out of the world economy while not managing to produce even 1% of the 550 exajoules humanity now consumes each year is found here:

Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2015.

More than one trillion bucks in the last 5 years, for no real result, this on a planet where 2 billion people lack basic sanitation, a similar amount lack decent nutrition, where 7 million people die each year from air pollution (Source: Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60 See Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

But we couldn't care less about these dead, and in fact, we have a subset of rich intellectually lazy scientific illiterates with pulling their underwear into wedgies and picking lint out of their navels while burning all sorts of oil and gas and coal to run servers claiming that someone someday might actually die from Fukushima.

Critical thinking is dead, killed once and for all. We deserve what we are getting. The weekly average for the week beginning April 19 for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was recorded as 403.05 ppm, the highest level ever recorded.

But we couldn't care less, so we don't need nuclear power.]

For myself, as I near the end of my life, in great shame for what my stupid self absorbed generation of nincompoops left behind, I think this was a great moral and ethical tragedy, that we decided we didn't "need" nuclear power, our last best hope.

But why say more? The great minds who built the nuclear enterprise, Fermi, Wigner, Seaborg, Bethe, Nobel Laureates all, have had their work trashed by primitives worshiping the sun and wind like the Neanderthals they are.

It's over. We lost. Very little can be saved now.

Why say more? I breathed my last:

Energy and Ethics

[kristopher]

3. Poor little feller still hasn't got a clue...

And that was in 2010. Since, nuclear has declined while wind and solar have been growing by leaps and bounds - especially in the developing countries that need energy the most.

[NNadir]

4. Your graphic is entirely at odds with the graphic produced by the EIA.

the source is probably from some shit for brains renewable energy scam website but it is telling. One trillion bucks went to solar and wind in the last 5 years, and the little blue sliver on the renewables graphic shows what a tragic waste this has been.

The key energy statistics of the International Energy Agency shows quite a different picture:

IEA, Key Energy Statistics 2014

One of the telling things about the people who stole the future from all future generations is their reliance on graphics rather than text. I have generally assumed that this is because they're very bad at reading.

Nevertheless, even for a dumb person who relies on graphics rather than text and mathematics, the graphic on page show unequivocally that between 1973 and 2012, the renewable energy enterprise was an expensive failure, another scheme whereby rich people with dangerous fantasies stole from the poor. The tiny red sliver in the 2012 pie chart shows what a trillion dollars over the last 5 years, and two trillion dollars over the last ten has purchased.

The figures in both cases for the main input from failed expensive renewable energy scam are dominated by "traditional biomass" which kills, according to the Lancet paper cited above in my previous post, just under 3.5 million people each year, this while twits chase a few atoms of cesium 137 from fukushima all around the Pacific Ocean, burning oil, and gas and coal to tell us all about it.

Very few of the reactionaries who want to return to the time before the 19th century, when less than one billion people abandoned diffuse energy sources because they no longer wished for poverty to be wide spread, give a shit about these 3.5 million dead.

The point is not who has done a better marketing job, who sold the most horseshit, or forced the most impoverished people to live on animal dung for cooking their food, but what would have been just and ethical.

The anti-nuke renewable energy scam has certainly triumphed as marketing, but the triumph, such as it is, is a huge tragedy for all future generations who will need to live with the consequences of this fad.

What was just and ethical, what might have lifted the billions who live today on less than $1.50 a day, was not some reactionary return to the 18th century.

It was the enterprise invented by the finest minds of the 20th century, nuclear energy.

We are now at 403 ppm of carbon dioxide, and the unreliability and extreme costs of the so called renewable enterprise, and the vast environmental damage it is doing - more than 30% of Chinese rice crops are now contaminated with cadmium - remains as always, a fig leaf for fracking, oil drilling and coal burning, all of which are now at the highest levels ever observed.

Congratulations on the great marketing victory over nuclear energy. It's certainly not the first time that the work of serious scientists has been punctured and destroyed by popular mob enthusiasms. Hell it goes back to the days of Archimedes.

Having studied this issue for more than three decades, in thousands of nights of library time, I, of course, cannot forgive you for having participated in that awful exercise of fear and ignorance, nor, I think, will history forgive the ilk to which you belong, should history itself survive.

But you did "win." I freely confess. I am not, however, a "poor fellow." I will pass on soon enough and thus escape this tragedy. The "poor fellows" are the generations that will come after, who will pay for this stupidity.

[kristopher]

5. Poor little feller is confused so easily...

Doesn't know the difference between 'final' or 'end use' energy consumption and primary energy consumption. The first tells us the amount of energy we need to provide to actually accomplish work where it is done, the latter tells us about all the waste heat that nuclear and fossil fuels put out to boil the water they use to make the product we actually are interested in - electricity.

A good example is the tally for nuclear up-rates in the OP. The 2.6GWe number added between 2004-2014 denotes electricity. The number by primary accounting would be 8.6GWt.

[madokie]

7. The problem with your argument is your attempt to paint a picture that is not honest

"The figures in both cases for the main input from failed expensive renewable energy scam are dominated by "traditional biomass" which kills, according to the Lancet paper cited above in my previous post, just under 3.5 million people each year, this while twits chase a few atoms of cesium 137 from fukushima all around the Pacific Ocean, burning oil, and gas and coal to tell us all about it."

The majority of those 3.5 million deaths each year are due to indoor air pollution mostly caused by a lack of people in third world countries having a safe way to prepare their food and heat their homes by using very poorly designed heating and cooking apparatuses or totally lack of having either and use open fires instead. Its not only from our power plants and only a fool would try to push that narrative, or liar take your pick. Once you lie to me nothing else you say matters.

Why do you continue to use language as you do rather than try to have a discussion you start off by being a bully? Do you not know better? Most of us here are rational people who can and do have honest opinions and rational debate.

"Shit for brains, dumb, twits, will history forgive the ilk to which you belong" as examples of the bullying ways of nnadir. You don't want to have an honest discussion, you want to dictate and the only tool you have in your tool box is to be a bully

.

The real question is why the use of this kind of language is allowed to continue in discussions on a board such as this one.

Fact is if nuclear energy had to stand on its on merits there would be none to be found anywhere. Every country where nuclear energy is in the mix have to prop it up to make it competitive. Primarily in many countries its used as a stepping stone in the path to nuclear bombs. Therefore the cost/subsidies are seen as a necessity in the ways of the means to the end. The end being the Bomb.

How do you suppose you warn future civilizations of the dangers of the nuclear waste. They may not be able to understand our language or be able to figure out just what the hieroglyphics mean as we haven't yet to some we find today from civilizations of long ago

If history hasn't shown us anything else its shown us that no civilizations last forever. If its not from a big rock from the heavens its a volcano from our interior but most all will perish and civilization will have to start anew. History has shown us that to be true.

[GliderGuider]

6. The greatest increase has been in natural gas generation

In terms of the future installation of natural gas compared to renewables, natural gas is projected to outpace renewables by 3:1 over the next 10 years: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/pdf/tbla9.pdf

If one feels (as I do) that CO2-driven climate change is humanity's primary existential threat over the short to medium term then this is an extremely bad sign. Fortunately the projected addition of nuclear power over that time is zero, so we won't have more of that problem as well as climate change to worry about.

The world doesn't need more nuclear power, it needs less (much less) fossil fuel use. Starting 40 years ago.

At this point it doesn't really matter much what we do with the electricity generation mix. We're fucked.

[kristopher]

8. What is the track record for EIA's renewable energy predictions?

I'm certain you know that the Energy Information Agency, along with every other agency that grew out of the entrenched energy industries, has zero credibility when it comes to prediction the rate of adoption for renewable energy.

Nuclear props up the existing fossil fuel system. Going ala-carte won't work, it's the large scale centralized generating system itself that is obsolete.

[XemaSab]

9. Welcome back!