XPost fm GD: For nuclear supporters

[kristopher]

The science says WE DO NOT *NEED* NUCLEAR ENERGY.

originally posted at: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x644471

These are the facts of the matter:

Renewable energy resources extracted with *existing technologies* are more than sufficient to meet all of modern societies energy needs on a more reliable grid than now exists.

The renewable path is less expensive.

The renewable energy path is completely sustainable.

The renewable path is safer in all ways.

The renewable path is faster to achieve.

And last but not least in the long run widescale reliance on nuclear power and its controlling infrastructure "would", to quote an associate, "provide an irrevocable justification and impetus for the burgeoning surveillance/police state".

Those are ALL irrefutably true statements.

In light of that why do YOU support nuclear power?

[Tansy_Gold]

1. I don't. Never have. K&R.

Tansy Gold, in very very sunny Arizona

[Systematic Chaos]

2. Looks like

to me....

[Nederland]

3. Why do I support nuclear power?

Probably because I have a very different definition of what an "irrefutably true statement" consists of. For example, even though I firmly believe that nuclear path is better than the renewable path, I would never claim that opinion to be "irrefutably true". Perhaps you should pick up a copy of Descartes 2nd Meditations to better understand what "irrefutably true" actually means.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

4. This weekend I spoke to one of the better known innovators in this area

his expertise is integrating irregular sources into the grid. His position was we were better off in the long run using alternative energy sources to generate hydrogen or other combustible and not have the windmills, solar cells, etc directly connected to the grid. He also pointed out that would allow alternative energy to grow at its natural rate and when ready could indeed replace oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear when ready. Apparently there are more issues there that I had understood previously and I learned a lot.

I view nuclear a lot like CFL. Interim step with some serious baggage until something better comes along.

[kristopher]

6. He is more than a decade behind the times.

The initial issues raised are covered under a discussion about the characteristics of energy carriers, efficiency and generating sources.

The short version is that he is modeling the existing energy infrastructure and attempting to find a component by componet replacement for the characteristics of the components now filling various niches. Hydrogen was a the best bet for a number of years for many applications but with the development of the lithium battery that calculus changed and interest in hydrogen has almost completely evaporated because of the far lower overall efficiency of using hydrogen as a storage medium that offers portability.

For example, it would take about 50% more generating infrastructure to use hydrogen fuel cells to power our personal transportation fleet with hydrogen as a carrier than it would using lithium batteries as a carrier.

Frankly what you claim he has said about the grid makes me question your friend's existence since it is predicated on a view of the power system that an experienced grid operator or someone tasked with integrating irregular sources into the grid would know to be false. It presupposes that the grid is the same as a single generating source. No one with the experience you claim for him would make such a fundamental error since one of the very first thing you learn about the grid is how it is NOT like any single generating source.

I was going to avoid giving cites but since I've questioned the veracity of your anecdote, I'll back it up.

Doesn’t Wind Power Need Backup Generation?

In a power system, it is necessary to maintain a continuous balance between production and consumption. System operators deploy controllable generation to follow the change in total demand, not the variation from a single generator or customer load. When wind is added to the system, the variability in the net load becomes the operating target for the system operator. It is not necessary and, indeed, it would be quite costly for grid operators to follow the variation in generation from a single generating plant or customer load.
"Backup” generating plants dedicated to wind plants — or to any other generation plant or load for that matter — are not required, and would actually be a poor and unnecessarily costly use of power-generation resources....

<snip>

Does Wind Need Storage?
The fact that “the wind doesn’t always blow” is often used to suggest the need for dedicated energy storage to handle fluctuations in the generation of wind power. Such viewpoints, however, ignore the realities of both grid operation and the performance of a large, spatially diverse wind-generation resource. Historically, all other variation (for example, that due to system loads, generation-commitment and dis- patch changes, and network topology changes) has been handled systemically. This is because the diversity of need leads to much lower costs when variability is aggregated before being balanced. Storage is almost never “coupled” with any single energy source—it is most economic when operated to maximize the economic benefit to an entire system. Storage is nearly always beneficial to the grid, but this benefit must be weighed against its cost. With more than 26 GW of wind power currently operating in the United States and more than 65 GW of wind energy operating in Europe (as of the date of this writing), no additional storage has been added to the systems to balance wind. Storage has value in a system without wind, which is the reason why about 20 GW of pumped hydro storage was built in the United States and 100 GW was built worldwide, decades before wind and solar energy were considered as viable electricity generation technologies. Additional wind could increase the value of energy storage in the grid as a whole, but storage would continue to provide its services to the grid—storing energy from a mix of sources and responding to variations in the net demand, not just wind.



Wind Power Myths Debunked
november/december 2009 1540-7977/09/$26.00©2009 IEEE Power and Energy Magazine Master Series
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2009.934268
Download at:http://www.ieee-pes.org/images/pdf/open-access-milligan.pdf

By Michael Milligan, Kevin Porter, Edgar DeMeo, Paul Denholm, Hannele Holttinen, Brendan Kirby, Nicholas Miller, Andrew Mills, Mark O’Malley, Matthew Schuerger, and Lennart Soder

Biographies
Michael Milligan is a principal analyst with NREL, in Golden, Colorado.
Kevin Porter is a senior analyst with Exeter Associates Inc., in Columbia, Maryland.
Edgar DeMeo is president of Renewable Energy Consulting Services, in Palo Alto, California.
Paul Denholm is a senior energy analyst with NREL, in Golden, Colorado.
Hannele Holttinen is a senior research scientist with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.
Brendan Kirby is a consultant for NREL, in Golden, Colorado.
Nicholas Miller is a director at General Electric, in Schenectady, New York.
Andrew Mills is a senior research associate with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, California.
Mark O’Malley is a professor, School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering of University College Dublin, in Ireland.
Matthew Schuerger is a principal consultant with Energy Systems Consulting Services LLC, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Lennart Soder is a professor of electric power systems at the Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden.

See also:
European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). (2005). Large scale integration of wind energy in the European power supply: Analysis, issues, and recommendations. European Wind Energy Association .
Available: http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/grid/051215_Grid_report.pdf



As you can see his view is at odds with the some of the most authoritative electrical engineers we have. Funny how that is a consistent fact of life when the claims are from those who support nuclear energy. I don't blame the supporters, however, it is the industry engaged in active deception that is the villain.

[Terry in Austin]

5. Why do you support Descartes?

Are you saying that he is "irrefutably true?"

:evilgrin:

[Nederland]

7. Well played sir, well played (nt)

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bhikkhu]

9. I've gone back and forth, but I'd say no, now

Its not even a matter of whether we can engineer, build and staff nukes so that they won't blow; its rather that the material is so dangerous to life that every single nuke is a requirement for a permanent stable society. A country with nukes automatically becomes the business of every other country, with or without nukes, and sufficiently strong and stable central governments capable of operating and protecting each nuke must be permanently maintained, more or less forever.

Of course, anyone with the faintest notion of history knows how impossible that is. What happens when a country fails, and a facility is "open" to whoever? Or what happens the first time a dis empowered low-technology society finds it has access to a material with which it can cheaply and easily poison the land of a rival? Military analysts have supposedly run war-games taking out reactors in such a way as to cause runaway meltdowns - the success rate is supposed to be about 40%. Its not even about nuclear weapons - the fuel itself is sufficiently deadly.

I think the more we turn to nuclear power, the more we are cursing the future to an inevitably chaotic and poisoned fate.

[kristopher]

10. That is very well said.