Some thoughts on energy conservation, nuclear power and renewable energy

[jpak]

We can not build any new nuclear power plants until we have a satisfactory way of disposing of the waste. At present, significant questions have been raised about the safety of Yucca Mountain, the disposal site in Nevada. Unless those safety questions are resolved Yucca cannot be opened and new plants must not be built.

I want renewables. Wind is here. The Europeans are far ahead of us. We've lost our technological edge. The federal government needs to get involved in a positive way if U.S. energy companies want to remain competitive in the global marketplace.

Solar is here. We ought to be making more aggressive investments there. On a federal level, I would set a standard of 15 percent renewables by 2010 and 20 percent by 2020 or higher -- maybe 25 percent. We can do that.

First, improved tax credits, buy-down programs, net-metering laws, interconnection standards, and all that. But also, direct federal aid to construction of transmission lines.

We need to create stricter standards and better incentives for fuel-efficient vehicles. My proposal is to make CAFE standards the same for SUVs as they are for the regular fleet. The technology to do that exists today. Ford will be coming out with a 35-mile-per-gallon, hybrid-engine SUV model this year. Lexus has one. People want SUVs and now they can get SUVs and trucks with good mileage standards. The CAFE standard would force a significant portion of the fleet to be hybrids in order to meet the average.

Discuss....




















































































































































































http://www.alternet.org/story/16059/

http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Howard_Dean_Energy_+_Oil.htm

[skids]

1. A few things that are often neglected.

...one is stimulation of manufacturing, as opposed to research. Everyone seems to love research, noone seems to see any role for action in scaling up stuff that's already been researched... e.g. konarka and daystar have virtually Si-free cell technologies waiting to be upscaled, and Evergreen has a 1/2 Si tech. If left to their own devices they will eventually scale up -- Evergreen's partnered with others to build string ribbon facilities in Germany, and DayStar is going from "evaluation models only" to a production line that will at least give them salable product. But they seem to lack the infusion of capital necessary to grow in leaps like we need them to, based on fears that something better will come along and ruin the investment.

So what do people often propose? "Create an X-prize for inventions." That just serves to stimulate just that "something better" research, and the cooling effect it has on investment. We need an X-prize for volume manufacturing and market undercut instead. Such could take the form of a massive open bid for a large project on the market -- a guaranteed volume sale rewardable to the first company that can make a per-peak-watt price well under current market norms, renewed every year until someone takes it and then replaced with a new bid at an even lower price.

The second neglected point is in home energy. Specifically rented home energy. Noone seems to want to address the catch-22: when a landlord rents, they lose a lot of the incentive to improve the property, and tenants are powerless to act whatever their inclination might be. On the flip side, when utilities are included, tenants have no incentive to conserve. So you end up with poor people living in poorly insulated houses with crappy old appliances stuffing a huge chunk of their much needed cash into the wall sockets and out the window frames. It's mind-bogglingly stupid.

What's needed here is for the state to start talks with the utilities and come up with a program that landlords can enroll in. In that program an allowance is given to the tenant, and as long as they stay below it their energy costs are stable and predictable -- factored into the rent. Thus the tenant has incentive to be efficient. On the other side, the landlord is given some perks (exemption from property tax on value of added energy improvements, a little more leeway, within reason, to remodel while the place is occupied, things like that) and further is allowed to keep any profit they might realize from tenants who do not use their full energy allowance. Then there's incentive on both sides to save.

Such a thing could come to be by private initiative, but as we see it hasn't. To ensure good tenant rights protections, to get the utilities on board with providing adequate metering systems, and to incent the landlords we need a package of legislation put together. I feel so strongly about this I've been feeling out the corners of how one goes about fleshing an idea like this out and selling it to my local rep.

[jpak]

3. I totally agree with the landlord/tenant Catch 22

On top of that, rental property developers continue to lobby heavily against stricter energy-related building standards.

Also agree that property tax relief is probably the way to go...

[Coastie for Truth]

2. Some Thoughts

We can not build any new nuclear power plants until we have a satisfactory way of disposing of the waste. At present, significant questions have been raised about the safety of Yucca Mountain, the disposal site in Nevada. Unless those safety questions are resolved Yucca cannot be opened and new plants must not be built.

I have to disagree here.

The Adobe Acrobat PDF files is free to "Digital Scientific American" subscribers: $5.00 charge for non-subscribers.

Abstract

Fast-neutron reactors could extract much more energy from recycled nuclear fuel, minimize the risks of weapons proliferation and markedly reduce the time nuclear waste must be isolated

Described is a liquid metal cooled, fast neutron reactor.

"If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods--;namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium. This nuclear fuel cycle would combine two innovations: pyrometallurgical processing (a high-temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel) and advanced fast-neutron reactors capable of burning that fuel. With this approach, the radioactivity from the generated waste could drop to safe levels in a few hundred years, thereby eliminating the need to segregate waste for tens of thousands of years"

References

================================================================

I want renewables. Wind is here. The Europeans are far ahead of us. We've lost our technological edge. The federal government needs to get involved in a positive way if U.S. energy companies want to remain competitive in the global marketplace.

I am pretty much in agreement here as to wind, geothermal.

================================================================

Solar is here. We ought to be making more aggressive investments there. On a federal level, I would set a standard of 15 percent renewables by 2010 and 20 percent by 2020 or higher -- maybe 25 percent. We can do that.

I think as a niche source, low load, peak load, etc. solar is here. After spending several years in the industry, I don't think it will ever be part of the giga watt base. To force PV into the giga watt base hurts solar advocates.

================================================================

We need to create stricter standards and better incentives for fuel-efficient vehicles. My proposal is to make CAFE standards the same for SUVs as they are for the regular fleet. The technology to do that exists today. Ford will be coming out with a 35-mile-per-gallon, hybrid-engine SUV model this year. Lexus has one. People want SUVs and now they can get SUVs and trucks with good mileage standards. The CAFE standard would force a significant portion of the fleet to be hybrids in order to meet the average.

I am pretty much in agreement - but we need to supplement higher CAFE with transit, and city planning/zoning that encourages people to do such un-American things as walking and taking transit.

But, even in the San Francisco Bay Area, in blue Marine, there is opposition to a commuter light rail, , and even in transit friendly Berkeley, tehere is opposition to "transit village" planning . I guess Jim Kunstler's long emergency isn't an emergency yet for most folks- even in the San Francisco Area.

"Coastie", PhD (ChemE)

[phantom power]

4. Your nested comments just gave me a stack overflow.

[Coastie for Truth]

5. Windows normally avoids stack overflows by storing virtual memory

on your hard drive.

[phantom power]

6. Oh, it wasn't Windows. It was my brain.

I have a very small stack. Just looking at a Rubik's Cube can put me into a coma.

[Dogmudgeon]

44. Lucky you. I don't have a Stack, I have a Pit.

Sometimes called a midden.

:evilgrin:

It has its uses. For instance, I can listen to Bush speeches without wanting to shoot my TV set.

It's saved me a lot of money I'd have to spend on TV sets.

--p!

[phantom power]

45. Hmm. I guess a midden is a bit like a stack...

In a midden-mound, some things are definitely on top of other things--just like a stack!

[jpak]

7. More thoughts

I think actinide burning schemes and fast liquid metal breeders are pie-in-the-sky and dangerous (sodium fires have plagued all liquid metal cooled reactors - particularly commercial-scale facilities, i.e., Fermi 1, Superphenix, Monju).

They would be outrageously expensive to develop, build and operate (the National Research Council estimates >$100 billion and admits that this might be an underestimate).

The NRC also concluded that actinide burning would not eliminate the need for geological disposal sites.

California (as well as Japan and countries in the EU) are planning to deploy many gigawatt's worth of PV capacity in the coming decades. Other than load management issues when PV comprises more than ~25% of grid generating capacity, there are no technical constraints on how much PV capacity can be produced or deployed in the US.

[Coastie for Truth]

8. Thermodynamically efficient "time shifter"

California (as well as Japan and countries in the EU) are planning to deploy many gigawatt's worth of PV capacity in the coming decades. Other than load management issues when PV comprises more than ~25% of grid generating capacity, there are no technical constraints on how much PV capacity can be produced or deployed in the US.

Even with efficient "spectrum splitting" (stacked thin film photodiode layers), the physics of photodiodes limit you to the UV. So accepting that limitation, and taking an integrated time average of incident UV, the deliverable is a lot less then the peak (but still good).

You do have losses in storing the electricity (I worked with thin film batteries laminated to the back of the thin film PV unit - like the old Polaroid SX-70 film/battery pack) - such as I2R losses and "overvoltage".

Then the DC -> AC conversion losses.

The numbers are still reasonable -- but not spectacular.

Bottom line -- conservation and energy efficient engineering in everything we do -- everything.

[skids]

9. Erm, no.

UV is only 5% of the energy.



Panel efficiencies are currently 18% (real world) to 35% (lab).



Plain old silicon absorbs well into the visible green. That's why panels have a lot less power in cloudy weather, despite UV's penetration through the clouds. Do note also, solar cell physics were not so well understood back in the 70s, it's not just photoelectric effect, but a host of other physical effects. The newer cells are also not very well understood in some cases -- the finer points of CIGS cells were a mystery until last year, for example.

The newer thin-film nanotechs and synthetic-organics have demonstrated conversion down into near IR.

http://www.photonics.com/todaysheadlines/article.asp?id=6070

...most of the research on IR photovoltaics, though, has previously been slated for thermophotovoltaics and used GaAs.

http://sev.prnewswire.com/oil-energy/20051012/LNW00512102005-1.html

You may want to brush up a bit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell

[Coastie for Truth]

10. Some the data points on the green lines are MINE

but I went into batteries and fuel cells by 1990.

Although thin film, amorphous Si has a lot of fabrication and deployment advantages. That's what i use to charge the ubiquitous rechargeable batteries that one collects (plus standby when the power goes out - can recharge a laptop and a cell phone).

[skids]

11. What do you think of a123systems?

Speaking of batteries...

http://www.a123systems.com/html/technology.html

[Coastie for Truth]

12. I have read a little bit about it

The electrodes are nano-scale Li compounds (intercalates? alloys?) encapsulated in a thin film of a conductive polymer, and "immobilized" in a solid electrolyte.

I know they are making some serious OEM "pitches" and they have good and (most important) consistently reproducable results.

I have not been in a position to "play" with their batteries yet.

[Dead_Parrot]

13. Very nice...

Hopefully somebody will stick some in a Prius... :evilgrin:

[Coastie for Truth]

26. IEEE Spectrum says the next generation hybrids will:

1. Use Li ion instead of Metal Hydride (I am guessing something like the A123 system).

2. Be plug ins - so you can also charge the batteries of of the grid.

[Dead_Parrot]

28. Thanks...

...I'll keep my eye on them, with fingers crossed....

[Massacure]

29. What motive is there to use Li-ion instead of Nickel-Hydride?

Nickel is more abundant than Lithium, and there isn't really much need to reduce the weight of batteries on automobiles as long as there is a gasoline engine to constantly charge the batteries.

[Dead_Parrot]

30. Huh? Wha?

"isn't really much need to reduce the weight of batteries on automobiles"...

C'mon Mass., Think Newton's second law... (Or are you a secret SUV driver? :evilgrin:)

[Massacure]

31. The Nickel-Hydride batteries aren't terribly heavy to begin with.

If you wanted a pure electric vehicle, you would almost certainly need Lithium Ion, but the batteries only need to be large enough to last between charges from a small, efficient gasoline engine. The entire point of hybrids with the electric motors is that even a small motor can crank out a lot of torque, although for short amounts of time, but the torque is only really needed for accelerating. Hybrids also reduce the need to idle an engine in city traffic.

The idea of a pure electric vehicle is stupid. Your just replacing gasoline with coal. It is a shell game.

[Dead_Parrot]

32. why stupid?

"The idea of a pure electric vehicle is stupid. Your just replacing gasoline with coal. It is a shell game"

I would have thought this was an argument for electric vehicles, since we'll be making our gas out of coal before too long - whereas we do have options for none-fossil electricity.

(Granted, there are biofuels, but I tend to get nervous when I think of the amount of land needed to grow the stuff. Probably just my prejudice, I think...)

[poopfuel]

41. facts about land in US, etc

According to the U.S.D.A., we have 434,164,946 acres of cropland. This is a very conservative number, describing land that is able to be worked in an industrial fashion, primarily for annual crops. There are actually 939,279,056 acres of farmland, nearly double what the U.S.D.A. considers cropland, much of which could support perennial crops which don’t require that the soil be plowed every year or that soil would be plowed on contour.

Current industrial farming practices would have to be abandoned, in favor of polycultural organic farming.

So if we only used what the U.S.D.A. considers prime flat cropland, we would only have to produce 368.5 gallons of biofuels per acre to meet 100% of the demand for transportation fuel at today’s levels. Corn grain alone could meet that goal and corn isn’t a particularly stellar energy crop. Polyculture opens the door for multiple sources. Places like the Texas panhandle and arid western areas currently require over one hundred acres of low quality grazing land to raise one beef steer. The same land can be used to grow crops adapted to arid climates, like pimelon, buffalo gourd, mesquite, and prickly pear to produce alcohol, biodiesel and animal feed.

Then there's marine algae as a huge source of biofuel....clean up the waterways and revive ocean life, harvesting the sewage for fuel. Construct energy plants all along the waterways, use cogeneration, etc.

Smart energy system design overcomes out of date fossil fuel and nuclear solutions. BTW, I never saw anyone worry too much about terrorism against coal and gas fired plants. But don't worry, humans never make errors so nuclear power is safe.

[skids]

33. They are in PHEVs

The non plug-ins have a small battery by comparison to what's needed for effective plug-in. Though space is a more pressing concern, what with regenerative breaking.

As to your initial question, theres really not ever going to be a shortage of Li. There are currently under a billion cars in the world, while there are millions and millions of tons of lithium already collected. Most of it we use in making glass and ceramics which end up in landfills. I don't see anyone scrounging for it there. (What, let me guess, you need it to make tritium? Then buy it from the battery recyclers.)

[Coastie for Truth]

39. True

but Li ion still provides more amp-hours/unit volume and more amp-hours/mass. That's a "marketing" issue.

[EuroObserver]

14. Good food for thought in this thread, thanks n/t

[One_Life_To_Give]

15. Not ready to write off Nuc's yet

Not that there aren't problems with Nuclear Waste. But our Base Load Generation comes primarily from Hydro, Coal and Nuclear. Wind, solar and tidal are periodic so without additional infrastructure are not suited to Base Load. If we had a surplus of renewable generated electricity it would make sense to try and store some of it. But until we see our renewable generation becoming significant, say >25% of consumed energy, this is a luxury we are not in a position to afford.

If we plan to make any serious reductions in GHG emissions, from electricity generation, over the next 25 years. Nuclear power has to be considered as an option for Base Load generation.

[Massacure]

16. Solar does have one use.

It can be considered reliable for large scale electrical generation in the Southwest states. It would be unreasonable to expect it to produce double digit percentages of electrical generation in other places though. Wind is also reliable in the Rocky mountains. Those are the only two situtations those can currently offset base load.

[One_Life_To_Give]

18. Not at 2AM though

With the exception of the "Solar Chimney" which hasn't been really proven in use. Solar can't supply the 24/7 base load. Both Solar and Wind are typically negligable at 2AM.

[Massacure]

24. Air conditioning usually isn't used at 2 AM though.

Notice how I said offset, not replace. ;)

[phantom power]

34. you must not live in Phoenix :-)

[Massacure]

35. Nope. Wisconsin.

But I always thought deserts were hot in the daytime and cold during the night.

[phantom power]

36. In the summer, nighttime "cold" is 80 degrees :-)

Last summer, we had some days where the nighttime low was 92. That's abnormal, but what isn't these days?

[mopinko]

37. why can't you get a solar window air conditioner, i want to

know! it seems like such a no brainer that you could build a window unit with a small pv panel. it's like peanut butter and jelly. as far as needing it at night- if the house is well insulated, and well cooled in the day, it should stay cool at night without the gain from the sun. it would be plenty for me, i hate paying for air. i just want enough to keep my computers from frying. sleeping would be a bonus.

[phantom power]

42. I'm not sure what benefit a window AC unit would have.

As far as nighttime cooling, there are a couple issues.

1) My wife has the unfortunate opinion that the only good way to sleep is to keep the house at 68F, and use a down comforter. She also has an equally unfortunate opinion that white noise is important for sleep, and that the best way to create white noise is to turn on the AC fan to "constant" during the night.

1a) I lost this battle. There is no reasoning with her. So don't ask. In part, I blame some unknown jackass who wrote a magazine article that authoritatively states the best temperature for sleeping is 60-70F, and white noise is good for sleeping. So she trots this dumb article out every time that I joust this windmill.

2) Regarding insulation, we have upgraded our ceiling insulation to something like R40, which has definitely been a big help. Regarding walls, our house is block construction. In the summer, this block gets plenty hot in the daytime, and it stays hot through the night, helpfully shedding it's heat into our home. Since it was constructed in 1972, there is no layer of insulation between that block and the drywall. Installing some 1/2-inch foam insulation panels would probably make a measureable difference, but I'm simply not tearing out all of our drywall to do that.

2a) this is exactly the kind of thing that pisses me off about lousy building codes. I shouldn't have to decide between ripping out my drywall and having good insulation. It should just be #@$%@$% required that the insulation was put in when the home was built.

[mopinko]

49. i have a lot of the same issues.

i have to have it cool at night also.
i'm just trying to point out that in a lot of situations, it is a good compromise- i may not have perfect temperature control 24 hours a day- but i have cool that is proportional to the heat, and "free". for people like poor renters, especially seniors, it could be life saving.

[phantom power]

50. Down here, we see two things...

with senior citizens. The first is that the AC will malfunction, and the owner of the house can either suffer from heat prostration before they realize what's going on, or they do realize what's going on, but they are disabled, bedridden, etc, and maybe they die before their regular in-home care arrives to check on them. Or, they just can't afford to repair it, and they make the risk analysis decision to buy their medications and food instead of the AC bill.

The other is just cost. If you're struggling to pay the electric bill, you aren't going to think much about buying a fancy solar installation, even a relatively small one. They aren't cheap.

[One_Life_To_Give]

51. Not much power for A/C

Trying to attach enough solar panels to a window unit is a problem. You need around 8 square feet for each 100W. And a room A/C unit will draw at least 500W. So you will need a array of solar panels covering 40 square feet and costing $2500 just for the solar cells.

[jpak]

19. Not so

US wind power resources....

http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/chp2.html#annual

<snip>

Areas that are potentially suitable for wind energy applications (wind power class 3 and above) are dispersed throughout much of the United States (Maps 2-6 and 2-16). Major areas of the United States that have a potentially suitable wind energy resource include: much of the Great Plains from northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico northward to Montana, North Dakota, and western Minnesota; the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Maine; the Pacific coast from Point Conception, California to Washington; the Texas Gulf coast; the Great Lakes; portions of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Pacific Islands; exposed ridge crests and mountain summits throughout the Appalachians and the western United States; and specific wind corridors throughout the mountainous western states.

In the Great Plains, class 5 wind resource is found over elevated areas of North Dakota, such as the Pembina and Missouri escarpments and Turtle Mountains, and the hilltops and uplands of the Missouri Plateau in southwestern North Dakota and high plains in northwestern Montana near Cut Bank. Class 4 wind resource exists over hilltops and uplands of eastern Montana and high plains in northwestern Montana, much of North and South Dakota, the Sand Hills of Nebraska, western Minnesota, northwestern Iowa, the Texas Panhandle, northwestern Oklahoma, southcentral Kansas and the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas, uplands of eastern Colorado, and parts of northeastern New Mexico.

Exposed coastal areas in the Northeast from Maine to New Jersey and in the Northwest southward to northern California indicate class 4 or higher wind resource. Class 4 or higher wind resource also occurs over much of the Great Lakes and coastal areas where prevailing winds (from the strong southwest-to- northwest sector) have a long, open-water fetch. Class 3 wind resource can be found along exposed coastal areas from Delaware to North Carolina, much of the California coast north of Point Conception, and the Texas coastal areas from the Mexican border northward to Galveston. Along many coastal areas, the abrupt increase of surface roughness inland from the coastline because of vegetation and topography can rapidly attenuate the wind resource inland. Notable exceptions occur along the Texas coast and Cape Cod in Massachusetts where the coastal wind resource extends inland a considerable distance.

<snip>

PV works everywhere in the US - not just the Southwest.

http://www.solarhouse.com/

http://256.com/solar/

http://www.oceansolar.com/

[jpak]

17. Nuclear is stopgap solution at best

The US imports >66% of its uranium.

If the US relied solely on its domestic uranium resources, it would last only ~25 years at current rates of consumption.

Global uranium supplies (geological and military resources) will last 40-70 years at the current rate of consumption.

The World Nuclear Association expects a significant shortfall in uranium supply in the next 10 years.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9069-1735134,00.html

Wind and PV with hydrogen storage and fuel cells can provide power that matches variation in load-demand without the need for "base-load" plants.

http://www.maui-tomorrow.org/issuespages/energy/norway_hydro.html

http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/trinidad.html

Nuclear is a dead-end and a black hole for R&D and tax subsidies. Renewables are the only sustainable energy sources available.

Why throw good money at nuclear when we all know we will have to invest in renewables to maintain our civilization 100 years down the road????

[Dead_Parrot]

21. Ahh, I've just caught on...

Wind and PV with hydrogen storage and fuel cells

You own a platinum mine. Sorry, I should have realised earlier...

(6.5 billion people x 1kw per person x 2 ounces Pt per kw x $400 per ounce...)

[Coastie for Truth]

25. Pt was (I said "was") from my grad school days.

An academic inventor from Belgium, Dr. Henri Beer (financed by the Italian electrochemist and entrepreneur, Dr. Vittorio deNora) discovered that one can get the electrocatalytic effects of Pt out of Pt (and Ru) "doped" ceramics.

Beer did his work with titanium dioxide doped with trace amounts of ruthenium dioxide (actually microcrystalline TiO1.95-1.98 "doped" with a few percentage points of RuO1.95-1.98). He found it to be just about as good as Pt for the
2 Cl- -> Cl2
reaction, at a fraction of the cost. Vittorio deNora then extended it to fuel cells.

But, there is still a lot of serendipity and luck in electrocatalysis.

[Dead_Parrot]

27. I'm being pessimistic. Or maybe realistic...

I've seen projected Pt/Kw loads as low as .05oz, throwing Pd into the mix and using atom-thick deposits: But the question over what's going to be economically viable for mass-production in the next decade chucks a spanner in the works for most such flights of fancy...

We may get lucky and hit a winning mix tomorrow: but if we don't, I don't want a researcher telling us 8 years from now, that he's not going to make it and we should think of something else...

[Coastie for Truth]

40. Much of that thin film and alloy-mixture

work comes from applying semi-conductor fab technologies (CVD, sputtering, etc.) to fuel cell electrodes. It is proven.

It's not the Pt per se - it's the valence bands and conduction bands of the catalyst that have the same catalytic effect. (Phys. Chem III).

;) Anybody remember the "hydrogen equation" from the days before PC's. That's what this is all about (Yccch) ;)

[jpak]

53. When the oil runs out we'll just recycle all those catalytic converters

from all those rusting idle cars....

:)

[NNadir]

20. And the "solar is here" value in exajoules produced....is...

...I thought so...

Set standards by "2020?"

I guess you think that's when the global climate change crisis will become serious, no?

Sorry, it's time to deliver, and the anti-environmental anti-nuclear crowd can't" do any more than it has done for 40 years: Promise something 20 years from now.

[jpak]

43. Those were direct quotes from Howard Dean (check the links in the OP).

Former Democratic presidential candidate and present Chairman of the Democratic National Committee

If we had a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress continually since 1973, we WOULD have solar that "delivers" today...

Any further thoughts on nuclear power and renewable energy?????

[NNadir]

46. This presupposes that the only place where solar energy exists is the US.

It is not.

Many governments around the world invest in solar PV power. It is a political winner, although it is a technical failure.

People think that the question of solar energy is political, that you can make it happen by throwing money at it. The existence of viable solar energy does not depend upon politics. It is a technical issue and an issue of cost. If were practical, people would do it. But it is not practical.

In any case the problem of global climate change is not an issue of make-believe fantasies about what would have happened under hypothetical conditions over the last 40 years. Nor can the problem be solved by wishing.

Global climate change is happening NOW.

The United States invested 1.2 billion dollars in solar PV energy in the period between 1989-1999 and there is STILL not a single exajoule of solar PV energy produced on the entire planet. Therefore it was a failure.

The real problem is fossil fuels. When there are no more fossil fuels being burned, the problem of global climate change will have been solved. At that point I will happy to engage in a discussion of the relative merits of the technologies that have replaced fossil fuels.

People of course raise all kinds of irrelevant matters to obscure this reality:

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[jpak]

47. Technical failure?????? LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!

Without PV there would be no commercial satellite communications.

There are over 250,000 US homes equipped with PV - none are "technical failures".

PV works - claims to the contrary are laughable nonsense.

So I take it that the Good Doctor Dean is deluding himself and has succumbed to the anti-nuclear anti-environmental Solar Fraud???????

on edit: I forgot to mention that Dick Cheney's Energy-Fraud Bill is providing ~12 billion dollars in direct and indirect subsidies to build 6 new nuclear power plants.

They would not be considered economically viable otherwise.

Talk about thowing money around....

[NNadir]

54. It is a technical failure on scale.

Most people do not live on satellites.

Any technology that represents itself as a solution to global climate change and is found on only 250,000 homes is a technical falure.

Sorry to inform you of that.

The US energy demand is 105 exajoules.

[jpak]

56. By that logic

The number of US households with electric light in 1890 "proves" that Edison's invention is a technical failure.

The number of US households with automobiles in 1905 "proves" that the automobile is a technical failure.

The number of US households with TV sets in 1950 "proves" that TV is a technical failure.

The amount of electricity produced by US nuclear power plants in 1960 relative to total US electricity production "proves" that nuclear power is a technical failure.

<yawn>

[NNadir]

57. Um, the TV was invented in 1939, the solar cell in 1954.

Yes. The solar PV industry is a failure, measured in exajoules.

After 20 years, the television was a clear commercial success. The electric light was also a success in a rapid time scale.

Of course, the solar PV industry can prove itself at any time, although it has failed for the last 50 years to be a commercial success, except in a few limited applications by those who can afford it.

Like I say, I'm not wishing for the PV industry to continue to fail. I am merely noting that it has failed commercially for 50 years. If it succeeds finally it will be wonderful.

However the problem that is occurring right now is called "global climate change."

And in case the fellows at Greenpeace haven't noticed this, the automobile is a very dangerous device. It's "success" has come at great cost.

[IDemo]

60. Earlier yet: television was invented in 1922, patented in 1930

http://sub.boisestate.edu/conferences/farnsworth.html

NNadir, if I recall, you called pebble bed reactors 'unfortunate' (or something like that) on another thread. I'm with you on the importance of nuclear in our energy future. What is it about pebble bed/VHTR/ or Gen-IV reactors you object to? Does the graphite encasement make spent nuclear material too difficult to dispose of easily?

[NNadir]

61. I object to the extreme stability of the pepples.

This makes it difficult to recover the uranium and other valuable products in the fuel.

The system is therefore a once through system. This is a waste of fission resources in my view.

Undoubtedly there is chemistry that could dissolve the fuel, but it is unnecessarily difficult. Silicon carbide decomposes only at extremely high temperatures, temperatures that are likely to not be readily accessible in ordinary operations. I suspect, but do not know that the chemistry of silicon carbide will be slow and characterized by excessively long reaction times involving corrosive reagents at high temperatures. This increases risk.

The pebble bed reactor was designed to address an already trivial concern, reactor safety. I see the reactor as more of a public relations effort than as a useful technology. I note that no one has ever been injured by a pressurized water reactor/boiling water reactors in many thousands of reactor-years of operation. Therefore any possible safety advantage is necessarily small, since the risks associated with the operations of existing reactors are also small.

I believe it will be essential over the long term to provide readily access to fission products and fissile and fissionable nuclei. This is why I am generally opposed to the various glassification strategies now proposed for places like Yucca Mountain.

The pebble bed reactor is not, however, in my view, a total disaster. Such reactors will probably provide good service if not much mass efficiency for the fuel. Another feature that recommends the reactor is that it is a high temperature reactor, and thus can be used for purposes beyond simple electricity generation, such as the manufacture of motor fuels, to the extent we desire motor fuels.

For high temperature applications however, the molten salt reactor is a much more flexible device with many readily applicable passive safety features.

The pebble bed reactor will not always be cheap to use. The reactor uses helium gas as a moderator, and helium gas will not always be cheap. It is a contaminant in natural gas.

[Kolesar]

48. How many B-17s did we produce from 1939 to 1945?

How many B-24s, P-51s, P-40s, P-38s, or B-29s? My favorite efficiency-advocate in my favorite grassroots environmental organization notes that with a 15% growth rate per year, wind and solar will not make a significant impact for decades. Such an argument presumes that the growth rate is somehow fixed, almost like one generation of wind turbines must support the next.

I counter that a country that can budget $50 billion to budget and tool up to build a few hundred supersonic F-22s can surely go to work and build tens of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines in the matter of a decade. That will surely cause factory utilization rates to go up in America and unit prices will rise, but I think the idea would make most of us smile.

(I think it was about 15,000 of each of the first ones and 2000 B-29s, but don't quote me, my citation was for dramatic purposes)

[NNadir]

55. Um, windmills are not B-17's.

The solar industry has been around for 40 years and has yet to produce. Over 1.2 billion dollars was invested in solar PV power in the period between 1989 and 1999 and still the solar PV energy industry has yet to produce a single exajoule.

There is no evidence whatsoever that 50 billion in wind farms - which by the way I might support - will produce energy when the wind does not blow.

There is no evidence that 200 billion in solar cells will solve the problem of energy storage.

Throwing money at a technology does not necessarily produce results.

In any case the United States is bankrupt. It was not bankrupt in 1940.

[jpak]

58. Umm...this year marks the 60th anniversary of commercial nuclear power.

More than $66 billion in R&D have been spent on nuclear energy since the Manhattan Project - and no new nuclear power plants have been ordered since 1978.

In order to build six new nuclear power plants today, however, the taxpayers will have to pony up...

...50% of the cost of the license application (tens of millions of dollars per plant)...

...$2 billion dollars in payments to reactor owners if the NRC delays construction...

...taxpayer guaranteed loans for up to 80% of the cost of construction ($billions per plant)...

...and $6 billion in federal production credits - 1.8 cents per kWh (compared to 1.5 cents per kWh for wind power)...

...and pay more than half of the cost of Yucca Mountain ($30+ billion and counting)...

...and subsidize their insurance costs (Price Anderson Act).

After 60 years, nuclear is most certainly a "mature technology".

Yet US taxpayers today have to PAY utilities to build new nuclear power plants and PAY them to produce electricity - which utilities will then sell to the taxpayers at the highest cost allowed.

Yet solar - which has endured an absolutely hostile political and R&D environment since Jimmy Carter left office - is somehow a "technical failure".

:rofl:

[NNadir]

59. Nuclear power production has increased by 2000 billion kw-hr since 1980.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

Primarily these increases came through improved operations.

All renewable energy in the same period - of which solar PV is a tiny (often concealed part) has not even matched in its entirety the amount by which nuclear power increased.

178 nuclear plants are in various stages of approval worldwide, 13 under consideration in the United States.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.htm

Nuclear power is indeed a mature technology. It works, providing 9% of the world's primary energy.

I note that if nuclear power were shut tomorrow the increase in carbon dioxide would be half again what the United States injects into the atmosphere each year.

Tough luck. The anti-nuclear fantasy has lost credibility, based on reality.

[Kolesar]

62. Cannot the fossil fuel generators be throttled down when the wind blows?

The limitations on ramping up production of wind turbines might be the knowledge and process control talent to make the composite fiber blades. If there is a market, though, corporations will find it. (I can envisiage blades lashed to the decks of container ships from Asia already). If this country were run by Napoleon, we would be vacating sites to put up the towers right now.

As for photovoltaics, an on site solar generator that produces electricity for ~26cents/kWh, amoritized, matches well against diesel generators that are a capital expense that just "sits there" for 80% of its life and has a dreadful fuel cost. The solar generator operates at the time when demand is high.

To get back to my original point, though, one cannot fairly plot future alternative energy generation by plotting the data points of the last few decades and laying a french curve down to see what's next.

(Actually, this country is being run by Napoleon. A coworker of mine reported with horror the drilling that he saw in the pinyon-juniper countryside. He saw a ghastly matrix of drilling pads as he flew over New Mexico on a cross country trip.)

[AZCat]

63. Some generators can.

Most NG turbines have start-up times of 2 hours or less, but others (coal and oil-based generators) have significantly longer start-up times. I'm at home right now (dial-up) and am having difficulty finding the information, but I will look at work today and see if I can get a range of start-up and shut-down times for various types of power plants.

[Kolesar]

64. I was crew on a Navy ship that had three boilers

It took the engineering department all night to start a boiler if we were going to steam off in the morning. That was bunker fuel oil, not pulverized coal, of course. Once we were underway, though, the OOD/Officer On Deck on watch could command the ship to change speeds in seconds.

Now, that is an application where the only output is to the screw. I don't recall how they disposed of extra steam energy. Matching time-variable steam generation to a persnickety power grid's demands would be wholly a different problem. The Navy also need not worry about efficiency to keep operating costs down, either. Their "shareholders" don't seem to care.

The appeal of the 1970s Spruance class destroyers was that their gas turbine engines could be started from cold in a matter of minutes. Again, there is a problem of matching output energy to the grid in the electrical generation application.

It is undeniable that my plan to depend upon wind means that a second capital investment will have to be maintained in methane or coal generation for when we are becalmed. The only other solution I could think of is rolling blackouts because the nuclear and coal fired plants that would yet be maintained cannot keep up with peak demands.

[hankthecrank]

22. Mean while More Coal gets burned

Yep all we do is talk. More and More Coal is burned.

But lets just keeping talking shit about anything that gets in the way of more Carbon in the Air.

Kind of like while Rome burned lets talk about what water to use.

But I think we don't care about carbon here we just want to talk.

In the end doesn't really matter does it so kill more electrons.

Has been a break thru on lead acid batteries, should help some.

So sorry for the silly comments. This just gets old after awhile.

Carbon is the enemy stay on target.

[Dead_Parrot]

23. Agreed, 100%

Predictions for what we can do "in the future" - like fusion energy, or cheap PV and hydrogen fuel cells - just don't cut it with me. The "10-year/400ppm CO2" prediction by the IPCC - which has been accepted by most sane people, and the "look what's happening now" observation from the peak oil crowd effectively mean we can flush everything down the pan if we can't make do with what we've got. There's no time for dreaming about developments, because by the time they've been scaled up to be useful, it's too damn late.

What we've got now for electricity is stupidly expensive PV, intermittently working wind - neither with means of storing the gigajoules needed for windless nights in Manhattan, geographically restricted geothermal and hydro... and nuclear power.

What we've got now for transport is wrangled oil (EROEI=laughable), hydrogen (yeah right) and biofuel (pass the chainsaw). We're going to be pretty screwed on that, but we'll have to manage. Skids' 123 batteries might have a big part to play in that, and if I had any money I'd be buying shares now.

What we don't have is time to sit around with our thumbs up our arses waiting for new technology to save us.

[mopinko]

38. what about tdp?

ok, i am over my head in this company, i admit. but if we had any kind of proper environmental regulation of factory farming, wouldn't every big farm be turning pig shit into oil? or at least harvesting the methanol? don't we just have to outlaw dumping this stuff in the river? and wouldn't we put a stop to mad cow if we made the slaughter houses do the same?
the day we start to really account for all the costs industry generates, and make them pay them, the world shifts on it's axis. no?

[jpak]

52. Just so everyone "gets it" - the quotes in the OP were from Howard Dean

I thought it would be interesting to see what the reaction would be...and I wasn't disappointed.

:evilgrin:

[aztc]

65. Lip service to conservation

This post illustrates THE problem perfectly: It begins with the keyword 'Conservation' but only addresses CONSERVATION as something SOMEONE ELSE needs to do by way of government intervention.

This IS the problem, all these schemes shift responsibility from consumers and call for efforts to build MORE (renewables, clean, whatever) and require MORE consumption of resources in general.

To simply mention conservation as something the government needs to tell manufacturers to do will only encourage the current trend of rising consumption. The ONLY thing the government can/should do to reduce consumption is tax energy to reflect its true 'full life cycle' costs, with no government subsidies, including the cost of waging war on the world to secure MORE and the long term health consequences from polluted air, water and land.

Re-Elect the BushCo regime - Fill 'er up! Take a jet flight! Consume!

http://Drive55.org

http://PeaceTraintoDC.com