From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
> There are many reasons why nuclear power is dead in the water.
>>I think the main reason is that reactors got too big too fast and their
design has been frozen for nearly half a century. They found a nuclear
reactor design that worked well in submarines and figured if they just
scaled it up a few hundred times it would work well in commercial power
plants too, but it didn't work out quite that way. Freeman Dyson said the
real problem is that reactor design isn't fun anymore because nobody is
allowed to build even a small one if it is significantly (or even slightly)
different from what has already been built, so the most creative people go
into areas other than nuclear power.
I agree with you there. The GE Mark II design (which is unfortunately quite
common) is the spawn of that bad engineering. Remember however that was the
era when they were toying around with atomic airplanes and of course the
Orion project, so it fits right in with the mindset prevailing during the
initial pre-Cuban phase of the Cold War.
In addition I think the early experiments at Oak Ridge with LFTR were
side-lined because it did not fit well with the requirements of the Cold
War. The LFTR fuel cycle does not support (i.e. help scale up) the military
need for highly enriched U-235.
>the sector would have never existed without massive government subsidies
>>Neither would wind farms or big solar energy power plants. And what do you
make of the government putting a huge tariff on Chinese solar cells to
protect domestic producers which makes photovoltaics much more expensive in
the USA?
There is no comparison. The nuclear sector has enjoyed direct and indirect
subsidies of a scale that dwarfs the sum total of all subsidies ever given
to wind + solar + geothermal + tidal + wave. I purposely leave out ethanol &
biodiesel, which has always been a welfare program for Big Ag (the EROI of
corn ethanol for example is less than one; it is actually an energy sink -
you get less than it took to make it)
Topically just in the news - and which very clearly makes my point -- Last
Wednesday, the Obama administration announced $8.3 billion in public loan
assistance to three nuclear power producers. That is a huge and brand new
subsidy on top of the fifty or more years of subsidy that has preceded it.
For comparison the loan guarantee to the bankrupt solar PV company Solyndra
was in grand total $535 million; this is less than one fifteenth the amount
of this brand new loan guarantee to the nuclear welfare queen. The
right-wing blogosphere could not stop shouting about the Solyndra loan
guarantee for years (and they still harp on it); I do not hear a peep of
protest from these same fiscal conservatives about this new massive subsidy
of nuclear.
If Solar PV had enjoyed even a fifth of the subisdies that nuclear has
enjoyed we would already be living in a Solar era.
> the lead time to bring working LFTR reactors to market and to build out
enough of them to begin to make an impact on the global (or some important
regional) energy market is long and should be measured in decades at least.
Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online.
>>That would certainly be true if there is no sense of urgency to get the
job done, but we got to the moon in less than 9 years once we decided we
really really wanted to go there. There is no scientific reason it would
take decades to get a LFTR online, but there are political reasons.
How many Apollo V rockets did we build for all that dough? It would take
many trillions of dollars to retool our energy systems; again there is no
comparison between the moonshot Cold War race and deploying a radically
different electric energy generation infrastructure. The logistics alone
mushroom out; these things take time and nine years is far too optimistic -
IMO. There is more to it than just the science/engineering of LFTR and
politics, there is also the economic dimension. capital allocation, scale
out of the required industrial base and resource constraints that are also
at play.
> Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come
online. By that time - they will need to compete with solar PV and the per
unit costs for PV that are achieved over the next two or three decades.
>>Finding a good inexpensive solar cell is not enough, even more important
is finding a cheap and reliable way to store vast amounts of electrical
energy. And because solar energy is so dilute environmentalists will whine
about the huge amounts of land required. And some applications are just not
going to work, you'll never see a solar powered 747 or fighter jet.
Dilute sources of power actually match quite well with how power is actually
consumed for the most part. Most electric power is consumed by the vast
number of dispersed (dilute) small consumers. Currently the grid topology is
dominated by having a few very large centralized producers and distributing
(with large inefficiencies by the way) this centrally produced power to a
large number of dispersed consumers over the grid. But that does not mean
this is necessarily the best electric power network topology; in fact simply
adding more centralized big thermo-electric power plants will not work, as
the grid itself is pretty much at capacity. it cannot take anymore juice,
without the high tension lines heating up and sagging down (until
SPARK->SURGE goes the grid, as happened I believe in 2003 when NYC went
dark)
Dispersed power generation makes sense - in this sense; solar PV on the roof
is consumed directly - no new power distribution infrastructure (laid at
great capital and political cost - power lines are always a huge legal
battle)
The grid, as it is, without any major changes could absorb 25% wind/solar.
the variability problem of renewables has been overblown [excuse the pun]
Urban areas have vast exploitable solar facing surfaces that could be
exploited for PV. The Los Angeles metro area for example covers 12,519
square kilometers. Covering just 4% of this urban fabric with PV surfaces
would yield a collection area of 500 square kilometers; at say a yield of
15% that gives a potential capacity for LA (by covering just 4% of its urban
fabric with solar PV) of around 75GW. Naturally the sun does not shine at
night or on cloudy days. A pretty widely rough capacity factor that I have
seen applied is about 25% (which is to say that this is the actual averaged
out yield). Even so this still is still more constant energy than 80 large
nuclear power plants (which operate at around 80% capacity).
Clearly energy storage systems will need to evolve - as they in fact are. It
is a huge race with a prize worth trillions for the organizations,
inventors, venture capitalists that figure out scalable batteries (or other
energy storage) A lot of money is going into this (and has been for some
time) And some very promising low cost flow batteries for example are on the
horizon. Utility scale batteries are critically needed. But not just that,
the grid itself is an antiquated Victorian era machine (the largest machine
on earth)
> The reason they are not getting built has less to do with political
activists and a more to do with the negative economic profile
James Hansen is one of the world's leading environmentalists and has done
more to raise the alarm about climate change than anybody else, he started
to do so in 1988. Hansen has recently changed his mind and is now in favor
of nuclear power because he figures it causes less environmental impact than
anything else, or at least anything else that wasn't moonbeams and could
actually make a dent in satiating the worldwide energy demand.
Yes I know and Hansen is terribly wrong on this. It is ironic to hear you
speak of this alleged small environmental impact of nuclear just a few years
scant years into the beginning of a trillion dollar mess at Fukushima - that
is going to be a resource and capital sinkhole for hundreds of years, just
as Chernobyl, Hanford, the enrichment plant at Oak Ridge (various places in
the former Soviet Union) and others are also proving to be.
If just one of the SFPs on top of the Fukushima Mark II reactors should fail
- what then? Several these units have been badly damaged by the hydrogen
explosions and are deteriorating structurally exposed to the elements.
Apparently the ground is starting to become unstable under unit #4 (which
explains the insane urgency to try to get those still very hot spent fuel
rods out of the SFP and into external storage - dry cask eventually
probably. Fukushima may be out of the news, but it is not over. It has not
been contained and the situation could quite suddenly become dire. They are
speaking of desperate measures to try to contain this - including freezing a
subterranean wall of injected water around the facility. The fuel assemblies
in three or four of the five unit's SFPs have partially melted and become
deformed by heat. Zirconium metal clad fuel rods - as you know spontaneously
combust in air - so removing them is a very tricky business. Also if any
rods get too close that can be very dangerous as well.
Just because something is out of the news does not mean the problem has been
solved. Hanford is out of the news. Have they dealt with the Hanford mess?
You know the answer is no; the estimate of what it will take now stands at
$112 billion (and rising)
There will be no easy answers to our looming need to adapt to energy
reality. As peak oil hits - and global conventional oil has already peaked -
and the other fossil energy types (including recoverable uranium) will
quickly follow - capital availability is going to collapse. There will be no
energy available to spare. Shale oil is essentially a Ponzi scheme boom - as
the depletion rates of the Eagle-Ford formation (and increasingly now the
Bakken as well) demonstrate. The EROI of Canadian tar sand is really not all
that good - and mining, refining it is destroying and degrading vast areas
and huge amounts of fresh water.
Everyone seems to be looking around hoping for that magical source of
energy. But it does not exist. We need to adapt and become more adept at
harvesting the solar flux and far more efficient in how we live. Otherwise
all we will be doing is ensuring our own and most large animal species
extinction - the global rate of species extinction is currently 10,000 times
the average background rate.. Just a thought to chew on.
Chris
John K Clark
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