British nuclear future in crisis

[Alkaloid]

1. Putting the debate off 100 year is fine. Except hydro which is pretty much already maximally exploited, no power source we build now will last 100 years, including renewables (which are not really renewable - the plant is the fuel).

2. Fission fuel with breeders will last >10,000 years, which is too long to worry about in terms of our our piddling current technological capabilities.

3. I don't doubt a renewable grid could be built in terms of raw possibility. But why? It offers no advantage over nuclear and a lot of disadvantages.

4. I doubt renewables will ever be a major grid component. Possibly solar in the very long term. But nuclear fusion is showing greater improvement than the mass energy storage technologies needed to really make solar work.

1. Why is putting of this debate fine? We have a problem now, we have a flawed but workable solution that is politically unpopular but workable short term in nuclear to fall back on while we get renewables developed, and we can't be certain that we will ever be in this position again. And if you want to get so picky as to call wear on the plant burning fuel, then any and all nuclear reactors will require more fuel then just fissionable materials because they aren't magically immune to maintenance.

2. OK, I'll leave you to work out the logistics of storing centuries worth of Nuclear waste. Centuries, mind you, where Nuclear is the primary energy source for every nation on the planet, none of whom will want to actually be responsible for storing it because it essentially means a large area of your landmass is unusable for more or less every other purpose for what amounts to forever.

3. We could build one now, yes, or we could actually take serious steps toward maturing the current renewable technologies over the next decade, like we should have been doing for the last 3, using nuclear as a short term stopgap, and then build one before we start phasing out things like nuke plants.

4. We can actually make reliable batteries, and have been improving the batteries we can make noticeably. That alone is more progress toward mass energy storage than there has been toward workable fusion generators.

I don't think many advocates of renewable energy are really talking about that kind of project though, because in addition to the vulnerabilities you already mentioned there's considerable logistical problems involved in running a large-scale solar power plant in such a hostile region, not to mention the problem of transmission fall-off.

The main application of solar power that people are talking about right now is to carpet the roofs of existing buildings with solar panels and connect them to a power regulator that can draw on the grid if demand exceeds supply, and feed excess power back into the grid -for a corresponding rebate on one's electric bill- if supply exceeds demand. Panel technology is nowhere near efficient enough to guarantee self-sufficiency even for private homes, but it could certainly shoulder a large fraction of the burden of power generation without taking up any space or needing much infrastructure support.

One of the really big problems with that sort of large scale power transfer, even when nothing is going wrong, is that you bleed so much power having to transmit it that you would almost be better off trying to power Europe with a solar plant that runs only at night than you would with one in the Sahara. The best solution is likely to be a bit of both, individual buildings with their own solar or wind generators attempting to provide enough power for themselves and feeding into the grid if they get an excess, as well as large scale hydro/solar/wind/geothermal/whatever else we can come up with feeding into the grid in order to pick up the slack. That would rely on the normally reliable plants like hydro being able to provide enough power in the case of eternal night or becalming though, and would benefit from the entire grid being able to feed into mass storage devices to supplement that as well.

[Rabid]

As an aside, Power Storage is not just batteries (which need tons and tons of lithium, or carbon-nanotubes in the hopefully near-future), or pumping waters into dams. In fact, one of the most efficient methods I know of to do it on an industrial basis is basically just compressing air in large tanks (the same used these days to stock Natural Gas), and run some kind of turbines to get the power back. I think I read somewhere the efficiency of the system was around 45-55%, against 20-35% for Hydro-dams-pumping.

And the advantage of such a system is that you can build it basically everywhere, in any country, scale it like you want and put it either the closest to the energy source or the final consumers depending on what you want (zoning laws permitting).

Sure, that's going to take some investment to put into place, but, hey, it has been pretty clear for all this thread that we were going to have to spill a lot of bucks in the bucket anyway.

[Sky Captain]

But anyway, the report I cited earlier (NegaWatt) shows that France could have an almost totally renewable AND sitting-inside-its-borders power-grid in fifty years, with efforts done in parallel to reduce the total power-consumption of the country.

Do they also take into account increased power demand to run electric vehicles? In the future electric cars will become more and more common and will require electricity to run. Basically a significant portion of energy currently supplied by liquid fuels will have to be supplied by electric power stations.

OK, I'll leave you to work out the logistics of storing centuries worth of Nuclear waste. Centuries, mind you, where Nuclear is the primary energy source for every nation on the planet, none of whom will want to actually be responsible for storing it because it essentially means a large area of your landmass is unusable for more or less every other purpose for what amounts to forever.

Nuclear energy in current wasteful form is not sustainable long term. If fission reactors will become primary energy source then almost certainly they will be breeders and with breeders most of the long term waste storage issues go away because they leave only fission products behind. I have read various figures claiming 300 - 1000 years storage requirement for breeder waste. And the amount of waste to store would be small, around 1 - 2 tons per year from 1 GW reactor so it is not a big problem.

We can actually make reliable batteries, and have been improving the batteries we can make noticeably. That alone is more progress toward mass energy storage than there has been toward workable fusion generators.

Batteries are unlikely to take up significant portion of grid level energy storage beause of high cost. Pumped hydro is most likely mass energy storage option.

The best solution is likely to be a bit of both, individual buildings with their own solar or wind generators attempting to provide enough power for themselves and feeding into the grid if they get an excess, as well as large scale hydro/solar/wind/geothermal/whatever else we can come up with feeding into the grid in order to pick up the slack. That would rely on the normally reliable plants like hydro being able to provide enough power in the case of eternal night or becalming though, and would benefit from the entire grid being able to feed into mass storage devices to supplement that as well.

You would still want a continent spanning power grid to use available renewable energy generation capacity more effectively. For example in the future the whole Atlantic coast is spammed with wind farms. It is winter and weather is stormy and most wind farms generate at full capacity making more electricity than nearby countries need. However in Eastern Europe weather is calm, wind farms located there don't work. During summer in Southern Europe likely would be overproduction of solar energy. Your renewable grid would benefit a lot if you had capability to move surplus electricity to areas where generation is low. It would cut down on storage and fossil fueled backup generation requirements and allow to place pumped storage reserviors in areas where local topography is most favorable.

[HMS Conqueror]

1. Why is putting of this debate fine? We have a problem now, we have a flawed but workable solution that is politically unpopular but workable short term in nuclear to fall back on while we get renewables developed, and we can't be certain that we will ever be in this position again. And if you want to get so picky as to call wear on the plant burning fuel, then any and all nuclear reactors will require more fuel then just fissionable materials because they aren't magically immune to maintenance.

Whatever is built now will last 50 years at most. Running out of fuel in 100 years, even if true (which it is not) does not matter to any decision made now because the entire grid will need to be replaced twice by then anyway.

Renewables are an inferior solution to nuclear fission, so it makes no sense to build them instead.

2. OK, I'll leave you to work out the logistics of storing centuries worth of Nuclear waste. Centuries, mind you, where Nuclear is the primary energy source for every nation on the planet, none of whom will want to actually be responsible for storing it because it essentially means a large area of your landmass is unusable for more or less every other purpose for what amounts to forever.

Putting it in drums and not fucking around with them seems to work pretty well.

If you really care that much you can simply destroy the waste with neutron bombardment, which is also net productive of energy for the most part (the basis of breeders).

3. We could build one now, yes, or we could actually take serious steps toward maturing the current renewable technologies over the next decade, like we should have been doing for the last 3, using nuclear as a short term stopgap, and then build one before we start phasing out things like nuke plants.

Nuclear will always be better than renewables. It is furthermore as good a solution to CO2 now as renewables with ever be. Renewables are a political dogma pirouetted on marketing bullshit and journalist lies; there's no technical reason to favour them.

4. We can actually make reliable batteries, and have been improving the batteries we can make noticeably. That alone is more progress toward mass energy storage than there has been toward workable fusion generators.

We can't make batteries at a good enough price (as in, the batteries alone would increase electricity cost multiple times), and they're not improving rapidly. The problem is there are hard physical limits to battery capability, while fusion performance has been doubling every couple of years due to mostly increased understanding of turbulence control. The best way to time shift electricity atm is pumped storage, but that's not viable either except in the few sites where geography has done most of the work, so it's not scalable to the extent a solar or wind grid would need.

edit: actually, even if you assume it is completely scalable, you are still looking at crazy trillions-level initial investments. Which is more than it costs to replace the entire world's electricity supply with nuclear.

Personally I think that continued adherence to renewables nonsense after being informed of the technical facts is a good indicator of someone not really caring about solving the CO2 problem at all, just using it as a means to push ideological goals.

[HMS Conqueror]

Sorry, didnt see the replies on page 2 at first. Im not going to respond to everything, but to what I consider the important points (many are duplicate issues, so if yours isnt answered it may just be because someone else said something similar already).

Aharon: I don't mean a wall of politicians' vague "invest more money in nice things!", I mean how technically are you going to do it, ideally in 1 paragraph?

The only really satisfactory way is to store a huge amount of energy - and thats a big unsolved fundamental physics problem. At the moment it imposes unreasonably huge costs.

And you don't think an equiv. 10% drop in salary is significant? That's a greater standard of living drop than that caused by the recession. And that being for people on "middle incomes", not the poor.

It is not a big unsolved fundamental physics problem, it's a political and economical problem. All you need is a bunch of pumped-storage power stations and other ways to store the energy from renewables. It's just currently more expensive, or not doable given current laws, so you need political incentives. And as I tried to make clear by showing the actual measurements taken. It's not vague promises, it's actual money being invested to further those goals.

Pumped storage is dependent on geography. There aren't enough good sites. Even if there were infinite number at the cost of currently exploited sites, the investment requires is still stupendously huge to store grid capacity for 12 hours (for solar) or several days (for wind).

@drop in salary
Well, I wouldn't consider a car a luxury good, either. Yet, it comes at more than four times that cost (According to Autokostencheck.de, a small car (Renault Twingo 1.2 Bivalent) will cost you 151€ a month for fuel and insurance, without paying of the credit. Assuming a price of 8.730 €, of which you pay 4.000 immediately, at an interest rate of 6% you have to add 291 € for financing the car).

151+291 isn't 4x 1000.

I think you're being optimistic to start with; average electricity bill in the UK is actually like £1k/year; 10x that is equivalent to a complete min wage pre-tax salary: the poor can't have electricity anymore, although the middle class can maybe continue to use it for essential and low-consumption tasks like lighting. Universal computer and TV ownership is probably over. Widespread ownership of refrigerators and dishwashers is dead and buried. Now for sure not all of that is the wholesale cost of generating electricity, but as we've established the other parts of the supply chain also encounter hefty costs in a renewable grid, be it centrally computer-managing everyones' usage, or building a TWh of pumped storage. So I think that's much more like what you're going to get.

The fundamental isssue to me is: what's the point spending this more money when the solution offered is only as good in some ways, and inferior in others? I'd understand if there were some big advantage to it, like it's the only way to avert catastrophic AGW or something, but as it is it's just pissing away money I would rather spend on whisky.

HMS, something caught my eye, and I have to ask: how are giant wind farms or carpeting deserts with solar cells "back-to-nature" ideology? A wind farm is no more a natural artifact than a nuclear reactor. It requires less physics to understand, and that's about the only significant difference.

Most of the people I meet or see on the news who self-identify as environmentalist are more interested in the idea of little village communes with their own windmill, and radically less industry and consumption generally. There ideal is a sort of cleaner version of the middle ages.

It offers a few disadvantages, and a few advantages. In my opinion it balances out and we should probably build plenty of both, or a lot of whichever is permanently and consistently cheaper, and I'm not sure which that is.

I agree. If renewables were cheaper I would favour them, but they aren't.

I know some guys who work on fusion, guys with actual plasma physics degrees, and even they would laugh at this.

And how do you know I am not one

For one thing there is not exactly such thing as a "plasma physics degree," but other than that?

Here's the catch. Mass energy storage is (or can be) done by building machines that pick up heavy things, then put them down.

Yes, but not cheaply enough. Fusion can be done by detonating hydrogen bombs in a tank of water and using it to drive a turbine, but not cheaply enough. The costs matter, because our resources are not infinite.

- First, it is decentralized. It is harder to take down a power grid relying primarily on decentralized power sources than it would be if it was based on a few huge centrals producing gigawatts of power. The downside is that such a grid may cost much than a centralized one to maintain - but we have already established that the end of Cheap Energy is over anyway, so we might as well bite the bullet and get over with it.

What's the advantage here? The current grid is already decentralised enough to be stable, while remaining centralised enough to be efficient. You could already now make some ultra-decentralised grid by putting a small gas turbine in every village rather than making a big central gas turbine; it's not done because it's a bad way of doing things, but with wind it is the only way of doing things (fwiw, and in fairness to renewables, solar probably will be built in centralised power stations a long way from the consumer, because that's the most efficient way).

- Secondly, the energy can be produced with local resources, ending the dependency on foreign energy sources. I don't think I have to draw you a picture of what this would imply... The downside is that these new power sources still use resources (rare elements), for their construction, that might have to be imported (China, US, Peru & Bolivia, I'm looking at you). But it is only a one time investment, and with R&D and sensible recycling policies this foreign dependency can also be reduced.

I don't hate the ferriners, nor do I think they're likely to suddenly embargo us, so YMMV on this. Nuclear offers similar advantage - uranium is sourced from Canada and Australia primarily, and can be easily stockpiled. More fundamentally we cannot withdraw from global interdependence whatever we do; even if the grid becomes autarkic everything else still won't be.

Your main argument, Boat, is that Renewable is costly and has drawbacks. Well, Nuclear also has its drawbacks, doesn't it ?

You base your arguments on economic calculations, saying that in this frame of reference Nuclear beat Renewable hand down. Maybe.

Economic calculation is the right way to look at this. It's just an industrial input that we want to get for the lowest expenditure or our valuable time that can be more enjoyably spent drinking whisky.

However you fail to understand that Nuclear is dead. You can't build nuclear anymore. It had become difficult after Three Miles Island ; next to impossible after Tchernobyl. After Fukushima ?
Fission is dead.
Deal with it.

This isn't a "you're wrong" argument, it's a "you're right, but morons will disagree with you anyway" argument. Yes, they will disagree right up to the point someone tells them they can't have a television or a fridge anymore.

[Rabid]

Renewables are an inferior solution to nuclear fission, so it makes no sense to build them instead.

Consider I'm dumb and you have to teach me. What is the metric you use to judge renewable is inferior to nuclear ?

[HMS Conqueror]

To produce the same amount of electricity with the same greenhouse gas emissions, they cost considerably more.

[Bakustra]

@drop in salary
Well, I wouldn't consider a car a luxury good, either. Yet, it comes at more than four times that cost (According to Autokostencheck.de, a small car (Renault Twingo 1.2 Bivalent) will cost you 151€ a month for fuel and insurance, without paying of the credit. Assuming a price of 8.730 €, of which you pay 4.000 immediately, at an interest rate of 6% you have to add 291 € for financing the car).

151+291 isn't 4x 1000.

151 + 291= 442 x 12 = 5304 € a year. Your math doesn't seem to work out, sir.

HMS, something caught my eye, and I have to ask: how are giant wind farms or carpeting deserts with solar cells "back-to-nature" ideology? A wind farm is no more a natural artifact than a nuclear reactor. It requires less physics to understand, and that's about the only significant difference.

Most of the people I meet or see on the news who self-identify as environmentalist are more interested in the idea of little village communes with their own windmill, and radically less industry and consumption generally. There ideal is a sort of cleaner version of the middle ages.

No it isn't. That's anarcho-primitivism, which is a fringe movement on a fringe movement. You believe that because you disagree with the general ideology of environmentalism, and so mentally filter things to make them more offensive to feel better about your disagreements. But I don't see what's wrong with less consumption- if you had my job you'd probably agree (eventually) that we could stand to have radically less consumption with a marginally lower standard of living at worst. But then again, I'm an American.

I know some guys who work on fusion, guys with actual plasma physics degrees, and even they would laugh at this.

And how do you know I am not one

For one thing there is not exactly such thing as a "plasma physics degree," but other than that?

Princeton, UCLA, UW-M, MIT, and Columbia all disagree, since they offer master's and doctoral programs in plasma physics. As for why I personally am not convinced you're involved in the nuclear fusion field, well, it rhymes with "plum."

[HMS Conqueror]

@drop in salary
Well, I wouldn't consider a car a luxury good, either. Yet, it comes at more than four times that cost (According to Autokostencheck.de, a small car (Renault Twingo 1.2 Bivalent) will cost you 151€ a month for fuel and insurance, without paying of the credit. Assuming a price of 8.730 €, of which you pay 4.000 immediately, at an interest rate of 6% you have to add 291 € for financing the car).

151+291 isn't 4x 1000.

151 + 291= 442 x 12 = 5304 € a year. Your math doesn't seem to work out, sir.

He didn't specify monthly repayments, and I didn't check his maths.

HMS, something caught my eye, and I have to ask: how are giant wind farms or carpeting deserts with solar cells "back-to-nature" ideology? A wind farm is no more a natural artifact than a nuclear reactor. It requires less physics to understand, and that's about the only significant difference.

Most of the people I meet or see on the news who self-identify as environmentalist are more interested in the idea of little village communes with their own windmill, and radically less industry and consumption generally. There ideal is a sort of cleaner version of the middle ages.

No it isn't. That's anarcho-primitivism, which is a fringe movement on a fringe movement. You believe that because you disagree with the general ideology of environmentalism, and so mentally filter things to make them more offensive to feel better about your disagreements. But I don't see what's wrong with less consumption- if you had my job you'd probably agree (eventually) that we could stand to have radically less consumption with a marginally lower standard of living at worst. But then again, I'm an American.

The anti-consumption lot are the back-to-nature lot. Consumption is, ipso facto, good. The only question is can we eliminate any harmful side-effects, at least for a lower cost than living with them? And we can.

I know some guys who work on fusion, guys with actual plasma physics degrees, and even they would laugh at this.

And how do you know I am not one

For one thing there is not exactly such thing as a "plasma physics degree," but other than that?

Princeton, UCLA, UW-M, MIT, and Columbia all disagree, since they offer master's and doctoral programs in plasma physics. As for why I personally am not convinced you're involved in the nuclear fusion field, well, it rhymes with "plum."

A doctorate is about producing a specific piece of research (or multiple pieces). I wouldnt usually describe a PhD from the PPPL as a "plasma physics degree", but rather as a PhD in X. Actually, this might indeed be different in US where coursework and exams are still a big component into doctoral study.

I do not work in the field but I do have a degree-level physics education and some specific knowledge of the issues.

You've offered a lot of nitpicks and veiled character attacks; if you think you are clever you should contribute something of substance.

[Aharon]

@pump-storage
If you are willing to use lots of lakes for this, it's possible. Plus, there are other ways to store energy (wind and solar energy converted to gas, for example, or, a few years downtime, the batteries of electric cars which aren't yet in use).

A rough estimate for Great Britain by David MacKay plan G

He reaches the same conclusion that you do - that nuclear is cheaper. However, he doesn't make the idiotic mistake of claiming all-renewable energy is impossible.

@drop in income
You're either lazy or dishonest. If you didn't check the math, you should not criticize it. If you did check the math, you can't tell me that you really believe there's any place in the world where you can get a 4.730 € credit and repay 291 € once.

I didn't mention it in my other post, sorry:
My assumptions on electricity use came from the energy agency of north rhine westfalia in combination with Verivox, a consumer portal for comparing energy prices to get the electricity price. Where did you pull your numbers from?

[HMS Conqueror]

@pump-storage
If you are willing to use lots of lakes for this, it's possible. Plus, there are other ways to store energy (wind and solar energy converted to gas, for example, or, a few years downtime, the batteries of electric cars which aren't yet in use).

A rough estimate for Great Britain by David MacKay plan G

He reaches the same conclusion that you do - that nuclear is cheaper. However, he doesn't make the idiotic mistake of claiming all-renewable energy is impossible.

I didn't make that claim. I explicitly stated the opposite in fact:

3. I don't doubt a renewable grid could be built in terms of raw possibility.

MacKay's book is excellent. The only problem with it is he doesn't quantify the costs, especially of the intermittency mitigation schemes. Yes, even in the worst case you can build a million fly wheels or excavate a billion tonnes of rock and pump water in and out of the cavity, but that all has to be paid for. I don't mean that so much as a criticism of MacKay, because he's not an economist and that's not the sort of book he was trying to write, but the cost is the vital next step after you've established raw technical possibility.

@drop in income
You're either lazy or dishonest. If you didn't check the math, you should not criticize it. If you did check the math, you can't tell me that you really believe there's any place in the world where you can get a 4.730 € credit and repay 291 € once.

I didn't mention it in my other post, sorry:
My assumptions on electricity use came from the energy agency of north rhine westfalia in combination with Verivox, a consumer portal for comparing energy prices to get the electricity price. Where did you pull your numbers from?

I skim read about 10 posts and replied to about half of the wall of text therein; we all make mistakes. The mistake in this instance doesn't make any difference to the fundamental point I'm making anyway.

[Aharon]

A clear summary of your position would be nice. You also wrote

The only really satisfactory way is to store a huge amount of energy - and thats a big unsolved fundamental physics problem.

Yes, the next sentence was "At the moment, it imposes an unreasonably huge cost", but both me and Simon_Jester thought you really meant it is an unsolved problem.

the cost is the vital next step after you've established raw technical possibility.

Yes, it is. But there's a difference between actually talking about real costs and just sayin "Oh, it's too expensive, let's forget it."

I skim read about 10 posts and replied to about half of the wall of text therein; we all make mistakes. The mistake in this instance doesn't make any difference to the fundamental point I'm making anyway.

Perhaps if you would make clearer statements and less assertions, you would get less opposing opinions? Then you would have the time to actually read and understand, and answer based on this, instead of skim-reading and then making false statements.

To help clarify your position, please back up your claims:

1. About the electricity cost for an average household in Great Britain
2. About the minimum income in Great Britain
3. That Nukes will be more expensive than Germany's coal grid. About 10-20%. Solar is 1,000% more expensive.

[HMS Conqueror]

A clear summary of your position would be nice. You also wrote

The only really satisfactory way is to store a huge amount of energy - and thats a big unsolved fundamental physics problem.

Yes, the next sentence was "At the moment, it imposes an unreasonably huge cost", but both me and Simon_Jester thought you really meant it is an unsolved problem.

Doing it at an acceptable cost is the problem.

the cost is the vital next step after you've established raw technical possibility.

Yes, it is. But there's a difference between actually talking about real costs and just sayin "Oh, it's too expensive, let's forget it."

I skim read about 10 posts and replied to about half of the wall of text therein; we all make mistakes. The mistake in this instance doesn't make any difference to the fundamental point I'm making anyway.

Perhaps if you would make clearer statements and less assertions, you would get less opposing opinions? Then you would have the time to actually read and understand, and answer based on this, instead of skim-reading and then making false statements.

To help clarify your position, please back up your claims:

1. About the electricity cost for an average household in Great Britain
2. About the minimum income in Great Britain
3. That Nukes will be more expensive than Germany's coal grid. About 10-20%. Solar is 1,000% more expensive.

If everyone on the site wants to argue with me I am happy to respond but it doesn't mean I have more time to do so! My posts were very concise until the point where I had to start responding to multiple peoples' multiquote cut'n'rebuttals.

3. is the only fundamentally important claim and I cited it when I made it, in this post, the source being here (the full report gives an explanation of methodology and record of data, but it is too long to easily see the conclusions).

Solar electricity isn't actually inherently 1,000% as expensive to produce, at least in the good sites and more sensible applications; you have that confused with the UK feed-in tariff being 1,000% greater than nuclear generation costs. However even in the IEA's more favourable comparisons it is still a multiple fold increase vs nuclear. Again this is wholesale without intermittency/grid upgrade costs.

[K. A. Pital]

The inefficiency of storage and power production is being rapidly challenged in materials science. E.g. the recent creation of graphene.

So while renewables are an inferior solution now, I see no reason to stop pushing in that direction. They may be a superior solution down the line.

[Aharon]

@HMS
Thank you. Do you have the full report? I would be interested in reading it - the topic interests me not only because of our current discussion.

@1000%
You did make this exact claim on the second page of the discussion. I hadn't seen that you made a similar claim that is truer to the source on the first page.

@other data
Now that the rest of the posters don't seem to be involved anymore, you could provide the data. I think it is relevant to judge wether your claims that energy is becoming a luxury good the poor can't afford. Or do you withdraw that claim?

[Sky Captain]

Expensive energy would make not only your power bill higher, but also make manufacturing of goods and providing services more expensive so if you don't have lots of spare income you will have to live with less than you used to live when energy was cheap. Or it can lead to companies reloating their energy hungry factories to countries with lax environmental regulations and just burn tons of coal to generate cheap energy.
All of that would affect local economies negatively.

[HMS Conqueror]

@HMS
Thank you. Do you have the full report? I would be interested in reading it - the topic interests me not only because of our current discussion.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 4#p3659724

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19051979/ElecCost

Linked here, although not in response to you so I don't blame you for not seeing it.

@1000%
You did make this exact claim on the second page of the discussion. I hadn't seen that you made a similar claim that is truer to the source on the first page.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 4#p3659382

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16721328

First time it was mentioned. I may have also become mixed up but I am not going to check. If so I apologise.

@other data
Now that the rest of the posters don't seem to be involved anymore, you could provide the data. I think it is relevant to judge wether your claims that energy is becoming a luxury good the poor can't afford. Or do you withdraw that claim?

Do you think that a multiple-fold increase in electricity costs wouldn't restrict the usage of electricity? We can argue over magnitude, which is at least somewhat unclear, and at what point something becomes a luxury, which is subjective, but it would seem to be not a disagreement in principle, only haggling over price.

The inefficiency of storage and power production is being rapidly challenged in materials science. E.g. the recent creation of graphene.

So while renewables are an inferior solution now, I see no reason to stop pushing in that direction. They may be a superior solution down the line.

I would not advocate the ending of all research in that line, but at present nuclear is much superior. I would therefore advocating ending all subsidies and other regulatory favours for renewables.

Also, while it is possible that energy could become radically cheaper to store (we are talking at least an order of magnitude) I do not believe that any progress as so far been made toward that goal. Ie. electric storage approaches are at present, afaik, still not even competitive with geological pumped storage methods.

[Aharon]

@Report
Thanks a lot!

@increase in electricity cost
Yes, it probably would reduce usage. The question is how much of a reduction is acceptable. Your position seems to be that current levels should be kept, and that there is no room for discussion. I think a moderate reduction is acceptable - say, down from 5.000 kWh to 4.000 kWh for a 4-person family. This makes a 20% increase in price feasible, which would be enough for the switch to the cheaper renewables. Solar is the most expensive one, per the summary you cited.

@storage
I hadn't found this source before (again in German, unfortunately): initiative for economical and environmental energy use

They cite an estimate by the federal environment office, which has current storage capacity at 40 GWh and needed storage capacity at 20.000 GWh.
However, the German natural gas grid already has a storage capacity of 220.000 GWh, so they advocate storing the energy in the form of natural gas. They claim this method has an energy conversion efficiency of greater than 60%.
It certainly doesn't solve all problems, but it has the big advantage of using an existing infrastructure.

Together with a build up in the number of pumped storage facilities and the use of new technologies (I think it was Simon_Jester who mentioned molten salt as energy store), it is hopefully sufficient.

@nuclear
It's not doable from a political point of view in Germany. And unlike you, I don't think this is totally stupid. Yes, nuclear is relatively safe. But screwups or natural desasters undeniably can have far greater consequences than any other type of energy generation, and cost cutting and lax safety measurements seem to be wide spread.

[HMS Conqueror]

@increase in electricity cost
Yes, it probably would reduce usage. The question is how much of a reduction is acceptable. Your position seems to be that current levels should be kept, and that there is no room for discussion. I think a moderate reduction is acceptable - say, down from 5.000 kWh to 4.000 kWh for a 4-person family. This makes a 20% increase in price feasible, which would be enough for the switch to the cheaper renewables. Solar is the most expensive one, per the summary you cited.

Keeping current levels is preferable; any reduction represents a reduction in quality of life. Asking whether we could make do with less is to me the wrong question. What we want is to have as much as possible while achieving whatever other goals we think are important (eg. eliminating CO2 emissions).

The only renewable I can think that would fit in the same cost bracket is wind without intermittency mitigation. The intermittency mitigation then kills it.

As best I can work out, the current plan in wind-subsidising countries is to ignore this problem because in the short term they only want 10-20% grid penetration, which can be maintained using existing fossil excess capacity to load match. But this is an absurd worst of both worlds: still increasing costs, but permanently capping CO2 reduction at a still high level.

@storage
I hadn't found this source before (again in German, unfortunately): initiative for economical and environmental energy use

They cite an estimate by the federal environment office, which has current storage capacity at 40 GWh and needed storage capacity at 20.000 GWh.
However, the German natural gas grid already has a storage capacity of 220.000 GWh, so they advocate storing the energy in the form of natural gas. They claim this method has an energy conversion efficiency of greater than 60%.
It certainly doesn't solve all problems, but it has the big advantage of using an existing infrastructure.

Together with a build up in the number of pumped storage facilities and the use of new technologies (I think it was Simon_Jester who mentioned molten salt as energy store), it is hopefully sufficient.

Excuse me if any of this is wrong, my interpretation is from copy/pasting parts of the slides into google translate -

They propose to make synthetic gas from water and atmospheric CO2 using electricity from renewables. Ok, I accept this is technically possible and that they could store enough gas. The main problem with this approach is what is the cost of producing it and then burning it again?

[I am nonetheless impressed that this problem is seriously considered in Germany; here it is whitewashed with misleading statistics and govt seems to have no policy on it at all.]

@nuclear
It's not doable from a political point of view in Germany. And unlike you, I don't think this is totally stupid. Yes, nuclear is relatively safe. But screwups or natural desasters undeniably can have far greater consequences than any other type of energy generation, and cost cutting and lax safety measurements seem to be wide spread.

I think Germany's position is in fact totally stupid. That idea of a North Sea tsumani washing down the Rhine or something is totally fanciful. Or if not that, there was no reason to change the policy due to Fukushima.

It really depends what you think is more important: stopping CO2, or stopping low probability of low/no fatality accidents. Choosing the latter, to me, indicates one does not think AGW is worth worrying about. There's an argument for that, but not one that seems accepted at a policy level.

[aerius]

I hadn't found this source before (again in German, unfortunately): initiative for economical and environmental energy use

They cite an estimate by the federal environment office, which has current storage capacity at 40 GWh and needed storage capacity at 20.000 GWh.
However, the German natural gas grid already has a storage capacity of 220.000 GWh, so they advocate storing the energy in the form of natural gas. They claim this method has an energy conversion efficiency of greater than 60%.
It certainly doesn't solve all problems, but it has the big advantage of using an existing infrastructure.

The only way I can see this being possible is if they use some sort of high efficiency fuel cell setup to convert the natural gas back to energy and have an equally efficient way of converting energy into natural gas for storage. Compression losses for natural gas (gotta compress it if you want to store it in a reasonably sized tank) is around 3-5%, so you'll need at least 80% efficiency on both ends of the conversion. Theoretically possible with fuel cells for turning it back into electricity, but as far as I know it isn't possible yet on the other end.

Now if they're going to burn the natural gas in a combined cycle turbine, forget about it, 60% efficiency ain't happening since the best combined cycle plants are only 60% efficient and that's only when running at peak power output.

[Aharon]

@HMS Conqueror
Well, obviously the same events as in Japan won't transpire in Germany. The problem is that we don't sufficiently prepare for this kind of accident, and that it seems to be very hard to put a probability to it.

The Rasmussen-Study (1976) puts the risk of a meltdown at 2/10000 per year per reactor (according to wikipedia, haven't read the extensive source myself (link)

A similar study for german reactors from th end of the 1970s gets the same result, but a change in methodology leads to completely different results in the continuation in 1989; it puts the same risk at roughly 3/1000000.

So basically, it seems to be very hard to judge the actual safety of nuclear reactors. If we work with the higher risk (considering oneself risk-averse), we do get the oft-cited result of one major accident every thirty years. Now this is for 400 reactors world-wide, so the chance that this accident is in Germany is rather low, but if it does happen here, it would bring tremendous costs - both Japan's and the Ukraine's economies will have to deal with the costs for a long time.

And this doesn't take into account the issue of repositories for nuclear waste yet. Yes, there isn't lots of waste in relation to the energy produced, but it does add up. And previous governments didn't ensure safety in the past - I'm talking about Asse II, which leads to high costs the public has to shoulder (2 billion, if I remember correctly).

So, to summarise my position: in theory, nuclear energy could be safe. In practice, people are idiots, and costs will be cut in the wrong places, making it less safe than it ought to be if one considers the big consequences a major accident can have.

[Simon_Jester]

@increase in electricity cost
Yes, it probably would reduce usage. The question is how much of a reduction is acceptable. Your position seems to be that current levels should be kept, and that there is no room for discussion. I think a moderate reduction is acceptable - say, down from 5.000 kWh to 4.000 kWh for a 4-person family. This makes a 20% increase in price feasible, which would be enough for the switch to the cheaper renewables. Solar is the most expensive one, per the summary you cited.

Keeping current levels is preferable; any reduction represents a reduction in quality of life.

Not necessarily. Swapping incandescents for fluorescents isn't much of a quality of life issue (though I'm sentimental about blackbody radiation; I sometimes indulge in incandescent light bulbs in the winter when the waste heat doesn't do me any net harm anyway). Swapping poorly insulated homes for well insulated homes, or energy-economic refrigerators for uneconomic ones, likewise. Improving the energy-efficiency of industrial processes, likewise.

So no, I don't agree with that: the amount of electricity you consume may correlate with your quality of life, but that doesn't mean the relationship between them is one-to-one.

[Aharon]

Sorry, missed the edit window:

[quote=me]The problem is that we don't sufficiently prepare for this kind of accident, and that it seems to be very hard to put a probability to it.[/quote]

Is probably better phrased as

The problem is that we can't sufficiently and cost-efficiently prepare for the kind of accident where several improbable circumstances coincide. This also seems to make it hard to put a probability to it.

Also, while I'm at it:
@aerius
the number (60%) is for the conversion in one direction, energy to natural gas, only. It's still better than to shut down the plants because its production exceeds grid capacity (which already has to be done from time to time on very windy or sunny days).

[K. A. Pital]

The inefficiency of storage and power production is being rapidly challenged in materials science. E.g. the recent creation of graphene.

So while renewables are an inferior solution now, I see no reason to stop pushing in that direction. They may be a superior solution down the line.

I would not advocate the ending of all research in that line, but at present nuclear is much superior. I would therefore advocating ending all subsidies and other regulatory favours for renewables.

Also, while it is possible that energy could become radically cheaper to store (we are talking at least an order of magnitude) I do not believe that any progress as so far been made toward that goal. Ie. electric storage approaches are at present, afaik, still not even competitive with geological pumped storage methods.

I wouldn't do so. China is funding massive construction of nuclear reactors and at the same time lots of research in the renewables field (solar, wind, storage, hydro).

As for the graphene stuff:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gra ... orage.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 150731.htm
http://www.electrochem.org/dl/interface ... 63-066.pdf

Keeping current levels is preferable; any reduction represents a reduction in quality of life.

That's simply not true, which Simon has aptly demonstrated.

[Julhelm]

Just because parts of an operation are subsidized does not mean the nuclear power part is, nor does it make them "quasi state cartels". I want you to prove how they are cartels, and how they are quasi-state.

And while you are at it, name those "artificial barriers" as well.

Well considering E.ON which is one of the companies referenced in the article has already been fined for anticompetitive behavior and E.ON and others are also involved in the Scandinavian Nord Pool power exchange which recently was raided along with Epex Spot by anti-trust regulators as part of a 3 year crackdown on anti-competitive behavior in the energy industry I don't think his argument is such a stretch.