To meet global warming objectives we must expand nuclear.

[Mr. G]

By the way:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... renewables

Annual subsidies paid for fossil fuel energies: 550 billion dollars
Annual subsidies paid for renewables: 120 billion dollars

Just reallocate all the subsidies to renewables and global warming is solved!

[Jub]

Mr. G, if you're so confident that we can fix things with renewable sources alone please outline exactly how you think it should be done. This includes meeting the growing power needs of India, China, and Africa, solving the issue of energy storage, and explaining where exactly these clean sources of energy can be built to supply the needs of the nations building them. If you're going to try to refute experts making these claims I expect you to go point by point and show where they went wrong in their estimations and show how your plan works better.

[madd0ct0r]

ugh, G, since you clearly can't be bothered to read the actual report:



6ds = 6 degreees warming
2ds = 2 degreees warming

from the IEA report: http://www.iea.org/publications/freepub ... Energy.pdf

Renewables are just about fully exploited there.

[jwl]

One of the main problems with non-nuclear renewables seems to be that their energy production fluctuates too much over the seasons. One way of solving this is to have industries that work seasonally, using a lot of energy-heavy manufacture in the summer and do less energy-heavy admin work in the winter. A bit like what cern does with the lhc.

[Darth Tanner]

It's all a matter of cost, nuclear today is probably more expensive than solar, hydroelectric and wind.

Not remotely true!!! Atleast from all the models and pricing regimes I've seen.

Annual subsidies paid for fossil fuel energies: 550 billion dollars

Most of this is things like alleviating fuel poverty in the third world and the fact like in the UK you pay reduced VAT on electricity consumption which is largely fossil fuel subsidy. In terms of cash paid out fossil fuels get almost no subsidy and are in fact massive tax payers. If you took all the subsidy from fossil fuels and spent them on wind and solar you would be left with a massive shortfall.

One of the main problems with non-nuclear renewables seems to be that their energy production fluctuates too much over the seasons.

Nevermind seasonal it varies too much over hours - solar and wind work quite well when their complimenting gas and coal (or hydro if your country is blessed with sufficient mountainous areas to install it) because the gas and coal are quick and flexible enough to compensate for the varying load - without that fossil fuel capacity your left with either needing battery backup which is not technologically or economically feasible or blackouts.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That's not true, Mr. G. You cannot just pour money to get results. There are industrial development and expansion curves which in heavy industry are not nearly as elastic as they are in software tech, the existence of which has been the bane of realism for the past two decades when dealing with economists and libertarians. Take one look at Tesla: A decade after they started, they're still producing one model of car in fractionally tiny batches. If simply pouring money at a problem magically solved production bottlenecks, why isn't Tesla building as many cars as Chrysler right now? Oh right, it doesn't. Worse, because of limitations at every level of the supply pyramid and in trained professionals, pouring more money into renewables after a certain point will have a completely useless return on investment as the cost per increased productivity unit sharply increases.

Look, I had wanted to be a nuclear engineer, looked at the US after Fukushima, and instead got my Master's in Ocean Engineering with my thesis work on a subject which materially contributes to renewable energy by helping improve construction techniques for offshore wind turbines. I know renewables are not some joke and can genuinely change our energy balance when properly handled -- though the lack of pump-storage construction to help make that possible is getting pretty pathetic. This article, however, simply reflects the fact that no matter how much money you put into renewables, you cannot expand their use fast enough to meet our warming targets, and can in fact only meet those targets by roughly increasing worldwide nuclear use to 250% of present levels.

[Zaune]

One of the main problems with non-nuclear renewables seems to be that their energy production fluctuates too much over the seasons. One way of solving this is to have industries that work seasonally, using a lot of energy-heavy manufacture in the summer and do less energy-heavy admin work in the winter. A bit like what cern does with the lhc.

That's not practical for large chunks of the manufacturing sector, and it doesn't help at all for parts of the world where electrical power demands are heavier in the winter, like a big chunk of Europe.

[Patroklos]

The politics of nuclear power expansion in the US would be greatly alleviated if we had a long term storage location that was operational. Yucca mountain was supposed to be it but thanks to its location and situational politics (aka Harry Ried being Senate Majority leader) it is sitting there unused. Hopefully that can change once he retires. It would be nice if Obama could use his lame duck don't give a shits to push this through but he is inexplicably cool on nuclear for some reason.

Nuclear is one of those issues that has all the right pieces to make everyone happy but for some reason they never fall into place.

[Borgholio]

It would be nice if we implemented waste recycling and used fast-neutron reactors would eliminate the waste issue while providing us with plenty of energy. But being more expensive than conventional reactors, it's even less likely to be supported.

[Patroklos]

Ha, I post about Yucca Mountain and then ten minutes later see this article on the front page of Slate:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... yucca.html

Next week, Republicans will finally be ready to send their Keystone XL bill to President Obama, who has promised to veto it on procedural grounds without a second thought. That won’t end the partisan bickering over the pipeline, which has been raging for the past six years and counting, but it will largely freeze the fight in place. The GOP lacks the votes it needs for an override, and the State Department is refusing to say when it will make a final recommendation on the project, which is what the president says he’s waiting on. Republicans, then, will have done all they can—and Obama all he has to.

But with the Keystone fight losing steam, another high-profile energy battle is bubbling back up: the decades-old debate over Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, the proposed site of a massive federal repository for America’s nuclear waste. The project, which dates back to the Reagan administration, has long been a top priority for the nuclear industry and its Republican allies, but it was more or less left for dead after the 2008 election. Obama promised on the campaign trail that he would block the project and, with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the president effectively did just that shortly after he took office.

Now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress, however, Yucca appears destined to return to the national stage. Industry officials have said that GOP leaders assured them privately that jump-starting Yucca is one of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s top priorities for this year. And, Rep. John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who chairs that panel’s Environment and Economy Subcommittee, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal last month that he is working on just such a bill that he hopes the House will then vote on this summer. Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, both of whom lead key energy-themed committees in the upper chamber, have also suggested nuclear waste is on their agendas.

Republicans and Democrats are sure to clash on a whole host of energy issues in a post-Keystone world, but a singular project like Yucca seems poised to draw the type of attention that made Keystone a polarizing staple of stump speeches, fundraising pitches, and attack ads during the past two elections.

The two projects are, of course, vastly different. One is a 1,700-mile pipeline that would move tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, the other amounts to a high-tech underground garbage dump that would house 77,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel, as well as the detritus that remains from the nation’s bomb-building binge during the Cold War. Politically speaking, though, the two projects share more than enough in common for the fight over Yucca to pretty seamlessly pick up where the fight over Keystone left off. Both are individual projects that have become de facto litmus tests in the larger fight over the nation’s energy future. Support and opposition both fall largely—but not completely—along party lines. And, most important of all given the existing tensions in the nation’s capital, both have been wrapped in bureaucratic red tape by a White House that would prefer to block each project on procedural grounds than on their merits alone.

...

The rest is in the link.

As I have said in many other environmental and nuclear power threads I would prefer to pollute one location utterly than spread the stuff around the world. Its hard to take any US environmentalist seriously if they are opposed to this project.

[Simon_Jester]

Especially when the one spot that is being polluted utterly is a dead spot in a cave a mile under a huge mountain.

There's nothing there to pollute.

[Zaune]

Hell, I could live with evacuating the occasional mid-sized town when one corner too many gets cut and a reactor goes China Syndrome if it meant no catastrophic drought in the midwestern United States.

[Sky Captain]

What would happen if for example some Chinese company develops standardized reactor design that can be factory produced and shipped to destination in pieces to be assembled on site much like the large wind turbines are built taking only few months from digging hole for foundation to reactor generating electricity at price competitive to coal? It would solve the build time issue plaguing current reactor designs. Would NIMBY attitude still stop such units from becoming widespread in Europe and US?

[Borgholio]

some Chinese company

Cue knee-jerk reactions about poorly designed and dangerous Chinese reactors. They will never be allowed on American soil. :-/

[Terralthra]

Standardized designs is (part of) what led to the Fukushima partial meltdown. You have to adapt the design of a nuclear plant to the particular natural disasters prevalent in that region, because it's nearly impossible to design a reactor that will survive all of them. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and so on are all different threats with different design requirements for them to be survivable in safety. Luckily, most places one only needs to deal with 1-2 of those.

[fnord]

iirc, it wasn't standardised designs per se, but that TEPCO hadn't retrofitted those reactors with lessons learned from other units of the same design.

Two things that immediately come to mind are adding a hardened hydrogen vent (obviating the hydrogen explosion that happened), and having all the diesel generators in a floodable basement (and thus knocked offline when the basement got flooded by tsunami), instead of physically dispersed - yeah, some in the basement, but have some on a higher level in the reactor buildings.

[Guardsman Bass]

Take one look at Tesla: A decade after they started, they're still producing one model of car in fractionally tiny batches. If simply pouring money at a problem magically solved production bottlenecks, why isn't Tesla building as many cars as Chrysler right now? Oh right, it doesn't. Worse, because of limitations at every level of the supply pyramid and in trained professionals, pouring more money into renewables after a certain point will have a completely useless return on investment as the cost per increased productivity unit sharply increases.

Eh, it's not so much an issue of broad limitations so much as it's the cost of Lithium batteries, and the fact that expanding supply of cars sold is difficult when you have to fight tooth-and-nail against the crooked car dealership cartels that dominate in most states (and tend to be very cozy with state legislatures). Tesla's working on the former with the factory it's building.

[Adam Reynolds]

. I know renewables are not some joke and can genuinely change our energy balance when properly handled -- though the lack of pump-storage construction to help make that possible is getting pretty pathetic.

What is the bottleneck on pumped storage? It doesn't seem any more complicated in principle than building a hydroelectric plant and we've been doing that for more than a century.

[Zaune]

What is the bottleneck on pumped storage? It doesn't seem any more complicated in principle than building a hydroelectric plant and we've been doing that for more than a century.

Logistics, probably. Large-scale installations require a convenient place to dig a reservoir up a sufficiently steep hill, and doing it on a smaller local scale with compressed air involves a big chunk of up-front capital and lots of health-and-safety paperwork compared to lithium batteries.

[madd0ct0r]

money, basically. in the UK, pumped storage schemes fall between the cracks of various development funds.
I was reading an excellent source in this earlier, but can't find it again. This covers the main points though:

http://www.scottishrenewables.com/media ... _paper.pdf

[quote]There have been no new Pumped Storage facilities built in the UK in the last thirty years, however, this paper demonstrates that there is a very clear case for expanding the capacity of this technology. Whilst there are advanced plans for Pumped Storage stations in Scotland, these face significant investment challenges which need to be overcome before the benefits outlined in this paper can be realised.

Risks associated with time and cost
Pumped Storage schemes have significant capital costs associated with them due to the large proportion of specialist underground construction and dam works, long construction period and site specific electrical and mechanical components. Since the long lead times for a Pumped Storage project from development to operation could be as much as ten years, future market certainty is a significant risk throughout the development process.

Lack of reward for benefits provided
It is anticipated that the main source of revenue from a pumped storage scheme will arise from:
 arbitrage between prices at peak and off-peak demand;
 provision of balancing services;
 capacity payments available under EMR arrangements, but no specific mechanism which
recognises the wider benefits of pumped storage.
At present, investors are concerned that forecast income from these three activities combined is insufficient to support investment and that the inherent benefits to consumers and the electricity system are not suitably rewarded.

No Long-term Contracts Available
Since pumped storage generally provides ancillary services to the System Operator that cannot be planned for in advance, such stations do not receive long-term contracts. This makes long term investment decisions more difficult as revenue is less certain. It is not currently possibly to enter into forward agreements to capture peak/off-peak spreads or to provide balancing services for the period relevant to investment in Pumped Storage plants. These agreements are always less than 5 years in length but lead times to operation of Pumped Storage plants can be up to 10 years ahead and plants have an operational life of at least 50 years.

Transmission Charging
The current transmission charging regime means that transmission access fees for pumped storage projects located in Scotland are very high and there is no differentiation between Pumped Storage schemes and stations which are pure generators. The current transmission regime does not recognise that Pumped Storage provides a benefit to the grid network and assists in reducing costs on the transmission network.

[Sky Captain]

Standardized designs is (part of) what led to the Fukushima partial meltdown. You have to adapt the design of a nuclear plant to the particular natural disasters prevalent in that region, because it's nearly impossible to design a reactor that will survive all of them. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and so on are all different threats with different design requirements for them to be survivable in safety. Luckily, most places one only needs to deal with 1-2 of those.

Any small scale reactor that is meant to be deployed in thousands of units should be able to cool itself and stay safe using only passive systems so it shouldn't matter if external power fails like it did in Fukushima. Reliance on powered systems for cooling is what led to Fukushima meltdown. If Fukushima reactors were passively cooled then tsunami would be a non issue because there would be no mission critical diesel generators and electric switchboards to short circuit.

[Simon_Jester]

Take one look at Tesla: A decade after they started, they're still producing one model of car in fractionally tiny batches. If simply pouring money at a problem magically solved production bottlenecks, why isn't Tesla building as many cars as Chrysler right now? Oh right, it doesn't. Worse, because of limitations at every level of the supply pyramid and in trained professionals, pouring more money into renewables after a certain point will have a completely useless return on investment as the cost per increased productivity unit sharply increases.

Eh, it's not so much an issue of broad limitations so much as it's the cost of Lithium batteries, and the fact that expanding supply of cars sold is difficult when you have to fight tooth-and-nail against the crooked car dealership cartels that dominate in most states (and tend to be very cozy with state legislatures). Tesla's working on the former with the factory it's building.

The problem is that issues like this are intrinsic to the nature of heavy industry. You do indeed have to overcome entrenched political lobbies. You have to build the factories to make the components to make your product, and the factories to make the components of those components, and the mines to extract the raw materials to make those components.

As a result of all this, you can't simply look at a blank slate and say "welp, let's throw X dollars at Y, which costs Z dollars per unit," and automatically get X/Z units of Y. Duchess contrasted this to software and I think she has a point. With a software project, there is lead time but you can basically develop anything within a year or three if you're willing to throw enough skilled manpower at it- and there is a nearly unlimited manpower pool if you're willing to spend enough money.

When talking about heavy industry, building up the capability to do something fundamentally new on a very large scale can take decades. Especially if (as is the case with renewable energy), you don't have a massive nationwide commitment to mobilize all the state's resources to expand that capability in a hurry. Something like the US mobilization during the World Wars, or the Five Year Plans, could get renewable energy out there a lot faster... but at the cost of basically drafting people to set up solar panels and build massive concrete tidalpower basins, and forcibly repurposing factories that now do something else to build wind turbines.

Economies don't normally work that way in peacetime.

[Wing Commander MAD]

As a result of all this, you can't simply look at a blank slate and say "welp, let's throw X dollars at Y, which costs Z dollars per unit," and automatically get X/Z units of Y. Duchess contrasted this to software and I think she has a point. With a software project, there is lead time but you can basically develop anything within a year or three if you're willing to throw enough skilled manpower at it- and there is a nearly unlimited manpower pool if you're willing to spend enough money.

Simon, that really isn't true. Software development is not something that you can simply throw more manpower at to get it done quicker, better, etc.. Up to a point adding manpower to a given task can improve efficiency/peformance, but after a certain point you'll actually hamper the project due to complexity. This is even worse if you are adding it late into the project to try to make up for the project falling behind.

[Starglider]

With a software project, there is lead time but you can basically develop anything within a year or three if you're willing to throw enough skilled manpower at it- and there is a nearly unlimited manpower pool if you're willing to spend enough money.

Simon, that really isn't true. Software development is not something that you can simply throw more manpower at to get it done quicker, better, etc.

Of course it isn't true. I assumed that Duchess was talking about software distribution; if someone invents better software, you can make unlimited copies with no tooling, everyone can switch over to it fairly quickly once it gains exposure and momentum. Simon though is just wrong. Software development is not even analogous to industrial production, it is analogous to industrial design. The effectiveness of spending more money on software design is exactly the same as spending more money on say designing nuclear plants; you can design multiple plants in parallel, but loading on more people has very quickly dimminishing returns in getting any single design completed. Computer science research is just like any other basic research, you can hire more researchers but the quality declines, duplicated work increases, and some innovation is inherently serial.

P.S. Tesla isn't a great example because while they're quite well funded for a tech startup, they are small fry as a car company. They definitely could 'pour' at least 10x more money and ramp much faster; they won't be hitting global supply chain limits on their input components any time soon.

[Simon_Jester]

My apologies.

I was thinking in terms of projects that were modular enough that you could just assign more programmers to write more modules, in which case you can actually get things done twice as fast by having 2X guys write the modules in parallel, rather than having X guys each write two modules sequentially.

Realistically, integration of the modules is by far the more important and time-consuming task and I should have stopped and realized that. I apologize for the fried state of my brain.

I should have thought harder.

And having reread to check, Duchess totally was talking about software distribution, not software development.