Nuclear Power versus Hydrogen Power

[Norade]

My friends are arguing that small locally generated hydrogen power is more efficient and viable than a robust nuclear program. Their small scale hydrogen would consist of people using solar, geothermal, and wind power at a small scale to produce hydrogen for a fuel cell. They point to a small community in Britain as proof of concept. I have argued that their method would be inefficient and unable to produce enough power for large scale projects.

I've argued for small scale community nuclear generators such as the Russian model I have seen pictured here. They argue that such a small reactor is unsafe due to the shielding being easier to breach, or the risk of small scale terrorist attacks. They also argue that nuclear power is unsustainable and environmentally harmful.

My question, which power generation system would you rather see used on mass and why? Also, would your answer change if you needed to implement the system on a limited time frame?

[PeZook]

Have they showed any calculations proving it's possible to use a distributed system on a wide scale? Proof of concept is fine and dandy, but powering a small community doesn't compare at all to running a multi-million city.

Also, while nuclear power is technically unsustainable, so is solar, wind, geothermal and all others: windmills and solar cells have to be built and maintained, which means consumption of irreplaceable resources.

[Mr Bean]

Nuclear is about the only option going forward for long term cheap power. And not as in a few but as in hundreds of nuclear power plants in America if we want to keep the lights on. I'm sorry but unless your willing to coat Texas in Solar panels your not going to get the kind of power generation required to power the US, but worse such power is only good for a certain amount of distance, so Texas coated solar power will not make it to California in useful amounts for example. The same arguments apply for Wind and Geothermal except some areas are totally unsuitable for those two methods while solar can be used(All be it much less efficiently) across the entire US.

And second this is the big WTF
Hydrogen does not produce energy, it is an energy storage medium, it takes power, lots of power to produce hydrogen, which is why Nuclear power plants are so good at making the stuff(Plus byproducts) while the example solar/geo/wind method would be hard pressed just to keep the lights on let alone produce enough power to separate enough hydrogen out in useful amounts for burning.

Edit

Also, while nuclear power is technically unsustainable, so is solar, wind, geothermal and all others: windmills and solar cells have to be built and maintained, which means consumption of irreplaceable resources.

Technically on a geological timescale? We can build hundred year plants(Proof of concepts are out there) of Nuclear power generation plants which can be run for close to one hundred years off a single fuel source. We are not talking thousand year atomic Bat-batteries. But a hundred years on a planet which you just need to replace the shielding and maintain the plant is pretty damn impressive.

[Starglider]

Their small scale hydrogen would consist of people using solar, geothermal, and wind power at a small scale to produce hydrogen for a fuel cell.

Current practical fuel cells use rare materials (e.g. platinum), supplies of which are insufficient to power the whole economy. Frankly we'd have better luck with batteries.

They argue that such a small reactor is unsafe due to the shielding being easier to breach, or the risk of small scale terrorist attacks.

Hydrogen is unsafe. The stuff has to be either pressurised or liquified, both at considerable energy cost. Gaseous Hydrogen leaks burn with an extremely hot invisible flame that will toast anything nearby. Liquid hydrogen leaks quickly produce explosive vapor, and oxygen leaking into hydrogen storage tanks produces an explosive mixture much more readily than with hydrcarbons. The terrorism argument is bullshit anyway, given how often terrorists have attacked power plants (zero) or even infrastructure targets (also zero, AFAIK), but if anything is going to be a terrorist delight having tanks of rocket fuel stowed in every car and building would be.

They also argue that nuclear power is unsustainable

Known uranium reserves are already sufficient to last thousands of years (with reprocessing), and that's without further exploration, uranium extraction from seawater, or fusion.

and environmentally harmful.

The environmental harm is considerably less than for coal power, or for that matter coating the entire country with windmills and pumped storage towers.

My question, which power generation system would you rather see used on mass and why?

Nuclear, fission now, fusion later. If the environmentalists wanted 'clean power', they should've backed the space program sufficiently that we'd have space solar by now. They didn't and we don't, so mass nuclear deployment it is.

Also, would your answer change if you needed to implement the system on a limited time frame?

Not really. Wind has a long lead time as well, and storage technologies adequate to make it a viable baseload power source are even further over the horizon than fusion. If I was on a tight schedule I'd probably install some additional hydro, regardless of whether a few more scenic valleys and villages get flooded.

[Starglider]

I'm sorry but unless your willing to coat Texas in Solar panels your not going to get the kind of power generation required to power the US, but worse such power is only good for a certain amount of distance, so Texas coated solar power will not make it to California in useful amounts for example.

This is already solvable using a superconducting power grid. That's extremely expensive of course - no one has built one because it doesn't currently make economic sense to do so - but it's still probably an order of magnitude cheaper than a Texas-sized amount of solar cells.

[Norade]

I did some research on my own based on area used as cost per watt and found nuclear to be the best source. It would come in at about $2 per watt at current prices to build and maintain; solar comes in $7.6 per watt if you factor in current installation fees; geothermal is at about $3.4 per watt; and wind is in the lead for cost at $12 per watt. As well as we all know nuclear will have the smallest footprint compared to the other options.

[Starglider]

I did some research on my own based on area used as cost per watt and found nuclear to be the best source. It would come in at about $2 per watt at current prices to build and maintain; solar comes in $7.6 per watt if you factor in current installation fees; geothermal is at about $3.4 per watt; and wind is in the lead for cost at $12 per watt.

Is that the raw generation cost, or does that include the cost of enough energy storage to cover periods where sun and wind aren't available? Nuclear is effectively always-on (assuming enough spare capacity to cover scheduled maintenance).

If geothermal was really that cheap in general there would be significantly more installed capacity. I strongly suspect that figure is for geographically optimal locations only, of which there are very few (deep drilling for non-fault locations is much more expensive). Also are you considering that existing geothermal plants are mostly open-loop, and thus experience diminishing power output over time? Closed-loop plants would be genuinely renewable, assuming extraction does not exceed the local heat input from the mantle, but they would also be considerably more expensive than open-loop plants.

[Norade]

I used my google-fo to find numbers, however I suspect that you're right and that some of the things like wind and geothermal are for optimal locations only.

[fnord]

I've seen quotes for 1B USD/GWh as damn good for a large scale storage system, but take that with a shaker of salt until I can find some references. At that price, if you want to store 2 GWh, you might as well just build a GWe nuclear plant.

[Shinova]

I had watched a science channel program recently that talked about developments on solar cells that increase their efficiency by some large amount. I forgot the name and guy who was doing it but he's working and testing his project in Australia. Anyone with knowledge in this, would this still require gigantic arrays of solar panels to sufficiently provide power for the US?

[Darth Wong]

There's only a finite amount of power which actually reaches the ground; that puts an upper limit on solar power collection no matter how efficient it is. Of course, an imaginary economically feasible superconducting power grid would help solve some of that problem by putting massive arrays of solar panels in the sunniest areas with the least cloud cover and then transmitting it thousands of kilometres to the point of use, but that highlights a tendency of alternative-energy theorists to assume that certain technological innovations will occur in time to be used.

From a standpoint of social policy and engineering, one cannot base contingency plans upon such things. "Projected" technology, "future" technology, and "nonexistent" technology are all the same thing, as far as policymakers should be concerned.

[PeZook]

Technically on a geological timescale? We can build hundred year plants(Proof of concepts are out there) of Nuclear power generation plants which can be run for close to one hundred years off a single fuel source. We are not talking thousand year atomic Bat-batteries. But a hundred years on a planet which you just need to replace the shielding and maintain the plant is pretty damn impressive.

Yeah, that's why I wrote technically, not just technically

[Darksider]

I can't help but notice that much of the problems regarding alternate energy sources are based on the fact that they can't sufficiently replace Oil enough for us to maintain our current standard of living and level of growth.

Do people just not realize that ALL of the planet's resources are finite and that we're going to have to either reduce our standards of living or reduce the population to more sustainable levels?

[Mr Bean]

Do people just not realize that ALL of the planet's resources are finite and that we're going to have to either reduce our standards of living or reduce the population to more sustainable levels?

If we go whole hog nuclear we can maintain our standard of living just fine thankyouverymuch. Hydrogen can work as a car fuel assuming there's tons of it being produced at local nuclear power plants. Oil can be removed as a fuel source and the larger container ships might be able to switch over to miniature pebble-bed style reactor's(Crazy Nukes in everything is Sheppard's department not mine)

So no cars/trucks burning oil, no power plants burning it, and maybe no sea use for it. Bam our 50 year supply becomes a 500 year supply(Those are very... VERY rough numbers) either way if we can massively reduce oil it lasts for that much longer, and that extra time can be used to develop oil alternatives in areas where we have none(plastics ect).

Either way with such semi-sealed designs as the French 4th Gen reactors which recycle their waste you can build plants which will last for a century, and with existing nuclear stores, you can build enough plants for both redundancy and decent prices. If such designs could be built in 3rd world countries(We could operate them under some kind of UN charter perhaps?) we could then move to that kind of full switch-over which gives us the time to find alternatives.

[Sky Captain]

Another problem with wind and solar is that you need a lot more installed capacity than with nuclear power because on avarage wind and solar plants will produce around 20 - 30 % of their rated output meaning you need to install ~4 GW of wind or solar to replace 1 GW reactor and also build a large scale energy storage system to make up for days with no wind and sun.

[Glom]

If he's referring to the town I think he's referring to, the renewable wank isn't actually part of the project. The project is the fuel cell side only. The hydrogen is probably derived from natural gas like most commercial hydrogen so they have in fact accomplished nothing. They have demonstrated a fuel cell can be used for relatively small scale utility applications and just assumed the fuel can be sourced reliably and economically from renewables. They haven't demonstrated that though.

[Starglider]

Of course, an imaginary economically feasible superconducting power grid would help solve some of that problem by putting massive arrays of solar panels in the sunniest areas with the least cloud cover and then transmitting it thousands of kilometres to the point of use, but that highlights a tendency of alternative-energy theorists to assume that certain technological innovations will occur in time to be used.

A superconducting power grid isn't an imaginary technology; a trial installation is about to go into commercial service, and conventional mass production is enough for a substantial cost reduction without any further scientific advances. Superconducting lines will only be cost effective for special cases in the near future because it's usually cheaper to just build a power station closer to the source, but we're talking about less than an order of magnitude difference in costs vs conventional lines, which is quite feasible relative to the costs of switching the bulk of generation to solar.

[Starglider]

Do people just not realize that ALL of the planet's resources are finite and that we're going to have to either reduce our standards of living or reduce the population to more sustainable levels?

Actually pretty much every physical resource can be recycled, given enough energy (helium is a possible exception). Metals for example go from being diluted and buried to being refined and scattered around the surface, they don't magically disappear when we use them. Fertilisers could be produced from water and air if we had to, though of course it's much cheaper to use oil or biomass feedstocks. Energy supply is the real problem.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I love the ridiculous false dichotomy of the OP, as though hydrogen can somehow be a power source instead of a portable storage source for energy, the best production source of which is nuclear reactors. Indeed, we have decisions for practical 4th generation Fission reactors which not merely reprocess virtually all of their waste (close to 99.6%) back into fuel), but also operate hot enough to crack water using waste heat to produce hydrogen on a large scale, and would do so without reducing their electrical power generation potential.

[Darth Wong]

Of course, an imaginary economically feasible superconducting power grid would help solve some of that problem by putting massive arrays of solar panels in the sunniest areas with the least cloud cover and then transmitting it thousands of kilometres to the point of use, but that highlights a tendency of alternative-energy theorists to assume that certain technological innovations will occur in time to be used.

A superconducting power grid isn't an imaginary technology; a trial installation is about to go into commercial service, and conventional mass production is enough for a substantial cost reduction without any further scientific advances. Superconducting lines will only be cost effective for special cases in the near future because it's usually cheaper to just build a power station closer to the source, but we're talking about less than an order of magnitude difference in costs vs conventional lines, which is quite feasible relative to the costs of switching the bulk of generation to solar.

Someone is going to use liquid nitrogen to cool a nationwide transmission grid with tens of thousands of kilometres of wire? I'm having trouble seeing how that's economically feasible on a large scale.

[Sea Skimmer]

Someone is going to use liquid nitrogen to cool a nationwide transmission grid with tens of thousands of kilometres of wire? I'm having trouble seeing how that's economically feasible on a large scale.

Its something like 300,000km long, and this length is in fact quite inadequate as the US grid is actually three grids which are very poorly connected. The nitrogen cooling idea might be practical for very specific applications, like a direct connection between a power plant and a very power intensive industrial facility but even then maintenance requirements would likely be far too excessive to make sense. One nitrogen leak and the grid shuts down and repair is no longer nearly so easy as splicing two wires together.

Plus you can’t even get many of the economic advantages from this proposal as a retrofit to existing lines, since we’ve already bought big cables, big heavy duty towers to hang them off and all the right of way. It’d work out much better for wholly new lines since you could actually save money scaling down.

[Starglider]

Someone is going to use liquid nitrogen to cool a nationwide transmission grid with tens of thousands of kilometres of wire?

The technology is basically the same as that used for oil pipelines; the flow rate is much lower, but you need to maintain vacuum in the jacket and make sure your materials don't get too brittle at LN2 temperatures.

I'm having trouble seeing how that's economically feasible on a large scale.

It depends what you mean by 'economically feasible'. As I've said, the cost of transmission loss in conventional wires is much lower than the cost of a superconducting grid, so it doesn't make sense to deploy at present, but the cost of a superconducting grid is still substantially lower than a solar array plus energy storage sufficient to power the whole US. As such the 'would need a superconducting grid' criticism of major solar deployment is a minor one compared to the difficultly of funding and building the generation and storage.

One nitrogen leak and the grid shuts down and repair is no longer nearly so easy as splicing two wires together.

A nitrogen leak will only affect a local section of transmission line. Grids inherently have redundant transmission paths, so this is no different than a normal power line going down (unexpectedly or for scheduled maintenance). Like a normal grid, a superconducting grid will be designed to handle up to a certain level of failure. Leaks sufficient to cause loss of superconductivity will likely occur at similar frequency to oil pipeline leaks sufficient to cause stoppage of transmission, i.e. relatively rarely.

[Mr Bean]

A nitrogen leak will only affect a local section of transmission line. Grids inherently have redundant transmission paths, so this is no different than a normal power line going down (unexpectedly or for scheduled maintenance). Like a normal grid, a superconducting grid will be designed to handle up to a certain level of failure. Leaks sufficient to cause loss of superconductivity will likely occur at similar frequency to oil pipeline leaks sufficient to cause stoppage of transmission, i.e. relatively rarely.

This is liquid nitrogen we are talking about, not oil. A oil leak is a disaster but a liquid nitrogen leak would be massive repair issue. Unlike with traditional power grids you must bury the lines by default which adds... a massive expense increase You can not hang liquid nitrogen cooled superconducting lines.

This is a point overlooked in most so called studies of a new power grid. A superconducting grid must be buried because the lines proprietary (Mostly due to shielding) the extra mass required for cooling in additon to the larger twisted lines means your going from wires that are two inches thick to eight inches thick(Due to heat shielding) The plus side is the extra weight does not matter because you have to dig them in away. If you do hang them understand that if someone does take out a telephone poll your going to have any torn wires which temporarily become high pressure liquid nitrogen firehouses as they vent the cooling agent into the area.

Either way digging up and burying these much bigger wires will cost money, cost far more than Google Fu projects will take into account. But speaking of Google Fu, here's some rough numbers.

To buy telephone polls, string the wire up along a twenty mile section of road, the costs work out to roughly eighty cents to just over a dollar ten per mile depening on factors like steepness of roads, number of tree's your cutting through ect. On a desert Nevada desert style road your talking costs as low as 70 cents per mile to string the wire up.

Burying said wire costs roughly eleven times as much with costs running anywhere from nine dollars a mile all the way to twenty one dollars a mile if your working in Suburbia and have to dig up sidewalks to lay the wire and right of way issues.

You cost projects have to take that kind of thing into account. Yes superconducting grid is a fine idea, but the extra cots for the thicker wires, the requirement to bury them, the costs of maintaining them must be factored in if you want to have a realistic idea of how much money such a grid would cost VS keeping our old grid(Even burying it anyway) and putting a plant outside every large city or town, and rebuilding our entire electrical system and building in enough backups for our solar power to work.

[Patrick Degan]

Basically, every argument eventually points to nuclear being the cheapest, longest-term solution to this civilisation's pending energy problems. While solar and wind can do fine on a local basis, they're not something you want to hang a national power grid on.

[Count Chocula]

In addition to hydrogen being a storage medium and not a production medium, and in addition to the cost of platinum for fuel cells, there's the little tricky matter of hydrogen storage. Recent demonstrator vehicles have used cryogenic tanks to store pressurized hydrogen, (page 7) but that poses its own problems: the average car owner is highly unlikely to be able to maintain a cryogenic system in their vehicle, and I'd guess that a car that sits in a driveway 3 days a week would have reliability issues. And the range of the demonstrators is unimpressive at less than 200 miles. None of which addresses the OT, sorry.

Even in a power plant scenario, the storage of hydrogen is a bit tricky. If you go low-tech and store it in balloons, you'll have environmental influences like wind and hail...God forbid the plant with balloon storage is in a place that has lightning! With pressurized systems, you have the option of cryogenics or expensive pressure vessels, neither of which are cost competitive with nuclear power. The fuel cells that would be required to generate the hydrogen, just based on the platinum cost, would most likely be far more expensive than nuclear plants and would require more intensive precious metals mining. That would increase the supply of gold, silver and copper since platinum is often found in or near veins of those metals, but would ALSO entail more environmentally damaging/impacting mining operations; my guess is the scale of mining needed would be an environmental no-no in developed countries.

Nuke plants are just "hot" steam boilers, based on decades-proven technology, and they are primary sources of power. Nuclear power has a PR problem, not a problem with cost-effectiveness or reliability. There's assuredly a place for fuel cells generating hydrogen for power, but I don't see it as a technology that could economically compete with nuclear energy.