New Method to Improve Uranium Extraction From the Ocean

[Sky Captain]

Solar and other unreliable energy generation methods could really take over if a cheap energy storage technology is invented and the cost of deploying and maintaining the generating hardware + storage system is less than for fossil and nuclear power plants.

[Simon_Jester]

All it really needs is to be cost-competitive with nuclear and beat fossilpower. Nuclear does have a very real meltdown risk, and the economic cost of having such a meltdown happen in a developed country is large enough that at equal prices per kilowatt-hour, you take the thing that can't irradiate thousands of square kilometers in one go.

That could happen reasonably soon- but I don't think we can presume that solar will beat wind, or that either will consistently beat tidal power, geothermal, or other reliable sources of renewable energy. For that matter, the question will have different answers in different places. China has room to put nuclear reactors out of the way so that a meltdown won't cause mass death and loss of very valuable land. Japan really doesn't; they can't take the same risks.

Hm. Has anyone ever investigated the possibilities of geothermal in Japan?

[kc8tbe]

Nuclear doesn't really have a meltdown risk if you use a modern reactor with a negative thermal coefficient. (Besides, Three Mile Island has shown us that nuclear meltdown ≠ irradiate thousands of square kilometers in one go.) The problem, as with solar, is that the latest, greatest, safest, short-lived waste producing reactors such as LFTR haven't been developed on a commercial scale. What I think is irritating to nuclear engineers is that while the government has been throwing money at solar it has been actively discouraging nuclear energy.

Getting back to the first few posts on the thread, ten or twenty billion dollars could build a commerical LFTR (or some other next-gen nuclear reactor) and basically solve the world's energy needs for the next thousand years or so. The money is out there, but no one wants to take the risk. Part of the risk is that the next-gen nuclear technologies might not work on a commercial scale. Part of the risk is the government -- just getting a permit to build such a prototype could take years, and then some of the component technologies might be illegal under America's prohibition against reprocessing fuel.

[Simon_Jester]

There ought to be no meltdown risk, but from the political point of view nuclear engineers have been saying "we've got it figured out" for a long time.

This is one of those issues that hangs on how a non-expert is supposed to interpret the advice of an expert. From an SDN point of view "always obey the expert" sounds appealing. But it looks rather different when you consider what the layman gets told. What really screwed the nuclear industry, I think, was the way "safe, clean, too cheap to meter" got juxtaposed with "oh, yeah, let's just block off this big chunk of the Ukraine." The perception of doublethink was (and remains) very strong for some people.

What are you supposed to do when someone comes to you and says "give me 100 billion to rebuild all the old nuclear plants and we will never ever have a meltdown again!" Do you just fork over the money? Do you assume that someone else's ability to do the math compensates for both your own inability, and their fallibility?

I don't think it's as easy as it looks from inside our own SF-fan bubble.

[Baffalo]

What about modernization? Would it be easier to convert a reactor to more modern technologies? Or would it be more cost effective to build a test-reactor and prove the technology works?

[Zaune]

What are you supposed to do when someone comes to you and says "give me 100 billion to rebuild all the old nuclear plants and we will never ever have a meltdown again!" Do you just fork over the money? Do you assume that someone else's ability to do the math compensates for both your own inability, and their fallibility?

The same thing we do when any expert tells us something that sounds too good to be true, suspiciously expensive or both. Contact an independent expert in the same field, or a closely related one, and get a second opinion.

[Singular Intellect]

What I think is irritating to nuclear engineers is that while the government has been throwing money at solar it has been actively discouraging nuclear energy.

This is a very good thing. Nuclear is dangerous, solar is not (a solar plant spill is called a sunny day).

It takes many years to build a nuclear power plant, while Germany (not the sunniest country by any means) installed well over four gigawatts of solar power in just six months. Nuclear is outclassed so much it isn't even funny.

[Zaune]

You know, I'm still waiting for an answer to the question of how a 100% solar power-dependent power grid is supposed to cope with prolonged cloud cover, fog or shorter periods of daylight. Or at least answers that don't depend on energy-storage technologies that are pretty much vapourware.

[Baffalo]

What about the plans to build large solar plants in desert states such as Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, California and Texas? I thought the plan was that the deserts, with little to no cloud cover, would produce viable power. It was my understanding that it would handle the increased demands during the day, such as air conditioning and extra lights and whatnot. That doesn't handle the steady loads such as residential air conditioners and industrial loads, but that can be handled by nuclear plants which cost the same to run regardless of how much actual energy they produce. It would eliminate some of the need of coal to handle those loads, though coal is still producing over half the electricity in the United States.

[Simon_Jester]

What are you supposed to do when someone comes to you and says "give me 100 billion to rebuild all the old nuclear plants and we will never ever have a meltdown again!" Do you just fork over the money? Do you assume that someone else's ability to do the math compensates for both your own inability, and their fallibility?

The same thing we do when any expert tells us something that sounds too good to be true, suspiciously expensive or both. Contact an independent expert in the same field, or a closely related one, and get a second opinion.

Yes, but do you see where the problem comes? It's very possible for an entire field to make itself look bad if all the members make the wrong predictions. The nuclear industry lost its credibility by making "safe, clean, too cheap to meter" its mantra up through the '70s, and not doing a good enough job of creating an accurate idea of the risks. So the risks got exaggerated and the promises never got delivered, and now nobody who matters in public policy trusts nuclear engineers very often. Even when they should.

What I think is irritating to nuclear engineers is that while the government has been throwing money at solar it has been actively discouraging nuclear energy.

This is a very good thing. Nuclear is dangerous, solar is not (a solar plant spill is called a sunny day).

It takes many years to build a nuclear power plant, while Germany (not the sunniest country by any means) installed well over four gigawatts of solar power in just six months. Nuclear is outclassed so much it isn't even funny.

Repeat that for ten years and you have 80 gigawatts.

Any major country could build 80 gigawatts of nuclear reactors in ten years if they wanted to. Which is the point, really; nuclear power gets much of its disadvantage from public perception. Go to China and nuclear is doing a lot better. Purely because the Chinese government is the only one in the world that's technocratic enough, politically and environmentally insensitive enough, to hear "nuclear meltdown" and shrug rather than saying "that could bring down our government, let's forget the whole thing."

You know, I'm still waiting for an answer to the question of how a 100% solar power-dependent power grid is supposed to cope with prolonged cloud cover, fog or shorter periods of daylight. Or at least answers that don't depend on energy-storage technologies that are pretty much vapourware.

It doesn't take vaporware, it takes what I'm going to call... "hugeware." The obstacle isn't that we don't know how to do it, it's that we'd have to spend hundreds of billions pouring enormous amounts of concrete and building heavy machinery. Modern Western countries are often averse to doing that for infrastructure projects.

[Versac]

What I think is irritating to nuclear engineers is that while the government has been throwing money at solar it has been actively discouraging nuclear energy.

This is a very good thing. Nuclear is dangerous, solar is not (a solar plant spill is called a sunny day).

There's a problem with this reasoning, and it's a very simple one: whenever you start to scale any engineering project up to widespread implementation, occasional freak accidents start to become significantly significant.

(For those opposed to following links, it turns out amortizing the deaths from nuclear accidents over total energy generated shows nuclear to be - in terms of deaths per TW - an order of magnitude safer than rooftop solar.)

Yes, I understand that rooftop solar is a particularly dangerous type of solar infrastructure; but if you're only willing to go with centralized solar farms and the like, then you've conceded the strongest argument against nuclear.

[aerius]

It takes many years to build a nuclear power plant, while Germany (not the sunniest country by any means) installed well over four gigawatts of solar power in just six months. Nuclear is outclassed so much it isn't even funny.

So what? Germany has a total installed solar capacity of about 29GW as of the end of June this year. For the first half of the year those solar installations generated 14.7 TWh of electricity. How much is that you ask? About the same as the CANDU nuke plant at Darlington, which isn't even the biggest one we have. A single nuke plant generates as much energy as every single solar power project in Germany put together. Yeah, totally outclassed. Solar that is.

You know, I'm still waiting for an answer to the question of how a 100% solar power-dependent power grid is supposed to cope with prolonged cloud cover, fog or shorter periods of daylight. Or at least answers that don't depend on energy-storage technologies that are pretty much vapourware.

It doesn't take vaporware, it takes what I'm going to call... "hugeware." The obstacle isn't that we don't know how to do it, it's that we'd have to spend hundreds of billions pouring enormous amounts of concrete and building heavy machinery. Modern Western countries are often averse to doing that for infrastructure projects.

I'm not so sure about that since there is no energy storage technology which is available in sufficient quantities even if we wanted to do it. Let's say you want to do batteries, congrats, you've used up the entire global production of various metals several times over and it's still not enough to keep the lights on in Canada. Ok, what about that molten salt storage shit the solar mirror guys keep going on about? Well let's see, the energy density there is about 12Wh/kg, so once again you end up using the entire global production just to light a single city under a best case scenario. And in both cases you'll end up consuming all the known reserves of various elements and then some if you want to power the world. Pumped hydro? Sure, maybe if you dam the Mediterranean Ocean and use that as your storage reservoir.

Or you could just build a bunch of nuke plants the size of Bruce NGS, reprocess as required and that's power for a hell of a long time using nothing that we don't have or can't get.

[Simon_Jester]

Put this way- you'd need a pumped storage facility roughly the size of the Three Gorges Dam to produce power output broadly comparable to the Three Gorges Dam. Storing one kilowatt-hour of electricity would require you to raise, say, 100 tonnes of water 36 meters.* Storing something like Bruce NGS's overnight output- that's about 72 GWh, so you're talking about moving ~720 million tonnes of water up and down through your reservoir. Damn near a cubic kilometer. And that's assuming perfect efficiency.

Is this difficult? Hell yes. Is it impossible? No, not really. Is it more expensive than building the nuclear plant? Probably. It certainly takes up more land.

So I won't dispute that- the point is that if nothing else, pumped hydro is something we could do, on the necessary scale, if we really wanted to and had no sense for how much things really cost. Which is all a really hardcore solar advocate often thinks they need...

[aerius]

Just for reference, the hydroelectric generating stations at Niagara Falls put out a total of about 4.5GW at full power during non-tourist days and use about 3/4 of the total flow of the Niagara river, with the total drop being about 90 metres. So to match the output of a nuke plant, you'd have to shut down the falls and divert every drop of water into the power turbines, and then you'd have to move all that water back uphill. The entire flow of the Niagara River. To match a nuke plant. And the pumps to move that water back uphill. And a suitable reservoir to store it in. Plus the surplus power to run those pumps.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes.

We could do that, but it'd be so ridiculously huge and expensive to set up. Like I said we know what to do it, it just doesn't matter.

And more 'high-tech' methods of storing the energy have other problems, again as you said; they're more compact but also a lot more expensive and require bottleneck resources.

[Magis]

It takes many years to build a nuclear power plant, while Germany (not the sunniest country by any means) installed well over four gigawatts of solar power in just six months. Nuclear is outclassed so much it isn't even funny.

I'm struggling to see how "installed capacity per unit time" is even a valuable metric.

And Germany was installing many solar projects simultaneously. You are aware that it's possible to build more than one nuclear plant at the same time, too, right?

This is a very good thing. Nuclear is dangerous, solar is not.

Justify this statement with evidence.

[Academia Nut]

This is a very good thing. Nuclear is dangerous, solar is not (a solar plant spill is called a sunny day).

Actually, a spill at a solar production plant is "Oh God we lost containment on the Hydrofluoric acid tank!"

Did you know that solar power stems out of the semiconductor industry and thus requires use of chemicals capable of etching silicon and silicon dioxide, which primarily means use of fluorine chemistry? And did you know that fluorine chemistry is among the most nightmarish of subsets of chemistry?

Did you know that solar power requires use of rare elements that need to be mined?

Did you know that there is in fact an environmental cost involved in producing solar panels (generally a two to five year payback depending on exact technology being used and where) wherein if the panel breaks before then it would have been less environmentally costly to just burn coal?

Did you know that under the most subsidized and generous scheme, roof-top solar never pays back its investment once you account for the time value of money?

All power generation has pros and cons, and if you aren't willing to acknowledge the fact that solar has a lot of cons then you can't honestly have this debate. Yes, nuclear power has a lot of cons too, the thing is in order to have this debate you have to lay out all the pros and cons of all possible options and carefully weigh them. To dismiss nuclear out of hand and to praise solar as the beginning and end of what we should be doing is as ignorant as those who say that global warming isn't happening.

Also, funny story, it is the environmentalists who made sure that coal was the only viable option for power generation in the United States. They prevented nuclear power plants from being built. They helped shut down wind turbines because of the number of bird strikes. They prevented desert solar plants from being built because of the disruption to the desert ecosystem involved in paving over all the terrain needed to compensate for the lower power generation per hectare of solar. They protested the construction of dams because of the damage caused by the flooding. That left coal as the only viable option to build new plants. So this unwillingness to even have the open and honest debates we as a society need to have on how we as a society should produce power has not helped at all.

[Sky Captain]

Also in places like Western and Northern Europe, Russia and Canada there is very little solar energy available during winter so it means either placing solar powerplants in tropical deserts and building thousands of kilometers long transmission lines or relying on fossil power during winter. A storage system for storing surplus summer solar power for use in winter would be ridiculously expensive.

It takes many years to build a nuclear power plant, while Germany (not the sunniest country by any means) installed well over four gigawatts of solar power in just six months. Nuclear is outclassed so much it isn't even funny.

Installed capacity is not the actual output. Solar power plants in Germany has capacity factor of 10 % so those 4 GW will have average output over the year of 400 MW. Your link says Germany has target of 52 GW so in reality average output of all those installations will be around 5.2 GW. Most of the power will be produced during summer, very little during winter when demand is the highest. The same average output could be provided by 4 - 5 nuclear reactors providing steady power day and night, summer and winter and far more easy to integrate into existing power grid.
Your link also say that so much solar power are installed only because of government subsidies. When subsidies will end solar energy market will become unatracctive to investors.

[aerius]

Actually, a spill at a solar production plant is "Oh God we lost containment on the Hydrofluoric acid tank!"

Did you know that solar power stems out of the semiconductor industry and thus requires use of chemicals capable of etching silicon and silicon dioxide, which primarily means use of fluorine chemistry? And did you know that fluorine chemistry is among the most nightmarish of subsets of chemistry?

Did you know that solar power requires use of rare elements that need to be mined?

Just to expand on that,
http://thingsworsethannuclearpower.blog ... ution.html

Panel Plant Pollution

Last September, hundreds of Chinese villagers protested a solar panel plant for high levels of pollution, especially high lead levels, dense smoke, and toxic discharges to a river killing the fish population.

It's no huge surprise, since PV manufacture requires over 50 dangerous chemicals in its production, including potent greenhouse gases, carcinogens, and toxic chemicals. The chemicals range from arsenide to cadmium and lead, sulphur hexaflouride (the most potent greenhouse gas known), thiourea (carcinogen), selenium hydride (highly toxic), nitrogen trifluoride (significant greenhouse gas), indium phosphide (known carcinogen), hydrofluoric acid (inhalation or skin contact can be fatal), hexafluoroethane (greenhouse gas), germane (extremely toxic), chromium VI (known carcinogen and toxin), carbon tetrachloride (carcinogen), arsine (carcinogen with high toxicity), and others. These are good things to realize when weighing solar pros and cons.

[Baffalo]

How do they classify those plants where they use large mirrors to reflect solar energy up into a container of sand to generate heat for several hours? IIRC, the molten glass stays hot enough for hours after the sun goes down to provide energy into the night.

[aerius]

That would be Concentrated Solar Thermal, where they use a bunch of mirrors to heat molten salts or pressurized water. Yes the working fluid can stay hot enough to generate electricity for a few hours after the sun goes down, but guess what that means in the morning? You need to get that fluid back up to working temperature so for the first few hours of sunlight the plant will be putting out reduced power until everything heats back up again. There is no free lunch. The energy that's taken out of the system at night has to be put back in when the sun comes back up.

[Baffalo]

That would be Concentrated Solar Thermal, where they use a bunch of mirrors to heat molten salts or pressurized water. Yes the working fluid can stay hot enough to generate electricity for a few hours after the sun goes down, but guess what that means in the morning? You need to get that fluid back up to working temperature so for the first few hours of sunlight the plant will be putting out reduced power until everything heats back up again. There is no free lunch. The energy that's taken out of the system at night has to be put back in when the sun comes back up.

Right, I knew it would take a long time to heat up, but it might offer a solution when combined with solar plants or even nuclear plants to handle the extra burden of electricity generation during peak hours. I'd much rather see the safer CST plants combined with nuclear power than the harder to produce solar panels. Just saying.