Al Bundy, yes talking about the baseload for a single house with solar panels is a bit pointless, you have to look at a cluster of users over time and averages. Its like comparing weather and climate.
Which you refused to claim when you failed to link or quote where I said what you claim I said. Which you can’t do, because I never said it. Your dishonest claims to the contrary are based on deliberate (and I dare say malicious) misinterpretation.
You claim 5,000 1,000MW reactors can supply 15 terawatts of power to the economy by counting their waste heat.
Never said that. I said that primary energy must be compared to primary energy, not a secondary product like electricity. There is a vast difference between the two. The USA consumes roughly 3.3 TW of primary energy (average), but only about 460 GW of electric power. Most other needs can be met by direct use of heat. 3.3 TW of heat would require roughly 825 Combustion Engineering reactors at 3990 MW(t) each. Fourth-gen reactors such as LMFBRs or MSRs run at much higher temperatures than LWRs and could both replace fuels with direct nuclear heat in many more applications, AND achieve higher thermal efficiency in conversion to electric power.
I have the EIA numbers to back up my claims about district heating, though you could demonstrate the truth of my statements by just going over there yourself and having a look at Table 2.2 and Table 2.3. But you won’t do that, because truth takes a back seat to your ideology.
In the same post you claim the waste heat is only 55% of output and not 66%.
You lie again, claiming that I stated the present actuality rather than the potential of a specific technology which is not yet in use. (Incidentally, Dostal concludes that sCO2 thermal efficiency could push 53% at input temperatures of 700°C. There are no essential roadblocks to making nuclear reactors which produce heat at such temperatures; fission can produce temperatures of millions of degrees. It’s just an engineering problem, albeit likely a difficult one.)
Since you explicitly accepted the bet and have failed to meet your burden of proof, you owe me $1000 (make it US dollars). Communicate your address to me so I can come by and collect on my next vacation trip.
if you could use all the waste heat you could build a perpetual motion device.
You don’t have to use all of it. You just have to be able to displace fossil fuels with it. This doesn’t even require year-round use, you just have to have enough to meet peak needs. Supplying 456 GW peak of low-grade heat from about 1.8 TW of waste heat is a pretty easy job.
Now give me your description of how you are going to power airplanes and ships using waste heat.
Never said that either. A container ship such as the Emma Maersk is about the right size to be powered by a pair of NuScale reactors. Two reactor units @ 700 tons apiece will take less space and weight than the 200 tons/day of bunker fuel such a ship typically burns. It would consume somewhat more primary energy because of the lower efficiency; the Wartsila engine in the Emma Maersk can squeeze out over 50% based on LHV, while a NuScale is projected to get about 30%.
In this thread at 72 you describe a plan to generate only the existing electricity supply in the US.
Do you EVER get tired of lying? I stated the numbers for generating 100% of the PRIMARY ENERGY used in the United States. Even using LWRs such as the AP1000, that would generate as much as 1.1 TW of electricity, more than twice current electric consumption. But since the supply of fissiles for LWRs is so limited, other (improved) reactors are required. They will operate at higher temperatures which support much higher thermal efficiencies. At 3.3 TW(th) and 45% efficiency, you’d generate as much as 1.485 TW(e). I’m pretty certain we’d run out of loads to serve before reaching 3.3 TW.
Your plan covers existing electricity and district heat
Liar. It’s a sketch, not a plan (a plan specifies means). It’s a 30,000 foot view of what a fully-decarbonized economy might look like, allowing for generation of more than twice current US electric consumption to support EVs, electrification of industrial energy and electrofuels, among other things. And at that level, it’s a piece of cake. Some things that are nigh-impossible with wind and solar are trivial with nuclear, because the former require staggering amounts of storage and nuclear needs none for either electricity or heat. Meeting the space-heating needs of about 70% of the US population is basically an afterthought. The rest can use heat pumps with electrofuel backup in case of outages.
Your plan does not cover electric cars and other transportation, about 1 TW
You run your reactors 24/7/365 with no maintenance or repairs or long term upgrades.
At worst, a 10% overbuild would be required to address that. More likely is that the country would run out of loads before reaching 3.3 TW(th) of primary energy.
You use reactor designs that do not exist and are not expected to exist before 2050.
In November 1942, there wasn’t a single nuclear reactor in the world. By August of 1945, there were multiple reactors employed to produce plutonium as well as a solid uranium enrichment industry. The USA has operated reactors based on uranium salts dissolved in water, molten salt mixtures without water, oxide fuel, metal fuel, and carbon-based fuel forms.
The materials for the reactor container and the valves are not known to exist.
Liar. You can’t name a single such material and specify what it’s required for.
Many of the other rare metals are used in reactor construction do not exist in sufficient amounts to build out the reactors you propose.
Liar. You can’t specify the metals and what they’d be required for. Things like stainless steel are never going to be THAT scarce; iron, nickel and chromium are just too abundant, and they have substitutes if we need them.
You plan to build reactors in the center of cities which is unsafe
insufficient sources of cooling water do not exist.
Grammar error noted, and water doesn’t matter if you don’t need any.
Your entire argument is a Gish Gallop.
HA! TOO funny to see you use that phrase, particularly since your entire comment is a textbook example of precisely that. Hypocrite.
You hope to fool people like Nigelj who do not read the peer reviewed literature.
The so-called “peer reviewed literature” has things like 3x errors in basic assumptions. Taking it as gospel is downright idiocy.
You would not last three posts in a moderated forum because none of your claims can be supported by references.
I have thus far provided (counting) 6 links, 5 of which are to primary sources and the last is to myself (where I linked primary sources). Your post has zero. If either Real Climate or SkS were fair, your posts would be banned.
No plan to power the world using nuclear has ever been proposed because nuclear supporters know it is not possible.
If you’re not already wrong, I’m going to make you so.
You asked me at #34 how my common carrier grid would operate so as not to require “ancillary services”. I responded at #42.
Did you see it? Is there something there you disagree with?
zebrasays
#95 Al Bundy,
“only the aggregate of demand matters”
That makes no sense at all. The aggregate certainly doesn’t matter to me, which is the point I made explicitly at #79, to which you are responding:
It [market granularity] matters to me because of the example I gave above, where I pay for the service I choose to receive. Traffic lights would be under a different contract, with the government, and a business, e.g. a supermarket that had lots of refrigeration to maintain overnight, would pay appropriately for their “baseload” requirement if their system is compressor-based.
And of course I prefer it because it is a system that rewards and promotes innovation, rather than a model that offers rent-seeking “employment” for plug-and-chug Authoritarian types.
Wasn’t it just a few years back when 20% of electric energy from renewables was sworn up and down to be the most optimistic fraction to hope for? USA is passing that now, and of course various sizable regions within or elsewhere are well past. What’s the new allegedly impossible benchmark?
You have to know the accounting tricks which underlie numbers like “Renewable energy’s share of German power mix rose to 46% last year“. Germany does not have its own grid, and it has long used its neighbors as a dumping ground for excess “renewable” generation. This got bad enough that Poland had to install phase-shifting transformers in order to block the surges and force Germany to deal with the problems it was causing. In essence, coal-fired Poland was both Germany’s energy sink and spinning reserve. Germany took all the credit for its “green” efforts while dumping some of the pain outside its own borders, reaching as far as hydro-powered Norway via interconnections through Denmark.
As for newly constructed nukes, I’m probably not interested in your details. To get my attention (should that be anything that might matter to you) you must address the gargantuan quantities of FF currently required to build them.
You have that totally backwards. Peterson et al found that wind requires 460 metric tons of steel and 160 m³ of concrete per average megawatt. A 70’s vintage nuclear plant required only 40 MT steel and 90 m³ concrete per average megawatt. Today’s designs do it with less.
Not to mention the waste highly dangerous for millennia
The gamma and high-energy beta emitters are effectively gone in 500 years. What’s left after that is alpha emitters, which can be trivially avoided by not eating them. If you do get a bit, it won’t hurt you; regarding the UPPU group who had plutonium contamination, “the mortality rate of the club members has been lower than that of the population in general.”
something we can’t even handle today,
We can handle it just fine until we decide it’s time to make it useful. Save for a bit of radio-krypton, it’s solids most of which are quite refractory and insoluble. It can sit tight in dry casks until we rediscover our balls and build a fleet of FBRs or something.
They were warning me that they didn’t think you were trustworthy, that you might publish my IP, thus nuking it. Personally, I think you are trustworthy.
Technically you nuked your IP when you shared your idea without getting an NDA from me, but I’m not the type to stab people in the back.
And frankly, I’m impressed in a weird sort of way about how you own your bigotry.
I have to make a confession here: most of that is an act that I’ve been putting on because the pearl-clutching responses to it are so funny. But that doesn’t mean that I think Greg Cochran isn’t dead right. His recent posts are all about the Kung Flu (aka Lung Pao Sicken, thank you Babylon Bee) but go back a ways and he gets into all kinds of stuff that induces lots of pearl-clutching in academia.
Go read West Hunter, it’s full of nuggets that our CultMarx rulers don’t want anyone to know. That is good enough reason for me to want to know them.
Only a moron or a liar would say that his joke wasn’t obviously a joke.
I tend to take people at their word. I’ve seen some AMAZINGLY dumb stuff in my time, and tone of voice is notoriously difficult to read over text. You have to go as far as wEIrD cApiTAliZatION or other extremes if you absolutely do not want anyone taking stuff seriously.
If a wind turbine burns, nobody (or onsie-twosie) dies. If a reactor burns, all Hell breaks loose.
More people died in just ONE wind turbine fire in the USA than from radiation in all the commercial NPP accidents in the US, Europe and Japan.
The “all hell breaking loose” is mostly hysterical over-reaction to what is actually a pretty low-risk situation. It’s better if you don’t have pols trying to micro-manage things too; PM Naoto Kan ordered a halt to critically-needed venting of the Fukushima reactor containments so water could be added (he insisted upon holding a press conference first), with the result that the cores were uncovered, fuel damage and hydrogen evolution occurred, and the spectacular hydrogen explosions followed. All of that was avoidable, but in Japanese culture underlings can’t say no to the PM even if he’s dead wrong.
Go ahead, price the insurance for a 100% covered reactor policy with zero government backstop.
The only thing you need to insure is the residual value of the plant after an accident has occurred. If someone wants more money than that, you do what every other industry is allowed to do: declare bankruptcy and say “you own it now”.
Price-Anderson makes ALL nuclear plants backstop one with an accident after the particular plant’s insurance limit is reached. This reinsurance has never been used, even at TMI. We have enough experience, we should admit that this is paranoid and repeal it.
No. They use facts, sometimes cogently, sometimes not so much. But those facts are always marshalled in support of a prejudice which is immune to new information.
No, I did not see your #42. Having read it, I don’t see how it applies to the actual grid as it exists, which was the subject I was addressing–unwillingly, may I remind you!–at the #34 to which you intended to respond.
You are talking about a toy model, essentially. And no, it requires no ancillary services. That does not demonstrate that the actual extant grid does not.
gavinsays
Reminder: Discussions of theology, WW2, or how stupid everyone else is are off topic and will just be deleted.
Michael Sweetsays
Engineer Poet:
At 102 you say “Which you refused to claim when you failed to link or quote where I said what you claim I said. ”
I cited the post you wrote AND quoted you. From my post 87:
“As I previously referenced from post 463 in the last forced variations thread:
“He’s apparently referring to this piece in the October 2011 Proceedings of the IEEE. Right off the bat any on-the-ball layman finds gross errors of fact (and it’s shameful that the peer-reviewers let them pass). The first page states that human energy consumption runs about 15 TW. That is primary energy consumption. But then Abbott claims that serving so much energy would require 15,000 (presumably GW-scale) reactors. This is blatant deception, because he’s rating them by electric output, not thermal output (roughly 3x as much). So, cut that to 5000 reactors.”
You claim 15 TW usable power from 5,000 1,000 MW plants. You use the waste heat to reach 15 TW.
From Abbott 2012:
“Let’s assume that the conversion of nuclear thermal energy to electricity IS 100 PERCENT EFFICIENT. For the purpose of large-scale calculations, this generous assumption makes little difference to the conclusions. Now imagine a world where 15 terawatts is supplied by 15,000 1-gigawatt reactors.” my upper case
Abbott ALREADY counted the waste heat production as electricity production. You have tripled the thermal power produced in your “plan”. Your perpetual motion device is three times more efficient than mine!! Send me my check!
You said you would power the entire economy. You have produced only enough electricity to power current electricity and electric cars. That means you need to power air planes and from waste heat. Describe how that works. You will have to add the cost of all the reactors you plan to put on ships. I note that the reactors you plan to put on ships are once through reactors which you have said are not sustainable. Your plan changes with every post you make.
Real power plans include all expenses. Connelly el al 2016 Smart Energy Europe counts building out district heating as a cost of their energy system. You leave out all the additional costs like the district heating, the plants to make electrofuel and the plants to make electricity from the nuclear waste heat.
Electricity is the PRIMARY product of wind and solar generators. Only inefficient thermal units like coal and nuclear waste 60% of the power right off the top with their inefficient boilers. Your fantasy of recovering all the waste heat violates the first law of thermodynamics. To use any of the waste heat the reactors must be near the user of the heat.
All the reactors must be located near a huge cooling source like the ocean. Inland sites do not have enough cooling water (which is where all the heat goes). If you want to cool the reactor by heating a city you must cost out the heating pipes. You will never be able to draw off enough heat to run that many reactors.
Plans like Engineer Poet’s and Joris Van Dorp’s are designed to fool people who have not read the background information. They do not address the difficult parts of power generation like airplanes. They leave out many of the costs, like district heating, to make nuclear appear cheap. They use fossil fuels as storage. They use reactors that have never been built and costs that are grossly too low.
those facts are always marshalled in support of a prejudice which is immune to new information.
You never add any new information; you have posted exactly one link in this thread so far, and that was to another blog site. You keep making un-sourced claims and arguing by empty contradiction (shades of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic”). Why don’t you try moving up the quality pyramid and do something like prove that the supply of actinides is insufficient (and state your assumptions behind this)? There are substitutes for everything else, but not actinides.
When I find someone who repeatedly fails to produce actual evidence and derive their conclusion from it, I have not yet found one who was actually capable of doing so. Generally they prove themselves innumerate, which puts them out of the game right there.
“Electricity is the PRIMARY product of wind and solar generators. Only inefficient thermal units like coal and nuclear waste 60% of the power right off the top with their inefficient boilers. ”
Good grief do you think wind and solar power is 100% efficient in terms of energy conversion? Wind efficiency is typically 35 -45% efficient as below, due to the combined effects of inability to utilise all the wind present and electrical losses in the generators.
“Your fantasy of recovering all the waste heat violates the first law of thermodynamics. To use any of the waste heat the reactors must be near the user of the heat.”
Yet EP said explicitly at 102 that you are responding to that he didn’t expect the system to recover ALL the heat. And EP already explained at 102 that some types of reactor can be located near urban centres. Some countries already use waste heat from nuclear reactors for urban heating.
“Plans like Engineer Poet’s and Joris Van Dorp’s are designed to fool people who have not read the background information. They do not address the difficult parts of power generation like airplanes. They leave out many of the costs, like district heating, to make nuclear appear cheap. They use fossil fuels as storage. They use reactors that have never been built and costs that are grossly too low.”
And the renewables plans are based on guesstimates of future storage costs and hopes they will fall a lot, or use of polluting gas fired backup, and dont take account of all the costs such as millions of people having to change from oil or gas heating to electric heating. Honestly both sides of this debate are as bad as each other!
That said, fossil fuels are no longer tenable as an energy source and are very unsustainable when burned. We should be using them just for petrochemicals and plastics, and preferably ones that can be recycled.
Germany does not have its own grid, and it has long used its neighbors as a dumping ground for excess “renewable” generation. This got bad enough that Poland had to install phase-shifting transformers in order to block the surges and force Germany to deal with the problems it was causing.
Gosh, those terrible Germans, forcing Poland to accept cheap, clean energy, to the extent that the latter had to unilaterally “force Germany to deal with the problems it was causing.”
Or, maybe the Poles and the Germans cooperated to serve their own interests:
First, “Integration of additional renewable energy sources on the area of western and north-western Poland as well as eastern part of Germany.”
Second, “All investments in project 94 complement each other in bringing the desired increase of grid transfer capability on the Polish-German border which causes decreasing price differentials between Poland and Germany.”
Third, “This project contributes to a decrease of unscheduled flow from Germany to Poland, Poland to Czech Republic and Poland to Slovakia by increasing the controllability on the entire synchronous profile.”
Poland was so bothered by German renewable energy that it resolved never to make the same mistakes!
Or maybe:
“Wind power is a minor but growing source of electricity in Poland. As of the end of 2015, total installed capacity was 5.1 gigawatts (GW), which provided 10,858 gigawatt-hours (GW·h) — around 6.22% of the electricity consumed in the country. By year end 2016 total installed capacity had risen to 5,782 MW…
“As of 2018 the Polish government was still considering whether the first nuclear power plant should be built, but in May 2018 state-owned PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna, who would have carried out any build, chose to invest in offshore wind power instead, targeting the build of 2.5 GW by 2030.”
E-P 109: More people died in just ONE wind turbine fire in the USA than from radiation in all the commercial NPP accidents in the US, Europe and Japan.
BPL: Note: E-P is carefully not counting Chernobyl as a “commerical” reactor here. He is also, of course, discounting all the excess deaths from radiation, since he labors under the psychotic delusion that radiation is good for you.
Not sure what the “toy” part means. Physics and engineering make progress working from exactly the kind of model I proposed. At this point, though, it hardly makes sense to think of it as only a theoretical model:
1. Smart meters exist!
2. They are being used to do exactly what I described– reduce load, in a contractual arrangement with the consumer, when needed!
This is a very comprehensive discussion from actual experts…don’t know if it has been referenced by others recently:
The point is, what stands in the way of having a very reliable and environmentally optimized system is not physics or technology. The hardware is effectively off-the-shelf, once you start scaling up.
Scale up my scenario by whatever, with details appropriate to the locale, and you still don’t need “ancillary services”. The level of sophistication possible goes way beyond just turning off the supply to a house… you can integrate the process at the level of individual solar panels and wind turbines on the source side, and individual appliances/devices at the load.
How is that a “toy”? And how does “the way the grid works now”..(your ‘grid’).. matter, if changing that is what we are trying to achieve?
Abbott ALREADY counted the waste heat production as electricity production.
Then he’s over-counted the number of units required by a factor of 3 (or equivalently downsized them by a factor of 3), because he’s counting their electric output as their total energy production. A 1 GW(e) nuclear plant has a thermal power of about 3 GW(t).
I can see why you love Abbott so much. He uses the same hand-waving style of rhetoric that you do. Abbott 2012 goes from his erroneous reactor count on page 2 into “Site selection”, where he has not ONE calculation and only the vaguest reference to Jacobson (hardly a reliable authority). He then goes into “Metal degradation”. Well, so what? Everything made of metal is subject to degradation from fatigue, corrosion and other factors. But the metal remains metal. He goes on about neutron embrittlement. He fails to note that said embrittlement is easily reversed by annealing, which Rosatom is selling as a service. He declares flatly,
These aging factors, all acting together, unavoidably lead to plant shutdown after 50 to 60 years of operation.
There are already PWRs in the USA which are looking at license renewals to 80 years, and that’s without refurbishment by annealing. Abbott is just plain wrong. He gets even hand-wavier on page 3:
In a nuclear power station, entropy is inescapable.
This is a claim that is so profoundly nonsensical that it indicates either thermodynamic illiteracy or a very sophisticated scheme to fool most people who are neither scientists nor engineers. If you were either, you’d have raised an eyebrow at this too.
Change in entropy has a very simple definition: ΔS=ΔQ/T(abs). Among other things, this means that the Earth is a huge entropy-generating machine. Earth receives an average of about 340 W/m² of sunlight, reflects about 30% and absorbs the rest. The effective temperature of this heat is 5700 K, the temperature of the visible surface of the sun’s photosphere. Most of this (minus a small amount disappearing into the oceans) is re-radiated to space at a blackbody temperature of about 255 K. Thus, each square meter of Earth’s surface generates 340*0.7*((1/255)-(1/5700)) = 0.89 J/K/m²/sec of entropy, or about 4.6e14 J/K/sec across the entire earth. A 3990 MW(t) nuclear plant’s entire output becomes waste heat relatively quickly, so we can just divide by 255 K to get 15.6 million J/K/sec of entropy generation. This is about 1 thirty-millionth of the entropy generation of Earth itself. We could put 15,000 such plants (about 60 TW(th)) on Earth and only notice small local effects.
Abbott uses the figure of 1 plant/day as a scare tactic. This is silly. If it takes 15,000 man-years to build a 1 GW(e) plant and a new one every day, you need 15,000 man-years of labor per day or a labor force of about 5.5 million. That’s for the entire world.
Abbott’s claims about nuclear waste (still only on page 3 here) are unsourced. There are several countries with solutions to SNF. The problem in the USA is not technical, it’s political.
Abbott uses more scare tactics when talking about nuclear accidents (page 4 at last!). The frequency of such accidents is low and the application of lessons learned has prevented repeats of any substantial accidents. Abbott claims “the combinatorial possibilities for human error rapidly increase with scale” but (a) plants are operated independently and (b) “renewables” and even “virtual power plants” are subject to the same scaling laws.
Abbott rants about nuclear proliferation, ignoring that today’s proliferation is occurring in places like N. Korea which do NOT have nuclear power.
Abbott goes on about energy requirements of uranium mining, but he takes Mudd’s figure for energy requirements per unit U3O8 (Fig. 8, p. 107) and treats it as energy per unit of ore. Energy requirements scale roughly logarithmically with ore concentration. Given his other faulty figures and their consistent bias, this is more likely academic fraud rather than a mere mistake.
Abbott writes an un-cited, number-free plaint about “depletion of elemental diversity”. His complaints are already being obviated. There are now silicon carbide fuel channels under development to replace Zircaloy, and SiC fuel cladding has been under development for years. Abbott would be thoroughly humiliated if he tried to claim either silicon or carbon were being depleted. (SiC fuel cladding practically eliminates hydrogen-evolving reactions with steam, and melts at a far higher temperature than Zircaloy. SiC-clad fuel might have prevented the Fukushima meltdowns by making the reactors stable until PM Kan had finished his presser.)
Heh, that’s pretty much the piece I needed to write for SkS. Polish slightly and add cites, and I’m done. Well, as soon as I finish that 150-entries-long comment thread, in which you were VERY long-winded.
You said you would power the entire economy. You have produced only enough electricity to power current electricity and electric cars.
Liar, or just innumerate? In my sketch I wrote “If you built out 3.3 TW(th) of nuclear either as molten-salt reactors or LMFBRs (capable of being considerably more efficient than LWRs), at even 40% efficiency you’d have 1.3 TW of nameplate generation….” 2019 electric generation was 4,118,051 GWh, an average of 470.1 GW. 200 GW average for EVs gets me up to a whole 670 GW. That leaves another 630 GW un-spoken for. Jet fuel is nothing. Total US energy in jet fuel in 2019 was 3,601 trillion BTU, an average of 120.4 GW. My chemistry analysis suggests that about half of this energy can come from biomass, so the required electric contribution is something closer to 60 GW. That still leaves 570 GW of electric generation (or about 1400 GW of raw heat used as heat instead of generating electricity) unallocated. Industrial energy consumption runs about 700 GW; if you can serve half of that with direct nuclear heat, you pretty much have everything covered. If you can serve 3/4 of it with direct heat, you’ve got plenty to spare.
Real power plans include all expenses.
So tell us, why are e.g. transmission upgrades to serve wind farms rolled into rate bases rather than being charged to the wind farms? Why aren’t fees paid for Renewable Energy Certificates counted as a cost of “renewables”?
Connelly el al 2016 Smart Energy Europe counts building out district heating as a cost of their energy system.
Good for them. Do you have a hyperlink?
You leave out all the additional costs like the district heating
Don’t have numbers for that. Since most methods involve a whole lot of pavement work it’s probably best to roll it into a general infrastructure project.
the plants to make electrofuel
Depends too much on the specific process you use. H2@Scale assumed electrolyzers cost $1,691/kW, but I don’t think it’s necesssary to generate hydrogen. The “renewable” schemes to use hydrogen as the main storage medium will require many more electrolyzers because of their far higher peak-to-average generation ratios (low capacity factor). At any rate, 100 GW of electrolyzers @1671/kW costs $167.1 billion. I’d consider that a ceiling.
and the plants to make electricity from the nuclear waste heat.
That’s $0.00, because there aren’t any. Waste heat is used for 5th-generation district heating (peak temps of 20°C, very high efficiency heat pumps used to bring it up to end-use temperature), heating greenhouses in the winter, melting snow, stuff like that.
Electricity is the PRIMARY product of wind and solar generators.
You mean ONLY PORTABLE product, meaning you can’t get any synergies by exploiting co-produced heat.
All the reactors must be located near a huge cooling source like the ocean.
You mean, like the atmosphere? This may surprise you, but you CAN use it as a heat sink.
You will never be able to draw off enough heat to run that many reactors.
And outside the heating season you’ve got no use for any heat at all. Are you crazy enough to think this is a PROBLEM? Not having ENOUGH is a problem. Having more than you can possibly use leaves you with lots of options.
Plans like Engineer Poet’s and Joris Van Dorp’s are designed to fool people who have not read the background information.
But you can’t produce one number to back up your empty claims. Not One. Single. Number.
nigeljsays
Zebra @121 says:
“Scale up my scenario by whatever, with details appropriate to the locale, and you still don’t need “ancillary services”. ‘
It’s not remotely clear what his scenario is. I understand where most people are coming from but not Zebra. Can anyone explain what they think his scenario is and why it would not need ancillary services?
The pdf file he uses as evidence says nothing in the abstract about not needing ancillary services.
My admittedly limited understanding is only a single house with solar panels operating independently of anyone else would not need ancillary services. Its not much different from a simple torch with batteries. Is this what Zebra means?
Once you get multiple users of a common power source you get variations in the electrical supply parameters that require to be corrected by ancillary services, regardless of the type of generation.
Thanks for the link to the MIT study. I’ll read it with interest; perhaps it will clarify your comments for me.
So far, though, I find this:
Opportunities for improving the functioning and reliability of the grid arise from technological developments in sensing, communications, control, and power electronics. These technologies can enhance efficiency and reliability, increase capacity utilization, enable more rapid response to remediate contingencies, and increase flexibility in controlling power flows on transmission lines. If properly deployed and accompanied by appropriate policies, they can deal effectively with some of the challenges described above. They can facilitate the integration of large volumes of renewable and distributed generation, provide greater visibility of the instantaneous state of the grid, and make possible the engagement of demand as a resource.
Which I read to mean “there are new technologies that enable functioning of the grid.” You’ve been talking about some of them (for instance, smart meters.) But the ‘needs’ addressed by such include load matching and its corollaries (for instance, any AC system needs frequency regulation.) And some of those are the ancillary services that you decry as mere ‘bookkeeping.’ So evidently I still don’t understand your perspective.
The report goes on to say:
The electric power system is composed of four interacting physical elements: energy generation, high-voltage transmission, lower-voltage distribution, and energy consumption, or load. Two less tangible elements are also important: the operational systems that protect and control the physical elements, and the regulatory and governance structures that shape the system’s evolution. The term “grid” as used in this report refers not only to the physical transmission and distribution systems that link generators to ultimate loads but also the associated operational, regulatory, and governance structures.
That starts to get to why I called your scenario a ‘toy’ model. I didn’t mean it pejoratively; toy models can be very instructive indeed. But let’s drop that and just say ‘model.’ Your model, as far as I understand it, includes energy generation and energy consumption explicitly. And energy distribution seemed to be assumed, but not really accounted for, in that you envisioned direct contractual arrangements between (or among) consumer-generators, but didn’t discuss how the power would be delivered. (Apologies if that bit was contained in a comment I didn’t see.) It did not contain anything about high-voltage transmission that I saw–a major simplification to your model, given how crucial that transmission is today. Nor did it address the “operational systems that protect and control the physical elements”–something I alluded to when I said that operating the ‘vast machine’ that is the grid requires operators. And the “the regulatory and governance structures that shape the system’s evolution” you mostly seem to me to be asserting to be unnecessary, which struck me as assuming what you want to prove.
But hey, I’m here to learn. Which would start with reading your linked source.
Killiansays
Killian: I roughly calculate 6,800 industrial wind turbins vs. the same cost as a nuclear power plant.
Somebody do the math and which covers more households/energy production. I can’t stand to dip my toe that far into the stupid of this issue.
AB: Brilliant, dude! I salute you. (And NigelJ for saying the same, though without your humor)
It was a straightforward statement, zero humor, actually.
David B. Bensonsays
Barton Paul Levenson — There is ample evidence of ionizing radiation hormesis at low dose. Here’s the award to Prof. Calabrese:
those terrible Germans, forcing Poland to accept cheap, clean energy
“Hyu vill take ze electricity ve made but do not vant und cannot use. Hyu vill deal mit our surges und sags, und hyu vill LIKE IT because ist grün.”
Poland was having to ramp its plants fast enough to cause problems with thermal cycling, risking damage, unscheduled outages and blackouts. Driving your neighbors into blackouts is a rather unfriendly act.
to the extent that the latter had to unilaterally “force Germany to deal with the problems it was causing.”
Money quote, shorn from all the happy-talk:
“This project contributes to a decrease of unscheduled flow from Germany to Poland, Poland to Czech Republic and Poland to Slovakia by increasing the controllability on the entire synchronous profile.”
Having to install hardware to control troublesome (unscheduled) power flows is a signal that something is wrong. In this case the problem was Germany’s refusal to arrange for either curtailment or productive use of excess unreliable generation. Germany is playing the hypedrogen game as “the solution” to intermittency and energy storage, but so far that’s running at a tiny fraction of what is required and is not growing fast enough to be a serious response to the issue.
“Wind power is a minor but growing source of electricity in Poland. As of the end of 2015, total installed capacity was 5.1 gigawatts (GW), which provided 10,858 gigawatt-hours (GW·h)….
10858 GWh / (5.1 GW * 8766 h) = 0.243 capacity factor. Per Wikipedia, Poland consumed 150 TWh of electricity in 2013 which is an average of 17.1 GW. 5.1 GW nameplate of wind isn’t that much compared to 17.1 GW of average load, but with about 1.25 GW of average generation you aren’t going to significantly decarbonize with that little. AAMOF, at 0.243 capacity factor you are going to need 70+ GW nameplate to get an average 17.1 GW out, especially given losses in storage. Worse, that would only cover electric consumption. Total Polish primary energy was 1135 TWh in 2013, 985 TWh more than just the electric consumption. Assuming that 450 TWh of fuel went into electric generation which has already been replaced by the wind/storage system, generating another 535 TWh with wind farms at 0.243 capacity factor requires another whopping 251 GW nameplate for a total in excess of 320 GW.
E-P is carefully not counting Chernobyl as a “commerical” reactor here.
I’m saying it wasn’t in Europe, the USA or Japan. I’m also not counting the SL-1 incident because it was military. The meltdowns at EBR-I, Fermi 1 and Three Mile Island unit 2 all had zero casualties. There’s ONE fatality attributed to Fukushima Dai’ichi, which was probably due to smoking instead.
He is also, of course, discounting all the excess deaths from radiation
Strange, we can’t find these excess deaths. Shouldn’t we be measuring excess deaths in high-radiation Denver compared to low-radiation Florida? VERY high-radiation Ramsar, Kerala and Guarapari? Yet we don’t. UNSCEAR expects no increase in cancers from Fukushima either.
he labors under the psychotic delusion that radiation is good for you.
You seem to have left out conceding that you claimed you could run the entire world’s economy, 15 TW, on 5,000 TW of electricity and 10 TW of waste heat. I have now quoted you twice and twice referred to your post at 463 last month.
As usual, you change the subject and go on a long Gish Gallop. Where is my $!,000 you promised?? I have quoted you powering 2/3 of world power with waste heat. District heat cannot be used in rural areas, that is half the heating used. You need to power electrical heating in the rest, but you have not generated enough power for that. Half the “heating” is cooling. How will you generate 3 TW of cooling with waste heat?
You are correct about entropy when you say “We could put 15,000 such plants (about 60 TW(th)) on Earth and only notice SMALL LOCAL EFFECTS” my caps. The local effects are all inside the reactor. The high entropy inside the reactor will result in decay of the reactor components as described by Abbott. You offer a straw man against Abbott.
You have not described how you will fly airplanes using waste heat.
As for your absurd claim that you will power shipping with nuclear power, you will need 50,000 reactors to power all the ships in the world. They will only run at 50% or lower power most of the time and you will lose all the waste heat to the ocean. Add those reactors to your “plan”. Now you need 55,000 reactors. Nuclear is not used in commercial ships because it is too expensive. But then nuclear proponents do not care about being the most expensive energy.
You have no “plan”. You just make up another wild story with each post.
Michael Sweetsays
Nigelj:
You need to learn the vocabulary of energy systems if you want to post on scientific sites without looking like you do not know what you are talking about.
Nuclear plants only convert about 33% of the heat generated in the plant into electricity. The rest is waste heat which is dumped into the ocean or a large amount of water. that is why a 3000 MW(th) plant only generates 1000MW of electricity. That is why nuclear plants require huge water supplies, to dump all the waste heat.
By contrast if a wind or solar plant generates 1000 MW of power it is all electricity. None of the power is wasted by dumping it into the environment. Only a very small amount of water is needed.
The capacity factor is the amount of electricity generated during the year compared to the theoretical maximum. For onshore wind that is about 35% in the USA and over 40% for offshore wind in Europe. Nuclear plants have about a 90% capacity factor in the USA and about 70% in France and many other countries. If the reactors are used in load following than the capacity factor is lower. In France they turn off reactors on the weekend because they generate too much electricity. That is not economic.
Nuclear plants are also off line for scheduled long term maintenance 15% or more of the time but they do not count that against the capacity factor. Wind and solar do not have such long term outages.
EP’s plan at 463 last month provided 15 TW of power using 5,000 1000 MW power plants (5 TW power) and recovering 100% of the waste heat (10 TW power). Read his post again until you understand what you are defending. He is trying to bluff people with his Gish Gallops.
How would you know what the renewable plans say? You have never read any of the papers that I have referred you to.
Michael Sweetsays
Nigelj:
Nuclear plants are 33% efficient because they convert only 33% of thermal power released from the fuel into deliverable electricity.
Wind and solar PV are about 99% efficient because all the generated power is electricity.
1. Smart meters exist!
2. They are being used to do exactly what I described– reduce load, in a contractual arrangement with the consumer, when needed!
I have dealt with such “smart meters” and their predecessors. Back in 2010, I came home late from a job and tried to turn on my A/C to cool my apartment off. Unfortunately, my A/C was shut off by “contractual arrangement” (that I had no knowledge of contracting to) so I had to open my windows to hot humid air and turn on fans to try to cool off instead. I lived… but had I been old and ill, there is no guarantee that I would have.
This is a very comprehensive discussion from actual experts
It’s 280 f’in pages, of which you quote NOTHING of direct relevance to your assertions. (Gavin, you need to enforce some level of proven relevance of a cite or refuse to approve the post.)
The point is, what stands in the way of having a very reliable and environmentally optimized system is not physics or technology.
Wrong. It IS physics, plus time. You can only defer/deny certain needs for so long, and your insistence that we rely on unreliable “renewables” means denial on a scale of hours to months. That. Does. Not. Work.
Scale up my scenario by whatever
I would LOVE to force you to live without your refrigerator and microwave for 3 days at a time (of my choosing), just to make you experience what “scaling up” means in practice.
you still don’t need “ancillary services”.
Pretty much every blackout on the record can be attributed to lack of “ancillary services”, primary among them being reactive power and frequency control. I would LOVE to force you to live without such “ancillary services” just to make you appreciate what they do for you. That would mean booting you to a third-world country, but I’m fine with that too. You are anti-civilization and deserve NOTHING.
E-P 127: Germany is playing the hypedrogen game as “the solution” to intermittency and energy storage, but so far that’s running at a tiny fraction of what is required and is not growing fast enough to be a serious response to the issue.
BPL: They now have a steel plant running on hydrogen.
But it seems to me that we are still having a “warrants” problem… you keep going back to “the grid as it is”. If you want to discuss my model, you have to talk about my model, and tell me why it wouldn’t work as a replacement for the existing model. So,
at 111 you say (my bold):
You are talking about a toy model, essentially. And no, it requires no ancillary services. That does not demonstrate that the actual extant grid does not.
but then at 124 you say:
for instance, any AC system needs frequency regulation.
Huh??
And with respect to distribution, here’s what I said at #42:
-My “grid” is the wires only. We have a source, the inverter, and a load…my house
and
The meter on my house, and the meter at the source, is standardized by the grid (the wires) “operator”.
Perhaps that wasn’t clear enough, but it seems obvious to me that the (zebra-) grid operator sets the specs… it’s 60Hz not 50Hz, and the voltage is whatever at the inverter output, and the wires that drop to my house can only handle 100 amps, and so on.
The meters would be owned by the z-grid operator, but their action as an interface would be cooperative…the grid operator facilitates the transaction between the seller and the buyer.
OK, so before you start talking about getting electricity from Kansas to NYC, you really need to get squared away on these basic concepts. If you don’t understand something, just ask.
And so on. A search through Google Scholar supplies dozens of studies, some concluding, e.g., no measurable effect in England and Wales, most concluding very large effects in Ukraine and Belarus.
“Nuclear plants only convert about 33% of the heat generated in the plant into electricity. The rest is waste heat which is dumped into the ocean ….By contrast if a wind or solar plant generates 1000 MW of power it is all electricity.”
Misses the point as usual. As I pointed out with an internet link renewables are not perfectly efficient either. Your 99% efficient statement is completely irrelevant to what I posted.
For every criticism you make of nuclear power there are equal criticisms of renewables. You can’t see it and wont see it, so further discussion with you is pointless. All you know how to do is quote other peoples studies, not think for yourself.
DBB’s link: The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. 20 billion US gallons (76,000,000 m³) of treated water are evaporated each year.[12][13] This water represents about 25% of the annual overdraft of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix Active Management Area.
AB: So it uses water, but more efficiently, via vaporization instead of slight heating. It’s a good idea since it dries out sewage and adds humidity (and so precipitation downwind), both of which are services. But it’s not sustainable and the wording of your comment, “is far from any obvious source of cooling water”, was flawed. Sewage is an obvious source of cooling water. But again, it appears to be a good concept.
______
E-P 128: I’m saying it [Chernobyl] wasn’t in Europe
BPL: Hear that, folks? Eastern Europe isn’t in Europe.
AB: “Europe” is often used as a shorthand for “Free Europe”. EP’s correct that the USSR’s nukes were such pieces of garbage that including them in the “set of nukes” pretty much destroys any conclusions. No containment building makes for serious danger, eh?
_______
zebra:
#95 Al Bundy,
“only the aggregate of demand matters”
That makes no sense at all. The aggregate certainly doesn’t matter to me,
AB: The grid lives or dies as an aggregate. Your puny little house can’t get power unless the grid is up. “Not going dark” is something that essentially everyone demands. Your concept is an anarchy of myriads of contracts that would result in either total collapse or frequent individual shutdowns, such as the one EP described in his 2010 apartment. Utilities are utilities precisely to avoid the scenario you cherish. Why on earth would we choose a system that fails constantly by design? “Oops, your designated source is 1% short so you go dark because other sources (that are 15% oversupplied) aren’t in your network”. Yeah, you could convolute and re-convolute contracts but if you do that what have you gained besides Rube Goldberging the system? Seriously, do you want a 100 page contract with 12 different suppliers just to get reliable electrical service? Do you want to pay those 12 suppliers to do the processing dance required? WAY expensive, WAY time-consuming for each and every consumer, WAY frustrating, WAY brittle.
Again, aggregate is the ONLY thing that matters cuz your little house is irrelevant gridwise.
The grid operator NEEDS to be the intermediary, the single point of contact for suppliers and consumers, the God who prices ancillary services and manages flows so that the least disruption results.
EP’s gripe is valid. Yep, renewables are given trumping ability and nuclear is not because society has decided that renewables are the path to the future. EP disagrees with that choice and mathematically he may be correct; maybe nuclear would be cheaper and/or easier. Maybe. But my point to him, which he completely misses, is that humans ain’t robotic mathematical devices and humans, including their fears and aspirations, matter. “I like renewables” is a 100% valid point, as is “I fear nukes”, even if nukes are no more dangerous than spiders.
______
EP: Technically you nuked your IP when you shared your idea without getting an NDA from me, but I’m not the type to stab people in the back.
AB: Nope. The USA has a one year clock for non-published disclosures made for commercial purposes (so I can disclose to family, for example, without tripping the clock). If I don’t file within a year I might lose my IP, but I might not since the disclosure was to a friend (or so I would claim because I do consider you a friend). A tad fuzzy and certainly of the “Who can afford the best lawyer” sort. Other countries have other laws; I believe that the UK follows the rule you expressed. And, of course, China’s rule is, “You aren’t Chinese? LOLOL!”
Again, I respect you and sincerely believe that you are way honorable. And as a backup, I doubt that I will claim the system I partially shared with you. More likely it will be a gift to humanity. So even if I’m wrong about you the result is merely that my choice is made for me. No biggie.
And note that my actual interest was to find out about you. I ain’t a mathematical robot; my words, goals, and thrusts are rarely related to what they “obviously” are.
Killiansays
Hey!!!! People!!!!!
If after 2 years of grids and nuclear horse apples, guess what?!! You haven’t solved a single damned thing! Nobody has changed their minds! And it isn’t even germane! I *promise* you nuclear will never be a significan’t part of the long-term global solution.
Why have you chosen to waste two years of this valuable forum’s time?
He tipped his hand at the top, by accusing me of missing the point. Sure enough, that’s exactly what his post did.
Point #1: The Poles did not unilaterally ‘force’ the Germans to do anything. There were problems with the grid–3 related ones, actually, and yes, one of them was integrating excess generation (some of which, however, seems to have been Polish, not German). The Germans and Poles *co-operatively* engaged in upgrades to deal with the problem. Calling this description ‘happy talk’ will not change the fact that both German and Polish authorities paid the bills.
Point #2: Yes, the Polish grid is (famously) fossil-heavy, with lots of coal-fired capacity. However, the actual point here is that the Poles are *increasing* their RE capacity now. Apparently, the putative horrors of their German Renewable Trauma weren’t all that bad.
There’s also some bumpf about the US only built wind up to yada, yada, can you imagine “little Poland” coming close? Pure rhetoric, and vacuous rhetoric at that, as readers here probably don’t need me to point out. They can recognize actual analysis, or rather, its lack. And ditto for Gish gallop.
If you want to discuss my model, you have to talk about my model, and tell me why it wouldn’t work as a replacement for the existing model.
Remember, I didn’t. You dragged me into this discussion.
However, I seem to be in it, and I’m curious enough to stay in it for a bit, at least.
So, yes, you are right that your z-grid operates on AC (since there would be no inverters in a DC system.) And, mea culpa, I was careless in responding.
You write:
If you don’t understand something, just ask.
So, here’s a question.
If the z-grid is “60Hz not 50Hz, and the voltage is whatever at the inverter output, and the wires that drop to my house can only handle 100 amps, and so on,” what happens when the voltage output from Customer A drops but the demand from Customer B does not? How does the z-grid operator keep the frequency at 60 H in that circumstance?
You seem to have left out conceding that you claimed you could run the entire world’s economy, 15 TW, on 5,000 TW of electricity and 10 TW of waste heat.
False. I’ve shown you how I proposed to do it, and that ain’t it.
You seem to have left out conceding that you claimed you could run the entire world’s economy, 15 TW, on 5,000 TW of electricity and 10 TW of waste heat. I have now quoted you twice and twice referred to your post at 463 last month.
Misinterpreted rather badly, despite me giving you MULTIPLE corrections. You were set straight @122, so either you don’t have the brainpower to understand what I wrote or you’re just lying. Either way, no point dealing with you any further.
Where is my $!,000 you promised??
You already have the $1000. It’s rightfully mine, but it looks like I’ll have to extract it from you at gunpoint.
Fortunately, search engines reveal lies and half-truths. Two hops got me to this Aussie article which has a few details not exactly backing your claim:
German manufacturing giant Thyssenkrupp has completed
IOW, it’s over.
Thyssenkrupp fed hydrogen into one of 28 tuyeres, or nozzles, that otherwise supply coal into the blast furnace.
That’s hardly “running on hydrogen”.
As part of the demonstration conducted in its ‘furnace 9’
So there appear to be at least furnaces 1-9.
Thyssenkrupp plans to scale up the injection to all 28 tuyeres within the furnace and aims to eventually run at least three furnaces completely on hydrogen by 2023.
That’s a long way from running the whole plant on hydrogen.
In conventional blast furnaces around 300 kilograms of coking coal and 200 kilograms of pulverised coal are used in the production of a tonne of pig iron.
And the H2 appears to substituting only for the pulverized coal.
The truth just isn’t living up to your hype. That’s why I call it “hypedrogen”.
Al Bundy, yes talking about the baseload for a single house with solar panels is a bit pointless, you have to look at a cluster of users over time and averages. Its like comparing weather and climate.
Michael Sweet gets more dishonest than usual @87:
Which you refused to claim when you failed to link or quote where I said what you claim I said. Which you can’t do, because I never said it. Your dishonest claims to the contrary are based on deliberate (and I dare say malicious) misinterpretation.
Never said that. I said that primary energy must be compared to primary energy, not a secondary product like electricity. There is a vast difference between the two. The USA consumes roughly 3.3 TW of primary energy (average), but only about 460 GW of electric power. Most other needs can be met by direct use of heat. 3.3 TW of heat would require roughly 825 Combustion Engineering reactors at 3990 MW(t) each. Fourth-gen reactors such as LMFBRs or MSRs run at much higher temperatures than LWRs and could both replace fuels with direct nuclear heat in many more applications, AND achieve higher thermal efficiency in conversion to electric power.
I have the EIA numbers to back up my claims about district heating, though you could demonstrate the truth of my statements by just going over there yourself and having a look at Table 2.2 and Table 2.3. But you won’t do that, because truth takes a back seat to your ideology.
You lie again, claiming that I stated the present actuality rather than the potential of a specific technology which is not yet in use. (Incidentally, Dostal concludes that sCO2 thermal efficiency could push 53% at input temperatures of 700°C. There are no essential roadblocks to making nuclear reactors which produce heat at such temperatures; fission can produce temperatures of millions of degrees. It’s just an engineering problem, albeit likely a difficult one.)
Since you explicitly accepted the bet and have failed to meet your burden of proof, you owe me $1000 (make it US dollars). Communicate your address to me so I can come by and collect on my next vacation trip.
You don’t have to use all of it. You just have to be able to displace fossil fuels with it. This doesn’t even require year-round use, you just have to have enough to meet peak needs. Supplying 456 GW peak of low-grade heat from about 1.8 TW of waste heat is a pretty easy job.
Never said that either. A container ship such as the Emma Maersk is about the right size to be powered by a pair of NuScale reactors. Two reactor units @ 700 tons apiece will take less space and weight than the 200 tons/day of bunker fuel such a ship typically burns. It would consume somewhat more primary energy because of the lower efficiency; the Wartsila engine in the Emma Maersk can squeeze out over 50% based on LHV, while a NuScale is projected to get about 30%.
Do you EVER get tired of lying? I stated the numbers for generating 100% of the PRIMARY ENERGY used in the United States. Even using LWRs such as the AP1000, that would generate as much as 1.1 TW of electricity, more than twice current electric consumption. But since the supply of fissiles for LWRs is so limited, other (improved) reactors are required. They will operate at higher temperatures which support much higher thermal efficiencies. At 3.3 TW(th) and 45% efficiency, you’d generate as much as 1.485 TW(e). I’m pretty certain we’d run out of loads to serve before reaching 3.3 TW.
You’re full of crap. Total US primary energy consumption in 2019 was 100.215 quads. That’s 3.35 TW.
Liar. It’s a sketch, not a plan (a plan specifies means). It’s a 30,000 foot view of what a fully-decarbonized economy might look like, allowing for generation of more than twice current US electric consumption to support EVs, electrification of industrial energy and electrofuels, among other things. And at that level, it’s a piece of cake. Some things that are nigh-impossible with wind and solar are trivial with nuclear, because the former require staggering amounts of storage and nuclear needs none for either electricity or heat. Meeting the space-heating needs of about 70% of the US population is basically an afterthought. The rest can use heat pumps with electrofuel backup in case of outages.
Nonsense on stilts. As of 2004 when I last analyzed this, the actual crankshaft figure was well under 200 GW. This is easily met with even 1.1 TW(e) of generation.
At worst, a 10% overbuild would be required to address that. More likely is that the country would run out of loads before reaching 3.3 TW(th) of primary energy.
In November 1942, there wasn’t a single nuclear reactor in the world. By August of 1945, there were multiple reactors employed to produce plutonium as well as a solid uranium enrichment industry. The USA has operated reactors based on uranium salts dissolved in water, molten salt mixtures without water, oxide fuel, metal fuel, and carbon-based fuel forms.
Liar. You can’t name a single such material and specify what it’s required for.
Liar. You can’t specify the metals and what they’d be required for. Things like stainless steel are never going to be THAT scarce; iron, nickel and chromium are just too abundant, and they have substitutes if we need them.
GE’s PRISM reactor is designed to be air-cooled in shutdown. It needs no active cooling; it can be sited anywhere. Molten-salt reactors are similarly free of many failure modes.
Grammar error noted, and water doesn’t matter if you don’t need any.
HA! TOO funny to see you use that phrase, particularly since your entire comment is a textbook example of precisely that. Hypocrite.
The so-called “peer reviewed literature” has things like 3x errors in basic assumptions. Taking it as gospel is downright idiocy.
I have thus far provided (counting) 6 links, 5 of which are to primary sources and the last is to myself (where I linked primary sources). Your post has zero. If either Real Climate or SkS were fair, your posts would be banned.
If you’re not already wrong, I’m going to make you so.
BPL unintentionally tells the truth @90:
Yes, it does appear that one secret to long life is radiation. In combination with red wine it looks to be the magic formula of the residents of the Greek island of Ikaria, and it was shown in 1958 that radiation increased the mean lifespan of Sprague-Dawley rats by a MINIMUM of 25%.
For some reason, search engines bury the ZDNET article when searching by title. Evil bastards.
Kevin McKinney projects his own faults AGAIN @93:
FUD means Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. My assertions are all fact-based; none of those elements are even peripherally present. You admitted that you refused to give anything like a direct answer, and practically crowed that you had. You are beneath contempt.
#96 Kevin McKinney,
‘ancillary services’
You asked me at #34 how my common carrier grid would operate so as not to require “ancillary services”. I responded at #42.
Did you see it? Is there something there you disagree with?
#95 Al Bundy,
“only the aggregate of demand matters”
That makes no sense at all. The aggregate certainly doesn’t matter to me, which is the point I made explicitly at #79, to which you are responding:
And of course I prefer it because it is a system that rewards and promotes innovation, rather than a model that offers rent-seeking “employment” for plug-and-chug Authoritarian types.
Ric Meritt writes @94:
You have to know the accounting tricks which underlie numbers like “Renewable energy’s share of German power mix rose to 46% last year“. Germany does not have its own grid, and it has long used its neighbors as a dumping ground for excess “renewable” generation. This got bad enough that Poland had to install phase-shifting transformers in order to block the surges and force Germany to deal with the problems it was causing. In essence, coal-fired Poland was both Germany’s energy sink and spinning reserve. Germany took all the credit for its “green” efforts while dumping some of the pain outside its own borders, reaching as far as hydro-powered Norway via interconnections through Denmark.
You have that totally backwards. Peterson et al found that wind requires 460 metric tons of steel and 160 m³ of concrete per average megawatt. A 70’s vintage nuclear plant required only 40 MT steel and 90 m³ concrete per average megawatt. Today’s designs do it with less.
The gamma and high-energy beta emitters are effectively gone in 500 years. What’s left after that is alpha emitters, which can be trivially avoided by not eating them. If you do get a bit, it won’t hurt you; regarding the UPPU group who had plutonium contamination, “the mortality rate of the club members has been lower than that of the population in general.”
We can handle it just fine until we decide it’s time to make it useful. Save for a bit of radio-krypton, it’s solids most of which are quite refractory and insoluble. It can sit tight in dry casks until we rediscover our balls and build a fleet of FBRs or something.
Al Bundy wrote @95:
Technically you nuked your IP when you shared your idea without getting an NDA from me, but I’m not the type to stab people in the back.
I have to make a confession here: most of that is an act that I’ve been putting on because the pearl-clutching responses to it are so funny. But that doesn’t mean that I think Greg Cochran isn’t dead right. His recent posts are all about the Kung Flu (aka Lung Pao Sicken, thank you Babylon Bee) but go back a ways and he gets into all kinds of stuff that induces lots of pearl-clutching in academia.
Go read West Hunter, it’s full of nuggets that our CultMarx rulers don’t want anyone to know. That is good enough reason for me to want to know them.
Response to #95 continued:
I tend to take people at their word. I’ve seen some AMAZINGLY dumb stuff in my time, and tone of voice is notoriously difficult to read over text. You have to go as far as wEIrD cApiTAliZatION or other extremes if you absolutely do not want anyone taking stuff seriously.
More people died in just ONE wind turbine fire in the USA than from radiation in all the commercial NPP accidents in the US, Europe and Japan.
The “all hell breaking loose” is mostly hysterical over-reaction to what is actually a pretty low-risk situation. It’s better if you don’t have pols trying to micro-manage things too; PM Naoto Kan ordered a halt to critically-needed venting of the Fukushima reactor containments so water could be added (he insisted upon holding a press conference first), with the result that the cores were uncovered, fuel damage and hydrogen evolution occurred, and the spectacular hydrogen explosions followed. All of that was avoidable, but in Japanese culture underlings can’t say no to the PM even if he’s dead wrong.
The only thing you need to insure is the residual value of the plant after an accident has occurred. If someone wants more money than that, you do what every other industry is allowed to do: declare bankruptcy and say “you own it now”.
Price-Anderson makes ALL nuclear plants backstop one with an accident after the particular plant’s insurance limit is reached. This reinsurance has never been used, even at TMI. We have enough experience, we should admit that this is paranoid and repeal it.
[edit – off topic]
Another E-P laugher (#104):
No. They use facts, sometimes cogently, sometimes not so much. But those facts are always marshalled in support of a prejudice which is immune to new information.
zebra, #105–
No, I did not see your #42. Having read it, I don’t see how it applies to the actual grid as it exists, which was the subject I was addressing–unwillingly, may I remind you!–at the #34 to which you intended to respond.
You are talking about a toy model, essentially. And no, it requires no ancillary services. That does not demonstrate that the actual extant grid does not.
Reminder: Discussions of theology, WW2, or how stupid everyone else is are off topic and will just be deleted.
Engineer Poet:
At 102 you say “Which you refused to claim when you failed to link or quote where I said what you claim I said. ”
I cited the post you wrote AND quoted you. From my post 87:
“As I previously referenced from post 463 in the last forced variations thread:
“He’s apparently referring to this piece in the October 2011 Proceedings of the IEEE. Right off the bat any on-the-ball layman finds gross errors of fact (and it’s shameful that the peer-reviewers let them pass). The first page states that human energy consumption runs about 15 TW. That is primary energy consumption. But then Abbott claims that serving so much energy would require 15,000 (presumably GW-scale) reactors. This is blatant deception, because he’s rating them by electric output, not thermal output (roughly 3x as much). So, cut that to 5000 reactors.”
You claim 15 TW usable power from 5,000 1,000 MW plants. You use the waste heat to reach 15 TW.
From Abbott 2012:
“Let’s assume that the conversion of nuclear thermal energy to electricity IS 100 PERCENT EFFICIENT. For the purpose of large-scale calculations, this generous assumption makes little difference to the conclusions. Now imagine a world where 15 terawatts is supplied by 15,000 1-gigawatt reactors.” my upper case
Abbott ALREADY counted the waste heat production as electricity production. You have tripled the thermal power produced in your “plan”. Your perpetual motion device is three times more efficient than mine!! Send me my check!
You said you would power the entire economy. You have produced only enough electricity to power current electricity and electric cars. That means you need to power air planes and from waste heat. Describe how that works. You will have to add the cost of all the reactors you plan to put on ships. I note that the reactors you plan to put on ships are once through reactors which you have said are not sustainable. Your plan changes with every post you make.
Real power plans include all expenses. Connelly el al 2016 Smart Energy Europe counts building out district heating as a cost of their energy system. You leave out all the additional costs like the district heating, the plants to make electrofuel and the plants to make electricity from the nuclear waste heat.
Electricity is the PRIMARY product of wind and solar generators. Only inefficient thermal units like coal and nuclear waste 60% of the power right off the top with their inefficient boilers. Your fantasy of recovering all the waste heat violates the first law of thermodynamics. To use any of the waste heat the reactors must be near the user of the heat.
All the reactors must be located near a huge cooling source like the ocean. Inland sites do not have enough cooling water (which is where all the heat goes). If you want to cool the reactor by heating a city you must cost out the heating pipes. You will never be able to draw off enough heat to run that many reactors.
Plans like Engineer Poet’s and Joris Van Dorp’s are designed to fool people who have not read the background information. They do not address the difficult parts of power generation like airplanes. They leave out many of the costs, like district heating, to make nuclear appear cheap. They use fossil fuels as storage. They use reactors that have never been built and costs that are grossly too low.
Kevin McKinney writes @110:
You never add any new information; you have posted exactly one link in this thread so far, and that was to another blog site. You keep making un-sourced claims and arguing by empty contradiction (shades of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic”). Why don’t you try moving up the quality pyramid and do something like prove that the supply of actinides is insufficient (and state your assumptions behind this)? There are substitutes for everything else, but not actinides.
When I find someone who repeatedly fails to produce actual evidence and derive their conclusion from it, I have not yet found one who was actually capable of doing so. Generally they prove themselves innumerate, which puts them out of the game right there.
Michael Sweet @113 — This older nuclear power plant
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
is far from any obvious source of cooling water. Yet it supplies reliable power as far away as Los Angeles and even El Paso.
From
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/finland.aspx
Finland is considering SMRs, Small Nuclear Reactors, to supply district heating. District heating is typical throughout Finland.
Michael Sweet @113
“Electricity is the PRIMARY product of wind and solar generators. Only inefficient thermal units like coal and nuclear waste 60% of the power right off the top with their inefficient boilers. ”
Good grief do you think wind and solar power is 100% efficient in terms of energy conversion? Wind efficiency is typically 35 -45% efficient as below, due to the combined effects of inability to utilise all the wind present and electrical losses in the generators.
https://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/Efficiency_of_Wind_Energy
“Your fantasy of recovering all the waste heat violates the first law of thermodynamics. To use any of the waste heat the reactors must be near the user of the heat.”
Yet EP said explicitly at 102 that you are responding to that he didn’t expect the system to recover ALL the heat. And EP already explained at 102 that some types of reactor can be located near urban centres. Some countries already use waste heat from nuclear reactors for urban heating.
“Plans like Engineer Poet’s and Joris Van Dorp’s are designed to fool people who have not read the background information. They do not address the difficult parts of power generation like airplanes. They leave out many of the costs, like district heating, to make nuclear appear cheap. They use fossil fuels as storage. They use reactors that have never been built and costs that are grossly too low.”
And the renewables plans are based on guesstimates of future storage costs and hopes they will fall a lot, or use of polluting gas fired backup, and dont take account of all the costs such as millions of people having to change from oil or gas heating to electric heating. Honestly both sides of this debate are as bad as each other!
That said, fossil fuels are no longer tenable as an energy source and are very unsustainable when burned. We should be using them just for petrochemicals and plastics, and preferably ones that can be recycled.
E-P, #107–
Gosh, those terrible Germans, forcing Poland to accept cheap, clean energy, to the extent that the latter had to unilaterally “force Germany to deal with the problems it was causing.”
Or, maybe the Poles and the Germans cooperated to serve their own interests:
First, “Integration of additional renewable energy sources on the area of western and north-western Poland as well as eastern part of Germany.”
Second, “All investments in project 94 complement each other in bringing the desired increase of grid transfer capability on the Polish-German border which causes decreasing price differentials between Poland and Germany.”
Third, “This project contributes to a decrease of unscheduled flow from Germany to Poland, Poland to Czech Republic and Poland to Slovakia by increasing the controllability on the entire synchronous profile.”
https://tyndp.entsoe.eu/tyndp2018/projects/projects/94
Again, a co-operative effort:
“…the project coordinated between the Polish and German Transmission System Operators, PSE and 50Hertz, respectively.”
https://transformers-magazine.com/tm-news/3249-phase-shifting-transformer-between-poland-and-germany-goes-online/
Poland was so bothered by German renewable energy that it resolved never to make the same mistakes!
Or maybe:
“Wind power is a minor but growing source of electricity in Poland. As of the end of 2015, total installed capacity was 5.1 gigawatts (GW), which provided 10,858 gigawatt-hours (GW·h) — around 6.22% of the electricity consumed in the country. By year end 2016 total installed capacity had risen to 5,782 MW…
“As of 2018 the Polish government was still considering whether the first nuclear power plant should be built, but in May 2018 state-owned PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna, who would have carried out any build, chose to invest in offshore wind power instead, targeting the build of 2.5 GW by 2030.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Poland
And as of the end of 2019, RE capacity had increased to 8.8 GW, with major initiatives to increase that.
https://www.reuters.com/article/poland-energy-wind/poland-plays-catch-up-with-launch-of-major-renewable-energy-auction-idUSL8N2862W5
I guess some people never learn.
E-P 109: More people died in just ONE wind turbine fire in the USA than from radiation in all the commercial NPP accidents in the US, Europe and Japan.
BPL: Note: E-P is carefully not counting Chernobyl as a “commerical” reactor here. He is also, of course, discounting all the excess deaths from radiation, since he labors under the psychotic delusion that radiation is good for you.
Sorry, “commercial.”
#111 Kevin McKinney,
“toy model”
Not sure what the “toy” part means. Physics and engineering make progress working from exactly the kind of model I proposed. At this point, though, it hardly makes sense to think of it as only a theoretical model:
1. Smart meters exist!
2. They are being used to do exactly what I described– reduce load, in a contractual arrangement with the consumer, when needed!
This is a very comprehensive discussion from actual experts…don’t know if it has been referenced by others recently:
https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/MITEI-The-Future-of-the-Electric-Grid.pdf
The point is, what stands in the way of having a very reliable and environmentally optimized system is not physics or technology. The hardware is effectively off-the-shelf, once you start scaling up.
Scale up my scenario by whatever, with details appropriate to the locale, and you still don’t need “ancillary services”. The level of sophistication possible goes way beyond just turning off the supply to a house… you can integrate the process at the level of individual solar panels and wind turbines on the source side, and individual appliances/devices at the load.
How is that a “toy”? And how does “the way the grid works now”..(your ‘grid’).. matter, if changing that is what we are trying to achieve?
Michael Sweet rambles on @113:
Then he’s over-counted the number of units required by a factor of 3 (or equivalently downsized them by a factor of 3), because he’s counting their electric output as their total energy production. A 1 GW(e) nuclear plant has a thermal power of about 3 GW(t).
I can see why you love Abbott so much. He uses the same hand-waving style of rhetoric that you do. Abbott 2012 goes from his erroneous reactor count on page 2 into “Site selection”, where he has not ONE calculation and only the vaguest reference to Jacobson (hardly a reliable authority). He then goes into “Metal degradation”. Well, so what? Everything made of metal is subject to degradation from fatigue, corrosion and other factors. But the metal remains metal. He goes on about neutron embrittlement. He fails to note that said embrittlement is easily reversed by annealing, which Rosatom is selling as a service. He declares flatly,
There are already PWRs in the USA which are looking at license renewals to 80 years, and that’s without refurbishment by annealing. Abbott is just plain wrong. He gets even hand-wavier on page 3:
This is a claim that is so profoundly nonsensical that it indicates either thermodynamic illiteracy or a very sophisticated scheme to fool most people who are neither scientists nor engineers. If you were either, you’d have raised an eyebrow at this too.
Change in entropy has a very simple definition: ΔS=ΔQ/T(abs). Among other things, this means that the Earth is a huge entropy-generating machine. Earth receives an average of about 340 W/m² of sunlight, reflects about 30% and absorbs the rest. The effective temperature of this heat is 5700 K, the temperature of the visible surface of the sun’s photosphere. Most of this (minus a small amount disappearing into the oceans) is re-radiated to space at a blackbody temperature of about 255 K. Thus, each square meter of Earth’s surface generates 340*0.7*((1/255)-(1/5700)) = 0.89 J/K/m²/sec of entropy, or about 4.6e14 J/K/sec across the entire earth. A 3990 MW(t) nuclear plant’s entire output becomes waste heat relatively quickly, so we can just divide by 255 K to get 15.6 million J/K/sec of entropy generation. This is about 1 thirty-millionth of the entropy generation of Earth itself. We could put 15,000 such plants (about 60 TW(th)) on Earth and only notice small local effects.
Abbott uses the figure of 1 plant/day as a scare tactic. This is silly. If it takes 15,000 man-years to build a 1 GW(e) plant and a new one every day, you need 15,000 man-years of labor per day or a labor force of about 5.5 million. That’s for the entire world.
Abbott’s claims about nuclear waste (still only on page 3 here) are unsourced. There are several countries with solutions to SNF. The problem in the USA is not technical, it’s political.
Abbott uses more scare tactics when talking about nuclear accidents (page 4 at last!). The frequency of such accidents is low and the application of lessons learned has prevented repeats of any substantial accidents. Abbott claims “the combinatorial possibilities for human error rapidly increase with scale” but (a) plants are operated independently and (b) “renewables” and even “virtual power plants” are subject to the same scaling laws.
Abbott rants about nuclear proliferation, ignoring that today’s proliferation is occurring in places like N. Korea which do NOT have nuclear power.
Abbott goes on about energy requirements of uranium mining, but he takes Mudd’s figure for energy requirements per unit U3O8 (Fig. 8, p. 107) and treats it as energy per unit of ore. Energy requirements scale roughly logarithmically with ore concentration. Given his other faulty figures and their consistent bias, this is more likely academic fraud rather than a mere mistake.
Abbott writes an un-cited, number-free plaint about “depletion of elemental diversity”. His complaints are already being obviated. There are now silicon carbide fuel channels under development to replace Zircaloy, and SiC fuel cladding has been under development for years. Abbott would be thoroughly humiliated if he tried to claim either silicon or carbon were being depleted. (SiC fuel cladding practically eliminates hydrogen-evolving reactions with steam, and melts at a far higher temperature than Zircaloy. SiC-clad fuel might have prevented the Fukushima meltdowns by making the reactors stable until PM Kan had finished his presser.)
Heh, that’s pretty much the piece I needed to write for SkS. Polish slightly and add cites, and I’m done. Well, as soon as I finish that 150-entries-long comment thread, in which you were VERY long-winded.
Liar, or just innumerate? In my sketch I wrote “If you built out 3.3 TW(th) of nuclear either as molten-salt reactors or LMFBRs (capable of being considerably more efficient than LWRs), at even 40% efficiency you’d have 1.3 TW of nameplate generation….” 2019 electric generation was 4,118,051 GWh, an average of 470.1 GW. 200 GW average for EVs gets me up to a whole 670 GW. That leaves another 630 GW un-spoken for. Jet fuel is nothing. Total US energy in jet fuel in 2019 was 3,601 trillion BTU, an average of 120.4 GW. My chemistry analysis suggests that about half of this energy can come from biomass, so the required electric contribution is something closer to 60 GW. That still leaves 570 GW of electric generation (or about 1400 GW of raw heat used as heat instead of generating electricity) unallocated. Industrial energy consumption runs about 700 GW; if you can serve half of that with direct nuclear heat, you pretty much have everything covered. If you can serve 3/4 of it with direct heat, you’ve got plenty to spare.
So tell us, why are e.g. transmission upgrades to serve wind farms rolled into rate bases rather than being charged to the wind farms? Why aren’t fees paid for Renewable Energy Certificates counted as a cost of “renewables”?
Good for them. Do you have a hyperlink?
Don’t have numbers for that. Since most methods involve a whole lot of pavement work it’s probably best to roll it into a general infrastructure project.
Depends too much on the specific process you use. H2@Scale assumed electrolyzers cost $1,691/kW, but I don’t think it’s necesssary to generate hydrogen. The “renewable” schemes to use hydrogen as the main storage medium will require many more electrolyzers because of their far higher peak-to-average generation ratios (low capacity factor). At any rate, 100 GW of electrolyzers @1671/kW costs $167.1 billion. I’d consider that a ceiling.
That’s $0.00, because there aren’t any. Waste heat is used for 5th-generation district heating (peak temps of 20°C, very high efficiency heat pumps used to bring it up to end-use temperature), heating greenhouses in the winter, melting snow, stuff like that.
You mean ONLY PORTABLE product, meaning you can’t get any synergies by exploiting co-produced heat.
You mean, like the atmosphere? This may surprise you, but you CAN use it as a heat sink.
And outside the heating season you’ve got no use for any heat at all. Are you crazy enough to think this is a PROBLEM? Not having ENOUGH is a problem. Having more than you can possibly use leaves you with lots of options.
But you can’t produce one number to back up your empty claims. Not One. Single. Number.
Zebra @121 says:
“Scale up my scenario by whatever, with details appropriate to the locale, and you still don’t need “ancillary services”. ‘
It’s not remotely clear what his scenario is. I understand where most people are coming from but not Zebra. Can anyone explain what they think his scenario is and why it would not need ancillary services?
The pdf file he uses as evidence says nothing in the abstract about not needing ancillary services.
My admittedly limited understanding is only a single house with solar panels operating independently of anyone else would not need ancillary services. Its not much different from a simple torch with batteries. Is this what Zebra means?
Once you get multiple users of a common power source you get variations in the electrical supply parameters that require to be corrected by ancillary services, regardless of the type of generation.
#121, zebra–
Thanks for the link to the MIT study. I’ll read it with interest; perhaps it will clarify your comments for me.
So far, though, I find this:
Which I read to mean “there are new technologies that enable functioning of the grid.” You’ve been talking about some of them (for instance, smart meters.) But the ‘needs’ addressed by such include load matching and its corollaries (for instance, any AC system needs frequency regulation.) And some of those are the ancillary services that you decry as mere ‘bookkeeping.’ So evidently I still don’t understand your perspective.
The report goes on to say:
That starts to get to why I called your scenario a ‘toy’ model. I didn’t mean it pejoratively; toy models can be very instructive indeed. But let’s drop that and just say ‘model.’ Your model, as far as I understand it, includes energy generation and energy consumption explicitly. And energy distribution seemed to be assumed, but not really accounted for, in that you envisioned direct contractual arrangements between (or among) consumer-generators, but didn’t discuss how the power would be delivered. (Apologies if that bit was contained in a comment I didn’t see.) It did not contain anything about high-voltage transmission that I saw–a major simplification to your model, given how crucial that transmission is today. Nor did it address the “operational systems that protect and control the physical elements”–something I alluded to when I said that operating the ‘vast machine’ that is the grid requires operators. And the “the regulatory and governance structures that shape the system’s evolution” you mostly seem to me to be asserting to be unnecessary, which struck me as assuming what you want to prove.
But hey, I’m here to learn. Which would start with reading your linked source.
Killian: I roughly calculate 6,800 industrial wind turbins vs. the same cost as a nuclear power plant.
Somebody do the math and which covers more households/energy production. I can’t stand to dip my toe that far into the stupid of this issue.
AB: Brilliant, dude! I salute you. (And NigelJ for saying the same, though without your humor)
It was a straightforward statement, zero humor, actually.
Barton Paul Levenson — There is ample evidence of ionizing radiation hormesis at low dose. Here’s the award to Prof. Calabrese:
https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-researcher-edward-calabrese-receives-marie-curie-prize-work-hormesis-low-dose
There are plenty of of links, many to peer reviewed research to be found towards the end of
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/312/wade-allisons-radiation-critique
KM completely missed the point AGAIN @118:
“Hyu vill take ze electricity ve made but do not vant und cannot use. Hyu vill deal mit our surges und sags, und hyu vill LIKE IT because ist grün.”
Poland was having to ramp its plants fast enough to cause problems with thermal cycling, risking damage, unscheduled outages and blackouts. Driving your neighbors into blackouts is a rather unfriendly act.
Money quote, shorn from all the happy-talk:
Having to install hardware to control troublesome (unscheduled) power flows is a signal that something is wrong. In this case the problem was Germany’s refusal to arrange for either curtailment or productive use of excess unreliable generation. Germany is playing the hypedrogen game as “the solution” to intermittency and energy storage, but so far that’s running at a tiny fraction of what is required and is not growing fast enough to be a serious response to the issue.
10858 GWh / (5.1 GW * 8766 h) = 0.243 capacity factor. Per Wikipedia, Poland consumed 150 TWh of electricity in 2013 which is an average of 17.1 GW. 5.1 GW nameplate of wind isn’t that much compared to 17.1 GW of average load, but with about 1.25 GW of average generation you aren’t going to significantly decarbonize with that little. AAMOF, at 0.243 capacity factor you are going to need 70+ GW nameplate to get an average 17.1 GW out, especially given losses in storage. Worse, that would only cover electric consumption. Total Polish primary energy was 1135 TWh in 2013, 985 TWh more than just the electric consumption. Assuming that 450 TWh of fuel went into electric generation which has already been replaced by the wind/storage system, generating another 535 TWh with wind farms at 0.243 capacity factor requires another whopping 251 GW nameplate for a total in excess of 320 GW.
Can you see Polish wind generation scaling up by a factor of 64 or more? The entire USA has only scaled up to 105.6 GW after decades of effort; how could little Poland get to more than 3x that much? Can you appreciate the STAGGERING scale of effort required to “go renewable”?
Somehow I doubt it.
BPL libels @119:
I’m saying it wasn’t in Europe, the USA or Japan. I’m also not counting the SL-1 incident because it was military. The meltdowns at EBR-I, Fermi 1 and Three Mile Island unit 2 all had zero casualties. There’s ONE fatality attributed to Fukushima Dai’ichi, which was probably due to smoking instead.
Strange, we can’t find these excess deaths. Shouldn’t we be measuring excess deaths in high-radiation Denver compared to low-radiation Florida? VERY high-radiation Ramsar, Kerala and Guarapari? Yet we don’t. UNSCEAR expects no increase in cancers from Fukushima either.
The German and Austrian governments labor under that same “delusion” and pay for people to be treated in high-radon mines for a list of ailments, and 0.8 rads/day of Co-60 radiation is VERY good for your male Sprague-Dawley rats. There’s even evidence that lesser-exposed A-bomb victims in Japan benefitted from the radiation. If I’m deluded, isn’t it strange that the evidence supports me and only known-to-be-defective LNT theory supports you?
Engineer Poet:
You seem to have left out conceding that you claimed you could run the entire world’s economy, 15 TW, on 5,000 TW of electricity and 10 TW of waste heat. I have now quoted you twice and twice referred to your post at 463 last month.
As usual, you change the subject and go on a long Gish Gallop. Where is my $!,000 you promised?? I have quoted you powering 2/3 of world power with waste heat. District heat cannot be used in rural areas, that is half the heating used. You need to power electrical heating in the rest, but you have not generated enough power for that. Half the “heating” is cooling. How will you generate 3 TW of cooling with waste heat?
You are correct about entropy when you say “We could put 15,000 such plants (about 60 TW(th)) on Earth and only notice SMALL LOCAL EFFECTS” my caps. The local effects are all inside the reactor. The high entropy inside the reactor will result in decay of the reactor components as described by Abbott. You offer a straw man against Abbott.
You have not described how you will fly airplanes using waste heat.
As for your absurd claim that you will power shipping with nuclear power, you will need 50,000 reactors to power all the ships in the world. They will only run at 50% or lower power most of the time and you will lose all the waste heat to the ocean. Add those reactors to your “plan”. Now you need 55,000 reactors. Nuclear is not used in commercial ships because it is too expensive. But then nuclear proponents do not care about being the most expensive energy.
You have no “plan”. You just make up another wild story with each post.
Nigelj:
You need to learn the vocabulary of energy systems if you want to post on scientific sites without looking like you do not know what you are talking about.
Nuclear plants only convert about 33% of the heat generated in the plant into electricity. The rest is waste heat which is dumped into the ocean or a large amount of water. that is why a 3000 MW(th) plant only generates 1000MW of electricity. That is why nuclear plants require huge water supplies, to dump all the waste heat.
By contrast if a wind or solar plant generates 1000 MW of power it is all electricity. None of the power is wasted by dumping it into the environment. Only a very small amount of water is needed.
The capacity factor is the amount of electricity generated during the year compared to the theoretical maximum. For onshore wind that is about 35% in the USA and over 40% for offshore wind in Europe. Nuclear plants have about a 90% capacity factor in the USA and about 70% in France and many other countries. If the reactors are used in load following than the capacity factor is lower. In France they turn off reactors on the weekend because they generate too much electricity. That is not economic.
Nuclear plants are also off line for scheduled long term maintenance 15% or more of the time but they do not count that against the capacity factor. Wind and solar do not have such long term outages.
EP’s plan at 463 last month provided 15 TW of power using 5,000 1000 MW power plants (5 TW power) and recovering 100% of the waste heat (10 TW power). Read his post again until you understand what you are defending. He is trying to bluff people with his Gish Gallops.
How would you know what the renewable plans say? You have never read any of the papers that I have referred you to.
Nigelj:
Nuclear plants are 33% efficient because they convert only 33% of thermal power released from the fuel into deliverable electricity.
Wind and solar PV are about 99% efficient because all the generated power is electricity.
zebra deceives (as usual) @121:
I have dealt with such “smart meters” and their predecessors. Back in 2010, I came home late from a job and tried to turn on my A/C to cool my apartment off. Unfortunately, my A/C was shut off by “contractual arrangement” (that I had no knowledge of contracting to) so I had to open my windows to hot humid air and turn on fans to try to cool off instead. I lived… but had I been old and ill, there is no guarantee that I would have.
It’s 280 f’in pages, of which you quote NOTHING of direct relevance to your assertions. (Gavin, you need to enforce some level of proven relevance of a cite or refuse to approve the post.)
Wrong. It IS physics, plus time. You can only defer/deny certain needs for so long, and your insistence that we rely on unreliable “renewables” means denial on a scale of hours to months. That. Does. Not. Work.
I would LOVE to force you to live without your refrigerator and microwave for 3 days at a time (of my choosing), just to make you experience what “scaling up” means in practice.
Pretty much every blackout on the record can be attributed to lack of “ancillary services”, primary among them being reactive power and frequency control. I would LOVE to force you to live without such “ancillary services” just to make you appreciate what they do for you. That would mean booting you to a third-world country, but I’m fine with that too. You are anti-civilization and deserve NOTHING.
E-P 127: Germany is playing the hypedrogen game as “the solution” to intermittency and energy storage, but so far that’s running at a tiny fraction of what is required and is not growing fast enough to be a serious response to the issue.
BPL: They now have a steel plant running on hydrogen.
E-P 128: Strange, we can’t find these excess deaths.
BPL: Ernest Sternglass did. And they’ve certainly found them in Ukraine and Belarus.
E-P 128: I’m saying it [Chernobyl] wasn’t in Europe
BPL: Hear that, folks? Eastern Europe isn’t in Europe.
#124 Kevin McKinney,
“I’m here to learn”
Good, next reading assignment…I gave you the MIT thing first as an overview; this source deals with the specifics of the technology I’m addressing:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/preventing-blackouts-power-grid/
But it seems to me that we are still having a “warrants” problem… you keep going back to “the grid as it is”. If you want to discuss my model, you have to talk about my model, and tell me why it wouldn’t work as a replacement for the existing model. So,
at 111 you say (my bold):
but then at 124 you say:
Huh??
And with respect to distribution, here’s what I said at #42:
Perhaps that wasn’t clear enough, but it seems obvious to me that the (zebra-) grid operator sets the specs… it’s 60Hz not 50Hz, and the voltage is whatever at the inverter output, and the wires that drop to my house can only handle 100 amps, and so on.
The meters would be owned by the z-grid operator, but their action as an interface would be cooperative…the grid operator facilitates the transaction between the seller and the buyer.
OK, so before you start talking about getting electricity from Kansas to NYC, you really need to get squared away on these basic concepts. If you don’t understand something, just ask.
Some references on deaths other than the immediate ones at Chernobyl:
https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA4834997&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00368075&p=HRCA&sw=w
(39,000 deaths expected at first)
https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA185469048&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00280836&p=HRCA&sw=w
(initial expected death toll probably too high; a better estimate is 4,000)
https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3579632
(suicides caused more deaths than radiation among Estonian clean-up workers)
http://www.cogamble.org.uk/media/other/14705/torch_executive_summary-1.pdf
(4,000 exposed people under 18 had thyroid cancer by 2005; future total is 18,000-66,000 in Belarus alone)
And so on. A search through Google Scholar supplies dozens of studies, some concluding, e.g., no measurable effect in England and Wales, most concluding very large effects in Ukraine and Belarus.
For electric power systems, small is beautiful?
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/697/power-world?page=6#post-6521
Perhaps so.
Michael Sweet @130
“Nuclear plants only convert about 33% of the heat generated in the plant into electricity. The rest is waste heat which is dumped into the ocean ….By contrast if a wind or solar plant generates 1000 MW of power it is all electricity.”
Misses the point as usual. As I pointed out with an internet link renewables are not perfectly efficient either. Your 99% efficient statement is completely irrelevant to what I posted.
For every criticism you make of nuclear power there are equal criticisms of renewables. You can’t see it and wont see it, so further discussion with you is pointless. All you know how to do is quote other peoples studies, not think for yourself.
Chernobyl: How bad was it?
Peter Dizikes
2019 Mar 05
MIT News
http://news.mit.edu/2019/chernobyl-manual-for-survival-book-0306
A review of Kate Brown’s “Manual for Survival”.
Michael Sweet @129
“Nuclear is not used in commercial ships because it is too expensive. But then nuclear proponents do not care about being the most expensive energy.”
Electric motors and batteries are too expensive as well, much too expensive. If they weren’t, large ships would already be using them.
me @138 — But what we observe is ever more tightly integrated large grids:
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/697/power-world?page=6#post-6525
DBB’s link: The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. 20 billion US gallons (76,000,000 m³) of treated water are evaporated each year.[12][13] This water represents about 25% of the annual overdraft of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix Active Management Area.
AB: So it uses water, but more efficiently, via vaporization instead of slight heating. It’s a good idea since it dries out sewage and adds humidity (and so precipitation downwind), both of which are services. But it’s not sustainable and the wording of your comment, “is far from any obvious source of cooling water”, was flawed. Sewage is an obvious source of cooling water. But again, it appears to be a good concept.
______
E-P 128: I’m saying it [Chernobyl] wasn’t in Europe
BPL: Hear that, folks? Eastern Europe isn’t in Europe.
AB: “Europe” is often used as a shorthand for “Free Europe”. EP’s correct that the USSR’s nukes were such pieces of garbage that including them in the “set of nukes” pretty much destroys any conclusions. No containment building makes for serious danger, eh?
_______
zebra:
#95 Al Bundy,
“only the aggregate of demand matters”
That makes no sense at all. The aggregate certainly doesn’t matter to me,
AB: The grid lives or dies as an aggregate. Your puny little house can’t get power unless the grid is up. “Not going dark” is something that essentially everyone demands. Your concept is an anarchy of myriads of contracts that would result in either total collapse or frequent individual shutdowns, such as the one EP described in his 2010 apartment. Utilities are utilities precisely to avoid the scenario you cherish. Why on earth would we choose a system that fails constantly by design? “Oops, your designated source is 1% short so you go dark because other sources (that are 15% oversupplied) aren’t in your network”. Yeah, you could convolute and re-convolute contracts but if you do that what have you gained besides Rube Goldberging the system? Seriously, do you want a 100 page contract with 12 different suppliers just to get reliable electrical service? Do you want to pay those 12 suppliers to do the processing dance required? WAY expensive, WAY time-consuming for each and every consumer, WAY frustrating, WAY brittle.
Again, aggregate is the ONLY thing that matters cuz your little house is irrelevant gridwise.
The grid operator NEEDS to be the intermediary, the single point of contact for suppliers and consumers, the God who prices ancillary services and manages flows so that the least disruption results.
EP’s gripe is valid. Yep, renewables are given trumping ability and nuclear is not because society has decided that renewables are the path to the future. EP disagrees with that choice and mathematically he may be correct; maybe nuclear would be cheaper and/or easier. Maybe. But my point to him, which he completely misses, is that humans ain’t robotic mathematical devices and humans, including their fears and aspirations, matter. “I like renewables” is a 100% valid point, as is “I fear nukes”, even if nukes are no more dangerous than spiders.
______
EP: Technically you nuked your IP when you shared your idea without getting an NDA from me, but I’m not the type to stab people in the back.
AB: Nope. The USA has a one year clock for non-published disclosures made for commercial purposes (so I can disclose to family, for example, without tripping the clock). If I don’t file within a year I might lose my IP, but I might not since the disclosure was to a friend (or so I would claim because I do consider you a friend). A tad fuzzy and certainly of the “Who can afford the best lawyer” sort. Other countries have other laws; I believe that the UK follows the rule you expressed. And, of course, China’s rule is, “You aren’t Chinese? LOLOL!”
Again, I respect you and sincerely believe that you are way honorable. And as a backup, I doubt that I will claim the system I partially shared with you. More likely it will be a gift to humanity. So even if I’m wrong about you the result is merely that my choice is made for me. No biggie.
And note that my actual interest was to find out about you. I ain’t a mathematical robot; my words, goals, and thrusts are rarely related to what they “obviously” are.
Hey!!!! People!!!!!
If after 2 years of grids and nuclear horse apples, guess what?!! You haven’t solved a single damned thing! Nobody has changed their minds! And it isn’t even germane! I *promise* you nuclear will never be a significan’t part of the long-term global solution.
Why have you chosen to waste two years of this valuable forum’s time?
Re #138 David B. Benson said For electric power systems, small is beautiful?
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/697/power-world?page=6#post-6521
Perhaps so.
Told you that back in 2008. Do I need to post it yet again?
The Greenhouse Blues
https://youtu.be/I_Ais9S4YHE
:)
E-P, #127–
He tipped his hand at the top, by accusing me of missing the point. Sure enough, that’s exactly what his post did.
Point #1: The Poles did not unilaterally ‘force’ the Germans to do anything. There were problems with the grid–3 related ones, actually, and yes, one of them was integrating excess generation (some of which, however, seems to have been Polish, not German). The Germans and Poles *co-operatively* engaged in upgrades to deal with the problem. Calling this description ‘happy talk’ will not change the fact that both German and Polish authorities paid the bills.
Point #2: Yes, the Polish grid is (famously) fossil-heavy, with lots of coal-fired capacity. However, the actual point here is that the Poles are *increasing* their RE capacity now. Apparently, the putative horrors of their German Renewable Trauma weren’t all that bad.
There’s also some bumpf about the US only built wind up to yada, yada, can you imagine “little Poland” coming close? Pure rhetoric, and vacuous rhetoric at that, as readers here probably don’t need me to point out. They can recognize actual analysis, or rather, its lack. And ditto for Gish gallop.
zebra, #136–
Remember, I didn’t. You dragged me into this discussion.
However, I seem to be in it, and I’m curious enough to stay in it for a bit, at least.
So, yes, you are right that your z-grid operates on AC (since there would be no inverters in a DC system.) And, mea culpa, I was careless in responding.
You write:
So, here’s a question.
If the z-grid is “60Hz not 50Hz, and the voltage is whatever at the inverter output, and the wires that drop to my house can only handle 100 amps, and so on,” what happens when the voltage output from Customer A drops but the demand from Customer B does not? How does the z-grid operator keep the frequency at 60 H in that circumstance?
Michael Sweet trolls like there’s no tomorrow @129:
False. I’ve shown you how I proposed to do it, and that ain’t it.
Misinterpreted rather badly, despite me giving you MULTIPLE corrections. You were set straight @122, so either you don’t have the brainpower to understand what I wrote or you’re just lying. Either way, no point dealing with you any further.
You already have the $1000. It’s rightfully mine, but it looks like I’ll have to extract it from you at gunpoint.
BPL makes an un-sourced assertion @133:
Who is this “they”, and what plant is that?
Fortunately, search engines reveal lies and half-truths. Two hops got me to this Aussie article which has a few details not exactly backing your claim:
IOW, it’s over.
That’s hardly “running on hydrogen”.
So there appear to be at least furnaces 1-9.
That’s a long way from running the whole plant on hydrogen.
And the H2 appears to substituting only for the pulverized coal.
The truth just isn’t living up to your hype. That’s why I call it “hypedrogen”.