Hydro done wrong kills fish. Hydro done right provides habitat, recreation, flood control, drought relief and energy.
Hydro is never right except on very small scales. Beavers do hydro right, humans only very, very rarely. No large-scale hydro is “right.” It is done to make habitable that which otherwise would *naturally* be uninhabitable and to support unsustainable ag, etc. Virtually all human-built hydro is maladaptive.
We should rather be reducing consumption to within the parameters of functioning ecosystems.
Killiansays
378 Richard Caldwell says:
16 Apr 2021 at 3:39 AM
Killian: But “Europeans came in and shot all of them. That’s a Western mentality of resource exploitation—squeeze everything out of it that you can. Well that’s not how it was in these Indigenous cultures.”
RC: perhaps there is something in that, but IIRC the slaughter of the bison was done specifically to starve the “enemy”.
So they could exploit what the First Nations had.
But the point is about mentality, connection/integration with the ecosystem.
Double the engine’s efficiency, reduce the engine size by 90%, and do an apples to apples (same size, aero, etc) and it is no contest. The hybrid wins easily.
Not if the grid is decarbonized! (Your video makes this point, too, WRT the RAV-4/Tesla Y comparison.)
I’ll be back on my foot soon, and off to Stanford I’ll go.
I don’t really do petitionary prayer, as I tend to think that even a less-than-omniscient deity would probably have a better grasp than I do on how the universe should unfold, but I hope that both components of that projection are quickly and salubriously realized!
RC: That [nuclear] success is no match for politics and radiophobes.
Here in South Carolina, the latest “success” cost ~$9 billion and will never produce a single watt.
In Georgia, it’s a little better, due to deeper pockets; there, they’re somewhere north of $21 billion but will get online eventually–officially, this fall, but indications are that that deadline’s probably going to be missed, too. It’ll be rather fascinating, in a gruesome sort of way, to see what the actual final price tag will turn out to be.
And that, my friend, is the total US experience of new nuclear builds this century!
I don’t reject complexity; I merely prefer simplicity. If you could check my shirt wardrobe, you’d see lots of solid colors, not so many fussy prints, or even patterns. But as a realist of sorts, I recognize that in particular cases there tends to be a ‘sweet spot’ somewhere, and it may or may not be where I ‘prefer.’
(Music composition is an interesting case, by the way–my paradigm there is that it’s essentially an exercise in finding a balance between simplicity (that is, fulfilled listener expectations) and complexity (surprise). The devil is for once not in the details, so much as in the fact that no two listeners have identical or even similar expectations. For me, the journey to better composition has been learning to embrace complexity, despite my apparently native preference for the clearcut and straightforward.)
That said, my preferred paradigm for economics-related stuff (such as the energy economy) tends to be ecological in flavor. And that paradigm is a paradigm of abundance–ecology is the Realm of the Many. That’s in part what gives life its incredible tenacity and resilience (even, e.g., in the face of the end-Permian catastrophe.)
So, yeah, diversity of power supply does in fact seem to me to be desirable. And I don’t think I’m inconsistent in that; despite the high percentage of first person singular pronouns in this comment, “it ain’t really about me.”
Killiansays
Passage of the Northern Sea Route, Arctic Ocean, Feb. 2021. As it says, no thick multi-year ice.
Looking ahead to Biden’s climate summit and what should be on the agenda as part of a real US climate plan, both Murphy and Fancy have insights about a path through our present predicament. Murphy suggests those in power (p331):
“appeal to the fundamentally conservative nature of most people. This is conservative with a small c,’ rather than the Conservative (right-leaning) political party. In this sense, conservative means: 1. low risk: let’s not gamble the future on speculative notions; 2. conservation of resources and quality of the earth environment; 3. laying the groundwork for future generations (e.g., grandchildren)to have a liveable world…An apt analogy is that our society is, metaphorically, barrelling toward a cliff. Faced with credible warnings, the low-risk (conservative) approach would be to alter course: get serious about a non-fossil infrastructure and transition away from growth.”
While Fancy concludes his OpEd:
“Canadian business executives must find the moral clarity to make clear to the public that systemic problems require systemic solutions led by democratically elected leaders. Truly averting the climate threat requires governments and the private sector to come together to rapidly transform our economy into one that doesn’t have to be bad for business, but can no longer be business as usual.”
Drivel, both of them. Barking words. Neither quote means a damned thing or is in any way actionable. Just words. Sound and fury signifying nothing. Fancy, particularly, is explicitly spouting nonsense: rapidly transform our economy into one that doesn’t have to be bad for business…
You cannot shift from one paradigm to another keeping the core problems of the previous one. Business? In a regenerative future? Guess what is not part of any regenerative society? Business.
Etc.
The complete lack of understanding of what is regenerative fka sustainable and what is not is almost total… it’s frustrating. and people shut down every attempt to inform them. Stupidly maladaptive.
nigeljsays
Kevin McKinney @406
“That said, my preferred paradigm for economics-related stuff (such as the energy economy) tends to be ecological in flavor. And that paradigm is a paradigm of abundance–ecology is the Realm of the Many. So, yeah, diversity of power supply does in fact seem to me to be desirable. ”
Hmmm. I’m not sure diversity of power supply is desirable just because nature does diversity. Simplicity involves least effort, so you would only have multiple power supplies if there was good reasons. There often are of course. The real lesson is nature has complexity, so its very likely ok for humans to create complexity.
Mr. Know It Allsays
402 – Killian
“So they could exploit what the First Nations had.
But the point is about mentality, connection/integration with the ecosystem.”
A most unfortunate fate for the Native Americans. Europeans were driven here not by what the Native Americans “had”, but by tyrants in Europe who denied them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Native Americans did not “have” anything to speak of except for a continent of wilderness with no tyrants. The tyrants did follow the Europeans over here to squash our freedom but we shot them until they STFU and went home. ;) I don’t know if there would have been a way for the Europeans and Indians to get along better. The history of the world is the same – one group coming in, killing the occupants and taking over – again and again and again. US history is mild compared to that of Europe. Just read the history of a gentle WOKE country like France – one bloody war after another:
For whatever reason many Indigenous groups do not develop much technology that could separate them from the ecosystem like Europeans do. I don’t know why that is, but I doubt it is a conscious choice. “Hey check out this new chainsaw I invented” says Tree Hater. “We don’t need that” says the Chief. :)
Nuclear energy is the only proven way to reverse that trend; it has almost completely decarbonized the grids in France, Sweden and Ontario.
An untruth oft-repeated remains an untruth. While nuclear energy is a prominent part of the mix in all three nations–and I’m quite willing to give credit on that heading–there’s a lot more to all three stories.
I’m going to repeat the ENTIRE thing, instead of selectively quoting (emphasis added in bold):
Especially consider that the push for “renewables” since the 1970’s oil price shocks has seen fossil fuel consumption CLIMB almost every year since. Nuclear energy is the only proven way to reverse that trend; it has almost completely decarbonized the grids in France, Sweden and Ontario.
And it’s true. Sweden, France and Ontario have almost completely decarbonized their grids, and have uncharacteristically low carbon emissions as a direct consequence.
First, Sweden also makes considerable use of renewables
There is one country that has done a good job: Sweden. Sweden has decarbonized its electricity, which is provided by nuclear power and hydropower.
Note: hydropower, a form of electric generation which generally incorporates a great deal of energy storage, a stockpile which can be tapped at need. Wind and solar have none. THAT is the problem with them, and grouping them together as “renewable” does not make them equal.
Second, Ontario was *not* “almost decarbonized” via the addition of nuclear power; the total retirement of its coal generation capacity was accomplished essentially by substituting wind, solar, and natgas while simply maintaining already extant nuclear capacity. As the system operator, IESO, puts it:
Over the past decade, wind, solar, bioenergy, hydro, refurbished nuclear and natural gas-fired resources have replaced Ontario’s coal fleet.
Yes, refurbished nuclear. Nuclear capacity that had been shut down due to neutron damage, and was rebuilt rather than throwing it away. That nuclear capacity, plus the hydropower that Ontario has had for most of a century, did by FAR the greatest part of the work. The so-called “renewables” did far less, at vastly greater expense. The wind and PV generators are paid far more per kWh than the nuclear and hydro generators.
Third, France does indeed have a grid dominated by nuclear power–about 70% share.
…
France’s current policy is to reduce the share of nuclear power to 50% of the mix, replacing it with–you guessed it–renewable energy, principally wind and solar.
By all accounts, the process has been beset by bureaucratic delay, and they are not on track to meet their targets.
WHY is the target a set amount of “renewable” energy? Why is the target NOT a reduction in carbon emissions? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
If you can’t figure it out and name it, you’re not tall enough for this ride.
So, what does it say that all three of E-P’s nuclear success stories continue to expand renewable energy, not nuclear power?
Because the people in charge are in thrall to a “green” dogma which doesn’t actually give one single fuck about the welfare of the planet.
Meanwhile, E-P continues to ignore examples such as Uruguay
Oh, FFS. Uruguay is EMBLEMATIC of the phenomenon I’m talking about. It is EXACTLY like France, Ontario and Sweden: piles of hydropower to cover the deficiencies of wind and solar.
You can’t wish those deficiencies away, nor can your precious pinwheels and obsidian oblong panels provide the industrial energy required to make more of them. Come up with something that works (and demonstrate it), or concede the point.
Whenever someone starts to tell me that there is only one solution to a complex problem, my spidey bullshit detector starts tingling.
I’m from Missouri. If there’s another proven solution, show me.
Norway, Quebec, Uruguay etc. have hydro in abundance. Regions without sufficient hydro resources must use thermal generation or do without, and nobody but nobody wants to do without. If you think wind and PV can replace (not supplement, replace) thermal generation, feel free to set up a demo somewhere. But putting everything on them when they have such a disappointing track record isn’t just betting the rent, it’s betting the rent on a likely loser.
The other piece of the Tweet was “A gas tanker & icebreaker made it from China to Yamal in the 1st transit of the Northern Sea Route in February, “confirming that year-round safe navigation is possible,” Russia says.”
Well if you use double standards it is easy to criticize others.
I wouldn’t know, but you obviously do.
You say for renewables: ” assuming technologies develop according to industry’s current expectations.” are a problem. Yet you describe using nuclear process heat at 1200C (a technology no-one is working on) to drive industrial reactions.
A further target of HTR development is direct use of the heat generated by nuclear reaction at high temperatures for chemical processes, in particular coal gasification.
So, 1200°C might not be needed, though it would be nice.
There are no nuclear powered industrial installations.
Only because the earthmoving contractor for the dual-reactor plant being built at Midland MI screwed up the soil compaction on the foundation of a critical building.
You also use process heat to heat the entire country!!
No, just the areas dense enough to be served by district heating systems. Everyone else would use electricity with a fallback to DME or the like for demand peaks. 500 gallons of DME packs about 42 million BTU, more than enough to get through a cold snap. Going through my utility bills, my house used less than 400,000 BTU of gas per day so 42 million BTU would be close to a season’s worth of heat.
Many cities and homes are too far from a cooling source
That’s why a reactor which can feed open-cycle gas turbines in lieu of combustion would be so handy. You could site one anywhere.
large district heating is not installed in the most of the world.
So we’ll need some infrastructure. At least it would be IN the cities being served by it, unlike the vast rights-of-way required to move “renewable” energy from the far-flung places it can be captured to where it’s consumed.
You have to add that cost to your already too expensive reactors.
I calculated the cost of district heat from a NuScale reactor. It came to less than $1/mmBTU, a fraction of the price of natural gas at the Henry hub.
I note that Connelly et al cost out district heating that they want installed.
Did they conclude that it was affordable? Are you claiming that my scheme would be unaffordable, because it’s nuclear? Whose double standard is on display now?
Germany made a one time purchase of generators and now has no fuel costs for their renewable energy. They save large amounts of money.
All this “saved money” has come at the cost of skyrocketing electric rates for German consumers, while the country continues to burn lignite. At the same time, France’s rates continue to be low while it has some of the cleanest electric generation on the continent.
What about the bottleneck that district heating is not installed for your wild heating scheme?
How about the bottleneck that your “renewables” require long transmission lines which cannot be built by 2050, let alone 2030, due to all the legal challenges from the people whose land will be affected?
Or the bottleneck that the reactors have not been designed yet?
k. Between 1966 and 1988, the AVR (Arbeitsgemeinschaft VersuchsReaktor) experimental pebble bed reactor at Jülich, Germany, operated for over 750 weeks at 15 MWe, most of the time with thorium-based fuel (mixed with high-enriched uranium). The fuel consisted of about 100,000 billiard ball-sized fuel elements. Maximum burn-ups of 150 GWd/t were achieved. It was used to demonstrate the inherent safety of the design due to negative temperature coefficient: reactor power fell rapidly when helium coolant flow was cut off.
The 300 MWe THTR (Thorium HochTemperatur Reaktor) in Germany was developed from the AVR and operated between 1983 and 1989 with 674,000 pebbles, over half containing Th/HEU fuel (the rest graphite moderator and some neutron absorbers). These were continuously recycled and on average the fuel passed six times through the core. Fuel fabrication was on an industrial scale. The reactor was shut down for sociopolitical reasons, not because of technical difficulties, and the basic concept with inherent safety features of HTRs was again proven. It drove a steam turbine.
The 200 MWt (72 MWe) HTR-modul was then designed by Siemens/Interatom as a modular unit to be constructed in pairs, with a core height three times its diameter, allowing passive cooling for removal of decay heat, eliminating the need for emergency core cooling systems. It was licensed in 1989, but was not constructed. This design was part of the technology bought by Eskom in 1996 and is a direct antecedent of the pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR).
Ironically, the IPCC was founded in 1988… and Germany responded by eliminating its options for a truly low-carbon future.
Or the fact that it is illegal to locate nuclear reactors in cities where district heating could be used?
Human laws can be changed with the stroke of a pen. What YOU want requires changing the laws of nature, and that’s just not gonna happen.
You hand wave off the concern that nuclear plants require extensive storage, both shout time and seasonally, that you have not accounted for.
LOL! France ran an 80%-nuclear grid where the only “storage” downstream of the reactors was the water behind the hydro dams. The storage IN the reactors is on the order of 51 months, the typical operating lifespan of a fuel element. One kilogram of LEU can generate upwards of 40 megawatt-DAYS of heat over that lifespan.
Electric storage is helpful for nuclear, but not essential. In today’s markets, storage would let nuclear plants bid higher numbers into capacity and reserve markets and increase their revenues; if the storage systems had enough power capacity, it would let nukes cease selling power when unreliables drive wholesale grid prices below zero. That would only require overnight storage, a few hours’ worth. Intermittent wind and PV would require WEEKS of storage to achieve the same reliability.
My own scheme uses biomass upgrading as a non-electric energy storage method and dump load. This allows more capacity to be built and run flat-out regardless of the remainder of electric demand. Converting biomass into pipeline-shippable liquids allows the carbon to be moved to where the power is, rather than having to bring most of the power to where the biomass is.
We do not know how much storage will be needed since no researchers use nuclear power in a future energy system.
Many scenarios in Chapter 2 and in AR5 (Bruckner et al., 2014) project an increase in the use of nuclear power
You sure weren’t looking hard if you couldn’t find any researchers looking at the subject. That’s pretty much the definition of “confirmation bias”.
No one serious has ever proposed a primarily nuclear power system for the world. Even for the USA only no-one has proposed a nuclear only power system.
I have. I am.
Abbott 2012 has shown that it is impossible to build more than a very small amount of nuclear poser.
“Nuclear poser” is precisely the term to describe Derek Abbott. He’s a member of a firmly anti-nuclear organization and his 2012 paper is riddled with major errors. For instance, he notes that world energy consumption was about 15 TW at the time, but that’s primary energy consumption. He then strawmans an all-nuclear world positing 15 TW of nuclear electric generation. That would be about 45 TW thermal. He STARTS by assuming the job is 3x as big as it would actually be, and he goes downhill from there.
I have provided three references and can provide 30 more that show scientific energy researchers are in 100% agreement that nuclear power is not needed or helpful for a future energy system.
When people were in 100% agreement that the four elements were earth, air, fire and water, did that make it true?
Provide a reference to support your wild claim that Connelly et al are incorrect when they say nuclear should not be considered.
How about the IPCC, and the common-sense observation that what some people CLAIM “renewables” can do, nuclear is already doing… in multiple places across the globe?
Even Brave New Climate has not published a pronuclear article since 2015.
Mr. Know It All @410 says ” Europeans were driven here (America)not by what the Native Americans “had”, but by tyrants in Europe who denied them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”
Then the European immigrants removed the life liberty and happiness of most of the native american occupants rather permanently. So much for having good principles. In America liberty is an over used word that seems to mean “I can do anything I like to you, but you can’t do anything you like to me.” In all fairness its not limited to America.
Killiansays
409 nigelj says:
17 Apr 2021 at 10:07 PM
Hmmm. I’m not sure diversity of power supply is desirable just because nature does diversity.
Just dumb.
Simplicity involves least effort
Only that, huh? And wrong. It’s least effort to get the maximum effect, which is not at all what you say. It’s about efficiency.
so you would only have multiple power supplies if there was good reasons.
Hmmmm… like every element being supported by *at least* two other elements?
Anywho… you’re blowing it, as ever. It’s about resilience and anti-fragility.
Michael sweetsays
EP at 414:
Your gish gallop is too long to answer every wild rave. I note that you link nothing to support your claims.
You state that you’re the only person supporting an all nuclear future.
The cartoon you link from Brave New Climate provides no data to support nuclear power despite its source at a nuclear industry think tank.
You cite your own, unpublished calculations to support your argument. Nothing peer reviewed.
You cannot answer the 15 problems with nuclear described by Abbott 2012, which is peer reviewed.
You do not cost out all your proposals.
Nuclear power is not economic. There are zero reactors being built worldwide without government financing. It takes 15 years to build a nuclear plant. That is too slow. There is not enough uranium and other rare materials.
Your proposals are fantasy.
Killiansays
410 Mr. Know It All says:
18 Apr 2021 at 5:14 AM
402 – Killian
“So they could exploit what the First Nations had.
But the point is about mentality, connection/integration with the ecosystem.”
A most unfortunate fate for the Native Americans. Europeans were driven here not by what the Native Americans “had”
Because there was nothing? Don’t be an idiot. Had it been a barren landscape, they would have never come.
but by tyrants in Europe who denied them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Bull. They told them whom to/not to/how to worship. And Europeans absolutely sold the dream as one of abundance.
The Native Americans did not “have” anything to speak
You’re a racist damned fool.
of except for a continent of wilderness with no tyrants.
There was no wilderness. That’s a myth. There were functioning ecosystems significantly managed by the civilization(s) living there.
For whatever reason many Indigenous groups do not develop much technology that could separate them from the ecosystem like Europeans do. I don’t know why that is, but I doubt it is a conscious choice.
It absolutely was, racist. They were not children; they knew how to live within their ecosystems. Not so much in Central America and Peru… Even the Missippians with at least two cities the size of Paris, or larger, managed to keep the ecosystem intact.
This is why I don’t talk to racists and climate criminals.
E-P 411: Oh, FFS. Uruguay is EMBLEMATIC of the phenomenon I’m talking about. It is EXACTLY like France, Ontario and Sweden: piles of hydropower to cover the deficiencies of wind and solar.
You can’t wish those deficiencies away, nor can your precious pinwheels and obsidian oblong panels provide the industrial energy required to make more of them. Come up with something that works (and demonstrate it), or concede the point.
BPL: Denmark is now getting 80% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind.
E-P 415: Meritocracy in running speed or the ability to throw a ball are different matters, obviously. The designated demons don’t do so well at those things, so it’s okay.
BPL: Yeah, black people are good at sports because of all them years in the jungle, right E-P? Whereas Nordic people are more cerebral. Tell us some more.
Ray Ladburysays
E-P@415, Wow, absolutely every thing you say in that post is wrong. You must have really worked at it to ensure you didn’t get anything right by accident.
The only thing critical theory is asking (be it critical race, critical gender…) is asking is for people to consider that factors other than merit might be behind outcomes–particularly when the outcomes are so lopsided and when there are so many documented causes other than merit that explain the outcomes.
Cream is not the only thing that rises to the top, and if you don’t want to ruin your coffee (or your lie) it is judicious to examine the purported “cream” carefully. And yes, this applies just as much to throwing a ball as it does to string theory. We cannot afford to squander talent as we have for millennia. Examining our society critically is essential to its survival.
A fantastic illustration of E-P’s ability to completely ignore what interlocuters say, in favor of empty repetitions of claims already made. Sadly.
For instance, did he read any of the linked material showing what Sweden is actually doing with renewable energy? If so, there is no indication of it whatever. Instead, there’s a pointless reference to what James Hansen said 7 years ago, as if that were relevant to anything at this point.
Yes, hydro is important in Sweden. Yes, nuclear is important. And yes, wind is also important, and–unlike the former two–is at this point what is actually growing:
Wind power has been the fastest growing source of renewable energy around the world in recent years, and capacity is expanding in Sweden. In 2000 Swedish production totalled 0.5 TWh, for 2018 that figure was 16.6 TWh. Today, there are about 3,600 wind turbines in Sweden.
Per the same page, that’s now 12% of Swedish generation.
So what we see here is that Sweden–blessed with a strong base of hydropower and a nuclear fleet to match–is meeting further needs with wind and other forms of renewable energy. (For instance solar, which is tiny now, but growing.)
Let’s turn to Ontario. In the province of my birth, the closing of the coal fleet mostly occurred between 2009, when the Green Energy Act passed, and 2014, when their initial mitigation target was reached.
E-P wants to credit that to “refurbished nuclear”. Trouble is, the last major capacity addition to the nuclear fleet came in 1993 with the completion of the final unit at Darlington. There was one significant addition via refurb: Bruce A Units 1 & 2 added about 1.5 GW when they came back online in 2012. (The refurbishments of the two Pickering A reactors that were put back into service were complete by 2005, while the next round of refurbs, which will involve both the Bruce and Darlington complexes, began in 2016. And there have been some uprates, increasing output marginally, but that’s small potatoes.)
So, while it’s fair to say that nuclear (and to a lesser extent, hydro) are mainstays of the Ontario generation mix, decarbonization actually happened when coal was retired–replaced by mostly by wind, backed with some gas peakers. Currently, wind supplies about 7% of generation, with solar chipping in another 2%. As in Sweden, RE growth continues, meeting additional energy needs on the solid base provided by hydro and nuclear.
Finally, Uruguay.
As I expected, E-P flings feces:
Uruguay is EMBLEMATIC of the phenomenon I’m talking about. It is EXACTLY like France, Ontario and Sweden: piles of hydropower to cover the deficiencies of wind and solar.
Had he bothered to read the link, he’d know that there’s no question of “covering deficiencies of wind and solar.” Uruguay had long had a pretty fully-developed hydro capacity. But it didn’t cover all the need, and they had been relying mostly on oil-fueled generation to cover the deficit.
…only twenty years ago, oil accounted for almost 30 percent of Uruguay’s imports and large bulks of electricity were imported from neighboring Argentina.
It was expensive, naturally. Enter President Mujica:
…who led the country between 2010 and 2015. For him, renewables, especially wind energy, were a way to cut electricity generation costs. Already by 2016, a year after his reign, wind farms across the country had lowered these costs by more than 200 million US dollars annually.
So, an eminently rational motivation. I would suggest that motivations in France, Canada, and Sweden, not to mention numerous other jurisdictions, more nearly resemble Mujica’s than they do E-P’s conspiratorial fever dream. Per E-P, everybody is choosing modern RE:
Because the people in charge are in thrall to a “green” dogma which doesn’t actually give one single fuck about the welfare of the planet.
Wow. All those RE zombie politicians croaking “Brains!” Frightful. Also not very bloody likely.
Anyway, the point isn’t that wind and solar can do it all. IMO, they probably *can*, though there are very real challenges, but they won’t anytime soon, because we’re going to have nuclear and hydro and biomass and geothermal and whatever else. And we’re going to have boodles of storage. And in that context, wind and solar are going to be a useful and important component that contributes mightily to decarbonization–whether E-P likes it or not.
P.S. E-P also implies that nuclear has been a great deal economically in Ontario. Well, that may be so, though numbers to determine it one way or another aren’t nearly as easy to come by as I’d like. What is certainly true is that it hasn’t historically been nearly as great a deal as was initially promised. (Note the costs below are not in constant dollars, so the older projects look much cheaper.)
Pickering refurbs: significant delays, cost overruns of ~$600 million (100%) Darlington construction: significant delays, cost overruns of ~$7 billion (100%) Bruce construction: significant delays, cost overruns of $0.9 billion (100%) for Bruce A, and $3.1 billion (50%+); refurbs (Units A 1 & 2): drastic delays, cost overruns of ~$2 billion (75%)
As for the next rounds of refurbs, only time will tell. Darlington 2 was completed on time, I’m glad to say. The total budget for all 4 units is $12.8 billion, and Bruce, I think, is pretty close to that number as well. That’s a lot of money, but it certainly looks like a good deal next to the Georgia or South Carolina projects.
For instance, did he read any of the linked material showing what Sweden is actually doing with renewable energy? If so, there is no indication of it whatever. Instead, there’s a pointless reference to what James Hansen said 7 years ago, as if that were relevant to anything at this point.
Because the link you posted is useless; it doesn’t break out production by type of generation.
The EIA provides a much better breakdown of Swedish electric generation than the Swedish government does, and what it tells us is that, as of 2018 (the last year on record), nuclear and hydropower were roughly tied for total generation (at 64 and 62 TWh respectively) while wind made a mere 17 TWh and solar and miscellaneous totaled a pathetic 0.4. So yes, if you’re generating nearly 4x as much power from hydro as from wind, you can accommodate more wind. You can probably get that up closer to 50%, or about 30 TWh/yr.
This is NOT going to work if the nuclear plants are closed down.
nigeljsays
Engineer Poet @425
“On subject, can you tell me why the life of George Floyd mattered, but the brief life of Dajore Wilson is somehow unworthy of national attention and anti-violence protests? Why aren’t the actual innocents getting the sympathy, instead of people with long criminal records?”
Because the police have considerable power and have abused that power with George Floyd, so you want to focus attention on that, and do everything possible to shut down that abuse of power before it spreads. The fact he has a criminal record is therefore irrelevant.
Innocents like the little murdered girl and her family get plenty of well deserved sympathy and it was in the news paper. I’m not sure the public were THAT sympathetic to George Floyd as such given his record. They probably just dont like abuse of power by police, especially when there are racist overtones and neither do I. Another way of saying it is Floyds murder was symbolic of wider issues.
While I agree pointing out differences between the races is not necessarily racism, you come across as minimising police brutality and racism, whether you intend to or not. And it will make people suspicious of your other contributions to discussion.
Mr. Know It Allsays
419 – Killian
“You’re a racist damned fool.”
Is that all you got – name calling? Your side uses the R word so much it has no meaning. By the way, are you on the Portland, Oregon school board?
E-P 426: Pitting one “woke” organization against another can only damage both, and benefit me.
BPL: Because it’s a war of white people against every other race, right, E-P? Did you remember to send your kids to Camp RaHoWa this year? Will you be ready when the Boogaloo goes down?
michael Sweetsays
EP at 428:
In 2020 Sweden generated 27.9 TWh of wind energy. That is 164% of your 2018 number. At the same time nuclear generation has decreased substantially because of low prices. Nuclear plants were being held offline because it was not economic to generate any electricity at all (capacity factor for first 6 months of 2020= 60%). https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2020/08/07/10538373/low-nordic-power-prices-cast-doubt-on-swedish-nuclear-return Since a lot of wind was built last year, they will increase generation this year. Contrary to your claim in 428, this is working out fine. Peer reviewed studies, which you do not read, like Connelly 2016 say that variable renewables (wind and solar) can generate about 80% of All Energy (not just current electricity) without much difficulty or storage. If you read current information you will make less ignorant statements like your post 428.
You need to find a new country to cite for generating nuclear power. Sweden will be generating more wind than nuclear in just a few years. Oh wait, not enough nuclear plants are being built in all Europe to replace old plants being retired so there will be no additional countries you can cite for nuclear generation.
jgnfldsays
@425 re. “Weightlifting isn’t a very cerebral sport.”
I thought this myself until a world class power lifter asked for my research help once and I did a lot of research and data collection on him. Among other things I found, I first found out that I was completely wrong in my prejudices.
Killiansays
The numbers below may remind you of comments such as this from… 2014, and not requiring a bunch of researchers:
As of now, that level of resource use is a lot less than the US currently consumes, and without getting to deep into things, my best guess is maybe ten percent of current U.S. consumption.
If the world wants to keep on track to restrict the rise in temperatures this century to 1.5C, then these high carbon footprints will need to be significantly curbed to around 2.5 tonnes of CO2 per capita by 2030.
For the poorest 50% of the world, that would actually mean an increase in their footprint by a factor of three.
And for the top 10% of earners, this would mean cuts to around one tenth of their current level.
But for the richest 1%, it would mean a dramatic reduction.
“The wealthy bear the greatest responsibility in this area,” Unep executive director Inger Anderson wrote in a foreword to the report.
“The combined emissions of the richest 1% of the global population account for more than twice the combined emissions of the poorest 50%.”
“This elite will need to reduce their footprint by a factor of 30 to stay in line with the Paris Agreement targets,” she wrote.
As long as we’re on the subject, can you tell me why the life of George Floyd mattered, but the brief life of Dajore Wilson is somehow unworthy of national attention and anti-violence protests? Why aren’t the actual innocents getting the sympathy, instead of people with long criminal records?
OT, of course, but–while the tragedy of Dajore Wilson may not be getting national press, the linked story makes quite clear that there is considerable sympathy and yes, activism for change, in relation to it:
Early Walker, founder of the anti-violence group “I’m Telling, Don’t Shoot,” announced last week that his organization was offering a $10,000 reward for anyone with information on the shooter.
But there’s a difference in the Floyd case: Derek Chauvin murdered him while acting in his official capacity, on the tax-payer-funded clock, and in a context in which killings cops are very seldom followed by legal consequences. The administration of justice is thus called into question, as there is at least a reasonable appearance that police are not appropriately accountable for their actions.
So yes, if you’re generating nearly 4x as much power from hydro as from wind, you can accommodate more wind. You can probably get that up closer to 50%, or about 30 TWh/yr.
Thank you.
This is NOT going to work if the nuclear plants are closed down.
Which I’m not advocating. My point, which I’m restating for the who-the-hell-actually-knows-anymoreth time, is that in the context of real-life, diverse energy mixes as they exist in numerous places today, wind and solar can be an effective means of quickly and economically added power capacity to replace FF. They are not the product of an alleged “green dogma” or whatever the phrase was. They are not a ‘horrible mistake’ or ‘distraction.’
Nuclear power can and will play a role in our decarbonized energy mix. But it will not and cannot be a mitigatory ‘silver bullet.’ It’s too slow to scale, and too financially risky, to be that, any time during the next couple of decades at least.
Killiansays
435 Kevin McKinney says:
21 Apr 2021 at 10:55 AM
E-P, #426–
As long as we’re on the subject, can you tell me why the life of George Floyd mattered, but the brief life of Dajore Wilson is somehow unworthy of national attention and anti-violence protests? Why aren’t the actual innocents getting the sympathy, instead of people with long criminal records?
OT, of course, but–while the tragedy of Dajore Wilson may not be getting national press, the linked story makes quite clear that there is considerable sympathy and yes, activism for change, in relation to it:
Early Walker, founder of the anti-violence group “I’m Telling, Don’t Shoot,” announced last week that his organization was offering a $10,000 reward for anyone with information on the shooter.
But there’s a difference in the Floyd case: Derek Chauvin murdered him while acting in his official capacity, on the tax-payer-funded clock, and in a context in which killings cops are very seldom followed by legal consequences. The administration of justice is thus called into question, as there is at least a reasonable appearance that police are not appropriately accountable for their actions.
He is well aware this is racist and a Straw Man, Kevin.
Apparently, the owners here have a very high tolerance for racism.
Because the police have considerable power and have abused that power with George Floyd, so you want to focus attention on that, and do everything possible to shut down that abuse of power before it spreads. The fact he has a criminal record is therefore irrelevant.
Nigel, I have intimate, personal acquaintance with the abuse of power by American police. I laid out over USD13,000 just to find out what happened to me (I had to file suit to get the information under subpoena), and I am still suffering the effects of PTSD from it. I had done LITERALLY NOTHING except to suffer a nightmare, for which my LIFE was turned into a nightmare.
How I now feel about cops is not something I will put into print.
George Floyd died with multiples of the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system. Surveillance footage shows that something like a baggie of drugs had fallen from his pockets when he was detained, and his symptoms were consistent with drug overdose. Why is ANYONE accusing ANYONE else, let alone Derek Chauvin, of the slightest involvement in his death when there is NO evidence of deadly physical trauma? Chauvin et al. had called for EMS to try to save the life of George Floyd. You have 3 guesses how much this helped Chauvin, and the first 2 don’t count.
Innocents like the little murdered girl and her family get plenty of well deserved sympathy and it was in the news paper.
No rallies for her. No demands that the violent “Black Lives Matter” protests be shut down so that the murderous shooters participating in them don’t shoot any more 8-yr-olds. You’re a Kiwi, you can’t see the asymmetry from where you are unless you get out a microscope.
I’m not sure the public were THAT sympathetic to George Floyd as such given his record.
Show me ONE protest, let alone riot, against the violence that killed Dajore Wilson vs. the mere containment which apparently did nothing to harm George Floyd.
EP at 439:
George Floyds fentanyl concentration was 11 ng/mL. For anesthesia they us e10-20 ng/mL. Clearly 11 ng.mL is not a lethal dose. Many newspapers have fact checked this claim.
In 2020 Sweden generated 27.9 TWh of wind energy. That is 164% of your 2018 number.
Okay, they added another 64% (and reached a whole 3.18 GW average wind power, not a number I find very impressive). I suspect that they’ll start having issues about the time they hit 40 TWh, unless they’re using something like interconnects to Norway to add additional buffering.
I notice that Sweden may eliminate its on-shore wind subsidies this year. That’s bound to put a brake on expansion. And isn’t it highly unfair to ask free-market nuclear to compete with subsidized wind power? You should add the subsidies to the market rate of power to make a proper comparison of what it ACTUALLY costs.
Peer reviewed studies, which you do not read, like Connelly 2016 say that variable renewables (wind and solar) can generate about 80% of All Energy (not just current electricity) without much difficulty or storage.
Peer review is no guarantee of reliability; the Reproducibility Crisis proves this in spades, and Clack showed that the peers did a very poor job with MZJ’s work. We know those people are wrong (or lying), because if what they said was true then there would have been no rolling blackouts in Texas this past winter. 20 GW of unreliable generation that was mostly off-line, plus no storage, led to tens of fatalities and untold property damage.
If you read current information you will make less ignorant statements like your post 428.
Since you’re the self-appointed expert, what did Connelly have to say about ERCOT’s troubles and how his miracle scheme would have solved them?
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @439
“George Floyd died with multiples of the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system.”
The coroner determined fentanyl was NOT the cause of death or even a contributory factor, and there was no ambiguity or doubts about the decision. The jury heard expert witnesses from both sides and believed the coroner. I also observe that the fentanyl wasn’t slowing this man down by impeding his respiration, because he was certainly very active before the arrest and he did resist arrest. So we have to believe the fentanyl suddenly kicked in and killed him JUST as the policeman put his knee on his neck. Yeah, and there is a pink pig flying past my window. The simplest explanation is usually right according to Occams razor: knee on neck.
“Show me ONE protest, let alone riot, against the violence that killed Dajore Wilson vs. the mere containment which apparently did nothing to harm George Floyd.”
My understanding is someone shot at the car and she died. It was in the news. Its tragic but there are murders every day. Are you saying people should be out there protesting about every one? Ridiculous. And by and large the police do work hard to deal with crime.
The reason people were out protesting regarding George Floyd is because it had huge media coverage, the details were caught on video, it certainly looked like abuse of police power and as I said its important to stop that in its tracks. The jury clearly agreed he was guilty and it was not caused by drugs in his system. I don’t live in America, but it sure looks like the police force is blatantly racist and data appears to support this. So this is another understandable reason for protest that did not apply with the little girl.
Sorry to hear about your bad experiences with the police. Mine have been good, but a friend not so much, despite the fact he had done nothing wrong.
Mikesays
interesting juxtaposition of news stories:
US electric power sector is halfway to zero carbon emissions
RC: If liquid fuel and electricity are decarbonized the comparison stands pretty much exactly the same. I don’t understand your point. Unless you are saying laws will be passed so only one but not the other will be allowed to decarbonize? Or there is some physical barrier to one or the other being decarbonized?
Richard Caldwellsays
EP: I was just high-balling the temperature. 1200°C isn’t beyond reason
RC: Even without changing the core nuke’s parameters, the 950C to 1200C increase “required” can be supplied by concentrated solar, biofuel, or even electric resistance heaters.
A 90% reduction in the thermal increase required is not something to turn one’s nose up at. It reeks of technobigotry.
Richard Caldwellsays
Oops. By 90% reduction I was thinking of the 3500F or so thermal increase hydrocarbons provide when burned.
Units and whatnot don’t match, but one only has to use 10-15% or so of the oxygen content of air to oxidize enough fuel to do the job.
Richard Caldwellsays
EP: My own scheme uses biomass upgrading as a non-electric energy storage method and dump load.
RC: I came to the same conclusion. Like convergent evolution, when system designs that begin with essentially unrelated DNA evolve to strikingly similar designs (like a marsupial “wolf”) it is near certain that the core design (“wolf”) is quite a good competitor.
Nukes with liquid fuel as a dump load just make sense.
Except to technobigots, who don’t do the math, which is fine as long as they accept what the math says.
But unfortunately it’ll be a cold (or, in this case, a seriously hot) day in Hell when that happens. How long do you think the renewables-only crowd will continue to reject reality, EP? Are you lecturing with no possibility of success? Would it be just as effective to let the fantasy of renewables-only (without nukes and/or Killian’s simplicity model) play out and topple?
michael Sweetsays
EP at 442:
Well you don’t quit when you are losing!
So you are not impressed that wind has increased 164% since your outdated numbers from 2018. At the same time 2 of the remaining 8 nuclear plants in Sweden have shut down permanently. Nuclear will never again generate as much power in a year as you cited in 2018. They generated less than 50 TWh in 2020, only 30% of electricity in Sweden. As I pointed out in 432, nuclear plants cannot economically compete with wind so in 2020 they ran only 60% of capacity. The remaining nuclear plants will be shut down permanently in the near future. Nuclear plants with no mortgage can not compete with new wind plants with a mortgage.
I noticed you shifted your goal posts. Now you predict that 40TWh will be a problem where before it was 30 TWh. We will see next year about that, at the rate their wind is increasing they will generate over 40 TWh in 2022, unless they hit that mark in 2021
Meanwhile in Georgia the government has backed $12 billion in loans to build the new plants there and they have charged customers $3 billion interest on their loans even though they will not get any electricity before at least 2022. That’s “free market nuclear” for you, government all the way.
This is a scientific blog, you should be banned for dissing peer review. Meanwhile you post numerous errors in your seat of the pants calculations and say we should believe them. As far as reproducibility is concerned I can cite at least 30 papers that all conclude renewable energy can power the world. No-one uses more than 2% nuclear power, and most use none. Nuclear is not economic. So we have both reproducibility and a 100% consensus that nuclear will not work. Jacobson 2018 answered all the issues Clack raised about Jacobson 2015. Clack has not responded so that shows he agrees. That is how scientific argument is done.
Connelly 2016 has several suggestions that would have prevented the ERCOT meltdown:
1) Require all plants to be winterized. Texas had exactly the same problem in 2011 when they had little wind power. The recent problem was caused by gas and nuclear generators failing because they were not winterized. Wind and solar produced as expected. Your suggestion that wind caused the ERCOT problems is a deliberate lie, the problem was the gas and nuclear plants failing.
2) Connelly has a much larger grid. Neighboring grids were winterized and did not fail like Texas did. In addition, larger grids have more consistent renewable energy.
3) Connelly uses gas peaker plants using electromethane for storage. These would work fine as long as they are winterized. Individual homes would have heat pumps so they would not use the gas the peaker plants need.
How would your nuclear plants deal with this problem? At least one nuclear plant in Texas failed (25% of nuclear capacity) and nuclear cannot ramp up to deliver the high peak power that this event required.
386 Ray Ladbury says:
16 Apr 2021 at 7:23 AM
Hydro done wrong kills fish. Hydro done right provides habitat, recreation, flood control, drought relief and energy.
Hydro is never right except on very small scales. Beavers do hydro right, humans only very, very rarely. No large-scale hydro is “right.” It is done to make habitable that which otherwise would *naturally* be uninhabitable and to support unsustainable ag, etc. Virtually all human-built hydro is maladaptive.
We should rather be reducing consumption to within the parameters of functioning ecosystems.
So they could exploit what the First Nations had.
But the point is about mentality, connection/integration with the ecosystem.
RC, #388–
Not if the grid is decarbonized! (Your video makes this point, too, WRT the RAV-4/Tesla Y comparison.)
I don’t really do petitionary prayer, as I tend to think that even a less-than-omniscient deity would probably have a better grasp than I do on how the universe should unfold, but I hope that both components of that projection are quickly and salubriously realized!
RC, #376–
Here in South Carolina, the latest “success” cost ~$9 billion and will never produce a single watt.
In Georgia, it’s a little better, due to deeper pockets; there, they’re somewhere north of $21 billion but will get online eventually–officially, this fall, but indications are that that deadline’s probably going to be missed, too. It’ll be rather fascinating, in a gruesome sort of way, to see what the actual final price tag will turn out to be.
And that, my friend, is the total US experience of new nuclear builds this century!
RC, #377–
I don’t reject complexity; I merely prefer simplicity. If you could check my shirt wardrobe, you’d see lots of solid colors, not so many fussy prints, or even patterns. But as a realist of sorts, I recognize that in particular cases there tends to be a ‘sweet spot’ somewhere, and it may or may not be where I ‘prefer.’
(Music composition is an interesting case, by the way–my paradigm there is that it’s essentially an exercise in finding a balance between simplicity (that is, fulfilled listener expectations) and complexity (surprise). The devil is for once not in the details, so much as in the fact that no two listeners have identical or even similar expectations. For me, the journey to better composition has been learning to embrace complexity, despite my apparently native preference for the clearcut and straightforward.)
That said, my preferred paradigm for economics-related stuff (such as the energy economy) tends to be ecological in flavor. And that paradigm is a paradigm of abundance–ecology is the Realm of the Many. That’s in part what gives life its incredible tenacity and resilience (even, e.g., in the face of the end-Permian catastrophe.)
So, yeah, diversity of power supply does in fact seem to me to be desirable. And I don’t think I’m inconsistent in that; despite the high percentage of first person singular pronouns in this comment, “it ain’t really about me.”
Passage of the Northern Sea Route, Arctic Ocean, Feb. 2021. As it says, no thick multi-year ice.
https://twitter.com/ASLuhn/status/1363315951127588866?s=20
396 Bill Henderson says:
16 Apr 2021 at 6:16 PM
Drivel, both of them. Barking words. Neither quote means a damned thing or is in any way actionable. Just words. Sound and fury signifying nothing. Fancy, particularly, is explicitly spouting nonsense: rapidly transform our economy into one that doesn’t have to be bad for business…
You cannot shift from one paradigm to another keeping the core problems of the previous one. Business? In a regenerative future? Guess what is not part of any regenerative society? Business.
Etc.
The complete lack of understanding of what is regenerative fka sustainable and what is not is almost total… it’s frustrating. and people shut down every attempt to inform them. Stupidly maladaptive.
Kevin McKinney @406
“That said, my preferred paradigm for economics-related stuff (such as the energy economy) tends to be ecological in flavor. And that paradigm is a paradigm of abundance–ecology is the Realm of the Many. So, yeah, diversity of power supply does in fact seem to me to be desirable. ”
Hmmm. I’m not sure diversity of power supply is desirable just because nature does diversity. Simplicity involves least effort, so you would only have multiple power supplies if there was good reasons. There often are of course. The real lesson is nature has complexity, so its very likely ok for humans to create complexity.
402 – Killian
“So they could exploit what the First Nations had.
But the point is about mentality, connection/integration with the ecosystem.”
A most unfortunate fate for the Native Americans. Europeans were driven here not by what the Native Americans “had”, but by tyrants in Europe who denied them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Native Americans did not “have” anything to speak of except for a continent of wilderness with no tyrants. The tyrants did follow the Europeans over here to squash our freedom but we shot them until they STFU and went home. ;) I don’t know if there would have been a way for the Europeans and Indians to get along better. The history of the world is the same – one group coming in, killing the occupants and taking over – again and again and again. US history is mild compared to that of Europe. Just read the history of a gentle WOKE country like France – one bloody war after another:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France
For whatever reason many Indigenous groups do not develop much technology that could separate them from the ecosystem like Europeans do. I don’t know why that is, but I doubt it is a conscious choice. “Hey check out this new chainsaw I invented” says Tree Hater. “We don’t need that” says the Chief. :)
A half-truth is a whole lie @357:
I’m going to repeat the ENTIRE thing, instead of selectively quoting (emphasis added in bold):
And it’s true. Sweden, France and Ontario have almost completely decarbonized their grids, and have uncharacteristically low carbon emissions as a direct consequence.
Ye gods, have you been ignoring Dr. James Hansen all this time? He made a direct reference to Sweden a full SEVEN YEARS AGO. For those of you who don’t have the patience to watch a half-minute of video, these are his words:
Note: hydropower, a form of electric generation which generally incorporates a great deal of energy storage, a stockpile which can be tapped at need. Wind and solar have none. THAT is the problem with them, and grouping them together as “renewable” does not make them equal.
Yes, refurbished nuclear. Nuclear capacity that had been shut down due to neutron damage, and was rebuilt rather than throwing it away. That nuclear capacity, plus the hydropower that Ontario has had for most of a century, did by FAR the greatest part of the work. The so-called “renewables” did far less, at vastly greater expense. The wind and PV generators are paid far more per kWh than the nuclear and hydro generators.
And as Michael Shellenberger noted, the “replacement” has increased French carbon emissions.
WHY is the target a set amount of “renewable” energy? Why is the target NOT a reduction in carbon emissions? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
If you can’t figure it out and name it, you’re not tall enough for this ride.
Because the people in charge are in thrall to a “green” dogma which doesn’t actually give one single fuck about the welfare of the planet.
Oh, FFS. Uruguay is EMBLEMATIC of the phenomenon I’m talking about. It is EXACTLY like France, Ontario and Sweden: piles of hydropower to cover the deficiencies of wind and solar.
You can’t wish those deficiencies away, nor can your precious pinwheels and obsidian oblong panels provide the industrial energy required to make more of them. Come up with something that works (and demonstrate it), or concede the point.
Yet another half-truth-whole-lie @360:
I’m from Missouri. If there’s another proven solution, show me.
Norway, Quebec, Uruguay etc. have hydro in abundance. Regions without sufficient hydro resources must use thermal generation or do without, and nobody but nobody wants to do without. If you think wind and PV can replace (not supplement, replace) thermal generation, feel free to set up a demo somewhere. But putting everything on them when they have such a disappointing track record isn’t just betting the rent, it’s betting the rent on a likely loser.
#407, K–
Thanks for that.
The other piece of the Tweet was “A gas tanker & icebreaker made it from China to Yamal in the 1st transit of the Northern Sea Route in February, “confirming that year-round safe navigation is possible,” Russia says.”
And yeah, note the irony: a natgas tanker.
@393:
I wouldn’t know, but you obviously do.
I was just high-balling the temperature. 1200°C isn’t beyond reason; the HTR is specced at 950°C outlet temperature and among its prospective uses is:
So, 1200°C might not be needed, though it would be nice.
Only because the earthmoving contractor for the dual-reactor plant being built at Midland MI screwed up the soil compaction on the foundation of a critical building.
No, just the areas dense enough to be served by district heating systems. Everyone else would use electricity with a fallback to DME or the like for demand peaks. 500 gallons of DME packs about 42 million BTU, more than enough to get through a cold snap. Going through my utility bills, my house used less than 400,000 BTU of gas per day so 42 million BTU would be close to a season’s worth of heat.
That’s why a reactor which can feed open-cycle gas turbines in lieu of combustion would be so handy. You could site one anywhere.
So we’ll need some infrastructure. At least it would be IN the cities being served by it, unlike the vast rights-of-way required to move “renewable” energy from the far-flung places it can be captured to where it’s consumed.
I calculated the cost of district heat from a NuScale reactor. It came to less than $1/mmBTU, a fraction of the price of natural gas at the Henry hub.
Did they conclude that it was affordable? Are you claiming that my scheme would be unaffordable, because it’s nuclear? Whose double standard is on display now?
All this “saved money” has come at the cost of skyrocketing electric rates for German consumers, while the country continues to burn lignite. At the same time, France’s rates continue to be low while it has some of the cleanest electric generation on the continent.
How about the bottleneck that your “renewables” require long transmission lines which cannot be built by 2050, let alone 2030, due to all the legal challenges from the people whose land will be affected?
The PRISM and NuScale most certainly HAVE been designed. The AP1000 and various HTRs have been BUILT and OPERATED. There are two AP1000s providing both electric power and district heating in China. And this little thing should open your eyes to what we could have done… and didn’t:
Ironically, the IPCC was founded in 1988… and Germany responded by eliminating its options for a truly low-carbon future.
Human laws can be changed with the stroke of a pen. What YOU want requires changing the laws of nature, and that’s just not gonna happen.
LOL! France ran an 80%-nuclear grid where the only “storage” downstream of the reactors was the water behind the hydro dams. The storage IN the reactors is on the order of 51 months, the typical operating lifespan of a fuel element. One kilogram of LEU can generate upwards of 40 megawatt-DAYS of heat over that lifespan.
Electric storage is helpful for nuclear, but not essential. In today’s markets, storage would let nuclear plants bid higher numbers into capacity and reserve markets and increase their revenues; if the storage systems had enough power capacity, it would let nukes cease selling power when unreliables drive wholesale grid prices below zero. That would only require overnight storage, a few hours’ worth. Intermittent wind and PV would require WEEKS of storage to achieve the same reliability.
My own scheme uses biomass upgrading as a non-electric energy storage method and dump load. This allows more capacity to be built and run flat-out regardless of the remainder of electric demand. Converting biomass into pipeline-shippable liquids allows the carbon to be moved to where the power is, rather than having to bring most of the power to where the biomass is.
Oh, come on. Here’s the IPCC on the subject:
You sure weren’t looking hard if you couldn’t find any researchers looking at the subject. That’s pretty much the definition of “confirmation bias”.
I have. I am.
“Nuclear poser” is precisely the term to describe Derek Abbott. He’s a member of a firmly anti-nuclear organization and his 2012 paper is riddled with major errors. For instance, he notes that world energy consumption was about 15 TW at the time, but that’s primary energy consumption. He then strawmans an all-nuclear world positing 15 TW of nuclear electric generation. That would be about 45 TW thermal. He STARTS by assuming the job is 3x as big as it would actually be, and he goes downhill from there.
When people were in 100% agreement that the four elements were earth, air, fire and water, did that make it true?
How about the IPCC, and the common-sense observation that what some people CLAIM “renewables” can do, nuclear is already doing… in multiple places across the globe?
Try six months ago:
https://bravenewclimate.com/2020/10/02/kurzgesagt-on-climate-change-mitigation/
[deleted]
Mr. Know It All @410 says ” Europeans were driven here (America)not by what the Native Americans “had”, but by tyrants in Europe who denied them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”
Then the European immigrants removed the life liberty and happiness of most of the native american occupants rather permanently. So much for having good principles. In America liberty is an over used word that seems to mean “I can do anything I like to you, but you can’t do anything you like to me.” In all fairness its not limited to America.
409 nigelj says:
17 Apr 2021 at 10:07 PM
Hmmm. I’m not sure diversity of power supply is desirable just because nature does diversity.
Just dumb.
Simplicity involves least effort
Only that, huh? And wrong. It’s least effort to get the maximum effect, which is not at all what you say. It’s about efficiency.
so you would only have multiple power supplies if there was good reasons.
Hmmmm… like every element being supported by *at least* two other elements?
Anywho… you’re blowing it, as ever. It’s about resilience and anti-fragility.
EP at 414:
Your gish gallop is too long to answer every wild rave. I note that you link nothing to support your claims.
You state that you’re the only person supporting an all nuclear future.
The cartoon you link from Brave New Climate provides no data to support nuclear power despite its source at a nuclear industry think tank.
You cite your own, unpublished calculations to support your argument. Nothing peer reviewed.
You cannot answer the 15 problems with nuclear described by Abbott 2012, which is peer reviewed.
You do not cost out all your proposals.
Nuclear power is not economic. There are zero reactors being built worldwide without government financing. It takes 15 years to build a nuclear plant. That is too slow. There is not enough uranium and other rare materials.
Your proposals are fantasy.
410 Mr. Know It All says:
18 Apr 2021 at 5:14 AM
402 – Killian
“So they could exploit what the First Nations had.
But the point is about mentality, connection/integration with the ecosystem.”
A most unfortunate fate for the Native Americans. Europeans were driven here not by what the Native Americans “had”
Because there was nothing? Don’t be an idiot. Had it been a barren landscape, they would have never come.
but by tyrants in Europe who denied them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Bull. They told them whom to/not to/how to worship. And Europeans absolutely sold the dream as one of abundance.
The Native Americans did not “have” anything to speak
You’re a racist damned fool.
of except for a continent of wilderness with no tyrants.
There was no wilderness. That’s a myth. There were functioning ecosystems significantly managed by the civilization(s) living there.
For whatever reason many Indigenous groups do not develop much technology that could separate them from the ecosystem like Europeans do. I don’t know why that is, but I doubt it is a conscious choice.
It absolutely was, racist. They were not children; they knew how to live within their ecosystems. Not so much in Central America and Peru… Even the Missippians with at least two cities the size of Paris, or larger, managed to keep the ecosystem intact.
This is why I don’t talk to racists and climate criminals.
E-P 411: Oh, FFS. Uruguay is EMBLEMATIC of the phenomenon I’m talking about. It is EXACTLY like France, Ontario and Sweden: piles of hydropower to cover the deficiencies of wind and solar.
You can’t wish those deficiencies away, nor can your precious pinwheels and obsidian oblong panels provide the industrial energy required to make more of them. Come up with something that works (and demonstrate it), or concede the point.
BPL: Denmark is now getting 80% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind.
E-P: Germany responded by eliminating its options for a truly low-carbon future.
BPL: CO2 emissions are dropping in Germany the last two years. You’ll have to stop citing Germany as a bad example soon.
E-P 415: Meritocracy in running speed or the ability to throw a ball are different matters, obviously. The designated demons don’t do so well at those things, so it’s okay.
BPL: Yeah, black people are good at sports because of all them years in the jungle, right E-P? Whereas Nordic people are more cerebral. Tell us some more.
E-P@415, Wow, absolutely every thing you say in that post is wrong. You must have really worked at it to ensure you didn’t get anything right by accident.
The only thing critical theory is asking (be it critical race, critical gender…) is asking is for people to consider that factors other than merit might be behind outcomes–particularly when the outcomes are so lopsided and when there are so many documented causes other than merit that explain the outcomes.
Cream is not the only thing that rises to the top, and if you don’t want to ruin your coffee (or your lie) it is judicious to examine the purported “cream” carefully. And yes, this applies just as much to throwing a ball as it does to string theory. We cannot afford to squander talent as we have for millennia. Examining our society critically is essential to its survival.
#411, E-P–
A fantastic illustration of E-P’s ability to completely ignore what interlocuters say, in favor of empty repetitions of claims already made. Sadly.
For instance, did he read any of the linked material showing what Sweden is actually doing with renewable energy? If so, there is no indication of it whatever. Instead, there’s a pointless reference to what James Hansen said 7 years ago, as if that were relevant to anything at this point.
Yes, hydro is important in Sweden. Yes, nuclear is important. And yes, wind is also important, and–unlike the former two–is at this point what is actually growing:
Per the same page, that’s now 12% of Swedish generation.
So what we see here is that Sweden–blessed with a strong base of hydropower and a nuclear fleet to match–is meeting further needs with wind and other forms of renewable energy. (For instance solar, which is tiny now, but growing.)
Let’s turn to Ontario. In the province of my birth, the closing of the coal fleet mostly occurred between 2009, when the Green Energy Act passed, and 2014, when their initial mitigation target was reached.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/climate-change/greenhouse-gas-emissions/sources-sinks-executive-summary-2021.html#toc6
http://media.assets.eco.on.ca/web/2016/11/2016-Annual-GHG-Report_Chapter-2.pdf
E-P wants to credit that to “refurbished nuclear”. Trouble is, the last major capacity addition to the nuclear fleet came in 1993 with the completion of the final unit at Darlington. There was one significant addition via refurb: Bruce A Units 1 & 2 added about 1.5 GW when they came back online in 2012. (The refurbishments of the two Pickering A reactors that were put back into service were complete by 2005, while the next round of refurbs, which will involve both the Bruce and Darlington complexes, began in 2016. And there have been some uprates, increasing output marginally, but that’s small potatoes.)
So, while it’s fair to say that nuclear (and to a lesser extent, hydro) are mainstays of the Ontario generation mix, decarbonization actually happened when coal was retired–replaced by mostly by wind, backed with some gas peakers. Currently, wind supplies about 7% of generation, with solar chipping in another 2%. As in Sweden, RE growth continues, meeting additional energy needs on the solid base provided by hydro and nuclear.
Finally, Uruguay.
As I expected, E-P flings feces:
Had he bothered to read the link, he’d know that there’s no question of “covering deficiencies of wind and solar.” Uruguay had long had a pretty fully-developed hydro capacity. But it didn’t cover all the need, and they had been relying mostly on oil-fueled generation to cover the deficit.
It was expensive, naturally. Enter President Mujica:
So, an eminently rational motivation. I would suggest that motivations in France, Canada, and Sweden, not to mention numerous other jurisdictions, more nearly resemble Mujica’s than they do E-P’s conspiratorial fever dream. Per E-P, everybody is choosing modern RE:
Wow. All those RE zombie politicians croaking “Brains!” Frightful. Also not very bloody likely.
Anyway, the point isn’t that wind and solar can do it all. IMO, they probably *can*, though there are very real challenges, but they won’t anytime soon, because we’re going to have nuclear and hydro and biomass and geothermal and whatever else. And we’re going to have boodles of storage. And in that context, wind and solar are going to be a useful and important component that contributes mightily to decarbonization–whether E-P likes it or not.
P.S. E-P also implies that nuclear has been a great deal economically in Ontario. Well, that may be so, though numbers to determine it one way or another aren’t nearly as easy to come by as I’d like. What is certainly true is that it hasn’t historically been nearly as great a deal as was initially promised. (Note the costs below are not in constant dollars, so the older projects look much cheaper.)
Pickering refurbs: significant delays, cost overruns of ~$600 million (100%)
Darlington construction: significant delays, cost overruns of ~$7 billion (100%)
Bruce construction: significant delays, cost overruns of $0.9 billion (100%) for Bruce A, and $3.1 billion (50%+); refurbs (Units A 1 & 2): drastic delays, cost overruns of ~$2 billion (75%)
As for the next rounds of refurbs, only time will tell. Darlington 2 was completed on time, I’m glad to say. The total budget for all 4 units is $12.8 billion, and Bruce, I think, is pretty close to that number as well. That’s a lot of money, but it certainly looks like a good deal next to the Georgia or South Carolina projects.
[deleted]
[edit – this stuff will keep being deleted]
Changing the vegetation, both on land and in coastal waters, will affect the climate. Here are some relevant links:
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/694/trillions-trees?page=4
not all of which are about planting trees.
@424:
Because the link you posted is useless; it doesn’t break out production by type of generation.
The EIA provides a much better breakdown of Swedish electric generation than the Swedish government does, and what it tells us is that, as of 2018 (the last year on record), nuclear and hydropower were roughly tied for total generation (at 64 and 62 TWh respectively) while wind made a mere 17 TWh and solar and miscellaneous totaled a pathetic 0.4. So yes, if you’re generating nearly 4x as much power from hydro as from wind, you can accommodate more wind. You can probably get that up closer to 50%, or about 30 TWh/yr.
This is NOT going to work if the nuclear plants are closed down.
Engineer Poet @425
“On subject, can you tell me why the life of George Floyd mattered, but the brief life of Dajore Wilson is somehow unworthy of national attention and anti-violence protests? Why aren’t the actual innocents getting the sympathy, instead of people with long criminal records?”
Because the police have considerable power and have abused that power with George Floyd, so you want to focus attention on that, and do everything possible to shut down that abuse of power before it spreads. The fact he has a criminal record is therefore irrelevant.
Innocents like the little murdered girl and her family get plenty of well deserved sympathy and it was in the news paper. I’m not sure the public were THAT sympathetic to George Floyd as such given his record. They probably just dont like abuse of power by police, especially when there are racist overtones and neither do I. Another way of saying it is Floyds murder was symbolic of wider issues.
While I agree pointing out differences between the races is not necessarily racism, you come across as minimising police brutality and racism, whether you intend to or not. And it will make people suspicious of your other contributions to discussion.
419 – Killian
“You’re a racist damned fool.”
Is that all you got – name calling? Your side uses the R word so much it has no meaning. By the way, are you on the Portland, Oregon school board?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-choose-mascot-wont-be-controversial-2021
Are you the guy in the very beginning of this video? (the full performance starts at 3:35).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxdlDJqGc-A
Come on, admit it, which one of these is you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbES3Rbs9Wk
Maybe in this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrZxNh0uck4
:)
:)
:)
E-P 426: Pitting one “woke” organization against another can only damage both, and benefit me.
BPL: Because it’s a war of white people against every other race, right, E-P? Did you remember to send your kids to Camp RaHoWa this year? Will you be ready when the Boogaloo goes down?
EP at 428:
In 2020 Sweden generated 27.9 TWh of wind energy. That is 164% of your 2018 number. At the same time nuclear generation has decreased substantially because of low prices. Nuclear plants were being held offline because it was not economic to generate any electricity at all (capacity factor for first 6 months of 2020= 60%). https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2020/08/07/10538373/low-nordic-power-prices-cast-doubt-on-swedish-nuclear-return Since a lot of wind was built last year, they will increase generation this year. Contrary to your claim in 428, this is working out fine. Peer reviewed studies, which you do not read, like Connelly 2016 say that variable renewables (wind and solar) can generate about 80% of All Energy (not just current electricity) without much difficulty or storage. If you read current information you will make less ignorant statements like your post 428.
You need to find a new country to cite for generating nuclear power. Sweden will be generating more wind than nuclear in just a few years. Oh wait, not enough nuclear plants are being built in all Europe to replace old plants being retired so there will be no additional countries you can cite for nuclear generation.
@425 re. “Weightlifting isn’t a very cerebral sport.”
I thought this myself until a world class power lifter asked for my research help once and I did a lot of research and data collection on him. Among other things I found, I first found out that I was completely wrong in my prejudices.
The numbers below may remind you of comments such as this from… 2014, and not requiring a bunch of researchers:
As of now, that level of resource use is a lot less than the US currently consumes, and without getting to deep into things, my best guess is maybe ten percent of current U.S. consumption.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/04/impacts-of-climate-change-part-2-of-the-new-ipcc-report-has-been-approved/#comment-494958
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725
The bigger point here is, how do you get the rich and powerful to consume 3.3% of what they currently consume?
Rhetorical question; you cannot. Then, how do you cause them to against their will? Starve their money and power machine.
How? Rhetorical question. You simplify and opt out of the machine and build a better one: Regenerative localization.
That is also the only way to do so rapidly.
(NO, nigel! Just don’t.)
E-P, #426–
OT, of course, but–while the tragedy of Dajore Wilson may not be getting national press, the linked story makes quite clear that there is considerable sympathy and yes, activism for change, in relation to it:
But there’s a difference in the Floyd case: Derek Chauvin murdered him while acting in his official capacity, on the tax-payer-funded clock, and in a context in which killings cops are very seldom followed by legal consequences. The administration of justice is thus called into question, as there is at least a reasonable appearance that police are not appropriately accountable for their actions.
Thank you.
Which I’m not advocating. My point, which I’m restating for the who-the-hell-actually-knows-anymoreth time, is that in the context of real-life, diverse energy mixes as they exist in numerous places today, wind and solar can be an effective means of quickly and economically added power capacity to replace FF. They are not the product of an alleged “green dogma” or whatever the phrase was. They are not a ‘horrible mistake’ or ‘distraction.’
Nuclear power can and will play a role in our decarbonized energy mix. But it will not and cannot be a mitigatory ‘silver bullet.’ It’s too slow to scale, and too financially risky, to be that, any time during the next couple of decades at least.
435 Kevin McKinney says:
21 Apr 2021 at 10:55 AM
He is well aware this is racist and a Straw Man, Kevin.
Apparently, the owners here have a very high tolerance for racism.
430 Mr. Know It All says:
21 Apr 2021 at 4:36 AM
Statement of fact, not name-calling.
Improved building materials:
https://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/687/building-materials-advances
Worthy of discussion.
@429:
Nigel, I have intimate, personal acquaintance with the abuse of power by American police. I laid out over USD13,000 just to find out what happened to me (I had to file suit to get the information under subpoena), and I am still suffering the effects of PTSD from it. I had done LITERALLY NOTHING except to suffer a nightmare, for which my LIFE was turned into a nightmare.
How I now feel about cops is not something I will put into print.
George Floyd died with multiples of the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system. Surveillance footage shows that something like a baggie of drugs had fallen from his pockets when he was detained, and his symptoms were consistent with drug overdose. Why is ANYONE accusing ANYONE else, let alone Derek Chauvin, of the slightest involvement in his death when there is NO evidence of deadly physical trauma? Chauvin et al. had called for EMS to try to save the life of George Floyd. You have 3 guesses how much this helped Chauvin, and the first 2 don’t count.
No rallies for her. No demands that the violent “Black Lives Matter” protests be shut down so that the murderous shooters participating in them don’t shoot any more 8-yr-olds. You’re a Kiwi, you can’t see the asymmetry from where you are unless you get out a microscope.
Show me ONE protest, let alone riot, against the violence that killed Dajore Wilson vs. the mere containment which apparently did nothing to harm George Floyd.
I’m from Missouri. SHOW ME.
[edit – way off topic and also BS]
EP at 439:
George Floyds fentanyl concentration was 11 ng/mL. For anesthesia they us e10-20 ng/mL. Clearly 11 ng.mL is not a lethal dose. Many newspapers have fact checked this claim.
Why do you make such easily Googled lies?
@432:
Okay, they added another 64% (and reached a whole 3.18 GW average wind power, not a number I find very impressive). I suspect that they’ll start having issues about the time they hit 40 TWh, unless they’re using something like interconnects to Norway to add additional buffering.
I notice that Sweden may eliminate its on-shore wind subsidies this year. That’s bound to put a brake on expansion. And isn’t it highly unfair to ask free-market nuclear to compete with subsidized wind power? You should add the subsidies to the market rate of power to make a proper comparison of what it ACTUALLY costs.
Peer review is no guarantee of reliability; the Reproducibility Crisis proves this in spades, and Clack showed that the peers did a very poor job with MZJ’s work. We know those people are wrong (or lying), because if what they said was true then there would have been no rolling blackouts in Texas this past winter. 20 GW of unreliable generation that was mostly off-line, plus no storage, led to tens of fatalities and untold property damage.
Since you’re the self-appointed expert, what did Connelly have to say about ERCOT’s troubles and how his miracle scheme would have solved them?
Engineer-Poet @439
“George Floyd died with multiples of the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system.”
The coroner determined fentanyl was NOT the cause of death or even a contributory factor, and there was no ambiguity or doubts about the decision. The jury heard expert witnesses from both sides and believed the coroner. I also observe that the fentanyl wasn’t slowing this man down by impeding his respiration, because he was certainly very active before the arrest and he did resist arrest. So we have to believe the fentanyl suddenly kicked in and killed him JUST as the policeman put his knee on his neck. Yeah, and there is a pink pig flying past my window. The simplest explanation is usually right according to Occams razor: knee on neck.
“Show me ONE protest, let alone riot, against the violence that killed Dajore Wilson vs. the mere containment which apparently did nothing to harm George Floyd.”
My understanding is someone shot at the car and she died. It was in the news. Its tragic but there are murders every day. Are you saying people should be out there protesting about every one? Ridiculous. And by and large the police do work hard to deal with crime.
The reason people were out protesting regarding George Floyd is because it had huge media coverage, the details were caught on video, it certainly looked like abuse of police power and as I said its important to stop that in its tracks. The jury clearly agreed he was guilty and it was not caused by drugs in his system. I don’t live in America, but it sure looks like the police force is blatantly racist and data appears to support this. So this is another understandable reason for protest that did not apply with the little girl.
Sorry to hear about your bad experiences with the police. Mine have been good, but a friend not so much, despite the fact he had done nothing wrong.
interesting juxtaposition of news stories:
US electric power sector is halfway to zero carbon emissions
https://theconversation.com/the-us-electric-power-sector-is-halfway-to-zero-carbon-emissions-159190?fbclid=IwAR25AL8QW_h0Sdu7vsyNFaNIWBBnYCaCPF4Ur4ctBb8Sx_MyHeDR8ev7fVA
and carbon emissions to soar in 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/20/carbon-emissions-to-soar-in-2021-by-second-highest-rate-in-history?utm_term=374a3a44583c2124c1c1657850cdd550&utm_campaign=GreenLight&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=greenlight_email&fbclid=IwAR3LnHKecCkICWKuVYmPiYakgCiGV2KVYgvu8uEkYS5iKac26C4I3aX0iIk
Meanwhile, in the real world, to keep tabs on how we are actually doing on reducing CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere:
March CO2
Mar. 2021 = 417.64 ppm
Mar. 2020 = 414.74 ppm
per CO2.earth
Cheers
Mike
https://medium.com/@deneum.power/nord-pool-grid-capacity-and-current-price-megawatt-hours-76fa7607f290
Contains graphic showing how throughly the Nordic and Baltic countries’ power grids are interconnected.
Kevin M: Not if the grid is decarbonized!
RC: If liquid fuel and electricity are decarbonized the comparison stands pretty much exactly the same. I don’t understand your point. Unless you are saying laws will be passed so only one but not the other will be allowed to decarbonize? Or there is some physical barrier to one or the other being decarbonized?
EP: I was just high-balling the temperature. 1200°C isn’t beyond reason
RC: Even without changing the core nuke’s parameters, the 950C to 1200C increase “required” can be supplied by concentrated solar, biofuel, or even electric resistance heaters.
A 90% reduction in the thermal increase required is not something to turn one’s nose up at. It reeks of technobigotry.
Oops. By 90% reduction I was thinking of the 3500F or so thermal increase hydrocarbons provide when burned.
Units and whatnot don’t match, but one only has to use 10-15% or so of the oxygen content of air to oxidize enough fuel to do the job.
EP: My own scheme uses biomass upgrading as a non-electric energy storage method and dump load.
RC: I came to the same conclusion. Like convergent evolution, when system designs that begin with essentially unrelated DNA evolve to strikingly similar designs (like a marsupial “wolf”) it is near certain that the core design (“wolf”) is quite a good competitor.
Nukes with liquid fuel as a dump load just make sense.
Except to technobigots, who don’t do the math, which is fine as long as they accept what the math says.
But unfortunately it’ll be a cold (or, in this case, a seriously hot) day in Hell when that happens. How long do you think the renewables-only crowd will continue to reject reality, EP? Are you lecturing with no possibility of success? Would it be just as effective to let the fantasy of renewables-only (without nukes and/or Killian’s simplicity model) play out and topple?
EP at 442:
Well you don’t quit when you are losing!
So you are not impressed that wind has increased 164% since your outdated numbers from 2018. At the same time 2 of the remaining 8 nuclear plants in Sweden have shut down permanently. Nuclear will never again generate as much power in a year as you cited in 2018. They generated less than 50 TWh in 2020, only 30% of electricity in Sweden. As I pointed out in 432, nuclear plants cannot economically compete with wind so in 2020 they ran only 60% of capacity. The remaining nuclear plants will be shut down permanently in the near future. Nuclear plants with no mortgage can not compete with new wind plants with a mortgage.
I noticed you shifted your goal posts. Now you predict that 40TWh will be a problem where before it was 30 TWh. We will see next year about that, at the rate their wind is increasing they will generate over 40 TWh in 2022, unless they hit that mark in 2021
You need to read before you predict. This article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-22/giant-swedish-wind-park-targets-turbines-as-tall-as-eiffel-tower describes a giant new wind farm that they are starting up in Sweden. It is not the only one. In your reference they state that wind farms were already profitable without subsidy in 2018 so since wind prices have gone down 15-20% they will make money.
Meanwhile in Georgia the government has backed $12 billion in loans to build the new plants there and they have charged customers $3 billion interest on their loans even though they will not get any electricity before at least 2022. That’s “free market nuclear” for you, government all the way.
This is a scientific blog, you should be banned for dissing peer review. Meanwhile you post numerous errors in your seat of the pants calculations and say we should believe them. As far as reproducibility is concerned I can cite at least 30 papers that all conclude renewable energy can power the world. No-one uses more than 2% nuclear power, and most use none. Nuclear is not economic. So we have both reproducibility and a 100% consensus that nuclear will not work. Jacobson 2018 answered all the issues Clack raised about Jacobson 2015. Clack has not responded so that shows he agrees. That is how scientific argument is done.
Connelly 2016 has several suggestions that would have prevented the ERCOT meltdown:
1) Require all plants to be winterized. Texas had exactly the same problem in 2011 when they had little wind power. The recent problem was caused by gas and nuclear generators failing because they were not winterized. Wind and solar produced as expected. Your suggestion that wind caused the ERCOT problems is a deliberate lie, the problem was the gas and nuclear plants failing.
2) Connelly has a much larger grid. Neighboring grids were winterized and did not fail like Texas did. In addition, larger grids have more consistent renewable energy.
3) Connelly uses gas peaker plants using electromethane for storage. These would work fine as long as they are winterized. Individual homes would have heat pumps so they would not use the gas the peaker plants need.
How would your nuclear plants deal with this problem? At least one nuclear plant in Texas failed (25% of nuclear capacity) and nuclear cannot ramp up to deliver the high peak power that this event required.