Nuclear Plant's Fuel Rods Damaged, Leaking Into Sea

Quote from dcraig:


There are only two routes to low emission baseload electricity on a scale that can power a whole grid - hydro and nuclear. Hydro and nuclear provide ~30% of the worlds electricity. Wind and solar - well under 3%. The message is very clear.
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Your statements about Solar and wind remind me of others from the past.

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"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946

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"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

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"Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."

Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995

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Of all the people that I talk to about solar, they almost always share one common trait. They don't realize how far solar has come during the past five years and how quickly it is dropping in price. A couple years ago my family's company was sitting on a large inventory of panels after buying out a competitor. What came next was astonishing. During 2009 we would watch as the efficiency increases in solar panels caused a massive price drop. Retail prices dropped by 50% in a single year as my family scrambled to sell off the newly acquired inventory that they had luckily bought for a fraction of its market value. 2010 saw a similar drop. 175W panels were the norm, but now 260W panels are the most cost effective. Next year it will likely be 300W. At 300W we are still only about 21% efficient.
 
"Düsseldorf, Germany – E.ON Kraftwerke has received the permission for its new coal fired power plant project at its Studinger location in Großkrotzenburg, Germany. The permission covers the construction of a 1100 MW power plant that will also produce 300 MW of district heating."

http://www.bulk-solids-handling.com/management/projects_contracts/articles/299746/

If renewables alone can do the job, then why are new coal plants being built in Germany? These things will have a service life of at very least 30 years so this is not some stop gap measure. And this in the nation that is being repeatedly held up as THE example of how to clean up electricity generation using just renewables.
 
Quote from Cache Landing:
Of all the people that I talk to about solar, they almost always share one common trait. They don't realize how far solar has come during the past five years and how quickly it is dropping in price. A couple years ago my family's company was sitting on a large inventory of panels after buying out a competitor. What came next was astonishing. During 2009 we would watch as the efficiency increases in solar panels caused a massive price drop. Retail prices dropped by 50% in a single year as my family scrambled to sell off the newly acquired inventory that they had luckily bought for a fraction of its market value. 2010 saw a similar drop. 175W panels were the norm, but now 260W panels are the most cost effective. Next year it will likely be 300W. At 300W we are still only about 21% efficient. [/B]
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Here is the projected cost of electricity generation from new nuclear power plants in a number of countries compiled by the IEA in their 2010 report:

11tyizd.jpg


It depends on country and on discount rate and varies from $29.05 per MWh (Sth Korea) to $136.50per MWh (Switzerland) , but the nations with the lowest cost are the ones building the largest number of new nuclear power plants.

And here is what the report says about solar PV:

"For solar photovoltaic plants, the load factors reported vary from 10% to 25%. At the higher load factor, the levelised costs of solar-generated electricity are reaching around 215 USD/MWh at a 5% discount rate and 333 USD/MWh at a 10% discount rate. With the lower load factors, the
levelised costs of solar-generated electricity are around 600 USD/MWh."

http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ElecCost2010SUM.pdf

There is simply no comparison in cost and while the cost of solar PV is dropping it still has a long way to go to become competitive.

But LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) is not the whole story. The variability problem with renewables forces extra costs on the grid as a whole - either by extra capital expenditure for backup generation or overbuild of renewables and expanded transmission network. Up to a certain point (maybe 20%?) existing grids can hack it, but after that these extra costs will really start to bite.

As for Bill Gates and his 64 k of memory, you can find any number of counter cases of ridiculous technological optimism, but none of them actually mean a damn thing because it is only by carefully looking at the engineering and economic realities that you can draw any informed conclusion.
 
Quote from dcraig:

Here is the projected cost of electricity generation from new nuclear power plants.
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The French company Areva is building a new EPR reactor in Finland with the help of cheap Polish workers. The project has encountered a ton of problems. It's four years over schedule and the costs have DOUBLED and it's still years before they can start it.
If nuclear is such a money making machine why is it so hard to get financing for new plants in the US. Government is generous in giving full grants for loans but investors (Wall Street) don't get too excited.
They know it's too risky. Also not a single nuclear company has a full insurance for a plant to cover ALL damage in case of a catastrophe.
Insurance companies know it's like playing russian roulette.
260km from Chernobyl there are areas that are uninhabitable for who knows how long, maybe for centuries or even longer.
Tokyo is some 200km from Fukushima and it's still possible, if not probable, that we see some major radiation reach there if one or more cores melt and the wind plows from the northeast.
If Tokyo would become a place where you could only stay for a few hours, what do you think would be the cost?
 
Quote from Cache Landing:

Yes, my price was the cost of the entire project of building enough solar field to supply the US with electric power. Not just the land cost. ...blah blah blah... our current one. I think it will become a reality once solar cost drops to about 30% of current prices.
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Cache, you seem serious enough in your convictions to warrant a response.

Sorry to be blunt, but forget solar ever being a top 3 or 4 contributor to the generation stack. I hear and understand all your points about economies of scale, etc etc. the only impact solar will make is on the bills of customers in regulated utility (i.e. non-consumer choice) areas, where un-economic, politically driven PUC actors with ulterior motives force solar down the throats of ratepayers. They're trying to build a 10MW solar field down the road from me, for nearly $50MM. What an incredibly ridiculous "investment," but I digress...

The reason large scale solar is unworkable is that while you can transmit power a long way, you cannot support voltage over long distances, and you cannot support frequency well without large amounts of spinning mass (mechanical generators) locked together in the grid. Wind has many of the same problems.

Load following is impossible with Solar, and just the whole idea of large amounts of non-controllable resources participating in the grid isn't feasible. Here in TX we have massive problems with the overbuilding of Wind Generation. literally 6,000MW can vanish in like 20 minutes (average load is ~33,000 MW). You need to keep a lot of dirty old fossil fuel online (and make their owners whole by charging ratepayers to run them) to be able to actively manage against voltage collapse and frequency degradation caused by the material presence of Wind power on the grid. The last thing we need is another several thousand solar MW's that can suddenly come on or disappear because of cloudcover or whatnot.

Anyway, not trying to be a grouchy naysayer, but Solar isn't going to work at the wholesale level. I agree that having distributed residential/ small businesses with panels on the roof can help the early mover consumers with their net bill, but once too many start with that there will have to be some sort of regulation or charge to owners of those to compensate for the stresses they create for the grid itself and its management.

I'm not a peanut gallery armchair expert, btw, I generate & sell tens of millions of MWh's in TX, and am fairly well embedded in the regulatory affairs here. I'm 100% for environmentally sound energy policy, and solar will likely play a small (heavily subsidized) role, but it'll never become a huge player % wise. (unless of course we stop caring about voltage, frequency, phase angle, etc...)

Sorry if my commentary is uncomfortable, but you seem to have invested enough thought and effort into formulating your position on the subject, so I thought I would share my take on it.
 
Quote from Cache Landing:

Yes, my price was the cost of the entire project of building enough solar field to supply the US with electric power. Not just the land cost. Funny, I actually used $500/acre in my estimated cost of the project and that was just off the top of my head. :D

The bulk of the cost is in the solar panels themselves. Even after dramatic price reductions over the past two years they are still quite expensive relative to coal/oil/NG. The panels alone would cost about 4.5 trillion, and then you have to figure in racks, inverters, wire, roads, trackers, etc. $10 trillion would barely get us there, and that is only the US. Then you have to consider that while we are making huge progress with solar panel efficiency and cost, there is still almost no ability to store large amounts of electricity, which I believe is the point that Hydroblunt was trying to get at (although he could've been a bit more civil about it).

To switch over to solar would take a complete revamp of how we perceive our energy usage, mainly because of the on-demand nature of the way we use electricity. As a yearly average, solar panels only hit the equivalent of full output about 5.5 hours per day, year round. More in the summer and less in the winter. Cloudy locations are horrible and sunny locations exceed that estimate, but that is the average. Current economies of electrical transmission make it feasible to transmit a max of about 3,000 miles before the law of diminishing returns starts to hurt too bad. Therefore, at any given location you could only expect to draw power from panels located within a couple thousand miles. This does effectively lengthen the daily production and (contrary to popular opinion) on average most electricity is used during the day.

So imagine a system that worked like this. Solar panels were littered about everywhere, on rooftops and such. These were mainly grid-tie systems w/ backup on-site storage for emergency use only. So for example a home would be fitted with enough solar production to supply itself, but it didn't actually use that power, but instead fed it into the grid under a net-metering contract with the power company. This is usually what happens currently anyway. But in this future scenario, a total of all panels within a 2,000 mile radius supplied the vast majority of all daytime consumption. Peak morning and afternoon demands are somewhat compensated by the ability to draw power from locations that are in a peak production time zone, but haven't yet reached peak demand. Current power plants would then serve the purpose of simply satisfying abnormal demand during severe weather events and a short nighttime period. Under such a scenario they might only see about 25% of current production rates.

We would then have decentralized the power production such that it would be much more difficult to cripple the system, and a large portion of the buildings would be able to operate on backup power storage during emergencies. I'm sure as technology progresses one of two things will happen. Either storage capability will increase, or the ability to cheaply transmit power over much longer distances will become a reality. In the mean time, this proposed situation is still much better than our current one. I think it will become a reality once solar cost drops to about 30% of current prices.
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One can actually buy thin film solar panels for ~$1.1 per watt or less now in bulk quantities. Given that actual US electricity production was ~1.1 Twatt in 2007, the panels would cost ~$1.21T. The balance of systems cost for a solar plant on the ground( not inefficient rooftop installs) is ~approaching 1.5X the panel cost so total cost for 1.1TW is ~ $1T(land) + ~$1.2T(panels) + ~$1,8T(balance) = ~ $4T. And this would not be overnight. It could be spread out over 20 to 30 years as other forms of electricity lose their plant licences or fail inspection. Of course, you would still need a form of power to run at night, so there would always be a need for geothermal or small scale fossil power at night.
 
Please see what a "Nagasaki survivor" has to say about the nuclear fallout in Japan as below:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_japan_family

"I may be a bit too callous about this due to the fact that I was really heavily exposed to radiation, but I don't think this is anything to turn pale over," she told Reuters.
"People seem to be much too sensitive, though of course it's not really for me to say, and heavy radiation exposure is a serious thing. But I was 3.6 km (2.2 miles) from the bomb, and they've evacuated for 20 km (around the stricken nuclear plant). I really don't understand this kind of feeling."
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Quote from Cache Landing:

Pretty bold statement considering that i already stated my connections to the industry. What "way" was I saying that electricity works? And what numbers were way off?

Seems that maybe you are assuming that I was making certain points that I was never making and subsequently rushed to try to prove your intellectual dominance. I wasn't arguing the point of on-demand power at all. In fact, I was demonstrating why solar is NOT currently viable as a primary energy source.
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Your understanding of solar economics is on the level of the average shmoe. A key note, it's all dependent state by state and varies significantly.

Your understanding of electricity pricing is in the same boat. States have either regulated or deregulated utilities, with retail pricing going significantly above $0.10/kwh in deregulated states. Regardless, when talking about a large scale utility project, you're selling to the grid, so retail pricing has no bearing.

Whatever your point is in regards to these topics, does not even matter when you lack the basic knowledge.
 
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