Dead industries walking
Nuclear power and fossil fuels face water crises and other problems 40
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Posted 11:29 AM on 6 Feb 2008
by Joseph Romm -
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Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:37 am
06 Feb 2008
But they use more-than-10x less than Nuclear/Coal power plants.
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Karen Street Posted 6:39 am
06 Feb 2008
How much is residential water use in the southeast? 150-200 gallons/house/day?
1 MWh/day provides electricity to 700 houses or so.
Biomass and coal consume 300 - 480 gallon/MWh, and I assume efficient natural gas is even lower. Coal and natural gas help cause droughts, so how does that affect the choice?
Nuclear consumes 400 - 720 gallon/MWh
Solar thermal: 1,060 gallon/MWh
Geothermal: 1,800-4,000 gallon/MWh
The southeast doesn't have wind, so you want to power the whole area with photovoltaics and batteries?
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:39 am
06 Feb 2008
SolarThermal, and Geothermal both use water too.
But they use more-than-10x less than Nuclear/Coal power plants.
And both can reduce that consumption near zero. Geothermal can used close cycle Rankine engines that consume zero water in operation. (Anything takes water to build of course.) This slightly more expensive than conventional geothermal, but it also eliminates emissions geothermal otherwise produces; it make for much cleaner geothermal in general.
Similarly solar thermal can be air cooled at the expenses of a 10% energy loss. Or you can used close cycle cooling water at the expense of a tiny increase in capital expenses. Speculatively you could use waste heat from solar thermal to distill or desalinate contaminated water; it could be last step in recycling of sewage or agricultural runoff. Urban and agricultural desert dwellers in greenhouse earth probably will need to close their water cycles in any case. Distillation of used water (after other cleaning steps have been completed) with waste heat from solar thermal plants could be a key part of this.
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Matt G Posted 6:59 am
06 Feb 2008
"coal and gas-fired power plants withdrew more than 650 million gallons of water per day from seven dry western states in 2000 -- Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming -- enough to take care of the water needs of at least 3.64 million people for a year."
Let's see, the population of just Arizona is 6.2 million. Wouldn't it make sense to use waste heat from power generation to heat domestic water and perhaps even our homes?* This would not only remove much of the water wasted by thermal plants, but it would also remove much of the (expensive and polluting) fuel we use for heat. If we really set up the system right, we could dump heat to our waste water as well.
The answer is: of course it would. This is such a good idea that hotels are installing expensive equipment and burning expensive natural gas to make their own electricity, with remarkable payback. Imagine if our power company gave/sold us our heat instead of boiling away water with it.
* and yes, this would work for geothermal or solar thermal as well
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Matt G Posted 7:04 am
06 Feb 2008
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ids Posted 11:10 am
06 Feb 2008
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-zionplant_bd ...
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Matt G Posted 11:35 am
06 Feb 2008
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ce1907 Posted 12:08 pm
06 Feb 2008
and how do we communicate this info?
To hell with what is wrong, how do we do it right?
specifically
what do we do tomorrow and the day after?
what requires legislation, what does not?
the average person and average pol are not reading Grist daily
and even if they did, I do not think they would come away with a clear, concise idea of "what is to be done"
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amazingdrx Posted 4:10 pm
06 Feb 2008
Yes water water, it's the big issue. Renewables and conservation, plugin hybrids and geo heat exchange all conserve it. Pumped hydro storage powered by wind to backup the renewable grid can help restore aquifers.
Offshore floating wind/wave power platforms can desalinate sea water for cities, saving river water.
Nuclear, coal to liquids, tar sands oil, fuel farming, are all huge water users at every stage of mining and processing and generation. Water issues alone dictate the renewable/conservation solution to energy policy.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:34 pm
06 Feb 2008
No. That would be a bad idea.
When they "reuse" the waste, they are primarily using the "chaff" Uranium-238.
If you take that part out, the remaining waste is nearly identical in radioactivity.
So it doesn't really do you any favors.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4891
http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/site_down/ipfmresear ...
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ce1907 Posted 4:47 pm
06 Feb 2008
Obama was in the minority; he had to accept changes to his bill or it wouldn't move
the NY Times was spun like a top
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amazingdrx Posted 5:00 pm
06 Feb 2008
Wether it was his fault or not, I'm not sure. Just like I'm not sure if Hillary was to blame for the tires to kwhs plan in New York. She ought to have stopped it before it started up though.
We would really like a Teddy Roosevelt like figure who would re-regulate these scofflaws. Give them a rough ride, as it were, harumph, to the hooscow! hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Matt G Posted 1:00 am
07 Feb 2008
/"In the past," Rousselet says, "the antinuclear movement tried to say that they would not succeed with reprocessing. But they succeeded. To be honest, at least in terms of the technical aspects, it works."
//Even the largest of France's reactors, which can produce 1300 megawatts, generate just 20 canisters of high-level waste per year. According to Areva, it's about a factor of 10 reduction in the mass of highly radioactive waste needing to be stored under the most stringent conditions, and a four- or fivefold reduction in volume relative to leaving a plant's spent fuel unseparated
/ "Everybody is in agreement that the right system ultimately results in multiple recycles in fast [breeder] reactors, so that's where things are going," Richter says./
//If we do reprocessing and recycle, we can increase the capacity of Yucca Mountain 100-fold," /
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amazingdrx Posted 2:03 am
07 Feb 2008
Let the nuclear industry build a few of these experimental reactors. New inproved waste reprocessing water less, melt proof, terror proof, theft proof design, what ever great improvements that nuclear advocates keep on touting. To solve the past and present problems of leaks, contamination, waste.
Make sure plenty of public scrutiny shines the light of day on the construction and operation of these new, safer, better reactors. Compare their costs and waste problems with renewables, wind, solar, smart grid technology and so forth after that testing period.
Give nukes a chance. My guess is they will fail on the basis of cost. Maybe 5 times that of renewables. With continued waste problems.
Big baniking investors in nuclear energy are balking at this point. Even these fat cat porcine blobs of kleptocracy want verification of the efficacy of the favorite fixes for Chernobyl/three Mile Island/Hanford realities of modern nuking.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:04 am
07 Feb 2008
(And of course, no federal loan guarantees, get it from Wall Street)
If Nuclear can prove itself under those conditions, then I got not problem with that.
But chances are it's the same bullshit as Coal Sequestration.
i.e. A theoretical possibility but nowhere near ready for production, and would be an economic nightmare. And the chances of global compliance are slim to nill. (Great odds to rest the fate of the planet on ...)
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:51 am
07 Feb 2008
The problem in a nutshell is that without breeder reactors, which can break down the most long-lived elements in nuclear waste, reprocessing comes nowhere near achieving Finck's 100-fold reduction in that waste.
France's engineers tried harder than those in any other country to build and run breeder reactors reliably at a commercial scale, but ultimately they failed.
No Breeder Reactor, then Reprocessing is Worthless.
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Karen Street Posted 4:48 am
07 Feb 2008
Natural gas, a greenhouse gas emitter, only consumes 100-180 gallons/MWh, but again, fossil fuels help cause droughts. Hydro averages 4,500 gallons/MWh, due to evaporation.
Some geothermal plants consume no net water. Parts of the southeast appear to be good locations for geothermal.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Matt G Posted 5:06 am
07 Feb 2008
Take this example from a 2007 DOE report (borrowed from Karen's blog). We need to use all of our firepower to defeat that haunting blue line. Yes, a breeder reactor is expensive. Yes, it will take money to roll out the hundreds of nuclear power plants required to cut down that blue line. But I'm far from convinced that a purely sustainable solution can be built quickly that can knock coal out completely at a cost less than nuclear - even with a breeder reactor.
I hope you're both right and sustainable solutions are cheaper than nukes, since that would fix all of our problems without any effort.
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amazingdrx Posted 6:08 am
07 Feb 2008
That's the kind of effort we the people really like, the kind that pays decent wages.
The money for 100s of new nukes will go to multinational contractors, corrupt as the day is long.
Keeping the money in local businesses and spending on devices manufactured in the US, and energy produced locally. Instead of sending it to the saudis or nuclear contractors. Or shoddy nuke operators that leak all over the nation, like Exelon.
That local money magnifies itself many times as it spends its way through the local economy. A wind farmer down the road payed 75 cents per "gallon" of electric driving in your plugin hybrid. He spends that cash locally.
There are studies though, of how roof mounted solar and wind and wave and water and biogas from waste power feeding the smart grid can store power and meet demand.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GRLCowan Posted 6:45 am
07 Feb 2008
It is an error to imagine uranium mining can't readily be both ramped up rapidly and sustained at rates much higher than today's in the very long term, many times 200 years, without breeders and without the reprocessing plants they require.
To see this, consider Kazakhstan, whose uranium production was 16 percent of Saudi Arabia's oil production in 2006 and 20 percent in 2007. In both years its nuclear fuel export income was less than 0.005 of Saudi Arabia's chemical fuel export income. In terms of heat, it was a greater fraction than it was in financial terms. Go figure.
Also consider uraniferous marine shales. The USA has many cubic miles of them. Deffeyes and MacGregor show 50,000 cubic miles of them worldwide, maybe not so easy to process as seawater, but ~20,000 times richer in uranium, so rich that a cubic metre of this shale can provide more energy to a CANDU reactor than a cubic metre of petroleum can provide to an oil-burning power plant. That is, the shale is worth more than its own volume in oil.
("World Uranium Resources", Deffeyes and MacGregor, Scientific American January 1980, plus 164 MW(t)/kg U datum from AECL.)
People who benefit from natural gas royalties and consumption taxes that add up to a dollar or two per million BTU ("mmBTU")* often seem not to understand that the tremendous rate of discovery of economical uranium deposits in recent years has been driven by prices that peaked last year at 64 cents per mmBTU. They have since slipped back to 35 cents.
They don't seem to understand, but they understand that on a day when the US nuclear fleet is boasting of 92 percent production last year, the dignified thing to do is denounce it on the basis of slight drought-related production losses it might suffer from later this year.
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
* Inclusive of royalties but not of consumption taxes, the recent NYM price is $8/mmBTU.
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GRLCowan Posted 7:33 am
07 Feb 2008
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:02 am
07 Feb 2008
http://greyfalcon.net/nuclearwater.png
To start off with, one should factor in the "other uses" and "mining/processing" columns.
That adds up to 180 more gal/MWh to Nuclear.
_
Second, if we're looking at open loop cycle power plants, Nuclear unambiguously consumes more water than conventional Coal plants.
_
Closed loop evaporative cooling processes, not surprisingly, evaporate more water.
With evaporative losses alone, you get a very close comparison of solar thermal and nuclear.
(I will admit though, that I'm not certain how the 400 number figures in there with the CL Tower evaporative cooling category. Since thats the same number given for the closed loop cooling. And it's hard to believe that they would be the same, given evaporative cooling's higher evaporation rates.)
Solar Thermal Troughs, is a bit higher.
But that would also likely be hybridized with a NGCC generator. Which would reduces it's overall water demand. (Especially given the fact that Combined Cycle generators in general consume a lot less water)
Additionally, if we want to look at other solar thermal options. Solar Dishes require only enough water to wash the mirrors twice a year.
_
So if we're only talking evaporative losses.
Nuclear is worse than Fossil Fuels.
And Solar Thermal gives it a run for it's money.
If we're talking overall withdrawls.
Nuclear is one of the thirstiest energy sources out there.
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Karen Street Posted 9:56 am
07 Feb 2008
The main point is that old power plants were not designed for today's drought. This is true of all power plants. Illinois plants are getting extensions so that the pipes reach the lakes, as the lake levels are dropping. This is true of any power plant, none would have been designed for today's lake level.
New power plants will need to be designed somewhat differently to take account of tomorrow's climate, water levels, etc. The main question is, do you want to use power sources that change the climate? Or do you want to use nuclear power?
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Pompey Road Posted 10:13 am
07 Feb 2008
The federal flood control Dam's nickname in the area is Trash Trap. All the clearing before the stipping is done causes excess drebis to float down to the spillway from Virginia and the watershed area of the dam. They are usually cleaning trash all year and burn it at the Spillway area. They even invented a special trash catching barge that runs up and down the dam lake scooping up the floating logs and brush. The Fishtrap budget did not allow them to run it this year so they took it off the lake.
So if a big ol log don't get stuck in the water powered turbine we may yet see some clean hydro power lighting up Pikeville Ky. down stream.
If of course Pikeville don't get washed off from the continuous stripping of the watershed during our next scheduled flood event.
Pikeville got hit hard in the 1977 flood but have no fear they got them a flood wall and gate built. I hope it works better than the levi system down in New Orleans.
At any rate we have plenty of high plateau's now to move to due to the Mountain Top Removal & Valley Fills we are doing. That seems to be the Corps intention to create enough high plateau land up in the watershed area of the Fishtrap Dam to relocate the communities downstream after the next big flood.
If they ever need to do a remake of High Plains Drifter or High Plains Drifter II we got a good location here now to shoot the high plains scene's on.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Pompey Road Posted 10:25 am
07 Feb 2008
It seems that the Federal, State and County agencies in Kentucky don't understand that letting coal corporations strip the watershed in a federal controlled flood project defeats the purpose of building a flood control dam in the first place.
The new coal gasification plant will also be below the dam so the upside is that it may get washed off also.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:18 am
07 Feb 2008
Of course not.
Which is Exactly why we shouldn't do Nuclear.
If we have a global problem, we need global solutions. Something which we can Confidently spread far and wide throughout the world, on an unprecedented scale.
The Proliferation of Nuclear doesn't fit that bill.
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 2:42 pm
07 Feb 2008
The average American lifestyle uses 1,550 watts, 37.2 kWh / day. The waste heat would be 74.4 kWh / day. 1 kWh = 3,412 Btu, so the waste heat is 254,000 btu/day. It takes about 1,100 btu to evaporate 1 pound of water starting at 80 deg, so the worst case evaporation rate is 230 pounds per day, 27.6 gallons per day. Since most of our electricity comes from steam plants we probably evaporate a substantial fraction of this now.
In year 2000 the U.S. used 408 billion gallons of water per day.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/waterproperties.html
Assuming a population of 295 million that is an average of 1,338 gal / day / person, of which the worst case evaporation rate would be about 2%.
This is a drop in the bucket compared to the water needed to grow a substantial amount of bio fuel, even cellulosic bio fuel. It takes 2000 gallons of water to grow and process the corn for one gallon of ethanol.
Half of the uranium in sea water is sufficient to support 10 billion people for 400 years at the U.S. rate, using first generation reactors. We don't need breeders anytime soon, but they will be a nice improvement.
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:03 pm
07 Feb 2008
The whole point of the Breeders was to consume the radioactivity of the high level waste we're generating. (i.e. A solution to the waste issue.)
But as you mention, if material supply isn't an issue, that makes it extremely clear that reprocessing without Breeders is absolutely pointless.
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elbarto Posted 3:11 pm
07 Feb 2008
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200705/r140801_484774.jpg
http://www.uic.com.au/graphics/OlympicDamaerial.gif
Like most mines this place is a wasteland. It's hard to get a sense of the scale of it but if you can't see any cars in the picture it's because they're too small. This mine is currently an underground operation, when it goes open cut, the pit will swallow this little site like a crumb.
The tailings dams containing low-level waste already stretch for miles and the whole operation sucks several megalitres a day from precious aquifers.
Does anyone seriously think nuclear is a clean green future when this is what has to be done to the Earth to get the fuel? Mines like this are practically irreversible they leave a toxic scar that nature will take millenia to regenerate if ever.
Contrast the mine with wind turbines built on farmland:
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200707/r159961_584192.jpg
Farming and power generation co-exist, the farmer get extra income for leasing his land and the turbines are ever taken down you'd never even know they were there.
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:24 pm
07 Feb 2008
Since most energy industries still require some form of mining. Steel, copper, nickel, etc.
Even windmills require a significant amount of steel, and all the metals to make the turbine generate electricity.
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elbarto Posted 4:11 pm
07 Feb 2008
I think the original post misses the fact that most of the damage done(notwithstanding a Chernobyl) to the environment by nuclear power is through the mining of the fuel. Uranium mining is especially damaging because the yellowcake is at such a low concentration the mines have to be massive and it literally requires mountains to be moved.
It's all too easy to forget that running a suburban nuke plant requires a massive hole in the ground somewhere else. Most mines are irreversible. The land can never be remediated on meaningful time scale.
Getting really off topic you may want to read this excellent post relating to "peak minerals": http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3451
Peak everything is coming...
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:11 pm
07 Feb 2008
The rush to grow biofuel crops -- widely embraced as part of the solution to global warming -- is actually increasing greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing them, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Science.
One analysis found that clearing forests and grasslands to grow the crops releases vast amounts of carbon into the air -- far more than the carbon spared from the atmosphere by burning biofuels instead of gasoline.
Ok, Grist Ecologists. Now you can tell us that you don't really favor Biofuels, but only the super special biofuels that George Bush would never use and which Hillary Clinton would make in her backyard with a super secret sauce from Al Gore.
jabailo.johnmccain.com
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:12 pm
07 Feb 2008
Here's that link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-bio ...
jabailo.johnmccain.com
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Pompey Road Posted 11:00 pm
07 Feb 2008
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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GRLCowan Posted 3:31 am
08 Feb 2008
Many, me among them, think it is clean. But it is not green in the sense in which that word is commonly understood by energy wonks.
Green energy, in that sense, is energy whose producers receive large per-kilowatt-hour subsidies but produce so few kilowatt-hours* that fossil fuel tax takers can take virtually as much as ever, even with the subsidies taken into account. Thus, green means nonthreatening to the biggest fossil fuel interests, who are personified in this thread by Romm.
when this is what has to be done to the Earth to get the fuel? Mines like this are practically irreversible they leave a toxic scar that nature will take millenia to regenerate if ever.
Contrast the mine with wind turbines built on farmland:
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200707/r159961_584192.jpg
Farming and power generation co-exist, the farmer get extra income for leasing his land and the turbines are ever taken down you'd never even know they were there.
I think you left out an "if", as in if the turbines are ever taken down. Perhaps some recent progress in turbine dismantlement will continue.
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
* less, for instance, from all the wind turbines in the world than was produced by the reactors fed by the single uranium-and-copper mine that 'elbarto' showed photos of.
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:59 am
08 Feb 2008
Nuclear on the other hand eats up more Federal tax dollars than all fossil fuels, or all renewables plus efficiency programs combined.
http://greyfalcon.net/2009budget.png
http://greyfalcon.net/h2nuke
So I guess it's the best at something.
_
Oh yeah, and Nuclear is getting a Production Tax Credit.
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/productiontaxcredits.htm
Meanwhile Renewables just got theirs axed.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/2/5/162252/0067
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Charles Barton Posted 6:04 am
08 Feb 2008
Charles Barton
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ThomC Posted 7:46 am
08 Feb 2008
Capacity factor is not the best measure to use when comparing energy generating technologies, since it depends on wether the technology employed is base, intermediate or peak load plant. Sure the capacity factor of a base load system comrpised of a mixture of renewables may be much lower, however it is still providing the base load. A much better way to separate the men from the boys is a total energy balance i.e. to produce 1MWe how much MWth or MWe must i use. I think if you follow this through to conclusion you will see the bigger picture. With just an extra bit of effort you could also calculate the CO2 intensity as well.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:22 pm
08 Feb 2008
Large demand like heating/cooling can be stored in buildings and turned on and off to adjust demand to supply. Some kind of an inverse capacity factor is needed for that part of the interactive system. Storage factor related to total capacity factor.
Plugin hybrids can be charged to adjust supply and demand too.
Total kwh demand over different time periods versus total supply over that same time period, measured at different intervals, compared to the amount of available storage through smart grid demand managment.
I would think that a distributed network of internet devices, that switch power on and off, governed by simple fractals guiding the power management from each home, solar panel, plugin car, and wind farm would provide astable power.
The vital things we need would stay on no matter what. Less vital home and business power uses would be adjusted to supply and done ahead of time, the energy stored as heat or cold or water pressure in your home water system.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:39 pm
08 Feb 2008
Geothermal has just as high a capacity factor as Nuclear.
And SolarThermal is completely dispatchable with amazing storage efficiencies.
Which of course means that you have reliability, as well as a technology which you can quickly "proliferate" throughout the world.
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