Comments Ender has made

Fix Transport First

My ideas is to concentrate on transport first.  Try to start a crash program to replace IC cars and trucks with Vehicle to Grid (V2G) capable battery electric cars and plug in hybrids.  This way we help mitigate climate change with reduced emissions (up to 30%) and help solve the twin problem of Peak Oil.

The huge storage potential of V2G cars and trucks will enable a much greater penetration of renewable power and can lead to the desired phasing out of coal.

Stephen Gloor Perth Western Australia

Vanadium batteries

Gar - why the requirement for 75 hours of capacity.  There is no way that a distributed renewable grid would have no energy input for that long.  Forcing a requirement for this is like forcing the present grid to be 100% reliable.  It is not, which makes a company like mine spend a couple of million dollars providing a UPS for each of it sites for when the grid does fail.

To make renewables more dispatchable then only something like 6 or 12 hours storage is needed.  If V2G gets going in a big way then we will have a lot more storage available however just the local storage of vanadium batteries would be sufficient for a much greater expansion of renewable power.  These batteries are vastly more efficient and evironmentally friendly that pumped storage or hydrogen however some hydrogen, or hydrogen converted to methane or methanol, will always be stored.

6 hours storage for a 90MW wind farm:
From the FAQ
:As the size of the system in kWh increases, the cost per unit decreases significantly. The incremental cost of storage for large systems is approximately $150 per kWh.:

In six hours a wind farm of 90MW would be expected to deliver .3 * 90 000 * 6 = 162 000 kWh.  At $150 per kWh then the this would cost
162 000 X 150 = $24 300 000.  Which would increase the cost of the wind farm from 50 million to 75 million however it would now be despatchable and have a repository to store excess wind power.

"The vanadium redox (and redox flow) battery was first patented by the University of New South Wales in Australia in 1986"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

Stephen Gloor Perth Western Australia

Transform the Way we Drive and Generate Power

Could not agree more.  There is a path to a sustainable future and with some changes could be brought about.  Perhaps we need more positive people to make it happen.  These are the steps that I see as a start.

1.  Conserve Energy - the easiest, cheapest, and fastest method of reducing greenhouse emissions and downsizing our power requirements.

2.  Replace Oil Based Transport - Replace IC cars with Plug in hybrids and Battery Electric Cars and make all transport electric or electric hybrid.  Make sure that all the PHEVs and BEVS can participate in Vehicle to Grid.  Clean up cities and promote public transport and bicyles/walking.

3.  Increase Renewables to 75% - use the battery storage potential of millions of AC electric cars to allow renewables - solarPV, solar thermal, wind, wave tidal and biomass to increase share of power generation to 75%.

4.  Convert All Coal Thermal Plants to IGCC - get rid of all coal thermal plants and use a mixture of natural gas, stored renewable hydrogen and gasified coal to fuel flexible and fast reacting gas turbines that can interact automatically with renewable power.  

5.  Transform the current vunerable, monolithic and centralised electricity grid into a fault tolerant, decentralised smart grid based on small self contained, but communicating, cells.

Energy Efficiency

Energy Efficiency is one of the equal pillars that a renewable future will be built on.  If we can do this at a profit so much the better.

There is huge potential to save energy once you get motivated by higher electricity costs or subsidies. If the millions of industrial and domestic air conditioners and refridgerators were slowly replaced by more efficient ones then this could save massive amounts of electricity.  Things as simple as replacing the incandescant globes with compact flouros can save both you and the planet.

These are not just band-aids.  To stave off the nuclear peril we must reduce our energy demand so renewables can supply it.

Stephen Gloor Perth Western Australia

Nuclear Power Available?

Reading the last post made me think.  Is Nuclear power available to the US?  The real answer is no as you do not have much or any uranium.  The USA by contrast has plenty of wind and also plenty of sunshine.

With this availability of natural resources you woudl require less military spending as you would not really mind who was doing what in the world as youwould not be reliant on foreign countries for you prosperity.  Maybe then you could spend the money on education and health care.  Here in Australia I do not have the worry of a major illness resulting in bankrupcy as we have 'socialised' medicine.

I am sure that if you really asked the majority of citizens of the US whether they were prepared to scale down on their electronic goodies a bit and accept renewable power if it meant better health care and education they would jump at it.

The people really put out by a plan like this would be large corporations and of course their will will prevail.On Umbra on nuclear energy posted 4 years, 7 months ago 45 Responses

Nuclear Waste Problem Solved????

Here is a comment from    
http://books.nap.edu/books/0309073170/html/86.html#pagetop

    "Nevertheless, the common perception is that for geological disposal specifically, one must be able to predict the future accurately--and it is beyond established engineering practices to predict accurately for many thousands of years how the waste and the repository will behave. It is also beyond established practice to predict accurately whether or not some of the radionuclides disposed in the repository may move through the geological formations and eventually come in contact with human beings and the environment in the future and cause them harm. As emphasized above, however, the challenge is not to accomplish these impossible tasks, but rather to assess the range of potential future behaviors with sufficient confidence to allow the appropriate societal decisions to be made."

This is saying in black and white that is IMPOSSIBLE to predict the future behaviour of nuclear waste no matter how we dispose of it.  Yes we may be able to store it for a few human lifetimes or even a hundred but what about longer when our civilization is but a legend of dubious authenticity like Atlantis is today.

As has been pointed out in previous posts to which you seem to have paid no attention nuclear power's costs are heavily subsidised - so much so that you do not seem to be able to sort out the real costs from the subsidies.  Read this:

"Arguably the best and most current economic comparison of nuclear and fossil-fueled plants is by Professor Paul L. Joskow in a recent interdisciplinary MIT study, "The Future of Nuclear Power."4 As seen from the following table from the MIT Study, in the study new nuclear plants are far from being competitive with new natural gas or coal-fueled power plants. The levelized cost of electricity5 generated by a new nuclear plant is estimated to be about 60 percent greater than the cost of electricity from a coal plant or a gas-fueled plant assuming moderate gas prices."

and

* According to a July 2000 report by the Renewable Energy Policy Project, the U.S. government has spent approximately $150 billion on energy subsidies for wind, solar and nuclear power--96.3% of which has gone to nuclear power.

and

    "* Limited Liability: The Price-Anderson Act establishes a taxpayer backed insurance regime for nuclear power plants that limits liability of nuclear operators in the event of an accident. (The Act was enacted in 1957 as a temporary measure to support the fledgling nuclear industry.) Under Price-Anderson, commercial nuclear operators are required to carry only $200 million in primary insurance. A second level of retrospective premiums in the event of an accident is capped at approximately $88 million per reactor, for an industry-wide total of approximately $9.4 billion.

    Yet according to a November 1, 1982 Congressional Subcommittee Report, based on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's "Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences" ("CRAC-2") model, a worst case scenario accident at a U.S. nuclear reactor could cost as much as $500 billion in damages. The economic consequences of a severe nuclear waste transportation accident could cost as much as $271 billion. The sizable discrepancy between the coverage available under Price-Anderson and the calculated consequences of severe nuclear incidents leaves the public unprotected and the industry unaccountable in the event of a serious accident. Furthermore, by artificially limiting the liability of nuclear operators, the Price-Anderson Act serves as a subsidy to the nuclear industry in terms of foregone insurance premiums. By masking the risk of nuclear power, the Price-Anderson Act distorts economic viability assessments of nuclear power and encourages the construction of new nuclear plants. No other energy source benefits from this level of subsidy.

    * Electric utility deregulation and the stranded cost bailout essentially amount to $120-200 billion, mostly to utilities that are selling off their commercial nuclear power reactors.

    http://www.cato.org/dailys/05-18-01.html

    Here at home, the federal government took responsibility for the supply and enrichment of uranium but failed to charge nuclear power plants anything for the capital or inventory costs of the program. And just since the establishment of the Department of Energy in 1978, more than $20 billion of taxpayer money has been spent on nuclear power research and development.

    Then there's the granddaddy of all subsidies, the federal assumption of high-level radioactive waste-disposal responsibilities. If the feds had stayed out of this and simply required the industry to secure its own waste disposal through private arrangements, who doubts that the construction costs for such facilities and, more important, the liability costs would greatly exceed the fees the industry currently pays the federal government? In fact, it's extremely doubtful that the industry could insure itself against the possibility of accidents in waste disposal facilities, which could remain highly radioactive for thousands of years."

Also on the subject of risk.  Just because no accidents have happened does not affect the statistical likelihood of an accident occurring in the future.  I know that the chance of my house burning down or being broken into is less that 1% yet I still pay house insurance because the consequences of an accident or break-in to my home, though very unlikely, would have devastating financial conequences to my familie's finances for years to come if I was not insured.  Similarly it is not enough to say that nuclear power is OK because there has not been a significant accident for years because the possible consequences of a nuclear accident are so large any accident, no matter how far apart, still have unique to nuclear power devastating effects.  A perfect example of a low risk - high consequence event.

You also glibly dismiss the uranium supply problem when to get around this you need breeder reactors thereby greatly increasing the problems of nuclear weapon proliferation.
On Umbra on nuclear energy posted 4 years, 7 months ago 45 Responses

Half a Life

Endorse all the previous comments.  I have written reams on just these objections to Nuclear Power.

The main problem is 'rising energy demand' until we reverse this with lifestyle changes and increased efficiency there will always be a call for more generating capacity.

Really if you install a cheap inefficient air-conditioner in your house to improve your comfort you are basically saying yes to nuclear power. If you have a 400sqm house that you have dreamed of and use only a few rooms you are saying we want more power so I can have a big house I want instead of the small one I really need.  This increased demand has to be satisfied somehow.  This is the danger. To support the current and rising level of energy consumption, to supply our wants, we need massive power generation capabilities which nuclear or coal power are the logical answers.

Until we 'power down' we will never get rid of the Nuclear option.  Renewable power cannot power our current demands.  The only way renewable power will work, is for us, you and me, to reduce demand .On Umbra on nuclear energy posted 4 years, 7 months ago 45 Responses

Nuclear Waste

It is amazing how blind proponents of nuclear power are when it comes to waste.  I really think it comes down to "store it until after I am dead".  This way it becomes what the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines as an SEP - Somebody Else's Problem.

A scientist was tasked with coming up with a way of signposting a waste site with a message that would last.  He found this impossible and suggested an Atomic Priesthood.  I wrote a bit on it and the original article is in the blog entry I wrote at

http://stevegloor.typepad.com/sgloor/2004/11/the_atomic_prie.html

However like the SEP in the Hitchhikers Guide there is no way to make a NP advocate acknowledge there is a problem and that it should be addressed as they know that they will be safely dead before anything bad happens.

Stephen Gloor Perth Western Australia