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Post by prismsuk on Nov 6, 2013 0:55:19 GMT 9.5
Tom Blees has won the competition for the Electric Power Sector. His video presentation mentions IFR technology and the prospects for a PRISM reactor build in the UK: prismsuk.blogspot.co.uk/
Thanks to all those who voted - Yeeaahhh!
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Post by Grant on Nov 23, 2013 19:35:08 GMT 9.5
Interesting to get a picture of author Joe Shuster's goal from his book 'Beyond Fossil Fuel The Roadmap to Energy Independence By 2040'.
"That’s the plan. Vigorously promote wind and solar energy so that by 2040 each contributes at least 10 percent of total U.S. electrical needs. Each would then produce more electrical energy than the total consumed in Italy. Get the remaining 80 percent from nuclear energy."
I'm not sure how hydro got left out of the picture. Maybe he's talking about what it would take in addition to eliminate fossil fuel, since our hydro has been pretty much maxed out. Nice to see the optimism from 2008 but from our present perspective it seems highly unlikely.
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Post by Ed Leaver on Nov 24, 2013 5:17:52 GMT 9.5
EPA thinks we've got maybe an additional 30 GW untapped hydro, max. As of 2003 we had 96 GW hydro capacity, so 30 more would be a noticeable bump. Probably includes smaller reservoirs that do not currently have generation, and quite a bit of run-of-river. Not much room left for massive 30's-style public works. Not in my backyard, anyway. www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-and-you/affect/hydro.html 10% Solar is probably at the upper end. But we should be able to do 20% wind with careful hydro management, perhaps a bit more with NG+CCS if CCS ever becomes viable. Really depends on how cheap nuclear can become. At present economics really restricts it to baseload. 'Course, at present we haven't near enough nuclear to saturate baseload anyway, so hoping getting that market will boost volume and economies of scale to work into the bottom end of variable load. Also hoping that hydro+wind+NG+CCS and/or hydro+wind+coal+biomass+CCS can shave some of the load peaks without much CO2 emission, keep the nuclear plant factors as high as possible and the fossils as low. (I don't know why I always see biomass co-fired with coal rather than NG, but there's no doubt a good reason.) Dennis linked a fascinating paper RCP4.5: a pathway for stabilization of radiative forcing by 2100 by Allison Thomson et al. a while back. It illustrates how these optimal energy mixes may be calculated. (She shows results for RCP 2.6 as well). The methodology is pretty mind-boggling, but the paper itself is relatively short and -- should your mind need to be boggled -- well worth the read. I've put it in context of explanation of IPCC's Relative Concentration Pathways here.
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Post by Grant on Nov 24, 2013 14:21:11 GMT 9.5
For dummies like me "In climate science, radiative forcing is defined as the difference of radiant energy received by the earth and energy radiated back to space." You've got to keep it simple for most of us. However some folks will determinedly remain clueless. I tried to explain to one guy what a greenhouse gas was and he could not get beyond the sun generating CO2. He insisted a lightly dispersed gas like CO2 couldn't possibly catch any radiance from the earth. I also run into a lot of folks who can't handle the idea of variations within longer term trends. They think if Buffalo has a record cold for a particular day that AGW is disproved. No doubt they are the folks who keep Las Vegas in business.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Nov 24, 2013 14:23:07 GMT 9.5
Ed Leaver – I am inclined to think that no CCS plan ever was viable. For a start, any thermal cycle requires heat to be exhausted at low heat into a low pressure environment, whereas capture of CO2 requires you to cool and compress the exhaust gas. However this fantasy of negative emissions gets dragged up from the dead whenever planners want to include fossil fuel and need the illusion of net zero emissions. I can argue against CCS on other grounds too, but I believe that the persistence of CCS in major documents is simply denial. Fossil fuels means fossil emissions, and we shouldnt let any thimble-twiddling accountant deceive us otherwise. Grant – I am just one more member, not the owner of the site, however I for one would be interested to read an intelligent argument against some aspect of nuclear energy. For that matter, any non-nuclear discussion related to the changing climate would have at least one avid follower!
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Post by Grant on Nov 24, 2013 14:37:00 GMT 9.5
From you're last link.
“Long before climate policy became fashionable, global energy consumption data shows that from 1965 to 1999 the proportion of carbon-free energy more than doubled to more than 13 percent. Since then, there has been little if any progress in expanding the share of carbon-free energy in the global mix. Despite the rhetoric around the rise of renewable energy, this stagnation suggests how policies employed to accelerate rates of decarbonization of the global economy have been largely ineffective.”
Sad, we're just treading water and that's despite all the fuss and subsidies for alternatives.
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Post by Grant on Nov 24, 2013 15:17:32 GMT 9.5
There are plenty of arguments Roger, but I'm not sure how good they are. Try: 1. The money spent on nuclear would be better spent on things like efficiency. I think Amory Lovins argues along those lines. 2. The third industrial revolution is going to be horizontal not vertical along IT lines, now applied to energy - Jeremy Rifkin's shtick. 3. Nuclear has had 60 years to prove itself and it still has bad PR and is largely stalled in most of the places where it got started. 4. Nuclear unlike other energy technologies has steadily increased in price. 5. Nuclear doesn't personalize very well or lend itself to small entrepeneurial startups or local community energy solutions if you value those features. 6. When nuclear does suffer a disaster the consequences are very expensive and very long lived. 7. Spent radiation rods remain on site here like with the Japanese which naturally generates a lot of fear. 8. For coastal NPPs the ocean's are rising and the surges getting stronger. 9. Terrorist sabotage. Indian Point near NYC was on the original 9/11 target list and of course one continually hears worries of plutonium theft. 10. Vulnerability to earthquakes and other natural disasters. I'm not giving any special weight to any of the above but I've heard them all and I imagine you have to and merited or not they are part of the negative discussion around building nuclear power plants.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Nov 24, 2013 17:24:09 GMT 9.5
Grant – Any of those ten points would provide a title to an argument or short essay against some aspect of nuclear energy. You could even write up one of titles as a thread on this site. Most of them refer to social issues - values, sense of disaster, fears, worries, terrorism, bad PR and where money should be better spent. I think you would invoke most knowledgeable discussion from BNC readers if you were to develop a technical argument, such as on points 4, 8, 9b, 10a.
If you allow me to pick one out before you have had a chance to collect facts and argue the case, it would be your tenth point – "Vulnerability to earthquakes"
Earthquake-resistance is a question for engineering design that has challenged engineers throughout the evolution of reactor designs, particularly in Japan, where earthquakes are big and frequent. For the same reason, the survival of Japanese reactors to all of the major earthquakes of the last fifty years is an emphatic demonstration of how reactors can be designed to survive even the world's largest earthquakes. Following the near-record Tohoku earthquake of 2011, all of Japan's reactors underwent thorough scrutiny, yet not one of them was reported with significant damage due to the earthquake. So this issue too, is fear rather than fact.
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Post by Grant on Nov 24, 2013 18:57:34 GMT 9.5
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Post by Ed Leaver on Nov 25, 2013 9:12:57 GMT 9.5
I think Roger was referring to Japan's reactors other than FD Units 1-3, which of course remain inaccessible. There were indeed anomalous condition at FD #1 after the quake, and the operators there assumed manual control of the cooling system. From Why Fukushima Was Preventable (March 6 2012): More slowly, but the sequence would have surely unfolded nonetheless. There is nothing new here. Whether or not Unit 1 sustained damage from the quake, it was the tsunami and complete station blackout that destroyed its cooling system beyond the operators' ability to cope. What is clear is that some parties are using this possibility as an excuse (a) to find further fault with Tepco and to cast further aspersions upon that company's honesty, (b) not to restart any of Japan's reactors for any reason at any time, and (c) not to build any new reactors of any design anywhere ever again.
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Post by Grant on Nov 25, 2013 10:35:07 GMT 9.5
Just to make it clear, I don't think they should be shutting down reactors that were unaffected by the quake and the German reaction was overkill. I just wanted to make it clear that some people who were in place felt the quake by itself did severe damage. Here is a more complete discussion of the issue including problems with the reactors preceding the quake. www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/MH12Dh01.html
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Post by Ed Leaver on Nov 25, 2013 11:14:01 GMT 9.5
Just to make it clear, I don't think they should be shutting down reactors that were unaffected by the quake and the German reaction was overkill. I just wanted to make it clear that some people who were in place felt the quake by itself did severe damage. Here is a more complete discussion of the issue including problems with the reactors preceding the quake. www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/MH12Dh01.htmlThanks, Grant. No reactor should be operated unsafely. If safety standards cannot be economically maintained, an unsafe plant must be decommissioned.
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