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Post by edireland on May 27, 2013 12:52:32 GMT 9.5
That is unchanged. I’ve also said repeatedly that i’ll gladly volunteer time and energy opposing the uranium/nuclear industry because of i) the WMD links and ii) the sickening, systemic racism which makes the industry unsupportable. Again, no change.
How exactly is the nuclear industry systematically racist? Is this an Australian-specific thing? Weapons Proliferation is rather a moot point since the technology to make nuclear weapons is so simple that any state that wants them can have them, even without widespread civil use of nuclear power. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle on that one. Additionally, I fundamentally disagree with this whole idea of measuring radiation from uranium mining/milling over a hundred thousand years.... that is a truly absurd timescale, I wonder what the total dose to mankind from bananas will be over that timescale..... It also doesn't account for measures that could make uranium mining effectively obsolete (the recently demonstrated and continuing drastic improvements in seawater extraction). And then there is them talking about UNSCEAR studies about Chernobyl from 2005 but ignoring the more recent work done by the agency simply because it revises down the fatalities from 9000 to a few dozen.
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Post by edireland on May 25, 2013 1:41:49 GMT 9.5
Energy efficiency's primary contribution to civilisation is to improve the standard of living as opposed to actually saving energy.
Its like LED lights are almost at the point where the lighting bill for leaving them on is negligible, so people will probably only turn them off when they actually want it to be dark.
EDIT:
Another example is that for similar screen sizes LCD Televisions use far less power than CRT ones.... however power consumption of the average television has in recent years.... gone up because sizes have escalated enormously.
Within a few years it appears 50" will be standard... which has seven times the area of a 19" television.
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Post by edireland on May 21, 2013 19:12:14 GMT 9.5
I wasn't really arguing against efficiency (in fact I'd prefer us to be efficient, though even there things are more complicated), just noting that it isn't the way to save the planet. But that's quite different from what Geoff Russell writes in the article: Who gives a damn how much electricity you use when it’s clean? Nobody should give a damn. If we care about money, then it seems very reasonable to give a damn. He means that noone else should care how much people use. The social impacts of the electricity use effectively dissapear. You can complain about energy wastefulness when it will negatively effect you but not really when it won't... in that case its none of your business.
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Post by edireland on May 18, 2013 11:27:58 GMT 9.5
Heard, Russell, Brook, Hansen et al take the position that low-level radiation exposure is harmless. That view is at odds with the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion. Heard, Russell, Brook, Hansen et al claim that the Chernobyl death toll was a few dozen deaths. The credible scientific estimates range from 9,000 to 93,000. Actually most reasonable projections show about 6-7000 cancers, so far, amongst the general population, almost all of them thyroid cancers which have a 90%+ survival rate. The Casualty rate among the liquidators was obviously far higher but it is far from causing tens of thousands of deaths. Those figures are sloppy science that likes to assign all increases in the death rate after the accident to the accident. And I also note that all of these links you provide are on websites that are a) not peer-reviewed journals and b) from political organisations that campaign against nuclear power. Do you have any actual evidence? EDIT: From UNSCEAR's website on Chernobyl: Bolding added for Emphasis. But ofcoures this is where you say the UNSCEAR is simply a shill of "Big Nuclear" despite the fact that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are now larger organisations than many of the reactor vendors people associated with that term.
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Post by edireland on May 17, 2013 4:17:07 GMT 9.5
Is this even a problem?
It's not as if the ground is going to literally break open and swallow the reactors whole. Subsidence is unlikely to cause a catastrophic loss of reactor cooling if the plant is properly prepared.
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Post by edireland on May 16, 2013 17:46:06 GMT 9.5
The best wind farms can get around 40%, but they are very rare. 30% would be more realistic for Australia. Average across all wind farm types and the like, the UK tends to average ~20-25%.
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Post by edireland on May 16, 2013 9:14:24 GMT 9.5
Denmark has the advantage that it has essentially unlimited hydro on-demand from Norway and a huge capacity sink to its south (Germany).
You can't use it to model a large scale system because such a system would be unable to muster that much spare capacity.
EDIT:
This 'study' also assumes ~39% capacity factor for wind..... (page 14 of the PDF)
I don't think such a capacity factor has been obtained commercially anywhere, let alone on the several-gigawatt scale. Unless ofcourse you are deliberately derating turbines to get into lower nameplate bands for the purposes of calculating subsidies.
It also assumes that supply-side management will reduce demand rather a lot when the grid wants... which has unpleasant social side effects.
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Post by edireland on May 15, 2013 11:17:24 GMT 9.5
There are numerous other operational advantages to electric rail traction even in the no-carbon saving case of high carbon electricity. (And that situation is very hard to end up at, since electric locomotives can run regenerative braking into the grid, cutting energy production 20%, and before static power generators tend to be far more efficient than the medium/low speed diesels in locomotives).
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Post by edireland on May 15, 2013 5:20:47 GMT 9.5
Railfreight most certainly can be electrified, here is a 6000hp electric locomotive, and if that is not enough horsepower there is always the Iore which has 14700hp for a coupled pair. (That runs on Iron ore trains in Sweden). However railway electrification has now reached something on order of $2.3m/track.km in the UK, although that is Overhead line equipment meant for 100mph running. Slower freight only equipment would probably be half the price or something of that order, but still the amount of track that would have to be electrified to make a significant difference is just staggering. I estimated decarbonisation of the electricity/domestic heating supply would get carbon emissions in the UK down close to 70% with the largest holdouts being transport. Transport however is dominated by private car emissions, with the railways in teh UK only consuming ~570,000t of oil a year.
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Post by edireland on May 14, 2013 8:35:12 GMT 9.5
Until we get an electric car with a large range that is under $20k, we haven't really got a chance of making a wide scale decarbonisation of transport happen.
Unless we all end up like Japan with 30% of passenger kilometres being on trains.
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Post by edireland on May 12, 2013 12:51:24 GMT 9.5
Brown Coal is essentially free. (it is the archetypal stranded resource since its energy value is so low its impractical to move long distances, meaning that the mine and power station tend to be vertically integrated).
Reserves tend to be so large that the cost, in maintenance terms, of shutting the plant down and then restarting it are higher than simply continuing to burn through the coal.
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Post by edireland on May 10, 2013 9:40:45 GMT 9.5
Given its pricetag, I would expect it to score highly.
$90,000 for the one with the large battery?
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Post by edireland on May 7, 2013 22:41:25 GMT 9.5
How many times do we have to go over this? PV does not reduce the need for generating and distribution capacity since it only reduces peak demand on some days Sorry, but you have not shown anything like that. Data shows the opposite: No it doesn't..... you post the same links over and over and we break them down over and over. Have you actually read this paper properly? www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/5/4/1406/pdfOn page 8 of the paper written by Graham Palmer (it was posted on this blog!) he shows the effect of solar on peak demand. There are days, with a small reduction. (10th Feb), but the peak drops from 9858 to around 9000, depending on the orientation of the panels. So you build 2000MWe of PV panels to get a maximum peak reduction from 9858 to 9051MWe.... or a saving of 807MWe. On average, the drop is massive, at least 20%, but even the real day peak is reduced by 5 to 10%. So the price of 2000MWe solar buys you an 8.1% reduction in generating capacity, and only after the solar panels are deoptimised to produce less total power. While generates an effective capacity factor rather higher than the normal ten percent this does not really improve the economics of the installation that much. Even at the lowest known installation costs for PV solar, which happen to be for large installations of the kind you constantly rail against, this means you have paid something like $4.5bn (US dollars). Are you seriously suggesting you could not get a ~900MWe class reactor less than that? That is the projected price for those PRISMs GE is raving about? (and remember it will infact be rather more expensive than that since you want distributed installations). And while the solar plant supposedly has near zero operating costs, the nuclear plant would have had its capital cost defrayed by the peaking role, which means its operating cost can be defrayed by its other job. During the 90% of the day it is not needed to peak-shave, it can be used to produce very cheap electricity (as it is generating only at marginal cost as its capital cost has already been defrayed) for desalination or similar processes. And before anyone asks, the price of desalination is heavily influenced by electricity prices, so producing for 90% of the day at ~2 US cents/kWh is going to end up a lot chaeper than 100% of the day at 5 US cents/kWh. So yeah, you have proved nothing with this paper, if nothing else it undermines your position.
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Post by edireland on May 6, 2013 14:41:41 GMT 9.5
There is no need for mining, seawater uranium and beach thorium (in India) will see us through.
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Post by edireland on May 6, 2013 5:02:55 GMT 9.5
Sod, As you mentioned UK costs, DECC's estimates of 2012 LCOE for various electricity generation technologies: Nuclear (FOAK EPR): 0.081 p/kWh Solar (PV): 0.161 p/kWh The strike price eventually agreed to by the UK government for the first EPR will probably be higher than 0.081 but probably no higher than 0.10. Furthermore strike price is LCOE + profit. This is bad news for nuclear. So in rainy Britain it can still (barely) beat the price of PV solar? Very bad news for nuclear! (and remember, it is in Britain, where they want that 40 years contract!) Considering that the UK's solar subsidies are still around 16p/kWh alone, I doubt the veracity of those figures. Which is still rather large. Also EDF has effectively got a monopoly on newbuild nuclear in the United Kingdom at the present time, which means it can charge what it likes. It is also building EPRs, which are a disaster. And LCOE doesn't tell the whole story, those costs are almost certainly predicated on PV being must-take, which makes no sense in a PV Heavy Scenario. Additionally it doesn't account for the fact seasonal demand peaks are opposite PV production peaks.
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Post by edireland on May 3, 2013 11:04:22 GMT 9.5
I also question his land use figures..... you can push the land use per square kilometre far lower than that if you want.
See Gravelines Nuclear Power plant for reference. It fits 6 900MWe reactors onto half a square kilometre, generating the rather insane figure of 10.8GWe per square kilometre.... or something like 3 square kilometres for 26GWe of nuclear.... not 100 square kilometres.
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Post by edireland on Apr 30, 2013 21:02:05 GMT 9.5
Forgive me for asking.... but why does a nuclear power plant have a gymnasium?
Was this for staff use or something?
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Post by edireland on Apr 21, 2013 23:54:10 GMT 9.5
Have you folks really started a discussion about the security of PV solar equipment in the case of war? The security of Europe is an important consideration, and do you really think any future enemy is going to ignore a thousand kilometre long jugular stretching from the power generation "heart" of europe? It renders all defensive planning for Western Europe completely obsolete because we have to defend the Sahara as if it were europe. While you support nuclear power, which can never be secure in such a situation? They are more secure than a field of Photovoltaic panels thousands of kilometres away in territory that could very soon be controlled by the enemy. Deploying all those panels in the Sahara means Europe effectively has to control the Sahara outright, and defend it to the last man. Nuclear reactors can survive significant munitions deployment without catastrophic damage and more to the point..... they would be inside our defensive perimeter.
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Post by edireland on Apr 21, 2013 9:59:12 GMT 9.5
Attempting this with the low level civil war that is still going on in Libya is going to be a nightmare. It is likely it will remain just talk for the forseable future.
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Post by edireland on Apr 21, 2013 3:28:45 GMT 9.5
Wouldn't even have to wire the panels themselves, if they are on trainable heliostats they could just use small amounts of explosives to wreck the elevating mechanisms and cause the whole things to topple. We're talking thousands of square kilometres of collector area here, I doubt they could set that up on all of them overnight. That wouldn't neccesarily have to do it all in one night. But it could easily take 48 hours or more for the European nations to organise any sort of operation to do anything about the fact that someone is rushing around preparing to demolish everything. Given the size of the area that the security detail would have to protect (not necessarily from a government, expect a lot of people to want to steal solar panels, wiring, whatever they can take) it'd probably be sized more like an occupation army. Which would come right up against the political arguments you noted earlier, no african nation is going to let a huge heavily armed force on its soil to guard these panel arrays. And if they did try to seize them, working out a way to overrun a force defending a power plant without wrecking the power plant would give military men fits. Don't attack the power plant then, instead send warships to blockade their ports and not let anything in (even food, worked on Germany in WWI) along with some air-strikes against their leaders. They blockade the Saharan nation's ports.... they cut off the juice. If its the middle of the winter the European nations would probably break first. And if you start going after leaders they could easily start demolishing the panels out of spite. (Even if its a mod of angry civilians running around with sledgehammers or something). Essentially the whole thing is unworkable without a one world government.... or atleast a federal government in Europe and North Africa.
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Post by edireland on Apr 21, 2013 0:41:30 GMT 9.5
Given how big the solar collector would need to be they'd need a lot of explosives, somehow I doubt they could install them without the foreign owner (most likely renewable energy farms in the developing world exporting to the developed would be owned by a company in the developed world) knowing and taking action to stop them. Wouldn't even have to wire the panels themselves, if they are on trainable heliostats they could just use small amounts of explosives to wreck the elevating mechanisms and cause the whole things to topple. The fall would probably seriously damage at-least some of the panels and getting the surviving panels on new mounts would take months. So from the point of view of a Europe facing a cold winter with none of its power generation infrastructure intact... they are effectively destroyed. Whether the plant's owners know or not is another question, the executives in Europe will just wake up one day to discover that the entire plant security detail has been interned and there are lots of African engineers running around their plants. And if they did try to seize them, working out a way to overrun a force defending a power plant without wrecking the power plant would give military men fits.
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Post by edireland on Apr 20, 2013 23:52:25 GMT 9.5
The Swiss Defence is "defending" something by threatening to destroy it if someone attempts to take it away from you.
In this case they would have the expensive and fragile parts of the photovoltaic infrastructure wired for demolition and blow the whole array to pieces if we invaded.
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Post by edireland on Apr 20, 2013 21:10:45 GMT 9.5
you also forget the cut into peak demand. This will ease the strain on the system (Oi reactors were put back online, only because of the fear of summer blackouts..) As a last point, these solar power will cut into prime time cost of power. This will make it hard for coal, to be competitive. But that Melbourne study you provided to support your posistion suggested that a 2000MWe solar park would only provide ~800MWe of peak demand reduction. And only after it's power production was deoptimised in order to optimise it for the peak-shaving role. So you are effectively payign $6-7000/kW for that power, nuclear is definitely cheaper by all reasonable estimates.
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Post by edireland on Apr 20, 2013 21:04:27 GMT 9.5
The Sahara is pretty wide so it'd be the best candidate for not being able to use something situated at the coast. But of course you still get the issue of water which may have to be piped from coastal desal plants. This illustrates perfectly, how your focus on nuclear power as a solution to everything is disturbing any sense for realistic solutions. (remember, title of this topic is "hidden cost of energy"...) What realistic solutions? Magical power stations that are made of fairy dust and dreams? Solar is a disaster and will be for a forseable future. we need extra power because of additional air conditioning on a couple of hot days? let us build nuclear power plants! Building nuclear plants makes a lot more sense than building 2000MWe of solar capacity just to shave a few hundred megawatts off the peak demand (as that Melbourne study you cited suggested), deliberately positioning them for peak reduction rather than energy production, which makes the produced electricity even more expensive. We need power in the sahara desert? Nuclear power plants must be the right solution, let us focus on how to cool them (ignoring the HIDDEN COST of such cooling!)! No, I didn't say that we needed power in the Sahara Desert, I simply said that it is one of the few places I could find that has significant areas more than a thousand kilometres from the sea. What "hidden cost", since any hypothetical plants on the edge of the Sahara would be cooled using the world ocean, which is apparently the cheapest way to cool a thermal plant. solar power in the sahara desert could power the globe. Why would anyone even think about how to build nuclear power there? It simply doesn t make any sense! Solar power in the Sahara is a pipe dream, if for no other reason that the Europeans would have to use such power would then be completely at the mercy of the Saharan nations who could just demand we pay twice as much for electricity one winter or be left to freeze. (The Swiss Defence would prevent us from simply seizing the facilities) PS: funny side note: security check for this reply was the term "moot point". I guess the "system" is reading your posts... Well your posts are even more pointless since you consistantly propose insane ideas involving spamming more photovoltaic panels everywhere. We have more important things to do with land surface that build the enormous solar farms you propose. And I am not convinced that the solar panels on rooftops are significantly better (especially considering the cost of them) than simply covering roofs in shiny aluminium plates.
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Post by edireland on Apr 20, 2013 20:57:02 GMT 9.5
Even in Australia you are hard pressed to find an area more than a thousand kilometres from the sea. I named Alice Springs off the top of my head. Admittedly it only has a population of about twenty five thousand and about forty thousand in the region. I make Alice Springs roughly 890km from the sea in Great Australian Bight and roughly 915km from the sea in the Carpentarian Bay. About the only area that is hard to serve due to distance from the sea and other significant water sources is the Sahara. The Sahara is pretty wide so it'd be the best candidate for not being able to use something situated at the coast. But of course you still get the issue of water which may have to be piped from coastal desal plants. Indeed but you have to do this anyway. So we can't really count it against the power plants in question.
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Post by edireland on Apr 20, 2013 11:39:41 GMT 9.5
Even in Australia you are hard pressed to find an area more than a thousand kilometres from the sea.
Doesn't that mean nuclear plants could just be provided at the coast and the power shipped in via the aforementioned HVDC Light type systems? using whatever cheaply deployed cable is considered best (either the shallow ploughed type or somesort of lightweight tower system).
About the only area that is hard to serve due to distance from the sea and other significant water sources is the Sahara.
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Post by edireland on Apr 19, 2013 9:05:02 GMT 9.5
While low altitude sulphur emissions were the primary cause of acid rain, it is highly unlikely that the sulphur could be contained above the weather systems in the long term.
It is likely large amounts of sulphur dioxide would have to be added to the upper atmosphere annually, with a similar amount (obviously) being washed out each year.
What goes up, has to go down.
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Post by edireland on Apr 17, 2013 22:34:58 GMT 9.5
If you don't want to exclude the rest of Europe, stop quoting figures for Portugal alone. What are the renewable energy figures (listing Hydro seperately) for all of Western Europe? You don't get to go on and on about how Portugal has managed to be 50%+ renewable if you are treating the grid as whole object. Your request is strange. so massive increases in alternative power only count, if they stretch all over europe? Why? You may not have noticed, Portugal is a rounding error. A population of ten million out of 500 million in the EU alone. (not counting the other countries that are not almost completely integrated into the European power system). Its power demand is rather small, especially considering it is one of the less economically developed Western European nations. It only counts if it is achieved across europe because if you can't do it everywhere you have effectively achieved nothing. So SHP potential across pretty much the entirity of western europe is roughly 38,000GWh/year? You do realise ther are 8760 hours in a year right? Which mean that translates to the equivalent of 4.3GWe of actual generating capacity. Most SHP plants are run-of-the-river and as such are not dispatchable. (A mill pond based system can't stop up the river for obvious reasons) So you are stuck with 4.3GWe of actual non dispatchable power production. Which means it produces roughly the same as three modern nuclear reactors. It would produce as much power per annum as this nuclear power plant, which operates at a deliberately reduced capacity factor of only 77% primarily for economic reasons. Does this still look like "considerable" increase to you? It really is effectively nothing. Diesel back up is even required in nuclear power plants. An ESBWR only requires a 9hp diesel powered pump to pump water into its isolation condensors during long shutdowns..... hardly a significant amount for a power station that has a shaft output of something like 2.1 million horsepower. It has larger diesels in the design to provide black start capability but those would only be used for a few hours during the plant's entire operating life.
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Post by edireland on Apr 17, 2013 22:19:31 GMT 9.5
5.3 square kilometres of greenhouses to reject 1.1GWt?
That is going to get very large with normal nuclear plant sizes.
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Post by edireland on Apr 17, 2013 22:15:52 GMT 9.5
Noone is ever going to approve the use of the sulphur dioxide shield for some very good reasons. (After spending absurd sums of money removing sulphur aerosols from the atmosphere you want to put them back?)
$1.3tn a year really isn't very much when you put it into context. And that estimate assumes zero economic benefit from the giant forest.
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