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Post by cyrilr on Apr 4, 2013 19:27:54 GMT 9.5
Wow, PV will solve the 10% problem and in turn we require the other 90% to be mostly fossil fuels.
Renewables enthusiasts such as Sod will throw in the kitchen sink and still get no further than 20% renewable. 30% is not easily achievable at all, only countries that have large amounts of hydro (not easily expandable by a large factor) or excellent interconnections to fossil fuel powered neighboors or hydro neighbours, can do this. At great cost and not solving the 70% problem.
Sod keeps missing the main point and focusses on sideshows.
The main point is this. You cannot power a country on windmills and solar panels. You just cannot. You can try, as many countries have, and end up locked into fossil fuel "backup" - the understatement of the century - forever.
I don't know how to make this point any more dumbed-down than this.
You can never do just one thing in the world of energy. You can put in 30% wind+solar+other unreliables but the implication for the other 70% is that it needs to be exclusively flexible (inefficient) fossil fuel generation. How does that solve our problem?
We're currently at 31 billion tonnes CO2eq. We're rapidly heading towards 40 billion tonnes CO2eq, at a time that we need to cut back to under 5 billion tonnes CO2eq ASAP. We need 90% solutions not 20% distractions.
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 4, 2013 18:10:40 GMT 9.5
Solar hot water, I have my doubts about this. Usually hot water demand is fairly stable seasonally. Not a good match for solar. In fact, I need a lot more hot water in winter due primarily to lower feedwater temperature from the drinking water supply system (ie requires more heating to get to the required 35-55 degree Celsius that I need). This puts solar hot water at a disadvantage in my mind. The main advantage is how simple it is, in fact I understand that the power saved by not needing to heat as much water already makes it worthwhile in reasonably sunny places. But you will always need large amounts of backup power or fuel (methane/propane etc.). Whereas aircon could be standalone solar powered with >90% solar (with maybe 10% grid backup as emergency in odd hot-but-not-sunny weather). PV powering aircon is very simple. Making chilled water for thermal store is among the simplest and cheapest of tasks I can imagine. Aircon itself is much more complicated, yet that hasn't stopped rapid growth. Personal computers are extremely complicated, yet every home has one.
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 4, 2013 17:50:52 GMT 9.5
Solar hot water, I have my doubts about this. Usually hot water demand is fairly stable seasonally. Not a good match for solar. In fact, I need a lot more hot water in winter due primarily to lower feedwater temperature from the drinking water supply system (ie requires more heating to get to the required 35-55 degree Celsius that I need). This puts solar hot water at a disadvantage in my mind.
At least with airconditioning in hot arid areas like much of Australia, the output dovetails the demand closely enough. I'd expect ~5% PV would be sensible for this, but it would certainly require chilled water or ice storage to deal with the afternoon/evening aircon peak. Not a big deal I would say, maybe 3 hours of low temp thermal store. Ice is more compact, but chilled water would be more efficient and practical and seems... sensible... pardon the pun.
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 3, 2013 22:31:10 GMT 9.5
Sod's rebuttal is that 70-80% fossil is acceptable. Whereas the climate scientists make it clear than 80% reduction is needed. Considering economic and population growth, we're talking about 90% reduction. Reality is that Germany is the world's biggest user of brown coal, the dirtiest type of coal. Oops! Never mind, be happy, look at the pretty solar panels. Denmark, the biggest champion of wind in Europe, gets a bigger percentage of its power from coal than almost any other European country. Oops!
Sod claims that my assertions are false, but provides no evidence or even claim that shows this is the case (or even that Sod has read my comment at all).
Sod further asserts that I am wrong about industrial demand; apparently claiming that industries don't use power at night. Sod completely misses the point, as usual. So I will repeat: the issue is not peaking, it is total energy supply. PV and wind combined cannot supply the needed 90% reduction, therefore they are dangerous distractions. People like Sod use wind and solar as an excuse to not build nuclear plants, which is a recipe for failing on all climate targets.
The best synergy so far that I can imagine is for solar to provide airconditioning in hot sunny regions, reducing peak demand, possibly with the help of some ice making air conditioning as buffer, and then the remaining demand is much more baseload so can be serviced with nuclear. Airconditioning is typically less than 5% of total grid demand, so a 5% solar, 90% nuclear, 5% fossil (preferably natgas) is probably a realistic option.
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 3, 2013 21:03:24 GMT 9.5
Actually if you include industrial and commercial demand, it gets a lot worse on the whole: this is because those demands are much more baseload than homes demand. So PV's mismatch with demand would further deteriorate, even though the peaking portion may improve slightly, the situation on the whole looks far worse. For example, most industries I work with have 6000 hour/year workload. They work 3 shifts, and each shift produces about the same amount. In fact in some cases the night shift has more production because of excess grid capacity available. Obviously the amount of solar available at night is zero, not useful for industry.
This isn't really about peaking demands, this is about how will we power a modern economy with lots of industry without fossil fuels. As the paper from Palmer suggests, PV is not very useful and in fact may risk fossil lock in due to it's fickle nature requiring loads of fossil backup. Actually providing 10% of your power with PV and most of the remaining 90% with gas and coal is not fossil backup, it's downright greenwashing.
I don't feel that the paper has made this explicit enough.
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 3, 2013 17:32:24 GMT 9.5
In figure 4, the solar generation is bloated by a factor of 8 over the substation load.
Why? I would expect this from pro-solar advocacy groups, not from a scientific paper.
If 50% of the housholds have that 1.5 kWp system, and the PV generation is displayed fairly (ie on the same scale as substation load) then the solar generation appears as a tiny speck not a giant mountain. I understand that the graph must show the shape of PV versus the load curve, but that doesn't justify chartjunk.
To get that mountain peak, you'd need 6 kWp systems on 100% of the homes. Most homes actually couldn't fit that on their roofs, and it would still only generate a fraction of total load and 1/3 has to be dumped since it exceeds load on the full light of day.
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Post by cyrilr on Mar 17, 2013 23:51:29 GMT 9.5
Duh! They've been pestering, blundering, and taxing nuclear in every possible way for decades!! You are no doubt very proud of that. First regulate and pester a viable industry (nuclear power) to death, then subsidize an industry that will never ever be viable (grid connected PV in Germany) with 600-700% subsidies, and then you claim that PV has achieved a lot and nuclear has not? That's the most pathetic and disengenious argument I've heard in months. The simple fact that you can't understand is that France got to 75% nuclear in 15 years, whereas Germany has barely 6% solar in 20+ years of blind money throwing. That is not conjecture. It is reality. It happened. We should learn from Germany's failure and France's success, rather than cheering at failures while time ticks away. The reasons are pedantically simple. Solar has a capacity factor of 10% in Germany. Nuclear gets 80% in France. It means that a nuclear Watt in France produces 8x as much electricity as a solar Watt in Germany. Since nuclear plants last 2x as long as solar plants (60-80 years versus 30-40 for solar PV if you're lucky) it follows that the nuclear Watt in France produces 16x as much electricity as the solar Watt in Germany. These are simple facts. Draw your own conclusions.
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Post by cyrilr on Mar 17, 2013 20:47:08 GMT 9.5
So Germany does not get power from solar for 94.4%. After hundred billion dollar money throwing. That is not encouraging, but for some reason solar enthusiasts such as Sod are very happy at not solving problems 94.4% with energy sources that are not there 90% of the time, at 100 billion euro price tags. Did you know Germany is the world's biggest consumer of brown coal? That's the dirtiest type of coal, if you didn't know. If we all follow Germany's policy, world CO2 emissions will quadruple in no time. Don't worry, be happy. Put solar panels on your roof and feel good.
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Post by cyrilr on Mar 15, 2013 3:33:11 GMT 9.5
The WWF... is not an energy organisation. Yet they obtusely insist on publishing energy studies. Not surprisingly, almost all of it is dross, complete poppycock and nonsense. In stead of embarrassing themselves further, I suggest the WWF stops publishing about areas they are clueless about. The only published material that is worse than their energy "studies" are the "studies" regarding nuclear power. And how evil it is. Bad, bad nuclear power. If you're knowledgeable about nuclear power, don't read these studies unless you have no issues with blood pressure. Anyway. Thanks for the great article. I'd like to add something important. The sun is quite unreliable, not being there 80% of the time in the tropics, and 90% of the time in a northern country like Germany. Yet society needs very reliable and nearly constant energy sources. This means a huge amount of energy storage will be needed. This dwarfs the solar panel equipment by at least 1 order of magnitude. I'll let the numbers do the talking: physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 20, 2013 4:33:02 GMT 9.5
I'm missing something important here. Why go after CO2 in seawater instead of CO2 from smokestacks on the coal plants? Can this process work directly on a coal power plant using electricity and heat from the coal power plant to capture the CO2 at the point of origin? I know the Navy needs jet fuel at sea -- they can't capture the exhaust from what they're burning. But I don't understand capturing CO2 or anything else from a widely distributed dilute source instead of capturing it at the point of origin, when that's available. It's simple, long term we don't want to lock ourselves into using coal, and there just isn't enough low impact sustainable biomass around. Short term, coal flue gas - or even better, natural gas flue gas, which is not contaminated with sulphur or heavy metal compounds - can be used to test the idea.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 19, 2013 22:36:11 GMT 9.5
Edireland or anyone else - do you have technical references I can read about these SOFCs-in-reverse? It sounds like an important simplification in synfuel processing, but Googling finds a number of different techniques used and I don't know which one you're talking about here.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 18, 2013 23:30:35 GMT 9.5
cyrilr, agree about high temperature synthesis or SOFC electrolysis. Cycling that stuff doesn't work, and capital utilization requires maximum throughput. I don't like the idea of using direct membrane separation of CO2. That implies high pressure forcing of very large volumes of seawater through molecularly tight membranes. The energy cost would be enormous. The reason the PARC membrane process looks feasible is that that is not what is going on. In that process, an electric field across the membrane produces H+ on one side and OH- on the other. The seawater is merely passed past the membrane, not through it. Much lower power requirements, low pressure operation and higher throughput than a desalination plant. I'm no more than novice on chemistry (and less than novice on organic chemistry) but my understanding is that any membrane process, if feasible, will be much more efficient than any electrolytic or electrochemical approach. Certainly you need a lot of pushing, but breaking down molecules one for one always requires more electricity than a physical pumping process. And it seems that the membrane process would possibly be more suitable to air capture of CO2. It is a lot simpler to deal with dust than to deal with all that biological gunk, salt, sand (water is much more of a debris transporter than air).
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 18, 2013 19:21:24 GMT 9.5
Taking a hint from reverse osmosis membrane technology to desalinate seawater, can't we use membranes to allow the CO2 to pass through whilst leaving a depleted stream on the other side?
This type of process is typically much much more efficient than electrolysis. If you're going to use electricity anyway...
Membranes are typically quite high-learning curve technologies. Development of reverse osmosis membranes over the last 30 years has been astronomical.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 18, 2013 19:04:23 GMT 9.5
You have found a use for intermittent electricity from renewables. Since the synthetic fuel can easily be stored in tanks, the intermittency doesn't matter. Use the nuclear power for the grid because intermittent power cannot be tolerated on the grid. We have uses for both nuclear and renewables. I'm sorry but this is wrong. These synfuel plants are industrial high temperature installations that must operate at full bore as much of the time as possible. Otherwise the reaction kinetics don't work well, you either end up with poor energy efficiency or poor reaction completion. They are not good at throttling up and down at the vagaries of the wind. Nor are they cheap, so you don't want to run them at 20% capacity factor even if you could. Certainly not when you could run the thing on coal or nuclear at industrial capacity factors (>70%).
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 18, 2013 18:54:57 GMT 9.5
Douglas Wise - fair enough. An S-PRISM being built would be a good thing.
Edireland - thank you for the critique. Let me put a few points in.
1. On load refuelling - the European project has an interesting solution: the fuel rods have metal extensions so that they can be manipulated in the gas space, avoiding troublesome in-lead manipulation (as lead is fairly opaque all the way through to the gamma spectrum...).
2. Mass of lead - yes, certainly the European project and even the Berkeley salt cooled project, have learned that the sodium pool designs aren't directly Xerox-able to their designs. Shorter pools must be used. I should point out also, that all nuclear reactors must manage heavy spent fuel, which weighs almost as much as lead. IFR fuel is much heavier still, with uranium metal fuel twice the weight of lead, and a tighter pitch to diameter ratio. Weight isn't so much a problem as volume, though, as volume determines the weight of the construction as well. IFRs have a lot of volume in the double walled steam generators and secondary loops. Not needed in lead fast reactors...
3. Noncondensables in the ICs. Yes, agree, all newer BWRs that I reviewed already have DW to WW vent lines for purging the noncondensables. It's why the TEPCO statement of hydrogen in the IC was surprising to me.
I like ICs. The European lead cooled project uses them in the design. Each SG has an IC. The ICs of the lead cooled reactor are easier to maintain and design, as they involve condensing nonradioactive steam (eg significant hydrogen and fission products are never present).
I like BWRs too. The ESBWR, ABWR, ABWR-II, EU-ABWR and Kerena (formerly SWR-1000) are all very attractive and safe designs. These are all build-able right now or in a few years.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 17, 2013 0:07:36 GMT 9.5
Cyrilr, what you say makes sense but is not the final word. In a finite world under extreme challenge, there is no need to adopt only a select range of preferred options - in fact, such an approach leaves unmet need which must be considered. Aviation fuel must come from somewhere, and this author has demonstrated that this could very plausibly be from the oceans. It is easy to say that electric cars are better and perhaps they are, from an either/or point of view. But you have entirely failed to consider that both targets are essential. "We can't spare the clean energy" you say. I say that we cannot afford to manage only the vehicles whilst ignoring air transport, heavy road transport, unelectrified rail (where this exists), ocean freighters and, in a world where resource wars are an increasing possibility, defence purposes. That's far too much liquid hydrocarbon usage to ignore or to place in the "too hard basket". Once we get most of global electricity supply plus much of transport on nuclear-electric, we'll be in a much happier position. Moreover, we can develop synfuel tech whilst switching mostly to nuclear-electrons. So by the time we've exhausted the electricity supply, heat pump electric heating, and electric cars, we may find a much better, higher efficiency synfuel production method. In the meanwhile, using 20 kWh of electricity to make a liter of synfuel to drive a car 20 km, when that same amount of electricity can power an electric car 200 km, is not a good way to tackle our predicament. It is to be hoped that we one day not too far in the future find ourselves with such abundant clean energy that the last bastions of fossil fuels can be brought down to the history books of our children.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 16, 2013 22:10:36 GMT 9.5
If the electricity to synfuel process is 50% efficient (rough estimate) and a liter of synfuel has 10 kWh embedded energy, it follows that you need 20 kWh of electricity per liter of synfuel.
If that electricity comes from a low cost low carbon source, of 5 cents per kWh, then the cost is $1/liter just in electricity costs. Then you add capital, operations personell, maintenance equipment, replacement, etc.
I have very serious doubts about the cost of this idea. What is more it is a major energy sink, in fact energy hog. We can't spare the clean energy capacity for this until more efficient solutions such as electric vehicles, etc. have saturated the market.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 16, 2013 0:23:02 GMT 9.5
I am not convinced we really need liquid metal cooled reactors to reach our objective. We can now apparently reach above unity breeding ratios with Boiling Water Reactors (atleast Hitachi claims we can, see RBWR) using Uranium oxide fuel. With uranium nitride fuel we can apparently reach breeding ratios of 1.12 which would be more than enough for our needs. More to the point we can build BWRs relatively inexpensively en masse now, we are not in the experimental phase as we are with the other designs. That's an interesting idea, just use a tighter pitch on the BWR to get a faster spectrum. Use existing BWR technology. Though it is still a faster spectrum reactor, and that changes the licensing basis a bit (especially with regards to recriticality post accidents). Lead does have some advantages and disadvantages over this fast BWR idea: - With the lead fast reactor, there are two loops rather than 1 and one loop is liquid metal, the other steam. That complicates the design compared to a fast BWR. - With the lead fast reactor, the primary loop is not radioactive, non-pressurized, does not contain hydrogen and is inert in accidents compared to steam (no oxidation of metals, etc.). That's a serious safety advantage. The steam side safety systems of the BWR could still be used, such as isolation condenser systems, and these would be much easier than with a BWR, because it's a clean steam loop with no radioactivity and no noncondensables such as hydrogen to clog the isolation condensers as happened at Fukushima Daiichi unit 1. Plus the higher temperature means a lower cost per watt, higher efficiency steam loop.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 8, 2013 2:33:16 GMT 9.5
Thanks for sharing your views at Desmogblog. While I don't comment much on BNC since Barry cast me into the outer darkness I still read every post and support Barry's "Solutions" even though replacing fossil fuel electricity generation with nuclear will have no measurable effect on the climate. Take a look at this: energy.llnl.gov/informatics.phpIn the USA electrical generation accounts for only ~30% of the fossil fuels consumed. Even if you eliminate all of it there won't be a noticeable effect on climate. Electric generators are just the start. Once you have covered electricity, it becomes attractive to electrify transport via electric vehicles and trains, and electrify low temperature heating via heat pumps. That takes up a sizeable chunk of CO2 emissions. Next is industrial heat and reduction of metal ores such as iron oxide. This can be electrified, all that is needed is cheap electricity to make the economics work. Coal for making iron is tough to beat in price, but possible. Coal for iron will probably one of the last bastions of fossil fuels we will tear down.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 7, 2013 23:59:22 GMT 9.5
Apart from popularity issues, I do believe that molten lead has a number of real (physical, engineering) advantages over sodium.
1. Higher boiling point, and lack of negative void coefficient, means voiding is not going to happen even in beyond design basis events. 2. Less tight coolant channels can be engineered because of lead's lower absorption and other nuclear characteristics. This means that even though lead is heavier, pump power (pressure drop across the core) can be reduced. 3. The spectrum can be faster (if needed) since lead has a lower neutron lethargy than sodium. 4. 2/3 higher volumetric heat capacity as sodium 5. Less extreme thermal conductivity reduces thermal shock in transients. 6. In the event of core damage, lead's higher density provides fuel dispersal over compaction, ruling out re-criticality in beyond design basis events. 7. Lead's compatibility with air and water avoids the need for expensive engineered components, ranging from fast sodium isolation systems, to double walled (expensive!) steam generators. The intermediate loop can also be avoided, further reducing equipment and pump power costs. It also means that flow blockage from sodium oxide contaminant is avoided. Things like loss of cover gas systems become inconsequential. 8. Lead shields gamma radiation very well and has much lower equilibrium activation than sodium. Sodium24's activity rivals that of the fission products at equilibrium (!).
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Post by cyrilr on Nov 18, 2012 20:32:02 GMT 9.5
I already registered before, was just being too lazy to login ;D
Does anyone have more data on the materials input, especially steel and concrete, of the total Ivanpah CSP project?
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 28, 2012 2:29:01 GMT 9.5
(Inflammatory comments deleted)
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 27, 2012 23:22:23 GMT 9.5
Cyril's quote It's surpringly easy to imagine. Because:
1. There's not enough cow dung to power the world. Who said there was? Your quote is qualitative, not about scale. [/quote] I was starting out with pointing out that the comparison was apples to oranges in the first place. I could have stopped after that, as further discussion of "nuclear versus cow dung" is obviously blatently pointless, but since there is actually an impact of methane and sulphur that must be mentioned. If cow dung cannot scale to the point of replacing nuclear (or coal) then the "lower impact than nuclear" argument is invalid altogether. But your response does show the lack of perspective we see from "greens". Lawyer science (form), rather than problem solving (content).
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 27, 2012 23:19:32 GMT 9.5
I'm sorry, but that's just nonsense. To get such large production figures from unreliables, the amount of installed capacity vastly exceeds peak demand. So most of the time you'll be dumping excess unreliables energy. Here in the Netherlands we get 10% capacity factor out of solar. Also we need more electricity in winter, not in summer. Failure to quantify such important facts means Ecofys gets no credit for trying. In fact, "trying" is too big a word for the Ecofys document. The Ecofys document is really just a simple back of the envelope, lump in all energy sources, without considering important things like effective load carrying capacity. It's the kind of "study" an 12 year old might produce as an elementary school project.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 27, 2012 19:37:23 GMT 9.5
It's amazing how so called "conservation" organisations are pushing for massive ecofootprint technologies like biomass, while dissing the one technology with the lowest ecosystem impact of them all - nuclear power. It's hard to imagine that nuclear power would have a lower ecosystem impact than this.It's surpringly easy to imagine. Because: 1. There's not enough cow dung to power the world. Blatantly obvious, but apparently people need this to be said: nuclear power and cow dung power are not in competition, and never will be. Cow dung is for cooking for people in remote areas; nuclear power is to power modern industrial societies. 2. Biogas does actually have some impacts, relating to sulphur emissions, and non-combusted and fugitive methane emissions (25x more powerful GhG than CO2). But admittedly, the impact is less than doing nothing with the dung (risk of diseases) or burning the dung (particulate emissions). Worse than all is to not have energy at all, so any energy is better than no energy (even coal, yes). People cooking on their converted cow dung is a great idea for remote locations and developing countries. That's not the same as saying it's a useful comparison with nuclear power.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 26, 2012 23:08:57 GMT 9.5
The Ecofys report does not at all look at intermittency (supply-demand) using any real data.
That makes it a load of bullsnot. It's just another exercise of, add up all the unreliables quantitatively and make qualitative statements about the real problem, which is intermittency and supply-demand.
Of course this shallow nonsense is to be expected from the WWF, who is absolutely horrible in their energy analysis (this is widely recognized among energy experts - wwf is no authority at all on energy). If Ecofys is working with them, that hurts their credibility (up till now I considered ecofys to produce useful material; now I am forced to revert that standpoint).
It's amazing how so called "conservation" organisations are pushing for massive ecofootprint technologies like biomass, while dissing the one technology with the lowest ecosystem impact of them all - nuclear power. This shows these organisations are driven by ideology and are cut off from any scientific influence. Sad.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 26, 2012 8:06:09 GMT 9.5
sorry, but his "probabilities" have to fit to the statistics we have! you simply can not claim, that the majority of meltdowns cost below $50 Million and then have 3 in a row, costing billions! i tend to side with statistics in this case: if the first part of a book i look at, turns out to be obviously false, then you will need to convince me to read much more. (the entire chapter 6 looks pretty bad to me. do you get the feeling that his descriptions are a good explanation for the what happened in Fukushima?) Actually that is exactly what we, or anyone, can claim. Just as I can claim, after rolling a dice three times, while getting three times 6s, that the probability of rolling a 6 is 1/6. Even though I just got 100% 6s. Statistically I got only 6s but that's not the same as probability. Please just read the book, it's generally excellent. Yes, Cohen's descriptions are eerily close to reality. Even though the book is old, almost all of his predictions came true (eg no significant % solar PV market penetration, etc.). Don't judge a book on a few passages. If I judge you by what you've written so far, I might be inclined to think I'm dealing with just another not-thinking-clearly lacking-all-perspective, knowing-nothing-about-probabilities-and-statistics, anti-nuke.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 26, 2012 0:08:28 GMT 9.5
Sod, Cohen is not concerned with statistics, but with probabilities, two very different things. If you read the book you would have known the difference. Of course Fukushima is among the more costly meldtowns; considering the long duration of the station blackout (essentially permanent station blackout for accident purposes). I really must recommend that you read the book in full.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 25, 2012 18:06:48 GMT 9.5
The numbers i cited above ($12.81 billion.) is a pure (and very optimistic) guess of decontamination of land. the estimates of the total cost of the disaster (including compensations and decommissioning the plants) is much higher. Japan made an estimate of "20 trillion yen ($257 billion)" www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/06/japan-nuclear-cost-idUSL3E7N60MR20111206and again: if the cleaning is done by fire hose, 3 meltdowns would not cost more than 1. (of course what Cohen proposed will not be done either!) The cost of cleanup can be as high as you want it to be. If you decontaminate to below background levels, costs are massive. However, your claims such as 12 billion being "optimistic" and 3 meltdowns not being more expensive to cleanup, are substantial claims. These require substantial evidence. 3 meltdowns and containment failures produce more radioactive contamination than 1 so that increases the cost. Really talking about figures like 250 billion $ is just speculative nonsense. We can spend any amount we want, if we want to cleanup every microsievert. If that is the approach, then most of Japan has to be cleaned up; radon is everywhere, and Cohen showed it is dangerous. Sod, you have to read Cohen's book. In full. Then come back with more questions or assertions if you have any. Most of your assertions are fully debunked in Cohen's book.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 24, 2012 22:20:22 GMT 9.5
This could be a useful thread for people that want to read more books on the subject of energy, energy analysis, energy history, solar energy, nuclear energy, etc. Vote for the best book on energy you've read. My vote for best book on energy analysis, obviously David Mackay's brilliant "sustainable energy - without the hot air". Available online: www.withouthotair.com/My vote for best book on nuclear energy, "the nuclear energy option" by Bernhard L. Cohen. Also available online: www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/Let me know about your favorites!
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