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Post by jagdish on Jan 19, 2014 15:30:24 GMT 9.5
Realization of fusion reactor will bring up its own requirements but existing and fast reactors also need to run at low pressure and high temperatures. Low pressure in the reactor reduces the cost while high pressure in turbines increases the efficiency of conversion to mechanical/electric power. Current fast reactors run at low pressure but use fire prone sodium coolant. A safer coolant has to be introduced, as secondary coolant outside the reactor to begin with.
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Post by sod on Jan 19, 2014 18:16:21 GMT 9.5
Realization of fusion reactor will bring up its own requirements but existing and fast reactors also need to run at low pressure and high temperatures. Low pressure in the reactor reduces the cost while high pressure in turbines increases the efficiency of conversion to mechanical/electric power. Current fast reactors run at low pressure but use fire prone sodium coolant. A safer coolant has to be introduced, as secondary coolant outside the reactor to begin with. This is a discussion about the cost of nuclear. The cost of nuclear already is too high. I don t think this discussion about experimental technologies will help your cause! We need to understand the basics: New electricity plants basically all cost the same. (about 10ct per kwh) www.agora-energiewende.org/fileadmin/downloads/publikationen/Impulse/EEG_2.0/EEG20_ms-final.pdf(page 14, unfortunetly in german) so even alternative energy supporters like this institute want a reduction of feed in tariffs (8.9 ct) to a price BELOW the Hinkley nuclear price per kwh !!! www.agora-energiewende.org/topics/the-energiewende/detail-view/article/agora-schlaegt-eeg-20-mit-anschliessendem-marktdesign-prozess-vor/The real problems now are these: 1. no new power can compete with old coal (around 4 ct) 2. land based wind is a t the low end, nuclear at the high end of the spread.But more wind will even INCREASE the price of nuclear!
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hank
Gluon
Freefall cartoon (c) Stanley 2013 freefall.purrsia.com
Posts: 10
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Post by hank on Feb 6, 2014 5:54:59 GMT 9.5
thebulletin.org/nuclear-vs-renewables-divided-they-fall"... in 2012 nuclear and renewables each provided between 8 and 9 percent of all energy used in the United States. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal together provided 81 percent. You would think, then, that the little guys would realize they only stood a chance if they teamed up against Goliath. Instead, advocates for nuclear and renewables are doing just the opposite: They’re competing with each other for government favors and bickering .... they stubbornly refuse to grow up and face the facts: Even with huge expansions of both nuclear and renewables, keeping global warming below a dangerous level will be a tough order. It must be entertaining for fossil-fuel lobbyists to watch from the sidelines as their puny adversaries sling rocks at each other. But for climate campaigners, being divided and conquered is the worst possible game plan. If they don’t all learn to get along, and soon, it’s game over for climate policy...."
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Post by jagdish on Feb 6, 2014 22:23:29 GMT 9.5
Price of nuclear power, like everything else, varies with time and circumstances. There should be voluntary stress on safety instead of forced regulation for improved technology to develop. Asian prices, other than Japan, are below highly regulated world.
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Post by cyrilr on Feb 7, 2014 0:59:29 GMT 9.5
I'm surprised that Sod is not banned from this board yet. He's consistently shown no interest in science and analysis, and consistently demonstrated ignorance, belief system bias, and rejection of any evidence contrary to his myopic worldview.
Moderator?
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Post by BNC Moderator on Feb 7, 2014 14:04:03 GMT 9.5
Sod had never registered as a member. My patience ran out! I have banned his IP address.
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Post by Ed Leaver on Feb 8, 2014 13:09:29 GMT 9.5
Price of nuclear power, like everything else, varies with time and circumstances. There should be voluntary stress on safety instead of forced regulation for improved technology to develop. Asian prices, other than Japan, are below highly regulated world. Come again? Safety variance at Chernobyl and Fukushima may well have doomed the planet. Regulation must indeed be reasonable -- but nuclear reactors confine a lot of energy in a small space, so we gotta be careful. You're welcome to argue the time, effort, and $$$ required to certify new designs, permissible radiation exposure, etc. but there must be rules and they must be respected. I think a more important deciding factor is uncertainty in electric markets themselves. Something like 3/4 the cost of nuclear electricity is in front-end capital, after which it can supply low cost reliable power for sixty or more years. Truely an excellent deal -- if you can afford it. For that one needs a modicum of market certainty. Asian prices (I assume you mean Chinese) are indeed low compared with U.S., but a dollar goes further there as well. A careful comparison of regulatory practice should come before conclusions, and a more meaningful metric might be the relative cost of nuclear vis-a-vis coal in the respective regions. Worthwhile reference: Economics of Nuclear Power.
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Post by David B. Benson on Feb 8, 2014 13:31:42 GMT 9.5
BNC Moderator --- Thank you.
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Post by Ed Leaver on Feb 9, 2014 23:36:38 GMT 9.5
@all: but is it ecologically sound environmental policy? Admittedly, I'm rather new around here and haven't your depth of experience, but Sod "played by the rules" as he bent them. Once upon a time I myself was moderated off a green island, possibly for positing a distinction between "renewable capacity" and "useful energy" once or thrice too often. (Or perhaps it was the "n" word.) Whatever, I thought I'd something to contribute. My point is there is a huge disconnect between Pragmatic Prometheans and Deep Greens, and while Sod may have been a rpita, he was our pita, courteous as such things go, and happy to explain German energy policy as he sees it. Could have been worse, and amidst understandable relief over his banishment, one is also mindful of Le Roi's admonition to his new Minstre de la Justice... BNCMODERATOR Ed - sod was banned for violating the Comments Policy regarding repetitious posts. He was given a number of warnings (which he chose to ignore) against repeating a question ad infinitum, after other commenters had given him an answer. As such he was deemed to be trolling. He was well known, on the BNC blog, for such behaviour and had previously met the same fate there. We gave him a little more rope on the Forum but he still chose to hang himself.
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hank
Gluon
Freefall cartoon (c) Stanley 2013 freefall.purrsia.com
Posts: 10
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Post by hank on Mar 21, 2014 3:40:11 GMT 9.5
Re including the cost of cooldown power for a widespread long grid blackout from a Carrington-scale event: Article with links to research and other summaries: io9.com/a-massive-solar-superstorm-nearly-blasted-the-earth-in-1547913445Press release and brief quote therefrom: newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/03/18/fierce-solar-magnetic-storm-barely-missed-earth-in-2012/---quote--- (Tuesday, March 18 [2014]) in the journal Nature Communications, former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and research physicist Ying D. Liu, now a professor at China’s State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, UC Berkeley research physicist Janet G. Luhmann and their colleagues report their analysis of the magnetic storm, which was detected by NASA’s STEREO A spacecraft. “Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous,” said Luhmann, who is part of the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) team and based at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. A study last year estimated that the cost of a solar storm like the Carrington Event could reach $2.6 trillion worldwide. A considerably smaller event on March 13, 1989, led to the collapse of Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid and a resulting loss of electricity to six million people for up to nine hours. “An extreme space weather storm — a solar superstorm — is a low-probability, high-consequence event that poses severe threats to critical infrastructures of the modern society,” warned Liu, who is with the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “The cost of an extreme space weather event, if it hits Earth, could reach trillions of dollars with a potential recovery time of 4-10 years. Therefore, it is paramount to the security and economic interest of the modern society to understand solar superstorms.” Fast-moving magnetic storm Based on their analysis of the 2012 event, Liu, Luhmann and their STEREO colleagues concluded that a huge outburst on the sun on July 22 propelled a magnetic cloud through the solar wind at a peak speed of more than 2,000 kilometers per second, four times the typical speed of a magnetic storm. It tore through Earth’s orbit but, luckily, Earth and the other planets were on the other side of the sun at the time. Any planets in the line of sight would have suffered severe magnetic storms as the magnetic field of the outburst tangled with the planets’ own magnetic fields. The researchers determined that the huge outburst resulted from at least two nearly simultaneous coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which typically release energies equivalent to that of about a billion hydrogen bombs. The speed with which the magnetic cloud plowed through the solar wind was so high, they concluded, because another mass ejection four days earlier had cleared the path of material that would have slowed it down. “The authors believe this extreme event was due to the interaction of two CMEs separated by only 10 to 15 minutes,” said Joe Gurman, the project scientist for STEREO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md..... ---end quote---- So it's a new risk, not previously considered likely, with new costs to factor in. We all know how easy it is for people to slip into denial rather than face inconvenient facts. But this, seems to me, is a strong argument for fission power _and_ solar/hydro/wind/whatever to be installed together, letting the fission power subsidize the more expensive 'renewable' source, so it's available in the event of a long term grid loss. Make them work together, so they can work well enough to cool down plants if the grid (and transport, and refineries) are lost due to a major flare event.
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Post by David B. Benson on Mar 21, 2014 7:30:51 GMT 9.5
hank --- Far more sensible for current nuclear power plants is enough diesel backup to provide local power. Do not assume that either transmission lines or even the grid connection transformers will survive a Carrington event.
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Post by trag on Mar 28, 2014 2:35:23 GMT 9.5
hank --- Far more sensible for current nuclear power plants is enough diesel backup to provide local power. Do not assume that either transmission lines or even the grid connection transformers will survive a Carrington event. Once they become available, how about burying something like a Toshiba 4S at each nuclear power plant as an emergency backup generator. That obviates the diesel fuel limitations.
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Post by jagdish on Mar 29, 2014 21:47:42 GMT 9.5
Burying a nuclear plant may have the points for and against but we should think of easier options opened by nuclear. The spent nuclear fuel has decay heat equal to 2-6% of fission energy. It is perceived as a big storage problem. A substantial part of it is in Cs and Sr fission products, which can be leached out as chlorides and used for thermo-electric generation. Just the right source of buried power for a few decades as they have a half life of nearly 30 yrs. The spacecraft use thermo-electric power from Pu-238 with half life of 90 yrs at higher costs. Cs/Sr could be a by-product of whatever reprocessing is being already done.
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Post by Graeme M on Apr 14, 2014 0:04:19 GMT 9.5
I think the answer is easy. The choice of whether to go nuclear is BLACK and WHITE. If you believe the Chernobyl Forum document written by 49 experts from 13 countries, including 14 from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, then nuclear power is white, the quantum of risk involved is very low, less than so-called renewables. Nuclear power is WHITE. If you believe the TORCH report, commissioned by the greens and written by two British scientists without any university posting, and with a history of rigid anti-nuclear attitude, then nuclear power is BLACK. (I assume Fairlie & Sumner were commissioned because they couldn't find anyone of status who would give them the answer they knew they wanted.) I have shown my colours. I think we need to go nuclear now, and go fast. But I'm not an expert. I will happily defer to the experts. Why won't the IPCC either say explicitly that they believe either: - 1. Nuclear is the only way to go. OR 2. Nuclear isn't the answer because of other potential environmental problems. My guess is that 95% of the IPCC KNOW the answer AND the answer is NUCLEAR. Why won't they say so??? We need them to say it. If I am wrong and 95% of the IPCC oppose nuclear power, I will accept their judgement. The IPCC needs to say explicitly that GERMANY IS WRONG. At the moment, change can't occur because we are squashed between the ANTI-SCIENCE RIGHT - The UN is involved in a conspiracy about Climate Change, and the ANTI-SCIENCE LEFT - The UN is involved in a conspiracy about Nuclear Power. I think the ANTI-SCIENCE LEFT is the bigger problem in Australia. Much of the above debate about the relative costs of Nuclear & so-called Renewables isn't relevant. If UNSCEAR is correct, then the choice can be determined by the market. If TORCH is correct, then nuclear should be avoided. I suggest we all agree to accept the judgement of the IPCC panel, or in Australia we get the 100 top Climate Change scientists. If there is a 90% consensus in favour of 1 or 2 above, we ALL agree to accept it
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Post by Greg Simpson on Apr 15, 2014 15:26:55 GMT 9.5
I don't think there is that big a consensus, either way. Climate scientists are not experts on how to generate power, and some of them even know that. If you think Amory Lovins has the answers, you'll be against nuclear. If you think Barry Brook does, you'll be in favor of it.
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hank
Gluon
Freefall cartoon (c) Stanley 2013 freefall.purrsia.com
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Post by hank on Apr 20, 2014 2:24:31 GMT 9.5
I asked about factoring in the cost of dealing with total grid loss -- since the risk of that has been reassessed in recent years. It’s looking far more likely than was imagined til recently. www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012JA017706.shtml” Because the likelihood of flares larger than approximately X30 remains empirically unconstrained, we present indirect arguments, based on records of sunspots and on statistical arguments, that solar flares in the past four centuries have likely not substantially exceeded the level of the largest flares observed in the space era, and that there is at most about a 10% chance of a flare larger than about X30 in the next 30 years.” When the risk numbers change, we cope. Here's another example of a different issue associated with grid loss, an interesting study in how engineers and architects can -- quickly -- fix an astonishingly scary design flaw, once it's understood. This is a fascinating comparison. Citicorp's uniquely designed skyscraper, built with an active mass damper, a 400-ton concrete weight, computer controlled, high up -- actively driven, that moves to reduce sway in windstorms. What happens when electric power is lost in a storm? www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_tower_design_flaw_that_could_have_wiped_out_the_skyscraper.html3-part video at the link. Fascinating story. Don't miss the last words, in the third video. "One wonders ...."
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Post by Roger Clifton on Apr 20, 2014 13:33:51 GMT 9.5
EdIreland's solution does seem to deal with the eventuality of total grid loss. Instead of the hypothetical disaster triggering an automatic complete shut down of the reactor, it drops only to its minimum stability wrt Xe135, allowing it to provide its own electricity while dumping excess power - and fission product heat - in its normal cooling system.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Jun 27, 2014 12:32:05 GMT 9.5
cyrilr --- Carrington events are presumed to be rare. How rare? A lead article in EOS, 17 June 2014 P201, titled: "Space Weather From Explosions on the Sun: How Bad Could It Be?" includes: "[Solar particle events follow a steep power law] dropping to below once per millennium for a total particle dose 3 times that of the largest event observed and below once per million years at 10 times this value". That's pretty rare. Nevertheless, any scenario of systemic collapse underlines the assurance implied by passive cooling. Air would be even better than copious water as coolant, as it could never run out. Unless of course, there is a nightmare scenario for that one too. But in that event a broken down power station would be of little concern to the inheritors.
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Post by ColinF on Jul 22, 2014 21:32:27 GMT 9.5
Sorry people, most of what you are talking about is what is wrong with the nuclear debate already. It is based on half truths and emotive position taking. Construction costs are definitely increasing, look at Olkiluoto, $12 Billion and rising, producing how much energy so far? (http://permaculturenews.org/2014/03/06/trouble-olkiluoto-nuclear-plant/) No accurate costing can be made because we simply do not know, but it would not be unreasonable to suggest about $8billion per GW according to those numbers above - and I certainly would not be entertaining anything nuclear from the Russians.
But then, why is there no discussion about lifespan? Has any nuclear plant gone the whole distance of its projected lifespan? How many have been shut down for one reason or another, not including accidents? How many nuclear power stations are actually turning a profit? Has anyone discussed decommissioning costs? The land cannot be rehabilitated, well, not for 25,000 years or so. Isn't that, too, part of the costs?
So what makes anyone think nuclear is a reasonable option?
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 28, 2014 9:55:54 GMT 9.5
ColinF --- Construction costs depend, not being uniform across types or localities. For example, the 4 NPPs being build by the South Koreans in the UAE is on schedule for an all-in cost, including transmission lines and finance charges, of US$4,777/kW. The Magnox NPPs in England have come to the end of useful life and are being decommissioned to greenfield status. On way to keep up with matters nuclear is to follow www.world-nuclear-news.org/every few days.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Jul 28, 2014 19:17:51 GMT 9.5
Magnox NPPs in England ... are being decommissioned to greenfield status. Requiring greenfield status is overkill, punitively excessive. Why should the operator go to great expense to create the illusion of an eternal landscape with a contented cow -- grazing on transported soil that has no memory of any ecology predating Homo sapiens? We are a species that is placing its imprint everywhere on the burdened planet, so why should this site pretend that we were never here? Surely the most appropriate use for a site that once carried an old power station is for it to carry a new power station. After all, it is already at a major node in the grid, it is near to a cooling water supply, it is near to heavy industrial users and it is in a community that has come to accept its presence. Where a concrete building has been so irradiated that its steel reinforcement needs to tick down before being broken free of the concrete that shields it, the building can be used for some other industrial use in the meantime. Walls and floors that still have traces of low level radiation on them only need another layer of plaster or cement to isolate them for the required period. And for that matter, if somewhere inside the security fence there is a old reactor pressure vessel idling in SAFSTOR, it just becomes a tourist attraction for the new management to show off to visitors.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 30, 2014 7:11:27 GMT 9.5
Roger Clifton --- The Magnox decommissioning plans span 85 years.
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