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40 comments on Peak Oil Aware NY Governor?
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40 comments on Peak Oil Aware NY Governor?
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Now, Californians don't want LNG terminals in their backyards. I doubt that all the large wind farms that would be necessary to replace Indian Point would go up without a whole lot of NIMBY fights.
By the way - how many ridge-top wind farms of the sizes appropriate for NY State topography would be needed to replace Indian Point's 850 megawatts?
Anti-nuclear politics is an extremely counterproductive energy policy in a world where CO2 emissions are a problem.
- I seriously under-quoted Indian Point's generation. Indian Point generates 1,970 MW of electricity, not 850.
- I forgot to mention that the large difference in capacity factor between Indian Point (over 90% average) and the ~30% average capacity for wind generation would also need to be accounted for, so more than 1,970 MW of wind farms would be needed to replace the 1,970 MW of reactor capacity.
That's a tall order, Elliott Spitzer!Then again you have a lot more land in the US. (9.6M KM^2 compared to our 0.07M KM^2 - thats 137x the land area)
Marco
- using your numbers, 1970 * 0.9 = 1773 MW = 1478 turbines (@30%) = approx $6.0B
- using UK numbers, 1970 * 0.7 = 1379 MW = 1723 turbines (at 20%) = approx $6.9B
Either way, those are big numbers. And they don't allow for any transmission lines or possible storage required...Nuclear capital costs are $3M to $5M per MW. Or are they $1.7M per MW (EIA)? So, replacing Indian Point nuclear would cost $3.3B to $9.8B. Take your choice.
On an amortized per kw/hr cost, wind is often still more expensive than nuclear even before load leveling capacity.
But shutting down indian point makes no sense at all, considering the capital is allready paid for, even if wind was much cheaper than nuclear.
Where do you get this? Nuclear cost allways includes decomissioning and waste storage.
As opposed to next to a coal plant where you have deliberate release of particulates, heavy metals, and several orders of magnitude more radioisotopes from the coal itself. Or wind farms with the incessant whine of the gearboxes and towers marring the skyline.
Me, I think wind towers are neat but some dont. I'd still take living in the shadow of a nuclear plant any day.
Quality of life near a nuclear plant = probability of an accident X damage from that accident.
As such complex systems with complex feedbacks, failures are inevitable, in the same way we cannot legislate against airline crashes. Or Shuttles blowing up.
The question then is what is the hazard of an accident, and can it be contained? (Chernobyl failed this test, Windscale led to significant radiation release (fire up a stack), TMI led to some radioactive release).
If I have a problem with nuclear power, it is that it requires an ongoing level of complexity and technical competence, and it is very hard to legislate for conditions 50 years from now, let alone 500 (in the case of waste).
nuclear - 8c/ kwhr (long term waste disposal not priced in)
onshore wind 5-9 cents
offshore wind 6-12 cents
(I would stress again that nukes and wind solve different problems. Wind is not baseload power, and nukes are not mid merit and peak power-- in both cases, an ability to export power can increase the size of the sector, but essentially where your nighttime bottom demand is, is the top of your nuclear sector size).
You could undoubtedly find cases of nukes which were cheaper (France) and offshore wind which might be more expensive.
MIT (2003) study of nukes made a case for 6 cents/ kwhr, I believe, but I also think they were way too optimistic on some issues.
Both calculations are incredibly sensitive to the interest rate used.
If you have long runs of reactor units then you might well drop construction costs quite significantly, if not O&M.
The US reactors which were most economic were the smaller versions and where they were then repeated, the same type of unit on the same site.
In that sense, the 3rd Gen 'scale up' to 1650MW/unit worries me. The Finns aren't doing too well at the moment.
Rather than "ridge top" farms why not "off shore" turbines on Lake Ontario?
G.E. has a 1.5MWatt unit that has been used in this area, so ;est say grid input from that was 0.5 megawatts, using your 30% number. You would thus need about 3,900 turbines.
Each turbine has a footprint of about 30 acres, so the farm would cover about 184 square miles, lets say a patch of lake 10 X 20 miles in size
At $1.5M per turbine (WAG) total build cost of say $6 Billion
Assuming 11 cent per kw hour sell price for the power (thats the standard offer contract price from the Ontario utility) the farm will generate about $214,000 of electricity per hour. (3,900 turbines X 500 Kwatt/turbine X $0.11/KWatt)
The capital cost of the plant would then be recovered in about 6,000,000,000 / 214,000 = 28,000 hours = about 3.2 years.
Seems pretty do-able....
Both nukes and wind are high cost solutions. They both only make sense with 1). explicit subsidies (recognised in the Bush Energy Act which places equal subsidies on new nukes and new wind, I believe) 2). reasonably low real interest rates (low risk premium on debt) 3). explicit carbon taxation or tradeable permits.
On 3, one way to look at it is that if we don't have that in 10 years, it is quite unlikely we will need to worry about the 50 year scenario. You might as well plan your power system around it, because if the world doesn't adopt those measures, there isn't a world (that our civilisation can inhabit) at the other end.
I suggested offshore because that seems to be where the highest wind levels are in the New York area, and it might avoid some of the objections from the folks who find them ugly...
I'd be interested in knowing if the cost for nukes mentioned above includes the cost of some "reasonable" method of dealing withe the waste for the next X thousand years...
Yes. Thats how discounting works. You pay the rent (or opportunity cost) on some low value parking lot for the next century one year at a time, and this stuff takes up a surprisingly small amount of space.
You can bet that in a century someone will be popping those things open to get at the spent fuel, because that stuff is valuable. Even if you dont recycle the fuel, theres still about ten million dollars in platinum group metals alone per GW/year.
It's an open question whether you can discount a permanent liability, that goes away in time spans longer than humans have been civilised. It's the same argument about global warming-- is it fair to discount disasters that will happen in 2050, because of our activities now? Why should we value the welfare of future generations less than our current one?
I believe the logic of the 3rd Generation Reactors is that they will create relatively little additional high level radiation waste.
£70bn is the UK (current present value) nuclear waste liability (civilian programme). If you price that across nuclear power, nuclear power doesn't look that attractive, in retrospect.
and we have no permanent waste depository.
No. It depends what in it scares you. If its the plutonium, the average half life is around 25000 years, with the most long lived (and rarest) Pu244 having a half life around 80 million years. It will be a quarter million years before most of it is gone. However, its very unlikely that Pu will be sitting in spent fuel rods for the next 500 years, let alone 25000, as its a valuable nuclear fuel in its own right. Someone is going to cut it out.
If its the Technetium and other long lived isotopes that are scary, those can have half lives in the millions of years.
If its the radioactivity itself you are more nervous about, the radioactivity of the waste decays down to background levels after about 300 years.
The Romans did it with all their damned lead pipes. Chemical industries do that all the time with chemical wastes and no one pays attention to them, and chemical waste stays toxic forever.
Why not?
Sorry, thats not really the goal. If it were, fluid fuel reactors would be on the menu. Instead the goals are better passive safety, economics, and the like. PBMRs actually produce higher volumes of spent fuel than LWRs... the difference is that it can be dry stored immediately instead of waiting several years in a cooling pond.
Dont need one. All the stuff in spent fuel is so valuable that it will all be cracked open for use in 100 years or less.
It was using 6732kWh per capita in 2003 vs.
a US average of 11,997kWh and a top use
in Wyoming of a whopping 26407kWh!
Does anybody know what is special about Wyoming? It seems a bit excessive, yet I don't think it is for residential use.
I don't call these numbers an energy bind but a rather succesful strategy to reduce consumption.
One can say about a few outages in summer whatever one will. They for sure help to conserve.
Source:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/us_percapita_electricity_2003.html
CA is now adding 3GW of renewables to its mix. That is approx. 10% of consumption, I believe.
Yes California has been very clever about energy savings, from the 70s. A combination of high prices (air pollution regulations have made it hard to build coal plants) and tough building codes has offset economic growth and technology adoption.
California is relatively less industrialised than some states, but of course it has a heavy air conditioning load (and spends a lot of energy pumping water).
http://greeneconomics.blogspot.com/2006/09/explaining-declining-us-energy.html
The first you measure in Gigawatts
The second in kilowatt hours
Typically on a per annum basis:
So capacity X Load Factor X 24hrs X 365 days (electricity nerds actually factor in leap years!)
Typical LFs:
wind - 28% (latest UK data, onshore)
Coal - 60-70% (80%+ if running baseload). Coal is the typical mid merit and peak power.
CCGT - anywhere up to 90% (depends on gas price v. pool price, the 'spark spread'). If the CCGT was debt financed and is relatively new (most are) you keep running as long as the net pool price (wholesale) is above the gas fuel price ('positive spark spread').
Hydro - might be 90%+, but droughts have a significant effect on hydro resources (most get their water from melting ice and snow)
nuclear - 80% (some do 90) but as I have argued elsewhere, this may not reflect maintenance events that happen every few years, and take significant downtime. The recent operating experience of many reactors is very good, the industry's historical experience has been dreadful.
A (related) concept is the Capacity Value (Capacity Factor) the grid operator will give you for capacity. In the UK at least this is 20% for wind, I think about 70% for nuclear (lots of unplanned maintenance shutdowns), and 90% for CCGT.