282 comments on NY Times Energy Series: Nuclear
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282 comments on NY Times Energy Series: Nuclear
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I am optimistic about the increased safety and cleanliness of modern nuclear fission reactors, as well as the potential for recycling of nuclear materials - I'm also hopeful that we'll have fusion reactors one day, or some other as-yet undreamed of energy source.
But even for the nuclear reactors we could start building now, as you rightly say, it will take years and years before they'll be up and running. And it sounds like the people who would have to invest in their construction are still apprehensive at even starting to build any.
Which brings us back to conservation and cleaning up our existing energy sources. I don't think there's anything else to be done.
And none of this touches on cars unless/until they shift to electric (batteries) or hydrogen (fuel cells) so we can just use our existing local power plants to fuel them. Until then, they need oil, so redesigning our cities and towns and reducing our car use is the only thing to be done.
Am I right? What am I missing?
Damek,
I don't think your far off, but at this moment, "non car" energy is not yet really in crisis, except in certain localities, and due to the greenhouse gas concern, much more than the "fuel supply" problem. It is "liquid fuel" problems, i.e., the car fuel problem that is most pressing.
Please check out some of the posts and links on down this thread on DG (Distributed Generation), it is an area in which we have not even began to scratch the surface of possible advances, incorporating "smart" grids, 'mini" grids, semi autonomous and part time stand alone power, energy storage on small flexible systems that can be used for power shaving, power smoothing, and streamlining the grid system to reduce line loss, incorporate renewables in various scales, use flywheel storage, ultra capacitors, thermal storage through cryogenics and ground coupled geothermal heatpumps, electrified transportation by hybrid and electric car and light rail and Personal Transport Rail, the list goes on and on.
Right now, for the planners and investors "in the know" of what is really going on technically, they are rightfully frightened of sinking billions into concentrated expensive nuclear. About the time, a decade or two away, when they finally get them built and running (as you rightfully point out it will take years and years), they look up and there is no market for expensive, centralized only semi-reliable power from a single massive source (remember, one major storm, or an equipment failure at one giant reactor and you could still be in the dark, completely reliant on ONE single utility and it's nuclear priesthood to maintain your lifestyle.)
Nuclear will just be so passe', it will seem so primitive! :-(
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
There is plenty of fuel to support a distributed generation model particularly if we de-couple and re-couple cooling, heating and lighting from electrical generation.
We decouple by using solar thermal, geothermal and daylight harvesting strategies and we loosely couple by using waste heat for heating and cooling (which moves efficiencies from 30% for small turbines to 80-90%)and thermal (ice) storage and pumped storage to take advantge of excess nightime capacity of large, centralized plants. In addition, as we re-design communities to be pedestrian-friendly we can create heating and cooling districts (heating & cooling are 50% of the load) that are substantially more cost-effective and efficient to operate than stand-alone HVAC systems.
Time-of-day net metering and breakthrus in thin-film PV (see Nanosolar) are the icing on the vake.
That is SOP in Sweden and it do anyway only add up to a few percent of the electricity production. In 2004 47.8 TWh of heat and 6.1 TWh of electricity were produced out of a total of 148.8 TWh electricity produced.
I think the district heating could about double and all of the electricity production potential is not used, 6.1 TWh could probably become 24 TWh in a very optimistic scenario.
We alost got biomass comming out of our ears, lots of hydro power but still need nuclear power. At least while we still have a lot of heavy industry making paper, steel, etc for quite a lot of people.
Energy markets are not homogeneous. In the US many older markets use NG for heating so the electric impact of districts is much smaller (though increased cooling demands are driving electric demands).
In the cooling-dominated climes of the sunbelt (e.g. Florida) heating and cooling is met predominately by electricity. And cooling represents 60-70% of peak demand.