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53 comments on Liberal markets create an addiction to gas - the Oil Drum in the Financial Times
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53 comments on Liberal markets create an addiction to gas - the Oil Drum in the Financial Times
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60% nuclear in the US would be about 240 new reactors
(I am assuming that the existing 84 are replaced by larger reactors, and these 240 'Generation 3' reactors would account for both the replacement, and the increase in the total electricity market)
The cost of this would be on the order of $600bn- 1 trillion.
It's very uneconomic to build nukes above baseload, because you wind up giving power away for free-- a problem with any energy system with high fixed cost operators. Baseload is typically about 40% of peak load, I believe.
Somewhere the US would have to find 60 or so new or existing sites to put those reactors on. And deal with all the local issues that raised , and the anti-terrorism issues.
In addition, the financial market has made it clear it will not finance new nukes without government subsidy. The level of subsidy would be very large. And of course the nuclear waste disposal situation remains unresolved (I think we can safely say it will not be Mt. Yucca, Nevada!).
Finally without a carbon tax, you wouldn't do it. You would build coal fired stations. Far cheaper to build, far lower risk. Global warming is a myth, ain't it? A conspiracy by scientists ;-).
I think if you had a decent carbon tax, at about the level ($100/tonne or $28/tonne of CO2) that triggers entry of carbon capture and storage technology, and mass wind power, and CHP and even solar, then nuclear has a role to play. I suspect around 20% of US total supply. Wind would easily be another 20% in that scenario, coupled with fuel cells, even more.
the likely source of hydrogen for the foreseeable future is coal: streaming the H2 off the gasifier step of an Integrated Gasified Combined Cycle (IGCC)-- this is what the FutureGen project is meant to do.
"The cost of this would be on the order of $600bn- 1 trillion."
For the US, this kind of thing is doable - think of it as $100bn/year for 15 years (expecting cost overruns) - about the same annual cost (and possibly duration) as the Iraq war - without dipping into the general defense fund. Now if I could tell you how to make it politically possible.....
It doesn't seem like we have much of a choice on the matter. Wind and Solar are even harder to balance, and without dramatic over investment, are unlikely to make up more then 10-15% of our energy needs each. Not only that, but for wind, we would have to build over 1.2 TWh of maximum capacity just to get our 40% base load on average. How much would it cost to produce that many wind turbines? I bet is significantly higher then your $600 billion to $1 trillion figure. Not only that, but the infrastructure would have to be completely retooled to allow those setups. You would have to construct massive storage facilities. With the N/H setup, you would only need some large tanks on site that are then used in hydrogen gas power plants. I bet you would end up SAVING a lot of money this way, most likely far more then the cost of all those nuclear power plants themselves.
And as you said, the obvious way to make such a scheme plausible and economical to do is to have a carbon tax. At which point, its way more profitable to simply create hydrogen via electrolysis's then it is to burn coal plants on standby as it a current common practice. I think you are underestimating the nuclear industry. This year, we are going to have dozens of new plant applications, especially on the west coast thanks to California's recent law that requires out of state electricity to come from clean sources.
Lastly, the problem with nuclear waste storage is grossly over-exaggerated. Many environmental and coal lobbying groups have made a far larger issue out of nuclear waste storage then it actually is. Over the lifetime of a nuclear plant, 97% of the uranium used can be reprocessed for use in other plants. Effectively, we're talking about a few tons of 'waste' from each nuclear plant over the course of 30-40 years. I'm sure you have probably noticed that France does not seem to have any kind of problem with their nuclear waste management.
On wind, please read this: No technical limitation to wind powerpenetration
There's more discussion in that thread of what the cost of that wind capacity would be, including the needed backup capacity, and it's quite low.