442 comments on The Future is Solar
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This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all.
I'll take "the world doesn't go at all" for $800, Alex.
It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today. You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
Solar and other renwables are our only future but only for a very reduced stable population size. Regardless of how much energy we can produce there are is only so much space, water, air and soil. No matter how clever we are in providing for our energy we still have a very bumpy road ahead as we reduce our population levels.
Another thing I wonder about is when do we pass the point with technology that the majority of the population is required just to service the technology for an ever decreasing number of individuals who can afford not to be concerned about it breaking down.
This is just ridiculous - the projected population of 9 odd billion people in 2050 will be perfectly capable of living prosperously once our energy and industrial production systems have been reconfigured.
Solar and wind aren't the only large scale clean energy options - there is a lot of power to be captured from ocean (tidal and wave) and geothermal sources as well.
Big Gav,
Didn't know you were back from hibernation.
Some solidly good new posts on your web site:
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/
p.s. IMHO, the movie, Children of Men is a religious piece, it was initially released last Christmas
p.p.s. How do you have time for doing all that research and posting?
Big Gav was very kind in the early days of The Oil Drum...hell of a thinker and aggregator that guy.
Thanks guys - glad you still find time to keep track of what I'm up to.
I'm slowly re-emerging from hibernation, though I may take a week or two off this month to write a long post I promised the Alpha Male Chimp Who Can't Drive a long time ago...
As far as time taken to write my stuff goes, I usually find 2 hours a day is sufficient. Basically I don't watch much TV, so that is usually possible most evenings.
I find it takes 2 hours for me just to read through the flame wars in a single TOD post, and then I find myself to be just like other humans and reptiles, merely having wasted another day without preparing for the coming apocalypse. :-)
Well - when I'm posting regularly I rarely have time to read through comments (at TOD or elsewhere) which is why I rarely comment here myself.
I certainly waste more time on the blog than I should - I've got lots of real world things to do as well, although I've decided its best to work towards avoiding the coming collapse of civilisation :-)
I should note some of my larger or more complex posts take a lot longer than 2 hours - something like "The Shockwave Rider" or "Bright Green Buildings and Dark Green Buildings" can take months to slowly assemble. Then some minion of big brother goes and bans it (The Shockwave Rider) anyway without even telling me which bit is annoying...
The idea that Children Of Men is a religious movie is an interesting one - I hadn't noticed it was a Christmas release, but given the prime spot occupied by the baby in the movie that makes a lot of sense...
Well, probably not. I've been putting together the numbers on all the options, and tidal, wave, and geothermal are pretty limited -- see this on tides and geothermal, and the links there to previous summaries of hydro, solar, fission, etc. options.
Basically the only large scale options (more than 10 times present world energy use in total renewable resource - of which we could only ever harness a few percent globally, or hundreds of millions of years worth of non-renewables) are:
* "water" - hydro + if we could somehow capture the latent heat energy associated with water vapor in the atmosphere, total about 3000 times present use
* solar - total about 13,000 times world use, or more if we go off-planet
* fusion - about 150 billion years of present world energy use from D+D fusion
* fission - about 600 million years of present world energy use from U-235.
bah humbug. If we're all going to die, why are you wasting the last few years blogging?
I can buy enough solar panels to make my power bill prettymuch go away for roughly $30K. That's <5% of what we have invested in the house. Obviously that's a net metering system (no batteries) so we do have to solve the storage problem for night/cloudy days, but we'll find a way and it won't take 100 years for it to happen. $100/bbl+ oil will concentrate a lot of minds over the next decade or 2.
Just curious. Are you? Installing panels, that is.
maybe next year. I'd prefer a windmill and want to get a small wind gauge to collect data for a year first.
we pay 30-35 cts/kwhr here.
May I suggest a mix, PV and small wind, if the economics of the two are close. Especially true if you plan to add batteries and develop off-grid capability.
Best Hopes for Renewable Energy,
Alan
30-35 cents a kilowatt hour? Where's that, an oil platform in the north sea? Sun+Windmill have synergy. Most places, it is either sunny and clear, or cloudy and windy.
You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
And the driving force for Hydro is?
What was the initial energy input for coal and oil?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today.
One of them you will not discuss the failure modes of, and the other you love brining up as having a 'costly' failure mode.
Hi gr,
Yes, exactly.
"It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?"
So, then what do you suggest? Who does what? (Say, for eg., now, us.)
Yeah yeah yeah. I want my MTV too.
May I suggest you (1) look at your state program for solar energy. If you don't have a solar energy program in your state or country, jump to step (4). (2) Do a financial analysis of the payback, ROI, or other metric including incentives and tax credits and deductions. (3) Contact your local solar installer and get a bid, or dial-800-SunEdison (or whoever), and find out what price you would pay per kWh-per term and repeat step (2). (4) Write your State and National representatives requesting a meeting, in which you want to discuss what they are doing to accelerate solar energy use and cost reduction.
If this doesn't work, please let me know. I would be happy to help see that someone gets solar on your property.
It takes a vill...oh forget it.
Hi John,
Thanks, and I'm not good w. sarcasm, so I'm (possibly) missing some of this (anyway, I'm not a TV person, so...?) I was just kind of wondering if he/she had ideas for conversion on a larger scale. Anyway, point well taken, otherwise.
That always seems the last step: write your reps. Why not kiss their asses too? Will it work better or less well?
There are a number of good ideas down thread. Those will go nowhere if we think they must pass the gate of our so-called representatives - because they really represent the likes of Raytheon and General Dynamics.
The system is too ossified. It has to be broken apart to increase reslience and diversity - let 10 thousand flowers bloom because the culling will be terrible. Raytheon and General Dynamics will be of no help. How do we build a photovoltaic factory in Maine with Maine capital and Maine workers that cannot be sold out?
The corruption at the state level - at least here in Maine - is just as bad as at the federal level if not at the same dollar scale. Who gets to privatize the state pier? The Governor's brother or Maine's dear ex-Senator George Mitchell?
Point is, our (mis)reps won't help. If they could, they wouldn't be (mis)reps. It's structural.
Maine's PV program is a tax credit. We end up with rich people getting tax credits for PV systems while everyone else is stuck. It would be a mistake to think that was "broken". No, that is the way the legislature wanted it; it's all about class, who wins and who pays.
cfm in Gray, ME
cfm - Sounds pretty bad up there from what you're saying.
But your rebate up to $7,000 for a 3 kW system is not chump change, and you have a pretty good loan program: $15,000 at an interest rate as low as 1% to homeowners with incomes up to 115 percent of the area median income.
You can't sneeze at the time value of money, and maybe more than the rich people, or at least those earning less than 115% of the area average, can install solar in Maine.
BTW, please feel free to post the letters you've written to your representatives, so we can out them right here for no actions taken. Who knows, maybe they won't get re-elected.
waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,
Contributors here at TOD have already demonstrated that once a new energy source is practical that it takes about 50 years to get to about 10% of the energy capacity of a society and then another 50 years to get to the 50% mark. We don't have 100 years. This is why we cannot wait for the market to react. This is not business as usual but a serious crisis.
It's also why I mention nuclear. I don't particularly like nuclear because it does have its issues but as Dezakin noted, it has an installed base that can (at least theoretically) also be rapidly expanded. What we need to be doing is expanding the four categories I mentioned before with probably the least emphasis on hydro. Personally, and while it is not what I really want, I end up envisioning a future (if we can even get there) that has a nuclear baseline generating capacity heavily supplemented for peak by solar and wind.
I'm still a doomer because I don't see this occurring at a pace that I think is adequate. In fact it's not really happening at all yet. I hope I am wrong but I don't think I am at least so far. 2007 is already showing declines and most of the peak oil crowd were not counting on real decline to start til after 2010. Is 2007 an aberration? Let's hope so because if it is not and we are on the downslope right now and it is already above 2% decline rate then 10 years out may be true hell if we aren't preparing right this minute.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
The other elephant in the room is that many high grade metallic ores are showing signs of peak.
So even if we're smart enough to take the road electric, eventually society will still have to grapple with the question " what types of devices are worthy of manufacture?".
Somehow HDTVs and IPods don't fit that criteria IMO.
IPods or even better miniture generic computers are an exellent use of resources in utility and hapiness generated per kg raw material or kWh. And the innards can be built to last for decades wich of course only is usefull if the technology plateus or lots of people becomme poor.
Large displays such as HDTV:s are also usefull, especially if they are long lasting.
Voice and data communication is only slightly less important then water, food and shelter since they make all kinds of efforts easier and gives access to culture.
Reading you I could figure out that hey everything is important.
...
GZ - agreed about the crisis (but drop the redundent serious). Can you point me to the contributors or sources at TOD about adoption rates of energy technology? ASAHP if you can.
Dennis Meadows relates energy return to rate of transition here (slide 31).
http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/aspo5presentations/Meadows_ASPO...
He also gives some scope to the current infrastructure size that will need replacement.
It's best to just drink the water.
gTrout - thanks but did you look at the viewgraphs??? Do you know WTF you're talking about?
Consider seriously either a large shot of Russian Vodka. or
plain old peristoika and cheers.
I think some of the animated slides were destroyed in the PDF conversion. But page 31 was clear text.
Here is the basic idea:
Say you have a nuke plant that will provide power for 40 years with an Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) of 10. So that means it takes 4 years of nuke output to provide enough energy to build a new nuke.
If you reinvest all energy produced from each nuke, there is exponential growth. But it is limited to 10 new plants from each plant built. If you try to build faster, then society must pay in energy and your nuke plants are a power sink.
This means the exponential growth is strongly limited by EROI.
Just a quick spreadsheet example. If you assume all energy is reinvested, and the nukes are constructed instantly once enough energy surplus is availiable, then you get these results
EROI of 5 gives 11 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 10 gives 70 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 20 gives 2216 total nukes in 20 years.
Cleaveland gives nukes an EROI of less than 5. Meadows says 10 or less. Odum is 4. Those are the middle of the road answers.
You can see why EROI 100 oil and coal was so wonderful for growth. The last value would end up getting constrained in growth rate by slower building or materials shortages, etc. And these rates are just break even. Society gets no power from this scenario. If you bleed off energy for the rest of us, the growth rate is lowered. And you can get a big jump on growth by taxing other energy sources, hence the nuke buildout in the 60-70's when energy was cheap.
gTrout - my apologizes. The presentation material is excellent and your EROI comments are pretty interesting. Boy was I off the mark.
No problem. The EROI to growth concept needed the example to make any sense. I will polish it up this weekend with a more complete model.
The transition to wood, coal, and oil were all aided by high EROI sources. Those allowed baby sized industries to grow into monsters in just a few years. That energy surplus meant they had tons of energy (money) to reinvest in better ways of doing things.
Nukes, solar, and wind all started with negative EROI values. They had to claw up to the current positive numbers. If you start out negative, it is hard to have profits to reinvest in growth and research.
Now we just need some serious belt tightning to free up investment capital to put into those technologies.
Personally I would like to see a cartel with monopoly power on coal be formed and push the price up. And a windfall profits tax be passed on all fossil fuel profits. Those funds could only be put into renewable energy investments.
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
Meadows can't even do his arithmetic right. 1000 MW/day over 50 years is more than 18 TW, not 10 TW. If he can't even multiply simple numbers correctly, how can his EROI figures be trustworthy? And he doesn't back his assumption of 10:1 EROI with anything.
I've calculated simple EROIs for parts of nuke plants. For instance, the concrete can be "paid off" in mere hours of full-power operation. I'd trust Dezakin; Meadows is just pulling numbers out of his butt.
Per my understanding, much of the concrete in modern nuke plants has to be alumina based, which is much higher energy value than regular concrete.
Alan
Say what?
This just doesnt make much sense... Not all parts of a nuclear power plant are the same. There are parts that require type V cement (low alumina) for sulphate resistance because of cooling water interaction and then there are parts where just structural strength is important, such as the containment dome, which can be any old cement.
I can't imagine embodied energy for the different types of cement is not an order of magnitude different, or close to the energy required for steel manufacture.
His argument may be a little circular, but he does go into this two pages on. You don't get the full rated capacity if you are counting what it takes to build and run the plant. But, with a growth projection, this is already happening in the numbers on which the projection is based so it seems to me that either you reduce the size of the "energy gap" to an effective size or you say what part of the projected growth is servicing energy production.
Another way to look at it is you don't get to keep the ones from the first ten years (40 year lifetime) though you need them to get the later ones, and the ones from the last 13 years don't count because of payback so you've got 50-10-13=28 years clear giving 10 TW effective capacity. To me the last -13 is the problem because you are grubbing in the dirt now for ore and you'll be gubbing then as well, though at that rate of burn, you'll be grubbing for some very low quality ore.
Cheers,
Chris
The whole 13-year figure is based on compounding of very iffy assumptions. If he doesn't have any error bars or sensitivity analysis, I'd say his PDF isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
And none of them are remotely based in reality.
Cite their methods and we'll compare notes... again.
Most of the papers are not on line. To chase back the sources I will need to spend a day or two in the campus stacks and I have not had time.
Till then I find these sources credible. Odum and Cleveland helped define the field. They have more experience at this than almost anyone. And I like the fact they agree in value (of course, they could be siting the same sources).
I have not found a "review" paper (published in a reputable journal) similar to this one on wind EROI. Maybe Nate has seen one. If you spot one, please post it.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/17/18478/085
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
It sort of demonstrates the unreliability of Cleveland; He just started obsessing about potential subsidies of variable cost (insurance indemnification.) If he wants to play funny numbers with accounting, fine, but then he gets into what might as well be as testable as philosophy.
There isn't any way nuclear power has a lower energy return on wind on the plant alone simply because the construction costs are easily calculable in terms of steel, concrete and the like... roughly five to ten times as much for wind. If Cleveland somehow claims nuclear has an energy return below five, then wind doesnt have any energy return at all if we ignore fuel costs...
Which I suspect where his argument lies. Throw in fuel, and you can either use the Storm Smith approach or the Vattenfall analysis. Guess which one has credibility.
Wind power doesn't require enriched uranium. From the font of all knowledge, the wikipedia:
Modern gaseous diffusion plants typically require 2,400 to 2,500 kilowatt-hours (8,600 to 9,000 megajoules or 9 gigajoules) of electricity per SWU while gas centrifuge plants require just 50 to 60 kilowatt-hours (180 to 220 MJ) of electricity per SWU.
Example:
A large nuclear power station with a net electrical capacity of 1300 MW requires about 25,000 kg of LEU annually with a 235U concentration of 3.75%. This quantity is produced from about 210,000 kg of NU using about 120,000 SWU. An enrichment plant with a capacity of 1000 kSWU/yr is, therefore, able to enrich the uranium needed to fuel about eight large nuclear power stations
Neither the United States nor France actually has any gas centrifugal enrichment so I'll go with the 2,500 kWh per SWU. I think the Iranians cornerred the market on centifuges. 120,000 SWUs is 3*10^8 kWh. There is 8760 hours in the year and I'll assume the nuke is online 90% of the time or 8000 hours. So thats 1.04*10^10 kWhs.
So that limits the EROI to no better than 30 and gas centrifuges are a game changer. I guess I wound up proving nothing, oh well. That's science.
Why? Nearly 60% of the global enrichment is centrifuge, and in the US and France diffusion plants are being replaced by centrifuge enrichment.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip33.htm
Say what? I dont recall them having anywhere near the required infrastructure to compete with Russia in SWU per year.
Sorry, I'm confused. I don't see how it is possible to include fuel costs for wind? Maintenance yes, consumables (hydraulic fluid?) yes, decommissioning yes, but not fuel.
You probably misread the argument; Its just that nuclear power plants require 1/5th to 1/10th the embodied energy of wind turbines while lasting two to three times as long. If one is going to suggest that nuclear has a lower energy return than wind, you have to place your argument in the fuel cycle; Which has been demonstrated many times to be overwhelmingly positive.
How do you figure? The carbon footprint for nuclear is between 30 and 170 g/kWh which does not bode well for a high EROEI. Looks like it would come in around 10 or so. Where is the demonstration, or does 10 sound about right to you?
My own thinking is that once we transmute the daughter elements to stable isotopes, we end up with ERORI much less than one. I think that the question of what to do with the waste has not been adequately addressed.
From the very political link:
Garbage in, garbage out. I thought that was where it was going, and its not like we haven't been here before. The Storm/Smith data has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a nice steaming pile, with the most obvious gamebreaker that they absolutely depend on gasseous diffusion for their numbers, before you start disecting the multitude of less obvious lies relating to plant construction and mining techniques.
Why would we bother? Almost all spent fuel decays to stable isotopes after 300 years anyways, except the transuranics which can be burned as fuel. This doesn't impose extra energy cost.
Is there a solid reference then on ERORI for nuclear power that covers the full life cycle? It seems clear that electricity is not too cheap to meter so there must be some accepted value that accounts at least for the running of the plants. Is this the study you are criticising? I've only just looked at it and I don't see the enrichment method as being the main cost they cite. They seem to find that the system goes below EROEI=1 for low quality ores and the quality of the ore has nothing to do with the method of enrichment. I haven't read it closely yet.
I don't know if you've ever gone hiking. If you have, you might be familiar with the saying "Pack out your trash." With long lived radioisotopes, you've got to do a bit more and retrun them to a stable state. I doubt very much that reprocessing really is going to do much for us given the energy cost of cleaning up the rest of the mess.
Certainly. Its been a topic here before.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
Its the most glaringly obvious; When you insist on using gasseous diffusion enrichment because its some 50 times more energy intensive per SWU than gas centrifuge techniques, its a major red flag. The University of Melbourne in their assessment of nuclear power lifecycle costs dissected this spread 'study' in more detail if you are curious.
It would be nice if they actually measured the energy costs, as the University of Melbourne study did, rather than operate from theoretical models where they can dictate how they would prefer reality ought to behave.
From the Rossing mine study:
And this is from the lowest grade ore mined today, of 300ppm.
The best argument I've heard was of the acid insolubility of different mineral bodies impeding uranium reclaimation from different ore bodies, but given how widespread uranium is allready, I somewhat doubt this is a problem we'll even bother trying to solve in the next several centuries.
Sorry, there is no energy cost for sealing up spent fuel in concrete, which really is all thats necissary. I'm not sure what other energy costs you're alluding to. Maybe using nitric acid reprocessing plants, but its not like we dont know how to use pyrometalurgical techniques now, or even have to bother doing any reprocessing at all. All the spent fuel generated in history would fill up an average sized parking lot.
All the spent fuel generated in history would fill up an average sized parking lot.
Best Hopes for no earthquake close to this "parking lot"...
Why? Spent fuel casks are big, stable lumps of concrete with low centers of gravity. You could rock them all day without anything happening to them.
I've mostly looked to TOD for expertise on oil so I'm not up on discussions about nuclear power here. Perhaps it is not the best thing to rehash that now. My own sense is that the limit of using nuclear power responsibly implies EROEI less than 1 owing to the need to deal with the waste. There are no accepted solutions to this problem because 1) low energy solutions cannot be engineered for the required timescales and 2) it is not apparent where the energy would come from for high energy solutions that do provide safe disposal. Because the cost curve for solar, in particular, is so favorable, number 2 may be solving itself, and we can think of nuclear power, along with fossil fuel energy, as a stepping stone a technology in the manner discussed by Bucky Fuller.
There is no doubt that allowing waste to cool for several hudred years is going to be a part of the solution. There are some interesting developments in transmutation research in the field of low energy nuclear reactions and in cryrogenically induced shortening of the half-life, but it would be more than premature to estimate the effect of these, if any, on EROEI.
So far as I can tell, the dolar cost of nuclear power is only going up and increasing it's share of the power supply only increases it's per kWh dollar cost. A large increase also has a secondary effect of depleting economically recoverable reserves of uranium prior to the end of the plant lifetimes, ensuring even higher costs. This is just the oposite of how renewable energy behaves. Owing to industrial scale advantages not yet taken, renewables come down in cost as they become a larger fraction of the energy mix. Thus, the points made in the series of rebuttals about the future efficiency of nuclear power may, thankfully, be moot.
I was interested in the proposed solution to the discrepancy in plant construction energy, that highly skilled labor might account for the offset. If so, this suggests that training times would limit deployment of nuclear power on much larger scales in timeframes relevant to peak oil. Don't know if this is actually the reason for the disagreement and the level of ad hominum on both sides in the various rebuttals makes me think that it will be hard for them to come to agreement any time soon. But, who knows? The call for greater transparency seems like common ground, while the nuclear industry seems more and more inclined to cover things up. Perhaps no reliable estimate can be made until that issue is resolved.
I do think that the spent fuel fills cooling ponds rather than parking lots, or at least I hope so. There are heat management and safety issues involved in concentrating the waste too tightly.
You realize that this waste isn't the one ring of Sauron; After several hundred years its much more benign than most mercury compounds, which are toxic forever. We dont have plans for geologic repositories of mercury. This is mostly based on nuclear exceptionalism and ignorance.
While I don't favor 'high energy solutions' to waste management, because there is no urgency to destroy the waste (what happens if we dont destroy it? nothing) as long as you have a neutron surplus in a fast reactor you can destroy long lived radioisotopes and burn transuranic actinides. This has been demonstrated several times before, though not as economically competitive; Its clearly energetically positive however.
Please, why bother? We arent short of space or time. We are only talking about several thousand tons here, not exactly a huge amount.
Nuclear power competiveness is nearly entirely wrapped up in capital costs, construction schedules, and interest rates. Fuel simply isn't an issue over long periods. We've had a spike in fuel costs that not even touched the end price of nuclear power.
Er, on what do you base this?
Sure, it spends several years in a cooling pond, then gets sealed in a storage cask for dry storage depending on location.
Hummm, you may not be aware of the chemical toxicity of some nuclear waste. However, it needs disposal because it is radioactive. This is a characteristic of nuclear waste, not really an exception.
Being economically competitive is a little irrelevent since breeders are not legal in the US.
Your estimate of the waste mass seems a little low but you'll note, I think, that it is somewhat proportional to the power so far produced. Disposal will thus be proportional. If it takes more energy to dispose of properly than has been produced, their will be a question of where the energy comes from.
I would say that we are still exploiting "easy" resources. There is a point, where mining becomes nolonger economically viable. That point is usually estimated to be in about 85 years at the current rate of use. Magic, like seawater, is only that. Even the number 85 years assumes some introduction of breeders if there is any growth in output, and, these are not legal in the US.
Secrecy in the nuclear industry is on the rise in the US. Last year there was a public NRC licensing meeting for a Tennessee processing plant that had to shut down for about 7 months because of a 35 liter spill of highly enriched uranium solution. This nearly caused a criticality incident. The public meeting was not attended because it was kept secret. Many documents needed to assess the safety of reactors are no longer available to the public. As the incident last year suggests, secrecy is being used not for enhanced security but rather to cover up gross incompetence. Going forward, it looks as though neither the nuclear industry, nor the NRC will be reliable sources of information.
It's also a characteristic of bananas, and yet people actually try to increase their intake of dangerously radioactive potassium in bananas.
Mercury componds need disposal also, yet not much fretting in the public mind about mercury compounds despite being much more dangerous to public health. Whats important is the stability of the waste. Gooey gunk that can migrate around the environment is bad; Oxide spent fuel sealed in concrete isn't.
Bullshit makes the flowers grow, one by one, row by row.
Why do you think it takes so much energy to seal spent fuel in concrete and steel dry storage casks?
Try again.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
This isn't an indication that secrecy in the nuclear industry is 'on the rise.' Its an anecdote, and one that was reported eventually anyways. A criticality incident didn't occur, and there wasn't any reason to report it. We don't hear about every time a chemical company cleans up a mercury spill in house.
Not sure about that, but blame that on the 'war on terrar' paranoia more than industrial conspiracy theories.
I've looked a little closer at the web site you've been referring to. I find it's treatment of solar power to be deceptive. Why, for example, do they not state the amount of solar power expected in 2040 based on their assumed growth rate? Why do they appear to apply an efficiency twice? If this is an industry related site, it is not too suprising that they may be a bit optimistic for their power source and less glowing about another, yet, for nuclear power, which takes a great deal of planning, what is happening in 2040 is very important since this would be halfway through the lifetime of a plant proposed now.
I think you should take what they say with a grain or two of salt. Overstatement of resources is typical for industry aligned entities. That, after all, is the main issue that TOD addresses.
I'm not so sure that an uncotrolled accumulation point is something that would cause death and destruction in the case of a mercury spill. Your analogy seems a little strained. In any case, the nuclear industry has a pretty poor safety record. What is changing is that we will not be informed of problems and so not be able to react to patterns of incompetence, poor design or deferred maintenance. The NRC has sought to boost confidence in the job they are doing by being candid and forthcoming about problems with the industry. Their new tack can only harm the industry in the long run by promoting a sense of laxity that will lead to fatalities. It won't take much to end the lease on remaining design lifetime that the industry managed to salvage after TMI.
Could you please cite the link and quote, and how thats relevant to nuclear power production? I don't know what you're talking about. If solar power somehow becomes more competitive than nuclear, that's wonderful, but entirely unrelated to observed competitiveness of nuclear power today, or the resource base for the future.
It was done by several at the University of Melbourne, not exactly closely affiliated with the industry as far as I know.
Indeed, which is why their study merited several guest posts here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2323
Its exactly the same, except mercury doesnt become less toxic over time, and most mercury compounds migrate much more readily than most spent fuel radioisotopes. You can stabilize it as mercury sulfide just as you can stabilize spent fuel fission fragments as glass...
Do you want to try that again?
Injury/death per gigawatt hour maybe?
Consider that dam failures have killed thousands overnight... several times.
Let's take this up again if nuclear power comes up again on TOD. You may want to study how sustained or runaway nuclear reactions work before then though. You're thoughts on the mercury analogy make very little sense.
Here is the link you requested.
The bottom line is that the past quarter century was well and truly squandered. The investments we needed for the future were not made so that the elites could rake in more money to spend on multi-McMansions & other goodies. We're all going to bitterly regret that.
Even such simple things as good insulation for McMansions would have made a substantial difference. But after construction, it is prohibitively expensive to retrofit it in most cases.
Even such simple things as good insulation for McMansions would have made a substantial difference.
And it does not happen because that insulation makes for more expensive up front construction.
But it makes the home owners less sensitive to fuel costs and thus more credit worthy. Thus the banks can lend more money.
Banks in Sweden are usually willing to finance conversions from oil heating or direct resistive electric heating to firewood, pellet or ground/sea source heat pumps. I figured that this makes sense since the saved heating oil or electricity cost enables the home owner to pay the interest and amortize and the house and thus lone security increase in value making it a low risk loan.
Perhaps loans to uprate macmansons makes sense after folding and writing of the building loan?
The substandard insulation (and leaky construction, and windows with summer sun blazing through them without shades, etc.) should have been prohibited outright as non-compliant to building codes.
A building which is almost entirely self-heated in winter, stays cool in summer, and is resistant to most water and weather damage is "future proof". Investments in such buildings are worthwhile. Buildings which can become unusable due to water/weather damage or the expense of keeping them habitable are the civil engineering equivalent of mayflies.
The primary article was Luís de Sousa's Marchetti's Curves but I believe it's also been referenced before. TOD has a lot of material these days.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Thanks GZ.
Well, I have an idea. That 50 years figure is standard industry making energy available. And it may be quite right. But solar can be different. I'd compare it more with computers. We'll only need the equivalent of Apple Mac ][, Windows 95 or anyother mainstream catchers for normal people to see that the power they can harvest by themselves could be staggering.
The thinking process here would be to leave energy companies on producing solar cells and leave energy deployment and investment to private (normal people) entrepeneurs. Think of the power of wikipedia compared to any other "pedia" made by specialists. That's what I'm talking about. It could seem to be too late now, but remember, wikipedia is 3-4 years old. And its as mainstream as it gets. These things, when well structured, grow incredibly fast.
But as the internet required the government to push it to an incredible system, so will solar and other energy systems need a wide system that will solve the "net-metering" problem annunciated here. There are some private interesting projects on that, but it should be more mainstream.
I like your thoughts LuisDias.
I wish to write an article about the large-scale transformation of the US industrial and manufacturing base in the late '30s through WWII. I already have a bunch of data on production rates of various armaments - planes -tanks - soldier's uniforms...boots.
While not all that comfortable with a comparison to a wartime setting, annual production rates exceeding 1000% of large manufactured goods (ie aircraft) suggests to me the possible.
Now I know many will say that was built out on cheap energy and I agree, but importantly it was built on out on shared sacrifice.
Fire when ready.