The Fort Collins Dilemma
Posted by Big Gav on December 2, 2007 - 6:39pm
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: colorado, energy, fort collins, nuclear, solar power [list all tags]
Shannon Arvizu at Triple Pundit has an article on the dilemma facing the good citizens of Fort Collins in Colorado (and home of Colorado State University--note the advert in the sidebar)- choosing solar or nuclear power.
The New York Times reported today an intriguing article on what's happening in Fort Collins, Colorado - a city that prides itself on being a bastion of green living. The town's motto, "Where renewal is a way of life," is more than just a metaphor. The city is heavily involved in promoting carbon-free energy production. They currently have two proposals on the table - an innovative solar panel production plant and a uranium mining project for nuclear power. Although the energy that wil be generated from each project will be carbon-free, the processes of production and/or extraction each have their own environmental hazards. Should the town support nuclear, solar, or both? And what about the NIMBY factor? Should the town expose itself to possible health hazards for the sake of local job creation and global carbon-free energy production?
This case is an interesting example of the type of decisions that those of us in the sustainable business field have to consider. At first, it may seem like a no-brainer. Fort Collins should support the solar panel production and veto the uranium mining. But, the type of solar panel production that they are considering necessitates the use of cadmium, which could enter the waterways and is linked to cancer. In addition, the amount of clean energy that could be produced from the panels is probably not as much the amount that could be generated from the uranium. Mining uranium, however, has its own host of problems. The plan involves using "in-situ mining," an experimental process developed in the 1950s that injects chemicals into the ground to release the uranium and is pumped to the surface. So...what to do?
I think both options are a bust. Both would bring in local revenue and produce carbon-free energy, but both represent outmoded forms of technology. What about applying cradle-to-cradle principles to energy? Instead of solar panel production, why not, for example, solar thermal production? Harness the sun's energy directly using mirrors and direct the heat to create steam to power energy turbines. The picture for this article is an example of one such plant in operation in the Mojave desert.
Fort Collins shouldn't have to sacrifice their principles, or their health, to make their motto a reality. Residents of this progressive town should consider new ways of eco-efficient technology for their energy needs.
I don't see why you can't build the solar panel production plant and build a solar thermal power plant...
http://politics.reddit.com/info/61yvf/comments/
thanks for your support...
Wow - I must be posting stuff to TOD in my sleep - I could have sworn I only put this one up at Peak Energy :-)
(not a complaint, just a slightly bemused observation)
Could you send me some of your mojo? I've sent a e-mail to the editors more than a week ago and got no answer so far. I'm very new here, and I don't yet understand the whole process of publishing something. Is there something or someone I should contact?
Why do you spam reddit with every oildrum post? People don't take oildrum seriously that way.
I don't know why PG posts every TOD article to Reddit, but there are 2 schools of thought about the etiquette of this - one is to be very discriminating about what you post, the other is to post whatever you feel like as often as you want and let the voting mechanism decide if it gets widely viewed or consigned quickly to obscurity.
I'm firmly of the second school of thought myself.
Of course, you may run the risk of getting shadow banned if the reddit powers that be decide you are just spamming them with stuff they don't like...
I thought the "why" was in the article:
Maybe there are also other rare resources involved in the production of PV panels?
Cd does not come out of solar panels unless you happen to burn them all in an open pit. Quit sensationalizing.
CdTe cells are made of rare earth metals, formed in supernovae explosions, they are rare, period, but are only needed in dopant amounts around 1E-9 per mol silicon. Therefore the quanitiy being used is very small, I volunteer to lick un-glassed solar panels for a whole day and check my Cd levels later. My 1000$ bet, a sandy tounge and no detectable Cd levels at all.
It's an amorphous crystal for frigs-sake. You have to heat it back to the melt temperature for any appreciable diffusion. The hazard is contained. It is like the nuclear waste they are turning into melted glass and shoving down vents into the earth, it is a GLASS, and a tough one at that, solid diffusion is VERY VERY VERY SLOW.
I worked in a pv mfr lab, and you are soooo wrong
Jeff
Can you be more specific? Gilgamesh's summary is exactly what I would think.
I don't work in PV production but I did do an EE degree in 94 so I have some knowledge.
They're both correct.
Lick the panels all you like - that's safe.
However, at the mfg side you're talking much higher concentrations of really nasty stuff to get diffusion (via high temperature) into the bulk material. If you want to work in a fab plant you've got to be paranoid about everything - leaks can kill you before you could smell or see anything. Using the final product though is a different story except for getting stabbed by pins on an IC.
Then why stop at Cadmium? Electronics is stuffed full of nasty things [at the manufacturing + assembly stage] I dont think you would want Arsenic, Berylium, Gallium, Telurium, Germanium, Phosphorus, Mercury, Americurium, Tantalum, Phosgene, Thorium, CFCs, nastystuffium etc in your Coffee. This issue needed resolving 80 years ago.
ya im an engg too, to purify the waste water stream we need gov costs for different pollutions and the toxicologists to tell us what purification method to use (chemical precipitation, RO, UF, MF, centrifugation, electrodepositation, ion exchange) these processess all require energy, and it is probable that the specific efficiency of solar panels would allow for said filtering.
This is where toxicology comes in to play, we need to know the LOEL and NOEL's for the chemicals to determine economic responses.
I'd happily stir my coffee with a tantalum spoon; the metal is unreactive enough that it's used in medical implants. Also hard enough and refractory enough that making a spoon out of it would be an interesting and quite expensive exercise.
Oliver Sacks has been known to offer guests a gallium spoon for their coffee - gallium melts at about 37C, so the spoon ends up as a little pool at the bottom of the mug - which suggests gallium is not horribly toxic.
I'll spell it out for you...these panels are not just CdTe...they're a combo of Cad Tel, Cad sulfide, and Cad Chloride, lick away my friend, you owe me 1000.00
Jeff
Cadmium is Cadmium. Heat it up...cool it down it's still cad.
CdTe panels are actually made of a cadmium telluride film on glass, rather than silicon; the patent http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5393675-claims.html (by a person who doesn't seem to be involved with First Solar, so the technology may have changed) suggests that the active film is only about a micron thick, and protected on both sides by other cadmium compounds. This isn't a dopant issue.
First Solar seem to be keeping the CdTe step of their work as a trade secret, and are patenting mechanical parts of the apparatus, various laser-cutting processes, chemistry for CVD of materials other than cadmium and tellurium, and a remarkably obvious patent on crushing defective cells and dissolving them in acid before recovering the Cd and Te by electrolysis.
On the whole I'd rather not lick cadmium chloride, since it's reasonably soluble and reasonably toxic. I'd expect any working system to have the CdTe layer pretty well encapsulated.
Tom,
Thank you, a sane person on this thread. I worked for First Solar. 2 years in R & D. One of my tasks was to load the system with cad,tellurinium and sulfide. Chloride was down stream from me...another of my tasks was to measure the surface profile, big bad with that one. Previous to that, I was in the re-cycling dept. I assure U, nothing in that place was recycled...you don't recycle CdTe, you stash it...they still have the cad I wiped off of every panel that didn't make it to Shipping and receiving. Very hazardous, they don't have enough money to throw that sh#t out. Ask yourself this, why bother with the wiping it off of the glass? Cause it's Hazardous!!! Sheesh!!! Plus, it's easier to store. In drums. That are still there. The thing is, if they ever move from that building, the cad's going with 'em. Gee, why's that if it is so friendly?
Jeff
Fort Collins should support the solar panel production and veto the uranium mining. But, the type of solar panel production that they are considering necessitates the use of cadmium, which could enter the waterways and is linked to cancer.
Errr, and when doesn't the heavy metal Uranium not enter the water ways and stopped being linked to cancer?
Hey, why not use the processed Uranium as plant fertlizer?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEEDB1E31F935A25752C1A...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,966085,00.html
The closing line of the NYT article was very perceptive:
"“I don’t know of anyone who’s really for it,” she said of the mine. “But we shouldn’t be giving the other guys a pass because they’re sexy right now.”
Note that the article said cadmium "could" get into the groundwater, not that this was precondition of the production plant. The Fort Collins plant is thus given the opportunity to show the world how to do it right without cadmium release. Given the expense of cadmium, I doubt they are going to want to waste it!
The other major major factor in choosing between the two plants is "which one gives a road forward to the future?"
Since cadmium is mentioned so prominantly, I am assuming the PV plant produces CIGS Copper indium gallium selenide type thin film cell.
These cells have the potential to be the cutting edge of solar PV design in years, even decades to come. There is a real road forward here in development, efficiency improvement, application, etc.
Nuclear however, if we leave aside fusion, seems to be at the end of it's developmental road. There is no real road forward.
This is the error we made with hybrid automobiles. When Toyota produced the first ones almost a decade ago, the Americans looked a the fuel mileage and said, "hey, no great improvement over a small car or a Diesel, they are wasting their time." Bob Lutz, now of GM once called hybrids "show business" and dismissed them.
Now, GM is playing catch up with the Volt, and the U.S. auto makers whine about the Japanese "monopolizing" lithium ion battery development and hybrid control components. What the U.S. did not see, but the Japanese did, was that the hybrid idea provided the bridge to a revolution, and to the "grid based" automobile.
So Fort Collins has to ask itself, of the nuclear option or the solar option, which provides the possibility of a "bridge" to a new paradigm?
The mention of thermal solar only adds to the mix.
Who would have believed only a decade ago that we could even be having this discussion now? Developments are moving VERY fast, it is starting to get the feel of the early silicon valley days! :-)
(edited to correct definitional acronym (CIGS Copper indium gallium selenide)
RC
Yes, looking to the future is not a strongpoint of Detroit.
While Fort Collins fiddles, over in Japan:
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/11/sharp-to-up-thi.html#t...
Sharp is full speed ahead...
IMO this is a no brainer... looking ahead 10, 20, 50, 100 years and one sees that the Sun is the best bet for never-ending energy supply. Nuclear is needed now, and I am not anti-nuke. However, the long term the answer is, and this has been known for decades, solar.
Singapore is getting in on the act too - having no energy resources of your own concentrates the mind wonderfully...
http://sikod.com/blog/2007/10/29/singapore-posed-to-be-the-world-largest...
Some disconnects here..
* the cadmium cells will be under glass film
* the uranium leaching is not part of a reactor
* Colorado is not the Mojave Desert.
My view is approve everything so long as it's not coal.
Yeah, the article is about production of uranium or solar panels not the use of them. I say go for them with the proper safegards. Does it have to be either/or?
The plan is for Cd cells being manufactured there, not just used - so presumably the concern is that Cd leaks out from storage or during the manufacturing process (seems like an easy problem to solve to me, but I'm no expert in manufacturing these things, much as I like them).
Solar thermal probably isn't great in Fort Collins - I had in mind somewhere west of the Rockies - its not like you have to generate power locally (although the merits of distributed and localised power generation should never be underestimated).
The solar cells would be CdTe. There is no more (or less) danger associated with a CdTe solar cell plant than a NiCd battery plant. They both require good engineering practices. If Cd were released into the groundwater as a consequence of either operations someone should be strung up. There is no excuse for it. More of an issue is and an imperative is recycling the used product. This is a silly article that makes a false equivalence.
First Solar used CdTe and only sells commercially so far. This is because recycling the panels is part of price of the panels and so they need a good idea of how to price that.
The NYT article says they'll be producing 4.5 million panels per year. I'm guessing that means 500 MW or greater capacity. It is a little hard to see how a passed over uranium resource could possibly match this. After 20 years of operation they'll have put 10 GW in place. The 9.7 million pounds of uranium mentioned in the article could only produce a fraction of that power. It hardly seems worth the effort.
Chris
"The 9.7 million pounds of uranium mentioned in the article could only produce a fraction of that power."
I don't follow the reasoning for this statement. With the current uranium fuel cycle (no tech advances), we get about 20 Megawatt-hrs per pound of unenriched uranium. The energy of the mined uranium is then about 20 GW-years. For solar, the average capacity over the 20 years is 5 GW assuming a constant rate of production. Assuming a 25% duty cycle, we would expect about 25 GW-years of energy from the solar panels.
These numbers are comparable.
I'm not a subscribed to the NYT, so I can't see the referenced article, but it's important to rememeber that uranium mining can be very energy-intensive. Olymic Dam in South Australia produces around 4,000 tonnes of yellowcake annually, but uses 10% of the state's baseload power to do so.
If the ore of the site under discussion is less rich than Olymic Dam, it will of course take more energy per kg of uranium to extract; if more rich, less.
You mention a figure of 20MWh of electricity "per lb of unenriched uranium." I'm not able to verify this figure. Did you mean,
- triuranium octoxide (U3O8), as sold on the open market?
- uranium dioxide (UO2), used as unenriched rods in pressurised heavy water reactors (29 of 400+ in the world)?
- uranium hexafluoride (UF6) as used to make enriched uranium?
- pure uranium metal?
All these things would affect the final net energy gain, as well as other things like the energy requried for decomissioning (no commercial nuclear power plant in the world has ever been completely decomissioned and dismantled, the site clear and free for other uses).
Likewise, where and how the solar panels are made would also affect their net energy gain.
It's one thing to toss out figures about "20MWh per lb", it's another thing to consider a completely lifecycle analysis to get an EROEI figure. Failing more detailed figures, we'll have to consider the thing on issues other than EROEI.
A further consideration is how quickly the uranium can be mined. We may be able to get (say) 20GWyr of energy from them, but if we can only mine 0.01GWyr each year, that doesn't look so awesome; and if we can get all 20GWyr in on year, then the uranium will be exported from the site, and not available for any power plant, they'll be having to import stuff.
"I'm not a subscribed to the NYT"
- Registration is now free!
"Olympic Dam in South Australia produces around 4,000 tonnes of yellowcake annually, but uses 10% of the state's baseload power to do so."
- The website for Olympic Dam says 120 MW average total load from the electrical grid. This is about 1/8 of the electrical output of a typical plant. Over the course of a year, this power produces over 100,000 tons of copper, some gold, and some silver, along with the uranium. That 4,000 tons of U is enough to fuel over 50 nuclear power plants for that year, so the electrical energy return on electrical energy invested seems very good.
"You mention a figure of 20MWh of electricity "per lb of unenriched uranium."
- I am using the same context as the article, U3O8, aka yellow cake. My reference is Bernhard Cohen, at:
The Nuclear Energy Option
He derives the 20MWh per pound figure from 33 x 10^6 kW-days of heat per 1000 kg of U3O8. This number comes from LeMarsh's Introduction to Nuclear Engineering.
In any case, due to the large mass of U compared to O or F, the uranium fraction in each of the 4 compounds you mention differs by less than a factor of 2 from the others.
An excellent analysis of the overall net energy gain is available at: http://nuclearinfo.net/ (done by some fellow Aussies BTW)
This is a fair analysis of the situation for nuclear power, unlike the much touted work of Storm and Smith.
I don't think we should give up on the life cycle analysis. There are complications, but based on the apparent high EROEI of the current nuclear industry, it is something that must be considered. IMO, we need to reach consensus on a qualitatively satisfying analysis first, before we can honestly push the figures much farther. Some people seem to want to make nuclear power safer than the ore sitting undisturbed in the ground. Of course, they forget about erosion. :-)
As far as tossing out figures, look at the parent post. MDSolar says he is guessing! :-)
As far as mining speed goes, this seems to be a modest uranium mine. The yearly output of Olympic Dam is just about the total resource of this Colorado mine.
Here is a scenario: We mine at 0.1 GW-yr, so the life of the mine is 200 years, feeding a modest 100 MW power plant. In about 50 years, we lose the technology to make replacement parts for the 1990s tech of the solar panel plant. The last solar panel conks out at the 100 year mark. We manage to keep the 1950s technology necessary to maintain the nuclear plant for the full 200 years. Nuclear is then 100 years more "sustainable" than the solar option.
You need to read your link more carefully. Their "Full Energy Analysis of Nuclear Power" is completely bogus. They claim an EROEI of 93 by hiding the energy needed to enrich the uranium.
My guess was on the size of individual panels. Because CdTe has lowish efficiency I was figuring about 120 W so they would not be awkward to handle with lifting equipment. (First Solar does 72.5 W and these guys think they are in a position to compete.) Some folks are going for the utility market with this kind of stuff so they make kW plus panels. As it turns out they are planning 65 W modules, but their production cost will be under $1/Watt while First Solar's cost is still above $1/Watt. Based on the efficiency data on their web site I expect their actual panels will be more like 80 W than 65 W, but we'll see.
Chris
Are you refering to this webpage?
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Powe...
I think that you may be misinterpreting their statement. In order to provide the 1 KWh of electricity, the nuclear plant has to "burn" some uranium. This is about 0.023 grams of U. In order to get that uranium, and build the plant to burn it, they tabulate the non-nuclear energy inputs. There is also an extra 0.003 grams of U that is burned in reactors in France to enrich the natural uranium to LEU fuel. That is how they get the 0.026 grams of U that is mentioned. Note this 0.003 gram figure will improve as more gas centrifuge enrichment is used instead of gaseous diffusion.
True to a certain degree. The figure of 93 does indeed not include the energy required to enrich the uranium. This can be calculated by looking at the spreadsheet of energy inputs from the Forsmark nuclear plant EPD on the nuclearinfo website. According to this, 1kWh of electricity requires 146kJ of fuel throughout the lifecycle, giving an EROEI of:
(3600*1kWh/146kJ) = 24.7
a more modest, but still respectable figure.
However, it would be wrong to end the analysis here as 25% of the uranium is enriched using energy intensive diffusion methods. This uses more than 40 times the energy of the more modern centrifuge plants (2500 kWh/SWU vs. 60 kWh/SWU). The spreadsheet tells us that of the 146kJ used to produce each kWh of electricity, 77kJ is spent on enrichment. We can estimate how much this would be reduced if the diffusion plants were replaced with centrifuge:
(100/((25*40)+75))*77kJ = 7.2kJ
Thus, total lifecycle fuel requirements for the Forsmark plant with centrifuge only enrichment can be estimated as 76.2kJ/kWhe, giving an EROEI of:
(3600*1kW)/76.2 = 47.2
So the EROEI of 93 quoted above is out by a factor of two for the Forsmark plant if it used 100% centrifuge enriched uranium (as will almost all nuclear plants after the diffusion ones shut over the next decade or so). Third generation nuclear plants likely to be built in the early part of this century have higher burn ups and thermal efficiencies, so it would seem fair to state that they will have an EROEI > 50.
Certainly not to be sniffed at.
[The discrepancy between the spreadsheet EROEI without enrichment (52) and that on the nuclearinfo website (93) is caused by conversion of hydro into primary energy (x3) on the spreadsheet]
In the context of what they are trying to do, counter the claims of Storm and Smith, what they have done is highly deceptive. Given that France devotes the entire output of three reactors to enrichment, the EROEI for their program can't be more than about 7. Their plan to switch to centrifuges appears to be in trouble, so assuming that centrifuges will become dominant soon is on shaky ground.
To me, a life cycle analysis of nuclear power can't be done until many things have occured. Not least, the US congress must reauthorize the Superfund tax, which is has failed to do since 1995. Cleanup of uranium mines is an energy expense that has not yet been fathomed. The final energy cost of transmuting nuclear waste is unknown as well. With present technology this would reduce the EROEI of nuclear power well below unity.
Chris
I thought it was clear they presented information on the non-nuclear energy input versus the nuclear energy output.
Given that France has 59 reactors, (59-3)/3 is more like 19 than 7 for a quick and dirty EROEI.
There are not any real technical difficulties switching to gas centrifuges. If Iran can build this industry from the ground up in the face of opposition from the West, I think that France can do it regardless.
I think that Peak Oil is going to motivate the public to reprioritize how they weigh the risk of nuclear power. Right now alot of people are willing to spend billions of dollars to prevent a single nuclear-related death per year. In the future, when Peak Oil impacts the electrical grid, people will probably realize that expansion of reliable base load capacity will save many more lives than mitigating a tailing pile out in the middle of the Nevada desert.
You mention an energy cost for transmuting nuclear waste. It is very probable that we will get much more energy out of the "waste" than we do from the original burn of the nuclear fuel. With a breeder or fast reactor technology, we have enough "waste" to burn that we would not need to mine any more uranium for at least a century.
You forget that they convert to electricity before enriching so they have a thermodynamic factor.
At last check, breeders are not legal in the US and are considered not economically viable in France. It is very doubtful that breeder programs will get much further than they have. A new 1.5 GW solar fabrication plant is going in in Singapore and that should put an end to India's program since the manufacturing cost will be quite low and thus much less expensive than nuclear power. The last estimate I heard for new nuclear construction was $5/watt as a partial accounting. That was for a plant in Oklahoma.
I'm suprised that you feel that nuclear power should not clean up after itself. Is it something you don't like about Nevada?
Chris
Sheesh, you play fast and loose with math. Its not a legimate move.
Second, all of Frances enrichment capacity goes towards more than just the french power market.
Breeders are legal, though intensly difficult to liscence. I'm not sure where you pull your magic bag of misinformation from. Liquid metal fast breeder reactors aren't now economically viable and likely wont ever be economically viable since they attempt to solve the problem no one is going to have except states desperately attempting to get strategic deterrant as fast as possible: A shortage of plutonium.
However its quite plausible that molten salt reactors could have much higher economic competitiveness than light water reactors:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
A textbook illustration of a strawman argument.
Strange, they could have used hydro, a power source that does not have a big thermodynamic factor, but they did not. So, you want to discount energy invested for some reason or other. If they had used hydro, would you insist that only a third of the energy was used?
The EROEI of nuclear power is manifestly not very high. For some reason there are people who wish to hide this by dishonest means. Years ago you might forgive people who find themselves in awe of E=mc^2, but now, with electricity still not too cheap to meter, the inefficiencies are pretty obvious. Since there are vastly superior alternatives, it is time to shut the reactors down and concentrate on cleaning up after them.
Chris
It sounds like you are criticizing the fact that nuclear power is constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. In France, we use the electrical power of 3 reactors to enable 56 other reactors to provide generally useful electrical power. We do not count the waste heat from the 3 reactors as valuable input, just as we do not count the waste heat from the 56 reactors as useful output. It is like an equation where a common factor can be cancelled from both sides. Note also that we could use the "waste" heat from all 59 reactors for district heating/cooling.
It seems like this sort of reasoning could be applied to other forms of energy conversion. The Earth only intercepts 1 part in 500 million of the Sun's energy. This is smaller than 1/100 of a period at the end of this sentence, relative to the area of the entire page. Horrible waste! :-) On top of this, our photovoltaics can only convert about 20% of that energy to electricity. This is worse than the 33% conversion efficiency of a nuclear plant.
It is too easy for some people to label others with divergent views. I don't think there is anything manifest about solar or nuclear power. Recall Einstein's "For every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong."
You may think me dishonest, or unforgivable, for not seeing your vastly superior alternatives, but here is an observation I think is relevant. In psychology, they talk about the concept of transference. In regards to nuclear power, we may have a sort of collective transference, where the horrors of the atomic bomb have poisoned the public's minds against nuclear power. Our understandable revulsion of fission and fusion weapons creates in our fallible minds an inappropriate certainty of nuclear power's poor merit. We may think we can consciously compensate for this tendency, but we can't be certain of this.
I don't think nuclear power, as it is currently used, can be applied to district heating. Power plants are built to serve vast areas