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208 comments on Offshore Wind
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208 comments on Offshore Wind
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Thanks for this Jerome! Very timely given the recent announcement from John Hutton, the UK Energy Secretary.
A few media clippings highlighted on PowerSwitch:
This sounds like fantastic news. 33GW though, that’s a big number. Can the industry deliver? What needs to be in place to enable the industry to deliver? There are some 4400 days until 2020. 33GW from 5MW turbines means 6600 or well over one a day.
It certainly seems possible in the same vein as the US mobilisation after Pearl Harbour.
The automobile industry went from producing nearly 4 million cars in 1941 to producing 24,000 tanks and 17,000 armored cars in 1942 — but only 223,000 cars, most of which were produced early in the year, before the conversion began. Essentially, the auto industry was closed down from early 1942 through the end of 1944. In 1940, the United States produced some 4,000 aircraft. In 1942, it produced 48,000. Source: Lester Brown
Compared to those numbers, ~7000 off shore turbines in 13 years, seems eminently achievable. What do you think Jerome?
WWII showed what we can do, but we won't do it because we would probably actually have to make trade offs
. But yes, let us shutdown most of the automobile industry and use that capital to produce things like wind turbines. Restrict auto output to those autos getting at least 45 mpg.
WWII was an obvious crisis that required extraordinary efforts and, in essence, a dictatorial approach to industry that forced them to produce weapons for the war effort. In my view , peak oil and global warming are problems that will dwarf the threats encountered in WWII.
But we will blunder, unprepared, into the coming decades.
Chris / Jerome - do you think this U Turn by Hutton is driven by climate concern or a more acute concern that the UK is fast running out of indigenous energy?
I’d like to think both arguments are worthy. Why the u-turn? I guess someone has convinced Hutton that offshore wind is technically feasible, economically viable and politically acceptable within the 2020 timescale. Well done whoever that was.
I'm not sure I understand the numbers
When calculating the number of 5MW turbines is it really 6600 i.e. 33000/5.
Why is it you do not have to include the capacity factor and technical availability i.e. 33000/(5*.4*.95). That would mean over 17000 turbines ?
Also is it realistic to assume these are all 5MW turbines - are 5MW off-shore turbines proven yet and would all off-shore sites be suitable for these big turbines ?
The 33GW Hutton is talking about refers to name plate capacity. Sure - that needs to be multiplied by the load factor (27% for UK offshore wind in 2006) to get the actual amount of energy generated. This is no different to other ways of generating electricity. The UK nuclear fleet had an load factor of 69% in 2006, coal 66%, gas 54%... it should be noted that gas at least wasn't trying to maintain 100%, whereas the wind and nuclear would have been targeting maximum production.
But the headlines talk about wind providing "half Britain’s current electricity consumption" or 100% of household consumption.
Is this reasonable ?
Indeed not.
The confusion between name plate capacity and actual output is an issue that dogs the wind industry, becuase such inaccurate claims are made, and then used to point out that wind is not as good as it looks.
What matters is the MWh rather than the MW. On that basis, wind is expected to provide 30% or so of total electricity generation in 2020.
Is it fair to say that 50% (or more) of wind's MWh are produced at night when demand is lowest ?
I can see that some of this night-time wind power can replace gas/coal baseload generation but surely not all of it due to the technical demands on maintaining a stable 50Hz grid.
Without the pump storage capacity available in Scandanavia won't much of the night-time wind MWh simply be thrown away ?
No, actually wind production patterns quite closely follow consumption mattern, being lowest at night and highest in the afternoon. Offshore is the same, with smaller intra day variations (on average). I have a graph showing this, but not on this computer, I'll try to post it later.
Wind turbine are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability and reactive power.
No, actually wind production patterns quite closely follow consumption mattern, being lowest at night and highest in the afternoon. Offshore is the same, with smaller intra day variations (on average). I have a graph showing this, but not on this computer, I'll try to post it later.
Wind turbine are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability and reactive power.
In your story entitled: No Technical Limitation to Wind Power Penetration published on line in the European Tribune,
http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/1/28/183633/609
I found a link which led me to a report by the Tyndall Center for Climate Change entitled: Security assessment of future UK electricity scenarios.
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/research/theme2/project_overviews/t2_24.shtml
In this report they modeled the effects of wind penetration into the U.K. electricity mix up to 37% of total electric energy supplies. At this level of penetration they claim that only 9.4% of conventional capacity can be retired. This claim alone would appear to imply that this model is in strong disagreement with your claim that “wind turbines are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability”. However, here is specific verbiage from the report about the need to compensate for wind variability with conventional generation:
Due to this disproportion between conventional capacity and energy substitution by the wind source, a considerable number of thermal plants will be running at low output levels over a significant proportion of their operational time in order to accommodate wind energy. Consequently these plants will have to compromise on their efficiency, resulting in increased levels of fuel consumption as well as emissions per unit of electricity produced. This will cause higher electricity production costs.
The average load factors for conventional plants, with 25GW installed wind capacity at 35% average output, will reduce to about 40% (utilization factor for UK plants in the year 2002 was 54%)[DTI04]. Nevertheless the cost recovery of those plants that might be forced to run at lower load factors will be a major challenge for future electricity systems.
Would you care to comment on the contradiction between the conclusions of this paper and your statement above?
See my comments that the UK needs a half dozen pumped storage schemes in Wales & Scotland. These could absorb the fluctuations nicely. Interconnections to hydroproducers Iceland & Norway would also be useful.
Alan
I agree that storage is needed for effective integration of wind energy into the grid. Including it will naturally increase the costs. Also if they end up pumping fresh water rather than sea water then seasonality issues and long term fluctuations in rainfall may also affect the economics. Iceland seems like it's a long way away from the U.K. Norway is already providing effective storage for Danish wind power producers. They may have excess capacity, but I doubt that they can provide storage services to all of Europe.
Roger
Pumped storage water (other than - evaporation & + rainfall) is recycled. One time allotment basically.
Pumped Storage is also requied with a high % nuke grid (France uses Swiss Hydro + German coal, Italian, Spanish, Belgium FF + Luxembourg pumped storage to balance their nukes at night). Uk does not have the interconnections to do that. A high % nuke UK would also require pumped storage. As would massive tidal powerplants.
Landsvirkjun made a study on supplying 2 GW of peak hydropower to UK a dozen + years ago. UK uninterested, plant was built instead for steady 540 MW for aluminum smelter.
UK has best wind resources in EU, so "getting your share" should mean a fair % of Norwegian (and even Swedish) hydro. Biggest threat is large Norse wind development IMO.
Best Hopes,
Alan
There is no contradiction whatsoever. You need a lot of wind MW to replace a conventional MW (roughly 4 for 1). But each MWh of wind replaces a MWh of conventional electricity.
All we care about are MWh, not MW.
I wrote:
In this report they modeled the effects of wind penetration into the U.K. electricity mix up to 37% of total electric energy supplies.
I said 'energy' and I meant 'energy'. I know the difference between MW and MWh. In this report 37% displacement of energy (MWh) supply resulted in 9.4% displacement capacity (MW). Have you actually read the report? I got the link to it from your article. You have not answered my question. You also conveniently ignored the statement by the report authors talking about the need to turn conventional generation plants up and down to compensate for wind variability which is in clear contradiction to your statement that wind capacity adds to the voltage stability of the grid.
I have written it three times: wind power replaces few conventional MWs. Yes, that's true. It does not matter. What causes global warming is conventional MWh, not conventional MW. So yes, wind power development requires that conventional capacity be kept in place - but used much less than now. I fail to see how this is a problem. It's not like you need to build new gas-fired plants, they are already there.
As to stability, I'm not sure what you mean. How are starts and stops of gas-fired plants detrimental to voltage stability?
I do not dispute that wind generation displaces some amount of CO2 emissions. I am not arguing that wind power is a useless technology, but we need to be realistic about its economic potential. The fact that with 37% energy displacement over 90% of conventional generation remains in place means that the capital cost of a wind/conventional generation system is much higher than conventional generation alone. And as the authors of the study quoted above point out the displacement of emissions is far less than 37% since spinning reserve and peaking reserve emit much more CO2 per kHw produced, and in addition this excess fuel use means excess costs.
Also natural gas, and after it coal, are going to decline in supply. If we have only displaced 9.4% of conventional capacity at 37% energy penetration then how are we going to produce a stable grid voltage in a post-fossil fuel world? My feeling is that in the long term effective integration of wind capacity will require energy storage which will add substantially to the costs.
I am convinced that wind energy will play an important role in humanity's future, but the claim that wind is already cheaper than natural gas and that there are no economic limits to obtaining arbitrarily large amounts of grid electricity from this source is incorrect.
The fundamental realization that the developed world needs to come to is that our levels of economic production are already too high and that reduction of consumption should be a primary goal. Encouraging people to believe that wind can easily substitute for fossil fuel and thus maintain our high consumption lifestyles without guilt about CO2 emission is dangerous.
Not if there are enough PHEV's and EV's. And with the V2G discussion, it's frequently mentioned that people don't want to see the Grid's unimaginable Demands leaning on their expensive batteries and their morning available-commute-miles, but this is a good reminder that if there are intermittent sources more heavily in the mix, that there will be times that there is 'Surplus to sell' too, and if V2G happens, isn't it reasonable to expect that people with such a 'Portable Smart-Grid Intertie' will pretty much set up their buy pricing scheme, their SELL price-scheme, and their 'Lowest Discharge Before Cutoff' or some such thing, so that on a Dark and Stormy Night when it's howling out there, you might get yourself a fine deal purchasing, and if the next calm morning, demand is high and your car is selling at a profit, you opt to jump on the bus or the bike. (I think it would actually be your car AND house that would be in automated Buy/Sell negotiations with the grid, not just the car.. ?)
By the way, who knows whether there is a functioning Flywheel System in standard use out there? I never hear any updates at TOD for the current state of that storage medium.
Bob
"I'm going off the rails on a crazy train!.."
- Ozzy
V2G is surely the way to go.
Or any other storage in that sense.
The danish wind industry has made an ambitious plan named "windforce 50" that outlines a plan to make wind contribute to 50% of our electricity use.
This envisions a major change in how we use electricity and which windturbines to build. Today we (danes) get 20% from 5.200 WT but with modern larger WT we could get 50% from 1.700 WT
The biggest issues are to get people to change when they use electricity and to what.
We need to get EV's or PHEV and use electricity to heating as well as transport.
The industry is already cooling freezers below -18 at times of cheap electricity to enable idling of cooling when electricity is expensive. The same idea applies to heating where the use of district heating is widespread and using electricity to heat water is a great way to store energy.
Cooling ice or heating water is just one way to even out consumption. In some areas they have installed meters that charge users by the hour on spotprice to encourage people to start there driers at night etc. We have 2 hours with very high electricity use, and it is easy to imagine that these hours could be covered by reduced use or V2G.
Soon the EV's will have >200 miles capacity and with most people traveling less than 30 miles a day, there is good storagecapacity available here.
Being close to Norway makes it a lot easier as their hydroplants give us the flexibility needed, but as soon as V2G is widespread the need for external storage is reduced.
Rune
Confident that most of our energy use can be replaced by efficiency and alternate generation.
use the electricity to make NH3, you can sell it at $500/t if you don't need it.
Here's the breakdown from 2004 (sorry no time to draw a new a new chart):
Click to enlarge
According to George Monbiot in his book Heat on p. 101, the UK uses about 400 TWh/year, an average power supply then of about 46 GW. Half of that is 23 GW so the required capacity factor on 33 GW nameplate is 70%. It is quite windy off shore of the UK, but I kind of think that there must be some anticipation of reduced consumption. California has shown that a 20% per capita reduction in consumption is good for the economy. Doing that gives a 55% capacity factor which sounds about right for offshore wind. Interestingly, Monbiot points out that the material requirements for offshore wind are lower than for onshore wind because the wind blows harder offshore. He cites the Performance and Innovation Unit, 10 Downing Street, as finding on shore wind reducing in price by factor of 1.4 between now and 2020 and offshore wind reducing in price by a factor of 2.75 by 2020 to the current onshore price. Both are expected to be less expensive than nuclear power in 2020 by factors of 2.5 and 1.75 respectively. See tables on pp. 111 and 95.
Chris
27% load factr sounds strangely low. The projects I have financed are close to 40% (and that's with pretty conservative estimates for the banking case).
Maybe this is the overall rate for all of wind in the UK?
The load factors for UK wind (offshore and onshore) as published by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (stupid, stupid name) are here (Excel):
http://stats.berr.gov.uk/energystats/dukes7_4.xls
To get anywhere close to the 80% reduction in C02 compared to 1990 levels by 2050 (required to avoid a 2 degree C temperature rise say the IPCC) the world will have to do much more than 20% reduction in primary energy by 2020.
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but only for the UK - the whole world needs to do the same or we fail in the task.
by 2020 ? We are just three weeks from 2008 so BY 2020 means 12 years not 13!
4400 days is correct though. :-) But in reality they won't start installing them for a couple of years or so - so 10 years or 3650 days.
Eminently achievable? The numbers proposed could be a serious uphill task.
Britain’s current range of coal, gas, nuclear and other power stations are capable of generating 75 gigawatts (GW) of electricity. By 2020 most of the nuclear will be gone -close to half the windmills will be replacing that, so no C02savings there.
The 33 GW needs to be actual - if it isn't we don't get the 20% to 40% reduction in C02 required - the 5 MW windmills only produce full power 38% of the time (3300 hours per year).
http://www.reuk.co.uk/Worlds-Largest-Wind-Turbine-Generator.htm
So, that means we actually need ~90 GW of windmills
that's 18,000 5GW windmills - around 5 of these monsters every day.
That is certainly a 'war footing' porduction rate.
In WW2 all effort was directed to making tanks and aeroplanes etc.
Which parts of what remains of UK manufacturing will be shut down by the government do you suppose?
Or we could build Nukes in the same time frame if we had a government with the bottle for it. And the Nukes and Coalfired units that are slated for switch off produce base load will have to be compensated for.
The 7000 turbines will have to be covered by something like nukes, coal or gas, so we will have to spend money on back up systems as well.
So, thats 7000 turbines + back up generation capacity + additional new builds to take over from the Nukes and Coal fired stations coming offline.
In other words, we will be running to stand still.
As for 'reducing Carbon'...
We are about to give the go ahead for a 3rd , full sized runway at Heathrow, even though most of Heathrow traffic is for holiday flights and not 'essential to business and commerce' as spuriously described by this government.
Also, I dont know how much concrete will be used in the base pedastals for these 7000 wind turbines, but I should imagine quite a lot... Possibly more than you would need for 10 Nukes.
Wind no doubt will have its place as will tidal, PV etc.
But we will still need a lot more Nukes in my opinion.
IMO it is immoral to build any more nuclear until we can adequately deal with the waste. If we can deal with it safely then fine, otherwise use something else or plan to use less electricity.
Despite our best efforts we appear unable to engineer anything that will stay functional without maintenance for more than 100 years - a 100,000 year engineering job is required, this is a serious engineering problem.
Give me one good reason why it is ok to leave it for future generations to clear up our mess.
Dont need to give you one good reason:
We can bury it quite safely in hard rock and deep enough to survive the next couple of ice ages.
It is just a matter of political courage.
Sounds good - except that nobody anywhere in the world has done it, there is still waste and associated bombs around from my grandparents generation not dealt with! - and how do you know any of it is safe? - so, unless you can prove the engineering is safe(which it seems nobody can at present, even after sixty years of thinking about it), it isn't a good reason after all - so, no wonder the politicians don't have the courage - not all of them are immoral.
Detailed technical plans for burial have been in place for 30 years. Test Drilling has supported this at Windscale.
If they told me they were going to test drill for burial on the Buchan Shield, I would not be worried at all: We live with high levels of natural background radiation from the granite in the buildings and the land :-(
BTW
Jerome proveded two photos at the start of this essay.
They are very telling:
The sea is flat calm.
The turbines point in different directions.
What is wrong with these pictures?
Maybe bankers only go to sea on calm days? ;)
It occurs to me that the windmills can only be installed on calm days ... as the towers, blades and installation cranes etc are so tall. My experience is that the North Sea isn't a very calm place for much of the time - how long does it take to install one of these things?
I guess what I am asking is how many windmills can an individual barge install in a year? ... just so I know how many barges, cranes, crew, immigrants etc are going to be required.
Chris,
you say that the 33 GW is nameplate - are you sure? where did you get that from?
Ok, I saw that, you think that implies nameplate and not actual - even though windmills never produce anywhere near full nameplate? Maybe 33GW 'peak' would be more accurate?
If so, 39% (maximum, in a very windy spot?) of 33GW is 12GW, barely any more than the nuclear that will be gone by 2020.
Oh yeah - all these numbers are nameplate.
See this comment:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3342#comment-275378
Possibly.
But if this is the UK's answer to the 'generation gap', dont put yer granny in a flat with more than two floors up and an elevator.
Unless you dont like her very much.
Wind has its part to play, but to my mind it is 'opportunistic': Base load from nukes and tidal - and coal with sequestration and gas for peaks.
Wind? use the electricity for something like pumped storage, bio fuels etc.
Of course serious conservation is still the lowest hanging fruit.
Oh, I agree with what you are saying ... although it is a massive step in the right direction, if this is the UK's contribution to combat climate change and fossil fuel depletion then the world is definitely going to overheat or we have a massive recession (or both!) Working full scale seqestration does not exist anywhere yet - and even if it did, I doubt there are enough places to safely hide the CO2.
I think if we do the sums (sorry, math) for the whole world, let alone the UK, then this is much to little, but most importantly, much to late, as the CO2 reduction target is so large.
Just as one example of the colossal UK task envisioned here (even though it's way too little, and should it actually come to pass!), the diameter of the blades on a 5MW unit is 126m, so each must be just over 60 metres long - that's not far short of the total wingspan of a Boing 747 (~68M).
So, even on the (lowside?) estimate of installing just one of these things every day for 12 years, that's 3 huge aircraft style wings to be manufactured every day!
It looks like the people at Airbus needn't worry about finding a job if the airline business fades!
There might just be one 'small' fly in the ointment ... where does all that finance come from to ramp up such a huge undertaking so rapidly?
Well, we have ideal strata for Carbon Sequestration in the form of depleted Sandstone reservoirs capped by salt in the southern north sea.
As for 'who pays?' - regrettably we are very good at squandering the moolah:
The Dome (a one-night pissoir for the great, the good and the glitterati)
The Olympic Games (double the original price tag before even one sod is cut , for what? drug pumped athletes and corrupt foreign dictators) - We are even going to get Zil Lanes , not for the hoi-polloi of course...
ID Cards (watch the costs snowball)
The Iraq war (45 minutes , yeah , right... anyone with a vague knowledge of Janes book of Warmongers would know that was complete BS)
Any government contract involving software (A milch cow for any passing con-man in a £500 suite pretending to be a consultant).
So, assuming we get a sane government, we could fund all 7000 turbines and back up from a new generation of Nukes.
But we will probably go to a Private Finance Initiative (God, how I hate that word 'initiative').
Of course, it could all be smoke and mirrors. The UKGov is in a bit of a hole right now, what with corrupt donations and missing data discs containing 25 million names and addresses. (ID data will be safe? - yeah , right.)
I will believe it when I see it. This Gov dont do science, it does PR and spin.
some good news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7137881.stm
Hunterston Has had its life extended by 5 years.
Of course Jim Mather , the 'tourism and enterprise' minister is against it.
I wonder if we will need a 'tourism' minister in the coming years...
WT blades are far less complex (and far less QC/QA required) than aircraft wings. But they are big !
LK (memory of Danish WT blade maker) is setting up a new factory in Little Rock, AR, USA to make blades of the US market.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Why do we need to bury it at all? Sealing it in dry storage casks is good for at least several centuries. We revisit the issue then.
What a good idea - /sarcasm - leave the current mess for somebody else to clean up and add a load more to it for good measure!!!!!!
Where do you live, if this stuff is so safe then I presume you and several generations of your descendents won't mind storing a few casks of the stuff at your place?
Name just one civilisation, of the more than 20 that have come and gone since the last ice age, that has lasted several centuries - especially a high tech one - that would have been capable of doing the job. You should not assume the past is any guide to the future.
If we can't solve a technical problem now, even after 60 years of thinking about it, why assume that in the future they will be able to?
I've been wondering recently just how bad could it be? What would happen if we took all the of several hundred thousand tones of nuclear waste created to date and simply piled it up on the South Pole. Yeah, it sounds crazy but what would be the actual, quantifiable, impacts to the biosphere over the next millennium of such an approach? I guess it would melt its way down to the rock, and be covered over with ice within a few years – then what?
The future wheat & rye farmers of Antarctica would find the scattered piles of broken up debris quite a problem.
Alan
While I agree that the waste issue is the most irresponsible risk in the nuclear industry, I have always guessed [ironically] that the best solution environmentally is to just disperse it. Find a fast flowing current across the centre of a huge ocean and just mix it in..
Repeat post from upthread
The more viable method is fuel recycling (MANY billions wasted so far with marginal results, but as uranium prices climb and wastes mount, we will FINALLY get the bugs out).
Take the uranium and neutron absorbed products (plutonium, neptunium, etc.) and recycle them for fuel. Take the fission byproducts (literally every element) that resulted from U atoms splitting, and wait 300 years. Then refine out the good stuff (platinum group metals !) and anything else useful (Cu, Fe, Ni, Ag, Hg, Pb, Cd, Te ...) and find an industrial use for it. Throw the rest into a low level radiation dump (abandoned mine, etc.).
300 years should allow ten half lives of just about everything in fission byproducts to decay out.
Refining 300 year old fission byproducts will not require major safety measures. The key may be to keep people's hands off of it after just 150 years when it is "safe enough".
Best Hopes for Fuel recycling,
Alan
France and I think Japan are doing this today, The UK recently had an OOPS moment with theirs.
The problem is its not the least bit economic with light water reactors because of our technology choices. MOX fuel requires using expensive, archaic aqueous reprocessing regimes or speculative pyroprocessing regimes, and yields fuel that is more expensive to handle, transport and use because of higher activity. Uranium can be easily extracted with fluoride volitility, but because its been through a reactor theres a higher concentration of U234 and U236, so higher enrichment is required and reprocessed uranium can only be used in a reactor once with diffusion or centrifuge enrichment. Laser enrichment may change the game so that fluoride volitility reprocessing from LWR fuel can be pursued.
Before any of this, DUPIC would make sense, but we're not even doing that.
I expect all spent fuel will eventually be reprocessed, if nothing more than for the xenon and rhodium, but that we wont bother for several centuries.
Untill then sitting in big concrete casks in a secure parking lot is a fine option.
I am curious why recycled uranium cannot be diffused again, and the isotope mixture adjusted (from memory U234 is good fuel, unsure about U236). And why not mix more highly enriched virgin fuel with recycled U if recycled U cannot be diffused again ?
The higher costs of using MOX fuel are largely labor costs and will be overcome when uranium shortages arise (do NOT expect new uranium mines to come on-line smoothly and faultlessly, see Cigar Lake, etc.)
And thorium/uranium fuel mixes are possible today I understand (thorium as hamburger helper to U).
I am sure that AECL will be glad to see the use of DUPIC, and dozens more CANDU reactors to reburn used fuel. I have earlier speculated about building one CANDU reactor at 2+ LWR reactor sites, designed to reuse rods "as is". Swelling of used fuel rods may be a problem though.
'
One day fusion will work. So U supplies only have to last us that long plus a half century or so after that.
Best Hopes for Nuke Expansion,
Alan
Neither U234 nor U236 are fissile. They're both fertile but thus becoming neutron poisons in the same way U238 does. The isotope mixture can't be 'adjusted' with diffusion or centrifuge enrichment because in these somewhat crude methods these isotopes end up in the enriched stream with the desired U235.
Sure you could enrich virgin fuel and mix it with these neutron poisons but its logically similar to enriching fuel and then mixing it with depleted uranium. It doesn't actually buy you anything. Laser enrichment lets you select only the desired U235 isotopes however, so someday reprocessed uranium may be desirable.
That isn't the path of least resistance. More likely we'll dip into our ample supply of depleted uranium and run them through more enrichment cycles, since depleted uranium isn't really that depleted. It still has over half the U235 that natural uranium does.
Ancient Egyptian civilization.
Alan
Which one?
They had continuity in religious practices for several millennium, even as the pharoahs came & went.
http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/dynasties.htm
Alan
The more viable method is fuel recycling (MANY billions wasted so far with marginal results, but as uranium prices climb and wastes mount, we will FINALLY get the bugs out).
Take the uranium and neutron absorbed products (plutonium, neptunium, etc.) and recycle them for fuel. Take the fission byproducts (literally every element) that resulted from U atoms splitting, and wait 300 years. Then refine out the good stuff (platinum group metals !) and anything else useful (Cu, Fe, Ni, Ag, Hg, Pb, Cd, Te ...) and find an industrial use for it. Throw the rest into a low level radiation dump (abandoned mine, etc.).
300 years should allow ten half lives of just about everything in fission byproducts to decay out.
Refining 300 year old fission byproducts will not require major safety measures. The key may be to keep people's hands off of it after just 150 years when it is "safe enough".
Best Hopes for Fuel recycling,
Alan
Of course I don't mind! I'm familiar with dry cask storage so if you want you can store it right under my house and the houses of all my friends and family if you like.
I wouldn't presume a history nearly entirely populated by dirt farmers who's largest accomplishments were formations of men that got really good at poking each other with sticks would be very predictive of the future of industrial civilization. It doesn't have to. If civilization crashes, we'll have far bigger problems than the spent fuel storage casks to deal with.
We can 'solve' it but theres no point! There are far bigger demands being made of us than a couple of refrigerator size casks per reactor year that we should devote resources to. Letting it just sit there isn't unsafe or imprudent, its just common sense. Where is it going to go?
Mudlogger,
the boss of Nukem USA, a manufacturer of nuclear fuel rods, recently gave a presentation (unfortunalety no longer available on the web due to a merger) in which he stated:
"Forget the nuclear renaissance, there's just not enough fuel."
If you look at the official uranium mining industry's numbers, you will find that the world will soon be very hard pressed to provide the fuel even for the existing fleet of reactors, let alone for any expansion of capacity.
Nuclear is a dead end, a cul-de-sac.
Cheers,
Davidyson
Awww no! Peak Uranium? We have only just started to get our heads around Peak Oil.
Some say Nay
http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2006/2006-02.html
Some say Yea:
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/frameset.php?pageid=http%3A//www.mi2g.com/c...
Re: The Sustainability of Uranium Resources
The question has been raised by the ATCA Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) briefing, "Energy Crunch: The Overlay of Peak Oil and Peak Uranium on the Credit Crunch," whether there is enough uranium to sustain the kind of nuclear renaissance being discussed enthusiastically all round the world at present. It has been pointed out that for a number of years production of raw uranium has fallen far short of the amount needed to fuel existing reactors, that the shortfall has been met by the dilution of weapons material from super-power nuclear disarmament or by the run down of inventories, and that these alternative sources of supply must inevitably run out quite soon. Any increase in the number of operating reactors, it is claimed, will increase the pressure on the resource as can be seen from the current surge in the uranium price, and will hasten the day that it runs out.
Others sound strangely familiar (look at last sentence below…)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2006/2006-06-06-03.asp
VIENNA, Austria, June 6, 2006 (ENS) – Over the next 20 years, world nuclear energy capacity is expected to increase between 22 percent and 43 percent, according to a new estimate issued by the UN nuclear watchdog agency. At that rate of increase and using current technology, there is enough uranium to last for the next 85 years, although the study says that fast reactor technology would lengthen this period to over 2,500 years.
Released Thursday in Vienna, the new edition of the world reference guide "Red Book": Uranium 2005: Resources, Production and Demand," was jointly prepared by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 30 industrial democracies.
Head of the IAEA Department of Nuclear Energy Yuri Sokolov told reporters, "There is plenty of uranium assuming the industry keeps moving ahead with exploration and new mines. The message in the Red Book is that, for the immediate future at least, they are doing precisely that."
Ah well, so its back to the caves then.
I'm not against nuclear if it can be made safe, but I really think that dealing with the toxic waste must be solved by our generation, in some way or another, before we move on - even if there is enough uranium left.
Governments have procrastinated long enough - there is no good excuse for not dealing with it. At least with nuclear waste we may have some chance of making it safe - unlike CO2 it seems.
But, in my view, the most important aspect of nuclear is this :
If nuclear electricity is an option for any country who can't get enough energy from fossil fuels to meet their needs, then it must also be an option for all the world's countries.
The trouble with nuclear is, once any country has it, it can be used for good or very evil.
Many countries with civilian nuclear reactors have gone to the next level and produced weapons systems. Nuclear proliferation is real.
As the USA has shown with Japan, if the enemy doesn't have a nuclear weapon then 'mutually assured destruction' doesn't apply and use of nuclear weapons will rapidly cause an enemy to capitulate - if you know who the enemy is!
IMO the safest place for a nuclear reactor is 93 million miles away!
Well, with uranium as with fossil fuels, it doesn't really matter exactly when production peaks. It's a finite resource, so it'll peak. Whether that's today or 10 years or 100 doesn't matter much.
At some point, it'll peak, and we'll have to start learning to do without the stuff.
Now, either it turns out to be impossible to do without the stuff, or it turns out to be possible.
If it's impossible to do without the stuff, we should begin trying now so that we know for sure it's impossible, and we can do things like reduce energy consumption to put off the end of modern industrial civilisation and at least have a soft landing into dark barbarism.
Or if, as I believe, it's possible to have a modern industrial civilisation while not burning fossil fuels, trees or uranium, then we should get right onto it, because it'll be a lot easier to change now than when the burnable stuff peaks.
So really I am not keen on any solution that involves burning stuff, even if burning that stuff actually gives us vitamin C, let alone if it has other dangers, like warming the planet or giving people cancer or bombs. I prefer solutions that can go on forever.
One of my country's political parties has a good way of looking at policies. "Will our children and grandchildren thank us for this?" It's pretty plain our children and grandchildren are not going to thank us for a sooty coal station or a pile of radioactive waste. Nor will they thank us for miles of concrete, but they might thank us for wind turbines and parks and forests. Still less will they thank us for a world in which the zone of tropical cyclones widens, or where the arctic wilderness becomes a cool swamp.
Will our children and grandchildren thank us for burning more stuff, leaving less for them to burn and the world more polluted?
No? Then we shouldn't do it.
Given there's about 160 trillion tons of fissionables in the earths crust and all of it can be reached and burned in breeder reactors, it would take at least a million years to burn all. Burning this faster would literally melt the crust from the waste heat.
A million years or more of nuclear fuel means its essentially limitless for the purpose of any conversation we're going to reasonably have.
there's about 160 trillion tons of fissionables in the earths crust and all of it can be reached and burned iburned in breeder reactors
A dozen or more failures (at many billions of $ wasted), no real successes. We may very well run out of our current & planned uranium mines before we can get some design to work properly. If the future of nukes require breeder reeactors, the future is dim.
Fuel reprocessing has also seen a string of hyper expensive failures (UK just apparently blew a few billion on a fuel reprocessing facility that is likely to be scrapped) but France seems to have one that kind of works (Japan as well ?)
New mines and fuel reprocessing will expand the fuel supply, but it will NOT be a smooth ramp-up and we have certainly not seen the maximum price. And we may see some reactors short of fuel here and there.
Best Hopes for Realism,
Alan
Alan, thats just not true. While there's no real hope for liquid metal breeder reactors, the ORNL prototype of the molten salt breeder reactor was a success on every front. In addition to being roughly 200 times as fuel efficient as a LWR, it showed many passive safety features and potential advantages over LWRs, from lack of requirements of fuel fabrication, true negative void and temperature coefficients, and the lack of a requirement for the massive pressure vessels that make LWR's so hard to put together.
It was a massive failure on the front that mattered most for getting funding at the time: Producing weapons grade plutonium on short order.
Other successful breeder reactor regimes were the light and heavy water breeder reactors.
These just fail on plutonium production and actinide incineration because they rely on thorium-U233 breeding because of the fact U233 produces more neutrons per thermal interaction than Pu239, and so can sustain a breeding regime... but U233 is a terrible weapons material because of U232 contamination and the resultant hard gammas.
They fail on economics simply because theres no incentive to engineer new breeder regimes with uranium being so plentiful and so cheap. Molten salt reactors may be an exception to this because they offer more cost advantages than just fuel efficiency, and don't require expensive reprocessing plants relying instead on simple online fluoride volitility, sacrificial anodes, and vacuum distilation instead of more expensive pyrometallurgical or aqueous processes.
They exist because of strategic policy decisions, not because they make any economic sense. Perhaps pyroprocessing plants will be cheaper, but maybe not.
I highly doubt we'll see any reactors short of fuel. Enriched uranium is as simple to get as tapping the DU stores for more enrichment at the cost of slightly more SWU's. Higher prices mean existing mines can just go a little further down the ore grade to increase they're marginal return.
As for high uranium prices, they don't affect the power price in the least. Uranium price is less than 1% of the price of nuclear power.
... and your glib answer to that is?
Its unrelated to civilian nuclear power production. If a foreign state wants to make weapons, they dont need to build reactors, and power reactors wont help them because the isotopic makeup of actinides out of the reactor is unsuitable for weaponization.
The genie is out of the bottle.
From your previous postings that's just what I thought you would say.
Do you work in the nuclear industry by chance?
No.
Dezakin, I thank you for your contribution in this thread. From my limited knowledge about the nuclear industry, I have basically come to the same conclusion you seem to have.
Here in Norway the environmental anti-nukes always talk about the dangerous actinide heavy metals. The way I see it, we have already created these dangerous materials, and it doesn't make much difference whether we have to handle 10000 tons or only 10 tons.
As you say; the genie is out of the bottle
Actually, it prrobably does matter whether it is 10 tons or 10,000 - if the nuclear industry is as competent and safe as it says it is, and since they have had 60 years to think about it, then they should be able to give the world proof of their skills and quickly make the current waste safe and 'put the genie back in the bottle'.
I know from UK experience that accidents do indeed happen in the UK nuclear industry, time and time again - it is completely false to say otherwise, humans do make mistakes and do not think of every possibility - you would not want to be downwind of a serious UK nuclear leak!
The reason I asked Dezakin if he makes his living from the nuclear industry is that his responses look to me like living proof of 'it's difficult to get somebody to understand something when their future depends on them not understanding it.'
Before one announces a project, doesn't it make sense to actually plan how that project would occur before announcing it? When I worked for the government, the higher ups wanted the promise first; it was up to me to plan how to meet that goal later. More often than not, of course, the goal was not accomplished.
The best goal, of course, is one that will fail after one leaves office or moves to another job. We don't just need goals for 2020, we need goals and plans for 2008, and every year after. But that might actually result in someone's feet being held to the fire.
Let us begin by shutting down the automobile industry, at leas that part that produces anything over 120 gm/km.