Author Topic: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy  (Read 50035 times)

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Offline tggzzz

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #50 on: December 12, 2016, 10:15:36 am »
That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...
Pumped Hyrdro...
http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

The UK is very limited in that respect. We are limited to minutes (seconds?) of the total grid demand.

A prime use of our pumped storage is for a "black start" contingency.
The UK is limited in its current installed capacity, not limited with the available capacity it has not exploited. But there was 6 pages on that in the other thread.

Really? Do tell us where!

Someone who knows about the subject has outlined what would be needed (1200GWh), what has been achieved (30GWh), what could be achieved next (100GWh), and how far it might reasonably be pushed (400GWh). There is a large gap (a factor of 3) between the "would be needed" and "could be pushed to".

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_186.shtml and following pages
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline Someone

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #51 on: December 12, 2016, 10:48:59 am »
That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...
Pumped Hyrdro...
http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

The UK is very limited in that respect. We are limited to minutes (seconds?) of the total grid demand.

A prime use of our pumped storage is for a "black start" contingency.
The UK is limited in its current installed capacity, not limited with the available capacity it has not exploited. But there was 6 pages on that in the other thread.

Really? Do tell us where!

Someone who knows about the subject has outlined what would be needed (1200GWh), what has been achieved (30GWh), what could be achieved next (100GWh), and how far it might reasonably be pushed (400GWh). There is a large gap (a factor of 3) between the "would be needed" and "could be pushed to".

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_186.shtml and following pages
You are such an impertinent nit picker, its right there in the same document on page 193 where the 400GWh fraction is described as easy to obtain just within Scotland:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_193.shtml
But you hold onto this one line with endless insistence:
Quote from: David JC MacKay, Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, pg 194
Achieving the full 1200 GWh that we were hoping for looks tough, however.
Tough, but certainly not impossible and in its wider context in the book that may be just referring to Scotland. Just start looking outside of Scotland at the rest of the UK for candidate sites, perhaps even those that don't already have a water body in them. Geospatial investigation reveals many many unexpected resources for pumped hydro, even in Australia with its exceptionally flat and rolling topography. In the other thread I put up the numbers at around 0.5% of UK land area required to cover that demand. Or from David JC MacKay in Sustainable Energy - without the hot air where in "plan G" where he suggests a possible solution for the UKs energy needs including 4000GWh of pumped storage, presented as a possible solution with no disclaimers of impossibility.

You're so far off reality is comedy.
 

Offline amspire

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #52 on: December 12, 2016, 11:19:59 am »
I am simply saying that the only way to go to 100% renewables is to have long term storage. You cannot go to 100% renewables with 50 day hydro buffers - even if we did have the water in Australia to do so.

The hydro storage solutions are only needed if you stick to coal generation. If you plan for renewables + long term storage, you don't need hydro.

Your argument is that even if long term storage is technically possible, you are in lala land if you talk about it.

Ok. Over to you. How can we stop using coal? If you are responsible for engineering a solution for the future, how would you do it?
Right off the bat you've stuck to your corner, 100% renewable generation does not require long term storage. We can generate enough power year round to only require short term storage. Hydro is one of the cheapest forms of grid scale energy storage and Australia has plenty of it available, so its a natural choice to solve the intermittency problem of renewables.
Australia has plenty of hydro? Where? there is the Snowy scheme developed in the 50's and 60's.

Anyway, lets follow your argument. In 1883-1885, the northern hemisphere had a mini ice age. Basically it was one continual winter. Noon was hardly distinguishable from dawn for two years in the US. 

The annual average temperature was way below average. In the US, temperatures hardly ever got above the 50's (farenheit). If you had a system relying to a large extent on solar power, and you only had up to 50 days reserve, you would not last the two years without sever power rationing - in very cold conditions.

What happened? It was believed that a partial volcanic eruption in Alaska put ash in the atmosphere that affected the light from the Sun for the two years.

With coal, we have over 100 years reserve to see us through. You want to replace that with renewables and essentially no reserve? That is a guaranty of disaster.

 
Quote


Right now adding solar generation capacity to the Australian grid is profitable (wind is less certain based on rebates and government kickbacks as far as I know), its also profitable to build new pumped storage. So you can keep incrementally adding those alone until you reach 100% renewable generation, with todays technology. It will need a massively upgraded distribution network unless the storage and generation are co-sited and then you need more of both, tradeoffs for the market to analyse case by case. Equally the exact mix of generation to storage to demand is not exactly known yet but as the price fluctuates storage becomes more profitable, while as the price is steady intermittent renewable generation becomes more profitable so they are self balancing in the market place.

At a rough guess you would end up with between 2 and 4 times the peak power requirement in installed capacity of wind and solar (both run around 25% capacity factor in Australian grid scale projects), and around 2 times peak power in pumped power, with storage to ride out between 2 and 6 days of zero generation. Thats a guess but you're welcome to suggest how it would be impossible, electricity prices would increase but that's how it is when you're trying to reduce pollution and reliance on finite resources.

Right now Australia has hydro generators that can output about 8 GW peak and peak national demand is about 47GW. The current hydro is nowhere near capable of covering the gaps in renewable energy. The current system is still totally dependant on coal.

If you want a renewable based system that has enough in reserves in the case of a major volcanic eruption, you need to have several years of time at least to do something like resurrect coal fired power generation for the duration of the problem.

Anyone who says we have plenty of water has got to be joking. We even reneged on the promise to reintroduce significant flows back into the Snowy River. Over 99% of the Snowy river flow at Jindabyne was redirected into the Murray without any environmental study. State and federal governments made a solemn commitment to add a small amount back into the Snowy, and then shut the water off again due to water shortages in the Murray.

But you definitely seem to have a huge issue with long term storage - it is almost like you hate the idea. Why wouldn't we want to implement long term storage for renewable energy? You do not want to consider it. You don't want to debunk it. About 4.5% of Australian power comes from hydro and according to the Australian Government's "Energy Resource Assessment" paper,

Quote
Australia   has developed much of its large scale hydro energy potential. Electricity   generation   from   hydro has declined in recent years because of an extended period of drought in eastern Australia, where most hydroelectricity capacity is located. Hydro energy is becoming less significant in Australia’s fuel mix for electricity generation, as growth in generation capacity is being outpaced by other fuels.

If it is possible to store 10 years of energy in a typical home using simple chemical energy, and if this makes a much more robust grid, shouldn't we spend some money to investigate? If houses, farms, and other independent power producers can produce base power - much of which can go to local communities without needing to load the grid, that is a very nice idea. Were I am, we have plenty of sun, free space and wind and we could easily generate enough energy locally for our needs, but every time the line from the generating plant 70 kM away fails, we have a blackout.

I am not convinced your dream is a particularly well engineered dream. Is there a reason you believe in the renewables+hydro option so fervently? Are you in the industry?

 

Offline tggzzz

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #53 on: December 12, 2016, 11:32:00 am »
That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...
Pumped Hyrdro...
http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

The UK is very limited in that respect. We are limited to minutes (seconds?) of the total grid demand.

A prime use of our pumped storage is for a "black start" contingency.
The UK is limited in its current installed capacity, not limited with the available capacity it has not exploited. But there was 6 pages on that in the other thread.

Really? Do tell us where!

Someone who knows about the subject has outlined what would be needed (1200GWh), what has been achieved (30GWh), what could be achieved next (100GWh), and how far it might reasonably be pushed (400GWh). There is a large gap (a factor of 3) between the "would be needed" and "could be pushed to".

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_186.shtml and following pages
You are such an impertinent nit picker, its right there in the same document on page 193 where the 400GWh fraction is described as easy to obtain just within Scotland:

Really? Do point to it. P193 is, with my emphasis indicating that there are significant suppositions:

"difference between Loch Sloy and Loch Lomond is about 270 m. Sloy’s area is about 1.5 km2, and it can already store an energy of 20 GWh. If Loch Sloy’s dam were raised by another 40 m then the extra energy that could be stored would be about 40 GWh. The water level in Loch Lomond would change by at most 0.8 m during a cycle. This is less than the normal range of annual water level variations of Loch Lomond (2 m).
Figure 26.10 shows 13 locations in Scotland with potential for pumped storage. (Most of them already have a hydroelectric facility.) If ten of these had the same potential as I just estimated for Loch Sloy, then we could store 400 GWh – one third of the total of 1200 GWh that we were aiming for.
We could scour the map of Britain for other locations. The best locations would be near to big wind farms. One idea would be to make a new artificial lake in a hanging valley (across the mouth of which a dam would"

For the less geographically challenged, the much of the UK is densely populated and - in pumped storage terms - relatively flat and unattractive.

Quote
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_193.shtml
But you hold onto this one line with endless insistence:
Quote from: David JC MacKay, Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, pg 194
Achieving the full 1200 GWh that we were hoping for looks tough, however.

Yes, with good reason. You appear to want to wish it away, because it demolishes your position

Quote
Tough, but certainly not impossible and in its wider context in the book that may be just referring to Scotland.

"Tough" to a phycisist means "a bad idea which will probably fail".

The whole book is considering the UK as a whole. In pumped storage terms, Scotland is almost the complete story, so it is sensible to concentrate on that.

Quote
Just start looking outside of Scotland at the rest of the UK for candidate sites, perhaps even those that don't already have a water body in them.

I live here. I travel here. I look out the window. I have a clue about the rest of the UK's topography.

Quote
Geospatial investigation reveals many many unexpected resources for pumped hydro, even in Australia with its exceptionally flat and rolling topography. In the other thread I put up the numbers at around 0.5% of UK land area required to cover that demand.

Australia is an irrelevant strawman.

Please indicate your locations. Your misuse of statistics reminds me of the statician that drowned in a lake with an average depth of 1 inch.

Quote
Or from David JC MacKay in Sustainable Energy - without the hot air where in "plan G" where he suggests a possible solution for the UKs energy needs including 4000GWh of pumped storage, presented as a possible solution with no disclaimers of impossibility.

If you read that section, it is a statement of a necessary consequence. His plans deliberately and explicitly do not address feasibility with current technology nor economic viability; they are about physics and chemistry and biology.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline tggzzz

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #54 on: December 12, 2016, 11:38:30 am »
I am simply saying that the only way to go to 100% renewables is to have long term storage. You cannot go to 100% renewables with 50 day hydro buffers - even if we did have the water in Australia to do so.

The hydro storage solutions are only needed if you stick to coal generation. If you plan for renewables + long term storage, you don't need hydro.

Your argument is that even if long term storage is technically possible, you are in lala land if you talk about it.

Ok. Over to you. How can we stop using coal? If you are responsible for engineering a solution for the future, how would you do it?
Right off the bat you've stuck to your corner, 100% renewable generation does not require long term storage. We can generate enough power year round to only require short term storage. Hydro is one of the cheapest forms of grid scale energy storage and Australia has plenty of it available, so its a natural choice to solve the intermittency problem of renewables.
Australia has plenty of hydro? Where? there is the Snowy scheme developed in the 50's and 60's.

Oh, he's as off-kilter in Australia as well as in the UK. Shame.

Quote
Anyone who says we have plenty of water has got to be joking. We even reneged on the promise to reintroduce significant flows back into the Snowy River. Over 99% of the Snowy river flow at Jindabyne was redirected into the Murray without any environmental study. State and federal governments made a solemn commitment to add a small amount back into the Snowy, and then shut the water off again due to water shortages in the Murray.

That was my, very limited, understanding of the position in Australia. But I wouldn't presume that I knew enough to make that statement!

Quote
I am not convinced your dream is a particularly well engineered dream. Is there a reason you believe in the renewables+hydro option so fervently? Are you in the industry?

They don't seem engineered. "Not impossible" != "Possible".

Dreams are fine and can be very useful - provided you don't convince others that they are reality.  (Maybe he could start a KickStarter campaign; many would donate money :) )
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline Someone

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #55 on: December 12, 2016, 11:39:02 am »
I am simply saying that the only way to go to 100% renewables is to have long term storage. You cannot go to 100% renewables with 50 day hydro buffers - even if we did have the water in Australia to do so.

The hydro storage solutions are only needed if you stick to coal generation. If you plan for renewables + long term storage, you don't need hydro.

Your argument is that even if long term storage is technically possible, you are in lala land if you talk about it.

Ok. Over to you. How can we stop using coal? If you are responsible for engineering a solution for the future, how would you do it?
Right off the bat you've stuck to your corner, 100% renewable generation does not require long term storage. We can generate enough power year round to only require short term storage. Hydro is one of the cheapest forms of grid scale energy storage and Australia has plenty of it available, so its a natural choice to solve the intermittency problem of renewables.
Australia has plenty of hydro? Where? there is the Snowy scheme developed in the 50's and 60's.
I'll repeat the link since you missed it:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2
There are enormous untapped pumped hydro resources available.

But you definitely seem to have a huge issue with long term storage - it is almost like you hate the idea. Why wouldn't we want to implement long term storage for renewable energy?
You're the one dismissing renewables and pumped hydro, which on their current economics are very profitable. I'm not trying to say they'll ride out some major apocalypse, but they're a plausible way of providing the entire electricity demand of Australia with current technology. Even at 100% renewable generation.

More storage options are great but you keep claiming pumped hydro wont work and 100% renewable isnt possible, they're both possible on large scales in Australia and some other countries around the world. There hasnt been a demonstrated need for long term energy storage, so trying to claim that its essential is misleading. Its nice to have and there is lots of work around hydrocarbon (or just hydrogen) storage but right now the most cost effective option is pumped hydro (salt water included).
 

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #56 on: December 12, 2016, 11:47:48 am »
Really? Do point to it.
To your golden reference you like to mis quote so much:

Quote from: David JC MacKay, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air,  pg 203
I’ll present a few plans that I believe are technically feasible for the UK by 2050.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c27/page_203.shtml

Quote from: David JC MacKay, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air,  pg 210
Plan G’s electricity breaks down as follows. Wind: 32 kWh/d/p (80 GW average) (plus about 4000GWh of associated pumped-storage facilities).
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c27/page_210.shtml

There are no caveats, no questions as to the feasability presented, its a straight claim that 4000GWh is possible. You can do your own figures to prove it one way or the other but you wont present anything of substance.
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #57 on: December 12, 2016, 01:00:06 pm »
The problem in the UK is that the government sell everything off and private companies only care about making money. Nuclear has bigger time scales than any parliament so no parliament will bother because investing is bad and leaving the mess for the next government to clean up is good for their political carrer. Last I heared we were running out of temporary storage for the waste because no one could be bothered to build permanent storage and it was mounting up in temporary storage where it had nowhere to go from.

For anyone wondering just what out electricity is made from go here: http://gridwatch.co.uk/ bearing in mind that 1/3 of wind is not registered here and none of the solar is as it's not all centrally monitored.
 

Offline amspire

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #58 on: December 12, 2016, 03:47:06 pm »
I am simply saying that the only way to go to 100% renewables is to have long term storage. You cannot go to 100% renewables with 50 day hydro buffers - even if we did have the water in Australia to do so.

The hydro storage solutions are only needed if you stick to coal generation. If you plan for renewables + long term storage, you don't need hydro.

Your argument is that even if long term storage is technically possible, you are in lala land if you talk about it.

Ok. Over to you. How can we stop using coal? If you are responsible for engineering a solution for the future, how would you do it?
Right off the bat you've stuck to your corner, 100% renewable generation does not require long term storage. We can generate enough power year round to only require short term storage. Hydro is one of the cheapest forms of grid scale energy storage and Australia has plenty of it available, so its a natural choice to solve the intermittency problem of renewables.
Australia has plenty of hydro? Where? there is the Snowy scheme developed in the 50's and 60's.
I'll repeat the link since you missed it:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2
There are enormous untapped pumped hydro resources available.

But you definitely seem to have a huge issue with long term storage - it is almost like you hate the idea. Why wouldn't we want to implement long term storage for renewable energy?
You're the one dismissing renewables and pumped hydro, which on their current economics are very profitable. I'm not trying to say they'll ride out some major apocalypse, but they're a plausible way of providing the entire electricity demand of Australia with current technology. Even at 100% renewable generation.
People survived the 1883-1885 event - probably because they were using technologies like coal. Your the one trying to say it is OK to reduce the total energy reserve in the system to under 30 days. You are the one saying that if an event that happened only 133 years ago happens when we are using 100% renewables, it will become a major apocalypse.

I get it. With PHES, you can pump seawater up a hill as a way of storing the days solar energy for the night. That is a good thing.

Is it a solution to store the summer solar energy for use in the winter? No.

I looked at all the proposed solutions and they all seemed to be Big Energy solutions. But it definitely is not cheap, since you have to consider the cost of the grid updates since the PHES sites have to accept all the excess solar power during the day and release all of it at night. If the solar power is at Broken Hill and the PHES site is on the coast, that is a long way to be sending power back and forth.
Quote

More storage options are great but you keep claiming pumped hydro wont work and 100% renewable isnt possible, they're both possible on large scales in Australia and some other countries around the world. There hasnt been a demonstrated need for long term energy storage, so trying to claim that its essential is misleading. Its nice to have and there is lots of work around hydrocarbon (or just hydrogen) storage but right now the most cost effective option is pumped hydro (salt water included).

There has most definitely been a demonstration of long term energy storage that every single one of us has personally experienced. For many of us, we have seen storage for far many decades. More on that later.

The point about long term storage for renewables is if we want to stop a completely expected volcanic event being a "major apocalypse", it is totally essential. Sorry if it is a shock to you, but there will be more volcanoes and some will be whoppers. Yellowstone park is a supervolcano as it sits on top of a couple of massive blobs of magma. There have been super-eruptions about every 700,000 years for the last 2.1 million years and the last was 630000 years ago.

So I still come back to the point. Ten years of energy can easily be stored as fuel in a relatively small volume in a house. That is absolute and uncontroversial. Just do the calculations.

I did do the calculations using fat (just because it is the long term storage our body uses) and 10 years 24kWh/day of energy occupies 2 x 2 x 2.5 meters. Realistic storage will need more space, but we are not talking unreasonably big volumes of space. Perhaps a room in the house, a shed outside the house, or a basement.

We are allowed in this forum to talk about ideas that have not been invented yet. The usual response if the idea is a dud is to give a reasoned explanation as to why it is technically impossible. In this forum, it is a very positive and helpful thing to do. Arguing that we don't need long term storage because we already have a different mostly unimplemented short term solution that would be rendered obsolete if the long term solution worked is a very funny kind of rebuttal.
 

Offline jonovid

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #59 on: December 12, 2016, 04:34:39 pm »
half life of radioactive substances and hard core environmentalists.  :box: why the arguing may never end  :blah:
two things better avoided  :-DD
Hobbyist with a basic knowledge of electronics
 

Offline tggzzz

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #60 on: December 12, 2016, 05:16:24 pm »
The problem in the UK is that the government sell everything off and private companies only care about making money. Nuclear has bigger time scales than any parliament so no parliament will bother because investing is bad and leaving the mess for the next government to clean up is good for their political carrer. Last I heared we were running out of temporary storage for the waste because no one could be bothered to build permanent storage and it was mounting up in temporary storage where it had nowhere to go from.

That's pretty much the case, with an added element of "the market is always right".

Quote
For anyone wondering just what out electricity is made from go here: http://gridwatch.co.uk/ bearing in mind that 1/3 of wind is not registered here and none of the solar is as it's not all centrally monitored.

I missed that bit about 1/3 of the wind power (not that it changes the cumulative distribution function, of course). Is there any indication of why it is "missed out"?
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline zapta

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #61 on: December 12, 2016, 05:45:59 pm »
..There are currently methods that will probably be safe for the lifetime of anyone alive today, but people don't even know what changes might occur over the next 50,000 years - crustal, environmental, political and economical.

Did you intentionally omitted scientific and technological changes?

Extrapolating from the scientific and technological progress in the last 50,000 years, it's naive to assume only our current waste management solutions.
 

Online coppice

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #62 on: December 12, 2016, 05:50:52 pm »
..There are currently methods that will probably be safe for the lifetime of anyone alive today, but people don't even know what changes might occur over the next 50,000 years - crustal, environmental, political and economical.

Did you intentionally omitted scientific and technological changes?

Extrapolating from the scientific and technological progress in the last 50,000 years, it's naive to assume only our current waste management solutions.
Its also naive to assume that as we develop more advanced waste management technologies, we'll even be able to find all the stuff which need reprocessing. :)
 

Offline hamster_nz

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #63 on: December 12, 2016, 06:17:25 pm »
The other option is to move to Thorium Reactors which can burn Nuclear waste as fuel.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-thorium-can-burn-nuclear-waste-and-generate-energy/

What, like contaminated rubber gloves and other low-level waste?

Or intermediate level waste like fuel cladding that is currently put into the ground in concrete blocks?

Or are you talking about only a small proportion of the estimate 12,000 metric tons of nasty high-level waste that is made every year?

To me it sounds like the green-washing that is the Energizer Eco-advanced battery - each battery is 4% old battery. So it takes 25 new batteries to get rid of an old one... yeah - that's green :D

How about reading the link before you get on your high horse and act like a dick?

I've read quite a bit off and on over Thorium reactors, and this ability to "burn waste" is often quoted, often to mostly to an uninformed public, but very very suspect. A bit like "The Space Shuttle will make access to space safe, regular and affordable".

It boils down to 'you need plutonium or highly enriched Uranium to seed the reactor, so this is "getting rid of existing nuclear waste" is a good way market this",

My understanding is that the fuel still needs to be reprocessed to get rid of  fission products and to keep its properties - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor has a large amount on information what is required.
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Offline mtdoc

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #64 on: December 12, 2016, 06:52:24 pm »
..There are currently methods that will probably be safe for the lifetime of anyone alive today, but people don't even know what changes might occur over the next 50,000 years - crustal, environmental, political and economical.

Did you intentionally omitted scientific and technological changes?

Extrapolating from the scientific and technological progress in the last 50,000 years, it's naive to assume only our current waste management solutions.
Its also naive to assume that as we develop more advanced waste management technologies, we'll even be able to find all the stuff which need reprocessing. :)

It's the mistake of most of us born in the late 20th century to extrapolate the recent rapid pace of technological advancement indefinitely into the future.

Human history shows that technological advancement has been an erratic wave like function,  with most of human history showing periods of slow, steady progress punctuated by periods of regression.  Egyptian, Asyrian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Roman, and other ancient civilizations all introduced technological advancement that was later, at least in part, lost for decades or centuries. 

The truth is that despite advancement in mathematics and architecture and agriculture, humans living 200 years ago did not live lives that where fundamentally different than those in much more ancient civilizations. Drop an ancient Egyptian, Asyrian, or Chinese into the rural USA in 1816 and he or she would not feel entirely out of place. For the most part they would recognize the technology in use (with the exception of perhaps gunpowder).

It was only the discovery and use of the immense stored energy in fossil fuels that provided civilization with the excess energy necessary to divert human capital to the development of new technology as well as providing the high energy dense fuel to then utilize the new technology to substitute for what was previously achieved only through human and animal labor.

It's foolish IMHO to extrapolate the progress of the last 200 years indefinitely into the future.  It's an open question what will happen to current civilization and technology once fossil fuels become sufficiently scarce - either due to absolute depletion or prohibitive cost (financial or in terms of energy) of extracting what remains.   That is if we don't blow ourselves up or choke in our own waste in the meantime...

Current economic and political turmoil are the first rumblings of that "phase change" IMO.

The assumption that we will, without question, be able to safely manage the waste from current nuclear reactors for the next 1000+ years has no basis in historical experience.
 
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Offline Simon

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #65 on: December 12, 2016, 08:03:03 pm »
The problem in the UK is that the government sell everything off and private companies only care about making money. Nuclear has bigger time scales than any parliament so no parliament will bother because investing is bad and leaving the mess for the next government to clean up is good for their political carrer. Last I heared we were running out of temporary storage for the waste because no one could be bothered to build permanent storage and it was mounting up in temporary storage where it had nowhere to go from.

That's pretty much the case, with an added element of "the market is always right".

Quote
For anyone wondering just what out electricity is made from go here: http://gridwatch.co.uk/ bearing in mind that 1/3 of wind is not registered here and none of the solar is as it's not all centrally monitored.

I missed that bit about 1/3 of the wind power (not that it changes the cumulative distribution function, of course). Is there any indication of why it is "missed out"?

The information is supplied by national grid that centrally monitor most power generation. But 1/3 of wind power is not monitored centrally on a live basis so can't be included - no doubt the data is collected but it's not available every 5 minutes like the data used for this website. Same for solar. No idea why. It does make a different to the graphs though as the unacounted for power will show up as a lack of demand on the other sources. In the summer you see a noticeable dip just after 12noon lasting until 4pm, no doubt partly due to solar being at it's best but it is slight as we don't have large amounts of solar. My own panels although not metered cut my electric bill a bit as when I am at home in summer with a powerful desktop going full pelt (the most power hungry device I have) or my dehumidifiers are on the panels pick up quite a bit of the consumption.

I don't like nuclear, I don't trust people enough. We have seen time and time again how profits trump safety, the VW scandal being a good example. I am also sick of the private sector ruining stuff. I don't know how the whole nuclear generation cycle works but it cleaerly works badly if we are running out of storage.

Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear, by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2016, 08:04:46 pm by Simon »
 

Offline Someone

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #66 on: December 12, 2016, 08:39:13 pm »
I am simply saying that the only way to go to 100% renewables is to have long term storage. You cannot go to 100% renewables with 50 day hydro buffers - even if we did have the water in Australia to do so.

The hydro storage solutions are only needed if you stick to coal generation. If you plan for renewables + long term storage, you don't need hydro.

Your argument is that even if long term storage is technically possible, you are in lala land if you talk about it.

Ok. Over to you. How can we stop using coal? If you are responsible for engineering a solution for the future, how would you do it?
Right off the bat you've stuck to your corner, 100% renewable generation does not require long term storage. We can generate enough power year round to only require short term storage. Hydro is one of the cheapest forms of grid scale energy storage and Australia has plenty of it available, so its a natural choice to solve the intermittency problem of renewables.
Australia has plenty of hydro? Where? there is the Snowy scheme developed in the 50's and 60's.
I'll repeat the link since you missed it:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2
There are enormous untapped pumped hydro resources available.

But you definitely seem to have a huge issue with long term storage - it is almost like you hate the idea. Why wouldn't we want to implement long term storage for renewable energy?
You're the one dismissing renewables and pumped hydro, which on their current economics are very profitable. I'm not trying to say they'll ride out some major apocalypse, but they're a plausible way of providing the entire electricity demand of Australia with current technology. Even at 100% renewable generation.
People survived the 1883-1885 event - probably because they were using technologies like coal. Your the one trying to say it is OK to reduce the total energy reserve in the system to under 30 days. You are the one saying that if an event that happened only 133 years ago happens when we are using 100% renewables, it will become a major apocalypse.

I get it. With PHES, you can pump seawater up a hill as a way of storing the days solar energy for the night. That is a good thing.

Is it a solution to store the summer solar energy for use in the winter? No.

I looked at all the proposed solutions and they all seemed to be Big Energy solutions. But it definitely is not cheap, since you have to consider the cost of the grid updates since the PHES sites have to accept all the excess solar power during the day and release all of it at night. If the solar power is at Broken Hill and the PHES site is on the coast, that is a long way to be sending power back and forth.
Quote

More storage options are great but you keep claiming pumped hydro wont work and 100% renewable isnt possible, they're both possible on large scales in Australia and some other countries around the world. There hasnt been a demonstrated need for long term energy storage, so trying to claim that its essential is misleading. Its nice to have and there is lots of work around hydrocarbon (or just hydrogen) storage but right now the most cost effective option is pumped hydro (salt water included).

There has most definitely been a demonstration of long term energy storage that every single one of us has personally experienced. For many of us, we have seen storage for far many decades. More on that later.

The point about long term storage for renewables is if we want to stop a completely expected volcanic event being a "major apocalypse", it is totally essential. Sorry if it is a shock to you, but there will be more volcanoes and some will be whoppers. Yellowstone park is a supervolcano as it sits on top of a couple of massive blobs of magma. There have been super-eruptions about every 700,000 years for the last 2.1 million years and the last was 630000 years ago.

So I still come back to the point. Ten years of energy can easily be stored as fuel in a relatively small volume in a house. That is absolute and uncontroversial. Just do the calculations.

I did do the calculations using fat (just because it is the long term storage our body uses) and 10 years 24kWh/day of energy occupies 2 x 2 x 2.5 meters. Realistic storage will need more space, but we are not talking unreasonably big volumes of space. Perhaps a room in the house, a shed outside the house, or a basement.

We are allowed in this forum to talk about ideas that have not been invented yet. The usual response if the idea is a dud is to give a reasoned explanation as to why it is technically impossible. In this forum, it is a very positive and helpful thing to do. Arguing that we don't need long term storage because we already have a different mostly unimplemented short term solution that would be rendered obsolete if the long term solution worked is a very funny kind of rebuttal.
Coal in particular has a very good shelf life and the plants mothball and reactivate easily, if you want to protect against something like "the 1883-1885 event" just keep a bunch of coal around since its already there, or assume the market will respond and unviable coal resources would become viable. Or you could invest in expensive long term storage solutions, its your money.

The need for more than several days of energy storage is an extreme corner case thats not likely to happen during a persons lifetime, trying to say its essential is like insisting we build tsunami walls around the coastline. In some regions that makes sense, but it doesnt here due to the rare occurrence of such events. Some sort of dense long term storage will be a very profitable and useful technology but its absence at the moment is not a reason we can't power Australia on 100% renewables until such a catastrophe occurs.
 

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #67 on: December 12, 2016, 10:46:31 pm »
The problem in the UK is that the government sell everything off and private companies only care about making money. Nuclear has bigger time scales than any parliament so no parliament will bother because investing is bad and leaving the mess for the next government to clean up is good for their political carrer. Last I heared we were running out of temporary storage for the waste because no one could be bothered to build permanent storage and it was mounting up in temporary storage where it had nowhere to go from.

For anyone wondering just what out electricity is made from go here: http://gridwatch.co.uk/ bearing in mind that 1/3 of wind is not registered here and none of the solar is as it's not all centrally monitored.

Solar and wind, at least here in the States, are a windfall of profits for those that can suck their teet on the "benevolence" of government. Solar photo-voltaic cells are known to have a shelf-life of 10-20 years (p-n doping degrades 0.5%-1% a year), which is quite a bit shorter life span than the average nuclear plant. This is why we have the likes of T. Boone Pickens enriching themselves at taxpayer expense.
 

Offline mtdoc

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #68 on: December 12, 2016, 11:22:49 pm »
. Solar photo-voltaic cells are known to have a shelf-life of 10-20 years

Nonsense. There's a reason PV panel manufacturers give 20-25 year warranties (typically guaranteeing 80-85 % of STC rating at the end of warranty) 

It varies by the type of panel and the installation conditions, but for modern monocrystaline panels - the most common for residential PV systems,    the degradation rate is less than 0.5% for panels made before 2000, and less than 0.4% for panels made after 2000. See Photovoltaic Degradation Rates — An Analytical Review

I personally know someone living off-grid and still getting usable electricity production from 40 year old panels.

As for subsidies, that horse has been beat to death many times over on this forum. Suffice to say that all forms of electricity production are heavily taxpayer subsidized and the lifetime subsidies for nuclear power (including waste management) dwarfs that of solar (even before considering the recent cutbacks in solar power subsidies).

The history is that all types of electricity production subsidies have been taken advantage of by producers - be it coal, nat gas, oil, nuclear, wind or solar.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2016, 11:28:12 pm by mtdoc »
 
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Offline tggzzz

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #69 on: December 13, 2016, 12:08:15 am »
I don't like nuclear, I don't trust people enough. We have seen time and time again how profits trump safety, the VW scandal being a good example. I am also sick of the private sector ruining stuff. I don't know how the whole nuclear generation cycle works but it cleaerly works badly if we are running out of storage.

While I don't disagree with those premises, I think the conclusion is unwarranted. The principal problem is that the conclusion ignores the manifest serious problems with the other technologies. Hence I think the reasoning is unbalanced.

Choose your poison.


Quote
Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear,

Oh, that old canard.
Q: if you install X GW of wind generating plant then how much conventional plant can you remove?
A: 0 GW; nada, zilch.
You still have to have the equivalent conventional plant capacity available when wind power is unavailable, and that costs money. Self evidently, if you only have to use a plant for, say, 10% of the time, then the fixed costs make the cost per minute or GWh look extremely high. But what's the cost of not having it available when required? (Hint: much, much higher).

Quote
by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.

Well that's principally economics and politics, and nothing to do with technology and physics. Nobody has any idea what the price of electricity will be during the course of the reactor's life. Indeed electricity has already been twice that price for a short time.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
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Offline tggzzz

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #70 on: December 13, 2016, 12:12:19 am »
we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.
totally agree

Easier said than done.

There's a lot of money to be made with storage => that the problem hasn't been solved demonstrates that the problem is non-trivial.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #71 on: December 13, 2016, 02:12:16 am »
Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear, by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.
Oh, that old canard.
Q: if you install X GW of wind generating plant then how much conventional plant can you remove?
A: 0 GW; nada, zilch.
You still have to have the equivalent conventional plant capacity available when wind power is unavailable, and that costs money. Self evidently, if you only have to use a plant for, say, 10% of the time, then the fixed costs make the cost per minute or GWh look extremely high. But what's the cost of not having it available when required? (Hint: much, much higher).
It depends which costs you externalise, the new build nuclear reactors are going ahead with an artificially inflated and guaranteed price for the electricity they produce. A huge incentive for them to continue and makes some alternatives non-viable as they are unable to compete with those heavily subsidised contracts.

But in a more open market where the price freely fluctuates adding wind capacity will offset other generators, already gas peaking and hydro are used as short dispatch generators from their stored energy before we get into storage of electricity. A mixture of gas and wind is where the money has been going in Australia as its more profitable than coal. If there is storage (of some sort, be it gas as above) and fast slewing capacity in the grid then renewables can keep adding in more generation capacity, even if they can't deliver the tops of the peaks or have lulls other generators will price themselves to the market. That encourages storage and discourages slow/conventional thermal plants. Incremental adding of intermittent renewables doesn't directly offset any conventional generation but it changes the market radically, and the incumbents with their long term investments don't like that idea.

Your argument that adding renewables won't directly substitute for the existing conventional plants is again reducing the agreement to a boring and irrelevant point, a large conventional coal or nuclear plant can easily be replaced by some mixture of other plants that together have a lower impact on the population. Gas alone is a good option, but if the desire is to move away from non-renewable resources then intermittent renewables in combination with some fast slewing plants will make a start in that direction.

Add enough intermittent renewables and the conventional plants will price themselves out of existence as they become less and less viable to operate. All the elements are there in the countries with effective energy markets, or if you want to take full control and dictate the entire system. But government taking these piecemeal approaches to energy policy are hampering the ability to transition away from the conventional plants.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #72 on: December 13, 2016, 03:37:58 am »
..There are currently methods that will probably be safe for the lifetime of anyone alive today, but people don't even know what changes might occur over the next 50,000 years - crustal, environmental, political and economical.

Did you intentionally omitted scientific and technological changes?

Extrapolating from the scientific and technological progress in the last 50,000 years, it's naive to assume only our current waste management solutions.
Its also naive to assume that as we develop more advanced waste management technologies, we'll even be able to find all the stuff which need reprocessing. :)


True, but I suspect that if we can't find it, it may not be much of a hazard.  Of course something could be safe now (not leaking and hence not detectable) and go unsafe at some time in the future.  But now we are arguing some really esoteric ethics and possibilities.  A future low technology civilization that nevertheless has such good health that excess cancer deaths from a radiation leak has a measurable impact on their society.
 

Offline zapta

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #73 on: December 13, 2016, 07:06:18 am »
..There are currently methods that will probably be safe for the lifetime of anyone alive today, but people don't even know what changes might occur over the next 50,000 years - crustal, environmental, political and economical.

Did you intentionally omitted scientific and technological changes?

Extrapolating from the scientific and technological progress in the last 50,000 years, it's naive to assume only our current waste management solutions.
Its also naive to assume that as we develop more advanced waste management technologies, we'll even be able to find all the stuff which need reprocessing. :)

It's the mistake of most of us born in the late 20th century to extrapolate the recent rapid pace of technological advancement indefinitely into the future.

Rapid? Read my post. I was extrapolating from the last 50K years. A century is a drop in the ocean of time.
 

Offline mtdoc

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Re: Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy
« Reply #74 on: December 13, 2016, 07:38:39 am »
..There are currently methods that will probably be safe for the lifetime of anyone alive today, but people don't even know what changes might occur over the next 50,000 years - crustal, environmental, political and economical.

Did you intentionally omitted scientific and technological changes?

Extrapolating from the scientific and technological progress in the last 50,000 years, it's naive to assume only our current waste management solutions.
Its also naive to assume that as we develop more advanced waste management technologies, we'll even be able to find all the stuff which need reprocessing. :)

It's the mistake of most of us born in the late 20th century to extrapolate the recent rapid pace of technological advancement indefinitely into the future.

Rapid? Read my post. I was extrapolating from the last 50K years. A century is a drop in the ocean of time.

You seem to have missed the major point of my post (most of which you omitted).

I'll try again:

The vast majority of human tecnological advancement has occurred over the past 200 years. Advancement prior to that was very slow, incremental, and erratic, with centuries of slow progress punctuated by long periods of regression and retrenchment.  So your "extrapolation of the last 50k years" does not make much sense and holds no predictive power.  Human progress is not a linear function. History has proven that during any future epoch, regression could just as well be the norm as progression. This is problematic when pondering long term management of nuclear waste.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2016, 07:41:48 am by mtdoc »
 


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