Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy

[mash107]

After debating friends for quite a bit on this topic... I thought I'd bring it here

If carbon emissions is indeed the issue of our generation... and there is no shortage of demand for energy. We absolutely need energy, both in the physical and metaphysical sense, to work, make goods abundant (affordable), and diminish the effects of poverty.

Why is there not more widespread support for employing nuclear energy across the board? I just don't get it. Telling people they have to pay more for goods produced by energy because you lack an alternative to fossil fuels is not a tenable position.

[Kleinstein]

Nuclear energy also has it's down sides - real physical ones, more morally or social and a lot of emotionally. It is so much different from what normal people know and hard to understand, that people get scared and are thus more on the careful side. It also did not help nuclear energy that in the 1960s some scientist or those who claimed understand nuclear energy did promises that turned out to be false (and they could have known by then). In this context it is essentially impossible to do argumentation based on facts on a topic that most people just don't understand.

A big point, at least in Europe is that the environmental movements really stared with opposition to nuclear energy. So even if you have good arguments - they would not even try to understand you and it is a difficult topic.

Even if you try to look just at the facts, there are real problems with nuclear energy. So it is not a clear pro but not a clear no either:
1) Much of the costs / downsides come disposal of the waste. So it is like a big loan from future generations with uncertain interests. So it would need a long term (e.g. 1000's of years) stable society to work. You can always argue one such a social problem - no definite answer appealing to all.

2) The simple once through nuclear energy only works for a limited time / amount. So to be a real solution one would need breeding reactors - here development / predictions badly failed. There was quite some trouble with fast reactors, and they are no doubt the more dangerous ones. Also fast reactors bear more danger for nuclear proliferation.

3) If there is a really big accident happening (like Chernobyl), the damage can be really big in a dense populated area. The Fukushima accident was not that far away from turning into really bad (like evacuation for Tokio). Such an extreme danger would be only acceptable if there would be an insurance for it - but there is no such thing. The world is just to small and divided for it. There is just no way one could have treaties that would allow things like all the Japanese or half of India to evacuate to the US and Europe in case of an accident. So even if the expected frequency of accidents and expected accumulated damages are OK, it is just the single damage that can be to large.

[mikron]

Have a look at this presentation from Arnie Gundersen:

[ez24]

Just learned a nuclear safety tip today.

Got a Fujitsu Scansnap S1300i scanner.  According to their safety instructions the scanner is NOT to be used inside a nuclear plant.   

All we can hope is everyone reads the manual.

[Someone]

Have a look at this presentation from Arnie Gundersen:

Thats grabbing some "big" headline figures/arguments which push a certain narrative. Its certainly true that solar and wind have a lower energy production cost, but you do need to account for the increased distribution/arbitrage/storage costs which are externalised, just as disposal is externalised for nuclear power. I'd be guessing that the final costs would still be strongly in favour of wind and solar. But the headline:
"New Nukes Make Global Warming Worse"
Is a dangerous over simplification, the global warming cost of nuclear energy is possibly greater than wind or solar, but still much lower than the incumbent generation types and there is no clear agreement on the relative intensities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources
From the economic perspective the world could do better (from a CO2 centric point of view) by investing in solar and wind, but that has its downsides with availability, limited space, distribution, and the need for more efficient markets for electricity. But you could invest in nuclear power and still get huge improvements in the CO2 emissions compared to doing nothing, its only when comparing to massive investment in solar and wind that its possibly a worse solution.

After debating friends for quite a bit on this topic... I thought I'd bring it here

If carbon emissions is indeed the issue of our generation... and there is no shortage of demand for energy. We absolutely need energy, both in the physical and metaphysical sense, to work, make goods abundant (affordable), and diminish the effects of poverty.

Why is there not more widespread support for employing nuclear energy across the board? I just don't get it. Telling people they have to pay more for goods produced by energy because you lack an alternative to fossil fuels is not a tenable position.

Kleinstein makes most of the points, but a few others are:

Nuclear power in its current form (or even considering the emerging technologies) isn't going to last forever, we're still stuck with a finite resource of uranium and a very inefficient way of producing electricity from it, if the entire world switched to nuclear power we'd only have a few hundred years before that resource ran out.

The materials science (and nuclear industry in general) is still a long way from maturity, its not a simple and low risk solution yet and there needs to be a lot more reactors built before it becomes routine and cheap/easy/safe.

[station240]

Big downside I see with Nuclear power, compared to wind and solar, is the single point of failure.
The grid is distributed, so why shouldn't the power generation also be distributed ?

Say you build a 1000MW reactor complex, then you need to feed high voltage power lines into it, and a substation.
Should events caused by mother nature damage said power feed, lightning, storms, earthquake, then the entire plant shuts down. Hence large scale blackouts.

If anything wind and solar should make the power grid more reliable and cheaper to build. Use power near where it is generated, less need for huge transformers and electricity pylons.
At the moment in Australia things are in a transitional phase, we have wind and solar, but not enough power storage. As idiots voted in the "anti progress" party, otherwise known as Liberals (sic), any attempts to modernise the grid are being messed with.

One political issue not mentioned in this thread so far, time and cost!
Nuclear power stations are not cheap to build, nor are they quick to construct.
Climate change is a problem we need to solve today, not in 10+ years. Between the redtape and construction time it can take this long.
Also the actual total costs of a Nuclear power station are [redacted], that is construction + grid connection + approvals + insurance.
The 3rd party insurance for nuclear power as you can imagine is insane, the tax payers are the ones that pay it, one way or another.

[Someone]

i do not support nuclear power.
to start up a reactor is easy, 10 years? 20 years?
to close it? after using it for 100 years? 200 years? will take more than 1,000,000 million years.
and those who watched the fukushima documentary will understand, our current containment technology is not enough for accidents, and will never be enough. between the reactor and the outside world in reality is just some safety water barrier, thats it.

The waste is safe to store and handle within a few decades of shutdown, politics prevent it happening.

between the reactor and the outside world in reality is just some safety water barrier, thats it.

Which is completely false, all modern reactors have a "bomb proof" containment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building
Which at Fukushima was blown apart by an explosion.

[zl2wrw]

Business as usual (burning fuel for energy?) seems to be causing lots air pollution (which makes people sick, and causes some to die before they otherwise would):
http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-overview/

This map, in terms of cigarettes per day, is easier to understand than ?g / m³:


There is a case to argue that coal, oil and gas fired generation kill more people per unit of electricity produced than nuclear:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161125154327/http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

Whilst battery technology is better than what we had 30 years ago, it still sucks if you want to say store enough energy from PV panels during the day to keep a city running at night... (we are lucky here in NZ, something like 80% of our electricity is already produced from renewables because we are blessed with hydro & geothermal power).

Costs of construction - rather than each reactor being a custom build, "standardise" on a handful of designs and build as much as you can on a production line in a factory (eg think airliners A380, B777, etc with massive NRE and certification costs, but these costs are spread over large volume of identical product produced).

Centralisation - the laws of physics do not require reactors to be > 1000 MWe capacity. Production line construction may make smaller reactors cost effective.
In the case of New Zealand, our nuclear free legislation does not ban land-based civil nuclear reactors (nuclear weapons and nuclear propelled ships/aircraft are illegal), however, our national grid is small, and probably could not handle the step change of a 1000 MWe unit tripping off-line (200 to 300 MWe units are probably a more suitable size for us, should we want to do away with our gas and oil fired thermal plant).

re: 3roomlab's chart of radioactivity over time - it is a log/log graph and it shows total radiation, but does not distinguish alpha/beta/gamma. (alpha is easiest to shield, but causes the most damage if it gets into your body).
Starting at the top, Cs137 & Sr90 are fission products, then the Americium and Plutonium are what you call transuranic elements. If you re-process your spent reactor fuel (yes, I know it is not politically correct, because that is how you get Pu239) you can send the transuranic elements back to the reactor for another fuel cycle. The fission products can be vitrified (mixed with molten glass) and buried as high level waste. According to 3roomlab's chart, after less than 1000 years, the activity of the separated fission products will have fallen practically to that of its Tc99 content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99
At ten times less activity than Tc99 you have U238, which is an alpha emitter (so most of the alpha particles can't escape from a solid source), and many years ago at University of Canterbury, I got to handle kg-size metallic U238 (at the time, the density of it was amazing to me).

Fukushima was old technology (Mk. 1 BWR?), in a bad location, which arguably combined with some bad culture (something like "I shouldn't push for catalytic hydrogen scrubbers to be installed because it will make me look bad for signing off that the reactor was safe last year when said scrubbers were not available")

[Someone]

There is a case to argue that coal, oil and gas fired generation kill more people per unit of electricity produced than nuclear:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161125154327/http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

Nice cigarette equivalency map, but the numbers on fatalities per unit of energy are very rubbery and open to interpretation from different sources:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/deaths-and-energy-technologies/blog/34275/
I'd suggest nuclear power is higher than most renewables for fatalities caused just on the basis of lifetime/fleet/cumulative energy generated of all nuclear plants and the "true" estimates of total fatalities caused by Chernobyl. Pick your own figure for total deaths caused from the nuclear industry (just the figures for Chernobyl are very rough and in dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impact) and divide it by approximately 100,000 TWh (world bank dataset) then compare to the promoted figures:
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
http://www.nuceng.ca/refer/risk/risk.htm
They're all on the lowest possible end of the estimates before you add in deaths from uranium mining and fuel processing/disposal.

Nuclear power is a great option but its easy to get caught up in the hype and happy statistics promoted by the industry.

[mash107]

Big downside I see with Nuclear power, compared to wind and solar, is the single point of failure.
The grid is distributed, so why shouldn't the power generation also be distributed ?

Say you build a 1000MW reactor complex, then you need to feed high voltage power lines into it, and a substation.
Should events caused by mother nature damage said power feed, lightning, storms, earthquake, then the entire plant shuts down. Hence large scale blackouts.

If anything wind and solar should make the power grid more reliable and cheaper to build. Use power near where it is generated, less need for huge transformers and electricity pylons.
At the moment in Australia things are in a transitional phase, we have wind and solar, but not enough power storage. As idiots voted in the "anti progress" party, otherwise known as Liberals (sic), any attempts to modernise the grid are being messed with.

While solar/wind might be more decentralized, it is far more susceptible to those environmental events you're referring to. Earthquakes, tsunamis, etc would just completely destroy a solar field, I'm almost certain. When I was in school, I went through dozens of cells because of how easy they fracture, and that was me being clumsy. I'm sure it can be ruggedized with plastics, but that would harm the efficiency of what is not a high-power output device. In the grand scheme of things, though, a diversified portfolio might not be a bad idea to hedge against one environmental factor or another, but energy output needs to substantially increase to account for the rising population, not decrease. And that's what I worry might come about from these alternative sources.

One political issue not mentioned in this thread so far, time and cost!
Nuclear power stations are not cheap to build, nor are they quick to construct.
Climate change is a problem we need to solve today, not in 10+ years. Between the redtape and construction time it can take this long.
Also the actual total costs of a Nuclear power station are [redacted], that is construction + grid connection + approvals + insurance.
The 3rd party insurance for nuclear power as you can imagine is insane, the tax payers are the ones that pay it, one way or another.

Either way, if you make energy less abundant, the taxpayer's are stuck with the bill as well with increased energy costs. If we're serious about combating climate change, a realistic solution that doesn't harm the pocket book needs to come about.

[amspire]

Nuclear power stations are not cheap to build, nor are they quick to construct.
Climate change is a problem we need to solve today, not in 10+ years. Between the redtape and construction time it can take this long.
Also the actual total costs of a Nuclear power station are [redacted], that is construction + grid connection + approvals + insurance.

The biggest factor of the cost of fission power by far is the cost that no supporter ever wants to mention - the cost of safe storage of waste for 50,000 years+. That would totally dwarf all other costs. The idea that anyone currently has a method of "safe storage" is pure fiction. All currently proposed methods are gambles that will fall on futures generations to live with - not us. 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. The reality is that we could easily have a setback - like an asteroid strike that might send us back to subsistence farming. People in 5000 years may not have a clue about the strange containers in the mine. They might not even be able to read or comprehend the warning signs. Basically, when we make elements like plutonium as a waste product, we are making elements that hardly exist naturally. Risking a mistake that puts them into major water tables is a risk that only the most thoughtless and greedy could impose on the future generations.

The thing is it is probably not needed as long as we can solve the one big problem of renewables - storing energy economically and safely for, say, 10 years. Even 12 months is inadequate - it needs to be longer. Batteries like Lithium batteries are not the answer.

The numbers do not make it impossible - the only thing missing is our abilities.

Just to pick a simple example, if you store energy in the form of aluminium, you can fairly easily fit enough aluminium to be a source of 10 years electric supply in shallow basement room in a normal home.

If you had a fat cycle like the plants + the human body currently uses, you could store 10 years supply of energy at an average power usage of 1kWh per hour (24kWh/day) in a space 2M x 2.5M x 2M. OK, there will be energy losses which means you need more space, but the point is the concept is not impossible - we are just currently way to dumb to be able to implement a fat cycle the way plants + our own body can already do. So it is possible - just not for us at the moment.

Silicanes are an interesting option. Silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust, and silicanes react with air (nitrogen+oxygen) to release their energy. I think the reaction uses something like 80% nitrogen + 20% oxygen.

There are probably thousands of candidate storage methods, but the issue is how to create a complete reversible room temperature cycle. The discharge rate does not have to be quick like a battery if you are storing 10 years worth of energy.

[Kleinstein]

From my view the technical problems with nuclear energy can be solved. Long time storage is a little difficult, but still much easier than it is with CO2 that does not decay at all, and the environment can only consume a rather limited amount per year - so we already have excess CO2 for several 1000 years out there. The really deep geological storage (e.g. > 3000 m) is a rather compelling option. Not 100% sure, but if a little of it comes out after 100000 years, the radiation is not that bad, and it will not come up all at once - so future generations will have centuries to learn about it. It is still not a really good solution, but better than fossil fuel. However nuclear energy turned out to be rather expensive - so it is not a cheap solution.

The big problem with nuclear energy is that human societies are not fit for it. You have to change humans first, to make them non egoistic - so maybe in the long run, in a few million years. Also the risks are global - so you have to convince everybody, and this is just not working with so many people and some areas that can have better options (e.g geothermal, waterpower).

The big problem with wind and solar power is storage. You don't need storage for more than about half a year though, but only daily storage is not enough. In many areas there is still more energy need in either summer of winter and production may not follow that. The problem with longer time storage are costs due to rather few cycles (e.g. maybe 2-10 a year). So far it looks like we have to prepare for considerably higher and more fluctuating prices for energy - no obvious cheap source in sight. Higher costs could effect how we use energy to: for some industries it can get more attractive to run only when power is cheap (e.g. good wind) and stop production when power would come from storage.

Even if the production of wind and solar power is decentralized, we need the large area grid, to average out production and demand over a larger number of sources and sinks. The grid is reducing the required storage quite a lot and it is more efficient. In Germany we even need more long distance grid because of the decentralized renewable sources. There could be exceptions in low populated areas like parts of Australia where more storage and thus local electricity are an option, but this is only for a few of us.

[jonovid]

If carbon emissions is indeed the issue of our generation

but If carbon emissions is Not an issue. as many scientific theories come and go,
 substantially or stagnation is more like BS. remember it was global cooling in 1970s.
problem is only political.  when obama leaves office problem it is solved.
remember their are other scientific theories not just the CO2 theorie.
eugenics or human population control is a also a bad move. it was tryed back in 1940 Europe but it failed.
trying to control the future.

[Kleinstein]

If carbon emissions is indeed the issue of our generation

but If carbon emissions is Not an issue. as many scientific theories come and go,
 substantially or stagnation is more like BS. remember it was global cooling in 1970s.
problem is only political.  when obama leaves office problem it is solved.
remember their are other scientific theories not just the CO2 theorie.
eugenics or human population control is a also a bad move. it was tryed back in 1940 Europe but it failed.
trying to control the future.

Even if there would be no global warming, there is still a a big (maybe even bigger) problem with to much CO2: it makes the oceans more acidic and this makes is more and more difficult for some marine life to make there shells. So the CO2 is poisoning the oceans.

Evidence for global worming gets more and more clear. There are clear weather data, and the physics of the atmosphere also suggest a warming of about the observed size. So we may exactly how much warmer it will get, but that is not the problem. To be on the safe side with releasing so much would be need to be sure that there is not problem with it. So even if in doubt, we should play safe.

[tggzzz]

For a balanced discussion of the alternatives, see http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

Who say it is balanced? All the environmental lobby. All big energy. Just about everybody elsel

[djos]

Interesting discussion, I'm personally pro-nuclear despite supporting a range of Green Policies and Ideas.

The big Issue I see with Fission Generation is not Saftey, (new passive designs are amazingly safe and imo 100's of years of burning Coal has prolly killed more ppl than every nuclear accident and intentional detonation combined), but waste management. You need the political will to build proper storage infrastructure and/or re-processing infrastructure (the better option imo) at the same time as you build the generation infrastructure or you end up with a stack of "temporary" waste dumps scattered around your country and the ensuing political quagmire as everyone fights to get rid of the "temporary" dump and fights to keep the "permanent" facility out of "their backyard".

To be blunt, a nation like Straya would be better off building several whacking great big Molten Salt plants per state for base load power plus incentivise say 70% penetration of residential Solar with Storage (PW2 has really changed the game imo). This would likely tide us over as we ditch Coal/Gas power generation until Fusion Power becomes genuinely viable in about 50 years time (big strides are now being made which is bloody exciting!).

/2c worth

[amspire]

As long as we have to dance between bad choices, we will end up with this "which is the worse - CO₂ or nuclear waste? question" and in all the discussions, we will ignore the cost to future generations - we are too far gone down the energy addiction path to care.

How do you decide between two really bad choices?

The two elements that would change the whole discussion are safe long term energy storage, and allowing individual homes and businesses to be genuine energy wholesalers. The storage is the total key, because you have to be able to save power in Summer and sell it in Winter and at night. Without the power storage, intermittent power generators are just a big headache for the companies trying to balance the grid. The year to year variation can be huge. Were I live the wettest year is 1500mm rainfall. The driest year is 250mm rainfall. You ideally want to have enough storage to save a bit in the drought years and use it in the overcast wet years.

The solution is to engineer new choices so you do not have to choose between coal or fission. Nuclear fusion may not have the same waste issues as fission, so that would also be an interesting path if anyone can work out how to practically achieve it.

Once storage is possible, every farm would probably become a power generator (could be solar on unfertile ground, wind, gasses from rotting waste) that would be a second income stream, and the energy price would be a genuine free market price. If the big energy companies charge too much, more people would become net energy producers instead of consumers.

[djos]

As long as we have to dance between bad choices, we will end up with this "which is the worse - CO₂ or nuclear waste? question" and in all the discussions, we will ignore the cost to future generations - we are too far gone down the energy addiction path to care.

How do you decide between two really bad choices?

The bulk of "Nuclear waste" can be reprocessed and reused greatly reducing the volumes of waste needing to be stored (iirc by about 60x). AIUI the main reason it isn't done is political.

https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/recycling.html

[mash107]

If carbon emissions is indeed the issue of our generation

but If carbon emissions is Not an issue. as many scientific theories come and go,
 substantially or stagnation is more like BS. remember it was global cooling in 1970s.
problem is only political.  when obama leaves office problem it is solved.
remember their are other scientific theories not just the CO2 theorie.
eugenics or human population control is a also a bad move. it was tryed back in 1940 Europe but it failed.
trying to control the future.

Even if its effects are overstated, it seems beneficial for us to come with more abundant and plentiful energy that is not contingent on dangerous fracking or drilling, and that's fairly limited in terms of quantity. Plus, over the long term it would make sense for CO2 to contribute to a greenhouse effect. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, there is no doubt about that. It's up to debate, I think, how much of an effect it would have in a closed-loop environment.

[Someone]

As long as we have to dance between bad choices, we will end up with this "which is the worse - CO₂ or nuclear waste? question" and in all the discussions, we will ignore the cost to future generations - we are too far gone down the energy addiction path to care.

How do you decide between two really bad choices?

The two elements that would change the whole discussion are safe long term energy storage, and allowing individual homes and businesses to be genuine energy wholesalers. The storage is the total key, because you have to be able to save power in Summer and sell it in Winter and at night. Without the power storage, intermittent power generators are just a big headache for the companies trying to balance the grid. The year to year variation can be huge. Were I live the wettest year is 1500mm rainfall. The driest year is 250mm rainfall. You ideally want to have enough storage to save a bit in the drought years and use it in the overcast wet years.

The solution is to engineer new choices so you do not have to choose between coal or fission. Nuclear fusion may not have the same waste issues as fission, so that would also be an interesting path if anyone can work out how to practically achieve it.

Once storage is possible, every farm would probably become a power generator (could be solar on unfertile ground, wind, gasses from rotting waste) that would be a second income stream, and the energy price would be a genuine free market price. If the big energy companies charge too much, more people would become net energy producers instead of consumers.

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources, seasonal storage is likely unnecessary for somewhere mild like Australia and only interesting in areas of the far north of Europe/America where people live snowbound for a period of the year. But nuclear waste is not such a big problem:

As long as we have to dance between bad choices, we will end up with this "which is the worse - CO₂ or nuclear waste? question" and in all the discussions, we will ignore the cost to future generations - we are too far gone down the energy addiction path to care.

How do you decide between two really bad choices?

The bulk of "Nuclear waste" can be reprocessed and reused greatly reducing the volumes of waste needing to be stored (iirc by about 60x). AIUI the main reason it isn't done is political.

https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/recycling.html

Reprocessing is energy (CO2) intensive, but still a good way to reduce the overall impacts of Nuclear sourced electricity. Storage is not the big problem people keep making it out to be, just enclosing the waste in several layers of metal and plastic/concrete then putting it underground would be stable for the hundreds of years needed for decay to take on. The long term is making sure the alpha emitters don't reach the water or food supply, which is entirely possible with dry underground storage. Again the potential releases are tiny compared to the intentional releases from weapons testing already spread around the world.

[djos]

Reprocessing is energy (CO2) intensive, but still a good way to reduce the overall impacts of Nuclear sourced electricity. Storage is not the big problem people keep making it out to be, just enclosing the waste in several layers of metal and plastic/concrete then putting it underground would be stable for the hundreds of years needed for decay to take on. The long term is making sure the alpha emitters don't reach the water or food supply, which is entirely possible with dry underground storage. Again the potential releases are tiny compared to the intentional releases from weapons testing already spread around the world.

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/

[tggzzz]

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meterological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

If you process the raw stats given at http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ to determine the CDF (cumulative distribution function), you will find that as a rule of thumb the CDF(x) ~= x. In other words, 100% of the time the wind output is less than or equal to the peak output (duh!), 50% of the time it is less than 50% of peak, and 3% of the time it is less than 3% of peak.

So, to counter the one day during the year when 99% of the wind power isn't there, you have to have the equivalent conventional plant available. And thermally cycling that plant doesn't do it any good.

[Someone]

For a balanced discussion of the alternatives, see http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

Who say it is balanced? All the environmental lobby. All big energy. Just about everybody elsel

Except I've linked above where there are legitimate questions about the presentation of fatality rates from Nuclear power. Its a great reference for quick figures but not perfect.

[amspire]

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meteorological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

This is why you need cheap long term energy storage at the generator sites. If the storage is separate from the generator sites, then to make recyclable energy work, you would need a power transport system that can manage several times the peak load demands.

Energy storage should be the No 1 research priority - definitely should have more money then military, nuclear, etc.

[tggzzz]

For a balanced discussion of the alternatives, see http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

Who say it is balanced? All the environmental lobby. All big energy. Just about everybody elsel

Except I've linked above where there are legitimate questions about the presentation of fatality rates from Nuclear power. Its a great reference for quick figures but not perfect.

The reference I gave just prevents facts for all of the alternatives, plus very explicit plausible extrapolations. As the author correctly stated, he is disinterested in the choice that society makes - but very interested to see that the arithmetic adds up. "Numbers, not adjectives".

That's why it is so highly regarded by all the players.

[tggzzz]

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meteorological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

This is why you need cheap long term energy storage at the generator sites. If the storage is separate from the generator sites, then to make recyclable energy work, you would need a power transport system that can manage several times the peak load demands.

Energy storage should be the No 1 research priority - definitely should have more money then military, nuclear, etc.

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

[djos]

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

[Someone]

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

Exactly, its already economically profitable but the energy companies are getting a better faster return from open cycle gas power plants so they go with that instead and complain about the running costs.

For a balanced discussion of the alternatives, see http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

Who say it is balanced? All the environmental lobby. All big energy. Just about everybody elsel

Except I've linked above where there are legitimate questions about the presentation of fatality rates from Nuclear power. Its a great reference for quick figures but not perfect.

The reference I gave just prevents facts for all of the alternatives, plus very explicit plausible extrapolations. As the author correctly stated, he is disinterested in the choice that society makes - but very interested to see that the arithmetic adds up. "Numbers, not adjectives".

That's why it is so highly regarded by all the players.

Its well referenced and very good, but not all of it has the same level of rigour. The specific example I'm calling out is whats being discussed in this thread.

There is a case to argue that coal, oil and gas fired generation kill more people per unit of electricity produced than nuclear:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161125154327/http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

Nice cigarette equivalency map, but the numbers on fatalities per unit of energy are very rubbery and open to interpretation from different sources:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/deaths-and-energy-technologies/blog/34275/
I'd suggest nuclear power is higher than most renewables for fatalities caused just on the basis of lifetime/fleet/cumulative energy generated of all nuclear plants and the "true" estimates of total fatalities caused by Chernobyl. Pick your own figure for total deaths caused from the nuclear industry (just the figures for Chernobyl are very rough and in dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impact) and divide it by approximately 100,000 TWh (world bank dataset) then compare to the promoted figures:
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
http://www.nuceng.ca/refer/risk/risk.htm
They're all on the lowest possible end of the estimates before you add in deaths from uranium mining and fuel processing/disposal.

Nuclear power is a great option but its easy to get caught up in the hype and happy statistics promoted by the industry.

So come up with some other references if you'd like to discuss it, but the fatality rates quoted to say how great nuclear is for society ignores the impacts from Chernobyl (or possibly only includes the low estimate for Chernobyl and ignores all other deaths from the incremental use of Nuclear power).

[amspire]

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meteorological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

This is why you need cheap long term energy storage at the generator sites. If the storage is separate from the generator sites, then to make recyclable energy work, you would need a power transport system that can manage several times the peak load demands.

Energy storage should be the No 1 research priority - definitely should have more money then military, nuclear, etc.

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

That is the problem. If this is the biggest energy need on the planet, why are we waiting for just one person to solve the problem? Recyclable energy cannot work for base load without storage. It just cannot.

Can't rely on Big Energy to solve this as they only want Big Energy solutions - they definitely do not want individuals to become the base load wholesalers.

As long as we are burning carbon or as long as we are using nuclear without a working waste solution, we are in a disastrous situation. Remember with nuclear, it has only been in use for half a century and already there have been some major accidents. How many more accidents will there be in the next 1000 years?

[djos]

So come up with some other references if you'd like to discuss it, but the fatality rates quoted to say how great nuclear is for society ignores the impacts from Chernobyl (or possibly only includes the low estimate for Chernobyl and ignores all other deaths from the incremental use of Nuclear power).

Fair suck of the sav mate, what's next adding in deaths from NMRI machine use? 

[amspire]

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

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

[djos]

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

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

and yet there are a number of Pumped Hydro facilities in operation or being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

[amspire]

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

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

and yet there are a number of Pumped Hydro facilities in operation or being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

But this discussion is long term energy storage. These solutions are inefficient short term energy. Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

As I pointed out, the space requirements for long term energy storage (10 years) even at a home is not a huge problem. It just the how that we need to discover, and as long as all the money goes into inefficient stop-gap big energy solutions, we are never going to find good long term storage solutions.

[ez24]

Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

But you have gravity
http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

The first video is just blah blah blah

but the second one is more interesting.  The idea is to use rail cars.

[Someone]

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

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

and yet there are a number of Pumped Hydro facilities in operation or being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

But this discussion is long term energy storage. These solutions are inefficient short term energy. Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

As I pointed out, the space requirements for long term energy storage (10 years) even at a home is not a huge problem. It just the how that we need to discover, and as long as all the money goes into inefficient stop-gap big energy solutions, we are never going to find good long term storage solutions.

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

[amspire]

Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

But you have gravity
http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

The first video is just blah blah blah

but the second one is more interesting.  The idea is to use rail cars.

These are all solutions to smooth out the generator vs load mismatch during a day. We are talking about maybe 5 hours of storage. The hydro solutions can possibly go up to 50 days storage. None of these are solutions for years of storage, and of course they are all big energy solutions so that even if we generate our own solar power, we can be ripped off in winter, overcast days and at night. They can pay us pitiful money for any excess power we generate.

[amspire]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

[Someone]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

Pumped hydro storage in Australia is already very profitable, the daily swings in price have enormous room for arbitrage:
https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard
It doesnt matter where the power comes from, whats important is that demand for it is wildly fluctuating across the day in predictable cycles.

Its economics, you could build in seasonal or multiyear storage, or you could oversize the generation and accept that it will be wasted/dumped/burnt off at some times of the year. Sizing renewables to provide 100% of the power all the time with five 9's reliability is a crazy solution, just as putting in the bare minimum of generation and trying to store energy for long periods is crazy. Somewhere in the middle the optimal point it found, and that optimal point will move with time, but you can start adding hydro storage and renewable generation right now at a profit.

[amspire]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

Its economics, you could build in seasonal or multiyear storage, or you could oversize the generation and accept that it will be wasted/dumped/burnt off at some times of the year. Sizing renewables to provide 100% of the power all the time with five 9's reliability is a crazy solution, just as putting in the bare minimum of generation and trying to store energy for long periods is crazy. Somewhere in the middle the optimal point it found, and that optimal point will move with time, but you can start adding hydro storage and renewable generation right now at a profit.

It definite is economics. First I cannot help get the feeling that you are thinking of storage in terms of batteries - twice the storage = twice the cost. That is wrong. Think of it as fuel + a generator type box with a power rating. You pay for the power rating and you can then store as much fuel as you have space for. If the fuel did turn out to be solid aluminium metal (as I suggested) and you had a system that could somehow turn Aluminium Oxide into Aluminium, you should be easily be able to fit a 10 year supply in a basement. How much you spend on the generator/converter box depends on how much power you want to be able to consume or sell. Two different economic decisions. I am only mentioning aluminium as it is a simple reaction and big lump of aluminium is not going to burst into flames and burn the block down. I would expect there are far better fuels.

You will want an economic system that encourages storage, and it is not just the power you generate - while the wholesale price is low, you can buy up cheap electricity that you can sell when the price is high. If individuals are not encouraged to store, then the utility companies will have to come up with some kind of ugly mega-storage facility, and there will be a lot of extra energy transport costs. The utilites will really make you pay for their mega-storage utilities.

I love the way people want to shy away from the reality of no coal and possibly no fission. If you want to plan to eliminate them totally, you have to have storage and you definitely need much more then one years storage as there is absolutely no other reserve. One big volcanic eruption that darkens the sky for a year or two and you are sunk if you do not have stored fuel.

[Someone]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

Its economics, you could build in seasonal or multiyear storage, or you could oversize the generation and accept that it will be wasted/dumped/burnt off at some times of the year. Sizing renewables to provide 100% of the power all the time with five 9's reliability is a crazy solution, just as putting in the bare minimum of generation and trying to store energy for long periods is crazy. Somewhere in the middle the optimal point it found, and that optimal point will move with time, but you can start adding hydro storage and renewable generation right now at a profit.

It definite is economics. First I cannot help get the feeling that you are thinking of storage in terms of batteries - twice the storage = twice the cost. That is wrong. Think of it as fuel + a generator type box with a power rating. You pay for the power rating and you can then store as much fuel as you have space for. If the fuel did turn out to be solid aluminium metal (as I suggested) and you had a system that could somehow turn Aluminium Oxide into Aluminium, you should be easily be able to fit a 10 year supply in a basement. How much you spend on the generator/converter box depends on how much power you want to be able to consume or sell. Two different economic decisions. I am only mentioning aluminium as it is a simple reaction and big lump of aluminium is not going to burst into flames and burn the block down. I would expect there are far better fuels.

You will want an economic system that encourages storage, and it is not just the power you generate - while the wholesale price is low, you can buy up cheap electricity that you can sell when the price is high. If individuals are not encouraged to store, then the utility companies will have to come up with some kind of ugly mega-storage facility, and there will be a lot of extra energy transport costs. The utilites will really make you pay for their mega-storage utilities.

I love the way people want to shy away from the reality of no coal and possibly no fission. If you want to plan to eliminate them totally, you have to have storage and you definitely need much more then one years storage as there is absolutely no other reserve. One big volcanic eruption that darkens the sky for a year or two and you are sunk if you do not have stored fuel.

You're off in lala land, pumped hydro is an effective storage solution for hours or days. Its profitable in Australia and even without any further mountains with easy rain/snow fed hydro options we still have enormous quantities of untapped pumped hydro resources. Here is where you started:

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meteorological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

This is why you need cheap long term energy storage at the generator sites. If the storage is separate from the generator sites, then to make recyclable energy work, you would need a power transport system that can manage several times the peak load demands.

Energy storage should be the No 1 research priority - definitely should have more money then military, nuclear, etc.

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

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

And now you distance yourself from that with a ridiculously specific example of infinite term storage for the purposes of eliminating most of the generation capacity. No one but you is suggesting such a wild end point or possibility, we're talking about slowly transitioning to renewables being a substantial proportion of the grid with days of storage to ride out their production variations, proven commercially viable techniques, right now with todays technology.

[amspire]

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?

[AG6QR]

The "environmentalists" are not one single group of people who think alike.

I'm proud to call myself an environmentalist.  I want my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, to inherit a world that is at least as clean and healthy as the one my generation inherited.

But I honestly don't know the best way to achieve that.  I'm a practical person, with a taste for engineering by the numbers, and I find it all too easy to find fault with the popular alternatives.  If we could get everyone to politically agree to reduce our use of fossil fuels over the next few decades, (I'm not sure the world can agree on that, but let's pretend for the sake of argument that we could), I still wouldn't know what route to best take to get us to that net reduction with minimal harm to the environment.

Nuclear has a reasonable safety record, but a problem with waste storage, and a potential for rare but devastating accidents.  Fossil fuels are unsustainable, and are slowly but surely causing serious problems.  Solar, wind, hydro, and other renewables aren't without their own environmental problems, as well.  Because the energy they harvest is dispersed, they require large areas, and large amounts of resources to build the facilities to harvest the energy.  Hydro reservoirs, either for pumped hydro storage, or for conventional capture of naturally flowing water, cause serious environmental problems.  Yes, energy storage is needed, at least for short term, to match uneven supply to demand.  Furthermore, transportation requires high energy density, in order to minimize the weight of energy storage which is carried around.  Fossil fuels are particularly energy dense -- it's hard to imagine a way of powering an intercontinental jet transport with anything other than liquid hydrocarbons, due to the energy density issues (though the liquid hydrocarbons don't necessarily need to come from fossil sources).

The unfortunate conclusion I come to is that there is no such thing as "green energy", only varying shades of brown. 

The one thing that I'm sure is "green" is conservation.  But even that isn't a panacea.  Consider the lighting paradox:  More efficient light sources make lighting cheaper and can cause us to use more lighting, ultimately increasing our energy consumption.  https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20082015/lighting-paradox-cheaper-efficient-led-save-energy-use-rises  I can imagine similar things happening as we get more efficient, better, public transit, people may start living even further from their workplaces, and could ultimately end up spending more energy commuting back and forth.

One particularly disturbing fact:  Fossil fuel use is now at an all-time high, despite the fact that renewable energy use is also growing.  The widespread use of renewables isn't actually causing a net decrease in our appetite for fossil fuels.  It's probably causing fossil fuel use to increase a bit more slowly than it otherwise would, but somehow or another we eventually need to lower the consumption of non sustainable energy sources.

I don't know what the ultimate solution is -- I wish there were a silver bullet, but I suspect it's not one thing, but a combination of various types of renewable energy sources, including wind, hydro, solar, and biomass, with a heap of conservation thrown in there, as well.

[Someone]

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.

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 thats how it is when you're trying to reduce pollution and reliance on finite resources.

[tggzzz]

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.

[tggzzz]

As long as we are burning carbon or as long as we are using nuclear without a working waste solution, we are in a disastrous situation. Remember with nuclear, it has only been in use for half a century and already there have been some major accidents. How many more accidents will there be in the next 1000 years?

It will kill/injure fewer people than coal/gas plants - they are already killing many people every year, and releasing large amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

Don't believe me? Go and live in lowland China's "airpocalypse", where pollution can be equivalent to a 20-60 fags/day habit.
FFI see http://www.economist.com/news/china/21661053-new-study-suggests-air-pollution-even-worse-thought-mapping-invisible-scourge
http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-and-cigarette-equivalence/

[tggzzz]

The unfortunate conclusion I come to is that there is no such thing as "green energy", only varying shades of brown. 

Very true.

Doubly so when you consider what the implication of ideal green energy sources mean in the long term:  http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

It is all worth reading, but one key extract is:

"Physicist: [sigh of relief: not a space cadet] Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase."

[Someone]

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.

[hamster_nz]

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

[djos]

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

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

[Someone]

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

Mixed oxide, higher burn up, fuel reprocessing, and/or breeder reactors can all contribute to a lower waste footprint for nuclear. The current utilisation of the fuel is woeful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnup
And when you consider the addition energy available from breeding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

Breeder reactors could, in principle, extract almost all of the energy contained in uranium or thorium, decreasing fuel requirements by a factor of 100 compared to widely used once-through light water reactors, which extract less than 1% of the energy in the uranium mined from the earth.

You see some big reductions in the waste streams. I found this cute plot which highlights it and compares it to thorium:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/2/20/Nuclear_waste_decay_it.svg
You can reduce the waste radioactivity that needs to be dealt with per unit of electricity delivered by an order of magnitude or more than the current once through process used in most of the world. Its more expensive and has serious political issues, but the option is there. Thorium promises much more, but needs investment and is largely unproven.

[tggzzz]

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

[Someone]

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:

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.

[amspire]

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.

 

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,

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?

[tggzzz]

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.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_193.shtml
But you hold onto this one line with endless insistence:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[tggzzz]

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.

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!

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 )

[Someone]

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).

[Someone]

Really? Do point to it.

To your golden reference you like to mis quote so much:

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

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.

[Simon]

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.

[amspire]

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.

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.

[jonovid]

half life of radioactive substances and hard core environmentalists.  why the arguing may never end 
two things better avoided 

[tggzzz]

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".

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"?

[zapta]

..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.

[coppice]

..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.

[hamster_nz]

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

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.

[mtdoc]

..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.

[Simon]

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".

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.

[Someone]

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.

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.

[mash107]

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.

[mtdoc]

. 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.

[tggzzz]

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.

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).

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.

[tggzzz]

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.

[Someone]

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.

[CatalinaWOW]

..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.

[zapta]

..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.

[mtdoc]

..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.

[Simon]

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.

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).

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.

I do chose my poison, or rather I chose the poison I really want to avoid and that is nuclear. If you plan badly for all the other technologies the consequence is that you won't have any electricity. If you plan badly for nuclear people end up dead very quickly. It is clear to me that costs will be put before common sense and even safety and they already have.

Nuclear could have so many side costs, the cost is nothing to do with the fuel cost, it's the general mess it makes that costs the most.

Yes we will always need some dependable generation solution to plug gaps but do you know that we already rely on wind ? at this time of year if wind power were to cease totally there would be power cuts, and yes it has happened before, the last time there was a shortage of capacity it was partly due to no wind output at all (that was national grids position) so it's not just a side project, it matters already.

I think prices of other generation methods will go down, they have so far. Our only main problem is storage.

[Red Squirrel]

I don't think nuclear is the end all source due to some draw backs such as the waste, and fact that it relies on nun renewable minerals, but it is a good transitional phase before we can make solar/wind more viable via better energy storage. Ex: if we can come up with a battery tech that could be used grid wide. 

There are also lot of political issues that could make nuclear better, such as allowing to use up the rods further, reducing the waste.

That said, I would rather have a nuclear plant go up in my back yard than a coal plant.

[tggzzz]

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.

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).

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.

I do chose my poison, or rather I chose the poison I really want to avoid and that is nuclear. If you plan badly for all the other technologies the consequence is that you won't have any electricity. If you plan badly for nuclear people end up dead very quickly. It is clear to me that costs will be put before common sense and even safety and they already have.

Nuclear could have so many side costs, the cost is nothing to do with the fuel cost, it's the general mess it makes that costs the most.

Yes we will always need some dependable generation solution to plug gaps but do you know that we already rely on wind ? at this time of year if wind power were to cease totally there would be power cuts, and yes it has happened before, the last time there was a shortage of capacity it was partly due to no wind output at all (that was national grids position) so it's not just a side project, it matters already.

I think prices of other generation methods will go down, they have so far. Our only main problem is storage.

So, given three alternatives:

• technology currently injuring and killing millions
• technology that - arguably - might have killed a few thousand
• technology that, because it cannot be relied upon, would cause severe economic problems - and in the worst case severe societal problems

you choose 1 and 3 over 2! To me that's irrational.

I've witnessed the problems with option 3 in India as an adult, and in the UK when I was a child. Intermittent and unpredictable power cuts are an a killer - both personally and economically.

[tggzzz]

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,

Just so. Most proponents of wind energy are disreputable in that they knowingly externalise and ignore the "dispatch costs" in order to make their preferred technology look good.

Responsible engineers don't do that.

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.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Wind and solar are heavily subsidised with guaranteed prices.

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.

Note that in the UK electricity prices have already been double the guaranteed strike price for the next generation of nuke electricity.

Any control engineer will tell you the limitations of using feedback to control a system. If you have a feedback system with a loop time of decades, then your system will completely fail to control fluctuations with a period of minutes/days/weeks.

The consequences of those fluctuations would not be tolerable to an advanced society. I know; I've seen the results in the UK when I was a kid and in India as an adult.

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,

Boring? Maybe.
Irrelevant? Absolutely not.

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.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Neither easily nor safely.

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.

Ah, so you knowingly ignore the externalised costs of some technologies but not others. That's not what a reputable engineer does.

[zapta]

..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.

The human race had great progress in the last 50k years even we exclude the last 200 years or last 1000 years.

[Simon]

So, given three alternatives:

• technology currently injuring and killing millions
• technology that - arguably - might have killed a few thousand
• technology that, because it cannot be relied upon, would cause severe economic problems - and in the worst case severe societal problems

you choose 1 and 3 over 2! To me that's irrational.

I've witnessed the problems with option 3 in India as an adult, and in the UK when I was a child. Intermittent and unpredictable power cuts are an a killer - both personally and economically.

I know we are in a deadlock situation because we have no been willing to progress fast enough. We should never have gotten to this point and the time to build this glorious new station is long. We are already in trouble right now. This year they anounced that through the winter we will be running on less margin than we may wish to. Small scale distributed generation is going to be key in the future. It will greatly unburden the distribution network - that has losses, and be more efficient in transmission. If I am not home and I am generating 1KW I don't think it will be going far up the street before it gets used.

[tggzzz]

So, given three alternatives:

• technology currently injuring and killing millions
• technology that - arguably - might have killed a few thousand
• technology that, because it cannot be relied upon, would cause severe economic problems - and in the worst case severe societal problems

you choose 1 and 3 over 2! To me that's irrational.

I've witnessed the problems with option 3 in India as an adult, and in the UK when I was a child. Intermittent and unpredictable power cuts are an a killer - both personally and economically.

I know we are in a deadlock situation because we have no been willing to progress fast enough.

The political reasons for that are inexcusable. The technical and economic reasons are less easily wished away. It is necessary to distinguish between those two categories.

We should never have gotten to this point and the time to build this glorious new station is long. We are already in trouble right now. This year they anounced that through the winter we will be running on less margin than we may wish to.

Just so.

Small scale distributed generation is going to be key in the future. It will greatly unburden the distribution network - ...

That's both technically and economically contentious.

Technically: it is unproven and very difficult to control (and the critical problem is generation, not transmission!).  If you keep your eye out and attend relevant talks/conferences, you will see there are already significant problems with large-scale solar and wind in that respect. Start by going to some IET lectures/talks at a local university; see http://www.theiet.org/events/index.cfm

Economically: how do you know what price to pay for a 1kW resource tomorrow, if you don't know what will be online/offline or even what they are generating? While there are, of course, such problems with the existing situation, small scale distributed generation exacerbates them.

[Kleinstein]

...
I know we are in a deadlock situation because we have no been willing to progress fast enough. We should never have gotten to this point and the time to build this glorious new station is long. We are already in trouble right now. This year they anounced that through the winter we will be running on less margin than we may wish to. Small scale distributed generation is going to be key in the future. It will greatly unburden the distribution network - that has losses, and be more efficient in transmission. If I am not home and I am generating 1KW I don't think it will be going far up the street before it gets used.

At least in more dense populated countries the grid loss is still rather low (e.g. 3-5% range, with about 1/3-1/2 of this due to the distribution transformers). Small scale generation will not change much of this. Especially the variable renewable sources put an extra burden on the grid. The grid is to a large extend an alternative to some of the storage requirements and compared to storage the grid is super high efficiency. Storage is usually rather low efficiency and alone for this reason makes the electricity more expensive.

Currently most countries are just starting with something like < 25% from PV and wind. This is still the easy part, as other sources can be used to compensate instead of having real storage.

While PV and wind have a problem in not producing 24/7, nuclear power has the opposite problem: it is producing best at 24/7 and not using them at night increases the cost even more. So 100% nuclear is also a problem and would need some storage and backup to.

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

[Simon]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

[tggzzz]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

By your reasoning, conventional plant should be shut down immediately, since they kill (and disable) far more people than nukes.

By your reasoning, no aircraft should ever fly. In practice, it is absolutely normal for defective commercial air transport aircraft to take off. By statute (probably the ANO, but I haven't checked!) it is the individual pilot's responsibility to look at the defect list and decide whether or not to take off. Landing isn't optional, of course.

[Kleinstein]

The safety of nuclear and and other high risk (possible large damage) facilities relies on the operators and those who control them to play by the rules. For the technical side it should be possible to bring the risk to an acceptable limit - but this does not help if the companies or governments stretch the rules all the way they think they can do it. If everything goes well, they get some extra money in one way or the other. If things turn out bad however they just can't compensate for the damage - so the state or maybe even other neighboring states have to pay for it. This is not limited to capitalism - we had a bad example in Chernobyl. As the USSR broke down and could not pay for the damages, it is now other countries that pay for it.

Things are a little different with planes: here the damage from a lost plane is large but usually the companies survive and they usually have insurance. The insurance somewhat is a big incentive for the airlines to play by the rules. Still things go wrong there too - like trying to safe by not carrying required fuel reserve. For nuclear there just is no real insurance - much is covered (more or less) by the states as a kind of subsidy.

With coal plants - governments should really stop building new ones and start to turn down the old ones. However building new nuclear as a replacement is not a good idea. Fist is that it takes too long to build them, they are rather expensive and still chances are the government will have pay for the waste or possible damages in the end. Especially in more corrupt states safety and the money laid back for final disposal can be a real problem - it is likely not there when needed. For the situation here in Germany it might be acceptable to shut down coal first and run nuclear a little longer. But politics decided the other way around - false claims from nuclear industries made this popular. It is more of a scandal the the US did not shut down (at least for upgrades) most of there plants just after Fukushima, as most US reactors are of similar design.

[Simon]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

By your reasoning, conventional plant should be shut down immediately, since they kill (and disable) far more people than nukes.

By your reasoning, no aircraft should ever fly. In practice, it is absolutely normal for defective commercial air transport aircraft to take off. By statute (probably the ANO, but I haven't checked!) it is the individual pilot's responsibility to look at the defect list and decide whether or not to take off. Landing isn't optional, of course.

I am afraid you are just putting words in my mouth. I take it you have no problem with the company that let this power station get into this state. This is why we in a capitalist society are not ready for nuclear. You have a government that has tied it's hands by letting private interests run public interests and when the private puts the public at risk the government has to just go along with it. Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

[julian1]

Good science and engineering does not exist in a vacuum. And unfortunately - politics, money and human-nature are unavoidable and cannot be factored out of the design process. When it all goes wrong - the result is environmental damage on the scale of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

[Simon]

Good science and engineering does not exist in a vacuum. And unfortunately - politics, money and human-nature are unavoidable and cannot be factored out of the design process. When it all goes wrong - the result is environmental damage on the scale of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Which is exactly why we should not have nuclear. It's not so much that there is a huge failing with the technology. But no technology can withstand being misused.

[tggzzz]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

By your reasoning, conventional plant should be shut down immediately, since they kill (and disable) far more people than nukes.

By your reasoning, no aircraft should ever fly. In practice, it is absolutely normal for defective commercial air transport aircraft to take off. By statute (probably the ANO, but I haven't checked!) it is the individual pilot's responsibility to look at the defect list and decide whether or not to take off. Landing isn't optional, of course.

I am afraid you are just putting words in my mouth.

Not really. If there's a "motes vs beams in eyes" issue, then it should be highlighted. Alternatively, please simply regard it as an exploration of consequences of opinions, or an exploration of imbalance in opinions.

I take it you have no problem with the company that let this power station get into this state. This is why we in a capitalist society are not ready for nuclear. You have a government that has tied it's hands by letting private interests run public interests and when the private puts the public at risk the government has to just go along with it.

Capitalism is a complete red herring. Dysfunctional political decisions are just as prevalent in communist, socialist, meritocratic, oligarchic, and any other form of government.

Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

And from that we can infer you have a limited experience of the world. In particular:

• you are too young to remember the 1970s in the UK. I had to revise for O levels and A levels by candlelight, sitting under a blanket, seeing a blacked out hospital through the window
• you haven't travelled to places where power cuts are frequent but irregular

If you had, you would be less sanguine about power cuts.

[Someone]

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,

Just so. Most proponents of wind energy are disreputable in that they knowingly externalise and ignore the "dispatch costs" in order to make their preferred technology look good.

You're going to have to define "dispatch costs" as its not a common term that seems to match anything relevant here. The cost of energy of wind (levelled or not) is for the UK a close match to all other generators other than open cycle gas and coal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_Kingdom
The grid is a market whether you like it or not (https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2015/09/wholesale_energy_markets_in_2015_final_0.pdf), you don't count the cost of storage for dispatch in with generators of any type, the marginal value of the energy produced is already counted in the levelled cost.

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.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Wind and solar are heavily subsidised with guaranteed prices.

Try the numbers:
https://www.frontier-economics.com/documents/2015/03/lcp-frontier-economics-next-uk-auctions-renewable-contracts-difference.pdf
To encourage new low carbon electricity capacity in the UK subsidies are being distributed to the nuclear and renewable sectors, the subsidy per unit of energy delivered varies but for all projects getting subsidies they are averaging less than the subsidies for Hinkley Point C. And as noted the subsidies for renewables are for shorter periods, so are committing less investment over time.

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.

Note that in the UK electricity prices have already been double the guaranteed strike price for the next generation of nuke electricity.

Seems like Hinkley Point C is still getting a strike price above the annual average:
http://www.energybrokers.co.uk/electricity/historic-price-data-graph.htm
The point of the contract for difference is to reduce risk for the investor, that the market has peaks above their price is a loss of opportunity for the investor having offloaded their risk to the cfd supplier who then profits (the government in this case).

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.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Neither easily nor safely.

By which numbers? The publicised fatalities per unit of energy show that solar and wind combined with pumped hydro storage would be lower than the same energy produced by oil, gas, or coal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
So they're actually safer, possibly more expensive, but safer and entirely possible. Nuclear would be safer again, so its a good option too.

[djos]

By which numbers? The publicised fatalities per unit of energy show that solar and wind combined with pumped hydro storage would be lower than the same energy produced by oil, gas, or coal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
So they're actually safer, possibly more expensive, but safer and entirely possible. Nuclear would be safer again, so its a good option too.

Even when you ignore incidents like the Hazelwood Coal Mine fire which likely contributed to an increased death rate in Morwell and surrounding areas, burning Coal absolutely contributes to health problems. I can recall visiting my Grandparents in Moe (Victoria) in the late 80's and suffering "asthma" attacks and respiratory problems in the 2 weeks I stayed there - i'd never had issues before or since. Not exactly scientific standard evidence I know, but it's the most likely culprit.

[Simon]

Capitalism is a complete red herring. Dysfunctional political decisions are just as prevalent in communist, socialist, meritocratic, oligarchic, and any other form of government.

Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

And from that we can infer you have a limited experience of the world. In particular:

• you are too young to remember the 1970s in the UK. I had to revise for O levels and A levels by candlelight, sitting under a blanket, seeing a blacked out hospital through the window
• you haven't travelled to places where power cuts are frequent but irregular

If you had, you would be less sanguine about power cuts.

I never said any of the current alternatives are any good either but we have a failing plublic sector that is destroying public services and the government is still trying to hand more over to it's ministers mates.

We have a rail service that is falling to bits despite it's astronomical cost (I used to live in italy and there was a local private rail service that ran much cheaper than rail does here and it worked so it can be done). Our hospitals are busting at the seams and what you don't see is how much "NHS" work is done by private companies charging a fortune leaving the NHS starved of money along with government cuts, we have phone companies expecting the government to invest in fibre optic services that they will then charge us a fortune for after we funded the infrastructure and in this environment of chaos and dog eat dog and profits before service you want me to be happy to have a nuclear power station ? no way, never, ever, ever. Sorry we are not grown up enough for a nuclear power station. The people making the decisions are clearly only seeing the money and not the risks. And all we are seeing is a country run by corporations not government. When a government has to change a law to allow a dangerous nuclear plant to continue to run then we are being held to ransom by the private company running that power station. I am sorry but I just can't see a happy ending here.

I don't want power cuts either, perhaps in the national interest people could start to use less energy ? lets face it most people are totally inneficient because they are lazy and/or ignorant. You want your clever toys ? then you should know how to use them...... The complaints people make about a nanny state are in part not justified. If we lived in a grown up and educated society people would be able to look after themselves and work with the system for the benefit for all.

For example. I have just bought a shiny new laptop, it's a decent one. and after using it for a few weeks I can say that I am now happy to have it replace my desktop PC for vitually everything, so I am now running a machine that uses 45W (according to the charger) as oposed to one using 2-300W. All my lights at home are LED and not overpowered. As I mentioned before I try and help the system by producing some of my own energy (I make about 1/3 of what I use although I am sure that won't help a blackout at 5pm in the dead of winter). and I even replace 400W of incandescent lights at work with 44W of CFL when I replaced them in my own home for he LED's. Tell me how many other people can be "arsed" to think of things like this ? It's not rocket sience.

[tggzzz]

Capitalism is a complete red herring. Dysfunctional political decisions are just as prevalent in communist, socialist, meritocratic, oligarchic, and any other form of government.

Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

And from that we can infer you have a limited experience of the world. In particular:

• you are too young to remember the 1970s in the UK. I had to revise for O levels and A levels by candlelight, sitting under a blanket, seeing a blacked out hospital through the window
• you haven't travelled to places where power cuts are frequent but irregular

If you had, you would be less sanguine about power cuts.

I never said any of the current alternatives are any good either but we have a failing plublic sector that is destroying public services and the government is still trying to hand more over to it's ministers mates.

We have a rail service that is falling to bits despite it's astronomical cost (I used to live in italy and there was a local private rail service that ran much cheaper than rail does here and it worked so it can be done). Our hospitals are busting at the seams and what you don't see is how much "NHS" work is done by private companies charging a fortune leaving the NHS starved of money along with government cuts, we have phone companies expecting the government to invest in fibre optic services that they will then charge us a fortune for after we funded the infrastructure and in this environment of chaos and dog eat dog and profits before service you want me to be happy to have a nuclear power station ? no way, never, ever, ever. Sorry we are not grown up enough for a nuclear power station. The people making the decisions are clearly only seeing the money and not the risks. And all we are seeing is a country run by corporations not government. When a government has to change a law to allow a dangerous nuclear plant to continue to run then we are being held to ransom by the private company running that power station. I am sorry but I just can't see a happy ending here.

I don't want power cuts either, perhaps in the national interest people could start to use less energy ? lets face it most people are totally inneficient because they are lazy and/or ignorant. You want your clever toys ? then you should know how to use them...... The complaints people make about a nanny state are in part not justified. If we lived in a grown up and educated society people would be able to look after themselves and work with the system for the benefit for all.

For example. I have just bought a shiny new laptop, it's a decent one. and after using it for a few weeks I can say that I am now happy to have it replace my desktop PC for vitually everything, so I am now running a machine that uses 45W (according to the charger) as oposed to one using 2-300W. All my lights at home are LED and not overpowered. As I mentioned before I try and help the system by producing some of my own energy (I make about 1/3 of what I use although I am sure that won't help a blackout at 5pm in the dead of winter). and I even replace 400W of incandescent lights at work with 44W of CFL when I replaced them in my own home for he LED's. Tell me how many other people can be "arsed" to think of things like this ? It's not rocket sience.

I agree with all those starting points, but I fail to see how they make conventional power plants more dangerous than nuclear plants. To go from rail/NHS/etc to nuclear power seems to me to be a incomprehensible complete non-sequiteur.

[Simon]

I think you meant less dangerous ?

What I am trying to explain is that we do not live in a society that wants to pay for anything and the government who usually would have our interests at heart and not profits are not running anything any more. As I said they changed the rules so that a nuke power station could stay in operation. This is profitiers holding the government and the public to ranson. You want your electricity, you have to risk a nuclear accident to have it because we won't invest and expect the givernment to bail us out.

[tggzzz]

I think you meant less dangerous ?

Duh! Yes. I inverted the sentence while writing it - or rather I inverted half the sentence.

What I am trying to explain is that we do not live in a society that wants to pay for anything and the government who usually would have our interests at heart and not profits are not running anything any more. As I said they changed the rules so that a nuke power station could stay in operation. This is profitiers holding the government and the public to ranson. You want your electricity, you have to risk a nuclear accident to have it because we won't invest and expect the givernment to bail us out.

Yes, that is the world we live in, and we should face up to all the realities while trying to improve it. Being able to store electricity from intermittent sources for short/medium terms would be a big help, but as yet the reality is that it can't be done.

Two current realities that cannot responsibly be avoided are:

• if electricity is turned off for whatever reason, many many people will die
• conventional plant kills more people than nuclear electricity

So, which set of people (other than easy targets like politicians, lawyers and estate agents) are you prepared to kill by not using nuclear electricity or by having long/short term power cuts.

Personally I prefer to keep people alive.

[zapta]

Two current realities that cannot responsibly be avoided are:

• if electricity is turned off for whatever reason, many many people will die

+1

Electricity could save for example these ~4M people that die every year from pollution, having to cook/heat with wood and dung.

http://www.who.int/indoorair/en/

[Simon]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning. We are not at the point where the lights are going out and the proposals to install more nuclear power plants are not going to solve any of our problems in the next 10 years. Generation capacity is not the problem with renewables but as you say storage is still a big problem. Again the government who should be looking after our interests is probably expecting the private sector to come up with the technology when instead the government could invest in the technology. As a country we are very poorly set up technologically, our ability to innovate has fallen drastically and we have become a country of traders. The main problem is that there is not yet the political or public will to accept that the way we are going is not the best way to go and we need to do something about it. We seem to take our technology for granted and expect it handed on a plate. I've not heard of the government explaining to people how to economise with power and be more efficient which if we were we could probably easily shave 20% of our national consumption and that would shore us up for quite some time with the necessary overhead in power supply.

Places like hospitals will have backups for short-term outages. No operating theatre would operate unless it had backup power because as you rightly point out a loss of power would mean in a hospital loss of life particularly as trying to book an appointment for an operation these days is like trying to get a train ticket. Obviously running on generators would be expensive but then what is the cost of our health?

There are quite a few rivers in this country for example why don't they have generators fitted? I would love to live near a small stream or rather have a small stream running through my property I would never pay for electricity again. There are lots of energy sources out there the problem is we haven't yet mastered the concept of microgeneration and distributed generation and storage which also comes with the need for an attitude that we are all in this together looking after each other and not every man for himself. Small scale generation with an amount of storage and grid tie inverter is could provide in my opinion a lot of resilience. It's only a pity our distribution network is not DC as that would make it much easier to pump power into the grid.

[zapta]

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

Simon, please keep in mind that the worst nuclear plant incident happened in a government owned plant in a socialist society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

What nuclear technology needs is accountability, not ideology.

[tggzzz]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning.

The problem is that non-nuclear power is already killing a lot of people. Removing nuclear power will kill even more.

Which of your friends and relatives are you prepared to sacrifice for a ideology?

We are not at the point where the lights are going out

Actually we are very very close to that.  "Notices of insufficiency" (i.e. prepare to be cut off) have already been raised this winter - and this winter not stressing the energy industry. If the weather at this time in 2010 occurred now, some industries would be shut down.

If you don't believe me, go and talk to those in the generating industry. At the last IET talk I attended they asked the audience whether they expected "the lights to go out". Those in the industry raised their hands to say "yes".

[Someone]

We are not at the point where the lights are going out and the proposals to install more nuclear power plants are not going to solve any of our problems in the next 10 years. Generation capacity is not the problem with renewables but as you say storage is still a big problem.

Well the narrow minded view (by excluding storage possibilities) is that you need excess generation capacity well above the peak demand to allow for outages and failures. But even for "conventional plants" the case for storage is strong:
http://gridwatch.co.uk
http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/electricity-spot-prices
There is a predictable daily demand variation, off peak tariffs haven't levelled the grid enough (and are much less popular than they have been in the past). Already with the existing mix of generation short term storage is a profitable exercise and the added peak generation capacity would make the grid more robust. Storage is a necessity in some form, and the predominant form at the moment is gas/coal. Gas is in a low period for the moment, so its doing well:
https://www.quandl.com/data/CHRIS/ICE_M1-UK-Natural-Gas-Futures-Continuous-Contract-1-M1-Front-Month
But if gas prices go back up again the field changes.

[Kleinstein]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning. ...

A nuclear accident usually will not kill many fast, the problem is more the longer term damages: first this is an increased cancer rate so more people are dying the next 30 years or so. Hard to tell how to count casualties. Also due to the still rather short experience and rare large incidents with nuclear energy we do not have a good statistics - so estimate as rater difficult. Besides directly killing people the is also the financial risk: quite a large area gets polluted for quite a long time (e.g. 100s of years). This is potentially enough to make states collapse leaving behind more reactors without proper supervision / care. We had been lucky in Fukushima with the wind - just imagine the wind driving the fallout to Tokio instead of the pacific ocean.

If everything runs well and in stable states the risks might be acceptable, but as universal solution this would mean there will be nuclear power in corrupt and failing states too and a single accident could turn a stable state to a failing one.  I don't think having a nuclear power plant in Syria or Somalia would be an attractive situation - they would likely run it until it breaks down, one way or the other.

[CatalinaWOW]

A little off topic, but is no one else concerned about all of this optimization, regardless of the raw source of the power.

Once upon a time all generation was local, and had to be sized for peak loads.  Inefficient, but lots of inherent excess capacity almost all of the time.  Made a pretty robust system.

Then we started grids and sharing power over regions.  Allowed for statistical reduction in peak capacity.  It didn't really cut load peaks too much, just by the slope of the daily curve over the east-west extent of the grid, but did help a lot with the somewhat random fluctuations and allowed more resistance to single generator failures.

Now we are talking about avoiding need for more generation by using storage to precisely level out the daily swings.  Raw generation capacity need only be equal to average demand, with some argument about the duration of storage and the length of the average.

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

[tggzzz]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning. ...

A nuclear accident usually will not kill many fast, the problem is more the longer term damages: first this is an increased cancer rate so more people are dying the next 30 years or so. Hard to tell how to count casualties. Also due to the still rather short experience and rare large incidents with nuclear energy we do not have a good statistics - so estimate as rater difficult. Besides directly killing people the is also the financial risk: quite a large area gets polluted for quite a long time (e.g. 100s of years). This is potentially enough to make states collapse leaving behind more reactors without proper supervision / care. We had been lucky in Fukushima with the wind - just imagine the wind driving the fallout to Tokio instead of the pacific ocean.

Of course almost exactly the same is true with dependable non-nuclear power sources. The only difference is in probability - and that makes nuclear look attractive.  That's why medium term (i.e. days-weeks) storage of large quantities of energy is so important.

So the current choice is between certainty and possibility; do you want to drink toxins or play russian roulette

[mtdoc]

A little off topic, but is no one else concerned about all of this optimization, regardless of the raw source of the power.

Once upon a time all generation was local, and had to be sized for peak loads.  Inefficient, but lots of inherent excess capacity almost all of the time.  Made a pretty robust system.

Then we started grids and sharing power over regions.  Allowed for statistical reduction in peak capacity.  It didn't really cut load peaks too much, just by the slope of the daily curve over the east-west extent of the grid, but did help a lot with the somewhat random fluctuations and allowed more resistance to single generator failures.

Now we are talking about avoiding need for more generation by using storage to precisely level out the daily swings.  Raw generation capacity need only be equal to average demand, with some argument about the duration of storage and the length of the average.

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

The broader point here is an important one IMO.  As a society matures it tends to adopt ever increasingly complex solutions to resource shortages. The result is decreased resiliency - a more brittle system - one more prone to collapse.  The anthropologist Joseph Tainter has written extensively about this phenomenon.

[Someone]

A little off topic, but is no one else concerned about all of this optimization, regardless of the raw source of the power.

Once upon a time all generation was local, and had to be sized for peak loads.  Inefficient, but lots of inherent excess capacity almost all of the time.  Made a pretty robust system.

Then we started grids and sharing power over regions.  Allowed for statistical reduction in peak capacity.  It didn't really cut load peaks too much, just by the slope of the daily curve over the east-west extent of the grid, but did help a lot with the somewhat random fluctuations and allowed more resistance to single generator failures.

Now we are talking about avoiding need for more generation by using storage to precisely level out the daily swings.  Raw generation capacity need only be equal to average demand, with some argument about the duration of storage and the length of the average.

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

The theory is that it will never get behind, mothballed plants will be brought online quickly (weeks to months) if the market price starts rising because supply is getting scarce. But the current UK grid lacks storage for peaking with only 1.6GW of hydro against a peak demand of around 60GW, compare this to the Australian installed base of 7.8GW against a peak demand of around 50GW. You can see how the hydro and gas plants are used for peaking from their energy contribution compared to their installed capacity share:
https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistics/generation-capacity-and-output-by-fuel-source
The general trend is you need to introduce more "excess" capacity for peaking/reliability, and even more again if there are intermittent renewables dumping their low cost energy into the grid. Right now the only plants that have the ability to sit idle and deliver stored power quickly are gas and hydro, oil is slower, and coal slower again, nuclear is uneconomic to run at anything other than a constant load.

[tggzzz]

A little off topic, but is no one else concerned about all of this optimization, regardless of the raw source of the power.

Once upon a time all generation was local, and had to be sized for peak loads.  Inefficient, but lots of inherent excess capacity almost all of the time.  Made a pretty robust system.

Then we started grids and sharing power over regions.  Allowed for statistical reduction in peak capacity.  It didn't really cut load peaks too much, just by the slope of the daily curve over the east-west extent of the grid, but did help a lot with the somewhat random fluctuations and allowed more resistance to single generator failures.

Now we are talking about avoiding need for more generation by using storage to precisely level out the daily swings.  Raw generation capacity need only be equal to average demand, with some argument about the duration of storage and the length of the average.

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

The theory is that it will never get behind, mothballed plants will be brought online quickly (weeks to months) if the market price starts rising because supply is getting scarce. But the current UK grid lacks storage for peaking with only 1.6GW of hydro against a peak demand of around 60GW, compare this to the Australian installed base of 7.8GW against a peak demand of around 50GW. You can see how the hydro and gas plants are used for peaking from their energy contribution compared to their installed capacity share:
https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistics/generation-capacity-and-output-by-fuel-source
The general trend is you need to introduce more "excess" capacity for peaking/reliability, and even more again if there are intermittent renewables dumping their low cost energy into the grid. Right now the only plants that have the ability to sit idle and deliver stored power quickly are gas and hydro, oil is slower, and coal slower again, nuclear is uneconomic to run at anything other than a constant load.

The peak, measured in GW, is not a fundamentally important factor since renewables output is fairly predictable in the short term (hours). Certainly the UK's hydro is sufficient in that respect.

What is more important and difficult to achieve is storage, measured in GWh. The UK's hydro is completely insufficient for that - and will be for the foreseeable future. A noticable proportion of it has to be reserved for "black start" capability.

[hamster_nz]

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

This happens in New Zealand.

Using energy in long-term storage (hydro lakes) is very cheap compared with burning fossil fuels. This gives great commercial pressure to maximize the use of hydro, and play the "one in twenty year" game.

The generation sector are then faced with a complex problem of predicting the weather many months in advance. If there is a 'one in 20 year' dry autumn, we head into winter with lower than required storage lake levels, and possibly insufficient fossil fuel generation capacity to cover peak winter demand if hydro runs out.

This lack of supply pushes up the wholesale price of electricity on the spot-price market, allowing generators to make more money than had they conserved the relatively cheap hydro for use over the winter peak.

So using hydro when storage is mostly full, or cover peak loads would maximize security of supply. The opposite maximizes return to generator shareholders who makes the most when lakes have been emptied.

[Someone]

A little off topic, but is no one else concerned about all of this optimization, regardless of the raw source of the power.

Once upon a time all generation was local, and had to be sized for peak loads.  Inefficient, but lots of inherent excess capacity almost all of the time.  Made a pretty robust system.

Then we started grids and sharing power over regions.  Allowed for statistical reduction in peak capacity.  It didn't really cut load peaks too much, just by the slope of the daily curve over the east-west extent of the grid, but did help a lot with the somewhat random fluctuations and allowed more resistance to single generator failures.

Now we are talking about avoiding need for more generation by using storage to precisely level out the daily swings.  Raw generation capacity need only be equal to average demand, with some argument about the duration of storage and the length of the average.

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

The theory is that it will never get behind, mothballed plants will be brought online quickly (weeks to months) if the market price starts rising because supply is getting scarce. But the current UK grid lacks storage for peaking with only 1.6GW of hydro against a peak demand of around 60GW, compare this to the Australian installed base of 7.8GW against a peak demand of around 50GW. You can see how the hydro and gas plants are used for peaking from their energy contribution compared to their installed capacity share:
https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistics/generation-capacity-and-output-by-fuel-source
The general trend is you need to introduce more "excess" capacity for peaking/reliability, and even more again if there are intermittent renewables dumping their low cost energy into the grid. Right now the only plants that have the ability to sit idle and deliver stored power quickly are gas and hydro, oil is slower, and coal slower again, nuclear is uneconomic to run at anything other than a constant load.

The peak, measured in GW, is not a fundamentally important factor since renewables output is fairly predictable in the short term (hours). Certainly the UK's hydro is sufficient in that respect.

What is more important and difficult to achieve is storage, measured in GWh. The UK's hydro is completely insufficient for that - and will be for the foreseeable future. A noticable proportion of it has to be reserved for "black start" capability.

The peak alone is critical to this discussion about robustness, whatever sources of energy are chosen the available capacity needs to exceed the peak at all times for energy security, this is the stupid reductionist argument that the grid cannot be 100% renewable generators only as they have a chance of not being available and their available capacity is 0 (while they still manage to generate a 25-30% load factor annually). The peak to trough is important also, you can't take out the fast slewing plants and replace them with nuclear reactors (unless you accept they will be running load dumps routinely, which are possibly better than negative energy prices but at least they send a message to the market). You could have any mixture of generators coupled with storage that can deliver the peak power, then its a matter of sizing the energy storage and energy production to match the expected delivery.

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

This happens in New Zealand.

Using energy in long-term storage (hydro lakes) is very cheap compared with burning fossil fuels. This gives great commercial pressure to maximize the use of hydro, and play the "one in twenty year" game.

The generation sector are then faced with a complex problem of predicting the weather many months in advance. If there is a 'one in 20 year' dry autumn, we head into winter with lower than required storage lake levels, and possibly insufficient fossil fuel generation capacity to cover peak winter demand if hydro runs out.

This lack of supply pushes up the wholesale price of electricity on the spot-price market, allowing generators to make more money than had they conserved the relatively cheap hydro for use over the winter peak.

So using hydro when storage is mostly full, or cover peak loads would maximize security of supply. The opposite maximizes return to generator shareholders who makes the most when lakes have been emptied.

Gas/Coal/Nuclear fuel delivery can be interrupted too, and some reserve is stored for those possibilities. If the hydro was emptied and then there is inadequate energy available over winter then the hydro plants were operated sub optimally from a market perspective, they will generate the most money when the market is on the brink of collapse and are the only options available. Time for some pumped storage instead of relying only on the natural catchment.

[tronde]

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

Simon, please keep in mind that the worst nuclear plant incident happened in a government owned plant in a socialist society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

What nuclear technology needs is accountability, not ideology.

So, how does it come Three Mile Island happened? US turned communinst? It could very well be the US instead of Russia in the nuclear disaster hall of fame.

[hamster_nz]

This happens in New Zealand.

Using energy in long-term storage (hydro lakes) is very cheap compared with burning fossil fuels. This gives great commercial pressure to maximize the use of hydro, and play the "one in twenty year" game.

The generation sector are then faced with a complex problem of predicting the weather many months in advance. If there is a 'one in 20 year' dry autumn, we head into winter with lower than required storage lake levels, and possibly insufficient fossil fuel generation capacity to cover peak winter demand if hydro runs out.

This lack of supply pushes up the wholesale price of electricity on the spot-price market, allowing generators to make more money than had they conserved the relatively cheap hydro for use over the winter peak.

So using hydro when storage is mostly full, or cover peak loads would maximize security of supply. The opposite maximizes return to generator shareholders who makes the most when lakes have been emptied.

Gas/Coal/Nuclear fuel delivery can be interrupted too, and some reserve is stored for those possibilities. If the hydro was emptied and then there is inadequate energy available over winter then the hydro plants were operated sub optimally from a market perspective, they will generate the most money when the market is on the brink of collapse and are the only options available. Time for some pumped storage instead of relying only on the natural catchment.

Are you are saying that while generating using hydro (over spring/summer), we also need to pump the water from the tailraces back into the lake (using fossil fuel generated power) to allow hydro generation when short of water due to the unpredictable natural catchment.

Humm... sounds just a little bit fishy to me.

[zapta]

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

Simon, please keep in mind that the worst nuclear plant incident happened in a government owned plant in a socialist society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

What nuclear technology needs is accountability, not ideology.

So, how does it come Three Mile Island happened? US turned communinst? It could very well be the US instead of Russia in the nuclear disaster hall of fame.

Did I said that *all* nuclear incidents were in socialists power plants?  Please read my post again.

Simon dismissed private capitalist operators and I kindly reminded him that is was a socialist government that was responsible for the worst accident so far.

[Someone]

This happens in New Zealand.

Using energy in long-term storage (hydro lakes) is very cheap compared with burning fossil fuels. This gives great commercial pressure to maximize the use of hydro, and play the "one in twenty year" game.

The generation sector are then faced with a complex problem of predicting the weather many months in advance. If there is a 'one in 20 year' dry autumn, we head into winter with lower than required storage lake levels, and possibly insufficient fossil fuel generation capacity to cover peak winter demand if hydro runs out.

This lack of supply pushes up the wholesale price of electricity on the spot-price market, allowing generators to make more money than had they conserved the relatively cheap hydro for use over the winter peak.

So using hydro when storage is mostly full, or cover peak loads would maximize security of supply. The opposite maximizes return to generator shareholders who makes the most when lakes have been emptied.

Gas/Coal/Nuclear fuel delivery can be interrupted too, and some reserve is stored for those possibilities. If the hydro was emptied and then there is inadequate energy available over winter then the hydro plants were operated sub optimally from a market perspective, they will generate the most money when the market is on the brink of collapse and are the only options available. Time for some pumped storage instead of relying only on the natural catchment.

Are you are saying that while generating using hydro (over spring/summer), we also need to pump the water from the tailraces back into the lake (using fossil fuel generated power) to allow hydro generation when short of water due to the unpredictable natural catchment.

Humm... sounds just a little bit fishy to me.

If you're going to play the game of negative corner cases then yes, if its raining at one end of the country and the hydro dams are close to capacity they will run and produce (almost) zero marginal cost electricity, which if you have some form of storage which isn't full (such as other hydro) that can absorb the excess at a low price for later dispatch.

And yes, if you are planning to need more energy in the future you would run the coal plants and pump extra electrical energy into the dams. Even if its during a period when the price is relatively high, if the price will be higher later when the grid approaches its limit and all the opportunistic generators with high marginal cost have been called upon already. Predicting that is not simple, but they can make out like bandits if planned well.

[hamster_nz]

And yes, if you are planning to need more energy in the future you would run the coal plants and pump extra electrical energy into the dams. Even if its during a period when the price is relatively high, if the price will be higher later when the grid approaches its limit and all the opportunistic generators with high marginal cost have been called upon already. Predicting that is not simple, but they can make out like bandits if planned well.

It isn't a lack of generation capacity, it is miking the cash cow of (govenrment built) hydro while the sun shines, forcing the burning of fossil fuels during winter.

2008 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jun/09/alternativeenergy.energy
New Zealanders are to be urged to wash dishes by hand and turn off lights as the country teeters on the brink of a power crisis caused by drought.


2012 - http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/6478238/Winter-power-shortages-loom
Electricity companies and industry are in talks about a looming hydro power shortage this winter.

2013 - http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10875947
New Zealand could face power shortages this winter unless the hydro lakes get a significant boost soon.

Anyhow, I see this is approaching your ideology around free markets being best, so I will leave it alone....

[Someone]

And yes, if you are planning to need more energy in the future you would run the coal plants and pump extra electrical energy into the dams. Even if its during a period when the price is relatively high, if the price will be higher later when the grid approaches its limit and all the opportunistic generators with high marginal cost have been called upon already. Predicting that is not simple, but they can make out like bandits if planned well.

It isn't a lack of generation capacity, it is miking the cash cow of (govenrment built) hydro while the sun shines, forcing the burning of fossil fuels during winter.

2008 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jun/09/alternativeenergy.energy
New Zealanders are to be urged to wash dishes by hand and turn off lights as the country teeters on the brink of a power crisis caused by drought.


2012 - http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/6478238/Winter-power-shortages-loom
Electricity companies and industry are in talks about a looming hydro power shortage this winter.

2013 - http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10875947
New Zealand could face power shortages this winter unless the hydro lakes get a significant boost soon.

Anyhow, I see this is approaching your ideology around free markets being best, so I will leave it alone....

If you're extracting all the energy available from the hydro resources then thats ideal, the coal would need to make up the short fall at some point and that may as well be directly to the grid without storage losses. But the inability to meet the winter peaks that sure looks like a lack of generation capacity, so how much power is available in NZ from electricity storage systems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations
Zero? Which is silly when the markets have such large swings:
https://www.electricityinfo.co.nz/comitFta/ftaPage.prices?pNode=HAY2201
Sure not all the existing hydro dams have enough head or basin to support an upgrade to storage but those that could would be very profitable against the short term fluctuations of the NZ market:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_electricity_market#Wholesale_spot_market

All the pieces are in place, either managing the existing energy storage better or adding new capacity.

[Simon]

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

Simon, please keep in mind that the worst nuclear plant incident happened in a government owned plant in a socialist society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

What nuclear technology needs is accountability, not ideology.

Yes and what I am saying is that we don't and never will have the accountability, if you want to dress that as ideology then so be it. We all know that this country does not do accoutability. Our government is accountable to no one and they are in the hands of the corporate interests they have handed our infrastructure to.

[Simon]

This discussion has become pointless as some won't discuss, they ignore the points they don't want to answer and put words in other peoples mouths.

[hamster_nz]

All the pieces are in place, either managing the existing energy storage better or adding new capacity.

Pumped storage isn't built, because for use it makes no sense. If we had a large component of wind or solar generation it might start to be sensible to pump water uphill to store any excess generation capacity. However, because the bulk of the generation from water stored in lakes it doesn't - you can leave the water sitting in the lakes.

The way the market works doesn't reward management of the resource in the energy consumers interest (a fairly level, predictable price with high security of supply). It rewards generators to exploit the nearly free hydro resource when demand is low, and doing so to create supply-side shortages that raise the spot price at peak periods.

[Someone]

All the pieces are in place, either managing the existing energy storage better or adding new capacity.

Pumped storage isn't built, because for use it makes no sense. If we had a large component of wind or solar generation it might start to be sensible to pump water uphill to store any excess generation capacity. However, because the bulk of the generation from water stored in lakes it doesn't - you can leave the water sitting in the lakes.

The above links predicted mass problems because the hydro lakes were low/emptied, while the coal power stations continued running below capacity, there was a peak capacity problem not a lack of energy in the system. Thats exactly the use case for pumped hydro.

[tggzzz]

A little off topic, but is no one else concerned about all of this optimization, regardless of the raw source of the power.

Once upon a time all generation was local, and had to be sized for peak loads.  Inefficient, but lots of inherent excess capacity almost all of the time.  Made a pretty robust system.

Then we started grids and sharing power over regions.  Allowed for statistical reduction in peak capacity.  It didn't really cut load peaks too much, just by the slope of the daily curve over the east-west extent of the grid, but did help a lot with the somewhat random fluctuations and allowed more resistance to single generator failures.

Now we are talking about avoiding need for more generation by using storage to precisely level out the daily swings.  Raw generation capacity need only be equal to average demand, with some argument about the duration of storage and the length of the average.

The resultant system seems brittle to me.  If something gets a little behind it can never catch up.

The theory is that it will never get behind, mothballed plants will be brought online quickly (weeks to months) if the market price starts rising because supply is getting scarce. But the current UK grid lacks storage for peaking with only 1.6GW of hydro against a peak demand of around 60GW, compare this to the Australian installed base of 7.8GW against a peak demand of around 50GW. You can see how the hydro and gas plants are used for peaking from their energy contribution compared to their installed capacity share:
https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistics/generation-capacity-and-output-by-fuel-source
The general trend is you need to introduce more "excess" capacity for peaking/reliability, and even more again if there are intermittent renewables dumping their low cost energy into the grid. Right now the only plants that have the ability to sit idle and deliver stored power quickly are gas and hydro, oil is slower, and coal slower again, nuclear is uneconomic to run at anything other than a constant load.

The peak, measured in GW, is not a fundamentally important factor since renewables output is fairly predictable in the short term (hours). Certainly the UK's hydro is sufficient in that respect.

What is more important and difficult to achieve is storage, measured in GWh. The UK's hydro is completely insufficient for that - and will be for the foreseeable future. A noticable proportion of it has to be reserved for "black start" capability.

The peak alone is critical to this discussion about robustness,

No. The instantaneous peak (measured in Watts) is merely one of the factors; the duration of the peak is just as fundamental. That's most sensibly measured in power-over-time, i.e. energy i.e. Watt-hours.

The UK has perfectly adequate short term (tens of minutes) pumped storage capacity, but nowhere near sufficient for the troughs related to intermittent renewables.

whatever sources of energy are chosen the available capacity needs to exceed the peak at all times for energy security, this is the stupid reductionist argument that the grid cannot be 100% renewable generators only as they have a chance of not being available and their available capacity is 0 (while they still manage to generate a 25-30% load factor annually). The peak to trough is important also, you can't take out the fast slewing plants and replace them with nuclear reactors (unless you accept they will be running load dumps routinely, which are possibly better than negative energy prices but at least they send a message to the market). You could have any mixture of generators coupled with storage that can deliver the peak power, then its a matter of sizing the energy storage and energy production to match the expected delivery.

And the latter is subject to - and largely determined by - practicality and economics.

If the hydro was emptied and then there is inadequate energy available over winter then the hydro plants were operated sub optimally from a market perspective, they will generate the most money when the market is on the brink of collapse and are the only options available.

Heaven preserve us from people that think they understand how markets work.

Let's consider a very simple example from a different domain, the supply of Christmas Crackers or bananas (which are the same as PCs in the sense that if either are on the shelf too long, they begin to smell).

The worst thing that can happen to a retailer is that they order too many crackers/bananas/PCs and are left with them on the shelves after Christmas or when they are rotting. If there's a 10% margin on each product, then if 10% are left over that's the whole profit from the entire 100% gone down the drain. The normal response is to order slightly fewer than they think they could sell, say 90%. Then they have reduced the risk of losing 100% profit to not gaining 10% of the profit. Don't take analogies too far, but similar phenomena do occur in many markets.

In other cases, a valid market strategy is to squeeze as much profit out of consumers for a limited time, and then simply exit the market. Bugger the consumers; they are then somebody else's problem. That repeatedly happens here in transport and healthcare industries.

Anybody that puts all their trust in "market forces" is simply ignorant of history and economics. Even Adam Smith recognised that!

[plazma]

Finland has an ongoing plan for burying the nuclear waste https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository

[hamster_nz]

The above links predicted mass problems because the hydro lakes were low/emptied, while the coal power stations continued running below capacity, there was a peak capacity problem not a lack of energy in the system. Thats exactly the use case for pumped hydro.

And why were the lake levels low? Because spring melt-water was used during summer, whenthe low wholesale price made it 'uneconomical' to run the thermal generators. When it should have been stored for use during winter.

Adding extra thermal generation capacity that will be needed for 2 days a year isn't the answer - it ties up capital for minimal return. The correct way is to turn the existing thermal generation on for a few more days during off-peak time, and saving more energy in the lakes.

it is a management of the lake capacity issue.

[tronde]

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

Simon, please keep in mind that the worst nuclear plant incident happened in a government owned plant in a socialist society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

What nuclear technology needs is accountability, not ideology.

So, how does it come Three Mile Island happened? US turned communinst? It could very well be the US instead of Russia in the nuclear disaster hall of fame.

Did I said that *all* nuclear incidents were in socialists power plants?  Please read my post again.

Simon dismissed private capitalist operators and I kindly reminded him that is was a socialist government that was responsible for the worst accident so far.

No, you did not say all. But it's quite difficult to read you in another way than non-capitalist economies are worse, and a quite large part of the problem. The problem with nuclear and a possible disaster is not about "most disastrous". Even a much smaller accident than Chernobyl can be a disaster given the right conditions.
Three Mile Island was pure luck for the US, so no reason to blame other. Fukushima could also have been worse. Neither the US nor Japan can be seen as "socialist", so please adjust to reality.

When you employ technology that must be fool-proof, you ask for trouble. Either you will have to handle pure neglect, or you can face the "oh shit, we forgot" moment. It does not matter what the reason for an accident is. It's the results that matters, and I myself prefer to stay away from nuclear as much as possible. Norway is quite far away from Chernobyl, but we do still face trouble with radiation in animals used for food because of it. A slightly different wind direction in 1986 and we would have been in deep shit.

[Someone]

The peak, measured in GW, is not a fundamentally important factor since renewables output is fairly predictable in the short term (hours). Certainly the UK's hydro is sufficient in that respect.

What is more important and difficult to achieve is storage, measured in GWh. The UK's hydro is completely insufficient for that - and will be for the foreseeable future. A noticable proportion of it has to be reserved for "black start" capability.

The peak alone is critical to this discussion about robustness,

No. The instantaneous peak (measured in Watts) is merely one of the factors; the duration of the peak is just as fundamental. That's most sensibly measured in power-over-time, i.e. energy i.e. Watt-hours.

The UK has perfectly adequate short term (tens of minutes) pumped storage capacity, but nowhere near sufficient for the troughs related to intermittent renewables.

If you'd stop cutting out peoples quotes to try and make arguments of them I specifically said that both are necessary:

The peak alone is critical to this discussion about robustness, whatever sources of energy are chosen the available capacity needs to exceed the peak at all times for energy security, this is the stupid reductionist argument that the grid cannot be 100% renewable generators only as they have a chance of not being available and their available capacity is 0 (while they still manage to generate a 25-30% load factor annually). The peak to trough is important also, you can't take out the fast slewing plants and replace them with nuclear reactors (unless you accept they will be running load dumps routinely, which are possibly better than negative energy prices but at least they send a message to the market). You could have any mixture of generators coupled with storage that can deliver the peak power, then its a matter of sizing the energy storage and energy production to match the expected delivery.

You're the one saying incorrectly a part of this balance is unimportant.

In other cases, a valid market strategy is to squeeze as much profit out of consumers for a limited time, and then simply exit the market. Bugger the consumers; they are then somebody else's problem. That repeatedly happens here in transport and healthcare industries.

Except the UK power grid pays generators to sit on standby for supply of the last of the peaking loads, and offers generous prices for that electricity produced. So they're adding more robustness by giving additional incentives to those who provide it.

[Someone]

The above links predicted mass problems because the hydro lakes were low/emptied, while the coal power stations continued running below capacity, there was a peak capacity problem not a lack of energy in the system. Thats exactly the use case for pumped hydro.

And why were the lake levels low? Because spring melt-water was used during summer, whenthe low wholesale price made it 'uneconomical' to run the thermal generators. When it should have been stored for use during winter.

Adding extra thermal generation capacity that will be needed for 2 days a year isn't the answer - it ties up capital for minimal return. The correct way is to turn the existing thermal generation on for a few more days during off-peak time, and saving more energy in the lakes.

it is a management of the lake capacity issue.

You're wandering off again, if you refer to the full quote:

All the pieces are in place, either managing the existing energy storage better or adding new capacity.

Pumped storage isn't built, because for use it makes no sense. If we had a large component of wind or solar generation it might start to be sensible to pump water uphill to store any excess generation capacity. However, because the bulk of the generation from water stored in lakes it doesn't - you can leave the water sitting in the lakes.

The above links predicted mass problems because the hydro lakes were low/emptied, while the coal power stations continued running below capacity, there was a peak capacity problem not a lack of energy in the system. Thats exactly the use case for pumped hydro.

And why were the lake levels low? Because spring melt-water was used during summer, whenthe low wholesale price made it 'uneconomical' to run the thermal generators. When it should have been stored for use during winter.

Adding extra thermal generation capacity that will be needed for 2 days a year isn't the answer - it ties up capital for minimal return. The correct way is to turn the existing thermal generation on for a few more days during off-peak time, and saving more energy in the lakes.

it is a management of the lake capacity issue.

I discuss both options as being feasible.

Yes, its possible to avoid the problems you are talking about by using the hydro energy more sparingly and rely more on coal to avoid draining the dams.
or
Since the rest of the generators in the grid aren't running at full load consistently throughout the winter you could add some storage capacity to achieve the same increased reliability.

Which one would be cheaper? Probably management in the short term, and probably storage in the long term.

[LukeW]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning.

To try and justify that statement with evidence, try and make a list of all the people in the world ever killed as a result of nuclear power.

The peak, measured in GW, is not a fundamentally important factor since renewables output is fairly predictable in the short term (hours). Certainly the UK's hydro is sufficient in that respect.

Be careful switching around hydro and "renewables" interchangeably.

Hydroelectricity is reliable, dispatchable and predictable, much more so than the other technologies that get lumped together under "renewable".
Along with nuclear power, hydro accounts for most of the dispatchable, predictable, scalable clean energy in the world.
It's generally worth considering it as its own category when looking at clean energy, rather than lumping it together under "renewable".

Anyway, "renewable" is a pointless marketing buzzword, a brand name for an ideology.

Does it mean anything, does it have a consistent definition, technically? No.
The energy content of a closed system is never "renewable" - that's the second law of thermodynamics.
It's just a brand name for an activist ideology of excluding nuclear power as well as excluding fossil fuels, it's a brand for their ideologically "acceptable" technologies.

[mtdoc]

Anyway, "renewable" is a pointless marketing buzzword, a brand name for an ideology.

Does it mean anything, does it have a consistent definition, technically? No.
The energy content of a closed system is never "renewable" - that's the second law of thermodynamics.
It's just a brand name for an activist ideology of excluding nuclear power as well as excluding fossil fuels, it's a brand for their ideologically "acceptable" technologies.

Um no.

It actually does mean something. One definition per Wikepedia:

Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources, which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat.

The exact words one might choose to define it may vary but anyone with even a modicum of technical literacy can delineate the difference between energy sources such as fossil fuel and nuclear which depend on extraction of clearly (human time scale) finite resources versus those which utilize energy from the sun (solar PV, wind, hydro, waves), tides, or geothermal.

Now renewable is a bit of a misnomer, I'll grant you that - since the materials needed to harvest the solar, tidal, or geothermal energy are also finite and not infinitely renewable. However, the difference is that those materials can be recycled, re-used, and are present in much more abundance than fossil fuels or the fissionable material needed for current nuclear power stations.

Whether one favors pursuing renewable energy over fossil fuel or nuclear energy or visa versa is something that falls in the category of "ideology" and whether one chooses to think long term versus short term, but pretending that the term Renewable Energy has no meaning is just demonstrating your particular ideology and is not based on fact.

[CatalinaWOW]

Anyway, "renewable" is a pointless marketing buzzword, a brand name for an ideology.

Does it mean anything, does it have a consistent definition, technically? No.
The energy content of a closed system is never "renewable" - that's the second law of thermodynamics.
It's just a brand name for an activist ideology of excluding nuclear power as well as excluding fossil fuels, it's a brand for their ideologically "acceptable" technologies.

Um no.

It actually does mean something. One definition per Wikepedia:

Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources, which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat.

The exact words one might choose to define it may vary but anyone with even a modicum of technical literacy can delineate the difference between energy sources such as fossil fuel and nuclear which depend on extraction of clearly (human time scale) finite resources versus those which utilize energy from the sun (solar PV, wind, hydro, waves), tides, or geothermal.

Now renewable is a bit of a misnomer, I'll grant you that - since the materials needed to harvest the solar, tidal, or geothermal energy are also finite and not infinitely renewable. However, the difference is that those materials can be recycled, re-used, and are present in much more abundance than fossil fuels or the fissionable material needed for current nuclear power stations.

Whether one favors pursuing renewable energy over fossil fuel or nuclear energy or visa versa is something that falls in the category of "ideology" and whether one chooses to think long term versus short term, but pretending that the term Renewable Energy has no meaning is just demonstrating your particular ideology and is not based on fact.

While I agree with the general direction you are going, you are being awfully loose in definitions.  More reflection of an ideology than fact.  Tidal does renew - daily, but is not vastly more abundant than either fossil or nuclear.  Geothermal (at least with current technology) is also a relatively rare resource, and also gets "used up" in many senses on a human time scale.  And nuclear is abundant relative to our needs in the broad sense.  Again, the technologies selected (and the ideologies that result in those selections) make it somewhat limited in scope, though likely to last long enough to make technology changes that make todays arguments irrelevant.

[tautech]

Geothermal (at least with current technology) is also a relatively rare resource, and also gets "used up" in many senses on a human time scale. 

Um No.
We've got a fair bit of geothermal generation here (in certain areas) and have had for many decades over which time processes have changed to ensure the longevity of such resources (read: learnt buy historical mistakes).
They include "in hole" heat exchangers and condensate recycling where the comparatively small percentages of liquids in geothermal extraction are returned close to source by high pressure pumps.

That others are not using this technology would indeed exclude geothermal from being seen as "renewable" or an inexhaustible resource.

[mtdoc]

Tidal does renew - daily, but is not vastly more abundant than either fossil or nuclear.

  Sure. I don't disagree. However abundance is not part of what makes something renewable or not. Some renewable sources are abundant. Others are relatively less so - at least in the sense that they are not easily harvested with current technology.

Geothermal (at least with current technology) is also a relatively rare resource, and also gets "used up" in many senses on a human time scale.

Hmm. Is that true?. I know little about geothermal energy but I didn't think that the heat from the earth's core was in danger of being used up anytime soon.  On a geological time scale perhaps, but then that is true for energy from the sun as well.

And nuclear is abundant relative to our needs in the broad sense.

Well perhaps. But again abundance is not really the issue and in any case it's my understanding that the fissionable materials available to fuel current reactors has a very finite supply - on the order of a couple of hundred years at current rates of consumption - much faster if it was used at a rate needed to meaningfully replace fossil fuels.

To make my position clear - I do not think renewables are a panacea.  They can never fully replace fossil fuels - nothing can.  In fact, harvesting of renewable energy at any meaningful scale, requires some fossil fuels (primarily in the form of liquid fuels).  But the claim that the term renewable energy does not have real world meaning and clearly delineates some forms or energy from others is not a fact based argument.

[tggzzz]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning.

To try and justify that statement with evidence, try and make a list of all the people in the world ever killed as a result of nuclear power.

That's the wrong point.

The better point is to try to make two lists:

• those killed directly or indirectly by nuclear power
• those killed directly or indirectly by non-nuclear power

The former is possible. The latter is impossible, since there have been - and continue to be - so many.

As someone a little older than Simon, I remember that in our home country the top news story for a few days every year was whether or not they would rescue trapped coal miners.
People of retirement age, will remember that coal directly killed >4000 people in London in 1952, and London was infamous for "pea soupers"
Anyone looking at current news, should wonder how many people are being killed by coal in China - see pictures of modern "pea soupers" such as http://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/heavy-smog-hits-north-china-n697861

"Is X dangerous" is rarely a useful question. "Is X more or less dangerous than the alternatives" is a useful question.

[Someone]

Geothermal (at least with current technology) is also a relatively rare resource, and also gets "used up" in many senses on a human time scale.

Hmm. Is that true?. I know little about geothermal energy but I didn't think that the heat from the earth's core was in danger of being used up anytime soon.  On a geological time scale perhaps, but then that is true for energy from the sun as well.

It can be "used up" very quickly if not managed carefully:
https://nzgeothermal.org.nz/geo_benefits/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_New_Zealand
Many of the NZ geothermal fields move their wells around periodically to leave the unproductive areas to recover, they say its sustainable but its hard to find solid reviews of the data. The available heat flux that could be extracted continuously around the world is actually tiny:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_internal_heat_budget
So if we were to utilise just the natural flux then the worldwide available resource would be 47TW, yet there is 10GW of installed capacity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient
So how sustainable can that be when we dont have 0.1% of the world covered in geothermal power stations? Or more likely geothermal power is drawing on unnatural flows of heat, its not a free lunch at that point.

[tautech]

So how sustainable can that be when we dont have 0.1% of the world covered in geothermal power stations?

Geothermal energy has to be accessible to be economical, that's the primary reason why it's in only a few locations. The areas where it's prevalent in NZ are sites of naturally occurring steam vents not far from historic volcanic eruption sites.
As the decades go by the deep drilling used by the petroleum industry may well be applied to geothermal prospecting when the return on investment calculations make sense to do so.

[DenzilPenberthy]

That's the wrong point.

The better point is to try to make two lists:

• those killed directly or indirectly by nuclear power
• those killed directly or indirectly by non-nuclear power

... ...
"Is X dangerous" is rarely a useful question. "Is X more or less dangerous than the alternatives" is a useful question.

Some scientists from NASA made those two lists and wrote a paper on it.  Conclusion: 1.84 million lives saved by nuclear power to date. (Well even more by now because the paper is a few years old)

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen&

[tggzzz]

That's the wrong point.

The better point is to try to make two lists:

• those killed directly or indirectly by nuclear power
• those killed directly or indirectly by non-nuclear power

... ...
"Is X dangerous" is rarely a useful question. "Is X more or less dangerous than the alternatives" is a useful question.

Some scientists from NASA made those two lists and wrote a paper on it.  Conclusion: 1.84 million lives saved by nuclear power to date. (Well even more by now because the paper is a few years old)

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen&

Is that all? I'd have expected it to be higher!

[DenzilPenberthy]

I suppose it reflects the relatively small market share of nuclear for power generation vs fossil & hydro over the whole world. Nuclear is around 20% of the UK energy mix but it must be far lower than that on a global basis...

[CatalinaWOW]

And nuclear is abundant relative to our needs in the broad sense.

Well perhaps. But again abundance is not really the issue and in any case it's my understanding that the fissionable materials available to fuel current reactors has a very finite supply - on the order of a couple of hundred years at current rates of consumption - much faster if it was used at a rate needed to meaningfully replace fossil fuels.

Your number of a couple hundred years is consistent with my understanding.  My point is that dismissing something because it will only last a couple hundred years is akin to the technically literate of the late 1700s or early 1800s pontificating on the power sources and consumption in the year 2200, only worse. 

If you believe in the exponential growth of technology the answers in that time frame will be so far beyond anything we currently dream of that discussion is pointless.  Maybe the primary fuel will be anti-matter generated in solar plants in the same solar orbit as Mercury.

If you believe in a Malthusian collapse of society the discussion is pointless for other reasons.  The pockets of humanity will be warming their hands around the spent fuel cooling pools of the nuclear plants, unconcerned that they will only live to 29 instead of their normal 32 year life span.

There is plenty of nuclear fuel to last until the discussion changes entirely.

[mtdoc]

Your number of a couple hundred years is consistent with my understanding.  My point is that dismissing something because it will only last a couple hundred years is akin to the technically literate of the late 1700s or early 1800s pontificating on the power sources and consumption in the year 2200, only worse. 

I was not "dismissing" nuclear energy at all in my post. I was only pointing out that there is a clear fact based delineation between energy sources that are considered "renewable" and those that are not. Nuclear energy is not.

Electricity can clearly be generated in large amounts by nuclear energy. If there was a full build out of nuclear power perhaps there is enough fuel to last 50-100 years.

IMO it won't happen for a number of reasons - the two main ones being:  1)  Society cannot afford the large capital (and energy) investment required to build hundreds (thousands?) of nuclear power plants and 2) Public concern about safety and waste storage/disposal will continue to present political roadblocks.

Whether one believes the concerns about safety are justified or not is a separate issue.

[CatalinaWOW]

Your number of a couple hundred years is consistent with my understanding.  My point is that dismissing something because it will only last a couple hundred years is akin to the technically literate of the late 1700s or early 1800s pontificating on the power sources and consumption in the year 2200, only worse. 

I was not "dismissing" nuclear energy at all in my post. I was only pointing out that there is a clear fact based delineation between energy sources that are considered "renewable" and those that are not. Nuclear energy is not.

Electricity can clearly be generated in large amounts by nuclear energy. If there was a full build out of nuclear power perhaps there is enough fuel to last 50-100 years.

IMO it won't happen for a number of reasons - the two main ones being:  1)  Society cannot afford the large capital (and energy) investment required to build hundreds (thousands?) of nuclear power plants and 2) Public concern about safety and waste storage/disposal will continue to present political roadblocks.

Whether one believes the concerns about safety are justified or not is a separate issue.

Again, the devil is in the details. 

Nuclear energy is not renewable?  Agree for the current fuel cycle.  But breeders make that distinction blurry.    Breeders would extend the fuel limits virtually indefinitely, but have serious political problems in addition to some solvable technical issues.  Which gets to the second blurriness.

I don't disagree with your observation about building out nuclear.  But the large capital costs are heavily related to the political issues.  Years of capital tied up with no return because the permitting process keeps recycling, and tied up for more years after production stops because a perfect disposal solution is demanded, which hasn't been required of any other energy source of similar magnitude. Whether those other large scale power sources should be subjected to the same level of safety requirements is a separate issue.  The trend has been to regret the lassaiz faire attitude which surrounded the development of fossil and hydro power systems, but even now they create public hazards larger than nuclear.  The same may also be true of solar and wind, though by not so large a factor.  We tend to learn about the small negative affects after large scale deployment.

So renewable has a definition, but it isn't purely technical.  It is affected by the political climate. 

[mash107]

If carbon emissions is indeed the issue of our generation

but If carbon emissions is Not an issue. as many scientific theories come and go,
 substantially or stagnation is more like BS. remember it was global cooling in 1970s.
problem is only political.  when obama leaves office problem it is solved.
remember their are other scientific theories not just the CO2 theorie.
eugenics or human population control is a also a bad move. it was tryed back in 1940 Europe but it failed.
trying to control the future.

can you justify this assertion with studies, data, etc? it seems contrary to popular opinion at the moment.

you can't possibly contend burning coal, as is done in China to the nth degree, is possibly good for breathing. If China were to adopt nuclear energy, as Japan had, they wouldn't see a smog / air pollution problem. That is fact.

[Kleinstein]

If China had used nuclear power like in Japan - Japan or Korea might have a problem with the radioactive fall out drifting to the east. It was the wind blowing from the west that made a relatively moderate damage from the Fukushima accident.

Burning coal has more problems to it than just climate change: to much CO2 makes the oceans acidic and this way cause massive disturbance for marine life. Also pollution with sulfur and mercury can be a problem.

[CCitizenTO]

Best way to go about things is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Each type of power has it's own benefits and drawbacks.

Solar

Pros: Free after initial setup. Generates power primarily when there is a high demand for power (daytime).
Cons: 50% of the time or less it's doing nothing unless you have fancy utility-scale setup where you use something like batteries or use the sun's energy to turn salt from a solid to a liquid (801 C melting point) it doesn't generate any energy at night or negligible amounts (I think someone tested how much power a solar panel did with moonlight and it was like less than 1% output).

Wind
Pros: Work during the day and the night.
Cons: Needs wind to make the turbine spin. Likely requires more in terms of maintenance as there are moving parts involved.

Nuclear

Pros: Generates lots of power all day and night.
Cons: Nuclear waste. Expensive to set up. Subject to single point of failure. Lots of NIMBY not wanting a plant anywhere near them.

A mixture of all of the above might solve the energy crisis. I mean I seen videos of some dudes using fresnel lenses and large parabolic mirrors melting steel with just sunlight. If those sorts of things could be incorporated into manufacturing processes it might reduce the amount of electricity we need because I believe the bulk of power needs come from commercial and industrial sectors not people at home with a TV or some lights.

[Kleinstein]

I agree very much, that a mix of sources is a good idea.

Solar power from moon light is somewhere in the ppm level, so usually not enough to start up the DCAC converter.

Wind power like solar has considerably more power during the day than during night - at least on average.

Nuclear power can run 24/7, which is a pro but also a con, as it is difficult / expensive to turn them off at night. There are also limitations on how fast / far they can increase and decrease the power. With many similar plants there is also a chance that with a common weakness, there is a need to shut down all plant of one type for safety upgrade. So there might be need for an backup too.

It depends on the country, but in many countries industrial and private use can be approximately same order of magnitude.

[james_s]

I'm a cautious proponent of nuclear energy. Yes it can be environmentally damaging, but so is every other form of energy production known to man. Ironically the anti-nuke movement has indirectly kept a lot of very old, relatively unsafe and inefficient nuke plants operating well beyond their design life by preventing the construction of newer, safer, much more efficient ones.

[retrolefty]

I'm a cautious proponent of nuclear energy. Yes it can be environmentally damaging, but so is every other form of energy production known to man. Ironically the anti-nuke movement has indirectly kept a lot of very old, relatively unsafe and inefficient nuke plants operating well beyond their design life by preventing the construction of newer, safer, much more efficient ones.

 Oh they deal with the older plants by tying up renewal permits. It's just SWJ gone bonkers. They don't want to solve problems, just add to existing problems.

[coppice]

Wind power like solar has considerably more power during the day than during night - at least on average.

That depends on where you live. In many places days are calm and nights windy for much of the year. In Texas, for example, there appears to be a lot of wind energy available each night in West Texas, but not much during the day. People have talked of this as a good match for the needs of electric cars, should they achieve a mainstream position.

[helius]

Nuclear power using LWRs is incredibly wasteful of a scarce resource (²³⁵U) and can only meet our energy needs for 100 years at best.

[james_s]

100 years is quite a long time, and what else are we going to use U235 for?

[coppice]

Nuclear power using LWRs is incredibly wasteful of a scarce resource (²³⁵U) and can only meet our energy needs for 100 years at best.

A fuel supply only needs to outlast the equipment designed to use it for it to be valuable. No power station lasts 100 years.

The real problems with U235 are cleaning up the leftovers, and the complacency it could bring. Complacency could defund development of a suitable replacement for the end of the 100 years. We see this happening every time oil prices drop.

[helius]

In current practice, "cleaning up the leftovers" means entombing them in ways that make future PUREX reprocessing infeasible. This is wasteful and ignorant.

[coppice]

In current practice, "cleaning up the leftovers" means entombing them in ways that make future PUREX reprocessing infeasible. This is wasteful and ignorant.

You are making some big assumptions about what might be feasible,  should the need arise to use this stuff later on. At least the stuff is packed safely (we hope) and not dispersed.  One of the most wasteful things we do in waste disposal is spreading the material so thinly that it is implausible that we could ever gather the stuff up for future reuse. Good luck ever trying to get workable quantities of rare elements back from all the world's land fills.

[CCitizenTO]

Nuclear power using LWRs is incredibly wasteful of a scarce resource (²³⁵U) and can only meet our energy needs for 100 years at best.

Doesn't Uranium after it's been used turn into some other radioactive element or there's some means to turn it into a fuel source again. I think someone mentioned that we have enough radioactive material on the planet to cover our energy needs for the next 200,000 years if you take into account lower level nuclear fuel sources like Thorium and the like.

The problem with nuclear power is not that people are using it to generate electricity. The problem is people complaining about the byproducts and the problem of byproducts would not be there if we a a global community agreed to say ship all our hazardous nuclear waste somewhere to be reconstituted into usable fuel again.

[helius]

Doesn't Uranium after it's been used turn into some other radioactive element or there's some means to turn it into a fuel source again. I think someone mentioned that we have enough radioactive material on the planet to cover our energy needs for the next 200,000 years if you take into account lower level nuclear fuel sources like Thorium and the like.

No, not really. After ²³⁵U fissions, you have waste isotopes like strontium and cesium that are radioactive but not fissile. What you can do is to design the reactor so that the neutrons from the fission can be captured by other elements. This causes transmutation into a target isotope, hopefully one with economic value. We do this all the time to make medical isotopes. But making fissile materials this way (a breeder reactor, like Fermi built at Oak Ridge) is controversial because there is a fear that it makes nuclear weapons easier to make and harder to control.
In a traditional breeder reactor, ²³⁸U is transmuted to ²³⁹Pu, which is fissile and can be used for fuel. The transmutation of thorium to ²³³U is also promising since thorium is a relatively common element, but it hasn't yet been shown to be a viable process.

The problem with nuclear power is not that people are using it to generate electricity. The problem is people complaining about the byproducts and the problem of byproducts would not be there if we a a global community agreed to say ship all our hazardous nuclear waste somewhere to be reconstituted into usable fuel again.

Only the fissile byproducts are usable as fuel. It's possible for a reactor to produce more fuel than it consumes, but a lot of other materials get irradiated and simply become (high or low level) nuclear waste. Those do need to be disposed somehow, but for the most part reprocessing isn't even part of the plan now, which is unfortunate.

[Kleinstein]

Reprocessing the used fuel from current reactors is a two sided thing: One could recover the left over fissile ²³⁵U and newly produced ²³⁹Pu. This way one might recover something like 25%-50% of the original fissile fuel. Also there is little reduction in radioactivity of the rest (as PU is a significant part of the medium term radioactivity). However reprocessing also produces quite a lot of low level waste from chemicals used. So the overall wast volume to store away goes up quite a bit and the radioactivity is not reduced very much. Reprocessing also adds significant costs - the recovered fuel is currently much more expensive than new one, though costs are open to debate. Also currently reprocessing only works that way for one cycle - so reprocessing fuel from the second cycle will be more difficult and would result in lower quality fuel.

Thorium as a fuel needs reprocessing to make is a real fuel and not just a small addition. However reprocessing thorium based fuels is even more difficult and expensive.

How much fuel is available also depends on how much you are willing to pay for uranium. There is a lot of uranium available in see water, but the costs are to high for just using the U235 in this. If the rest could be used in a beading cycle too, the higher price could be acceptable - this way going towards 200000 years as a more theoretical limit. A similar number applies to thorium if used with hypothetical perfect recycling. Currently (and in foreseeable future) this is way to expensive (e.g. more expensive than uranium from see water), as the recycled thorium is also radioactive and thus more of a waste than of any practical use.

[Someone]

Nuclear power using LWRs is incredibly wasteful of a scarce resource (²³⁵U) and can only meet our energy needs for 100 years at best.

Doesn't Uranium after it's been used turn into some other radioactive element or there's some means to turn it into a fuel source again. I think someone mentioned that we have enough radioactive material on the planet to cover our energy needs for the next 200,000 years if you take into account lower level nuclear fuel sources like Thorium and the like.

The problem with nuclear power is not that people are using it to generate electricity. The problem is people complaining about the byproducts and the problem of byproducts would not be there if we a a global community agreed to say ship all our hazardous nuclear waste somewhere to be reconstituted into usable fuel again.

Its quite complicated, even the most optimistic fuel cycle plans still involve huge amounts of very hard to handle material going around and in the waste streams. I'm not away of any solutions that eliminate the problems of handling highly active materials or eliminate them in the waste stream.

Unlike fuels you might be familiar with (ones that burn) nuclear fuel poisons its self to the point where it wont sustain a chain reaction, then you have to either reprocess it or buy some new fuel. Reprocessing has proliferation (political) problems and is expensive, so its often more economical to work around a simpler fuel cycle where you simply dont reprocess the fuel and use it very inefficiently.

Thorium as a fuel needs reprocessing to make is a real fuel and not just a small addition. However reprocessing thorium based fuels is even more difficult and expensive.

How much fuel is available also depends on how much you are willing to pay for uranium. There is a lot of uranium available in see water, but the costs are to high for just using the U235 in this. If the rest could be used in a beading cycle too, the higher price could be acceptable - this way going towards 200000 years as a more theoretical limit. A similar number applies to thorium if used with hypothetical perfect recycling. Currently (and in foreseeable future) this is way to expensive (e.g. more expensive than uranium from see water), as the recycled thorium is also radioactive and thus more of a waste than of any practical use.

A lot of it comes down to economics. There are some really promising looking fuel cycles with thorium or breeder reactors but even though they could produce less activity per unit of energy delivered, their lifecycle cost of energy is high enough that they wont attract any real investment.

[moz]

I'm mildly surprised no-one has mentioned John Quiggin yet. He's an Australian economist who is quite scathing about both the timelines and economics of nuclear power, at least in Australia. A quick search of his site brings up a series of posts, and this one seems like a good summary/starter.  He mentions the US situation here

even if Australia could match the construction rates observed in the US, the time necessary to set up a regulatory infrastructure and undertake greenfield site selection would delay the commencement of generation until at least 2040. Since the publication of this article, further construction delays have been announced for both US and Chinese AP1000 projects. On the basis of more recent US experience, even a 2040 startup date for Australia appears highly optimistic.

So it depends a lot on what you want nuclear power for, and what your expectations are. If you just want to be able to say "hey, we have a nuclear power station", that's definitely possible and a whole bunch of countries have done that. But if you want to make a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions the lead times for nuclear start to get ugly. To make it work you really need an authoritarian government willing to put safety well down the list of considerations. That lets "you" build a plant in 10-20 years from idea to grid connection. I'm personally not a fan of the Russian or Chinese solutions to those problems.

[JulietMikeBravo]

Glad to see a polite discussion on nuclear energy.

Personally I see nuclear as follows:

Run properly, it is a highly dependable and safe way of generating electricity and heat. I don't think renewables are bad, but as long as energy storage is in development we need backup power, and I'd rather have waste concentrated in small spots than put in the atmosphere and polluting the whole planet. Nuclear waste sounds scary but has never affected people on the same scale as global warming has.

I do have certain concerns about nuclear energy. When poorly managed it can have bad results. For example, the combination of a large deployment of nuclear energy and a seismically unstable region isn't desirable. Currently used LWR reactor tech is wasteful as only a fraction of the fuel is fissioned before too much fission products and nuclear poisons build up. Modernization of reactor tech is delayed because use of nuclear tech is too highly regulated, in part due to distrust of nuclear tech and the industry.

Still, I think it is stupid to discard nuclear altogether, there are craptons of energy in natural uranium and thorium. We will probably need it.

[moz]

I don't think renewables are bad, but as long as energy storage is in development we need backup power

For much of the world pumped hydro is an old technology (1890's) that's fairly readily available. Even Australia can use it, thanks to putting 80% of our population on the east coast. I don't imagine we'll stop developing storage until it becomes irrelevant (perhaps due to fusion power generators that fit in cellphones?) The fact that we're constantly seeing new storage technologies says to me that there are still improvements being made.

Sadly when we look at nuclear fission the opposite seems to be happening - existing designs are being retired at the same time as new ideas are falling short. Partly that's because of the cost of experimentation - when someone needs tens of billions of dollars and a couple of decades to perform an experiment the number of experimenters is necessarily very small. But with renewable generation and electrical storage the scale is smaller and the timelines shorter. Even at the "novel chemistry" end, a few tens of millions for less than a decade is usually enough (Redflow in Australia, for example). You can DIY as well, there are a lot of "homemade powerwall" people around. Bob help us all if people start to DIY thermal fission generators.

use of nuclear tech is too highly regulated

I suggest that fission power is heavily regulated because we can see the consequences of not doing that. The list of sites that have to be actively managed for centuries due to regulatory failures in the nuclear industry is longer than the one example that I think we could accept as a learning experience. Seriously, looking at Three Mile Island makes me say "more rules are needed", not "clearly that would have been better with less oversight and government interference". You don't even have to use Chernobyl or Mayak, and for that matter Fukushima also works as an example of why we need more regulation not less. We just don't have examples of renewable disasters or sites that renewables have made into thousand year nightmares.

[CatalinaWOW]

I suggest that fission power is heavily regulated because we can see the consequences of not doing that. The list of sites that have to be actively managed for centuries due to regulatory failures in the nuclear industry is longer than the one example that I think we could accept as a learning experience. Seriously, looking at Three Mile Island makes me say "more rules are needed", not "clearly that would have been better with less oversight and government interference". You don't even have to use Chernobyl or Mayak, and for that matter Fukushima also works as an example of why we need more regulation not less. We just don't have examples of renewable disasters or sites that renewables have made into thousand year nightmares.

I don't know what your list of renewables includes, but if it includes wood, biomass and human waste there are many places about the planet that have been made into nightmares for periods that approach or exceed your 1000 year mark.  The whole Eastern Mediterranean (the land of milk and honey described in the Christian Bible) was turned into desert wasteland by improper use, and much remains that way, though in the twentieth century reclamation efforts made significant progress.  Hydroelectric and water storage dams have caused the extinction of some aquatic species and have caused large scale declines of others that may or may not be recoverable on a 1000 year scale.  That is not to say that controls to prevent this aren't easier in some ways than nuclear, or that the nightmares are equally bad (though different folks bad dreams are different).  But all technologies used on large scales have risks and downsides.  Renewables are not an exception to this.  Solar and wind power have not yet been implemented on large enough scale to be sure that there are not significant side effects to these technologies.

[moz]

I don't know what your list of renewables includes, but if it includes wood, biomass and human waste there are many places about the planet that have been made into nightmares for periods that approach or exceed your 1000 year mark.  The whole Eastern Mediterranean was turned into desert wasteland

I'm not convinced that going back several millennia and then saying that a particular large geographic area was primarily devastated by renewable energy generation is meaningful. Was firewood gathering the really major cause of the disaster? The "Eastern Mediterranean" appears not to be used by geographers, so I'm not entirely sure which specific site you mean.

My broader point is that those cases are rare and arguable unless you broaden them to include all human activity in the area.

I'm reluctant to get into local extinctions, for much the same reasons as arguing about bird strike for wind or solar is hard. To talk meaningfully about it you need pretty intense research and the argument ends up being as much definitional as statistical. Are the birds that used to live around an open cut mine locally extinct because, well, it's an open cut mine? Do they count as killed by the mine in the same way as birds killed by wind turbines count?

And then there's this amazing bit of writing about the Mediterranean desert that popped up in my search results (caution: faith-based material). It's worth reading just for the mind-boggling nature, if you're into a bit of casual boggling.

[CatalinaWOW]

I don't know what your list of renewables includes, but if it includes wood, biomass and human waste there are many places about the planet that have been made into nightmares for periods that approach or exceed your 1000 year mark.  The whole Eastern Mediterranean was turned into desert wasteland

I'm not convinced that going back several millennia and then saying that a particular large geographic area was primarily devastated by renewable energy generation is meaningful. Was firewood gathering the really major cause of the disaster? The "Eastern Mediterranean" appears not to be used by geographers, so I'm not entirely sure which specific site you mean.

My broader point is that those cases are rare and arguable unless you broaden them to include all human activity in the area.

I'm reluctant to get into local extinctions, for much the same reasons as arguing about bird strike for wind or solar is hard. To talk meaningfully about it you need pretty intense research and the argument ends up being as much definitional as statistical. Are the birds that used to live around an open cut mine locally extinct because, well, it's an open cut mine? Do they count as killed by the mine in the same way as birds killed by wind turbines count?

And then there's this amazing bit of writing about the Mediterranean desert that popped up in my search results (caution: faith-based material). It's worth reading just for the mind-boggling nature, if you're into a bit of casual boggling.

I agree that it is hard to separate all of the variables, and particularly hard since most of those who try are proponents of one or another energy resource and end up with biases - intentional or otherwise. 

I could give you a narrower geographical area - the countries of Lebanon and Israel.  Then we could get into a discussion of whether burning wood for room heating and cooking is energy generation since it doesn't involve electricity, and what percentage of the environmental damage was "energy" related vs other human activity.  For species extinction I was specifically thinking of the Colorado River system in North America.  Here the Bonytail (a half meter size fish) is functionally extinct with no known wild breeding populations and a declining captive population, and others like the Pikeminnow (a two meter fish) and the Humpback Chub (a one third meter size fish) which are now endangered.  As far as I know all biologists believe that dams on the Colorado river system are the primary and perhaps sole cause of their problems, with changes in water flow and temperature being the specific problems.

Interpretation of the devastation caused by these events is again subject to interpretation.  While no one can argue about the half lives of radioactive products, and while there is not too much argument about the existence of excess deaths due to exposure to radiation the responses diverge radically from there.  For example, I grew up in Colorado, spending most of my time at altitudes that varied from 2000 to 2700 meters, with occasional forays over 4000 meters.  Due to natural radioactivity in the soil and higher cosmic ray radiation from the thinner atmospheric belt people living in that area can expect a significantly higher rate of radiation induced cancers than those living in Mississippi or Denmark.   Not to mention cataracts and a host of other altitude related ailments.   No one suggests evacuating or cordoning off my birthplace.  But people casually talk about the need to cordon off areas for 10000 years or more on the chance that radiation levels in pockets might exceed a safety standard.  Chernobyl is viewed by some as a radioactive wasteland, and by others as the place they live.  Those who have chosen to live there are at higher risk, but their daily lives are far more affected by the lack of economic community that exists because of the quarantine than it is by the radiation.

[mtdoc]

When evaluating the health hazards of radiation it's very important to understand that there are very large differences in the risks posed by different sources of radiation and different isotopes. 

The risks from the cosmic radiation that increases with altitude or from naturally occuring earth sources like radon are minuscule relative to the risks posed by some of the fission products of nuclear reactors such as isotopes of iodine, caesium and strontium.  And the relative health hazard of different isotopes depends not only on their relative radioactivity but also on their biological activity and propensity to bioaccumulate.

[CatalinaWOW]

When evaluating the health hazards of radiation it's very important to understand that there are very large differences in the risks posed by different sources of radiation and different isotopes. 

The risks from the cosmic radiation that increases with altitude or from naturally occuring earth sources like radon are minuscule relative to the risks posed by some of the fission products of nuclear reactors such as isotopes of iodine, caesium and strontium.  And the relative health hazard of different isotopes depends not only on their relative radioactivity but also on their biological activity and propensity to bioaccumulate.

Absolutely true.  But I suspect that because of durability of exposure (cosmic radiation will not change in human history) and widespread exposure (The high Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Tibetan plateau), the total number of excess deaths due to living at altitude will be comparable to those from the three major nuclear incidents.  Particularly if measured over the timescales some are using for nuclear safety.  Three or four generations from now the effects of these incidents will have faded largely into the background, while cosmic rays will keep ticking along.

My point isn't that nuclear power is safe.  If we continue to employ it as we have in the past you can assume that the contamination from accidents will be continually refreshed.  The point is that this is just another example of the perceived risk being far different from other kinds of risk.  We could run lots of nuclear power as ineptly as the Russians did at Chernobyl and death from nuclear radiation would still be pretty far down the cause of death list.   Certainly below the cost of burning and using coal if you total up mining accidents and the various types of atmospheric releases.

Look at the possibilities -  If you banned living at high altitude you could create huge nature reserves.  Save numerous endangered species.  Save large amounts of heating energy.  Eliminate or reduce deaths from snowslides and landslides.  Safe human lives from excess cancers (remembering that UV radiation is worse up there also).  A safer better world.  And just a day late for 4/1.   

[tautech]

But I suspect that because of durability of exposure (cosmic radiation will not change in human history) and widespread exposure (The high Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Tibetan plateau), the total number of excess deaths due to living at altitude will be comparable to those from the three major nuclear incidents. 

You don't consider the numerous atmospheric tests in the US, Australian outback and on Pacific atolls major ? 
Most of these areas are still roped off as nogo regions. 

Sure we know a lot more today but damage has been done that will take generations to become safe if ever.

So that you know where I stand, I support the safe use of nuclear energy for our future energy needs.