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Wind and Sun Beat Other Energy Alternatives
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Dec 12, 2008 05:45 PM
from the think-of-the-birds dept.
from the think-of-the-birds dept.
iandoh passes along the news that researchers at Stanford University have completed the first quantitative, scientific comparison of alternative energy solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability, and sustainability. Based on their model, they found that the best sources of alternative energy are wind, concentrated solar, and geothermal energy. The worst are nuclear, clean coal, and ethanol-based fuels. In other words, "the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options."
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Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Shortage of solar cells might be a problem if production cannot meet demand, but I can't imagine it being more severe than a shortage of uranium or petroleum.
What if you had less sunlight because you caused a nuclear winter?
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, solar thermal plants can be made using the same steam turbines and generators used by coal, gas power plants to produce energy from high pressure steam.
If one adds an additional component of a heat reservoir such as molten salt, a solar plant is even capable of providing electricity through night and cloudy days (depending on the duration of reduced insolation and the capacity of the thermal reservoir of course) without requiring any advancement in battery technology.
However, I really do not appreciate him lumping nuclear power in with inferior bio fuels and carbon sequestering. Proper use of feeder-breeder reactors can effectively eliminate nuclear waste from uranium reactors and provide power for the entire world for many hundreds of years (all on its own). Add to that the potential of thorium reactors using a more plentiful fuel and nuclear power makes a perfect compliment to solar for regions not blessed with great weather.
Meanwhile the drilling and pressure issues of carbon sequestering mean that the excess energy extracted is marginalized while the risk of a geologic release of billions of tons of CO2 due to fissures or shifting could kill thousands or even millions if close enough to a major city.
Biofuel is not a renewable resource. To meet our gasoline needs alone we would need a corn field larger than the continental US. Even with switchgrass we would need ~25% of the surface of the US to meet our gasoline needs. Consider for a moment that modern farming is already devastating the aquifers that will take 10s to 100s of thousands of years to replenish naturally.
Wind has some potential but can never be used for base load due to the fact that weather on earth is inherently unpredictable, producing squalls that can overload a power grid with to much wind or starve it with periods of calm over nearly continental spans.
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
There are production solar-thermal facilities in California. They are base-load generation, too, because they burn natural gas when output falls (in practice they're 85%-90% solar).
Most of these "alternative energy" ideas are pipedreams that just can't scale to the 1 TW electical baseload (which will get far higher whe people start plugging in hybrids - the idea that "people wil only plug in at night" is another pipe dream). Solar thermal is great, however. It's not limited by the scarce elements needed by photoelectric cells. It's proven technology using well-understood components.
If you want *no* depenency on fossil fuels, nuclear is the only real choice with technology that doesn't depend on some future scientific breakthrough, but I think a minimal natural gas solution is a great plan for Southern states.
Replacing heating oil for heating in Northern states is going to be a huge infrastructure change, however. Even if you're OK with the inefficiency of electrical heating (and we could be OK with that, given the right source of power), you *must* have a reliable way to deliver that power. Too many places lose power in blizzards, when the lines come down. Burying all the power lines in a rural area is a gigantic proposition.
Still, I'd rather spend 2 trillion on that than on bailing out executive bonuses and stockholder dividends!
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah a grid is needed for high power transmission much like
we have now, though I say it is far less expensive to maintain
if they buried it in service tunnels.
In the tunnels the temp remains constant and thus less losses due
to heat such as in the southwest.
Sag of the lines in high heat has its own set of issues.
Too many times massive thunderstorms, ice storms, downed trees
damage the lines or lightning surges damage the substations and
end users personal electronics.
Often after massive storms, downed lines kill ppl and pets.
Less repair of the lines means smaller repair crews which
equals lower insurance losses, and lower operating costs.
The initial tunneling cost is high but could done in the
highest repair rate areas first, and the savings rolled
on to the other areas over time, ie. "pay it forward".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There are some reactor designs that are amenable for making weapons-grade materials and there are some that are not.
The best weapons grade material comes from frequent replacement of fuel rods so you can maximize the amount of Pu-240 generated from U-238 and minimize the amount of Pu-241 generated from Pu-240.
The intermingling of Pu-240 and Pu-241 is one of the best ways to prevent proliferation.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From my limited understanding, if we repealed those laws...we could really stretch the nuclear fuel in a massive way, and have much, much less ra
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it was.
Without the stupid Jimmy Carter-style prohibitions on nuclear recycling, "nuclear waste repositories" would be completely unnecessary; we could re-refine our "nuclear waste" and the actual amount of real "waste" to date would be easily pit into a 100-gallon drum or two, stuffed into a rocket, and lobbed at the sun.
Not just that, they don't evaluate the OTHER problems caused by the technologies. Making solar panels for solar electrical generation generates massive quantities of toxic waste, which has to either be chemically treated or otherwise disposed of. Wind farms have massive problems of maintenance due to fluctuating conditions, and are unreliable at the best of times.
The most "reliable" of the lot is actually Geothermal, which is predictable. Solar and Wind both have weather-related (not joking here) problems; Tidal and Hydroelectric (river/dam-based) generation suffer whenever the water level changes due to rainfall or landmass motion.
Now admittedly, Ethanol is a fucking joke, especially corn-based ethanol which wastes 1.8 units of energy just to produce 1 unit of "energy" in the form of whiskey in the gas tank (you think I'm joking: I'm not). And Ethanol is also MURDER on engines.
And then there's the problem of burning food for fuel. I mean, seriously. That's an idea that came right out of the wrong side of an Animaniacs "Good Idea, Bad Idea" sketch if I ever saw one.
"Clean Coal"? Well, no combustion-based energy source will ever be "perfect", but I don't think that completely eliminating coal use overnight is possible, so I'm all for cleaning it up as much as is reasonable until we can phase it out over time (one big problem with the envirowacko movement, they always want things RIGHT NOW, they never can understand that you have to change things over time).
As for the rest... there's a reason that gasoline beat electrical batteries for automobile power sourcing in the early days and it still holds true today: our battery technology just has NOT caught up to where it needs to be. Gasoline allows for a fill-up to take 5-10 minutes tops, and a mobile range of a couple hundred miles before another fill-up. If you can't do that, then you can't compete with gasoline, and I'm sorry but that is just how it has to be.
"Hydrogen" isn't a real fuel source: you have to extract it from something, and store it somehow. IF we had nothing but electrical from "renewable" sources or properly refined Nuclear, it could theoretically be made viable (better utilized in fuel cells than a combustion engine, but still). Since the majority of our generation is still fossil-fuel based, generating hydrogen to "replace" gasoline will actually cause MORE emissions than just putting the fucking gas in our cars.
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Try Biking to work in 10 degree F weather with 4 inches of snow that is now Ice. Try biking 5 miles in 30 degree weather with fresh snow or rain coming down or catching the road spray of other melting ice and snow as you roll down the roads.
And this doesn't even begin to address the fact there there are not major transportation hubs all over the place or that they could be made cheap and easily. The ones in place has had the benefit of being there long enough for the landscape and industry to develop around it. It's an entirely different scenario when attempting to kludge fit on together in an existing situation.
What works in your little world isn't always practical in others.
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think electricity is a good idea for cars as they exist today.
Right now, cars are massive, they're heavy, they're expensive.
Why the hell would I want to pay for a car that only goes 75km for 5 years?! Why the hell would I want that car to take up a huge amount of space in my driveway?!
A more ideal electric vehicle would be inexpensive; less than $2000. A more ideal electric vehicle would be small; I should be able to fold it up and hang it on the wall in my garage when I'm not using it. A more ideal electric vehicle would be light; I should be able to fold it up and hang it on the wall in my garage when I'm not using it without a forklift.
Regular people would still likely own cars. They'd need one for trips, for towing the boat, for days when the electric just won't do the job, or it's too cold to use the electric (Batteries hate cold). An ideal electric vehicle would be more like a 4-wheel electric bicycle, with enough room for 2 people, a top speed of 50 km/h, room for a couple bags of groceries, an EXTREMELY light, watertight skin (It should be able to handle a foot of snow on the roof, but not someone standing on it), and a range that's short, but a hell of a lot longer than any of the "cars pretending to be environmentally friendly" we're seeing today. It'll take a change in our conception of a vehicle, but it'd be very useful.
If I were in the government, my goal would be to legalize a new class of vehicle for public roadways that would be designed specifically for 50km/h use and no more, with greatly reduced safety regulations, and for internal combusion engine vehicles, greatly reduced particulate emissions standards if the economy is beyond a certain level (for example, 80MPG city).
Parent
What he says about nuclear is just stupid (Score:5, Informative)
So basically, to make Nuclear just fall off his chart, he assumes that building more powerplants will lead to nuclear war, and calculates how much stuff that will burn. Is that not completely absurd?
Basically, the gist of what he's saying about Nuclear is this: "We have to pretend like it's a bad idea, because if we don't, other countries will want to do it, and then they might build bombs. So, say it with me: Nuclear is a baad idea."
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US? And besides, what's more likely to cause war: Clean and cost-effective nuclear powerplants that the rest of the world will want to copy, or an energy shortage which sends us looking to secure fossil fuels? I think the latter.
Anyway, this calculating methodology is so incredibly bizarre that I suspect it's bought.
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
The US may never have good nuclear reactors. The process of developing new reactor technology is so mired in political bullshit that in the future we'll have to look at nations like France for how to apply nuclear power in an effective and safe way. I am convinced that it will never be developed here at home.
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
Of course the ones getting the most attention can be much more easily controlled by those who provide it.
I smell a vague conspiracy theory that doesn't hold water compared to more simple explanations. Specifically that those which are attracting more attention are doing so in general because they're more viable in the short-term, or rather appeared that way.
Ethanol got a lot of attention (read: subsidies) because of exactly one thing: the iowa primary. Traditionally, politicians hoping to run for president supported ethanol because Iowa grows corn. The thinking was "If I support ethanol, I'll get big numbers in Iowa, one of the first primaries, and that will get me big campaign contributions!" Who cares about whether it is a real solution. Although not a good reason, it's not that "THEY" can controll you better. And to be honest, you can add it to your current car and put it into the infrastructure, that's a plus it has over other energies. Of course as the article points out, it's a waste of time for numerous reasons.
Nuclear: again, not evil white men out to control you, it was a big thing for a while. Of course it's going to get attention: we can do it right now.
Clean coal: you know who is pushing big for this? Everyone who is currently supported by coal, which is a lot of people. Say you own a coal-fired power plant. Which is more attractive: being forced to dismantle your plant completely in a few years (IE if solar power wins) or spend a few million on researching "clean" coal and convincing congressmen on your payroll that you're on the way to making coal which has all of the upsides of renewables but none of the downsides without raising taxes? If your answer is "going bankrupt" instead of "clean coal" you are either a saint, a liar, or are badly deluded.
In short, we can see it's not about population control, it's about money, laziness, and semi-corruption. It's not evil crafty men in suits trying to turn off your power if you stumble onto their secrets, its about fat lazy men in suits being greedy.
Subtle difference I guess, but be realistic and you won't sound like you wear a tinfoil hat.
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Battery capacity, charge times, etc., all need to improve by an order of magnitude.
So, just to use the Phoenix SUT as a starting point and improving it by an order of magnitude, you're saying that you want electric cars that go 1,500 miles per charge and charge to 80% in 30 seconds? Or are you still under the misconception that EVs only go 50 miles or so and inherently take hours to recharge?
State of the art but commercially available battery tech is the titanates, which get ~70Wh/kg and can recharge as fast as you can provide the power and cool the pack (individual cells have been charged to 80% in one minute), or phosphates and stabilized spinels which get ~100Wh/kg and can recharge in 10 to 20 minutes. Traditional li-ion now gets nearly 180Wh/kg, but is limited to 1 hour charging minimum and won't last the lifespan of the car (unlike the aforementioned techs). To get weight/range parity with a typical gasoline vehicle, you need about 300-400Wh/kg, which is what about a dozen different next-gen battery techs are promising. Personally, all I care about is the ability to drive for about two hours on a charge; I don't see the point to more since I'm not going to want to have to be sitting down for that long in a row.
As for chargers, the highest power EV chargers I've seen are 250kW. The highest I know of that are already installed for general use are the 60kW Aerovironment Posicharge chargers in Oahu. For a 200Wh/mi EV charging at 250kW, that's 21 miles range per minute of charging, meaning that charging makes up under 5% of your travel time.
In short, while the state of the art tech isn't perfect yet, it's not half bad.
Parent
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:All things decay (Score:5, Insightful)
AKA: If the site is valuable maintaining or upgrading the wind farms is a net gain.
Parent
Hard to beat economics (Score:3, Insightful)
When a solution is safer, uses less resources, causes less polution. But costs more to scale to a useful size, then it tends to lose out.
While electricity is a commodity, and is sold on a market as such, the cheapest producer wins. To fix this artificial constraints that artificially inflate the cost of the cheaper methods of electricity production have to be considered.
The farmers are gonna be mad (Score:5, Interesting)
The corn farmers are going to be upset by this but once again research shows that Ethanol made from corn is not an energy efficient way to create fuel. It's time to stop the ethanol subsidies and start spending money on energy sources with real potential. That way corn will now go back into the food stream, and farmers will also start growing hops again rather than switching to corn to make more money [yoursforgo...tables.com].
Sincerely,
Home Brewer who misses his hops
Re:The farmers are gonna be mad (Score:5, Interesting)
Why don't we just put all the state primaries on the same day? The importance of the Iowa primary is no longer vastly inflated, presidential canidates no longer have to pledge to Big Corn, and ethanol stops getting subsidies.
Farmers can get mad all they like, it's bad for the rest of us.
Parent
Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it. He only doesn't like nuclear power because of them there terr'ists. And that it's completely reasonably possible to get weapons-grade uranium from any nuclear reactor.
And he completely ignores the effects of wind power on things like bats and birds.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind. Being in the Bay Area, he's got to be aware of activists trying to shut down the wind farms near Stockton because they're killing birds. And I remember reading that the manufacture of photovoltaic cells uses some of the same processes that are already poisoning the groundwater in Silicon Valley.
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
> Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind.
Of course the author had an ax to grind. Green gets grant money, nukes get you shunned from elite society.
The horrible truth is that for hard core greens the only solution is eliminating a couple billion excess humans and forcing the remnant to live a 'reduced' lifestyle to satisfy their self loathing. Thus no proposed solution to the 'energy crisis' is going to be acceptable if it has the potential to actually produce energy at affordable prices in quantities anywhere close to current levels. As you correctly note the greens are already mobilizing against wind and solar on the fear that they MIGHT become practical someday. There are even efforts to stop geothermal! What could possibly be wrong with geothermal? Google it if you want to be sickened.
The truth is there is no 'energy crisis' there is only a political movement to change our lifesysle. Nukes can be built perfectly safe these days, the fuel can be reprocessed to minimize the waste storage issue and we have more than enough Uranium to power any lifestyle we want until we finally perfect a practical fusion reactor. Saying this in public will end a scientist, politician or TV pundit's career though so we hear endless bleating about an energy crisis, running out of energy and global warming bullcrap intended to frighten us into doing things sane people would never do otherwise.
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
> A scientist saying creationism is real will get him shunned, as it should.
Yes it should. As should saying creationism is false should. Neither can be proved by the ways of science and anyone trying to push a political or religious agenda under the cover of science should be written out of the profession. Current science is only even believed to be valid back to the big bang and can say zero about anything before that... even if the phrase 'before the big bang' has a meaning or not. It might be able to say more in the future as our understanding improves but as things currently stand science cannot answer the big questions of Life, the Universe and Everything.
> A scientist saying "we need nukes, there is no possible way anything else can work" is not a scientific statement.
Corrent. However one can say all of the following and be 100% correct from a scientific Pov.
1. We currently possess the knowledge to build safe reliable nuke plants on a scale to provide all of our energy needs. The only obstacles are political. Since we know of at least one route to generating all of the energy we could want any talk of an 'energy crisis' is this pure political theater.
2. Sufficient proven reserves of Uranium exist to supply our needs for over a hundred years without recycling spent fuel rods. With recycling we have enough to either last much longer or increase our energy usage during the next hundred year.
3. No other currently proposed 'alternative energy' source, alone or in total can demonstrate a plan to provide our current energy supply at anywhere close to the current costs. Solar and wind are currently so innefficient that without government subsidies they would only be practical in locations so far off the grid that wiring them would be impractical. Continued research and development may or may not improve the deployment cost and output so as to make one or more alternatives practical in the future. Thus adopting as official policy that we MUST adopt these technologies means betting our future lifestyle and prosperiety on an ASSUMPTION that the price/kwh can be brought down.
4. While it is true that a practical fusion reactor has been thirty years away for the last forty years, unity gain is getting closer and closer now. It is thus rational to argue that it is at least as likely that we can build a fusion reactor in the next hundred years as it is that we can perfect wind or solar in the next twenty.
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
Nice conspiracy theory you have there
It's a conspiracy theory in that it claims that the hard-core greens (which by no means includes all liberals, or all environmentalists) are lying about their stated reasons for opposing nuclear power. But unlike most other conspiracy theories it makes a specific prediction, which is that as solar, wind, and geothermal power becomes increasingly viable as replacements for fossil fuels, greens will suddenly discover reasons why they're unacceptable. I believe that is likely to be the case; we'll get to find out in the next decade or so.
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the gross amount of concrete that would be needed to create all those plants and the resulting global climate effects resulting from the emissions in creating that concrete.
As opposed to the solar and wind installations that are built from pixie dust? The US has 104 active nuclear plants producing 20% of our electricity [wikipedia.org]. Is building 400 more to get close to 100% really going to cause a concrete shortage?
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
The study claims to be quantitative and scientific. But when he goes into his anti-nuclear rant, it's all just opinion.
We currently have no perfect energy sources. I for one think nuclear sucks less than most of the others.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe these statements are also relevant:
Weird... It's like you tried to read the article... but then just read a random paragraph from the middle and stopped.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
Well given that he computes the carbon footprint of nuclear by dragging things like "terrorists could steal the fuel to make a bomb which could be used in a city which would burn and release lots of CO2," and that one of the reasons nuclear plants take so long to license is the regulatory hurdles designed in part to prevent terrorists from doing just that, I'd say the GP's summary, while glib, was accurate.
--MarkusQ
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Funny)
Well given that he computes the carbon footprint of nuclear by dragging things like "terrorists could steal the fuel to make a bomb which could be used in a city which would burn and release lots of CO2,"
Man, that's such a stretch my back just popped.
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Essentially, they are assuming that converting to nuclear power results in global nuclear warfare. Yes, it's only the "upper limit" for the range of possible deaths that they throw into their calculations, but let me break it down for you... they have a weighted average of factors used to calculate what is the best solution, and each factor is actually a probability distribution, and they set the upper 10% (or whatever) of potential deaths per year (one of the factors in their model) for one of the solutions (nuclear) to infinity (essentially infinity.... a number so high as to completely skew the resulting weighted average), then guess what... they stated nuclear wasn't an option.
This isn't research, this is propaganda.
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
The only reason most of it "needs" to be stored is regulatory. 99% of the so-called primary wastes are perfectly usable as fuel for future cycles. If reprocessing were permitted (like in France, etc.) most of our "nuclear wastes" would become "nuclear fuel reserves."
Almost all of what's left is either commercially valuable / recyclable or harmless.
The nuclear waste "problem" is a creation of our fossil fuel industry driven political system.
--MarkusQ
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
PS: Carter understood a lot more about the industry than most lay people. "He was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine." So it's not like this was some idiot deciding something based on an uninformed whim.
Parent
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll agree that Carter knew a lot about nuclear power, and for that reason I doubt that he thought that breeder reactors can blow up. 'cause it isn't true.
And while new fuel may be cheap the real question is how much does storing the fuel after extracting less than 1% of the energy cost?
--MarkusQ
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
At the 40 year mark the radiation levels are still something to be cautious of, but short term exposure isn't a major problem at that point so as long as you don't take long naps on the stockpile, you should be fine. The thi
Windbelt (Score:4, Interesting)
I am happy to hear this: Wind (and solar) does seem to be a very elegant energy solution.
I do note, however, that the report seems to assume wind-based power generation as taking place with traditional turbines.
The question arises in my mind if the use of the windbelt technology might offer additional gains in this respect?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windbelt [wikipedia.org]
My searches for use or deployment of the windbelt seem to garner sparse results...any info out there?
is the windbelt indeed a more effecient method of wind-power generation? Or are turbines still the way to go?
Very sloppy, misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Very sloppy, misleading headline (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet the word "model" appears nowhere in TFA. It refers instead to "quantitative evaluation". You can certainly disagree with the way evaluation was carried out. But you're not doing that. You're claiming that there are "wild assumptions", something I see no evidence of.
Advocates of a given technology tend to be pretty blind to its downsides. This is particularly true for advocates of nuclear power (waste disposal, weapons proliferation, high costs, high NIMBY factor) and biofuels (environmental degradation; diversion of cropland from food production). All this study does is point out these blind spots. The way you dismiss the study out of hand is all too typical of the river-in-Egypt approach to environmental debate.
One caveat with respect to biofuels: most of the objection to it don't apply to plans to extract it from oil-rich algae [renewableenergyworld.com]. But this emerging technology doesn't seem to get much press, probably because it doesn't have the entrenched businesses lobbying for it that nukes and fuel crops do.
Parent
Missing option (Score:5, Funny)
Nuclear is the best option. (Score:5, Insightful)
I love how it's dismissed out of hand because of the bogeyman argument.
TERRORISM!!!!!! Oh crap.
We better rule out anything that is efficient and can be used RIGHT NOW.
No let's pick the ones based on Unobtanium.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It mostly takes so long because of all the regulatory hurdles. If the other technologies were held to the same paperwork standards, they'd take as long (or longer) to get online.
--MarkusQ
Nuclear? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was young and savvy, I always knew that nuclear power was bad. Polluting. Toxic. Dangerous. Wrong. But now that I'm older, I'm not so sure. In fact I think it's pretty safe. But, I can't objectively confirm this. My current opinion is still just as uniformed as my previous one.
Trouble is, it's difficult to separate the facts from the rhetoric, and it is danm near impossible to find an unbiased introduction to radioactivity, its uses dangers and safety limits. I would like to learn more, but there is precious little information available. I mean real information, with numbers. Without them, I'm just getting gas. And no, I am not going to rely on wiki-trips.
It's easy to find information on astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, radio, electricity, etc, etc, etc. But radioactivity? Not a chance. How close to I have to be to an exposed nuclear rod before I am "at risk"? 10 meters? 100 meters? A kilometer? In orbit? Give me graphs. Give me numbers. Help me understand. I'm not stupid, nor are most people. But without hard numbers, I can't confirm or deny my suspicions?
Or you could just keep making Radioactive super-mutant movies and promoting candle wick alternate energy sources. Whichever.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Any radioactivity associated with N.P. is inherently assumed to be bad and probably rightfully so. ( I don't know either )
Nuclear however appears to be the ONLY fuel capable of supplying our needs. It gets a bad rap because of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear today is not your father's nuclear. I wish people would realize THAT.
Every other unrealistic idea has us completely shutting our energy usage down and replacing i
Wind produces the least carbon? (Score:3, Interesting)
From TFA:
I wonder if the transportation necessary to reach 0.5 of all U.S. land was considered. You must transport 1) the windmills themselves to the site, 2) all maintenance materials, 3) all maintenance workers over the lifetime of the windmills, 4) the windmills themselves offsite once they're retired.
Transport costs for windmills is undoubtedly large. I live in Texas and I've seen a few of these being hauled up I-45 from the port of Houston on the way to their destination in Midland. The blades are hauled individually by semi trailer and are about 2x as long as an 18 wheeler. And they're shipped to Houston from the Netherlands!
So I suspect that the analysis has neglected to take these factors into account when rating the carbon footprint of wind power...
Economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't see much mention of economics in the article. If there's one thing I would have thought environmentalists had learned by now it is that no matter what the politicians say, nothing is going to happen if the finances don't work out. From what I can tell wind and solar are still a ways from being competitive with oil and gas even though the $/KWH cost is very close. The real problem is you have to put all the money in up front with wind and solar, whereas gas plants are cheap, and a gas plant can start generating revenue with its first drop of fuel. So a fossil-fuel plant carries less debt and less risk for the power company.
Also there's the problem of reliability. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. So you either need lots of excess power generation capability, or you need to burn something. And yes, I know Germany has this tri-mode system with wind, solar, and biofuel. But the Germans couldn't keep the lights on without French nuclear power.
This is a judgement call, not science. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is it is NOT comparing everything in one area. It uses multiple different measures, including pollution, cost, etc.
But when you that kind of study it requires you to make judgments about which is more important. These are value judgments, NOT scientific ones. Basically all this study does is tell you what a few scientists at Stanford want, not what is true or factual.
P.S. While ethanol as done in US is stupid, Ethanol as done in South America makes sense. They take all the production waste from agricultural and make ethanol from it. That would be the leaves, etc. the things we don't eat. In the US on the other hand they put the stuff we actually EAT into the pot. South American plan makes sense, but the US version does not..
Study relies on absurd assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
This "study" is not really a study, but a model. As such, it's only as good as its assumptions. Unfortunately, many of its assumptions are completely wrong or totally implausible.
For example, the model predicts that nuclear power emits 25x as much carbon as wind power. You may wonder how that could be possible. It's possible because that conclusion follows from the model's assumptions which are all wrong, as follows.
First, the model compares the carbon output of new windmills, versus the carbon output of obsolete ways of refining uranium as an average over the last 40 years. Since refining uranium is far less carbon-intensive than it was, we should use the new figures only. It does not matter how much carbon was emitted by uranium enrichment for plants in the 1960s. Nobody is suggesting building those. We are debating whether we should build new nuclear power plants, or new windmills. As such, we should compare the carbon output of new uranium enrichment against new windmills. In this case the author clearly commits the "sunk cost fallacy", and the assumption is totally wrong.
Another mistaken assumption behind carbon emissions of nuclear plants, is carbon emissions from delays in plant constructions. The author assumes that nuclear power plants will take 10+ years to construct, and in the mean time, we will continue to generate electricity by burning coal. On the other hand, he assumes that the delay associated with windmills is "zero". However, that assumption is totally wrong. Windmills will lead to "zero delay" only if the United States throws away every coal-burning plant we have and replaces them with windmills this year. Since that will never happen, the assumption is wrong. In actuality, those coal plants will be decomissioned at the end of their useful lives and will be replaced by either wind, nuclear, or something else. So, the delay associated with nuclear or wind would probably be quite similar. Since this factor alone accounts for most of the "25x as much carbon" which nuclear is said to produce, that figure is refuted.
And there are other assumptions which are wrong. For example, the model assumes that nuclear power will lead to nuclear weapons which will cause a nuclear war with a resulting environmental catastrophe. Since nuclear power cannot be used to construct nuclear weapons, this assumption is mistaken. Unfortunately, the author makes many errors when he discusses the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In actuality, nuclear power has almost no probability of starting a nuclear war.
The paper states that "Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea)" and shortly thereafter concludes that "Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power". But that is entirely wrong. It's a spurious correlation. The reason some countries have nuclear power plants, and the same countries have nuclear weapons, is because those countries are technologically advanced, which causes both nuclear weapons and nuclear power; not because nuclear power causes nuclear weapons.
And there are other assumptions about nuclear (not related to carbon emissions) which are equally unrealistic. For example, the model claims that nuclear "produces fuel rods that are usually stored on site for several years in cooling ponds pending transport to a permanent site" and somehow concludes that nuclear has as much of a detrimental effect on wildlife as coal power. I honestly have no idea how he derived that conclusion (he doesn't say). It seems to me that mass strip-mining of the countryside (including mass-strip mining for serpentine rock if we intend to use that for mineral sequestration) every year, would greatly outweigh nuclear power's single kilometer of radioactivity buried deep beneath a single mountain in an isolated arid desert in Nevada, once. In fa
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
there is ALWAYS wind. if there's no wind here, there certainly will be wind 500 miles from here. No wind is only possible when the the sun has gone out, AND the globe has stopped turning.