Alternative Energy Confusion 558
pcnetworx1 writes "New York State is starting to get crunched for electricity. While other states may just say 'pop a couple more coal/oil/natural gas/nuclear power plants down', NY has decided to take the green route. NY State wants to get more power by strategically placing windmill powerplants in upstate NY to help the grid. While getting a dedicated power plant placed on your property for FREE (and being paid $3,000 a year per tower) may sounds good to some Slashdotters, the citizens in upstate NY still need some education in the safety of alternative energy."
People fear change (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Legalities will be the downfall of America? (Score:4, Informative)
One example I saw a few years ago when I still did things in materials science was presentations from researchers from the USA and Japan in the lucrative feild of artificial body joints. The Japanese reasearcher had decent funding in a project with limited chance of a financial payoff (remember that the Japanese are supposed to only copy and not innovate) while the US researcher with a proven background couldn't get the funding for a single person to develop better designs of a flawed product that makes millions per year but would sell more if it was improved. If your design has made billions for the company due to solid research you would normally expect the company to put a bit more money in for billions in the future instead of sitting on their patents.
Kyoto (Score:5, Informative)
Re:People can't have their cake and eat it too! (Score:5, Informative)
Wind power is great, and there are really no known sideeffects of them, besides a nice view. Wind power has been around for a long time, so other alternative energy methods are not as widespread. Each year we hear of windmill companies expanding and increasing sales, and I'm very satisfied with that "on behalf of the environment".
Our electricity over here is very stable compared to other contries, _afaik_. I don't know of _anyone_ who would complain of more windmills. When mother nature does her thing sneezing (yes, I know - it's usually very quiet over here) on the trees making them fall on power lines, there aren't much we can do, but actually NESA is putting power lines into the ground, so that's less to worry about.
In short: No we are not paranoid about electricity, and yes - I personally do fine without an UPS. I bet our electronics are just as sensitive as any other electronics from Taiwan
However, like i said: Alternative methods are approaching, but far from popular.
Amongst other methods are "wave-farms" (I don't know the formal term). Swedish scientists and Danish scientists recently improved this technology to such a point that... well i don't know any numbers, but I remember it being more promising/effective per square mile and cheaper set-up than windmills.
Windmill hell, or, now that they work... (Score:5, Informative)
And that's the problem. These things are big. 400 feet high [gepower.com], the size of a 40 story building. And that's the old 1MW model. The new 3MW units are even bigger, with a 341 foot blade diameter.
But that's only 3MW. These things need to installed in large numbers to generate enough power to drive whole cities. So thousands of these huge towers have to be built. This is happening. And, let's face it, the result looks like an industrial park. [friendsofbruce.ca] We're not talking about those little hippie windmills from the 1970s. This is serious machinery.
Upstate New York people are bitching about this, as mentioned in the original article. The Cape Cod and Nantucket people are furious. [capewind.org] The plan there is to build a wind farm six miles offshore, with 130 turbines. This seems huge, but it will only provide about a quarter of Cape Cod's electricity. Residents are upset about how it will "ruin the ocean view". Six miles offshore.
Actually, the Cape Cod site probably should be about 10x bigger. Someday it will be.
uhh, they have (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Legalities will be the downfall of America? (Score:5, Informative)
Swimming pool storage is just fine, it works, it's safe. The waste doesn't last for thousands of years, in 500 years, it's less radioactive than the ore it came from. Reprocessing is perfectly safe, and should be done, but the US cut it out in hopes that other countries wouldn't build reprocessing facilities, since the material could be used in weapons. Of course, North Korea and Iran have proved that countries that want weapons will get them, and most of the industrialized world that uses nuclear power reprocesses their material somewhere.
What you are citing isn't a problem with nuclear power, it's a political problem that was created, mostly, but nuclear power's opponents. These arguments don't even make sense, since for them to be a problem, you have to do something wrong, and the reason that we have difficult times doing the right thing, is because we want to satisfy nuclear power's opponents (who wouldn't you can't appease by doing it right, since they want it gone altogether).
If wind power is super-cheap, maintanence free, and inexpensive, hey, go for it. Most of the people whose views aren't backed by some strawman argument seem to go for nuclear power though.
Here's a bit of trivia. Because we don't use nuclear power (which upsets its detractors), a large portion of the US power is provided by coal (we don't build so many plants). Burning coal puts more uranium into the atmosphere than nuclear power does. So, instead of storing uranium safely, we blast it into the atmosphere.
Re:Nobody does the math on alternative energy... (Score:3, Informative)
Denmark Energy Statistics [www.ens.dk]
Looks like they are generating 3.1 Gigawatts total. Not bad but not a whole lot. They are adding about 300mw a year. I'll leave out oil from the energy statistics because liquid fuels is a whole nother' ball of yarn that I'll let slide. However, If you look at total natural gas usage up at the top of the spread sheet it's 15 times their wind power. This natural gas could be replaced by electricity for heating so I would say that electricity meets about 5% of their total fuel budget along with other renewables, most notably "Wastes".
Danish windmills and power grid (Score:3, Informative)
No Danish electricity supply is not untrustworthy. The avarage time between a power grid failure (affecting a specific houshold) is around 10 years. Apart from one (which was a network configuration error in Sweden), the ones I have experienced have all been extreme weather related (trees blown into power lines, stuff like that). I don't know anyone with an UPS, I don't see them marketed in the stores, but sometimes they are in catalogues, so there must be some people who buy them.
Hearing about the power problems in Californaia made most Danes shake their head in disbelief. To us, it sounds like a third world situation, and we don't think of USA that way. I have even heard unstable power used as an argument to keep Turkey out of EU. If they can't even keep their power grid running, they are clearly not ready for the EU.
However, this has nothing to do with wind mills. Winds mills can save use of fossil foil, but cannot contribute to the stability of the grid. We still need enough coal based power plants to supply the nation with electricty, even when there is no wind. So it is not a question of whether you want to build a coal plant or 100 wind mills, but whether you want the coal plant alone, or the plant plus 100 wind mills.
The Danish power grid has until recently been run by regional companies, mostly owned by municipals, with a monopoly. They build the grid to have excess capacity. With deregulation coming, they even upgraded their capacity further in order to be able to export power (and increase their value for comming buyers). My guess is that the main problem with unstable grid come from deregulated markets with strong competion and low profit margins, not leaving money for any excess capacity.
The wind mills are not particular popular among the local population in Denmark either. Not because of any health issues, but because they a huge (only the largest mills are anything near cost efficient compared to coal), and not everybody think they are pretty. There are hate-organizations such as "Neighbors to Wind-mills" in Denmark as well. The trend is that ever larger mills are build out on the sea. More wind, less neighbors.
The current 20% is considered the maximum technically possible, without any means for efficiently storing the energy. The hydrogen based economy is interesting to us, as it would allow the wind-mills to store convert the energy to hydrogen to be taped later.
More important than the wind-mills are probably the local combined heat and power plants, which allows a very high utilization of the coal. They are clean and noiseless, and provide a local community with heat, while the power goes to the grid. We still need some of the large dedicated power plants to when we want power, but not heat.
Re:Legalities will be the downfall of America? (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed, but until we at least get the political will to deal with the existing waste we should be cautious about creating more.
Swimming pool storage is just fine, it works, it's safe. The waste doesn't last for thousands of years, in 500 years, it's less radioactive than the ore it came from.
Somehow I don't find that reassuring considering the fact that yesterdays uranium mines tend to become tommorows Superfund sites. In any event, everything I've read suggests that high level waste from spent fuel rods needs to be contained for thousands of years, not hundereds. From the nrc.gov site:
Even low level waste can be dangerous if it gets into the air or water. Are you really sure that none of those pools is ever going to leak or that the operators wouldn't cover it up if it did? It happens with all sorts of other toxic wastes and it's happened with uranium mines and processing facilities.
One other quote from the NRC re. wet storage:
Does that sound like a 500+ year solution to you?
Re:Legalities will be the downfall of America? (Score:5, Informative)
The real problem with nuclear power is that it's cheaper, faster and easier to build coal power plants. Sure coal pollutes more and generates CO2 but the only people that have to pay for that are your grandchildren. Pollution and CO2 are officially somebody elses problem.
Corporations and governments are faced with two choices. Choice 1 is to spend a buttload of money and take 15 years to build a nuke or spend 100 times less money and build a coal plant in half the time. The choice is a no brainer.
Until somebody is charged for polluting and generating CO2 the cost benefit analysis won't change.
Re:real danger (Score:3, Informative)
Is it a joke? Even very pro-nuke agencies think that it will kill approx 4000 persons [iaea.org], and this is based upon very very dubious data and methods (see below).
> Anyway, the site that you cite says that the 4000 people estimate is based on bad science.
Indeed. Official UN agencies try hard to let us think that the disaster will only kill 4000 persons, and the proposed site shows why it is not true [makarevitch.org], why the grand total is very probably way higher.
In France alone (2000 km from Chernobyl), a Nobel Prize (G. Charpak, physics, very pro-nuke) thinks that the disaster will kill approx 300 persons (French site) [nouvelobs.com]. Many think that it will kill at least 100000 persons. Special bonus: don't neglect the teratogen and mutagen effects.
> you might want to consider other industrial disasters. When I was in college, 7
> people were killed in a collapse at a local coal fired plant
It did not irradiate an enormous area and did not release very dangerous stuff, some active during very long periods and some freely wandering around, flying with the wind. Is ther any possible comparison?
Re:Things change (Score:3, Informative)
From actual cost analysis reports produced by our provincial energy producer. Taking EVERYTHING into account, average energy costs are $0.05/kWh for nuclear, $0.07/kWh for fossil, about $0.12/kWh for wind and $0.20/kWh for solar.
The simple reason is that nuclear benefits from sheer volume of production. A $7 billion dollar nuclear reactor serves 2 million homes. A $1.5 million dollar wind turbine serves 250 homes. Now take into account that a nuclear reactor has a uptime of 90-95% while a wind turbine is only producing power for 20-40% of the time. Over the lifetime of both, nuclear is much cheaper.
See above. If you work out the maintenance cost per house powered, nuclear is a lot less.Re:They seem to have a confused concept of aesthet (Score:4, Informative)
It is also very saddening to see all those already debunked myths about wind and solar energy pop up again and again and again. "It takes more energy to produce a wind mill | solar panel than they ever produce in their lifetime."
Replace "wind and solar" with "nuclear fission" and your argument is still valid.
In any case, I happen to live in upstate New York (outside of Binghamton for those with a map) and wish I had been online last night to see this discussion. Locally there seems to be two interests that are attempting to derail these projects. A) Bird Lovers, B) NIMBY.
I don't know if there is a solution to A. Has anybody ever done a real study to see how many birds these things kill? Or for that matter how many birds cell towers kill? We used to find dozens of dead birds and bats (presumably flew into the guy wires?) when I worked for a WISP and went up to the tower we were leasing. The solution to B is equally challenging. Property owners rights must be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. This is nothing new -- you'd be facing the same opposition to a cell tower, new transmission line, new gas pipeline or a prison (literally -- there's a big argument locally now about siting a juvvie prison).
For my part, as a New Yorker, I would like to see the New York State Power Authority (the same people that run the St. Lawrence Seaway and Niagara Falls) get a mandate to build and operate nuclear power plants and sell the resulting electricity to our utility companies in the same manner that the sell the power they get from hydro projects. They sell it at cost to the utilities who are not allowed to mark it up. Anybody who lives in New York State should see a "Hydroelectric cost savings" line item on their electric bill -- this is because of the power authority. Safety concerns with nuclear power could be addressed by recruiting the talent from the US Navy -- they've operated nuclear power for five decades without a problem.
New York also has limited natural gas resources. Our leaders in Albany are currently trying to get mineral rights from the property owners so they can bring in the out of state energy companies (the Enron's of the World) to exploit these resources. This is a mistake! If I had my way I'd see these natural gas resources exploited by the power authority (or a similar state agency with a mandate to serve the public) and used to supplement the HEAP program for low income families having problems meeting their heating bills.
Of course none of this will ever happen because we have the most dysfunctional State Government in the country :) It's nice to dream though! Maybe Spitzer will clean it up when he gets elected.
Re:Electricity is NOT a scarce resource! (Score:3, Informative)
This is a technical problem with viable solutions. For one, modern (4th and 5th generation plant designs) do not expose the plant itself to much radiation. The moderating fluid absorbs the neutrons now, and its MUCh easier to handle storage for it than for the reactor materials. There's still the metal cladding to the fuel rods, however that's generally stored with the spent fuel itself.
As far as I know, the dangerous levels of radioactivity associated with reactor parts tends to not be such a problem after 20-50 years; that's a much more manageable problem then the fuel itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Asso
IFRs may also be a solution; thought they've never been tested.
Either way, its entirely a technological problem, and the solution is more research on disposal technologies.
Also, it does seem that there may be technological solutions to radiation. I'm more than a little bit suspicious of this: http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=849072003 [scotsman.com] , however, the idea looks pretty interesting.