Wind and Sun Beat Other Energy Alternatives 584
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."
Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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:Well of course (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:Hard to beat economics (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead, make these cheaper, more polluting methods of electric generation pay for the environmental damage that they are causing. At that point wind, solar, and geothermal energy would become more cost-viable.
Re:Nuclear (Score:2, Insightful)
Storing that nuclear waste for the next million years is the problem. Who wants that stored in their backyard?
Very sloppy, misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:Nuclear? (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 it with solar or wind. NOT realistic. People will NOT do this. We'll continue to pollute until we die. Hell we're dying already. Some on the right love to portray the idea that there is some debate in the scientific community about global warming. There IS no debate on global warming. It exists and we are making it worse just like a goldfish that craps in his bowl and you don't change the water. Maybe they think that the rapture is going to make it all irrelevent.
Our energy usage is so out of control and we will not be turning back so we either have to cut down (won't happen, especially since China is slowly modernizing) or we find a replacement. I'm not sure I would hold France's nuclear 1.0 as being a great example and we probably shouldn't since it's dated technology.
The only drawback is what to do with the waste and I'm not sure so sure we have the time to figure this one out before we start using it. Even one of Greenpeace's founders has reversed position on nuclear power. If nothing else use nuclear until we have in place a good solar/wind grid in place after solar/wind technology has become a reasonable replacement.
I like Pickens' idea of converting to both electric and natural gas. Semis can't run on electric but they can on NatGas. Convert heavy vehicles to NatGas and resurrect the EV-1 technology for cars. NatGas burns mostly clean and the EV-1 cars can be recharged via clean nuclear power plants.
There are always going to be terrorists, just safeguard the stuff better.
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.
Re:Nuclear (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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear is the best option. (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
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..
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.
Re:Well of course (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All things decay (Score:5, Insightful)
AKA: If the site is valuable maintaining or upgrading the wind farms is a net gain.
Re:Nuclear? (Score:3, Insightful)
Radioactivity from nuclear power is no different than radioactivity from any other source. Alpha, beta and gamma radiation is alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Radioactivity occurs naturally all around us. Every day. Trace amounts of radioactive materials are found everywhere. It used to be common to practice radiological monitoring skills using the mantles from Coleman (and other) gas lanterns (which have higher than background radioactivity). Some natural ores used in making ceramic glazes contain radioactive elements.
The only difference is that nuclear power plants use concentrated radioactive elements. So do many hospitals (ever hear of "radiation therapy" for cancer?) Food processing plants (irradiated foods). That smoke detector hanging on your wall.
What level of radiation is "safe"? Define "safe". There is an existing "background" level of radiation. That, at a minimum, better be "safe". If it isn't, well, we're already screwed. (And no, we really aren't "screwed" by there being a background level. In fact, it is credited with being the driving force for the random mutations that evolution requires to operate. It's also why the center of the earth is HOT instead of COLD.)
"How much will you get at ten feet from a rod?" It doesn't matter since you will probably never be that close. That rod will be shielded and you'll not experience anything more than background. "How much in the center of an operating reactor?" Big numbers. Again, you'll never be there. The levels drop as the inverse square of the distance (with no absorption), and much faster than that when absorption is considered. That means if you know the level of radiation at one foot, it will be half that at 1.4 ft. It will be 1/4 that at 2 feet. It will be 1/100 at ten feet.
There are regulations and rules about exposure limits, but I don't have any of them handy to quote from. The limits are cumulative, which means you integrate the exposure rates over time and have a sum that is considered "ok", but every radioactive exposure can be the source of a mutation that causes cancer. It's a statistical thing. (The exposure limit is not because the radiation collects in your body, it's because of the cumulative damage it has done to your DNA.)
Why is "nuclear" energy considered so dangerous? Badly designed reactors break and leak radioactive material. "Chernobyl". (Shudder.) That is the classic example of a style of reactor that is not manufactured in the US precisely because it has the ability to do what it did. "Three Mile Island" is the classic example of hysteria, because a small amount of radioactive gas was released and anti-nuke evangelists spread the word without spreading the knowledge to go with it. "The China Syndrome" is the classic disinformation campaign -- surely, if you see it in the movies it must be true!
There IS no debate on global warming. It exists ...
There is debate on global warming, just not open debate. And while it may exist, there is still debate on the anthropogenic contribution.
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
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Insightful)
It should be view as a 75 year solution.
Stop gap sounds..cheap.
Use it as solar thermal ramps up.
Now, some of the reactors on the drawing board look fantastic. Hopefully they will see the light of day.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Insightful)
This.
Building a nuke really isn't that hard. The US plowed through it in a few years.
Corrected for inflation into 2008 USD, the whole shebang was only $24 billion.
That's pretty cheap when you think about how much the government is throwing around for all these bailout packages.
Re:Nuclear is the only viable option (Score:3, Insightful)
The awesome thing about solar is that when installed on houses, it actually DECREASES the demand on the "grid", because power is generated locally and does not have to be transmitted. And... it does it when demand is highest!
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?
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Insightful)
I object to your lumping any corn-produced fuel with "biofuel" the real biofuels are waste by-products(aka something that doesn't require "fields", except maybe junkyards) and restaurant grease is probably sufficient in most areas. Any crop used as a biofuel is just an attempt by that industry to get more subsidies, but intensive production is going the wrong way when it comes to energy efficiency.
Re:Nuclear? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only drawback is what to do with the waste and I'm not sure so sure we have the time to figure this one out before we start using it.
There's a lot of mis-information surrounding nuclear waste. It only lasts for thousands of years when you don't reprocess to seperate the 5% that is useless in a reactor from the 95% that is useful. If you reprocess, the remainder needs to be stored for 500 years to reduce it's radioactivity to background levels.
Reprocessing was banned in the U.S. as an anti-proliferation measure during the Carter administration. At the time, the reprocessing process would have produced a highly pure fuel that could have been diverted for weapons.
However, newer fast reactor designs allow for a fuel high in actinides (which make the fuel unsuitable for a weapon and are quite hard to remove). A different reprocessing method can then be used where the actinides are never separated from the fuel.
As for radiation safety, the prevailing view is that no amount is 'safe'. However there is a growing minority view that some radiation is actually necessary to health and even that the background levels today are just a bit less than optimal. In any event, a nuclear plant releases far lass radiation in normal operation than a coal plant (due to traces of thorium and radium in coal).
It's important to note in nuclear safety that for all the fear and headlines, Three Mile Island released only traces of radiation (long since decayed) and resulted in no injuries whatsoever.
Chernobyl was a dangerously designed reactor even for the time it was built and was being operated well outside of safety guidelines at the time of the accident.
France's efforts ARE a good example. It wasn't outdated when they built it and the fact that they're still up and running shows that it can be done.
The Candu program is a good place to look. By standardizing a pre-approved design, it greatly reduced the time and costs of building a nuclear plant.
Interestingly, if we build fast reactors now, they can be fueled by with the 'expended' fuel rods we're already storing for some time. The result will be a net reduction in the nuclear waste we need to track and store. By turning it from a liability into an asset we can immediately create an incentive to guard it more carefully.
It's true... in a very false way. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes the (non-science) environmentalists are overzelous and try to sell this argument. The fact is everything currently takes brown energy to produce so if you're making a nuclear power plant, that's brown energy because it takes carbon-based work to make the fuel.
Solar panels? Those are brown energy because the wafers and cells take carbon-energy to produce.
Electric cars? Those are brown energy because it takes brown energy to make the battery.
It's true, but really it's false. The energy produced, saved, converted, etc causes a net drop in the amount of brown energy we use and lets us stop. I suppose the idea is that we should somehow stop using energy all together or somehow magically convert to a green economy without using our current brown infrastructure. It's factually true, but inherently dishonest and despicable rhetoric.
Down with Nuclear... (Score:3, Insightful)
Turn off the sun! We have all the solar and wind we'll ever need. Nuclear is a complete failure.
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.
All power (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Corn is not the only bio fuel available and in fact is one of the
worst available.
The current top producer is algae using sealed vertical hydroponic
methods in the desert by Valcent Technologies.
Valcent Technologies claims to be able to do all the fuel needs
for the US in a land area 10% the size of New Mexico.
They have achieved yields as high as 100,000 gal/acre/year
in the desert and even at $1.50 a gallon that is a crop with
a gross yield of $150,000 per acre/ per year on some of the
cheapest unused land in the world.
The initial cost setup will cost more of course, but the long
term cost savings of no more middle east mess saves trillions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hioZ7C6HLs [youtube.com]
Right there is the CNN video showing it.
This is indirect use of sunlight.
Some ancient diatom algae is nearly 50% oil by weight and
is said to be the fastest growing plant on the planet.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Places that have massive deserts with high solar levels
should not use nuclear power as an option in the future.
Also undersea ocean currents and the high level jet streams
would provide more power than several earths could use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream#Future_power_generation [wikipedia.org]
The antarctic current alone is 125 times all the flow of all
the rivers on earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circumpolar_Current [wikipedia.org]
Slow current power generation tools like the Aquanator
could provide power to small island nations or large
ones as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquanator [wikipedia.org]
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
cost factored in? nope! (Score:2, Insightful)
Did they include energetic cost of production? (Score:3, Insightful)
While solar "heat oil/water -> turbine" approach may be plausible, with the common "ecological" solar batteries, it takes more (usually "dirty") energy to produce such a battery than it can produce in its lifespan. Meaning solar is just a hype which in fact is bad for environment.
All Models are Wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Westinghouse and GE just want to build the old stuff with a few minor changes (move a bolt and add another generation number) at the taxpayers expense. They are the sort of places where they pretend to have an R&D budget but spend it all on "executive retreats".