First New Nuclear Reactor In a Decade On Track 575
dusty writes "Plans to bring online the first new US nuclear plant since 1995 are on track, on time, and on budget
according to the Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA had one major accident with a coal ash spill of late, and one minor one. The agency has plans and workers in place to have Unit 2 at Watts Bar, near Knoxville, online by 2012. Currently over 1,800 workers are doing construction at the plant. Watts Bar #1 is the only new nuclear reactor added to the grid in the last 25 years. From the article: 'TVA estimates the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor every year will avoid the emission of about 60 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions linked with global warming. ... TVA began construction of Watts Bar in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace.'"
Re:Just Takes One (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just Takes One (Score:5, Informative)
1. Reactors don't explode.
2. A Chernobyl style accident is impossible with a light water reactor.
3. Even with a Chernobyl style reactor and even if they had the exact same accident the problem would have been manageable if they had a freaking containment building.
4. Reactors all go critical. What you don't want is for them to go super critical.
5. No modern reactor can go super critical the fuel they use isn't enriched enough to go super critical and they all need a moderator like water to work.
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:5, Informative)
I think the security threats are exaggerated. Highly radioactive materials are mostly dangerous to whomever possesses them, and even the highest-level reactor fuel or plutonium products cannot be turned into bomb fuel without multi-billion dollar enrichment facilities. The biggest threat is probably low-level radiation leaking into ground water supplies, but if our society reaches the point where people don't care or don't know about that hazard, we probably aren't living long enough for that to be a big concern anyways.
Re:Less radioactive waste, too (Score:2, Informative)
Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm. The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks.
Source [usgs.gov]
Although coal releases the joyous toxins of arsenic, mercury, and selenium, the radioactive components of coal are minor enough to be ignored.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:5, Informative)
1) Mostly true. They can have a steam explosion, which is basically the first thing that happened at Chernobyl. That said, they can't result in a nuclear explosion.
2) Exactly. To be specific, the Chernobyl (RBMK-1000) reactor design used a graphite moderator in order to make it more suitable for production of weapons materials. Graphite moderators are bad for a variety of reasons, both in regards to reactor stability, and the fact that it's extremely flammable (which is where most of the atmospheric contamination from Chernobyl came from - burning graphite.) No US civilian power reactor serves such a dual purpose.
3-5) Don't really need to say more
Additonally:
A typical coal plant releases more radioactive material into the air in a day due to traces of uranium in the coal than TMI released in its lifetime
Also, in addition to the fundamental deficiencies of the the RBMK-1000 design, they were running an experiment with the reactor that could only be described as "fucking dangerous". Well not only, "fucking stupid" works too. By the time the incident occurred, the reactor operators had overridden most of the reactor's safety features - the reactor SHOULD have SCRAMed long before the incident occurred but the operators kept it going to run an experiment because they feared retribution from their superiors. (The experiment failed the first time, and rather than continue shutdown they tried to restart the reactor to try again.)
The biggest problem currently is waste. Sadly, there are reactor designs that are both far more efficient in fuel use (hence produce far less waste per kWh) AND also produce far shorter-lived waste (plus can use traditional LWR waste as fuel), but were killed because politicians translated "breeder" into "proliferation risk" even though traditional LWRs were more of a proliferation risk than the IFR was. Also, a past president (Carter?) banned all nuclear fuels reprocessing in the U.S. with an executive order. Back then, reprocessing = PUREX and banning PUREX was understandable (it WAS a major proliferation risk), but now there are many other reprocessing technologies that are not proliferation risks but are still banned under the wording of the executive order.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Informative)
In the 1940s-1950s, the US detonated numerous nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada and New Mexico, releasing a hell of a lot more radioactive material than Chernobyl
Nope. The 100 or so bombs detonated above ground on the US mainland were relatively small, releasing a few kg of material each. Chernobyl released tons of material. To match that, you'd have to go to the US thermonuclear tests in the Pacific ocean, some of which released about of ton of fission products each. (Some of those test site islands are actually still uninhabitable.)
Applications (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a map of sites [nrc.gov] for which applications have been submitted to the NRC and are currently undergoing review. None of these will happen until the political will emerges to move the bureaucracy.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Humans consume 16 TW on average.
89 PW of solar energy reaches the earth's surface.
That's over 5,000x the power we need.
(source [wikipedia.org]).
I support nuclear too, but GP is no idiot.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Informative)
All wrong:
1. Reactors don't explode. :
See SL-1, Chernobyl, and the one the AEC blew in Idaho just for fun.
2. A Chernobyl style accident is impossible with a light water reactor.
True, but there are still about 843 other failure modes that don't involve the many bad
design features of RBMK-style reactors.
3. Even with a Chernobyl style reactor and even if they had the exact same accident the problem would have been manageable if they had a freaking containment building.
Not feasible if you're a poor country that needs a RBMK style reactor that can be refueled while running.
4. Reactors all go critical. What you don't want is for them to go super critical.
Duh. And I think you're confusing super-critical to with prompt-critical. Very different beasts.
5. No modern reactor can go super critical the fuel they use isn't enriched enough to go super critical and they all need a moderator like water to work.
Nope. Enrichment has nothing to do with it. AT least three reactors have gone boom with low enrichment uranium.
Re:Finally (Score:1, Informative)
Plutonium? Really? FAIL.
Also, YFA indicates "Data from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and USEC, a uranium enrichment company, indicate that enriching the amount of uranium needed to fuel 1,000-megawatt reactor for a year using the most efficient method can require 5,500 megawatt hours of gas- and coal-fired electricity (a 10-megawatt power plant running for 550 hours).*"
Holy brainfuck batman... If there were more nuclear power, they wouldn't need to use power generated by fucking oil and coal plants. You know, nuclear might not be all that great, but it's the best we've got by a long shot, and if we continue to develop it, it'll get better. Letting nuclear cool its heels for decades is not an answer.
Re:Less radioactive waste, too (Score:4, Informative)
It's not true. He is misrepresenting the actual (and true) claim, which is that that during normal operations, coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear plant creates many orders of magnitude more radioactive waste than a coal plant; however, almost all of it is normally kept contained, whereas the coal waste is released into the air.
Of course, people who have concerns about the radiation involved with nuclear power aren't worried about radiation released during normal operations, so the claim is rather pointless. They're worried about accidents, sabotage, leakage, and WMD proliferation, which are all ways that the containment could fail.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)
Solar output in Watts: 3.86x10^26
Solar energy that reaches Earth: 1.74x10^17 W
Energy that reaches ground: 8.9x10^16 W
Energy consumption of the planet: 1.6x10^13 W
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Also, YFA indicates "Data from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and USEC, a uranium enrichment company, indicate that enriching the amount of uranium needed to fuel 1,000-megawatt reactor for a year using the most efficient method can require 5,500 megawatt hours of gas- and coal-fired electricity (a 10-megawatt power plant running for 550 hours).*"
in other words, for the math-challenged grandparent post, the 1,000 MW reactor would have to run at full load for 5.5 hours for every year worth of enriched fuel it consumes. The remaining 8,754.5 hours of the year can be used to do other things. like power homes and businesses.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Breeder reactors would be able to use most of that waste as fuel, allowing the fuel to last hundreds of years with a fraction of the waste generated.
And at a lesser cost in the end, partially because they wouldn't have to mine as much new fuel and partially because they wouldn't have to find places to bury the spent fuel.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Informative)
1. Not really an explosion. It was more of steam rupture. No combustion or nuclear explosion was responsible. Just think of it as venting in a hurry. But that can happen with your home hot water heater.
2. But none of those will cause a Chernobyl style disaster.
3. The US isn't a poor country that needs to refuel the reactor while it is running.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:5, Informative)
Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
I do. See for example the IPCC 4th assessment report [www.ipcc.ch], working group 3, chapter 4 "Energy Supply". In particular 4.3.2 pp. 269-270 "Nuclear Power", and also the summary graph Figure 4.19 on page 283, which compares the lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit energy of different primary sources.
In short, considering the entire energy cycle, nuclear power has comparable CO2 emissions to wind, hydro, and solar power, and actually appears rather cleaner than the latter two.
This isn't surprising at all, when you consider the extreme energy density of nuclear fission. Annual uranium mining is on the scale of merely tens of thousands of tons / year [wikipedia.org], contrasted for instance with coal which is billions of tons [wikipedia.org] - a tiny fraction. The scale is ridiculously small, and correspondingly so are the environmental impacts.
This all comes with a non-obvious disclaimer, that these lifecycle CO2 emissions are only valid in the present context, that most electricity and all transportation are still fossil-fuel powered. Nuclear only emits CO2 at all because there is not enough of it yet, and so the steel mills are powered by coal, and the transport trucks by oil. When we transition to clean energy and electric vehicles or clean synfuels, NONE of the clean energy sources will have ANY lifecycle CO2 emissions at all, and the debate will be moot. (Well, there are two exceptions - inputs of concrete, whose manufacture [wikipedia.org] necessarily emits CO2, in the reduction of CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2, and with hydropower (see the same IPCC chapter, 4.3.3.1, p. 273-4), which emits the GHG methane from anaerobic decomposition of plant matter that is flooded when reservoirs are filled.))
Oh one more thing - plutonium isn't extracted from the ground, it is synthetic, created by nuclear transmutation. One neutron capture U-238 + n -> U-239, followed by two spontaneous beta-decays (neutron turns to proton, emits electron and antineutrino), U-239 -> Np-239 -> Pu-239.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
The mining and processing argument against nuclear power doesn't make sense. Greenhouse gases emitted during mining and processing are roughly proportional to energy spent in mining in processing (assuming, worst case, that all of it is from fossil fuels). But for nuclear power to be of any practical use, the amount of energy you get out of a unit of fuel must be orders of magnitude greater than the energy taken to mine and process it. This, fortunately, turns out to be the case. Thus, nuclear power produces orders of magnitude less greenhouse gasses than fossil fuels, even considering emissions during mining and processing.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm .... just how many deaths and how much radioactivity was released by 3MI? Approx: None.
The ONLY lesson to be learned from Chernobyl is that a tin roof over a bad rector design isn't a good combination. Modern reactors have both failsafe designs AND better containment, so no, it can't happen here. Reactors like (eg.) the Pebble Bed reactor have no unstable state. Even if some lunatic director goes berserk in the reactor control room he can't cause a meltdown.
Re:Finally (Score:1, Informative)
"Chuck DeVore receives a perfect pro-family score" [chuckdevore.com]
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
And the cost of energy and materials to produce the solar cells needed to capture said solar energy?
... is covered in usually 7 to 10 years of the average 28 years the cell will reliably produce energy. But what is also covered in that 7 to 10 years is the energy it would require to recycle that cell into a new working cell. Now you know; spread the word.
Please don't post/echo false memes unless you actually want to hear the truth.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
How much do you actually know about what you're talking about? I'm not asking you rhetorically (though that would be fun to poke at you with), but actually. Tell me what you know before I pay any credence to your b.s.
I can, however, rapidly destroy your b.s. with the fact that the average solar cell produces enough energy to pay for itself AND recycle itself into another working cell in 7 - 10 years. And the average lifespan being 28 years before requiring recycle. Do the math, if you can. 28-10 = 18 years of relatively free energy.
I'm happy to have informed you. Spread the word instead of the false memes you're trying to echo.
Re:Finally (Score:1, Informative)
This simply is NOT true with current technology. Please state a source.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/solar-panels-take-100-years-to-pay-back-installation-costs-917202.html
Please don't post/echo false memes unless you actually want to hear the truth.
Oh the ironing.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Because fly-ash is radioactive.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lost Time (Score:5, Informative)
I think it's great to see new nuclear power coming online, but it's too bad this is simply the completion of a project begun in the 1970's. There hasn't been enough work done in the US to advance the design of nuclear power stations in the last few decades. I wonder how much more efficiently these stations could be built and run today if we had been focused on the problem all this time.
Actually, there's been a lot of work on reactor designs over the last decade o so:
GE has the ABWR and SBWR plants, and ABWRs have been built in Japan,
Westinghouse has the AP-600 (now AP-1000), and
CE had the System 80+
Of these, the SBWR and AP-1000 are probably the most advanced, in the sense of passive safety systems and i teh SBWR's case, natural circulation. Both are attempts to simply construction and operation to reduce costs and increase safety.
The AP-1000 and SBWR will probably be the next generation of US plats, built at existing sites where multiple units were planned but not built; since those sites have already passed NRC site approval.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia also says [wikipedia.org]: "A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could release as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds (34 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium." One big difference here is that an event like the Three Mile Island accident is usually a one-time event, while the coal-burning plant goes on releasing its radioactive material year after year after year....
I'm not going to take sides because I don't know how many curies you get from the release of 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, or what the typical lifespan of a coal plant is (the multiplication factor here), but I definitely don't think it's quite as simple a matter as your brief post suggested. Can you show your work in a little more detail?
Re:Finally (Score:1, Informative)
Looking at history, it looks like the Soviet Union had the worst luck with Nuclear power and accidents.
This is patently false. This meme self-propagates through careless use of wording.
Chernobyl wasn't about luck, nor was it an accident.
It is a tale of corruption (the project director falsified documents claiming all safety measures were implemented on schedule in order to get bonuses), poorly engineered experiments (the core shutdown experiment was conducted at the worst possible time, at the end of the fuel cycle, when the fuel rods emit the most waste heat that the cooling system then has to get rid of) and sheer managerial incompetence (the experiment had to be delayed for many hours, so they decided to conduct it anyway in the night, when night shift employees had not been trained for the experiment). Oh, and then they disabled some more safety features, inserted the control rods too deeply (causing xenon poisoning and lowering power output much below what was needed for the experiment), and then, in order to get enough power to conduct the experiment anyway, they withdrew the control rods far further than the safety specifications allowed, having to trigger a manual override to do so.
There is more; I suggest you read up on it, for it is a very shameful (yet interesting) topic.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Informative)
I'll agree that Greenpeace is not an idiotic organization, but thats because they are very good at capitalizing on people's fears and the general ignorance of the world. Using two simple figures as above illustrates this point, as it makes many unreasonable assumptions, and doesn't emphasize the proper conclusion.
Assuming that the above figures are correct and that half the solar panels will always be in the dark, we find the amount of surface area required to power mankind's average consumption. Searching google for:
((radius+of+earth)^2)*4*pi%2F2500+in+km^2
gives us a area of 204 481 km^2.
Then, for the sake of comparison, we grab a list of countries by total area, and compare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_total_area [wikipedia.org]
It turns out that just to meet current consumption would require covering an area the size of Romania with solar cells. Add on the fact that no solar cell is more than 50% efficient (i am rounding up from 41.1% http://dvice.com/archives/2009/01/germans_break_t.php [dvice.com] ) and we end up covering at least all of Japan.
So while nuclear power may not be sustainable, and is therefore impractical in the longrun, solar power is already impractical.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:3, Informative)
Nuclear glows blue, actually. /pedant
Re:Less radioactive waste, too (Score:3, Informative)
Let's also remember that uranium is a heavy metal, like lead. By burning coal, we're spewing heavy metal dust into the atmosphere. Actually, more likely, we're spewing dust containing heavy metal salts and oxides, which is far more harmful to the body than elemental heavy metals (better solubility means it can move throughout the body and accumulate in bad places, like bones). And uranium is chemically harmful no matter what isotope it is, even if it's not radiologically dangerous.
Meanwhile, the dangerous stuff in a reactor is sitting nicely in a little pile inside a big steel pressure vessel.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Solar cell (photovoltaic) efficiencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell [wikipedia.org]
Power grid issues with Wind and Solar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/10grid.html?_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=slogin [nytimes.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/business/27grid.html [nytimes.com]
A host of nonpartisan (I'm independant BTW) issues can be found in the wikipedia articles for Geothermal and Tidal (waveform hydroelectric) power. Ironically enough, they can generate power, but are equally horrible for the environment in other ways. Not to mention they are extremely cost prohibitive in most circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide [wikipedia.org]
Worldwide we are producing about 10GW of power using geothermal today. Overall, thats not alot. And geothermal has many construction and engineering hurdles to overcome that are different with EACH installation which increases costs and can reduce overall output. Technology can solve this problem, yet again, its not there yet. Not reliably anyways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_Barrage [wikipedia.org]
http://www.reuk.co.uk/Severn-Barrage-Tidal-Power.htm [reuk.co.uk]
Even if they start the Severn Barrage right this second, it would not be fully operational and completed until 2020 at the earliest. The construction costs are nearly $40 billion (24bn. pounds), and the total power output would be around 8.6GW under ideal circumstances. Output is dependant on variable scenarious such as weather (which can also cause damage) and current. Expected average output is about 2GW. Current nuclear technology can generate upwards of 1.4-1.5GW of power per reactor with multiple reactors built at each plant.
http://www.reuk.co.uk/Severn-Barrage-Tidal-Power.htm [reuk.co.uk]
So, about that extensive data you have seen. Want to provide some links that have hard numbers and are based in facts or do you want to sit over there and provide no helpful commentary yourself other than to say I'm wrong and you're right?
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
The conclusions reached in that chapter are based on Vattenfall and they build nuclear power plants [vattenfall.com] so it's not surprising the results favor nuclear power. Whilst they are the best run nuclear reactors in the world and an example of what a *baseline* nuclear program should look like, U.S reactors fall dreadfully short.
The work of Vattenfall *and* Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, upon which that chapter cites as references, both use the same method to calculate energy consumption [sciencedirect.com] funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and are used in 80 odd industry sectors. The exceptionally detailed work of Dr Phillip Smith, Nuclear Physicist and Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (MSc) (Stormsmith.nl), who both work in the nuclear industry and have specialisation on energy system analysis, is mostly ignored in the IPCC report. They have no vested interest in the outcome whilst Vattenfall does.
Their criticisms of Vattenfall include "Process analysis leads to a large underestimation of the total construction energy requirements when labor and supporting activities of the construction are not included".
One thing that is not immediately obvious is that the primary greenhouse gas from the Nuclear industry is not Carbon Dioxide but Chlorinated Fluro-Carbons (CFC114) a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02. Whilst it's equivalent effect is slightly over 8 megatons of C02 more potent is the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer and it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton [wikipedia.org] which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.
If that wasn't serious enough, long term it's not radiation but radioactive isotopes that will eventually make it into the food chain via bioaccumulation. As the hidden cost of carbon is imposed on our generation in the form of a Carbon tax, so we pass on a cost to future generation forced to have to deal with radioactive isotopes and other environmental externalities. Wouldn't it be better to develop a longer term strategy wrt Nuclear power than we currently have that actually addresses the very real problems the industry has?
Which is only relevant if you use the energy density of the enriched isotope and currently PWR use 0.3% of the available energy density. This brings us back to Storm van Leeuwen and Smith whose analysis was to asses the net energy return of the Nuclear industry. For example, for the expected 300TWh's output of a new AP-1000 (low side Vattenfall, high side Storm/Smith) energetic estimates for construction of a nuclear power plant is somewhere between 11TWh and 35TWh, energy cost for demolition around 55TWh to 70TWh, that's around a third before you start. Yet you still have to factor dismantling and clean up of the core alone 5.6TWh's - 16TWh's. They talk in Peta-joules but I've done the conversions to put it in a frame of reference that will be easier to understand.
Using a conservative energy expenditure of 1528Kwh per ton of rock (containing Uranium) you have to process 500 tons of rock, that's 763500Kwh's, to produce one kilo of Uranium. Assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assuming you have a high grade ore that's roughly 763Gwh's per ton and you need 160tons for your first core. Even before enri
Re:Just Takes One (Score:2, Informative)
Western designs are absolutely nothing like the RBMK series reactor that was built at Chernobyl. Reactor design may have stood still in the United States over the past three decades, but other western countries (& a few non-western countries) have been building new reactors and improving reactor design while the US has been sleeping. Modern CANDU designs, the Westinghouse AP1000, ABWR & APWR are not 1950's technology.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Finally the RICS study gives figures at the other end of the extreme. I can't find how they calculated the figures but they seem well off. I do know that they did not take into account raising fuel prices, the money you can get from returning power to the grid and government subsides.
A quote from the independent article for a proponent of the other side is, "He (Jeremy Leggett, executive chairman of Solar Century) estimated the current payback of power-generating PV panels was 13 years."
I hate ironing too, get no iron clothes they are great!
Re:Lost Time (Score:1, Informative)
I know that the AP1000 is approved by the NRC (and tangentially, being built in China), but I hadn't heard of the SBWR, so I wiki'd it. Wikipedia states: "The Simplified Boiling Water Reactor was not submitted to or approved by the NRC, or even built; still, the concept remained intriguing to GE's designers, and served as the basis of future developments." Is this the same reactor you were talking about? If so, it sounds like they plan on taking it further before submitting it to the NRC.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Informative)
Criticality is not a function of free neutrons. Criticality (or rather, the multiplication factor) is an eigenvalue of a system and is independent of flux. A reactor can be critical with zero neutrons flying around. This is actually a real issue, because when a reactor is being initially loaded while offline, you need a constant, external neutron source to provide some flux- otherwise if the core was misloaded you could be critical and not even know until it was too late.
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, you disagree with the report, so its BS. I get it. I haven't seen any reports stating anything else.
What I've seen is actual cost charged per KWH when buying from nuclear compared to buy from a wind farm. Thats not estimates, thats actual cost right now today. Why do you suddenly think wind will become cheaper in the long run than it is now?
I've at least provide links; you've provided nothing except "oh, its all BS."
Its interesting that people don't want to hear the truth, and go with the overrated mod.