World's Largest Solar Plants Planned In California 403
Pickens writes "Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles, that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. 'If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big,' said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. OptiSolar will employ enough of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project to generate 550 MW. Meanwhile, SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW-worth of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plains Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent from following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. 'These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy,' said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E."
Reader thefickler notes some related news that researchers have developed a method of collecting infrared rays at night to supplement day-time solar power.
Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:4, Informative)
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, mod parent -1, because talking common sense when talking about environmental and social concerns is practically sacrilege. Why -1? Because he isnt in your environmentalist hippie nuclear power hating cult? Give me a fucking break. If nuclear power produces that much more power, in a more confined area, for less money, and produces negligible amounts of pollution whats the problem?
I would love to see solar and wind to become the only needed power source, but that isnt a reality. While this article shows that solar is an improving technology, it is also showing that we have a long way to go for a real alternative to our current reliance on the only real options available: continued use of fossil fuels or nuclear. Reducing consumption is argument non grata. For example: Your still waisting electricity to post on slashdot.
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Realistically, part of the problem is load balancing. While solar might be particularly well suited to covering energy needs when air conditioners kick in during the summer, what happens when we plug in our electric cars at night, or rely on electric heat when natural gas and propane prices go even higher?
Perhaps we can use the limited information over power to load balance car charging during night hours, but even then we will either need nukes/coal, or invest in some highly expensive solar storage solut
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:4, Interesting)
Lakes? [consumersenergy.com]
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The UK shows how much load balancing can be done: because millions of housholds put on electric waterheaters after the end of the mo
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And we wave away the pesky protection and isolation of waste while it cools for a time longer than our history of recognizable civilization. San Luis Obispo already has a nuclear power plant, by the way.
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:4, Informative)
And we wave away the pesky protection and isolation of waste while it cools for a time longer than our history of recognizable civilization.
I believe that this is the first time I've heard of 'wave away' being used to disparage recycling. With recycling the waste is split 90/10 into usable fuel and waste that only needs to be stored for a couple hundred years - much more doable.
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200 years ago most of the US was thinly settled wilderness.
Care to accurately project what the US will be like in 200 years?
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Care to accurately project what the US will be like in 200 years?
While the US wasn't settled heavily 200 years ago, Europe was - and they have plenty of records, businesses, and buildings that are over 200 years old.
Heck, we've dug up graveyards and garbage dumps in the thousands of years old.
I'm just saying, for the pollution caused, properly recycled nuclear waste, or breeder reactors, end up producing 10X the power for a given amount of waste that stays radioactive for a much shorter period of time.
Given
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you. Consideration of risk and liability are preventing a lot of progress.
For example- we could easily be on mars and on the moon if we were willing to take the losses that the american settlers did (50%? 60%?) And even knowing the risks, people would line up to be settlers on mars and the moon if you would just let them.
We are killing the space program with an insistance on zero risk.
However....
While I'm willing to take enormous risks personally and let others take big risks - I'm not willin
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Informative)
This is another example of the environmentalist's fallacy.
First, why focus on nuclear waste while ignoring all kinds of other long-lived, harmful industrial outputs from processes like semiconductor manufacturing or steel refining?
Second, the volume of nuclear waste is tiny [world-nuclear.org]. The waste produced by a nuclear plant in a decade might fill a house. And by reprocessing the waste, we can reduce its volume by 90%. Compared to other forms of power generation, nuclear plants are practically clean.
Third, the waste that is produced is not all that dangerous: the way radioisotopes work, the more radiation a substance produces, the shorter its half-life. Long-lived waste products will be low-radioactivity and inert.
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:4, Interesting)
Excuse me, Greenpeace != All Environmentalists. In a lot of ways, they're just a nuisance who claim to speak for others. There are plenty of us "environmentalists" who are very pro-nuclear. I am one of them.
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Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Informative)
Plutonium is not very radioactive. Its activity is fairly low. The half life of Plutonium 239 is approximately 24,100 years, meaning that any given atom probably lasts a very long time before decaying. In turn this means that the number of atoms decaying at any given moment is quite small. Furthermore, Plutonium decays in the form of alpha particles, which don't penetrate at all. Alpha particles are stopped by human skin, still in the dead bits, and thus are completely harmless when external to the human body. You can hold a big lump of Plutonium in your hand all day and not have the slightest ill effect. It only becomes dangerous when ingested, and even then it tends not to be absorbed by the body except in certain forms, for example fine particles breathed into the lungs.
As for toxicity, it's pretty bad, but not nearly as evil as it's made out to be. I'd certainly rather have a little more Plutonium around than live with the many tons of mercury per year emitted straight into the atmosphere by the average coal plant, given the choice between the two.
Lastly, consider that several tons of Plutonium have been released straight into the atmosphere as a result of nuclear bomb testing, and there hasn't been any real environmental harm from this. It's certainly no good thing, but on the other hand this is vastly worse than what happens with nuclear waste, which is safely stored rather than being vaporized and released into the air.
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Insightful)
The point in renewable technologies is that any additional power that we can get outside of the fossil/nuclear fuel box is a good thing. The power demands of society will continue to increase. I'm not completely convinced that petroleum (note I don't use the term "fossil fuels") is a limited resource. However it is quite possible that we will continue to consume it more quickly than it is replenished by whatever process pumps the stuff into the earth's crust. Nuclear (uranium and plutonium) energy sources are scarce and hard to get to. One of the big reasons we're in Afghanistan is because they have huge uranium deposits there. I'm getting off on a tangent so I will try to draw a couple of analogies here.
Just because you might never win the Boston marathon doesn't mean that you shouldn't do cardio training to keep yourself healthy. Just because you will never be a body builder doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise and have a good diet. Just because you can't afford a Ferrari doesn't mean you shouldn't drive. Just because wind and solar power might not ever produce base load power doesn't mean that we shouldn't harness them to the best of our ability. Just because one particular technology might be "better" than another does not make the other technology worthless. To use a computer analogy... "Why do you even bother with a stupid desktop computer? Obviously a supercomputer is much more powerful."
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature doesn't keep secrets. You can't uninvent anything, ever. You just have to learn to mitigate and live with it.
The basic principles behind a nuclear weapon and nuclear power are the same, but having a nuclear reactor won't get you much closer to a nuclear weapon all by itself. The bombs themselves are dead-easy. Really all you need to do is quickly bring two sub-critical lumps of weapons-grade fissile material together and BOOM.
Getting the fissile material and enriching (essentially, concentrating it down) it is the tricky part that takes government-level resources to accomplish. Fuel for a nuclear power plant and its wastes are useless for making a bomb without the critical enrichment step.
That being said, there are some very real concerns over existing nuclear power plants. No private company will insure them, the high risk and long payback period on the initial investment scares away most investors, and they can't be shut down and spun back up as needed for fluctuating power demands, so they're not suitable for everywhere. Blindly declaring "build more nukes!" isn't going to be very helpful. We need to give careful consideration to if, how and where we build more; and focus on promising new designs that mitigate many of the drawbacks (pebble bed, breeders, thorium, etc.)
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, if you say so. However, just a few catches.
How large lumps?
What shapes should they be?
How pure do they need to be?
How quickly do you need to bring them together?
How long will they have to stay together?
How powerful will the explosion be?
How powerful explosives do you need to bring them together quick enough?
Will you need a neutron source to ensure the chain reaction begins at the right moment?
If so, how will you build it? Will you use Polonium-Beryllium or D-T fusion?
How do you ensure the neutron source triggers at the right time?
When should the chain reaction start to ensure a powerful yield?
How many neutrons does your neutron source produce?
Does it produce the same number of neutrons every time?
Is the fissile material you use pure enough for a gun triggered design (hint, plutonium will not be)?
If not, how do you build an implosion type weapon?
What explosives can you use for the explosive lenses?
What shape should the lenses have?
What is the detonational velocity of the explosives you use?
Otherwise I agree with you. Once you have worked out those tiny details there, and a couple of others like them, you just need to bring two pieces together. Of course, this all assumes you have the fissile material to begin with. Weapons grade Uranium is not exactly easy to manufacture, and getting Plutonium-239 pure enough from Pu-240 that you can use a simple "bring the pieces together" design is extremely challenging.
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Hmm... why is it that
* a country who itself
- owns tons of nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons (all WMDs),
- the biggest military in the world
- and dangerously crazy people in the government,
- and that wants to oppress the whole world(*)
* wants to stop another much smaller country
- with dangerously crazy people in the government
* to build
- nuclear bombs
- and power plants
* to protect itself from
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. The parent poster may be actually insane. Not just nutty in an eccentric, slashdot, sense, but someone with a full-on schizophrenic break with reality.
Fire has killed a lot of people, too.
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:5, Funny)
Fire means fire weapons. The two are inseperable. The only way to eliminate fire weapons is to destroy fire technology and ensure that nobody ever rediscovers it.
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:5, Interesting)
Canada uses CANDU [wikipedia.org] nuclear reactors, which do not promote nuclear weapons since they use regular unenriched uranium. Canada also has no nuclear weapons. The idea that nuclear power is tied to nuclear weapons is absurd.
This is a little disingenuous. The NRU at Chalk River used to run on high-enriched uranium, and now runs on low-enriched uranium. Source [wikipedia.org].
Furthermore, the NRU, like the NRX before it, is heavy-water moderated, which is efficient at producing plutonium. Source [ccnr.org].
Production of the world's medical isotopes using the NRU is one of the Canadian excuses for being able to produce bombs in a several-month time frame. It's true that Canada has never actually produced a nuclear weapon, but it's also true that some of the programs at Chalk River are "dual use".
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In defense of the 'nutter', nuclear power is so expensive it's not really worth investing in, unless you are planning to build some nukes.
One, By the same arguement, Solar and wind power aren't worth investing in, because they're more expensive per kwh than nuclear.
Two, nuclear weapons aren't made from reactor waste much anymore - we have more efficient methods.
The waste from the nuclear plants in Canada, France, UK, and USA aren't used for creating nuclear weapon materials.
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:4, Informative)
In defense of the 'nutter', nuclear power is so expensive it's not really worth investing in, unless you are planning to build some nukes.
Nuclear power is the cheapest power source, cheaper than all but the cheapest coal plants, cheaper than hydro and wind, much cheaper than solar.
Swedish power company's power generation costs [vattenfall.com]
IEA survey on electricity generation costs [iea.org] (PDF, page 46 fig 3.10, page 57, fig 4.6 and 4.7)
Nuclear is also the safest in terms of fatalities per MWh generated (yes, even including Chernobyl).
Stats on all significant power generation accidents 1969-1996 [web.psi.ch] (PDF, page 240, fig 7.2.6)
There are lots of other neat stats in the two PDFs, including injury rates (nuclear is about the same as hydro, only coal is safer), wind generation is much cheaper in the U.S. (maybe because the U.S. is only building it when it makes economic sense instead of where ever environmentalists want it?), solar costs almost 10x as much as other power sources
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Those figures don't include waste storage or decommissioning, which can run up quite a high bill. And of course the generating price depends in uranium ore cost, which could rise quite a lot if everyone turns to nuclear.
Also important to remember: in most nuclear power generating countries new plants where never outlawed. If any company wanted to build one they could. The fact that they haven't says something about the cost/benefit analysis (yes there's also the NIMBY problem but still).
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The first link I gave included estimated nuclear waste disposal costs. Of course they have it easy since they can just ship most of it to France where it's reprocessed into more fuel. Here in the U.S. we're trying to bury "waste" that still contains 90% of its original energy consequentl
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Naaa, Sweden's policy is even worse than the US one. Not only are we on a once through cycle, we also have a law prohibiting construction of newer more modern plants, meaning the lifetime of the old ones had to be extended.
The disposal has been handled a bit better here however. The authorities were smart enough to choose a repository site right next to one of the existing nuclear sites. The people who live there are largely positive to the plant and plans for a repository, possibly because they benefit fro
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps the only country you can think of. But, countries with commercial nuclear power but no nuclear weapons program are:
Japan (your caveat noted)
South Korea (including domestic designs)
Canada (including domestic designs)
Spain
Belgium
Germany
Taiwan (similar to your caveat on Japan, though)
Ukraine (built in Soviet days, though)
Czech Republic
Switzerland
Bulgaria
Finland
Slovakia
Brazil
South Africa (they had nuclear weapons at one time, though)
Hungary
Romania
Mexico
Lithuania (again, built in Soviet days)
Argentina
Slovenia
Netherlands
and Armenia
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:4, Informative)
But how could you place a nuclear power plant in a desert without a river to cool it?
There are simply only few places where a power plant can be built at all, even if no humans lived everywhere and had something against it.
In the summer last year multiple nuclear plants in Europe had to get special permissions to make the rivers boil or they had switched off, just because there was not enough cool enough water in the rivers. So limiting a nuclear power plant to the area is takes itself it just absurd, you need much more place.
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's more an issue with a specific plant design than with the technology in general. Can't you use radiative closed-cycle cooling, like in a big automobile engine?
Fortunately, the places people tend to actually live are the places with water.
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Re:Where to put the heat? (Score:4, Insightful)
I see your point. But we can mitigate the problem:
According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], we can build turbines that reach 90% efficiency. That leaves us with 100MW of power to dissipate (not a 1GW "hair-dryer").
First of all, the output of that turbine is going to be barely warmer than the surrounding air. (Think about it: if it weren't, you could use it as the input to another turbine stage.)
Sure, there will be a lot of this output, but it won't be particularly hot. Also, I imagine you'd use a condensing turbine, so you get most of your original cooling fluid back. What's left is a large volume of warm, dry air. Lots of industrial processes produce that kind of output today, and we don't see birds dropping out of the sky.
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Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Funny)
But how could you place a nuclear power plant in a desert without a river to cool it?
If they'd played Civ3, they'd know this already. They'd also realize that Solar plants give you a 50% bonus, and nuke plants give you a 150% bonus.
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The desert is full of life, why should it be treated any different from river life?
Besides, the biggest problem facing the US is power transmission. If we had that down we could situate nuke plants where people didn't care or would see them.
Got to love mandate, which means its a new tax on consumers because the power company can pass it all on. People need to realize what they are voting on.
How much of the rated energy to solar farms produce across the year? I have seen reports than many windfarms strugg
Deserts (Score:2)
The desert is not full of human life. When we protect the environment, we ought to do it protect human interests, not because the environment has some moral rights. When you train a cat to use a litter box, do you do it because you believe the carpet has moral rights and needs to be protected? Well, I do it so I don't have to deal with the smell.
The desert simply doesn't have much to offer man except mineral resources and wide-open tracks of land for exactly these kinds of projects.
I see what you mean about
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:4, Funny)
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
If nuclear power were a viable answer to the world's energy needs, we'd be helping Iran develop its fuel cycle technology.
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There are ways to bolster Nuclear energy without enhancing proliferation. One promising solution involves a fusion hybrid breeding process.
Briefly, the idea entails the use of a tokamak fusion reactor with a thorium float wall. The thorium would be bred into uranium 235, which would be immediately mixed with uranium 238 into a noncritical mixture. The mixture could then be used to fuel several fission plants in a fission park or sent to developing countries - as long as they agree to send back the spent fue
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Also, they have demonstrated their capability of suicidal and homicidal actions so have lost the privilege of nuclear capabilities.
Exactly. The factors that make us deem nuclear technology to be a "privilege" are the same ones that prevent it from being a viable answer to the world's energy needs.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, they have demonstrated their capability of suicidal and homicidal actions so have lost the privilege of nuclear capabilities.
Exactly. The factors that make us deem nuclear technology to be a "privilege" are the same ones that prevent it from being a viable answer to the world's energy needs.
Iran signed the NPA; they were completely free to use nuclear power. The only problem is that they allegedly started their nuclear program without informing the IAEA, which means they broke the terms they agreed to in the NPA.
For some reason they're not co-operating in clearing themselves of the accusation that they started before informing the IAEA, and if nuclear power is their goal why would they do that?
Their actions only make sense if nuclear weapons are their goal. (Also they are refusing pre-en
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
2. ???
3. No more nuclear weapons.
North Korea didn't use fission as a major power source but they still got nukes, same with Pakistan, same with Israel.
Nuclear power is becoming more and more economical, so if your plan for eliminating proliferation relies on fighting the laws of economics you're pretty much screwed from the start. You also need to demonstrate a correlation between nuclear proliferation and nuclear power use.
(To save you so
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Interesting)
Does that ten acres include the uranium mine and the waste disposal site? Because in-situ leaching isn't exactly eco-friendly. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:4, Informative)
You're kidding, right?
Uranium's average concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million. [wikipedia.org]
Most uranium mining is very volume-intensive, and thus tends to be undertaken as open-pit mining. It is also undertaken in only a small number of countries of the world, as the resource is relatively rarely found. [wikipedia.org]
Measured by mass, silicon makes up 25.7% of the Earth's crust and is the second most abundant element on Earth, after oxygen. [wikipedia.org]
"Silicon mining", I couldn't find anything about. They seem to just find the nearest sand and scoop some up.
So, yeah, let's hold silicon's feet to the fire! Stop silicon mining now! <eyeroll />
Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but the scale is tiny. Look: this argument comes up so often, I'm going to give it a name:
The Environmentalist's Fallacy
It goes something like this:
In reality, X produces far less overall pollution than Y.
I've seen this argument used to oppose:
All of these are great technologies. If we're ever to make any progress, we have to learn to think past the environmentalist's fallacy.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure it's a fallacy.
Around here, the eco-people are honest enough to say what their motive is. Their motive is to get us take a cut to our living standards and reduce the need for energy.
Of course, they will never succeed - but they don't realize that.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, especially after seeing the recent opposition to solar farms based on "altering desert ecosystems", I'm convinced that the oil industry will put on an environmental face when convenient. None of the environmental groups I've participated in were anything but appalled by that stonewalling of solar power. There is no monolothic environmentalist group to have a fallacy; rather, there's shared concern from many groups for the state of the earth, and the faux-green capitalist crap trying to cash in o
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As opposed to what? Fossil fuels? PV versus Fossil fuels such as coal are not in the same league as far as scalability goes. PV cannot replace fossil fuel plants at this time, regardless of the argument.
If your talking about pollution from Uranium mining, how about the pollution from mining that goes into extracting the metal used to build tools for creating solar panels? How about the chemicals that go into the creation of solar cells? How about the disposal of PV cells at the "end of life"? How long will
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A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
When nuclear power was first developed, we knew we'd solve all its problems except for refuse. At that time, the problem of refuse was at least 20 years in the future, and we thought we'd have it solved by then.
Today, 50 years later, we still don't have the faintest idea about what to do with nuclear refuse. Until this problem is solved, suggesting nuclear as the one solution to every energy problem is at best short-sighted.
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Re:Nuke Plants More Dense (Score:5, Insightful)
You joke but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, that *is* how a lot of people think. Not only that, but they did a survey years back and found that a huge chunk of people thought Three Mile Island was a near-Chernobyl level disaster with deaths and lots of released radiation, rather than an fine example that even those old safety systems actually worked.
The bulk of the human race is living in a fantasy world where about 5/6 of what they believe is utter bullshit. And it seems pretty constant across the globe. Different areas just have local varieties of bullshit.
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Today, 50 years later, we still don't have the faintest idea about what to do with nuclear refuse. Until this problem is solved, suggesting nuclear as the one solution to every energy problem is at best short-sighted.
Yep, throwing the pollution in the atmosphere and groundwater, like with fossil fuel plants, is clearly safer than concentrating the waste in one place. That's why I toss my trash all over the neighborhood, rather than bag it for the trash man every week.
BTW, even "clean" coal plants throw out
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That's true.
And nuclear is perfect for baseload electricity generation. What it's not great for is peaking power. And normally - in the US - we use gas for that.
But here's the thing. PG&E's peak electricity load correlates almost exactly with when it is sunniest. (Because all that solar irradiation leads to aircons being turned on across Northern California.) There's actually a chart on it on some DoE paper; PG&E needs *twice* the generating capacity when the temperature is 110 degrees as when it is
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Except that our "friends" the Liberals and Green Folks WON'T LET US build more Nuclear Power Plants, even though their friends the French derive over 80% of their electrical power from Nuclear, and other countries like Japan derive the bulk of their power from Nuclear too!
France reprocesses it's nuclear waste back into fuel because the generating process isn't 100% efficient. All you have to do is to process the fuel rods and concentrate the still useful material and remove the waste, and "Voila!" as the Fr
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A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
True, but you can't install your own nuclear power plant in your basement (well without getting into trouble) and get off the grid all together.
I'm all for large development of solar panel because eventually that means the panels that you can install yourself will be developed sooner than later and therefore sooner you can get off the grid all together and never have to pay a power company a dime ever again.
800 MW? (Score:2, Informative)
12.5 square miles of silicon, and it still generates less than a single average sized block of a nuclear power plant (~1000 MW).
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Large scale solar panel plants will be a diasaster (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever technology they use it'll be out of date before they finish installing 12.5 square miles of the stuff, and replacing it will mean starting from zero.
Compare this with thermal plants (mirrors focused on something to heat it up). The mirrors and focusing system remains the same, you just change the central element.
Thermal plants are far more sensible at the moment. This plan is yet another example of environmentalism gone mad.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How will you dump the waste heat in the desert? ANY thermal plant works by, in effect, charging a toll on heat flowing from a source (focal point of a mirror, a fire, a nuclear reaction, etc) to a sink (cooling tower, large body of water, dry air cooling structure, etc.). If a nuclear plant has so much trouble dumping the heat in an arid region, why won't a solar thermal plant have the same trouble? (Or even more if the source temperature is less that the 500C or so for a reactor.)
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is that counting all the space taken for the railways to bring in and store the coal? (or for the mine for the coal)
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12.5 square miles of silicon, and it still generates less than a single average sized block of a nuclear power plant (~1000 MW).
You:
is that counting all the space taken for the railways to bring in and store the coal? (or for the mine for the coal)
Me: Since when does Nuclear or Solar require Coal?
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Shhh - don't tell anyone, but it's actually Santa's secret storage location for the coal he puts in bad children's stockings.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
i love math..
so let's say the power-to-area ratio is 500 MW to 12 square miles, and the usage is 500 GW. that's 0.1% of the nation's use per 12 square miles.
so to meet say 100% of the nation's consumption, that would be.. 12,000 square miles, or an area about 110x110 miles.
Hail? (Score:4, Funny)
That's gonna suck in the first hailstorm they have.
Re:Hail? (Score:5, Informative)
Hail?
No, coastal CA. The last time I remember hail was about 4 years ago. The pieces were less than 1cm. And that's living ~5 hours north of SLO County. When I lived 2 hours south of SLO (for 35 years), I remember hail maybe 3 times, all the same small pieces.
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experienced some hail a few years ago down in solvang (60 miles south), quarter inch to half inch sized pieces. right in the middle of the Solvang century bike ride.
And.. we just had hail in Las Vegas last week in between 100+ degree days. That said, I'm sure the panels have been tested for inclement weather.
Is photovoltaic really the best way to go? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised that photovoltaic is more cost effective than solar thermal. Using fresnel lenses that focus on heat exchangers that double as turbines, it can be cheaper than coal. See here:
http://www.celsias.com/article/utahs-solar-fired-furnace-power-california-less-co/ [celsias.com]
I have a better idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
How about removing the tax credits for ALL forms of energy so we can have an undistorted idea of what the energy costs from each method, hmmmm?
Oh wait, the oil industry won't like this, will they?
When we use taxes to distort the markets for
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I love tax cuts and tax credits. But they need to be uniform, and not targeted at narrow interests, because they can distort the market when unevenly applied. The problem isn't that oil companies are getting tax breaks, it's that the tax structure is a kind of tariff on all other forms of energy.
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Good luck with your mercury-laced syphilis cure.
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Re:I have a better idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
My point is that government regulation and intervention is often a good thing. Let's look at energy specifically. Coal is cheap if you ignore its huge, disastrous externalities. In an unregulated market, we'd all be using coal. Now, we can ban coal outright, but that's very disruptive. A far better idea to simply make it expensive (or equivalently, make its competitors cheaper).
In this way, government tax manipulation makes markets work better.
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We can't legislate CO2 out of existence, and we have no viable technology for sequestering it. Reducing the number of coal plants is far more effective than waving a magic legislative wand.
Besides, even if we could eliminate polluting outputs of the plants, coal mining is environmentally disastrous. Uranium mining demands only a small fraction of the manpower, pollution, and infrastructure for the same power output.
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So we're reduced to conspiracy theories? The fact is that coal does pose huge, disastrous, scientifically-verifiable problems for mankind. Decades of research have supported this conclusion. You can't simply make it go away because you'd like it not to be true. Saying coal's pollution problems are made up is about as credible as saying the moon landings were faked, or that there really is a Loch Ness monster.
By the way: I oppose coal and strongly support nuclear power.
Re:I have a better idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
These would be climatologists.
are the same people that won't allow the only reasonable alternative (nuclear)
These would be Greenpeace.
is all anyone should need to realize global warming is a hoax.
These would be idiots.
Re:I have a better idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
Make the market efficient enough that the trillion or so spent on the Iraq war comes out of the oil company pockets, instead of adding to them, and I'll agree with you.
When the industry/consumer actually pays _all_ the costs associated with the technology, then we can do away with taxes that favor one approach over another. Until then, I'm all for taxing polluting & non-renewable industries and giving tax-breaks to non-polluting & renewables.
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Make the market efficient enough that the trillion or so spent on the Iraq war comes out of the oil company pockets, instead of adding to them, and I'll agree with you.
Oooh, mad-libs!
Make the market efficient enough that ponies come out of the sky, and I'll agree.
Make the market efficient enough that toner comes out of the trees, and I'll agree.
Is Exxon-Mobil another party in the Iraqi oil profit-sharing arguments? I thought it was mostly a Sunni/Shiite/Kurd thing.
But, you make one good point: There are
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2010? Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
We are never going to get one fifth of our energy from renewable in two years in this state. It ain't going to happen. Californians are under this delusion that passing a law can change reality. We're rather stupid that way.
We simply don't have the technology to produce 20% of our current electricity from renewable source within two years. This law will either be ignored or the state will end up suing itself for non-compliance. We might be able to do it if we dammed up some major rivers but we couldn't build the dams and get them filled in time.
We'll eventually get cheap and efficient solar cells we can roof our houses and pave our streets with. But bulldozing twelve and a half square miles to erect mirrors is going to cause a lot of permanent damage to the environment for almost negligible gain. It's stupid in a way only California can be stupid.
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they don't tear out houses to put in solar farms. Typically use desert. The big problem there is transmission due to distance from the city, but they're working on using superconductive underground transmission lines for that. (see manhatton island)
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The main problem, besides higher cost, is that solar, wind, etc are all unreliable. So to handle that you have to have duplicate a massive amount of the generators so replace 1Watt of power from reliable sources(coal, nuclear, hydro, etc) you have to have the ability to generate between 1.7 to 1.9(depending on study) Watts of power and that needs to be spread around so the lack on wind in one area does not sto
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or you just arrange to buy power from other places during peak periods or at any other time your generation is below demand.
The superconducting angle was a front page article recently on slashdot, here's a little summary if you missed it: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18790/ [technologyreview.com]
Though in that respect I think they were more interested in reliability than added capacity.
Googling for "solar power desert transmission loss" we find losses quoted anywhere from 10-40%, probably varying on distance.
One article
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i strongly disagree. I live on the central coast and know where they planned to put this planet ( carrizo plains and/or california valley ). The land there is super flat to begin with and almost completely barren.
Conditions in this area are very ideal, the only opposition comes from the few people actually inhabiting this area: they don't want to look outside and see solar panels.
More than all the money ever printed (Score:2)
And they're spending more than all the money ever printed to buy Calif* land instead of the nearest non Calif* land.
Split some atoms (Score:5, Interesting)
I still like nuclear.
The plant that's 4 miles from my house sits on less than 1 square mile and produces over 2300 MW, day or night.
The 12.5 square miles of flat desert land may be no problem out west, but finding several hundred acres of flat land here in the Appalachians just isn't happening. Besides, we'd have to cut down all the trees.
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Re:Split some atoms (Score:5, Informative)
If space is your concern, think about the square miles needed to permanently store the nuclear waste.
It's tiny compared to solar plant scales, even without reprocessing, and if we'd ever fix the political problem we have with breeder reactors, we'd reduce the waste volume by two orders of magnitude.
Uranium also doesn't grow on trees, you know?
Again, reprocessing vastly increases the power obtainable from a given amount of uranium, and use of breeders also means that we can use lots of other radioactive elements, many of which are far more common than uranium.
The power plant that you can see four miles from your house is just a tiny part of the whole complex.
A fact that is even more true of PV solar plants.
Fission is the cheapest, cleanest energy technology we have, and one of the safest as well. Unfortunately, it's bound up in nearly-intractable political problems. Eventually, though, oil and coal will be expensive enough, and we'll have seen that solar, wind, wave, etc. technologies simply aren't workable on a sufficiently large scale, and then the political obstacles will disappear.
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Sure, but every KW generated by solar out west is one more KW you don't have to generate in the Appalachians.
World's biggest solar plant... (Score:2)
that'd be a Sequoia, right? Hence California.
....mine's the one with the little windmill on the lapel.
Scale Required (boring statistics within) (Score:5, Informative)
So, what would it cost to replace California's carbon point sources with 'renewable' (I know it costs energy to make these things) energy? I'll share my math, others can expand:
It says here [ca.gov] that California in 2007 used 230,931 of 'non-renewable' energy. It says here [ca.gov] that California's peak demand was 52,863 MW when total usage was 265,000 GWH (2002). Adjusting to the current levels, a 14% increase, we get a current peak of 60,264 MW.
So, if these solar plants can produce a combined 800MW, you'd need 75 of these projects to handle peak energy generation. If we factor in 10% for transmission losses, and another 14% increase over the next six years (while they get built) then you're looking at 94 of these projects, which is really two projects, so 188 plants, or by 2020, 214 plants, using 1,338 square miles of desert. That's only 5% [desertusa.com] of the Mojave Desert, ignoring mountains, ignoring environmentalist lawsuits preventing destruction of desert habitat, not thinking about what happens when Joshua trees want to grow up under solar panels (Monsanto Roundup?).
So, that's 18 plants a year to build. It's probably possible, though what that would cost in rare earth elements, and what would the construction of such project do to the market prices of those rare elements? I don't know, except to think it would be bad.
OK, so how about replacing natural gas, outside of electricity generation? Using the information from here [ca.gov] it says that half of the natural gas is consumed for electricity generation, so we can double that part of the number for the total energy budget of electricity and natural gas. That increases the GWH total to 298,962 GWH, or a 29% increase. So, we're up to 276 solar projects.
So, how about converting all the motor vehicles to plug-ins? It says here [ca.gov] that CA uses about 24 Billion gallons of transportation fuels a year. This calculator puts that at 3,032,000,000 GW, or if divided by the number of hours in the year, gives 345,881 GWH (TODO: check units?). So, add to our current total and multiply by 2.16 and get 596 solar projects, at 3725 square miles, or about 15% of the Mojave Desert, and 50 of these solar projects a year to get CA largely carbon-neutral by 2020.
Now, this is a bit of a simplification. This is meeting peak demand with current generation. There might be some opportunity for storage, though demand somewhat parallels light availability. What is the quoted efficiency, average (during what time period) or max? This doesn't count wind power as I don't know the rules of thumb for standby generation (I heard recently 90% standby needed to be in production for wind to account for variability and startup time). I'm assuming no new hydro will be built (probably safe). I'm assuming solar won't get more efficient (it will). I'm assuming the installed solar won't lose efficiency over time (it will). I don't know what the proper rule of thumb is for calculating demand based on time-of-day usage. etc. So, it's much complicated, but I wanted to understand what scope people were talking about when they advocate an all-solar solution.
I'm also counting nuclear as 'non-renewable' in this calculation as folks who want all-solar usually are anti-nuclear. If you factor in the existing nuclear generation it gets a bit better. If you wanted to power CA on all-nuclear instead you'd need about 300 reactors covering 22 square miles of land, if they're like the 1.6GW one they proposed in Fresno. Or you could use newer, safer technologies instead and clean up our existing nuclear waste by feeding stuff currently bound for Yucca Mountain into these reactors and
Re:They need to generate 50% more power (Score:5, Funny)
I'd think moving the entire plant at 88 mph would be the bigger engineering challenge.
Let your smile be your umbrella ... (Score:2)
Re:Why would anyone put capitol at risk in Califor (Score:3, Informative)
Nice troll. It's always in the run-up to an election that the right-wing shills come out in-force.
How many 3rd world countries do you know that have a larger economy than all but 8 (out of 190) countries (ironically, including the USA) around the world?
There isn't ONE state, country, city, municipality, etc., that hasn't, at one time or another, done something a bit unfair and/or short-sighted. Just try and name one.