Japan Has Restarted Five Nuclear Power Reactors In 2018 (oilvoice.com) 193
With Shikoku Electric Power Company's 890 megawatt (MW) Ikata-3 reactor, Japan has restarted a total of five nuclear reactors in 2018. "Japan had suspended its nuclear fleet in 2013 for mandatory safety checks and upgrades following the 2011 Fukushima accident, and before 2018 only four reactors had been restarted," reports OilVoice. From the report: Following the Fukushima accident, as each Japanese nuclear reactor entered its scheduled maintenance and refueling outage, it was not returned to operation. Between September 2013 and August 2015, Japan's entire reactor fleet was suspended from operation, leaving the country with no nuclear generation. Sendai Units 1 and 2, in Japan's Kagoshima Prefecture, were the first reactors to be restarted in August and October 2015, respectively.
The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants requires the approval of both Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and the central government, as well as consent from the governments of local prefectures. In July 2013, the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness. As part of Japan's long-term energy policy, issued in April 2014, the central government called for the nuclear share of total electricity generation to reach 20%-22% by 2030, which would require 25 to 30 reactors to be in operation by then. In 2017, four operating nuclear reactors provided 3% of Japan's total electricity generation.
The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants requires the approval of both Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and the central government, as well as consent from the governments of local prefectures. In July 2013, the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness. As part of Japan's long-term energy policy, issued in April 2014, the central government called for the nuclear share of total electricity generation to reach 20%-22% by 2030, which would require 25 to 30 reactors to be in operation by then. In 2017, four operating nuclear reactors provided 3% of Japan's total electricity generation.
Was Article Summary run through google translate? (Score:2)
What is the other 80% of electrical generation?
It seems like if the "fleet" was shutdown and all the generation was lost for 3+ years, why did they need to start turning them on now?
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What is the other 80% of electrical generation?
Mostly coal.
It seems like if the "fleet" was shutdown and all the generation was lost for 3+ years, why did they need to start turning them on now?
Because importing all that coal to make up for the lost nuclear electrical generation capacity was costing a lot of money, producing a lot of pollution, and alternatives are far more expensive.
I remember something of a joke I was once told... Do you know what a physician calls "alternative medicine" that works? Medicine.
That's what I think of when people tell me we need more "alternative energy". If "alternative energy" worked then we'd just call it "energy".
I'll believe wind and solar energy
Re:Was Article Summary run through google translat (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly coal.
Nope. In 2015 Japan was:
39% gas
34% coal
9% oil
8.4% hydro
~4.3% other renewables
0.9% nuclear
Data from the IEA: https://www.iea.org/statistics... [iea.org]
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What was the other 4.4%? That only adds up to 95.6....
Re:Was Article Summary run through google translat (Score:5, Funny)
Enslaved Pokemon forced to spin giant turbines.
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Enslaved Pokemon forced to spin giant turbines.
You'd think they could just convert the output from electric-type Pokemon directly, and it would be more efficient... Guess that's being held up by supercap development?
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9% oil
Sad.
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It was far worse. You're right. Coal only took a bit of the gap. Gas did quite a lot, but Oil... They doubled the amount of oil they were burning.
Oh man do I wish they were burning coal instead.
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Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
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Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition. Let me guess, wind and solar do not require mining fuel from the ground but instead rely on extracting the energy from natural processes that are never ending. Sound about right? Well, that's a nice definition but when wind and solar requires more than ten times the mining to get that energy that seems like a rather misleading definition. Take a look here at the material needed for wind and solar
Re:Was Article Summary run through google translat (Score:4, Informative)
Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition.
Nuclear power isn't renewable because the fuel is spent, it cannot be renewed. The clue is in the name. It's not a fossil fuel either. Even if your claim that there will still be plenty left when we're done was true it is irrelevant to the question.
Re:Was Article Summary run through google translat (Score:5, Funny)
Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
And solar is just nuclear power with the reactor fueled at the beginning of the solar system (and yes, it will run out...eventually ;-p) and stored 150 gigameters away...
Re:Was Article Summary run through google translat (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Was Article Summary run through google translat (Score:5, Informative)
> Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
They convert one resource ("fertile material") into fuel, but since that fertile material is itself not renewable the entire process isn't renewable.
Solar is considered renewable because there is an effectively unlimited supply of sunlight. Even if the sun is only expected to last another few billion years, that is a pretty solid prediction and is so far beyond the horizon it can safely be considered unlimited.
Wind and hydro are renewable because the air and water are not lost forever once they pass through the turbines.
Biofuels are renewable because once you burn them, the carbon that was released into the air can be recaptured by more plants and turned back into biofuel. Logistical issues aside, this is a closed-loop carbon cycle and thus renewable.
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone. There are some tricks to make new fuel, but there's no reasonable way to take all the waste and put it back into the system ad infinitum. Reprocessing spent fuel just removes contaminants and re-purifies the unused portion; it does not make new fuel from spent fuel.
=Smidge=
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> Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
They convert one resource ("fertile material") into fuel, but since that fertile material is itself not renewable the entire process isn't renewable.
U235 is a limited resource, but there is enough u238 minable with current tech for thousands of years, and then there is thorium.
By the time that runs out, we should be close to getting fusion working.
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This is incorrect. Uranium is approximately as renewable as solar.
The sun will eventually go out, after consuming most of its fuel. You could say we will be dead by then, but we actually have enough uranium in the Earth to last the same amount of time. So they both get "used up" at about the same time.
Also, once the sun is gone a new star will likely eventually be formed. So the sun is actually "renewable". But in a similar way, the old sun's final moments will likely produce more uranium than was ever
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> but we actually have enough uranium in the Earth to last the same amount of time.
Yeah not even close. Some cursory research and math suggests anywhere from ~200 to ~170,000 years of fuel depending on how efficiently we use it, whether or not we can successfully develop thorium fuel cycles (and how efficiently we can use *that*), and assuming NO GROWTH IN POWER USAGE over 2016 levels.
Even the rosiest of outlooks are a far cry from ~4 billion years.
=Smidge=
Re:Was Article Summary run through google translat (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, after a wind tower reaches its end of life in 20, maybe 25 years, you can recycle the metals pretty easily. The plastics used to insulate wires, etc. not so much. Doubt much of a solar panel can be recycled, but I don't have any figures off the top of my head on their lifecycle, might not be as ultra short as wind towers, which are subject to lots of stress, with many parts needing to be as light as possible, forcing engineers into tough yield (of power) and longevity tradeoffs, and they're badly exposed to the elements. Solar cells, you ought to be able to seal them up pretty well, but I have no idea how much they're subject to degradation over time.
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Solar cells, you ought to be able to seal them up pretty well, but I have no idea how much they're subject to degradation over time.
Thin-film solar cells can last around twenty years, but will have substantial loss by that time. PC cells can last much longer [cleantechnica.com]. This kind of information is readily available via a simple google search, which is how I found it, though I already knew. The truth is that if we had started building solar plants en masse in the 1970s, most of those panels could still be producing over 70% output today. Of course, they probably wouldn't be, because they probably would have been replaced, and the used panels sold a
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Not disingenuous when the solar crowd pretends it's so "clean".
Ummm, relying "100% on coal and gas" is a lot more diversified than relying 100% on solar. In fact, there was a r
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Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition.
Renewable sources use naturally self-renewing resources, with the caveat that the renewal must be over a relatively short term. Another general requirement is that the use of the fuel causes little pollution or environmental damage.
It's a myth that wind and solar require massive amounts of mining. The blog you cite is unconvincing and the sources it cites don't support its conclusion. Do you have something peer reviewed that shows that all the experts in this field calling for more wind and solar power and
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The material used in renewable generation can be recycled.
Nuclear waste issues are complex and not fully resolved. They're not purely technical problems either.
Nuclear safety issues are also complex and not fully resolved. Sure a blue-sky fresh power plant built with the best technologies is a dandy thing, but that's not what we're talking about.
I say this, and I'm pro-nuclear.
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Carbon waste sequestration from fossil fuel is not remotely solved.
Storage of wind and solar power for 24/7 supply is complex and not fully solved.
Hydro is clean - aside from the pristine valley ecosystems that were wiped out. And Hydro dam failures make Chernobyl look like traffic accident.
If there was a perfect solution, we would be using it.
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You sound like you're stuck in a false dichotomy.
Meh. Experts are using a mix of solutions and researching renewables. All good from my standpoint. Fossil fuel subsidies and free carbon waste should end though. Carbon taxes etc, would put nuclear on stronger footing.
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I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
Um, nobody calls wind, solar or hydro "alternative energy".
(Well, almost nobody. Apparently you do...)
"Alternative energy" is all those crackpots on youtube who claim to invent perpetual motion machines.
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A psychological puzzle of the modern world are people who think nuclear is a solution to anything although it has repeatedly shown to be an economical failure.
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I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
Humans were using wind power to do work long before they were using coal to do anything other than produce heat. The idea that wind power is alternative energy is a trick which was pulled upon you by the fossil fuel industry, and here you are feeling all smug about your complicity. How useful of you.
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I guess the 216 TWh of electricity generated by renewables produced in Germany in 2017 (33% of all electricity generated) is a placebo effect then. Or somebody here lives in its own alternative reality where renewables don't work.
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How much do you pay for that again? 3 times as much as other countries?
Please come back when it's actually competitive.
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Mein Gott! I knew it was bad, but per these two sources, one [statista.com] and two [cleanenergywire.org], for households it's 33 US cents per kWh, 33.29 from the last and Bing's currency conversion calculator. Three times the general US price indeed, and I've heard its really pinching people in the winter. I guess it was more than low natural gas prices that prompted BASF to do their lastest rounds of expansion in the US, especially Texas, which has its own grid since it's big enough to have a stable one and that avoids a lot of Federal
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When the alternative is paying the Ruskys for gas (and being extorted), Germans are happy to pay more.
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Or, you know, they could have kept their nuclear reactors running, Germans have a safety culture that's up to the job, unlike the Japanese. Per Wikipedia, 8 permanently closed just coincidentally before state elections representing 43% of their nuclear electrical power, the rest by 2022, although I seem to recall some recent waffling about that.
Or, you know, continue and/or resume burning a lot of coal, as
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OMG, can't believe I've overlooked this issue. Live in Tornado Alley, my family has suffered smaller losses from hail storms, and hail can get pretty big. Yeah, maintenance costs are not going to be small, and in things like this, they're always underestimated.
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This is.... good news. (Score:4)
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest energy sources, as well as one of the safest. The fact that a modern industrialized nation like Japan realizes this, should be encouraging for those who care about the planet's climate and health.
Re:This is.... great news. (Score:2)
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No. Official numbers are here: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... [ag-energiebilanzen.de]
Germany has net exports of 55 TWh of electricity in 2017. It produced 216 TWh of electricity from renewables which is 33% of total production. Energiewende works fine. It is France which once in a while has to import from Germany because nuclear is not too reliable (e.g. in sommer when it gets to hot) or because they have to shut down a large part of the fleet for maintance.
Emissions (Score:2, Troll)
Solar Paint (Score:2)
A team of researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has developed a paint that can be used to generate clean energy. The paint combines the titanium oxide already used in many wall paints with a new compound: synthetic molyb
Who's down modding all of these posts? (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like every post that makes a good point has a 1 score. Somebody doesn't like nuclear power here but they'd better get used to the idea.
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NRA (Score:2)
the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness.
The new regulations are to wear hearing protection while shooting at tsunamis.
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Works in certain fiction universes. [fanfiction.net]
(In the Worm ("parahumans") web novel, one of the "Engbringers" (yeah, the name tells you most of what you need to know) main power is hydrokinesis on a massive scale, tsunamis are a regular part of his repertoire. But if you've got clean nukes....)
Re:Good, but nuclear is doomed (Score:4, Insightful)
Japan doesn't have enough sun and wind to run an industrial economy, and neither does it buy into the Green dream of devolving the economy into primitive foraging tribes. While its nuclear plants were down, it even has to import coal for the interim mothballed power plants.
Most importantly, Japan doesn't have western defeatism. When a problem comes up, it gets worked on and solved.
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it even has to import coal for the interim mothballed power plants.
Worse. They more than doubled the amount of oil they were burning to keep the lights on.
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Here's your citation: https://oilvoice.com/Opinion/2... [oilvoice.com]
If Japan had enough wind and solar power to avoid the politically problematic decision of restarting their nuclear power plants then they'd have built solar panels instead. If Japan was willing to revert to a pre-industrial economy then they'd have not bothered to restart mothballed coal plants when they ordered all the nuclear power plants shut down.
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Re 'small renewable energy powerplants". Japan is a nation the exports advanced products. Its production lines have to work 24/7 and need lots of energy.
Hydro is not going to fill that need.
When the sun goes down small renewable energy production is not going to run export production lines at night.
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"energy powerplants all over the place plus storage," -- it's in my first post.
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You know, servers also have transmission and access requirements. You can't plop a server down in a field and walk away either. It's called "networking", and it happens I did mention it in the previous post.
And given that the electrical network reaches pretty much everywhere this entire subject would matter, it doesn't seem like that much of a problem.
Also, it's an analogy. Analogies by their nature are always not 100% exact anyway, though this one is holding up fairly well I think.
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And here we come to the word "eventually", which is also in my first post.
They're not doing it because things aren't there yet. I'm saying nuclear will eventually go away in favor of the mass application of simpler ideas. It's far easier to throw more solar panels at the problem than to comply with nuclear regulations.
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Basically what I'm saying that eventually just putting solar panels everywhere, plus storage for the night will do the trick. If you end up exceeding the daylight requirements by 50%, who cares if it's still cheaper and easier than nuclear?
I suspect that if this was even close to true that Japan would not be restarting any nuclear power plants. Japan doesn't like anything nuclear, being the only target of a nuclear weapon might have something to do with that. Japan is also not short on smart people with lots of technology, they make solar cells in Japan you know.
But then you did say "eventually". From now until that day comes Japan will have to do something. That something is restarting many old reactors and building come new ones.
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The Greens will fight you tooth and nail to prevent so much of the countryside being covered with ugly solar panels, and they'll have lots of company. In Japan, putting them up also won't be cheap, given the limited unused land is largely hilly or mountainous.
As others have noted, your IT orientation is leading you astray, we're not talking about doing stuff in a few isolated machine
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Which do you suppose is more economical over the long haul?
I've done those calculations.
In places that have sun: solar.
In places that do not have good sun, nuclear, unless storage or transmission cost goes down.
It turns out to be really hard to compete with cheap solar panels if you have sunlight available to power them.
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Then show us your math. You're replying to someone who questions the economics of merely maintaining the national fleet of panels, which is a very good question, including keeping them clean, I want to see how you get around the problem that solar can provide neither baseline nor peaking power. The cost and maintenance of new transmission systems would also be good.
And while you're at it, how many billions of dollars for the environmental regulatory process, inevitable numerous failures to get the permits
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Nuclear vs solar electric (Score:2)
Which do you suppose is more economical over the long haul?
I've done those calculations. In places that have sun: solar. In places that do not have good sun, nuclear, unless storage or transmission cost goes down. It turns out to be really hard to compete with cheap solar panels if you have sunlight available to power them.
Cool. Then you should start your own solar powered utility. You will make trillions of dollars because everyone will switch to your utility.
I don't need to; it's already happening. Take a look at the ratio of new solar generation installation versus new nuclear generation installation.
Oh, wait, new nuclear generation has an installation rate of zero. So that ratio is infinite.
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Don't let the PRC know that. [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, I was referring to the U.S. (and the western world in general). PRC does not have a market economy, so it's problematical to base "economically competitive" (which is what we were talking about) on what they do.
That also applies to the 53 gigawatts of solar capacity the PRC installed last year-- considerably more than the nuclear generation installed, even with the capacity factor. Interesting, but the decisions in PRC are calculated by a different metric than we do, so you can't really translate that
Re:Good, but nuclear is doomed (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear power will be with us for a very long time in some form. I say this because of the 200 or so nuclear reactors in operation by the USA roughly half of them are operated by the US Navy.
It turns out that you can in fact put a nuclear power reactor just about anywhere you like, such as on about 70% of the world's surface. They do take years of planning and construction but so do a lot of things. I recall hearing that Boeing plans out their aircraft lines out to 30 years in the future. They hit the "Y2K bug" in 1970.
There is no modern navy in the world that will power their ships with wind and solar power. There's always stories that pop up every few months or so of some company or another that plans to have some cargo ships with sails on them. Greenpeace like to talk big about their boat, Rainbow Warrior, calling it a "sailing yacht". This boat does in fact have sails, and with them it can sail about 5 knots in a good wind. What they don't like to talk about is the 1800 HP diesel engine it has. For someone that likes to go about harassing oil rigs at sea they seem rather hypocritical for using so much of the products from those oil rigs to get there.
So, how are we to expect to get people and products over the sea unless it's by nuclear power or petroleum?
People like to point out how experiments with commercial shipping by nuclear power failed in the past. Well, that happens when oil prices takes a dive. Having organizations like Greenpeace harassing the crews and owners of these boats didn't help either. That's going to have to change if we find it politically or economically problematic for shipping to use oil.
Oh, let's not forget air travel. Even if someone developed some leap in electric aircraft technology tomorrow there's going to be 30 years before Boeing uses that technology in their airplanes.
You might think our electricity will come from wind, sun, and batteries but that's something like 1/3rd of the energy we use. About 1/3rd is transportation and the remaining 1/3rd is things like industry and heating. That's not going to be from wind and sun. That's going to be nuclear, coal, or natural gas. And, again, that will be true for at least 30 years if not hundreds of years.
Re:Good, but nuclear is doomed (Score:5, Insightful)
The military doesn't need commercial liability insurance. That alone makes commercial nuclear shipping uneconomical. It's actually kind of perverse, it's cheaper to use polluting diesel than to insure against the risk of a nuclear shipping accident.
The Navy model can't be applied to commercial ships. The Navy has an endless supply of well trained people to monitor the reactors, people who are largely immune to cost considerations. The supply and maintenance contracts are gold plated.
For shipping we might look at hydrogen for fuel. At least we can make that cleanly.
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Make Hydrogen cleanly? Not at this time..
Commercial hydrogen gas production is currently done by reforming natural gas, which releases carbon and consumes huge amounts of energy. I suppose you *could* sequester the hydrogen easier, but that's about the *only* environmental advantage I can come up with for hydrogen as fuel.
Splitting water using electrical hydrolysis is insanely inefficient, wasting nearly 70% of your input energy. Note that this is a theoretical limit based on the physics and chemistry of
Re: Good, but nuclear is doomed (Score:4, Interesting)
The soviet use of radiothermal generators gave us a bunch of (not well sealed) Strontium 90 sources floating around, not necessarily even documented in the worse cases; use in commercial shipping would likely end up with a bunch of reactors ending up in one of the hellholes where shipbreaking is cheap because regulations are thin and workers largely expendable.
It's much easier to get adequate standards for operational competence when you have fewer specialist operators; but that rules out a lot of distributed applications. As it is, isotope sealed sources with assorted medical, industrial, and scientific applications already go missing all the time; increasing the number(and power) of those things being used out and about seems likely to go poorly.
Different strokes for different folks' application (Score:3)
Nuclear, even from an optimist's perspective, seems to be an abjectly terrible idea for the more small scale/dispersed requirements.
True, but what that's saying is primarily that not all sources meet all applications, so we may want to use different energy sources for different applications.
As you say (or imply), solar turns out to be a very good source for distributed small scale applications in regions that have good solar availability-- which is much of the third world, which turns out to be the part of the world that most needs new energy sources.
Nuclear, on the other hand, may be the preferred source for gigawatt-scale baseload pow
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Except, you know, the reason they're the Third World is that their populations don't have the intelligence and very much linked culture to even maintain such complicated systems, let alone build them in the first place. One of the clearest and
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I can agree with you for the most part. There's certain things we cannot change but what we can do is bring the infrastructure and training for getting the energy these people need to lift themselves into a first world economy. What I heard one person call this is "hammer and spanner" technology. If you show someone a common diesel engine then they can take it apart and put it back together with hand tools. People have done so for at least 100 years. Solar power takes technology beyond hand tools, some
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There is no modern navy in the world that will power their ships with wind
This made me chuckle a bit.
Yes, I know he said "Modern". It's still made me laugh.
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Nuclear power will be with us for a very long time in some form. I say this because of the 200 or so nuclear reactors in operation by the USA roughly half of them are operated by the US Navy.
It turns out that you can in fact put a nuclear power reactor just about anywhere you like, such as on about 70% of the world's surface.
Not "anywhere". Nuclear plants need cooling, so you want to have access to water.
(That turns out to be not a problem with the Navy, which operates its ships only in environments surrounded by water.)
...
You might think our electricity will come from wind, sun, and batteries but that's something like 1/3rd of the energy we use. About 1/3rd is transportation and the remaining 1/3rd is things like industry and heating. That's not going to be from wind and sun. That's going to be nuclear, coal, or natural gas.
Transportation is not going to be nuclear, unless you're talking electric vehicles, in which case the electrical source can be solar, or pretty much anything that generates electricity. You mentioned ships, but marine freight accounts for only 15% of the transportation energy use, which itself is about 25% of
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You can use cooling towers as many plants do, and this is true of all thermal power plants, you need to get rid of waste heat for best thermodynamic efficiency.
Cooling [Re:Good, but nuclear is doomed] (Score:2)
You can use cooling towers as many plants do, and this is true of all thermal power plants, you need to get rid of waste heat for best thermodynamic efficiency.
Cooling towers don't remove the need for water. It's not a big deal overall, since 75% of the planet is water (and most cities tend to be near one body of water or another) but, no, you can't site them "anywhere". "Dry cooling" exists as a technology, but it's 3-4 times as expensive, and no plants use it in the U.S. (I think that there's one in South Africa).
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Only if your country is run by idiots. For one thing, you shouldn't be storing it, you should be recycling it, remove the neutron poisons, recover the unused uranium and the plutonium which was incidentally bred during operation (although I'm not sure how much you can usefully include in new fuel due to the isotope that's thermally hot). What's left over is quite small in volume, and then you have to wait a maximum of 600 years before i
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20.0% of electricity generated comes from Nuclear power.
(0% of transportation comes from Nuclear, 0% of heating comes from Nuclear.)
Then electric cars are a myth? As are heat pumps?
Realistically, 1/3rd of energy comes from solar today, but it could easily be 100% if we can store the energy.
First, next to nothing of the energy we use today comes from solar. Second, that a big "if". Sure, "IF" we can store the energy a lot of things could happen, such as using that storage to load follow so we can use thermal power (like nuclear, coal, and natural gas) more effectively. Thermal (or steam) power plants are very efficient, cheap to run, but don't load follow very well. If we can get cheap and plentiful energy storage then we would never bother
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Sure, "IF" we can store the energy a lot of things could happen
For example, once the energy storage problem is solved as we have to do a buy new batteries every few years. We won't need any generators at all!
(The batteries will come charged, right?)
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Japan's big problem is that when those plants were built the understanding of the geology and potential failure modes was poor. It's far from perfect now, but with experience and better equipment to find and analyze faults and model disasters they are realizing that many of those plants are not as safe as they thought.
Much of the delay has been because when people started to look they found new faults and potential weaknesses in design. No-one was really looking before, there was no programme to use the lat
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technically speaking, also these sources are of nuclear origin, since they come from our Sun...
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> just putting a bunch of solar panels/mirrors/wind turbines pretty much anywhere
technically speaking, also these sources are of nuclear origin, since they come from our Sun...
Technically speaking, anyone that points this out is a pedantic asshole that deserves being punched in the face.
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Given that "solar panels/mirrors/wind turbines" provide neither baseline nor peaking power, the only required forms for a reliable grid, where nuclear excels at the former, and can do the latter for the easily predicted general peaks
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Draw a big circle around Japan and pay for energy imports.
A new wealth circle to span Asia out from Japan.
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Edward Teller made very sure that civilian nuclear power plants with positive void coefficients were outlawed in the US. One reason we never adopted CANDU reactors.
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Quite a few commercial power reactor designs can be used to breed plutonium. MAGNOX and RBMK were openly designed to allow simultaneous power generation and plutonium production. India clearly found a way to breed plutonium in a CANDU reactor. You could probably find a way to use an AGR to produce useful amounts of
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That's not "quite a few", although thanks for reminding me of the Magnox design, making a total of 3. It's inherent in the CANDU design, where you push fuel through horizontal tubes in the original manner used by the Manhattan Project. Push them through so a fuel assembly stays there only a few months, and there won't be too much of the thermally hot or fissions too easily plutonium isotopes.
But those reactors are not the ones the lies were made about, I'm thinking in particular the hue and cry about that
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If you're really worried about this, never eat bananas per your #1 or sleep with more than one person, based on the doses you'll get from the radioactive potassium found in both.
That's amusing, but debunked. Bananas do contain potassium, some of which is 40, but the body maintains homeostatic levels of potassium: you don't incorporate more potassium in your body if you eat bananas. Even the Wikipedia article points that out.
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* Lie I personally find most annoying: you can't use civilian reactor bred plutonium to make nuclear weapons, it's in there too long, too much of the isotopes that are hot or fission too easily.
Uh, sort of. You're right, you don't do that today, because we don't use breeder reactors, nor do we reprocess "spent" nuclear fuel. If we are going to move to a long-term solution of the global energy requirements using nuclear power, however, we would have
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Why didn't you quote my preceding sentence:
Thorium [Re:Top Myths about Nuclear Energy] (Score:2)
I'm not even sure what your point about potassium is. Eating a banana does not increase your potassium 40 exposure. This is true whether you use the linear-no-threshold model or not.
As for Thorium cycle reactors, yes, I agree that it's wise to be somewhat skeptical of the technology until some of the details are a bit more developed. The old IAEA report gives some of the basics: https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/... [iaea.org] , and there are review papers here and there that give a somewhat more updated view: https://ai [scitation.org]
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It is by the metric that counts for more than anything else, politics.
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# 10: Nuclear energy can't reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Truth: Nuclear-generated electricity powers electric trains and subway cars as well as autos today. It has also been used in propelling ships for more than 50 years. That use can be increased since it has been restricted by unofficial policy to military vessels and ice breakers. In the near-term, nuclear power can provide electricity for expanded mass-transit and plug-in hybrid cars. Small modular reactors can provide power to islands like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Nantucket and Guam that currently run their electrical grids on imported oil. In the longer-term, nuclear power can directly reduce our dependence on foreign oil by producing hydrogen for use in fuel cells and synthetic liquid fuels.
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process. This is a technology that works right now. That's unlike algae based fuel which is
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That's unlike algae based fuel which is still mostly theoretical.
That's ignorant at best, or more likely knowing you, an outright lie. It's not theoretical at all; the ground work was laid in the 1980s. Most of the work being done now is to make it more profitable, but if the fossil fuel companies weren't permitted to pass their externalities off onto everyone on the planet instead of having to deal with their own emissions (let alone the downstream emissions) then biofuels from algae would be more profitable than petrofuels today.
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Aquaculture in general is plagued, in a very literally sense, by extreme ease at which bad stuff can jump from item to item, be it tiny algae or fish, crustaceans, etc. The problem is that it's just way too easy for a pool or whatever of algae
Synfuel [Re:Top Myths about Nuclear Energy] (Score:2)
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process.
Nope. Synthetic liquid fuel ("synfuel") is typically made from either coal, or oil shale.
Check the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There are biomass conversion technologies, but they're usually called "biofuels", not synfuels.
You can make hydrogen from electricity, and you can make hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon dioxide (e.g., by Fischer-tropsch reactions), but at the moment that's a pretty inefficient process, and not economically competitive. (That could change, of course, wit
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And you have to be careful introducing them into an already running system, since all that I know of have a polar section, resulting in their freeing up polar gunk that's accumulated.
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Nope. Synthetic liquid fuel ("synfuel") is typically made from either coal, or oil shale.
I agree, typically this is true. What the US Navy is working on is an atypical variation on this theme. Perhaps "synfuel" is not the best word for it since that carries the connotation of the fuel being derived from coal but then I didn't call this "synfuel", you did.
The reason the US Navy is working on this specific process is that they can get the carbon and hydrogen from seawater. The CO2 is dissolved in the water from being exposed to the atmosphere (as all seawater is exposed to the atmosphere) and