Joe Biden Opens Up California Coast To Offshore Wind (theverge.com) 232
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Offshore wind is headed west. The Biden administration announced today that it will open up parts of the Pacific coast to commercial-scale offshore renewable energy development for the first time. The geography of the West Coast poses huge technical challenges for wind energy. But rising to meet those challenges is a big opportunity for both President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom to meet their clean energy goals. There are two areas now slotted for development off the coast of Central and Northern California -- one at Morro Bay and another near Humboldt County. Together, these areas could generate up to 4.6GW of energy, enough power for 1.6 million homes over the next decade, according to a White House fact sheet.
Compared to the East Coast, waters off the West Coast get deeper much faster. That has stymied offshore wind development. So the White House says it's looking into deploying pretty futuristic technology there: floating wind farms. Until now, technical constraints have generally prevented companies from installing turbines that are fixed to the seafloor in waters more than 60 meters deep. That's left nearly 60 percent of offshore wind resources out of reach, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). With the development of new technologies that could let wind turbines float in deeper waters, it looks like those resources might finally be within reach.
The Department of Energy says that it has funneled more than $100 million into moving floating offshore wind technology forward. There are only a handful of floating turbines in operation today, and no commercial-scale wind farms yet anywhere in the world. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management still needs to officially designate the areas off the California coast as Wind Energy Areas for development and complete an environmental analysis. The plan is to auction off leases for the area to developers in mid-2022. It's also working with the Department of Defense to make sure the projects don't interfere with its ongoing "testing, training, and operations" off California's coast.
Compared to the East Coast, waters off the West Coast get deeper much faster. That has stymied offshore wind development. So the White House says it's looking into deploying pretty futuristic technology there: floating wind farms. Until now, technical constraints have generally prevented companies from installing turbines that are fixed to the seafloor in waters more than 60 meters deep. That's left nearly 60 percent of offshore wind resources out of reach, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). With the development of new technologies that could let wind turbines float in deeper waters, it looks like those resources might finally be within reach.
The Department of Energy says that it has funneled more than $100 million into moving floating offshore wind technology forward. There are only a handful of floating turbines in operation today, and no commercial-scale wind farms yet anywhere in the world. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management still needs to officially designate the areas off the California coast as Wind Energy Areas for development and complete an environmental analysis. The plan is to auction off leases for the area to developers in mid-2022. It's also working with the Department of Defense to make sure the projects don't interfere with its ongoing "testing, training, and operations" off California's coast.
Save Diablo Canyon (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Save Diablo Canyon (Score:5, Informative)
Technical Issues (Score:2, Informative)
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I am sure those people who build this stuff took Science and Engineering classes, that have gone past the perfect Spheres and Frictionless surfaces in a perfect vacuum.
One thing that I find amazing is actually how much better and more reliable technology works today than it did 20 or 40 years ago.
I remember trying to start my Fathers 1986 Pickup Truck (It had automatic transmission), I had to turn the key, pump the gas pedal, then stop wait a second and try again 2 or 3 times before the engine would start.
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Aside from offshore turbines being a fairly mature technology at this point, proven to work for their intended lifespan, nuclear plants take in sea water too. The reason many of them are built next to the ocean is so that they have a supply of water for cooling.
The plumbing that handles that water has to be much more complex than anything needed for an offshore windmill. As well as surviving the salt water for much longer than typical turbine lifetimes, it has to keep the fish and algae and plant life out.
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Sharks biting under sea cables? That’s from one of the Jaws movies you dolt.
Re:Save Diablo Canyon (Score:5, Informative)
Big bonus: Since the coal fired generators went mostly offline in 2010, the Ontario hasn't had any more smog issues.
https://lfpress.com/news/local... [lfpress.com]
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That's not right. Fission products are not the same as decay products. Many are considerably more dangerous in the short and medium term,
Yes, but the short term is 10 years and the medium term is 300 years (the long lived stuff is best handled via trans-mutation to other stable elements in a sub-critical waste burner reactor). And we can get power from them while they decay. The short term elements are insanely valuable and are among the rarest and most valuable elements used when making renewables. To put it in perspective, the 5th most valuable of them is Silver (which is stable the moment it is produced BTW) but there is also V, Dy, Nd
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The wind never dies down enough to matter out to sea.
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Even the USSR couldn't build nuclear power plants for $500M, and it had no legal issues and didn't even bother with an expensive containment building around the RMBK models.
China also has few legal issues, and of course low labour costs and massive output of material needed like steel and concrete. Still can't build them for less than a few billion.
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It's the political process that drives up the cost.
Bullshit. [sciencedirect.com]
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How is onshore wind cheaper than offshore wind?
Because it faces fewer engineering issues than offshore wind, such as salt water particles everywhere, or the need for much more complicated structures.
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Diablo has been good but its old and needs work. And its on a fault.
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Everything in Ca is on a fault. If that is going to be a criteria we need to evacuate the entire state
There's a significant different in risk between a house on a fault and an antiquated nuclear reactor on a fault.
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Get this person a job as a policy maker.
Diablo Canyon is seismically active (Score:5, Informative)
Keeping Diablo Canyon open would be better.
Diablo Canyon nuclear power station is sitting on top of a recently discovered fault line. [ucsusa.org] Potential ground acceleration from those fault lines is well above what the plant was designed for. Closing down Diablo Canyon is a good move, especially for the nuclear industry. It would demonstrate the take responsibility.
The Fukushima disaster was caused by the nuclear industry in Japan ignoring proper seismic guidelines for operating the plant. Essentially you are suggesting the same thing on the opposite side of the pacific.
Re:Save Diablo Canyon (Score:4, Informative)
I'm all for nuclear power, but that nuclear power plant sits on an earthquake fault and it's really outdated and past its expiration date, plus it's vulnerable to tsunamis.
Re:Save Diablo Canyon (Score:4, Interesting)
All power plants along the California coast will sit on fault lines, and be vulnerable to tsunamis. Would not offshore windmills be especially vulnerable?
We are going to need nuclear power. A lot of nuclear power. On the level of one new gigawatt of capacity per month to keep up with the closures of old nuclear, coal, and natural gas plants. We will need another gigawatt of capacity to keep up with a transition from fossil fuels to carbon neutral transportation.
Can we build two gigawatts of wind and solar capacity instead? No. We were able to put a gigawatt of nuclear power on the grid per month in the 1970s, and the economy grew ten times over since. We can do this. We've never been able to bring such capacity of wind and solar on the grid, and expecting to bring that kind of industrial capacity into existence in a meaningful time frame is a fantasy.
Because nuclear power plants can get to over 90% capacity factor while wind and solar are more like 20% to 30% we'd need three gigawatts of wind and solar to get the same energy from one gigawatt of nuclear power over a given time frame. Because wind and solar don't always provide power when needed then we will need energy storage, and a lot of it. Storage is expensive but we can lower this cost with an increase in operating and capital costs of wind, solar, or nuclear with over building and curtailment. With nuclear power we can bring storage costs to zero but we can't with wind and solar. Fuel is stored energy, uranium is a fuel, therefore nuclear power has the means to provide energy storage in a way.
Tsunamis and earthquakes are bad but we know how to build nuclear power plants to survive both. The reactors at Fukushima survived the tsunami and earthquakes, but melted down because these were old designs that needed power to keep cool once shutdown and power was lost. It's possible that the power plant would not have melted down if they had not shutdown the reactors. These 2nd generation reactor designs require a lot of power to keep cool once shut down, and they need a lot of power to get running again once shutdown. New 3rd generation reactors are able to keep cool in case of a total power loss. They will need power to start up once shutdown, but with power from batteries like those proposed to make up for when there isn't enough wind and sun they can be restarted.
We can build new reactors at Diablo Canyon, the kind that will not meltdown like at Fukushima after an earthquake and tsunami. Those are not the only threats to our energy supplies. We can't build windmills and solar panels that can operate through hurricanes, snowstorms, and other severe weather but we can with nuclear power.
An all nuclear power grid is as much a fantasy as one that uses only wind and solar. We need energy that is safe, abundant, low in CO2 emissions, low in needs for labor and materials, and low in costs. This means we don't use offshore wind and solar. This means onshore wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear fission.
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Would not offshore windmills be especially vulnerable?
Not if they're floating in deep water like the proposal says.
Even if they fall over. You won't end up with radiation in your cornflakes.
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"We know how to build fail-safe reactors now. The problem in the past was too much credit was given to humans."
You do see the contradiction in those two sentences?
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I see what you're saying, but there's a difference between peer-reviewed designs that can be looked over and discussed before approval, and bad decision making by under-trained operators on the 3rd shift that are "in the moment".
If the first bit is successful, you don't end up needing the second bit to go right, because the second bit doesn't happen.
False dichotomy (Re:Save Diablo Canyon) (Score:2)
Those are not your only choices. We don't have to put a nuclear reactor on the coast where it can be hit by a tsunami, earthquake, mudslide, or whatever. Put it out in the Arizona desert, far from such things. Also, even if an ideal location can't be found there's been advances in nuclear power technology where even having the reactor "ripped in half" isn't going to make a multi-billion dollar mess.
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The problem with sighting a nuclear plant, is that you need a shit ton of water to cool it. Deserts aren't exactly known for being lush, moist environments.
That being said, Arizona already has a huge fucking reactor complex at Palo Verde that cranks out almost 4GWe, or about 30% of Arizona's electricity. It's the only large nuclear generating station not situated near a body of water in the world - so before you start talking about just pumping it in, we're already doing that, and there's only so much wat
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We could have more desert nukes if we ran them hotter, using molten salt as coolant, so that we could use dry desert air as a sole heat sink. Palo Verde gets a heat sinking assist from Phoenix municipal wastewater. The dry poop that is left over is used on the cotton fields near the plant.
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You could always have a floating nuclear reactor bobbing up and down a few inches. The Navy has been doing it for decades.
Very good point.
I'd say it might be quite expensive. But floating wind looks like it will be expensive too.
Re: Save Diablo Canyon (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear is a cheaper than off shore wind [eia.gov] (But more expensive than onshore wind and solar though.)
Nuclear being more compact, I would guess floating it would be cheaper than floating a bunch of separate windmills. You'd have to check the details properly to find out which would be more expensive.
Off shore floating wind and offshore floating nuclear would both be on the more expensive side. Neither would be cheap. You'd only bother doing it for 'some other reasons' like CO2 reduction.
Having some floating nuclear that you could move around as needed would come in handy. Such as third world countries hit by disasters, or Texas having a cold snap. That kind of thing.
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Not sure where they get that Fukushima cost $700B. There was nothing dangerous about Fukushima, the panicked response from the government killed 2000 people, not the nuclear plant who hasn't yet radiated much beyond international safety levels (which are already so insanely low, you exceed them regularly in planes and soon spacefaring).
You could've just drained the entire thing in the sea (which they're planning on doing now anyway) and it wouldn't have made a blip.
It's almost as if they spent that money to not let it be a bigger deal that it turned out to be...
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We were able to put a gigawatt of nuclear power on the grid per month in the 1970s, and the economy grew ten times over since. We've never been able to bring such capacity of wind and solar on the grid, and expecting to bring that kind of industrial capacity into existence in a meaningful time frame is a fantasy.
Are you sure MacMann?
Over a GW of wind per month in 2020 [cleantechnica.com] 13 GW of wind, and an extra 8GW of solar as well.
I guess 2020 was a fantasy...
The year before was 15GW combined solar and wind, so not just a fluke.
Re:Save Diablo Canyon (Score:4, Informative)
One gigawatt of nuclear power that can run at 100% rated output continuously for months at a time is not equivalent to one gigawatt of wind power that stops producing power when the wind stops blowing. Or blows too hard.
15 gigawatts of combined wind and solar with a capacity factor that can't seem to quite get to 25% is equal to about 4 gigawatts of nuclear power.
Then comes the issue of life span. The average age of currently operating nuclear power plants is over 40 years old. Many of these plan to keep operating for 60 or even 80 years. Windmills and solar PV cells will last 20 to 30 years. So, taking this into account the wind and solar power industry getting to 4 times the rate of new capacity over that of nuclear power will not be enough. It's going to have to be double that.
One gigawatt of nuclear capacity would need to be replaced with eight gigawatts of wind and solar capacity. That's an estimate on current trends so it might be more like five or ten.
We've never seen wind and solar get to this level of construction before but we saw nuclear power get there decades ago. We will see new nuclear power get to the rate needed to replace old nuclear power before we see wind and solar get there.
We can do it! (Re:Save Diablo Canyon) (Score:4, Informative)
There is no solution that can ramp up faster than nuclear can. People have tried to replace nuclear power for 40 or 50 years and failed. It's time to take the shackles off nuclear power and let it grow.
Not all energy needs to come from nuclear fission power. We will also need proven, affordable, plentiful, safe, and low CO2 sources, those being geothermal, onshore wind, and hydro.
Whether we replace petroleum for transportation with electricity or synthesized fuels we will need one gigawatt of new nuclear power capacity per month in the USA. To keep up with the closing of old coal and nuclear power we will need another one gigawatt of new nuclear power capacity.
In the 1970s we put online one gigawatt of new nuclear power generating capacity every month. We did this with an economy nearly 1/10th the size it is now, and with much less technology and experience. If we did that 40 or 50 years ago then we can do double that now.
In the USA Democrats had their foot on the neck of nuclear power for 50 years. In their latest platform document they support nuclear power. So, on paper at least, the largest obstacle to new nuclear power in the USA is gone. What is the excuse for wind and solar?
Wind and solar power has had the government giving it every possible chance to grow for decades but it's not even close to what nuclear power able to do from when the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, was commissioned in 1951 to when Jimmy Carter effectively ended the nuclear power industry in 1979. Nuclear power has provided 20% of the electricity in the USA for decades, while Democrats did their best to kill the industry, and more than 40 years later wind hasn't caught up and solar power is little more than a rounding error in total energy supplied.
There is nothing we can ramp up faster than nuclear power. To go any faster than that means "all the above", not "all the above but nuclear power".
Developing nations need fossil fuels to develop. Anything else is suicide. You don't have to like it, it just is.
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Have you looked at how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant these days?
Not sure why you think renewables need an excuse, they are booming right now and going subsidy free. When will nuclear be subsidy free?
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Have you looked at the amount of time spent on lawsuits for a new nuclear plant? Nuclear doesn't have engineering problems, it has lawsuit-happy anti-nukes working as hard as they can to make sure we're using coal for as long as possible....
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I have actually, yes. For example the legal questions over Hinkley C had very little effect on the cost and were mostly concluded concurrently with other planning so didn't delay much either.
The delays were because nobody wanted to build it, and when EDF eventually agreed to (with Chinese investment) it nearly bankrupted them and they had to be bailed out by the French government.
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Have you looked at the amount of time spent on lawsuits for a new nuclear plant?
You realize we can subtract those delays from the total construction time of the plant, right?
Just the design, engineering and construction of a nuclear plant more than a decade. Even when you subtract time dealing with regulations and legal issues.
Re:We can do it! (Re:Save Diablo Canyon) (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you looked at the amount of time spent on lawsuits for a new nuclear plant? Nuclear doesn't have engineering problems, it has lawsuit-happy anti-nukes working as hard as they can to make sure we're using coal for as long as possible....
Yes! You nailed it!
Nuclear theoretically can be deployed quickly and safely. However in practice, it can't.
Offshore wind can theoretically be deployed quickly and safely, and that's true in practice as well.
So we can either build imaginary nuclear power plants quickly and efficiently in your imaginary world, or we can build offshore wind quickly and efficiently in the real world.
Here's an important hint for you: It doesn't matter what you can imagine or what is theoretically possible. What matters is what is actually possible in the real world. If you want to live in an imaginary world where nuclear power plants spring up like daisies, you're welcome to do that. But don't try to convince the rest of us that it's a real world, because we know that it isn't.
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Have you looked at how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant these days?
How is that relevant when we can build more than one at a time? We need to have one gigawatt, minimum, of new nuclear power generating capacity every month if we are going to solve our energy problems in the USA. That does not mean building one start to finish inside a month. It means we start building one this month, another next month, yet another the month after, and so on. If it takes 10 years to finish construction then we will have 120 reactors under construction at any given time.
How long it take
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I'm all for nuclear power, but that nuclear power plant sits on an earthquake fault and it's really outdated and past its expiration date, plus it's vulnerable to tsunamis.
It is on bedrock. In fact it is safer where it is located than if it was on normal ground. It has to do with the waves from the earthquake causing soil liquefaction. In grad school we worked on an earthquake simulation in my scientific visualization class. If there was a major earthquake on the San Andreas in the mountains there would be significantly less damage at the epicenter than in Los Angeles 100's of miles away. The faults next to Diablo are much smaller that San Andreas.
it's really outdated and past its expiration date
It's younger than me.
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Keeping Diablo Canyon open would be better
An antiquated reactor design in an area prone to earthquakes. I can't imagine why people would think keeping it open is bad...
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A perfectly functioning reactor on bedrock
Nope, there's a fault literally running under the reactor complex that was found after it was built. That fault has the capability of generating an earthquake larger than the reactor's engineering design can handle.
And Fukushima was a perfectly functioning reactor for a long time too. How'd that work out again?
Re:Save Diablo Canyon (Score:5, Informative)
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cringe
Killing people for fossil fuel profit is definite cringe worthy. Shutting down Diablo Canyon will do exactly that.
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If your going to take hallucinogenic drugs, please stop yourself from posting to slashdot.
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retard
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Gavin's recall election is in November. He may be gone soon.
Did Alex Jones tell you that? C'mon, trumptard. You can do better than that.
Nah, Alex Jones would have told Bill that Gavin will be removed and replaced as governor of California in a genius political move by Donald Trump who would then convert the California in to a bastion of Trumpublicanism and Alex would have cited a ton of Q-droppings to prov it. Then Alex would then have urged Bill to buy some of his corpse-starch.
Regain a technical advantage. (Score:2)
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One thing I unironically don't mind being sent to China, apart from the emissions they create with abandon while doing it. I've seen strip mining in my state and it's incredibly destructive to the scenery. Also takes a ton of water to do so, and my state (and many) are prone to droughts already.
The whole thing seems stupid to me when we have next-gen nuclear, but that's a separate story.
If it pays like an oil platform it (Score:3)
can be built and anchored like an oil platform.
Floating structures FAR more complex than wind generators are old news:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Underwater turbines. (Score:2)
Well there's always hydropower. [youtu.be]
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The Environs don't like that either, it disturbs the fish
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The Environs disturb me too.
I believe these idiots will get us all killed in an attempt to save the planet. They keep chasing after the next thing once something better than the old thing is proved viable. They used to support nuclear power. They used to support natural gas. I believe that they liked hydro power too. Once natural gas dominated the energy sector they didn't like it any more, even though it is still better than coal and petroleum. Some of these idiots protested a natural gas pipeline an
It's not enough and it's not great for the environ (Score:2)
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Re:It's not enough and it's not great for the envi (Score:4, Informative)
Nuclear has never been as much as renewables [ourworldindata.org] and the gap is widening.
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Really? Renewables can't keep up with nuclear?
Well windmills definitely can't keep up on a calm day.
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Have you looked at the amount of wind energy available? The laws of physics say it's more than enough. Renewables are more than outpacing the annual increase in demand in many countries, with some European ones seeing long periods of no fossil fuel use in the last few years. Even Europe has barely tapped the available resources.
The laws of economics say that nuclear can't be the solution. It's got to the point in the UK, for example, where you can save a lot of money by not using nuclear power. As a consume
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Fortunately, the laws of economics agree with the laws of physics on wind. I figure ~400,000 - ~800,000 turbines is enough to satisfy US electrical demand (depending on peak demands, storage, etc.) Assuming 20% are being serviced at any given time that is ~2-3 million jobs and probably equivalent to how many people are employed by the energy sector currently.
I used to see idiots on Slashdot proclaiming a solar-powered future, somehow unable to grasp the eco
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I know what you mean. I put solar panels on my roof 15 years ago and the maintenance burden of that since then has been... zero.
Do you know how solar panels work? They sit there and produce electricity when the sun shines on them for decades.
Eventually you will replace them, probably ever 30 years, but most of the cost is the site preparation and support structure, and this is less than the maintenance cost on a percentage basis than just about any other power source.
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Do you know what physicians call alternative medicines that work? They call it medicine.
If alternative energy worked then we would not be calling it alternative energy.
Wind subsidies are forcing nuclear power plants to close. End energy subsidies and nuclear power will dominate.
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You are comparing wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biomass under "renewables" to get just barely more than nuclear. Is that how this works? No, we compare one to another. How does solar compare? It's not good. Biomass? That;s not great either. Hydro and wind aren't bad but that's not an energy plan. We will need nuclear, onshore wind, hydro, and geothermal to have an energy plan.
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One would need 25 square miles of solar panels to replace an average 1GW nuclear reactor.
Well, that tears it! I am amazed that this has not been noticed before!
To provide the 1000 GW (average) that powers the entire U.S. grid using solar alone we would need 25,000 square miles of solar farm! That is clearly impossible since the 48 contiguous states only have a combined area of 3,100,000 square miles and this... is 125 times larger.
But this is sooo much area that it dwarfs the land area that is occupied by cities which is 110,000 square miles... oh wait, that is four times larger.
Now if only som
Re: It's not enough and it's not great for the env (Score:2)
Pebblebed is meh, molten salt is pie in the sky, sodium burns. The only reasonable risk investment for something which can be built by 2035 are traditional PWR and smaller modular versions (though yet unproven).
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we do have the technology to build fail-safe reactors. We have new reactor designs (pebble bed, etc).
Guess what happened when Germany built a pebble-bed reactor?
Hint: The reactor was nicknamed "Shipwreck" [wikipedia.org] because of all the things that went wrong. It was shut down in 1989, and is still one of the most contaminated reactors on the planet.
There's a reason nobody started mass building pebble beds, despite the hype.
Why not build a HVDC link instead? (Score:2)
Built renewables where it's cheap and just transport the power, grid needs upgrading anyway.
Build the links past good spots for nuclear plants while at it.
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Re: Why not build a HVDC link instead? (Score:2)
Maybe from California's point of view, from a national point of view if building them somewhere else inside the US and transporting the power is cheaper that makes more sense for the nation.
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Because offshore wind is pretty consistent, removing the largest downside from wind power.
We need nuclear fission power, so say the experts (Score:3)
I heard on the radio that some expert points out that we will need one gigawatt of new nuclear power generating capacity per month if we are to replace the energy needed for transportation we now get from petroleum. I heard from other sources that to keep up with the closing of old coal, natural gas, and nuclear fission plants we'd need a gigawatt of new nuclear power capacity every month. That's just in the USA. For the rest of the world we would have to multiply that by five. To bring the rest of the world to the standard of living seen in the USA? A whole lot more.
Nuclear fission power plants can reach a capacity factor averaging above 90% over a year. Often as high as 98%. Wind and solar can reach only between 20% and 30%, and anything over 25% would be rare. That 4.6 GW of wind power in the fine summary is about equal to the annual energy output of a 1.21 GW nuclear power plant. By closing the nuclear reactors at Diablo Canyon and building these windmills we are going backwards on energy production and lowering CO2 emissions.
Can we build 2 GW of nuclear power capacity every month? Sure. We built 1 GW of new nuclear power per month during the 1970s, and we have a larger economy and greater industrial capacity now than in the 1970s.
Can we build enough windmills and solar PV cells to keep up with energy demand? Not a fucking chance. Wind and solar can't even keep up with growth in electricity demand. Then comes the growth in carbon neutral energy from switching to electric cars. Then comes more demand as we close old coal and nuclear power plants. We can keep up with demand with natural gas. A nuclear power plant requires no more material and labor than a natural gas plant. By stopping the building of natural gas power plants we immediately have half of the labor and materials needed for replacing the energy we currently get from coal, oil, and natural gas.
Offshore wind costs more than nuclear fission power. It produced more CO2 and pollution. It takes more material and labor. Offshore wind kills more people than nuclear fission power, and more threatened species like eagles, vultures, condors, cranes, ducks, geese, and gulls. I'll see people point out that domestic cats will kill billions of birds every year, as if this is relevant.
Cats don't kill eagles, windmills do.
Offshore wind and solar power is not what serious people will use to solve our energy problems. This is the realm of unserious politicians looking for votes from unserious voters. Serious people, people that looked at the math, will tell us that we need more hydro, geothermal, onshore windmills, and nuclear fission to lower CO2 emissions, deaths of humans and birds, pollution in the air and water, and the price we pay for our energy.
I will hear a lot of people talk about how we need to listen to the science when they fail to do so themselves. What a bunch of unserious people.
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Climate change caused by fossil fuels kills eagles. In fact, it might cause some species to go extinct. And your claim that offshore wind costs more than nuclear fission proves one of the less serious people here is you. For one thing, insurance companies won't touch a nuclear plant with a long stick unless the relevant government agrees to have taxpayers assume liability for about 90% of the cost of an accident. You never count the upstream and downstream costs of nuclear, either. Mining, refining, tr
How does all of this work out in War strategy? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be clear, I'm a big fan of renewables. Glad to see us taking some positive steps finally.
If we move a preponderance of energy generation to off-shore, how does that position us during a conflict? If I were an opposing nation, I would have specific plans to target (via stealthy subs, or strikes) offshore windfarms as an initial step in any conflict. Collapsing our power infrastructure would cause a great deal of chaos without an easy fallback plan.
Seems like we need nuclear plants sufficient to meet all emergency needs, even if they operate at a lower capacity and rely primarily on renewable outside of emergencies.
But I'm a pleb when it comes to energy infrastructure, anyone know more regarding this topic/strategy/plans?
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If ALL of your generation were offshore it would make you more vulnerable. But putting SOME of it offshore actually has its benefits in an armed conflict. If they're blowing up generation assets offshore, they're doing less collateral damage than if they were blowing up such assets onshore.
Defense in depth is the only meaningful defense any more. If someone can get close enough to your assets to destroy them, you are already in trouble. Ever notice how nobody is building walled cities any more? Instead they
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This ignores the scale of offshore wind farms. It's not like 1 bomb could take them all out. You'd be forced to take a plane or a drone and shoot up every single turbine individually. And we're talking hundreds to thousands of them. This would be doable, but a very tedious, long activity.
The more effective strategy would be to target the cable endpoint and transmission station on land. However, that's a very easy fix compared to ocean turbines. Plus, it wouldn't be overly difficult to harden that sort of th
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This ignores the scale of offshore wind farms. It's not like 1 bomb could take them all out. You'd be forced to take a plane or a drone and shoot up every single turbine individually.
If I could make whatever munitions I wanted out of what's commonly available, I'd make a cheapass drone for every turbine with a shaped charge on the bottom, land them on top of the turbines, and detonate. Just buying the parts on eBay you can build drones capable of doing that job for literally $100 each. However, without a reference point for DGPS, you'll have to handle landing each one manually which is admittedly a bit of a pain.
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Offshore energy is pretty robust to attacking forces. The turbines themselves are spread out and destroying one only takes out megawatts of energy.
They could attack the cables sending power back to shore, but there will be lots of them and it seems like a colossal waste of resources when the subs and ships damaging them could be doing something more useful like taking out the opposing navy or launching missiles at military targets. Causing a blackout wouldn't really help the attacker much, any decent milita
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Simpler to have some missiles aimed at the nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams or natural gas pipeline junctions.
Of course, the best defense is to not make so many enemies in the first place.
Open up Florida as well (Score:2)
Morro Bay's 2nd interesting Power Production Story (Score:2)
Re:chickens come home to roost (Score:5, Informative)
During the next west coast tsunami.
RTFS. They will be built on floating platforms. They will just bob up and down as the tsunami passes. In deep water, tsunamis have little effect.
Re: Uh oh (Score:2)
There are already visible oil platforms in the target areas. Wind turbines will be a welcome improvement.
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The smart thing about offshore below sea level desalination, is you use surplus energy to pump fresh water inland from the sea, the energy recovery is 100%, straight into use (rather than trying to store the energy, you store fresh water you produce to provide water to cities and irrigate crops, the desalination plant design is cool, reverse osmosis filters).
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Using offshore turbines to produce fresh water when the wind is blowing is a better idea than sending fluctuating power to the grid.
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The grid alraeady get constantly fluctuation power, because there is constantly fluctuating demand. The grids don't like excess power capacity. Some power plants turn on and off generators quite often. Having lots of source that can be added as needed is a good thing, even if they are not constant on.
However there is almost aways wind in the areas where the proposed sites are. Off-shore tends to always be windy anyway in central California. We have existing wind farms and they're a success, without util
Re: Uh oh (Score:5, Informative)
Vertical axis wind turbines are much quieter
Vertical axis wind turbines are less efficient and less economical. That is why nobody is installing them anymore.
The wind turbines will be far enough out at sea that the noise is a non-issue.
and can be design to not kill birds.
Turbines kill thousands of birds every year.
Cats kill billions of birds every year.
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Turbines kill thousands of birds every year.
Cats kill billions of birds every year.
... it is therefore self evident that we must purge wind turbines from the face of the planet.
That's not an argument. (Re: Uh oh) (Score:4, Interesting)
Cats don't kill eagles and condors. Eagles and condors kill cats.
Windmills may kill only thousands of birds now but they also produce somewhere around 5% of our energy needs. What happens to bird deaths when wind supplies more like 50% of our energy?
That's right, instead of hundreds of dead eagles we get thousands.
Again, cats don't kill eagles, windmills do. Once that is made clear your point about cats killing birds does not follow.
One means to lower deaths of threatened birds is to stop the windmills when these birds are detected. That will impact the energy output and therefore the cost of energy produced. Offshore wind power is already higher in cost than nuclear power. Offshore wind also kills more people than nuclear, not just birds. Offshore wind takes more materials and labor than nuclear.
Offshore wind is the energy policy of people not serious about solving any energy demand problems. This is a waste of money as we have better options in hydro, onshore wind, geothermal and nuclear fission.
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That's right, instead of hundreds of dead eagles we get thousands.
And how many due to global warming?
Offshore wind power is already higher in cost than nuclear power.
You're going to have to be more specific, as this says it isn't: https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
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That article says offshore wind is cheaper than Hinkley Point C. The title does not match the text.
Here's a news article that compares average costs to average costs. not some best case offshore wind project to the worst run nuclear power project since we built the first nuclear power plants.
https://www.nucnet.org/news/nu... [nucnet.org]
Hinkley Point C is a badly run project but it is the exception, not the rule. I could point to many failures in offshore wind power but that is not how one builds a case against offsho
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Per MWh produced wind turbines kill fewer birds than nuclear plants do.
https://www.tandfonline.com/do... [tandfonline.com]
Wind: 0.269/GWh
Nuclear: 0.638/GWh
Re: That's not an argument. (Re: Uh oh) (Score:2)
Did that idiot really just include bird deaths occuring at uranium mining sites while excluding bird deaths at mining sites required for the manufacturing of windmills?
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Even if you ignore the mines, nuclear is still worse than wind. Even the nuclear industry paid research can only fudge it enough to draw level with wind.
It's not surprising at all, any kind of large scale industrial site kills a lot of birds.
Re: That's not an argument. (Re: Uh oh) (Score:5, Funny)
So windmills save cats?
Re:That's not an argument. (Re: Uh oh) (Score:5, Informative)
Eagles and condors kill cats.
Eagles and condors aren't sea birds, and thus aren't relevant for offshore wind farms.
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It gets really tiresome having to debunk the same tired old anti-green talking points over and over again. For the hundredth time: blades make up only a very small portion of the actual wind turbine. The rest of it is recyclable, and there are currently plans to recycle the composite material in turbine blades. Right this minute a significant percentage of the material in turbine blades actually IS reused in the making of cement. Its role is to reduce the need for other materials that have a greater en