Nuclear power is clean and safe

Turning them off does seem like a very bad idea. Those old plants on a fault line might need to be shut down. But this is deja vu, from history. CO2 is only one threat. The nuc that provides my local grid 20% of its power was estimated to cost less than $1B to build, but ended up costing $5.5B. Government needs to charge real prices for insurance and not guarantee loans that would not be made as these plants are not cheap.

Germany is replacing old coal plants with more efficient ones with plans to add CCS. Closing down all the coal plants and not building any more seems very troubling right now.

Texas has quickly wind and it now powers 8% of the grid, and it looks like its on its way to 20%. Its only massachustes that seems to be screaming about the wind problems. Ranchers in West Texas are happy to have the turbines. The wind is balanced by natural gas generation when the wind doesn't blow, but I can see a time in a few decades where there is excess capacity and it is stored in batteries or hydrogen. Wind in texas is much cheaper to build than a new nuclear plant, but costs very depending on region, and more wind requires a build out of the grid.

part of the solution, but it is a very small part. Less than 1% today. This can definitely grow. The expansion of solar in spain and germany has drastically reduced costs and pushed the technology.

This is a huge future tech. Air conditioning and heating are large users of electricity, and geothermal can reduce these a great deal when built into homes. Power generation is in its infancy, but tech is catching on.

95% of new power built in the last decade in the united states was natural gas. If efficient combined cycle plants are built it is anouther part of the solution. CC can also use CCS technology when it is developed.

Homes have gotten bigger, but these are not the bad old days. Solient green and mad max are not happening. There will be power and polution and risks. I don't think we are headed to a dark age where no one can power their ipad to read the news. ;-) The situation in Japan is scary, let's hope the rods can be cooled.

 

It's important to keep things in perspective. The tsunami's damage on the obsolete reactor designs is significant, going to take a long time to clean up, and potentially cause deaths in the 10s to 100s.

It's the 10,000 other lives lost that should be the focus. Better Earthquake detection and warnings + well worked out evacuation plans will save many more future lives than perfect reactor technology. The first is extremely hard. The second is doable, but limited by how well we handle the waste.

One of the key things that will come out of these lessons is that storing the spent rods (something done in the US) locally rather than in remote sites should be a very important lesson learned. Our national incompetence of bait and switch on a permanent storage site leaves all the waste sitting locally, often by the coasts (both in the US and Japan). I know that is the case in Florida.

One interesting note. US Navy reactor design is to cut in emergency cooling when power is lost. Commercial design to cut it in using externally generated power on command is a far more questionable approach. One thing for sure, future reactor designs just got a whole lot more expensive.

 

the people who don't want a turbine in their backyard never say 'but i'd be happy to have a coal or nuke plant built next door!'

 

What about those that want a wind turbine in their backyard and a nuke plant within a stone's throw? We exist too...

 

How about something like this?

SmartWind device can generate power from rooftops - SmartPlanet

 

"500 Internal Server Error".
I want to see this. In this climate, an annual average of 17 kwh/day from a 5 kw array seems like a fantasy. And 10 kwh/day seems optimistic even with complete disobedience of the tree preservation codes.

How do you get society's cost down to $12k? Credits and rebates don't reduce the cost, they just transfer it to others.

My household's car rotation schedule is far slower, so someone else should respond.

I'm really hoping to harvest some state incentives to put some wasted roof space to good use, but the necessary in-state production volumes seem to keep getting pushed out.

 

How about some measurements of or estimating tools for actual annual production for various locations?

 

Sorry for the link being down, I will try again. I included a site specific for Minneapolis since I thought the poster was from there. I will link the basic PV watts calculator which will allow anyone to plug in their own location and the calculator will do the calc. Western WA presents an interesting challenge, especially in the winter. That is why I have always suggested that investing in a solar co-op in E. WA would give you more bang for your buck.

Here is the basic PV watts link: PVWATTS v. 1

Here is PV watts for Seattle.

http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/PVWATTS/version1/US/code/pvwattsv1.cgi (EDIT note: The link doesn't seem to work. Use the basic PV watts link above, and plug in your location,, sorry for any confusion.)

It reveals an annual harvest (from 5 kw array) of ~ 4900 kwh, or 13.5/kwh/day. (that average is some what misleading as you will get way more harvest in the summer than the winter in W. Wa. but on an annual basis with net metering, if you use ~ 13 kwh/day, your bill will be ~ $0.)

As for off loading the costs to society, yea, we do that any way with many things. How much subsidy has the oil and gas and nuke industry gotten over the years. My point is (was) is that a good use of public resources? My answer would be yes!

So a 5 kw system at $5/watt comes at a gross cost of ~ $25,000, 30% tax credit would reduce that to~ $17,500. Utility rebates depending on the utility might reduce it to ~ $12,500.

Icarus

 

There are almost no (and in my experience none!) small scale wind applications that work very well long term for residential applications. The irony of small scale wind is if you have enough to be useful, (over ~ 12 mph 24/7-365) you have too much to keep the hardware reliable. Small scale wind is subject to lots of tough engineering loads. Because of the small scale, the moving parts are not robust enough to have genuine long term reliability. I know of no small scale wind system that has been trouble free for more than a year or two. On the other hand, I am in year 15 on my off grid PV system, my neighbour is pushing 20. I have had no failures, he has had one panel fail. (due to bugs in a J box shorting a diode)

Icarus

 

To get a good overview of the numbers involved, people might find the following book helpful (free downloadable PDF):
David MacKay FRS: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: Download. It is UK centric, but the ideas translate pretty easily to the US's DOUBLE footprint.

 

Fuzzy,

There was a interesting short piece on "All things considered" today on midsized PV solar co-ops, like what I have been speaking about. Large enough to benefit from economies of scale better than household sized units, but not too big to require massive utility transmission infrastructure upgrades to be viable. Cheap to build, cheap to bring on line.

In your case, if you are a Puget Power Customer, you can essentially invest in PV and green power by agreeing to buy green power through Puget. The reality is that your own roof top may not be the best solution for investing in PV.

Icarus

 

Here's a nifty "Deaths Per Terawatt Chart" showing coal as the reigning champion when it comes to killing people:

Deaths per Terawatt-hour by energy source [spoiler: coal kills the most people]

It probably wasn't put together by their industry ... you know ... to clear their conscience.

 

Sadly, from this country, I cannot go back to thenextbigfuture source to see if the coal deaths are mining only, or if they also include particulate asthma/cardiac and a few other interesting categories.

May have nothing to do with the mining-safety record of...this country. More than a few web sites are blocked, and it is often not clear why.

But more importantly, coal does its thing each and every day. It may be a long time before we know everything about nuclear.

FWIW, I would be happy to live next door to the new Westinghouse design. Would I leave the radiation monitor permanently connected to the computer? Yes.

 

Most of the coal deaths are preventable, and many of the solutions such as scrubbers have already been implemented in this country. Going forward coal death rate will be lower, but still extremely high.

Nuclear seems like a no-brainer loser. No one would build nuclear in this country without huge subsidies of government insurance and not paying for waste disposal. That does not mean that france, china, and india will not use more going forward. For the united states and the bulk of europe natural gas and renewables will slowly phase out aging nuclear and coal plants.

I would not want to be there, but many choose to live by refineries also.

 

By those numbers, Nuclear is the safest.

 

By those numbers "you may already be a millionaire"
If you are lucky youve already won the magazine sweepstakes.
If you are unlucky,Diablo Canyon gets overrun by 127 terrorists who commandeer the facility and destroy the cooling pumps.Creating a nuclear meltdown which wafts over the entire country.
Try exporting radioactive corn and wheat .

 

I don't think it includes any coal mining deaths. Here are some details, slightly trimmed:

"Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – ***** 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including *******) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 1xx,xxx ******* dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)"


"World average for coal is about 161 deaths per TWh.
In the USA about 30,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 2000 TWh.
15 deaths per TWh.
In ***** about 500,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 1800 TWh.
278 deaths per TWh."

"Air pollution deaths from coal, oil and natural gas are from the analysis of the impact of particulate matter (10 micron and 2.5 micron). Other air pollutants also cause health impacts but the scientific cause and effect is the most clear with particulates."

 

This link made it easy to do something I'd been too lazy to do earlier -- compute the consequences of different panel tilt angles, taking into account the local seasonal weather. Here is a chart derived from the output of the above calculator:



The serious winter cloudcover means that a fixed panel intended for a direct grid tie (not off-grid use) should be biased towards the stronger summer sun, sacrificing output in winter when clouds block a larger fraction of the sun's energy. The 6:12 pitch of my shed roof is close to ideal. The 4:12 pitch of the house isn't so bad either.

I have had a 50W toy system on the house since shortly after the Clinton inaugural disaster. (For non-locals, that is a reference to a massive windstorm-induced power outage, not politics.) Before joining a co-op across the mountains, I'm more inclined to expand this to a ~1kW system on the shed (better location, easier code restrictions than the house) as an additional learning exercise.

Numbers --
Fixed, tilt = latitude: 970 kWH
Fixed, tilted 34 deg: 993 kWH
1-axis tracking, max: 1238 kWH
2-axis tracking: 1293 kWH

 

One difficulty with including nuclear here is the deep disagreement on fatailties caused. IIRC the Chenobyl onsite body count was 36. The offsite cancer deaths were 9000 per some UN organization, 200,000 per Greenpeace, or zero according to some other group whose name I've forgotten.

So what is the right number? I've no idea. I suppose there will be some more to count when we are finished with Fukushima, but again I have no idea how many.

My gut feeling is that coal is truly the loser in this category, but really don't think that helps us towards "The Goal". This is based on the idea that Fossil C and nuclear energy will both be needed and increasing over the next few decades (at least). Therefore whenever you build a new facility of any type, make it as safe and clean as technology allows. Got any old plants that are not up to current standards? Fix or replace them, starting with the worst ones first. Fair to sy that the US took an early lead in that after the Clean Air Act.

But wouldn't it be cheaper to just keep doing these things the old way? Sure, depending on how you count. If Externalities count for nothing, you cannot forsee any chance of geological damage (among other categories), you cannot forsee fossil C shortages, and you willfully choose NOT to lead in developing new energy technology. All that leads to one way of counting, and it teaches us that the old ways are the best ways.