Germany and Switzerland to phase out Nuclear Power.

(And, unsurprisingly, some of that money comes from taxes/fees put on non-renewable plants. When you start to eliminate those plants, guess what else goes away?)

Apparently they play to keep the nuclear tax despite shortening the allowed plant operation period. Needless to say, the nuclear companies are trying to fight it.

edited 31st May '11 6:11:16 PM by storyyeller

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Sounds like you dropped a decimal.

Fight smart, not fair.

I'm a big fan of integrated fast breeder reactors, and how they burn the waste instead of just making more, but if Germany and Switzerland can make their power needs happen with nothing but wind and solar, props to them.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

@Uchuujinsan

The energy industry, particularly nuclear energy, will never be fully privatised to the point where government fiat can't force them to make such changes, if it is normally not the case. However, I dispute that simply because I wasn't talking about security. I was talking about efficiency and safety. Any power generating sector evolves the longer they are around and given the impetus to do so, as has happened time and again with coal-fired plants et al. While they are still polluting, they're not nearly as bad as they were decades ago, because of continued operation and through that, trial and error in trying to comply with regulations or (more unfortunately) accidents.

As I already noted in the alternative fuels thread, aside from numerous safety issues not shared by conservation nor sustainables, conventional nuclear (including thorium) has nowhere near enough fuel to replace fossil power (I calculate about 6 years, tops.)

Also, while I admittedly don't have figures on hand, I recall that conservation and sustainable generation both have lower incremental cost than nuclear, and even coal or gas.

Aside from the fact that “full processing” means “use in still experimental breeders that would transmute everything they eat into plutonium and can accidentally turn into atomic bombs,” most of the waste isn't spent fuel, but just random workplace garbage (clothing, equipment, parts, consumeables…) that happens to be lethally radioactive.

[citation needed]

tl;dr: Not a problem now, will be solved with time to spare.

Long answer: That's only an issue once peak generation exceeds baseload demand, so long as grid demand far exceeds the supply of intermittent sources like solar and wind, none of it will be wasted. There would have to be far more wind and solar generation capacity than at present for storage to actually become an issue. To compound this, one of the major projected consumers of electricity in the near future (electric vehicles) will act as a distributed storage system, since they'll be charged on the cheapest (I.E.: when solar/wind/etc are peaking) electricity. Later, a variety of grid storage systems mentioned by other posters (hydrogen, compressed air, liquid sodium, good 'ol pumped water, etc…) will be installed in sufficient capacity for peak-y power to supply peak demand during off-peak generation.

Eric,

edited 31st May '11 9:28:19 PM by EricDVH

Annnnnd the problem of fuels would be solved by 4th gen reactors, since they would create fissile material from stable one (99.3 % of the world's uranium is 238, useless today since non-radioactive, so, those reactors would just multiply our fuel reserves by more than 140, which, I don't think I have to add, would solve our problem the time fusion is finally on-line).

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

And you can go back to being ignored, just like me when we talk about Shakespeare.

Fight smart, not fair.

^^Like I said in the other thread, breeder generators (including all “next gen” ones, of course) are currently experimental (as they have been for the last 60 years,) are far more accident-prone and dangerous than conventional reactors, transmute all of their fuel into plutonium (and keep it that way as long as possible, to extract as much power as they can from it,) are a GIGANTIC security/proliferation hazard, and are a waste of money to boot (higher incremental cost than conservation/sustainables.)

Also, I can't help but appreciate the irony of your user name.

Eric,

edited 31st May '11 10:52:35 PM by EricDVH

Well, I worked with Mako reactors, and instead of helping my crack scientific teams to improve them and contribute to the well-being of the population or the defense operations, some wannabee eco-heroes blew them up and replaced them by... oil. So, yeah, I've already been there, guys. Germany is Midgar all over again!

Serious Mode: how are the 4th gen more accident-prone, since, like the EPR, they would have a protection to confine the corium in the particularly unlikely scenario of a core melting (which, do I need to recall, only happened with the fifth most powerful earthquake ever known, in a already aging powerplant, so with less security and fail-safes than the modern ones)? For proliferation risks, it's kinda obvious only the P5 (plus Japan, India and Germany, at least, since we know they're reliable with fissile material) countries would have 4th gen reactors with transmutation capability, Areva, Westinghouse and the others would only sell to other countries designs able to use standard fuel created by those reactors. Tough, but fair, since you'd easily find your fuel in one of the big powers and not in a tinpot autocracy like today (be honest, there, it's the case).

And the waste of money, I have yet to see it justified, since, as it doesn't look like energy storage techs are advanced enough to let "green" powerplants work alone (except maybe in Canada, where they have ludicrous hydro reserves for their needs, as well as their secret maple syrup fusion powerplants), nuke plants can provide the energy, while "green" need constant support from coal, oil, gas or nukes.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

The thing about viable 4th gen is that all of them MUST transmute their fuel to plutonium in order to breed. Breeders aside, all “thorium powered” reactors transmute thorium into uranium or plutonium as part of the fuel cycle. The basic idea behind a breeder is to have a large hunk of plutonium sitting in the reactor for as long as possible, otherwise you're not going to squeeze every last drop of power from the fuel, which also results in a negative ERoEI for nearly all the fuel on earth. All of the fuel materials in a breeder are a direct proliferation risk, and it is impossible for a breeder to use any other fuel.

The safety problems I was referring to can be read about in more detail in this post's links. Most particularly the PDF, which details a history rife with sodium fires and other accidents absent in conventional systems plaguing Real Life breeders. Also, of course, (as I noted before) the fact that breeders share so many design features with atomic bombs that they can literally explode just like one by accident.

Grid storage isn't really a technological problem (all of the technologies I mentioned are mature) in my opinion, but rather an infrastructural one. That is, the problem' not a lack of technologies to build, but (much like wind and solar themselves) merely the fact we haven't physically built enough of those extant technologies that they're available for use.

Eric,

edited 31st May '11 11:59:18 PM by EricDVH

Do you realize tour claim about a nuclear ignition in a breeder reactor is linked to a blog, where the post itself is classified as:

"Posted in dubious claims, fast reactors, nuclear engineering, nuclear physics" The link you posted: http://enochthered.wordpress.com/2007/08/20/fast-spectrum-reactors-and-supercriticality/

Somehow, even if we're not The Other Wiki, I don't really think it's reliable enough.

For the other link, well, OK, there are some problems with the sodium coolant, but nearly all of those reactors were research ones, meaning that the technology was indeed not mature at the time, but that's why there are research programs. Should I remind you that the coolant for the different designs of 4th gen reactors is NOT sodium (except for one of them, out of six), but rather supercritical water, liquid metal (like in the Soviet-era Alfa attack subs) or helium. And, well, I never heard about a helium fire.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

Fusion, baby. Fusion.

Hey, we're working on it, but there are a few problems with the flintstones. But don't worry, two high school interns are on the project, and we hope to get them to find a way to bash those rocks all the way to 15,000,000 C° (they should be able to. I mean, we gave them TWO pocket calculators, some coffee and five weeks).

What, is it so obvious I'm complaining about the lack of budget for ITER?

edited 1st Jun '11 12:25:26 AM by RufusShinra

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

Eric, your statement that batteries are just fine because development will eventually allow it to become viable, while the idea that any new nuclear developments are inherently impossible and prone to failure is a little concerning to say the least. The rest of your explanation sounds like it has next to nothing to do with the actual reason batteries are an issue, but I don't think I'm the "battery guy" to be calling anybody out on that here, so maybe forget this part.

Beyond that, I wouldn't mind if you could point me to the source you cited on...geological surveys wasn't it? I'm having a hard time finding it in that old post, if you even linked to it from there. If I remember, the last time I saw it, I recalled that you mostly used a survey source, along with extrapolating some current trends of nuclear energy, and power consumption, to suggest that our uranium and thorium reserves would be completely run dry in some short period of time (like, a decade, or something?) if we immediately had nuclear as the sole power provider.

We can overlook the fact that this does nothing to dismantle the argument that even older nukes have already proven cheaper and more commercially reliable than just about all the other present choices for alternative energy that haven't been exhausted; even if we do not have enough reserves to become fully reliant on them, your estimates would still give us a viable reason to build them, if only so that we wouldn't have to shore up the shortcomings of alternatives with more fossil fuels for the several decades it may take to develop really viable alternative sources.

But if I'm thinking about the actual geological surveys that I know about related to uranium and thorium, it means that making that kind of extrapolation to begin with is a misunderstanding as to how those surveys actually work.

Although like I said, I can't find that part in your older post for the life of me, and that's usually a sign that I'm getting too tired for stuff like this, so I wouldn't mind if you could bring it up again, since I could just be misremembering it.

As for the latest experimental fast breeders, didn't China have one that just turned on a little while ago? How's that doing?

I never said that we should use batteries for grid storage (that's no more practical than using photovoltaics for grid solar,) nor did I say we should wait for future technology to build grid storage. Rather, I noted that there are a number of technologies we can use right now to build grid storage, so technology is a “solved problem,” but that building enough storage to fully offset the difference between peak generation and peak consumption will take time.

My basic argument is that grid storage will only be an issue once we've switched over enough of the grid to sustainable power, which is an event far enough in the future where we'll logically have built the necessary grid storage already.

I can understand why you missed the geological survey links for nuke fuel in the first post I linked, since they're hidden in a hot tip. Just click on the underlined text in that post to reveal it.

@Rufus Shinra: Dubious or not, it was seen as a significant risk by physicists when most breeder programs were shut down and international treaties were put in place banning their construction, and still is. Read the PDF, it has numerous references on the topic, most particularly page 9. I linked that blog post because it neatly summed up the issue, it doesn't dismiss the idea, just casts a skeptical air over it. Keep in mind this is just the worst of many, MANY horrible safety and security problems breeders exhibit.

I admit I'm not familiar with the helium design, but a look into the accident records of current projects that have gone beyond the blueprint stage would no doubt be hilarious.

Also, as I've repeatedly noted, ALL breeders are research reactors, since there are exactly zero commercial breeders.

edit: Ninjas, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

Eric,

edited 1st Jun '11 12:46:48 AM by EricDVH

Well, that's wrong, since Superphénix, in France, was commercial. The greens got it closed, and thus made us lose ten to fifteen years of tech leadership (even if it wasn't perfect as a powerplant, but were giving the CEA and Cogema -now Areva- a lot of practical experience (you know, the same thing ITER is supposed to do: help solving engineering problems with a real case)). And as for the rest, the problems with fast-breeder were, according to the safety issues part in the pdf, mostly linked to the coolant, either sodium or water. With helium or liquid metal, those are on a good way to be solved. And, as told before, why do nuclear powerplants don't have any hope of seeing their problems solved while energy storage problems will inevitably be solved in a short time?

edited 1st Jun '11 12:40:58 AM by RufusShinra

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

Because they're already solved. Grid storage is already a common technology, and most of the newest designs have been commercialized for years, so it's just a question of building more.

Superphénix is a bit of a dubious example, given the fact it wasn't hooked up to the grid until (horribly accident-prone) decades after it went online, whereupon it went right back offline in something like a couple years after yet another malfunction.

edit: Wait, did you just say sodium is dangerous and then call liquid metals perfectly safe in the same breath?

Eric,

edited 1st Jun '11 12:57:36 AM by EricDVH

Huh huh, storage able to recharge then throw dozens of Gigawatts for 12 hours, every single day? Without costing you the GNP of the Galactic Empire?

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

In the Green Energy thread a while ago, I mentioned some ways that energy is currently being stored in wind and solar plants.

All of these are already in use.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Yes, but you didn't answer my question: are they able to store ENOUGH energy, and with a short enough reaction time to compensate solar plants inabilty to work at night? And without costing you an arm.

That's the problem, 'cause we could buy a zillion car batteries and hook them to the grid. It would work, for sure, but it's not practical.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

Wish I had the article here so I could look up the numbers...

For energy storage facilities like these, you're basically gonna have to build a whole lot of them (or very big ones) to cover a huge network of green power plants. Some of these (like the salt thing) are pretty expensive, but some are cheaper.

I'm not sure if these kinds of facilities are currently economically viable in a larger scale, but if memory serves, the ones mentioned in the article, while they were test facilities, were already making a profit.

I think the solution proposed in the article was to build an energy storage facility for every wind farm (or other concentration of green plants) you have. The energy storage facility would then be considered part of the plant complex. It'll greatly increase the cost of building (or expanding to include a facility like this in case of older wind farms) your plants but you'll be producing energy 24/7.

With the newer kinds of wind power plants (not experimental ones, but the newest types that are in use) and the newest types of storage facilities (again, if I remember the figures at all correctly,) you'll need to run the plant (and the energy storage facility) for a couple of years before you'll have made enough to cover the cost. Even with current technology, it is possible to build a wind farm and an energy storage facility that'll serve the whole farm and get the initial investment back in about a decade or so.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

@Rufus Shinra: Yup, most of these technologies now hover around $500-$1500 per kilowatt, with round-trip efficiencies from pumped water's 70% up to well above 95% (as compared with nuclear construction, which regularly runs around $3000-$10000+ per kilowatt,) the demand for power at these prices right now amounts to tens of gigawatts in the USA alone, which will of course skyrocket once mass production lowers costs even further.

Eric,

edited 1st Jun '11 4:12:18 AM by EricDVH

Since I don't recall the numbers from the article and they're probably different now (because of advances in technology and experience) anyway, how well does compressed air compare to water pumps as a means of energy storage?

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

From your link:

For frequency regulation by grid operators, who will want short bursts of energy and therefore a storage time measured in minutes, the least expensive choice is lead acid batteries, which cost $950-$1,590 per kilowatt,

"A storage time measured in minutes"? That's pretty useful to lighten up your country for the whole night... (Sarcasm Mode)

More seriously:

The only storage system that could hold its power for at least a few hours requires huge caves for compressed air, which means you'll have a very limited number of sites where there'll be those devices. In turn, this means additional losses, increasing the cost of this system, while you'll also need at least twice the nominal power capacity, since half of the powerplants will only work to charge up the "batteries", thus increasing the effective cost of the energy. So, with both the double cost of the powerplants, the additional losses and the storage systems themselves, the difference is not as clear as you seem to say.

edited 1st Jun '11 4:28:56 AM by RufusShinra

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

I think this is completely short-sighted. There is no risk of a major Earthquake in either country. They could continue to benefit from nuclear power, but instead react with fear to technology which, if maintained well and secured against natural disasters, can provide a very potent source of energy suitable for 21st-century needs. It's lunacy.

Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]