The Fort Collins Dilemma
Posted by Big Gav on December 2, 2007 - 6:39pm
Shannon Arvizu at Triple Pundit has an article on the dilemma facing the good citizens of Fort Collins in Colorado (and home of Colorado State University--note the advert in the sidebar)- choosing solar or nuclear power.
The New York Times reported today an intriguing article on what's happening in Fort Collins, Colorado - a city that prides itself on being a bastion of green living. The town's motto, "Where renewal is a way of life," is more than just a metaphor. The city is heavily involved in promoting carbon-free energy production. They currently have two proposals on the table - an innovative solar panel production plant and a uranium mining project for nuclear power. Although the energy that wil be generated from each project will be carbon-free, the processes of production and/or extraction each have their own environmental hazards. Should the town support nuclear, solar, or both? And what about the NIMBY factor? Should the town expose itself to possible health hazards for the sake of local job creation and global carbon-free energy production?
This case is an interesting example of the type of decisions that those of us in the sustainable business field have to consider. At first, it may seem like a no-brainer. Fort Collins should support the solar panel production and veto the uranium mining. But, the type of solar panel production that they are considering necessitates the use of cadmium, which could enter the waterways and is linked to cancer. In addition, the amount of clean energy that could be produced from the panels is probably not as much the amount that could be generated from the uranium. Mining uranium, however, has its own host of problems. The plan involves using "in-situ mining," an experimental process developed in the 1950s that injects chemicals into the ground to release the uranium and is pumped to the surface. So...what to do?
I think both options are a bust. Both would bring in local revenue and produce carbon-free energy, but both represent outmoded forms of technology. What about applying cradle-to-cradle principles to energy? Instead of solar panel production, why not, for example, solar thermal production? Harness the sun's energy directly using mirrors and direct the heat to create steam to power energy turbines. The picture for this article is an example of one such plant in operation in the Mojave desert.
Fort Collins shouldn't have to sacrifice their principles, or their health, to make their motto a reality. Residents of this progressive town should consider new ways of eco-efficient technology for their energy needs.
I don't see why you can't build the solar panel production plant and build a solar thermal power plant...
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http://politics.reddit.com/info/61yvf/comments/
thanks for your support...
Wow - I must be posting stuff to TOD in my sleep - I could have sworn I only put this one up at Peak Energy :-)
(not a complaint, just a slightly bemused observation)
Could you send me some of your mojo? I've sent a e-mail to the editors more than a week ago and got no answer so far. I'm very new here, and I don't yet understand the whole process of publishing something. Is there something or someone I should contact?
Why do you spam reddit with every oildrum post? People don't take oildrum seriously that way.
I don't know why PG posts every TOD article to Reddit, but there are 2 schools of thought about the etiquette of this - one is to be very discriminating about what you post, the other is to post whatever you feel like as often as you want and let the voting mechanism decide if it gets widely viewed or consigned quickly to obscurity.
I'm firmly of the second school of thought myself.
Of course, you may run the risk of getting shadow banned if the reddit powers that be decide you are just spamming them with stuff they don't like...
I thought the "why" was in the article:
Maybe there are also other rare resources involved in the production of PV panels?
Cd does not come out of solar panels unless you happen to burn them all in an open pit. Quit sensationalizing.
CdTe cells are made of rare earth metals, formed in supernovae explosions, they are rare, period, but are only needed in dopant amounts around 1E-9 per mol silicon. Therefore the quanitiy being used is very small, I volunteer to lick un-glassed solar panels for a whole day and check my Cd levels later. My 1000$ bet, a sandy tounge and no detectable Cd levels at all.
It's an amorphous crystal for frigs-sake. You have to heat it back to the melt temperature for any appreciable diffusion. The hazard is contained. It is like the nuclear waste they are turning into melted glass and shoving down vents into the earth, it is a GLASS, and a tough one at that, solid diffusion is VERY VERY VERY SLOW.
I worked in a pv mfr lab, and you are soooo wrong
Jeff
Can you be more specific? Gilgamesh's summary is exactly what I would think.
I don't work in PV production but I did do an EE degree in 94 so I have some knowledge.
They're both correct.
Lick the panels all you like - that's safe.
However, at the mfg side you're talking much higher concentrations of really nasty stuff to get diffusion (via high temperature) into the bulk material. If you want to work in a fab plant you've got to be paranoid about everything - leaks can kill you before you could smell or see anything. Using the final product though is a different story except for getting stabbed by pins on an IC.
Then why stop at Cadmium? Electronics is stuffed full of nasty things [at the manufacturing + assembly stage] I dont think you would want Arsenic, Berylium, Gallium, Telurium, Germanium, Phosphorus, Mercury, Americurium, Tantalum, Phosgene, Thorium, CFCs, nastystuffium etc in your Coffee. This issue needed resolving 80 years ago.
ya im an engg too, to purify the waste water stream we need gov costs for different pollutions and the toxicologists to tell us what purification method to use (chemical precipitation, RO, UF, MF, centrifugation, electrodepositation, ion exchange) these processess all require energy, and it is probable that the specific efficiency of solar panels would allow for said filtering.
This is where toxicology comes in to play, we need to know the LOEL and NOEL's for the chemicals to determine economic responses.
I'd happily stir my coffee with a tantalum spoon; the metal is unreactive enough that it's used in medical implants. Also hard enough and refractory enough that making a spoon out of it would be an interesting and quite expensive exercise.
Oliver Sacks has been known to offer guests a gallium spoon for their coffee - gallium melts at about 37C, so the spoon ends up as a little pool at the bottom of the mug - which suggests gallium is not horribly toxic.
I'll spell it out for you...these panels are not just CdTe...they're a combo of Cad Tel, Cad sulfide, and Cad Chloride, lick away my friend, you owe me 1000.00
Jeff
Cadmium is Cadmium. Heat it up...cool it down it's still cad.
CdTe panels are actually made of a cadmium telluride film on glass, rather than silicon; the patent http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5393675-claims.html (by a person who doesn't seem to be involved with First Solar, so the technology may have changed) suggests that the active film is only about a micron thick, and protected on both sides by other cadmium compounds. This isn't a dopant issue.
First Solar seem to be keeping the CdTe step of their work as a trade secret, and are patenting mechanical parts of the apparatus, various laser-cutting processes, chemistry for CVD of materials other than cadmium and tellurium, and a remarkably obvious patent on crushing defective cells and dissolving them in acid before recovering the Cd and Te by electrolysis.
On the whole I'd rather not lick cadmium chloride, since it's reasonably soluble and reasonably toxic. I'd expect any working system to have the CdTe layer pretty well encapsulated.
Tom,
Thank you, a sane person on this thread. I worked for First Solar. 2 years in R & D. One of my tasks was to load the system with cad,tellurinium and sulfide. Chloride was down stream from me...another of my tasks was to measure the surface profile, big bad with that one. Previous to that, I was in the re-cycling dept. I assure U, nothing in that place was recycled...you don't recycle CdTe, you stash it...they still have the cad I wiped off of every panel that didn't make it to Shipping and receiving. Very hazardous, they don't have enough money to throw that sh#t out. Ask yourself this, why bother with the wiping it off of the glass? Cause it's Hazardous!!! Sheesh!!! Plus, it's easier to store. In drums. That are still there. The thing is, if they ever move from that building, the cad's going with 'em. Gee, why's that if it is so friendly?
Jeff
Fort Collins should support the solar panel production and veto the uranium mining. But, the type of solar panel production that they are considering necessitates the use of cadmium, which could enter the waterways and is linked to cancer.
Errr, and when doesn't the heavy metal Uranium not enter the water ways and stopped being linked to cancer?
Hey, why not use the processed Uranium as plant fertlizer?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEEDB1E31F935A25752C1A...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,966085,00.html
The closing line of the NYT article was very perceptive:
"“I don’t know of anyone who’s really for it,” she said of the mine. “But we shouldn’t be giving the other guys a pass because they’re sexy right now.”
Note that the article said cadmium "could" get into the groundwater, not that this was precondition of the production plant. The Fort Collins plant is thus given the opportunity to show the world how to do it right without cadmium release. Given the expense of cadmium, I doubt they are going to want to waste it!
The other major major factor in choosing between the two plants is "which one gives a road forward to the future?"
Since cadmium is mentioned so prominantly, I am assuming the PV plant produces CIGS Copper indium gallium selenide type thin film cell.
These cells have the potential to be the cutting edge of solar PV design in years, even decades to come. There is a real road forward here in development, efficiency improvement, application, etc.
Nuclear however, if we leave aside fusion, seems to be at the end of it's developmental road. There is no real road forward.
This is the error we made with hybrid automobiles. When Toyota produced the first ones almost a decade ago, the Americans looked a the fuel mileage and said, "hey, no great improvement over a small car or a Diesel, they are wasting their time." Bob Lutz, now of GM once called hybrids "show business" and dismissed them.
Now, GM is playing catch up with the Volt, and the U.S. auto makers whine about the Japanese "monopolizing" lithium ion battery development and hybrid control components. What the U.S. did not see, but the Japanese did, was that the hybrid idea provided the bridge to a revolution, and to the "grid based" automobile.
So Fort Collins has to ask itself, of the nuclear option or the solar option, which provides the possibility of a "bridge" to a new paradigm?
The mention of thermal solar only adds to the mix.
Who would have believed only a decade ago that we could even be having this discussion now? Developments are moving VERY fast, it is starting to get the feel of the early silicon valley days! :-)
(edited to correct definitional acronym (CIGS Copper indium gallium selenide)
RC
Yes, looking to the future is not a strongpoint of Detroit.
While Fort Collins fiddles, over in Japan:
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/11/sharp-to-up-thi.html#t...
Sharp is full speed ahead...
IMO this is a no brainer... looking ahead 10, 20, 50, 100 years and one sees that the Sun is the best bet for never-ending energy supply. Nuclear is needed now, and I am not anti-nuke. However, the long term the answer is, and this has been known for decades, solar.
Singapore is getting in on the act too - having no energy resources of your own concentrates the mind wonderfully...
http://sikod.com/blog/2007/10/29/singapore-posed-to-be-the-world-largest...
Some disconnects here..
* the cadmium cells will be under glass film
* the uranium leaching is not part of a reactor
* Colorado is not the Mojave Desert.
My view is approve everything so long as it's not coal.
Yeah, the article is about production of uranium or solar panels not the use of them. I say go for them with the proper safegards. Does it have to be either/or?
The plan is for Cd cells being manufactured there, not just used - so presumably the concern is that Cd leaks out from storage or during the manufacturing process (seems like an easy problem to solve to me, but I'm no expert in manufacturing these things, much as I like them).
Solar thermal probably isn't great in Fort Collins - I had in mind somewhere west of the Rockies - its not like you have to generate power locally (although the merits of distributed and localised power generation should never be underestimated).
The solar cells would be CdTe. There is no more (or less) danger associated with a CdTe solar cell plant than a NiCd battery plant. They both require good engineering practices. If Cd were released into the groundwater as a consequence of either operations someone should be strung up. There is no excuse for it. More of an issue is and an imperative is recycling the used product. This is a silly article that makes a false equivalence.
First Solar used CdTe and only sells commercially so far. This is because recycling the panels is part of price of the panels and so they need a good idea of how to price that.
The NYT article says they'll be producing 4.5 million panels per year. I'm guessing that means 500 MW or greater capacity. It is a little hard to see how a passed over uranium resource could possibly match this. After 20 years of operation they'll have put 10 GW in place. The 9.7 million pounds of uranium mentioned in the article could only produce a fraction of that power. It hardly seems worth the effort.
Chris
"The 9.7 million pounds of uranium mentioned in the article could only produce a fraction of that power."
I don't follow the reasoning for this statement. With the current uranium fuel cycle (no tech advances), we get about 20 Megawatt-hrs per pound of unenriched uranium. The energy of the mined uranium is then about 20 GW-years. For solar, the average capacity over the 20 years is 5 GW assuming a constant rate of production. Assuming a 25% duty cycle, we would expect about 25 GW-years of energy from the solar panels.
These numbers are comparable.
I'm not a subscribed to the NYT, so I can't see the referenced article, but it's important to rememeber that uranium mining can be very energy-intensive. Olymic Dam in South Australia produces around 4,000 tonnes of yellowcake annually, but uses 10% of the state's baseload power to do so.
If the ore of the site under discussion is less rich than Olymic Dam, it will of course take more energy per kg of uranium to extract; if more rich, less.
You mention a figure of 20MWh of electricity "per lb of unenriched uranium." I'm not able to verify this figure. Did you mean,
- triuranium octoxide (U3O8), as sold on the open market?
- uranium dioxide (UO2), used as unenriched rods in pressurised heavy water reactors (29 of 400+ in the world)?
- uranium hexafluoride (UF6) as used to make enriched uranium?
- pure uranium metal?
All these things would affect the final net energy gain, as well as other things like the energy requried for decomissioning (no commercial nuclear power plant in the world has ever been completely decomissioned and dismantled, the site clear and free for other uses).
Likewise, where and how the solar panels are made would also affect their net energy gain.
It's one thing to toss out figures about "20MWh per lb", it's another thing to consider a completely lifecycle analysis to get an EROEI figure. Failing more detailed figures, we'll have to consider the thing on issues other than EROEI.
A further consideration is how quickly the uranium can be mined. We may be able to get (say) 20GWyr of energy from them, but if we can only mine 0.01GWyr each year, that doesn't look so awesome; and if we can get all 20GWyr in on year, then the uranium will be exported from the site, and not available for any power plant, they'll be having to import stuff.
"I'm not a subscribed to the NYT"
- Registration is now free!
"Olympic Dam in South Australia produces around 4,000 tonnes of yellowcake annually, but uses 10% of the state's baseload power to do so."
- The website for Olympic Dam says 120 MW average total load from the electrical grid. This is about 1/8 of the electrical output of a typical plant. Over the course of a year, this power produces over 100,000 tons of copper, some gold, and some silver, along with the uranium. That 4,000 tons of U is enough to fuel over 50 nuclear power plants for that year, so the electrical energy return on electrical energy invested seems very good.
"You mention a figure of 20MWh of electricity "per lb of unenriched uranium."
- I am using the same context as the article, U3O8, aka yellow cake. My reference is Bernhard Cohen, at:
The Nuclear Energy Option
He derives the 20MWh per pound figure from 33 x 10^6 kW-days of heat per 1000 kg of U3O8. This number comes from LeMarsh's Introduction to Nuclear Engineering.
In any case, due to the large mass of U compared to O or F, the uranium fraction in each of the 4 compounds you mention differs by less than a factor of 2 from the others.
An excellent analysis of the overall net energy gain is available at: http://nuclearinfo.net/ (done by some fellow Aussies BTW)
This is a fair analysis of the situation for nuclear power, unlike the much touted work of Storm and Smith.
I don't think we should give up on the life cycle analysis. There are complications, but based on the apparent high EROEI of the current nuclear industry, it is something that must be considered. IMO, we need to reach consensus on a qualitatively satisfying analysis first, before we can honestly push the figures much farther. Some people seem to want to make nuclear power safer than the ore sitting undisturbed in the ground. Of course, they forget about erosion. :-)
As far as tossing out figures, look at the parent post. MDSolar says he is guessing! :-)
As far as mining speed goes, this seems to be a modest uranium mine. The yearly output of Olympic Dam is just about the total resource of this Colorado mine.
Here is a scenario: We mine at 0.1 GW-yr, so the life of the mine is 200 years, feeding a modest 100 MW power plant. In about 50 years, we lose the technology to make replacement parts for the 1990s tech of the solar panel plant. The last solar panel conks out at the 100 year mark. We manage to keep the 1950s technology necessary to maintain the nuclear plant for the full 200 years. Nuclear is then 100 years more "sustainable" than the solar option.
You need to read your link more carefully. Their "Full Energy Analysis of Nuclear Power" is completely bogus. They claim an EROEI of 93 by hiding the energy needed to enrich the uranium.
My guess was on the size of individual panels. Because CdTe has lowish efficiency I was figuring about 120 W so they would not be awkward to handle with lifting equipment. (First Solar does 72.5 W and these guys think they are in a position to compete.) Some folks are going for the utility market with this kind of stuff so they make kW plus panels. As it turns out they are planning 65 W modules, but their production cost will be under $1/Watt while First Solar's cost is still above $1/Watt. Based on the efficiency data on their web site I expect their actual panels will be more like 80 W than 65 W, but we'll see.
Chris
Are you refering to this webpage?
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
I think that you may be misinterpreting their statement. In order to provide the 1 KWh of electricity, the nuclear plant has to "burn" some uranium. This is about 0.023 grams of U. In order to get that uranium, and build the plant to burn it, they tabulate the non-nuclear energy inputs. There is also an extra 0.003 grams of U that is burned in reactors in France to enrich the natural uranium to LEU fuel. That is how they get the 0.026 grams of U that is mentioned. Note this 0.003 gram figure will improve as more gas centrifuge enrichment is used instead of gaseous diffusion.
True to a certain degree. The figure of 93 does indeed not include the energy required to enrich the uranium. This can be calculated by looking at the spreadsheet of energy inputs from the Forsmark nuclear plant EPD on the nuclearinfo website. According to this, 1kWh of electricity requires 146kJ of fuel throughout the lifecycle, giving an EROEI of:
(3600*1kWh/146kJ) = 24.7
a more modest, but still respectable figure.
However, it would be wrong to end the analysis here as 25% of the uranium is enriched using energy intensive diffusion methods. This uses more than 40 times the energy of the more modern centrifuge plants (2500 kWh/SWU vs. 60 kWh/SWU). The spreadsheet tells us that of the 146kJ used to produce each kWh of electricity, 77kJ is spent on enrichment. We can estimate how much this would be reduced if the diffusion plants were replaced with centrifuge:
(100/((25*40)+75))*77kJ = 7.2kJ
Thus, total lifecycle fuel requirements for the Forsmark plant with centrifuge only enrichment can be estimated as 76.2kJ/kWhe, giving an EROEI of:
(3600*1kW)/76.2 = 47.2
So the EROEI of 93 quoted above is out by a factor of two for the Forsmark plant if it used 100% centrifuge enriched uranium (as will almost all nuclear plants after the diffusion ones shut over the next decade or so). Third generation nuclear plants likely to be built in the early part of this century have higher burn ups and thermal efficiencies, so it would seem fair to state that they will have an EROEI > 50.
Certainly not to be sniffed at.
[The discrepancy between the spreadsheet EROEI without enrichment (52) and that on the nuclearinfo website (93) is caused by conversion of hydro into primary energy (x3) on the spreadsheet]
In the context of what they are trying to do, counter the claims of Storm and Smith, what they have done is highly deceptive. Given that France devotes the entire output of three reactors to enrichment, the EROEI for their program can't be more than about 7. Their plan to switch to centrifuges appears to be in trouble, so assuming that centrifuges will become dominant soon is on shaky ground.
To me, a life cycle analysis of nuclear power can't be done until many things have occured. Not least, the US congress must reauthorize the Superfund tax, which is has failed to do since 1995. Cleanup of uranium mines is an energy expense that has not yet been fathomed. The final energy cost of transmuting nuclear waste is unknown as well. With present technology this would reduce the EROEI of nuclear power well below unity.
Chris
I thought it was clear they presented information on the non-nuclear energy input versus the nuclear energy output.
Given that France has 59 reactors, (59-3)/3 is more like 19 than 7 for a quick and dirty EROEI.
There are not any real technical difficulties switching to gas centrifuges. If Iran can build this industry from the ground up in the face of opposition from the West, I think that France can do it regardless.
I think that Peak Oil is going to motivate the public to reprioritize how they weigh the risk of nuclear power. Right now alot of people are willing to spend billions of dollars to prevent a single nuclear-related death per year. In the future, when Peak Oil impacts the electrical grid, people will probably realize that expansion of reliable base load capacity will save many more lives than mitigating a tailing pile out in the middle of the Nevada desert.
You mention an energy cost for transmuting nuclear waste. It is very probable that we will get much more energy out of the "waste" than we do from the original burn of the nuclear fuel. With a breeder or fast reactor technology, we have enough "waste" to burn that we would not need to mine any more uranium for at least a century.
You forget that they convert to electricity before enriching so they have a thermodynamic factor.
At last check, breeders are not legal in the US and are considered not economically viable in France. It is very doubtful that breeder programs will get much further than they have. A new 1.5 GW solar fabrication plant is going in in Singapore and that should put an end to India's program since the manufacturing cost will be quite low and thus much less expensive than nuclear power. The last estimate I heard for new nuclear construction was $5/watt as a partial accounting. That was for a plant in Oklahoma.
I'm suprised that you feel that nuclear power should not clean up after itself. Is it something you don't like about Nevada?
Chris
Sheesh, you play fast and loose with math. Its not a legimate move.
Second, all of Frances enrichment capacity goes towards more than just the french power market.
Breeders are legal, though intensly difficult to liscence. I'm not sure where you pull your magic bag of misinformation from. Liquid metal fast breeder reactors aren't now economically viable and likely wont ever be economically viable since they attempt to solve the problem no one is going to have except states desperately attempting to get strategic deterrant as fast as possible: A shortage of plutonium.
However its quite plausible that molten salt reactors could have much higher economic competitiveness than light water reactors:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
A textbook illustration of a strawman argument.
Strange, they could have used hydro, a power source that does not have a big thermodynamic factor, but they did not. So, you want to discount energy invested for some reason or other. If they had used hydro, would you insist that only a third of the energy was used?
The EROEI of nuclear power is manifestly not very high. For some reason there are people who wish to hide this by dishonest means. Years ago you might forgive people who find themselves in awe of E=mc^2, but now, with electricity still not too cheap to meter, the inefficiencies are pretty obvious. Since there are vastly superior alternatives, it is time to shut the reactors down and concentrate on cleaning up after them.
Chris
It sounds like you are criticizing the fact that nuclear power is constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. In France, we use the electrical power of 3 reactors to enable 56 other reactors to provide generally useful electrical power. We do not count the waste heat from the 3 reactors as valuable input, just as we do not count the waste heat from the 56 reactors as useful output. It is like an equation where a common factor can be cancelled from both sides. Note also that we could use the "waste" heat from all 59 reactors for district heating/cooling.
It seems like this sort of reasoning could be applied to other forms of energy conversion. The Earth only intercepts 1 part in 500 million of the Sun's energy. This is smaller than 1/100 of a period at the end of this sentence, relative to the area of the entire page. Horrible waste! :-) On top of this, our photovoltaics can only convert about 20% of that energy to electricity. This is worse than the 33% conversion efficiency of a nuclear plant.
It is too easy for some people to label others with divergent views. I don't think there is anything manifest about solar or nuclear power. Recall Einstein's "For every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong."
You may think me dishonest, or unforgivable, for not seeing your vastly superior alternatives, but here is an observation I think is relevant. In psychology, they talk about the concept of transference. In regards to nuclear power, we may have a sort of collective transference, where the horrors of the atomic bomb have poisoned the public's minds against nuclear power. Our understandable revulsion of fission and fusion weapons creates in our fallible minds an inappropriate certainty of nuclear power's poor merit. We may think we can consciously compensate for this tendency, but we can't be certain of this.
I don't think nuclear power, as it is currently used, can be applied to district heating. Power plants are built to serve vast areas at the cost of being subject to catastophic accidents. There would simply not be the demand for heat within reach of a typical nuclear plant. Let me try another example. If we were using a life cycle analysis to look at a coal plant and we needed to measure the energy used to run a buldozer to prepare the construction site. Would we only count the horsepower or would we count the energy content of the fuel? In the classic example of running and oil well using oil from the well, the point at which you use exactly as much oil as you get is the operational point where EROEI equals one. You don't count the horsepower, you count the oil because all of its energy is expended.
On the other hand, with solar power there is no waste, regardless of efficiency, because we invest nothing in making the Sun shine. To calculate EROEI for renewable resources we count the energy we invest to intercept the flow of the resource. For some time to come, boosting efficiency will boost EROEI because PV can get up to 80% efficiency before it reaches a thermodynamic limit. This kind of makes a point that the solid state physics behind solar power is much more elegant than the rock banging physics used in nuclear power. While there is a relationship between elegance and simplicity, it is not one-to-one so the crude simple physics of nuclear power makes for clumsiness rather than elegance. This is why Chernobyl is killing migratory birds and will continue to do so. Wind power, on the other hand, is learning to avoid this problem. The use of renewable energy rises above the mindset of exploiting depletable resources that has created so many of the problems we face today.
I don't think you dishonest, just taken in by a false and deceptive claim that the EROEI of nuclear power is 93. Now that you have been undeceived, you can view the issues more clearly. Low EROEI is not the only problem with nuclear power, it is also depletable on a short timescale and prone to accidents that remove large areas of land from habitability. It produces wastes that must be unmade, likely at a high cost in energy, and is a contributing factor in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It also strongly promotes the habit of keeping state secrets and thus is detrimental to the cause of liberty.
Chris
mdsolar: "Low EROEI is not the only problem with nuclear power"
Did we not go through the calculation of EROEI for nuclear above and conclude that it was in the range 25-50 for 2nd generation plants and likely higher for any new build? And that was with the hydroelectric inputs multiplied by 3 to convert to equivalent thermal energy.
Either you believe an EROEI of 25 or above is low or you have some problem with my sums. The spreadsheet for the audited LCA for the Forsmark nuclear plant is available here so you're more than welcome to do your own calculation.
Not only does nuclear have a healthy and increasing EROEI but it provides power 24/7 for years at a time. Modern industrial societies will need that consistency for some time to come and they won't be getting it from solar.
I was glad to have your agreement the EROEI=93 is incorrect, but I did not follow much further since the data seem tainted. We can estimate that the EROEI for the french program has to be less than about 7 which is in reasonable agreement with the Storm and Smith result.
At present, the US program is likely running at an EROEI below unity because it's fuel is sources from diluted HEU. We're largely getting poorly transmitted Soviet hydro power in very dirty batteries.
Interconneted wind does 24/7 quite well and is forecastable whereas nuclear plants are subject to unplanned outages implying greater need for spinning reserve.
Chris
By what?
You dont get to multiply the system efficiency by the thermodynamic efficiency of the power plant, and the French enrichment facilities have more than french power plants as customers. I suspect you know you're lying also; Which is worse, being willfully ignorant or just being a lying bastard?
It is true that the French nuclear program is very heavily subsidized and they can and do dump their power but they do not run the only enrichment program in Europe. If you have a count of their customers, produce it. It won't affect the calculation much since they have most of the reactors there. Also, learn some manners.
Chris
http://www.uic.com.au/nip33.htm
Note the table :World Enrichment capacity (thousand SWU/yr)
France - Areva 10,800* 10,800*
Out of a total of 48,428 SWU/yr, a full 1/5th of global supply.
This is for all reactors, military enrichment, naval reactors, HEU. Your numbers are intrinsically flawed, and you know it. You're an outright liar. You're distorting figures deliberately.
Of course it affects it. Global enrichment serves the nearly 500 power reactors, more research reactors, stockpiling, in addition to weapons material and other HEU such as naval reactors which consume far more SWU than the light enrichment for power reactors.
Bull. Coal emissions measures tons of CO2, not thermal energy wasted. Lets say that the diffusion enrichment plants only serviced French reactors rather than the entire Areva customer base in all of France, and many other host countries and the French military. You still have 59 plants output / 3 plants input. Theres no 'thermodynamic losses' that are applied here.
Oh you can add them if you want... You have 59 plants that put out some 200 plants worth of thermal power that get converted back to 59 plants of electrical power that takes 3 plants to run an enrichment facility.
And its still fallacious because diffusion enrichment is dead in a decade anyways!
You are digging yourself into a hole. Just about everyone else but you is aware that much nuclear generation presently is using historic Soviet enrichment. Thus, your attempt to stretch enrichment capacity to supply all reactors requires substantial correction.
Hopefully all enrichment is dead in a decade. We can't really afford such a poor power source.
Chris
Wrong on two counts:
On top of this, nothing stops the world from retiring diffusion plants and replacing them with centrifuges; the only limitation now is lack of pressure to do so. I believe it is you who should stop digging.
Another day, another lie.
I've rarely seen anyone so deliberately full of crap and completely obstinate in their position in the face of all the evidence.
Your little accounting trick to magically divide the energy ratio by 3 was a lovely little piece of nonsense. You dont get to do it.
I'm afraid it is true about the birds. Very sad. You might want to do a little homework on nuclear power. You don't seem very well informed.
On the accounting, if it were coal, it would certainly be counted. The bit of "work" you champion is attempting to hide invested energy to hide carbon dioxide emissions. The correct approach on emissions would be to look at the European mix of power but they want to sneak around this. They are intentionally deceiving the reader. I suggest you drop it.
Chris
The work that you cite about the barn swallows is an ecological study of birds in the wild, which constrains how the results can be interpreted. There are many confounding factors for which the researchers need to compensate. There are alternate hypotheses that could explain the observations as well as the one that the researchers appear to champion. One possibility is that the low level radiation has augmented the health of birds that would normally have died. The fact that this study contradicts other more tightly controlled laboratory-based studies indicates that correlation probably does not equal causation.
The physicists that present the accounting you are suspicious of are on a first name basis with mathematical ideas like the geometric series, and they may have assumed others would see how it applies. In the situation they present for Vattenfall, there is nuclear fuel burned in order to enrich the nuclear fuel that is burned in Vattenfall. Of course, that uranium would also need some uranium for its enrichment. If we take this ratio to be around 1/7 ( 0.003 grams of U to enrich the 0.023 grams needed to produce 1 KWh), then the total amount of uranium is 1/(1-1/7) times 0.023 grams, or 0.02683 grams of uranium Total to produce 1 KWh. This number is not that different from the 0.026 grams given on the webpage. It would change the figure of 93 they calculate to around 80, a number that still supports their arguments.
If there is any deception to be found here, I think it is more on the side of Storm and Smith, and it is that most potent variety, self-deception.
Actually, the study is interesting because it does work out a bit from the center. In the center, the bird just drop dead. I suppose it could be invisible mutant elves with bb guns doing that if you want to offer an objection to that. Chernobyl poisoned a vast area. Denying this is a little silly.
Again, they are trying to hide emissions but their method leads to a patently obvious falsehood about EROEI. They are attempting to decieve. Apparently you have been taken in.
Chris
You haven't the slightest idea what the energy accounting is, do you? You measure the electrical power out, the thermal power isn't even in the figures. Do you even know anything about thermodynamics or is it a new word for you?
I think that, in contrast to the original article, we are in agreement that the solar plant produces more energy. I would take all 10 GW of power for the manufactured panels since the plant will give over to recycling after 20 (or perhaps 30) years. After that point, it no longer adds to generating capacity. Of course, we could extend the use of that 10 GW of capacity that the plant supports arbitrarily into the future, something that would not be an option with the uranium.
Chris
First a quote from the metallurgist-philosopher Chris Shaw:
"In the (alas, too few) years to come, we will see great argument over the proper allocation of dwindling oil reserves. It will be realised that other sources of energy cannot deliver sufficient surpluses to replace the potent portable energy we know as gasoline and diesel. It is not generally understood that poorer quality energy sources can be critically dependent on oil for their extraction, processing and distribution. In other words, oil is the precursor for other sources of energy; gas, coal, nuclear, solar, hydro, because these require oil fuel to create and maintain infrastructure. It also gives them the illusion of being profitable." http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3837
Neither solar nor nuclear are carbon free. The construction/implementation of solar or nuclear uses considerable oil, natural gas, and coal. And if all of the energy inputs in mining, personnel transport, processing of ores, silicon, glass, materials transport, maintenance etc. are counted, the EROI could be very low for solar, and it is spread out over a very long period of time. Read Shaw's brief article. Do we really want to expend oil and natural gas to get solar/electric power (or nuclear/electric power? Electric power is not the liquid fuels that produce and transport food, nor the fertilizer for food production source?
cjworth - "Neither solar nor nuclear are carbon free. The construction/implementation of solar or nuclear uses considerable oil, natural gas, and coal. And if all of the energy inputs in mining, personnel transport, processing of ores, silicon, glass, materials transport, maintenance etc. are counted, the EROI could be very low for solar, and it is spread out over a very long period of time."
You are of course forgetting that solar PV is probably the most energy intensive of the renewable options. Solar thermal is much less and its payback and EROI is much higher. Also concentrating solar PV uses much less silicon. Wind is also quite low in carbon inputs with a very fast payback.
Nuclear is by far the worst option. Apart from the energy needed to enrich the fuel you have construction plus decomissioning and the energy required to store and safeguard the waste. The waste management is almost never mentioned by nuclear proponents and would be hugely energy intensive when someone actually does it properly rather than the band-aid solutions that seem to be prevalent today.
You seem to be saying that solar is the best of the worst. Why move in a bad direction at all? You do not give any figures on ALL of the energy investments for PV. As Chris Shaw notes, oil gives alternatives the illusion of providing net energy. Let's deal with this before wasting a lot of valuable fossil fuels... And if ALL of the energy inputs in mining, personnel transport for ALL operations for solar, processing of ores, silicon, glass, materials transport, buildings where the PV panels are made, lighting/heating/AC for those buildings, and maintenance of everything over the lifetime etc. are counted, the EROEI could be very low (possibly zero) for solar, and it is spread out over a very long period of time. Why waste fossil fuel energy to get electric power which is not what we need? We need liquid fuels. The proponents of solar must study this and report on it, before more good energy is wasted to get bad energy.
Clif;
The energy inputs for PV have been discussed repeatedly, and while they don't delve into the gastank of the Roach Coach that sits in the Solar Factory Parking lot, the fact that the NREL reports show the 'Balance of System' components can recover their basic invested energy in under 4 yrs, yet will produce for 30 or more is convincing enough an argument to me that if we have a Simple, Portable, Low-Maintenance tool for harvesting Sunlight Directly into Electricity, then we have good cause to be building the stuff. It's already out there in countless places, replacing generators on highway roadsigns, cabling on callboxes and who-knows-How-many unseen applications like that, regularly replacing tons of mercury in millions of desk calculators, etc etc. It works quietly and dependably with no maintenance, and will keep doing so in a coming time where we might be trying to attend the maintenance on Far Too Many other levels.. that quiet contribution will be priceless!
'Electric power which is not what we need..' No? Read Alan's 'Light Rail Now'.. we've had electric transportation solutions all along, but have been sweet-talked out of using them by underpriced Petrol. Be it Freight or Commuters, we could do some serious destruction to our FF demands with Electric Rail. Of COURSE we need to be implementing new electric generation for the Grid, which depends so heavily on Fossil fuels at this point, as well as distributing the generation to more of the Load points, to relax the pressures on the grid as it now stands..
I don't disagree with your premise that we have no single or combination of Alternatives to meet with our current energy usage. But the answer to that is NOT to eliminate what alternatives we do have available, but to develop what generation we can, while cutting our consumption in every way possible, to try to get them to 'meet in the middle' somewhere. Even if we can't get the road-speed down and the engine speed up enough before the clutch engages, the need will be to get them as close as possible (energy supply and demand) to minimize the jolt when those friction plates finally grab.
Best,
Bob Fiske
Excuse me. I understand that this is a site that is dedicated to the liquid fuels crisis, but to imply that we don't need electricity or that electricity cannot be a transportation fuel is sort sighted. The EROI for photovoltaics is a fundamental figure of merit and one of the reasons that CdTe looks very good in relation to single crystal silicon.
Although I like all forms of solar for electrical generation, it must be noted that CSP (Which I am a proponent of) is suited for centralized power generation. PV modules have the strength of providing distributed power.
The strength of all these technologies is as an alternative to coal. Unless you are among those who deny the reality of global warming, turning to coal for increased electricity generation is something that we really should be trying as hard as possible to avoid.
If we postulate a role for electricity as a transportation fuel it will be difficult to avoid that fate without a significant effort to expand alternative means of generating electricity. Indeed, the need is so great that we really can't afford the luxury of rejecting any with a positive EROI. CdTe photovoltaic solar cells are one of those alternatives.
cjwirth,
You have not read the article. They are planning on using CdTe, not silicon. The EROEI for CdTe is 27 in a somewhat typical place in the US, but is higher near CO. But, for silicon you get an especially big boost when you recycle so it ends up with an even higher EROEI than for CdTe in the long run.
Remember that EROEI for oil has to be averaged up to the point where we kick the habit. So, oil's EROEI is likely to be no larger than the average of conventional oil and tar sand oil, perhaps around 15 and similar to coal. The EROEI for solar only gets better with time.
Chris
Cjwirth - "You seem to be saying that solar is the best of the worst. Why move in a bad direction at all? "
I am saying nothing of the sort. Solar PV is best when a reliable and maintenance free solution such as the top of domestic houses in needed. Solar Thermal is best in large central plants.
"And if ALL of the energy inputs in mining, personnel transport for ALL operations for solar, processing of ores, silicon, glass, materials transport, buildings where the PV panels are made, lighting/heating/AC for those buildings, and maintenance of everything over the lifetime etc. are counted, the EROEI could be very low (possibly zero) for solar"
Well if you go that far for nuclear as well you could well find the same thing. Nuclear does not get the uranium mined and seperated or transported to the enrichment plant. Nor does it transport the nuclear fuel to and from the enrichment plant. The generally accepted figure for Solar PV is 8 or 10:1
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html
From this document also note the the uranium figures are for very high grade ore from the Ranger Uranium mine. As Peak uranium hits lower grade ore will result in dramatically lower EROI while the solar PV will still be chugging along.
"Why waste fossil fuel energy to get electric power which is not what we need? We need liquid fuels. The proponents of solar must study this and report on it, before more good energy is wasted to get bad energy."
Why are you so fixed on liquid fuels. Electricity is perfectly able to substitute for liquid fuels in all but a few niche areas. Nuclear does not give us liquid fuels either unless you mean to use it to mine the tar sands. In this case how does the 50:1 EROI of nuclear add up with the 3:1 at absolute best of the tar sands. Then only to be burnt in a 15% efficient IC car. If I were a nuclear advocate I would be building the nukes near the supply instead of outback in Alberta. This way you can fill cars with electric energy direct from the nuke plant rather than turning it into oil first and wasting just about all of it and turning most of Alberta into a desert wasteland.
There is no time to develop the solar economy you envision and the capital to do it does not exist. Proponents of solar have not fully examined ALL of the energy inputs, and the real EROEI is probably less than 1, and if above 1, it is realized over a long period of time. Liquid fuels provide food and transportation. You have no real plans for farming and transporting food, just some dream that cannot possibly be realized given the pathetic real EIOER and the time frame of peaking, 2006 and we are on the slope. I suggest that you start by doing an analysis of all inputs for solar before taking the nation down a dead end road that consumes vital energy. Then, look at PO at 2006, and increasing costs of energy for getting to PV and the capital availability for trillons of dollars, and the fact that when oil hits just $200 a barrel solar will be dead in the water. The Wall Street Journal reported 2 weeks ago that solar was in trouble with sales due to high oil costs. Time to get a grip on the larger picture and change gears before you mire the nation in the quicksand of solar dreams. After peaking we will go into recession and have lots of spare electric power and don't need to waste oil, natural gas, and coal on constructing the wasteful dreams of the solar ideology.
While we may fail in the pursuit of renewable, low carbon energy, the processes for developing solar cells, for example, are improving, and solar manufacturers are learning how to use less and less materials such as silicon in their production. The cost of PV is coming down and the energy required to produce PV is coming down. Whether or not these costs come down low enough is one of conjecture and some debate, but it is clear that the continued pursuit of an oil based economy is a loser.
Are you suggesting that because solar may currently be an energy loser that we should continue our reliance on a guaranteed loser -- oil? Or, are you suggesting that we should continue our reliance on liquid fuels with such pursuits as biofuels, shale oil, and the like. At best, the latter types of liquid fuels have a very marginal, if any, positive return on investment.
You seem to imply that we will be entering a permanent recession and this, somehow, will free up plenty of electric power on an indefinite basis.
Recession or not, oil has peaked or will peak shortly. Recession or not, demand will continue to increase with the increasing demands from countries like China and India. Recession or not, our ability to obtain fossil fuels will be both limited and dangerous. It is pretty much guaranteed that a continued reliance of fossil fuels will be a disaster both for the economy and the planet, or take your pick.
You admit that oil is peaking but yet do not provide any alternatives for what you think is a requirement for the continued consumption of liquid fuels.
Since liquid fuels will become so increasingly precious, it sounds like we need to find away to transition away from them, starting with transportation and heating.
While there will be continued to doubt whether or not we can make a transition to a healthy society and planet with renewables, it is clear that our current path is unsustainable.
Tstreet;
Since Clif won't answer this, maybe you will.
HOW do you get to the conlusion that Solar is an 'Energy Loser'? It has been clearly shown that it can fully recover its embodied energy, with up to 15-20 times that amount in surplus thereafter. What other inputs do you attribute to mfr'ing PV that brings its EROEI to under One? (or "Zero", as CJ was suggesting originally)
Just because it's expensive? I know that's anathema for a source in our cheap-power society.. but it doesn't change its actual energy yield.
Bob Fiske
Bob Fiske
Just for the sake of argument,I was admitting the possibility that solar may currently be an energy loser, but I am not stipulating that. There seem to be a lot of claims in both directions. My main point is that the oil path or the coal path is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. If one truly feels that we are peaking with respect to oil, it would be prudent to pursue a number of alternatives, even if there is some current uncertainty as to whether we can sustain a reasonable economy by doing so.
Notice I didn't say that it is required to continue happy motoring or our current growth paradigm. If we have to eliminate growth or even decrease our GDP in order to maintain some semblance of a habitable planet, than, by all means, so be it.
We don't have all or even most of the answers and it may also be that we need to start asking different questions.
The economics are getting better and will continue to do so despite more expensive oil.
We should proceed full speed ahead on solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable low carbon or zero carbon fuel or energy sources. And I don't reject nuclear, at least for some interim period of time. Waste is a problem but then we already have a significant amount of waste for which a solution still needs to be found.
The situation we are in is way worse than World War II and yet there is no crash program to do anything. During WWII, private auto production was virtually halted. We should do the same thing in this emergency, except perhaps for those autos that provide at least 45 miles per gallon. This is just one place where we should free up as much capital as possible for a sustainable, renewable, low carbon, low consumption society.
Right. Thanks for explaining.
Even after I posted, I realised that you had made the 'energy loser' comment a hypothetical. I think I can understand how people get riled about PV, since it often becomes the 'Poster Child' of Alt-Energy, and thus gets painted also as a panacaea, which it is not. It also gets draped in the Hippy Flags, and is probably disliked somewhat for the cultural assumptions that go with that.. ("Solar Panels are only ideal for powering Free-love Communes where deodorant is forbidden and you have to sing Mr.Rogers songs for every morning's Gaia Prayer. Go Solar, man!")
Yeah, I think that Clif, your 'There's no time to build a solar economy' is a strange hyperbole. It's like my friend Chris's old line. "I don't want to buy happiness.. just a boat and some other stuff!" You don't have to build a 'whole economy', whatever that is.. but I DO think we have an opportunity while we still have some energy to play with to build out the manufacturing for items that can ultimately help to power themselves as their output comes on line. The fact that there's little or no TIME says to me that we have to buy ourselves the kind of accelerated time we can only leverage with the energy that's put us into this predicament in the first place. Use it to build it's replacement.. not JUST to keep driving to our jobs that continue running down the old source. You could say that it's hypocritical or just too ironic.. I say it's poetic justice and possibly one of the only routes that CAN buy us that time to build out technologies that can live within a post-peak world.
I'm a huge supporter of Lovins' 'Negawatts', and much of the stuff I design and build is to get work done without electricity or burning fuels at all. But if you have a way of showing where PV manufacturing would actually turn 'negative', I would like to hear a more specific argument.
I will look at your article again, but if you can share some of the specific mechanisms (ie Failure Modes?) that you are concerned over, it would be useful for me to hear them.
Best,
Bob Fiske
cjwirth - "Proponents of solar have not fully examined ALL of the energy inputs, and the real EROEI is probably less than 1"
So post the reference to backup this statement or retract it. The reference I posted, if you read it, had all the renewables at over 8:1 so you insistence that it is less than one is plainly ridiculous.
"Liquid fuels provide food and transportation"
So how do you get nuclear fuels from nuclear?
"I suggest that you start by doing an analysis of all inputs for solar before taking the nation down a dead end road that consumes vital energy."
This has been done many times with the same answer - please read the posted link - it is after all a nuclear proponent link not a renewable power link.
"hen, look at PO at 2006, and increasing costs of energy for getting to PV and the capital availability for trillons of dollars, and the fact that when oil hits just $200 a barrel solar will be dead in the water."
You seem to have this strange fixation with Solar PV and think this is the only renewable technology. The future energy mix will include solar PV as well as Solar Thermal, wind, geothermal, wave and tidal as well as fossil fuels.
"Time to get a grip on the larger picture and change gears before you mire the nation in the quicksand of solar dreams."
Exactly as you should get a grip before you mire the nation in a greenwashed wet nuclear dream.
In other words, we need to keep the low efficiency, pollution and toxicity problems of the current system.
The truth is otherwise. Long-haul freight is easily electrified (via rail). Local freight is going electric. Personal transport can go electric via either
three wheel or four wheel vehicles. We can supply these vehicles with carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative electricity. We need far less liquid fuel than we are using even in the mid-term, and ultimately that number will approach zero.
You're being deliberately misleading. The EROEI of a powerplant is spread over as much as 50 years, possibly more. OTOH, the payback time of a PV panel was calculated as 2 years for single-crystal and 1 year for amorphous... way back about 1999. Those estimates are now very dated and probably pessimistic.
Later in the thread, you say:
They are not required for transportation, and people do not eat liquid fuels. Nitrate isn't made from liquid fuels; it's usually made from natural gas, and may some day be made electrolytically from atmospheric nitrogen, water and whatever electric source is cheap.
You're not contributing anything besides the opportunity (necessity) to refute your false claims. Why are you posting here?
would be hugely energy intensive when someone actually does it
Off topic maybe but a fair comment. Even the Forsmark method seems expensive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3
However a uranium miner told me he doesn't see why disused tunnels and shafts of working mines can't be used to reduce the cost. The tight security, radiation monitoring and logistics are already in place as is knowledge of groundwater (if any) and tectonics. This seems to be not the case for places like Yucca Mountain.
As for the suggestion that nuke waste be stored in highly protected and monitored former uranium mines, I have never seen a highly protected and monitored former uranium mine. In SE Utah where uranium was mined for years (and is being mined again after a hiatus), there are literally hundreds of former mines that you can walk right into, if you know the access points. You might be able to use one for storage, just as you could use a former coal mine or any other shaft type mine, but you still have so many environmental issues you might as well send it to Yucca or wherever...
If there was a reliable way of sending it into space, that would be the ticket....
It wouldn't have to be reliable. All the nuclear waste that presently exists, if it could somehow be thoroughly mixed into the ocean, would only alter the ocean's concentration of radioactivity by a small fraction. In fact it could not be dissolved, UO2 being an insoluble material -- Google (uraninite placer) to learn more, uraninite is its mineral name -- so if flying saucers were nuclear-powered, and were surreptitiously dipping into the deep Pacific to dump out their spent fuel rods, and were using as many gigawatts as our land-based plants are, we would have no way to even find this out.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
UO2 (uraninite or pitchblende) may be insoluble, but it weathers (oxidizes) to hexavalent U which is highly soluble in aqueous solutions - the basis for many in situ mining technologies. Organic matter or other reducing agents precipitate uraninite, but most of the oceans, at least near the surface, are oxidizing, which would favor high uranium solubility. That's not to say I disagree with the rest of your post.
Iron, BTW, behaves the opposite from uranium - it's oxides are precipitated by oxidation (whereas UO2 is precipitated by reduction). This is one reason why the ocean surface is highly depleted in iron, and why one atmospheric engineering idea involves "fertilizing" the sea surface with soluble iron.
Do you know anything about the nuclear industry?
Nuclear requires 1/10th the steel and concrete wind does for equal power, and 1/20th when you factor in the pumped storage requirements. Storing and safeguarding the waste requires nearly no energy at all! You just seal it in concrete and let it sit there over several centuries and revisit the issue then. Either spent fuel will be valuable then and be utilized as fuel itself, the fuel will be resealed again, or society will have happily collapsed into Morlocks and Eloi or whatever doomer fantasyland is in vogue and spent fuel will be the least of societies worries.
Unlike say, methyl mercury from chemical facilities.
But then we're still left with the toxic legacy of the lead pipes from the Roman empire. Oh the tragedy and woe!
I do know some things about the nuclear industry, and I was a cautious supporter of nuclear until I ran into serious information about the industry's practices when mining outside of the rich world (Niger, polsci case study in '93). The industry's safety/pollution record in mining is really bad but conveniently concealed to most of the public. The other side of the cycle is more difficult to conceal. Storing and safeguarding waste products does require energy off course. All reactor waste contains isotopes which Morlocks love to get their hands on in order to wipe out Eloi. Armies are notoriously energy inefficient."Just seal it in concrete and wait a few centuries" is not a good option then. If we're really going to run into a collapse we'd better use some of our prescious energy left to actively alter the isotope composition of the waste and hope for the best.
Have you also come out against the electronics industry (or the textile industry, or the chemical industry, or other mining industries) because of their similarly shoddy practices outside the rich world?
The practices can be changed. The fact that practices are so much cleaner and friendlier to the environment in the developed countries shows that the problems are not inherent to nuclear power, and opposing it because of some mines in the third world is wrong-headed.
Dezakin - "Do you know anything about the nuclear industry?
Nuclear requires 1/10th the steel and concrete wind does for equal power, and 1/20th when you factor in the pumped storage requirements."
Do you know anything about the renewable industry or the nuclear industry? Are you trying to say that the containment vessel and reactor core contains less concrete and steel than a wind farm? Are you serious??? I would like to see the reference for this statement or have you just made it up? Pumped storage is the least likely method as other methods are far more likely and have far less embodied energy.
"Storing and safeguarding the waste requires nearly no energy at all! You just seal it in concrete and let it sit there over several centuries and revisit the issue then"
So according to you you just take it out of the reactor and cast it in concrete and it is OK???????
What about letting it sit around for 10 years or so to cool? Are you going to vitrify it in glass or cast it in Synroc. Either way this is energy intensive. Are you going to seperate the spent nuclear fuel or just leave it in one lump?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle
Maybe you should have a look at this
A 1MW wind turbine needs a foundation about five metres in diameter and a couple of metres deep, which is about thirty cubic metres of concrete. It also needs a tower about fifty metres high made of 50mm-thickness tubular steel, which weighs (http://www.mecal.nl/files/algemeen/ewec2003-ATS_paper.pdf)
about 250 tons.
A 540MW nuclear power station in India ( http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:VRrbJV8Zb7oJ:www.npcil.nic.in/nupower... )
used 1500 tons of rebar and 13000 cubic metres of concrete for its two containment domes; which is about the same concrete usage as the foundations of 540MW of wind turbines, and very much less steel than the towers.
Of course you let it cool if its standard LWR fuel. After waiting several years you store it in dry storage casks and its good for several centuries.
You just seal the spent fuel rod in a dry storage cask. I dont see how you can suggest this is energy intensive.
Your patronizing link towards the nuclear fuel cycle would be amusingly absurd if it weren't so trite. The most energy intensive part about the nuclear fuel cycle is enrichment, not waste disposal.
Good point. However, the problem is a complex one because we won't have energy to spare eventually. We MUST STOP using oil for food production or we will eventually starve in large numbers.
In that respect, we should use it NOW for renewable electricity and switch to local, non-petro methods of agriculture ASAP.
That may take a 'break down' to get to a place Cuba has gone through already. But 'victory gardens' are the endgame of the 'green petro revolution' which has gotten us to the brink of mass starvation.
Cjwirth,
Your quote exactly echoes what I have been saying for two years on this site.
Why it is so difficult for people to understand such simple physical realities is beyond me.
It is important to also recognize that oil is also the precursor to overpopulation. It makes overpopulation seem like a breeze.
We will inevitably discover this directly.
We aren't overpopulated (nor are we in overshoot).
What we have is an industrial society that needs to be reconfigured to adopt sustainable practices.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/10/fat-man-population-bomb-and-green...
Our Capital cities are definitely in overshoot mode. They have grown beyond their sustainable limits. Peak oil will soon demonstrate this. A sustainable city would have a maximum of 160 - 200 K population. And global warming will force us to abandon coal:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1870955.htm
What Hansen could have meant here is for example the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice by 2013:
Causes of Changes in Arctic Sea Ice; by Wieslaw Maslowski (Naval Postgraduate School)
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/May032006_Dr.WieslawMaslows...
Then one of the Earth's air conditioners reflecting sunlight back into space will be gone.
I am repeating this until it sinks in.
Alas, a wake up call is required to do something. But as soon as the wake up call is loud enough, it is already too late to fix the problem. Clearly, the polar ice caps are beyond hope; our only slim hope now is to partially avoid extreme discomfort, pain, suffering, starvation, and the coming extinction of the world's species.
The bell was rung by Hansen 20 years ago, but those in a position of power and the vast majority of the population were not listening. I was in Washington,D.C. at the time and noticed the warm winds coming.
We are on a super tanker and there is not time to turn around. The sad part, of course, is that future generations won't understand the metaphor.
Here in the mountains of Colorado it was raining on December 1st. It is not supposed to rain in November, much less December.
Best hopes for skiing on plastic ski slopes.
large cities in antiquity probably had up to a million people living in them. with the vast majority in slums (90%+).
Matt,
here from italy.
it has been proven that ancient Rome reached more than 1 million inhabitants some 2 millennia ago. no FF back then, only plenty of public baths, aqueducts and sewage systems.
So if they could long ago, they'll be able in the future too. Regards
You can repeat it as much as you like but you'll still be wrong.
Peak oil implies a shortage of oil, not energy. As we can substitute in alternatives, peak oil is not evidence of overshoot.
Global warming implies our fossil fuel based energy systems are emitting too much carbon dioxide. These energy systems can be replaced with alternatives. Global warming is not evidence of overshoot.
Feel free to read the link I posted for a brief discussion of this.
No-one's principles need be sacrificed in either uranium mining or solar cell production, and neither is oil in disguise; their EROEIs are high enough that the inefficient use of a little of either's output to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon from air and water would cover all the energy-invested that must be invested in that form.
Solution mining of uranium is not experimental.
If I could be heard by the citizens of Fort Collins, I'd point out that uranium mining is allowing oil and gas tax revenue to be withheld from government today. Nothing solar is doing that. If someday it does, antinuclear activists will, perhaps, find it rewarding to branch out into antisolar activism.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
We will need to try lots of different things. Some will work, others won't. We need the wisdom to keep the first and discard the latter. In Tampa, Florida, we built the largest reverse osmosis plant in the US. It didn't work right out of the box and had years of cost over-runs and re-do. It is finally working, making 25 million gallons of water each day. Should we build more of them? No. But we need to learn from the experience and move on to other possibilities. I hope all the other states learn from us and don't build desalination plants. Same here with the solar, nuclear options. Go over the plans for each one. If there is no clear reason to terminate a project, let it go forward. A little experience beats a lot of theory. If a breakthrough is made with solar cells we have the holy grail. It is also possible with nuclear, I have to admit. We have current nuke plants that will need fuel to run. Maybe a new type of reactor will work out much better than we think. A few years of experience should tell us how it will all work out.
Support solar and ask your friends at NREL in Golden to help you out. PV is a decentralized electricity source while both solar thermal and nuclear are centralized. There are benefits and detriments to both source types.
It's crucial to always factor in the cost of securing nuclear waste for the next 1,000,000 years into the cost of nuclear electricity. You don't need guards or cameras to secure your PV array.
I secure my PV array with an attack golden retriever. He's very fierce. He tells me so.
concentrating solar power
I would like to promote csp. Spain is having great sucess with csp. Many csp projects are planed in the united states in california and will fail. csp power has been working in california since mid 1980's. There needs to be a concentrated effort to build more plants with an understanding that these plants will have a lower return on investment then coal. I think a nuclear plant is being planed to process oil sands. i saw a sugestion to build a nuclear coal to liquid plant. france will build four nuclear power plants for china. I do not belive we will run out of solar energy. I do not belive solar energy will cause a catastrophe. with pv you can still produce some power at times when you can not with csp. csp does not rely on rare substances but it needs a lot of sun.
Give the best comments award to Gilgamesh. The projects should be evaluated on their merits, not on luudite scaremongering. I would think it very unlikely that the CdTe plant would be a bad neighbor. And the adavantage of thin-film is that it needs a tiny fraction of the material of monocrystalline silicon. The later is likely to remain a niche product, thin film, likely in the form of BuildingIntegratedPhotoVoltaics BIPV, is likely to be an important part of our future energy mix.
Now the U mining, may or may not be polluting. The decision should be based upon the best technical analysis, not on the scaremongering of activists.
When the article states that "in-situ" uranim mining is 'experimental' used since the 50s this is ridiculous. Since the 50s is half a century. How long before it's current technology? There is a long running in-situ mine in the southern Powder River Basin in Converse County, Wyoming ( Highland Uranium Mine if I recall correctly). These people are making piles of money at the moment leaching uranium at low concentrations in the low teens per million down to single digits ppm of uranium. They are leaching the White River formation old volcanic ash beds. Sorry, I don't recall the exact figures. Surface disturbance is minimal, ground water is recycled on site and closely monitored by the state DEQ. Such a mine beats the old open pits (like the old Highland Uranium open pit mine not too far away)with their dust and the associated surface disturbance all to heck. Saw sheep and pronghorn on site grazing/browsing in active areas being pumped for the metal. When I visited the place about four years ago, they were one of two such operations in the country. They were selling yellowcake for the mid-$20s per pound then. It's a whole lot more now.
I agree, judge the project on its individual merits. Now, if Fort Collins could only stop the insane urban sprawl creeping north on I-25 out of Denver. The loss of that farmland is having and will have far more negative impact in the short and at least medium term. Kunstler would have a field day!!
Cadmium, Tellurium, Indium, Germanium, Selenium are all produced mainly as by-products of "mainstream" metals production, such as lead, zinc, and copper. The economics of producing panels from these materials will deteriorate once they are scaled up. Silicon may be more energy intensive, but being the second most abundant element on earth, it scales. It will be interesting to see how big Nanosolar and the CdTe guys can get. My bet is not very.
Yes, these exotic metals are currently produced as by-products of larger-scale mining, but this is in part because nobody bothered developing indium mines when indium was an exotic material used in vacuum-tight seals.
There is apparently a half-reasonable indium mine in New Brunswick in eastern Canada:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2007/04/04/nb-charlottemini...
where 'half-reasonable' means 100 grams of indium per ton of ore; yes, it's mixed in with about two hundred times that much zinc, but the prices are such that the indium's worth three times as much as the zinc at the moment.
http://www.geodexminerals.org/home.asp?RQ=EDL,1&sPID=0&linkid=2 is setting up to mine there.
Even if it eventually proves economic 5 or 10 years hence, that would be a pretty small indium mine in terms of production. Apparently it contains ore veins and stockworks of small veinlets surrounding one or more granite bodies, not massive replacement ore. The 128 grams indium per metric ton quoted in the story represented a single drill hole intersection.
If metal prices collapse, as they tend to during a recession, it might never even open, unless indium prices prove recession proof and the company can continue to obtain financing for exploration. Still, perhaps an interesting indicator for the future of metal mining. Usually only gold, silver, and platinum (and platinum-group elements) are considered minable at ppm (g/t) levels. At about $1 per gram, indium is there too now.
I think we need to do cost-benefit analyses with each project we do. Most firms do, but I think that they don't necessarily include social costs and benefits, long-term vs. short term. I used to be opposed to nuclear power; I now believe we need to do what we can with it. I certainly hope to see more solar. I live in a forward thinking suburb that put in solar panels all around the city to power Wi-Fi. It really isn't substantial, but it is psychologically significant. I feel just a little bit of optimism knowing that solar is becoming part of the fabric of our daily lives.
I think I missed something. Is there a life cycle carbon used vs carbon offset? I mean you still need fossil fuels to produce both of these options, no? So which one has the smaller carbon footprint vs usable energy?
This is correct, incorrect and misleading. In-situ mining is used to extract U, but this is not experimental and is commonly used for a number of soluble minerals and elements. To say that chemicals are pumped into the ground is an exageration and wording that is obviously used to incite fear. U is very soluble and simply pumping an acidic solution will extract it, and it is easily flushed out. States like Wyoming have rules on how it is done; I have run groundwater models to design the system.
It has been pointed out how Cd is dangerous in high concentrations, which the author conveniently carries over into a criticism of the PV panels, which is patently invalid.
I'm not a big proponent of U mining but I hate to see an article on this site that uses these techniques to spin an argument instead of using facts. How about the fact that there isn't enough cumulative water surplus in Colorado and its neighbors to support a nuclear plant? How about the fact that the heat pollution from a plant would wipe out the habitat of the South Platte? And don't get me started on Yucca Mountain...I worked there for 3 years mapping geology in tunnels. The place is our generation's Hoover Dam in terms of engineering a new frontier. I can say that it is the best place we have for nuclear waste...we just have too many mental blocks to fill it up. We absolutely must find a solution to our nuclear waste problem, and all the engineering and science in the world is being trumped by irrational fear and the Nevada gambling industry.
Why? What problems is it causing?
hanford
Promises to increase funding to stop contamination spreading to the Columbia River from
Hanford are broken in President Bush’s Budget Request for the US Department of Energy
(USDOE) sent to Congress today, says the region’s premier Hanford Clean-Up watchdog group,
Heart of America Northwest. Following release of the USDOE’s Budget Request for 2007, Heart
of America Northwest issued its annual analysis of the cleanup budget for the most contaminated
area in the Western Hemisphere, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Heart of America Northwest
has issued the region’s most detailed and authoritative independent analyses of the Hanford and
USDOE Clean-Up budgets since 1989.
“USDOE has again broken its promise to restore funding needed to protect the Columbia
River from Hanford’s contamination,” said Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America
Northwest. Pollet is an attorney and former economist who has testified to Congress on the cost
overruns and contracting practices at Hanford. “Our region delayed enforcing compliance to
allow USDOE to fund cleanup elsewhere in the country, in exchange for promises that funding
would be restored starting in 2006 and 2007. The lesson, again, is never trust the federal Energy
Department.”
The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site with cleanup expected to continue for decades.
Much of the cleanup involves treating 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste that has been stewing in 177 aging underground tanks. Most critical is the waste in 149 tanks that have a single-wall construction, making them more susceptible to leaks as they age.
The single-shell tanks, built from the 1940s through the '60s, were designed to last about 20 years. An estimated 67 of them have leaked about 1 million gallons of radioactive brew into the soil, contaminating the aquifer and threatening the nearby Columbia River.
So far, seven single-shell tanks have been emptied to meet regulatory requirements. Contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group is handling the tank waste cleanup.
The state Department of Ecology issued the fine under the Tri-Party Agreement, a cleanup agreement signed by the state, Energy Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The fine cited two violations: for an inadequate design of the waste retrieval system, and for inadequate engineering reviews required by state regulations.
Hedges also said she was troubled by the length of time it took the contractor and the Energy Department to determine there was a spill.
"There was a delay of more than seven hours from the time the first high radiation readings were discovered," Hedges said in the statement. "This is completely unacceptable."
Last month, the Energy Department notified CH2M Hill that it would see a $500,000 cut in payments as a penalty for the spill. However, the contractor could earn back half that amount by completing all of the corrective actions that were identified in an investigation into the incident.
Meanwhile, none of the highly toxic, radioactive sludge is being emptied from other leak-prone, single-shell tanks until the contractor is sure problems will not recur.
Last month the Energy Department reached an agreement with its regulators to settle a $1.14 million fine for cleanup failures at Hanford. That penalty concerned operations at a landfill for contaminated soils and other hazardous and radioactive waste.
It was the largest fine levied by the Environmental Protection Agency's Northwest office for Hanford work.
Oh, sorry. A nuclear weapons facility from the dawn of the nuclear age does have some legacy problems. This isn't the least bit related to waste in the nuclear fuel cycle.
Dezakin
Oh, sorry. A nuclear weapons facility from the dawn of the nuclear age does have some legacy problems. This isn't the least bit related to waste in the nuclear fuel cycle.
It is not a legacy problem it is a profound problem. 3rd post in first I felt I was more then concilitory to the expansion of nuclear power. I still feel resigned to that.
If there is value in the days that make up our lives we should give equal effort to deploying solar power plants.
A higher natural background radiation is statisticly and evidentialy linked to a shorter life. 1 India statistics not proof 2 china public health warning about reuse of water used in cooking in area which naturaly contained raidio active elements, not concentrating the elements saves lives. France seems to have done very very well.
Japan has had spills and fires and has not handled them well.
Er, a rambling disagreement is the most I can grok from your post, but again, Hanford has nothing to do with the nuclear fuel cycle from power reactors.
Have to disagree with you about background radiation and shorter lifespan. Have you seen these studies?
http://units.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2001/october/a5oct01.cfm
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/LNT-06%20fig.rtf
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/%7Eblc/Cancer_risk.pdf
In the last linked paper, it is striking how lung cancer mortality is so clearly decreasing with increasing exposure to radon.
Personally, I have placed a few samples of uranium ore in the cabinet next to my desk at home. They about double my background radiation exposure, depending on how much I work! :-)
Everett
I appreciate the study you linked. I don't dispute it. There is a tiping point, some places were always to hot.
"The pump don't work because the vandals took the handle"
Red Gate woods was the site of the first nuclear reactor there now is radiation in the ground water, water pumps were taken out of service. I think I went out there some days that I shouldn't have. Caution do not dig burried in this area is nuclear material 1945-1949. I do not own a working giger counter I am not an athority on the subject. A cup of tea. I don't have a citation for the China thing The water had some radioactive element you had to fetch the water if you reused the water that had steamed vegtables the tea would have a definitly harmful amount of the radioactive element, fetching more water to make tea aliveated this .
I would like to build you a new office building out of glass blocks containing nuclear waste.
I don't know about an office building, here is what they did in Taiwan about 20 years ago in some apartment complex:
http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf
I think 100 milliSieverts per year would be about right for me...
I took another look. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/%7Eblc/Cancer_risk.pdf The part about inhaling plutonium foot note 34,35,36. does not increase risk of lung cancer was just wrong. and wrong to say you can inhale a substance that combust in the presence of air
so I found a study that says that breathing uranium does increase cancer.
There was a guy who fabricated research for a living, he did go to trial but a cripled policeman rolled into the court room and shot the plantifs and the judge, at the daley center in Chicago and that is why we have metal detectors, the case was dropped. afterwards someone said yes all this research was phoney but we are going to regard it as genuine because we are not going to pay to have it done right. The companies that paid for the research got what they wanted.
Mortality among Navajo uranium miners.
Roscoe RJ , Deddens JA , Salvan A , Schnorr TM .
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Cincinnati, OH 45226, USA.
OBJECTIVES. To update mortality risks for Navajo uranium miners, a retrospective cohort mortality study was conducted of 757 Navajos from the cohort of Colorado Plateau uranium miners. METHODS. Vital status was followed from 1960 to 1990. Standardized mortality ratios were estimated, with combined New Mexico and Arizona non-White mortality rates used for comparison. Cox regression models were used to evaluate exposure-response relationships. RESULTS. Elevated standardized mortality ratios were found for lung cancer (3.3), tuberculosis (2.6), and pneumoconioses and other respiratory diseases (2.6). Lowered ratios were found for heart disease (0.6), circulatory disease (0.4), and liver cirrhosis (0.5). The estimated relative risk for a 5-year duration of exposure vs none was 3.7 for lung cancer, 2.1 for pneumoconioses and other respiratory diseases, and 2.0 for tuberculosis. The relative risk for lung cancer was 6.9 for the midrange of cumulative exposure to radon progeny compared with the least exposed. CONCLUSIONS. Findings were consistent with those from previous studies. Twenty-three years after their last exposure to radon progeny, these light-smoking Navajo miners continue to face excess mortality risks from lung cancer and pneumoconioses and other respiratory diseases.
PMID: 7702118 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]