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Advice to Pres. Obama (#5): One Engineer's Advice for Energy Policy
Posted by Engineer-Poet on January 26, 2009 - 10:49am
This article is one of a series of articles, offering energy advice to President Obama and his administration.
The incoming Obama administration has promised a much-needed change in the direction of US energy policy (or non-policy, as some see the current situation). However, some of those changes appear to be campaign gimmicks or aimed at satisfying special interests rather than solving our various problems. (The heavy-for-light crude swap in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve proposed in the Obama-Biden energy proposal appears to be one such gimmick.)
For much too long, US energy legislation (I hesitate to call it policy, because it lacks the coherence to justify the label) has been aimed at short-term patches on problems which have only gotten worse. CAFE regulations have barely held fuel economy steady, while low fuel prices caused consumption to skyrocket. "Free trade" allowed cheap oil imports to kill movement toward efficiency and substitutes. The auto industry lobbied against fuel taxes to promote its short-term interest in selling profitable trucks, with the long-term result that all 3 US automakers will go bankrupt in the next year if nothing is done.
We've had change before, but the results put us where we are now. It's time for the right change.
Cargo-cultism, Ghost Dances and Stone Heads
This is not a Field of Dreams; you can build it, but it will not make them come. Building airplanes and control towers of bamboo will not bring prosperity from the sky. Mysticism and cargo-cultism are not things of other places and other times; we are human and can make the same mistakes, only New, Improved, and much, much bigger.
We can laugh and marvel at the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island, whose stone-carving came at the expense of the last trees they had. Once the island was denuded, they had no boats, no building materials, nothing; with no boats there was neither fishing nor escape. The people starved and the population crashed. We can make mistakes as much bigger as Madoff's pyramid scheme is compared to Ponzi's, and so much more disastrous.
Cargo-cultism and ghost dances are alive and well in America today. You can "drill here" all you want, but dry holes benefit no one. You can start the "shovel-ready" road projects, but people who drive less and less every year will get no use out of them. You can make ethanol out of corn, and watch the nation's best topsoil wash down the Mississippi to expand the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. All of these cults have their constituencies. All of them will want more mandates, more money, more power. If you're going to be the one to fix this mess you've inherited, all of them must be told "No."
Whatever we undertake to do must aim for three very important things:
- It must reduce the use of what is scarce, imported, or gives money to people hostile to us.
- It must only increase the use of what we have in abundance (which isn't everything touted as such).
- It must reduce the burden of emissions on land, water and air.
Employment and Economic Stimulus
The massive financial meltdown has put many Americans out of work and idled a great deal of our industry.
Paradoxically, the economic slump has created opportunities. Demand for both industrial and consumer goods is down, and the idle production capacity can be used to improve our economic and energy situation. Vast amounts of materials such as scrap metal, once headed to China, now languish in ports; recent news reports state that the price of scrap aluminum has fallen from 80¢/lb to 40. These materials are a boon. We can use metal which would have gone to make appliances to upgrade our infrastructure. This nation needs a great deal of repairs, upgrades and additions, starting with light and heavy rail and support towers for high-tension electric lines. We don't need plans to start building, either. Materials like rails, cables and material for pylon towers can be fabricated starting immediately and stockpiled for later use. All of this can put people back to work as soon as the first orders are placed.
The stimulus should emphasize manufacturing, not the "consumer economy". The US economic crisis is as much about our inability to finance our trade imbalance in general as it is about any particular import, such as oil. Pumping money into the economy to send it to China for plastic toys and big-screen TVs is just going to drive us further into debt. We are now at the end of our ability to print dollars to buy things; we used to be a country that made things, and we must return to our heritage. This is the only way to create the jobs that will pay, and the improvements that will last.
It is important, however, to follow one principle: all investment must reduce costs and pollution. The world is running out of oil, and the atmosphere's capacity to absorb more CO2 without damage is already exhausted; our new investments should be aimed to solve both problems and exacerbate neither. This means that we cannot and should not "invest" in new steel mills or vehicles which do not slash petroleum use. Repairing roads is probably a good idea, but adding roads is a bad one. Last, anything that reduces our need for fossil fuels in general and oil in particular is going to be a very good idea for the years ahead.
And since this gets us around to the topic of energy, it's time to talk about
Electricity
No modern society can run without electricity, but the US electric grid is both somewhat run-down and supplied by some of our biggest sources of pollution. These have cost us in many ways both immediate and deferred, from the costs of blackouts, to acid rain and mercury emissions killing forests and making fish dangerous to eat, to each added ton of CO2 acidifying the world's oceans and increasing the threat of climate change. Finally, we are not getting the most benefit out of the investment we've already made. We need to both make the grid better, and use the grid better.
The US electric grid represents perhaps a trillion dollars of investment, and carries on the order of $400 billion in power per year. However, this investment was originally made for providing power from local plants to local consumers, with relatively little transfer of power over long distances; most of the long-distance connections were planned to provide reserve capacity only. Recent changes in law have forced utilities to buy power from distant generators, but did not provide investment to increase the capacity of the transmission lines to carry it. Carrying power from ever-more distant supplies to population centers, such as wind farms in the Midwest to the Great Lakes and the coasts, will require many times the long-haul transmission capacity now installed.
The consumption end needs work too. Electric consumption in most parts of the USA peaks in summer afternoons, and in other places on winter nights. The grid is designed to handle these peaks and is under-utilized the rest of the time. The law must encourage the shift of power consumption to times when the grid has surplus capacity. Ice-storage air conditioners and electric vehicles are two ways to help improve the utilization of the electric grid, getting more out of the investment already made.
Of course, none of this would be possible without generators. Whether we increase overall consumption or decrease generation from certain fuels, we will need new generation to make up the difference. I'll touch on that below.
Transportation
The world oil shortage (which precipitated the credit crunch and economic contraction) mostly affects air and road transport. Trains use relatively little oil, and pipelines use even less. Both pipelines and trains can be electrified and use no energy from oil at all.
The bulk of the USA's diesel fuel goes to run medium and heavy trucks, carrying freight on freeways. Not long ago, most of this freight would have gone by rail instead; we can make it so again. Just a couple of decades ago, rail rights-of-way were stripped of track to reduce the property values and the taxes they had to pay. Railroads are already replacing some of that track, but government assistance can get it done much faster. Exempting the added value from property taxes (the same as Interstates enjoy) would make certain that the same thing does not happen again.
Instead of building new freeways, a sensible program would be to develop new rail lines or redevelop abandoned ones. These new rail lines would help get freight traffic off the highways, both saving fuel and reducing road congestion and damage. This will not only save huge amounts of diesel fuel, it will save lives. These rail lines should be electrified to eliminate diesel noise and pollution. You can call this the Interstate Rail Transport Network.
Light rail for passenger transport is a good alternative to automobiles for many trips. There is a backlog of streetcar and other projects requested by cities; these should be put on the fast track (no pun intended).
The personal vehicle is not going to go away, and both the pollution and fuel consumption of this class must be addressed. The plug-in hybrid has had your support for some time, but further initiatives are needed to get the charging infrastructure into the field and promote interoperation with the electrical grid. This can simultaneously cut fuel demand, cut air pollution and make the grid more reliable—a three-fer.
One last detail is intermodal transport. Containerized cargo has long gone from container ship to rail flatcar to semi-truck, but vehicles themselves can be made intermodal. The Blade runner dual-mode truck could put semi rigs directly on rails; those trucks could then draw electric power from overhead wires, eliminating the fuel consumption and pollution. Dual-mode electric delivery trucks could use streetcar tracks and overhead power lines to run most of their mileage and recharge batteries between stops. This would make it far easier to convert truck fleets to electric and save critical diesel fuel for off-road and emergency uses.
One detail of intermodal transport is worth dwelling on: vehicles capable of jumping between roads and rails would allow the conversion of expressway medians to rail lines. If maintenance of a lane of roadway is too expensive, it could be rebuilt as rail instead. Rather than having to rebuild the road surface every ten years or so, the rails would be good for 50 and the concrete sleepers and roadbed for a century. This would truly be a lasting legacy.
Alternative Energy
As supplies of fossil fuels become smaller and more difficult to extract, what replaces them will be "alternatives" almost by definition. However, "alternatives" vary widely in their usefulness. The real alternatives can displace large amounts of other energy supplies while using little or no fossil energy themselves, and are viable without subsidies. Some of today's "alternatives" cannot meet either standard, and should be de-emphasized or dropped.
Wind
Wind is the alternative-energy elephant. It is mostly useful for electricity, but its share of US generation is roughly 1% and rising rapidly. The estimated energy available from wind power in the USA's land and continental shelves exceeds the nation's total energy consumption from all sources. This is clearly a place for the Engineer's corollary to Sutton's Law1: Go where the energy is.
There are two problems with wind, one legislative and one logistical. The legislative problem is the structure of the Production Tax Credit, which is only available to indirect investors. This should be replaced with a straight feed-in tariff, simplifying the system and cutting out third parties. The logistical problem is more difficult. The windiest parts of the country are also the least-populated and have little grid capacity to export their power to the rest. A new network of high-voltage DC (HVDC) power lines is needed to help get power from the major areas of supply from the Dakotas down to Texas out to buyers across the country.
Solar
Solar energy has even greater potential than wind, but it is far more expensive and only accounts for perhaps 1/100 of 1% of US electric generation. This makes it difficult to scale up in time to make a big difference in the short term.
Regardless of this, solar needs attention - R&D and targets for installation are good, but more important is legal protection. Residential solar electric, solar heat and solar hot water can make big contributions over time, but building codes and residential associations often throw up roadblocks. Just as some states have prohibitions against SLAPP lawsuits, it is time we took action against SLURS: Strategic Lawsuits Undermining Residential Solar. It is time to define classes of solar installations which must be allowed, and levy triple damages against persons, associations or governments which attempt to restrict or prohibit them.
Tidal, Wave and Micro-hydro
These are even smaller than solar. They have less potential than wind, but may be suitable for niche applications. No big bets are warranted.
Biofuels
Biofuels are a problem. Yes, you read that right: a problem. They have been promoted heavily as the solution to all our petroleum woes ("Live Green, Go Yellow"), but they cannot deliver. Ethanol from corn is a particularly large problem. It has an enormous political constituency from farmers and distillers, all built on subsidy money from US taxpayers and creditors. Corn ethanol is essentially "laundered" fossil fuels: diesel for cultivation, natural gas for fertilizer and distillation, oil for petrochemical pesticides. US natural gas drilling costs are skyrocketing; it is only a matter of time before the bill for this comes due.
Most of the claims made for ethanol are pure marketing hype. If the entire US corn crop were turned into ethanol, it would only replace about 1/5 of the recent US consumption of gasoline by volume (and a substantially smaller fraction by energy). This is not a solution2.
I believe this was always the point: it isn't a solution and was never really intended to be one. Ethanol as it currently exists is a farm subsidy program marketed as an energy program, and it can soak up as much corn as we can grow. Its purpose was not to get the US off imported oil, but to guarantee that surpluses could not drive the market down again. It works, but we cannot afford such luxuries any more; if we cut off the subsidies, the entire industry would dry up and blow away. As a senator from a farm state, you should know this as well as anyone. We can no longer use borrowed money to hide from politically difficult facts; it's time to fix the real problem.
Biomass does have a future. It is the only way that we can take carbon out of the air and control what happens to it. It is the only source of carbon that will not become more and more scarce over time. We are going to need it to make chemicals, plastics, and just to reduce the CO2 level in the atmosphere. Dow Chemical has already started working with a Brazilian company to convert ethanol from sugar cane into ethylene, which is the raw material for polyethylene and so much else. Stone-age methods are sufficient to turn inedible crop byproducts into charcoal; stirred into soil this creates "terra preta", which increases the fertility of soils and stores carbon for thousands of years. As a senator from a farm state, you should know how important soil fertility is. It is one of the USA's little-recognized natural assets, and it behooves us to improve it. We'll need it more than you know.
If we need to pay farmers to do something more than grow food, we should pay them to make energy and take carbon out of the air. If we are going to charge carbon taxes, we can pay farmers for every ton of carbon they remove from the air and plow into the soil. When farmers turn the charcoal's byproduct gas into electricity, or digest the manure from livestock to make biogas, we can guarantee them a market for their power. The law can help the farmers help us, by paying them to do the right thing. For decades, the farm bill paid them to do the wrong thing; that's one change that is long overdue.
Nuclear
Nuclear is the other problem facing the USA, but for the opposite reason. It has long been the bogeyman of "progressives" and self-styled environmentalists, to the point that they have attempted to eliminate it world-wide and have actually succeeded in some countries. In the USA, their efforts have managed to make nuclear power more expensive and frustrated efforts to dispose of spent fuel, causing the US government to default on its obligation to take control of it and forcing it to be stored at plant sites even after the plants have closed.
The driving force behind this is mostly a mistaken impression that nuclear reactors equal nuclear weapons, which has been repeated by many ideologues. This propaganda and the consequent nuclear paranoia have been felt throughout society, even forcing nuclear magnetic resonance scanners—which have nothing to do with nuclear fission or radiation—to be renamed "magnetic resonance imaging" (MRI) to avoid frightening the public!
We can't afford such misconceptions any longer. Fortunately, they seem to be falling to the pressure of reality. No less a luminary than James Lovelock has recognized that climate change is a far greater threat than nuclear energy, and it's time to switch away from fossil fuels ASAP. The recent natural-gas spat between Russia and Ukraine has re-awakened interest in nuclear energy across Europe as an energy source with fewer sources of insecurity.
Nuclear energy is certainly worthwhile. It is one of the safest sources of electricity in the USA, with an enviable record of accidents. Unlike most renewables, it can be located where the users are and is available whenever desired. Despite the concerns about nuclear waste, the volume of spent fuel is so small that a plant's lifetime production can be stored in concrete casks on the grounds; the recent flood of a billion gallons of toxic coal ash from a TVA dump makes a very sharp contrast to the minuscule output of a reactor.
This isn't good enough. Our nuclear technology still has faults:
- it uses only a fraction of the energy in the uranium we mine,
- it leaves much more waste than is necessary, and
- it presents proliferation hazards that could be avoided.
The USA has developed technologies to address all of these problems, and then mothballed them. The failure to develop our capabilities was not technical, but political, and came mostly from within your own party. This is another luxury we can no longer afford. These should go back on the front burner as soon as humanly possible.
The neglected technologies are:
- The molten-salt reactor (MSR)
- The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)
These two technologies have several very valuable properties in common:
- They reprocess their fuel at the reactor site.
- Because of the on-site reprocessing, there is no storage of spent fuel.
- Also because of this, the volume of waste is minuscule; the waste from a reactor's entire lifetime can be stored on-site and not removed until decommissioning.
- They can use roughly 100 times as much of the raw fuel material as today's reactors.
A ton of raw nuclear fuel (uranium or thorium) can make approximately one gigawatt-year of electric power in an MSR or IFR. The total electric power needs of the USA could be satisfied by less than 500 tons per year of either, and a great deal of this could come from material already mined or even designated as "waste". Because of these properties, the MSR and IFR are potential solutions to both the USA's energy difficulties and the nuclear waste problem.
The Molten-Salt Reactor (MSR)
The Molten-Salt Reactor was originally developed for nuclear aircraft, but it was later tested as an alternative to water-cooled reactors. An experimental reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was tested using three different fuels: enriched uranium-235, plutonium and uranium-233 (bred from thorium). It ran well on all of them. The final run was intended to gather data to evaluate the feasibility of a thorium-uranium fuel cycle, and was apparently successful.
Molten-salt reactors have a number of advantages over today's water-cooled technology:
- They cannot suffer a meltdown, because the fuel is already molten. If the cooling systems are shut off, the reactors shut down through their essential physics; they are inherently safe.
- They cannot explode, because they run well below the boiling point of the salts and require no pressure vessels. This also makes their components relatively lightweight and easy to manufacture.
- They can run at relatively high temperatures, which increases their efficiency and makes the heat usable for many industrial purposes.
- They can remove fission wastes continuously, so there is never a danger from "afterheat" when a reactor is shut down.
- The extracted wastes are relatively pure rather than containing large amounts of unused fuel, so their bulk is comparatively tiny. The wastes can be made ready for permanent disposal right at the reactor site. Fuel cannot be diverted for weapons because it never leaves the reactor building.
- They can be started up with plutonium from spent nuclear fuel or reclaimed weapons material, and can destroy this fuel while breeding new fuel from thorium.
- The physics of breeding thorium to uranium creates uranium-232 as well as uranium-233, which is not a difficulty for power production but makes the material unsuitable for use in weapons. Even more so than light-water reactors, molten-salt thorium breeders do not pose a risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
According to recent news, the USA has approximately 900,000 tons of high-grade thorium reserves. This is approximately 2000 years of supplies at current rates of electric consumption, or hundreds of years if thorium was substituted for all fossil fuel. Lower-grade thorium resources include coal ash.
In addition to reactors using molten fluoride salts, it appears to be possible to make fast-breeder reactors using molten chloride salts. This has not yet been tested, but it probably should be.
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)
The IFR is another promising technology nixed by partisan politics. A prototype reactor was killed by a Democratic congress in 1994, despite test results showing great potential. Fifteen years have now passed, fifteen lost years. It's time to go back to it.
The IFR is similar in some ways to the Molten Salt Reactor. It can convert nearly 100% of the raw fuel (uranium in this case) to useful energy; it reprocesses fuel at the reactor; it produces tiny amounts of waste pre-packaged for disposal; the fuel processing does not separate weapons-grade components; and the fuel from the reactor is always too radioactive to be safe to divert.
Unlike Light Water Reactors which use fuel as ceramic (oxide) pellets and the Molten Salt Reactor which uses salt mixtures, the IFR's fuel is metallic. This fuel is cast into rods and cooled by liquid metal. Both liquid sodium and lead-bismuth alloy have been suggested as coolants. Like the MSR, the IFR operates at atmospheric pressure and requires no large metal forgings. The last design tested was also proven to be passively safe.
The IFR may seem redundant if we have MSRs, but it has proven capabilities that MSRs do not, capabilities that we need:
- It is a fast-neutron reactor, so it can "burn" troublesome isotopes of plutonium and americium rather than leaving them as a disposal problem.
- It can turn stocks of uranium to fuel, even the uranium in spent PWR fuel.
- Because of this, it can ultimately eliminate the entire stock of nuclear fuel piled up at present and past nuclear plants.
- It can also convert our entire stock of Depleted Uranium (DU) to fuel.
It may be possible to make a fast-neutron reactor using molten salts, but the fuel chemistry and other details have not been tested; the IFR has. The IFR needs to be taken to full-scale test ASAP, so that our big nuclear waste problem can be turned into a small, short-lived one.
The Consequences of Breeders
Between the two technologies of the MSR and IFR, the USA's entire inventory of spent nuclear fuel (43,000 tons of uranium as of 2002), depleted uranium (roughly 6 times as much) and thorium (900,000 tons of reserves) become available as domestic fuel reserves. The entire electric demand of the USA could be met with roughly 500 tons per year of this; the entire energy needs of the USA would take perhaps 1500 tons. We could export both clean, no-carbon power generators and the fuel to run them. If we are looking to save the world from climate change, we have to grab these opportunities with both hands.
Conclusion
As you noted in your inauguration speech, we are facing problems created and made worse by our refusal to make tough decisions. Now is not the time to cave on those. If we are going to address all the problems facing the nation and the world, we have to avoid wasting effort on measures that won't build for the future. The stone heads of Easter Island were shovel-ready, but spelled suicide for the people. Expanding today's pot-holed roads may just leave them empty five years from now, but rails will be usable for 50. No amount of effort will raise US oil production to what we now use, but we can change from petroleum to electricity. For the sake of public health and the planet we must switch our electricity away from coal and gas, and our main near-term options appear to be wind and nuclear. These can supply our needs for decades from our "waste" alone, and hundreds of years after that. They can even help give us the export markets needed to heal the economy again.
We need a future. You have to point the nation where the future is.
Endnotes
1. Sutton's Law: Go where the money is (attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton).
2. Ethanol can be used as an octane-booster in specially-designed engines to allow the same power out of an engine only half the size (link). The smaller engines would save as much as 30% of the fuel. Using a few percent of ethanol as a separate fuel stream (not blended with gasoline) would save far more, and ethanol from corn would save enough other fuel to be worth it.
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Thanks EP - you should write more often...;-)
I share your optimism on nuclear, if for no other reason than this is the only chance at replacing the coming decline in aggregate energy surplus. But as typically is the case when addressing one problem at a time (in this case energy), there is often a cost - in this case water. Currently a full 48% of the water use in the United States is devoted towards cooling of thermo-electric power plants ((another 34% (and 81% of fresh water) towards crop irrigation)). Unless new nuclear water consumption/withdrawal technologies accompany a nuclear scale up, we are going to have water limitations to power, as recently was the case in France. Also, the choice to move to electric vehicles, unless the electricity is largely generated from new sources will have big implications for water:
I agree with much in your letter, but engineering and efficiency alone will not be enough. We need systems thinking and reductions in consumption (that are not the result of a credit crisis), starting yesterday.
Nate:
With regard to your citation regarding increased water consumption and withdrawal:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es0716195?cookieSet=1
I think it would be helpful to put the increase in context.
But from earlier in the same paper at page 4310:
and from the "Conclusions", also at page 4310:
The quote was directly from the papers abstract.
The tradeoffs and linkages between energy and water are among the most critical we face; but they are very complicated, and extend beyond just those two commodities (e.g. we could use more water for bioenergy if we used less for meat, etc.) I am painfully aware of how complicated the linkages are, as evidenced by my current 3rd rewrite on a paper on Energy and Water. As soon as possible I plan to devote an entire post to the issue -but my main point here is everytime we look to a supply side 'solution', we tend to make some other limiting input more limiting.
P.s. are you the TOD'er I went to U of Chicago with? I keep forgetting.
A large share of the publicized problems that the Atlanta area has had with water have to do with water usage for electricity.
One view now is that the estimates of water available for electric cooling were based on the assumption that Atlanta can be expected to get 50+ inches of rain a year--more than Seattle. Now there is some question whether the time period over which the 50+ inches assessment was taken was really representative. Maybe we should be expecting only about 40 inches of rain a year.
If this is the case, the problem is that the Southeast is already overbuilt for water-cooled electric power generating plants. All of the arguing about how much water Atlanta gets vs Florida vs Alabama basically has to do with how much water is available for electric power plants. It starts sounding a lot like the US Southwest.
Much thermal generation is near the sea/ocean since a lot of population is there as well. Once through cooling is no problem there, only a diffusor pipe system has to be built to mitigate local thermal pollution issues.
Anyways, for inland locations, dry cooling is a proven option available at a small increment in levelised cost. Historically little value was placed on water conservation, so most plants are wet cooled. Adding a tax on freshwater cooling (bigger in arid areas) is one solution.
However, a more productive option is to use CHP thermal desalination and water treatment plant, using the nuclear plant's turbine heat rejection. This both creates a lot of new freshwater supply (from eg sewage water, brakish water, salt water if a sea/ocean is nearby) while reducing cooling water use (because the CHP can be seen as increased efficiency). If no water supply is nearby (could be the case in arid areas where freshwater supply is most dire), other CHP uses can be devised, such as paper and pulp heat input, other chemical processes etc. etc. that can also greatly reduce cooling water use.
This is one problem that is easily solved, and that can actually reduce fuel use and imports even more in the process by reducing natural gas and oil that would otherwise be needed if CHP was not available. This all does require the right policy. So now that you're reading along, Barack... :)
Is it possible (reasonable) to go back and retrofit some existing power plants for dry cooling? It seems like both the Southwest and Southeast could use the additional water, if it were available.
Retrofitting is possible, however the plants electrical output would suffer. Thermodynamics of heat engines, of which steam turbines, diesel engines, and gas turbines are examples, state that the output is directly proportional to the heat flux times the difference between the input temperature and output temperature. For water it is difficult go higher than about 350º C on the hot end because of corrosion, high pressure and other engineering problems. On the low side we can go down to about 50º C if we can use cold sea water for cooling. For PWRs, (Pressurized Water Reactor) this limits us to about 34% efficiency. With a dry heat exchanger it would be difficult to get the low end temperature lower that about 110º C which would lower system efficiency to maybe 30%.
One large advantage of the LFTR and gas turbine is it can operate at between 650º- to 900º C on the hot end. With an air cooled heat exchanger on the low end running at 110º C we have an efficiency of over 50%, and lower cost.
The Lower Mississippi River has no foreseeable heat sink issues. The volume of water is incredibly vast.
Just the shipping channel at New Orleans is 900' wide and 100' deep moving at several knots at the summer minimum. Add the water underneath the shipping channel and to the sides.
Alan
I was pretty sure 'frombigeasy' was refering to your hometown and not some techy organization that feels big things come easy (you do paint bright pictures with a broad brush). Always good to see someone give good information about a place they know well, thanks. :)
hit the key twice
Overall, excellent article. Kudos.
I tend to discount the difficulties of "water for power generation cooling" on the following grounds:
a) Much of the present water "used" for power plant cooling is not really used, simply heated slightly then returned to source immediately available for other uses. Distinction needs to be made.
b) For only a relatively small (approx. 2% for added blower input, 2% reduced overall plant efficiency) hit plants can switch to air cooling and eliminate water use almost entirely.
c) Most population concentrations live near enough to "essentially unlimited" ocean water sources to ignore the issue.
d) Coming technologies such as the "Vortex Engine" technology have a clear potential with relatively small R&D to both eliminate the cooling tower requirement altogether, and also to contribute an added 20% to the overall plant efficiency. Probably very cost-effective, esp. in dry areas. See Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE)
I realize I'm somewhat over-simplifying, but so is above (necessarily, as myself) in the limited space and time available.
The linked to paper (and indeed all papers addressing water limitation issues) distinguish between water consumption and withdrawals. Withdrawals are typically considered the diversion of freshwater from its natural hydrologic cycle, either at the surface or from below the ground, for anthropogenic purposes. Water consumed usually refers to water used in the energy production process that is either lost to a given watershed as steam or contaminated beyond cost-effective remediation.
Though energy from biomass is far more worrisome in its water impacts, the closures in Europe in 2006 and 2007 of nuclear plants due to heat/water limitations suggest this is not a trivial issue. Globally the current water stock in rivers is about 2000 km3; the anthropogenic water withdrawals from these rivers is 3800 km3/yr; and the global river discharge is 45,500 km3/yr -so clearly we can reuse this water many times over - (unlike energy) - but, as with energy, there are limits.
One of the advantages of molten-salt (and perhaps also metal-cooled) nuclear plants is that they can run hot enough to use gas turbines instead of steam turbines as the heat engines. If the designers are willing to accept lower efficiency1, open-cycle gas turbines using air are possible. This eliminates water as a coolant, and also eliminates the capital cost of condensers and cooling towers. (It also makes the design suitable for sites where there is no available water.)
GE's recent F-series intercooled gas turbines produce several hundred megawatts from a rather small package. A few similar units, with regenerators instead of heat-recovery steam generators and supplied heat from a molten salt or metal loop instead of combustion, would make a compact and innocuous generator system for a 1-GWe class reactor.
1 Nuclear fuel is so cheap that capital cost should probably be a greater concern. Just being able to eliminate both the sulfur/mercury emissions and water consumption of plants in the Southwest would be a major selling point.
There are potential advantages to that, as you mention. But don't get ahead of the facts now. For a given temperature, advanced steam cycles are more efficient than gas turbines. This is a big advantage too. Sure, regenerators increase efficiency, but they cost $$$ and adding more has diminishing returns. Sure, ultracritical can't be taken to really high temps, but it's still increasing incrementally, and anyway we may find that very high reactor temps are not optimal from a total cost and durability viewpoint.
Gas turbines excel at power density. Great for airplanes. Not hugely important for a stationary utility generator.
Gas turbines could be safer since the pressures in/around the reactor can be lowered, and possibly yielding a bigger power density. That could be a big advantage. But it's a matter of good design, and it's not like there would be a meltdown in the event of a major failure.
There is a difference between capital cost per unit of thermal output and capital cost per unit electrical output. Sometimes, increasing the net electrical efficiency can increase the cost per unit of thermal output, but decrease the cost per unit of electrical output. That last thing is what we're looking for. I think we may find that a rather high efficiency is optimal.
How high a temperature can they run at?
The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment ran at up to 650° C. If you look at the pictures, you'll see that it didn't take much of a radiator to dissipate 7.4 megawatts of heat at that temperature! I expect that the temperature was limited by the properties of the Hastelloy-N used to make the vessels, pipes and pumps, and increasing the temperature to the ~850° C needed to run a sulfur-iodine cycle for thermochemical hydrogen production would require some new materials science.
GE's latest gas turbines are running at ~1300° C turbine inlet temperature, so an air-cycle turbine fed from an MSR would be rather unchallenging from a technical standpoint.
The nuclear part is somewhat challenging at higher temperatures, especially with regards to durability over decades of use.
650°C is only 100 degrees above the typical operating temperature of a steam turbine. I am guessing that you could run a closed cycle gas turbine with this inlet temperature using coal as the energy source. I am not promoting more coal fired generation; I am just saying that it could be done if it was necessary. Presumably it is not done in practice because there is some kind of performance/cost penalty.
At the time of the experiment, no heat engines were available in the 650 degrees celcius range. This no doubt lessened the commercial interest in the MSR, along with little political backing it's no surprise that the experiment didn't lead to real reactor systems.
State of the art steam turbines operating at around 600 degrees C are more efficient than gas turbines at similar temperature. A huge amount of power is required to run the compressor in the gas turbine. Natural gas burning gas turbines are still very efficient because they are burning extremely hot, so as to get a high delta T. This is not optimal for a nuclear heat source, IMHO.
Nate -
The water issue is certainly non-trivial, but I think you would have to admit that it is largely a regional issue.
I don't see that water usage for nuclear power plants would be a deal-killer for most of the Northeast, Great Lakes Region, or on our most of our major rivers, such as the Mississippi or the Ohio. The Southwest is a whole other story, and probably the last thing the Colorado River basin needs is to add a large nuclear power plant. Parts of the Southeast could also be problematic.
One thing I do not have a handle on is the comparative water consumption of a nuclear power plant versus a coal-fired power plant of the exact same rated output. Let us assume that both have similar natural-convection cooling towers with the exact same evaporation and blow-down rates. The question I have is: Which one will consume the most water (by 'consumption' I mean water evaporated from the cooling tower, not gross water throughput)?
Unless I am missing something, I tend to think the water consumption of the two would be in the same range. Both operate a steam cycle in which cooling water is used for running the condensers. As far as reactor cooling goes, doesn't the heat transfer loop that furnishes heat to the steam generators accomplish just that, and isn't the reactor power level and amount of such cooling closely optimized for a given level of output so as not to waste reactor heat?
If indeed a nuclear power plant and a coal-fired power plant have similar water consumption, then it become less of a persuasive argument against nukes to say that they consume too much water.
Anybody else out there knowledgeable on this question?
I think you're "mostly right", eg. "a nuclear power plant and a coal-fired power plant have similar water consumption". No water is consumed in a nuclear power plant other than for cooling/condensing the steam after the turbine, just like in a coal plant. However, since overall thermal efficiency of a typical new nuclear power plant might be as much as 5% lower than a comparable coal plant, a cooling-tower-cooled nuclear plant will use perhaps (40/35 - 1) * 100 =approx 15% more cooling water.
lengould -
Thanks.
If indeed due to differences in thermal efficiencies a nuclear power plant results only slight more water consumption than a coal-fired one, then high water consumption is not a terribly valid argument against nukes, at least in comparison to coal-fired plants.
I wonder if some of these 'next generation' nuclear power cycles, as described in the lead article, will have thermal efficiencies equal to or somewhat better than coal-fired power plants.
And as pointed out in some other posts, it is possible to go to air cooling, though there is a significant penalty in doing so, both in terms of capital cost and energy consumption. However, if worse comes to worst, that may be a option in highly water constrained regions. As such, I don't think it's fair to try to write-off nuclear power solely on the water consumption issue.
The issue is mostly policy related. Putting a tax on cooling water would fix the issue, especially if combined with a guaranteed long lasting low investment tax and property tax rate on CHP as the business case for CHP uses would look much more attractive. (CHP saves cooling water by artificially increasing the efficiency of the cycle, reducing per kWh cooling water required).
The MSR is sited underground in deep holes and uses passive air cooling from the chimney effect to cool the reactor. The high operating temperature of the reactor and gas turboelectric generators support efficiency of 55% as opposed to 33% for coal and LWR plants.
The MSR that EP described is air cooled and uses no water. If MSRs replaced coal generation and light water reactors, there is no water problem.
Even light water reactors don't have to be a water problem. The Palo Verde Nuclear Power station in Arizona uses effluent from Phoenix for cooling. http://phoenix.about.com/cs/utilities/a/paloverde.htm
It's just a design issue, as in it is easier to put a power plant near to a river and use that for cooling, so that's what happened.
The Metcalf Energy Center (NG fueled 600MW) in San Jose, CA uses recycled water from the San Jose Sewage Treatment plant for cooling as another example of water reuse rather than using "new" water for plant cooling. This was a win-win solution as it reduced the amount of fresh water going into San Francisco Bay and did not impact local water supplies.
It has been claimed that air cooling erases the efficiency gains from supercritical steam at the Kogan Creek coal fired station in Queensland. The operators claimed a CO2 saving of 22% relative to pulverised coal but apparently omitted the power drain of the pumps and fans.
Note in heatwaves they just spray river water on the outside of the radiator. So much for water saving.
You could operate the system during a heat wave without water, but this requires extra redundancies like more powerful fans and pumps, and this also increases parasitic losses.
Again, the issue is too little or no tax on cooling water. It's too cheap to use water cooling. A high tax on cooling water (at least in arid areas) would spur deployment and development of CHP which is desirable.
Nate
heard you comment on obama's speech on the BBC world service just now...
good delivery... very serious and measured tone that carried a sense of "knowing expertise"
gravitas with out the panic cassandra stuff
get yourself on MSM more..
When a farmer withdraws 1,000,000 gallons of water from a river to irrigate corn for ethanol, none of it is returned, hopefully, because any return water would be contaminated with fertilizer, pesticide and top soil.
When a nuclear power plant withdraws 1,000,000 gallons of water from a river to cool its condensers, all 1,000,000 gallons is returned, actually slightly more because the water expands when heated, but the same mass. The river is slightly warmer as a result and over the next few days a small amount of water evaporates due to the temperature change, about one half gallon per kWh.
The average American lifestyle uses 1,550 watts, 37.2 kWh / day / per person.
If all that power came from nuclear with an average evaporation rate of 0.5 gal / kWh it would evaporate 18.6 gallons per day, 6,790 gal / year.
In year 2000 the U.S. consumed 408 billion gallons of water per day.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/
Assuming a population of 295 million in 2000, that is an average of 1,380 gal / day / person, of which the nuclear share would be about 1.3% if it all came from nuclear. Fossil plants also consume water, so the difference between fossil and nuclear is much smaller.
Contrast that with corn ethanol which needs 10,000 gallons of water to produce the energy equivalent of 8 gallons of gasoline, page 54.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/ewr/pubs/DOE%20energy-wat...
Filling a 20 gallon tank with E-85 one time consumes enough water to make all of your electricity for two years with nuclear power.
But, many nuclear plants are located on coastlines and use the ocean as a heat sink which is effectively unlimited and consumes no fresh water. Plants located near the discharge of rivers don’t count since the water discharges into the ocean before it has time to evaporate. So the average evaporation rate for our nuclear plants is significantly less than calculated above.
If we mass produce floating nuclear plants they will use sea water for cooling and they can desalinate sea water. Also note on the chart, page 38 of the pdf, that dry nuclear is an option.
So why the big fuss about water consumption by nuclear plants?
How many people want to see their electric bill double to save ½ % on their water consumption?
Anti nuclear folks like to talk about water withdrawals, not water consumption, because most people do not understand the difference. It is deliberate obfuscation, and in my mind unethical.
By the way, hydro evaporates 9 times more water than nuclear, bottom of page 38.
Nukes do require a minimum river flow though.
Atlanta has seen it's stored water in a prolonged severe drought drained away to cool the Southern Co. nukes near Dothan Alabama. In this particular case it is many thousands of gallons/NW Georgia resident lost to nuclear power.
Alan
Only those built with once through cooling. Take a satellite trip down the Ohio River and see how many fossil and nuclear plants have cooling towers. If climate change reduces Georgia rainfall, cooling towers, canals or ponds can be retrofitted.
Citing water withdrawals of once through plants as a reason not to build nuclear, as if all nuclear plants need that much water, is misleading. Water issues are not a good reason to avoid nuclear power in the future.
Water issues are not a good reason to avoid nuclear power in the future.
When reactors have to be shut down on the hottest days of the year when A/Cs are at max and drought impacts river flows, then yes, water issues do come into play.
Only those built with once through cooling.
I understand that there are maximum discharge temperatures that are also a consideration.
If climate change reduces Georgia rainfall, cooling towers, canals or ponds can be retrofitted.
And what happens when those canals and ponds begin to look like Lake Lanier?
The issue that I have isn't that water issues are unimportant, but they are far less important than one might be led to believe. They're issues of concern to individual locations in the same way that geographic fault lines, hurricanes, infrastructure, and distance to market are. They aren't a singular concern unique to nuclear power and dont really merit discussion except on a case by case basis.
I agree, but a more focused concern of water availability will reduce the number of viable nuke sites even more.
One reason (among several) to build new nukes next to old nukes is site acceptability. Adding a new nuke near Dothan is likely to draw objections form Georgia, as one specific example.
Overall, there are wide areas of the USA where there are no acceptable nuke sites. A limitation that has to be seriously considered (and routinely overlooked) by advocates for a "Rush to Nuke".
Alan
If the new nukes are air-cooled, the objections may turn to praise; replacing existing water-cooled plants would not just save the water, it would prevent power shortages when water temperatures are too high.
FWIW, 650°C is roughly the temperature at the inlet of a diesel turbocharger. Open-cycle gas turbines are a definite possibility for high-temperature reactors (and play nicely with CAES).
Today's nukes would also be suitable for CAES. The rejected steam from the turbine outlet is over 160 degrees Celcius. Not as efficient as having very high grade heat, but it should do nicely, right?
Air cooling makes sense sometimes, but it's typically much better to find a use for the waste heat - CHP, the double edged blade. Desalination, district heating, domestic hot water, paper and pulp, various chemical processes, etc.
A fine engineer is he who turns a problem into a solution.
Most steam powerplants have turbine exhaust pressures well below atmospheric and send sub-saturated steam (some fraction of liquid water) to the condenser; the exhaust temperature is closer to 130°F, not 160°C.
We are not talking about the condensate that is already cooled from the condenser here.
An example of a modern efficient operating saturated steam cycle range would be from, say, 300 degrees Celcius down to 200 degrees Celcius. However, the lower pressure sections don't really get you that much power; steam is not very good at that under lower temperatures. An easy way to do a CAES heat diversion, then, would be to bleed off steam at some lower pressure part of the turbine (i.e. at a point where steam pressures are well above atmospheric), without too much electrical output losses.
It's painfully obvious that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Oh that's very enlightening. The only thing that's painfully obvious is that you don't have an argument, nor make even the slightest effort to try. Do you even understand the basics of CHP? Do you know what bleeding off steam means from a turbine section? I thought better of you.
http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/Web/corporate/pages.nsf/Links/2E4F3CDA2F5DEA36802574870037D7AF/$file/Appendix+4.c+Combined+Heat+and+Power+potential.pdf
Take a look at table 1. Sacrificing a relatively small amount of electrical output gets you a large amount of heat available for the CAES system - and the heat input compared to electric CAES output is relatively small. Considering the relatively low cost of the CAES system, and the high value kWh electricity that the CAES system will deliver - nearly carbon free, clean, dispatchable electricity - this should make for an impressive business case.
Cyril, since you do not even try to understand the thermodynamics, you're just talking nonsense. I'd hoped to spare you this, but you don't know when to quit.
Quite. I've written on it before.
It's long been one of the standard methods of increasing the efficiency of steam-cycle plants; partially-expanded steam is tapped off and used to pre-heat boiler feed water, which is heat that does not need to be supplied by the boiler and is not rejected to the condenser. See Feedwater heater. I have done thermodynamic analyses of such systems, which you obviously have not.
Bleed steam has nothing whatsoever to do with CAES, which does not have a steam cycle.
Steam at 10 bar has a saturation temperature of about 180°C. A nuclear-driven CAES system will input heat to the turbine at over 600°C, and a gas-fired CAES system would probably operate at well over 1000°C; this is crucial, because the energy which can be recovered from a given amount of air is proportional to the absolute temperature (and expanding air cannot be allowed to drop below 0°C or the turbines will ice up). The waste-to-energy system you're using as a reference has a maximum electric thermal efficiency of 23.3% (refer back to column 1 of your Table 1, which you obviously did not understand); CAES systems on the drawing board are specced at 80% fuel-to-electric. There is no point bothering with a steam cycle at less than 1/3 the thermal efficiency when you can feed heat to the air cycle. It would be a waste of both energy and capital.
BTW, I note that you can't even provide a working link to your own reference. Here's a good one, for anyone who wants to check out the details.
The thing that you've made painfully obvious is that your intellect goes as far as recognizing acronyms beginning with "C", and loses the ability to make distinctions after that. Thermodynamics is beyond your ken, and probably always will be.
Show me which of my statements regarding thermodynamics was factually incorrect.
DUH! You may have followed thermodynamics courses, yet you are not very good at listening. I was suggesting to use nuclear LWR and HWR cogeneration to supply CAES heat input. Then you say this:
So you do know what you're talking about - I knew that, but you were being deliberately obtuse and I had to call you on it.
So it is proportional. That means 180 degrees is still a large potential heat input. It depends on the cost which you've shown no detailed calculations on. Sure, parasitics will be higher if lower grade heat is used. But this is not huge and moreover is also a cost issue.
Nope; the LWR and HWR are already there. Paid for and delivering energy to the grid. That's what makes it so attractive to me if LWR cogeneration can be used for CAES heat input.
Don't know why that happened. It works if you copy paste it in your browser; clearly this is too much too ask. I get the feeling that you're really frustrated. Maybe you should get some coffee? Or did your cat die? Do you want to talk about it?
First you do not respond to my post - only with an ad hominem attack. This is not an intellectual response EP. Then when I call you out for that, you post more proof of not understanding what I said, and even now you dismiss a potentially powerfull CAES heat input (from existing nuclear technology) on a very thin analytical basis. Saying it is too expensive won't do. Show me accurate cost calculations why LWR steam bled off to supply CAES heat input replacing natural gas is uneconomical and/or does not supply enough heat. Since LFTR and high temperature nuclear in general is not widely available and has a risk of not being available for a long time, this is important. It is you who did not make distinctions.
Why would you say such a thing? It doesn't serve any purpose of debate, and is not a very scientific thing to say. Remember, you started the ad hominem attack; when you do that, do not be surprised when people respond negatively. What is your problem? You're not usually like this.
Now, let's keep it factual. Being mean doesn't help. Show me the cost calculations.
What are you wrong about? Just about everything.
Wrong; try 93° F and 0.8 PSIA.
More of the same.
Demonstrated to be nonsense above.
And this claim of yours is generally false:
Even at the reactor outlet temperature of ~550°F, the available heat would be insufficient. 1000°F is about the minimum for a serious gas turbine, and the hotter the better. If you understood thermodynamics, you'd be able to demonstrate this to your own satisfaction and drop the issue. Either you don't understand or you're trolling. The prescription is the same for both: shut up. TOD does ban trolls.
Bullshit. You were and are committing the fallacy of ambiguity, which is dishonest.
Another statement showing you have no grasp. 180°C is ~453 K, while you really need to hit about 820 K and would prefer to be well over 1000 K. You're talking around half the pressure-volume product, half the recoverable energy, twice the heat exchangers required to achieve it, around 1/4 or less of the heat transfer per mass of air...
Since you claim to be so smart, let's see you do an analysis of this issue. Assume air out of storage at 303 K and 50 bar, how much energy/kg of air could you get with heat at 453 K, 560 K and 920 K and isentropic expansion (γ=1.40)? How many reheats would you need for each input temp to avoid cooling below 273 K? What's the thermal efficiency of the three cycles?
You're talking about a wholesale re-engineering of the heat engine, for a purpose for which the reactor is ill-designed. This would be massively expensive. This is why I proposed doing it with a molten-salt reactor designed around an air-cycle gas turbine; most of the heat engine would already be handling air in the way required for CAES.
Clearly, you didn't try it. I did, and only got a partial URL.
BS is highly unscientific. It's a reaction to the BS you've been flooding this thread with, and you can stop right here, troll.
CAES- compressed air energy storage?
Yes. I'd link these things but I use the acronym so often it gets tiresome.
It's tough writing for a mixed audience. You may write about CAES every day of the week but I don't read about CAES that often.
So what's the advantage of storing energy as compressed air as opposed to keeping a couple tons of molten salt in insulated containers?
A short list off the top of my head:
One CAES study I saw posited several days of storage capacity, and it wouldn't be all that difficult to expand to weeks. Pumped hydro and other systems are limited to hours, and molten salts would be very expensive to expand beyond that (and would be very lossy due to heat conduction). CAES is a game-changer.
A CAES system operates partially as a heat engine itself, and usually outputs more energy than is input to the compressors.
Could you expand on that (no pun intended)? I know you don't mean a perpetual motion machine, but are you referring to the inclusion of natural gas, and not counting its input energy? Or are you implying that it is adiabatic?
Yes, I'm referring to the inclusion of fuel (natural gas isn't the only one that could be used). One CAES overview study I read included a system which had an electric output:input ratio of 1.33:1 and a gas-to-output efficiency of 80%.
Adiabatic CAES would beat those figures handily. I'm trying to find the time to look at the potential of near-isothermal compression for the first stage, which might also be a game-changer.
I'd be curious to see that study; did the cavern have a higher starting temperature than ambient air? Was this averaged over a year's time of charging/discharging? There has to be some reason for having a higher output vs. input energy. And it's not clear how the gas efficiency was determined.
I'm all for CAES, btw, just curious how many sites would achieve this level of performance, and for how long.
There's no mystery. The compressed-air input isn't included in the gas-to-electric figure, but it takes a bit of digging into the report to get all the figures together to calculate exactly what comes from what. The overall efficiency (output vs. electric+gas inputs) is around fifty percent, IIRC (the storage of air at near-ambient temperature loses a lot of compression energy, which has to be made up before expansion - that's what the fuel is for).
The overall efficiency (output vs. electric+gas inputs) is around fifty percent
Ok, that makes sense now.
If the heat generated during compression can be stored (that is, the adiabatic variant), the total efficiency could be in the 70-80% range and perhaps even better.
But don't take my word for it. Someone recently told me thermodynamics is beyond my ken.
If one could insulate the cave/reservoir, then it might be more adiabatic. Otherwise, the thermal conductivity of the rock mass (virtually infinite) will draw heat energy out at some rate and dissipate it.
The heat capacity of the earth may be effectively infinite, but the thermal conductivity is not and it becomes less significant as the system gets larger. Hot-water storage for concentrating solar thermal plants has been suggested using lined rock caverns without insulation. The rate of heat loss to the rock (presumably after an initial heating period, which is a one-time cost) is low enough that it's not worth the cost of insulation.
A regenerator has a thermal gradient from the hot side to the cold side. If insulation is an issue, one possibility is to put the hot side in the middle of a volume and the cold side at the edges. The heat would have to move through the colder areas before it could escape, and this heat would be the first to be removed from the regenerator when air was withdrawn.
I don't think the guys ordering a brand new nuclear reactor are worried about the cost of salt. Even tons of it. Air isn't free at my corner gas station. Compressed air has costs involved.
All a nuclear reactor produces is heat. If the air compression took mechanical or electrical energy, that means at some point there was a lossy heat engine producing the mechanical energy. Molten salt energy hasn't gone through the lossy heat engine yet. You use the phrase "back to mechanical energy". The energy was never mechanical in the first place. Losses due to heat conduction can be arbitrarily small just by piling on more insulation.
I know of two utility scale CAES in the USA (you mention the one in Alabama.) They've built a commercial scale prototype and they aren't going forward. The cure is evidently worse than the disease at least at this point in time. Nobody doubts storing energy as compressed air is "proven technology".
Anyways, I don't have a dog in this hunt and don't really care if the future is CAES or not.
What kind of salt are you talking about? If it's got isotopically-purified 7LiF in it, it's going to be expensive.
It really doesn't make sense to store nuclear heat anyway, since you can make it 24/7. That's more for concentrating solar.
For the compressing. The atmosphere is free, and isn't depleted or appreciably altered by people compressing air and letting it out again. Water's often not so easily available.
The beauty of air as a medium for storing e.g. wind energy is that it holds mechanical energy, not heat energy. You have losses but the medium is so cheap that your system cost is determined mostly by the power capacity of the system and only slightly by the amount of energy stored.
The wind energy was. This discussion of CAES is in the context of a hybrid wind/nuclear system with storage. The nuclear energy would be applied to the reheat of stored air before expansion.
I don't have a dog in this hunt either, but if people are complaining that the grid can't run on base-load nuclear and un-schedulable wind, CAES is a way to match supply and demand. (It would also allow major power lines to go out for significant periods with minimal effect on the system; the ability to store energy on one side and release storage on the other make such events far less troublesome.)
Ok, hybrid wind-nuclear system. I missed that. The low grade heat from somewhere in the steam turbine is used to heat the compressed air which is where the synergy comes in. So the air is compressed by windmills.
The CAES is used for load following and the nuke is always on. So the steam has to cooled whether the CAES is discharging or not. I guess we can heat a nearby river for that.
Ok, we need a site with 1) huge salt caverns, 2) excellent wind, 3) running water 4) High voltage grid connection. Are there any likely candidates in the USA?
You really need high-grade heat. MSR or HTGR heat would do, PWR/BWR heat would be marginal (and stick you with two different power systems).
The air is compressed using whatever power source is in surplus. The compressors are electric and don't care where the power is coming from.
If the reactor is running on an open-cycle gas turbine, there's no steam. Air comes in, is compressed, heated, expanded and exhausted. If there's surplus power, there's a cooling and storage stage between compression and heating.
It's easier than that.
Grid power is the sine qua non.
Yes; However thats only the salt in the core. Salt for thermal transfer doesn't require isotopic purity.
Other advantages are:
- CAES is proven (Germany and Alabama have been operating a large system for years). It uses very conventional turbomachinery, the labor and expertise are largely available. Solution mined salt caverns is the same - salt mining industry. In the case of the Norton CAES facility being constructed right now, an existing mine is being used.
- CAES uses very little materials per unit of capacity and energy stored, compared to other bulk energy storage options, and it uses almost all commodities like steel.
Regarding heat storage, a long term attractive option for CAES is to store the heat generated during compression, to be used for reheating on expansion during discharge. This will make CAES a true storage option, as normally natural gas or other fuels would have to be used to get the heat in the expansion stage. So CAES and heat storage may not be mutually exclusive in the future; developments in large scale heat storage could benefit CAES with heat storage. However, going for combined heat and power (from eg nuclear and geothermal plants) may also prove to be an attractive option, as that avoids the cost and issues with storing the heat. Theoretically, storing the heat is ideal, but economics and practical issues are important.
Reactors do not have to be shutdown on the hottest days of the year. Cooling towers are an option. For a 100 year heat wave it might make more sense to wave the temperature limits than build a cooling tower that may only be needed for a few weeks in the 60 year life of the plant. These issues are the same for other heat sources.
Over the entire U.S., wind power dropped 20% below average during July and August of 2006, while Electricity consumption for the nation jumped 20% above average. Nuclear power plants normally run at 100% year round, yet production was 10% above average during July and August because they schedule refueling and maintenance outages for spring and fall when demand is low. Windfarms often perform maintenance in the summer to minimize production losses.
In California, windmill output at the time of peak demand dropped below 4% of data plate rating for seven days during the heat wave of 2006. Counting on wind power for baseload capacity during a heat wave could be deadly.
With a cooling tower water requirements are reduces by a factor of 100. Most likely other issues will dominate at that point. As a last resort we could cut back on biofuel production a tiny bit.
A more focused concern of water availability will dramatically reduce the number of viable sites for growing biofuel. Pumping an ancient aquifer to make ethanol is insane.
Adding a new nuclear plant at Dothan that includes cooling towers for both plants could reduce water withdrawals of that site by 98%.
“Zogby Poll: 67% Favor Building New Nuclear Power Plants in U.S.”
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1515
“More than three times as many strongly supported nuclear energy than strongly opposed it. Two thirds of self-described environmentalists favor it”
“In mid 2007 a survey of 1150 people living within 16 km of nuclear power plants in the USA, but without any personal involvement with them, showed very strong support for new nuclear plants. Over 90% thought nuclear energy was important for future supply, 82% favoured it now, 77% said that new plants should definitely be built and 71% said they would accept a new plant near them.”
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html#opinion
People who live near existing nuclear plants are more supportive than average Americans. Some of the new construction will be on existing nuclear sites, like the two plants in Texas.
Evidence please.
Adding a new nuclear plant at Dothan that includes cooling towers for both plants could reduce water withdrawals of that site by 98%.
As long as a nuke operates near Dothan, a minimum flow in the Chattahoochee River is required, The existing plants should go off-line circa 2040. A new reactor is likely to extend that to 2080 or so.
I think Georgia would object to another nuke at that site.
Evidence ?
1) The multi-year process to qualify a new nuke site (geology, hydrology, evacuation routes & capacity, soil stability among other factors that can disqualify a site for a new nuke).
2) AFAIK, only two new sites (one in Idaho, the other West Texas) are being considered for new nukes. All others at old sites.
3) No new nukes on Long Island, Oahu, very large areas of California, between Memphis & St. Louis, south of New Orleans, near Yellowstone, in or near large cities, etc. All areas where NRC rules would almost certainly ban a new nuke.
Alan
Even cooling towers require a certain level of water. Why are they on the Ohio River and not some creek ?
Cooling is a parasitic loss of electricity, the more power used to pump water & air, the less power for society.
Alan
CHP is one of the best solutions, since you can use wet cooling because a lot less cooling water is required, and a societal useful purpose is found for the rejected heat. Turn a minor problem into a major solution.
FYI Obama's energy team
Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu - A Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has been working to develop new and cleaner energy, recently leading the Berkeley National Laboratory in pursuit of new alternative and renewable energies. He will be leading the Department of Energy in continuing these pursuits. "His appointment should send a signal to all that my Administration will value science, we will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action," said Obama.
Energy and Climate Policy Coordinator, White House, Carol Browner - "Carol understands that our efforts to create jobs, achieve energy security and combat climate change demand integration among different agencies; cooperation between federal, state and local governments; and partnership with the private sector," said Obama. Browner is the longest-serving administrator of the U.S. EPA and will work to implement new energy policies.
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson - "Lisa also shares my commitment to restoring the EPA's robust role in protecting our air, water and abundant natural resources so that our environment is cleaner and our communities are safer," said Obama. Jackson recently served as Commissioner of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, helping New Jersey reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop new sources of energy, and she will use her experience to continue this effort at the EPA.
Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley - Sutley most recently worked as the Deputy Mayor for Energy and the Environment in Los Angeles. According to Obama, Sutley will "bring this unique experience to Washington, and be a key player in helping to make our government more efficient, and coordinating our efforts to protect our environment at home and around the globe."
Thank you for posting this, it was excellent. I believe that the economic depression will hopefully link into to a thorough upgrading of energy infrastructure.
The worst scenario would be a repeat of the Ford/Carter road to no-where. Although there were some energy efficiency gains, however, most programs were doa'ed with the Reagan Administrators.
A fair summary of most energy sources (I believe nuclear has a place), and I heartily agree with most of your assessment and recommendations, especially the unfortunate high percentage of funding that is targeted to roads.
I do, however, have a comment on your summary statement of solar;
Solar energy has even greater potential than wind, but it is far more expensive and only accounts for perhaps 1/100 of 1% of US electric generation.
Since solar hot water and passive solar heating displace fossil fuels, and do so with a roughly 4-8 year payback (after that, it's 'free energy'), I don't see how this can be termed "far more expensive". Perhaps you were referring to solar PV and solar thermal electrical generation, but your statement doesn't specify and comes off as a sweeping all-inclusive judgement, even though you seem to favor some of these in the next paragraph. You also seem to dismiss upcoming low cost PV technology, though I saw no reference to costs in your nuclear section. Note that building PV is as closer to point-of-use than any other solution.
One major aspect I would have hoped this article would address is references to reducing demand through energy efficiency and demand side management.
Will -that is why in the end we decided on a series, rather than a 'list of TOD recommendations'. These issues are so complicated that the best we can do is provide data, educate, discuss and try to toss out the dead ends and keep the gems. I don't think we at TOD, the public at large, nor the policymakers in government could even agree on the ends, let alone the means....(hint: ends should be considered first)
I look forward to your piece on the importance of passive solar use in energy policy.
One thing I would point out with respect to efficiency increases is that capital expenditures required become terribly important, with today's lack of capital. The energy efficiency that comes through car pooling is a kind of energy efficiency we can latch onto, with only a tiny amount of effort. Building more automobiles with higher MPG and passive solar homes requires a lot of capital. We really need to look at whether we really need additional cars / homes, and whether the capital could better be used elsewhere.
We are basically working on a cash flow basis now. A dollar spent one place is a dollar not spent somewhere else.
Well worth asking, Gail, but I would also suggest that with new homes being built all the time, both with and (mostly) without serious attention to energy-use applied to their design and outfitting, this means that the 'standard construction' homes will be spending dollar after dollar after dollar in excess operating costs.
Amory Lovins has shown a string of efficiency designs that make a home so much more energy-wise, that the needed heating and cooling equipment is reduced or eliminated entirely, making the construction costs of the building as cheap or cheaper than the typical counterpart, since you didn't have to buy or install a furnace or A/C. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvmHJNeif24 (Good Example of this mentioned at 2:00 minutes, but also throughout the 10 minute overview)
There is a constant presumption in this conversation that conservation and forward-thinking in building design is automatically wildly expensive. As with Solar, which ultimately pays for itself, the reputation is ALL based on the up-front cost, and Lovins shows how compounding benefits can preclude even the initial increased build expense.
Hi Gail,
re: "We really need to look at whether we really need additional cars / homes, and whether the capital could better be used elsewhere."
This is the heart of the issue.
It certainly looks like we have "peak now."
Perhaps you could write an article explaining the difference between "cash flow" basis and "other" bases, to help expand and clarify this distinction.
We need an immediate study by an impartial scientific body, and the National Academy of Sciences is the only one that comes to mind. This study should be fast-tracked, and cover the Hirsch report, the GAO report and the other scientific studies in place already.
We are looking at a situation of impending catastrophe. We need immediate contingency and emergency planning.
It's not just a lack of capital, in fact; it's an excess of debt.
Your car-pooling suggestion is an excellent specific.
Thank you Will. This is a superb post with the usual excellent follow up comments. The one big omission was the role of reducing energy consumption across the board. Nate Hagens has been addressing this with his recent post on residential solar construction. We can change the energy mix, alter transportation patterns but mandating energy efficiency should be a huge emphasis. Using less pollutes less. All in all excellent post. Please write more often!
I was speaking more about PV, but my point about SLURS (overriding local laws, condo or homeowner association rules, etc. which burden solar installations of any type) was to address those points and make technical feasibility rather than local politics the major consideration.
The logistical problem is more difficult. The windiest parts of the country are also the least-populated and have little grid capacity to export their power to the rest. A new network of high-voltage DC (HVDC) power lines is needed to help get power from the major areas of supply from the Dakotas down to Texas out to buyers across the country.
Here's my stupid question. Would we better off encouraging residents in Windy States to replace portable fossil fuels with Electricity? I lived in Southeastern ND for several years and most homes were heated with propane or fuel oil. Replacing some of that trucked in fuel oil or propane with Electricity seems like it could be a win win. Likewise electrifying the rail lines (as you proposed) crossing the midwest would be a good way to put "grid fenced" power to work. Given the climate I'm not sure if Plug in Hybrids/Electrics would work.
On electrification of rail I wonder if a Green Goat (or similar) could be fitted with a catenary system so it could pick up and deliver cars without using the diesel engine in urban areas. I'd like to see more door to door rail (versus intermodal which is easier to do but doesn't reduce diesel pollution in cities where it is most harmful).
I like these ideas. Figure out how to use wind generation where it is generated first. Dramatically encouraging substitution of eg. ground-source heat pumps for propane and oil heat would be a brilliant start.
Roll out wind power in conjunction with frequency responsive air source heat pumps, to be joined by electric transport as the technology matures.
Hi OMG,
Agreed. Whilst ground source heat pumps are certainly one option, high efficiency air source units are often a better choice in residential applications, especially when propane or fuel oil (or wood) is available for supplemental heating.
Our oil tank was last filled October 24th. I checked the gage earlier this evening and we're currently standing at about 7/8ths full, which means we've used roughly 115 litres/30 U.S. gallons over the past 95 days. A large chunk of this can be attributed to running the boiler during a series of extended power cuts over the Christmas holidays (we lost power on several occasions due to severe weather). To put this into context, our average temperature thus far this month is -7.7C /18F. Today's high was -16C/3F and our low was -21C/-6F; yesterday, it was -8C and -17C respectively. We're currently standing at -20C and our small 12,000 BTU/hr Sanyo is still supplying enough heat to keep our 900 sq. ft. basement level at a steady 20C.
This heat pump is connected to a Kill-a-Watt meter (it operates at 120-volts and draws a maximum of 1,500-watts). Over the past 439 hours, it has consumed a total of 333 kWh (it's been a little over eighteen days since we last lost power and the meter reset itself). Our average temperature over this same period is -8.9C/16F. At $0.11796 per kWh, our operating costs during this spell of particularly cold weather works out to be a little over $65.00 CDN/month ($US 53.00).
Anyone who tells you air source heat pumps don't work well in colder climates is sadly mistaken.
Cheers,
Paul
I recall reading an article in Home Power from a family which installed a wind turbine and found that the price paid by the utility was so small that it made sense to use their annual excess generation for space heat. They did this with an electric water heater, baseboard radiators and a circulating pump.
Excellent!!! A quality article that is comprehensive without being beyond the grasp of a busy politician -- certainly not beyond the grasp of our very able President. Let's see if he quits promoting ethanol and "clean coal". Let us see if he doesn't believe in Unicorns.
Dammit, now my head won't fit through the door again. Someone rag on me to get my ego down to size before I really have to pee.
Excellent EP, as usual, a no nonsense recommendation. And may I say, very critical points!
Be prepared for a lot more gimmicks, and a lot more sound energy policies as well. Compromises will have to be made. No worries. I would gladly take a gimmick like SPR swapping if it gets just one sound policy instrument in the bargain. A far bigger problem is when the sound policy instrument gets watered down to the point of being ineffective.
Now can you see why I noted fiscal policy is so important? Low taxes on infrastructure that we need - based on scientific merit - are a powerful tool to push change in the right direction.
That's not true, mineral sequestration, like olivine neutralizing CO2, is already occuring on a large scale. Courtesy of mother nature: natural processes like erosion are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and waters of our earth, far more effectively, and with far less saturation effects, than biological systems can. See this short introductory PDF:
ftp://ftp.geog.uu.nl/pub/posters/2008/Let_the_earth_help_us_to_save_the_...
While sodium has advantages, I would advise against using it at all, and go for the lead bismuth. Perhaps public opinion has changed favorably, but the risk of creating another Kalkar failure is unnecessary IMHO.
And speaking of metallic fuels, what are your thoughts about Hyperion's hydride reactor?
I took a quick look at Hyperion's site and some other stuff. It is aimed at a different problem (it is specifically designed for smaller applications off the main grid). It doesn't have any provision for reprocessing fuel during the lifetime of the system, and it uses enriched uranium. I cannot tell if it could use e.g. natural uranium spiked with U-233 instead of enriched uranium, which would let it be fed from a thorium-based power cycle.
Looks like a niche product. It will probably be useful, but it doesn't address the dual problems of bulk power and spent PWR fuel (it will create spent-uranium fuel itself). The spent fuel could probably be fed to an IFR, so it need not create another waste stream of its own.
If I understand it correctly, reprocessing should be easy with a hydride fuel. Simply heat up the spent fuel in a controlled environment and the hydrogen separates from the uranium hydride, leaving nearly pure metals (mostly uranium and plutonium). Reprocessing oxide fuels is really difficult; they're just really stable. Pure metal is easy. Of course most of the U238 can't be utilized, but that's not a big problem IMHO, especially not if the reprocessing is that much more effective. And as you say, it could work well with an IFR.
This design could definately be sooner to market than an IFR, and it could take a rather big niche; the company has plans for a 100 GWe. NRC licensing is expected by 2013.
As someone else mentioned, this might be coupled to a windfarm, to have a baseload wind/nuclear system (the nuclear system would last a lot longer in terms of fuel use, although I can't say what kind of thermal and mechanical cycling issues it would have that would reduce the lifetime).
Quotes are from: http://www.techrockies.com/story/0017490.html
There's a lot of skepticism toward nuclear energy in this country, including the waste it produces. What are your plans for disposing of the spent fuel?
John R. "Grizz" Deal: We're going to take it back to the factory and we're going to reuse most of it.
The waste that comes out of our reactor after powering 20,000 homes for 8-10 years is about the size of a football. Using coal and gas over the same time frame, the waste stream for just you, after factoring in CO2 emissions, would overflow Mile High Stadium in Denver. So our waste stream is very concentrated, and yes, we have to do something with it, but there are known ways of dealing with it.
Our fuel is very unique. It's uranium hydride. UH3 is the chemical formula. Low-enriched, about 10 percent [uranium isotope]-235, the rest is U-238. By comparison, bomb-grade fuel is about 98 percent enriched.
You can't turn our fuel into a bomb. You'd have to re-enrich, re-process the fuel, so you might as well start with yellowcake. That's one of the neat safety features of our reactor. For nefarious purposes, our reactor has absolutely no value whatsoever.
John R. "Grizz" Deal: Thirty megawatts is enough to power 20,000 U.S. homes or, internally, we've figured out that would equate to about 100,000 homes anywhere outside the U.S.
There's not a lot of 100,000-home places out there in the developing world, so they're going to have enough electricity to power residential, plus industrial, plus clean water, plus sewage. It's everything; it's not just powering homes.
These are very good points.
You can make a bomb with about 90% enriched U235. Japan being the empirical evidence. But 90% enrichment is really much more difficult than 5-10%. It gets more and more difficult to get to the really high enrichment levels.
Starting with yellowcake is definately easier, as you wouldn't have to worry so much about other fission products that would be present in the spent uranium fuel from the hydride reactor.
If bulk power is required (I honestly don't see why 30MWe would not be bulk power, nor why bulk power would be required anyway) then ganging 10x10 of these things together gets 3000 MWe. Or 10 for 300 MWe. All the flexibility you'd want. With a LWR you need to go big to be affordable. Bulk isn't very practical. Even the biggest cities don't use multiple GWe, so there's really no demand related point in going that big, it only complicates grid operation and -logistics.
Not really.
It takes about 30 times more raw uranium and 40 times more energy to go from 3.5% reactor fuel to 90% atomic bomb grade but the process is identical.
http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfcue.html
If you can process uranium you can make a bomb--there is no impediment.
And things have gotten much cheaper with the development of Zippe gas centrifuges.
A huge reprocessing program is a huge proliferation threat (except for devotees of the breeder reactor cargo cult).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separative_Work_Unit#Separative_work_unit
The key to proliferation resistance from nuclear terrorism is U232.
It emits a powerful gamma ray at 2.6 megavolts. At 1 par per 100,000,000, it can be detected at 300 meters. If U232 concentration is maintained at 3%, the level where nuclear fuel is self protecting, it kills immediately at 1 meter.Nuclear material can be detected from a high flying reconnaissance plane or even from space by using a one square meter sodium iodine detector producing a computer enhanced two dimensional radiation image; use the inverse square law(1/d^^2), do the math.
State sponsored nuclear proliferation can be mitigated or at the least discouraged by the use of U232/233 fissile fuel. This is why I favor U233 as a fissile material since U232 is very difficult to isotopically separate from U233 because of U232s minimal isotopic weight difference to U233. I don’t believe U232 has been removed by isotopic processes from U233 yet, correct me if I am wrong.
Centrifugation is very energy intensive - it's not that simple,fortunately,to go up from a few % to > 90% enrichment without any external effect
No, gaseous diffusion is very energy intensive (2400 kWh/SWU) while centrifuges are on the order of 60 kWh/SWU (reference, other sources slightly different).
Not that expensive with the Zippe technology--about 60 kwh per SWU. An atomic bomb takes about 20 pounds of 90% U-235 which is about 120000 kwh of energy input(60 tons of coal?).
It simply isn't that hard to enrich uranium.
Processing/reprocessing is an invitation to proliferation.
I'm sorry, but when you mentioned Zippe, I had an unguarded moment of free association....
Indeed, it takes 150-200 thousands SWU to produce enough slightly enriched uranium to produce one GWyear of electricity, much more if you want to go up to > 90% in enrichment (about x200 factor per kg of product). Obviously, you don't spend billions of $ of infrastructure only to produce a few kg of HEU, nor you can do it without any external effect
This is nonsense.
E-P, you are the chief shaman of the nuclear-electron cargo cult.
Why should we believe you when you say nonsense like,
Raw? the feed is reprocessed highlevel waste!-and it would require 6.7 tons of FBR fuel to get 1 ton GWea versus ~20 tons of equivalent LWR fuel for 1Gwea with no EXPENSIVE reprocessing.
500 tons of reprocessed, high level,
concentrated reactor waste FROM WHERE EXACTLY?
The US produces 2,000 tons of LWR waste (from 106 Gwe units) a year. If all of it were magically sent to reprocessing and then on to FBRs that would produce 85.6 Gwea. That would double our nuclear power output to reduce our coal consumption by only 50%. And we would still run out of natural uranium in 60 or so years.
There's a reason nuclear power is out of favor and it has nothing with the opposition by Green and "progressives"( and you are not one). It's expensive and certainly not what the dreamy cornucopians are selling.
MIT has explored what a fast breeder economy would be like and it appears you don't understand what it would be.
http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/
They estimate that the entire world can support 1500 GWe of nuclear power in 2050(!) based on the once-thru method, based on 3-4 million tons of uranium. With reactors running 8760 hours per year that is 13140 Twh, yet today the world uses 18580 Twh without all the darling electric cars and electrified trains running about.
The fast breeder method turns radioactive waste from commercial LWR into fuel for IFR 'incinerators', not natural uranium into fuel. The fact is that a LWR/FBR system which nuclear scientists(not you) propose. Waste would still be produced but be called 'separated uranium'. The LWR/IFR program of MIT would extend uranium supplies by 1.8 times for the same amount of electricity.
Readers at TOD should know that there are NO technofixes for consumption but the lure of
science fiction solutions is irresistible to
the poets of technology.
It is also possible according to physics to build a tiny wormhole if we could convert the planet Jupiter into pure energy!
Ummm...energy[Homer Simpson].
I would estimate this article was perhaps locked in before Friday's post on the Liquid-Fluoride Reactor [Barton]) or (Thorium Molten Salt Reactor [French]. The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm - The Oil Drum
Perhaps you missed it. makes all your stuff go away.
Then you forgot to read the sources in the article.
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/WASH-1097.pdf
Thorium is not a nuclear fuel--it becomes fuel when you put it inside a nuclear reactor along with U-235 or Pu.
The technical name for the Liquid Fluoride Reactor is the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor [MSBR] because thousands of gallons per minute of molten plutonium/U-235 and thorium fluoride salts at 700 degrees C are pumped around in the reactor with thousands more gallons per minute of liquid salt coolants being circulated to cool this inferno. Pumping molten metals like lead is not a trivial application. The spec seems to call for 11000 gallon per minute molten salt pump?!
The thorium breeder cycle acts exactly like a plutonium breeder cycle except that thorium breeds more slowly but burns up faster than uranium; since making new U-233 is more important than burning it up, this
is a very big negative.
OTH, U-233 is a very good burning fuel for thermal reactors like LWRs, better than plutonium with fewer hazardous wastes.
This good burn meant it was excellent fuel for high temperature gas reactors but this technology has failed in the real world despite it's potential for higher efficency electricity generation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
The other method is to convert (blanket)thorium in a heavy water reactor fueled with plutonium reprocessed from a LWR with the U-233 going back to the LWR.
As far as I can see, the thorium process will closely resemble the mass balance of a plutonium breeder cycle and therefore is far from a cornucopian's delight.
The fact that is paper dates from 1969 should have had you thinking harder, but your energy addiction is firmly in control of your critical thinking ability.
The specs seem to call for a maximum salt velocity of 13 feet per second. That's not a big problem.
Molten metals and molten salts are both conductive fluids, and can be pumped by induction without physical contact.
Any source of neutrons can produce U233: i.e., fusion. Check out the LIFE reactor.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/
While there are many good points presented in the article, I think there's too much emphasis on nuclear, as you mention. The not too subtle switch from the title of "Energy policy" to "Electricity policy" may have slipped by the average reader.
For example, in the short discussion of solar, EP focuses on solar electricity and compares that with nuclear, claiming that solar provides less than .01% of present generation, therefore it won't provide much in the near term. This is clearly a one sided comparison, as low temperature solar thermal is ignored. Solar hot water and space heating have the potential to provide the same resulting energy services as electricity, only they are locally available and thus not going to be fed into the power grid to be sold by the electric utilities. But, what the nation needs NOW is energy available for the end user, not more money poured down the drain in the financial markets.
Also, any comparison of present installations ignores the fact that future supply increases from conventional sources (BOTH coal and nuclear) will be much more expensive than the costs of plants built over the past 50 years. One must perform the calculations at today's costs, a fact that EP ignores. Today's price of electricity to the consumer includes the much lower capital cost which was invested over the years. It's been pointed out that building LWR's today would cost at least 3 times more than building the same plant 30 years ago.
Furthermore, the short list of renewable alternatives for making electricity ignores the fact that there has been a large contribution from hydro power. While most good sites for large dams have already been taken, there are many smaller dams which do not have generators. Hydro can also be used in peaking systems to level the load and cut the peak in demand. Peak power is the most expensive power, as the peaking plants are not run flat out, thus their capital cost per kWhr is very large. Other storage options are available and those were not mentioned either.
Sorry to say, I think the article could have been much better. The strong slant toward nuclear, especially options still in development and not yet put into service, looks rather one sided to me.
E. Swanson
In the quite near future, pretty much ALL energy policy will be electricity policy, or should be. We may as well get used to it now.
Agreed this item, see my posts below.
On costs of nuclear plants, AECL will come to your licensd site today and guarantee to build you a pair of 1100 MW CANDU-ACR Gen III reactors at $1450 / kw, cheaper than coal. On time, under budget. Only problem with nuclear build is the politics and legal interference in construction schedules.
If they are so confident about that budget, then surely they will agree to a law that allows no rate increases due to the nuclear project.
As for me, I will believe 1450/kWe when they have finished the project. 1450/kWth would not surprise me as closer to the real cost.
Nuclear Canada Canadian Nuclear Association Electronic Newsletter VOLUME V MAY 14, 2004 NUMBER 17
Back in 2004, this information was wdely available in many news sources in Canada. Demanding "No rate increase due to new generation build" is clearly unreasonable, however if you tell me what rates you have now, I'll tell you whether they'd need to increase. The more rational demand is fixed price constuction contracts, which AECL does offer (and no-one else).
If they can build new nuclear for 1450/kWe then that will not mean significant rate increases at all.
I don't listen to nuclear group spokespeople. In the US they say under 2000/kWe, and when a real project comes in at 5000-8000/kWe without the first concrete even poured, they keep saying it will be under 2000/kWe and even lower after the 'nth' unit, when that historically has never happened.
We will see how real projects are finished, and then see what it costs.
This quote is not from a "nuclear group spokesperson". Mr. Polycin is marketing manager USA for AECL. He's the decision-maker of whether they take a contract.
And how exactly is that different? AECL is a nuclear group. Mr. Polycin is speaking for AECL.
Of course, marketing people talk about cheap nuclear, unfortunately the inconvenient truth is that real projects suggest otherwise. This is the issue you're trying to avoid here.
So you're actually saying you don't believe anything anyone knowledgeable about nuclear says about nuclear?
Marketing people also negotiate the contracts... This is not car selling, these guys are well-trained, knowledgeable, and put their entire corporation on the line with every contract.
You obviously know nothing about the new-construction history of AECL. Get the stupid politicians and lawyers out of the way and they'll give you solid contracts on time on budget. See Quinshan 3 and 4 in China (2004 startup), the CANDU 6's in Korea, several others recent enough for valid evaluation.
Ahhhh, usless and pointless. No further responses unless you post reliable backup.
I could have broken out solar PV from solar-thermal electric from solar DHW and space heat, but my long piece was already becoming a tome and I had another piece to finish on deadline (met, thank you).
LWRs are under construction now. The feed-in tariffs for PV in Germany are much higher than the price expected from the new nuclear plant in Finland. There are sites and applications where PV is excellent, but it's starting from a very low base and we should be expecting it to hit the 10-20% level perhaps 20 years from now. Solar thermal has some of the same geographical issues which are making headaches for wind, and technical issues are easier to resolve than geography. Nuclear is already cranking out 19% of US generation, and we need to replace coal and gas starting today.
That Finnish plant was supposed to go online in May 2009, which has now been postponed to 2012 (enough time to add a few more delays).
The cost has risen from 3 billion to 5 billion Euros. Given the three additional years needed to finish building, there's enough time to add another 1-3 billion Euros.
The plant was offered much too cheap by Areva and Siemens, probably on purpose, because otherwise they would not have gotten the order. Now they're bickering about the extra costs.
P.S. Nuclear is also facing the same personnel issue as the oil industry: aging engineers and no fresh blood.
P.P.S. Nuclear is gradually losing capacity, not adding. Just to keep at the present level, many new plants would have to be built in the next decades. Wind is replacing fossil fuel today. Solar will do that tomorrow.
The Finnish EPR is a first of a kind project with all the delays and overcosts typical of first of a kind projects. The French EPR to be built in Flamanville is facing only modestly delays and overcosts, today its cost is in the range of only 4 billions euros, against the beginning 3,3 billions euros.
Unfortunately, neither wind and solar energy are really displacing fossil fuel on a large scale (besides about 1% of electricity world needs),nor at reasonable costs, even in richer countries.
It' s not really correct nuclear capacity is falling worldwide : infact it goes up from 250 to 360 GW from 1985 to 2000-2005.
I agree with you on workers issue, but it' s nothing to do with costs or natural resources depletion
Siemens is trying to sell their % of Areva. A "vote of confidence" in the billions of euros.
"Ask someone who makes them" ?
Alan
Ah, now my head's down to size again, and the pressure's off my bladder.
Two points here:
If you don't recognize when you are contradicting yourself, you're not one to criticize.
With FBRs of any type, the 95% of unfissioned uranium left in PWR (or CANDU) fuel is fuel, as is the entire stock of depleted uranium (DU) left over from the enrichment process. The USA had over 43,000 tons of spent uranium fuel in storage as of 2002, and had produced roughly 6x as much DU in the process of creating it. That is a total of perhaps 280,000 tons of FBR fuel; at 1 ton/GW-yr, the average US demand of ~450 GW could be met for roughly 600 years without mining another gram of uranium.
Proliferation resistance (the bugaboo of the MIT study) is a good thing, but the USA does not need to worry about proliferation from our domestic power cycle.
(Ewwww...gross)
You are assuming that all the fuel is burned
each cycle, most of it is not in a breeder cycle and the spent fuel is sent back to reprocessing to get more fissile U-235 and plutonium from incoming LWR waste. There will always be large amounts of perfectly good U-238 which won't be converted in a cycle. Look at figure 4.3 from MIT study.
Yawn...an 'ad hominem' from EP.
The point is that MIT estimates the maximum amount of electricity the whole world can produce with an energetic nuke program 42 years from now is still less than the amount of electricity we are using today. I thought that would alert you cornucopians that there is a flaw to their nuke powered electron economy, but you are too fascinated by the 'Dream'.
No. It is potential fuel, it is fertile.
U-238 doesn't burn, Pu-239 does. The rate of
transmutation is actually very important, EP!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-238
Yes, we have a lot of old high level reactor waste that could be reprocessed to separate plutonium, so why isn't it being done(by magic). Because it's harder than you seem to imagine. The French have concluded that it is
uneconomic have since starting major reprocessing operations in 1976(in anticipation of a fleet of FBRs like Superphenix which never came) have accuulated 20000 tons of reprocessed uranium (most likely depleted)and gleaned only 50 tons of separated plutonium.
http://www.ipfmlibrary.org/rr04.pdf
I'm sorry, but you show every sign of zero reading comprehension.
You Just Don't Get It.
In the IFR, a fuel rod may achieve only 15% burnup before it's removed, but it never leaves the building. It comes out of the reactor, loses its cladding and goes into a molten salt bath. The used fuel is electrolytically dissolved, and the U and Pu are plated out onto a new rod. The fission products remain in the salt. The new rod goes into a new steel cladding and goes back into the reactor.
There's that 15% or so you need to make up. You can add new rods of fresh metal every so often, or you can add uranium salt to the reprocessing bath and just plate it out along with the reclaimed material. Out of your 6.7 tons leaving the reactor, 5.7 tons is recycled and 1 ton is discarded as waste. You need 1 ton of makeup material.
There is no such assumption, it's implicit in the electrolytic reprocessing. There is no need for U-235 or Pu from any source after the initial fuel load, but the reactor is perfectly capable of burning them if they are introduced as part of the fuel stream. The reactor can operate as a net breeder, a net burner or at equilibrium.
You're not paying attention. The point is that the MIT study assumes a once-through cycle using PWRs or CANDUs, while I am assuming LFTRs and IFRs with full fuel recycling.
If you are refusing to admit your error, you're a troll; if you're unable to understand where you're in error, you're stupid. Either way, contempt directed at you is justified.
A distinction with debatable difference in this case. It enters the system as uranium, yields energy, and exits as fission products.
How easy it is depends on how you do it. The French weren't doing it right.
The Superphenix used mixed-oxide fuel. Reprocessing uranium oxide using the traditional water chemistry is expensive and dirty, which is why the IFR uses metallic fuel with molten salts as the processing medium and the LFTR never brings fuel out of solution in some medium or other. The amount of plutonium separated is irrelevant, because an IFR wouldn't need a separate stream of plutonium; if you had material from spent PWR fuel (perhaps requiring conversion to salts first), the U and Pu could be incorporated directly into new fuel elements just like reclaimed material from the IFRs own recycled rods.
The one situation where separation of Pu would be justified is to get the initial fuel load for a breeder reactor. This is only required once per reactor, and would not be necessary if there is e.g. material from decommissioned weapons available for the purpose.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/
Conceptual design for a LIFE engine and power plant based on NIF-like fusion targets and a NIF-like laser operating at an energy of 1.4 megajoules (MJ) at a wavelength of 350 nanometers (ultraviolet), with a 2.5-meter-radius target chamber and with the final optics at a distance of 25 meters from the target.
I like the LIFE reactor. It has many advantages over the MSR/LFTR and IFR.
The LIFE fusion/fission hybrid is currently under development now at the Laurence Livermore Nuclear Lab. From Dr Peterson, one of its developers and the web site as follows:
The interesting thing about the LLNL LIFE fusion/fission hybrid concept is that it can be fueled with natural or depleted uranium, without any enrichment, and the fission fuel (in solid form) is driven to high discharge burn up (>90%), so the resulting spent fuel is an attractive waste form that requires no reprocessing.
This is possible because due to the additional neutrons provided by the fusion power source (about 20% of the total energy generation results from fusion, about 80% from fission). The challenges associated with the fusion power source (materials, recirculated power, etc.) are also simplified substantially, relative to a pure-fusion system. Livermore projections show that the cost of producing electricity from the LIFE engine should be competitive with the projected cost of electricity for advanced nuclear power plant options envisaged for the 2030 time frame and beyond.
These projections were made by comparing the estimated capital costs of the laser and fusion targets required for LIFE with cost savings achieved by operating a subcritical fission blanket, eliminating uranium enrichment and multiple fuel reprocessing and recycling steps, and minimizing the need for long-term waste repositories.
LIFE also avoids costs faced by other new energy technologies, such as new grid infrastructure costs.
LIFE engines have an important advantage – a virtually unlimited supply of fuel. This comes from the enormous fuel flexibility of a LIFE engine: It can use a wide range of materials as fuel, including current nuclear fuels, depleted uranium and other materials commonly considered to be nuclear waste.
The U.S. supply of these materials is extensive and, if the estimated supplies of natural uranium and thorium are included, they could be used to meet the country's energy needs for many thousands of years.
LIFE has the advantages that it uses fission fuel sustainably without enrichment or reprocessing. It also operates with clean salt, where the fluorine potential can be kept very low and corrosion rates are very small. The disadvantage is that one must recover and handle substantial amounts of tritium, although almost all salt cooled/fueled will produce some tritium requiring management.
Regardless of fuel cycle, all gigawatt-scale salt cooled/fueled reactors will have attractive economics compared to sodium, gas and water cooled reactors, due to the high volumetric heat capacity of the salts, high power conversion efficiency, and lack of any stored energy source (high pressure or chemically reactive fluid) necessitating a high-pressure containment or confinement structure.
Note: discharge burn up (>90%) means burning both fissionable and fertile material which would yield between 900 GWd/MT and 1,000 GWd/MT. Burning thorium fuel will reduce the transuranics in its wastes to a trace.
Some of the strongest supporters of MSR/LFTR technology are Laurence Livermore fusion-fission technology researchers.
True Charles, there is a large technology overlap between the Lftr and LIFE. But the differences are very important in the long run.
First, the Lftr totally uses liquid fluoride salts in its blanket and core where as LIFE does not. This does not permit the removal of gaseous nuclear poisons that result in the nuclear reaction. They stay confined inside the solid fuel pebble. This wastes valuable neutrons. The designers of LIFE say that this will reduce corrosion of the blanket barrier. The Lftr has an advantage here. I just don’t understand why the US nuclear establishment does not totally embrace liquid fuel fluoride salts.
Next, the deployment of both the Lftr and IFR will eventually be constrained by a growing scarcity of U-235, U-233, and PU-239. There is a finite amount of this valuable fissile material in the world. The breeding ratio of these reactor types is low. For example, the Lftr is barely able to get above 1:1. In the long run, the PU-239, nuclear waste, and yellow cake will be increasingly rare and/or expensive to extract. LIFE can use any nuclear fertile material without enrichment. Unlike both the Lftr and IFR, this means the LIFE fusion technology is effective for many thousands of years even if electrical power increases super exponentially.
Finally, because of the need for fuel reprocessing, the deployment of the Lftr and the IFR must remain confined to a first world. IAEA inspectors must be constantly present boring reprocessing and supported by robust security precautions. The nuclear economy of these reactor types means that they cannot endure removal of a portion of their fissile fuel material to support deployment of failsafe operator free uranium hydride nuclear batteries in the third world. On the other hand, because of its robust neutron economy, LIFE can support a rapid and broad, and open ended deployment of simple operator free nuclear power sources to the third world.
An answerer as follows:
From: Molten salt fuel version of Laser Inertial Fusion Fission Energy (LIFE)
R. W. Moir, J. Farmer, L. Kaufman, P. Song, J. F. Latkowski
Molten salt with dissolved uranium is considered for the Laser Inertial Confinement Fusion Fission Energy (LIFE) blanket as a backup in case the TRISO-fuel version does not meet the objectives owing to radiation damage for example. However, radiation does not damage molten salt and therefore could likely achieve the high burnup (>99%) of heavy atoms of 238U. A perceived disadvantage is the possibility that the circulating molten salt could lend itself to misuse (proliferation) by making separation of fissile material easier than for the TRISO-fuel case.
Reprocessing the hydride fuel should be really easy, a priori, and it produces nearly pure uranium metal. So this might also form a proliferation threat, although if a U233/U232 fuel mixture is used this should be mitigated, as you noted elsewhere.
This looks like a variant of the accelerator-driven power system, with a more complex (and expensive) neutron source.
I can't say I know enough about these things to judge the merits, but a 14.7 MeV fusion neutron is going to bust up heavy nuclei a lot more effectively than a fission neutron will. Maybe we could use one or a few to dispose of 243Am, 99Tc and other long-lived fission products
The prospect for a substantial cost drop for high powered lasers in the near future makes the LIFE fusion approach more appealing then the accelerator driven approach.
From Neutron Transport and Nuclear Burnup Analysis for the Laser Inertial Confinement Fusion-Fission Engine (LIFE) as follows:
As part of this effort, we describe the neutron transport and nuclear burnup analysis. We utilize standard analysis tools including Monteburns, the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) transport code, TART and ORIGEN to perform the nuclear design. These analyses focus primarily on a fuel composed of depleted uranium not requiring chemical reprocessing or enrichment. However, other fuels like weapons grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium are also explored. In addition, we have developed a methodology using 6Li as a burnable poison to generate self-sustaining tritium production for fusion and to maintain constant power over the lifetime of the engine. The results from depleted uranium analyses suggest up to 99% burnup of fissile U, Np, Pu and Am isotopes is attainable while maintaining full power at 2GW for up to 50 years.
Your numbers are wrong in many points. I hope you can make the facts clearer :
First, one gram of fissile element produces about one Megawattday of heat (pratically, all transuranics (TRU) are fissile in fast spectrum). One GWe LWR produces about 250 kg of TRU per year, about 1% of the waste stream (the remaining is 95% depleted uranium and some % of fission products) so the TRU still produced in the last decades and stored in the nuclear plants can produce large amounts of electricity (not consedering depleted uranium in case of breeders)), eliminated high levels nuclear waste (plutonium and transuranics). Don' t make confusion between fast *breeders* reactors and fast reactors used as burners which don' t breed any plutonium, in fact they destroy that produced from current LWR fleet
The MIT study consider only natural uranium with a cost in the order of current market price, i.e. less than 130 $/kg. This corresponds only to a $ per oil barrel equivalent and it' s only a small fraction of the uranium from both the energy and cost POV available in the earth, even without breeders or thorium. Moreover with thorium MSR and/or fast reactors (breeders or not) nuclear fuels are pratically renewables, almost infinite on a human scale
I also do note that MIT study assumes that gas at $6.72 per thousand cubic feet is a "high price" assumption for gas. Actually this assumption is obsolete, at least in Europe, where we usually pay to Gazprom of Russia more than 400 $ per thousand cubic meter (almost x2) and you know that kWh cost from natural gas combined cycles is heavily dependent on the fuel price; nor we have remarkable coal resources, even without considering emissions costs
Hold up now.
You're saying the only "solar" available is solar panels, and hot water?
What about solar thermal power?
http://greyfalcon.net/solarbaseload
As for "Nuclear R&D",
Nuclear power has gotten more than half of all electricity related R&D funds for the past 10 individual years, and for the past half century cumulatively.
And yet it still can't yield power plants that are self financing.
And then to say that "Nuclear will be great if we toss a couple trillion dollars at it"
All things being equal, you aren't being very objective.
Furthermore, Nuclear isn't a "Near Term" option. Even the most optimistic estimates don't plan on seeing any Nuclear power plants completed for atleast 11 years.
We need to utilize everything in out power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil including using our own natural resources.OPEC will continue to cut production until they achieve their desired 80-100. per barrel. The high cost of fuel this past year seriously damaged our economy and society. Oil is finite. We are using oil globally at the rate of 2X faster than new oil is being discovered. I just read a book by a guy named Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is worried about our economy and would like to see us become more energy independent.
http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com
re: BeyondGreen
1. Please, don't equivocate Electricity and Liquid Fuel. It's dishonest, and not helpful.
2. No we don't "Need Everything". Saying that we shouldn't spend time and money wisely is just stupid.
Agree that solar thermal appears badly ignored in the article relative to it's potential versus wind in appropriate locations. Also see
Assessment of Parabolic Trough and Power Tower Solar Technology - Cost and Performance Forecasts - Sargent & Lundy LLC Consulting Group Chicago, Illinois
Clean Power from Deserts - The DESERTEC Concept for Energy, Water and Climate Security - Club of Rome
DESERTEC USA
DESERTEC Australia
Given Sargent & Lundy Engineering's worst case scenario provides peak time solar electricity at $0.062/kwh by building only 2.8 GW and doing a few minor and definitely achievable R&D improvements, plus transmission, and a clear path is provided to offering 83% capacity factor using cheap sand and gravel tanks for thermal storage with 3x collector area and no additional central plant, which should make the installation no more expensive PER KWH, I don't see what we are waiting for.
It also appears to me that the more agressive forecasts of NREL / SunLab of $0.035 / kwh if we can get to only 8.2 GW installed quite quickly is entirely within reach.
I personally would like to see S&L's timeframes (2.8 to 8.2 GW built by 2020) dramatically squeezed down, even if it adds a bit to the costs.
I'd also add that we should be eliminating natural gas as a primary energy source for electricity immediately. It's far to valuable to our future generations as a backup energy source esp. for solar thermal plants during the rare but obviously occasional longer periods of absence of sunshine even in deserts. Should be used only at solar thermal plants when the thermal store is depleted, in simple-cycle areo-turbine generators, with the exhaust heat used to provide steam to the stations primary steam turbine generator.
Combine this system with a real time price market for customers where customers are financially incented to a) maximize efficiency with a rampup scale of price per unit consumption in a period. b) use grid energy when it is readily available, and minimize use when it is not. c) a good solid baseload supply of nuclear generation. and we'd be a long way toward sustainable solutions to our energy difficulties.
Additional note: With a large installation of solat-thermal-with-storage in place in the US western states and a strong HVDC grid in place to market it, we would then be in an excellent position to exploit wind generation in the "midwest corridor" at maximum, because it would be easy for the solar-thermal-with-storage stations to simply shut down a few turbines and continue storing the heat, whenever the wind was blowing strongly during daytime peaks or better yet at night. Seems obviously like a perfect fit. Key is the transmission, and this concept enables financial justification of the HVDC transmission because it is used a LOT more than just the 25% time the wind is blowing.
Maximize distributed solar / sustainable generation etc. as much as is economical, and implement this strategy.
A good HVDC transmission system could be used for a whole host of load flow adjustments between the southwest and the Midwest similar to what they have been doing for years with the Pacific Intertie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
True, this is a proven concept that is gaining more attention. Here we now have the new norway-netherlands cable, it works quite well since the grids are complementary (rather inverse load profiles). Total line losses only a few percent.
Why not minimize consumption in a first step for ex. replace incandescent bulbs with LED ? If all US homes did this switch
by how much is consumption reduced?
A LED bulb that replaces a 40 watt incandescent consumes 6 watts ( 4 watts when hooked to a 3.6 volts supply ) that gives 34 watts reduction per replaced bulb...
Of course its expensive but in turn Cree etc. could start hiring big.
CFL is still a better bet in the near term. Incandescent bulb LED replacements are right now roughly analogous to where retrofit CFLs were in the 80s/early 90s - expensive, widely varying in quality from manufacturer to manufacturer, and likely to leave a bad taste in people's mouths and deter future use.
Also, color rendering for LED incandescent retrofits is not as good as CFLs.
Ok then replace Incandescent bulb with CFL made in China .
What I read here is no one is willing to use energy in the maximally efficient way.
Everyone can do that instead of waiting for and betting on the respective government's innate ingenuity.
That's not how I read it at all.
What you need to remember is that maximally efficient does not necessarily equal maximally effective.
We'll have to tighten our belts considerably that is to remember.
Thus the questions are which kind of "energy saving" and which kind of energy sources creates jobs in US?
A very simple means to create new jobs in construction is a legislative
that every home owner has to achieve a particular thermal conductivity
of his home overall less than x.
Another is fostering renewables not that academic future nukes stuff.
And finally buy US made products not some China made with a GE brand on it.
Unfortunately I think this is a poorly though out plan. Assuming you have a professional do the required analysis for each of the roughly 75 million residences in the U.S., and have a fully burdened cost of about $250 per residence, and thats conservative. We have a cost of about 17 billion dollars just for getting the required data. Average remediation cost including government licensed contractors paying prevailing wage workers, read that union workers, and U.S. sourced materials is $5,000 again conservative. Add in the cost of the government side of the system, we will call it, “The Department of Housing Energy Compliance Department”:), funded at $200 million a year. Our total is now at $375 billion. Who is going to pay the bill? It can’t be the “poor”, they have no money. Thirty four percent of the U.S. population make so little that they pay no Federal taxes. Do we tax the rich, or maybe just add it to the $1.1 trillion Obama is going to spend in his first part of the “bailout”.
As you can see things get sticky when you start looking into the details.
Actually, I think you just made the case that it is perfectly affordable. Obama just asked for a $350 billion tax cut. Cross that off the list, and replace with the insulation program.
All the more reason to...
http://aperfectstormcometh.blogspot.com/2008/03/build-out-grid-vs-househ...
BTW, According to the CIA FactBook, aren't there about 110,000,000 households? Given the variety of types of ownership, leases, rental agreements, it might be better to go with that metric. This increases costs to around half a trillion. Still, a MUCH cheaper alternative than... pretty much anything else.
Cheers
The S&L engineering report is really quite excellent, with highly plausible learning estimates. It is unfortunate that the political support for the incentives required to achieve learning is very low at best.
This is one of the crash programmes that we need so much. At only a few billion dollars it would be almost criminal not to try. And there's new stuff happening too, like the CLFR, with numerous inherent design advantages.
A technical note about thermal storage. You don't want sand and gravel, they are not very conductive, leading to very high parasitic losses and extra system costs. For lower temperature, hot pressurized water is one of the best options overall - no heat exchangers, low cost environmentally friendly, lowest cost, lowest losses. For higher temperature, single tank thermocline molten salt is one of the most promising ones, and also specialized concrete storage (heat transfer pipes embedded). For really high temperatures, graphite could be interesting in the future. Magnesia fire bricks are also great, simple, efficient and affordable. Could also be used in a thermocline as medium for extra thermal storage.
Agreed, Cyril. Real problem is that solar thermal doesn't have any group with lobbying power to push it.
Oh, I agree that solar thermal-electric could be wonderful for the band from California across to New Mexico and maybe West Texas, but a large fraction of the population lives outside easy HVDC reach of this resource (especially given the mountain ranges). I think we'll see wind grow much faster for quite some time, and it's starting from a much higher base.
I think you must be using a quite arbitrary definition of "HVDC reach". The single largest cost of an HVDC line is the end station converters. Once the electricity is converted, it is quite cheap to transmit it for seriously long distances, eg. DESERTEC project in Europe planning to provide 83% of all energy used in Europe with solar thermal stations installed at the latitude of North Africa. Certainly Minnesota to (California and Florida) is economically do-able, I've done the designs. Requires some creativity in selection of conductors however, and not effective unless doing very large quantities.
Edit: I note that the distance from Morroco to Denmark (2800 km) is only slightly less than that from Phoenix AZ to Syracuse NY (3285 km). Essentially all of N. America is within reach of the southwestern deserts.
I'm thinking of the hassles of mountains, or have you forgotten what happened to lines supplying Juneau?
The Dakotas are much closer to Syracuse than Arizona, and there's a heavily populated belt which starts around Lake Michigan and goes roughly east. That's a more natural route for HVDC than the empty spaces in Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska: paying customers starting just east in Minnesota and bigger markets all the way.
Agreed with all, of course. My point is that anything done should only be done as part of a larger and comprehensive long-term plan, and its the plan I'm discussing. The plan should have a pair of very heavy duty trunks crossing the continent, one at approximately the Salt Lake City / Chicago / New York latitude, and another at approximately the LA / Phoenix / Dallas / Atlanta latitude. Then three serious north-south ties, east cost / mississippi / west coast, and perhaps a couple of branches for specific purposes such as picking up the huge storage hydro resources existing in Quebec, Canada for use as peaking resources, or joining in Mexico. Arrange to swap nighttime wind to Quebec in exchange for daytime peaking resources, need to install more turbines in existing stations, beef up the transmission, but no additional reservoirs needed.
There would no doubt be some significant development work needed to work out how to manage such a complex multi-point DC grid, but there's other precedents. Also would be nice to fast-track enough improvements in IGBET technology to enable their use at eg. 1 MV or more, rather than needing to continue dependence on the dumb old Thyristors common in present high-capacity HVDC.
I wonder how much surplus electricity Hydro Québec will have available for export in coming years, in light of growing domestic demand and as they continue to chip away at their remaining hydro-electric potential. Hydro Québec's peak demand hit a new high of 37,220 MW on January 16th (approximately 70 per cent of all homes in this province are electrically heated and that percentage continues to grow each passing year).
Source:
Pour diffusion immédiate
Montréal, le vendredi 16 janvier 2009
La demande en électricité du Québec a atteint un sommet historique
Les besoins en électricité ont atteint un sommet sans précédent de 37 220 MW, ce matin entre 7 heures et 8 heures. Au moment de la pointe record, la température extérieure était de – 26 degrés Celsius à Montréal.
Apparently, things were expected to be so tight during this recent cold snap that HQ turned down the heat in all of their facilities and turned off their head office logo:
Afin d’assurer la fiabilité du service, Hydro-Québec a mis en place les divers moyens dont elle dispose pour faire face à des situations exceptionnelles. De plus, Hydro-Québec réduira le chauffage et l'éclairage dans tous ses locaux au Québec et le logo du Siège social sera éteint.
Also, it's pretty clear Ontario is eying some of those table scraps for itself. Going by memory, I believe Ontario can import up to 1,700 MW of power at this time although other constraints, in practice, may pull this number downward somewhat. However, a new intertie to be commissioned later this year will bump that number up by a further 1,250 MW.
Cheers,
Paul
More detailed than the level I was working on, but ok here goes. 1) The fact all quebec homes are resistance electric heated means there's a huge pool of energy available after a crash program to replace with heat pumps. 2) The reservoir water levels are of little significance to a discussion of switching a system from baseload to peaker. Peakers need less water per kw installed. 3) etc. etc.
You need to think more clearly before jumping on someone.
I doubt you'll see very much electric resistance heat displaced by either air or ground source heat pumps in this market unless electricity becomes dramatically more expensive and that would require a complete reversal of public policy at, presumably, a correspondingly high political cost. Under the Régie de l’énergie act, the province has set aside a heritage pool of 165 TWh of power for domestic needs, at a wholesale cost of $27.90 per MWh (any domestic needs in excess of this allotment can be supplied by Hydro-Québec at market rates). In 2004, domestic consumption stood at 166 TWh/year and three years later it had climbed to 173 TWh. The long and short is that domestic rates will remain artifically low for the foreseeable future, notwithstanding any increase in provincial demand. Note too the province has demonstrated a willingness to sell electricity to major industrial consumers at extremely attractive rates as part of its job creation (and retention) efforts.
In 2007, export sales to Ontario, New Brunswick and the United States came in at 19.6 TWh, or about 12 per cent of total production.
Agreed. This has much greater relevance to energy exports than peak demand support. Québec is winter peaking and New York and New England are summer, so this helps too. Likewise, water reserves can be conserved as additional wind generation comes online. Nonetheless, seasonal variations in river flows, as well as increased export sales to Ontario will establish upper limits. Can the system be expanded to meet additional demand? Yes. But it then becomes a question of "At what cost?". Will it be competitive with other alternatives (e.g., natural gas peakers). Will Québecers (northern natives in particular) accept the social and environmental consequences of an expanded system simply so that the citizens of New York can continue to run their air conditioners? That might have been the case thirty years ago, but I'm not so sure its still true now.
I'll try harder not to offend you, but please let me know if I've fallen short of your expectations.
Cheers,
Paul
Agree most of your points, but would contend that you're operating in the "present reality system" and I'm discussing the "idealy modified future system". Obviously a subsidized artificially low energy price is a bad thing for Quebec and the world in the long term, as it discourages common-sense efficiency and encourages over-consumption of a globally scarce good. However, if politically necessary, the huge general subsidy of a huge block of power at a fixed $0.027 / kwh is of no significance to the discussion. If the Quebec government chose to do so, they could readily offset the costs of purchasing off-peak wind power from the midwest with the revenues of selling peak hydro power to the east coast, and have a lot of spare revenue remaining.
Again, this is an excellent article, but I'm curious about which impassable mountains would be crossed by CA thermal solar being distributed in CA, OR, and WA (where hydro is an excellent complement)? What mountains have to be crossed from New Mexico to Denver, Lincoln, Witchita, Kansas City? Texas to Oklahoma City, Tulsa, New Orleans, Little Rock, St. Louis? Any surplus at these locations can be passed up the line, especially on windy days.
I suggest our thinking shouldn't be nuclear vs. renewables; it should nuclear + renewables. We need both, because neither can supply us with enough to replace coal and liquid fuels for transportation fast enough.
Your patient reasoning and presentation of reliable sources has won me over; please continue that approach.
There are mountains all over the Southwest (I've driven up and down quite a few). "Impassable" is a relative term, but I notice that you're ignoring the difficulties with east-west transfer (if everything is solar California will want Texas power early in the morning, and TX will want CA power in the evening) and the general issues with cutting lots of rights-of-way through national forests and such is going to cause delays at the least.
Prairies are relatively hospitable territory for HVDC, and wind is growing much faster in absolute terms than solar. I expect the HVDC grid to be aimed at wind and nuclear, at least at first. If we get smart and use MSRs with air-cycle gas turbines and CAES, we can integrate nuclear seamlessly with wind and meet just about any load curve in a zero-carbon power system.
There are mountains all over the Southwest
But there are areas without mountains and passes where there are, given that routes I mentioned.
if everything is solar
But as I mentioned, it is not just one or the other, it's renewables and nuclear.
California will want Texas power early in the morning, and TX will want CA power in the evening) and the general issues with cutting lots of rights-of-way through national forests and such is going to cause delays at the least.
There's already the Pacific Intertie, which would serve the Pacific states (one route I mentioned);
and quite a few other interconnections throughout the southwest with already existing rights-of-way;
With Global Warming steepening air pressure gradients-especially between continental and ocean areas, and between temperate regions and the tropics, wind generation is the winner in this scenario. Every cloud has a silver lining.
I am one of the few people to have flown by helicopter over the power lines from Kitimat to Kemano BC. Impassable is an understatement !!
Yet power towers and lines were installed (and repaired) by helicopter.
HV lines only require towers every half mile or so, and can easily pass over canyons, and work around mountains.
Alan
Those who support supply of electricity to Europe from North Africa should remember the Dakar car rally no longer goes to Dakar. They shifted the whole thing to South America because of seemingly insurmountable security problems in North Africa.
On HVDC costs the 300km underwater Basslink cable was sold for $A1.2bn which I apportion as $300m for the rectifier-inverter stations at either end plus $3m per kilometre for cable. Land based pylons would be cheaper if easements or right of way already exist.
The problem with biofuels is that were using the wrong biofuel. Ethanol pits food against fuel and waste 60% of total biomass. If methanol were produced from biowaste then this would eliminate the need to use edible crops for fuel while at the same time increasing biofuel production by 50% by using the non-edible biowaste. Methanol can also be produced from municipal garbage and sewage. And with just a 10% increase in energy cost, methanol can easily be converted into high octane gasoline using the Mobil Oil MTG process.
And substantially more biofuel could be produced if hydrogen from nuclear and hydroelectric water electrolysis were added to the mix since 80% of the carbon dioxide from biomass synthesis is simply wasted.
Ethanol is a bad idea.
See 'Gasoline from Nuclear and Renewable energy' article:
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/08/gasoline-from-nuclear-and...
Marcel F. Williams
But, Poison is a great idea.
Biowaste is a great idea - when it's converted to Ethanol.
Sorry, but Exxon Mobil isn't going to win This fight.
Electricity to liquid fuel is wrong headed. Exergetically retarded and thus expensive, not what we need right now. We need to prioritize a host of high potential and efficient solutions, that get a lot of bang for the buck. Electricity to liquid fuel is way too far down the list.
Biomass to methanol is one of the most promising next gen biofuels, however. And as you mention, methanol can be converted into gasoline with proven zeolite catalytic technology.
Methanol is a better fuel for spark-ignition engines than gasoline (higher octane, higher specific power); it makes no sense to synthesize gasoline from methanol unless the natural supplies are insufficient for cold starting (and dimethyl ether may suffice for that).
That would be true if you car could currently use methanol. It would be better to convert carbon neutral methanol into gasoline until future automobiles are required to be fully flex fueled (gasoline, ethanol, and methanol). But it would be a huge mistake if the Obama administration required flex fueled vehicles to use only gasoline and ethanol, IMO.
Marcel F. Williams
California had an M-85 vehicle program before E-85 was a gleam in ADM's eye.
High methanol fuel mixes are getting popular in China right now.
The only problem is that methanol created from natural gas or coal is not carbon neutral. If we were simply facing a liquid fuels crisis, you're 100% correct and we could turn coal into methanol(more efficiently than FT coal to synthetic petrol) and even bury the process CO2 but when it comes to use in cars it still would be carbon positive.
Cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass or other energy crops would be carbon neutral. The only problem is we are short of actual crops.
I think flexfuel accessories can handle methanol as well ethanol.
Indeed.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090126/ap_on_sc/sci_greenhouse_irreversible...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903&ft=1&f=1025
Cheers
We were talking about making liquid fuel from biomass also. This can be at least theoretically carbon-neutral, and it makes no sense to discard hard-won carbon and energy to turn perfectly usable MeOH to synthetic gasoline.
Such fuels would be expensive, and relegated to niche applications.
I think you need be careful with making some definite statements, that might be disputable, and could be used to discredit an otherwise excellent set of recommendations. I'll highlight just two:
(1) The claim that solar is only .01%. That sound a bit low to me, I don't have any numbers, but I think it is closer to .1%.
(2) Your claim that biomass is the ONLY way we have to remove CO2, and control where it goes. Presumably you are attacking things like ocean fertilization, replanting forests etc. But we may have other approaches as well. Last week we were discussing a new cement type & process which is supposedly carbon negative. We also have the possibility of increased weathering of silicate rocks, which absorbs CO2 to create carbonate. We have to be careful with words like ONLY, and NEVER, as a single (perhaps even trifling) counterexample can be used to attack ones credibility.
The enemies of your good ideas, will not hesitate to nitpick. This is meant in the spirit of helping you to defend against that.
The olivine sequestration thing sounds pretty benign to me. Simple and not too expensive either.
US generation from PV and solar (reported) was about 0.6 billion kWh out of > 4000 billion kWH total, or about 0.015%.
If they'll work, I'm all for them. However, I don't see how we could use them to give farmers a revenue stream to replace crop and ethanol subsidies. I also don't see how they could address our looming soil-fertility problem.
I also don't see how they could address our looming soil-fertility problem
What about this: renewable ammonia production (you'll have to page down a bit to get to the relevant bits)
The idea being that surplus wind (or perhaps solar) electric generation can be used to generate ammonia for agricultural uses. Good wind resource locations correlates well to farming areas, and poorly to population centers. Kill two birds with one stone WRT ammonia production coming from something besides fossil fuels and wind installations not having sufficient transmission capacity.
Also, some agricultural regions in the Western US have excellent solar insolation and PV/concentrator installations could possibly be used in this fashion.
Near as I can tell, this is the only real use for wind and solar and other intermittent renewables. But note that this is effectively an "off grid" kind of situation, albeit writ large; each installation will ask whether building an array of wind turbines (or solar collectors) is less expensive than connecting to the grid.
Then you can't tell us nearly as much as you think.
Physical reality is doing the telling, Cyril. Fools ignore it at their peril.
The reality is that grid connected wind and solar are happily growing exponentially as they have done in the past. You're making an assertion about the future and present that as fact. This is not scientific. Science is about the past and about the present. Based on this, things are looking good for wind and bad for nuclear cathedrals. What data we have suggests strongly that significant amounts of wind (and probably solar) on the grid will be cost effective and provide substantial environmental gains over the existing situation. THAT is the physical reality. Fools ignore it at their peril.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jfdecaro/decarolis_EPwind.pdf
If you insist on trying to predict the future, you have to start with swapping your ideology for facts.
Here here ... applause, I will vote for all of that!
Would like to see a lot of CSP included as well to round out this power supply mix.
- dual mode freight
I'm told by someone who drives a rubber tyred vehicle with drop down rail wheels they are hard to manoeuvre in side streets. Maybe trucks will have to be forced off highways by legislation then operators will design better transfer stations for pickup by short haul trucks.
-olivine sequestration
As with the wonders of biochar you have to ask if it will be really different to what is going on now unassisted in Nature. When humans do these things they tend to need a lot of diesel for digging and electricity for pumping.
- Gen III nukes
I understand there are at least 20 such reactors on order. Surely it is better to keep building them and saving the waste while working on a Gen IV design that it is bug free. That gives us a breather til say 2050.
I don't think we can wait that long. The beauty of the MSR (LFTR) and IFR is that they don't compete with the critical parts of the PWR construction industry (no heavy forgings required for reactor pressure vessels) and don't compete for the fuel either (do not require enriched uranium except perhaps to start, and that may be replaced by reclaimed PWR plutonium). A strong development effort could give us multiple parallel nuclear industries. If we can start burning our existing inventory of PWR/BWR fuel down to short-lived wastes, we could also remove the concrete storage casks from our current and decommissioned nuclear plants and get rid of the final objection to the nuclear power industry.
About " You can "drill here" all you want, but dry holes benefit no one."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Everything isn't so bad....
I would like to inform you, that to drill almost each wildcat with oil/gas discoveriy there is new technology for oil/gas detection. The technology is designed and successfully tested in the Barents and the Black Seas as well as in the Gulf of Mexico (see: www.binaryseismoem.weebly.com ).
I would like to see an "Energy Corps" .....
made up of 1000's of people manufacturing ,installing , servicing ,and repairing -
"USA made" solar and wind systems ....from large projects to rooftop and pole mount systems.
They want to create jobs why not give Solar a chance with current technology.
50 - 100% cash rebate
No corps, but community-based organization that makes a plan and applies for fast-tracked grant through a very small office that processes applications and accepts ANY that gets household usage below a given threshold, say 25% of previous usage. (Just a number. A feasibility study would set the number locally/regionally.)
While I'm at it: E-P, I noticed no attempt to analyze in-depth the time frame and financial issues.
1. You say we don't have time. Do we have time to build 300+ reactors?
2. Do we really want the government supplying ALL our power? Not one privately financed reactor in existence today.
3. In absolute terms, where's the money?
4. OK, say the US can do this. What are the follow-on effects of the rest of the planet going dark because they don't have the resources to follow suit?
5. What are the follow-on effects of making BAU possible, even likely?
6. What are the follow-on effects of replacing all these reactors every 100 (more like 50 or 60...) years ?
7. If built, where does the money end up (Hint: a very, very small number of pockets.) vs. other build-out possibilities?
Etc.
As others have said, if nuclear is such a good idea, why hasn't it taken off already? And, please, no more bull crap propaganda. (Should you be using propagandist rhetoric in a key post?) Maybe because it cannot pay for itself?
Getting off coal is a good idea. I laud your support for it. I do not laud your use of propaganda (your characterization of opposition to nuclear), your belittling other posters, nor ignoring Liebig's in the form of costs and time.
Cheers and Jeers
We have to build something, because our existing coal capacity needs massive re-engineering if we're going to keep using it and gas supplies aren't going to be there in the amounts we're used to.
We need ~230 GW average generation to replace coal, and another 90 or so to replace natural gas. If we built 400 GW of nuclear to get that plus some extra for demand shifted from petroleum, it would take ~270 1.5 GWe plants or 200 2 GWe plants. If we develop the new systems over the next 10 years and then install them over the following 20, that's between 10 and 14 plants per year; call it 16/year at the peak after a ramp-up. I cannot believe that we could lose the capability to build 16 of anything per year if we expected to be doing it for a while.
The actual solution isn't going to be all-nuclear; it's going to be wind ramping up now, nuclear uprates on existing plants plus new plants coming on-line about 2016, and new tech whenever we can get it into the field. MSRs and possibly LMFBRs can be synergistic with wind, supplying carbon-free heat for CAES systems and boosting peak output to 70% or more of the reactor's thermal rating. The combination of wind and Gen IV nuclear with CAES might allow wind to supply 40-50% of US demand instead of 30%. If 15% is still supplied by hydro and other non-wind renewables (a SWAG) for a total demand of 550 GW, that would leave something between 190 and 250 GW to be supplied by nuclear (in round numbers). Call it 95 to 125 2-GW plants.
We could build that over 20 years if we standardized on a few designs and built them in factories instead of custom-welding most of the fussy parts at the site. Price would go way down. The bigger problem would be the 275 GWavg of wind; at 30% capacity factor, we'd need 183 THOUSAND 5-megawatt turbines. The building wouldn't be so hard, but siting and wiring may not be so simple.
You are quite wrong. Most US reactors are privately financed and owned (see the history of Exelon Corp).
Where's the money to pay for damage to the climate? A hundred-odd units in two designs coming out at a peak rate of 4/year each isn't going to be all that much, especially if the fuel is free (already mined and sitting there) and we're replacing imported oil and gas.
The rest of the planet can use wind and CAES too. They won't have the spent nuclear fuel that we need to get rid of, so won't need the tech to get rid of it.
I wouldn't say that nearly-complete de-carbonization and electrification of the economy, including transportation, is anything close to BAU.
125 units over 60 years is about 2 units per year. This is assuming that we haven't developed something better (like polymer-based PV with carbon nanotube batteries) and decide to shut them down at end of life; I won't even speculate what we'll have in 2080.
It depends who builds them. A very small number of pockets? You wouldn't have pre-judged the question, would you? And if combined with wind, a lot of that money goes to lease payments on land all over the place.
You don't seem to understand. It already took off once, like a rocket; the USA generated about 42 GW average from oil in 1978, and this largely disappeared to be replaced twice over by nuclear. In 1978 (the peak for oil-generated power), the US generated 365.1 TWH from oil and 276.4 TWH from nuclear; in 2000, the USA generated 753.9 TWH from nuclear but only 111.2 TWH from oil.
The nuclear boom was killed by the 1980's recession, inflation and the obstructive legal tactics of the anti-nuclear lobby. The law has been changed to eliminate the obstructions, we have the prospect of carbon taxes or other GHG restrictions on the way, and the nuclear industry is already ramping up again. I'm proposing that we open up a couple more avenues, roads briefly explored and then abandoned. Those roads appear to be headed where we need to go.
I don't disagree with you, except for the 30% wind threshold. There is no hard threshold, if we really have to, providing learning curve enhancements, around 80% wind (with the rest provided by biogas, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar and whatever)
Since there's already 20% nuclear, doing an 80% wind grid with the nuclear thermal output providing CAES heat should also be possible. It strongly depends on the future economics.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jfdecaro/decarolis_EPwind.pdf
I think you're heavily neglecting NegaWatts and conservation of absurd energy uses. The inconvenient truth is that, whatever the generation mix is going to be in the future, it's going to be so much easier if we leapfrog energy efficiency and use energy more wisely in general.
My old man always used to say, if you want to fix a problem, first make sure it doesn't get any bigger.
I think you overestimate what we can get from negawatts, and adding 100-200 GW of average load shifted from petroleum is going to use up the savings and then some. Arguments that we can wave a magic wand labelled "negawatts" and fix our problems sound too much like Mao's Great Leap Forward to me.
Going 80% wind, even with a very optimistic 40% capacity factor, requires doubling the grid's capacity; lower capacity factors require larger margins. I'm willing to listen to arguments that it's economically feasible but I haven't seen one that's comprehensible yet.
Most people walk into this pitfall. Don't get me wrong, Negawatts aren't a magic wand - but that's a strawman really. NegaWatts are fast and low cost even with credible take-back estimates (typically 10-50%). Estimates range from -1 cent/kWh to 4 cent/kWh for the low hanging fruit, and keep in mind technological advancement can make some of that low hanging fruit grow back!
Because nuclear is really a long term solution in the sense that you won't get many GWe online in Obama's term, we need to prepare for large nuclear buildout in the future, and leapfrogging efficiency plus cutting down on silly uses of energy for the immediate term. This will make it easier for us since it will require less generation capacity. No matter how fast you could scale nuclear capacity, it will always be faster when there's less generation required. This is the inconvenient truth for many nuclear absolutists (not you E-P). Nuclear power and NegaWatts aren't mutually exclusive, in fact they are complementary, also because of the different time frames involved.
I think you underestimate the potential for NegaWatts. Just look at best available technology in various sectors and compare that to today's average in these sectors. Often a factor of 2 or more improvement can be realized, that's a lot even with 10-50% less net gains. Sometimes it's over a factor of 10 (although these are rare cases).
And that's assuming best available tech won't improve, which is of course silly. Even incremental improvements add up over time, and stimulating RD&D in a large number of high efficiency technologies could plausibly speed development of best available technology up as well.
US uses about 4 EWhe from 1 TWe that's less than 50% total capacity factor. Constant nuclear ouput isn't ideal either. What's important is the correlation with the load, as this determines effective load carrying capacity. Neither nuclear power nor wind is very good in this respect, although wind has even more costs due to longer term intermittance.
The study I linked to keeps these things into account, and also uses a low capacity factor for the long distance HVDC portion; the cost was very low, in the order of a few cents per kWh. The question is how much higher the levelised grid cost will be, after busbar (the AC portion, to the consumer) compared to a higher CF grid. Because the long distance transmission was found to be very cheap, I seriously doubt that the shorter distance regular transmission would be very costly.
But yeah, total cost is an important variable that will strongly determine how much of each source will be used. I just think it's great that a plaubible case is made for very large amounts of wind at an affordable cost. Makes me sleep easier, you know ;)
If we were building new, it would be simple to put in the best-available gear and get all those negawatts. Not so when we've got an installed base and there is not only equipment in place requiring only maintenance, but also a bunch of costs involved with taking things out of service and disrupting other activities, it's not so easy. I want to do some negawattage myself but, aside from re-lamping everything with CFs (which I've done for everything I use much and can reach) the investments in money and time have kept me away so far.
When current power is a few cents a kWh at the plant and has little or no LD transmission required, this is going to have negatives.
Yet we are not really doing this, so there's much to improve still. Also, the lion's share of electricity consuming equipment will have to be either completely replaced or require major refurbishment in less than 20 years, so we're talking about a reasonably short timeframe. Certainly not longer than the generation side of the equasion - eg powerplants are contracted way longer than appliances etc. (with the possible exception of long lasting buildings)
Also important, many of the barriers are non-market, eg when property rights aren't clearly defined, incomplete information, habitual issues (eg some people are so used to buying incandescents they will not switch to CFL/LED etc even if the costs are lower and lighting quality is maintained or even enhanced). These things justify much more active policy instruments.
When current power is a few cents a kWh you will not be able to make any business case for new nuclear in the US either. This is not very relevant because you can't build amortized plants, only new ones - and one new plant competes with an alternative investment in new generation, and one could argue it should also compete with a NegaWatt investment, preferably on a levelised cost basis. As amortized plants reach the end of their life, new investment must occur. If (wind+more transmission cost+other intermittency costs) < (nuclear+lower transmission cost), it is highly likely more wind will be built.
My point being, negatives can be quantified, and should be quantified, so options can be compared. Some things are difficult to quantify though, eg because they are subjective (like perceived business risk of a new project). There would also be a likely restraint on carbon emissions (and other nasties) which pushes things in the right direction.
Now don't get me wrong though, my position is also that we should engage in a large number of attractive technologies, NegaWatts, wind, and nuclear are at the top of the list right now.
I am hoping to see some significant R&D spending from the Obama administration in the near future on these types of programs.
One of the thing Bush & Co got right was shifting the rules to allow for the rebirth of the US Nuclear industry, which appears on a trajectory for rapid growth at the moment.
I agree this is were we need to start heading to deal with the current/near peaks of our existing fossil fuels.
Energy efficiency (Negawatts) will surely be part of the solution, but is unlikely to prevent overall generation expansion.
I just don't see power down as a realistic option when we have nuclear as an option and wind scaling up nicely...
I think we need to fix the demand side of the equation before we go looking for an increase in the supply -and its cheaper overall. We can build cars that are much more efficient and perform the same function, houses that use a fraction of the energy to heat or cool than current designs, etc.
I remember reading about a costly mistake the Chinese made when they introduced a refrigerator design that used tens of watts more than a similiar sized model. Ultimatley they had to build another power station to supply the extra Megawatts being drawn from the millions of fridges that people bought...
If/when energy becomes consistently more expensive the economics of going for the slightly more expensive better-designed-for-efficiency models should become more clear. I just wonder whether we will be able to afford the extra at that point -e.g. gas guzzlers are likely to be ten a penny as they are cast off.
Nick.
Great post, EP
I've been on the MSR/LFTR bandwagon for a couple years now, and have yet to see any serious reason why we shouldn't immediately pick up where the ORNL MSRE left off.
Actually there seems to be a great deal of consolidation of opinion in this matter lately -- MSRs with maybe some wind power thrown in for aesthetic reasons -- as the future of our energy supply.
Hopefully Dr. Chu is thinking along this path as well.
And of course, rails++
EP - an amazing piece. I'm unable to evaluate the analysis of nuclear options but imagine that Steven Chu will be able to do so.
Why have the French not built these "new generation" reactors?
€
The French did try developing a sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor. IIRC it was deemed uneconomical, but a serious surge in uranium prices might change that conclusion. An oxide-fueled FBR would still have the reprocessing headaches of oxides (Superphenix used oxide fuel, not metal fuel).
As for why the French didn't pursue MSRs or the IFR... all that experience was in US labs. France cut its PWR costs by certifying one design for the whole nation (after the bugs had been worked out elsewhere), and I'll bet the research budget was going to the Superphenix and there wasn't enough budget money or political capital to pursue another line of research. The Greens are stronger in Europe than in the USA and succeeded in shutting down existing nuclear powerplants in several nations; expanding research on novel reactors sounds like it would have been very difficult to do.
Poor President Obama...another un-solicited advice.
I tried reading trough but I had to stop at the stupidest comment of the day:
"The auto industry lobbied against fuel taxes to promote its short-term interest in selling profitable trucks, with the long-term result that all 3 US automakers will go bankrupt in the next year if nothing is done."
I can't believe somebody in his right mind would believe that higher fuel taxes would have saved Chrysler, GM and Ford !
You must be more poet then engineer...
I work in the auto industry. Not for a “US automaker”. Engineer. Real one. No poet.
What's selling right now is TRUCKS. NOT CARS!. If GM would have had Honda's product mix, they would have been bankrupt by now. Product mix is, right now, not on the list of the first 10 problems the "3 US automakers" are facing.
And Obama’s list of problems shouldn’t have ENERGY in the first 10.
Stripper wells shutting down every day….drilling rigs cancelled…energy companies going bankrupt…oil and gas prices at record lows (measured in gold).
Bankrupt banking system, exploding unemployment, soaring foreclosure rates, catastrophic level of trust in markets… He has tons of real problems to deal with in the next few years.
When fuel prices spiked, the Big 3 were caught flat-footed. After 7 years of Washington's guzzler-promotion, they didn't have the product mix people wanted. Fuel taxes would have stabilized the situation and bent US consumer preference over years - like it did after the 1979 oil price shock.
I've done work for all three, and specialty vehicle manufacturers also. My perspective is just a bit broader than yours.
Funny, that. US energy non-policy sacrifices national security and balance of trade to the interests of the oil companies, and US consumer preference goes to trucks. The auto industry complains that it can't make any money selling cars, because US auto company lobbying keeps fuel so cheap it doesn't matter. This continues mostly unabated until world oil demand slams into world oil capacity and the price skyrockets. Cars outsell trucks for a while. But the price spike collapses the credit system, and in the midst of the unwinding of leverage oil gets cheap again. Auto companies sell whatever they can move, and the erstwhile profit margins on trucks allow much greater discounting.
Oil will not remain cheap (in income-adjusted terms) for long, so the age of the personal truck as a lifestyle statement is coming to a close.
Natural gas prices well below replacement costs? OPEC slashing production to prop up prices at levels 2-3x what they were a few years ago? Energy is one of our biggest issues; it underlies everything else.
Look at the factor behind most of that: the US trade imbalance, with foreign interests recycling dollars as cheap debt. When they stopped, the whole thing fell down. What's the element which caused the US trade imbalance to skyrocket last year? Oil - energy!
Obama's trying to create a stimulus, but that stimulus relies on borrowing money. We've got a huge trade deficit already; who's going to lend us money? Part of this is predatory monetary policies on the part of nations like China, but a big part of it is our oversize appetite for oil. If we are going to fix our problems, we have to start with making more and importing less. With our national average fuel economy down at 25 MPG or so, one thing that's relatively easy to cut is fuel consumption. One way to get people to consume less fuel is to tax it, taking money out of the hands of the exporters and keeping it at home.
Try to see the big picture.
"When fuel prices spiked, the Big 3 were caught flat-footed. After 7 years of Washington's guzzler-promotion, they didn't have the product mix people wanted. Fuel taxes would have stabilized the situation and bent US consumer preference over years - like it did after the 1979 oil price shock. "
I still don't understand how higher fuel prices would have saved GM. They were- and still are- losing money on every smaller car they sell.
"I've done work for all three, and specialty vehicle manufacturers also. My perspective is just a bit broader than yours."
Your assumptions are as misguided as the rest of your article. I've done work for all 3 as well in the past. Where does that leave your "perspective"?
"Funny that"
Is that an approval or a rebuttal?
"But the price spike collapses the credit system..."
Hahaha...clueless...I'm wasting my time...have you ever heard about the bubble in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie... what about the Bear Sterns, Lehman and so on 50:1 leverage... AIG Credit Default Swaps...Merrill's Basis Trade...you need some serious education...broaden the perspective a little bit... the dinosaurs and the Roman Empire did not disappear because the oil price spike LOL
"OPEC slashing production to prop up prices at levels 2-3x what they were a few years ago?"
In GOLD, what's the current price in gold?
And the fact OPEC is slashing production, is that a sign of abundance or lack of energy?
And the FUNNYEST LINE OF THE DAY IS
"Part of this is predatory monetary policies on the part of nations like China"
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!
Say that again? China buying 30 years treasuries with 3% interest... from a virtually bankrupt country... a country printing trillions in paper money and IOU's every year... China predatory!...you're killin' me man...ROTFLMAO...you're killin' me...
Don't bother to reply... get some "perspective" first.
Here is a start:
http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini
http://market-ticker.org/
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/MogamboGuru.html
http://www.safehaven.com/archive-238.htm
http://www.safehaven.com/archive-162.htm
http://www.hussmanfunds.com/weeklyMarketComment.html
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
Because they're aimed at people with no money. If fuel cost $5/gallon, people would be willing to spend money on efficient vehicles. GM makes plenty of money on cars in Europe, where $5/gallon is at the low end.
GM makes the kind of car I would have loved to buy, but only makes them for non-US markets. The Cadillac BTS with the diesel engine would have had my eye, if they'd had it for sale in 2004. I have a diesel Passat instead. Ironic, that the German company brought the European product I wanted to me, and GM wouldn't.
"GM makes plenty of money on cars in Europe."
Clearly, you can't get anything right...
Check this out:
"GM Europe's reported third quarter pre-tax loss increased to $1 billion from a $398 million loss in 2007. Adjusted losses widened to $974 million from a $136 million loss in 2007."
http://horisly.blogspot.com/2008/11/third-quarter-2008-auto-sales-gm-los...
"G.M., based in Detroit, is trying to end losses in Europe that totaled $3 billion the last four years. The company said Monday that the unit would have a loss this year, falling short of its forecast for earnings of as much as $100 million. The company has been hurt by slowing German sales and losses at Saab, the Swedish automaker. "
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE0D81439F93AA25755C0A...
GM was making money on cars in Europe as late as 2006, so it's obvious that cars can be profitable where petroleum's externalities are charged at the pump; they are only inherently unprofitable here, where petroleum is subsidized.
You have no shame... From your own link...
"Including special items, GM made a net loss of $2.0 billion for 2006, compared with one of $10.4 billion a year earlier. GM earned record revenue of $207 billion in 2006, compared with $195 billion in 2005. "
And remember, these guys are currently under investigation for overstating their revenues...
Our little exchange will stop here... I don't want to have anything to do with liars...
Shame on you.
You're deliberately obscuring the difference between GM Europe and GM worldwide.
I see you're playing "tu quoque". I won't have anything further to do with you either.
You're deliberately obscuring the difference between GM Europe and GM worldwide.
Yes, that was obvious. He didn't have an argument, so he attempted to bamboozle the readership and duck out the back door.
I can't believe somebody in his right mind would believe that higher fuel taxes would have saved Chrysler, GM and Ford !
We'll spell it out for you.
Higher gas taxes incentivize people to buy more fuel efficient vehicles. Which pushes the automakers to make more fuel efficient vehicles. When the spike in gas prices occurred last year, the Big 3 could have been selling more fuel vehicles, but could not, because they did not make them, because they've been lobbying for years to do everything they could to sell TRUCKS, which guzzle gas, which we send trillions overseas to fuel. Every hear of the term "energy dependence"? Ever wonder what it means?
Gas is cheap now and people are buying more trucks, at least in the short term. But don't think that people here are ostriches and assume oil will stay cheap, at least as long as the economy recovers. And if it doesn't recover, the Big 3 are out of business.
And Obama’s list of problems shouldn’t have ENERGY in the first 10.
Then what are you doing here?...Where do you get your kicks?
Another clueless comment.
The "Big 3" had plenty of fuel efficient vehicles. Do you think GM ran out of Aveo, Wave, Cobalt, Vibe, Astra...?
The trouble was/is they don't make any money on them.
Again,
What’s killing the Big 3 is:
1) The current economic depression bringing NA sales levels under 10m/yearand forcing even mighty Toyota to operate at a loss.
2) The current economic depression bringing devastating losses at financing arms (GMAC, Ford Credit)
3) The current economic depression bringing a contraction of credit
....
10) Higher production costs due in part to higher labor costs
11) A (founded)perception of lower quality
....
101) Product mix
Another vested interest firmly holding their blinders in place.
Higher production costs due in part to higher labor costs
Showing your management skirt there big time, pal. You forgot to talk about the growing size/weight of the vehicles and additional frivolous features. No one bought a SUV with a gun against their head.
We didn't have an economic depression until oil prices became unmanageable. They had been climbing for years, and financial analysts had been forecasting economic disaster for that reason. But the GDP juggernaut marched on, like a drunken sailor with $5 left in his pocket at 3am.
Why would oil prices hit us so badly? Because we had a fleet of gas guzzlers continually being refreshed with less fuel efficient gas guzzlers.
Is Honda doing as badly as the Big 3? No, they have a much leaner product mix.
Aveo, Wave, Cobalt, Vibe, Astra
Aveo, made in the US? Not.
Pontiac Wave, made in the US? Not.
Chevy Cobalt auto gets less than 30 mpg combined. Nothing fuel efficient to write home about.
Pontiac Vibe, built in a joint GM-Toyota facility, gets less than 30mpg combined, same as above.
Astra, made in the US? Not.
Sorry, you haven't shown us fuel efficient cars made in America that would help keep Detroit afloat. You seem to think that because the Big 3 are grossly overweight, they need to sell trucks to stay afloat. Ignoring geological resource limits will only result in a harder fall when those resource limits are slammed into.
You may find out what you wish you hadn't (as a cornucopian automotive engineer) in this DoE report. Be forewarned you may have a change of mind.
Product mix (now and over the preceding decade) is a major reason Detroit is in shackles right now, and if that product mix doesn't change quickly, they'll be gone. Regardless of whether you want to believe it or not.
Typical...
You didn't bring up the "made in US" argument in your first post.
However, I understand your need to change the story when your arguments sound like bullshit...
So, if they would make Aveo and Wave in US, GM would be saved!
Stupid GM, salvation is so… at hand!...if they would only read your and engineer-poet's comments!
BTW, what fuel efficient vehicles does Honda make in US?
I heard they just started cutting production in NA and laying off people everywhere...Maybe because of the product mix...maybe they don’t make enough “made in US” vehicles…that must be it...LOL…They need to cut production in US because they don’t make enough US production! … You guys are so funny…
You didn't bring up the "made in US" argument in your first post.
Let's see, American firms in trouble because they can't sell enough cars. Cars made elsewhere? How many Detroit workers have jobs overseas? So foreign made rebrands therefore have no influence on the bottom line wrt American jobs.
BTW, what fuel efficient vehicles does Honda make in US?
We were talking about American automakers and why they are having such trouble. Is Honda in such financial trouble as the Little 3? BTW, a 24-26 mpg car is not 'fuel efficient'. And which US Honda auto plant is closing?
They need to cut production in US because they don’t make enough US production!
You have an unusual way of mixing up your thoughts and those of others'... they don't make the cars that enough people feel secure buying.
Stupid GM, salvation is so… at hand!
Wagoner has admitted to making a number of bad decisions, such as the EV-1, Precept, and Hummer.
...if they would only read your and engineer-poet's comments!
Actually, earlier would have been better, (EP can speak for himself).
You guys are so funny
You wouldn't be laughing if you had read the DoE report I linked above. Do yourself (and your family) a favor and read it...and then think about what career field you will be in after 5 years...or 5 months.
Thank you for an enlightening and concise overview.
On point though; as a railway man, I wouldn't be too sanguine about the long term durability of a railway system.
Maintenance is continuous and fairly intensive: wooden sleepers need to be regularly replaced and are being fazed out, concrete sleepers are often cast around steel trusses, which eventually rust. Ballast needs to be adjusted. More than half the lines I use have spare track and sleepers lying along the road. In wintry conditions, some locomotives spray sand in front of the wheels: instant abrasion on wheels and track. When overhead lines sag, they get caught in the pantographs, and are torn off, stopping traffic until the guilty train is towed, and a special line mounting loc is brought in. Every night of the year, maintenance crews are at work somewhere along the lines.
Railways need to be highly integrated systems, requiring loads of low-grade maintenance, engineers, signalmen, tracklayers, grunts, cleaners, drivers, conductors and an administration to keep the whole thing going.
If all those people can remain organized, and resources provided, along all of the track needed to keep a system going, railways can survive.
As long as they can usefully carry people and goods, going as well as coming. (people need to get to work, resources to workers, goods to consumers)
Both ifs are questionable.
Significant breaks in maintenance can make the system unusable. Lack of resources or localized conflict could render repairs hard or impossible. A few well-placed suicides can, and did bring down the whole system for hours (Suicides are a plague, about a hundred lucky ones a year, a bit less unlucky ones - they only lose a few limbs). Social conflict or disease (Discerning viruses and bacteria travel by rail: you meet such a lot people, and you get to see the whole country) could decimate a skilled workforce.
The other point is about the demand side. There is little point in getting ad men to their presentations, or animal hairdressers to their dogs. A functioning railway system needs a functioning economy. The cows need to be brought to the butchers, the butchers to the cows, the beef to the diners. The butchers need knives, the smiths need iron, the smelters need ore. and so on. You need to move fish from the coast and wood from the hills. If all you do is to bring lawyers to courtrooms and attendants to gyms, those lawyers and attendants have to cough up the cost of running that railroad.
A railroad is a service that should bring people to work and goods to people. As it it is, most of the people on my trains produce hot air 8 hours a day, and fritter away the rest of it.
All things considered, I am apprehensive about the future of the railroad. I am afraid it could slip into oblivion quite fast, quite soon.
Thanks for your post, it is always good to hear from those with practical experience in matters that others pin their vast hopes.
Significant breaks in maintenance can make a road rather nasty, also. The question is, what's cheaper and easier to maintain? Which can do without petroleum? (Certainly not asphalt roadways.)
A functioning highway system also needs a functioning economy. Maintenance of 8-lane superhighways is a significant amount of overhead. If that can be cut to 4 lanes and a double-track of rail, what happens to your overall burden? If you ran low on money, could you slash the road to 2 lanes and still move your freight without bottlenecks? That's the question.
Track is a big investment. Once track is laid - taking the central lanes of the highways as you suggest, the system can be quite economical.
But railways aren't highways. The driver can only speed up and brake, he cannot steer. Steering is done by the people in control of points and switches. Traffic is timed and planned and directed.
Railways are complicated systems, lots of people, maintenance and overhead. European railways are part subsidized, subsidies amounting to about half or more of the cost.
Railways aren't cheap, but they can keep an economy running. Getting labor to industry at low prices lowers industries costs.
Your comments are highly educational; please continue to visit and comment here at TOD.
Go back up to the key post, find the link for the Bladerunner, and follow it. You'll find a rail-capable truck that can stay glued to a rail, hop between sets of rails or go off on the pavement; there were videos of a change of rail-lanes on line last time I looked.
For better or worse, Blade Runner will never pass FRA safety regs.
The inherent weight of FRA safety (just the glass of a loco window is close to an inch thick) makes any FRA approved vehicle unsuitable for more than minor road use on pneumatic tires.
Hypothesize changed FRA safety regs (which I support, lives lost on increased rail with lower safety << lives lost on highways) and things change. But not in the near future.
Alan
That's pretty simple, actually. Bladerunners usually won't be sharing tracks with conventional trains, so can be regulated as trucks (which they are). Tracks laid on expressway medians won't have the dangers of grade crossings either.
Hi lukitas,
re: "Railways need to be highly integrated systems, requiring loads of low-grade maintenance, engineers, signalmen, tracklayers, grunts, cleaners, drivers, conductors and an administration to keep the whole thing going."
This strikes me as a very important point.
What is the relationship between construction and - signficantly - maintenance of the rail system and the fossil fuel infrastructure?
At what price per barrel of oil does this maintenance become impossible?
What can be done to prepare for the multitude of worsening crises, given the apparent July, 2008, "peak" date?
I'd like to see you write up more about your observations, and perhaps add some research and information to round out the maintenance picture.
Really awful about the suicides. It shows how interconnected are our social relationships to things considered "hard and fast", such as the shipping and transportation systems.
What is the relationship between construction and - signficantly - maintenance of the rail system and the fossil fuel infrastructure?
The USA built, and then maintained, a MASSIVE railroad infrastructure in the 1800s with the oil used primarily for lighting.
The vast majority of railroad depots had dirt roads leading to them.
Alan
Today, Harsco makes a machine that travels along the rails and repositions ballast (rocks do not wear out quickly) and realigns the rails at a couple of feet/second. Today's solution.
But a gang of FWOs with shovels, picks and lever bars can do it as well. Redundant solutions.
Whereas most passenger rail in Europe is electrified, cargo is often pulled by diesel locomotives, maintenance machinery is mostly diesel. Most railway workers come to work by car - they have to be there before the trains start running, and go home after the trains stopped. There was a rule that drivers and conductors had to live within three miles of their depot. It hasn't been applied since the advent of cheap car travel.
I don't have numbers on electricity and oil use for the railways. What I do know is this: France gets about 70% of it's electricity from nuclear, Belgium about 50%. Helpful, but not quite enough. The national railways are building windmills along some of the track.
The numbers that most caught my attention are these:
For 2006, income was €522 million, state intervention amounted to €826 million.
The state pays more than half the running costs of the railroad.
High speed rail, such as Thalys, Eurostar and ICE are supposed to show a profit, but the tickets cost an arm and a leg.
I suspect railways can only work well when they are handled as a large and continuing investment in trade, funded by the state.
Belgium was the first country after Britain to build railroads. At first, railroads were built by private companies, which rapidly consolidated into fewer larger companies, which went bust and had to be nationalized. Nationalization started in 1870, was largely complete by 1882, but was only finished in 1956.
Now the powers that be have decided to move the railways towards privatization. The first step was to split up infrastructure, passenger service and cargo. Friction is rife. On a holiday last year, infrastructure decided to run Sunday service, passengers on the other had had opted for Saturday service. Nothing matched up: drivers, trains and conductors were all lost trying to figure out where they were supposed to be going.
However certain you may be, that there well always be corruption at the top, in some cases one top is better than several.
cargo is often pulled by diesel locomotives, maintenance machinery is mostly diesel.
Pres. Chirac announced on January 1, 2006 that all French railroads would be electrified within 20 years. Only one "tourist line" in Switzerland is not electrified. The % electrified keeps increasing elsewhere in the EU (even the UK is talking).
I agree about maintenance equipment (it should have diesel as a back-up at least). A crane to handle derailed cars might be operating where the lines were knocked down by derailment, etc. Such equipment uses a minimal amount of fuel though.
Most railway workers come to work by car
This "varies". Most work mid-day shifts, so they can take the tram/Urban rail to work. 24 hour streetcar operation had some operators in New Orleans taking the streetcar to work.
A solvable "problem".
Alan
A solvable problem indeed.
But I know these guys. I work with them, I talk to them.
I try to be a bit of a missionary for peak oil and peak everything, so the conversations often involve petrol, farming and finance .
The smart guys (most train drivers are smart) live 30 to 60 miles from their depot, where they have access to gardens and farms. They could not get to work without a car. Not without a sleep-over before or after work, in the depot. They would not consider sleeping over without considerable extra pay. How would you like to sleep in a locker room, where the last users make noise at two in the morning, and you have to start work at four?
So they use cars. It may not be smart, but as long as gas is available, it is the only way to go, and stay reasonably comfortable.
Me, I live 5 miles from depot. The way home is uphill. I am 47. I avoid using my bicycle to get to work as much as possible - happily subways and buses are easy to hand - but doing a Lance Armstrong at two thirty in the morning in freezing January weather is not my idea of fun. And driving a bike through peak traffic does not make you happy nor healthy.
Of course it is solvable. Making the last trains run later, so they can pick up the work force for the first trains is a very good idea, but an expensive one. Which is why it is not being done.
This is reality: We have passenger trains ranging from two to twelve carriages. We have 2, 3 and 4 carriage automotors, and 4 to 12 carriage pulling locomotives. 2 and 4 carriage automotors can be combined, 3 carriage automotors couple to 12 carriages max.
We try to keep volume adapted to demand, but it doesn't exactly match: often, trains are too short, and even more frequent are trains that are too long.
One of the most daunting tasks of managing a railroad network is adapting capacity to demand.
Every night, trains have to be where they will be needed in the morning; this does not always work out: where I live, manual labor starts at 6, white collar between 8 and 9 (higher status means later hours). There is a lot of manual work on seaports, but from the middle of the country, the ports cannot be reached before 07:15 up to 08:30.
Consequently, most manual labor to port areas use cars to get to work, whereas ports are very well endowed with track.
Before 7 o'clock, we move mostly menial and manual workers and a few drunks going home late.
Between 7 and 9 o'clock, the trains are filled to overflowing with administrative workers.
9 to 3 is students, pensioners, jobless and businessmen, and not very many of them.
People return home, according to hierarchy: starting with workers, ending with managers.
After 9 o'clock, we have the people who don't have the money for a car, and do need to get home. Sometimes, they do not have money for the train, and our sense of justice is called upon, to decide who deserves punishment, who can have reprieve.
Most of my colleagues are rather punitive; people tend to want to punish transgressions. The problem with punition is that it calls for revenge.
I try to be more effective, and work on the shame of not being up to standard. People ashamed of a transgression will never transgress again. You need to make it so they owe you
The problem was getting railwaymen on the job by the railways instead of cars. This is possible, but you would have to shame the railways into providing the service, and you would have to shame the workers into dropping their cars.
Just where do you work ?
I suspect UK, certainly not the "T" (they run constant length diesel trains ALL day).
Part of the change we need is a change in urban form and a broader network of passenger rail.
Alan
Can't say. There's a gagging clause in my contract.
You're not very far off ;)
EP great section on Bio carbon / Biochar,
There is also promising work utilizing Bio Carbon to scrub volatile Hg upstream to allow economic CO2 capture from Coal power emissions. This could be a bridge technology to get Pyrolysis scaled up now and later devote biochar production to the soil.
Erich
Biochar Soil Technology
Biotic Carbon, the carbon transformed by life, should never be combusted, oxidized and destroyed. It deserves more respect, reverence even, and understanding to use it back to the soil where 2/3 of excess atmospheric carbon originally came from.
We all know we are carbon-centered life, we seldom think about the complex web of recycled bio-carbon which is the true center of life. A cradle to cradle, mutually co-evolved biosphere reaching into every crack and crevice on Earth.
It's hard for most to revere microbes and fungus, but from our toes to our gums (onward), their balanced ecology is our health. The greater earth and soils are just as dependent, at much longer time scales. Our farming for over 10,000 years has been responsible for 2/3rds of our excess greenhouse gases. This soil carbon, converted to carbon dioxide, Methane & Nitrous oxide began a slow stable warming that now accelerates with burning of fossil fuel.
Wise Land management; Organic farming and afforestation can build back our soil carbon,
Biochar allows the soil food web to build much more recalcitrant organic carbon, ( living biomass & Glomalins) in addition to the carbon in the biochar.
Biochar, the modern version of an ancient Amazonian agricultural practice called Terra Preta (black earth), is gaining widespread credibility as a way to address world hunger, climate change, rural poverty, deforestation, and energy shortages… SIMULTANEOUSLY!
Senator / Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar has done the most to nurse this biofuels system in his Biochar provisions in the 07 & 08 farm bill,
http://www.biochar-international.org/newinformationevents/newlegislation...
Charles Mann ("1491") in the Sept. National Geographic has a wonderful soils article which places Terra Preta / Biochar soils center stage.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text
It's what Mann hasn't covered that I thought should interest any writer as a follow up article;
Biochar data base;
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=node
NASA's Dr. James Hansen Global warming solutions paper and letter to the G-8 conference, placing Biochar / Land management the central technology for carbon negative energy systems.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf
The many new university programs & field studies, in temperate soils; Cornell, ISU, U of H, U of GA, Virginia Tech, JMU, New Zealand and Australia.
Glomalin's role in soil tilth, fertility & basis for the soil food web in Terra Preta soils.
This 1996 study http://www.agnet.org/library/eb/430/ It contained quite a bit on AMF -arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and some interesting results from pot trials. It proved again to me that we need to be in better communication about biochar with the Japanese.
Also;
Mycorrhizal responses to biochar in soil – concepts
and mechanisms
Daniel D. Warnock & Johannes Lehmann &
Thomas W. Kuyper & Matthias C. Rillig
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/PlantSoil%20300,%209-20,...
Given the current "Crisis" atmosphere concerning energy, soil sustainability, food vs. Biofuels, and Climate Change what other subject addresses them all?
This is a Nano technology for the soil that represents the most comprehensive, low cost, and productive approach to long term stewardship and sustainability.
Carbon to the Soil, the only ubiquitous and economic place to put it.
Strange how pyrolysis which generates CO2 can somehow absorb more CO2 than just letting plant debris lie where it falls. That's after gathering the material with fossil fuel powered machines then plowing the charcoal back in to the soil. It all seems remarkable.
--------
And please quit polluting up my bio-char with mercury and heavy metals from your coal plant. It'll be of little use as a soil conditioner after that.
Instead of micromanaging fuel economy for each vehicle manufacturer in every state, the govt. would do much better to focus on the systemic fuel efficiency. This is a change that not only America but the entire world urgently needs today. The good news is that the solutions are available.
The change primarily is about trying to see the problem from a higher level than the thinking that created them in the first place.
This can be a win-win both for the commuters - safe bigger vehicles, more leg space, comfortable and luxurious seats running in safe and fuel-efficient speed limits and overall 10X better experience than they enjoy today
as well as
for the auto manufacturers - significantly better margins on each car, new opportunities to provide value added services - remote diagnostics and prognostics, annual contracts for maintenance and upgradations - performance, fuel, retrofitting; advanced traveler information, telematics, navigation assistance, emergency response etc. as well as lower cost structure. Even at lower volumes, they will be much better off.
For the government, the economic stimulus is far more effective if it can focus on the auto industry to make this transition of what William Clay Ford Jr., the present Ford chairman, famously said in 2001 - to move from being “box sellers” to become “mobility service providers.
This has a sinificantly greater impact on reducing GHG emissions not only in the transport sector but also through the multiplier effect on food, housing and other consumption choices.
What we certainly do not need are the so called smart cars with small, congested seats which most people prefer to or can afford to self-drive, with often empty seats. It’s not only the “smart cars” that are a problem but “the forced driving” in combination with outdated road traffic control systems worldwide which together create the “death traps”.
Obama should try to get the country going green. Going green requires you to do sustainable things - the most important being to stop population growth. Yes, believe it or not, and as much as business loves it, population growth is not sustainable. And it not only makes problems worse for generation after generation after generation down the road, it makes things worse today.
Hello EP,
Well crafted keypost, plus many TODer comments afterwards--Well Done!
I don't have the eng. cojones to scientifically thrash these tech-topics one way or the other, but my concern is: Is our Peak Outreach effort sufficiently convincing to enough young bright kids that they are literally thirsting to get deeply involved and educated on these postPeak topics? Shouldn't Prez O & his Boyz be ramping Peak Outreach nationwide to make sure that the American Youth are involved early and often?
I lament that I see so few youngsters here on TOD, and so many older farts like me [But absolutely Huge Kudos extended by me to whatever youngsters are present].
We need lots of soil microbiologists to leverage Terr Preta/biochar.
We need lots of various solar tech experts to push this envelope out.
We need lots of engineers for the various nuke ideas in this keypost.
We need a whole new generation of kids excited about Alan's RR & TOD.
We need kids to climb/build Windturbines and HVDC power towers.
We need every kid in America to get total immersion in this New Paradigm direction.
Matt Simmons is deathly afraid the old farts will retire from the FF-industry before the young kids can safely keep this creaking and rusting edifice from collapsing.
I afraid lots of kids ultimate career goal is to get Vanna White's job on Wheel of Fortune.
I worried that lots of kids hope to design the next great videogame, cellphone app, or Guitar Rockstar-Hero toy.
I upset that so many kids think being on a reality show is the coolest, only beaten by becoming a music, dance, movie, or athletic star.
I worry about an upcoming generation that wants to design the next iteration in credit default swaps, ponzi-scams, bailouts, and new TARPS to pull over our eyes.
IMO, we need to make sure that kids everywhere are Peak-Reached; the Boy Scout motto of 'Be Prepared'. If we fail: lots of kids will die needlessly. That would be the greatest resource loss of all.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
" It can also convert our entire stock of Depleted Uranium (DU) to fuel..".
I don' t agree with this kind of statements about IFR
IFR is NOT a breeder, but a "burner" of transuranics, i.e. elements with a very high half lifes (plutonium, americium, etc..). In an ordinary fast *breeder* reactor the "blanket" consists of depleted uranium to be converted to plutonium 239. This is not the case of IFR where the blanket is replaced by the transuranics produced from current LWR fleet; indeed, there is no depleted uranium to plutonium breeding, to say that I think it's a mesleading statement
Besides this, I find instead very interesting and powerfull the development of MSR, particurally in the fluoride theraml-epithermal version : depth destruction of transuranics together with breeding of thorium, and without the costs and complexity of sodium fast reactor (no matter breeders or burners)
You're contradicting the common knowledge:
More at the link.
I don't think it's correct, we can't tap 100% of natural uranium energy potential if we don' t achieve a conversio ratio higher than 1, that means to operate IFR as a breeder in plutonium-uranium cycle, not simply as burner of transuranics from LWR, where the conversion ratio is < 1. Of course with IFRs we can get rid of the nuclear wastes, even if MSRs have the same features with much more complexity, costs and infrastructures (altough I understand that IFR is today a much more mature technology); I'd like to read about this point some educated opinions
Yes, exactly. The IFR can be operated with a conversion ratio greater than 1 (as can the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor). This is only necessary if the power supply needs to be expanded faster than reactors could be started with decommissioned weapons materials and reclaimed PWR plutonium; if the goal is to eventually eliminate nuclear power, the reactors could be run as net burners and fuel consolidated to fewer and fewer reactors over time.
Grand top post and interesting discussion.
Still a bit complicated.
What about, in rough order of importance:
- Negotiation and compromise instead of war (fair trade replaces military clout, control)
- Negawatts (and reducing life style) as a general principle
- Refurbishing buildings - immediately (also involves giving up some and the roads that go there)
- Nuclear (plan now, when the massive brown-outs hit nobody will give a f*, pardon the language)
- Electric rail
and that is it.
One might add footnotes: reorganizing, rehab, of water, mostly river, transport, and moving slowly away from meat production to more veggies and grains (and other agri matters, top soil, manure, fertilizer, more...), cities and suburbs re-drawn for pedestrian, bike, light rail, etc. use (social change), proper, that is ‘sustainable’ so to speak, management of forests/wood. These all imply, nay require, some kind of political change. Personal transport needs to be transformed, that follows on from the top points.
I’ve left out coal as that is a whole extra issue.
Fiddling about with cow farts, solar panels in the desert, windmills, expensive and FF dependent geo-thermal, bio-fuels such as ethanol, shouldn’t really be part of a Master Plan. (=Local, R&D, etc.) A master plan has to have a few very clear principles that cut to the heart and are the ‘best choices’. And then political will, followed with propaganda, first; then regulations and funding, etc.
Hi Noizette,
I like the style of your suggestion, in terms of making a list that includes different kinds of approaches, by which I mean, includes things other than those in the energy supply-side category.
It reminds me of this post yesterday on EB. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47828.
I always thought that the easiest way for the government to support rail infrastructure would be to give the industry low interest loan guarantees at say the rate of treasuries. In this way, it wouldn't cost the government anything, and the US government is the lowest interest rate borrower in the world. This would be especially helpful to the railroad industry because it is one of the most capital intensive industries in the world, so capital costs for them are huge.
Hi Dax,
I'm curious about what Alan might have to say about financing rail infrastructure?
I have mentioned direct Treasury financing (with a 1% mark-up over costs) for railroad improvements. ROW would be security for the gov't loans.
This would be a parallel path for financing. The mark-up can vary with the intentions of the gov't.
Alan
The driving force behind this is mostly a mistaken impression that nuclear reactors equal nuclear weapons, which has been repeated by many ideologues. This propaganda and the consequent nuclear paranoia have been felt throughout society, even forcing nuclear magnetic resonance scanners—which have nothing to do with nuclear fission or radiation—to be renamed "magnetic resonance imaging" (MRI) to avoid frightening the public!
I've mentioned MORE than once here that the Fission Industry has had opportunity to show how safe the industry is - yet fines keep being leveled FOR safety violations, guards get caught sleeping on videotape and the industry begs for the government to protect 'em via Price-Anderson.
But I've heard a person suggest turning anything organic into char and combining it with Zinc for power. Then, the costs of removing the elements from the soil got considered and the view has changed by the same person to making terra preta - burying the char. Widespread fission has widespread downsides if one actually thinks about it - just like saying if you took all the waste wood and made batteries the energy crisis would be over - was a bad plan if you think about it.
The non-wide spread use of fission the history of failure is well document. So is Mans willingness to attack Man. How does creating MORE failure points in the form of the normal fission safety violations in addition to providing targets - fission reactors - for attack in the world that is sold to us by the government of having terrorists around every corner a good plan?