What Is the Most Efficient and Safest Method to Generate Electricity?

[jim hardy]

Same problem, though. There's a whole natural gas infrastructure that isn't being shown in that pic compared to "all that solar."

quite so.

And solar doesn't replace that infrastructure or relieve its necessity if we're to have power outside the five hours per day of good sunshine.

 

[zoobyshoe]

And solar doesn't replace that infrastructure or relieve its necessity if we're to have power outside the five hours per day of good sunshine.

True, but 'solar doesn't work at night' is a different objection than "all that solar," by which you mean the large area required by solar collectors.

Fossil fuel is basically millions of years of stored solar energy, and there's no way we'll ever be able to compete with that once it's depleted. Eventually we'll have to collect solar directly as it hits the Earth as best we can. The more we do that now, the better we'll become at it and avoid a sharp, forced learning curve down the road.

 

[votingmachine]

Conspicuous consumption, that...
This plant uses solar collectors to preheat feedwater for its steam boiler saving around 10% fuel in good daylight..
The advantage is this plant still makes power at night, just a little less of it.
The aerial photo shows the convenience of fossil fuel. All that solar for 10% ?

View attachment 85665

I'm not sure why you keep harping on land use efficiency. It seems irrelevant. We all see that the most compact power source is nuclear, and solar can only harvest a portion of the solar constant (IIRC about 1.3 watts per square meter). In an area where the solar surface area is high priced, don't buy that surface area as an economic proposition.

Costs need to be considered. If they bought an acre of what looks like rural/agricultural land, and put a solar array on it, then you have to account for that opportunity cost.

You keep presenting power compactness as the definitive reason that fossil fuels are superior and that just doesn't matter as much as you portray it. Fossil fuels are cheaper. THAT matters. If solar gets cheaper, THAT matters.

As was pointed out, that solar field vs the power plant also ignores the amount of surface area dedicated to strip mining, or fossil fuel collection. There might be another photo with the collected areas of the fossil fuel collection ... that might be larger than the field where the solar sits.

There are cost-benefit analysis with every electric generating process. I think the cheapest in the US right now is natural gas. We should use the heck out of that. Cheaper is great. But it is important to notice that the PV module supply has been growing, getting cheaper, and while producing more efficient panels. The largest part of that economic improvement has been a result of German government subsidies for installations, which drove market demand, which drove producer investment. It was one of those chicken-and-egg situations, industrial investment in panels needed demand, and demand needed lower prices, and lower prices needed industrial investment, and so on. There is still an open question as to what the eventual price will drop to. Demand is now growing in ordinary consumer markets ... as I said, I am considering a home installation for economic reasons.

In that home installation, I will put roof surface area, ordinarily acting as environmental isolation of the home interior, to a second use. The surface area is basically free. Other than I am waiting to time solar installation after a new roof installation, as my roof is about 19 years old ... the economics have to include not throwing away 10% of roof life.

I think costs have to be evaluated and benefits have to be evaluated. If surface area is important, then it has to be considered. I tend to think it is an unimportant part in most cases. The picture you show does not really tell us the value of the land they used. Maybe the installation was purely a show, maybe the installation was a well reasoned economic investment.

 

[jim hardy]

True, but 'solar doesn't work at night' is a different objection than "all that solar," by which you mean the large area required by solar collectors.

Fossil fuel is basically millions of years of stored solar energy, and there's no way we'll ever be able to compete with that once it's depleted. Eventually we'll have to collect solar directly as it hits the Earth as best we can. The more we do that now, the better we'll become at it and avoid a sharp, forced learning curve down the road.

Good. Now we're in agreement. Extrapolating to the extreme mankind will someday have to get through every day on what energy he can eke out of the sun.

Utility scale solar and wind exist in US today only because of tax incentives.
In some quarters people gripe about corporate tax breaks , but you just explained why they exist - to get a technology or enterprise going. There's a premise that gov't will share in your development cost with anticipation of sharing in your future profits.

The question "What's the best way to generate electricity" has to be considered at two levels - utility scale and homeowner scale.

Utility scale i'd rank
1 Hydro, 2 Steam, followed by wind and solar where they're plentiful.

Homeowner scale i'd rank
1.Reduce consumption of electricity by direct solar heat collection for space and water heating, on premise not using electricity in the first place it is as good as making it..
2. Rooftop solar PV at latitudes where it makes sense, windmills where they make sense

If we're to keep our mechanized society and lifestyle i do not see the electric grid going away. Nuclear steam will replace fossil as carbon resources dwindle, buying a century or two to get fusion up and running.

 

[mheslep]

(I calculate 1882 - 100 Mcf/day gas wells for one 1150 MW plant @50% eff)...

Apparently ~7000 Mcf/day is more typical for a gas well brought online in the last few years, so 26 wells are enough for a 1150 MW plant at 50%.

 

[mheslep]

Fossil fuel ... no way we'll ever be able to compete with that once it's depleted.

Nuclear?

 

[mheslep]

1 Hydro, 2 Steam,

Jim - Don't need steam for gas fired electricity (Brayton cycle). More efficient and no large water supply required. US has 121 GW of such turbines (though only 3% of power as of 2012 - its rising).

 

[votingmachine]

At one point the Tennessee Valley Authority was looking at a storage idea where they used a mountain reservoir. Pump water up at low demand and then hydroelectric down when there is peak demand. I don't know if anything ever came of the idea, but I recall that there was one impressive claim of 90% efficiency of recovery.

It is only practical where there is an existing geographical feature to provide the elevation ... I would think building a supported tank would add to much cost. But if you could take advantage of natural geography, the pipes and pumps are pretty cheap. You might even be able to use the power turbines as pumps.

I agree that the inevitable backstop for the foreseeable future should shift to nuclear fission. Hydroelectric and geothermal are geography dependent, but make sense in places. I think nuclear should be much more cost efficient than it currently is. There should be much more standardization across nuclear plants. Standard, pre-approved designs would improve the construction economics considerably.

 

[jim hardy]

Jim - Don't need steam for gas fired electricity (Brayton cycle). More efficient and no large water supply required. US has 121 GW of such turbines (though only 3% of power as of 2012 - its rising).

Gas turbine powered generator?

My utility began installing them early 1970's when the nuke plant was late and they needed a few hundred megawatts online quickly.
Early ones had a terrible heat rate and there was a learning curve to stumble up, we were not jet engine mechanics.

They've come a long way but i spent hardly any time around them. When one recovers their exhaust heat by tacking a small boiler behind the gas turbine, their efficiency beats a conventional steam boiler/turbine.

Our system guys were ecstatic with heat rates of 6,000 BTU/KWH which is around 56% efficient.

http://www.energy.siemens.com/us/en/sustainable-energy/power-generation.htm?stc=usccc021878&s_kwcid=AL!462!3!44427756700!b!g!combined%20cycle%20power%20plants&ef_id=UpUo0gAABR99gZzO:20150708165315:s

It's the improvements in gas infrastructure that enabled them in Florida. When i started working there in 1969, we burned low grade oil brought in on huge barges.. 40,000 barrels a day of the gooey stuff. Our heat rate was around 9,000.

 

[mheslep]

they used a mountain reservoir. Pump water up at low demand and then hydroelectric down when there is peak demand. I don't know if anything ever came of the idea

See Pumped-storage hydro. Supposedly 128 GW of capacity worldwide, which runs on the order of hours. The largest facility in the world (by power output) is in Virginia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

 

[jim hardy]

More efficient and no large water supply required. US has 121 GW of such turbines (though only 3% of power as of 2012 - its rising).

Interesting link.

It looks like the pure Brayton turbines are still expensive to run though , the article describes them used mostly for meeting peak demand. We called them "Peaking Units" .

Correspondingly, generation was highest when hourly http://www.iso-ne.com/nwsiss/grid_mkts/how_mkts_wrk/lmp/ (LMPs) averaged about $55 per megawatthour (MWh), and generation was much lower when real-time hourly LMPs were about $20/MWh. Natural gas combustion turbines are more expensive to operate than other types of power plants but can respond quickly when needed, so they tend to be used when they are needed to meet short-term increases in electricity demand related to ramping or when loads (and therefore prices) are higher.

We made a lot of nuclear electricity for under $20 a megawatt hour.

Our first Brayton turbines went in at a plant in Fort Lauderdale near the airport. When they were running, small planes on final approach got quite a lift as they crossed over the upward directed exhaust. A lot of heat was wasted. But the addition of heat recovery boilers and recent improved availability of gas fuel has really changed things for the utilities.

 

[EverGreen1231]

True, but 'solar doesn't work at night' is a different objection than "all that solar," by which you mean the large area required by solar collectors.

Fossil fuel is basically millions of years of stored solar energy, and there's no way we'll ever be able to compete with that once it's depleted. Eventually we'll have to collect solar directly as it hits the Earth as best we can. The more we do that now, the better we'll become at it and avoid a sharp, forced learning curve down the road.

The problem is, many real innovations come only at the precipice of need.

 

[EverGreen1231]

Good. Now we're in agreement. Extrapolating to the extreme mankind will someday have to get through every day on what energy he can eke out of the sun.

Utility scale solar and wind exist in US today only because of tax incentives.
In some quarters people gripe about corporate tax breaks , but you just explained why they exist - to get a technology or enterprise going. There's a premise that gov't will share in your development cost with anticipation of sharing in your future profits.

The question "What's the best way to generate electricity" has to be considered at two levels - utility scale and homeowner scale.

Utility scale i'd rank
1 Hydro, 2 Steam, followed by wind and solar where they're plentiful.

Homeowner scale i'd rank
1.Reduce consumption of electricity by direct solar heat collection for space and water heating, on premise not using electricity in the first place it is as good as making it..
2. Rooftop solar PV at latitudes where it makes sense, windmills where they make sense

If we're to keep our mechanized society and lifestyle i do not see the electric grid going away. Nuclear steam will replace fossil as carbon resources dwindle, buying a century or two to get fusion up and running.

Do you really think Fusion will ever become viable? Everything I've read seems to say a couple hundred years before anything significant can be produced.

 

[mheslep]

We made a lot of nuclear electricity for under $20 a megawatt hour.

Is that after the initial capital outlay was retired? For operating costs, nothing is cheaper than nuclear among dispatchable power sources aside from geothermal, if one can get it. The US government still estimates nuclear operating (fixed and variable O&M) costs at $24/MWh out to 2020. Problem is nuclear capital costs are $70/MWh (2020). China appears to be spending a third of that for their nuclear reactors (dozens of them).
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

 

[jim hardy]

Is that after the initial capital outlay was retired?

Nope. This was an early plant built for just ~120 million, a 10th what the next one cost us. (caveat - i was not in the financial side of the company. I don't know when they declared the plant paid off )
That was before steam generator replacement, though. I don't know what today's cost per mwh is.

 

[OmCheeto]

What is the best way to produce electricity?
Nuclear : people are afraid of leaks and waste storage problems.
Coal: People are afraid of smoke pollution, and it may run out soon.
Oil same as above.
Wind inefficient and to costly.
Wave renewable but again too costly
Solar: it takes up to much land.

What do you think?

All of the above?
There was a study done recently here in the states, where the authors determined the optimal combination of the above for each state.
The provided a cute little infographic web site, where we could go and see what combination is best for where we live.
I find it very promising that people are thinking this way.

And there are always novel new ideas popping up.
A local, a while back, decided that we should be making electricity every time we flush our toilets.
The first installation was done just about a mile from my house.
I just checked out the rivers of England, and it might behoove you to do a feasibility study of installing such devices on the larger streams that feed your rivers.

ps. Regarding the discussion of E.T. solar. I came up with a minimum cost of $500 trillion dollars, in another thread. I expect the cost to be more like $5 quadrillion. I just calculated that it would cost around $125 trillion for total Earth based solar electric.

pps. And if you don't like my response, start eating more pasties!

 

[zoobyshoe]

Nuclear?

You tell me.

I started googling to find some estimates on how long nuclear resources might last, but the sites that address this on the first page of results seemed to be pro-alternate energy sites. The notion they seem to purvey is that if we switched to all nuclear we'd use up those resources much faster than we're currently depleting them. Anyway, I couldn't get a good idea of how much time nuclear might buy us.

Also, there's the usual objections: storage of the waste, potential use of the waste as "dirty" weapons, all that.

 

[jim hardy]

The notion they seem to purvey is that if we switched to all nuclear we'd use up those resources much faster than we're currently depleting them. Anyway, I couldn't get a good idea of how much time nuclear might buy us.

Glasstone & Sessonske's 1960's textbook we used in Reactor Physics course said there's about the same amount of fissile fuel as fossil in the crust of the Earth . Add to that the near-fissile like Thorium that we can breed into reactor fuel and they estimated 400 years worth.
That's a fifty year old estimate.

You're right, i too find mostly pro-nuke produced info.

This one from a paper submitted by a Stanford student in an introductory nuke engineering course is readable, and he lists his references.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/engelsen1/

Mineable Uranium Resources
The most important Uranium reserves are found in Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia where Uranium is found in high enough concentrations to be commercially viable at current Uranium prices. Over half the World's yearly Uranium production originates in these three countries. [5] Uranium is found in the form of Uranium oxides and is usually extracted by open-pit mining. The Uranium ore is then purified, and in most cases enriched to obtain a higher percentage of U-235. The Uranium can then be used to manufacture fuel rods, which can finally generate electricity in nuclear reactors. The OECD estimates that there are 6.3 million tons of identified Uranium supplies recoverable at a rate less than $260/kg. At 2008 rates of Uranium consumption, these supplies would last about 100 years. If the projected discoveries are included as well, world supplies will last 220 years. [5] If Uranium consumption rates increase, as they are projected to, the supplies will last even shorter. A long-term energy solution can therefore not be based on minable Uranium in current reactor technology.

Technological Advances
The estimates given above only include mineable Uranium, and they also assume that there are no improvements in reactor technology. The most direct way of increasing nuclear fuel supplies would be to extract Uranium from sea water, where it is found in small concentrations. Pilot projects in Japan have estimated the price at 200-300$/kg. [12] The total amount of Uranium in the ocean is about 4.5 billion tons, but it remains to be seen whether it can be extracted on a large scale. Development of breeder reactors where fertile U-238 is transmuted to fissile Pu-239 in-situ such that more fissile material is produced than is consumed, would significantly prolong the lifetime of fissile fuel supplies. The use of the fertile material Thorium in a Thorium fuel cycle could allow us to use the Earth's Thorium supplies. Thorium is three to four times more abundant than Uranium and a Thorium fuel cycle may have significant advantages over the Uranium fuel cycle currently employed. However, significant technological and economic challenges remain before Thorium nuclear reactors are commercially viable and only India has a Thorium nuclear power program. [8] Reprocessing of spent fuel is a currently available technology increasing the efficiency of nuclear fuel by extracting the remaining fissile material in a spent fuel rod by the PUREX method. All major nuclear powers except the United States have a currently operating reprocessing program for spent fuel rods. [13] bold mine jh

 

[Enigman]

You tell me.

I started googling to find some estimates on how long nuclear resources might last, but the sites that address this on the first page of results seemed to be pro-alternate energy sites. The notion they seem to purvey is that if we switched to all nuclear we'd use up those resources much faster than we're currently depleting them. Anyway, I couldn't get a good idea of how much time nuclear might buy us.

Also, there's the usual objections: storage of the waste, potential use of the waste as "dirty" weapons, all that.

Here's what I got googling
Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?
Vol. 99, No. 10, October 2011 | Proceedings of the IEE

XVI. CONCLUSION
We have highlighted that there are fundamental engineering and re- source scaling limits that make the notion of a nuclear utopia somewhat impractical. There are fundamental limits imposed by embrittlement, accident rate, land resources, fuel re- source extraction rate, and mineral resources for making enough nuclear vessels. As the nuclear vessel is irradiated and not recyclable, we highlight that a rapid uptake of nuclear power would seriously limit elemental diversity and would drive up price volatility given there are other significant competing industrial uses of the required metals. Therein lies the rub. It can be argued that a nuclear nirvana supplemented by renewables may mitigate the need to reach 15 TW by nuclear power alone . Even a lesser goal of several terawatts of nuclear power would run into many of the outlined limitations.Therefore, the notion of a nuclear utopia is a false one. But there are two types of nuclear advocates: the nuclear utopian and the nuclear realist. A nuclear realist would only suggest that we need about 1 TW of nuclear power as part of our world energy mix. However, one only has to divide the results, in this paper, by 15 to see that 1 TW still stretches resources and risks considerably. One then has to count the cost, consider the safety, the complexity, and the issues surrounding governance of nuclear power. Also if the technology cannot be fundamentally scaled further than 1 TW, one has to ask if the same investment would have been better spent on a truly scalable technology. It has been suggested that for the same investment, solar thermal farms (with storage) would exceed the power output of nuclear stations and eliminate many of the problems. Solar thermal is also scalable as it has the capacity to deliver hundreds of terawatts should mankind require it in the future. The weakness of a scalable renew- able solution, however, is intermitten- cy. In the short term, this problem can be addressed via dual use of solar thermal with natural gas. Then, the natural gas can be phased out, as storage and grid balancing techniques come online to solve the intermittency problem.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6021978

Shorter physorg summary of the analysis - http://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

Another thing I found worth mentioning was seawater extraction. Although, uranium extraction from seawater seems to show tremendous promise in future but is as of now terribly inefficient and will take a lot of research before it becomes economically viable let alone globally scalable.

Based on a cost analysis of uranium extracted from seawater, it is concluded that the world’s energy requirements for the next 5 billion years can be met by breeder reactors with no price increase due to fuel costs.(AIP)
Breeder reactors: A renewable energy source
Am. J. Phys. 51, 75 (1983);
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/ajp/51/1/10.1119/1.13440

Full paper: http://88.167.97.19/temp/Breeder_reactors_A_renewable_energy_source_pad11983cohen.pdf

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F-uY83ty5UkJ:88.167.97.19/temp/Breeder_reactors_A_renewable_energy_source_pad11983cohen.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in

Further googling of seawater extraction gives -

The uranium concentration of sea water is low, approximately 3.3 parts per billion or 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater.[12] But the quantity of this resource is gigantic and some scientists believe this resource is practically limitless with respect to world-wide demand. That is to say, if even a portion of the uranium in seawater could be used the entire world's nuclear power generation fuel could be provided over a long time period.[13] Some anti-nuclear proponents^[12][13][14] claim this statistic is exaggerated.^{[citation needed]} Although research and development for recovery of this low-concentration element by inorganic adsorbents such as titanium oxide compounds has occurred since the 1960s in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan, this research was halted due to low recovery efficiency.

At the Takasaki Radiation Chemistry Research Establishment of the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI Takasaki Research Establishment), research and development has continued culminating in the production of adsorbent by irradiation of polymer fiber. Adsorbents have been synthesized that have a functional group (amidoxime group) that selectively adsorbs heavy metals, and the performance of such adsorbents has been improved. Uranium adsorption capacity of the https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polymer_fiber_adsorbent&action=edit&redlink=1 is high, approximately tenfold greater in comparison to the conventional titanium oxide adsorbent.

One method of extracting uranium from seawater is using a uranium-specific nonwoven fabric as an absorbent. The total amount of uranium recovered from three collection boxes containing 350 kg of fabric was >1 kg of yellowcake after 240 days of submersion in the ocean.^[15] According to the OECD, uranium may be extracted from seawater using this method for about $300/kg-U.[^16] The experiment by Seko et al. was repeated by Tamada et al. in 2006. They found that the cost varied from ¥15,000 to ¥88,000 (Yen) depending on assumptions and "The lowest cost attainable now is ¥25,000 with 4g-U/kg-adsorbent used in the sea area of Okinawa, with 18 repetitionuses [sic]." With the May, 2008 exchange rate, this was about $240/kg-U.^[17]

In 2012, ORNL^[18] researchers announced the successful development of a new absorbent material dubbed HiCap, which vastly outperforms previous best adsorbents, which perform surface retention of solid or gas molecules, atoms or ions. "We have shown that our adsorbents can extract five to seven times more uranium at uptake rates seven times faster than the world's best adsorbents," said Chris Janke, one of the inventors and a member of ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division. HiCap also effectively removes toxic metals from water, according to results verified by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.[^{18] 19][20]}

^wiki

 

[zoobyshoe]

Shorter physorg summary of the analysis - http://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

This has some damning figures:

Lifetime:Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement - cracks that develop on the metal surfaces due to radiation. If nuclear stations need to be replaced every 50 years on average, then with 15,000 nuclear power stations, one station would need to be built and another decommissioned somewhere in the world every day. Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement unrealistic.

and:

Accident rate:To date, there have been 11 nuclear accidents at the level of a full or partial core-melt. These accidents are not the minor accidents that can be avoided with improved safety technology; they are rare events that are not even possible to model in a system as complex as a nuclear station, and arise from unforeseen pathways and unpredictable circumstances (such as the Fukushima accident). Considering that these 11 accidents occurred during a cumulated total of 14,000 reactor-years of nuclear operations, scaling up to 15,000 reactors would mean we would have a major accident somewhere in the world every month.

The recovery of uranium from seawater was interesting. I have no doubt better ways of doing that would be invented down the road, but the above problems make it both unrealistic and undesirable to try to replace fossil with nuclear. Going from 440 nuclear plants to 15,000! I never realized it would have to be scaled up that much!

 

[russ_watters]

This has some damning figures:

and:

That first bit is kind of misleading because that's the total energy use from all sources, not just electricity. It includes heating and cars, for example. Now, maybe he's talking about replacing everything with electricity, but note that heating is not replaced at a 1:1 ratio. A heat pump allows you to get the same amount of heat for perhaps 1/3 as much energy input. Similarly, an electric car is much more efficient than a gas powered car. So an all electric world would use substantially less power than that estimate.

Second, 1 nuclear plant a day may sound like a big number, but we live in a big world. Though it has slowed a bit from its peak, China alone was turning-on a new coal plant better than once every 4 days until a few years ago. That's just one country and one source of energy! The world most certainly has built large power plants at a rate of one a day before and though nuclear is harder than other sources, it is something that can be done. France as a country went all nuclear for electricity over a period of 20 years -- there is no reason other countries can't do it too.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Second, 1 nuclear plant a day may sound like a big number, but we live in a big world. Though it has slowed a bit from its peak, China alone was turning-on a new coal plant better than once every 4 days until a few years ago. That's just one country and one source of energy! The world most certainly has built large power plants at a rate of one a day before and though nuclear is harder than other sources, it is something that can be done. France as a country went all nuclear for electricity over a period of 20 years -- there is no reason other countries can't do it too.

I've looked this up before and don't remember finding much informative but I wonder how mass production would affect the economics of nuclear power. AFAIK nuclear power stations are built to order and in countries like the UK we've only built them once in a long while (though I think we build some magnox reactors in ~5 years once). If you wanted to build a whole load of reactors at once, or at least over a small time scale, then presumably mass production would bring the unit cost down somewhat.

 

[russ_watters]

I think the news reports I read look like a snapshot, and it was misleading. They met half of demand with solar, but it was a low demand time. It is a bit difficult (apples to oranges) to compare power plant maximum capacities and what is being run.

Well, sorry, but that would be a pretty useless stat.

The yellow line for solar does show the story of increased installation. And you absolutely have to build capacity for peak demand, and the coal/nuclear plants will remain the main backstop for that peak. It looks like for the last decade, the only significant capacity they are adding is in Wind, Solar, and Other (hydroelectric?). The German goal is 80% of electricity from renewable sources. It may be that they will have a surplus coal plant capacity remaining idle.

IMO, Germany's goal is unrealistic. Currently they are not replacing all of the power they are shutting down, they are buying it from adjacent countries.

I would say the electricity from solar in Germany is NOT insignificant. If you look at power capacity, it is still a very small fraction of the installed power production infrastructure. But it is used at 100% capacity available, which actually makes it more significant than you might otherwise expect.

I'm sorry, but you have that exactly backwards. Because solar only runs during sunny days and at peak when the sun is overhead, it runs at perhaps a 15% capacity factor, which is much lower than most other sources. Nuclear tends to run above 90%. That said, the graph I provided was in energy, not power (but be wary of news articles reporting/comparing solar by capacity: they are misleading). Still, I challenge you to try to calculate the fraction of the energy generated by solar: the number is so small, it is tough to read off the graph accurately!

The US, this summer, is likely to reach the milestone of solar energy providing 1% of our energy over the course of a month (probably this month), after which it will go back down again until next year. When I say "insignificant", 1% is about enough to start paying attention even if it doesn't make much of a real difference. The Department of Energy still has to report "other renewable" energy sources on a separate graph/table from the primary sources because they are too small to read on the same graph. That's a sign of irrelevance, to me.

 

[russ_watters]

I've looked this up before and don't remember finding much informative but I wonder how mass production would affect the economics of nuclear power. AFAIK nuclear power stations are built to order and in countries like the UK we've only built them once in a long while (though I think we build some magnox reactors in ~5 years once). If you wanted to build a whole load of reactors at once, or at least over a small time scale, then presumably mass production would bring the unit cost down somewhat.

Agreed. And if we're going to talk about all of the world's energy, we need to consider all of the worlds energy in the comparison: [google] If a random car manufacturing plant can output 1,000 cars a day at 100 kW each, that's the equivalent of one nuclear plant every 10 days(at a cost of $200 million). So the goal of one nuclear plant a day could be served by just 10 auto manufacturing plant scale facilities (rough order of magnitude estimate).

[edit: also, while the guy said "plant" and I've continued using the word, I think he means "reactor". In the US, the average nuclear plant has about 3 reactors.

 

[zoobyshoe]

That first bit is kind of misleading because that's the total energy use from all sources, not just electricity. It includes heating and cars, for example.

It says current global power consumption is 15 terawatts, so I think he's only referring to electricity, not gasoline or heat.

Second, 1 nuclear plant a day may sound like a big number, but we live in a big world. Though it has slowed a bit from its peak, China alone was turning-on a new coal plant better than once every 4 days until a few years ago. That's just one country and one source of energy! The world most certainly has built large power plants at a rate of one a day before and though nuclear is harder than other sources, it is something that can be done. France as a country went all nuclear for electricity over a period of 20 years -- there is no reason other countries can't do it too.

The thing is, though, this would be ongoing: non-stop. A new nuclear power plant would have to come online somewhere every day, and there would eventually be a huge backlog of them undergoing the 20 year decommissioning with a new one added to that every day for as long as we used nuclear. It wouldn't just be a temporary bug push. And, as it said earlier in the article, there are only so many sites in the world suitable for a nuclear power plant:

Land and location:Onenuclear reactorplant requires about 20.5 km2(7.9 mi2) of land to accommodate the nuclear power station itself, its exclusion zone, its enrichment plant, ore processing, and supporting infrastructure. Secondly, nuclear reactors need to be located near a massive body of coolant water, but away from dense population zones and natural disaster zones. Simply finding 15,000 locations on Earth that fulfill these requirements is extremely challenging.

Once you get 15,000 nuclear power plants built, you only have enough viable uranium to operate them for 5 years:

Uranium abundance:At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.)

So, you'd have to extract it from seawater, and we don't currently have a good way to do that. If we did, we would render the concentration unusable in 30 years. There's thorium, and breeder reactors, but any kind of reactor requires things besides the nuclear fuel, things that are not limitless:

Exotic metals:The nuclear containment vessel is made of a variety of exotic rare metals that control and contain the nuclear reaction: hafnium as a neutron absorber, beryllium as a neutron reflector, zirconium for cladding, and niobium to alloy steel and make it last 40-60 years against neutron embrittlement. Extracting these metals raises issues involving cost, sustainability, and environmental impact. In addition, these metals have many competing industrial uses; for example, hafnium is used in microchips and beryllium by the semiconductor industry. If a nuclear reactor is built every day, the global supply of these exotic metals needed to build nuclear containment vessels would quickly run down and create a mineral resource crisis. This is a new argument that Abbott puts on the table, which places resource limits on all future-generation nuclear reactors, whether they are fueled by thorium or uranium.

So, this Abbot fellow paints a pretty damning picture for those who think we can just convert everything to nuclear when the fossil runs out.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

AIUI we could also reprocess the nuclear waste we currently have to produce more fuel as we're rather inefficient at using it these days. Uranium levels aside I don't think we'll ever need to have an all nuclear world given how renewable energy is a very good option for large regions (solar in equatorial countries, places like Brazil have loads of hydro, Iceland loads of geo etc).

 

[zoobyshoe]

AIUI we could also reprocess the nuclear waste we currently have to produce more fuel as we're rather inefficient at using it these days. Uranium levels aside I don't think we'll ever need to have an all nuclear world given how renewable energy is a very good option for large regions (solar in equatorial countries, places like Brazil have loads of hydro, Iceland loads of geo etc).

Right. That particular author is addressing people who are unconcerned about using up fossil fuels because they believe we can just switch everything to nuclear, and it will last forever.

 

[russ_watters]

Here's the original article:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6021978

It is really bad and really disappointing for IEEE.

First:

It says current global power consumption is 15 terawatts, so I think he's only referring to electricity, not gasoline or heat.

That's an American-layman-centric view due to our use of the English system for everything except electricity: kW and kWh are power and energy, period, and do not imply electricity.

2012 global primary (see what "primary" means below) energy consumption from all sources was 155,505 TWh, which works out to 17.8 TW:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Original source is here, but it is a dense read:
http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WEO2012_free.pdf (page 69 is a good start)

Second, that is primary energy, not the electrical energy itself:

In 2008, the world total of electricity production and consumption was 20,279 terawatt-hours (TWh). This number corresponds to an average consumption rate of around 2.3 terawatts continuously during the year. The total energy needed to produce this power is roughly a factor 2 to 3 higher because a power plants' efficiency of generating electricity is roughly 30–50%. The generated power is thus in the order of 5 TW. This is approximately a third of the total energy consumption of 15 TW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption

Why does that matter? Because if you use natural gas for heat, you might get 95% efficiency, but if you use natural gas to make electricity, to make heat with electrical resistance, you might only get 35% efficiency. That's the issue I was highlighting previously. So:

The article erroneously compares primary energy to secondary energy, so they are high by a factor of three. Specifically, if a nuclear plant is about 33% efficient, that means a 1 GWh electrical output is provided by a 3 GWh nuclear heat input. Worse, due to the improved efficiency of heat pumps and electric cars, a pretty significant fraction of the energy will be saved in the switch - as much as 2/3 for those uses.

Third, why set a goal so high to begin with? Fossil fuels are depletable, but wind, solar and hydro aren't. Even the most ardent proponent of nuclear power (me?) wouldn't suggest we tear down the Hoover Dam. In the US, my starting goal for nuclear would merely be to triple it, to eliminate fossil fuel electricity and start to dig into what would be needed for all-electric heat and cars. That's an eminently feasible goal (See: France).

For the other issues:
His accident rate is a combination of bad math and bad analysis. To get a number like 11 "full or partial core-melt" requires treating all of the 2012 Japanese reactor failures as separate accidents, counting early research reactors (not commercial reactors) and counting accidents that caused only minor damage. A more reasonable count would be 3 major accidents, destroying 5 reactors (Fukushima alone lost 3 reactors). Obviously, since the Fukushima reactor failures were all triggered by the same event, you cannot extrapolate that to a rate for separate events.

Even worse, he assumes that that rate is going to be the same, forever. That is widly unrealistic, probably by somewhere between a factor of 10 or 100. The obvious comparison is with plane crashes. The worst year (globally) for commercial plane crashes was 1972, when 55 planes crashed. In 2014, 12 crashed. But people fly about 7x more today than they did in 1972, so the accident rate is actually 1/32nd what it was in 1972. That is an entirely engineering-dirven improvement.
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/07/travel/aviation-data/

We already know nuclear power has gotten safer: the worst accident, Chernobyl, is not possible today and shouldn't have been possible even then, but the USSR ran a known flawed design. Such an accident was not possible in countries with more mature industries like France or the US (or even Japanese) and I don't think there are any reactors left with similar designs.

Frankly, the article reeks of bad anti-nuclear activism. Whether it is dishonest or just misinformed I don't know, but I don't have much sympathy for errors that always lean in the same direction. Much of the rest is the same wrong, recycled anti-nuclear rhetoric we've seen for decades (such as the storage and proliferation red-herrings, plus he threw in some peak oilism for good measure). It's so bad I'm loath to keep going, but a couple more that you asked about specifically:

1. Fuel: we have a once-through fuel cycle because it is cheap and the fuel is plentiful. Bad math on how many plants we need aside, if it starts getting scarce, we can just start recycling it: we are a long, long way from needing to get it from water, even if we build plants by the thousands.

2. Waste: Waste is a non-existent issue, or, rather, is a fully political issue. Most nuclear waste isn't even really waste (see #1) and the waste that is can be stored basically anywhere. The idea of needing 100,000 years of stable geological storage is a fools-errand set up for political reasons to keep nuclear power down. We've been storing the waste locally for 50 years and all that is really needed is more storage for those places that are filling-up. Perhaps a central facility, located, literally, anywhere would be nice, but it isn't a limiting factor.

3. Land use: What? See solar, wind and hydro. This is a non-issue for nuclear. And the number itself is at least intentionally misleading for that too, by a factor of 10, since it includes not just the plant, but off-site support facilities like the processing plant that have different constraints and are probably not additive. The plant near me (2 reactors) is 30 miles from the center of Philadelphia and covers about half a square mile of ground. 15,000 reactors totals 3,700 sq mi at that rate. That's 100-1000 times less than what would be required of solar.

4. Rare metals and environmental impact of mining them: What? That's troglodyte talk (literally). Every industry depletes resources and damages the environment. The whole point of nuclear is that it does less of that than, say, coal. That argument is nothing short of lets-go-back-to-living-in-caves "environmentalism".

 

[russ_watters]

Right. That particular author is addressing people who are unconcerned about using up fossil fuels because they believe we can just switch everything to nuclear, and it will last forever.

Do any such people exist? That on it's own is a really bad strawman - a star-trek style limitless energy utopia (he actually says "nuclear utopia" ). Let's start smaller, with replacing our coal power with nuclear and then see where we are in 30 years or so.

 

[tom aaron]

Do any such people exist? That on it's own is a really bad strawman - a star-trek style limitless energy utopia (he actually says "nuclear utopia" ). Let's start smaller, with replacing our coal power with nuclear and then see where we are in 30 years or so.

Re uranium supplies. It's a grey area. I first came to Canada in the 1970's because of a job involved in field exploration for Uranium and other resources in the High Arctic and then in Nova Scotia. We did seminal mapping and there was a general high concentration of uranium ore. However, none of his was developed due to an eventual decrease in demand ( thus the closing of Uranium City).

That was my last experience with hard rock geology before moving into paleontology. So, I know very little about uranium deposits. However, I'd 'guess' that with demand, exploration would pick up and potential large deposits developed.

Back to the real world. Nuclear energy is on wobbly legs. A big issue is not only acceptability but viable nuclear technology infrastructure. A lot of it is gone...non existent. Along with nuclear plants, China is also developing incredible infrastructure...this is also France's forte. If the USA was to 'declare' the building of a hundred plants tomorrow it would largely be a paper declaration...much (not all)of the nuclear infrastructure is gone. That generation has retired and the new generation is working for apple perfecting Itune downloading.

 

[jim hardy]

Along with nuclear plants, China is also developing incredible infrastructure.

Can this be so, they're making half the world's steel now?

I think we've awakened a sleeping giant.

 

[russ_watters]

Nuclear energy is on wobbly legs. A big issue is not only acceptability but viable nuclear technology infrastructure. A lot of it is gone...non existent. Along with nuclear plants, China is also developing incredible infrastructure...this is also France's forte. If the USA was to 'declare' the building of a hundred plants tomorrow it would largely be a paper declaration...much (not all)of the nuclear infrastructure is gone. That generation has retired and the new generation is working for apple perfecting Itune downloading.

You say "infrastructure" but it sounds like you are describing "expertise". Assuming I'm reading you correctly, I agree: it will take decades just to build-up the expertise to ramp-up production to be able to build (for example) a hundred plants at a time (10 being completed a year for 10 years of construction). It's a huge problem.

Fortunately(?), we'd need at least a decade after making the decision before anything can happen anyway. "Somebody" would need to develop a/the new, standard, reactor for mass production and production facilities would need to be designed and built. This would also slowly build back up the expertise base as people are brought-in to work on the systems.

Fortunately, my understanding is that the nuclear portion of a power plant is not a huge fraction of the plant: much of construction of a plant is just regular steam/water piping, steel framing and concrete. So while building that many new plants at once may take a million people, the vast majority need not have nuclear power expertise.

Note, in my now 10 year old "Fix the US Energy Crises" thread, I said 5 years of design and 5 years per plant to build, though still a total of 10 per year. That's probably overly ambitious timewise, but the output ends up roughtly the same. Though it is all moot until someone decides to pull that trigger. Still, it is tough to accept for someone who was born after Apollo, that we could get to the moon in 10 years, at a time before computer aided design, but can't design/build a nuclear plant in 10 years (much less design and produce a new fighter jet in 20 years!).

 

[mheslep]

t says current global power consumption is 15 terawatts,...

That's the commonly used figure for the all-in, global primary rate: electricity, heat, transportation, everything. The total energy figure drops significantly if everything, especially transportation, is theoretically converted to electric power because of the efficiency improvement.

 

[mheslep]

Can this be so, they're making half the world's steel now?

China also now burns more than half the world's coal.

 

[mheslep]

This has some damning figures:

The author lacks a sense of scale. Currently, a new coal, gas, or oil electric plant (500 MW equivalent) is built globally every 1.3 days (i.e. 131 GW new fossil fuel capacity in 2013), which doesn't include all the biomass, hydro, or nuclear plants coming online every day.

 

[zoobyshoe]

O.K. Let me just digest one thing at a time:

The article erroneously compares primary energy to secondary energy, so they are high by a factor of three. Specifically, if a nuclear plant is about 33% efficient, that means a 1 GWh electrical output is provided by a 3 GWh nuclear heat input. Worse, due to the improved efficiency of heat pumps and electric cars, a pretty significant fraction of the energy will be saved in the switch - as much as 2/3 for those uses.

So, you're saying that currently only 5 TW of the 15 TW consumed is in the form of electrical energy. And were we to do the whole 15 as electrical energy, we would only have to generate 1/3 of the remaining 10, about 3.333 TW, instead of the whole 10. Am I understanding you correctly?

 

[Ryan_m_b]

O.K. Let me just digest one thing at a time:

So, you're saying that currently only 5 TW of the 15 TW consumed is in the form of electrical energy. And were we to do the whole 15 as electrical energy, we would only have to generate 1/3 of the remaining 10, about 33.333 TW, instead of the whole 10. Am I understanding you correctly?

You're a decimal point out but I believe that's the point yes. It would be quite a challenge to switch to all electric, cars and trains not so much but airplanes and ships would be difficult. Of course they could be replaced overtime, reintroduce the airship and build far greater continental train networks (like China's proposed new Silk Road that could connect it all the way to Europe with freight train links). We could even build a 21st century version of the NS Savannah and try to get commercial nuclear shipping back on the agenda.

 

[zoobyshoe]

You're a decimal point out...

DOH! I fixed it.

but I believe that's the point yes. It would be quite a challenge to switch to all electric, cars and trains not so much but airplanes and ships would be difficult. Of course they could be replaced overtime, reintroduce the airship and build far greater continental train networks (like China's proposed new Silk Road that could connect it all the way to Europe with freight train links). We could even build a 21st century version of the NS Savannah and try to get commercial nuclear shipping back on the agenda.

You have any estimate of how much of the 15 TW is used by planes and ships? I'm curious.

 

[tom aaron]

The author lacks a sense of scale. Currently, the year builds a new coal, gas, or oil electric plant (500 MW equivalent) every 1.3 days (i.e. 131 GW new fossil fuel capacity in 2013), which doesn't include all the biomass, hydro, or nuclear plants coming online every day.

The future is bright for coal the rest of this century, especially in the big growth economies such as China and India. It will be 'the' fuel for producing electricity. A positive for coal is that it doesn't have a geopolitical variable. The big reserves are in Australia, Russia, China, Brazil, Canada, the USA.

 

[mheslep]

The future is bright for coal the rest of this century, especially in the big growth economies such as China and India. It will be 'the' fuel for producing electricity. A positive for coal is that it doesn't have a geopolitical variable. The big reserves are in Australia, Russia, China, Brazil, Canada, the USA.

Increasing coal use a century out seems unlikely. Even current figures indicate a limited outlook. Gas is replacing coal in the US (down 18%/10 years), and now even in China coal consumption for electricity seems to have finally peaked, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/26/china-coal-idUSL3N0WL32720150326Add in the coal emission harms, trends toward carbon pricing, and the innovations ongoing in nuclear power (small modular, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Fast-Neutron-Reactors/, and molten fuel) and I don't see an outcome other that decline of coal fired electricity past, say, 2040, if that.SMR:

Small modular reactors offer the advantage of lower initial capital investment, scalability, and siting flexibility at locations unable to accommodate more traditional larger reactors. They also have the potential for enhanced safety and security.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Fast-Neutron-Reactors/

The BN-800 from OKBM Afrikantov and SPbAEP, is a new more powerful (2100 MWt, 864 MWe gross, 789 MWe net) FBR [Fast Breeder Reactor], which is actually the same overall size and configuration as the BN-600. The first (and probably only Russian one) is Beloyarsk 4, which started up in mid-2014.

Premature deaths from PM due to coal combustion:

A new study has revealed the staggering cost of China’s dependence on coal to power its economy: 670,000 deaths in one year alone. ... the study found that tiny particulate pollutants, especially those smaller than 2.5 micrograms (known as PM2.5), were linked to 670,000 premature deaths from four diseases – strokes, lung cancer, coronary heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – in China in 2012...

 

[russ_watters]

So, you're saying that currently only 5 TW of the 15 TW consumed is in the form of electrical energy

Consumed for electrical energy: The 5 TW of consumed nuclear fuel (per hour) is converted to about 2.3 TW of electricity.

And were we to do the whole 15 as electrical energy, we would only have to generate 1/3 of the remaining 10, about 3.333 TW, instead of the whole 10. Am I understanding you correctly?

It probably isn't quite that low because not all of the other energy used is used for transportation or low temperature heating. Transportation is about 25% of the total (3.8 TW) and I'm going to guess that low temperature heating applications that could use heat pumps are another 25%. That means 1/3 of 7.6 = 2.5 TW. That leaves 15-7.6-5=2.4 TW unaccounted for and let's assume that's high temperature heat. So the total generated electricity to be an all-electric world would be about 2.3+2.5+2.4 = 7.2 TW.

You have any estimate of how much of the 15 TW is used by planes and ships? I'm curious.

According to the wiki, 20% of the total is transportation. I'll take a stab at it and say planes and ships are probably 10% of transportation, or 0.3 TW.

 

[russ_watters]

It would be quite a challenge to switch to all electric, cars and trains not so much but airplanes and ships would be difficult. Of course they could be replaced overtime, reintroduce the airship and build far greater continental train networks (like China's proposed new Silk Road that could connect it all the way to Europe with freight train links). We could even build a 21st century version of the NS Savannah and try to get commercial nuclear shipping back on the agenda.

If we reaaaaly want to go as nuclear/electric as possible, I think a great many big ships could be nuclear powered. Airplanes, though, are going to be a big problem.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Consumed for electrical energy: The 5 TW of consumed nuclear fuel (per hour) is converted to about 2.3 TW of electricity.

Ah, O.K.

It probably isn't quite that low because not all of the other energy used is used for transportation or low temperature heating. Transportation is about 25% of the total (3.8 TW) and I'm going to guess that low temperature heating applications that could use heat pumps are another 25%. That means 1/3 of 7.6 = 2.5 TW. That leaves 15-7.6-5=2.4 TW unaccounted for and let's assume that's high temperature heat. So the total generated electricity to be an all-electric world would be about 2.3+2.5+2.4 = 7.2 TW.

Sticking just to how many TW of nuclear fuel will be consumed, what would that figure be after conversion to an all-electric world? Your original statement was that it won't be one-to-one because electric cars and heat pumps are more efficient. So, I'm looking for your estimate of the reduced consumed TW.

 

[russ_watters]

Sticking just to how many TW of nuclear fuel will be consumed, what would that figure be after conversion to an all-electric world? Your original statement was that it won't be one-to-one because electric cars and heat pumps are more efficient. So, I'm looking for your estimate of the reduced consumed TW.

Nuclear power is about 30% efficient, so an all-electric world of 7.2 TW requires an input of about 22 TW of nuclear fuel.

 

[tom aaron]

If we reaaaaly want to go as nuclear/electric as possible, I think a great many big ships could be nuclear powered. Airplanes, though, are going to be a big problem.

Cimmercial nuclear ships are not being built and will not be built for some time. They are not viable economically or practically.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Nuclear power is about 30% efficient, so an all-electric world of 7.2 TW requires an input of about 22 TW of nuclear fuel.

I'm very confused. I thought you started with 15 TW to get to the 7.2 TW. Working backward, it doesn't seem you could get greater than 15 TW and it should be less with your previously proposed savings by electric car and heat pump.

 

[russ_watters]

I'm very confused. I thought you started with 15 TW to get to the 7.2 TW. Working backward, it doesn't seem you could get greater than 15 TW and it should be less with your previously proposed savings by electric car and heat pump.

The author of the article mixed together input and output (primary and secondary) and I guess I haven't untangled it enough for you yet: He said you'd need 15 TW of output (which would be 45 TW of input), but based on current usage you need 7.2 TW of output (22 TW of input).

In other words, he said you'd need 15,000 nuclear reactors (at 45 GW input to get 15 GW output) but you'd really need only 7,200 reactors (22 GW input, 7.2 GW output).

 

[zoobyshoe]

The author of the article mixed together input and output (primary and secondary) and I guess I haven't untangled it enough for you yet: He said you'd need 15 TW of output (which would be 45 TW of input), but based on current usage you need 7.2 TW of output (22 TW of input).

In other words, he said you'd need 15,000 nuclear reactors (at 45 GW input to get 15 GW output) but you'd really need only 7,200 reactors (22 GW input, 7.2 GW output).

Regardless of what he said I though you were starting with 15 TW of input to get 7.2 TW output. That's what is confusing me.

 

[russ_watters]

Regardless of what he said I though you were starting with 15 TW of input to get 7.2 TW output. That's what is confusing me.

Essentially yes: I calculated 7.2 TW of output from 15 TW of input, based on my efficiency and usage assumptions/data.

The world doesn't care much about the input. Indeed, for renewable sources we generally don't even consider the input at all, since it is free and eternal. The world cares about the output. What I did, that matters for his analysis, was correct his output number (for a start). The fact that the input number goes up as a result appears to be tripping you up, but it isn't really all that important. On a day-to-day basis, we really don't care much about the input of a nuclear plant.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Essentially yes: I calculated 7.2 TW of output from 15 TW of input, based on my efficiency and usage assumptions/data.

O.K. So what you're saying is that, in the switch from current power generation to all nuclear/electric, we would have to consume more than 15 TW to get the same 7.2 TW output. Consumption would be more like 22TW.

The world doesn't care much about the input. Indeed, for renewable sources we generally don't even consider the input at all, since it is free and eternal. The world cares about the output. What I did, that matters for his analysis, was correct his output number (for a start). The fact that the input number goes up as a result appears to be tripping you up, but it isn't really all that important. On a day-to-day basis, we really don't care much about the input of a nuclear plant.

But uranium is non-renewable, so it is important. This goes to his claim that, were we to be generating the current output exclusively by nuclear we'd use up all the viable uranium in 5 years. That was my original question: how long will supplies of nuclear fuels last? If he's overestimated consumption by a factor of 3, as you say, that means we actually would have 15 years of an all nuclear/electric world before the viable uranium got used up. Not better enough to be worth correcting him, IMO. "The world," as you put it, "doesn't care about" ten more years. The world is looking for the longest lasting possible energy source. Should we invest so much in something that's just going to be fossil fuels all over again?