Nuclear energy: for or against?

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The discussion on nuclear energy highlights a divide between proponents and opponents of its use. Supporters argue that nuclear energy is a clean, efficient, and necessary alternative to fossil fuels, emphasizing its ability to power entire cities and its potential for proper waste management. Critics raise concerns about the inherent dangers of nuclear power, citing past disasters and the long-term implications of radioactive waste. The conversation also touches on the potential for nuclear fusion as a future energy source, though current technological limitations are acknowledged. Ultimately, the debate centers on balancing energy needs with safety and environmental considerations.
  • #91
nikkkom said:
First, earthquake per se did not destroy much (a testament to Japanese building codes and quality).

Second, tsunamis aren't designs of men - reactors *are*, therefore, those men should be held accountable for their designs.
You are trying to draw distinctions here that don't exist. This isn't Chernobyl where there was no natural disaster: every bit of what happened along the coast that day was due to the natural disaster. Fukushima's deficiencies were in protection from natural disaster.

In all 3 cases, engineering can mitigate the effects:
1. As you pointed out, there is good earthquake resistance in the construction of buildings.
2. Fukushima was not well protected from tsunamis.
3. The Japanese coast was not well protected from tsunamis.

The only real difference is the upfront cost of the protection due to the fact that Fukushima was intended to be protected and the coastline wasnt, but weighed against the cleanup costs both 2 and 3 would suggest engineering solutions. See: New Orleans for a similar example.

New Orleans also provides an example of displacement: 8 years later, the population is about 90,000 below what it was before Katrina. Given that engineering was supposed to protect New Orleans and didn't, it is a very similar situation to Fukushima...but worse of course, since 1800 people died.

We don't just throw up our hands and let nature have its way with us.
 
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  • #92
mheslep said:
While tragic, how are any number of these foreclosures

http://www.csmonitor.com/var/archive/storage/images/media/images/102210-foreclosure-auction/8860858-1-eng-US/102210-foreclosure-auction_full_600.jpg


in any way comparable with this?


http://ksj.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/tracker/2011/TsunamiJapanAftermath.jpg
[PLAIN]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Signpost_of_prayer_and_wish.JPG/640px-Signpost_of_prayer_and_wish.JPG[/QUOTE]

I do not think the reality of the situation is accurately portrayed by this juxtaposition.
A shot of blighted areas of Baltimore or Phoenix or any of the cities where a tidal wave of foreclosures has left masses of abandoned/boarded up buildings and ruined lives would be more representative.
The crisis has affected many more people and much larger areas in the US, plus as a man made disaster, it is much more socially damaging.
 
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  • #93
Google some pictures of Detroit and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference from Pripyat, Ukraine.
 
  • #94
[Continuing previous thought]
Why does this matter? Similar to wolfman's post, I see a double standard. More people were killed and more damage was done by the tsunami, but while ALL nuclear plants have been shut down in Japan - even ones without tsunami risk - no one is talking about abandoning Japan's coastlines. The nuclear plant problems are seen as intractable and fatal, while the reality is that it is the vulnerability of the coast that is the intractable problem. Preventing future Fukushimas is relatively easy.
 
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  • #95
nikkkom said:
First, earthquake per se did not destroy much (a testament to Japanese building codes and quality).
The jury is still out on Unit 1.

2 Escalation of the accident

"4. Several TEPCO vendor workers who were working on the fourth floor of the nuclear reactor building at Unit 1 at the time of the earthquake witnessed a water leak on the same floor, which houses two large tanks for the isolation condenser (IC) and the piping for IC. The Commission believes that this was not due to water sloshing out of the spent fuel pool on the fifth floor. However, since we cannot go inside the facility and perform an on-site inspection, the source of the water remains unconfirmed.

5. The isolation condensers (A and B systems) of Unit 1 were automatically activated at 14:52, but the operator of Unit 1 manually stopped both IC systems 11 minutes later. TEPCO has consistently maintained that the explanation for the manual suspension was that “it was judged that the per-hour reactor coolant temperature excursion rate could not be kept within 55 degrees (Celsius), which is the benchmark provided by the operational manual.” The government-led investigation report, as well as the government’s report to IAEA, states the same reason. However, according to several workers involved in the manual suspension of IC who responded to our investigation, they stopped IC to check whether coolant was leaking from IC and other pipes because the reactor pressure was falling rapidly. While the operator’s explanations are reasonable and appropriate, TEPCO’s explanation is irrational."http://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp.../blog/reports/es-1/#toc-4spread-of-the-damagehttp://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp/en/report/
 
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  • #97
... TEPCO’s explanation is irrational...

over cooling (exceeding allowable cooldown rate) is a well known concern that the operators would be very conscious of. Not "irrational" at all. It may be a fabrication, but it isn't an irrational one.
 
  • #98
However, the Japanese regulator concluded.
Water splashes from the pool of fuel.
Condenser intact.
Is not it?
====================
That's interesting.
area that (what size km 2) will be occupied by solar panels, to be compared with AC power reactors in Fukushima 1.
Given the breadth, day and night, clouds.
Every hour of 2.5 gigawatts, 13 consecutive months
 
  • #99
gmax137 said:
over cooling (exceeding allowable cooldown rate) is a well known concern that the operators would be very conscious of. Not "irrational" at all. It may be a fabrication, but it isn't an irrational one.


I agree and I'm a little curious if the translation got it right.
 
  • #100
mheslep said:
Nobody knows exactly what *will* be done. We can only know the past. Hiroshima was rebuilt, so was Nagasaki, largely within five years.
Well, nuclear weapons have a different isotopic composition and distribution scheme.

The area around the power plant where radiation levels will be problematic in a few years is very small. Smaller than typical areas ruined by mining brown coal, for example.

2.5 GW in full vertical sunlight needs an area of roughly 10km^2, with a realistic solar flux and averaged over a year this is more like 50-100km^2. And then you still need to store the energy somehow, as the sun rarely shines at night.
 
  • #101
People cited the Three Gorges Dam, but I'm not sure the relevant fact was ever stated: It displaced 1.3 million people. The equivalent nuclear disaster would be something like Limerick Nuclear Plant in southeastern Pennsylvania (where I live) going Chernobyl and making Philadelphia uninhabitable.
 
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  • #102
mfb said:
Well, nuclear weapons have a different isotopic composition and distribution scheme.
Sure, but unlike leaks from a shutdown reactor, weapons have a colossal neutron flux (still ~10e12 N/cm^2 at one mile for a 15 kt weapon, pg 13) that make things in line of sight of the detonation a candidate for activation and thus a further source of radiation.
 
  • #103
mfb said:
2.5 GW in full vertical sunlight needs an area of roughly 10km^2, with a realistic solar flux and averaged over a year this is more like 50-100km^2. And then you still need to store the energy somehow, as the sun rarely shines at night.
Agreed, if that was for collection by ~20% efficient photovoltaic panels. Interestingly, that area, ~50+ km^2, is just the amount of the of land drown by the man made lake built solely for cooling the reactor in Virginia closest to me.
 
  • #104
etudiant said:
Tidal power has been studied since at least the 1950s and France built a practical demonstrator at Rance, using a tidal basin with low speed turbines to tap the water flow energy. There has not been a larger unit built since afaik, so clearly the economics are hard to justify. ...
One reason being that tidal is also an intermittent, though predictable, power source. The cost of storage and/or other backup still has to be eventually added, like the other intermittent sources.
 
  • #105
jim hardy said:
Do the math then the engineering...

Here's a map of available solar energy per day for every month, let's pick March...

...

Now the US electrical consumption in 2011 was 3.75 X 10^12 kwh
http://www.ipsr.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/energy/18ener7.pdf

... requiring 2.27 X10^10 square meters of collector.

The US has area of 9.16 X 10^ 12 square meters of land area
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_area
and \frac{2.27E10}{9.16E12} = .0025
so covering ~1/4% of the whole country with solar panels could make as much electricity as we used in 2011.

... I suspect their immense size would wreak political havoc with suburbia..

Thoughts ? Corrections ?

Nice. I get roughly the same, with a couple of comments.

I find it quicker to express demand in units of average power (428 GWe, 2011). I think the most useful solar flux maps are flat plat tilted at latitude (http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook/atlas/colorpdfs/208.PDF), showing the annual average solar flux ranges from four hours of 1 kW power a day up to six or seven such hours in the southwest. That's a useful way to think about the subject since the actual solar flux hitting the ground does actually peak out at ~1kW - something to keep in mind if the collection method is pure thermal like solar hot water instead of photovoltaic, or the efficiency of PV jumps.

So then your figure with three hours is ~22 thousand sq km to produce the same average annual power demand, or about 150 km on a side. That sounds like a lot of land until it is compared to some other, current uses. I think you'll find existing rooftop areas, homes and warehouses, will about cover it. The single US military base out in White Sands, NM has an area of a similar order of magnitude. So too the existing highway system.

Serious problems do appear with the seasonal variation, as you mention. In January, http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook/atlas/colorpdfs/209.PDF in the northern third of the country. This has a couple implications. If the annual fraction of daily power produced by solar is to stay constant through January, then the amount of installed solar has to be doubled or quintupled, at least, and the same goes for the daily storage.

Germany's big solar push reflects these facts and shows that, at those latitudes, the difference between winter and summer collection can be 20 or 25 to 1. That kind of over installation and storage is a non-starter. This means we're in effect required to *keep* a good part of the existing power system sitting on standby for the winter. That is, keep a big part of the existing power system that supplies 428 GWe from coal, gas, nuclear and hydro sitting around to run 3-6 six weeks a year: an expensive proposition.
 
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  • #106
mheslep said:
So then your figure with three hours is ~22 thousand sq km to produce the same average annual power demand, or about 150 km on a side. That sounds like a lot of land until it is compared to some other, current uses.

I advise anyone to go to google maps and take a good hard look at satellite image of US southwest: Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico. A *huge* chunk of land, sparsely populated, not very usable for agriculture.

Germany's big solar push reflects these facts and shows that, at those latitudes, the difference between winter and summer collection can be 20 or 25 to 1.

I see Germany's solar push as mostly a way to speed up R&D in PV. For Europe and Africa, it will make a lot of sense to eventually use Sahara, not Northern or Central Europe, as its primary solar power generation area.
 
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  • #107
but the Sahara as far away from Fukushima or Kiev.:confused:
So then your figure with three hours is ~22 thousand sq km to produce the same average annual power demand, or about 150 km on a side
almost equal to or even greater area of the "exclusion zone"
===================================================
In addition, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are building (planning to build) nuclear power plant.
Although they have a lot of sun.
 
  • #108
nikkkom said:
I advise anyone to go to google maps and take a good hard look at satellite image of US southwest: Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico. A *huge* chunk of land, sparsely populated, not very usable for agriculture.

True, and with little water its difficult to build any kind of traditional Rankine cycle power plant in the area. Solar's perfect in that regard.

On the other hand, being in the middle of nothing means it also a long way from that which uses the power. Note that transmission of solar and wind is not only expensive because of the long distances, it is expensive also because the transmission resource sits idle much of the time. That is, transmission developers count on power on the line staying relatively steady. In the case of solar the line is idle ~80% of the time. That drives up the cost per unit energy delivered by a factor of five.
 
  • #109
a.ua. said:
but the Sahara as far away from Fukushima or Kiev.:confused:

almost equal to or even greater area of the "exclusion zone"
For Fukushima? Isn't that 20 km long, and slowly shrinking?
 
  • #110
nikkkom said:
I see Germany's solar push as mostly a way to speed up R&D in PV. For Europe and Africa, it will make a lot of sense to eventually use Sahara, not Northern or Central Europe, as its primary solar power generation area.

German energy policy is a shambles.
Major players in alternative energy such as Siemens for wind or Bosch for solar are looking to exit their involvement, partly because super aggressive Chinese competition has made their production unprofitable. That curtails new R&D pretty thoroughly.
Meanwhile, the German public is balking at the much higher energy prices needed to support the shift to 'green power', as it is at allowing the large transmission and switching installations needed to hook up the wind farms to the industrial centers.
The upshot is that the German coal fired power plants are doing great!
 
  • #111
mheslep
For Fukushima? Isn't that 20 km long, and slowly shrinking?

there is a "language", but I do not know the exact measurement of the area.
Our area of alienation also decreases.
Now, luxury cottages with barbed wire border zone.
 
  • #112
a.ua. said:
but the Sahara as far away from Fukushima or Kiev.:confused:

Gibraltar is only 14 km wide.
Distance from the coast of Tunisia to Sardinia is about 100 km.
There are existing undersea HVDC lines much longer than this (~500 km).
 
  • #113
nikkkom said:
I advise anyone to go to google maps and take a good hard look at satellite image of US southwest: Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico. A *huge* chunk of land, sparsely populated, not very usable for agriculture...

And I can think of 14 reasons that would never work in Nevada. From the same link 14 in Utah, 24 in Arizona, and 16 in New Mexico.

Also to note that Germanys push for green energy had caused problems with not only there electrical grid, but the electrical grids of neighboring countries. This instability of power in country had forced several large manufactures to purchase costly backup generators, or costly battery backup systems to prevent damage to there equipment. Also these power spikes from Germany has forced several neighboring countries to install electrical grid disconnect switches on the borders. Finlay Germans pay much higher electrical costs ($0.34 per kWh) then the average US resident ($0.12 per kWh)

The US needs to take a good long hard look at this green energy moment, especially with the boondoggle it has become in Spain and now Germany.

Source for the German power woes link
 
  • #114
Argentum Vulpes said:
And I can think of 14 reasons that would never work in Nevada. From the same link 14 in Utah, 24 in Arizona, and 16 in New Mexico...

Endangered species will stop solar PV deployment? I've read about some law suits to stop solar PV farms but so far they a appear to have failed. In any case the endangered species act won't stop PV on top of warehouses or over parking lots.
 
  • #115
etudiant said:
German energy policy is a shambles.
Major players in alternative energy such as Siemens for wind or Bosch for solar are looking to exit their involvement, partly because super aggressive Chinese competition has made their production unprofitable.

Why should consumer care? If equivalent Chinese PV panels are cheaper, so be it.

Meanwhile, the German public is balking at the much higher energy prices needed to support the shift to 'green power'

Since it was German public, no one else, who forced nuclear phase-out, I am not believing you.
 
  • #116
mheslep said:
Endangered species will stop solar PV deployment? I've read about some law suits to stop solar PV farms but so far they a appear to have failed. In any case the endangered species act won't stop PV on top of warehouses or over parking lots.

Yes it won't stop putting PV on top of existing structures or over roadways/parking lots. However if a planed project even remotely encroaches on critical environment of an endangered species say good by to the project.

The post was also more directed at Nikkkom's veiled comment at turning the American SW into a giant solar farm

* After reading the link a bit more carefully it also appears that the tortuous in question that the Sierra Club, Defenders of wildlife, and Natural Resources Defense Council, used as a basis for their lawsuits is only threatened under the Endangered species act. Even though threatened species are protected by the act, it allows for more leeway in projects that encroach on habitat of threatened species.

On a side note the project the article sites has been abandoned due changing market conditions. http://www.pe.com/local-news/local-news-headlines/20130624-barstow-calico-solar-plans-withdrawn.ece
 
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  • #117
Argentum Vulpes said:
Yes it won't stop putting PV on top of existing structures or over roadways/parking lots. However if a planed project even remotely encroaches on critical environment of an endangered species say good by to the project.

The post was also more directed at Nikkkom's veiled comment at turning the American SW into a giant solar farm

On a side note the project the article sites has been abandoned due changing market conditions. http://www.pe.com/local-news/local-news-headlines/20130624-barstow-calico-solar-plans-withdrawn.ece

Some projects fail, others already generate power.
Check these on Wikipedia:

Agua Caliente Solar Project
Installed capacity 250 MW, maximum planned 397 MW
California Valley Solar Ranch
Installed capacity 22 MW (Oct 2012), maximum planned 250 MW
Copper Mountain Solar Facility
Installed capacity 150 MW, maximum 418 MW
Catalina Solar Project
Installed capacity 60 MW, maximum 143 MW
Mesquite Solar project
Installed capacity 150 MW, maximum 700 MW

Use the map link to see them in Google Maps with your own eyes. Gives quite a perspective on their size, simplicity, and the vast areas of undeveloped desert available for expansion.
This is really happening, despite eco-nazis' attempts to return us to life in caves.
You just refuse to read the writing on the wall.
 
  • #118
What is happening? All of those projects put together, if finished, will only equal the kW capacity of one nuclear plant and have a kWh capacity of about one sixth of a nuclear plant. That's still a long way from breaking out of the "other" category on a pie chart.
 
  • #119
russ_watters said:
What is happening? All of those projects put together, if finished, will only equal the kW capacity of one nuclear plant and have a kWh capacity of about one sixth of a nuclear plant. That's still a long way from breaking out of the "other" category on a pie chart.

Not even, keep in mind the capacity factor of solar is like 15% while nuclear is >90%.
 
  • #120
nikkkom said:
Why should consumer care? If equivalent Chinese PV panels are cheaper, so be it.
They appear cheap as the government (and therefore all taxpayers) throws money on it. They are not really cheap.
Since it was German public, no one else, who forced nuclear phase-out, I am not believing you.
A significant fraction of them did not think about the consequences.
 

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