Is nuclear the way to go?

[Pup]

But, Richard....Scaaaaaaary Picture!!!

I especially love the spontaneously-generated radiation cloud over Florida. Think of the poor kids visiting Disney - they never knew.

...the pro nuclear greed merchants are strangely silent at present.

Well, this Greed Merchant (can you actually sell greed? - because I sense an opportunity) thought all the scare mongering had long past. I'd no idea, what with radiation levels dropping, reactors getting fixed, food and water warnings being lifted, and tests showing no contamination of seawater or radiation increases in kids' thyroids, etc., that the situation was still getting worse. I was lost in a sea of reality - thanks for saving me, auto-g.

[andrew]

Strange Ciro, I have a vertical shaft wind turbine on the roof of my workshop.
It takes up no extra land space and produces sufficient energy to run the lights and heating for most of the year.
Hmm, now if every building had one and decent insulation, I wonder how that would affect your figures?
Plenty of wind for a billion turbines and no need for any land space whatsoever.
Hmmm, someones wrong here and I think I know who.

And is every bulding structurally suitable? No. So it would have to be ground mounted so where does the space come from? Also, wind turbines are subject to planning permission and I suspect most would be refused.

Aside from these fundamental issues, there is another even more vital issue: where does the money come from? The UK is broke so the government can't foot the bill and spending my already stretched funds on a piddly wee desk fan to stick on my roof is not a financial priority.

[andrew]

Interesting and balanced report - Viewpoint: We should stop running away from radiation

It is full of facts and figures. Best of all though, no scaremongering! Enjoy.

[autogyro]

Hahahahaha you have got to laugh andrew, because it is certainly not worth crying about comments and articles such as yours.
When there was a good chance of bringing this nuclear disaster under control (which we all I hope wished for), all you nuclear statistic mongers were calling those against nuclear power, simple minded and badly educated morons.
Now when the disaster is almost certainly at level 7 and probably has been for days (it is now admited that they lied), you now try telling everyone that there realy is no danger and to ignore radiation.
I wish the lot of you would go and live inside the now 19 mile exclusion zone you were telling everyone only last week was perfectly safe.
Then perhaps the world will have a brief peaceful respite from such dishonest people.

[hollus]

Interesting and balanced report - Viewpoint: We should stop running away from radiation

It is full of facts and figures. Best of all though, no scaremongering! Enjoy.

A fully one sided report I would say. Full of numbers and good grammar.
It ignores,for example that there is more than one isotope, of almost every element. Mentioning Iodine without it's isotope number(s) shows that the article is written without good understanding. More than 1 isotope of iodine is produced in such reactor, more than one was measured and one of them was measured at times above acceptable levels.
It is hopeless to have a debate here if we are just going to follow whoever is shouting our way.
Use your brains everyone. That was clearly written by pro-nuclear people. Haven't you heard that the nuclear inductry has a lot of money to throw at PR? Many other things like the graph of dispersal above, were clearly made by anti-nuclear people, and show a hypothetical scenario should an uncontroled release of radiaoctivity really start, with numerically simulated weather. I assume that antinuclear people also have quite some money to throw at PR!

I still have to read a balanced piece in the regular press. Dangerous things have happened in Fukushima, but as of today, no uncontrolled disaster at all. Radioactivity is not undertood by normal people (but the technically minded should and could do a bit better), radioactive isotopes come in hundreds of types, with different dangers and properties. Doses can be quantitated in lots of ways (total over time, temporary over an area, weighed by biological effects...), and radiation is stupidly easy to detect, so much so that the counter I use at work for fully unrelated reasons never quite stops clicking... all of which makes it very easy to manipulate opinion. Both ways.

In this forum we can do better than just cite the press whenever it says what we want to hear, I think.

[WhiteBlue]

People who think that the Fukushima nuclear accident is peanuts are either too young or too dumb to remember what nuclear fall out will do to public health. It is not the radiation that kills or injures most people. It are the radiating particles that get into the food chain that cause thyroid cancer, leukaemia, genetic defects in foetal life, breast, ovaries, uterus, testicular and prostate cancer. All this will be outdone by massive thyroid related disorder and illnesses like Hashimoto and Grave. Millions of people are undiagnosed with these diseases and suffer from severe depressions and mental disorder as a result.

This sad truth is well known since the late 60's when the shocking consequences of nuclear testing in America became public knowledge. There is no safe background radiation in foodstuff. Every radioactive iodine or caesium atom we ingest is harmful. That is the reason we have a constant rate of radiation related diseases. Every increase of ingestion of such isotopes increases the damage. When public services talk about safe levels of food contamination they simply look at what is the established level of damage and conclude that this rate of diseases would be accepetable. I'm sure that they would disagree if they knew their name was on one of additional particles that they allow the public to ingest.

The Fukushima accident has produced massive radioactive iodine and caesium fall out and will continue to do so for weeks and months. Contrary to the official propaganda all radioactive isotopes of those two elements are absorbed by the body if inhaled or ingested. They are mistaken for non radioactive iodine and potassium which the body needs urgently for hormone production.

The only saving grace so far is the direction of the fall out pattern which was mainly off shore. It means that 90% of the fall out will be massively diluted before it enters the food chain. I regard this simply as dumb luck. The potential damage from Fukushima could have impacted on millions of people more if prevailing winds and some release events had been slightly different. You cannot simply count the direct death toll and forget the huge amount of suffering that the victims and their families will experience in the future.

There is no way around the truth that Fukushima had become an INES 6 event at least if the earth rotation was the other way round and the fall out had hit Japan and the Asian mainland with full force. The worst case scenario just based on different weather conditions could have been ten thousands of direct long term deaths and millions of diseased people. With such consequences at risk we have a moral duty to re assess the safety of NPPs.

We cannot afford unfit NPPs with exposure to magnitude 9 earth quakes, A380 crashes, 30m tsunami waves and attacks by mid sized military weapons in the hands of terrorists closer than 300 km from metropolitan areas. Existing and new NPPs will have to be protected by very costly measures to meet such safety demands. Any thing else is just political white washing IMO. It is clear that in most European countries the cost of making nuclear really safe will exceed the cost of renewable energies including the redundant capacities, more robust electrical grids and energy storage facilities.

[Richard]

And is every bulding structurally suitable? No. So it would have to be ground mounted so where does the space come from? Also, wind turbines are subject to planning permission and I suspect most would be refused.

Aside from these fundamental issues, there is another even more vital issue: where does the money come from? The UK is broke so the government can't foot the bill and spending my already stretched funds on a piddly wee desk fan to stick on my roof is not a financial priority.

Structural considerations are rarely an issue for the size of turbine typically put on a building. However, location is very important. City centre buildings with turbulent wind, plus wind shadow from existing buildings is a big issue. A colleague has data showing that turbines installed in many schools only achieve 20% of their published capacity. OK, the educational value of a turbine at a school is worthwhile, but it doesn't make sense for generating power.

As for cost, the UK electricity regulation subsidises renewable power generation through the Feed In Tariff Scheme (FITS). It is aimed at building scale micro generation which can be more effective because it avoids grid distribution losses. The scheme currently include PV and wind, but will soon be extended to biomass boilers and ground source heating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_ta ... ed_Kingdom

There is also the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI)from 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Heat_Incentive

There are now companies that will install PV on your roof for free, they recover the cost through sharing your FITS payments. So you can afford it, it is possible to get it for free.

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Gen ... -PV-offers

Finally, naysayers will complain that micro generation only scratches the surface. However, building regs will require all new homes to be carbon neutral from 2016. At that point, micro germination will have a big impact.

However, what do you do with all that solar & wind energy that you don't use? Store it in your car's fuel cell. So your car will power your house at night using energy captured during the day. Of course it won't be direct, your car will be plugged into the grid at the train station or work, while your home is putting energy into the grid a couple of miles away.

[Arterius]

The following link is to a recent report (March 2011)on the use of wind power in the UK.
http://www.jmt.org/stuart-young-report.asp
It shows how unreliable wind really is in large scale use of power generation unless an efficient manner of large scale energy storage is found.

Full report at: http://www.jmt.org/assets/pdf/wind-report.pdf

Also on the nuclear front. Uranium can be used for either creating weapons or generating electricity. Coal and Oil on the other hand can be used for so much more other than power generation.

Lets rather use the Uranium for generating electricity, not for building bombs and keep the coal and oil for other uses.

[WhiteBlue]

It is relatively easy to figure out the true cost of wind or nuclear if you use the existing figures in a fair way. I have previously debated the true investment cost of reliable wind energy with the user expensive here on this board. What is missing from the picture is the true cost of nuclear accident damage liability and insurance.

It is entirely relevant to the debate what the damage of worst case nuclear accidents are and how often they actually occur. The true liability cost depend of those questions. Naturally there is also the follow up question if the society is really supposed to let equipment suppliers and utilities get away with fractions of the insurance premiums needed to pay for the total liability they should carry and dump the clean up cost and damage claims to the tax payers.

In that context it is very relevant to look at the question of where the accident occurred. If a plant nearer to Tokyo had been affected the impact would have been much greater. Already now we are probably looking at damages exceeding €500bn and each day the reactors are out of control and the clean up is delayed adds to the damage bill. So the likely actual cost are going to be in the €1,000bn order. The worst case with an almost direct hit of full nuclear fall out on a metropolis like Tokyo could have easily resulted in damages of €15,000bn. The mind boggles at the idea to evacuate Tokyo and clean up a metropolitan area from caesium-137 fall out with something like 1,000 Becquerel per square meter and day.

It is very relevant for the energy debate to discuss the full cost of the power generating methods including the decommissioning cost, the cost of nuclear waste disposal and the true insurance or capital risk cost. And quite obviously in that context it is very relevant whether you have your worst case accident in an area where 100 million people inhabit the fall out zone - like central Europe - or perhaps 20,000 in the case of some desert states in the USA. The proof of this point is the different political treatment the risks of nuclear accidents get in Germany and Finland. The cost of a catastrophic accident of Chernobyl or Fukushima type in Germany would be ten thousand times higher than in a desert location.

As it stand we can conclude that an accident with a €1,000bn damage statistically occurs each 25 years with 500 reactors running. And we cannot exclude that a big one with €15,000bn could happen. The logical conclusion is that the suppliers and operators have to insure between the two points of proven statistical outcome and potential maximum damage. If we settle on a collective damage fund of €6,250bn over 25 years each nuclear power plant will have to pay €500mil insurance premium per annum or €15bn over the course of a regular plant life. It means that the actual capital cost of the investment multiplies with a factor of four compared to today. Instead of €5.5bn per plant you are suddenly looking at €20.5bn.

But one can also look slightly different at the true cost scenario. It was said that the owners of the seven nuclear power plants that are now shut down in Germany can suffer a loss of profit of €1m per day and plant. We conclude that they typically earn €350m per year by the operation. If they have to pay the true insurance cost of €500m per year they would simply stop running the plants by themselves.

Everybody who looks at these figures should instantly realize why it is important for tax payers and the public debate to make sure that all hidden costs are figured into the various power generating scenarios. If you end up squandering you national wealth on costly nuclear damage repair and compensation instead of making investments into future proof power generating and distribution technology you are gambling with the future of your children. You may take the risk and get away with it but inevitably for one or the other nuclear happy nation the pay day will come like today it did for Japan and the responsible politicians will look like idiots and criminals.

[Tamburello]

Can we have too much energy? Is that an issue even?

[andrew]

Can we have too much energy? Is that an issue even?

I saw a programme a while ago which looked at the national grid and how it met demand. Basically, there are engineers/technicians who monitor the amount of electricity in the national grid and increase or decrease the supply from their individual plant to suit the requirements. They operate in a very narrow frequency band - too much and everyone will be in B&Q the nexrt day buying fuses, too little and we go back to the dark ages. At the same time they have to predict the demand and try and match it as closely as possible.

If the demand isn't there for energy, then the power plant in that area reduces production.

This link will explain it better than I can put my thoughts into words!

[Mr Alcatraz]

and radiation is stupidly easy to detect, so much so that the counter I use at work for fully unrelated reasons never quite stops clicking...

But isn't what Sagan explains at about one and one half minutes into this video account for a portion of this?



[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvHHZO2wmmg&feature=fvsr[/youtube]

[hollus]

I am resuscitating this thread. Very valid points were raised by people from all sides of the fence. It's been three years since, so maybe there are new arguments, maybe some people's points of view have evolved (nah...), and maybe new people want to pitch in.

We now have an electric racing formula with F1 drivers and fully electric cars in the roads that respond to any functional parameter commonly used to define a car. Also renewable generation is moving away from being a barely noticeable portion of the energy mix. In 2013 in Spain, eolic energy was the main single source of consumed electricity with 20.9% of the mix (20.8% for nuclear), and renewables produced 42.2% of the total. That's average over the whole year.
http://economia.elpais.com/economia/201 ... 04329.html

I also wanted to bring in what for me is new info. It was an often raised point back then that since only very small amounts of already produced energy can be stored, many renewables were a no-go, as similar back-up capacity is needed for low production periods, and that often comes from coal and gas (and more money). A completely new distrubution or storage infrastructure would have to be created at an enormous cost.

Recent reading has brought new possibilities in conversion of electricity to gas to my attention, and as it looks, slowly to mainstream media attention too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas

To summarize some of the most important points. Electricity can be converted to H2 and then back to electricity with a 40% efficiency, 60% including electricity and heat.
This H2 gas can be mixed with our existing natural gas supplies to a 2% concentration without risks nor infrastructure changes, meaning that excess energy can simply be stored there.
If this H2 gas is further processed, it can be converted to methane with the Sabatier reaction:
CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 + 2H2O
The necessary CO2 can conceivably come from captured CO2 in the future.
The whole electricity -> methane -> electricity cycle has a 34% efficiency, up to 50% including electricity and heat.

Now the kicker: This methane (natural gas) can simply be injected in the current natural gas distribution network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_e ... wer_to_gas
Depending on the sources consulted this includes 100 to 700 days worth of the energy consumption in many places. This is with the existing infrastructure, conduction pipes, etc. At zero cost. And it automatically includes both storage and transport.

To me this is new information, although WB hinted as much in page 11 back in the day. Not every country will have Germany's natural gas infrastructure, but other countries have other advantages, and all have a significant gas infrastructure. Simply the fact that more or less everywhere there are months worth of storage capacity, and storage in about the most convenient form possible (methane is also easy to liquify and transport), means that the technology to move away from carbon, natural gas or nuclear is here about now.

The production capacity of all renewables combined is not here yet, the electrolysis capacity is absolutely nowhere near enough; but if we accept to get back only 50% of the excess production from good days, the potential scenario in which there is no wind, no sun, no hydro, etc, has simply disappeared. The question of whether we use energy from coal, oil, gas, from nuclear centrals or energy that in one way or another comes from the sun or the moon is an economical and political one, and no longer a technological one.

Interestingly, this makes not only renewables a viable (expensive) proposition, but also 100% nuclear a valid proposition (that I don't want to be anywhere near, but that is another question). Nuclear is good at base load generation, but not at responding to load changes. It is slow to start or stop a reactor, and extremely slow to bring new centrals to the net if needed. Having the option of converting the excess to methane and burning it in the existing natural gas power stations, and capturing the CO2 produced, means that nuclear could potentially feed the whole grid, including load variations, with close to zero CO2 emissions. Technologically speaking at least.

[Andres125sx]

you want to compare square miles of area destroyed by power distribution. Hmm strip coal mines. Millions of acres of forest destroyed by hydro electric. Miles of desert now being covered in solar array. Beautiful mountains being covered with windmills.

A bit late to reply to this, but anycase...

That´s a discussion I got at the university with a teacher... Visual Impact is NOT an evironement impact and I don´t care what the books say, Visual Impact is only a problem for us humans, animals don´t care about windmills in the middle of the mountain, they care about a plant throwing tons of pollution to the atmosphere.

Visual impact is realted to the human beauty concept, but have nothing to see with environement, nature or balance. An abandoned house in the middle of the forest have a visual impact for us humans, but for the forest and the animals that´s even beneficial, it´s a lair for all sort of insect, small animals, a place to go hunting for predators....

It´s curious, because when it´s a ship we do consider it beneficial and even sink some ships intentionally to promote it, but when it´s a house in the middle of the forest it´s considered bad, harmful...

[WhiteBlue]

Power to gas is not an option for every kind of storage. It is only useful if you want to store power over a long time and you are prepared to accept a cycle efficiency of 50%. With this kind of cost attached to it Germany should use power to gas only for 5-10% of it's terminal storage needs when we have reached renewables of 80%.

In the meantime the original most cost effective plan was to use scandinavian hydro capacities and retrofit pumping capability to the one way power plants. In 20-30 years Germany should have 60-65 GW scandinavian pump hydro capacities for any short term storage.

Combined with some power to gas capacity which will bridge longer periods with wind and solar deficits we should have an economicaly viable 100% renewable energy supply. The master plan for this was published by the environmental expert counsil for environmental issues of the German federal administration in 2011.

http://www.umweltrat.de/SharedDocs/Down ... cationFile

This is the URL to the 396 page German language document. Please read it before making "funny" remarks.