Is nuclear the way to go?

[Edis]

A good friend of mine in this small Canadian city (the one where Rim is making all those Blackberrys the world finds so appealing) is the first here to install solar panels on his roof, and considering Canadians have some of the highest energy use per capita in the world due to our heating and air conditioning needs, it's quite impressive that he gets $80 a month from the electrical utility averaged throughout the year.

I'm just pointing out that if more people were responsible for at least some of their own power if not most, maybe these fantastical seeming solar fields and wind farms might not have to be the same ridiculous size that Ciro has calculated.

My understanding is that an array of mirrors directing light to a vessel of water that makes steam to turn a turbine makes far more energy per square unit of measure than photovoltaic cells do.

Photovoltaics are really too expensive to be useful to supply any significant portion of our energy need.

Solar thermal, which use mirrors, is perhaps 50-100% better when it comes to efficiency, but they have trouble with diffuse light. Costs aren't far behind photovoltaics. Since they can't be integrated into buildings, the tranmissions losses are going to be higher too.

Nuclear plants can be operated very safely if enough money and effort is put in, like in Sweeden, that seems to be the convenient base of most comments pro nuclear.
The potential risks increase however as the financial base and moral interest declines, as in my sad badly run country.
It could get to the level in some countries, where nuclear power becomes the same as giving a child a box of matches.

The swedish nuclear power plants are owned by major energy companies, and they have to fund their own operating costs. Additionally, they are forced to pay a special nuclear power tax (for the ten reactors plant operators pay something like 500 million euros a year to the government for this special tax). The costs of a final repository and that sort of expenses are payed by a fund, to which all nuclear powerplants pay a fee per produced kWh.

The safety at the plants is under supervision of the radiation safety authority.

+1 I agree a very wide and long description of the nuclear incdustry.
Still does not tell us how to deal with the nuclear waste or what the result of a major nuclear accident would be.

Anyone who is happy with nuclear power and supports its use gets one suggestion from me. Let them live next door to the stations and nuclear waste dumps.
They might say on here that they would be prepared to do so.
I doubt they would be telling the truth when it came down to it.

Nuclear power at present is essential to the world economy. However the intent should be to faze it out. Shareholders should not get a say in the matter.

To deal with nuclear waste is not really such a big issue, and studies regarding nuclear accidents (probability, number of deaths and so on) are availible.

People who live next to a nuclear plant are generally positive to nuclear power. Most of them have nothing against building additional reactors at the site or have the final repositories located there. This have been showed by several surveys. On the other hand, when a swedish nuclear plant operator was planning to build windpower near their plant the complains from neighbors started dropping in.

If something we need much more nuclear power to secure our energy need, while reducing our impact on the emvironment. If we aren't building, others certainly are. China which have recently passed 10 GW installed nuclear capacity have a goal of 400 GW nuclear power by 2050.

grasping at straws

It has been studied since a 50s that reactors or safer than any other power generation system. People get scared when they hear scary words. I live next to a dump site and have no worries about contamination. much more worried about cfl light bulbs dumping mercury into the water supply

Mercury from fluorescent lights is not a problem. This is also a good example of when people worry about the wrong thing. The main source of mercury emissions these days is from the burning of fossil fuels for electricity production. The average mercury emission per kWh electricity produced is actually so high that even if a fluorescent light was throwed in nature after its end of life, the electricity saved during the life of the lamp have actually decreased mercury emissions in total.

While I admit its easy to accept something you agree with I have yet to see any study claiming that reactors are any more dangerous than coal power. please prove me wrong one accredited study showing coal to be worse than a nuclear power.

May I suggest you take a look at ExternE ( http://www.externe.info/ ) which is a large study into externalities of energy. The externalities are the costs of the damage caused by energy production not covered within the production costs. Not surprisingly, nuclear power has low external costs.

[WhiteBlue]

@WB

Indeed, the volume figures are large: makes me wonder how much of the dreaded CO2 will be produced making all of that c/f...

BMW will have to use the types of systems being pioneered by McLaren (and Lamborghini for the Gallardo replacement I believe (and also by BMW for the roof of the M3?)). Traditional c/f just isn't practical for mass production but the new systems are. The MP4-12C tub is a single piece rather than lots of 'bits' stuck together as the F1 was.

All of these electric cars are going to need some serious increases in grid generation too. The UK won't have any electric cars in 10 years time. Why? Because we won't have any electricity to charge them with!

I find it ironic that the only way we'll be able to power all of these green cars is by building several dozen nuke power stations. As a fan of nuke power I'm all for that happening but the greens will be most put out!

I'm not so sure that the UK will run out of electricity. An estimate of the theoretical maximum potential of the UK's offshore wind resource in all waters to 700 metres (2,300 ft) depth gives the average power as 2200 GW. Wikipedia & Source for Wikipedia article

I did a bit of research into the investment cost of off shore wind parks and nuclear power stations in Europe and got some interesting results about investment cost and time of construction.

The London grid in the UK will have a 1 GW name plate capacity from 278 Siemens 3.6-107 wind turbines at an investment cost of €2.2bn and a construction period of 2 years. The significant net capacity (winter peak demand) will be 0.4 GW. This leads us to discounted specific investment cost of €5.5/GW. The investment is split into two slices of 50% each. The total specific investment after interest for the construction period is €6.5bn/GW at 12% interest rate.

The Finish Olkiluoto III Nuclear Power Plant (Typ EPR) will have a 1.6 GW net capacity with investment cost of €5.5bn. The construction time is planned at 8 years. The discounted specific investment cost will be €3.5bn/GW. Nuclear energy investments generally require a much higher risk premium which is either paid by the national government or by higher interest on the free capital market. The interest rate is estimated at 20%. The investment is split into eight slices of the following percentages (20%, 20%, 15%, 15%, 10%, 10%, 5%, 5%). The total specific investment after interest for the construction period of eight years is €10.2bn/GW at 20% interest rate.

We find that non discounted specific investment (including interest for the construction period) and energy type specific risk premiums make the nuclear energy capacity 1.6 times as expensive as the wind energy in terms of investment cost. Building the capacity with nuclear plants will take four times longer than using off shore wind powered generators. I think that the UK can go ahead with it's plan to have electric cars based on those figures.

[myurr]

Handy chart showing relative radiation dosages for various things.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

I like the fact that eating one banana exposes you to more radiation than living next to a nuclear power station for a year.

WhiteBlue you may also be interested in the UK Governments 2010 study into relative costs of power generation by source. Here nuclear came out the cheapest option with offshore wind being anything up to 4 times more expensive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_el ... _estimates

[WhiteBlue]

Those cost studies are outdated. My costs are up to date (21.11.2011). The cost of new reactors rose considerably in the last two years. The latest model in Finland went from €1bn and four years to €5.5bn and eight years. The overruns have not been figured in. The cost of Off Shore Wind Farms (OSWFs) have come down dramatically to 50% of what was paid 18 months ago.

There are considerable scaling effects being realized now. Besides the OSWFs can push the local economy creating massive jobs in mechanical and electrical engineering for the erection and maintenance. For a capacity of 50 GW equal to 35 very large scale NPPs you have a national contract volume of €325bn. Such deals allow you to dictate 90% national fabrication to the big suppliers like Siemens and GE. This keeps a lot of the value creation in land instead of sending it to countries who do Uranium mining, Plutonium reprocessing and reactor design. Most countries would do considerably better by investing in OSWFs instead of NPPs.

[xpensive]

It's all in the economy and availability, when the Olkilouto 3 is up to speed, agreed a few years behind schedule
but that's down to the French contractor I believe, it will pump out a massive 1600 MW at a 90+% availability.

Nothing can ever beat that, no matter how hard some people try to lead us to believe.

Besides, the Olkilouto 4 is already in the pipeline, no chickens these Finns.

[Just_a_fan]

And what do we do when we have large highs sat over the country giving little wind? Or when we have winter lows that give very high wind speeds? Both situations mean that OSW would not be generating. Result is brown-outs.

Nuclear doesn't care about the weather. We don't get earthquakes or tsunamis either. As for planes being flown in to a plant by terrorists (an argument used by some anti-nuclear types), we make some quite good air defence kit which we could use to protect them (this bit's a joke by the way).

As with most things, the answer is to have a suitably balanced approach using the best of different types of system to ensure the end result is achieved. Reducing demand for electricity would also be useful.

The UK has a history of nuclear generation and it's one that we should continue to add to in my view. The knee-jerk reactions of a number of our European cousins would be funny if it wasn't so serious an issue.

[myurr]

@WhiteBlue - you make several presumptions and quote figures from the future (was it a typo)?

The government study was from last year, not two years ago, and you presume that all nuclear builds will suffer from massive overruns and complications whereas wind will not.

There are also scaling effects to be realised with nuclear if you commit wholesale plus the opportunity to sell those services and capabilities overseas, much like France do. I'm sure designing a brand new advanced nuclear will take considerable time and resource, but adapting that design to ten or more sites and installations around the country would give benefits of scale that could bring the costs down into line with the government study.

The cost of mining Uranium is minuscule compared to the other costs involved, so that is a complete red herring.

Finally have any studies actually been done to see what happens to local and global weather patterns when you start taking out GW of power from the atmosphere? It has been estimated that total on and near shore wind power is approximately 5 times the current global energy requirements. So lets say we target 50% of the Worlds needs, and they stay static rather than increasing as they currently are. Even then you are talking about taking 10% of the total energy in the atmosphere in those regions out of the system. And this is going to have no affect at all and is green?

[WhiteBlue]

It's all in the economy and availability, when the Olkilouto 3 is up to speed, agreed a few years behind schedule
but that's down to the French contractor I believe, it will pump out a massive 1600 MW at a 90+% availability.

Nothing can ever beat that, no matter how hard some people try to lead us to believe.

Besides, the Olkilouto 4 is already in the pipeline, no chickens these Finns.

So what is that supposed to mean in terms of figures? Make a point why my figures are wrong! It looks like you can't do it. So my points are true.

Nuclear is the more expensive investment!
It is slower to build up!
It is worse for the national employment and value creation!
It is by far the more dangerous to the environment!

@WhiteBlue - you make several presumptions and quote figures from the future (was it a typo)?

The government study was from last year, not two years ago, and you presume that all nuclear builds will suffer from massive overruns and complications whereas wind will not.

There are also scaling effects to be realised with nuclear if you commit wholesale plus the opportunity to sell those services and capabilities overseas, much like France do. I'm sure designing a brand new advanced nuclear will take considerable time and resource, but adapting that design to ten or more sites and installations around the country would give benefits of scale that could bring the costs down into line with the government study.

The cost of mining Uranium is minuscule compared to the other costs involved, so that is a complete red herring.

Finally have any studies actually been done to see what happens to local and global weather patterns when you start taking out GW of power from the atmosphere? It has been estimated that total on and near shore wind power is approximately 5 times the current global energy requirements. So lets say we target 50% of the Worlds needs, and they stay static rather than increasing as they currently are. Even then you are talking about taking 10% of the total energy in the atmosphere in those regions out of the system. And this is going to have no affect at all and is green?

For a government study you need to collect data which at the time of publishing already have a certain age. I bet the time reference of the study is not the publishing day. But my figures are simple to check and the government figures have no raw source data. Show me a point where I have used a wrong cost figure! I am prepared to make any correction.

I have checked the cost and construction time of the other new EPR in France. The cost is the same and the completion estimates identical. There is no prognosis or claim that future projects will see lower cost and faster construction times. Perhaps you can point us to a serious source which predicts such times and cost?

Regarding the availability of wind in a situation where we would utilize 50 GW out of 2,200 GW potentially available I would ask you to go back to the study which I quoted. They are obviously serious about the prediction. I suggest to look at their work and challenge the methodology in detail at the source. Then tell us what those scientists did wrong. That is usually the way you can make a scientific point.

And what do we do when we have large highs sat over the country giving little wind? Or when we have winter lows that give very high wind speeds? Both situations mean that OSW would not be generating. Result is brown-outs.

Nuclear doesn't care about the weather. We don't get earthquakes or tsunamis either. As for planes being flown in to a plant by terrorists (an argument used by some anti-nuclear types), we make some quite good air defence kit which we could use to protect them (this bit's a joke by the way).

As with most things, the answer is to have a suitably balanced approach using the best of different types of system to ensure the end result is achieved. Reducing demand for electricity would also be useful.

The UK has a history of nuclear generation and it's one that we should continue to add to in my view. The knee-jerk reactions of a number of our European cousins would be funny if it wasn't so serious an issue.

I have not gone into detail but the net power figure used in my calculation is only 40% of the name plate capacity. That is the typical lowest net power that you get in winter when the peaks in consumption are highest. Btw the wind does not slow down or over speed everywhere in the UK and Europe at the same time.

Obviously I'm not advocating the use of wind only. You have to have other sources in the mix at all times. I also agree that you have to have a robust European grid and some storage facilities and quick reacting capacities for peak management. In Germany we will mainly use natural gas and bio methane for the purpose. Surplus wind power can be used to turn electricity into hydrogen and react that with CO2 to methane. You can use an existing natural gas storage capacity and power plant capacity for the load balancing. But that is only one way. There are other options as well by going for a mix.

I would not joke about the terrorist threat. You can force every nuke power plant to SCRAM just by blowing some towers away with a few pounds of C4. All it needs for a terrorist is a couple of motorised parachutes and rocket propelled grenades and you can take out the backup diesels or the switch gear before your fancy fighters even realize that they have been there. The plant will die from the decay heat with no energy to keep cooling going. You are not going to rebuild a power line in 72 hours if it is taken down by destroying ten towers in different locations. Such an attack will be possible with $50,000 worth of equipment. Virtually no way to protect against it unless you put the whole infrastructure of the plant into hardened bunkers.

[WhiteBlue]

I think the fundamental flaw in WBs, if you ask me rather tiresome posts, on the subject is that "wind power" will always be stocastic, meaning that for every invested MW of such, an equal investment of back-up power needs to be made.

The second problem is that "wind power" has a cubic relation to the wind speed, which means that whith your typical
"3 MW" windmill, it will produce that at 12 m/s, but it will only yield one eighth of it, or a measly 375 kW at 6 m/s.

I Europe, 12 m/s is rare, 6 m/s is far more the case, which makes the entire investment a charade.

Politicians have been taken, journos have been taken, but most of all the taxpayers have been taken big time.

A scam is what it is.

Instead of arguing with made up figures you should go to the Wikipedia UK wind analysis that I have quoted and show us where those figures are wrong. They give the exact statistical data of existing wind farms instead of vague ideas.

[xpensive]

In Sweden we have almost 10 000 MW of nuclear power.

Statistics from Scandinavian windmills reveals an average availability of about 20% of installed power. So, even if we could trust that ---, we would still need 50 000 MW of windpower to replace the nuclear plants.

Installation cost of land based windmills is in Sweden about 2 MEUR per MW, which would ask for 100 billion EUR in total.

I think we're fine with our nukes, thank you.

[segedunum]

This still doesn't mention the investment required in backup power and storage (wind and waves are not constant). Frankly, I'm getting fed up to the back teeth of seeing total tosh produced by the Green Party and others that we can somehow replace existing power sources and 'renewables' and unspecified and fanciful 'efficiency gains' i.e. hypothetically turning certain things off, which is never going to happen.

It's also a law of ever decreasing returns as well. You have to invest exponentially more in a wind farm to get a proportionate increase in power. You also have to expand horizontally. You can't just increase the capacity with what you're already got. You can only add even more wind turbines costing more money and taking up ever more land space.

Who wouldn't like to have unlimited energy, but all I know is that the 'renewable energy' industry (contradiction in terms) is costing taxpayers around £20 billion a year in the UK and producing zilch but promises. Of course, the advocates will argue that with even more money and grants being poured in it will easily make up for any loss of nuclear power.........

Oh, and how would a wind or wave farm cope in an earthquake or a tsunami?

[WhiteBlue]

I think we're fine with our nukes, thank you.

Enjoy what you have.

This still doesn't mention the investment required in backup power and storage (wind and waves are not constant.

Oh, and how would a wind or wave farm cope in an earthquake or a tsunami?

I have covered that point above but you don't seem to pay attention.
An off shore wind farm may take some damage from a quake but not likely from a tsunami. And if it is damaged it would get repaired like any other plant. It would definitively not emit radioactivity.

[segedunum]

I have covered that point above but you don't seem to pay attention. An off shore wind farm may take some damage from a quake but not likely from a tsunami. And if it is damaged it would get repaired like any other plant.

I can't see that you have, sorry.

While I admire your enthusiasm WB, it is seriously misguided I'm afraid. Any off-shore wind or wave farm's ability to transfer power to a grid would be completely wiped out - at the very least - as with everything else. Let's not mention solar panels. They are flimsy structures with little protection - or do we spend at least three or four times as much making them earthquake and tsunami proof? You wouldn't repair them like any other plant because the plant wouldn't be there and you'd have to build a new one.

It would definitively not emit radioactivity.

Neither did Fukushima, despite everybody's best efforts to tell us otherwise, until it promptly disappeared as the main news story.

[xpensive]

As my main interest in engineering life is rotating machinery, I can only begin to imagine the maintenance cost of 50 000 MW of installed windpower. Bearings, seals, couplings and gears on some 2000 poles 100 meters up in the sky.

And if they asked me to design this c**p in salt-water environment, get the f**k outa here, these people simply don't have a clue of what they are dreaming about. But I can tell you what, 2 MNm of torque at a speed so slow that conventional bearings and seals dont work properly as they can't build up a proper separationfilm.

If a private investor wants to waste his money, fine, but don't touch my tax-money.

[segedunum]

If a private investor wants to waste his money, fine, but don't touch my tax-money.

The fact that few, if any, private investors are touching them unless there is a serious government subsidy involved should tell us all we need to know.