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But coal plant as opposed to solar plant has a reliable, predictable output and works after dusk. Nuclear power plant also has these characteristics.
by Scea91 7y ago
But coal plant as opposed to solar plant has a reliable, predictable output and works after dusk. Nuclear power plant also has these characteristics.
- AstralStorm 7y agoWe do not have to limit ourselves to just one source. Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network and huge renewable infrastructure is common for some reason. We can use any and all power sources that are clean.
- Scea91 7y agoI completely agree with you. My argument was not against solar. It was against ‘solar only’. Of course, there are other renewables and if some country has an option to use solar + hydro then they do not need nuclear. But not everyone has that option. Disclaimer: I am a layman in this topic and not energetics expert, this is my understanding of the state but please feel free to correct me.
- rob74 7y ago> We can use any and all power sources that are clean. I completely agree with you on that. Of course, the disagreement hinges on whether you can consider nuclear power "clean"...
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThere's enough data today to show that it absolutely is. No air pollution, very little CO2, almost no deaths/TWh compared to other sources. Accidents have been bad but recall that fossil while operating normally kills 3.8 million/year and causes climate change. In comparison to that nuclear is absolutely pristene. Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up kills a few thousand people per year.
- bildung 7y ago> Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up Often repeated, but still wrong: Germany also phased out coal.
- pjc50 7y ago"Is in the process of phasing out", maybe, but it's absolutely not phased out yet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534
- acidburnNSA 7y agoIncorrect. Here's some live data for you to gander at: https://www.electricitymap.org https://www.electricitymap.org They still run over 40 GW of coal.
- bildung 7y agoYeah, sorry, native German speaker here, I got the tense wrong. Germany is in the process of phasing out coal, just as with nuclear. https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-power-20190126-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-powe...
- acidburnNSA 7y agoYup. They promised to phase coal out later and phased nuclear out today. Literalling killing a few thousand per year by air pollution while they're at it. It's a great anti-scientific tragedy of our times due to fear of radiation and inability to judge actuarial statistics correctly.
- bildung 7y agoI'm not at all disagreeing. The coal phase-out should have happened a) before the nuclear phase-out and b) decades earlier. Processes like these tend to be pretty sluggish, the political discussions for both date back to the 1970s. Chernobyl was a big thing in German politics, and there are still some species of mushrooms that can't be eaten in the country. The actual health problems were negligible, but this isn't how politics work.
- edhelas 7y agoAre solar panel and wind turbines clean ? They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%).
- kragen 7y ago> They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%). How many tonnes of concrete per megawatt do wind turbines use, and how many do nuclear power plants use? Solar plants used to use a lot of concrete, but they no longer do. "Power factor" is an attribute of electrical loads, not electrical generating equipment; it describes how far the load's current consumption deviates from the perfect in-phase sine wave of, say, a resistor. Perhaps you meant "capacity factor", the ratio of average power produced to peak power produced. Typical capacity factors for wind turbines are in the vicinity of 35%, although some offshore wind farms reach 60%. Photovoltaic plants typically have a capacity factor of around 25%, though in sunny places like Arizona and California it can exceed 30%. In the US, the lowest PV capacity factors are in Maine, which averages 12%. Germany's average PV capacity factor is 10%. Natural gas peakers are around 9%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor I've already thoroughly demolished this nonsense about "need to be changed often" in the case of photovoltaic panels. I don't know what wind turbine lifetimes are. Shorter, I imagine, but they still have a much higher ERoEI than PV or in fact any other power source.
- edhelas 7y ago> Nuclear power plants built in the 1970’s used 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity. > Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nuclear-power.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nu... First source I found. Wind turbine lifetimes are 20 to 25 years at the best. I agree for solar panels, they don't need lots of concrete and only loose efficiency over time. But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.
- belorn 7y ago> We can use any and all power sources that are clean. I would prefer if we did not use use any power source that is dirty. It might sound similar but the outcome is very different. A ban against fossil fuels would prevent countries from relying on fossil fuels for base load when wind or solar can't fulfill demand.
- marcosdumay 7y ago> We do not have to limit ourselves to just one source. Well, as long as it is no coal or nuclear, no, we don't. But those two do not like to share capacity, so as much as you have them, you better use them. > Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network... The natural state of nuclear is blocked. It's not in favor of a renewable network, it simply is. Maybe it would be better if it wasn't, but that's not reality.
- crdoconnor 7y agoReliable and predictable at 2x the cost. Saving 50% on generation gives you a lot of options in terms of demand shaping and storage. It's also far, far less capital intensive and doesn't require an uncapped disaster insurance subsidy from the taxpayer.
- Scea91 7y ago1) Increased investment in nuclear energetics should bring the cost down 2) 2x cost for these attributes does not seem particularly bad to me. 3) I am not aware of any production ready options that have been deployed at scale somewhere. I know there are a lot of ideas however. If you have time can you please point me to the most promising ones? I am genuinely interested.
- crdoconnor 7y agoNuclear has shown no particular inclination to come down in price whereas renewables have. It's just not cost effective without both massive implicit and explicit government subsidies. Renewables are cost effective now and will only become more so.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThey're cost effective when the sun is shining or wind is blowing but are strongly tied to increased high carbon fracked natural gas otherwise. When batteries are used the Energy Return on Investment drops below what's necessary to sustain industrialized civilization (around 5:1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399
- bildung 7y agoEven without including cost overruns and decomissioning, wind energy costs the same per kilowatt of capacity[0,1]. And the actually produced energy as share of capacity (= the capacity factor) is way better than most think. For the nuclear plants in France it currently is just over 70%, while it is about 50% globally for offshore wind parks [2,3] [0] http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-edf-expects-six-new-nuclear-reactors-to-cost-46-billion-euros-le-monde-idUSKBN1XJ074 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e... [2] http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet [3] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20170912wnisr2017-en-lr.pdf https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20170912wnisr2017... Edit: Changed phrasing because it apparently sounded like the 50% capacity factor also referred to France.
- cygx 7y agoWhat's more predictable than the day/night cycle? We can work around that. More problematic is what's known as a 'Dunkelflaute' in German: Overcast skies, fog, etc, combined with no wind, for days. Doesn't happen that often (in Germany, every 2 years or so), but it happens.
- Scea91 7y agoYou answered it yourself, it’s not about day night cycle only but also about the weather. But I agree that in this particular area we can probably achieve solid innovation.
- edhelas 7y agoDo you think we should base all our hope into things that are not even in the labs yet ? I prefer to use good ol' technologies such as power plants/damns, they are reliable, they can be done locally (most of solar panels are coming from China), they can be repaired and we can handle them country wise easily. If we want to reduce our CO2 emissions, we move to gaz (coal -> gaz is -20%), we reduce our consumption (building isolation is -30%, sometimes -50%), and we massively reduce cars usage (by developing trains, another good ol' technology that works really well).
- edynoid 7y agoTrains and isolation are great. But gas still produces net carbon emissions. So if you adopt it, you have to move away from it very soon anyway. Seems like wasted effort from my point of view.
- edhelas 7y agoIt is indeed for a transition phase. I agree. But if we need to reduce our CO2 emissions really fast it's one of the most efficient way to cut 1/5 of the emissions without massively changing how the grid and the other things are working. But for sure in the end it's more a way to save time and to reduce coal usage that is also producing serious health issues to the populations.
- skitout 7y agoWind + Solar + hydro + demand response + some thermal and electric storage has a reliable, predictable output and works after dusk And for new capacities, that is cheaper than coal or nuclear
- leecarraher 7y agowhat about pumped storage hydroelectricity? It currently accounts for 95%-99% of potential energy storage capacity, is far cheaper and more efficient than current commercially available chemical battery storage methods.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoCauses biogenic methane emissions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/
- pfdietz 7y agoThat's primary hydropower, where there is an external water source constantly carrying organic material into the reservoir. A closed pumped hydro system could have much less organic input (and possibly could exploit the pumping to keep the water oxygenated, so methane would not be produced.)
- mattgibson 7y agoSolar power towers can be built with molten salt heat stores, which continue to power the turbines during the night, so they do work after dusk now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower
- kragen 7y agoThe thermal part of these is essentially the same cost as a coal plant — the only difference is that you're boiling the water with molten salt instead of burning coal — so they're having a really hard time competing with modern photovoltaic. It's true that they're a zero-carbon option for energy storage, but batteries are a more likely option.
- edhelas 7y agoAny power plant basically. All those kind of plants are mostly similar (turbines activated by steam that produces electricity), the biggest difference is how you produce the heat.