Another thread for lengthy debates, off-topic exchanges, long posts on regular hobby-horses etc.
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Another thread for lengthy debates, off-topic exchanges, long posts on regular hobby-horses etc.
John Quiggin 
David – some of the pro nuclear websites are just as delusional as the climate science delusionist websites……follow the money trail as ever. The lobbying industries today are in many cases grotesque deformities seeded by the already rich and powerful seeking to clean up on any dirty technologies they can. Im damned sure some pro nuclear mass dissemination advocates operate by nuclear fission – a small spark causes a huge expansion of word mass and volume.
Im used to the methodology of the starcrossed pro nukers by now. IMHO I think Fran is definitely guilty of the fission gallop. Peter Lang is another.
DavidC, way up above,
Renewable power doesn’t work. I’m not equivocating. What we’re asking renewable energy to do is provide power at utility scale, and cut CO2 emissions in quantity. Thats what we want it to do. But it doesn’t work.
I’m well aware of the Archimedes solar installation that you point to, and it has indeed been discussed at BNC. This is a linear collector design in which the storage fluid is also the working fluid for the collectors. I’ve looked, but haven’t been able to find anywhere, how much storage this installation has. Your citation states it can operate “24 hours a day for several days in the absence of sun or during rainy days”, but it does not specify at what power level, which is key. Can you tell me how much energy this plant can store, in MJ or kWh?
You should also note that this is not a utility scale system. Its a 5 MW plant, ie nothing. For some idea of scale, its “integrated” with a gas plant of 752 MW. Guess whats doing the heavy lifting.
It gets worse. It apparently produces 9 million kilowatt hours a year. With 8760 hours in a year, thats a real output of about 1 MW, not 5 MW. This plant is the equivalent of four Commodores! For ~$80 million. Or $80 trillion/GW. Prototype or not, thats a big cost gap between reality and fantasy. Come on, lets get real about our energy options.
Clearly Peter Lang has worked out that his attempt to put five links to fervent pro nuke sites (do these people have no sensitivity?) gets him blocked for spamming.
So PL cuts his links down to three a post – must have tried 4 and that got blocked too.
Really Prof – at what point do we turn the power off on these deliberate disseminators of political spin? We got all these one eyed non objective (“renewables dont work”) pro nuke site links last time. I didnt think we needed another exorcism quite so soon.
Renewables – what was I thinking? Of course uranium must be much better for all of us. What was I thinking?
Its just a dying shame its so radioactive.
Chris, my apologies, that statement was made by “Alan”, and my response should be directed to him, not yourself. (But “stupidity”? Don’t be childish.)
I also hate to pop the bubble of love some people have in here for Professor Brook but perhaps there are other strings to the good Professors bow and perhaps he is a very versatile fellow.
I quote
“The former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr Mohammed El Baradei, told the UN that he faced the impossible task of regulating hundreds of nuclear installations with a budget comparable to a city police force. His agency had documented literally hundreds of examples of attempts to divert fissile material for improper purposes. There is a real risk of rogue elements or terrorists having either full-scale nuclear weapons or the capacity to detonate a “dirty bomb” that could make an entire city uninhabitable.
The fundamental point, and one that I outline in a new book I’ve co-authored with…wwait for it…. Barry Brook,… is that there are better alternatives.”
Article title “nuclear power – no thanks!”
The link
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/07/26//2964146.htm
Sorry again, that should be $80b/GW, not $80 trillion/GW. That’s stupidity.
Alice, this is the book.
http://www.panterapress.com.au/shop/product/5/why-vs-why-nuclear-power
That would be this book:
http://www.panterapress.com.au/shop/product/5/why-vs-why-nuclear-power
I’m afraid you are not. You’re still stuck in the mire of nuclear propaganda.
Throughout this ‘debate’ you have behaved exactly as the vast majority of nuclear advocates do. You ignore all evidence that you have no response to and continue to parrot standard-issue talking points that do not match reality.
There’s none so blind as those who will not see….
The totally predictable response: “that first-of-its-kind solar thermal plant did not solve all the world’s energy problems therefore it is a failure.”
And the sun does not shine in winter? Who knew?! You do know that Italy is not in the Arctic circle?
Tell that to the thousands of German, Danish, Chinese, etc. scientists and engineers who *are* making it work.
You are quite simply in denial of reality.
Just in case people don’t follow the link to the book co-written by Professors Barry Brook and Ian Lowe, it’s titled ‘Why vs. Why: Nuclear Power’. The two authors present the case for their respective views, Ian against nuclear power, Barry for it. I mention this just so no-one is misled by Alice’s attempt to sow the seeds of doubt concerning Barry Brook’s actual position on this issue.
Indeed. Obviously it is difficult or impossible to make all the connections, but it’s very clear that the fossil industry is in bed with the nuclear corporations. Given the speed and cost with which nuclear can be deployed, it offers the best strategy for the fossil corporations to extract every last dollar of profit out of their polluting and dying industry.
Also, nuclear suits the billionaire’s club by retaining massively centralised control over power generation. They do not like the idea of you and me with solar PV on our roofs or communities buying their own wind turbines or smaller engineering companies selling biomass and biogas generators.
“Follow the money” indeed!
Having said that, even the nuclear corporations are waking up to reality, e.g. ‘French nuclear giant Areva buys Ausra, says solar thermal power market may increase 30-fold by 2020.’
Similarly, ‘nuclear utopia’, France, recently announced a €1.35 billion investment in renewable technology and deployment of €10 billion offshore wind. France is also currently building the largest solar PV plant in the world. For those not in denial of reality, all of that speaks volumes.
Well actually David, the sun often doesn’t shine in winter, which I suppose is why the gas was necessary.
For the record, I made no mention of “all the worlds energy problems”. I was referring solely to your example plant. It may be baseload, but it is not CO2 emissions free.
@Chris Warren
You beat me to it Chris Warren; to assume as Peter Lang does, that the cost per unit of wind turbine components is free of scale-of-economy effects is nuts, especially when people are assuming that some sort of economy-of-scale effect applies from building several nuclear power plants in a row. It is reasonable to expect cost decline in both of the examples given by Peter Lang, namely both nuclear power station manufacture and windfarm manufacture, rather than just for nuclear.
I keep banging on about the financial advantages in terms of funding of windfarm projects. Once an initial windfarm is set up and selling energy, this initial income source can assist in securing second and subsequent rounds of funding for rapid, but incremental, growth. Nuclear power by its nature cannot turn on the power generation until the project is complete – this makes it a more risky consideration to the fund providers, and hence not only are fewer sources of capital available for funding, but that capital has an interest cost reflecting the extra risk.
Another frustration is this desire to paint the rated capacity of a wind turbine as the energy generation assumed in calculations and models used (by? who, used by whom ?) to help justify the economics of windfarms. This is silly because actual capacity is wind-limited, up to the rated capacity (roughly). So, if a mighty storm blew through and the turbines were allowed to spin up to whatever the storm conditions could achieve, perhaps rated capacity could be reached. In the real world though, it is the modelling of wind speeds and other similar factors that help establish the real capacity of a turbine sited at a particular location – and of course it is smart to check wind conditions (Bureau of Meteorology, aka BOM, has data on Australian regions) to find the best revenue generating locations with relatively predictable wind patterns.
One of my major gripes with several previous governments revolve around the fund then de-fund seesaw of major alternative energy projects, especially early proof-of-concept projects. Political uncertainty hurts alternative energy probably even more so than nuclear energy (around the world – obviously in Australia nuclear energy is limited to Lucas Heights revamp, and that’s not for public use).
John Quiggan,
Regarding the ‘baseload fallacy’, could you help me to understand your position, and perhaps help you to understand my position on this?
I suggest we consider a realistic scenario of the NEM demand at three points in time and you explain which generator types would be contributing to supplying the power to meet the demand at that time.
The three times are:
7 pm week night in July (winter) (peak demand is 35GW)
2 pm hot week day in summer (peak demand is 35 GW)
4 am in summer (minimum is 17 GW)
For each of these times, assume there has been rain and heavy overcast weather over eastern Australia for the past week or two (so there is no energy stored in solar thermal energy storage). Also, there is a wind lull over all the NEM wind farms (a common occurrence)
[This is realistic. We have to provide reliable power at all times. So we must design for the worst case situation.]
At each of these three times, how much of the total demand is being met by each type of generator? (e.g. solar thermal 10 GW, wind 1 GW, combined cycle gas 10GW, open cycle gas 14GW). (Add whichever other generators you want to include in the mix.)
How much of each type of generator is on standby (spinning reserve) to cover for unscheduled outages?
What is the total installed capacity of each type of generator that is needed to cover for all situations?
If you want to shift demand from night time to day time so that solar can carry this load, then could you define the scenarios of peak and minimum demand as you see it.
Once we’ve done this we can do a rough comparison of the capital costs.
Peter
For starters the weather that you have describe is a low pressure system which typically includes strong winds.
Secondly a baseload CSP system is more inland, not coastal.
Thirdly a baseload hybride CSP uses natural gas backup to provide vapour for the turbines. Storage does not just run out at a certain point in time, the system can run for extended periods in augmented mode. The hybride system can operate for weeks powered by gas if necessary. That is an extremely unlikely scenario, but it could happen. Hybride CSP also has the ability to operate at over nameplate capacity if it is fitted with standby turbines (these are steam or vapour turbines).
Give credit to the designers of the plants, they are fully aware of all of these concerns.
Of course you are going to make a big noise about the natural gas part of the operation. This amounts to a small percentage of the overall annual electricity generation output.
If an installation is designed to deliver baselod power then that is what it delivers.
There is no mystery to it, it is straight forward engineering. Should you have difficulty understanding this or need confirmation that these systems are ready to install then you should direct you inquiry to the office of Franz Trieb in Germany, or David Mills in the US. Further there is an abundance of information available on the web.
@BilB
Of course you are going to make a big noise about the natural gas part of the operation. This amounts to a small percentage of the overall annual electricity generation output.
Well, this is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Does this attempt to harness the power of the sun overcome the debilitating limits thus far encountered by solar power systems, or will it fall to them as the others have?
Which specific solar-thermal plants currently in operation do you wish to point to as exemplars of this approach? Please provide a link to the info.
Just to add to BilB’s comment re. hybrid CSP systems: they can also run on biogas and these systems are already appearing where sewage, household / industrial waste, farm effluent, etc. is used to generate that gas. There is abundant information on this for those who wish to understand.
Also, looking at Peter Lang’s previous comment, it typifies the thinking of the anti-renewable brigade: take a snapshot of today’s technology and see if it will power the world. This is painfully simplistic and flawed.
We are not going to deploy all renewable energy next weekend. It will happen over several decades where economies of scale and incremental improvements in efficiency will transform what is possible.
However, the only way that process can happen is if the technology is actually deployed. Germany have proven this with their solar PV program – they have deployed 1% of their electricity requirement in just the first 8 months of 2010 and brought net economic benefit to the country. Of course, this is impossible according to some. 😉
It’s worth reflecting as I suggested above on the distinction between dispatchable power and non-dispatachable power.
Let’s imagine a wind farm with a CF of 30%. What this means is that during any consecutive set of 8760 hours it should average about 30% of its rated output. That’s not the same as saying that at any point you will get 30% of its rated output. You might get 0% or 100% or anything in between. Would a car that operated at bettween ) and 100% of its capacity be as useful (and thus as valuable) as one that operated at its rated capacity 100% (or even 99%) of the time?
Of course not — not even if when it operated, it operated for free and even if 80% of the time you weren’t using it (because you were asleep, at work or shopping. It wouldn’t even be 30% as valuable because the purpose of having a car is to be able to use it when you want it. You’d have to have a second car that worked all the time on standby and which could follow the other one around when it stopped working. Imagine a restaurant that opened randomly and gave out random amounts of food in random qualities at random prices albeit sometimes for free. Could it operate?
Dispatchable energy is simply a lot more valuable than non-dispatchable energy. A windfarm or a solar plant that always operated at no more and no less than its CF would actually be very good. You’d need no backup and it would be easy to work out the cost of the power or the cost per ton of CO2 abatement and fit that into a budget, working out the premium over coal or gas.
Of course, it’s the redundancy cost that kills these things. The cost per ton of CO2 abated blows out either because the system redundancy entails fossil hydroacarbon combustion or you need massively expensive storage or massive overbuild and connection fees. What that means is that you can choose between abating less, paying more for abatement or choosing something that fits into the abatement budget.
DavidC and Alice allege a dark conspiracy between fossil and nuclear interests to stop people doing microgeneration but that’s simply silly. Those with coal and gas assets are in competition with each other when they aren’t the same folks. If nuclear power were the norm, it would necessarily be at the expense of coal and gas and oil since these are the leading suppliers of energy.
And does anyone really think that if it were profitable (albeit with the kind/magnitude of clean tech subsidy/levy that a state or community could plausibly pay) to supply power from solar thermal or wind plants or any other kind of near zero plant, that the generators would not be keen on getting into the business? Somebody would do it even if those holding coal or gas assets did not.
The problem is that at the moment it is simply not profitable at the current mooted level of subsidy/levy — not even close. And of course, in this country, one of the key technologies that could fit into a proper CO2 price is barred. If/when we get $23 per ton, we will probably see more gas usage. That will produce cleaner air and be less CO2-intensive, but it will ensure that zero emissions are out of the question.
Yet it is hard to see how wind or solar could fit into $23 per ton or even $230 per ton. One day, someone will put together a robust study publishing the cost of PV subsidies in Australia in terms of dollars per ton of CO2 abated and I strongly suspect that it won’t be a pretty number.
As you imply, Peter, step 1 would be to change prices so that they match the supply characteristics of the new system, not the existing one based on coal (and therefore ideal for nuclear). To start with, while adding solar and gas, the existing discounts for night-time consumption would be reduced and replaced with surcharges for predictable times of peak demand and low supply, such as winter evenings (or, if you’re a marketer, and don’t like surcharges, you can express this as discounts for predictable periods of low demand and high supply). A combination of gas and renewables could then outperform nuclear (in the absence of the price decline you posit) or coal +CCS (if that existed). This takes advantage of the fact that, on average, solar supply is well-matched to the pattern of demand, higher during the day than at night.
Then long run solution is to offer smart pricing (feasible with the meters that are now being rolled out) are current , in which users pay the market pool price for electricity, rather than an averaged tariff. People willing to turn off their appliances at peak demand times could make big savings, since the maximum pool price under current arrangements is $10/kWh. And for medium-sized business users, the incentives are even sharper.
I think that there is a fair bit of information on the Spanish CSP installation with liquid storage where the storage is proving to be a very valuable part of the economics of the system and they are planning expansions of that. A number of the US installations have storage of various types. For more information refer to the experts whose names I mentioned in the previous comment.
Debilitating limits? I had a good look at the Windorah installation which cost $4.5 million. Not all of that cost is attributed to the solar component on the one hand, and the solar component for that size installation will be able to be achieved for between $700 thousand and $1 million in the near future. It is a mobile phone of the 70’s to cellphone of the 90’s kind of difference. That is the advantage of smaller scale power generation, the quantity of generation modules is way higher, so economies of mass production that are only achieveable when manufacturing quantities head into the hundreds of thousands become possible, and a steady procession of design refinement is able to be established. Windorah would have been a fraction of the price with or GenIIPV system, and far more effective. But we are not there yet.
A little piece of information I heard (but have not yet verified) is that Porugal is having to pay France $300 million dollars a month to manage Portugal’s nuclear waste. If it is true, then that is some trash bill, a massive overhead.
@BilB
I haven’t identified any source that roughly bears out this claim. Do you have a cite? In fact I haven’t found any sites that speak of any relationship between Portugal and France pertaining to radioactive hazmat.
Fran, coal & nuclear aren’t dispatchable/controllable in the same way as gas or hydro because they can’t be turned off. So, a fair bit of the power they generate has to be given away.
Clearly the power from a dispatchable source is going to be more valuable than from other sources. As between a constant, always-on source and an intermittent source, the comparison is much trickier, and depends on the correlation between supply and (underlying) demand. Comparisons based on existing price structures, designed to match demand to the supply of coal-fired electricity, are useless.
I’ve made this point more times than I care to count, and it doesn’t seem to sink in.
To use your example, a car with an engine that ran 100 per cent of the time, whether you wanted it to or not, would be an awful nuisance and not very cost-effective.
Fran,
“Yet it is hard to see how wind or solar could fit into $23 per ton or even $230 per ton”
is a nonsense straw man comment.
As I have clearly demonstrated our GenIIPV system is economic at today’s electricity prices and without any subsidy or carbon price at all.
The simple method for testing the silliness of your comment, Fran, is to test the fundability of a renewable energy system. I have proposed in the past to apply a 20% levy on the retail electricity rate. At a levy rate of 4 cents per kilowatt hour and todays electricity throughput of 261 gigawatt hours this would yield a build fund of $10.4 billion per year. That is sufficient to build 2 full baseload CSP plants (Dr Franz Trieb’s figures) per year.
So with 2 new CSP 1 gigawatt installations each year coming on line funded by the levy, built and managed by private industry having competitively tendered for the funds, and privately funded GenIIPV being installed at the rate of 200,000 domestic and small business installations per year, the cross over to a totally renewable energy electricity sector could feasible occur 13 years from the commencement of building.
The above is without solar subsidies or carbon pricing, although a stable electricity price is desireable. It is highly likely that the infuluence of peak oil driving oil per barrel prices into triple digit stability is likely to drive the demand for GenIIPV higher.
Fran, as you have made the claim that solar energy will not work at virtually any carbon price, I challenge you to prove quantitatively that the above scenario is not realistic.
In light of JQ’s #25 clarification on dispatchible power I would like to point out that CSP solar thermal (Hybride) is fully dispatchable and highly reative (nearly as flexible as hydro) as the collected solar energy can be directed to integrated storage for extraction apace with demand.
@DavidC
David says
“Obviously it is difficult or impossible to make all the connections, but it’s very clear that the fossil industry is in bed with the nuclear corporations. Given the speed and cost with which nuclear can be deployed, it offers the best strategy for the fossil corporations to extract every last dollar of profit out of their polluting and dying industry.
Also, nuclear suits the billionaire’s club by retaining massively centralised control over power generation. They do not like the idea of you and me with solar PV on our roofs or communities buying their own wind turbines or smaller engineering companies selling biomass and biogas generators.”
Of course it does – and no they wouldnt like Mum and Dad to have a solar panel on their roof because then they cannot control the infrastructure as much as they would like – and we wont be getting herded nicely to a centralised pricing station over which they have control.
Unfortunately in their misuse of pro nuclear propaganda they need unquestioning disciples and the best unquestioning unthinking disciples are delivered by making it a political issue and a promise of utopia, not an energy issue.
We here are exposed to the wordy lackeys, the cut and paste jocks, the unpaid disseminators, the devotees, little people who think they are fighting a “good fight” but in reality who help the worlds largest polluters, the oil and gas merchants in bed with nuclear entrepreneurs, attempt to sell us us an inferior dangerous solution over a better one.
The issue of pushing nuclear use is just another ugly offspring of the worlds largest polluters and their powerful lobbying methods.
There are none so blind as those who cannot see.
@Peter Lang
You are playing games.
Renewables consist of a range of resources – wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, tidal, biofuel and various storage systems. Nuclear provides better baseload power than any one of these – but a system, sans nuclear, can be constructed using the full range.
As Figs 5.2, 5.5, 5.6 show (in your own citation) the cost of developing renewables goes down and the cost of nuclear goes up.
You have been asked to explain how you deal with these figures and conclusion, particularly as you cited this source. Based on your citation, it looks like nuclear is a vast waste of money, and the biggest strategic blunder in history.
Your silence is revealing.
@Fran Barlow
I am always interested in how nuke-pundits think. How they get from point A to point B, and how they seek to follow a logical thread.
Both you and John Morgan were asked to explain why the ANU paper did not show that:
“the pace of improvements in renewables seems reasonable.”
Surely you must have some logic.
I am also interested in finding out why, if your subject of interest is:retiring watt hrs of fossil or abating fossil energy, you would expect the answers from a scientist only looking at “Concentrating Photovoltaics”.
If you expect to find answers in the wrong documents, you will never come to grips with the nuclear question.
@Fran Barlow
says “DavidC and Alice allege a dark conspiracy between fossil and nuclear interests to stop people doing microgeneration but that’s simply silly. ”
Its you thats silly Fran. Its not even a “dark conspiracy”. It damn well blatant when institutions luike CATO are pushing this pro nuke line.
PrQ says:
In the case of nuclear, to the extent that this is so, that is a feature not a bug. The marginal cost of running the plant is small and the fuel cost (due to its density) trivial. CCGT can’t just be shut off either.
It’s a more significant cost in the case of coal and gas of course, and during the off-peak, when we hope/expect lots of electric cars will be recharging, it will be useful to have this off-peak discount. being able to run plants at night cheaply would also be useful So would desalination, for example. Indeed, if we do augment pumped storage significantly, being able to recharge these off-peak would make sense, as would pumping water to other reservoirs.
It would be an awful nuisance if it cost a lot to run or caused a lot of pollution. Yet nuclear plants, per unit of output don’t fit that description, and even in the case of coal/gas plants, one can always find “paying passengers” for them, which presumably means there were useful .
@Chris Warren
I’m wondering why a bald statement like this should be of interest to anyone wanting to explore the technical and commercial basis for retiring fossil hydrocarbon capacity. What does such a statement even mean? That something “seems reasonable” is not an objective standard.
It certainly doesn’t mean the same as “seems certain to underpin the retirement of xGW of fossil hydrocarbon capacity by the year Y at a cost of only Z times the installed capacity cost of an anthracite coal plant and be capable of being built at pGW per annum”.
Claims like that are testable and therefore interesting, especially if plausible.
@BilB
So $40 per ton of CO2 …
Fran,
This plan was proposed when electricity prices were 17 cents per kilowatt hour, rates have since risen to over 20 cents per unit. That is with no carbon price at all. With the levy applied at 20 cents to bring the retail rate to 24 cents per unit and an a carbon price exemption for stationary energy, stable electricity pricing would be achieved along with a guaranteed alternative energy infrastructure build rate. With many pundits predicting that any carbon price at all will drive electricity rates towards as much as 45 cents per Kwh your suggestion that a carbon price of $10 equates to a retail rate increase of 1 cent is laughable, as pricing signals for the Rudd government’s CPRS have driven electricity rates higher twice now, far greater than 4 cents per unit, and there will not be a CPRS nor will there be a reduction in the electricity retail rate in the CPRS’s failure to eventuate. Market forces have little influence over electricity prices, industry expectations have a far greater influence.
I’m pretty sure that I have said above that $10.4 billion dollars would be sufficient for a nominal 2 gigawatts of baseload hybride CSP infrastructure. I say nominal because CSP does have the ability to be driven at an output well above the nameplate value.
@Fran Barlow
Now I see your problem …..
You did not read the objective evidence I cited specifically slide numbered “38”.
Why is this not objective. On this basis – why is any statement a bald statement?
In fact the evidence is objective.
In fact the statement is not bald (except for those who do not read slide numbered “38”).
Most reasonable people will see a direct link between:
A) – improving renewables efficiency and cutting developmental costs, (for example photovoltaics) and
B) – a technical and commercial basis for retiring fossil.
A leads to B. A is necessary for B. B is a consequence of A. B follows A.
Its a pity you deny this linkage.
Not “allege” – and no need to dramatise it by describing it as a “dark conspiracy”. It is simple fact that fossil and nuclear corporations are intertwined. The evidence is abundant if you simply make an attempt to find it instead of assuming it does not exist because you have no knowledge of it.
I don’t have a single article that uncovers it all, but do some research on the companies – especially in the US that operate fossil and nuclear power. They are often one and the same company. Do you think they are going to damage their investment in coal plants? Of course not – so they support and advocate for the technology that takes the longest to deploy and maintains centralised control. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe this – just lucid and informed. Actually, you just need to be able to use Google.
Look at the money they spend on lobbying (AKA ‘bribing’) politicians: nuclear / fossil operators in the US have spent $600 million + $63 million in campaign contributions attempting to influence the energy market in their favour and gain government handouts. Why would that be necessary if it were such a wondrous technology? It’s a con trick – and *you* are being conned.
Need more evidence? Only in the last couple of days has it been revealed that the Tories in the UK have agreed to pay for decommissioning and clean up costs for the nuclear industry to the tune of billions of £££s. This after they assured the electorate that no subsidies would be paid to the nuclear industry. The one constant with nuclear is that it is *always* taking money out of your pockets.
If you and all the other nuclear fans stepped outside of Barry Brook’s echo chamber occasionally, you’d likely discover facts like the ones I’ve been feeding you here.
Or perhaps you have no concerns about being fleeced by nuclear corporations for thousands of years to come? How about the health of children, then? Google ‘Childhood Leukemias Near Nuclear Power Stations’ to find:
The authors found 14 cases of leukemia in children living within 5 km of the nuclear plant. The 14 observed cases significantly exceeded the 0.45 predicted cases based on national incidence rates. An inverse distance – effect relationship linked the cancers directly to the nuclear facilities.
Now do you want quibble over cost of renewables?
P.S. My questions are rhetorical – I’ve become accustomed to you ignoring pretty much everything being communicated in this thread.
I don’t know about dark conspiracies but there is a current convergence of interests between fossil fuel and nuclear proponents – neither want regulatory or other policy regimes that favour renewables. Thus we get opposition from both to a carbon price.
This convergence won’t survive should mass nuclear to replace fossil fuels look like actually really being built; fossil fuel interests will be implacable opponents of their industry being forced to scale back and replaced, and probably see nuclear as a bigger threat than renewables. They already make the green climate action and anti-nukes crowd look like ineffectual pussies and the first attempt to put a price on carbon saw them successfully lobby to make themselves the biggest beneficiary of carbon credits, subsidies and exemptions; and they weren’t even required to reduce emissions! They really do have the power to pull the plug on Australian households and industry. Want to bet they won’t be willing to do so? So they play both sides against each other and continue to successfully prevent effective action to replace their industry with anything.
Fossil fuel costs won’t rise by themselves enough to do the job; stuff you dig up and just burn will always be cheap, just have reduced margins. I actually think that rising energy costs are the only way to reduce opposition to nuclear and will have to be applied by regulation, whereas keeping energy costs low by opposing carbon pricing and expecting public and mainstream politics to dump fossil fuels and adopt nuclear because it’s so sensible is extreme naivety.
@jquiggin
What you say about nuclear power plants not being dispatchable or capable of load following is not really accurate. It depends on the design and operational requirements.
From memory, the Areva EPR can load follow slewing at 5% of nominal power per minute from 60% to 100% of nominal power while maintaining constant temperature. (from Areva web site).
Load following by NPPs in the French grid is discussed here:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html
I believe German NPPs can also do load following, but I can’t find the reference at the moment.
I think we can reasonably assume that if there is a requirement for load following, NPPs will be built to do just that.
@Chris Warren
What is really a pity is that you cannot point to any renewable source of energy retiring any fossil hydrocarbon capacity. I’m not being the least bit disingenuous about that because I wish it were so.
@BilB
So 2GW rated facilities can produce more than 2GW and at just $5.2bn per GW? Amazing!
Why is there not a proposal to do this before Brumby, given that he is supposedly trying to retire Hazelwood?
Please outline where a plant such as you describe has been built and operated in the manner you specify just so we can clarify.
TIA
John Quiggan,
I understand what you are saying. It has been said many times by others. However, I disagree (but am open to be convinced).
Can we simplify this discussion so we reduce the number of variables.
Let’s compare the cost of a) an emissions-free system that can supply our existing demand with b) an emissions-free (no nuclear) system that can provide the demand as you expect if we have the pricing system you are advocating.
For the existing system let’s assume the NEM demand (for 2007 because I have the figures on top of my head)
1. Average demand is 25GW
2. Peak demand is 33GW at 7 pm in July (winter)
3. Summer baseload is about 18GW (occasionally 17 GW)
4. Mid winter baseload is 20 GW
That is the demand we have to supply. The capital cost for this system with nuclear only (for simplicity I am ignoring the capacity reserve margin of about 20%) is roughly estimated as follows.
New nuclear, settled down cost, at say A$3000/kW ($3700/kW for the first units if wee remove the impediments so we get the same price as for the UAE):
The total capital cost is: $33GW x $3000/kW = $99 billion
We can reduce this cost a little if we replace 8GW of nuclear with 8GW of pumped hydro (for $15 billion, refer to the pumped hydro paper on BNC); the cost reduces to:
Nuclear: 25GW x $3000/kW = $75 billion, plus
Pumped hydro: 8GW for $15 billion
Total = $90 billion
But keep in mind, we have to replace the existing fleet of fossil fuel generators with something over the same time period as we would be building new nuclear. If we replaced the existing generators with coal (no CCS), the cost would be:
Coal only: 33GW x $2000/kW = $66 billion
So the extra capital cost for nuclear and pumped hydro would be $24 billion
Sensitivity analysis on the unit costs I’ve used: If I have underestimated the settled down cost per kW by 50%, the cost of the nuclear only option would be say $150 billion instead of $99 billion. The difference between replacing with coal only or replacing with nuclear only would be $84 billion.
[By the way, I believe that nuclear should and could be a lot cheaper than coal. It can be in the future. We need to remove all the impediments that have been imposed on nuclear as a result of the 40 odd years of anti-nuclear protesting.]
Now let’s turn to your alternative. I understand (perhaps misunderstand) you are arguing that, through flexible pricing, smart grids, etc., we can shift load to when the renewables are most efficient. This would require totally impracticable amounts of energy storage.
The BZE have put a great deal of effort into developing the ‘Zero Carbon Australia by 2020’ plan to do what you are arguing for. They used heroic assumptions about smart grids, efficiency improvements and fuel switching from fossil fuels to electricity for land transport and heat. I joint-authored a critique of this study. You can Google it or find in on BNC.
In short, it shows that their plan to provide our electricity needs is based on non-existent technologies, and performance from their assumed technologies that are unlikely to be viable for decades, if ever. The conclusions of the critique are:
• The ZCA2020 Stationary Energy Plan has significantly underestimated the cost and timescale required to implement such a plan.
• Our revised cost estimate is nearly five times higher than the estimate in the Plan: $1,709 billion compared to $370 billion. The cost estimates are highly uncertain with a range of $855 billion to $4,191 billion for our estimate.
• The wholesale electricity costs would increase nearly 10 times above current costs to $500/MWh, not the $120/MWh claimed in the Plan.
• The total electricity demand in 2020 is expected to be 44% higher than proposed: 449 TWh compared to the 325 TWh presented in the Plan.
• The Plan has inadequate reserve capacity margin to ensure network reliability remains at current levels. The total installed capacity needs to be increased by 65% above the proposed capacity in the Plan to 160 GW compared to the 97 GW used in the Plan.
• The Plan’s implementation timeline is unrealistic. We doubt any solar thermal plants, of the size and availability proposed in the plan, will be on line before 2020. We expect only demonstration plants will be built until there is confidence that they can be economically viable.
• The Plan relies on many unsupported assumptions, which we believe are invalid; two of the most important are:
1. A quote in the Executive Summary “The Plan relies only on existing, proven, commercially available and costed technologies.”
2. Solar thermal power stations with the performance characteristics and availability of baseload power stations exist now or will in the near future.
The demand is higher in the ZCA plan and in our critique than in the NEM 2007 figures I used in the example above so the two sets of figures are not directly comparable. However, the costs are consistent with the other studies that show renewables cannot do the job and, even with heroic sassumptions, the cost of renewable only system would be in the order of 5 to 50 times the cost of doing the same with nuclear.
It is interesting that despite the alleged influence the nuclear power folks in the US are said to have over the US government, that they are still, years later, paying the US government a fee for waste storage that the government promised to remove and sequester but has not been able to remoive from the sites on which the waste was generated.
Effectively, this is a levy being paid by the users of nuclear power to the US government for services not supplied.
People talk a lot about subsidies to nuclear, but the fact of the matter is that the nucela power operators pay tax, and pay levies. The renewables get tax credits and concessional treatment. If we were to follow the money, as Alice suggests, we might reach a different conclusion about who was in charge here.
That would be silly of course, because despite the considerable subsidies to renewables, the renewable folk are not in charge. If anyone is, it’s fossil fuels, who, as Ken notes above, are far more frightened of nuclear than renewables.
There just aren’t that many jobs in nuclear power or even in digging up uranium/thorium. Coal is far more labour-intensive and therefore attacking coal/gas or oil is a lot more politically risky.
This paragraph is not part of the conclusions in the critique. It was intended to be my concluding paragraph.
“The demand is higher in the ZCA plan and in our critique than in the NEM 2007 figures I used in the example above so the two sets of figures are not directly comparable. However, the costs are consistent with the other studies that show renewables cannot do the job and, even with heroic sassumptions, the cost of renewable only system would be in the order of 5 to 50 times the cost of doing the same with nuclear.”
By the way, the lead author of the critique is Martin Nicholson
John Quokka,
You said: “Fran, coal & nuclear aren’t dispatchable/controllable …”
Thatr is a misunderstanding of what dispatchable means in the context of trhe electricity supply system. It means that the grid operator can instruct generators to supply power. Different generators can be schedule ahead of time (years, months, weeks days and minutes ahead of time) to provide power. This allows scheduled shut down for maintenance (and for refueling of nuclear reactors). Fossil fuel, nuclear, hydro generators are dispatchable. Wind and solar are not. The power must be taken when the generate it. This results in higher costs for other generators and higher emissions from the fossil fule generators that must throttle up and down to back up for the intermittent wind and solar generators.
Everthing we try to do with renewables adds costs to the electricity system.
Peter,
“However, the costs are consistent with the other studies that show renewables cannot do the job and, even with heroic sassumptions, the cost of renewable only system would be in the order of 5 to 50 times the cost of doing the same with nuclear”
This is just total rubbish. Studies resourced by the German government show a very different picture. I’ve seen your studies which have the property of magnifying compounded errors exponentially, which then become the basis of further wild extentions.
And here it is
“The cost estimates are highly uncertain with a range of $855 billion to $4,191 billion for our estimate”
You should feel totally embarrased making a statement such as this in public. To suggest that it might cost 4 trillion dollars to produce the machinery to produce what is by world standards a very small amount of electricty is beyond belief.
Do yourself a favour and go back and contemplate what 4 trillion dollars represents in human engineering achievement, and you might start to see how stupid the claim is.
Perhaps embarresment more properly belongs to the people who are trying to implement the technology, rather than those warning us about these issues.
John Quiggin,
My appologies for spelling your name incorrectly (repeatedly). Sorry.
Peter,
I remember when you developed that 4 trillion dollar argument. You started with the performance figures of Queenbeyan solar Photo Voltaic platform, a poorly positioned 10 year old non tracking fixed angle experimental system using 80’s inverter electronics, and multiplied the scale and costs out (based on that performance) to achieve total solar coverage 24 hours a day at the highest demand level requiring the ability to achieve this with storage for a 90 day total cloud cover period. Then applied that result to CSP thermal as a fair representation of cost and performance. Elsewhere you have justified this transposition stating that you could not find information on solar thermal costs and performance.
Not rational, not scientific, not thorough, not credible. At all. And the conclusion proves this.
C’mon, Finrod, surely you do not endorse this!
Is Barry Brooke going to sign his name to this conclusion of Peter Laing’s?
Quokka, some nuclear plants can fairly easily reduce their electricity output, but unfortunately this isn’t very useful, as it saves very little money. Most of the cost of nuclear power is capital cost, followed by operating costs, with fuel costs only being a small percentage of the total. All else being equal, it is better to have a nuclear plant that can easily reduce output than one that can, but it’s not much of a money saver.