Re: Transportation and the energy economy, was Re: Just an FYI....Atlanta Police stalk Critical Mass

Tom Kunich wrote:
"peter" <prathman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6426ac6d-a047-4ac2-aaef-e5b6434154a8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jul 28, 5:30 pm, Peter Cole <peter_c...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tom Kunich wrote:
> What's interesting is that you chose the only fatal US reactor incident
> in history and presented that as nuclear power. So how many nuclear
> accidents has France had?

Several recently:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE7DA113CF936A25757...

Do you consider minor accidents that happened over 20 years ago to be
'recent'?

Certainly the anti-nuke crowd does. One person killed that has the slightest thing to do with a nuclear reactor and they go absolutely nuts.

Yet thousands of people killed mining coal, drilling for oil or gas or the fact that coal contains radioactive isotopes that are released into the atmosphere in relatively huge quantities is conveniently ignored.

It is a mental problem. Most of them are incapable of even bothering to learn anything about what they supposedly hate.


http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,568467,00.html

"Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo has now acknowledged that France's nuclear facilities have experienced a total of 115 "small irregularities" this year."

France is apparently still committed to nuclear, while Germany is phasing them out. It's not a black or white issue. The real issue is whether nuclear is a viable option -- economically and environmentally for large scale global roll out. The "low level" accidents can be looked at as either proof that the safety systems are working (no major catastrophes since Chernobyl) or as proof that there will always be accidents, and sooner or later another Chernobyl (or worse) is inevitable.

Beyond environmental issues, there are very real economic obstacles to counting on fission as the major source of global energy 40-50 years from now. Besides building the plants and the infrastructure to support them, there's the availability of sufficient uranium and enrichment/reprocessing facilities and the energy to run them. These considerations moved France to pursue the fast breeder class of reactor, it was only the cooling off of the market (post-Chernobyl) that removed this pressure. The net is that while proponents of fission power can claim that new generations of reactors are safer, that category of reactor is not a viable candidate for significant (majority) global energy production. New technologies may reduce that problem, but there still remains the thorny issue of waste, still unresolved after decades.

Although I'm leery of the prospect of 100's of times the number of current fission facilities dotting the global landscape from an environmental POV, it may simply be the economics that dooms the idea. If the above article can be believed, nuclear may just be too expensive.

http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNuclIlusion.pdf

"A further issue arises in states that still rate-base new power plants: financial comparisons between power plants typically use levelized costs, but utility customers would feel sticker shock. A total construction cost ~$5,200/kW, near the low end of Moody’s October 2007 estimate, implies a levelized busbar cost of ~16¢/kWh. But this would require a typical regulated utility in 2013 to collect first-year project revenue of ~27¢/kWh—three times typical tariffs55— plus delivery cost to customers. At that rate, even photovoltaics could look like a bargain. A “death spiral” of rising price and falling demand may ensue because customers now have more choices than just buying ever more grid electricity: they can vote with their feet by buying less electricity, more efficiency, and more onsite generation—all now becoming widely available."

"This update confirms, as Fig. 1 summarizes, that new delivered nuclear power costs from ~2× to ~10× more than equivalent firm delivered power from micropower and negawatts—a gap far too big for any conceivable technical, institutional, or financial improvements to bridge. This gap is widening, for three reasons:

• nearly all the distributed competitors are trending inexorably cheaper over the long run through routine improvement and production volume (though in the short term, photovoltaic prices have temporarily stabilized for photovoltaics and turned up for wind power due to extraordinarily rapid growth in demand)—while central plants, for fundamental reasons, have historically tended to become costlier as more are built, contrary to normal learning-curve assumptions;

• markets are starting to recognize distributed benefits, chiefly in financial economics and electrical engineering, that will ultimately increase by another tenfold or so the economic value of distributed resources, but, in a major conservatism, aren’t shown here (except for recovery of waste heat); and

• negawatts and such potentially potent very-large-scale competitors as photovoltaics exhibit many paths for disruptive technological breakthroughs that can drastically cut cost"

It's beginning to look like fission is just an idea whose time has come -- and gone. There are better: cheaper, safer, faster to scale up, options available.

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
--John Cage
.

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