Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
They would have more for export, thus relieving supply constraints for the rest of us. It is in the West's interests that other countries - including producers - use less oil.
"Sustainable Energy — Without the hot air." No bullshit approach to carbon issue.
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They would have more for export, thus relieving supply constraints for the rest of us. It is in the West's interests that other countries - including producers - use less oil.
And anyway wasn't this part of the speech Brown gave, urging large oil producers to invest in alternative energy. The world can't afford to buy your finite produce. What are you going to do then.
But where's the war level investment that's needed.
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
Being spent on war
Being spent on war
Yeah quite. Obviously building secure sustainable energy systems in partnership with middle eastern oil producing countries, to our meutril bennefit isn't prophetable enough for some.
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
Solar concentrated with steam turbines scale up to do away with any other option.
http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1480/
free spirit
more tea vicar?
I take it you've thoroughly researched the issue then?
you've taken account of the £73 billion that's the current estimated bill to the taxpayers for cleaning up the current (and previous) generations of nuclear power stations in the UK - a figure that essentially rises substantially everytime anyone takes a serious look at it. So that's a £72 billion minimum bill to the taxpayer just to decommission our existing nuclear power stations, a bil l that should have been born by the private sector according to the tories, but the private sector solution essentially went belly up leaving the taxpayers to fund the decommissioning costs.
This government also envisages the private sector including the 'waste management' costs within it's financial plans, but tellingly says fuck all about the actual final waste disposal costs - basically because it knows full well that the private sector will not guarantee these costs, and would anyway simply declare the company bankrupt at the point that all the profit had been extracted, leaving the tax payer to pick up the tab for the clean up. This is the lesson from history, it's what the city boys are saying, so please don't be fooled by the government / nuclear industry bollocks - the taxpayer will have to pay the bill for decommissioning one way or another, and that's going to run into tens of billions of pounds minimum... never mind the costs of maintaining the nuclear waste dumps essentially for as long as mankind continues to live on these islands.
oh, and you'll also presumably have read that Wulf Bernotat, the head of the world's largest power company E.On, a company that actually is partners in the building of Europes only new nuclear power stations currently being built, has recently estimated the cost of building each new nuclear power station at £4.8 billion, compared to the governments figures of £2.8 billion, or a total cost of £48 billion, not including operating or decommissioning costs simply to replace our current nuclear generating capacity.
now I don't know about you, but I'm slightly more inclined to think that the head of the worlds largest power generating company's figures might be fairly close to reality rather than the figures produced by a government with a long track record of massively underestimating the costs of large capital projects... millenium dome, olympics, actually pretty much every major procurement they've presided over has been at least 2-3 times over budget, usually more.
now let's look at some alternatives from us daft eco-protestor types who should just shut up about stuff we know fuck all about and let the bulldozers drive over us...
New Generation of Nuclear Power Plants
Total Power output (10* 1 gw plants)= 10 gigawatt
Estimated operating lifespace = 30 years
Estimated Capital Cost = £48 billion
Estimated operational costs = £12 per Megawatt hour
Estimated Decommissioning Costs = £50-100 billion payable by the taxpayer plus unknown costs associated with the ongoing management of the final waste disposal site for ever.
seven estuary barrage : Tidal Barrage
Total Power rating 8.6 GW
estimated operating lifespan = 120 years
Estimated capital cost = ~ £14 billion
Estimated Operational costs = less than £8 per megawatt hour.
Estimated Decommissioning costs = max £14 billion to essentially replace the existing barrage in 120 years time if needed.
I could go on, but apparently I'm just a daft eco-protestor who deserves to be run over by a bulldozer because i stand up and point out that the figures don't add up, and nuclear is a fucking massive red herring that will cost all of us a hell of a lot of money... money that I'd prefer to spend in the pub given the choice. actually let's keep things simple...
nuclear = fuckloads of money, plus loads of radioactive waste that we don't know what to do with
tidal barrage = lots cheaper, plus lots of money left to spend in the pub / on pensions etc. or possibly on other forms of renewables.
*fs waiting for the bulldozers since 1997*
free spirit
more tea vicar?
very short version
the seven estuary tidal barrage can produce roughly the same amount of electricity as the entire planned new generation of nuclear power stations for just over 1/4 of the cost of the nuclear power programme's building costs alone. The nuclear power stations will then have higher operating costs while they are running, and a huge decommissioning cost at the end of their life. You will also need to build 4 generations of nuclear to cover the time span that the severn barrage is expected to operate - 30 years vs 120 years, so in actual fact the seven barrage about 3% of the total cost of the nuclear option (taking account of 4 build and decommissioning cycles).
the seven estuary tidal barrage can produce roughly the same amount of electricity as the entire planned new generation of nuclear power stations for just over 1/4 of the cost of the nuclear power programme's building costs alone. The nuclear power stations will then have higher operating costs while they are running, and a huge decommissioning cost at the end of their life. You will also need to build 4 generations of nuclear to cover the time span that the severn barrage is expected to operate - 30 years vs 120 years, so in actual fact the seven barrage about 3% of the total cost of the nuclear option (taking account of 4 build and decommissioning cycles).
free spirit
more tea vicar?
see above... I take it you've not been looking very far?
I've only read the intro page of the linked study, but can someone tell me if he ventures into the topic that no-one dare speak of, namely global overpopulation? I appreciate the O word gets co-opted by the anti-immigrant lobby of a particular country or area, but on a global level it surely has to be looked at. In the last 50 years, the global population has approximately doubled, so continuing this trend on a finite planet is surely suicide. There are obviously a great many factors in the environmental field, but it does irritate that nobody is prepared to discuss this subject in public (whilst acknowledging it would probably be political suicide for any party).
elbows
Well-Known Member
No, rather its because I am not talking about whether renewable energy could replace our existing nuclear capacity. I am talking about whether it can meet all of our energy needs & achieve the necessary carbon reductions.
My belief is that we need all the feasible renewable projects, plus more nuclear, plus greater efficiency, plus reduction in use, to make the numbers add up.
Just replacing the current nuclear capacity is a large task on its own.
Compensating for future reductions in supply of natural gas is a truly massive task.
If oil supplies dwindle and the petrol car is replaced with the electric car, there is a further gap that needs filling.
Personally Id prefer massive lifestyle changes and a complete change to how our economy works, and I mean total change, then maybe we could get by on renewables alone.This is not likely unless we try the business as usual approach and it fails and we end up ruined.
Also its not entirely fair to take all those tidal barrier figures at face value, and considering the environmental issues Id be in favour of far more smaller-scale tidal stuff being tried first, in order to ensure that capacity calculations are accurate and that there are not any factors that would massively alter the running costs.
spacemonkey
I Love Noodles
I'm a big fan of the barrage, there's no doubt that the impact on the surrounding ecology will be huge but overall FAR less than the predicted amount of waste that will be generated by a raft of new nuke stations.
Ideally the government would invest more in tidal lagoon research. Large scale lagoons could generate up to 4.5GW IIRC and have a much higher capacity factor.
I think they're much more attracive to investors, you could start small and expand capacity when the technology is proven to work. The impact on the tidal regime would be far less than a Weston-Cardiff barrage.
One of the big negative aspects of the lagoon option is the huge quantities of aggregate the would be required. Sourcing a couple of hundred million tonnes of aggregate is no mean feat!
I firmly believe we should invest in massive desert solar thermal via HVDC. Concentrated solar designs are improving all the time - I particularly like the look of this new design being developed by MIT. MIT Students develop dish hot enough to melt steel
I can't see any government brave enough to do it though. So looks like we're stuck with meagre investment in renewables and 50 new nuclear power stations.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Well that sounds great, but it would be foolish to sit back and rely on it as being the total solution. This technology should be tried, on a fairly big scale, and then we will see if the reality lives up to that article.
Forgive my skepticism but there has been more than 30 years of optimistic 'some technology will save us' chatter when it comes to energy. We sure do need people to come up with these ideas, and to try them, but we cannot bank on them working on the scale required until it has been successfully done..
free spirit
more tea vicar?
I see you took note of my desertec thread thenI firmly believe we should invest in massive desert solar thermal via HVDC. Concentrated solar designs are improving all the time - I particularly like the look of this new design being developed by MIT. MIT Students develop dish hot enough to melt steel
I can't see any government brave enough to do it though. So looks like we're stuck with meagre investment in renewables and 50 new nuclear power stations.
powering Europe, north africa and the middle east from renewables by 2050 via a network of high voltage DC long distance interconector cables
surely this is better than essentially spending all the money we can find on the dead end technology that is nuclear power, that will only need replacing in 30 years time anyway and will leave us with an additional £50-100 billion clean up costs to pay at that point.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
yeah, but by the same rationale, Nuclear has been tried, tried, tried and failed every time in terms of it's costs - the bottom line is that the decommissioning costs make it entirely uneconomic, and the more we practice decommissioning the higher the cost estimates go.
Nuclear has had trillions of dollars thrown at it over a 60 year period and is still uneconomic.
Isn't it time that technologies like (on a large scale) wave power, tidal power, concentrated solar thermal, use of anaerobic digestors to produce methane from compostable waste for electricity generation etc got that level of funding instead?
don't forget that wave power was killed off in the UK in the 1980's not because it was uneconomic, but because of one closed meeting with no wave power representatives at it, and only coal / nuclear reps present... plus someone misrepresented the costs by a factor of 10....
[source]
so essentially wave power was seen as such a threat that the nuclear and coal lobbies decided to lie about it and get the funding shut down completely.
basically all these technologies are real world technologies that just need the right level of investment to make them happen.
never mind the potential for micro solar thermal, which if implemented right has the potential to reduce total household heating and hot water bills in the UK by upto 40%... note I did say heating, fuck all idea why the uk keeps ignoring the fact that solar thermal is well suited to being used (in conjunction with gas boliers) for central heating as well as hot water. Solar thermal has extemely good payback times, and pretty much doesn't even need subsidy, though it could have done without the government recomending everybody get's rid of their hot water tank for most of the last decade.
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
You didn't read the link, then ...
"The first major solar thermal power plants were built in California's Mojave Desert in the 1980s. They have been producing over 350MW of reliable (99% field availability) solar power for more than 20 years. While these 1980s plants produced power above market rates, new solar thermal technologies are coming to market with prices below 10 cents per kWh – better than new fossil and nuclear plants."
Solar collectors consist of parabolic mirrors, motors, metal tubes with water in, steam turbines, generators, electricity lines and batteries. How fucking simple and proven do you want it? Or when you say about the 'some technology will save us' chatter, were you meaning nuclear?
Bob_the_lost
Elsewhere
Which is going to be an underestimate, that's 2001 pricing so factor the compound interest, the rising cost of steel and then chuck in the same fuckup factor that all government projects run into.
Add in that PWC were advocating £60 per MWH to recover costs in 7 years and then somewhere between £20 and £27. Oh and you're looking at a 10 year build time, that's as bad as nuclear and at least there is some experience somewhere in the world for building those things.
Nice idea, probably worth implementing but your numbers make it out to be too good to be true.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
well, to be fair I did take the upper estimate, and I believe that cost actually includes stuff like buying an entire new stretch of land and turning it into a wetland wildlife reserve to compensate for the loss of habitat, and I don't think it was a government figure in the first place (could be wrong mind).
I take your point though, how about we play safe and double it?
so £28 billion including all possible cost over runs.... just under half the cost for nuclear.
tidal barrage still wins
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
There are two known ways to reduce population growth. Increase everyone's standard of living to a comfortable level (as in Europe, Japan etc) or authoritarian methods (as in China) on a global scale - presumably requiring some kind of global governmental system. Which do you suggest we use?
Or to put it another way, people don't talk about it because there's fuck all we can do about population growth except (a) create a One World Order (with you at the head perhaps?) or (b) make everyone well-off. I quite like (b) as an idea myself but we don't have the will or even the knowledge to do it at the moment.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
I haven't seen anything significant on that topic so far, but I only just got back to the hotel (yay, free internet connection so I can join in)
What I would want to say about population though, is said better by the late Murray Bookchin.
source
elbows
Well-Known Member
Im not so much interested in the economic costs, as exactly what those costs represent. How much energy is used in the construction and maintenance for example. Does it break down a lot? What are the human & environmental costs etc. I know most of these are represented by £ figures but I find that can sometimes obscure the detail.
When it comes to nuclear, I quite agree that it has failed on many levels, in very important ways, but it also has its successes, it has delivered a lot of electricity. Going forwards I question its sustainability largely on the basis that there is not an infinite supply of Uranium. I know there are alternatives that would make sense if it were not for political, profit & power motives. I know that if we were starting again with the world, humans could live within their means.
I want all the things people are mentioning to be tried. But is it really so wrong for me to refuse to rule out the nuclear option until the alternatives are given more of a chance to be used properly, to see how they turn out in practice?
Anyways I am just reading the pdf 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air' that is what this thread was originally about, and I wil be sure to report back whether the contents of the draft book make me sound like the biggest hot air blower in this thread or not.
When it comes to nuclear, I quite agree that it has failed on many levels, in very important ways, but it also has its successes, it has delivered a lot of electricity. Going forwards I question its sustainability largely on the basis that there is not an infinite supply of Uranium. I know there are alternatives that would make sense if it were not for political, profit & power motives. I know that if we were starting again with the world, humans could live within their means.
I want all the things people are mentioning to be tried. But is it really so wrong for me to refuse to rule out the nuclear option until the alternatives are given more of a chance to be used properly, to see how they turn out in practice?
Anyways I am just reading the pdf 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air' that is what this thread was originally about, and I wil be sure to report back whether the contents of the draft book make me sound like the biggest hot air blower in this thread or not.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Yep. Tend to agree with elbows there. The enormous energy density of nuclear fuel is awfully appealling if you're looking for ways out of this mess and it needs to be looked at carefully. On the other hand it offers very little help with the closely connected issues of food security and indeed, may act as an enabler for some really disastrous ideas like providing energy inputs to biofuels to enable business as usual to continue, competing for land with food security in the process and making lot of the world's less fortunate people even worse.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
dammit, you editted...
ok, the £60 per mwh was only so it could recover it's build costs within 7 years - if you costed nuclear using the same basis then nuclear would need to charge £99 per mwh to cover it's build and operating costs in 7 years not including it's decommissioning costs...
If you did a whole lifespan analysis then the severn barrage wins by a factor of something ridiculous - not even allowing for the fact that uranium is a finite resource who's price is likely to go through the roof if any other countries followed britains lead on new nuclear power stations.
btw if we take a rough estimate of the likely decommissioning costs of new nuclear as being ~£60 billion (todays money) which is fairly conservative as it's lower than the current estimates for the current generation and divide that by it's 30 year life span & total annual output at 90% operational time, basically to give you the decommissioning costs per mwh you get £25.4 per mwh for the decommissioning costs averaged over it's 30 year lifespan.
so total costs per megawatt hour for new generation nuclear should be give as something more like £57 per mwh over it's entire lifespan.
obviously I've essentially plucked the decommissioning costs from thin air, but then the industry doesn't seem to have obliged us with those figures for some reason so I've not got much choice.
eta - this report gives figures of 2.3p per kwh or £23 per mwh for decommissioning, so my figures weren't far off - the reports figures however are based on the nuclear decommissioning authorities current annual budget, rather than the current estimated costs of decommissioning which keeps going up, so I'd contend that it's likely to be higher than the figures he's using.
obanite
Kroketten
Regarding the whole 'solar in desert to power europe' theory, I must have missed something in physics, but isn't it basically unfeasible to transmit power over distances like that? "high voltage DC long distance interconector cables" - isn't the reason AC was invented to transmit eleccy without losing half of it? (Wikipedia)
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
It's AC because it's easier to step the voltages up and down with Transformers. Stepping DC up and down used to be very tricky, but it can all be done with solid state componenets these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
I'd heard it was increasing education levels rather than increasing standard of living that reduced population growth, although you'd imagine the two would be related.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
obanite
Kroketten
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
I refer the Honourable Member to my previous link:
"All this would, however, need connecting with existing grids with ultra-high-voltage transmission lines. These are expensive, costing $1m to $1.5m per mile. China is, again, taking the lead by building ultra-high-voltage transmission lines to move energy derived from coal and hydroelectric power over 2,000km away to where it is needed." They're AC as I recall.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
the problem is that the reality of the situation is that this really really is an either or situation.
we either go for new nuclear in a big way, and continue to trickle feed the renewables sector, or we say a categoric no to new nuclear and invest all those billions of pounds in the full range of the most economically viable renewables options.
there is also the added bonus that without the next generation of nuclear power stations we'd probably not need to spend another £20 billion on the next generation of nuclear weapons as we'd then be 100% reliant on the americans to give them to us so what would be the point... er oops, was I not meant to point out the link?
bottom line, we as a country are skint, we're in debt up to our eyeballs both as a nation and individually, we have one last through of the energy dice with which we can choose to either make ouselves into a world leader in renewable energy technology (pretty much the fastest growing sector of the global economy), or simply hand all the money to either french or german companies to build us a new generation of nuclear power stations, and we'd simply have to put away an extra £2 billion per year just to enable us to pick up the tab for cleaning up after they're finished.
for reference purposes the Uk's total public support for renewable energy averaged around £700 million per year 2003-2006 expected to rise to about £1 billion per year by 2010 - mainly from the renewables obligation certificate scheme rather than direct government subsidy from taxation. the governments entire scheme for micro-renewables consisted of £30 million that pretty much ran out due to the high level of demand almost as soon as it had opened, yet instead of pumping more money in, the government reduced the level of grant funding each applicant was eligable for, and closed the scheme for anyone other than community groups and individual homeowners.
This is why I think it unfair to judge whether renewables could fill the gap in the market left by nuclear based on the performance of the last 15 years when the industry has been chronically underfunded by this government.
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