Nuclear is a good option, at the very least for the next 50 years or so.
Solar is not yet viable as solar panels, it takes as much energy to make them as they would produce in their lifetime even in the perfect sunny environment.
Tidal power cannot be used en-masse because it would actually start to effect the orbit of the moon, which isn't clever.


I cannot see why the Edinburgh duck, which stops 90% of waves that pass through it, isn't used as a coastal defence and energy generation facility.

@Speaker - regarding food growing in an urban environment... common approaches use either vacant lots (which in many cities there are plenty of) or rooftops as either community gardens (shared) or allotment gardens (a garden area subdivided into numerous individual plots). There are a number of successful uses of the concept and much promise in expanding it... but some areas would obviously be too densely built to make it possible on a significant scale (how about a small garden on your balcony?). Another idea is "Urban Farms" - where farming is conducted just outside of the city center - a few miles away but at least not hundreds. Other advantages besides lower fuel use related to food transport include efficiencies related to local composting (reducing the waste stream), water use, fresher produce, and lower usage of preservatives.

@Speaker - One study reported that the average conventional produce item travels 1,500 miles, using, if shipped by tractor-trailer (most common approach in the U.S. at least), one gallon of fuel per hundred pounds.

Well, I'm all for nuclear power. It seems to me the only thing holding it back is fear of it.

However, prevention is better than the cure. I agree that fuel consumption needs to be reduced.

TheGostmaker:

"Solar is not yet viable as solar panels, it takes as much energy to make them as they would produce in their lifetime even in the perfect sunny environment."

This statement was true about 30 years ago, but is not true anymore. The EROEI (Energye Return On Energy Invested), is about 1 year in sunny environment and about 2 years in a less sunny environment.

There is energy enough, but it takes space (for solar deserts) and it is more expensive.

Geothermal is a good source (especially for heating), but availability is limited. It is 0,04 watt per square meter. Solar is more 10000 times stronger than geothermal, per square meter.

Lucas

Check this out! http://www.groundloop.com/geothermal.htm Just something I stumbled upon.

Most of the answer will be in the form of small scale individual power production. Solar water heaters and small scale wind or photovoltaic cells can augment this system.

For our global needs direct extract methods like geothermal, solar(heat), wave, wind, water currents are preferable to fossil fuels and nuclear. But, all forms of power need to be on the table. It will take all forms to power the future.

Direct extraction low tech/distributed systems will be more important in the future. They will be more accessible and maintainable to developing economies with lower initial investment and they are scalable. Probably as important they disperse political power within a country or region. If there is one large power plant - he who owns the power plant controls a lot of political power. Direct extraction methods are less susceptible to commodity price swings and currency fluctuation and misuse(can't imagine what a solar water bomb would be like).

Transmission and transportation networks are energy hogs themselves and only serve to concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the owners of the network. Dispersed direct extraction method would eliminate some of the need for these.

The post is political and economic in is focus. I don't focus on which technology is most efficient from and engineering point of view. I can afford to loose some efficiency with dispersed systems because I don't have to feed the distribution net. Sometimes the most beautifully sophisticated machines are simply unworkable in the field. And, always required expensive highly trained workers to maintain.

Systems that are simple in nature and construction will be cheap to maintain by non-experts. This should be our goal for the developed and developing world.

Australian case study (Australia has plenty of sun):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Australia#Solar_Systems

A$7,000,000 instead of A$45,000 worth of diesel fuel for a remote town. Could you afford for your power bill to go up over 100x?

Even on a larger scale; A$420,000,000 for a 154MW plant (not including the large maintenance costs). That's A$9,300/year on electricity instead of A$300/year at current costs off the grid. That's over 30x as much, and not a large allowance of energy.

(These use the marketing figures, which probably means peak output not actual output)


The fact is there's just *no way* we can move to renewables without some *huge* breakthrough in efficiency. Australia is in about as good a position as possible to do it, sun and wealth, so if even we can't do it are they going to do it in China?

By pushing for renewables you're just going to get governments signing onto token plans and initiatives, while it uses coal. Even Germany, which abandoned nuclear to go with renewables, ended up importing its power from nuclear France


Compare this to nuclear, where a GW reactor which lasts for decades will cost $1/watt (this is an upper estimate); uranium is cheap and the cost of decommissioning and waste storage is built into the metered price

The US is building its first next-gen reactor in 2011, which are safer and cheaper. All of its plants were bought by private companies and have lasted far longer than their initial prices accounted for
The UK is also pushing to renew its plants, as is most of Europe. Italy is returning to nuclear after abandoning it


Also although some estimate we only have 50 years worth of enrichable uranium (it's almost certainly more, Australia alone has loads of unsurveyed land) that doesn't include reprocessing techniques, which convert the uranium-238 (nuclear "waste") into plutonium-239.
There are even nuclear technologies which use a thorium cycle instead of uranium, and thorium can't be used for weapons and is as abundant as lead. It costs more than enrichable uranium, but not a lot more and the tech already exists.


There are two valid anti-nuclear arguments: proliferation and waste.
- Proliferation is a concern, but denying ourselves the technology hasn't stopped Iran and North Korea. What people don't usually consider though is that to make a bomb you need to enrich the uranium way more than you need to to use it as fuel. It's pretty clear when a country is enriching for a bomb instead of power, and it takes a long time. (And enriched uranium for a reactor isn't expensive; if a country isn't buying uranium but wants to enrich its own it's pretty suspicious. Lithuania has a 1GW nuclear reactor and it sure can't enrich its own uranium)
Also this tech lets you build primitive WW2 nukes, which are simple, given plenty of time and money. But the ones with disturbing implications are thermo-nuclear bombs. These are the cold-war nukes, which can be about as powerful as a country wants, and they still use relatively inaccessible tech and materials.

- The other is waste. First off people hear "half life of 100,000 years" and freakout, but no-one mentions that the longer the half-life the less radioactive. Stuff that's radioactive for a very long time is more dangerous for being a heavy metal (like lead) than for its radioactivity. (Plus this sort of waste is often reprocessable, so it might become a commodity rather than waste once uranium-235 becomes more expensive)

Short-term waste is dangerous, but we should be able to look after it fine. In a radiation absorbing medium in a solid cask in a concrete bunker deep underground it's hard to see the threat, and if there is a threat is it worse than global warming or growing fossil-fuel costs?


I agree with the founder of Greenpeace that environmentalists who push for renewables are only damaging the environment by being unrealistic. Nuclear isn't perfect but we have to compromise and we can't wait and hope for a new perfect power source

"Even on a larger scale; A$420,000,000 for a 154MW plant
(not including the large maintenance costs). That's A$9,300/year on electricity instead of A$300/year at current costs off the
grid. That's over 30x as much, and not a large allowance of
energy."

You make a VERY big mistake. The 9300 is for the whole life time. If you take 25 years lifetime, plus 7% interest rate, you have to divide the number by 11.7. This means, that the cost is comparable with about 900. This is 3 times the price of 0.05 per kWh. However, 0.05 is the price for very cheap coal (with plants paid off and no environmental constraints) and 0.15 can compete with oil based fuels if the price is above 100$/barrel.

This is still quite a lot, but if you consider that this is new technology, for which only the first serious plants are build, this is quite good.

Nuclear does not receive much incentives for producing energy (this compared to renewables). However, still large amounts of money go to nuclear research. Both US and EU research funds are half nuclear. The amount that were spend at nuclear in the time 1960-1985 to nuclear were much higher than renewables now.

Thorium does have a proliferation problem, because of the production of U-233. Furthermore, for complete Thorium cycle (not just a little burning in a convential plant), you need a complete new design, which combines chemical and nuclear technology The reason for this, is that if Thorium absorbs a neutron, you have to take it out and wait for splitting, to avoid a wasteful cycle (absorbing another neutron). Designing such new plant will cost at least 20 billion dollars. Remind, that the only success story of the nuclear industry is the conventional nuclear plant. There have been numerous other experiments that never commercialized. The breeder reactor in Kalkar would produce electricity for a price of 0.21 eurocent a kWh in 1985. No inflation is added here and no operational costs (only capital costs).

Some of your other numbers are incorrect. $1/watt for nuclear is way off of current build reactors. Think more about between $2 and $3/watt. Still this is cheaper than solar, because you have a higher availability.

The 0.05 Adollar a kWh, isn't a realistic (and old) price. You can not get that price with new coal plant with all environmental constraints. And certainly not, with CO2 CCS (is about 6 eurocent per kWh with an highly efficient coal plant).

I am not totally against nuclear, but I am writing a book about energy. All support groups are lying about their technology. However, the pro-nuke boys are the worst with lying. This lying is as a boomerang, but I distrust all numbers of pro-nuke boys. They also continuously attack the renewables.

If you want to battle climate change with nuclear energy, the uranium production must be 10-fold in 2050. The uranium reserves are disputable. Some expect a shortage the coming 10 years, due to the end of the megaton to megawatt program. On the positive side you may assume a 3-fold is possible (there are many that dispute that, France has many nuclear plants but depleted uranium source, coincidental?). But some doubts by a 10-fold are certainly valid. Or we have to go to breeders or Thorium, both unproven technology.

So, we need all alternatives sources.

Lucas

Also look at the Cloncurry plant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloncurry_solar_power_station

30 million kWh a year for 31 million Adollar. This is a little bit more than 1 dollar per kWh production a year. Divide this by 11.7 to correct for 25 years and 7% interest and you have about 0.09 Adollar a kWh. Some operation expenses, but this is just a few persons that operates the plants (cleaning the mirrors, no cleaning of turbines such as coal plants) and is not very much.

With heat storage in purified graphite blocks, the plant can produce day and night.

Lucas

>Most of the answer will be in the form of small scale individual power production.

There are lots of little things that individuals can do. If you have a lawn, then you can plant a garden and compost your organic waste. If you have no lawn but you have a windowsill, then you can grow an herb garden; if there's a vacant lot, then maybe you can get together with neighbours and plant a community garden. You can eat mostly vegetarian food that you cook for yourself; if you've got land or roof access, you can use a homemade solar cooker in the summer.

Hum … all of my examples are about food … I like food … (^_^)

None of these things will solve all of your energy problems. But every little bit helps (and saves you money).

I take it we've discounted wind power,unreliable and inefficient as it is?

The Royal Academy of Engineering recently conducted a comparative study of energy cost... and onshore wind energy cost was reported at 5.4 pence/kWh. Which translates into about 8 cents U.S./kWh. That hardly sounds inefficient. It is more than coal... but, of course, that is misleading when it is considered that coal costs do not capture the indirect costs of it's carbon footprint and it's health impact (to both workers and the public).

I don't know if anyone else told Diplofool this (I just read his inane commencts and had to respond) but weapons grade uranium and plutonium are NOT suitable for use in a nuclear reactor. Where did you get your suppossed PhD from? You, sir, are a total idiot.

I was involved with the clean up of Fernald (in Fernald, OH, just northwest of Cincinnati) back in the eraly 90s. Point in fact, they used nuclear reactors to MAKE Pu-239 (weapons grade plutonium).

Please tell me your suppossed PhD isn't in a field of actual science.

oops, early 90s

"Not true. The government uses its old nukes in nuclear power plants. They both contain a radioactive metal. I saw a TV show on it."

OK, so you saw a National Geographic special that was either wrong or you misunderstood. The spent Uranium in a power plant can be refined into weapons grade plutonium, but if you put weapons grade plutonium or uranium into a nuclear reactor, you'd have one HELL of an explosion on your hands. Reactor material is a slow release material. Putting in weapons grade material makes for a damn near instant release and causes the reactor to go instantly critical and devastates the surrounding with an immediate effect equal to an equivalent sixed bomd, but worse as the slow release material already in there gets scattered and causes cancer, birth defects, and more for centuries.

I'll trust the guys I worked with who were nuclear engineers than some video journalists and theoretical "scientists" from NG.

Hey Lucas,

I know I'm a bit out of the loop, so maybe you can answer. I finally finished reading all the replies and noticed Ur-233, Ur-235, and Pl-239 bandied about a few times. When I was working for a DOE subcontractor cleaning up Fernald, these three were considered weapons-grade material. Now, Fernald was Pl-239 and Ur-235 oriented. They used Ur-235 in altra small reactors to produce Pl-239, so I can see that Ur-235 could be used in energy plant reactors, but how would anyone use something so unstable at Pl-239 to power a plant without creating one hell of a huge bomb.

And, just so you know, most of the engineers I worked with agreed that nuclear was NOT the way to go, but then we were cleaning up a mess, not creating it. With the exception of a few nuclear engineers still employed by the DOE, most of the engineers were civil engineers and we were trying to contain the contaminants so the water table wouldn't be spoiled, prevent additional releases into the environment, and clean the soil. I was involved in these three by developing computer models and running numbers through more complex calculations (like Gaussian theory to find the worst case wind event for the next hundred years based on the last 50 years of data at the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky airport, that was my favorite).

Anyhow, I'd be interested to read up on your research. Let me know when it's published and I'll buy a copy.

@Draugnar - I'll interject... purity is key in regards to "weapons-grade"... something may nominally be Pl-239 (or whatever) but be at a lower purity - and thus, not be "weapons-grade" at all.

True, but it still seems that even impure Pl-239, when put in a reactor, would be like pouring nitro-glycerine in your gas tank, hoping to boost your horsepower and praying all the vibrations and the explosion of the fuel-mixture in the cylinders doesn't set it off all at once.

@Draugnar - I don't know anything about Pl-239 but I imagine that those nuclear engineers know exactly what they're doing... trust them. Engineers never make mistakes (see Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Kansas City pedestrian bridge failure, Titanic, Chernobyl, Cypress Structure, Challenger Space Shuttle, Apollo 13, Submarines K-19, Kirsk, Thresher, Scorpion, and Leaning Tower of Pisa).

LOL - how true, DM! I especially love the last one!

Hey! Some engineers are better than others, certainly, but on the whole, I'd say we do a pretty good job... Though it is all trial and error...

They guys I used to work with were some of the best. Of course, my own father was no slouch in his day. He was an NDT engineer developing ultrasonic and eddycurrent probes for everyone from the airlines industry (GE, Boeign, etc) to the racing industry (his company was based out of Noblesville, IN and did all the testing of wheels and engine parts for micro cracks between races and practices).

> All support groups are lying about their technology. However, the
> pro-nuke boys are the worst with lying. This lying is as a
> boomerang, but I distrust all numbers of pro-nuke boys. They
> also continuously attack the renewables."
I hope you don't count me in that, we all want what's best and if I "mis-speak" as Hilary would say it's ignorance. I'm pro-nuclear at the moment because from what I've been told and what I've looked up I think it's best choice, and the reasons to be opposed to it always seem to be myths about safety (usually from renewables supporters, to be honest)


> You make a VERY big mistake. The 9300 is for the whole life
> time. If you take 25 years lifetime, plus 7% interest rate, you
> have to divide the number by 11.7. This means, that the cost is
> comparable with about 900."
True, didn't spot that and it is a very big mistake. It's pretty hard to compare though. That's without maintenance costs and we don't know how long it'll last (I've heard PV has a big problem with losing efficiency over time). 154MW is maximum DC power, how was the energy/year figure estimated and does it factor in bad weather.
Also the energy/year estimate is ~0.1% of Australia's total (and this will be the world's largest solar plant). 154MW sounds fairly impressive but it generates a fraction of the energy a 154MW coal/nuclear plant would generate. Getting just to 20% would cost A$84 billion at that rate, and who knows what ramping up solar to more than 0.1% would do to the cost of PV panels


> Nuclear does not receive much incentives for producing energy
> (this compared to renewables). However, still large amounts of
> money go to nuclear research. Both US and EU research funds
> are half nuclear. The amount that were spend at nuclear in the
> time 1960-1985 to nuclear were much higher than renewables
> now."
I agree that investing in renewables research is a good idea, but with renewables we're already at the point where we're optimizing etc, it's hard to see any breakthroughs coming.
With nuclear there's fusion and breeders, 4th gen reactors with many advantages, the 3rd gen reactor the US are building under nustart can apparently generate hydrogen, it has desalination applications which will be useful for global warming, etc.


> Thorium does have a proliferation problem, because of the
> production of U-233."
That's interesting, I hadn't heard of that yet. But looking it up it does seem to say there are a whole host of issues with the possibility for using it in nuclear weapons. Mentioning the difficulties developing it as a power source without mentioning the difficulties of using it as a weapon is a typical sort of thing that happens when nuclear is debated I find.


> Some of your other numbers are incorrect. $1/watt for nuclear is
> way off of current build reactors. Think more about between $2
> and $3/watt."
Looking up the current estimates I'm seeing $1.5-2/watt given, but MIT and US govt reports have given per kWh figures of 6.7c and 5.9c respectively

France apparently has some of the cheapest power in Europe and exports the surplus, and the US companies which bought up the nuclear plants have shares at an all.

> If you want to battle climate change with nuclear energy, the
> uranium production must be 10-fold in 2050."
Wikipedia is linking me to http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html , which doesn't seem concerned about running out of uranium in the near future.


The main reason I'm suspicious about anti-nuclear stats is that everyone seems to be going for nuclear. Are policy makers the world over really unaware that we'll be out of uranium in 10 years, when some of the reactors being planned will only just be starting? If renewables are viable why do the largest proposed plants output so little energy? If France is out of uranium why did it buy British Power so it could run the UK's nuclear industry, why is it exporting power to its neighbours, why is its electricity so cheap, why is it selling reactors?

We seem pretty confident of a century of nuclear fuel, based on existing known reserves and sensible nuclear adoption scenarios. Why not research in breeders, fusion and renewables in that time period and go for whichever looks best then, instead of wasting time building renewable plants which contribute little energy

Question... when looking to switch away from fossil fuels because there is only 50 or 100 years (or a little more) of fuel left, why go to nuclear fuel when that has 50 or maybe a few hundred years of fuel supply? Why not go to renewable which has... I don't know... a billion years plus of viability? I'm not saying that nuclear doesn't have a place... it just seems foolish to invest only (or even predominantly) in it.

Using breeder reactors we may have over a billion years worth of supply (estimates range from 10,000 to 4 billion years), and using fusion water is the fuel. In these time spans even the sun isn't renewable

Besides since renewables are currently more expensive and may be impractical on large scales we could use the 100+ years of cheap uranium and coal to invest in research that'll make it easier to switch to whatever the best option is when cheap uranium gets pricey. Whether the next-cheapest thing are renewables (which will have become more efficient), breeders, fusion, or something we haven't thought of yet doesn't matter

Hmmmm... I wonder if someone could develop some kind of small tidal/surf electric generator for the home with a lake or pond... I'm thinking a teathered float where the surface "waves" would cause a set of sealed units to move around inside the casing and generate frictional or static electricity. that could be siphoned down through the teather into a power line run to the house. I may have to give one of my electrical engineer friends a ring and see what he could do with the concept. A well insulated and sealed system couod be dropped in the fuel tank of a car and a variation of it could be used to recollect energy from the momentum used when accelerating, braking, and turning.