TSMC has bought the entire output of one of the off-shore wind power projects.
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Google bought a bunch of solar power as well.
What is this?
hooked up to hog farms and night markets, unlimited renewables!
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Maybe good for the east coast and southern west coast
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They’re using pig poop?
That’s like aliens using Al Bundy’s socks for rocket fuel.
/sarcasm, sorry.
The problem with wind power is the turbines are often at sea and demand is in urban areas often away from the sea where diesel generators are often used. Getting it onshore and having updated infrastructure to transport it long distances on the grid is very pricey.
Often good for local communities near the turbines but as a real country-wide solution globally? Fossil fuels ain’t going nowhere.
Not against it, but not practical in many places. In Taiwan, it could be practical
Nobody… not even Greta would want to live near to any kind of power plant, renewable or conventional.
People use high voltage cable infrastucture.
Or even there is an alternative to convert electricity to hydrogen, and transport it.
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10B NTD annually to import uranium fuel rods from the US
To give the meaning to this figure let’s compare it to the cost of coal bought yearly by Taiwan:
- Taiwan consumes 72,649,581 Tons (short tons, “st”) of Coal per year as of the year 2016.
- Taiwan ranks 14th in the world for Coal consumption, accounting for about 6.4% of the world’s total consumption of 1,139,471,430 tons.
Coal Price Forecast | Is Coal a Good Investment?’%20price%20targets,2023%20and%20%24250%20in%202024.
Assume ~100USD per tonne for 2016
72,649,581 Tons * 100 USD/ tonne * 30NT/USD = 217B NTD yearly!
Taiwan paid in 2016 21x per coal what it pays for nuclear fuel.
2022 coal price is 328 USD/t (3x higher than 2016)
Taiwan electrical production 2017:
coal (46.6%), natural gas (34.6%), nuclear (8.3%)
Energy produced: Coal / nuclear = 5.6x
Cost Coal/ nuclear: 21x
Nuclear fuel is 21/5.6 = x3.75 cheaper than coal for Taiwan.
Sounds like a very good deal!
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Again, not accounting for costs after energy production.
When talking about minimizing energy dependency due to the threat of a PRC blockade, coal, natural gas, and nuclear are all pretty terrible options.
Like I’ve mentioned many times before, I’m not against all nuclear energy, I’m just against uranium/plutonium based fission since Taiwan’s geology is unsuited to guarantee both the safety of that kind of nuclear plant as well as spent fuel and waste storage.
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Ever seen Taiwans housing? Loads of people live next to plants. be it energy, chemical or otherwise. Money trumps health more often than not. That said, I would far rather a solar roof and start wasting less than live next to a coal plant.
Not true at all. Modern designs cannot meltdown. It’s impossible, even worst case. And the clay beds in the sea are the perfect place to dispose of waste if you decide not to just store it locally in casks, which isn’t an issue either because the amount of waste is minute.
With breeder reactors and reprocessing, you don’t need to import fuel often either
Which ones? If you are talking about needing energy to prevent a meltdown, then it’s not suitable for an volcanic eruption, earthquake, typhoon, and tsunami prone place like Taiwan. If you are talking about the fission automatically shuts down without any kind of intervention, then you are not talking about uranium based fission. That’s why I said I will be fine with molten salt thorium based nuclear power plant, or breeders, but no thanks to restarting nuclear power plant 4.
No thanks. Leave the ocean out of it.
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It’s also illegal.
Guy
Gotcha, I missed that. But I’d keep number 4 too and just update the design.
Wouldn’t seabed geomorphology pose a risk for waste to be released? Say waste being near subduction zones, and sea floor drift causes the disturbance and release of this waste. Or are you saying the waste is so minute it wouldn’t matter if it was released into the ocean?
Seems like underground on land rather than in the seabed might be safer.
Radionuclides have a high affinity for clay, so even if they escaped the casks they would be stuck. These clay beds remain undisturbed (geologically stable) for hundreds of millions of years and the area is lifeless. Almost zero carbon per square meter. Subduction would just bury it deeper.
There was a natural nuclear reactor that ran unchecked for a few hundred thousand years and the radionuclides only migrated about 15 feet I think. Any fear of dumping waste there is scientifically unsound. It’s the best scenario using probabilistic risk analysis. The biggest objection is burying all that good waste that can probably be reused or used for something else in the future.