Nuclear Power: Viable energy or not after the Japanese disaster?

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
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[quote=“yuli”]You might become credible if you would just stop making predictions about the future. :unamused:
We all hope that nothing worse will happen, but most of us are smart enough to know that we are not in control - neither of the situation in Fukushima nor of the future in general…[/quote]
And those people in shelters that have seen whole communities washed away are very much aware how the future can suddenly change. Absolutely. But the problems at the plant are known. The amount and type of fissile material is finite, and it is known. It’s nuclear science. It simply can not get beyond a certain level. It most certainly can make the area within a 20-30km radius almost useless for humans for sometime. That’s the worst case. The China Syndrome was a movie you couldn’t, or rather shouldn’t make today. The Fukushima plant is a shitty old reactor, for sure. But it’s never going to be a Chernobyl (4,000 deaths- I’d add that’s a generous, if that can be stomached in the context, assessment).

As for the viability of nukes. Unquestionable. Two words. China and India, or one if you’re groovy - Chindia. I maybe too glass half full for your taste, yuli-san, but this disaster, which will, mercifully be fairly limited in its destruction, will create even safer nukes. There’s a vast appetite for power, and nothing else much can feed that. The Chinese, for one obvious example, are sick of sucking in the particles from burning tyres to keep plants producing to meet fundamental power demand.

Sorry, that’s a Forumosa historical reference you may not have understood. If you’re vaguely interested, you can search posts by a “Fred Smith.”

Only when I’m deliberately being funny, I hope!

As I mentioned on another thread. Aside from perhaps some lumpy details, we’re actually not that far apart. Apologies if I haven’t appeared to grant you the respect I do think you deserve, by the way. :bow:

By the way, the kowtow thing is cute, but I’d like to see a Thai “wai” (ไหว้) thingee. That’s my current respect meter. if I “wai” somebody, it is genuinely sincere.

The fact that it’s a kid in this pic isn’t really the story. It’s just the most sincere “wai” I can find on an image search. This pic nicely captures that moment when you are supposed to stop and reflect on the purpose for the respect offered. Okay, it’s sort of topical too. I have a Thai daughter growing up and going to an international school here in HK. I’d prefer she perfect here “wai” and not blow it off as some thng of Thailand past. Or by crikey, go down the Canto road.

HG

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But the problems at the plant are known. The amount and type of fissile material is finite, and [quote]it is known. It’s nuclear science. It simply can not get beyond a certain level. It most certainly can make the area within a 20-30km radius almost useless for humans for sometime. That’s the worst case. The China Syndrome was a movie you couldn’t, or rather shouldn’t make today. The Fukushima plant is a shitty old reactor, for sure. But it’s never going to be a Chernobyl (4,000 deaths- I’d add that’s a generous, if that can be stomached in the context, assessment).

As for the viability of nukes. Unquestionable. Two words. China and India, or one if you’re groovy - Chindia. I maybe too glass half full for your taste, yuli-san, but this disaster, which will, mercifully be fairly limited in its destruction, will create even safer nukes. There’s a vast appetite for power, and nothing else much can feed that. The Chinese, for one obvious example, are sick of sucking in the particles from burning tyres to keep plants producing to meet fundamental power demand. [/quote]

There’s the way you precieve things and there is the way it is. One day you will realize that.

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The economics of making nuclear power “cheap”:

“Glowing endorsement”
thedaily.com/page/2011/03/24 … almia-1-2/

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Actually, a youthful dalliance with illicit chemicals drove this particular lesson home quite early in my life. I’ll spare the specifics, but let’s just say that deciding I needed a shave on my first acid trip, wasn’t a good idea.

[quote=“yuli”]The economics of making nuclear power “cheap”: “Glowing endorsement”
thedaily.com/page/2011/03/24 … almia-1-2/[/quote]
Desperation by a government caught on the back foot and requiring a big leap in power output as it rapidly re-industrialised a country, and the only country to have been hit by two nuclear blasts at that. It must have been a very hard sell indeed to get plants into communities.

Silver lining? As I really can’t see the Japanese willing to permanently stumble around Shinjuku in the dark, nukes are going to remain a part of Japanese life for a very long time to come. This event could/will be a catalyst for change. At the very least, all nukes in Japan are going to be beefed up. My greater concern is what some posters have alluded to, and that is, will Taiwan do likewise?

BTW, reading between the lines, that article also explains why I think Tepco shares are massively oversold.

HG

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[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]…There’s a vast appetite for power, and nothing else much can feed that. The Chinese, for one obvious example, are sick of sucking in the particles from burning tyres to keep plants producing to meet fundamental power demand.
HG[/quote]

Nuclear will play a small roll in China’s energy demands in the coming decades. Even by 2030 it’s only expected to be 200 gigawatts of capacity which is what wind is projected to be by 2020. Hydro may reach 400 gigawatts (huge new push into hydro at the moment) by 2020 as well if a rash of new projects that are just getting going come online.

Coal is still going to dominate for decades. That said, the push toward renewables and nuclear has nothing to do with soot and pollution but with China’s very real limits on water. They’d love to keep using cheap coal but there simply isn’t enough water in the country and it’s decreasing each decade because of global warming.

Nuclear is viable but the real lesson in China these days is just how much energy we can get out of wind, solar and hydro. If Canada and the US for example built the same wind capacity as China by 2020, it could supply about 40% of energy needs. But that would require some leadership.

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No surprises there, Mucha Man, that you’re absolutely right. And quite frankly I don’t think the PRC gets enough credit for its huge push into renewables, even if it is simply that it has no other option. Still, despite being relatively small compared to the total grid, nuclear is a growing component of China’s energy plan.

But I would take a slight issue with the tolerance of particle emissions. Those commies are number crunching pragmatists these days, and they are looking at and understanding the impact to the country of fossil-fuel based power. Likewise, they have done the pragmatic thing and put on hold approval for the bigger roll out of nuclear to assess the risks as a result of what’s happened in Japan.

I’m certainly not blinded by commie red coloured glasses, but I do happen to think Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious society” (和諧社會) as the underlying impetus of China’s policies on almost everything is proving very promising.

HG

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Wow! Australia really is the luck country! We got enough sun to fuel the world, and bunnies to spare. Cool! Would be prefect if we can toss in cane toads too! Bunny BioDiesel

HG

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MM You can’t compare renewables except hydro with base load providers such as nuclear/coal/oil, it’s not 1KW : 1KW.
The problem is it takes a large multiple of renewables to cover the same base load, you have to stretch those renewable resources over a vast area and then grid them together, add on the manufacturing components and it puts a heavy demand on our environment, visually and physically. The missing part to me seems to be energy storage, not energy generation.

You are spot on regarding coal. Many people don’t realise that China’s appetite for coal is increasing at the same time that they are increasing renewables, it’s projected to increase for the next two decades. It’s a very worrying trend for them and for us in Asia and worldwide, just thinking of the air borne pollution alone…bad news. I have seen the effects of coal fired plants in Taichung/Changhua, it’s a nasty fuel for power generation and it’s impact is severe on the local environment and health.

I’ve read an account about the impact of vastly multiplying renewables resources worldwide, one researcher said it would have as much as an impact on climate as the current fossil fuel based ones. Basically you would be taking energy from the environment and bringing it to other areas aswell as increasing the amount of heat energy. Sure there are many views on this but it’s something to ponder.

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[quote=“headhonchoII”]MM You can’t compare renewables except hydro with base load providers such as nuclear/coal/oil, it’s not 1KW : 1KW.
The problem is it takes a large multiple of renewables to cover the same base load, you have to stretch those renewable resources over a vast area and then grid them together, add on the manufacturing components and it puts a heavy demand on our environment, visually and physically. The missing part to me seems to be energy storage, not energy generation.

You are spot on regarding coal. Many people don’t realise that China’s appetite for coal is increasing at the same time that they are increasing renewables, it’s projected to increase for the next two decades. It’s a very worrying trend for them and for us in Asia and worldwide, just thinking of the air borne pollution alone…bad news. I have seen the effects of coal fired plants in Taichung/Zhanghua, it’s a nasty fuel for power generation and it’s impact is severe on the local environment and health.

I’ve read an account about the impact of vastly multiplying renewables resources worldwide, one researcher said it would have as much as an impact on climate as the current fossil fuel based ones. Basically you would be taking energy from the environment and bringing it to other areas aswell as increasing the amount of heat energy. Sure there are many views on this but it’s something to ponder.[/quote]

Can you explain how that works then? I assume when the US Department of Energy for example says that 300 gigawatts of wind engery capacity would supply 20% of US enegy needs by 2030, the same would be true of 300 gigawatts of coal power capacity. I coudl well be wrong but I do not see the stats presented in the way you are when general generating capacity is discussed. I understand of course that wind provides variable outputs of energy but when capacity is discussed again I assume that they take this into account and are not merely giving theoretical numbers or possible output but real generating capacity that is kw to kw equal to coal or hydro.

As for the environmental and aethetic aspects, these are way overblown imo. I mean we are perfectly happy to see a new city go up that is essentially square blocks, but a similar sized development of sleek wind turbines is somehow too much to look at?

I’m sure you’ve seen the turbines along taiwan’s west coast. They look better than anything else around them. :laughing: In fact, had we built wind farms instead of half the new suburban developments over the past decade Taiwan would look immensely better.

In China in any case, they are going up in places like Gansu and Jilin, provinces with lots of open land. But yes, coal will generate the bulk of China’s power for decades (and energy needs are slated to double what they are now :noway: ).

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Here is, in a nutshell, an explanation of humans dealing with “risk”:
physicsforums.com/showpost.p … count=2473

And the question of how viable nuclear energy will be for anybody in the future is very much related to this point:

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[quote=“yuli”]“Glowing endorsement”
thedaily.com/page/2011/03/24 … almia-1-2/[/quote]

A related analysis by someone else:
“The incalculable cost of nuclear power”
guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … ower-japan

(Note:
Links on news websites may become unusable or closed to the general public after a while.
To ensure future access to information that is posted here, please download the linked articles to your own computer)

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[quote=“Mucha Man”][quote=“headhonchoII”]MM You can’t compare renewables except hydro with base load providers such as nuclear/coal/oil, it’s not 1KW : 1KW.
The problem is it takes a large multiple of renewables to cover the same base load, you have to stretch those renewable resources over a vast area and then grid them together, add on the manufacturing components and it puts a heavy demand on our environment, visually and physically. The missing part to me seems to be energy storage, not energy generation.

You are spot on regarding coal. Many people don’t realise that China’s appetite for coal is increasing at the same time that they are increasing renewables, it’s projected to increase for the next two decades. It’s a very worrying trend for them and for us in Asia and worldwide, just thinking of the air borne pollution alone…bad news. I have seen the effects of coal fired plants in Taichung/Zhanghua, it’s a nasty fuel for power generation and it’s impact is severe on the local environment and health.

I’ve read an account about the impact of vastly multiplying renewables resources worldwide, one researcher said it would have as much as an impact on climate as the current fossil fuel based ones. Basically you would be taking energy from the environment and bringing it to other areas aswell as increasing the amount of heat energy. Sure there are many views on this but it’s something to ponder.[/quote]

Can you explain how that works then? I assume when the US Department of Energy for example says that 300 gigawatts of wind engery capacity would supply 20% of US enegy needs by 2030, the same would be true of 300 gigawatts of coal power capacity. I coudl well be wrong but I do not see the stats presented in the way you are when general generating capacity is discussed. I understand of course that wind provides variable outputs of energy but when capacity is discussed again I assume that they take this into account and are not merely giving theoretical numbers or possible output but real generating capacity that is kw to kw equal to coal or hydro.

As for the environmental and aethetic aspects, these are way overblown imo. I mean we are perfectly happy to see a new city go up that is essentially square blocks, but a similar sized development of sleek wind turbines is somehow too much to look at?

I’m sure you’ve seen the turbines along Taiwan’s west coast. They look better than anything else around them. :laughing: In fact, had we built wind farms instead of half the new suburban developments over the past decade Taiwan would look immensely better.

In China in any case, they are going up in places like Gansu and Jilin, provinces with lots of open land. But yes, coal will generate the bulk of China’s power for decades (and energy needs are slated to double what they are now :noway: ).[/quote]

MM, I’ll look for some links regarding how capacity is discussed but unfortunately, in almost all cases, wind power figures from the providers thenselves tend to upmarket to thetotal possible generating capacity and they also average it over a year. Major problems occur at peak load times where you could have massive demand but no wind, it happened all over Europe this Winter. To prevent this it is often the case that EXTRA fossil fuel generation must be added to give redundancy in the system, which increases the cost and negates somewhat the positive environmental aspects of renewable energy (in theory again this could allievated somewhat by interconnectors in Europe but I don’t know how effective that would be). Other problems are reliability of the turbines themselves which seems to have improved a lot. The only way to counteract that is to have huge supergrids feeding into each other and transporting energy over long distances (but energy is lost from long distance transmission) or more energy storage (pump hydro storage is the usual one but it involves flooding valleys).

I think everything in moderation, there’s nothing wrong with turbines per se but when their concentration becomes too great and if they dominate formerly pristine scenic areas that would have quite an impact, plus they are noisy if in close proximity and dangerous for birds. All in maybe not too bad but remember how many wind turbines you have to put up to guarantee an equivalent base load to a coal powered station. Basically I don’t think it’s worth putting turbine all along Taiwan’s coasts to generate less than 1% of it’s electricity demand or even 5% of it…trade-off is not worth it wouldn’t you agree. It would simply make more sense to reduce electricity demand by banning further fossil fuel refiniries or steelworks. I think solar power could be big in Taiwan, there are large areas of Tainan/Pingtung/Yunlin that look perfect for it. Microsolar generated power should also be a winner.

Penghu has a massive wind project underway now, Penghu is sitting on wind black gold (with guaranteed strong and constant winds for half the year) and every landowner in Penghu is entitled to stock in the local wind powered electricity generating company. Ultimately it would make sense to cover large parts of the Taiwan straits with wind turbines, as the straits are quite shallow.

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I’ve been saying it for years: solar.

A solar panel on every roof.

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[quote=“yuli”][quote=“yuli”]“Glowing endorsement”
thedaily.com/page/2011/03/24 … almia-1-2/[/quote]

A related analysis by someone else:
“The incalculable cost of nuclear power”
guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … ower-japan[/quote]

From the above-linked article:

And this situation came into being decades ago. I’ve told this story before, but I think it’s worth repeating: I remember, it must have been in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I was reading the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, paper, and I turned to the Op-Ed section, and lo and behold, the paper had come out editorially against nuclear power. I was surprised, because the paper had been pro-nuke before, and it was rumored that the paper’s owner was a substantial investor in a regional utility (power and gas) company. But reading further down the column, the change of editorial opinion made sense: the paper stated that nuclear power was a bad investment.

This was probably about thirty years ago. People say that the plants have gotten better and safer since then (setting aside the fact that there are still active plants that were built back then), but I wonder how much ice that would cut in a situation where the government wasn’t willing to back the nuclear industry up.

[quote]“It is not too much to expect,” Mr. [Lewis L.] Strauss [then Chairman of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission] said, “that our children will enjoy electrical energy in their homes too cheap to meter–will know of great periodical famines in the world only as matters of history–will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast for an age of peace.”

Mr. Strauss speaks with authority, for he knows secrets which most of us cannot even guess.[/quote]–“Atoms for Peace,” Youngstown [Ohio] Vindicator, September 24, 1954

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I believe that 4th gen nuclear power production needs to go on and at an accelerated pace. As DB pointed out in another post, 4G can consume current nuclear waste, therefore helping to clean up the crap from the older technologies, as well as generating new power.

For the last six years, I have been installing Grid-tied solar systems. In that time, I have installed about a megawatt, it is just about a drop in the bucket. It has contributed to R&D though, so not at all a waste. The projects started out as 5 kW at a time, and grew to 40 kW for my last install. I am currently back in the states doing the engineering work for proposals for a few solar farms at 5mW each.

Solar still needs quite a bit of R&D, and the price point needs to drop a bit before it really becomes viable.
As a semi-conductor product, I hope that it follows the trend of memory chips, and that the price of production drops as the quantity increases.
2 kW on every home would start to contribute, but you still need some other sources of generation for when the sun is not shining.

Edit: I should add that 2kW is not nearly enough to power a whole home. Most houses do not have enough area to support all of their power needs with solar alone. Add to that all of the high rises in Asia, and you can see that not every apartment can even use solar.

Fuel cells are promising, but also need much more R&D work. Transporting hydrogen safely, and the price point of the membranes need to come down drastically before they will contribute much.

Right now, I think we need some more 4th gen Nukes in our portfolio. The quicker the better.

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OT, but your post had slipped out of sight. Nice picture, that. In real life i use at times a gesture like that for “thanks” - picked it up from friends who often spend time in India…

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Well, this is perhaps a perspective you are not familar with, but that talk about 4G nuclear reactors is to me just like another version of “toys for the boys”. :wink:
It’s a stereotype, alright, but men seem as much in love with “power” as ever: all they dream up seems to work along the lines of “big” and “hard” and “strong”.

Where is the creativity to think about small, soft, smart, subtle technology? About elegant processes that reduce the need for, and dependency on, materials, machines, and money?
No room for technology - a “logos of techne”, an art/science of skillful processes - as opposed to an amassing of expensive and dangerous machines?

And “everybody” starts from the assumption that humans will need more energy in the future - why?

As i see it, advanced civilizations (advanced in comparison to what we are familiar with) would require and use less energy, not more.
Advanced civilizations would also require fewer material resources, because they would use the available resources more efficiently and effectively.
Advanced civilizations would not produce any waste - an unthinkable concept?

We pride ourselves of our individual freedom, but this freedom depends on countless gadgets and an expensive infrastructure supporting them.
But as humans we are as interdependent as ever, we have simply replaced direct human interaction with gadget(machine)-mediated interaction.

We call all that “progress”, but future generations may well call us unrefined, deluded, self-important gluttons…

But perhaps fundamental considerations of this nature are really off topic? :no-no:

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Yuli, you are ignoring the difference that electricity and energy makes to our lives. It was cheap energy from oil and coal that ultimately brought the masses up from living hand to mouth.
A simple concept is horsepower, the power that 1 horse can provide. In the old days you would need a horse for transportation, ploughing and milling. To feed that horse took a large amount of resources. In fact there weren’t enough fields to keep a lot of horses and grow food crops at the same time. Basically the large mass of humans were not able to progress beyond this poor existence through lack of energy resources. There was no real increase in living standards for thousands of years (as far as I can see), until the 19th/20th century.
The fact is that there are still billions of humans living hand to mouth, should we doom them to a life of abject poverty too?
Yes it would be better if there were not so many humans in the world but who do we vote off first, ourselves?

It’s also an inescapable fact that our technological advances require energy. There is a force called entropy that drives many reactions in the universe, it is the movement of order to disorder (or how your bedroom always gets messy overtime but never tidies itself up). You need energy to put order back into the system and actually do work. With the development of smart devices the order (ordering information, processing and delivering information) we will require more and more energy to power our connected world.
You can notice this trend clearly by the large amount of heat emitted by electronic devices, this is due to their increased computational power and their need for more energy. The same can be seen with a smartphone as compared to a bog standard mobile phone. They use their batteries faster and burn ‘hotter’.

Even if some of us decrease energy use the large majority of the world will increase energy use (in both developed/developing nations), no matter any wishful thinking on rich peoples part. So the priority must be to expand energy supplies to keep up.

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Well, in the case of India and China, and vast swathes of the so called developing world there’s this thing called urbanisation. It’s alright for you, since you can choose to opt in or out of the grid, but for some, that’s as appealing as neon lights. Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m as much a conservative as the next first worlder, but I simply can’t find it within myself to condemn millions to grass huts and candles when they aspire to warm showers and some degree of regulation over their environment.

[quote=“yuli”]As i see it, advanced civilizations (advanced in comparison to what we are familiar with) would require and use less energy, not more.
Advanced civilizations would also require fewer material resources, because they would use the available resources more efficiently and effectively.
Advanced civilizations would not produce any waste - an unthinkable concept?

We pride ourselves of our individual freedom, but this freedom depends on countless gadgets and an expensive infrastructure supporting them.
But as humans we are as interdependent as ever, we have simply replaced direct human interaction with gadget(machine)-mediated interaction.

We call all that “progress”, but future generations may well call us unrefined, deluded, self-important gluttons…

But perhaps fundamental considerations of this nature are really off topic? :no-no:[/quote]
No, I think it cuts to the core, no pun intended. I’m pleased to see you fess up to the position you’ve been presenting the Fukishima incident from the outset.

A few posts back we had comment from a person fitting out solar panels. Yes there have been big leaps, but there are major hurdles to that providing anything like what’s required to make stuff like steel, for example.

Chris commented that solar panels on every roof was one answer, and as pretty as that scene is, it omits a key point - the making of polysilicon wafers for solar panels is an energy sucking process which solar makers themselves don’t bother attempting! The power to make solar panels comes from the dirty old grid, by necessity.

As I mentioned elsewhere, my biggest problem with nuke power is that it’s so wasteful. Mind you it’s wasteful with one eye on the future. they store the nuke waste with half a mind to how it can be re-used when the technology improves. Presently a mere 10% of the potential energy of nuclear material is used, and that means the dumping of a 90% rich source is the norm, and therefore hazardous. I’m hoping we can find a way to gobble that all up. 4 Gen nukes are the way ahead, and the impetus (demand) is unstoppable.

So are nukes viable? Bloody oath. They are a certainty. Like it or lump it.

HG

Edit: Just saw headhonchoII’s post. Similarly themed, but better argued.

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I missed this when published, and if it’s been cited here, missed it again.

[quote=“George Monbiot”]
How the Fukushima disaster taught me to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd March 2011

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three-Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I’m not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
[…]
Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.[/quote]I appreciate where he’s coming from, but expect the results? NIMBY writ large.

Btw, that article cause many people to go nuts. Here is a follow up.