Zero Carbon Energy Production

Emotions don't have to be logical.

Not to mention when you have capital assets sitting by idly, you are losing money.

Energy storage systems. Well the state Gov is installing a 500MW battery incendiary in the area where there is a coal fired power station of nominally 1855MW.

Do the maths, the power station runs 24/7 but pick a day where 1855Mw is generated in an hour. The battery can only supply power for .27of an hour or 16.17minutes but if we apply the 20% to 80% battery limitation then 9.7 minutes is all that can be obtained.

The cost of this fake backup storage is 500 million dollars which could be better used on base load power maintenance or put towards another boiler/turbine unit. Green energy scam propped up by subsidies.

Is this where you can say "Someone sold them a bill of goods."

I believe what they were sold is what we in the DCS world used to call Vapour Ware, it is coming, don't know the cost, don't know the outcome but it will come.

I should note that the gov are upgrading the storage to 1GW or 15min of power.

Renewable; no, We Know A Bull.

Let's go back to the second sentence of the third paragraph of #8: We have already produced enormous amounts of weapons-grade fissile material during the paranoid madness of the cold war.

In the process of producing that weapons-grade material, we also produced much much more Uranium-238. Remember that U-235 is about .71% of natural uranium!That means that roughly 99% was U-238.

In a Gen IV (fast) nuclear reactor that huge amount of U-238 will become fuel, as will thorium and the highly radioactive and long-lived transuranic nuclides produced in today's thermal nuclear reactors. This is about 100 times more energy with resulting waste that is much less radioactive and much shorter half-lives. And remember that thorium is more abundant than uranium.

The shorter the half-life the greater the radioactivity, as the nuclei are decaying faster

Someone read my opinion.

One of the main problems with nuclear is the perception by the public. Radiation!!! Bad!!! Some background why we are told that radiation is bad is in this article: The Troubled History of Cancer Risk Assessment The effects of radiation depend on the dose rate, not the total dose.

Interesting that just last week the EU spokesperson stated that Europe does not have enough electricity as they miscalculated wind power and solar and now urgently require 4 billion euro investment to cover the the deficit of power by adding more turbines across the landscape.

We learn nothing, so we now add more rubbish to the land to view and everyone wants power lines buried and pylons removed as they are unsightly to look at, running across the landscape. We replace the pylons with wind turbines. Where are the complainers and advocates for removing overhead lines now?

There is an article that uses a very similar title: Why I Changed My Mind. It was written in Aug, 2021, by Ron Gester who is a retired geologist & physician. It is 10 pages of text and graphics documenting why he changed his mind about nuclear power. I first became aware of this in the Aug, 2021, issue of the SCGI News Bits. SCGI is Science Council for Global Initiatives.

Wade Allison has written at least 2 books that apply to this topic. Wade is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. The titles are: Radiation and Reason, The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear. and Nuclear is for Life, A Cultural Revolution. Both address the now disproven LNT (Linear, No Threshold) theory. Radiation and Reason has a longer discussion and presents that low doses of radiation probably are beneficial--think chemotherapy for treatment of cancers where low doses attack the cancer, but high doses are poison.

Nuclear generation of hydrogen demonstrates the ability to store clean energy from a clean source and reduced nat gas use in Peaker plants and other uses...

......"Power-to-Power Hydrogen Demonstration Involving Largest U.S. Nuclear Plant Gets Federal Funding...

Palo Verde Generating Station, a 4-GW nuclear power plant in Arizona, is gearing up to produce hydrogen from a low-temperature electrolysis (LTE) system, and that hydrogen will then be used to fuel a natural gas–fired power plant owned by Arizona Public Service (APS). The innovative power-to-power demonstration led by PNW Hydrogen is set to receive $20 million in federal funding, including $12 million from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (HFTO) and $8 million from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).

The funding formally kicks off the demonstration, which will involve multiple stakeholders in research, academia, industry, and state-level government. On a federal level, that includes Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the Idaho Falls-sited laboratory that is becoming a central hot spot for nuclear integration research and development, as well as the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The Electric Power Research Institute, along with Arizona State University, and the University of California, Irvine will also collaborate on the project. These entities have been vocally supportive of the DOE’s June 7–launched Energy Earthshots Initiative, which aims to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per kilogram (kg) over the next 10 years.

....

‘Pink’ Hydrogen Could Demonstrate Nuclear Versatility

Because the Arizona demonstration is part of a larger nuclear industry-led effort to explore hydrogen’s future role for nuclear in renewables-saturated power markets, it will also involve input from members of a utility consortium, which are already working with INL on nuclear-hydrogen integrated systems.

The consortium includes Energy Harbor, which in September 2019 kicked off a two-year project to demonstrate a 1- to 3-MWe LTE unit at its Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station near Toledo, Ohio.

It also includes Xcel Energy, which in October 2020 got $10 million to explore hydrogen production using high-temperature steam electrolysis likely at its Prairie Island nuclear plant in Minnesota.

Though the consortium does not include Exelon, the company that owns the nation’s largest nuclear fleet is also exploring low-temperature proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis at its Nine Mile Point nuclear plant in New York under a federal cost-shared agreement."...

https://www.powermag.com/power-to-power-hydrogen-demonstration-involving-largest-u-s-nuclear-plant-gets-federal-funding/?oly_enc_id=1249D9862912F8V

What would happen if the hydrogen step were skipped? Instead, going directly the generation of electrical power? I suspect better efficiency and certainly less complication.

You miss the point entirely, it's a storage method for storing energy, a battery of sorts...

Why store energy from a base load generator, which can be turned up and down to match demand?

I thought the characteristic of a base-load generator is that it can't be quickly turned up or down.

..."Terrestrial Energy Launches 390-MW Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Design...

Terrestrial Energy has unveiled an upgraded 390-MWe design of its Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) power plant to meet utility requirements and boost its cost-competitiveness as part of an effort to ramp up its candidacy for deployment at Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG’s) Darlington Nuclear Generating Station. This week, the Canadian firm also announced a series of developments that could further its bid to commercialize the Generation IV small modular reactor (SMR) technology and begin operating its first plant by 2028.

Simon Irish, CEO of the Oakville, Ontario–based technology developer, said Terrestrial’s upgraded IMSR power plant design, the IMSR400, pairs two 195-MWe IMSRs. It draws on technology “developed and demonstrated over many decades,” but it “has the efficiency, economics, and flexibility to play a major role in the clean energy transition including the production of clean hydrogen at industrial scale,” he said.".....

..."Originally rolled out as a 195-MWe plant, the IMSR garnered industry fascination because it is a Generation IV molten-salt reactor that operates at 700C. It supplies its steam turbines with superheated steam at 600C, which potentially raises the system’s fuel efficiency to up to 48%.

As Irish has explained to POWER: “A conventional reactor is stuck in the mid-30s, and if it’s a small conventional reactor, it may not achieve 30% at all,” said Irish. “If you operate at a much higher temperature, you can make power much more efficiently and you can do many more things with your nuclear reactor. You can provide high-quality industrial heat that can be used in industrial process applications that are very different compared to the steam generated electric power provision—which is pretty much the sole activity of nuclear energy today.” " ...

https://www.powermag.com/terrestrial-energy-launches-390-mw-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-design/

Nothing needs to be exclusive. Big solar and wind farms (on or off-shore) can have adverse environmental and ecological effects of their own, We are yet to see a full product life cycle. We should revert to hydel and nuclear which are known devils. And CCS could be the dark horse, let us not jettison it yet.

Just about everything has some risk. There's lots of risks in transportation. However, those risks are not catastrophic like nuclear waste. Keep researching nuclear power until there are no spent rods to store or at least, only store them for only, say, 50 years.

So you demand a perfect solution....meanwhile Rome is burning

In theory, high level nuclear waste could be stored in an insulated container and the heat from radiation could be harnessed to provide steam and electric power.

This would make use of one of the radioactive byproducts of nuclear, but doesn't deal with low level radioactive waste.

Steam?!

No. If the heat production of low-level radioactive byproducts were so high as to boil water, then power production by this method would have been done long ago. A Sterling engine probably could harvest some of the thermal energy from decay. However, I would expecct the yield to be low and probabably unprofitable.

Why not use a Gen IV (fast) nuclear reactor? Then there would be much less (maybe 100 times) waste and, I expect, very little high level waste because it has been fissioned to make energy for our use. A fast reactor uses unmoderated neutrons to fission U238, thorium, and the high-level "waste" elements.

I was discussing the idea of using the heat from the nuclear decay of high-level waste, not the idea of Gen IV reactor power production.

My concern with Gen IV reactors is that they are still in the research phase. Some of the touted advantages of Gen IV will certainly become just wishful thinking. The unexpected consequences are still unknown. Don't get me wrong, we need new nuclear power production techniques. We also need to be cautious when making any nuclear power production.

I think the Gen IV reactors are ready to come out of the research phase, but (in my opinion) the regulators are preventing it by being over cautious. I also think the "unexpected consequences" have pretty much been discovered since the fast reactor type has been around since the 1950s. I was in the EBR-I after it had been mothballed in the 1960s. I think EBR-II was operating at the Idaho Nat'l Lab by then. These were both cooled by liquid sodium. They did many experiments with various scenarios including loss-of-coolant, and I think the reactor just shut down.

What about hydroelectric. It has the huge advantage of being "demand driven".

I know that it has a bad reputation for damaging ecologies, but, if you started a project with the goal to create ecologies you could at least end up neutral on that front.

I must be missing something here: nearly all hydro projects look like this

Surely this (ignoring the type of turbine shown here, any would do)

Could be improved vastly by doing this

Just put the reservoir half way up the mountain and the turbine at the bottom.

What am I missing here?

Your missing the complex simplicity and common sense some have, not many I add, and the catch phrases the word now operates on. Throw in some fear mongering, a hint of ambiguity that the world will end in 12 days and your idea and drawing will make sense to all. You need to do some marketing as well and utilise fear.

I think what you are missing is how one gets enough water up the mountain and into your higher reservoir. River-based hydroelectric plants use rainwater that is gathered over a much larger area than just one mountain.

With the Hydro idea one could build storage tanks on top of high cliffs near the sea and use wind power to pump sea water into the tanks as storage, the let the water go back into the sea to generate power. Of course like anything there are engineering issues like the harsh corrosive environment.

I built my own off grid system with batteries, 4KW solar and 10Kwhr 48V back up battery its been going now for 4 years. My biggest problem is the cost of storage battery technology is very expensive. Generating the power is now not a problem with PV the cost has come done incredibly to something like 30 cents per peak watt.

I think fossil fuels will still be around 2050 but we will not be using as much. Will we ever solve this problem ? I really do not know I hope we can

I think you're right. A google search for highest rivers didn't yield anything

Wyoming and Colorado look promising

Yellowstone lake is at 2357 meters and the yellowstone river carries 390 m³/s.

If you took a quarter of that (100 m³/s) down a pipeline to 357 m You'd have 200 Megawatts of potential energy.

That's one half of it, the other is the turbine will be as low as possible to maximise the head difference, but has to be high enough for the discharge water to get away.

Wind turbines, bigger and bigger...

...""We need to make sure it's a sustainable race for everyone in the industry," says Ms Nasse, as she points out the need for larger harbours, and the necessary equipment and installation vessels required to bring today's huge turbine components offshore.

Then there's the hefty investments required to get to that point. "If you look at the financial results of the [manufacturers], basically none of us make money anymore," explains Ms Nasse. "That's a big risk.""...

..."But surely there are limits to how large these structures can get? They are already mind-boggling. Each blade on Vestas' 15MW turbine is 115.5m (379ft) long - nearly as long as London's Centre Point tower is high. The turbine itself has a rotor diameter of 236m (London's tallest building, The Shard, is 310m tall)."...

..."However, current turbine designs have a maximum speed for the blade tip of around 90m/s, or 324km/h (201mph), says Prof Hogg, which has a "big effect on the overall aerodynamics of the blade.""...

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58704792

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/samuel-miller-mcdonald-nuclear-power-our-best-bet-against-climate-change

"New York (CNN Business)...In a blow to the climate movement, US power companies are ramping up their coal consumption due to surging natural gas prices.

US coal-fired generation is expected to surge by 22% in 2021, the US Energy Information Administration said Monday. That would mark the first annual increase in coal-fired electric power generation since 2014, the EIA said. ... In recent years, utilities ditched coal because of concerns about the climate crisis and due to the abundance of very cheap natural gas.

US coal consumption fell in 2019 for the sixth straight year, dropping to the lowest level since 1964, as natural gas prices fell to record lows. Yet this trend has reversed in recent months because natural gas prices have spiked, making coal more competitive."...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/18/business/coal-power-climate-crisis/index.html

Why do I get the feeling it was never about any perceived climate crisis...?

With the La Palma volcano still carrying on there is not much sense these days with worrying about the CO2 emissions, so they may as well carry on sensibly and run the stations. By the time we worry about the coal fired stations, the volcano will have provided enough pollution, noxious gases and more to replace that which we seem to think we have saved.

Humans seems to love catch phrases and saving everything. We forget that quite a few times nature has made human life and animal life extinct. This is not a new phenomenon to us. The climate has changed many times over the life of planet earth and it will continue to change. That is how nature works.

The good side is that at least many will now have that addiction to energy resolved.

I recall that for years many people objected to power lines running across the landscape sighting them as unsightly and a scar on the countryside. There was a revolution to have all power lines buried where possible to please the folks complaining and save the environment and wild life. Of course burying cables is a very expensive project and about 4 times more expensive than overhead lines. Overhead lines carry higher amperage than buried cables.

The gist being, if those people who wanted the power lines under-grounded such that they can enjoy a free view of the country side, why are these very same people not complaining about solar farms and wind farms blighting the country side?

I don't hear Greta Thunberg advocating for the clear view of the landscape when she was very vocal about the mine that was being opened in her hometown and she did not want to see mine tailings and headgear blighting her view of the forest.

Blighting is in the eye of the beholder. Where some see blight others see beauty.

Case in point: When driving across the high plains of west Texas, the multitudes of wind mills gave me something to look at, but I could easily see a rancher spittin' mad that the beauty of the endless horizon is now cluttered up with a bunch of spinning junk.

Much the same way when I rounded the corner of a winding mountain road in rural New Hampshire and there on the peak a small mountain was this garish spinning monstrosity defiling the beauty of the mountains. And others will see a climate-saving ballet of svelte machines saving the planet with their whisper quiet swooshes of their long, beautiful arms knocking eagles dead right out of the air.

We all have our NIMBY biases.

...and just behind the mountain, hidden from the eye, a vast graveyard of fallen turbine blades, having served a useful life now destined to languish peacefully until some inquisitive soul from a distant future world excavates the landscape with a college grant looking for signs of past civilizations, only to find the boneyard of relics lying undisturbed these many generations later...

Pay no attention to the man behind the 'green' curtain.

Off-topic! Interesting to me is the bolting used on the flange joint. For transmission poles we used 2.25" high strength rods into the concrete foundation; by memory, those anchor rods were 104 ksi yield. These are a series of much smaller bolts, perhaps A325 or stronger.

I don't see anything in that picture that one can guess the size of anything else. To my eyes, the inner hole could be the size of a manhole opening or just a tiny inspection hole for a borescope. What clue tells you the size of those bolts or studs?

The number of them.

This is part of a picture from an article with the same picture

Looking at the size of the man in the 'dozer, I'd say that the base of the blades are about 3m in diameter.

So I make the bolts about (10/600 x 3000 = 50) 2" in diameter

Anchor bolt size...

• common size 1 3/8” (35mm) • rare: large loads 1 ¾” (46mm)

Huh?

All these bolts are protruding by almost exactly the same same length. Why don't they just make the bolts the right length then pot the whole base in an oil based gel and add a rigid top?

Simples

"MPI Offshore, an offshore installation service firm owned by Van Oord, last week accidentally dropped three wind turbine blades into the sea, while conducting scheduled maintenance at Vattenfall's Ormonde wind farm in the Irish Sea, off the UK.

According to the Kingfisher incident report, MPI Offshore's MPI Adventure jack-up vessel last week jacked up alongside Ormonde B01 wind turbine and dropped three 61 m turbine blades and a blade clamping tool weighing 3000-3100kg overboard."

Oops...

https://www.oedigital.com/news/491518-jack-up-vessel-drops-turbine-blades-overboard-at-vattenfall-s-ormonde-offshore-wind-farm

I have limited issues with nuclear waste disposal - I see (and feel) the effects of air pollution caused by coal-fired power plants where I live, as well as the mountains of waste left behind, and we all love the scars left by strip-mining (not). (A study found that our monopoly utility is the world's most polluting company, causing >2 000 premature deaths annually in the Highveld due to high SO₂ levels.) So nuclear isn't perfect, probably no system is, so what?

The problem seems that, apart from being subsidised as in some places, nuclear power plants end up being rather expensive and prone to cost and time overruns (in "democratic" countries anyway). So my take as an electricity consumer would be "what is the c/kWh you're charging me". Therefore, get the proposer of the nuclear power station to put their money where their mouths are and build it and provide power at the indicated cost to customers. If they have a 50% cost overrun, sorry for them but not my problem, I still only pay what the business case initially stated. This is how renewable energy is treated here, and I expect no less of any other new source of electrical energy, be that renewable, fossil, nuclear, whatever.

There are of course other factors at play, but this is an important consideration.

Most of the cost is generated by compliance and permitting costs...They used to be cheap to build, but the cost is artificially inflated due to scare tactics used by those opposed to nuclear...

..."How misguided that view seems now, with the advantage of decades of experience. The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million."...Apr 28, 2014

https://thebulletin.org/2014/04/the-rising-cost-of-decommissioning-a-nuclear-power-plant/#:~:text=How%20misguided%20that%20view%20seems,%2439%20million%E2%80%94cost%20%24608%20million

...".How much does it cost to construct a nuclear power plant?

Projected Nuclear Power Plant Construction Costs Are Soaring
Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant."...

https://www.synapse-energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePaper.2008-07.0.Nuclear-Plant-Construction-Costs.A0022_0.pdf

There are those that realize the threat of the build up of spent nuclear rods and there are those that believe it's OK in order to have cheap energy now for us. They believe the spent rod threat will go away like VD.

The king cobra can kill you the fastest of any snake — in less than 10 minutes.

..."An estimated 1.2 million people have died from snake bites in India in the past 20 years, a new study has found."...

I guess some people have bigger fish to fry....

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53331803

Impressive though that is, it pales in comparison to the tiny mosquito, which kills nearly a million people a year...

Nuclear energy = 0.07 deaths per year

Deaths from the boogie man = 0

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

An unexploded nuclear bomb kills no one. An exploded nuclear bomb kills millions.

Stored spent rods kills no one. Busted open stored spent rods kills billions.

Busted open spent rods = cleanup = kills no one

You're obvious hysterical fear of all things nuclear shows in your estimates...

We're not talking bombs here. A nuclear reactor cannot be a bomb. We're discussing energy production.

No. The nuclear reactor is not a bomb. It produces a situation that can react like a bomb. Natural or manmade destruction of the storage of the highly radioactive nuclear spent rods produces the same effects of a nuclear bomb. The nuclear energy advocates will not say how many tons of the spent rods will accumulate over the next 100 years if a way to neutralize them isn't developed. All they can do is call people like me fanatics or worse because they won't state the amount of nuclear waste that will pile up in the next 100 years. What about the next 500 years? Huh? Calling people names means you haven't nothing else.

situation that can react like a bomb

Please explain how a storage facility can react to produce the concussive effect of a bomb.

In a nuclear explosion nearly all of the deaths are caused by burning, like 90%, the rest flying debris...

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-unesco-forests-emit-co2.html

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-unesco-reveals-largest-carbon-australian.html

Another bombshell. Even the forests are revolting. And it all the fault of humans. When Nature was asked for comment, she denied all knowledge stating is was a nefarious plot to destroy her reputation.

However, there are stores in Australia waiting for the release date of the latest deposits. We could soon be breathing dinosaur breath.

Can you tell us how many tons of turbine blades will be landfilled in the next 100 years and any unintended consequences from that? What about solar panels? What about lithium batteries? How many tons of toxic waste will the "green energy" leftovers produce? Millions? Billions? Trillions? You live in a fantasy bubble produced by ignorance and denial...There is no such thing as clean energy...

I have always wondered why nuclear waste wasn't put in an insulated container so the heat from the radiation could raise steam and generate power. Of course this only applies to high level wastes so doesn't completely solve the disposal problem, but it could mitigate it.

On decommissioned ‘conventional’ nuclear power stations. There have been discussions what to do with the properties. Going on ever since the decommission. I believe the nuclear waste are still stored there wait to be transported to the disposal site.

even developing the site for a Molten Salt reactor. It’s a pretty interesting read.

it quite interesting, this reactor had help keep my tax base down with properties I own in Kewaunee.

I’m curious to see what it could lead up do

A problem with renewables is the cost of decommissioning when it's service life is over.

In the case of wind turbines there are damaged (not biodegradable) blades as a continuing load on the environment. At end of life the tower materials are recyclable as is most of the generating component.

In the case of solar cells, apparently very little is recyclable.

In addition most of the calculations of it's cost for solar farms leaves out the cost of lost production of arable land taken up by the farm.

Renewables are not the "free energy" claimed and have environmental costs.

Well, the energy is free, but the cost to harvest it is huge.

Also, consider that I suspect most solar and wind projects are sold on their "label" capacity. However, the year-'round production is about 1/3 of the label capacity because of the intermittency.

Crops can and are (in some places) still grown under solar panels.

Agree crops can be grown under some solar farms, but machine farming is difficult, so large scale farming is difficult.

in addition most of these are in grain cropping areas where machine use is necessary to economically farm. This is difficult, if not impossible, with solar farms.

There is no such thing as Zero Carbon Energy ! Even Wind Turbines are one of the biggest environmental pollutors.

Did you know that the biggest Offshore Wind Turbines contain 1 Ton of Rare Earth used in the Magnets and about 8.2 tons of Copper ?
Onshore Turbines are smaller and only contain around 5 tons of Copper.
90% of the Wind Turbines are produced in China using dirty power from coal .
After a Lifespan of 20 years the Turbine is finished and has to be replaced.
So as China now owns around 75% of the world's rare earth materials we can easily be held to ransom from a cost point of view or who knows what the Chinese built into the system, example a "Kill Switch" Boom no wind power for the civilised world !
We need to be looking at H2 as a soluton, takes a natural product that is available everywhere, processes it, extracts energy and returns the product in its natural state.
Hydrogen can be produced at local facilities and stored and also dispensed where its manufactured so no major distribution network needed.