While it has many of the characteristics you quote, it simply is not feasible everywhere for baseload energy. Without nuclear to replace fossil fuels for base flow where solar/wind etc is not feasible, you are talking about 50% of the US covered.
While it has many of the characteristics you quote, it simply is not feasible everywhere for baseload energy. Without nuclear to replace fossil fuels for base flow where solar/wind etc is not feasible, you are talking about 50% of the US covered.
Yea, alternative/renewable energy advocates pretty much ignore (or to be charitable - are ignorant of) baseload and grid stability. But I guess we'll find out how that works out in a few years. The Diablo Canyon shutdown will be a huge test, especially considering California already has rolling brownouts when it is hot.
Diablo Canyon is the state’s only operating nuclear power plant; three others are in various stages of being decommissioned. The plant provides about 9% of California’s power, according to the California Energy Commission, compared with 37% from natural gas, 33% from renewables, 13.5% from hydropower, and 3% from coal.
“The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is an incredible, marvel of technology, and has provided clean, affordable and reliable power to Californians for almost four decades with the capability to do it for another four decades,” Ed Halpin, who was the Chief Nuclear Officer of PG&E from 2012 until he retied in 2017, told CNBC.
“Diablo can run for 80 years,” Halpin told CNBC. “Its life is being cut short by at least 20 years and with a second license extension 40 years, or four decades.”
^^^^ I know nothing about cold fusion but I remember the excitement 30 years ago. Your post prompted me to see if Wikipedia had anything new about it. It does, but I’m afraid I saw nothing encouraging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
I believe solar will replace all other energy sources over time.
* The cost of solar is going down and down.
* It does not leak radiation like the quite expensive to run nuclear plants
* It does not pollute like the coal, gas and oil plants
* It does not explode now and then like hydrogen filling stations and production plants do
* It is not costly to maintain like wind power stations
* They can be located on roofs and be almost invisible unlike wind mills and nuclear plants
I'm far from an expert on these things.
I've always been a fan of nuclear but I Fukoshima and a better understanding of Chernobyl have dramatically lowered my enthusiasm. The risks are infrequent but potentially destructive on a scale to impact 10s-of-millions when they happen. Its so big as to be un-insurable. To quote Jurrassic Park: "God help us, we're in the hands of engineers."
......
I'm far from an expert on these things.
I've always been a fan of nuclear but I Fukoshima and a better understanding of Chernobyl have dramatically lowered my enthusiasm. ...
The Chernobyl reactors were a special design using highly enriched uranium in a graphite moderator-and as we learned from studying the event-the accident could only have happened with this type of design. The reactors were created to produce weapons grade plutonium for the Soviet military forces along with electricity for commercial use. They were difficult to operate and required constant adjustment to remain stable.
... As an investment, it is just such a political minefield that I would fear to tread there. ...
... I'm no genius on baseload, but my gut says that some combination of multi-source renewables, distributed energy generation, storage and gas generators that come up to supplement renewables when necessary will end up being the answer...punctuated by occassional electrical shortages. ...
... A carbon tax will ultimately tip the scale because the above will be a better financial arrangement than running fossil fuels 24x7 and paying the tax.
Fukoshima was not a design fault of the power plant, but a result of the tsunami that hit it.
Nobody stopped drilling for oil due to the Deepwater horizon oil spill, the largest spill in history by BP. Only part of it ever got "cleaned up", the rest is just distributed all over and not talked about.
^^^^ I know nothing about cold fusion but I remember the excitement 30 years ago. Your post prompted me to see if Wikipedia had anything new about it. It does, but I’m afraid I saw nothing encouraging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
And I also wish that the US would have followed France's lead, and had a standard design that was replicated, so that operation and improvements were more transferable. France gets ~ 80% of its power from Nukes, and I've never heard of an incident there.
The Deepwater observation is a good one. Other forms of energy are far more dangerous than Nuke, relative to power produced, even solar is more dangerous. But those don't get the attention. I understand, a mass event of a scale of 100 is more newsworthy than 100,000 isolated ones, but it doesn't change anything for those affected (or their loved ones).
-ERD50
In regards to the danger of other types of energy, I remember reading that burning coal puts more radiation in the atmosphere than a modern nuclear plant. It seems that coal contain minute amount of radioactive material, but is burned in such huge volumes that the total emitted radiation adds up fast. I assume they mean radiation released into the environment, not the total radiation in the nuclear material itself. Or maybe not?To manage the nearly 1150 tonnes of spent fuel it produces every year, France, like several other countries, decided early on to close its national nuclear fuel cycle by recycling or reprocessing spent fuel. In doing so, the French nuclear industry can recover uranium and plutonium from the used fuel for reuse, thereby also reducing the volume of high-level waste.
Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html
SKUNKWORKS a pretty compelling ad to JOIN the TEAM!
On Sunday, August 8th 2021, the National Ignition Facility appear to have triggered fusion ignition in the laboratory for the first time in the 60+ year history of the ICF program. The shot yielded 1.3 Megajoules of fusion energy, an 8X increase over tests done in spring of 2021 and a 25X increase over NIF 2018 record experiments. Early reports estimated that 250 kilojoules of energy was deposited on the target (roughly 2/3 of the energy from the beams), which resulted in a 1.3 Megajoule output from the fusing plasma...
On 8 August 2021, preliminary experimental results suggested that fusion was achieved. The yield was estimated to be 70% of the laser input energy.
... California's goal is to have 50% of energy from renewables by 2030 and they are on track to make that goal. This progressive state has the political power and will to make it happen. The same can not be said for other states, especially those with large energy producing sectors heavily invested in fossil fuels.
Fukoshima was not a design fault of the power plant, but a result of the tsunami that hit it.
Nobody stopped drilling for oil due to the Deepwater horizon oil spill, the largest spill in history by BP. Only part of it ever got "cleaned up", the rest is just distributed all over and not talked about.
Which means somewhere in the process someone made an explicit decision to build it strong enough to withstand tsunami "size a" but not tsunami "size b". That was a flawed decision. It might have been statistically sensible, but the edge case happened.
WADR, I will question your understanding of Chernobyl.
Chernobyl was a design that no one else in the world used. Why is that? From what I understand, I wouldn't even consider Chernobyl to be a nuclear power plant, and its failure should not be counted against nuclear power plants. Chernobyl was a weapons grade plutonium plant that produced electricity as a side benefit. It lacked some of the containment features that every other nuclear power plant in the world has, because that allowed them to more easily remove the products for producing weapons grade plutonium.
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