A modest proposal: 100 ExaJoules per year

[phantom power]

I've been pondering all the conversations we have here about What We're Going To Do About Energy, and one thing that seems to be missing from most of them is a target amount of energy.

Any discussion like this involves all kinds of assumptions about particular technologies, performance characteristics, what have you, but it all starts with saying "I want to generate X amount of energy"

My modest proposal is: If any of us advocates an energy solution, we should try to paint a generic picture of what it would take to implement, in terms of actual target energy numbers.

Just to put some numbers out there, I checked out the DOE, and here are a few numbers for the amount of energy the United States used in 2003:

Total: 100 ExaJoules/year (3200 GigaWatts)
Residential: 21 ExaJoules/year (700 GigaWatts)
Commercial: 18 ExaJoules/year (585 GigaWatts)
Industrial: 34 ExaJoules/year (1000 GigaWatts)
Transportation: 40 ExaJoules/year (1300 GigaWatts)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0201a.html

For example, if I propose nuclear power as a replacement for "all energy" in the US. what would that really look like? How many nuclear plants are we talking about? Well, to supply us at 2003 levels, I'd need 3200 GigaWatts. I'll assume 1.5 gigawatts per reactor (which may or may not be a good estimate), and I get about 2100 reactors.

In reality, it's not so simple. Just one example: I haven't accounted for peak loads, which are higher than the average of 3200(GW). How much would it cost? Where do we put them? How do we fuel them? I really don't know, but at least I've got someplace to start: I need to come up with 3200 Gigawatts!

It gives a sort of first approximation of what a solution looks like.

Another example, suppose I proposed biodiesel for transportation. Then I would want to show how I obtain enough biodiesel to supply 40 ExaJoules of energy each year. I won't even try to calculate that, because I don't have the right information. But some of you out there propose biodiesel, so maybe you can champion your cause by doing the math.

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Unless we can get our energy usage down to 50 EJ

:)

BTW, nukes, while great for stationary electric applications, cannot easily power cars.

[phantom power]

2. See? It's working!

Right, you can play with the numbers. Standard of living is ultimately a function of available energy. Assuming 50EJ/year, we might make a (very broad) estimate that people's standard of living would be about 1/2 what we have now.

Some would argue that a good thing. Decreases materialism, increases spirituality, what have you. I won't say they are wrong, either.

However, I *am* sort of hoping to weed out solutions where you come up with 1/100 the target. For instance, I'm pretty sure that proposals involving "waste vegetable oil from restaraunts" are in this category. But any way, now I have a number to test against.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. 50 was just a wild-ass number. Technology exists for us to be much more

efficient, without a serious impact to our "standard of living."

But then again, I feel that being forced to drive a huge SUV would be a decrease in my SoL.

[phantom power]

4. The goal of my modest proposal is to try and ground things in specifics.

If your energy scenario requires technologies for high efficiency, or much higher efficiency than we now use, it would only be fair to explain what they are.

[dcfirefighter]

9. I believe Europeans use about 1/2 the per capita energy we do n/t

[BlueEyedSon]

10. Yeah, but their lives SUCK.

LOL!

[PaulaFarrell]

40. I think your basic assumption is wring

How does, for example, using low-energy light bulbs lower the standard of living? In fact, it increases it because you save money, both on bills and on replacement bulbs. Most energy conservation does not affect
standard of living but does require a litte thought and commitment, and
in some cases an upfront investment. I would argue that it's wasting energy that decreases standard of living by paying unnecesary energy costs.

[phantom power]

41. yes, conservation and new tech can improve the equation.

The problem with generating a plan based too heavily on new technologies, is that people tend to use overly optimistic numbers. If we make a plan based as much as possible on the technology used widely today, we avoid the dangers of being overly optimistic. If new conservation techniques come into widespread use, then it becomes just a pleasant surprise.

There are grey areas. Things like compact fluorescents are not hypothetical, I use them in my own house. On the other hand, they aren't the answer to all lighting needs, and so it's hard to predict to what degree they will (or should) replace incandescent bulbs.

[Massacure]

42. What do incandescent bulbs have over florescent???

[dcfirefighter]

7. Well, maybe, maybe not.

I've heard that there are more cars than drivers in the US. As an observation, most families have at least one car per driver.

The average trip is less than 10 miles, so it would be conceivable to replace one or more car per family with a nuclear powered (battery stored) car. With FlexCar, and SmartCar, etc., it may be possible to replace all of a family's cars with an electric 'daily driver'.

A more likely solution would be to have some sort of hybrid that had an-electric only feature.

There are also alternatives to cars that run on wires: subways, light rail, streetcars, trams, and the yet-to-be implemented http://www.skywebexpress.com/130d_comparisons.shtml">PRT.

[dcfirefighter]

5. Biodiesel

at 36 MJ/l would require 1 Tl of biodiesel to create 40 EJ of energy.

I would guess that the actual energy used in transport is less. I assume the 40 EJ is what is consumed.

According to the DoE, biodiesel from algae can be produced with a yield of 142kl/ha. This would require 7.8 Mha of land area to produce.

For comparison 7.8 Mha is 30,000 square miles, which is less than 4% of the land area we currently use for livestock grazing.

Another comparison: there are 3.9 million miles of public roads in the US. A 'shoulder' 20' wide on each side of every public road would be 30,000 square miles of area. My guess is that if we built 30,000 square miles of algae ponds, more surface area of the US would be paved than would be under an algae pond.

[phantom power]

6. Does MJ/l stand for "mega-joules per liter" ?

If so, then I presume "142kl/ha" is 142 kilo-liters per hectare. Is that per year?

[dcfirefighter]

8. yeah

i went hog-wild with the metric prefixes. ha isn't SI, but it makes more sense than m^2 inthis case.

Yes thats an annual yield.

[phantom power]

11. That doesn't seem outlandish.

It does leave us with 60 EJ to come up with. If you scaled it directly, you could do the whole enchilada with 75,000 squre miles, which still seems feasible.

I have no idea what the logistics are of raising that much algae, and then converting it. For that matter, how does it get converted? I assume you could use that new hydrogenation process that everybody is posting about.

[dcfirefighter]

14. I suppose it's feasible

If the biomass is directly used for generating electricity, the products of combustion can be bubbled through the ponds, increasing yields and reducing the amount of land needed. About 70kW / ha could be produced (about 30 kW / acre), assuming a generator efficiency of 40%.

I think this is 3-10 times better than PV, and maybe 25% better than the solar tower, and deals with peak loads and storage better, while being more scalable than the tower, less scalable than PV.

As for processing, I don't know what process the study used. My guess would be a mechanical press for the oil, mass separation for the vegetable algae oil and water, and combining the oil with methylene and hydroxide.

The carbohydrate mash left over can be fermented into methylene, or fed to livestock or fish, who's waste can be used to fertilize the algae.

[phantom power]

16. Do you have data on cost?

How much would we be paying per liter (or gallon, barrel, etc). If it's prohibitively expensive, that would be a big problem.

[phantom power]

12. One issue: plant food.

the sunlight and CO2 are covered. But I assume we need nitrates. Or phosphates. Or whatever it is that algae eat. I get the impression that lots of this stuff is currently manufactured out of fossil oil. So, we'd need to make sure we could feed our microscopic green friends with renewable food.

Another figure I'm trying to find: how many square miles of land do we currently devote to agriculture? Expressing 75K square miles (or 30K) as a fraction of what we currently use for growing food would be interesting, although using "grazing" land is also a good reference.

[phantom power]

13. Another issue: growing season

I assume there are places where it's possible to grow algae all year long, but that's only a fraction of the total continental US. So, we either have to get our 75K acres from that fraction, or we have to account for growing our tera-liter of biodiesel in 6 months, not 12, which means more than 75K acres.

Another option, I suppose, is to grow it on the ocean. Big floating algae farms. You'd have to protect them from weather, but there's plenty of acreage. Near the equator might be ideal. Warm all year, and hurricanes don't occur at the equatorial lattitudes.

[dcfirefighter]

15. 450 million acres cropland

500 million acres grazing

neat idea about the algae farms.

don't know how much N P K they'd need.

read this: http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
their study says 15,000 sq miles, in the desert, with some efficiency improvements (diesel cars v gas ones). They actually recommend that a real-world implementation would do better with dispersed facilities, taking in wastewater (fertilizer) and putting out oil & fresh water.

[Dogmudgeon]

17. Cons and Pros, and my own contribution (Alert -- Long Post!)

Congratulations! My highest compliments to you, phantom power. This is an excellent and important post. It is the way we have to begin thinking -- systems, time, and human impact. Modern socioeconomic models, whether they are Marxian, Keynsian, liberal-capitalist, or otherwise, all deal in short-term processes, and underplay many forms of “wealth”, such as human happiness and health.

So, first, I will make some criticisms of phantom-p’s proposal, and then outline a proposal of my own.

• Biofuels are not capable of providing a sustainable 40 EJ of energy per year. In the short run, using TDP (thermal depolymerization), it is do-able, but much of the material of TDP depends on an organic waste generation stream that we would be far better off without. The overall EROEI of TDP biofuels does not even reach 1.0, though that could be improved. Using a biofuel energy mix from agricultural or algal carbohydrates has similar constraints, and requires a large-scale cultivation industry. I see biofuels as stopgap energy sources; possibly excellent, but subject to long-term constrains as severe as petroleum.

• The current average size of a nuclear reactor is about half a gigawatt, one-third your estimate. There is no reason why they could not be scaled up, but if they are most efficiently built to produce 500 MW, then your estimate will have to be scaled up. There are problems with nukes, mainly security, and the use of environmentally destructive support technologies. For instance, uranium enrichment technology is currently dependent on very ecologically destructive solvents. But there is no reason why eco-friendly technologies could not be developed fairly quickly. Local nuke expert NNadir is better versed on these issues, especially using radionucleide recycling to reduce environmental impact and to prolong the useful life of nuclear energy to centuries.

• Other novel sources of energy have their own downsides. For some, like tidal, ocean thermal grandient, and deep geothermal, the downside is our lack of experience with implementing the technology. With photovoltaic, it’s the economic and environmental costs involved in manufacturing the cells. Wind power may adversely affect the weather and the habitats of birds. I would personally like to see development in tidal and oceanic thermal energy sources, but so far a few pilot programs have been tried that prove them as viable energy sources, but have yielded little or no information on economic sustainability or ecological impact.

I wholehearted disagree with the equation that a 50% drop in our energy budget “(d)ecreases materialism, increases spirituality”. SUVs and GameBoys may decrease “spirituality”, but these are merely symbols of What’s Wrong With The World. I guarantee that a 50% decrease in energy will increase misery, not spirituality. People will burn their Bibles, their copies of Dianetics, and their Wayne Dyer and Tony Robbins CDs to alleviate the misery of wintertime hypothermia. Most of the energy growth (that can not be sustained) currently keeps our economy from imploding. Chopping energy supplies in half would result in an immediate, and catastrophic, depression. So, we must address the dynamics of energy growth and shrinkage, not just compensatory replacement.

Indeed, this is what the “Peak Oil” argument is all about -- providing not just enough energy to keep the lights on and the living room temperature at 65F, but keeping our civilization from collapsing due to energy “starvation”.

The big question is this: Can we make the transition to a sustainable economy quickly (in less than 20 years) and still deal with the costs involved? Coping with an overall energy shortage would be a challenge that starts at the same order of magnitude as World War 2, and grows quickly. I have no doubt that we can do it with a minimum of suffering, but will we?

Finally, I’ll briefly outline my own Complete Solution.

The most productive route will undoubtedly be to move industry and high energy consumption enterprises into space, preferably in super-stable positions at the Lagrange points (the so-called “L4” and “L5”). The outline below could go from its start to early “phase 3” in under 100 years; as little as 25-30 years, if it is enthusiastically supported by the people of the world, or even a large percentage of them.

The first phase would be the construction of solar energy collection stations, preferably generating on the order of 100 GW per station. These stations would require a small human presence, and possibly none at all, given advances in telepresence and autonomous process control (or “robotism”). Relatively low-tech energy production methods could be used, like focused sunlight heating a working fluid to drive turbines. At least some of this energy could be “beamed” to Earth in collimated microwaves or as a MASER beam. Yes, this will have some negative impacts on the ecology, and may result in some accidental deaths, but it should have a low overall impact. It would be used to help us over the transitional phases from terrestrial oil to free-space solar energy, a period of maybe 25-50 years.

In this first phase, we would also have to have well-coordinated management of economic and social activity. Yes, this would be some form of “socialism”, or for a better term, a “command economy”. It would NOT require political tyranny, though many entrepreneurs might think so.

The solution to this restraint of business would be in the next stage -- the active development of publically and privately capitalized industry in space. It would again free entrepreneurs from most Earthbound constraints, as well as remove industry from the planetary environment. This isn’t to say that the space economy would be regulation-free. The need to maintain a sealed environment would include pollution control technology as a matter of course. Using the solar energy sources described above, terrestrial pollution would be far less of a problem than it is today.

If our corporate system could be changed to require wide public stockholding, tax liability could cease to exist, being replaced by dividend payouts in lieu of government subsidy programs.

Phase Three would be the development of Earthlike millieux in these space habitats. The initial use might be for agriculture alone, but eventually a lot of people will want to live in space. This would be the open-ended program, slowly and “organically” developing a civilization extending beyond the Earth.

It would almost certainly NOT be a quickie scheme to build “cyberpunkoid” tin-can kennels for human beings. It will take us a long time to learn exactly what an “Earthlike millieu” is. The first few decades will be like the much-derided Biosphere 2 experiment, showing us how NOT to do it. Unlike Biosphere, the presence of people would not always be required, and those who do choose to participate would not be required to stay in a deleterious habitat ecology.

Okay, that’s my “contribution to the problem”. Commence fire!

--p!

[dcfirefighter]

18. My personal thoughts are WAY against a command economy

either by democracy or by oligopoly / plutocracy.

I'm an unabashed fan of Henry George, with a few modern updates.

The world has limits: area, sunlight, atmosphere, freshwater, mineral resources, frequency spectrum, etc.

Man has no limits: our population grows, it's impossible to have a labor shortage, we can build more and more 'things' that help us meet our needs.

If we 'share' the limited portions of our economy - what the classical economists termed 'Land', as a commonwealth, held in ownership by all, and who's returns are shared by all in the form of public goods and services, and perhaps dividend payments, a FREE economy will determine the best allocation of those resources. Making market payments for the occupation of land eliminates all real monopolies, except for those granted by government: patents and utilities. We'll still have anti-trust laws, but we'd never have to use them as long as those irreproducable things are shared.

Incidently, a tax on land value encourages efficient land use, reducing sprawl and associated transport costs (and energy).

If we free labor and labor-built capital from taxation, we'll have higher wages, and better production processes. It's possible to have full employment, without inflation.

If we collect the externalities of energy production, we'll consume less harmful energy.

Economic ideas like this are the foundation of 'Green' Economics, and are supported by the Green Party, as well as various liberal parties in the UK and Australia.

an example, regarding atmospheric carbon:
http://www.usskytrust.org/faqs.html

[Dogmudgeon]

20. Georgist Economics

I do not advocate a command economy -- but I do forsee it as the most likely short-term solution to be chosen. If I gave the impression that I was promoting such a system, I erred, and apologize for the error.

I, too, am an advocate of George's socioeconomic thought and its various modernizations. However, the problem with Georgist solutions to "Peak Oil" is simple. We need to confront resource scarcity crises quite soon, and implementing a Georgist economic system will require either a long transition, or a revolution. In fact, I doubt that there is anything we can do at this point to avoid at least some turmoil. It's not the result of the economic system(s) so much as the results of blind stupidity on the part of our "leaders".

There are many actions we could have, and should have, taken over the past four or five decades, but we blew it. Even if we were to begin putting Georgist principles into practice right now, we would still face perilous resource shortfalls as we hit the downslope of the oil supply curve. Georgist economic policies could shorten the period and soften the blow, but the main cause would still be decades of willful negligence. The transition period will still be difficult.

Georgist economics would also allow development of off-Earth resources. If asteroid or lunar source materials are used to build space habitats, they would be subject to the same resource taxation as land on the Earth. Such Georgist taxation would result in an enormous windfall for the human population at large, and free labor and management alike from taxation on material improvement. But this is already part of the Henry George canon.

A tip of the hat to you for bringing up the topic of Georgist economics! And for those who are reading this and want more information, click here to go to the Henry George Institute website.

--p!

[phantom power]

23. I'm a big advocate of moving off-planet, but...

There's a whole world of stuff we don't know about how to live there. Literally. Every aspect of our technology, industry, agriculture, society, you-name-it, is intrinsically adapted to being on the surface of this planet. With our ambient atmosphere, one earth gravity, etc.

For one example, how do we run a steel mill in space? Can we do it in zero-gravity? Not with the processes we use now. We could *probably* run it in a space station, spun up to one earth gravity. But centripital gravity is subtly different than natural gravity. It produces coreolis forces. Do those differences screw up the processes? Nobody knows, but we have to find out.

Ditto for every other industrial process that currently makes up our technology web. And there are thousands upon thousands of them.

Then there is the all-but-nonexistant science of managing closed system ecologies. BioSphere-2 was a great, visionary, start. But there was no followup. We know almost nothing, compared to what we'll *need* to know. We're still in the stage where everything we learn brings up new difficulties and questions, not solutions.

I view all that as good reason to get busy on it right away, but we're going to have to solve big energy problems in the next decade or two.

Nobody is going to be establishing any major industry off-planet in that time frame. To say nothing of planet-independent civilization.

[phantom power]

24. Regarding biodiesel

Based on the numbers in the biodiesel sub-thread, it appears that we can supply our energy needs with biodiesel. As you say, it requires dedicated agriculture, but the land requirement seems quite feasible.

[NNadir]

19. Typically this data is given for total energy usage.

It does not include values for efficiency, or the amount of energy that is actually usable.

In the case of power plants, two types of rating are given, MWe (Megawatts of electricity) and MW(th) Megawatts of thermal energy.

The 100 exajoules is a thermal consumption figure, and represents the total energy consumed, not the total energy that is usable. Most heat engines operate, depending on the temperature outside at around 30% efficiency.

I am, of course, an advocate of the rapid expansion of nuclear energy, and I will do what you ask.

A typical nuclear power plant (BWR or PWR) is rated at 1000 MWe and at 3000 MW(th). Thus the total energy output of a nuclear power plant is around 3000MW*31.5 M seconds/year = 9.5 X 10^16J. An exajoule is 10^18 Joules. Thus if all of the energy in the United States were generated by nuclear means, we have 100E18J/9.5E16J = 1060 nuclear power plants. This means we would need to increase our nuclear capacity by about a factor of 10.

It's not that simple however. As we all know, electricity, while it is a very flexible form of energy, is not usable for automotive transportation (although it IS usable for rail transportation). Moreover, any attempt to convert electricity into a motor fuel is very, very inefficient, no matter what George Bush tries to sell you with this "hydrogen" shell game.

This is where some of the newer nuclear power plants come in. It is possible to operate thermochemical cycles wherein hydrogen is produced directly from water and heat. This hydrogen can be used to manufacture liquefiable motor fuels like DME. Typically these processes operate at temperatures greater than 800C. Therefore the waste heat generated in these processes can be captured to generate electricity at very high thermal efficiency (since efficiency is a function of temperature gradients). Nuclear power plants operating under these conditions have overall thermal efficiencies (motor fuel + side product electricity) of over 60%. A plant of this type is now under construction in China, and many more such plants have been proposed there. Unfortunately, the type of design for these plants is not, in my view, ideal. They are Pebble Bed Reactors (PBR).

This type of system, where waste heat from one process is captured for another purpose, is called a “cogeneration” system. Cogeneration systems are not unique to nuclear power plants, and many such systems have already been built using other types of fuels, including coal, oil, gas, and garbage. Many Soviet era nuclear reactors were cogeneration reactors; the waste heat was used to heat water and homes. This is not a particularly new idea. It gains popularity whenever energy prices rise.

It is worth noting that there is one kind of solar plant that can also be used for thermochemical generation of hydrogen. This is a type of plant known as a parabolic mirror plant. Although such plants have not been built to generate hydrogen, they have been built to generate electricity. As I recall, they involve molten salt technology, so they are certainly adaptable to other purposes. One or two such plants operate in California I believe, and I believe that they are, unlike many other solar schemes, economically viable, if relatively small. I believe that the fixed costs are reduced by operating the plants off natural gas at night.

It is expected, assuming that humanity survives that long and we are not all killed by climate change, that world energy demand will rise to about 1000 exajoules by 2050. This means that the requirement for all of the world’s energy to be produced by nuclear means would mean about 10,500 nuclear power plants. This would mean an increase by more than a factor of more than 20 for the existing capacity with 440 plants now operating and 20-30 now under construction.

It is useful to examine how much fuel will be consumed under these circumstances. A fission event produces about 200 MeV or about 3 X 10^(-11) J. This means that producing 1000 exajoules of energy would require the complete fissioning of about 6.2 X 10^38 atoms each year. It is easy to show that this translates (if U-235 is the fuel) to about 1,200 MT of fuel. The volume of this fuel, which would represent all of the energy produced on the earth, is about 65 cubic meters, or a cube about 4 or 5 meters on a side given the density of uranium.

It’s not really that simple of course, since this fuel is suspended in a matrix of what is essentially inert. Only about 3-5% of the fuel is actually consumed per fuel cycle in a nuclear reactor. The balance of this material is called in the United States (but not elsewhere) “nuclear waste.” However this “inert” matrix is usually uranium (or thorium). It is recoverable and reusable, although in the case of uranium, it must first be converted to plutonium in order to be made into energy. It is of course possible (and preferable) to use thorium as the inert matrix in question.

I will show at some point in the External Cost of Energy thread, assuming that I live that long and that none of my antagonists kill me :-) that some of the so called “nuclear waste” actually is a usable form of energy in itself. For instance, it can be shown that the energy available from strontium-90, when it has reached its equilibrium value where it is decaying as fast as it is formed, represents about 10 nuclear power plants worth of energy, assuming a 1000 exajoule thermal output.

Using the historical data, we can estimate the failure rate for nuclear power plants were such capacity built, as well it might be. In 50 years of nuclear operations involving roughly 500 plants there have been two failed commercial power plants. This means we should expect, if all nuclear energy were provided by nuclear means, about 40 plants to fail every half a century or about 1 per year. However this figure is somewhat disingenuous. No nuclear power plant has actually failed catastrophically in almost 20 years. This is, in my view, because reactor physics is much better understood now than it was at the dawn of the nuclear age. We have things now that we didn’t have then, better materials, much more highly developed materials science, more computing power, better robotics and, oh yes, experience. Therefore there is no reason to assume that the future failure rate will be as high as the early failure rate. In any case, it seems desirable that if nuclear power plants fail, that the consequences of such failures be better represented by the case of Three Mile Island, where no one was injured, than by Chernobyl where it seems – when all is said and done – that several thousand lives will have been appreciably shortened.

It certainly seems to me that 10,000-11,000 nuclear plants are achievable and – at least for the foreseeable future – desirable. I know these figures will cause all kinds of paroxysms in my antagonists, but I must say that I have very, very, very, very little intellectual respect for them, almost zero in fact.

[dcfirefighter]

21. Glad you joined the fray

A thought regarding cogeneration & waste heat. At some point the heat is of too low quality (low temperature) to be economically used by industrial processes.

Biological processes use 'low' temperature heat quite well, a degree or too can increase output (growth) by a significant amount.

[phantom power]

22. That is why I liked the "thermal" figures....

They account for the inefficiencies. A sort of worst-case scenario. If we achieve higher efficiencies at any stage, the picture just gets better. (or, am I just completely missing the point?)

I presume we could run almost any industrial chemical processes directly off of nuclear plants. This might look a bit odd, relative to how we do things these days. Lots of industrial plants clustered around nuclear reactors.

Is there any reason for not building larger plants? For instance, are there any economies of scale to be obtained by building 30,000MW(th) nuclear plants? (i.e. 10x larger)

Uranium sure is dense.

[hunter]

25. Economies of Scale.

Manufacturing very large pressurized reactor vessels is difficult. This is one of the reasons for Canada's CANDU design, which was later used in India. These reactors are essentially a bundle of pipes, and not a single pressure vessel. For political and economic reasons Canada and India did not wish to import large reactor vessels or the technology required to build large reactor vessels.

If the use of nuclear power is expanded greatly it will be most economical if various components are manufactured at centralized "assembly lines" and shipped out to various construction sites. The size of these components is thus limited buy our ability to transport them. Ideally these components would all fit on railroad cars.

I can imagine some novel designs where all the very large components might be fabricated on-site, but many of the problems we've had with nuclear power are the result of novel designs that didn't quite turn out right.

Another consideration is the size of the electrical distribution system the power plant will be attached to. Larger power plants require higher capacity HVAC and HVDC transmission lines. It makes sense for the capacity of a single nuclear reactor to roughly match the capacity of the largest electrical transmission components.

Politically and economically it may also be easier to fund the construction of a number of smaller reactors over time, rather than one larger reactor.

I haven't looked carefully at the research into economies of scale for individual power plant units, but 800MWe seems to be a pretty common number in these discussions.

[NNadir]

26. Your excellent points direct our attention to the French experience.

"Economic Factors

France's nuclear power program has cost some FF 400 billion in 1993 currency, excluding interest during construction. Half of this was self-financed by Electricité de France, 8% (FF 32 billion) was invested by the state but discounted in 1981, and 42% (FF 168 billion) was financed by commercial loans. In 1988 medium and long-term debt amounted to FF 233 billion, or 1.8 times EdF's sales revenue. However, by the end of 1998 EdF had reduced this to FF 122 billion, about two thirds of sales revenue (FF 185 billion) and less than three times annual cash flow. Net interest charges had dropped to FF 7.7 billion (4.16% of sales) by 1998.

The cost of nuclear-generated electricity fell by 7% from 1998 to 2001 and is now about EUR 3 cents/kWh, which is very competitive in Europe.

From being a net electricity importer through most of the 1970s, France now has steadily growing net exports of electricity, which amounted to 63 billion kWh and EUR 2.6 billion in 1999. France is thus the world's largest net electricity exporter, and electricity is France's fourth largest export. (Next door is Italy, without any operating nuclear power plants. It is Europe's largest importer of electricity, most coming ultimately from France.) The UK has also become a major customer for French electricity.

Reactor engineering

The first eight power reactors were gas-cooled, as championed by the Atomic Energy Authority (CEA), but EdF then chose pressurized water reactor (PWR) types, supported by new enrichment capacity.

Apart from one experimental fast breeder reactor, all French units are now PW Rs of three standard types designed by Framatome (the first two derived from US Westinghouse types): 900 MWe (34), 1300 MWe (20) and 1450 MWe N4 type (4). This is a higher degree of standardization than anywhere else in the world..."

http://www.uic.com.au/nip28.htm

I have been to France quite a bit and when I am there I am often struck by a type of French design that is remarkable for simultaneously achieving simplicity, utility and elegance all at once. These features of a type of general design are all incorporated specifically in French nuclear design as well; clearly the French nuclear power program is the most successful in the world. The world would do well to learn from this experience, which incorporates all of the features you have suggested, the most important of which is standardization.

Standardization does not mean, however, that one should only build one type of reactor; it merely means, as you suggested, that whatever type of reactor you build should be of a standardized, readily reproducible designs.

It seems to me that two very successful designs that should be a part of any successful nuclear program are pressurized water reactors (PWR) and the CANDU reactors. When the fuel loading in a PWR is used according to the Radkowsky fuel loading scheme, one can use an ordinary PWR as a plutonium burner (particularly weapons grade fuel) and through the use of the fuels discharged from the thorium blanket, more or less operate the CANDUS as near breeders achieving very high burn up. The interplay of these two types of reactors allow for excellent fuel economy, high burn-ups of fuel (with a need for intermediate reprocessing).

Eventually though we will need more fast spectrum reactors, if only to destroy the transplutonium actinides that accumulate.

Some of the types of reactors are planned in the international Gen IV nuclear program described here:

http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/ndel/NDPE03/jchang.pdf

Note the presence of large numbers of high temperature reactors that will be suitable for the manufacture of portable liquid fuels. Of the reactors cited here, two of my favorites are the molten salt reactor and the lead cooled nuclear reactor. These reactors can run at very high temperature, produce liquid fuels and an electrical side product, thereby realizing very high efficiency.

[NNadir]

27. Sorry, I missed your question. Some comments on large nuclear reactors.

Thanks for the thread by the way. I do these type of calculation frequently and they are illustrative.

Hunter has answered your question very well for the majority of existing types of reactors, especially Pressurized Water Reactors.

There are types of reactors that are known as homogeneous reactors for which such limitations do not necessarily apply. The famous Pebble Bed Reactors can almost be considered homogeneous reactors, but the point of these reactors seems to be their modular nature: They are easy and cheap to build on a small scale. I don't like these reactors very much and therefore have not studied them in any detail, but I can't imagine that there are too many economies of scale inherent to their design.

There is another type of homogeneous reactor that has been piloted and was shelved for political (as opposed to technical) reasons. This is the molten salt reactor, which was being built as a Th-232/U-233 breeder. This type of reactor will be built in the future almost certainly, just because its properties are just too attractive to ignore. Because the Thorium cycle even further lowers the already low risk of weapons proliferation from commercial nuclear power (owing to the physics of the Thorium transmutation), this cycle is very attractive.

It is possible to imagine molten salt reactors that operate on a very large scale. Since most of the internal heat of the earth derives from the earth's radioactivity, and since portions of the earth are molten, one way to think of the planet is exactly that, as a giant molten salt reactor. (Note: Most of this heat is nuclear decay heat; only tiny amounts are fission derived heat. It is very unlikely at this point in our geological history that there are regions of criticality in the earth's core. Such places are known to have existed in the past, even in crustal rocks, but much of the U-235 originally incorporated into the earth has now decayed to lead.)

All this said, I don't know that there are any particular economic reasons for building such reactors at a very, very large scale. It is possible that such reasons will show themselves as nuclear power production becomes the international standard in the wealthy nations of the future, assuming humanity survives the environmental catastrophe now taking place.

Here's a personal note: Right now I am working on a project to make a lot of money so that I can get my children out of the country before it's too late, since I cannot bear the thought of my descendants living in a third world theocracy. Once this task is accomplished, wherever I go, I will finish some patentable work on an MSR with some extremely attractive features. I have a few decades to live, at best, but I hope this will be a suitable gift to the planet for all that the planet has given me.

[phantom power]

28. I've kind of got my eye on New Zealand.

But any country where they speak english will do. I suppose I should start learning Chinese, but I'm lazy.

[NNadir]

29. I'd love to join you there.

The way I read it, you need about 6 million dollars to invest there to have enough points in order to emigrate to New Zealand.

[phantom power]

30. If that's true, I'm screwed.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it's not a very big country. It would get crowded in a hurry, if they just let everybody in.

Oh well, I can always stay here and live the Road Warrior lifestyle, wherever the glaciers haven't advanced. And as long as I can evade the roaming fundamentalist mobs, or whatever is left of our government.

[IChing]

31. Remember it's a Nuclear Free Zone

So I don't think your politics would be welcomed there, according to my New Zealand friends.

[NNadir]

32. I know it's "nuclear free," but I believe they're literate and can think.

From my perspective, this is the most important point. I, for instance, was once an anti-nuclear dunderhead, but I got better because I increased my level of education.

Now let's face it, education in the United States is certainly becoming a more and more devalued trait. What we see here in the United States, right and, in the case of the anti-environmental anti-nuclear crowd, "left."

In fact, Americans can't even think straight. For instance, using the example anti-nuclear anti-environmentalists, let's try to an American a question. If you ask an American who prattles unintelligently about the "dangers" of so called "nuclear waste," "Can you show me one person in the United States who has actually been killed by the storage of commercial nuclear waste?" he or she attempt to raise all sorts of illiterate irrelevant points about me and my personal position but they never answer the question. I don't regard this as evidence of thinking ability, but that's just my view.

I have very little doubt that New Zealanders can be educated. I have tremendous doubts that Americans can be educated, as my experience with some people on this website clearly demonstrates to me.

But it is possible that New Zealand is not as nice a place as I might think it is. I have a lot going on right now, but when the time comes, I will educate myself about any perspective destination.

[IChing]

33. I have very little doubt that New Zealanders can be educated

The New Zealand’s education system is world renowned, ranking third for mathematics and literacy and sixth for science out of 31 countries sampled in a recent OECD assessment. Quality was identified as probably the strongest foundation on which a value proposition could and should be built, especially for an industry which in the global context must inevitably be limited in size. http://www.educationtauranga.co.nz/go/why-study-in-nz
They don't need your education you need theirs.

[NNadir]

34. I'll let you know when I value your view what constitutes "education."

Don't wait up all night to hear about it, though.

Thanks for the google though. It was done like a true anti-nuclear anti-environmentalist might do, with the possible exception of the fact, that the links reproduced do not, in this case, come from an article in an American newspaper written by a scientifically illiterate American newspaper reporter.

I do note that the great New Zealand scientist, Ernest Rutherford, was a pioneer of nuclear science.

"At Manchester, Rutherford continued his research on the properties of the radium emanation and of the alpha rays and, in conjunction with H. Geiger, a method of detecting a single alpha particle and counting the number emitted from radium was devised. In 1910, his investigations into the scattering of alpha rays and the nature of the inner structure of the atom which caused such scattering led to the postulation of his concept of the "nucleus", his greatest contribution to physics. According to him practically the whole mass of the atom and at the same time all positive charge of the atom is concentrated in a minute space at the centre. In 1912 Niels Bohr joined him at Manchester and he adapted Rutherford's nuclear structure to Max Planck's quantum theory and so obtained a theory of atomic structure which, with later improvements, mainly as a result of Heisenberg's concepts, remains valid to this day. In 1913, together with H. G. Moseley, he used cathode rays to bombard atoms of various elements and showed that the inner structures correspond with a group of lines which characterize the elements. Each element could then be assigned an atomic number and, more important, the properties of each element could be defined by this number. In 1919, during his last year at Manchester, he discovered that the nuclei of certain light elements, such as nitrogen, could be "disintegrated" by the impact of energetic alpha particles coming from some radioactive source, and that during this process fast protons were emitted. "

http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1908/rutherford-bio.html

In spite of working extensively with radioactivity, Rutherford seems to have lived 66 years, not bad for his times. (In spite of discovering plutonium and many other highly radioactive elements, Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, who essentially endorsed my position, lived to be lived to be 87. In spite of working extensively in nuclear science for most of his life, liberal Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, who also endorsed my position - quite loudly in fact - lived to be 98.) I'd ask an anti-nuclear anti-environmental activist to explain this phenomena of long lived nuclear scientists, but I know what ever answer I would get would be completely irrelevant to the question asked.

Given, again that New Zealanders seem quite able to think, I have little doubt that there will be many nuclear power plants in New Zealand in the future. They have no intention, it would seem, of becoming a third world backwater inhabited by illiterate mystics.

[jpak]

37. I've spent a lot of time in New Zealand

coming from and going to Antarctica

and you are wrong.

New Zealanders do not want sick pro-nuclear American nut-jobs calling them names and telling them what to do.

...and they ARE doing something about greenhouse gas emissions...

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2005/05/06/2003253318

...and they are doing it without fucking nucular power plants...

http://www.irl.cri.nz/msl/research/light/solar_energy.html

New Zealand has a great potential for wind power that has yet to be fully exploited...

http://www.windenergy.org.nz/

...the same for residential PV and solar hot water (I know of one apartment complex in Christchurch where every unit has its own solar hot water heater)....

...and I can personally attest that New Zealand public transit is affordable, reliable and convenient. Intercity bus services on the South Island are door-to-door in some towns.

...and there is potential to further expand these services (ex. inter/intracity electric trolleys)

...and even though Kiwis drive like maniacs, there is a great potential for hybrid vehicles to further reduce petrol consumption.

New Zealand will probably be the first "Western" country to develop a sustainable economy with renewable energy.

http://www.wind-works.org/articles/SustKiwis.html

http://www.greenpeace.org.nz/campaigns/climate/solutions.asp

And believe you me, the Kiwis are NOT going to foul their fair islands with asshole American nuclear power plants.

[NNadir]

38. We'll see.

Maybe New Zealand has more than 10 gigawatts of solar PV power?

I keep trying to get you to show me even 1/6th of the current nuclear capacity under construction that exists anywhere on earth.

You can't.

It doesn't exist.

Why doesn't it exist?

Because it's too expensive and it only works for part of the day, and then only when the weather is good.

We have lots of "will probably's" and similar bullshit out of solar hype types, but what we don't have is a gigawatt even under construction.

Now, I basically I don't believe anything that anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists say. They are so bereft of even minimal attention to ethical or intellectual consistency, that they actually start threads about global climate change.

Now, I support buses, trains, and mass transit in general, but - not that I suspect there is an anti-environmental anti-nuclear activist anywhere on the planet who is aware of it - these devices still use energy. They do not quantum-mechanically tunnel under cities. Now, I know you can't belong to Greenpeace if you are aware of the laws of thermodynamics, but the laws of thermodynamics apply nonetheless. Trains have mass. They therefore require energy to accelerate, and they release heat when they decelerate.

Now, I happen to like New Zealand. Last time I looked, they weren't invading other countries to steal their oil. They weren't killing children for that purpose. They have a greenhouse gas tax and that's a good thing. Only 29% of their energy comes from coal, although we are certainly hearing from pro-greenhouse gas anti-nuclear anti-environmental activists about how much coal there is in New Zealand. Still, they don't have a gigawatt of energy that is acceptable to the mindless twits at Greenpeace. In fact, no one on earth does. These immoral pie-in-the-sky apologists for middle and upper class elitism, in the link provided, indicate that even they fucking know it will take two decades to develop a 10% capacity for wind power in two decades.

I like wind power, and I have never failed to support it anywhere it is installed or proposed. To tell you the truth, I actually like PV power and as soon as I get wealthy, which I now plan to do, I will buy some solar cells, cut down some trees and install the capacity. I promise. But to say that this is the same as believing that this are practical solutions to the crisis we face NOW!!!!!!!!!! as in N-O-W, that would be in the present, currently, immediately (are there any others word that can be used to go through the wooden heads of anti-environmental anti-nuclear dunderheads?), would represent a lie.

The idea that some solar nirvana is going to pop out of nowhere and save us from global climate change is a lie. Come back to me when you can show me a fucking gigawatt. Anywhere. On earth. New Zealand will do. Shit, I'll take a gigawatt in Bangladesh. Or Somalia. Or Zimbabwe. Or any other country that Greenpeace twits ignore while chasing around shipments of nuclear fuel that have yet to harm even one person on this planet.

I repeat: In the link provided, Greenpeace indicates that even they fucking know it will take two decades to develop a 10% capacity for wind power in two decades.

Now, I have not pulled any punches about my total and complete lack of respect, intellectual, moral and otherwise, for Greenpeace in particular and solar hype types in general. Can somebody who can stomach them point me to a link on the Greenpeace website showing where the other fucking 90% is coming from and when? Is there anyone in that organization who knows the difference between 10% of power in two decades and the 80% now produced by fossil fuels? Anyone?

Come on, it's merely the difference between 80 and 10. Surely someone knows. Or are we going to hear more stupid crap about "someday, someday, in the future...etc."

If New Zealand going to meet their greenhouse gas commitment they are going to have to go nuclear. Everyone and anyone who participates in the arrest of global climate change, and the destruction of our atmosphere supports nuclear power. Why? Because nuclear power exists. Because nuclear power works. Because nuclear capacity is being built, right now, worldwide and worldwide people know how to do it and have proven it.

[jpak]

39. 29% of NZ's electricity is derived from coal AND gas

Only 22% is produced from coal - from a single 360 MW plant.

To replace this plant with nuclear capacity would cost the country $1-3 billion and force them to rely on foreign sources of uranium, and enrichment fuel fabrication services - not to mention the cost of shipment(s).

Both the North and South Islands are seismically and volcanically active - how much would this add to the cost of a new reactor(s)????

...and where would they put the spent fuel???

...and how much would that cost???

Again both islands are seismically and volcanically active. Much of the North Island is hydrothermally active as well.

Both islands are covered with thick deposits of volcanic ash, sedimentary rock and/or limestone karst.

These are less than ideal locations for spent fuel repositories.

Send their plutonium-containing spent fuel overseas for reprocessing - to be used perhaps for nuclear weapons???

Most Kiwis would respond, "Fuck that".

(Clue for the clueless: most of NZ's greenhouse gas emissions are from methane emitting livestock - not coal-fired power plants. Just how is nucular power supposed to solve THAT problem???)

As for Greenpeace New Zealand, they rock.

I spent several hours drinking (way too much) beer with a bunch of them in Christchurch one Saturday PM (they had just finished a day campaigning against GM in Cathedral Square).

They were very knowledgeable and very smart - and intellectually light years ahead of the typical anti-Kyoto pro-nucular 'Merican moran.

...and Greenpeace commands a lot of respect there - especially after the French attacked and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Aukland harbor.

NZ will never go nuclear - never.

[NNadir]

44. I am sure you admire Greenpeace of New Zealand.

I have no doubt that you think Greenpeace New Zealand rocks.

I disagree but I do not disagree respectfully.

One does not doubt that Greenpeace types discuss energy while drinking way to much beer. Personally, I do not generally discuss or think about energy while intoxicated, since for me it is a serious issue, not a fucking game.

I like New Zealand and almost everything I've heard about the place. Like I said, the nuclear pioneer Ernest Rutherford comes from that country. This does not mean however that every policy of the government of New Zealand, or every opinion that is held by the people of New Zealand, is beyond reproach.

In any case, if 22% of power in New Zealand is represented by 360 Megawatts, New Zealand is tiny on the scale of global climate change. This doesn't mean that New Zealand is well served by ignoring the incredible environmental catastrophe represented by coal. Everyone is morally obligated do their part, no matter how small it is. This is especially true because some of us will have to make up for the efforts of drunks and other useless twits who do no more than stand in the way.

As for cow and sheep farts and their portion of the New Zealand greenhouse gas emission, I note that I am a vegetarian, and a part of my reason for not eating meat derives from my environmentalism.

I decline, although I do not decline respectfully, to respond to the remarks about spent fuel in New Zealand since such a discussion would only have meaning to someone who understood chemistry and physics. I have long been on record as opposing geological disposal of spent fuel. I do note however for all the rather absurd claims about the supposed "dangers" of commercial so called "nuclear waste" whether disposed of in geological formations or simply stored elsewhere, the drinking class of the environmental movement has yet to produce a case of a death from this cause.

I have no doubt that the New Zealand Greenpeace set spends part of the day in luddite land crusading against GM. Apparently their understanding of genetics is as poor as their understanding of physics and chemistry. This is hardly a surprise. My experience suggests that one doesn't get well educated in bars.

I have noted elsewhere my opinion of the predictive ability of anti-nuclear anti-environmental crusaders. I, of course, am old enough to recall predictions in the 1970's about the huge fraction of the world's energy supply that would be provided by solar PV power by the year 2000.

[IChing]

35. You'll have to do a lot of "educating"

6th September 2004

Should NZ go nuclear?
As New Zealand's economy and population continue to grow, the nation's electricity needs have been growing quickly. An important issue New Zealand needs to resolve now is where the extra generation capacity is going to come from.

Choices include:
>> Building more dams for hydroelectricity.
>> Construction of large-scale windfarms.
>> Importing more natural-gas.
>> Burning coal. (Over 1,000 years' supply available underneath New Zealand)
>> Going nuclear.

The latter option is definitely unwanted, according to an NBR opinion poll. When asked their views on using nuclear power to provide the country's energy, just 15% of New Zealanders supported the idea. 70% opposed it, with the rest neutral or unsure.

http://www.emigratenz.org/News-Briefs-Sept-2004.html

From their emigration guide.

[NNadir]

36. Well thanks for enlightening me about coal in New Zealand.

We'll certainly see if New Zealand really does, like American anti-nuclear anti-enviromentalists, prefer dangerous and dirty coal - which actually kills people every day during normal operations - to clean and safe nuclear power which kills no one. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Nuclear power may kill someone somewhere possibly in the next hundred years in extraordinary "failure mode" operations. I am familiar with the illiterate radiation paranoid position: Spare me the links.) If such an attitude prevailed, this would certainly have an impact on my decision to move there.

Of course, I don't really put much credence in this googled third hand link about New Zealand attitudes. I have no idea of how the questions in this poll were framed. You can represent anything you want by cruising the internet. Shit, we have complete nonsense on the internet as evidenced by all the links we get here to www.ratical.org.

I concede, however, nuclear energy has a negative image in New Zealand, owing especially to South Pacific nuclear weapons testing. Hell, like I said, I was at one time, when I was young and stupid, confused about the distinction between nuclear war and commercial nuclear power. Then, to repeat, I educated myself. By the way, I didn't do this by reading tripe that I found in popular sources. I read something called "books." Try it sometime, you may like it.

If Amsterdam goes under water, and New Zealand chooses to expand it's use of coal, this will say something profound about New Zealand. If on the other hand, Amsterdam goes under water and New Zealand, like say, Finland is already doing - on greenhouse gas grounds alone - decides to use nuclear power, this will also say something about New Zealand. Right now, I'm inclined to think that a whiff of coal will make New Zealander's think. If they can do so, so much the better for them. If they can't, if they cover themselves with soot out of radiation paranoid mysticism, so much the worse for every living thing on the planet.

[Pizza]

43. They speak Kiwi...

Not English....