Swedish government approves uprates of Ringhals nuclear plants.

[NNadir]

After a court referred the issue to it, the Swedish government has affirmed that in the short to medium term "it is not possible ... to shut down the nuclear plant without serious disruption to the electricity system" in Sweden and the Nordic region. It addressed particularly the Ringhals plant which provides 20% of Sweden's electricity. Furthermore it said some 290 MWe of uprates to this plant "are vital", and do not violate environmental laws. This approval for uprating units 1 & 3 at Ringhals and relicensing unit 2 clears the way for further uprates of other plants and gives a stamp of approval to Sweden's nuclear power, notwithstanding an official but increasingly irrelevant phase-out policy dating from 1980. New licences will have no time limits.

The government has agreed to pay the owners of Barseback-2 - Vattenfall and E.On - SEK 5.6 billion (EUR 583 million) in compensation for the unit's premature closure in May. Compensation for the politically-ordered closure of unit 1 in 1999 cost the Swedish taxpayers SEK 5.7 billion (EUR 593 million) plus a payment for operating unit 2 on its own.

Nucleonics Week 27/10/05 & 17/11/05.

http://www.uic.com.au/news605.htm

[Oerdin]

1. Europe's "Greens"

Are some of the least green people out there. It's all well and good to tax gasoline just as it is great to fund mass transit but to shut down perfectly safe nongreen house gas causing nuclear power plants and replace them with coal or oil fired power plants is insane. It is absolutely anti-enviroment and it is the result of ignorance.

[NNadir]

4. The Swedish people are rather enlightened about nuclear power.

The 1980 government decision to phase out nuclear power originated not from a plebiscite on the subject, but from the necessity to form a coalition with some small parties that insisted on so doing.

I note that in 1980, I certainly would have agreed with those small parties. I was against nuclear power then. It was one year after Three Mile Island which coincidentally occurred just as the silly Hollywood movie "The China Syndrome" came out. At that time I knew very little about nuclear power, and actually believed that the "China Syndrome" was a movie based on plausible facts. With the event of Three Mile Island, it offered a scary scenario. I was certainly inspired to actively resist nuclear power.

Moreover, Chernobyl, which was discovered in the Western World when radiation detectors at Swedish nuclear stations went crazy, was still six years off. No one knew then what the consequences of the release of the full, or nearly full, load, of a reactor's radioactive inventory would involve. It was all then a matter of speculation. Such speculation included the deaths of millions of people in a reactor failure.

Moreover there was no evidence whatsoever that nuclear reactors could run for long periods at high capacity without failing. The technology was still very new and subject to a learning curve. Thus many plants around the world operated a relatively low capacity loading, profoundly effecting their economics. The physics of fuel management were only moderately understood: Modeling with the evaluated nuclear data using programs like ORIGEN at the time required long use of then expensive computer time on what where then called super computers. There were no PC's in those days, certainly none that could solve huge series of multivariate differential equations (which constitute the fuel depletion equations) iteratively. After the improvement in computational power became available, plus as the growth in experience with nuclear operations set in, however, the fuel burn-up, or efficiency of existing reactors was able to rise from around 20,000 Megawatt-days/metric ton of fuel to 40,000 Megawatt-days/metric ton of fuel, with existing types or reactors with little or no modification. This also profoundly effected the economics, in a positive way, because it required fewer fueling outages. (People now believe that some fuel strategies including thorium can lead to burn-ups that are well over 100,000 Megawatt-days/metric ton of fuel.) There are now nuclear reactors that run close to two years without refueling.

In 1980, no one was intimately aware of the greenhouse effect or its risks.

Energy demand was lower; population was lower; the real world consequences of air pollution had not been as fully studied. Most of the models of risk were just that, models, and they were not backed up by either data or experience.

The then third world was not clamoring for energy, everyone believed that the populations of places like India and China would accept being consigned to their then low energy intensive life styles (aka poverty).

Moreover, the promises of the renewable energy industry had not been tested. Certainly those technologies seemed realistic as plausible options. Their experimental risk was unknown.

Thus in 1980 it was perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about nuclear power, as I, and the Swedish public were.

The last 25 years however have put things in a far different light.

The Swedes are not going to shut their nuclear capacity whatever winks they may direct at the "official" stance. As noted in the previous link, and the action of the government in uprating Ringhals, the official "shut down the nukes" policy is increasingly irrelevant.

Here is the results of a 2004 poll of the Swedish people on the subject of nuclear power:



http://www.analys.se/engsite/engopin/engopin_0405.html

Support for nuclear power is high in Sweden. The public would go crazy if they were asked to shut out the lights in order to replace nuclear capacity with so called "renewable" energy, just as I would go crazy were someone to do something quite so ridiculous in New Jersey. Renewable strategies are fine when people can afford them, or when they are economically viable. They are to be desired in many cases, especially when they help speed to end to truly dangerous technologies like the use of natural gas and other fossil fuels. However, wind excepted and sometimes hydroelectric, they are not as safe as nuclear power. Hydroelectric resources are extended as far as they should be (in some cases they should actually be abandoned) and wind is intermittent, requiring back up.

The Swedes, so far as I am aware (and I have only been to Sweden once) are merely being rational and business like when they approach nuclear power in modern times. The anti-nuclear hysteria, of which, regrettably, I freely admit to having once been a purveyor, has had its day. It is over and only a shrinking portion of the population now buys it. The world is recognizing that it must evaluate risk and go with the risk that is smallest, because the great risks, including global climate change, are not acceptable.

Will there ever be another nuclear accident? Absolutely. Will there be loss of life, including loss of life from radiation originating in a nuclear plant? Most probably. Will the risks of these events ever compare to the risks of fossil fuels, the loss of life, the accidents, the threat to the future? No.

The Swedes and I, reviewing history have come to understand the same thing: There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[Grover_Cleveland]

11. I remeber reading a while ago......

... that Sweden was planning to phase out nuclear power. I thought that was not a realistic plan. I'm glad you said it won't happen.

I have read many of your posts here, and I agree with your position on the subject.

Since you seem extremely well informed on this subeject, I have a question for you. This writer says that we have enough uranium to last for 5 billion years. What do you think of his claim?

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html

[jpak]

16. Not so....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=29898

Some people will tell you that we can easily and cheaply extract uranium from seawater (based on a single non-peer-reviewed abstract from an ocean engineering symposium in 1994).

It's nonsense.

This scheme would produce a large artificial reef (great for growing microbial biofilms, barnacles and macroalgae), sequester a lot of magnesium and manganese, but recover insignificant quantities of uranium.

The concentration of uranium in seawater is 3.3 µg per liter. Global consumption of uranium for power reactors is currently ~67,000 metric tonnes per year.

Assuming a 30% extraction efficiency, you would have to process ~34,000 cubic kilometers per year to meet current global uranium demand.

note: annual global continental discharge of fresh water into the ocean is "only" ~37000 cubic kilometers per year.

This scheme would be a net energy loser and an environmental disaster.

But that won't stop the mystical thinking LaRouchite Cheneyite pronuclear crowd from making the claim...

:rofl:

[Grover_Cleveland]

18. Thanks!

I read the post by NNadir in that thread and it was great.

[jpak]

28. Yes, I thought it was rather humorous myself....

n/t

[NNadir]

25. The Japanese have piloted an aldoxime based uranium extraction system.

It works.

Basically it is the same principle as an ion exchange resin.

I'm not a big fan of John McCarthy's thinking on everything, but I am familiar with his claims. He is the first person who led me to Bernard L. Cohen.

Bernard L. Cohen, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, has had a very profound effect on my thinking about energy. He is an old man now, and I am doing my best to spread his important ideas. His work on risk is widely cited and I cannot think of many things he has written with which I disagree.

The claim about the inexhaustibility of seawater uranium is plausible, but I am in no way certain that it is absolutely correct.

That there is a huge amount of uranium in the earth is obvious. It is well known that the internal heat of the earth is almost totally due to the decay heat of the uranium and thorium decay series, plus a dollop of potassium-40 (500 billion curies of which is found in the ocean.) Since the half-life of uranium is extraordinary long, the specific activity is low. This means one needs a lot of uranium to account for the earth's heat.

The ocean is saturated with respect to uranium, and uranium is continually added to the oceans by weathering of terrestrial rocks. I suppose the claim that uranium removed by ion exchange will be replaced by that from weathering of rocks depends on some things that are perhaps not completely known. One factor would be the rate of turnover of crustal rocks, the chemistry (and fate) of river flows, the size of currents and many intangibles such as the acidity of waters.

Most rivers today do not flow unimpeded to the sea. The output of many rivers is now distributed on fields. (I suspect that this issue may be a bigger problem than energy in questions of sustainability since unrestricted irrigation is very much like deliberately sowing salt.)

In any case, nuclear fission resources with fuel recycling are huge. Uranium resources are small compared to thorium resources, until, at least, one needs to appeal to seawater as a source. (Thorium is less soluble than uranium.) There is much less thorium in seawater than there is uranium.

We can increase the efficiency with which we recover nuclear energy. Some of this derives from thermodynamics. High temperature reactors of the type proposed for thermochemical splitting of water can operate at thermal efficiencies as high as 60%. Another opportunity comes from decay heat. About 3% of the energy released in nuclear fission comes from the decay heat of fission products. Some of these fission products are retained in the spent fuel and are not used to generate heat for the production of electricity. The amount of recoverable energy is potentially quite high.

I have calculated that the radioequilibrium quantity of Sr-90, for instance, (the rate at which it is decaying as fast as it is formed - the maximum that can accumulate) is about 11,000 MT if one produces 1000 exajoules (twice current worldwide energy demand) per year from nuclear fission. The issue is somewhat complicated by the fact that many non-radioactive isotopes of strontium are fission products as well as Sr-90. This has a troublesome diluting effect. Since in equilibrium with Y-90 the power output of Sr-90 is about 1 watt per gram, the amount of energy recoverable from this isotope is equivalent to three very large nuclear plants. It's not much, but its something. (It would take over 100 years to closely - asymptotically - approach this equilibrium value.)

(The form of the equation giving the rate of accumulation of new fission products is K(1-e^-kt) where K is a constant determined by power output and fission yield and k is the decay constant k = ln(2)/t_1/2. The rate of accumulation is essentially zero when t becomes very large.)

Another opportunity comes from the actinide fuel cycle itself. The transmutation of neptunium (which yields Pu-238) and americium (which yields both curium-242 and curium-244) creates a significant quantity of decay heat. In an advanced nuclear fuel cycle, the effect of this heat will be to derive more energy from actinides than is available through straight up fission. However the effect is, again, small. Pu-238 provides about half a watt per gram of decay heat, curium-242 - which has Pu-238 as a daughter - about 50 watts per gram and curium-244, about 3 watts per gram. The penultimate daughters, U-234 and Pu-240, are fertile nuclei that are easily transmuted into fissionable nuclei. (It is possible to go critical with large amounts of Pu-240 under some circumstances.)

I am not entirely sure that nuclear fission energy resources are inexhaustible. They may be, but it's not a sure bet. In any case the ocean has 3 to 4 billion tons of uranium, and that will last for a very long time, giving lots of breathing room should humanity survive global climate change. My only concern about removing uranium from seawater is that it will serve to reduce the radioactivity of the ocean over the long term. This may have unpleasant ramifications of which we are unaware. My view of nuclear energy is that it is a resource that will buy humanity time that it otherwise doesn't have. I believe each generation has a responsibility to the next to use all resources wisely. I don't think we would be wise to regard nuclear resources with the same short-sighted attitudes that characterized our forbearers with respect to oil.

[jpak]

29. The concept of inexhaustible uranium is a crock

In order extract enough uranium from seawater to satisfy current global reactor demand, one would have to process a quantity of seawater equal to the combined annual discharge of every major river on the planet, plus the annual flow of the Gulf Stream - and then some.

OR

Grind whole mountain ranges into fine particles for uranium extraction and pile the tailings back up again.

AND

When one presents a cheesy cartoon of a hypothetical "uranium extraction plant" as "proof" that the concept works, or proposes using Sr-90 extracted from spent fuel to heat homes or hospitals or schools...

well....all I can do is...



:rofl:

[NNadir]

35. What a surprising answer. It is very deep and insightful.

I especially like the giggling. It's something like the giggling that goes on all the time when the imminent end of the nuclear industry is predicted along with the solar nirvana.

Still, the dying :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: nuclear industry goes on and on, year after year after year after year punctuated by giggled promises of its opponents of the solar nirvana that is eternally just around the corner, just like Jesus. Nuclear of course measures itself in units of energy, exajoules, 10¹⁸ a unit not known in the solar nirvana, well because in nirvana one doesn't do energy; one does karma and promises.

I especially like the references on the topic of this particular declaration of crockdom, which consists wholly the usual "crock! crock! crock!" Sounds like a duck.

They don't do much insipid giggling and crocking at MIT, where in this report http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/10_2%20127%20150%20Lidsky.pdf they write:

Continued reliance on nuclear power for electricity and process heat in
the long term would be assured by the availability of seawater-derived uranium
in large quantities at a cost that would have only marginal effects on
the price of nuclear energy production. Although studies on “mining” uranium
from seawater were initiated more than 30 years ago in England,3 it is the
R&D carried out in Japan which has established the technical and economic
feasibility of the technology.4 The guaranteed availability of uranium at reasonably
low and predictable prices facilitates development of reactors optimized for
such features as demonstrable safety, proliferation resistance, export capability,
and process heat production, without the compromises required by recycle
and breeding...

Mining Uranium from Seawater
Seawater uranium at an affordable price is the ultimate guarantee of uranium
availability for any nation with access to the ocean. Because of the very large
amounts of uranium in the oceans—about four billion tonnes, or about 800 times
more than the terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of $130/kg or less—
the possibility of recovering uranium from seawater has received considerable
attention over the past four decades. The major drawback is the fact that the
uranium concentration is very low, about 3 ppb. This implies that the extraction
cost will be high unless the uranium recovery efficiency from seawater is
high and adequate seawater flows can be established without active pumping.
Ongoing R&D efforts in Japan over the last decade on uranium adsorbents and
seawater processing schemes have met this challenge; both the technical feasibility
and economic viability of the process have been established. For example,
the most recent (1993) cost estimate was about 40,000 yen per kg of recovered
uranium, equivalent to about $100/lb U3O8 (U.S.$1D125 yen).28 Although this
is about 10X the current market price of uranium, it would increase the busbar
cost of LWR electricity by only 10%, and that of more efficient reactors by even
less.

And then there is this paper: Dynamic-state Adsorption and Elution Behaviour of Uranium(VI) Ions from Seawater by a Fibrous and Porous Adsorbent Containing Amidoxime Chelating Functional Groups
Authors: Zhang A.; Uchiyama G.; Asakura T.

Source: Adsorption Science and Technology, Volume 21, Number 8, 1 October 2003, pp. 761-773(13)

I guess the crock, crock, crock, crock ducks need to call Drs Zhang, Uchiyama, and Asakura to tell them, "It's a crock! It's a crock!"

I'm sure that they'll drop this work immediately, especially when they understand the true nuclear chemistry and nuclear physics insights that one can get by handling a GE vial of a tritiated nucleic acid and a micropipette.

:crazy:

Oh, these guys need to hear about the crock too, so they can further the predicted world wide nuclear shut down that is proceeding at breakneck speed. They might miss the nearly free solar nirvana that has produced at least a few kilowatt-hours somewhere (I can't wait for 50 links to 50 kilowatt systems):

http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html

And we should get to "crock! crock!" crocking to these guys:

Aquaculture of Uranium in Seawater by a Fabric-Adsorbent Submerged System

Nuclear Technology Volume 144 · Number 2 · November 2003 · Pages 274-278

The total amount of uranium dissolved in seawater at a uniform concentration of 3 mg U/m3 in the world's oceans is 4.5 billion tons. An adsorption method using polymeric adsorbents capable of specifically recovering uranium from seawater is reported to be economically feasible. A uranium-specific nonwoven fabric was used as the adsorbent packed in an adsorption cage 16 m2 in cross-sectional area and 16 cm in height. We submerged three adsorption cages in the Pacific Ocean at a depth of 20 m at 7 km offshore of Japan. The three adsorption cages consisted of stacks of 52 000 sheets of the uranium-specific non-woven fabric with a total mass of 350 kg. The total amount of uranium recovered by the nonwoven fabric was >1 kg in terms of yellow cake during a total submersion time of 240 days in the ocean.

Gee that's 1 kg for 350 kg of absorbent. What a failure! "Crock! Crock! Crock!"

The "failed" gold industry needs to process only 58.3 million tons of rock to get 283,000 troy ounces of gold, having not been informed that the concentration of elements is impossible: http://www.goldencycle.com/operationsccv.html Someone has to crock! crock! crock! at these people too.

I am so glad to learn here that nuclear power is dying a natural death, in spite of the record production for 2004. It is always fun to be informed of the end of nuclear energy as provided by the vast solar capacity that is pushing it out of business. Our anti-environmental anti-nuclear ducks are so well informed and so insightful. Quack, um I mean Crock! Crock! Crock!

Gigglers can giggle (and google) all they want, but in the next 5 years the increase in nuclear production will probably yet again completely outstrip world total solar capacity, even as the solar clueless crowd will still be quacking, "crock! crock! crock!"

Of course, one always wonders why, if the nuclear industry doesn't work, people have to shout "Crock! crock! crock! at it all the time." These people are always predicting for us, with such assurance and certainty, after all, that the nuclear industry will vanish, so why are they so worried about the matter? How does it demand so much energy to assail the nuclear industry, even more energy than all the worlds PV solar cells produce? Are they not confident in their predictions?

But who cares any way? The nuclear industry certainly is used to nay sayers. They've been quacking for decades. It nonetheless produces, doesn't it?



I love this stuff. It doesn't get any better than this.

:nopity:

[jpak]

37. LOL!!!!

If this was published in a peer reviewed analytical or marine chemistry journal it might be believable.

But this is the same crap these people have been claiming for over 10 years - and no magical uranium aquafarms to show for it - or confirmation by other researchers of their (wild) claims.

The Japanese are building a $20+ billion reprocessing plant that will produce Pu for MOX fuel at a cost of $2000 per kg. If claims of cheap and easy uranium from the ocean were credible, they would be building these extraction plants already...

...but they aren't...

...and PT Barnum WAS right.

[Massacure]

48. If I had a penny every time you put LOL!!! in the subject line,

I would be a rich man.

[Dead_Parrot]

51. ...Hey, you could get some solar panels! nt

[jpak]

33. and another thing

The amount of ion exchange material required for this cock-eyed scheme would be absolutely mind boggling.

The resin would be single-use-only. After several months in the ocean, it would be coated with bacterial polysaccharides, micro-/meso-/macro fauna and algae - useless (except for fertilizer maybe) and not recyclable.

It would also be made from petroleum - but as all RW wackos know, petroleum too is "inexhaustible" and being produced abiotically all the time!!!! Peak Oil is a fraud!!!!!

:rofl:

[NNadir]

39. Thank you for this lesson in chemistry. The pilot recovery must not

have worked, just like nuclear power doesn't work.

I didn't know that the source of all organic chemistry was petroleum, either. It is always fun to be lectured by those with greater chemical insight.

I was under the mistaken impression perhaps that acrylonitrile was available from methane and carbon monoxide in the presence of ammonia or acetylene and ammonia or even from the dehydration of acetamide from acetic acid. You know, with acrylonitrile being a 2 carbon molecule, I can maybe be excused from realizing that it came from petroleum.

And polyethylene! A rare substance indeed! I was under the mistaken impression that ethylene is available from about 8 zillion chemical reactions from eight zillion starting materials including hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide or from acetylene obtained by calcining carbon with calcium oxide; I had no idea that all of it came from petroleum!

Our nuclear opponents are so well educated, they have stumped me again.

I must be an isolated shit for brains academic who has never held a real job or never understood the first thing about an industrial process.

[jpak]

41. Yup - that "pilot plant" is cranking out the yellowcake!!!!

Japan is saved!!

[NNadir]

44. Well not really. They won't need it for about a brazillion years.

The world is awash in uranium and thorium right now.

Right now the process is too expensive because uranium is so cheap, the equivalent of gasoline at less than one hundredth of a cent a gallon.

But we don't need no stinking uranium...

Of course, if we did need uranium, we all know that a brazillion years of research can do. We know this from all those exajoules of solar PV energy that are driving all of the world's coal plants right out of business.

The world, and not just Japan has had global climate change stopped in its tracks by the grand solar PV electricity business.

I can't believe that anyone was worried about global climate change. How silly of us all.

[rfkrfk]

2. what is wrong with the gov't policymakers in these countries ?

the people of Scandanavia support renewable-alternate energy systems
such as...
ocean thermal
solar
tidal
hydrogen

somebody needs to go first.
--> turn those electricty plants off <--, respect the wishes of the
people, how much electricity does a person
living in Sudan really need?

[NNadir]

3. Um... because those forms of energy don't work?

Hydrogen isn't energy at all. It's a shell game.

[Oerdin]

5. Hydrogen

Costs more energy to produce then anyone will ever recover from it.

[phantom power]

6. That's because it's a storage-medium, not a "source"

All storage-mediums operate at less than 100% efficiency, so in that way H2 is no worse than batteries, biodiesel, compressed air or contained anti-neutronium.

Oops, I've said too much.

[jpak]

15. But that's not stopping ChimpCo from spending

$1.25 billion to build two (a 200 kW and a 500 kW) hydrogen cogeneration nuclear plants...

[jpak]

7. What a crock of shit

Solar doesn't "work"????

It's an exponentially growing multi-billion dollar business...

http://www.oja-services.nl/iea-pvps/isr/31.htm

OTEC doesn't "work"??????

OTEC power plants are currently operating in Japan and Hawaii...

http://www.nrel.gov/otec/achievements.html

Tidal doesn't "work"??????

The 240 MW La Rance (FR) Tidal Project has been operating since 1966...

http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/01-02/RE_info/tidal1.htm

The 20 MW Annapolis (CA) Tidal Project has been operating sine 1984...

http://www.nspower.ca/AboutUs/OurBusiness/PowerProduction/HowWeGeneratePower/Hydro.html

Norway has operated a 300 kW(p) experimental tidal turbine (similar to a wind turbine) since 2003....

http://www.e-tidevannsenergi.com/index.htm

Hydrogen doesn't "work"???????

It most certainly does....

The Schatz solar hydrogen project (US) ran continuously for 7 years without human intevention...

http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/trinidad.html

The Otsira Island (NO) wind hydrogen project has been operating since 2004...

http://www.maui-tomorrow.org/issuespages/energy/norway_hydro.html

Every one of those technologies "work" - period.

[NNadir]

8. Whoops. I meant it doesn't work on scale.

It is well known that a few distracted rich boy types can produce a few hundred thousand kilowatt-hours here and there, enough to power up hundreds of millions of websites to tell us all about the grand success that characterizes the solar nirvana that we are now all experiencing.

I withdraw my comment. Solar power does work. It powers almost enough stuff to power a great promotional campaign about solar power and how wonderful it is. It probably is self-sustaining, at least in its ability to promote itself.

Of course, the world needs thousands of billions of kilowatt-hours to combat global climate change.

In this sense, solar PV energy doesn't do important work. This is why, 25 years after promising to shut it's nuclear plants because of the imminent availability of renewable solar energy, the Swedish has found it essential to uprate the Ringhals nuclear power plant. I guess the solar nirvana didn't work for them.

People who know what "exponential" really means by the way, that would be people who know math for instance, recognize that not all exponential functions grow rapidly. Some functions actually decrease. Of course, among those with poor educations, the word is widely misused.

When one is using an exponential function to model a physical system, or even a biological one, for instance, it sometimes happens that an area exhibiting exponential growth only does so over a localized region. It really doesn't happen for instance, that in spite of what they teach you in elementary school, that a colony of bacteria grows until it is the mass of the earth. In fact, most elementary school teachers clue you in, and explain why that doesn't happen.

I have been reading about the exponential growth of "solar energy" for years now. This article, for instance, dates from 1997: http://www.cat.org.uk/information/solarage.tmpl?subdir=information

It reports on a glorious solar survey done in 1995, ten years ago, on solar heating systems. Personally I still don't know any one who has one, although I expect that given the exponential growth of solar systems, by 2015, my state will be completely covered by solar systems growing like bacteria.

To the extent that solar systems are used by people, and to the extent that they reduce the use of the very dangerous fuel, natural gas, they are, of course, a good thing. One hopes that solar energy will grow and eventually become an important source of energy. But the impact of solar energy on the crisis before us remains just has it has been for 40 years, trivial.

No matter.

As shown in Sweden, the world is moving on from the dangerous reliance on mystic marketing. It needs results.

178 new nuclear reactors on earth are in various stages of construction, or have been ordered, or are planned. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.htm The results will be measured in exajoules, not kilo"watts". That is hardly enough, of course, but it is progress and a source of some thin hope.

[Massacure]

9. Oh, lets be sensible here. PV does do important work.

Most work is important. I think the word you are looking for is significant. ;)

[NNadir]

10. You are right. I should have said significant, or maybe...

"industrially important," or "industrially significant."

The fact remains that if all solar cells on earth were for some reason recalled, the world would hardly notice. It would be relatively easy to replace the world's solar PV cells, not desirable maybe, but easy.

[jpak]

12. Photovoltaics made commercial satellite telecommunications possible

I do believe that this is a "significant" contribution to the world's economy (and all out of proportion to the "mystical measly micro-watts" these satellite systems produce).

[Grover_Cleveland]

14. Very good!

I like that. It shows you're thinking!

[Massacure]

17. We are talking work, not the economy though.

Of course satellites do important work that greatly aid the world's economy, but it is not a significant amount of work.

Oh, and word games = fun. :rofl:

[Grover_Cleveland]

20. Please consider how much copper wire it would take.....

.... to carry all that information if we didn't have satellites.

[Dead_Parrot]

13. Swedish PV

would be an interesting game to play, since the country sits astride the Artic Circle: Kiruna, for example, hasn't seen the sun for quite a while now, and even Stockholm doesn't get much. It would be great is summer, though...
:)

[Odin2005]

19. Phase OUT nuclear power?

Have the Swedes gone mad? you're going to need FOSSIL FUEL BASED POWER PLANTS to replaces the nuclear ones.

[Grover_Cleveland]

21. They aren't really going to do it.

It was just a fantasy to placate the people who don't understand science.

[Oerdin]

22. The European Greens

Are raving lunitics when it comes to nuclear power. They demand nuclear plants be shut down and when their alternative power dreams don't manage to produce enough electricity they eventually just build more fossil fuel power plants. That's the end result. They import more fossil fuels, the enviroment gets polluted with more green house gases, the Earth gets a little warmer, and a safe nongreen house gas producing energy source gets underutilized.

[Odin2005]

23. Exactly, when people bash me for using the term "Eco-Nut"...

It is THESE people I'm talking about, the ignorant people who are Greens because they thinks it hip and cool, or because they are "sticking it to The Man", or think we should all live nakked in the woods. :banghead:

[jpak]

24. Please provide a link to support the statement

that the Green Party (of any state or country) wants everyone to "all live nakked in the woods".

What a crock of shit.

The only people claiming environmentalists want "everyone to live in caves" blah blah blah are anti-environmentalist right wingers...

http://republicanrants.blogspot.com/

http://community.cnhi.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/38410611/m/361105211

http://www.holysmoke.org/fem/fem0082.htm

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/151467.php

and many more examples that can't be posted here....

[Odin2005]

26. They apprently don't want erlectricity.

[jpak]

27. Again, please post a link from a Green Party or Greenpeace site

or one from any major environmental group stating that: "They apprently (sic) don't want erlectricity" (sic).

[Dead_Parrot]

30. Greenpeace say on thier site:

That they want "To go from a world powered by nuclear and fossil fuels to one running on renewable energy."

Given the current state of renewable energy with it's storage and capacity problems, this does indeed reduce to "we don't want electricity".

[jpak]

31. LOL!!!!!!!!!!

Nice try though....do they have photos of filthy smelly hippies running naked through the forest and howling at the moon too?????

Here's some folks that "don't want electricity"...

http://www.solarhouse.com/

:hi:

[Dead_Parrot]

32. I'm very happy for them.

The 99.9% of the population who can't afford this sort of home can just fuck off, right?

[jpak]

34. Yes - 99.9 per cent of the population can't afford the

<$100 a month these people "pay" for ALL their electricity and heat.

But they can afford (multi)-billion dollar uranium mines and mills, uranium enrichment plants, MOX fuel fabrication plants, nuclear reactors, reprocessing plants and spent fuel disposal sites.

And this is why Our Popular War President and his minions have allocated >8 billion dollars in direct and indirect subsidies - including a 1.8 cent per kWh production credit* - to build 6 new nuclear power plants that US utilities could not afford otherwise.

We're paying them to build them, subsidizing their insurance and spent fuel disposal costs, paying for them to produce electricity and giving them opportunity to charge us the highest price possible for it.

Such a deal.

*note: the current production credit for US wind power is 1.5 cents per kWh...

[Name removed]

36. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Dead_Parrot]

38. Let's try that again:

You forgot to mention their capital cost. What did their house cost? $300,000? Half a mil? more? And that's brought them an average of 1-2kW, if they're being efficient.

On the other hand, 1kW of nuclear has capital costs of around $2,000.

Are you seriously telling me you don't see any reason why these people

don't live like these people?

[jpak]

40. What's that in the background of the top photo???

An oil depot???? Water towers??? A nuclear power plant????

No cars, no electricity and no water - and probably no jobs for most of them.

And why aren't those people's lives enriched by the presence of whatever that thing is????

If the facility in the background of that photo was indeed a nuclear power plant - or a fuel depot - or a thermal power plant - would the economic status of these people change????

Experience in India might be revealing....

http://india.indymedia.org/en/2001/11/241.shtml

http://www.infochangeindia.org/devp_dictionary_06.jsp

http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm1295.06.html

...and reports of the use of "glow slaves" by India's nuclear power ministry....

http://www.thesouthasian.org/archives/000438.html

http://www.nci.org/pr/pr62183.htm

and please post a link to where I can of them thar $2000 1 kW nuclear power plants...

:evilgrin:

[Dead_Parrot]

42. I have no idea...

...maybe it's a 1Gw solar power plant. Oh, wait...

As to a link, try this: http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm

This was updated in 2005 with a joint report by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Energy Agency showing that nuclear power had increased its competitiveness over the seven years. The principal changes since 1998 are increased nuclear plant capacity factors and rising gas prices. The study did not factor in any costs for carbon emissions from fossil fuel generators, and focused on over one hundred plants able to come on line 2010-15, including 13 nuclear plants. Nuclear overnight construction costs ranged from US$ 1000/kW in Czech Republic to $2500/kW in Japan, and averaged $1500/kW.

You'll notice I rounded it UP, just be safe.

Or try here, here or here.

When you've soaked that up, come back and tell me what that house cost. I'm guessing it was a hell of a lot more than $4000 for the PV & storage, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

[hankthecrank]

43. The Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation is putting light into rural India.

They say about 100,000 villages in India still doesn't have any electricity.

http://environment.about.com/b/a/233210.htm

I guess this helping them.

[Dead_Parrot]

46. It certainly is

Slightly more expensive, but cheap enough for a village to buy, are the wind-up/PV radios, and fridges that run on collected solar (not PV). The chances of getting the "civilised" west to accept this level of technology as the norm is, sadly, nil.

[hankthecrank]

47. Yes but a lot less than you said nt

[Dead_Parrot]

50. There is a world of difference

in living standards between the Maine coast and rural india. The article is saying how great it is that they actually have the ability to make light at night time. It's not like they're all on the internet and listening to iPods with the A/C going full whack in the background while the beers are chilling in the fridge while the dinner's in the microwave.

[hankthecrank]

52. You have a picture showing something like rural India

They now can have light because of solar. Your picture makes it seem like they can't have it. But they do. The stuff that comes out of the wall socket should go to the job that it is best at. Heating and cooling not the best use. For heating small amounts micowave is best. I don't live on the grid I have what you say they don't.

[Dead_Parrot]

53. Where did I say that?

I agreed with you that these lanterns were a good thing: Of course they can have them. But that's just not the same as a PV array that will run a western household - You do indeed have what they don't. Could you enlighten me as to the specs and cost of your system? Cheers...

[hankthecrank]

54. Here you go

1 32 watt pv module
one charge controller
4 lead acid batterys
one 2000 modified sine wave inverter
one apu bio diesel
one 12v lind DC adapter
one 12v lunchbox heater
one tandem webasto
$11,565 more or less

[Dead_Parrot]

56. Thanks...

...and an eye-bulging congratulations for keeping your use down that far! :toast:
Even your system, however, cost 15 times more than a Indian well-digger earns in a year (at 100Rs/day, one of the best-paid rural jobs: Normal harvesting/sowing brings in 50Rs/day if you're lucky). I think we're still in the realms of impossibility for them, I'm afraid.

[hankthecrank]

57. I also have higher cost then the well-digger

If I was in India I would have one of the Lister engine copies. They may not call them one eyed buffalo in India but I would have one of those also. (walk behind tractor). You could make use of those, the one eyed buffalo does the harvesting and sowing. It could also power what the lister did not. The prices are about 1/4 what they are here.

[Dead_Parrot]

59. Ahh, but then...

...we're back into the orininal problems of reliance on fossil fuels ;)

[hankthecrank]

61. No fossil carbon. carbon from plant in life cycle and not fossil carbon

Carbon used by plants is here already. When products burned from plants are used carbon is returned. No new carbon, so carbon load on the planet is not increased.

[Dead_Parrot]

62. Sorry...

...I must be thinking of the wrong sort of lister. I'll go and educate myself...:dunce:

[jpak]

45. Cost of the Lord House????

About 15% more than comparable houses in that area of Maine....

http://www.oja-services.nl/iea-pvps/cases/usa_04.htm

..and NO oil or gas or electricity bills which saves them at least $2000 a year....

http://256.com/solar/

http://democrats.senate.gov/energy/factsheets/102005.html

money well spent...

[Dead_Parrot]

49. A quick look around Maine realtors on google...

...suggests that "comparable houses" in Kennebunkport carry a price tag of well over half a mill, which would make thier solar/insulation costs at least $75,000. If you've got that sort of cash lying around, I'm very happy for you, too. My entire house is worth less than that.

Yes, it's money well spent. The rest of us don't have that sort of capital. Shall we all commit suicide, or do you have a suggestion for us, too?

[jpak]

55. Back in 1995, when that house was built, home prices were lower

and there were no federal or state tax incentives for solar.

Even if the total cost of these solar systems was $75k, over the life of a 30 year mortgage (~$2500 per year in principal) it would still be money well spent (and especially so as electricity and heating oil costs continue to rise).

A solar hot water system runs ~$3500 (US - before rebate).

A plug-and-play Blue Link 0.48 kW grid intertie PV system costs about $4800 (US - before rebate).

A 0.5 kW wind turbine and tower can be had for under $1500 (US before rebate).

An Energy Star rated fridge can be yours for ~$650.

A compact fluorescent light bulb costs ~$6.

Pellet stoves cost between $1200-2100 US

You don't have to buy them all at once, but collectively they could allow you to buy into the Solar/Conservation Fraud for under $13K.

[Dead_Parrot]

58. Found it...

The house cost a total of $300,000 to build. All told, the environmental features described here accounted for $32,000 of that, or a little more than 10 percent.

from http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/information/pdf/national-tour-solar-homes.pdf

So I'll chow down a small slice of humble pie for that one :). It would appear, depending on output, that this is still around 10 times more expensive than just switching to nuclear power would have been - and it's still a years wage for the average american, never mind the average Chinese or Indian.

Your own shopping lists appears to bring it down to 6.5x (assuming there's storage in there somewhere) even though you're sneaking in CO2 and particulate pollution with the stove...

I would hope we're all using energy star appliances etc anyway.:)

I'm afraid PV is still, to use NNadir's phrase, a rich boys toy.

[jpak]

60. Fisher Paykel makes some fine energy efficient appliances

and a Kiwi company I believe.

:)

The cost of a Blue Link PV system or a solar hot water system is comparable to the cost of a snowmobile or an ATV - well known "toys" of the rural US working class. Lots of not-so-rich folks have them in the US.

A well-insulated modestly-sized home (single-wide or double-wide) equipped with all those "toys" could very conservatively satisfy ~50% of electricity demand, consume <$10 month worth of electricity, produce most (or all) of its hot water and most (or all) of its space heat (depending on location in the US and weather).

All affordable to the vast majority of Americans.

[Dead_Parrot]

63. Are we talking about the same USA?

I'm talking about the one with 37 million people living below the poverty line, and a typical income of under $50k per household. I'm also talking about the people who don't live in the richest country, who make up the vast majority of humanity.

[Dead_Parrot]

64. BTW...

...I was curious, so I looked it up: 0.5% of americans have a snowmobile, so even if they all sell them and buy PV, it would only reduce CO2 emissions by 0.02% (give or take) :P