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Global Warming Is a Scam to Bring Back Nuclear Power

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New designs, again?

The word 'modular' also scares me.
I know how it's usually defined, but in practice, in government, it seems to mean:
- We will divide up the work into packages to give each powerful constituency some work.
- Note that the division is political, not based on technical issues.
- We don't know how all the modules will work, but <hopefully> we'll be able to define interfaces that allow them to function in coordination. ... before any but the most basic of functions can be outlined.
...



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
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IR, I think you have your 'headline' the wrong way round. It's NOT that 'Global Warming' is a scam, but rather that the nuclear industry is using the realization that climate change is upon us to prop-up their heretofore failure to deliver on a 65+ year promise of clean, cheap energy. Now I'm not saying that properly engineered and operated nuclear power-plants couldn't be part of a long-term solution to reduce the impact and dependence on fossil-fuel-based energy production, but anyone who suggests that this somehow represents the ultimate technology that will reverse climate change is naive at best. Anyway, that's my humble opinion...

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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It's a LONG GAME, John; they've been working this for years, helping the fossil-fuel energy generators and consumers into a unbreakable habit, so that global warming will get us so desperate that we'll be willing to put up with the shortcomings of nuclear. How's that for a conspiracy theory?

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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There's no question to me that the nuke angle could be our savior - except for the enormous bureaucracy and "don't rock the boat" mentality that's pretty much sank the boat anyway.

Countless newer designs should've been embraced but can't be because the NRC won't endorse them and hence the gov'ment won't underwrite them, so there's no one willing to lay out the money.

We've all seen the catastrophes delivered by the existing antiques even after all the heaped on 'safety'.

The new designs that burn the waste or are walk-away safe should've been built before the massive wall of public negativity was erected. I suspect it's too late now. The ship has sailed and it's the Flying Dutchman.

Keith Cress
kcress -
 
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Global warming is NOT a scam- it is a real problem. It is also an excuse being used by the nuclear industry to exhume its ghost.

I design and build modular chemical plants for a living. I find the notion of a "modular", factory-built mass-produced nuclear reactor positively hilarious- it is based on the wooliest of thinking. I don't think too many people who are involved in this pitch have actually designed and built anything truly modular.

 
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moltenmetal,
Do you really want to go there? I saw the headline and cringed, imagining another 300+ post thread that no one ever changes their minds.

One thing I can say for certain is that the "nuclear industry" absolutely lacks either the size or the commitment to perpetrate an impact of the magnitude of the AGW hysteria. Whether AGW is a scam, the worst eco-disaster ever to face the planet, or somewhere in between the nuclear industry is way too small a fish to pull it off.

That being said, I am the administrator for this forum and I will not delete or edit individual posts so I hope that everyone will remain civil. Further, anyone who finds posts on this subject to be personally offensive, I invite you to not open the thread.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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IR, I was objecting to the wording of your title to this thread, not the arguments that you've made. If you look at my response, I think you'll see that I basically agree with you.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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I think the nuclear industry is incapable of making any kind of a comeback even though I think nuclear power is a good partner with renewables. The recent fiasco in SC should pretty well nail the coffin shut.



----------------------------------------

The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.
 
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No, I have no desire to "go there" David! Been there often enough, thanks.
 
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This summer Germany has depended heavily on its coal plant because the wind generation has failed to deliver and they have decommissioned much of their nuclear capability. Something reliable has to underwrite the vagaries of renewable generation - be it coal, CCGT, nuclear, or whatever.
 
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I've been hearing a lot more positive stories about hydrogen lately, personally I think it's a bit like fusion, always 20 years away.

eg


CSIRO are not a bunch of idiots or starry eyed unicorn riders.








Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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Greg, hydrogen is NOT a source of energy and this leads to misconceptions when it is included in discussions of renewable energy. It is a non-polluting fuel for mobile applications. But it must be created from other sources of energy. It is one way to store energy instead of batteries, but even there it has many drawbacks, such as low storage density.
 
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I know that. If hydrogen could be stored easily then it can be used to replace batteries, on a massive scale. The combination of PV/wind(known art) +hydrogen by electrolysis (second link)+storage as ammonia(first link)+fuel cell(known art) is renewable deployable baseload power, or a way of powering HVs. That becomes very interesting.

There are many gotchas. Fuel cells aren't there yet, and the ammonia storage idea is promising rather than proven.



Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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Hydrogen is an inefficient energy carrier and its limitations are thermodynamic. We won't invent our way out of them. We'll need to become very good at making renewable hydrogen to make renewable ammonia to get the fossil monkey off our backs and still have plenty to eat, but wasting hydrogen as an inefficient transport fuel or worse still, a grid energy storage scheme, isn't going to help.
 
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I think you have to be very careful what you mean by efficiency when talking about systems where the input energy is costless.

For instance suppose you have a remote island with a hill slope that faces away from the sun. An efficient solution for solar panels would be to build some strong structure to point the panels the right way. This maximises the output of the panel. Far cheaper would be to screw a larger number of panels direct to the ground. The output per panel is less , ie the efficiency is lower, but the installation and maintenance costs are lower. So the less efficient system is more cost effective. The fact you are using expensive pV panels as a cheaper alternative to scaffolding pole seems odd, but that's how it works.

The same applies with hydrogen and renewables. If you can run your renewable generators and never have to burn the energy off, but just use it to generate more hydrogen, it is relatively unimportant exactly what the chain of efficiencies is, the important thing is cost per kWh of usable energy.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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While this is not my area of expertise, the topic of energy storage, but because I worked for Siemens for a number of years, the headline caught my interest:

Maxwell Technologies Announces Ultracapacitor Grid Energy Storage Subsystem Design-in with Siemens Transmission Solutions to Stabilize Global Power Grids


John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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Their best cell has a specific energy of 7.4Whr/kg = 26.64 kJ/kg. By way of reference, oil's specific energy is 48 MJ/kg. A NiMH battery has a specific energy of 60 Whr/kg. Obviously, the supercap has some inherent advantages in retrieving the stored energy, but it's still not as weight-efficient as batteries or oil.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Grid storage doesn't care much about either Wh/kg or Wh/L. What it cares most about is $/kWh returned. That means cycle life, efficiency and capital cost all matter more.

BTW, even the LiFePO4 batteries I used in my car conversion project are around 100 Wh/kg. Tesla's finished modules are over 200 Wh/kg. But cycle life for Li ion, although adequate for uses like electric vehicles, is likely still too short to make Li ion a good solution for bulk grid storage. Emergency/short term grid support is a different matter- there Li ion has proven it can pay.
 
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