Nuclear energy has still some popularity in the US. Especially among technical people. But technology is only one thing. What are the effects on a society long term?
Here in Germany it is mostly dead. For us you are discussing positions of twenty years ago. The US has a very different energy situation compared to us: large country, nuclear weapons, lots of nuclear technology, extremely high energy use (more than twice than the average German), much lower population density, lots of energy sources, ...
Here in Germany we've seen a lot of the negative effects in a country with higher density in the middle of Europe:
* no plan or place for the waste
* nuclear power plants all over the country
* widespread corruption between politicians and industry
* protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war
* lots of transport of nuclear materials through the country
* extremely costly research paid by the tax payer
* lots of promises of the nuclear industry just did not materialize: for example our pebble-bed reactor was closed silently, while earlier it was promised to solve a lot of technical problems
* centralization of electricity production in few monopoly-like companies with zero competition
The effects on an democratic society of nuclear technology is at least as bad as its technological problems. This was seen decades ago in the book 'Der Atomstaat' and the effects had been shown in Japan, where the Atomstaat was more advanced than here in Germany. We were able to stop it.
Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany.
The problem is that Germany, with its focus on wind and solar, is paying twice as much as for electricity compared to France - also a country with higher density in the middle of Europe - while also emitting more carbon dioxide per capita (9.6 vs 6.1 tons per capita). The difference is that France made the right decision 30 years ago when they transitioned from oil and coal to nuclear power for power generation. Solar and Wind are a much more expensive way of accomplishing the same thing. Der Energiewende is both expensive and inefficient.
In reality you find that the German industry is in much better shape, even though we pay more for electricity - much of that is tax, btw..
France's electricity is all state-run and the price of electricity is a political one. No French president survives raising electricity prices, even though the companies would need that money...
> Der Energiewende is both expensive and inefficient.
Expensive is not a problem for us on that level. Nuclear is as expensive as renewable and more. We have a lot of money. Let's say the Energiewende will cost us around a trillion dollar over 50 years. Maybe more? So what? The positive effects will be much larger. We actually have the money.
> inefficient
If you look at nuclear power plants, they use around 30% of the energy for electricity. With the rest they heat the rivers in France. That's inefficient.
German industry may indeed be in better shape, but that is inspite of German energy policies, not because of them. What you're really arguing for here is a poorer, less prosperous, Germany because of anti-nuclear-ideology. There's an opportunity cost of that trillion dollars, it could have been spent on health care, research, fighting climate change and thousands of hings other that actually improve people's lives instead. I mean, if you accept that - that's fine - there's no mandate that people must choose the most efficient solutions at all times. But the reality of technical merits doesn't change based on your ideology.
Nonsense. The prices at the energy exchanges for energy have been fallen while the prices for consumers have risen. The divident goes to the companies and the Energiewende is blamed as the reason for the higher prices. It is a shame, really.
Btw the billions poured into nuclear energy as direct and indirect subsidizes could have been and could be spend better.
I don't think this discussion is getting us anywhere. You are simply claiming the opposite of the GP, without any facts.
Facts are that electricity in Germany is much more expensive compared to countries without an Energiewende. This is not a positive for German industry, plain and simple.
Germany currently has low unemployment and high prosperity because it's executing it's own Marshallplan. Lending trillions to other EU states, and getting that money back through selling cars to them. German cars are known for many good things, but their price is not one of them. The same goes for many other German products. German industrial automation. No complaints about the quality (well, a little, but certainly much better than the competition. Though it would be great if German engineering firms met this little thing called "English", and gave manuals in more than one language with their things). The price, however, WTF.
> Facts are that electricity in Germany is much more expensive compared to countries without an Energiewende. This is not a positive for German industry, plain and simple.
The economic data of the last decade says EXACTLY the opposite. Record unemployment, record exports, very competitive industry ... - all despite the financial crisis.
We are talking about FACTS.
Fact is that the energy intensive industry has lower energy prices. Fact is, Germany has more industry than France, much more and it is also more efficient. Fact is Germany exports a lot of energy technology. Fact is: German industry has very efficient tools and processes - due to energy prices and the large amount of research and development in this area. Exactly this stuff sells excellent on the world market.
Fact is German's industry is in much better shape than France. A simple look at the economic data should make that clear for you.
> Germany currently has low unemployment and high prosperity because it's executing it's own Marshallplan. Lending trillions to other EU states, and getting that money back through selling cars to them.
Fact is: Germany is selling world wide. Fact is: Germany is selling much more than cars.
> German cars are known for many good things, but their price is not one of them.
Okay?
> The price, however, WTF.
Last year Germany sold goods and services for 1.09 trillion Euros. All time record. Fact.
Despite energy prices.
If the Energiewende, which started in 2000, has had any effects on German economic performance, we want more of that.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but here goes. Germany has made loans to many countries. Loans that come with conditions : you buy mostly from us and make others' life difficult. (say the Japanese and US cars)
Then Germany lent out $XX trillion and in return received sales of $X trillion. Germany lent out money they didn't have (ie. vast majority freshly printed money), and lent it out at record low interest rates, because it's sales were dropping. The "Energiewende" was just one more of those loans, which Germany made out to itself.
Those results, while they provided quite a bit of economic improvement, are not exactly impressive. Using these techniques, a company called "anthrax diarrhoea and coffees" can sell for billions to the medical establishment.
I'm not saying Germany doesn't have impressive engineering, and research (though not as impressive as the US has, and it's not like it matters, cost dominates everything and copying is much more efficient than research). I would argue Germany does not have impressive efficiency. However no sane person believes that's what's made the difference in the last 10 years.
> I feel like I'm repeating myself, but here goes.
I feel you are living in a parallel world.
> Then Germany lent out $XX trillion and in return received sales of $X trillion.
Ah, the funny smell of 'zero facts'.
> Those results, while they provided quite a bit of economic improvement, are not exactly impressive. Using these techniques, a company called "anthrax diarrhoea and coffees" can sell for billions to the medical establishment.
You are hallucinating.
> The "Energiewende" was just one more of those loans, which Germany made out to itself.
Everybody does something like that when investing in new energy infrastructure.
> I'm not saying Germany doesn't have impressive engineering, and research (though not as impressive as the US has, and it's not like it matters, cost dominates everything and copying is much more efficient than research).
I'm not sure Germany will care whether you'll find its engineering impressive or not. Fact Germany sells much more engineering products to the world market per capita than the US.
The US has wonderful engineering products. Though I doubt a Boeing is more impressive than an Airbus...
> I would argue Germany does not have impressive efficiency. However no sane person believes that's what's made the difference in the last 10 years.
Well, many German engineering companies are targeting this market.
Anything that is that heavily subsidized with tax money is cheaper than Solar and Wind. We see sinking Energy prices since the Energiewende at the european energy exchange and other trade platforms. The difference just does not reach the consumers.
Solar power is improving fast enough that by the time nuclear power plants are built, let alone pay themselves off, it may no longer matter. However it was arguably the correct decision years ago.
Off topic: I'm always a bit mystified as to why people try to use German articles in English texts when they obviously don't know the gender of the word. "Wende" (turn) is female and you thus use "die" as an article. The third possible article is "das" and used for neutral nouns like "Auto". Given it is easy to look up [1], I guess you didn't know there are several?
On topic: I won't state my opinion about the short term cost efficiency of nuclear power, because I don't have the references or raw data at hand to back it up (I wish a lot of others in this thread in the same situation wouldn't either). But IMHO the strongest argument against nuclear power is the uncertainty of long term waste disposal, given that we (currently) can't realistically predict storage conditions on a geological time frame. A month ago there was an article on HN about how we fail to come up with a way to communicate the danger of long term storage to future generations in a reliable way [2].
Even from an economic point of view the danger of a cost explosion of the nuclear waste disposal purely because of political struggles is daunting. In Germany we have a small disposal facility, the Asse, build to test long term storage in salt mines. Because of the usual combination of human error, incompetence and cover ups, waste was dumped there even while it was slowly becoming unstable [3]. Getting it all back out will cost somewhere around 5 billion euros. Guess who's paying for it.
Nuclear energy contributes ~17% of the world's electricity, and has only killed 90 people. Solar (rooftop) contributes <1% of the worlds electricity and has killed 440 people. So I don't really see how nuclear is a 'social problem'.
The number of non-acute deaths from Chernobyl is highly uncertain and difficult to estimate, even 30 years later. The range of estimate seem to more reflect the author's opinion on nuclear power than scientific fact. WHO estimated 4000 additional cancer deaths from Chernobyl (out of a population of hundreds of millions), based on the LNT-model, which seems very conservative given that there doesn't seem to be much glaring extra cancers in areas with higher natural background radiation.
Even if, when you tally everything up, nuclear still ends up as the least deadly solution per kWh. And it's not even about one-upping one another on safety statistics. Is that mainstream has it completely backwards. They think that nuclear is the most deadly and fossils are safe, whereas it's exactly the other way around. Nuclear is the safest, while fossils are probably the most lethal.
Rooftop solar is pretty fucking bad as well [1]. It is only just shy of fossil fuels, and only if you count several kinds of deaths as fossil fuel deaths that are debatable whether they're part of fossil fuel energy generation. Car-related deaths being the obvious one.
Most deaths for most energy generation methods come from disasters (all except solar, where most deaths happen during installations), for example, the tidal wave that caused fukushima raised the death tolls for nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. For nuclear, because 2 employees were having a smoke outside of the power plant, got picked up by the wave and smacked against the wall of the power plant. Nuclear death, right ? Solar, why ? Two reasons, first a number of installations were rudely interrupted by the wave, and for a few larger buildings solar panels came crashing down, a few of them right into people (that second part happens more often during earthquakes). Solar deaths ? Well, yes. Wind, well, if you were doing maintenance on a wind turbine while the wave washed it away ... And for fossil fuel the same : a number of employees of refineries and transporters (one oil train, for example), were killed. One particularly bad example : in one of the refineries a number of engineers were doing a quality inspection with management of the inside of several new gas tanks, and the wave filled it with water after knocking it over. My point here is that in many cases it's a bit of a stretch saying that the energy generation method is what killed people.
Although it must be said that coal mine safety in China, yes, deaths come from disasters, but ... it takes a special kind of dishonesty to call these disasters accidental.
I don't get people that defend rooftop's solar track record. Installing slippery, heavy pieces of glass on inclined surfaces a dozen meter up from the ground, that may have become slippery due to rain and frequently suffer structural failure (meaning a small piece cracks when you walk on it) ... Believe it or not this is NOT a particularly safe thing to do. (and of course, the US has many seismically active zones, and well, you may want to avoid being a roof worker in those zones)
Wind power, incidentally, is also famous for killing or maiming maintenance technicians.
> Can it be done quickly enough to prevent the damage from climate change?
Actually the renewable push in Germany is accelerating climate change, not preventing it. They don't get enough sun to make solar cells worth it, yet they do it anyway.
What it means is they will never make EROEI for them. On paper everything is wonderful (as a country emissions are low), but actually all they are doing is shipping the emissions to China which is where the solar cells are made.
That's pure FUD. EROEI for solar in Germany vary's a lot but it's from a physics standpoint it's ~20x. However, EROEI has no set standard and it's easy to fudge the numbers. Yet, gasoline generally ends up as less than 1 using those metrics.
PS: Though from an economic and EROEI standpoint Rooftop solar is significantly less appealing than solar farms.
You don't understand the difference between EROEI or ROI if you believe this. This is a really fundamental problem with your point, and it's like not grasping big-O notation in algorithmic analysis.
Edit: I take it back. Based on your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8248722 you are either dense as a rock or spreading FUD like the preceding comment suggested. I suspect I am not engaging in a good faith discussion.
Edit 2: Just something to leave you with. Nuclear disposal costs are externalized (deferred), educating the workforce is externalized (navy), risk is externalized (indemnified), fuel is currently underpriced (megatons to megawatts), construction (highest single input cost) is massively subsidized, and in the end it's still burning unrenewable fuel so even assuming it's cheap and we never have an accident we're just kicking the can down the road a couple of hundred years.
> You don't understand the difference between EROEI or ROI if you believe this.
Actually I claim there is virtually no difference.
Every single time I read an EREOI calculation I kept wondering "But he ignored that energy, and that, and that". After thinking about it I realized that money makes an excellent proxy for EROEI.
Every step in the process that costs energy also increase the cost. So the money essentially acts as "book keeping" for energy.
Everyone always gets mad when they encounter this for the first time, but think about for a while. Think about the basic cost for every single thing we make, and you'll realize at its core its always energy.
There is one exception that I thought of and that is pollution. Reducing pollution is a valuable thing even if it costs extra energy to do so.
Because at the end of the day we don't care how much energy we use, we care that we don't dirty our environment, and that we don't run out.
Your edit #2 is well taken. I will need to think about that.
My initial impression is that nuclear costs more energy (all those externalities you mention) than hydrocarbon fuel, but makes less pollution. So maybe it's worth it anyway.
With real world numbers averaging ~90+% of stated efficiency over 25 years.
1W solar produces ~8-10 wh/day * 365 days * 25 years /1000 kw per w = 65.7+ kwh over 25 years. 2.04 / 65.7 = 3.1 cents per kwh worst case. Panels don't instantly die at 25 years. So, actual lifetime output is guaranteed to be higher so costs are lower. But there are vary low maintenance costs and occasional physical damage so that's a reasonable estimate on average.
The time value of money is only meaningful if you want to compare your returns with other options over the long term there is no point in including inflation etc. As it's not like 1kwh will magically turn into more than that just by time passing.
I notice and appreciate the change it tone, thank you.
I don't disagree with your approach in a general sense, but what I think you should understand is that this approach is not a true measure of the input costs along early points of a technology's adoption curve.
For example, it looks like I can pick up a high end i7 for $300 at standard consumer prices. It has the cutting edge lithography standards, the kinks in that manufacturing process are still getting worked out (wastage), they are still paying off the initial R&D investment, they are actively marketing & selling it, and it's paying for future R&D investment. I can get a nearly equivalent (roughly speaking) Celeron for $40 from the same site, and I didn't even price out ARM/generic fab cpus. The Celeron price (or more accurately, the average price of that Celeron over time) is much more indicative of the true energy input costs of the underlying technology at scale.
A manufactured product has a virtuous cycle (from a consumer perspective, at least) of high upfront cost for development dropping as less marginal R&D is required, at the same time as the production process gets further optimized/automated and economies of scale kick in.
Solar is still definitely in the early stages of adoption based on growth curves, and prices reflect a huge amount of non-energy input costs that are not truly representative of the EROEI that will be present when it represents 10, 20, or +50% of total energy production.
There are certain physical properties of PV cells that prevent efficiencies of +35% or so in standard unconcentrated single-junction pv cells. Because silicon is so ubiquitous, I suspect that we're already hitting points of diminishing returns in research/cell efficiency and production/process optimizations are going to start dominating until product optimizations are necessary to increase density. Right now, the biggest cost I'm aware of is silicon wasteage, which is the driver behind thin-film tech or alternative geometries (eg Solyndra) - I have heard of research into vapor deposition approaches that could greatly limit this. Hypothetically, if that works at scale, I can't really see a mass-produced 250w panel costing more than $50 (could be even lower assuming a market/industry for refined Si recycling from old/damaged panels).
Same thing would eventually go for concentrated multijunction modules that can hit +80% efficiencies, eventually, assuming that the non-Si junctions don't have material constraints (like HRE elements).
Now, I've gone on too long already, but let me say I'm not de facto anti-nuclear. I think light water reactor design is terrifying and I think existing waste storage policy is basically sticking fingers in ears and yelling 'LALALALA'. In order not to end the world with a climate catastrophe, I think it will be a bridge fuel and hopefully novel reactor design tech (eg CANDU) can help there.
However, the future is solar and wind power supplanting coal and nuclear, bio-petroleum from algal/renewable-electric input supplanting necessary high density applications (oil), and biomass methane supplanting NG for intermediate applications like peaking plant generation.
edit: Evidence of this happening already: http://www.seia.org/policy/environment/pv-recycling ... you've accurately noted that there are substantial subsidies, but they exist to accelerate the maturation of this source of energy. In that sense, though, they've been effective and relatively inexpensive.
Not if you use breeder reactors. The main reason those are not further along in development is precisely that nuclear fuel is currently cheap. As the cost of mining more fuel goes up, the economic advantage to using breeders increases.
No, it's still not burning renewable fuel. It intrinsically turns a fissile or fertile product into a lower energy product until it's no longer fissile. I am aware of breeder designs - I mention CANDU reactor designs later in the thread which can be used as a breeder with unenriched U, Pu239, or Thorium inputs. This stretches out the fuel supplies substantially, but it's still nonrenewable. Solar is, as long as our large scale fusion reactor is still running.
> It intrinsically turns a fissile or fertile product into a lower energy product until it's no longer fissile.
No, it turns an isotope that is not fissile into one that is.
> This stretches out the fuel supplies substantially, but it's still nonrenewable. Solar is, as long as our large scale fusion reactor is still running.
The Sun will eventually stop, as will any energy source eventually; so if "renewable" means "inexhaustible", there is no such thing as a renewable energy source.
Ah, sorry, I missed that word. I'm still confused about the "lower energy" bit, though.
> The sun will be a viable energy source for billions of years, vs tens or hundreds for nuclear.
Or thousands or tens of thousands, if we use breeders. Or millions or billions, if we get fusion working.
I'll agree that the Sun is the current front runner by a wide margin for "time available" if that's all we look at. But given the pace at which human technology is changing, I don't think there's much difference between a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, or a few billion years; on any of these time scales, we are going to make profound changes in the way we generate energy. What we need right now is a way to get to that point; right now, solar can't give us that because we don't know how to capture it in a way that can provide reliable base load power all the time.
You can't undo what's already been done, but if you want to stop damaging it further, or if you don't want to see our civilization collapsing/being seriously disturbed by running out of fossil fuel and therefore you want to go all green before that happens, then yes, you can build enough nuclear plants and absolutely positively have to.
This book [0] goes through math of pretty much all energy sources and one of the conclusions the author reaches is that if you want to cover all of our power needs with green energy, renewables alone ain't gonna cut it.
Why not? It would be extremely easy. The only reason they don't make more nuclear power plants is they are slightly more expensive on a KWh level than natural gas.
"In 2009, Petteri Tiippana, the director of STUK's nuclear power plant division, told the BBC that it was difficult to deliver nuclear power plant projects on schedule because builders were not used to working to the exacting standards required on nuclear construction sites, since so few new reactors had been built in recent years."
We're certainly not helping ourselves by delaying/canceling more nuclear projects because of stupidly high amounts of FUD in the society regarding nuclear powers.
The second one in France is not doing much better. Work in China on similar ones is faster. But it is unclear what's actually going on, due to a lack of transparency.
To be fair, using natural gas has an unknown future cost (global warming) which is not (properly and generally) reflected in either the cost of the gs fired power stations or the gas fuel itself.
Total agree, we should also be charging the coal/gas fired energy producers for the actual clean up costs, then it would be interesting to see which people want to invest in.
Only because fossil energy is currently cheaper. If it were more expensive, you would see all kinds of construction starting to use electric-powered equipment that used non-fossil-fuel electricity.
> But isn't that non-fossil energy built with fossil energy?
Not if you use non-fossil electricity to power all the steps in the build process. I should have clarified that that's what I was envisioning.
> Fossil energy has a higher EROI than other sources, currently.
Actually, I don't think that's currently true for nuclear; the EROEI figures for nuclear that I've seen seem way off, even if breeder reactors are left out of the equation. I don't think a lot of people realize just how much energy there is in a kilogram of uranium, compared to a kilogram of fossil fuel.
>Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany.
Great. But Germany is also building new brown coal power plants, what's more Germany is backing a brown coal power plant just across the border with Poland. So it seems that there is a need for ongoing base load power generation... and effectively Germany is going for brown coal over nuclear.
Brown coal is, I believe, the most polluting way to generate electricity. So... why not nuclear instead?
I would hardly say it's dead. It's just dead domestically for Germany. Germany imports a large quantity of power from France (which relies almost entirely a nuclear for production).
Germany has been a net exporter of electricity since 2003. It exported more electricity than ever in 2013 and has a positive balance of trade with France.
Granted, that's just economics at work as both countries are net exporters - but keep in mind that France periodically has troubles when it gets too hot to use river water for efficient cooling.
The proportion of renewable energy sources in Germany has risen to 23.4%.
mmm...that's not what I read/heard. Germany had a surplus sometimes during the year but on the average it's a consumer more than a producer.
edit : what I just wrote is untrue, Germany is a net exporter (since 2012) but suffer from the important irregularity of solar/wind production (overproduction and underproduction happen regularly and may damage the network).
And, 46% of the electricity is coming from coal...
> mmm...that's not what I read/heard. Germany had a surplus sometimes during the year but on the average it's a consumer more than a producer.
But that's wrong.
> Germany is a net exporter (since 2012) but suffer from the important irregularity of solar/wind production (overproduction and underproduction happen regularly and may damage the network).
That's the same with nuclear. France has lots of surplus power on weekends, in the night and on holidays. On demand peaks in summer and winter they have not enough.
> may damage the network
Peak demands like in France can also damage the network.
> And, 46% of the electricity is coming from coal...
No, that statement is BS if you compare it to climate-friendliness of all other solutions. PV arrays don't grow on tree, they involve a lot of carbon emissions and highly toxic processing, but if it's done in China, then apparently nobody cares.
The obstacles that nuclear power faces are formidable.
One is that two other carbon-free options, solar and wind, are dropping in cost at a rapid rate at the same time that cost estimates for new nuclear plants are rising at a similarly rapid rate.
Another is that there isn't anyone who thought their investment in the existing fleet of nuclear plants in the US was a good investment. They were uniformly bad investments, which is the primary reason for the 40 year gap with essentially no new plants ordered.
Furthermore, even completely amortized plants are shutting down in the US. They can't even cover their operating costs, the few that shut down in the last year, let alone operating cost plus amortized construction cost.
So even with the federal government guaranteeing 90% of the funds used for new plant construction (free money) it hasn't been easy to find investors willing to put up the remaining 10%.
Nuclear power is awesome, especially if it is fusion power, and the reactor is 90M miles away, and anyone can use it for free just by put an inexpensive fusion power receiving panel outside with a clear view of the sky.
One just needs to project what the wholesale price of PV power will be in 10 years to see the real reason it is difficult to find investors for new nuclear plants. Why spend $5B on a nuclear plant when you could spend it on five solar panel plants that each produce 1GW of solar panels, each year, creating substantially more jobs than the reactor would? Just asking.
Problem with nuclear is that they cannot operate in situation where there is other players which destabilizes the network and are profitable with subsidies even if they sell at negative price. Nuclear is long term base load you just cannot shutdown a nuclear plant in windy situations, and expect it up in next hour and save anything by doing it.
Solar and wind is more expensive if you take away all subsidies and force everyone to handle the smoothing their electricity production to grid needs. But force buying in short term spot prices and giving more subsidy than cost of production per kw/hour for intermittent sources is actually terrible way of handling the grid, it increases greenhouse emissions by forcing to use low efficiency gas plants when sun doesn't shine, (not high efficiency since you cannot bring them online fast enough).
Nuclear gets loan guaranties which are not free money, and regulatory fees which are additional tax for nuclear industry.
My guess is that one reason for nuclear power's relatively high cost is that they must spend large amounts on safety while their primary competition, carbon-based power, gets a free ride from the rest of society on their safety costs, especially climate change. Nuclear pays for its own safety (AFAIK); who pays for climate change prevention, mitigation, and damage (e.g., hurricanes, seawalls, droughts, etc.)? The taxpayers.
Make carbon pay to clean up the mess it creates, and nuclear will look much more attractive.
While nuclear pays for site safety, it is the tax payer that covers the decommissioning and future waste storage / processing. As the costs for this is just so obscenely high that no private company would be involved if they had to pay for it from the meager profits they'd made from the electricity they'd produced. So once again it is the tax payer that covers the damage.
> One is that two other carbon-free options, solar and wind, are dropping in cost
What's with that myth? They are certainly not "carbon-free" (presumably you mean carbon dioxide free).
Solar and wind use huge amounts of energy to build. The most common way they make money is be spending energy where it is cheap, and selling energy where it is expensive. (But the CO2 is global, as is the pollution.) In essence they are a complicated way of shipping energy.
They have a positive EROEI, but not hugely, just somewhat.
You make a good point on the financial costs of nuclear.
That single panel can produce enough energy to produce something like 35 tons of steel over its service life.
Just looking at a state of the art PV panel (http://us.sunpower.com/sites/sunpower/files/media-library/da...) - note, its capacity is 345 watts - it weighs 41 pounds. I am fairly confident that, outside of it being made of pure energy, that the EROEI is pretty decent.
edit: Also, I can't imagine this is a favorable comparison to nuclear, which requires immense amounts of energy-intensive steel and concrete, as well as a fuel that is difficult to mine, process, purify, and separate.
You won't get 10 hours of direct sun, you're lucky to get 6. You are also unlikely to get 20 years out of it - certainly not with zero maintenance (i.e. zero cost). And you are ignoring conversion losses.
Assuming 6 hours and 10 years you get 4.5MW out of it, and let's ignore conversion losses. 4.5MW of electricty at $0.15 per KW/h costs $675.
Installed cost for a 300 watt solar cell? About $500. Not including the inverter.
Cost is a reasonable proxy for energy usage, so your EROEI is about 1.35. Even assuming your figures you have an EROEI of about 4. Less once you include maintenance.
i.e. huge energy costs.
PS. Don't confuse my numbers for financial ROI - if you want that you need to include the time-value of money, and once you include that solar cells loose money even by your measure.
I have solar panels. The A/C conversion efficiency is about 85%. The sunlight doesn't have to be directly incident to generate power, and 10 hours is a perfectly fine estimate, thank you. If anything, it's conservative, like every number I used.
You are pulling the 10 years number right out of your rear end. Many people on old-generation panels are doing 75-80% (above projection) on 25 year old panels. In fact, most panels today are warrantied to 60-80% of nameplate capacity in straight line degradation to 25 years.
Your $.15 power is retail, not wholesale which would be $.02. The $500 installed is also retail, not wholesale. And it is a ROI calculation at that point, not EROEI. I seriously doubt the $500/panel price has any relation whatsoever to the energy requirements to produce a single panel. And I seriously doubt the financial ROE of current panels has any relation to the scaled out EROEI of solar PV infra in the future.
I would spitball the material costs as effective proxies of input energy costs:
Plastic, glass: effectively free
Copper 1 kg: $7.00
Aluminum 3 kg: $5.00
Silicon 1 kg: $40.00
Now, just randomly cutting my original estimate to 10mWh to humor you and the correct wholesale electricity price of $.02/kWh, the wholesale value of the power is $200. So closer to 300%. I would guess one tenth to one twentieth of the input energy costs of a typical inverter would be less than $10, and even then it's over 250%.
You completely ignore grid transmission losses on your side of the argument, which are 70% or so.
I'm surprised you don't bring up grid level storage, which is solar PVs weakest point, currently.
Did you pay for them yourself, or did you get subsidies?
> I seriously doubt the $500/panel price has any relation whatsoever to the energy requirements to produce a single panel.
It's actually pretty much dead on. Just about every single expense, at the end of the day goes to energy. At the most basic, most fundamental, what else is there to spend money on? Minerals are free - they are just sitting in the ground. The costs is the energy costs of getting them out, not the cost of the mineral itself.
Any costs of making something are the costs of the parts, or the machine, or the transportation, etc. Labor costs at the end of the day go to someone buying those items which fundamentally boil down to energy costs.
> I would spitball the material costs as effective proxies of input energy costs: Plastic, glass: effectively free Copper 1 kg: $7.00 Aluminum 3 kg: $5.00 Silicon 1 kg: $40.00
So where does the rest of the money go? It goes to pay for other energy uses you have not included, that's where.
> the wholesale value of the power is $200.
That's worse for you you know. You are telling me that a panel costing $500 only makes $200 worth of electricity over its entire lifetime?
> You completely ignore grid transmission losses on your side of the argument, which are 70% or so.
That's one of the reasons I used retail prices.
From your reply I think you did not in the slightest understand what I wrote, since your arguments are not helping your case.
AMAZING. That $2000 bottle of Margaux takes over 600 times as much energy to produce as Three Buck Chuck. I knew it tasted better for a reason.
edit: and fine, be a pain. Let's make it apples to apples and make it an ROI comparison. So $500 you can keep the panel, but I keep the retail power cost of $.15/kWh and will also increase retail prices by 4% over a 25 year period. I'm going to use 10mWh again. So 400kWh/yr, or $60 in year 1. In year 1 dollars, that is $1500 over the life of the system. However, using a handy compounding interest calculater, the 4% annual increases in power cost increase the lifetime cost of non-solar power by a factor of 2.5, so that's $3750. So we have a 600% financial ROI. That's unrealistic for solar and I'm ignoring the NPV, but I'm just working with the numbers you handed me.
> That $2000 bottle of Margaux takes over 600 times as much energy to produce as Three Buck Chuck.
Profit is not exempt from my argument. Because at the end of the day profit gets spent, and by paying for the more expensive item you are contributing to energy use once that profit is spent.
Some expensive (in money and energy) item that otherwise would not get purchased has now been purchased because the profit enabled someone to afford it.
> and will also increase retail prices by 4%
That's fine, but I'm not following your math. If you made $60 the first year, and prices went up 4% each year (inflation presumably), your total generation after 25 years is $2,499 worth of power.
Now lets take our $500 and invest it at 6% (which is pretty low), after 25 years you have $2,240.
Hopefully there are lots of people here who feel like I do, that building nuclear plants is a great idea -- just, what kind of nuclear plant should we build?
1. You want to use government funding to build nuclear plants. My response: please look at previous government-funded nuclear operations of all types. It appears this doesn't work, from a failure to manage the environmental impact to a failure to keep the project cost-effective. This includes state-controlled energy companies, since nuclear power is a very tightly controlled business.
2. You want to use an unproven technology. My response: there are several well-proven nuclear options that are being developed by very promising companies. Please compare your technology with them. Some of the promising technologies are government-funded, however, which seems like a waste of a good idea.
3. You want to keep existing plants alive. This is nuanced. Some existing nuclear plants are necessary, but hopefully we can shut down the aging and dangerous and high-level-waste-producing ones in favor of cleaner alternatives. Doing so shouldn't necessarily cost a lot of money.
4. You want to reprocess existing nuclear waste and burn it to low-grade waste while generating clean electricity. My response: if you can show that you've cleared the regulatory hurdles (a lot of waste is held by governments) and if you're reasonably transparent about your progress, I'd like to give you a donation.
Why is France rarely mentioned in these discussions?
Most of their energy is nuclear. They've also standardized on plant design, which must have huge benefits - fungible employees and more MTBF being big ones.
All of our (the United States) plants afaik are bespoke designs, and can't be cheaper than pumping out cookie cutters.
They dump toxic waste from the rod processing into the sea. They pollute entire regions from mining operations (Niger, Canada). They operate plants at limits (age, cooling, costs) - not a week without an incident.
Keep in mind that not everything is golden in the promised land of nuclear energy production that is France: If it gets too hot to use river water for cooling, they have to shut down their nuclear reactors and import electricity from their european neighbours.
For that matter, they also have problems when it gets too cold: The French generally use electricity for heating and they cannot meet demand on their own.
Yes they river water for cooling, but water is not polluted as it's not in direct contact.
French use mostly electricity for heating, but we are importing only for some occasion when temperature are very cold which append maybe 10-20 times a year.
The rest of the year we are heavily exporting to england & italy.
Sometimes people get confused when they meant to say electricity instead of energy. Rather than correcting it, they get embarrassed and downvote. It really is a huge difference that needs to be acknowledged with people switch to electric forms of transportation.
The people of the areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl may beg to differ.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so high, that the engineering must be to similarly high standards. Unfortunately, as we have seen in the cases of 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima, this is not the case. We need to really figure that part out before opting for this route.
And then there's the problem of nuclear waste disposal.
What people don't think about, because it's not an acute disaster like a nuclear accident, is that coal power plants kill a /lot/ of people.
According to this article, coal power in China killed 300,000 people last year, which itself is way more than were displaced (not killed) by Fukushima. Even US coal power, which is much safer than Chinese coal power, is 160x more deadly per joule than nuclear, and it appears that's not counting climate change effects.
I don't mean to suggest that nuclear power is without risk -- of course it's risky business. But we need to compare the risk to the alternatives.
Germany responded to Fukushima by shutting down their nuclear power plants, and using more coal. In fact, they've embarked on a program of building new coal plants across Germany, which is madness by basically any metric you care to use.
Which has an interesting outcome: The irrational response to Fukushima (in particular, the shift from nuclear to coal generation) will undoubtedly kill several orders of magnitude more people than the actual Fukushima disaster did.
Sometimes it's hard not to get cynical and bitter.
> Germany responded to Fukushima by shutting down their nuclear power plants
Germany did not do that. Some of the oldest were shutdown. Basically Germany went back to the original plan from 2000, which was made together with the industry. The last nuclear reactor will be shut down around 2022.
> In fact, they've embarked on a program of building new coal plants across Germany, which is madness by basically any metric you care to use.
Germany did not do that. Various coal power plants were planned long ago. Also many old were and are taken offline. That Germany is using coal is not actually madness. Germany has basically only one fossil fuel in larger quantities in the country: coal.
> Which has an interesting outcome: The irrational response to Fukushima (in particular, the shift from nuclear to coal generation) will undoubtedly kill several orders of magnitude more people than the actual Fukushima disaster did.
Germany is on a long missions towards renewable energy. Nuclear energy is not a part of the plan. Nuclear will be replaced early, since it is a very costly energy which needs decades to be replaced. So Germany wanted to stop investing into it very early.
There is no shift to coal. This year for example coal use is going down. What you think is a shift to coal, is just a temporary effect in a long-term plan.
> Sometimes it's hard not to get cynical and bitter.
If you would be better informed about German plans, you would not need to be cynical and bitter.
Item 1: Germany shut down 41% of it's nuclear plants following Fukushima, and greatly accelerated plans to close the remaining ones.
Item 2: Germany is building a raft of new coal plants; something like 30 are in various stages of planning and building. According to Die Welt, power generation from brown coal (the dirtiest form) is climbing, at the highest level since 1990, and projected to increase further. Overall fossil fuel use for power generation is staying constant. If it wasn't for the decline of nuclear power in Germany, fossil fuel use could have declined. And according to Germany's energy regulator, coal fired plants will be essential to replace the closing nuclear plants.
> There is no shift to coal.
Yes, there is. As you go on to admit, even if you label it a "temporary effect in a long-term plan". (But given that the coal plants now being built are projected to be operating for 40 years, it's not what I'd call temporary.)
And that shift will result in a net increase in deaths. You seem very defensive, but you haven't actually disputed any of the underlying facts.
> Item 1: Germany shut down 41% of it's nuclear plants following Fukushima, and greatly accelerated plans to close the remaining ones.
Those were to close anyway in the very near future. Germany did not greatly accelerate the plan.
> Item 2: Germany is building a raft of new coal plants; something like 30 are in various stages of planning and building.
It does not. 'Planning' is not building. Germany currently discusses the closing of 50 fossil fuel plants.
> According to Die Welt, power generation from brown coal (the dirtiest form) is climbing, at the highest level since 1990, and projected to increase further.
It is not. This year coal use is going down.
> Overall fossil fuel use for power generation is staying constant.
Only for a few years.
> If it wasn't for the decline of nuclear power in Germany, fossil fuel use could have declined. And according to Germany's energy regulator, coal fired plants will be essential to replace the closing nuclear plants.
Fossil fuel plants will be greatly reduced during the next decades.
Already the industry is closing them faster than we want:
> Yes, there is. As you go on to admit, even if you label it a "temporary effect in a long-term plan". (But given that the coal plants now being built are projected to be operating for 40 years, it's not what I'd call temporary.)
We have a lot of old ones to close.
> And that shift will result in a net increase in deaths. You seem very defensive, but you haven't actually disputed any of the underlying facts.
Your so-called 'facts' are mostly wrong. I told you for example that coal use is going down this year. That's a fact.
You are including the coal used to build solar cells right?
No, of course you aren't. Germany is just shipping their coal emissions to China, so that on paper they look good, but are actually making things worse.
Greenwashing at its finest: Country wide and government supported.
Somewhat vitally, there's a certain amount of unease for a danger we can't sense and can't see. Nuclear power is scary for that reason, it doesn't matter if it's irrational or unfounded, the thought of being killed by an invisible foe is pretty universally terrifying.
I'd much rather see wind, tidal or geothermal anyway. In the scheme of things they have lower regulatory hurdles and can even be tinkered with in your back yard for the former. One of the houses I walk past on my way home has a wind turbine made out of a washing machine motor and PVC pipe, it's extremely cool to watch.
3-Mile Island is a very bad example, since no member of the general public was harmed by it (some plant workers got more radiation exposure than they should have, but nobody who wasn't a plant worker did).
Chernobyl is a bad example too, not because it didn't do harm, but because nobody since the Soviet Union is going to be insane enough to build a plant without secondary containment, or to run uncontrolled experiments with a reactor, or to build a reactor with a positive void coefficient of reactivity.
Fukushima is a somewhat better example, but the engineering that needed to be done better in that case was not nuclear engineering: the problem was siting the backup power generators and switchgear behind a seawall that got overwhelmed by the tsunami. (To be fair, newer reactor designs don't need backup power to cool the reactor after a shutdown; but those designs didn't exist when Fukushima was built.)
Nuclear waste disposal is only a problem if you refuse to reprocess the waste, which only the United States has done among all nuclear-using countries (because of misplaced concerns about proliferation; other countries have been reprocessing for decades and there have been no incidents).
Finally, if you're going to be fair in assessing nuclear power, you have to compare the overall cost of nuclear power with the overall cost of other forms of base load power generation. You have to look at the damage done by coal mining, coal ash and soot (not to mention radioactivity in coal ash, which is actually worse than many forms of nuclear waste), oil spills, fracking for natural gas, etc.
Good point about Fukushima. People often forget that there was a reactor closer to the earthquake that got hit by an even bigger tsunami which survived just fine...
...because they'd built a sensibly sized sea wall. I'm all for learning lessons from Fukushima, but the lesson basically seems to be "don't put reactors on the coast without big sea walls".
Perhaps the lesson is that reactors are just about the most complicated construction projects that humans build, they continuously operate on the edge of disaster, and they require a huge number of highly educated operators. There are too many factors to assure they will be safe, and their failure mode can reach catastrophic levels.
As you obviously know, the Fukushima disaster was not because of quake or tsunami damage to the reactors. It was because of water damage to the diesel generators that circulated the coolant to remove decay heat. Then failures in 3 (4?) redundant backup measure to provide that power occured, too.
What would happen, hypothetically in the event of an human generated EMP (or general infrastructure because of war) or a multi-stdev CME from the sun? What if a sufficiently dedicated group was able to infiltrate a reactor and intentionally damage it? There's always a way to imagine a failure scenario that is possible, even if unlikely.
Thankfully Fukushima wasn't nearly as bad as Chernobyl. Had the fuel breached the containment unit and triggered a steam explosion with groundwater. it would have been worse.
> they continuously operate on the edge of disaster
No, they don't.
> they require a huge number of highly educated operators.
Older designs, like Fukushima, do require operators to take certain actions in the event of failure in order to prevent damage to the reactor. (Newer designs don't even require that, which is certainly an improvement; but that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the features of older designs.) But they do not require operators to take certain actions in the event of failure to prevent radiation release to the outside world. They just require backup power. (Again, newer designs don't even require backup power, which, again, is certainly an improvement. But that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the features of older designs. As another poster noted, a similar reactor even closer to the tsunami had no problems--because the backup power generators were sited properly.)
> There are too many factors to assure they will be safe, and their failure mode can reach catastrophic levels.
This is not true either. Even if we grant that Fukushima has harmed many people, the main reasons for that harm were unrelated to the reactor itself: they were the bad siting of the backup power, and the fact that TEPCO and the Japanese government refused to admit what was really going on and take proper steps to contain it, including asking for help. The same sorts of human errors have caused much more harm in connection with other technologies--for example, consider the people harmed due to coal mining (several orders of magnitude more than those harmed due to nuclear energy).
> There's always a way to imagine a failure scenario that is possible, even if unlikely.
Sure, and this is true of any technology. But just imagining the failure scenario doesn't quantify the risk, and it's the quantitative risk that you need in order to make a fair assessment of the technology.
I'm no friend of coal and would prefer nuclear to it. I prefer solar to both.
I can't go on at length responding to you - too much time on this thread and only so many hours in life^H^H^H^Hthe day. However, I think you really know the issues but are approaching it from a slightly contrarian tack.
I think it's very fair to say reactors operate on the edge of disaster. But I say that in the same sense that motorcycles operate on the edge of disaster (for the rider). It's the controlled fission of a super critical amount of enriched uranium.
Even if there is a hypothetically perfect reactor, imperfect people with build it, run it, make decisions about it, and design/implement the risk control protocols around it. Just look at a few of the almost infinite examples of human factors mistakes in complex systems: Colgan 3407, Air France 447, Chernobyl, Challenger... I would even be kinder to Fukushim Daiichi because 1) the risk at the site was not as well known at the time of construction 2) there were backup power sources beyond the diesel generators that failed 3) most damage was not preventable after the wave hit whether help was requested or not.
People are the weak link and we're pretty much intrinsic to the process.
If solar gets to the point where it can provide reliable base load power, I will too. I keep watching for solar thermal plants to take off.
> It's the controlled fission of a super critical amount of enriched uranium.
No, it's the controlled fission of a critical amount of enriched uranium. Supercritical means the reaction is not controlled--that's a bomb, not a reactor.
As far as operating "on the edge of danger", that depends on how the reaction responds to various changes in conditions, particularly those caused by failures in other parts of the plant. The key is that you want reactivity to go down in response to a failure condition (i.e., you want the reactor to become subcritical, so the chain reaction dies out). Early on, we did not know how to design reactors that had this property under all failure conditions; but now we do, and we have for quite some time (and, as I noted in an earlier post, nobody since the Soviet Union has been insane enough not to make use of that knowledge when designing a reactor).
The problem with the Fukushima reactor was something different: decay heat removal, i.e., once the reactor shuts down, you still have fission products inside the core that are producing heat because they're highly radioactive. At the time the Fukushima reactor was built, we did not know how to design a reactor that could remove that decay heat in a controlled fashion without backup electrical power available. Now we do know how to do that; in fact there are at least two different ways to do it (either design the cooling system to operate using natural convection, or redesign the reactor core so that fission products can be removed and reprocessed while the reactor is operating).
So while I'll agree that early reactors were more like motorcycles, recent reactor designs are more like family sedans, with all kinds of safety features that protect the driver even from his own mistakes. (The Fukushima and Three Mile Island designs were somewhere in between.)
> People are the weak link
Agreed; we humans are almost always the least reliable component of any system that includes us.
> and we're pretty much intrinsic to the process.
Not necessarily; it's often possible to design passive safety features (i.e., ones that work automatically without human intervention), and in systems where reliability is paramount, this should be done whenever possible.
I agree with all of your points except nuclear reprocessing. It is overall worthwhile, but it is far from inherently safe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster, which was a level-6 incident, i.e. the third worst in history (probably actually the second). Granted, it was the Russians.
Exactly. Also, it happened in 1957, when nobody really knew a lot about how to reprocess properly--but unlike the Russians, everybody else recognized that and worked on getting it right.
Don't confuse Fukishima with a nuclear disaster. Yes there was environmental contamination, but 10's of thousands of people were killed by a tsunami. Nuclear accidents aren't nearly that bad. What we need is more sea walls, not less nuclear plants.
Also it was of the type that melts down if the cooling water is lost. Other reactor designs (eg 3-mile island) need water to operate so they shut down automatically if there's any major breakdown.
Furthermore, coal is far more dangerous. We just don't care when thousands of Chinese coal miners die every year as much as we do when Japanese farmland is rendered unusable once in a lifetime.
Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar?
I don't trust anybody with nuclear power. I don't know whether I should be eating fish from the pacific ocean. I have some idea how much cesium is in our ocean water because somebody is tracking it, but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
Nuclear is—even counting all the accidents—the safest and one of the greenest forms of energy we know of. Geothermal is hugely limited; wind is flaky, limited, and bad for the environment; solar is promising and getting economical, but it's still faced major practical and safety challenges.
> I have [...] no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
None. Zero. Absolutely no impact or ramifications whatsoever. And that you'd even feel like that was in question is a crushing indictment of our sensationalist media.
No, the correct answer is zero. The impact of Fukushima on someone living on the west cost of the US is negligible; as near to zero as makes no difference. There are many, many, many other things you don't worry about which has a much larger impact on your life: most dangerous of which is probably your diet and your commute to work.
> Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar?
There isn't enough. Not even close. It's not as abundant as you think - the amount of our planets resources we would have to consume to make use of this "renewable" energy is enormous.
> but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
Well now you do. There are no ramifications whatsoever.
Since current energy storage solutions are more resource intensive (and polluting) to make than energy generation, we need on-demand energy generation.
Solar (and wind) of x MW average power means at least 2x of max power, and thus needs at least 2x of 'reserve' non-solar power to cover the gaps when it's not being produced due to daytime or weather.
This means that solar, even if it'd be completely free and perfect, can't fill a majority of global energy needs - I'd guess that a third would be an absolute maximum unless/until we get radical breakthroughs in energy storage technology.
Those types of unpredictable energy don't replace other power plants, as those nonrenewable power plants are needed anyway - they only save fuel for those plants by allowing them to reduce load at random times.
Solar and wind energy are perfectly predictable: www.energymeteo.com
There are fluktuations every day due to the differend demand and loads in any case. Thats why you link many sources together in a Virtual Power Plant. Works quite well. The biggest Virtual Power Plant in Germany is the one of Statkraft (a Norwegian Company); it has about 8GW capacity.
That is a great point, and I do think that large scale transmission (closer to a global grid) and energy storage advancements are possible, but so far have suffered from a chick/egg problems. But even so I think there's a legit place for spot generation from whatever origin (probably methane powered turbines) in a balanced energy roadmap.
It probably could, if we spent enough resources on it. It's just not worth it, Nuclear is better for the environment.
Photovoltaics could not do it, no way. But solar thermal probably could. Storing power would require immense amounts of land for pumped water storage, but we could do it.
We'd also need huge amount of land for the solar collectors, but we could do it.
And huge amounts of copper for power lines and transformers. Again, possible.
But none of that is worth it, not when we have something as good as nuclear.
That must be news about how photovoltaics could not meet global energy needs. Last I'd read up, global capacity with realistic assumptions was 3 times current energy use. Also, it's already cheaper per kWh than nuclear (fully depreciated). Also, nuclear is non-renewable. It's still flipping the bird to future generations.
Perhaps you are conflating capacity with transmission and storage?
Also, I don't understand your response.
1.) what is "too much" energy.
2.) what's your source on solar thermal vs PV EROEI at scale?
3.) what's the relevance of the solar thermal vs PV comparison, since every building in the US can have solar on the roof but not solar thermal.
4.) what's the relevance of your response to what I said?
More energy than it costs to make them, or at least enough energy that it's better to build something else.
> what's your source on solar thermal vs PV EROEI at scale?
Solar thermal just needs a mirror (ideally aluminium rather than glass and silver) and the rest of the plant is the same as a regular power plant. A mirror costs less than fuel I'm sure.
Solar cells need ultra pure silicon which is very very expensive to make.
> what's the relevance of the solar thermal vs PV comparison, since every building in the US
can have solar on the roof
What would be the point if the energy return is not there?
> 4.) what's the relevance of your response to what I said?
I said they could meet global energy needs, just that it's not worth it. You assumed for some odd reason that I said they could not, so I figured you were asking about a comparison.
> Solar cells need ultra pure silicon which is very very expensive to make.
So sayeth the poster, sitting at a computer filed with the same kind of silicon out of which panels are made. The reason solar panels are so cheap to buy, is because they're cheap to build.
> What would be the point if the energy return is not there?
Everything except evidence that this is so. If solar panels didn't pay for themselves, people wouldn't buy them.
A reply to ars - a 1cm piece costs 200 dollars? Because I've got a solar pocket calculator here that I'm sure I picked up for £2 and I am pretty sure wasn't subsidised. Been doing its job for a very long time too...
> A piece about 1cm square costs $200 or more. Solar panels need square meters of the stuff.
Excuse me, but what planet are you posting from? Your claim above suggests that a monocrystalline silicon solar panel that's of average size (120 by 54 cm), 6480 sq. cm., should cost $200 per square centimeter, or 1.3 million dollars. In fact, such a panel costs $168.50:
"A piece about 1cm square costs $200 or more. Solar panels need square meters of the stuff."
And that would be a real problem if solar panels producers had to have microprocessors etched into panels, had to pay the scientists to design the processors, and had to build the plants to scale that process to industrial levels, like Intel.
Happily, they just have to buy an ingot of the stuff and cut it with a saw into a 250 micrometer by 1 meter squared (or so) piece. I will leave it as an exercise to you to verify the spot price of solar grade silicon is less than $30/kg.
So lets say a panel takes 250 micrometers * 1 meter * 1 meter * 2g/cm^3 (density of silicon) * $30 / kg (assuming spot prices and not long term contracts or internal sourcing). That's 250 cm^3 * 2g/cm^3 * $30/1000g, or $15 for a whole panel of the stuff.
Compared to what? Solar cells last a long time, and in sunny climates generate a lot of power, far more than enough to pay back the energy cost of their construction.
> Solar thermal at scale uses less energy for what it returns.
That may be true, but don't dismiss solar panels, in particular in remote locations where there's adequate sunlight.
"Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" [1] suggests renewables don't stand a chance at displacing conventional power generation without radical efficiency gains across the board and massive investment in infrastructure. They are not ready to drop in at massive scale.
As for Fukushima: I can't find a single source suggesting there is any danger short of eating fish caught right in front of the facility, which would indeed be a bad idea.
As far as I (with only an semi-educated opinion) can tell, renewable energy doesn't come with the steady output a nuclear plant provides. Either its not sunny enough (sudden cloud formations, bad weather) for solar panels or the wind calms so that wind turbines don't work.
Another issue is location, in my country (Germany) we have wind parks in the northern regions but the providers are having difficulties directing the power to where it's needed [citation needed].
Geothermal is available all the time. I'd like to read about what kind of difficulties they're experiencing directing power. Maybe it's a political problem, not a physical one.
Renewable is up there with nuclear for base load generation if one is not dumb about it, and it can be spooled up faster than nuclear because it doesn't depend on heat.
If we generate power some people are going to get hurt no matter which technology you pick. If we don't generate power some people are going to get hurt because we don't have access to the power necessary extend their lives.
Nuclear, hydroelectricity and wind have pretty much the best deaths per MWH, solar happens to be worse than nuclear.
Yes, I would also love us to stop using coal, and believe we should asap.
But this doesn't mean that we should be subsidising nuclear, we should be able to see and pay for the true costs of all our power sources. But instead we have crazy incentives where for residential and commercial energy contracts, the more you use the lower your unit cost. So a highly energy efficient house pays more per unit than an inefficient one.
3 Mile Island was not a catastrophe, although it could have been. The reason for this is arguably the high standard of engineering. The safety systems worked to contain almost everything. Chernobyl was an outdated design when it was built, today it is a really outdated design. In addition, Soviet bureaucracy prevented people from being properly informed what was happening and evacuating. Fukishima was a disappointment, I normally have a huge amount of respect for Japanese engineering. One way to solve it is to not locate nuclear reactors near seismic activity. (In the case of Japan, they have to. They aren't going to build them in another country, and all of Japan is vulnerable to seismic activity and tsunamis.) Very high voltage power transmission is feasible, and will only get better as silicon fabs increase. It also likely that we will have some energy dense liquid like gasoline/ethanol that is produced easily from electricity, and can be shipped anywhere. Hydrogen is not realistic.
I'd say we have figured out the engineering more than you claim.
The cost of a nuclear power plant is pretty high, but not because of the dangers. Rather, the expensive part is inherent with all reactors, and has to do with how it is constructed. IIRC, Nuclear reactors need a few years to "warm up" before they begin producing power, so you basically have to pay people to work on (and in) the reactor all the while knowing that they won't be producing anything that can make you money. In short, a big reactor is a very expensive investment, but eventually it pays off.
I'd say 3 incidents in the almost 50 years of solid nuclear power usage is a pretty good track record. These incidents were also relatively "contained", that is, their meltdowns didn't trigger worldwide environmental catastrophe, or even a catastrophe inside their own countries.
It appears that Fukushima isn't exactly over. And, it's clear that in the case of a disaster, nobody needs to take responsibility. Who is holding Tepco accountable?
Yeah, actually one of the reasons of their failure was that both were made with old tech, Fukushima one was made in 1967 and Chernobyl in 1977. Even if they did upgrade software they certainly didn't upgrade hardware.
To be fair, the most doom and gloom predictions (which are also disputed) basically amount to approximately a 7% increase in cancer risks as a result.
While that's obviously tragic, the WHO has far less pessimistic estimates, it's worth noting that some 15,000 people died just from the earthquake itself, and another couple thousand or so from exposure as a result of evacuating to nowhere.
More importantly though, if they hadn't been utterly and woefully incompetent on safety, would almost certainly have survived the earthquake without incident.
Note that we haven't yet reached the end of the line as far as improvements to the manufacturing process of solar cells is conscerned, in particular http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/natur... . Cheaper solar energy might not be far off.
The use of any sort of nuclear power with a well though out multi millenia waste storage system is irresponsible.
Ideally this would be accomanied by a secret cult of priests of the atom, charged with defending the sacred temple sites fovever. (Religion being the one institution proven able to survive millenia.)
As long as the nuclear waste problem isn't solved, nuclear power can't be the answer. Also the cost is very high, especially if you factor in risk/insurance and decommissioning.
This is the easy way to get energia. Ok, We have seen that in Canada they use the dams, but we know that this harms the environment (for salmon).
Here we really need to do research for alternative energy, do not think only about money and earnings, but think about the future. Otherwise we risk in 2050 to find the first deserts created by humans because of global warming.
Here in Germany it is mostly dead. For us you are discussing positions of twenty years ago. The US has a very different energy situation compared to us: large country, nuclear weapons, lots of nuclear technology, extremely high energy use (more than twice than the average German), much lower population density, lots of energy sources, ...
Here in Germany we've seen a lot of the negative effects in a country with higher density in the middle of Europe:
* no plan or place for the waste
* nuclear power plants all over the country
* widespread corruption between politicians and industry
* protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war
* lots of transport of nuclear materials through the country
* extremely costly research paid by the tax payer
* lots of promises of the nuclear industry just did not materialize: for example our pebble-bed reactor was closed silently, while earlier it was promised to solve a lot of technical problems
* centralization of electricity production in few monopoly-like companies with zero competition
The effects on an democratic society of nuclear technology is at least as bad as its technological problems. This was seen decades ago in the book 'Der Atomstaat' and the effects had been shown in Japan, where the Atomstaat was more advanced than here in Germany. We were able to stop it.
Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany.