Nuclear energy

Are you for nuclear energy production?

  • Yes

    Votes: 69 86.3%
  • Undecided

    Votes: 6 7.5%
  • No

    Votes: 5 6.3%

  • Total voters
    80
I am under the impression that the amortised capital costs of nuclear are too expensive compared to renewables (windfarms and solar, for example) and thus isn't really financially viable.

I'd prefer using the lower-cost windfarms and then supplementing with coal when the wind dies down. Since weather can be predicted, we'd idle the coal plants unless they are needed. We don't need to move to ZERO CO2 output, just less. And then we should start sequestering the coal-produced CO2 as we learn how.

Too often with the debate of nuclear vs. wind, we see the nuclear lobbyists using operating costs and the wind lobbyists using capital+operating costs. Nuclear doesn't seem viable, financially.

Finally, with the less-developed world, wind is more portable. You can ship a couple turbines to supply a village much more cheaply than you can lay cable from a distant powerplant to a village
 
Extracting the materials used for producing nuclear energy is really expensive.

Also, getting rid of the waste poses are serious long term problem.

Uranium and plutonium are in limited supply. What happens when they run out?

Wind and solar are definite long term solutions. Nuclear isn't a long term solution.

Nobody has mentioned hydrogen as a fuel...thank god, because it will never be a viable fuel.
 
I am under the impression that the amortised capital costs of nuclear are too expensive compared to renewables (windfarms and solar, for example) and thus isn't really financially viable.

I'd prefer using the lower-cost windfarms and then supplementing with coal when the wind dies down. Since weather can be predicted, we'd idle the coal plants unless they are needed. We don't need to move to ZERO CO2 output, just less. And then we should start sequestering the coal-produced CO2 as we learn how.

Too often with the debate of nuclear vs. wind, we see the nuclear lobbyists using operating costs and the wind lobbyists using capital+operating costs. Nuclear doesn't seem viable, financially.

Finally, with the less-developed world, wind is more portable. You can ship a couple turbines to supply a village much more cheaply than you can lay cable from a distant powerplant to a village

I agree with you on this.

However, coal wouldn't be sufficient to create the "energy minimum base" when the wind dies down because it would be too slow to start up.

Gas might work effectively here.

But what wind power people are trying to do is calculate the long term mean wind speeds across a large geographic area i.e. Europe. This will mean that there will always be a specific amount of wind power available based on the principal that if it's not windy in the UK, it's windy in the Ukraine.

A Pan-European grid would be needed to link up everyone's wind farms.

The difference between the wind power minimum base and the actual energy consumed would need to be provided by Gas or Nuclear, or possibly solar.
 
Extracting the materials used for producing nuclear energy is really expensive.

Also, getting rid of the waste poses are serious long term problem.

Uranium and plutonium are in limited supply. What happens when they run out?

Wind and solar are definite long term solutions. Nuclear isn't a long term solution.

Nobody has mentioned hydrogen as a fuel...thank god, because it will never be a viable fuel.
I realise nuclear is not a long term fuel, but I feel it's better than fossil fuels, which will need to be replaced anyway. Wind and solar I also support - if I could (and if I had a house), I would certainly consider installing solar panels on my roof. Wind and solar are smaller scale though - I don't think wind produces much energy, and solar probably doesn't either, and it's small scale: People have them on their roof, you don't see power plants. The real way forward is to try and copy what nature has come up with (which could also encompass stars). Nature is a bit confused due to evolution, which is trial and error, but the mechanisms that is comes up with are near optimal. Once we have discovered a method like that, we then need to build on it and try and beat nature at its own game to come up with something even better.
 
I am under the impression that the amortised capital costs of nuclear are too expensive compared to renewables (windfarms and solar, for example) and thus isn't really financially viable.

I'd prefer using the lower-cost windfarms and then supplementing with coal when the wind dies down. Since weather can be predicted, we'd idle the coal plants unless they are needed. We don't need to move to ZERO CO2 output, just less. And then we should start sequestering the coal-produced CO2 as we learn how.

Too often with the debate of nuclear vs. wind, we see the nuclear lobbyists using operating costs and the wind lobbyists using capital+operating costs. Nuclear doesn't seem viable, financially.

Finally, with the less-developed world, wind is more portable. You can ship a couple turbines to supply a village much more cheaply than you can lay cable from a distant powerplant to a village

But how much space would it take to suppy an entire city with wind power? The cost of land would be absolutely enormous. In your village example, wind power would be feasible, and perhaps on the small scale it is a good choice of energy, but for the larger cities where power is consumed on a large scale, it doesn't seem realistic.
 
But how much space would it take to suppy an entire city with wind power? The cost of land would be absolutely enormous. In your village example, wind power would be feasible, and perhaps on the small scale it is a good choice of energy, but for the larger cities where power is consumed on a large scale, it doesn't seem realistic.

One typical wind turbine by today's standards generates approx. enough energy for 250 houses. Each of these turbines normally requires 1 acre of land.

So if 250 houses need 1 acre of land to provide energy, I cannot why it should be an over bearing cost in the grand scheme of things.

If you take remote regions, land can be bought for practiaclly nothing.

A 2MW land based wind turbine has a capital cost of roughly €2million. That ignores the cost of the land. The life span of a wind turbine is about 20 years.

So that's €1m per MW over 20 years indexed.

Doesn't mean anything on its own though. :)
 
That's interesting JC. Can you provide a source that I can explore more deeply?
 
I don't really know about space required. I'm really an armchair quarterback in this field. The turbines I've seen were each able to supply 1800 households and I'd say they were decently close to each other (less than 100m apart, but I don't think they can be put in a plane in that density, only lines)

edit: :lol: hmmn, 1800 is different than 250! I might have to recheck my sources!
 
That's interesting JC. Can you provide a source that I can explore more deeply?

I work for a firm that is funding a windfarm, so I gathered alot of these figures from various models.

But try this wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

Some of the figures I mentioned can be rationalised here.

What I said about the 1 acre per turbine, thats on a sloped surface. You wouldn't normally have 20 turbines in a flat 20 acre field. If it was on the side of a valley or mountain you could.

Edit: This is a link showing some highlights of generating electricity by wind in Ireland. As you can see, they quoted €5.5m for a 5MW turbine. This is €1.1m per MW, slightly higher than my €1m figure above.

http://www.sei.ie/uploadedfiles/RenewableEnergy/Economics.pdf
 
There was an article on the BBC that I happened to read yesterday that had a poll about nuclear power: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6704665.stm

62% of men were for the building of more nuclear power stations, 34% against. 27% of women were for it, 63% against. Quite a gender split.

For what it's worth, I'm in favor.

Nobody has mentioned hydrogen as a fuel...thank god, because it will never be a viable fuel.

More like because it isn't an energy source.
 
More like because it isn't a fuel. "Viable" has nothing to do with it.

You can actually use hydrogen as a fuel, but it is really really expensive to extract, and once it is extracted, it reacts with everything it touches, so it is impossible to transport.
 
You can actually use hydrogen as a fuel, but it is really really expensive to extract, and once it is extracted, it reacts with everything it touches, so it is impossible to transport.

I edited my original post because my wording was incorrect. Yes, it's a "fuel", but not in the sense that it is a source of energy. You input more energy to create it than you can later recover from it.
 
I edited my original post because my wording was incorrect. Yes, it's a "fuel", but not in the sense that it is a source of energy. You input more energy to create it than you can later recover from it.

That's a hugely relevant topic of discussion. The cost of producing in energy terms.

I think when oil was first drilled in Saudi Arabia, it costed 1 barrell in energy to extract 100 barrells. Now, the global average is something like 1:10.

But I suppose this can be more easily explained in money terms.

When George Bush revealed his hydrogen plan a few years ago, it was a farce. He claimed that it was a possible road to a renewable energy source. Burn oil to extract hydrogen from water. He's such a chancer!
 
Uranium and plutonium are in limited supply. What happens when they run out?

Absolute minimum estimate on Uranium stocks is 85 years, though it could be up to 300 times that. Then we can move onto thorium which has at least 500 years in it :). The fact that you talk about Plutonium as a fuel source indicates to me that you need to do more reading (hint, its not used for commerical energy production).

Thus nuclear power is a 'short' term solution that will give us a lot of time to come up with something better.

Nobody has mentioned hydrogen as a fuel...thank god, because it will never be a viable fuel.

What? Hydrogen fuels are an energy store, not a source. It takes energy to make hydrogen, and you do it because its efficent and portable (if not feasible yet). edit:Damn looking stuff up times.

A Pan-European grid would be needed to link up everyone's wind farms.

:lol: the cheap super conductors that would allow a pan-europe gird to be feasible* would probably allow practical fusion, thus invalidating the necessity of a pan-european set up!

*Contempory transmission have theortical limits of 7000km and the longest ever built is only 1,700 km. You'd need so much better than that to share wind power between the ukraine and the uk.
 
Ultimately I would be all in favor of fusion power, in the meanwhile I'd like wind and solar power to become more widespread, but realistically, if we can stop building coal and oil plants and replace them with nuclear plants that would be an improvement.
 
I love nuclear energy. Cheap, efficient, zero CO2 output, fuel can be reprocessed so we have enough for thousands of years, safest energy source, extra depleted uranium would be great for our military to have, and it produces the highest energy to land use ratio. Waste that can't be reprocessed or used for armor/weapons can be buried safely. Large portions of the planet are uninhabitable deserts, burring it deep under the sands or mountains of these deserts makes it so the pros greatly outweigh the cons.
 
You can actually use hydrogen as a fuel, but it is really really expensive to extract, and once it is extracted, it reacts with everything it touches, so it is impossible to transport.

I've heard something about storing it in hydrid form, recently. Crumb, where did I hear that?
 
Breeder reactors can dramatically reduce the half-life of nuclear waste (while extracting energy). With them then storage of nuclear waste is not as big a deal.

-Drachasor
 
I'm all for it! Just as long as they build it safely and make sure that none of the radioactive water leaches into my shower water.

Besides from what I hear about current reactor designs, it's virtually impossible for a reactor to meltdown unless you had someone wedge something into the rod assembly so as to prevent the rods from rising.
 
Top Bottom