Wind energy providing 60% Of Ireland's Electricity requirements Tonight.

SeanW

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Don't kid yourself, it's not due to lack of R&D.


Throrium cycle was announced to the public in 1946. The basics are the same as plutonium production which was being done in multiple reactors since 1944. IICR thorium has been used in five power plants over the years. Between the US/USSR/UK/France/China there's been hundreds of long life naval rectors where cost wasn't as critical. So the physics is very well understoood.

Until we have uranium 238 / plutonium 239 breeders we won't have thorium 232 / uranium 233 ones.

Actually, we don't really need Thorium any more, because Uranium from seawater is a lot closer: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#75832c95159a

So no biggie there.

Like gas is sooo much cheaper and more flexible.

However, gas, unlike uranium, has a load of hidden costs that I don't see being discussed here or by any anti-nuke environmentalist.

1. Gas power still emits a lot of CO2. Not as much as coal or oil, but still more than hydro or nuclear. Way more.
2. Methane leakage (unburned gas) is 100 times more effective at trapping heat from the sun in our atmosphere than CO2 is. The natural gas production lifecycle emits enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere. The impact of this is might be far worse than the CO2 emitted in the gas plants.
3. Gas supplies are running low in Western Europe, and much of Europe's gas supplies come from Russia and Qatar. It will only get worse in the years to come as Western sources are depleted. This carries an extreme geo-political cost.
4. Getting more gas nearer home often requires "fracking" which carries severe environmental consequences especially in the local area.
5. Extreme "opportunity costs". Simply put, the opportunity cost of using any resource for anything is that by using it in that way, you forego the opportunity to use that same resource for something else. Money is the best example, you could go on a massive holiday followed by a massive shopping spree, drinking bottles of expensive champagne along the way, but then you'd have no money for food or rent. Natural gas is the second best example, because it can be used for electricity generation, home heating, cooking, transportation, or as a feedstock in certain chemical processes. Like oil, it has higher opportunity costs than coal, which has fewer applications, or uranium, which has almost no alternative use but plenty of supply.

This is in addition to all the other problems caused by the mainstream environmental movements' policy platform caused by the renewables themselves. That they are:

1. Insanely expensive.
2. Literally as reliable as the weather.
3. Projecting that instability onto the power grid.
4. Require enormous amounts of "rare earth" metals, the processing of which cause extreme environmental damage.
5. a grave threat to Earth's biodiversity. Windmills alone are now more dangerous than White Nose Syndrome for bats in the United States, WNS alone is an existential threat to many bat populations. Windmills and some types of solar installation are also a serious danger to various types of birds.
6. Require enormous amounts of land, especially wind mills that must generally be placed in the most unspoilt parts of our environment. I.E. the tops of hills and mountains.
7. Require the construction of enormous amounts of new power lines as the renewable installations have to be sited far away from main population and industrial centres.

SeanW

Oh and by the way, in case anyone is under the illusion that the problems above are purely academic, a recent report found that Ireland is way off course in tackling our contributions to the cause of climate change:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/ireland-completely-off-course-in-tackling-climate-change-473039.html

You'd almost think we were doing something stupid, like, oh, I don't know - ignoring the one technology that has actually been proven to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions deeply and on a very wide scale.

At 12:54PM today, 28 July 2018, Ireland emitted 331g/kwh for the electricity we used.
Germany, following similar policies to ourselves, emitted 450g/kwh.

France, which has the opposite policies, emitted only 35g/kwh almost a full order of magnitude less than ourselves and more than one order of magnitude better than the Energiewende in Germany.

Source: https://www.electricitymap.org/

We've let the mainstream environmental movement dictate our energy policies since '78 and this is the result. Every day that we allow this insanity to continue, we emit a column of dangerous greenhouse case emissions (CO2, methane etc) into the atmosphere that is 100% unnecessary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXX1fHy8V-A

No, you really couldn't make it up.

Co2 is BS , it's not changing our climate, the Sun and Oceans are what drive our climate , more and more people are living in cities and cities are grown and the urban heat island effect is growing and Met office thermometers all over the world are now in places which would have been fields decades ago giving higher temperature readings.

Anyway, why don't we replant our forest ? real hardwood trees ? hmm ? forest loves Co2.

We see the way the greens forced a Diesel agenda in Ireland poisoning people in towns and cities all over Ireland because they bought into this whole Co2 BS. Diesel exhaust was seemed a lesser danger than Co2 ? no you really couldn't make that up ! It seems like politicians failed miserably in School , Co2 is essential and without it it would be a damn cold place.


You have to look at the disgraceful way housing estates were built in Ireland over the decades, concrete and more concrete, 6 foot concrete walls all over the place, patch of Green grass in the middle called the "green" little to no trees and shrubs and hardly and space in the front and rear and concrete drive etc.

Why don't we build apartments ? housing estates are outdated and not practical for big towns and cities any more, then you can have nice parks, I love when I go to Germany and see how they construct their houses, apartments and towns, lovely places and best of all , no housing estate eyesores where everything looks the same , plane and boring and an eyesore.

The Government are talking about offering a grant for Solar PV but still no Feed In Tariff, they talk about self consumption meaning large batteries adding to the cost of installation, instead of offering the FIT so people would not have to go to the extra expense of installing batteries, the Grid becomes a big free battery then you buy back whatever energy you need.

And I can bet installers will raise costs to ensure it's them and not the public that benefit from the Grant, will the Government ensure this money goes to the customers ? I doubt it !

We have a situation where we've too much wind energy and no PV meaning in Winter we got a decent amount of wind and in Summer we got far less and only Gas to back it up, again, you couldn't make it up, think of all the roof tops in Ireland just waiting to be littered with Solar PV !

Capt'n Midnight

SeanW wrote: »

Actually, we don't really need Thorium any more, because Uranium from seawater is a lot closer:

You can recover gold from seawater too. But uranium is much easier.

Anyway as the article says But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power

So this won't make nuclear power cheap. Just cheaper. And that's before you count the cost of the petrochemicals used in the recovery. UK's new nuclear plants have been a guaranteed price of twice the market rate.


Opportunity costs for nuclear are insane. Flamanville has been under construction since 2007 and might start producing power in 2019. €10.5 Billion tied up. A wind farm would have paid for it's self by then. And there is still no guarantee that any EPR will be reliable in use.

However, gas, unlike uranium, has a load of hidden costs that I don't see being discussed here or by any anti-nuke environmentalist.

1. Gas power still emits a lot of CO2. Not as much as coal or oil, but still more than hydro or nuclear. Way more.

You can't run a grid on nuclear. You need to load balance with gas or hydro, if like France you have massive amounts of hydro.

[*]Methane leakage (unburned gas) is 100 times more effective at trapping heat from the sun in our atmosphere than CO2 is. The natural gas production lifecycle emits enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere. The impact of this is might be far worse than the CO2 emitted in the gas plants.

Yip it's a biggie, fracking in the US is a biggie there.

[*]Gas supplies are running low in Western Europe, and much of Europe's gas supplies come from Russia and Qatar. It will only get worse in the years to come as Western sources are depleted. This carries an extreme geo-political cost.

You haven't mentioned that HALF of the gas imported into the EU comes from Norway 37% and Algeria 12.7%. Or that LNG also comes from the USA and even the Baltic States have have terminals for LNG tankers. Cheap Russian gas is nice, but we have alternatives and Russia needs hard currency. Qatar only supplies a 1/17th of the imported gas so yeah, it's kinda hard to imagine the geopolitical conditions that would have all those countries aligned against us.

[*]Extreme "opportunity costs". Simply put, the opportunity cost of using any resource for anything is that by using it in that way, you forego the opportunity to use that same resource for something else.

Nuclear is a money pit. And there's always the risk of the plant being shut down before it's broken even.


Rare earths aren't rare.
Agree that China is making a mess processing them.
They are used for magnets. With a slight reduction in efficiency they could be replaced with electromagnets like most generators have used since the 1850's.

Wind farms don't use monopolize land. you can still have fields and forests and bogs and live stock inside wind farms. Skydiving is a no-no.

Nuclear power plants tend to be build in remote areas (why ?? - it's a serious question.) so they also need lots of pylons.


And like I've posted before you can use excess wind energy to produce hydrogen and dump it into the gas network. It's not that energy efficient by the capital costs are low.

The Pheasant2

I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to the nuances of modern energy production.
Nuclear supplemented by wind and solar (tidal too though it always seems to be in development hell whenever I check on its progress) renewables appears to be the most sensible option...

But from my reading of the thread it seems a few are saying Nuclear isn't a good fit for us at the moment - would I be right in saying we've missed the boat so to speak on the current generation of reactors? Or is it just the massive initial cost coupled with a long delayed benefit?

Dardania

The Pheasant2 wrote: »

I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to the nuances of modern energy production.
Nuclear supplemented by wind and solar (tidal too though it always seems to be in development hell whenever I check on its progress) renewables appears to be the most sensible option...  

But from my reading of the thread it seems a few are saying Nuclear isn't a good fit for us at the moment - would I be right in saying we've missed the boat so to speak on the current generation of reactors? Or is it just the massive initial cost coupled with a long delayed benefit?

FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)
Not helped by most of Irish people's exposure to nuclear is due to Sellafield, which is a really dirty process to try re-process nuclear waste, whereas other countries just bury the waste.
I'd say your last point is the particular problem - massive initial cost and long delayed payout - Irish people typically need a quicker payout, and very established technology. Based on my experience working abroad, and comparing different national approaches.

Capt'n Midnight

The Pheasant2 wrote: »

I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to the nuances of modern energy production.
Nuclear supplemented by wind and solar (tidal too though it always seems to be in development hell whenever I check on its progress) renewables appears to be the most sensible option...

But from my reading of the thread it seems a few are saying Nuclear isn't a good fit for us at the moment - would I be right in saying we've missed the boat so to speak on the current generation of reactors? Or is it just the massive initial cost coupled with a long delayed benefit?

Tidal is easy. It's just very, very expensive to make stuff that will survive the worst winter storm. That's how Aberdeen makes its living.


In general renewables AND nuclear need load balancing, usually using dispatchables like fossil fuel or hydro.



Most thrid gen nuclear power plants are 1.2 - 1.6GW each.
But development hell and companies tottering on bankruptcy.

Too big to stick one on the Irish grid because you'd need 1.2 - 1.6GW spinning reserve to back it up in case of transformer problems or jellyfish*. Also our summer night valley is 2GW and with renewables potentially taking a a good chunk of that , there's not enough to justify one reactor.

Nuclear is too expensive to have plants that are only used during peak demand. If you aren't selling power 24/7 then nuclear is not for you. It's a one trick pony, baseload or nothing.



And yes we missed the boat, if we needed nuclear power by 2020 to meet out Koyoto obligations we should have ordered it back in 2003 , and like a mortgage it'll be mostly interest payments for years before you start paying off the actual costs.

We could throw up a few wind farms by 2020 if we pulled out all the stops.


Lots of nuclear snake oil too
Small self contained long life reactors ? They've been used at sea since the mid 1950's. But they still aren't cheap.
Thorium ? It's the fuel of the future, just like it's been since it was publicly announced in 1946.
On time, on budget ?
We've been building reactors for three quarters of a century, but somehow this time it will be different :rolleyes:

Pumped storage sorta helps nuclear, but also helps renewables. In reality the low cost of renewable power means that pumped storage is needed less often and so isn't as economic as it used to be.


* UK, Israel , Korea, Canada , USA , South Africa , France and Sweden.

SeanW

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

You can recover gold from seawater too. But uranium is much easier.

Anyway as the article says But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power

So this won't make nuclear power cheap. Just cheaper. And that's before you count the cost of the petrochemicals used in the recovery. UK's new nuclear plants have been a guaranteed price of twice the market rate.

Actually it does more than that. It guarantees a steady supply to all peoples on Earth with access to the oceans. Assuming the physics of seawater leaching uranium from rocks is as proponents say, then it makes nuclear "renewable" for at least 1 billion years.

Opportunity costs for nuclear are insane. Flamanville has been under construction since 2007 and might start producing power in 2019. €10.5 Billion tied up. A wind farm would have paid for it's self by then. And there is still no guarantee that any EPR will be reliable in use.

The EPR is expected to generate 1.6GW per reactor. At this time there are 3 under construction across Europe, Olkiluoto-3 in Finland, Flamanville-3 in France and Hinkley Point C in the United Kingdom.

All of these projects are over budget, years behind schedule and none producing power yet. Fine.

You haven't explained why the EPRs seem to be so hard to build and get started, I assume it is an attempt to make all nuclear look bad because the EPRs aren't working out so well.

Since you haven't broached the topic of WHY the EPRs don't seem to work, I will. For the sake of argument say that the EPR projects are all a complete mess. That can be for one of three reasons:
1) The EPR as currently constituted is a flawed technology.
2) Nuclear engineering has got significantly worse since 1995 when Sizewell B was commissioned in the United Kingdom, 1.2GW reactor for a cost of £2bn. Most/all of France's Gen 2 reactors are similar, for example the Cattenom Nuclear Power Plant, which uses BWRs @1.3GW. Since the French built those en-masse between '71 and the 1990s, they couldn't have overshot their budgets and timetables like that otherwise the French would have to choose between abandoning them all half-built or going bankrupt trying to finish them.
3) The first few EPR projects are simply providing an expensive learning curve that will provide experience to those building later ones. The first of anything is usually more expensive and inferior to the things that follow - the laws of first movers disadvantage or last movers advantage may apply.

Of these, a combination of 1) and 3) is the most likely as EdF admitted in 2015 that the design is hard to build, and they proposed a "new EPR" redesign to deal with those issues.

Assume the EPR is FUBAR as a design, the solution is simple - build more Sizewell Bs and French style Gen II reactors for a fraction of the cost. Ya know, like France did in the 20th century. When they solved their climate change problem by accident. Without even trying. And the UK. The big advantage of the EPR was that it was supposed to be more uranium-efficient, something like 17%, which, for reasons above doesn't really matter anymore.

You can't run a grid on nuclear. You need to load balance with gas or hydro, if like France you have massive amounts of hydro.

Yes, France has about 20% of its power supply from hydro, but whenever I check electricitymap.org it's pretty much the same story. 90%+ non-fossil energy, of which 75% of that is accounted for by nuclear. The hydro they have might help, but I have to wonder how important it actually is.

You haven't mentioned that HALF of the gas imported into the EU comes from Norway 37% and Algeria 12.7%. Or that LNG also comes from the USA and even the Baltic States have have terminals for LNG tankers. Cheap Russian gas is nice, but we have alternatives and Russia needs hard currency. Qatar only supplies a 1/17th of the imported gas so yeah, it's kinda hard to imagine the geopolitical conditions that would have all those countries aligned against us.

Not so fast. Norway has less than 2 trillion cu/m3 of gas reserves. Russia has 47.8 trillion. If your plan is to make Europe energy independent by leaning on the Norwegian gas fields, it's not going to work so well. Russia has the most gas reserves of any country on Earth, they will always be a big player wherever natural gas supplies are concerned.

Nuclear is a money pit. And there's always the risk of the plant being shut down before it's broken even.

Not a chance. Sizewell B in the UK was commissioned in 1995 with a cost just around £2bn. It had a design lifespan until 2035, but the operator expects it can run to 2055. Assuming new hypothetical Sizewell Bs are built to the same engineering standards, there's no reason they should not be built with at similar (inflation adjusted) prices and also with a 60 year lifespan.

Rare earths aren't rare.
Agree that China is making a mess processing them.

I think it's more that they are very difficult to process and invariably create major toxic wastes. So far as my knowledge extends, rare earths come from China because only China is willing to drown it's country in the toxic waste sludge necessary to make them. By the way, while the "wastelands" around Chernobyl are in fact havens for wild life and will be re-habitable in the next few hundred years as the Cs137 destabilises into chemically stable atoms, the toxic waste lakes in Baotou will be toxic forever. Unless the sludge escapes, then it will pollute elsewhere. Forever.

Wind farms don't use monopolize land. you can still have fields and forests and bogs and live stock inside wind farms. Skydiving is a no-no.

Wind farms are inherently destructive. Given the nature of wind flows, you generally have to put them on the hilltops and mountaintops, scenic, previously unspoilt areas which are themselves natural/national treasures. Been to Northern Ireland recently? I have, and they've pretty much carpet bombed all the hilltops of County Fermanagh and beyond with ugly, bird chomping, bat killing monstrosities many times the size of the Dublin Spire. You can see them from 10 miles away even in North Cavan. You couldn't make it up.

Speaking of bat kills (remember, windmills are grave, existential threat to bat populations worldwide and has for many years been worse than White Nose Syndrome which is itself an extinction-level threat), the news just keeps getting sadder and more depressing.
Bird and bat kills at wind farms in Israel (Dec 2017)
Scientific American: Bat killings at wind turbines continue.
The Guardian: Wind turbine collisions killing hundreds of bats each month in the UK just from turbine strikes (this presumably doesn't include barotrauma which is worse).
London Free Press (Ontario): Wind turbines kill 10,000s of bats in Ontario.

That so called "environmentalists" are pushing this garbage is insane and it makes me sick. You couldn't make this **** up. On what planet does this even remotely resemble a good idea?

Nuclear power plants tend to be build in remote areas (why ?? - it's a serious question.) so they also need lots of pylons.

Nuclear plants need to be near water, preferably fresh water (salt water is harder to process as coolant etc) so they tend to be along rivers where possible. The pylon issue is a red herring, yes, pylons may be needed but that is to take power from a few central points (Cattenom in France produces 5200MW in total) to the greater existing grid. With wind mills you have to carpet bomb your country with them, and that means building not just a few sets of new pylons as with nukes, but that you also have to carpet-bomb your country with new pylons to pull power from a myriad of new, small, disparate, remote and unreliable sources.

By the way, a huge problem in Germany is that Ze Germans built all ze Windmühlen in the North but their heavy industry is all in the South. So instead of building nukes in Bavaria near the industry they now have to build a whole new grid to carry the wind power from North to South. In the meantime, they're just dumping huge, uncontrolled surpluses on their neighbors like Poland, causing havoc there. Just brilliant. :mad:

And like I've posted before you can use excess wind energy to produce hydrogen and dump it into the gas network. It's not that energy efficient by the capital costs are low.

Question, how exactly do you do this? The natural gas network transports methane, hydrogen is presumably totally incompatible with this. How do you make sure that only methane goes to Joe Soaps' residential gas boiler (and everything else) if you stuff lots of hydrogen into the system?

Also, if the answer is "it can be done, and here's how" that benefits nuclear more than weather based renewables, because if there's a trough-peak of 500MW demand in the night time and 1.5GW in the day time in a hypothetical region, a 1GW reactor can cover that with storage for only 24 hours. Wind turbines can have low wind speeds for several days, solar panels are dependent on sunlight with similar potential for variance only they're also useless in the winter. So to power a civilisation with solar panels your storage plan needs to cover 6 months instead of 24 hours.

And yes we missed the boat, if we needed nuclear power by 2020

We should have started in '78. And kept going.

Thorium ? It's the fuel of the future, just like it's been since it was publicly announced in 1946.

Nobody gives a monkeys about Thorium anymore. It made sense to look at Thorium before uranium from seawater became near-viable. There's no more need for it. It's over.

Too big to stick one on the Irish grid because you'd need 1.2 - 1.6GW spinning reserve to back it up in case of transformer problems

Nothing that could not be solved by more interconnection with France/the UK, the pumped hydro we have plus a few of those Tesla powerwalls scattered across the country if they actually work.

dense

According to the CSO, in 2015 Irelands total energy consumption was around 14m tons of oil equivalent (and probably rising as the economy grows).


https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpub...ii2016/energy/


That converts to around 163twh.


http://www.conversion-website.com/energy/ton-of-oil-equivalent-to-terawatt-hour.html

Of that, total electricity consumed was just 29twh, and of that, just 27% came from renewables which is less than 8twh.

So to transition to a fossil fuel free economy we need to find a way for renewables to reliably substitute the remaining 155twh of energy being used.



Electricity
• Final consumption of electricity increased by 2.9%
to 29 TWh with a 3.1% increase in the fuel inputs.
• Renewable electricity generation, consisting
of wind, hydro, landfill gas, biomass and
biogas, increased to 27.3% of gross electricity
consumption in 2015.
• In 2015, wind generation accounted for 22.8%
of the electricity generated and was the second
largest source of electricity generation after
natural gas.


• The use of renewables in electricity generation in
2015 reduced CO2
emissions by 3.2 Mt and avoided
€286 million in fossil fuel imports.


http://www.seai.ie/resources/publica...yN1ldrrBIgVW8t


How many wind turbines will that require?