- This topic is empty.
-
AuthorPosts
-
September 17, 2012 at 4:13 pm #769808
kootchmanMemberChrist redblack read your own links@@@@
Some Republicans in Congress want to halt subsidies completely and let market forces decide whether wind can survive on its own.
The tax credit works by giving wind farm owners 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of power they produce for 10 years. That subsidy, which makes wind power far more competitive, is expected to cost the federal government about $1.3 billion this fiscal year.
A combination of federal tax incentives with state and local subsidies can cover as much as 50% of the cost of a renewable-energy project, says John Gimigliano, principal-in-charge of KPMG LLP’s energy sustainability tax practice in the U.S.
That’s not economical…. oh yea… and your Texas boondoggle?
Wind energy isn’t foolproof. Critics note that the wind doesn’t normally blow on hot summer days when electricity demand soars in Texas, meaning the grid still must have enough power plants on standby for the hottest of days.
You build your capacity for the highest demand load… so essentially you are building a redundent and less reliable parallel system? So you are all in for a system that can survive only with a 50 per cent subsidy…. ??!!
September 17, 2012 at 4:35 pm #769809
miwsParticipantSeptember 17, 2012 at 4:52 pm #769810
DBPMember>>Wind energy isn’t foolproof. Critics note that the wind doesn’t normally blow on hot summer days when electricity demand soars in Texas . . .
True, true.
The wind, she comes and she goes.
But radiation? Now that’s forever.
Our atomic love will always keep things “hot” between us, right kootch?
September 17, 2012 at 5:00 pm #769811
waynsterParticipantSo we burn more coal and more natural gas… I know they get no gov tax breaks them oil co’s… clean solar and wind power is out why the wind don’t blow when the sunshine’s and when the wind blows the sun don’t shine… so in Texas when the sun don’t shine they cant use wind and when it does they can’t use solar……hmmmmm yep that’s Texas don’t come out of the ground can’t use it…
September 17, 2012 at 5:01 pm #769812
kootchmanMemberUse fast breeder reactors and there will be less of it. A lot less. Fact, we probably have enough spend uranium to not have to mine uranium ore for many a decade…. and if we ever come to our senses… ( 50/50? ) we can use all that warhead material for good use. Lord knows we have lots of it. My thinking is we are a lot greener in intent and actuality by consuming what is headed for landfills… I’d trade off for breeder reactors against or in lieu of bird choppers. And….. we can use salt, brackish or even dirty water as in pathogens … made nice and clean and sanitary by creation of purified steam… ya get a two fer.
“Nuclear waste became a greater concern by the 1990s. Breeding fuel cycles became interesting again because they can reduce actinide wastes, particularly plutonium and minor actinides.[4] After the spent nuclear fuel is removed from a light water reactor, after 1000 to 100,000 years, these transuranics would make most of the radioactivity. Eliminating them eliminates much of the long-term radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel.
The reprocessed uranium, which constitutes the bulk of the spent fuel material, can in principle also be re-used as fuel, but that is only economic when uranium prices are high. Finally, a breeder reactor can employ not only the recycled plutonium and uranium in spent fuel, but all the actinides, closing the nuclear fuel cycle and potentially multiplying the energy extracted from natural uranium by about 60 times. “
September 17, 2012 at 5:19 pm #769813
kootchmanMemberwaynster… take a good hard look… you of the eternal benefits tree… one, no other industry puts more money in the hands of the federal government than… fossil fuels. Two, imagine the state budgets… whereas Conoco makes about .05 cents per gallon of gasoline… California rakes in .65 in taxes. This is not a particularly high CO2 saturated atmosphere .. we will transition but not with bird choppers. Not on an industrial scale that would support a modern economy.
September 17, 2012 at 5:20 pm #769814
waynsterParticipantIts not so much how good nuke generated electricity works it is one of the best at it… its all in weather one can keep it safe so far when nukes go they destroy life and property in country’s like japan earthquakes proved that….the former soviet union lack of everything proved that… three mile island once again people so how to fool proof it from man and nature are the biggest test… other then the waste and what to do with it witch is even a bigger problem…
September 17, 2012 at 5:36 pm #769815
kootchmanMemberhere ya go redblack….
Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, the math is straightforward: to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans. Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines.
Not all environmentalists ignore renewable energy’s land requirements. The Nature Conservancy has coined the term “energy sprawl” to describe it. Unfortunately, energy sprawl is only one of the ways that renewable energy makes heavy demands on natural resources.
Consider the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects. The production and transportation of steel are both expensive and energy-intensive, and installing a single wind turbine requires about 200 tons of it. Many turbines have capacities of 3 or 4 megawatts, so you can assume that each megawatt of wind capacity requires roughly 50 tons of steel. By contrast, a typical natural gas turbine can produce nearly 43 megawatts while weighing only 9 tons. Thus, each megawatt of capacity requires less than a quarter of a ton of steel.
Obviously these are ballpark figures, but however you crunch the numbers, the takeaway is the same: the amount of steel needed to generate a given amount of electricity from a wind turbine is greater by several orders of magnitude.
Such profligate use of resources is the antithesis of the environmental ideal. Nearly four decades ago, the economist E. F. Schumacher distilled the essence of environmental protection down to three words: “Small is beautiful.” In the rush to do something — anything — to deal with the intractable problem of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental groups and policy makers have determined that renewable energy is the answer. But in doing so they’ve tossed Schumacher’s dictum into the ditch.
You are all going whole hog on a technology that is not “green” not by a long shot….
Time to ponder fellahs… time to ponder. It ain’t ready for prime time. we have done all of this before… beautiful, non polluting hydro power… all in. I just watched hundred of millions being spent to tear down the Elwha dam…. and y’know…. the only thing I could think was… too bad we couldn’t do the same for the Columbia and Snake rivers. As much thought went into TVA and Bonneville as the Bird Chopper devotees have given to windmills … regret is something to avoid, not court.
September 17, 2012 at 6:45 pm #769816
kootchmanMemberPoint granted waynster. But we are not the Soviet Union… and we have been remarkably good at nuclear safety. Lesson learned at Fukishima… don’t build in tsunami prone coastal zones. Probably eliminates Westport as a site.
September 17, 2012 at 9:40 pm #769817
DBPMemberLesson learned from Fukushima:
Don’t build reactors in tsunami-prone coastal zones.
–Great. Thanks for that, kootch.
Is this the kind of lesson we can afford to keep learning the hard way? Like the lessons we learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?
And while we’re at it, here’s another lesson that we’re probably gonna have to learn before we finally wise up:
Don’t build reactors in fault zones.
Last year the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission identified 27 US reactors that should be upgraded in order to “better withstand” earthquakes.
–Whoops! There went all the profits.
***************************************************************************************
And here’s yet another lesson that we learned (and are still learning, in fact) over there in the Tri-cities area:
Don’t store nuclear waste anywhere near groundwater.
Whoops again!
Sorry folks.
But don’t worry.
I think we’ve really learned our lesson this time.
Until the next time, that is.
****************************************************************************************
Welcome to Hanford: DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!
September 18, 2012 at 3:55 am #769818
kootchmanMemberIndeed.. but Hanford was a plutonium manufacturing facility, for WW2…and the nuclear arsenal to follow. we had no idea then what to do with waste. And after you have destroyed thousands of square miles of natural habitat with bird choppers your descendants can have the sublime pleasure of wondering what we were thinking of. We trend to design caution with nuclear … even our worst accident, operator error and all… Three Mile Island… was a non event other than to galvanize anti-nuclear hysteria. The net effet? No damage to life or property… and even greater safety regulations. The Three Mile Island “disaster”.. just what were the “disasterous” consequences… ? I would rather see the vast stockpiles of waste (depleted uranium) reduced in volume, consumed, and rendered less toxic. Which is greener? Have hundreds of upgraded Hanford storages… as we do now.. or complete the extraction cycle? The cost of maintaining waste stockpiles is never going to get cheaper.. Reuse, recycle. Seismic upgrades? That’s ongoing, we have been doing it for years… schools, public buildings… it’s still cheaper than wind.
and your link link is at odds with your post I see.
Here’s your post
Last year the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission identified 27 US reactors that should be upgraded in order to “better withstand” earthquakes.
Here’s what the link ACTUALLY said
The 27 nuclear reactors identified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as possibly needing upgrades to better withstand earthquakes
Needed or possibly needed… are two different animals.. and upgrade may be as simple as more redundency in the “scram” procedures, or better digital controls… they may be structurally fine.
September 18, 2012 at 4:20 am #769819
redblackParticipanthmm. fast breeder reactors, eh? sounds intriguing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (February 2012)
oops.
might be an article penned by duke energy. shucks. better look elsewhere…
ahh! here’s a good and comprehensive article on fast breeders! well, shut my mouth! turns out that britain has the world’s largest repository of spent plutonium on earth:
The skeptics include Adrian Simper, the strategy director of the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which will be among those organizations deciding whether to back the PRISM plan. Simper warned last November in an internal memorandum that fast reactors were “not credible” as a solution to Britain’s plutonium problem because they had “still to be demonstrated commercially” and could not be deployed within 25 years.
The technical challenges include the fact that it would require converting the plutonium powder into a metal alloy, with uranium and zirconium. This would be a large-scale industrial activity on its own that would create “a likely large amount of plutonium-contaminated salt waste,” Simper said.
Simper is also concerned that the plutonium metal, once prepared for the reactor, would be even more vulnerable to theft for making bombs than the powdered oxide. This view is shared by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the U.S., which argues that plutonium liberated from spent fuel in preparation for recycling “would be dangerously vulnerable to theft or misuse.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-breeder-reactors-nuclear-waste-nightmare
holy [expletive deleted]!
bet ya’ can’t do that without government subsidy.
***
now, regarding the wind farm debate…
so, you noticed that cattle can graze on wind farm land, right? and we all want our cattle to be fed grass, right?
well, crikey. you could grow corn on all of that useless land, too.
hops, soybeans, wheat…
i’ll bet you could even drill for oil on the same patch of ground – if only API and their pimps – oops! there’s that word again! – would give up the right to use the surface land.
anyway, i’ve been waiting for you to respond to the gigawtt/square mile question. waiting and waiting. and waiting.
and my answer is this:
that 150, 200, 250 square miles/gigawatt that you sob over? the same square mileage that texan cattle farmers cheers about?
once acquired, that amount of land never changes. nothing more is used. it can be used over and over and over and over and over again until it produces terrawatts of power.
and the “fuel” to run it still costs exactly
nothing.
September 18, 2012 at 3:56 pm #769820
DBPMemberI’m picturing two pelicans paddling happily along next to a pristine, sandy beach. One of them decides to start a conversation:
“Say Murray, this sure is a swell vacation, huh? I’m glad we decided to fly instead of driving this year.”
“Sure, Sally. Me, too. But how about those big chopper thingies we flew over on the way down, huh? Jesus! Just imagine what would happen if you got close to one of those. It’d be like: Whack-SQUAWK-whack-SQUAWK-whack . . .”
“Listen, Mur! Don’t even kid about that kind of stuff. It’s too horrible to think about. Besides, we’re on vacation, yeah? Try to think some nice thoughts for a change.”
[ . . . ]
“Hey, Sally! Look!”
“What? What is it now?”
“It’s a big black thing, and it’s coming right toward us. We’d better get outta here.”
“Oh, Murray! You are your scary stories . . .”
September 18, 2012 at 7:04 pm #769821
kootchmanMemberSeptember 18, 2012 at 7:05 pm #769822
kootchmanMemberredblack… France….
The Super-Phenix was the first large-scale breeder reactor. It was put into service in France in 1984.
The reactor core consists of thousands of stainless steel tubes containing a mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides, about 15-20% fissionable plutonium-239. Surrounding the core is a region called the breeder blanket consisting of tubes filled only with uranium oxide. The entire assembly is about 3×5 meters and is supported in a reactor vessel in molten sodium. The energy from the nuclear fission heats the sodium to about 500°C and it transfers that energy to a second sodium loop which in turn heats water to produce steam for electricity production.
Such a reactor can produce about 20% more fuel than it consumes by the breeding reaction. Enough excess fuel is produced over about 20 years to fuel another such reactor. Optimum breeding allows about 75% of the energy of the natural uranium to be used compared to 1% in the standard light water reactor.
September 18, 2012 at 7:20 pm #769823
kootchmanMemberand the “fuel” to run it still costs exactly… but the energy to make them is huge..and they have to be replaced every 20 years… like all things mechanical… they wear out. And again… you still haven’t addressed the “load” problem. Can’t use them in the winter if the blades ice up and can’t use em when you need em if the wind ain’t blowing.
Here ya go redblack…. there are multiple breeder conventions to use.
http://www.argee.net/DefenseWatch/Nuclear%20Waste%20and%20Breeder%20Reactors.htm
Plutonium is used in atomic bombs – the fact that it’s pure Plutonium-239 that makes an atomic bomb work, and not the other three isotopes, apparently didn’t matter, because in 1977 President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order that banned the reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the United States. The rationale was that the Plutonium could possibly be stolen, and terrorists might be able to use it to make atomic bombs.
Never mind that in the real world, it is essentially impossible to separate out the Plutonium-239 from the other isotopes in sufficient purity to use it for bomb making. The British tried it, the Russians tried it, the French tried it, and we tried it, but nobody did it very well, even though we had the best scientists and all the money in the world to throw at it.
If you try to make a bomb with such a mixture of Plutonium isotopes, forget about it – it won’t work, ever. We’re talking about the laws of physics, Greenpeace notwithstanding. Unless you have pure Plutonium-239, your bomb will fizzle. So throwing away all that valuable nuclear fuel to prevent terrorists from making a bomb that won’t work anyway is just plain dumb.
At its best, the Breeder Reactor system produces no nuclear waste whatever – literally everything eventually gets used. In the real world, there actually may be some residual material that could be considered waste, but its half-life – the period of time it takes for half the radioactivity to dissipate – is on the order of thirty to forty years. By contrast, the half-life for the stuff we presently consider nuclear waste is over 25,000 years!
Damn science and engineering again…
The fuel IS free..and it meets demand loads when needed.. . it’s in barrels, pools, containment vessels stacked up all over the USA…… might even make those electric cars viable …. instead of burning fossil fuels to generate the electricity to charge them! Ya getting the picture…. “ohhhh nuclear”… scary word.
September 18, 2012 at 9:14 pm #769824
365StairsParticipantDammit! I thought this one was going to be easy…A or B?
Well…after nearly reading every relevant post…
Wind Turbines….
Why? They are already in place…working…pay for themselves…and generally speaking installed on land that really wouldn’t be used for any other purpose.
Eye sores? Landscape ruiners? Hmmm…I guess if I had to look at one all day…I would learn to appreciate them…
Judging by all the wind power on this blog…TR should install one or two in their yard and figure out how to turn each negative gibberish combative post into their personal wattage store!
(count this post)… ;)
September 18, 2012 at 9:28 pm #769825
DBPMemberVery droll, stairs. :-)
Breeder reactors, eh? OK, kootch, I’ll bite. But might I refer you to an earlier post from my skeptical friend, JV, in which he says, and I quote:
“When the technology gets there, I’m all for it. Until then let companies or universities try to improve it.”
Presumably breeder reactor technology is still getting the wrinkles worked out, eh? Otherwise, we would’ve seen many more of them out there by now. No, wait. Don’t tell me! The wind turbine lobby spent a fortune on lobbying and got Congress to shut down the breeder reactor program.
Drat those hippie kids! They’ve ruined everything.
September 18, 2012 at 9:30 pm #769826
DBPMemberFrom a Scientific American article published in 2006:
Creating extra fuel in nuclear reactors, however, is not without its concerns: One is that the plutonium produced can be removed and used in nuclear weapons. Another is that, to extract the plutonium, the fuel must be reprocessed, creating radioactive waste and potentially high radiation exposures. For these reasons, in the U.S., President Carter halted such spent fuel reprocessing, making the use of breeder reactors problematic.
The U.S. constructed two experimental breeder reactors, neither of which produced power commercially. The Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan was the first American fast breeder reactor but operated only from 1963 until 1972 before engineering problems led to a failed license renewal and subsequent decommissioning. Construction of the only other commercial fast breeder reactor in the U.S., the Clinch River plant in Tennessee, was halted in 1983 when Congress cut funding. Elsewhere in the world, only India, Russia, Japan and China currently have operational fast breeder reactor programs; the U.K., France and Germany have effectively shut down theirs.
Source article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-fast-breeder-react
September 18, 2012 at 11:36 pm #769827
kootchmanMemberActually the first US breeder reactor was developed in what is now INEEL in Idaho… 1954 I believe. The “wrinkles” would surprise the French… they were operating them very successfully…as the SA articel probably states… but was omitted.. the Fukishima accident shot down all nuclear power in Germany, UK et al, they were not shut down for economics or for technical complications… mass hysteria did it… they will be back on line. President Carters motivation was IMO flawed… it was not that the engineering doesn’t exist… or the technology. The SA article references plutonium… but any current nuclear power of substance can do that… France, UK, USA, Russia and now China can make plutonium… interesting though, NK, Iran, India, Pakistan… use the older but very effective uranium enrichment process… this addresses Jimmy Carter’s reason… see post #91. See, you can’t control enrichment … as Iran is about to prove… better to get uranium out of the energy stream….. seems smart to me to consume all that waste, a free energy source. Of course the Chinese will zoom right past us.. and the Russians, Indians, and Korea while we have high school graduates (maybe) climb up ladders to oil the bird chopper transmissions… they will be seeding their science and technology base with nuclear engineers, scientists, nuclear chemists, and we will have bird choppers…. great. Let’s see if our MIT, RPI, CalTech, Stanford grads to those countries for their future opportunity. NASA has been gutted. might as well go all the way in. Bring back the mules and plows too? Ah well.. the deniers of nuclear are the counterweight to the dismissal of climatologists as crackpot scientists with an agenda.
September 18, 2012 at 11:46 pm #769828
kootchmanMemberOn a brighter note…… Apple broke $700 per share !! I guess if you owned Apple shares…. who cares how expensive gas is? A Bugatti is not very fuel efficient.
September 19, 2012 at 4:35 am #769829
miwsParticipantSeptember 19, 2012 at 4:57 am #769830
redblackParticipantk000tch:
Superphoenix) or SPX was a nuclear power station on the Rhône River at Creys-Malville in France, close to the border with Switzerland. A fast breeder reactor, it halted electricity production in 1996 and was closed as a commercial plant in 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
oops.
try again.
September 19, 2012 at 5:33 am #769831
redblackParticipantthis is hilarious.
any other conservatives want to defend the nucular subsidy as a means of tearing down the wind energy subsidy – which is about doodly-squat when compared to the nucular subsidy?
and doesn’t create matt-groehning-inspired three-eyed fishies?
September 19, 2012 at 7:05 am #769832
kootchmanMemberhere are some beautiful pictures .. well there goes that crown jewel for FBR’s…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083149/Wind-turbines-cope-UK-weather-3-blown-pieces.html
Fiery: Last month a 300ft wind turbine in Ardrossan, Ayrshire, exploded into flames when it was buffeted by high winds
Canada’s original wind farm along Cowley Ridge remains shut down for intensive structural inspection following the spontaneous self-destruction late Friday of one of its 18-year-old turbines.
On September 26, at 11 a.m., an environmental expert hired by Duke Energy to survey its North Allegheny Windpower Project in western Pennsylvania found the body of a small, brown bat more than 300 feet beneath the spinning blades of a wind turbine. Duke didn’t wait for a directive from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The company immediately suspended night operations of the wind farm and sent the carcass to the USFWS for evaluation. Bats are killed most often on nights with low wind in the late summer or fall. And, at least some of the time, they’re not killed by the blades themselves, but by a drop in pressure near the quickly spinning rotor that causes blood vessels in the lungs to explode.
Closer to Home!!!
Wind farms in the Pacific Northwest — built with government subsidies and maintained with tax credits for every megawatt produced — are now getting paid to shut down as the federal agency charged with managing the region’s electricity grid says there’s an oversupply of renewable power at certain times of the year. “We require taxpayers to subsidize the production of renewable energy, and now we want ratepayers to pay renewable energy companies when they lose money?” asked Todd Myers, director of the Center for the Environment of the Washington Policy Center and author of “Eco-Fads: How the Rise of Trendy Environmentalism is Harming the Environment.”
NATIONAL GRID has been forced to ask wind farms to shut down for the second time in a MONTH – because it’s too windy. National Grid paid out almost £3 million to wind farm operators in compensation in mid-September when a dozen wind farms were shut for three nights in a row.
Wind turbine plant shuts down Windsor operations.
http://blogs.windsorstar.com/2012/03/29/wind-turbine-manufacturer-in-windsor-closing-down/
14000 Abandoned Wind Turbines In The USA
Altamont’s turbines have since 2008 been tethered four months of every year in an effort to protect migrating birds after environmentalists filed suit. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, 75 to 110 Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333 American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually.
The problem with wind farms when they are abandoned is getting the turbines removed, as usual there are non Green environmentalists to be seen. Imagine the outraged Green chorus if those turbines were abandoned oil drilling rigs.
or
The owners of a French-made wind turbine have been advised to keep people away from them after bits started falling off.
The Northern Ireland Health and Safety Executive gave the warning and advised the 17 owners to lower the turbines the ground.
The warning came after the blade assembly fell off several machines.
Here DPB… beautiful, suitable pictures for framing…
Pictured (in 2009) are abandoned turbines of the Kamaoa Wind Farm at Ka Lae on the Big Island of Hawaii. In the spring of 2012 the wind turbines pictured were torn down. The area is known for strong winds and has been the site of several wind farms. When it began operations in 1987, the Kamaoa project generated a typical total peak output of 7.5 MW with its 37 Mitsubishi 250 KW wind turbines. The wind farm was shut down in 2006 after the turbines fell into disrepair.
http://denglerimages.photoshelter.com/image/I0000eLa6MrmyQqY
How green is that?
Lethbridge
Damn I am so far behind on my reading… on the “to do” list ..“Eco-Fads: How the Rise of Trendy Environmentalism is Harming the Environment.”
I guess. Nothing is goof proof Messer redblack.. but we are going whole hog, very quickly, to satisfy eco appetites and the track record for wind is not exactly perfect. Our nuclear record is great… and I guess I will throw in with the nuclear industry fossil fuel alternatives.
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.