Nuclear 5 to 20 according to assumptions suspect figure
Where did this number come from? I see a link to the a website that is all assertions with no citations.
The citation from the world nuclear organization has citations that back up all their claims, that indicates that conventional nuclear power with uranium enrichment from the 1960's (diffusion) has an energy payback ratio of at least 20. With modern centrifuge enrichment it jumps to 50.
With breeder reactors, particularly molten salt breeder reactors, the energy payback ratio climbs into the thousands. First because you get all the energy from the fuel rather than just the fissile U235, second because you dont have to do fuel enrichment anymore which is the bulk of the energy cost of nuclear energy.
Then there are CANDU reactors, which burn unenriched uranium, that are economical today. It wouldnt be unreasonable to guess they have an 'EROEI' in the hundreds.
Joined: Sep 25, 2004 Posts: 4428 Location: Boston, MA
Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 2:33 pm Post subject:
I'm going to assume that what you tell me is true Dezakin.
If this technology has such a high EROEI and a high $$ profit ratio, why aren't we building them right now?
How fast could we build them?
How much would electricity cost if we used breedor reactor energy?
How many of these reactors would we need in order to produce gasoline from...air?
Peak Oil is not running out of oil, it's running out of cheap oil. Peak Oil isn't just about running out of cheap oil either, it's about running out of cheap transport fuel. I can't put a nuclear reactor in my car (although that might be pretty cool). Fuel cells require plantinum and other exotic materials. It would be rather difficult to replace the world's car fleet with fuel cell cars if we ran out of platinum.
Also, if this new technology isn't cheaper than oil...economic growth will grind to a halt. No growth = no new $$$. No new $$$ = Deflationary Depression with no end in sight. We may end up building a few of these molten salt reactors and have an economy in such disarray that no one can afford the electricity.
Regardless, if these reactors are as good as you say they are, we should be investing heavily in them. Exxon should be demanding the construction of hundreds of new reactors all across the world. Surely the folks at Exxon know how much money they could make from controling the world's energy production. Who cares if they can only sell it for 1 cent a kilowatt, if they control the market, they make billions. Additionally, if nuclear power is so cheap, why do they need a heavy government subsidy? And why can't they pay for their own insurance? _________________ "www.peakoil.com is the Myspace of the Apocalypse."
How many of these reactors would we need in order to produce gasoline from...air?
Four
Tyler_JC wrote:
I can't put a nuclear reactor in my car (although that might be pretty cool).
Would a Plug-in hybrid (which is charged by a nuclear reactor on the grid) be sufficient for your coolness factor?
Tyler_JC wrote:
Additionally, if nuclear power is so cheap, why do they need a heavy government subsidy? And why can't they pay for their own insurance?
The risk is that a utility issues bonds for $5-$10 billion in debt, gets the nuclear power plant(s) 100% built, then cannot use them because of lawsuits or red tape. Those bonds still require debt payments to be made and there is currently not any market that will cover that risk.
Utilities are heavily regulated and they tend to minimize risk because of that regulation. They cannot risk being stuck with those debt payments and none of the income from the nuke plant stuck in litigation.
Joined: Sep 25, 2004 Posts: 4428 Location: Boston, MA
Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 3:59 pm Post subject:
Quote:
Tyler_JC wrote:
How many of these reactors would we need in order to produce gasoline from...air?
Four
Are you making up that number or did you get that from a scientific source . I mention producing gasoline from air because biomass is not realistic in a fertilizer-poor future. We have a limited supply of carbon on the ground, but lots of CO2 in the air. If we could figure out a way to...
Now I'm the one being irrational. _________________ "www.peakoil.com is the Myspace of the Apocalypse."
Joined: Oct 12, 2004 Posts: 1647 Location: Davis, California
Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 4:04 pm Post subject:
You can easily make methane from CO2. It just costs a lot of energy. _________________ Joseph Stalin "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. "
If this technology has such a high EROEI and a high $$ profit ratio, why aren't we building them right now?
Well, because EROEI really has nothing to do with profit ratios. I didn't say that nuclear power has high profit ratios... It doesn't. It isn't enormously expensive, but you can get better returns today by building a coal power plant or a natural gas power plant, because the capital costs are lower.
That isn't to say nuclear is uncompetitive. Even with the excessive regulation by the NRC (tolerances are such that a smeared banana on the floor would be considered nuclear contamination because of the potassium in the banana) and the inevitable NIMBY legal challenges, as well as the tax on nuclear power plants for a national repository that is a bad idea and wont ever get built, nuclear power plants are still profitable.
If EROEI was all that mattered, we would be using molten salt reactors, solar concentrators, and any number of other technologies that have huge energy returns... that are expensive. But the world works on Money returned on Money invested.
Quote:
Also, if this new technology isn't cheaper than oil...economic growth will grind to a halt.
Thats a nonsensical assertion that ignores the economic growth that occured at the beginning of the industrial revolution before liquid fuels were widespread. A recession and restructuring is certainly believable, but you seem to be implying 'collapse of civilization' which is nonsense.
Quote:
Regardless, if these reactors are as good as you say they are, we should be investing heavily in them. Exxon should be demanding the construction of hundreds of new reactors all across the world.
Sure. They should also be investing heavily in coal liquefaction plants and contracting with sasol. Companies are run by men with short visions and memories of buying infrastructure that turned up worthless when the oil price plunged. No one wants to be caught holding their unmentionables if another asian financial crisis hits and oil falls to ten dollars per barrel.
Hell Exxon et all should be investing in conventional drilling infrastructure even. Everyone is still holding back on any oil that has production costs over 10 dollars per barrel.
Quote:
Additionally, if nuclear power is so cheap, why do they need a heavy government subsidy? And why can't they pay for their own insurance?
Run the numbers and you can find vast subsides for other energy industries. Nuclear power has to pay more in a nonsensical repository than they get back for insurance payments.
Joined: Apr 28, 2005 Posts: 3451 Location: West shore Lake Eire, MI, USA
Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 7:40 pm Post subject:
MarkR wrote:
Quote:
The main cost of nuclear fuel is not the uranium itself but the enrichment of the fuel and the manufacturing of fuel elements et cetera. Do you mean this is not necessary in a breeder? That you only have to dig the ore out of the ground and throw it into the breeder? I don't think so. What is your source?
It is true that breeders don't need enriched uranium - in fact they use depleted uranium.
However, instead of an enrichment plant you need a plant capable of extracting plutonium from spent fuel - this is a considerably more costly and difficult process. It is plutonium that actually fuels the reactor, the uranium is converted to plutonium as a useful side effect. The problem is that before the new plutonium is useful, it has to be extracted and concentrated, before it can be formed into new fuel.
Not only that, but because the fuel in a breeder operates at higher stresses, fuel changes need to be more frequent and fabrication quality needs to be higher.
Due to the increased complexity of a breeder fuel cycle and higher capital costs of the reactors, it is generally though uneconomic if Uranium prices remain below about 3-5x what they are today.
This is no longer the case as it was in the early 80's with the breeders designed in the 50-70 period. Todays design is the Integral Fast Reactor, you can look it up through any search engine as a DOE project.
http://www.cmt.anl.gov/science-technology/nuclear/spent-fuel.shtml _________________ Oxygen: - An intensely habit-forming accumulative toxic substance. As little
as one breath is known to produce a life-long addiction to the gas, which addiction invariably ends in death.--Isaac Asimov
If a reactor can produce more fuel than it uses, it is breaking the second law of thermodynamics. It is physically (ya know, those unbreakable lwas) impossible to create energy.....
Breeder reactors work! However you are right in that producing more fuel then what you consume is impossible. But technically speaking breeders don't "produce" more fuel then they consume. Instead they unlock the potential of U-238, which is something that a regular reactor can't do.
Imagine U-238 as being 100 pounds of coal that is trapped inside a lock box. If you take 1 pound of coal to burn a hole thru this "lock box" you can extract the 100 pounds of coal inside. You've just spent 1 pound of coal to be rewarded with 100 pounds. Is that a violation of the laws of thermodynamics? NO!
That's what happens when a breeder converts U-238 into Pu-239. The breeder doesn't "create" more fuel it unlocks the potential of U-238.
Joined: Jul 18, 2004 Posts: 198 Location: S. Yorkshire, UK
Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2005 3:57 pm Post subject:
Quote:
This is no longer the case as it was in the early 80's with the breeders designed in the 50-70 period. Todays design is the Integral Fast Reactor, you can look it up through any search engine as a DOE project.
I'm familiar with the IFR, and what I said is equally applicable to the IFR as the older breeders.
The only difference was that the IFR brings the reprocessing and fuel fabrication plant onto the same site as the reactor - the whole process is integrated into 1 building - hence the name.
Although the fuel processing plant propsed for the IFR design is considerably simpler than the process currently used for recycling of PWR fuel - it is, nevertheless, a complex process which involves handling the intensely radioactive waste, dissolving it in a molten salt at red hot temperatures, and then refining it. Finally, reforming the resulting highly radioactive refined fuel into fuel rods. By contrast, conventional uranium fuel is often assembled by hand, and once assembled requires virtually no precautions.
My problem with the nukes is the ideal meeting the real world. I am sure that MIT can operate one nuke really well, as the US Navy has with several small ones.
But in order to make enough energy to replace petroleum as a transportation fuel worldwide, you would need 20,000, thousand megawatt power plants. Even if friendly space aliens paid for the construction of all these nukes (imagine the steel and concrete involved), you would need people to run them. If each plant had 100 employees, you are talking about a couple million Homer Simpsons. Doh!
Now think about the proliferation issues involved in breeding all that plutonium. Folks, this just isn't going to happen. There will be a few hundred new nukes built worldwide, and I am sure they will be better designed than those built in the 1960s. They will help keep some of the lights on after the natural gas runs out. But, they will not make enough hydrogen (or methane) to keep 800 million motor vehicles and thousands of passenger jets running. _________________ "The world is changed... I feel it in the water... I feel it in the earth... I smell it in the air... Much that once was, is lost..." - Galadriel
My problem with the nukes is the ideal meeting the real world. I am sure that MIT can operate one nuke really well, as the US Navy has with several small ones.
But in order to make enough energy to replace petroleum as a transportation fuel worldwide, you would need 20,000, thousand megawatt power plants. Even if friendly space aliens paid for the construction of all these nukes (imagine the steel and concrete involved), you would need people to run them. If each plant had 100 employees, you are talking about a couple million Homer Simpsons. Doh!
Now think about the proliferation issues involved in breeding all that plutonium. Folks, this just isn't going to happen. There will be a few hundred new nukes built worldwide, and I am sure they will be better designed than those built in the 1960s. They will help keep some of the lights on after the natural gas runs out. But, they will not make enough hydrogen (or methane) to keep 800 million motor vehicles and thousands of passenger jets running.
Nobody's proposing to build enough plants to supply energy to the motor vehicles and passenger jets - they're unsustainable and destructive technologies anyway. Not only this, they're inefficient at moving people around anyway - one need only look at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area to learn THAT particular lesson.
But in order to make enough energy to replace petroleum as a transportation fuel worldwide, you would need 20,000, thousand megawatt power plants.
The USA is operating 104 nuclear power plants currently with a total 97,400 megawatts. So using your number, we have about 97 of those 1,000 MW power plants.
Nuclear power comprises about 20% of the power of electric grid. So if nuclear (breeder, etc) were to handle 100% of our electric grid (which nobody believes is required) an additional 400 nuclear power plants would achieve the goal.
Since wind, solar, biosmass and hydro are each going to be part of the grid, it is likely that they can contribute 30% to 40% ultimately, so that would remove about 200 of those nuclear power plants from the mix.
So the reality is that the USA would need about 300 to 400 nuclear breeder power plants at 1,000 MW each.
If the USA uses 25% of the world's energy (commonly cited quote) that would indicate that worldwide 1,200 to 1,600 nuclear breeder power plants at 1,000 MW each.
I hope that makes you feel better and you can cease citing the figure of 20,000.
I'm guessing this guy needs to replace the batteries in his "bullshit meter" b/c obviously 20,000 gigawatt nuke plants is a suspiciously high number IMHO.
Granted that's not enough to be a level 1 Kardaschev Civilization we'd need 175*10^15 watts
in other words 175 million 1 gigawatt nuke plants.
You did not pay attention to what the guy said. You are only referring to electricity consumption. You must be aware that transportation energy consumption is on about the same scale as electricity. If TRANSPORTATION FUEL is to be provided by nuclear especially via the wasteful hydrogen route, the U.S alone would need near 1 TW (1000 1GW plants) to supply the requirements. Add in worldwide requirements and we are talking about 5 - 6 TW of installed capacity. This by the way does not include total energy demand such as industrial/residential heat etc. That represents an awful lot of plutonium floating through the system and in the grand scheme of things not that much short of the 20 TW figure. This by the way does not account for population/energy demand growth.
Hence the reason for my stated position for abandoning the non-sustainable economic growth philosophy. We obviously cannot continue along this path for much longer before destroying ourselves completely. All options hoping to satisfy growth will be inadequate.
Joined: Sep 25, 2004 Posts: 4428 Location: Boston, MA
Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2005 7:48 pm Post subject:
Don't forget to that nuclear plants don't run 100% of the time at 100% capacity. It's probably closer to 90% of the time. So 20 TW becomes 18 TW... _________________ "www.peakoil.com is the Myspace of the Apocalypse."
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. I mention producing gasoline from air because biomass is not realistic in a fertilizer-poor future. We have a limited supply of carbon on the ground, but lots of CO2 in the air. If we could figure out a way to...
