jbeckton wrote:Everything requires a huge capital investment.
Wrong. Gas turbines are relatively cheap to build. The capital investment is roughly ordered currently as
gas - hard coal - brown coal - water - wind - nuclear - - - - - PV.
[Wind, water depend strongly on location etc.]
The first law of thermodynamics basically states you don't get something for nothing.
The first law basically states that the total energy of the universe won't change, regardless of you building a nuke or a coal or a wind power plant. People always throw in 'laws of thermodynamics' in order to spice up a debate about energy economics (what's the cheapest way to do things), full of vague generalities only in the loosest sense connected to rigorous laws of physics and even less relevant for the point in question.
It's not the question whether you will need eggs for an omelett or not, but which chicken you should buy for laying them.
We will use the remaining FF anyways, why not use them to build
renewables, a net energy producer no matter what way you look at it.
Because
(a) energies are not all alike,
(b) net energy calculations are not always the only thing that matters,
(c) people won't act 'rational' (maximize energy flow over lifespan of humanity), but what economists call 'rational' (maximize short-time earnings).
"Accounting tricks" are great but even without them wind turbines now cost about 4-7 cents per kwh, whats not cost effective about that?
The problem is that they are not very reliable. (Ask the danes about it.) People don't want unreliable power supply, so power suppliers need backups, either by call options on power or by back-up plants. Both choices cost money, which comes on top of the wind power price. Moreover, if you want to sell every kWh produced (which you need to meet those price forecasts), you need other power plants balancing the load. This will cost you dearly again, since those other power plants cannot operate at maximum efficieny, but in much less efficient constant change of load.
Additionally, all those nice 'look how cheap' calculations make, of course, very favourable assumptions about location. The energy yield increases like the (averaged) cube of wind speed, so the wind speed plays an enormous role in the price of power. And you can bet that the sites with such optimal wind conditions are taken first and fastest; the price of wind power is thus, essentially, inversely related to the amount of wind power already installed.
You are not sure about a lot of things. Steam turbine and CT plants are not efficient at all! (about 33%)
First of all, Parson type steam turbine couples work at about 40%, not 33%, and they are used in the power industry
if it pays off economically. In NPP, you usually don't want many things that can jam, because down-time and maintenance costs you dearly, hence you usually accept lower efficiency than theoretically achievable. Second, even 33% is not too far from carnot efficiency, hence I do not understand what you mean by 'not efficient at all'. Of course, a gas-cooled NPP etc. can achieve higher efficiency, since it can achieve higher gradient of temperatures, but this comes bundled with possibly higher building costs, a maybe more sophisticated cooling system and higher discharge of cooleant in case of leakage, not to mention the higher nuclear fuel temperature. It is always a payoff to be balanced, and just pointing at one single number and claiming 'inefficiency' seems absurd to me.
Where does nuclear energy suck air out of the atmosphere?
At its ventilation openings. Cool air is used to cool cooling water.
It uses a nuclear reaction to boil water, the rest is no different from a coal plant.
Hell yes it is. If you have a leakage in the cooling water containment of the coal plant, you can make a guesstimate how long you can run this thing and go on; in the NPP, you have to shut down immediately and file an incident report.