Power Plants Planning
As the UK and Euro zone people are slowly finding out, and we’re slowly beginning to realize, wind and solar plants are not necessarily the best choices for power generation for a large populace. They are not reliable. They are easily damaged, destructive of the environment and wildlife, and when the parts have to be replaced, e.g., the turbine blades, they cannot be recycled so they end up in landfills and unfortunately do NOT deteriorate into anything. They either have to be burned or tossed. They are not material that can be recycled.
From the article: …while the energy generated by wind turbines is clean and green, outdated turbine blades are not. With blades spanning up to 260 feet and weighing an average of 36 tons, old or broken blades pose a difficult disposal problem in the U.S.
Currently, there are two common disposal methods for turbine blades – burning them or throwing them in a landfill. According to NPR, more than 720,000 tons of blade material will be disposed of over the next 20 years. With an increasing dependence on wind-generated electricity and the ever-growing size of the turbines themselves, the issue of waste from wind turbines is one that cannot be ignored. – article https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/wind-turbine-blades-cause-issue-with-waste/
In Germany, 46% of the Black Forest has been demolished to provide heat to the populace. https://www.dw.com/en/future-looks-dark-for-germanys-black-forest/a-1439662#:~
From the article: Future Looks Dark for Germany’s Black Forest
Germany’s best-known tourist attraction, the Black Forest, may be losing some of its luxuriance as a new environmental report warns of dire damage in the region wrought by pollution.
The idyllic region is environmentally ailing according to the report
Klaus von Wilpert points to a clump of spruce trees in the middle of the plantation. For him, it typifies the gradual decline of the Black Forest, one of Germany’s biggest tourist draws.
“That’s the most visible effect of pollution. The trees began yellowing in autumn and have progressively lost their needles,” says the researcher from the German FVA forestry office, which supervises the Black Forest.
Black Forest badly damaged
The agriculture ministry too acknowledges the problem has become acute. In a report this month, it said that Germany’s woodlands have never been in such bad shape.
One in four trees is damaged, and the number of those worst hit has increased by eight percent over the last year, the report said. The development is particularly disturbing in the Black Forest, which is considered to be 40 percent “damaged”, the worst attrition rate since 1983.
The number of unhealthy trees in this southwest corner of Germany near the French border has risen by 10 percent over 2003, due in part to a drought last year whose effects are being felt with some delay. – article
Here is a good article explaining all sides of the nuclear power plant issue:
From the article: This conversation – “nuclear good but uranium dangerous” – regularly leads to a very good question: what about thorium? Thorium sits two spots left of uranium on the periodic table, in the same row or series. Elements in the same series share characteristics. With uranium and thorium, the key similarity is that both can absorb neutrons and transmute into fissile elements.
That means thorium could be used to fuel nuclear reactors, just like uranium. And as proponents of the underdog fuel will happily tell you, thorium is more abundant in nature than uranium, is not fissile on its own (which means reactions can be stopped when necessary), produces waste products that are less radioactive, and generates more energy per ton.
So why on earth are we using uranium? As you may recall, research into the mechanization of nuclear reactions was initially driven not by the desire to make energy, but by the desire to make bombs. The $2 billion Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb sparked a worldwide surge in nuclear research, most of it funded by governments embroiled in the Cold War. And here we come to it: Thorium reactors do not produce plutonium, which is what you need to make a nuke. – article.
The Army did have a plan a few years ago to have these small nuclear reactors as part of its contingency basing plans… and just awarded a contract to develop them.
From the article: Pentagon awards contracts to design mobile nuclear reactor
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Monday issued three contracts to start design work on mobile, small nuclear reactors, as part of a two-step plan towards achieving nuclear power for American forces at home and abroad.
The department awarded contracts to BWX Technologies, Inc. of Virginia, for $13.5 million; Westinghouse Government Services of Washington, D.C. for $11.9 million; and X-energy, LLC of Maryland, for $14.3 million, to begin a two-year engineering design competition for a small nuclear microreactor designed to potentially be forward deployed with forces outside the continental United States.
The combined $39.7 million in contracts are from “Project Pele,” a project run through the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), located within the department’s research and engineering side. The prototype is looking at a 1-5 megawatt (MWe) power range. The Department of Energy has been supporting the project at its Idaho National Laboratory.
Pele “involves the development of a safe, mobile and advanced nuclear microreactor to support a variety of Department of Defense missions such as generating power for remote operating bases,” said Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a department spokesman. “After a two-year design-maturation period, one of the companies funded to begin design work may be selected to build and demonstrate a prototype.”
“The Pele Program’s uniqueness lies in the reactor’s mobility and safety,” said Jeff Waksman, Project Pele program manager, in a department statement. “We will leverage our industry partners to develop a system that can be safely and rapidly moved by road, rail, sea or air and for quick set up and shut down, with a design which is inherently safe.” – article
Mother Earth News had a great many articles back in the 1970s on how to make use of solar and wind energy on a private basis, and if possible, sell the overage to the local power companies. That made a lot of sense, including their notions about battery storage for night-time use, long before the current crop of rechargeable batteries was available.
Nowhere was there the remotest suggestion that this should become a commercial endeavor and product, with the direst of consequences for the consumer population at large. Nuclear power was never considered a bad idea as it provided genuinely cheap energy for both industry and household use.
But all that was before the ecohippies and greenbeaners and greedy corporate squabs got hold of the notion that they could sell solar/wind as being better for the environment on a large scale…. an idea which has been repeatedly proven false, and is now being dissed and repudiated by well-known Greenbeaners such as Michael Moore and Michale Shellenberger, as well as other semi-prominent persons whose eyes have finally opened wide. They can see that they were lied to and have said so publicly, which annoys the money-grubbing clodpoles that think they can tell everyone what to do and how to live.
Australia’s own power generating systems are not doing well, but the Aussie government is proposing to provide electric power to Singapore via an undersea cable. This is not a joke: https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/australia-backs-plan-worlds-biggest-solar-farm-pow/#:~:text
The Australian government has assigned major project status to a proposed A$22bn plan to build the world’s biggest solar farm in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) and send the electricity through a 3,700-km-long undersea cable to Singapore where, promoters say, it will meet 20% of Singapore’s demand for power.
The 12,000-hectare solar farm, to be located near the town of Elliott in NT’s Barkley Region, will be visible from space, says Sun Cable, the start-up company formed to develop the scheme.
Electricity will be stored in a 30GWh battery – the world’s biggest, according to Sun Cable – allowing transmission at night.
From Elliott, the electricity will be sent by cable 750km to the coast at Darwin to begin its submarine journey to Singapore.
Sun Cable, which secured its first round of investor funding in November, believes the operation, called Australian-ASEAN Power Link (AAPL), can be up and running in 2027.
A final investment decision has yet to be made, and the scheme still needs various approvals. – article
Remember that scene from Ice Age with the dodos chasing a watermelon off a cliff? Heh. It seems that the real dodos may not be extinct just yet.
I don’t know what this is all going to come to, but it’s best to be as informed as possible and know the facts well enough to discuss them in a rational way, even with an ecohippie, should you run into one by mistake.
Here’s one more thing to think about: what is the count/volume of lithium batteries that have been disposed of in landfills? I don’t know the answer to that, but as careless as people are, it’s probably a high volume, because they’re just flashlight or computer or phone batteries, right? Right, and lithium batteries have a bad habit of self-igniting, as you may recall from the Tesla car fires. Yes, I know: that’s been “fixed”, but it should never have happened. So if lithium flashlight batteries are disposed of in landfills, and they self-ignite, are the tossers of those batteries even vaguely aware that landfills or garbage dumps generate enormous quantities of methane, a flammable gas? Wouldn’t it be ironic if tossed out lithium batteries set one on fire that could not be put out?
_________________________
Forbes and Defense News Links were provided by MI Ranger.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", It's science!
A fire that can’tbe put out – believe I read of a tire disposal place which has been smoldering for years?
If you can find that, please post the link.
There is a hole in the ground in Russia where they drilled too carelessly, sparked a methane fire, and it has never gone out. Methane lies deep in the Siberian tundra. BOOM!
Centralia PA has a coal seam fire that’s been going for decades. Caused the vast majority of the town to be abandoned.
Hold my candle lantern and watch this.
Speaking of the Black Forest, I’ll take a sammich made of their Ham…with cheese…on that good crusty bread…and mustard. Blackforest Ham Matters!
https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-oldest-underground-fire-has-been-burning-fo-1539049759
I know about those coal seams. They are all over the place in those hills, leftover from the Carboniferous epoch. There are highway cuts that show the coal seams.
Amazing how little we know about our own planet, isn’t it?
The methane fire Ex-PH2 is referring to is the Darvaza gas crater – AKA the “Door to Hell” or the “Gates of Hell”.
At the time it was created, it was in the Soviet Union. Today, it’s now in Turkmenistan, about 160 mi N of the capital.
Thanks for the update on location, Hondo!
Do you think maybe that’s the reason Putin isn’t as eager to drill as we are? Or might it be “other reasons”?
I’ve seen video of this on Science and Discovery channel and I’m sure it just doesn’t do it justice.
It looks amazing and the blue flame too from the sulfur. Eerie!!
https://webecoist.momtastic.com/2013/05/28/burn-rubber-the-worlds-9-worst-tire-fires/ think it was the 1982-2005 Rhinehart fire I had read about. (Sorry, I retain what I read for years… head full of trivial nonsense. )
Oh, goody. Landfill fires. Something to look forward to.
Butbutbut WHAT ABOUT it making the eco-kooks feel good about themselves? That’s gotta account for something!
Not sure where to post this but I just e-mailed this to Ed.
Paging Dave Hardin, Paging Dave Hardin, white courtesy telephone please…
BEIRUT EXPLOSION in Firework Factory in LEBANON
Apparently this just happened hours ago, Tuesday Aug 4, 2020
Looks like Chicago.
Wow. Geezo Pete, that is one Big Boom!
I bet there’s not an intact window for miles!
“Firework” factory, my left testicle.
A Mossad preemptive strike?
But what WAS there – originally – for real?
And what sort of mouth breathing window lickers put a “fireworks factory” in a residential neighborhood??
A Middle Eastern type who knows just who to bribe and/or blow!
Ex-PH2, naturally occurring Thorium is not fissile, therefore it -cannot- fuel a nuclear chain reaction.
Non-fissile = not fuel.
Thorium is -fertile-, making that when bombarded by “thermal” (slow) neutrons it transmutes into fissile material, in this case Uranium 233. -that- U233 is used for fuel.
U235 is the naturally-occuring fissile stuff, diluted below usefulness by the more common non-fissile U238.
A similar neutron-capture process transmutes non-fissile U238 into fissile Plutonium 239. (More fuel)
So, there is no such thing as a “thorium only” reactor. The thorium cycle is another “breeder” cycle, producing U233 instead of Pu239.
No fissile – no fuel – no reactor.
As for nuclear weapons, fissile stuff, assuming pure enough, is bombstuff.
U235, Pu239, and U233 have all been used successfully in nuclear weapons.
Someone posted a breakdown on how thorium is converted to usable material for a reactor. I have to find that. Thanks, 11B, for reminding me.
Neutron bombardment of Thorium resulting in beta decay to Protactinium, which then further beta decays to U-233, which is a thermal fuel, along with U-235.
Problem with Thorium reactors is they’re not efficient enough to be commercially viable, at least not in our lifetimes.
Thank you, Sparky!
NHSparky is correct. But if you’d like more detail than he provided regarding the thorium fuel cycle, the Wikipedia article on same is fairly decent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
Oh, and for what it’s worth: the Forbes article is written by someone who is woefully ignorant of nuclear reactors and nuclear engineering. A couple of points: 1. Both U235 and U233 are fissile – as is the majority of the plutonium produced in today’s reactors. However, U233 is NOT the same fissionable isotope used in today’s reactors and which occurs in natural uranium. That is U235, not U233. U233 occurs only in negligible amounts in nature. 2. Thorium is non-fissile (like U238, thorium is fertile – which means it can only be used to produce nuclear fuel if bombarded with neutrons). Ergo, you have to have a working nuclear reactor before you can use thorium to produce nuclear fuel. This in turn means that such a reactor requires a hefty amount of either (1) enriched uranium, (2) plutonium, or (3) mixed oxide (mixture of enriched uranium and plutonium) fuel for startup – which means that however you slice it, you need uranium (plutonium is also produced by breeding in a uranium-fueled reactor). And using thorium also requires quite different reactor designs for efficient breeding. 3. Like Pu239, U233 is excellent fission bomb material. So diversion of U233 for proliferation purposes is just as big a concern with a thorium cycle reactor as is the diversion of plutonium is with today’s uranium-fueled reactors. (Diversion of either obtained from reprocessing of power reactor fuel has major technical issues for the potential bomb-maker, though those issues are different for power-reactor plutonium and U233). 4. While a thorium-cycle breeder doesn’t produce the trans-uranic elements that a uranium fueled reactor does, it has other problems. Specifically, the U233 produced contains a small fraction of U232. U232 decays rather rapidly, and some of its decay products are intensely radioactive. That means storage of the U233 for future use becomes quite problematic, as it gets hot (requires cooling) and working around it after it’s been in storage for a while becomes truly hazardous duty. Plus, U233’s fission fragments are essentially the same as those of U235. Several of those are long-lived and pose long-term radiation hazards.… Read more »
Thank you, Hondo. Better assessment and discussion than that provided by the author of the article.
And again, thanks to Carter for fucking us over with regards to reprocessing fuel.
New England is currently about 2/3 natural gas.
Massive reserves of the stuff just offshore.
Check out this page, you could spend hours just
looking at all the cool realtime graphs.
A plethora of good educational stuff to look at
and decide for yourself what is really going on.
Click on the “renewables” tab and see what a
useless mess wind and solar are. Landfill gas
beats them both on a cloudy calm day.
Expand and play around with the fuels chart.
Look at how Nuke is steady freddie all day long
enjoy:
https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/
And yet look at the NG prices in New England versus other parts of the country.
Why? ONE major pipeline in the NE, thanks to the NIMBY/BANANA idiots.
I remember discussing power with my octogenarian father in law once – he knew of over a hundred dams built in his lifetime in the NH/NE area – out of which maybe 3 had electric-generating built in. His opinion was that had the builders been a bit more far-sighted, nuclear power would not have been even needed there.
Uh, yeah, no.
Not even close. NH peak daily consumption alone runs about 2500-3000 MW at peak.
That’s more than double the output of Seabrook or 1.5 times output of Hoover Dam.
Think of hundreds of dams (and this conversation was circa 1985 or so.)
I seem to recall that most if not virtually all dams in New England would only be suitable for microhydro (100kWe or less) if used to generate electricity. Assuming 200 such dams and max output for the category (100kWe), that’s a grand total of 20 MWe. A thousand such dams would produce an aggregate 100MWe.
Seabrook Unit 1 alone has a capacity of 1244 MWe. (For comparison, the US Niagra Falls hydropower operation – the Robert Moses Niagra Power Plant, one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the US – has a capacity of barely twice that at 2675 MWe.) And Seabrook was originally scheduled to have a second nuclear unit, which was later cancelled.
There’s a place for small hydroelectric power. But it’s not suitable as a replacement for the electrical grid’s baseload – the minimum amount consumed by the electrical grid 24/7/365 – which is primarily what nuclear and coal-fired power plants are used to produce.
Hydro in NE runs about 4% of the total until late afternoon when
it is needed for peaking and then only rises to about 6-7% of
the total load. And most of that hydro is from Canada.
The three nukes provide the baseload at about 3100 MW and low end
load for the day is usually about 11000 MW so there is room for
more Nuke baseload but that ain’t gonna happen.
Natural gas is the “marginal” fuel and tracks the load nicely but
gets expensive during the afternoon and thus Hydro comes on line
to ease the price spike until the load starts to drop at 6 PM.
Oil and coal are miniscule. Solar and wind are a bad joke on a
sunny, windy day in July.
formatting son…formatting.