'Nukular' power

[maryjane48]

Nuclear also gets a deal from ratepayers in the form of special contracts that are considerably higher than the spot-market price.
Consider that the average spot price of power on Ontario’s electricity market in 2010 was 3.79 cents a kilowatt hour — compared with only 3.16 cents in 2009.
Ontario Power Generation sells its nuclear output for a contracted price of 5.6 cents a kilowatt hour.
Bruce Power has a more complicated arrangement. The output from its Bruce A station — in which two of four units are still undergoing a refurbishment that is years behind schedule and far over budget — fetches 7.2 cents a megawatt hour, according to the Ontario Energy Board.
Output from the Bruce B plant is supported by a floor price of 5.1 cents a kilowatt hour. Since the average market price has been below the floor price, it has triggered substantial payments.
Keith Stewart of Greenpeace estimates payments under the floor price may have totalled as much as $250 million in 2010.
The Ontario Power Authority and Bruce Power said the payments are confidential and wouldn’t comment.
The power authority releases only a global total of what it pays to all generators who have contractual deals — which includes nuclear operators, gas-fired generators and renewable power generators such as gas, wind and solar.
Most of those contracts pay prices higher than the average market price.
The total payout for all the contracts was $1.62 billion in 2010, up from $1.4 billion in 2009.
Consumers make up the difference through an extra charge called the “global adjustment” or “provincial benefit,” which is adjusted monthly, and now often equals or exceeds the actual price of electricity.
Thursday at 9 a.m., for example, the hourly electricity price was 3.25 cents a kilowatt hour; the global adjustment was 4.3 cents.
Premium prices being paid for renewable energy are often blamed for Ontario’s rising power prices, Stewart says.
But he argues they’re not the chief culprit.
“It’s these types of nuclear top-ups, and to a lesser extent gas contracts, that’s actually driving the provincial benefit,” Stewart contends.
And new-build nuclear plants will require even higher prices if they are going to cover their costs, he says.

http://www.thestar.com/business/2011/05/06/the_debate_wind_vs_nuclear.html

[I Think]

The peer reviewed papers indicating the weak financial basis for nukes out numbers the positives by dozens to one.

[maryjane48]

seems like nukes are paid by taxpayers otherwise to expensive to build

[logicalview]

The peer reviewed papers indicating the weak financial basis for nukes out numbers the positives by dozens to one.

what "peer reviewed" papers are you referring to? Given the amount of junk science that has come out of the AGW fraud, under the flawed auspices of "peer review" I hold them in total disrepute. It seems like you can get "peer reviewed" papers to agree on anything and everything these days. The actual economics work, and this concept doesn't require some corrupt scientists to issue a slanted and useless "peer review" on to determine this.

What doesn't work, and what these junk peer reviewers should be looking at, is just how completely weak financially wind turbines are. They are completely and totally useless. Wind turbines have no positives whatsoever. They can't even say that they are environmentally friendly, as the acid boiling required for the rare-earth magnets are incredibly environmentally destructive. Then you add in the fact that they blend up entire species of birds and bats, and that they require massive subsidies to even operate (Warren Buffett said so) and they are just plain not worth building. At all. Wind turbines suck, and the people who continually make excuses for them suck even more.

[Terris]

http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... contribute

[zensiert]

Thorium power is the greenest power possible. You take a naturally abundant material (thorium), put it into a reactor (called a molten salt reactor) which is designed to be impossible to melt down (flare-ups kill the reaction process), and the resulting output is almost completely radiation-free and what remains has an incredibly short half-life.

Plus, you can take the highly radioactive waste output from other nuclear fuel, mix it with the Thorium to enrich it, and the other waste ends up being used up as well. We could power our entire civilization for the next 10,000 years with what thorium we have just lying about on the surface of the planet, and we would be able to eliminate all of our nuclear waste within 20 or so years at the same time.

Finally, reactors can be incredibly small. Think warehouse small. A city could have a Thorium reactor, and unless its presence was advertised, no-one would be able to tell what building it was housed in.

[I Think]

Mr View wrote

what "peer reviewed" papers are you referring to?

Simply google the term "economic viability of nuclear power generation" You will find hundreds of thousands of references (both pro but mainly con).

He also wrote

They can't even say that they are environmentally friendly, as the acid boiling required for the rare-earth magnets are incredibly environmentally destructive

Most wind turbine generators manufactured since the '90's do not use permanent magnets, but are excited by copper coil magnets.
There is some study of PM generators, but the machining tolerances for such huge magnets and the massive spinning armatures is making their entry into the field somewhat slow. PM generators are more efficient at less than design maximum, but as noted are so difficult to engineer that companies like Siemens are slow to implement them.

[I Think]

Gotta admit that I had never heard of Thorium Nuclear reactors, they seem on the surface of things to be quite promising, here is a link to a pretty good article on them, it includes pros and cons in a relatively non tech manner.

http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/t ... myths.html

[logicalview]

Simply google the term "economic viability of nuclear power generation" You will find hundreds of thousands of references (both pro but mainly con).

Ok - I googled this - and as usual you are twisting words to support your agenda.

Exelon CEO John Rowe, who said in 2012 that new nuclear plants in the US “don’t make any sense right now” and won’t be economically viable in the foreseeable future, because of low natural gas prices in the American market.

Of course natural gas is better then nuclear at present time. But you hate natural gas, because you still want to cling to the nonsense that is the AGW fraud. Nuclear doesn't generate "greenhouse" (blech what a stupid term) gases. Nuclear is far superior to stupid bird-blending wind turbines. Wind turbines suck.

Most wind turbine generators manufactured since the '90's do not use permanent magnets, but are excited by copper coil magnets.

Complete garbage.

Rare Earth Horrors

Manufacturing wind turbines is a resource-intensive process. A typical wind turbine contains more than 8,000 different components, many of which are made from steel, cast iron, and concrete. One such component are magnets made from neodymium and dysprosium, rare earth minerals mined almost exclusively in China, which controls 95 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth minerals.

Simon Parry from the Daily Mail traveled to Baotou, China, to see the mines, factories, and dumping grounds associated with China’s rare-earths industry. What he found was truly haunting:


As more factories sprang up, the banks grew higher, the lake grew larger and the stench and fumes grew more overwhelming.

‘It turned into a mountain that towered over us,’ says Mr Su. ‘Anything we planted just withered, then our animals started to sicken and die.’

People too began to suffer. Dalahai villagers say their teeth began to fall out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages, and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases. Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed.

Official studies carried out five years ago in Dalahai village confirmed there were unusually high rates of cancer along with high rates of osteoporosis and skin and respiratory diseases. The lake’s radiation levels are ten times higher than in the surrounding countryside, the studies found.

As the wind industry grows, these horrors will likely only get worse. Growth in the wind industry could raise demand for neodymium by as much as 700 percent over the next 25 years, while demand for dysprosium could increase by 2,600 percent, according to a recent MIT study. The more wind turbines pop up in America, the more people in China are likely to suffer due to China’s policies. Or as the Daily Mail put it, every turbine we erect contributes to “a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China.”

Big Wind’s Dependence on China’s “Toxic Lakes”

The wind industry requires an astounding amount of rare earth minerals, primarily neodymium and dysprosium, which are key components of the magnets used in modern wind turbines. Developed by GE in 1982, neodymium magnets are manufactured in many shapes and sizes for numerous purposes. One of their most common uses is in the generators of wind turbines.

Estimates of the exact amount of rare earth minerals in wind turbines vary, but in any case the numbers are staggering. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences, a 2 megawatt (MW) wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium. The MIT study cited above estimates that a 2 MW wind turbine contains about 752 pounds of rare earth minerals.

To quantify this in terms of environmental damages, consider that mining one ton of rare earth minerals produces about one ton of radioactive waste, according to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. In 2012, the U.S. added a record 13,131 MW of wind generating capacity. That means that between 4.9 million pounds (using MIT’s estimate) and 6.1 million pounds (using the Bulletin of Atomic Science’s estimate) of rare earths were used in wind turbines installed in 2012. It also means that between 4.9 million and 6.1 million pounds of radioactive waste were created to make these wind turbines.

For perspective, America’s nuclear industry produces between 4.4 million and 5 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel each year. That means the U.S. wind industry may well have created more radioactive waste last year than our entire nuclear industry produced in spent fuel. In this sense, the nuclear industry seems to be doing more with less: nuclear energy comprised about one-fifth of America’s electrical generation in 2012, while wind accounted for just 3.5 percent of all electricity generated in the United States.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/a ... -minerals/

[I Think]

I guess the slanted tripe posted From an anti turbine site, means that you make certain that none of the electric motors you use are permanent magnet types. This includes the starter, the heater fan motor, the window winders, the windshield wipers the antenna motor and many of the relays and actuators in your car.

[hobbyguy]

Nuclear Energy has two problems right now. One is pure dollars and cents, which from an investor and consumer point of view are generally viewed through a short term lens. The other is failure risk that multiplies the environmental footprint exponentially, think Fukushima, and destroys public perception.

Both MSR and LFTR have the potential, unproven and undeveloped, to get around those issues. However, we are likely decades away from fruition in terms of those technologies.

[I Think]

There are vast areas of desert, many near the 'grid' that are increasingly being used to generate electricity, now that the cost of PV panels is coming down.

[I Think]

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

Utility executives say the trend has accelerated this year, with several companies signing contracts, known as power purchase agreements, for solar or wind at prices below that of natural gas, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, where wind and sunlight are abundant.

On the other hand,

A 2011 UCS analysis of new nuclear projects in Florida and Georgia shows that the power provided by the new plants would be more expensive per kilowatt than several alternatives, including energy efficiency measures, renewable energy sources such as biomass and wind, and new natural gas plants.

the nuke industry has responded to escalating costs with escalating demands for government support. A 2009 UCS report estimated that taxpayers could be on the hook for anywhere from $360 billion to $1.6 trillion if then-current proposals for nuclear expansion were realized.

[I Think]

It has been pointed out above that bird kills by
wind turbines and nukular generators are about equal in North America;

Does that mean we get to choose between Shredded Tweet and Microwaved Bird Casserole.

[rustled]

There are vast areas of desert, many near the 'grid' that are increasingly being used to generate electricity, now that the cost of PV panels is coming down.

Check out the actual destruction in the Mojave. Shredded by turbines, trampled by the construction of wind farms, fried by the very solar generating stations you seem to be touting as a better solution to nuclear.

Not just birds but entire ecosystems.

Over vast areas, as you yourself have pointed out.

Deserts should not be treated like they're expandable.

It has been pointed out above that bird kills by
wind turbines and nukular generators are about equal in North America;
Does that mean we get to choose between Shredded Tweet and Microwaved Bird Casserole.

To my mind, a person who is genuinely concerned about the environmental cost of providing power would spend some time seriously investigating the environmental consequences of all traditional and emerging technologies, seriously weigh all options, and promote better solutions.