Yes, my price was the cost of the entire project of building enough solar field to supply the US with electric power. Not just the land cost. Funny, I actually used $500/acre in my estimated cost of the project and that was just off the top of my head. The bulk of the cost is in the solar panels themselves. Even after dramatic price reductions over the past two years they are still quite expensive relative to coal/oil/NG. The panels alone would cost about 4.5 trillion, and then you have to figure in racks, inverters, wire, roads, trackers, etc. $10 trillion would barely get us there, and that is only the US. Then you have to consider that while we are making huge progress with solar panel efficiency and cost, there is still almost no ability to store large amounts of electricity, which I believe is the point that Hydroblunt was trying to get at (although he could've been a bit more civil about it). To switch over to solar would take a complete revamp of how we perceive our energy usage, mainly because of the on-demand nature of the way we use electricity. As a yearly average, solar panels only hit the equivalent of full output about 5.5 hours per day, year round. More in the summer and less in the winter. Cloudy locations are horrible and sunny locations exceed that estimate, but that is the average. Current economies of electrical transmission make it feasible to transmit a max of about 3,000 miles before the law of diminishing returns starts to hurt too bad. Therefore, at any given location you could only expect to draw power from panels located within a couple thousand miles. This does effectively lengthen the daily production and (contrary to popular opinion) on average most electricity is used during the day. So imagine a system that worked like this. Solar panels were littered about everywhere, on rooftops and such. These were mainly grid-tie systems w/ backup on-site storage for emergency use only. So for example a home would be fitted with enough solar production to supply itself, but it didn't actually use that power, but instead fed it into the grid under a net-metering contract with the power company. This is usually what happens currently anyway. But in this future scenario, a total of all panels within a 2,000 mile radius supplied the vast majority of all daytime consumption. Peak morning and afternoon demands are somewhat compensated by the ability to draw power from locations that are in a peak production time zone, but haven't yet reached peak demand. Current power plants would then serve the purpose of simply satisfying abnormal demand during severe weather events and a short nighttime period. Under such a scenario they might only see about 25% of current production rates. We would then have decentralized the power production such that it would be much more difficult to cripple the system, and a large portion of the buildings would be able to operate on backup power storage during emergencies. I'm sure as technology progresses one of two things will happen. Either storage capability will increase, or the ability to cheaply transmit power over much longer distances will become a reality. In the mean time, this proposed situation is still much better than our current one. I think it will become a reality once solar cost drops to about 30% of current prices.
"The biggest advantage of the molten salt is once cooled, it could be reutilized for the same purpose. The molten salt can be stored for days to generate electricity. We know that storage of power is great problem as far as energy generated from alternative sources. We can store power in a battery on a small scale basis such as car or home. But power for such a large scale canât be stored in batteries. Murphy elaborates on the solution to power storage, âYou can put that (molten salt) into a storage tank that would look much like a tank at an oil refinery. We can store that energy almost indefinitely.â
thats the whole point you would never know...if there was an accident all of these barriers should protect from radiation being leaked into the environment...well in theory
The most sustainable way to do nuclear power is to close the fuel cycle by recycling spent fuel. Nearly all long lived radio isotopes - uranium, plutonium, americium and other actinides are separated from the spent fuel and recycled into new fuel. The remaining waste comprised of the fission products is only a couple of percent of the mass of current waste and has short half lives rendering it harmless within a few hundred years. It would probably be fused into some sort of ceramic for storage. The proposed technology for this for uranium fuel is pyroprocessing developed at the US Argonne National Lab. It cannot be used for extracting chemically pure plutonium required for weapons. Sth Korea and Japan have R&D programs for this and Sth Korea says it will have an industrial scale demonstration facility by 2015. http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/Frontiers/2002/d1ee4.html There are certainly solutions to the waste issue if governments want to get serious about energy. Also Google Integral Fast Reactor
Absolutely. There's one country that has understood it, Germany. They have made huge investments in wind power and especially PV, regardless of its location in the northern hemisphere. With that policy they have created over 300 000 jobs and taken the lead in renewables in EU. People in Germany want to get rid of nuclear and politicians have heard their voice and acted accordingly. Think about Russia. They have a huge land area and could produce all the electricity they use by wind. Still they have only a few windmills and building more nuclear. Now, which of the two countries had an economy that's blooming.
Yeah well, you're probably wrong (about Fukushima, not the part about relying on media hype). The difference between this and TMI is (afaik) that the problems at TMI got overstated and got gradually less severe, while the situation here is that problems are continuously understated and get gradually more severe. I.e. it went from "Sure we can handle this no probs, in the worst case we isolate and shut down the whole thing no harm done" to "Well the cables don't fit so we can't really do anything after all" to "fire and smoke" to "we have to evacuate workers now due to radiation" to "tap water in Tokyo is deemed unsafe for children" to "one of the reactors has probably partially melted". What's next you think? I like problems that get vastly overstated like the European debt crisis in April 2010 or the whole Dubai thing. Who really cares about crap like that? If it goes wrong they'll just change/invent some rules that prevents catastrophe. This, on the other hand, could be a so-called exogenous shock and IF it goes wrong (which is still less likely than it going right) it will be absolutely catastrophic for the global economy not to mention political stability (without Japan, China becomes an unchallenged military power in Asia)
It seems that Germany has about 18 GWe of PV installed. PV in northern Europe has a capacity factor of about 12%. In 2008 according to the IEA, Germany produced about 640, 000 GWh of electricity. Do the sums and you will find that PV is producing about 3% of German electricity. Insignificant for emissions reduction and very, very expensive - perhaps 10 times more expensive than nuclear. But it's worse. In winter, German PV was producing less than 1 GW at the best time of the day on many days. Compare the CO2 emissions of Germany and Denmark - the poster children of renewables to European countries with large chunks of nuclear: Germany: 9.57 tonnes per capita Denmark: 9.15 France: 6 tonnes per capita There are only two routes to low emission baseload electricity on a scale that can power a whole grid - hydro and nuclear. Hydro and nuclear provide ~30% of the worlds electricity. Wind and solar - well under 3%. The message is very clear.
You forget the fact that wind and especially PV are just taking their first steps in electricity production, while commercial nuclear has been around for over fifty years. Also the price of PV is coming down FAST and the price of nuclear going up. And I mean UP after Fukushima. In fact if the Japan disaster is not going to be the death strike to nuclear craze, I don't know what will. You think the germans are stupid to invest in wind and PV. PV capacity increased by over 7 GW in Germany last year They know the sun shines less in the north but still they get about 1000kwh per 1kwp per year. Of course you would get more by taking the panels to, say Africa. That's why they have Desertec, which is in the planning stages You could also make some research on the trend of new capacity. In the last ten years nuclear capacity in the world has decreased, while wind and pv have increased with huge numbers. If all the money that has gone to nuclear research and plants had been put on means utilizing the energy coming from the biggest fusion reactor, the SUN, we wouldn't even have need for filthy nuclear fission power.
I am not putting my money back in the market, I don't care if I miss a move to a new high. If this nuclear situation goes south, all these buyers are screwed. I'd rather keep my $$$ than lose it.