Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum

I'm sure your numbers are much closer to the truth than my admittedly overstuffed 5 billion EUR per GWe.

My goal is to leave zero room for people claiming I'm understating total nuclear costs. If my number turns out to be twice the real cost, that's ok, cause it's still a fraction of solar+wind+pumped hydro+geothermal+biomass.

Please quote me the cheapest nukes per GWe that went online in the last 10 years in a developed country. South Korea / China / India labor costs are a fraction of North America / European labor, so we can't compare apples to bananas. Three would be ideal. This will help a lot in future discussions.

People need to bring up the Germany number more often in pro/anti nuclear debates.

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There haven't been three units in a developed country in the last ten years is the simple answer (if you exclude South Korea/Taiwan/Japan).

South Korea's minimum wage is $4.80/hr, even scaling that to the US Minimum wage would produce costs well below $2000/kW.

AECL claimed ACR would make below $1000/kW in the West.

S Korea is not a low wage country for large industry.
The unions are very strong and very well organized.
I dont have up to date numbers but in 2011
Credit Suiise put the all-in wage rate for the Korean shipyards
at close to 100 USD/mh.

When Samsung looked into taking over the effectively defunct
Avondale yard in 2013, they found the wage rates
on the Gulf Coast well below those at home.

The Koreans due it on productivity, smarts, and slightly less
out of control regulation.

Germany and S Korea are industrialized countries contrasting in their attitude to nuclear power. Koreans, like pre-Fukushima Japan, on the other side of straits, are keen to develop nuclear power. Germans decided to go off nuclear power post- Fukushima. It is a great loss of nuclear knowledge.

I think the anti-nuclear stance of Germany is very damaging, Engineering is held in high regard in Germany and it is very sorry to see that German knowledge and expertise, with regard to nuclear engineering, is decaying. For example, the Germans were experimenting with thorium fuel in high temperature reactors in the 1980s.

It is also bad for EU policymaking concerning nuclear energy. At the moment, there is an anti/pro-nuclear fault line in the heart of Europe, with Germany, Denmark, Italy and Austria in the anti-nuclear camp and France, Finland, Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and the UK in the pro-nuclear camp.

Russia is, of course, not in the EU, but is, being a European country, also a strong proponent of nuclear energy. It is building a new reactor in Kaliningrad (Russian enclave; former East Prussia) and is also influencing nuclear policymaking of East European countries.

The Germans will eventually have to come to the conclusion that they can't be dependent on solar power. It's only a matter of time, really. But still, it's a shame that they're exploiting the most of their expertise at this time. Every year passing by that they don't do anything new is wasted time.

When I was learning to fly, I was told that if you attach enough horsepower, you can even get a house to fly.

If the Germans are willing to throw 1 trillion euro on this problem, they will solve it, regardless of the fact that we could do it with current Gen III nuclear for 100 billion euro investment in nuclear, plus another 100 billion euro to operate those nuclear reactors over 40 years. The Germans are as crazy green as Vermont, don't you forget all the shutdown yankee reactor protests.

In the end they will have something like 150 GWe solar panels + 150 GWe wind turbine + 1TWh worth of pumped hydro total capacity to produce 60GWe of peak electricity demand (plus whatever Hydro, geothermal and biomass they had to begin with).

The astonishing fact is they aren't deluding themselves that this will be cheap, they know how much it will cost and they are willing to pay for that. I posed the statement that if you put aside 10 billion euro per GWe for a new nuclear power plant, you can build, operate over 40 years and dispose of it, and there will still be billions left in the end.

One guy I was debating over this in slashdot kept telling me that Germany is all prone to 6 pointer earthquakes, so it's unsafe for any nuclear reactors, I said, maybe places that could get 8 pointer (100 times more energy) could be somewhere you would want to avoid putting nuclear on, but 6 pointers are not a factor.

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Mac - the issue that I have with your reasoning (which seems to be the Greens argument as well) is that clearly 1 trillion will not actually solve the problems.

The Germans will get what they are paying for - wind and solar.

They are not asking for a fossil fuel free electricity grid, so they will get fossil fuels as well.

These two lines are not mutually exclusive; if the focus of the German plan was on decarbonizing the grid, they would have to use nuclear and would have used only a small amount of wind and solar (much likely not even grid connected).

150 GWe of solar means you're generating too much power at noon during the summer, and still zero power at night and too little during winter days. You can in fact average only 1 GWe over a cloudy winter day (there are many of those in germany). Germany has most electricity demand in winter, so this is "exactly wrong". The capacity credit of grid connected solar in germany is actually negative; in a sane world we'd be paying to get rid of solar panels off the grid.

The answer is not months of energy storage (this will cost a large multiple of 1 trillion). The answer is more fossil fuels. This is the REAL problem of Germany foolishness (which oddly enough everyone is celebrating as a renewable success story). They are deluded. If all the world would copy Germany's energy plan, we will end up with at least TEN TIMES the fossil fuel usage (run some numbers here - 7 billion people times a German level fossil fuel consumption). This is what I call "the big picture". Almost everyone is missing it.

already the germans are building more coal plants, and they have only begun at shuttering the nuclear plants.

A ref to support my contentions.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e6470600 ... z2tVXhr3mi

Notice the graph - coal use is basically constant, only dropping slightly with economic downturns. There is no effect whatsoever of renewable energy buildout on coal use.

This paper contains a lot of informations about electricity generation in germany in 2013 :

http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files-englisch/news/electricity-production-from-solar-and-wind-in-germany-in-2013.pdf

We can see that there is more wind generation in winter, that compensates a part of lower solar generation ( you can see the sum "wind +solar" page 13). But there is still some variation between the months.

No it is far worse than the monthly aggregated data shows.

If Germany had 1 month of electricity storage, then monthly aggregated data would be useful and honest.

In reality the variation within a month cannot be dealt with. There is no storage at that scale.

Monthly data is not an honest way to portray variability. Hourly data is. An hour of storage at full country grid load is reasonable. If you do this, you're in for a shock. See the Ireland wind data from Mackay for an example.

Well it's true that monthly data didn't show the problem of instant variability. There is also the daily data, page 37, we can see more variability, and an example of hourly data page 101 (maybe smoothed). So Germany need more than weeks of energy storage or a lot of overcapacity for a total renewable system.

Overcapacity will be a lot cheaper and a lot riskier than storage. Cheaper because battery cost are high and not declining fast (pumped hydro is not available in the amounts needed). Riskier because even with overcapacity, there will be many hours during which there is no sun or wind at all, and many hours even that both will occur at the same time. Germany is currently benefitting from huge amounts of domestic and neighbouring countries fossil fuel capacity. If they follow Germany's lead they'll be in the same boat, so that won't work anymore. Europe had then better get ready for continent scale blackouts.

What do you think about the fraunhofer institute's plan : energy storage by converting the electricity of renewables into synthetic gas (power to gas, methane I guess) and inject this gas into the already available gas system (with additionnal storage capabilities), and then use central gas power plants (some with heat cogeneration) ? Economically unrealistic ?

That, and the fact that the amount of renewables needed becomes so big as to be unrealistic. Round trip efficiency is so poor that it becomes quite crazy. This capacity isn't there. Already there is major restance in Germany to large expansion of wind power, for example. So in case of wind, talking about crazy overbuild and throwing away 2/3 of it through some crazy inefficient storage scheme is not realistic.

Environmental organisations, in their great internal inconsistancy, are very enthusiastic about these wasteful schemes. They don't like big V8 engine powered cars but quite like a similarly inefficient scheme for energy storage.