The_Fighting_Téméraire being tugged to her last Berth to be broken
symbol of the replacement of wind power by coal-driven steam.
--headline from "The Times", London, June 25, 2007 Well may they do so. But it could be solved by adopting a nuclear power option which renews the supply of fissile nuclides. Two such options exist, one of them proven. At present, the actual annual consumption of fissile uranium is about 50 tons. That figure also applies to the genuine waste produced, i.e. fission products. See
A study in 2004 by the California Energy Commission estimated that up to 4,720 birds from 40 different species are killed each year at the Altamont Pass wind farm, including as many as 1,300 protected raptors.
There is a known way to do this, politically unpopular because of its unnecessary association with the horrors of the Cold War, and the guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Part of the problem, of course, is the dismally low level of popular scientific understanding.
The key to the problem, and its solution, is the fact that compared with other technologies, per gigawatt-hour of energy produced, nuclear power plants use minuscule quantities of fuel, and create even smaller amounts of waste.
A gigawatt-hour is a million kilowatt-hours, which are the kwh on your electric bill.
A gigawatt-year is a gigawatt-hour multiplied by the number of hours in a whole year.
can survive a direct hit from a major hurricane.For example, when hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, the eye and eyewall devastated a swath 20 miles wide. The heat energy released around the eye was 5,000 times the combined heat and electrical power generation of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant over which the eye passed. It should be noted that a hurricane is in fact a gigantic heat engine, at least as high as its highest cloud top, and with a base area as big as three medium sized eastern USA States. Its energy input comes from the warm water of the ocean.But of course the hurricane's energy was unpredictable, unusable, and would have destroyed any wind machine in its path.
Turkey Point's two reactors report a "net capacity" of just under 1,400 MW, and share a 3,300 acre site (about five square miles) with two fossil fuel electric plants.
Their combined "capacity factor" for 2008 was 94%, meaning that they supplied just over 1.3 gigawatt-years of electrical energy in that year.
Interestingly enough, the hurricane did do minor damage to a smokestack of one of the fossil fuel plants.
Note that hurricanes accumulate solar energy for days, over a sea area comparable with several states.
Warm water provides water vapor, which contains far more energy than a comparable volume of dry air.
We may therefore note that a vast amount of wind and solar power was present in the hurricane, totally unusable to human industry.
Any wind farm in the path of Andrew would have had to be rebuilt.
This is where a great deal of the seemingly immense amount of solar power reaching the Earth is inaccessibly used up.
Enormous land masses are required to produce reasonable amounts of power from alternate energy sources. For a 1000 MW output, it will take 150 square miles for wind power, and 10 square miles for solar energy.
These figures are consistent with what I have gleaned from pro-solar websites.
They also say that
As for the biomass option, if all the trees in the United States were used for energy production on a renewable basis (i.e., trees would be growing at the same rate they were being harvested), their contribution could amount to only about 10% of our total energy needs.Energy and Power Units
In actual fact, there are few instances in history of forests being harvested at a renewable rate.
Shutting down the IFR program may also have been due to the view, widespread in the USA, that the world tends to follow America's example. When we abandoned reprocessing and the deliberate manufacture of plutonium, the rest of the world did not. It was a naîve idea, and also stupid because
Here is a reference (Battling the Butterfly Effect) which lampoons fears of terrorism.
James Lovelock alludes to this kind of ignorance, in his book "The Vanishing Face of Gaia", when he contrasts nuclear power with the so-popular wind turbine fashion. Here is an excerpt from that book, in a London Times article. Lovelock finds the popular "renewable technologies" hopelessly inadequate, as I do, and wind turbines particularly offensive.
The authors recommend that nuclear fuel be consumed and reprocessed in fast neutron reactors, using metallic rather than ceramic fuel rods, and liquid metal coolant rather than water. This facilitates the recycling of the neutron capture products by on-site processing which does not make bomb-grade fissile material available, and the waste is entirely fission products, which are a thousand times more short-lived than plutonium 239.
These figures for solar, wind, and biofuels can be checked, if you have sufficient determination, using the various estimates by their promoters.
It is necessary to ignore imprecise nonsense about the number of "homes" that can be supplied.
Look at the area of the project, compute the expected megawatt-hours per year, and then look at the ability of the project to match its output to an actual demand.
Wind, in particular, is totally unable to be summoned for the purpose of meeting a sharp increase in demand.
When the windspeed drops by 5%, the power supplied by the wind drops more than 14%.
And if it's blowing hard when there's no demand, unless you're pumping water out of a polder in the Netherlands, it's useless.
For biomass in particular, the energy available, no matter what clever organic technology you devise, cannot exceed the energy that the organic biomass would supply if it were directly oxidized. In actual fact, you cannot convert simple sugars to ethanol with better than 67% energy efficiency. Yeast fermentation consumes one in three carbon atoms in the conversion. That's why champagne is fizzy, and bread rises. The fizz is carbon dioxide.
If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might wonder if the left wing opposition to nuclear power is being funded clandestinely by the petroleum industry. It is my opinion, and theirs, that coal and oil will never be replaced by wind, solar, and biofuels. So the only threat to their profits comes from nuclear, and in my opinion it would need to be nationally owned, like the great hydro dams of the Columbia watershed.
The government of France, which has never had much coal or oil, committed France to nuclear power instead. Not only does Électricité de France supply 75% of France's electric consumption from nuclear, it can afford to export electricity to Britain and Germany. In Britain, a flourishing nationally owned electric generation system was "privatised" in the Thatcher regime, and what seem to have been perfectly adequate nuclear power plants when nationally owned, now seem to have become a liability to their private corporate owners. Perhaps they deteriorated under private maintenance, or perhaps the regulated profit allowance upon the capital, which is the biggest part of the plant investment, makes it unattractive. The company "British Energy" is now owned by and is part of Électricité de France. --Another sign that the Sun has Set upon the British Empire!
The thing is, solar power is so dilute that the best way to collect it is hydroelectricity, and it doesn't emit any carbon dioxide after you've built the dams and machinery.
But it's not entirely benign environmentally.
What on earth makes people think that wind turbines are environmentally harmless?
Email to the skeptic
Fast neutrons create 239U -> 239Np -> 239Pu from 238U, the common isotope of uranium.
The coolant is liquid metal, e.g. sodium which melts at the boiling point of water.
The prime example of this was the IFR program, which was canceled as "unnecessary" by the Clinton administration in 1994.
It had already proven itself effective, and proof against meltdown. The closed fuel cycle makes it resistant to anything less than terrorists who already have nuclear weapons.
In this case, the fuel itself is in solution, which has certain advantages.
It is claimed that even with thermal neutrons, it can consume ALL of its nuclear fuel, so the only wastes are the short-lived fission products.
See Kirk Sorenson on Thorium - pdf
The fissile material is expected to be 233U, but the two other fissile species can probably be used as starters.
The "fertile" material is 232Th, the common isotope of thorium. By neutron capture, it is turned into 233Pa which decays to 233U, a uranium isotope which like 235U and 239Pu is fissile.
The US government has neglected some otherwise promising examples of this option. Any one of India, France, Russia, Japan, and the Czech republic may very well become the world leader.
