Posted on 10/06/2020 5:42:28 PM PDT by RomanSoldier19
In recent weeks, the media landscape has been awash with stories declaring the beginning of the end of the age of hydrocarbons in America and around the world.
The facts on the ground, however, paint a different story.
As of this year, renewable generation accounted for only 17.5% of the US energy mix. While Deloitte predicts this number will grow to just shy of 50% by 2050, it would be naïve to assume that fossil fuels wont continue to play a significant role in our lives for the foreseeable future.
The road to the energy system of the future is not a straightforward one and policymakers, utilities and governments have a critical role to play in ensuring we dont run headlong into the obstacles and challenges that a changing energy system will inevitably bring.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Get rid of the grid. Local micro nuclear plants for all.
BBC was spruiking the following this week on its World Business Report. plenty of laughs:
3 Apr: Bloomberg: China Wants to Power the World
A Global Energy Interconnection would create a supergrid that spans the globe.
By Adam Minter
(China’s State Grid Corporation) Chairman Liu Zhenya has a plan that he believes will stall global warming, put millions of people to work and bring about world peace by 2050...
Among other benefits, according to Liu, the system will produce a community of common destiny for all mankind with blue skies and green land....
State Grid estimates it would cost $50 trillion to develop a truly global grid...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-04-03/china-s-state-grid-wants-to-power-the-whole-world
Good luck with that.
Wow,”smart” people are so smart. I am a nobody and could come to this conclusion in way fewer words.
The grid is a white elephant in the making. A hot potato that no one wants to be responsible for when energy production and storage are localized.
Not too long ago, 0bama and sleepy Joe were looking for shovel ready jobs.
They claimed no shovel ready jobs to be found
They did not build the wall
They did not manage the forests in california
They did not rebuild the grid
“Renewable” is deceptive. The vast bulk of that 17.5% is hydro and that is not expanding. The rest are boondoggles whose expense is crushing the grid.
Nuclear power works 90+% at full power base loads. The typical plant runs at 100% output for 18 months then shuts down for two weeks to refuel and shuffle rods around 1/3 are replaced the other 2/3 are moved around to even the burn out. Nuclear power is 100% renewable every year more uranium than humanity can burn up is washed into the oceans where it is in equilibrium with the subsea sediments at aleast 4ppm concentration. The USA and Japan both have technology that can extract uranium is commercial rates the reason we do not is cost. Seawater uranium is $250 lb of yellow cake , Australian mined uranium is $80 simple economics. But when the cheap easy to mine stuff runs out and the need for $250 lb uranium takes off there’s an unlimited supply in the oceans enough for billions of years of use even at a consumption rate of thousands of times what humans use every year in total energy. As humans use seawater uranium lowering the concentration in the water more leaches out of the sediments and off the land in runoff from rivers replacing what we take out. There simply is no way possible for man to deplete the uranium levels in the oceans they are too massive. As for waste I’m a geologist I can name at least 5 places in north America that have geologically stable rocks of over a billion years of stability. Deep bore hole disposal in bentonite lined holes at 4,000 meters depth with 2000 meters of concrete plug is the answer to waste disposal. Waste is a political problem not a scientific one. That’s even without going to fast breeder or transmutation reactors for deep buring the wastes before deep geological disposal. Nuclear is the only truly renewable energy source that can provide the constant and also the volume needed for modern society. Nuclear power can also make seawater into drinking water at a fraction of the cost of buring hydrocarbons to dp it let alone solar or wind. The fuel costs of nuclear are less than 1% of the total cost per megawatt hour even going from $80lb uranium to $500 the upper limit for seawater recovery only raises the cost by a few percents. This is because the raw uranium cost is only a small fraction of the cost to make nuclear fuel, even a 6x increase in raw uranium is only 1/3 the input cost of making new fuel.
Right now the economics favor terrestrial mining and once-through fuel use. But higher demand may make reprocessing and seawater extraction economically viable. Jimmy Carter implemented a national policy discouraging reprocessing. Supposedly Reagan issued an EO cancelling Carter's EO-based ban on reprocessing, but I cannot find a copy of it that has words to that effect in it. Still, it doesn't matter, the die was cast. Nobody will build a reprocessing plant worth billions of dollars if some political hack can shut down your business with the stroke of a pen.
George W. Completely rescinded Carter’s none sense. Seawater uranium extraction has come down to nearly $100 a lb and is dropping. The once through is only possible because the NRC has allowed the temporary storage of wastes in dry casks and unshielded fuel ponds it’s simply unsustainable yucca mtn will only hold 70,000 tons of HLW we have no.choice but to partition out high heat load fission products for decay and vitify the long lived trans uranium elements or chose some form of transmutation be it deep burn in epithermal spectrum, fast burn in fast spectrum or using particle beams and accelerator driven sub critical systems. UT Austin has a fusion fisson hybrid design that incinerates 10 lwr worth of transuranium worth for each hybrid. It not a matter of if but when we have to manage the spent fuel there already is too much to store without partitioning in yucca mtn. The better alternative is to partition into LLW of spent uranium and HLW with two streams a short half life fisson product stream put in air cooled casks for a few hundred years and a long lived transuranium plus the long lived fisson products into a boron silica glass waste form then into deep bore holes in geologically stable continental.shield rocks. There is no alternate to at minimum partitioning. Fortunately GWB told that moron Carter to piss up wind. The NRC stalling is the reason we don’t they are letting the stake holders kick the can down the road for at least 20 years more thats when the fuel ponds and dry cask storage space fills up. Read the second links PDF they have an economic break down of the deep burn partition deep burn and direct burial it is.already competitive with LWR even without breeding which the gas cooled helium reactors can also do with full reprocessing in a closed fuel cycle.
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