Posted on 03/26/2003 6:58:12 AM PST by newgeezer
Now I know you are either joking or nuts.
I don't think you understand the economics. A million dollar windmill makes 150,000 dollars worth of electricity per year. There are no fuel costs. I can see that you just don't like them for some reason and love nukes.
Wind farms are getting awfully close to producing electricity at $.04 per kilowatt hour which is the cost of a coal fired plant!
Build enough windmills to close down the coal generation and you shut up the envirowackos who scream CO2 emissions.
The amount of wind energy that is generated from the daily solar input is something like 15,000 times the amount of energy generated from all sources.
when you look at the deset that India is becoming because many of its rural villages still gather wood for cooking and heating homes you can understand why alternative energy be it solar, wind, water and biomass offers cleaner energy.
Total BS. Without heavy subsidies, none would be built. You statement shows your ignorance. They only make money from the tax credits and the laws that force the grids to buy kwh that are far more expensive than any other source. Guess who pays for that?
Why Iowa only? Each state has it's own wind resource. N Dakota could produce 20 times what it needs.
LOL. North Dakota probably needs an installed capacity less than 1 GW to meet it's entire needs. There's one nuclear plant down the road from me that that sits on about 20 acres that produces enough power for a over 1.8 million people and produces it a less than 2 cents a kwh. The total population of North Dakota is less than 700,000! One nuke could supply the whole damn state of N. Dakota with plenty left over for export.
Wind also farms do absolutly nothing to replace the need for all the other plants in the grid, and they never will. Since their average availability is around 30%, even if you built enough wind farms to meet peak demand, all the other units necessary to meet that demand must be kept at the ready in order to supply the grid for the 70% of the time when the wind ain't blowing! All wind farms do in reality is to drive up the kwh costs of those other sources since they have less total revenue to cover fixed costs. i.e. bw, the more wind farms, the higher your electric bill will be.
As to the cost of a nuke, it would be about 3 times the cost of an equally sized CC plant or about 1/10 the cost of an equal amount of wind power. A 1000 MW nuke would run about $1 billion vs. around $300 M for a 1000 MW gas CC plant. The difference is the cost of the output. A nuke delivers MW to the grid at around 1/3 the cost of a gas fired CC plant, so the total pay-back time for the Nuke and the gas CC each plant is the about the same while the nuke would be zero emission and the gas plant will still be emitting CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere.
As to Price-Anderson, no it is not a subsidy. In over 50 years, it has never cost a cent of taxpayer money because there has never been a single claim against it. All of this while you are letting the envro-hucksters reach into your pocket every day with their wind farm and solar scams.
Maybe you are a wonk on the Good Book, but you don't know diddly squat about the power generation industry.
Yes I do and your arrogance doesn't change that.
Lets see. You are running around here all the time advocating that we as a nation spend several trillion dollars to switch to "wind power" that is only good 30% of the time.
Sure... you know a lot.
The cost is negligible; the problem has been solved (vitrification and deep burial). The real problem is political, not technical. Comparing the mass of waste from (say) a coal-fired plant and a nuclear plant shows the absurdity of worrying about 'storage' costs. Oh, and a coal-fired plant releases more radioactivity than a nuclear one, as shown by the late great Dr. Petr Beckmann.
"Build enough windmills to close down the coal generation and you shut up the envirowackos who scream CO2 emissions."
Let an endangered bird get chopped up by the rotors and listen to them howl for demolition. They started demolishing dams because they inconvenienced fish...
"The amount of wind energy that is generated from the daily solar input is something like 15,000 times the amount of energy generated from all sources."
Big deal. As I said, the problem is that both solar and wind are dilute and hence represent the worst possible investments for energy sufficiency.
"when you look at the deset that India is becoming because many of its rural villages still gather wood for cooking and heating homes you can understand why alternative energy be it solar, wind, water and biomass offers cleaner energy."
I note that no actually feasible or economically justifiable methods make your list. Hydro does not count, as all economically-feasible sources are already fully exploited. As Beckmann remarked, "the only reason Robert Redford favors solar power is that only Robert Redford can afford it!"
--Boris
I don't like stupidity and wilful sillyness masquerading as practicality.
I admire practical, economical and workable solutions.
Some years ago the Harvard Lampoon ran a parody of 'appropriate' energy generation schemes. Two that I recall:
-- Scale up those bobbing bird toys that 'sip' from a glass of water. Make huge ones and line them up along a river; connect them with a shaft. Voila!
-- The Arboreal Turbine. Sink a turbine into a tree. When the sap rises in the summer time, the turbine turns v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. But just think! Zero emissions and zillions of trees...
Note the similarity to wind, solar, tidal, and other marginal (noneconomic) 'sources'.
BTW, as a sanity check, be aware that California (for example), absorbs 40,000 megawatts 24/7/365.
--Boris
Yeah, enviro-hucksters like GE and Shell.
Your statement is wrong but pissing matches are pointless.
Actually, there are some very sweet Generation IV systems under development. I am working on a couple. Check out the PBMR concept, for example. General Atomics has a very nice modular high-termperature gas-cooled reactor that makes use of very advanced technology on the turbine side. Westinghouse has a water reactor concept (IRIS). All of these have features in common, such as passive safety, modularity, long core lifetime, and costs per installed kilowatt capacity on the order of gas-fired generation.
Low intensity and variability will always be the Achilles Heel of so-called "alternate energy" schemes. Solar and wind energy is very diffuse, so you have to spend a lot to capture a little (comparatively speaking). The sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow. Overbuilding capacity hurts in two ways. First, its wasteful and expense when you've got perfectly good energy sources that are much better in terms of availability and capacity factor. Second, if you're thinking about a grid-type distribution system (the most practical means of energy distribution and utilization for an industrialized, technological society), grid stability becomes a nightmare when you've got nothing but variable and intermittant energy sources available for dispatch.
A huge number of us feel that way about nukes and non-renewable energy.
Yes. We will always have innumerate fools among us.
Such individuals disgust me. They are as ignorant as savages as to how--exactly--the light comes on when you flip the switch.
Magical thinking. Literally, they wish magic to rule the world instead of physics. They want electricity without the messy necessity of generating plants; transportation without combustion; food and clothing without agriculture; plastics without petrochemical plants; metals without mines; ease without effort; wealth without work.
The big silver bird takes them over fly-over country; it is a miracle. Bernoulli? Never heard of him. But the big silver bird makes noise that they dislike (yet they persist in moving next door to airports) and emits pollutants they want to outlaw.
--Boris
Not surprising because I have numbers and physics and you do not.
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