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Large-scale Solar: How Big Is Too Big?

By Jennifer Runyon, Managing Editor, RenewableEnergyWorld.com
June 16, 2011   |   115 Comments

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Huge solar farms are an increasingly hot topic nowadays. Companies like Brightsource, Abengoa, Solar Millennium and NextEra are planning giant projects in the U.S. Abengoa has its 280-MW Solana project; Solar Trust of America, which is owned in part by Solar Millennium, has its 1,000-MW Blythe solar project (divided into four 250-MW parts); and Brightsource has its 392-MW Ivanpah project, just to name a few.

115 Reader Comments
Comment
1 of 115
June 16, 2011
Even given the very short timeframe climate science has given us before impending disaster, I'm inclined to err on Blaeloch's cautionary side of this argument. It is exactly America's dunderheaded postwar tradition of bigger-is-always-better that has catapulted us (and the world) prematurely into this mess. Had we not pursued an agenda of centralized everything and more-is-better (including planned obsolescence and creating the myth of infinite growth), we might have staved off our present predicament another generation or two (though rising population makes it inevitable).

The precedents we are now setting with our approach to renewable energy will largely determine the future of the industry; and so far, they seem solidly old school-based in the bureaucratic ideal of centralized power production and economies of scale, with little regard for the tremendous value distributed generation offers. It's still plunder-and-profit, with the benefits of renewables ultimately compromised by the environmental costs of these new centralized generation systems: e. g., rampant consumption of water in deserts, destruction of sensitive ecosystems and habitats, endangered species risk. And doesn't it seem the least bit ironic that these remote behemoths will require more large-scale transmission lines (and accompanying losses) to ferry the new power back to where it could more easily and cheaply have been generated in the first place-- the rooftops of the cities?

We DO have choices about developing renewables. We can-- and must-- address more than merely the problem of energy source; we must also look at how we do business, the methods of which themselves generate their own sets of problems in addition to, or exacerbating, the myriad problems in which we are now hip-deep.

We could, for example, make it national policy to prioritize efficiency above alternative generation; something like a quarter to a third of our energy could come from that source, and MUCH more cheaply.
Comment
2 of 115
June 16, 2011
ReBen, you took the words out of my mouth about the folly of bigger is better. And that "it's the way we know how to do it," in my view, points up how mistaken it has to be--the way we know how to do things is what has led us to where we are now, scrambling to reverse or slow the consequences.

There are 2 primary factors that Mr. Resch and the other industry reps referred to as "roadblocks" in that congressional hearing (at which, I might add, no non-industry voices were invited to testify). These are (1) keystone environmental laws that have been on the books for more than 30 years precisely to inject some deliberation into proposals that, like these, could do significant harm, and (2)the potential that the spigot is about to be turned off on the subsidy pipeline that sends billions in cash grants and loan guarantees to these developers.

If American big business is so smart and so good at what they do, why aren't they smart and able enough to build projects without massive subsidies and regulatory shortcuts? Why do they constantly beg, as they did at that hearing, for the "certainty" to which none of the rest of us are entitled?

This is precisely the time in American and human history for us to take a sharp turn away from "the usual way we do things."
Comment
3 of 115
June 16, 2011
Hi:

Large generation centralized power is needed to be a certain percentage of the available electric mix to satisfy peek loads. However the current amount is way far bigger than it needs to be if you redesign allot of the basic energy devices we use. The amount of distributed renewable energy should easily be able to be at 50% or higher before lack of available peak generation would be an issue. Distributed generation is so much more resilient to Murphy as well, no matter what direction he may choose to come from....
If these large solar, wind etc.. projects can eventually lead to large conventional plant shutdown, then I don't have to big a problem... But it must go hand in hand with a huge ramp up in distributed RE power and energy efficiency...

.....Bill
No image available
Comment
4 of 115
Anonymous
June 16, 2011
A point lost within this discussion is this: Even at a build-out of solar power of all types to satisfy USA energy demands for the remainder of this century, the land-use impact relative to that of the fossil fuel industry would be miniscule. In fact, the land use for such solar development would be about one half of one percent of the land already given over to the fossil fuel industry onshore in the USA through 2010.

The fossil fuel industry currently owns leases on about 75,000 square miles of USA federal onshore public lands alone. This does not count the use of state and other public lands and private lands. Nor does this number include the vast offshore and foreign land and undersea areas given over to providing fossil fuels to the USA.

Additionally, the fossil fuel industry requires a continuing, growing use of lands for mining and transporting the fuels that feed the hundreds of utility-scale fossil fuel fired power plants nationwide.

The natural gas industry has drilled hundreds of thousands of wells nationwide in the past few years, and expects to drill hundreds of thousands to millions more in the future. Each well occupies 2 to 6 acres of obliterated land, meaning that we are looking at many more tens of thousands of square miles of land disruption to add to the millions of square miles already disrupted.

And if you want to see the ultimate in land disruption, I suggest looking up "cast blasting" for coal on YouTube. Coal companies blast away "overburden," meaning they explode the soil, rock, vegetation, and all living things to get at the coal underneath.

Yes, it is a good idea to think about where we locate solar power. But our higher priority should be to think more clearly about the alternatives that have land-use and other environmental impacts many tens of thousands of times that of solar power.
Comment
5 of 115
June 16, 2011
I'm with Bill and Anonymous on this one. In order to provide the vast amount of energy that it is going to take to replace fossil fuels, I think that it's going to take a mix of large and small, centralized and distributed and, as pointed out, large scale implementation of conservation measures.

That said, I think that these large scale projects should have to adhere to all existing environmental laws and regulations.

One last point, regarding the building of transmission capacity, I'm all for it as long as it's done in a systematic way that will contribute to the improvement of a national (or continental) grid.

Bob "Free As The Wind" Mitchell
Comment
6 of 115
June 16, 2011
It is going to take both distributed solar and Big Solar just to slow down the juggernaut of global warming. We need both; no need to fight. Distributed solar will not by itself do the job. We need gigawatts, not megawatts, of baseline power that does not die with the sunset. Please educate yourselves on the terms "gigawatt" and "baseline power" and the fact that 93% of electricity used in the country is not used by residences. This reflexive opposition to anything Big Solar is mindless. The tortoise population can be managed successfully with Big Solar. Apparently we should prefer the monstrous destruction of mountaintop removal or gas fracking to power the vast majority of the population who couldn't care less where their power comes from and will outvote the idealists every time. I don't want to be irrelevant to the conversation. I want to do something meaningful to stop global warming. The consumption of a small percentage of desert land is a worthy tradeoff for what is happening right now in WV or PA. If you insist on living in world where you don't want to make any tradeoffs, then you're not going to be part of the answer.
Comment
7 of 115
June 16, 2011
That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. — Kyle Reese

I'm thinking, you can replace "terminator" with "fossil fuel industry"... and "you are dead" with "renewable energy is dead" and you are not that far from the truth. They have more wealth and power than god, pretty much own the Republican party, and have convinced some huge percentage of the world population that Global Warming is a hoax... Think about that! AND we are in an epic battle against them which we could still potentially lose.

So, even though I'm a major tree hugging liberal, I would like to hear someone from "Solar Done Right" try to convince me that they are not helping the fossil fuel industry in their quest to destroy renewable energy before we reach a tipping point.

- billb
Comment
8 of 115
June 16, 2011
Given the heinous assault that fossil consumption represents in land use (thanks, Anonymous), concomitant resource depletion, and environmental and health destruction, sure, I recognize the need to git 'er done and push forward with all types of renewable projects. What irks me most is that we're just trading one rapacious profit-driven technology with another-- of admittedly reduced (but clearly not eliminated) destructive power.

I think the 800-pound gorilla is assumed consumption levels. It's the 800-pound gorilla in the living room. Let's face it, we use as much as we use not because we actually NEED it (in terms of efficiency) but because we CAN. We drive as much as we do because it's cheap and easy to do so, not because it's the best way to do things. So if our projections of future power needs are based on the absurd waste and energy profligacy in current vogue, then OF COURSE everyone cries, We need bajillions of gigawatts as soon as possible! But the fact is, we don't. We need to look at HOW we use energy (inefficiently!) at least as much as what energy we use. A wholesale jump from fossils to renewables with no change in consumption may be an improvement in some ways (almost certainly would be!) but will NOT address the underlying practices which in part led to our predicament: excess based on assumptions of infinite growth and infinite supply. With conservation and efficiency alone, we can address a HUGE proportion of our current problems--- but it's a political hot potato no candidate has the balls to confront.
Comment
9 of 115
June 16, 2011
@Jeff Kelly:
Not sure I follow you on your 93% stat:
"93% of electricity used in the country is not used by residences"

EIA says otherwise:
http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_use

Could you specify, please?
Comment
10 of 115
June 17, 2011
reBen said it well.

I'd just add that these big projects are stupid for another reason: the designers are incapable of considering more than one technology at a time, and the writer doesn't indicate what a handicap this is for public confidence.

An example not mentioned in the article is that a CSP (presumably heat engines; it wasn't stated) farm should be combined PV and CSP. If we're not informed about this sort of thing in a reasonably accessible way, we can't form a reasoned opinion.

Presumably these big farms could get still more heat, from the wind, by mounting the collectors on frictional devices (hydraulics or mechanically lossy alloys), and arranging for some turbulence. Of course this would never be considered because it would not *on its own* rival a dedicated wind farm.

Like many others, I'm afraid that if things go on like this we'll all be in really big trouble within a decade or so.
Comment
11 of 115
June 17, 2011
As I understand it CSP with molten salt tanks allows solar to extend in to the night peak period , and might be able to extend to overnight EV charging. Since it has different delivery aspects to PV and can help balance grid demand it seems like we need it. I guess the rich companies will get richer and some desert will get covered but it seems less onerous than the whole scale destruction of the fossil and nuclear industry.

Its not PV or CSP, its about how much of each work best together with wind.
Comment
12 of 115
June 17, 2011
Big PV + Combined cycle gas plants? PV for daytime baseload, CCGT for (admittedly dinosaur farts) peaking and nighttime baseload?
Comment
13 of 115
June 17, 2011
There's a tendency still to confuse energy use with electricity use, and energy storage with electricity storage.

Electricity - or the ability to generate it can only be stored at large scale cost effectively by pumped hydro storage, or compressed air energy storage - both of which are dependent on special geographical / geological conditions only available in a few places.

A better alternative might be to look at thermal storage for thermal loads and dispachable energy use to store or time shift energy which would otherwise come from live electricity use.

How would this be achieved?

District heating - hot water can be obtained from a mix of solar thermal and heat pumps, and stored in a cost effective manner in large tanks or by heating up a large underground block of soil and rock using an array of deep boreholes. Heat from the heat pumps can then be obtained when the grid has spare power to offer - with electricity use regulated to match available supply by the grid operator.

Cooling - likewise with air conditioning and refrigeration loads, there are ways to store cold using tanks of slush ice with or without salt additives (these additives can make slush ice down to -40 centigrade). In a few cities like Stockholm, district cooling has been installed in the business district which makes storing cold more cost effective as storage cost declines with increasing tank size.

Aluminium manufacture from Aluminium Oxide by electrolysis could also be carried out under the control of the grid operator, again giving substantial effective spinning reserve for modest cost - true, limiting the capacity factor of the plant, but at the same time substantially cutting its specific electricity cost.

These are just a few examples among many of ways to shift electricity demand to better match availability - greatly increasing the potential proportion of electricity which can be obtained from intermittent sustainable sources without disrupting the grid.
Comment
14 of 115
June 17, 2011
I still don't think it's helpful to compare technologies or applications in an 'either/or' sense. Of course there are benefits to distributed generation - and in the case of PV one advantage tends to be a much greater user-awareness of electric power consumption as well as production, which tends to reduce wastage in the home/building.

Large-scale solar? Concentrating solar thermal needs to be big (mostly) and that's its great strength. Multimegawatt PV delivers clean power on a large scale. Yes, there are arguments against building them in environmentally sensitive areas or agricultural land - but the impact needs to be seen in the light of other impacts we make all the time, such as constructing a new large highway, shopping mall or a thirsty golf course. Not to mention the impact of open-cast coal mining ...
While I believe that rooftops and PV are natural partners, if a utility builds (or signs a power purchase agreement for) large-scale solar, this may well displace the construction of some fossil-fuel plant which has a 30-40 year lock-in to carbon emissions.

There are many strands to transforming the energy supply.
Comment
15 of 115
June 17, 2011
One thing to note is that CSP can be used in hybrid configuration with conventional steam driven fossil fuel systems. Any heat fed into a conventional power plant from a CSP array displaces heat which would otherwise come from fossil fuels, and in doing so, generally achieves a higher efficiency than a stand alone CSP facility. This is because conventional plant operates at higher temperatures and pressures than CSP, so achieving higher levels of heat conversion to electricity as predicted by the Carnot equation
Comment
16 of 115
June 17, 2011
I think there needs to be a meaningful discussion on scale. Manufacturing the equipment to repower America is a staggeringly large endeavor. We all hear the estimates of the new renewable energy economy generating about five million jobs, and such. Let me shed a little light on where those numbers come from. Here's the scenario if Texas were to convert its existing electric grid to 75% solar, and 25% wind. For brevity, I will focus on solar. All numbers were based on existing technology, existing labor, and existing prices.

Square feet of solar panels required, 14% efficiency:
4.8 billion, (111,000 acres)
Number of mounting units required 1 per 32 s.f.: 153 million assemblies
If each mount uses 8 lbs of aluminum: 1.2 billion lbs Aluminum
Linear feet of distribution wire: 3.7 billion lf of wire
If each mount uses 15 fasteners: 2.3 billion fasteners
Lift trucks: 8,000
Drill rigs for mount holes: 500
Meals: 76 million
Uniforms: 225,000
Pickups: 12,000
Transformers: 600
Switch Gear: 600
Transmission towers: 2,000
and many, many more items.

When Texas completely switches to a renewable electric economy it will generate 5x the numbers listed above. When the United States as a whole changes it will generate 25x the numbers listed above. I cannot overemphasize the impact this will have on our country.

As the baby boomers retire, consumer spending is predicted to drop by 50% over the next 10 years. It will depress the economy. The death rate will spiral as the boomers die. Most boomers are parents. This means nearly one hundred million will lose their parents or grandparents in the next 25 years. We are those parents. Those young adults will need a direction, a vision, and jobs. These projects and their transportation spin-offs are large enough to prop-up the economy for nearly two decades.

The problem of 'big' is also an opportunity.
Make sure you see the forest through the trees.
Comment
17 of 115
June 17, 2011
Hi:

From #4 above, if you take the 75000 sq miles alone, just that area factor, at about 700 acres per square mile that's just over 52 million acres!! Remember that is not the external damage caused from the resources from the 75000 sq miles, just the actual land use at acquisition which by #4's number was just federal public land. SO, 111,000 acres VS 52 million for starters... A large endeavor..yes.. but of a scale that has already been done by the conventional industries etc.. and yes much needed...

.....Bill
Comment
18 of 115
June 17, 2011
The numbers posted by John Carr (comment 17) are interesting, but have no context. Thus such numbers might appear imposing to those who know nothing about our current fossil fuel infrastructure and its ever-continuing growth.

Carr's numbers and similar tabulations regarding the clean energy industry need to be contrasted with similar numbers for producing electricity using fossil fuels. For example, 111,000 acres of land is puny compared to the lease sales of federal public lands to the fossil fuel industry where such sales include tens to hundreds of thousands of acres per month.

Similarly, an overview of the materials, transportation, and other requirements of the coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear industries will show that Carr's numbers would come to no more than a fraction of a percent of equivalent dirty energy requirements.

For comment 18, it is 640 acres = one square mile; thus, no need to estimate at 700.
Comment
19 of 115
June 17, 2011
What a silly discussion. How about large scale hydro electric? Why not a microturbine in every back yard? How about large scale nuclear? Shouldn't everyone have a small reactor in their basement? How about large scale wind? Put micro-turbines on every roof. All are feasible and have been done.
The pertinent aspect of solar power is its versatility. But that shouldn't be a reason for a prejudicial attitude towards it. It's use of land area per TWh is comparatively modest except for nuclear power - not including an exclusion zone. Big solar has a very long way to go before it consumes the area blown up to recover coal for power production.
Economy of scale is always one good reason for large scale projects. Roof top solar is great and should have a place in the mix, primarily because it bypasses grid congestion which is increasing at an alarming rate. On the other hand, design and permitting of rooftop systems is more expensive than free standing structures and much more expensive than large scale solar farms. Virtually every rooftop install is a semi-custom job while freestanding projects are mostly cookie-cutter engineering. At the same time rooftop is less efficient due to the scarcity of effective rooftop tracker systems and proper maintenance.
I would take anything Ms Blaeloch says with a grain of salt. She endorses the use of sensitive land for transmission lines and pipelines but not for solar. The former presents a conundrum: how can you support the use of public lands for transmission but not for large scale generation as the two are joined at the hip.
The discussion of variable generators, storage, etc. is off topic for the most part. The relevant consideration is that some of the most cost effective storage methods only work on a large scale - not something one could put in the back yard or the basement.
Once the turtles are inside fencing where they can't be run over by ATVs they will fare much better.
Comment
20 of 115
June 17, 2011
Bill,
That 111,000 acres is for 75% of Texas's electric production @ avg solar insolation, and 14% efficiency. If Texas switch to 100% renewable for all energy, (which is not possible today, because there is no good replacement for jet fuel), it would take 5x the capacity of the stated 75% electrical requirements.

However, that 5x is high, because the efficiency of electric motors in transportation and distribution jumps from around the current 15% average Carnot efficiency to around 80%.

What about that 14%? The solar energy is assumed to exist once it is captured at the solar panel. Any radiation that is not captured is not counted in the solar macro system efficiency. This is similar to oil, in that the energy value of the oil does not include all the energy that went creating the oil in the first place. Energy from oil is counted after it is captured. So it's not quite apples to apples. It's much better.

To supply all energy for the nation, including transportation, etc. it would take about 100 miles square of solar area, (not 100 square miles). That's about 35 million acres. Check the math on that acreage, I'm pulling it from memory. The area is quite variable since it is based on the overall collection efficiency you think is reasonable, I chose 14%.

Consider this;
There are...
128 million acres of urban and suburban sprawl.
35 million acres of military land
28+ million acres of road right of way.

So, there's plenty of room without building in the desert, or covering farmland.
Provided the energy source is placed near the load in urban and suburban areas it could have practically no impact on land required, and less impact on T&D infrastructure in the final build-out.

No matter where it's located, or how many pieces you break it into, it's collectively huge undertaking.

We live in a dig and burn economy. It's tough for fossil fuel companies to see the light when their eyes are always looking down a hole, or into a pit.
Comment
21 of 115
June 17, 2011
Hi:

Know I agree, land that has already been "done in" in one respect or another is available to meet our needs.
Commenter #7 quotes a line from the original "T" movie (I love movies BTW, especially sci-fi).
I would disagree with his replacements on "Terminator" and "you are dead". I would replace Terminator with "money" and "you are dead" with "the world as we know it".

.....Bill
No image available
Comment
22 of 115
Anonymous
June 17, 2011
All -- 100 x 100 square miles = 10,000 square miles x 640 acres per square mile = 6,400,000 acres. This compares with substantially more than 1,000,000,000 (one billion) acres nationwide in the USA devoted to dirty energy production.

Commercial solar photovoltaic panel efficiency, represented by SunPower E19 panels installed and operating at the San Luis Valley Solar Park in southern Colorado, deliver a total panel conversion efficiency of 19.6 percent with an array output of 19 megawatts at the Greater Sandhill facility that went online December 2010 .
Comment
23 of 115
June 17, 2011
Here's some context.
Oil imports: $600 billion/yr and growing.
We will pay another country 12+ trillion dollars in fuel by 2032.

I did a cost estimate for rewiring the U.S. to solar and wind a couple of years ago. It came out to about $11 trillion.

If you just offset oil imports, that's a 19 year payback.
With the cost savings on transportation, and power generating efficiencies, the payback is closer to 12 years, but that depends on a LOT of things.

One year's GDP. But you don't spend it in one year. It would take about 15 years to build all the infrastructure.

We can do it in 15 years, assuming we have an actual plan. That's where big engineering companies come in. They make big plans. Complex plans. Even if the plan is to place a solar panel on every roof. There's storage, T&D, grid stability, and many other factors that require a big picture planning.

If we were truly serious as a nation, we could change our world without leaving the debt to our children. But, change is hard. Too hard for most. It all comes back to this...'You pay for it, I won't.' So, our children will, in fact, pay for our selfishness, because we will leave them no choice.

China understands. Build big, or perish. Big projects are full of tens of thousands of small people and small pieces. I don't usually go for super sized government projects, but this is one I would back. The Eisenhower interstate highway system costs a fortune to build and maintain, but look at the economic benefits.

Ah well, I shall step down from my soap box, as I am preaching to the choir.
Comment
24 of 115
June 17, 2011
I don't endorse transmission and pipelines on sensitive lands. That's hooey.

A point I believe was in my original article but not cited here is that, even with DG desirability aside, there is no good reason to site these plants on undeveloped public land when the EPA has identified 15 million acres of damaged, degraded, even contaminated lands (some of which may be public land)potentially suitable for renewable energy development. That one part of the government should have a program focusing on that type of land while another part of the government charges into sensitive habitat does not make any sense.

Finally, I think people understand that to like DG and not like Big Solar on sensitive land does not equate to liking fracking, MTR, oil & gas, or anything of the sort. A major reason I find it necessary to focus on the threat Big Solar poses to public land is that the national environmental groups have declined to talk about that or about DG because they have acquiesced to the false inevitability of the current policy in order to be politic.
Comment
25 of 115
June 17, 2011
@ #23 (anonymous):

I think you've misunderstood the scale, or the arithmetic.
It has been suggested that about 100 square miles of solar collection could cover the entire U.S. electricity load (not sure if PV or CSP). 100 square miles is 10 linear miles times 10 linear miles.
Comment
26 of 115
June 17, 2011
Hi:

Lets see, 100 square miles at a 40 deg lat on a PSD would yield tracking at a 50% overall efficiency (1 day), 52800 squared = 2.788 billion sqft x .8544 KW x .5 = 1.191 Billion KWH.
I don't know, is that even in the ball park for our usage in a day..??..

.....Bill
No image available
Comment
27 of 115
Anonymous
June 17, 2011
Re comment 23: The calculation for the area of current technology solar PV panels to supply current USA electricity demands shows the panels would need to cover 100 miles x 100 miles, or 100 miles square, or 10,000 square miles.

This is a conservative approximation, and with greater panel efficiency, the number today is more precisely somewhere between about 4,000 and 8,000 square miles.

In either case, the idea of 10 by 10 square miles of solar panels to power the USA is an often repeated mistake made by many and reported by many.

Do the research on your own so you understand the numbers. Contact NREL, SEIA, etc., or look across the web for many versions of the very often-repeated calculation that shows about 10,000 square miles of panel area to power the USA.
Comment
28 of 115
June 17, 2011
Brownfields used for large-scale solar projects is happening in some places, such as Ohio's "Turning Point Solar" plan: at a proposed 50MW, the array south-central Ohio, will be one of the nation's largest, and will be built on land formerly ravaged by coal mining.
Comment
29 of 115
June 17, 2011
I think it is silly to complain about big solar displacing tortoise, when environmental degradation for fossil fuels is killing wildlife at unprecedented amounts. Also, why would a tortoise not just walk by the solar panels and live a normal life? It would only be a few actually killed. Once the original disruption of land from construction is over, the solar farm is a very clean place. The greatest threat to wildlife is pesticides. While using existing property is great for many homeowners, tall buildings do not have enough roof area for all occupant's needs. Also industrial processes require more power than a roof can provide, so there will still be need for some large utility scale solar. The utilities has all our money, so why refuse them the ability to build clean power? If we are to phase out undesirable power like coal and nuclear, replacements have to be built. As others mention, we need to get off fossil fuels in short order, and this requires as much renewable energy as we can manage. Let the complainers use their efforts against coal and nuclear power, they are shooting themselves in the foot by fighting utility scale solar. The best way to preserve wildlife is to eliminate fossil fuel and nuclear power. After all anyone can install solar at home any time they want. It seems many of the complainers expect someone else to hand out solar power to homeowners for free. That is not deserved.
Comment
30 of 115
June 17, 2011
"the recipients of government money to pursue the projects"

So we're again, like corn ethanol, supposed to give tax $ no one can afford (and folks like Exxon don't pay) to help profit-seeking folks create inefficient, massive, distant solar arrays that permanently waste ~10% of their output in transmission, operate with less than the most efficient solar devices, especially if thermal, and claim to be "American" because they're big? Really.

Might better describe the idea of massive solar (or wind) as P. T. Barnum described us: "There's one born every minute."

Current, local solar devices are >20% efficient and increasing. Massed solar projects won't be upgraded as quickly by any means, because their investors want the subsidized watts to turn a profit long enough to get out.
We've got lots of square miles of abandoned solar & wind in our formerly natural Calif. lands. Who's gonna dig up all that concrete?

And, if NYC can supply 1/2 their own power with local (DG) solar, why pay scam artists subsidies to pollute our open spaces?

www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/science/earth/16solar.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

We in Calif,. know we have so much roof & parking-lot space for PV, we can meet more than the peak daily demand even with current, 20% eff. cells. They have 2 doublings of efficiency left and so again, why massed, land-hungry, subsidized scams?

Oh, right, to make $ for a few 'green' con artists. How silly of me.

Dr. A. Cannara
650-400-3071
Comment
31 of 115
June 17, 2011
If you're interested...
Texas Electrical Generation Stats:
Summer Capacity: 100.8 GW
Area Required: 7.4 billion sqft
Avg solar irradiance: 1,366 W/m2
Available irradiance: 1,052 W/m2
Captured irradiance: 147 W/m2
Captured irradiance: 0.3816 GW/sqmile
Area Required: 264 sqmi
Area Required: 219,500 acres
Square Perimeter: 16.2 miles square

United States
Texas consumes roughly 1/4 of all the electricity in the U.S.
If you disagree, just plug in the number you feel most comfortable using.

Area Required for solar cells (Electricity replacement only): 1,056 sqmi
Square Perimeter: 32.5 miles square (using TX available irradiance)
Round up to 41 miles square for lower average U.S. irradiance.

Electrical power consumption accounts for 20% of the total fuel consumption mix.

Area Required, (all fossil fuel): 8,600 sqmi
Square Perimeter: 93 miles square, (using 80% TX irradiance).
Area Required, 5.5 million acres

I know...zzzzzzzzz.
Comment
32 of 115
June 17, 2011
Hi:

Our yearly electric appetite is around 4500 TWH/365 = 12.3 TWH per day.
AT 40 deg lat tracking energy all day per sq ft on March 21 = 2916 BTU's assuming a PSD. That's 854.38 watt hours. times a 10% eff = 85.4 watt hours times a 50% sunshine avg = 42.72 watt hours. times 2.788 billion sq ft (100 square miles) = 119 Billion watt hours... 12.3 TWH / .119 TWH = 103 times to small or about 100 times bigger than 100 sq miles or about 10000 sq miles needed...

.....Bill
Comment
33 of 115
June 17, 2011
Per EIA, 2009 stats: Total U.S. electricity consumption was 3,741 billion kWh, or 3.741 TWh.
Hmm, maybe we're finally leveling off. I know the recession and all that. But still, I'm awaiting the 5(ish)-year EIA report on average residential energy consumption to prove we're getting more efficient. The assumed lockstep between population and consumption will have to be adjusted; we're always using less to do more (at least in the developed world); this adjustment will substantially affect demand projection calculations.
Comment
34 of 115
June 17, 2011
No such thing as to Big...in 25yrs we will look back and laugh at such a statement...just wait on the giant Solar Farms I will be operating in the Low Orbit Satellite configuration...and beaming it down to what ever grid needs it ON-DEMAND
PV IN SPACE....

SolarManJD
Comment
35 of 115
June 17, 2011
>4.7 $/W for large installations? You got to be joking!!! Take a look at what is happening in germany! 3.4 $/W for SMALL <100kWh installations. For large installations they are probably below 3$/W already and its likely that not all module price reduction have been incoorporated yet.

http://www.solarwirtschaft.de/preisindex
Comment
36 of 115
June 17, 2011
Regarding space solar power, beamed to us "on demand" -- the earth's current heat balance is net 1/2Watt per sq meter toward warming now, due to emissions history, etc. And, emissions are up 5% this past year: http://tinyurl.com/3cw4rkc

We use >17TW globally all day long.

Solar incoming is ~86,000TW, so say we increase consumption to ~50TW, and maintain our very inefficient lifestyles where 50% is wasted, and all but talk radio, etc. ends up as heat, then the heat balance will be further tilted toward warming, even if CO2 were magically returned to pre-industrial times.

The point is that reality and Ma Nature don't care how dumb we are. We have a max energy input & consumption that is sustainable on this planet. 'Free' energy from solar sails in space is not going to get around that, no matter how cool we may think the idea is.
Comment
37 of 115
June 17, 2011
Hi:

#34 you messed up the first line.
'Per EIA, 2009 stats: Total U.S. electricity consumption was 3,741 billion kWh, or 3.741 TWh.'

One number is Kilo (1000) the other is not, that is what is messing you up.

3,741 Billion KWH is equal to 3,741 Trillion WH, abbrv. TWH
My resource had electric production in 2008 at 4,160 TWH with a 6% increase each year from 2004 thru 2008, so I pushed it up a bit since it is now 3 years later than '08.

.....Bill
Comment
38 of 115
June 17, 2011
Comment 7 Billtoe: In the long run, renewable energy will win out. All the fossil fuel industry can do is delay and cause more damage. In the long run, however, fossil fuel will become more and more scarce and prices will rise while renewable energy will be constant and as we learn more it will become less expensive.

Comment 8: ReBen: You're right when you say that if we conserve we can do away with a lot of the need for every increasing energy production capacity and I think that as a society, we are getting closer to doing just that.

Unfortunately, while we are starting to use energy more efficiently, we are also continuing to experience population increases, what were once considered to be "western" lifestyles are becoming the norm throughout the world and technology that are energy intensive are continuing to be adopted throughout the world. Therefore, while maybe not as quickly as once was thought, worldwide demand for energy is going to continue to grow.

Even if it didn't, as has been pointed out in the comments here, we use a BUTTLOAD of power! (Most of it coming from less than idea sources). Even without growth in demand, it's still going to be a challenge to replace fossil fuels in our lifetimes.

Comment 10 Anonymous: Be careful when you take statements about the effect of renewable energy on the grid at face value. There are effects, no doubt, but they can be engineered around through building larger, more robust grids and by various storage methods.

Bob "Free As The Wind" Mitchell
Comment
39 of 115
June 17, 2011
Dr Alex you need to go back to school maybe MIT,
because you are confusing apples with oranges...
Solar Energy is Pure Direct Current not Alternating Current...
and with in the next 25yrs we will go back to MR Tesla's real
electricity the one we should have stuck with from the beginning not the over heating way of stupid AC current...and we will come to that realization very soon...
Comment
40 of 115
June 17, 2011
Really, JD -- you give courses on winning friends?
;]
I forget where I said anything about AC or DC?

Tesla was a personal hero, but his idea for radiating electromagnetic energy all over the place to pick it up in just a few places was naive. And, by the way, his radiation was and remains AC, whatever that means to you.

How many EE/Physics degrees & job years did you say you have?
Comment
41 of 115
June 17, 2011
@Bill:

Oops. Thanks for the catch. But isn't the unit beyond billion watt-hours called "terawatt-hours"? Potato/potahto?

Anyway, what stats source did you use?

Ben
No image available
Comment
42 of 115
Anonymous
June 17, 2011
USA electricity consumption in 2010 was 10,270,000,000 kwh per day = 3,748,550,000,000 kwh for the year

See: USEIA Electricity Industry Overview @ http://www.eia.gov/steo/
In the right-hand column are downloadable .gifs and Excel spreadsheets, with number 22 being "U.S. Total Electricity Consumption."
The link to the Excel table is: http://www.eia.gov/steo/7atab.pdf
Comment
43 of 115
June 17, 2011
The number I used was 3,816,900 GWh/yr, but that was from a few years ago.
Comment
44 of 115
June 17, 2011
The technical term I've heard is 'biggawatt".
;]
Comment
45 of 115
June 17, 2011
Hi Ben & anon:

I can not find the link at the moment...LOL.. but I found another link and it looks like electric might have actually dropped from 08 to 09. If it also went down some from 09 to 10 rather than the 6% yearly increase from 04 thru 08, the ~3,800 TWH (Three Thousand eight hundred TeraWatts)could be right...anyway that's about 10,000 sq miles needed as mentioned by my calcs in post #33... and in other posts above..

too many numbers...LOL....

.....Bill
PS: Its easier to express those numbers as pure TeraWatt Hours (TWH) rather than mixing in the additional Kilo prefex.. it can mix people up...
Comment
46 of 115
June 18, 2011
Free as the wind you are absolutely right...in my 25yrs of the Alternative Energy Arena and for some of you who don't like to refer to it as Alternative...refresher course: Alternative to Extractive Energies...Fossil Fuel Burners and Nuclear Fusion or Fission...

I thought long and hard when This Industry was in It's real infancy late 80's...why has no one put all three of the clean generation systems together on one platform.

So this is were I cam up with Solar(Tracking Sun), Wind (Magnetic Levitation no bearings to wear out)and Hydro-kinetic Energy (Tidal-Flow, wave passive rivers and the Like)on one Platform off Shore then Beam to Satellite and re focus to what ever Grid needs On-Demand.

So when my esteemed colleague out in Hawaii beamed DC current from one Island to the other to prove my theory that it could be done (2008).

I set me Goals even Higher

My life's Goal is to Have Total and complete Global Domination of Electric Generation from my Satellite Solar Generators in Low Orbit world wide circumnavigating the earth
next stage generating from Moon and tele-porting it Back...
by 2050.

Some say I am just a dreamer , but I give you Chris Columbus, Magellan and the Appolo Space Missions of the 60's to back me up...
Comment
47 of 115
June 18, 2011
For my part, I'm going to lean toward the side of lower tech rather than higher tech. I thing we have a tendency, in this modern age, to derive solutions to problems that involve the highest possible tech imaginable. Bean power to satellites, then back to Earth? Really? Why not just use less power more efficiently.

So I'll go ahead and make a draft of Gorman's Law:

In solving large-scale problems (i. e., bioregional, global), the use of technology significantly higher than that involved in the problem itself will ultimately further complicate the problem.

And the corollary:

The favored solution to any problem should involve only technology at the same level, or below, that of the problem.

~bg
Comment
48 of 115
June 18, 2011
Aw, JD's just funnin' -- not much science, little engineering, but lots of comic-book potential, like "beamed DC current from one Island to the other". When/if he understands "beam" & DC current" don't fit in the same sentence, unless it's a joke, we'll be older & greyer (or dead).
;]
And when the next big solar storm hits, the satellite population will be reduced enough so his will have room to function, until the next storm, of course. "Beam me up" said the AA cell to the triple encabulator!
Comment
49 of 115
June 19, 2011
Fireof... says "Direct heat decay from most all useful energy, would escape (in the absence of excess CO2)." which misses the key behavior of the zoo atmospheric gasses, especially water vapor, and the new ones we're adding that aren't CO2.

If you bothered to look at the spectra links I gave above, you'd see that CO2 is now only responsible for about 16% of atmospheric warming, while water vapor is dominant by far. This means that the very many more bands that water vapor absorbs must be examined in relation to any calculation of alternative for capturing/emitting solar radiation.

And, policies regarding new GHGs must be calculated as well, since, for example, the increasing reliance on fertilizers has begun adding considerable new N2O to the air, which is hundreds of times more powerful a GHG than CO2. Other novel GHGs are entering these days as well -- one of the worst, unregulated is NF3, used in manufacturing flat screen displays.

And, the remarks about mirrors vs panels are off as well, since a black panel that converts all incoming radiation to output electricity won't be hot! A mirror that heats a fluid, whatever it is, will be fine, except that the temperatures of that fluid and whatever thermal-mechanical-electrical converter it drives will produce waste heat in proportion to Toutput / Tinput. No way around that.
Comment
50 of 115
June 19, 2011
HEAR IS JUST ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF HOW RELEVANT THIS IS
Oh yea AND Dr Alex this is just one more of my colleagues from MIT...

The team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who call their invention 'WiTricity', believe it could change the way we use electricity and do away with the tangle of cables, plugs and chargers that clutter modern homes.
It could also allow the use of laptops and mobile phones without batteries.
The inspiration came when the lead researcher, Dr Marin Soljacic, was standing in his kitchen at night staring at his mobile phone.
'It was probably the sixth time that month that I was awakened by my cell phone beeping to let me know that I had forgotten to charge it. It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging,' he said.
To turn this dream into reality, Dr Soljacic needed a way of transmitting power wirelessly.
Scientists have known for nearly two centuries that it is possible to transfer an electrical current from one coil of wire to another without them touching.
The phenomenon, called electromagnetic induction, is used in power transformers and electric motors around the world.
However, the coils in motors and transformers have to be close for power to pass from one to another. Attempting to transfer power over distances is impossible.
The breakthrough came when Dr Soljacic realised there was another way of transferring energy through the air.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-460602/The-end-plug-Scientists-invent-wireless-device-beams-electricity-home.html#ixzz1Plnnf7pu
Comment
51 of 115
June 19, 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer

Electrodynamic induction method
Main articles: Inductive coupling, Electrodynamic induction, and Resonant inductive coupling

The electrodynamic induction wireless transmission technique is near field over distances up to about one-sixth of the wavelength used. Near field energy itself is non-radiative but some radiative losses do occur. In addition there are usually resistive losses. With electrodynamic induction, electric current flowing through a primary coil creates a magnetic field that acts on a secondary coil producing a current within it. Coupling must be tight in order to achieve high efficiency. As the distance from the primary is increased, more and more of the magnetic field misses the secondary. Even over a relatively short range the inductive coupling is grossly inefficient, wasting much of the transmitted energy.[13]

This action of an electrical transformer is the simplest form of wireless power transmission. The primary and secondary circuits of a transformer are not directly connected. Energy transfer takes place through a process known as mutual induction. Principal functions are stepping the primary voltage either up or down and electrical isolation. Mobile phone and electric toothbrush battery chargers, and electrical power distribution transformers are examples of how this principle is used. Induction cookers use this method. The main drawback to this basic form of wireless transmission is short range. The receiver must be directly adjacent to the transmitter or induction unit in order to efficiently couple with it.
Comment
52 of 115
June 19, 2011
Very good, JD, you can quote info on electromagnetics. But that doesn't mean power can be efficiently transferred that way. If you were to examine the relevant parts of Maxwell's Equations, you'd see that. Your MIT friends also know that, unless they flunked.
;]
Electromagnetic induction efficiency depends on the permeability and loss factors of the material enclosed by and between to two coils. That's why transformers have iron, ferrite, etc. intimately enclosed by their coils. Without high permeability material between coils, no matter how close or far, the ability to couple energy between them drops precipitously, and even further as they move apart.

That's why induction stove tops have to have the pots sitting very close to their surfaces. Same for why motors/generators have as narrow spacing as possible between rotor and stator, and so on.

"Near" (evanescent) field is indeed what stove tops, motors & transformers exploit. Propagating field is what radio/TV/satellites... exploit, with aiming accuracy demands increasing with frequency.

To charge your phone, you need to sit its internal coil as close to the charging coil as possible. There's no magic -- if all that's between the two coils is plastic & air, the power coupled will be low. If your phone had an iron core coil, whose iron reached the phone's surface and the charging dock had similar, then the coupling would be much better. This knowledge is as old as the hills.

Calling this "wireless" is odd, since it is, but the term was the original term for radio, and considered archaic decades ago. It' humorous that some folks think the word is somehow cool in recent years.

Your finger on a touch-pad phone or screen is also doing "wireless" communication & power transfer, but via the dual to inductive -- capacitive. Maybe check out Maxwell's stuff again, with your MIT folks' help, to see how electric & magnetic fields are mathematical duals, where voltage & current are concerned.
Comment
53 of 115
June 20, 2011
Please re-read original post...The R@D in the next 25yrs will perfect this concept. I am at the center of bringing the capital together to produce the largest and most well capitalized corporation in this Arena.
Bringing Solar, Wind and Tidal-Flow generation one platform to the mainstream the Electricity generated by these 3 will power giant Fuel Cells, all off-Shore...

Again this is the stepping stone now to what I WILL ACCOMPLISH IN THE FUTURE.

It is the Nay-Sayers like you that have stifled R&D and the Brilliant Minds that may have actually went this direction from even trying...

I am and have been, for 20 years hell bent on changing the way we Generate Electricity...this I will accomplish before I Die....
Comment
54 of 115
June 20, 2011
51 comments in 3 days...very good one. I'm all for de-centralizing power. POWER TO THE PEOPLE ! Screw Duke Energy and Xcel. The more individuals and communities that generate their own power the more the utilities have to sell to us and cater to us. BUT, that being said, it is great to see the big boys expanding their RPS standards. Now if we can get just get some additional cleaning up requirements on the coal companies,THEN we will see them abandon their oldest coal fired plants and renewables will be off to the races.
Comment
55 of 115
June 20, 2011
Hi:

I would hold off on the beaming of energy in the electromagnetic wave length like Micro wave and down. There is mounting evidence that MW and even VLF energy is responsible for various types of cancers in growing numbers. If you think about, from inception through death, we now bombard ourselves with this radiation 24/7. NO BREAKS. Cancer is a result of the failure of the RNA to correctly replicate cells. God, no wonder!! Is it really any surprise between ALL forms of radiation exposure and chemical exposure!!!
SO, as much as I LOVE new energy solutions, I would take it easy on the beaming stuff.....

.....Bill
Comment
56 of 115
June 20, 2011
Long life JD! Sounds like you'll need it. And, study just a bit more about reality.
;]
Comment
57 of 115
June 20, 2011
What you are all missing are the water requirements to maintaining the panels etc. California just sustained a nearly 10 year drought and if desertification takes places this will end up as a boondoggle because of wind storms. The drought is not over despite the more than ususal rain we received this winter. I want solar on MY roof. Real easy except Southern Cal Edison will not lets access the funding.

Here is the most recent source on the water needs that the EIR's have barely covered:

http://www.theamericanwestatrisk.com/media/Solar-Power-Plants-Annotated-Notes.pdf

http://www.theamericanwestatrisk.com/media/Fast-Tracking-Solar.pdf

Please do not discount the water energy nexus. See Chokepoint report http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/featured-water-stories/choke-point-us/
Comment
58 of 115
June 20, 2011
Very good point, Kidsolar, and we're not all missing it. Purified water by the ton is needed for desert arrays. Add in the unavoidable transmission loss and environmental degradations, and we see why it's both subsidized & expensive.

This is why groups like Sierra Club are advocating local solar, as on your roof, plus efficiency. As we learned recently, even NYC could generate 50% of its needs from roof solar, and there are many more floors per bldg needing juice there!

You should contact your local Sierra Club chapter and see if they have a deal with a local installer. There's a pilot project in some regions in which the club has vetted installers/leasers, which will insulate homeowners from the utility. This isn't perfected yet, because it may interfere with the Community-Choice concept for aggregating local power demands and choosing power providers(s) for the CCA, rather than go with the local utility.
Comment
59 of 115
June 20, 2011
very good civil discourse
I'm all for de-centralizing power as much as possible.Xcel and Duke Energy should be limitted in their power more and more as more individuals and companies produce their own power.
Comment
60 of 115
June 20, 2011
Compared with the water requirements of natural gas "fracking", concentrated solar's requirements are minimal. Also, if you capture and reuse the water, it's even less.

The power to clean the water again would be right there, so I really don't see a problem.

Bob "Free As The Wind" Mitchell
Comment
61 of 115
June 20, 2011
Ok Fireof... When we look up at the sky at night, between stars, it's what color? Right answer -- black. If we shine a light or a microwave dish into that blackness, what gets hot? Right, nothing, until the light reaches something far, far away.

So just because something looks black doesn't mean it's converting light to heat. It could simply be taking in all energy, reflecting none, and converting it all to something else, like electricity that goes elsewhere. An ideal solar panel thus would look black at all frequencies it could convert -- hopefully all frequencies of sunlight.

With current panels, only 20-40% gets converted, so their blackness is indeed internal surfaces that absorb wastefully. An ideal version of that panel would look as if it were an odd color, because its surface would reflect all colors not being converted to juice.

For the water vapor and other absorption bands, you can go here...
2nd graphs here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_%28electromagnetic_radiation%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect

Then...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_absorption

Click on upper left graph here...
www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/spectrum.html

And, ocean warming not only melts ice, it evaporates more water so more atmospheric absorption of its bands and more rain and more snow and more weather...

www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010JD015065.shtml
www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011EO150011.shtml

So, yes, paint your roof white/aluminum (Henry 555 at Home Depot).
;]
Comment
62 of 115
June 20, 2011
How Big Is To Big ? remember where we started ? We aren't even in the ball park of TO BIG. when purchasing electricity is cheaper in rural Mexico than it is in central Denver, then we should bring up this topic again. But for now , BRING IT ON.
Comment
63 of 115
June 21, 2011
So, it sounds like most of you just want the U.S. to penny-ante our way up to the scale we need. Organic growth.
Somehow Bechtel has become a whipping boy because they make money at their core business.
Wouldn't it be better to PLAN the expenditure of 11 trillion dollars, and not just leave it up to fate? The organic model has a dark side. If the grid has problems nobody is responsible, because nobody planned it, and everybody owns it. Good luck with regulating anything under that scenario. It's every man for himself.
Isn't one of the goals of renewable energy the replacement of fossil fuel? That's thousands of huge projects. It's 10's of millions of small projects.
Whose going to finance all of this? Mastercard? Meanwhile, the price of fuel rises, cash get tighter, and the will to do it withers with an ever shrinking pocketbook.
A better question is, how do you put GWhr of storage into an T&D system using AA batteries? You can, but it would be stupid.
There is more than one kind of large project. Not all projects are top-down. Our highway system, water systems, sewer systems, T&D systems were all build from millions of smaller projects. Things they have in common... They were PLANNED, engineered, budgeted, and discussed to death. But it works.
Engineers will make some money on this. So what.
Poorly conceived and designed plans constructed by inefficient and incompetent project managers should always face the chopping block. But "big" is inevitable if we really intend of changing our ways.
Comment
64 of 115
June 21, 2011
Not sure what's going on with some of this, but the "Bechtel has become a whipping boy" straw man sounds so much like what happened after Exxon Valdez. Of course while Exxon played abused for many years (still hasn't paid the Alaskans) all), they did what biz folks lacking responsibility always do -- pass off future liability to someone else (or to the govt.) -- they stopped owning their ships and simply rebadged them ans leased them back. Bye, bye legal vulnerability if the captain they hired is a drunk! Deniability is monetizable, baby.

It's so sad to hear how hard it is to be a large, tax-avoiding US corporation. Even Reagan's past chief economic advisor chokes on this pap. I mean, look at Halliburton -- just 'cause they couldn't make or test good well cement, they got static from BP & the media (certainly not MMS). We even abused them for stealing $ from our troops by inflated cafeteria provisioning. And BP, well, poor BP, at least they can legitimately keep their profits from our incompetent regulation offshore, legally. They don't have the hope for a "tax holiday", as many of our 'patriotic' corporate 'citizens' are now asking for, in order for us to see what they've stashed away offshore.

As to the need for massed solar, or whatever, we've more local, on-structure solar opportunities across the country than we need. Maybe some massive solar folks are betting against affordable lease programs and efficient local storage? Their bet, however will be disappointing fairly soon, as those who bet against Henry Ford learned, especially because DG and local storage are also directly linked to every American's realization of freedom -- our cars. That's a real, low-risk, high-reward market.
Comment
65 of 115
June 21, 2011
UPDATE: new solar technology my colleagues hear in Fort Lauderdale is now building the manufacturing plant. This NEXT GENERATION solar panel you have not seen or know anything about. It has been a quiet little secret for R&D of the DOD and now is ready for production. 8sq ft of little giant...not based on silicon , not thin film and puts out a mere 630Watts while holding a base load @ 56amps...nothing near it out there...made with HURRICANE GLASS and has a 56yr warranty.

And the best yet less than $1.25watt price...

The man already holds over a billion dollars in contracts to fulfill for just DOD and DOE....not to mention a few major Power Providers...
This panel was exclusively designed to charge batteries...

SolarManJD

This will be my last post…I bid all to live as long as you Want and never Want for as long as you live…
Comment
66 of 115
June 21, 2011
Even for large-scale solar, the trend goes towards projects below 20MW. The positive economic effect of spread out energy production is far greater - then again, the majority of energy consumers claims to have different things to worry about than producing electricity.

PV Power Plants - USA 2011 will deal with both large and very large power plants - would somebody care to hand in a paper on this subject?
Comment
67 of 115
June 21, 2011
Dear john carr;
Let's go big. Let's merge the Dept.of Defense with the Dept.of Energy.Spend a few hundred $Billion with (dare I say it) the likes of Bechtel,Morton Thiacal,Haliburton and the rest of the defense big boys. Then we really will be defending ourselves.
Have them build the smart grid as well as solar and wind farms etc.And as each project is finished ...sell it to municipal utility companies, so we as local citizens own it.Stop exporting gazillions for oil.
Stop spending gazillions in oil rich nations.
Start paying our own municipalities for our own power.
Maybe this could work?
Comment
68 of 115
June 21, 2011
Evidently, the Department of Defense has become our enemy.
The Department of Energy must be in some grand conspiracy with the military industrial complex to take over the solar power industry. Maybe your city is conspiring to poison you with chlorine in the water?
Remember Cholera? Ever had malaria? Have you ever driven on a road in Haiti? Have you ever drank water in India and been sick for weeks? Maybe my relatives and friends who fought and died for you in the Department of Defense were just trying to rob you of your hard earned cash.

Do you know why electric rates are almost always regulated? Of course not. It's because electrical generation is not a free market. It's a closed market. Free trade is not a catch phrase you'll hear at ConEdison, FP&L, APL, TXU, Reliant, or any of them.

Like it, or not, it takes government to keep these things in check. The exception. Municipal utilities. The customer has a direct vote on rates. Oh yeah. That's a government run utility.

Speaking of 'your own power' will you bring it with you to a restaurant? Will you carry it in your car and power up the bank every time you go. Better bring a lot of AA batteries for the mall, those A/C units gulp the power. When you open your faucet, will you run the pumps that pump water from the local lake? Oh no, did you bring enough energy to power the surgical room? We share power constantly. The idea that energy usage is not a community function is just plain ignorant.

This every man for himself attitude is the foundation of anarchy. We can't survive as a country with that attitude. It is not realistic.

About that planned economy. Ever heard of electric reliability councils? Have you ever seen a place without them? I have. You better have your own power there, because the base power is intermittent. Go live on the equator for awhile.

The fact is most people don't have a clue about big projects, just fear.
Comment
69 of 115
June 21, 2011
Been traveling, so a couple of comments from reading the threads...

1. DoD is actually more on the band-wagon of solar then most people realize. They have a HUGE fuel and energy budget to contend with, not to mention fuel transportation problem in war zones, renewable significantly reduces their long-term costs for both. In the case of transportation of fuel, solar and wind reduce people losses as well.

2. My reasons for disliking large-scale solar projects and much prefer distributed rooftop solar...

a. From a national security standpoint a distributed system that does not rely on centralized infrastructure is better then a centralized system which is easier to target (get more people with one attack when you centralize)

b. Weather versus Solar versus Grid:
One centralized large solar facility has some serious ups and down with power from cloud passing, a single large cloud and power drops probably 40%(a guess) on a 100MW system that is a lot of power dropping in a relatively short time frame. However, that same cloud over 10000 x 10kW distributed systems throughout a city sized area is unlikely to have any serious affect on the overall power (I think I read the grid can handle 10% no problem) and as you have more distribution for the power, the ups and downs become forecast-able within 10% or less of the minute to minute output (cloud cover prediction over a regional area is very accurate these days). The end result is backup systems can be brought online relatively casually as needed and grid upgrades are minimized with distributed solar PV.

c. As has already been covered - more land developed for nothing better then we have always done it that way businesses.

So I much prefer roof-top solar first, any distributed solar second and large scale only because it is better then fossil fuel reliance.
Comment
70 of 115
June 21, 2011
I'll more than second Longw's last comment, for more reasons...

a) If we want to give solar storms or up & coming terrorists great targets, just build a few large plants, of any kind, and run long lines from them. The cost of an upcoming major solar storm is now estimated to be over a decade of recovery in rebuilding transmission gear. Local solar, DG, hasn't that bullseye drawn on it. And, we will be having a major storm in the next few years, likely at least as in 1921, maybe as bad as 1859 (how many satellites, power lines & Garmins in 1859/1921? www.spaceweather.com

2) Local storage without chemical batteries is coming available, and will be essential for EVs, so the market will drive economy & power density.

3) Poo-pooing permanent transmission losses, maintenance costs, environmental costs, reliability and security doesn't make those real problems go away for subsidized, large-scale solar, wind, etc. If your bank started charging 10% to have your checking account, what would you do?

4) DoD is indeed on board, has been for years, looking for remotely sited, fly-in, non-petrol power sources. Solar is one, small salt reactors another. Remember how many of our kids we've lost driving fuel trucks around the Middle East as targets?

5) And, for history buffs, Google the Rural Electrification Act, to see how electric utilities never had wanted an open, competitive business model. Government had to make them do it. Same for telcos, FCC, and so on. As the President of US Steel said on nationwide TV (in a moment of angry, uncontrolled honesty) "US Steel is in the business of making money, not steel". Sound like any Wall St. firm? Any fossil-fuel company? Any subsidized 'green' company?...
;]
No image available
Comment
71 of 115
Anonymous
June 21, 2011
One thing I didn't see brought out in the article was that big solar can have thermal storage attached, often 12 hours of it. Night time and passing clouds are much less of an issue. Tough to do that with rooftop PV. (Although I do want PV on my roof, too.)
Comment
72 of 115
June 21, 2011
Again, the basic problem with a thermal device is its low conversion efficiency. Fine to store heat overnight, but if your generator is only able to get 30+% of the heat energy out of it, it's no better than an old gas plant. Remember, 10% transmission loss on top of that ~60% conversion loss, plus other losses in heating the stored fluid (salt) itself.

There's no magic trick to get around thermodynamics when we start with heat. The only course is to maximize initial temps and maximize output (turbine) stage efficiencies, and minimize exhaust temps to approach the 40+% a good coal/gas plant gets today.

If we have >20% efficient local solar PV, we're near breaking even with the very best thermal plants of any kind and eliminating emissions from fossil plants. With upcoming 30% panels & local storage, we pull ahead. There's a huge amount of research in squeezing an electron or more from every solar photon we get at the surface. Thermal efficiencies in massive solar thermal plants have little improvement possible, and retain all the disadvantages of massive, remote systems already mentioned.
Comment
73 of 115
June 21, 2011
Longwatcher,
I'm with you. The DoD has come along way recently advocating for solar powered stations, eV's and pulling away from oil. Sure hope that Panetta does as well as Gates has done in this reguard. As far as small distributed solar vs. big centralized solar. For now,I'm for both.Would like to see more decentralized as time goes on.And as prices drop, I believe we will.

john carr,
grand conspiracy? malaria? bringing batteries to restaurants?
lighten up , you might sleep better
Comment
74 of 115
June 21, 2011
DrAlexC you are right that we can't get around the laws of thermodynamics, but thermal storage in large scale solar thermal plants at least enable us to improve the economics of a worth while system. Power systems of the future are about diversity. No one technology needs to become the dominant. PV, both in rooftop and large-scale, has its place. CSP because of its ability to access efficient thermal storage (as opposed to in efficient "battery"/electric storage" can offer many benefits.
I have nothing against PV or for that matter any form of renewable energy that can be economically dispatched. The problem with large scale deployment of roof top PV, is the the dependence it will have on government interaction. In Australia we have seen that attention to renewable energy alternatives is an election to election proposition. It will take only a small distraction to change policy that will shift investor confidence.
Comment
75 of 115
June 21, 2011
Steve Poppitz,
It seems you can be sarcastic, but are unable to decipher it from others.
The DOD is not our enemy, nor the DOE. The real enemy is ignorance, and a profound sense of selfishness in this country. This entire thread is a good example. We have people who will only talk about their niche, and are not engaging in discussing the question posed by the author. How big is too big?

What are the answers given?
I like thermal, its works like a battery.
Iron lithium batteries are good, how do they work?
I like PV, mine is cheaper than yours.
I want to build something in outer space.
How much heat gets thrown back from a black panel.
I don't want to pay people I don't like, Bechtel, Haliburton, etc because we all know they are just like Exxon.

Those aren't answers, they are complaints, and peripheral discussions. I see this over and over again in this community.

Lack of Focus.

A few of you have stuck to it. Good for you.

Have any of you seen a piece-meal grown distributed public electric grid? It's a nightmare to operate and maintain. Spend some time in Southern India, Haiti, and Liberia. You'll get the picture.
Yet, that's exactly what we get when there are no checks and balances put into the grid. It's not a good idea to hobble it together. Again, each man for himself. The real important part is grid planning for a community's distribution. Buy your own equipment, but what happens when that equipment fails, and the new owner cannot maintain it? This lesson's already been learned.
If the only large projects that gets implemented are grid planning, and reliability measures, then at least it's a platform for private expansion of distributed generation.

Thanks John G. for speaking to the article. It's an important question.
Comment
76 of 115
June 22, 2011
Some straw men being raised here -- "hobbled" or do you mean "cobbled"? The Calif. grid is well controlled by several agencies, with some federal oversight, so the long existence of various municipal utilities here demonstrates the clear possibility of generalizing the Community=Choice concept throughout any region with good laws & regulators. Indeed that's up to voters, but no where near the chaos caused by vested interests from subsidized, large-scale, 'green' investments outside of community control, yet attempting to influence hourly ISO decisions & purchases.

And, for local storage, batteries are again straw men, though quite good in recent MW products. And Thermal storage is not like a "battery", because batteries haven't thermodynamics to be saddled with. There are other choices arriving, including inertial storage for large businesses, with 85% efficiency input to output. The market for 100kWHr to 10MWHr local storage will be huge, partly because some of the techniques map directly to great vehicle needs & markets.

I'll be away from this discussion for a while, so have fun!
Comment
77 of 115
June 22, 2011
Yes indeed, ultra-capacitors will be one of the best, safest, long-life choices, even easily exchangeable, if preferred. For static locations, inertial modules, like the 200kWHr Velkess unit, would be great. In both cases, charging can be relatively quick (observing the electrical limits) -- no sparks please!

Just remember, the way we do things today doesn't define the ways the same things can be done, perhaps better, in the near future -- so many folks are working every day on improvements.
Comment
78 of 115
June 26, 2011
"Again, the basic problem with a thermal device is its low conversion efficiency. Fine to store heat overnight, but if your generator is only able to get 30+% of the heat energy out of it, it's no better than an old gas plant."

The 30% thermal conversion efficiency is not really relevant to the utility of thermal storage in conjunction with CSP. Even without storage CSP is a thermal conversion device whose exergy output is limited by the second law of thermodynamics. So what? Are you going to claim that PV is useless because its conversion efficiency is only 20%? The only relevant efficiency related to thermal storage is the ratio of the energy output obtained using stored heat to produce steam to the energy output obtained using the heat at the moment of collection.
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Comment
79 of 115
Anonymous
June 28, 2011
Unless reliable, large-scale energy storage becomes a reality renewables CAN NOT replace traditional fuels. The top responsibility of utilities, above all else, is RELIABILITY. Renewables (wind/solar) are not dispatchable but as-available. Therefore, substantial, dispatchable backup generation (i.e. fossil) must be maintained or even added to INTEGRATE renewables RELIABLY.

Although many contributors here are well intentioned, the REALITY is that, when it's all added up, renewables are substantially more expensive than just their capital and delivery costs, which is already a lot. The fragile economics of renewable projects don't hold up when the veil is lifted on total cost (which is why it has not been).

PV is interesting in that its cost continues to fall whereas solar thermal and wind show little possibility of future reductions.
Comment
80 of 115
June 28, 2011
Do people actually get paid to spout off bs that has no basis in reality in order to confuse people and plant a seed of doubt in their minds? If so, I think that there is probably a special place reserved in hell for folks like you!

That said, Anonymous, You couldn't be more WRONG! While I agree with you that large scale storage does need to be incorporated in large scale renewable energy projects, the technology to do that is available as we speak. It costs money and the issue hasn't been pressed, so large scale storage hasn't really been made part of most large scale renewable energy projects, but it should be.

If storage was incorporated in most if not all large scale renewable projects, there wouldn't be a need for fossil fuel backup. Another, longer term, option is to redo the nation's grid, maybe even expand the grid to where it covers the entire continent.

By doing so, it would help balance out the intermittent nature of wind because if the wind weren't blowing in one part of the country, it's very likely that it is in another!

While there would be transmission losses, these could be compensated for by simply building more generation capacity.

When you mention "The fragile economics of renewable projects", it makes me wonder how fragile the economics of fossil fuels are without the huge subsidies that industry gets. When you consider these subsidies, please take into account miliatary and environmental costs that we pay, but that aren't included in the cost of fossil fuels.

Considering these subsidies, who's economics are "fragile"?

Bob "Free As The Wind" Mitchell
Comment
81 of 115
June 28, 2011
While I agree partially with Anonymous that without energy storage Solar and wind can not replace dirty fuels. HOWEVER, what it CAN DO IS SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE the NEED for those fuels. And until we have a reliable relatively low-cost energy storage system in place, I would like to conserve as much of the fossil fuels we have as possible. There are certain things that only fossil fuels can do by the nature of their being transportable energy (such as planes - although I note the R&D being done in that realm), large land vehicles (such as Main Battle Tanks - although a nuclear power pack is technically an option) and if nothing else emergency power supplies for unusual situations.

If we use it all up, it is not available for what only fossil fuels can do; so I want it to last as long as possible into the future. To do that we need to stop using it as a primary energy source and use it only for what it can do. Solar and Wind should become our primary energy sources. We can run our transportation network off of just solar eventually that would be a huge savings in oil and natural gas. And we can at least reduce the need for coal and Nuclear power plants and that is not a bad thing.

Conserve for the future by converting as much as we can now.

Just my opinion,
Comment
82 of 115
June 29, 2011
solar collectors on every possible building, community wind farms, biogas digestors in front of every sewerage plant,Bloom Boxes at every office building...you don't think we could get rid of dirty fuel ...? come on wish a little.
Comment
83 of 115
June 29, 2011
Lotsa poetry and wine in this article.
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Comment
84 of 115
Anonymous
June 29, 2011
Bob, your logic is about as solid as the wind and it appears you have no regard for utility considerations nor any real experience in energy operations.

First off, your suggestion that I have a place in 'hell' tells me clearly that your are 'religious' about your position, from which I must conclude that your 'facts' and knowledge are more based on your faith and motivations in place of any real experience, much less concern, for the reality of serving utilities and ultimately the customers.

Now to my point, note without insult to you.

So even WITH STORAGE, a bad WEEK may spell complete shutdown.

Is this acceptable? The honest answer is a resounding NO.

How much backup generation? It is a complex question that is impossible to answer cleanly and is subject to the present state of the system - which is constantly changing anyway.

To dismiss dispatchable resources so readily is reckless and based on limited perspective.

I know much about renewables from first hand experience over many years and I don't denigrate your contributions so please don't do that to mine.
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Comment
85 of 115
Anonymous
June 29, 2011
Longwatcher and Steve - I would love to get rid of fossils as much as anyone else, but we can't do it recklessly.

Now fusion power would be my choice to expedite as a baseload resource to complement or replace all current generation forms.
Comment
86 of 115
June 29, 2011
Anonymous, actually I wasn't speaking of you specifically when I made the comment about people who purposely confuse the issues at hand in order to confuse people. While I think that you're wrong about the costs of renewables vs. that of fossil fuels, I do agree with you that in the short run (5 - 10 years) fossil fuels probably can't be replaced without a Manhattan project type of effort that I think is not very likely.

Regarding the "needs" of the utilities, while I think that they need to be included in our switch to renewables, I think that they need to be the ones to take a leadership position in making the switch and don't think that they deserve any special consideration or protection while the switch is being made. From what I've seen, most utilities are very typical of big business and are more concerned with their bottom lines than in doing the "right" thing.

Fortunately, I do see some utilities accepting the facts that the energy scene is indeed changing and taking the first steps towards adopting clean energy generation from renewable sources.

As far as my logic goes, I think that it's pretty freaking solid.
*Coal, while artificially "cheap", is finite and extremely dirty.
*Natural gas is also finite and while it burns cleaner than coal, it also has severe environmental consequences.
*Nuclear is expensive and dangerous and also based upon a currently finite resource.
*Hydro is clean, but pretty fully utilized in a practical fashion.
*Technologies that are possible (such as fusion), but not here let need to be researched, but not counted upon.

That leaves renewable energy, which if you look at ALL the costs is much cheaper in the long run than fossil fuels. Utilities and society need to accept this and make the switch as quickly as possible.....where is the flaw in my logic?

Bob "Free As The Wind" Mitchell
Comment
87 of 115
June 30, 2011
This adds a new dimension to the discussion:

http://www.energy.gov/news/10391.htm
Comment
88 of 115
June 30, 2011
Does anyone dispute that renewable energy has to eventually be the base load generator? By eventually, I mean a long time. In my opinion there are two major hurdles for renewables:
1. Installed cost.
2. Reliability. (able to produce regardless of the time of day or weather.)

PV mftg's and installers are making some gains on lowering the price. There are current means to store energy, (with losses).

But honestly, there are no renewable installations in the U.S. that come close to the horsepower required to be a base load provider at the needed minimum reliability.

Wind farms in Texas come the closest. I am excluding the obvious, and essential hydropower.

If PV mfg could include internal storage in the panels then we would come closer on the reliability.

Anonymous raises a good question. What happens if you have a bad WEEK? That's a lot of storage. But if renewable energy is going to be the backbone of the power grid it will be necessarily large. Can we avoid building big at some point? I don't think so.

Distributed grids with millions of mini generators are still grids. These grids distribute gigawatts of energy. That's not small. Powering trains is no small deed. Powering a telecom building is no better. A city's worth of A/C on a summer day in Texas is a very large load to distribute.
Comment
89 of 115
June 30, 2011
"Does anyone dispute that renewable energy has to eventually be the base load generator?" -- Yes and No...

Yes, because what is marketed today as 'renewable' is not, except for DG PV on existing structure. The rest all demand large land/water be removed from other uses, for generators & transmission systems. And, DG PV is not just another "grid", because unlike the present, inadequate grid (as the upcoming solar storms will expose) provides local load servicing independent of other local systems that may have failed. I'm actually in a town that survived the great NE blackout some years back because a wise engineer pulled their grid switch so their 100-year-old hydro generator could run the town from the Conn. River. It was the only town in the NE to see no power interruption. DG PV, plus some local storage provides this.

No, because as time goes by, the true costs of marketeers fibs about wind/wave, geothermal, etc. will become apparent, just as subsidies we give fossil fuels are becoming obvious. This leaves the true renewabels, with low land demands and higher power density -- DG PV/hot water and safe nuclear (Thorium MSR).

With local solar heading toward 2-3MW/acre (existing surfaces), with local storage, and Th MSR at >50MW/acre, both peak & base loads are met 24/365 forever. We've a few billion years of solar left before we're toasted by bloating Sun. We've millions of years of Th available (4x the abundance of Uranium).

If we get smart and follow the report JFK requested and received in 1962, we'll have our energy needs solved in as few decades as we choose. If we're smart & not fooled by subsidized interests' hype.

http://energyfromthorium.com/msrp/cnp1962/
--
DrAlexC
Comment
90 of 115
June 30, 2011
I don't want to derail this to talk about thorium, but in 2004 I was invited to meet with the NRC and all of the major nuclear players in the US at College Station, TX. I was invited by Bechtel. The meeting was about how the get a new nuclear plant built in the next 15 years. One interesting fact was presented I hadn't heard before, and haven't heard repeated since. If all the energy of the US was made by solely by nuclear (fissable Uranium), we have approx 25 years supply without breeder reactors. So, thorium may be part of the answer, but it's also a finite resource. Please, don't assert that thorium fission is waste free. Even slow neutrons irradiate the material used to contain them.
Besides, thorium is a still part of the "dig and burn" economy we all rely on. Isn't one of he points to truly renewable energy to get free of the dig and burn economy?
Just a thought.
Comment
91 of 115
June 30, 2011
DrAlexC. Are you serious in defining renewable energy as only those that do not take up any land or make any demands on water. Surely I must have misunderstood, because if I haven't then why wouldn't you eventually question the purpose that a structure was used for in determining its suitability to be classified renewable (I guessing the rooftops of companies associated with fossil fuel are out of the question).
Use of water should not rule out its suitability to be classified renewable. After all we have the same number of water molecules (give or take a few) that we had millions of years ago. Just distributed a little differently
Comment
92 of 115
June 30, 2011
John Carr: Wow, I actually agree with DrAlex for once. But for different reasons, of course! Yes, there are folks who don't think that renewables will ever be able to handle base loads. They point out the massive scale of the problem and ignore the fact that EVENTUALLY we won't have a choice; that finite resources are just that...finite and will run out some day.

The correct answer is, "No", people shouldn't doubt that some day that renewable/sustainable energy will provide all of the energy that we need.

It's true that some technology may be developed that produces energy in such a manner that wind, solar, etc. becomes obsolete, but even then that technology will have to be based upon a source that is sustainable and renewable. As of right now, that technology hasn't been developed, so let's dance with the partner that is currently available and that would be wind, solar, hydro-kinetic and maybe nuclear to help us over the hump.

DrAlex: Are renewable energy sources less dense than fossil fuels? Yep, no getting around that. Are they going to require the use of land and water? Again, yep! But as Mr. Giannasca pointed out above, the use of water (particularly if it can be cleaned and recycled) by itself shouldn't rule a power source out as "renewable".

Do large scale solar and wind projects take up land? Again, yep...but with wind the actually space taken up by the turbine is only about 100 Sq ft.. The blades do extend further, but they are up in the air and don't preclude the land still being used for other purposes. Large scale solar can be placed over parking lots and such to minimize land impacts.

Bob "Free As The Wind" Mitchell
Comment
93 of 115
June 30, 2011
DrAlexC,

FYI, That document refers to the development of breeder reactors as being the solution for long term energy production. Sodium salt breeder reactors, like the two decommissioned ones in Idaho Falls worked very well, (EBR I & II).

The clean-up is not so easy. I used to think breeders were the way. The problem has been breeders produce plenty of other undesirables. Also, we can't recycle spent fuel, as part of nuclear non-proliferation. Cleaning the nuclear poisons out occasionally = recycling spent rods. Also, fast neutrons penetrate the casing material creating more radiation and failure issues over the long term. Try cleaning up 400 C liquid sodium that's leaking. Been done, not fun.

I wish building breeders were clean and consequence free. But, it's not. I know the thorium cycle is better, but fast neutron reactors can be very dangerous.

"When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm very bad."

I think we're going to have to suck it up, put in lots of storage, and get along with a lower power density. Low power density, and large storage means maintenance and replacement jobs for our children. So, it's not all negative. Give them something to improve.

About that water comment...I think you were misunderstood. I believe you meant, conventional thermal generation takes up lots of water that could be used elsewhere. PV conserves that water.

No?
Comment
94 of 115
June 30, 2011
Just a quick comment because words matter.

Solar is reliable, what it is not is 24/7 continuous.

As we distribute small solar PV systems over a city sized area, it becomes possible to predict the output of solar over that city relatively accurately (within 10%) up to 72 hours in advance on at least an hourly if not smaller increment time frame. Because we can predict cloud cover, humidity, and temperature to that level of accuracy and sun angle even more so, making a city sized distributed solar PV system very predictable (well within the grid load design limits. And since very little maintenance is required (I haven't touched mine since I got them and don't expect to until the inverters go).

To me that means solar is very 'reliable'.

Saying it is not, is detracting from its advantages over other sources. Please find a better word then 'not reliable' to describe solar.
Comment
95 of 115
June 30, 2011
Thank you LongW for accuracy.

JohnC & JohnG, please read the first several pages of the 1962 report and note the statement about "breeder" reactors that mentions using Thorium, as well as natural Uranium.

The reason 'thorium is a still part of the "dig and burn" economy' is false is quite simple -- natural Uranium has 2 primary isotopes only one of which is fissile (for reactor power), and that one (235U) is only 0.71% of natural U even when purified from ore. This is what we start with when we "enrich" U, trying at great expense & energy to get the fraction up to 4% 235U, which is then enough to run a fission reactor.

In contrast, Th, which is 4x more common in all rock, is 100% convertible inside a reactor to 233U, which is 90% fissile (235U is only 80% fissile).

The energy potential of a kg of earth (or Mars or Moon) rock is then 4x 140 times that of natural U, when using its Th content. This is why the 3200 ton stockpile of Th in NV can run all US energy needs for several years -- no mining. It's also why all the Th in mine tailings around the world is enough to run the US for 1000 years -- no mining. One rare earth mine in Idaho has 1000 years of all US energy in its Th content -- a 1000-acre mine. At >10GWHrs/kg, Th has no competition for energy density and environmental benefit.

In 1962, they were intending to breed Pu from 238U (the 99.3% of U ore), then fissioning that 239Pu (only 65% fissile). This is equally good, but 1/4 the natural abundance of Th & 35% long-lived waste vs 2% for Th-233U). And, we don't want Pu around anymore. Thus, Th is the safe path to safe nuclear power.

The Folks who wrote reports like that in '62 knew about global warming, knew about wasting fossil hydrocarbons by burning for energy and in fact instigated a report in 1970 to the President & Congress about the effect of climate change on the US economy -- OMG, this was before Tweets, the Internet & 'smart' phones! They also had some Nobel prizes!
Comment
96 of 115
June 30, 2011
(continued...)

So now the issue is why was the breeder not pursued to fruition? Well GE quoted $159/kW in their 1963 price list, to build a light-water reactor (LWR, like Fukushima's). We already had them in Rickover's nuclear navy, and the 1st civilian one at Shippingport PA. Would a subsidized, established U mining, purifying, enriching, fuel-fabricating, reactor-building, steam-turbine industry be interested in something better & safer? Even if it were designed by the same folks who held the patentys on the LWRs they were madly selling?

You know that answer. Add to this that the AEC & Congress only funded the hard to control, liquid-metal-cooled, fast-neutron breeder reactor (LMFBR), despite the thermal neutron molten-salt reactor having been run perfectly at Oak Ridge for over 4 years, and you see how we typically screw up US decision making. The govt. simply failed to create a funded Thermal-neutron breeder program. And, industry didn't care, despite their cost estimates for LWRs being naive.

The 1962 report made clear that we should be out of the LWR business by 2000, running nearly 100% breeders, which would supply more power than the US currently consumes.

So, the Chinese are now doing what we should have 49 years ago, and funding the Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor development we should have -- patents have expired, thousands of R&D documents are public (see energyfromthorium.com), but just maybe our current govt. will be scared enough by the prospect of giving even more $billions of our balance of payments away as China comes to dominate worldwide energy & fresh water markets -- yes, safe nuclear power means abundant fresh water, anywhere.

There are 2 essential points to why liquid Th-salt breeders are what aliens would raise eyebrows at (if they have them) should they land and see us not using...

1) Th-U233 breeding reduces wastes by ~1000.

2) Th/U Fluorides are stable molten salts at far more efficient temps than LWRs' H2O.
Comment
97 of 115
June 30, 2011
DrAlexC. I have no issue at all on your comments for Thorium. Its an issue I must admit I have never considered. This discussion has sparked an interest and I am keen to find out more. I guess I entered this renewable discussion from down under because I am seeing a passion in you guys that I don't see in Australia. I love your banter and the points you all make.
My background is energy storage and remote area power (integrating wind and solar to isolated diesel power stations). In a few short days I have learned that there is musch to learn. I am intrigued by the diversity of oppions that center arround the common theme of renewable energy. I lookforward to make a contribution to these foroms in some meaningfull way. A little information on our company is at www.cbdenergy.com.au. If your interested in the energy storage system I have developed utilizing graphite let me know.
Comment
98 of 115
June 30, 2011
So, Th-233U breeding provides us the ability to depend on just two reliable, long-lived power sources -- DG solar and safe nuclear fission at >50MW/acre with miniscule mining/waste.

If NYC can meet 50% of its daily peak load with rooftop solar, then LA can meet 100% (more people/machinery under each NYC roof). Add local storage and there's no need for the wasteful, non-renewable 'renewables', like remote, massed solar/wind, silly wave, limited, environmentally-damaging hydro (ask the Chinese), limited geothermal with its emissions & water problems, and so on, down the list of subsidized follies wise aliens would puke on.

I love the windies who claim the 'footprint' of wind machines is just their base -- not the 1000 cubic yards of concrete just under the grass? Not the 700 tons/MW of fossil-fuel-processed materials? Not the access roads & limited land use underneath? Not the pitiful power density of <200W/sq meter?

Th, U... are simply 10GW/kg fusion batteries charged by supernovae shock waves billions of years before the sun existed. But we've ignored wise opportunities before!
Comment
99 of 115
June 30, 2011
(continued, to correct omission...)

Wind -- Not the 10% transmission loss? And who cares about the flying-animal deaths? Those subsidized watts that come in unpredictable bursts are just so enticing!

So, bottom line, as our children, grandchildren, etc. are looking back at us from the future, what are they saying about us?

It may be useful to think on this -- Th is not only a future power solution, it's largely responsible for our being alive. Radioactivity has long maintained the earth's molten core (80% of its heating today). Th's mild alpha emission is responsible for 60%. Without a molten core, a planet has no magnetic field. Its surface is then bombarded with solar protons & alphas, cosmic & gamma rays -- no life (hydrocarbon) can form. So thank Th's 14 billion-year half life, 40Potassium's too (in your bones & the banana you just ate), plus 20% of the heat from earth's piping hot formation >4 billion years back.
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Comment
100 of 115
Anonymous
July 10, 2011
Comment 98 contains some statements based on the naive ignorance typical of some 'learned' folks pretending to be 'green', while actually promoting dirty unsafe non-renewables. Let us consider these statements separately:–

1. "what is marketed today as 'renewable' is not, except for DG PV on existing structure. The rest all demand large land/water be removed from other uses, for generators & transmission systems".

The question of land use has been investigated in depth by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which found in 1978 that the land use of solar is less than that of nuclear or coal when the area needed for mining, transport and waste disposal is included in each case.

See EPRI technical report ER-685 titled 'Requirements assessment of photovoltaic power plants in electric utility systems', or see 'Photovoltaics today and tomorrow' by the Director of the then Solar Energy Research Institute (now NREL) in Science 244, 297-304.

Also, the non-contaminating water use of renewables (even solar thermal electric) is neglible compared to that of 'fracking' which contaminates water with fracking chemicals, and with brine and radioactive materials from deep down. Power tower systems tend to recycle their cooling water, and have low nett consumption per MWh.

The area used for rural roads & highways could support 3 times the PV needed to power the USA, when used with concentrating solar power. The area used for feeding horse before the use of automobiles was 14 times that needed to provide the annual USA power demand with this technology – which already provides power day and night. See

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Concentrating_solar_power_land_use and

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/07/solar-can-be-baseload-spanish-csp-plant-with-storage-produces-electricity-for-24-hours-straight?cmpid=WNL-Friday-July8-2011
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Comment
101 of 115
Anonymous
July 10, 2011
Further on Comment 98

2. The statement "fibs about wind/wave, geothermal . . This leaves the true renewabels (sic), with low land demands and higher power density – DG PV/hot water and safe nuclear (Thorium MSR)" contains the biggest naivety of all – that the Thorium reactor is safe. This is further elaborated on in subsequent posts by the same author.

An advantage of the molten salt Th-U233 cycle is that it produces less long lived transuranics – but more "hot" short-lived fission products of more intense radioactivity.

Also a bigger tonnage of these "hot" fission products. Its serious disadvantages are that it is far more complex, more expensive, less safe, and contains many times the radio-activity (measured in Bequerels) when compared to current light water reactors (LWRs).

Trillions of (2011 equivalent) dollars of tax money have been spent on its development since the 1950's – several hundred times as much as on all renewables together. Some want more of this taxpayer-funded boondoggle.

Had the Fukushima reactors been of this type, the radioactive fall-out would have been many times larger than what happened, as the contained radioactivity from the fission process would be many times larger. The accident would have spiralled out of control more rapidly from the greater radioactive decay heat, and would have been far worse for the same reason.
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Comment
102 of 115
Anonymous
July 10, 2011
DrAlexC

Bird deaths due to wind turbines is well below 0.01% of deaths due to collisions with glass windows of buildings, according to a comprehensive study.

See http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr191/Asilomar/pdfs/1029-1042.pdf

If you are really concerned about bird deaths, should you not ban all buildings with glass windows, which cause more than 10 000 times the deaths of wind turbines?

Why are you so concerned about wind power transmission losses, but not the losses from your as yet fictitious Thorium reactors?

Why must your 'true' renewables be restricted to those on existing roofs, but not your thorium reactors (which by are by no stretch of the imagination renewable)?

The subsidies for nuclear & fossil exceed those of renewables by a large factor, on a per GWh basis. Why are you only concerned about the smaller ones?

MrDC
Comment
103 of 115
July 10, 2011
Man, I've gotten sucked it again...
Even if Thorium produced no radioactive decay products in its fuel rods for later disposal, there would still be a waste issue. With higher neutron densities in the reactor, along with all of the other quite intense radiation, the reactor components eventually become irradiated.
Now what?
Where do you dispose of the hundreds of thousands of tons of "low level" radioactive waste at decommissioning? Some of those isotopes can be nasty. Thorium is, at best, a stop gap measure if petroleum and coal become too expensive.

Also, all these reactors still need a fissile seed to convert Th to U 233. The new 233 rich fuel must be 'reprocessed.' Reprocessing is not allowed by international law, and by Executive Order of the President (Carter).

Why are we discussing nuclear on a renewable thread anyway? Nuclear, even Thorium is not renewable.
It's all dig and burn.

PV equipment is reliable enough today to pass the bar on generation. It's availability over the cycle of a day, week, or month is more problematic. Let's fix the real problem of renewable energy, intermittent generation.

Resurrecting Thorium would be an act for desperate times. I don't think we're there yet.
Comment
104 of 115
July 10, 2011
Wow, take a few days off & what happens!?

Starting from the last -- JohnC: "fuel rods for later disposal" -- there are no "fuel rods" in liquid reactors, like the Thorium fluoride systems, for example: http://tinyurl.com/25mgqkd

The use of liquid fuels at industrial temperatures, raises efficiency to match any other source, and it allows only the amount of fuel needed to run the reactor to be in it -- present solid rods must contain far more fuel than needed, because they must be removed as neutron poisons, cracks, gasses, etc. build up. Liquids are what chemists prefer, which is exactly why liquid reactors were among the very first operated.

This also bears on: "new 233 rich fuel must be 'reprocessed'", which is false for liquid fuel. All the 233U is created from Th inside the reactor, and 90% is consumed inside the reactor. The 10% not fissioned at once gets transmuted to 235U which fissions 80% of the time, and so on. The result is few fissionable atoms are wasted, and very little of the heavy products up near Pu are ever produced. Valuable, salable isotopes are produced, however.

"hundreds of thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste" -- a 1GW ThF4 molten-salt reactor in Japanese research produces 60lbs of waste in 30 years of operation. That's under 2 cuft. And, the isotopic content is of short-lived products, many salable for medical/industrial purposes.

A primary reason for starting with Th is that its 232 neutrons & protons are rarely bumped up to 239 -- Plutonium & other transuranics with long lives. Natural Uranium 238 is only 1 neutron capture away from Pu, which is why Uranium, not Thorium, was used to make bombs for the Cold War.

The folks who invented & patented most of our reactor technologies weren't dummies, surprising as that may seem to some with opinions rather than knowledge. The Chinese are spending $1B right now on ThF4 reactors, using the very research we paid for from 1954-1974 -- are we or they dumb?
Comment
105 of 115
July 10, 2011
(more...)

As to what's "renewable" and what's not -- first, all sources are finite, both in time and space. The sun has only ~3B years left before it expands & incinerates us. Before then, we'll have to alter earth's orbit to adjust for its brightening. All wind/wave/geo/hydro is far more limited, by location, as well as low power density. Biomass burning is so limited & wasteful, it's meaningless. Solar, at least, has the potential for providing over 1kW/sq meter, from ground to space, everywhere. None of the others do.

Th, like all the elements beyond iron, provides access to fission energy stored by supernovae before our sun was born. The amount of energy available from these, is far more 'renewable' than any other renewable, excepting solar. And, it's constantly available everywhere, unlike all other renewables.

No disputing solar PV/heating is fine and capable on existing structures -- as a Sierra Club member, DG PV's one leg of what we support. With upcoming storage, things get even better for solar. But, it will take time. In contrast, we have no more time to waste on combustion. Since the molten-salt reactor was developed and operated for years in the 1950s-'60s, it's viable and available relatively soon. The Chinese realize that. And, since it can run the Brayton cycle for turbine generators, it can be air cooled, needing no water, and can make fresh water easily from seawater, with a power density over 50MW/acre. Thousands of years of Th exist in the tailings around existing mines -- read my lips, no new mining. Nothing else matches this.

And, this is exactly what the Seaborg Commission recommended to the President in 1962 -- all US electricity from breeder reactors by 2000. But what did those scientists & Nobellists know, eh?
;]
Maybe we need no new nukes later, as DG PV & storage come on line. Fine. But that's decades away. Yes, nuclear is as "renewable" as any other, because it too comes from stars.
Comment
106 of 115
July 10, 2011
Now to MrDC...

Why "...concerned about wind power transmission losses, but not the losses from...Thorium reactors"? Wind's power density is under 200 Watts per sq meter. This immediately explains why wind machines must cover huge swaths of land/sea. They also must be positioned away from built-up areas & in whatever locations seem best. Both those realities mean long transmission lines. Other generation forms like wave/geothermal/hydro share some of these serious problems. Long transmission means high loss and high system vulnerability forever -- not good for the future of an improved grid.

For wind/wave, natural fluctuations are an additional problem, requiring additional equipment, management, losses, etc. This amounts to a subsidy beyond any given for construction & feed-in rates. Bottom line for wind: at <200W/sqm, why bother?

But investors wanting subsidized $ have never cared about other realities. Today, we can no longer afford such wasteful subsidies & environmental impacts, which is why the corn ethanol subsidy was canned.

"Bird deaths" -- again, why bother? No one's building new glass building for their DG or nukes, so no new bird deaths, unless we put up new windmills -- got the logic?

DG PV is quite adequate for peak needs most everywhere. And, the Russians are building icebreaker nukes, not wind farms, for their arctic industrial expansion as the ice disappears. One 300MW ship a football-field long would need how many windmills to replace with 24/7 output? Now you get the idea?

Myth n: "subsidies for nuclear & fossil exceed those of renewables" -- even existing nukes pay per kWHr for decommissioning. Does wind? Desert solar? You apparently didn't read this before. Sure, all combustion power is subsidized, from mining to emissions & ash. One reason for moving to Th breeder reactors is precisely elimination of mining/waste & construction burdens -- even fits well with DG.
Comment
107 of 115
July 10, 2011
And, Anonymous (we can see why)...

Th reactors make "more 'hot' short-lived fission products of more intense radioactivity." -- false. Fission of 233U, 235U... produce pairs of the same Chinese menu of 20 smaller elements, like Xenon, Cesium, etc. If you want to study this, let me know and I'll give you some actual scientific papers. Otherwise, this is incorrect.

"Also a bigger tonnage of these "hot" fission products." -- also false. Since a liquid reactors uses only the U needed, the standard, existing LWRs we were supposed to be done with by 2000 make more, simply because they have solid fuel and they can't use that before it gets to damaged/polluted to use.

The rest of this is false too, suggesting Anon... hasn't read any real nuclear reports/texts -- "Its serious disadvantages are that it is far more complex, more expensive, less safe, and contains many times the radio-activity (measured in Bequerels) when compared to current light water reactors (LWRs)"

First, Bq's are simply clicks per second on a counter, so meaningless to radiologists and those setting hazard standards -- look up Sievert. LWRs actually produce more radiation because of their extra fuel & storage facilities.

As to safety, Anon... suggests the inventors of the LWR didn't know what they were doing when they moved to other designs like the MSR. Really? Weinberg, Teller, Seaborg... all were dumb & ran molten-salt reactors 40 years ago that were unsafe? Again, if you want the facts, read the original ORNL reports, etc. The reactor run for 4 years was so safe the crew could simply take weekends off by turning off an electric fan cooling the salt drain plug, then go home.

A big purpose of molten salt for fuel is that there's no pressure -- no explosions possible.

So, Anon... has just shown us that he/she doesn't bother to actually study what he/she is biased against, yet is willing to mislead others. That's neither science, nor valued commentary.
Comment
108 of 115
July 10, 2011
Final Anon stuff...

"EPRI), which found in 1978 that the land use of solar is less than that of nuclear or coal when the area needed for mining, transport and waste..." -- incorrect on two counts, with DG, no new land need be consumed for solar PV/water heating. EPRI works for and is funded by the power companies. They only do what the industry wants. Their nuke comments are only for existing LWR designs, supposed to have been gone by 2000. So what they have to say is both right & wrong.

Again, the 1962 AEC report specifically explained why moving away from U mining, etc. to breeders (from Th, etc.) was the future, giving us 700GW of clean power by 2000. EPRI, as an industry tool, has still no interest in anything new that utilities don't care about. I know folks there, since it's just 3 miles away.


The other comments on solar power availability are fine, but again, DG on existing structures solves the main problems: loss, robust grid, peak needs, land consumption.

The Sierra Club advocates efficiency improvements as well as DG, because we waste over 50% of all generation today -- now there's a great source!
No image available
Comment
109 of 115
Anonymous
July 10, 2011
DrAlexC

AEC director Dixie Lee Ray famously predicted in the 1950's that nuclear power would be 'too cheap to meter'. So much for high-level AEC infallibility.

And as has been clearly shown by events, this fallibility can become rather expensive. The economies of 2 major countries have been severely affected

A country with the highest (99+%) proportion of literacy (indeed of doctorates, with a Dr of Physics / Physical Chemistry as head of its government) is moving away from nuclear. I am sure that they have enough people capable of not only reading scientific papers, but of also UNDERSTANDING their implications.

As to your ill-informed and blinkered statements about energy density:
A standard off-the-shelf wind turbine with a swept area of (100 m)2 = 10000 square meters can generate 6 MW. Relative to the swept area a density of 600 W/m2. On water (lakes & sea) wind speeds are higher and steadier than on land, and power densities much higher.

As to bird deaths -- you introduced the subject which is irrelevant to wind power. Try to UNDERSTAND the scientific paper referred to above. ;)

As to the EPRI report, it at least looks at power generation holistically (including the entire cycle), and not merely in terms of the footprint of the power station, as pro-nukes tend to do.

Whether you measure Sieverts, Curies or Bq, the radioactivity in a Th reactor will be much higher than in a U235-Pu one. And the risks also much higher.

To state that a Th reactor does not involve fuel reprocessing simply displays ignorance of the worst kind. If you have UNDERSTOOD any scientific paper on Th reactors, you will know that the risks of reprocessing are one of the main features that makes Th reactors unsafe.


John Carr

I fully agree that nuclear promotion does not belong on a solar website.
Comment
110 of 115
July 10, 2011
Must have hit a nerve.
About your renewable definition. Are you kidding?
A few days off and the renewable time scale inflates to the age of the solar system?
Yeah, Right.
I'll get back to you on that.
Most people worry about what they're having for lunch today. Lunch in 3 Billion years doesn't seem all that important. Energy needs to be renewable on a Human Time scale.
But, I thought that went without saying.
As I have been around the clean-up and decommissioning of nuclear facilities, you will note that I discounted the actual fuel waste. But, you didn't.
Fuel rod, liquid, who cares, you missed the point.
It is the decommissioned, irradiated containment vessels, valves, heat exchangers, etc. that I am referring to, hence "low level." My associates have built and commissioned heavy water, and light water reactors. They are not young. I am not averse to nuclear power. There is no need to get defensive.
My physics, quantum mechanics, physical chemistry, chemistry, and engineering skills are in good shape. I don't need a lesson on half-lives, neutron absorption and beta, or alpha decay.
Comment
111 of 115
July 10, 2011
Besides, thorium breeders are more likely to be built as modulated heavy water reactors than molten salt reactors for various reasons that I will not discuss publicly. Heavy water modulated breeder technology is a small step away from the type of reactors my friends built in India under BHPV, and would be compatible with the CANDU reactors in Canada. AHWR technology is in the public domain.

In this era of free information, it is easy to lose track of what facts are actually dangerous. The nuclear genie may be out of the proverbial 'bottle,' but we should not strip him down and dissect him in public. Nuclear education is a double-edged sword. Not everyone who reads your words is a friend who holds your health and welfare above all else.

Dr., I hope you live long enough to see renewable energy as the dominant form of energy used by all of us.
Comment
112 of 115
July 11, 2011
Wow-wa-wow...two 'experts' at me!

Bottom up, with John: "thorium breeders are more likely to be built as modulated heavy water reactor" -- what word in that indicates lack of understanding? Do I hear "modulated"?

So maybe John, you can explain why you should have at least said "moderated"?

So, again, John jumps to solid-fueled reactors, where waste is a critical problem, because the fuel must be periodically removed. The molten salt reactor provides a safe alternative -- run with no fuel removal. Since a molten-salt reactor is small, unpressurized and containing little plumbing, compared to what we currently use, there's again a great benefit in what ends up needing any disposal decades from start up. In fact, there are no issues similar to the spent-fuel problem we now face -- there are some pounds of fission products and perhaps some tons of graphite core, if designed that way, all short lived (hundreds of years). And, under 1/1000 the long-lived waste a conventional, solid-fueled reactor produces in 30GW-years.

Dropping other reactor types as if they're relevant doesn't actually add anything, but it does show lack of straightforwardness -- CANDU is a solid fuel "assembled from alloy tubes containing ceramic pellets of fuel" reactor. Heavy water just provides a moderator to slow neutrons with somewhat different characteristics from regular water, as LWRs use. Its complex structure results from the US not sharing with Canada in the early days of nukes. There was a Russian spy or two. In any case, more fuel is entered than used before bundles must be removed, even if some Th is tossed in to add some fuel breeding. Our 1st reactor in Shippingport PA did this in 1957, ending up with >1% more fuel in it when shut down in '82 than when it started. But, it still had most of the waste associated with solid fuel.

As for swords -- fire is a double-edged sword, as are guns, as are windmills -- just had a technician killed by one recently.
Comment
113 of 115
July 11, 2011
As to John & swords with multiple edges, more escalator deaths occur every year than the total of all deaths due to commercial nukes in US, Japan, France, UK... Come to think of it, windmills have killed more just this year in the US than in >50 years of nuke power in all those countries.

Working upward, John, very wise about the Human Time Scale, which is indeed what makes Th (etc.) as 'renewable' if not more so. The point is that all are finite. There are not thousands of years of hydro, for instance, because there's not enough water -- China knows it needs 100 3 Gorges Dams and knows that's silly. It's also learning that fixed windmills in its western reaches are losing wind power due to aready perceived climate change. Is something "renewable" if you have to rebuild it somewhere else periodically? Is it renewable if you have to take away land/sea from other uses?

Now to Anon... power density isn't what the windmill's prop sees, it's what power you can get divided by the land/sea area you must sacrifice. The top line Siemens 5MW windmill needs 10 acres. That's 500kW/acre/ Solar PV now gets 600kW/acre, with standard 20% cells. Military/space cells are over 40% -- >1MW/acre. Wind has no comparison, and never will. Solar PV will continue toward its ground-level max of 3MW/acre, and on existing structures. Wind never has that option, thus adds a tax due to loss, 365 days/year.

Wind's power density is even smaller than what its land demands might suggest, because of loss, resource consumption, maintenance, variability, etc. Can't dress up this pig!

Back to Anon's nuke errors -- Dixie Lee Ray was a political appointee, a biologist and not a physicist, so why would you believe her on nukes? Do I hear "straw (wo)man"? But you do mislead folks again: "radioactivity in a Th reactor will be much higher than in a U235-Pu" one. Maybe you can explain how the difference of 2 neutrons does that? No? Thought so.
Comment
114 of 115
July 11, 2011
Just final notes for Anon... Maybe using a name would make his words weightier?

The wind/birds issue is simple -- no windmills, no unnatural bird/bat deaths. The idea that glass buildings have anything to do with windmills or nukes is a symptom of desperate argument, as is use of caps.

As to reprocessing in salt reactors, the salts stay in the reactor and what comes out is whatever we want to come out, for sale or storage. A salt reactor can be run in many ways, one of which involves no salt processing, called the denatured MSR, to which we add some old LWR fuel-rod material some years. Or, we add some weapons material being destroyed, etc. In other words, MSRs support not only waste reduction, but waste and weapons destruction with no explosive dangers. Thus they provide anti-proliferation services, if desired. All the chemistry is done onsite, inside the reactor cell. Nothing to explode/burn, some things to sell for big $, and eventually some wastes -- a very small fraction of what we have to deal with today, because we ignored the 1962 report JFK requested.

But what did those old scientists know, eh? You know better, right Anon...?
;]
Maybe you'll offer to cover our possible further loss of jobs and balance of payments to China if they succeed with their plan to use our public research from those years to build out Th MSRs for themselves & the world? Would seem a fair bet, since you know they'll fail, right?

The fundamental point is that a few people don't get to define the range of "renewable" power for all.
No image available
Comment
115 of 115
Anonymous
July 11, 2011
DrAlexC

Nice to see that you corrected your former claim that Th reactors avoid fuel reprocessing.

How about correcting your 100s of other erroneous or deliberately misleading statements? Like "no windmills, no unnatural bird/bat deaths" above. If ever there was a desperate argument, this must be a strong contender.

I do not pretend to know better than the great physicists or nuclear engineers, but also do not spread misinformation.

I merely said that nuclear physicists & engineers are fallible, like anyone else. I should know -- I have a good Masters in Nuclear Physics.
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