Nuke Power? Themal Solar!
Sep. 28th, 2007 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yesthattomI am sort of on the fence about Nuke Power. I used to be strongly against it, but now I realize that 20 years later computer controlling systems are much better, there are much better designs (including one that can lose cooling for 24 hours and still not melt down), and dealing with the waste has gotten better.
However yesterday I learned about Thermal Solar. What is Thermal Solar, you ask? Well, see, the sun is really hot. Really, really hot, see? And that’s where you get the term “thermal”. Ok, you didn’t need that much detail... let me start over.
Solar panels work by using these silicon devices that turn light into electricity. This is different.
Coal plants work by heating water, which turns to steam, and the steam pushes a turbine which generates electricity.
Thermal Solar is when you point tons of mirrors at a huge tower with water in it, this gets hot enough to make steam, and then the steam pushes a turbine which generates electricity.
Here’s the neat thing. A nuke plant requires a certain amount of real-estate for the plant plus more for security. That same amount of space, if used for a Thermal Solar plant, would generate 10x the power.
A 100x100 mile^2 tract of land in Nevada would generate more electricity than the US currently uses. You know how Alaska gets so much tax revenue from the oil companies that it pays citizens to live there? Well the desert states could end up in the same arrangement. Heck, we could become an exporter of energy to other countries. Plus, the company that gets good at building these can put them up in third-world desert counties and bring all sorts of goodness to them.
It costs about 14 cents/watt, and coal is 3 cents/watt. However, the way they do Thermal Solar right now is on a small scale. Doing it larger would bring the cost down considerably.
So I’m thinking... find a 100x100 mile square in Nevada that is owned by the federal government and make it happen. But a few small plants to learn what you are doing, optimizing each one until you are at 2 cents/watt; I’m sure by the time you assembly-line the process to build plant after plan there will be tons of optimizations. For example, once you get the process down you can be hiring cheaper, less skilled labor for construction instead of PhDs and researchers; etc. etc.
The more I think about this, the better it gets. The jobs it creates are relatively clean jobs: construction, physical repair and maintenance, and electrical control engineers; not dangerous mining or oil-rigging jobs.
The only problem is, “what about at night?” Well, we use less electricity at night, so we should be able to cover that by using some coal, some stored-energy technologies (maybe someone will invent something better once there is a big need), plus we could find a 100x100 mile^2 area in the east-coast timezone and that would power the west-coast morning.
However yesterday I learned about Thermal Solar. What is Thermal Solar, you ask? Well, see, the sun is really hot. Really, really hot, see? And that’s where you get the term “thermal”. Ok, you didn’t need that much detail... let me start over.
Solar panels work by using these silicon devices that turn light into electricity. This is different.
Coal plants work by heating water, which turns to steam, and the steam pushes a turbine which generates electricity.
Thermal Solar is when you point tons of mirrors at a huge tower with water in it, this gets hot enough to make steam, and then the steam pushes a turbine which generates electricity.
Here’s the neat thing. A nuke plant requires a certain amount of real-estate for the plant plus more for security. That same amount of space, if used for a Thermal Solar plant, would generate 10x the power.
A 100x100 mile^2 tract of land in Nevada would generate more electricity than the US currently uses. You know how Alaska gets so much tax revenue from the oil companies that it pays citizens to live there? Well the desert states could end up in the same arrangement. Heck, we could become an exporter of energy to other countries. Plus, the company that gets good at building these can put them up in third-world desert counties and bring all sorts of goodness to them.
It costs about 14 cents/watt, and coal is 3 cents/watt. However, the way they do Thermal Solar right now is on a small scale. Doing it larger would bring the cost down considerably.
So I’m thinking... find a 100x100 mile square in Nevada that is owned by the federal government and make it happen. But a few small plants to learn what you are doing, optimizing each one until you are at 2 cents/watt; I’m sure by the time you assembly-line the process to build plant after plan there will be tons of optimizations. For example, once you get the process down you can be hiring cheaper, less skilled labor for construction instead of PhDs and researchers; etc. etc.
The more I think about this, the better it gets. The jobs it creates are relatively clean jobs: construction, physical repair and maintenance, and electrical control engineers; not dangerous mining or oil-rigging jobs.
The only problem is, “what about at night?” Well, we use less electricity at night, so we should be able to cover that by using some coal, some stored-energy technologies (maybe someone will invent something better once there is a big need), plus we could find a 100x100 mile^2 area in the east-coast timezone and that would power the west-coast morning.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 01:53 pm (UTC)The night time problem can be helped by hydroelectric power and limited use of existing nuke, coal, etc. plants until the energy storage capability is in place.
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Date: 2007-09-28 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 02:08 pm (UTC)But I *love this*. There's a variant you may or may not have heard of wherein rather than mirrors heating a water cylinder, there's a great big funnel that channels rising hot air through a turbine.
The solution that I really like for nighttime, in addition to mitigation through other technologies, is to not directly-drive the generator. Instead the steam turbine spins up a whacking super great fucking flywheel. This may be unrealistic, but in my head it *looks* fucking awesome.
Sorry for the expletives. I'm all psyched for altwheels, but I can't actually make it. :/
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 03:40 pm (UTC)That's actually not correct.
Time from "OKAY GO" to a nuke plant going online is approximately 10 years. Texas has just approved a new plant on an existing site, and they're looking to go online in something like 2015.
The solar tower plants can go online FAR faster.
On the flywheel idea, for a couple gigawatts of power, you don't have that much mass moving. Flywheels are an interesting idea, but the amount of power you want to get out of it is rarely within the margins of materials available to build a flywheel (look up all the thoughts about flywheel energy storage in vehicles. YOu can't spin a disk fast enough to make it worthwhile - the disk comes apart).
A half mile of spinning concrete and steel? Dunno, maybe. SOunds complex :)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 04:09 pm (UTC)Sure, that's the intuition, but my point is that we don't actually know that yet. We have plenty of hard data on implementing a nuke plant and can plan around such, and build policy that makes sense given that hard data. We haven't got that yet with thermal solar, and it will take research to get there. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it hasn't yet. There are pebble-bed reactor designs that can be implemented on rail cars and moved into a site. Much of the lag is regulatory/legislative. Am I suggesting that the regulatory aspects of this are excessive? Certainly not. Am I suggesting that the legislated guidelines for much of this sort of thing are A) not reflective of modern understandings regarding nuclear power plant designs and management thereof, and B) influenced strongly by NIMBY politics? Absolutely.
Re: flywheel - this wasn't at all intended to be a technically feasible suggestion, rather the image of a couple dozen acres of desert overshadowed by a spinning concrete monolith appeals to my skiffygeek.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 02:17 pm (UTC)Also, doesn't the combined energy required the move the mirrors during the day use up a lot of energy?
no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 05:56 am (UTC)Cleaning the mirrors is a cost. Luckaly, using winshield washing technology, the problem can be solved.
Moving the mirrors uses a trivial amount of power if they are well counterbalanced. By trivial I mean much less than 1% of generated power.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 08:42 pm (UTC)Water mostly:
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=6636866
This PV solution has a built in pressure washing system.
http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/06/big_solar_green.html
no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-30 01:31 am (UTC)How does the Bellagio have such wonderful fountains in the middle of the desert?
Obviously you are either unwilling to do the math yourself, or you are trying to goad me into some sort of belligerent reply. So let us do the math together.
The amount of water needed to clean a window is about as much as you'd need to clean a mirror. The guys that clean the floor to celling windows at one of the local coffee shops can clean maybe 15 x 3 meter of window with a bucket of fluid. I figure they use a gallon or two of fluid. Call it 2.something or simplicity. 20 m^2 of mirror can be cleaned with a gallon of water. (I'm sorry that I'm mixing units, get over it, I was not the lazy one). So figure this needs to be done once every two weeks. Well, to make it simpler lets say we'll do it 20 times a year. So cleaning 1 m^2 of mirror for a year will take 1 gallon of water.
What is a desert? It is a very flexible definition. But even deserts places like Tucson Arizona get some rain. Tuscon gets 12 inches a year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert
So how much of that 12 inches would our little mirror cleaning operation take? Well, 12 inches x 1 m x 1m, (I use units, you can too) = 80 gallons.
So if one were to put a rain gutter on one side of the mirror, and plumb that up to a water tank, one could use up 1 / 80th the yearly rain fall to clean the mirror. (yes there would be some loss, and some of the rain is unusable or uncatchable, but bare with me for a second. Note, this wont' be done because water is too cheap to bother.
"Full cost for production and distribution of reclaimed water is about $558 per-acre foot".
http://ag.arizona.edu/AZWATER/publications/sustainability/report_html/chap5_03.html
An acre foot is exactly what it sounds like, take an acre and put a foot of water on it. It is round 325,851 gallons. Or about $0.001 / gallon. Which is enough for one m^2 of mirror / year.
The water is not the problem, how about getting it there? Even if you had to truck it to the site, the water is basically free at $8.50 / truckload of 5000 gallons. Truck based transport costs maybe $2 / mile. Be bold and say it'll cost $.1 / gallon to get the water there. That 1 m^2 mirror at 30% efficiency and selling power for $.03 / KWh will pay for it's cleaning water in less than 4 days. And give someone a truck driving job. If your carbon footprint worries you, lay a pipe, like everyone else does.
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Date: 2007-09-28 03:19 pm (UTC)I've been pro-nuke for all my adult life, because nuclear 1) funded my childhood and 2) kept Carptown and its shores beautiful and clean despite the very large amounts of power generated nearby (we had a 2 reactor plant just outside of town and an additional 1 reactor plant up the road in Kewaunee). The closer plant was also -- back in the day -- had an education center that sponsored some science opportunities we might not otherwise have gotten in Carptown. As far as the waste goes, I've always assumed that when the economic incentive becomes appropriate we'll start to recondition and reuse...but so far that incentive has not been present.
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Date: 2007-09-28 03:32 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Power_tower_designs
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Date: 2007-09-28 03:45 pm (UTC)But.
1) You have to get the power from point A to point B. That costs energy (copper is not a 100% conductor). Getting juice from Nevada to New York is impossible without relay boosters / stations.
2) Nighttime - as others have mentioned. Also rain, clouds, maintenance downtime, etc. Sure, one 100x100 cluster of towers could generate all the power, but that also goes immediately into SPOF mode. Better to have several of these, located along the south of the US. Problems getting 50x50 sq miles in Georgia :)
3) Towers of this scale have never been built. The pilot projects have looked good, but this is really a south-area system. Half the US could not take advantage of this system, including the massive power centers of the north-east corridor, chicago, detroit, and the pacific northwest.
There are a lot of obstacles. IMHO, one decent installation like this could easily drive most of LA and San Francisco, and desert is not far away. Convince Google to fund it.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 06:06 am (UTC)a) supper conducting transmission lines.
b) DC power transmission. The losses are higher but apparnely it can be made to work cross country.
c) Think the Alaskan pipeline but filled with molten sodium, or maybe live steam. (with a return pipe).
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Date: 2007-09-28 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-09-29 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 07:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 04:01 pm (UTC)I admit, they were doing it in an incredibly dumb way, but still...
Stirling Engines
Date: 2007-09-28 04:31 pm (UTC)http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/giant-penises-s.html
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Date: 2007-09-28 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 06:21 am (UTC)Solar thermal can be done without the tower.
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/991/
The electricity at night problem is solved by putting nice big tanks next to the turbines. Fill up the tanks with hot stuff during the day, use the hot stuff at night. It also allows for quick load balancing.
Some of these arrays are getting installed next to coal plants to preheat the water going to the steam generators, thus saving coal.
The east cost however need look no further than the Atlantic ocean for power.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/11/norways_hydro_d.php
If the rich bastards in Marthas vinyard can't deal with windmills in there field of view, then push them back 100 miles out to sea. (then charge them the cost difference).
Wind power is currently cost competitive with new power generation. The 3 cents / kw hour is the generation cost for old coal plants, not new ones. Or problem as a society is that we 'have to' wait for something to become economically viable for some large company to make oodles of money off of something before we can do the right thing.
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Date: 2007-09-29 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 12:14 pm (UTC)