The Role of Nuclear and Renewable Energy: Further Discussion
Here’s a conversation that I thought readers may enjoy:
Craig: (Writing to a reader who claims that wind and solar would require all the lands in PA, OH, and VA in order to achieve 99.9% reliability.) No one advocates using wind and solar to do that. Wind contributed 4.18% to the U.S. grid-mix in 2013, displacing about 500 billion pounds of CO2. That’s a very, very good thing. Why are you and the other so-called “scientists” in your group trying so hard to invalidate the concept of wind? And, if you really are scientists, why are you going about this in such a childish way?
Reader: Sarcasm (which includes extrapolating things to absurd limits to make a point that even non-scientists can grasp) and childishness are two very different things.
Craig: Acknowledged. I’m sure I’m coming off as ultra-combative here, and that’s not my nature. But why “extrapolate things to absurd limits?” Why not simply get on-board with what virtually everyone wants to see?
Informed people would love to see coal as baseline go away totally in places like the U.S and China, replaced with advanced nuclear, if it becomes technically feasible and cost-effective. In this scenario, renewables would continue to make important contributions, increasing into the future, especially in places that have solid wind/solar resources or currently run on bunker diesel, e.g., island nations.
Here’s yet another thing to think about: Again, no one is advocating this to my knowledge, but Timothy’s calcs call for covering almost exactly 2% of the continental U.S. with solar and wind. It’s actually far less intrusive when you consider that wind farms, which provide 18 times more power than solar, are simultaneously used for agricultural purposes, but let’s ignore that for the moment. If that 2% could be put in the desert and other unpopulated places, which, admittedly, requires a massive grid build-out, would that really be such a disaster?
If voters were asked to pick between:
A) Continuing reliance on fossil fuels for all current uses of electricity and transportation fuel, using the current infrastructure for coal, oil, and natural gas, recognizing that it’s causing climate disruption, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, lung disease, etc.
Or
B) Dedicating 2% of the U.S. landmass to an alternative solution that makes all of “A” obsolete. In addition to eliminating the enormous stream of poisons used to generate electricity, this includes powering our cars and trucks. All the gasoline and diesel (extractions, pipelines, and exhaust) will be gone in favor of electricity to charge EVs. We can replace every internal combustion engine in our 230 million U.S. cars and trucks with an increase of only 14% of our electricity capacity, due to the high efficiency of charging/discharging batteries vs. creating tiny explosions of refined crude. This admittedly may bump the figure to 2.3% or something like that.
I think you’ll have an awful lot of people calling for “B”. Even some of the people whose only news source is Fox News and are thus being told that this is a communist plot or part of some other agenda to take away our freedom are going to say, “Hmmmm. Wait a dog-gone minute here.”
Thanks, and again, sorry to sound so argumentative.
Craig: You forgot to mention the billions of dollars sent out to countries with different points of view (politically) to buy the oil, which will otherwise be paid to US producers and will also become tax payers. That will also have a positive impact on the US (and the worlds) economy, a better world-political balance.
Craig,
Land use doesn’t mean anything unless you quantify the marginal value of the land in question.
I recently took a trip to Oklahoma to see my nephew graduate basic from Fort Sill. It’s VERY windy out there. The buildings are short, and the land is open. We passed a few massive wind farms, and the cattle could literally graze right up to the base of the towers. While the wind farms themselves may have covered tens of square miles, the value of the land sacrificed was minuscule for two reasons: First, it was being used for cattle ranching prior to the wind turbines, and was still being used for cattle ranching after the wind turbines were built – so the loss was restricted only to the land lost from the roads and the footprint of the tower bases… That’s only ~1% of the land claimed by the wind farm. So the marginal loss experienced from the build-out of wind farms only has a marginal land cost of ~1% of the sale price of ranch land acreage. Google tells me this land is worth between ~$500 and ~$4000 / acre, If we assume that between 30 and 100 acres/MW are needed by a wind farm, and 1% of that land loses its function due to the wind farm, then the marginal land cost for the wind farm is between $150 and $4000/MW.
Solar is even more interesting. In most cases non-industrial solar is built on top of existing structure, so the net loss of land is 0 (marginal cost: $0/MW). But industrial solar – whether PV or concetrated solar power – does indeed take a lot of land. Brightsource’s Ivanpah facility spans 3500 acres for 377 MW, so it’s ~10 acres/MW, fully utilized land. But it’s built in the desert. It’s built on public land, but I’d be very surprised if similar land would sell even for $50/acre. There’s no demand for desert land to be used for anything OTHER than solar power. However, just to hedge our bets, less place an absurd value of $100/acre, which would put the marginal land use cost of solar at ~$1000/MW.
Nuclear, on the other hand, touts itself as being extremely land-use efficient. A nuclear reactor complex that spans a few acres could easily generate a GW of power! But NRC regulations require a very large amount of space be maintained as an exclusion zone between a nuclear power plant and anything else. This means that while the reactor has an extraordinarily small footprint/MW, the actual land that is permanently removed from any functionality due to nuclear reactor may be as high as ~20 km2 per reactor. So a 1.1 GW reactor might require 5000 acres just in the exclusion zone (4.5 acres/MW)… but then beyond that you have the “very low population zone”, and the “low population zone”, each having permanently regulated land use restrictions. Unlike wind and solar, this land often has potential value, and utilities are often required to purchase the land at a premium due to the permanent nature of rendering the land useless (this is similar to the problems involved in instituting a new cemetery).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m rabidly pro-nuclear. I think that “environmentalist” opposition to nuclear will have resulted in another 30 years of coal reliance, and more than a 200 billion tons of CO2 emissions worldwide once all the tallies are counted. But I imagine that there are few instances, if any, where nuclear power does not have a higher marginal land use cost than wind or solar power.
Thanks for this very interesting enhancement to my post. I just emailed it to my cadre of pro-nuke/anti-wind people.
I responded to this link when it was proffered in an email the other day. My comments below may not all be directly relevant, but arguments like the “exclusion zone” around nuke plants are disingenuous, since those zones are peanuts compared to any wind ‘farm’, and they’re natural preserves. So here’s my comment…
This is a common wind-supporter fallacy…
” the cattle could literally graze right up to the base of the towers.
While the wind farms themselves may have covered tens of square miles,
the value of the land sacrificed was minuscule for two reasons:”
Even Jacobson tried that BS a few years ago at an IEEE meeting.
a) The land wasn’t grazed by cattle originally. Land is conscripted for
the massive wind-tower foundations (see 2nd attached), transmission
lines, control centers and transmission corridors to the grid.
b) Each windmill demands ~2000 tons of raw material fro every average MW
it actually delivers — iron ore, rock, limestone, coal, rare earths,
fossil fuel… Just 1 Siemens several MW-peak windmill has more than
enough steel to build the largest nuclear reactor vessel ever made, and
that reactor will generate >100 times the energy. The attached spec
sheet from one company shows the masses involved — the tower alone is
150 tons of steel, which takes about 600 tons of coal to make. Just a
dozen or so windmills contain all needed to build a nuclear plant that
ruins 24/7 and generates >100x the energy on 1/1000 the land…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc7rRPrA7rg
c) Every windmill kills species — a study is ongoing in the upper
midwest to see if the value of the electricity generated comes close to
the farming losses due to killing pest predators. And windmills kill
people…
http://tinyurl.com/kqce99w
http://l.facebook.com/l/4AQFK5uhm/www.archipelagofiles.com/2014/03/this-photo-of-two-engineers-hugging.html
http://docs.wind-watch.org/Larwood-bladethrow-presentation.pdf
d) Wind ‘farms’ are necessarily remote from loads, unlike local solar,
so wind always wastes energy in transmission & conversion — and,
windmills draw grid power when wind is too slow or too fast.
e) Wind’s poor power density and high variability makes it absurd for
massive deployment…
http://www.adamsmith.org/news/press-release-wind-farms-generate-below-20-of-their-supposed-output-for-20-weeks-a-year-a-new-report-finds/
“…wind farms generate below 20% of their supposed output for 20 weeks
a year, and generate below 10% for 9 weeks a year. Wind farms, on
average, only exceed 90% of their rated output for 17 hours a year.”
http://canadianenergyissues.com/
f) Windmills make grid management continually more expensive as they are
an increasing portion of the available source (see attached graph of
German grid-management intervention/cost explosion).
g) Windmill components have relatively short lives, as insurers and
researchers note.
h) Wind workers have their own opinions — a wind technician in Bismarck
ND was interviewed…
“Yeah we all want to think we’re making a difference, but we know it’s
bulls___. If it’s too windy, they run like sh__, if it’s too hot, they
run like sh__, too cold, they run like sh__. I just checked the
forecast, and it’s supposed to be really calm this weekend so hopefully
not very many will break down, but f___ man, they break even when they
aren’t running. I’ve given up on the idea that what I’m doing makes a
difference in the big picture. Wind just isn’t good enough. ”
Interviewer: “Would you say we’re f___ed? ”
“Yep, we’re definitely f___ed. I mean, you and I will probably be
ok, but our kids? They’re f___ed.”
The wind scam of the ’80s has left our state with garbage on its lovely
hills (pics attached). The present wind scam has subsidized the few by
taking from the many, and has misled millions to believe the lowest
power-density, highest-variability source, derived as 2nd-order,
solar-driven movements of the flimsiest fluid on our planet, means anything.
I learned a few years ago to use windmills to assess the technical &
environmental knowledge of folks interested in ‘green’ power. I have
yet to meet a wind supporter who’s a tru environmentalist.
—
Alex
Unfortunately, this site is too anxious to post without pictures, so, to get the pics, just email last name at sbcglobal dot net.