That's communism under the gise of "saving the plant".Tell that to our idiot politicians who are forcing us out of our cars and on to completely unreliable and expensive public transport to 'save the planet'.
World Electricity Production by Source
- Thread starter Snagglefoot
- Start date
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions
What do you mean by "small percentage"? In the US light duty cars and trucks account for 16 percent of total emissions and 57 percent of emissions from the transportation sector.
List your sources pleaseShow me where any large wind turbine blades last 20 years. Maybe you should look into your sourcing of info.
Here's some I found quite quickly
https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-wind-turbine-blades/100/i27
https://windexchange.energy.gov/end-of-service-guide
https://www.fullcirclewindservices....ain,resistance, which affects optimal output.
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I think your numbers are incorrect. From 4.86 to 8.05 is an increase of 3.19. This is an increase of .8 times, not 1.66.
Gas is used extensively in coal fired plants to ignite the coal being conveyed into the boilers. Many people don't realize that.
Best case scenario they last 20 years.
If they lasted 20 years then ask why every single wind farm keeps one blade on hand per 10 to 20 turbines.
Yeah natural gas or oil warms intake air, preheats the boiler. A coal fired power plant typically has several 1,200 to 1,500 natural gas boilers.
8.05/4.86 = 1.66. To verify, 1.66 x 4.86 = 8.05. (Just for clarity, a result of 1 is no increase at all).
1.66 represented as a percentage is a 66% increase. (8.05-4.86)/4.86.
Scott
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In places where a gas pipeline exists, most coal plants have been converted to run either fuel, and often become exclusively gas so that coal emission control systems can be retired. There are often times when btu for btu, gas costs less than coal.
On an industrial scale, but I fired a coal furnace in my parent's basement and loaded the coal and took out the ashes. Luckily the backyard had a convenient place to put the ashes. We'd load that thing up at night, go to bed and the house would be cool in the winter morning. Back to the basement to load more coal to run the hot water to the radiators through out the house.
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Uranium would like a word.
If we were smart, Thorium might be an even better word.
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The reason we built centralized power plants in the first place, moving away from localized generation, was economies of scale. It's cheaper to build large generators and robust transmission corridors then to try and build a massive web of interconnected distributed resources with enough transmission capacity to handle local generation faults.
Transmission costs have already gone up considerably just trying to integrate dispersed wind and solar installations. We had to run thousands of km of transmission lines to integrate the thousands of wind turbines that were installed in Ontario, and, because they aren't very energy dense, you are not getting a great ROI on your transmission investment. Spending massive amounts of money for low value supply that's often not even coming close to utilizing the required nameplate of the capacity you built.
Nuclear regulation around the world varies, in terms of exclusion zones, setbacks...etc. Here's Gravelines in France, their largest nuclear power plant, located directly next to a residential area:
Here's Pickering here in Ontario, same situation:
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Thorium is already usable in CANDU's, and there are a couple of companies pursuing thorium-based CANDU fuel bundles, like Cleancore:
https://cleancore.energy/news/clean...uclear-safety-commission-pre-licensing-review
It has been tested in the past, but we've never had a reason to pursue thorium beyond proof of concept in Canada, since we have the world's richest uranium deposits and an established supply chain, so the economics don't work. However, in places like India and China, that don't have abundant uranium reserves, Thorium is absolutely an option.
Of course there are numerous MSR and other SMR designs that are focusing on being able to use Thorium as well, but those are all FOAK and of course have considerable financial risk still at this juncture.
Thorium's big advantages are that it's more abundant, has reduced radio active waste stream issues like the lack of those heavy 10,000+ year half-lived elements, as well as lower risks of weapons grade material proliferation because it's difficult to extract Plutonium from the waste stream. It also has some interesting possible applications like continuous refueling in molten salt reactors.
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Yes, it's more abundant in certain areas, like India, as I mentioned. It's not the long-lived actinides you need to worry about, its the short-lived ones, remember, the shorter the half life the higher the number of decays that are taking place in a given amount of time. All the really crazy stuff decays quite rapidly while the fuel sits in the spent fuel pools, after a couple hundred years you can handle spent fuel, just don't eat it.
Weapons proliferation is difficult with LWR's and HWR's already, not sure how much more difficult the thorium fuel cycle REALLY makes it. You want weapons material, you build a gas centrifuge cascade, that's how North Korea is making their weapons material, same with Iran, no reactor required. Research reactors are the other common vector, that's how India got theirs.
CANDU's are already on-line refuelled, hence holding the longest uninterrupted runtime of any thermal plant at 1,106 days.
I find the benefits of the thorium fuel cycle are a bit played-up. They are there, don't get me wrong, but there's a lot of hype (thorium bros!).
It was down at 14% total energy use for some time. Put another way, the complete elimination of personal vehicles could at best result in 86% of what we currently consume, with nobody traveling anywhere, at all, ever. Any way we slice that, it's "low hanging fruit".
That goes without saying but no one wants to talk about it. Remember when pre climate crazies demonstrated against nuclear power holding up signs saying nuclear is dirty and should be banned. Doesn’t seem dirty to me these days. A couple of years ago I talked to a nuclear engineer in Aiken,SC who worked at the Savanna nuclear facility. They had developed a process where they made glass around the spent fuel. It was totally sealed enclosed in thick glass. At that time they were shipping it to New Mexico for burial. You probably know more about it than I.
In the USA and Canada, there is no commercial spent nuclear fuel being shipped off site for reprocessing, burial, or other disposition. Certian military waste has been vitrified and buried in New Mexico.
Commercial high-level waste continues to accumulate on site at the plant where it was generated.
Commercial high-level waste continues to accumulate on site at the plant where it was generated.
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Yeah nuclear uses the least amount of land and other resources such as concrete, steel, copper, glass, ect. It's going to use water like any thermal plant so the desert isn't a great place for them.
