| Author | Message | ||
     Reepicheep |
Errr, an ethanol burning engine might be able to make more power then a gasoline burning engine, but only if it is burning a lot more fuel faster. Gallon for gallon, ethanol is at a 15% or so disadvantage. It's lighter though. Unless somebody found a way to add atoms... Hydrogen is the ***perfect*** "battery", we just need an efficient way to generate it, and a practical way to transport and store it. | ||
| Jaydub |
Errr, an ethanol burning engine might be able to make more power then a gasoline burning engine, but only if it is burning a lot more fuel faster. Gallon for gallon, ethanol is at a 15% or so disadvantage. It's lighter though. That is the second item that will need to change - either by re-inventing the combustion engine, or more likely is to design engine management systems that can improve this negative aspect of ethanol when compared to gasoline. Gasoline has always had that over ethanol - you don't have to fill up as much - if that can be reversed or at least leveled, gasoline will not be as inviting | ||
| Hughlysses |
I've been a nuclear power proponent for most of my life, but I have my doubts now. I'm certainly not scared of it (I worked around nuclear plants at a Naval shipyard for 15 years), but I read this interesting perspective from someone from the Cato institute a while back: ----------------- Jerry Taylor, director of natural-resources studies for the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank, claims to take no side in the energy debate. But he argues that to the extent nuclear power has failed in the United States it was not because of environmentalists or excessive regulation but because it is not cost-effective. "The conservative enthusiasm" says Taylor, "for nuclear power is goofy and misplaced. If you just substitute the word solar for nuclear you would hear the environmentalists talking about energy" in the same way. "The common denominator," explains Taylor, "between the case of solar and nuclear power is that both sides think they have very clean fuels, both think that the only reason these technologies are not in the market is because of dark and infernal forces that somehow are blocking them, and neither proponents of solar nor nuclear energy will ever talk about costs. Dick Cheney says that the government hasn't issued a license for a nuclear-power plant in more than 20 years, but that is because no one has applied for a license in more than 20 years." Taylor claims, "The total cost of nuclear power on average is twice the cost of natural gas and coal. Yes, in the long run, nuclear energy is less expensive, but it costs a ton of money to build a plant, and the return on the investment comes many years later. Investors look at the total costs and, on average, nuclear energy is a white elephant." ------------------------------ I think the point here is that nuclear power is not automatically "better". Unless we figure out how to build them less expensively or until natural gas and oil get so expensive that nuclear becomes more cost effective, there's not a good reason to build more. | ||
| Arcticktm |
Not_purple: You will use more like 20-25% more E85 than 100% gasoline, to do the same work in the same engine. This is data from the USDA website. Puts a much bigger dent in your range than 10%, and also means you must create even more to break even, energy wise. Kuud: 1 factor in why 2008 cars have lower MPG claims is that the gov't changed the method used to test for MPG. It now reflects more "real world" conditions, which mostly means higher speeds. The old method was when most speed limits were still 55mph after the 70's gas crisis. Tougher emissions laws also hurt MPG (especially in diesels), as most ways of reducing NOx emissions results in lower efficiency. On top of all that, customers (us) demand more power and performance in our new vehicles, as well as more features (more weight), and more power=more fuel. | ||
| Etennuly |
Thump, it is an '03 6.0L AWD. The unusual thing about it is its mileage on long trips. It has done 18.7 mpg at 75+ mph on the Interstate. That is better than it will do at 65 mph. It seems to hit its stride between 72 and 80 mph, that is its sweet spot for overcoming aerodynamic forces verses hp/rpm/gear ratio/fuel injection efficiency. I run the cheapest non alcohol gas I can get. I ran another test with a premium gas one tank full. The mileage went up about another 6%, but the extra cost was a little over 11%. So that wasn't helping the efficiency vs the dollar program. | ||
| Thumper74 |
Etennuly, this is pretty impressive mileage. I have an 02 SVT Focus and I reset my trip every fill up to determine fuel economy. My average is only 24mpg, my best (not an average) was on the way to Florida at 27mpg. Now I tried different grades as Ford recommends 91 octane and around here it's 87, 89, 93, or 94. The car does not care for cheap gas, but the mileage stays the same. I see a knock sensor and misfire code when I use 87 or 89. When I switch to 93 or 94, the fuel economy is the same, but the car has more power and the check engine light goes away... | ||
| Bill0351 |
I did a one year cycle as the Police Sergeant (Property NCO) for my old Marine unit. I was totally amazed to see the M998 Humvees getting 15-18 MPG. It made me want to get one for myself. I got back a little over a year ago from a year of driving the 1114 variant all over Iraq. After almost 45,000 miles of convoy escort security, we averaged about 6 MPG. It is amazing what 7,000 pounds of armor and a turbo will do to your fuel economy. Couple that with the fact that nobody thought to increase the fuel capacity from 25 gallons, you never left the wire without 2-3 extra fuel cans. I am sold on that GM engine though. When we left "Big Truck" to the next unit, it had 60,000 miles on the original engine, turbo, and transmission in some of the worst driving conditions on the planet. I wonder if they put that engine in a Denali like yours. Bill | ||
| Ft_bstrd |
France derives 80% of it's energy from Nuclear. Although I hate to suggest imulating the French on most things, this is a long term solution that we should have imulated. If we could change the mix in favor of nuclear, it would allow us to utilize other resources more strategically. Nuclear is expensive, but the long term benefit amortization allows it to be a good solution vs the cost curve associated with decreasing supplies of petroleum. Solar and oil shale didn't die because of lack of subsidies or because Reagan killed them. They died because they weren't economically viable. Where do you think those subsidies come from? If I raise your taxes to provide subsidies to decrease the cost of something you are buying, the net effect is of no benefit. In fact, you end up creating inefficiencies in the system by increasing the burucracy restricting the flow of that money. If you raise an "energy tax" with the specific intent of using it for energy subsidies, how much of that money actually reached the target? How much goes to pay for collection? How much gets siphoned off for pork? How much ends up as profits for companies? How much goes into black hole research projects? It's the same argument for stem cell research. If the concepts were economically viable, companies would invest their R&D money. It's a red herring. | ||
| Thumper74 |
With the Humvee, there's so much more. The Ford Powerstrokes are getting close to 20mpg and weigh 7000-8400 depending on configuration. With the humvees, I suspect being that they are geared towards off-road worthiness, with gearing,etc that had more of an impact. | ||
| Bill0351 |
I was just impressed with the durability. If I remember, the M998 was somewhere around 7,000 pounds and came without a turbo. They were governed, but a good one would cruise all day long at 65MPH. The M1114 weighs in at over 14,000 pounds depending on the weapons system and ammo load. They also have a turbo and an armored turret on the roof. With all that, the engine was barely able to keep up with the demands. Still, the thing survived the entire year without leaving me stranded even once. Of course.... If we were energy independent, I wouldn't have had to spend a year of my life in that s**t-hole of a country at all. I am all for researching a way to cut our ties to that entire godforsaken region. Bill | ||
| Ryker77 |
e85 was and is just a scam by the big three auto makers to get CAFE credits. Even a govt report says that giving CAFE credits to e85 cars only allowed the car makers to continue to push •••••• MPG cars. | ||
| Trac95ker |
Here is some interesting info on the real cost of going nuclear. When you look at the so-called "nuclear fuel cycle", you realize pretty quickly that this nuclear fuel cycle is mainly a rather expensive method of producing a large amount of some pretty dangerous waste. Furthermore, it becomes quickly clear that we're not actually dealing with a cycle by any means here, but rather, it's a cycle with a great number of open ends if one might call it a cycle at all. So, one cannot speak of "recycling" in any sense as suggested by the term. . . . [I]n order to run this reactor for one year, in order to generate power, one begins with the mining of 440,000 tons of rock. After the various steps, 33 tons of uranium fuel remain in the end. So, of 440,000 tons of rock, 33 tons of fuel is left-over. . . . So, what's left over is here: Just under a twentieth, that is, five percent of the original activity taken from the ground actually goes into the reactor, and 95 percent remain in the landscape. . . . [T]he results show that it is uranium mining alone which is responsible for the greatest proportion of the health-related damages. [T]he operation of a single 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant, . . . produces in one year 76 fatalities due to the radon alone coming from the tailings. That's based on the numbers of the IAEA. And that's not during the year that the energy is produced, but rather, it's integrated throughout all eternity; that is, radon will be released for millennia. So, this one year of energy production results in these fatalities throughout the future. . . . [F]or one year of a reactor's operation, a further 20 fatalities are due only to the fact that radium makes its way into the ground water. So, first we had 76, now 20; that adds up to almost 100 fatalities for one power plant for one year. About 400 are installed, I believe, throughout the world. That means that one year of operation of the current atomic industry results in 40,000 deaths per year resulting from uranium mining alone! -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ The True Price of Nuclear Power The Economic, Environmental and Social Impacts of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Lecture by Peter Bossew Peter Bossew, Austria. Physicist, member of the Austrian Ecological Institute for Applied Environmental Research and the Institute for Gamma Ray Measurement, Vienna. (This lecture was drawn up together with Antonia Wenisch, Austria, and held originally in German) Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen! My name is Peter Bossew. I come from Vienna, work at the Ecological Institute there and am actually a physicist. . . . As you heard, I'm actually speaking in place of someone else, Mr. Oren Lyons, who is still unable to make it. I was actually scheduled for Thursday morning, so please excuse any confusion. My subject, as you can gather from the announcement, is "The True Price of Nuclear Power". This whole business is something of a thankless task; this is not a romantic subject, but is, in fact, rather dry, and can only be illustrated with a lot of numbers and diagrams. I hope you won't find this too disconcerting, but unfortunately, there is no way around it, and there are a few technical terms I must warn you about right away. My approach is as follows: We don't want to limit ourselves to economic costs alone, obviously, but we'll also try to include the environmental effects and the so-called "social costs", that is, the social effects, in the total balance. You'll see that it's not easy, but we've tried to set up such a balance. Let me quickly tell you how the lecture is organized: I'll begin by introducing and briefly discussing the nuclear fuel cycle and would then like to present a few balances of this nuclear fuel cycle, specifically, the material balance, the radiological balance, the activity balance and the time balance -- you'll soon understand what all this means. In the next chapter, three, we get to the heart of the matter, namely, the impact of the nuclear fuel cycle. And that is then divided into sub-headings: First, we'll be discussing the economic costs, then an estimation of the cost of atomic energy as opposed to alternative forms of energy, and finally, we'll cover the environmental and social effects. I'd like to add just one more remark here: I'm actually not an economist, but rather, a physicist; I hope that won't be too noticeable. Before getting into details, I'd like to give you our summary that we developed into theses, and then, I want to deliver these theses one by one. When you look at the so-called "nuclear fuel cycle", you realize pretty quickly that this nuclear fuel cycle is mainly a rather expensive method of producing a large amount of some pretty dangerous waste. Furthermore, it becomes quickly clear that we're not actually dealing with a cycle by any means here, but rather, it's a cycle with a great number of open ends if one might call it a cycle at all. So, one cannot speak of "recycling" in any sense as suggested by the term. The four theses are as follows: 1) Nuclear power is more expensive than it is usually declared to be. And we can assume that it will become even more expensive due to the costs of the nuclear fuel cycle, for example, the costs of disposal which will continue to escalate as they have over the last decades. 2) Atomic electricity, that is, electricity from nuclear power plants, is at least as expensive as the electricity from comparable sources of energy. For a long time, atomic power was supposedly preferable because it was not only cleaner, safer, etc., but also cheap. This is not true. 3) In terms of environmental impact, it has often been claimed -- and it is still claimed -- that atomic power is the solution to the global warming problem, the green house effect. This is not true, it's wrong, it's ideology and propaganda. On the contrary, other sources of electricity are considerably more effective in reducing the green house effect. 4) The most efficient method of supplying power, economically as well as ecologically, and in terms of social effects, is power that is not put to use, meaning an efficient power usage. I'd like to get into the details a bit now; I won't be able to get into them too deeply due to time limitations, but I'll try. -- So we begin with the fuel cycle. I have a few overhead transparencies. The whole thing is a bit crooked; nevertheless, I hope you can see. There we are. This description of the fuel cycle was taken from a publication by the nuclear industry. You can tell this because everything looks rather harmless and idyllic, really like a cycle. What they call a cycle is, in reality, nothing more than the route which uranium follows from the mine past various intermediate stops like a reactor and ends in final storage, final storage being something that doesn't really exist. There we are. This is the uranium mine; it is indicated in the drawing down here; the uranium goes via the enrichment process, or the fuel production, into the reactor. There's such a nice drawing of it up there. This is where the uranium is actually utilized. Then it goes into interim storage -- uranium goes into interim storage a number of times -- and then on to the reprocessing plant, as you can see here -- at least this is what they originally had intended. According to this original idea, the plutonium which is produced in the reactor is supposed to be separated during reprocessing. Plutonium is of interest not only for the military but also as nuclear fuel that is usable in reactors, and it was regarded as a valuable raw material in the past. This actually could be considered a cycle and this is what they mean when they say "nuclear-fuel cycle". The illustration insinuates this cycle. Left-over uranium can be re-used -- theoretically, at least; that's what this arrow here is suggesting. In other words, according to this drawing we really are dealing with a cycle, at least initially. So, according to the initial concept, whatever remains after the reprocessing should then be out into final storage; that's this subterranean cavelike thing here. In reality, however, these arrows do not actually exist. You can do this in a laboratory, it is technically possible, but it has never been economical and, as things are, it will not be getting any more economical in the next few decades. That is, this arrow here, this circle, you might as well forget them and you'll be closer to the real situation. The so-called "cycle" begins here in the uranium mine and ends in final storage without ever having gone through a cycle. What has been ignored here, of course, are the open ends that this so-called "cycle" usually has, for at each step of this process, all possible sorts of waste, gaseous, fluid, solid emissions are produced which, packaged sometimes well and sometimes not so well, get into the environment, and these are not to be found here on this cycle. That's why I said that this picture is pretty much of a euphemism. So, enough about the representation of the nuclear fuel cycle. I'd like to look more closely at a few of the phases of this nuclear fuel cycle. I've already said that this recycling doesn't actually work in reality. The reason is that the production of plutonium in the reprocessing plant is much too expensive. On the world market, uranium is cheaper right now than it has ever been and no one needs plutonium. What used to pass for a valuable fuel has since been discovered to be a rather irritating by-product that everyone wants to get rid of but no one knows exactly how. So we're not talking about a valuable raw material here; on the contrary, it's well-known for being pretty dangerous and unpleasant to have around, and now it is lying around, is causing difficulties and, above all, expenses. I don't want to delve too deeply into uranium mining itself since that is the general theme of this conference; so I won't be expanding too much on that now. An interesting point, of course, is "final storage", for what is labelled here as such doesn't actually exist. What we, or the atomic industry, can do these days is store the relatively harmless low-level; this can be done -- more or less, but somehow it can be done. What we cannot do, however, is store high-level waste which is mostly the spent fuel. So, what do we do is, we put it in so-called "interim storage". Those of you who come from countries where there are nuclear power plants are familiar with the problem of interim storage. Because no one knows what to do with the spent fuel, it simply gets stuck away in halls, shafts, or wherever, waiting for a better idea to come along as to what to do with it. It's more or less simply lying around. Final repositories are being built. The first final repositories are to be made available -- so they say -- in the U.S.A. in the year 1999 or around 2000, and then in Germany around the year 2000 -- so they say, but it has also been said before that they were supposed to have been ready in 1980, and they weren't, as we know. So, enough of this illustration of this cycle which is made up primarily of fiction. As my next point, I'd like to present to you the balances of this cycle, the amounts and categories of the materials we're actually talking about. We'll begin now with the material balance. It's like this: We've made general postulations and have tried to calculate what a large reactor with the ability to generate one electric Gigawatt (1 GWe-NPP) -- that is the average amount of a current large reactor -- what it uses per year. So, in order to run this reactor for one year, in order to generate power, one begins with the mining of 440,000 tons of rock. After the various steps, 33 tons of uranium fuel remain in the end. So, of 440,000 tons of rock, 33 tons of fuel is left-over. You can read the details here if you'd like. The rest disappears somewhere along the way, that is, it doesn't appear in the atomic process anymore, so it ends up lying around in the landscape. This is an ore that has too little usable ore content left in it for further processing; it's left over after it's been mined. Then there are these infamous tailings, of course, that is, the residue of uranium processing. This doesn't just lie around, it's poured into basins. And in the enrichment, there's some left over, in the fuel fabrication, there's some left over, etc. Somewhere, we've got a graphic of that -- where is it? -- so that you can imagine a bit better how it looks. So we begin with a pretty large amount of ore. This vertical line here shows what remains in the various phases of the process, and these thick lines pointing right show what is basically thrown away along the way. And you see that down here by the reactor -- that's this little ball here -- 33 tons remain of the 440,000 by the reactor; the rest is somehow lost along the way, and that is, of course, radioactive material lying around. And now we move on: What happens in the reactor? Here, the 33 tons of uranium there are turned into about the same amount of uranium plus 300 kilograms of plutonium plus the fission products -- that is actually the bad part because that's the truly highly active, troublesome waste -- plus all sorts of low-level waste, discharged liquids, discharged gases, all sorts of things. That ranges from such harmless items as contaminated handcloths to the filters in the chimneys. And in the reprocessing, in so far as it really happens, one separates this used fuel and the unused uranium, the newly produced plutonium and the fission products which can no longer be used. Graphically, it looks like this: What comes out of the reactor, the 33 tons, that is either -- as long as there is the capacity for it -- used again, divided into various streams of material, or it is -- as long as reprocessing is not planned, as is the case in some countries such as Sweden, for example -- simply buried, at least at some point. That was the material balance. We now come to the activity balance, for we know that the actual danger lies in the activity, and not in the material. I'll show that to you graphically again because the numbers, I think, don't make much sense. Here we have figured out the activities according to the masses quoted above. It starts like this: That is the activity of the fuel that the reactor needs to run for one year. It begins with an amount of ten Peta-Becquerel (10 PBq) uranium ["Peta" means 10^15 times the quantity of a unit] plus what is contained in the ore, the decay-products of the uranium. That's thorium, radium, etc., etc., etc., we've heard all about that. A large portion of that, as we see, is thrown away. That is simply the ore that is too poor to make it worth processing; it remains as tailings in the environment. The next step is the uranium milling in which the yellow cake is extracted from the uranium ore. As you see, the greatest portion of the activity -- that is mostly the "uranium daughters", or uranium decay-products, thorium, radium, lead, etc., etc. -- are left over in the form of these tailings in the tailing basins which then "enhance" the landscape. The next step is conversion: Here, a uranium gas is made from the yellow cake which is a solid substance. The gas is needed for the enrichment process. There, too, in the enrichment process, there are again great amounts of waste, and in the end, after many steps, of these ten Peta-Becquerel (10 PBq) uranium there is left just under half of a Peta-Becquerel (0.48 PBq) uranium. So, what's left over is here: Just under a twentieth, that is, five percent of the original activity taken from the ground actually goes into the reactor, and 95 percent remain in the landscape. But the "fun part" is just starting: Here, we have the reactor. Inside it is the fuel, about three years -- in which the nuclear fission occurs and so on, I don't want to get into that now -- and then afterwards, the fuel is infamously highly radioactive and can no longer be touched. You can touch the original fuel easily with your hand, it's no problem, but you can no longer touch the burnt fuel. You drop dead just getting near it. We weren't able to illustrate this graphically, for if you assumed that this line here were one centimeter wide, and represented the activity of ten Peta-Becquerel (10 PBq), then this line here would have to be three kilometers wide, and that somehow just didn't fit onto the transparency. That's why this question mark is here. So the activity inside is greater by a factor of approximately 100 millions. To make it less dangerous, it's allowed to lie for a few years; there it wears off in interim storage; those are these nice halls, warehouses in Germany, but also in America and everywhere. Afterwards, there is still a pretty high amount of activity, namely, a factor of 100,000 times more than at the beginning. And then comes either the direct final storage without reprocessing or the reprocessing itself. In the reprocessing, it is divided about half and half -- according to the activity now -, half in plutonium and half in fission products. The fission products can no longer be used, but the plutonium can, at least theoretically, be used. We have primarily made these graphics in order to show what we mean when we say that the uranium cycle -- which can no longer be spoken of as a cycle -- is, in reality, a very expensive and crafty way of producing waste. Another point is the time balance which I'd like to mention here in order to get an idea of what sort of time period we're dealing with. We need about ten years for the construction of a reactor; the reactor runs, let's say, 30 years; they're trying to run it longer. Then a few years must pass to let the used fuel wear off; then maybe a few years more to take the reactor apart, for a reactor has to be decommissioned once it can no longer be of use. And then, there is the waste. And consider that some -- not all of these waste materials, but some of them -- have lives that require isolation periods of a few 100,000 years. These are, for example, the tailings with the main nuclide thorium-230 with a half-life of 75,000 years. One can assume then that after ten half-lives the activity sinks by one thousandth; and for thorium-230, that would be 750,000 years. There are similar half-lives for certain types of fission products and activation products; they go on up to millions of years, as with neptunium-237, for example. So, a profit is made for a few decades at the most, and then, for hundreds of thousands of years, we're in it up to our necks -- well, I certainly hope not up to our necks, but it's got to be taken care of, nonetheless. I'd like to bring up one more point concerning the balances, and that is the radioactive balance. Up to now, we've been talking about the amounts of material, but we haven't yet spoken about the actual effects. This is unfortunately very difficult to calculate, and there are a variety of numbers on what this released radioactivity actually brings about in terms of damages -- I'll limit myself to health damages here. We found a few numbers at the IAEA, that is, the International Atomic Energy Agency. It must be said that the IAEA is not known for being very critical of atomic power, and therefore, I think that these numbers that can be found there can be thought of more as minimum levels. We've done a bit of calculating with these numbers; I'll spare you the details, but basically, the results show that it is uranium mining alone which is responsible for the greatest proportion of the health-related damages. In comparison, the running of the reactor, the final storage, etc., are relatively harmless. I also have a graph for this: Concentrate on the white line, and you can see, up there is uranium mining, here we have the atomic waste, here we have the operation of the reactor, and here the vocational exposition. And here you see that uranium mining represents the largest portion. But the catch is: When you read carefully, you can see that they have integrated this for 10,000 years. That's pretty long in human terms, but we've just heard how long the half-lives are of thorium-230, which mainly exists in the tailings as a forerunner of radon. And when you figure this a bit more closely, you see that this line here actually should be several meters long. When one translates these numbers into fatalities -- which is a bit macabre, but I've done so anyway -- then you see -- this is not what the IAEA says, I've figured this out myself from IAEA numbers -- that the operation of a single 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant, that is, one large plant produces in one year 76 fatalities due to the radon alone coming from the tailings. That's based on the numbers of the IAEA. And that's not during the year that the energy is produced, but rather, it's integrated throughout all eternity; that is, radon will be released for millennia. So, this one year of energy production results in these fatalities throughout the future. The second number I found at the IAEA concerns radium -- which was spoken about yesterday; radium, which trickles into the ground water from these underground tailings pools. If they're well-built, it may not be much, but it's nevertheless there. And the IAEA gives numbers on how big the collective dosage is that is supposedly caused by this worldwide. And if you again figure this out in terms of fatalities, you find out that in the long run, for one year of a reactor's operation, a further 20 fatalities are due only to the fact that radium makes its way into the ground water. So, first we had 76, now 20; that adds up to almost 100 fatalities for one power plant for one year. About 400 are installed, I believe, throughout the world. That means that one year of operation of the current atomic industry results in 40,000 deaths per year resulting from uranium mining alone! This is based on IAEA numbers, so it's not just pulled out of a hat, but all is based on IAEA numbers. So much for the balances of nuclear power. The next chapter was the price, the economic price of nuclear power. Due to the time limitations, I'll have to sum things up, but if you look into this even just a bit, it's very interesting to see the varying numbers you find in the literature. Obviously, no one knows exactly what the power that comes out of there costs, simply because there are so many uncertainties involved. In the end, the question is this: What does one include in this calculation? To what degree are environmental factors, for example, figured into the cost? What about social effects? What about political factors? In what way are possible catastrophes, which, hopefully, never occur, but clearly do, as we've seen, in what way are they included? How far can the clean-ups actually be calculated, even though no one knows exactly how some phases of it actually function? Because there is no final repository for highly active waste, no one can know how much it costs. So, the estimates for final storage are very rough. We've tried to figure all this out somehow (...). I'll spare you the numbers and tell you what we've come up with: The entire fuel cycle -- that is, from uranium mining to disposal -- it costs, if you don't count the reclaiming of the uranium mine and the uranium waste, so they're not included, and the costs of the final repositories are only very roughly calculated, and if you leave out the infrastructure costs altogether, you come to 4.5 to 17 dollars per megawatt hour of energy, that is, for the fuel cycle costs alone. But the fact is that the greatest costs involved in atomic energy are related not only to the fuel cycle, but also to the costs of investment that a nuclear power plant requires. This differs from the fossil power station situation; there, you have relatively -- I say, relatively -- lower investment costs going into the plant, but the fuel costs are much higher. This is because coal is comparatively more expensive than uranium. If you figure out the price of the power itself, taking numbers from the literature and try to figure them out yourself, you arrive at the following costs: According to IAEA estimates, 25 to 60 dollars per megawatt hour (MWh); according to estimates of the Worldwatch Institute, you arrive at around 120 dollars per megawatt hour; Mr. Keepin spoke yesterday of 130 dollars per megawatt hour; and we've done our own figuring, a very, very rough economic estimate, and arrive at 60 to 110 dollars per megawatt hour. The costs in themselves are, of course, of no interest if you don't compare them to other forms of energy. We did that, too: I don't want to get into why it's actually so difficult to figure these things and why, when you reach a conclusion, it's not very reliable. The results depend on, among other things, such simple matters as where the power plant is located. If a water power plant is located by a river, it's got an energy source right by the door, so to speak; if a coal power plant is located next to a coal mine, the coal needn't be transported, whereas, if a coal power plant is located 1,000 kilometers away from a coal mine, the coal has to be transported. So the power is more expensive. I've left such things out. And the results are -- that's the upper table -- according to the IAEA, coal costs about as much as atomic power. So it's like that; even the atomic lobby doesn't claim that atomic power is all that much cheaper. They used to claim it, but no one dares to say that anymore, the numbers are relatively fresh. The Worldwatch Institute has the following numbers: that's the 120 dollars quoted above; compare that to natural gas at 60 dollars; wind and geothermal energy: 60 to 80 dollars; and -- very important, because I'll be coming back to this -- efficiency improvement, obviously the cheapest at 20 to 60 dollars. That atomic power is not at all as cheap and cost-efficient as it has occasionally been claimed to be can be seen without much figuring, simply by looking at the allocation of contracts to the reactor industry. I've got another graph from the IAEA: That's the installed capacity along a time-line, and there, you see the black line, that's the number of existing reactors. It only goes to 1990, so it would flatten out here, for, in the meantime, the atomic power contingent has decreased worldwide. And the white line, that's the allocation situation for the reactor industry. So, you see that in the seventies, it rises steeply, and now, it's practically at zero. There you see that those who can do their economic math -- and the atomic industry can, of course, for considering the numbers involved, they have to be able to -- that they know best that atomic power is not actually able to compete, for otherwise, the situation in the reactor industry wouldn't look so dreary. So now the problem is, that somehow, I've got to finish this. I'll try to condense a bit. As I implied, obviously, the cheapest form of energy is energy that is saved. By "saved" you must understand that that doesn't mean turning off the lights or freezing in winter or such things, or that we're not allowed to operate our refrigerators anymore, but rather, it simply means that we must employ the technical means at hand more effectively. And so you see: The savings potential -- this was figured for Austria, for example, also for other countries, but I've got numbers here for Austria, so what might be basically typical for a modern industrial country -- and the results are that the savings potential with technology now available is 50 percent. That means we could save 50 percent of our power without suffering any loss in our living standard. The reason this isn't being done is simply a matter of energy policy; that must be said, for they always claim that living standards are coupled with the use of energy, that they can't be separated. But this is not a natural law, as is often suggested, but rather, it is simply so because energy policy focuses far more on setting up new sources of power than on efficient use of power. As for saving power, I'd like to give a very, very dramatic and drastic example: It relates to reports of natural gas leakage in the pipelines in the former Soviet Union. You know that they have a very broad network of natural gas lines. Some of that natural gas is also delivered to Austria and western Europe. And it's been discovered that due to poor maintenance, faulty workmanship and the like, 40 billion cubic meters of natural gas is lost through leakage. You can do some figuring; I'll spare you that. That part of these 40 billion cubic meters lost due to leakage which could be avoided can be figured to equal 90 percent of the atomic capacity of the former Soviet Union. That means that, using average technology, 90 percent of nuclear power in the former Soviet Union could be saved by simply stopping up the leaks! And if this natural gas were put to efficient use, more than 100 percent of the current atomic power share could be covered! That shows that atomic power could easily be avoided altogether if this money were stuffed in the proper holes. We should continue to develop solar technology. The sun puts out unlimited energy, its free and there is no waste. With the development of super capacitors to eventually replace batteries, we would have free energy. | ||
| Ft_bstrd |
Labs look at recycling weapons-grade plutonium for energy Business & Technology | Science & Technology By SUE VORENBERG Tuesday, November 21, 2006 Finding a way to get rid of 34 tons of extra weapons-grade plutonium poses an interesting challenge. The United States and Russia _ under an arms reduction treaty _ can't just drop it off at the dump or toss it in the garbage. And the people who might want to take it off their hands _ say, North Korea and Iran _ probably wouldn't do anything nice with it. One option in the United States is to carefully treat it, then store it at the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, if it ever opens. Or, if you're one of New Mexico's national laboratories, you can look at doing something even stranger with it _ recycling it into commercial power. The United States and Russia cleared a major diplomatic hurdle in September that gets both closer to getting rid of the deadly material through recycling. The two countries agreed on liability protection for the United States so it can help Russia with its part of the equation. Both countries have been working on efforts to use plutonium to create a recycled nuclear fuel called MOX, or mixed oxide, which can power commercial nuclear plants. But the programs have been stalled for the past several years because there are risks involved and there was no liability agreement to protect either country in case something went wrong with the recycled product, said Randall Erickson, former program manager at the nuclear nonproliferation program office at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since the early 1990s, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories have been working on various aspects of making MOX a reality in the United States. It's tricky, because you have to keep the material out of the wrong hands and you have to tweak it before it can be used in commercial power reactors. Still, Erickson said he appreciates the ironic twist of turning material for nuclear bombs into something more positive. "Somebody coined the term that we're taking megatons of nuclear weapons materials and turning it into megawatts to light the cities," Erickson said. The 34 tons could power a nuclear plant for more than 34 years, he said. Not everyone agrees that turning bomb materials into fuel is a good idea, including the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said Edwin Lyman, a senior staff member. "On the surface, it sounds like a good idea, but if you start looking at it in any detail, you realize it can't fulfill that promise," Lyman said. "When you use plutonium in a light-water (power) reactor, there are characteristics that increase the likelihood of certain accidents." That could include uncontrollable chain reactions leading to a Chernobyl-like accident, Lyman said. Los Alamos scientists, however, say they've found a mixture of one-third plutonium and two-thirds uranium will work in conventional power plants without damaging them, Erickson said. Los Alamos has been testing recycled fuel in France as a first step in the U.S. program. The French purified the unclassified combination of plutonium and uranium in 2004 and 2005 and turned it into fuel for a reactor in South Carolina. That reactor has been test-burning the fuel since summer 2005, Erickson said. "Everything is performing as they anticipated," he said. "In truth, this technology was not a major leap." That doesn't mean the plutonium is completely secure, Lyman argued. "There's an issue about whether reactor sites will have to increase security because of the threat of fuel being stolen," Lyman said. Also, plutonium fuel creates different nuclear byproducts as it breaks down and it burns hotter than uranium, so it will put more stress on a conventional power plant system, Lyman said. "You just don't want to do anything to increase the risks," Lyman said. "The MOX program has always been the more dangerous, riskier option." Either way, the United States and Russia are years away from actually burning the 34 tons of plutonium in commercial reactors, Erickson said. After the test is finished, the United States will have to build its own MOX fuel fabrication facility and a facility to take the weapons-grade plutonium and break it down into a powder. Those facilities are slated for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Erickson said. If we are looking at 34M tons of refined plutonium, that equates to 680M tons of mining that wouldn't need to be done. Coal is so much better, right? http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant world power generation was 366 GW in 2005. By the 76 people/GW number, that should give us a net death rate of 27,816. Seems to me, if the estimations are correct, that coal kills 2,184 more people per year than nuclear energy. Currently there are 83,100 coal miners in the US. http://www.nma.org/pdf/c_trends_mining.pdf On average, about 35 will die each year mining. http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2 006/01/us_coal_mining_.html Of those, a high percentage will develop Coal Workers pneumoconiosis. http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/reprint/78/2/406.p df Coal ain't great either. | ||
| Jlnance |
That is the second item that will need to change ... that can improve this negative aspect of ethanol when compared to gasoline. That is a fairly fundamental feature. If you burn a gallon of Ethanol you get a certain amount of heat. If you burn a gallon of Gasoline, you get more heat than the Ethanol produced. The only way to work around this is to find something that makes it possible to make a Ethanol engine more efficient than a Gas engine. That may be possible, I think you can run higher compression with Ethanol. I don't know if it's enough to make up the difference. | ||
| Ryker77 |
Higher compression = more pumping loss - which is less effecient. Turbo is one option that Saab is working on to use E85. However turbo's are also not effecient in a gas motor. Now matter how you look at it e85 has LESS power. The only good option I can think of for ethanol would be on turbo cars that would use a second fuel tank for holding the ethanol (100% not e85) and then using alchol injection for use when need to make more power. An engine like VW's TSI would be great platform for alchol injection. | ||
| Trac95ker |
When a coal mine closes down the land can still be used. I don't think anybody is going to buy real estate with the description " Ex nuclear production site." If there is ever a melt down, I'm sure lots of people will feel the effects for a long time if they live. Wonder how their children will turn out? When electric cars with sports car performance become mainstream, I'll part with my diesel. http://www.teslamotors.com/ | ||
| Blake |
"Higher compression = more pumping loss - which is less effecient. " I don't buy that. If it were true, then diesel engines would be much less efficient than their gasoline counterparts, which is not true. Pumping loss results from poor ability to fill and/or evacuate the cylinder, poor volumetric efficiency, like that which is caused by restrictive intake or exhaust tracts, akin to the difference between inhaling and exhaling through a small straw, versus your open mouth. | ||
| Blake |
Somebody tell France how many people they are killing, 100 per year per 1GW reactor? Sounds like complete baloney to me. | ||
| Aesquire |
I'm all for booze burning, but making it from food is nuts. Garbage is the answer, and if we could just get the politicians to see that, Maybe Jersey would lead the effort... ( just kidding....) Consider that all the commercial reactors in the U.S. were designed before I was born. ( so they updated the computers to ones without tubes, the core didn't change ) Consider If your Xb had a 750cc flat head engine. Same deal. Reactors can be made fail safe, no meltdown possible. Helium as a primary working fluid, means coolant leaks escape to space & don't ruin the neighborhood. The primary problem with nuclear power is the propaganda of doom, not the reality. IMHO every natural gas electric plant, ( that is not ON a fault line, or poised on a cliff, hazard-wise. ) should have the boilers replaced with pebble bed safe reactors. Then coal. Then the coal goes to make gasoline. The remaining oil could be purchased from Canada & Kansas. Then Corn can make tortillas, it's true purpose. | ||
| Ryker77 |
I don't buy that. If it were true, then diesel engines would be much less efficient than their gasoline counterparts, which is not true. Diesel engines do not suffer from pumping loss - since they DON'T have a throttle body. Diesel engines also benifit from a higher BTU ratings. Pumping loss results from poor ability to fill and/or evacuate the cylinder, poor volumetric efficiency, like that which is caused by intake or exhaust tracts, akin to the difference between inhaling and exhaling through a small straw, versus your open mouth. }Pumping loss comes from the throttle body controling the amount of air. Which is why the engine intake manifold has a vacuum. A higher compression engine sucks in more air. The higher the suction the less effecient at normal driving. Modern gasoline engines like the r18 in the Honda Civic uses intake valve timing to control air and allows the throttle body to be more open ie less restricted. BMW and Infiniti are using intake valve timing on some models. (Message edited by ryker77 on January 06, 2008) (Message edited by ryker77 on January 06, 2008) | ||
| Etennuly |
Why don't they just make that clear corn juice legal to consume, don't toxi-fy it with gasoline. People could buy it in gallon corked jugs, stay home after work, consume it(for medicinal purposes of course), and not use their vehicles until the next day or so. Farmers get to sell their subsidized corn, people use less gasoline and everybody is VERY happy!  I'd even bet that drug abuse would lessen, thus further helping society in many other ways. Don't put that stuff in a gas tank unless it is some kind of remedy for an emergency of some sort.  Oh wait, I forgot, the gom'ment don't want happy people.  | ||
| Blake |
You're right about the diesel engines Ryker. As usual, I was thinking WOT. I still don't see how higher compression affects pumping losses. Higher compression engines do not necessarily suck in more air; why would they? They simply compress the air/fuel charge to a greater degree. | ||
| Blake |
Also, whether the quantity of intake charge is controlled by variable intake valve in the cylinder head or by the throttle body, the pumping loss due to the restriction is not much different, slightly yes and that is improvement, but not a whole heck of a lot. | ||
| Ryker77 |
I still don't see how higher compression affects pumping losses. Higher compression engines do not necessarily suck in more air; why would they? They simply compress the air/fuel charge to a greater degree. Can't really explain why - it just does. Higher compression would suck in more air and suck it in faster. Look at the 2.0l in the Civic Si or the S2000 engine. They both get pretty crappy MPGs compared to the same size engine with less compression. Also, whether the quantity of intake charge is controlled by variable intake valve in the cylinder head or by the throttle body, the pumping loss due to the restriction is not much different, slightly yes and that is improvement, but not a whole heck of a lot Research the Honda r18 engine in the newer Civics. http://asia.vtec.net/Engines/R18A/index.html http://world.honda.com/HDTV/news/2005-4050705a/ Now when the pistons are running, they will need to suck air from the intake manifold and through the almost closed throttle butterfly. However the almost closed throttle buttefly will be resisting the sucking / pumping action of pistons. This wastes energy and is called "Pumping Loss". If we think about it, this situation is actually very ironic when we look at it from the practical point of view. Here is the situation where we are able to, and expects the engine to produce great fuel economy. But the almost closed throttle butterfly also introduces the largest amount of pumping restriction - and power loss - to the engine. So the almost closed throttle butterfly actually negatively impacts the engine's operating efficiency and thus its fuel economy, at a time where the operating environment is most conducive for the engine to deliver good fuel economy. In a case of clearly thinking outside of the box, Honda's R&D engineers for the Rseries tackled this imbalance directly and introduced the Rseries's SOHC i-VTEC implementation. So the Rseries SOHC i-VTEC is a fuel economy implementation that works by targetting at the reduction of pumping losses in the engine in driving conditions which are most conducive to fuel economy. Now the R18A engine can truly be seen as a 'dual mode' engine with clear-cut normal driving and 'economy driving' modes. Watch the video and you see. I own one of these. I've never gotten less than 32mpg and often get upwards of 40mpgs on 55mph roads. Not bad for a auto trans gas car. | ||
| Ryker77 |
Under low-load conditions on conventional engine, the throttle valve is normally partly closed to control the intake volume of the fuel-air mixture. During this time, pumping losses are incurred due to intake resistance, and this is one factor that leads to reduced engine efficiency. With the i-VTEC engine, however, intake valve closure timing is delayed to control the intake volume of the air-fuel mixture, allowing the throttle valve to remain wide open even under low-load conditions for a major reduction in pumping losses of up to 16%. Combined with comprehensive friction-reducing measures, this results in a significant increase in fuel efficiency for the engine itself. http://www.worldcarfans.com/2050705.005/honda-deve lops-new-1.8-i-vtec-engine | ||
| Hexangler |
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-be tter-ethanol-than-corn Not time to talk gotta work, just found this article. Hex | ||
| Panic |
Higher compression increases power, mileage and especially part-throttle mileage far more than than a simple comparison of ratios. The loss of work added to the compression cycle is completely erased by the added output under any and all conditions, until the ratio (or cylinder pressure) is so high that the engine cannot run with the octane available. For straight methanol that can be 17:1, which gets back of lot of that fuel waste. Ethanol is inferior as to BTU/gallon energy content, window of mixture accuracy, etc. to methanol. Then why don't we hear about it? Because Archer/Daniels/Midland doesn't control the supply. When you see a corn product - it belong to ADM. | ||
| Ryker77 |
"Higher compression increases power, mileage and especially part-throttle mileage far more than than a simple comparison of ratios. " On paper a higher compression engine is better. But when you look at any high MPG car - it will be lower compression engine. And run on 87 octane. Don't recall any high MPG car running high compression and requiring 93 octane fuel. | ||
| Jlnance |
But when you look at any high MPG car - it will be lower compression engine. And run on 87 octane. Don't recall any high MPG car running high compression and requiring 93 octane fuel. I don't think that people who buy economy cars are interested in filling them with premium. | ||
| Etennuly |
In the mid seventies I had a Fiat 850 Spyder. It was definitely an economy car at 52 mpg. It had to have premium gasoline as all Fiats in the US did at the time. They were high compression engines. I changed engines by unbolting everything and simply picking it out of the rear compartment by hand. It was scary small, held 6 gallons of premium, had leg room for a basket ball star, and shoulder and hip room for an undersized anorexic. For fun I would pick up one of my 230 lb buddies, and with me at 200, we would see if we could get it up to 75 mph. It would do almost 80 mph with just me in it. In the North-Eastern US these cars rusted so fast in the winter from road salt, you could mark a rust spot and watch it grow. |
