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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035, Study Says
By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report Monday from the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said.
The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable.
As gas plants lose their edge in power markets, the economics of pipelines will suffer, too, RMI said in a separate study Monday. Even lines now in the planning stages could soon be out of the money, the report found.
Hopefully our electrical distribution grid will still work.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:07PM
Euuuh....No, but yes.
Nuclear reactors (except breeders) consume radioactive materials and convert them to electricity. The problem is that there are a lot of "waste products" that are hard to deal with. The ones that are radioactively dangerous have a relatively short half-life...but some of them tend to get entangled in biological tissue, so they need to be confined.
OTOH, "relatively short" can be as long as a couple of hundred years, or as short at a few nano-seconds. The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous the product (at equivalent exposure). As for radioactive danger, most alpha radiation can't get through your skin, and beta isn't much worse. It's the gamma you need to worry about, if it's outside your body. If it gets inside, though, it's a different story, and especially if it gets built into an important molecule, because when it emits radiation it changes into a different element, and that can do all sorts of weird things. Most of the time it isn't important, but it *can* be deadly...in a slow motion fashion.
That said and admitted, this is usually not anything to worry about, unless you're exposed to massive doses. It's true that sometimes it is, and unpredictably so, but the probability is low. And this kind of danger doesn't keep people from living in Colorado, where the incident radiation is a lot higher than in, say, Texas. (Yellowstone is called yellowstone because it's a yellow Uranium ore. Generally a very poor grade ore, but it still emits radiation...of course, so does granite, but yellowstone is a lot better ore.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.