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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 11 2019, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the things-prior-to-2038 dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:29PM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:29PM (#892886) Journal

    Radiation is also not the innocent that you would portray it as. I'll accept that only 54 people directly died at Chernobyl, but the radioactive cloud spread over much of Europe, and that has probably (proof is not available) shortened many thousands of people's lives by a year or two. IIRC that cloud contained radioactive strontium, which replaces calcium in, e.g., bone marrow.

    In the Fukushima event the worrisome problem in Japan was radioactive iodine. That's a short half-live, so it didn't make it across the Pacific, and in California some people were worrying about radioactive Cesium. That can replace Potassium, but the worries were probably unreasonable, as the doses would have been quite low.

    This is a real problem. The media exaggerates dramatic events to the extent where it's nearly impossible to tell how serious they are without being an expert in the field. But nuclear plants *are* dangerous, though not really in their dramatic failure, but rather in the aftermath. And I can't tell *how* dangerous, because everybody is trying for media attention. And lying.

    You are only counting the direct costs, and your figures are correct in saying that by that estimate nuclear power is extremely safe. But you are relying on a combination of media and industry PR. This is clearly wrong, and it's clear that your estimates are a lowball estimate of the danger. What's not clear is what a reasonable guess would be. (And, of course, coal probably has a much worse record, but trying to get good figures on that is also an exercise in futility. It's even difficult to find out how many miners died last year.)

    And solar and wind do the same thing. How do you count an installer who falls off a roof top and breaks an arm, when the roof needed to be replaced anyway?

    I tend to rate nuclear as a safer choice than coal or gas, and less so than solar, largely because of the problem of spent fuel rods.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)

    by The Shire (5824) on Wednesday September 11 2019, @09:51PM (#892922)

    With Fukushima and Chernobyl however, as I have previously mentioned, we were dealing with early 1960's era technology. Very primitive by todays standards. Neither plant can be held up as an example of the safety record of modern designs. Even Three Mile Island, which was designed in the 70's, proved to be safe in even the most convoluted and catastrophic of failure modes. In that instance, no one was hurt, no one was irradiated, the surrounding area was untouched. TMI-1 continued generating power and is still running today.

    I don't deny that radiation from those accidents can result in a shortening of lifespan. But the studies from Fukushima at least indicate even the worst civilian exposure would result in only a loss of 3 months of lifespan for the population and even that is hard to measure statistically because so many other non nuclear related environmental factors have a much greater effect. And this was a worst case scenario. As I mentioned, TMI-2 had a meltdown and no one was exposed, no one died, the surrounding area was not contaminated.

    The bottom line however is that you can't replace the 80% of the power generated by fossil fuels with solar and wind. You just can't do it. There's not enough open land or production capability to deploy enough solar to cover what fossil fuels are generating today. And it scales horribly. But nuclear scales exceptionally well, runs 24/7, and with enough national support could easily be built out to supply the hole that killing fossil fuels would leave.

    I'm not saying stop deploying solar or wind or even wave. But I am saying that those will always be niche power generation programs. Only nuclear can scale up to generate the kind of electrical demand the future holds.

    I would further say that the New Mexico facility for storing spent fuel is moving ahead. That will help enormously with the waste issue, though most plant designs provide enough water cooled storage for their own waste. I'm also a big fan of getting in there and solving the problems associated with LFTR's. Those have the capability of literally burning the nuclear waste of other plants while producing virtually no actinide waste of their own.

    Just drives me crazy - the answer to our power generation problem, and perhaps that of climate change, is right in front of us. The only thing stopping it from becoming a reality is the irrational fears and the lack of political backbone. The boilerplate plant designs are already done, the uranium fuel has already been mined and processed. All we need to do is build them.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:18PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:18PM (#892955) Journal

      OK, but 3 months loss of lifespan for how many people? If it's only 1200 that's (arguably) equivalent to 400 years of lifespan. If you guess that otherwise people would live to be 80, and that everyone affected was an infant, that's 50 deaths. (And that's using "spherical cow" figuring.)

      But a lot more than 1200 people were affected, and of that number some were affected more than others, and... Basically, there's no defensible number. You can say "it's got to be more than 50" and "it's got to be less than 100,000", but defending any particular number is not defensible. (With more information I could probably whittle that "100,000" number down a lot, but how much?)

      So it's somewhere between "lost in the noise" and "an immense tragedy".

      OTOH, and as you said, that was old technology. But the people who are promising that the new plants are totally safe are the same (kind of) people who were saying the exact same thing about the prior generations of nuclear plants. That doesn't mean that they're wrong this time, but it means that there's little reason to believe them. This is extremely annoying, because I *want* to believe them.

      This isn't all because of the nuclear industry. The media deserves at least as much blame. But look at the management practices of Tokyo Electric, shaving safety to get a slightly better return. And look at the recent US practice when operating plants nearing the end of their estimated useful life are suddenly given the go ahead to operate years (decades?) longer at higher power generation levels, and tell me why I should think that safety was why that happened.

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