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Straight from the department of energy, what a powerplant is going to cost you in dollars per megawatthour. Long story short, build nukes.
Actually the chart specifically lists capital costs. As for the limits it's part of a larger paper I'm reading about the DOE's outlook on renewables which calls out most of the issues with these styles of generation. It's a high level paper so they really only touch on the issues but its something anyone interested in the energy future of the country should read.Mikey wrote:That chart, though, doesn't show startup capital or consider availability. Geothermal is great but geographically limited, and biomass at this point is still going to engender considerably more capital outlay to make significant contributions than nukes.
Yeah, I'd figured my info wasn't as current as yours; no surprise the economy would kill the plants. For the green crowd, the downturn artificially, but only temporarily also, caps emissions and cuts growth thereof. Perhaps some more Nukes will pop up once the economy starts to improve? I guess the more recent image I had in my head was of huge sprawling arrays of mirrors in a solar thermal plant but then again large scale PV implementations aren't individual panels strapped to roofs either.Tyyr wrote:Solar thermal really isn't any more wasteful than Solar PV in terms of land area. It's not tremendous in terms of energy output but it's not that bad.
Nukes are easier to make happen but the economy has put a lot of nuclear projects that had been progressing on hold as electricity demand stopped climbing. There were two new plants planned for Florida but FPL canceled theirs due to tapering off of demand. Progress Energy is continuing on though with Levy county which will be a pair of 1,000MW nukes.
Well if monetary costs are your only deciding factor you might be right. On the other hand there is quite a reason why nukes are not considered a renewable form of energy, meaning that at some point we will also run out of fissionable material. And even if this were not the case you would still need to find a more satisfactory solution for the storage of the nuclear waste than we have at the moment.Tyyr wrote: Straight from the department of energy, what a powerplant is going to cost you in dollars per megawatthour. Long story short, build nukes.
Total recoverable uranium reserves are between 3.3 and 5.4 million tons with more potential energy than all the fossil fuels on the planet combined. That's just uranium. If you stopped all consumption of fossil fuels today and replaced those energy needs with nukes we've got enough uranium alone to keep us going for centuries. Never mind other technologies utilizing strontium, thorium, or breeder reactors. I strongly suspect that we'll get a handle on that whole fusion thing or some other energy technology between now and then.Atekimogus wrote:Well if monetary costs are your only deciding factor you might be right. On the other hand there is quite a reason why nukes are not considered a renewable form of energy, meaning that at some point we will also run out of fissionable material. And even if this were not the case you would still need to find a more satisfactory solution for the storage of the nuclear waste than we have at the moment.Tyyr wrote: Straight from the department of energy, what a powerplant is going to cost you in dollars per megawatthour. Long story short, build nukes.
My hope is still that we will soon find better alternatives and I also think it won't be any one kind of renewable energy but a combination of everything available.
Yeah, no sh*t. We're already being charged exorbitant fees for it; no one wants to have to drop their insurance or take out a second mortgage to pay the f*cking light bill. Our taxes should cover it; why the hell else are we paying them?Tyyr wrote: My company has done multiple studies with our customers to find out their feelings on green power. One of the questions we asked was how much would they be willing to pay over what they currently do for their electricity for totally green power. You know the answer? $0.00. They weren't even willing to pay a 1% premium for green power. Not even 1% over their current rates.