Although many of the Fukushima stories may have been sensationalist I welcomed them. Because in a way nuclear energy generation is also a status quo industry and an idea, although less so than coal. But we needed something to nudge people into wanting solar power, even over nuclear. The more demand there is for it, the more research will be made for it, and new ways will be found to make solar more efficient and cheaper.
We already hear about such new discoveries every few months now. Imagine if many more countries and Government were committed to solar energy and would make the solar industry boom because of it. We're still very early in this, and the potential is enormous.
Concentration on solar is great but has some sub-optimalities. Concentration on an energy industry that could also provide materials for a cold war arms race was clearly a bad idea.
Concentration on solar is a media myth - maybe because, next to wind mills, photovoltaics is the most visible generator, and unlike wind mills (quite expensive, lots of space needed), pretty much every house owner could invest a relatively modest amount to put PV on their roof.
IMHO the success story isn't solar, it's lots of tools (PV, wind, water, burning waste, storage) building an energy market with many participants where for nuclear, a few large corporations can control it all.
That's what's happening in Germany, and the Big Four definitely don't like that. It's not all roses, but I prefer the situation now over the several decades of subsidies + no liability for an industry club of 4.
What is wrong with nuclear is that it has not turned out to be cost effective relative other options. The Economist, which has had a strong pro-nuclear stance for decades recently changed its mind.
"Whether it comes to benefit from carbon pricing or not, nuclear power would be more competitive if it were cheaper. Yet despite generous government research-and-development programmes stretching back decades, this does not look likely." http://www.economist.com/node/21549936
And there you have the real answer why it is not used and why uranium/plutonium is. It has very little to do with the economics and safety of energy production.
> Imagine if many more countries and Government were committed to solar energy and would make the solar industry boom because of it. We're still very early in this, and the potential is enormous.
Here's one possibility: Sunny countries will begin to make a lot of money generating solar power and selling it to cloudy countries. North Africa, for example, could easily support all of Europe's electricity needs if we find some way to keep sand off the solar panels. But all of that money goes into the pockets of African and Middle Eastern autocrats, and the world enters a new era where everyone tries to grab the sunniest parts of the world ... umm ... wait a second, those are the same areas where we're currently killing people for oil. tl;dr: History repeats itself.
But on the flip side, solar energy would allow humanity to make good use of some of the most barren parcels of real estate in the world. Instead of using fertile fields to produce biofuel, we could use those fields to produce actual food and leave power generation to places like Arizona.
If we find some way to keep sand off the solar panels, and some way to efficiently transport it across the Mediterranean. That's certainly not impossible, but the technology for things like long-distance seafloor superconducting cables is even less mature than solar power plants.
It'd be way cool to see all of that come together In The Future, but in the near-term, surplus solar power in Africa is not going to help Europe, unless they use it indirectly by using solar electricity to synthesize oil or something.
The strait of Gibraltar is only 14km across. So maybe not all of Europe, but Spain could easily connect with African grids even with conventional equipment.
You know, you're right. I had previously thought that was infeasible due to transmission losses, but I ran the numbers (which I should have done before posting the above), and it would only require a worst case of 50% losses, and ~4000 of today's HVDC cables going around the world. And probably quite a bit better, since that assumes that half the world is getting its power from the other half all the time.
I still think everyone owning an electric car for storage is probably a more realistic plan, but it's definitely not impossible to create a world energy grid and run the world even just from solar.
Your comment is exactly right; a blend is what's needed. Though in the case of solar, a blend still requires very long, very high capacity HDVC cables.
On the other hand, Tesla is busy getting luxury car buyers to help subsidize the capital investment in building storage on a bigger scale, and nobody has figured out how to get luxury car buyers to subsidize grid improvements.
In the long term, since the grid is a monopoly that is not eager to drop its price, whereas solar and batteries are likely to keep dropping in price, in part due to competition and in part due to appealing to early adopters, I expect that a few decades from now, the typical homeowner will use mostly solar and batteries instead of paying the monopolies' higher prices.
I find that a reasonable expectation, but it will not make any difference in the ability of European homeowners to benefit form Africa's surplus of sunlight. Storage only helps when you have a sufficiently high average power in one spot, and just need to spread out the peaks and valleys in production. Fantastic storage does not help if you can't gather enough energy to store in the first place. That may not turn out to be a problem for the average European homeowner if photovoltaics get good enough, but it is the problem that kijin was addressing by suggesting sunny countries sell power to cloudy countries.
One might use excellent storage technology to, e.g., charge batteries in the Sahara and ship them to Switzerland (or, more realistically, synthesize oil in the Sahara and ship it Switzerland), but that's just a slightly more indirect way of addressing the problem of transportation- moving the energy from the place where it can be produced to the place where it is needed to be used.
There are types of nuclear plants that can load-follow much more easily, but it's not a design goal right now. The cost of nuclear energy is almost entirely construction and red tape; once you have a nuclear plant, the marginal cost of producing another megawatt-hour is so low that you want to run them as close to 100% as you can.
If more of our electricity came from nuclear, load-following would become more of a design priority. Or we would build some highly adjustable loads that can take a bunch of excess power when it's there, like aluminum smelting or electric car charging.
That's budgeted as part of the (still remarkably low) operating costs. In the US at least, anybody operating a nuclear plant has to pay a certain amount yearly into a fund for its eventual decommissioning. (The same sort of situation applies to insurance, in case anybody was wondering.)
It's weird and may relate to different Things being measured, but UK decommissioning seems to be vastly more expensive than US decommissioning. Judging by news coverage anyway.
There are many ways to store leftover capacity so that nuclear plants can operate all the time even when combined with renewable sources. For example, you could use leftover capacity to drive pumped storage plants. Pump storage plants operate at 70-87% efficiency [1] and can produce gigawatts of power on demand (in fact, within seconds). They are effectively the largest batteries in the world.
Other problems: you require a pretty significant hydrological infrastructure for PS: upper and catchment resevoirs, and a sufficient gradient to provide a net energy differential.
The logistics make multi-purpose use of PS systems (vs. typical flood-control or irrigation reservoirs) somewhat problematic as water levels may fluctuate dramatically over a brief period of time, and spillways/headways constitute a significant flash-flood drowning risk unless access-controlled.
Still, yes, pretty efficient energy storage systems overall.
There are already solutions for load balancing power. And these load balancing solutions for nuclear actually would be the same ones you'd need for wind and solar.
We already hear about such new discoveries every few months now. Imagine if many more countries and Government were committed to solar energy and would make the solar industry boom because of it. We're still very early in this, and the potential is enormous.