Nuclear v/s Wind Debate

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Occasionally, I get a really well informed and well thought out comment into this blog. The following ticks all boxes and I want to thank "Craig" for the time and effort taken in writing this interesting piece. I am a declared anti-nuclear person, and would disagree on a few issues raised by Craig. That said, debate is what leads to balanced outcomes, and again thank you Craig so much for the excellent input.



craig has left a new comment on your post "Wind Energy v/s Nuclear Reactors":

First of all, let me declare that I am an engineer who has worked on technical issues associated with nuclear plant, wind turbines, wave power and other fluid machinery.

At the risk of seeming patronising, the issue of nuclear vs "any other power source" is very complex. I do not claim total expertise, but rather a lot of informed opinion.

And before somebody tries to pigeonhole me as “pro” or “anti” anything, I am pro a highly developed society with the benefits of abundant and reliable, high grade power supply. (i.e. I prefer the idea that most of us should live in the 21st century, and not the 18th).

Some points:

1) Nuclear and wind have very similar investment profiles, per MWe: fuel costs are small, up front capital costs high, and O&M costs are similar. You seem to be talking exclusively about the installed (i.e. capital) cost. This is nonsensical, as this accounts for only about half the cost of electricity supplied by either technology and ignores grid supply issues.

2) Wind has the huge advantage of being modular (a couple of actual MWe is the incremental unit). Nuclear comes in big chunks (~1600MWe for most modern). Nuclear has the huge advantage of being reliable base-load, with no real “security of supply” issues, at least in the short/medium term.

3) Wind has an energy density of about 2W/m^2, nuclear has a density 1000 times that. So the red herring question at the head of the post ("Really enhances the Natural Landscape?" under a pic of a nuclear plant) could be answered, "well yes, it does enhance the landscape, actually, as it confines the necessary developed zone to an area about 1km x 1km rather than 50km x 50km for equivalent wind power").

4) The cost of nuclear power is a hotly contested issue. I can quote from 6 reputable sources all at odds, which estimate nuclear wholesale power costs in the range 10-84 £STG/MWe. Onshore wind has a smaller spread in the range 25-60 £STG/MWe. (apologies for the currency). As for there being no reliable figures to depend on because there has been no new build in the USA recently, this is total crap (not that there has been no new build in the states, but that there are no reliable data). For example, China is building several. And incidentally is also building a lot of wind, so it isn’t necessarily and either/or proposition.

5) On the issue of technological development, while modern wind power is younger than nuclear (i.e. turbines which can reasonably by called modern designs), wind power has borrowed heavily from the aerospace industry (design, materials and manufacturing), and has had many iterations, precisely because wind is more modular. Nuclear plant on the other hand, while mature and reliable now, is only on the 3rd or 4th generation. As a result, from a technical viewpoint, I am not convinced that wind has any great technological leaps to make to achieve dramatically lower unit costs.

The bottom line is that like it or not, nuclear is definitely part of the global and regional energy mix for the foreseeable future. The real question is do we build a plant in Ireland. My feeling is that for technical reasons we should not at this point, but we will absolutely still depend on nuclear through our interconnects to UK and France, so we should be a little more reasonable about nuclear power generally.

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SEAI Merry-Go-Round

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Here is a reply I received from Marese. I want to emphasise it in the hope it sparks more action by others in similar positions, with Geo-Thermal, Solar, and WoodPellet white elephants sitting on their property as a result of SEAIs advice and urging.

Regarding SEAI, don't you think that there is a distinct comparison to be made between a bunch of headless chickens and Merry-Go-Round behavioural patterns in an organisation.

http://wood-pellet-ireland.blogspot.com/2010/10/seai-and-more-wood-pellet-woes.html

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your reply. I did phone SEI and was told that I needed to talk to a different section and so the Merry Go Round started which ended up back at the start with the first person I spoke to. 

Each time I explained the situation and requested a contact for a suitable serviceman and on the last contact they said to leave it with them and they would get back to me......still waiting and don't expect to hear from them at all. Like you said high and dry! 

Yes I will get in touch with both Green Ministers as you suggested but I fully expect the same useless response...nothing! 

Thanks anyway and I hope more people in Ireland wise up and start fighting for our rights because nobody else will. 

MF

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Googling Google and Aliens

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Google and Aliens 

Have a Lot in Common!

Have you noticed lately that Google is getting harder and harder to contact. Timed Out - searches are very common place. But not only the search engine is slow or out for up to 15 minutes at a time, Picasa, Google Blogger, Google News etc. all are going through major traffic jams. The trend has been getting worse of late, at least in Ireland.

I have now switched many web searches to Bing or Yahoo etc. because Google is "not available" or "timed out". When writing or editing a blog this Google traffic jam can become a dang darn nightmare, as various elements keep getting stuck in the Google traffic jam. 

ET could phone home easier than it takes to get logged into Google at times.

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SEAI and More Wood Pellet Woes

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 Yet More  

Wood Pellet 

Woes

Spitting in the Wind - it just comes back at you!

Marese has left a new comment on your post "Wood Pellet Heating Rip-Off in Ireland":

We have a ProSolar Fireline pellet boiler which needs mending....but the company which installed it two years ago is gone bust....The problem is this is an expensive piece of machinery and we don't know how to find a properly qualified serviceman to repair it here in Co. Wexford...at the moment it is looking like a white elephant an expensive one! Any advice welcomed. M.F.

 
Marese - I can only sympathise with you. There are many many more like you. SEAI (Sustainable Energy Authority Ireland) encouraged all sorts of weird and wonderful business' to start up in the hope of cashing-in on the generous grant schemes they offered.

However, having set this snowball in motion down the hill, SEAI then made no provision whatsoever to see to the customers needs in terms of value or quality, and have thereby left a great many people hanging out to dry.

Have you written to Ministers Eamonn Ryan and John Gormley or to SEAI for help or advice, or made a complaint at the total lack of regulation or control of an industry they sparked in their wisdom?

I have no knowledge of the law, but I suspect that a case could be made to gain some sort of help or compensation from the government agencies in this type of case. Do you have any lawyers in the family?

I have been singing from this same hymn sheet about SEAI abandoning the people they recruited to their schemes for 4 years now, and I might as well be spitting in the wind!!!

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Wind Energy v/s Nuclear Reactors

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Really enhances the Natural Landscape?

Wind Energy Costs

v/s 

Nuclear Reactors

According to reports recently published, the cost of Wind Power has become more economical than Nuclear Power. At an estimated cost of approximately €4,500 a kilowatt or perhaps a lot more, the installed cost of the nuclear option is well ahead of the cost of wind turbines with an average cost of  €1,350 per kW in 2009.

The actual cost of a nuclear reactor has been a matter of some contention for many years among researchers and others. No reactors have been built in the USA in recent times, so there are no solid current figures to rely on.

In 2009, MIT updated the estimated figure to about  €3,000 a kilowatt but with some caveats. On the other side of the argument, another published report quotes Mark Cooper University of Vermont Law School, as saying that the costs could be as high as $8,000 per Kw. 


Decommissioning costs?

The capital costs of a nuclear reactor must include the decommissioning costs when the reactor had reached the end of it useful life. Decommissioning costs have never been fully and clearly outlined. There are likely to be enormous and horrendous costs involved - some say the decommissioning could cost many times the initial building costs. More optimistic estimates suggest a cost of cleaning up the toxic and highly dangerous mess might cost a mere $4000 per Kw of installed capacity, but I wonder if this fully costs out the disposal, storage, and making safe of vast quantities of materials, and does it cost the making safe of the site for the next 200,000 years?

Rather These in your Area than a Nuclear Reactor?

Cost of Wind Turbines

The cost of wind turbines has fallen steadily over recent years as turbine design has been improved and simplified. The installed cost per kilowatt of capacity are generally taken as an average of €1,350 per kW in 2009. The costs are expected to fall further to €1,240 per kW by 2020 and €1,216 by 2030.

The problem with wind energy is that it is intermittent and therefore needs some sort of storage capacity to balance the load. Batteries for storage wind power sell for €2,500 a kilowatt. Compressed air power storage can cost €750 per kilowatt.

Allowing for storage capacity it is still fair to argue that Wind Power would be considerable more economical, in the log run, than Nuclear Power, not to mention safety, national security issues, aesthetics, and sustainability. Nuclear fuels are not a renewable resource.

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SEAI blog stats

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My Blog Stats

My first ever blog post was posted on the 7th June 2006. Since that day, I have posted a total to date of 594 articles.

http://wood-pellet-ireland.blogspot.com/2006/06/wood-pellet-heating-rip-off-in-ireland.html


Some of my regular readers have asked me regarding my site statistics so I have taken a snapshot of the 14 day graph and have pasted it below.

The average daily hit rate is going around the 340 - 360 mark at the moment. Not big numbers by any means but for a speciality blog I feel it is not too bad.

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Blog Comments - Links and Spam

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I hate

Embedded Links 

and SPAM

Most of the comments I have received on this blog in recent months have either been pure 100% genuine SPAM or have had commercial links embedded.

I don't mind links to non commercial blogs and non profit organisations etc. but I do not tolerate any other types of link.

PLEASE NOTE:

All commercially linked comments will be marked SPAM and will, forever more, remain invisible to this blog.

Good riddance!!

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Zero Cost + Painless 2% Energy Saving

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We Can Save 2% of Energy

by simply

Stopping Food Wastage

I was taught as a child that to waste food was a sin before God, and additionally it was an insult to the hungry people of the world. In Ireland we waste hundreds of tons of food every day. Every household dumps loads of good food. Eateries dump tons of unused food every day. Supermarkets discard perfectly good food when the date is not to EU liking.

A scientific study in the USA has shown a painless way of saving 2% of the entire energy of the US. A saving of approximately 350 million barrels of oil each and every year. All of that energy saving can be made without spending a single dollar. The magic formula: Stop wasting food.

1.4 billion barrels of oil go into food production, packaging and distribution each year. The study found that somewhere between 8% and 16% of national energy consumption went into food in 2007.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate that 27% of food is wasted each year. Doing the maths, that represents approximately 2% US annual energy consumption.


In our fat and rich part of the world, we have sinned greatly before God by our wasteful ways, and daily we insult the third world with our arrogant food orgy.




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Dealing with Down-Draught

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Curing 
Down-Draught
Problems

One of a series of 4 Posts on the General Subject

Downdraught problems have a fairly simple solution. Simply stated, it is to use the “Venturi Effect” to your advantage.

 Giovanni Battista Venturi 1746 - 1822 Italian Physicist

Thank you -Giovanni Battista Venturi for outlining this important effect for us - so many years ago, the auto industry would have been rightly screwed only for you!

The venturi effect states that where there is a flow across the end of a tube it causes a suction or negative pressure within the tube.

So the answer to your downdraught problem is to use a chimney cowl that ustilises the effect defined by Giovanni Battista Venturi.

Above is a diagram of the airflow in a Cylinder type Anti-Downdraught cowl. The arrows show a downdraught pushing down through the top of the cowl. The inner cylinder is the actual flue and this opens in such a way as to present the flue outlet at a right angle to the air flow inside the larger cylinder. The downward airflow blowing across the end of the flue outlet thus creates a venturi effect and thereby a suction up the flue pipe. It does not matter in which direction the wind pattern strikes the cowl, because the venturi effect will work with an airflow in either direction and cause a suction up the flue.

This is an example of a Cylindrical Anti-Downdraught Cowl

 

Above is another common type of anti-downdraught cowl. It is called a H cowl for obvious reasons. It works on exactly the same principle as the cylindrical type. Either type of cowl will usually solve a downdraught problem. These types of cowl will however NOT solve a pressure zone problem, as already discussed in the previous post - go look!

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Dealing with Downdraughts and Pressure Zones

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Pressure Zones

&

Down-draughts

So how do you deal with these two quite seperate problem; (1) Pressure Zones and  (2) Down Draughts? A Pressure Zone is created when a wind blows against a house or other obstruction causing the wind to dam up and form an area of raised pressure.

A down draught is formed when the wind blows over the top of an obstruction such as a hill, a large building, or grove of trees. The wind tends to curl down on the far side of the obstruction in a vortex type movement.

Downdraughts.

Downdraught problems have a fairly simple solution; simply stated it is to use the “Venturi Effect” to your advantage.

I mentioned the “venturi effect” in my last post on smoking fires, where I pointed out that an air intake with only a single inlet point could suffer from a suction effect rather than a desired positive pressure of air to a fire. Simply stated the venturi effect says that if you blow across the end of a tube, you cause a suction or partial vacuum in the tube.

An Artists Fixative Sprayer Uses the Venturi Effect

If you would like to demonstrate this effect, simply place a clear plastic tube or a drinking straw in a glass of water.  The water level inside the tube will match that outside of the tube. Now, blow across the top of the tube, like you might blow across a panpipes, and you will see the water being sucked up inside the tube. Artists use a simple sprayer that utilises the venturi effect to spray fixative onto a watercolour. Carburettors use the venturi effect to suck the fuel into the air stream and thus atomise the fuel.

How is the venturi effect going to help?  Well tune in to my next post and I will fully explain and make a few suggestions.

Pressure Zones

Pressure zones are another ball game altogether. Small pressure zones against the roof of a house can easily be overcome. You simply have to put the chimney well above the pressure zone - a taller chimney will generally do the trick. Simply add an extension to the chimney pot. Some problems have been cleared by adding 600mm to the height.

But what is the pressure zone is a very large one cause by an embankment etc.? If the pressure zone engulfs the entire house, it will usually cause no problem because all of the affected areas will have the same pressure. Problems only arise when there is a pressure differential; more pressure at the top of the chimney than at the bottom!

Curing Down-Draught problems next:

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