Posted by Dale on Feb 26, 2002 at 11:11
(204.212.222.66)
Re: Dale Question - but others feel free (bobbapink)
Assumption: People woke up one day with a clue. I know it's wild but play along.
No better way to learn stuff than to play along with a blue sky assumption and see where it leads.
The nuclear industry is allowed to build power plants in a regulatory environment mandating only that overall safety, in terms of likely lost person-years, not exceed that of the non-nuclear power industry after accounting for processes from mining to disposal.
But this is WAY out there! You really want nuclear with 200,000 deaths per year instead of less than 10? Ok, I’ll play and I even have a way to get the cost way down if we do this.
What is your best shoot-from-the-hip guess as to the production cost per Kwh?
If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. Let’s build them fuel cells to replace oil in all uses including everything from transportation to blast furnaces. Get the hydrogen from nuke. Replace all the coal and gas with nuke electricity. Heat homes with nuke. If it moves or gets warm or is bright, make it run on nuke.
Stay with me now. I’m going to run through this fast without all the intermediate steps. Feel free to ask questions at the end.
The US currently consumes about 10^17 BTU/yr. (a href=http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/sep/us/frame.html> http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/sep/us/frame.html
) Assuming the inefficiency of replacing primary energy sources with electricity and hydrogen and…, we’ll need about 5e17 BTU.Here’s an interesting site on nuclear fuel cycles. http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/index.html I don’t vouch for the accuracy of the results (this is an environmentalist site intent on showing nuke will kill everyone and cost far more than we are told) but they don’t seem totally out of bounds and they can be used for “shoot-from-the-hip” discussion. We start by converting 5e17 BTU to 1.7e4 GWa and plug that in to find the deaths. 90K total. WAY high but less than half the coal deaths in the US every year. So let’s do some simple things to get them down again. We prohibit people from living on mine tailings and put the tailings back in the mine they came out of. That saves 55K. That brings the total down to 35K. One sixth the current deaths just from coal.
So we go over to the cost calculator. Plug in the current nuke production and see that they say nuke costs $20e9 to produce 6e12 KWh. That’s 0.3 cents/KWH. (That’s actually about right even though these are environmentalists who want you to think nuke is tremendously expensive if you include all the costs. The real cost of electricity is distribution and not generation.) The efficiencies of scale should make that price much lower when we scale up to an all nuke economy.
So, what would the costs be if we came to our senses? With the same outrageously expensive technology we now use we would save 5 out of six people who now die from the effect of the soot we now dump in the air and the primary cost would be about a third of what we now pay. The total cost would be about the same since most of the cost of energy is in distribution and not the source.
So now I said I had a way to get the cost WAY down. Distribution is the expensive item. To eliminate distribution we need to generate the energy with nuke at the point of use. Let’s put a nuke reactor in every home and office. Now the deaths are going to rise but considering that we have plenty to spare to get back up to where we are now… We can build a totally self controlled reactor that generates a fixed temperature for well over 100 years. We design it such that as the temperature rises the fuel container expands from the heat which decreases the reaction rate causing the temperature to fall. Totally self regulating by the physics of the design. The TRIGA reactor (a href=http://www.ga.com/triga/frtyears.html> http://www.ga.com/triga/frtyears.html ) near my home works on this principle. I have stood on top of it and looked directly at the fuel rods while the control rods were fired out and the power level went from 1W to 1e9 W in a millisecond. The result is a nice blue flash and a ripple in the water from the sudden heat produced. But the reactor stabilizes in less than a second because as the temperature rises the reaction goes out.
So we build these little TRIGA reactors with no control rods producing a fixed fuel temperature. No moving parts. They produce heat that can be converted to electricity with simple thermocouples. Seal the unit to prevent even water vapor from escaping and you have a totally self contained self controlled source of DC electricity. Use it directly to break up water to make hydrogen. Add a solid state DC to AC converter and you have a replacement for the electric utility company.
Now we have the political problem of getting these things into homes and offices. Simple. We have this black box that has two wires coming out that makes electricity and lasts for 100 years. We don’t tell anyone what is inside. Instead we form a corporation to produce a device called GeOThermal Technology Creates Hydrogen Artfully. Just a black cylinder with a cable coming out of the top. We install it by digging a well down to ground water (good sink for the waste heat) and drop the device in. Tell the customer we are tapping into the heat of the earth (actually tapping OUR heat into the earth). The environmentalists will especially buy into this.
Yes, the radiation level would increase slightly. But if we bury these things at least 20 feet down the number of additional deaths would still be immeasurable. The cost would be a one time cost for the device (should be less than $20K for a 10KW mass produced unit). It would produce energy for the full life of the fuel charge. That would be in the range of 0.3 cents /KWH which is far less than the current 10 cents you pay your electric utility to bring the cheap power they generate to your home.
Re: Speaking of AC/DC Dale 01/3 10:39
(3)