Can anyone compute the ecological footprint of this power plant?
Just curious how much raw material( water, etc, even waste ) went into building all that panels and the auxiliar stuff.
Just curious how much raw material( water, etc, even waste ) went into building all that panels and the auxiliar stuff.
I'd be astonished if it wasn't clearly the least impactful.
What the world needs is easier ability to compare true impact of building, and running our stuff. Without all the hidden externalities and hidden subsidies.
Nuclear is a close third with waste included for ecological foot print including waste. Its a $$$ game that Nuclear losses.
http://www.nei.org/News-Media/News/News-Archives/Nuclear-Pow... (Has a strong bias towards nuclear)
Nature article shows its the money and lead time that kills nuclear.
"Add to that the high costs and long lead times for building a nuclear plant about $3 billion for a 1,000 megawatt plant, with planning, licensing and construction times of about 10 years and nuclear power is even less appealing." (2008)
And now the cheap cost of solar and other alternative energy shows that it makes financially cense to use renewable over traditional carbon fuels.
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0810/full/climate.2008.99...
http://energypost.eu/battery-storage-will-take-backup-power-...
In the next 10 years batteries will have a larger role and about 25% of coal power plants will be retired by 2020 in US and Europe.
If these regulations were updated to require less polluting peaker plants, nuclear might be the only option because the economics are government mandated. I wouldn't be surprised if California started moving this direction by 2050 if it can give up the Nat gas addiction.
Yeah. I tried to create a (potential) transaction-oriented economic 'markup' system a few years ago... http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex ... despite some early interest via the IRTF, it never received any other developers and my then-employer asked me to focus elsewhere. The idea was basically that you built a risk model and then formally described enough properties of a potential transaction to enable automated routing of transactions even across multi-hop, multi-settlement-system, multi-asset topologies. I'd be willing to pick it up again as a group if anyone wanted to combine efforts.
I came around to the area because we were building a crypto-currency exchange (Kraken) and the availability (24x7x365) and risk management (re: gray settlement periods, exchange rate exposure, per-transaction and/or per-subsystem critical failure scenarios) profiles were therefore fairly extreme. It occurred to me that a decently generic solution in this space was not limited to conventional or digital assets and could apply with equal utility to physical goods and services.
Everything I've done since I have always regretted not finishing that project because I felt it would have been useful. This strongly suggests to me that there really is an opportunity to produce something in this space for wide adoption.
There is an ecological construction cost in any kind of power plant.
Regardless, this is still pretty awesome and my (limited) understanding of India suggests that it has the kind of climate that would really let this shine (pun intended).
Technology has advanced a lot since Homer got out of the lead suit. A lot of nations just refuse to use said technology out of fears that there will be another Chernobyl (human error and poor maintenance) or Fukishima. Fukishima is a very real danger, but partially avoidable through contained systems [0] and a comparable threat for other power plant models)
Yes, you will eventually have some waste. But nowhere near as much as we used to. And there have been quite a few studies (and "common sense") to indicate that greenhouse gas emissions are MUCH MUCH lower [1] than most of the alternatives.
So it is a tradeoff. Obviously solar/wind/geothermal/hydro [2] are the best choices where feasible. But if you can't use those reliably in a manner that is able to provide required energy at all hours of the day (including peak usage), you are stuck with dirty approaches. And of those, nuclear is pretty gosh darned "clean".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small,_sealed,_transportable,_...
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-basics/greenhouse-gas-e...
[2] Hydro actually tends to cause a lot of problems for wildlife and the like. Not aware of any drawbacks for the other three though
I'm from Germany and since our Chancellor closed down this disastrous technology, those who were running it try to get rid of that shiny radioactive material and they can't (instead they are creating sub companies who's products are green energy). Now Germany and me will have to pay for it to disappear. Maybe France will take it. With their old and crappy plants some more leakage from the processing plants won't show.
Or maybe we can sell it to China. At some point they may pay a lot for it. Or we just wait for Trump to start a new cold war. I've read this stuff is good for weapons.
Unfortunately our Country is not as big as the US or Russia so the usual dig and forget won't work.
Wow...I mean..this technology was good at some point in our history for different reasons. But that point has passed. We did not come up with good solutions for the plants or the waste. I don't see any reason to INVEST in this. It's like investing in coal again.
Because your government said reprocessing was not allowed, there is now an excess of nuclear material. Ergo, reprocessing is a bad technology
Thank you for illustrating my point. The tech is sound. Getting past the fearmongers and actually using it is the problem. We have had some ridiculously safe reactors for decades, we just aren't allowed to build or use them anywhere. We have ways to deal with waste, but we aren't allowed to do it... and then get yelled at for having excess waste.
Seriously. Put your prejudices and patriotism at the door and actually do some research on the subject. Yes, a lot of this hasn't been tested at scale (in large part because politicians and Activists won't let anyone) but they have been researched VERY heavily, tested at varying scales, and are a more viable alternative than anything else right now. But because there is a "nuclear" in the name, it is inherently evil and wrong.
> We have had some ridiculously safe reactors for decades, we just aren't allowed to build or use them anywhere.
Why should you? The same thing has been said about those xx years old ones who threaten our lives east and west of Germany while we have so much green energy that we have to sell it.
> We have ways to deal with waste, but we aren't allowed to do it...
Yeah but those ways suck. They are bad for the environment and they cost a hell lot of money those who ran the plants don't want to pay for: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/kosten-atommuell-101.html
> Seriously. Put your prejudices and patriotism at the door and actually do some research on the subject.
I got the fallout of Tszarnobyl in east Poland as a child and Fukushima on a trip in Tokyo. Spare your idiotic propaganda about how safe this last century technology is supposed to be. It's dead and the sooner the nations who still base their electricity output on it recognize this, the better for the whole humankind.
Because your government said reprocessing was not allowed because they base their decisions on decades old technology and ignore any advances, there is now an excess of nuclear material. Ergo, reprocessing is a bad technology
Aside from that: If anyone who can avoid calling people "idiotic" and cares to read (I addressed the Chernobyl and Fukishima issues) wishes to continue discussion, feel free. I would love to. But I don't really see a point with this person though.
You've adressed Fukushima and Czarnobyl? Are you kidding me? You swiped that away saying one was a human error like this would never happen again and the other could be solved by some technology that didn't even come up with a prototype somewhere in the past and the development on it stopped 2015. It's in the link you've posted!
And you wonder why word like "idiotic" come up...besides the fact that you've started the insulting first of course.
Here's one of the top results of a search I just did, which seems like a good start for those interested: A Comparative Analysis of Energy Costs of Photovoltaic, Solar Thermal, and Wind Electricity Generation Technologies [1] - this is a 2013 meta-analysis of life-cycle assessments (LCA) and life-cycle energy costs (LCEC) in kWhe/Wp and kWhe/We - these are split into both capex and opex.
Here's another study from 2012, The Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) of Photovoltaics: Methodology and Comparisons with Fossil Fuel Life Cycles [2] that gives a chart w/ comparison to coal & oil energy - looks like plants w/ all PV types have better EROI than oil-fired electricity, and the best performing PV has EROI of about 12, on par w/ the worst performing coal-fired electricity (an EROI of 1 is breakeven btw).
Ah, just find this 2015 review: Energy payback time (EPBT) and energy return on energy invested (EROI) of solar photovoltaic systems: A systematic review and meta-analysis [3] which actually might be the best paper I've seen yet. It looks like EROI for solar is actually growing tremendously as volume/learning rate advancements are applied.
If I'm reading the chart correctly, EPBT (energy payback time) for mono-Si is approaching 2 years (the time of which has been decreasing with each newer study) as more panels/plants are getting built.
(Interesting, this paper [4] from 2000 seems to correctly project payback times: "At present the energy payback time for PV systems is in the range 8 to 11 years, compared with typical system lifetimes of around 30 years. About 60% of the embodied energy is due to the silicon wafers. As the PV industry reduces production costs and moves to the use of thin film solar cells the energy payback time will decline to about two years.")
[1] PDF: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/3/2/325/pdf
[2] PDF: http://www.clca.columbia.edu/241_Raugei_EROI_EP_revised_II_2...
[3] PDF: http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~relling2/PDF/pubs/life_cycl...