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| Topic of the week: green mercantilism | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 16 2015, 07:58 PM (199 Views) | |
| Larsland | Jun 16 2015, 07:58 PM Post #1 |
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Thought I'd throw up a controversial topic in economics ![]() Mercantilism is where the government takes control of an economy to bring down the economies of other governments. Green mercantilism is where the government takes control of the green sector specifically, and tries to out-green all the other governments. An example was when China nationally exported solar panels below market rates, making it difficult for solar manufacturers in other countries (primarily the USA) to compete. However, it also meant solar panels became much more affordable and the environment may have become more green. What's your stand on green mercantilism? |
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| Ismaria | Jun 19 2015, 01:14 AM Post #21 |
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When exactly have you seen a missile blow up a nuclear power plant? One could argue the same missile could destroy a wind farm or a hydroelectric dam. It's a ridiculous hypothetical scenario. Nuclear power plants run on a closed system. Radioactive water does not leave the system until it is treated sufficiently and properly. A hydroelectric dam can easily run 200 years plus. I'll believe it when a dam is still in operation a hundred years from now. Hydroelectric dams have only been around for a hundred years or so. Solar panels, sixty. Structurally speaking, a dam might be standing a century from now, but its electrical systems, without maintenance and care, won't be around for so long. The problem with solar panels is that for thin films, the maximum efficiency today is only 13%. Solar panels aren't really viable commercially unless you seriously want to ruin your country. Hydroelectric also has a few problems of its own. They severely limit the movement of silt downstream, leading to poorer crop yields for fields downstream. Just as it is catastrophic when a nuclear power plant fails, so is it when a hydroelectric dam breaks. |
| Naal Okvahlinro stahdim jah, mu kroniin! | |
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| Larsland | Jun 19 2015, 06:56 AM Post #22 |
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I don't think it's ridiculous. New things come up all the time and people plan ahead to deal with them. Saying something was totally unprecedented really means they couldn't be bothered dealing with it before it became a problem. A wind farm would be more difficult to destroy as the turbines are quite isolated from each other, and they are not generally located next to important infrastructure. It's true dams do suffer from the same problem, though for various reasons (notably, lower costs generally meaning fewer incentives to use cheaper, weakest-link construction materials) dams tend to be built out of stronger materials. That said, a bomb in a dam and nuclear reactor would both probably cause a fair amount of devastation. A system that outputs untreated waste is not closed, but it is a fairly closed system especially compared to other non-renewables. Renewables are also fairly closed. Not sure why there's this obsession with the generation part of the lifecycle here again. Electrical systems of a nuclear plant would die in hours without maintenance and care. At the very least you need a computer to monitor some basic stuff, and nuclear plants almost universally employ full-time engineers and security guards. Dams generally share an engineer or two among several dams within an area, and very rarely have any kind of security. The point is, all electrical systems require ongoing maintenance. The theory says Hydro has a lifespan at LEAST four times that of nuclear, and many should last many centuries longer still - that's just in the generation, not the fuel, which is infinite with Hydro. The oldest hydro dams are now well over 100 years old and still in perfect working order. Compare that to nuclear, where most first generation plants are now already decommissioned. Not sure where that calculation of efficiency comes from. Are you talking about how much incoming energy it transforms into power? If so then, it doesn't actually matter what the efficiency is does it? If solar has more than 7.5 times the energy to transform as nuclear does, then it generates more. And it so happens that it does - the sun is really, really big! On sunny days, solar outperforms nuclear every time. Places that have large solar plants routinely see their supply of electricity go so high, they couldn't use all that power if they tried. Seriously, a negative price for electricity is just economically messed up. Nuclear is more constant, but solar is EASILY able to beat it given good conditions. I agree hydro is about equally dangerous to nuclear. Some newer designs for hydro dams are a lot better with how they manage things like silt, fish etc. It's far more progressed than research into future fusion reactors, that's for sure, but I'll grant you, there's work to be done. This being said, I find in practice this only applies to truly massive megadams, such as those in China and South America - crops grow just fine by New Zealand rivers that are dammed. You only really hear about it where the silt movement is actually, like, pretty huge. And there's been a lot of good developments in this field even for those dams. I don't think silt movement is a convincing argument against hydro power in general. |
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| Ismaria | Jun 19 2015, 09:06 AM Post #23 |
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I'm not saying nuclear is particularly better- they all have their problems. That's why its in the best interest to not have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. I like tidal power, particularly. Radioactive water, and I want to make this clear, never leaves the closed system in a PWR reactor. The same water is used again and again to be pumped into the reactor, pumped back out (under pressure to prevent boiling) into a steam generator and then that same steam is condensed back into water and pumped back into the system. Also, the PWR reactor can scram itself- all designs feature control rods held up by electromagnets that will fall as soon as power is cut. While the same can't be said for Fukushima, Fort Calhoun Nuclear Reactor survived just fine through the 2011 Missouri Flood- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Corp_of_Eng._6-16-11A_267.JPG/1600px-Corp_of_Eng._6-16-11A_267.JPG The Nuclear Reactor Commission had this to say about the possibility of terrorists flying planes into nuclear power plants: "Nuclear power plants are inherently robust structures that our studies show provide adequate protection in a hypothetical attack by an airplane. The NRC has also taken actions that require nuclear power plant operators to be able to manage large fires or explosions—no matter what has caused them." I'd imagine this robustness could probably stretch over to being attacked by a missile. So nuclear reactors are very safe places, and can survive on their own for more than "a few hours" as you suggest. Edited by Ismaria, Jun 19 2015, 09:06 AM.
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| Naal Okvahlinro stahdim jah, mu kroniin! | |
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| Larsland | Jun 19 2015, 05:54 PM Post #24 |
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Ismaria, you can't reuse the same water that you used in a steam generator indefinitely. That's how you get meltdowns. With all that pressure the heat and radioactivity keeps building, and eventually destroys the reactor. The water does get replaced, though it is generally (barring the occasional malfunction) treated first in cooling towers and such. It's true many reactors can scram themselves, kinda sorta (given time) - so too can many renewables I might add - but that isn't the only thing that can go wrong inside a plant. Hence why, as I said, nuclear employs more people in each plant. Floods are rarely so bad as tsunami because you can see the flood waters rising up and take action. Nuclear can be easily shut off given a few hours, but not instantly, because the core needs to cool down slowly to prevent a meltdown. A fusion reactor, if ever built, would drastically cut this time, but it would still not be any better against events without even a few dozen seconds warning, such as an extremely sudden earthquake. Some reactors are built to withstand these quakes as well to be fair (China has some amazing earthquake protections on their reactors that have withstood some giant quakes) but such protections are expensive and most countries tend to forgo them. The NRC, of all lobby groups, would be the least knowledgeable in that. These are the same guys who literally sold nuclear materials for a dirty bomb to US government agents posing as terrorists in 2007. Pretty much everyone agrees they're a classic example of the corruption that exists within the nuclear industry. If you're reading anything on nuclear power, please don't read it from the nuclear industry themselves, because they're like the FIFA of energy generation. |
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| Britannia | Jun 19 2015, 06:07 PM Post #25 |
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Ironically, solar power tries taking energy from an energy source which we ourselves can create here in a smaller scale through nuclear fusion... Hence why in the long run a 100% efficiency solar panel wouldn't compete against a perfected fusion reactor. |
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| Ismaria | Jun 19 2015, 10:44 PM Post #26 |
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Hours? Try minutes, Lars. Sometimes it's even seconds. As soon as those control rods drop down, it's a quick shutdown- hence the name SCRAM. While there will always be decay heat (about 7% of the output, depending on the design of the reactor), the reactor can be brought from a meltdown state into a safe, controlled state in minutes. As I said before, in modern designs, control rods are supported above the reactor by electromagnets- as soon as the power fails, these rods drop, scramming the reactor immediately. The shutdown of a reactor is quick and automatic enough that it's often called simply a reactor trip as well. Computers monitor reactor heat as well nowadays, and they'll automatically scram if the reactor is in danger of overheating. There is really not much need for human intervention in an emergency situation. Radioactivity and pressure of the coolant has nothing to do with the creation of a meltdown scenario. PWR reactors aren't reactors where the reactor is under pressure, but where the water is under pressure. This prevents the water from boiling off until it gets to the steam generator, a larger, more open container where it is allowed to evaporate to drive the steam turbines. The pressure of the coolant has nothing to do with the overheating of the reactor. And radioactivity having something to do with it? That's just plain stupid. Water is only removed from the system once it's been treated. Nuclear power companies aren't stupid- they know they'll be beaten into the ground by the EPA if they catch them dumping radioactive water anywhere. The reason why Fort Calhoun wasn't scrammed and maintained operation during the flood is because it had eight foot floodwalls built around all essential buildings.They didn't even need to consider that the Missouri was flooding. Fukushima should have taken greater precautions for tsunamis and earthquakes in its design, and Tokyo Electric is certainly paying the price for it. But Fukushima and Fort Calhoun aside- how safe are nuclear power plants anyway? Let's define a "catastrophic disaster" as a disaster that involves the significant loss of life. How many catastrophic disasters have there been since the invention of nuclear power? One- Chernobyl. Let's look at hydroelectric dams (starting in 1959, since that's the general time of the first nuclear power plant): Vega de Tera dam failure, 144 deaths, Malpasset dam failure, 423 deaths, Kurenivka dam failure and mudslide, 1.500 deaths, Panshet dam failure, 1,000 deaths, Sempor dam failure, 2,000 deaths, the Banqiao and Shimantan dam failures- 171,000 deaths. Clearly, at least in the case of catastrophic disasters, nuclear is far superior in safety than hydroelectric dams. Edited by Ismaria, Jun 20 2015, 09:36 AM.
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| Naal Okvahlinro stahdim jah, mu kroniin! | |
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| Larsland | Jun 20 2015, 12:41 AM Post #27 |
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@Britannia - of course it can. Even a fusion reactor needs fuel, while with solar, the fuel is free and readily available. As I've been saying all along, the biggest problem with nuclear is the cost. It's more expensive over the production lifecycle than most people realize. @Ismaria - Can I see such a design? I know they use electromagnets to trigger the shutdown process, what the nuclear folks call a scram, but my understanding is that in all current production reactors there's still a cooling process that needs to happen that runs for at least an hour. Some points here regarding water's role in a meltdown. As the term meltdown suggests, it occurs when the fuel becomes too hot. When the cooling systems remove less heat than the core creates, then things get hotter and hotter until the whole thing disintegrates. If the water is radioactive, that contributes to the heating process. If the water is warm, it can remove less heat. The more pressurized the water, the less well it can absorb heat. This is all fairly basic physics. Water isn't just a system to drive some turbines, it usually also doubles as the cooling system. And if the water is not cooled, then there's a problem. Molten-type reactors (such as the proposed molten salt design) promise to avoid that problem a little bit, but the point is, water is CRUCIAL in preventing a meltdown process. It's why you can have a reactor at all. Untreated water has several times "accidentally" been dumped out of power plants. Occasionally nuclear companies have been fined, though this is rare because the industry is corrupt. They don't care. Most generators are built with government subsidies and the privately operated. The thing is that running a nuclear reactor has surprisingly variable profitability, as the price of power can change quickly due to it more being influenced by renewables. In countries such as the UK, reactors have had to be shut down because they were too seriously bankrupt. To stay afloat, in the US, the culture is more to cut corners than allow the plant to go under. The government, supported by the well-funded nuclear lobby, sets fines low to ensure a stable energy supply and a return on investment on the plants they subsidized. Again, I don't deny hydro has the potential to kill millions. I've said it many times throughout this thread. Wind and solar and tidal, not so much, but hydro certainly. It's roughly the same level of danger as nuclear. The thing is, people take a LOT of precautions with nuclear and pay a lot of money to keep nuclear plants safe. It's interesting to note that Chernobyl was a plant that specifically wasn't doing that and several people had raised alarms that it was unsafe before the incident. People don't do that so much with dams. People tend to trust dams and not worry too much. The thing is, dams are extremely strongly built and don't tend to break on their own. Almost every disaster in history was caused by somebody making a serious human error with the operation of floodgates during a storm, which caused flooding downriver, and those floods proved deadly, not the dam itself. And I agree, people should be more worried about dams, and since those high profile dam mistakes, several redundant security steps are now built into most modern hydro plants. It's still a lot easier to keep a hydro dam safe than a nuclear plant, it's just that culturally people tend not to bother to worry about it as much as they do nuclear. Edited by Larsland, Jun 20 2015, 12:42 AM.
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| Ismaria | Jun 20 2015, 09:35 AM Post #28 |
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The US patent for control rods being held up by electromagnets was patented in 1992. http://www.google.com/patents/US5114663 Here is a paper written in 1999 about how these passive systems (which include electromagnets) can also be designed to drop control rods when they detect temperature in the reactor to be unsafe: http://www.kns.org/jknsfile/v31/A04803285794.pdf Scrams are usually called reactor trips at PWR plants. According to Duke Energy, control rods are designed to enter the reactor core and stop the fission reaction in less than two seconds. The time you refer to as "hours" is this: "The time required to return the power plant to service is determined by the time required to assess and correct the cause of the trip limit being exceeded. A normal time to recover from a minor problem would be roughly 48 – 96 hours." The NRC agrees with this, saying three seconds is how long it takes to shut down a reactor. (http://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2013/07/17/a-reactor-trip-an-important-nuclear-safeguard/) Yes, pressurized water does absorb less heat, but that's not at all what happens in a PWR reactor. Here's a diagram of the water flow at a PWR reactor. http://www.nrc.gov/images/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/student-pwr.gif The water (coolant) is heated in the reactor, right? This prevents a meltdown and keeps the temperature of the reactor stable. Then, you'll notice, there's a little thing called a pressurizer. The water isn't pressurized when it enters the reactor, it's pressurized once it leaves the reactor to prevent it from boiling until it gets to the steam generator. The water is not pressurized when it is in the reactor. The water is not particularly radioactive when it is entered into the reactor. In this way water serves as both the coolant and the means of the generating electricity at a PWR power plant. I would like to see some examples of untreated water being dumped. "Dams are extremely strong built." Tell that to the 11 million Chinese who had their homes washed away when 62 poorly-made and poorly-built dams were all destroyed in Typhoon Nina. Dams have so much more potential to create loss of life. As I mentioned earlier, since 1959, there has been plenty of catastrophic disasters involving dams while there has been only one with a nuclear reactor. How exactly does that equate in your mind to hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants being equal in safety? Edited by Ismaria, Jun 20 2015, 09:39 AM.
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| Naal Okvahlinro stahdim jah, mu kroniin! | |
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| Ismaria | Jun 20 2015, 09:58 AM Post #29 |
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Oh, and adding on to what I said previously. The cost of nuclear per kilowatt hour has remained well below 3 cents for the past 18 years. The cost doesn't fluctuate as much as Lars wants you to think. In fact, nuclear per kilowatt hour (at only 2.40 cents) is below coal (3.27 cents), natural gas (3.40 cents), and petroleum (22.48 cents) in cost. So, in the long run (and these reactors last for half a century), nuclear is immensely profitable. Do you know why nuclear has such low costs? Because only 31% of this is actual fuel costs. (http://www.nuclearmatters.com/economic-engines/low-costs) Look, the largest solar farm in the world, Topaz Solar Farm, only makes 1100 GWh per year- and it is highly variable (is it sunny today)? Whereas nuclear is running 24/7, around the clock, at a standard speed of generation. A powerplant near where I used to live, Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, makes 10,763 GWh per year. And that's just on one reactor! Solar power is so vastly inefficient compared to nuclear it's not even funny. What's great about nuclear is it actually produces less radiation than coal power. That's right. Less radiation than coal power. You want to know why? The byproducts produced in coal power plants, flyash and bottom ash, both of these are loaded with heavy metals (uranium not excluded). When they're burned, they're thrown up into the atmosphere. Oh, and it gets better. You think nuclear waste is a problem? Try coal power plant waste. It's buried too. And it contaminates groundwater with mercury, boron, cobalt, and even arsenic. The EPA in 2011 listed 141 coal ash ponds that posed a significant hazard. 47 of these were life-threatening. When have you seen nuclear waste facilities be life-threatening on a scale like that? (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Radioactive-Waste-Management/) If you want an efficient, safe, and in the long-term cost effective solution to climate change and pollution, choose nuclear. Edited by Ismaria, Jun 20 2015, 10:05 AM.
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| Naal Okvahlinro stahdim jah, mu kroniin! | |
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| Larsland | Jun 20 2015, 07:49 PM Post #30 |
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Ismaria- Like I said, that control rod system you linked only TRIGGERS the shutdown procedure to begin. Seriously read it. The whole thing is a glorified switch, exactly like I was saying. It makes the shutdown process automatic, but the cooling period is the SAME. Your paper adds nothing to this discussion at all. It points out that its safer than other systems, not that it helps it cool faster as you're trying to claim. Just because you instantly stop the reaction doesn't mean the fuel isn't still hot. It still needs cooling. In other words, just because you break the circuit of the generator (which happens a fair amount) doesn't mean the plant stops needing power. If the water isn't hot and pressurized when it enters the reactor, there must have been some time when it unpressurized and cooled, and had time to remove the radioactivity, since the last time it went through the reactor, right? Your diagram uses a condenser to cool it, along with a constant supply of fresh cooling water (this isn't the only way, but it's valid). Similarly, the reactor vessel is cooled by the cool water coming in constantly. This all supports what I've been saying all along. An example of water not being fully treated largely due to the need for marginal profitability in US culture? Sure. Lake Erie. http://www.rense.com/general96/lakeerie.html In Typhoon Nina, the dam systems wouldn't have collapsed if the dams had been opened. Due to a communication failure and, to a lesser extent, the weather service in China sucking at the time, the dams were kept closed. The dams themselves were fine and would have killed nobody if they had only been opened at any point between the start of the storm and their failures, which was many hours. Modern dams are now designed to open automatically once they detect the water reaches a certain overflow limit height. They equate because both have great POTENTIAL to kill people. I could steal nuclear waste and make a bomb out of it, or I could sabotage a hydro dam somehow. Both would have a roughly equal effect in terms of impact. Nuclear GENERATION is extremely cheap. What's expensive is building the plant, storing the fuel etc, which is not counted in generation. The cost here is the price at which the plant sells to the national grid, which barring some kind of issue at the plant, shouldn't change at all for nuclear. Other types of generators with an inconsistent output sell at massively fluctuating prices, which sometimes makes this energy cheaper for the grid to buy than the nuclear power. Uranium is fairly cheap right now (in no small thanks to government interference and anti-coal, anti-pollution lobbies) but one thing people should know is that there was once a time, not too long ago, when OIL was fairly cheap. Few nations export uranium in bulk and they're perfectly capable of holding much of the developed world to ransom. Knowing Australia, you can be sure it's not a matter of if, but when. Topaz may be the biggest in size, but it is not the biggest in output. I'll happily admit that it can be variable and depends on weather. But like with putting a wind turbine in an extra-windy city, you can in fact control this slightly by wisely choosing the location of your plant. I'll believe nuclear is as efficient as solar if it ever manages to do this: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/05/queensland-solar-negative-electricity-prices/ http://energytransition.de/2014/05/german-power-prices-negative-over-weekend/ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-12/spot-power-turns-negative-in-california-on-solar-wind-output All over the world, solar has a proven ability to supply so much electricity sometimes, rather than paying for electricity, you got paid to use electricity. And that wasn't because of some publicity stunt, that was because the price of electricity went down to "free", and then went BELOW EVEN THAT! Almost every solar plant has proven itself cost effective by the end of its life. Coal used to be the most profitable kind of power station. Now, believe it or not, in places where solar has decent adoption, solar is becoming the most profitable easily as they flood the market with cheap power: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/solar-has-won-even-if-coal-were-free-to-burn-power-stations-couldnt-compete I agree nuclear RELEASES less radiation than coal, even though strictly speaking, nuclear generation is more radioactive. If you don't count nuclear waste, that is. Renewables are still the least radioactive, with the possible exception of solar if you count the pollution from mining for the cells (which unfortunately isn't very environmentally friendly and is the main reason I don't support it). |
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