alt.energy.renewable

"Fran" < @ > wrote in message
news: @ ...
> On Jul 21, 12:39 am, "daestrom"
> wrote:
>> "Fran" < ...@ > wrote in message
>>
>> news: @ ...
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Jul 20, 6:24 pm, "Arnold Walker"
>> > wrote:
>> >> "Fran" < ...@ > wrote in message
>>
>> >>news: @ ...
>>
>>
>>
>> >> The hidden cost is also true of wind turbines as well.
>> >> You can look at numerous turbine sites over the years and see that.
>>
>> > No, I can't. Wind technology is improving each year. Twenty years ago,
>> > they weren't built in the right places or to the right scale.
>>
>> >> Whether you are talking California,Hawaii,or Denmark with the large
>> >> farms
>> >> .
>> >> And abandoned turbines littering the land scape aren't exactly clean
>> >> power
>> >> either.
>>
>> > Much better than abandoned nuclear plants.
>>
>> Oh puh-lease! Show me a nuclear plant where the owners have just filed
>> bankruptcy and walked away leaving the plant completely 'abandoned'.
>> Sure,
>> some nucs have been shutdown. But the plant isn't 'abandoned' for the
>> government to step in and clean it up or left rusting like several wind
>> plants have.
>>
>
> If the plant is sitting there idle, and off limits for safet reasons,
> I'd say "abandoned" was a fair term. Certainly, it's no less
> "abandoned" than a non-functional windfarm -- which is a doddle to
> make safe by comparison.
>

No, the difference between a shutdown nuc and an 'abandon' wind farm is many
and various.

Nucs in the US that are shutdown are 'decommissioned'. That means the plant
is disassembled and disposed of while the land is returned to a 'green
field' state. Buildings disassembled, cooling towers dismantled, most
radioactive material removed (Big Rock still has spent fuel in a much
smaller storage area with armed guards). If there are armed guards and
technicians maintaining what little remains, it isn't 'abandoned'. As long
as there is radioactive material on the premises, the licensee or its
decendant is required by law to maintain the storage facility.

Look at Maine Yankee, Yankee Rowe or Big Rock point for examples. Big Rock
is in a bit of a political problem right now because the state and locals
want to place the land in public domain and make a park out of it, while
others want to develop it into an elite housing development with $1M lake
shore properties. Funny how people are fighting over the right to *use* the
land that a former nuc plant sat on.

While some wind-farms have been totally 'abandon' by the owners. The local
government siezed it for non-payment of taxes and taxpayers don't want to
pay to remove the rusting eyesores. So they sit there, a yoke around the
local government's neck, trying to figure out what to do with it.

Now do you see the difference between 'abandoned' wind farm and a
decommissioned nuc plant?

>
>> >> And as to your price for the power ...why do you think wind power is
>> >> priced
>> >> higher than
>> >> conventional power generation.
>>
>> > Because it doesn't get the kind of price support that nuclear energy
>> > gets?
>>
>> Another red herring. How much funding do nucs get from the feds? The
>> recent energy act promises to help fund the first few new plants if they
>> ever get built, but none of that has happened yet. You think the
>> government
>> is subsidizing nucs somehow?
>>
>
> Take a look at the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Direct and indirect
> subsidies run into the billions. Even more when you count Price-
> Anderson indemnity outside the US.
>

Try again. How many of the current generation of nucs have benefited from
the 2005 act? None.

Read up some more on Price-Anderson. The nucs pay an annual fee to the
government for the 'priviledge' of insuring themselves. Each reactor
operator is required by P-A to show the financial ability to pay over $200M
each for any accident that impacts the general public safety. With 104
reactors, that's over $20 B of private funds that must be available for any
reactor incident before public tax dollars would be touched. Some may say
that in a Chernobyl-type accident that wouldn't be enough. Yet the P-A act
did not require *any* payments for TMI. Basically the P-A allows / requires
separate reactor owners to pool together to 'self-insure'. If *any* reactor
in the US has an accident, *all* US reactor owners pay for damages. And for
that 'priviledge', they get to pay the federal government a hefty 'premium'
every year regardless of any accidents.


Yeah, paying a premium to the feds and having money idle in escrow for some
other reactor's accident sure does lower the cost of nuclear, I can 'see'
your point.


>> Wind and PV *do* get significant support from the government in the form
>> of
>> subsidies, 'green' tax breaks and 'renewable' tax breaks.
>
> Nothing like nuclear though. I wonder what 6 or so billion up front
> and a couple of billion each year would do the price.

???

You might try to use some real numbers. And divide them by MW-hours
generated to see what that really comes down to.

>
>> Yet it is still
>> expensive. Some of the expense is *probably* because the investors want
>> a
>> short amortization of the capital. Such facilities don't yet have a very
>> good track record for operating 40+ years. And investors in general are
>> more inclined to seek short-term results then what they were willing to
>> accept 30 years ago.
>>
>> >> Or for that matter wind and solar needs
>> >> government price supports in some fashion.
>>
>> > The Energy Policy Act sets out massive subsidies for nuclear energy.
>>
>> Which have not yet been utilized. But their are 104 nucs already running
>> today. Don't you see a disconnect there?
>>
>
> You're not counting Price Anderson are you?
>

No, and you shouldn't either. Learn what Price-Anderson really is before
you speak about it.

>> >> In spite, of being some ot the oldest forms of power ....both have
>> >> been
>> >> around before electricity came into
>> >> general.
>> >> For small villages,the biomass power is best in the first
>> >> the
>> >> initial infrastructure is established.
>> >> In highly industrialize countries like Japan, land is at a high enorgh
>> >> prime, the power plant had best offer
>> >> much better return than wind does on a given area.
>>
>> > Japan is one of the least stable places on the face of the Earth.
>>
>> >> Given the earthquake factor niether windmills or solar would survive a
>> >>
>> >> quake ,much less do as well as the reactor in this thread.
>>
>> > But they needn't all be in the same place. You may not have heard, but
>> > Japan is actually an archipeligo -- composed of about 4000 islands.
>> > The turbines in the vicinity of the quake may well have been put out
>> > of action, but the cost of restoring them would have been piffling.
>>
>> 'Piffling'? The cost of restoring them would be on par with the original
>> cost to build them.
>
> No, it wouldn't. To begin with not all of the capacity would have been
> knocked out -- it's spread remember? Secondly, you don't have to
> repurchase the land, build access roads, build new transmission lines.
> You replace the towers that have been damaged.
>

You replace the towers, the hub, the blades and the transmission line. This
is not 'piffling'. About the only thing you do get to avoid is the land
cost (*thats* a 'piffling' amount of the original construction cost). Some
units may not be damaged if they really are spread out over 200 miles, but
every one that falls will need replacement and be off-line for more than 'a
couple of weeks'.

>> There wouldn't be much salvage. The nuc plant however
>> retains most of its capital value. Even if it needs several million
>> dollars
>> in repairs, that isn't bad compared to the total investment.
>>
>
> That's far from clear. It's far from certain that this won't be a
> write off.

At this point, any speculation either way is just that, pure speculation.

>
>> > There would have been no panic. They could have been back up within
>> > weeks and maybe less, and all the while, all the others would still be
>> > working.
>>
>> "weeks"?? You seem to think you could just dig the blades up out of the
>> mud
>> and re-install them? Or maybe you just trot on down to the local BIG_BOX
>> store and order up some replacements? Seriously, if a tower fell from a
>> quake, the hub and blades would probably not be salvagable except as
>> scrap
>> copper and steel. You'd be looking at getting into the manufacturer's
>> sales
>> queue and whatever lead-time they have.
>>
>
> It's not passenger aircraft we're doing here. The designs and specs
> are all done. No manufacturer is going to want to delay a minute
> longer on a deal like that.
>

It's a matter of production capacity. Yes, the manufacturer can
'cookie-cutter' them out just as fast as they produce them. But guess what,
they are *not* sitting around idle waiting for your disaster-replacement
order. They're already building units for others. They have production
schedules out for a year or more. They've got a staff out there marketing
and scheduling all the time to keep the production floor gainfully employed.

Are they going to tell their other customer in Norway (or whereever),
"Sorry, we stopped work on your order because they had an earthquake in
Japan. We'll get back to it in a couple of months when we've finished
building them some replacements."

Maybe if the Japanese come up with a hefty 'expeditition fee'. But it would
have to cover all the 'penalty fees' for not delivering on time to Norway.
Not likely though. More likely is your replacement order goes on the bottom
of the pile and won't be filled until all the other orders ahead of you are
filled.

daestrom