Next U.S. nuclear reactors won't be made in USA

[jpak]

http://www.energybulletin.net/5950.html

MIAMI (Reuters) - The United States is gearing up to build a new generation of nuclear power plants but will probably have to import many of the component parts for them, the nation's top nuclear regulator said on Tuesday.

Nils Diaz, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said America has the nuclear fuel but no longer has the production facilities to build the components for nuclear reactors.

"I think when old nuclear power plants were built, I think the majority of the components were built in this country," Diaz told journalists in Miami. "We had large fabrication facilities for pressure vessels and steam generators and major components and most of those things no longer exist in this country."

The United States has not ordered a new nuclear power plant since the 1970s. The last one to start up, the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar reactor, came on line in 1996 after 23 years of construction delays.

<more>

[TallahasseeGrannie]

1. A few weeks ago

that might have bothered me. Suddenly I don't feel we are quite as invincible as I used to. We can't even get water through a flood to dying people.

[Team44Car]

2. That surprises me, tho' it probably should not

[MrModerate]

3. Certainly some other countries' technology is worth looking at . . .

But we do still build new steam generators here. The problem (well, maybe ONE problem) with nukes when we built 'em here was that each plant was like a work of art -- unique, customized to within an inch of its life, and with substantially reduced opportunities to take advantage of state-of-the-shelf technology. Unlike the French, who turned out a bunch of cookie-cutter plants that were significantly less expensive than ours.

I'm one of those folks who thinks that nukes are a better choice for power generation than fossil fuel plants (because I think the safety, security, and spent fuel issues can be solved with appropriate technology and political will).

I'm not sure that view is especially popular here at DU. Let's see what sort of a response I get to the above admission.

[Oerdin]

4. It would be nice to have the parts made here but...

Let's face it 35 years of chicken littles cry that the sky is falling and that supporting nuclear power means you some how want to drop nuclear bombs on puppy dogs was bound to have a negative impact. Realistically, if we want to meet our energy needs while still reducing our output of greenhouse gases then nuclear power is the only option. The added benifet is that we'll import less oil and natural gas which will help our balance of trade and if we build enough new plants we just might get them to reopen a few component plants.

[Fovea]

5. Not to pee on your birthday cake.

But 'chicken little' starts with the same letter as Chernobyl,
and three little pigs is remeniscent of three mile island.

It wasn't that nuclear power can't be made safe enough, it is that the piggies at the trough keep the government from actually mandating and enforcing that it be safer. In Enron and Halliburton America, do you really believe that reactors will be safely constructed and operated?

I think that pebble bed reactors have a great future for responsible nations, we however, are not currently responsible enough.

[Massacure]

12. How many people died as a result of Three Mile Island?

Name one.

Besides, we are better off shutting down all the old reactors and building new ones than just keeping the old ones. France, China, and India have made a lot of breakthroughs since most of the current U.S. reactors went online.

[Fovea]

19. Better to ask how many thousand have died from

Chernobyl.
Three mile island's near miss was instructive. But Fermilab's fast breeder was even more instructive. Read 'We almost lost Detroit.'

I am not adverse to nuclear if it is stringently maintained and built with the best science we posess. But again, my core argument, which you did not touch... Do you trust the Enron/Halliburton government to oversee a reactor production/management program?

I sure as hell don't. I don't trust these nimrods with a cheese sandwich, never mind a fission energy device. They are less responsive even than the old Soviets to the public weal. They can't even administer FEMA, fer crissakes.

[Massacure]

22. Chernobyl is an exception to the norm.

Chernobyl was a rare type of reactor built without a contaiment structure, run by an organization that had no regard for public safety, while doing an unauthorized experiment with no clear plan.

Soviet scientist never had to jump through as many loops as U.S. of French ones did.

[jpak]

6. There's not enough uranium to do this

Uranium Shortage Poses Threat

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=29898

...and <3% of the electricity generated in the US comes from oil-fired intermediate and peaking plants (which nuclear power plants can't replace)...

Want to do something about oil imports???

Take the bus...

Buy a hybrid...

Buy a pellet stove to reduce heating oil consumption...

etc..

[dcfirefighter]

7. Pro Nuke

I hope they choose Maryland as the location to build the next one, it's on the short list.

I don't know what type they're planning on using, but I hope it's a CANDU Reactor. I doesn't require refining the uranium.

[Massacure]

14. I don't think any U.S. utility would want to bother with heavy water

I have a feeling it will be based on French technology. But it's only a feeling, I could always be wrong.

[NNadir]

21. I think the prospects for CANDU's worldwide are excellent.

I see no reason not to build them in the United States.

They are a superior technology and can be used flexibly in various types of fuel cycles.

I'd love two or three CANDU 6's here in New Jersey. We could easily be 100% nuclear in this state. (Only 47% to go.)

I doubt it will happen though. The United States is bankrupt. One Argentine CANDU's construction stopped cold when the currency collapsed.

There has been a lot of experience with building CANDU's. Korea put two on line in the last decade, India finished four of them.

[jpak]

27. And what did India do with its CANDU's?????

1974

:nuke:

[Massacure]

32. The U.S. already has nuclear weapons. That is not a valid argument.

[Dr.Phool]

8. One major problem we had 40 years ago

And they still haven't figured it out.

WE STILL DON'T HAVE ANYPLACE TO PUT THE WASTE!!!!

It's gotta go somewhere. And it's gotta be secure for like 20,000 years.

[Oerdin]

9. Recycling is the anwser.

Breeder reactors can recycle the waste and we can just keep recycling until there is virtually nothing left. The French already do this and in any event there is hardly any waste to begin with. All of the nuclear waste produced from 1945 until today would fit into one football stadium. If we recycled that waste using breeder reactors like the one already working in France then we could reduce that by 85%-90%.

That's huge amounts of energy at rates which are already market viable which produces this power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and has a proven track record of safety. The only meaningful nuclear accident in the last 60 years has been the one the Soviets had in the Ukraine and that had everything to do with a broke and dying USSR deliberately not making the repairs the designers and plant operators said was necissary. If France, Japan, the UK, and Germany can all run large accident free nuclear power industries for 50 years then the evidence says it is one of the safest power sources on Earth.

[jpak]

10. Bullshit

The French don't "do this"

Their Superphenix breeder program was a technical and ($10+ billion) financial disaster.

The roof feel in on it.

It consumed more plutonium than it produced.

It had a series of serious sodium fires which lead to its decommissioning.

It is currently being dismantled.

Their Phenix prototype breeder is only being used for low-power experimentation.

Chernobyl only meaningful accident????

Gee - the experimental EBR-1 breeder experienced a meltdown in 1951...

The experimental Teledyne breeder melted down in 1957 and released radioactive material off-site...

The prototype Fermi-1 breeder was plagued by sodium fires and suffered a core meltdown in 1966...

Superphenix suffered a serious sodium fire in 1990 - which again lead to its decommissioning...

Japan's Monju experimental breeder also suffered a serious sodium fire in 1995 - and it is still under repair.

Kazakhstan is desperately seeking foreign assistance to decommission its defunct BN-350 breeder reactor..

Russia's BN-600 breeder suffers from repeated sodium fires and will be shut in the near future over rising maintenance costs.

Fast-breeder reactors - a dying breed

http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nucleararticles/breeders_dying.htm

http://www.nci.org/01NCI/12/FFTF.htm

The bottom line is - breeders don't fucking work.

Period.

[Oerdin]

13. Less then half right.

The Breeder reactor in France was commissioned in 1984 and has exceeded it's 20 year life span so the French government has started contruction of a new second generation facility though the original remains in use until the replacement facility comes online. It performed exactly how it was designed to perform and recycled an aweful lot of waste into new reusable power rods which were then put back into French nuclear power plants. The point is this is not some new hairbrained plan but instead is a tried and tested technology with decades of practical experience behind it. The new plant has several design changes which will make it even more efficent.

The breeder reactors work and have a long history of working. Lastly, you most certainly did claim that the world would run out of fissil material and NNadir wrote a long post showing you just how wrong you really were. A number of us all had a good long laugh at you in that thread.

[jpak]

26. Link for this fantasy talk???

Didn't think so...

:rofl:

...and more lies...

The world will most certainly face shortages of uranium in the next decade and will deplete its uranium resources this century.

That is the conclusion of the OECD, and the uranium and nuclear power industries...not me...

<snip>

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9069-1735134,00.html

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Nuclear Agency’s “red book” — its statistical study of world uranium resources and demand — the world consumed 67,000 tonnes of uranium in 2002. Only 36,000 tonnes of this was produced from primary sources, with the balance coming from secondary sources, in particular ex- military sources as nuclear weapons are decommissioned.

In 2001 the European Commission said that at the current level of uranium consumption, known uranium resources would last 42 years. With military and secondary sources, this life span could be stretched to 72 years. Yet this rate of usage assumes that nuclear power continues to provide only a fraction of the world’s energy supply. If capacity were increased six-fold, then the 72-year supply would last just 12 years.

<snip>

Some wackos on this board claim the the Japanese have developed a workable method to extract uranium from seawater.

This claim was based on a SINGLE NON-peer-reviewed paper presented by Japanese researchers in 1994.

http://www.isope.org/publications/proceedings/ISOPE/ISOPEVol_I_1994.htm

Development of a Floating-Type System for Uranium Extraction from Seawater Using Sea Current and Wave Power. Hisashi Nobukawa, Mitsuru Kitamura, Swilem A.M. Swilem and Kozo Ishibashi

I work with radioistopes (14C, 3H, 32P, 35S 55Fe), seawater trace metal chemistry, marine microbial processes and collaborate with researchers that extract 230Th and 234Th from seawater (used to determine POC flux from the upper mixed layer of the ocean).

...and I can tell you this is bullshit.

Abstracts of papers presented at scientific meetings or conferences are NOT subject to peer review. Furthermore, they are NOT allowed to be cited in peer reviewed science journals (except perhaps 21st Century Science and Technology - a publication of Lydnon LaRouche - the darling of the wacko pronuclear crowd around here).

You can say pretty much anything in them - up to a point.

They represent works in progress - not the final product of research.

It's been 11 years since that paper was presented - where are all the magical floating uranium chelation extractors????

<crickets chirping>

Clue: they don't exist because they don't work.

Any material place in the ocean is quickly colonized by bacteria. These organisms form a biofilm of complex polysaccharides on the surface of the colonized material. That film would effectively and quickly isolate chelation sites on uranium extraction mats and prevent the extraction of uranium or other elements from surrounding seawater..

Furthermore, you can CANNOT hydrolyze these biofilms using dilute acids at room temperature (and you cannot remove them with dilute base for that matter either). That would require prolonged treatment with concentrated sulfuric acid at high temperatures - conditions which would degrade any chelation material and render it useless (I use Chelex 100 in my research so please don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about).

http://www.biocompare.com/itemdetails.asp?itemid=51051&catid=147

In addition to bacteria. any material placed in the ocean is quickly colonized by other micro-, meso- and mega-fauna that would restrict or halt the movement of water into and through the rolls of chelating material proposed by Nobukawa et al.

No flow - no extraction.

Furthermore, any ion exchange resin placed in seawater would be quickly saturated by other cations (Na, Mg, K, Mn, Ba, etc.) - that are present in much higher concentrations than uranium. This would greatly hinder (if not outright preclude) the extraction of uranium from seawater.

The concentration of uranium in seawater is 14 nM. Hundreds of cubic kilometers of seawater would have to flow through these floating extraction devices to extract industrial quantities of uranium. This cannot be accomplished by passive floating devices - that water would have to be pumped through these devices in very large quantities at considerable cost.

Oceanographers use rather beefy submersible electric pumps to extract minute (ng, µg) quantities of thorium from seawater.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:X4cvzMH84z4J:www.awi-bremerhaven.de/GEO/Geochem/Publ/Th234MarChem.pdf+Seawater+extraction+of+Thorium++POC+++methods

This requires processing hundreds and thousands of liters of water - not the hundreds of trillions of liters as would be required for industrial-scale uranium extraction.

The US would have to process >7000 cubic kilometers of seawater per year to extract enough uranium to meet the current demand the US nuclear power industry. This 10 times greater than the annual discharge of the Mississippi River.

The amount of energy required to process this amount of of seawater would easily exceed the energy yielded from the extracted uranium many times over.

There's also a matter of economics.

Nobokawa et al. estimated their process could produce uranium at a cost ~$200 per kg (about 10 times the current price of yellowcake).

If Japan could obtain uranium from seawater at that cost, they would be doing it today.

Japan has no uranium resources.

They are currently building a spent fuel reprocessing plant at a cost of $20+ billion. It will produce plutonium for MOX fuel at a cost 20 times the price of uranium-ore based fuel.

If they are willing to go to that extreme to produce plutonium at 20 times the price of uranium, they would not hesitate to spend a few billion dollars on magical floating uranium extraction devices that would produce uranium at half that cost.

In short - any claim that global uranium resources are "inexhaustible" is bullshit.

PS. I don't subscribe to the Cult of Charlatan Larouchian Wackos. If people want to believe Fairy Tales - fine - but some of us know better...

[Massacure]

16. The U.S. didn't have much of a problem with the EBR-II.

It was able to recycle spent fuel down to a point where it had the same radioactive level as the original ore after just 300 years as opposed to hundreds of thousands.

[skids]

11. To me the issue isn't really nuclear, it's centralization.

Frankly, though I think there are some good arguments as to why nuclear is not as good as all the proponents say, my major concern is the continued domination of energy by large industry. Here in the first world it's power. In the third world it's water. If we let them disempower and impoverish us, it will be water here too.

Power should be in the hands of small business, and even that should only be top-off power. Really it should be in the hands of the homeowner, where possible. I'm sick of seeing subsidies go to large inefficient corporations that squander them and then lobby for more.

And no, nuclear is not the "only option" no matter how much you stomp your feet and insist that it is. Only the lack of scale-up investment in businesses manufacturing a variety of home-power products has kept the alternatives from competing. I mean, for goodness sakes, the technology is not that complicated. A long tube buried under the ground. A few large water tanks as a thermal mass. A heat engine. Some mirrors and if you want to get fancy, heliostats. This is 19th century technology, and there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for home systems to cost anywhere near what they now do.

[Massacure]

15. Unless you live in New York City.

Solar panels won't run all of New York. You could probably power a whole suburb on solar, wind, and some form of energy storage whether it be batteries or a flywheel, but then you run into the problem of replacing oil based transportation.

[skids]

17. Who said anything about solar panels? n/t

[dcfirefighter]

18. It seems there are too schools of thought to green energy

(never trust anyone who tells you there are two types of people...)

Distributed and Centralized.

Distributed folks support the idea of sprawling communities of self-sufficient homes & businesses. I'm not sure how they get around, I suppose in EVs or HPVs. But generally, these are the people who have passive solar homes, organic gardens, composting toilets, and some form of micro wind/hydro/PV power generation. This is a viable community form to a point - and that point is exceeded when a good or service is needed that cannot be provided on the homestead or by a friendly neighbor.

Throughout history, civilizations have developed cities, where people, cultures, goods, and ideas intermingle. People are social creatures, and even the antisocial among us like being around others. Cities allow specialization and economy of scale. Where else but a city (or town) are you going to find operas, symphonies, museums, research hospitals, and the like? Density allows for reduced transport energy to a staggering number of destinations. Density allows for reduced per person area, due to shared use of public spaces like parks, rec centers, cafes, taverns, and theaters. Density (in row homes) reduces heat gain / loss. Human density allows for the cultural mingling that builds tolerance.

A pretty interesting comparison http://www.energybulletin.net/3757.html

[skids]

20. There are plenty of green power options for cities too.

Cities may indeed need a central power source, but they could provide partial power to themselves through various means. Geothermal heating and cooling is already employed in many office and public buildings. Also there's stuff like this that takes advantage of tall buildings:

http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/01-02/RE_info/Urban%20wind.htm
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1292
http://www.electricityforum.com/news/dec03/wtctower.html

For office buildings, it's important to take a look at their power requirements:



...and the fact that these buildings draw most of their true electrical (e.g. electricity not just wasted to generate heat or AC) power during daylight hours, lighting interior rooms. Which makes these here worth a look:

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/hybridlighting/techoverview.htm

(And incidentally, a good number of the highrises could collect a signifigant amount of power using a solar air chimney, which could be used for heat in winter and adsorbtion or dessicant AC systems in the summer. It's just an solar-absorbitive backing covered by a heat-trapping transparency running up the side of the building.)

This building represents a lean towards that direction, but the chimneys themselves can be light foil and plastic so retrofits may be possible, not just new construction.

http://renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=21469

[dcfirefighter]

23. LEEDs

I like the idea, but think that generally space is too valuable in the city not to have your energy shipped in, just like your food.

Now a herbal window box in the city is nice, and so too would be a little help with daylighting, heavy insulation, heat recovery, etc. but not all things are available to the urban landscape: insolation may be blocked by other buildings (I'd rather have a few trees in the city than a clear south view), GSHPs can only operate within a certain distance of each other, etc. etc.

For example, In many cases, I'd rather use my roof for a patio than for a fraction of my energy needs.

Now dense urban areas do win out with cogeneration - district electric and heating, or trigeneration - district electric, heating, and cooling, or even quadgeneration - district electric, heating, and cooling with a solar water preheater. I know that cogeneration is ~75% thermally efficient, I assume the other prefixes add marginally to that.

[NNadir]

24. You are certainly free to decentralize yourself.

If you can afford it, and if you are 100% confident with these technologies, what's stopping you?

Or are you insisting we all drink the Koolaid?

I mean is energy only the province of people who can afford "A long tube buried under the ground. A few large water tanks as a thermal mass. A heat engine. Some mirrors and if you want to get fancy, heliostats..." and so on?

To repeat myself, it sounds like the Repuke agenda, "only people who are rich are entitled..."

[skids]

25. The only thing I insist on...

...is that people stop thinking in the "if it could have been done, we would have done it already" mentality. It is wrongheaded, and completely oblivious to the facts.

As far as what's stopping me -- I rent. I'll have to change that before I can take care of 100% of my energy load through renewables. Landlords don't appreciate it if you engage in large construction projects, and certainly aren't going to pay you for the added equity.

Now as far as who can afford it, any home owner (even those who only "lease from the bank" with little or no equity) can afford it even in the overpriced alternative energy equipment market of today. I've already shown how a horizontal geothermal system can be bought on loan and pay for its own finance charges in most climate regions. You don't have to be especially rich to do so. Just one of the 70% of Americans who own the house they live in.

[NNadir]

28. OK then, here is what I find reasonable in your post.

It is wrong to state categorically "if it could have been done, we would have done it already." People trying new things, including home power enthusiastists can certainly lead to innovation. Innovation is a good thing, and I am wrong when I demean that instinct.

I really don't have a problem with the "home power" movement per se. I will confess, actually, to having read some of these home power magazines as a guilty pleasure.

I really don't have a problem with home based renewables for those who can afford them. Certainly buying these sort of systems is a more ethical undertaking than many other sorts of things that well off people do.

However, I disagree with the statement that "any homeowner" can "afford" it. Irrespective of what the Bush administration claims, taking a loan is not paying for something. There are many other variables in the financing of these systems, one of which, certainly, a fucntion of how long one intends to stay in his or her house.

Since you don't own a house, and are speaking solely from a theoretical standpoint I will tell you something else. Every house is different. Drilling for instance varies with the type of soil, the depth of bedrock, the height of the water table, etc. There are other variables like terrain. Lots of things sound better on paper or in theory than they do in practice.

I also disagree with the notion that a heat pump is a "geothermal" system, as I noted elsewhere. The use of that term is very misleading for the systems described. One is NOT obtaining geothermal energy, one is merely using the earth as a heat reservoir. This are very different things. The claim is analagous to representing a cooling tower as a source of energy. The use of a particular type of heat reservoir may or may not increase efficiency, but it does not "create" energy. However, I note that most heat pump systems are effectively electricity based heaters. In this sense they offer a certain advantage in that they can be powered by nuclear or, if you insist, solar electricity. This means that they can have under certain circumstances, excellent greenhouse gas mitigating abilities when compared to natural gas and oil.

I am also not sanguine that all of these things are necessarily good for the environment in all cases. I for instance would be very upset if any of my neighbors began sinking huge ethylene glycol pipes into the ground around here, and I would certainly never do it myself. We have enough trouble with leaked perchloroethylene and underground oil tanks, which can and do leak frequently in this area. Underground pipes can and do leak. Ethylene glycol does have a relatively short environmental half-life, on the order of a few weeks, but it is a toxic compound under the right circumstances. We all have wells in this area and anything that leaks ends up in our water.

My own lot is heavily covered with trees, and I am convinced that removing their passive cooling would have a deletorious effect on my air conditioning bill in summer. When the trees lose their leaves in the winter, this allows for passive solar heating through my large south facing windows. There is also the aesthetic and greenhouse effects to weigh. These trees probably represent many, many tons of sequestered carbon and I think they are beautiful.

I don't think that the distributed power market can really be used to address the macroscopic environmental and energy problems we face. But it certainly can contribute some fraction to a solution, and in this sense, if one can manage it, it should be encouraged.

[skids]

30. You are an excuse-making MACHINE! Man you can crank them out.

There are many other variables in the financing of these systems, one of which, certainly, a fucntion of how long one intends to stay in his or her house.

If you leave the house early, you harvest the extra equity provided by the improvement (the geothermal system.)

I also disagree with the notion that a heat pump is a "geothermal" system, as I noted elsewhere.

The geothermal industry agrees with me and disagrees with you.

The claim is analagous to representing a cooling tower as a source of energy.

There is a huge difference between a cooling tower and a large colder-than-ambient thermal mass. You do seem to understand thermodynamics, so you should know that. Any temperature gradient is a source of power, whether the energy is sourced or sunk, and it should be immediately obvious the value of that power given the huge amount of power we use to create cool temperatures.

The use of a particular type of heat reservoir may or may not increase efficiency, but it does not "create" energy.

...I take that back. Maybe you don't understand thermodynamics.

I for instance would be very upset if any of my neighbors began sinking huge ethylene glycol pipes into the ground around here, and I would certainly never do it myself.

Then dig a system that can use plain water.

My own lot is heavily covered with trees, and I am convinced that removing their passive cooling...

I thought you were supposed to be a smart guy. Can't figure out how to dig a hole without chopping down trees?

[NNadir]

36. This is pretty rich.

First of all, you don't own a house, so let's start with the assumption that speaking is easier than doing.

Second of all, the "geothermal industry" would not be the first industry to pull a scam. In fact many "alternative energy" industries participate in over representation of their technology.

Here is a company selling one of these systems that is more honest about what it is: Geothermal Exchange, the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium. Here is a link:

http://www.geoexchange.org/about/how.htm

I quote: " At a depth of approximately six feet, for example, the temperature of soil in most of the world’s regions remains stable between 45 F and 70 F. This is why well water drawn from below ground tastes so cool even on the hottest summer days. "

Also there is this:

"The length of the loop depends upon a number of factors, including the type of loop configuration used; a home’s heating and air conditioning load; soil conditions; local climate; and landscaping. Larger homes with larger space conditioning requirements generally need larger loops than smaller homes. Homes in climates where temperatures are extreme also generally require larger loops. A heat loss/heat gain analysis should be conducted before the loop is installed...

...Standing Column Well System. Standing column wells, also called turbulent wells or Energy WellsTM, have become an established technology in some regions, especially the northeastern United States. Standing wells are typically six inches in diameter and may be as deep as 1500 feet. Temperate water from the bottom of the well is withdrawn, circulated through the heat pump’s heat exchanger, and returned to the top of the water column in the same well. Usually, the well also serves to provide potable water. However, ground water must be plentiful for a standing well system to operate effectively. If the standing well is installed where the water table is too deep, pumping would be prohibitively costly..."

Obviously it is not one size fits all no matter how naively you wish to represent it from your armchair.

Are you trying to claim that the difference between the temperature underground and the temperature of the atmosphere is enough to drive a heat engine? Do you know anything at all about thermodynamic efficiency?

Here let me help you: http://www.answers.com/topic/thermodynamic-efficiency.

I repeat, this is a heat pump, and it does not really derive "energy" from the earth, irrespective of what you or the salesmen say. It is the same kind of deal as a refrigerator, which is not a particularly magical device. A refrigerator does in fact heat your home in the winter, but it requires an additional energy input to make it work. This is why most refrigerators have electric plugs on them. They need energy to operate.

This system pumps or recirculates heat to and from a reservoir. While conventional heat pumps use the air itself as this reservoir, this elaborate system merely uses an underground reservoir, most typically one with lots of water in it. It may offer certain efficiency advantages - even economic advantages - but it is not really geothermal, as in being a "source" of energy.

If you think otherwise, well I really can't help you with thermodynamics, you're way to weak on the subject. This sort of thing is covered in most introductory courses on the subject.

You have no idea what it costs to "dig a hole" 500 meters into the ground or what damage it may involve to property. There are many things involved, including ground water flows, zoning regulation, flow from septic systems, all kinds of things of which you are blissfully unaware since you are in the luxuriant position of not being in a position actually to install such a thing but merely to complain that others have not or will not do so.

There is not a huge rush for these things, and I would suspect that there is a good reason for that.

In fact this stuff is esoterica for the naive. It probably has some advantage for some people, but I can tell you that many (but not all) people in the 1970's who installed heat pumps in the last "energy crisis" were disillusioned by them later. My neighbor in fact, ripped one out at considerable expense to install gas heat. Maybe he'll regret that, I don't know. The fact is that you need electricity to run this thing, electricity that you seem to think must come from magical "distributed" power systems, which I presume are always solar PV in your world. (Correct me if I'm wrong; is it OK to hook up to those mean corporate grids to run these things?)

I note that no one on earth runs a heat engine to pump water or generate electricity exploiting the cool waters of a running stream or a deep well on hot days. The Carnot efficiency of a system running on a 35C day exploiting 15C well or stream water would be about 6%, effectively useless, except for maybe a children's toy. In the ground water case, that heat gradient would vanish quickly at least for some periods, since ground water flows can be slow. You know, that annoying first law of thermodynamics.

Real geothermal systems, which typically involve subterranean steam related to the upwelling of magma are quite a different story. The temperature gradient is much larger.

Thank you for telling me about how I should spend my money, and chop up my property, but, sorry, I live in the real world. I remain unconvinced that this solution represents a huge advantage for the majority of homes. I certainly am not going to investigate it much further.

I am not interested, by the way, in your opinion of whether or not I am a "smart guy," because of my understanding of how to dig holes around trees. Of course, one does not really "dig" a hole hundreds of meters deep. Usually this is done by something known as "heavy equipment," and like all of this, the actual practice is somewhat more involved than is stated in the glib marketing brochures of various types or hyped representations by people with no practical experience in the matter. Personally, I think that applying generalizations across the board to properties that one has never seen is not a particularly bright idea, but that's only my opinion.

[skids]

37. You crack me up.

:rofl:

You know, I really try to take you seriously, but you can't seem to touch your keyboard without exagerrating, or attempting to put claims into other people's mouths.

When exactly did I claim that these systems are cookie-cutter solutions? That's obviously not how this works. You have a survey done by a pro. They tell you how much it would cost for the desired level of power savings.

Secondly, you took objection to me using the term "geothermal", and then say, "look here, these people call it a geothermal heat pump! I was right." Maybe you should read that again. They call it a "geothermal" heat pump. Thanks for proving my point for me.

Your lack of understanding of the power potential here is a result of your viewing the system without mentally accounting for the fact that ambient temperature fluxuates. If you have a fluxuating ambient and control over thermal flow to/from a capacitative mass, you have power potential. Plain and simple. There's no arguing that. You just can't. It's fact.

At what point did I propose running a heat engine off the differential? Please provide an exact quote. If I didn't say it, why are you trying to infer that I did? If I didn't say it, why do you bring it up? (Though I must say, there are engines that *can* run off even a couple of degrees of differential, and the differential we are talking about here may indeed be sufficient to eek enough power "off the top" to take care of it's own circulation needs. But that's overengineering it and not generally how it is done. To do so you would need a larger thermal mass. It is a point worth noting that efficiency is only neccessary when there is not an overabundance of mass in the source and/or sink.)

At what point did I suggest to you that you would be forced to choose the "Standing well" technology and dig 500m? Please provide a direct quote. Do you have a one-track mind or something? You can't read about that particular option (you know, the kind that does not require a 500m hole) without entirely forgetting about horizontal slinky tube systems?

Now, let's get to your neighbor. Perhaps the others have confused you. "Heat pumps" do not necessarily have anything at all to do with geothermal. They are two separate but distinct technologies that are sometimes, but not always, used together. The reason why your neighbor threw out his heat pump is likely that his was not a geothermal heat pump, but an ambient air heat pump that was not attached to a geothermal system. In other words, just a glorified all-in-one heater and air conditioner capable of forward or reverse operation, rejecting waste heat directly to the exterior of the house rather than banking it in geothermal. So it's natural that an old system like that would be rendered obselete by advances in gas furnaces.

Finally, to your point of one-size-does-not-fit-all, let me refer you to previous posts. Geothermal storage was one single example I used simply to demonstrate a point. At no point did I propose it as a panacea for every single household. It is one single product in a suite of technical solutions that are not "innovations" recently bodged together by "ethusiasts." They are technologies that have been in use since the 19th century and in some cases earlier. And my point was that, even in an unecessarily underproduced/overpriced product market, many of these products can pay their own way by exchanging a finance charge for a savings in energy costs. Even moreso if the materials to implement them get mass produced and sold by more honestly competitive companies.

Now wait, before you answer any of the above questions, please do try your best not to misrepresent anything I said, because I would assume if you respond to this post your purpose in doing so might be to convince me, or a lurker, of some pertinent point. You cannot do so by raising impertinent objections. It just makes you look to me, and to lurkers, like an ass.

[NNadir]

38. Likewise.

Here is one of your statements to which I was responding:

If you leave the house early, you harvest the extra equity provided by the improvement (the geothermal system.)

Sounds pretty cookie cutter to me. Extra equity doesn't result from these systems. Heat pumps, like swimming pools, sometimes represent minuses when one is selling a home. By your own admission you have no experience buying and selling a home. In general what is equity to an owner, may not be seen as equity by a pool of sellers.

Now, for the rest of it:

Yes I know that the ambient power fluctuates, but what you don't understand that a temperature gradient, even one that fluctuates does not necessarily provide useful power. In fact most of these "gradients" fluctuate in the same direction, and thus the temperature difference, on which the extraction of useful power depends, remains constant, year round. A gradient between 45F ambient, and 50F underground is not useful for instance, neither is a summer one between 80F ambinet and 70F underground. You have to pump heat into one reservoir to make it useful or you have to circulate (at energy expense) huge amounts of transfer fluid to obtain thermal equilibrium. That restoration of a thermal disequilibrium will depend on many factors, including the thermal conductivity of local soils, water flows, height of the water table, etc, etc. Moreover, if lots of one's neighbors install similar systems (which is unlikely) this will have some effect on the speed at which heat gradients are re-established.

I was simply with the heat engine reference point mocking the general claim that this could be part a "distributed power" system. I was pointing out that a "geothermal" system depends on power from the grid. Maybe I could have done that more clearly.

I was using standing well technology, because it was the only technology that is even conceivable on my property, about which you know nothing. I don't have a pond, and I would have to tear up my yard quite a bit to put a huge water tank underground. I thought you were making this claim because of your remark about my stupidity for how did you put it "I thought you were supposed to be a smart guy...digging...trees...blah...blah...blah," and all that other stuff showing that this is your pet dream with which you have no practical experience.

As for my neighbor, the system, if you understood you're own claims -which apparently you don't - was similar because, again, this system depends on heat pumps. Or are you now going to inform us that on a 30F day you can heat a house to 70F using 60F ground water without a heat pump?!!!?

It is true that really having some trouble finding your point, since it's hardly coherent, dancing from one point to the other, using words like "power" "thermodynamics" etc, etc, in a very, very, very weak way, certainly not in a way that a person familiar with heat exchangers would use. For the record, overall, I was responding to a post, in case you're agitated, in which you were screaming at me about my house.

By the way, I don't live in an apartment, and I don't have city water. Thus I have a real sense of subterranean temperatures when I run the cold water from my well, which I think is 2 or 3 hundred meters deep. In fact a large portion of my electric bill comes exactly from that, pumping water out of that well. I can assure you that the water I pump is not a source of winter warmth without the use of a heat pump. Neither would it be much of a source of summer cool - again without a heat pump - without the use of large (read expensive) exchangers pumping lots of water. Thus I have direct daily experience on the subject of the temperatures underground. You don't. In my opinion, you know less about the subject than you think you do.

I note that the amount of work to lift 1000 liters of water 300 meters is about 0.8 kilowatt-hours.

I already have a heat pump that works well on the few days I am required to use it. It's called an air conditioner. It works pretty well, even without a pipe sunk deep into the ground. It has a fan which probably costs at best, a few hundred bucks. It took about 1 day to install it and it cost about two grand overall for the entire system. It doesn't effect my electric bill all that much.

However, there isn't much point right now in going over and over this. You clearly don't have much respect for me, which is absolutely fine with me. Nobody has to like me. Other than that little bit of clarity, I otherwise apparently have no idea what you're talking about. In fact, I'm past the point of being interested. I find that I upset people when I point to the holes in their pet technologies.

There is nothing wrong with that by the way. You are certainly free to advocate this stuff. It's probably harmless in most cases. It will succeed or fail on economic terms based on the number of people who are convinced to use it and the word of mouth they provide about their experience. If you prove me wrong, so much the worse for me and so much the better for the world. The point is not the talk, but the delivery. If these systems are really great, they will become increasingly popular and one will see them all over. I doubt that will occur. This stuff has been around for quite some time.

Whatever. I stick by my contention, this is all still just more toys for rich boys. It has very little to do with the real energy problems faced by the real world. Specifically, these systems will do very little overall to address global climate change and that they are of trivial importance in the environmental crisis at hand.

[NNadir]

29. OK then, here is what I find reasonable in your post.

It is wrong to state categorically "if it could have been done, we would have done it already." People trying new things, including home power enthusiasts can certainly lead to innovation. Innovation is a good thing, and I am wrong when I demean that instinct.

I really don't have a problem with the "home power" movement per se. I will confess, actually, to having read some of these home power magazines as a guilty pleasure.

I really don't have a problem with home based renewables for those who can afford them. Certainly buying these sort of systems is a more ethical undertaking than many other sorts of things that well off people do.

However, I disagree with the statement that "any homeowner" can "afford" it. Irrespective of what the Bush administration claims, taking a loan is not paying for something. There are many other variables in the financing of these systems, one of which, certainly, is a function of how long one intends to stay in his or her house.

Since you don't own a house, and are speaking solely from a theoretical standpoint I will tell you something else. Every house is different. Drilling for instance varies with the type of soil, the depth of bedrock, the height of the water table, etc. There are other variables like terrain. Lots of things sound better on paper or in theory than they do in practice.

I also disagree with the notion that a heat pump is a "geothermal" system, as I noted elsewhere. The use of that term is very misleading for the systems described. One is NOT obtaining geothermal energy, one is merely using the earth as a heat reservoir. These are very different things. The claim is analogous to representing a cooling tower as a source of energy. The use of a particular type of heat reservoir may or may not increase efficiency, but it does not "create" energy. However, I note that most heat pump systems are effectively electricity based heaters. In this sense they offer a certain advantage in that they can be powered by nuclear or, if you insist, solar electricity. This means that they can have under certain circumstances, excellent greenhouse gas mitigating abilities when compared to natural gas and oil.

I am also not sanguine that all of these things are necessarily good for the environment in all cases. I for instance would be very upset if any of my neighbors began sinking huge ethylene glycol pipes into the ground around here, and I would certainly never do it myself. We have enough trouble with leaked perchloroethylene and underground oil tanks, which can and do leak frequently in this area. Underground pipes can and do leak as well, including those to heat reservoirs. Ethylene glycol does have a relatively short environmental half-life, on the order of a few weeks, but it is a toxic compound under the right circumstances. We all have wells in this area and anything that leaks ends up in our water.

My own lot is heavily covered with trees, and I am convinced that removing their passive cooling would have a deleterious effect on my air conditioning bill in summer. When the trees lose their leaves in the winter, this allows for passive solar heating through my large south facing windows. There is also the aesthetic and greenhouse effects to weigh. These trees probably represent many, many tons of sequestered carbon and I think they are beautiful.

I don't think that the distributed power market can really be used to address the macroscopic environmental and energy problems we face. But it certainly can contribute some fraction to a solution, and in this sense, if one can manage it, it should be encouraged. However, I have a big problem with representing this sort of thing as a generalized solution to, for instance, the crisis of global warming. There is a lot of magical thinking surrounding these sorts of things, a feeling that if one merely points out that they are possible that it somehow means that the problem is solved. This is not the case at all.

Personally, I don't have a blanket feeling that corporations are intrinsically evil by virtue of being corporations. Like people, some are better than others, and none are perfect. I believe that some industries to things better centrally than do individuals, which is why capitalism arose, and, I note, arose naturally without the imposition of some theoretical or political construct. This is particularly the case in power generation, especially when one speaks of pollution. There is a real risk of some "distributed" systems - wood fired stoves for instance - representing profound point source pollutants.

[Karthun]

31. So...

Who is going to generate the power required to manufacture solar panels? Break even is still 5-10 years. Longer if you include the energy required to mine and refine rare earth metals.

[skids]

33. See here...

Methinks your knowlege of PV technology is a bit out of date.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x30896

... as far as who is going to finance energy generation for the commercial sector -- well, I would expect in our wonderful "free market" economy that they won't have to rely on me the taxpayer to subsidize nuke plants for their energy needs.

Though the one thing power generation manufacturers do have going for them is that they could, conceivably, use their own product.

Oh, and folks, let's stop being so obsessed with electricity, shall we? Most of it we use to heat, cool and light. We don't need to the majority of that, and electricity generation could be relegated to a pretty darn minor role in the overall energy economy if we managed heat and daytime light correctly and invested in power-efficient electronics and appliances.



Residential


Commercial

[Karthun]

34. ..

With all of that you basicly have said nothing.

Once you figure in JUST manufacturing, it takes 5-10 years for the PV cell to produce the electricity that it took to make it.

Secondly, PV is only useful for peak power generation. There is no sun at night. Eather you need batturies or baseload generation from coal or fission. Batturies compleaty shoot any efficency out of the window. Coal and fission are what we eventully want to replace. What PV will replace is natrual gas peakload generation, however these same plants will still need to exist for when there is high daytime demand and low sunlight.

This is why I am a major proponant of biofuels from corn (ethanol), soybeans (biodiesel) and suger beats (ethanol). Wow, that will work as a good crop rotation too. Btw, if you mention Pimentel you automaticly lose. The "scientist" assumes farming practices that were outdated in the 70's would be used today, that all corn fields use irrigation when only about 15% do, and low farming yields. Also most damning of all, he belives that we will run out of hydrogen from natrual gas for use in fertilizers while telling everyone that hydrogen from water will be used to power cars. Some how he doesnt think that hydrogen from water can be used to make fertilizer and in the inverse, hydrogen from natrual gas will be used to power cars. Ahh, the lies of the mythical hydrogen economy.

[skids]

35. Interesting statistic.

Would you care to elaborate exactly where you get the figure 5-10 years? Which PV technology? What I'm saying is your statistic is old. Obselete. As in, it doesn't apply anymore.

I like biodeisel. If they could actually pull off the algae pool plan, that would be great. In the meantime, though, it has already shown itself to be viable as a cottage industry in food oil waste processing.

My favorite crop, though, would be hemp, with pyrolytic production of methanol from the hurd byproduct of fiber production. It's easy on the soil and could likely be grown in the required scale. That and methanol is an easy fuel for both adapted IC engines and proton exchange membranes.

[jpak]

39. Bullshit

The energy payback time for PV is 2-3 years - same as a nuclear power plant.

http://www.ecotopia.com/apollo2/pvlever.htm

PV modules are quite simple, low-Fe glazing (that's glass y'all), silicon PV cells, an aluminum frame and some wiring.

All these can be made using power from existing hydroelectric plants (most of US aluminum is produced using hydro-power in the Southeast and Northwest.)

I'm a "hugh" fan of biomass but using foodstuffs as fuel is obscene and Pimental was and is right...

http://www.agriculture.com/ag/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/ag/story/data/050823-views-danlooker.xml&catref=ag5001

And let's not forget that Midwest fertilizer use for corn production is primarily responsible for the formation of so-called Dead Zone on the Louisiana Shelf...

(but then again Ag types will deny this too.)

Ethanol from corn could be produced sustainably and with minimal fossil fuel inputs if:

it's grown organically

it's processed using solar thermal energy (drying)

its distilled using solar thermal and biomass energy inputs -concentrator arrays to pre-heat distillery mash and biomass combustion (corn stalks) for the final distillation process.

and the distillery wastes are used for livestock production

But to use fossil-fuel grown corn to fuel SUV's is fucking obscene...