Interesting Links for 01-03-2019
Mar. 1st, 2019 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Why trans people are refusing invitations to "debate"
- (tags:transgender lgbt media )
- How an Instagram star walked away from 'selling anorexia'
- (tags:socialmedia advertising anorexia food diet )
- Brexit: Brussels rejects Costa amendment plan for side-agreement to protect EU citizens rights in no deal
- (tags:rights europe uk doom )
- YouTube bans comments on all videos of children
- (tags:youtube children )
- Weekend lie-ins could be worse than staying sleep deprived
- (tags:sleep )
- Some people have a gene linked with happy Marriages (rs53576)
- (tags:relationships genetics )
- Why Renewables Can't Save the Planet
- (tags:nuclearpower renewables electricity viaCipherGoth )
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no subject
Date: 2019-03-01 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-02 12:34 am (UTC)Off by a factor of two on the materials, no idea where they are coming up with the waste. Solar panels go outside for decades, so everyone uses aluminium instead of steel.
Nuclear reactors need about 60 tons of steel and 300 tons of concrete per TWh, assuming a 60-year design life.
A 24.9 kg commercial solar panel designed to withstand 25 Canadian winters has a peak output of 405 W. At a 20% capacity factor, that's about 2800 tonnes per TWh. So, about 7-8 times as much material as a reactor. Half that if you used panels designed for milder winters.
BUT, a reactor is basically a useless concrete shell after it is decommissioned. The aluminium frame and copper busbars of a solar panel are readily recyclable, and you can even use the glass panel for a greenhouse or something (assuming you have the patience to warm it with a hair dryer and scrape off the sticky goop).
The waste from our solar panel factory was a few scrap glass sheets per month. The aluminium frame scraps, tin-plated copper busbars, and EVA backing plastic scraps were recycled, and the empty drums of silicone sealant were returned to the manufacturer for reuse. We even collected the used hairnets from the operators to be recycled by Terracycle. The weight of our waste silicon wafers was negligible.
"Despite what you’ve heard, there is no “battery revolution” on the way, for well-understood technical and economic reasons."
Ask Elon Musk and Australia about that. He's already making a fortune turning underperforming and used car batteries into
load-leveling systems.
"Experts fear solar panels will be shipped, along with other forms of electronic waste, to be disassembled—or, more often, smashed with hammers—by poor communities in Africa and Asia, whose residents will be exposed to the dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium."
If you hit one of our solar panels with a hammer, the hammer will bounce back and will smack you on the forehead. We had to make a hydraulic press to punch through it to break up the glass. Our facilities manager gave up and put legs on many of our defective panels, and we are now using them as tables in our meeting rooms.
Modern solar panels do not contain any lead, cadmium, and chromium.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 08:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 11:49 am (UTC)We didn't use rivets or threaded fasteners for the aluminium frames on the solar panels, but just crimped the corners with a press. That way it's 100% aluminum to recycle, with no need to separate different metals.
Unless a nuclear reactor is expressly designed to avoid neutron activation of components (such as in a CANDU reactor, where everything in the calandria is beryllium), neutron bombardment will make some of the steel and other metals radioactive. This renders it useless for recycling purposes. Scrap yards have radiation detectors to detect irradiated metal that enters the supply chain, to prevent contaminating their supply, but sometimes people mess up:
https://petpitchusa.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/petco-recalls-some-stainless-steel-pet-bowls-due-to-cobalt-60-contamination/
The concrete shell of the reactor could be reused for some application not requiring windows or easy entrance (perhaps a server farm? safe-deposit boxes?), provided the concrete itself had not been exposed to neutrons. If the concrete itself has become radioactive you couldn't even use it as a server farm, as radiation hitting RAM will cause single-bit errors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset
So, solar panels may use more materials per TWh, but those materials are recycleable.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-02 01:44 pm (UTC)Because we're scared and feel threatened.
Next?
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 04:01 am (UTC)I still don't know what to think about quillette.com - it feels like the early days of "who the hell are these thecanary.co people?" - but it does feel like they're right-wing bad-faith guys.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 12:55 pm (UTC)(I feel very unsure about nuclear power, and don't know what to think on the subject)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 02:00 pm (UTC)But I think the nuclear industry should stop whinging and get on with making their equipment fit the cost structures and operating requirements of the way the grid will be in 2050 and not how they imagined it was in 1950.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 02:43 pm (UTC)There's a decent opportunity in front of them. A play on small, modular reactor built by the hundred or thousand might get you both flexibility they need to operate on a messier grid and the various economic advantages from long series production but they seem very reluctant to go there.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 01:54 pm (UTC)Firstly, I think the article is California focused. I wouldn't use US energy markets or grids as a model of how to run an electricty system - especially California. This is the place that brought you Enron and the California Electricity Crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
You are dealing with a jurisdiction where energy companies are taking legal action to prevent people de-coupling from the grid.
If you want to look at dams - look at Costa Rica, not at California. California is a desert trying to grow alfalfa. (Other people who have tried that include Syria, right just before their 8 year long civil war.) California's water rights issues are grounded in a really murky politcal battle in the early 20th Century and the constant threat of a drought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars
Is Californian demand a good proxy for everywhere else in the world?
Secondly, there are a few false dichotimies there. Why are we aiming for 100% renewables? (We need to significantly limit carbon dioxide emissions and quickly but I think we could live with 10% from CCGT's.) 100% of what, exactly, capacity or production? (Having a CCGT which you only run at night during the winter would look like 10% capacity but only 1% output.) Why are renewables only solar PV and onshore wind? (What happened to offshore wind, biomas, biogas and marine renewables - in the context of filling the last 10%) Who made the rule that the system had to be 100% renewables or 100% a combination of nukes and CCGTs?
As for batteries - sure they are expensive today but a) you have to look at the total cost of the system rather than the costs of individual components. The cheaper solar pv becomes the more money there is left over for storage or transmission. b) other storage solutions are available, including proper grid infrastructure such as the Chinese are building which allows you to shift production around the country.
There is an economic path way to more battery deployment - as peaker replacements or grid stability service providers which should drive a continued role out of batteries and continued reductions in cost. See solar panels, wind turbines, cars, tin cans, and just about anything humans have ever done more than once ever. (It's a significant difficulty for the nuclear industry - they rarely build in fleets and so don't get the cost reduction advantages that come with building fleets.
The question isn't "Is this expensive today?" the question is "Will this be expensive when I need to buy it?" We don't need huge amounts of electricity storage to back up intermittent renewables right just now. Mostly our grids are not full and not fully interconnected. We should make policy for the next round of infrastructure build out and not some imagined situation in 30 years time.
(That said the biggest threat to battery uptake is the fact that solar PV + CCGT as a backup is cheaper than just running a CCGT.)
Trust is a big issue. Costa Rica, which is just about made of hydropower, is about 6.5 thousand kilometers from San Franscisco - about the maximum range of a UHV DC cable as built by the Chinese, but you have run that cable through Nicaragua, Hondurus, Guatamal and Mexico. It's not the techncial limitations but the political limitations. Efforts to fully integrate the energy markets in the EU are very slow.
Or, you could find that solar pv gets so cheap that you don't bother storing it for longer than 72 hours. You build your solar pv system to provide 100% of your power needs on a cloudy 21st December and throw away the rest. (This is my bet on where we will end up.)
This quote
"You can make solar panels cheaper and wind turbines bigger, but you can’t make the sun shine more regularly or the wind blow more reliably"
True (sort of) but somewhat missing the point. You can make solar panels so cheap you point some of them due east at the rising sun and expand your early morning production. You can design wind turbines to have lower capacity but higher capacity factors by using undersized blades designed for operating in low-wind speeds. The wind is more reliable the further up you go and the further offshore you go. And we haven't even properly started on using deep learning techniques to site wind turbines for maximum output.
(For sure there are problems with the synchronisity of wind across continents and deadcalm spells - but what is the problem you are trying to solve with wind. If the problem you are trying to solve is that solar PV needs oversized batteries to shfit power from June to February then all you using the wind turbines for is to top up the batteries over the winter so you only a third as many batteries.)
A reason, perhaps the entire reason (and YMMV) why electricity prices increased in California and Germany whilst solar PV prices came down is that those jurisdictions were explicitly paying to subsidize the roll out, and associated reduction in cost, of solar PV as a gift to the world. Because solar PV is all CAPEX those costs are front loaded and built in from the begining. You can't make a solar panel built in 2009 and installed in 2011 cost the same as a solar panel built in 2019.
The comment about the energy density by area on nuclear is a little misleading. If you go to a uranium mine they are quite big holes in the ground.
France can run on mostly nukes because it sits in the middle of 4 heavily industrialised jusisdictions that don't run on nukes - Germany, Benelux, the UK and Italy - all of whom act as off-taker for surplus French generation.
On nukes - successful industries are too busy making money to bleat about regulation.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 01:13 pm (UTC)Ooh, good point!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 02:12 pm (UTC)And obviously also point different ones at the sunset and oriente your solar panels for maximum production in the winter, rather than maximum overall production - which I think helps match demand and supply better by maximising winter production whilst at the same time slightly reducing summer peak production.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 08:18 am (UTC)