Climate change: The Critical Decade

Nope

As the links show, the total size of the TMI plant is only 382 acres.

It has room for two reactors capable of putting out 26 times as much power as the Fenton Wind Farm.

But the Fenton wind farm, at .5 acres per tower, which means for the same amount of power you would need 1,781 acres or nearly 5 times as much, and of course hundreds of more miles of land for the high voltage lines to get the power from the distant wind fields to the cities where the power is needed.

And no, typically Nukes are situated far enough away from major population centers so that their land cost is not high, yet they will typically be MUCH closer than wind farms are to the population centers they feed.

Arthur

 

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That's the plant area size - the access acreage, waste storage, security perimeter, and so forth, adds quite a bit - something like doubles the area, for my local nukes.

The wind towers in my area run about a quarter acre each for 1.5MW, so at 25% you would need about a thousand acres to match an ideal TMI setup (one with no major accidents, etc) at 90% of the original expectations of 1706 MW for the pair. So figuring 500 acres for TMI facilities and security etc total (an underestimate, but probably the windmills need a field entrance or two modified as well) we have about twice as much acreage for the wind power.

But good turbine land is worth less than half as much in property tax opportunity cost, so the property tax subsidies are apparently larger for the nuke.

The actual TMI, compared with any actual wind farm, of course comes out far behind - the entire acreage produces around 800MW when it's running, not 1700, and after all down times (runup, accidents, refueling) are added up only about 27 of its 37 years have been online at all, with even one reactor.

I refer you to your link. The MN nukes are both in areas in which land is often sold (and taxed) by the building lot, rather than the acre.

 

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NO, the Site Size is a total of 382 Acres, for BOTH TMI reactors, see previous link.

And when comparing Nuke to Wind, you can't keep using the one facility that had a problem as your yardstick. You need to factor in TMI as 1 out of 104 reactors, or cut the actual output of nukes by less than 1% to account for the loss of less than 1% of our capacity due to accidents, and so when we say nukes get 90+% of capacity, that's system wide and that's what you compare with.

And I did check the locations and Prairie Island is not in any high value land even now (see absence of roads), its 28 miles from Minneapolis and it's been operating since 1974, when the land was really unused.

http://maps.google.com/maps?rlz=1T4...erating Plant&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl

Monticello is even further out, 35 miles away from Minneapolis, and again on low value/density land and it's been operating since 1981.

http://maps.google.com/maps?rlz=1T4...Plant, Unit 1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl

Arthur

 

True - not always dedicated, though. In my general area they seem to be easements, existing field access and road rights of way, etc - not high value land made unavailable for other normal use, and taken off the tax rolls accordingly.

The comparison is between property tax breaks for the various forms of power - some people seem to think wind power is getting huge and disproportionate subsidies in that manner. Obvious nonsense, but we need some kind of argument for them.

All power generation is subsidized, heavily. None more than nuclear, now and for decades past and future, unless we establish a high monetary value for the the use of the public waters and air (and the public itself) for waste dumping, and enter that into coal's books.

btw: as long as "the critical decade" is the threat, and time is of the essence, we might notice that most renewable stuff can be quickly built compared with the heavier and more hazardous coal, nukes, etc - you can even bring a solar setup or windmill operation on line in stages, as fast as you can build them.

 

If you price high, level, open, scenic, waterfront property less than fifty miles from downtown Minneapolis and right in the 94 corridor,

and compare it with subpar water short glacial outwash pasture land in the wind-blown SW part of MN, far from major roads and even minor cities,

you will discover a large difference in its real estate valuation and expected property tax yield.

The Federal, State, County, and local city (Red Wing) governments established that area as combination Indian Reservation and various kinds of park, wildlife reserve, etc, long ago. The "low value" is the subsidy - an artificial creation of government. The use of eminent domain, various pressures on the Tribe involved, a good deal of infrastructure development (such as the miles of improved access road to the "island" and utilities for the casino etc), and serious property tax negotiations, were all involved and still are - that plant is heavily subsidized, and has been since construction began.

TMI comparison was your choice - you liked the "382 acres" number associated with it.

But they all have problems and accidents, not just TMI 2 (TMI 1 was just down from November through January of last year) and of course present a huge risk that an honest bookkeeper would include in the books. The Monticello plant was shut down for a while recently when its main reactor control box fell off the wall and landed on the cooling water pipes - turned out to be minor, by luck; Prairie Island has had continual problems with corrosion and other problems in its piping (during construction one of the engineers with responsibility for that piping and consequent safety guarantees quit due to ethical reservations - the piping started to fail long before its assumed lifespan). And every time they re-evaluate the serious earthquake risk under those two plants the number is bigger - it's up to one in 25,000 now for Prairie Island, and some think that's very optimistic.

We might even classify the bogus risk evaluations and protection from liability as a form of subsidy - if Prairie Island had been required to proof and indemnify itself against the higher, rather than lower, risk estimates, it would have been far too expensive to build in the first place, and too costly to run now in insurance premiums alone.

 

Not when you add in the fact that it takes at least twice as much land and then all the land needed to get the power clear across the state.

BS, you brought up TMI in your post 109 because you wanted to infer that Nukes needed PRIME real estate when you know from your own situation that's a LIE.

http://sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2765013&postcount=109

And yet all that downtime is included in the percent of capacity they produce and yet they get over 90% of rated capacity and we have over a half-century of commercial nuclear energy production in the US, including over 3,500 reactor years of operation, there have been no radiation-related health effects linked to their operation, and the loss of only one reactor. So, no the risk premiums are not an issue.

Arthur

 

And the property tax opportunity cost - the subsidy if the wind farms pay no property tax at all for life on their occupied acreage - in such situations, does not appear to be very large.

 

They may not be required to, but still it's probably an easy number to estimate as long as you are doing it on a monthly basis. Wind might vary day by day, but the overall average wind speed for a given month of the year won't vary that much from year to year, but as you said, there can be exceptional months, but then again, something big can unexpectedly break in the Coal plant as well, so even their estimates are just that, estimates.

Well like most power systems, typical backup are thermal plants with low cost per kWh of Capacity (Typically Gas turbines) but higher fuel costs than baseload capacity to make up the slack.

The other option is things like pumped storage because as we increase our percent of power that we can't regulate ourselves we will probably have to increase our use of various means of energy storage.

Arthur

 

Yes, but that's megawatts of CAPACITY.

Because wind has about 1/3 the actual output compared to capacity of thermal plants you have to multiply those numbers by 3 to compare them to the land used by thermal plants (5.4 acres to 18 acres per MW of average output), similarly the long high voltage lines that get the power from remote wind farms to population centers have to be sized for the MAX output of the farm, which again is 3 times the average output.

Arthur

 

Again, you said to do the estimate on a monthly basis and as you know, as you increase the number of days you are adding up, the average wind speed will tend to be less deceiving and thus when you are dealing with 30 days out of any given season will tend to be pretty close to the same average as the same period in the years before. Unless you are asking for a higher degree of accuracy than I would expect.

Yeah, there is that.
Not sure about how they figure it reduces the the reduction in CO2 though.

What I find Winds biggest drawback is that it is out of phase with our demand.
Peak Wind seasons are almost always Spring and Fall and yet peak Electrical demands are Summer and Winter.

Solar fits in well with Wind in the Summer, but not so well in the short days of winter.

Arthur

 

Possibly, I'm not sure what they are using the estimate for.

Still....

Luckily modern Wind Turbines have a very wide range of wind speeds they operate at and thus this shouldn't be that much of a problem. The wind speeds are measured at Hub height, which for these turbines is at least 85 meters up as well, pretty much insuring that they will almost always have sufficient wind speed to produce some power. So for instance the GE 2.5 MW turbine has a very low cut in speed at just 6 mph (3 m/s) and a pretty high cut out speed at 55 MPH (25 m/s), it also has a very fast ramp up of output, with it producing 1,000 kW at 7.5 m/s, 2,000 kW at 10 m/s and full power, 2,500 kW at just 12 m/s.

http://www.ge-energy.com/content/multimedia/_files/downloads/GEA17007A-Wind25Brochure.pdf

So my guess is that on a given month, the number of hours where wind at 85 meters is below 3 m/s or above 25 m/s will be pretty low, and that the amount of time the wind is between 3 m/s and 12 m/s and between 12 m/s and 25 m/s will be reasonably predictable.

At least that doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

Arthur

 

In case it was missed: all my arithmetic above included that factor - I used 25%, not 1/3, as a closer match to the 23% you were asserting earlier.

We clearly need a lot of storage for all the solar, wind, etc, if we are planning to rely on them.

The exact form will depend on local stuff - and of course massive government subsidy for research and establishment, probably (to be pessimistic) something on the order of the subsidies required by coal and nukes.

Fortunately, even the comparatively meager resources so far devoted to that project have turned up half a dozen promising and near term possibilities - pressurized air, pumped water or other weight, flywheels, heat sequestration, batteries and fuel cells of various provisions ( a windmill setup or thermal plant used to recharge fuel cells by the trainload would thereby store automatically), and so forth.

Compare with the billions shoveled into space lasers, fusion power development, coal gasification, and the like.

But all power setups need backup of some prudent adequacy - such as the nuke in Missouri that has been off line since April, because of the flood. It may well be harder to plan for nuke mishaps than for, say, next year's electrical shortfall from the last five years of drought. They are sudden, and dramatic in their effects. Fukushima didn't have adequate storage, the Missouri plant didn't, etc.

 

The 23% was the US rate, the 1/3 is more of a global number (the rest of the globe uses much more off shore resources than the US does and thus gets a bit better utilization rate)

Storage is not the same as Backup. Conventional baseload power sources don't need storage, but do need backup. Wind/Solar can only be baseload if they have both. Storage is much more expensive than Backup.