Cheap “Nuclear Fusion” vs. VERY Expensive Nuclear Fission
I’m talking about how nuclear fission and nuclear power plants stack up in comparison to new ways of cost effectively harnessing our fusion reactor THE SUN.
(Safely located 93 million miles away.)
Here’s an article explaining why new solar breakthroughs in price and production make economic sense NOW,
network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/06/23/here-comes-the-sun.aspx
Here’s the video showing this Nanosolar machine in action. This is a: Game Changing, Leapfrog Technology, Economy of Scale, in the form of a rapid solar collector printing device.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClLKVs9oSxE
The scoop from the Nanosolar Company website:
(quote) As we are busy ramping our operation, we almost forgot to recognize achieving a major milestone in solar technology:
The solar industry’s first 1 GIGAWATT/ year production tool.
Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?
This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.
Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers and the kinds of high-vacuum based deposition techniques from industries where there’s a lot more $/sqm available for competitive manufacturing cost.
Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.
Plus if we cared to run it even faster, we could. (The same coating technique works in principle for speeds up to 2000 feet-per-minute too. In fact, it turns out the faster we run, the better the coating!) (unquote)
The Nuclear (fission) solution being widely promoted takes 10-20 years to produce the first watt of power, and BTW, the Sun is also a nuclear (fusion) reactor, proven fairly safe at this 93 million mile distance for millennia.
BY MY OWN HYPOTHETICAL DOLLAR COMPARISON LOOK AT NANOSOLAR VS. A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT:
Just one of these $1.65 million dollar thin film printing devices from Nanosolar can print a BILLION watts of solar collectors per year adding that much new capacity to the grid each year that it’s outputting product. So by the time it takes for each one of any of the proposed $6 to $9 BILLION nuclear power plants to come on line, each one of these Nanosolar machines will have meanwhile printed 10-20 gigawatts of new generation capacity to the grid. Not only that, the wattage available from these solar electric panels is privately insurable and warranted for 25 years and will probably function well for up to 35 years (with no radioactive waste disposal problem and instead the ability to recycle the materials when they wear out.) BTW, under the Price Anderson Act, Nuclear Power Plants are set up to have very limited liability, they’re self-insured for up $10 Billion but beyond that are insured by the federal government (i.e. TAXPAYERS WHO ALREADY HAVE MASSIVELY SUBSIDIZED THIS UNECONOMIC INDUSTRY ARE ALSO LIABLE FOR ABSORBING ANY CATASTROPHIC DAMAGES). When you consider that the plant may cost $9 BILLION to reimburse the investors just for the construction that leaves them liable to pay only $1 BILLION in damages. Just look at Chernobyl to see what kind of regional and world damages could be done by a serious nuclear accident. If you think Chernobyl is an extreme example, lets just look back at Brown’s Ferry Alabama, a nuclear accident in 1975 that cost $1.8 BILLION to repair because of an inspector with a candle. LET ME REPEAT- in what’s supposed to be one of the most secure places on earth a nuclear power plant, a candle caused $1.8 BILLION in damages. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown%27s_Ferry Oh and lets not just think about accidents or releases of radiation, lets remember what many nuclear advocates remind us all the time. That it’s a dangerous post 9-11 world. There are people out there willing to die if it means they can kill a lot of us. What kind of materials does Al Qaeda want to get its hands on? Solar materials or nuclear materials? What kind of energy are we threatening Iran about? Nuclear energy or solar energy?
The world could use a lot more solar proliferation and a lot less nuclear proliferation. Building nuclear power plants OVER HERE sets a bad example OVER THERE. How do you tell Iran not to build nuke plants if it is supposedly absolutely necessary in order to save us from climate change. The oil rich Wahhabists are located typically in places where they can take maximum advantage solar energy. Wouldn’t it be a delightful economic change to start balancing trade by selling them our solar technology and depend less on borrowing money from the Chinese to pay for the $141/barrel petroleum from underneath their sands.
It varies, but the average nuke plant produces 800 megawatts of generating capacity, which is only 80% of the gigawatt this CISG printing press can produce in 1 year.
Doing the math for comparison…say a $7.5 BILLION dollar nuke plant is “rushed” to bring it online in 12 years. During that time this cost effective solar printer will have produced 12 billion watts of generating capacity …. 15 times more power than the nuke plant will produce once it’s up and running…. Assuming these figures: Going with Nanosolar’s technology, just one of these $1.65 million dollar machines can add the equivalent of a $7.5 BILLION dollar nuke plant to the grid in only 9.6 months….and there will be no nuclear waste storage costs, no environmental risks, and no de-commissioning costs in 40 years which are in addition to the 7.5 BILLION dollar construction cost. Even with the boosterism for nuclear power that’s now heard everywhere, nuclear is now under the severest attack from market forces assuming politics and corporate socialist lobbyists don’t prevail over market forces.. Even if the cost of a Nuke plant is a mere $5 BILLION …….take that same $5 BILLION and invest in the Nanosolar printing presses and you get OVER THREE THOUSAND TIMES AS MUCH ENERGY PRODUCTION. 3,030 times more to be accurate.
To be fair, above I’ve only described the cost of the printing machine in a one-off custom price. I’ve left off the cost of aluminum, copper, indium, selenium, and gallium nanoparticles so to simplify we’ll need to really look at the selling price of Nanosolar collectors produced and installed at $1 per watt (and that’s conservative). So installing the output of one of these machines will cost $1 BILLION. for 1 GIGAWATT of capacity which will produce warranted for 25 years with very little maintenance and NO fuel costs, no staffing by highly trained professionals. The Nanosolar Gigawatt $1 Billion investment compares with an equal Gigawatt capacity from a nuclear power plant construction cost investment of $9.4 Billion. That includes no fuel costs, staffing costs, maintenance, security, spent fuel storage and transportation costs. So the choice is between spending a dollar for a renewable watt installed on the grid within a year, or at least $10 on a watt available in 10 years or more.
Quoting the article below:
“As the fight over nuclear energy shifts from safety to cost, timing the public release of the multibillion-dollar expense takes on an increasingly strategic value to both sides.
The estimated cost of new nuclear power plants has tripled in the past few years, with projections now hitting $6 billion to $9 billion per reactor. Cost estimates are expected to continue escalating. Soaring costs make the prospect of new nuclear power even harder to sell to a public that will ultimately pay for new plants through rate increases.”
My reference on the current Cost of Nuclear is this article www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1048035.html
If you need more evidence that this clean renewable technology is economically superior to nuclear power plants, consider this:
The talking heads on th MSM are always pointing to the French as the model we should emulate to save us from the disastrous consequences of climate change. The French have very little in the way of hydrocarbon fuel resources to exploit so they became an early adopter of nuclear power and it accounts for a very high percentage of their electrical production….YET now a French electric utility company has invested $50 million in Nanosolar. earth2tech.com/2008/04/02/nanosolar-raises-50m-more-secures-french-buyer/ hmmmmm.
If you want to know where the smart money is going, let me remind you that the founders of Google, a (some would say successful) company that uses a great deal of electricity to run its servers, were early major investor’s in Nanosolar.
How about using some sharp insight and common sense in our desperately needed multi-pronged national energy policy?
June 27th, 2008 at 10:28 am
“Just one of these $1.65 million dollar thin film printing devices from Nanosolar can print a billion watts of solar collectors per year adding that much new capacity to the grid each year that it’s outputting produ”
Not quite. Even leaving aside the fact that we don’t mine enough raw materials annually to make all that nanoparticle ink, you have to mount those sheets on something farily rigid to prevent the wind from tearing them to ribbons. Currently that’s aluminum or wooden panels but in the future they’re talking about using all kinds of materials, like roofing tiles. Nevertheless that material has to come from somewhere and solar power farms are HUGE. The resources needed to build an 800MW PV plant are several times those needed to build a nuclear power plant and there’s simply no comparing the relative footprint of a PV plant to a nuke plant. Space-based solar power plants would be ideal though still out of our reach for the next 50-100 years or so. NASA estimated the cost as over $100 Billion dollars per plant in 1979 dollars. We’ve some ideas but they’re nowhere near ready to implement.
All current nuclear power plants are based on designs prepared in the 1950s. Back then when we wanted to make power we boiled water to make steam and drive a turbine: Engineers just replaced the boilers with fission rods and added cooling towers so they didn’t have to dump the now-radiactive discharge water back in the rivers. It turns out that was an absolutely stupid way to use atomic power and modern reactor designs are much lighter, cheaper to build, and far more efficient. Even mentioning Chernobyl as a reason not to use nuclear power should rate a horsewhipping - no one but the Stalin-era Soviets were ever stupid enough to build something like that.
Bottom line is we’re going to need nuclear power as a bridge to whatever “green” energy technology we finally arrive at. No matter how many miles of solar panels we can build per year there’s a problem assembling all those PV plants that we’ll need.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
check out http://www.generalfusion.com/ for a less expensive nuclear option… maybe not as far along as Nanosolar, but still interesting…
April 12th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Orin,
Here’s a fun fact for you.
“1kg CIGS = 5kg Uranium
December 16, 2008
By Martin Roscheisen, CEO
The notion of a kilogram of enriched Uranium conjures up an image of a powerful amout of energy. Enough to power an entire city for years when used in a nuclear power plant, or enough to flatten an entire county when used in a bomb — that’s presumably what many people would say if one asked them about their thoughts.
In our new solar cell technology, we use an active material called CIGS, a Copper based semiconductor. How does this stack up against enriched Uranium?
Here’s a noteworthy fact, pointed out to me by one of our engineers: It turns out that 1kg of CIGS, embedded in a solar cell, produces 5 times as much electricity as 1kg of enriched Uranium, embedded in a nuclear power plant.
Or said differently, 1kg of CIGS is equivalent to 5kg of enriched Uranium in terms of the energy the materials deliver in solar and nuclear respectively.
The Uranium is burned and then stored in a nuclear waste facility; the CIGS material produces power for at least the warranty period of the solar cell product after which it can then be recycled and reused an indefinite number of times.”