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thunderhead
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PostThu Mar 28, 2019 2:29 pm 
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45423575 As for Fukushima, it looks like we are up to 1 death from the nuclear accident. While much value was lost in the exclusion zone, it still pales in comparison to the tsunami itself and I think it is safe to say such an accident will be less likely in the future, because now we have a good reminder to not put all your backup gear at sea level on a tsunami coast... though perhaps that should have been obvious from the get go...

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Randito
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PostThu Mar 28, 2019 2:29 pm 
thunderhead wrote:
No country of appreciable size has yet been able to get solar and wind above the low 20s, and those that try jack up their electric rates more than is necessary.
I think you are quoting out of date information China -- which isn't a "small" country has recently expanded its solar percentage to 25.8 % in 2016 and is now up to 32% https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

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thunderhead
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PostThu Mar 28, 2019 2:39 pm 
Quote:
China -- which isn't a "small" country has recently expanded its solar percentage to 25.8 % in 2016 and is now up to 32%
That is their share of nameplate capacity, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the previous value being discussed, which was grid penetration. The relevant value for china, grid penetration of solar, is about 2%. That is the correct value you should have used. It is available on the link you provided under share of total consumption(1.8%) if you scroll down. Perhaps you should have actually read through it. Note, if you add in grid penetration of wind you get up to something like 7% for total erratics in china. Far below the 20% value where the curve gets steep.

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MtnGoat
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PostThu Mar 28, 2019 3:13 pm 
RandyHiker wrote:
thunderhead wrote:
No country of appreciable size has yet been able to get solar and wind above the low 20s, and those that try jack up their electric rates more than is necessary.
I think you are quoting out of date information China -- which isn't a "small" country has recently expanded its solar percentage to 25.8 % in 2016 and is now up to 32% https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
By all means, let's let China lead in wasting resources on non issues.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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drm
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PostFri Mar 29, 2019 3:14 pm 
thunderhead wrote:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45423575 As for Fukushima, it looks like we are up to 1 death from the nuclear accident. While much value was lost in the exclusion zone, it still pales in comparison to the tsunami itself and I think it is safe to say such an accident will be less likely in the future, because now we have a good reminder to not put all your backup gear at sea level on a tsunami coast... though perhaps that should have been obvious from the get go...
Meanwhile the cleanup cost is currently estimated at $180 billion. Some estimates go over $200 billion.
Quote:
"I truly cannot say" whether decommissioning can be wrapped up on a 30- to 40-year timeline, and "it is important to be honest," said Hajimu Yamana, head of the government-backed Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation.

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Randito
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PostFri Mar 29, 2019 6:02 pm 
MtnGoat wrote:
By all means, let's let China lead in wasting resources on non issues.
Along with Idaho and Hawaii https://electrek.co/2019/03/29/egeb-17-low-solar-prices Hawaii is an interesting case as oil/natural gas generation costs are fairly high due to the cost of shipping said fossil fuels from the mainland. Solar with battery storage is coming in at 2/3 the cost per kwh as fossil fuel generation. Nuclear seems like it could be a good candidate on the islands -- except for that volcano eruption risk.

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Sculpin
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PostMon Apr 01, 2019 10:37 am 
A couple things folks here don't seem to realize: 1. After Three Mile Island, nuclear reactors were redesigned to be fail safe. In other words, when a major failure occurs, the fire goes out. Both Fukushima and Chernobyl were old style. Not sure how many fail safe reactors have been built, but for newer reactors meltdowns are no longer an issue. 2. All the blathering about German energy costs misses the main point. Germany lacks fossil fuels other than low-grade coal. They actually developed the technology to burn the low grade stuff cleanly, but it is expensive to do it that way. They are not going to just pump out sulfur and other atmospheric toxins. Germany is a world leader in renewables mostly because it will make them energy independent - no more having to suck up to autocrats like Putin just to keep the fossil fuels flowing. So all your arithmetic on energy costs...Germany says have a nice day. moon.gif

Between every two pines is a doorway to the new world. - John Muir
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MtnGoat
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PostMon Apr 01, 2019 1:51 pm 
So dependence upon the non German, imported rare earths necessary for all the solar and wind is OK, but dependence upon gas, isn't? Help us find the 'there' present in the nothing that is 'independence' claims. Color me skeptical...extremely so. After all, at the outset when it was 'global warming' we were regaled with the idea the the US needed to be 'energy independent' and this idea formed a very common basis for action, and was often the pragmatic basis of the pre-hysteria at that point. I bet you can find this 'independence' argument in this thread, as a matter of fact. Then comes the pause, the failure of nations to sink or snows to end, and all the rest, along with the name change to climate 'change'...and most importantly, the fracking revolution in which the US is now the top producer of oil. Voila..independence, what we were told the point was. Yet the claims of a desire for energy 'independence' have all but dried up, while the hysteria de jour, remains. The desire for 'independence' was a convenient stalking horse all along, and the notion it wasn't has been falsified by the near complete dropping of this talking point. So when I'm told Germany merely wants to be 'independent' of this that or the other on the basis of claims related to warming, I wonder about that

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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Parked Out
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PostMon Apr 01, 2019 4:00 pm 
Sculpin wrote:
Germany is a world leader in renewables mostly because it will make them energy independent...
You could also say that Germany is the world's crash-test dummy for renewables, because they're having to learn the hard way what smarter nations can figure out with math and a little common sense. Whether the goal was energy independence or climate, all they had to do was look next door at France to see a much quicker, cheaper and more effective path to reduced dependence on fossil fuels. But bless their progressive little hearts, they had to go wind & solar, and now we can all watch and see how that works out for them. Here's wind resource surpluses & deficits across Europe for the month of January 2016. Notice how often most or all of the countries are experiencing surplus or deficit at the same time. Works the same for solar with the whole day & night thing... Overproduced electricity has little or even negative value when you can't store it or sell it to your neighbors.

John
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MtnGoat
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PostMon Apr 01, 2019 5:00 pm 
Back to 18th century tech ......abandoned for it's unreliability.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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Randito
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PostMon Apr 01, 2019 8:38 pm 
MtnGoat wrote:
So dependence upon the non German, imported rare earths necessary for all the solar and wind is OK, but dependence upon gas, isn't?
Rare earths aren't all that rare in the earth's crust. As with most things that require labor to produce them those produced in China with its low wages and lack of labor standards are so much cheaper that local production isn't economically viable. However should China attempt to "OPEC" the supply, local production will ramp up. Also there is a vast difference in dependency between a commodity that requires weekly resupply and installing solar panels that will produce electricity for decades without further importation. But being blind to that difference suits your agenda eh?

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MtnGoat
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PostTue Apr 02, 2019 8:26 am 
No, but casting disagreement as blindness fits yours, as we see above. Note that my argument made no use of the flawed idea that rare earths are rare. It noted that the argument for 'independence' is one demonstrably abused with full intent, as with the bait and switch we saw in arguments for forcing the US off oil so the US could be 'energy independent'...arguments dropped now that we are energy independent in terms of the commodity we were urged to drop in pursuit of independence. It was never about independence, and it's not about that for Germany either. Yes, different things...are different! It's far from clear, and I'll argue doubtful, that either solar or wind turbines are actually net zero carbon. Decades of partial power at best from products that take immense energy to produce in the first place should have been able to sustain their own economics without subsidy by now.....many decades after the invention of solar cells, and centuries after the invention of windmills. I challenge *anyone* to show us the supply chains of all metal, materials, conductors, semiconductors, and composites powered by the 'renewable' energy products they create in the first place. They don't exist because they are net losses in every sense, underpinned by the existence and use of non renewables. Then we have the CO2 production and waste production necessary for the support for all stages of the rare earths alone...
RandyHiker wrote:
As the academic David S. Abraham explains in his book The Elements of Power, this makes for a grueling extraction process. To create rare earths from the ore that contains them, this material has to be dissolved in solutions of acids, over and over again, then filtered, and dissolved once more. “The goal is not so much to remove rare earths from the mix as to remove everything else,” writes Abraham. Rare earth ore goes through these steps hundreds and hundreds of times, and for each new mining location, the concentration of the acids used has to be recalculated in order to target the specific impurities in the soil. To top it off, the whole process produces any number of nasty chemical byproducts and is radioactive. PROCESSING RARE EARTHS INVOLVES A LOT OF TIME, ACID, AND RADIOACTIVITY The whole process is “expensive, difficult, and dangerous,” says former rare earth trader and freelance journalist Tim Worstall. He tells The Verge that, because of this, the West has been more or less happy to cede production of rare earths to China.
I'm uncertain why your argument is concerned with the economic non viability of producing rare earth elements outside of China. As with renewables, why, we could just force it to *appear* viable here with a never ending stream of market distortions and subsidies. This is true in Germany as well. My agenda is straightforward...arguing against non-science, and the non-sense which attends it... with people pushing to waste energy and resources, and people's rights, choices, and their resources, in pursuit of the non attainable and irrational. Everyone owns the right to waste their own time and resources. They do not own the right to force others to do the same.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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MtnGoat
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PostTue Apr 02, 2019 8:48 am 
RandyHiker wrote:
MtnGoat wrote:
By all means, let's let China lead in wasting resources on non issues.
Along with Idaho and Hawaii https://electrek.co/2019/03/29/egeb-17-low-solar-prices Hawaii is an interesting case as oil/natural gas generation costs are fairly high due to the cost of shipping said fossil fuels from the mainland. Solar with battery storage is coming in at 2/3 the cost per kwh as fossil fuel generation. Nuclear seems like it could be a good candidate on the islands -- except for that volcano eruption risk.
So the big savings comes from adding only 2/3rds *more* to the cost of the standard sources *required* in order to actually have a 24/7/365 power grid? I think 'green' customers who push these sources on the basis of costing so much less, should also get the actual performance of the systems at their low price. Paying 2/3rds of the cost for 1/4 the power, or less, ought to be a real bargain.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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Parked Out
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PostTue Apr 02, 2019 9:55 am 
RandyHiker wrote:
Also there is a vast difference in dependency between a commodity that requires weekly resupply and installing solar panels that will produce electricity for decades without further importation.
I would have to look up the exact number, but under Mark Jacobson's 100% wind-water-solar plan for the US, the daily replacement rate for solar panels in perpetuity is literally in the millions of square meters. With Germany's relatively poor insolation, their number would probably be just as high.

John
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Randito
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PostTue Apr 02, 2019 7:30 pm 
MtnGoat wrote:
Paying 2/3rds of the cost for 1/4 the power, or less, ought to be a real bargain.
Work on your reading comprehension skills. 2/3 the cost per KWH compared to fossil fuel based electricity.

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