I wrote a real downer of a diary last week. It was supposed to be thought provoking but instead it turned into barf inducing. Oh well, it happens. I'm a computer geek who writes SIMD graphics code. English is like a third language to me after assembler and C.
So to anyone who had the misfortune of stumbling into that last POS let me take some space here to apologize, "I am sorry."
However, I was trying to make a point. And I think a very important point that still needs to be made. This time it'll be better, I promise.
This is the most important image you will see today. Look at it really hard.
Do you recognize it? Anyone? Yeah, that's pretty hard to make out. Maybe you'd recognize it at a somewhat larger scale. Here's a full size version of one of those blurry bits
That's the amazing 110 Mwh (megawatt hours) solar plant just approved for construction. It represents a huge step forward to our nation's energy independence. It might be a long journey ahead of us but a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. (BTW, the Chinese version 千里之行, 始於足下 translates to "Thousand li journey start with one step". A li being about 1/3rd of a mile). And from the article on the plant
designed to provide enough renewable energy to supply 75,000 households with electricity, using solar thermal power technology.
That first picture, the one you couldn't make out, that represents 70 of those power stations. A pretty decent number of them. That's 7.7Gwh (gigawatt hours) of solar baby! That'd be 5.25 million households supplied with pure, clean, solar power! We're cooking now!
Umm, no. We're not. According to those crazies at Lawrence Livermore’s Nuclear Laboratory the US, from all sources, produced 94.6 Quads of energy in 2009. A quad is a unit of heat energy equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 BTU. Yes, you read that right. One quadrillion BTU (or for those of you across the pond 1,000 billion BTU – After all, the B in BTU stands for British). Now those are thermal units, to convert to the equivalent in electrical energy (assuming perfect conversion, see the Carnot cycle to learn why that’s impossible) 0.293 watt-hours is one BTU. So that 94.6 Quad amount comes to 27.7 Pwh (petawatt-hours). Yes, 27.7 quadrillion watt-hours. It’s huge, in Saganesque terms it’s getting close to “billions of billions”.
But that’s the power requirements for a year and from all sources of energy. Only 75% of our energy generation comes from non-renewable carbon sources. And we need to bring that number into daily requirements to get it in the same realm as the solar power plant. So (27.7 Pwh) X 0.75 / 365.25 gives us 56.8 Twh/day. Nearly 57 trillion watt-hours of generation per day need to be replaced if we’re going to kick the hydrocarbon habit completely and since we're already past the tipping point of 350 ppm of CO2 we're going to have to go cold turkey. Sorry, but doing it in 0.0002% steps once a year or even once a week isn’t going to cut it. Wrap your brain around those numbers. At one new 110 MWh solar plant a week we reduce our carbon requirement by 0.01% each year. To eliminate our carbon use completely by 2030 we'd need to build 70 of those plants a day.
Or you can admit that we might need to consider something else as an energy source. Yes, I'll say right now -- no reactor, no matter how perfectly designed, will ever be 100% safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Jokes about "wind spills" and "sunshine leaks" aside, if we don't find a way to get off the carbon habit, and soon, we're pretty much fucked as a species. But hey, at least we'll die from starvation, thirst, and disease instead of radioactive corn flakes. Building one 20th century style "Failotron" gigawatt-hour nuclear plant once a month in addition to those solar plants triples the reduction on our carbon usage to 0.03%.
But that still won’t be enough. Not even close. That’s why “smaller is better” has to be considered. Those LFTR reactors you've heard about can be made to be about the size of a semi-truck. Generating about 20 megawatt-hours of energy means each of them could supply about 13500 households with power. And they could tap into the electrical grid we already have in place. As better grids became available and improved efficiency in residential electric usage occurred they’d go even further. Still better is the fact they could be massed produced. We could build 10, 20, maybe more per day. Now we’re talking about a real change. At only 10 a day that comes to 200 Mwh of nuclear power going on line each day. We would reduce our carbon needs by almost 0.13% every week. That’s more than 6.6% every year. In 15 years we would be carbon free. We could achieve that even at today’s power requirements.
Now there are other ways to replace that power or even the need for it. In addition to solar there's conservation, wind, tidal, geothermal, and biomass. And I'm pretty certain we will and have to do all of them. But as Scotty said, "I canna change the laws of physics!" By which I mean some of it we're not going to get back, there's always waste inherent in energy transfer, lousy reality :P. But damn, we've got to do better than losing 60% of the energy generated as waste heat. If we plan on surviving we're going to have to get the amount of energy required down a lot.
But even still, even if we get down to 20-30% of today's energy requirement (and that's a stretch) we're going to need something like the equivalent 15-20 of those solar plants being built every single day. And those other means of producing energy (wind, tidal, conservation, etc.) are not going to appear magically and won't be any faster or easier to produce. It will take the equivalent amount of effort to build them, they'll just be useful in different places. To put in simple terms, there's no point in building tidal collectors in Utah.
Oh, and that global warming thing, it's going to turn the bread basket of this country into a desert. Where are you going to get the water to keep the wheat, corn, etc. growing? The Great Plains' aquifers are drying out so don't think we can drill our way out of that problem. And when ocean acidifaction destroys the food chain in the ocean (more fallout from our carbon addiction) where are we going to replace those calories? By growing crops? With what water? We're going to need water. Lots and lots of potable water for agriculture. And desalinating and pumping that water hundreds and thousand miles from the ocean to where it's needed will take power.
But this is all moot. Nuclear power is now machina non grata. We can't even conceive of using it, not after the events of a week ago. So we're just going to have to get busy and start building those solar plants (or their equivalent). So let's see, it's been more than a week since radiophobia (yes, that's the word for fear of radiation) has gripped the world. That means by my calculations we're already more than 500 solar plants behind schedule. Oh well, I'm sure we'll catch up by July or so.
Have a sunny day.