LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

Quote from Shane D.

"100 barrels of oil are needed to manufacture a single battery that, when converted, stores only one barrel of oil."

Today about 12 % of a nuclear power plants energy is already used to produce the nuclear fuel 15% were used to build the plant 10% will be used for decommission 10% is lost by power transmission.

That's why German lime coal plants are producing dirt cheap current. Almost no fuel costs complete destruction of a landscape, CO2 in megatons, but 50% more efficient than nuclear!

You can have Cobalt free wind turbines. Just a bit heavier...

Quote from Shane D.

"100 barrels of oil are needed to manufacture a single battery that, when converted, stores only one barrel of oil."

I doubt that is true, but suppose it is. The battery stores one barrel of oil over and over again, many more than 100 times. It uses the energy far more efficiently than a gas tank storing oil derivatives.

This criterion makes no sense. It is like pointing out how much oil it takes to make a highway. Quite a lot. Much more than a single car burns driving along that highway. But once you make the pavement, millions of cars can drive over it before it needs to be replaced.

Quote from Shane D.

https://inventions.news/2020-0…-of-renewable-energy.html

"In the case of green machines, they require an estimated 10-fold increase of extracted and processed materials to produce the same amount of energy compared to machines that use hydrocarbons"

"a single electric car with a battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires the extracting and processing of about 500,000 pounds of materials. This is equivalent to five pounds of materials for every mile driven by the car, measured against the battery’s life. In comparison, an internal combustion engine will need about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile."

"an electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphones while the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than five million smartphones. In addition, a solar array powering one data center has more glass than 50 million phones."

"100 barrels of oil are needed to manufacture a single battery that, when converted, stores only one barrel of oil."

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I'm in favor of EROI calculations. I think we need an all in - environmental costs / energy costs of electric cars vs petrol, and similar for batteries. Obviously with petrol, you are mining for the petrol --- refining and transporting --- obviously with electric cars you are creating electricity somehow!

Do note: Mark Mills the author is definitely from a fossil fuel perspective "think tank".

Quote from Navid

Obviously with petrol, you are mining for the petrol --- refining and transporting --- obviously with electric cars you are creating electricity somehow!

Electric cars are far more efficient for various reason, so you create many fewer megajoules of electricity per mile for an electric car than the megajoules per mile from gasoline. Also, nowadays a significant fraction of electricity produce no CO2, so the electric car contributes less to global warming.

I do not know if the manufacturing of the electric car (or battery) really does take more embodied energy than a gasoline car, as some people claim. I doubt it. Overall, electric cars take fewer materials and less labor than gasoline cars. Once they become commodities, they should be cheaper than gasoline cars.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Today about 12 % of a nuclear power plants energy is already used to produce the nuclear fuel 15% were used to build the plant 10% will be used for decommission 10% is lost by power transmission.

Those numbers are way off. Nukes are turned on nearly 100% of the time for 50 years (or more). If 15% of the energy were used to build the plant, that would be the equivalent of running most of Georgia for 7.5 years. Look at a nuke under construction and you do not see that kind of massive effort requiring huge amounts of energy. It is not like building the Panama Canal, or invading Normandy. There are not thousands of machines at work.

The transmission losses are the same for any remote generator, such as a dam or wind farm far from a city. The only generators that do not lose a lot in transmission are natural gas turbines close to cities. There are some massive ones right outside New York city next to Amtrac.

Overall, nuclear power produces about as much CO2 per watt as solar panels do. Not bad. Not quite as low as wind, but low. See:

https://theconversation.com/is…igh-emission-either-41615

Quote from JedRothwell

Those numbers are way off. Nukes are turned on nearly 100% of the time for 50 years (or more). If 15% of the energy were used to build the plant, that would be the equivalent of running most of Georgia for 7.5 years.

Nukes are designed for 40 years. The initial (official Swiss) calculations 4.6 years of 40 years were made for the old cheap buildings. Most of the energy goes into the concrete of the building cooling tower steel. It's a fact nukes are very very inefficient.

Nukes do stay at least 1 month every three years. For fuel exchange and in-depth revisions.

Quote from JedRothwell

Overall, nuclear power produces about as much CO2 per watt as solar panels do. Not bad. Not quite as low as wind, but low. See:

Of course this is nonsense. 15% building 10% decommission 12% fuel preparation makes 37% carbon content!

Quote from Wyttenbach

Nukes are designed for 40 years.

But in the U.S. they have often been upgraded to last longer.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Of course this is nonsense. 15% building 10% decommission 12% fuel preparation makes 37% carbon content!

As I said, those numbers are wrong. Look at a photo of a reactor being constructed. Do you really think the machinery, concrete and other energy being used in that is enough to run most of a state for 7.5 years? No way.

10% decommission is also impossible. It does not take that much energy to break the reactor apart and bury it, which is what decommissioning is. I doubt that fuel prep is 12% but if it is, it is mainly done with electricity which nowadays has much less carbon content than it used to. A nuke can be used to prepare fuel for itself, making it zero carbon, except for the mining. It takes far less mining to extract uranium than coal, because uranium produces so much more energy than coal. That is taking into account the enrichment.

If just one if them go's thats the end of cheap.

Sorry, i was not trying to end the discussion ....It seems I'm overly irritated about everything.. my bad.

Quote from DnG

If just one if them go's thats the end of cheap.

Them what? Goes what? Do you mean when a nuclear reactor melts down? That was not true of Three Mile Island. That accident did not cost more than all the money saved with nuclear power. It was true of Fukushima. That accident was so bad, and so expensive, it bankrupted Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), which was the largest power company in the world. It probably cost more than all the money saved with nuclear power. It also triggered such strong opposition from the public the rest of the reactors were either shut down or will be shut down. It meant the end of fission power in Japan. Not officially yet, but de facto the industry is a dead duck.

There were other accidents in the U.S. besides Three Mile Island. They cost a lot of money but they did not destroy the industry. What has probably killed off the industry once and for all is the construction of the Vogtle Nuclear Expansion project in Georgia. It is the first new reactor being constructed in the U.S. in 30 years, and the cost overruns are so horrendous, I think it will be the last. Other methods of generating electricity are far cheaper. Wind power is not available in Georgia but in other states it is far cheaper than nuclear power or coal. Probably, solar is cheaper in Georgia by now. I have not looked at the numbers.

https://www.powermag.com/how-t…pansions-costs-escalated/

The future is (clean) ELECTRIC 😁

https://ember-climate.org/project/global-electricity-h12020/

Quote from interested observer

Actually, a recent study at MIT suggests that car batteries could be used for utility-scale energy storage for a period of ten years after they no longer meet the requirements for vehicle use.

That is interesting. Perhaps by the time the batteries degrade to the point they are no longer fit for that purpose, someone will have invented a way to recycle them. That would be an example of a temporary solution along the way to a permanent solution. Technology often works out like that. Something looks like a big problem with no solution in sight, but someone comes up with an ad hoc way to fix it partially. Then another way, then another. Especially in pollution and waste disposal. In the 1990s when the internet became prevalent, companies established on-line trading of garbage. In some cases waste disposal went from costing money to making a profit. You may not want a ton of rotting fish heads, but someone out there does. One's man's garbage is another man's gold. Piles of lead batteries in "supersites" went from being dangerous pollution to become a valuable resource.

In programming there was the so-called "application crisis" in the 1970s. People could not imagine how we would find enough programmers or enough money to make all the various specialized programs corporations wanted. Microcomputers came along, the market changed, and the crisis faded away. Now there are a million cell phone "apps."

https://www.investors.com/news…-jones-oil-giant-chevron/

Zap energy got $6,767,334 from DOE a while back

https://www.energy.gov/article…nergy-technology-projects