Quote from Wyttenbach

You should stop watching Simpsons cartoons or posting nonsense...

Presumably, you disagree with the embodied materials estimates provided by the US Department of Energy? Or maybe you just don't like the answer it gives?

Many techno-utopian fantasies have withered and died when subjected to the cold light of arithmetic. Intermittent renewable energy is destined to go the same way. It will continue to have niche applications in some places, but it cannot sustainably provide the terrawatts of Power that humanity needs. You can be bitter about it if you like.

Green hydrogen is a poor use of expensive electricity. It means taking a high grade energy carrier (electricity) which has close to 100% work potential and then using costly capital equipment and losing one half to one third of the initial energy to convert it into a low grade chemical fuel, which is difficult to store and has 50% work potential at best. The only way it makes sense is if we need hydrogen as a chemical input (I.e ore reduction, cracking reactions or ammonia production), have no cheaper source of hydrogen and we can essentially use hydrogen as quickly as it is being produced, without the problem of storage.

The most sensible first application for green hydrogen would be production of ammonia for ammonium nitrate fertiliser production. The hydrogen doesn't need long-term storage or shipping long distances to serve this need, it can be used at its source and mostly as it is produced. Short term storage could be achieved using gasometer type tanks, at pressure only slightly above atmospheric. This largely avoids leakage issues.

It will be tough for green hydrogen to compete with natural gas as a hydrogen feedstock on a cost basis where natural gas is available. In the US, the spot price for NG has averaged $5 per 1000 cu feet for the past 20 years. That works out at $0.005/MJ, or $0.018/kWh. Now consider that the cost of the green hydrogen will be the cost of electricity (including inefficiencies) and the marginal capital cost of the electrolysis stack and storage solution. Operating and maintenance costs add even more. The marginal capital costs will increase as capacity factor declines. The idea of using hydrogen production to absorb intermittent electricity is a bad one. It results in poor utilisation of an expensive asset and more expensive hydrogen.

Taking all these things together, green hydrogen will cost multiple times what natural gas derived hydrogen will cost where it is available. But if natural gas is not available, then using green hydrogen to make ammonium nitrate beats going hungry. All of these things are going to add to the cost of food. And for people already living on low incomes, the only way they can deal with this cost is by eating less. That is a solution that can only be taken so far before life itself is in jeopardy. For electrolysis derived hydrogen to be as cheap as possible, we need to run it at high capacity factor, very close to its point of generation and exploit high scale economies. In the future, we will need to build GW scale electrolysis plants close to nuclear power plants that can generate electricity cheaply and 24/7. Those electrolysis units will supply neighbouring steel, concrete and ammonia plants. There will be as little storage as possible.

Even exploiting all of these advantages, I cannot see synthetic hydrogen being economically competitive so long as natural gas and coal can be produced for the cost of digging them out of the ground. I think it more probable that electricity from nuclear reactors, wind farms and solar panels, will displace coal and NG as electricity fuels. These fuels can then be deployed where we need industrial high heat and chemical reagents.

Here is why it will be impossible for renewable energy to replace more than a small fraction of the energy presently gained from fossil fuels.

Below is a link to the 2015 Quadrennial energy review, produced by the US department of energy. A reliable enough source?

Go to Section 10, Table 10.4 for a summary of materials inputs into several different types of powerplant in ton/TWh. Here are some tallys per TWh:

Nuclear (PWR) = 760t concrete / cement; 3t copper; 0t glass; 160t steel; 0t aluminium.

Wind = 8000t concrete / cement; 23t copper; 92t glass; 1800t steel; 35t aluminium.

Solar PV = 4050t concrete / cement; 850t copper; 2700t glass; 7900t steel; 680t aluminium.

Compared to a pressurised water reactor nuclear power plant, a solar PV plant producing the same electric power output will require some 5.3x more concrete; some 280x more copper, some 49.4x more steel; and thousands of times more glass and aluminium. Wind turbines (presumably onshore) require about an order of magnitude more materials for the same amount of electrical energy generated.

There is no indication that these quantities include any materials investments needed for energy storage. This would require further materials investments in pumped hydro, CAES or some other means. This increases the materials cost of wind and solar still further. Embodied materials are a reflection of embodied energy.

Solar PV and Wind energy, appear relatively affordable right now, only because the embodied energy used to provide their enormous materials budgets is provided by low cost fossil fuels. These fuels are predominantly coal based and mostly in China. How much would a wind turbine cost, if the energy needed to produce all of the materials necessary for its manufacture were produced using wind energy? Do they actually generate enough net energy for this to be possible?

The enormous material budgets of RE systems stem from the inherently low power density of wind and sunlight. The power density of wind and solar farms are 2-3W/m2 and 5W/m2, respectively. Compare that to a pressurised water reactor, which has core power density of 80,000,000W/m3. Nuclear power, in the form of fission, Fusion or LENR, is really the only solution to the energy crisis that allows any measure of material prosperity to survive. People that claim we can switch from fossil fuels to RE without huge declines in human numbers and living standards are kidding themselves.

Historical construction costs for nuclear power reactors vary a great deal across the world.

Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors

The existing literature on the construction costs of nuclear power reactors has focused almost exclusively on trends in construction costs in only two…

www.sciencedirect.com

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292964046_Historical_construction_costs_of_global_nuclear_power_reactors

In the US, projects that got started before Three Mile Island were generally completed in less than five years and for <$2000/kWe, with many coming in around $1000/kWe. These plants produced some of the world's cheapest electricity and remain cost effective to this day. After TMI, construction costs rapidly went to the moon. In fact, between 1998 and 2008, new build costs roughly doubled in the US and are now 10-20 times higher than they were in the 1970s.

Other parts of the world had very different experiences. In South Korea and India, construction costs remain in the region of $2000/kWe to this day. More recent projects in China, not shown in this study, have completed in 4-5 years and come in at around $2000/kWe as well.

This study demolishes the myth that there is anything inherently expensive about nuclear power. OECD countries have managed to make this technology unworkable. But there are still plenty of countries that continue to construct economical power plants. In principle, there is no technical reason why nuclear fission cannot generate power very cheaply in Western countries. Clearly something has gone very wrong with the way we manage nuclear build programmes. But it isn't a problem with the technology.

A question to any resident quantum mechanics experts on this board. From what I remember from undergraduate materials science, the Schrodinger equation tells us that the position of a particle within a system can be described in terms of a probability density function. This probability declines exponentially as distance increases from the most probable position. However, it never quite declines to zero, suggesting that there is a small but real probability that two deuterium nuclei in a heavy water molecule will fuse even under standard conditions, because a tiny but real proportion of their probability density functions overlap. If true, this would suggest that nuclear fusion is taking place in ordinary water under standard conditions, but at an infinitesimal rate that is so slow that it would be difficult to detect. Even this a true description of reality?

It would appear that NASA and the US Navy have cottoned on to the Lattice Confinement Fusion Fast Fission idea.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210026340/downloads/White%20Paper%20regarding%20LCF%20and%20Fusion-fast-fisson.pdf

Very soon, this will begin displacing other energy sources.

The energy crisis that we find ourselves in has been slowly building since the 1970s. The economy is essentially a thermodynamic machine. Everything that humans call wealth, is the production of surplus energy used to rework matter. If you plot global GDP against global energy production, you get a virtually straight correlation between the two. The world has developed high living standards only through the intensive use of energy.

Gradually, over a period of several decades, the energy cost of producing energy has been rising. Between the late 70s and late 90s, we replaced US land based conventional light sweet crude, with North Sea oil, Alaskan oil, GOM, Arctic oil. This solved the oil shortage problems of the 1970s, but it did so at a higher price and poorer 'Energy Return on Energy Investment'. This allowed Western economies to grow again, but at a lower rate than they had up until the mid 1970s. Inequality between rich and poor grew during this period, as rising production costs restrained wages. By the late 90s, global oil production from conventional sources could no longer grow. Manufacturing industry shifted from the OECD to China. Officially, this was all about exploiting Chinese Labour. But it was also driven by the allure of low cost Chinese coal based energy. This was exploited using cheap and often forced labour and provided some of the cheapest electricity in the world. Rising oil demand from China and stagnant global production, set the scene for high inflation leading up to 2008. This was driven by rising oil prices. This inflation and central banks reaction to it (rising interest rates) was the direct cause of the financial crisis.

Since 2008, interest rates have been held close to zero and central banks everywhere have flooded economies with fiat currency. The idea is to stimulate economic growth. Politicians and economists tend to view the economy as a financial system, in which the only relevant input for growth is money supply. It hasn't worked because economies are in reality physical systems in which people make goods and services and exchange them. They run on surplus energy. Money is just the medium of exchange. What monetary inflation has achieved is to push the stock market to absurd heights, completely disconnecting company valuations from any realistic future earnings estimate. It has also depressed bond yields to very low levels. This directly enabled the US tight oil and Canadian syncrude revolutions, which have been responsible for all growth in global oil production since 2008. The inherently poor EROIE of shale and syncrude has led to an industry that has spent billions of dollars, producing millions of dollars of oil. So long as interest rates and bond yields remain beneath inflation, these zombie companies can keep running. They can borrow almost unlimited amounts of money, confident that inflation will erode the value of debt without ever having to repay it. But nothing can defeat the declining energetics of fossil fuel production. In real terms, the average American and European has been getting poorer since the early 2000s.

In November 2018, global oil production hit what looks increasingly likely to be an all time peak. This was driven the declines in OPEC production. Spare capacity in Saudi Arabia and UAE, could no longer compensate for the decline rate of all other OPEC producers. US oil production now faces bottlenecks that are hampering its recovery. However, the Permian is the only shale basin with growth potential. Increasingly, growth in the Permian must offset declines in other shale basins. All other producing regions in the world are either close to peak (Saudi and UAE) or past it (Europe, Russia, China, East Asia, etc).

The oil crisis is occurring at the same time as an apparent peak in Chinese coal production. This is placing cost pressures on just about everything that is being made in China. The recent antagonism between Russia and the Western world, has aggrevated global energy supply shortfalls. Energy intensive products like fertiliser and diesel, could have been manufactured in greater volumes elsewhere in more abundant times. Now that is all but impossible, as there are no abundant low cost oil and and gas resources whose production can be increased quickly enough and cheaply enough to make up for loss of Russian supply.

Renewable energy is often touted as something that can be used to substitute for fossil fuels. This is looking increasingly unlikely as the world heads into a situation where fossil fuels are in short supply. Renewable energy sources are low in power density. Each unit of energy produced by a Wind farm or solar farm, depends upon a much greater mass input of industrial materials than legacy fossil or nuclear energy systems. Producing them at low cost depends upon well functioning global supply chains and abundant fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, needed to produce the gigatonnes of steel, concrete, glass, copper and polysilicon needed for these things to be built at scale. The recent competitive costs of wind and solar projects are an artifact of cheap Chinese coal, low interest rate money at both manufacturing and customer ends, abundant diesel needed to maintain supply chains and above all huge economies of scale. As the world enters the depletion phase of fossil fuels, all of these supporting factors are going into reverse. Supply chains are disintegrating, along with the diesel supplies that sustain them. Cheap coal is a thing of the past, even in China. Political antagonism is rising between states. The capital costs of large renewable energy projects are now rising at rates far above official inflation. Renewable energy systems also tend to reduce fuel consumption in legacy fossil power stations. They do not replace them. They also impose additional requirements, such as grid strengthening and battery banks for frequency control. These facts, taken together and contrary to popular hype, make it extremely unlikely that renewable energy sources can provide more than a niche solution to our civilisation ending problem of declining surplus energy.

It is in this environment that we must rapidly find a nuclear energy solution capable of producing the high EROEI surplus energy that fossil fuels are no longer capable of providing. It would be helpful if this were applicable to transportation as well as electricity supply. This solution may be fission, fusion, LENR, all three, or maybe some hybrid solution involving all of them. In some respects this is good news for LENR and fusion. Never has a breakthrough in these areas been more desperately needed. The bad news is that as surplus energy declines, long-term R&D projects are likely to be scaled back. Which is why the solutions that might help are things that we can develop quickly and easily and relatively cheaply. My own thoughts are that the institutional barriers that stand in the way of nuclear fission need to be removed in a hurry. But LWRs would quickly run into uranium fuel shortages. Fusion has made impressive progress, but is not yet in a position to provide stand alone power plants. It is doubtful in fact that magnetic confinement fusion could ever develop the power density needed to build an economicically competitive power plant, especially when embodied energy is accounted for.

What Fusion has succeeded in doing is provided a compact source of high energy neutrons, but has thus far fallen short of breakeven. This could be especially valuable if we can develop designs that combine Fusion and fission in a single reactor. Each of those 14.1MeV neutrons, could ultimately produce several fission events. Fast fission from a 14.1MeV neutron will release an average of 4.2 neutrons. In a fast reactor, at least one of those secondary fission neutrons would produce fast-fission of 238U, which would yield three additional neutrons. What this neutron rich environment allows us to do, is build fast reactors that can function as travelling wave reactors. Essentially, these reactors can be fuelled with depleted uranium, breeding all of the fuel it needs as it shuffles through the core. There is no need for chemical reprocessing and the TWR converts a large proportion of total uranium energy into heat. Without fusion neutrons, a fast reactor would need to achieve a burn up of 300GW-days per tonne to achieve this. It isn't practical with existing cladding materials. The addition of a fusion neutron source could allow a TWR to function at lower discharge burn ups. This makes it a near term solution, that is cheap and compact enough to build anywhere, using modular construction techniques. Lattice confinement Fusion is in my opinion the key technological advance allowing this, because it uses the fission reactors own gamma and neutron flux to produce Fusion, thus amplifying neutron flux and dramatically hardening the neutron spectrum. The reaction itself never needs to reach breakeven.

Quote from JedRothwell

If that were true, why are the power company investing heavily in wind and solar? Wind and solar are 70% of new capacity. Do you think power companies are run by idiots? The subsidies for these sources have been largely phased out, so that is not the reason.

Renewables account for most new U.S. electricity generating capacity in 2021

I think consumers have no choice but to pay higher prices, for renewable energy investments that are effectively mandated.

Most of the Western world operates liberalised electricity markets. The people that operate the wind farm may not be the same people that operate the CCGT plant. But wind farm will have privileged access to the grid. It will dump its output onto the grid whenever it is generating at a pre-agreed strike rate, which will probably be subsidised above the wholesale rate. The CCGT will have to bid for slots and may or may not be subsidised for lost market share. That isn't so bad for a CCGT, which has high fuel cost, but relatively low labour costs and low capital costs. It is disastrous for coal and nuclear plants, which are only really effective as base load units.

One way or another, the consequences of these investments are hitting consumers with higher energy bills. In the EU, the wholesale cost of electric power is now €0.3/kWh. That is one third of a dollar. This is a direct consequence of Europe's renewable energy revolution. It requires huge investments in renewable energy capacity, grid extension and frequency control. But the old plant is still needed for back up and must eventually be replaced.

The worst thing about this is that Europe is no less dependent on fossil fuels than it was before. Renewable energy has kept Europe hooked on natural gas. The only wholesale replacements for natural gas as an electricity source are coal and nuclear power. The crazy Euros would rather burn a billion tonnes of coal, than fission a hundred tonnes of uranium. This is the brain wasting ideological trap that these people have dug themselves into.

Quote from JedRothwell

Solar cells and batteries would be far cheaper, safer, and more reliable. You might think of nuclear plants as reliable, but in a way they are not. With a nuke, you have 1 GW of power on line. It is subject to sudden catastrophic interruption. You get a plugged up water line and bam! the whole thing turns off with a SCRAM. Most SCRAM events are caused by plumbing problems. Most are not serious, and are fixed within hours or days. The point is, you lose the entire 1 GW abruptly, at one time. With natural gas plant you might lose a 200 MW generator, but the other generators will probably stay on line. With wind, you might lose 1 MW when a generator malfunctions, by the other 200 MW remain on line.

Fission reactors are obsolete. The technology has come and gone.

Hmm. I don't disagree that nuclear power is having problems in the US and other western countries of late. But it doesn't follow that this is due to anything inherently wrong with the technology. This is a problem that has its roots in human stupidity and deliberate fear mongering. In the 1980s, the French were able to build N4 reactors for $2000/kWe and at peak, they produced 3-4 each year. In China and Korea, PWRs are being constructed that cheaply today. LWRs were built cheaply in the US until the 1980s. Nuclear power has gone from being the cheapest source of electricity to one of the most expensive, if you believe the Lazard LCOE studies. But this has nothing to do with any problem with the technology. The reason that we know this is that many countries have and continue to build and operate nuclear power plants cheaply.

I think there are a number of things that have interacted to push costs to the moon in the US and other western countries. The root of the problem is a collective delusion in the public mind, that a nuclear reactor is some sort of Pandora's box, with the potential to spew evil onto the land and destroy entire nations, rendering them uninhabitable forever more. That has never been true, but it is what people generally believe. The fact is that the pollution health risks in the most heavily contaminated areas in Japan following the Fukushima accident, are about the same as you would take from air pollution in a big city. The pollution death toll from Chernobyl was estimated by WHO to be about 4000. When compared to the tens of thousands of air pollution deaths that occur in Europe every year and the millions of deaths attributable to air pollution in Europe since 1986, Chernobyl is lost in statistical noise.

Risk assessments repeatedly show that nuclear power is the safest energy source. The reason is that catastrophic accidents are unlikely and if they do occur, the health consequences of living in heavily contaminated places are about the same as the air pollution hazards that billions of people are exposed to already in urban areas. For all the media sensationalism, nuclear accidents just aren't that dangerous. If every nuclear reactor in the world melted down with the same leakage of radiation as we saw at Fukushima, the number of pollution fatalities (spread over decades) would be equivalent to a few months of air pollution in big cities. Air pollution delivers those gifts every year with certainty, whereas a nuclear accident is something we may get if we are careless or unlucky.

But I digress. The point is that a nuclear accident has been built up in the public mind as being synonymous with the apocalypse. And because of this fear, regulatory ratcheting has gradually increased component supply chain costs and operating overheads to ridiculous levels. The nuclear industry employs about the same number of people per MWh as the wind industry, the majority of them in supply chains. Wind energy has a power density orders of magnitude lower than nuclear energy. The mass of steel and concrete that must be invested in building these monstrosities over country sized areas of land and sea, makes the equivalent nuclear power plant look tiny.

Something else started happening in the 1990s. OECD countries started outsourcing industry to China. Suddenly, their power demand began to decline. At the same time, CCGT plants fuelled by cheap natural gas, allowed power generation more cheaply than any competing energy source. This coincided with liberisation of electricity markets. The nuclear industry suffered two decades of close to zero orders, as collapsing industries shrunk Western Power demand and natural gas displaced every other energy source. Now we are attempting to restart the nuclear industry from scratch. This requires rebuilding huge industrial supply chains for nuclear projects that are initially at least, few and far between. Components are expensive and time consuming to manufacture under these conditions. And workforces must build up the skillsets for nuclear construction from scratch. It is difficult and time consuming. And one thing that is guaranteed to push up nuclear build costs is increasing build time, due to skill shortages and supply chain bottlenecks. In the US, you have the problem of all sorts of legal BS holding up the project as well. As the first units to be built in Western countries for decades, and with all the paranoia built up about nuclear energy in the publuc mind, investors consider new nuclear plants to be high risk ventures. This means any loaned money will require a higher discount rate than what is available for more trendy RE projects.

So in summary: (1) Overinflated supply chain costs and overheads due to regulatory ratcheting; (2) New plants with no established scale economies, make supply chain costs even higher; (3) Long build times, due to a workforce that is trying to learn the ropes, starting a new industry and having to start up some supply chains from scratch; (4) Additional delays due lawsuits and political interference; (5) High discount rates. All of these things together lead to high capital costs, especially for the first units to be built.

Western society has made a mess of the nuclear power industry. But there was nothing inevitable about it. No technology, no matter how good, is invulnerable to human idiocy.

I would propose that cold fusion in deuterium saturated conducting metals, is actually a stripping reaction that is catalysed by debye shielding during Cooper pair interactions.

In a deuterium saturated metal lattice carrying current, the spatial location of metal ions is continuously shifting, as local variations in electron density draw ions closer together. This results in regions of net positive charge. The orbitals of deuterium atoms close to these regions will distort and electrons will be drawn towards them. This will pull the deuterium atom towards the region of positive charge. At the same time, the protons within the deuterium nuclei will orient away from the positive charge region. However, the momentum of the electrons is greater than zero, and they will provide debye shielding allowing the metal nucleus and deuteron to approach one another to a greater proximity than orbital interactions would ordinarily allow. The stripping reaction is driven by strong nuclear force. As the nuclei achieve greater proximity, the probability that stripping will occur by quantum tunnelling increases.

If you build a nuclear reactor (or a LENR fusion reactor), then you have a power plant that can generate 24/7. You time refuelling shutdowns and planned maintenance for summer months when demand is lower and you stagger planned outages.

But if you invest in wind and solar power, what you actually end up with is a combined cycle gas turbine power plant, with a few wind turbines and solar panels reducing the gas bill. But they don't reduce capital, maintenance or staffing costs in any meaningful way. And they add other costs associated with grid extension and frequency control. Which is why wherever intermittent renewables are built, the cost of electricity increases. You are building three power plants to produce the same power as one did before. And you remain dependant on natural gas and continue producing greenhouse gases. This is not an energy solution for any serious industrial nation. It makes no sense from either an economic or environmental viewpoint. It all about ideology.

That said, given how bad the energy crisis has gotten, I wish people would get real when it comes to Fusion energy. Stop trying to build 'pure' Fusion reactors and instead focus on hybrid fusion - fission approaches. Fusion doesn't need to pass the magic 'breakeven' for it to be useful in building much better fission reactors. It is an excellent source of super fast neutrons.

Likewise in IC Fusion, a microgram of fissile (or fissionable) material at the centre of a fuel pellet could be used to produce hot spot temperatures sufficient to send a detonation wave through the compressed pellet. Fission would produce a negligible proportion of total energy and little radioactivity, but fission products would deliver that critical spark that heats the hot spot to 10KeV. No one is pursuing these approaches because of the purist attitude of Fusion researchers, who are prudish about having anything to do with fission. The problem is we need an affordable replacement for fossil fuels right now. We can't wait until 2050. In another thirty years, declining fossil fuel EROEI may have removed our ability to finance Fusion experiments. We need to consolidate what has been learned and build hybrid nuclear energy systems with what we've got.

NASA's recent achievements with lattice confinement fusion opens some interesting possibilities for fission reactors.

NASA’s New Shortcut to Fusion Power

Lattice confinement fusion eliminates massive magnets and powerful lasers

spectrum.ieee.org

The NASA experiment used 2.9MeV X-rays to decompose deuterium into a neutron and proton. The neutron then delivered energy to deuterium nuclei, which then undergo fusion.

The x-ray driven process is unlikely to achieve breakeven. However, modules of titanium deuteride inserted into a fast neutron reactor, would function as superb neutron multipliers. Fast neutrons produced by fission would transfer energy to deuterium nuclei trapped in titanium metal lattice, heating the deuterons to energy sufficient for fusion to occur. The additional neutrons yielded by fusion would reduce required enrichment of the fuel. They would also allow travelling wave reactors to function with much reduced fuel burn ups. The travelling wave reactor is presently impractical because fuel cladding cannot remain intact reliably at a burn up of 30 atom%. If the required burn up can be reduced to 20 atom% through the use of an amplified neutron flux, the concept becomes a lot more workable.

A travelling wave reactor equipped with TiD3 neutron multiplier modules, could be fuelled with a 20% enriched metallic uranium starter core. Additional fuel added at the core margins would be depleted uranium. This would be cycled towards the centre of the core until burn up had reached 20 atom%.