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The Forum > Article Comments > Compact nuclear power units may blow wind away > Comments

Compact nuclear power units may blow wind away : Comments

By Mark S. Lawson, published 4/3/2015

Unsubsidised wind power can compete, on a cost-per-output basis, with the likes of coal and gas, while the other forms of green power - photovoltaics and solar thermal - trail the field by a fair margin.

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Peter Lang,
99 is not the number of my comments in that thread, but rather the sum of that and the replies others have made to them. Some of those were my disputing others' claims that nuclear was never the best option! And if my comments were silly, ignorant, trivial and dishonest, a good reason for John Morgan to reply is to show that they're silly, ignorant, trivial and dishonest. But he didn't. He responded to my first post, and when I pointed out why his argument would not apply to nuclear, he left the discussion.

So do you think pointing out the flaw in someone's argument makes me a zealot? Seriously, what definition is there that includes me but not you? Or do you consider yourself a zealot too?

Meanwhile, thanks to ppp251 on that thread, we can see that as well as the thin film solar cell production methods that don't use so much energy, new much more efficient ways of producing silicon solar cells are now here, making those EROEI requirements moot. http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/sunedison-begins-production-of-electronic-grade-polysilicon-using-fluidized-bed-reactor-technology_100016659/#axzz3TSIHgplE

As for Climate Spectator, your comment looks very much like shooting the messenger. It's not where I originally heard that the increased supply of renewable energy was cutting electricity prices more than the RET itself was increasing them. But that particular report (found from a Google search) seemed to explain it clearly enough. And Business Spectator, a site run by Alan Kohler and published by News Limited, doesn't appear to be at all extremist, though I admit I haven't studied the views of its climate editors!

Would you prefer it if I linked to someone else's report saying much the same thing?
Posted by Aidan, Thursday, 12 March 2015 10:39:40 AM
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Sorry, just noticed an error in my above post: John Morgan left the discussion when I pointed out his argument would not apply to RENEWABLES (not nuclear as I'd previously typed).

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Luciferase, the reason that I say technical obstacles can be overcome is that as a civil engineer I have a fair idea of how they can be overcome, and it annoys me when others treat them as insurmountable.
Posted by Aidan, Thursday, 12 March 2015 10:44:02 AM
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John Morgan replied to the comments that were serious and worth addressing. Yours were not. They were trivial, silly, showed a lack of understanding of basics, and importantly are clearly those of a zealot and ideologue who is not interested in facts unless they support the dogma he believes in. That is clear from a reading of your comments. You have nothing serious or constructive to offer. And you are clearly intellectually dishonest: http://judithcurry.com/2013/04/20/10-signs-of-intellectual-honesty/

John gave an excellent summary response to the serious questions and critiques he'd received on other web sites.
He begins:

"This blog post has been picked up in a quite a few places. One of them is the blog of physics professor Micha Tomckiewicz, Climate Change Fork. Micha posted my article, then wrote another three posts detailing what he saw as problems with it.

My article has proven quite difficult for a lot of people to grasp or accept, in places, and has resulted in a lot of intellectual gymnastics in trying to find ways out of the Catch-22. Micha’s three articles include a number of the common misunderstandings. I wrote this comment to address them. For some reason the comment is not showing up on his blog, so I will post it here, as the misconceptions I address are not just confined to the Climate Change Fork blog.

Micha has responded to my EROI article in three posts; I’ll consolidate a response here.

The core thesis of my article is that: energy storage cannot back up wind and solar for primary energy supply, because storage degrades EROI below a viable level.

In his three posts, Micha discusses a range of issues, but does not challenge that core thesis about storage, which I believe stands. There are now over 500 comments on this piece at The Energy Collective and Brave New Climate that directly interrogate that conclusion at a range of technical levels, and while many qualifications can be elaborated the conclusion appears robust.

... "

Read his full response here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/#comment-350520
Posted by Peter Lang, Thursday, 12 March 2015 12:08:53 PM
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I'll assume that same philosophy applies to nuclear, Aidan.

An engineer should have something to say on "base-load" in relation to efficacy and cost of renewables vs nuclear. All things considered, and with the view that, hypothetically, nothing is technically insurmountable, but is so financially and/or in the scale required, I see baseload renewables in urban areas as a dream on the time-scale needed to mitigate climate change.

Why should I think otherwise?
Posted by Luciferase, Thursday, 12 March 2015 12:36:55 PM
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Peter Lang, you should take another look at the intellectual honesty link, because you're not complying with them at all well, and you're very clearly showing the signs of intellectual dishonesty. For example you claim my opinions are worthless because I'm a zealot, yet you're the one who is not interested in facts unless they support the dogma he believes in: that nuclear's always the best option and renewables will never be competitive.

John's "excellent" summary, which he posted over two months before I joined the discussion, shows two very deep flaws: firstly he's underestimating the EROEI of renewables, and secondly his statement that " That there exists some threshold above 1 that is a minimum requirement for a given mode of organization of society is also physical" is incorrect.

Except at very low values, EROEI is never itself the limiting factor. It can contribute to making electricity viable or unviable, but the ultimate constraint is either land availability or the cost of human labour - and the latter can be overcome by increased automation.

Failure to comprehend that, instead assuming (as Weißbach and others did) that an observed value is somehow a minimum threshold, shows a lack of understanding of the basics. And when I pointed out that flaw in his reasoning, John Morgan left the discussion and never returned.
Posted by Aidan, Thursday, 12 March 2015 2:26:33 PM
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Luciferase, with the benefit of hindsight I think we should have opted for nuclear power twenty years ago, but with the huge fall in the cost of renewables I really think Australia's left it too late to be worth starting now. Despite our demand per person being high, our demand per square km is very low. We're a very sunny country with plenty of room for wind turbines, so renewable power will be cheap. There is plenty of unrealised scope for load balancing, particularly if we can attract heavy industry to take advantage of our cheap power (which shouldn't be difficult as so much mining is done locally). And there are plenty of opportunities for dispatchable renewables as well: geothermal, solar thermal, and increased hydro output capacity. And I'm sure the fluctuating price of electricity will make batteries viable too.

How quickly it can be done depends on the political will, as it does for nuclear. Concessional loans are the best way to fund it, but convincing the government of that may be difficult.
Posted by Aidan, Thursday, 12 March 2015 2:27:56 PM
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