From: houle@nmt.edu (Paul Houle)
Subject: Re: ZERO Nuclear impact (was: Is car pooling for real? etc)
Organization: New Mexico Tech
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 03:46:45 GMT

In article <1992Jul22.200320.7520@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
>
>     Not anti-technology, just pro-economic.  
>
>     Solar power may well be the answer of the future, especially with the 
>     dye cells of Regan and the boys or the metallurgical grade silicon 
>     cells of TI and SoCal Edison.  However, it is not the wave of the
>     present and those smoke-belching plants cannot be replaced by 
>     distributing solar panels.  And even when costs come down, there
>     are still nontrivial infrastructure and energy storage questions that 
>     must be economically solvable.  These things have all been solved
>     for nuclear and fossil fuels.  

	If it wasn't for government intervention,  we either would not
have an existing infrastructure for nuclear power,  or if we did,  I think
it would be considerably different than what it is today.  I think that
the free market would have started with natural uranium reactors if it
started at all.  Similarly,  if we developed a national energy/industrial
policy that encouraged the development of sustainable infrastructure,  we
might be able to shape it in the right direction.  The problem is to be
able to give guidance to the flexibility produced by market mechanisms.

	Can we do better than we did with our nuclear infrastructure?  I
think so.  The nuclear technology of today grew out of an intensive effort
to produce nuclear explosives.  If we make sustainability our actual goal,
we should have a better chance of attaining it.  I think that the nuclear
technology of tomorrow is going to be "desktop nuclear" -- devices such
as ion ring accelerators and plasma foci.  Machines that can produce
controlled quantities of radioisotopes and radiation that can be concentrated
far more than the old fission-based technology.  Such technology could
widely expand the range of isotopes used in medicine,  allowing us to make
the isotopes on site,  so that we can use shorter-lived isotopes which
give us a better trade-off between immediate radiation intensity and the
safety of patient,  staff and the outside environment.

	One idea that I've been kicking around with,  it's a bit embryonic,
is a kind of basic scenario for decentralized power.  Suppose that we can
mass produce some kind of sustainable energy device the same way that we
produce cars,  television sets,  etc.  Just to make it simple,  let's have
one of these for every man,  women,  and child in the US,  which would be
250 million and let's make each one have a capacity of 1 kw.  Such a system
would then produce 250 GWe at peak capacity.  The actual sustainable
energy units could be different in design...  Some solar,  some wind,  maybe
turbines dipped into swiftly flowing rivers every couple of hundred feet.
(Of course,  because of scalability,  some things are more profitable to
do in larger sizes,  like geothermal and biomass cogeneration,  but this
is just a simple radical model).

	What must these sustainable energy units cost to be competitive
with nuclear energy?  A nuclear power plant that was intended to produce
about 1 GW (Reactor 1 at Seabrook) was expected to cost about $750 million.
Seeing that it actually cost $11 billion,  let's be charitable and assume
that we could do it right...  And guess that such a thing might actually
cost $1.5 billion,  or $1500 per KWe.  Now,  a nuclear power plant probably
has less down time than many sustainable energy sources...  So let's throw
in a fudge factor and say that this hypothetical 1Kw sustainable energy
unit needs to cost less than $1000.

	This then takes the problem to a matter of engineering for the
consumer.  It doesn't seem all that outrageous that we could construct,
say,  a rooftop PV array based on dye PVs and a synchronous inverter
of 1 Kwe capacity if we were building hundreds of millions of them for
under $1000.

>     If one assumes market efficiency, there is always a sacrifice 
>     in cutting electricity usage.  

	I don't.  It's pretty hard to believe that the market for
cigarettes is efficient.  Or the market for baby formula in the third
world.

	Then again,  the market does give us an interesting answer for
handling variations of availible power under changes of availible wind,
sunlight and other factors.  Although some producers of power (PV arrays,
wind,  biomass cogeneration) and some consumers (TV sets,  computers)
cannot turn themselves on and off as the market price for electricity
changes,  some of them can (dedicated biomass,  hydroelectric (to some
extent),  refrigerators (to some extent),  electric car chargers,
irrigation pumps).  I propose that we use electronic controllers that
automatically trade electricity.  People who own power storage systems
could have them programmed to buy energy from the grid when it is
cheap and sell it back when it is more expensive,  making the market
more efficient.  Seeing that most new appliances contain microprocessors
anyway,  and that we'll need to build a fiber-optic information
infrastructure one of these days anyhow,  I think this could be
done very reasonably.

>     I have absolutely no fear of sustainables, just a fear of being
>     led down the garden path by the incorrect economic assumptions
>     of advocates.

	Well,  the economic assumptions that underlie sustainability
are fundamentally different from those that operate now.  It might be
very profitable now to overgraze a patch of land,  although if the
land had been managed with sustainable grazing it could continue to
produce smaller profits into the indefinite future. Much of it depends
on your values,  and what kind of weighting one puts on the future.

	I think that we should manage our resources sustainably so that
we don't steal from the future potentials of our resources for our
children and potential future civilizations.  I put a high value on
that,  so I think that paying more to do something sustainably is
often justified.

>     Show me a renewable system that competes economically with 
>     the service I get from Virginia Power, and I'll switch tomorrow.
>     (Oh by the way, I'm not going to rewire all of my capital goods
>     in anticipation).

	This all depends on how much of a research priority that renewables
are made.  Industry and the rest of the scientific community have made
incredible advances in PV technology in the last decade with a relatively
small level of investment.  The future of cost of PVs and other sustainable
technology hinges on demand and investment.


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