Lockheed Martin, yes that Lockheed Martin, is about to create the world's largest wave-energy project off the coast of Victoria, Australia.
For about the cost of a brace of its overdue, overpriced and underperforming F-35 stealth, 'first strike' light bombers, Lockheed will deploy power buoys capable of generating 62.5 megawatts of electricity, enough for about 10,000 homes. Like most renewables, the costs ($205 million) are front-end loaded. Unlike fossil-fuel plants, there's no ongoing fuel costs. Wave energy, it seems, is free. You build and maintain the mechanical part and Mother Nature supplies the fuel at no charge - indefinitely.
Wave energy typically is ideal along continental west coasts where westerly winds have thousands of miles of open ocean to energize waves. Even on calm days off the west coast of Vancouver Island, the swells, while gentle, are something of a roller coaster. That's all virtually free and entirely clean energy.
I'm in the midst of reading a very interesting and readable book on Thorium reactors called "Super Fuel: Thorium, The Green Energy Source of the Future" (Richard Martin, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-137-27834-0). It basically argues that Thorium reactors, which employ s simpler, safer, more reliable operating design and fuel cycle - could offer significant advantages as a transitional, and even primary, energy generation source. Well worth the read...
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Hi Neil. That's right. If you search this blog you'll find posts I've written about 4th and 5th gen reactors, their safety and the opportunity they provide to safely dispose of our mass of supposedly 'depleted' fuel rods and even nuclear weapons grade materials such as plutonium.
ReplyDeleteWhat we consider 'spent' fuel rods today and will have to securely store for thousands of years still retain most of their initial nuclear energy. We're squandering that energy and compounding our loss by condemning future generations to secure and store it for a couple of thousand years. The amount of energy in those 'spent' fuel rods is enormous and could, with the proper reactor technology, deliver carbon-free, clean energy for centuries.
Hi Neil. That's right. If you search this blog you'll find posts I've written about 4th and 5th gen reactors, their safety and the opportunity they provide to safely dispose of our mass of supposedly 'depleted' fuel rods and even nuclear weapons grade materials such as plutonium.
ReplyDeleteWhat we consider 'spent' fuel rods today and will have to securely store for thousands of years still retain most of their initial nuclear energy. We're squandering that energy and compounding our loss by condemning future generations to secure and store it for a couple of thousand years. The amount of energy in those 'spent' fuel rods is enormous and could, with the proper reactor technology, deliver carbon-free, clean energy for centuries.
As long as we've got tons of nuclear waste, it's probably not a bad idea to further "burn" it, hopefully reducing the amount of time it stays dangerous.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why there aren't any of these thorium reactors, though. Is the massive power of misguided environmentalists stopping them from being built?
The wave generators seem pretty cool. Let's see, a moment of long division -- $200 million / 10,000 homes, that's $20,000 per home. My instinct says that's a bit on the expensive side, but then it's a technology that's seen very little manufacturing work. I can readily see a strong program of wave energy production leading to some pretty rapid price reductions. We've seen with every other renewable that prices go down as more units are manufactured.
Nuclear energy, PLG, has suffered from the 'ban the bomb' movement of the late 50s. It hasn't been helped by leadership that allowed us to stagnate with Gen 1 reactors like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The very weaknesses that led to these disasters have been surmounted in new technology reactors.
ReplyDeleteWe don't realize the enormity of the costs we're passing off to those who'll have to deal with our mess for the next two millennia. Worse still is that we're passing up all that free energy in those notionally 'spent' fuel rods. Some of those rods are said to retain up to 95% of their usable energy due to the inefficiency of Gen 1 technology. That also allows critics to attack nuclear as being not cost-effective.
I remember reading an article many years ago in the now long defunct magazine "OMNI" about what will be the left-behind legacy of the existing reactor technology we've relied on for so long. Most folks are aware of the hazards of spent nuclear fuel rod waste, but most are completely uninformed when we're faced with the reality that entire reactor facilities will essentially have to be abandoned or entombed in situ since not only has equipment in the core area become highly radioactive, but the very structures housing the cores themselves are irradiated and will remain dangerously so for millenia to come. I remember a suggestion the author of the article was that a kind of religious mythos be created around the sites and a kind of priesthood formed to keep people away. Bizarre.
ReplyDeleteThorium reactor technology isn't clean sheet stuff. It's been fully vetted and developed over decades and was given a great deal of gravitas early on in the Nuclear Age, but what essentially happened was the US Navy wanted a reactor compact and powerful enough to power submarines, which placed greater emphasis and funding on work with Uranium and saw further real development of Thorium reactors kicked to the curb. But Thorium makes a helluva lot more sense now. As an element is far more abundant in the Earth's crust (and on the Moon's near side) and easier to process than separating U-235 from U-238 (U-238 is also a source of Thorium as that's the first element it naturally decays into). Thorium reactors are simpler in design - as are their safety systems and emergency protocols. China, India, and others are beginning to the value in LFTR's and MSTR's, it's time Canada got on board...
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