Dee D. Flint wrote:
"Clint" rattlehead@computronDOTnet wrote in message
...
"Kim W5TIT" wrote in message
...
"N2EY" wrote in message

No new nuclear power generation is
planned, 'least not that I know of...

Kim W5TIT



that's because the environmental wackos are doing thier damndest
to fight them, at every level of governement and in every manner
of social disobedience...

This is why california hasn't built any new power plants in 10 years
while experiencing a DOUBLING of population.... resulting in
the blackouts they just had.

You might make it clear that California hasn't built any new plants of ANY
KIND because the environmentalists wackos are blocking them. It's not just
nuclear they are blocking. They have taken the step that any risk
whatsoever is unacceptable. Actually I'm amazed that there even willing to
take the risk of getting out bed. Maybe they don't even use beds since they
could fall out and break their necks.

It would be good to clear up a couple of things about California
electricity generation, since the above really is becoming urban
legend.

The assertion that no new power generation capacity has been built
in California recently just isn't true. About 4.5 GW of generating
capacity was added in the 1990's, and more since then. The
non-renewable plants which have been built recently have mostly been
natural gas fired plants, mostly because the technology for natural
gas generation has made huge efficiency gains over the past couple
of decades (and small plants have become as efficient as large ones,
meaning you can locate them closer to consumers and save transmission
costs too), making it about the most cost effective way to generate
electricity until fuel costs began to rise even more recently. In
recent years new coal and oil fired plants have produced more expensive
electricity than natural gas (for equal emissions out the chimney)
when the costs of the plants are included, while I think the cost of
nuclear power plant construction, maintenance and subsidies makes
their output more expensive than even the non-hydro renewables
(including wood!).

Also note that all but, perhaps, a lunatic fringe in California, would
love to build more hydro plants. The problem is that to do this you
need to get sufficient output from the facility to pay for the cost
of building it, and the output from a hydraulic plant is proportional
to the river's flow rate times the vertical distance from the top of
a dam you can afford to build to the turbines at the bottom. A river's
flow rate and topography are dictated by God, not by people, and
unfortunately just about all the economic hydro sites in California
have already been developed (Yosemite is an exception, I guess, but
I don't think it is "wacko" to oppose flooding that).

As for the blackouts of 2000-2001 being caused by the lack of adequate
generating capacity, I'd just point out that the system of generators
which produced rolling blackouts in the winter of 2001 at a 28 GW
demand level was pretty much identically the same system that
comfortably met a 53 GW peak load on a hot day in the summer of 1999,
so any theory that it was the lack of new generating capacity which
caused the problem would also need to explain where 25 GW of existing
capacity disappeared to. The fact is that much of it was taken out of
service (by its new, post-deregulation owners) for "maintenance", an
action which most now view as having a lot more to do with the ability
of generators to make more money by selling less power in the new,
deregulated market than it did with any immediate need for 20 GW of
generating capacity to receive simultaneous repairs.

To tell the truth, while there are a lot of things I could find fault
with in California, electricity generation and consumption isn't one
of them. California has kept its per-capita electricity consumption
almost constant over the past quarter-century, compared to a 50%
per-capita increase in the rest of the country, while increasing its
per-capita GDP at a rate substantially higher than the rest of the
country, without any other associated pain or inconvenience that I
can figure out and at prices that were, until recently, lower
than, say, the US northeast. About 10% of the electricity comes from
non-hydro renewable sources (there are about 6,000 wind turbines in
the Altamont pass about an hour from where I live; I-80 passes through
there). The response to the 2001 blackouts, and subsequent rate
increases (probably assisted by the economy), was that California
residents and businesses lowered consumption by 15% over the next
year. If you look at http://www.caiso.com you'll probably find
demand peaking at about one kilowatt per person on a summer day
with temperatures in the urban areas ranging from the low 80's
to mid 90's. I don't think there is anywhere else in the country
that can match this, yet here it is done effortlessly.

I hence don't think there are so many negatives to be learned from how
the construction of electric generation, and consumption of that
power, has been managed in California. If you want to learn what not
to do, I think the best lesson might concern how not to deregulate
an electricity market.

In any case, for non-renewable energy sources I think natural gas
still has big cost advantages over coal for equal emissions out
the stack, while oil which, unlike the others, needs to be imported
from unstable places, should be saved for those things which can't
currently be done as well any other way (e.g. transportation). Natural
gas is also a good substance to derive hydrogen from should we ever
have the infrastructure to use it, this eliminating its greenhouse
gas emissions as well. I'm not entirely opposed to nuclear power,
particularly since its fuel costs tend to be uncorrelated with fossil
fuel costs, but I think if you honestly added up the full cost of
providing that power, including all the hidden government subsidies,
you'd find it to be more expensive than just about anything else (I'd
also be more impressed by their claims of safety if they'd buy
liability insurance or self-insure, like all other power producers do,
instead of threatening to close up existing plants and build no more
if congress doesn't continue to reauthorize the Price Anderson Act's
liability cap, yet another big subsidy). These days you can get more
energy out of a pound of silicon, which is mostly just sand, then you
can by turning a pound of nuclear fuel into really unpleasant stuff.
And it mystifies me why people so commonly complain about the
environmentalist wackos who want to keep oil reserves in the Alaska
Wildlife Refuge from being exploited but have no comment or care about
the Alaska politicians who have insisted the development of natural gas
reserves in the existing fields, useful to replace declining production
in other domestic fields, be tightly wrapped in a pork barrel straight
jacket.

Of course, I may have been reading too much written by Amory Lovins
recently.

Dennis Ferguson