Isn't Karma a renewable resource?
Oh.. If you replace Nuclear power with (X) whatever X is that's quite a chunk of power to replace. In 2011, according to this Nuclear power in this country produced over 821 billion kWh of power. If you replace that with X, we need to know what that replacement cost should be, right?
How many wind Turbines that kill about 600,000 birds / year including Eagles/Hawks/Owls.
We're not building any more large Hydro projects, and we have drought in most of the country presumably because of global warming.
Large Scale Solar Projects are hit / miss (30 to 40% success range) but they're getting better. So how many square miles of solar panels would we need and where would we put them? I have Solar at my house an 8kW system but it has degradation problems with US built panels. I'm already fighting to get those replaced but if we buy more Photo-Voltaic based Solar, that means we'll pad the pockets of the Chinese, increasing an already voluminous trade deficit.
Coal is an option but we'll never get to 0% CO2 with Coal, are we willing to build more Coal mainline plants to make up for the capacity?
Natural Gas seems to be attractive and the Natural Gas folks think substantially along the lines that most of the new energy in this country over the upcoming decades will by CNG capacity, not Nuclear, not Coal. Natural Gas produces less CO2, but it's not-renewable and it pollutes both on the supply side (fracking etc)
and in the processing. So, there's trade-offs there and costs.
On the Photo-Voltaic side of things, right now current panels are anywhere from 100 to 200 watts per square meter. My panels for example were rated to average 180.. I get a lot of sun where I am but let's just work this out and figure out with COTS technology what it would take.
Figure 150 watts / square meter.
Let's assume it's sunny every day where you put these and you get 6 hours at that production rate (early morning/late afternoon, lets power, sometimes clouds) shorter days/longer days etc. Anyway that's 900 W and with extra time, let's say another 40% for morning/evening etc. 1260 W/day/meter or approximately 1.3 kWh/square meter. That 821 BkWh figure is 24/7/365 but let's assume 60% of that was peak daytime capacity for 1/3 (8 hr/day) and the remaining 40% was for non-peak. I'm just pulling some numbers out here, so you plug in your own. 60% of that 821 BkWh figure comes out to 492.6 BKwh that you'd need during daylight hours. At 1.3 KWh/sq meter/day that's 492,600 square km. or 190,194 square miles. of COTS Photo-Voltaic or an area larger than California. But wait, an area that large is going to have clouds, storms overhead etc. So let's say that it's only on average 70% efficient, that means you'll need another 30% in additional area plus that would include Winter when the days are shorter. Anyway, this could all be put into a spreadsheet but who in California is willing to live in Shade the rest of their lives to supply us with 60% or so of the replacement of our Nuclear Main Line generating capacity? That other 40% of that that generating capacity that can't be by Solar would need to be replaced by Natural Gas, Coal or Wind. Let's say NG is the way you want to go. You'd need 328.4 BkWh in capacity and a typical NG Power Station about 500kWh (Largest in US has about 545 megawatts/day capacity) so 545 MW/day = 545,000 kWh/day
(sorry for the crude scientific notation)
328.4 x 10^9 / 545 X 10^6 = 602 plant operating days. From this. Using Natural Gas, for a kWh takes the burning of .00798 Mcf of gas McF = 1000 cubic feet. So producing 328,400,000,000 kWh of electricity (X .00798 Mcf / kWh) = 2,620,632,000 Mcf of gas. From this. We get anywhere from 115lbs to 122lbs of CO2 released for burning 1000 Cubic Feet so let's figure worst case 122lb X 2,620,632,00 Mcf = 319,717,104,000 lbs of CO2 released into the atmosphere or 160 million tons. Or measured in other ways:
With just those numbers, and mind you I'm flying here with my calculator. Yes, there are issues, mostly political around dealing with the waste issue however there are also proposals on dealing with it in other ways other than storage and we also need to address all of those aspects. Putting that much CO2 into the atmosphere isn't responsible either and I'm just showing 40% of the that capacity. Think if it were 100%?
Also San Onofre 2/3 produced about 2000 MWe combined, or 48,000 MWh/day. Since they've been shutdown awhile, we've already been hit with the environmental impact of burning more Gas to make up for it. SO per year of the loss of that power costs 48,000,000 kWh/day * 365.25 = 17.5 BkWh/year in power generation that has to come from somewhere. If it's been made up by Natural Gas, that's about 17.1 billion pounds of CO2 or approximately 8.5 million tons. Take the second line impact above using the lowest impact ($893/ton as of 2010) number above and excluding direct economic impact (higher electrical rates, lost jobs etc.) of the shutdown is $7.6 Billion in economic damage/yr. Okay, so Mother Jones uses some high estimates if you take the $40/ton in increased healthcare costs it's $340 Million / year.
My calculator and I have been arguing all night but I have gone over these numbers a couple of times. If I've made a mistake, I apologize in advance but just running a few numbers, for me at least in CO2 impact equating to economic impact means that we don't have a solution that can replace current Nuclear technology unless we're willing to do a whole lot more damage to the environment.
YMMV.
