Re: [Phys-l] The West Wing

[Rick Tarara <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

As always, check out the 'reality' here with numbers.  Let's take the 
Chicago area--roughly 10 million people.  At the national average usage of 
80,000 kWh/year (total energy use) that is close to a trillion (10^12) kWh 
annually.  If Chicago had a desert climate (maybe it will in a couple 
decades due to global warming ;-) then the annual solar absorption would be 
about 2000 kWh/y/m^2.  At a 15% conversion rate, it would require over 3000 
km^2 (1300 mi^2) of photovoltaics to provide the energy.  Then of course you 
also need a way to store the energy to provide some at night.

At some point the 'small is beautiful' group came to realize (or will need 
to realize) that high population density areas need high density power and 
nuclear IS an available technology that is safer and cleaner than coal. 
While natural gas is probably safer, it is not cleaner (greenhouse and other 
air pollution) and our proven reserves of gas are tenuous.  Ultimately, cost 
may not be the overriding factor.  Environmental impact and land use may 
become more important.

[Aside:  I have often seen the argument that high density power is not 
needed for countries like India BECAUSE that country is still 70% rural. 
However...this misses the fact that the urban population is over 300 million 
people--more than the entire population of the U.S.  Bottom line: 
distributed energy sources are too land intensive to be a viable solution 
unless mixed with _some_ forms of high density energy production.  In the 
near term (50-100 years) that will need to be nuclear if we get serious 
about reducing the use of fossil fuels for environmental concerns.]

Rick

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Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, Indiana
rtarara@saintmarys.edu
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hugh Haskell" <hhaskell@mindspring.com>
To: "Forum for Physics Educators" <phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 11:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] The West Wing


> At 09:34  -0400 5/25/06, jbellina wrote:
> > Many years ago a friend got interested in what drove people to be, at
> > the time, strongly pro-solar and anti-nuclear.  It turned out to have
> > little to do with technology as such and more to do with power and
> > the size of the technology.  Solar was small, local and comfy, and
> > nuclear was large dark and powerful.  So how do you address that issue?
> That doesn't seem like too bad a characterization to me. It isn't
> just that solar is warm and fuzzy, it that it is local. Distributed
> power production has some advantages in efficiency--very little
> transmission line loss, and the possibility of using the waste heat
> from the power generation to provide space heating. Nuclear is big,
> needs to be (but isn't always) remote, requiring long transmission
> lines, and, compared to solar, much less safe, and then there is the
> problem of the radioactive waste products that never seem to go away.
>
> Uranium mining isn't the most pleasant occupation, either, since it
> has all the usual difficulties involved in mining plus radioactivity.
> I presume, however, that the manufacture of solar panels isn't
> entirely benign, so on balance, that may be pretty much a wash.
>
> Processing uranium to be used in a reactor, however, gets more and
> more expensive, in both dollars and energy as the quality of the ore
> declines with time. At some point, I suspect that the energy budget
> for processing the fuel will be such that all of the output of the
> plant will be used to process the fuel to run the plant. I think
> nuclear will become less than practical long before we reach that
> point, however.
>
> The characterization was made during the "small is beautiful" era,
> which, alas, seems to have passed. I still think it has great merit
> as a slogan, for the idea of distributed power generation.
>
> Hugh
> --
>
> Hugh Haskell
> <mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
> <mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>
>
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