The Atomic Show #110 – George Karayannis, Executive Director, EnergizeAmerica
George Karayannis, Executive Director, EnergizeAmerica chats with Rod Adams and Kelly Taylor about energy policies and proposed actions.
Here is the mission of Energize America as found on the organization’s web site:
EnergizeAmerica is a comprehensive and compelling 20-point plan developed by informed citizen activists to wean the U.S. from its fossil fuel addiction and provide the U.S. with Energy Security by 2020, and Energy Freedom by 2040.
Energize America seeks to Make the Right Choice the Easy Choice as we move toward an Energy Smart culture.
One of the components of the proposed energy plan left me wondering a bit about the real goals and missions – here is what the plan says about nuclear power:
Nuclear
Nuclear power is experiencing a political resurgence of sorts, and several new plants are in various stages of planning. However, the nuclear industry enjoys huge subsidies that shield the industry from nuclear disaster liability. The nuclear industry and our government have also failed for decades to solve the nuclear waste problem. These issues must be addressed before nuclear power is more widely used.
I think you will find the discussion lively, challenging and worth the effort it takes to listen. Kelly did a bang up job of asking probing questions.
I would be interested in your responses.
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Enhanced geothermal(Hot Dry Rock geothermal) is most definetly finite unless you’re satisfied with just a trickle of power.
It’s essentially heat mining and the expected life of a well is a few decades. The well(or rather the volume of rock from which it draws heat) will eventually recover if you leave it alone for long enough.
The average heat flow through the Earth’s crust is 87 mW/m^2, that’s approximately how fast heat will flow into your heat reservoir from below.
I have very strong reservations against net metering with the current grid.
It forces the utillities to buy back unschedulable power of unknown quality and unknown intermittency. The cost of transmission is payed twice at no cost to the consumer.
The grid would have to be smart enough that you could characterize the type of resource so that someone who wants to buy intermittent power (probably at a steep discount, let the market determine what it’s worth) can choose to do that.
That would also allow anyone, including a household, to buy intermittent electricity, store it and sell it back to the grid at peak demand. That’s a valuable service and if someone can make money living on the arbitrage between the two rates that should be encouraged.
It’s also highly desirable for households to be able to sell the abillity for utillities to switch load off in their home. e.g. utillities would like to be able to switch off your air conditioning rather than having rolling black outs in an emergency, and if you’re a healthy adult you may want to sell them the abillity to do that. It would also be possible to use phase change materials(e.g. salt water eutectic) to give a freezer the abillity to soak up quite a lot of intermittent electricity.
Hyperion’s reactors are $25–30 million for 25 MWe. That’s about 1 $/W, not 2. The catch is that they only last 5–10 years, rather than a LWR’s 40–60 years.