#quantitative reasoning

This hourly diagram of electricity production and emissions for eleven European countries over the course of 2023 is honestly fascinating.

The lowest emissions, unsurprisingly, are found in Norway (hydro), Sweden and Switzerland (hydro plus nuclear, although Switzerland has yet to abandon its “nuclear phase-out” policy), and France (nuclear). The highest are in Poland, which burns coal very heavily. And Germany varies wildly.

But we can also see, for instance, that Poland has a very narrow range in its production of electricity. So does Denmark, perhaps suprisingly ― although, contrary to what you might expect, Denmark is not among the top 10 countries in the world by share of wind power, according to OECD-IEA. We can guess that Norway’s very broad range of output variation reflects the use of its hydro plants to follow the variations in the Danish load.

Belgian output is also in a fairly narrow band, and we can likewise guess that a part of the large variation in French output is to compensate for that. German output, on the other hand, is all over the map because of variations in supply, not correlated with load.

6•April•2021

9.10.17 | GRE Study Challenge | Day 7/84

I finished making my own GRE formula sheet for the Quant section!

I focused on things that I need to work on and left out redundant topics I’ve already mastered

I highly recommend looking at the Magoosh GRE Formula guide [X] , as I used it heavily. But definitely supplement it with the ETS Math Review [X] and other useful tidbits you pick up while doing practice problems. 

Where will the power to operate these all-electric buildings come from?

What transmission lines will that power flow through?

Policies which cannot be implemented will not be implemented.

The page claims that “New York is rapidly increasing its grid capacity with renewable energy sources”. Are these sources near the load centers? Are they going to be available, say, in the middle of winter?

It also states that “energy-efficient all-electric buildings will use significantly less electricity than buildings which run on fossil fuels”. We feel inclined to skepticism, especially since the Rocky Mountain Institute ― meaning Amory Lovins ― seems to be a major information source, and we may infer, involved in the policy-making process. There may well be apples-to-oranges comparisons involved.

Lovins is the guy who warned us all that a kilogram of plutonium would cause 20 billion lung cancers if it escaped into the environment, so that we absolutely must not use nuclear power. No such effect has been observed from the tens of tonnes of Pu injected directly into the atmosphere in the course of about 40 years of thermonuclear weapons testing.

That is only the beginning of the reasons to suspect any quantitative information received from Lovins of being fudged and manipulated. But he is widely regarded as an infallible guru as far as energy policy is concerned.

Anti–nuclear propaganda at its finest!

You can, in fact, run from radioactive wastes. Typically, they are in a solid form, such as spent fuel pellets composed of the tough, refractory ceramic, uranium dioxide, and enclosed in metal tubes. They are not going to chase after you!

The dose of radiation received from a source depends on the intensity of the radiation field, and the time spent in the field. The intensity in turn diminishes with distance by the well–known inverse–square law. It is excessively unlikely that a flask carrying spent nuclear fuel would break open in front of you, but if it did, running away would be an excellent way to reduce your absorbed dose, and so avoid harm.

When radioactive wastes are buried for final disposal, generally they are treated to immobilize them. In the case of fission–product wastes from reprocessing nuclear fuel, this takes the form of conversion into glass. For other kinds of wastes, this can mean incineration followed by blending the ash with cement or asphalt, among other similar techniques. Again, if you run away from them, they cannot chase you.

Opponents of atomic power seem to feel licensed to say anything, without regard to facts.

Seok Kwang-hoon, a special advisor to the Energy Transition Forum, countered, “Nuclear reactors experience around five unplanned outages per year on average. The weakened grid flexibility due to reduced gas power generation remains an overlooked issue.”

That well known environmentalist message, “burn more fossil fuels!”

We wonder whether Mr Seok expects people to accept his claim about the reliability of nuclear power plants on the basis of his mere word. If not, we would like to know how he means to support it. We have mentioned before the 1106–day operating run of Darlington unit 1, ending according to schedule, which must be a world record for any kind of thermal power plant, and several months ago one of the CANDU units at Qinshan, China, completed 738 days of uninterrupted operation.

“Five unplanned shutdowns a year” might have been typical of the first years of operation of the first commercial nuclear stations. No such situation is reflected, for instance, in the most recent World Nuclear Performance Report, which shows that more than 60% of nuclear generating units achieved a capacity factor above 80% in 2024. Likewise, Nuclear Power Reactors in the World shows that, in 2024, nearly 80% of outages were planned. Since planned outages typically occur no more often than once a year, this means approximately one unplanned outage per five reactor years, or exactly the opposite of Mr Seok’s claim.

From the 1967 edition of The Yankee Story [PDF, 12 MB].

At the 28th United Nations Climate Change conference (COP28) in 2023, nearly 200 countries set a target to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Based on an assessment by the International Energy Agency (IEA), tripling the capacity of renewables globally requires allocating up to an additional 600 000 km² of land – an area the size of France – to utility-scale solar PV and onshore wind power by 2030, and 2 million km² by 2050.

Does this seem like a reasonable thing to do?