Wave Power

February 18, 2008


Video: The Wave Dragon System, see www.wavedragon.net

In our attempt to encourage a genuine look at alternatives to the filthy and disgusting coal fired power stations, and the ridiculously proposed Nuclear power plants with their prohibitive initial setup costs, the absence of any real solution for their waste and the fact that mistakes made with Nuclear power plants may result in a wide spread catastrophe… which is why any attempt to place such plants inevitably results in prolonged legal battles that often go on for years and years. So we will have a look at Wave Power.

POST CONTINUES

As an island continent with an apparent coastline of almost 60 000 kilometers… this is way bigger than I’d have thought, but the figure comes from the Australian government as the link shows. Be that as it may, it’s academic really, our coast is huge and the ocean waves around it are in motion 24 X 365, which means given enough Wave Power generators spread around Australia we should be able to power Australia 24 X 365 with no pollution, no waste problems and virtually no risks.

Oceanlinx Wave Power Generator
Photo: Experimental wave generator off Wollongong, NSW, Australia ( not the wave dragon though )

Whether or not the Dutch system is the best choice or not is also academic, because their are several other Wave Power alternatives available including an Australian version tested of the coast of Wollongong NSW. The $6 million plant is capable of producing 500kw and powering 500 homes, as well as desalinating 2,000 liters of drinking water a day and able to withstand a 1-in-100 year storm.

Website: Wave Dragon, wave power generation and Oceanlinx Experimental Unit



Written by Beam · Filed Under Energy, Political 

Comments

10 Responses to “Wave Power”

  1. Ken on February 19th, 2008 3:27 am

    2,000 of these equals one small coal fired plant or nuclear reactor. $12,000,000,000 to install. Lots of moving parts to maintain. This is also industrial scale production just off shore in marine habitats. Are there better systems out there?

  2. Craig on February 19th, 2008 8:29 am

    What cost would you put on the number of people who have been killed, or had their quality of life destroyed by nuclear accidents.

    Just a little side note, Beam had to mates who were in Chernobyl when the reactor problem occurred. Both are now dead from cancers.

    What price would you put on a life.

    If risk management is entered into the equation, Nuclear doesn’t seem to be such a good idea after all.

  3. Ken on February 19th, 2008 10:11 am

    Don’t be rediculous, $12 billion misspent isn’t going to solve problems, it will only make things worse. Better to distribute that money to coal fired plants without scrubbers to install them. I just don’t think its a good technology based on the information given. Do you think diverting funds to something with this little yield per dollar will save lives??? It looks way more expensive per kilowatt than a bad wind turbin, it’s just more constant.

    Don’t resort to emotional blackmail, I feel bad about the death and destruction caused by the Soviets at Chernobyl, and Beam’s friends, but its a bit like arguing that jets aren’t safe based on what happened to the de Havilland Comet, although that is a bit unfair to the Commet. We can go back and forth on this, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere. Dams have broken, fossil fuel power plants have exploded etc. I have a co-worker from Nagasaki, I’ve never asked him about it, but people live there. Of course that was an air detonation 5000 feet up and the wind probably took a majority of the fallout out to sea. Chernobyl was a series of screw ups that Homer Simpson would have been embarrassed about from drawing board to execution. It was so reckless, TMI is a better case study, and taught us how to make current reactors safer. I power you have to chose your poison and none of them actually looks absolutely attractive, even the ones you are proposing.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

    If you have ever been to Niagrara falls, it’s an amazing amount of water, and an amazing drop. However, it’s only 25 to 50% of the water that was destined for the falls, the rest is diverted for power generation, 4GW of hydro. On top of this Ontario Power also runs 14 nuclear plants and 7 coal fired plants, one of which is the largest in North America at 4 GW. They also run over a dozen other hydro-electric dams. It totals 22GW and on our side of the boarder there’s a similar portfolio. Water, if it runs down your street at 10 miles an hour and is deep enough will take your car right with it without thinking twice, wind has to blow at around a hundred miles per hour to possibly tip it over, but it won’t roll it away. I’m just defining the task at hand with some visuals. Look at the energy stored in Lake Mead for another example, it’s a huge water column. Compare this with what you think you’re going to get from wave power or tidal power, picture it as the level of the water slowly rises with the tide and then slowly ebbs back out. Just watch this in your mind’s eye and compare it to the billions of liters of water rushing over Niagara. To me there just seems to be a huge problem with scale. I believe that all these technologies can be used to lessen the need for more dangerous methods, but I can’t see them replacing them. Also, you can’t efficiently transmit low voltage over long distances. The higher the voltage, the less the transmission loss. Thus, Its probably better to use Solar and other low voltage producers at their source, but maybe you can get enough voltage with a large enough array. It might not be the best use of the technology or money. If its not the best use, then you are cutting off your nose to spite your face by investing in it.

  4. Craig on February 19th, 2008 10:29 am

    More nuclear power stations do not need to be built to replace the base load if coal is removed.

    There are other alternatives.

    I will get back to you on this one as I am flat out like a lizard drinking.

  5. Hans Chr Soerensen on February 20th, 2008 6:06 am

    Hi Ken
    Something must have darkened your mind.
    A Wave Dragon unit along the Scottish coast or similar place has a rated power of 12 MW which to my knowledge gives only 100 units to form a really large Coal or nuclear power plant of 1200 MW.
    The invest cost is only the double (taking into account a modernized Coal fired plant which full file all air pollution requirement) even before we have started a industrial production. And the waves are free.

    And all the moving parts? We have a rotor running at 250 – 350 rpm. That’s not a challenge. All technology parts proven for life time of 50 years in small hydro power plants and ship building but now to be assembled in a new way for ocean power plants. But we don’t have the incentives existing for coal production and Nuclear power.

  6. Craig on February 20th, 2008 7:35 am

    Thanks for your comment Hans, much appreciated.

  7. Ken on February 20th, 2008 8:28 am

    Hi Hans,

    I appreciate the input too.

    No mind darkening, just a calculation based on the last paragraph above and device shown, which is not the wave dragon. The device in the video appears different. What is most attractive about the wave dragon is that it appears relatively free of sea bed disruption.

    As far as incentives, the US is finally investing millions in alternatives. I was reading that Nanosolar just got a $20 million dollar grant for further research. Actually, much of this government’s efforts have been misguided in the past, going to biofuel technology that suffers from massive false economies. I have the feeliing lately like they have burned out many of their ideologues, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m counting days. The subsidy programs inacted on biofuels have mainly gone to corn based ethanol which has done little besides spark food inflation and cost more energy than the technology delivered. In alternative energy, the road to hell can be paved with good intention.

    Speaking of economics, false or otherwise, how much does the wave dragon currently cost and how much do you think it can be priced at given conceivable economies of scale? In my mind these are the critical issues. I don’t recall them being mentioned and without this data one cannot evaluate whether it is a good technology or not. Most of the other wave generators that I’m aware of are rated at around 1MW. Is yours 12 MW or 12MWhr?

  8. Ken on February 20th, 2008 11:05 am

    Hans,

    Sorry if this is a stupid suggestion, but it looks like they are going to build the Cape Wind project in the Nantucket sound, if the wave properties are right, could they moor the Wave Dragons to the windmills and then piggy back the electricity generated by the dragons back to land on the infrastructure in place for the wind farm? This seems like it would be more cost effective and might make the current generated by the total installation a little more constant. I don’t know if there would be any electrical engineering problems with this, but I can’t imagine any. If the Democrats get in, I’m sure this kind of thing could be subsidized to make it more attractive.

    Keep up the good work.

    http://www.capewind.org/

  9. Craig on February 20th, 2008 1:11 pm

    Hi Ken

    That seems like a really good idea. I cannot see any problems electrically, that could not be addressed.

    Currently there are a number of techniques used for Wind farms connected to the grid so that the differences in Voltage and Current are compensated for.

    They use wind activated or friction methods to slow down the turbine speed, they also use voltage regulation circuits with transformers and capacitors as well.

    So marrying these 2 systems together should not be any major problem.

    Your idea of the wave dragon tied to the wind towers, I think is excellent, it would have to save quite a bit of the cost of keeping the wave units in place and definitely save on transmission back to the mainland grid as you say.

    It’s good to see you agree with our philosophy, get lots of renewable sources working for you everywhere, connect them all to the grid and phase out coal.

    Eventually even the nukes could go.

  10. Ken on February 21st, 2008 12:34 am

    I maintain that nuclear power will be in the mix for a long time. The point of alternatives in the foreseeable future will be augmentation and source point reduction of demand. I think that this can have a huge impact and I believe that if this is reality, then focusing on this as the immediate goal will go farther than an attempt to achieve a wholesale replacement of coal and nuclear. That may eventually come, but renewables only account for around 1% (excluding hydro) of output and the sources proposed to replace them are not as energy dense as fossil fuel or nuclear.

    As for nuclear, I believe that part of our current problems with it is the use of a uranium based fuel cycle. This is analogous to burning brown coal vs black coal. Originally, the idea for commercial reactors was to use Thorium. There were two reasons this is scuttled, the first was technical, thorium has to breed into U233 which is then burned. You have to achieve the right steady state breeding and consumption in the reactor to make it work efficiently, the problem is that if you don’t the chain reaction will die out. You could use a two stage breeder cycle like India is working on where one reactor breeds U233 which is then extracted and burned in another reactor, but reprocessing is very difficult because the fuel is denatured with U232, which breaks down into Th228 which is deadly with hard gamma. There is also the problem that the Pa233, which is an intermediate from thorium to uranium, has a huge capacity to capture thermal neutrons which leads to the production of U234, which is not fissionable unless transmutated up to U235. This poisons the process. The second reason, and the primary reason these technical problems weren’t worked on to iron them out is that the US and USSR wanted to achieve economies of scale for uranium enrichment and plutonium production for military purposes. If you look at the fission daughters from U233 vs U235 you can see why this was a pretty dirty and counter productive thing to do from an environmental standpoint. A vast majority of the waste produced from U233 is half-lived out in 500 years whereas the fission products of U235, and the products of neutron bombardment of U238 last for up to three log units longer. There are added benefits to a Thorium fuel cycle, Thorium oxide melts 500degrees K higher than uranium oxide yielding a greater safety margin of operation, the presence of U232 daughters makes the fuel proliferation resistant for around a hundred years, set up as a seed blanket breeder reactor, the blanket containing the thorium (2/3rds of the mass) burns in the core for 9 to 12 years. The seed is reactor waste or weapons grade plutonium and is largely incinerated due to the higher neutron density yielded by U233 fission. I don’t know what the constituents of spent seed would be, but if it gets rid of plutonium and produces power in the process I think its a good thing. If you compare turning a third of the fuel rods over every year verses this scheme you can see that the total mass of waste is also markedly reduced. Westinghouse scientist found no problems with the design that has been burning in research reactors for the last 4 years and the IAEA has endorsed it. If this fuel design works, and it hasn’t been adequately proven yet, I hope that it is deployed in countries now seeking new nuclear programs for its proliferation resistance alone. The Shippingport reactor’s last fuel load was a similar design and it worked for a year until the plant was shut down and decommissioned.

    I ipersonally became interested in Thorium because I ran across an article on a system that Los Alamos is working on called the accelerator transmutation of waste program. This is similar to the Norwegian “energy amplifier” except its purpose is to burn actinides left over from fuel reprocessing. I don’t think either are viable in the near term and I have come to the opinion that vitrification is more effective for dealing with actinide waste. This has the added advantage of disposal of plutonium stock piles, which is a real concern.

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