Carnival of Nuclear Energy 157

The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 157 is up at Hiroshima Syndrome.

Yes Vermont Yankee looks at what the land use requirements would be to achieve 90% renewables by 2050 in Vermont.

* 18,000 GWh of electricity, Vermont would need to build 140 wind farms with the approximate output of Lowell Mountain’s 21-turbine facility. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory web site and other comparisons, 21 turbines of this size would usually cover 5 miles of ridgeline. These 140 wind farms would use 2,240 industrial turbines over 700 miles of ridgeline. Lowell claims to use only 3 miles of ridge line: in this case, ”only” 420 miles of ridgeline would be required for the turbines. However, not all ridges have wind as good as Lowell, so more turbines would probably be needed. Keep in mind, the entire state of Vermont is 158 miles long and 90 miles across at its widest.

* A 2.2 MW solar facility was recently installed in White River Junction. An area of 15 acres was cleared for this facility. Do to our northern locations and frequent cloud cover, this can be expected to generate only 2,755 MWh or 2.8 GWh per year. Making 18,000 GWh per year with solar would require 6,700 such facilities or 100,000 acres of solar installations. They would cover an area approximately one-fourth the size of the Green Mountain Forest

* Getting 18,000 GWh with wood biomass will require between 8 and 14 million cords per year. In contrast, the current wood harvest from Vermont is about 1 million cords per year.

* Assuming one cord per acre, we would need 12 million acres to be devoted to wood for the biomass power plants. The total area of the state of Vermont is 5.9 million acres, of which 4.6 million is forested.

Nextbigfuture – China steps up efforts to export nuclear reactors. Three moves this week by China’s state owned nuclear companies all demonstrated that China intends to capitalize on a growing global interest in nuclear power.

Nextbigfuture – The density of the fusion-producing plasmoid is the key factor to demonstrate the feasibility of energy production from Focus Fusion. In the past month’s experiments, LPP’s research team has demonstrated the near-tripling of ion density.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks