The Paradigm Shift from Nuclear Energy to Renewable Energy – the Fukushima debacle

April 16th, 2011 4 Comments   Posted in nuclear energy and power

The Paradigm Shift from Nuclear Energy to Renewable Energy – the Fukushima debacle

The recent nuclear meltdown incident in one of the 15th largest nuclear power plant in the world as a result of a sequence of events starting with an Intensity 9.0 earthquake that initiated a 10-15 meter tsunami wave within minutes (leaving little time for safe evacuation in spite of adequate tsunami warning by civil and military authorities) that engulfed as far as 10-20 kilometers inland along the flat lands of northeastern Japan, and in the process destroying buildings, roads, bridges, flinging ships inland and disabling the backup diesel generation system of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

There are newspaper accounts that the earthquake isolated the Fukushima nuclear power plant from the grid, and with a non-operable backup diesel generation backstopped only by an 8-hour battery pack, the world was indeed very close to a China-syndrome type nuclear power plant meltdown. Only the timely use of seawater pumped using crude methods to cool the reactor core and the spent fuel pool prevented a full meltdown. Up to now, the nuclear power plant operator has not succeeded in stabilizing the cooling water system and has relied on pumping and spraying sea water over the damaged nuclear reactors and exposed spent fuel rod cooling pools, leading to leakage of hot radioactive and contaminated sea water into the sea thru the minute cracks on the reactor building’s damage floors. More »

New Simplified Calculation Procedure for Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and Feed-in Tariff

July 28th, 2010 3 Comments   Posted in cost of power generation

New Simplified Calculation Procedure for Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and Feed-in Tariff

As part of the on-going technical preparations for the proposed mini-conference on the Mindanao Power Crisis this coming late August or early September 2010 and the main conference on “Energy & Climate Change”, the workshop coordinator, Mr. Marcial T. Ocampo, has prepared the simplified calculation procedure for calculating the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and levelized selling price (tariff) for conventional and renewable energy resources.

The result of the simplified formulas using the US NREL formula for generation cost and the RP MTO formula for selling price were compared with the results from a full-blown project finance model and the variance between the two methods were minimal in most of the power generation technologies analyzed.

The input data came from the IEPR research summary of 2007 and from internationally published data on power generation technology by noted experts such as Paul Breeze and yours truly, Marcial Ocampo. More »