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Fritz Schlunder

Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 2:43 pm

Guest

Greetings Mr. Lavigne.

You seem to be pretty vocal about your views in this newsgroup (and judging
by the crossposting in many others as well). While in general I tend to
more or less agree that your scenario is one possible outcome for humanity,
I don't believe it is the only possible outcome.

Anyway, I wonder about your thoughts on nuclear energy, and in particular
breeder reactor technology? How much do you know about breeder reactors and
what are you conclusions regarding them? Why in your view are they not a
feasible technology that could eventually free us of fossil fuels?

What are the opinions of other readers in this newsgroup?

G. R. L. Cowan

Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 3:37 pm

Guest

Fritz Schlunder wrote:

Quote:

about breeder reactors ...
are they not a feasible technology
that could eventually free us of fossil fuels?

What are the opinions of other readers in this newsgroup?

Breeder reactors that are cooled with liquid sodium
have an interesting, although rather unimportant,
advantage over the water-cooled ones that do the bulk
of today's carbon-emission-free electrical generation:
iodine binds strongly to sodium,
and sodium iodide is an involatile compound,
much like the familiar sodium chloride.

So in sodium reactors the radio-iodine pathway
to accidental exposure of plant neighbours
has one more barrier, a very reliable one.
A liquid metallic sodium surface, so to speak,
never sleeps in its vigilant watch for halogen.

The scarce-uranium part of the story that justified
breeder prototypes never made any sense.
A US dollar buys ~40 grams of natural
uranium and in today's burner reactors, e.g. CANDU,
with no reprocessing, that makes > 2 electrical megawatt-hours.
The uranium mining cost is less than US$0.0005/kWh.

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

Raising the price offered for uranium mining
to a penny or two per kWh
would yield at least tens of gigatonnes of it.
See "World Uranium Resources"*, Kenneth S. Deffeyes and
Ian D. MacGregor, Sci. Am. January 1980.
It shows on page 74 a plot of seawater
and other low-grade ores.
The bar for "Black Shales" is 30 billion tonnes
high and centred at 0.006 mass percent uranium.

So uranium scarcity cannot, for at least several thousand
years, close down burner reactors like today's.

--- Graham Cowan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.doc --
fireproof fuel, real-car range, no emissions

Fritz Schlunder

Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 9:36 pm

Guest

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message
news:3FCE4972.42C17CE7@eagle.ca...

Quote:

Fritz Schlunder wrote:

about breeder reactors ...
are they not a feasible technology
that could eventually free us of fossil fuels?

What are the opinions of other readers in this newsgroup?

Breeder reactors that are cooled with liquid sodium
have an interesting, although rather unimportant,
advantage over the water-cooled ones that do the bulk
of today's carbon-emission-free electrical generation:
iodine binds strongly to sodium,
and sodium iodide is an involatile compound,
much like the familiar sodium chloride.

So in sodium reactors the radio-iodine pathway
to accidental exposure of plant neighbours
has one more barrier, a very reliable one.
A liquid metallic sodium surface, so to speak,
never sleeps in its vigilant watch for halogen.

Interesting.

Quote:

The scarce-uranium part of the story that justified
breeder prototypes never made any sense.
A US dollar buys ~40 grams of natural
uranium and in today's burner reactors, e.g. CANDU,
with no reprocessing, that makes > 2 electrical megawatt-hours.
The uranium mining cost is less than US$0.0005/kWh.

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

Raising the price offered for uranium mining
to a penny or two per kWh
would yield at least tens of gigatonnes of it.
See "World Uranium Resources"*, Kenneth S. Deffeyes and
Ian D. MacGregor, Sci. Am. January 1980.
It shows on page 74 a plot of seawater
and other low-grade ores.
The bar for "Black Shales" is 30 billion tonnes
high and centred at 0.006 mass percent uranium.

So uranium scarcity cannot, for at least several thousand
years, close down burner reactors like today's.

Certainly tremendous quantities of natural uranium exists in the sea and
ordinary continental crust, but is it ever going to be realistic to
economically extract most of it? On the first page of the foreward of the
book "Fast Breeder Reactors" by Alan E. Waltar and Albert B. Reynolds (C
1981) they lead the reader to believe that the energy content of 70 parts
per million uranium ore is approximately that of coal when burned in a
conventional reactor.

But then if you read the book "Nuclear Electricity" 7th ed. by Ian Hore-Lacy
available online at:

http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm

And then check out chapter three:

http://www.uic.com.au/ne3.PDF

They suggest seawater has a natural uranium concentration of a mere 0.003
parts per million, or 3ppb. That seems like such a truly pitiful number I
can't imagine seawater (or regular dirt for that matter) ever being a
practical source of uranium. If the 70ppm ore has approximately the same
energy density (when burned with conventional reactors) as coal, then that
would suggest sea water has a rather negligible energy density. Does
technology exist that can extract the uranium from sea water that doesn't
take more energy than the uranium extracted could ever generate? If it
does, could you point me to a place where I might start reading about it?

G. R. L. Cowan

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2003 11:20 am

Guest

Fritz Schlunder wrote:

Quote:

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message
news:3FCE4972.42C17CE7@eagle.ca...

Breeder reactors that are cooled with liquid sodium
have an interesting, although rather unimportant,
advantage over the water-cooled ones that do the bulk
of today's carbon-emission-free electrical generation:
iodine binds strongly to sodium,
and sodium iodide is an involatile compound,
much like the familiar sodium chloride.

So in sodium reactors the radio-iodine pathway
to accidental exposure of plant neighbours
has one more barrier, a very reliable one.
A liquid metallic sodium surface, so to speak,
never sleeps in its vigilant watch for halogen.

Interesting.

The scarce-uranium part of the story that justified
breeder prototypes never made any sense.
A US dollar buys ~40 grams of natural
uranium and in today's burner reactors, e.g. CANDU,
with no reprocessing, that makes > 2 electrical megawatt-hours.
The uranium mining cost is less than US$0.0005/kWh.

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

Raising the price offered for uranium mining
to a penny or two per kWh
would yield at least tens of gigatonnes of it.
See "World Uranium Resources"*, Kenneth S. Deffeyes and
Ian D. MacGregor, Sci. Am. January 1980.
It shows on page 74 a plot of seawater
and other low-grade ores.
The bar for "Black Shales" is 30 billion tonnes
high and centred at 0.006 mass percent uranium.

So uranium scarcity cannot, for at least several thousand
years, close down burner reactors like today's.

Certainly tremendous quantities of natural uranium exists in the sea and
ordinary continental crust, but is it ever going to be realistic to
economically extract most of it? On the first page of the foreward of the
book "Fast Breeder Reactors" by Alan E. Waltar and Albert B. Reynolds (C
1981) they lead the reader to believe that the energy content of 70 parts
per million uranium ore is approximately that of coal when burned in a
conventional reactor.

But then if you read the book "Nuclear Electricity" 7th ed. by Ian Hore-Lacy
available online at:

http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm

And then check out chapter three:

http://www.uic.com.au/ne3.PDF

They suggest seawater has a natural uranium concentration of a mere 0.003
parts per million, or 3ppb. That seems like such a truly pitiful number I
can't imagine seawater (or regular dirt for that matter) ever being a
practical source of uranium. If the 70ppm ore has approximately the same
energy density (when burned with conventional reactors) as coal, then that
would suggest sea water has a rather negligible energy density. Does
technology exist that can extract the uranium from sea water that doesn't
take more energy than the uranium extracted could ever generate? If it
does, could you point me to a place where I might start reading about it?

Let us first be clear on the distinction
between the task mentioned in your first question --
"economically extract most of" the Earth's uranium --
and the one I mentioned, extracting, over many centuries,
a few tens of gigatonnes, i.e. only the most accessible 0.1 percent.

--- Graham Cowan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.doc --
fireproof fuel, real-car range, no emissions

Dez Akin

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2003 12:46 pm

Guest

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message news:<3FCE4972.42C17CE7@eagle.ca>...

Quote:

Heh. Didn't think of that. But I do hate sodium cooled reactors.

Quote:

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

This is with traditional Liquid metal cooled fast reactors. Of course
they're going to suck; They have to have a seperate safe reprocessing
facility that is often aqueous.

Quote:

Raising the price offered for uranium mining
to a penny or two per kWh
would yield at least tens of gigatonnes of it.
See "World Uranium Resources"*, Kenneth S. Deffeyes and
Ian D. MacGregor, Sci. Am. January 1980.
It shows on page 74 a plot of seawater
and other low-grade ores.
The bar for "Black Shales" is 30 billion tonnes
high and centred at 0.006 mass percent uranium.

So uranium scarcity cannot, for at least several thousand
years, close down burner reactors like today's.

Hrmm... At constant power demand. I expect we'll continue our energy
consumtion growth for some time yet. Probably at least hundreds of
years away before fuel price alone pressures us into new reactor
regimes though, yes.

Some breeders may compete on cost though, especially if waste disposal
costs become significant. Molten salts for instance have the advantage
over traditional breeders of removing the fuel fabrication facility, a
seperate reprocessing plant, all the aqueous goo involved, in addition
to being safer and more thermodynamically efficient. Recent economic
analysis of molten salt reactors indicates that industrial scale
molten salt breeders are likely to be cheaper to operate than light
water reactors or coal. Of course there is the big development cost
sink, given that we have no industrial size molten salt breeders.

Daniel J. Lavigne

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2003 5:26 pm

Guest

Fritz Schlunder <me@privacy.net>wrote:

Quote:

Given the state of the world, and America's growing panic at the prospect of
having to abandon its claim to a "right" to "A Blessed Life Style" (Fueled by
ever increasing amounts of foreign oil.), it seems that my predictions will
come true. Be assured that I shall share the sadness felt by all when the
majority come to the unavoidable conclusion that their very greed for "MORE!"
shall precipitate their need to be satisfied with "LESS".

With respect to Nuclear Energy: When the world at large recognizes the scope
and scale of the coming energy crisis, the majority will put all fears aside
and "scream" for the development of all available energy resources, including
nuclear energy.

To satisfy our needs(?), some 23,000 to 25,000 "NEW" nuclear reactors shall be
needed to produce the electricity with which we intend to produce Hydrogen to
feed our hoped for advances with respect to fueling the "The Hydrogen
Economy". I am unsure as to the
number of breeder reactors we would need to produce the fuel requirements for
those
nuclear reactors. However:

Should we come to a conclusion that we will be able to develop a cadre of
employees
that would be 100% reliable with respect to the need to follow strict
procedures in
the operation of those reactors, we must then face the fact that we DO NOT
HAVE
sufficient fossil fuel supplies remaining to build those reactors AND supply
the rest
of the world's various economies with fossil fuels sufficient to maintain the
level
of energy consumption needed for the processes on which those economies
depend.

Should we come to a conclusion that we will NOT BE ABLE to develop a cadre of
employees that would be 100% reliable, and that attempts to redirect the
majority
of remaining fossil fuel supplies to the construction of such plants would be
met
by anarchy, insurrections and generalized war, we are left to reconsider the
problems we face.

I won't, at this time, discuss the reality of our fast depleting uranium
supplies. I will state that we could safely rely on "Nuclear Energy", *IF*
we could safely rely on each other. We can't.

And that ends our hopes with respect to reliance on Nuclear Energy to help
alleviate the energy crisis and the very real probability that *BILLIONS*
will starve to death as lack of Natural Gas and other fossil fuels adversely
impacts our ability to grow food sufficient to feed some (GASP!) 6.4 BILLION
people . . . in a world that is already far past its "Carrying Capacity"
(See "Overshoot" by Catton.).

Alas, some suggest that we could / should kill off many of the species
that compete for food and living space and that we should feel no regret
for having done so. I suggest that all such individuals have already
succumbed to the stress of overpopulation that overhelmed the rats in
Skinner's experiments.

Acknowledging that continuing on a path to an insane end leads us to the
end of that road, we should be willing to look at the reality that we
must confront the crime of our support of societies that have committed,
and will continue to commit, Mass Murder. We can't, and we won't.

Nor will we dare to openly recognize the we will ignore our duty, as per
the Nuremberg Principles, to refuse to support such societies. We will
continue to support such madness, and praise our "leaders" preparations
to USE all of our Nuclear and other Weapons Of Mass Murder as the wars
for the last few barrels of conventional oil start within some 5 years
of "The Peak Of Production Of Conventional Oil". It is my belief that
we shall reach that point in 2007, and face worldwide anarchy by 2012.

Prior to that point, will some start to question why they supported
societies that failed to wake and heed the warnings that were repeated
since the early 70's? Alas, none of that will matter, and Humanity may
never advance to a point that might / would permit all to actively ponder
the meaning and significance of consciousness. Thank you.

Daniel J. Lavigne
***********************************************

Say "Enough!" to societal insanity.

Help bring about the changes that must take place.

Join the Tax Refusal.

Act on your now recognized right and duty to refuse to
support a society that would be party to Mass Murder.

***********************************************
http://www.taxrefusal.com http://www.dieoff.com

daestrom

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2003 7:12 pm

Guest

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message
news:3FCE4972.42C17CE7@eagle.ca...

Quote:

Fritz Schlunder wrote:

The scarce-uranium part of the story that justified
breeder prototypes never made any sense.
A US dollar buys ~40 grams of natural
uranium and in today's burner reactors, e.g. CANDU,
with no reprocessing, that makes > 2 electrical megawatt-hours.
The uranium mining cost is less than US$0.0005/kWh.

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

While I'm pro-nuclear, you are mis-representing the cost of
nuclear-generated electricity. The *FUEL* cost of uranium is low, but the
cost to generate is much higher. Even *if* the advent of breeder and
reprocessing technology could reduce the fuel cost to zero, the cost would
still be on the order of $0.02/kWh.

The O&M costs of running a modern nuclear plant far exceed the fuel costs
(can be as high as on the order of 8:1). Payroll of a large number of
engineering & operations personel often exceed 50% of the O&M costs.
Because fuel costs are already pretty low, the emphasis is on improved
operating performance and capacity-factor. The trade-off can be seen in
that many plants are willing to spend *more* for fuel, if it will reduce the
'down-time' and allow longer operating cycles with a reduced chance of fuel
failure.

Regarding the OP's original question, it is not the availability of nuclear
fuel that is preventing nuclear power from freeing us from fossil fuels. 1)
Policital issues make the cost of building nuclear risky and unattractive.
2) The large transportation industry cannot be converted from fossil fuels
in a short order.

daestrom

G. R. L. Cowan

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2003 7:40 pm

Guest

daestrom wrote:

Quote:

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message
news:3FCE4972.42C17CE7@eagle.ca...
Fritz Schlunder wrote:

The scarce-uranium part of the story that justified
breeder prototypes never made any sense.
A US dollar buys ~40 grams of natural
uranium and in today's burner reactors, e.g. CANDU,
with no reprocessing, that makes > 2 electrical megawatt-hours.
The uranium mining cost is less than US$0.0005/kWh.

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

While I'm pro-nuclear, you are mis-representing ...

!!!

Quote:

the cost of
nuclear-generated electricity. The *FUEL* cost of uranium is low, but the
cost to generate is much higher.

Mis-representing!? Think carefully.
Usenet is full of misrepresenters.
Do you really think, and want others to think,
that I'm one of them?

My words, which you fortunately did not snip,
draw a clear distinction between uranium mining cost
and total cost.

--- Graham Cowan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.doc --
fireproof fuel, real-car range, no emissions

daestrom

Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2003 7:04 pm

Guest

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message
news:3FCFD3FD.7436BE04@eagle.ca...

Quote:

daestrom wrote:

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message
news:3FCE4972.42C17CE7@eagle.ca...
Fritz Schlunder wrote:

The scarce-uranium part of the story that justified
breeder prototypes never made any sense.
A US dollar buys ~40 grams of natural
uranium and in today's burner reactors, e.g. CANDU,
with no reprocessing, that makes > 2 electrical megawatt-hours.
The uranium mining cost is less than US$0.0005/kWh.

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

While I'm pro-nuclear, you are mis-representing ...

!!!

the cost of
nuclear-generated electricity. The *FUEL* cost of uranium is low, but
the
cost to generate is much higher.

Mis-representing!? Think carefully.
Usenet is full of misrepresenters.
Do you really think, and want others to think,
that I'm one of them?

My words, which you fortunately did not snip,
draw a clear distinction between uranium mining cost
and total cost.

Perhaps 'mis-representing' was too strong a term. But some may interpret
what you wrote as trying to show that nuclear breeder reactors would make
electricity that is 'too cheap to meter', and we don't need to go down
*that* road again ;-)

Plainly, the *fuel* cost of nuclear power is not much of an economic
concern. The *total* cost per MWhr is a much more 'level playing field' for
comparisons with other energy forms.

Persuing breeder technology for fuel production is not (IMHO) worth the
investment at this point. Finding methods of 'burning' the long-lived
actinides may be more beneficial. Molten salts or the pebble-bed designs
have desirable characteristics too.

daestrom

Axel Berger

Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2003 8:53 am

Guest

*daestrom* wrote on Sat, 03-12-06 01:04:

Quote:

'too cheap to meter', and we don't need to go down *that* road again Wink

At least the regulars here ought to know better than to bring that up
again. "Too cheap to meter2 means just that, is does *not* mean and has
never been meant to meant to mean 'too cheap to pay for'.
There are actual examples where this is true. Heating in water in
apartment blocks come to mind. Both truly are too cheap to meter.
For what is done is have one meter in the basement for the whole block
just distribute the cost equally. Of course this is a bonus to the high
users and makes low users pay more than their share, but metering
itself is not free and the actual spread between high and low users is
limited. As the extra cost of metering has to be paid for too, nobody,
not even the lowest possible user, saves anything but the high users
will pay a lot more.
For heating this has to be done by law. All heaters in all flats are
equipped with some kind of meter. The total cost of metering alone is
about a quarter of total heating costs, thus those laws benefit nobody
(except workers in a superfluous industry) and are a burden to everyone.

In many cases energy savings will affect the troughs more than the
peaks (you'll change your freezer, not the heater for your shower), so
there might be a real case to not meter power or at least not down to
the individual flat level.

--
Tschö wa
Axel

G. R. L. Cowan

Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2003 10:39 am

Guest

Fritz Schlunder wrote:

Quote:

"G. R. L. Cowan" <gcowan@eagle.ca> wrote in message
news:3FCE4972.42C17CE7@eagle.ca...
Fritz Schlunder wrote:

about breeder reactors ...
are they not a feasible technology
that could eventually free us of fossil fuels?

What are the opinions of other readers in this newsgroup?

Breeder reactors that are cooled with liquid sodium
have an interesting, although rather unimportant,
advantage over the water-cooled ones that do the bulk
of today's carbon-emission-free electrical generation:
iodine binds strongly to sodium,
and sodium iodide is an involatile compound,
much like the familiar sodium chloride.

So in sodium reactors the radio-iodine pathway
to accidental exposure of plant neighbours
has one more barrier, a very reliable one.
A liquid metallic sodium surface, so to speak,
never sleeps in its vigilant watch for halogen.

Interesting.

The scarce-uranium part of the story that justified
breeder prototypes never made any sense.
A US dollar buys ~40 grams of natural
uranium and in today's burner reactors, e.g. CANDU,
with no reprocessing, that makes > 2 electrical megawatt-hours.
The uranium mining cost is less than US$0.0005/kWh.

Breeders, with reprocessing, can reduce that to US$0.000005/kWh
but to date, at prototype scale, have increased total costs.

Raising the price offered for uranium mining
to a penny or two per kWh
would yield at least tens of gigatonnes of it.
See "World Uranium Resources"*, Kenneth S. Deffeyes and
Ian D. MacGregor, Sci. Am. January 1980.
It shows on page 74 a plot of seawater
and other low-grade ores.
The bar for "Black Shales" is 30 billion tonnes
high and centred at 0.006 mass percent uranium.

So uranium scarcity cannot, for at least several thousand
years, close down burner reactors like today's.

Certainly tremendous quantities of natural uranium exists in the sea and
ordinary continental crust, but is it ever going to be realistic to
economically extract most of it? On the first page of the foreward of the
book "Fast Breeder Reactors" by Alan E. Waltar and Albert B. Reynolds (C
1981) they lead the reader to believe that the energy content of 70 parts
per million uranium ore is approximately that of coal when burned in a
conventional reactor.

But then if you read the book "Nuclear Electricity" 7th ed. by Ian Hore-Lacy
available online at:

http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm

And then check out chapter three:

http://www.uic.com.au/ne3.PDF

They suggest seawater has a natural uranium concentration of a mere 0.003
parts per million, or 3ppb. That seems like such a truly pitiful number I
can't imagine seawater (or regular dirt for that matter) ever being a
practical source of uranium. If the 70ppm ore has approximately the same
energy density (when burned with conventional reactors) as coal, then that
would suggest sea water has a rather negligible energy density. Does
technology exist that can extract the uranium from sea water that doesn't
take more energy than the uranium extracted could ever generate? If it
does, could you point me to a place where I might start reading about it?

As yesterday noted, keeping the lights on and the nuke-fed cars
zipping around for the next few millennia, even with no breeders,
takes a thousandth of the planet's U content, not most of it.

Most of it can't be extracted in that time, or probably ever.
(But look at the distribution on the diagram on this page:
http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics/html/neutrino.htm .
Nature wants to help.)

Presenting as evidence the limits of his own imagination,
Schlunder gets the same response from it on two or three
very different ideas, different by orders of magnitude:
extracting uranium from "regular dirt" using a small
fraction of the energy it will yield in burner reactors
once extracted, and similarly extracting it from seawater.

That may be two ideas or it may be three because
it's not certain what he means by "regular dirt".
He goes on to mention a 70 ppm ore,
which is around 40 times richer than regular dirt.
That richness would tie in with the idea of taking
only the easiest 0.001 of the Earth's U.
Regular dirt -- 1.8 ppm U according to the neutrino people above linked
--
is, IMO, not likely ever to be a uranium ore.
There is too much other energy.

So it's amazing that seawater, another factor of 500 *poorer* in U
than regular dirt, can ever be considered as a uranium ore.

But it can, because it's fluid.
Natural currents can move, and have moved,
it slowly past a filter made of an adsorbent
designed to adsorb U, rather as green plants' leaves
grab dilute CO2 from the air flowing past them.

And I see I have said all this before: http://tinyurl.com/y0ab .

Anyone who says that nuclear cannot take over from fossil fuels
is either a fool or a liar -- or both.

--- Graham Cowan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.doc --
fireproof fuel, real-car range, nuclear cachet

daestrom

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2003 1:58 pm

Guest

"Axel Berger" <Axel_Berger@b.maus.de> wrote in message
news:200312061453.a34815@b.maus.de...

Quote:

*daestrom* wrote on Sat, 03-12-06 01:04:
snip

Quote:

For heating this has to be done by law. All heaters in all flats are
equipped with some kind of meter. The total cost of metering alone is
about a quarter of total heating costs, thus those laws benefit nobody
(except workers in a superfluous industry) and are a burden to everyone.

Well, I have to disagree somewhat with that. While the metering *does* ad a
cost, it also provides some benefit. Human nature being what it is, if most
people don't see a direct connection between their actions and their heating
bill, they would not make any effort to conserve. Not really a
thermodynamic or economic issue, more one of psychology. Without individual
metering, the energy waster doesn't care and has his wasteful practices
subsidized by more frugal tenants. Whereas the frugal tenent sees no direct
benefit of their frugality. Without individual metering, there is less
incentive to practice conservation.

daestrom

Richard Bell

Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2003 12:37 pm

Guest

In article <8LKAb.190652$ZC4.142695@twister.nyroc.rr.com>,
daestrom <daestrom@NO_SPAM_HEREtwcny.rr.com> wrote:

Quote:

"Axel Berger" <Axel_Berger@b.maus.de> wrote in message
news:200312061453.a34815@b.maus.de...
*daestrom* wrote on Sat, 03-12-06 01:04:
snip

For heating this has to be done by law. All heaters in all flats are
equipped with some kind of meter. The total cost of metering alone is
about a quarter of total heating costs, thus those laws benefit nobody
(except workers in a superfluous industry) and are a burden to everyone.

Well, I have to disagree somewhat with that. While the metering *does* ad a
cost, it also provides some benefit. Human nature being what it is, if most
people don't see a direct connection between their actions and their heating
bill, they would not make any effort to conserve. Not really a
thermodynamic or economic issue, more one of psychology. Without individual
metering, the energy waster doesn't care and has his wasteful practices
subsidized by more frugal tenants. Whereas the frugal tenent sees no direct
benefit of their frugality. Without individual metering, there is less
incentive to practice conservation.

daestrom

If we were producing electric power that was too cheap to meter, why does
it matter if the consumer never conserves?

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