Of course, we can thank Carter for banning the US from using breeder reactors on the largely unfounded belief that it would contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation.
Like that's insurmountable. Bush pulled us out of the fucking Non-Proliferation Treaty because he wanted to play GI Joe with pew pew missile shields.
Of course, we can thank Carter for banning the US from using breeder reactors on the largely unfounded belief that it would contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation.
Like that's insurmountable. Bush pulled us out of the fucking Non-Proliferation Treaty because he wanted to play GI Joe with pew pew missile shields.
Yeah, but it takes some political will to reverse that. And with the irrational fear of nuclear power that is so prevalent in the US it make take some time or more oil price hikes for that will to materialize.
They make glass out of nuclear waste right? Is it non-toxic? Radioactive? Probably right? So where does that go? Into a dump site. California has like 12 don't they?
What if you adopted that into a world wide base for energy? You'd either run out of uranium, or fill a great deal of the earth with radioactive material for thousands of years.
Unless the glass they make is completely inert and safe. Then they should just use it for all purpose glass in homes and businesses. I don't think that's the case though.
You really have no conception of the amounts of material we're dealing with here, do you?
A quick wiki doesn't give exactly comparable numbers, but to give you an idea:
A large coal train called a "unit train" may be two kilometers long, containing 100 cars with 100 tons of coal in each one, for a total load of 10,000 tons. A large plant under full load requires at least one coal delivery this size every day.
Oh wait.
Seriously, I don't mean to act like a jackass, but you need to do some reading before you get into arguing about this. The truth is that your attitude is contributing to global warming; spreading FUD about nuclear only means increased reliance on fossil fuels.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
They make glass out of nuclear waste right? Is it non-toxic? Radioactive? Probably right? So where does that go? Into a dump site. California has like 12 don't they?
What if you adopted that into a world wide base for energy? You'd either run out of uranium, or fill a great deal of the earth with radioactive material for thousands of years.
There's a whole lot of extractable uranium in the world. I think the last estimate I saw was something like a thousand years' worth, which should give us some time to get fission power working.
I agree that we need to utilize nuclear power a bit more. People are afraid of it for various reasons we all know about, but realistically it is one of the best ways to produce electricity in a clean manner that we have at the moment. We just need a better way to deal with the byproducts than shoving them in mountains, thats all.
They make glass out of nuclear waste right? Is it non-toxic? Radioactive? Probably right? So where does that go? Into a dump site. California has like 12 don't they?
What if you adopted that into a world wide base for energy? You'd either run out of uranium, or fill a great deal of the earth with radioactive material for thousands of years.
There's a whole lot of extractable uranium in the world. I think the last estimate I saw was something like a thousand years' worth, which should give us some time to get fission power working.
Yes, here's to the day when fission power is a possibility! :P
They make glass out of nuclear waste right? Is it non-toxic? Radioactive? Probably right? So where does that go? Into a dump site. California has like 12 don't they?
What if you adopted that into a world wide base for energy? You'd either run out of uranium, or fill a great deal of the earth with radioactive material for thousands of years.
There's a whole lot of extractable uranium in the world. I think the last estimate I saw was something like a thousand years' worth, which should give us some time to get fission power working.
Yes, here's to the day when men fly and people can speak to each other instantly! :P
They make glass out of nuclear waste right? Is it non-toxic? Radioactive? Probably right? So where does that go? Into a dump site. California has like 12 don't they?
What if you adopted that into a world wide base for energy? You'd either run out of uranium, or fill a great deal of the earth with radioactive material for thousands of years.
There's a whole lot of extractable uranium in the world. I think the last estimate I saw was something like a thousand years' worth, which should give us some time to get fission power working.
Woo, Steorn e la demo fiasco within a couple days. This should prove interesting.
I bet the only thing we will see is a moving something or other under zero load.
They are apparently having someone coming in to test the thing in various ways (and perhaps even attempt to dismantle it!). Though I am 95% sure its another hoax, color me intrigued.
We need something like that. It'd take untold global cooperation to at least spread the cost around, which probably won't happen for quite some time.
Maybe it'd have to be too large to be feasible?
Well, about 89 petawatts of energy hits the earth in the form of sunlight, or an average of 175 megawatts per square kilometre. So you'd have to cover about 430,000 square kilometres in 20% efficient solar panels to supply the world energy need. That's less than 0.05% percent the area of the Sahara, but I don't know how much it costs to cover a square kilometre with solar panels. A lot, probably. Then there's the necessary infrastructure to be set up.
The panels would need to be replaced every 20 years and suffer a drop in capacity from day 1 due to gradual oxidation of the silicon.
In addition to this, there are problems with large scale solar panel manufacturing because the world supply of silicon is mostly dedicated to the semiconductor industry to be turned into silicon wafers (99.9999999% pure wafers set you back like $5 AUD I've been told). However if you suddenly wanted to make a fairly thick wafer 430,000 km^2 then you'd pretty quickly drive the price up because the supply just cannot react to the demand that quickly.
Bear in mind too, that making silicon itself takes a pretty big investment of energy (you're going backwards the oxide form) and making solar panels takes a hell of a lot as well (when UNSW's solar team did it they were basically running an 800 degree C furnace for 2 weeks straight to anneal them) so your initial energy investment is through the roof.
On top of all that, at minimum these need to geographically disperse around the equator and you in fact need about double the number you quoted since you have to ensure that 430,000km^2 of solar paneling is always in sunlight - that's assuming you can somehow distribute the power efficiently over the entire planet (electrical distribution is very efficient, but you're talking at least 10 times the distance we do now minimum, probably a lot more).
You also need to store the power anyway, since you need to service the peak loads and not just average demand otherwise you're not going to be making any more solar panels cleanly in the first place without making many times more then that estimate needs
So yeah...all in all nuclear reactors are the better, smaller and possibly even cleaner choice.
Woo, Steorn e la demo fiasco within a couple days. This should prove interesting.
I bet the only thing we will see is a moving something or other under zero load.
They are apparently having someone coming in to test the thing in various ways (and perhaps even attempt to dismantle it!). Though I am 95% sure its another hoax, color me intrigued.
I'm intrigued to see if they have anything new to bring to the table re: free energy trickery.
I mean they said something like 10 days didn't they? If you timed it right and dropped the appropriate simple electronics into it, I bet you could make a spring powered motor spin at the same speed for 10 days while powering a light bulb.
Hydroelectric is one of the better choices because it can switch between operating in peak and nonpeak loads. There can be a very large differential of the price of electricity over the course of a day, as at peak loads you need to have spare generation that can go online and offline quickly to make sure supply meets demand and you don't have blackouts or brownouts. Shifting load from peak times to offpeak times is something being looked into as a similar vein to conservation, as you wouldn't have to as much idle or inefficient power generation sitting around.
Solar's big problem is that it's power output is a random variable depending on weather, and it's output is effectively zero at nighttime. That doesn't mean it is useless, as that output is positively correlated with peak load (the most power will typically be used in the daytime), but it can't be the only source of power nor can it take up too large of a portion of the capacity. You don't want cloudy days to cause brownouts.
Nuclear is a bit different, as the level of power a plant will put out is pretty constant and on all the time. Shutting down or starting up a nuclear plant temporarily is rather costly and slow. So nuclear is good for providing the "baseline" level of power, but you will need to have other forms of generation to fill in for the shifting demand over the course of a day/year.
Yeah, I agree with you, it's not a very practical option (although I didn't know that the cost of solar panels was so high as that). We can save solar power for the Dyson sphere.
I saw a show on TV about a company developing these. They've even got some working off the coast of B.C or Oregon or something like that. Perhaps not in a power generating capacity yet, but for testing and what not, it's up and running.
Is there anything required in terms of rare alloys in large amounts?
It'd require a lot of infrastructure but it might be worth looking into if Solar Power isn't such a reliable alternative.
I also read about aerial wind generators in Popular Science where they launch "flyers" into the air with 4 turbines. The flyers go up several hundred feet where the wind is quite strong, and the turbines both create energy and sustain the flight of the flyer. It's attached to a cord on the ground, and to a capacitor/storage facility.
It might fuck up flying routes (or maybe it won't, if they are remotely located), but it certainly sounded promising.
Nuclear is a bit different, as the level of power a plant will put out is pretty constant and on all the time. Shutting down or starting up a nuclear plant temporarily is rather costly and slow. So nuclear is good for providing the "baseline" level of power, but you will need to have other forms of generation to fill in for the shifting demand over the course of a day/year.
You can change it pretty easily with control rods, or in the cases of those gumball-machine plants, just changing the amount of fissable balls in the reactor.
What floors me is that I live in North Dakota and the two natrual resources we have in abundance is open space and wind. Like, lots of wind. In spite of this abundant amount of wind and giant open farm fields with nothing to block the wind, we have almost no wind turbines up.
Reprocessing really just means you go through the slag and sift out the un-fizzled bits. You still end up with something you need to bury in a hole for a while.
Reprocessing really just means you go through the slag and sift out the un-fizzled bits. You still end up with something you need to bury in a hole for a while.
You do realize that properly managed, nuclear waste is probably the least dangerous type of waste in the world, just because everyone is so terrified of it that we actually go to extreme lengths to account for, price and track the entire life cycle of both the fuel and the resultant waste products?
As opposed to like the 10,000 drums of hexachlorobenzene sitting on some industrial site in Sydney, probably slowly seeping into our groundwater.
Although ironically, this is why people who oppose nuclear waste facilities are stupid - where do they think the radioisotopes and contaminated gowns etc. from hospital radiology go right now?
I saw a show on TV about a company developing these. They've even got some working off the coast of B.C or Oregon or something like that. Perhaps not in a power generating capacity yet, but for testing and what not, it's up and running.
The wave-exploiters that go out on the open oceans are cool, but the estuarine ones are quite problematic, because they fuck up the entire estuary where they're placed, and those environments are really important both in terms of direct economic benefits (fish breeding grounds, mostly) and environmentally (as a sediment deposition zone, a water filter, etc). River mouths are highly dynamic and mobile environments, as are a lot of shore environments, and trying to 'lock' them in place technologically generally causes more problems than it solves.
I saw a show on TV about a company developing these. They've even got some working off the coast of B.C or Oregon or something like that. Perhaps not in a power generating capacity yet, but for testing and what not, it's up and running.
The wave-exploiters that go out on the open oceans are cool, but the estuarine ones are quite problematic, because they fuck up the entire estuary where they're placed, and those environments are really important both in terms of direct economic benefits (fish breeding grounds, mostly) and environmentally (as a sediment deposition zone, a water filter, etc). River mouths are highly dynamic and mobile environments, as are a lot of shore environments, and trying to 'lock' them in place technologically generally causes more problems than it solves.
Ocean tidal generators are problematic for many of the same reasons as solar panels are as well - materially they take a lot of beating and they generate surges of energy rather then a nice continuous flow, which again, you have to buffer somehow.
I saw a show on TV about a company developing these. They've even got some working off the coast of B.C or Oregon or something like that. Perhaps not in a power generating capacity yet, but for testing and what not, it's up and running.
The wave-exploiters that go out on the open oceans are cool, but the estuarine ones are quite problematic, because they fuck up the entire estuary where they're placed, and those environments are really important both in terms of direct economic benefits (fish breeding grounds, mostly) and environmentally (as a sediment deposition zone, a water filter, etc). River mouths are highly dynamic and mobile environments, as are a lot of shore environments, and trying to 'lock' them in place technologically generally causes more problems than it solves.
Ocean tidal generators are problematic for many of the same reasons as solar panels are as well - materially they take a lot of beating and they generate surges of energy rather then a nice continuous flow, which again, you have to buffer somehow.
I'm pretty sure all power generation machinery takes a beating in one form or another. Not sure that's a relevant argument against any of them, unless they're crumbling to nothing in a year or whatever.
Reprocessing really just means you go through the slag and sift out the un-fizzled bits. You still end up with something you need to bury in a hole for a while.
You do realize that properly managed, nuclear waste is probably the least dangerous type of waste in the world, just because everyone is so terrified of it that we actually go to extreme lengths to account for, price and track the entire life cycle of both the fuel and the resultant waste products?
As opposed to like the 10,000 drums of hexachlorobenzene sitting on some industrial site in Sydney, probably slowly seeping into our groundwater.
Although ironically, this is why people who oppose nuclear waste facilities are stupid - where do they think the radioisotopes and contaminated gowns etc. from hospital radiology go right now?
Heh, read the last page. I am so not that guy. I'm just telling it the way it is— Reprocessing isn't a way of dealing with waste, burying it in a hole for a while is.
Reprocessing really just means you go through the slag and sift out the un-fizzled bits. You still end up with something you need to bury in a hole for a while.
You do realize that properly managed, nuclear waste is probably the least dangerous type of waste in the world, just because everyone is so terrified of it that we actually go to extreme lengths to account for, price and track the entire life cycle of both the fuel and the resultant waste products?
As opposed to like the 10,000 drums of hexachlorobenzene sitting on some industrial site in Sydney, probably slowly seeping into our groundwater.
Although ironically, this is why people who oppose nuclear waste facilities are stupid - where do they think the radioisotopes and contaminated gowns etc. from hospital radiology go right now?
Heh, read the last page. I am so not that guy. I'm just telling it the way it is— Reprocessing isn't a way of dealing with waste, burying it in a hole for a while is.
Yeah, but reprocessing means you have less waste to deal with.
Yeah, but not extraordinarily less. We're talking about such small quantities anyway. It does make the waste less radioactive, but it's most useful as a way to stretch fuel out. If that's your interest.
I saw a show on TV about a company developing these. They've even got some working off the coast of B.C or Oregon or something like that. Perhaps not in a power generating capacity yet, but for testing and what not, it's up and running.
The wave-exploiters that go out on the open oceans are cool, but the estuarine ones are quite problematic, because they fuck up the entire estuary where they're placed, and those environments are really important both in terms of direct economic benefits (fish breeding grounds, mostly) and environmentally (as a sediment deposition zone, a water filter, etc). River mouths are highly dynamic and mobile environments, as are a lot of shore environments, and trying to 'lock' them in place technologically generally causes more problems than it solves.
Ocean tidal generators are problematic for many of the same reasons as solar panels are as well - materially they take a lot of beating and they generate surges of energy rather then a nice continuous flow, which again, you have to buffer somehow.
I'm pretty sure all power generation machinery takes a beating in one form or another. Not sure that's a relevant argument against any of them, unless they're crumbling to nothing in a year or whatever.
It's basically the balance of energy in/energy out versus materials costs (which factors in an energy cost of production). The same thing comes up with wind turbines - they're very clean, but if you have to re-forge a steel pylon or whatever to hold them once a year, then you really need to consider if they're actually working.
As far as I know, it's not too much of an issue with wind farms - I'd have to go hunting around to find out what the deal with tidal farms would be, but I do know that it was an engineering problem they had to put a lot of effort into solving because the load is unpredictable essentially (as opposed to say, a steam driven powerplant where you've got a lot of pretty well known parameters).
Yeah, but not extraordinarily less. We're talking about such small quantities anyway. It does make the waste less radioactive, but it's most useful as a way to stretch fuel out. If that's your interest.
Uh...actually it is quite a lot less:
Once processed, two bundles totaling 528 fuel rods yield one vitrification canister 1.3 meters tall and a bit less than half a meter in diameter, plus another steel canister of similar size holding the compacted metal fuel rods. Even the largest of France’s reactors, which can produce 1300 megawatts, generate just 20 canisters of high-level waste per year. According to Areva, it’s about a factor of 10 reduction in the mass of highly radioactive waste needing to be stored under the most stringent conditions, and a four- or fivefold reduction in volume relative to leaving a plant’s spent fuel unseparated
It's basically the balance of energy in/energy out versus materials costs (which factors in an energy cost of production). The same thing comes up with wind turbines - they're very clean, but if you have to re-forge a steel pylon or whatever to hold them once a year, then you really need to consider if they're actually working.
I'm aware of that; what I'm saying is has anyone done a proper comparative study of uptake costs between various power generation methods and the subtypes of same? The squillion moving parts in coal and nuclear plants must require progressive replacement, and what are the manufacturing and disposal costs of said parts like? You can't just say 'oh this method requires inputs' without assessing those inputs in relation to what goes on in other systems.
And what about manpower costs? I can't help but wonder if some of these newer methods, particularly wind power, benefit significantly from requiring far fewer people to run them.
A lot of these things are unknown because not enough projects have been around for a fraction of the time that good old-fashioned Rankine power cycles have been. Getting investors on board for long-term viability studies of shaky ideas like wind and tidal power is a really tough task when something efficient and well studied already exists (and is still growing).
Having said that, there are several engineering journals devoted to different types of power generation, and somebody's sure to have performed speculative cost-benefit analysis before. I see several fairly old ones, but nothing pops out right now that looks worth linking to.
It's basically the balance of energy in/energy out versus materials costs (which factors in an energy cost of production). The same thing comes up with wind turbines - they're very clean, but if you have to re-forge a steel pylon or whatever to hold them once a year, then you really need to consider if they're actually working.
I'm aware of that; what I'm saying is has anyone done a proper comparative study of uptake costs between various power generation methods and the subtypes of same? The squillion moving parts in coal and nuclear plants must require progressive replacement, and what are the manufacturing and disposal costs of said parts like? You can't just say 'oh this method requires inputs' without assessing those inputs in relation to what goes on in other systems.
And what about manpower costs? I can't help but wonder if some of these newer methods, particularly wind power, benefit significantly from requiring far fewer people to run them.
From my experience doing a bit of research and talking to my brother in the power industry, the most important cost is the capital or initial costs, especially before gas prices started taking off. For something like a nuclear plant or a dam, just building it is the riskiest and most costly part. For example, there is the case from my home-state of Washington there was the ill-fated WPPSS (whoops!) program where only one out of five of the planned reactors was completed due to the financing falling apart.
The staggering capital costs cause a number of abnormalities in the power industry, such as one case where an old and exceptionally inefficient coal plant was kept online until very recently simply because it was paid off. This also lead to a lot of expansion into relatively easy to build gas plants when the fuel was cheap, which more recently has been biting us (and especially California) in the ass due to rising costs. Compare this to a nuclear plant where uranium prices have been skyrocketing recently but fuel represent sa much smaller proportion of its overall costs.
One fundamental problem related to this is that the prices of electricity on a power market are often low enough that it is unprofitable for new players to enter the market and build new generators or transmission. But it's also the case that not fully regulated power markets are pretty weird when compared to other markets and are exceptionally volatile. That's a bit of a separate discussion though.
Edit - Unfortunately, power companies have a history of skimping on maintenance too. I heard a story of one company that can expect millions of dollars a day fines once the regulators get around to them.
I was hoping that would be the case but SciFinder has not delivered (it's very chemistry and physics orientated, not so much mat sci). I was more interested in what it was for tidal power, since I'm somewhat under the impression that wind farms quote pretty well (documentary talking about how they redesigned aerodynamic pylons and all that).
I love these threads, they make me actually have to look up stuff.
Near Palm Springs (California) right now there's a large wind farm by part of Interstate 10, I happen to live within a few miles of it, and apparently it's generating a good amount of power for the Coachella Valley. There are literally hundreds of them dotting the landscape.
I read a story the other day about a small family operation that does uranium mining. It seems there isn't a lot of investment in safety or their isn't a lot of regulation. All of them die in their fifties from cancer. So do their families.
I read a story the other day about a small family operation that does uranium mining. It seems there isn't a lot of investment in safety or their isn't a lot of regulation. All of them die in their fifties from cancer. So do their families.
This doesn't prove anything, particularly due to the lack of the story and the idea of "a small operation" to mine uranium when uranium is strip mined.
EDIT: Also what country it is in.
I read a story the other day about a small family operation that does uranium mining. It seems there isn't a lot of investment in safety or their isn't a lot of regulation. All of them die in their fifties from cancer. So do their families.
This doesn't prove anything, particularly due to the lack of the story and the idea of "a small operation" to mine uranium when uranium is strip mined.
[IMG]_ http://www.peakoil.org.au/ranger-pit1.jpg[/IMG]
EDIT: Also what country it is in.
Um. I didn't set out to "prove" anything. I was just sharing an anecdote.
I think these guys were prospecting. The story had them drilling holes at different locations with a rig in the back of their pickup truck.
I read a story the other day about a small family operation that does uranium mining. It seems there isn't a lot of investment in safety or their isn't a lot of regulation. All of them die in their fifties from cancer. So do their families.
This doesn't prove anything, particularly due to the lack of the story and the idea of "a small operation" to mine uranium when uranium is strip mined.
[IMG]_ http://www.peakoil.org.au/ranger-pit1.jpg[/IMG]
EDIT: Also what country it is in.
Um. I didn't set out to "prove" anything. I was just sharing an anecdote.
I think these guys were prospecting. The story had them drilling holes at different locations with a rig in the back of their pickup truck.
I think what I meant to say was "where was this?"
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
edited July 2007
RE: solar power - Solar is great, cheap, clean, freely available to al half the time. The problems so far are always capital investment and efficiency, both of which are staggeringly bad if you use photo-voltaic cells to generate your power.
What no-one has mentioned so far are the other alternatives. On e such would be the "sodium boiler" method - you put a field of mirrors out, all focused on a central point so that all the light is reflected into the heating chamber (usually at the top of a tower) where all that energy is focused to heat pure sodium to it's boiling point, or close to it. That heat is then turned into electricity by the good old-fashioned steam turbine, which we've gotten pretty good at lately, seeing as how the same technology is used to generate the electricity in both coal and nuclear power plants.
The capital outlay is tiny (brick towers and mirrors are really quite cheap these days) and maintenance consists of hiring a window cleaner on full time...
The only real hindrance to the development of these things is space - they need a hell of a lot of surface area to do anything useful, but even so it's much less per megawatt than photo-voltaics.
Then there's the orbital solution - unlimited free space, but astronomical (sorry) building and maintenance costs, but potentially even more efficient than any ground-based station due to the lack of atmosphere. Although public acceptance might be a problem as no-one wants to live next door to a gigawatt-plus microwave beam. Awesome space defence weapon though...
Yeah, solarthermal is a better choice for a power plant than photovoltaic is. There's a solarthermal plant out in the middle of nowhere in California that I've driven by a few times. There are plenty of good places where there isn't a whole lot around that you can throw a bunch of those things up on cheap land.
A big problem then becomes transmission though, because you have to shell out (and go through the regulatory grinder) to expand that. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of will to expand transmission to the extent that is necessary or prudent.
Which reminds me, that's an obvious application of titania nanoparticles - embed them in the mirrors to let the little bit of transient light generate radicals to self-clean them. Might run into problems with heat I suppose.
Incidentally on an unrelated topic, it appears the Steorn trick is going to be a desperately simple wound spring in a box. My prediction for their demo is that the weight is lifted and then lowers while still attached to the same armature, and there's something in there to wind it just a little more to keep it going.
Yeah, but not extraordinarily less. We're talking about such small quantities anyway. It does make the waste less radioactive, but it's most useful as a way to stretch fuel out. If that's your interest.
Uh...actually it is quite a lot less:
Once processed, two bundles totaling 528 fuel rods yield one vitrification canister 1.3 meters tall and a bit less than half a meter in diameter, plus another steel canister of similar size holding the compacted metal fuel rods. Even the largest of France’s reactors, which can produce 1300 megawatts, generate just 20 canisters of high-level waste per year. According to Areva, it’s about a factor of 10 reduction in the mass of highly radioactive waste needing to be stored under the most stringent conditions, and a four- or fivefold reduction in volume relative to leaving a plant’s spent fuel unseparated
And if we ship all the remaining waste to France we'll have none to deal with at all.
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Like that's insurmountable. Bush pulled us out of the fucking Non-Proliferation Treaty because he wanted to play GI Joe with pew pew missile shields.
Yeah, but it takes some political will to reverse that. And with the irrational fear of nuclear power that is so prevalent in the US it make take some time or more oil price hikes for that will to materialize.
You really have no conception of the amounts of material we're dealing with here, do you?
A quick wiki doesn't give exactly comparable numbers, but to give you an idea:
Hmm, 30 tons does sound like a lot.
Oh wait.
Seriously, I don't mean to act like a jackass, but you need to do some reading before you get into arguing about this. The truth is that your attitude is contributing to global warming; spreading FUD about nuclear only means increased reliance on fossil fuels.
There's a whole lot of extractable uranium in the world. I think the last estimate I saw was something like a thousand years' worth, which should give us some time to get fission power working.
That's actually a pretty decent way of dealing, from what I understand. we could certainly stand to do it better, though.
Yes, here's to the day when fission power is a possibility! :P
I bet the only thing we will see is a moving something or other under zero load.
They are apparently having someone coming in to test the thing in various ways (and perhaps even attempt to dismantle it!). Though I am 95% sure its another hoax, color me intrigued.
Edit: More info here: http://freeenergytracker.blogspot.com/
In addition to this, there are problems with large scale solar panel manufacturing because the world supply of silicon is mostly dedicated to the semiconductor industry to be turned into silicon wafers (99.9999999% pure wafers set you back like $5 AUD I've been told). However if you suddenly wanted to make a fairly thick wafer 430,000 km^2 then you'd pretty quickly drive the price up because the supply just cannot react to the demand that quickly.
Bear in mind too, that making silicon itself takes a pretty big investment of energy (you're going backwards the oxide form) and making solar panels takes a hell of a lot as well (when UNSW's solar team did it they were basically running an 800 degree C furnace for 2 weeks straight to anneal them) so your initial energy investment is through the roof.
On top of all that, at minimum these need to geographically disperse around the equator and you in fact need about double the number you quoted since you have to ensure that 430,000km^2 of solar paneling is always in sunlight - that's assuming you can somehow distribute the power efficiently over the entire planet (electrical distribution is very efficient, but you're talking at least 10 times the distance we do now minimum, probably a lot more).
You also need to store the power anyway, since you need to service the peak loads and not just average demand otherwise you're not going to be making any more solar panels cleanly in the first place without making many times more then that estimate needs
So yeah...all in all nuclear reactors are the better, smaller and possibly even cleaner choice.
I'm intrigued to see if they have anything new to bring to the table re: free energy trickery.
I mean they said something like 10 days didn't they? If you timed it right and dropped the appropriate simple electronics into it, I bet you could make a spring powered motor spin at the same speed for 10 days while powering a light bulb.
Solar's big problem is that it's power output is a random variable depending on weather, and it's output is effectively zero at nighttime. That doesn't mean it is useless, as that output is positively correlated with peak load (the most power will typically be used in the daytime), but it can't be the only source of power nor can it take up too large of a portion of the capacity. You don't want cloudy days to cause brownouts.
Nuclear is a bit different, as the level of power a plant will put out is pretty constant and on all the time. Shutting down or starting up a nuclear plant temporarily is rather costly and slow. So nuclear is good for providing the "baseline" level of power, but you will need to have other forms of generation to fill in for the shifting demand over the course of a day/year.
Yeah, I agree with you, it's not a very practical option (although I didn't know that the cost of solar panels was so high as that). We can save solar power for the Dyson sphere.
I saw a show on TV about a company developing these. They've even got some working off the coast of B.C or Oregon or something like that. Perhaps not in a power generating capacity yet, but for testing and what not, it's up and running.
Is there anything required in terms of rare alloys in large amounts?
It'd require a lot of infrastructure but it might be worth looking into if Solar Power isn't such a reliable alternative.
I also read about aerial wind generators in Popular Science where they launch "flyers" into the air with 4 turbines. The flyers go up several hundred feet where the wind is quite strong, and the turbines both create energy and sustain the flight of the flyer. It's attached to a cord on the ground, and to a capacitor/storage facility.
It might fuck up flying routes (or maybe it won't, if they are remotely located), but it certainly sounded promising.
This annoys the hell out of me.
France reprocesses their waste.
You do realize that properly managed, nuclear waste is probably the least dangerous type of waste in the world, just because everyone is so terrified of it that we actually go to extreme lengths to account for, price and track the entire life cycle of both the fuel and the resultant waste products?
As opposed to like the 10,000 drums of hexachlorobenzene sitting on some industrial site in Sydney, probably slowly seeping into our groundwater.
Although ironically, this is why people who oppose nuclear waste facilities are stupid - where do they think the radioisotopes and contaminated gowns etc. from hospital radiology go right now?
The wave-exploiters that go out on the open oceans are cool, but the estuarine ones are quite problematic, because they fuck up the entire estuary where they're placed, and those environments are really important both in terms of direct economic benefits (fish breeding grounds, mostly) and environmentally (as a sediment deposition zone, a water filter, etc). River mouths are highly dynamic and mobile environments, as are a lot of shore environments, and trying to 'lock' them in place technologically generally causes more problems than it solves.
Heh, read the last page. I am so not that guy. I'm just telling it the way it is— Reprocessing isn't a way of dealing with waste, burying it in a hole for a while is.
Yeah, but reprocessing means you have less waste to deal with.
As far as I know, it's not too much of an issue with wind farms - I'd have to go hunting around to find out what the deal with tidal farms would be, but I do know that it was an engineering problem they had to put a lot of effort into solving because the load is unpredictable essentially (as opposed to say, a steam driven powerplant where you've got a lot of pretty well known parameters).
Uh...actually it is quite a lot less:
I'm aware of that; what I'm saying is has anyone done a proper comparative study of uptake costs between various power generation methods and the subtypes of same? The squillion moving parts in coal and nuclear plants must require progressive replacement, and what are the manufacturing and disposal costs of said parts like? You can't just say 'oh this method requires inputs' without assessing those inputs in relation to what goes on in other systems.
And what about manpower costs? I can't help but wonder if some of these newer methods, particularly wind power, benefit significantly from requiring far fewer people to run them.
Having said that, there are several engineering journals devoted to different types of power generation, and somebody's sure to have performed speculative cost-benefit analysis before. I see several fairly old ones, but nothing pops out right now that looks worth linking to.
From my experience doing a bit of research and talking to my brother in the power industry, the most important cost is the capital or initial costs, especially before gas prices started taking off. For something like a nuclear plant or a dam, just building it is the riskiest and most costly part. For example, there is the case from my home-state of Washington there was the ill-fated WPPSS (whoops!) program where only one out of five of the planned reactors was completed due to the financing falling apart.
The staggering capital costs cause a number of abnormalities in the power industry, such as one case where an old and exceptionally inefficient coal plant was kept online until very recently simply because it was paid off. This also lead to a lot of expansion into relatively easy to build gas plants when the fuel was cheap, which more recently has been biting us (and especially California) in the ass due to rising costs. Compare this to a nuclear plant where uranium prices have been skyrocketing recently but fuel represent sa much smaller proportion of its overall costs.
One fundamental problem related to this is that the prices of electricity on a power market are often low enough that it is unprofitable for new players to enter the market and build new generators or transmission. But it's also the case that not fully regulated power markets are pretty weird when compared to other markets and are exceptionally volatile. That's a bit of a separate discussion though.
Edit - Unfortunately, power companies have a history of skimping on maintenance too. I heard a story of one company that can expect millions of dollars a day fines once the regulators get around to them.
Near Palm Springs (California) right now there's a large wind farm by part of Interstate 10, I happen to live within a few miles of it, and apparently it's generating a good amount of power for the Coachella Valley. There are literally hundreds of them dotting the landscape.
EDIT: Also what country it is in.
Um. I didn't set out to "prove" anything. I was just sharing an anecdote.
I think these guys were prospecting. The story had them drilling holes at different locations with a rig in the back of their pickup truck.
I think what I meant to say was "where was this?"
What no-one has mentioned so far are the other alternatives. On e such would be the "sodium boiler" method - you put a field of mirrors out, all focused on a central point so that all the light is reflected into the heating chamber (usually at the top of a tower) where all that energy is focused to heat pure sodium to it's boiling point, or close to it. That heat is then turned into electricity by the good old-fashioned steam turbine, which we've gotten pretty good at lately, seeing as how the same technology is used to generate the electricity in both coal and nuclear power plants.
The capital outlay is tiny (brick towers and mirrors are really quite cheap these days) and maintenance consists of hiring a window cleaner on full time...
The only real hindrance to the development of these things is space - they need a hell of a lot of surface area to do anything useful, but even so it's much less per megawatt than photo-voltaics.
Then there's the orbital solution - unlimited free space, but astronomical (sorry) building and maintenance costs, but potentially even more efficient than any ground-based station due to the lack of atmosphere. Although public acceptance might be a problem as no-one wants to live next door to a gigawatt-plus microwave beam. Awesome space defence weapon though...
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A big problem then becomes transmission though, because you have to shell out (and go through the regulatory grinder) to expand that. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of will to expand transmission to the extent that is necessary or prudent.
Incidentally on an unrelated topic, it appears the Steorn trick is going to be a desperately simple wound spring in a box. My prediction for their demo is that the weight is lifted and then lowers while still attached to the same armature, and there's something in there to wind it just a little more to keep it going.
And if we ship all the remaining waste to France we'll have none to deal with at all.
It's only France, what are they going to do?