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Giant Snake-Shaped Generators Could Capture Wave Power
Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have developed a prototype of a future giant rubber tube which could catch energy from sea waves. The device, dubbed Anaconda, uses 'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.' So far, the experiments have been done with tubes with diameters of 0.25 and 0.5 meters. But if the experiments are successful, future full-scale Anaconda devices would be 200 meters long and 7 meters in diameter, and deployed in water depths of between 40 and 100 meters. An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses). These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."
If you believe that humans are causing the climate to change, the answer is fewer humans. Lots fewer.
Or the answer could be that each human should have less impact, starting with those with the MOST impact... the people in the USA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the captain was elsewhere working and the trawler was on autopilot, snagging a field of those things in your nets would rip the rigging off completely and probably capsize the boat from the stern before he had time to react and reverse engines. Modern fishing boats are like big tractors, huge engines and big props designed to pull hard, and they will. As soon as they reach whatever big anchor point is there for the turbines, the bow will lift severely, then either the whole rigging will go or they sink, just pulled over backwards more or less. A lot of fishing boats have had similar misfortune when they snagged submarines in unexpected places. Of course, I would expect them to have lit buoys and so on above the turbines, and have it marked on charts, but weird stuff still happens in the oceans. I remember a close one one day when we hit some unmarked coral heads on what was supposed to be pretty flat mud bottom, Yikes! Reality changed fast, luckily the chunks of coral broke off before stuff tore up bad or we flipped. Still tore the nets up bad. You just never know, there's sea laws and theory, then practice. One night I was catnapping in between drags, first mate yells out "get up, get ready to jump!" An unlit freighter had crossed our path, she didn't see us, we didn't see her, we scraped down her side, pressure wave kept us from being really damaged. Like two feet more our way we would have been smashed. Not a huge distance in the ocean.
Stuff just happens in the oceans and mass quantities of submerged and hidden anchored up things would be a menace without a lot of warnings of various kinds posted. Nowadays I guess you'd have GPS doing a lot of it, back then we had about zilch besides some ancient loran and mark 1 eyeballs.
Many shorelines require natural wave action and currents to remain healthy. It seems like this is yet another technological "solution" that might in the long run cause more problems. The potential issues with shoreline erosion (or whatever might happen when wave energy is dispersed prior to getting to the shore) won't happen as quickly and obviously as we have seen with wind farm bird kills (apparently those big slow moving windmills are pretty good at whacking birds), the effects could be as disastrous as some of the things we've done with the Florida Everglades and much of the gulf coast.
The point that completely escapes many environmentalists, is that you can't just discard one technology and replace it with another, and expect everything to come out all right. There are damn good reasons behind the scientific method, and they do not include stomping feet, claiming anyone with a different opinion is trying to kill the world, or jumping headlong into untested technologies that, because they aren't bad in the same way as other technologies, must be 100% good. That's an insane way to pursue large-scale technology change, but that's what Gore and his army of environmental extremists consistently propose. Anything that replaces oil must be ok, even if it results in us burning food or in this case, disrupting wave energy and water currents along a stretch of shoreline. What could possibly go wrong? Idiots.
Let's see some long-term studies in limited regional experiments before we dump too much money into this boondoggle. We already wasted far too much cutting down and burning rainforests to grow corn which we then turned around and burned... How about using tried and true scientific methods before we rush into something really harmful.
In the meantime, we already have plenty of reasonably safe and clean technologies that have been in use for decades. Every nuclear power mishap that has ever occurred caused a mere fraction of the casualties we've had in just the last decade of conventional power plant and oil refinery mishaps... How about we start using the technology that doesn't actually kill anyone on an annual basis?
The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Hmmm, is that why the population density in the US is so much lower than in most of the rest of the world? Wait, I'm confused.
I'd say that most likely, we're best off pursuing fusion power with all the resources we have at our disposal. In the end, solar power is the same thing, hydrogen fusion. But the difference is, we can (in principle) get much more power out of fusing terrestrial hydrogen ourselves than the total incoming flux from the sun. We won't run out of terrestrial hydrogen for plenty long enough that we'll be able to build something approaching a Dyson sphere in time to keep our available power on a steady rise.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
One important factor there is whether or not energy at the coastline is beneficial, harmful, or neutral to the coastline (and the marine life there). If a reduction in energy has a neutral effect on marine life and reduces erosion, a reduction of energy may actually be a good thing.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Now take the remaining farmland in the US, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Don't convert an acre of forest, park, or city. No mountains, or prairies. Only the existing farmland. You can grow enough food for everyone (via a vegetarian diet).
Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.
Now put 700 nuclear plants in the deserts of Nevada. You have enough power for everyone to live at the energy consumption level of the US.
Go do the research, you'll see this all to be true. We could support every single person on the face of the earth within 40% of the North American continent. No one on any other continent, island, or waterway.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
And note that it is almost always the country that would benefit that restricts the offer of aid. Think Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Turkmenistan, North Korea. Those countries are stricken with poverty because of the G8 or the first world; they are stricken because twisted, maniacal leaders are power-drunk.
Overpopulated? Not by a long shot. Poor distribution? Sure. The solution is to encourage free and expanded trade - and in some cases like Zimbabwe and Myanmar - a few well placed bullets. Economic growth is required to free more people.
And when there's more people with freedom and no longer having to worry about their next meal, or their next drink of water, you'll find a lot more participation in solving other big problems facing the world.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I know and understand that - but something that size for just 1MW seems a waste of engineering/manufacturing to me...
Like the guy in the study said - (which I'd REALLY like to find) - a(some) 40GW nuclear plant(s) is(are) a very hard system to match - although some wind/solar/tidal will help, it still makes sense to use the most efficient system, (and this doesn't sound like it - only 1MW per object) - (though linking to solar power in the sahara is still the best technical solution - the best 'political', however, is, of course, another matter, which is where nuclear comes in).
According to the study - (if I remember) - using all the available space in the UK for wind turbines and some offshore too, along with some tidal etc. STILL didn't produce enough power - I think we need a least a hundred GW, (or 2?), if I remember correctly, and this sort of system, along with wind turbines simply doesn't produce anywhere near enough power for national use...
'Stupidity is an often fatal disease' - R. A. Heinlein
The US ain't shit. It's CHINA.
Don't get me wrong, Americans are using up resources like crazy with seemingly little regard for the future or for anyone else.
However, CHINA is 100x worse. They are ramping up their economy ridiculously fast and they make us look like environmental super heroes.
Do some research.
There is at least *some* movement in the US towards better energy policies, implementation (not just development) of alternative energy technologies, and an economic motivation to do so stronger than ever before.
I have seen China first hand too by the way. 20 cities, and not as a tourist, but for business. I saw the conditions in the factories and the outer lying urban areas. It's frightening to think about just how large China is going to get in 25 years, how much pollution they will create, and if they learn from our mistakes.
So it's easy to bash on the US, which I am not saying you are doing either, but China is going to be of a progressively greater concern. Any environmental tech you see being deployed in China is something being showcased for the rest of the world. Everything is clean, everyone is bright and happy, everything is just *polished* up till it is all nice and shiny. It only represents the smallest fraction of the whole country and if you are a guest of the government, at any level, you will most likely not see the terrible stuff.
For anybody reading this, I am NOT bashing on China either. I found the people wonderful, the food insanely good, and their country rich with culture and beauty. Just telling it like I saw it. That's it.
Not quite
From Wikipedia US electricity consuption per capita (2005 figures) works out to 12.8 MWh/year.
Multiply that by 6.5 billion people gives 83.2 billion MWh/year.
The US's 103 nuclear reactors' highest ever output (2004) was 788.5 million MWh.
Put the numbers together and you find you need around 10,900 nuclear reactors working at the average output for a US nuclear power stations.
Were every one of those stations to be the same design as the world's largest nuclear power station (which actually consists of 7 operating units) you'd still need 1150 of the things to match US power consumption rates.