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World's Largest Solar Plants Planned In California
Pickens writes "Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles, that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. 'If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big,' said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. OptiSolar will employ enough of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project to generate 550 MW. Meanwhile, SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW-worth of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plains Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent from following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. 'These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy,' said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E."
Reader thefickler notes some related news that researchers have developed a method of collecting infrared rays at night to supplement day-time solar power.
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
12.5 square miles of silicon, and it still generates less than a single average sized block of a nuclear power plant (~1000 MW).
In case anyone wants some perspective on that 550 MW figure, the US uses about 430 GW of electricity on average.
That's gonna suck in the first hailstorm they have.
20 percent in watt, 18 months? I'd like to see that!
I'm surprised that photovoltaic is more cost effective than solar thermal. Using fresnel lenses that focus on heat exchangers that double as turbines, it can be cheaper than coal. See here:
http://www.celsias.com/article/utahs-solar-fired-furnace-power-california-less-co/
How about removing the tax credits for ALL forms of energy so we can have an undistorted idea of what the energy costs from each method, hmmmm?
Oh wait, the oil industry won't like this, will they?
When we use taxes to distort the markets for policy, the special moneyed interests ALWAYS get it so it benefits them and makes the intended result moot. Which means screwing over the folks who it was supposed to help in the first place.
We are never going to get one fifth of our energy from renewable in two years in this state. It ain't going to happen. Californians are under this delusion that passing a law can change reality. We're rather stupid that way.
We simply don't have the technology to produce 20% of our current electricity from renewable source within two years. This law will either be ignored or the state will end up suing itself for non-compliance. We might be able to do it if we dammed up some major rivers but we couldn't build the dams and get them filled in time.
We'll eventually get cheap and efficient solar cells we can roof our houses and pave our streets with. But bulldozing twelve and a half square miles to erect mirrors is going to cause a lot of permanent damage to the environment for almost negligible gain. It's stupid in a way only California can be stupid.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
And they're spending more than all the money ever printed to buy Calif* land instead of the nearest non Calif* land.
I still like nuclear.
The plant that's 4 miles from my house sits on less than 1 square mile and produces over 2300 MW, day or night.
The 12.5 square miles of flat desert land may be no problem out west, but finding several hundred acres of flat land here in the Appalachians just isn't happening. Besides, we'd have to cut down all the trees.
I'd think moving the entire plant at 88 mph would be the bigger engineering challenge.
What's the TCO cents/kw? If it's not economical then the money simply goes to someone else to put gas in their Ford 250.
and go stand under a lightning bolt. :)
Wrong. You do not need nuclear power to make nuclear weapons. Nor do you need nuclear weapons to have nuclear power.
That's crazy. Seems the more practical approach is build a solar array in space! This way you always have sunshine 24/7 with no worries of bad weather. More importantly land on earth can be left alone.
The only concern I have about the space solar array is the method of transferring the energy towards earth's receiving stations using microwaves in megawatt power range. This would certainly cook some peeps if they ever misaligned the energy beam. I guess this will dispel the "spontaneous combustion theory."
Nuclear power means nuclear weapons. The two are inseperable. The only way to eliminate nuclear weapons is to destroy nuclear technology and ensure that nobody ever rediscovers it.
Wow. The parent poster may be actually insane. Not just nutty in an eccentric, slashdot, sense, but someone with a full-on schizophrenic break with reality.
Fire has killed a lot of people, too.
that'd be a Sequoia, right? Hence California.
....mine's the one with the little windmill on the lapel.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Fire means fire weapons. The two are inseperable. The only way to eliminate fire weapons is to destroy fire technology and ensure that nobody ever rediscovers it.
I see your point. But we can mitigate the problem:
According to wikipedia, we can build turbines that reach 90% efficiency. That leaves us with 100MW of power to dissipate (not a 1GW "hair-dryer").
First of all, the output of that turbine is going to be barely warmer than the surrounding air. (Think about it: if it weren't, you could use it as the input to another turbine stage.)
Sure, there will be a lot of this output, but it won't be particularly hot. Also, I imagine you'd use a condensing turbine, so you get most of your original cooling fluid back. What's left is a large volume of warm, dry air. Lots of industrial processes produce that kind of output today, and we don't see birds dropping out of the sky.
The desert is not full of human life. When we protect the environment, we ought to do it protect human interests, not because the environment has some moral rights. When you train a cat to use a litter box, do you do it because you believe the carpet has moral rights and needs to be protected? Well, I do it so I don't have to deal with the smell.
The desert simply doesn't have much to offer man except mineral resources and wide-open tracks of land for exactly these kinds of projects.
I see what you mean about nuclear power too. But on the other hand, nuclear power is so plentiful that if, as a condition of constructing them, we have to locate them far from population centers and live with transmission losses, so be it. They're still our best bets.
Japan is the only country that I can think of that has nuclear power, and doesn't have (or want) nuclear arms, but Japan is a special case (US investment, tiny area makes nuclear the only option, China will go for a 'preemptive strike' at the first hint of an arms race).
Point. Can you use seawater, at least, as a coolant? Europe has a long coastline.
Whatever technology they use it'll be out of date before they finish installing 12.5 square miles of the stuff, and replacing it will mean starting from zero.
Compare this with thermal plants (mirrors focused on something to heat it up). The mirrors and focusing system remains the same, you just change the central element.
Thermal plants are far more sensible at the moment. This plan is yet another example of environmentalism gone mad.
No sig today...
Why do so many people seem to assume that local, government-backed monopolies with large territories are the most efficient way to generate and distribute electricity?
It can be efficient to have gas-fired units generate for 15 square blocks or a single factory.
I'd much rather see wind-mills and solar panels scattered all through suburbia, with lots of competition, than big "wind farms" or "solar farms" in just a few places. It'd be better from the anti-terrorism angle, too.
Economist Walter J. Primeaux (U of Texas at Austin, U of Illinois) researched these unnatural monopolies back in the 1970s and 1980s. Other economists looked into the X efficiencies created merely because there was competition, even if it was only on the basis of quality of service. There were dozens and dozens of articles in the journals, the trade publications, and a few popular media reporting on the advantages of competition, though they hardly reached most main-stream media radar screens. Vail and Insull created quite a bit of meme-inertia with their propaganda campaign of a century ago.
And why isn't the government just paying to put solar on everyones roof and doing away with a major part of the grid? Save at both ends. Self-enforced conservation and fewer costly infrastructure requirements. Of course, then the corporate and government swine can't screw the public.
As I understand it, photovoltaic panels are useful on cloudy days, while solar thermal installations only work in full sun.
An ancestor of mine was killed in the works of a water powered grist mill in 1747. Another was killed in a buggy accident in 1911. I can drive in half an hour to the site of a coal mine disaster that killed over 200. If we build wind mills by the tens of thousands it's going to cost lives.
So, what would it cost to replace California's carbon point sources with 'renewable' (I know it costs energy to make these things) energy? I'll share my math, others can expand:
It says here that California in 2007 used 230,931 of 'non-renewable' energy. It says here that California's peak demand was 52,863 MW when total usage was 265,000 GWH (2002). Adjusting to the current levels, a 14% increase, we get a current peak of 60,264 MW.
So, if these solar plants can produce a combined 800MW, you'd need 75 of these projects to handle peak energy generation. If we factor in 10% for transmission losses, and another 14% increase over the next six years (while they get built) then you're looking at 94 of these projects, which is really two projects, so 188 plants, or by 2020, 214 plants, using 1,338 square miles of desert. That's only 5% of the Mojave Desert, ignoring mountains, ignoring environmentalist lawsuits preventing destruction of desert habitat, not thinking about what happens when Joshua trees want to grow up under solar panels (Monsanto Roundup?).
So, that's 18 plants a year to build. It's probably possible, though what that would cost in rare earth elements, and what would the construction of such project do to the market prices of those rare elements? I don't know, except to think it would be bad.
OK, so how about replacing natural gas, outside of electricity generation? Using the information from here it says that half of the natural gas is consumed for electricity generation, so we can double that part of the number for the total energy budget of electricity and natural gas. That increases the GWH total to 298,962 GWH, or a 29% increase. So, we're up to 276 solar projects.
So, how about converting all the motor vehicles to plug-ins? It says here that CA uses about 24 Billion gallons of transportation fuels a year. This calculator puts that at 3,032,000,000 GW, or if divided by the number of hours in the year, gives 345,881 GWH (TODO: check units?). So, add to our current total and multiply by 2.16 and get 596 solar projects, at 3725 square miles, or about 15% of the Mojave Desert, and 50 of these solar projects a year to get CA largely carbon-neutral by 2020.
Now, this is a bit of a simplification. This is meeting peak demand with current generation. There might be some opportunity for storage, though demand somewhat parallels light availability. What is the quoted efficiency, average (during what time period) or max? This doesn't count wind power as I don't know the rules of thumb for standby generation (I heard recently 90% standby needed to be in production for wind to account for variability and startup time). I'm assuming no new hydro will be built (probably safe). I'm assuming solar won't get more efficient (it will). I'm assuming the installed solar won't lose efficiency over time (it will). I don't know what the proper rule of thumb is for calculating demand based on time-of-day usage. etc. So, it's much complicated, but I wanted to understand what scope people were talking about when they advocate an all-solar solution.
I'm also counting nuclear as 'non-renewable' in this calculation as folks who want all-solar usually are anti-nuclear. If you factor in the existing nuclear generation it gets a bit better. If you wanted to power CA on all-nuclear instead you'd need about 300 reactors covering 22 square miles of land, if they're like the 1.6GW one they proposed in Fresno. Or you could use newer, safer technologies instead and clean up our existing nuclear waste by feeding stuff currently bound for Yucca Mountain into these reactors and
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Canada uses CANDU nuclear reactors, which do not promote nuclear weapons since they use regular unenriched uranium. Canada also has no nuclear weapons. The idea that nuclear power is tied to nuclear weapons is absurd.
In defense of the 'nutter', nuclear power is so expensive it's not really worth investing in, unless you are planning to build some nukes.
One, By the same arguement, Solar and wind power aren't worth investing in, because they're more expensive per kwh than nuclear.
Two, nuclear weapons aren't made from reactor waste much anymore - we have more efficient methods.
The waste from the nuclear plants in Canada, France, UK, and USA aren't used for creating nuclear weapon materials.
I don't read AC A human right
In defense of the 'nutter', nuclear power is so expensive it's not really worth investing in, unless you are planning to build some nukes.
Nuclear power is the cheapest power source, cheaper than all but the cheapest coal plants, cheaper than hydro and wind, much cheaper than solar.
Swedish power company's power generation costs
IEA survey on electricity generation costs (PDF, page 46 fig 3.10, page 57, fig 4.6 and 4.7)
Nuclear is also the safest in terms of fatalities per MWh generated (yes, even including Chernobyl).
Stats on all significant power generation accidents 1969-1996 (PDF, page 240, fig 7.2.6)
There are lots of other neat stats in the two PDFs, including injury rates (nuclear is about the same as hydro, only coal is safer), wind generation is much cheaper in the U.S. (maybe because the U.S. is only building it when it makes economic sense instead of where ever environmentalists want it?), solar costs almost 10x as much as other power sources
An internet means copyright violations. The two are inseperable. The only way to eliminate copyright violations is to destroy internet technology and ensure that nobody ever rediscovers it. The only way to ensure the end of internet proliferation is to cease development of internet technology in ALL FORMS, and destroy any existing internet technology.
The supposed benefits of internets (which I find highly dubious and false) do not justify the continued existence of copyright violations which can destroy all life in Hollwood.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Where is superman when you need him?
It's the overall thermodynamic efficiency that rules. This is a simple function of max temp and min temp: max possible efficiency = 1 - max/min (absolute temps), a physical limit which is never fully reached.
The value for a good nuclear plant design is 41%. This means that for every gigawatt generated (100-41)/41 = 1.4 gigawatts of heat must be dumped to the environment. And this value isn't much lower that follil power. efficiency Nuclear is the way to do it.
Nature doesn't keep secrets. You can't uninvent anything, ever. You just have to learn to mitigate and live with it.
The basic principles behind a nuclear weapon and nuclear power are the same, but having a nuclear reactor won't get you much closer to a nuclear weapon all by itself. The bombs themselves are dead-easy. Really all you need to do is quickly bring two sub-critical lumps of weapons-grade fissile material together and BOOM.
Getting the fissile material and enriching (essentially, concentrating it down) it is the tricky part that takes government-level resources to accomplish. Fuel for a nuclear power plant and its wastes are useless for making a bomb without the critical enrichment step.
That being said, there are some very real concerns over existing nuclear power plants. No private company will insure them, the high risk and long payback period on the initial investment scares away most investors, and they can't be shut down and spun back up as needed for fluctuating power demands, so they're not suitable for everywhere. Blindly declaring "build more nukes!" isn't going to be very helpful. We need to give careful consideration to if, how and where we build more; and focus on promising new designs that mitigate many of the drawbacks (pebble bed, breeders, thorium, etc.)
Oops, hit Submit too soon. Last sentence should be:
And this value isn't much lower than for fossil power efficiency, also in the low 40s. Nuclear is the safest and lowest cost method for producing large amounts of power. All the big problems are political, not technical.
Racist!
Just because our skin is green, we communicate telepathically, we have 14 eyes, and we all have goatees doesn't mean that we're not human!
I'm sorry I don't have a reference handy, but last month the European Union announced a solar plant project that will take a good chunk of the Sahara desert to power all of Europe, so I guess that would be the biggest plant in the world.
And why not pipe it to heat homes / industrial zones?
Mr. Burns?
What?
Ha. I just use my Mr. Fusion to generate the needed power, and then sit back and play Duke Nukem Forever all day.
Hmm... why is it that
* a country who itself
- owns tons of nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons (all WMDs),
- the biggest military in the world
- and dangerously crazy people in the government,
- and that wants to oppress the whole world(*)
* wants to stop another much smaller country
- with dangerously crazy people in the government
* to build
- nuclear bombs
- and power plants
* to protect itself from that big country's embargos?
Hmmmmmmmmm???
Ewwwwwwww!!!
Exactly.
(*) Oil did not get more expensive. The price for oil *normalized*, after the USA could not force the OPEC to sell out under market price anymore, because the Chinese told the OPEC that if the USA does stop buying, they'll buy it instead.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Shit. Slashdot ate my <Internet-is-for-porn-monster> and <kate-monster> tags.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Canada uses CANDU nuclear reactors, which do not promote nuclear weapons since they use regular unenriched uranium. Canada also has no nuclear weapons. The idea that nuclear power is tied to nuclear weapons is absurd.
This is a little disingenuous. The NRU at Chalk River used to run on high-enriched uranium, and now runs on low-enriched uranium. Source.
Furthermore, the NRU, like the NRX before it, is heavy-water moderated, which is efficient at producing plutonium. Source.
Production of the world's medical isotopes using the NRU is one of the Canadian excuses for being able to produce bombs in a several-month time frame. It's true that Canada has never actually produced a nuclear weapon, but it's also true that some of the programs at Chalk River are "dual use".
I'm curious what the carbon impact of 12.5 square miles of solar panels vs 12.5 square miles of forest.
On the one hand you're not burning oil, on the other you're preventing light from reaching massive amounts of land, so no plant life will exist there.
Granted you can cover the deserts with solar panels, but beyond that would it be worse than burning fossil fuels?
How about:
Gee, this might be good news. I've seen people respond cynically to some of these posts about solar and alternative energy because they assume nothing will really be done about it. Well, here's proof of practical application.
Glad my state is setting an example.
According to your link, the new Advanced CANDU Reactor does used enriched fuel.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
"Wow. The parent poster may be actually insane. Not just nutty in an eccentric, slashdot, sense, but someone with a full-on schizophrenic break with reality."
Never attribute to schizophrenia what may be adequately explained by the (common) combination of ignorance, stupidity, and passionate emotion driven by the above.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
There's a lot of solar power generation going into Mojave. This project is only one of the ones going in or already running. Right now, there's about half a gigawatt of installed solar capacity at Mojave. Several companies are putting in new plants. Some use solar panels, some use concentrator cells, and some use mirrors to heat oil to make steam.
About 10 GW is needed to cover peak Southern California air conditioning load. That's what to go for, and at peak-hour bulk power prices, it makes money. Solar power and air conditioning load peak at the same time, which works out nicely. (Wind is cheaper but somewhat random. Even averaged over a wide area, you get maybe 80-90% uptime at best, so you need other sources which are "dispatchable", that is, will deliver power when asked. About 15% of capacity can be met from wind wind without a need for extra dispatchable capacity.)
10GW in 10 years is well within reach, and will probably happen from commercial activity. 10GW in 2 years is unlikely, but 10GW in 5 years is probable.
This won't help with base load. California's base load is about 19GW; that's the low level at night. That should be on nuclear power. California has about 4GW of nuclear power now, (two plants, 4 reactors) and that needs to be increased by about a factor of 4 to 5.
Siting nuclear power plants may be a solveable problem. It used to be hard to find sites for prisons, but small towns with declining industry started competing for them, and now Northern California has many prisons, all in rather remote areas. A similar competitive approach might be used to site nuclear plants. All new plants should be in green earthquake zones, toward the eastern edge of the state.
If both of those things get done, most of the rest of California's power will come from existing hydropower sources, with peaking from natural gas. Al Gore's
It is not civil nuclear power per se which is being opposed for Iran, but the centrifuge technology they have been developing. It is dual-use technology which can work either to make low-enriched uranium for power or high-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. The IAEA has wanted to inspect the centrifuges to see if they have traces of high-enriched uranium, but Iran persistently refuses inspections which does not make others trust their intentions more for sure. Iran also has the required missile technology to deliver nuclear warheads, and continues to do saber rattling towards Israel and the USA.
How will you dump the waste heat in the desert? ANY thermal plant works by, in effect, charging a toll on heat flowing from a source (focal point of a mirror, a fire, a nuclear reaction, etc) to a sink (cooling tower, large body of water, dry air cooling structure, etc.). If a nuclear plant has so much trouble dumping the heat in an arid region, why won't a solar thermal plant have the same trouble? (Or even more if the source temperature is less that the 500C or so for a reactor.)
Perhaps the only country you can think of. But, countries with commercial nuclear power but no nuclear weapons program are:
Japan (your caveat noted)
South Korea (including domestic designs)
Canada (including domestic designs)
Spain
Belgium
Germany
Taiwan (similar to your caveat on Japan, though)
Ukraine (built in Soviet days, though)
Czech Republic
Switzerland
Bulgaria
Finland
Slovakia
Brazil
South Africa (they had nuclear weapons at one time, though)
Hungary
Romania
Mexico
Lithuania (again, built in Soviet days)
Argentina
Slovenia
Netherlands
and Armenia
because the Iranian Government panders to the 13yr old mind set and 13 year olds are the scariest most belligerent people on the planet
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
CANDU-style technology can be used to make nuclear weapons. India's nuclear weapons come from similar heavy-water, natural uranium plants. Actually, so does most of the US arsenal. The Savannah River Site reactors were of that configuration, with on-power loading (like a CANDU) for producing weapons-grade Plutonium-239. We also got plutonium from the graphite-moderated reactors at Hanford. They also ran on unenriched uranium.
Enriching uranium is *not*, necessarily, a step in building a nuclear weapon. Certainly not a requirement. Plutonium from natural uranium has always been much more common.
Sadly, that *is* how a lot of people think. Not only that, but they did a survey years back and found that a huge chunk of people thought Three Mile Island was a near-Chernobyl level disaster with deaths and lots of released radiation, rather than an fine example that even those old safety systems actually worked.
The bulk of the human race is living in a fantasy world where about 5/6 of what they believe is utter bullshit. And it seems pretty constant across the globe. Different areas just have local varieties of bullshit.
I agree with your first point, salt water is bloody annoying to work with. That and performing maintenance on a nuclear reactor to replace corroded elements would probably involve shutting the reactor down.
However, they should both cool equally well. When cooling hot objects with a cold fluid, the important characteristic of the fluid is heat capacity (how much heat the liquid has to absorb before raising in temperature), not freezing point. The addition of salts to water lowers the freezing temperature of the solution and thus takes longer to freeze. Adding small concentrations of salt shouldn't have a big impact on the heat capacity of your coolant.
So these plants will generate 800 MWe peak using 12.5 square miles.
For reference, Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles, so they will be a bit larger than half of Manhattan.
"Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California
Oh wait ...
Well, so long as it near Paso Robles or Carissa Plains, I won't worry overmuch.
Those figures don't include waste storage or decommissioning, which can run up quite a high bill. And of course the generating price depends in uranium ore cost, which could rise quite a lot if everyone turns to nuclear.
Also important to remember: in most nuclear power generating countries new plants where never outlawed. If any company wanted to build one they could. The fact that they haven't says something about the cost/benefit analysis (yes there's also the NIMBY problem but still).
It should be noted though that at least half those countries could probably produce nuclear weapons within months, should they decide to do so.
Who cares if it is out of date? It will still generate the promised amount of KW hours, for the next few decades.
"13 year olds are the scariest most belligerent people on the planet"
After the United States government.
I hate printers.
Ok, if you say so. However, just a few catches.
How large lumps?
What shapes should they be?
How pure do they need to be?
How quickly do you need to bring them together?
How long will they have to stay together?
How powerful will the explosion be?
How powerful explosives do you need to bring them together quick enough?
Will you need a neutron source to ensure the chain reaction begins at the right moment?
If so, how will you build it? Will you use Polonium-Beryllium or D-T fusion?
How do you ensure the neutron source triggers at the right time?
When should the chain reaction start to ensure a powerful yield?
How many neutrons does your neutron source produce?
Does it produce the same number of neutrons every time?
Is the fissile material you use pure enough for a gun triggered design (hint, plutonium will not be)?
If not, how do you build an implosion type weapon?
What explosives can you use for the explosive lenses?
What shape should the lenses have?
What is the detonational velocity of the explosives you use?
Otherwise I agree with you. Once you have worked out those tiny details there, and a couple of others like them, you just need to bring two pieces together. Of course, this all assumes you have the fissile material to begin with. Weapons grade Uranium is not exactly easy to manufacture, and getting Plutonium-239 pure enough from Pu-240 that you can use a simple "bring the pieces together" design is extremely challenging.
While most concerns may not be logical, historically there's been a lot of misinformation and outright deception produced by the pro-nuclear crowd. Look at the cover-ups that invariably accompany nuclear accidents. Look at the reaction of business interests after the 3 mile island accident ("nothing to see here, move along").
Same with Yucca mountain. Apparently there was misinformation broadcast about the actual safety of that site. So, you can denegrate the anti-nuclear crowd as a bunch of tree-hugging Luddites, but I respect their fears (note: I like the idea of nuclear power but I want to see a change in the arrogant, dismissive way nuclear power is advocated).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The problem isn't that oil companies are getting tax breaks
I'll be the last person in line demanding any kind of windfall profits tax, but oil companies get a 'depletion allowance'. That is, they can sell their oil, then write off that oil as no longer being an asset, much like you'd depreciate a fixed asset.
One or the other, not both. And oil in the ground won't 'go bad' in our lifetimes.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The first link I gave included estimated nuclear waste disposal costs. Of course they have it easy since they can just ship most of it to France where it's reprocessed into more fuel. Here in the U.S. we're trying to bury "waste" that still contains 90% of its original energy consequently making it unnecessarily "hot" for an unnecessarily long period of time at unnecessary expense. If we reprocess, we should have enough uranium for thousands of years. Plenty of time to develop cost-effective renewables, if not fusion.
The U.S. is almost alone in not expanding nuclear power (Germany banned it, and consequently buys a lot lot of electricity from France which is 80% nuclear). The U.S. hasn't been building nuclear plants because they take longer to get approved and construct (due to excessive regulatory requirements and lawsuits). So coal plants end up being less risky and requiring less capital investment, so that's what the power companies here build.
"13 year olds are the scariest most belligerent people on the planet"
After the United States government.
Sure, you're trying to be funny and America-bash at the same time, but really. If the U.S. government were truly composed of the scariest, most belligerent people on the planet, why, we'd all be very fortunate. As it happens, there are far scarier, more belligerent, and rapidly-becoming-nuclear-capable governments on the planet. Get a grip. We may be your enemy, but we're not your only one.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Deserts seem to have no problems radiating their daytime heat into the night sky - so well that they can get below freezing. Either fin fans or a ground loop could be used as the heat sink.
It's called the spotlight fallacy, and by trying to attach it to environmentalism, you're making use of the fallacy yourself. Hypocrite.
RE the article on how to collect infrared rays at night - way to violate the third law of thermodynamics! They seem to be proposing to absorb infrared rays and rectify the electromagnetic rays somehow. The only way this would be possible - even theoretically - is if the absorber were kept at a lower temperature than the incoming rays, yet I see no mention of this and I get the impression that someone is blissfully unaware of certain well known truths in physics (e.g. the third law, which states that entropy must increase). To spell it out, without a heat sink the proposed idea would provide a way to convert heat (not a heat difference) into usable energy, which violates the third law.
The
Also important to remember: in most nuclear power generating countries new plants where never outlawed. If any company wanted to build one they could. The fact that they haven't says something about the cost/benefit analysis.
Wikipedia begs to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#New_plants_under_construction
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
You just look up that sort of information on wikipedia... ...easy!
The enrichment technology is the only real bottleneck these days, in particular the tricky bits of technology needed to build centrifuges that can enrich to weapons quality.
The actual bomb designs are extremely widely published these days, at least for simple fission bombs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Nice troll. It's always in the run-up to an election that the right-wing shills come out in-force.
How many 3rd world countries do you know that have a larger economy than all but 8 (out of 190) countries (ironically, including the USA) around the world?
There isn't ONE state, country, city, municipality, etc., that hasn't, at one time or another, done something a bit unfair and/or short-sighted. Just try and name one.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Japan is the only country that I can think of that has nuclear power, and doesn't have (or want) nuclear arms
This is also true for most of Europe (like here in Germany for example). There actually are nuclear weapons here, but they're under the NATO Nuclear Weapons Sharing programme, and are realistically entirely controlled by the United States, so more or less they're "US Nuclear Weapons" that happen to be in Germany rather than "German nuclear weapons".
(note that "most of Europe" does not include France of course - they love their nuclear weapons over there...)
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Come to Australia, mate. I have a hibiscus that wants that title. Last time I gave it an audit it was in the process of taking over a sheep station in the far north of Queensland.
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Naaa, Sweden's policy is even worse than the US one. Not only are we on a once through cycle, we also have a law prohibiting construction of newer more modern plants, meaning the lifetime of the old ones had to be extended.
The disposal has been handled a bit better here however. The authorities were smart enough to choose a repository site right next to one of the existing nuclear sites. The people who live there are largely positive to the plant and plans for a repository, possibly because they benefit from it in terms of energy and jobs, but also because they are used to the idea of having nuclear infrastructure nearby. Compare this to the US approach where the dump was located in a state that benefits very little from the industry that generates the waste. Public relations disaster... Also, in Sweden we have an interim storage facility that is already operating, so we're not in a rush to deploy a final repository in order to be able to accept waste from the utilities. As a consequence our regoluatory institutes have had plenty of time to asses and research the possible sites and technologies that could be used.
By reprocessing it we can reduce it to zero. We can remove and recycle all of the transuranic elements from spent nuclear fuel. All you have left is uranium (which occurs naturally, so could hardly be considered nuclear waste) and fission products, which will decay over a few hundred years into non-radioactive substances.
If we use the breeder cycle, we can eliminate all waste except the fission products, and we'll get more total energy too.
But reprocessing fuel eliminates on of the main benefits of Nuclear - cost. Reprocessing as it is done today is expensive. A pound of reprocessed fuel is more expensive to produce than a pound or mined and enriched uranium. If we were to switch to molten salt reactors, reprocessing would be much less expensive because it would eliminate the need for handling fuel elements (molten salt reactors have a liquid core).
I measure "belligerent" using the metric "number of times it has started wars in foreign countries".
Not "proficiency at convincing public that its aggression is actually self-defense".
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no, but it may be better to spend that money into getting the other half of the world access to clean water, food and education. Of course we'd never get away with stealing their natural resources any more...
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If we collect the infrared rays then won't all those cute animations have to be rewritten to show a different method of heating? What will be reflected back by the CO2?
Actually, the cost figures for nuclear power are generally fudged heavily, by omitting the cost of decommissioning and waste storage post-decommissioning. I'm not sure nuclear power would even be commercially viable if it wasn't for governments subsidising them by dealing with decommissioning themselves.
Your #2 example does not compute. Saltwater doesn't freeze that easily because the freezing point of saltwater is so much lower than the freezing point of freshwater. As my 10 year old daughter pointed out to me this weekend, that is why they put salt on the roads in the winter time. This does not correlate to the cooling efficiency of saltwater, though there could be other explanations why saltwater is less efficient (I do not know if it is or not).
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I come from a 30 career of electronic manufacturing infrastructure stuff. It scares me to think of the environmental cost of manufacturing a 12 square mile silicon chip. And yes, I'm thinking about the cost of most of the stuff involved in doing it... the chemical required, the electrical power (enormous, but I don't have a kJ number) building the plant to do it, the people to do it, the whole enchilada). Do you know that most of the power requirement was from COAL? Jeeeeezeeee
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Nuclear weapons are the greatest force of world peace in the world.
Universal proliferation of such dread weapons of destruction is the best way to make sure there's no war.
And look! The only countries anyone is at war with are tiny ones without nuclear weapons!
It's been a long time.
Maybe if you try to obtain some kind of military-grade detonation, but I think that to Al-Quaeda et al, obtaining even the worst fizzle ever somewhere down in Manhattan would be amply satisfactory. And to get that you definitely don't need a D-T fusion neutron source, lense-shaped explosives or even probably much calculation or testing at all.
So the main problem for the bad guys is to get their hands on enough reasonably concentrated material. A full-blown, worldwide fuel reprocessing industry, with many trucks and boats crossing land and sea full of such material, would make it very easy for them to steal that, and I think that was one of the reason for which politics decided against fuel reprocessing at the time.
So much obfuscation ...
So I'll bite.
> How large lumps?
Large enough for the combined mass to no longer be sub-critical. For U-235 it's about 50 kg. This doesn't need to be exact; just make two 30kg pieces and you're there.
> How pure do they need to be?
OP had this: weapons grade; read more carefully. better 85% U-235
> How quickly do you need to bring them together?
Probably around 300 m/s
> How long will they have to stay together?
> How powerful will the explosion be?
Nearly the same question. Doesn't really matter; it'll go boom with any reasonable design. Maybe not a big boom, but ... maybe.
Most of these questions are silly, pre-supposing an implosion type device. Although I'd probably want a Po-Be trigger for a gun-type too.
> What shapes should they be?
> Will you need a neutron source to ensure the chain reaction begins at the right moment?
> If so, how will you build it? Will you use Polonium-Beryllium or D-T fusion?
> How do you ensure the neutron source triggers at the right time?
> How many neutrons does your neutron source produce?
> Does it produce the same number of neutrons every time?
> Is the fissile material you use pure enough for a gun triggered design (hint, plutonium will not be)?
> If not, how do you build an implosion type weapon?
> What explosives can you use for the explosive lenses?
> What shape should the lenses have?
> What is the detonational velocity of the explosives you use?
The problem with your efforts to obfuscate the issue is this: It really isn't that hard to make something which goes boom --- IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH FISSILE MATERIAL. To your credit, you acknowledge this. But it cannot be overemphasized.
But please don't try to pretend that anyone who can purify enough U-235 can't overcome the other, relatively simple technical challenges inherent in a gun-type design.
Even those who simply buy the fissile material would have a good chance of making something scary. Maybe not devastating, but scary.
Remember folks, even though we torture, and we use brutal military force slaughtering thousands to keep Iraqis in check, it's a GOOD thing we invaded Iraq, becuase Saddam Hussein tortured, and used brutal military force slaughtering thousands to keep Iraqis in check.
I mean, Saddam Hussein had a puppet republic set up to hide the fact that he was really ruling the country. That's terrible. Obviously he should have set up a puppet republic to hide the fact that he was really ruling the country, like we do.
It's been a long time.
Wake me when it actually goes online.
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nuclear power plants take 8-10 years to plan/design/build. There's a major bottle kneck in manufacturing the castings for the core - only one company in the world can build them (a japanese company, can't remember the name), which will be a major issue if we all start to build new reactors. We will not be able to build reactors nearly quick enough to keep up with demand, let alone if we all decide to go down the nuclear route to replace all our power.
by omitting the cost of decommissioning and waste storage post-decommissioning
Not true in the USA. When a plant comes online a part of the 'cost' of the electricity goes into an escrow fund for eventual decommisioning. US nuclear plants at this point have plenty of money for their eventual decommisioning, especially as they've extended their service life several times.
As for the waste, by US LAW, they pay a tax per Kwh to the government in exchange for the USGov disposing of the waste. Problem: The USGov broke it's side of the deal, wasting money left and right over Yucca mountain. The organization has actually gotten sued over it, as the nuclear plants say they could have disposed of the waste for the money the government's been given.
Pretty much every country except the USA has managed to figure out a way to handle their waste - Japan and France reprocess.
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there are reactor designs that allow for the core container (the part you are talkin about) to be composed of two peices put togethr (which is easier done) the company you speak of is the only one with the equipment to cast it as a single peice.
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Whatever technology they use it'll be out of date before they finish installing 12.5 square miles of the stuff
Meaning what? Not the latest and greatest? I'm not aware of a rush to decommission other types of power plants just because they aren't the latest and greatest.
and replacing it will mean starting from zero.
Why? I can't think of any power generation technology that is more modular than PV solar. Why couldn't you swap out or add newer panels?
Thermal plants are far more sensible at the moment.
I don't know the specifics of the renewable energy mandate PG&E is working under, but I would expect that any solar qualifies. And it seems they (PG&E) would choose the best type of plant for their needs. I'm not saying you're wrong about PV vs. thermal solar, but with the number of dollars at stake, I'm pretty sure someone has done a comparative analysis of many different options (including ignoring the mandate and facing any fines and penalties that would result).
yes there's also the NIMBY problem but still
Brushing off the NIMBY problem is absurd. It is the greatest cost and problem. France provides most of its electricity with nuclear and it isn't going bankrupt... at least not because of nuclear power. The US stopped building nuclear plants because of the irrational fear caused by 3 mile island and the return of cheap oil.
If cheap oil is gone, then we either suffer the consequences of not having enough heat and electricity or we go nuclear. There is no other viable option.
And if we turned to nuclear power then nuclear fuel would be too valuable to keep sitting in warheads.
California essentially has a direct democracy. That means the majority of the people making any given decision aren't experts on the subject. The results are conveniently public, which means we can all point and laugh.
California is special though. They do something like that approximately once a week.
Also, you should check your math. Since California only accounts for just over 10% of the US economy, it's not just unlikely... It's mathematically impossible for California's economy to be larger than the US economy.
Only one company can build the cores? Well, that means that I, enterprising industrialist, can build a new plant and make a killing. This is the kind of situation capitalism is perfect for.
No, it isn't. Remember Deregulation? Enron? That was good old California doing the Republican thing, and letting power companies set their own prices. Doing the opposite now can only be a good thing.
CA has a more balanced electorate than most states, with about 45% voting Republican, often electing Republican governors (like the current Governator), and in the not-too distant past, being won by Republican presidential candidates. There are numerous Republican House Reps from CA, including good old "Duke" Cunningham (Mr. Kickbacks himself) and Jerry Lewis (Ranked #1 in Federal Government Pork).
The idea that CA is some bastion of socialism couldn't be further from the truth. With a couple more years of Mexicans streaming over the border, and it'll go even more to the right.
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13% actually, which is FAR larger than any other of the 50 states, even the geographically larger ones like TX. The CA population is #1, but not much larger than several other states.
And if CA starts to slip, the rest of the US, and in fact the world, is in very deep trouble. Most of the world's airplanes are developed, designed, built, tested, etc., in CA. The vast majority of the jet engine industry is located in CA. All the major technology companies are centrally located in CA: Intel, AMD, Google, Sun, IBM, etc. Hollywood is still turning out TV shows and movies that are shown around the world. Pretty much everything that the US has, that other countries want to buy (keeping the trade deficit from ballooning) is being developed in CA. Forget a couple measly little banks... If CA starts having economic problems, the US is in worse trouble than it has ever seen.
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
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That may be true as far as engineering tolerances go, but as far as design knowledge goes, I thought the design of the 1945 "Fat Man" bomb was pretty widely disseminated by now, so you could just use that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"Japan is the only country that I can think of that has nuclear power, and doesn't have (or want) nuclear arms"
Finland, Sweden, Germany, South Korea, Spain, Belgium, Taiwan, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Slovakia... Finland is building a new nuclear power-plant as we speak, and last time I checked, Finland has no nukes, nor do they have any desire to have them.
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I think you misread my comment as having partisan bias.
Neither party has cornered the market on stupidity. If you look at other comments in my thread, you'll see that I've picked on them for having such a direct democracy... Not for being a bastion of socialism.
In California, you live/do business at the whim of the voters. There is no other state that operates that way. We have a representative republic for good reason.
Will you see some "serious shit"?
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
You're right. Oops.
em, i think theres only one company that builds the cores, cause theres only one company that CAN build them. they're incredibly difficult to build, and this company has probably over 50 years experience in building big castings. So, by all means, if you could build them, had the expertise, then go on ahead.