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Company Wants To Put Power Plants In the Sky
Zothecula writes "Harvesting power from the wind and the sun is nothing new. We've seen flying wind turbines and solar power plants that aim to provide clean renewable energy. UK-based New Wave Energy has a bolder idea in the works. The company plans to build the first high altitude aerial power plant, using networks of unmanned drones that can harvest energy from multiple sources and transmit it wirelessly to receiving stations on the ground."
Some of my French friend might not mind the idea of sharp 20m x 20m solar panels occasionally plummeting on the Brits.
Where can you find a good EMP device these days?
If I see another story about some schlub who "plans on" making clean, cheap power; or one that "reveals" a breakthrough that "could" revolutionize power generation, I'm going to lose it. We can harness the power of the atom to provide almost limitless clean energy, but no one cares because Japan gets flooded sometimes. *yawn*
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Calling Michael Moorcock.
Is Oswald Bastable available?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Typical pie in the sky thinking of the europeans. Don't they know we need to dig for energy.
"We've seen flying wind turbines
We've seen artists impressions of flying wind turbines in PopSci and PopMec , nobody has actually built one that works yet...
"networks of unmanned drones that can harvest energy from multiple sources"
Won't they be using most of the energy they harvest just to stay airborne?
" transmit it wirelessly to receiving stations on the ground."
What could possibly go wrong?
Gee, that sounds efficient. Not.
No sig today...
What about internet access? Low latency, unlike satellites.
Now add a camera and you get a pretty good domestic surveillance coverage.
Tomorrow is another day...
Oh for a mod point.
No sig today...
"Space-based solar power (SBSP) is the concept of collecting solar power in space (using an "SPS", that is, a "solar power satellite" or a "satellite power system") for use on Earth. It has been in research since the early 1970s."
(Emphasis mine)
Forgive me, but isn't the ability to transfer energy wirelessly something we don't yet have- apart from those 'wireless' boxes that use induction to charge batteries, which isn't really wireless at all?
Why don't we use this technology in our homes, or would the EM fry us and all our electronics? Perhaps shielded devices maybe...
Ok, I get the photovoltaic part, but how can it gain energy from the wind without a tether?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But what if the power plant is run by incompetent Ukrainian communists, didn't think of that did you!
...The Sun.
But what if the power plant is run by incompetent Ukrainian communists, didn't think of that did you!
That problem has a known solution.
No sig today...
My thoughts exactly.
The plant in Japan was an obsolete design, hit by a tsunami rather larger than any planned for, and experiencing by sheer bad luck multiple redundent system failures.
And it *still* couldn't do worse than leak a tiny bit of radiation. Fatalities: Zero. It's not even leaving a not 'no entry' zone. At worst, no fishing in the area for a while. It's a non-disaster.
But... nuclear, scary!
There's really no point in flying solar cells, they don't work any better than down on Earth, and they shade what's under just the same. It's quite pointless, if you ask me. If you're going to fly something, use the flying aspect of it to generate power. What a let-down.
IMHO the way of using flying-anything for power has been demonstrated by Makani Power. I somehow trust Makani's engineering a tad better. They've been a bit more open about their engineering process, and they have some pretty damn good talent. Oh, and their areal power density (per are of flying "stuff") is at least order of magnitude better than an ideal 100% efficient solar cell would be. So, meh. Big meh.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If you want to harvest more energy than what was involved in the construction and maintenance of the energy-harvesting-drone, then you need to send a significant proportion of that energy toward the ground. And it then hit the same problem we have had with such idea for a long time : there isn't significantly more solar energy in altitude than on the ground, you would have to go in orbit. But even if you collect it using wind, giving it back to the ground station can then be hazardeous due to the quantity involved (multiple kW , maybe more) so either you spread it over a surface to make it harmless to the living stuff on the ground, or you have far away. Spreading it on a large antena makes an even greater investment and means being far away from where it is mostly used (near city). Making it tight and dangerous invovle targeting issues and liabilities, and being far away from city again.
That idea seems practicable only for small amount of power, far away from any city.
I'm pronuclear but I think it's pretty well demonstarted that TEPCO can be called anything but truthful.
Whilst I understand your desire to downplay events we do need to accept that nuclear does have one very real and dangerous flaw: People.
Yes the tech, especially today's designs, are safe.
But, as long as you have penny pinching arsehats running the show, things are going to go wrong.
The solution to this also involves harness the power of the atom.
You know, if motors and stuff existed back then, the early explorers could have gotten here so much more quickly by putting giant fans on the decks of their ships to blow into the sheets. They could have harvested the energy from the water moving beneath the ship.
Now, here are my millions of dollars in loan guarantees so I can turn my green idea into reality???
world finally catching up to Nikolai Tesla.
I think the government will be all over this. Don't mind the drones in the sky, they are just generating power. Really would we lie.
Okay, flying drones are possible. Flying drones with power generation methods such as solar cells on board are possible. Flying drones that can fly for weeks or months through the high atmosphere are perhaps possible with some technology development. Flying drones that can fly for months through the high atmosphere and generate a significant quantity of excess power might be possible some day with significant technology development in solar cell or wind turbine efficiency. But...but...but...transmitting that power 'wirelessly' to a ground station with any sort of reasonable efficiency is definitely NOT possible with any technology currently known, such as microwaves or lasers. To do that would take some sort of breakthrough insight into a completely new technology such as, for example, quantum energy exchange between coupled atomic reservoirs, localized gravity field modulation, or, more ambitiously, time progression distortion in a localized electrical transmission field. But...the article says they will have a working prototype in one year after receiving the modest quantity of startup funding. This entire project sounds like a scam to bilk investors akin to running cars on water as a fuel or, perhaps, a CIA cover story for some sort of screwy long-term drone surveillance scheme, to name just two possibilities. In any event, the story as presented is complete and utter bullshit.
Once again, someone forgot to run the numbers. It's not practical, and certainly not news. How does this trash make into /. ?
Instead of a dam, and all the expense. Why not have an underwater windmill? In fact, you could mount it on a platform that could be raised and lowered for servicing the unit. The cables that keep it from washing away also protect/carry the conductors for the electricity.
If the unit is deep enough, barge traffic could go right over the top.
To cloud based high energy network.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"hit by a tsunami rather larger than any planned for"
That's the problem. Not larger than any expected in that area, because earthquakes and tsunami of that scale are a part of the history of the region (e.g., the 869AD earthquake and tsunami), but larger than they decided to build a tsunami wall for. It didn't have to be that way, because another nuclear plant in the same region (Onagawa) survived just fine thanks to building a wall that was big enough. At Fukushima it was a sloppy decision for the sake of saving money. It wasn't bad luck, it was stupid, cheap design, like also putting the backup generators below normal sea level instead of up high. In a known tsunami-prone area, that was foolish. Fukushima was a disaster waiting to happen thanks to decisions made decades before. Even as the risk because of tsunami became more established in recent decades because of more research on historical tsunami, they still didn't update adequately. This was not "bad luck". It was incompetence.
Sure, no deaths, but huge areas of well-justified evacuation. Contrary to your claim, there will be wide areas on land that are unsafe for agriculture or residence for decades (particularly because of the effects of cesium isotopes). Even if people return, their lives will be changed for a long time. Thousands of people are currently refugees in their own country. I agree that the magnitude of the event has been somewhat exaggerated, and you could argue that some of the continued effects on people is because of overblown paranoia about radiation, but you're going too far the other way. I wouldn't want to live in the main contaminated areas either.
I'm pretty supportive of nuclear power generally, and I think the idea of flying solar power generation ranks pretty close to perpetual motion machines for practicality, but you won't get people to accept nuclear power or do it safely by downplaying the effects at Fukushima, and what a $@!#$!-up it was. The people in the midst of the disaster that kept it from being much worse are heroes, but the people who made the longer-term decision to cheap out on protections aught to be publicly flogged. The whole thing could have been a genuine non-event if it was properly managed. Onagawa nuclear power station proves that conclusively.
This is much better.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
day care centers in the containment.
jr
you call these things drones.
I think they're trying to sell to the wrong audience.
Sell them to the NRO as spying platforms.
Sell them to Google as mapping bots.
Sell them to Verizon as wireless stations.
Then all that free, solar nrg can be sweet, sweet profit!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I say we harness the power of the atom from a circular trajectory. It's the only way to be positive.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
The plant in Japan was an obsolete design, hit by a tsunami rather larger than any planned for, and experiencing by sheer bad luck multiple redundent system failures.
So what you are saying is that you can solve the obsolete design part (is that even a problem? something newer isn't automatically better) but the problems of rare unplanned-for events and bad luck are still there.
You also forgot the issue of the operators being cheap and screwing up when things got bad.
Fatalities: Zero. It's not even leaving a not 'no entry' zone.
People died during the evacuation, and now at least 20 odd children have cancer that was likely caused by leaks from the plant with many more to come in the next few years.
But hay, who gives a fuck about the human suffering, it's costing hundreds of billions of dollars to clean the damn thing up and compensate everybody!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That copywriter over at dvice is a hoot!:
Harvesting gas from Uranus could power an interstellar spaceship
Telescope sees past clouds of gas and into depths of Uranus
Uranus takes a pounding more frequently than thought
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
we all know how dangerous the microwave power stations were in Sim City.
Does anyone vet these before posting? The "proof of concept" is a toy helicopter with a toy photovoltaic cell sending power down a wire to light five toy houses. It's toys all the way down.
It's a high school science project -- a bad one at that. It's an April Fools' joke. It's $39.95 at Toys r Us. It's $9.95 on Woot! It's a cover from the December 1964 Popular Science. It's a scene from a 1955 science fiction movie. From Afghanistan. It's News for nerds, Stuff that matters.
Neither the fine article, nor the linked web page for the company mentions what happens at night. Do the drones land? Do they stay in the air using batteries? Does anybody know?
The Fukushima problem is not contained yet, and it appears people were covering up the damage, so it might be wise to wait a while, until all the data is in, before saying it is a non-disaster. Things could still go really badly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I have an idea for a tethered version that can derive large amounts of power from the electrostatic discharge between the electrically charged regions. :P
patent followed by investment money pls.
I think it would be much more efficient to harness the power of the atom to create superheroes who can build flying solar tesla broadcast power for us.
The plant in Japan was an obsolete design, hit by a tsunami rather larger than any planned for, and experiencing by sheer bad luck multiple redundent system failures.
The plant in Japan... was real, not theoretical. That's how things work in the real world: old plants built with poor designs have bad luck. That's reality, and that's why nuclear is dead: all apologies and no acknowledgment of the UNLIMITED risks.
If you're going to beam power down... the environmental impact statement for solar power satellites was done in the early eighties.
And no, idiots, it is not a MEGAWATT BEAM TO WIPE OUT CITIES - IIRC, they were talking about something about 10? 100? watts/m^2, and a large array of receivers in desert areas.
mark
Wouldn't it be more efficient if the drones were in space, away from our atmosphere? And if one can harness power in such a way that it can be wirelessly transmitted, wouldn't that also be "in the wrong hands" a weapon of some rather next level form of mass destruction?
So, I presume that these drones are powered by the power they collect and that they stay aloft at night...
There is no way this works in a financially viable way. Getting any kind of aircraft in the air and keeping it there is a power intensive operation. We only recently demonstrated a solar powered aircraft capable of staying aloft overnight. Even so, it wasn't a power generation platform because it returned with less of a charge in the battery than it left with. So I think they are being a bit optimistic about being able to stay aloft, much less collect enough energy to send some of it home. But let's assume they manage to be power positive.
Now they have to somehow transfer this fraction of the power they collect down some wireless link. This will be extremely inefficient and very hard to do on an industrial scale. Assuming the airborne equipment doesn't wreak the efficiency of the drone, I just don't see how this will be possible.
In the end, this really just looks like a ploy to get government money for R&D work where the execs and owners can skim off funds and not have to worry about making any actual progress. In fact, the less progress the better, because all they will likely prove is stupid this idea actually is. It's just a fly by night operation.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's still way cheaper than the alternative (i.e., coal) -- in terms of human suffering and dollars.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yes the tech, especially today's designs, are safe.
They're still designed on the same principles as the bomb-making reactors of the 1950s. There's still a danger in a really really bad screw-up and they produce an awful lot of very nasty waste product (this is by design - they were meant for making bombs, remember).
We've got newer designs that are inherently safe (ie. they fail to a safe state) and don't produce all the bomb-making residues. Trouble is, governments want no part of funding the R&D costs these days and financing them through private investors makes them a hundred times more expensive (it's a long term project so they won't bother investing unless they get a return on their money 20 years from now which is a hundred times their initial investment).
No sig today...
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was The Flying Hockey Stick, in which a kid straps an umbrella and a fan to a hockey stick, assembles a very long chain of extension cords and then proceeds to fly all around the world on various adventures. Even as a child I knew that such a contraption would never work in real life, but the important take-away for me was that I learned the willful suspension of disbelief in the interest of enjoying a fanciful story. Obviously, anyone who invests real money in a scheme to deploy airborne heavier-than-air wind turbine power generators is either engaging in the same sort of self-delusion, or dumber than a box of armpit hair. I hear there's one born every minute.
Life isn't supposed to be perfectly safe. Nuclear power plants are very safe - they're down in the noise floor compared to real risks. But "oooooh nukular scary scary" is all people can hear.
Bad things happen in life, and eventually everyone dies. A nuclear power plant with a modern design is as safe as there's any point in making things in life. Will people eventually die as a result. Sure. People die building them to. It's just not important that they aren't "perfectly safe" because that's not an interesting goal.
A very low change of death is a minor factor in our standard of living. Technology that gives a net increase in standard of living is good, even if there are also downsides, because everything in life has downsides.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
" Fatalities: Zero"
Actually several died trying to clean up some of the mess. Just because it wasn't radiation doesn't mean nuclear wasn't the cause of those persons deaths as those persons wouldn't have been there if the nuclear disaster hadn't happened. Kind of how people die in coal mines but ignore the fact that uranium mining has killed people too. And I won't go into the issues of nuclear waste.
At minimum, tens to hundreds of square miles of farmland and cities have been abandoned and will be for decades to centuries which might not have been a problem except that Japan is an island with a large population. And after all those pets died and decayed in those apartments maybe just razing the cities to the ground might be better. There's also fresh water, ocean contamination as well so many food/recreational resources were affected by the disaster.
It hasn't even been five years and elevated cancer rates are being seen in the exposed areas. A lot slower and more torturous route to death that can be generational with continued exposure.
And as for the age of the plant, the newer reactors are safer but still have ugly failure modes. Especially with humans, the biggest potential failure enabler of all, in charge of equipment that creates a major disaster as part of its normal operation. What could possibly go wrong?
P.S. To those that ask for citation. You're on the internet, look it up yourself.
Ouch.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Absolutely, something newer isn't automatically better, but a newer design that has much better passive/inherent safety really is better. It's not the obsolescence of the GE torus BWR that makes it shitty. It's the inherently unsafe design with terrible containment that makes it shitty. There is a reason that naval vessel reactors are PWR. Three Mile Island was a PWR and suffered a partial core meltdown and did not harm the environment at all. It did not blow up. No dangerous levels of radiation were released into the surrounding neighborhood. And it is was from about the same era as Fukushima.
The operators of TMI were as much "cheap screwups" (as you put it very well) as those of Fukushima, but the outcome was very, very different because of the much safer design and much more intelligent and competent dealing with the accident in the hours and days following.
Bad luck had nothing at all to do with it, unless you spell bad luck i-n-c-o-m-p-e-t-e-n-c-e. Not planning in the design for levels of natural disasters well known to have occurred in the very recent past was criminal. I suppose you could say that criminal acts will always be with us. All the more reason to stay away from designs that require perfectly executed continuing active measures to prevent them from becoming disasters. A pebble bed reactor, for example, is passively safe. It does not require large quantities of water actively circulating to prevent meltdown even after shutdown. It does not rely on control rods to prevent a runaway reaction. The coolant, being an inert gas, physically cannot change phase (like water into steam) and get used up thereby; it cannot become radioactive in the case of helium. The material of the fuel "pebbles" does not melt at any temperature, and does not sublimate (directly gasify) until it reaches 4000 C. That is well over twice the temperature at which steel melts into a puddle.
A liquid fluoride thorium reactor is another example of inherently safe design with passive cooling.
There's a difference between accepting that there is always risk, even in a very safe and carefully-monitored setting (e.g., commercial airline flights), and putting trust in a system that has demonstrated severe incompetence (Fukushima nuclear power plant). Fukushima was an old design, yes. But even when the risk from a tsunami became increasingly obvious in recent decades as a result of studying historical tsunami in the region, they did not adequately prepare, contrary to other nuclear power plants in the region. It was badly managed. They did things on the cheap instead of doing them well.
It's not a question of people setting unreasonable expectations of perfect safety. It's people questioning whether it can be done safely when cost-cutting is considered more important than safety even when an avoidable risk becomes obvious. That would be like running an airline, and when the FAA advisories come out because of previous mechanical issues or human issues that caused crashes, you do nothing.
I like your point, and would like to add to it, 4 words:
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
I live in the effected area, and things haven't been the same since. But as far as what we're talking about, they have remained exactly the same...
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
... and now at least 20 odd children have cancer that was likely caused by leaks from the plant with many more to come in the next few years
Citation please?
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
We don't need flying wind energy harvesters. Let's just put windmills close to trees and then encourage the trees to wave their branches as continuously and vigorously as possible.
I would have a sig but I am too busy updating programs and restarting my computer
Science project? Really this sounds like something dreamed up by a kid, one who hasn't heard of 200mph winds that that elevation.
Wake me when it makes more power than it consumes
That's an engineering problem. You know, we can put them flyers in orbit. Assuming we can do this, we can go further and put them on an orbit around/closer to the Sun and use some kind of EM radiation to send the power on Earth.
Or... you know... we begin by boosting the receiver end to take advantage of that kind of EM radiation the Sun already emits and eliminate the energy cost of the drones?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
You end with an interesting simile:
"That would be like running an airline, and when the FAA advisories come out because of previous mechanical issues or human issues that caused crashes, you do nothing."
Japan's response to Fukushima is like dissolving all the airlines and not having passenger air travel anymore because a plane crashed due to pilot error or shoddy maintenance. When companies screw up like that the solution is to tighten up regulations and/or put the criminals in charge in jail. Not to shut down all the nuclear power plants that didn't screw up.
Unlimited risks? Illustrating the point that any topic with "nuclear" in the name inspires a special brand of unreasonable hysteria, aren't you?
You know what, sod this. If you don't want to have an adult debate about this and will just resort to "oooooh nukular scary scary" there really isn't much point, is there?
I tried to make a rational argument. Of course life isn't perfectly safe, but there are cheaper and safer options. I'm not talking about coal, don't try to pull that one. You didn't address it... Well, I'm feeling generous, so I'll give you another chance. The cost of Fukushima is astronomical. That cost has nothing to do with fear or scaremongering. The cost to clean up is the cost to clean up and is still yet to be fully determined because a disposal site has not been found yet. The cost of compensation is also unarguable since clearly people have lost material property and their jobs.
No other for of power generation would cause such a huge financial hit. Arguably coal might over the long term, but not in one go, and most opponents of nuclear power are not arguing for more coal (or at least not beyond a stopgap measure). What is your counter argument, or were you just hoping to win some up-mods with childish name calling and ad hominem attacks?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A liquid fluoride thorium reactor is another example of inherently safe design with passive cooling.
Someone always mentions thorium, forgetting that so far no-one has been able to demonstrate it working on a commercial scale and almost all the small scale experiments have ended in partial or total failure. Come on, show me a working commercial scale one.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I agree that nuclear power is the answer to future's energy demand.
It's just that when people talk about nuclear power they instantly think about the old-fashioned uranium based reactors and related problems.
Thorium has for a long time been a perfect option for nuclear power, but it wasn't implemented back in they day because it couldn't be weaponized. The biggest advantages of thorium based reactors is that it can be found almost everywhere and it's safe even if the worst happens. AFAIK, India is unfortunately the only country actively currently pursuing thorium reactors. The US also has a working thorium reactor concept, but hasn't for some reason implemented it at all.
Raptors with jetpacks, no less:
Uh, yeah. I'm thinking about the only organisms you're going to bump into at 50k feet would be Need For Speed skydivers like that Baumgartner dude.
Airline safety varies wildly by operating country.
Nuclear safety and airline safety go hand in hand, risk-wise, in different cultures and countries. Japanese airlines have many of the same needless risks stemming from overly-hierarchical decision making and inability to admit mistakes that have hurt the Fukushima efforts - it's the exactly same cultural issues at play (my brother used to be a pilot for a Japanese airline - he had many of these same complaints).
It's people questioning whether it can be done safely when cost-cutting is considered more important than safety
All of which applies equally to airlines, but while airline safely varies by country, it's generally still safer to fly than to drive in each one.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The energy might be "clean" (argueable)
The storage of the waste is not, nor is the mining.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The non existing "no entry" zone is a 30km radius if I'm not mistaken and many organizations demand a 200km radius.
Also I don't realy get what you call a 'tiny bit' of radiation ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Pfft ... you are not comparing apples with oranges here but mushrooms with gold nuggets, or sand or the concept of virgin pregnancy.
How can you compare a flight crash with a nuclear desaster? Or how can you compare the shut down of 20? reactors (owned by one company) with the shut down of multiple flight lines with 1000ds of planes?
Regulations did not work so far. On what base do you assume they will work in future?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Let's really have an adult debate, something you've failed at, off the bat.
_No one_ is suggesting that we build another Fukushima. Instead, it's been suggested that we use LFTR designs based on the MSRE. While the cleanup for the MSRE was among the most expensive nuclear-related cleanups anywhere, we came out of it with a design that works (with a far higher safety margin than any other existing design, especially relative to the energy contained within the plant) and _the knowledge of how to avoid such a cleanup_ in the future. No more liquid fluoride thorium salts sitting in a cold storage tank for decades, splitting out into their component parts. And it did take *decades* for that to happen.
The problem with 'recent events' and 'historical evidence' is: 100s of /. ers and hobby scientists and even real scientists claim: "the facts are exagerated". Because so many died they "exagerated the hight of the wave". Or they claim: "well at that time they used likely a shakku of the sice of 30cm instead of 39cm as in later times, so we have to reduce the size of the wave by 25%" .... after all that is the cheapest part of the plant.
Bottom line many people simply don't believe that so high tsunamis are in fact _common_
And frankly it would be simple to just make the wall around the plant 3 times as high
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is a bald-faced lie.
The MSRE most certainly did NOT end in failure. It was considered a resounding success. It was then decomissioned, and later on the decommissioning procedures were found to have been insufficient. After one of the most expensive nuclear-related cleanups in history, we walked away with no one hurt or dead, a successful reactor design with proven passive safety (they did several shutdowns, one lasting over a month, where they simply walked away), and the _knowledge to avoid such a cleanup in the future_.
I really can't stand it when idiots like you don't even bother to read the supporting documentation/historical analysis on what you're ignorantly bashing. It's schmucks like you who are busy screwing over the human race, often by suggesting we build provably unsafe designs like PBWRs or coal-fired plants which emit far more radiation than any modern nuclear design and many older ones. Solar is an interesting argument, but until you have the money to take up vast amounts of land, implement a system with large, expensive to maintain flywheels all over the place, and somehow manage to achieve the energy density of even trifling gasoline, you can cordially shove it. Same for many other alternative energy sources. They require extensive land and resource use, excessive distributed maintenence, and have shit for energy density. Not to mention that solar panels have a short lifetime.
The cost of evacuation certainly had a lot to do with fear and scaremongering. The cost of compensation will certainly have to do with fear and scaremongering.
Coal is a fair comparison for Japan, as that's something they can actually import. CNG is great, but it sucks to transport. Wind only goes so far, and Japan's in a bad latitude for solar. And coal does suck so very badly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My goodness, your posting completely changes my mind! Why Fukushima was little more than a misunderstanding between the 4 ethers! Earth, Air, Fire & Water, why can't we all just get along?
One way he can compare that and be absolutely correct is that when that airplane crashes, you typically kill 200 or 300 people but no nuclear plant has ever come close to that many deaths. Chernobyl, commonly considered the worst nuclear disaster, only directly killed 31.
Your mistake is that you treat these as mitigating factors. They are not. The obsolete design should have been replaced. It was not. The tsunami should have been planned for. It was not. The multiple redundant system failures occurred due to sloppy (at best) implementation and management, which should have been prevented. It was not. And each of these failures derive from a common, unavoidable cause: humans. I suspect that even if you made it a law that any executive involved in the planning, building or maintaining of a nuclear power plant had to live for their rest of their life in an apartment built on top of the reactor dome, humans would still find a way to screw things up.
Basically, there is no problem with nuclear power technology that can't be solved by not letting homo sapiens get within about eight light-minutes of it.
This could be fun to watch.
India is working on it but that lack of military applications has slowed down research there are well. The US nuclear industry ate it's own children by actively opposing R&D and lobbying to shut down the thorium project, so you won't see anything come out of the US other than under the radar skunkworks derived from military research.
Sheer bad planning multiple redundent system failures. Where they sited the backup generators was only one of a long list of fuckups in what was supposed to be a highly regulated situation.
Once they have the flying power transmission station, why just not harvest lightnings?
There was a series of incredible fuckups that a system was supposed to prevent so they didn't trust the system. To use your analogy it would be as if there were detailed records of aircraft maintainance that had never happened signed off by the heads of all the airlines and the head of the FAA. In such a situation you shut it all down and make sure that you put something else in place without a pack of proven liars running it.
Cultural issues? How many young and upcoming American managers with an MBA admit mistakes?
The Indians are giving it a go. Come back in a decade or two for the commercial scale one if it all works out.
On the US side the lobbying of the nuclear lobby against thorium research, against reprocessing and against nuclear waste management research shows that do not care about anything other than using 1970s dinosaur plants to funnel money out of the taxpayer.
Just being up there provides a bit of potential difference. There's an old (1970s or late 1960s) amateur scientist article in Scientific American on how to make a plastic disk spin powered by the potential difference from a kite to the ground.
Don't expect much current. I don't know if even an LED could run off it.
On a similar subject the science fiction author Terry Downling had a series of short stories in a setting where vehicles where powered by very large arrays of photovoltaic kites simply as a way to get a lot of surface area.
There's plenty of zero coupon bonds which mature in 20+ years, which is basically the same thing as profit that won't be realized until the long term. With interest rates as low as they are now, if a company *knew* they could make a profit in 20 years, even a fairly middling profit, there are financial instruments which would allow them to build the reactor and immediately reap their financial rewards.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
So what you are saying is that you can solve the obsolete design part (is that even a problem? something newer isn't automatically better) but the problems of rare unplanned-for events and bad luck are still there.
No. They already have. A reactor of modern design would almost certainly not have melted down even under the conditions experienced there.
People died during the evacuation, and now at least 20 odd children have cancer that was likely caused by leaks from the plant with many more to come in the next few years.
You are truly a complete idiot. Increase those numbers by an order of magnitude and they're still several orders of magnitude lower then death and disease caused by petrochemical industry. But no...oooh. One killed or diseased by the nuclear industry is far worse that thousands killed or diseased by the petrochemical industry.
But hay, who gives a fuck about the human suffering, it's costing hundreds of billions of dollars to clean the damn thing up and compensate everybody!
Evidently you don't
Who is John Galt?
So if the power were doubled to 800 MW, that would be enough to power over 205,000 homes for two years?
Oh, and the false accuracy thing. That's exactly 205,000 homes and not, say, 204,000 or even 200,000?
we needthis kind of inovation. come on people, let's do this.
According to the company director, with it's operating altitude of 15km, it won't interfere with flora and fauna, unless (of course) flying over the Himalayas (alien traffic?). If 15km up is such a wonderfully uncrowded place with a lot of sunshine, gentle breeze and a wonderful view, I can't think of a reason helicopters have not once flown at this altitude. Also, I love the idea of generating power by flying a quad against a wind. Brilliant!
Just the wanted to say, as the quoted AC, I completly agree.
See my point about "People" ;-)
People died during the evacuation, and now at least 20 odd children have cancer that was likely caused by leaks from the plant with many more to come in the next few years.
Over 17000 people, some of them children, where killed or are missing from the same Tsunami. Keep it in perspective.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
While it wasn't a failure. It wasn't even a complete design. No breading was done at all example and a breeding ratio of 1 has not been done. The in situ reprocessing has not been tested or done or had safety demonstrated. The list goes on.
As for safety. Yea pebble bed reactors are totally safe too with all that passive safely. Germany would no longer agree with that statement. Anyone who says "total safety nothing can go wrong" are liars or stupid. Yea sure you thought of everything.. oh no wait you didn't. ops.
The only people who think LFTR are ready to be deployed now are armchair pro nuke folk. Anyone in the industry or the know realizes that its prototype plant time at best, and a 20+ year testing and validation cycle.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
And each of these failures derive from a common, unavoidable cause: humans.
Humans are the cause of all of our problems (other than weather and beast-eats-man stories). The problem with nuclear is that for most cases humans have evolved systems to deal with these risks. In monetary terms, we call that insurance.
But we have nuclear where the US and Japanese governments have said, "don't worry about it, we'll take care of the insurance". Throw in a little bit of corruption, and voila, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiachi.
You've probably heard about the ancient stones up the hill from the Fukushima plant that say, "do not build below this point". But who cares? If there's a problem the government will handle it.
Consider instead an insurer that would have to pay out for any damage that the plant caused. Doing something stupid like building a nuclear plant in a flood zone is potentially going to cost that insurer its entire business -- no client is worth that. So it doesn't happen.
But with government "insurance", you just need to grease the right palms and everything gets done "efficiently".
Every power source has risks - nuclear just has the lowest risks of all of them, and that's true even given the absurd 1950's reactors that are running. If they were privately insured, all the light water reactors would get shut down and replaced with pebble bed reactors or integral fast reactors and then we'd have plenty of safe carbon-free power that would last us until fusion can be brought online.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
without a pack of proven liars running it
And there's the cold hard truth of the matter. The problem then becomes doubling down and expecting the same pack of liars to come up with something better. Eventually we'll realize we shouldn't trust them at all and deploy systems to our defense (likely economic) that do not require any trust at all to operate effectively.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Chernobyl, commonly considered the worst nuclear disaster, only directly killed 31.
Stop that. Everybody can recognize that "directly killed" is a weasel word. You can honestly compare cancers due to coal plant deaths with the real numbers from Chernobyl and Fukushima and still have a good argument.
Posting this crap as AC just makes your side of the argument ... oh ... hello paid opposition from the coal industry!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
About 9 million percent more than in Japan. Heck, the entire business decision-making process revolves around no one openly taking any position about an issue until consensus is reached, so that no one important has ever lost an argument. There's a reason Japanese factories famously had to hire an American consultant to tell them to take suggestions from workers: any process improvement is an admission that the existing process is less than perfect, and thus whoever wrote that process wasn't perfect. How shameful.
Then there's Russia, where they just don't care. If you're not a fan of Chernobyl, I recommend against flying Aeroflot.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
gosgog:
Come on lets go Nuke Plants...with THORIUM instead of Uranium. Safe, and Thorium is worldwide availability, inlike Uranium which is dangerous!!
A man in the United States has already found a way to tap higher altitude jet steams using an unmanned blimp with large inflated propellers that never stop turning. EVER! They are simple machines that are tethered to the Earth with anchors so they don't float away. They constantly generate energy because there's a jet stream that never stops.
I've been generating power on my own for 13 years. Most of the time the simpler solutions are the best. YOU DON'T NEED DRONES !
I'm so glad you mentioned pebble bed reactors, because of this.
ok its an island nation with active vulcanism ongoing and was formed thru same process-its got NO business having nuke plants
I'm just trying to point out that the "coverup" cultural issue spans a few cultures. Perhaps most of the American management I've been exposed to was exported so that they did not do their colossal fuckups at home. Of course that's some sort of silver spoon horse judge bank VP at 22 entitlement culture and not representative of anything like the entire place.
Some of the nicest people I've met are Americans so I think there must be something in your MBA courses that turns them into sociopathic utter pricks that look hell bent on sabotage then a rush to the airport with the cash. There's definitely a few things wrong with US corporate culture that definitely do lead to coverups.
I don't know how easy such a thing would be to gather on a useful scale, but I believe you can keep a hang-glider more or less permanently aloft by riding thermal updrafts, and birds of prey have been known to utilize this as well. With some kind of kinetic energy conversion (e.g. a turbine, like current wind power collectors use) you could potentially be energy-positive. They talk about high-altitude though, which I don't recall being the best place to find updrafts.
My question is, how much does it cost to produce the hardware that can do this with enough efficiency to be worth bothering to do? Wikipedia talks about a wirelessly-power helicopter, but presumably the efficiency was terrible and it's only because a big, heavy, ground-based power source was throwing all kinds of energy at it. TFA talks about doing it the other way around, and I have serious reservations about how much power you're going to get out of such a system, to say nothing of weather and equipment failure complications. We don't even have wireless electric-car charging stations (with any real distance involved); how do they think they're going to drive that kind of power over longer distances?
Goddammit just when I get my first +5 the Beta rolls out and kills everything
A pebble-bed reactor is a reliable source of radioactive dust and requires unreasonable amounts of maintenance to keep it working. There's a good few years worth of design work to get those to a useful state. This involves prolonged testing at temperatures of ~800C, much of it at full scale. Germany gave up on it as too much effort for the potential return.