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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."
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
"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?
Now add a camera and you get a pretty good domestic surveillance coverage.
Tomorrow is another day...
"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)
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."
...The Sun.
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!
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.
Yeah, it's like they're unaware we already have a nuclear reactor in the sky beaming wireless energy to the ground -- It's called The Sun. Now, with the first part of their problem completed, we just need to erect more and more efficient energy collectors on the ground.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.