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Will Future Nuclear Power Plants Float? (thebulletin.org)
Russia isn't the first country to launch a floating nuclear power plant. 50 years ago America's army built a floating nuclear power plant to supply energy to the Panama Canal Zone. Even though it's now being dismantled in Texas -- a four-year job -- China has plans to build as many as 20 floating nuclear power plants.
Gayle BAS quotes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Proponents say that floating nuclear plants have major advantages over land-based power plants: They have easy access to cooling water and can be quickly installed near coastal cities with rapidly growing energy demands. And unlike other types of energy that produce relatively few climate-altering emissions, nuclear power plants can run 24/7.
But as with onshore nuclear reactors, the closely related issues of safety and economics could be showstoppers.
Gayle BAS quotes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Proponents say that floating nuclear plants have major advantages over land-based power plants: They have easy access to cooling water and can be quickly installed near coastal cities with rapidly growing energy demands. And unlike other types of energy that produce relatively few climate-altering emissions, nuclear power plants can run 24/7.
But as with onshore nuclear reactors, the closely related issues of safety and economics could be showstoppers.
Yes, the US Navy hasbeen doing it since before commercial reactors existed.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Because the coastal-land-based Fukushima withstood unexpected weather so well. I'm sure a floating plant would withstand rogue waves and tsunamis just as well. And then there's the whole undersea cable thing...
Small modular reactors are the future of nuclear energy. These reactors are meltdown proof and factory built. And yes some of them will be on ships. One of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gasses are large shipping frigates. Reactors on ships can also power many coastal cities without fear from natural disaster.
The issue isn’t technical but cultural.
Nuclear energy needs community support and a plan for maintenance lasting thousands of years.
With half the population wanting more of them without regulations the other half wants to take them off line. We get a dangerous mixture where such plants are not adequately being supported and maintained.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
... the other half wants to take them off line.
This is a First World problem. There are few anti-nuke protests in India, and none in China. North America and Western Europe have zero to negative growth in energy demand, so they don't need new nukes anyway. Most future demand growth will be in Asia and Africa, and most of that demand will be within 200 km of the coastline.
These power ships solve much of the NIMBY problem. A big risk with land-based nuke plants is that they take a decade or more to build, and voters may cancel them before they are complete, leaving investors with a huge sunk cost. But floating nukes can be towed anywhere, so they can just sell the completed reactor to someone else.
None of these nuclear power plants will float. They are just nuclear plants on a structure that has more buoyancy than the plant.
This is little different than the nuclear power plants in larger, floating vessels, (e.g. large aircraft carriers). The biggest difference is the method of heat rejection.
Just because we have super sensitive detection devices that allows us to detect radiation doesn't mean that radiation is at a harmful level.
> just a single homeowner does all the mechanical aerobics exercises each day to not need a power company bill
A fit human being at peak output can generate anywhere from 100-200 watts of recoverable power depending on the person. Go look at your power bill and see how many KwH you use a day. You're insane if you think an average dwelling - even a crazy efficient one - could be powered by humans alone.
If they are made of wood or weigh as much as a duck then they will float. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There are few anti-nuke protests in India, and none in China.
Uh...I won't speak on India, but I think there may be other reasons why there are no anti-nuke protests in China.
Will It Blend?
And things that can be moved can be stolen.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Commercial plants have historically been much larger. One thing about this... the obvious corollary of using the ocean water for cooling means you're pumping heat into the ocean.
Ideally, as much heat as possible would be turned into electrical energy and very little would end up back in the water. It's not like we need to intentionally add heat directly to the ocean. It's bad enough that electricity end users and various other inefficiencies turn the electricity back into heat anyway.
We should really be doing better, but, costs, sigh.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think there may be other reasons why there are no anti-nuke protests in China.
Other than what? I didn't mention any "reasons". I just stated facts. The reason is obvious: China does not tolerate organized public protests of CCP policies.
China is building nukes now, and public opposition is not an issue. It would not be an issue for floating nukes either. So if these power ships make sense, they can be built and/or deployed in China, where power is currently 80% coal.
North America and Western Europe have zero to negative growth in energy demand, so they don't need new nukes anyway.
That's an insane statement to make. The USA gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear power. These nuclear power plants have an average age of about 40 years. That average age is about the same as the intended operational life span of these reactors. Fortunately these reactors were overbuilt with just crazy safety margins. This means that as more was learned the operators were able to figure out how to get more out of what they had. Through improved techniques and upgrades over time the output of nuclear power increased over time even as older reactors were shut down and not replaced.
This continued extension of the lifespan of these aging reactors cannot continue indefinitely. They will have to be shutdown, and relatively soon, and replaced with something. That something must be new nuclear power.
Here's a recent article on why nuclear power is a good choice.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
There is 1000 GW, give or take, of electrical generation capacity in the USA right now. About 100 GW of that is nuclear. The observant might now be asking how 10% of generating capacity being nuclear can provide 20% of the electricity we consume. The answer is that nuclear power plants are operating 90% of their maximum capacity while other generating sources are getting half that, more or less. More generating capacity with coal and natural gas, less than half maximum generating capacity from wind, solar, hydro, and others.
Now coal is not only "bad" (whether that be politically, economically, environmentally, or whatever) they are often old. We will need new generating capacity to replace these coal plants that are scheduled for shutdown. As it is now the US federal government expects to see 20 GW of new natural gas generation installed by the end of this year. We can keep doing that until all the roughly 300 GW of coal is replaced, and the 100 GW of aging nuclear as well, or we can try something else.
We can install more wind and solar but as the article I linked to above from the "A Cubic Mile of Oil" blog, the resources needed for wind and solar are orders of magnitude higher. We're talking a few hundred tons of material per TWh produced versus 10,000 or 15,000 tons. Then there is the issue of CO2 produced and that is laid out in the last paragraph of that article.
The prospect of climate change and ocean acidification are real, and the long time it takes to implement corrective measures means that we must rapidly decarbonize our energy systems. Our fears of radiation are largely unfounded and have had the deleterious effect of continued use of fossil fuels. Even as we deploy wind and solarâ"the nominally low-carbon sourcesâ"the absence of large scale storage systems have forced us into using natural gas power for back up. The design of natural gas power plants used as spinning reserves are selected on the rapidity with which they can be brought online. These designs are among the least efficient of gas-fired plants, with thermal efficiencies around 33%, and thus high carbon emissions. Gas-fired power plants that operate with a combined steam cycle have thermal efficiencies in excess of 50%. Analysis by Larsen and Rez shows that we would do better in terms of carbon emissions if instead of installing low capacity factor wind or solar systems and backing them with natural gas, we simply used a combined cycle natural gas plant.
Wind and solar do not reduce our CO2 output and they will not until we have a sufficient supply of low CO2 storage online. Building natural gas plants up to now only reduced CO2 because it was replacing coal. With added wind and solar more of that natural gas is consumed in inefficient peaker power generators that in the end do not reduce CO2. If we assume no future growth
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It would be really hard to keep Submarines away from these things. Fat target and all.
A household of 3 persons in Germany uses over a year on average 4250 kWh. That is close to 11kWh per day. ... ... that went down during work time.
So you obviously could generate that yourself if you wanted
But who wants to ride a bike at home after work for 4 hours to recharge the batteries
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm doing a little trolling here, I like reminding solar advocates that the electricity that the panels make is from nuclear fusion.
Passionately Indifferent
But there are also issues of a market economy. The US military uses nuclear options not only because it makes sense in their application, but also because they are subject to almost no civilian oversight or normal price pressures. In the real world, nuclear power has had most of 50 years to prove itself, and as far as the marketplace it has failed.
It has failed in the US because we have cheap fuels, like coal and natural gas, lots of land for solar and wind, and lots of waterways. It is not that nuclear is a bad option, just that in the US with the resources we have, it is not the best option. Nuclear did not lose because people are against it, it lost because it makes no sense.
Take Texas, for example, certainly not a bastion of liberal hysteria and certainly not inexperienced in energy. Only a small fraction of the energy is produced by nuclear power, and right now more energy is produced by wind and solar.
Furthermore, many of the wind farms are owned and operated by private firms, and many were instigated by local land owners who receive significant royalties. In fact the one of the largest wind farms in Texas, which is privately held by private investors that funded the building and operation, was organized by local land owners who say the long term profit potential of wind.
On the other hand, one of the largest nuclear power plants in Texas is 70-80% owned by the state. Like in Russia and China, the people did not want the plant, the government told them they had to build it, the raised taxes and rates to pay for it. In fact, when one of the cities wanted to opt of the plant, and try to sell their stake, no private investor was dumb enough to buy it. You know, in the US, what we call an asset that you can't get a private investor to buy. A scam, a dud, a worth pile of crap. Even Radio Shack was able to find a buyer.
Mind you that this is even though, in real costs, wind probably costs $15-30 more per MWhr to produce than nuclear, if all costs are taken into account, and the pro nuclear people alway promote. Of course, as we have seen, when nuclear melts down it costs at least $1, if not $10 per MWhr ever produced to clean up. And if you put the generators out at sea, then you get some of the cost incurred by wind that the pro nuclear people always assert that has to be included for nuclear, such as transmission lines and backup power resources when the plant is cutoff, such as in the case of hurricane. Again, some coast lines do not have hurricanes, but in the US all but the northern coasts are in danger of such storms.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If you understood what had happened, you would say that it was a good idea.
And ideally, we would put these on the Great Lakes as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For the same cost we can build pumped storage plants, and let the consumer worry about the generation side.
Same costs? How? Nuclear takes the least material to produce power than any energy source available to us, and with the least CO2 produced. Did you even click on the link? Here it is again:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
The ramp-up rate on homeowners choosing to go solar before Juche-Trumpism would be enough to replace a lot of the shortfall, except for the storage problem.
That "storage problem" is not trivial. That's a sixteen TRILLION dollar problem.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
That kind of expenditure does not make it impossible, I will admit that. What it does do is make the storage problem alone a greater expense in time, money, effort, and materials, than if the energy was produced with far more reliable nuclear power. Nuclear power, as it is done today, will need some storage for load following and perhaps even seasonal variation but far far less of it. That "storage problem" is many times more than the cost of building an all nuclear grid of PRODUCTION. I'll emphasize that, the storage needs alone for wind and solar exceed the cost of producing that electricity from even old style nuclear power.
Rather than building a new massive hub and spoke infrastructure, we should be investing in to a truely distributed grid with localized storage facilities to help balance the load
I agree. Let's build many "small" nuclear power plants of about 5 GW generation each (that would be probably 6 current reactors or about a dozen small modular reactors) and spread them about over 200 different sites. Add in some storage from batteries and hydro to keep the grid stable and manage for losses of grid connections, and have some on-site backup generation at vital sites like hospitals, police stations, military bases, airports, and so on. But we have such backup already, or at least we do if we're smart. There's also plenty of hydro storage too in a lot of places. Wherever we need storage for nuclear then we can draw from the same well this storage would draw from as if we did solar and wind.
There is a very important reason we use this "hub and spoke" infrastructure, economy of scale. It's this aversion to building large nuclear power plants that has driven up costs in people to run engineering, administration, security, maintenance, and so on. Put 4 or 6 reactors on a site and watch prices fall.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
oh good lord.
What do you want to do? COntinue with nat gas and coal? That is destroying nearly all species here.
And 1000's of years? Give me a break. If we fully utilitize the fuel, then it will have around 200 years and we can simply bury it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and only a bunch of idiots would base their whole economy on wind/solar, esp when they have volcanoes around.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm doing a little trolling here, I like reminding solar advocates that the electricity that the panels make is from nuclear fusion.
Oh, they know that and they seem to enjoy pointing that out whenever someone claims nuclear fusion is just 10 years away.
Here's what I like to do, point out to the geothermal people that it's powered by uranium and thorium. We are consuming that energy either way with geothermal or with nuclear. The difference is in how much energy we can draw from that pool of radioactive material in the billions of years it will last. We can consume with considerable losses in the transfer by geothermal or we can mine it, put it in a reactor, and consume it with far greater efficiency by fission. There's enough uranium dissolved in the ocean to last millions of years at current rates. By using both thorium and uranium fuel in breeder reactors we will see the sun consume Earth's atmosphere before we run out of fuel.
If solar power is "sustainable" or "renewable" then so is nuclear. If geothermal power is "sustainable"... well, you get the idea.
Nuclear power is just as renewable, sustainable, and "zero carbon", as any other energy source we know of today. Nuclear power is also as safe, or safer, as anything else today.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Nuclear energy needs community support and a plan for maintenance lasting thousands of years.
No, it does not.
The fission products from uranium is not a dumping out of the periodic table and all it's isotopes. We have observed what kind of isotopes are produced and the number is quite small. There are the short lived products that last seconds, minutes, or perhaps a few months. Those we allow to decay in the spent fuel cooling pools on site. A good "rule of thumb" is that in 10 half lives any given isotope is effectively "gone". So keep the fuel in these pools for perhaps a dozen years, we know we can do that because that's standard practice now.
Next are the medium lived products, and there are only a handful of those. Many of which have useful industrial or medical uses and we'd be idiots to just throw them away. These have half lives in the decades and so a "rule of thumb" danger on them if we did throw them away is about 300 years. We've managed projects for 300 years before. Again, this is assuming we did something stupid like throw this stuff in a hole and were guarding it from scrap metal scavengers and curious children.
With the long lived fission products there is a big leap in the length of the half life, we go from decades to millions of years. With half lives this long it's not considered a radiation hazard. This kind of stuff occurs in nature. That doesn't mean we should eat it, no more than people should eat dirt, but it's not a radiation hazard. We can simply landfill this stuff. If we want to take extra care we can encase it in glass or concrete first. If we feel the material has exceptional value then we can use it industrially. This might be true of the more plentiful fission products like zirconium and palladium.
If anyone believes I am mistaken then point to the fission products that concern you, and the half life of those isotopes.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I think we need to understand that nuclear power failed in the United States because of the market. It proved itself expensive and unreliable. And that was without considering the permanent waste storage problem that we still haven't solved. There are lots of tortured arguments from proponents for why nuclear power is better than wind or solar. But both those technologies continue to be cheaper to build and more reliable in operation. Until that changes, it doesn't matter whether it floats or not, nuclear power is going to remain at the bottom of the list for new investment. As for the "material" used by nuclear power, have you ever been to an open pit mine? Yes, it probably requires digging up less material than a coal mine for similar output. But why would we care?
IOW, less than what 1/10 of what your system will cost.
No, read the study. Here's the link again:
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
The STORAGE needed for a wind and solar solution would cost at least double the PRODUCTION of the nuclear solution. With wind and solar the production would cost at least what the storage costs. That's four times what nuclear costs with just storage and production. Then there are issues of needing a "smart grid" to move all this energy around to where it is needed, and the land it would take to put these windmills and solar collectors.
I'll also bring this back again, nuclear power has a lower CO2 output than wind and solar.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Why is anyone so opposed to nuclear power? It's safe, clean, inexpensive, reliable, and domestically sourced.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Your first link is ridiculous. Those figures are absolutely not right, at least for solar power. They seem to overestimate the material requirements for solar by a factor of about three, maybe somewhat more for rooftop installations. Somebody screwed up structural numbers there.
Ezekiel 23:20
Your first link is ridiculous. Those figures are absolutely not right, at least for solar power. They seem to overestimate the material requirements for solar by a factor of about three, maybe somewhat more for rooftop installations. Somebody screwed up structural numbers there.
First, that chart is from the United States Department of Energy. I'm not aware of them being a bunch of cheerleaders for nuclear power.
Second, assuming what you say is true that still leaves quite the margin on material savings for nuclear. It's pretty safe to assume that materials like concrete and steel cost the same whether that be for solar or nuclear, so that leaves a lot of savings on material costs to cover things like labor, engineering, and licensing costs. Costs that can be reduced with economy of scale. Rooftop installations may reduce the cost of materials for not needing as much additional structure to anchor the panels but it will increase labor costs for having to do more moving about from rooftop to rooftop, and time in lifting the panels onto those rooftops. Solar economy of scale only kicks in when it's a bunch of panels on a large and flat piece of land.
Third, you gave nothing as a reference to back up your claim. It's a very weak claim at that given my first and second points.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
A household of 3 persons in Germany uses over a year on average 4250 kWh. That is close to 11kWh per day. So you obviously could generate that yourself if you wanted ...
But who wants to ride a bike at home after work for 4 hours to recharge the batteries ... that went down during work time.
I am so angry at how bad your math is right now, I could spit acid. I want to take a math book with the word "average" highlighted and beat your damn head with it. Let me show you why.
11kWh per day. Okay, now take the sum of these numbers in kW. (0.34, 0.38, 0.39, 0.41, 0.42, 0.41, 0.43, 0.45, 0.51, 0.53, 0.59, 0.53, 0.52, 0.51, 0.53, 0.59, 0.48, 0.47, 0.47, 0.46, 0.46, 0.4, 0.36, 0.36). They add up to 11 kW, right? Also note there are 24 values, that's because that 11 kWh a day doesn't mean we use 0.46 kW every hour. It means over a 24 hour period we use what would on average add up to 11 kWh. That spread could be... (0.11, 0.13, 0.14, 0.41, 0.42, 0.43, 0.54, 0.53, 0.51, 0.53, 0.68, 0.71, 0.68, 0.67, 0.66, 0.67, 0.66, 0.57, 0.52, 0.53, 0.51, 0.11, 0.13, 0.15) Again, those add up to 11 kWh, but now we have really low times, but that has to be offset by really high times to get to the 11 kWh average you specified.
And we could change this spread however we like the point being is it has to come up to 11 kWh to hit your average per day. Which if you wanted to do this over a four hour period, like you said, you would need to pedal 2.75 kWh each hour, not the 0.46 watts you calculated, and 2.75 kWh could not be done by a family of three.
Please never pretend to do math ever again.
The nuclear figures seem correct regarding the material usage. The solar ones are ridiculous. The glass mass seems to correspond to the amount of panels necessary for a 1 TWh generation but the amount of concrete and steel are out of whack. This is how a ground installation around the panels looks like. According to the chart, it should comprise around 300 kg of concrete and around 500 kg of steel. But the actual datasheet says that this metallic structure only weighs 115 kg.
Ezekiel 23:20
First, that chart is from the United States Department of Energy. I'm not aware of them being a bunch of cheerleaders for nuclear power.
That must be why they're in control of maintaining America's nuclear arsenal, right?
Ezekiel 23:20
There really is no evidence that any level of radiation exposure is safe. The question appears to be not whether there is harm, but how much to how many people and what significance should we attach to it. There is also the issue of persistence, some radioactive elements have very long half lives that make them virtually permanent, others have short half lives and disappear quickly. Some elements are taken up into the body where they release radiation in internal organs, other element's aren't. The issue of the danger of radiation exposure is both complicated and not really settled science on much of any level.
But who wants to ride a bike at home after work for 4 hours to recharge the batteries ... that went down during work time.
Which part of this did you not comprehend?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What do you want to do? COntinue with nat gas and coal? That is destroying nearly all species here.
Yawn. Your logical fallacy is false dichotomy. Solar+wind+storage will do the job.
And 1000's of years? Give me a break. If we fully utilitize the fuel, then it will have around 200 years and we can simply bury it.
Breeders are expensive and dangerous, which is why we don't use them. Nuclear is already barely profitable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Russian project uses two naval nuclear reactors, the same ones used in their nuclear ice breakers.
Engineering decisions often result in some things getting harder while other things get easier. Putting a nuclear reactor on a ship certainly simplifies the problem of obtaining cooling water, but you run into the problem of space. To keep naval reactors physically compact, they run on highly enriched uranium. At least American and Russian ones do. France uses low enriched uranium in its submarines, but their reactors as installed are much less powerful than American or Russian.
The KLT-40 reactor used in the Russian project is designed to run on 40% to 90% enriched uranium. At the upper end of that scale the fuel could easily be used in a crude gun type weapon as was dropped on Hiroshima. The fuel at the lower end could be used in a more sophisticated design, or as part of a multi-stage weapon, or used as a shortcut to obtaining higher enrichment levels for a less sophisticated design.
And that fuel is already on a conveniently mobile platform.
It's not that the floating reactor idea is inherently impractical, it's just that the Russian project doesn't really demonstrate that idea is feasible for widespread deployment, because you wouldn't want hundreds of these things all over the place. And it doesn't really tell you anything about the economics of potential civilian designs, because you wouldn't use HEU in those and HEU simplifies everything else.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But who wants to ride a bike at home after work for 4 hours to recharge the batteries ... that went down during work time.
Which part of this did you not comprehend?
The part where that doesn't mathematically add up. Three average people at best can generate 0.3 kW in an ideal conditions, which more than likely you use 0.5 kW per hour actually being home. You cannot charge a battery with -0.2 kW, that's what the negative sign means. It's like you don't understand math AND you don't understand the size of energy in 1 kW. A 100 W light bulb uses the entire stream of energy the everyday man can produce, and that's not even taking anything out for losses. Marathon bicyclers can maintain around 130 - 150 W an hour, but maybe the top 5% of the world's population can output 200 W for any measurable amount of time. So even the best that this planet has to offer cannot at best power two light bulbs for any measurable amount of time. But again, side stepping that.
No matter how hard a family of three pedals, they cannot in four hours even hope to produce anything over 20% the amount of power used during an eight hour period while they weren't home. Over the course of a year, you cannot provide any meaningful offset of power usage by cycling. It's like the difference in time of arrival by increasing speed by marginal percentage. Yes, if you are only five miles away from your destination, increasing your speed by 5 mph can have a noticeable percentage change in the overall time spent driving. However, if you are 1000 miles away, increasing your speed by 5 mph isn't going to even change the arrival time by any noticeable percentage of the entire duration. The numerator is vastly larger than the speed by orders of magnitude. The same is true for pedal power, humans produce so little power in pedal power compared to the vast amount of power they will use in one year.
Does that mean no one should do it? No, if that's what floats your boat, by all means. But goodness do not get on here and do "math" and try to prove your point when your math is worse than a fifth grader attempting the problem. Your final numbers are just straight up wrong. There's zero meaning in what you think has meaning. Your argument was non-existent from word "go".
Let's say I concede the point, that the DOE got the materials needed for solar power off by an order of magnitude you still have on a per megawatt-hour basis....
Solar power requires 3 to 10 times the materials compared to nuclear, depending on how you want to do your math. (And it would be more like 30 times if I don't concede this point.)
Solar power causes 4 to 4000 times as many fatalities. (Here's another source for that: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... )
Solar power has the same to 10 times the CO2 output as nuclear, depending on who you ask.
(This shows solar has about 3 times CO2 output over nuclear: https://energy.utexas.edu/news...
This shows solar and nuclear at near parity: https://www.carbonbrief.org/so... )
As for cost... I can't seem to find a straight answer. I'll search and keep finding sources from nuclear power advocacy places where they show nuclear is cheaper than solar. When I look for data from places that advocate for wind, solar, and hydro, they don't mention nuclear power at all. That in itself is quite telling. There's those studies from a place called Lazard that give wildly varied numbers on solar power based on the specific type and they include a warning not to compare intermittent energy, like wind and solar, to dispatchable energy, like nuclear and natural gas.
This warning from Lazard to compare solar power costs to nuclear become apparent when looking at the paper from Conley and Maloney where they compute that just the backup power in natural gas, or storage from pumped hydro, would cost double to 5 times the generation capacity from nuclear. Again, that's the cost to match the solar supply to the load, before the costs of the actual solar power generation is added. Again I'll give the link: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
To defend your point on material needs you gave a pamphlet on a do-it-herself solar power kit that looks like something someone would prop up at a campsite, not a permanent install done by professionals.
So, if I concede the point on materials needed, and agree the DOE was off by as much as an order of magnitude, then it still doesn't look that great for solar. Would you like to go into the other points against solar now?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Citation needed.
Uh, in a 3 persons household, obviously all 3 can cycle 4 hours before they work and 4 hours after they work: so as a rough estimate: it does add up. Does not really matter if we are 50% off or not. It was just "thought experiment".
Please forgive me that I did not take a pocket calculator and made an exact calculation.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Has anyone been harmed by it? The article you link to does not make the claim that they are at a dangerous level, only that it is elevated and has frightened hunters.
So, there are multi-generational colonies of boar thriving in this level of radiation.
Souds like our tests need to be recalibrated...
You're being a pedant. The only thing that matters is if the house uses 11kWh in that day, then 11Kw needs to be generated. So you either need 1 person on a stationary bike for 55 to 110 hours depending on their fitness - going full out. Which is of course impossible - or you need a number of people divided into that total to make it happen. Like I said, can't be done on human effort. Unless you want to hire 20-30 people to bike for 3-4 hours every day to generate enough electricity to run your house. Which is insane.
It's not even a pocket calcuator. 3 people in the household generating power for 8 hours per day - which like I say requires FULL EFFORT, like Tour de France/Ironman marathon effort - to get to 200w of out them - will generate only 4.8 kWh. So after burning out all of your dwellers and ensuring they have no life, you're still not even halfway to that 11kWh.
When the literally comment is...
A household of 3 persons in Germany uses over a year on average 4250 kWh. That is close to 11kWh per day. So you obviously could generate that yourself if you wanted
And I show how that's incorrect, that's not being pedantic, that's showing that the person's entire argument is false. If your argument is ABC and ABC is the main point of your argument, going over the math of ABC isn't fretting the small stuff, it's me going over ABC which person indicated was the main point of their argument.
Yes, and what is your point?
Being half way off during a 10 seconds calculation, is quite ok for me.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.