First off, cadmium was the control system; if you're going to count that, you ought to count a heck of a lot more stuff like you did. Secondly, if you're not reaching criticality, what kind of "cooling" needs are you dealing with? You're just talking about lumps of uranium in a tank of water with a slightly elevated rate of decay for some unknown length of time.
Care to provide more specifics, or do you prefer to leave your anecdote -- which I can't find anywhere else -- completely unreferenced?
Oh, and by the way: your definition of "reactor" classifies the uranium/beryllium varieities of the natural mineral alanite/muromonite as "nuclear reactors". So the first nuclear reactor was whenever the first deposit of such minerals formed.
As of yesterday, Tokyo, a city with what's normally a very low background radiation, was at 50% higher radiation than Mexico City, a place of high background radiation (and no, there have been no statistically significant results on whether higher natural rates of background radiation cause adverse health effects in *either direction*; that sort of study is extremely difficult to do). But we're talking Tokyo, *150 miles away* from the reactor, and tangential to the direction of prevailing winds. And we're talking about radioactive particulate matter which is inhaleable/ingestible, a problem orders of magnitude worse than exposure from purely external sources.
This says 20 worldwide since 1970. And they're counting things like "The first was Tim McCartney, who fell to his death near Conrad, Montana in the mid 1970s while trying to salvage a 1930s-era windcharger" and "In a bizarre year 2000 accident, a young parachutist crashed into a wind turbine on the German island of Fehrmarn" and "Robert Skarski died in 1993 while installing a small wind turbine at his Illinois home. He was killed when the tower he was on buckled and fell to the ground" and "Ugene Stallhut was driving a tractor as a tow vehicle when it flipped over and crushed him on a farm in Iowa" and "a spate of electrocutions". Or are people working with power lines for wind power somehow more likely to die than people working with power lines for nuclear power plants?
That report is from 2004, mind you, but I seriously doubt there's been some radical change in the picture since then.
As for nuclear accidents, I don't even begin to keep track of those (deaths from non-acute radiation poisoning especially are hard to track, and who's keeping track of mining deaths, electrocution deaths, etc?)
No, the right argument is, "Why was a plant built that could be damaged by a huge fucking tsunami". The word "tsunami" is a Japanese word, for crying out loud. If a nuclear power plant in the great plains was hit by a "huge fucking tornado" and went down, would you just excuse it as an act of god? You have to build toward the known risks or not build at all. And when the scale of economic catastrophe caused by a failure of what you're engineering is massive, your tolerance toward risk should be equally minimal. And that includes doing your best to account for "unknown unknowns". If you can't? You don't build it.
Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion. Apart from initial explosions and the like, there's no good reason any sizeable number of people in an informed populace has to die because there's plenty of time to react. That doesn't mean you can ignore them or that they don't cause tens or hundreds of billion dollars in damages. You have to put forth heroic efforts to try to stop a catastrophe from becoming a megacatastrophe. You have to order the evacuations. You have to destroy produce and milk. You have to leave areas closed off to settlement and larger areas to agriculture. You have to find new water supplies. You have to seal off any sources of further radiation leakage, whatever the cost. And so on, all depending on the scale of the accident.
Everyone focuses on deaths with nuclear accidents, but apart from the sudden explosion/etc deaths and the deaths caused by a poor response to the disaster, nobody has to die in even a major nuclear accident. They're just really freaking expensive to deal with, in terms of containment, in terms of ruined property, and in terms of protracted economic damages.
Someone should probably look up the differences between "acute radiation poisoning" and "chronic radiation poisoning".
And your comments about bathing in reactor coolant are just plain absurd, unless you mean secondary coolant. FYI, several Japanese workers recently washed their legs in *extremely diluted* coolant from on of the Fukushima #1 reactors (runoff from the intensive seawater flooding). The two who had skin exposure are now in the hospital. And what are you talking about to begin with -- the world's first nuclear reactor in Belgium? The world's first nuclear reactor was the Chicago Pile, famous for their "ax man" control rod system. Belgium's first reactor was the BR1 research reactor which went critical in 1956, and it was hardly a bathtub.
No, he's not. I went one step further and followed his link. Proof by Ghost Reference. It does not say what he claims it does.
The main reason why elements with low half lives are dangerous is precisely *because* they have low half lives. U-238 is all over the bloody planet, but with a half life similar to the age of the planet, it poses little threat. Iodine poses the primary threat initially after a nuclear accident, followed by cesium and strontium over time. The Chernobyl exclusion zone may be opened for development and agriculture again up once the cesium and strontium decay sufficiently.
What sort of ridiculous-looking hat are you pulling your figures from, like your "500m higher" one? Fukushima City's radiation levels are ~100 times their normal background level -- and they're 30km *west* (against the prevailing winds) of the reactor. Tokyo today is at 4x their normal background, and they're *150km* away and tangential to the prevailing winds. And the accident is still ongoing, and will be for quite a while. And we're talking about external radiation, not inhaled/ingested particulate, which is orders of magnitude worse for the body than radiation from external sources (like most background radiation, like the radiation from X-rays, like the radiation from flying, etc).
Could you please put down the nuclear power pom poms for just a minute and enter the real world where this is a serious disaster having a serious effect on a first-world country?
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound He pulls the spitting high-tension wires down...
You know, I once came up with the notion that if you wanted an *incredibly* loud speaker, and had a large budget, you could encode music into detonating det cord by varying its radius and thus the force of its pressure wave. Depending on how thin you can make the cord, a normal length song would take a couple dozen to a couple hundred tonnes of explosives (not cheap), but you would have the volume to broadcast across a huge area.
I was then thinking of, "What song would be best to play to people out of the blue, no warning, as part of a crazy art project?" And then it hit me: Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult. In Tokyo Bay. As you inflate a Godzilla parade float in the water with helium, causing it to rise up and out of the water head-first (ultimately releasing it to float away over the town).
All the research I know of says that small doses of radiation are not particularly harmful.
Citation please yourself. There's a distinct lack of conclusive evidence in either direction because controlling for such large population based studies on something that varies so much with other factors is extremely difficult. Nuclear proponents often cite this absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Nuclear opponents counter that barring research to the contrary, due caution requires assuming that the same effects that occur at the larger scale (DNA damage by ionizing radiation leading to cancer, for example) are problematic at the smaller scale as well.
Quite true. Only the volatiles (Cs-137, I-131, etc) make it any significant distance from a nuclear disaster. The non-volatile elements end up attached to or as part of larger particulate matter and are generally deposited within 100km of the accident -- aka, significant amounts wouldn't even make it to Tokyo if the winds at the time of release were pointing straight at it.
A lack of those means it's less likely Fukushima will involve a permanent exclusion zone around it, but the overall health effects for regions beyond will be similar to that for Chernobyl after adjusting for prevailing wind direction.
Note that this accident isn't even close to over. There's several times as much nuclear decay waste products at Fukushima #1 as there were at Chernobyl, only a small fraction of those have been released into the environment so far, and the disaster is still clearly ongoing. There will almost certainly be more volatiles released by Fukushima than Chernobyl when this is done. The question is how kind will the winds be over the coming months and whether there will be even more "oh noes".
Changing a battery pack is like changing your car's frame. Only that if you wear down the connections between frame parts, you don't get arcing, melting, and fire.
What are you trying to prove, except for the fact that you pay absurd rates for electricity, several times more than most Americans pay?
I pay 8.5 cents per kWh for each incremental kWh.
The US national average for residential electricity, all buys together, is now up to 11.04 cents per kWh. That's residential; commercial and especially industrial are even cheaper (industrial is 6.59 cents per kilowatt hour).
Sorry to have to tell you that you're getting ripped off.
I've watched a layer nanometers thick charge up to over 50V and discharge with a loud, bright spark when it finally arced. What's being worked on in the laboratories right now is damned impressive.
Also, an 80kWh pack will take a Prius-like vehicle about 300 miles if you don't drive too fast.
If all vehicle transportation energy shifted to electric, it'd increase our production needs by roughly half. This is well less than our current surplus capacity which is designed to cancel out day/night differences, so if it was predominantly at night, it'd barely be noticed. So needless to say, power companies are hugely on board with this -- extra sales with little new infrastructure. Their main concern, the thing they need to deal with, is "last leg" delivery. Some of the smaller neighborhood substations may not be able to handle the extra charging at peak charging times and will need to be upgraded. But this is no big deal; it's just something that needs to be monitored and dealt with as necessary.
You know that not all capacitors are the same, right? Just because it's "a capacitor" doesn't mean it's going to behave like whatever particular type of capacitor you're thinking of.
Anyway, I've met with some of the people at the University of Illinois who are working on energy storage. This is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg compared to what's being worked on there. Their physics department is taking advantage of quantum effects for energy storage. We're talking theoretical electrical energy storage densities near that of nuclear reactions, and practical energy densities from some of their earlier designs which still put chemical fuels to shame. I don't want to go into the things that they haven't published about yet (although they're really, really cool!), but if you want to see some of their older work, look up "digital quantum batteries".
Most people don't realize that the reasons trains get disappointing mileage is because they average being extremely heavy per passenger once you factor in the empty seats, not-seating cars, etc. They get superb results for well-loaded cargo trains, mind you.
People, please stop quoting these numbers; they're absurd and not even close to the real world. A Prius-like vehicle uses about 250Wh/mi at low to moderate highway speeds. Perhaps an electric monster truck would use power like that, but not your average passenger sedan.
Really? Swap something that weighs hundreds of kilograms, with connectors at hundreds of volts, which forms the structural backbone of part of your vehicle and is critical for its weight balance? At home? Really?
See my comments earlier about power transfer and RF.
A *passively cooled* cable (with a current flowing for long periods) would be. For EV chargers exceeding about 50kW in output or so, you have to start actively cooling the cable to keep it manageable in size. But cooling can easily take you through the hundreds of kW, potentially even into the MW range.
1) Flowing DC creates a magnetic field, but it's static. Only flowing AC makes a propagating electromagnetic field (RF). Batteries don't charge on AC. 2) If you have a cheap battery pack for the vehicle, you can get an equally cheap, slightly higher voltage pack for the home. The grid doesn't need to deliver that kind of power; it can go from pack to pack. 3) The numbers are totally wrong. A Prius-like vehicle at low to moderate highway speeds on flat terrain uses about 250Wh/mi / 150Wh/km. 80km = 12kWh. In 10 minutes, that's 72kW. Not 1.0MW. 4) Even if you did have 10kW waste heat -- nearly 14 times as fast charging -- that's 6MJ of waste heat, 1.4Mcal, or enough to raise about 12 gallons of cooling water by 30C (assuming the water doesn't cool at all during the charging). Oh noes!
The US residential average just recently broke 10 cents per kWh. Even California's is half of what you quoted. Yes, some isolated places pay out the nose, but it's what most people pay that matters, not you poor schmucks.
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First off, cadmium was the control system; if you're going to count that, you ought to count a heck of a lot more stuff like you did. Secondly, if you're not reaching criticality, what kind of "cooling" needs are you dealing with? You're just talking about lumps of uranium in a tank of water with a slightly elevated rate of decay for some unknown length of time.
Care to provide more specifics, or do you prefer to leave your anecdote -- which I can't find anywhere else -- completely unreferenced?
Oh, and by the way: your definition of "reactor" classifies the uranium/beryllium varieities of the natural mineral alanite/muromonite as "nuclear reactors". So the first nuclear reactor was whenever the first deposit of such minerals formed.
As of yesterday, Tokyo, a city with what's normally a very low background radiation, was at 50% higher radiation than Mexico City, a place of high background radiation (and no, there have been no statistically significant results on whether higher natural rates of background radiation cause adverse health effects in *either direction*; that sort of study is extremely difficult to do). But we're talking Tokyo, *150 miles away* from the reactor, and tangential to the direction of prevailing winds. And we're talking about radioactive particulate matter which is inhaleable/ingestible, a problem orders of magnitude worse than exposure from purely external sources.
This says 20 worldwide since 1970. And they're counting things like "The first was Tim McCartney, who fell to his death near Conrad, Montana in the mid 1970s while trying to salvage a 1930s-era windcharger" and "In a bizarre year 2000 accident, a young parachutist crashed into a wind turbine on the German island of Fehrmarn" and "Robert Skarski died in 1993 while installing a small wind turbine at his Illinois home. He was killed when the tower he was on buckled and fell to the ground" and "Ugene Stallhut was driving a tractor as a tow vehicle when it flipped over and crushed him on a farm in Iowa" and "a spate of electrocutions". Or are people working with power lines for wind power somehow more likely to die than people working with power lines for nuclear power plants?
That report is from 2004, mind you, but I seriously doubt there's been some radical change in the picture since then.
As for nuclear accidents, I don't even begin to keep track of those (deaths from non-acute radiation poisoning especially are hard to track, and who's keeping track of mining deaths, electrocution deaths, etc?)
No, the right argument is, "Why was a plant built that could be damaged by a huge fucking tsunami". The word "tsunami" is a Japanese word, for crying out loud. If a nuclear power plant in the great plains was hit by a "huge fucking tornado" and went down, would you just excuse it as an act of god? You have to build toward the known risks or not build at all. And when the scale of economic catastrophe caused by a failure of what you're engineering is massive, your tolerance toward risk should be equally minimal. And that includes doing your best to account for "unknown unknowns". If you can't? You don't build it.
Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion. Apart from initial explosions and the like, there's no good reason any sizeable number of people in an informed populace has to die because there's plenty of time to react. That doesn't mean you can ignore them or that they don't cause tens or hundreds of billion dollars in damages. You have to put forth heroic efforts to try to stop a catastrophe from becoming a megacatastrophe. You have to order the evacuations. You have to destroy produce and milk. You have to leave areas closed off to settlement and larger areas to agriculture. You have to find new water supplies. You have to seal off any sources of further radiation leakage, whatever the cost. And so on, all depending on the scale of the accident.
Everyone focuses on deaths with nuclear accidents, but apart from the sudden explosion/etc deaths and the deaths caused by a poor response to the disaster, nobody has to die in even a major nuclear accident. They're just really freaking expensive to deal with, in terms of containment, in terms of ruined property, and in terms of protracted economic damages.
Someone should probably look up the differences between "acute radiation poisoning" and "chronic radiation poisoning".
And your comments about bathing in reactor coolant are just plain absurd, unless you mean secondary coolant. FYI, several Japanese workers recently washed their legs in *extremely diluted* coolant from on of the Fukushima #1 reactors (runoff from the intensive seawater flooding). The two who had skin exposure are now in the hospital. And what are you talking about to begin with -- the world's first nuclear reactor in Belgium? The world's first nuclear reactor was the Chicago Pile, famous for their "ax man" control rod system. Belgium's first reactor was the BR1 research reactor which went critical in 1956, and it was hardly a bathtub.
No, he's not. I went one step further and followed his link. Proof by Ghost Reference. It does not say what he claims it does.
The main reason why elements with low half lives are dangerous is precisely *because* they have low half lives. U-238 is all over the bloody planet, but with a half life similar to the age of the planet, it poses little threat. Iodine poses the primary threat initially after a nuclear accident, followed by cesium and strontium over time. The Chernobyl exclusion zone may be opened for development and agriculture again up once the cesium and strontium decay sufficiently.
What sort of ridiculous-looking hat are you pulling your figures from, like your "500m higher" one? Fukushima City's radiation levels are ~100 times their normal background level -- and they're 30km *west* (against the prevailing winds) of the reactor. Tokyo today is at 4x their normal background, and they're *150km* away and tangential to the prevailing winds. And the accident is still ongoing, and will be for quite a while. And we're talking about external radiation, not inhaled/ingested particulate, which is orders of magnitude worse for the body than radiation from external sources (like most background radiation, like the radiation from X-rays, like the radiation from flying, etc).
Could you please put down the nuclear power pom poms for just a minute and enter the real world where this is a serious disaster having a serious effect on a first-world country?
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
He pulls the spitting high-tension wires down...
You know, I once came up with the notion that if you wanted an *incredibly* loud speaker, and had a large budget, you could encode music into detonating det cord by varying its radius and thus the force of its pressure wave. Depending on how thin you can make the cord, a normal length song would take a couple dozen to a couple hundred tonnes of explosives (not cheap), but you would have the volume to broadcast across a huge area.
I was then thinking of, "What song would be best to play to people out of the blue, no warning, as part of a crazy art project?" And then it hit me: Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult. In Tokyo Bay. As you inflate a Godzilla parade float in the water with helium, causing it to rise up and out of the water head-first (ultimately releasing it to float away over the town).
Citation please yourself. There's a distinct lack of conclusive evidence in either direction because controlling for such large population based studies on something that varies so much with other factors is extremely difficult. Nuclear proponents often cite this absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Nuclear opponents counter that barring research to the contrary, due caution requires assuming that the same effects that occur at the larger scale (DNA damage by ionizing radiation leading to cancer, for example) are problematic at the smaller scale as well.
Quite true. Only the volatiles (Cs-137, I-131, etc) make it any significant distance from a nuclear disaster. The non-volatile elements end up attached to or as part of larger particulate matter and are generally deposited within 100km of the accident -- aka, significant amounts wouldn't even make it to Tokyo if the winds at the time of release were pointing straight at it.
A lack of those means it's less likely Fukushima will involve a permanent exclusion zone around it, but the overall health effects for regions beyond will be similar to that for Chernobyl after adjusting for prevailing wind direction.
Note that this accident isn't even close to over. There's several times as much nuclear decay waste products at Fukushima #1 as there were at Chernobyl, only a small fraction of those have been released into the environment so far, and the disaster is still clearly ongoing. There will almost certainly be more volatiles released by Fukushima than Chernobyl when this is done. The question is how kind will the winds be over the coming months and whether there will be even more "oh noes".
Changing a battery pack is like changing your car's frame. Only that if you wear down the connections between frame parts, you don't get arcing, melting, and fire.
What are you trying to prove, except for the fact that you pay absurd rates for electricity, several times more than most Americans pay?
I pay 8.5 cents per kWh for each incremental kWh.
The US national average for residential electricity, all buys together, is now up to 11.04 cents per kWh. That's residential; commercial and especially industrial are even cheaper (industrial is 6.59 cents per kilowatt hour).
Sorry to have to tell you that you're getting ripped off.
I've watched a layer nanometers thick charge up to over 50V and discharge with a loud, bright spark when it finally arced. What's being worked on in the laboratories right now is damned impressive.
Also, an 80kWh pack will take a Prius-like vehicle about 300 miles if you don't drive too fast.
If all vehicle transportation energy shifted to electric, it'd increase our production needs by roughly half. This is well less than our current surplus capacity which is designed to cancel out day/night differences, so if it was predominantly at night, it'd barely be noticed. So needless to say, power companies are hugely on board with this -- extra sales with little new infrastructure. Their main concern, the thing they need to deal with, is "last leg" delivery. Some of the smaller neighborhood substations may not be able to handle the extra charging at peak charging times and will need to be upgraded. But this is no big deal; it's just something that needs to be monitored and dealt with as necessary.
You know that not all capacitors are the same, right? Just because it's "a capacitor" doesn't mean it's going to behave like whatever particular type of capacitor you're thinking of.
Anyway, I've met with some of the people at the University of Illinois who are working on energy storage. This is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg compared to what's being worked on there. Their physics department is taking advantage of quantum effects for energy storage. We're talking theoretical electrical energy storage densities near that of nuclear reactions, and practical energy densities from some of their earlier designs which still put chemical fuels to shame. I don't want to go into the things that they haven't published about yet (although they're really, really cool!), but if you want to see some of their older work, look up "digital quantum batteries".
You really think that you expend half of your engine's capability just to maintain speed on the highway?
Try again.
The RAV4EV (an electric RAV4) took about 300-350Wh/mi for low to maintain moderate highway speeds.
Most people don't realize that the reasons trains get disappointing mileage is because they average being extremely heavy per passenger once you factor in the empty seats, not-seating cars, etc. They get superb results for well-loaded cargo trains, mind you.
People, please stop quoting these numbers; they're absurd and not even close to the real world. A Prius-like vehicle uses about 250Wh/mi at low to moderate highway speeds. Perhaps an electric monster truck would use power like that, but not your average passenger sedan.
Really? Swap something that weighs hundreds of kilograms, with connectors at hundreds of volts, which forms the structural backbone of part of your vehicle and is critical for its weight balance? At home? Really?
See my comments earlier about power transfer and RF.
A *passively cooled* cable (with a current flowing for long periods) would be. For EV chargers exceeding about 50kW in output or so, you have to start actively cooling the cable to keep it manageable in size. But cooling can easily take you through the hundreds of kW, potentially even into the MW range.
1) Flowing DC creates a magnetic field, but it's static. Only flowing AC makes a propagating electromagnetic field (RF). Batteries don't charge on AC.
2) If you have a cheap battery pack for the vehicle, you can get an equally cheap, slightly higher voltage pack for the home. The grid doesn't need to deliver that kind of power; it can go from pack to pack.
3) The numbers are totally wrong. A Prius-like vehicle at low to moderate highway speeds on flat terrain uses about 250Wh/mi / 150Wh/km. 80km = 12kWh. In 10 minutes, that's 72kW. Not 1.0MW.
4) Even if you did have 10kW waste heat -- nearly 14 times as fast charging -- that's 6MJ of waste heat, 1.4Mcal, or enough to raise about 12 gallons of cooling water by 30C (assuming the water doesn't cool at all during the charging). Oh noes!
The US residential average just recently broke 10 cents per kWh. Even California's is half of what you quoted. Yes, some isolated places pay out the nose, but it's what most people pay that matters, not you poor schmucks.
Are you kidding? Al-Qaeda cites Israel and the Palestinians all the bloody time.
Because anyone who says "god damn you" means that they want to live in a Christian theocracy?
Some things are just phrases.
But to speed those up, we'd need to use tiny atoms. And have you priced those lately? I'm not made of money!