> A large part, as much as 80%, should be nuclear.
On most grids, it's a surprisingly bad idea to have that much nuclear in the mix.
The reason is demand-side variation; if you have to reduce the output of your reactor, the cost of the energy has gone up- for example a nuclear reactor running at half power is making electricity at twice the cost/kWh; and it wasn't cheap electricity to start with; nuclear power is never cheap.
With 80% you'd pretty much always have to daily be turning down your nukes due to demand side reductions. France has problems with that, they have some hydroelectricity to help buffer their nuclear, but not enough of the right sort.
> I also believe that we are close to hitting the limits on wind and solar as well, if we have not already.
Not really. The limiting factors are almost exclusively financial, and costs are continuing to drop as production ramps up.
> I have been following the development of PV solar for some time now and while we see many claims of more efficient PV cells they rarely or never make it to market because of cost.
The PV market is not limited much at all by efficiency thing; most panels are 15-20% efficient but a 5% efficient PV might well be worth it if it was cheap enough to deploy.
> What I've seen as a trend in PV development is a focus on making them cheaper rather than more efficient. They'll give up as much as 1/2 of the power output per area if it means making them 1/4 the price. They'll just make up the difference in volume.
Exactly.
> Oh, and windmills are windmills. I don't see a whole lot of gains there either. The best we'll see is an improvement in price due to volume. People have been experimenting with windmills for centuries now, I don't expect to see big gains here.
Actually, this isn't true, there's been big improvements over the last decade or so, and there are quite big gains still being made even now. There are large gains being made in the last few years by making taller and taller windmills; the power is more reliable at higher altitudes that these taller structures can reach, and the cost per watt goes down-wind power is now the cheapest of all power where the biggest wind turbines are deployed. Also other big economies of scale are happening thoughout the production and installation processes. And replacing existing windmills with bigger windmills is a thing that is done where appropriate.
In short, there's no limits that have been reached on the cost/watt of renewables, which is mostly what we care about; energy efficiency is not an issue for renewables, unlike coal where you're actually having to dig coal out of the ground and where burning it creates pollution.
"Nobody needed to worry except those near Chernobyl or any children in the areas where significant I-131 could accumulate."
Perhaps technically true, except that due to the weather conditions at the time fucking Chernobyl dumped significant quantities of I-131 in Wales, which was over 2000 km away.
That just shows how unsafe nuclear power really is. The Welsh farming restrictions took decades to be removed.
Nuclear power is unsafe in an economic sense, and it's not really safe in a medical sense either; just because you can nearly always get away from a nuclear disaster before it kills you (and hence leads to few deaths) it doesn't mean that it's safe, any more than fire is "safe" if it burns down a building if everyone gets out. If it was really safe you wouldn't need to have everything contained in thick steel and concrete, and it wouldn't fairly regularly melt down.
Not purely, no. But global warming is a numbers game. If you can greatly reduce the CO2 emissions, and it's currently looking like we might be able to because alternative energy is getting seriously cheap, then we can stop the really bad things happening; even if we still use coke for some things.
Yes, I genuinely would find it more comprehensible. Because energy and power are not the same thing at all. You cannot measure energy in watts, no way, no how. Something can be high power, low energy, or low power, high energy; they are very, very different.
I can only assume that you're referring to a Scientific American article that says that a coal powered plant emits a hundred times than the amount of radiation of a RUNNING nuclear plant; that's a RUNNING plant, not one that has lost its containment when it melted down. When a nuclear reactor melts down, the amount of radiation emitted jumps about a MILLION fold; and then takes decades, or longer, to decay away.
But don't take my word for it, here's the article:
The articles just says that the absorbed dose of someone living within a mile or so downwind of a coal plant is about 1.8 mrem/year, compared to 300 mrem/year of natural background radiation. After a meltdown the levels at that distance can be more than 300mrem/year just from the reactor. It will decay away over time, but it can still be well above acceptable limits hundreds of years later.
There's just absolutely no way at all that the total output of the coal plant could ever reach that of melted down nuclear reactor, let alone being a hundred times more. You're just totally full of it.
There's plenty of reasons to shut down coal plants, mercury, small particle air pollution, acid rain, CO2 etc. etc. Radiation just isn't one of them. The radiation is very dilute and far, far below background radiation. Dilute radiation is largely (but non completely) non problematic; we're surrounded by dilute background radiation anyway. it's the fallout from meltdowns that causes mass evacuations and all farming to cease. That's the real problem, and it's specific to nuclear accidents.
> No, it isn't. Actually, it is shockingly cheap, if done correctly...
Yeah right, whatever you say. France was the absolute best case, and even they don't have the cheapest electricity.
>And that is where you're going wrong. You think that because a select few places are doing it (or appearing to do it), that means it can be everywhere.
>Right now, about 5% of the world's power comes from renewables, but that is just electricity, that doesn't count all the fossil fuels used directly.
LOL, you're out by a factor of 10, try 22% of worldwide primary energy in 2014!!!
> Driving, for example, consumes huge amounts of oil. Large amounts of natural gas are consumed by healing homes (and water and cooking). None of that is going to change any time soon.
Actually no, again, you're not tracking reality very well.
Electric cars are largely practical and can be charged very well using renewable power, particularly wind and solar; and they're getting better pretty rapidly (car battery costs are dropping ~8% per annum).
But the kicker is that when you use wind and solar, the primary energy needed to drive goes, way, way down.
That's because electricity is low entropy; batteries and electric motors can be, and are very efficient.
That's also why people with electric cars report that their electricity bill doesn't change much; because their cars are so much more efficient.
Also heating houses can be done with heat pumps.
These things aren't going to change this year or next year, but as cars and boilers wear out people can replace them with more environmentally friendly technologies; it will take a decade or so, but it's definitely happening; and in the meantime nuclear isn't likely to grow, it will shrink, and nor is it needed.
> I don't doubt it, but the reasons for that are also political in nature... we could get the costs down if we got over our "oh my god the nuclears" fears. If we don't, then it will be coal, oil, and natural gas.
Yeah, yeah. Fundamentally, nuclear is pretty expensive, but it's not just price; there's multiple other highly valid reasons why nuclear power can be seriously bad news including nuclear proliferation, nuclear waste, safety (a few percent of ALL reactors have melted down), it's extremely complex, it's highly inflexible- it pretty much has to be run flat-out, needs huge amounts of fresh cooling water, and it takes a long, long time to build. It's not just any one thing. Sure you can fix some of those problems in some places, but that's a lot of major potential downsides. Fuck up any of them, and you end up with a massive white elephant.
But the world is not either-or. We're not back in 1980s where the options were very limited, coal, gas nuclear. Here is a list of places that already have 100% renewable electricity:
>yet it is highly variable and natural gas turbines have to be kept on standby to make up for the shortfalls when they happen.
ROFLMAO. You do know that nuclear reactors can fail at any time, and require back up turbines for the shortfalls? And nuclear doesn't load-follow worth a damn; a nuclear reactor running at 50% is making electricity at double the cost; and it wasn't cheap in the first place. I mean sure, reactors can physically do it, it's just too expensive to actually do it. France- the poster child for nuclear power has to import energy from friendly neighbouring countries during cold snaps, and France was the best possible case for nuclear power!!!
And there's no upper limit on the amount of wind you can put on a grid, and the costs of electricity storage are dropping in price exponentially as well. One main trick is to export any spare electricity you have. That's what Denmark does, and they're already running on 40% wind power, and have a plan to take it to 85%.
That is impossible, nuclear power is cheap, safe, and radiation cannot hurt me anyway; and soon nuclear reactors will be EVERYWHERE and it will be GLORIOUS!
> Solar and Wind will slowly increase in overall percentage, but won't be a major part of the total world wide power consumption this century. Maybe in the 22nd Century they will, but hopefully by then Fusion is working and we won't need them.
Yeah, right. This is just wishful thinking on your part.
Wind power alone is already making 10% of the EU's average electricity supply, and wind energy is now cheaper than coal or gas in many parts of America.
Wind power in the world is growing enormously quickly, literally exponentially, at around 14%, year on year, and has been for about a decade, and shows no sign of slowing; and it's price competitive, fairly consistently cheaper than nuclear. It also has less restrictions than nuclear.
That's just wind; and it's already starting to overtake nuclear power for overall production.baseline.
Solar is smaller, but growing faster, the price is still relatively high, but dropping like a stone; and in sunny places it's already very competitive.
Yes, this is why all coal power plants have an exclusion zone around them.
Oh... wait...
Hmmm has it ever occurred to anyone that shear amount of radioactivity might not be the most important thing, that the density of radiation might be important, or to wonder why nuclear power only looks kinda good if compared to what is pretty much the most ridiculously polluting way to generate electricity ever invented, and even then comparing in very narrow ways?
Apparently not. Moving along. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Oh I'm not scared of nuclear reactors, they're just a waste of money.
The reason (say) Fukushima was not evacuated was because of the winds at the time, if the winds had been different the result would have been different. Of course prevailing winds are normally from the West due to the rotation of the Earth, so a reactor meltdown on the East coast next to a huge ocean like the Pacific is about the best possible place for it, but even then winds can go in any direction.
And Wales is well over a thousand miles away from Chernobyl; and yet it was very affected by it. Think about what that means for nuclear power.
Banqiao was a once in 2000 years flood that caused the dam to fail. We almost certainly haven't had the one in 2000 year nuclear accident YET.
Imagine trying to evacuate Tokyo or Paris; that's the kind of thing that could happen.
You can't imagine it. Your brain is too small.
If Nuclear was super-duper cheap, maybe it would be worth it, but actually it's fairly expensive and pretty inflexible. Meanwhile the cost of renewables are dropping like a stone, and they don't mix very well with nuclear. When building a power generation system, you start with the cheap, easily built stuff, and build it around that. Doing that will largely or completely squeeze nuclear power out of the equation.
Complex, dangerous, expensive nuclear power just isn't very good from very many different angles, and that's why it has not taken off, and nor will it ever.
In Wales it took 20 years to get down to levels where farming could begin again.
This year, there was a HUGE spike in the radioactivity found in reindeer from Chernobyl; that's like 30 years later, and levels aren't remotely down to levels where the meat is safe.
And Chernobyl probably wasn't even the worse case meltdown; it's just the worst we've had so far. There's a subtle fallacy that we cannot get a worse meltdown than that.
Nuclear power is just too expensive and too dangerous. It's also too inflexible; it can pretty much only give you baseload power. If you run a nuclear reactor at 50% load, the price of the electricity doubles. So then you have to have pumped storage or hydroelectricity anyway. In which case why are you bothering with it, you might as well use cheaper renewables, which can be much more rapidly deployed.
It also affected sheep in Wales, and they had to stop sheep farming for quite a while; that was more of a nuisance I think.
Note that there was recently a big spike in the radioactivity of the reindeer population, like this year; the problem simply hasn't gone away. Apparently mushrooms also bioaccumulate it or something, and they had a big crop.
Even with reindeer; people do farm reindeer, presumably they're in big trouble.
Really, nuclear power is a waste of money; it's expensive and a few percent of all nuclear reactors ever built have melted down. That's too many, and there's no signs that the rate is decreasing, in spite of claims with EVERY generation of reactors that this generation of reactors is perfectly safe. Fukushima was fortunate in that it was on the east side of Japan, if a reactor on the west coast, the fallout pattern would have been much, much worse.
And statistically speaking we still haven't seen the worse case meltdowns; winds vary- imagine if a reactor melted down upwind of a capital city.
> Caesium-137 is most of what remains, and has a 30-year half-life. So the atoms will be around up to 10 or 20 generations, but it is highly water soluble, so...
Nope. Caesium 137 concentrates up the food chain, it doesn't just dissolve down. If it did dissolve it would be no problem, but that's not the case. That's why it's one of the biggest issues long term. Grasses suck it up, cows eat the grass, humans eat the cows... gets laid down in your bones, and you get cancer. Yummy!
The reason that people aren't so up in arms about it, is that the cancers that result are hard to distinguish from naturally occurring cancers. If you can't tell precisely who died from fallout, it must be all OK, yes???
Clean coal pretty much does actually exist, you can put carbon capture and smoke stack scrubbers etc etc. but when you do that it winds up very expensive.
> The upper limit of efficiency for a solar cell is about 30% - and we're still about 10% below that on even the best experimental designs.
Wrong. Solar sells have already been built that are ~45% or more efficient.
FWIW the upper theoretical limit is over 90%. The reason that solar panels don't do that right now is because you have to tune the solar panel to the colours of light you want to collect; and you'd have to construct the panel to absorb equally well in each range, and that's hard. The high performing panels collect several ranges to achieve those higher figures.
The reason why the theoretical limit is over 90% is because of Carnot- the temperature associated with the light which hits the panel is that of the sun, which is very, very hot, and the waste heat is emitted at ambient temperature.
Slashdot Mirror
> A large part, as much as 80%, should be nuclear.
On most grids, it's a surprisingly bad idea to have that much nuclear in the mix.
The reason is demand-side variation; if you have to reduce the output of your reactor, the cost of the energy has gone up- for example a nuclear reactor running at half power is making electricity at twice the cost/kWh; and it wasn't cheap electricity to start with; nuclear power is never cheap.
With 80% you'd pretty much always have to daily be turning down your nukes due to demand side reductions. France has problems with that, they have some hydroelectricity to help buffer their nuclear, but not enough of the right sort.
> I also believe that we are close to hitting the limits on wind and solar as well, if we have not already.
Not really. The limiting factors are almost exclusively financial, and costs are continuing to drop as production ramps up.
> I have been following the development of PV solar for some time now and while we see many claims of more efficient PV cells they rarely or never make it to market because of cost.
The PV market is not limited much at all by efficiency thing; most panels are 15-20% efficient but a 5% efficient PV might well be worth it if it was cheap enough to deploy.
> What I've seen as a trend in PV development is a focus on making them cheaper rather than more efficient. They'll give up as much as 1/2 of the power output per area if it means making them 1/4 the price. They'll just make up the difference in volume.
Exactly.
> Oh, and windmills are windmills. I don't see a whole lot of gains there either. The best we'll see is an improvement in price due to volume. People have been experimenting with windmills for centuries now, I don't expect to see big gains here.
Actually, this isn't true, there's been big improvements over the last decade or so, and there are quite big gains still being made even now. There are large gains being made in the last few years by making taller and taller windmills; the power is more reliable at higher altitudes that these taller structures can reach, and the cost per watt goes down-wind power is now the cheapest of all power where the biggest wind turbines are deployed. Also other big economies of scale are happening thoughout the production and installation processes. And replacing existing windmills with bigger windmills is a thing that is done where appropriate.
In short, there's no limits that have been reached on the cost/watt of renewables, which is mostly what we care about; energy efficiency is not an issue for renewables, unlike coal where you're actually having to dig coal out of the ground and where burning it creates pollution.
"Nobody needed to worry except those near Chernobyl or any children in the areas where significant I-131 could accumulate."
Perhaps technically true, except that due to the weather conditions at the time fucking Chernobyl dumped significant quantities of I-131 in Wales, which was over 2000 km away.
That just shows how unsafe nuclear power really is. The Welsh farming restrictions took decades to be removed.
Nuclear power is unsafe in an economic sense, and it's not really safe in a medical sense either; just because you can nearly always get away from a nuclear disaster before it kills you (and hence leads to few deaths) it doesn't mean that it's safe, any more than fire is "safe" if it burns down a building if everyone gets out. If it was really safe you wouldn't need to have everything contained in thick steel and concrete, and it wouldn't fairly regularly melt down.
...but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines." - David Brent
But it turns out they get fried by particle colliders, so it's not all good news.
Is Elon Musk a serf?
You can also use charcoal, although it's more expensive. Charcoal is potentially zero-carbon because it's produced from biomass.
Not purely, no. But global warming is a numbers game. If you can greatly reduce the CO2 emissions, and it's currently looking like we might be able to because alternative energy is getting seriously cheap, then we can stop the really bad things happening; even if we still use coke for some things.
Electric arc furnaces are used to recycle steel all the time rather than using coke for it.
Yes, I genuinely would find it more comprehensible. Because energy and power are not the same thing at all. You cannot measure energy in watts, no way, no how. Something can be high power, low energy, or low power, high energy; they are very, very different.
This is absolute total fucking bullshit!
I can only assume that you're referring to a Scientific American article that says that a coal powered plant emits a hundred times than the amount of radiation of a RUNNING nuclear plant; that's a RUNNING plant, not one that has lost its containment when it melted down. When a nuclear reactor melts down, the amount of radiation emitted jumps about a MILLION fold; and then takes decades, or longer, to decay away.
But don't take my word for it, here's the article:
http://www.scientificamerican....
The articles just says that the absorbed dose of someone living within a mile or so downwind of a coal plant is about 1.8 mrem/year, compared to 300 mrem/year of natural background radiation. After a meltdown the levels at that distance can be more than 300mrem/year just from the reactor. It will decay away over time, but it can still be well above acceptable limits hundreds of years later.
There's just absolutely no way at all that the total output of the coal plant could ever reach that of melted down nuclear reactor, let alone being a hundred times more. You're just totally full of it.
There's plenty of reasons to shut down coal plants, mercury, small particle air pollution, acid rain, CO2 etc. etc. Radiation just isn't one of them. The radiation is very dilute and far, far below background radiation. Dilute radiation is largely (but non completely) non problematic; we're surrounded by dilute background radiation anyway. it's the fallout from meltdowns that causes mass evacuations and all farming to cease. That's the real problem, and it's specific to nuclear accidents.
> No, it isn't. Actually, it is shockingly cheap, if done correctly...
Yeah right, whatever you say. France was the absolute best case, and even they don't have the cheapest electricity.
>And that is where you're going wrong. You think that because a select few places are doing it (or appearing to do it), that means it can be everywhere.
>Right now, about 5% of the world's power comes from renewables, but that is just electricity, that doesn't count all the fossil fuels used directly.
LOL, you're out by a factor of 10, try 22% of worldwide primary energy in 2014!!!
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> Driving, for example, consumes huge amounts of oil. Large amounts of natural gas are consumed by healing homes (and water and cooking). None of that is going to change any time soon.
Actually no, again, you're not tracking reality very well.
Electric cars are largely practical and can be charged very well using renewable power, particularly wind and solar; and they're getting better pretty rapidly (car battery costs are dropping ~8% per annum).
But the kicker is that when you use wind and solar, the primary energy needed to drive goes, way, way down.
That's because electricity is low entropy; batteries and electric motors can be, and are very efficient.
That's also why people with electric cars report that their electricity bill doesn't change much; because their cars are so much more efficient.
Also heating houses can be done with heat pumps.
These things aren't going to change this year or next year, but as cars and boilers wear out people can replace them with more environmentally friendly technologies; it will take a decade or so, but it's definitely happening; and in the meantime nuclear isn't likely to grow, it will shrink, and nor is it needed.
OK, I'm out, you have no clue.
> I don't doubt it, but the reasons for that are also political in nature... we could get the costs down if we got over our "oh my god the nuclears" fears. If we don't, then it will be coal, oil, and natural gas.
Yeah, yeah. Fundamentally, nuclear is pretty expensive, but it's not just price; there's multiple other highly valid reasons why nuclear power can be seriously bad news including nuclear proliferation, nuclear waste, safety (a few percent of ALL reactors have melted down), it's extremely complex, it's highly inflexible- it pretty much has to be run flat-out, needs huge amounts of fresh cooling water, and it takes a long, long time to build. It's not just any one thing. Sure you can fix some of those problems in some places, but that's a lot of major potential downsides. Fuck up any of them, and you end up with a massive white elephant.
But the world is not either-or. We're not back in 1980s where the options were very limited, coal, gas nuclear. Here is a list of places that already have 100% renewable electricity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
>yet it is highly variable and natural gas turbines have to be kept on standby to make up for the shortfalls when they happen.
ROFLMAO. You do know that nuclear reactors can fail at any time, and require back up turbines for the shortfalls? And nuclear doesn't load-follow worth a damn; a nuclear reactor running at 50% is making electricity at double the cost; and it wasn't cheap in the first place. I mean sure, reactors can physically do it, it's just too expensive to actually do it. France- the poster child for nuclear power has to import energy from friendly neighbouring countries during cold snaps, and France was the best possible case for nuclear power!!!
> The US is growing, but Wind is only cheap when government dollars make it so.
No, it's not subsidies, and the cost is still going down. Taller wind turbines produce energy much more cheaply and give more consistent power.
> Like I said, people who think Wind and Solar will become a majority of our power are bad at politics and math.
Uh huh. Nuclear power is getting more expensive over time, and is already more expensive than onshore wind. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And there's no upper limit on the amount of wind you can put on a grid, and the costs of electricity storage are dropping in price exponentially as well. One main trick is to export any spare electricity you have. That's what Denmark does, and they're already running on 40% wind power, and have a plan to take it to 85%.
That is impossible, nuclear power is cheap, safe, and radiation cannot hurt me anyway; and soon nuclear reactors will be EVERYWHERE and it will be GLORIOUS!
> Solar and Wind will slowly increase in overall percentage, but won't be a major part of the total world wide power consumption this century. Maybe in the 22nd Century they will, but hopefully by then Fusion is working and we won't need them.
Yeah, right. This is just wishful thinking on your part.
Wind power alone is already making 10% of the EU's average electricity supply, and wind energy is now cheaper than coal or gas in many parts of America.
Wind power in the world is growing enormously quickly, literally exponentially, at around 14%, year on year, and has been for about a decade, and shows no sign of slowing; and it's price competitive, fairly consistently cheaper than nuclear. It also has less restrictions than nuclear.
That's just wind; and it's already starting to overtake nuclear power for overall production.baseline.
Solar is smaller, but growing faster, the price is still relatively high, but dropping like a stone; and in sunny places it's already very competitive.
Yes, it's not good for the environment, except relatively, in that humans are so incredibly bad anyway.
Yes, this is why all coal power plants have an exclusion zone around them.
Oh... wait...
Hmmm has it ever occurred to anyone that shear amount of radioactivity might not be the most important thing, that the density of radiation might be important, or to wonder why nuclear power only looks kinda good if compared to what is pretty much the most ridiculously polluting way to generate electricity ever invented, and even then comparing in very narrow ways?
Apparently not. Moving along. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Oh I'm not scared of nuclear reactors, they're just a waste of money.
The reason (say) Fukushima was not evacuated was because of the winds at the time, if the winds had been different the result would have been different. Of course prevailing winds are normally from the West due to the rotation of the Earth, so a reactor meltdown on the East coast next to a huge ocean like the Pacific is about the best possible place for it, but even then winds can go in any direction.
And Wales is well over a thousand miles away from Chernobyl; and yet it was very affected by it. Think about what that means for nuclear power.
Banqiao was a once in 2000 years flood that caused the dam to fail. We almost certainly haven't had the one in 2000 year nuclear accident YET.
Imagine trying to evacuate Tokyo or Paris; that's the kind of thing that could happen.
You can't imagine it. Your brain is too small.
If Nuclear was super-duper cheap, maybe it would be worth it, but actually it's fairly expensive and pretty inflexible. Meanwhile the cost of renewables are dropping like a stone, and they don't mix very well with nuclear. When building a power generation system, you start with the cheap, easily built stuff, and build it around that. Doing that will largely or completely squeeze nuclear power out of the equation.
Complex, dangerous, expensive nuclear power just isn't very good from very many different angles, and that's why it has not taken off, and nor will it ever.
"Rapidly"
In Wales it took 20 years to get down to levels where farming could begin again.
This year, there was a HUGE spike in the radioactivity found in reindeer from Chernobyl; that's like 30 years later, and levels aren't remotely down to levels where the meat is safe.
And Chernobyl probably wasn't even the worse case meltdown; it's just the worst we've had so far. There's a subtle fallacy that we cannot get a worse meltdown than that.
Nuclear power is just too expensive and too dangerous. It's also too inflexible; it can pretty much only give you baseload power. If you run a nuclear reactor at 50% load, the price of the electricity doubles. So then you have to have pumped storage or hydroelectricity anyway. In which case why are you bothering with it, you might as well use cheaper renewables, which can be much more rapidly deployed.
It's just a total waste of time.
It also affected sheep in Wales, and they had to stop sheep farming for quite a while; that was more of a nuisance I think.
Note that there was recently a big spike in the radioactivity of the reindeer population, like this year; the problem simply hasn't gone away. Apparently mushrooms also bioaccumulate it or something, and they had a big crop.
Even with reindeer; people do farm reindeer, presumably they're in big trouble.
Really, nuclear power is a waste of money; it's expensive and a few percent of all nuclear reactors ever built have melted down. That's too many, and there's no signs that the rate is decreasing, in spite of claims with EVERY generation of reactors that this generation of reactors is perfectly safe. Fukushima was fortunate in that it was on the east side of Japan, if a reactor on the west coast, the fallout pattern would have been much, much worse.
And statistically speaking we still haven't seen the worse case meltdowns; winds vary- imagine if a reactor melted down upwind of a capital city.
> Caesium-137 is most of what remains, and has a 30-year half-life. So the atoms will be around up to 10 or 20 generations, but it is highly water soluble, so ...
Nope. Caesium 137 concentrates up the food chain, it doesn't just dissolve down. If it did dissolve it would be no problem, but that's not the case. That's why it's one of the biggest issues long term. Grasses suck it up, cows eat the grass, humans eat the cows... gets laid down in your bones, and you get cancer. Yummy!
The reason that people aren't so up in arms about it, is that the cancers that result are hard to distinguish from naturally occurring cancers. If you can't tell precisely who died from fallout, it must be all OK, yes???
You learnt all this at Trump University didn't you.
Clean coal pretty much does actually exist, you can put carbon capture and smoke stack scrubbers etc etc. but when you do that it winds up very expensive.
It's a pyric victory really.
> The upper limit of efficiency for a solar cell is about 30% - and we're still about 10% below that on even the best experimental designs.
Wrong. Solar sells have already been built that are ~45% or more efficient.
FWIW the upper theoretical limit is over 90%. The reason that solar panels don't do that right now is because you have to tune the solar panel to the colours of light you want to collect; and you'd have to construct the panel to absorb equally well in each range, and that's hard. The high performing panels collect several ranges to achieve those higher figures.
The reason why the theoretical limit is over 90% is because of Carnot- the temperature associated with the light which hits the panel is that of the sun, which is very, very hot, and the waste heat is emitted at ambient temperature.