The dirty bomb scare is a result of LNT radiation model. If LNT were true, Chernobyl would have killed millions, when in reality it killed a few thousands (less than 150 from radiation sickness, a few thousands from cancers, 95% of those deaths were from people that were a few Km away from the reactor in the first few years, the remaining 5% within a few tens of Km in the first months until the radioactive iodine decayed completely). If LNT were true, Three Mile Island would have caused a small, but measurable increase in cancer rates close to the reactor, none were found. If LNT were true, Fukushima would have caused hundreds to thousands of cancers and tens would have died already, where are those ? Ok. I haven't done some precise math that arrived at those numbers. All I'm doing is following the dire predictions of the most serious and logical anti nuclear activists made right after those accidents, always end up wrong by several orders of magnitude. Please go study radiation facts. We should be FAR more concerned about poisonous metals (Mercury, Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic,...), which are routinely dumped into open piles of coal ash and many other chemical processes. But instead of going after the real danger, the anti nuclear idiots focus instead on the remotely potential hazard to human life, instead of the certain ones.
50 Kg of Pu238 in the ocean is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the lead we dumped there from leaded gasoline combustion. We used hundreds of millions of tons of lead over the last 100 years mostly ended up in the oceans. After 250 years 80% of the Pu238 decays to Uranium-234, there are hundreds of thousands of Uranium-238 already dissolved in the oceans. Again, drop in the bucket.
While Hydrazine is next to useless on a rocket booster (first or second stage). Hydrazine is still the most commonly used rocket fuel on satellites, space capsules, any application that requires that a rocket engine can be used weeks to years after launch. Its by far the most commonly used hipergolic (fuel that combusts in contact with its oxydizer, needing no spark/flame to combust). Satellites are slowly migrating to ion drive engines, but they offer very low thrust (but very high specific impulse). It is limited to situations when its ok to fire the engine for hours to weeks instead of seconds to minutes.
The problem with wind isn't land mass consumed. Its that wind is a massive jobs program. Wind turbines are maintenance hogs. And worse of all wind output is proportional to wind speed cubed (usually 45-80km/h winds power output is flat, and below 45km/h its cubed), so if wind drops from 45 to 30 km/h (a 1/3 drop), power output drops 70% ! Ok, so the argument is install lots of turbines spread over thousands of miles, wind is always blowing somewhere... But you disregard the massive cost of long distance transmission upgrades to share the wind output where the wind is blowing the hardest with the rest of the country. And transmitting electricity to 1000 miles away also incurs serious power losses, or even more expensive HVDC transmission solutions (that loose just 10% or so of transmitted power). Or you need lots and lots of pumped (or regular) hydro to store energy surplus. With regular hydro and spare reservoir capacity you can just reduce hydro output, save water and produce more when wind dies. But all of that has serious costs and drawbacks. See, land consumed is just a minor portion of the real problem. Its no wonder that the largest supporters of solar and wind power are... transmission electrical suppliers, like ABB. They profit more from renewables even than solar PV and wind turbine suppliers.
The reality is a little different. The US wind energy subsidy is a fixed per MWh produced subsidy. Like US$ 20 per MWh. It doesn't matter if that particular MW was produced earning US$ 50 (peak demand) or US$ 5 (off peak demand) or even US$ -1 (grid overloaded, generators must pay to put more electricity on the grid), with a fixed US$ 20 per MWh wind operators can afford to dump their output on the grid even if the grid is overloaded, which is killing large baseload generating capacity. So when people say that nuclear power plants are being shutdown, its not because wind is naturally cheaper than nuclear, its because after their subsidy wind can afford to dump their electricity to the market at all times, and is forcing nuclear operators to pay to dump their output to the grid at off peak hours. When Warren buffet bought a few electrical utilities with nuclear construction plans and killed those plans switching to wind instead, that was a result of the perverse wind energy credit subsidy results, not of some natural wind advantage.
41% is great. You don't want neither 100% nuclear nor 10% nuclear. Water cooled nukes are designed to be economical operating at 100% power output. With up to 50% nuclear share and a strong industrial base consuming electricity nukes can run flat out at 100% and never overload the grid. Then hydro does the load following to match demand on a minute by minute basis. New nuclear (molten salt or metal cooled) is designed to do as agile load following as hydro, not requiring boron injections and other consumables for load following. The MSRE experiment ran in the late 60s/early 70s was very interesting. The reactor power could be adjusted by just changing air flow through the heat exchanges (that reactor had no turbine hooked to it, its heat was just dumped into the air). Close the air flow, the core temperature goes up a little, coolant density decreases => reducing reactivity => power output reduced. Increase air flow, the core temperature goes down => coolant density increases => power output goes up. molten salt reactors can be designed to need no control rods, but most designs include control rods just to comply with blind regulatory rules tied to water cooled reactors.
By 2020s we should have the first molten salt reactors hitting the market. US$ 50 cent per Watt of capacity (1/4 the price of the cheapest new nuclear being installed today). Sealed reactors with 7 years worth of fuel included, nuclear reactor sites will have spots for two reactors, so before shutting down after 7 years a new reactor will be installed and ready to go, just switch over to the new one, leave the old one cooling then return to factory for nuclear fuel reprocessing and refurbishing. Reactors will be road/rail/ship transportable, no local nuclear specific construction required, just basic concrete foundation plus installing the turbine to convert heat into electricity. At that price new nuclear will be far cheaper than solar. Realize that a reactor at US$ 50 cent per Watt is equivalent to solar panels around 15 cents per Watt (solar produces 6 hours worth of peak capacity per day, while nuclear produces 23.9 hours worth of peak capacity per day or average) ! Please look at my post above. You are infected with nuclear fiction. Go lookup nuclear facts. Nuclear fiction is utter terror. Nuclear facts are reassuring.
New nuclear power is way safer and healthier to the environment than any fossil electricity. Still, I consider all water cooled nukes kludges for all their worth, but they are far safer than coal, natural gas or oil based sources of electricity. What you need is to go read rational, science based info on nuclear, not the deeply biased, irrational, unscientific sites on nuclear power. Most people ignore the fact that we have about 400 nuclear reactors in the world, producing about as much electricity as north america needs. Coal kills over 200 thousand yearly worldwide. Natural gas kills over 10 thousand yearly worldwide. Oil kills over 20 thousand yearly worldwide. Nuclear power has killed less people over its 60 year history than coal kills every year (estimated nuclear power total deaths far less than 30 thousand). The reality is the anti nuclear power sentiment is rooted on pacifist people that are violently against nuclear weapons, and see each and every nuclear reactor a source of materials for nuclear weapons (which is mostly hogwash). Plus they ignore the simple fact that before the creation of nuclear weapons we had 2 world wars, in the 70 years since, zero world wars, in my view nuclear weapons avoided at least 2 world wars and 50-100 million of deaths. I look forward to molten salt cooled reactors (MSRs) and fast reactors, MSRs are about 100 times safer than water cooled reactors, fast reactors about 10 times safer than water cooled reactors. Water cooled reactors are 95% of the world nuclear fleet. Over the last 10 years, there was a single nuclear death in the USA, a single uranium mining accident death. On average we have a few dozen deaths worldwide per year since the 70s (including Chernobyl deaths dilluted over the 44 years since 1970). Nuclear facts are reassuring. Nuclear *fiction* is terrifying.
This depends heavily on your grid and generating structure. For instance, my Brazil is on average 70% hydro (including rainy years, dry years, rainy and drought seasons). Right now we're going through an extreme drought, that is forcing the grid to put every single thermal plant online. Those plants cost anywhere from twice to 10x per kWh than hydro (even including substantial losses from dams 2000Km away). So any solar and wind that is installed close to consuming centers is saving expensive thermal backup plants (technically Brazil needs no peaking plants connected to the national grid, hydro does the load following, thermal plants are switched on-off as needed but when on run at 100% all the time). So in our case, until there's enough micro (0-100kW) and mini (100kW-1MW) generation connected to the grid that we can turn off all of our thermal plants, its a great deal $$$ wise for the whole system. And since our country is mostly tall buildings, its very unlikely we'll see even 5% of our electricity offset by micro/mini generation customers. Even after the rain returns, and hydro is back at full capacity, our total consumption is continously increasing, if micro+mini generation could avoid needing to build more large hydro plants, the upfront cost of those is very high (although cheap in the long run), so avoiding having to build new hydro plants (and associated long distance transmission lines) is also a good deal. Also there are countries that don't have lots of hydro but that could install substantial pumped hydro facilities.
My only quarrel with this whole solution is wind (in countries that don't have the hydro to load follow wind efficiently), unless wind is forced to pay for the costs of associated pumped hydro facilities. In Brazil's case wind is a good deal in our north shore close to consumer centers, as it saves hydro capacity too. Up to the point those cities don't become a net exported of electricity, then there is a significant cost associated with inverting the power flow in transmission.
The solution is fairly simple, use a combined grid tie and energy storage system. Have enough batteries to store half of a day's solar production and only send electricity back to the grid after the batteries are fully charged, and wait for using those batteries at peak hours. This typically reduces energy given back to the grid by half. In essence you become a much smaller consumer of electricity and don't use the grid at all during peak hours. The cost of energy storage is proportional to how much battery capacity you need. In an off grid install, you would typically need at least twice your daily production capacity (much more depending on how much solar production is lost in your winters). At the same time Li Ion battery packs are coming down in price not as fast as solar PV, but it should half in cost from 2012 and 2020 (at a minimum). Plus there's iron air technology that is still not at full commercial production which promisses to be far cheaper than Li Ion (as it sacrifices weight for much lower per kWh costs). With Iron air tech it might be fully economical to employ batteries with 2x your daily production capacity, so you might be able to only sell electricity to the grid in the summer, and in the winter only buy electricity at off peak hours, bringing you the best of off grid with grid tie solutions combined.
Doesn't common carrier forces ISPs to unbundle their services, like ADSL was in the beginning ? I recall having Bellsouth phone line and ADSL from earthline through the same copper wire. Perhaps that's the real issue. Comcast is terrified of all common carrier obligations. Another possibility is preventing Obama from doing anything until he gets replaced. Perhaps they think that even if a democrat win, that new president will be more business friendly.
What hot particles from nuclear reactors ? Alpha, beta, gamma and neutron radiation ? Except for neutrons, I get all of those while sunbathing in Guarapari-ES-Brazil (yes that beach shown on Pandora's promise, I sunbathed meters from that spot). You show in your writing you can't differentiate radionuclides from radiation particles, which disqualifies you completely from making any radiation analysis. Go get a radiation related degree then we can talk some, or at least take a class like this: https://class.coursera.org/nuc... Like I did, with 95% grade. Then we can discuss rationally, with facts. Be concerned about coal. Nuclear kills when a serious accident happens. Coal kills dozens to hundreds EVERY SINGLE DAY. Coal powerplants emits a thousand times the level of radiation a nuclear reactor emits under normal operations. Plus poisonous heavy metals. Nuclear is safe. Coal isn't. Even natural gas pollution and industrial accidents are a much more serious hazard to human life, killing ten thousand every year worldwide. Coal kills every year more people than nuclear reactors killed over the 80 years we've been operating them. Mercury, Cadmium, Lead, Arsenic, Radium, Uranium, Thorium, just a small list of elements that come out of a coal plant ash pile (and goes up in its exhaust unless very advanced / expensive filters are installed). While spent nuclear fuel is safety stored in drums with extreme safety margins, coal ash piles are stored outdoors, ripe for a flood to wash it away into the nearest river and contaminate drinking water. Go fight the real enemies. Nuclear is the only alternative for baseload energy sources which doesn't produce CO2 and could power the whole planet. I'm not defending even a 50% nuclear world. Perhaps 25-30% for a few generations until we can master solar+wind+utility scale eletricity storage.
If your argument were even remotly true, the area around Chernobyl would be a barren desert land where no animal life would exist. Instead life goes on, with mammals drinking water contaminated with Caesium, Strontium, Plutonium and Uranium. Hundred of Humans are back living in Pripyat, also drinking water, not sure what kind of filter they use for their water, but I doubt they can control the water their cows drink. If anything, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have actually shown radiation safety standards are overblown for low dosage exposure. There is zero risk of radiation from Fukushima killing Japanese people, the worst is over. In order of Fukushima radiation causing any measurable health hazard to North America, there would be piles of dead bodies in Japan and tens of thousands of aggressive cancer cases, which there aren't. Stop and think about it. You are so tightly wound inside your soapbox you can't think rationally anymore. Or perhaps you need a degree in an area related to radiation to get some base common sense.
No its not a slow news cycle. Its called radiophobia. Reporters love to report even the tiniest any nuclear sensational misleading factoid. And they make it a point not to ask a rational nuclear scientist or nuclear doctor to analyze the information in a rational way. They are only interested in reporting the anti nuclear (sensationalist) side.
You need to go out and understand how little is 8 becquerel per cubic meter. It's orders of magnitude below insignificant. And the morons taking this subject to court also need to read something about nuclear biology.
Gamma rays are considered the deadliest thing ever. Guess what, all animals produce gamma and beta rays from K40 and C14 decay. Our bodies have cell level equipment to handle with radiation damage. If low levels of radiation were a menace to animal life, we'd be all extinct. A good nuclear physics / nuclear biology book is highly recommended.
If Caesium ingestion was serious, there wouldn't be a single living mammal around Chernobyl, as the most common Caesium fission product (Cs 137) has 30 year half life, so it takes 90 years to decay 7/8ths of the material. Chernobyl has barelly gone though the first half life, so about half of it is still there.
No only there is lots of animal life around Chernobyl, but there are hundreds of humans livings less than 20 Km from the accident site, in Pripyat, go watch pandora's promise for some qualify fact based radiation accident data, instead of the sensationalized stuff you love so much.
The really dangerous fission products have half lives of days, so in two months 99.99% of it is gone.
Yeah, like as if you have the scientific knowledge to actually know any better. Your opinions show ZERO physics knowledge. So you are far worse than the govt. You probably don't have a clue what a becquerel is, do you ? Do you even know what is an alpha, beta, gamma particle, what are the characteristics of neutron radiation. If the radiation had the slightest chance of doing any harm to the USA, there would be piles of dead bodies in Japan. Thousands of aggressive cancers. But per the usual, you conspiracy theory nutjobs are hell bent on taking anything the govt say and claim its a lie. Get a live.
Ok, so pumped hydro is over a century old. But it is most heavily used in France, due to Nuclear power being more cost effective operating at maximum capacity full time. This allows overnight production surplus to be stored until peak hours, and to be sold to Germany (and other neighbors) when wind falls short.
I know how the grid works.
Brazil has no pumped hydro that I know of, as we have 70%+ of our electricity needs from regular hydro dams, the national electricity system operator determines which hydro dams will operate under load following and which will operate at x% capacity based on reservoir capacity status. Other countries that have lots of regular hydro also don't need PUMPED hydro, as they can just throttle regular hydro.
Problems that don't exist... Germany is at the edge of having too much solar and wind installed on its grid, HAS dialed back on incentives for new solar and wind installations. They need lots more energy storage to continue installing more solar and wind... Many wind and solar fanatics tend to ignore those facts.
Denmark's case is another dire need of energy storage, another example of a problem that doesn't exist ?
The reality is that if the rest of Europe had even a third as much solar and wind as Germany, the European grid would crash due to massive electrical overloads and underloads. The Germany plan has only gone so far cause they can dump their excess power on their neighbors and buy reserve power at a surplus latter. Lots of buying French (and other countries) nuclear power when wind is weak at night or in a winter's day.
That's why I'm a much bigger fan of Solar+Biomass+Geothermal+Nuclear. Wind is a heap of load cause it oscillates too much, and the period of those oscillations are just too long to store and recover energy over weeks at a time. It is viable to store many hours worth of methane from biomass to run thermal peaking plants. While most currently installed nuclear power plants weren't designed for load following, many nuclear designs can do agile load following (specially those that don't use water cooling). Geothermal usually is baseload, which is much better for mating with pumped hydro than any other intermittent source.
Large Scale Energy storage is:
1 - Pumped hydro, the french invented it to fully use their nuclear reactors, works great with nuclear and solar, nuclear typically only shutdown in pre-planned outtages, and solar produces a known capacity per day depending on the season.
2 - Big reservoir hydro (aka Big Hydro) - Most dams can be upgrade for higher energy production capacity, which allows hydro+wind pairing in large scale. In such cases wind works as a means to save water for peak hours and dry season, with upgrades dams can operate at minimum output in Solar PV peak hours, and increase production as needed. This is a great solution for Brazil that has 70% hydro electricity share.
2 - Chemical batteries - Needs to drop in price / kWh at least 5 fold to become really economical for grid scale storage. Its already economical for some end user applications, specially where retail electricity is very expensive (or at least very expensive in peak hours), with a 50% reduction in Li-Ion batteries solar+chemical battery storage will become very interesting for households (only sell surplus production at peak hours, possibly live off grid in tropical/equatorial areas). This 50% reduction in Li-Ion prices is likely to happen soon, Tesla Motors + Nissa LEAF is increasing demand for Li-Ion so much its leading to accelerated investment on Li-Ion factories. The Tesla Giga factory should be at full capacity before 2020 and will match worldwide 2013 Li-Ion production levels, expected to significantly reduce Li-Ion cell costs. In all three cases the issue isn't energy storage research per se, the technology is well known, and already commercial, the issue is chemical battery cost.
The real problem with solar isn't clouds, its the winter. In high summer solar PV is producing 8-9 hours worth of its peak capacity, but in the winter it comes down to less than 2 (to be generous). Oh, so wind blows stronger in the winter, but there is a bell curve of possibilities and there will be "perfect storm of lack of wind events" every whatever years, when the wind will be weak over very large areas, for a day, when solar is producing close to nothing. The main concern is very serious, a country with a large mix of solar and wind still needs a large dispatchable power generation capacity to make up for the supply-demand gaps, but if those peaking power sources are only needed for a few days per year, its not economical to keep them open ! That's why I think the right mix is solar-wind-nuclear-geothermal-biomass-hydro. Specially baseload geothermal/nuclear and peaking biomass, it brings some sanity to this model of intermittent solar+wind power sources, unless your country have lots of hydro, with lots of hydro a solar-wind-hydro mix might be achievable with total stability. That's the problem of having the environmentalists dictate the energy policy without much respect for the people that really keep the lights on, the transmission and generation electrical engineers. They aren't happy at all with this insanity, cause they know in the end they will be blamed if the lights go out.
If your concern is from a nuclear reactor meltdown or a nuclear strike tens of miles away, you can get away with a very cheap anti nuclear panic room. A few milimeters of aluminum plus some plexiglass can stop alpha, beta rays and radionuclides from getting into you. This doesn't protect you from gamma radiation, but gammas are the least dangerous, since they have the least energy of those. There is also neutron radiation, which is dangerous, but those end very quickly after the nuclear blast, like a few hours. Its the radioactive decay from the neutrons created by the nuclear blast or spontaneous fissions from released radionuclides from a nuclear reactor which are much less common than alpha, beta and gammas.
Let's take it one item at a time:
The biggest concern by far isn't being irradiated, its ingesting radionucleides, specially radioactive Iodine and atoms that mimic calcium and potassium in your body like Cs and Sr. Point one for staying home.
The second concert is ingestion of alpha radiation sources. Alpha rays are harmless on your skin, but deadly if they make it into your bloodstream. Alpha rays can be stopped with a mere sheet of paper. Again point for staying home.
Then you have beta and gamma radiation, which does penetrate. Beta radiation can be stopped with a few milimeters of aluminum, plus some low density material like plexiglass to absorb x-rays created by the absorption of the beta rays. So having a room in your house with a thin layer of metal followed by some low density material saves you there too.
Gamma radiation does penetrate more deeply, but gamma rays have the least interaction with matter, so unless the level of gamma rays is really high, animals are able to cope with gamma ray damage to cells. Animals continuously produce beta and gamma rays from decay of Potassium 40 and Carbon 14.
So staying in a properly sealed home isn't such a bad plan, and all it took to find out this information was some quick wikipedia searches, plus I knew what to look from an intro to nuclear technology course I took a year ago. The biggest problem with nuclear power isn't nuclear power itself, its man created radiophobia which leads to overblown psychological trauma, much greater than actual radiation symptoms.
Its not sure to me if this is a plan about an incoming nuclear strike or a nuclear power plant meltdown. The latter should be addressed by replacing nuclear reactors designed 50 years ago with newer reactors that are about 100x safer, should survive any earthquake or tsunami scenario conceived.
GPS L1C signal have 60W (a few times more on newer GPS sats) of power being irradiated by the antenna. By the same that signal travels 18000Km to the ground its down to miliwatts, in fact so weak that a one watt transmitter one Km away can still overpower the original signal. A 1 watt jammer can fit in your pocket. A 100 Watt jammer (no more than the size of a suitcase) can jam GPS for a hundred Kms easily. GPS works great as long as its not jammed. And the dangers are far worst when there's a signal being spoofed (artificially sending a signal that looks genuine, but has the wrong parameters, potentially leading to aircraft crashes, banking transactions recorded with the wrong timestamp, shutting down celullar towers, leading people to the wrong locationto name just one of the dozens of life threatening scenarios). eLoran is the only solution that can actually compliment GPS, providing it with a signal of similar accuracy to GPS L1C that can be received without line of sight to the antenna transmitting the signal 1000 Km away from the antenna. In my opinion destroying the Loran-C towers was the single worst decision the Obama administration made. The Loran-C signal was worthless, but the towers and adjacent building could have been shutdown and then repurposed to transmit eLoran.
Guarapari-ES has very high radioactivity levels from Thorium rich monazite sands. So is has alpha, beta and gamma radiation (the Thorium decay chain). The "Areia Preta" beach (black sand, from Barium that results from Thorium decay) has high enough radiation that a nuclear worker would be forbidden from being exposed to that much radiation more than a few days per year. Yet hundreds of thousands of people sunbathe right on those sands, without any measurable increase in cancer levels on the population. I'm 42 and over my lifetime I spent 24 months in various monazite beaches (with sand black enough as evidence of Barium from Thorium decay), like me I know thousands of people that did the same, and we don't have abnormal cancer levels. Thorium has half live of over 10 billion years, so its ultra low radioactivity, but there is so much of it. Well, watch Pandora's Promise, they go to that same beach, show a geiger counter pegged and then show that Fukushima has 5% that radiation level (and since its been around 24 months since Pandora's Promise was produced, the radiation level is significantly lower in Fukushima). Of course there are tiny hot spots in Fukushima with slightly higher radiation, but it doesn't justify forbidding people from living there, it could however justify prevent people from raising kids and teens in the area, but the largest death rate was from elevated stress levels on the elderly, exactly those that are at lowest risk of contracting cancer. At the core of the issue is the Linear No Threshold radiation (LNT) vs the Hormesis hypothesis. There is ample evidence the LNT model was favored due to extreme anti nuclear bias rather than strict medical/biology science. Data from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima seriously contradict LNT and tend towards Hormesis, but nuclear regulatory authorities insist on ignoring Hormesis cause it would reduce their importance (budget, power, political clout). It's big govt feeding itself at its worst. And the largely ignorant population goes for that crap. Nobody questions that ultra high radiation levels kills and high radiation levels cause high cancer incidence, but even the highest levels of radiation found in Fukushima (and in Chernobyl right now) is at the range that even with LNT would cause something like just 10-20% more cancers than normal.
Slashdot Mirror
The dirty bomb scare is a result of LNT radiation model. ...), which are routinely dumped into open piles of coal ash and many other chemical processes. But instead of going after the real danger, the anti nuclear idiots focus instead on the remotely potential hazard to human life, instead of the certain ones.
If LNT were true, Chernobyl would have killed millions, when in reality it killed a few thousands (less than 150 from radiation sickness, a few thousands from cancers, 95% of those deaths were from people that were a few Km away from the reactor in the first few years, the remaining 5% within a few tens of Km in the first months until the radioactive iodine decayed completely).
If LNT were true, Three Mile Island would have caused a small, but measurable increase in cancer rates close to the reactor, none were found.
If LNT were true, Fukushima would have caused hundreds to thousands of cancers and tens would have died already, where are those ?
Ok. I haven't done some precise math that arrived at those numbers. All I'm doing is following the dire predictions of the most serious and logical anti nuclear activists made right after those accidents, always end up wrong by several orders of magnitude.
Please go study radiation facts. We should be FAR more concerned about poisonous metals (Mercury, Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic,
50 Kg of Pu238 in the ocean is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the lead we dumped there from leaded gasoline combustion. We used hundreds of millions of tons of lead over the last 100 years mostly ended up in the oceans.
After 250 years 80% of the Pu238 decays to Uranium-234, there are hundreds of thousands of Uranium-238 already dissolved in the oceans. Again, drop in the bucket.
While Hydrazine is next to useless on a rocket booster (first or second stage). Hydrazine is still the most commonly used rocket fuel on satellites, space capsules, any application that requires that a rocket engine can be used weeks to years after launch. Its by far the most commonly used hipergolic (fuel that combusts in contact with its oxydizer, needing no spark/flame to combust).
Satellites are slowly migrating to ion drive engines, but they offer very low thrust (but very high specific impulse). It is limited to situations when its ok to fire the engine for hours to weeks instead of seconds to minutes.
The problem with wind isn't land mass consumed. Its that wind is a massive jobs program. Wind turbines are maintenance hogs. And worse of all wind output is proportional to wind speed cubed (usually 45-80km/h winds power output is flat, and below 45km/h its cubed), so if wind drops from 45 to 30 km/h (a 1/3 drop), power output drops 70% ! ... transmission electrical suppliers, like ABB. They profit more from renewables even than solar PV and wind turbine suppliers.
Ok, so the argument is install lots of turbines spread over thousands of miles, wind is always blowing somewhere... But you disregard the massive cost of long distance transmission upgrades to share the wind output where the wind is blowing the hardest with the rest of the country. And transmitting electricity to 1000 miles away also incurs serious power losses, or even more expensive HVDC transmission solutions (that loose just 10% or so of transmitted power).
Or you need lots and lots of pumped (or regular) hydro to store energy surplus. With regular hydro and spare reservoir capacity you can just reduce hydro output, save water and produce more when wind dies.
But all of that has serious costs and drawbacks.
See, land consumed is just a minor portion of the real problem.
Its no wonder that the largest supporters of solar and wind power are
The reality is a little different. The US wind energy subsidy is a fixed per MWh produced subsidy. Like US$ 20 per MWh. It doesn't matter if that particular MW was produced earning US$ 50 (peak demand) or US$ 5 (off peak demand) or even US$ -1 (grid overloaded, generators must pay to put more electricity on the grid), with a fixed US$ 20 per MWh wind operators can afford to dump their output on the grid even if the grid is overloaded, which is killing large baseload generating capacity.
So when people say that nuclear power plants are being shutdown, its not because wind is naturally cheaper than nuclear, its because after their subsidy wind can afford to dump their electricity to the market at all times, and is forcing nuclear operators to pay to dump their output to the grid at off peak hours.
When Warren buffet bought a few electrical utilities with nuclear construction plans and killed those plans switching to wind instead, that was a result of the perverse wind energy credit subsidy results, not of some natural wind advantage.
41% is great. You don't want neither 100% nuclear nor 10% nuclear.
Water cooled nukes are designed to be economical operating at 100% power output.
With up to 50% nuclear share and a strong industrial base consuming electricity nukes can run flat out at 100% and never overload the grid. Then hydro does the load following to match demand on a minute by minute basis.
New nuclear (molten salt or metal cooled) is designed to do as agile load following as hydro, not requiring boron injections and other consumables for load following.
The MSRE experiment ran in the late 60s/early 70s was very interesting. The reactor power could be adjusted by just changing air flow through the heat exchanges (that reactor had no turbine hooked to it, its heat was just dumped into the air). Close the air flow, the core temperature goes up a little, coolant density decreases => reducing reactivity => power output reduced. Increase air flow, the core temperature goes down => coolant density increases => power output goes up. molten salt reactors can be designed to need no control rods, but most designs include control rods just to comply with blind regulatory rules tied to water cooled reactors.
By 2020s we should have the first molten salt reactors hitting the market. US$ 50 cent per Watt of capacity (1/4 the price of the cheapest new nuclear being installed today). Sealed reactors with 7 years worth of fuel included, nuclear reactor sites will have spots for two reactors, so before shutting down after 7 years a new reactor will be installed and ready to go, just switch over to the new one, leave the old one cooling then return to factory for nuclear fuel reprocessing and refurbishing. Reactors will be road/rail/ship transportable, no local nuclear specific construction required, just basic concrete foundation plus installing the turbine to convert heat into electricity.
At that price new nuclear will be far cheaper than solar. Realize that a reactor at US$ 50 cent per Watt is equivalent to solar panels around 15 cents per Watt (solar produces 6 hours worth of peak capacity per day, while nuclear produces 23.9 hours worth of peak capacity per day or average) !
Please look at my post above.
You are infected with nuclear fiction. Go lookup nuclear facts. Nuclear fiction is utter terror. Nuclear facts are reassuring.
New nuclear power is way safer and healthier to the environment than any fossil electricity.
Still, I consider all water cooled nukes kludges for all their worth, but they are far safer than coal, natural gas or oil based sources of electricity.
What you need is to go read rational, science based info on nuclear, not the deeply biased, irrational, unscientific sites on nuclear power.
Most people ignore the fact that we have about 400 nuclear reactors in the world, producing about as much electricity as north america needs.
Coal kills over 200 thousand yearly worldwide. Natural gas kills over 10 thousand yearly worldwide. Oil kills over 20 thousand yearly worldwide.
Nuclear power has killed less people over its 60 year history than coal kills every year (estimated nuclear power total deaths far less than 30 thousand).
The reality is the anti nuclear power sentiment is rooted on pacifist people that are violently against nuclear weapons, and see each and every nuclear reactor a source of materials for nuclear weapons (which is mostly hogwash). Plus they ignore the simple fact that before the creation of nuclear weapons we had 2 world wars, in the 70 years since, zero world wars, in my view nuclear weapons avoided at least 2 world wars and 50-100 million of deaths.
I look forward to molten salt cooled reactors (MSRs) and fast reactors, MSRs are about 100 times safer than water cooled reactors, fast reactors about 10 times safer than water cooled reactors. Water cooled reactors are 95% of the world nuclear fleet.
Over the last 10 years, there was a single nuclear death in the USA, a single uranium mining accident death. On average we have a few dozen deaths worldwide per year since the 70s (including Chernobyl deaths dilluted over the 44 years since 1970).
Nuclear facts are reassuring. Nuclear *fiction* is terrifying.
This depends heavily on your grid and generating structure.
For instance, my Brazil is on average 70% hydro (including rainy years, dry years, rainy and drought seasons).
Right now we're going through an extreme drought, that is forcing the grid to put every single thermal plant online. Those plants cost anywhere from twice to 10x per kWh than hydro (even including substantial losses from dams 2000Km away).
So any solar and wind that is installed close to consuming centers is saving expensive thermal backup plants (technically Brazil needs no peaking plants connected to the national grid, hydro does the load following, thermal plants are switched on-off as needed but when on run at 100% all the time).
So in our case, until there's enough micro (0-100kW) and mini (100kW-1MW) generation connected to the grid that we can turn off all of our thermal plants, its a great deal $$$ wise for the whole system. And since our country is mostly tall buildings, its very unlikely we'll see even 5% of our electricity offset by micro/mini generation customers.
Even after the rain returns, and hydro is back at full capacity, our total consumption is continously increasing, if micro+mini generation could avoid needing to build more large hydro plants, the upfront cost of those is very high (although cheap in the long run), so avoiding having to build new hydro plants (and associated long distance transmission lines) is also a good deal. Also there are countries that don't have lots of hydro but that could install substantial pumped hydro facilities.
My only quarrel with this whole solution is wind (in countries that don't have the hydro to load follow wind efficiently), unless wind is forced to pay for the costs of associated pumped hydro facilities. In Brazil's case wind is a good deal in our north shore close to consumer centers, as it saves hydro capacity too. Up to the point those cities don't become a net exported of electricity, then there is a significant cost associated with inverting the power flow in transmission.
The solution is fairly simple, use a combined grid tie and energy storage system. Have enough batteries to store half of a day's solar production and only send electricity back to the grid after the batteries are fully charged, and wait for using those batteries at peak hours. This typically reduces energy given back to the grid by half. In essence you become a much smaller consumer of electricity and don't use the grid at all during peak hours.
The cost of energy storage is proportional to how much battery capacity you need. In an off grid install, you would typically need at least twice your daily production capacity (much more depending on how much solar production is lost in your winters).
At the same time Li Ion battery packs are coming down in price not as fast as solar PV, but it should half in cost from 2012 and 2020 (at a minimum).
Plus there's iron air technology that is still not at full commercial production which promisses to be far cheaper than Li Ion (as it sacrifices weight for much lower per kWh costs). With Iron air tech it might be fully economical to employ batteries with 2x your daily production capacity, so you might be able to only sell electricity to the grid in the summer, and in the winter only buy electricity at off peak hours, bringing you the best of off grid with grid tie solutions combined.
Doesn't common carrier forces ISPs to unbundle their services, like ADSL was in the beginning ? I recall having Bellsouth phone line and ADSL from earthline through the same copper wire.
Perhaps that's the real issue. Comcast is terrified of all common carrier obligations.
Another possibility is preventing Obama from doing anything until he gets replaced. Perhaps they think that even if a democrat win, that new president will be more business friendly.
What hot particles from nuclear reactors ?
Alpha, beta, gamma and neutron radiation ?
Except for neutrons, I get all of those while sunbathing in Guarapari-ES-Brazil (yes that beach shown on Pandora's promise, I sunbathed meters from that spot).
You show in your writing you can't differentiate radionuclides from radiation particles, which disqualifies you completely from making any radiation analysis.
Go get a radiation related degree then we can talk some, or at least take a class like this:
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
Like I did, with 95% grade.
Then we can discuss rationally, with facts.
Be concerned about coal. Nuclear kills when a serious accident happens. Coal kills dozens to hundreds EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Coal powerplants emits a thousand times the level of radiation a nuclear reactor emits under normal operations. Plus poisonous heavy metals.
Nuclear is safe. Coal isn't. Even natural gas pollution and industrial accidents are a much more serious hazard to human life, killing ten thousand every year worldwide.
Coal kills every year more people than nuclear reactors killed over the 80 years we've been operating them.
Mercury, Cadmium, Lead, Arsenic, Radium, Uranium, Thorium, just a small list of elements that come out of a coal plant ash pile (and goes up in its exhaust unless very advanced / expensive filters are installed). While spent nuclear fuel is safety stored in drums with extreme safety margins, coal ash piles are stored outdoors, ripe for a flood to wash it away into the nearest river and contaminate drinking water.
Go fight the real enemies.
Nuclear is the only alternative for baseload energy sources which doesn't produce CO2 and could power the whole planet.
I'm not defending even a 50% nuclear world. Perhaps 25-30% for a few generations until we can master solar+wind+utility scale eletricity storage.
I wish I could be so succinct. Kudos ! ROTFLMAO.
If your argument were even remotly true, the area around Chernobyl would be a barren desert land where no animal life would exist.
Instead life goes on, with mammals drinking water contaminated with Caesium, Strontium, Plutonium and Uranium.
Hundred of Humans are back living in Pripyat, also drinking water, not sure what kind of filter they use for their water, but I doubt they can control the water their cows drink.
If anything, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have actually shown radiation safety standards are overblown for low dosage exposure.
There is zero risk of radiation from Fukushima killing Japanese people, the worst is over.
In order of Fukushima radiation causing any measurable health hazard to North America, there would be piles of dead bodies in Japan and tens of thousands of aggressive cancer cases, which there aren't.
Stop and think about it. You are so tightly wound inside your soapbox you can't think rationally anymore.
Or perhaps you need a degree in an area related to radiation to get some base common sense.
No its not a slow news cycle. Its called radiophobia. Reporters love to report even the tiniest any nuclear sensational misleading factoid. And they make it a point not to ask a rational nuclear scientist or nuclear doctor to analyze the information in a rational way. They are only interested in reporting the anti nuclear (sensationalist) side.
You need to go out and understand how little is 8 becquerel per cubic meter. It's orders of magnitude below insignificant.
And the morons taking this subject to court also need to read something about nuclear biology.
Gamma rays are considered the deadliest thing ever. Guess what, all animals produce gamma and beta rays from K40 and C14 decay. Our bodies have cell level equipment to handle with radiation damage. If low levels of radiation were a menace to animal life, we'd be all extinct.
A good nuclear physics / nuclear biology book is highly recommended.
If Caesium ingestion was serious, there wouldn't be a single living mammal around Chernobyl, as the most common Caesium fission product (Cs 137) has 30 year half life, so it takes 90 years to decay 7/8ths of the material. Chernobyl has barelly gone though the first half life, so about half of it is still there.
No only there is lots of animal life around Chernobyl, but there are hundreds of humans livings less than 20 Km from the accident site, in Pripyat, go watch pandora's promise for some qualify fact based radiation accident data, instead of the sensationalized stuff you love so much.
The really dangerous fission products have half lives of days, so in two months 99.99% of it is gone.
The high salt content will do a lot more damage to your body than anything else.
Yeah, like as if you have the scientific knowledge to actually know any better. Your opinions show ZERO physics knowledge. So you are far worse than the govt.
You probably don't have a clue what a becquerel is, do you ? Do you even know what is an alpha, beta, gamma particle, what are the characteristics of neutron radiation.
If the radiation had the slightest chance of doing any harm to the USA, there would be piles of dead bodies in Japan. Thousands of aggressive cancers.
But per the usual, you conspiracy theory nutjobs are hell bent on taking anything the govt say and claim its a lie.
Get a live.
Ok, so pumped hydro is over a century old. But it is most heavily used in France, due to Nuclear power being more cost effective operating at maximum capacity full time. This allows overnight production surplus to be stored until peak hours, and to be sold to Germany (and other neighbors) when wind falls short.
I know how the grid works.
Brazil has no pumped hydro that I know of, as we have 70%+ of our electricity needs from regular hydro dams, the national electricity system operator determines which hydro dams will operate under load following and which will operate at x% capacity based on reservoir capacity status. Other countries that have lots of regular hydro also don't need PUMPED hydro, as they can just throttle regular hydro.
Problems that don't exist... Germany is at the edge of having too much solar and wind installed on its grid, HAS dialed back on incentives for new solar and wind installations. They need lots more energy storage to continue installing more solar and wind... Many wind and solar fanatics tend to ignore those facts.
Denmark's case is another dire need of energy storage, another example of a problem that doesn't exist ?
The reality is that if the rest of Europe had even a third as much solar and wind as Germany, the European grid would crash due to massive electrical overloads and underloads. The Germany plan has only gone so far cause they can dump their excess power on their neighbors and buy reserve power at a surplus latter. Lots of buying French (and other countries) nuclear power when wind is weak at night or in a winter's day.
That's why I'm a much bigger fan of Solar+Biomass+Geothermal+Nuclear. Wind is a heap of load cause it oscillates too much, and the period of those oscillations are just too long to store and recover energy over weeks at a time. It is viable to store many hours worth of methane from biomass to run thermal peaking plants. While most currently installed nuclear power plants weren't designed for load following, many nuclear designs can do agile load following (specially those that don't use water cooling). Geothermal usually is baseload, which is much better for mating with pumped hydro than any other intermittent source.
Large Scale Energy storage is:
1 - Pumped hydro, the french invented it to fully use their nuclear reactors, works great with nuclear and solar, nuclear typically only shutdown in pre-planned outtages, and solar produces a known capacity per day depending on the season.
2 - Big reservoir hydro (aka Big Hydro) - Most dams can be upgrade for higher energy production capacity, which allows hydro+wind pairing in large scale. In such cases wind works as a means to save water for peak hours and dry season, with upgrades dams can operate at minimum output in Solar PV peak hours, and increase production as needed. This is a great solution for Brazil that has 70% hydro electricity share.
2 - Chemical batteries - Needs to drop in price / kWh at least 5 fold to become really economical for grid scale storage. Its already economical for some end user applications, specially where retail electricity is very expensive (or at least very expensive in peak hours), with a 50% reduction in Li-Ion batteries solar+chemical battery storage will become very interesting for households (only sell surplus production at peak hours, possibly live off grid in tropical/equatorial areas). This 50% reduction in Li-Ion prices is likely to happen soon, Tesla Motors + Nissa LEAF is increasing demand for Li-Ion so much its leading to accelerated investment on Li-Ion factories. The Tesla Giga factory should be at full capacity before 2020 and will match worldwide 2013 Li-Ion production levels, expected to significantly reduce Li-Ion cell costs.
In all three cases the issue isn't energy storage research per se, the technology is well known, and already commercial, the issue is chemical battery cost.
The real problem with solar isn't clouds, its the winter. In high summer solar PV is producing 8-9 hours worth of its peak capacity, but in the winter it comes down to less than 2 (to be generous). Oh, so wind blows stronger in the winter, but there is a bell curve of possibilities and there will be "perfect storm of lack of wind events" every whatever years, when the wind will be weak over very large areas, for a day, when solar is producing close to nothing.
The main concern is very serious, a country with a large mix of solar and wind still needs a large dispatchable power generation capacity to make up for the supply-demand gaps, but if those peaking power sources are only needed for a few days per year, its not economical to keep them open !
That's why I think the right mix is solar-wind-nuclear-geothermal-biomass-hydro. Specially baseload geothermal/nuclear and peaking biomass, it brings some sanity to this model of intermittent solar+wind power sources, unless your country have lots of hydro, with lots of hydro a solar-wind-hydro mix might be achievable with total stability.
That's the problem of having the environmentalists dictate the energy policy without much respect for the people that really keep the lights on, the transmission and generation electrical engineers. They aren't happy at all with this insanity, cause they know in the end they will be blamed if the lights go out.
If your concern is from a nuclear reactor meltdown or a nuclear strike tens of miles away, you can get away with a very cheap anti nuclear panic room.
A few milimeters of aluminum plus some plexiglass can stop alpha, beta rays and radionuclides from getting into you. This doesn't protect you from gamma radiation, but gammas are the least dangerous, since they have the least energy of those.
There is also neutron radiation, which is dangerous, but those end very quickly after the nuclear blast, like a few hours. Its the radioactive decay from the neutrons created by the nuclear blast or spontaneous fissions from released radionuclides from a nuclear reactor which are much less common than alpha, beta and gammas.
Let's take it one item at a time:
The biggest concern by far isn't being irradiated, its ingesting radionucleides, specially radioactive Iodine and atoms that mimic calcium and potassium in your body like Cs and Sr. Point one for staying home.
The second concert is ingestion of alpha radiation sources. Alpha rays are harmless on your skin, but deadly if they make it into your bloodstream. Alpha rays can be stopped with a mere sheet of paper. Again point for staying home.
Then you have beta and gamma radiation, which does penetrate. Beta radiation can be stopped with a few milimeters of aluminum, plus some low density material like plexiglass to absorb x-rays created by the absorption of the beta rays. So having a room in your house with a thin layer of metal followed by some low density material saves you there too.
Gamma radiation does penetrate more deeply, but gamma rays have the least interaction with matter, so unless the level of gamma rays is really high, animals are able to cope with gamma ray damage to cells. Animals continuously produce beta and gamma rays from decay of Potassium 40 and Carbon 14.
So staying in a properly sealed home isn't such a bad plan, and all it took to find out this information was some quick wikipedia searches, plus I knew what to look from an intro to nuclear technology course I took a year ago.
The biggest problem with nuclear power isn't nuclear power itself, its man created radiophobia which leads to overblown psychological trauma, much greater than actual radiation symptoms.
Its not sure to me if this is a plan about an incoming nuclear strike or a nuclear power plant meltdown. The latter should be addressed by replacing nuclear reactors designed 50 years ago with newer reactors that are about 100x safer, should survive any earthquake or tsunami scenario conceived.
GPS L1C signal have 60W (a few times more on newer GPS sats) of power being irradiated by the antenna. By the same that signal travels 18000Km to the ground its down to miliwatts, in fact so weak that a one watt transmitter one Km away can still overpower the original signal. A 1 watt jammer can fit in your pocket. A 100 Watt jammer (no more than the size of a suitcase) can jam GPS for a hundred Kms easily.
GPS works great as long as its not jammed. And the dangers are far worst when there's a signal being spoofed (artificially sending a signal that looks genuine, but has the wrong parameters, potentially leading to aircraft crashes, banking transactions recorded with the wrong timestamp, shutting down celullar towers, leading people to the wrong locationto name just one of the dozens of life threatening scenarios).
eLoran is the only solution that can actually compliment GPS, providing it with a signal of similar accuracy to GPS L1C that can be received without line of sight to the antenna transmitting the signal 1000 Km away from the antenna.
In my opinion destroying the Loran-C towers was the single worst decision the Obama administration made. The Loran-C signal was worthless, but the towers and adjacent building could have been shutdown and then repurposed to transmit eLoran.
Guarapari-ES has very high radioactivity levels from Thorium rich monazite sands. So is has alpha, beta and gamma radiation (the Thorium decay chain).
The "Areia Preta" beach (black sand, from Barium that results from Thorium decay) has high enough radiation that a nuclear worker would be forbidden from being exposed to that much radiation more than a few days per year. Yet hundreds of thousands of people sunbathe right on those sands, without any measurable increase in cancer levels on the population.
I'm 42 and over my lifetime I spent 24 months in various monazite beaches (with sand black enough as evidence of Barium from Thorium decay), like me I know thousands of people that did the same, and we don't have abnormal cancer levels.
Thorium has half live of over 10 billion years, so its ultra low radioactivity, but there is so much of it.
Well, watch Pandora's Promise, they go to that same beach, show a geiger counter pegged and then show that Fukushima has 5% that radiation level (and since its been around 24 months since Pandora's Promise was produced, the radiation level is significantly lower in Fukushima).
Of course there are tiny hot spots in Fukushima with slightly higher radiation, but it doesn't justify forbidding people from living there, it could however justify prevent people from raising kids and teens in the area, but the largest death rate was from elevated stress levels on the elderly, exactly those that are at lowest risk of contracting cancer.
At the core of the issue is the Linear No Threshold radiation (LNT) vs the Hormesis hypothesis. There is ample evidence the LNT model was favored due to extreme anti nuclear bias rather than strict medical/biology science.
Data from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima seriously contradict LNT and tend towards Hormesis, but nuclear regulatory authorities insist on ignoring Hormesis cause it would reduce their importance (budget, power, political clout). It's big govt feeding itself at its worst. And the largely ignorant population goes for that crap.
Nobody questions that ultra high radiation levels kills and high radiation levels cause high cancer incidence, but even the highest levels of radiation found in Fukushima (and in Chernobyl right now) is at the range that even with LNT would cause something like just 10-20% more cancers than normal.