Heh. One thing to realize is that the NRA is a bit like the ACLU. It's actually considered 'not extreme enough' and 'too willing to bend' by some, there are more extreme organizations out there like the 'Gun Owners of America'.
But I'll agree, the NRA does have some kooks in it, but mostly they're there because they recognize the NRA as the '800 pound gorilla', so they throw some support to it, while also supporting the 300 pound gorilla who is, theoretically speaking, mauling some of the anti-gun gorillas around the corner, so the big guy gets even more done./Lifetime member of NRA AND GOA.
Pedantic - Oil is frequently used for power generation. You're burning it for power everytime you start your car. It's just not significant for electrical generation, which is a specific form of power generation.;)
A joule is a joule, whether it's motive, electric, or heat. Electric is generally the most useful form though.
Sure, building a nuke plant takes a lot of concrete(that emits CO2). However, everything I've read indicates that the amount of concrete needed to build a plant depends more on the specific design choices of the plant than the type. IE a 'concrete hungry' coal plant will use substantially more concrete than a nuclear plant that uses an average amount for nuke plants.
Oddly enough, I've read that due to the lack of energy density wind turbines actually use the most concrete, on average, mostly due to the footings needed. You need a LOT of turbines to match the power output of a GW class nuclear reactor, and when each one uses a truck or two worth of concrete at the base...
Coal isn't quite just crushed and sorted. I mean boiling it down that may be close to the heart of it, but as a communications tech up north here, some of my big customers are coal mines. They usually have 1-2 30+ thousand square foot plants, filled about 50+ feet high with machinery, all running at the same time. I imagine that is a fairly power hungry process. It is not refined but as far as how much electricity it takes, I bet it is a large chunk of what uranium is. I'm talking out my ass a bit here since I've only seen the coal side, but it sure seemed power hungry.
A bit disjointed, but I'll try. The reason why they have huge plants full of machinery running all the time is that even simple 'crushing and basic sorting' ends up taking a lot of space when you're looking at a 200 car train daily to keep a 1GW coal plant 'fed'. And yes, the crushing and sorting ends up relatively power intensive just due to the scale involved.
Per pound, Uranium takes a couple hundred times more power to manufacture to a state ready for a power plant, up to a couple thouand if you need 'highly enriched'. But it provides a couple million times the energy that burning a pound of coal does. Heck, I've read that the fissile products within the contaminants of coal(naturally occuring uranium, thorium, and such), if used in a nuclear power plant, would provide more power than the coal itself. There's riches available in them tailings(if it's prevented from going up the smokestacks)...
As for betting me, did you miss the part where I agree with you? You can trace SOME CO2 emissions to nuclear power - the testing and operating of backup generators, the vehicles driven around the plant, plant construction, mining operations and such. However, when you go that deep with the analysis, the carbon emissions from coal plants get even worse - They tend have just as many employees involved per kwh produced(more in mining operations, for example), and while they spend less energy(and thus oil) on refining, mining operations are on such a vaster scale that just the mining of coal overwhelms the entire uranium production line. That 200 car train every day is going to use a lot more diesel even for short trips than shipping Uranium to the nuke plant; even if the coal mine is close to it's plant and the uranium is coming from halfway around the world. Sure, a containment dome uses a lot of concrete, but on the whole, so doesn't building all the structures necessary for a clean operating coal plant - you need a lot of concrete to help contain the tailings, for example. To boil it all down - that's why CO2 generation from nuclear power is considered *insignificant*. You can find some, but it's on such a low factor that you get similar or higher amounts from wind and solar power. Heck, I read somewhere that Wind 'produces' more CO2 due to the concrete footings they use with the towers, the amount of steel involved, etc...
Mining: Coal generally rounds to 1:1 - 1 unit of mined material = 1 unit of coal burned. Nuclear power is more like 100:1 - you need 100 units of ore to get 1 unit of uranium to go into the reactor. You're still looking at 1 unit of Uranium being worth ~73k units of coal though. (measured by mass) Casting/Assembly - Energy intensive on a micro-scale, you're having to melt the metal, after all, but since you're only having to do it with a few pounds, it ends up being a relatively minor expenditure. We use more energy making glass, aluminum, steel, etc... Burn - The core, critical difference. You have to go out of your way to capture the CO2 from burning coal; it's part of the process, and a big one. With Uranium it's a matter that burning oil is cheaper for a lot of the steps, if electricity(from nukes, hydro, wind, solar)was cheaper we could use that and be much closer to being completely CO2 release free. Recycling - Could also involve reprocessing not involving a breeder; but a breeder gives the best results. Disposal - One more reasonable proposal I've se
I'd like to see a source on this claim. All too often when I see such projections it's heavily weighted with unrealistic assumptions and back-end installations. For example, stuff like 75% of the renewable power will be installed in 2015-2020, and they're already behind their 25% goal by 2015.
A google search - seems the goal is 100% electricity from renewables, not energy. The goal for heating is only 11% by 2020: Not until 2030(by Oil&Gas, admittably) Equivalent, not 'actual' 100% - They'll be trading with other countries, buying non-renewable power, but will sell renewable at other times, but will net out 100%(realistic). This page suggests they lucked out on the renewable resource trend; favorable wind and tide power locations. They're also 'ahead of schedule' and 35% of the way there. Still, they'll need to increase 8% a year to meet the goal, which I find a bit ambitious.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't be trying to reach similar goals if I was evil overlord of the United states; it's just that nuclear power would very much be part of the mix.
It also only produces 110 GWh/year. A single 1GW nuclear reactor that takes a decade to build will produce ~7884 GWh/year. Or almost 72 times as much. By that standard, you can build nuclear capacity faster than you can solar.
It also takes up 195 hectares of land, or about 2m m^2. Palo Verde, one of the largest nuclear plants in the USA, is on property that's 16km^2(16M m^2), 8 times as the solar facility, but it produces 29 TWh/year, or 264 times the power. Looking on google maps, it looks like a good deal of the land is 'empty', such that you could put a couple of those solar tower systems in. It'd be more, but the sewage treatment/cooling water ponds take up quite a lot of space.
If I'd seen your post earlier, I might of modded you up.
At this point I'll concede on the global warming/climate change point. As you point out, the real question now is: Is avoiding the damage economically worth it? In some cases I hear people advocating to switching to electric sources that run 10X the cost of conventional ones.
As somebody else pointed out, if we were given a source of essentially free unlimited electricity we'd be 99% of the way towards post-scarcity. Cheap power enables so many things.
I think we still need a healthy mix of power sources, and I don't like coal due to the ancillary pollution - not just global warming. By the time you pilo on enough pollution controls to qualify coal power as 'clean', it's more expensive than nuclear.
We dearly need affordable power, and I think nuclear has the best promise. Even then I don't propose making it our 'sole source.' I like to place my ideal non-carbon electric mix at 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'other' such as hydro. In order to reach this in the USA we simply need around twice as many nuclear reactors if we keep building them in the 1-1.4GW size range. We could use a whole raft of the small kw range devices for both providing electricity and heating remote Alaskan towns. Put the solar panels on roofs south of the Mason-Dixon line, the wind turbines in North Dakota and such, where they make sense.
The heat from combustible fuels not used for electricity is probably comparable.
Probably quite a bit higher, I'd think. Our electrical usage tends to be dwarfed by our non-electrical energy usage - lighting vs space heating, running computers vs running a car, etc... Heck, consider that most electric power plants are only 30-40% efficient. That means that for every watt of electricity produced, around 2 watts are immediately discarded as heat(or if we're lucky used to heat something useful). That means your 2TW of electrical production becomes 6TW released into the environment(solar and wind still being 'insignificant').
This site places world consumption at 142,300 TWh, or about 16TW, 8 times our electrical generation, for overall power usage.
Being a bit of a precisionist, I feel the need to point out that coal is generally NOT refined in any practical sense of the word; simply crushed and sorted a bit. That's part of the reason for the pollution problem with it - any non-coal bits go into the burners as well.
Oil is used for 'power' all the time, it's just not a significant source for *electrical* generation.
Many people use 'burn' as a term for using up uranium/nuclear fuel.
To address some of the higher threads- The true difference is that a single train car of Uranium a year can produce as much power as a daily 200 car train of coal. Or 1 train car(mostly shielding) of Uranium = ~73k train cars of Coal. In the mining and refinement of said car of uranium you might release about 10 cars worth of CO2, making the CO2 release from nuclear power 'insignificant'. IE we wouldn't have a global warming problem from CO2 release if we were all nuclear power(and did something about oil usage).
We dont' need to get down to 'carbon neutral' in order to avoid global warming; we simply need to avoid overwhelming the planet's ability to re-absorb it.
my point was that its not all that hard to convert AC at X to Y voltage RMS to a single Z voltage that can be fed into a diode bridge converting it into Internationally Standard DC with a variance of Plus Minus pick your tolerances.
Eh, you're correct. IT 'just' takes a transformer, or even just a voltage doubler/halver. I was just thinking that most of the power supplies you see today are 'universal' voltage, and reading up, they do the voltage conversion after the rectifier.
Then again, as you said it's relatively trivial to convert X Volts at Y Hz into A Volts at B Hz if you're willing to pony up the cash; at which point the specific implimentation depends mostly on the details/needs. Saw this recently at a aircraft electronics repair shop - they had outlets with 115V@400hz. Exceedingly well marked outlets...
To me your post looks deceptive, so I'm going to expand upon it a bit.
By law, every reactor must carry the maximum amount of private insurance possible*. Currently, this is $375M. For $860k, which gives you that the insurance companies think there's roughly a.22% (yes, less than 1%) chance that they'll have to pay out.
Add up all the benefits and my auto insurance is roughly $450k worth of benefits. Annual premium is ~$1k. Seems they think that I'm about as likely to have an accident as the nuke plant (.22%).
In the event of an accident, after the deducible you get the $375M in insurance, and after that it's a cooperative insurance pool - each owner gets to pony up that $111.9M per reactor. At 104 reactors at the moment, that's a total liability of $1.2B before the federal government gets involved.
Look at Deepwater Horizon. The federal government typically gets involved LONG before $1.2B in damage during an industrial accident. Heck, a really bad non-nuclear industrial accident could bust those levels and trigger superfund status(also federally subsidized). In exchange, nuclear plants have to follow the directions of the NRC. Personally, given that we haven't had a really major accident since TMI, I figure they're doing their jobs.
If nothing else, a damaged reactor isn't going to be producing power, which means they aren't getting the income. They still have to pay to clean/fix up their mess - all that money is only for liability to others.
Same with airline safety - sure, they'd like to save costs on maintenance, but a crashed plane isn't going to be earning them any revenue, even completely discounting fewer people flying with them due to the negative publicity.
With all this being said, I'll say this: I'd still prefer to build a number of NEW nuclear reactors with the specific goal in mind of shutting down the worst polluting fossil fuel plants and the least safe legacy nuclear ones.
What? You're unwilling to give up your nice house, computer, car/motorcycle/bicycle, etc...?
Saving resources is only part of the puzzle. It's been a while since I did the calcs, but shifting to 100% electric vehicles would increase the average* family's electricity usage by ~50%. You can indeed do a bunch of power shifting in such a scenario to keep demand even, such that you'd need a lot less than 50% build up in power lines and such, and you certainly wouldn't need 50% more generators, but you would need a substantial shift towards more baseload generators in such a scenario, and baseload is where nuclear excels.
Fact is, lighting is only 12% of the current power bill, so even if we went completely dark, we'd still be at 38% over current household consumption. Indeed, the only way to get us back down would be to eliminate the energy spent on heating and cooling, including heating water. Eliminating that would require complete rebuilding of most of the homes and apartments inside the USA - it takes a completely different design philosophy to make homes that don't need active heating/cooling. If we just look to increase efficiency Heat pumps are great, but expensive. However, much of the heating in the USA is done directly by buring NG, propane, fuel oil, etc, not using electricity. So it's quite possible that for every home you save electricity by installing a heat pump instead of direct resistive current, you're going to end up using MORE joules of electricity by converting the gas and oil systems over to electric heat pumps.
Conclusion: In order to save power we're going to need power. I say build away with modern, safer, nuclear plants so you can retire the old ones, and reduce the amount of coal/oil burned.
*average driving habits, average power bill, average electric car mileage, etc...
What are you doing with said small screened phone that will stress it such that you need more processor/memory? A device the size of a quarter can play MP3s and handle phone calls today.
Thoughts on 'expensive' tasks mostly includes games - but with a game a bigger, higher resolution screen is going to take more processor power for the video. Taking video might be another, but I'm not sure.
I'm going to have to kick it back to you - what application are you putting your phone to where more processor/memory would be useful, but the larger screen wouldn't? Is it common?
With the disclaimer that things change if you stick probes INTO your body, yes, you can touch both terminals of a fully charged car battery all day long without danger, even though it has enough wattage potential to kill you a couple thousand times, give you nasty burns, etc...
It's the whole A=V/R formula. 12V divided by the kiloohm your body typically presents, even when wet, isn't dangerous. 110-220VAC will shock you, but generally not lethally. At 600V you start needing to pay SERIOUS attention. Above that you're looking at specialized safety equipment.
There are some Hindu sects, it's big in Buddhism, Ahmadiyya for the Muslims(But they endorse violence in self defense), etc...
Though on the whole I agree with Blufoxlucid - I give credit to true pacifists, those who won't raise a hand even in their own defense, with a sort of respect, but I'm also going to treat them a bit like a child, needing protection from the dangerous world.
I wouldn't say that it'd be 'easy', but it's quite possible to arrange things so I'd do my level best to kill you. Make yourself a threat to me or mine, and I'll be a threat to you.
No need to 'flip' between the two. There are systems out there that can take *ANY* voltage between 260V-90V AC and turn it into an arbitrary DC voltage (5-24V being the common range). The trick is in how they build the inverter. Theoretically you could build a power supply that would take anything from 12VDC to 260VAC and output a clean 5V. It'd just be expensive.;)
It just so happens that my 'ideal' truck is something ranger sized with a 4 cylinder turbodiesel in it. Which is why I specified the V-8, just for that 'overkill' factor.
The frame of the F-150 isn't reinforced enough(unlike the 250/350) to handle the hauling/towing that the V8 can do. Sure, you can shoehorn one in, but you're not going to be able to make best use of the engine(processor) due to the secondary limitations.
'not immediately obvious' is right. It's kind of like how lawyers have been telling us, for decades, 'don't apologize, it might open you up to liability in a lawsuit!!!'. When they finally do a study, they find that apologizing, especially with an honest attempt to make it right, virtually eliminates lawsuits, and even if it goes to trial, the apology and offer of (reasponable) compensation tends to keep the awards down.
Of course, my point would be - why would it be in a lawyer's best interest to reduce the number of suits? They generally get paid whether they win the case or not.
I figure it's the same deal here. A little bit of niceness can go a long ways to preventing a lawsuit(expensive), gives good publicity, etc...
The parent specified 'emergency workers', and The NRC allows a dose 5X the normal recommended max under 'exceptional circumstances' where restricting to the lower dose levels are impossible/impractical. But only once in a career.
5 REM is actually extremely safe. Depending on the specific source of the radiation. Indeed 5 REM is for 'whole body', if the radiation hazard is skin or organ specific, the limit increases to 50, except for the lense of the eye, which is 15.
These limits were established quite some time ago. Back in the '60s if I remember right. It's not some 'corporate' screw the worker level. Indeed, remember, they provide healthcare and if the limits caused too much it'd screw them financially.
The 5 REM limit is to keep the increase in chance of cancer 'undetectable' over the course of a ~40 year career.
I should note that most first world countries with universal health care still use the private model for providers. I think that what Fred was trying to say is that it's the Insurance companies, more than the providers, that is driving our insane healthcare costs, and I think he's right.
If you're willing to shop around a bit and your illness is treatable short of the hospital(which all plan more on money from insurance anyways), you can get care much cheaper. My insurance-less brother has been able to get most of his care with a 'cash up front' discount of between 50-75%, and that's over the insurance rates.
I've seen the same with Keynesian economics - people claim it's a failure when most of the time the government only impliments HALF the strategy.
Yes, it calls for cutting services, increasing taxes, and paying down debts when the economy is heated - cutting services frees up government workers to go work in the private economy, helping to fulfill that demand, increased taxes reduces the cash available for hiring said workers, acting to cool it, and paying down debts allows the government to have a good balance sheet and credit when the next downturn hits.
Heh. True. Heck, I describe myself as a 'moderate libertarian' because of the 'major' parties(known to exist by at least double digits of the US population), it comes closest. Note that I don't fit my views to it; it simply comes closest. Despite this, I've been described elsewhere as 'more of a practical minarchist', meaning that I'm always looking for the least expensive/intrusive way to get things done.
You missed the point, I think. One, THIS lawsuit targets DRM, but I said 'copyright, trademark, and patent' - there's many avenues where Notch(if he wasn't a nice guy) could target something like minetest - you wouldn't need to be a coder for the game at all. Companies that merely use open source software have been sued for copyright infringement.
And you don't even need to reside in the United States to find yourself being sued in a Texan court over this stuff. Just ask Spamhaus.
As for Notch, well, he's living the american dream. I'm not going to grudge him his success, though yeah, at this point paying to have minecraft done in something other than Java would be good. He wasn't expecting to make millions from the game, and he coded in what he knew(at the time).
Heck, in some ways it makes it WORSE, because let's say that Notch wasn't such a nice guy and he decided that minetest somehow violated some of his copyright, trademark, or patent. YOU could find yourself named in the suit. In the case of commercial software, the seller of said software generally assumes the risk of such things. Meanwhile, in the case of open source software, companies have been known to sue users. Not particularly successfully, but even retaining a lawyer for such things is expensive, not to mention the time involved.
Honestly enough, it's one thing to be using an open source application as opposed to buying one from Microsoft, HP, or such. Notch? He's a single programmer looking to make a living. Why grudge him that?
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Heh. One thing to realize is that the NRA is a bit like the ACLU. It's actually considered 'not extreme enough' and 'too willing to bend' by some, there are more extreme organizations out there like the 'Gun Owners of America'.
But I'll agree, the NRA does have some kooks in it, but mostly they're there because they recognize the NRA as the '800 pound gorilla', so they throw some support to it, while also supporting the 300 pound gorilla who is, theoretically speaking, mauling some of the anti-gun gorillas around the corner, so the big guy gets even more done. /Lifetime member of NRA AND GOA.
Pedantic - Oil is frequently used for power generation. You're burning it for power everytime you start your car. It's just not significant for electrical generation, which is a specific form of power generation. ;)
A joule is a joule, whether it's motive, electric, or heat. Electric is generally the most useful form though.
Sure, building a nuke plant takes a lot of concrete(that emits CO2). However, everything I've read indicates that the amount of concrete needed to build a plant depends more on the specific design choices of the plant than the type. IE a 'concrete hungry' coal plant will use substantially more concrete than a nuclear plant that uses an average amount for nuke plants.
Oddly enough, I've read that due to the lack of energy density wind turbines actually use the most concrete, on average, mostly due to the footings needed. You need a LOT of turbines to match the power output of a GW class nuclear reactor, and when each one uses a truck or two worth of concrete at the base...
Coal isn't quite just crushed and sorted. I mean boiling it down that may be close to the heart of it, but as a communications tech up north here, some of my big customers are coal mines. They usually have 1-2 30+ thousand square foot plants, filled about 50+ feet high with machinery, all running at the same time. I imagine that is a fairly power hungry process. It is not refined but as far as how much electricity it takes, I bet it is a large chunk of what uranium is. I'm talking out my ass a bit here since I've only seen the coal side, but it sure seemed power hungry.
A bit disjointed, but I'll try. The reason why they have huge plants full of machinery running all the time is that even simple 'crushing and basic sorting' ends up taking a lot of space when you're looking at a 200 car train daily to keep a 1GW coal plant 'fed'. And yes, the crushing and sorting ends up relatively power intensive just due to the scale involved.
Per pound, Uranium takes a couple hundred times more power to manufacture to a state ready for a power plant, up to a couple thouand if you need 'highly enriched'. But it provides a couple million times the energy that burning a pound of coal does. Heck, I've read that the fissile products within the contaminants of coal(naturally occuring uranium, thorium, and such), if used in a nuclear power plant, would provide more power than the coal itself. There's riches available in them tailings(if it's prevented from going up the smokestacks)...
As for betting me, did you miss the part where I agree with you? You can trace SOME CO2 emissions to nuclear power - the testing and operating of backup generators, the vehicles driven around the plant, plant construction, mining operations and such. However, when you go that deep with the analysis, the carbon emissions from coal plants get even worse - They tend have just as many employees involved per kwh produced(more in mining operations, for example), and while they spend less energy(and thus oil) on refining, mining operations are on such a vaster scale that just the mining of coal overwhelms the entire uranium production line. That 200 car train every day is going to use a lot more diesel even for short trips than shipping Uranium to the nuke plant; even if the coal mine is close to it's plant and the uranium is coming from halfway around the world. Sure, a containment dome uses a lot of concrete, but on the whole, so doesn't building all the structures necessary for a clean operating coal plant - you need a lot of concrete to help contain the tailings, for example. To boil it all down - that's why CO2 generation from nuclear power is considered *insignificant*. You can find some, but it's on such a low factor that you get similar or higher amounts from wind and solar power. Heck, I read somewhere that Wind 'produces' more CO2 due to the concrete footings they use with the towers, the amount of steel involved, etc...
Mining: Coal generally rounds to 1:1 - 1 unit of mined material = 1 unit of coal burned. Nuclear power is more like 100:1 - you need 100 units of ore to get 1 unit of uranium to go into the reactor. You're still looking at 1 unit of Uranium being worth ~73k units of coal though. (measured by mass)
Casting/Assembly - Energy intensive on a micro-scale, you're having to melt the metal, after all, but since you're only having to do it with a few pounds, it ends up being a relatively minor expenditure. We use more energy making glass, aluminum, steel, etc...
Burn - The core, critical difference. You have to go out of your way to capture the CO2 from burning coal; it's part of the process, and a big one. With Uranium it's a matter that burning oil is cheaper for a lot of the steps, if electricity(from nukes, hydro, wind, solar)was cheaper we could use that and be much closer to being completely CO2 release free.
Recycling - Could also involve reprocessing not involving a breeder; but a breeder gives the best results.
Disposal - One more reasonable proposal I've se
Mentioned that earlier: any non-coal bits go into the burners as well.. Bits such as arsenic, lead, mercury, etc...
I'd like to see a source on this claim. All too often when I see such projections it's heavily weighted with unrealistic assumptions and back-end installations. For example, stuff like 75% of the renewable power will be installed in 2015-2020, and they're already behind their 25% goal by 2015.
A google search - seems the goal is 100% electricity from renewables, not energy. The goal for heating is only 11% by 2020:
Not until 2030(by Oil&Gas, admittably)
Equivalent, not 'actual' 100% - They'll be trading with other countries, buying non-renewable power, but will sell renewable at other times, but will net out 100%(realistic).
This page suggests they lucked out on the renewable resource trend; favorable wind and tide power locations. They're also 'ahead of schedule' and 35% of the way there. Still, they'll need to increase 8% a year to meet the goal, which I find a bit ambitious.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't be trying to reach similar goals if I was evil overlord of the United states; it's just that nuclear power would very much be part of the mix.
Okay, it takes two years to produce.
It also only produces 110 GWh/year. A single 1GW nuclear reactor that takes a decade to build will produce ~7884 GWh/year. Or almost 72 times as much. By that standard, you can build nuclear capacity faster than you can solar.
It also takes up 195 hectares of land, or about 2m m^2. Palo Verde, one of the largest nuclear plants in the USA, is on property that's 16km^2(16M m^2), 8 times as the solar facility, but it produces 29 TWh/year, or 264 times the power. Looking on google maps, it looks like a good deal of the land is 'empty', such that you could put a couple of those solar tower systems in. It'd be more, but the sewage treatment/cooling water ponds take up quite a lot of space.
If I'd seen your post earlier, I might of modded you up.
At this point I'll concede on the global warming/climate change point. As you point out, the real question now is: Is avoiding the damage economically worth it? In some cases I hear people advocating to switching to electric sources that run 10X the cost of conventional ones.
As somebody else pointed out, if we were given a source of essentially free unlimited electricity we'd be 99% of the way towards post-scarcity. Cheap power enables so many things.
I think we still need a healthy mix of power sources, and I don't like coal due to the ancillary pollution - not just global warming. By the time you pilo on enough pollution controls to qualify coal power as 'clean', it's more expensive than nuclear.
We dearly need affordable power, and I think nuclear has the best promise. Even then I don't propose making it our 'sole source.' I like to place my ideal non-carbon electric mix at 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'other' such as hydro. In order to reach this in the USA we simply need around twice as many nuclear reactors if we keep building them in the 1-1.4GW size range. We could use a whole raft of the small kw range devices for both providing electricity and heating remote Alaskan towns. Put the solar panels on roofs south of the Mason-Dixon line, the wind turbines in North Dakota and such, where they make sense.
The heat from combustible fuels not used for electricity is probably comparable.
Probably quite a bit higher, I'd think. Our electrical usage tends to be dwarfed by our non-electrical energy usage - lighting vs space heating, running computers vs running a car, etc... Heck, consider that most electric power plants are only 30-40% efficient. That means that for every watt of electricity produced, around 2 watts are immediately discarded as heat(or if we're lucky used to heat something useful). That means your 2TW of electrical production becomes 6TW released into the environment(solar and wind still being 'insignificant').
This site places world consumption at 142,300 TWh, or about 16TW, 8 times our electrical generation, for overall power usage.
Being a bit of a precisionist, I feel the need to point out that coal is generally NOT refined in any practical sense of the word; simply crushed and sorted a bit. That's part of the reason for the pollution problem with it - any non-coal bits go into the burners as well.
Oil is used for 'power' all the time, it's just not a significant source for *electrical* generation.
Many people use 'burn' as a term for using up uranium/nuclear fuel.
Coal: Mine, crush, burn.
Uranium: Mine, refine, enrich(sometimes), cast, assemble, burn, recycle(sometimes), dispose.
To address some of the higher threads-
The true difference is that a single train car of Uranium a year can produce as much power as a daily 200 car train of coal. Or 1 train car(mostly shielding) of Uranium = ~73k train cars of Coal. In the mining and refinement of said car of uranium you might release about 10 cars worth of CO2, making the CO2 release from nuclear power 'insignificant'. IE we wouldn't have a global warming problem from CO2 release if we were all nuclear power(and did something about oil usage).
We dont' need to get down to 'carbon neutral' in order to avoid global warming; we simply need to avoid overwhelming the planet's ability to re-absorb it.
my point was that its not all that hard to convert AC at X to Y voltage RMS to a single Z voltage that can be fed into a diode bridge converting it into Internationally Standard DC with a variance of Plus Minus pick your tolerances.
Eh, you're correct. IT 'just' takes a transformer, or even just a voltage doubler/halver. I was just thinking that most of the power supplies you see today are 'universal' voltage, and reading up, they do the voltage conversion after the rectifier.
Then again, as you said it's relatively trivial to convert X Volts at Y Hz into A Volts at B Hz if you're willing to pony up the cash; at which point the specific implimentation depends mostly on the details/needs. Saw this recently at a aircraft electronics repair shop - they had outlets with 115V@400hz. Exceedingly well marked outlets...
To me your post looks deceptive, so I'm going to expand upon it a bit.
By law, every reactor must carry the maximum amount of private insurance possible*. Currently, this is $375M. For $860k, which gives you that the insurance companies think there's roughly a .22% (yes, less than 1%) chance that they'll have to pay out.
Add up all the benefits and my auto insurance is roughly $450k worth of benefits. Annual premium is ~$1k. Seems they think that I'm about as likely to have an accident as the nuke plant (.22%).
In the event of an accident, after the deducible you get the $375M in insurance, and after that it's a cooperative insurance pool - each owner gets to pony up that $111.9M per reactor. At 104 reactors at the moment, that's a total liability of $1.2B before the federal government gets involved.
Look at Deepwater Horizon. The federal government typically gets involved LONG before $1.2B in damage during an industrial accident. Heck, a really bad non-nuclear industrial accident could bust those levels and trigger superfund status(also federally subsidized). In exchange, nuclear plants have to follow the directions of the NRC. Personally, given that we haven't had a really major accident since TMI, I figure they're doing their jobs.
If nothing else, a damaged reactor isn't going to be producing power, which means they aren't getting the income. They still have to pay to clean/fix up their mess - all that money is only for liability to others.
Same with airline safety - sure, they'd like to save costs on maintenance, but a crashed plane isn't going to be earning them any revenue, even completely discounting fewer people flying with them due to the negative publicity.
With all this being said, I'll say this: I'd still prefer to build a number of NEW nuclear reactors with the specific goal in mind of shutting down the worst polluting fossil fuel plants and the least safe legacy nuclear ones.
*Within certain rules of 'possible'.
Fine. You can lead the way.
What? You're unwilling to give up your nice house, computer, car/motorcycle/bicycle, etc...?
Saving resources is only part of the puzzle. It's been a while since I did the calcs, but shifting to 100% electric vehicles would increase the average* family's electricity usage by ~50%. You can indeed do a bunch of power shifting in such a scenario to keep demand even, such that you'd need a lot less than 50% build up in power lines and such, and you certainly wouldn't need 50% more generators, but you would need a substantial shift towards more baseload generators in such a scenario, and baseload is where nuclear excels.
Fact is, lighting is only 12% of the current power bill, so even if we went completely dark, we'd still be at 38% over current household consumption. Indeed, the only way to get us back down would be to eliminate the energy spent on heating and cooling, including heating water. Eliminating that would require complete rebuilding of most of the homes and apartments inside the USA - it takes a completely different design philosophy to make homes that don't need active heating/cooling. If we just look to increase efficiency Heat pumps are great, but expensive. However, much of the heating in the USA is done directly by buring NG, propane, fuel oil, etc, not using electricity. So it's quite possible that for every home you save electricity by installing a heat pump instead of direct resistive current, you're going to end up using MORE joules of electricity by converting the gas and oil systems over to electric heat pumps.
Conclusion: In order to save power we're going to need power. I say build away with modern, safer, nuclear plants so you can retire the old ones, and reduce the amount of coal/oil burned.
*average driving habits, average power bill, average electric car mileage, etc...
What are you doing with said small screened phone that will stress it such that you need more processor/memory? A device the size of a quarter can play MP3s and handle phone calls today.
Thoughts on 'expensive' tasks mostly includes games - but with a game a bigger, higher resolution screen is going to take more processor power for the video. Taking video might be another, but I'm not sure.
I'm going to have to kick it back to you - what application are you putting your phone to where more processor/memory would be useful, but the larger screen wouldn't? Is it common?
With the disclaimer that things change if you stick probes INTO your body, yes, you can touch both terminals of a fully charged car battery all day long without danger, even though it has enough wattage potential to kill you a couple thousand times, give you nasty burns, etc...
It's the whole A=V/R formula. 12V divided by the kiloohm your body typically presents, even when wet, isn't dangerous. 110-220VAC will shock you, but generally not lethally. At 600V you start needing to pay SERIOUS attention. Above that you're looking at specialized safety equipment.
There are some Hindu sects, it's big in Buddhism, Ahmadiyya for the Muslims(But they endorse violence in self defense), etc...
Though on the whole I agree with Blufoxlucid - I give credit to true pacifists, those who won't raise a hand even in their own defense, with a sort of respect, but I'm also going to treat them a bit like a child, needing protection from the dangerous world.
I wouldn't say that it'd be 'easy', but it's quite possible to arrange things so I'd do my level best to kill you. Make yourself a threat to me or mine, and I'll be a threat to you.
No need to 'flip' between the two. There are systems out there that can take *ANY* voltage between 260V-90V AC and turn it into an arbitrary DC voltage (5-24V being the common range). The trick is in how they build the inverter. Theoretically you could build a power supply that would take anything from 12VDC to 260VAC and output a clean 5V. It'd just be expensive. ;)
It just so happens that my 'ideal' truck is something ranger sized with a 4 cylinder turbodiesel in it. Which is why I specified the V-8, just for that 'overkill' factor.
The frame of the F-150 isn't reinforced enough(unlike the 250/350) to handle the hauling/towing that the V8 can do. Sure, you can shoehorn one in, but you're not going to be able to make best use of the engine(processor) due to the secondary limitations.
'not immediately obvious' is right. It's kind of like how lawyers have been telling us, for decades, 'don't apologize, it might open you up to liability in a lawsuit!!!'. When they finally do a study, they find that apologizing, especially with an honest attempt to make it right, virtually eliminates lawsuits, and even if it goes to trial, the apology and offer of (reasponable) compensation tends to keep the awards down.
Of course, my point would be - why would it be in a lawyer's best interest to reduce the number of suits? They generally get paid whether they win the case or not.
I figure it's the same deal here. A little bit of niceness can go a long ways to preventing a lawsuit(expensive), gives good publicity, etc...
The parent specified 'emergency workers', and The NRC allows a dose 5X the normal recommended max under 'exceptional circumstances' where restricting to the lower dose levels are impossible/impractical. But only once in a career.
5 REM is actually extremely safe. Depending on the specific source of the radiation. Indeed 5 REM is for 'whole body', if the radiation hazard is skin or organ specific, the limit increases to 50, except for the lense of the eye, which is 15.
These limits were established quite some time ago. Back in the '60s if I remember right. It's not some 'corporate' screw the worker level. Indeed, remember, they provide healthcare and if the limits caused too much it'd screw them financially.
The 5 REM limit is to keep the increase in chance of cancer 'undetectable' over the course of a ~40 year career.
I should note that most first world countries with universal health care still use the private model for providers. I think that what Fred was trying to say is that it's the Insurance companies, more than the providers, that is driving our insane healthcare costs, and I think he's right.
If you're willing to shop around a bit and your illness is treatable short of the hospital(which all plan more on money from insurance anyways), you can get care much cheaper. My insurance-less brother has been able to get most of his care with a 'cash up front' discount of between 50-75%, and that's over the insurance rates.
I've seen the same with Keynesian economics - people claim it's a failure when most of the time the government only impliments HALF the strategy.
Yes, it calls for cutting services, increasing taxes, and paying down debts when the economy is heated - cutting services frees up government workers to go work in the private economy, helping to fulfill that demand, increased taxes reduces the cash available for hiring said workers, acting to cool it, and paying down debts allows the government to have a good balance sheet and credit when the next downturn hits.
Heh. True. Heck, I describe myself as a 'moderate libertarian' because of the 'major' parties(known to exist by at least double digits of the US population), it comes closest. Note that I don't fit my views to it; it simply comes closest. Despite this, I've been described elsewhere as 'more of a practical minarchist', meaning that I'm always looking for the least expensive/intrusive way to get things done.
You missed the point, I think. One, THIS lawsuit targets DRM, but I said 'copyright, trademark, and patent' - there's many avenues where Notch(if he wasn't a nice guy) could target something like minetest - you wouldn't need to be a coder for the game at all. Companies that merely use open source software have been sued for copyright infringement.
And you don't even need to reside in the United States to find yourself being sued in a Texan court over this stuff. Just ask Spamhaus.
As for Notch, well, he's living the american dream. I'm not going to grudge him his success, though yeah, at this point paying to have minecraft done in something other than Java would be good. He wasn't expecting to make millions from the game, and he coded in what he knew(at the time).
Heck, in some ways it makes it WORSE, because let's say that Notch wasn't such a nice guy and he decided that minetest somehow violated some of his copyright, trademark, or patent. YOU could find yourself named in the suit. In the case of commercial software, the seller of said software generally assumes the risk of such things. Meanwhile, in the case of open source software, companies have been known to sue users. Not particularly successfully, but even retaining a lawyer for such things is expensive, not to mention the time involved.
Honestly enough, it's one thing to be using an open source application as opposed to buying one from Microsoft, HP, or such. Notch? He's a single programmer looking to make a living. Why grudge him that?