If they just cut a connection before the meter and manage to hide it, there are no power worries whatsoever. Cheaper utility bills to boot as well.
It's harder to do than you might think. The utility owns and reserves the right to inspect any/all wiring before the meter, and they DO have meters upstream. If the upstream meter is reporting more consumption than normal compared to the sub-meter consumption, they know something is up - either they have a short or somebody is stealing electricity. Then they have various means of testing individual homes.to determine the culprit.
Plus, it's dangerous to be choppng into live 200-400 amp 240V wires.
Great, just great. I can see the calls for banning solar energy technology since it allows drug lords to escape detection via electric meters.
Entirely possible, but in most areas I'd simply go for extensive sun-roofs instead. Solar-electric panels are expensive. The install costs for a sun-roof might be higher, but the panels/windows are a lot cheaper, even if you can only get sun for half the day that way.
... yet. What you conveniently fail to consider is that nobody's concerned about the acute effects of radation, except possibly for the plant workers on site; people are wary of the long-term consequences, and rightly so. Also cancers are just part of the story, there are also the teratogenic effects to consider, which open a whole new chapter of this grim tale.
If you want to start playing that game, I can always start pulling out the statistics for coal when it's operating 'as normal' as opposed to an emergency.
As I said in an earlier post, the nuclear apologists have adopted lately a new and very convenient frame of reference for nuclear disasters, i.e., Chernobyl = very serious (obviously, it was the stinking commies), and even that part is not clear, anything less = a walk in the park, obviously because you see, it's "not as bad as Chernobyl". Well a third grader knows that "smaller than huge" doesn't equal small, in fact it can perfectly be huge too.
I've had risk management and safety analysis training(though I'm not an expert). We now know that a major accident involving a significant uncontrolled containment leak is, roughly, a 1 every 25 years event. We also can start figuring out the cost of it.
Even figuring on a Chernobyl level event every 25 years, it's still better than coal. Affordable electricity makes coal power better than no power. Unsubsidized solar and wind are generally still expensive enough that even if you include the health effects in the cost of coal power, it's still cheaper.
One problem I see here is that at the time they were built, these reactors were declared "perfectly safe" and the people who protested them were "luddites", "joe-six-packs", "tree-hugging hippies", etc. Now the discourse has changed and all of a sudden these reactors are not so safe in fact, first they are old now, but also their designs leave some to be desired after all. But the newer ones are perfectly safe right? And again anyone daring emitting any doubt about that is an idiot, correct?
They were safe for longer than I've been alive...
No reasonable pro-nuclear person I know of goes for 'perfectly safe' outside of soundbites(where such distortions are pretty much par for the course). Heck, I'm sure you can still find quotes from airline people that their planes are 'perfectly safe', despite a few crashes each year.
Note that I never said 'perfectly safe'. I said 'safer'. So much safer that modern plants should cause fewer casualties than roof-mount solar, just from the occasional accidental fall. Same deal with wind, what with the towers requiring occasional maintenance.
Again as I said previously, I don't think the general public really fear nuclear power because of ignorance, as nuclear apologists like to believe. I'd say they distrust the nuclear industry, and possibly rightly so. Please show us that we really should trust you.
Like with any power source, nuclear should be respected. We need to respect the power of pretty much any power source. Still.
Natural Gas - mining techniques at least occasionally contaminate drinking water supplies. Look up 'burning water'. Natural Gas explosions cost a few lives each year. Coal - Thousands of mining deaths a year, tens of thousands from the pollution. Occasional containment loss of slurry has cost lives. Nuclear - With all accidents included; under a hundred deaths a year. Hydro - dam failures, other accidents, well, hundreds of deaths. A broken dam can kill tens of thousands quick Solar and Wind - As stated earlier, falls from roofs and towers.
Yeah, I should have more said 'none have been used since the effects of radiation became more well known'. Like I said though - you don't actually have to bomb the nuclear plant; just the switching yard for the power. Losing the grid connection will cause it to SCRAM automatically; they aren't designed to dump the power locally.
Look at nuclear weapons - despite quite a few countries having them at this point, none have been used. Countries with working nuclear reactors also tend to have functioning militaries, to the point that competency would be required in a military attack against them.
Competency and sanity do tend to go together, at least when it comes to the low level of sanity it takes to know [i]not to bomb or shell a nuclear plant[/i].
Indeed. Radiation levels around the plant prove beyond any doubt that the amount of radiation release was neither small, nor did it decay within minutes, nor was it contained in any containment chambers. It's amazing how very confidently people can be so extremely wrong.
We're still right about the radiation killing approximately nobody*.
The radiation release is still small in scope compared to Chernobyl, for a plant commissioned in 1971, which actually makes it OLDER than chernobyl by 6 years(commissioned in 1977). Reactor #4 wasn't completed until 1983.
Personally, I'd like to see us decommissioning these old reactors in faver of newer, safer reactors.
*It's possible that it might, sometime in the future, trigger a cancer for one of the workers.
'nearly everone else in the world' isn't true either, and getting less true every day. The only people to run an active smallpox vaccination program today is the US Military.
People who were vaccinated as teens are are at least in their 50s now, and scientists are doubtful that significant portions will retain sufficient immune response without a booster.
Probably because, in war, no sane military is going to be shooting at the nuclear plants; it would be as bad, if not worse, as setting off an actual nuke.
Worst case, they'd be looking to take out the power switch yard, a much softer target, which would prevent the distribution of the power and therefore force the plant to shut down.
Are you serious? You couldn't pull your pants up in the dark? I might fumble around a bit in such a situation with finding the toilet paper and such, but I'm fairly sure I could complete my business in such a case and at least be decent when walking up to the door. Why waddle around the bath waving the coat around? Wouldn't it have been easier to buckle back up and, even if you fumble a bit, walk back to the door? In my experience most doors aren't sealed so tight that you won't have a light to walk to.
Fixes in your case: 1. Use a better sensor - one that uses sound as well, maybe. 2. Position the sensor differently - to better cover the room(sounds like it was locked on the door) Putting it up on the fixture pointing down might of worked. 3. Increase the time the lights are on from ~10 minutes to ~20. While this might result in the bathroom lights staying on most of Sunday, for most churches doubling the time the lights stay on wouldn't increase energy use all that much.
Bad sensors call for replacement with better sensors, flawed deployments generally calls for fixing the deployment, not tossing the idea.
I wouldn't necessarily say that you'd need an electrician to install it - just somebody who understands the differences between sensors and the proper choice for the area in question..
As one AC mentioned, for an indoor sensor you're going to want infrared, and for something with stalls, you're going to want something that can detect movement within said stalls, or at least the entire restroom.
There are a number of options other than this though, that don't need the addressing/network connection.
For example, light/motion sensor lights. Set your porch light to come on only if it's dark and somebody approaches.
For a room, perhaps a reed switch in the door or just tie it to a timer. Or have it do both - something like 'turn light on for 5 minutes whenever switch activates'. Then again, perhaps an infrared sensor that lights the room when it thinks a human is inside.
As danlip mentions, the networking features will consume more power - and you gotta get the power pretty low when you're talking about 15 watt LED/flourescent bulbs.
I like the idea of putting the addressing into the fixture, if you do anything - that way you can better account for legacy wiring that simply chops power off when the switch is thrown, or just select the most appropriate lighting level setting system - whether that be IP addressing, dimmer switch, motion or other sensor.
I'd consider it a practical evaluation of consequences that is almost totally independent upon the USA's usage of nuclear weapons in WWII. Why? NK's potential usage of nuclear weapons is far greater than Syria or Libya, simply because they're known to have them.
The evaluation remains the same whether it's the USA considering invasion (known user of nuclear weapons), Britain(known possessor), or even Japan (no known possessed; estimates are could build quickly). North Korea can respond to invasion with nuclear weapons, Libya and Syria can't. That reduces the potential cost of invasion by orders of magnitude, making it a far 'cheaper' option, thus more likely to be used.
Generally you don't use force on the country with a large, competent military. You use force on the country without an effective military.
Tell me why i should use bitcoins instead of real gold.
Because Bitcoins can be directly electronically transfered? If you're transferring 'gold' electronically, you're not actually moving gold, you're moving a deed for gold. Heck, said deed for gold might not actually have any gold to back it up, I remember hearing on the news somewhere that some estimates are that up to a third of them are fake.
The problem is how much damage can be caused by a technology.
Can I be concerned about how much damage IS caused by a technology? I mean, it's not like
We cannot make a 50 km radius around each reactor contaminated and still have enough space to life. I do not propose that every plant is going to explode, however the result of an accident can be so harmful that we are not really able to handle them.
Didn't you just propose just that? At the current rate we only need an exclusion zone every 25 years, and we don't mark off 50km even for Chernobyl. Chernobyl is 30km, and Fukushima is 20km. As for 'handle them', we did so for Chernobyl, we're doing so for Fukushima.
So comparing dead people in a coal mine with thousands or millions (depends on the location) of people to be relocated to other places.
I'd rather be relocated than take a 1/10th chance(or so) of being dead...
But the contamination of an nuclear accident effects the general public. And frankly we do not want to be radiated, because someone is not able to operate his plant safely.
Beside that we have alternatives. One is hanging above our heads it is this yellow thingy it produces energy by nuclear fission. It works properly and we do not have to care about the waste for one or two billion years. Until then we can use energy supplied by that reactor.
Costs something like 10 times as much for the power, still need a method to generate electricity at night.
Germany will shutdown all its nuclear plants by 2020/2030 and replace it by renewable energy. Do you think they are going back to the stone age because of that. And no they are not building coal plants to replace the nuclear plants. they go to replace old inefficient coal plants by new ones.
I'll believe it when it happens; it was my understanding that the politicians were moving away from this before fukushima happened. We'll see in 9 years. And if they're not building coal plants to replacement, what are they building? Just curious.
You have to stop to think that a nuclear plant has to be replaced by another plant with the same output. You have to build a grid and attach many wind turbines. In Europe for example, they interconnect their wind farms in the North Sea.
Off-shore wind power is probably still cheaper than solar, but probably more expensive than on-shore. On shore you're looking at taking up a huge amount of space - wind is 5GWh/year/km2 by my calcs, vs nuclear at 1,828 GWh/year/km2. When I figured out having a Chernobyl/Fukushima every 25 years, and them being uninhabitable for 100, wind power STILL took out 82 times more land area from development than nuclear.
Note, I'm not entirely against wind/solar - I think they should be part of the mix, but only part. I'm thinking something like 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% other(hydro, tidal, geothermal, biomass, etc...) for my 'CO2 neutral' power supply. Heck, I've even been looking at a solar heating system for my house.
If you dig into the actual study, it's 5k thyroid cancer cases, most easily treated and highly survivable. Not good, but not fatal either.
You do get an anticipated 4k extra cancer deaths from the highest exposed, and 5k from the population in general, but that's not 9k kids dying from thyroid cancer, like the UN News Center article suggests. Heck, the article itself suggest that the effects are hard to confirm due to smoking, drinking, and other pollution. Increase in cancer is expected at 3-4% for the highest exposed,.6% for the rest.
I'm not going to suggest that this doesn't suck, but it's still minor compared to the deaths from air pollution from coal power. Heck, I think just coal mining accidents has added up to more than Chernobyl's total anticipated deaths over the years.
Slightly different numbers than the UN Study I found earlier - UN Source, 6k cases, 15 per this report, and only a 'large fraction' of the 6k from the iodine contamination.
The WHO article is from 06, the UN one is from 08, which could explain some of the different numbers.
I happen to remember the thyroid thing. Thing about radiation induced thyroid cancer is that it's one of the easiest cancers to treat. Going to the UN Source, I find that you're wrong on several counts 1. It's not 9000 cases, it's 6000 2. It's not thyroid cancer deaths, it's thyroid cancer cases. Most survived it. 15 per this report 3. The 6000 is all cases of thyroid cancer in the area, thyroid cancer is rare otherwise, but still occurs. The UN merely attributes a 'large fraction' to the radioiodine
Yeah, I think people understand that they need water.
That's not entirely true, especially anymore. Palo Verde, for example, uses treated sewage water for cooling, and if they'd built the additional two units they were planning - those would have been cooled via dry towers. It just tends to cost a bit more.
The state has to pick up the tap when (not if) something goes wrong.
Do you have a source showing the state stepping in on every construction project?
Do the risks add up enough that the cost of said backing exceeds that of the subsidies for other energy sources, especially solar and wind, in light of how much usable energy they actually produce?
Of course, I support nuclear power mostly in the context of replacing dirty coal power.
Okay, you need a 20km exclusion zone around 1 nuclear plant every 25 years. Assuming that we go with a sort of 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, 20% other low-CO2 mix, this would be a approximately twice as many reactors; right now many countries are around 20% nuclear, and newer reactors tend to be bigger than older ones. I figure the danger would remain around the same - newer reactor designs are substantially safer; they're designed to be able to SCRAM without external power, among numerous other improvements.
One of the things about wind and solar is that they are far less dense than nuclear power. Some sources suggest exclusion zones for housing of up to 2km. 350-500 meters is more common. It's not listed here, but some suggest these zones due to concerns about blade separation or ice formation(and subsequent 'throwing' by the turbine). Going by the study, I wouldn't want to build closer than ~150m, even without noise concerns.
Roscoe Wind Farm - 782 MW, 400km^2. Cost > $1B. Going by standard 30% capacity factor, that's 2,055 GWh a year. $487k per Gwh/year Ivanpah Solar Power Facility - 392 MW, 16km^2. Cost $2.2B, Annual Generation of 1,080 GWh, capacity factor 31%. $2M per Gwh/year(ouch!) Palo Verder Nuclear Generating Station - 3,875 MW, 16km^2, $5.9B, 29,250 GWh/year. A capacity factor of 86%. $202k per Gwh/year.
Wind: 5 GWh/km2, $487k per Gwh/year Solar: 67.5 GWh/km2, $2M per Gwh/year (produces half the power at twice the cost...) Nuclear: 1,828 GWh/km2, $202k per Gwh/year
There are 442 nuclear plants in the world today, with a combined output of 374,958 MW. At an 80% capacity factor(average), that's 2,627,705 GWh a year, or to give them the same room as teh Palo Verde plant - 1,437 km2. Each Chernobyl level disaster will take out ~1256 km2. Let's say that lasts 100 years. That'd mean 4 uninhabitable areas(worst case scenario, Chernobyl was BAD, and I don't think the Fukushima exclusion will be that large or last that long). That's 5k km^2 due to nuclear accidents, adding up to 6.4k km2 for all nuclear power plants + exclusion zones(make great wildlife preserves if Chernobyl is any indication).
Wind, which you don't want to be building underneath: 525k km2, or 82 times as much area that you can't use for much other than farming/grazing.
Solar power is extremely expensive, around $5-6 a watt(installed), and made worse by the ~30% capacity factor, but is significantly denser, at least at Ivanpah. It would still require 39k km2, requiring 6 times as much area. Sure, you can dual-use in much of the world, but unless the cost comes down...
Still, I'm not about to depend on one source, so my suggested ratio is around 40% nuclear(double today's), 20% wind, 20% solar, and 20% other(hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, etc...)
Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes, it is a electricity exporter in Europe.
Source? Also, if it's exporting less electricity, that implies that other countries are having to generate more electricity because they're not buying it from you, and that implies burning more NG and/or Coal.
By the way, I pay 20 cents/kWh and I'm with a utility that uses renewables exclusively. I don't know where the source in Wikipedia got their numbers from.
Well, good for you on the renewable electricity. Germany also has some of the highest renewable power subsidies going, so it's probable that a lot of your electricity cost is being subsidized by your government. - requiring utilities to buy solar at 62 cents a kwh, for example.
As for the wikipedia article, I should have mentioned that the costs in the wikipedia article are in US Cents. As 1 Euro is currently $1.42 USD, that makes your.20 EU into.28 USD, or a smidge under the quoted rate, easily explained by variances in the exchange rate from the 2009 sample. The source is right in the table, even. Going to the source gives an average of.22-.24 EU a kwh for residentials for Jan 2011.
Source on this? I see a 20km evacuation zone, and that should shrink once they finally get a handle on the situation and take measurements. Much less clean up efforts.
You seem to assume that designs considered safe today will stay so for eternity. Yet nuclear apologists claim all the time that our nuclear plants are only unsafe because they use a 30-year old design and that newer designs are far superior and in fact safe. You can't have it both ways.
Well, you were backpeddling and saying that even modern nuclear plant designs would be unsafe because the companies would skimp on maintenance. Thing is, pretty much all large industrial plants need regular maintenance. Even dams need some maintenance or they'll become unsafe. A properly maintained 30 year old plant should remain just as safe as it was when new, it's just that eventually it's uneconomical, especially when we can make one that 99.99% safe compared to the old 99.9% safe one.
I think what he was trying to get at was that it doesn't matter if a plant is 30 or 100 years old - you replace it when it makes sense to replace it. Maintenance isn't an option, irregardless of what type of plant it is.
In Germany, the plants build before 1980 are not able to withstand a plane crash (the newer ones supposedly are). These plants are properly maintained (I hope), but they are certified unsafe.
Well, 'withstand a plane crash' is a rather vague measurement of protection. There's a vast difference between a Cessna 150 and a Boeing 747. There's also differences between a full fuel load and a mostly empty plane. Still, most reactors are awfully small targets for a larger plane and fairly armoured for the purpose. Pressure vessels have to be built tough, after all. Even the armouring the pentagon had on 9/11 made a huge difference in limited the destruction from the plane that hit it.
In the end I look at it like a car. A car from the 1960's generally isn't anywhere near as safe as a car from 2010. Even a 2000 will generally be safer than one from 1990, but we don't force all the 1990 model cars off the road. Instead we do what amounts to phased replacement.
If we had actually kept building nuclear reactors, it's likely that due to economy of scale it'd have been cheaper to shut down older, less safe reactors such as Fukushima sooner, and we'd be safer overall today.
I assume that these politicians saw the reality you are talking about.
They probably did. Then, because they're politicians, when Fukushima happened they promptly jumped on the anti-nuclear bandwagon again.
11 of Germany's 17 nukes are currently offline, yet there are no blackouts.
Probably because you're buying power from France and buying(and burning) more natural gas from Russia, increasing your CO2 emissions and marginally increasing the amount of pollution in your air. Then again ~43.6% of your power is generated from coal, so you might be burning more of that. 23.3% nuclear, 13% natural gas.
Also, your electricity averages 30.66 cents a kwh, compared to France's 19.25, so you're paying roughly 50% more for your avoidance of nuclear power. The USA? We average 9.28.
Of course, in the USA we are a touch more dependent upon coal, and a touch less on nuclear(until you shut reactors off in a knee-jerk reaction). 45% Coal, 24% natural gas, 20% nuclear for the USA. .
For all of Germany's investment into renewable energy, only 15% of it's power comes from renewables. The USA? 11%. A significant lead, but at what price?
Personally, I hate coal with a passion, such that yes, I'd love to take our investments into renewable power, plow it into nuclear, and get OFF of coal. Even with the occasional nuclear accident, coal power kills more people every year and costs more in increased medical expenses.
I'll also note that ideally you'd also build the nuclear plants as either cogeneration or even trigeneration plants - do more with that waste heat.
My 'plan' for the USA would be ~60% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% 'other' - mix of hydro, tidal, geothermal, etc...
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If I remember right, part of his being caught was that he boasted about it.
But yeah, he set up a sort of air-gap transfer coil in his barn.
If they just cut a connection before the meter and manage to hide it, there are no power worries whatsoever. Cheaper utility bills to boot as well.
It's harder to do than you might think. The utility owns and reserves the right to inspect any/all wiring before the meter, and they DO have meters upstream. If the upstream meter is reporting more consumption than normal compared to the sub-meter consumption, they know something is up - either they have a short or somebody is stealing electricity. Then they have various means of testing individual homes.to determine the culprit.
Plus, it's dangerous to be choppng into live 200-400 amp 240V wires.
Great, just great. I can see the calls for banning solar energy technology since it allows drug lords to escape detection via electric meters.
Entirely possible, but in most areas I'd simply go for extensive sun-roofs instead. Solar-electric panels are expensive. The install costs for a sun-roof might be higher, but the panels/windows are a lot cheaper, even if you can only get sun for half the day that way.
For that matter, it mentions only the computing power 'the size of a credit card'.
Isn't that true already? I mean, at this point the computing power of a cell phone isn't anywhere near the majority of the volume of the phone.
I'd say the largest component is the screen, followed up by the battery, then(in mine) the 2 cameras, speakers, microphones, etc...
... yet. What you conveniently fail to consider is that nobody's concerned about the acute effects of radation, except possibly for the plant workers on site; people are wary of the long-term consequences, and rightly so. Also cancers are just part of the story, there are also the teratogenic effects to consider, which open a whole new chapter of this grim tale.
If you want to start playing that game, I can always start pulling out the statistics for coal when it's operating 'as normal' as opposed to an emergency.
As I said in an earlier post, the nuclear apologists have adopted lately a new and very convenient frame of reference for nuclear disasters, i.e., Chernobyl = very serious (obviously, it was the stinking commies), and even that part is not clear, anything less = a walk in the park, obviously because you see, it's "not as bad as Chernobyl". Well a third grader knows that "smaller than huge" doesn't equal small, in fact it can perfectly be huge too.
I've had risk management and safety analysis training(though I'm not an expert). We now know that a major accident involving a significant uncontrolled containment leak is, roughly, a 1 every 25 years event. We also can start figuring out the cost of it.
Even figuring on a Chernobyl level event every 25 years, it's still better than coal. Affordable electricity makes coal power better than no power. Unsubsidized solar and wind are generally still expensive enough that even if you include the health effects in the cost of coal power, it's still cheaper.
One problem I see here is that at the time they were built, these reactors were declared "perfectly safe" and the people who protested them were "luddites", "joe-six-packs", "tree-hugging hippies", etc. Now the discourse has changed and all of a sudden these reactors are not so safe in fact, first they are old now, but also their designs leave some to be desired after all. But the newer ones are perfectly safe right? And again anyone daring emitting any doubt about that is an idiot, correct?
They were safe for longer than I've been alive...
No reasonable pro-nuclear person I know of goes for 'perfectly safe' outside of soundbites(where such distortions are pretty much par for the course). Heck, I'm sure you can still find quotes from airline people that their planes are 'perfectly safe', despite a few crashes each year.
Note that I never said 'perfectly safe'. I said 'safer'. So much safer that modern plants should cause fewer casualties than roof-mount solar, just from the occasional accidental fall. Same deal with wind, what with the towers requiring occasional maintenance.
Again as I said previously, I don't think the general public really fear nuclear power because of ignorance, as nuclear apologists like to believe. I'd say they distrust the nuclear industry, and possibly rightly so. Please show us that we really should trust you.
Like with any power source, nuclear should be respected. We need to respect the power of pretty much any power source. Still.
Natural Gas - mining techniques at least occasionally contaminate drinking water supplies. Look up 'burning water'. Natural Gas explosions cost a few lives each year.
Coal - Thousands of mining deaths a year, tens of thousands from the pollution. Occasional containment loss of slurry has cost lives.
Nuclear - With all accidents included; under a hundred deaths a year.
Hydro - dam failures, other accidents, well, hundreds of deaths. A broken dam can kill tens of thousands quick
Solar and Wind - As stated earlier, falls from roofs and towers.
Doh!
Yeah, I should have more said 'none have been used since the effects of radiation became more well known'. Like I said though - you don't actually have to bomb the nuclear plant; just the switching yard for the power. Losing the grid connection will cause it to SCRAM automatically; they aren't designed to dump the power locally.
Look at nuclear weapons - despite quite a few countries having them at this point, none have been used. Countries with working nuclear reactors also tend to have functioning militaries, to the point that competency would be required in a military attack against them.
Competency and sanity do tend to go together, at least when it comes to the low level of sanity it takes to know [i]not to bomb or shell a nuclear plant[/i].
Indeed. Radiation levels around the plant prove beyond any doubt that the amount of radiation release was neither small, nor did it decay within minutes, nor was it contained in any containment chambers. It's amazing how very confidently people can be so extremely wrong.
We're still right about the radiation killing approximately nobody*.
The radiation release is still small in scope compared to Chernobyl, for a plant commissioned in 1971, which actually makes it OLDER than chernobyl by 6 years(commissioned in 1977). Reactor #4 wasn't completed until 1983.
Personally, I'd like to see us decommissioning these old reactors in faver of newer, safer reactors.
*It's possible that it might, sometime in the future, trigger a cancer for one of the workers.
'nearly everone else in the world' isn't true either, and getting less true every day. The only people to run an active smallpox vaccination program today is the US Military.
People who were vaccinated as teens are are at least in their 50s now, and scientists are doubtful that significant portions will retain sufficient immune response without a booster.
Probably because, in war, no sane military is going to be shooting at the nuclear plants; it would be as bad, if not worse, as setting off an actual nuke.
Worst case, they'd be looking to take out the power switch yard, a much softer target, which would prevent the distribution of the power and therefore force the plant to shut down.
Funny enough, I've been wiping my bum for enough years at this point that I generally know when I'm clean by touch. The TP drags different.
I've had to finish my business and even wash my hands completely in the dark before. It's not that hard. Blind people even do it all the time. ;)
Are you serious? You couldn't pull your pants up in the dark? I might fumble around a bit in such a situation with finding the toilet paper and such, but I'm fairly sure I could complete my business in such a case and at least be decent when walking up to the door. Why waddle around the bath waving the coat around? Wouldn't it have been easier to buckle back up and, even if you fumble a bit, walk back to the door? In my experience most doors aren't sealed so tight that you won't have a light to walk to.
Fixes in your case: 1. Use a better sensor - one that uses sound as well, maybe. 2. Position the sensor differently - to better cover the room(sounds like it was locked on the door) Putting it up on the fixture pointing down might of worked. 3. Increase the time the lights are on from ~10 minutes to ~20. While this might result in the bathroom lights staying on most of Sunday, for most churches doubling the time the lights stay on wouldn't increase energy use all that much.
Bad sensors call for replacement with better sensors, flawed deployments generally calls for fixing the deployment, not tossing the idea.
I wouldn't necessarily say that you'd need an electrician to install it - just somebody who understands the differences between sensors and the proper choice for the area in question..
As one AC mentioned, for an indoor sensor you're going to want infrared, and for something with stalls, you're going to want something that can detect movement within said stalls, or at least the entire restroom.
There are a number of options other than this though, that don't need the addressing/network connection.
For example, light/motion sensor lights. Set your porch light to come on only if it's dark and somebody approaches.
For a room, perhaps a reed switch in the door or just tie it to a timer. Or have it do both - something like 'turn light on for 5 minutes whenever switch activates'. Then again, perhaps an infrared sensor that lights the room when it thinks a human is inside.
As danlip mentions, the networking features will consume more power - and you gotta get the power pretty low when you're talking about 15 watt LED/flourescent bulbs.
I like the idea of putting the addressing into the fixture, if you do anything - that way you can better account for legacy wiring that simply chops power off when the switch is thrown, or just select the most appropriate lighting level setting system - whether that be IP addressing, dimmer switch, motion or other sensor.
I'd consider it a practical evaluation of consequences that is almost totally independent upon the USA's usage of nuclear weapons in WWII. Why? NK's potential usage of nuclear weapons is far greater than Syria or Libya, simply because they're known to have them.
The evaluation remains the same whether it's the USA considering invasion (known user of nuclear weapons), Britain(known possessor), or even Japan (no known possessed; estimates are could build quickly). North Korea can respond to invasion with nuclear weapons, Libya and Syria can't. That reduces the potential cost of invasion by orders of magnitude, making it a far 'cheaper' option, thus more likely to be used.
Generally you don't use force on the country with a large, competent military. You use force on the country without an effective military.
Tell me why i should use bitcoins instead of real gold.
Because Bitcoins can be directly electronically transfered? If you're transferring 'gold' electronically, you're not actually moving gold, you're moving a deed for gold. Heck, said deed for gold might not actually have any gold to back it up, I remember hearing on the news somewhere that some estimates are that up to a third of them are fake.
As for the CPU power, it's to generate scarcity.
The problem is how much damage can be caused by a technology.
Can I be concerned about how much damage IS caused by a technology? I mean, it's not like
We cannot make a 50 km radius around each reactor contaminated and still have enough space to life. I do not propose that every plant is going to explode, however the result of an accident can be so harmful that we are not really able to handle them.
Didn't you just propose just that? At the current rate we only need an exclusion zone every 25 years, and we don't mark off 50km even for Chernobyl. Chernobyl is 30km, and Fukushima is 20km. As for 'handle them', we did so for Chernobyl, we're doing so for Fukushima.
So comparing dead people in a coal mine with thousands or millions (depends on the location) of people to be relocated to other places.
I'd rather be relocated than take a 1/10th chance(or so) of being dead...
But the contamination of an nuclear accident effects the general public. And frankly we do not want to be radiated, because someone is not able to operate his plant safely.
What about the contamination from coal plants?
Beside that we have alternatives. One is hanging above our heads it is this yellow thingy it produces energy by nuclear fission. It works properly and we do not have to care about the waste for one or two billion years. Until then we can use energy supplied by that reactor.
Costs something like 10 times as much for the power, still need a method to generate electricity at night.
Germany will shutdown all its nuclear plants by 2020/2030 and replace it by renewable energy. Do you think they are going back to the stone age because of that. And no they are not building coal plants to replace the nuclear plants. they go to replace old inefficient coal plants by new ones.
I'll believe it when it happens; it was my understanding that the politicians were moving away from this before fukushima happened. We'll see in 9 years.
And if they're not building coal plants to replacement, what are they building? Just curious.
You have to stop to think that a nuclear plant has to be replaced by another plant with the same output. You have to build a grid and attach many wind turbines. In Europe for example, they interconnect their wind farms in the North Sea.
Off-shore wind power is probably still cheaper than solar, but probably more expensive than on-shore. On shore you're looking at taking up a huge amount of space - wind is 5GWh/year/km2 by my calcs, vs nuclear at 1,828 GWh/year/km2. When I figured out having a Chernobyl/Fukushima every 25 years, and them being uninhabitable for 100, wind power STILL took out 82 times more land area from development than nuclear.
Note, I'm not entirely against wind/solar - I think they should be part of the mix, but only part. I'm thinking something like 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% other(hydro, tidal, geothermal, biomass, etc...) for my 'CO2 neutral' power supply. Heck, I've even been looking at a solar heating system for my house.
If you dig into the actual study, it's 5k thyroid cancer cases, most easily treated and highly survivable. Not good, but not fatal either.
You do get an anticipated 4k extra cancer deaths from the highest exposed, and 5k from the population in general, but that's not 9k kids dying from thyroid cancer, like the UN News Center article suggests. Heck, the article itself suggest that the effects are hard to confirm due to smoking, drinking, and other pollution. Increase in cancer is expected at 3-4% for the highest exposed, .6% for the rest.
I'm not going to suggest that this doesn't suck, but it's still minor compared to the deaths from air pollution from coal power. Heck, I think just coal mining accidents has added up to more than Chernobyl's total anticipated deaths over the years.
Slightly different numbers than the UN Study I found earlier - UN Source, 6k cases, 15 per this report, and only a 'large fraction' of the 6k from the iodine contamination.
The WHO article is from 06, the UN one is from 08, which could explain some of the different numbers.
I happen to remember the thyroid thing. Thing about radiation induced thyroid cancer is that it's one of the easiest cancers to treat.
Going to the UN Source, I find that you're wrong on several counts
1. It's not 9000 cases, it's 6000
2. It's not thyroid cancer deaths, it's thyroid cancer cases. Most survived it. 15 per this report
3. The 6000 is all cases of thyroid cancer in the area, thyroid cancer is rare otherwise, but still occurs. The UN merely attributes a 'large fraction' to the radioiodine
Yeah, I think people understand that they need water.
That's not entirely true, especially anymore. Palo Verde, for example, uses treated sewage water for cooling, and if they'd built the additional two units they were planning - those would have been cooled via dry towers. It just tends to cost a bit more.
Solar thermal consumes more water than nuclear?. Oh, and this source says that coal power consumes nearly as much.
The state has to pick up the tap when (not if) something goes wrong.
Do you have a source showing the state stepping in on every construction project?
Do the risks add up enough that the cost of said backing exceeds that of the subsidies for other energy sources, especially solar and wind, in light of how much usable energy they actually produce?
Of course, I support nuclear power mostly in the context of replacing dirty coal power.
Okay, you need a 20km exclusion zone around 1 nuclear plant every 25 years. Assuming that we go with a sort of 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, 20% other low-CO2 mix, this would be a approximately twice as many reactors; right now many countries are around 20% nuclear, and newer reactors tend to be bigger than older ones. I figure the danger would remain around the same - newer reactor designs are substantially safer; they're designed to be able to SCRAM without external power, among numerous other improvements.
One of the things about wind and solar is that they are far less dense than nuclear power. Some sources suggest exclusion zones for housing of up to 2km. 350-500 meters is more common. It's not listed here, but some suggest these zones due to concerns about blade separation or ice formation(and subsequent 'throwing' by the turbine). Going by the study, I wouldn't want to build closer than ~150m, even without noise concerns.
Roscoe Wind Farm - 782 MW, 400km^2. Cost > $1B. Going by standard 30% capacity factor, that's 2,055 GWh a year. $487k per Gwh/year
Ivanpah Solar Power Facility - 392 MW, 16km^2. Cost $2.2B, Annual Generation of 1,080 GWh, capacity factor 31%. $2M per Gwh/year(ouch!)
Palo Verder Nuclear Generating Station - 3,875 MW, 16km^2, $5.9B, 29,250 GWh/year. A capacity factor of 86%. $202k per Gwh/year.
Wind: 5 GWh/km2, $487k per Gwh/year
Solar: 67.5 GWh/km2, $2M per Gwh/year (produces half the power at twice the cost...)
Nuclear: 1,828 GWh/km2, $202k per Gwh/year
There are 442 nuclear plants in the world today, with a combined output of 374,958 MW. At an 80% capacity factor(average), that's 2,627,705 GWh a year, or to give them the same room as teh Palo Verde plant - 1,437 km2. Each Chernobyl level disaster will take out ~1256 km2. Let's say that lasts 100 years. That'd mean 4 uninhabitable areas(worst case scenario, Chernobyl was BAD, and I don't think the Fukushima exclusion will be that large or last that long). That's 5k km^2 due to nuclear accidents, adding up to 6.4k km2 for all nuclear power plants + exclusion zones(make great wildlife preserves if Chernobyl is any indication).
Wind, which you don't want to be building underneath: 525k km2, or 82 times as much area that you can't use for much other than farming/grazing.
Solar power is extremely expensive, around $5-6 a watt(installed), and made worse by the ~30% capacity factor, but is significantly denser, at least at Ivanpah. It would still require 39k km2, requiring 6 times as much area. Sure, you can dual-use in much of the world, but unless the cost comes down...
Still, I'm not about to depend on one source, so my suggested ratio is around 40% nuclear(double today's), 20% wind, 20% solar, and 20% other(hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, etc...)
Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes, it is a electricity exporter in Europe.
Source? Also, if it's exporting less electricity, that implies that other countries are having to generate more electricity because they're not buying it from you, and that implies burning more NG and/or Coal.
By the way, I pay 20 cents/kWh and I'm with a utility that uses renewables exclusively. I don't know where the source in Wikipedia got their numbers from.
Well, good for you on the renewable electricity. Germany also has some of the highest renewable power subsidies going, so it's probable that a lot of your electricity cost is being subsidized by your government. - requiring utilities to buy solar at 62 cents a kwh, for example.
As for the wikipedia article, I should have mentioned that the costs in the wikipedia article are in US Cents. As 1 Euro is currently $1.42 USD, that makes your .20 EU into .28 USD, or a smidge under the quoted rate, easily explained by variances in the exchange rate from the 2009 sample. The source is right in the table, even. Going to the source gives an average of .22-.24 EU a kwh for residentials for Jan 2011.
Except in a 20-mile radius around Fukushima.
Source on this? I see a 20km evacuation zone, and that should shrink once they finally get a handle on the situation and take measurements. Much less clean up efforts.
You seem to assume that designs considered safe today will stay so for eternity. Yet nuclear apologists claim all the time that our nuclear plants are only unsafe because they use a 30-year old design and that newer designs are far superior and in fact safe. You can't have it both ways.
Well, you were backpeddling and saying that even modern nuclear plant designs would be unsafe because the companies would skimp on maintenance. Thing is, pretty much all large industrial plants need regular maintenance. Even dams need some maintenance or they'll become unsafe. A properly maintained 30 year old plant should remain just as safe as it was when new, it's just that eventually it's uneconomical, especially when we can make one that 99.99% safe compared to the old 99.9% safe one.
I think what he was trying to get at was that it doesn't matter if a plant is 30 or 100 years old - you replace it when it makes sense to replace it. Maintenance isn't an option, irregardless of what type of plant it is.
In Germany, the plants build before 1980 are not able to withstand a plane crash (the newer ones supposedly are). These plants are properly maintained (I hope), but they are certified unsafe.
Well, 'withstand a plane crash' is a rather vague measurement of protection. There's a vast difference between a Cessna 150 and a Boeing 747. There's also differences between a full fuel load and a mostly empty plane. Still, most reactors are awfully small targets for a larger plane and fairly armoured for the purpose. Pressure vessels have to be built tough, after all. Even the armouring the pentagon had on 9/11 made a huge difference in limited the destruction from the plane that hit it.
In the end I look at it like a car. A car from the 1960's generally isn't anywhere near as safe as a car from 2010. Even a 2000 will generally be safer than one from 1990, but we don't force all the 1990 model cars off the road. Instead we do what amounts to phased replacement.
If we had actually kept building nuclear reactors, it's likely that due to economy of scale it'd have been cheaper to shut down older, less safe reactors such as Fukushima sooner, and we'd be safer overall today.
I assume that these politicians saw the reality you are talking about.
They probably did. Then, because they're politicians, when Fukushima happened they promptly jumped on the anti-nuclear bandwagon again.
11 of Germany's 17 nukes are currently offline, yet there are no blackouts.
Probably because you're buying power from France and buying(and burning) more natural gas from Russia, increasing your CO2 emissions and marginally increasing the amount of pollution in your air. Then again ~43.6% of your power is generated from coal, so you might be burning more of that. 23.3% nuclear, 13% natural gas.
Also, your electricity averages 30.66 cents a kwh, compared to France's 19.25, so you're paying roughly 50% more for your avoidance of nuclear power. The USA? We average 9.28.
Of course, in the USA we are a touch more dependent upon coal, and a touch less on nuclear(until you shut reactors off in a knee-jerk reaction). 45% Coal, 24% natural gas, 20% nuclear for the USA. .
For all of Germany's investment into renewable energy, only 15% of it's power comes from renewables. The USA? 11%. A significant lead, but at what price?
Personally, I hate coal with a passion, such that yes, I'd love to take our investments into renewable power, plow it into nuclear, and get OFF of coal. Even with the occasional nuclear accident, coal power kills more people every year and costs more in increased medical expenses.
I'll also note that ideally you'd also build the nuclear plants as either cogeneration or even trigeneration plants - do more with that waste heat.
My 'plan' for the USA would be ~60% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% 'other' - mix of hydro, tidal, geothermal, etc...