On a properly configured automailer, any error messages are supposed to go to the administrator. How else would he be made aware that something is amiss?
And he still has to care enough to fix the problem of MY mail server rejecting his notices.
And if the automailer is so badly set up that it can't set up a proper reply, are you really trusting that outfit that it handles all other aspects of the service well? (such as not communicating your e-mail to a spammer anyways...)
'set up a proper reply'? What does that mean?
My point would be that spammers have and will send out emails that are crafted to look like these confirmation emails. They're an attempt to get you to click on the link. As such, forums small enough to not end up on whitelists often get blocked.
You start sending reject messages with resubmission requirements to allow email through and the spammers will automate that process faster than many lazy forum administrators will process the handful of rejects they may get a week.
Not to mention that the whole reason for the confirmation emails is/was an attempt to cut down on spamming from their end, not increase their workload.
No matter how much functionality you duplicate, unless you actually copy the code from Microsoft Office (i.e. you don't write it yourself), there is no copyright violation.
Don't have to copy code; simply copying the design too much might be enough to trigger it. The images used for copy/paste and such, for example.
Can we now expect the OpenOffice New Zealand version to basically "be" microsoft office, since software patents won't work there?
Well, there's two factors here: Patents and Copyright. Patents are more general than copyright, generally speaking.
Get OpenOffice or other software too close to 'Microsoft Office' and you'll likely be treading into copyright violation zone. Copyright also lasts a lot longer than patents.
How about a linux or other OS that is 100% Windows compatible? Do you really think M$ will let this fly, once stuff like this starts hitting torrents, etc. from New Zealand?
Would be possible, not much microsoft could do without breaking compatibility in other ways. You'd still have to be careful of copyright. Political lobbying would still probably be used though.
You probably wouldn't need the full 'cleanroom' reverse engineering that was done with BIOS back in the day. You had one team disassembling the sytem, writing up it's behavior and technical specifications, and another team making a ROM that met the specifications, never having looked at the original ROM.
Russia still maintains at least one active Kirov class missile cruiser.
Didn't know that; more familiar with US ships.
how do you suppose the Exocet compares to a WW2 era shell in terms of explosive and kinetic energy?
Exocet: 670 kg, 165 kg warhead. 315 m/s velocity. 180km range Mark 8 shell for the 16"/50 mounted on an Iowa: 1200 kg 820 m/s at the muzzle. ~20km range Unable to find amount of explosives.
Still, the USS Stark was a frigate. And it survived it's two hits.
Hmm... I'd say the Exocet is a 7.62x51 vs a.50BMG for the shell. The best shell my quick search found.
Why limit the conversation to nuclear powered ships?
Because this was originally about the risk of having reactor breaches due to battle damage to nuclear powered ships in combat
If a nulcear sub or carrier goes down in the mid Atlantic or pacific, exactly how much pressure could a reactor casing take
Details probably classified, but consider this: What happens when you take a vessel that's designed to contain not inconsiderable interior pressure and put it into an environment where it has more exterior pressure?
Or, to put it another way; water is incompressible. A reactor vessel is filled with water for cooling and power transfer. Any pressure put on the vessel by the sea is going to be countered by the water in the vessel.
Think about it this way: Take a ballon, fill it with water. Tie a string around the end and put a lead weight on it. At what depth would you expect it to crush at? Or take two glass vessels - one has a couple pounds of lead and is filled with water, the other has enough lead to match the weight of the other but is sealed with air inside. The one with air will break; the one filled with water won't, at least not just from water pressure.
If breached what would be the ultimate result (explosion, fission will continue, fission will stop).
Simple question that can be very complex:
Worst case: Breach occurs while reactor is in full operation. The missile/shell managed a direct hit on the reactor casing, probably. Results: probable steam explosion(not nuclear), spread of radioactive material. Fission likely stops, though radioactivity will be high at first. As an uranium nuclear pile is even denser than lead, any parts that hit the ocean are going to sink, rapidly. While highly radioactive water doesn't pick up radioactivity all that easily, oceans are good at the 'dilute' thing; remember the gulf oil spill is 1.5 - 2.5 MILLION gallons a day. You could fit a submarine pile into a couple barrels.
Theoretical 'impact at bottom of ocean' breach: The reactor has probably already SCRAMED - fission has already stopped. There will be no explosion as the reactor has already cooled too much to generate steam; much less generate steam at the pressures found at the bottom of the sea. Fission will not restart, though high radioactivity levels will have the pile materials producing heat for some time. Heat and radiation will fade into background within inches, you'd need impressive scientific equipment to detect much any further away. As a bonus, the pile likely hits the ocean bed at a good enough velocity to penetrate the mud covering most of the ocean floor by a good distance. Still plenty of water to keep the heat under control, but the mud(once settled) restricts water movement and limits contamination.
BTW, Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion; it was primarily a steam explosion that scattered radioactive material. Essentially a 'dirty bomb' similar to what we worry about the terrorists setting off; just on a massive scale. Reactors aren't set up to be able to create an actual nuclear explosion like what bombs produce.
The same thing would happen as in the situation where you wouldn't expect mail from that source: the sender would get the bounce, which would contain a reason why the mail was rejected (such and such keyword in mail, no text,...), he then would change his mail to match, and try again.
I'm not talking about an individual's mail; I'm talking about those new account confirmation emails many forums send out, that you have to acknowledge before you can post.
Odds are a rejection mail is going into the bitbucket.
The administrator, assuming he's paying attention and knows how, can't just 'change the email', because that's only a temporary fix - the spammers will just adapt to the NEW template.
And if he was unable to comply, he would use a different channel (i.e. phone) to communicate with you.
Like I want to give www.randomforum.com my phone number? Like they have an administrator that active?
I'd rather just check the spam folder so I can retrieve the occasional false-positive.
Can you name a single destroyer or cruiser that's on active duty which could survive a direct hit from a WW2 era shell?
Can you name a single destroyer or cruiser that's powered by a nuclear reactor?
Just like how people survive getting shot by a.50BMG while others die from a.22lr, I'd say that modern destroyers/cruisers actually have an excellent chance, not 100% but not 0% either, of surviving at least a single hit from a WW2 era shell.
At this time the nuclear ships you have to worry about are carriers and subs.
Maybe it is time to stop fighting the spammers and start training the users!
Consider, scammers have been using the same tactics for centuries, often simply updated to keep up with modern communication techniques.
'Male Enhancement'? Snake Oil, just no longer sold personally with the attendant risk of getting lynched. Nigerian scheme? Fake ransom demands.
We've tried educating people; I think there are certain types of people more suseptable than others. Perhaps they need a financial guardian or something. Along with the compulsive gamblers and such.:(
It's not a bad idea, I try avoiding scam training; it's at least partially effective. Still, I think that one one approach will fix this.
Ergo: 1. Train Users 2. Some sort of domain/server blacklist 3. Automatic spam filters 4. domain/server authentication 5. Lawsuits; jail time 6. Hitmen, reopen gladiator games featuring spammers, etc...
Replacing a turbine would practically be considered maintenance in my book. Still, I figure there's a significant chance that the tower itself may no longer be suitable after 20-30 years. Wind towers aren't like radio towers or even skyscrapers. They experience heavy wind loads.
Also, a tower is cheaper than a turbine, and technology marches on - after 20-30 years it might be cheaper to put fewer but larger turbines in, changing the ideal locations as you space larger turbines further apart. So you end up building new towers.
Interesting. Concerns I remember for geothermal included cost, corrosion, and groundwater contamination*.
Not insurmountable, but cost is likely the limiting factor here. No experience = increased cost. The corrosion results in increased maintenance expenses.
*The 'hot rocks' tend to carry heavy metals and such that can dissolve into the water.
Hmm... Non-Fossil society:
Electricity/Heating/Cooling: 1. Nuclear - 40% 2. Hydro - 20% 3. Geothermal - 10% 4. Wind - 10% 5. Solar - 10% 6. 'Other' - 10% *Things like turbines powered by NG recovery from dumps, waste burning, etc...
The Hyperian has a 10 year life, not a 5 year one.
Still, there's a signficant economy of scale here, at 70MW a pop you'd be shipping huge amounts of reactors around.
You're not going to be producing reactors that make 20 times the power off an assembly line, but it's 20X the power at not 20X the cost.
These smaller reactors are good for smaller communities in remote areas. Up in Alaska, I'd go so far as to wire up the towns for steam/hot water heating using 'waste heat'. 70 MW of electricity likely means ~140MW of waste heat, which can be used to heat homes and keep main roads free of ice and snow.
but at the end of the day it's still more than an order of magnitude less than construction cost...
Have a source on that? Not that I disagree - 'decommissioning' a wind turbine should involve relatively cheap work. Take the blades off, pull the turbine down, disassemble the tower, and break up/haul off the firsxt X feet of concrete base.
Cut the blades into managable chunks if you're not selling them as-is, send the turbine to recycling, likely the blades and tower as well. Recycling concrete is well known for that matter.
One concern I have is what the lifetime of wind turbines ends up being - if the lifespan of a turbine turns out to be a decade, it sucks. Two decades? Makes the constant replacement worse than nuclear - You'd have to figure on two builds and two decommissions during the time you'd have 1 install and decommission for a nuke plant.
I'm kinda curious about their reactors- what systems do they have in place to prevent loss of containment if their ship gets blown to bits?
US ships with reactors are either normally underwater or the size of old WWII battleships. Even the subs are fairly large for WWII combat vessels.
Why do I mention WWII ships? Because we did a lot of testing on them.
Anyways - on to the point:
Ships are TOUGH. Even in wartime they generally dont 'get blown to bits'. Instead they get holed, take on too much water and sink. A number of times combatants ended up scuttling(sinking) their own ships after battle damage rendered them combat ineffective and unable to reach a friendly port or fleet before likely capture. After Pearl Harbor, we actually raised and repaired a number of ships.
After WWII, during testing we actually NUKED a lot of ships. Superstructure would be blown off, sometimes the smaller ships would capsize. Still, the ships were mostly intact when they sank.
So, ships are generally 'mostly intact' even when sunk by battle damage. Reactors are located close to the bottome of the ship and have additional shielding.
Basically, in the case of a uncontrolled sinking, crew or automatic systems SCRAM the reactors. The vessel sinks to the bottom, where the residual heat from the reactor is taken care of by the vast amounts of cold ocean water. If it's in shallow water, we then recover it. Deep water? Generally we leave it.
What if the reactor vessel is breached? Well, Uranium isn't actually all that water soluble, and water doesn't pick radioactivity up that easily. There's already Uranium, Thorium, and other radioactive materials dissolved in seawater. Underwater vents release all sorts of nasty stuff, but also sustain some really wierd life like lobsters that gradually cook themselves while feeding. Speaking of vents - 400C water, but 2" away it's dropped to 2C. That's how much heat dispursion capacity deep water has.
Any damage is likely to be extremely localized. Even if the fuel gets free, it's extremely dense and will likely bury itself into the seabed when it hits.
After Russia used their natural gas supply as a political weapon, that group got pretty much stunted (even though it's not politically correct to say so).
I don't particularly see why not; here in the USA the a big reason for wanting to get away from oil is that we supposedly get so much of it from 'unstable' regions hostile to us. We don't actually get that much; but in a global market the more produced the cheaper it is.
Enabling a foreign country to hold your electricity production hostage isn't a good idea; especially if said country is willing to use it as a bargaining chip.
Even if you got 100% of your nuclear fuel from Russia, any embargo would take years to be seriously felt(unless they timed it just right), vs days for NG. If nothing else, if you have six months before you need to refuel the reactor, you have time to contract elsewhere.
Sizewell B, a PWR that I was involved in building in the UK, was built within its time and cost budget. Hasn't shut down yet so I can't answer the last part.
A number of the earliest reactors in the USA also came in on time and budget. The biggest budget busters was the ability for a random individual to stop construction with vague concern in a simple letter.
No mentions of cost overruns for 'Yankee Rowe' built back in 1960. Shut down after nearly 40 years due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle.
Honestly enough - a reactor done on time and budget is likely to be one done right, under good management, thus last longer than a boondoggle lemon.
Asking for an example that completed its entire lifespan is basically asking for the first-of-a-kind reactors and very early generation when people were still learning the hard way.
Or the 'lemons' and plants that were shut down more due to political pressure than economic or ecological reality.
Picking the first plant off the decommisioned list at the NRC, 'Connecticut Yankee', Haddam Neck, CT. 582MW (half the size of 'modern' reactors). Commissioned: 1968 Ceased production: 1996 (28 years) Decommissioned: 2004 Dome demolished: 2006
Fact sheet, because the wiki page is pretty bare 110 Billion kwh - $4B or so worth of electricity, at low utility rates. 619MW? - may be measuring closer to the reactor, not removing power used to maintain the plant itself. Decommisioning costs - not listed, but no federal funds are mentioned other than $34.1M awarded to them by the federal courts due to the feds violating the 'Nuclear Waste Policy Act(NWPA)' - The NWPA had nuclear plants pay the government a fee for each kwh generated, in exchange for them taking nuclear waste, starting in 1998. Yucca Mountain, in other words. Since they never took to accepting waste, CY had to store it themselves.
Another: 'Yankee Rowe' - 167MW. 1960-1992, 34B kwh produced($1.3B). Built for something like $45M back in 1960. No idea what the real decommisioning costs were, but was certified 'greenfield' in 1996, except for some land storing the waste until the feds pick it up(per law).
Honestly enough, in my research the feds haven't had to pick up much at all; mostly just paying for waste fuel storage expenses because the feds haven't done their job.
Now, decommission expenses are a very good reason for plants to want to keep operating; if we're really that concerned, just increase the reserve requirements for decommissioning that are built up over the life of the plant.
Hmmmm. What about a company perk of being able to charge your vehicle at work? That would seem to be a great incentive to get people into EV's in the first place (ie make it a non-taxable perk to charge at work).
That would indeed be a possible issue. Still, you should be able to do some sort of load leveling with the charging equipment; perhaps even solar panels on the roof, though there's generally lots of other solar things you can do that I think might be superior(hot water and AC).
Our true energy problem isn't production it is storage. Can you imagine if every home had a block that could store enough electricity for 6 hours of running their entire house(more if you turned off the stove and heaters) You could use Solar/wind power to trickle charge it and the mains to keep it full up when you needed to at night.
True. It's even technically doable now, just not economically doable. Wouldn't even need to be at the home level - if they could put it in switching stations it'd work just as well.
Another thing that would help with the AC would be solar absorbtion chillers - solar energy heats the water which is then used to create cold. It's neat tech, and done right is more efficient and cheaper than trying to use solar electric panels to make DC to run compression pumps for standard AC.
If we had blocks that could store ~6 hours of energy in a house that were economical, we'd probably also be using them for electric cars.
Realistically, it was my grandparent's generation that the food prices effectively went down.
I'd have said TVs, but they pretty much have - it's just that we traded up as prices went down.
What's especially grand is they're essentially premium 'business machines' - no fancy graphic adapters, but dual-monitor capable. Dual Cores right around the least $ per ghz*, 4 gigs RAM, etc... They're like you ordered 'the most computer for the buck'.
The $300 price would be more like $600 if you weren't buying them a couple thousand at a time.
By buying such 'good', if basic, machines, we're capable of getting six years out of them, which saves quite a bit of money in the long run - we might be able to get cheaper computers for like $200, but then they might only last 2-4 years, and there are costs associated with replacing a user's computer, such as moving profiles. We could spend twice as much, but that would be unlikely to get the computers to 8.
*Going by the way the bulk buys work, this is whatever processor offers the most performance per $ at the time.
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On a properly configured automailer, any error messages are supposed to go to the administrator. How else would he be made aware that something is amiss?
And he still has to care enough to fix the problem of MY mail server rejecting his notices.
And if the automailer is so badly set up that it can't set up a proper reply, are you really trusting that outfit that it handles all other aspects of the service well? (such as not communicating your e-mail to a spammer anyways...)
'set up a proper reply'? What does that mean?
My point would be that spammers have and will send out emails that are crafted to look like these confirmation emails. They're an attempt to get you to click on the link. As such, forums small enough to not end up on whitelists often get blocked.
You start sending reject messages with resubmission requirements to allow email through and the spammers will automate that process faster than many lazy forum administrators will process the handful of rejects they may get a week.
Not to mention that the whole reason for the confirmation emails is/was an attempt to cut down on spamming from their end, not increase their workload.
No matter how much functionality you duplicate, unless you actually copy the code from Microsoft Office (i.e. you don't write it yourself), there is no copyright violation.
Don't have to copy code; simply copying the design too much might be enough to trigger it. The images used for copy/paste and such, for example.
Can we now expect the OpenOffice New Zealand version to basically "be" microsoft office, since software patents won't work there?
Well, there's two factors here: Patents and Copyright. Patents are more general than copyright, generally speaking.
Get OpenOffice or other software too close to 'Microsoft Office' and you'll likely be treading into copyright violation zone. Copyright also lasts a lot longer than patents.
How about a linux or other OS that is 100% Windows compatible? Do you really think M$ will let this fly, once stuff like this starts hitting torrents, etc. from New Zealand?
Would be possible, not much microsoft could do without breaking compatibility in other ways. You'd still have to be careful of copyright. Political lobbying would still probably be used though.
You probably wouldn't need the full 'cleanroom' reverse engineering that was done with BIOS back in the day. You had one team disassembling the sytem, writing up it's behavior and technical specifications, and another team making a ROM that met the specifications, never having looked at the original ROM.
Even better, get Verizon to accidentally distribute it: Even more bricked phones and demonstratably Verizon's fault. Oops.
Russia still maintains at least one active Kirov class missile cruiser.
Didn't know that; more familiar with US ships.
how do you suppose the Exocet compares to a WW2 era shell in terms of explosive and kinetic energy?
Exocet: 670 kg, 165 kg warhead. 315 m/s velocity. 180km range
Mark 8 shell for the 16"/50 mounted on an Iowa: 1200 kg 820 m/s at the muzzle. ~20km range Unable to find amount of explosives.
Still, the USS Stark was a frigate. And it survived it's two hits.
Hmm... I'd say the Exocet is a 7.62x51 vs a .50BMG for the shell. The best shell my quick search found.
Why limit the conversation to nuclear powered ships?
Because this was originally about the risk of having reactor breaches due to battle damage to nuclear powered ships in combat
If a nulcear sub or carrier goes down in the mid Atlantic or pacific, exactly how much pressure could a reactor casing take
Details probably classified, but consider this: What happens when you take a vessel that's designed to contain not inconsiderable interior pressure and put it into an environment where it has more exterior pressure?
Or, to put it another way; water is incompressible. A reactor vessel is filled with water for cooling and power transfer. Any pressure put on the vessel by the sea is going to be countered by the water in the vessel.
Think about it this way: Take a ballon, fill it with water. Tie a string around the end and put a lead weight on it. At what depth would you expect it to crush at? Or take two glass vessels - one has a couple pounds of lead and is filled with water, the other has enough lead to match the weight of the other but is sealed with air inside. The one with air will break; the one filled with water won't, at least not just from water pressure.
If breached what would be the ultimate result (explosion, fission will continue, fission will stop).
Simple question that can be very complex:
Worst case: Breach occurs while reactor is in full operation. The missile/shell managed a direct hit on the reactor casing, probably.
Results: probable steam explosion(not nuclear), spread of radioactive material. Fission likely stops, though radioactivity will be high at first. As an uranium nuclear pile is even denser than lead, any parts that hit the ocean are going to sink, rapidly. While highly radioactive water doesn't pick up radioactivity all that easily, oceans are good at the 'dilute' thing; remember the gulf oil spill is 1.5 - 2.5 MILLION gallons a day. You could fit a submarine pile into a couple barrels.
Theoretical 'impact at bottom of ocean' breach: The reactor has probably already SCRAMED - fission has already stopped. There will be no explosion as the reactor has already cooled too much to generate steam; much less generate steam at the pressures found at the bottom of the sea. Fission will not restart, though high radioactivity levels will have the pile materials producing heat for some time. Heat and radiation will fade into background within inches, you'd need impressive scientific equipment to detect much any further away. As a bonus, the pile likely hits the ocean bed at a good enough velocity to penetrate the mud covering most of the ocean floor by a good distance. Still plenty of water to keep the heat under control, but the mud(once settled) restricts water movement and limits contamination.
BTW, Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion; it was primarily a steam explosion that scattered radioactive material. Essentially a 'dirty bomb' similar to what we worry about the terrorists setting off; just on a massive scale. Reactors aren't set up to be able to create an actual nuclear explosion like what bombs produce.
The same thing would happen as in the situation where you wouldn't expect mail from that source: the sender would get the bounce, which would contain a reason why the mail was rejected (such and such keyword in mail, no text, ...), he then would change his mail to match, and try again.
I'm not talking about an individual's mail; I'm talking about those new account confirmation emails many forums send out, that you have to acknowledge before you can post.
Odds are a rejection mail is going into the bitbucket.
The administrator, assuming he's paying attention and knows how, can't just 'change the email', because that's only a temporary fix - the spammers will just adapt to the NEW template.
And if he was unable to comply, he would use a different channel (i.e. phone) to communicate with you.
Like I want to give www.randomforum.com my phone number? Like they have an administrator that active?
I'd rather just check the spam folder so I can retrieve the occasional false-positive.
Does any email from a new source get put into a spam folder?
No, but it's iffy on new signups for small forums and such.
Can you name a single destroyer or cruiser that's on active duty which could survive a direct hit from a WW2 era shell?
Can you name a single destroyer or cruiser that's powered by a nuclear reactor?
Just like how people survive getting shot by a .50BMG while others die from a .22lr, I'd say that modern destroyers/cruisers actually have an excellent chance, not 100% but not 0% either, of surviving at least a single hit from a WW2 era shell.
At this time the nuclear ships you have to worry about are carriers and subs.
I think he's going for quality of kills over quantity.
Besides, I figure there are fewer than you might think. Remember, one spammer can send out millions of emails in less than a day, easy.
Maybe it is time to stop fighting the spammers and start training the users!
Consider, scammers have been using the same tactics for centuries, often simply updated to keep up with modern communication techniques.
'Male Enhancement'? Snake Oil, just no longer sold personally with the attendant risk of getting lynched.
Nigerian scheme? Fake ransom demands.
We've tried educating people; I think there are certain types of people more suseptable than others. Perhaps they need a financial guardian or something. Along with the compulsive gamblers and such. :(
It's not a bad idea, I try avoiding scam training; it's at least partially effective. Still, I think that one one approach will fix this.
Ergo:
1. Train Users
2. Some sort of domain/server blacklist
3. Automatic spam filters
4. domain/server authentication
5. Lawsuits; jail time
6. Hitmen, reopen gladiator games featuring spammers, etc...
Should keep the spam problem under control.
If I'm expecting an email from a new source, like I've signed up somewhere new, and the email doesn't show up, I'll check the spam filters.
If the new request is outright rejected, how am I supposed to get my confirmation email?
How'd I miss that? I know - I skipped the top and saw the '3650 full power days at 70 MW'
Even worse then, at $50M a pop, you're looking at 3X the cost per kwh. Yep, big plants = cheaper.
Replacing a turbine would practically be considered maintenance in my book. Still, I figure there's a significant chance that the tower itself may no longer be suitable after 20-30 years. Wind towers aren't like radio towers or even skyscrapers. They experience heavy wind loads.
Also, a tower is cheaper than a turbine, and technology marches on - after 20-30 years it might be cheaper to put fewer but larger turbines in, changing the ideal locations as you space larger turbines further apart. So you end up building new towers.
Interesting. Concerns I remember for geothermal included cost, corrosion, and groundwater contamination*.
Not insurmountable, but cost is likely the limiting factor here. No experience = increased cost. The corrosion results in increased maintenance expenses.
*The 'hot rocks' tend to carry heavy metals and such that can dissolve into the water.
Hmm... Non-Fossil society:
Electricity/Heating/Cooling:
1. Nuclear - 40%
2. Hydro - 20%
3. Geothermal - 10%
4. Wind - 10%
5. Solar - 10%
6. 'Other' - 10% *Things like turbines powered by NG recovery from dumps, waste burning, etc...
Transportation:
1. Electricity - 40%
2. Biodiesel - 30%
3. ethanol - 20%
4. 'Waste' NG/other - 10%
The Hyperian has a 10 year life, not a 5 year one.
Still, there's a signficant economy of scale here, at 70MW a pop you'd be shipping huge amounts of reactors around.
You're not going to be producing reactors that make 20 times the power off an assembly line, but it's 20X the power at not 20X the cost.
These smaller reactors are good for smaller communities in remote areas. Up in Alaska, I'd go so far as to wire up the towns for steam/hot water heating using 'waste heat'. 70 MW of electricity likely means ~140MW of waste heat, which can be used to heat homes and keep main roads free of ice and snow.
but at the end of the day it's still more than an order of magnitude less than construction cost ...
Have a source on that? Not that I disagree - 'decommissioning' a wind turbine should involve relatively cheap work. Take the blades off, pull the turbine down, disassemble the tower, and break up/haul off the firsxt X feet of concrete base.
Cut the blades into managable chunks if you're not selling them as-is, send the turbine to recycling, likely the blades and tower as well. Recycling concrete is well known for that matter.
One concern I have is what the lifetime of wind turbines ends up being - if the lifespan of a turbine turns out to be a decade, it sucks. Two decades? Makes the constant replacement worse than nuclear - You'd have to figure on two builds and two decommissions during the time you'd have 1 install and decommission for a nuke plant.
I'm kinda curious about their reactors- what systems do they have in place to prevent loss of containment if their ship gets blown to bits?
US ships with reactors are either normally underwater or the size of old WWII battleships. Even the subs are fairly large for WWII combat vessels.
Why do I mention WWII ships? Because we did a lot of testing on them.
Anyways - on to the point:
Ships are TOUGH. Even in wartime they generally dont 'get blown to bits'. Instead they get holed, take on too much water and sink. A number of times combatants ended up scuttling(sinking) their own ships after battle damage rendered them combat ineffective and unable to reach a friendly port or fleet before likely capture. After Pearl Harbor, we actually raised and repaired a number of ships.
After WWII, during testing we actually NUKED a lot of ships. Superstructure would be blown off, sometimes the smaller ships would capsize. Still, the ships were mostly intact when they sank.
So, ships are generally 'mostly intact' even when sunk by battle damage. Reactors are located close to the bottome of the ship and have additional shielding.
Basically, in the case of a uncontrolled sinking, crew or automatic systems SCRAM the reactors. The vessel sinks to the bottom, where the residual heat from the reactor is taken care of by the vast amounts of cold ocean water. If it's in shallow water, we then recover it. Deep water? Generally we leave it.
What if the reactor vessel is breached? Well, Uranium isn't actually all that water soluble, and water doesn't pick radioactivity up that easily. There's already Uranium, Thorium, and other radioactive materials dissolved in seawater. Underwater vents release all sorts of nasty stuff, but also sustain some really wierd life like lobsters that gradually cook themselves while feeding. Speaking of vents - 400C water, but 2" away it's dropped to 2C. That's how much heat dispursion capacity deep water has.
Any damage is likely to be extremely localized. Even if the fuel gets free, it's extremely dense and will likely bury itself into the seabed when it hits.
After Russia used their natural gas supply as a political weapon, that group got pretty much stunted (even though it's not politically correct to say so).
I don't particularly see why not; here in the USA the a big reason for wanting to get away from oil is that we supposedly get so much of it from 'unstable' regions hostile to us. We don't actually get that much; but in a global market the more produced the cheaper it is.
Enabling a foreign country to hold your electricity production hostage isn't a good idea; especially if said country is willing to use it as a bargaining chip.
Even if you got 100% of your nuclear fuel from Russia, any embargo would take years to be seriously felt(unless they timed it just right), vs days for NG. If nothing else, if you have six months before you need to refuel the reactor, you have time to contract elsewhere.
Sizewell B, a PWR that I was involved in building in the UK, was built within its time and cost budget. Hasn't shut down yet so I can't answer the last part.
A number of the earliest reactors in the USA also came in on time and budget. The biggest budget busters was the ability for a random individual to stop construction with vague concern in a simple letter.
No mentions of cost overruns for 'Yankee Rowe' built back in 1960. Shut down after nearly 40 years due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle.
Honestly enough - a reactor done on time and budget is likely to be one done right, under good management, thus last longer than a boondoggle lemon.
Asking for an example that completed its entire lifespan is basically asking for the first-of-a-kind reactors and very early generation when people were still learning the hard way.
Or the 'lemons' and plants that were shut down more due to political pressure than economic or ecological reality.
Picking the first plant off the decommisioned list at the NRC, 'Connecticut Yankee', Haddam Neck, CT. 582MW (half the size of 'modern' reactors).
Commissioned: 1968
Ceased production: 1996 (28 years)
Decommissioned: 2004
Dome demolished: 2006
Fact sheet, because the wiki page is pretty bare
110 Billion kwh - $4B or so worth of electricity, at low utility rates. 619MW? - may be measuring closer to the reactor, not removing power used to maintain the plant itself.
Decommisioning costs - not listed, but no federal funds are mentioned other than $34.1M awarded to them by the federal courts due to the feds violating the 'Nuclear Waste Policy Act(NWPA)' - The NWPA had nuclear plants pay the government a fee for each kwh generated, in exchange for them taking nuclear waste, starting in 1998. Yucca Mountain, in other words. Since they never took to accepting waste, CY had to store it themselves.
Another: 'Yankee Rowe' - 167MW. 1960-1992, 34B kwh produced($1.3B). Built for something like $45M back in 1960. No idea what the real decommisioning costs were, but was certified 'greenfield' in 1996, except for some land storing the waste until the feds pick it up(per law).
Honestly enough, in my research the feds haven't had to pick up much at all; mostly just paying for waste fuel storage expenses because the feds haven't done their job.
Now, decommission expenses are a very good reason for plants to want to keep operating; if we're really that concerned, just increase the reserve requirements for decommissioning that are built up over the life of the plant.
How many nuclear power plants were built pre-1960 that are still running?
Indeed, it'd be better to state that, at this point, the anticipated life of reactors built back in the '70s exceeds 50 years.
IE at this point they're not planning on shutting them down until the 2020's.
Hmmmm. What about a company perk of being able to charge your vehicle at work? That would seem to be a great incentive to get people into EV's in the first place (ie make it a non-taxable perk to charge at work).
That would indeed be a possible issue. Still, you should be able to do some sort of load leveling with the charging equipment; perhaps even solar panels on the roof, though there's generally lots of other solar things you can do that I think might be superior(hot water and AC).
Our true energy problem isn't production it is storage. Can you imagine if every home had a block that could store enough electricity for 6 hours of running their entire house(more if you turned off the stove and heaters) You could use Solar/wind power to trickle charge it and the mains to keep it full up when you needed to at night.
True. It's even technically doable now, just not economically doable. Wouldn't even need to be at the home level - if they could put it in switching stations it'd work just as well.
Another thing that would help with the AC would be solar absorbtion chillers - solar energy heats the water which is then used to create cold. It's neat tech, and done right is more efficient and cheaper than trying to use solar electric panels to make DC to run compression pumps for standard AC.
If we had blocks that could store ~6 hours of energy in a house that were economical, we'd probably also be using them for electric cars.
Too bad car prices didn't go down. ;)
Realistically, it was my grandparent's generation that the food prices effectively went down.
I'd have said TVs, but they pretty much have - it's just that we traded up as prices went down.
What's especially grand is they're essentially premium 'business machines' - no fancy graphic adapters, but dual-monitor capable. Dual Cores right around the least $ per ghz*, 4 gigs RAM, etc... They're like you ordered 'the most computer for the buck'.
The $300 price would be more like $600 if you weren't buying them a couple thousand at a time.
By buying such 'good', if basic, machines, we're capable of getting six years out of them, which saves quite a bit of money in the long run - we might be able to get cheaper computers for like $200, but then they might only last 2-4 years, and there are costs associated with replacing a user's computer, such as moving profiles. We could spend twice as much, but that would be unlikely to get the computers to 8.
*Going by the way the bulk buys work, this is whatever processor offers the most performance per $ at the time.