Personally, much like how BNC is still hanging around in a few spots, I think 15 years for 'more than half' would be optimistic. On the other hand, I have actually dealt with installed fiber to the desktop systems, so I have a bit of experience.
Fiber patch cords aren't as easily damaged anymore, especially for the plastic multimode stuff. There's also nothing preventing them coming out with patch cords that are armored to the diameter of today's cat6 cables. That's a LOT of armor.;)
Another option would be to steal a bit of PoE technology - make the computer's ethernet port support PoE, which feeds a media converter in the wall. Other options include fiber with a couple of small gauge wires with it to provide power to the MC in the jack, wiring AC to the jack, etc...
Why I see fiber eventually winning, even to the desktop. 1. Cost - Copper keeps going up in price, while fiber remains stable or even drops, relatively. Even today bulk gigabit+ capable fiber can be obtained cheaper than bulk cat6 cable. What currently kills fiber to the desktop is generally connector cost, combined with higher adapter cost because they're 'special purpose'. Still, laser tech keeps getting cheaper. Many motherboards today have optical connectors on them for the audio. Network adapter is a different matter, but the potential is there. Cat6 connectors are a bit harder to terminate and are also a bit more expensive. Thus far, the higher speed copper ones I've read about have been even harder. So that advantage copper has is going away. 2. Speed - Gigabit cat5e/6 costs more than old style cat5, which is more than phone quality cat3. They're looking at having to add wires to break gigabit speeds, and change the connecter so it's no longer RJ45 compatible. This, to me, breaks the backwards compatibility that has allowed twisted pair to win for so long. 3. Range - With a large building, the difference between fiber and copper can be the difference between having 1 network room and 8 or more network closets with powered equipment in them. If fiber was a bit cheaper, I'd run large multifiber wires to the closets, and merely have a patch panel inside to distribute the lines out to the various jacks. 4. Weight & Bulk - Cat6+ is getting heavier and heavier - computer density is still increasing today. With the increase in weight and bulk, existing building cable trays and runs are becoming overloaded. Adding more is an expensive proposition, and I estimate that I can fit two times as many fiber cords into a given cable tray, at half the weight over copper runs. Even more if you put in patch closets so that you run many pair. 5. Emissions - fiber doesn't emit or be affected by EMF radiation. 6. Future proofing - copper is pushing it's limits, fiber installed today would likely only need minimal modifications to support terabit speeds in the future.
What applications do you think will require this kind of bandwidth? HD video with moderate compression should easilly fit into a gigabit.
Well, how about HD 3D video? 120-150HZ refresh rates combined with blink glasses to display those 3D videos that movie theaters are showing?
Still, for most business uses, I tend to say that even 10meg connections are more than enough for most users. Seriously, we still occasionally find a 10 meg hub with some users on it. Thus why speed is only one of the advantages fiber has. Cost, Range, and bulk are bigger ones. Range and bulk because, well, they increase costs.
What I think fiber to the desktop needs is the equivalent to 10baseT - an open, low cost standard that is cheap and easy to use. Right now you have a dozen of propriatary connectors. Some are tougher, some are cheaper, etc... We need the equivalent of the RJ-45.
For fiber I'd consier a standard specifying optional small gauge metallic wires for power transmission to compete with PoE, one of the things keeping copper alive. Being pure power, it could be injected cheaply and effectively just about anywhere. Just keep the voltage low enough to not hurt anyone - depowering such as system could be a nightmare.
Nuclear gets 95% of it's "nameplate" value because they know fine well that they're going to throw 50-60% of the energy away right at the start. See "Carnot efficiency".
No, the 90-95% of nameplate is because a Nuclear Plant can RUN at 100% production 24x365 90-95% of the time. Yes, losses are figured into the nameplate. But 'capacity figure' is a useful way to tell how many kwh you'll get out of the system.
A 1GW nuclear plant is a different beast than 1 GW of solar panels or wind turbines.
A capacity factor of.9 means that it'll produce 3 times as many kwh, supplying 3 times as many homes and businesses than the.3 average that wind/solar manage to get.
Solar, of course, isn't going to get above 50%, even in a cloudless area with motors to change facings. Wind, well, if it's too slow or too fast the turbine can't produce as much(maybe any) power. I've heard that some areas will yield capacity factors of around 60%, but they're relatively rare.
Thus my mention of 'I don't know if his illness increased his focus and productivity in the realms of theoretical physics or not'.
I know about the arguement that his disability led to his discoveries, my point is that he was starting on stuff even before the disability had seriously developed.
Personally, I'd call it a wash, as our brilliant scientists, by and large, didn't have disabilities. Hawkins is an exception, not the rule. If I had the chance to prevent a Hawkings(or anybody else) from developing that condition, I'd do so. Most theoretical losses in productivity would be counterbalanced by theoretical increases in time to make the discoveries.
Try it, get back to me with a product from an insurance company willing to insure *your* loss from a nuclear accident with a policy *you* can purchase.
Ah, now I understand. Given the type of insurance nuclear plants are required to have, I was simply going to file the claim against them. After all, "Companies are expressly forbidden to defend any action for damages on the grounds that an incident was not their fault."
Given that I live closer to nuclear weapons than a nuclear power plant, I didn't check my homeowner's policy that closely for nuclear contamination incidents, I paid more attention to the 'acts of war' clauses. I'll have to double check, but I don't think there's a radioactive contamination exception.
For *you* to recover damages to *your* property by a nuclear accident, *you* have to fund a case in the federal court.
Assuming that the power company contests and doesn't simply pay out. Assuming that it's not big enough that it more or less becomes a class action.
The Federal liability exemption means that the Company responsible for the plant would be able to continue to operate.
The Act doesn't allow for them to differentiate between a true bad luck accident and one caused by negligence. The act doesn't indemify the corporations from fines/criminals charges. Plus, many power plants are run by state corporations. Do you really want to shut down the entire TVA, for example?
Well an increasing trend of Accident Sequence Pre-Cursors and Licensee Event Reports (reported to the NRC) indicates an event of *any* kind is more *probable* every day especially as the reactors approach the end of their designed lifespan.
Ah, so now we're not only looking at the safety stats of Model-Ts, we're looking at the safety stats of OLD model Ts to figure out how safe modern cars are? If anything, this is an arguement that we need to build more nuclear reactors to replace our aging ones.
I've mentioned in the past, in other threads, that I'd like to build *NEW* nuclear plants, for both the purpose of eliminating dirty coal power but to eventually replace the aging nuclear plants. The new plant designs are a lot more fail-safe than the old ones. We have advanced considerably in failure-mode modeling and material science since the '70s.
So, for an answer, draw a circle 1200 Square miles around Three Mile Island and figure out the potential for damage yourself, that's roughly the land mass irradiated by Chernobyl. I'd say that pretty much wipes out Pennsylvania.
While, depending on winds, it'd suck for Harrisburg, York, and Lancaster, it'd hardly take out Pennsylvania.
Also, a TMI worst case requires catastrophic breach of the containment dome, which didn't happen with TMI, and a dome wasn't even present for Chernobyl.
The Nuclear industry would not be able to exist without the protections the P-A act afford as no sane investor would expose themselves to that level of liability.
I disagree, still, investors LIKE the subsidy, and it's no great cost to the government as long as the companies are doing their business (more or less) right. Basically, every year without a major incident lowers the effective subsidization as the industry proves itself safer.
Don't forget that a plant that's had a meltdown isn't one that's producing power, no power equals no income, which investors need no incentive to not like.
As a charitable organization, the Vatican could get 50x the MWH offsets per buck by giving away efficient lighting,
The thing that gets me about this is that people will tell me about all the ways to save power, and my response is usually 'already done'. I'm at the point that to be more energy efficient would involve either extreme sacrifice - like keeping my house at 40F during the winter even when I'm home, or just plain rebuilding my house.
Once they've already updated their appliances and lighting, what's left?
Sure, there's still a good deal that can be done on the appliance side. However, the population of the USA and world are still increasing. We need to address the supply side, preferably sooner than later. The way we're going we aren't going to be shutting off dirty CO2 exhausting coal plants anytime soon.
A modern nuclear plant would save more CO2 per dollar spent, but this is still a step.
Almost 3/4 more expensive per kwh. Might not seem like much, but it would price some economic activities out of profitability. Be the difference between a $100 electric bill, and a $150 one.
*Unrealistic, but I'll be generous, likely there'll be a good amount of money spend repairing/cleaning the system.
OK: I had not heard of that. (I am not sure whether or not that applies in other countries.
Other countries have their own systems, of course.
Yes, that is what I mean. And yes they could be insignificant. I just want to know whether or not they get included in the figures people throw around !!
Generally they are, but as noted, the CO2 from a nuclear plant construction ends up being insignificant. I'm sorry, but the site I originally got the reference from is down, and I'm not going to spend the time to find it again atm.
On the strip mining - 'Open pit' is the closest I can see, but no comment on how common it is. Still, you don't actually need to mine much because the power density is so high, especially if you don't have to enrich afterwards.
Correct: we do not know how much it is except that if you look for a quote for the insurance either you do not find one, or it will be huge.
Which leads to my Number One complaint about the Energy debate: how can anyone say that nuclear is cheaper or more expensive than other forms of power?
Given that a kwh of electricity is a kwh of electricity, it's actually one of the easier things to reduce to a cost-benefit analysis.
Construction cost A, Operating costs B, power production C, capacity factor D, plant life E, interest rate F, construction time G. Fill in the blanks for each one, out pops a number. Lowest one wins, as long as it meets standards. IE wind/solar can't be 100% because they're not on demand systems.
Disregarding F(for the moment), 1 GW nuclear reactor, $3B. A: $3B, B: $200M, C: 1 GW, D: 90%, E: 5% Annual power production: 7,884 Gwh(7,884,000,000 kwh) Annual cost: 174M for loan servicing(40year@5%)+200M operating. $374M Cost per Kwh: ~4.7 cents Figure 3 years construction time, that'd push the loan up to 3.3B, 191M annual loan costs. 5 cents/kwh.
I'll have to come back later to compare it to solar/wind.
I'm not, not in this context. I'm refering to stuff like the extra cases of lung cancers downwind of coal plants, the extra smog, acid rain, mercury and other toxic elements/chemicals put into the atmosphere by coal burning.
It is disrespectful toward him, for people whom don't know anything about physics, to brown nose all over the guy, just because he's handicapped. Note, I'm not saying he's a loser, its not a binary this or that response. It is more respectful of his considerable intellectual achievements to describe him as definitely well above average in his profession, rather than a polite version of condescendingly fawning over every little little achievement of a sick child.
I'm going to butt in here and point out that Hawking's achievements were beginning to be known even as a post-grad, when his illness was [i]first diagnosed[/i]. At this point he's been restricted to a wheelchair for most of his life, but he was more or less normal for his first 20 or so years, physically. He was even on the rowing team IIRC.
Now, I don't know if his illness increased his focus and productivity in the realms of theoretical physics or not, other than to note that if he'd been whole in body he'd have a far easier time outputting his ideas, researching, etc... Not to mention possibly having an extra 30 or so years of him. His lack of mobility has likely led to certain health issues that will take him from us early.
And, since it's not on adults, I can even see decent arguments for doing so.
Personally, I'd go with the arguement that it's the school's network, they are allowed to put blocks up for the health, welfare of the network, and to at least try to ensure that it's used for what it's supposed to be used for.
Kinda like if your work wants to run a restrictive whitelist system, it's their option.
As for sites restricted from the school, if the parents so chose they can provide a completely open option at home.
That's because the act requires them to carry $300 million of site insurance. That doesn't apply to you getting private insurance for a Nuclear accident.
$300 million, private, no-fault insurance for each reactor site.
That IS insurance for any nuclear accident. And it's private, so there ARE obviously companies that are willing to insure nuclear plants.
For the Nuclear industry it's liability *ends* when the damages reach 9.1 billion, not the insurance companies liability.
Name some other industry that would still be held responsable after paying out $9.1B for an incident. For that matter, how much is an incident really likely to cause, given that a chernobyl level event is pretty much impossible?
The government generally gets involved LONG before that for big events. Look at superfund sites.
Paid for via a per kwh fee, mandated by the government. Right now being covered privately out of the operating expenses of the plant, for actually not that much money. Lawsuits are ongoing due to the feds screwing up their end.
I mean, if your local town/city mandated you pay $X/month for trash pickup, then they didn't pick up the trash, wouldn't you sue?
all the concrete etc required,
Uh, included in the building costs? If you're refering specifically to the CO2 costs for the concrete, they end up being 'insignificant' over the 40 year estimated lifespan of a plant. Wind has higher CO2 by that measurement; the footings end up taking up MORE concrete per kwh/year produced. Solar is a bit more iffy. More options for supports.
Uranium strip mining, reprocessing etc
Operational Expenses? The fueling costs for most nuclear plants are considered 'insignificant'. Huh, I've never come across a site that mentions Uranium is strip mined. Regardless, due to the sheer energy density of the stuff, less mining needs to be done to feed a nuclear plant, especially compared to a coal plant.
In the USA we're not allowed to reprocess. That would drop the amount of mining we need to do by an order of magnitude.
and as for the insurance costs they essential get under-written by the state (i.e. a huge hidden subsidy from the taxpayer).
Just how 'huge' is it when it's never been used? And wouldn't be used until the nuclear plants themselves end up on the hook for over a billion? How many billion plus level disasters DON'T get federal assistance?
We use the VAST majority of power during the daytime. PV is a perfect peak power play.
Not entirely perfect, and there are areas/times of the year when peak power usage doesn't correspond to peak sunlight. You also need a fair amount of backup when it comes to solar/wind sources, because they largely decide when they're going to produce power, not vice versa.
It's also subject to change if a significant base of electric or plug in hybrids join the fleet.
Every panel I've ever seen is guaranteed to deliver 80% of design after 20 years.
It's a significant decrease when you consider that nuclear power plants historically deliver MORE power 20 years later due to uprates and such. To the tune of 3-5% a year, spread over slightly more than a hundred plants.
I'm not saying to NOT produce solar panels, but we still need baseload, and nuclear plants can be dual tasked with the right equipment to also provide desalinated water, heat and electricity for ethanol/hydrogen production, heating, cooling(via absorbtion coolers), etc...
You're thinking of the 'void coefficient'. Chernobyl had a positive value, US(and rest of world) have negative ones.
In Chernobyl, when a bubble(void) forms in the coolant, the reaction increases in the area, tending to increase the size of the void. In the USA, reactors are designed that when a void forms, the reaction decreases, tending to self-regulate the problem.
I'd tend to say that there were quite a few mitigating factors, for example, the fact that nobody got killed by it.
Should we judge the safety of today's cars on the basis of crash tests using a Model-T?
We learned from that fiasco and fixed the problems.
And it was not a "small controlled release". The original overflows into the auxiliary buildings was uncontrolled and could be measured at 15 times above background level many miles away.
15 times above background level is something like the dosage you'd get from an airplane flight, isn't it? I think we'd need to find out what definition of 'background' they were using.
Call it 400 mrem. '15X', for a limited period of time, say, 2 weeks? 230MREM, and Upper GI Xray, half a barium enema. Chance of cancer goes up 10% if you get 250k MREM, you'd need 3k/year.
Now look at the deaths from coal mining, coal power, coal pollution. How many lives would have been saved if we had built enough nuclear plants(post TMI designs) that instead of our electricity being 20% nuclear, 60% coal, it was 20% coal, 60% nuclear?
I think you need to reread the Price-Anderson act, nuclear power plants already carry $300 million in private insurance, each.
Then there's the collective pool, which should be hovering around a Billion dollars before the government steps in.
Looking around, there's not many billion dollar disasters that [i]don't[/i] have the government stepping in anyways. Just look at federal disaster relief, Katrina, flooding in North Dakota, etc...
Insurance companies don't write unlimited liability policies by standard, all of my insurance policies have a maximum. Think it's $400k for my auto policy, for example.
Now just imagine how much it'd cost the power companies if the coal plants got charged for their share of the 100k or so annual deaths from air pollution...
When have republicans ever claimed to be libertarians? They're separate political parties.
Otherwise, your definition of a libertarian looks good; people just have to remember that there are moderate and extreme ones, just like for republicans and democrats, and we certainly don't agree on everything.
I paid for my own college, currently make a comfortable living, and so forth.
I call myself a moderate libertarian mostly because they're the closest matching party, I'm currently sort-of boycotting the major parties. Still write those in office.
Why do I consider myself libertarian? I believe that the war on drugs/prostitution is a lost cause, more expensive than just legalizing, taxing, and regulating it. That's not a position that mainstream democrats or republicans take. I believe that the federal government should normally have a balanced budget, in order to provide ready credit for wartime or economic crashes. EVERYBODY should pay some taxes, as a matter of policy. I like a clean environment; just listen to the news that pollution kills nearly a 100k/year right here in the USA. Still, there's also quality of life issues to consider - if a system costs 100 lives due to pollution, but saves 100k due to it's benefits, it still should be produced. I'm pro-choice and pro-death penalty, I'm also for extensive controls on police/prosecutor corruption/malpractice. They often has more power to screw somebody's life up than a surgeon.
Not strictly libertarian, but I'd expand the 'health care savings plan' and 'High deductible insurance' a LOT, and I'd forbid discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions as long as the individual HAD insurance in the last 3 months or so.
There's plenty more, but I agree with the democrats on some things, the republicans on others. Neither on quite a few. Extremists tend to be nutty, of whatever party, but I can't help but think that a half dozen or so libertarians might not be a bad thing in congress.
Doesn't change that it was designed to benefit the few, in the short term, to encourage them to produce their hard to create but easily copied goods, in order to benefit the masses in the long run.
It's why I personally call for reforming copyright, not eliminating it. Eliminating copyright completely would do just as much damage, personally I think it'd do more damage, than what the current system is doing.
Like it or not, but piracy is creating a pushback effect on the current system. It effectively puts a limit on copyright for everything.
Now, the articles I've read seperate 'clean coal' and 'carbon capture sequestration'(CCS). Clean coal is a plant that does far better at capturing elements that are traditionally considered pollution - mercury, lead, arsenic, the various other nasty things present in coal.
CCS is the carbon capturing part.
The problem, as I've seen it, is actually simple. Building a clean coal power plant is Expensive. How expensive? It's in the running with the expense of building a nuclear plant. CCS adds another 10% or so to the construction cost, generally making it MORE expensive than a nuclear plant of the same capacity.
At this point in time, and for the forseeable future, uranium is cheaper than coal per GWh. So if you're not going to save money building the plant/infrastructure, why would you select the more expensive fuel?
Adding insult to injury, CCS costs energy - sapping the efficiency of the plant. I've seen figures between 7-10%. This, of course means that you have to burn MORE coal in order to power the capture operation. The loss of efficiency might not be a big deal if you have a commercial concern willing to buy the CO2(such as an oil well looking to pressurize wells in order to extract more), but otherwise, well, it just adds another fraction of a cent to the cost to generate a kwh. In a business where that fraction of a cent can add up to millions, and existing nuclear plants, on average, beat coal plants in cost per kwh. Newer plants are supposed to be more efficient and even cheaper due to modern techniques that simplify a plant's design.
Once you add all that up, nuclear power beats 'clean' coal most of the time, especially under a CO2 constrained market.
Oh, I get it, they're against private ownership of proxies.
I think that it's legislation written by/for legislatures who don't really know how the internet works.
The law would be fine if it targeted specifically 'anonymizing' proxies, that the user deliberately sets up, as opposed to a transparent proxy you don't even know about, or the corporate proxy that you have to use because the firewall blocks 80 and 443 from anywhere else.
Here's the rub: there would be no need for this whatsoever if the government got out of subsidizing Tesla's competitors. If Tesla couldn't make it work in a competitive market, then that's that.
Good point. It reminds me of a number of other industries - like for electricity. The government provides so many subsidies to various companies that the remaining ones, even if well run, would be run out of business by the subsidized companies, so therefore they need some subsidization as well. Meanwhile the cost of the good is sold at an undervalued price, so people aren't motivated to conserve like they would otherwise be.
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Personally, much like how BNC is still hanging around in a few spots, I think 15 years for 'more than half' would be optimistic. On the other hand, I have actually dealt with installed fiber to the desktop systems, so I have a bit of experience.
Fiber patch cords aren't as easily damaged anymore, especially for the plastic multimode stuff. There's also nothing preventing them coming out with patch cords that are armored to the diameter of today's cat6 cables. That's a LOT of armor. ;)
Another option would be to steal a bit of PoE technology - make the computer's ethernet port support PoE, which feeds a media converter in the wall. Other options include fiber with a couple of small gauge wires with it to provide power to the MC in the jack, wiring AC to the jack, etc...
Why I see fiber eventually winning, even to the desktop.
1. Cost - Copper keeps going up in price, while fiber remains stable or even drops, relatively. Even today bulk gigabit+ capable fiber can be obtained cheaper than bulk cat6 cable. What currently kills fiber to the desktop is generally connector cost, combined with higher adapter cost because they're 'special purpose'. Still, laser tech keeps getting cheaper. Many motherboards today have optical connectors on them for the audio. Network adapter is a different matter, but the potential is there. Cat6 connectors are a bit harder to terminate and are also a bit more expensive. Thus far, the higher speed copper ones I've read about have been even harder. So that advantage copper has is going away.
2. Speed - Gigabit cat5e/6 costs more than old style cat5, which is more than phone quality cat3. They're looking at having to add wires to break gigabit speeds, and change the connecter so it's no longer RJ45 compatible. This, to me, breaks the backwards compatibility that has allowed twisted pair to win for so long.
3. Range - With a large building, the difference between fiber and copper can be the difference between having 1 network room and 8 or more network closets with powered equipment in them. If fiber was a bit cheaper, I'd run large multifiber wires to the closets, and merely have a patch panel inside to distribute the lines out to the various jacks.
4. Weight & Bulk - Cat6+ is getting heavier and heavier - computer density is still increasing today. With the increase in weight and bulk, existing building cable trays and runs are becoming overloaded. Adding more is an expensive proposition, and I estimate that I can fit two times as many fiber cords into a given cable tray, at half the weight over copper runs. Even more if you put in patch closets so that you run many pair.
5. Emissions - fiber doesn't emit or be affected by EMF radiation.
6. Future proofing - copper is pushing it's limits, fiber installed today would likely only need minimal modifications to support terabit speeds in the future.
What applications do you think will require this kind of bandwidth? HD video with moderate compression should easilly fit into a gigabit.
Well, how about HD 3D video? 120-150HZ refresh rates combined with blink glasses to display those 3D videos that movie theaters are showing?
Still, for most business uses, I tend to say that even 10meg connections are more than enough for most users. Seriously, we still occasionally find a 10 meg hub with some users on it. Thus why speed is only one of the advantages fiber has. Cost, Range, and bulk are bigger ones. Range and bulk because, well, they increase costs.
What I think fiber to the desktop needs is the equivalent to 10baseT - an open, low cost standard that is cheap and easy to use. Right now you have a dozen of propriatary connectors. Some are tougher, some are cheaper, etc... We need the equivalent of the RJ-45.
For fiber I'd consier a standard specifying optional small gauge metallic wires for power transmission to compete with PoE, one of the things keeping copper alive. Being pure power, it could be injected cheaply and effectively just about anywhere. Just keep the voltage low enough to not hurt anyone - depowering such as system could be a nightmare.
Nuclear gets 95% of it's "nameplate" value because they know fine well that they're going to throw 50-60% of the energy away right at the start. See "Carnot efficiency".
No, the 90-95% of nameplate is because a Nuclear Plant can RUN at 100% production 24x365 90-95% of the time. Yes, losses are figured into the nameplate. But 'capacity figure' is a useful way to tell how many kwh you'll get out of the system.
A 1GW nuclear plant is a different beast than 1 GW of solar panels or wind turbines.
A capacity factor of .9 means that it'll produce 3 times as many kwh, supplying 3 times as many homes and businesses than the .3 average that wind/solar manage to get.
Solar, of course, isn't going to get above 50%, even in a cloudless area with motors to change facings. Wind, well, if it's too slow or too fast the turbine can't produce as much(maybe any) power. I've heard that some areas will yield capacity factors of around 60%, but they're relatively rare.
Thus my mention of 'I don't know if his illness increased his focus and productivity in the realms of theoretical physics or not'.
I know about the arguement that his disability led to his discoveries, my point is that he was starting on stuff even before the disability had seriously developed.
Personally, I'd call it a wash, as our brilliant scientists, by and large, didn't have disabilities. Hawkins is an exception, not the rule. If I had the chance to prevent a Hawkings(or anybody else) from developing that condition, I'd do so. Most theoretical losses in productivity would be counterbalanced by theoretical increases in time to make the discoveries.
I goof that up quite a bit, unfortuantly. Habit from hand-coding on other boards.
If I've been posting on slashdot a bit, I do the opposite.
classical liberalism. I'm pissed off at most 'liberals' for spending money we don't have.
Oh, and I'm a gun nut. Seriously, check out my sig. ;)
Try it, get back to me with a product from an insurance company willing to insure *your* loss from a nuclear accident with a policy *you* can purchase.
Ah, now I understand. Given the type of insurance nuclear plants are required to have, I was simply going to file the claim against them. After all, "Companies are expressly forbidden to defend any action for damages on the grounds that an incident was not their fault."
Given that I live closer to nuclear weapons than a nuclear power plant, I didn't check my homeowner's policy that closely for nuclear contamination incidents, I paid more attention to the 'acts of war' clauses. I'll have to double check, but I don't think there's a radioactive contamination exception.
For *you* to recover damages to *your* property by a nuclear accident, *you* have to fund a case in the federal court.
Assuming that the power company contests and doesn't simply pay out. Assuming that it's not big enough that it more or less becomes a class action.
The Federal liability exemption means that the Company responsible for the plant would be able to continue to operate.
The Act doesn't allow for them to differentiate between a true bad luck accident and one caused by negligence. The act doesn't indemify the corporations from fines/criminals charges. Plus, many power plants are run by state corporations. Do you really want to shut down the entire TVA, for example?
Well an increasing trend of Accident Sequence Pre-Cursors and Licensee Event Reports (reported to the NRC) indicates an event of *any* kind is more *probable* every day especially as the reactors approach the end of their designed lifespan.
Ah, so now we're not only looking at the safety stats of Model-Ts, we're looking at the safety stats of OLD model Ts to figure out how safe modern cars are? If anything, this is an arguement that we need to build more nuclear reactors to replace our aging ones.
I've mentioned in the past, in other threads, that I'd like to build *NEW* nuclear plants, for both the purpose of eliminating dirty coal power but to eventually replace the aging nuclear plants. The new plant designs are a lot more fail-safe than the old ones. We have advanced considerably in failure-mode modeling and material science since the '70s.
So, for an answer, draw a circle 1200 Square miles around Three Mile Island and figure out the potential for damage yourself, that's roughly the land mass irradiated by Chernobyl. I'd say that pretty much wipes out Pennsylvania.
While, depending on winds, it'd suck for Harrisburg, York, and Lancaster, it'd hardly take out Pennsylvania.
Also, a TMI worst case requires catastrophic breach of the containment dome, which didn't happen with TMI, and a dome wasn't even present for Chernobyl.
The Nuclear industry would not be able to exist without the protections the P-A act afford as no sane investor would expose themselves to that level of liability.
I disagree, still, investors LIKE the subsidy, and it's no great cost to the government as long as the companies are doing their business (more or less) right. Basically, every year without a major incident lowers the effective subsidization as the industry proves itself safer.
Don't forget that a plant that's had a meltdown isn't one that's producing power, no power equals no income, which investors need no incentive to not like.
As a charitable organization, the Vatican could get 50x the MWH offsets per buck by giving away efficient lighting,
The thing that gets me about this is that people will tell me about all the ways to save power, and my response is usually 'already done'. I'm at the point that to be more energy efficient would involve either extreme sacrifice - like keeping my house at 40F during the winter even when I'm home, or just plain rebuilding my house.
Once they've already updated their appliances and lighting, what's left?
Sure, there's still a good deal that can be done on the appliance side. However, the population of the USA and world are still increasing. We need to address the supply side, preferably sooner than later. The way we're going we aren't going to be shutting off dirty CO2 exhausting coal plants anytime soon.
A modern nuclear plant would save more CO2 per dollar spent, but this is still a step.
Convienent Source!
A: $660 Million B: 0M* C: 100MW, D: 50%, E: 5%(cost of capital)
Annual Power: 438 Gwh (438,000,000 kwh)
Annual Cost: $38M
Cost per Kwh: 8.7 cents
Almost 3/4 more expensive per kwh. Might not seem like much, but it would price some economic activities out of profitability. Be the difference between a $100 electric bill, and a $150 one.
*Unrealistic, but I'll be generous, likely there'll be a good amount of money spend repairing/cleaning the system.
OK: I had not heard of that. (I am not sure whether or not that applies in other countries.
Other countries have their own systems, of course.
Yes, that is what I mean. And yes they could be insignificant. I just want to know whether or not they get included in the figures people throw around !!
Generally they are, but as noted, the CO2 from a nuclear plant construction ends up being insignificant. I'm sorry, but the site I originally got the reference from is down, and I'm not going to spend the time to find it again atm.
On the strip mining - 'Open pit' is the closest I can see, but no comment on how common it is. Still, you don't actually need to mine much because the power density is so high, especially if you don't have to enrich afterwards.
Correct: we do not know how much it is except that if you look for a quote for the insurance either you do not find one, or it will be huge.
$2.3M-$22M per reactor year, depending on who's figures you accept.
Which leads to my Number One complaint about the Energy debate: how can anyone say that nuclear is cheaper or more expensive than other forms of power?
Given that a kwh of electricity is a kwh of electricity, it's actually one of the easier things to reduce to a cost-benefit analysis.
Construction cost A, Operating costs B, power production C, capacity factor D, plant life E, interest rate F, construction time G. Fill in the blanks for each one, out pops a number. Lowest one wins, as long as it meets standards. IE wind/solar can't be 100% because they're not on demand systems.
Disregarding F(for the moment), 1 GW nuclear reactor, $3B.
A: $3B, B: $200M, C: 1 GW, D: 90%, E: 5%
Annual power production: 7,884 Gwh(7,884,000,000 kwh)
Annual cost: 174M for loan servicing(40year@5%)+200M operating. $374M
Cost per Kwh: ~4.7 cents
Figure 3 years construction time, that'd push the loan up to 3.3B, 191M annual loan costs. 5 cents/kwh.
I'll have to come back later to compare it to solar/wind.
Are we calling CO2 pollution now?
I'm not, not in this context. I'm refering to stuff like the extra cases of lung cancers downwind of coal plants, the extra smog, acid rain, mercury and other toxic elements/chemicals put into the atmosphere by coal burning.
It is disrespectful toward him, for people whom don't know anything about physics, to brown nose all over the guy, just because he's handicapped. Note, I'm not saying he's a loser, its not a binary this or that response. It is more respectful of his considerable intellectual achievements to describe him as definitely well above average in his profession, rather than a polite version of condescendingly fawning over every little little achievement of a sick child.
I'm going to butt in here and point out that Hawking's achievements were beginning to be known even as a post-grad, when his illness was [i]first diagnosed[/i]. At this point he's been restricted to a wheelchair for most of his life, but he was more or less normal for his first 20 or so years, physically. He was even on the rowing team IIRC.
Now, I don't know if his illness increased his focus and productivity in the realms of theoretical physics or not, other than to note that if he'd been whole in body he'd have a far easier time outputting his ideas, researching, etc... Not to mention possibly having an extra 30 or so years of him. His lack of mobility has likely led to certain health issues that will take him from us early.
Might not help you from this stuff. After all, all it needs to do is call back, and if the virtual machine does, well, you're screwed.
And the FBI/whoever confiscates the machine to keep the trojan from getting out in the wild.
And, since it's not on adults, I can even see decent arguments for doing so.
Personally, I'd go with the arguement that it's the school's network, they are allowed to put blocks up for the health, welfare of the network, and to at least try to ensure that it's used for what it's supposed to be used for.
Kinda like if your work wants to run a restrictive whitelist system, it's their option.
As for sites restricted from the school, if the parents so chose they can provide a completely open option at home.
That's because the act requires them to carry $300 million of site insurance. That doesn't apply to you getting private insurance for a Nuclear accident.
$300 million, private, no-fault insurance for each reactor site.
That IS insurance for any nuclear accident. And it's private, so there ARE obviously companies that are willing to insure nuclear plants.
For the Nuclear industry it's liability *ends* when the damages reach 9.1 billion, not the insurance companies liability.
Name some other industry that would still be held responsable after paying out $9.1B for an incident. For that matter, how much is an incident really likely to cause, given that a chernobyl level event is pretty much impossible?
The government generally gets involved LONG before that for big events. Look at superfund sites.
including life time waste storage,
Paid for via a per kwh fee, mandated by the government. Right now being covered privately out of the operating expenses of the plant, for actually not that much money. Lawsuits are ongoing due to the feds screwing up their end.
I mean, if your local town/city mandated you pay $X/month for trash pickup, then they didn't pick up the trash, wouldn't you sue?
all the concrete etc required,
Uh, included in the building costs? If you're refering specifically to the CO2 costs for the concrete, they end up being 'insignificant' over the 40 year estimated lifespan of a plant. Wind has higher CO2 by that measurement; the footings end up taking up MORE concrete per kwh/year produced. Solar is a bit more iffy. More options for supports.
Uranium strip mining, reprocessing etc
Operational Expenses? The fueling costs for most nuclear plants are considered 'insignificant'.
Huh, I've never come across a site that mentions Uranium is strip mined. Regardless, due to the sheer energy density of the stuff, less mining needs to be done to feed a nuclear plant, especially compared to a coal plant.
In the USA we're not allowed to reprocess. That would drop the amount of mining we need to do by an order of magnitude.
and as for the insurance costs they essential get under-written by the state (i.e. a huge hidden subsidy from the taxpayer).
Just how 'huge' is it when it's never been used? And wouldn't be used until the nuclear plants themselves end up on the hook for over a billion? How many billion plus level disasters DON'T get federal assistance?
We use the VAST majority of power during the daytime. PV is a perfect peak power play.
Not entirely perfect, and there are areas/times of the year when peak power usage doesn't correspond to peak sunlight. You also need a fair amount of backup when it comes to solar/wind sources, because they largely decide when they're going to produce power, not vice versa.
It's also subject to change if a significant base of electric or plug in hybrids join the fleet.
Every panel I've ever seen is guaranteed to deliver 80% of design after 20 years.
It's a significant decrease when you consider that nuclear power plants historically deliver MORE power 20 years later due to uprates and such. To the tune of 3-5% a year, spread over slightly more than a hundred plants.
I'm not saying to NOT produce solar panels, but we still need baseload, and nuclear plants can be dual tasked with the right equipment to also provide desalinated water, heat and electricity for ethanol/hydrogen production, heating, cooling(via absorbtion coolers), etc...
You're thinking of the 'void coefficient'. Chernobyl had a positive value, US(and rest of world) have negative ones.
In Chernobyl, when a bubble(void) forms in the coolant, the reaction increases in the area, tending to increase the size of the void. In the USA, reactors are designed that when a void forms, the reaction decreases, tending to self-regulate the problem.
Total unmitigated disaster.
I'd tend to say that there were quite a few mitigating factors, for example, the fact that nobody got killed by it.
Should we judge the safety of today's cars on the basis of crash tests using a Model-T?
We learned from that fiasco and fixed the problems.
And it was not a "small controlled release". The original overflows into the auxiliary buildings was uncontrolled and could be measured at 15 times above background level many miles away.
15 times above background level is something like the dosage you'd get from an airplane flight, isn't it? I think we'd need to find out what definition of 'background' they were using.
Hmmm... .5MREM/hour
Cosmic: 50 MREM
Terrestrial: 200
Food: 20
Self: 40(carbon-14)
Plane flight -
Call it 400 mrem. '15X', for a limited period of time, say, 2 weeks? 230MREM, and Upper GI Xray, half a barium enema.
Chance of cancer goes up 10% if you get 250k MREM, you'd need 3k/year.
Now look at the deaths from coal mining, coal power, coal pollution. How many lives would have been saved if we had built enough nuclear plants(post TMI designs) that instead of our electricity being 20% nuclear, 60% coal, it was 20% coal, 60% nuclear?
I think you need to reread the Price-Anderson act, nuclear power plants already carry $300 million in private insurance, each.
Then there's the collective pool, which should be hovering around a Billion dollars before the government steps in.
Looking around, there's not many billion dollar disasters that [i]don't[/i] have the government stepping in anyways. Just look at federal disaster relief, Katrina, flooding in North Dakota, etc...
Insurance companies don't write unlimited liability policies by standard, all of my insurance policies have a maximum. Think it's $400k for my auto policy, for example.
Now just imagine how much it'd cost the power companies if the coal plants got charged for their share of the 100k or so annual deaths from air pollution...
When have republicans ever claimed to be libertarians? They're separate political parties.
Otherwise, your definition of a libertarian looks good; people just have to remember that there are moderate and extreme ones, just like for republicans and democrats, and we certainly don't agree on everything.
I paid for my own college, currently make a comfortable living, and so forth.
I call myself a moderate libertarian mostly because they're the closest matching party, I'm currently sort-of boycotting the major parties. Still write those in office.
Why do I consider myself libertarian?
I believe that the war on drugs/prostitution is a lost cause, more expensive than just legalizing, taxing, and regulating it. That's not a position that mainstream democrats or republicans take.
I believe that the federal government should normally have a balanced budget, in order to provide ready credit for wartime or economic crashes.
EVERYBODY should pay some taxes, as a matter of policy.
I like a clean environment; just listen to the news that pollution kills nearly a 100k/year right here in the USA. Still, there's also quality of life issues to consider - if a system costs 100 lives due to pollution, but saves 100k due to it's benefits, it still should be produced.
I'm pro-choice and pro-death penalty, I'm also for extensive controls on police/prosecutor corruption/malpractice. They often has more power to screw somebody's life up than a surgeon.
Not strictly libertarian, but I'd expand the 'health care savings plan' and 'High deductible insurance' a LOT, and I'd forbid discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions as long as the individual HAD insurance in the last 3 months or so.
There's plenty more, but I agree with the democrats on some things, the republicans on others. Neither on quite a few. Extremists tend to be nutty, of whatever party, but I can't help but think that a half dozen or so libertarians might not be a bad thing in congress.
Didn't work out that way, though, did it?
Doesn't change that it was designed to benefit the few, in the short term, to encourage them to produce their hard to create but easily copied goods, in order to benefit the masses in the long run.
It's why I personally call for reforming copyright, not eliminating it. Eliminating copyright completely would do just as much damage, personally I think it'd do more damage, than what the current system is doing.
Like it or not, but piracy is creating a pushback effect on the current system. It effectively puts a limit on copyright for everything.
I've also read a number of similar articles.
Now, the articles I've read seperate 'clean coal' and 'carbon capture sequestration'(CCS). Clean coal is a plant that does far better at capturing elements that are traditionally considered pollution - mercury, lead, arsenic, the various other nasty things present in coal.
CCS is the carbon capturing part.
The problem, as I've seen it, is actually simple. Building a clean coal power plant is Expensive. How expensive? It's in the running with the expense of building a nuclear plant. CCS adds another 10% or so to the construction cost, generally making it MORE expensive than a nuclear plant of the same capacity.
At this point in time, and for the forseeable future, uranium is cheaper than coal per GWh. So if you're not going to save money building the plant/infrastructure, why would you select the more expensive fuel?
Adding insult to injury, CCS costs energy - sapping the efficiency of the plant. I've seen figures between 7-10%. This, of course means that you have to burn MORE coal in order to power the capture operation. The loss of efficiency might not be a big deal if you have a commercial concern willing to buy the CO2(such as an oil well looking to pressurize wells in order to extract more), but otherwise, well, it just adds another fraction of a cent to the cost to generate a kwh. In a business where that fraction of a cent can add up to millions, and existing nuclear plants, on average, beat coal plants in cost per kwh. Newer plants are supposed to be more efficient and even cheaper due to modern techniques that simplify a plant's design.
Once you add all that up, nuclear power beats 'clean' coal most of the time, especially under a CO2 constrained market.
Oh, I get it, they're against private ownership of proxies.
I think that it's legislation written by/for legislatures who don't really know how the internet works.
The law would be fine if it targeted specifically 'anonymizing' proxies, that the user deliberately sets up, as opposed to a transparent proxy you don't even know about, or the corporate proxy that you have to use because the firewall blocks 80 and 443 from anywhere else.
Here's the rub: there would be no need for this whatsoever if the government got out of subsidizing Tesla's competitors. If Tesla couldn't make it work in a competitive market, then that's that.
Good point. It reminds me of a number of other industries - like for electricity. The government provides so many subsidies to various companies that the remaining ones, even if well run, would be run out of business by the subsidized companies, so therefore they need some subsidization as well. Meanwhile the cost of the good is sold at an undervalued price, so people aren't motivated to conserve like they would otherwise be.