Bah, accidentally hit submit earlier instead of preview. Makes me wish slashdot had an edit button.
On the subject of nuclear waste - only for a short term. You want to get technical, the toxic ash dumps coal power is generating will need to be stored a heck of a lot longer. There's also a huge amount more of it.
But then, you want to double our NG production, taking us from about ~50 years of capacity to less than 25.
With breeder reactors or proper reprocessing, we reduce the amount of waste by something like 90%, and the time we need to store it by current guidelines by about a factor of a hundred - something like 300 years total. Yucca mountain or a number of other sites can do that easily.
Okay, in advocating that there's enough NG to replace coal and nuclear you post a link that says "but LNG will not be a panacea for North American natural gas shortfall"?
Second link - aren't we trying to gain energy independence from the middle east? Besides - Natural Gas Imported To US For Electricity Generation May Be Environmentally Worse Than Coal "The 1990s saw a surge in construction of natural gas power plants, fueled by cheap natural gas, low investment requirements and the idea that natural gas was less carbon-intensive than coal. Since these plants were constructed, natural gas prices have skyrocketed as the North American natural gas supply has become more limited. These gas plants are now operating at a very low capacity, fueling the energy industry's interest in increasing gas supply by using LNG."
By the way, that also increases costs for people trying to heat their homes with 97% efficient NG systems.
Your third link doesn't address production, it addresses liquification, storage, and transportation.
Per the DOE, in 2007 we used 6.8 trillion cubic feet for electricity. NG and nuclear are about equal at 20%, and coal is over double at slightly over 40% of electrical generation. We'd need 27 trillion cubic feet per year to replace the coal & nuclear plants. Overall production in 2007 was only 24 trillion.
Where are we going to get the supply to feed the various uses of NG for residential, commercial, and industrial use?
Actually we do have the capacity. Behind coal natural gas (LNG), linked to from Electricity generation, is the largest source of fuel in the US producing 20% the the electricity. However if it isn't enough electrical generation, then coal fired power plants can be converted to burn LNG. If geothermal, solar, and wind power are deployed this should be enough for the baseload generation. According to the Department of Energy the US only imports 16% of the LNG used, and most of that from Canada. The Picken's Plan calls for LNG plants be closed then LNG to be used as fuel for transportation.
You haven't proved capacity yet - that we'd be able to economically more than quadruple our harvesting of NG. I'll make no argument about being able to convert coal plants to NG, I'm arguing that we wouldn't be able to mine enough for long enough to make it economical.
And I'd rather LNG be used for the baseload, if it's really needed, as it's less polluting than coal. Unlike coal, the mining of which is destructive, LNG is pumped from wells. While I don't particularly like drilling it's better than coal mining.
No argument over my belief that we wouldn't be able to mine enough. In some ways we're running out of NG faster than coal. Like Picken's plan, I'd rather use it for mobile applications and local power utilizing co/tri generation.
All of which, as I said above about France, stull have trouble with reprocessing.
Breeder reactors, on site reprocessing, modern methods. While it indeed 'doesn't reduce radioactivity', it changes the nature - pulling out the stuff with longer halflives to use as fuel, leaving behind stuff with shorter half lives, that doesn't need to be buried for as long.
1. Please don't try to analyze my proposal for a sales tax on one sentence. The actual system, just the barebones, would be a small paper, and address the concerns you just listed 2. Shouldn't we punish being in debt? Besides, interest wouldn't be charged sales tax. 3. New goods would be taxed, not used; that way we don't have to try to hit up yard sales for revenue. 4. Look up the fairtax.org website and look at the rebate proposal 5. The wealthy are some of the biggest tax-avoiders around. Trump pays less in income taxes than his secretary. 6. You'd audit commercial companies for failing to collect the tax; not individuals for failing to pay it.
As it is now, taxes are too low to pay for the government programs that the public seems to really want. Remember: Health Care, Defense, Social Security, and interest on our debt make up literally 90% of the federal budget. Unless someone is to propose deep cuts in these programs, any populist moaning on taxes strikes me as a bit annoying.
I have to agree; task #1 would be to balance the budget first, long before you start lowering taxes.
Instead, I'd concentrate on fixing our tax structure so people aren't spending $50/year to figure out their taxes. Reducing pork - there's all sorts of incentive programs out there the feds run that state and local agencies chase to buy equipment and run programs that, if it was 'their own' money they wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole - See the bridge to nowhere(local airport), Alaska.
We have more federal employee jobs today than manufacturing ones. That's another one that needs fixing. Personally, I'd be lowering employee taxes, even offering incentives. Something like making employee wages of up to $50k per employee deductible to businesses at 115% instead of 100% - the extra 15% would make employees somewhat cheaper, reducing the benefit of outsourcing.
Or go whole hog and get rid of income taxes in favor of sales taxes.
I'd like to see how [i](14) Danylo Hawaliahka, "Still Blowin' in the Wind," Interview with Lester Brown, founder of World Watch Institute, MacLeans, May 17, 2004, p. 42.[/i] figures out that cost. In either case, you can only have so much wind/solar power attached to the grid without losing stability.
where I live a lot of electricity comes from the wind but I pay about 10 cents a KWH.
Welcome to the difference between generation and retail. I also pay ~10cents/kwh. Here is a quote from my bill:
The cost of electricity is composed of three main parts: generation, transmission, and distribution. For residential customers, each component's share of the total cost is:
Generation 42%
Transmission 7%
Distribution 51% These percentages are residential group averages. Your individual use may result in percentages that vary from these averages.
4 cents/kwh translates into a cost of 9.5 cents kw/h. Not bad.
Back on the nuclear plants - Right now we're stuck in before the Model T days. France has managed to run an economical electric grid off of mostly nuclear power for generations. They do this by 'cookie cuttering' the designs; Engineering and safety requirements are a huge cost for a plant, if you can type certify them it's far cheaper.
GenIII designs promise to be safer, simpler, and cheaper than the GenII designs you point out.
Until energy storage is solved I'd rather have natural gas power plants serve as a baseload.
Do you have any idea how much NG that would take? We don't have the generation capacity, and it'd drive NG prices through the roof as generators buy up supply. We wouldn't even significantly decrease our CO2 emissions if we replace coal & nuclear with it.
As such, pure NG baseload isn't possible, so we're back to coal vs nuclear for most of our baseload. I'd much rather have to deal with a few coal trains worth of nuclear waste a year than all the very real pollution of coal.
For the storage, well, we've proposed the solutions a number of times. Reprocess or run a breeder reactor, like France, Japan, and Russia.
I've recently bought a new tv with a digital tuner. To play around, I've been watching a bit more TV.
I'm currently wondering 'When did the TV stations start selling prime time air to infomercials?'.
Gah, I'm back to getting a box or at least a cable run over from my computer to play stuff. If that's the stuff they're going to play, I'll get my videos from netflix.
And to think that most of my stations are in the VHF spectrum. Due to the flat land and low population density; going VHF gets you more viewers. People just buy roof mount antennas. My antenna, for example, is longer than I am tall.
coal pays nothing for the CO2 they emit, and the coal mining companies don't either.
I wouldn't bother bringing the coal statistics up with me; I've already stated that I'd replace all the coal plants with nuclear ones if I could. They're dirty and nasty, and I'm of the opinion that if we'd thrown a fraction of the effort we've put into solar/wind power we'd have a much larger installed base of nuclear by now and due to better watts and kwh produced per year figures, we'd be able to shut some of the nastiest ones down. With cheaper electricity we'd be closer to economical electric vehicles, etc...
Ah, but do nuclear power plant operators and owners pay for insurance? I know they pay into a fund for disposal but I don't recall them paying for insurance.
Yes, they do. By Price-Anderson they're required to have $300 Million of insurance and $112 Million in a trust for the coop insurance per reactor.
Per the wiki article, the 'potential cost' of the PA law is $2.3 million per reactor-year, or 237 million annually.
Compare that to solar $2.9 Billion subsidy package for California alone. They're hoping to get an additional 3 MW out of the program.
If we assume that this program only pays for 20%, that's $15B for 3MW of capacity, or $5/watt. Nuclear is supposed to be $1-3/watt.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't install wind/solar, but I believe that nuclear should be a larger portion of the solution.
If it's like my area; those stations that are transmitting both analog and digital channels are transmitting the digital ones at about a tenth less strength. I suggest they(or you) visit antennaweb or TV Fool to find out the relative transmitting powers for their area.
Once they shut off the analog transmitters they're generally going to step up the power on their digital stations.
Maybe not, bigger isn't always better, more efficient.
On average, larger higher turbines are more efficient. This varies by the exact install situation, of course.
it's individuals or those who have them installed who get the subsidies. And those subsidies aren't that much though it may cut the cost in half.
You don't think a 50% subsidy isn't that much? Personally, I think it's huge. Plenty of large companies/installs get subsidies, they're just generally in the form of tax breaks and subsidized sale prices instead of direct dollars. They also hide the amounts a lot.
Only if you don't cut the limited liability nuclear has. No other type of energy gets limited liability. Now if instead nuclear power plants had to pay for insurance then the price per kilowatthour would be high I bet.
Haven't actually read about the price-anderson act, have you? $300 million per reactor, $11.6 Billion coop insurance, only then would the feds take over. Superfund would take over earlier for any other industry.
Why should the insurance be so high? It's essentially been free money for the insurance companies for decades.
I'd say there was a big difference between win95 and win2k. Different codebases, win2k came from the NT line.
95->98->ME->Dead
NT->2K->XP->Vista(bad)->Win7
2K was a massive upgrade, regardless. XP eventually added a number of new capabilities, vista, well, tried.
Win7? I have the 64bit version installed on my laptop, not incredibly impressed with it, but it works. I'm planning to try it on my main computer as a dual boot to give it more of a stress test.
Yeah, I goofed the link, and a mass of text disappeared as a result. What I get for working in a hurry. Anyways, Fixed link and restored text(that was hiding in the link: 6MW which is the largest commercial wind turbine made. You'd need 200 turbines to equal the nuke plant's max capacity, more likely 300 to match it's annual generation.
With big enough backyard, you can put one in your backyard, which I'd like to do, along with PVs on my roof.
While there'd be complications in how you figure the billing, I think a turbine just outside of my very small village would be neat. Larger turbines are more efficient and operate more evenly as the wind loads are steadier the higher you go. Even a single MW turbine would provide more than enough power for my town, on average. Due to my northern latitude, it'd be far more efficient to stick the solar panels in the nevada desert first.
Oh, there's one more thing I keep on forgetting. I read an article I think in SciAm that nuclear power plants need more water than any other type of power plant.
First, these cooling towers aren't for a nuclear plant.
A nuclear plant, depending on design, requires water for between 0 - 3 systems. Primary cooling, secondary loop, and final waste heat disposal.
Primary cooling loop - the water actually in the reactor. Normally pressurized, it's in relative direct contact with the core. It's tightly sealed up and is never intended to leave. Having to dump a significant amount of water into it would be unusual. Some designs use liquid sodium at ambient pressure instead. Secondary loop - heat is transferred from the primary to the secondary, this water transforms to steam and is used in the turbines to produce power. It's also distilled water and sealed/recycled. Around the same amount of water will be present in a coal plant of the same power level. Lots more behind a hydro dam.
Final waste heat - This is where the massive amounts of waste heat go to keep the secondary loop going. Trick is, it doesn't necesarily 'use up' the water. The water doesn't have to be potable. It merely heats it up a little. Well, depending on design and prevailing conditions. Generally you have three situations. 1. Lots and Lots of water available. Like a river or ocean. You run some river water through the heat exchangers or place the heat exchanger into the ocean. You get a spot where the water is slightly warmer. Fish tend to love these areas. 2. Not so much water available - cooling towers may be used to evaporate some of the water rather than warming more of it to an ecologically damaging level. 3. No water? Pure air cooling. Most expensive option, thus not much used. After last year though, when entry river water reached temperatures exceeding that of what they were allowed to release it at, a number of nuclear plants are adding more of this type of cooling capacity.
Throughout the world aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be recharged. Where is the water need to run nuclear power plants going to come from?
You're thinking of unsalinated ground source drinking water. Nuke plants use distilled, distilled, and 'don't really care what state it's in'. Generally they use river water, and put the water right back in the river.
However it is, nuclear power would not be profitable and Wall Street would not pay for it if government did not subsidize it.
You do realize that you can say the exact same thing for wind/solar, right? The only power generation types that get less subsidies than nuclear is NG and dirty coal. Solar and wind generally get at least an order of magnitude more subsidy than nuclear.
It is done in cities though. I don't know if it's still done in NYC but
Only one of those 4 meltdowns contaminated the area - Chernobyl. Which, as it turned out, was like building a house with no roof then complaining when the rain gets in.
TMI and the others had containment buildings that would act as secondary containment if the reaction breached the reactor vessel. Heck, ALL of our plants have that.
As I understand it, it's because breeder reactors haven't been developed to prime-time yet, and are perceived as more expensive/prone to failure than various light water reactors.
Personally, I'm very much for trying again - the French already figured out most of the problems, and we're much better at computer modeling today.
Like Chu, I fully believe that nuclear power does have issues/problems - it's just that, on the whole, they're a much better option than the other cheap source of power - coal.
every existing plant decommissioned and replaced with something that wasn't hip in the 70's.
Could we Please build the new plants first?
Heck, can we replace the coal plants first, as well?
Step 1: Build a 1.X GW GenIII plant. 2: Shut down 1.X GW of coal plant. Preferably the dirtiest, least economical, most dangerous plant in operation. 3: Build 2-3 GW of nuclear plant on the same site or close if moving the site a bit makes sense.
Repeat 2-3 until you run out of coal or other dirty electrical sources. Start on the old, inefficient nuke plants.
While you're at it, put some encouragements in to make them Co/Trigeneration plants - let's get some economical activity out of the pure heat.
Those wouldn't be as tall as the 200-300 meter towers you'd need to be able to replace your prototypical 1GW nuke plant with less than a couple thousand towers, and B: Rare, which means we don't have a large enough sample size to determine likelihood of a fatal accident in the fatalities per Twh you can measure with nuke plants.
For cogeneration/trigeneration, it's not like you can't do that with nuclear as well. Heck, I've suggested putting the small nuke plants onto some military bases - provide independent power, heat and cooling to the base itself.
You can also use the heat for desalination, ethanol production, and various other uses.
Can't really do co/tri generation with wind/solar, you can with coal - but then you're back to the nasty pollution which is the reason they moved them out of the cities in the first place.
Wasn't it a year or two ago that some miners were trapped in a cave-in in the west?
I think I remember that; but I don't remember it being a coal mine - I think it was for some other ore. Copper/Iron maybe?
What are those hazards that nuclear power does not have? Solar uses a lot of semiconductors, the same semiconductors needed for nuclear power control systems. Wind turbines need steel and concrete, however nuclear power plants need much more of both.
Well, roofing is one of the more dangerous jobs in the USA, if you go installing solar panels on all the roofs in the USA you're bound to get some accidents. As for the semiconductors, the main use for a nuclear plant would be control computers - and a single roof's worth of solar panels would be far more silicon than is needed in a nuclear plant.
As for the concrete/steel, sure, a nuclear plant uses more than a single turbine - but a GenIII plant will be something like 1.2GW vs Youneed a lot of steel/concrete for 300 some odd 198 meter tall towers and 126 meter wide blades. Other figures using smaller turbines and more pessimistic capacity factors are even worse - over a thousand towers in some cases.
You end up with the turbine footings taking up far more space than the entire nuclear plant.
As a byproduct, of course, the decay produces a huge amount of heat, easily enough to feed a steam turbine to power the beam and other stuff.
I wish the article had mentioned something about it's energy generation capabilities. By the sounds of it, it probably doesn't process 'raw' waste out of cores, instead treating the waste resulting from reprocessing them to sort out the still usable fuel elements.
Don't forget that even bars and taverns would often pay somebody to play music because there was no mechanical way to reproduce music. Then you had playhouses that would cater to the less wealthy with plays, acts, and shows.
I agree that copyright periods are ridiculously long, but that doesn't mean the underlying concept is wrong.
My thoughts as well. Personally, I'd go for a 20 year automatic/commercial/'for hire' copyright, 40 year for personal copyrights.
I mean, people are still bickering about the beetle albums!
I have no less than 3 stations that will be doing the flashcut; one already did it, the other two are going to wait to the last minute.
I hadn't seen anything on the FCC going after the low power stations as well. I just knew they were exempted from the feb 17 deadline. Not getting any, I felt no need to go searching.
There was NEVER any intent to keep analog operational, and if you believe these was, please provide a FCC-linked citation. (You won't find one.)
If you want to get really technical, low power stations can still transmit in analog even past the transition period, but yeah, this is a change that they've known about for nearly a decade.
If I'd had my way, I'd have taken a quick peek at the average lifespan of TVs and ordered that new TVs be sold with the digital tuner long before the ~3 years we actually got. 6-9 years would probably have reduced the need for the converter boxes by 75% or more.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, accidentally hit submit earlier instead of preview. Makes me wish slashdot had an edit button.
On the subject of nuclear waste - only for a short term. You want to get technical, the toxic ash dumps coal power is generating will need to be stored a heck of a lot longer. There's also a huge amount more of it.
But then, you want to double our NG production, taking us from about ~50 years of capacity to less than 25.
With breeder reactors or proper reprocessing, we reduce the amount of waste by something like 90%, and the time we need to store it by current guidelines by about a factor of a hundred - something like 300 years total. Yucca mountain or a number of other sites can do that easily.
Okay, in advocating that there's enough NG to replace coal and nuclear you post a link that says "but LNG will not be a panacea for North American natural gas shortfall" ?
Second link - aren't we trying to gain energy independence from the middle east? Besides - Natural Gas Imported To US For Electricity Generation May Be Environmentally Worse Than Coal "The 1990s saw a surge in construction of natural gas power plants, fueled by cheap natural gas, low investment requirements and the idea that natural gas was less carbon-intensive than coal. Since these plants were constructed, natural gas prices have skyrocketed as the North American natural gas supply has become more limited. These gas plants are now operating at a very low capacity, fueling the energy industry's interest in increasing gas supply by using LNG."
By the way, that also increases costs for people trying to heat their homes with 97% efficient NG systems.
Your third link doesn't address production, it addresses liquification, storage, and transportation.
In 2003, natural gas reserves in the United States were estimated to be 1,338 trillion cubic feet, and U.S. gas production was 18.6 trillion cubic feet.
Per the DOE, in 2007 we used 6.8 trillion cubic feet for electricity. NG and nuclear are about equal at 20%, and coal is over double at slightly over 40% of electrical generation. We'd need 27 trillion cubic feet per year to replace the coal & nuclear plants. Overall production in 2007 was only 24 trillion.
Where are we going to get the supply to feed the various uses of NG for residential, commercial, and industrial use?
Actually we do have the capacity. Behind coal natural gas (LNG), linked to from Electricity generation, is the largest source of fuel in the US producing 20% the the electricity. However if it isn't enough electrical generation, then coal fired power plants can be converted to burn LNG. If geothermal, solar, and wind power are deployed this should be enough for the baseload generation. According to the Department of Energy the US only imports 16% of the LNG used, and most of that from Canada. The Picken's Plan calls for LNG plants be closed then LNG to be used as fuel for transportation.
You haven't proved capacity yet - that we'd be able to economically more than quadruple our harvesting of NG. I'll make no argument about being able to convert coal plants to NG, I'm arguing that we wouldn't be able to mine enough for long enough to make it economical.
And I'd rather LNG be used for the baseload, if it's really needed, as it's less polluting than coal. Unlike coal, the mining of which is destructive, LNG is pumped from wells. While I don't particularly like drilling it's better than coal mining.
No argument over my belief that we wouldn't be able to mine enough. In some ways we're running out of NG faster than coal. Like Picken's plan, I'd rather use it for mobile applications and local power utilizing co/tri generation.
All of which, as I said above about France, stull have trouble with reprocessing.
Breeder reactors, on site reprocessing, modern methods. While it indeed 'doesn't reduce radioactivity', it changes the nature - pulling out the stuff with longer halflives to use as fuel, leaving behind stuff with shorter half lives, that doesn't need to be buried for as long.
1. Please don't try to analyze my proposal for a sales tax on one sentence. The actual system, just the barebones, would be a small paper, and address the concerns you just listed
2. Shouldn't we punish being in debt? Besides, interest wouldn't be charged sales tax.
3. New goods would be taxed, not used; that way we don't have to try to hit up yard sales for revenue.
4. Look up the fairtax.org website and look at the rebate proposal
5. The wealthy are some of the biggest tax-avoiders around. Trump pays less in income taxes than his secretary.
6. You'd audit commercial companies for failing to collect the tax; not individuals for failing to pay it.
I like the idea of consumption taxes too. Studies have shown though that Sales Taxes break down due to enforcement issues above 10% or so.
Happens with income taxes as well. See 'working under the table'.
Still, I'd make the challenge though, does the Fed.gov really need more than 10% of our income?
As it is now, taxes are too low to pay for the government programs that the public seems to really want. Remember: Health Care, Defense, Social Security, and interest on our debt make up literally 90% of the federal budget. Unless someone is to propose deep cuts in these programs, any populist moaning on taxes strikes me as a bit annoying.
I have to agree; task #1 would be to balance the budget first, long before you start lowering taxes.
Instead, I'd concentrate on fixing our tax structure so people aren't spending $50/year to figure out their taxes. Reducing pork - there's all sorts of incentive programs out there the feds run that state and local agencies chase to buy equipment and run programs that, if it was 'their own' money they wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole - See the bridge to nowhere(local airport), Alaska.
We have more federal employee jobs today than manufacturing ones. That's another one that needs fixing. Personally, I'd be lowering employee taxes, even offering incentives. Something like making employee wages of up to $50k per employee deductible to businesses at 115% instead of 100% - the extra 15% would make employees somewhat cheaper, reducing the benefit of outsourcing.
Or go whole hog and get rid of income taxes in favor of sales taxes.
I'd like to see how [i](14) Danylo Hawaliahka, "Still Blowin' in the Wind," Interview with Lester Brown, founder of World Watch Institute, MacLeans, May 17, 2004, p. 42.[/i] figures out that cost. In either case, you can only have so much wind/solar power attached to the grid without losing stability.
where I live a lot of electricity comes from the wind but I pay about 10 cents a KWH.
Welcome to the difference between generation and retail. I also pay ~10cents/kwh. Here is a quote from my bill:
The cost of electricity is composed of three main parts: generation, transmission, and distribution.
For residential customers, each component's share of the total cost is:
Generation 42%
Transmission 7%
Distribution 51%
These percentages are residential group averages. Your individual use may result in percentages that vary from these averages.
4 cents/kwh translates into a cost of 9.5 cents kw/h. Not bad.
Back on the nuclear plants - Right now we're stuck in before the Model T days. France has managed to run an economical electric grid off of mostly nuclear power for generations. They do this by 'cookie cuttering' the designs; Engineering and safety requirements are a huge cost for a plant, if you can type certify them it's far cheaper.
GenIII designs promise to be safer, simpler, and cheaper than the GenII designs you point out.
Until energy storage is solved I'd rather have natural gas power plants serve as a baseload.
Do you have any idea how much NG that would take? We don't have the generation capacity, and it'd drive NG prices through the roof as generators buy up supply. We wouldn't even significantly decrease our CO2 emissions if we replace coal & nuclear with it.
As such, pure NG baseload isn't possible, so we're back to coal vs nuclear for most of our baseload. I'd much rather have to deal with a few coal trains worth of nuclear waste a year than all the very real pollution of coal.
For the storage, well, we've proposed the solutions a number of times. Reprocess or run a breeder reactor, like France, Japan, and Russia.
I've recently bought a new tv with a digital tuner. To play around, I've been watching a bit more TV.
I'm currently wondering 'When did the TV stations start selling prime time air to infomercials?'.
Gah, I'm back to getting a box or at least a cable run over from my computer to play stuff. If that's the stuff they're going to play, I'll get my videos from netflix.
And to think that most of my stations are in the VHF spectrum. Due to the flat land and low population density; going VHF gets you more viewers. People just buy roof mount antennas. My antenna, for example, is longer than I am tall.
coal pays nothing for the CO2 they emit, and the coal mining companies don't either.
I wouldn't bother bringing the coal statistics up with me; I've already stated that I'd replace all the coal plants with nuclear ones if I could. They're dirty and nasty, and I'm of the opinion that if we'd thrown a fraction of the effort we've put into solar/wind power we'd have a much larger installed base of nuclear by now and due to better watts and kwh produced per year figures, we'd be able to shut some of the nastiest ones down. With cheaper electricity we'd be closer to economical electric vehicles, etc...
Ah, but do nuclear power plant operators and owners pay for insurance? I know they pay into a fund for disposal but I don't recall them paying for insurance.
Yes, they do. By Price-Anderson they're required to have $300 Million of insurance and $112 Million in a trust for the coop insurance per reactor.
Per the wiki article, the 'potential cost' of the PA law is $2.3 million per reactor-year, or 237 million annually.
Compare that to solar $2.9 Billion subsidy package for California alone. They're hoping to get an additional 3 MW out of the program.
If we assume that this program only pays for 20%, that's $15B for 3MW of capacity, or $5/watt. Nuclear is supposed to be $1-3/watt.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't install wind/solar, but I believe that nuclear should be a larger portion of the solution.
If it's like my area; those stations that are transmitting both analog and digital channels are transmitting the digital ones at about a tenth less strength. I suggest they(or you) visit antennaweb or TV Fool to find out the relative transmitting powers for their area.
Once they shut off the analog transmitters they're generally going to step up the power on their digital stations.
Maybe not, bigger isn't always better, more efficient.
On average, larger higher turbines are more efficient. This varies by the exact install situation, of course.
it's individuals or those who have them installed who get the subsidies. And those subsidies aren't that much though it may cut the cost in half.
You don't think a 50% subsidy isn't that much? Personally, I think it's huge. Plenty of large companies/installs get subsidies, they're just generally in the form of tax breaks and subsidized sale prices instead of direct dollars. They also hide the amounts a lot.
Only if you don't cut the limited liability nuclear has. No other type of energy gets limited liability. Now if instead nuclear power plants had to pay for insurance then the price per kilowatthour would be high I bet.
Haven't actually read about the price-anderson act, have you? $300 million per reactor, $11.6 Billion coop insurance, only then would the feds take over. Superfund would take over earlier for any other industry.
Why should the insurance be so high? It's essentially been free money for the insurance companies for decades.
I'd say there was a big difference between win95 and win2k. Different codebases, win2k came from the NT line.
95->98->ME->Dead
NT->2K->XP->Vista(bad)->Win7
2K was a massive upgrade, regardless. XP eventually added a number of new capabilities, vista, well, tried.
Win7? I have the 64bit version installed on my laptop, not incredibly impressed with it, but it works. I'm planning to try it on my main computer as a dual boot to give it more of a stress test.
Yeah, I goofed the link, and a mass of text disappeared as a result. What I get for working in a hurry. Anyways, Fixed link and restored text(that was hiding in the link:
6MW which is the largest commercial wind turbine made. You'd need 200 turbines to equal the nuke plant's max capacity, more likely 300 to match it's annual generation.
With big enough backyard, you can put one in your backyard, which I'd like to do, along with PVs on my roof.
While there'd be complications in how you figure the billing, I think a turbine just outside of my very small village would be neat. Larger turbines are more efficient and operate more evenly as the wind loads are steadier the higher you go. Even a single MW turbine would provide more than enough power for my town, on average. Due to my northern latitude, it'd be far more efficient to stick the solar panels in the nevada desert first.
Oh, there's one more thing I keep on forgetting. I read an article I think in SciAm that nuclear power plants need more water than any other type of power plant.
First, these cooling towers aren't for a nuclear plant.
A nuclear plant, depending on design, requires water for between 0 - 3 systems. Primary cooling, secondary loop, and final waste heat disposal.
Primary cooling loop - the water actually in the reactor. Normally pressurized, it's in relative direct contact with the core. It's tightly sealed up and is never intended to leave. Having to dump a significant amount of water into it would be unusual. Some designs use liquid sodium at ambient pressure instead.
Secondary loop - heat is transferred from the primary to the secondary, this water transforms to steam and is used in the turbines to produce power. It's also distilled water and sealed/recycled. Around the same amount of water will be present in a coal plant of the same power level. Lots more behind a hydro dam.
Final waste heat - This is where the massive amounts of waste heat go to keep the secondary loop going. Trick is, it doesn't necesarily 'use up' the water. The water doesn't have to be potable. It merely heats it up a little. Well, depending on design and prevailing conditions. Generally you have three situations.
1. Lots and Lots of water available. Like a river or ocean. You run some river water through the heat exchangers or place the heat exchanger into the ocean. You get a spot where the water is slightly warmer. Fish tend to love these areas.
2. Not so much water available - cooling towers may be used to evaporate some of the water rather than warming more of it to an ecologically damaging level.
3. No water? Pure air cooling. Most expensive option, thus not much used. After last year though, when entry river water reached temperatures exceeding that of what they were allowed to release it at, a number of nuclear plants are adding more of this type of cooling capacity.
Throughout the world aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be recharged. Where is the water need to run nuclear power plants going to come from?
You're thinking of unsalinated ground source drinking water. Nuke plants use distilled, distilled, and 'don't really care what state it's in'. Generally they use river water, and put the water right back in the river.
However it is, nuclear power would not be profitable and Wall Street would not pay for it if government did not subsidize it.
You do realize that you can say the exact same thing for wind/solar, right? The only power generation types that get less subsidies than nuclear is NG and dirty coal. Solar and wind generally get at least an order of magnitude more subsidy than nuclear.
It is done in cities though. I don't know if it's still done in NYC but
Yes, it contiminates the area.
Only one of those 4 meltdowns contaminated the area - Chernobyl. Which, as it turned out, was like building a house with no roof then complaining when the rain gets in.
TMI and the others had containment buildings that would act as secondary containment if the reaction breached the reactor vessel. Heck, ALL of our plants have that.
As I understand it, it's because breeder reactors haven't been developed to prime-time yet, and are perceived as more expensive/prone to failure than various light water reactors.
Personally, I'm very much for trying again - the French already figured out most of the problems, and we're much better at computer modeling today.
Like Chu, I fully believe that nuclear power does have issues/problems - it's just that, on the whole, they're a much better option than the other cheap source of power - coal.
every existing plant decommissioned and replaced with something that wasn't hip in the 70's.
Could we Please build the new plants first?
Heck, can we replace the coal plants first, as well?
Step 1: Build a 1.X GW GenIII plant.
2: Shut down 1.X GW of coal plant. Preferably the dirtiest, least economical, most dangerous plant in operation.
3: Build 2-3 GW of nuclear plant on the same site or close if moving the site a bit makes sense.
Repeat 2-3 until you run out of coal or other dirty electrical sources. Start on the old, inefficient nuke plants.
While you're at it, put some encouragements in to make them Co/Trigeneration plants - let's get some economical activity out of the pure heat.
Those wouldn't be as tall as the 200-300 meter towers you'd need to be able to replace your prototypical 1GW nuke plant with less than a couple thousand towers, and B: Rare, which means we don't have a large enough sample size to determine likelihood of a fatal accident in the fatalities per Twh you can measure with nuke plants.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
For cogeneration/trigeneration, it's not like you can't do that with nuclear as well. Heck, I've suggested putting the small nuke plants onto some military bases - provide independent power, heat and cooling to the base itself.
You can also use the heat for desalination, ethanol production, and various other uses.
Can't really do co/tri generation with wind/solar, you can with coal - but then you're back to the nasty pollution which is the reason they moved them out of the cities in the first place.
Wasn't it a year or two ago that some miners were trapped in a cave-in in the west?
I think I remember that; but I don't remember it being a coal mine - I think it was for some other ore. Copper/Iron maybe?
What are those hazards that nuclear power does not have? Solar uses a lot of semiconductors, the same semiconductors needed for nuclear power control systems. Wind turbines need steel and concrete, however nuclear power plants need much more of both.
Well, roofing is one of the more dangerous jobs in the USA, if you go installing solar panels on all the roofs in the USA you're bound to get some accidents. As for the semiconductors, the main use for a nuclear plant would be control computers - and a single roof's worth of solar panels would be far more silicon than is needed in a nuclear plant.
As for the concrete/steel, sure, a nuclear plant uses more than a single turbine - but a GenIII plant will be something like 1.2GW vs You need a lot of steel/concrete for 300 some odd 198 meter tall towers and 126 meter wide blades. Other figures using smaller turbines and more pessimistic capacity factors are even worse - over a thousand towers in some cases.
You end up with the turbine footings taking up far more space than the entire nuclear plant.
As a byproduct, of course, the decay produces a huge amount of heat, easily enough to feed a steam turbine to power the beam and other stuff.
I wish the article had mentioned something about it's energy generation capabilities. By the sounds of it, it probably doesn't process 'raw' waste out of cores, instead treating the waste resulting from reprocessing them to sort out the still usable fuel elements.
I'm still for using breeder reactors.
What we need is a mainstream movie and miniseries about the hazards of coal; perhaps going through the life of a Chinese coal miner?
Oh, and point out the cost/hazards of solar and wind while you're at it.
Don't forget that even bars and taverns would often pay somebody to play music because there was no mechanical way to reproduce music. Then you had playhouses that would cater to the less wealthy with plays, acts, and shows.
I agree that copyright periods are ridiculously long, but that doesn't mean the underlying concept is wrong.
My thoughts as well. Personally, I'd go for a 20 year automatic/commercial/'for hire' copyright, 40 year for personal copyrights.
I mean, people are still bickering about the beetle albums!
I have no less than 3 stations that will be doing the flashcut; one already did it, the other two are going to wait to the last minute.
I hadn't seen anything on the FCC going after the low power stations as well. I just knew they were exempted from the feb 17 deadline. Not getting any, I felt no need to go searching.
There was NEVER any intent to keep analog operational, and if you believe these was, please provide a FCC-linked citation. (You won't find one.)
If you want to get really technical, low power stations can still transmit in analog even past the transition period, but yeah, this is a change that they've known about for nearly a decade.
If I'd had my way, I'd have taken a quick peek at the average lifespan of TVs and ordered that new TVs be sold with the digital tuner long before the ~3 years we actually got. 6-9 years would probably have reduced the need for the converter boxes by 75% or more.