5 square cm makes sense, but your mention of a drawer 5 cm high seems a bit large for a sample. I'm picturing something more along the lines of 5mm high. I'm thinking glass slide.
Each sample would then be 2.5 cubic CM. If each cabinet is 2 meters high, 1 meter deep and wide, 50% usable, you'd only need 300 cabinets to store samples for the whole US population.
I've heard that sort of stuff as well. Asian peoples tend far more towards communal living('What's best for the community'), vs Western European types - who favor the individual far more.
I'd imagine that most people would rather be restricted yet fed rather than free but hungry.
Call it what you will, but in western/european society it's often the opposite. Probably has to do with a cultural heritage where being restricted also tended towards being hungry.
IE the local conditions were such that, on average you were more likely to be restricted and hungrey or free and fed. So it seems a false premise to us.
Certain criminals will. Others will be deterred. The harder you make it, the harder potential criminals will have to work to pass under the radar. Hard work generally equates to more time (in which to be suspected), more overt acts, and/or more people to conspire with (i.e. more weak links in the chain).
Looking at places like the UK, which has been doing this for quite some time, not to mention having one of the most comprehensive surveillance networks, etc...
The petty criminals don't care. They vanish into the noise. When you have thousands and thousands of criminals, a low res camera picture of a thug in a hoodie isn't enough to do more than get a few matches - it would still take traditional police work to find him.
Take the DNA example. Sure, you know it belongs to Joe Crook, but you don't know which temporary girlfriend he's living with this week, and his crime isn't enough for the police to spend the resources to track him down. So he stays free.
Even with the inevitable catches, normally more because of stupidity on the part of the criminal rather than brilliance on the part of the police, it's often along the lines of a 'catch and release' system.
This proposal reminds me of the murder investigation in Gattaca. They come in, vacuum the whole place and find the hair of somebody who doesn't 'belong'. Their search for and fixation on him delays the catching of the real murderer - who worked there and had left, as a matter of course, fragments of himself all over.
DNA is all fine and dandy, but it isn't magic and doesn't replace good investigation methods. It's just one tool in the box.
Heck, get the database too large and you might actually undermine the system as comparisons take longer to spit back matches, where false positives become so common that people start discounting them. Heck, we see it already in the ballistics databases set up by a couple states - so many firearms are never used in crime, yet so many ended up in the database that false positives rendered the database useless.
If you read his comment a little more closely, he said nothing about them refusing income or anything, he mentioned them LEAVING THE COUNTRY. IE packing their bags, renouncing their citizenship and moving to someplace willing to take a lesser tax bite.
Arguably the rich are the ones most capable of doing something like this. It's even like a corporation, it can 'incorporate' in some location with favorable laws in place while leaving operations where they are. A legal fiction, if you will.
In times and areas of high taxes, historically the rich have simply shifted efforts from making money(ultimately good for the economy) to hiding/sheltering it(not so good for the economy).
Let the rich keep their money. What we really need is government that practices fiscal discipline.
You tend to see stuff when your mom works for a business that handles subsidized housing.
Much of the difference between a poor person and a middle class person isn't necessarily their income. It's how they handle it.
Me, I'm shooting for early retirement, I'm socking relatively massive amounts of funds into investments. Meanwhile Joe Poor Guy is visiting the rent-to-own place for a 50" HDTV, is paying double the sticker price over one at walmart, not to mention effective interest over even that when he goes with the weekly or monthly payments. He got a newer used car from one of those 'no credit check' places. All this while I'm driving an older car and use an older TV.
He's living better now because he's not keeping any safety margin, while I am. I'll eventually come out on top, but the system isn't designed to train people to live within their means, nor does it encourage it in many ways. Worst case, he declares bankruptcy and can't get any credit cards for a while. Me, I get to pay more taxes.
Remember that 'working poor' is defined as people who don't qualify for social assistance like welfare or food assistance because they make 'too much' money.
Personally, I'd define 'working poor' as somebody who's still on assistance despite still working. They're the people I actually have some sympathy for.
Having seen people on assistance, they're often not that bad off. I sigh when I see them driving a newer car than mine and watch a bigger, newer TV.
These figures are 'capable of' determinations. You can still be rich and bleeding money out like a firehose if you have no fiscal discipline(like most big lottery winners). You might still be saving money and be poor through extraordinary measures.
Somebody who's 'Rich' in the midwest may be poor in NYC.
Just because you can barely afford the payments for your Ferrari and 500k square foot house, not to mention the monthly trips down to the caribbean for hookers and blow doesn't mean that you aren't rich.
There was a similar discussion on another board I frequent. Part of the difficulty in defining 'Rich' is that many try to use income to define it, but in reality it's more a statement of wealth. For example, a sole proprietor of a business could have a gross annual income in the millions, yet not be 'rich' because 99% of that is immedietly spent as business expenses.
Still, one guy made a general rule of thumb that I liked:
Poor - Income at or below basic expenses; IE unable to save Middle Class - Has the ability to save money/live better. Rich - Independent of work; capable of living indefinitly off of assets.
The fact that India and Pakistan are enemies and both have nukes should be some cause for concern.
Concern, yes, but it shouldn't be overwhelming fear. After all, they don't have a dozen nukes between the two of them.
Go back 40 years and you're looking at the USA and USSR as enemies and thousands of nukes.
Hopefully the same thing will occur - both sides now know that the other can destroy them, but they can destroy in return. Mutually Assured Destruction.
Thus, the diplomats become much more important than armies. Peace, of a sort, ensues.
When a wild animal in the middle of nowhere dies of cancer, who's going to know?
How many wild animals are going to survive long enough to even get cancer? I mean, most wild animals have a life expectancy of rather less than a decade. Exceptions are fairly rare.
In addition, merely getting sick can be enough to weaken an animal sufficiently so that it either gets caught by a predator, or if it's a predator that it starves to death.
These species display no visible deformations, and continue to breed and live undisturbed by humans.
Well, to be fair, I'll mention that one study involving birds found that the chicks of birds nesting in the sarcophagus had double the expected deformity rate over birds nesting outside of Chernobyl.
Given that a number of the bird species are the ones where the chicks gradually push out the others such that only one survives out of a laying of 2-6 eggs, the effect of the extra deformities was essentially noise, statistically insignificant to the species.
and the increased cancer risk that comes with eating it is minor, and irrelevant.
This. One of the fun things back in HS was to take the radiation detector to various common items. Heck, Brazil Nuts, Lima Beans, and Bananas are radioactive. So aren't carrots and potatoes. Potassium, an essential nutrient is radioactive.
An extra dose of radiation doesn't mean that somebody is going to die from cancer. It all depends on the dose.
rather than lengthening the life expectancy of a few unlucky individuals by a matter of days on average.
Unless the individual is making said radioactive coconuts a staple of their diet; I'd say minutes is more likely.
statute of limitations.;) I try not to point out people's grammer errors because I seem unable to not make them without reviewing an hour or so later. So with forums like this I generally don't worry about it.
Because the statutes of limitation for wrongful death are state-based, not federally-mandated. Anybody know what state the manufacturer is in?
The UK. So US state/federal mandates don't apply. Though if it HAD been an american company it likely would of ended up in federal court because of likely interstate commerce clauses and the fact that the ship sank in international waters.
Still, what I was talking about is the overwhelming probability that everybody involved is already dead, and it's generally useless to try the corpse of some guy who died 40 years ago of old age. Remember, the Titanic sank before WWII, and we don't have many WWII vets left.
Sorry, I missed that you were talking about a different tech. I'll take your price quote under advisement, with the caveat that, generally* speaking, it takes 3 watts of solar capacity to equal 1 watt of nuclear capacity over the course of a year.
Another problem is that, especially when you're looking at micro-installs(like for an individual house), the support equipment and install costs are frequently equal to the cost of the panels you're talking about.
*Very generally, as different nuclear plants can have different capacity factors, and different solar sytems the same.
I'm sure we could get 92 * 92 miles if we just put NanoSolar on every roof top.
You can't. As you note, it relies on steam technology, and that stuff just doesn't scale down well. Standard solar panels scale down more or less well, but they're so much more expensive that heat plants are more efficient, despite having fairly substantial ongoing O&M costs.
FTA: Smith says that costs could continue to balloon, even as lower cost options like energy efficiency get passed by, and that politicians need to reassess their support before customers start paying for it.
Heh. Higher electricity prices = people looking to conserve electricity by themselves.
Oh, here a good part of the sticker: Progress Energy's new estimate also includes a $2-billion to $3-billion transmission project, as well as the cost of land, financing, labor, fees and fuel. Early estimates didn't include those costs, the utility said.
Cost of land shouldn't be that big of a deal, but a $2-3B transmission project(IE power lines and such) isn't something I was figuring on. Oh well, it'd be a part of any major plant, and might even be worse for solar thermal power if you have to park the system further away to get the sun. Financing I have figured into the KW/h cost, not the raw cost of the plant, labor, fees, and fuel are O&M in my estimate.
Let's see. 17B - 3B = 14B for the plant. 8B@200M/year O&M for 40 years. 6B. Fudging around with my calculator says 3B construction cost seems about right(about half is interest). Or about 1.36B per gigawatt. Reasonable. Most of my estimates haven't figured on the recent rising costs of materials, inflation. And I'll admit to using the 'additional' reactor pricing - the first is the most expensive. Estimates for those were $1.4k per kilowatt of capacity, dropping to $1k per kw for additional requirements.
Who said anything about solar panels? The article is about solar thermal power, which is a completely different technology.
Not even making aluminum is absolutely clean. As it's a heat plant, it's probably got about 60% of it's infrastructure in common with a nuclear plant anyways.
For loads as high as sending power from, say, Nevada/Texas to NYC, it'd probably be economical to go with superconductor lines. You'd still have energy loss in the form of the machinery necessary to make the liquid nitrogen, but you'd be shipping enough power to make it worth it.
And yeah, it might actually improve conditions in the desert, depending on your definition of 'improve'. Minimal moisture, high heat species might be displaced by low moisture lower heat species.
Yeah, reprocessing would solve a lot of our 'problems' with nuclear waste.
I think that that's an excellent way to help make almost any heat based electricity plant more efficient - desalination is only one option.
You could also use the heat for hydrogen/ethanol/other fuel creation option, for example. Design the system so it's throttleable at will, you run the plant at essentially 100%, and simply switch to making an alternate product when demand is low.
Sure, it's predictable. You might only be able to get so many KWh out of it at a given water level, but you can turn it up and down almost at will. Thus, within the limits of ecology, it actually makes an excellent load balancing system - run at full power when power is needed, drop it down to a trickle and let the coal/nuclear plants take the load when it's not needed.
Solar shouldn't be too bad, but most current systems can vary quite widely simply with passing clouds.
One interesting wind idea I saw, rather than having the generators in the tower, instead had air compressors that eventually powered a turbine on the ground. The benefit being that the turbine has a buffer of compressed air to run through before it'll stop generating power during a lull. Allowing them to keep alternate power at a lower readyness level, saving much more money.
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
Like manufacturing solar panels is a totally clean affair.
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
We have such a low nuclear power casualty rate in the USA that the steam plant section can be considered more dangerous. Guess what this solar plant uses?
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
As Senator Kennedy demonstrated with the proposed wind farm in his area, this can affect renewable power as well. At least a nuclear plant is relatively small.
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
As compared to what? Looking world wide, I think that terrorists have attacked nuclear plants approximately 0 times. On the other hand, there are dozens of attacks on planes, hundreds against places like malls, restraunts, and schools.
That's like saying that.50BMG rifles are going to be the next big terrorist thing, thus need to be banned, despite no evidence to support it.
You can't be right, because the police are not in the business of helping robbers, yet they sell stolen goods. I got my first bike from a police auction btw.
There's a difference between the police releasing resources back into the public when they can't find the proper owners and helping to encourage thieves by providing them a market for their goods.
Of course, it begs the question: How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?
When they say '6 to 8 cents per KWh', it generally covers construction, O&M costs. Resources generally abstract out to dollar costs.
Basically, they generally assume you get a loan with a payoff duration of the expected lifespan of the plant. Say 20 years. They figure O&M will cost so much per year, and so many KWh will be produced. Simple division gives you O&M cost per KWh. Then you figure in the annual loan payments*. Divide and you get an expected infrastructure cost for the plant per KWh. Add the two. 6-8 cents per KWh isn't actually that bad. It'd be economical in California, for example, if not quite there for North Dakota(besides the whole 'less sun' thing).
Let's do a bit of comparison with what I think we need more of, nuclear plants. $1 Billion, 1 Gigawatt plant. 90% load factor. Let's say 4% interest, plant life 40 years. The interest and capital will be $50 million per year. (4.18M per month) Random webpage says $50M for Operations NEI says 1.26 cents per KWh, including fees for eventual disposal and decommisioning.
We can expect our plant to produce about 8B KWh a year. This translates to $100 million O&M per the NEI. I'll use this one.
This all translates to nuclear being around 1.9 cents per KWh. In comparison, I wouldn't say that this would be economical. Even if you knock the nuclear plant down to 20 years, it only increases the cost pre KWh to 3 cents.
*I often use a mortgage calculator that you can punch in duration, interest rate, and amount and it gives you monthly payments. It's intended for houses, but works equally well for cars and billion dollar nuclear plants.;)
The only difference is whether the apparel was passed through proper distribution channels or swiped from a table at quitting time.
So, if I can save 80% of my money buying a "counterfeit" motherboard, is my little indiscretion going to break the global economy? Why can't I save a bit on the mobo and splurge a bit on something else? The design and manufacturing knowledge to build them is out there, shouldn't anyone be able to replicate the boards? And if they come from the same assembly line, what differentiates a real one from a fake one? Isn't "proper distribution channels" an artificial construct to bilk customers?
Let me get this straight, you're advocating supporting theft by purchasing stolen goods. If you're talking about 'off the books' production runs - it's more than likely they're also using company materials to do it, thus they're stealing.
No, 'proper distribution channels' isn't an artificial construct to bilk you. It's to ensure that quality standards are met, as well as business expenses and profit*.
On the design end, I'll point out that R&D is a significant expense, and the company deserves to make back that money. In many cases, they also try to make a name for quality. Counterfeiters that imitate that name are trading off that quality, normally without meeting it, thus harming the company's reputation(which does matter).
If the counterfeiters went into legitimate business and didn't steal/infringe I wouldn't have a problem with them offering a cheap product at great prices. I'd still probably go for a higher quality company, but that's because I believe that quality is usually worth the higher price.
Another hour or two on the surface would have just delayed the inevitable, but there was still nowhere else for the people to go.
Like anything, it might of made quite a bit of difference. Given a couple hours a dedicated crew might of been able to start fashioning crude lifeboats out of the very fixtures and boat superstructures. They might of been able to get some patches in(ala USS Cole) that delayed or even stopped the sinking.
Slashdot Mirror
5 square cm makes sense, but your mention of a drawer 5 cm high seems a bit large for a sample. I'm picturing something more along the lines of 5mm high. I'm thinking glass slide.
Each sample would then be 2.5 cubic CM. If each cabinet is 2 meters high, 1 meter deep and wide, 50% usable, you'd only need 300 cabinets to store samples for the whole US population.
I've heard that sort of stuff as well. Asian peoples tend far more towards communal living('What's best for the community'), vs Western European types - who favor the individual far more.
I'd imagine that most people would rather be restricted yet fed rather than free but hungry.
Call it what you will, but in western/european society it's often the opposite. Probably has to do with a cultural heritage where being restricted also tended towards being hungry.
IE the local conditions were such that, on average you were more likely to be restricted and hungrey or free and fed. So it seems a false premise to us.
Certain criminals will. Others will be deterred. The harder you make it, the harder potential criminals will have to work to pass under the radar. Hard work generally equates to more time (in which to be suspected), more overt acts, and/or more people to conspire with (i.e. more weak links in the chain).
Looking at places like the UK, which has been doing this for quite some time, not to mention having one of the most comprehensive surveillance networks, etc...
The petty criminals don't care. They vanish into the noise. When you have thousands and thousands of criminals, a low res camera picture of a thug in a hoodie isn't enough to do more than get a few matches - it would still take traditional police work to find him.
Take the DNA example. Sure, you know it belongs to Joe Crook, but you don't know which temporary girlfriend he's living with this week, and his crime isn't enough for the police to spend the resources to track him down. So he stays free.
Even with the inevitable catches, normally more because of stupidity on the part of the criminal rather than brilliance on the part of the police, it's often along the lines of a 'catch and release' system.
This proposal reminds me of the murder investigation in Gattaca. They come in, vacuum the whole place and find the hair of somebody who doesn't 'belong'. Their search for and fixation on him delays the catching of the real murderer - who worked there and had left, as a matter of course, fragments of himself all over.
DNA is all fine and dandy, but it isn't magic and doesn't replace good investigation methods. It's just one tool in the box.
Heck, get the database too large and you might actually undermine the system as comparisons take longer to spit back matches, where false positives become so common that people start discounting them. Heck, we see it already in the ballistics databases set up by a couple states - so many firearms are never used in crime, yet so many ended up in the database that false positives rendered the database useless.
If you read his comment a little more closely, he said nothing about them refusing income or anything, he mentioned them LEAVING THE COUNTRY. IE packing their bags, renouncing their citizenship and moving to someplace willing to take a lesser tax bite.
Arguably the rich are the ones most capable of doing something like this. It's even like a corporation, it can 'incorporate' in some location with favorable laws in place while leaving operations where they are. A legal fiction, if you will.
In times and areas of high taxes, historically the rich have simply shifted efforts from making money(ultimately good for the economy) to hiding/sheltering it(not so good for the economy).
Let the rich keep their money. What we really need is government that practices fiscal discipline.
Actually, yes, I have.
You tend to see stuff when your mom works for a business that handles subsidized housing.
Much of the difference between a poor person and a middle class person isn't necessarily their income. It's how they handle it.
Me, I'm shooting for early retirement, I'm socking relatively massive amounts of funds into investments. Meanwhile Joe Poor Guy is visiting the rent-to-own place for a 50" HDTV, is paying double the sticker price over one at walmart, not to mention effective interest over even that when he goes with the weekly or monthly payments. He got a newer used car from one of those 'no credit check' places. All this while I'm driving an older car and use an older TV.
He's living better now because he's not keeping any safety margin, while I am. I'll eventually come out on top, but the system isn't designed to train people to live within their means, nor does it encourage it in many ways. Worst case, he declares bankruptcy and can't get any credit cards for a while. Me, I get to pay more taxes.
Remember that 'working poor' is defined as people who don't qualify for social assistance like welfare or food assistance because they make 'too much' money.
Personally, I'd define 'working poor' as somebody who's still on assistance despite still working. They're the people I actually have some sympathy for.
Having seen people on assistance, they're often not that bad off. I sigh when I see them driving a newer car than mine and watch a bigger, newer TV.
These figures are 'capable of' determinations. You can still be rich and bleeding money out like a firehose if you have no fiscal discipline(like most big lottery winners). You might still be saving money and be poor through extraordinary measures.
Somebody who's 'Rich' in the midwest may be poor in NYC.
Just because you can barely afford the payments for your Ferrari and 500k square foot house, not to mention the monthly trips down to the caribbean for hookers and blow doesn't mean that you aren't rich.
There was a similar discussion on another board I frequent. Part of the difficulty in defining 'Rich' is that many try to use income to define it, but in reality it's more a statement of wealth. For example, a sole proprietor of a business could have a gross annual income in the millions, yet not be 'rich' because 99% of that is immedietly spent as business expenses.
Still, one guy made a general rule of thumb that I liked:
Poor - Income at or below basic expenses; IE unable to save
Middle Class - Has the ability to save money/live better.
Rich - Independent of work; capable of living indefinitly off of assets.
The fact that India and Pakistan are enemies and both have nukes should be some cause for concern.
Concern, yes, but it shouldn't be overwhelming fear. After all, they don't have a dozen nukes between the two of them.
Go back 40 years and you're looking at the USA and USSR as enemies and thousands of nukes.
Hopefully the same thing will occur - both sides now know that the other can destroy them, but they can destroy in return. Mutually Assured Destruction.
Thus, the diplomats become much more important than armies. Peace, of a sort, ensues.
When a wild animal in the middle of nowhere dies of cancer, who's going to know?
How many wild animals are going to survive long enough to even get cancer? I mean, most wild animals have a life expectancy of rather less than a decade. Exceptions are fairly rare.
In addition, merely getting sick can be enough to weaken an animal sufficiently so that it either gets caught by a predator, or if it's a predator that it starves to death.
These species display no visible deformations, and continue to breed and live undisturbed by humans.
Well, to be fair, I'll mention that one study involving birds found that the chicks of birds nesting in the sarcophagus had double the expected deformity rate over birds nesting outside of Chernobyl.
Given that a number of the bird species are the ones where the chicks gradually push out the others such that only one survives out of a laying of 2-6 eggs, the effect of the extra deformities was essentially noise, statistically insignificant to the species.
and the increased cancer risk that comes with eating it is minor, and irrelevant.
This. One of the fun things back in HS was to take the radiation detector to various common items. Heck, Brazil Nuts, Lima Beans, and Bananas are radioactive. So aren't carrots and potatoes. Potassium, an essential nutrient is radioactive.
An extra dose of radiation doesn't mean that somebody is going to die from cancer. It all depends on the dose.
rather than lengthening the life expectancy of a few unlucky individuals by a matter of days on average.
Unless the individual is making said radioactive coconuts a staple of their diet; I'd say minutes is more likely.
statute of limitations. ;) I try not to point out people's grammer errors because I seem unable to not make them without reviewing an hour or so later. So with forums like this I generally don't worry about it.
Because the statutes of limitation for wrongful death are state-based, not federally-mandated.
Anybody know what state the manufacturer is in?
The UK. So US state/federal mandates don't apply. Though if it HAD been an american company it likely would of ended up in federal court because of likely interstate commerce clauses and the fact that the ship sank in international waters.
Still, what I was talking about is the overwhelming probability that everybody involved is already dead, and it's generally useless to try the corpse of some guy who died 40 years ago of old age. Remember, the Titanic sank before WWII, and we don't have many WWII vets left.
Sorry, I missed that you were talking about a different tech. I'll take your price quote under advisement, with the caveat that, generally* speaking, it takes 3 watts of solar capacity to equal 1 watt of nuclear capacity over the course of a year.
Another problem is that, especially when you're looking at micro-installs(like for an individual house), the support equipment and install costs are frequently equal to the cost of the panels you're talking about.
*Very generally, as different nuclear plants can have different capacity factors, and different solar sytems the same.
I'm sure we could get 92 * 92 miles if we just put NanoSolar on every roof top.
You can't. As you note, it relies on steam technology, and that stuff just doesn't scale down well. Standard solar panels scale down more or less well, but they're so much more expensive that heat plants are more efficient, despite having fairly substantial ongoing O&M costs.
FTA: Smith says that costs could continue to balloon, even as lower cost options like energy efficiency get passed by, and that politicians need to reassess their support before customers start paying for it.
Heh. Higher electricity prices = people looking to conserve electricity by themselves.
Oh, here a good part of the sticker: Progress Energy's new estimate also includes a $2-billion to $3-billion transmission project, as well as the cost of land, financing, labor, fees and fuel. Early estimates didn't include those costs, the utility said.
Cost of land shouldn't be that big of a deal, but a $2-3B transmission project(IE power lines and such) isn't something I was figuring on. Oh well, it'd be a part of any major plant, and might even be worse for solar thermal power if you have to park the system further away to get the sun. Financing I have figured into the KW/h cost, not the raw cost of the plant, labor, fees, and fuel are O&M in my estimate.
Let's see. 17B - 3B = 14B for the plant. 8B@200M/year O&M for 40 years. 6B. Fudging around with my calculator says 3B construction cost seems about right(about half is interest). Or about 1.36B per gigawatt. Reasonable. Most of my estimates haven't figured on the recent rising costs of materials, inflation. And I'll admit to using the 'additional' reactor pricing - the first is the most expensive. Estimates for those were $1.4k per kilowatt of capacity, dropping to $1k per kw for additional requirements.
Who said anything about solar panels? The article is about solar thermal power, which is a completely different technology.
Not even making aluminum is absolutely clean. As it's a heat plant, it's probably got about 60% of it's infrastructure in common with a nuclear plant anyways.
You're off by a dimension. You'd actually need 92x92 plants, or 8,464 total.
About 5% per 1000 miles
For loads as high as sending power from, say, Nevada/Texas to NYC, it'd probably be economical to go with superconductor lines. You'd still have energy loss in the form of the machinery necessary to make the liquid nitrogen, but you'd be shipping enough power to make it worth it.
And yeah, it might actually improve conditions in the desert, depending on your definition of 'improve'. Minimal moisture, high heat species might be displaced by low moisture lower heat species.
Yeah, reprocessing would solve a lot of our 'problems' with nuclear waste.
Good point. Excellent idea.
I think that that's an excellent way to help make almost any heat based electricity plant more efficient - desalination is only one option.
You could also use the heat for hydrogen/ethanol/other fuel creation option, for example. Design the system so it's throttleable at will, you run the plant at essentially 100%, and simply switch to making an alternate product when demand is low.
He liked hydro though.
Sure, it's predictable. You might only be able to get so many KWh out of it at a given water level, but you can turn it up and down almost at will. Thus, within the limits of ecology, it actually makes an excellent load balancing system - run at full power when power is needed, drop it down to a trickle and let the coal/nuclear plants take the load when it's not needed.
Solar shouldn't be too bad, but most current systems can vary quite widely simply with passing clouds.
One interesting wind idea I saw, rather than having the generators in the tower, instead had air compressors that eventually powered a turbine on the ground. The benefit being that the turbine has a buffer of compressed air to run through before it'll stop generating power during a lull. Allowing them to keep alternate power at a lower readyness level, saving much more money.
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
.50BMG rifles are going to be the next big terrorist thing, thus need to be banned, despite no evidence to support it.
Like manufacturing solar panels is a totally clean affair.
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
We have such a low nuclear power casualty rate in the USA that the steam plant section can be considered more dangerous. Guess what this solar plant uses?
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
As Senator Kennedy demonstrated with the proposed wind farm in his area, this can affect renewable power as well. At least a nuclear plant is relatively small.
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
As compared to what? Looking world wide, I think that terrorists have attacked nuclear plants approximately 0 times. On the other hand, there are dozens of attacks on planes, hundreds against places like malls, restraunts, and schools.
That's like saying that
You can't be right, because the police are not in the business of helping robbers, yet they sell stolen goods. I got my first bike from a police auction btw.
There's a difference between the police releasing resources back into the public when they can't find the proper owners and helping to encourage thieves by providing them a market for their goods.
Of course, it begs the question: How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?
;)
When they say '6 to 8 cents per KWh', it generally covers construction, O&M costs. Resources generally abstract out to dollar costs.
Basically, they generally assume you get a loan with a payoff duration of the expected lifespan of the plant. Say 20 years. They figure O&M will cost so much per year, and so many KWh will be produced. Simple division gives you O&M cost per KWh. Then you figure in the annual loan payments*. Divide and you get an expected infrastructure cost for the plant per KWh. Add the two. 6-8 cents per KWh isn't actually that bad. It'd be economical in California, for example, if not quite there for North Dakota(besides the whole 'less sun' thing).
Let's do a bit of comparison with what I think we need more of, nuclear plants.
$1 Billion, 1 Gigawatt plant. 90% load factor. Let's say 4% interest, plant life 40 years.
The interest and capital will be $50 million per year. (4.18M per month)
Random webpage says $50M for Operations
NEI says 1.26 cents per KWh, including fees for eventual disposal and decommisioning.
We can expect our plant to produce about 8B KWh a year. This translates to $100 million O&M per the NEI. I'll use this one.
This all translates to nuclear being around 1.9 cents per KWh. In comparison, I wouldn't say that this would be economical. Even if you knock the nuclear plant down to 20 years, it only increases the cost pre KWh to 3 cents.
*I often use a mortgage calculator that you can punch in duration, interest rate, and amount and it gives you monthly payments. It's intended for houses, but works equally well for cars and billion dollar nuclear plants.
Let me get this straight, you're advocating supporting theft by purchasing stolen goods. If you're talking about 'off the books' production runs - it's more than likely they're also using company materials to do it, thus they're stealing.
No, 'proper distribution channels' isn't an artificial construct to bilk you. It's to ensure that quality standards are met, as well as business expenses and profit*.
On the design end, I'll point out that R&D is a significant expense, and the company deserves to make back that money. In many cases, they also try to make a name for quality. Counterfeiters that imitate that name are trading off that quality, normally without meeting it, thus harming the company's reputation(which does matter).
If the counterfeiters went into legitimate business and didn't steal/infringe I wouldn't have a problem with them offering a cheap product at great prices. I'd still probably go for a higher quality company, but that's because I believe that quality is usually worth the higher price.
*No, profit isn't evil.
Another hour or two on the surface would have just delayed the inevitable, but there was still nowhere else for the people to go.
Like anything, it might of made quite a bit of difference. Given a couple hours a dedicated crew might of been able to start fashioning crude lifeboats out of the very fixtures and boat superstructures. They might of been able to get some patches in(ala USS Cole) that delayed or even stopped the sinking.