Unless these thing are designed to take 300mph hits by large object and a large building falling on them I can't see how regulators can possibly allow them to be sold.
It's buried underground with the generator portions in the building above it. The thing's designed such that it won't meltdown or release materials even if you capped off or left open the steam lines. Or screwed with them in any number of ways for that matter.
How likely is a large building to fall on it, especially if it's being installed in a remote alaskan village where 'large' is defined as 'more than one story'?
The safety measure to prevent theft is that it's a completely sealed unit that's buried underground, welded to the bottom, that requires a huge crane to remove.
Good luck purchasing the enriched uranium needed to run your private building block reactor.
Toshiba manages that
Or operating the thing yourself.
No need, it's completely automated. The only thing you worry about is putting water in one end and running the steam through the turbine on the other.
It's an interesting technology, but the chances of having one of these for your apartment are not very good.
It'd be expensive overkill, yes. Now, a few for the local military base... I mean, they already have highly enriched uranium buried all over the place...
Might as well save a few million(and let the local coal plant off the hook a bit).
Wait a second...
Let's say that this is a large apartment complex. 200 apartments. Each apartment averages ~8 amps, 1kw each. At 10 cents per kwh, that's $73 each, average bill*. We buy/sell electricity to the grid to balance load just like most people with solar panels(net metering). Selling electricity at 10 cents a kw/h to our tenants is more than enough to cover the cost of the plant. Heck, we break even if we can sell it to the power company at 5 cents.
Still, this reactor system isn't going to be 100% efficient at turning heat into electricity. Since we have the heat source on site, we build a trigenerationplant instead of a straight electricity generator that also heats the water for use in the apartments, runs a building heat system of some sort, and utilizes an absorbtion cooler to provide AC.
This should allow me to sell electricity to my tenants and the grid to cover the cost of the reactor, and provide heating & cooling to by tenants for essentially the cost of the generation equipment. Heating and cooling can easily equal the electricity cost, so the potential profit is high. At the very least, the lower costs would allow me to offer a lower rent price to keep the apartments full while still offering perks such as 'heat, AC, and hot water included!'.
*Just assume that they're running around with inefficient electric appliances and use their electric stove a lot.
I thought your figure looked wrong because a full scale gigawatt nuclear reactor would be expected to cost around the same amount during that time, depending on figures ($1B-3B in construction, some for more for overhead).
I think you multiplied by 200,000 instead of 200. Remember it's.05 per kilowatt hour. This nuclear plant produces 200 kilowatts, so it cancels out.
It's about double the cost of a conventional nuclear plant, but as noted, it's extremely small scale, so you can potentially save transmission costs.
To potentially put the size of this thing more in scale, a good, but standard, electric water heater can use 6.7 kilowatts while operating. A standard incoming panel size is 200 amps@240V, equaling a maximum of 48 kilowatts of draw. So 5 houses would theoretically be able to bust this thing's breakers. Figure a more reasonable maximum draw of 12 kilowatts(50 amps), that's 17 homes.
Like most nuclear reactors, it's best for base load, in that capacity it should power ~100 energy efficient homes and businesses that remember to shut their lights and such off when they leave*. Say their electric bills are $1k each over the course of a year, that's 100k per year, or 4 million over the course of the life of this reactor. For peak demand, go back to more traditional sources like NG turbines or even diesel generators.
*And use something other than electricity for heat.
Oh, and this is old. I believe it was around 3 years ago that I first heard of this. They were talking about installing one in a remote village up in Alaska that gets all it's power from diesel because it'd be too expensive to connect it to the grid it's so far away.
Then the greenies* heard about it and killed it. The villagers were pretty much all for it.
*Can't really call them NIMBY, unless they count the entire planet their backyard in this case.
How much paper during that 5 months? It's not like a printer uses toner if it's not printing.
I think that the correct decision here would be to have users educated enough that stuff like this results in printers sitting on shelves because nobody buys them.
As I don't see this happening, it's possible that in some areas(such as Europe) they might pass something forbidding this kind of stuff as an anti-waste/pollution measure.
If the dead voted in Chicago, it wasn't because people were pretending to be other people, it was because the most powerful man in American politics was pulling the strings at the top.
Richard Joseph Daley's the most powerful man in American politics? Interesting.
The dead voting is normally more of a joke in New Orleans than Chicago, but both are noted for having high levels of voting fraud.
I'll note that this has persisted for decades at the least, lasting through multiple parties in control of US politics.
It's more a statement about the local corrupt politics machine in the local area than it is for national stuff, encouraged by monolithic voting districs and loose/non-existant voter identification requirements.
. I don't think the current situation is that bad.
Personally, I don't think about the current situation. I look into the past and see that public voting(people can find out how YOU voted) has indeed caused major problems in the past - people risked their jobs, homes, and lifestyles on the basis of their vote.
Not believing that human nature has fundimentally changed in the last 200 years, I don't believe in going back.
The problem with your receipt is that it can be stolen or demanded. Illegal as all heck, but illegal stuff happens all the time.
But the public can understand the process. You put you X on a piece of paper. The papers are sorted into columns after party and candidate and counted. Every step of the vote counting procedure is completely transparent to ordinary people. If someone cheats or if an error is made, it also happens in a way the public can understand.
At least in the USA, this would be an incredibly inefficient way to do the counting. We're fond of omnibus balloting.
I don't remember an election where I had less than a half a dozen political offices, three measures, and a couple judge confirmations to vote for.
A simple stack system like you propose just wouldn't work well. Counting the votes by system as you sift through the stack would work better.
This is part of why I don't mind electronic counting near as much as I do electronic voting.
People can understand that as well, it happens with standardized tests in school and elsewhere all the time. It can be more accurate than hand counting.
Best yet, designed right you can feed it through pretty much any random optical scanning system for a recount(heck, I've suggested using the school system's scanners before). Then audit via retotaling and spot recounting, by hand if considered necessary. I'd do it with a couple random* voting districts each election just for audit purposes.
Too many anomolies would trigger a 100% recount.
*Random as selected by dice or lottery, not by election officials looking to save themselves labor by counting only the smaller districts.
I'd tend to discount them slightly over the 'body builder' block...
At least in Hillary's case, it'd be suicide for her. A recent poll found that 40% of people would turn out to vote against her./Pictures a battle where the other candidate strangles with an empty line as 40% of the population go to the hillary line to pull the opposite way.
Your definition of 'moderately high usage' might not meet the printer manufacturer's idea of 'moderately high usage'. They have to at least somewhat plan for heavy usage.
They could be figuring that you're going to be printing a ream of paper through there each day, and you need three days to get replacement cartridges through the mail.
Would you consider reporting when it's down to ~100 color photos reasonable? 2000 B&W letters? The photos would probably still take more ink than the letters.
However, in my case the gas thing would admittably be much more complicated. I have 1 propane appliance right now, and that's the central furnace.
The only cutoff valve I've seen is out on the tank, and it's wintertime in ND. So I'd have to turn the whole system off, purge it, then cut in to add new T-connectors.
If you think that working with water plumbing is a hassle...
If I already had terminators(with valves!) it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
You're more familiar with gas, I'm more familiar with plumbing.
Especially with CPVC, plumbing is easy - get a pipe cutter, cut to appropriate lengths, then glue the pieces together using various fittings using purple primer and the orange stuff. No need for torch or solder.
If you think you'll be messing with a section a lot, there's compression fittings you can use so you can just screw and unscrew stuff.
Just remember to give the joins a half hour or so to cure before turning the water back on.
Unless you completed the job in under 2 hours, you lost money on the deal. It's an error to think your time is free just because you did it in the evening or the weekend.
Took about an hour starting from cutting the breaker before cutting the old water heater out to flipping the breaker back on.
And who says that I value my time at $50/hour?
Tools and most supplies were mostly already on hand, I picked up what extra was needed before starting(a couple CPVC valves and connectors, and the drain pan).
Having worked with soda machines a bit, I don't think that I've ever seen a propriatary connector. There are different connectors for different kinds of mixes, depending on the mixing equipment and the volume expected.
The biggest problem with switching between the two would be purging the lines of the old beverage.
In a purchasing condition of 'convienence store' level - IE you're willing to pay more to get the item *NOW*, which would you rather give money to? Overpriced Best Buy, or better priced Walmart?
Office supply store might or might not be a better option, but in my experience they were even worse than BB.
Saved at least $100 in installation costs; install was pretty much without hassle just by reading and following the instructions. An electric heater has three electrical connections(2 hots and a ground), two water connections, and a pressure relief connection. Not a big deal. I did go a bit overboard by adding a drain pan, and the old water heater didn't have the proper pressure relief connection so I had to add that.
But then, I'm fairly experienced at this point with working with CPVC pipe, and the 240V electrical connection isn't much different than a 120V one.
Of course, I have experience from both reworking electrical outlets and fixing stuff like faucets.
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't hire out if my car's engine needs work or such.
I would have hired out if my heater had been gas; there's a world of difference between flipping a breaker to kill all power to the heater, and having to worry about a possible propane leak. I'm much more familiar with electricity than gas.
Seeing as how the company is moving forward, and has actually sold a system after having a number of smaller test ships, the data isn't necessarily in your factor.
As the other poster stated - trade winds are such that they'll be very constant. Remember, the higher you go the more powerful and steady the wind is.
* it could take 5-10 years to perfect the kite design, by which time the material science will have changed enough to redefine the problem (see the ongoing windsurfer sail design (r)evolutions over the last 20+ years. it just doesn't slow down)
By the same token, couldn't this add years to the lifespan from the start, due to using newer materials and computer aided design and testing?
I mean, the newest planes were designed entirely on computers, to include all sorts of simulations.
As the poster noted, that happened early on in the program, whereas the shuttle accidents were more recent. In addition, the capsule has gone through four revisions since them.
In addition, since the capsules are disposable, it's somewhat like looking at the accident fatality rate for a '90 civic to figure out how safe a 2008 civic is.
With the shuttles, we're driving the same 30 year old vehicles.
It's a rare group that can hold out and make a low-technology lifestyle attractive enough to ensure their own preservation as a community (e.g. the Amish).
And the Amish mostly do that by making it an all or nothing affair; IE you're raised to believe that family is pretty much all important, all through their life.
But when you become an adult, you have to make a decision: Either follow the rules about technology and everything else, or be cut off completely from family and the community of your youth.
Even so, even with larger family sizes, the Amish remains small enough to be an oddity.
FTA: Under favorable wind conditions, the 160-square meter kite shaped like a paraglider is expected to reduce fuel costs by up to 20 percent or more ($1,600 per day) and cut, by a similarly significant amount, its carbon dioxide emissions.
I'd read that as saving $1.6k per day(under favorable conditions).
Time for research: Daily fuel cost: 7,900 AUD ~ $6.8k. 20% of that is 1.36K. But then, it assumes heavy fuel oil at $130/ton, current prices look closer to $200. Then again, the dollar's value has dropped, so it'd skew stuff the other way.
Anyways, $1600 looks to be in the right range to be the savings. And only heading up, from what I've seen of HFO price trends on that site.
Slashdot Mirror
It's real. Look at the '4S'. Of course, that's talking about a 10Mw unit, but it mentions 'larger and smaller units exist'.
It's been mentioned before as 'christmas tree sized'.
Unless these thing are designed to take 300mph hits by large object and a large building falling on them I can't see how regulators can possibly allow them to be sold.
It's buried underground with the generator portions in the building above it. The thing's designed such that it won't meltdown or release materials even if you capped off or left open the steam lines. Or screwed with them in any number of ways for that matter.
How likely is a large building to fall on it, especially if it's being installed in a remote alaskan village where 'large' is defined as 'more than one story'?
The safety measure to prevent theft is that it's a completely sealed unit that's buried underground, welded to the bottom, that requires a huge crane to remove.
Good luck purchasing the enriched uranium needed to run your private building block reactor.
Toshiba manages that
Or operating the thing yourself.
No need, it's completely automated. The only thing you worry about is putting water in one end and running the steam through the turbine on the other.
It's an interesting technology, but the chances of having one of these for your apartment are not very good.
It'd be expensive overkill, yes. Now, a few for the local military base... I mean, they already have highly enriched uranium buried all over the place...
Might as well save a few million(and let the local coal plant off the hook a bit).
Wait a second...
Let's say that this is a large apartment complex. 200 apartments. Each apartment averages ~8 amps, 1kw each. At 10 cents per kwh, that's $73 each, average bill*. We buy/sell electricity to the grid to balance load just like most people with solar panels(net metering). Selling electricity at 10 cents a kw/h to our tenants is more than enough to cover the cost of the plant. Heck, we break even if we can sell it to the power company at 5 cents.
Still, this reactor system isn't going to be 100% efficient at turning heat into electricity. Since we have the heat source on site, we build a trigeneration plant instead of a straight electricity generator that also heats the water for use in the apartments, runs a building heat system of some sort, and utilizes an absorbtion cooler to provide AC.
This should allow me to sell electricity to my tenants and the grid to cover the cost of the reactor, and provide heating & cooling to by tenants for essentially the cost of the generation equipment. Heating and cooling can easily equal the electricity cost, so the potential profit is high. At the very least, the lower costs would allow me to offer a lower rent price to keep the apartments full while still offering perks such as 'heat, AC, and hot water included!'.
*Just assume that they're running around with inefficient electric appliances and use their electric stove a lot.
Huh, I only come up with 3.5 million.
.05 per kilowatt hour. This nuclear plant produces 200 kilowatts, so it cancels out.
I thought your figure looked wrong because a full scale gigawatt nuclear reactor would be expected to cost around the same amount during that time, depending on figures ($1B-3B in construction, some for more for overhead).
I think you multiplied by 200,000 instead of 200. Remember it's
It's about double the cost of a conventional nuclear plant, but as noted, it's extremely small scale, so you can potentially save transmission costs.
To potentially put the size of this thing more in scale, a good, but standard, electric water heater can use 6.7 kilowatts while operating. A standard incoming panel size is 200 amps@240V, equaling a maximum of 48 kilowatts of draw. So 5 houses would theoretically be able to bust this thing's breakers. Figure a more reasonable maximum draw of 12 kilowatts(50 amps), that's 17 homes.
Like most nuclear reactors, it's best for base load, in that capacity it should power ~100 energy efficient homes and businesses that remember to shut their lights and such off when they leave*. Say their electric bills are $1k each over the course of a year, that's 100k per year, or 4 million over the course of the life of this reactor. For peak demand, go back to more traditional sources like NG turbines or even diesel generators.
*And use something other than electricity for heat.
20 feet high, 6 feet in diameter.
Oh, and this is old. I believe it was around 3 years ago that I first heard of this. They were talking about installing one in a remote village up in Alaska that gets all it's power from diesel because it'd be too expensive to connect it to the grid it's so far away.
Then the greenies* heard about it and killed it. The villagers were pretty much all for it.
*Can't really call them NIMBY, unless they count the entire planet their backyard in this case.
GTA still sells, so an AO rating is actually likely to increase sales. Consider this: If you played DN3D when you were 12, you are now at least 24.
AO? No problem.
How much paper during that 5 months? It's not like a printer uses toner if it's not printing.
I think that the correct decision here would be to have users educated enough that stuff like this results in printers sitting on shelves because nobody buys them.
As I don't see this happening, it's possible that in some areas(such as Europe) they might pass something forbidding this kind of stuff as an anti-waste/pollution measure.
If the dead voted in Chicago, it wasn't because people were pretending to be other people, it was because the most powerful man in American politics was pulling the strings at the top.
Richard Joseph Daley's the most powerful man in American politics? Interesting.
The dead voting is normally more of a joke in New Orleans than Chicago, but both are noted for having high levels of voting fraud.
I'll note that this has persisted for decades at the least, lasting through multiple parties in control of US politics.
It's more a statement about the local corrupt politics machine in the local area than it is for national stuff, encouraged by monolithic voting districs and loose/non-existant voter identification requirements.
. I don't think the current situation is that bad.
Personally, I don't think about the current situation. I look into the past and see that public voting(people can find out how YOU voted) has indeed caused major problems in the past - people risked their jobs, homes, and lifestyles on the basis of their vote.
Not believing that human nature has fundimentally changed in the last 200 years, I don't believe in going back.
The problem with your receipt is that it can be stolen or demanded. Illegal as all heck, but illegal stuff happens all the time.
I have to agree that while mostly pointless, it does place a check on judges.
We've voted 2 or 3 out of office in NE for stuff that obtained at least local noteriety.
Stuff like the judge suing for millions with respect to a lost pair of pants...
But the public can understand the process. You put you X on a piece of paper. The papers are sorted into columns after party and candidate and counted. Every step of the vote counting procedure is completely transparent to ordinary people. If someone cheats or if an error is made, it also happens in a way the public can understand.
At least in the USA, this would be an incredibly inefficient way to do the counting. We're fond of omnibus balloting.
I don't remember an election where I had less than a half a dozen political offices, three measures, and a couple judge confirmations to vote for.
A simple stack system like you propose just wouldn't work well. Counting the votes by system as you sift through the stack would work better.
This is part of why I don't mind electronic counting near as much as I do electronic voting.
People can understand that as well, it happens with standardized tests in school and elsewhere all the time. It can be more accurate than hand counting.
Best yet, designed right you can feed it through pretty much any random optical scanning system for a recount(heck, I've suggested using the school system's scanners before). Then audit via retotaling and spot recounting, by hand if considered necessary. I'd do it with a couple random* voting districts each election just for audit purposes.
Too many anomolies would trigger a 100% recount.
*Random as selected by dice or lottery, not by election officials looking to save themselves labor by counting only the smaller districts.
I'd tend to discount them slightly over the 'body builder' block...
/Pictures a battle where the other candidate strangles with an empty line as 40% of the population go to the hillary line to pull the opposite way.
At least in Hillary's case, it'd be suicide for her. A recent poll found that 40% of people would turn out to vote against her.
Your definition of 'moderately high usage' might not meet the printer manufacturer's idea of 'moderately high usage'. They have to at least somewhat plan for heavy usage.
They could be figuring that you're going to be printing a ream of paper through there each day, and you need three days to get replacement cartridges through the mail.
Would you consider reporting when it's down to ~100 color photos reasonable? 2000 B&W letters? The photos would probably still take more ink than the letters.
the old stuff was cloth covered!.
;)
I still have some in my house!
However, in my case the gas thing would admittably be much more complicated. I have 1 propane appliance right now, and that's the central furnace.
The only cutoff valve I've seen is out on the tank, and it's wintertime in ND. So I'd have to turn the whole system off, purge it, then cut in to add new T-connectors.
If you think that working with water plumbing is a hassle...
If I already had terminators(with valves!) it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
You're more familiar with gas, I'm more familiar with plumbing.
Especially with CPVC, plumbing is easy - get a pipe cutter, cut to appropriate lengths, then glue the pieces together using various fittings using purple primer and the orange stuff. No need for torch or solder.
If you think you'll be messing with a section a lot, there's compression fittings you can use so you can just screw and unscrew stuff.
Just remember to give the joins a half hour or so to cure before turning the water back on.
Unless you completed the job in under 2 hours, you lost money on the deal. It's an error to think your time is free just because you did it in the evening or the weekend.
Took about an hour starting from cutting the breaker before cutting the old water heater out to flipping the breaker back on.
And who says that I value my time at $50/hour?
Tools and most supplies were mostly already on hand, I picked up what extra was needed before starting(a couple CPVC valves and connectors, and the drain pan).
Having worked with soda machines a bit, I don't think that I've ever seen a propriatary connector. There are different connectors for different kinds of mixes, depending on the mixing equipment and the volume expected.
The biggest problem with switching between the two would be purging the lines of the old beverage.
In a purchasing condition of 'convienence store' level - IE you're willing to pay more to get the item *NOW*, which would you rather give money to? Overpriced Best Buy, or better priced Walmart?
Office supply store might or might not be a better option, but in my experience they were even worse than BB.
disclaimer: I just installed my own water heater.
Saved at least $100 in installation costs; install was pretty much without hassle just by reading and following the instructions. An electric heater has three electrical connections(2 hots and a ground), two water connections, and a pressure relief connection. Not a big deal. I did go a bit overboard by adding a drain pan, and the old water heater didn't have the proper pressure relief connection so I had to add that.
But then, I'm fairly experienced at this point with working with CPVC pipe, and the 240V electrical connection isn't much different than a 120V one.
Of course, I have experience from both reworking electrical outlets and fixing stuff like faucets.
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't hire out if my car's engine needs work or such.
I would have hired out if my heater had been gas; there's a world of difference between flipping a breaker to kill all power to the heater, and having to worry about a possible propane leak. I'm much more familiar with electricity than gas.
Seeing as how the company is moving forward, and has actually sold a system after having a number of smaller test ships, the data isn't necessarily in your factor.
As the other poster stated - trade winds are such that they'll be very constant. Remember, the higher you go the more powerful and steady the wind is.
* it could take 5-10 years to perfect the kite design, by which time the material science will have changed enough to redefine the problem (see the ongoing windsurfer sail design (r)evolutions over the last 20+ years. it just doesn't slow down)
By the same token, couldn't this add years to the lifespan from the start, due to using newer materials and computer aided design and testing?
I mean, the newest planes were designed entirely on computers, to include all sorts of simulations.
As the poster noted, that happened early on in the program, whereas the shuttle accidents were more recent. In addition, the capsule has gone through four revisions since them.
In addition, since the capsules are disposable, it's somewhat like looking at the accident fatality rate for a '90 civic to figure out how safe a 2008 civic is.
With the shuttles, we're driving the same 30 year old vehicles.
That's odd, elsewhere I figured it'd be useful only 100 days out of a year(less than a third) and got $160k savings in a year.
Any particular reason you divided by 6 rather than 2 or 3 for your figure?
It's a rare group that can hold out and make a low-technology lifestyle attractive enough to ensure their own preservation as a community (e.g. the Amish).
And the Amish mostly do that by making it an all or nothing affair; IE you're raised to believe that family is pretty much all important, all through their life.
But when you become an adult, you have to make a decision: Either follow the rules about technology and everything else, or be cut off completely from family and the community of your youth.
Even so, even with larger family sizes, the Amish remains small enough to be an oddity.
Getting it up higher might help with the ocean air part a bit. Maybe they have some modern materials that can take the sun better.
Still, $1.6k saved a day could pay for quite a bit of maintenance.
How long to sails normally last under heavy usage?
FTA: Under favorable wind conditions, the 160-square meter kite shaped like a paraglider is expected to reduce fuel costs by up to 20 percent or more ($1,600 per day) and cut, by a similarly significant amount, its carbon dioxide emissions.
I'd read that as saving $1.6k per day(under favorable conditions).
Time for research:
Daily fuel cost: 7,900 AUD ~ $6.8k. 20% of that is 1.36K. But then, it assumes heavy fuel oil at $130/ton, current prices look closer to $200. Then again, the dollar's value has dropped, so it'd skew stuff the other way.
Anyways, $1600 looks to be in the right range to be the savings. And only heading up, from what I've seen of HFO price trends on that site.