I don't know what that says of our society but kids watching Sesame Street was just part of the culture and are we now going to be afraid of who we are?
I've always been firmly of the belief that kids are far stronger and more resilient than we make them out to be today. Yes, there are a few out there that may crack from this or that, but editing out dragons because it might be considered an endorsement of smoking or labeling early seasons of Sesame Street as 'adult' is insane in my opinion.
No, kids are not miniature adults, but they are far more capable of learning the difference between truth and fiction than we give them credit for. In addition, any one experience is generally going to have only very minor long term effects.
I think the usual caveat comes in here: The TV is NOT A BABYSITTER. Parents should be involved in what their kids do and watch.
The things we used to do as kids would likely get us arrested these days (12 year olds playing with homemade fireworks, carrying shotguns down the street and out to the field to go hunting, swinging from ropes into swimming holes infested with all manner of dangerous wildlife and more).
You had responsibility, and knew what would happen if you broke the rules. You almost certainly made mistakes, but you knew there would be consequences and punishments for disobedience. Your parents most likely made sure you knew how to handle the shotgun safely before they trusted you with it - much less alone or with a group of friends.
We treat 21 year olds like we used to treat 18 year olds, and we treat 18 year olds like 14 year olds. It's actually a disservice to our youth. We learn by making mistakes and suffering the consequences - it's best to teach this stuff early, before the school of hard knocks comes calling(IE the consequences are lasting and nasty, potentially fatal).
But what effects one energy sector effects others as well. I don't understand it but someone else shared a link explaining, now I can't find it.
I think that the term you'd be looking for would be 'displacement'. I'd be a prime example. My house needs to be heated. I'm outside of NG range, so my main choices are electric or propane. Right now propane is substantially cheaper than electric - but with the right setup(like a geothermal heat pump), electric would be cheaper. It'd just take a large capital investment - which isn't worth it at this time. Propane is a product of oil refining, so raise the price of oil, and therefore propane, enough and I'd switch over to electric. This adds up to fractional changes for any change in the balance. If it gets bad enough - you see more people driving electric cars because they're cheaper.
On to your list of links... I found #4 interesting, because it considers not charging for CO2 emissions a subsidy. Then it's analysis for plant insurance coverage seems disingenuous. "A single firm's coverage of its own operations exceeds the entire pool of coverage within the US for offsite liability in the case of an accident." - Considering that the floor for the feds to step in under price-anderson is 10 BILLION, I find that a bit strange. I also find how they place that cost in the billions given how the feds haven't had to pay out under it yet.
Yes, our energy systems could stand a lot less subsidization - except for possibly conservation efforts - and I hate to say it, but I think that they need to stop concentrating on reducing energy usage for a while and concentrate on appliance longevity. Chopping 10% off the electricity usage of an appliance makes sense when it lasts 20 years, but the average today is often less than 10, and for some is as low as 5, on average. There's a lot of resources involved in making and transporting a refrigerator, for example, rather than mandating it use $10 less in electricity a year, making it last twice as long(from 5 to 10 years) would save more. You use $100 extra in electricity - but you don't have to go buy another refrigerator for $500-$1000 at the five year point.
The US is spending billions of dollars daily in Iraq subsidizing oil.
Yeah right. You'd have better luck arguing about Iraq being to enrich Bush's contractor buddies. We could have done Iraq very much differently and gotten the oil cheaper, safer, and more reliably if it had truly been about the oil.
This is also a false attack in the part that oil is a trivial source of electricity in the USA - Coal is #1, followed by Natural Gas, Nuclear, and hydroelectric. Petrochemical production is 1.6% - Mostly from standby generators.
Fact is is big companies receive billions of dollars in subsidies yet people make a big thing about individual taxpayers getting less than $100,000 in subsidies.
Name an electricity provider that gets 'billions' in subsidies other than solar/wind. Heck, show some subsidies that aren't dwarfed by the taxes the companies pay. At least the Mineral Leasing Act was intended to spur economic growth.
As for the less than $100k to individuals, think about it this way: There are 300 million citizens in the USA. If we give this subsidy to 1% of them, that's $105 Billion in subsidies for it. For that price we could have 100 brand new gigawatt reactors, that would produce 788 billion kWh a year, about 20% of our electric needs.
To put that into perspective, even if we figure that the solar subsidy gets 4% of the population off the grid, that's still a fifth of those getting power from the nuclear system, even before we figure in that the solar panels only power homes, whereas the nuclear plant 20% figure is for all consumers - including businesses and factories, aluminum smelters, etc...
Now think for a moment of how much pollution we could prevent if, in turn, we turned off a similar amount of capacity of the dirtiest power plants still in use.
Thought I responded to this earlier, but the response never showed up...
And while today he may be loosing $400 per year, energy prices are only going up.
Then you invest in the system when energy prices are high enough to justify it - Electricity is more stable than oil, excepting California. The price of solar systems are dropping. So it makes more sense to invest in the solar system in the future.
For example, he takes the $15k, invests it into stocks and such. He'll make, on average, $1.5k a year, which can be used to pay for his electricity and then some. In a decade, when the cost of electricity has climbed to the point that it isn't true, and the cost for a solar system has dropped to $10k, then invest in it.
My real problem is with the fact that in order to make it economical for an individual, the government had to subsidize 70% of the costs, then keep paying him!
Now, I can understand schemes that do things like 'energy saving features(including solar energy panels) don't get added to the 'worth' of a house for the purposes of taxes'. But we're not talking paying for 70% of the system!
Yea, the lack of details here makes it hard to make a decision on whether it's good or not. For instance a Sun Frost refrigerator will beat many other refrigerators that are Energy Star rated in energy efficiency.
The only problem I have with them is that they're too expensive. I can get an 18.4CF refrigerator from sears for $388(or $499, if you don't buy it 'on sale'). Energy Star says it'll use 479kWh a year. More expensive conventional refrigerators offer more features like water dispensing, not normally better efficiency. The RF19, the largest unit Sun Frost makes, uses only 281 kWh a year, but also only has 16.14 cubic feet of internal space, and costs $3K.
It'll save 198 kWh/year, but capital cost wise is down ~$200. It's better quality, but doesn't have quite as much storage space... This is marking up the cheap unit up to $1k, IE you're replacing/repairing it more frequently. At 10 cents/ kWh, that's only saving you $19.80 a year in electricity. If you're paying a dollar a kWh, then it starts making sense.
Besides all this, if he bought a sun frost, was the price difference included in the $50k? That's hiding expenses and overstating the energy savings right there.
A Nuclear Loan Provision which would guaranty loans was slipped into a farm bill, what does nuclear power have to do with farming? I'm all for ending subsidies for solar but I want all subsidies eliminated, including those for big businesses.
Sure, let's stop all of them. I just want to point out that a loan guarantee isn't anywhere as expensive as what the solar/wind industries are getting. As for the farm bill thing, all I can do is shrug, because I hate it as well, but it happens all the time.
Admittedly I live alone, but even living with others my electric bill wouldn't be much higher than it is now, and it's below $30.
I'm alone as well, but while I don't have AC, I do run one computer all the time, but the big killers would be that all my appliances except central heat are electric. All my water is electrically heated(and I like HOT showers). My stove is electric, etc...
I've looked at getting a new propane water heater, but I'd need to modify the gas lines in my house, and I'm somewhat scared about that. Need to contact my propane company sometime to see if they can help.
And yes, AC is *far* superior over long distance than DC.
Actually it isn't. DC is superior, for one thing it doesn't have losses from capacitance. Not a big deal on shorter runs(and I'm talking in terms of tens to hundreds of miles), but on long runs - it matters.
Where AC gains is in voltage transformation - you can much more efficiently convert 60KV down to 600V in AC than DC.
For shorter runs, the loss in conversion efficiency is greater than the gain in transmission efficiency, so it's better to leave it as AC.
As for why houses are run with AC - because back when electricity was gaining acceptance, most loads were resistive, so it didn't matter whether it was AC or DC - and AC transformers were more efficient. You could step voltage up higher to save metal on transmission lines and step it down to something not needing huge amounts of insulation or just waiting to kill people inside. Yes, 120/240VAC can kill people - but 600VAC is much deadlier, and you start having to worry about arcing above that. You don't even need to touch anything to get yourself killed.
This is actually fairly important. Old linear transformers were huge, because they operated at 50/60HZ. Modern transformers, even for AC, chop the waveforms into the kilohertz or even higher. It took development to make these efficient; they simply weren't as efficient in the past.
This allows higher efficiency than old linear power supplies, at the expense of EM radiation and higher complexity. Though the largest transformers can reach 99% efficiency.
I think that they started seeing wide use in the 90's. My memory is vague, but I remember wall warts being much larger for their capacity back in the 80s; they were linear transformers, not switchmode.
Of course, this all ends up being an exercise in optimization. The maths and costs are well known, I'm sure power companies have formulas they can plug expected wattage, distance, usage patterns and come up with the most cost effective solution for any given run.
Long distance high wattage lines are better off being DC - the extra losses from being AC outweighs the extra expenses of dealing with DC.
Of course, the same is true for short runs - there are a number of data centers that are DC, for example. Telephone systems have been -48VDC for years. I've seen lots of equipment that you simply plug the DC power into. You have to buy the transformer seperately if you want to run it on AC. I think the primary reason this was done is that 48 volts is rather easy to regulate, hard to kill yourself with, can be powered by a not-large battery pack for small stations or very large batteries in a central location for the big stations. Rack mount, much less individual, UPS systems are highly inefficient in comparison.
From Dan's comments, this is the situation, compounded by old regulations from back when data traffic was unusual and expensive. The telecom company is of course raking in huge profits from the situation; so has no interest in improving it.
I was merely responding to one poster's comment. Off topic, I know.
If Aussie internet sucks that bad (and by all accounts it does) then they should be petitioning their Government and/or telecom carriers to build more links to the rest of the World.
Actually, they seem to have pretty good links to the rest of the world, it's internally that they have issues. Like a pattern of bandwidth charging that discourages server placement in their own country/continent.
I mean, yes, the weakening dollar will encourage this sort of stuff, but generally speaking hosting in a country shouldn't be so expensive that going to the other side of the planet is cheaper and provides better reliability. And these problems predate the fall of the US dollar.
but it's hard to be perfect when there is such a big group of interests
The amount of corruption in the UN makes even the most corrupt areas of the USA look legit.
They're also ineffectual, there have been a number of times where the blue helmets have at least allowed genocidal slaughters to continue. For example, blocking the side being killed from arming themselves, but not engaging(or not being allowed to engage) the killers.
I wouldn't mind so much if it was just a place for diplomats and leaders of countries to come and talk to settle differences peacefully, but it tries to be a world government.
These points, and many other historical arguements, are irrelevant. The only issue here is that the United States currently has control, and is being presented with no good (or even clear) reason why it should give that control up.
I find a lot of parrallels between this and Europe's Galileo program(GPS Alternative).
I found figures that the program would cost 4 Billion - Whether you consider that an expensive duplication of effort or a cheap means of removal of European commercial and military dependence on a US military system is up to you.
4 Billion would be plenty of funding to set up a fairly large independent network; it'd even pay for new protocols and gateways so the system could still interface with the US.
But, at least so far, ICANN has remained neutral, so there's no real motivation for people or nations to get off their butts and spend some money to get the 'problem' fixed.
Clark Beebe, 57, of Springfield, N.J., bought a $50,000 solar power system two years ago for $15,000 after rebates, installing it on the roof of his four-bedroom house. Because he offsets what he uses with what he pumps into the grid, his annual power bill has dropped from $1,270 to $170, though he also installed energy-saving appliances. His $1,100 yearly savings is supplemented by $500 in clean energy credits, cutting the payback period for his system to nine years. After that, he'll effectively net at least a $200-a-year profit. "I am now an electricity company," says Beebe 57. "Plus, I'm generating electricity without any pollutants."
Ok, he installed a $50K system, to save himself $1,100 a year. At 10% interest, that would him $5k in income each year. Even for his 'the government paid for most of it' cost, he's loosing out on $400/year. The only reason he's making money is that the government is paying him an extra $500/year. Then there's the 'energy saving appliances', which is hard to rate as I don't know the details. If he replaced his electric stove with a natural gas one, that would hide some expenses.
So, to make this system economical for a home user, the Government has to pay him $35k up front and $500/year? Not very economical on a large scale. When I look at this stuff, I try to look at it without subsidies. After all, we can't afford to have all these subsidies if everyone's doing it.
Carrie Buczeke, 42, of Livermore, Calif., rolled the cost of her $54,000 solar panels -- $25,000 after rebates and tax credits -- into a home-equity loan. She has wiped out her $400 monthly electric bill and pays $300 a month for the loan. After seven years, the loan will be paid off. "It was such a no-brainer," she says.
Ah, California, land of sun and high energy bills. My monthly electric bill is ~$90, and I get less sun. If anything I should be buying a gas water heater and eventually a gas dryer if I want to drop my electricity use. Again, I'll note that if it wasn't for the government buying half the system - it wouldn't be economical.
But you are not paying all the costs of nuclear power, even those who don't use any have to pay for it. All that's being done is shifting the costs onto everyone. I bet if owners of nuclear power plants had to pay all of the costs, including storage of nuclear waste and insurance, not only would your bill be a lot higher but not many businesses if any at all would even build a nuclear power plant. The only reason they exist is because of massive government subsidies.
I answered the waste issue on the other post. Insurance is funded completely through the nuclear power plants, in amounts in the billions. A good part of the cost of nuclear power is government regulations; many of which aren't particularly useful.
Have you actually read the Price-Anderson act? If you have, you wouldn't be talking about nuclear plants not getting insurance.
The Feds also haven't ever had to pay out, even for TMI.
Here's a question for you: Do you believe that large chemical plants, refineries carry the same amount of insurance? If there was a chemical disaster in the USA along the lines of Bhopal, would the chemical plant be capable of paying, or would the US Government step in and turn it into a superfund site?
Hint: Because of Externalities you don't have to pay full price. If coal fired and nuclear power plants had to pay all costs of the business then you would have to pay more.
I've stated before that I'd shut down all the coal plants if I could. There aren't actually many externalities for nuclear, though it does get complicated with potential weapons crafting - but the USA, Europe, etc... Are already nuclear powers. We at least,
Because taxpayers will end up paying to store nuclear waste. Even those opposed to, and don't use, nuclear power will have to pay.
Unless you follow a rather convoluted path, I'd argue that the nuclear power companies have already paid. It's pure.gov incompetence and waste that would end up costing taxpayers more money(hint: The nuclear plants will probably end up paying, they already have for interim storage).
With additional plants, preferably the development and construction of some advanced breeders, the waste problem would be solved - the amount of waste so small, industrially speaking, that even centuries of it wouldn't be that big of a deal. As for the waste products - they're so highly radioactive, have such short half lifes, they'd reach congress's measure of safety in decades, not eons. Makes storage a lot easier.
Yes, reprocessing is currently more expensive than using raw materials.
Still, there are new methods being developed that don't have some of the problems of the old reprocessing methods. Not to mention our habit of storing fuel rods for 40 years doesn't hurt. The radioactivity of the rod at that point is less than 1% of one fresh out of the reactor. This, in turn, leads to much less contamination of materials used to process it.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! Seriously, personal insults don't work.
There is no fissionable fuel in Cesium-137 or Strontium-90 or most of the other fission wastes
That's the 5% there. The rest of the rod is still Uranium.
and reprocessing is not a solution to the problem of what to do with nuclear fission wastes
That's your opinion, not mine. I mean, it's part of the 3 R's for a green earth. You know, Reduce, Reuse, & recycle?
Maybe you should start a business where you take the casks of the decades-old waste off of people's hands for a song and then separate out the short-lived isotopes and sell the stuff that's left for a lot of money to people who want to put it back in their reactor as cheap fuel.
Sure, let me start up an IPO and get to work... Wait, there's that pesky executive order... Hint: It's already done in France. Heck, we signed a deal a while back for them to reprocess some of our waste.
I'm not saying that it's cheap. I'm just saying that reprocessing would allow us to extent our stocks 20 fold, while vastly reducing disposal costs, below even the fact that we only have to dispose of 5% of the waste we were before.
Wow, you'll be wealthy in no time at all. You will have lots of suppliers for your little business but not many customers and your operating costs will stretch to infinity.
Straw man, and you should know it. Like I said - these programs are already in place in France. If I was actually running such a business, my suppliers will pay me to take the stuff, and would also be my customers - they'd buy the reprocessed rods off of me. The remaining waste would only have to be stored for a few hundred years.
I suggest reading up, or I shall taunt thee again.
Simple enough, as I've said elsewhere - what's called nuclear waste today is actually still 95% usable fuel. A little reprocessing and suddenty you only have 5% the waste for a unit of power - and the remaining 5%, the true waste, is so highly radioactive that you'd only have to worry about it for a century or so.
But where do you store the spent rods? I think that moving them is far too risky, and could lead to scary Jack Bauer type scenarios. Reactors should probably be built in such a way that they have enough storage on site to hold all the spent rods the plant will ever generate. Anyone have any thoughts for me on why that is or is not feasible?
Actually, that's the case today, except for a few plants that have had their licenses extended(IE they're operating longer than their original expected lifespan). Some have resorted to above ground casks for the older waste.
What's not considered good or feasable is keeping the waste at the plant site once the plant's shut down. Keeping track of one place is much easier than 100, thus the entirely reasonable boondoggle that is Yucca Mountain.
The problem is that without reprocessing, the waste is considered dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. If we reprocess, the risk pretty much goes away.
No, don't. Chernobyl was a type of Fast Breeder Nuclear reactor. They are not any safer than traditional nuclear power plants, they are just cheaper.
Very, very much wrong. RBMK reactors, while plutonium breeding, aren't actually what would be considered a 'modern' breeder reactor - Which actually tend to be more expensive than traditional nuclear plants. France has been operating one for years.
Hint: Chernobyl was a water cooled graphite moderated core. All breeders to date have been liquid metal cooled. Mostly sodium.
For a safe design go and look up "Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactor". These have the capability to become a much safer design but they are still on the drawing board.
Chernobyl was an incredibly flawed design. There are plenty of designs out there that have proven safe track records - and PBRs might not be able to compete on efficiency.
The whole idea of using a breeder reactor is to reduce fuel usage - it'd be quite possible to burn other plant's waste in it, as well as generate 100X the power from a given source of fuel.
good point, I just tend to naturally think 'steam', hot water would indeed probably be better, but I'm not sure you can run an ammonia cooler off of just hot water.
If the cost of an ipod or two is all it takes to buy a vote*, for a million dollars I could simply buy somebody else's vote each year and still come out ahead.
Heck, radio ads aren't that expensive, I could spend $10k out of my $100k annual interest off the million bucks and buy some radio time, which should garner a few votes for the candidates/issues of my choice.
I know I'd be awfully tempted if you offered me a million bucks. As long as it doesn't prohibit me from political activities.
*Yes, I know the article is about 'giving up the right to vote', but if they're willing to give it up, they're probably willing to sell it.
Sounds like a good plan. Given our problems with NIMBY (no new refineries, nuclear plants, etc... in decades), we are going to have to crash course this a bit.
I propose subsidizing building a test plant of each type approved by the NRC and DOE. IE the government buys the first plant of each design(within limits). This is used to provide the type accreditation. I'd suggest building them around military bases, the military can help provide security and use the power(and heat). But they can be built anywhere.
This way commercial investors can look at the plants and pick the most suitable one for their conceived project.
Limit this to ~1 new reactor design per year(or two). Figure costs to be around $1-3 billion per year, though initial glut would be ~$10 billion because we've been sitting on our butts. After a decade or so, if we haven't been selling the reactors off we'd be able to pay for the new reactors off the sales of electricity from the old ones. Probably still need some subsidies for construction - I'm sure not all of the new reactor designs will be competitive.
Of course, have some controls in place to try to cut losses early if any given design turns out to be a white elephant. Require a design at least reasonably promise a measurable improvement in some area - construction cost, time, efficiency, safety, hydrogen production... For a nuclear plant, something like a 1% gain in thermal efficiency without increasing construction/O&M costs would be worth it.
If multiple designs are eligable, have a board pick what they think is the best one - the others are eligible for next year.
Non of this means that consumers and companies can't put solar panels or wind turbines up. Or that we even stop subsidizing them.
That's the claimed cost, but in practice there've always been cost overruns, and between 1.8 and 3.5 billion is normal. I was generous in splitting the difference
Are these overruns caused by regulatory hassles or untested designs? One of the big things for reducing costs would be a type certification. Rather than every plant being effectively a pilot plant, build a dozen or so of the same design.
As well, the direct solar power options are getting cheaper too. Pairing efficient photovoltaics with a flow battery could mean a large proportion of a household's energy requirements could be produced in situ, saving infrastructure and transmission costs.
If it's not an off-grid solution, you still have grid expenses, so infrastructure costs are a wash. Last time I checked, I still had a payback period of infinity for a solar system - I could literally pay retail for my electricity out of gains if I invested what it would cost to install solar power into mutual funds. While not inflation or technology proof, I'd personally want a 10 year payback(IE I'm making money in 10) at most before I invest. Don't forget the difference between wholesale and retail - discounting subsidies, a home user is making out if his homemade generator is producing power at an effective cost of 9 cents/kwh, while a power plant(discounting subsidies and other tricks) would be going broke. Well, except for some places like California.
Still, I'm looking into solar water heating. That's a lot cheaper and more efficient.
There are other options too - in many parts of the world where thermal gradients are steep, Hot Dry Rock reactors can be built which are again have very low operating costs.
Suffer the same problems as solar, wind, and hydro - limited effective installation areas. I'd have no problems sticking a wind turbine in next to my small town - it's save a lot in transmission costs. Still, you'd need a huge farm to power NYC, for example. Nuclear for the cities, wind/solar for individual houses/towns. Where it makes sense.
I'm not saying there is no place for nuclear power at all, but today's oversized, monolithic generators are high cost, high risk ventures, and rely on yet another scarce resource to function. Do we really want uranium wars like the oil ones we're dealing with now?
We have plenty of uranium at slightly higher price points. It helps that major deposits are in countries like Australia and Canada - not the middleast.
Crud, what's with/.'s text boxes and losing their contents? I click on your link accidentally after composing some of the message, hit back and all my text is gone. Most annoying.
Still, if you look at most of these forcasts, for both uranium and oil, it's X Million barrels or Tons at 'price point Y'.
You double the price of oil, and the amount profitably exploitable deposits increase.
Oil, we have a fairly hard stopping point because at some point ethanol, biodiesel, other alternatives actually become cheaper.
With nuclear fission, even doubling the cost of uranium won't make them uneconomical as fuel costs are considered trivial. Still, drive the price up enough we can start recycling the fuel, as only about 5% of the usable fuel is used now. Looking into advanced technologies, with breeder reactors we can extract usable amounts from seawater.
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I don't know what that says of our society but kids watching Sesame Street was just part of the culture and are we now going to be afraid of who we are?
I've always been firmly of the belief that kids are far stronger and more resilient than we make them out to be today. Yes, there are a few out there that may crack from this or that, but editing out dragons because it might be considered an endorsement of smoking or labeling early seasons of Sesame Street as 'adult' is insane in my opinion.
No, kids are not miniature adults, but they are far more capable of learning the difference between truth and fiction than we give them credit for. In addition, any one experience is generally going to have only very minor long term effects.
I think the usual caveat comes in here: The TV is NOT A BABYSITTER. Parents should be involved in what their kids do and watch.
The things we used to do as kids would likely get us arrested these days (12 year olds playing with homemade fireworks, carrying shotguns down the street and out to the field to go hunting, swinging from ropes into swimming holes infested with all manner of dangerous wildlife and more).
You had responsibility, and knew what would happen if you broke the rules. You almost certainly made mistakes, but you knew there would be consequences and punishments for disobedience. Your parents most likely made sure you knew how to handle the shotgun safely before they trusted you with it - much less alone or with a group of friends.
We treat 21 year olds like we used to treat 18 year olds, and we treat 18 year olds like 14 year olds. It's actually a disservice to our youth. We learn by making mistakes and suffering the consequences - it's best to teach this stuff early, before the school of hard knocks comes calling(IE the consequences are lasting and nasty, potentially fatal).
Interesting.
But what effects one energy sector effects others as well. I don't understand it but someone else shared a link explaining, now I can't find it.
I think that the term you'd be looking for would be 'displacement'. I'd be a prime example. My house needs to be heated. I'm outside of NG range, so my main choices are electric or propane. Right now propane is substantially cheaper than electric - but with the right setup(like a geothermal heat pump), electric would be cheaper. It'd just take a large capital investment - which isn't worth it at this time. Propane is a product of oil refining, so raise the price of oil, and therefore propane, enough and I'd switch over to electric. This adds up to fractional changes for any change in the balance. If it gets bad enough - you see more people driving electric cars because they're cheaper.
On to your list of links... I found #4 interesting, because it considers not charging for CO2 emissions a subsidy. Then it's analysis for plant insurance coverage seems disingenuous. "A single firm's coverage of its own operations exceeds the entire pool of coverage within the US for offsite liability in the case of an accident." - Considering that the floor for the feds to step in under price-anderson is 10 BILLION, I find that a bit strange. I also find how they place that cost in the billions given how the feds haven't had to pay out under it yet.
Yes, our energy systems could stand a lot less subsidization - except for possibly conservation efforts - and I hate to say it, but I think that they need to stop concentrating on reducing energy usage for a while and concentrate on appliance longevity. Chopping 10% off the electricity usage of an appliance makes sense when it lasts 20 years, but the average today is often less than 10, and for some is as low as 5, on average. There's a lot of resources involved in making and transporting a refrigerator, for example, rather than mandating it use $10 less in electricity a year, making it last twice as long(from 5 to 10 years) would save more. You use $100 extra in electricity - but you don't have to go buy another refrigerator for $500-$1000 at the five year point.
The US is spending billions of dollars daily in Iraq subsidizing oil.
Yeah right. You'd have better luck arguing about Iraq being to enrich Bush's contractor buddies. We could have done Iraq very much differently and gotten the oil cheaper, safer, and more reliably if it had truly been about the oil.
This is also a false attack in the part that oil is a trivial source of electricity in the USA - Coal is #1, followed by Natural Gas, Nuclear, and hydroelectric. Petrochemical production is 1.6% - Mostly from standby generators.
Fact is is big companies receive billions of dollars in subsidies yet people make a big thing about individual taxpayers getting less than $100,000 in subsidies.
Name an electricity provider that gets 'billions' in subsidies other than solar/wind. Heck, show some subsidies that aren't dwarfed by the taxes the companies pay. At least the Mineral Leasing Act was intended to spur economic growth.
As for the less than $100k to individuals, think about it this way: There are 300 million citizens in the USA. If we give this subsidy to 1% of them, that's $105 Billion in subsidies for it. For that price we could have 100 brand new gigawatt reactors, that would produce 788 billion kWh a year, about 20% of our electric needs.
To put that into perspective, even if we figure that the solar subsidy gets 4% of the population off the grid, that's still a fifth of those getting power from the nuclear system, even before we figure in that the solar panels only power homes, whereas the nuclear plant 20% figure is for all consumers - including businesses and factories, aluminum smelters, etc...
Now think for a moment of how much pollution we could prevent if, in turn, we turned off a similar amount of capacity of the dirtiest power plants still in use.
Thought I responded to this earlier, but the response never showed up...
And while today he may be loosing $400 per year, energy prices are only going up.
Then you invest in the system when energy prices are high enough to justify it - Electricity is more stable than oil, excepting California. The price of solar systems are dropping. So it makes more sense to invest in the solar system in the future.
For example, he takes the $15k, invests it into stocks and such. He'll make, on average, $1.5k a year, which can be used to pay for his electricity and then some. In a decade, when the cost of electricity has climbed to the point that it isn't true, and the cost for a solar system has dropped to $10k, then invest in it.
My real problem is with the fact that in order to make it economical for an individual, the government had to subsidize 70% of the costs, then keep paying him!
Now, I can understand schemes that do things like 'energy saving features(including solar energy panels) don't get added to the 'worth' of a house for the purposes of taxes'. But we're not talking paying for 70% of the system!
Yea, the lack of details here makes it hard to make a decision on whether it's good or not. For instance a Sun Frost refrigerator will beat many other refrigerators that are Energy Star rated in energy efficiency.
The only problem I have with them is that they're too expensive. I can get an 18.4CF refrigerator from sears for $388(or $499, if you don't buy it 'on sale'). Energy Star says it'll use 479kWh a year. More expensive conventional refrigerators offer more features like water dispensing, not normally better efficiency. The RF19, the largest unit Sun Frost makes, uses only 281 kWh a year, but also only has 16.14 cubic feet of internal space, and costs $3K.
It'll save 198 kWh/year, but capital cost wise is down ~$200. It's better quality, but doesn't have quite as much storage space... This is marking up the cheap unit up to $1k, IE you're replacing/repairing it more frequently.
At 10 cents/ kWh, that's only saving you $19.80 a year in electricity. If you're paying a dollar a kWh, then it starts making sense.
Besides all this, if he bought a sun frost, was the price difference included in the $50k? That's hiding expenses and overstating the energy savings right there.
A Nuclear Loan Provision which would guaranty loans was slipped into a farm bill, what does nuclear power have to do with farming? I'm all for ending subsidies for solar but I want all subsidies eliminated, including those for big businesses.
Sure, let's stop all of them. I just want to point out that a loan guarantee isn't anywhere as expensive as what the solar/wind industries are getting. As for the farm bill thing, all I can do is shrug, because I hate it as well, but it happens all the time.
Admittedly I live alone, but even living with others my electric bill wouldn't be much higher than it is now, and it's below $30.
I'm alone as well, but while I don't have AC, I do run one computer all the time, but the big killers would be that all my appliances except central heat are electric. All my water is electrically heated(and I like HOT showers). My stove is electric, etc...
I've looked at getting a new propane water heater, but I'd need to modify the gas lines in my house, and I'm somewhat scared about that. Need to contact my propane company sometime to see if they can help.
I'm not sure why they call it that, it's just how I always see it.
Probably has to do with, unlike AC, DC has a definable polarity - and electronics do care.
And yes, AC is *far* superior over long distance than DC.
Actually it isn't. DC is superior, for one thing it doesn't have losses from capacitance. Not a big deal on shorter runs(and I'm talking in terms of tens to hundreds of miles), but on long runs - it matters.
Where AC gains is in voltage transformation - you can much more efficiently convert 60KV down to 600V in AC than DC.
For shorter runs, the loss in conversion efficiency is greater than the gain in transmission efficiency, so it's better to leave it as AC.
As for why houses are run with AC - because back when electricity was gaining acceptance, most loads were resistive, so it didn't matter whether it was AC or DC - and AC transformers were more efficient. You could step voltage up higher to save metal on transmission lines and step it down to something not needing huge amounts of insulation or just waiting to kill people inside. Yes, 120/240VAC can kill people - but 600VAC is much deadlier, and you start having to worry about arcing above that. You don't even need to touch anything to get yourself killed.
This is actually fairly important. Old linear transformers were huge, because they operated at 50/60HZ. Modern transformers, even for AC, chop the waveforms into the kilohertz or even higher. It took development to make these efficient; they simply weren't as efficient in the past.
This allows higher efficiency than old linear power supplies, at the expense of EM radiation and higher complexity. Though the largest transformers can reach 99% efficiency.
I think that they started seeing wide use in the 90's. My memory is vague, but I remember wall warts being much larger for their capacity back in the 80s; they were linear transformers, not switchmode.
Of course, this all ends up being an exercise in optimization. The maths and costs are well known, I'm sure power companies have formulas they can plug expected wattage, distance, usage patterns and come up with the most cost effective solution for any given run.
Long distance high wattage lines are better off being DC - the extra losses from being AC outweighs the extra expenses of dealing with DC.
Of course, the same is true for short runs - there are a number of data centers that are DC, for example. Telephone systems have been -48VDC for years. I've seen lots of equipment that you simply plug the DC power into. You have to buy the transformer seperately if you want to run it on AC. I think the primary reason this was done is that 48 volts is rather easy to regulate, hard to kill yourself with, can be powered by a not-large battery pack for small stations or very large batteries in a central location for the big stations. Rack mount, much less individual, UPS systems are highly inefficient in comparison.
monopolistic providers screwing their customers?
From Dan's comments, this is the situation, compounded by old regulations from back when data traffic was unusual and expensive. The telecom company is of course raking in huge profits from the situation; so has no interest in improving it.
I was merely responding to one poster's comment. Off topic, I know.
If Aussie internet sucks that bad (and by all accounts it does) then they should be petitioning their Government and/or telecom carriers to build more links to the rest of the World.
Actually, they seem to have pretty good links to the rest of the world, it's internally that they have issues. Like a pattern of bandwidth charging that discourages server placement in their own country/continent.
I mean, yes, the weakening dollar will encourage this sort of stuff, but generally speaking hosting in a country shouldn't be so expensive that going to the other side of the planet is cheaper and provides better reliability. And these problems predate the fall of the US dollar.
but it's hard to be perfect when there is such a big group of interests
The amount of corruption in the UN makes even the most corrupt areas of the USA look legit.
They're also ineffectual, there have been a number of times where the blue helmets have at least allowed genocidal slaughters to continue. For example, blocking the side being killed from arming themselves, but not engaging(or not being allowed to engage) the killers.
I wouldn't mind so much if it was just a place for diplomats and leaders of countries to come and talk to settle differences peacefully, but it tries to be a world government.
I'm no expert, but Dan of Dan's Data has mentioned some of the internet issues in Australia.
Do to the ways the ISPs charge, it's often cheaper to host your sites in the USA than to have the servers in Australia.
These points, and many other historical arguements, are irrelevant. The only issue here is that the United States currently has control, and is being presented with no good (or even clear) reason why it should give that control up.
I find a lot of parrallels between this and Europe's Galileo program(GPS Alternative).
I found figures that the program would cost 4 Billion - Whether you consider that an expensive duplication of effort or a cheap means of removal of European commercial and military dependence on a US military system is up to you.
4 Billion would be plenty of funding to set up a fairly large independent network; it'd even pay for new protocols and gateways so the system could still interface with the US.
But, at least so far, ICANN has remained neutral, so there's no real motivation for people or nations to get off their butts and spend some money to get the 'problem' fixed.
Clark Beebe, 57, of Springfield, N.J., bought a $50,000 solar power system two years ago for $15,000 after rebates, installing it on the roof of his four-bedroom house. Because he offsets what he uses with what he pumps into the grid, his annual power bill has dropped from $1,270 to $170, though he also installed energy-saving appliances. His $1,100 yearly savings is supplemented by $500 in clean energy credits, cutting the payback period for his system to nine years. After that, he'll effectively net at least a $200-a-year profit. "I am now an electricity company," says Beebe 57. "Plus, I'm generating electricity without any pollutants."
Ok, he installed a $50K system, to save himself $1,100 a year. At 10% interest, that would him $5k in income each year. Even for his 'the government paid for most of it' cost, he's loosing out on $400/year. The only reason he's making money is that the government is paying him an extra $500/year. Then there's the 'energy saving appliances', which is hard to rate as I don't know the details. If he replaced his electric stove with a natural gas one, that would hide some expenses.
So, to make this system economical for a home user, the Government has to pay him $35k up front and $500/year? Not very economical on a large scale. When I look at this stuff, I try to look at it without subsidies. After all, we can't afford to have all these subsidies if everyone's doing it.
Carrie Buczeke, 42, of Livermore, Calif., rolled the cost of her $54,000 solar panels -- $25,000 after rebates and tax credits -- into a home-equity loan. She has wiped out her $400 monthly electric bill and pays $300 a month for the loan. After seven years, the loan will be paid off. "It was such a no-brainer," she says.
Ah, California, land of sun and high energy bills. My monthly electric bill is ~$90, and I get less sun. If anything I should be buying a gas water heater and eventually a gas dryer if I want to drop my electricity use. Again, I'll note that if it wasn't for the government buying half the system - it wouldn't be economical.
But you are not paying all the costs of nuclear power, even those who don't use any have to pay for it. All that's being done is shifting the costs onto everyone. I bet if owners of nuclear power plants had to pay all of the costs, including storage of nuclear waste and insurance, not only would your bill be a lot higher but not many businesses if any at all would even build a nuclear power plant. The only reason they exist is because of massive government subsidies.
I answered the waste issue on the other post. Insurance is funded completely through the nuclear power plants, in amounts in the billions. A good part of the cost of nuclear power is government regulations; many of which aren't particularly useful.
Question:
.gov incompetence and waste that would end up costing taxpayers more money(hint: The nuclear plants will probably end up paying, they already have for interim storage).
Have you actually read the Price-Anderson act? If you have, you wouldn't be talking about nuclear plants not getting insurance.
The Feds also haven't ever had to pay out, even for TMI.
Here's a question for you: Do you believe that large chemical plants, refineries carry the same amount of insurance? If there was a chemical disaster in the USA along the lines of Bhopal, would the chemical plant be capable of paying, or would the US Government step in and turn it into a superfund site?
Hint: Because of Externalities you don't have to pay full price. If coal fired and nuclear power plants had to pay all costs of the business then you would have to pay more.
I've stated before that I'd shut down all the coal plants if I could. There aren't actually many externalities for nuclear, though it does get complicated with potential weapons crafting - but the USA, Europe, etc... Are already nuclear powers. We at least,
Because taxpayers will end up paying to store nuclear waste. Even those opposed to, and don't use, nuclear power will have to pay.
Unless you follow a rather convoluted path, I'd argue that the nuclear power companies have already paid. It's pure
With additional plants, preferably the development and construction of some advanced breeders, the waste problem would be solved - the amount of waste so small, industrially speaking, that even centuries of it wouldn't be that big of a deal. As for the waste products - they're so highly radioactive, have such short half lifes, they'd reach congress's measure of safety in decades, not eons. Makes storage a lot easier.
Looks like you got it! ;)
Yes, reprocessing is currently more expensive than using raw materials.
Still, there are new methods being developed that don't have some of the problems of the old reprocessing methods. Not to mention our habit of storing fuel rods for 40 years doesn't hurt. The radioactivity of the rod at that point is less than 1% of one fresh out of the reactor. This, in turn, leads to much less contamination of materials used to process it.
US Navy designs, while safe, are also expensive and maintenance heavy. If you go with the 4S, you have a design that needs hardly any maintenance.
Problem? It's more expensive per kwh, enough so that shipping power a ways is still cheaper.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! Seriously, personal insults don't work.
There is no fissionable fuel in Cesium-137 or Strontium-90 or most of the other fission wastes
That's the 5% there. The rest of the rod is still Uranium.
and reprocessing is not a solution to the problem of what to do with nuclear fission wastes
That's your opinion, not mine. I mean, it's part of the 3 R's for a green earth. You know, Reduce, Reuse, & recycle?
Maybe you should start a business where you take the casks of the decades-old waste off of people's hands for a song and then separate out the short-lived isotopes and sell the stuff that's left for a lot of money to people who want to put it back in their reactor as cheap fuel.
Sure, let me start up an IPO and get to work... Wait, there's that pesky executive order... Hint: It's already done in France. Heck, we signed a deal a while back for them to reprocess some of our waste.
I'm not saying that it's cheap. I'm just saying that reprocessing would allow us to extent our stocks 20 fold, while vastly reducing disposal costs, below even the fact that we only have to dispose of 5% of the waste we were before.
Wow, you'll be wealthy in no time at all. You will have lots of suppliers for your little business but not many customers and your operating costs will stretch to infinity.
Straw man, and you should know it. Like I said - these programs are already in place in France. If I was actually running such a business, my suppliers will pay me to take the stuff, and would also be my customers - they'd buy the reprocessed rods off of me. The remaining waste would only have to be stored for a few hundred years.
I suggest reading up, or I shall taunt thee again.
Simple enough, as I've said elsewhere - what's called nuclear waste today is actually still 95% usable fuel. A little reprocessing and suddenty you only have 5% the waste for a unit of power - and the remaining 5%, the true waste, is so highly radioactive that you'd only have to worry about it for a century or so.
But where do you store the spent rods? I think that moving them is far too risky, and could lead to scary Jack Bauer type scenarios. Reactors should probably be built in such a way that they have enough storage on site to hold all the spent rods the plant will ever generate. Anyone have any thoughts for me on why that is or is not feasible?
Actually, that's the case today, except for a few plants that have had their licenses extended(IE they're operating longer than their original expected lifespan). Some have resorted to above ground casks for the older waste.
What's not considered good or feasable is keeping the waste at the plant site once the plant's shut down. Keeping track of one place is much easier than 100, thus the entirely reasonable boondoggle that is Yucca Mountain.
The problem is that without reprocessing, the waste is considered dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. If we reprocess, the risk pretty much goes away.
No, don't. Chernobyl was a type of Fast Breeder Nuclear reactor. They are not any safer than traditional nuclear power plants, they are just cheaper.
Very, very much wrong. RBMK reactors, while plutonium breeding, aren't actually what would be considered a 'modern' breeder reactor - Which actually tend to be more expensive than traditional nuclear plants. France has been operating one for years.
Hint: Chernobyl was a water cooled graphite moderated core. All breeders to date have been liquid metal cooled. Mostly sodium.
For a safe design go and look up "Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactor". These have the capability to become a much safer design but they are still on the drawing board.
Chernobyl was an incredibly flawed design. There are plenty of designs out there that have proven safe track records - and PBRs might not be able to compete on efficiency.
The whole idea of using a breeder reactor is to reduce fuel usage - it'd be quite possible to burn other plant's waste in it, as well as generate 100X the power from a given source of fuel.
good point, I just tend to naturally think 'steam', hot water would indeed probably be better, but I'm not sure you can run an ammonia cooler off of just hot water.
If the cost of an ipod or two is all it takes to buy a vote*, for a million dollars I could simply buy somebody else's vote each year and still come out ahead.
Heck, radio ads aren't that expensive, I could spend $10k out of my $100k annual interest off the million bucks and buy some radio time, which should garner a few votes for the candidates/issues of my choice.
I know I'd be awfully tempted if you offered me a million bucks. As long as it doesn't prohibit me from political activities.
*Yes, I know the article is about 'giving up the right to vote', but if they're willing to give it up, they're probably willing to sell it.
Sounds like a good plan. Given our problems with NIMBY (no new refineries, nuclear plants, etc... in decades), we are going to have to crash course this a bit.
I propose subsidizing building a test plant of each type approved by the NRC and DOE. IE the government buys the first plant of each design(within limits). This is used to provide the type accreditation. I'd suggest building them around military bases, the military can help provide security and use the power(and heat). But they can be built anywhere.
This way commercial investors can look at the plants and pick the most suitable one for their conceived project.
Limit this to ~1 new reactor design per year(or two). Figure costs to be around $1-3 billion per year, though initial glut would be ~$10 billion because we've been sitting on our butts. After a decade or so, if we haven't been selling the reactors off we'd be able to pay for the new reactors off the sales of electricity from the old ones. Probably still need some subsidies for construction - I'm sure not all of the new reactor designs will be competitive.
Of course, have some controls in place to try to cut losses early if any given design turns out to be a white elephant. Require a design at least reasonably promise a measurable improvement in some area - construction cost, time, efficiency, safety, hydrogen production... For a nuclear plant, something like a 1% gain in thermal efficiency without increasing construction/O&M costs would be worth it.
If multiple designs are eligable, have a board pick what they think is the best one - the others are eligible for next year.
Non of this means that consumers and companies can't put solar panels or wind turbines up. Or that we even stop subsidizing them.
That's the claimed cost, but in practice there've always been cost overruns, and between 1.8 and 3.5 billion is normal. I was generous in splitting the difference
/.'s text boxes and losing their contents? I click on your link accidentally after composing some of the message, hit back and all my text is gone. Most annoying.
Are these overruns caused by regulatory hassles or untested designs? One of the big things for reducing costs would be a type certification. Rather than every plant being effectively a pilot plant, build a dozen or so of the same design.
As well, the direct solar power options are getting cheaper too. Pairing efficient photovoltaics with a flow battery could mean a large proportion of a household's energy requirements could be produced in situ, saving infrastructure and transmission costs.
If it's not an off-grid solution, you still have grid expenses, so infrastructure costs are a wash. Last time I checked, I still had a payback period of infinity for a solar system - I could literally pay retail for my electricity out of gains if I invested what it would cost to install solar power into mutual funds. While not inflation or technology proof, I'd personally want a 10 year payback(IE I'm making money in 10) at most before I invest. Don't forget the difference between wholesale and retail - discounting subsidies, a home user is making out if his homemade generator is producing power at an effective cost of 9 cents/kwh, while a power plant(discounting subsidies and other tricks) would be going broke. Well, except for some places like California.
Still, I'm looking into solar water heating. That's a lot cheaper and more efficient.
There are other options too - in many parts of the world where thermal gradients are steep, Hot Dry Rock reactors can be built which are again have very low operating costs.
Suffer the same problems as solar, wind, and hydro - limited effective installation areas. I'd have no problems sticking a wind turbine in next to my small town - it's save a lot in transmission costs. Still, you'd need a huge farm to power NYC, for example. Nuclear for the cities, wind/solar for individual houses/towns. Where it makes sense.
I'm not saying there is no place for nuclear power at all, but today's oversized, monolithic generators are high cost, high risk ventures, and rely on yet another scarce resource to function. Do we really want uranium wars like the oil ones we're dealing with now?
We have plenty of uranium at slightly higher price points. It helps that major deposits are in countries like Australia and Canada - not the middleast.
Crud, what's with
An honored elder responds! ;)
Still, if you look at most of these forcasts, for both uranium and oil, it's X Million barrels or Tons at 'price point Y'.
You double the price of oil, and the amount profitably exploitable deposits increase.
Oil, we have a fairly hard stopping point because at some point ethanol, biodiesel, other alternatives actually become cheaper.
With nuclear fission, even doubling the cost of uranium won't make them uneconomical as fuel costs are considered trivial. Still, drive the price up enough we can start recycling the fuel, as only about 5% of the usable fuel is used now. Looking into advanced technologies, with breeder reactors we can extract usable amounts from seawater.