Just curious. What's the lifetime storage and/or handling costs of the waste?
Insignificant, really. There's a tenth of a cent charge per kwh that would have been more than sufficient to ensure proper handling and disposal of the waste if it wasn't for government waste and bungling. Also, per Dun Malg's post, breeder reactors would both produce orders of magnitude more power from the material and waste that's above ambient for only around 300 years.
Is coal still a good economic decision if you figure in the cost to restore the open pit mine, remove the carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxides from the air, and remove the silt and pollution from the local streams and rivers?
Restoring the pit mine, indeed most of the pollution stuff is figured into the fuel cost of the coal. A small fee per kwh adds up over time. Still, to make a modern coal plant clean raises the expense that a minor increase in the cost of coal would render them more expensive than nuclear. A cost increase could be triggered by something as simple as a shift to using known processes to turn coal into crude into gasoline and such instead of directly extracting oil.
If you figure in the lifetime monitoring of Yucca mountain is nuclear still a viable option? Yucca Mountain is a stupid political 'solution' to nuclear waste. If somebody built some breeder reactors we'd be digging up the interred 'waste' for reprocessing into new fuel. A standard reactor pool would easily be able to hold a breeder reactor's waste for longer than the 300 years needed for it to drop below ambient. If the plant closes down, transfer the waste to other plants or a dedicated storage facility. A fund should be set up just for that likelyhood.
On the other side of the equation, what's the disposal cost of a silicon-based solar array?
Not sure, though I'm tempted to say that they'll probably want to recycle the thing. I can't think of anything particularly hazardous about them though, so probably not much.
Now the creation side, that's the polluter for solar.
1st: From the article, finding a suitable underground structure is 'difficult', IE rare. 2nd: It's not portable, so it wouldn't fix the electric car problem 3rd: Expected cost: $200 million, 6-12 hours of power, unless they're lucky and have a 'suitable underground structure'.
Unfortuantly, I can't seem to find enough information about efficiency and capacity to judge whether it'll be a groundbreaker. Even if it ends up being cheaper than nuclear, there are still severe restrictions on how many places have suitable winds for this situation.
I just bought the house; it came with the electric heater. My area doesn't have NG piping. My alternative would be propane, but that'd require running a propane line. Electric power is so cheap here that electric is competative with it. Standard electric is slightly more expensive, but I can get it for essentially half price if I install an off-peak system that allows the power company to shut it off during periods of high demand. That's cheaper than propane. Then there's the fact that a propane heater costs four times what an electric would run...
I'm looking into replacing the sucker, but I need a new electric service first. I also need to get some other things fixed up first if I want to even consider installing a propane one.
our conventional reactors will run out (given current usage, not much increase) at like the same time the oil reserves run out - and when that happens (and people like the ones saying renew. energy shouldnt be supported because nuclear is so easy) will have to look again..
You might want to check that statement. Current reserves at the current price would run out. However, as the price increases a little it makes sense to build breeders. Triple the cost of the uranium and it'd still be low enough to be considered 'trivial', yet extend the reserves into the thousands of years, even without breeders. Fact is, part of the reason we have 'limited' reserves is that we haven't looked hard, because we already have plenty. After the WWII 'gold rush' for finding it, we just haven't been searching for it much.
Here in the US we are building tight houses, to the point that we've had problems with air climate inside because they're so tight and insulated that there was insufficient air exchange to flush contaminants.
Besides that, everybody talks about powering houses. I think about powering industrial processes. Making an aluminum can takes electricity, and a fair amount of it. That's the real reason I want cheap electricity.
1) Can you trust ANYONE with the keys to the reactor, or is it always a danger? (hint : it is still a nuclear reactor. It has EXTREMELY dangerous high level radiation inside it, and if someone were to deliberately blow it up it could make a lot of people sick)
It's sealed in multiple layers. The outside might be railcar sized, but the actual material is about the size of a log. There's literally no user servicable parts. The description was that the plant gets two pipes. Water goes in one, steam comes out the other. Install is underground and welded to the bottom.
2) What does the plant look like that has to maintain these things for refueling? (hint : think lots of dangerous areas)
They're fairly small, and large nuclear plants do get into their own, relativly huge reactors all the time
3) Uh, you didn't include the nuclear waste disposal fee. To do this according to federal standards may cost several cents for every kilowatt ever generated.
several cents? By law it's one tenth of a cent per kw/h, not 'several'. It's less than the fuel cost for a coal plant, and probably less than what it costs to keep solar panels or mirrors clean.
4) Oh, forgot to mention that 140MW is a shitload of energy in one little box. It can most likely melt down. At the least, you still need steam turbines, a seperate "hot" loop of radioactive water (this thing does produce neutrons, it has to) and piping, a concrete containment vessel....
Nope, it can't melt down. That's a big requirement today, especially for a 'minimal management' reactor. The one I saw used a neutron reflector to make parts of the reactor go critical. As it moves around it makes different parts of the reactor more active. Move too fast and it simply shortens the life of the reactor, doesn't produce more power. Slow it down and it produces less power. Stop it and the reaction grinds to a halt. Remove all cooling and the reflector stops working.
Solar, once it is cheaply manufactured, involves placing the panels.
That's a big if. We can't count on everything ramping up like computer chips. Heck, look at how far we've come with cars. A model T got around the same gas milage as most of today's cars. Sure, today's cars are more efficient, but they're also heavier. It was a generational improvement rather than a exponential improvement.
$20 million for a 10MW reactor good for 30 years. Prototype development and regulatory fees estimated at costing $600 million for the first unit, after that the marginal cost would be $20 million.
Yes, because we haven't yet invented a cheap way to store massive amounts of energy yet.
There, fixed it for you. iPods, laptops, flashlights, cellphones all use very little power when you start looking that things like heating homes, 80 gallon water heaters, 100 watt lights, etc... The charger for my cellphone outputs a mere 6.6 watts, and can charge the phone in well under an hour, which has an advertised standby time of days and talk time in hours. Meanwhile my water heater takes up 5.5 kilowatts, nearly a thousand times more.
Perhaps if you invented such a way, you might be rich. It'd stop me from having to turn the crank on my iPod, thats for sure.
Yes, you'd be rich beyond Bill Gates if you invented a storage system capable of fairly extreme temperatures, yet costs a mere $1 per kw/hour and lasts for decades. Current storage runs around $50 per kwh of capacity and only lasts ~3 years. This is also what has made electric cars uneconomic. We have the motor, we have the generation, we just don't have a good method for storage.
You'd be better off installing a solar water heating system than photovoltiacs. It's much cheaper and more efficient. With a pump and a sufficiently sized tank somewhere, you should hardly ever need to heat the water using a different source. That alone would cut electricity usage(and NG, propane) by quite a bit.
By my calcs, it seesm that the solar project would cover about half a house's needs by converting it's roof to photovoltiac.
I've seriously considered one of these, but I live in the far north, and it doesn't quite hit the break-even point for me.
Bangalore, Areas in the USA south of the Mason-Dixon line? They should be everywhere.
For the power station though, it doesn't matter as much as they're focusing lots and lots of sunlight into a small area with constant circulation - not much is going to be radiated, and the situation demands more durability and raw absorbtion ability than reduced radiation.
Nanticoke Power Plant is a 3.92GW plant with what appears to be a 70% load factor.
In other words, even a hundred of these plants, with a combined cost of $30 billion dollars, wouldn't be able to replace Nanticoke. Meanwhile 4 Gigawatt nuclear reactors would cost ~4-8 Billion dollars and eliminate the need for nanticoke, complete with around a 30% increase in available power.
Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections.
Projects like this make sense if they increase economic activity, but building any kind of new power plant would do the same, and cheap power would help attract more new business than expensive power. Being miserly is the best way to increase business in many ways - providing the most services for the dollar.
I agree with you on the idea of eliminating pollution, just on the how.
Why start bitching about it just because in this case it's a green technology subsidy
Because it costs around 8 times as much as other clean technology? And people complain about Haliburton*.
*Not because I like fraud, but I also dislike waste. Rather than using this to 'spur' development, they'd be better off investing half directly into solar development and the other half building a few new nuclear reactors.
I just have to say that I agree with you. That's one of the points I've tried to make: There are limits to funding, economies, etc... While the supply is not fixed, there are processes that are more efficient than others.
A 40MW plant of solar is unlikely to enable the takedown of even a single coal plant. Even ten of them is unlikely to. Ten of these solar plants would cost $3Billion dollars, which, depending upon which figures you use, would result in 1-3GW of new nuclear plant capacity, which would enable the shutting down of a number of coal plants.
Is it just me, or does it appear that somebody's being awfully free with the troll mod on anybody being down on solar power, or this install of it?
I'd tend to think that the taxpayers would rather pay to replace the plants with cheaper and more effective alternatives. For example, while this has a construction cost of $8 watt, with a power factor* likely between 30-40%
continuation: nuclear power has contstruction costs of between $2-4/watt, and a factor around 90%, making it around twice as efficient per watt as solar. Fuel costs are actually considered trivial, and containing nuclear waste, while expensive, there actually isn't that much of it.
Where do you think the capital construction costs for new and/or retrofitted plants is going to come from? Those exact same taxpayers.
I'd tend to think that the taxpayers would rather pay to replace the plants with cheaper and more effective alternatives. For example, while this has a construction cost of $8 watt, with a power factor* likely between 30-40%
*Basically what percentage of the plant's rated capacity it actually averages. A 40MW plant with a power factor of 40% would actually average 16MW. A 1,000MW plant with a load factor of 90% would produce 900MW on average. It's what tends to really kill solar and wind, as solar can't break 50%, and wind only breaks 50% in some very rare locations.
The canadian plant is dedicating 4KW per home. In US terms, this is over a $100 of electricity. More than most people would use except for those with electric heat.
The UK one would be 2.7kw per home, so yeah, they're figuring on less power usage. Maybe the UK has fewer electric ranges/stoves/water heaters on average. Lights probably won't make much difference.
Now, in either case there's also the question of whether the reporter figured the power factor in, and if they did, what figure they used.
Well I'd say that they think getting cleaner energy is worth the price difference.
If I was solely in pursuit of the 'almighty buck' I'd have suggested coal. Coal, with minimal pollution controls would probably run $.25/watt capacity. Fuel costs would be higher, of course. With newest generation pollution control technology costs increase to the point that a minor rise in coal costs would make nuclear cheaper even in the short run.
I'd say that the difference between nuclear and solar isn't enough to justify spending eight or so times as much on it. Heck, going by the picture you'd have quite a bit of yard maintenance to do, and unless they're doing that with electric mowers it'd end up being about as carbon neutral as nuclear. Especially if, like I said, they build a breeder/IFR reactor and start using waste fuel from other plants to power the thing. That'd be like building a garbage fired power plant. Getting rid of waste while creating economic gains. Win-Win.
$70-80 million for a 10mw install, this one is expected to run $300 millon. $80 million for 10mw = $8 a watt, in Canada I'd expect availability to limit the production factor to, at most, 40%
Let's beat the nuclear drum a bit. Nuclear power = $1-2/watt, for a production factor that's above 80% today.
For around four times what they're predicting this to cost, they could set up a nuclear power plant that could cover 250,000 homes insteal of 10,000. 25 times as many, for 4 times the cost. Invest(or don't borrow) the rest and you'll save enough money to handle the increased continued maintenance. Figure 5-10 times and you could have a reactor that can burn other plant's wastes and actually make money as the plants enter a bidding war to sell you their waste.
365 hecters = 39.3 million square feet. The average size of new homes are ~2.4k square feet each, or 24 million square feet total. This doesn't count roof space though, as a two story house will have half the roof expected.
It's close, but not a match.
Hmm... 40MW over 10k homes only leaves 4kw average draw per house, or 16 amps of 240 during the day. Figure a 50% load factor(High end), that's 1,440 kw/h per house. At my local price of $.08/kwh $115.20 of electricity. I saw that Canada's subsidizing solar to the tune of $.24/kwh, so it'd end up being $345.60 of electricity.
It's not quite as simple as a simple GPA selection. A 3.5 is an indication of better achievement in many midwest schools than a 3.9 in many southeast schools(Mississipi, I'm looking at you). They also want to see if you took a challanging HS curriculum. There's a huge difference between a HS graduate with a 4.0 that took all standard 'putz' courses, and a graduate who took AP/Honors/College credit classes.
The metric is more complex than just the GPA. There's still a metric, however.
Or her job is so easy that even a retarded liar can do it. Seriously, how difficult can it be for a bureaucrat to pretend that it manages a bunch of other stupid bureaucrats and to go through resumes and select those with 100% test scores and GPAs?
Well, it's a little more difficult than that. After all, you have to figure out how many students you want, then look at the applications and decide who the best are going to be. Can we require a 4.0 GPA? Or, in order to get enough students do we have to accept 3.5 GPAs? What about those wierd schools that use a 5 point scale?
Do we want to require 2 years of foreign language in HS for entrance? What about that really smart kid from a small school that didn't offer it?
Then there's the whole affirmative action. By golly, we have to be 10% black or we'll be seen as discriminatory!* What do you mean we'd have to accept them with 2.0GPA's? Just do it!
Still, OJT counts for much in a job. Even if she wasn't prepared for it initially, I'm sure that the experienced subordinates under her would be able to keep things going while she learned.
*Yes, there are discrimination problems in the USA. It's also a sad fact that if I make any educational requirements, such as requiring a HS degree of a given GPA , and have the decisions made after removing all indications of race and sex that blacks would be underrepresented, on average. There are many problems with affirmative action; especially for something as late as college.
A college degree generally doesn't teach you the nitty gritty.
For example, with the intentially fubared compter I'd probably end up checking the motherboard settings against the manual(if available). STill, it'd be a while.
But no mention on whether they actually were accredited? I can build a car to US safety standards, but until it is inspected by and recieves that all important certification, it is still not allowed to be sold in the US to be driven on public roads.
From what I understand, they meet all the standards, and do have many certifications. But some certifications are only issued to hospitals inside the USA. They have even reached the point where some insurance companies and businesses will pay for people to have medical treatment done there. While more a statement of cost savings, they do open themselves to being sued if it turned out that the hospital was inferior to the ones here. It was explicitly stated that many patients found the 'customer service' was much better there than here.
And being new, there are no long term stats to say how infection rates really are. may look good initially, but after 10 years, will they still be better than an equivalent hospital in the west (US and Western Europe)?
I guess it depends on how 'on the ball' they remain and whether they eventually slack off. I see them trying to raise the bar though. The better they are, the more business they get the more money that comes into the country, the more prosperous the country the more they get paid.
And if "Fast" is the one dropped, then the services provided are likely to be things that are voluntary (plastic surgery) or are tightly controlled (think transplants) that people would have to travel outside the US to get ahead of lists.
You're never going to get emergency surgury there, such as an appendecomy. But there are a whole raft of surguries today that are neither urgent to the point of 'I need it TODAY', nor really optional like most plastic surgery. Think about things like hip replacements, bypass surguries. For the 'average' american it'd take a month and a half to get there for a surgury as that's the time you need to get the passport. For me, it'd take a week, much like most non-critical surgeries as I already have a passport. They can even do things like cancer treatment there. You may not entirely approve, but in some cases they're ahead of US practices, in that they're much more willing to do what's considered experimental treatments here in the USA.
Relativly speaking, it's a very minor trickle compared to the amount of medical treatment done here in the USA. But they are handling thousands of patients a year, not just from the USA. It was interesting enough that it made the morning show one day, and I thought it made for a rather different take on outsourcing.
But do you know if they meet US health stanards? Are they inspected and certified by a US health accredidation org?
Yes, they are. I heard about it on a radio program. It was explicitly said that they had been inspected to US accredidation standards.
As for the cost of the care, it seemed to start at half price, in some cases going down to 10%. Being a fully modern hospital, it actually has lower infection rates than many US hospitals.
And I could always save on my labour costs but I was willing to pay for quality and that is not cheap. You just have to decide which 2 of the 3 you want: Fast, Cheap, Good.
In this case it seemed the dropped one was 'fast', after all, you have to make arrangements to travel there. I figure that it'll lead to a fixing of our system(incredibly inefficient) and an increase in their wages to parity to ours, more or less.
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The government is subsidizing a new technology.
At this point it'd be better to subsidize research into new technologies than to build a power plant that's never going to become price effective.
Just curious. What's the lifetime storage and/or handling costs of the waste?
Insignificant, really. There's a tenth of a cent charge per kwh that would have been more than sufficient to ensure proper handling and disposal of the waste if it wasn't for government waste and bungling. Also, per Dun Malg's post, breeder reactors would both produce orders of magnitude more power from the material and waste that's above ambient for only around 300 years.
Is coal still a good economic decision if you figure in the cost to restore the open pit mine, remove the carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxides from the air, and remove the silt and pollution from the local streams and rivers?
Restoring the pit mine, indeed most of the pollution stuff is figured into the fuel cost of the coal. A small fee per kwh adds up over time. Still, to make a modern coal plant clean raises the expense that a minor increase in the cost of coal would render them more expensive than nuclear. A cost increase could be triggered by something as simple as a shift to using known processes to turn coal into crude into gasoline and such instead of directly extracting oil.
If you figure in the lifetime monitoring of Yucca mountain is nuclear still a viable option?
Yucca Mountain is a stupid political 'solution' to nuclear waste. If somebody built some breeder reactors we'd be digging up the interred 'waste' for reprocessing into new fuel. A standard reactor pool would easily be able to hold a breeder reactor's waste for longer than the 300 years needed for it to drop below ambient. If the plant closes down, transfer the waste to other plants or a dedicated storage facility. A fund should be set up just for that likelyhood.
On the other side of the equation, what's the disposal cost of a silicon-based solar array?
Not sure, though I'm tempted to say that they'll probably want to recycle the thing. I can't think of anything particularly hazardous about them though, so probably not much.
Now the creation side, that's the polluter for solar.
1st: From the article, finding a suitable underground structure is 'difficult', IE rare.
2nd: It's not portable, so it wouldn't fix the electric car problem
3rd: Expected cost: $200 million, 6-12 hours of power, unless they're lucky and have a 'suitable underground structure'.
Unfortuantly, I can't seem to find enough information about efficiency and capacity to judge whether it'll be a groundbreaker. Even if it ends up being cheaper than nuclear, there are still severe restrictions on how many places have suitable winds for this situation.
I just bought the house; it came with the electric heater. My area doesn't have NG piping. My alternative would be propane, but that'd require running a propane line. Electric power is so cheap here that electric is competative with it. Standard electric is slightly more expensive, but I can get it for essentially half price if I install an off-peak system that allows the power company to shut it off during periods of high demand. That's cheaper than propane. Then there's the fact that a propane heater costs four times what an electric would run...
I'm looking into replacing the sucker, but I need a new electric service first. I also need to get some other things fixed up first if I want to even consider installing a propane one.
our conventional reactors will run out (given current usage, not much increase) at like the same time the oil reserves run out - and when that happens (and people like the ones saying renew. energy shouldnt be supported because nuclear is so easy) will have to look again..
You might want to check that statement. Current reserves at the current price would run out. However, as the price increases a little it makes sense to build breeders. Triple the cost of the uranium and it'd still be low enough to be considered 'trivial', yet extend the reserves into the thousands of years, even without breeders. Fact is, part of the reason we have 'limited' reserves is that we haven't looked hard, because we already have plenty. After the WWII 'gold rush' for finding it, we just haven't been searching for it much.
Here in the US we are building tight houses, to the point that we've had problems with air climate inside because they're so tight and insulated that there was insufficient air exchange to flush contaminants.
Besides that, everybody talks about powering houses. I think about powering industrial processes. Making an aluminum can takes electricity, and a fair amount of it. That's the real reason I want cheap electricity.
Yep, .08 US per kwh, gasoline right now is around $3/gallon. So I pay about a third in each case.
Of course, I live in North Dakota, one of the cheapest states to live in. There's a large coal plant about 2 hours south of me.
Just remember that I used *new* home construction. As you can see in the census data, homes have gotten substantially larger over the years.
If it's like the Japanese 4S design,
1) Can you trust ANYONE with the keys to the reactor, or is it always a danger? (hint : it is still a nuclear reactor. It has EXTREMELY dangerous high level radiation inside it, and if someone were to deliberately blow it up it could make a lot of people sick)
It's sealed in multiple layers. The outside might be railcar sized, but the actual material is about the size of a log. There's literally no user servicable parts. The description was that the plant gets two pipes. Water goes in one, steam comes out the other. Install is underground and welded to the bottom.
2) What does the plant look like that has to maintain these things for refueling? (hint : think lots of dangerous areas)
They're fairly small, and large nuclear plants do get into their own, relativly huge reactors all the time
3) Uh, you didn't include the nuclear waste disposal fee. To do this according to federal standards may cost several cents for every kilowatt ever generated.
several cents? By law it's one tenth of a cent per kw/h, not 'several'. It's less than the fuel cost for a coal plant, and probably less than what it costs to keep solar panels or mirrors clean.
4) Oh, forgot to mention that 140MW is a shitload of energy in one little box. It can most likely melt down. At the least, you still need steam turbines, a seperate "hot" loop of radioactive water (this thing does produce neutrons, it has to) and piping, a concrete containment vessel....
Nope, it can't melt down. That's a big requirement today, especially for a 'minimal management' reactor. The one I saw used a neutron reflector to make parts of the reactor go critical. As it moves around it makes different parts of the reactor more active. Move too fast and it simply shortens the life of the reactor, doesn't produce more power. Slow it down and it produces less power. Stop it and the reaction grinds to a halt. Remove all cooling and the reflector stops working.
Solar, once it is cheaply manufactured, involves placing the panels.
That's a big if. We can't count on everything ramping up like computer chips. Heck, look at how far we've come with cars. A model T got around the same gas milage as most of today's cars. Sure, today's cars are more efficient, but they're also heavier. It was a generational improvement rather than a exponential improvement.
Wanna bet on that?
$20 million for a 10MW reactor good for 30 years. Prototype development and regulatory fees estimated at costing $600 million for the first unit, after that the marginal cost would be $20 million.
Yes, because we haven't yet invented a cheap way to store massive amounts of energy yet.
There, fixed it for you. iPods, laptops, flashlights, cellphones all use very little power when you start looking that things like heating homes, 80 gallon water heaters, 100 watt lights, etc... The charger for my cellphone outputs a mere 6.6 watts, and can charge the phone in well under an hour, which has an advertised standby time of days and talk time in hours. Meanwhile my water heater takes up 5.5 kilowatts, nearly a thousand times more.
Perhaps if you invented such a way, you might be rich. It'd stop me from having to turn the crank on my iPod, thats for sure.
Yes, you'd be rich beyond Bill Gates if you invented a storage system capable of fairly extreme temperatures, yet costs a mere $1 per kw/hour and lasts for decades. Current storage runs around $50 per kwh of capacity and only lasts ~3 years. This is also what has made electric cars uneconomic. We have the motor, we have the generation, we just don't have a good method for storage.
You'd be better off installing a solar water heating system than photovoltiacs. It's much cheaper and more efficient. With a pump and a sufficiently sized tank somewhere, you should hardly ever need to heat the water using a different source. That alone would cut electricity usage(and NG, propane) by quite a bit.
By my calcs, it seesm that the solar project would cover about half a house's needs by converting it's roof to photovoltiac.
I've seriously considered one of these, but I live in the far north, and it doesn't quite hit the break-even point for me.
Bangalore, Areas in the USA south of the Mason-Dixon line? They should be everywhere.
For the power station though, it doesn't matter as much as they're focusing lots and lots of sunlight into a small area with constant circulation - not much is going to be radiated, and the situation demands more durability and raw absorbtion ability than reduced radiation.
Nanticoke Power Plant is a 3.92GW plant with what appears to be a 70% load factor.
In other words, even a hundred of these plants, with a combined cost of $30 billion dollars, wouldn't be able to replace Nanticoke. Meanwhile 4 Gigawatt nuclear reactors would cost ~4-8 Billion dollars and eliminate the need for nanticoke, complete with around a 30% increase in available power.
Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections.
Projects like this make sense if they increase economic activity, but building any kind of new power plant would do the same, and cheap power would help attract more new business than expensive power. Being miserly is the best way to increase business in many ways - providing the most services for the dollar.
I agree with you on the idea of eliminating pollution, just on the how.
Why start bitching about it just because in this case it's a green technology subsidy
Because it costs around 8 times as much as other clean technology? And people complain about Haliburton*.
*Not because I like fraud, but I also dislike waste. Rather than using this to 'spur' development, they'd be better off investing half directly into solar development and the other half building a few new nuclear reactors.
I just have to say that I agree with you. That's one of the points I've tried to make: There are limits to funding, economies, etc... While the supply is not fixed, there are processes that are more efficient than others.
A 40MW plant of solar is unlikely to enable the takedown of even a single coal plant. Even ten of them is unlikely to. Ten of these solar plants would cost $3Billion dollars, which, depending upon which figures you use, would result in 1-3GW of new nuclear plant capacity, which would enable the shutting down of a number of coal plants.
Is it just me, or does it appear that somebody's being awfully free with the troll mod on anybody being down on solar power, or this install of it?
My post-fu is weak today...
I'd tend to think that the taxpayers would rather pay to replace the plants with cheaper and more effective alternatives. For example, while this has a construction cost of $8 watt, with a power factor* likely between 30-40%
continuation:
nuclear power has contstruction costs of between $2-4/watt, and a factor around 90%, making it around twice as efficient per watt as solar. Fuel costs are actually considered trivial, and containing nuclear waste, while expensive, there actually isn't that much of it.
Where do you think the capital construction costs for new and/or retrofitted plants is going to come from? Those exact same taxpayers.
I'd tend to think that the taxpayers would rather pay to replace the plants with cheaper and more effective alternatives. For example, while this has a construction cost of $8 watt, with a power factor* likely between 30-40%
*Basically what percentage of the plant's rated capacity it actually averages. A 40MW plant with a power factor of 40% would actually average 16MW. A 1,000MW plant with a load factor of 90% would produce 900MW on average. It's what tends to really kill solar and wind, as solar can't break 50%, and wind only breaks 50% in some very rare locations.
It depends upon your assumptions, of course.
The canadian plant is dedicating 4KW per home. In US terms, this is over a $100 of electricity. More than most people would use except for those with electric heat.
The UK one would be 2.7kw per home, so yeah, they're figuring on less power usage. Maybe the UK has fewer electric ranges/stoves/water heaters on average. Lights probably won't make much difference.
Now, in either case there's also the question of whether the reporter figured the power factor in, and if they did, what figure they used.
Well I'd say that they think getting cleaner energy is worth the price difference.
If I was solely in pursuit of the 'almighty buck' I'd have suggested coal. Coal, with minimal pollution controls would probably run $.25/watt capacity. Fuel costs would be higher, of course. With newest generation pollution control technology costs increase to the point that a minor rise in coal costs would make nuclear cheaper even in the short run.
I'd say that the difference between nuclear and solar isn't enough to justify spending eight or so times as much on it. Heck, going by the picture you'd have quite a bit of yard maintenance to do, and unless they're doing that with electric mowers it'd end up being about as carbon neutral as nuclear. Especially if, like I said, they build a breeder/IFR reactor and start using waste fuel from other plants to power the thing. That'd be like building a garbage fired power plant. Getting rid of waste while creating economic gains. Win-Win.
I saw that Canada's subsidizing solar to the tune of $.24/kwh, so it'd end up being $345.60 of electricity.
Excuse, me, I'm dyslexic apparently. $.42/kwh = $604.80
Are they insane?
$70-80 million for a 10mw install, this one is expected to run $300 millon.
$80 million for 10mw = $8 a watt, in Canada I'd expect availability to limit the production factor to, at most, 40%
Let's beat the nuclear drum a bit.
Nuclear power = $1-2/watt, for a production factor that's above 80% today.
For around four times what they're predicting this to cost, they could set up a nuclear power plant that could cover 250,000 homes insteal of 10,000. 25 times as many, for 4 times the cost. Invest(or don't borrow) the rest and you'll save enough money to handle the increased continued maintenance. Figure 5-10 times and you could have a reactor that can burn other plant's wastes and actually make money as the plants enter a bidding war to sell you their waste.
Are you sure about that?
365 hecters = 39.3 million square feet. The average size of new homes are ~2.4k square feet each, or 24 million square feet total. This doesn't count roof space though, as a two story house will have half the roof expected.
It's close, but not a match.
Hmm... 40MW over 10k homes only leaves 4kw average draw per house, or 16 amps of 240 during the day. Figure a 50% load factor(High end), that's 1,440 kw/h per house. At my local price of $.08/kwh $115.20 of electricity. I saw that Canada's subsidizing solar to the tune of $.24/kwh, so it'd end up being $345.60 of electricity.
This is considered good how?
It's not quite as simple as a simple GPA selection. A 3.5 is an indication of better achievement in many midwest schools than a 3.9 in many southeast schools(Mississipi, I'm looking at you). They also want to see if you took a challanging HS curriculum. There's a huge difference between a HS graduate with a 4.0 that took all standard 'putz' courses, and a graduate who took AP/Honors/College credit classes.
The metric is more complex than just the GPA. There's still a metric, however.
Or her job is so easy that even a retarded liar can do it.
Seriously, how difficult can it be for a bureaucrat to
pretend that it manages a bunch of other stupid bureaucrats and to go through resumes
and select those with 100% test scores and GPAs?
Well, it's a little more difficult than that. After all, you have to figure out how many students you want, then look at the applications and decide who the best are going to be. Can we require a 4.0 GPA? Or, in order to get enough students do we have to accept 3.5 GPAs? What about those wierd schools that use a 5 point scale?
Do we want to require 2 years of foreign language in HS for entrance? What about that really smart kid from a small school that didn't offer it?
Then there's the whole affirmative action. By golly, we have to be 10% black or we'll be seen as discriminatory!* What do you mean we'd have to accept them with 2.0GPA's? Just do it!
Still, OJT counts for much in a job. Even if she wasn't prepared for it initially, I'm sure that the experienced subordinates under her would be able to keep things going while she learned.
*Yes, there are discrimination problems in the USA. It's also a sad fact that if I make any educational requirements, such as requiring a HS degree of a given GPA , and have the decisions made after removing all indications of race and sex that blacks would be underrepresented, on average. There are many problems with affirmative action; especially for something as late as college.
A college degree generally doesn't teach you the nitty gritty.
For example, with the intentially fubared compter I'd probably end up checking the motherboard settings against the manual(if available). STill, it'd be a while.
But no mention on whether they actually were accredited? I can build a car to US safety standards, but until it is inspected by and recieves that all important certification, it is still not allowed to be sold in the US to be driven on public roads.
From what I understand, they meet all the standards, and do have many certifications. But some certifications are only issued to hospitals inside the USA. They have even reached the point where some insurance companies and businesses will pay for people to have medical treatment done there. While more a statement of cost savings, they do open themselves to being sued if it turned out that the hospital was inferior to the ones here. It was explicitly stated that many patients found the 'customer service' was much better there than here.
And being new, there are no long term stats to say how infection rates really are. may look good initially, but after 10 years, will they still be better than an equivalent hospital in the west (US and Western Europe)?
I guess it depends on how 'on the ball' they remain and whether they eventually slack off. I see them trying to raise the bar though. The better they are, the more business they get the more money that comes into the country, the more prosperous the country the more they get paid.
And if "Fast" is the one dropped, then the services provided are likely to be things that are voluntary (plastic surgery) or are tightly controlled (think transplants) that people would have to travel outside the US to get ahead of lists.
You're never going to get emergency surgury there, such as an appendecomy. But there are a whole raft of surguries today that are neither urgent to the point of 'I need it TODAY', nor really optional like most plastic surgery. Think about things like hip replacements, bypass surguries. For the 'average' american it'd take a month and a half to get there for a surgury as that's the time you need to get the passport. For me, it'd take a week, much like most non-critical surgeries as I already have a passport. They can even do things like cancer treatment there. You may not entirely approve, but in some cases they're ahead of US practices, in that they're much more willing to do what's considered experimental treatments here in the USA.
Relativly speaking, it's a very minor trickle compared to the amount of medical treatment done here in the USA. But they are handling thousands of patients a year, not just from the USA. It was interesting enough that it made the morning show one day, and I thought it made for a rather different take on outsourcing.
But do you know if they meet US health stanards? Are they inspected and certified by a US health accredidation org?
Yes, they are. I heard about it on a radio program. It was explicitly said that they had been inspected to US accredidation standards.
As for the cost of the care, it seemed to start at half price, in some cases going down to 10%. Being a fully modern hospital, it actually has lower infection rates than many US hospitals.
And I could always save on my labour costs but I was willing to pay for quality and that is not cheap. You just have to decide which 2 of the 3 you want: Fast, Cheap, Good.
In this case it seemed the dropped one was 'fast', after all, you have to make arrangements to travel there. I figure that it'll lead to a fixing of our system(incredibly inefficient) and an increase in their wages to parity to ours, more or less.