I said CAN live cheaper, not that they necessarily actually do.
just to flash their money The people who trash footwear and furniture while still good are wasteful, and tend to end up being not rich. Believe it or not, most people with lots of assets tend not to flash that money, because 'flashing' is wasteful. Wasting money is a good way to not become rich.
What I was trying to get at in the post is that the rich are often more effective with their money than the poor. Think about two individuals, both making the same amount a year. One has 20k in investments, one has 20k in credit card debt. Both drive the same type of car, pay the same for their home, etc. The difference comes in that the one with the debt is going to be paying 4k a year in interest, while the one with investments is going to be making something like 2k. That's a 6k difference in annual spending power. And that adds up.
After all, you can make $50k a year and be rich, and somebody else can make $1M a year and be dead broke, declaring bankruptcy, etc...
You only tend to see the flamboyant rich, and those reaching above themselves. My parents are accountants. There are people out there living in 60k houses with over a million in investments. There are also people who make over $100k a year who live paycheck to paycheck.
I've seen this myself. The discworld novels points this out in some of the city guard novels.
The rich can live cheaper than the poor. Sure, their leather boots cost 10 times as much as the cheap ones with the cardboard soles, but the cheap boots on last a month, while the boots will last a lifetime, and likely be able to be passed down. Furniture and clothing the same way.
I've seen people who live well on pay that others are struggling to make ends meet on.
Rich money credit: Home loan (5-10%?) Middle class credit: Credit cards 10-20% Poor 'credit': Paycheck advances, pawn shops $$$
Just a comment: Guns with recognition technology have some serious problems. IE they fail to fire substantially more often than guns without the controls. A gun is very stressful on it's components. You have heat, shock, corrosive chemicals, etc... Firearms are only reliable because they're kept relativly simple and strong. Those controls are complicated and small, and thus tend to break.
As for the kid getting the gun, most police have special "retention holsters" just for this purpose. They have controls that keep the gun in the holster if the person trying to remove it doesn't know how. It's kinda like a puzzle box. You know how, it's easy to open. You don't and it can take hours.
I'm a gun owner. I didn't have a huge problem with the nipple incident. Most of my gun-owning friends didn't have a huge problem with the incident. Many of the people who did have a problem weren't gun owners.
Bible thumpers != Gunnies
My reaction was simply "that's in bad taste and inappropriate". Otherwise, I didn't really care.
Step 1: Buy some charcoal, sulfer, and Potassium nitrate. Step 2: Make gunpowder Step 3: Buy some lead fishing weights Step 4: Over an open fire, melt the weights and pour into your molds.
Black powder technology is well over 400 years old. Making a flintlock rifle or pistol is easy. With access to mercury fulminate, I can make primers. Heck, I can even make a high-powered air gun. Lewis & Clark had one that was every bit as powerfull as it's black powder brother.
I've made cartridges before, and with the correct equipment making a cartridge takes me less than 12 seconds each after setup. Equipment: Lee progressive press, die set for same. Quality control: Powder scale(any sub-gram accurate scale will do), calipers.
Sure, just about every family in the "bible belt", "flyover country" owns a firearm. But guess what, they also have a lower average murder rate than the Europeans. Heck, Washington DC has an almost complete ban on firearms and one of the highest murder rates in the USA. The cities have far higher murder rates, and they're the ones trying to ban guns.
Perhaps the kid wouldn't have shot the cops if he couldn't have got access to a Gun.
Sure, he might of stabbed them, blown them up, hit them in the head with a hammer. Heck, making a gun isn't that difficult. Those nasty criminals over in England and Australia still seem to be able to get them, when they aren't simply running around in gangs with blades and bludgeons targeting the weak (women, elderly, small men, those who are alone...)
Personal responsability includes suffering the consequences of your actions. Steal something? Expect to spend time in prison and be forced to pay restitution. Rape? Expect to spend a LONG time in the Iron Bar Hotel, if one of your intended victims doesn't take you out.
On the other side, Police can't be everywhere, and don't have any duty to protect you in particular, as they're there to protect the community as a whole, not you in particular. So you should learn to defend yourself. A firearm is known as the "great equalizer" for a reason. A grandmother with arthritis is far more even with a 300 pound linebacker type when firearms are involved. Do not mistake it as a magic solution, the good guy will still lose sometimes, it's simply the best option you have.
Freedom isn't free, nor is it safe. If you want to address these problems, try moving to Europe. I'll take freedom.
I agree with this. People make mistakes the first time they do anything. Will teenagers make mistakes? Sure, but you have to give them responsability sometime, if you push it off you'll simply have unreliable 25 year olds, versus unreliable 21 year olds, 18 year olds, 16 year olds, etc.
Let them make mistakes and suffer the consequences. It's the only way people can truly learn.
And just before I go into the bathroom to light my doobie I stash my card under a trash can or something. As far as the school's record is concerned, I just spent the last 10 minutes wandering the hallway.
one less gun in the schools There is no freedom to bring weapons into any public building anywhere in this country
I have a question about this. I am an adult with training and a Concealed Carry Permit. I am legally authorized to carry a firearm, concealed or not. In order to do so I had to pass a written and practical test and pass a background check. Should I be forced to disarm if I'm visiting a school? How about the local DMV? At least courts and police stations generally have armed officers in the room. I wouldn't carry if I'm expecting to drink, but many states place Bars off limits period. I should also note that on average, CCW permit holders have a lower arrest rate than police officers.
I would want to restate that a bit, as 'one less illegal gun in the schools'
Guess what, in the past there have been rifle & shotgun clubs in schools, high school students would bring their guns to school to go hunting or shooting after school, and there was a lack of school shootings back then. There have been a number of shootings prevented by administrators using a firearm. On the other hand, in other countries there have been people who go nuts and kill multiple people with knives. In japan, there was one incident where something like eight people were killed.
I think that the idea was that the elementary school was teaching kids was basic enough that you only needed one teacher for all subjects. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, the alphabet, and spelling are all very basic skills. Throw in some history and you were pretty much good in the old system. Now we have grade school kids learning algebra and trigonometry. Foreign languages are also taught more frequently. The most teachers I ever had during elementary school year besides substitutes was two. And it was also in the 80's. Different philosophies I guess. My teachers that early were qualified to teach all the subjects.
They WERE being forced to participate. They were required to haul the RFID chips around as part of their ID cards, at least at first.
It was supposed to be a great solution, but it turned out that the teens were: Destroying the chips, defrauding the system by leaving the card in the desk, with a friend, etc...
The school had already disabled the scanners above classroom doors and was not disciplining students who didn't wear the badges.
Fat lot of good they're going to do that way. Of course, unless the doors are locked w/o a RFID signal, or the chips are implanted, it's not going to work like the administrators hoped.
It was a horribly invasive non-solution to a problem. If I'm going to cause trouble (like vandalizing the bathroom), the first thing I'm going to do is dump the RFID. Kids are technically savant, often moreso than the teachers and administrators.
Right now it's expensive, because the requirements to contain are often ridiculous. If you held decommissioning even coal plants to the same safety standards, they'd be expensive too.
Generally speaking, decommissioning a nuclear plant in my world would usually be more a deactivation of that plant's power generation core, with a new plant built nearby so that the workforce and other facilities can still be reused. Yes, the pool and other stuff is still going to have to be contained and eventually removed, but with radioactive materials, time is on your side.
Most exercise bikes are already powered by a small generator. The only problem is that when you figure in transformation losses, irregularity, inefficiency from either a low-speed generator or gearing to hook up the low rpm (~60rpm) source to a higher speed higher efficiency generator, you can barely power a small light bulb. And that's from a fairly fit person. I've seen ones that use the generator (no battery or plug in) to power both the screen/programming interface and a small radio/mp3 player and headphones.
What WILL we do with all that delicious fresh radioactive waste? Pile it up out back?
Basically, yes. that's the best thing to do with fresh nuclear waste. You leave it on site until the radioactivity levels drop a bit. It's not like arsenic, it'll become less dangerous with time.
Nuclear Proponent's waste management: 1. Reduction: Newer plant designs are simpler, safer, and more fuel efficient. 2. Reuse: There are plant designs that can use current nuclear waste as fuel with minimal #3 3. Reprocess: Something like only 5% of the potential fuel is used in convential US reactors. After the waste has cooled down a bit, it's possible to reprocess the waste into more fuel. Waiting 40 or so years makes it substantially easier on the equipment. 4. Disposal: If you follow the first 3 steps, the remaining waste (reduced by a factor of 20-100!)is much more highly radioactive than what is currently being held in pools at power stations. This is actually a good thing, because the average halflife is months-years, not centuries. This means that if you keep 20 years of fuel (1 railcar is the average per year per power station right now, so it'd be 1 railcar's worth per 20 years) onsite, by the time you're looking to bury it in a yucca mountain it's down to something like 1% or less of it's original radioactivity. Also, it degrades much faster, so you only need a shelter that'll last centuries rather than eons.
Sure the waste needs to be addressed. But we can handle it now. We just need to work through some of the politics, as only for nuclear power is reprocessing, recycling, and reuse BAD.
I think that, designed right, they'd simply submerge when hit with a wave over their capacity. A Tsunami isn't really big until it gets closer to shore. They're talking about puttign these a couple kilometers out to sea.
That actually made me think of another question. Remember that these things are taking energy out of waves. A Tsunami is a huge wave. Can a massivly overbuilt set of these reduce the effect of a Tsunami, kinda like regenerative brakes or shock absorbers? Reducing the size of the wave even a few feet could make a huge difference, the wave that makes it through would be a bit slower, stop closer to the shore, etc...
Unless we're talking about burying the oxygen with the carbon, for any given amount of power, you're going to have the same amount of CO2 per unit of coal. Enviromental controls have cleaned up alot of the other contaminants, but CO2 is a given.
And nuclear doesn't produce CO2 (unless you count the oil products used in the trucks to get it to the plant). So, nuclear doesn't share all of the 'hidden' enviromental detriments
No matter what metal you're mining the tailings are nasty. Trick is, especially with uranium tailings is that we've started putting the stuff back into the mine before we seal it.
Actually you will never change from AC to DC. AC is the most effective way of moving electricity around the world. If you want to produce power, it will most likely be AC.
Honestly there would be no benefit in producing power on premise. You would still need to use transformers and everything else. Actually it would be more inefficient.
Lets not get into a tesla vs edison debate;p
Did I say anything about changing over to DC? Some power sources naturally produce AC, some produce DC. Notably, Solar produces DC. Generators can be designed either way.
Transmission efficiency of electricity is a factor of voltage. The more volts you have, the fewer amps, and the less lost to resistance for a given stretch of wire. Transformers are much more efficient at changing voltage than other systems, and they only work on AC. Transmitting as DC would be (slightly) more efficient, however your transformation costs kill you.
I'd pay to have some panels put up on some desert spot in Nevada before putting them on my house in North Dakota, for example.
Power on premise is good for two things: Remote areas where it'd cost more to run the wire there, and reliability for critical applications.
Solar heating can make sense, but that's a much simpler system to put together.
Politics often creates stupdity. Like the grandfathering of old plants so they don't have to meet pollution demands. Heck, the article seems to rant on old dirty coal plants more than nuclear plants. If it wasn't for the costs and unreliability of allowing construction to be halted by stupid things, and if we had a common sense approach to the waste, we would have more power provided by nuclear sources and could shut down those dirty coal plants.
Also, there are modern reactor designs that can enrich their own fuel. You can put straight refined(unenriched) uranium into it. It does require enriched when first started, but that's like starting a diesal engine. Those first few cycles are the most polluting.
The costs of building, maintaining and decommissioning nuclear power plants led to a revolt by large industrial customers against having to pay for nuclear power.
I don't remember that US nuclear plants are decommissioned very often. But yes, it would be nice to be able to first shut down the old dirty coal plants (replaced by new high-efficiency nuclear plants), then shut down our aging nuclear plants. It'd be really nice if we can take all the "waste" sitting in pools and the moment and put it in the new reactors as fuel.
I found the article interesting, but I wonder just how much the night/day power difference is. It does say that it produces the most power during the day. But it is also a pretty massive construction.
Been done many times actually, and been determined to be a bad idea:
1: You loose much of the savings due to the expense & pollution from the rocket fuel needed to get it up into orbit, then to retrograde the orbit on the solar scale to drop it into the sun. 2: Rockets explode fairly frequently, waste is radioactive. Any questions? 3: Technology is being developed that might just place that waste back into the "fuel" category, so we'd kinda like to keep it around.
So, since a coal plant releases more radioactive material than a nuclear plant produces, you'll tolerate the nuclear plant grinding up and releasing it's radioactive waste into the air, as long as it does it gradually?
Whoa, solar's cheap. I mean, it's averaging only 2.67 times as expensive as the average US electricity costs. At 12c/KWh, it's only 60% more expensive.
They still have a ways to go. They only way they're operating at a "sustainable profit" is due to subsidies, whether they be 'research' or 'congratulations for being green'.
Slashdot Mirror
I said CAN live cheaper, not that they necessarily actually do.
just to flash their money
The people who trash footwear and furniture while still good are wasteful, and tend to end up being not rich. Believe it or not, most people with lots of assets tend not to flash that money, because 'flashing' is wasteful. Wasting money is a good way to not become rich.
What I was trying to get at in the post is that the rich are often more effective with their money than the poor. Think about two individuals, both making the same amount a year. One has 20k in investments, one has 20k in credit card debt. Both drive the same type of car, pay the same for their home, etc. The difference comes in that the one with the debt is going to be paying 4k a year in interest, while the one with investments is going to be making something like 2k. That's a 6k difference in annual spending power. And that adds up.
After all, you can make $50k a year and be rich, and somebody else can make $1M a year and be dead broke, declaring bankruptcy, etc...
You only tend to see the flamboyant rich, and those reaching above themselves. My parents are accountants. There are people out there living in 60k houses with over a million in investments. There are also people who make over $100k a year who live paycheck to paycheck.
And you must be a left-wing socialist hippy.
I've seen this myself. The discworld novels points this out in some of the city guard novels.
The rich can live cheaper than the poor. Sure, their leather boots cost 10 times as much as the cheap ones with the cardboard soles, but the cheap boots on last a month, while the boots will last a lifetime, and likely be able to be passed down. Furniture and clothing the same way.
I've seen people who live well on pay that others are struggling to make ends meet on.
Rich money credit: Home loan (5-10%?)
Middle class credit: Credit cards 10-20%
Poor 'credit': Paycheck advances, pawn shops $$$
Just a comment: Guns with recognition technology have some serious problems. IE they fail to fire substantially more often than guns without the controls. A gun is very stressful on it's components. You have heat, shock, corrosive chemicals, etc... Firearms are only reliable because they're kept relativly simple and strong. Those controls are complicated and small, and thus tend to break.
As for the kid getting the gun, most police have special "retention holsters" just for this purpose. They have controls that keep the gun in the holster if the person trying to remove it doesn't know how. It's kinda like a puzzle box. You know how, it's easy to open. You don't and it can take hours.
I'm a gun owner. I didn't have a huge problem with the nipple incident. Most of my gun-owning friends didn't have a huge problem with the incident. Many of the people who did have a problem weren't gun owners.
Bible thumpers != Gunnies
My reaction was simply "that's in bad taste and inappropriate". Otherwise, I didn't really care.
Step 1: Buy some charcoal, sulfer, and Potassium nitrate.
Step 2: Make gunpowder
Step 3: Buy some lead fishing weights
Step 4: Over an open fire, melt the weights and pour into your molds.
Black powder technology is well over 400 years old. Making a flintlock rifle or pistol is easy. With access to mercury fulminate, I can make primers. Heck, I can even make a high-powered air gun. Lewis & Clark had one that was every bit as powerfull as it's black powder brother.
I've made cartridges before, and with the correct equipment making a cartridge takes me less than 12 seconds each after setup.
Equipment: Lee progressive press, die set for same.
Quality control: Powder scale(any sub-gram accurate scale will do), calipers.
Supplies: Powder, primers, cases, and bullets
The gun culture is not the problem.
Sure, just about every family in the "bible belt", "flyover country" owns a firearm. But guess what, they also have a lower average murder rate than the Europeans. Heck, Washington DC has an almost complete ban on firearms and one of the highest murder rates in the USA. The cities have far higher murder rates, and they're the ones trying to ban guns.
Perhaps the kid wouldn't have shot the cops if he couldn't have got access to a Gun.
Sure, he might of stabbed them, blown them up, hit them in the head with a hammer. Heck, making a gun isn't that difficult. Those nasty criminals over in England and Australia still seem to be able to get them, when they aren't simply running around in gangs with blades and bludgeons targeting the weak (women, elderly, small men, those who are alone...)
Personal responsability includes suffering the consequences of your actions. Steal something? Expect to spend time in prison and be forced to pay restitution. Rape? Expect to spend a LONG time in the Iron Bar Hotel, if one of your intended victims doesn't take you out.
On the other side, Police can't be everywhere, and don't have any duty to protect you in particular, as they're there to protect the community as a whole, not you in particular. So you should learn to defend yourself. A firearm is known as the "great equalizer" for a reason. A grandmother with arthritis is far more even with a 300 pound linebacker type when firearms are involved. Do not mistake it as a magic solution, the good guy will still lose sometimes, it's simply the best option you have.
Freedom isn't free, nor is it safe. If you want to address these problems, try moving to Europe. I'll take freedom.
Molon Labe
I agree with this. People make mistakes the first time they do anything. Will teenagers make mistakes? Sure, but you have to give them responsability sometime, if you push it off you'll simply have unreliable 25 year olds, versus unreliable 21 year olds, 18 year olds, 16 year olds, etc.
Let them make mistakes and suffer the consequences. It's the only way people can truly learn.
And just before I go into the bathroom to light my doobie I stash my card under a trash can or something. As far as the school's record is concerned, I just spent the last 10 minutes wandering the hallway.
one less gun in the schools
There is no freedom to bring weapons into any public building anywhere in this country
I have a question about this. I am an adult with training and a Concealed Carry Permit. I am legally authorized to carry a firearm, concealed or not. In order to do so I had to pass a written and practical test and pass a background check. Should I be forced to disarm if I'm visiting a school? How about the local DMV? At least courts and police stations generally have armed officers in the room. I wouldn't carry if I'm expecting to drink, but many states place Bars off limits period. I should also note that on average, CCW permit holders have a lower arrest rate than police officers.
I would want to restate that a bit, as 'one less illegal gun in the schools'
Guess what, in the past there have been rifle & shotgun clubs in schools, high school students would bring their guns to school to go hunting or shooting after school, and there was a lack of school shootings back then. There have been a number of shootings prevented by administrators using a firearm. On the other hand, in other countries there have been people who go nuts and kill multiple people with knives. In japan, there was one incident where something like eight people were killed.
children who are growing more and more apathetic about learning
I don't think that it's the children who're growing more apathetic, it's the PARENTS who are more apathetic.
Ouch on the student numbers, though that sounds like a pretty small school. If the problem was that bad they should have campaigned more.
I think that the idea was that the elementary school was teaching kids was basic enough that you only needed one teacher for all subjects. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, the alphabet, and spelling are all very basic skills. Throw in some history and you were pretty much good in the old system. Now we have grade school kids learning algebra and trigonometry. Foreign languages are also taught more frequently. The most teachers I ever had during elementary school year besides substitutes was two. And it was also in the 80's. Different philosophies I guess. My teachers that early were qualified to teach all the subjects.
They WERE being forced to participate. They were required to haul the RFID chips around as part of their ID cards, at least at first.
It was supposed to be a great solution, but it turned out that the teens were: Destroying the chips, defrauding the system by leaving the card in the desk, with a friend, etc...
The school had already disabled the scanners above classroom doors and was not disciplining students who didn't wear the badges.
Fat lot of good they're going to do that way. Of course, unless the doors are locked w/o a RFID signal, or the chips are implanted, it's not going to work like the administrators hoped.
It was a horribly invasive non-solution to a problem. If I'm going to cause trouble (like vandalizing the bathroom), the first thing I'm going to do is dump the RFID. Kids are technically savant, often moreso than the teachers and administrators.
If they're leaving unconsolidated debris and such open to water then they're screwing up the disposal.
And you're quoting for coal mines, which IMW would be shut down. Uranium mines are much smaller volume, and I believe generally deeper.
Right now it's expensive, because the requirements to contain are often ridiculous. If you held decommissioning even coal plants to the same safety standards, they'd be expensive too.
Generally speaking, decommissioning a nuclear plant in my world would usually be more a deactivation of that plant's power generation core, with a new plant built nearby so that the workforce and other facilities can still be reused. Yes, the pool and other stuff is still going to have to be contained and eventually removed, but with radioactive materials, time is on your side.
Most exercise bikes are already powered by a small generator. The only problem is that when you figure in transformation losses, irregularity, inefficiency from either a low-speed generator or gearing to hook up the low rpm (~60rpm) source to a higher speed higher efficiency generator, you can barely power a small light bulb. And that's from a fairly fit person. I've seen ones that use the generator (no battery or plug in) to power both the screen/programming interface and a small radio/mp3 player and headphones.
Um, I've mentioned the waste any number of times.
What WILL we do with all that delicious fresh radioactive waste? Pile it up out back?
Basically, yes. that's the best thing to do with fresh nuclear waste. You leave it on site until the radioactivity levels drop a bit. It's not like arsenic, it'll become less dangerous with time.
Nuclear Proponent's waste management:
1. Reduction: Newer plant designs are simpler, safer, and more fuel efficient.
2. Reuse: There are plant designs that can use current nuclear waste as fuel with minimal #3
3. Reprocess: Something like only 5% of the potential fuel is used in convential US reactors. After the waste has cooled down a bit, it's possible to reprocess the waste into more fuel. Waiting 40 or so years makes it substantially easier on the equipment.
4. Disposal: If you follow the first 3 steps, the remaining waste (reduced by a factor of 20-100!)is much more highly radioactive than what is currently being held in pools at power stations. This is actually a good thing, because the average halflife is months-years, not centuries. This means that if you keep 20 years of fuel (1 railcar is the average per year per power station right now, so it'd be 1 railcar's worth per 20 years) onsite, by the time you're looking to bury it in a yucca mountain it's down to something like 1% or less of it's original radioactivity. Also, it degrades much faster, so you only need a shelter that'll last centuries rather than eons.
Sure the waste needs to be addressed. But we can handle it now. We just need to work through some of the politics, as only for nuclear power is reprocessing, recycling, and reuse BAD.
I think that, designed right, they'd simply submerge when hit with a wave over their capacity. A Tsunami isn't really big until it gets closer to shore. They're talking about puttign these a couple kilometers out to sea.
That actually made me think of another question. Remember that these things are taking energy out of waves. A Tsunami is a huge wave. Can a massivly overbuilt set of these reduce the effect of a Tsunami, kinda like regenerative brakes or shock absorbers? Reducing the size of the wave even a few feet could make a huge difference, the wave that makes it through would be a bit slower, stop closer to the shore, etc...
progressive regulations on CO2
Unless we're talking about burying the oxygen with the carbon, for any given amount of power, you're going to have the same amount of CO2 per unit of coal. Enviromental controls have cleaned up alot of the other contaminants, but CO2 is a given.
And nuclear doesn't produce CO2 (unless you count the oil products used in the trucks to get it to the plant). So, nuclear doesn't share all of the 'hidden' enviromental detriments
No matter what metal you're mining the tailings are nasty. Trick is, especially with uranium tailings is that we've started putting the stuff back into the mine before we seal it.
Did I say anything about changing over to DC? Some power sources naturally produce AC, some produce DC. Notably, Solar produces DC. Generators can be designed either way.
Transmission efficiency of electricity is a factor of voltage. The more volts you have, the fewer amps, and the less lost to resistance for a given stretch of wire. Transformers are much more efficient at changing voltage than other systems, and they only work on AC. Transmitting as DC would be (slightly) more efficient, however your transformation costs kill you.
I'd pay to have some panels put up on some desert spot in Nevada before putting them on my house in North Dakota, for example.
Power on premise is good for two things:
Remote areas where it'd cost more to run the wire there, and reliability for critical applications.
Solar heating can make sense, but that's a much simpler system to put together.
Politics often creates stupdity. Like the grandfathering of old plants so they don't have to meet pollution demands. Heck, the article seems to rant on old dirty coal plants more than nuclear plants. If it wasn't for the costs and unreliability of allowing construction to be halted by stupid things, and if we had a common sense approach to the waste, we would have more power provided by nuclear sources and could shut down those dirty coal plants.
Also, there are modern reactor designs that can enrich their own fuel. You can put straight refined(unenriched) uranium into it. It does require enriched when first started, but that's like starting a diesal engine. Those first few cycles are the most polluting.
The costs of building, maintaining and decommissioning nuclear power plants led to a revolt by large industrial customers against having to pay for nuclear power.
I don't remember that US nuclear plants are decommissioned very often. But yes, it would be nice to be able to first shut down the old dirty coal plants (replaced by new high-efficiency nuclear plants), then shut down our aging nuclear plants. It'd be really nice if we can take all the "waste" sitting in pools and the moment and put it in the new reactors as fuel.
I found the article interesting, but I wonder just how much the night/day power difference is. It does say that it produces the most power during the day. But it is also a pretty massive construction.
Been done many times actually, and been determined to be a bad idea:
1: You loose much of the savings due to the expense & pollution from the rocket fuel needed to get it up into orbit, then to retrograde the orbit on the solar scale to drop it into the sun.
2: Rockets explode fairly frequently, waste is radioactive. Any questions?
3: Technology is being developed that might just place that waste back into the "fuel" category, so we'd kinda like to keep it around.
So, since a coal plant releases more radioactive material than a nuclear plant produces, you'll tolerate the nuclear plant grinding up and releasing it's radioactive waste into the air, as long as it does it gradually?
I think that he was worrying more about cloudy days, climate change, perpetual winter due to nuclear war/asteroid strike etc...
Whoa, solar's cheap. I mean, it's averaging only 2.67 times as expensive as the average US electricity costs. At 12c/KWh, it's only 60% more expensive.
They still have a ways to go. They only way they're operating at a "sustainable profit" is due to subsidies, whether they be 'research' or 'congratulations for being green'.