Just to clarify on the swearing, you can say damn and hell all you want.
But if you are telling someone to "get a damn clue" just because you feel threatened by their position, I can tell you right off that is insulting and makes me a lot less inclined to keep checking this thread.
I urge you to read the straightdope link I linked to a while ago.
Yes, we will need wind power. we will need solar. we will need nuclear. And it still will be (barely) enough.
People with your attitude are, essentially, saying "fuck you" to the rest of the world.
They are people who have the chilling idea that the solution is some malthusian nightmare rather than the stabilisation mentioned in that straightdope arrticle.
Enough with the swearing? In fact, it's pretty clear you're about as stuck in your knee-jerk reactions as you claim I am.
Let's set aside the legitimate uses for cesium 137 in technology and medicine, since they aren't really that large compared to production.
There are two problems with your simplistic analysis. First, is the fact that a lot of this waste has very low radioactivity levels. If the half-life is 30 years, and you store it for 100 years, and the radiation level was, oh... 100 microsieverts... In a hundred years the radioactivty of that material would be 10 microsieverts, and would really be a negligible risk. Keep it for another 100 years and you're left with something with a laughable amount of radioactivity.
At 300 years, it would no longer be stored.
And storing something for 300 years is quite safe. The Yucca mountain worry was for actual significant amounts of time, like geological ones.
And. Due to decay, it isn't like we keep accumulating it indefinitely. An equilibrium level is reached, depending on the amount produced, that would be 44 times the actual amount of waste created per year.
The other is the amounts. The US produces 67,500,000 curies a year of cs 137. That's 788kg. At current levels, the maximum we'll ever have to deal with, excluding tech and medical uses and any future reprocessing, is 35 tonnes. That's ~17 cubic metres, or a cube a little over 2½ metres per side. The *actual* yearly production, 1/44th of that, or a cube 39cm high, is even more laughable.
OMG. However will we deal with this scale of waste?
And that's from ALL the nuclear power plants in the US, research or power. (an eigth of that was the research reactors)
Those reactors produce 20% of the power in the US. Assuming a respectable 3 gigawatt hours per year per turbine, that would require 270,000 wind turbines to produce, assuming they could do so with that sort of reliability.
And as the fellow far up the thread now points out, that is not free. Even wind turbines produce waste, have environmental impacts and deaths in their maintenance and production.
And let's not forget that the more concentrated power of the power plant (especially micros!) can have negligible transmission costs. That's not enormous savings, but still, skipping 10% or so in losses for a micro is not to be scoffed at.
I'm aware of the risks with the reactors. That's on the wiki. Risks of higher temperatures and corrosion are manageable. It is a new technology. The benefits are huge and make it worth investing in if people didn't have a knee-jerk anti-nuclear reaction.
Similar to people being clueless about how pervasive low levels of radiation are in nature and how essentially harmless they are to us. Some people have this odd idea it is a linear scale down to lowest exposures in terms of risk. It isn't. Heck, at low levels, hormesis may kick in.
Concerns about being used for nuclear weapon production... Hell. The countries that want them are already doing that. They don't need a ridiculously expensive reactor to do so. Furthermore, we don't need many of these reactors. Have more common micro reactors providing power to each town, even 3rd world, buried, no maintenance, leave for 40 years, no transmission losses.
Then, after they burn their 1% of fuel, take what's left to the fewer more expensive plants to be reburnt, the remaining 98% that is useable.
"get a damn clue" is hardly you being accomodating.
And the materials you keep going on about have a very short halflife. Similar to the 1% waste from a breeder. Also a short halflife. Does not involve millenia and is a tiny amount of waste.
Breeders that burn 99% of their fuel and leave "waste" with a halflife of a few decades and have actual technical/medical uses.
Thorium reactors and other such breeders generate waste that rapidly decays dramatically slashing storage times.
And you are deliberately focusing on a small portion of the waste. The big concern for long-term storage is spent fuel, which was exactly what I meant by "not exactly waste" just like it is far from "spent".
I'm talking about burning 99% of the fuel instead of 1%.
One thing though is that calling it nuclear "waste" is a bit inaccurate. What makes it dangerous is all that energy still flying out of it for looong periods of time. Most of it is just nuclear power that it is not yet cost-effective to recover. But that doesn't mean storing it for millenia, but just until we get around to making plants that can use it.
And since this is related to Italy... Ok. Wind farm equivalent to a 1GW power plant is maybe 500 square kilometres.
Italy consumed 339 TWh in 2008 according to wikipedia. Most of it fossil and imported, 20% renewable.
40 1GW nuclear power plants could handle the entirety of that (or less if higher capacity ones were built). Presumably the wind land area (assuming it could be found) would be proportional, so 20,000 square km. That'd be 7% of their land area, assuming suitably productive locations could be found, and assuming their energy demands do not grow. Oh. And that's just electricity - nevermind fossil fuels burnt for other things that it would be nice to replace...
Eliminating nuclear as an option means importing nuclear from France if they can pay or else or imported fossil fuels.
Importing French nuclear is fine, but I think the end result will be a lot more fossil fuel consumption for Italy.
They aren't even close to handling it with renewables.
In an unrelated google hit on annual electricity consumption. "The Millstone Plant in CT has two active reactors (out of 3) In 2007, Unit 2 generated 7,686 GWh and Unit 3 generated 8,699 GWh. Three Mile Island in PA generated 6,645 GWh last year."
Soooo, half of that reactor's production could support the entire state. Equivalent wind power would take over like half the state land mass.
And again, reactors can produce far more. It is easy to talk about how small that single wind farm would be, but we use a *lot* of power. Wind will only provide a fraction of it. The straight dope link I think covers that pretty well.
As for stuff on birds, bats and weather, that was off of the wikipedia page on wind power.
Yes, the land is still usable, but there are limits on its uses. Can't build too high/close, you still have to have easy access to the turbines, and you don't want them too close to people's houses if a blade breaks loose.
The numbers of bats killed by existing onshore and near-shore facilities has troubled bat enthusiasts.[41] A study in 2004 estimated that over 2,200 bats were killed by 63 onshore turbines in just six weeks at two sites in the eastern U.S.
Actually, googling, I might be wildly optimistic. I quote random google result.
""Contemporary wind projects are typically rated at 25 to 100 MW. A 25 MW project might have 60 to 70 turbines covering 1500 acres," says The EPA . Really, that's a little over 4 MW of *average* power from a total of about 65 windmills. (This was typical of early California wind turbines.)
The 4 MW divided by 1500 acres is about 2.67 kW per acre. But an acre is 4047 square meters, so the power density works out to be about 0.7 watts per square meter. By comparison, direct sunlight averages 200 watts per square meter around the clock, around the year, around the US.
Scale that up to 1000 MW (more or less standard for a serious power plant) by multiplying the number of windmills by 250. That's over 16,000 windmills on about 375,000 acres (585 square miles). "
A typical nuclear power plant generates a gigawatt of *CONSTANT* power.
A 1.5 megawatt turbine (and keep in mind these things are gigantic) typically produces at around 20% of capacity, highly variable, but let's pretend we could store the power somehow or get enough of 'em to magically balance out.
That means you'd need like 3333 turbines to replace a consistent nuclear output with an inconsistent power source. Turbines that would need constant maintenance. And this is for a traditional 1 gig nuclear power plant, not one of the new designs, or larger ones.
How much land would that cover? About 77,000 acres, or 312 square kilometres. That's a square 18 kilometres on a side filled with them. Of course, wind power is not exactly environmentally neutral if you consider constructional, maintenance, and impact on bats, birds and weather patterns.
And keep in mind, we need a lot more than just 1 or 2.
Amen. When I first heard about this format I was excited. I thought finally we had a lossy image format that would have an alpha channel. I was shocked to discover this was not the case, that it was basically just a static frame of video, with nothing else.
It offers little to no advantage over JPEG.
I'm still bitter over JNG getting killed off. It is possible to hack around the lack of a good JNG using 2 JPEGs (one for the alpha) plus a bit of javascript and a , and this can even be styled in CSS with mozElement and the slightly less flexible webkit alternative. But I have to say, overall, I'm cheering for Microsoft's apparently open JPEG XR standard.
I'll agree that pascal course helped, but she only sent me there since she saw I was interested.
She wasn't about to just throw money away.
In short, while I made it through pascal - kinda hard for any kid, I could have also gotten by just w/ qbasic in DOS.
But. Yes, like any other carrier, there's luck and parental involvement as well as desire. No different than if I'd gotten to college interested in track or biology.
And again, if people don't have that desire, and they just took CS1 to get in it for the money, they probably won't have a fun time.
... and to anticipate, seeing this thread is basically going to the point of focusing on the 5% or so of society who can't afford a bike, yes, she probably paid for the $50 or so for that bike once upon a time. It wasn't new either.
Point being. You didn't have to be well off to learn to program, and that's even more so now, when computers cost about the same as a television, and exist in every library.
And yes, you can program on a library computer. They have javascript web browsers.
Ok. This is getting ridiculous, but fine. Local community college, one trailer. Half of the town was, including our house. Mom worked as a dental assistant, dad deceased.
And that wasn't the 80s. It was the 90s. DOS computers were relatively easy to acquire, although I did play around on the ancient computers at school, as well, writing programs on the tape drives.
Fact is, access to stuff that you can program with is probably one of the easiest of the sciences to get into. Especially today. Kids going into college these days were exposed to computing all their lives, and had access to programming environments on any computer with a web browser more sophisticated than the qbasic I played with.
We were far from wealthy. My mom just thought it was important enough to apply for. Helped that she was a friend of the instructor. As for the qbasic, all that required was access to a computer capable of running DOS. Even at the time that wasn't exactly a luxury.
And as for the *time* to write programs. Most kids have at least a little free time after their 12 hour day at the sweatshop or whatever to play around...
What's also funny is I remember discussing precisely this attack method a few weeks ago w/ webgl folks. Thought at the time it'd be a bit slower than the end result, in terms of image extraction.
Also joked about combining it with a webgl game to keep the user occupied, where their clicks on the "red ball" or "blue ball" would steal more pixels.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify on the swearing, you can say damn and hell all you want.
But if you are telling someone to "get a damn clue" just because you feel threatened by their position, I can tell you right off that is insulting and makes me a lot less inclined to keep checking this thread.
I urge you to read the straightdope link I linked to a while ago.
Yes, we will need wind power. we will need solar. we will need nuclear. And it still will be (barely) enough.
People with your attitude are, essentially, saying "fuck you" to the rest of the world.
They are people who have the chilling idea that the solution is some malthusian nightmare rather than the stabilisation mentioned in that straightdope arrticle.
Enough with the swearing? In fact, it's pretty clear you're about as stuck in your knee-jerk reactions as you claim I am.
Let's set aside the legitimate uses for cesium 137 in technology and medicine, since they aren't really that large compared to production.
There are two problems with your simplistic analysis.
First, is the fact that a lot of this waste has very low radioactivity levels. If the half-life is 30 years, and you store it for 100 years, and the radiation level was, oh... 100 microsieverts... In a hundred years the radioactivty of that material would be 10 microsieverts, and would really be a negligible risk. Keep it for another 100 years and you're left with something with a laughable amount of radioactivity.
At 300 years, it would no longer be stored.
And storing something for 300 years is quite safe. The Yucca mountain worry was for actual significant amounts of time, like geological ones.
And. Due to decay, it isn't like we keep accumulating it indefinitely. An equilibrium level is reached, depending on the amount produced, that would be 44 times the actual amount of waste created per year.
The other is the amounts.
The US produces 67,500,000 curies a year of cs 137. That's 788kg. At current levels, the maximum we'll ever have to deal with, excluding tech and medical uses and any future reprocessing, is 35 tonnes. That's ~17 cubic metres, or a cube a little over 2½ metres per side.
The *actual* yearly production, 1/44th of that, or a cube 39cm high, is even more laughable.
OMG. However will we deal with this scale of waste?
And that's from ALL the nuclear power plants in the US, research or power. (an eigth of that was the research reactors)
Those reactors produce 20% of the power in the US. Assuming a respectable 3 gigawatt hours per year per turbine, that would require 270,000 wind turbines to produce, assuming they could do so with that sort of reliability.
And as the fellow far up the thread now points out, that is not free. Even wind turbines produce waste, have environmental impacts and deaths in their maintenance and production.
And let's not forget that the more concentrated power of the power plant (especially micros!) can have negligible transmission costs. That's not enormous savings, but still, skipping 10% or so in losses for a micro is not to be scoffed at.
I'm aware of the risks with the reactors. That's on the wiki.
Risks of higher temperatures and corrosion are manageable. It is a new technology. The benefits are huge and make it worth investing in if people didn't have a knee-jerk anti-nuclear reaction.
Similar to people being clueless about how pervasive low levels of radiation are in nature and how essentially harmless they are to us. Some people have this odd idea it is a linear scale down to lowest exposures in terms of risk. It isn't. Heck, at low levels, hormesis may kick in.
Concerns about being used for nuclear weapon production... Hell. The countries that want them are already doing that. They don't need a ridiculously expensive reactor to do so. Furthermore, we don't need many of these reactors. Have more common micro reactors providing power to each town, even 3rd world, buried, no maintenance, leave for 40 years, no transmission losses.
Then, after they burn their 1% of fuel, take what's left to the fewer more expensive plants to be reburnt, the remaining 98% that is useable.
"get a damn clue" is hardly you being accomodating.
We have *some* operational. We can have more.
And the materials you keep going on about have a very short halflife.
Similar to the 1% waste from a breeder. Also a short halflife. Does not involve millenia and is a tiny amount of waste.
Breeders that burn 99% of their fuel and leave "waste" with a halflife of a few decades and have actual technical/medical uses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
active.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBTR
And as I said in initial post that you seem obsessed with to the point of being insulting.
I was talking about use of materials in a decade or two.
Your suggestion seems to be that since we don't have reactors that can use these materials *now* that we never will.
Thorium reactors and other such breeders generate waste that rapidly decays dramatically slashing storage times.
And you are deliberately focusing on a small portion of the waste. The big concern for long-term storage is spent fuel, which was exactly what I meant by "not exactly waste" just like it is far from "spent".
I'm talking about burning 99% of the fuel instead of 1%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
Nice. I learned quite a bit.
One thing though is that calling it nuclear "waste" is a bit inaccurate. What makes it dangerous is all that energy still flying out of it for looong periods of time.
Most of it is just nuclear power that it is not yet cost-effective to recover. But that doesn't mean storing it for millenia, but just until we get around to making plants that can use it.
And since this is related to Italy...
Ok. Wind farm equivalent to a 1GW power plant is maybe 500 square kilometres.
Italy consumed 339 TWh in 2008 according to wikipedia.
Most of it fossil and imported, 20% renewable.
40 1GW nuclear power plants could handle the entirety of that (or less if higher capacity ones were built).
Presumably the wind land area (assuming it could be found) would be proportional, so 20,000 square km.
That'd be 7% of their land area, assuming suitably productive locations could be found, and assuming their energy demands do not grow.
Oh. And that's just electricity - nevermind fossil fuels burnt for other things that it would be nice to replace...
Eliminating nuclear as an option means importing nuclear from France if they can pay or else or imported fossil fuels.
Importing French nuclear is fine, but I think the end result will be a lot more fossil fuel consumption for Italy.
They aren't even close to handling it with renewables.
Dunno, hit this while googling. Seems pretty dramatic.
http://www.cleanenergyinsight.org/energy-insights/what-does-renewable-energy-look-like/
In an unrelated google hit on annual electricity consumption.
"The Millstone Plant in CT has two active reactors (out of 3) In 2007, Unit 2 generated 7,686 GWh and Unit 3 generated 8,699 GWh. Three Mile Island in PA generated 6,645 GWh last year."
Another hit says Rhode Island the actual state consumed, coincidentally, about that much (7.7 gwh) in 2005
http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/states/electricity.cfm/state=RI
Soooo, half of that reactor's production could support the entire state. Equivalent wind power would take over like half the state land mass.
And again, reactors can produce far more.
It is easy to talk about how small that single wind farm would be, but we use a *lot* of power. Wind will only provide a fraction of it.
The straight dope link I think covers that pretty well.
As for stuff on birds, bats and weather, that was off of the wikipedia page on wind power.
Yes, the land is still usable, but there are limits on its uses. Can't build too high/close, you still have to have easy access to the turbines, and you don't want them too close to people's houses if a blade breaks loose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#Bats
The numbers of bats killed by existing onshore and near-shore facilities has troubled bat enthusiasts.[41] A study in 2004 estimated that over 2,200 bats were killed by 63 onshore turbines in just six weeks at two sites in the eastern U.S.
Another place lists 6 1.5 megawatt turbines on a square kilometre. So that would be 556 square kilometres.
Actually, googling, I might be wildly optimistic. I quote random google result.
""Contemporary wind projects are typically rated at 25 to 100 MW. A 25 MW project might have 60 to 70 turbines covering 1500 acres," says The EPA . Really, that's a little over 4 MW of *average* power from a total of about 65 windmills. (This was typical of early California wind turbines.)
The 4 MW divided by 1500 acres is about 2.67 kW per acre. But an acre is 4047 square meters, so the power density works out to be about 0.7 watts per square meter. By comparison, direct sunlight averages 200 watts per square meter around the clock, around the year, around the US.
Scale that up to 1000 MW (more or less standard for a serious power plant) by multiplying the number of windmills by 250. That's over 16,000 windmills on about 375,000 acres (585 square miles). "
That has me underestimating by a factor of 5.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3000/followup-why-dont-we-ditch-nukes-em-and-em-coal
Also, some back of envelope calculations.
A typical nuclear power plant generates a gigawatt of *CONSTANT* power.
A 1.5 megawatt turbine (and keep in mind these things are gigantic) typically produces at around 20% of capacity, highly variable, but let's pretend we could store the power somehow or get enough of 'em to magically balance out.
That means you'd need like 3333 turbines to replace a consistent nuclear output with an inconsistent power source. Turbines that would need constant maintenance. And this is for a traditional 1 gig nuclear power plant, not one of the new designs, or larger ones.
How much land would that cover? About 77,000 acres, or 312 square kilometres. That's a square 18 kilometres on a side filled with them. Of course, wind power is not exactly environmentally neutral if you consider constructional, maintenance, and impact on bats, birds and weather patterns.
And keep in mind, we need a lot more than just 1 or 2.
He could be referring to an increase in game prices over time, due to inflation.
But that is hardly Gamestop taking a hit, since pre-orders are basically interest-free loans.
Dammit, I don't post here enough to remember that plain old text does not escape tags. that should have been
"plus a bit of javascript and a <canvas>"
Amen. When I first heard about this format I was excited. I thought finally we had a lossy image format that would have an alpha channel. I was shocked to discover this was not the case, that it was basically just a static frame of video, with nothing else.
It offers little to no advantage over JPEG.
I'm still bitter over JNG getting killed off. It is possible to hack around the lack of a good JNG using 2 JPEGs (one for the alpha) plus a bit of javascript and a , and this can even be styled in CSS with mozElement and the slightly less flexible webkit alternative. But I have to say, overall, I'm cheering for Microsoft's apparently open JPEG XR standard.
Never thought I'd be saying *that* :)
I'll agree that pascal course helped, but she only sent me there since she saw I was interested.
She wasn't about to just throw money away.
In short, while I made it through pascal - kinda hard for any kid, I could have also gotten by just w/ qbasic in DOS.
But. Yes, like any other carrier, there's luck and parental involvement as well as desire. No different than if I'd gotten to college interested in track or biology.
And again, if people don't have that desire, and they just took CS1 to get in it for the money, they probably won't have a fun time.
... and to anticipate, seeing this thread is basically going to the point of focusing on the 5% or so of society who can't afford a bike, yes, she probably paid for the $50 or so for that bike once upon a time. It wasn't new either.
Point being. You didn't have to be well off to learn to program, and that's even more so now, when computers cost about the same as a television, and exist in every library.
And yes, you can program on a library computer. They have javascript web browsers.
Didn't pay for my transportation, I biked.
1 class at local college, if she paid for it, would have been a large part of her budget.
And no, the computer was not expensive.
We weren't dirt poor, but we were not middle-class.
Ok. This is getting ridiculous, but fine. Local community college, one trailer. Half of the town was, including our house. Mom worked as a dental assistant, dad deceased.
And that wasn't the 80s. It was the 90s. DOS computers were relatively easy to acquire, although I did play around on the ancient computers at school, as well, writing programs on the tape drives.
Fact is, access to stuff that you can program with is probably one of the easiest of the sciences to get into. Especially today. Kids going into college these days were exposed to computing all their lives, and had access to programming environments on any computer with a web browser more sophisticated than the qbasic I played with.
We were far from wealthy. My mom just thought it was important enough to apply for. Helped that she was a friend of the instructor. As for the qbasic, all that required was access to a computer capable of running DOS. Even at the time that wasn't exactly a luxury.
And as for the *time* to write programs. Most kids have at least a little free time after their 12 hour day at the sweatshop or whatever to play around...
I started at age 11, mom sent me to local community college to learn pascal. Also wrote a lot of qbasic programs on my own before/after.
Where there's a will...
What's also funny is I remember discussing precisely this attack method a few weeks ago w/ webgl folks.
Thought at the time it'd be a bit slower than the end result, in terms of image extraction.
Also joked about combining it with a webgl game to keep the user occupied, where their clicks on the "red ball" or "blue ball"
would steal more pixels.
Speed up the attack while keeping them occupied.
Which they had already written for WebGL.
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/content/canvas/src/WebGLContextUtils.cpp#101
At least then users have to click ok before trusting a site, in a similar fashion to location data.
And hopefully that check will be strongly worded.
Personally, I'm glad I run NoScript