It just so happens that if you manage to invest your money at a 1% annual interest rate above inflation, $30k are worth $38.5k, but you'll likely get offers at 2% (worth $49k after 25y) or 3% (worth $62k after 25y) per annum. Oh, and did I mention that you neglected losses due to inflation? Sure, US inflation will probably be very low (about 1%) in the coming decades, but it's still a lot over a quarter century.
It shouldn't be a surprise that prospects darken for those corporations.
Solar power just isn't viable without energy storage on a large scale. Without that, it only works as a supplement to a reliable power supply that has already been established, shaving a few percent off the fuel usage before causing serious trouble. (On the order of 3-5%, at which point it makes up some 30-50% of peak power demand.)
See, that's the problem with propaganda those guys put out. The area of the solar cells is 500,000m^2, but the area occupied by the solar power plant is four times as big.
Have a look at this picture, the tsunami didn't reach beyond the reactors on the left side of the picture, there is no damage there. And that's exactly where you would put additional emergency generators. Getting power to where it was needed would have been much easier, had generators been on site.
In any case, safety depends on implementing all measures necessary. Sufficient emergency generators are just one of several missing measures.
The tsunami height was not easily predictable. Yes, Tepco was warned in February, that heights could reach 10.5m or so, but the actual height was on the order of 14.5m. The reason that the height wasn't predicted was that geologists were quite sure that the fault line in the area simply could not store that much energy and that at least two wave-fronts merged before hitting land.
Please, bear in mind that it was just about 40 ago that the idea that plate tectonics are the principle cause of earthquakes gained currency among scientists. Knowledge in that area is far from perfect, surprises do happen in such fields.
Which is the spot with the highest value they could find in the whole area. Had they moved the counter just 20cm above the ground at this place, the value would be much lower. That's exactly what television crews do all the time. It is in no way representative of what you receive in real live. Your hand would receive 6.4 micro sieverts per hour, if you put it there. If you put your head at this place with your right ear on the ground, your right ear would receive 6.4 micro sievert and your left ear perhaps 2 or 3. That's because radiation rapidly falls off with distance.
I have no idea what the actual value is, as such propaganda videos never show the values at a distance to the spot. Had this been about an actual representation of the radiation level you receive by being in the area, then they would have shown values in other places as well, and at about 1m above the ground. Because most of the time we're not lying on the ground motionless for 12 or more hours a day after having carefully picked out the one spot with the highest radiation.
My point is that it is staggering how many people don't grasp the magnitude of what JAPAN was put through.
It is just as staggering how many people don't care about the non-existence of vital, standard safety measures Fukushima Daiichi. Such as a sufficient number of emergency generators distributed over the site to prevent common cause failure. (Instead of having just 13 for 6 reactors, seven of which standing right next to each other along the sea shore with a safety distance of, oh, 25cm or so between each other.) Or catalytic converters to prevent hydrogen from reaching explosive concentrations (which took hours in all cases, as predicted in simulations 30 years ago) and filtered containment vents that can filter out 99.99% of the Cs-137 and 99% of elemental I-131. Most of the rest was contained by the containment, as it should.
This needs to change, not just in Japan, but everywhere where safety measures are not up to date.
In fact, most of the evacuation area (the southern and eastern part) is barely contaminated, it should have long been opened up again. On the other hand, there is an area to the northeast of the plant, outside of the evacuation area, that is contaminated by fallout and should have been declared an evacuation zone. On the whole, a realistic evaluation would yield a much smaller area than the 940 km^2.
Of course, such subtleties escape the so-called environmentalists. (As does the fact that paving an area of 940km^2 with photovoltaics would yield no more energy than a 3.5GW power plant (ignoring all energy-storage issues) and turn it into something with a striking resemblance to Coruscant.)
Meanwhile, half a million people are homeless, about twenty thousand are dead. And all everybody cares to talk about is that some nuclear reactors weren't safe enough (through neglect of safety updates during the last three decades) to withstand a tsunami. If you criticize TEPCO for neglecting tsunami protection, why don't you criticize the whole Japanese government for neglecting tsunami protection along all of the coast?
You mean like the swamps and moors that Europe was covered with until a few hundred years ago? There was a lot of work involved in draining and removing them in order to create fertile land.
Also, is your argument really so weak that you have to resort to such stupid subterfuges as comparing the extent of permafrost today with the extent of glaciers during the ice-age in order to come up with some comparison that you thought you could bend to your purpose?
And you're telling me to get a clue? You guys make me sick.
There was no dramatic shift that led to complete melting of all permafrost and a global warming 5K above today's levels, as the climate-apocalypse-runaway-chain-reaction is supposed to do. The increase in methane was a result, not the cause of he warming. Correlation does not imply causation.
By what reasoning should there not have been methane in the permafrost at the end of the ice age? Neither physics nor chemistry changed in the meantime, and biology didn't in a way meaningful to this question.
If methane was a serious problem, the must have been a huge one at the end of the last ice age, when there was a lot more permafrost thawing up and releasing methane than there is even in existence today. Alas, it wasn't.
If methane was the harbinger of a climate apocalypse, the apocalypse should have happened long ago.
How are they raising kids these days in the USA? Perpetually strapped into a car seat? I don't see any other way in which you could prevent them from "maiming" themselves with such murderous toys as those. I mean, they could get the hang of climbing stairs!!!11!!11!eleven
Seriously, 10m is a lot smaller than the state of the art in regular comm-sats. TerreStar-1 has an 18m dish. Yes, it's large but massive isn't exactly the right expression.
The ultimate question for all reactors is what they leave behind.
They can't help leaving behind fission products (that's where they get their energy from), which isn't too much of a problem, as it takes only about 300 years for them to decay to levels of radiotoxicity of natural uranium in equilibrium with its decay products.They will leave behind some Uranium, but this can still be used in other reactors.
The problem is mainly residual Plutonium, Americium and other elements, with half-lives of several thousand or tens of thousands of years, which require hundreds of thousands of years to decay to such levels. (Because of the very damaging high energy alpha decay, rather than lower energy and much less damaging beta and gamma decays.)
On the one hand non-fissle transuranic elements capture neutrons and interfere with the chain reaction, on the other hand capturing neutrons either splits them or eventually transmutes them into fissle elements. This turns them into fission products, which we can handle with reasonable confidence. The question now is: does the travelling wave in the travelling wave reactor provide enough neutrons to transmute and split the transuranic elements it breeds, such that the reactor as a whole reaches a stable equilibrium before the end of its operating time? Conventional reactors don't, because the chain reaction is stopped for lack of neutrons long before a stable equilibrium is achieved. Most breeder reactors do, but it depends a lot on how tight the neutron economy of the particular reactor is. And afaik (correct me if you know better or have access to specifications), the neutron economy of the travelling wave reactor is rather tight and might well be possible, that the wave leaves ever more transuranics in its wake as it moves, without ever reaching an equilibrium over the whole of the reactor.
Why is reaching a stable equilibrium before the end of operation enough? In this case you can add some additional transuranics at the start of operation and still reach the same equilibrium at the end of operation. If the amount you can add at the start (and still reach equilibrium) is larger than the amount left at the end of operation, you effectively reduced the total amount. Given that, you effectively solved the long-term problem of transuranic waste, by limiting its amount and eventually burning it.
The question is, can the travelling wave reactor do that or not? (There are other options ex post, but it is always best to not let the problem exist in the first place rather than dealing with it later.)
The problem is that there are very defined standard precautions in driving a car, but for firing a cannon those are at least a lot less well defined. As we're talking about the USA, it really only depends on whether or not somebody is hell-bent on suing them or not. And the likely answer is the former rather than the latter.
But it is impossible to prevent the Pu-239 from being further transmuted into (non-fissle) Pu-240 (or fissioned) before a sufficient amount of Pu-238 has been turned into Pu-239 to get the weapon-grade Plutonium (IIRC with at least 93% Pu-239)
What's worse: 3.8kg of Pu-238 in the ocean or 4.5 billion tons of Uranium, several million tons of Radium, Lead-210 and further decay products already there?
Just let the dollar depreciate to a fair value (meaning: a lot) and the US industry will be competitive in no time. You would have to pay a lot more for your oil and Chinese consumer products though. When all the other countries have artificially depressed currencies, you should start to wonder about yourself. You know, just as you should when all the other jerks are driving on the wrong side of the road.
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It just so happens that if you manage to invest your money at a 1% annual interest rate above inflation, $30k are worth $38.5k, but you'll likely get offers at 2% (worth $49k after 25y) or 3% (worth $62k after 25y) per annum. Oh, and did I mention that you neglected losses due to inflation? Sure, US inflation will probably be very low (about 1%) in the coming decades, but it's still a lot over a quarter century.
It shouldn't be a surprise that prospects darken for those corporations.
Solar power just isn't viable without energy storage on a large scale. Without that, it only works as a supplement to a reliable power supply that has already been established, shaving a few percent off the fuel usage before causing serious trouble. (On the order of 3-5%, at which point it makes up some 30-50% of peak power demand.)
Sea Shepherd is not a conservation group, it's a group of terrorists attacking people on sea. Means are not justified by the ends.
As well as lots of other species. No fuss about those.
Why is it that those guys still act like it's 1968? We have different problems these days!
See, that's the problem with propaganda those guys put out. The area of the solar cells is 500,000m^2, but the area occupied by the solar power plant is four times as big.
Have a look at this picture, the tsunami didn't reach beyond the reactors on the left side of the picture, there is no damage there. And that's exactly where you would put additional emergency generators. Getting power to where it was needed would have been much easier, had generators been on site.
In any case, safety depends on implementing all measures necessary. Sufficient emergency generators are just one of several missing measures.
The tsunami height was not easily predictable. Yes, Tepco was warned in February, that heights could reach 10.5m or so, but the actual height was on the order of 14.5m. The reason that the height wasn't predicted was that geologists were quite sure that the fault line in the area simply could not store that much energy and that at least two wave-fronts merged before hitting land.
Please, bear in mind that it was just about 40 ago that the idea that plate tectonics are the principle cause of earthquakes gained currency among scientists. Knowledge in that area is far from perfect, surprises do happen in such fields.
Which is the spot with the highest value they could find in the whole area. Had they moved the counter just 20cm above the ground at this place, the value would be much lower. That's exactly what television crews do all the time. It is in no way representative of what you receive in real live. Your hand would receive 6.4 micro sieverts per hour, if you put it there. If you put your head at this place with your right ear on the ground, your right ear would receive 6.4 micro sievert and your left ear perhaps 2 or 3. That's because radiation rapidly falls off with distance.
I have no idea what the actual value is, as such propaganda videos never show the values at a distance to the spot. Had this been about an actual representation of the radiation level you receive by being in the area, then they would have shown values in other places as well, and at about 1m above the ground. Because most of the time we're not lying on the ground motionless for 12 or more hours a day after having carefully picked out the one spot with the highest radiation.
Nope.
My point is that it is staggering how many people don't grasp the magnitude of what JAPAN was put through.
It is just as staggering how many people don't care about the non-existence of vital, standard safety measures Fukushima Daiichi. Such as a sufficient number of emergency generators distributed over the site to prevent common cause failure. (Instead of having just 13 for 6 reactors, seven of which standing right next to each other along the sea shore with a safety distance of, oh, 25cm or so between each other.) Or catalytic converters to prevent hydrogen from reaching explosive concentrations (which took hours in all cases, as predicted in simulations 30 years ago) and filtered containment vents that can filter out 99.99% of the Cs-137 and 99% of elemental I-131. Most of the rest was contained by the containment, as it should.
This needs to change, not just in Japan, but everywhere where safety measures are not up to date.
In fact, most of the evacuation area (the southern and eastern part) is barely contaminated, it should have long been opened up again. On the other hand, there is an area to the northeast of the plant, outside of the evacuation area, that is contaminated by fallout and should have been declared an evacuation zone. On the whole, a realistic evaluation would yield a much smaller area than the 940 km^2.
Of course, such subtleties escape the so-called environmentalists. (As does the fact that paving an area of 940km^2 with photovoltaics would yield no more energy than a 3.5GW power plant (ignoring all energy-storage issues) and turn it into something with a striking resemblance to Coruscant.)
Meanwhile, half a million people are homeless, about twenty thousand are dead. And all everybody cares to talk about is that some nuclear reactors weren't safe enough (through neglect of safety updates during the last three decades) to withstand a tsunami. If you criticize TEPCO for neglecting tsunami protection, why don't you criticize the whole Japanese government for neglecting tsunami protection along all of the coast?
You mean like the swamps and moors that Europe was covered with until a few hundred years ago? There was a lot of work involved in draining and removing them in order to create fertile land.
Also, is your argument really so weak that you have to resort to such stupid subterfuges as comparing the extent of permafrost today with the extent of glaciers during the ice-age in order to come up with some comparison that you thought you could bend to your purpose?
And you're telling me to get a clue? You guys make me sick.
There was no dramatic shift that led to complete melting of all permafrost and a global warming 5K above today's levels, as the climate-apocalypse-runaway-chain-reaction is supposed to do. The increase in methane was a result, not the cause of he warming. Correlation does not imply causation.
By what reasoning should there not have been methane in the permafrost at the end of the ice age? Neither physics nor chemistry changed in the meantime, and biology didn't in a way meaningful to this question.
If methane was a serious problem, the must have been a huge one at the end of the last ice age, when there was a lot more permafrost thawing up and releasing methane than there is even in existence today. Alas, it wasn't.
If methane was the harbinger of a climate apocalypse, the apocalypse should have happened long ago.
This presumes that the car seat is in a car. Which I didn't.
Erm, are you serious?
How are they raising kids these days in the USA? Perpetually strapped into a car seat? I don't see any other way in which you could prevent them from "maiming" themselves with such murderous toys as those. I mean, they could get the hang of climbing stairs!!!11!!11!eleven
Seriously, 10m is a lot smaller than the state of the art in regular comm-sats. TerreStar-1 has an 18m dish. Yes, it's large but massive isn't exactly the right expression.
Rebuild everything as they did in the richest country on earth in New Orleans?
The ultimate question for all reactors is what they leave behind.
They can't help leaving behind fission products (that's where they get their energy from), which isn't too much of a problem, as it takes only about 300 years for them to decay to levels of radiotoxicity of natural uranium in equilibrium with its decay products.They will leave behind some Uranium, but this can still be used in other reactors.
The problem is mainly residual Plutonium, Americium and other elements, with half-lives of several thousand or tens of thousands of years, which require hundreds of thousands of years to decay to such levels. (Because of the very damaging high energy alpha decay, rather than lower energy and much less damaging beta and gamma decays.)
On the one hand non-fissle transuranic elements capture neutrons and interfere with the chain reaction, on the other hand capturing neutrons either splits them or eventually transmutes them into fissle elements. This turns them into fission products, which we can handle with reasonable confidence. The question now is: does the travelling wave in the travelling wave reactor provide enough neutrons to transmute and split the transuranic elements it breeds, such that the reactor as a whole reaches a stable equilibrium before the end of its operating time? Conventional reactors don't, because the chain reaction is stopped for lack of neutrons long before a stable equilibrium is achieved. Most breeder reactors do, but it depends a lot on how tight the neutron economy of the particular reactor is. And afaik (correct me if you know better or have access to specifications), the neutron economy of the travelling wave reactor is rather tight and might well be possible, that the wave leaves ever more transuranics in its wake as it moves, without ever reaching an equilibrium over the whole of the reactor.
Why is reaching a stable equilibrium before the end of operation enough? In this case you can add some additional transuranics at the start of operation and still reach the same equilibrium at the end of operation. If the amount you can add at the start (and still reach equilibrium) is larger than the amount left at the end of operation, you effectively reduced the total amount. Given that, you effectively solved the long-term problem of transuranic waste, by limiting its amount and eventually burning it.
The question is, can the travelling wave reactor do that or not? (There are other options ex post, but it is always best to not let the problem exist in the first place rather than dealing with it later.)
The problem is that there are very defined standard precautions in driving a car, but for firing a cannon those are at least a lot less well defined. As we're talking about the USA, it really only depends on whether or not somebody is hell-bent on suing them or not. And the likely answer is the former rather than the latter.
But it is impossible to prevent the Pu-239 from being further transmuted into (non-fissle) Pu-240 (or fissioned) before a sufficient amount of Pu-238 has been turned into Pu-239 to get the weapon-grade Plutonium (IIRC with at least 93% Pu-239)
No. You're looking at Pu-238 not Pu-239.
What's worse: 3.8kg of Pu-238 in the ocean or 4.5 billion tons of Uranium, several million tons of Radium, Lead-210 and further decay products already there?
Just let the dollar depreciate to a fair value (meaning: a lot) and the US industry will be competitive in no time. You would have to pay a lot more for your oil and Chinese consumer products though. When all the other countries have artificially depressed currencies, you should start to wonder about yourself. You know, just as you should when all the other jerks are driving on the wrong side of the road.
If 1kg of Thorium or Uranium cost as much as a house - $300.000 - the material cost would still only add $0.03 per kWh of electricity.