Re:Plug-in Prius? Probably not an option
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If I drive to work and back and that doesn't drain the batteries fully, but I plug them in and recharge them to full, I'm still avoiding having to use fuel.
If you have a 1 KWH battery pack and the vehicle charge controller keeps it up to 80% charge, you can only put 200 WH into it before it's full again. If the car uses 250 WH/mile, that energy will only push you 0.8 miles. If you can only get 0.8 electric miles out of a 20-mile commute, you'll only save 4% of an already-small fuel consumption.
To make a serious difference you need a bigger battery and the ability to use its capacity to get to the next charging point. This is feasible but not yet done.
But what about, you know, the PRICE?
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The Solectria Sunrise car had a range of in excess of 350 miles at 55mph using NiMH batteries in *1997*....
Lithium ion batteries are available now and lithium sulphur batteries will be available in the near future with better characteristics still.
No, the problem is not the technology. It's with mass production.
We could mass-produce such vehicles 2 years from now, but the batteries wouldn't be much cheaper than they are today. Right now, that is the biggest stumbling block to widespread adoption - if batteries were free, we would all be able to walk into dealerships and buy something like tzeros and go smoke Corvettes.
Hybrids need smaller batteries than pure electric vehicles, so they offer one technology for putting electric propulsion out there without taking the full cost hit of a battery pack sufficient for complete propulsion. Volume production of hybrids would also push the advances in battery technology.
I'm just a bit skeptical
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The 2004 Prius is EPA rated at 60 MPG city, but the EPA rating system is notoriously fallible even for conventional vehicles. Without knowing how this 66 MPG value was measured I would not be willing to take it any more seriously.
That said, it would be a terrific achievement if it could be turned into a product. It would be doubly terrific if the car could run its first 10-20 miles of each trip on electricity; for typical local use, the average MPG could hit 3 digits.
Plug-in Prius? Probably not an option
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The problem I can see is that you can only charge the battery back up to full, so to use meaningful amounts of grid power you'd have to run the battery down just as you get to a charging spot. So far as I know, there are no hybrids on the market which give you any control over charge management.
The skinny about the military
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Unfortunately, the Energy Information Agency does not break out the military, or even the government, as a separate sector. However, if you compare the number and size of the ships of the Navy, vehicles of the Army, etc. to the number in the private sector, I'll bet that you'll find that the consumption they require is relatively small.
The Navy has an oil reserve in Alaska. We don't need it yet, and nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines never will.
Last, there's a lot of room to increase the efficiency of the military. There was talk about a hybrid HMMV replacement several years ago, with stealthiness (low thermal and audio signature) being a military advantage at least as great as the need for 50% less fuel. Hyperbar diesels could replace gas turbines in an M1A1 replacement, with probably a similar improvement. We could power ships with powdered coal if we wanted to, at some cost in range. I have not had the opportunity to study the issue in depth, but it doesn't look terribly difficult to me. The one intractable use is for aircraft fuel, but if you can divert large amounts from the land and sea to the airborne users it shouldn't be that big of a deal; a barrel is a barrel is a barrel no matter where you save it.
It's worse than that
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· Score: 5, Interesting
A number of refineries have been closed recently as a consequence of oil company mergers making them "redundant" or "uneconomic". What this appears to mean is that the oil companies found excuses to close older refineries on various grounds and eliminate nearly all excess production capacity. Demand for gasoline being as inelastic as it is over the short term, the artificial creation of relatively small shortages has led to large increases in price.
What this probably means is that we screwed up when the mergers were allowed. Then again, we also screwed up 25-odd years ago when we used the half-assed measure of CAFE regulations instead of just taxing fuel. We screwed up again when we allowed the California Air Resources Board to try to mandate use of ZEVs (in practice, battery-only electric cars) before the battery technology was remotely ready rather than far more achievable HEVs. If 30% of all new vehicles sold in California since 1990 had been hybrids, we'd be way beyond Toyota and Honda technologically and the reduced fuel demand would have eliminated the refinery capacity squeeze too.
Right now we need to aim at plug-in hybrids, so that our cars aren't totally dependent on petroleum for energy. Even if they didn't get radically better mileage than current vehicles, the flexibility in energy supply would add elasticity to fuel demand and moderate prices.
2) I never used the label "pro nuke" with all that implies..., and I certainly never said that people who dismissed claims of nuclear power not being safe were "exclusively" nuclear professionals. I did write that the ones I have met ( as in met in real life ) over the last 20 years have almost always been nuclear professionals. That is not the same as "exclusive".
Pardon me for drawing that conclusion from what you said:
The only people I have met in the last 20 years who have been very enthusiastic about nuclear power are people who have studied nuclear engineering and who have had their career opportunities curtailed by the anti-nuke movement.
And I further note that you restricted your use of "enthusiast" to those same professionals. You can't accuse me of taking you other than at face value.
Who made what claims about which situations? You haven't given me enough information to look up even one situation so I can't give you an opinion about your grievances.
Which situation: The transport of spent nuclear fuel to a central storage repository. This was characterized as a "Mobile Chernobyl" by a broad cross-section of the anti-nuclear lobby.
Who made the claim: A broad cross-section of the anti-nuclear lobby, at least twogroups of which are on the first page of Google results for the search phrase "mobile chernobyl".
What claim was made: that there was significant danger of any radioactive release, let alone a catastrophic one. I quote the NIRS:
Some people say that it is not accurate to use the name Chernobyl since the waste in the container is not the same as an actively fissioning (splitting atoms) reactor. In fact, much care has to be taken to prevent nuclear waste from "going critical" and resuming the nuclear fission reaction. While it is possible to do this, the task is monumental. This is because each and every fuel rod is different. A reactor core is like an oven of sorts - more fission in the middle, less around the edges. Thus, each rod has a unique profile because of its position while it was in the reactor core. This results in variation in how much uranium and plutonium is present that could "go critical."
Therefore the problem of preventing criticality in a nuclear shipping cask, or a repository cask, for that matter, is one of bookkeeping. Each has to be 100% within the margin to prevent critical mass. As everyone knows, bookkeeping is subject to human error. What will be the margin of error on loading more than 10,000 containers of this deadly waste?
These are carefully crafted, expert-sounding lies. It's so wrong it's hard to figure out where to begin:
In the reactor, the chain reaction can be stopped by the insertion of a few neutron-absorbing control rods which take up a small amount of the cross-section... and that is when it is bathed in a moderator which promotes the reaction. The only care that has to be taken to prevent a chain reaction within the shipping cask is to ship it in volumes much smaller than a full core-load and away from any moderator. Guess what, this is how it's packaged. If the cask should fall into water and spring a leak, the amount of fuel would still be sub-critical.
The task is not monumental, it's trivial.
It's impossible to be outside the margin of error when your packaging only allows you to get to some small fraction of a critical mass and the fuel cannot go critical without a moderator anyway.
Addition of "poisons" such as cadmium or boron would prevent any reaction from starting even if the shipment casks
Let me get this straight. You claimed that you sided with the anti side because the pro side was composed exclusively of people with personal interests in the issue. I showed you that the stereotype did not hold, and you came up with a host of other objections. Are you really being honest here?
Maybe I mentioned it in a reply to someone else, but I try to take the opinions of enthusiasts with a grain of salt.
I'm not an enthusiast, I'm a realist. Here are some of my reasons for believing that nuclear is better (for the industrial democracies) than the major alternative for electric generation, which is coal:
It emits less radioactive material than the tramp uranium, thorium, radium, radon and polonium found in coal and released by combustion.
It emits no acid-rain forming gases at all.
It emits no smog-forming gases at all.
It emits no greenhouse gases at all.
The volume of waste produced is so small that we can afford to use extraordinary means to isolate it from the environment for aeons, unlike the lead, mercury and other toxic materials in coal ash.
"anti-nukes mindlessly opposing everything that the industry tried to do"
IMHO such types of generalizations are less effective for convincing people of your views.
The question comes to mind that if all of the important nuances of an issue are painted over with such a broad brush by this person then how much attention to the important details of the issue did this person look at in forming their opinion?
It is exactly that painting - by the opposition - that forced me to the conclusion that the anti-nukes were largely ignorant and/or dishonest advocates of a bankrupt position. Take the opposition to a central nuclear waste repository in the USA. It is based on the claim (unproven) that there will be detrimental health effects on generations far in the future (100,000 or more years) if they drink the groundwater in the region very close to the repository, and that transporting the waste is too dangerous. Yet they disingenuously claim that leaving the waste where it is, in dry-cask storage, is also too dangerous! There is no consideration of what is better, they just oppose everything.
Regarding the scare claims about the dangers of transportation, the antis raise images of a cask falling off a bridge (they've been drop-tested), being caught in a fire (they have been fire-tested), or being blasted by terrorists with anti-tank weaponry. The claim is that this last could lead to "a Chernobyl", when they know full well that cold ceramic fuel could never behave the way the hot RMBK core did. The worst that could happen is that a few radioactive particles escape from the damaged cask and are found by crews using scintillation counters and cleaned up.
Their last and biggest scare tactic is that "reactors make plutonium, which makes BOMBS!" Never mind that bomb-grade plutonium is a very different isotopic mix from what you get out of a power reactor, and that nobody (not even Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein) was dumb enough to try to reprocess LWR fuel for its plutonium for military purposes; to the political action types who are trying to sway the opinion of an ignorant public, it is all the same stuff. (Note that if it were even remotely feasible to use spent PWR fuel to make bombs, the proliferators would not bother using dedicated reactors, gas centrifuges or other suspicious methods instead. The fact that regimes which are trying to keep their efforts hidden do not even try to use that "stealth" source of plutonium says a lot about how good the stuff is for making bombs; it is no good at all.)
Such statements also come off as the emotional reactions of a crank.
I've got facts to back up my opinions, and data from the real world enemies of anti-proliferation to support me. Yet the anti-nukes persist with their anti-factual claims. Am I justified in calling them liars, or are they just stupid?
On the highway, a Hybrid engine is just a low-powered gasoline engine...
No they aren't. Hybrids typically use Atkinson-cycle engines, which use valve timing tricks to achieve an expansion ratio greater than their compression ratio. This reduces peak power (you cannot pull in as much mixture) but it recovers energy which is lost to the exhaust in the Otto cycle in addition to reducing the pumping losses caused by throttling a larger engine.
I've never studied nuclear engineering and I have no employment, investment or familial connections to the industry. I still think that nuclear power, managed correctly, can be used safely. My conclusion was shaped in no small part by the anti-nukes mindlessly opposing everything that the industry tried to do, right down to creating a safe disposal site for existing spent fuel as already provided for by law and paid for by the nuclear power industry!
I have also read estimates that the US may have 500 years worth of nuclear fuel.
Nuclear power usage hasn't been that much so far.
Before I would answer your last question I would want to read studies about what would happen if you had MANY of these kinds of plants operating for YEARS AND YEARS doing what you described to a large degree.
As others have correctly pointed out there is a price for everything.
Fine, let's put a number on it.
The USA currently has roughly 900,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity. Let's assume for the sake of argument that we will use this amount of power 24/7/365 and that it's 100% nuclear. The electric consumption is thus ~330 million megawatt-days per year, or ~8 billion megawatt-hours per year. (This is about 2 times 2002 US consumption of 3.858 billion MWH, so it's fine for this analysis.)
Next, let's assume that this energy is generated using HTGRs which operate at 40% thermal efficiency and that they can get 50,000 megawatt-days of heat out of a ton of uranium. This is 20,000 megawatt-days of electricity per ton, so the annual uranium consumption would be 3.3e8/2e4 = 16,500 tons per year. Do this for 500 years, and you'd have 8.25 million tons of spent fuel.
If you assume that the spent fuel winds up in a form which has a bulk density of 2.75 g/cc (slightly less than the average for surface rocks, and a figure that I picked for convenience in calculating) the total volume would be 3 million cubic meters. This would fill a rectangle a mere 500 meters square by 12 meters high - FOR 500 YEARS OF ENERGY PRODUCTION. And by the time the last of it was produced, the first of it would be safe to hold in your hand for hours at a time.
Is it any wonder that I think the whole radwaste problem has been shamelessly overhyped by the political left?
Don't forget that the cows also drink water, and the feed may be dry grains and hay pellets. The dry weight of the manure will be less than the dry weight of the feed, but the total weight could easily reflect 50% water content.
Instead of trying to power the whole house, power something smaller. How's a gas-fired porch light for an idea? Or a continuous flame below the water heater. (Don't do this indoors.)
If you only feed toilet waste (no soap suds etc.) to the digester, you won't have problems on that account. And who knows; if you develop a system that is simple, reliable and inexpensive, you might find it being adopted wholesale to offset domestic energy use and take some of the load off of sewage treatment plants by reducing their burden of organic goo and its biological oxygen demand.
Burning the gas just to make heat is inefficient; it greatly increases entropy without obtaining any useful result from the process. Much more efficient would be to burn the gas in an engine (like the dairy farmers), use the power produced to offset the requirements of the treatment plant's pumps and such, and then use the waste heat from the engine to heat the digestion tanks and buildings.
This pays off quite a bit. If the engine is 25% efficient (and the digesters produce at least 33% more gas than heating demands require), the engine's output fully displaces electricity produced from other sources. If that electricity would otherwise come from coal, the engine could prevent the emission of more fossil carbon than the carbon in the gas burned by the engine; to the extent that the carbon in the sewage stream is biogenic rather than fossil, this is a win/win/win.
I mean, would there be anyone willing to fight a war over shit? No, and you wouldn't have to, it's everywhere. No more fighting between nations over energy infrastructure. This is the kind of solution even the third world can afford to maintain.
Your conclusion would only be true if there was sufficient manure to satisfy everyone's energy requirements. As the supply is very insufficient even at current levels of energy usage, your conclusion is false; any need for energy beyond domestic supplies is still a possible source of conflict.
To truly "fix the problem" in that fashion you're going to have to supply not just the 110 megawatts that California's dairy farms can crank out, but the 40,000 megawatts that the entire state consumes. Then you're going to have to address the consumption for transportation, typically drawn from petroleum rather than electricity. This is a problem of a wholly different magnitude and quality, so if you want to make a contribution you need to get an appreciation of what you're dealing with. This means both supplies and consumption.
Yes, but a pebble-bed generates it all inside the multiply-ceramic-coated pebbles. Being ceramic, these pebbles will not corrode like metal cladding (graphite is good for tens of millions of years) and can be disposed of directly.
For really good disposal, contract with Canada to do deep-rock burial in the Canadian Shield. Take a load of almost-spent pebbles while they're still hot, put them in a pointy casing of something like tungsten filled with molten lead (for heat transfer), place against the rock and let go. If it's generating enough heat it will start melting its way downward and will not stop until its heat is depleted - weeks to years. The melted rock will flow around behind it and then solidify, sealing it in place.
Is burial several miles inside unfaulted billion-year-old granite sufficiently safe to satisfy you?
Now if we could just get the prices down for the equipment it takes to use alternative sources....
There's a limit to how far you can go with this. Full exploitation will bring economies of scale in the production of equipment and let you run down the experience curve, but with any diffuse energy source you are going to need substantially more equipment to gather and use it than you would with more concentrated energy sources. Barring some technological breakthrough which only applies to the "alternative" sources, you're always going to be at a cost disadvantage.
You can make up for this with the difference between wholesale and retail (avoided) cost and other things, though. The analysis isn't trivial.
Think of the grass that has to grow and the nutrients placed into the soil, then what your body can't use is the crap. When it gets down to it... we would probably save money, and resources just growing tress on that land and burning those(skip the cow).
Your logic assumes that the trees are equally efficient in converting sunlight, water etc. to combustible biomass as grass is. Given that the candidates for biomass crops for feeding powerplants are typically not trees but grasses such as switchgrass, I strongly suspect that you are wrong there.
Replacing the cow might have its features, though. The cow is actually the indirect consumer of grass; the grass is first consumed by bacteria which convert its cellulose and other things to simpler carbohydrates and proteins (like growing mushrooms on straw) and then the cow digests the results. There isn't anything standing in the way of us growing such bacteria in vats rather than in cows and then feeding the results to e.g. fish, getting closer to the 2:1 feed/meat ratio than the cow's 8:1.
We haven't improved the overall efficency of wing design for some time. (That's why a 1967 Cessna 172 and a 2003 Cessna 172 have nearly identical wings.) This may change that.
I'd put that down to the requirements for FAA type certification rather than limits of knowledge or design. You can buy all kinds of flap- and aileron-gap seals and other cleanup hardware for Cessnas, but you can't get them installed at the factory. If the company doesn't find those relatively simple additions worthy of inclusion in the aircraft as shipped, why would they redesign the wing and have to go through all the required testing and paperwork?
If Cessna really wanted to clean up their aerodynamics, they would have gone where the Stallion went. Looks like a Skylane, but goes one heck of a lot faster.
I look forward to experimenters trying to apply the knowledge learned from the whale investigators, though. If drag can be reduced by 8%, it means several percent less fuel required to cover the same distance (induced drag would not be reduced, only parasite drag).
Most Cessnas are rivetted together, and already have bumpy wings....
What this says to me is that Ford may have had it more right than he knew, with the Trimotor. (The Trimotor's skins were corrugated with the ribs running parallel to the airflow.)
As whales move through the water, the tubercles disrupt the line of pressure against the leading edge of the flippers. The row of tubercles sheers the flow of water and redirects it into the scalloped valley between each tubercle, causing swirling vortices that roll up and over the flipper to actually enhance lift properties.
"The swirling vortices inject momentum into the flow," said Howle. "This injection of momentum keeps the flow attached to the upper surface of the wing and delays stall to higher wind angles."
This has been known to aerodynamicists for some time; there are vortex generators on many aircraft, including on the vertical stabilizers of many Cessnas (to improve the ability to resist turning forces during engine-out operations), on the leading edges of wings (to improve the attachment of airflow over the wings at high angles of attack and thereby increase the control effectiveness of the ailerons behind them), on the insides of the fan shrouds on the Boeing 757, and in other places.
This is not to say that this research doesn't show us anything we didn't already know, but it isn't exactly a huge revelation either.
What do you think ? When an island-nation in the pacific which pollutes very little still disappears under the waves because other, far richer nations pollute enormously much more, are they then "unproductive rent-seekers" when they consider it fair that those responsible for the damage also cough up to cover it ? That's a fairly common principle in law...
Nope, they're victims of a tort. The common-law concept of torts is sufficient to give the victims grounds to sue for damages, such as money to buy land somewhere else. Or precipitate limestone from the ocean to build up their atolls faster than the water is rising. Or whatever they feel like doing.
What it does not entitle them to is a global taxation regime devoted to international transfers of wealth under an unelected, unaccountable and all but certainly corrupt controlling bureaucracy. You know, like Oil-For-Food?
It does not change the fact that when certain countries pollute much more than what is sustainable, it degrades a shared resource.
Morally, this requires everyone to take similar measures to either avoid or ameliorate the harm. It does not imply that international welfare payments are even remotely justifiable as a response.
You knew (or had very very strong indications) that acting in a certain way would a) give yourself increased profits and b) cause damage to the property of others. You do it anyway, collect the profits, and see the damage happen. Is it fair that the hurt ones claim *anything* from you ?
That's not the situation. The situation is that we've been basing a growing world economy on fossil fuels since the 19th century, and on petroleum since the 1920's. We've put huge amounts of investment into infrastructure based on this, but it wasn't until the 80's or so that we became aware of the possibility of climate change as a consequence and not until a few years ago that we actually had unambiguous data to back up the theory.
I certainly think we ought to do something about it, but it's not an excuse to indulge the global welfare state / global bureacracy wet dreams of the eurosocialists and America's academic left.
This guy already covered a lot of the territory I'm about to go through, so read his post first for background.
Divide this amount equally between all countries according to population. (ok, I'm willing to consider the possibility that there should be sligth changes to this basic idea, for example somewhat higher quotas to people in colder climates to compensate for needed heating.)
Your proposal would have all kinds of undesirable (and even evil) consequences.
It encourages third-world governments to increase their populations so they can get more carbon-tax money.
Kleptocrats and other oppressive governments would have a strong incentive to make fuels expensive and collect a double bonus: tax money from their own populations, and emissions-credit money from the industrial countries. This becomes just one more avenue for rent-seeking rather than productive enterprise. Would you really want your money going to Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong Il or the erstwhile dictators of South Africa?
It frustrates the solution of the problem by creating false distinctions regarding the place where greenhouse gases are emitted. This creates an incentive to move production to places with the best balance rather than to where emissions can be controlled the best.
Fortunately, this proposal is what we call a "non-starter".
If an American factory can produce $1000 in value if allowed to pollute 10 tonnes extra CO2, while a chinese powerplant produces only $100 in value for the same pollution, then it'd be better for the chinese to sell that quota to USA for for example $200.
You're casting this in moral terms. What is the moral case for paying the oppressive government of China (or Zimbabwe) for not doing something that they shouldn't be doing anyway because they're less efficient than someone else? What is the moral case for paying a government to engineer a depression that "just happens to" depress greenhouse-gas emissions?
It'd be more *fair* there's no ethical reasons, other than essentially "because we're the bosses" why we western people have the rigth to claim the large majority of the atmospheres potential for absorbing pollution as "ours".
The problem is one of your own creation; you made a sellable "property right" ex nihilo, and then complained because its use wasn't distributed "fairly". This problem disappears if you stop thinking of the issue as common property, and just treat it as a global tax regime with all monies managed on a national basis but the tax rate set by agreement. You would still need some global management (for instance, to insure that the sellers of carbon-sinking services account for their "production" and don't sell more goods than they've actually created), but all of the incentives for rent-seeking and national impovershment disappear.
That is probably why proposals for tradeable credits and payments to less-emitting nations are being favored in the debates with the chattering classes. People whose lives are based on rent-seeking and other unproductive behaviors will jump at the chance to improve their business opportunities, even if it does nothing (or less than nothing) for the welfare of most of people in the world.
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To make a serious difference you need a bigger battery and the ability to use its capacity to get to the next charging point. This is feasible but not yet done.
Hybrids need smaller batteries than pure electric vehicles, so they offer one technology for putting electric propulsion out there without taking the full cost hit of a battery pack sufficient for complete propulsion. Volume production of hybrids would also push the advances in battery technology.
That said, it would be a terrific achievement if it could be turned into a product. It would be doubly terrific if the car could run its first 10-20 miles of each trip on electricity; for typical local use, the average MPG could hit 3 digits.
The problem I can see is that you can only charge the battery back up to full, so to use meaningful amounts of grid power you'd have to run the battery down just as you get to a charging spot. So far as I know, there are no hybrids on the market which give you any control over charge management.
The Navy has an oil reserve in Alaska. We don't need it yet, and nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines never will.
Last, there's a lot of room to increase the efficiency of the military. There was talk about a hybrid HMMV replacement several years ago, with stealthiness (low thermal and audio signature) being a military advantage at least as great as the need for 50% less fuel. Hyperbar diesels could replace gas turbines in an M1A1 replacement, with probably a similar improvement. We could power ships with powdered coal if we wanted to, at some cost in range. I have not had the opportunity to study the issue in depth, but it doesn't look terribly difficult to me. The one intractable use is for aircraft fuel, but if you can divert large amounts from the land and sea to the airborne users it shouldn't be that big of a deal; a barrel is a barrel is a barrel no matter where you save it.
Took the words right out of my, er, fingers.
What this probably means is that we screwed up when the mergers were allowed. Then again, we also screwed up 25-odd years ago when we used the half-assed measure of CAFE regulations instead of just taxing fuel. We screwed up again when we allowed the California Air Resources Board to try to mandate use of ZEVs (in practice, battery-only electric cars) before the battery technology was remotely ready rather than far more achievable HEVs. If 30% of all new vehicles sold in California since 1990 had been hybrids, we'd be way beyond Toyota and Honda technologically and the reduced fuel demand would have eliminated the refinery capacity squeeze too.
Right now we need to aim at plug-in hybrids, so that our cars aren't totally dependent on petroleum for energy. Even if they didn't get radically better mileage than current vehicles, the flexibility in energy supply would add elasticity to fuel demand and moderate prices.
Pardon me for drawing that conclusion from what you said:
And I further note that you restricted your use of "enthusiast" to those same professionals. You can't accuse me of taking you other than at face value.
Which situation: The transport of spent nuclear fuel to a central storage repository. This was characterized as a "Mobile Chernobyl" by a broad cross-section of the anti-nuclear lobby.
Who made the claim: A broad cross-section of the anti-nuclear lobby, at least two groups of which are on the first page of Google results for the search phrase "mobile chernobyl".
What claim was made: that there was significant danger of any radioactive release, let alone a catastrophic one. I quote the NIRS:
These are carefully crafted, expert-sounding lies. It's so wrong it's hard to figure out where to begin:
- It emits less radioactive material than the tramp uranium, thorium, radium, radon and polonium found in coal and released by combustion.
- It emits no acid-rain forming gases at all.
- It emits no smog-forming gases at all.
- It emits no greenhouse gases at all.
- The volume of waste produced is so small that we can afford to use extraordinary means to isolate it from the environment for aeons, unlike the lead, mercury and other toxic materials in coal ash.
It is exactly that painting - by the opposition - that forced me to the conclusion that the anti-nukes were largely ignorant and/or dishonest advocates of a bankrupt position. Take the opposition to a central nuclear waste repository in the USA. It is based on the claim (unproven) that there will be detrimental health effects on generations far in the future (100,000 or more years) if they drink the groundwater in the region very close to the repository, and that transporting the waste is too dangerous. Yet they disingenuously claim that leaving the waste where it is, in dry-cask storage, is also too dangerous! There is no consideration of what is better, they just oppose everything.Regarding the scare claims about the dangers of transportation, the antis raise images of a cask falling off a bridge (they've been drop-tested), being caught in a fire (they have been fire-tested), or being blasted by terrorists with anti-tank weaponry. The claim is that this last could lead to "a Chernobyl", when they know full well that cold ceramic fuel could never behave the way the hot RMBK core did. The worst that could happen is that a few radioactive particles escape from the damaged cask and are found by crews using scintillation counters and cleaned up.
Their last and biggest scare tactic is that "reactors make plutonium, which makes BOMBS!" Never mind that bomb-grade plutonium is a very different isotopic mix from what you get out of a power reactor, and that nobody (not even Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein) was dumb enough to try to reprocess LWR fuel for its plutonium for military purposes; to the political action types who are trying to sway the opinion of an ignorant public, it is all the same stuff. (Note that if it were even remotely feasible to use spent PWR fuel to make bombs, the proliferators would not bother using dedicated reactors, gas centrifuges or other suspicious methods instead. The fact that regimes which are trying to keep their efforts hidden do not even try to use that "stealth" source of plutonium says a lot about how good the stuff is for making bombs; it is no good at all.)
I've got facts to back up my opinions, and data from the real world enemies of anti-proliferation to support me. Yet the anti-nukes persist with their anti-factual claims. Am I justified in calling them liars, or are they just stupid?I've never studied nuclear engineering and I have no employment, investment or familial connections to the industry. I still think that nuclear power, managed correctly, can be used safely. My conclusion was shaped in no small part by the anti-nukes mindlessly opposing everything that the industry tried to do, right down to creating a safe disposal site for existing spent fuel as already provided for by law and paid for by the nuclear power industry!
The USA currently has roughly 900,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity. Let's assume for the sake of argument that we will use this amount of power 24/7/365 and that it's 100% nuclear. The electric consumption is thus ~330 million megawatt-days per year, or ~8 billion megawatt-hours per year. (This is about 2 times 2002 US consumption of 3.858 billion MWH, so it's fine for this analysis.)
Next, let's assume that this energy is generated using HTGRs which operate at 40% thermal efficiency and that they can get 50,000 megawatt-days of heat out of a ton of uranium. This is 20,000 megawatt-days of electricity per ton, so the annual uranium consumption would be 3.3e8/2e4 = 16,500 tons per year. Do this for 500 years, and you'd have 8.25 million tons of spent fuel.
If you assume that the spent fuel winds up in a form which has a bulk density of 2.75 g/cc (slightly less than the average for surface rocks, and a figure that I picked for convenience in calculating) the total volume would be 3 million cubic meters. This would fill a rectangle a mere 500 meters square by 12 meters high - FOR 500 YEARS OF ENERGY PRODUCTION. And by the time the last of it was produced, the first of it would be safe to hold in your hand for hours at a time.
Is it any wonder that I think the whole radwaste problem has been shamelessly overhyped by the political left?
Don't forget that the cows also drink water, and the feed may be dry grains and hay pellets. The dry weight of the manure will be less than the dry weight of the feed, but the total weight could easily reflect 50% water content.
If you only feed toilet waste (no soap suds etc.) to the digester, you won't have problems on that account. And who knows; if you develop a system that is simple, reliable and inexpensive, you might find it being adopted wholesale to offset domestic energy use and take some of the load off of sewage treatment plants by reducing their burden of organic goo and its biological oxygen demand.
This pays off quite a bit. If the engine is 25% efficient (and the digesters produce at least 33% more gas than heating demands require), the engine's output fully displaces electricity produced from other sources. If that electricity would otherwise come from coal, the engine could prevent the emission of more fossil carbon than the carbon in the gas burned by the engine; to the extent that the carbon in the sewage stream is biogenic rather than fossil, this is a win/win/win.
To truly "fix the problem" in that fashion you're going to have to supply not just the 110 megawatts that California's dairy farms can crank out, but the 40,000 megawatts that the entire state consumes. Then you're going to have to address the consumption for transportation, typically drawn from petroleum rather than electricity. This is a problem of a wholly different magnitude and quality, so if you want to make a contribution you need to get an appreciation of what you're dealing with. This means both supplies and consumption.
For really good disposal, contract with Canada to do deep-rock burial in the Canadian Shield. Take a load of almost-spent pebbles while they're still hot, put them in a pointy casing of something like tungsten filled with molten lead (for heat transfer), place against the rock and let go. If it's generating enough heat it will start melting its way downward and will not stop until its heat is depleted - weeks to years. The melted rock will flow around behind it and then solidify, sealing it in place.
Is burial several miles inside unfaulted billion-year-old granite sufficiently safe to satisfy you?
You can make up for this with the difference between wholesale and retail (avoided) cost and other things, though. The analysis isn't trivial.
Replacing the cow might have its features, though. The cow is actually the indirect consumer of grass; the grass is first consumed by bacteria which convert its cellulose and other things to simpler carbohydrates and proteins (like growing mushrooms on straw) and then the cow digests the results. There isn't anything standing in the way of us growing such bacteria in vats rather than in cows and then feeding the results to e.g. fish, getting closer to the 2:1 feed/meat ratio than the cow's 8:1.
You got it backwards.
If Cessna really wanted to clean up their aerodynamics, they would have gone where the Stallion went. Looks like a Skylane, but goes one heck of a lot faster.
I look forward to experimenters trying to apply the knowledge learned from the whale investigators, though. If drag can be reduced by 8%, it means several percent less fuel required to cover the same distance (induced drag would not be reduced, only parasite drag).
What this says to me is that Ford may have had it more right than he knew, with the Trimotor. (The Trimotor's skins were corrugated with the ribs running parallel to the airflow.)
This is not to say that this research doesn't show us anything we didn't already know, but it isn't exactly a huge revelation either.
What it does not entitle them to is a global taxation regime devoted to international transfers of wealth under an unelected, unaccountable and all but certainly corrupt controlling bureaucracy. You know, like Oil-For-Food?
Morally, this requires everyone to take similar measures to either avoid or ameliorate the harm. It does not imply that international welfare payments are even remotely justifiable as a response. That's not the situation. The situation is that we've been basing a growing world economy on fossil fuels since the 19th century, and on petroleum since the 1920's. We've put huge amounts of investment into infrastructure based on this, but it wasn't until the 80's or so that we became aware of the possibility of climate change as a consequence and not until a few years ago that we actually had unambiguous data to back up the theory.I certainly think we ought to do something about it, but it's not an excuse to indulge the global welfare state / global bureacracy wet dreams of the eurosocialists and America's academic left.
- It encourages third-world governments to increase their populations so they can get more carbon-tax money.
- Kleptocrats and other oppressive governments would have a strong incentive to make fuels expensive and collect a double bonus: tax money from their own populations, and emissions-credit money from the industrial countries. This becomes just one more avenue for rent-seeking rather than productive enterprise. Would you really want your money going to Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong Il or the erstwhile dictators of South Africa?
- It frustrates the solution of the problem by creating false distinctions regarding the place where greenhouse gases are emitted. This creates an incentive to move production to places with the best balance rather than to where emissions can be controlled the best.
Fortunately, this proposal is what we call a "non-starter". You're casting this in moral terms. What is the moral case for paying the oppressive government of China (or Zimbabwe) for not doing something that they shouldn't be doing anyway because they're less efficient than someone else? What is the moral case for paying a government to engineer a depression that "just happens to" depress greenhouse-gas emissions? The problem is one of your own creation; you made a sellable "property right" ex nihilo, and then complained because its use wasn't distributed "fairly". This problem disappears if you stop thinking of the issue as common property, and just treat it as a global tax regime with all monies managed on a national basis but the tax rate set by agreement. You would still need some global management (for instance, to insure that the sellers of carbon-sinking services account for their "production" and don't sell more goods than they've actually created), but all of the incentives for rent-seeking and national impovershment disappear.That is probably why proposals for tradeable credits and payments to less-emitting nations are being favored in the debates with the chattering classes. People whose lives are based on rent-seeking and other unproductive behaviors will jump at the chance to improve their business opportunities, even if it does nothing (or less than nothing) for the welfare of most of people in the world.