Petroleum isn't really burned in main-line plants. It comes into play in the smaller peaking plants that are generally only brought online to deal with maximum loads on the grid. They frequently take the form of gas-turbine engines burning diesel.
What about the huge piles of toxic and somewhat radioactive U-238 that you get at the end?
It's a commercial substance. Depleted uranium is routinely used as counterweight for aircraft control surfaces.
The 'huge piles' won't be any worse of a problem than the huge piles of toxic heavy metals and other contaminants that are scrubbed out of the emissions from coal plants. Nobody ever seems to bring that up.
Because it's fucking hard. There's a big test reactor that's going to be built in France, and that's *still* not going to get us to commercial fusion power, simply because of the material issues involved. In DT fusion, *every single atom* in your reactor vessel is going to be displaced by flying neutrons *hundreds* of times over the life of the reactor, and that does really bad things to all known materials. Right now, we don't even have adequate neutron sources in order to begin exploring that regime; there's also supposed to be another research facility dedicated to that purpse, tagging along with the reactor in France, but it's not even on the drawing board yet.
There are aneutronic schemes, but those seem to be impossble to actually generate net energy from, because the hot fuel loses too much energy to Brehmstrahllung losses.
Fusion is very very difficult.
I generally class problems into three categories: theoretical, materials, and engineering. The theoretical problems are killers: "We don't know if this is even *possible." The materials ones *can* be killers: "We know how do to this, but we don't know how to make it, and the stuff we need to make it may be unobtainable." Engineering ones are ones that can be cured by throwing enough money and time at them, like the Manhattan project: we knew a bomb was theoretically possible, we knew how to make the materials, we just had to crank a lot of numbers and actually build the fabrication infrastructure and the device itself.
Fusion is *all three*. I find it entirely plausible that we'll never develop commercial fusion power, bootstrapping right from mass nuclear fission to solar collection satellites. There's certainly enough fissile fuel around to keep us going until we can build large-scale orbital structures.
How much nuclear fuel is on earth. If we replaced all the fossil fuels we use, with nuclear fuel, how long would our supplies last?
There's about 50 years of uranium reserves right now, a bit over 2 million tons.
Reserves are ores that are economically exploitable. In other words, reserves increase when you find a less expensive way to get the ore, or when the price of ore rises. If the price of ore goes up by 50%, we more than double our reserves to 5 million tons. If it goes up much more than that, oceanic reserves come into play, and there are 4.5 *billion* tons in the oceans.
Now, that's talking about U235 burned in a PWR. There are other things you can do which vastly increase reserves. There are reactor designs that can breed U238 into U235. That presents a proliferation concern, but you can also just burn U238 in a CANDU reactor or other design. You can breed thorium into U233 and burn that.
And the thing is that nuclear fuel is so much more energy-dense than chemical fuel. Coal has an energy content of about 24 MJ per kilogram, assuming perfect conversion to electricity, and I think good coal plants with top-of-the-line turbines and boilers and everything can get up to about 70% overall thermal efficiency, but hell, let's say 90%. Figures I found for the US in 1982 indicate that all the nuclear power plants in the US consumed 540 tons of fuel and produced 1.1E12 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which means *after* all those efficiency losses (PWRs are less thermally efficient because you've got to transfer heat across coolant loops), we were getting 8 million megajoules per kilogram of fuel.
8 million megajoules per kilogram, versus 21.6 megajoules per kilogram. What that means is that your *fuel* cost can rise significantly, but your cost per kilowatt-hour at your meter will see only a very small rise.
So to sum up, there's a hella lot of nuclear fuel available.
Simply settling for something that works but has problems
Oh, really?
*Everything* has problems. I mean, come on, just wave your hands and come up with your ideal hypothetical, theoretical scheme for energy production, and I guarantee it will have some sort of problem.
The suggestion that we should wait to fix our current problems until we've figured out a way to eliminate *all possible* problems is not only silly, it's dangerous.
all the while destroying the very planet we live on.
Please. The planet has withstood enormous meteor impacts, global firestorms, earthquakes, enormous floods, and devasting environmental shifts far beyond our ability to cause, like the development of organisms which excrete oxygen as a waste product (You know, "plants").
The *planet* is doing just *fine*. The planet's survival is not at issue.
Schroeder is president of the Washington- and New York-based Association of American Publishers, sponsor of the event. Like a nurturing shepherd, she moves gently among her flock. But when she talks about threats to the group, she stiffens her back.
And who, you might be wondering, is giving Schroeder and her publishers such afright?
Librarians, of course.
No joke. Of all the dangerous and dot-complex problems that American publishers face in the near future -- economic downturns, competition for leisure time, piracy -- perhaps the most explosive one could be libraries. Publishers and librarians are squaring off for a battle royal over the way electronic books and journals are lent out from libraries and over what constitutes fair use of written material.
Grossly oversimplified: Publishers want to charge people to read material; librarians want to give it away.
"We," says Schroeder, "have a very serious issue with librarians."
Make no mistake: these folks are every bit as interested in demolishing both Fair Use and First Sale as the recording and movie industries are.
'course, this is what's known as anecdotal evidence: "X happened to me, so X is likely to happen to other people." It's a very weak type of evidence.
If you, or anyone else, wants to demonstrate even a *correlation* between violent media exposure and actual violent acts, go ahead, knock yourself out. If you want to demonstrate an actual causal link, that's even harder.
But them's the epistemological breaks: burden of proof lies on the person making the positive knowledge claim. The notion that we should be infringing on civil rights, shaping public policy, and writing new laws because someone, be that someone you, or Jack Thompson, makes an unsupported assertion, is both sad and risible. I mean, it makes every bit as much sense as saying "Cheerios cause diabetes! Ban Cheerios!" It's easy to say, and I might even be able to come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for my claim, but it's damned difficult to back up, and until such point as I have objective evidence in support of it, it's just another bullshit claim, just like Jack Thompson's.
If we can't justify our beliefs, they're meaningless, and we shouldn't try to foist them off on other people.
Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly. Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
My car can go from 0-60mph in 5.3 seconds. That's an acceleration of 4.9m/s/s. Therefore, my car can travel from New York to Los Angeles in about 23 minutes.
Talk about needlessly complicating issues. Integrals? Yeesh.
Graviational potential energy between two bodies is -G*(m1m2)/r, so that's 6.673E-11 * (3E30*3E30)/10000km, for just about 6E43 joules, so you're a few orders off. Head-on collision between two bodies of equal mass means each contributes half of that energy, so each one's contributing 3E43 joules. 3E30kg body would have to be moving at 4472135 m/s to do that. That's 1.49% of c, so it's not strongly relativistic, with a gamma of 1.00011113.
Why is an ammendment allowed on a bill that has nothing to do with the original bill?
How do you determine "nothing to do with"?
I mean, sure, you can find two cases that *obviously* have nothing to do with, but what about all the other cases? The last Federal highway bill included several million for IRS tax code enforcement. Does that have nothing to do with the bill, or is it justified by the fact that the IRS folks who enforce tax code use the highways?
Silly example, but you get my point: to prevent this, you'd need a Constitutional amendment, and the language in it would need to be pretty damned legalistic, intricate, and specific, to define a specific level of "nothing to do with" beyond which amendments may not attach.
Seems to be that this "problem," such as it is, could be solved by simply enforcing the Constitution we currently *have*. I see nowhere in the Constitution where the legislature is given the power to pass this sort of law, to tell manufacturers of hardware that they must manufacture their hardware in a particular way. Hell, I don't see why the design of a television is any less a creative endeavour than the design of a sculpture, so such a law would seem to be a violation of the creator's First Amendment rights in the first place.
Worrying about the specific legislative process by which Congress passes a law that is fundamentally unconstitutional seems to be placing focus on the wrong problem entirely.
You would be building this very close to, if not on, the equator. Hurricanes do not form there, and I can't even think of one that has ever crossed the equator.
Pennsylvania passed a law a few years back requiring ISPs to block access to sites accused of trafficing in child porn. The law was found to be unconstitutional (violates 1st Amendment, commerce clause), but other states, like Utah, have passed similar laws.
Take a look at the actual NOAA data, and you find that for the past several decades we have been in a *lull* of hurricane activity, and that's just recently started to swing back the other way.
Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.
But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.
From 1970 to 1994, the Atlantic was relatively quiet, with no more than three major hurricanes in any year and none at all in three of those years. Cooler water in the North Atlantic strengthened wind shear, which tends to tear storms apart before they turn into hurricanes.
In 1995, hurricane patterns reverted to the active mode of the 1950's and 60's.
Only on/. can comments which are nothing but knee-jerk facile reponses which completely ignore the bulk of available data be considered 'insightful.'
Your statement is the same thing as saying: if I take a solid brick (21 ppm radionuclides, 10 time more than coal), and crush it up into powder, I suddenly have nuclear waste!
It took you a while, but you got my point. The regulations involving nuclear waste do indeed require special treatment for material with that kind of activity level, if it comes from certain sources. But if it comes from other sources, the regulations don't apply, as if the *source* of a radioisotope somehow changed its significance or activity level.
If an industry developed a process that discharged as a waste product the *same* amount and type of radioisotopes that exist within a 70kg adult male, that industry would not be allowed to burn that waste, or simply bury it in a landfill. But the funerary and crematory industries aren't affected by those regulations, by legislative fiat.
*That's* my entire fucking *point*.
Nobody thinks coal is clean or desirable, but radioactive waste in not one of its problems.
I think the radiological hazards are insignificant compared to the other pollution output. But if you think distributing thousands of tons of U-235 and decay products through the earth's atmosphere doesn't kill a few people here or there, I think you're crazy.
You would have a 100% nuclear plume of highly radioactive materials settling over the downwind land.
So burn it energetically, pulverize it down to atomic diameters, inject it into the stratosphere where it won't settle out. Then it would be "diffuse radioactive material" and you wouldn't worry about it.
Buring coal with 15 ppb uranium 238 emissions, is NOT the same thing as burning 100% highly radioactive nuclear waste!
You have a remarkable ability to restate that which is not under dispute, while ignoring salient points that have been raised.
The measurement of the nuclear exposure is proportional to the concentrated quantity of nuclear material. 10 PPM of diffuse radioactive material is not the same thing as having a gram, kilo, or ton sitting in front of you.
Well, then, we have the solution to the nuclear waste problem.
Just burn it. Then folks like taharvey won't worry about it, once it's distributed evenly across the planet.
Oh *course* they're not the same thing. But claiming that having it diffused it better than having it concentrated in a readily-handleable form is asinine, it's like claiming that all the lead we were spitting into the environment back when cars still ran on leaded gas was less harmful than an equivalent amount of lead sitting there in the CONCENTRATED form of a big lead block.
Keep in mind that the above-ground nuclear tests that we conducted in Nevada, all on their own, increased the radiation exposure of Americans by 380 million person-rads, causing 120,000 cases of thyroid cancer resulting in 6,000 deaths, purely from the release of I-131.
That same exact amount of I-131 in a CONCENTRATED form would be easy to dispose of in a safe manner, and sure as HOLY LIVING FUCK wouldn't KILL SIX THOUSAND PEOPLE.
Typo, I mean "like lead." If a coal plant spit out as much lead into the air as it does uranium and thorium, it'd be shut down.
Among the daughter species, if you're worred about the radium, don't.
Naw, I meant the whole decay chain, through thorium and protactinium and bismuth all the way down to lead. The bottom line is that releasing all that isotope mass into the atmosphere has real and measurable effects on the background count, causes real cancers, and causes real deaths. It's not a cost that can be ignored simply because it's so distributed.
I'd like to see the proof that particulates, NOx, SO2, and global warming from coal emissions kill 50,000 Americans/year.
I didn't mean to suggest that was all from coal emissions. Quite a lot of it is from air pollution from other sources, like cars. But 50,000 is at the low end of the scale. Here's a report on a study indicating that particulate air pollution alone is responsible for 32,000 deaths in the UK each year. The WHO estimates that air pollution contributes to 3 million deaths *each year*.
I do agree that better technology can be used to overcome the waste-disposal objections, although I don't know what those technologies are, yet./I.
The waste-disposal objections are primarily motivated by fear and ignorance. I think that the best way to overcome them is through better education.
"Uranium is a toxic heavy metal, like *lead." Dammit.
Its chemical toxicity actually exceeds that of lead, but while any industry that spit that much lead into the atmosphere wouldn't survive long under current environmental legislation, coal plants get a pass.
It may be radioactive, but at such a low level (U-238 half-life is billions of years) that it poses no large-scale health risk.
Uranium is a toxic heavy metal, like coal. And the U-235 amount is still over 10,000 tons, and that, while still a relatively low-level alpha emitter, has a much shorter half-life than -238. And we *still* haven't talked about the daughter products. Or the thorium isotopes, which occur at even higher quantities. And *their* daughter products, some of which are quite nasty.
*Or* all the other crud, greenhouse gases, particulates, and other types of air pollution, stuff that kills more than 50,000 people each year in the US alone. I mean, c'mon, you're honestly going to compare 50 *pounds* of dense waste per megawatt of capacity per year to the pollution coal plants put out?
The bad stuff is the mildly radioactive isotopes like strontium-90 and cesium-137 that have strong physical chemical affinities to human tissue and stick around for hundreds of years.
That's absolutely true. But it's nothing that can't be dealt with, and dealing with it would kill far, far fewer people and have a far smaller environmental cost than any other useful alternative.
The bottom line is that electricity has a certain value. It doesn't matter how it is generated.
Of course it does. That's why people willingly pay *more* for power generated from clean sources. There are utility companies that *offer* people the chance to pay *higher* utility rates for the assurance that they'll be using windpower, and people pay that.
Currently electricity is valued much higher than chemical (gasoline) energy per kWh.
I'm certainly not aware of where you're getting *that* notion. A gallon of gas right by my house sells for $3.19 at the moment, and a gallon of gas comes out to about 33 kilowatt-hours. Electricity, on the other hand, goes for about 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, so 33 kilowatt-hours comes out to only $2.64. So it's *not* valued much higher than gasoline.
If I am a power company who can sell electricity for $0.25/kWh on the retail market, why in the world would I bother converting that to hydrogen which would sell to consumers for a lot less as auto fuel.
Because you stand to profit from the sale of hydrogen. You can't just make more money by increasing the supply of electricity.
A gallon of gasoline contains about 60 kWh or energy. Say gas costs $3/gallon. Even at this relatively high gas price, you're only paying $0.05 per kWh!
Just to check my figures. The figures on that page average 44.6 MJ/kg, gasoline has a density of.8 g/cc, so one US gallon (3785cc) weighs about 3 kilograms, that's 133.8 MJ, that's 37 kilowatt-hours. Still less expensive than an equivalent energy-amount of gasoline.
Granted, a lot of that cost/gallon is taxes, not the real cost of the gas, but that sort of artificial price inflation is also at work in the retail cost of electricity.
If you were to convert electricty (at $.25/kWh) to hydrogen, you would pay $15 for a gallon of gas worth of energy!
No, you wouldn't. At that price of electricity (Which is really a high figure, according to the DOE, for the year 2003 the average cost nationwide was 8.7 cents per kWh, so most power companies *can't* sell electricity for $.25/kWh. Those same DOE figures claim that the highest electricity costs in the nation are in Hawaii, at 14.47 cents/kWh. I believe that during the Enron debacle in California, prices went up to 20 cents. So, really, you're using a 'typical' value that is actually considerably higher than the worst absurdities the market has been able to generate. But moving on... ), you'd be paying $9.25.
NMR hits the sample atoms with a pulse of radio energy that *alters the spin of atomic nucleii*.
NMR is, strangely enough, concerned with the magnetic resonance of atomic nucleii, and directly changes the magnetic moment of those nucleii, which is directly related to the spin direction. It's not concerned with the magnetic moment of the electrons, but rather with the atomic *nucleus*.
Thus, it's called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. Or at least it was, until FUD over anything involving the word 'nuclear' led the marketers to rename it.
Slashdot Mirror
Petroleum isn't really burned in main-line plants. It comes into play in the smaller peaking plants that are generally only brought online to deal with maximum loads on the grid. They frequently take the form of gas-turbine engines burning diesel.
What about the huge piles of toxic and somewhat radioactive U-238 that you get at the end?
It's a commercial substance. Depleted uranium is routinely used as counterweight for aircraft control surfaces.
The 'huge piles' won't be any worse of a problem than the huge piles of toxic heavy metals and other contaminants that are scrubbed out of the emissions from coal plants. Nobody ever seems to bring that up.
Because it's fucking hard. There's a big test reactor that's going to be built in France, and that's *still* not going to get us to commercial fusion power, simply because of the material issues involved. In DT fusion, *every single atom* in your reactor vessel is going to be displaced by flying neutrons *hundreds* of times over the life of the reactor, and that does really bad things to all known materials. Right now, we don't even have adequate neutron sources in order to begin exploring that regime; there's also supposed to be another research facility dedicated to that purpse, tagging along with the reactor in France, but it's not even on the drawing board yet.
There are aneutronic schemes, but those seem to be impossble to actually generate net energy from, because the hot fuel loses too much energy to Brehmstrahllung losses.
Fusion is very very difficult.
I generally class problems into three categories: theoretical, materials, and engineering. The theoretical problems are killers: "We don't know if this is even *possible." The materials ones *can* be killers: "We know how do to this, but we don't know how to make it, and the stuff we need to make it may be unobtainable." Engineering ones are ones that can be cured by throwing enough money and time at them, like the Manhattan project: we knew a bomb was theoretically possible, we knew how to make the materials, we just had to crank a lot of numbers and actually build the fabrication infrastructure and the device itself.
Fusion is *all three*. I find it entirely plausible that we'll never develop commercial fusion power, bootstrapping right from mass nuclear fission to solar collection satellites. There's certainly enough fissile fuel around to keep us going until we can build large-scale orbital structures.
How much nuclear fuel is on earth. If we replaced all the fossil fuels we use, with nuclear fuel, how long would our supplies last?
There's about 50 years of uranium reserves right now, a bit over 2 million tons.
Reserves are ores that are economically exploitable. In other words, reserves increase when you find a less expensive way to get the ore, or when the price of ore rises. If the price of ore goes up by 50%, we more than double our reserves to 5 million tons. If it goes up much more than that, oceanic reserves come into play, and there are 4.5 *billion* tons in the oceans.
Now, that's talking about U235 burned in a PWR. There are other things you can do which vastly increase reserves. There are reactor designs that can breed U238 into U235. That presents a proliferation concern, but you can also just burn U238 in a CANDU reactor or other design. You can breed thorium into U233 and burn that.
And the thing is that nuclear fuel is so much more energy-dense than chemical fuel. Coal has an energy content of about 24 MJ per kilogram, assuming perfect conversion to electricity, and I think good coal plants with top-of-the-line turbines and boilers and everything can get up to about 70% overall thermal efficiency, but hell, let's say 90%. Figures I found for the US in 1982 indicate that all the nuclear power plants in the US consumed 540 tons of fuel and produced 1.1E12 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which means *after* all those efficiency losses (PWRs are less thermally efficient because you've got to transfer heat across coolant loops), we were getting 8 million megajoules per kilogram of fuel.
8 million megajoules per kilogram, versus 21.6 megajoules per kilogram. What that means is that your *fuel* cost can rise significantly, but your cost per kilowatt-hour at your meter will see only a very small rise.
So to sum up, there's a hella lot of nuclear fuel available.
Simply settling for something that works but has problems
Oh, really?
*Everything* has problems. I mean, come on, just wave your hands and come up with your ideal hypothetical, theoretical scheme for energy production, and I guarantee it will have some sort of problem.
The suggestion that we should wait to fix our current problems until we've figured out a way to eliminate *all possible* problems is not only silly, it's dangerous.
all the while destroying the very planet we live on.
Please. The planet has withstood enormous meteor impacts, global firestorms, earthquakes, enormous floods, and devasting environmental shifts far beyond our ability to cause, like the development of organisms which excrete oxygen as a waste product (You know, "plants").
The *planet* is doing just *fine*. The planet's survival is not at issue.
Not true at all. Burning oil is not the only source of CO2 emissions.
Burning coal is a huge one, and there's a huge amount of coal still in the ground to be burned. Hundreds of years worth of reserves at current prices.
I'm not. Pat Scroeder:Book Publishers::Hillary Rosen:RIAA::Jack Valenti:MPAA.
Okay, Hillary and Jack both stepped down, but you know what I mean. All three of them are shills/whores for their respective employers/pimps.
I mean, this article goes back to 2001:
Make no mistake: these folks are every bit as interested in demolishing both Fair Use and First Sale as the recording and movie industries are.
Does anybody else see that?
Sure do.
'course, this is what's known as anecdotal evidence: "X happened to me, so X is likely to happen to other people." It's a very weak type of evidence.
If you, or anyone else, wants to demonstrate even a *correlation* between violent media exposure and actual violent acts, go ahead, knock yourself out. If you want to demonstrate an actual causal link, that's even harder.
But them's the epistemological breaks: burden of proof lies on the person making the positive knowledge claim. The notion that we should be infringing on civil rights, shaping public policy, and writing new laws because someone, be that someone you, or Jack Thompson, makes an unsupported assertion, is both sad and risible. I mean, it makes every bit as much sense as saying "Cheerios cause diabetes! Ban Cheerios!" It's easy to say, and I might even be able to come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for my claim, but it's damned difficult to back up, and until such point as I have objective evidence in support of it, it's just another bullshit claim, just like Jack Thompson's.
If we can't justify our beliefs, they're meaningless, and we shouldn't try to foist them off on other people.
The older stuff used primarily copper, which had a few adverse effects on sea life.
Um...that's the point. Antifoul paint is biocidal, that's how it keeps stuff from glomming onto the hull.
Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.
Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
My car can go from 0-60mph in 5.3 seconds. That's an acceleration of 4.9m/s/s. Therefore, my car can travel from New York to Los Angeles in about 23 minutes.
I mean, come on, that's just moronic.
Talk about needlessly complicating issues. Integrals? Yeesh.
Graviational potential energy between two bodies is -G*(m1m2)/r, so that's 6.673E-11 * (3E30*3E30)/10000km, for just about 6E43 joules, so you're a few orders off. Head-on collision between two bodies of equal mass means each contributes half of that energy,
so each one's contributing 3E43 joules. 3E30kg body would have to be moving at 4472135 m/s to do that. That's 1.49% of c, so it's not strongly relativistic, with a gamma of 1.00011113.
Well, if it isn't my old friend Mr. McGregg, with a leg for an arm and an arm for a leg!
- Dr. Nick Riviera.
Why is an ammendment allowed on a bill that has nothing to do with the original bill?
How do you determine "nothing to do with"?
I mean, sure, you can find two cases that *obviously* have nothing to do with, but what about all the other cases? The last Federal highway bill included several million for IRS tax code enforcement. Does that have nothing to do with the bill, or is it justified by the fact that the IRS folks who enforce tax code use the highways?
Silly example, but you get my point: to prevent this, you'd need a Constitutional amendment, and the language in it would need to be pretty damned legalistic, intricate, and specific, to define a specific level of "nothing to do with" beyond which amendments may not attach.
Seems to be that this "problem," such as it is, could be solved by simply enforcing the Constitution we currently *have*. I see nowhere in the Constitution where the legislature is given the power to pass this sort of law, to tell manufacturers of hardware that they must manufacture their hardware in a particular way. Hell, I don't see why the design of a television is any less a creative endeavour than the design of a sculpture, so such a law would seem to be a violation of the creator's First Amendment rights in the first place.
Worrying about the specific legislative process by which Congress passes a law that is fundamentally unconstitutional seems to be placing focus on the wrong problem entirely.
Hurricanes aren't an issue.
You would be building this very close to, if not on, the equator. Hurricanes do not form there, and I can't even think of one that has ever crossed the equator.
Pennsylvania passed a law a few years back requiring ISPs to block access to sites accused of trafficing in child porn. The law was found to be unconstitutional (violates 1st Amendment, commerce clause), but other states, like Utah, have passed similar laws.
This would definitely seem to preempt such laws.
I was simply making a point that audiophiles' hatred of Bose is predictable.
As is their hatred of a piece of wax paper stretched across a tin can.
Is that because they're silly audiophiles, or because the tin can speaker actually sucks?
Take a look at the actual NOAA data, and you find that for the past several decades we have been in a *lull* of hurricane activity, and that's just recently started to swing back the other way.
The NYT has this to say:
Only on
Your statement is the same thing as saying: if I take a solid brick (21 ppm radionuclides, 10 time more than coal), and crush it up into powder, I suddenly have nuclear waste!
It took you a while, but you got my point. The regulations involving nuclear waste do indeed require special treatment for material with that kind of activity level, if it comes from certain sources. But if it comes from other sources, the regulations don't apply, as if the *source* of a radioisotope somehow changed its significance or activity level.
If an industry developed a process that discharged as a waste product the *same* amount and type of radioisotopes that exist within a 70kg adult male, that industry would not be allowed to burn that waste, or simply bury it in a landfill. But the funerary and crematory industries aren't affected by those regulations, by legislative fiat.
*That's* my entire fucking *point*.
Nobody thinks coal is clean or desirable, but radioactive waste in not one of its problems.
I think the radiological hazards are insignificant compared to the other pollution output. But if you think distributing thousands of tons of U-235 and decay products through the earth's atmosphere doesn't kill a few people here or there, I think you're crazy.
You would have a 100% nuclear plume of highly radioactive materials settling over the downwind land.
So burn it energetically, pulverize it down to atomic diameters, inject it into the stratosphere where it won't settle out. Then it would be "diffuse radioactive material" and you wouldn't worry about it.
Buring coal with 15 ppb uranium 238 emissions, is NOT the same thing as burning 100% highly radioactive nuclear waste!
You have a remarkable ability to restate that which is not under dispute, while ignoring salient points that have been raised.
I hope that continues to work out for you.
The measurement of the nuclear exposure is proportional to the concentrated quantity of nuclear material. 10 PPM of diffuse radioactive material is not the same thing as having a gram, kilo, or ton sitting in front of you.
Well, then, we have the solution to the nuclear waste problem.
Just burn it. Then folks like taharvey won't worry about it, once it's distributed evenly across the planet.
Oh *course* they're not the same thing. But claiming that having it diffused it better than having it concentrated in a readily-handleable form is asinine, it's like claiming that all the lead we were spitting into the environment back when cars still ran on leaded gas was less harmful than an equivalent amount of lead sitting there in the CONCENTRATED form of a big lead block.
Keep in mind that the above-ground nuclear tests that we conducted in Nevada, all on their own, increased the radiation exposure of Americans by 380 million person-rads, causing 120,000 cases of thyroid cancer resulting in 6,000 deaths, purely from the release of I-131.
That same exact amount of I-131 in a CONCENTRATED form would be easy to dispose of in a safe manner, and sure as HOLY LIVING FUCK wouldn't KILL SIX THOUSAND PEOPLE.
Coal is carbon, not a "toxic heavy metal."
Typo, I mean "like lead." If a coal plant spit out as much lead into the air as it does uranium and thorium, it'd be shut down.
Among the daughter species, if you're worred about the radium, don't.
Naw, I meant the whole decay chain, through thorium and protactinium and bismuth all the way down to lead. The bottom line is that releasing all that isotope mass into the atmosphere has real and measurable effects on the background count, causes real cancers, and causes real deaths. It's not a cost that can be ignored simply because it's so distributed.
I'd like to see the proof that particulates, NOx, SO2, and global warming from coal emissions kill 50,000 Americans/year.
I didn't mean to suggest that was all from coal emissions. Quite a lot of it is from air pollution from other sources, like cars. But 50,000 is at the low end of the scale. Here's a report on a study indicating that particulate air pollution alone is responsible for 32,000 deaths in the UK each year. The WHO estimates that air pollution contributes to 3 million deaths *each year*.
I do agree that better technology can be used to overcome the waste-disposal objections, although I don't know what those technologies are, yet./I.
The waste-disposal objections are primarily motivated by fear and ignorance. I think that the best way to overcome them is through better education.
"Uranium is a toxic heavy metal, like *lead." Dammit.
Its chemical toxicity actually exceeds that of lead, but while any industry that spit that much lead into the atmosphere wouldn't survive long under current environmental legislation, coal plants get a pass.
It may be radioactive, but at such a low level (U-238 half-life is billions of years) that it poses no large-scale health risk.
Uranium is a toxic heavy metal, like coal. And the U-235 amount is still over 10,000 tons, and that, while still a relatively low-level alpha emitter, has a much shorter half-life than -238. And we *still* haven't talked about the daughter products. Or the thorium isotopes, which occur at even higher quantities. And *their* daughter products, some of which are quite nasty.
*Or* all the other crud, greenhouse gases, particulates, and other types of air pollution, stuff that kills more than 50,000 people each year in the US alone. I mean, c'mon, you're honestly going to compare 50 *pounds* of dense waste per megawatt of capacity per year to the pollution coal plants put out?
The bad stuff is the mildly radioactive isotopes like strontium-90 and cesium-137 that have strong physical chemical affinities to human tissue and stick around for hundreds of years.
That's absolutely true. But it's nothing that can't be dealt with, and dealing with it would kill far, far fewer people and have a far smaller environmental cost than any other useful alternative.
The bottom line is that electricity has a certain value. It doesn't matter how it is generated.
.8 g/cc, so one US gallon (3785cc) weighs about 3 kilograms, that's 133.8 MJ, that's 37 kilowatt-hours. Still less expensive than an equivalent energy-amount of gasoline.
Of course it does. That's why people willingly pay *more* for power generated from clean sources. There are utility companies that *offer* people the chance to pay *higher* utility rates for the assurance that they'll be using windpower, and people pay that.
Currently electricity is valued much higher than chemical (gasoline) energy per kWh.
I'm certainly not aware of where you're getting *that* notion. A gallon of gas right by my house sells for $3.19 at the moment, and a gallon of gas comes out to about 33 kilowatt-hours. Electricity, on the other hand, goes for about 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, so 33 kilowatt-hours comes out to only $2.64. So it's *not* valued much higher than gasoline.
If I am a power company who can sell electricity for $0.25/kWh on the retail market, why in the world would I bother converting that to hydrogen which would sell to consumers for a lot less as auto fuel.
Because you stand to profit from the sale of hydrogen. You can't just make more money by increasing the supply of electricity.
A gallon of gasoline contains about 60 kWh or energy. Say gas costs $3/gallon. Even at this relatively high gas price, you're only paying $0.05 per kWh!
You're off by a factor of two. Here.
Just to check my figures. The figures on that page average 44.6 MJ/kg, gasoline has a density of
Granted, a lot of that cost/gallon is taxes, not the real cost of the gas, but that sort of artificial price inflation is also at work in the retail cost of electricity.
If you were to convert electricty (at $.25/kWh) to hydrogen, you would pay $15 for a gallon of gas worth of energy!
No, you wouldn't. At that price of electricity (Which is really a high figure, according to the DOE, for the year 2003 the average cost nationwide was 8.7 cents per kWh, so most power companies *can't* sell electricity for $.25/kWh. Those same DOE figures claim that the highest electricity costs in the nation are in Hawaii, at 14.47 cents/kWh. I believe that during the Enron debacle in California, prices went up to 20 cents. So, really, you're using a 'typical' value that is actually considerably higher than the worst absurdities the market has been able to generate. But moving on... ), you'd be paying $9.25.
Wow, is that wrong.
NMR hits the sample atoms with a pulse of radio energy that *alters the spin of atomic nucleii*.
NMR is, strangely enough, concerned with the magnetic resonance of atomic nucleii, and directly changes the magnetic moment of those nucleii, which is directly related to the spin direction. It's not concerned with the magnetic moment of the electrons, but rather with the atomic *nucleus*.
Thus, it's called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. Or at least it was, until FUD over anything involving the word 'nuclear' led the marketers to rename it.