When you provide a quote an attributation would be nice. Then I know who's spreading the lies.
The first quote doesn't really make much sense unless your spreading unfounded rumors. How many people, personal radiation dose, acute dose, chronic dose, contamination levels, source strength? For some you could make a case that Chernobyl was worse, for some Hiroshima.
More than half a million people dead or sick? Of what? Stress induced by radical groups? If we're going to do quotes like this I'll say that more fetus's were killed in abortions due to irrational fears of Chornobyl's effects than have died from it. Are you including those deaths?
And if you are talking about the potential of killing tens of thousands of people than using the same probabilities it could be argued (without the public perception filters) that a socioeconomic collapse due to radical world wide climate change from burning extensive fossil fuels will kill billions.
That's what drives scientists nuts and I feel for the Dubya's science advisor when he has to talk Kyoto. We can control the waste stream with nuclear and know how to contain it indefinitely with monitoring and for thousands of years without. But its only an educated guess what happens when we spew our wastes into the air and some of those guesses are not pretty.
They've met and exceeded their goals for safety. Its one of the safest jobs in the power industry now. And they've well exceeded their goals for cost savings now, generating power cheaper than any other source.
As for a waste stream the there is a plan in place for the industry. For every kWhr they produce a surcharge is added on and goes into a fund to pay for waste disposal that the government assured everyone that it would handle. Unfortunately the government reneged on its contractual obligations and the industry has been polite enough not to sue, yet.
Nope, right now nuke plants are one of the biggest money makers in the electric buisness. Most of the plants were designed before computers could do highly accurate power calculations so they were all horrendously overbuilt. Now that they've redone the calculations with modern computers they just adjust a few settings, make some minor modifications and you have tens to a hundred megawatts extra for virtually no capital cost. The glut in the uranium market with prices so low also helps. For the last year or so nuclear has been cheaper than any other power source and its getting cheaper every year.
Probably the last nail in the coffin for construction was the incredible interest rates of the late seventies early eighties. With the extremely high capital costs and the long construction times building new plants were just priced out of the market. Thats one of the big draws for the modular pebble bed design. You build in 100 MW increments and you're can be producing power very early in the construction process and minimizing interest costs.
You should really look at the cask designs for transporting this waste. Indestructable comes to mind. I know of only one incident where one was involved in a significant accident. The semi carrying the cask took a switchback on a mountainside a little to quick and went over. The semi looked like a giant had took a hammer and made tinfoil out of it while the cask just rolled down the mountain and landed in a stream with just a few scratches.
Aside from a nuke going off these things aren't going to break open on accident. Even with the nuke I'd have to ask how close.
Now if you're talking about the boxes of P-32 that FedEx bounces around you may have something. Ask your local biotech research center how many wet boxes that just had lots of broken glass they've recieved.
Of course if we create breeder reactors or use some exotic mixes in the new pebble bed desgins we don't have to dig up the fuel anymore. Just make more in the reactors and burn that, we could sustain areselves for centuries on what's already been mined.
Don't forget the lovely flashing light in downtown vegas that would warn of an impending blast. Don't think that would work to well now.
Everyone that visits Vegas should take a trip to the test site. See http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts/tours.htm for into on tours. The Sedan crater is awe inspiring when you realize that it was formed by only a 104 kT warhead. And I love the reason why the road is so bumpy getting there. It was too expensive to keep rebuilding it when after every detonation the shockwaves would ripple it.
What Nevada needs to do is set up a nice way to tax all the waste coming in that's not too high the feds won't pay it. Then have 'waste' become Nevada's property in a few hundred years. After that amount of time the short lived fission products will have decayed away and reprocessing the 'waste' into fuel to sell could net a nice big profit. Of course you have to take the risk that no one is going to come around with a pesky tabletop cold fusion plant to make energy too cheap to meter.
What I found very amusing about all the doom and gloom stories is that they neglect to mention several Pu thermoelectric generators have already dropped out of the sky.
Apollo 13 is the first one that comes to mind, I think that one is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean. NASA lost at least two more to reentry although they recovered a few from the ocean floor. One of them they used in a later mission since it was essentially undamaged from reentry.
There is a magnetic anamoly above the Northeast portion of South America that creates a significant depression in the Earth's magnetic field. The higher orbit of Hubble passes through that area and it does have a significantly increased radiation field.
I thought the latic acid was a result of an anaerobic reaction in the muscles that is used when there isn't enough oxygen. Its not as efficient as the aerobic ATP reactions but can release energy when its really needed.
Mir's orbit is low enough to get substantial protection from the Earth's magnetic field. Almost all manned missions have been protected by the Earth's mag field. The exceptions being, obviously, the lunar missions and the Hubble repair missions.
Actually with recent buget cuts the background checks were farmed out to private investigation corporations. That may have changed with recent security lapses at Los Alamos but it was PI's doing the work as of last year.
>If the costs and toxics are so expensive, then why bother to make them?
They are convient. How else are you going to power an emergency radio phone 30 miles from any electric source? Granted a RPG (Radioisotopic Power Generator) would work just fine but you would get all sorts of other problems.
>It might be convienent for the roadside phones, and electric cattle fences. But then why for houses and walkway lights, calculators?
Homeowners buy them for two primary reasons. 1) backup power for outages, 2) supplemental power to reduce electric costs. I doubt anybody except a fanatic really buys them to make money. Walkway lights and calculators fall into the convience category. To annoying to wire or keep a battery.
>I saw some 100W units for about $650. I remember seeing some things on flexible sheet style.
I doubt the flexible sheet style is going for $650. But I did see monocrystalline Si going for $660/120 watts.
Well first the link is http://www.dieoff.com/page84.htm. Plus its flawed on a few of the numbers (not to mention switching units every paragraph, what are they hiding...)
First they say that 1E9 kW-h/yr can be produced with 2.7E7 m^2 of solar cells. That's 37 kw-h/yr-m^2 => 4.2 w/m^2. Now that's actually pretty low for a solar system. I mean you can get a BP solar panel at up to 120 w/m^2. Anyways lets look at market costs:
Price for a 8kW system: $26,899.00
Money generated at market prices in LasVegas (close to the most intense area in the US): $1223.63/yr
So to break even you would need 22 years. But wait, the panels are only rated for 20 years, they are considered hazardous waste, most people don't live in an area with such sunny conditions. For comparison Seattle gives you $499.70 a year or 54 years to break even.
Oh, on the second resource you listed from gaia.org that was comparing solar heating of water to heating with electricity. But they put everything in units of kWh to give the impression they were measuring electric power, very sneaky to method to waylay the layman. Electricity is a very low entropy type of energy while heat is very high in entropy. Plus who wants to get hot water while you're in the Outback? I would think cold water would be the goal there.
Anyways PV's have a long way to go before they become economical. Very few people have worried about disposal costs or amortizing it over the lifetime of the PV's as utilites do for other electrical production. I saw one paper linked that talked about increasing the price of electricity generated by nuclear to allow for waste disposal and decommissioning. US consumers have already paid billions to the government for waste disposal and millions if not billions into trust funds for decommissioning. Those costs are already included in the electricity price.
Anyways, I'm not anti-solar. I'm actually moving to Vegas this year and will probably add some on to the house to offset the price of air conditioning and recharging a household UPS for those oncoming blackouts. I just think people should be aware of the true costs of PV's before buying into them.
Yeah! - No more headphones
on
Focusing Audio
·
· Score: 2
Just put in a tracking device, several of these spotlights, and a network of audio pickups and you can have your phone calls directed to you with no headset.
Now how to tell apart the people talking to nothing and the people on the phone...
Another disadvantage is that the energy used to mine, process, assemble and otherwise create a solar panel is greater than what a solar panel will ever produce within its lifetime. And that's assuming Nevada desert sunlight levels.
The big advantage that solar has going for it is convience. Other than that it has a low power density, still generates toxic wastes during construction and disposal. When you add in the total costs solar just isn't appealing compared to other fuel sources.
They just figured out how to get the Tivo's daily phone call to route itself over a serial PPP link instead of using the modem. Just tie the PPP link into you computer and forward the packets. No more phone line.
When the magnetic field is depressed away from the sun and as the earth rotates you have a changing magnetic field. Now in northern Canada the ground is solid non-conductive rock. On top of this rock plane was a loop of high tension wires spanning thousands of miles. When you have a loop of conducter and a changing magnetic field you generate electricity.
Unfortunately the power grid was designed to carry AC high voltage, low current power. The storm produced DC low voltage, high current power. When they tried to bleed the power off into the ground they discovered that a non conductive ground doesn't work very well as a power sync. As a result wires melted, transformers blew, and all power was disrupted.
Since then they have broken up the wire loops so there is little to no induction. Bored their grounding spikes deeper into the ground to insure that they could actually ground circuits. And placed many more circuit breakers into place.
I think if there is a problem it won't be a result of a power overload in the grid itself.
You do realize that they do keep track of who voted for who. They're only supposed to access that data when there are indications of fraud. At least that's how they do it in Michigan.
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When you provide a quote an attributation would be nice. Then I know who's spreading the lies.
The first quote doesn't really make much sense unless your spreading unfounded rumors. How many people, personal radiation dose, acute dose, chronic dose, contamination levels, source strength? For some you could make a case that Chernobyl was worse, for some Hiroshima.
More than half a million people dead or sick? Of what? Stress induced by radical groups? If we're going to do quotes like this I'll say that more fetus's were killed in abortions due to irrational fears of Chornobyl's effects than have died from it. Are you including those deaths?
And if you are talking about the potential of killing tens of thousands of people than using the same probabilities it could be argued (without the public perception filters) that a socioeconomic collapse due to radical world wide climate change from burning extensive fossil fuels will kill billions.
That's what drives scientists nuts and I feel for the Dubya's science advisor when he has to talk Kyoto. We can control the waste stream with nuclear and know how to contain it indefinitely with monitoring and for thousands of years without. But its only an educated guess what happens when we spew our wastes into the air and some of those guesses are not pretty.
They've met and exceeded their goals for safety. Its one of the safest jobs in the power industry now. And they've well exceeded their goals for cost savings now, generating power cheaper than any other source.
As for a waste stream the there is a plan in place for the industry. For every kWhr they produce a surcharge is added on and goes into a fund to pay for waste disposal that the government assured everyone that it would handle. Unfortunately the government reneged on its contractual obligations and the industry has been polite enough not to sue, yet.
Nope, right now nuke plants are one of the biggest money makers in the electric buisness. Most of the plants were designed before computers could do highly accurate power calculations so they were all horrendously overbuilt. Now that they've redone the calculations with modern computers they just adjust a few settings, make some minor modifications and you have tens to a hundred megawatts extra for virtually no capital cost. The glut in the uranium market with prices so low also helps. For the last year or so nuclear has been cheaper than any other power source and its getting cheaper every year.
Probably the last nail in the coffin for construction was the incredible interest rates of the late seventies early eighties. With the extremely high capital costs and the long construction times building new plants were just priced out of the market. Thats one of the big draws for the modular pebble bed design. You build in 100 MW increments and you're can be producing power very early in the construction process and minimizing interest costs.
You should really look at the cask designs for transporting this waste. Indestructable comes to mind. I know of only one incident where one was involved in a significant accident. The semi carrying the cask took a switchback on a mountainside a little to quick and went over. The semi looked like a giant had took a hammer and made tinfoil out of it while the cask just rolled down the mountain and landed in a stream with just a few scratches.
Aside from a nuke going off these things aren't going to break open on accident. Even with the nuke I'd have to ask how close.
Now if you're talking about the boxes of P-32 that FedEx bounces around you may have something. Ask your local biotech research center how many wet boxes that just had lots of broken glass they've recieved.
Of course if we create breeder reactors or use some exotic mixes in the new pebble bed desgins we don't have to dig up the fuel anymore. Just make more in the reactors and burn that, we could sustain areselves for centuries on what's already been mined.
Don't forget the lovely flashing light in downtown vegas that would warn of an impending blast. Don't think that would work to well now.
Everyone that visits Vegas should take a trip to the test site. See http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts/tours.htm for into on tours. The Sedan crater is awe inspiring when you realize that it was formed by only a 104 kT warhead. And I love the reason why the road is so bumpy getting there. It was too expensive to keep rebuilding it when after every detonation the shockwaves would ripple it.
I will eat a gram of it if you consume a gram of Sarin gas. Then we can sit down and discuss which is the most deadly substance on Earth.
What Nevada needs to do is set up a nice way to tax all the waste coming in that's not too high the feds won't pay it. Then have 'waste' become Nevada's property in a few hundred years. After that amount of time the short lived fission products will have decayed away and reprocessing the 'waste' into fuel to sell could net a nice big profit. Of course you have to take the risk that no one is going to come around with a pesky tabletop cold fusion plant to make energy too cheap to meter.
What I found very amusing about all the doom and gloom stories is that they neglect to mention several Pu thermoelectric generators have already dropped out of the sky.
Apollo 13 is the first one that comes to mind, I think that one is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean. NASA lost at least two more to reentry although they recovered a few from the ocean floor. One of them they used in a later mission since it was essentially undamaged from reentry.
There is a magnetic anamoly above the Northeast portion of South America that creates a significant depression in the Earth's magnetic field. The higher orbit of Hubble passes through that area and it does have a significantly increased radiation field.
I thought the latic acid was a result of an anaerobic reaction in the muscles that is used when there isn't enough oxygen. Its not as efficient as the aerobic ATP reactions but can release energy when its really needed.
Mir's orbit is low enough to get substantial protection from the Earth's magnetic field. Almost all manned missions have been protected by the Earth's mag field. The exceptions being, obviously, the lunar missions and the Hubble repair missions.
Actually with recent buget cuts the background checks were farmed out to private investigation corporations. That may have changed with recent security lapses at Los Alamos but it was PI's doing the work as of last year.
HFS+ is Unicode based and the locale to utilize is specified when you ask the OS to sort.
The momentum of the matter. Aka velocity times rest mass. The equation is actually E^2 = (m c^2)^2 + (p c)^2.
So for photons where the mass is zero (m=0) we can solve for the momentum p = E/c.
>If the costs and toxics are so expensive, then why bother to make them?
They are convient. How else are you going to power an emergency radio phone 30 miles from any electric source? Granted a RPG (Radioisotopic Power Generator) would work just fine but you would get all sorts of other problems.
>It might be convienent for the roadside phones, and electric cattle fences. But then why for houses and walkway lights, calculators?
Homeowners buy them for two primary reasons. 1) backup power for outages, 2) supplemental power to reduce electric costs. I doubt anybody except a fanatic really buys them to make money. Walkway lights and calculators fall into the convience category. To annoying to wire or keep a battery.
>I saw some 100W units for about $650. I remember seeing some things on flexible sheet style.
I doubt the flexible sheet style is going for $650. But I did see monocrystalline Si going for $660/120 watts.
Well first the link is http://www.dieoff.com/page84.htm. Plus its flawed on a few of the numbers (not to mention switching units every paragraph, what are they hiding...)
First they say that 1E9 kW-h/yr can be produced with 2.7E7 m^2 of solar cells. That's 37 kw-h/yr-m^2 => 4.2 w/m^2. Now that's actually pretty low for a solar system. I mean you can get a BP solar panel at up to 120 w/m^2. Anyways lets look at market costs:
Price for a 8kW system: $26,899.00
Money generated at market prices in LasVegas (close to the most intense area in the US): $1223.63/yr
So to break even you would need 22 years. But wait, the panels are only rated for 20 years, they are considered hazardous waste, most people don't live in an area with such sunny conditions. For comparison Seattle gives you $499.70 a year or 54 years to break even.
Oh, on the second resource you listed from gaia.org that was comparing solar heating of water to heating with electricity. But they put everything in units of kWh to give the impression they were measuring electric power, very sneaky to method to waylay the layman. Electricity is a very low entropy type of energy while heat is very high in entropy. Plus who wants to get hot water while you're in the Outback? I would think cold water would be the goal there.
Anyways PV's have a long way to go before they become economical. Very few people have worried about disposal costs or amortizing it over the lifetime of the PV's as utilites do for other electrical production. I saw one paper linked that talked about increasing the price of electricity generated by nuclear to allow for waste disposal and decommissioning. US consumers have already paid billions to the government for waste disposal and millions if not billions into trust funds for decommissioning. Those costs are already included in the electricity price.
Anyways, I'm not anti-solar. I'm actually moving to Vegas this year and will probably add some on to the house to offset the price of air conditioning and recharging a household UPS for those oncoming blackouts. I just think people should be aware of the true costs of PV's before buying into them.
Just put in a tracking device, several of these spotlights, and a network of audio pickups and you can have your phone calls directed to you with no headset.
Now how to tell apart the people talking to nothing and the people on the phone...
Another disadvantage is that the energy used to mine, process, assemble and otherwise create a solar panel is greater than what a solar panel will ever produce within its lifetime. And that's assuming Nevada desert sunlight levels.
The big advantage that solar has going for it is convience. Other than that it has a low power density, still generates toxic wastes during construction and disposal. When you add in the total costs solar just isn't appealing compared to other fuel sources.
Its also rather obvious to those who saw it burn. A bright orange to red color. Hydrogen burns with a cobalt blue color.
They just figured out how to get the Tivo's daily phone call to route itself over a serial PPP link instead of using the modem. Just tie the PPP link into you computer and forward the packets. No more phone line.
But the catch is that they only pay royalties to the author if more than 7 are sold per year. Not much chance of that happening.
The Sun mice require a special mouse pad to operate. Apple's mouse is good on any surface except smooth glass.
When the magnetic field is depressed away from the sun and as the earth rotates you have a changing magnetic field. Now in northern Canada the ground is solid non-conductive rock. On top of this rock plane was a loop of high tension wires spanning thousands of miles. When you have a loop of conducter and a changing magnetic field you generate electricity.
Unfortunately the power grid was designed to carry AC high voltage, low current power. The storm produced DC low voltage, high current power. When they tried to bleed the power off into the ground they discovered that a non conductive ground doesn't work very well as a power sync. As a result wires melted, transformers blew, and all power was disrupted.
Since then they have broken up the wire loops so there is little to no induction. Bored their grounding spikes deeper into the ground to insure that they could actually ground circuits. And placed many more circuit breakers into place.
I think if there is a problem it won't be a result of a power overload in the grid itself.
You do realize that they do keep track of who voted for who. They're only supposed to access that data when there are indications of fraud. At least that's how they do it in Michigan.