Transferring fuel and oxidiser sideways between tankage sections under 3-4 gees of thrust and vibration is, as far as I am aware, going to be a first in rocketry. It takes plumbing, pumps, valve gear etc. meaning major changes to the core and strap-on sections which add to the vehicle weight as well as the cost of manufacture since the cores are no longer physically identical. In contrast the Delta 4 Heavy strap-ons are pretty nearly identical to the core; the central engine just runs throttled down so that when the strap-ons separate it has enough propellant left to continue to orbit without the extra parasitic weight of transfer pumps etc. I don't know why this option isn't available to SpaceX; do the Merlin engines have a throttle-down and/or in-flight start capability?
The major cost of a manned Moon or Mars mission isn't the launch vehicles, it's the crew vehicle design and testing and construction. There would be a large number of actual launches to lift everything needed for even a "boots and banners" go-there-and-never-go-back mission; not even Elon thinks he could go to Mars (even one-way) on a single Falcon Heavy stack. That's where the trillion dollars would be spent and saving even 20 million bucks a launch by flying a flock of Falcons wouldn't shave more than 50 billion off that thirteen-digit price ticket in the end.
DBS and other geosync birds are getting bigger and heavier for various reasons -- more propellant so they can stay in their orbit slot longer, more solar cells to drive stronger transmitters, more broadcast channels, more fail-soft backup gear etc.
At the moment the Falcon 9 can (theoretically) put a typical satellite maxing out at about 4 tonnes or so into GEO with the forthcoming V1.1 version increasing that to 5 tonnes. It can't lift the newer birds like INTELSAT 20 weighing over six tonnes as Ariane can (and has done).
Until the paper-exercise Falcon Heavy with its kludgey fuel-transfer-in-flight mode flies SpaceX can't compete with Ariane's proven lift capability. After that... SpaceX only has one customer pencilled in for Heavy and that's Intelsat in 2015. A 50-tonne to LEO lift capability fits few if any commercial niches today; even the Delta 4 Heavy is underused with its 23-tonne to LEO capability.
Of course the Falcon Heavy's main projected use is manned missions to the Moon and Mars but that assumes substantial and sustained funding for such a project in the trillion dollar range at a time when the focus for space exploration is turning more and more to capable robots and cheap expendable probes rather than spam-in-a-can.
The market SpaceX is competing in already has the Ariane as well as other commercial/military launchers like the Deltas, the HII-B and of course the venerable Soyuz (1700 launches and counting) which is a closer match to the Falcon 9's capabilities. They're playing catchup with their launch price being the big market attractor while they get the bugs out and improve their throw weight.
What would you be launching and where for 200 mill? A geosync DBS bird costs about 100 million shrinkwrapped for launch with insurance, load integration and launch costs pushing the total price up to about 400 million dollars US after it has been delivered to its final position in the GEO constellation.
Scientific and telecomms platforms can be put into LEO for a lot less, of course but there are a lot more boosters other than the Falcon 9 that can do this job; the Ariane's speciality is DBS launches, two at a time with a side-order of Space Station resupply and reboost ATVs delivering 6 tonnes plus of payload and fuel per shot in a 20-tonne vehicle (the first commercial DragonX resupply mission carried about 500kg of cargo and no fuel).
SpaceX still hasn't attempted even a test GEO launch of a single DBS/GEO payload and is incapable of putting the biggest such satellites in place -- INTELSAT 20 launched by Arianespace in August this year massed about 6 tonnes, a tonne more than the uprated Falcon 9 is expected to be able to put into GEO. The same launch also put a 3-tonne DBS into GEO making the entire launch load over 10 tonnes including ancillary materials, way above anything the Falcon 9 will ever be able to do.
The Falcon 9 has flown four times IIRC; in two cases things went wrong -- on its first launch the orbital payload ended up rolling and yawing in the wrong orbit and on the fourth launch it lost an engine and couldn't deploy a secondary payload successfully and the mission was not a complete success. The Falcon Heavy is still to be completely assembled never mind actually flown.
The Ariane 5 in ES, GS and ECS configurations has 50 completely successful launches under its belt since the last failure back in 2002. It has a proven track record of delivering twice the payload of the Falcon 9 to LEO and twice the projected payload of the F9 v1.1 to GEO (since SpaceX has not yet attempted a launch to GEO).
Musk's comments sound like FUD to encourage sales of Falcon 9 launches, nothing more.
Cesium has a half-life in the human body of between 50 and 120 days depending on which tissues it ends up in (fat, muscle, bone etc.). Ingest a milligram of cesium and half of it will be expelled from the body in that 50-120 days, and half of the residue over the next half-life period and so on. It's not something like radioactive potassium which the body actively tries to conserve in equilibrium in various tissues and which makes up most of the human body's radioactivity level of ca. 4000Bq (assuming a 70-80kg adult).
If elements like cesium never left your body after ingestion you'd be spherical and weigh 200kg in six months. Then again, did you say you were American?
I have a pair of 1GB ECC DDR3 RAM sticks surplus from a friend's Apple Desktop Pro upgrade running happily in an AM3+ mobo (Biostar TA880GU3+) running alongside a pair of 4GB regular non-ECC DDR3 sticks. No BIOS or other tweaks required to get them to work.
I'm not sure Yucca Mountain was a good idea to start with for various reasons but the US decided it needed a shallow repository because of President Carter's never-revisited delusion that spent nuclear fuel from conventional power reactors is a proliferation threat. Once the billions in pork were on the table building the depository was a given but putting it into use against the opposition of anti-nuclear howler monkeys was not so certain.
Reprocessing vastly reduces the amount of actual waste needing disposal to a cubic metre or two a year per reactor after vitrification and jacketing. This amount can be put into a deep depository (typically 400m or more deep, in granite or other non-permeable geology), backfilled after a decade or two of operation and ignored. Unreprocessed spent fuel is bulky by comparison and there's always the thought that you'd want to go back some day to recover the unburnt U-235 and the Pu-239/240 still present in the fuel pellets by running them through a reprocessing cycle.
Nuclear fuel is a fraction of the cost of generating electricity compared to the cost of coal or NG for the same amount of power. The cheapest non-nuclear fuel in the UK is coal at about 3p per kWh including mining, transport, processing etc. but not including sufficient pollution controls to prevent the release of CO2, sulphur compounds, nitrogen compounds, radon gas, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium, uranium, thorium, radium etc. NG is a bit more expensive than coal and only releases CO2, a little sulphur, a lot of nitrogen oxides and lots more radon so it is considered clean enough to be embraced by the green renewables fans.
The biggest costs for nuclear generation are operating the plants to a high level of safety and availability and most of all paying off the loans for the upfront construction costs over the operating life of the reactor itself. That's why licence extensions past the initial 30-year or 40-year period are so eagerly sought by power station operators as by that time the loans will be paid off, future decommissioning will be 100% funded and the rest is gravy. Contrarily the overbuilding of critical plant for exaggerated safety reasons means that a 40-year-old reactor is quite often robust and safe enough to continue working for another ten or twenty years with the regular inspections and recertifications that they undergo anyway.
Actually the cost of uranium fuel for reactors is a fraction of the total price of generating electricity at 0.68 cents/kWh, (http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/costs/) and that price is similar pretty much everywhere in the world that uses reactors for electricity generation. The operators spend more running the reactors (staff, equipment, insurance premiums, landscaping etc.) than they do fuelling them. Uranium oxide (yellowcake) currently costs about $50 a pound at the minehead which is stunningly cheap and part of the reason we don't reprocess spent fuel more than we do at the moment.
Storage of spent fuel is also quite cheap -- large metal and concrete boxes and water pools which just sit there aren't expensive and given a reactor-year's worth of spent fuel produces less than a tonne of real medium-to-long-term waste we don't even need very many boxes and pools.
Long-term disposal of the enduring waste in geological depositories shouldn't be that expensive either once we've got enough waste that it's worth bothering making the effort to bury it -- right now all of Britain's power station high-level nuclear waste accumulated over the past sixty years of reactor operations would fit in a medium-sized house. That's after reprocessing the spent fuel rods and returning the uranium and plutonium in the rods back into the fuel cycle which as I mentioned elsewhere the US does not carry out as national policy hence the very large and elaborate Yucca Mountain depository project as they have lots more spent fuel to store.
As for fuel free sources I see no costing for solar panel disposal in most home and industrial installations. They are loaded with toxic chemicals and can't simply be dumped in landfill or allowed to come in contact with ground water to leach out so they will require expensive end-of-life handling. Some areas of China are already suffering from fly-tipping of chemicals and waste by solar cell panel manufacturers.
A big chunk of it has been spent building the Yucca Mountain depository in Nevada. Whether it ever gets used for storage of spent nuclear fuel is another matter.
The US government has chosen not to reprocess spent fuel as a matter of policy. This means the 30-odd billion dollars it has been given by the nuclear generating companies over the past few decades as a result of the 0.1c per kWh levy has to cover the cost of safe disposal of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of complete fuel rod assemblies currently in store rather than a few thousand tonnes of actual non-recyclable waste which would be the result of reprocessing.
Reprocessing doesn't actually save much money in total compared to a once-through fuel production system since uranium is very cheap but it does reduce the absolute amount of waste with significant long-term cost savings.
Current new-build reactors being constructed in China and elsewhere in the world generate three times as much electricity (1400MW) as this 1970s PWR does (550MW). The cost of fuel is trivial so the major expenses involved in running an older reactor are things like operating costs, staffing, maintenance and insurance which are similar or even greater than the newer designs due to economies of scale, rationalisation of design etc.
Yes, the cost was factored in. All US nuclear operators pay 0.1c per kWh generated to the US government to deal with spent nuclear fuel. They also pay into a fund for decommissioning reactors at end-of-life; I don't know whether this particular reactor's fund is paid off.
I don't know if they're going to decommission this reactor quickly or not; British practice is to seal the reactor building after final defuelling, demolish the ancillary buildings like turbine halls etc. which have no radiological problems and let the reactor vessel "cool down" for about 80 years in a custodianship period. That costs very little to do (basically a wire fence, secure doors and a few watchmen) and at the end of that period the rest of the plant can be demolished like any other building, with maybe some asbestos to worry about.
Faster decommissioning of the site requires the reactor vessel, the only part which is noticeably radioactive, to be removed and then buried in a pit for a few decades after which it can be dug up and treated as regular scrap. All of the really radioactive material on the site is in the fuel rods and that is dealt with separately when the reactor is taken out of service.
I had to explain to some folks in the photography business when the original iPad was released that it would not run Adobe PhotoShop even though it was an computer made by Apple. I expect there will be some folks who will make the same mistake with the MS RT tablets.
"Big enough electricity supply" is the problem. A Nimitz carrier has about 190MW of nuclear power available to it although a lot of that energy goes directly to the steam turbines driving the four props to push a 100,000 tonne aircraft carrier through the water and into the wind at about 60km/hr. By comparison an F/A-18 Super Hornet's engines produce about 40-50MW in flight, more if afterburner is used.
To make the fuel for a couple of Hornets for a single CAP flight of an hour's duration assuming, very generously a 10% electricity-fuel conversion ratio would require a GWhr of electricity or all of both reactors output for five hours. In reality the carrier needs a lot of power for radars, lighting, heating, computing etc. as well as steam for propulsion so only a fraction of the 190MW would be available at any time to synthesize fuel. Things get a little bit better in the Ford class carriers as they have much bigger reactors (2x300MW) but they also consume a lot of electrical power for their catapult systems and other systems.
I don't see the avgas tankers that accompany CV battlegroups going away any time soon.
I received some MS word documents via email, opened and edited them in LibreOffice then saved in MSWord format to return them. When I reopened them later I found that sections of the text had been randomly bolded. I checked with a copy of MSWord and yes the bolding was in the saved file. I went back to using Open Office as it doesn't bold the text or otherwise corrupt my work as far as I can tell. MSWord doesn't have this problem at all, of course.
The Dieselmax and its record campaign was paid for by JCB, based around their new (at the time) JCB 444 diesel engine they had designed for back actuators, front-loaders etc. They were heavily tweaked of course with the two engines in the car eventually producing about 1500hp in total for the record runs.
Interestingly the diesel-powered car record was one of the longer-standing entries in the FIA record books with the previous holder's record being set in 1973 at a bit over 230mph.
Andy Green, ex-RAF pilot and the holder of the supersonic land speed record as driver of Thrust SSC is the chosen driver for the 1000mph Bloodhound. He also holds the world land speed record for a diesel-powered wheel-driven car, the JCB Dieselmax which took the record to 350mph at Bonneville in 2006.
A simple sling system will achieve the necessary projectile speed you want. Set up a 3600rpm motor with the axis vertical. Attach a 2.5 metre long steel bar to the shaft and a counterweight on the other side, or use a 5m long bar mounted in the middle. Put your bullet on the end of the bar with some kind of remote-controlled hold/release device but remember it will be under considerable load from the centripetal forces.
Spin up the motor until it reaches its max rated speed, 3600 rpm. Air resistance etc. will be a problem but a big motor rated at a couple of kW should do the job if the bar is thin or profiled aerodynamically. At that speed the velocity of the end of the rod and the bullet will be about 900 m/s. Release the bullet and it will fly off. Where it goes depends on which point in the rotation you release it.
Note that this would work for any bullet size and weight --.223,.50 BMG, 20MM cannonshell, 23mm DU penetrator etc. A mechanism to feed a stream of projectiles down the axis of rotation and along the arm into a suitable hold/release "breech" would turn it into a continuous-fire system at a rate of up to 3600 rounds per minute. Assuming a 5m double arm then this rate could be doubled to 7200 rpm.
A gearbox and higher rotational speed would allow the use of a shorter sling arm while maintaining the final projectile velocity although air resistance would become more of a problem.
A gasoline engine could be used to drive the slingshaft if electrical power is not to hand, or it could even be human-powered via pedals for a low-tech Mad Max scenario (possibly with a flywheel attached).
Your initial supposition is basically wrong so the rest of your argument falls apart rather.
The materials in a nuclear reactor structure exposed to high levels of neutron and gamma flux are chosen so they don't activate easily or indeed at all. For example the steel alloys used for the reactor vessel don't contain cobalt as Co-59, the most common isotope plus a neutron produces the very radioactive isotope Co-60 with a short halflife of five years producing an intense gamma ray on decay. The fuel rods are jacketed with zirconium for similar reasons since it is pretty much transparent to neutrons. The result is that after a BWR or PWR has been opened for refuelling and the hot fuel rods removed the level of radioactivity within it is miniscule and people can work around and even inside the open reactor vessel (once it has been drained) with minimal protection.
Decommissioning a reactor is carried out either quite quickly after the reactor is shut down for the last time e.g. the Japanese Tokai 1 Magnox reactor which was reduced to brownfield status in about ten years or the alternative process employed by the British for its older Magnox reactors is to remove the fuel rods, demolish the rest of the site (turbine halls, control room etc.) and mothball the reactor building, leaving it for eighty years or so for residual radiation to decay to the point where the future demolition job has no radiation problem to deal with at all.
The long-term radiation problems with reactors really only accrue from the fission products and some of their daughters in the spent fuel rods. Separating them out for vitrification and geologic burial is a solved problem -- it costs money to carry out but it reduces the volume and mass of true waste quite substantially while returning 90%+ of the original fuel rod material to the fuel cycle. The US for political reasons does not reprocess fuel rods and the bulk and mass of the resulting stockpile is starting to become problematic hence the Yucca Mountain project and its political aftermath.
"Basically, when you add the costs of decomissioning and waste storage, they become pretty expensive. For the tax payer, of course."
Actually no. US and most other Western power reactor operators pay into funds for decommissioning their reactors and also for waste disposal on a kWhr basis. The US rate for waste disposal is 0.25 cents/kWhr which goes to the US government as it is in charge of all high-level nuclear waste since it is seen as a security risk. The current fund total is about 36 billion dollars IIRC. It's the taxpayer that has to deal with coal-slurry lagoons, mercury and other nasties in the exhaust stack, the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere etc. Legislative attempts to cut down such releases under the EPA and such are a "war on coal" according to, surprise suprise, the coal-mining and coal-burning industry.
As for nuclear power costs in the US, fuel costs are about 0.5 cents/kWhr and operations (running the plant, refurbishing the generators, landscaping the area etc.) are about a cent/kWhr. The killer cost is construction which is all up-front and expensive. It means that once a nuclear power station is up and running it starts paying off the 30 or 40 year financial instrument it took to build it and the owners really want to keep it running 24/7/365 to pay the capital and interest accruing.
You can buy diesel in the UK for stationary engine use without paying tax ("red" diesel) or if you buy enough of it to make it worth jumping through the hoops form-filling you can get the Vehicle Fuel Duty and VAT paid at the pumps refunded as it's not being used in a road vehicle.
Friends who own a coastal barge/houseboat buy red diesel from the local marina; I bought them a hundred gallons for their honeymoon cruise as a wedding present.
Yes, slowing down the air to subsonic speeds was the job of the nacelle structure in front of the engines on Concorde. It means high-bypass turbofans like the RR Trent 900 and GE-90 couldn't easily be used for supersonic flight since they provide a lot of their thrust by propelling air using the big fandisc driven off the jet turbine in the middle.
Supersonic fighters and such use low-bypass fans but they're not very efficient at transonic speeds since the fanblades don't work well in that regime. The benefits are in subsonic cruise and loiter mode where fuel economy and performance are improved over a pure jet design.
The problem is that engine design improvements for airliners over the past fifty years have been aimed at subsonic flight regimes producing the modern high-ratio bypass turbofans where the core jet turbine only produces 15-20% of the direct thrust and the fan produces most of the "push". Sadly fans don't work in supersonic regimes although if some aerodynamic Einstein ever comes up with a solution then the world will beat a path to her door.
That restricts supersonic flight to rockets, scramjets etc. and to pure jet engines with variable intake nacelle structures that can slow the incoming air to subsonic speeds so it can be compressed, burned and turned into thrust. The Olympus 593s that powered the Concordes are fifty-year-old designs. Modern engines with similar capabilities are a bit smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient but they are not even twice as efficient as the originals.
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Transferring fuel and oxidiser sideways between tankage sections under 3-4 gees of thrust and vibration is, as far as I am aware, going to be a first in rocketry. It takes plumbing, pumps, valve gear etc. meaning major changes to the core and strap-on sections which add to the vehicle weight as well as the cost of manufacture since the cores are no longer physically identical. In contrast the Delta 4 Heavy strap-ons are pretty nearly identical to the core; the central engine just runs throttled down so that when the strap-ons separate it has enough propellant left to continue to orbit without the extra parasitic weight of transfer pumps etc. I don't know why this option isn't available to SpaceX; do the Merlin engines have a throttle-down and/or in-flight start capability?
The major cost of a manned Moon or Mars mission isn't the launch vehicles, it's the crew vehicle design and testing and construction. There would be a large number of actual launches to lift everything needed for even a "boots and banners" go-there-and-never-go-back mission; not even Elon thinks he could go to Mars (even one-way) on a single Falcon Heavy stack. That's where the trillion dollars would be spent and saving even 20 million bucks a launch by flying a flock of Falcons wouldn't shave more than 50 billion off that thirteen-digit price ticket in the end.
DBS and other geosync birds are getting bigger and heavier for various reasons -- more propellant so they can stay in their orbit slot longer, more solar cells to drive stronger transmitters, more broadcast channels, more fail-soft backup gear etc.
At the moment the Falcon 9 can (theoretically) put a typical satellite maxing out at about 4 tonnes or so into GEO with the forthcoming V1.1 version increasing that to 5 tonnes. It can't lift the newer birds like INTELSAT 20 weighing over six tonnes as Ariane can (and has done).
Until the paper-exercise Falcon Heavy with its kludgey fuel-transfer-in-flight mode flies SpaceX can't compete with Ariane's proven lift capability. After that... SpaceX only has one customer pencilled in for Heavy and that's Intelsat in 2015. A 50-tonne to LEO lift capability fits few if any commercial niches today; even the Delta 4 Heavy is underused with its 23-tonne to LEO capability.
Of course the Falcon Heavy's main projected use is manned missions to the Moon and Mars but that assumes substantial and sustained funding for such a project in the trillion dollar range at a time when the focus for space exploration is turning more and more to capable robots and cheap expendable probes rather than spam-in-a-can.
The market SpaceX is competing in already has the Ariane as well as other commercial/military launchers like the Deltas, the HII-B and of course the venerable Soyuz (1700 launches and counting) which is a closer match to the Falcon 9's capabilities. They're playing catchup with their launch price being the big market attractor while they get the bugs out and improve their throw weight.
What would you be launching and where for 200 mill? A geosync DBS bird costs about 100 million shrinkwrapped for launch with insurance, load integration and launch costs pushing the total price up to about 400 million dollars US after it has been delivered to its final position in the GEO constellation.
Scientific and telecomms platforms can be put into LEO for a lot less, of course but there are a lot more boosters other than the Falcon 9 that can do this job; the Ariane's speciality is DBS launches, two at a time with a side-order of Space Station resupply and reboost ATVs delivering 6 tonnes plus of payload and fuel per shot in a 20-tonne vehicle (the first commercial DragonX resupply mission carried about 500kg of cargo and no fuel).
SpaceX still hasn't attempted even a test GEO launch of a single DBS/GEO payload and is incapable of putting the biggest such satellites in place -- INTELSAT 20 launched by Arianespace in August this year massed about 6 tonnes, a tonne more than the uprated Falcon 9 is expected to be able to put into GEO. The same launch also put a 3-tonne DBS into GEO making the entire launch load over 10 tonnes including ancillary materials, way above anything the Falcon 9 will ever be able to do.
The Falcon 9 has flown four times IIRC; in two cases things went wrong -- on its first launch the orbital payload ended up rolling and yawing in the wrong orbit and on the fourth launch it lost an engine and couldn't deploy a secondary payload successfully and the mission was not a complete success. The Falcon Heavy is still to be completely assembled never mind actually flown.
The Ariane 5 in ES, GS and ECS configurations has 50 completely successful launches under its belt since the last failure back in 2002. It has a proven track record of delivering twice the payload of the Falcon 9 to LEO and twice the projected payload of the F9 v1.1 to GEO (since SpaceX has not yet attempted a launch to GEO).
Musk's comments sound like FUD to encourage sales of Falcon 9 launches, nothing more.
Cesium has a half-life in the human body of between 50 and 120 days depending on which tissues it ends up in (fat, muscle, bone etc.). Ingest a milligram of cesium and half of it will be expelled from the body in that 50-120 days, and half of the residue over the next half-life period and so on. It's not something like radioactive potassium which the body actively tries to conserve in equilibrium in various tissues and which makes up most of the human body's radioactivity level of ca. 4000Bq (assuming a 70-80kg adult).
If elements like cesium never left your body after ingestion you'd be spherical and weigh 200kg in six months. Then again, did you say you were American?
I have a pair of 1GB ECC DDR3 RAM sticks surplus from a friend's Apple Desktop Pro upgrade running happily in an AM3+ mobo (Biostar TA880GU3+) running alongside a pair of 4GB regular non-ECC DDR3 sticks. No BIOS or other tweaks required to get them to work.
I'm not sure Yucca Mountain was a good idea to start with for various reasons but the US decided it needed a shallow repository because of President Carter's never-revisited delusion that spent nuclear fuel from conventional power reactors is a proliferation threat. Once the billions in pork were on the table building the depository was a given but putting it into use against the opposition of anti-nuclear howler monkeys was not so certain.
Reprocessing vastly reduces the amount of actual waste needing disposal to a cubic metre or two a year per reactor after vitrification and jacketing. This amount can be put into a deep depository (typically 400m or more deep, in granite or other non-permeable geology), backfilled after a decade or two of operation and ignored. Unreprocessed spent fuel is bulky by comparison and there's always the thought that you'd want to go back some day to recover the unburnt U-235 and the Pu-239/240 still present in the fuel pellets by running them through a reprocessing cycle.
Isn't waving your hands around how you make an iPad do what you want? Or is that different?
Nuclear fuel is a fraction of the cost of generating electricity compared to the cost of coal or NG for the same amount of power. The cheapest non-nuclear fuel in the UK is coal at about 3p per kWh including mining, transport, processing etc. but not including sufficient pollution controls to prevent the release of CO2, sulphur compounds, nitrogen compounds, radon gas, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium, uranium, thorium, radium etc. NG is a bit more expensive than coal and only releases CO2, a little sulphur, a lot of nitrogen oxides and lots more radon so it is considered clean enough to be embraced by the green renewables fans.
The biggest costs for nuclear generation are operating the plants to a high level of safety and availability and most of all paying off the loans for the upfront construction costs over the operating life of the reactor itself. That's why licence extensions past the initial 30-year or 40-year period are so eagerly sought by power station operators as by that time the loans will be paid off, future decommissioning will be 100% funded and the rest is gravy. Contrarily the overbuilding of critical plant for exaggerated safety reasons means that a 40-year-old reactor is quite often robust and safe enough to continue working for another ten or twenty years with the regular inspections and recertifications that they undergo anyway.
Actually the cost of uranium fuel for reactors is a fraction of the total price of generating electricity at 0.68 cents/kWh, (http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/costs/) and that price is similar pretty much everywhere in the world that uses reactors for electricity generation. The operators spend more running the reactors (staff, equipment, insurance premiums, landscaping etc.) than they do fuelling them. Uranium oxide (yellowcake) currently costs about $50 a pound at the minehead which is stunningly cheap and part of the reason we don't reprocess spent fuel more than we do at the moment.
Storage of spent fuel is also quite cheap -- large metal and concrete boxes and water pools which just sit there aren't expensive and given a reactor-year's worth of spent fuel produces less than a tonne of real medium-to-long-term waste we don't even need very many boxes and pools.
Long-term disposal of the enduring waste in geological depositories shouldn't be that expensive either once we've got enough waste that it's worth bothering making the effort to bury it -- right now all of Britain's power station high-level nuclear waste accumulated over the past sixty years of reactor operations would fit in a medium-sized house. That's after reprocessing the spent fuel rods and returning the uranium and plutonium in the rods back into the fuel cycle which as I mentioned elsewhere the US does not carry out as national policy hence the very large and elaborate Yucca Mountain depository project as they have lots more spent fuel to store.
As for fuel free sources I see no costing for solar panel disposal in most home and industrial installations. They are loaded with toxic chemicals and can't simply be dumped in landfill or allowed to come in contact with ground water to leach out so they will require expensive end-of-life handling. Some areas of China are already suffering from fly-tipping of chemicals and waste by solar cell panel manufacturers.
A big chunk of it has been spent building the Yucca Mountain depository in Nevada. Whether it ever gets used for storage of spent nuclear fuel is another matter.
The US government has chosen not to reprocess spent fuel as a matter of policy. This means the 30-odd billion dollars it has been given by the nuclear generating companies over the past few decades as a result of the 0.1c per kWh levy has to cover the cost of safe disposal of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of complete fuel rod assemblies currently in store rather than a few thousand tonnes of actual non-recyclable waste which would be the result of reprocessing.
Reprocessing doesn't actually save much money in total compared to a once-through fuel production system since uranium is very cheap but it does reduce the absolute amount of waste with significant long-term cost savings.
Current new-build reactors being constructed in China and elsewhere in the world generate three times as much electricity (1400MW) as this 1970s PWR does (550MW). The cost of fuel is trivial so the major expenses involved in running an older reactor are things like operating costs, staffing, maintenance and insurance which are similar or even greater than the newer designs due to economies of scale, rationalisation of design etc.
Yes, the cost was factored in. All US nuclear operators pay 0.1c per kWh generated to the US government to deal with spent nuclear fuel. They also pay into a fund for decommissioning reactors at end-of-life; I don't know whether this particular reactor's fund is paid off.
I don't know if they're going to decommission this reactor quickly or not; British practice is to seal the reactor building after final defuelling, demolish the ancillary buildings like turbine halls etc. which have no radiological problems and let the reactor vessel "cool down" for about 80 years in a custodianship period. That costs very little to do (basically a wire fence, secure doors and a few watchmen) and at the end of that period the rest of the plant can be demolished like any other building, with maybe some asbestos to worry about.
Faster decommissioning of the site requires the reactor vessel, the only part which is noticeably radioactive, to be removed and then buried in a pit for a few decades after which it can be dug up and treated as regular scrap. All of the really radioactive material on the site is in the fuel rods and that is dealt with separately when the reactor is taken out of service.
I had to explain to some folks in the photography business when the original iPad was released that it would not run Adobe PhotoShop even though it was an computer made by Apple. I expect there will be some folks who will make the same mistake with the MS RT tablets.
"Big enough electricity supply" is the problem. A Nimitz carrier has about 190MW of nuclear power available to it although a lot of that energy goes directly to the steam turbines driving the four props to push a 100,000 tonne aircraft carrier through the water and into the wind at about 60km/hr. By comparison an F/A-18 Super Hornet's engines produce about 40-50MW in flight, more if afterburner is used.
To make the fuel for a couple of Hornets for a single CAP flight of an hour's duration assuming, very generously a 10% electricity-fuel conversion ratio would require a GWhr of electricity or all of both reactors output for five hours. In reality the carrier needs a lot of power for radars, lighting, heating, computing etc. as well as steam for propulsion so only a fraction of the 190MW would be available at any time to synthesize fuel. Things get a little bit better in the Ford class carriers as they have much bigger reactors (2x300MW) but they also consume a lot of electrical power for their catapult systems and other systems.
I don't see the avgas tankers that accompany CV battlegroups going away any time soon.
I received some MS word documents via email, opened and edited them in LibreOffice then saved in MSWord format to return them. When I reopened them later I found that sections of the text had been randomly bolded. I checked with a copy of MSWord and yes the bolding was in the saved file. I went back to using Open Office as it doesn't bold the text or otherwise corrupt my work as far as I can tell. MSWord doesn't have this problem at all, of course.
The Dieselmax and its record campaign was paid for by JCB, based around their new (at the time) JCB 444 diesel engine they had designed for back actuators, front-loaders etc. They were heavily tweaked of course with the two engines in the car eventually producing about 1500hp in total for the record runs.
Interestingly the diesel-powered car record was one of the longer-standing entries in the FIA record books with the previous holder's record being set in 1973 at a bit over 230mph.
Andy Green, ex-RAF pilot and the holder of the supersonic land speed record as driver of Thrust SSC is the chosen driver for the 1000mph Bloodhound. He also holds the world land speed record for a diesel-powered wheel-driven car, the JCB Dieselmax which took the record to 350mph at Bonneville in 2006.
A simple sling system will achieve the necessary projectile speed you want. Set up a 3600rpm motor with the axis vertical. Attach a 2.5 metre long steel bar to the shaft and a counterweight on the other side, or use a 5m long bar mounted in the middle. Put your bullet on the end of the bar with some kind of remote-controlled hold/release device but remember it will be under considerable load from the centripetal forces.
Spin up the motor until it reaches its max rated speed, 3600 rpm. Air resistance etc. will be a problem but a big motor rated at a couple of kW should do the job if the bar is thin or profiled aerodynamically. At that speed the velocity of the end of the rod and the bullet will be about 900 m/s. Release the bullet and it will fly off. Where it goes depends on which point in the rotation you release it.
Note that this would work for any bullet size and weight -- .223, .50 BMG, 20MM cannonshell, 23mm DU penetrator etc. A mechanism to feed a stream of projectiles down the axis of rotation and along the arm into a suitable hold/release "breech" would turn it into a continuous-fire system at a rate of up to 3600 rounds per minute. Assuming a 5m double arm then this rate could be doubled to 7200 rpm.
A gearbox and higher rotational speed would allow the use of a shorter sling arm while maintaining the final projectile velocity although air resistance would become more of a problem.
A gasoline engine could be used to drive the slingshaft if electrical power is not to hand, or it could even be human-powered via pedals for a low-tech Mad Max scenario (possibly with a flywheel attached).
Your initial supposition is basically wrong so the rest of your argument falls apart rather.
The materials in a nuclear reactor structure exposed to high levels of neutron and gamma flux are chosen so they don't activate easily or indeed at all. For example the steel alloys used for the reactor vessel don't contain cobalt as Co-59, the most common isotope plus a neutron produces the very radioactive isotope Co-60 with a short halflife of five years producing an intense gamma ray on decay. The fuel rods are jacketed with zirconium for similar reasons since it is pretty much transparent to neutrons. The result is that after a BWR or PWR has been opened for refuelling and the hot fuel rods removed the level of radioactivity within it is miniscule and people can work around and even inside the open reactor vessel (once it has been drained) with minimal protection.
Decommissioning a reactor is carried out either quite quickly after the reactor is shut down for the last time e.g. the Japanese Tokai 1 Magnox reactor which was reduced to brownfield status in about ten years or the alternative process employed by the British for its older Magnox reactors is to remove the fuel rods, demolish the rest of the site (turbine halls, control room etc.) and mothball the reactor building, leaving it for eighty years or so for residual radiation to decay to the point where the future demolition job has no radiation problem to deal with at all.
The long-term radiation problems with reactors really only accrue from the fission products and some of their daughters in the spent fuel rods. Separating them out for vitrification and geologic burial is a solved problem -- it costs money to carry out but it reduces the volume and mass of true waste quite substantially while returning 90%+ of the original fuel rod material to the fuel cycle. The US for political reasons does not reprocess fuel rods and the bulk and mass of the resulting stockpile is starting to become problematic hence the Yucca Mountain project and its political aftermath.
"Basically, when you add the costs of decomissioning and waste storage, they become pretty expensive. For the tax payer, of course."
Actually no. US and most other Western power reactor operators pay into funds for decommissioning their reactors and also for waste disposal on a kWhr basis. The US rate for waste disposal is 0.25 cents/kWhr which goes to the US government as it is in charge of all high-level nuclear waste since it is seen as a security risk. The current fund total is about 36 billion dollars IIRC. It's the taxpayer that has to deal with coal-slurry lagoons, mercury and other nasties in the exhaust stack, the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere etc. Legislative attempts to cut down such releases under the EPA and such are a "war on coal" according to, surprise suprise, the coal-mining and coal-burning industry.
As for nuclear power costs in the US, fuel costs are about 0.5 cents/kWhr and operations (running the plant, refurbishing the generators, landscaping the area etc.) are about a cent/kWhr. The killer cost is construction which is all up-front and expensive. It means that once a nuclear power station is up and running it starts paying off the 30 or 40 year financial instrument it took to build it and the owners really want to keep it running 24/7/365 to pay the capital and interest accruing.
You can buy diesel in the UK for stationary engine use without paying tax ("red" diesel) or if you buy enough of it to make it worth jumping through the hoops form-filling you can get the Vehicle Fuel Duty and VAT paid at the pumps refunded as it's not being used in a road vehicle.
Friends who own a coastal barge/houseboat buy red diesel from the local marina; I bought them a hundred gallons for their honeymoon cruise as a wedding present.
Yes, slowing down the air to subsonic speeds was the job of the nacelle structure in front of the engines on Concorde. It means high-bypass turbofans like the RR Trent 900 and GE-90 couldn't easily be used for supersonic flight since they provide a lot of their thrust by propelling air using the big fandisc driven off the jet turbine in the middle.
Supersonic fighters and such use low-bypass fans but they're not very efficient at transonic speeds since the fanblades don't work well in that regime. The benefits are in subsonic cruise and loiter mode where fuel economy and performance are improved over a pure jet design.
The problem is that engine design improvements for airliners over the past fifty years have been aimed at subsonic flight regimes producing the modern high-ratio bypass turbofans where the core jet turbine only produces 15-20% of the direct thrust and the fan produces most of the "push". Sadly fans don't work in supersonic regimes although if some aerodynamic Einstein ever comes up with a solution then the world will beat a path to her door.
That restricts supersonic flight to rockets, scramjets etc. and to pure jet engines with variable intake nacelle structures that can slow the incoming air to subsonic speeds so it can be compressed, burned and turned into thrust. The Olympus 593s that powered the Concordes are fifty-year-old designs. Modern engines with similar capabilities are a bit smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient but they are not even twice as efficient as the originals.