Ah - that link - a video showing mousing over a google prompt - how insulting and condescending. I'm frankly astonished that you are so thin skinned and insecure that you would escalate to such an insult so quickly. Here is one that is merely informative without being condescending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting Note a requirement of a little more than "just add energy".
If you'd do a few minutes of research on the subject
I have taught some stuff on this topic a couple of years before this site existed. And no, that doesn't make me any more special than any other postgraduate engineering student with a metallurgical focus at the time, you just happen to have hit something I was doing.
it's fundamentally no different from electrolyzing water for hydrogen and oxygen
Perhaps you should look up some melting points of molten oxides and then consider if your electrodes are going to survive, let alone have your metal of choice plated out on them.
I'm sure that you are extremely good at coding or something, but there are a lot of people on this site and the odds are when you bring up something where you are out of your depth that you will hit someone who has had to actually put some work into that topic. Perhaps instead of feeling threatened and getting insulting you should consider a different reaction.
It has the same Carnot efficiency like the steam turbine behind the boiler.
Boilers lose a lot of heat, especially old ones, so no, that very lossy extra step means nowhere near as efficient as burning in the gas turbine even if you have a very large boiler and a turbines covering a very wide pressure range allowing quite a few passes with the same steam.
I should have mentioned that earlier but the proposed power station refurbishment where I thought about these things in depth was in 1994 so I'd forgotten all the details.
Instead of encrypted partitions (or as well as them) I'd say it's best to not put things that are most useful to a thief on there at all. Bank account details do not have to be saved for example. Scans of documents that could be used for identity theft - not the permanent place for them either. While a thief could do a social engineering attack on another using your email settings (another reason to not autosave a password) it's more hard work than them getting your banking details.
IMHO the likelihood of theft is why certificate only logins to VPNs or ssh are an extremely bad idea especially on laptops and tablets. Sure, use a cert, but if there is no passphrase than any thief or script kiddie that 0wns the device can get into whatever you can get into.
Perhaps you should look around a bit and find out why both of those metals are incredibly expensive to produce. Also look at what else is involved in those processes (hint: it's not just energy). Doing it electrochemically is not so easy, and indeed involves a lot more chemicals than you seem to be thinking of.
One thing to keep in mind is all of that gas used for initial heating to get the boiler nice and warm. It's a very expensive way to use gas instead of much cheaper coal. If you are using gas you don't want to throw a lot of it away so gas turbines are used instead.
Burning gas for a boiler or in a gas turbine has the same upper theoretical efficiency limit (around 42% - 45%)
That's for heat production, but when the aim is actually generating electricity you lose with each additional step. You cannot squeeze every last bit of energy out of the steam so the gas turbines with their single step win by quite a margin.
Doesn't Bill Gates give speeches all the time on how he's spending his own money on nuclear power
Has he actually invested in it anywhere, ever?
which is something that nuclear power detractors also say is impossible
Maybe they say that because it's never been done. Maybe not impossible but it seems to be an incredibly unlikely thing for an insurance company to want to cover because they are extremely risk averse. Up until now governments have footed the bills one way or another and even partial payback of loans from governments has been very rare. In the current investment climate I very strongly doubt that any nuclear power plant will attract full private funding.
No serious person would suggest creating an atmosphere these days. Maybe they would have in the 50s or 60s
I mentioned it elsewhere but Edgar Rice Burroughs used the impracticality of it as a plot point in 1912 in his "Princess of Mars" serial with the breathable atmosphere being lost to space very shortly after oxygen generating machines broke down. He kept track of various things in scientific circles but I'm not sure where he got it from.
Perhaps it was just a plot device to explain why Mars is dead at the time of writing but not in his story set some decades earlier, since due to spectroscopy the astronomers in 1912 knew that Mars did not have an atmosphere like Earth's.
They'd need a way to protect the atmosphere from solar wind and other dissipation mechanics before that would even be a relevant consideration. Pumping O2 or CO2 into the Martian atmosphere would quickly be equivalent to pumping it into space, and not especially useful.
As an aside, what you mentioned has been thought of for so long that it was a plot point of the John Carter of Mars books. The mythical Martians there had machines that just kept on throwing out oxygen, but eventually they stopped working and it was all lost to space.
Only energy? Dust those cobwebs off your brain. Remember that you were shown formulas for reactions some time back. You need a reducing agent as well. That kind of adds to the size of the industrial base you need to establish before you can start producing your own oxygen.
It's well and truly fiction but the Japanese near-future "Space Brothers" has that for their moonbase - modular construction by robots before the first astronauts arrive. Getting people somewhere requires lifting a lot of mass to orbit and you are on the clock with consumables. Automated stuff doesn't need so much support and is far less time critical. You don't need to send that stuff to do the walls at the same time as what you need to do foundations (or drill holes or whatever).
McMurdo is the city of Antarctic bases - a lot of flights in with fresh food and everything. A good place to start on getting more understanding is reading about the expeditions during the international geophysical year, that should be modern enough that you can relate.
Meanwhile in reality it's a hostile takeover bid in action. A couple of guys on the board who own other media companies blocked an effort to secure finance. They will buy it at file sale prices very soon. They would have done that already but there is a pesky law that needs to be changed first and that's planned for next week.
So extremely grubby business practices with a bit of help from people in politics that they donate to and nothing else - not even "movie piracy".
I just cannot remember how many times movie piracy has been blamed when something else is the cause, it must be a parrotty error.
It may be cheaper to convert the plant into a natural gas peaker.
No - burning gas in a boiler is extremely wasteful compared with gas turbines. The only things you can reuse are the switchyard and the building - even the stacks are unsuitable due to the very large difference in exhaust temperature.
So, is the cost of solar cheaper than continuing to use the coal plants that exist?
Yes. Expected design life for those 40-50 year old plants was around 25 years. It's not just a case of putting a few patches on them to keep them running anymore. Once you get to the point where it's looking like you have to replace turbine rotors on top of everything else a rebuild is looking cheaper, and then economics gets in your way even if the expected total is less than an alternative (long lead time and huge capital costs versus doing a little bit at a time with each bit costing a lot less and short lead times). Of course it's not so obvious with the stuff that's less than 30 years old so not far beyond the design life, but eventually they'll get to a point where it's cheaper to replace than major rebuilds.
Banks are never going to fund it. Power companies are never going to fund it. It's only going to happen with socialism. You do get that right? You are the last person I'd expect to be pushing socialism. Maybe you should think before you cheer for something inherently opposed to what you believe.
Hence your incredibly stupid and sig I suppose. Somehow you seem to think a symbolic gun can keep you free instead of the reality being a very large number of people, armed or not, keeping you free.
One guy with a gun calling for freedom is just called a target.
Can you give some examples of scientists predicting this phenomenon?
Every fucking glaciologist who has lived for the last century and even every fucking person who has heard of the "Titanic" - where the fuck do you think the icebergs go? They go out to sea. Faster glaciers, more icebergs. Warmer water - sea ice detaches - just like it does every year only earlier.
What's with deliberately pretending to be thirty times more stupid than you could possible be? It's incredibly insulting to everyone unfortunate enough to read such pretended ignorance.
You couldn't resist some stupid offtopic charging at windmills and cheering for nukes either - it's all a big one package deal with you blindly following a Party line then isn't it? Well, not even your hero Putin is getting some nukes built, he's got his money in oil, so it doesn't matter how much you cheer it's not happening.
Having one of them stuck while studying the "loss of sea ice" is just plain hilarious.
Where do you think the lost sea ice on the shore goes? It drifts out to sea and this ship got stuck in an unexpectedly huge amount of it far out to sea.
You really should read at least a tiny bit about something that you are attempting to pontificate on.
The ice becoming more mobile to the point of becoming a hazard to navigation was something I've never seen predicted before. It has always been that the ice would get thin and recede which would open the waters to shipping without the need for ice breakers.
That's because you were listening the the "climate change is good" people like Bjorn Lomborg (economist) and Christopher Monckton (sodoku columnist) instead of people who work with the physical sciences.
To the 2nd amendment? Wonderful how it's relevant when a political group disguised as a sporting club want it to be and irrelevant when it's not - it's like magic!
Maybe I should just give up on teasing you idiots that like to pretend that a useful tool is a combined penis and flag substitute and turns even those far too cowardly to sign up to defend their country into real soldiers. The irony of having a traitor like Oliver North leading all this bullshit is icing on the cake.
I got a Y2K bug in 2013 - stupid fucking flexnet "licencing" software designed to punish the honest decided the perpetual licence of the software I wanted to run expired in the year 2000. Modes of failure like that can still run if the developers of the software are idiots and the QC people do not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is one that is merely informative without being condescending:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting
Note a requirement of a little more than "just add energy".
I have taught some stuff on this topic a couple of years before this site existed. And no, that doesn't make me any more special than any other postgraduate engineering student with a metallurgical focus at the time, you just happen to have hit something I was doing.
Perhaps you should look up some melting points of molten oxides and then consider if your electrodes are going to survive, let alone have your metal of choice plated out on them.
I'm sure that you are extremely good at coding or something, but there are a lot of people on this site and the odds are when you bring up something where you are out of your depth that you will hit someone who has had to actually put some work into that topic. Perhaps instead of feeling threatened and getting insulting you should consider a different reaction.
Boilers lose a lot of heat, especially old ones, so no, that very lossy extra step means nowhere near as efficient as burning in the gas turbine even if you have a very large boiler and a turbines covering a very wide pressure range allowing quite a few passes with the same steam.
I should have mentioned that earlier but the proposed power station refurbishment where I thought about these things in depth was in 1994 so I'd forgotten all the details.
Instead of encrypted partitions (or as well as them) I'd say it's best to not put things that are most useful to a thief on there at all. Bank account details do not have to be saved for example. Scans of documents that could be used for identity theft - not the permanent place for them either.
While a thief could do a social engineering attack on another using your email settings (another reason to not autosave a password) it's more hard work than them getting your banking details.
IMHO the likelihood of theft is why certificate only logins to VPNs or ssh are an extremely bad idea especially on laptops and tablets. Sure, use a cert, but if there is no passphrase than any thief or script kiddie that 0wns the device can get into whatever you can get into.
Perhaps you should look around a bit and find out why both of those metals are incredibly expensive to produce. Also look at what else is involved in those processes (hint: it's not just energy).
Doing it electrochemically is not so easy, and indeed involves a lot more chemicals than you seem to be thinking of.
Citation please.
That's for heat production, but when the aim is actually generating electricity you lose with each additional step. You cannot squeeze every last bit of energy out of the steam so the gas turbines with their single step win by quite a margin.
In the question I asked, the word "it" is meant to mean "nuclear power".
Please try again.
Indeed - but not "The only thing needed to extract oxygen from rock is energy".
Has he actually invested in it anywhere, ever?
Maybe they say that because it's never been done. Maybe not impossible but it seems to be an incredibly unlikely thing for an insurance company to want to cover because they are extremely risk averse. Up until now governments have footed the bills one way or another and even partial payback of loans from governments has been very rare.
In the current investment climate I very strongly doubt that any nuclear power plant will attract full private funding.
I mentioned it elsewhere but Edgar Rice Burroughs used the impracticality of it as a plot point in 1912 in his "Princess of Mars" serial with the breathable atmosphere being lost to space very shortly after oxygen generating machines broke down. He kept track of various things in scientific circles but I'm not sure where he got it from.
Perhaps it was just a plot device to explain why Mars is dead at the time of writing but not in his story set some decades earlier, since due to spectroscopy the astronomers in 1912 knew that Mars did not have an atmosphere like Earth's.
As an aside, what you mentioned has been thought of for so long that it was a plot point of the John Carter of Mars books. The mythical Martians there had machines that just kept on throwing out oxygen, but eventually they stopped working and it was all lost to space.
Only energy?
Dust those cobwebs off your brain.
Remember that you were shown formulas for reactions some time back.
You need a reducing agent as well.
That kind of adds to the size of the industrial base you need to establish before you can start producing your own oxygen.
It's well and truly fiction but the Japanese near-future "Space Brothers" has that for their moonbase - modular construction by robots before the first astronauts arrive.
Getting people somewhere requires lifting a lot of mass to orbit and you are on the clock with consumables. Automated stuff doesn't need so much support and is far less time critical. You don't need to send that stuff to do the walls at the same time as what you need to do foundations (or drill holes or whatever).
McMurdo is the city of Antarctic bases - a lot of flights in with fresh food and everything. A good place to start on getting more understanding is reading about the expeditions during the international geophysical year, that should be modern enough that you can relate.
Meanwhile in reality it's a hostile takeover bid in action.
A couple of guys on the board who own other media companies blocked an effort to secure finance.
They will buy it at file sale prices very soon.
They would have done that already but there is a pesky law that needs to be changed first and that's planned for next week.
So extremely grubby business practices with a bit of help from people in politics that they donate to and nothing else - not even "movie piracy".
I just cannot remember how many times movie piracy has been blamed when something else is the cause, it must be a parrotty error.
No - burning gas in a boiler is extremely wasteful compared with gas turbines.
The only things you can reuse are the switchyard and the building - even the stacks are unsuitable due to the very large difference in exhaust temperature.
Yes.
Expected design life for those 40-50 year old plants was around 25 years. It's not just a case of putting a few patches on them to keep them running anymore. Once you get to the point where it's looking like you have to replace turbine rotors on top of everything else a rebuild is looking cheaper, and then economics gets in your way even if the expected total is less than an alternative (long lead time and huge capital costs versus doing a little bit at a time with each bit costing a lot less and short lead times).
Of course it's not so obvious with the stuff that's less than 30 years old so not far beyond the design life, but eventually they'll get to a point where it's cheaper to replace than major rebuilds.
Banks are never going to fund it. Power companies are never going to fund it. It's only going to happen with socialism. You do get that right? You are the last person I'd expect to be pushing socialism.
Maybe you should think before you cheer for something inherently opposed to what you believe.
Hence your incredibly stupid and sig I suppose. Somehow you seem to think a symbolic gun can keep you free instead of the reality being a very large number of people, armed or not, keeping you free.
One guy with a gun calling for freedom is just called a target.
Every fucking glaciologist who has lived for the last century and even every fucking person who has heard of the "Titanic" - where the fuck do you think the icebergs go? They go out to sea. Faster glaciers, more icebergs. Warmer water - sea ice detaches - just like it does every year only earlier.
What's with deliberately pretending to be thirty times more stupid than you could possible be? It's incredibly insulting to everyone unfortunate enough to read such pretended ignorance.
You couldn't resist some stupid offtopic charging at windmills and cheering for nukes either - it's all a big one package deal with you blindly following a Party line then isn't it? Well, not even your hero Putin is getting some nukes built, he's got his money in oil, so it doesn't matter how much you cheer it's not happening.
No "we" are not. Remember what happened last year instead of 2013.
Can we add promises by people in politics to the same law?
Where do you think the lost sea ice on the shore goes? It drifts out to sea and this ship got stuck in an unexpectedly huge amount of it far out to sea.
You really should read at least a tiny bit about something that you are attempting to pontificate on.
That's because you were listening the the "climate change is good" people like Bjorn Lomborg (economist) and Christopher Monckton (sodoku columnist) instead of people who work with the physical sciences.
To the 2nd amendment?
Wonderful how it's relevant when a political group disguised as a sporting club want it to be and irrelevant when it's not - it's like magic!
Maybe I should just give up on teasing you idiots that like to pretend that a useful tool is a combined penis and flag substitute and turns even those far too cowardly to sign up to defend their country into real soldiers. The irony of having a traitor like Oliver North leading all this bullshit is icing on the cake.
I got a Y2K bug in 2013 - stupid fucking flexnet "licencing" software designed to punish the honest decided the perpetual licence of the software I wanted to run expired in the year 2000.
Modes of failure like that can still run if the developers of the software are idiots and the QC people do not exist.