There is a temperature difference. There are many ways you can use that to do work and subsequently move bits of copper and magnets around to generate electricity.
PCs designed for relatively heavy use look unashamedly like machines and don't fit in with the idea of a well furnished space. Part of the solution is to surround it in something that looks like furniture that does fit in. Another is noise reduction, not as hard now as it used to be. Water cooled stuff comes sealed now and large diameter quite fans are easy to find.
My PC is a noisy beast sitting on a table made from a lump of chipboard and bolted together angle because I don't care, but I've seen people who do care make computer desks that hide the things. Maybe take your wife computer desk shopping or maybe just get it out of the living room entirely since that's not the place for obvious machines.
Solar hot water at whatever it can do on one side and mine water at 12 celcius on the other. Not a large temperature difference but things can be done with it.
Page six of the Glasgow housing PDF linked to by rapiddescent above mentions it. I'll quote it:
Geothermal energy - water at 12 degees celcius is taken from a disused coal mine 100 metres under the site, then passed through a heat pump to the thermal storage tank.
Not a huge temperature difference but you can get it to do work. It also seems like fairly restricted circumstances, however it turns out that flooded coal mines are under most of Glasgow, so despite the low temperature difference that adds up to a lot of available potential energy.
Thanks, good to see someone actually thinking about the issue before posting.
Smaller, very conservatively designed reactors
That was one of the big lessons of TMI in my opinion (as well as treating it seriously instead of having worse control systems than the minimum mandated for a fertilizer plant), but some military reactors and pebble bed seem to be the only things to follow the idea.
TMI was the perfect accident, dramatic but with no deaths - a wakeup call from the complacency where the plant wasn't even monitored as well as a fertilizer plant had to be. It showed the dramatic contrast in attitude between the early stages of design where the containment vessels were made to be the strongest in the USA due to the risk of a plane crashing into it on approach to the nearby airport, and the implementation of the control and monitoring systems years later that sucked by any measure. It resulted in the early retirement of some other reactors that were frankly death traps and the improvement of all the others. The engineers of the time didn't write it off as a non-event like you are counterproductively doing. Such bleating as above harms the cause of nuclear power instead of helping it. Instead of ignoring it the engineers put in the work and extra care that resulted in nothing like the Chenobyl incident happening in the USA, despite some of the older plants initially being inherently more dangerous.
My undergrad thesis supervisor knew that guy and talked to him as late as 1989 about using very high velocity projectiles to compress solid parts out of powdered metal. Bull manage to piss off both Iran and Israel, with a few other nations holding a grudge and was working for Saddam who had a reputation for killing scientists that he thought were too slow to produce results. While Mossad were/are infamous for that sort of thing the list of suspects resemble in scale the middle of an Agatha Christie novel. Also fast breeders are pretty well waste generation machines in addition to fuel production - they turn carefully selected very high grade waste into a small quantity of fuel and a very large quantity of medium grade waste. They are a fuel reuse idea and most definitely not a waste management idea. There's stuff like synroc for that sort of thing.
That's just fuel rods, and I doubt it's that high for anything other than very old designs that don't get much use out of their fuel - and probably not even then. There's a lot of other waste. I think the web page for the Harford reprocessing plant is a good starting point for fanboys that like to squeal in joy about their pet topic without knowing much about it. You are correct about mining and processing being a lot easier than reprocessing at this point, but it's for ecomonic and not "NIMBY" reasons. Some reprocessing plants actually exist so they've already solved problems with their neighbours.
With a truly major storage accident parts of it could be in Utah.
Yes I know, it would have to be a "somebody started the timer on this enormous hydrogen bomb we got from Russia" sort of storage accident but jokes don't have to be realistic do they?
Sarcasm, ignorance or a politically motivated excuse for those big donors halting R&D and everyone else getting stopped by huge barriers to entry carefully crafted by those big donors?
And more windmills, solar, fast trains etc as anyone who watches more than cartoons knows. So what is your point exactly and what does it have to do with me stating that they are the only ones with AP1000 reactors close to completion?
Small temperature difference of the size that is normally seen with heat pumps used to generate electricity then. Personally I think my post conveyed the message without confusing people as much as if I'd written small temperature difference thermal power generation or something similar, and thermodynamically it's pretty well the same as a heat pump only you are using the motion of a fluid in the heat pump-like system to do work.
Sorry, misunderstood, and good point about infrastructure being neglected in the UK apart from a few major cities. Another thing is there's some form of heat pump electricity generation technology that can only work in the niche of a cold place with a lot of tunnels underground filled with water - which is anywhere in Scotland where coal has been dug up. I forget the name of the project.
You've got it backwards. Decentralisation is pretty well the holy grail of grid stability. When things go down you are left with a hole instead of losing half the grid.
Hence also the problem with fission effectively stuck in the 1970s. It's 2014 and the best new thing we can build is an AP1000. Who knows where we would be if the nuclear lobby spend as much as they did on hookers and blow for Senators as the did on R&D? Who knows where we would be if the nuclear lobby didn't eat their own children by demanding the shutdown of the Clinton era thorium reactor project?
2) is what happened with Dungeon Keeper 2. I've got the original CD and all the patches but had huge problems installing and running it on three systems since. The warez version just worked, it applied the patches and removed the buggy copy protection that was responsible for many crashes. Awesome narration in that game. "You seem the have a lot of mistresses. There's a word for keepers like you."
Unlike the poor suckers who were sold short by budget cuts I had less need of educating myself. I had people who were paid to educate me instead of attempt childcare for oversized classes of teenagers.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a temperature difference. There are many ways you can use that to do work and subsequently move bits of copper and magnets around to generate electricity.
PCs designed for relatively heavy use look unashamedly like machines and don't fit in with the idea of a well furnished space. Part of the solution is to surround it in something that looks like furniture that does fit in. Another is noise reduction, not as hard now as it used to be. Water cooled stuff comes sealed now and large diameter quite fans are easy to find.
My PC is a noisy beast sitting on a table made from a lump of chipboard and bolted together angle because I don't care, but I've seen people who do care make computer desks that hide the things. Maybe take your wife computer desk shopping or maybe just get it out of the living room entirely since that's not the place for obvious machines.
Solar hot water at whatever it can do on one side and mine water at 12 celcius on the other. Not a large temperature difference but things can be done with it.
Not a huge temperature difference but you can get it to do work.
It also seems like fairly restricted circumstances, however it turns out that flooded coal mines are under most of Glasgow, so despite the low temperature difference that adds up to a lot of available potential energy.
That was one of the big lessons of TMI in my opinion (as well as treating it seriously instead of having worse control systems than the minimum mandated for a fertilizer plant), but some military reactors and pebble bed seem to be the only things to follow the idea.
TMI was the perfect accident, dramatic but with no deaths - a wakeup call from the complacency where the plant wasn't even monitored as well as a fertilizer plant had to be.
It showed the dramatic contrast in attitude between the early stages of design where the containment vessels were made to be the strongest in the USA due to the risk of a plane crashing into it on approach to the nearby airport, and the implementation of the control and monitoring systems years later that sucked by any measure. It resulted in the early retirement of some other reactors that were frankly death traps and the improvement of all the others.
The engineers of the time didn't write it off as a non-event like you are counterproductively doing. Such bleating as above harms the cause of nuclear power instead of helping it. Instead of ignoring it the engineers put in the work and extra care that resulted in nothing like the Chenobyl incident happening in the USA, despite some of the older plants initially being inherently more dangerous.
My undergrad thesis supervisor knew that guy and talked to him as late as 1989 about using very high velocity projectiles to compress solid parts out of powdered metal. Bull manage to piss off both Iran and Israel, with a few other nations holding a grudge and was working for Saddam who had a reputation for killing scientists that he thought were too slow to produce results. While Mossad were/are infamous for that sort of thing the list of suspects resemble in scale the middle of an Agatha Christie novel.
Also fast breeders are pretty well waste generation machines in addition to fuel production - they turn carefully selected very high grade waste into a small quantity of fuel and a very large quantity of medium grade waste. They are a fuel reuse idea and most definitely not a waste management idea. There's stuff like synroc for that sort of thing.
That's just fuel rods, and I doubt it's that high for anything other than very old designs that don't get much use out of their fuel - and probably not even then. There's a lot of other waste. I think the web page for the Harford reprocessing plant is a good starting point for fanboys that like to squeal in joy about their pet topic without knowing much about it.
You are correct about mining and processing being a lot easier than reprocessing at this point, but it's for ecomonic and not "NIMBY" reasons. Some reprocessing plants actually exist so they've already solved problems with their neighbours.
With a truly major storage accident parts of it could be in Utah.
Yes I know, it would have to be a "somebody started the timer on this enormous hydrogen bomb we got from Russia" sort of storage accident but jokes don't have to be realistic do they?
They just don't want to have to pay pennies per use for Synroc.
Sarcasm, ignorance or a politically motivated excuse for those big donors halting R&D and everyone else getting stopped by huge barriers to entry carefully crafted by those big donors?
And more windmills, solar, fast trains etc as anyone who watches more than cartoons knows. So what is your point exactly and what does it have to do with me stating that they are the only ones with AP1000 reactors close to completion?
Small temperature difference of the size that is normally seen with heat pumps used to generate electricity then. Personally I think my post conveyed the message without confusing people as much as if I'd written small temperature difference thermal power generation or something similar, and thermodynamically it's pretty well the same as a heat pump only you are using the motion of a fluid in the heat pump-like system to do work.
Sounds good.
Would have loved to be there instead of here when in was +42C over the weekend, and I'm not even in the tropics.
Sorry, misunderstood, and good point about infrastructure being neglected in the UK apart from a few major cities.
Another thing is there's some form of heat pump electricity generation technology that can only work in the niche of a cold place with a lot of tunnels underground filled with water - which is anywhere in Scotland where coal has been dug up. I forget the name of the project.
Read review 3 as to why I use the warez version despite having a legal copy. That isn't me that wrote it but it may as well have been.
You've got it backwards. Decentralisation is pretty well the holy grail of grid stability. When things go down you are left with a hole instead of losing half the grid.
Vitrification means keeping it desert dry forever. Incorporation such as Synrok is a different story.
Not hard since they are building the first of that kind!
Be interesting to see how it performs.
Hence also the problem with fission effectively stuck in the 1970s. It's 2014 and the best new thing we can build is an AP1000.
Who knows where we would be if the nuclear lobby spend as much as they did on hookers and blow for Senators as the did on R&D?
Who knows where we would be if the nuclear lobby didn't eat their own children by demanding the shutdown of the Clinton era thorium reactor project?
"You seem to have a lot of mistresses. There's a word for keepers like you."
2) is what happened with Dungeon Keeper 2. I've got the original CD and all the patches but had huge problems installing and running it on three systems since. The warez version just worked, it applied the patches and removed the buggy copy protection that was responsible for many crashes.
Awesome narration in that game. "You seem the have a lot of mistresses. There's a word for keepers like you."
Unlike the poor suckers who were sold short by budget cuts I had less need of educating myself. I had people who were paid to educate me instead of attempt childcare for oversized classes of teenagers.
No misconceptions. Education was cut from the time of Reagan and the shit you read here is the result.