It is also disastrous for those countries' local industries.
For example, 40 years ago GE began entering into a lot of this kind of deal. For example, Toshiba had an agreement where they bought a couple steam turbines from GE, licensed all the drawings, and then started building the GE designs. Since then, portions of the agreement are still in place- there are a couple joint factories where turbine blades are manufactured. But where do the companies stand now? GE has lost a lot thousands of workers, the share price is lower, and they are not the behemoth in steam turbines that they once were. Toshiba has grown in leaps and bounds in this market, and was the #1 supplier of steam turbines in 2006-2009 (by MW) according to the McCoy report.
GE entered into similar deals with Hitachi and Doosan. Their management is selling out on the long term in order to get short-term profits. I don't think this is unique situation with any US multinational. Their overseas business is booming now, but in 30 years let's see how they are doing.
As a steam turbine engineer who works with 1000MW machines routinely, I can appreciate that compared to the overall grid, this is a piddly amount of power. But we can't be blinded by the national scale when considering one facility. "Comparatively this is less than" is not a great argument for energy efficiency or value created. The amount of fossil fuels burned to support this one datacenter over its lifetime is staggering, and the value produced is honestly somewhat frivolous- a significant fraction of the power used is utilized in serving up Zynga games after all.
Maybe the problem is that energy is too cheap. The US has some of the cheapest electricity in the world for 1st and 2nd world countries. The party isn't going to last forever.
As for your office building, our landlord recently replaced all the T12 bulbs with T8 bulbs of greater efficiency. It cut the power bill in half, and the lighting was brighter if anything.
Has it? My impression is that the political parties have shifted to the right. The people they are supposed to be serving haven't changed much. For example- some (many? I don't know anybody that checks into this) Republicans have become disillusioned with the far-right agenda that today's Republican party is pushing. Similarly, many Democrats feel that Obama is "not liberal enough". And both parties use the media to make people believe that their party stands for things which it actually does not (The Republicans seems to be slightly more successful with this).
Ideally someone would form a viable third party to keep the others honest. The only way I see this happening is if some uber-rich philanthropist or idealist made it happen. A truly grass-roots effort is doomed to fail in this political climate thanks to the huge piles of money which are required. It is the same reason that incumbency rates in the House and Senate are so high, even though congressional approval is under 20%. Unfortunately, because of the huge piles of money being thrown around by corporations, our government will be owned by the corporations as long as unlimited corporate donations and massive lobbying exist.
You make it seem like 28MW is not a lot of power. It actually is. Its the rough equivalent of about 23,000 households. If you burned coal to get it, it is about 40-60 semitrailer loads of coal every day. If you burned wood chips, the figure is about the same.
If you were using a gas turbine burning natural gas, a suitable gas turbine such as an LM2500 (rarely used for utility power generation, but an equivalent power level) sucks down a semitrailer full of natural gas in 10 minutes. At idle.
The US has the best healthcare in the world, as long as your insurance is good and properly paid. Get your health insurance cancelled, you'll go bankrupt just trying to stay alive.
You don't even need your insurance canceled for that to happen.I have what some people would consider "good" insurance, and it is still damned expensive. For example, the birth of a baby would cost me about $15-20,000 without insurance (for a normal non-C section). With insurance, it is "only" going to cost me about $4000. I have a good job, so I can afford $4000 with a bit of sacrifice and wiping out some of my savings. A lot of people would either be put on a long payment plan or may even be bankrupted.
If the baby is born in Japan, the cost (I am told) is approximately $8,000 and various government programs and private insurance reduce that to around $3-4000 depending on where you live. Your company may give you a loan, and in certain places the government *pays you* (not a tax break, an actual check) every month until the baby is a certain age.
In Canada, universal government healthcare means you pay nothing.
The turbines are produced by Halliburton — I've seen the red Halliburton truck dragging one up Bottle Rock Rd. on a massive flatbed.
Sorry but no. Most of the Geysers turbines were manufactured by Toshiba Corp (sorry, PDF), with the exception of 2 turbines which were manufactured by GE (these may be retired now). New or replacement turbines are definitely competitively bid, since my company bids on them. Halliburton doesn't make steam turbines. If indeed you have seen Halliburton at the geysers, they must have been a transportation contractor or something like that.
As for the "superfund site", I can't find anything on this that is less than 15 years old. And this report from 1983 says there is nothing hazardous at the Geysers. I'll agree it is a very old report and standards have changed since then, but the only other EPA document available is in 1995- they seem to have capped some wells that had the potential of a hydrogen sulfide explosion. Hardly the "drums full of toxic chemicals" that you are implying.
In some cases, customers of a lobbyist may be asked to support pieces of legislation that have little or nothing to do with them. In return, the other businesses will support their pet legislation when it comes due.
Not only that, but newborn baby panda is 1/800 the weight of the mother. If human babies were that small, they would be roughly an inch long at birth and weigh 3 ounces.
The fact that pandas can only mate 3-5 days out of the year might have something else to do with it. It is really amazing how such an animal with extremely unfavorable survival traits survived for so long.
I, for one, hope that the likes of Toshiba can develop safer nuclear that can be deployed on a smaller scale so that nuclear industry does not rely on few "too big to fail" behemots [sic] with too much control (although that will probably remain a dream).
Disclaimer- I am a Toshiba worker in the Power Systems Division - Steam turbines etc., but not nuclear. I hear the nuclear news but I am not a part of it.
On December 22, we recieved NRC approval for our AP1000 design. [Sorry this is a subscription news site with a very hefty subscription fee, but you can get a good idea from the article summary]. There was a little doubt about whether our new units, Vogtle 3 and 4 would be built, since some of the financing fell through and Toshiba had to take a bigger share of the project costs. Now, it looks like the plants will be built, although I will hedge my words by saying that many nuclear reactors got to 75%-99% completion but were never fueled and later dismantled. I saw in our company newsletter today that the condensers were being shipped from Korea. After Vogtle 3 and 4, we have plans to build 2 more units, although I can't remember the name. Those are in the preliminary design process (although the design will be exactly the same; "preliminary design" is a department specific term meaning the early stages of the project).
As for the small nuclear designs, we have tried for years to give a 4S reactor away to a small town in Alaska. The problem is that currently NRC treats reactors the same whether they are 1000MW or 50MW. Nobody wants to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance and permitting that is required for a measly 50MW. Personally, I think that is a good thing- I have visited dozens of power stations from 21MW to 950MW, and the larger the machine and more people they have on staff, the higher the knowledge level and experience. I would rather have hundreds of trained staff available for an emergency than a dozen or two guys. According to the Wiki page (I don't know much about 4S) the NRC should take some action next year and maybe these small reactors will move forward.
Toshiba made a huge investment into Nuclear power (Billions with an S) in the couple of years before Fukushima. That is the reason our stock price tumbled after the disaster- it wasn't just that we were associated with a nuclear disaster, we also had a huge investment which looked (back in April 2011) like it might be money down the tubes. Japan might put up a huff politically about nuclear power, but the truth is it is almost required. Japan has no coal, oil, or natural gas deposits worth mentioning. All fuel has to be imported from Australia (coal) and elsewhere. Of course they can keep importing fuel, but eventually that will be seen as "not green". Coal is seen as dirty and my personal belief is that natural gas, although it burns cleaner, has many other environmental problems and is not much better. Large generation plants are still required to smooth out the mountain and valleys of electrical production that wind and solar can produced. Hydro? After the earthquake many mothballed hydro stations in Japan were refurbished and put back online (it was lucky the dams had not been dismantled yet). After the electrical crunch they will probably be mothballed again because of the environmental impact. The trend for hydro in Japan is less, not more. Until someone comes along with a better idea, my opinion is that nuclear will always be part of Japan's electrical mix.
It is a problem of latency and bandwidth. I live in a major metropolitan area and the best latency to a game server I can hope to get is about 40ms, but more commonly 50ms. If you're running games on a server somewhere, it is going to take around 0.08 to 0.1 seconds for an action to go from your computer to the server, and from the server to your buddy's computer. Then your buddy reacts. and it takes another 0.08 to 0.1 seconds to come back to you. Suppose your buddy has a 1 second reaction time. The latency adds 15% to 20% more time on top of his reaction time. This is often noticeable.
Compare to a home wired LAN. The latency will be 1ms, or 0.001 seconds. One of you is probably hosting the server, so the total time from action->reaction coming back to your computer is almost exactly the same as your buddy's reaction time. If your buddy can react in 1 second, you will never notice the 0.001s latency of the network.
Now- the bandwidth. If you have 10 people over, every time someone does an action, it goes to the server. Then it comes back to from the server to ALL the computers. Most games don't support multicast, and your ISP doesn't anyway, so the traffic is multiplied by the number of players. 10 people are uploading their action data, and action data from the equivalent of 100 players is coming back. For every X players you have, you have datarate*X going out, and datarate*X^2 coming back. The data coming in rapidly increases as you add players, and will eventually overload even the largest pipes. I can get gigabit internet for maybe $600 a month (a rough guess, it is probably more expensive). I can buy a gigabit switch for 16 connections for about $100. It is much better handled on a local network.
I don't understand why they did this at all. A steam catapult is relatively simple mechanically, and any pipefitting company can work on it as long as they have the appropriate government qualifications. Our carriers are going to have nuclear reactors for a long time, and that means a readilly-available source of steam. Going to magnetic launchers just hints to me that the principal contractor wanted to drive up the costs in order to increase their profit, and the ability for them to charge out the ass for aftermarket service and parts.
If they didn't stuff a nuclear reactor in it, they are probably burning Heavy Fuel Oil, sometimes referred to as Bunker C. It is a heavy oil which needs to be heated before you can even pump it. HFO is the nasty stuff left over after you refine the gasoline, diesel, and other useful oils out of crude. It burns dirty, but at sea nobody cares. In port, some countries/ports make you switch to marine diesel to improve the air quality. I didn't check, but I doubt China is concerned with burning HFO in their ports.
I use Problem Steps Recorder on Windows 7 to report problems to my IT department. If you have a problem which occurs when you do a certain thing, it can be a great tool. Especially on web-based software or forms.
Just type "PSR" into a command prompt or Start->run. It's a great tool.
It's not 5% efficiency. Of the thermal energy they produce, in fact, more of it can be used than coal, since nuclear reactors can operate at higher temperatures than coal furnaces.
Actually that is not correct. While the reactor operates at a high temperature, the steam is only heated to around 523F at 823psi in the newest AP1000 designs. A modern ultrasupercritical coal-fired turbine operates at around 1100F and 3450psi. If you know your thermodynamics, then you can easily realize why the coal plant can achieve around 35% efficiency while the nuclear design efficiency is so poor.
If you use combined cycle, you can get upwards of 60% total fuel efficiency using the waste heat of a gas turbine to heat water for the steam turbine. Common steam conditions for this are 1050F and 2000 to 2400psi, with some newer designs going to 1070F or 1100F.
Disclaimer- I work for Toshiba Power Systems (Steam turbines)
While it is true that Japan has a functioning grid now without most of their nuclear units, you can not look only at that fact. To get back to minimum capacity, they had to restart many of their old coal plants which had been partially or recently decommissioned. These plants were shut down because they were really filthy, and more expensive than nuclear- Japan imports 100% of their coal.
They restarted some of their old hydro facilities also. Mostly those were shut down because of environmental reasons also. They are lucky that they were only recently shut down and the dams were not demolished yet.
They borrowed a bunch of portable power units (generators in a container) from Taiwan, and purchased many also. These are diesel generators or gas turbines mounted in a container, producing maybe 3 to 7MW apiece. I am not sure about the details of Japan's pollution laws, but in the US, these container generators are only allowed to run in extreme emergencies, or for less than a few dozen hours a year since they have very little pollution controls.
The conservation effort is also still in progress, but maybe you didn't notice it. Our factory still has power saving measures in place, mostly relating to lighting and heating/cooling. I was there recently and working at a desk in my winter jacket might not have been "the stone age", but it was not very comfortable.
I did a quick calculation on how much energy would be saved by the earthquake victims and their companies not using electricity, but this is not that significant (around 25MW). Apologies if this is insensitive.
The country is still on the edge of a stable grid also. There is a big concern that later in the winter when it is much colder, there might be a big problem. Most Japanese apartments and houses use electric-based heating. In the summer, cutting off the AC might be a viable, if uncomfortable option, but you can't let people freeze.
So what do you propose we do about this? The only idea I can think of is to artificially make our economy less efficient- similar to Japan. In Japan, there are many regulations and practices which add jobs, but are inefficient.
For example- in Japan many (most?) private homes are demolished after 20-30 years and rebuilt on the same spot. Certainly a boon to the construction industry, but not very efficient and very costly for the homeowner. There are similar practices in Engineering and Industry- power generation facilities are required to do huge maintenance on their steam turbines every 4 years (by law). In the US, the standard is 6-10 years. The result for Japan is more jobs, the electrical grid is one of the most stable in the world (2011 Tsunami issues aside), and a much higher price for electricity. Cars are usually sold and transferred out of the country before 100,000km (~62,000 miles) because the taxation and maintenance requirements (some maintenance is required by law) increase based on age. In the US, taxation generally decreases dramatically based on age and maintenance is up the car owner. There are similar practices and laws in other areas such as accounting, law, car ownership, etc. which are inefficient but create work for people to do.
You could argue that all of these practices in Japan have made living costs very expensive, and one of the reasons that Japan can't shake their 20-year recession. Or you could argue that many more people in Japan have jobs (building houses, doing maintenance, etc) than otherwise would have. Japan's unemployment is in officially under 5% while the US's figure is around 9%. Take that as you will- both countries cook the unemployment figures to make them seem lower.
Is Japan better because they are less efficient? Maybe, or maybe not. It is a different way of doing things.
For the typical home user, wireless is probably fine. It could save a lot of money in a business environment also. But how many Slashdot readers are typical users?
I've been working on running Cat6 drops to every room in my house, with a patch panel in the basement. It has taken a considerable amount of time, but I think it is worth it. It takes me about 2 hours to put the 6,8, or 12 keystone block in the wall, run the wires, and test them. I am running multiple Cat6 drops to each location, plus a couple of binding posts.
Yes, it is a lot of work, but the cost is pretty low considering how much convenience and value I am adding to the house. I am currently using it for the following-
1. Internet, keeping the clutter of DSL boxes and routers in the basement. Roku, my TV, and everything else are all wired. The Roku and my TV both perform much better than they did on wireless.
2. CCTV system using Cat6 baluns on each end
3. SIP phone system, keeping the SIP gateway in the basement. You can plug a phone cable right into a RJ45 port, or make a special RJ45 to RJ11 cable if you like.
4. Future use- whole-house audio system. The speaker wires I am running are all terminated at binding posts in the basement, mounted in a rackmount keystone jack holder. I haven't done anything with this yet, but in the future it will make whole-house audio a piece of cake in whatever configuration I decide upon.
Certainly you can do all of this wirelessly, but the cost would be much more (especially the CCTV and the audio). Having a wired home is convenient and less expensive in the long run. I consider it valuable infrastructure.
I spent a summer working at a biomass plant. The plant had originally been designed to operate on peat, but it was determined that the peat was too wet to be commercially viable. And the plant was mothballed for a decade.
When I arrived there, they were burning wood chips. Except they needed 40 18-wheeler trucks a day (approx 1600 tons) to make about 20MW. This is a pretty big logistical problem for a piddly 20MW. There were a lot of problems at that place, but the principal one was the fuel handling system wasn't any good, and it wasn't economically viable anyhow- it would have been cheaper to just burn the diesel fuel that the 40 trucks/day were burning instead of the wood. And it would have been more environmentally friendly also.
# Existing coal plants can be converted at relatively low cost to use biomass power
# The ashes can simply be spread on the biomass farming areas to replenish minerals in the soil (compare to coal ash, which cannot be used in this way)
Existing coal plants would need a different fuel handling system. Coal pulverizers are designed to pulverize coal, not biomass. They may, depending on the boiler design, require a partial or complete boiler retrofit in order to burn biomass. This would cost a few hundred millions of dollars for an average 500MW coal unit. I am not an expert on permitting, but they might need permit re-approval or a new permit to switch fuels. This would cost millions of dollars and is not a sure thing.
EPA says that you can not spread the ashes on the ground. When I worked at the wood-chip fired plant, the company was fined heavilly by the EPA for letting their ash containers overflow onto the ground, and not keeping the ash on a pad with a water barrier. Fly ash is nasty stuff.
Recently I visited a new coal plant under construction in western Virginia (not West Virginia). They did not have a rail line (yet), so were anticipating approximately 500 trucks a day of coal, plus about 100 trucks a day of lime when they started operations. This is approximately a 500MW plant. I'm not sure they can be economically viable with trucking all their fuel in- I have never heard of a coal power station without rail on site. The good thing about coal is it generally comes out of a hole in the ground, so you can usually use rail to move it. With Biomass, the source is spread out more so trucks are generally required.
We have a few people in our engineering department who were in the military. The one who served on a nuclear submarine is perhaps the laziest guy in the organization right now. He constantly completes tasks completely wrong- ignoring procedures and instructions so he can do things the lazy way. His knowledge is shallow and his attitude is "ask someone else" and "get someone else to do my work".
This is a guy who came from a job in Hawaii with a stable company to work in the northern Midwest. If he resigned voluntarily, I would eat my hat.
Maybe he is an extreme exception, but generalizing people into a "preferred" group just because they served on a submarine may not be appropriate.
I don't usually reply to myself, but another problem with Helium is the tiny molecular size makes sealing pumps and other equipment difficult. In the case of the Fort St. Vrain plant, it basically killed the project.
Well, as a steam turbine engineer, their plan for the turbine is borderline ridiculous.
The turbine system believed best suited for its operation is a triple-reheat closed-cycle helium turbine system, which should convert 50% of the reactor heat into electricity compared to today's steam cycle (~25% to 33%).
Firstly, triple reheat turbines are more efficient from a thermodynamic point of view. But nobody builds them because the increased complexity and cost just aren't worth it. Double-reheat steam turbines were relatively rare for coal turbines- only a handful were built and the design concept was abandoned, but they may be common on the nuclear side.
The next problem is using helium for the working fluid. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but the turbine would have to be enormous in order to work with helium. I'm talking so big that you need to install the blades on site because you can't move it by road or rail. This adds a huge amount of extra cost also- assuming you can find a material to make blades that long with. Currently the longest blades for steam turbines available are Titanium 52" or maybe 60" (for 50hz systems). A longer blade would probably require an even stronger material with the desired properties, which does not currently exist at anything approaching a reasonable price.
If someone feels so strongly about a certain issue that they are willing to sign a petition, there is a chance that they will only vote for a politician who supports their pet issue- regardless of whether that candidate has any chance of actually winning. In recent years, the number of people voting 3rd parties seems to have shrunk, but even 1 or 2% will shift the election in some cases from one big party to the other. The last 11 years might be completely different if Gore had not taken the position that there is "absolutely no evidence" it is medically effective (September 2000) and swung 5000 potheads in Florida to his side. Or maybe he would have mobilized lots of cranky old people to vote against him. We will never know since there was no difference between Bush v Gore on this issue.
Both parties play the game of political calculations (although I can not understand the GOP primary candidates calculations right now). The result is 2 candidates who are sometimes very similar in what they say during the race, and very different in what they will do if elected.
I have a tape I want to convert. Its a pretty important one. I bought a $10 converter from Amazon, and a $5 VCR from goodwill. Put in the tape, start capturing in Virtualdub, it runs fine for a few minutes, then the video goes all garbly. I restart the process, the video goes garbly at a different point on the tape. It must be the VCR so I return it and try another (Goodwill has no shortage of VCRs).
The next Goodwill VCR has a problem with the loading/unloading mechanism. No good.
The next one would not read any tapes. No good
Another one with a problem with the loading/unloading mechanism.
I'm now at the point where I am willing to invest the time in tracking one down a known working one on Craigslist, or buying a new DVD/VCR combo unit. VCR-standalone units are no longer sold. DVD/VCR units start at around $100 which is a lot for obsolete technology. If you have tapes, I would convert them as soon as possible. We are getting to the point where conversion is getting a lot more difficult.
If the goal is to put particles into the air at high altitude, why not dump carbon black into the discharge of airline engines?
Hey, if you really wanted a permanent solution, maybe you could even come up with an inert fuel additive which had the property of being unburnable at turbine temperatures, and doesn't deposit on the turbine blades. It would have to be relatively cheap too. A miracle compound? Sure. But it beats pumping brazillions of gallons 20km into the air.
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It is also disastrous for those countries' local industries.
For example, 40 years ago GE began entering into a lot of this kind of deal. For example, Toshiba had an agreement where they bought a couple steam turbines from GE, licensed all the drawings, and then started building the GE designs. Since then, portions of the agreement are still in place- there are a couple joint factories where turbine blades are manufactured. But where do the companies stand now? GE has lost a lot thousands of workers, the share price is lower, and they are not the behemoth in steam turbines that they once were. Toshiba has grown in leaps and bounds in this market, and was the #1 supplier of steam turbines in 2006-2009 (by MW) according to the McCoy report.
GE entered into similar deals with Hitachi and Doosan. Their management is selling out on the long term in order to get short-term profits. I don't think this is unique situation with any US multinational. Their overseas business is booming now, but in 30 years let's see how they are doing.
As a steam turbine engineer who works with 1000MW machines routinely, I can appreciate that compared to the overall grid, this is a piddly amount of power. But we can't be blinded by the national scale when considering one facility. "Comparatively this is less than" is not a great argument for energy efficiency or value created. The amount of fossil fuels burned to support this one datacenter over its lifetime is staggering, and the value produced is honestly somewhat frivolous- a significant fraction of the power used is utilized in serving up Zynga games after all.
Maybe the problem is that energy is too cheap. The US has some of the cheapest electricity in the world for 1st and 2nd world countries. The party isn't going to last forever.
As for your office building, our landlord recently replaced all the T12 bulbs with T8 bulbs of greater efficiency. It cut the power bill in half, and the lighting was brighter if anything.
The entire country has moved to the right.
Has it? My impression is that the political parties have shifted to the right. The people they are supposed to be serving haven't changed much. For example- some (many? I don't know anybody that checks into this) Republicans have become disillusioned with the far-right agenda that today's Republican party is pushing. Similarly, many Democrats feel that Obama is "not liberal enough". And both parties use the media to make people believe that their party stands for things which it actually does not (The Republicans seems to be slightly more successful with this).
Ideally someone would form a viable third party to keep the others honest. The only way I see this happening is if some uber-rich philanthropist or idealist made it happen. A truly grass-roots effort is doomed to fail in this political climate thanks to the huge piles of money which are required. It is the same reason that incumbency rates in the House and Senate are so high, even though congressional approval is under 20%. Unfortunately, because of the huge piles of money being thrown around by corporations, our government will be owned by the corporations as long as unlimited corporate donations and massive lobbying exist.
You make it seem like 28MW is not a lot of power. It actually is. Its the rough equivalent of about 23,000 households. If you burned coal to get it, it is about 40-60 semitrailer loads of coal every day. If you burned wood chips, the figure is about the same.
If you were using a gas turbine burning natural gas, a suitable gas turbine such as an LM2500 (rarely used for utility power generation, but an equivalent power level) sucks down a semitrailer full of natural gas in 10 minutes. At idle.
The US has the best healthcare in the world, as long as your insurance is good and properly paid. Get your health insurance cancelled, you'll go bankrupt just trying to stay alive.
You don't even need your insurance canceled for that to happen.I have what some people would consider "good" insurance, and it is still damned expensive. For example, the birth of a baby would cost me about $15-20,000 without insurance (for a normal non-C section). With insurance, it is "only" going to cost me about $4000. I have a good job, so I can afford $4000 with a bit of sacrifice and wiping out some of my savings. A lot of people would either be put on a long payment plan or may even be bankrupted.
If the baby is born in Japan, the cost (I am told) is approximately $8,000 and various government programs and private insurance reduce that to around $3-4000 depending on where you live. Your company may give you a loan, and in certain places the government *pays you* (not a tax break, an actual check) every month until the baby is a certain age.
In Canada, universal government healthcare means you pay nothing.
The turbines are produced by Halliburton — I've seen the red Halliburton truck dragging one up Bottle Rock Rd. on a massive flatbed.
Sorry but no. Most of the Geysers turbines were manufactured by Toshiba Corp (sorry, PDF), with the exception of 2 turbines which were manufactured by GE (these may be retired now). New or replacement turbines are definitely competitively bid, since my company bids on them. Halliburton doesn't make steam turbines. If indeed you have seen Halliburton at the geysers, they must have been a transportation contractor or something like that.
As for the "superfund site", I can't find anything on this that is less than 15 years old. And this report from 1983 says there is nothing hazardous at the Geysers. I'll agree it is a very old report and standards have changed since then, but the only other EPA document available is in 1995- they seem to have capped some wells that had the potential of a hydrogen sulfide explosion. Hardly the "drums full of toxic chemicals" that you are implying.
It may be a kind of "lobbyist ring".
In some cases, customers of a lobbyist may be asked to support pieces of legislation that have little or nothing to do with them. In return, the other businesses will support their pet legislation when it comes due.
The answer to your question is the Ainol (pronounced "eye-nol") Novo 7 Advanced, which can run Ice Cream Sandwich.
I'm not a shill for Merimobiles but they seem to have the cheapest price. I'll buy one as soon as they get back in stock.
Not only that, but newborn baby panda is 1/800 the weight of the mother. If human babies were that small, they would be roughly an inch long at birth and weigh 3 ounces. The fact that pandas can only mate 3-5 days out of the year might have something else to do with it. It is really amazing how such an animal with extremely unfavorable survival traits survived for so long.
I, for one, hope that the likes of Toshiba can develop safer nuclear that can be deployed on a smaller scale so that nuclear industry does not rely on few "too big to fail" behemots [sic] with too much control (although that will probably remain a dream).
Disclaimer- I am a Toshiba worker in the Power Systems Division - Steam turbines etc., but not nuclear. I hear the nuclear news but I am not a part of it.
On December 22, we recieved NRC approval for our AP1000 design. [Sorry this is a subscription news site with a very hefty subscription fee, but you can get a good idea from the article summary]. There was a little doubt about whether our new units, Vogtle 3 and 4 would be built, since some of the financing fell through and Toshiba had to take a bigger share of the project costs. Now, it looks like the plants will be built, although I will hedge my words by saying that many nuclear reactors got to 75%-99% completion but were never fueled and later dismantled. I saw in our company newsletter today that the condensers were being shipped from Korea. After Vogtle 3 and 4, we have plans to build 2 more units, although I can't remember the name. Those are in the preliminary design process (although the design will be exactly the same; "preliminary design" is a department specific term meaning the early stages of the project).
As for the small nuclear designs, we have tried for years to give a 4S reactor away to a small town in Alaska. The problem is that currently NRC treats reactors the same whether they are 1000MW or 50MW. Nobody wants to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance and permitting that is required for a measly 50MW. Personally, I think that is a good thing- I have visited dozens of power stations from 21MW to 950MW, and the larger the machine and more people they have on staff, the higher the knowledge level and experience. I would rather have hundreds of trained staff available for an emergency than a dozen or two guys. According to the Wiki page (I don't know much about 4S) the NRC should take some action next year and maybe these small reactors will move forward.
Toshiba made a huge investment into Nuclear power (Billions with an S) in the couple of years before Fukushima. That is the reason our stock price tumbled after the disaster- it wasn't just that we were associated with a nuclear disaster, we also had a huge investment which looked (back in April 2011) like it might be money down the tubes. Japan might put up a huff politically about nuclear power, but the truth is it is almost required. Japan has no coal, oil, or natural gas deposits worth mentioning. All fuel has to be imported from Australia (coal) and elsewhere. Of course they can keep importing fuel, but eventually that will be seen as "not green". Coal is seen as dirty and my personal belief is that natural gas, although it burns cleaner, has many other environmental problems and is not much better. Large generation plants are still required to smooth out the mountain and valleys of electrical production that wind and solar can produced. Hydro? After the earthquake many mothballed hydro stations in Japan were refurbished and put back online (it was lucky the dams had not been dismantled yet). After the electrical crunch they will probably be mothballed again because of the environmental impact. The trend for hydro in Japan is less, not more. Until someone comes along with a better idea, my opinion is that nuclear will always be part of Japan's electrical mix.
It is a problem of latency and bandwidth. I live in a major metropolitan area and the best latency to a game server I can hope to get is about 40ms, but more commonly 50ms. If you're running games on a server somewhere, it is going to take around 0.08 to 0.1 seconds for an action to go from your computer to the server, and from the server to your buddy's computer. Then your buddy reacts. and it takes another 0.08 to 0.1 seconds to come back to you. Suppose your buddy has a 1 second reaction time. The latency adds 15% to 20% more time on top of his reaction time. This is often noticeable.
Compare to a home wired LAN. The latency will be 1ms, or 0.001 seconds. One of you is probably hosting the server, so the total time from action->reaction coming back to your computer is almost exactly the same as your buddy's reaction time. If your buddy can react in 1 second, you will never notice the 0.001s latency of the network.
Now- the bandwidth. If you have 10 people over, every time someone does an action, it goes to the server. Then it comes back to from the server to ALL the computers. Most games don't support multicast, and your ISP doesn't anyway, so the traffic is multiplied by the number of players. 10 people are uploading their action data, and action data from the equivalent of 100 players is coming back. For every X players you have, you have datarate*X going out, and datarate*X^2 coming back. The data coming in rapidly increases as you add players, and will eventually overload even the largest pipes. I can get gigabit internet for maybe $600 a month (a rough guess, it is probably more expensive). I can buy a gigabit switch for 16 connections for about $100. It is much better handled on a local network.
I don't understand why they did this at all. A steam catapult is relatively simple mechanically, and any pipefitting company can work on it as long as they have the appropriate government qualifications. Our carriers are going to have nuclear reactors for a long time, and that means a readilly-available source of steam. Going to magnetic launchers just hints to me that the principal contractor wanted to drive up the costs in order to increase their profit, and the ability for them to charge out the ass for aftermarket service and parts.
If they didn't stuff a nuclear reactor in it, they are probably burning Heavy Fuel Oil, sometimes referred to as Bunker C. It is a heavy oil which needs to be heated before you can even pump it. HFO is the nasty stuff left over after you refine the gasoline, diesel, and other useful oils out of crude. It burns dirty, but at sea nobody cares. In port, some countries/ports make you switch to marine diesel to improve the air quality. I didn't check, but I doubt China is concerned with burning HFO in their ports.
I use Problem Steps Recorder on Windows 7 to report problems to my IT department. If you have a problem which occurs when you do a certain thing, it can be a great tool. Especially on web-based software or forms.
Just type "PSR" into a command prompt or Start->run. It's a great tool.
It's not 5% efficiency. Of the thermal energy they produce, in fact, more of it can be used than coal, since nuclear reactors can operate at higher temperatures than coal furnaces.
Actually that is not correct. While the reactor operates at a high temperature, the steam is only heated to around 523F at 823psi in the newest AP1000 designs. A modern ultrasupercritical coal-fired turbine operates at around 1100F and 3450psi. If you know your thermodynamics, then you can easily realize why the coal plant can achieve around 35% efficiency while the nuclear design efficiency is so poor.
If you use combined cycle, you can get upwards of 60% total fuel efficiency using the waste heat of a gas turbine to heat water for the steam turbine. Common steam conditions for this are 1050F and 2000 to 2400psi, with some newer designs going to 1070F or 1100F.
Disclaimer- I work for Toshiba Power Systems (Steam turbines)
While it is true that Japan has a functioning grid now without most of their nuclear units, you can not look only at that fact. To get back to minimum capacity, they had to restart many of their old coal plants which had been partially or recently decommissioned. These plants were shut down because they were really filthy, and more expensive than nuclear- Japan imports 100% of their coal.
They restarted some of their old hydro facilities also. Mostly those were shut down because of environmental reasons also. They are lucky that they were only recently shut down and the dams were not demolished yet.
They borrowed a bunch of portable power units (generators in a container) from Taiwan, and purchased many also. These are diesel generators or gas turbines mounted in a container, producing maybe 3 to 7MW apiece. I am not sure about the details of Japan's pollution laws, but in the US, these container generators are only allowed to run in extreme emergencies, or for less than a few dozen hours a year since they have very little pollution controls.
The conservation effort is also still in progress, but maybe you didn't notice it. Our factory still has power saving measures in place, mostly relating to lighting and heating/cooling. I was there recently and working at a desk in my winter jacket might not have been "the stone age", but it was not very comfortable.
I did a quick calculation on how much energy would be saved by the earthquake victims and their companies not using electricity, but this is not that significant (around 25MW). Apologies if this is insensitive.
The country is still on the edge of a stable grid also. There is a big concern that later in the winter when it is much colder, there might be a big problem. Most Japanese apartments and houses use electric-based heating. In the summer, cutting off the AC might be a viable, if uncomfortable option, but you can't let people freeze.
So what do you propose we do about this? The only idea I can think of is to artificially make our economy less efficient- similar to Japan. In Japan, there are many regulations and practices which add jobs, but are inefficient.
For example- in Japan many (most?) private homes are demolished after 20-30 years and rebuilt on the same spot. Certainly a boon to the construction industry, but not very efficient and very costly for the homeowner. There are similar practices in Engineering and Industry- power generation facilities are required to do huge maintenance on their steam turbines every 4 years (by law). In the US, the standard is 6-10 years. The result for Japan is more jobs, the electrical grid is one of the most stable in the world (2011 Tsunami issues aside), and a much higher price for electricity. Cars are usually sold and transferred out of the country before 100,000km (~62,000 miles) because the taxation and maintenance requirements (some maintenance is required by law) increase based on age. In the US, taxation generally decreases dramatically based on age and maintenance is up the car owner. There are similar practices and laws in other areas such as accounting, law, car ownership, etc. which are inefficient but create work for people to do.
You could argue that all of these practices in Japan have made living costs very expensive, and one of the reasons that Japan can't shake their 20-year recession. Or you could argue that many more people in Japan have jobs (building houses, doing maintenance, etc) than otherwise would have. Japan's unemployment is in officially under 5% while the US's figure is around 9%. Take that as you will- both countries cook the unemployment figures to make them seem lower.
Is Japan better because they are less efficient? Maybe, or maybe not. It is a different way of doing things.
For the typical home user, wireless is probably fine. It could save a lot of money in a business environment also. But how many Slashdot readers are typical users?
I've been working on running Cat6 drops to every room in my house, with a patch panel in the basement. It has taken a considerable amount of time, but I think it is worth it. It takes me about 2 hours to put the 6,8, or 12 keystone block in the wall, run the wires, and test them. I am running multiple Cat6 drops to each location, plus a couple of binding posts.
Yes, it is a lot of work, but the cost is pretty low considering how much convenience and value I am adding to the house. I am currently using it for the following-
1. Internet, keeping the clutter of DSL boxes and routers in the basement. Roku, my TV, and everything else are all wired. The Roku and my TV both perform much better than they did on wireless.
2. CCTV system using Cat6 baluns on each end
3. SIP phone system, keeping the SIP gateway in the basement. You can plug a phone cable right into a RJ45 port, or make a special RJ45 to RJ11 cable if you like.
4. Future use- whole-house audio system. The speaker wires I am running are all terminated at binding posts in the basement, mounted in a rackmount keystone jack holder. I haven't done anything with this yet, but in the future it will make whole-house audio a piece of cake in whatever configuration I decide upon.
Certainly you can do all of this wirelessly, but the cost would be much more (especially the CCTV and the audio). Having a wired home is convenient and less expensive in the long run. I consider it valuable infrastructure.
I spent a summer working at a biomass plant. The plant had originally been designed to operate on peat, but it was determined that the peat was too wet to be commercially viable. And the plant was mothballed for a decade.
When I arrived there, they were burning wood chips. Except they needed 40 18-wheeler trucks a day (approx 1600 tons) to make about 20MW. This is a pretty big logistical problem for a piddly 20MW. There were a lot of problems at that place, but the principal one was the fuel handling system wasn't any good, and it wasn't economically viable anyhow- it would have been cheaper to just burn the diesel fuel that the 40 trucks/day were burning instead of the wood. And it would have been more environmentally friendly also.
# Existing coal plants can be converted at relatively low cost to use biomass power
# The ashes can simply be spread on the biomass farming areas to replenish minerals in the soil (compare to coal ash, which cannot be used in this way)
Existing coal plants would need a different fuel handling system. Coal pulverizers are designed to pulverize coal, not biomass. They may, depending on the boiler design, require a partial or complete boiler retrofit in order to burn biomass. This would cost a few hundred millions of dollars for an average 500MW coal unit. I am not an expert on permitting, but they might need permit re-approval or a new permit to switch fuels. This would cost millions of dollars and is not a sure thing.
EPA says that you can not spread the ashes on the ground. When I worked at the wood-chip fired plant, the company was fined heavilly by the EPA for letting their ash containers overflow onto the ground, and not keeping the ash on a pad with a water barrier. Fly ash is nasty stuff.
Recently I visited a new coal plant under construction in western Virginia (not West Virginia). They did not have a rail line (yet), so were anticipating approximately 500 trucks a day of coal, plus about 100 trucks a day of lime when they started operations. This is approximately a 500MW plant. I'm not sure they can be economically viable with trucking all their fuel in- I have never heard of a coal power station without rail on site. The good thing about coal is it generally comes out of a hole in the ground, so you can usually use rail to move it. With Biomass, the source is spread out more so trucks are generally required.
Anecdotal evidence is just that.
We have a few people in our engineering department who were in the military. The one who served on a nuclear submarine is perhaps the laziest guy in the organization right now. He constantly completes tasks completely wrong- ignoring procedures and instructions so he can do things the lazy way. His knowledge is shallow and his attitude is "ask someone else" and "get someone else to do my work".
This is a guy who came from a job in Hawaii with a stable company to work in the northern Midwest. If he resigned voluntarily, I would eat my hat.
Maybe he is an extreme exception, but generalizing people into a "preferred" group just because they served on a submarine may not be appropriate.
I don't usually reply to myself, but another problem with Helium is the tiny molecular size makes sealing pumps and other equipment difficult. In the case of the Fort St. Vrain plant, it basically killed the project.
Well, as a steam turbine engineer, their plan for the turbine is borderline ridiculous.
The turbine system believed best suited for its operation is a triple-reheat closed-cycle helium turbine system, which should convert 50% of the reactor heat into electricity compared to today's steam cycle (~25% to 33%).
Firstly, triple reheat turbines are more efficient from a thermodynamic point of view. But nobody builds them because the increased complexity and cost just aren't worth it. Double-reheat steam turbines were relatively rare for coal turbines- only a handful were built and the design concept was abandoned, but they may be common on the nuclear side.
The next problem is using helium for the working fluid. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but the turbine would have to be enormous in order to work with helium. I'm talking so big that you need to install the blades on site because you can't move it by road or rail. This adds a huge amount of extra cost also- assuming you can find a material to make blades that long with. Currently the longest blades for steam turbines available are Titanium 52" or maybe 60" (for 50hz systems). A longer blade would probably require an even stronger material with the desired properties, which does not currently exist at anything approaching a reasonable price.
You're ignoring the third parties.
If someone feels so strongly about a certain issue that they are willing to sign a petition, there is a chance that they will only vote for a politician who supports their pet issue- regardless of whether that candidate has any chance of actually winning. In recent years, the number of people voting 3rd parties seems to have shrunk, but even 1 or 2% will shift the election in some cases from one big party to the other. The last 11 years might be completely different if Gore had not taken the position that there is "absolutely no evidence" it is medically effective (September 2000) and swung 5000 potheads in Florida to his side. Or maybe he would have mobilized lots of cranky old people to vote against him. We will never know since there was no difference between Bush v Gore on this issue.
Both parties play the game of political calculations (although I can not understand the GOP primary candidates calculations right now). The result is 2 candidates who are sometimes very similar in what they say during the race, and very different in what they will do if elected.
I have a tape I want to convert. Its a pretty important one. I bought a $10 converter from Amazon, and a $5 VCR from goodwill. Put in the tape, start capturing in Virtualdub, it runs fine for a few minutes, then the video goes all garbly. I restart the process, the video goes garbly at a different point on the tape. It must be the VCR so I return it and try another (Goodwill has no shortage of VCRs).
The next Goodwill VCR has a problem with the loading/unloading mechanism. No good.
The next one would not read any tapes. No good
Another one with a problem with the loading/unloading mechanism.
I'm now at the point where I am willing to invest the time in tracking one down a known working one on Craigslist, or buying a new DVD/VCR combo unit. VCR-standalone units are no longer sold. DVD/VCR units start at around $100 which is a lot for obsolete technology. If you have tapes, I would convert them as soon as possible. We are getting to the point where conversion is getting a lot more difficult.
If the goal is to put particles into the air at high altitude, why not dump carbon black into the discharge of airline engines?
Hey, if you really wanted a permanent solution, maybe you could even come up with an inert fuel additive which had the property of being unburnable at turbine temperatures, and doesn't deposit on the turbine blades. It would have to be relatively cheap too. A miracle compound? Sure. But it beats pumping brazillions of gallons 20km into the air.