I agree that breeder reactors aren't inherently evil... but I do believe that if we built nuke generators by the thousand, instead of one offs, we could actually refine and enhance the design to get rid of inherent problems, not to mention being able to train a cadre of qualified support techs that can work on any station anywhere. NRC, or a similar body, would need to keep control of maintenance - you're right that you can't trust local city councils to keep up the funding. But... I think it would be reasonable to have automated monitoring, and if the failure and maintenance rates are anything approaching what they should be, you only really need one qualified tech per hundred installations. He'd spend 2 days per site doing routine annual maintenance, and hopefully have less than one emergency call per decade.
The batteries and power conversion circuitry are probably several times more costly than the panel itself, especially when you factor in their inefficiencies and what they do to total available power. Still, I think that a fair analysis would come up with a sustainable system (i.e., you could use only solar power to build solar power equipment at a better than self sustaining rate.) A lot more efficiency (scale and better engineering) will come if solar starts accounting for more than a fraction of a percent of the total energy generated.
I've got underground power in my neighborhood - and about a dozen ground mounted 50KV transformers. Take a 50KV transformer back to 1910 and people would be as afraid of it as they are of nukes today, full of toxic nasties that can leak into the ground water, can throw deadly lightning bolts or kill you from 50 feet if you're standing in a puddle and it fails... yeah, sure, that all _could_ happen. They've been there for 30+ years, and as far as I can tell they have been maintenance free for that period without as much as a squirrel fried.
We've got distributed power management already - anything we can do on the generation side to stop scraping off mountaintops, extracting all kinds of nasties (coal + uranium + mercury + + + ) from the heart of the mountain, shipping it around the country and burning the earth at rates of tons per minute (nationwide), I think would be progress.
A reasonable 11 Megawatt factory should be churning out 100 panels an hour or more, so factory costs run 1%. Shipping trans-global still isn't going to come close to 11 Megawatt hours per panel. Pretty much everything modern society does has toxic runoff, I'm sure if you're anti-solar you can find a nasty pit somewhere that is the result of solar panel manufacture. For comparison, look at an Aluminum ore extraction facility - they are ultra nasty, but I don't see a wooden bicycle movement yet....
I think the point is that "small is harmless" - you've already got isotopes all over your hospitals. The cost of hardening a garden shed inside 4' thick concrete isn't all that much, and if terrorists get ahold of one of these cores, that will make them easy to find and not much more dangerous than they already are with access to fertilizer and diesel fuel.
Big nuke plants may look impressive, and by fallacious association with impressive, impressively safe, but they are also big targets, and big things can go wrong in them that affect a wide area in a big way. Cleaning up a little reactors' little problems isn't a big deal.
Cleaning up the fly ash produced by your local big coal burning plant is simply impossible.
Edison didn't just invent DC power, he also installed a couple of urban generation stations. I think Westinghouse is a good comparison there, even if Tesla thought of it earlier.
Hold a florescent tube underneath a big transmission line set - watch it glow. Instant death? No. The same environment every living ancestor of yours for the last couple of billion years evolved under? Also no.
Politics has been squashing nukes for decades. I'm not so sure about powerlines and cellphones for cancer, and the science I have seen "proving" that vaccinations "can't possibly" cause autism has been far less than convincing, but... if you want to do something for the natural environment, use these mini-nukes as anchor points for nature preserves. Put a road in to the center for service, take the power lines out along that road and fence off a big wide buffer zone with absolutely no human admittance. Keep a fire break around the perimeter and around the powerlines and generation station, and otherwise just stay the hell out.
The problem with homo-sapiens is that they just can't resist exploiting nature. Maybe the nuke symbol, combined with stiff civil and criminal penalties for trespass, is strong enough to keep the deer hunters out.
If each of these mini-generation stations were located inside a 640 acre no-take nature preserve (1 square mile), it would do awesome things for the local ecologies.
I'd like to think that the US energy policy is actually strategic instead of stupid. We haven't developed our remaining oil reserves, therefore we still have them, and in exchange, Saudi Arabia has a couple of F-16s and a large collection of Italian leathers and German sheet metal - not a bad trade. Also, this "radioactive waste" we have been collecting for over half a century now is probably the most valuable untapped recycling opportunity on the planet - when necessary.
I'd like to think that... the truth is probably much more depressing.
Advances in automated control systems in the last 40 years should make it possible to "fail-safe" in the most conservative of ways. If a mini-plant is having any problem at all it can cry "MOMMY!" and shut off. Big generating facilities produce millions of dollars of revenue per day when they operate, shutting them down not only costs the power company money, in underserved regions (Chernobyl) it causes power outages and major problems for the power customers, thus the reluctance of Homer's comrades to "pull the plug" at the first sign of trouble.
I remember reading that it takes more energy to build a Solar power system than that system will deliver in it's expected lifespan.
Is this true?
No.
To elaborate: picture a 200W solar panel, it weighs about 30lbs and has a lifetime of 20 years or more. In those 20 years, if you average 8 hours a day of full output, that's 1.6kWh per day, or over 11 Megawatt hours. A moderately sized factory might consume 11 megawatts, but if it's that big, it had better be turning out more than 1 solar panel per hour.
This sort of mini-generation station distributed around to take the load off of long distance transmission lines should have happened a long time ago (like, 1995 or so...) but 3miI and especially Chernobyl put a political kink in it - NIMBYs are always present, but after that, they actually got a majority to join them.
Unfortunately, if the information I have read on the internet is in any way reliable, going 100% nuke isn't an option without breeder reactors, there's just not enough fuel in the ground - I suppose the government could run the breeders and the neighborhood stations could use the non-proliferation reactors. The upshot is that we will still need significant energy from alternate sources like wind and solar - and what they need most is a major improvement in the power transmission infrastructure - do that, and a big plus for these mini-reactors is erased.
I still like the "pollution free" mini reactor by every neighborhood scheme, as long as they don't scrimp on the installation facilities and make damn sure nothing leaks into the ground water. From a power distribution standpoint, it should do awesome things for reliability, and from a pollution standpoint I'd rather have a mini-nuke 1 mile away instead of a coal fired plant 5 miles away.
Good analysis - I wonder when "Trust Networks" will become a widely expected feature of new communication systems, the way Spam filtering is expected in e-mail.
And, I thought that e-mail ran more like 99% spam when not actively dodging the bots, and this isn't counting the great "cute bunny photo" forwards from "friends and relatives."
But really, no one can be expected to QA every single line of code that's shipped through their device
All depends on the level of concern - for a music player, what the hell, it's only the company's reputation that's riding on it... (now, if the company isn't already a laughingstock, maybe this might matter.) If this were code on a Mars Surveyor mission whose failure would set back an entire program by 2 years or more - I'd be checking every line of code, everywhere, three times.
Popular sport amongst hoodlum gangsters around Tampa when the first airbag equipped police cars rolled out was "pop-a-cop," intentionally ram hard enough to get airbag deployment, effectively disabling the officers' ability to give chase for long enough to get lost in the city.
I envision a really nifty radar spoofing device that would panic stop these Volvos without doing anything other than re-transmitting a modified radar pulse back at them... I'm sure the police wouldn't use such a system, but I can picture suburban geek troublemakers messin' with the soccer moms.
I was just going on the information (so reliably gleaned from earlier posts) that $50-100M/year was available by placing a single ad per page, smaller than the beg that ran recently to net $6M in direct contributions. If they can operate on 6, but have 100 available, it seems that it wouldn't take even a year to hoard enough cash to start throwing off basic operating expenses, two or three years and you can support respectable growth.
Even today, you should be able to get 5% return on whatever cash you have (not lost in the recent market implosion), especially with $100M to invest. Investing "wisely" does not mean keeping all of the money buried in the back yard, or in federally insured deposit accounts, you spread it around - unlike some of the rich geniuses who had the bulk of their wealth with Madoff.
Or you could just auto-throttle the ads to match the operating expenses.
Maybe I am too close to my Depression Era grandparents to comprehend this kind of thinking? Sure, too much ready cash can be a bad thing, but what's wrong with a big fat endowment that lets the cash flow out at a manageable rate? Does everyone think that display ad revenue will be this easy and lucrative forever?
I'm not really putting plumbers down (not even Joe - even as dim as he came off on national TV), what I'm really referring to is the difficulty aliens, especially aliens who have journeyed between the stars, would have in understanding that we are anything other than a bunch of insignificant hive dwellers - not really doing much of anything interesting or working toward any big common goals.
Plumbers work to keep a polar solvent flowing to the dwelling, and also to keep contaminated solvent flowing away, their life's work is probably less interesting than studying a naturally grown intestine.
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I agree that breeder reactors aren't inherently evil... but I do believe that if we built nuke generators by the thousand, instead of one offs, we could actually refine and enhance the design to get rid of inherent problems, not to mention being able to train a cadre of qualified support techs that can work on any station anywhere. NRC, or a similar body, would need to keep control of maintenance - you're right that you can't trust local city councils to keep up the funding. But... I think it would be reasonable to have automated monitoring, and if the failure and maintenance rates are anything approaching what they should be, you only really need one qualified tech per hundred installations. He'd spend 2 days per site doing routine annual maintenance, and hopefully have less than one emergency call per decade.
The batteries and power conversion circuitry are probably several times more costly than the panel itself, especially when you factor in their inefficiencies and what they do to total available power. Still, I think that a fair analysis would come up with a sustainable system (i.e., you could use only solar power to build solar power equipment at a better than self sustaining rate.) A lot more efficiency (scale and better engineering) will come if solar starts accounting for more than a fraction of a percent of the total energy generated.
I've got underground power in my neighborhood - and about a dozen ground mounted 50KV transformers. Take a 50KV transformer back to 1910 and people would be as afraid of it as they are of nukes today, full of toxic nasties that can leak into the ground water, can throw deadly lightning bolts or kill you from 50 feet if you're standing in a puddle and it fails... yeah, sure, that all _could_ happen. They've been there for 30+ years, and as far as I can tell they have been maintenance free for that period without as much as a squirrel fried.
We've got distributed power management already - anything we can do on the generation side to stop scraping off mountaintops, extracting all kinds of nasties (coal + uranium + mercury + + + ) from the heart of the mountain, shipping it around the country and burning the earth at rates of tons per minute (nationwide), I think would be progress.
A reasonable 11 Megawatt factory should be churning out 100 panels an hour or more, so factory costs run 1%. Shipping trans-global still isn't going to come close to 11 Megawatt hours per panel. Pretty much everything modern society does has toxic runoff, I'm sure if you're anti-solar you can find a nasty pit somewhere that is the result of solar panel manufacture. For comparison, look at an Aluminum ore extraction facility - they are ultra nasty, but I don't see a wooden bicycle movement yet....
I think the point is that "small is harmless" - you've already got isotopes all over your hospitals. The cost of hardening a garden shed inside 4' thick concrete isn't all that much, and if terrorists get ahold of one of these cores, that will make them easy to find and not much more dangerous than they already are with access to fertilizer and diesel fuel.
Big nuke plants may look impressive, and by fallacious association with impressive, impressively safe, but they are also big targets, and big things can go wrong in them that affect a wide area in a big way. Cleaning up a little reactors' little problems isn't a big deal.
Cleaning up the fly ash produced by your local big coal burning plant is simply impossible.
Edison didn't just invent DC power, he also installed a couple of urban generation stations. I think Westinghouse is a good comparison there, even if Tesla thought of it earlier.
If they'd bulldoze out about 3000 houses behind mine to make a safe zone around one of these things, I'd love to have it "in my backyard."
Hold a florescent tube underneath a big transmission line set - watch it glow. Instant death? No. The same environment every living ancestor of yours for the last couple of billion years evolved under? Also no.
Politics has been squashing nukes for decades. I'm not so sure about powerlines and cellphones for cancer, and the science I have seen "proving" that vaccinations "can't possibly" cause autism has been far less than convincing, but... if you want to do something for the natural environment, use these mini-nukes as anchor points for nature preserves. Put a road in to the center for service, take the power lines out along that road and fence off a big wide buffer zone with absolutely no human admittance. Keep a fire break around the perimeter and around the powerlines and generation station, and otherwise just stay the hell out.
The problem with homo-sapiens is that they just can't resist exploiting nature. Maybe the nuke symbol, combined with stiff civil and criminal penalties for trespass, is strong enough to keep the deer hunters out.
You left out solar-thermal, and my favorite, orbiting mirrors focusing extra sunlight for solar-thermal.
If each of these mini-generation stations were located inside a 640 acre no-take nature preserve (1 square mile), it would do awesome things for the local ecologies.
I'd like to think that the US energy policy is actually strategic instead of stupid. We haven't developed our remaining oil reserves, therefore we still have them, and in exchange, Saudi Arabia has a couple of F-16s and a large collection of Italian leathers and German sheet metal - not a bad trade. Also, this "radioactive waste" we have been collecting for over half a century now is probably the most valuable untapped recycling opportunity on the planet - when necessary.
I'd like to think that... the truth is probably much more depressing.
Advances in automated control systems in the last 40 years should make it possible to "fail-safe" in the most conservative of ways. If a mini-plant is having any problem at all it can cry "MOMMY!" and shut off. Big generating facilities produce millions of dollars of revenue per day when they operate, shutting them down not only costs the power company money, in underserved regions (Chernobyl) it causes power outages and major problems for the power customers, thus the reluctance of Homer's comrades to "pull the plug" at the first sign of trouble.
I remember reading that it takes more energy to build a Solar power system than that system will deliver in it's expected lifespan. Is this true?
No.
To elaborate: picture a 200W solar panel, it weighs about 30lbs and has a lifetime of 20 years or more. In those 20 years, if you average 8 hours a day of full output, that's 1.6kWh per day, or over 11 Megawatt hours. A moderately sized factory might consume 11 megawatts, but if it's that big, it had better be turning out more than 1 solar panel per hour.
This sort of mini-generation station distributed around to take the load off of long distance transmission lines should have happened a long time ago (like, 1995 or so...) but 3miI and especially Chernobyl put a political kink in it - NIMBYs are always present, but after that, they actually got a majority to join them.
Unfortunately, if the information I have read on the internet is in any way reliable, going 100% nuke isn't an option without breeder reactors, there's just not enough fuel in the ground - I suppose the government could run the breeders and the neighborhood stations could use the non-proliferation reactors. The upshot is that we will still need significant energy from alternate sources like wind and solar - and what they need most is a major improvement in the power transmission infrastructure - do that, and a big plus for these mini-reactors is erased.
I still like the "pollution free" mini reactor by every neighborhood scheme, as long as they don't scrimp on the installation facilities and make damn sure nothing leaks into the ground water. From a power distribution standpoint, it should do awesome things for reliability, and from a pollution standpoint I'd rather have a mini-nuke 1 mile away instead of a coal fired plant 5 miles away.
Good analysis - I wonder when "Trust Networks" will become a widely expected feature of new communication systems, the way Spam filtering is expected in e-mail.
And, I thought that e-mail ran more like 99% spam when not actively dodging the bots, and this isn't counting the great "cute bunny photo" forwards from "friends and relatives."
Tried putting the PS3 sitting flat instead of on the left side - much better now - fan runs on 1, sometimes 2 instead of 3, sometimes 2.
But really, no one can be expected to QA every single line of code that's shipped through their device
All depends on the level of concern - for a music player, what the hell, it's only the company's reputation that's riding on it... (now, if the company isn't already a laughingstock, maybe this might matter.) If this were code on a Mars Surveyor mission whose failure would set back an entire program by 2 years or more - I'd be checking every line of code, everywhere, three times.
Popular sport amongst hoodlum gangsters around Tampa when the first airbag equipped police cars rolled out was "pop-a-cop," intentionally ram hard enough to get airbag deployment, effectively disabling the officers' ability to give chase for long enough to get lost in the city.
I envision a really nifty radar spoofing device that would panic stop these Volvos without doing anything other than re-transmitting a modified radar pulse back at them... I'm sure the police wouldn't use such a system, but I can picture suburban geek troublemakers messin' with the soccer moms.
I believe the GP hulls are usually equipped with inertial dampers...
I was just going on the information (so reliably gleaned from earlier posts) that $50-100M/year was available by placing a single ad per page, smaller than the beg that ran recently to net $6M in direct contributions. If they can operate on 6, but have 100 available, it seems that it wouldn't take even a year to hoard enough cash to start throwing off basic operating expenses, two or three years and you can support respectable growth.
Even today, you should be able to get 5% return on whatever cash you have (not lost in the recent market implosion), especially with $100M to invest. Investing "wisely" does not mean keeping all of the money buried in the back yard, or in federally insured deposit accounts, you spread it around - unlike some of the rich geniuses who had the bulk of their wealth with Madoff.
I only see this benefiting the operators of the wrapper site...
Or you could just auto-throttle the ads to match the operating expenses.
Maybe I am too close to my Depression Era grandparents to comprehend this kind of thinking? Sure, too much ready cash can be a bad thing, but what's wrong with a big fat endowment that lets the cash flow out at a manageable rate? Does everyone think that display ad revenue will be this easy and lucrative forever?
I'm not really putting plumbers down (not even Joe - even as dim as he came off on national TV), what I'm really referring to is the difficulty aliens, especially aliens who have journeyed between the stars, would have in understanding that we are anything other than a bunch of insignificant hive dwellers - not really doing much of anything interesting or working toward any big common goals.
Plumbers work to keep a polar solvent flowing to the dwelling, and also to keep contaminated solvent flowing away, their life's work is probably less interesting than studying a naturally grown intestine.