Don't you think that batteries would help out other forms of energy too?
A big problem with coal, nuclear, or any other energy that relies on boiling water is that it does not load follow well. The way this is dealt with now is with expensive and not very fuel efficient natural gas turbines. If there is a battery system that can store up the cheap boiling water energy and release it during peaks then the boiling water energy starts to look cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable.
I do not believe that grid scale batteries will make wind and solar look better, I believe it will make them look worse. Feel free to disagree with me but I'd like to see someone actually do the math on this. My own "back of the envelope" math does not show batteries particularly helpful for making wind power affordable, reliable, and still green. Especially the "green" part of the equation. Just think about how much mining would have to be done for the materials to store enough energy to replace coal and nuclear with wind and solar.
We'd be much better off with nuclear power, even if we had a viable grid scale battery technology.
Some people waste their lives, or never really accomplish anything. John Glenn was not one of those people.
I heard a variation on that that went something like, "Most people wonder if they've made the world better than they left it, a Marine is not one of those people."
Semper Fi, Colonel, you are relieved of your duties.
I assume you were also a US Senator, an officer in the USMC, a US Navy test pilot and flight instructor, and a war veteran. This short list of accomplishments is far beyond being "meat in a can".
He was also the first person to complete a transcontinental flight that averaged supersonic speeds. He had to refuel at subsonic speeds but the average speed through the coast to coast flight exceeded that of a typical rifle bullet. That is not an easy thing to do and is something for the record books.
He is also the oldest person to date to go into space. He was a "payload specialist" where one could argue he was the payload. You might argue this accomplishment is simply being "meat in a tin can" again but just living to be 77 is an accomplishment, and he went into space at that age. If you live to be that old, and are willing to climb into a tin can that accelerates at about 9Gs, and live to talk about it for nearly 20 years then you might have some standing to claim this is nothing to celebrate.
I clicked on the link you gave and, yes, the EIA does say that renewable energy makes up 10% of the energy market. If you click on the breakdown on that from the page you gave and you will see that wind is 19% of that 10%. I thought we were talking about wind, not all renewable energy.
Wind, at about 2% of the total energy market is tiny. Maybe next year it will beat out wood in total energy produced.
While you are at the EIA site you can verify that nuclear power produced 9% of the energy in the USA. This is after forty years of stagnation in the market. While everyone got all excited about wind and solar we've seen nuclear power quietly provide safe, affordable, reliable, and carbon free energy. If nuclear power got the support from the government that wind had then we'd have solved our energy problems by now.
This hostility from the government towards nuclear power is one big reason why I have trouble believing in the global warming hysteria. If global warming is supposed to kill us all next Tuesday if we don't do something by noon tomorrow then we should be all about nuclear power.
I know people are all worried about another nuclear disaster but in fact the deaths from nuclear power, compared to energy produced, is safer than anything else we have by a large margin. We could make nuclear power safer yet if we'd only been building more nuclear power plants so that we can retire the old ones. It's not that the old nuclear power plants are not already very safe, they've proven their safety, it's that we can make them safer yet while reducing the price of energy too.
This hostility towards nuclear power on costs is also something that bothers me. The reason it costs so much is because we've forgotten how to build them. Costs go down with economies of scale. It's not that we'd necessarily have to build a lot of them, but we'd have to build enough that we can keep experienced engineers and technicians employed. If only we'd have been building one nuclear plant per year then the price would have gone down considerably in the time we've been subsidizing wind.
This is the same argument with wind power, we invest in it to promote development so that prices go down in the future. If it works for reducing the price of wind power then it should also apply for nuclear power. The difference between wind and nuclear though is that nuclear power is more reliable, kills fewer people and birds, and produces less carbon per energy produced.
I'm not impressed with wind power. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is a much better solution.
HVDC lines have one big problem against them, cost. These wires cost money. The losses may be minimal on paper but they also add up over time.
This is compounded by the issue that wind and solar are not cheap. For a long distance power line to pay for itself, HVDC or not, the energy on one end has to be cheaper than what one can get on their own on the other end. It's not enough that wind and solar reach price parity with coal and natural gas, they have to be cheaper. If there is a need to add storage systems to make up for demand/supply mismatches then that adds to the cost too.
People don't burn carbon based fuels to be dicks to the environment. They burn this stuff because it is cheap, reliable, plentiful, dispatchable (is that a word? it is now), safe, and people need energy to get shit done.
So many people keep talking about energy storage, carbon taxes, wind mills, and solar power just to avoid the "N" word... nuclear.
We'd have cheap, reliable, safe, and carbon free energy if only people would get over their irrational fear of nuclear power.
We've seen government subsidies for wind and solar power going on for decades and little to show for it. At the same time nuclear power has been providing 20% of our electricity. Can someone tell me the definition of insanity? Now, tell me if wind and solar subsidies do or do not meet that definition.
Pointing out that Google does not in fact run on 100% renewable energy is not "dumb fuckery". It's the truth. We can be pretty sure that Google is not running on 100% renewable power by means of energy storage because if they did they'd announce that and not this scheme of buying indulgences.
You are correct that just because the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine does not mean that one must turn to carbon based power. We know how to make safe, reliable, cheap, and carbon free energy with nuclear power.
Here's one thing that bothers me about this "green" movement. We've been spending a lot of tax money to subsidize wind and solar power but we really don't have much to show for it. People have been trying to maximize wind and solar energy collection for centuries really, and for decades with tax money and corporate "green washing". Still wind and solar provide only the tiniest fraction of energy in the world.
At the same time we've been developing nuclear power for decades. It got a big boost during World War II, and some of that big government money lasted for decades after. We still see a bit of government money in nuclear power research, mostly for US Navy projects. So, no doubt nuclear power got some government money. The difference is in the payback. Nuclear power provides something like 20% of the electricity in the USA.
Again, nuclear power is cheap, safe, reliable, and carbon free. It also exists right now. Looking towards wind, solar, and energy storage to save us is waiting for a train that might never come to the station. Nuclear power can do now what wind and solar promise to do in 20 years.
I got the picture. Rather than debating over what I wrote you are debating over what you wish I wrote. You aren't debating me, you are debating some image in your head of someone you'd rather be debating, someone that knows less than myself and holds opinions I do not hold.
First, no military in the world issues AR-15 rifles as standard equipment. The AR-15 design was the basis for the M-16, M-4, and other rifles but the AR-15 as available to the civilian population is far from common in any military.
Second, an "assault rifle" is a class of weapon that is capable of burst and/or fully automatic fire. There are some true assault rifles in private possession in the USA but the people that own them would not carry them into a pizzeria to put holes in their walls. To own such a weapon one would have to pass a stringent background check, pay considerable fees in lawyers and taxes, and be required to keep it under close guard.
Third, anyone that has had an actual drill sergeant would know how to spell "sergeant".
Fourth, a drill sergeant would never call such a weapon an "assault rifle". It would be called a "rifle" or "weapon". No one in the military would bother to expend the effort in calling such things an "assault rifle" in common conversation. That term would only be used to differentiate such a weapon from a sniper rifle, machine gun, carbine, sidearm, mortar, tank, or other weapon if there was some reason one might be confused. Even then the "M" designation would likely be preferred, as in calling it a "M-16" or "M-4".
If you were in fact in the military then I suspect that you were tossed out with a BCD. Probably from calling your weapon an "assault rifle" in front of your drill sergeant one too many times.
What makes you think that any significant proportion of flight crew have or desire weapons training?
The fact that once it was available the armed crew program could not keep up with demand for training and certification. I just typed "armed flight crew" into Google and up came a news article on how more than 10% of eligible flight deck officers took advantage of the program and as many as 15% of US domestic flights have at least one armed member of the crew.
I don't know the proportion of flight crew in America who are ex-military, and of them the proportion who have weapons training and have kept it up, and who want to keep it up. But in Britain the number of pilots leaving the military and going into passenger piloting is pretty low. The large majority of flight crew have never seen a weapon outside the hands of the police at international airports and few would want the difficulty of maintaining weapons certification for themselves.
That is just a demonstration that the UK is made of "subjects" and not "citizens". A subject is the property of a ruling class, a citizen is someone that has the right to freedom and the responsibility to protect it.
So you're putting the cost of the training and the weapons and the management of the weapons (lockers in the crew's briefing room ; what to do if a crew member leaves their issued weapon at the airport they've just left ; what responsibility does the airline have for the inevitable crew member who uses a works-issue weapon to kill or threaten another crew member on the ground ; what if a crew member gets arrested for carrying their works weapon to their hotel becaue they forgot to take it from their bags?
What if? Yes, what if. There are so many "what ifs" here that are irrelevant because the same questions can be asked of anyone that is armed. There are already armed air marshals on many flights but no one seems to complain about them. The air marshals could also lose a firearm (and it happens more often than they would care to admit) but we don't ban air marshals and other law enforcement from flights.
All you are demonstrating here is an irrational fear of firearms and/or armed individuals. The flight crews are routinely tested for their health, mental and physical, given background checks, and drug tests. Oh, and THEY ALREADY FLY THE FUCKING PLANE!! If they wanted to cause harm to someone then all they'd need to do is nose dive the plane into the ground, they wouldn't need a firearm to do that.
You also complain about the cost. How much does it cost for the armed air marshals? We're already spending money on putting armed people on aircraft, we'd actually be saving money on those air marshals if we allowed the crew of these planes to volunteer for the training and certifications. How much does it cost to lose a plane to a hijacking? By arming the crew we are saving lives.
I don't hear any demand from the airlines to implement this, because they probably don't want it. Despite what some gun associations in some countries want.
The airlines don't want it because they don't want to be responsible for fighting terrorism, because if the pilots are armed then they'd have to admit that a hijacked plane is possible, because of so many things including wanting to placate those with irrational fears of firearms like yourself.
Probably the biggest point I want to make is that I have no desire to make being armed a condition of flying the plane. The pilot should be a pilot first, if that person desires to be armed then there should be no law, regulation, or policy to prevent this.
This gets back to your earlier point of flight crews potentially getting arrested for being armed where they should not. I have two solutions for this. One possible solution is have the armed pilots be considered as law enforcement. No one arrests an FBI agent for taking their work gun with them to a hotel, nei
So a coder who has read a bit of shit on wikipedia but not finished the articles is telling an engineer with experience in the electricity generation industry that? Seriously?
Someone that mentions pebble bed reactors as some sort of next step in nuclear power would seem to be missing a lot of nuclear technology developments. Pebble bed reactors have all kinds of problems.
PBRs are a compromise to appease the incumbent fuel fabricators while also trying to achieve a means to move fuel and moderator into and out of the reactor almost as if it was a fluid. This is so close to how MSRs work but with all the problems of little fragile billiard balls for fuel elements. MSRs are PBRs with the fuel elements being on the molecular level. No worrying about cracked pebbles clogging up the works. No need to "shuffle" the pebbles to keep the fuel burn consistent.
MSRs work but the powers that be don't know how to deal with molten fuel. One method tried was with pebble beds. Another was to have fuel rods but the fuel inside was made so that it would melt within the sealed tubes. Put the two together and we'd have something like a molten salt or molten metal fuel reactor. Molten salt reactor research was going well in the USA before Nixon and/or Carter killed it off. Private companies came across this research and picked up where they left off.
If the rules on licensing nuclear reactors could be changed to allow for liquid fuel reactors again then we wouldn't have to bother with those compromise designs like pebble bed reactors again.
In addition to my post above I also must point out another problem holding up nuclear power. You say you are in the mining industry. Then perhaps you are aware of the nonsensical regulation on thorium. Rare earth metals tend to be in places that also contain thorium. Thorium is currently controlled much like uranium or plutonium, it is considered a weapon grade material. This is even thought the concept of using thorium in a nuclear weapon is theoretical, and the theory is suspect since the few times thorium has been used in weapons the tests had disappointing results. They still went "boom" but only because there was enough plutonium to make it work, it just did not work well enough.
Because of these rules thorium and rare earth mining is nearly non-existent in the USA. If the NRC treated thorium as a fuel, instead of as a weapon, then we'd not only have unlimited energy under our feet but enough rare earth metals that we'd stop buying them from China and would instead likely compete with them in the world market.
I studied electrical, computer, and software engineering so I have some familiarity with the workings of a power plant. My main area of study was in digital electronic design but one cannot go down that path without some exposure to power engineering, control theory, and such that comes with a degree in electrical engineering. I got to tour a couple coal fired plants and a very pathetic tour of a pumped hydro storage dam. I plan to take more, graduate level, courses on power engineering soon.
My undergraduate education and some reading on my own tells me that wind and solar simply cannot power the world on their own. Adding storage technologies to the mix benefits nuclear power as much as wind and solar. The pumped hydro dam I toured was in the TVA. They used the dam to store up nuclear power in the winter so that there would be enough water and electricity for the summer. They could do the same for wind and solar, I suppose, but that could mean having to operate the dam at a cycle it would not be able to handle, or at least not as efficiently.
These new high temperature nuclear power plants can load follow as well as any natural gas turbine or hydro dam. Put these power plants against wind and solar and the whole idea of energy storage starts to look real silly.
The nuclear engineers have done the math, they can build these things at a price cheaper than coal, if only the NRC would allow them to.
In a few weeks we won't have Obama running out in front of a crowd of construction workers telling them how great he is at "approving" the nuclear power plant they are working on. Obama didn't sign anything to make it happen. It was started before he came to office and the Bush appointees signed off on it all. The parade started without him and he ran to the front to look like a grand marshal.
You have much to learn about nuclear power if you believe the Russians and Chinese are leading the way in nuclear reactor technology. Look up Flibe Energy and their LFTR designs. Transatomic has WAMSR. Terrestrial Energy in Canada has their small modular reactors, Integral Molten Salt Reactors I believe that they are calling it. I don't mean to imply China is not making advances, they are investing in nuclear power development too, but they are starting from what they've been able to copy from America.
The rules are in fact holding up nuclear power development in Canada and the USA. The US NRC simply does not have the means to license anything other than a solid fuel, water cooled, big containment domed reactor. While it is possible that a molten salt reactor could be built under the rules as they exist it would be a very expensive design and it would destroy many of the benefits of a liquid fuel reactor.
As I recall Russia and Japan have experimented with molten metal cooled reactors they have not had much success. Russia is at least one step ahead of the USA by having nuclear powered icebreakers. This is a technology that I'm sure the US Coast Guard would love to have.
Kirk Sorensen from Flibe Energy is quite vocal about the lack of ability to build a molten salt reactor in the USA. He's got investors for his technology but without the ability to get approval from the NRC to build a reactor we are stuck with dusted off and repainted 1970s reactors.
It's hard to not bring politics into this because we've seen the Democrats fight to keep nuclear power down for decades. They'll let a few things through when it serves their needs to buy votes but for some reason they must see nuclear power as some sort of threat. Go look at the Democrat policy platform and then compare that to the Republicans. The Democrats simply do not mention anything nuclear except to say that nuclear weapons are bad. The Republicans recognize the need to have nuclear power, at a minimum, in an "all the above" energy strategy. Some Republicans are more supportive than others but at least they see nuclear power as a benefit. The Democrats seem to want to pretend that nuclear power does not exist.
When it comes to the importance that nuclear power proves to the military there are several ways that nuclear power helps. The first is perhaps the most obvious, large naval vessels with nuclear power plants provide an extreme tactical advantage. This is best demonstrated with submarines but is also a big help with surface ships. A ship that doesn't need to take on fuel oil constantly can better defend itself and do so while traveling much farther, faster, and longer.
Military bases want nuclear power so that they can be independent of the national grid if they must. That hydrocarbon fuel synthesis technology the Navy has been developing would be huge for vehicles on land, sea, and air. Now that I think about it, this technology would also be great for spacecraft as well.
Once the NRC gets off its thumbs and stars to go down the path of small modular reactor, molten salt reactor, and high temperature reactors, then we are going to see some movement in nuclear power. Again, this comes down to politics. The Democrats don't want nuclear power and they've been in a position to kill it off most every where it's been tried for a long time. With Reid gone, Obama gone, and Pelosi as a (rather unpopular) minority leader, the Republicans have two tears to fix this problem. Let's hope that they can fix it in a way that the Democrats cannot tear apart if they get some control back.
That is just crazy talk. I will even admit that my concern of a strong arm take over of a passenger plane is far fetched. Taking over an airplane today is exceedingly difficult. Putting some sort of biological agent in aircraft fuel with the intent to spread it over a populated area by dumping the fuel is just wild.
Someone using a crop duster or sky writer plane might be more likely. Also much more likely to be successful. This is assuming someone is able to put a biological weapon in an airplane without getting killed by it before they can take off. If we assume a suicidal person doing this, which they'd almost have to be since there is a non-trivial risk of dying from the agent carried on the plane, then they'd more than likely be willing to perform some maneuver that is also suicidal and/or likely to get them arrested if/when they land safely.
Dumping the agent on a populated area, and not bring attention to it by something like a fiery crash at the end and/or a close flyby of said populated area, is counter to the idea of terrorism. It's not terror inducing if no one knows it was done and not know who did it.
This is just another chem-trail conspiracy theory with a thin wrapping of terrorism fear mongering.
I've been wondering how long this theater will go on before we see another spectacular fail. The whole reason we see this theater now is because of a security failure overcome by people that planned an attack for months or even years. The security people are looking for weapons but what of a strong arm attack?
Weapons will certainly get attention but what if there was just an overwhelming number of attackers? It might not have the same effect in that not as many innocent people would die on the place since every strong arm attacker is displacing a seat that would be taken by someone else. However they'd still get control of the aircraft and be able to fly it like a missile into whatever target they choose.
I don't know how many people it would take but someone could do the math. They'd just do an estimate on how many people it would take to stop one of their own. Take into account that not all seats will be filled, some of them will be filled with people unlikely to put up a fight. Find as many people as they can that are willing to go through with it. They don't have to be big bruiser types either, just some people that can throw a good punch, or at least provide enough chaos for the bruisers on the team to deal with any passengers that want to put up a fight. Choose a plane with the maximum seating to match your team size.
Some improvised weapons wouldn't hurt. Wrap a belt around knuckles to throw a good punch. Wear an insulated vest to soften any blows and still leave the arms free. Even use things on the plane, the seat cushions as shields, belt extenders as flails, etc. The crew can lock the door to the flight deck but they would still have plenty of time to beat down the door until the crew could land. All the while the passengers would be cowed into a corner or getting a beating.
What of armed air marshals? There's not enough of them for every flight. If there were someone armed on the plane then they'd still have to deal with something like a dozen suicidal maniacs on a plane of 150. More likely the people planning the attack could sniff out the cop and call it off for another day.
What of armed crew? That might be helpful but since the powers that be don't like the idea the program that allowed flight crew to be armed after 9/11 has been lacking funds. The way the rules have been written have also been very stupid, like requiring the pilots to lock up their weapons before they land.
All this security theater is costing real money and time. The rules on locking the door to the flight deck, removing the curtains between sections of the plane, and arming the flight crew were likely all they needed to do and cost very little. The rules on limiting the size of liquid containers are not only stupid from the start but the way they are written is so easy to bypass, just declare that the fluid is required for a medical need and it does not get tested or denied entry. Body scanners, pat downs, etc. are all worthless. Requiring ID is not only worthless but also a violation of many constitutionally protected rights, such as being able to be free from unwarranted search or to be free to peaceably assemble.
As for all the firearms they've confiscated, if they thought these people really did intend to do harm on the plane then they should be cuffed and charged with a felony. An $11,000 fine is far to lenient on people that were intent on murder and far too harsh for people that forgot to check all their pockets before getting to the airport. I can see the need to bar the carry of pepper spray and the like, a leak in one of those would be a problem during the flight. Taking knives is just stupid, if you must keep them off the plane then allow the people to arrange to have them stored or shipped.
What really pisses me off though is the taking of toy plastic hammers, bullet casing key rings, and pictures of firearms... PICTURES!
How's that? New submarines are nuclear, and new aircraft carriers are nuclear. The U.S. has been out of the battleship business for some time - so where are these new nuclear ships going to be? And even then, if they started slapping them on cruisers, you couldn't tell the difference in the military's overall energy consumption. And aside from the Navy's use of oil, the Army, Air Force, and Marines are more or less 100% driven by fossil fuels.
The US Navy has hundreds of ships, of which only a few dozen are aircraft carriers and submarines. Since the submarine power plants tend to be in the 50MW to 150MW range then I'd say any surface ship with a power plant of 50MW or larger should be capable of being nuclear powered. This might even be "cheated" down a bit since I can imagine that some compromises were made on the size of these power plants in order to minimize fuel consumption. Since a nuclear powered ship is not limited by fuel, and can in fact create it, then many more ships that would not normally be considered for nuclear power might now be suitable for it.
Also, claiming that if we cannot shift the entire military to nuclear power then we should not bother does seem odd. I know that's not what you said but that is how it could be read. What you seem to fail to comprehend is that nothing requires this technology to be used only on ships. It can be done in any location where a nuclear power plant can be located and there is access to water. Put these reactors and fuel synthesis plants on all military bases large enough to support them and the US military will not only never have to buy fuel again they could get in the business of selling excess to the community around them.
Or....Congress could completely gut every single military program and institution outside of the various Guards: Coast, National and Air. It would be more than enough for this nation's actual defense needs. Having a thousand military bases around the world and special forces deployed to 130+ countries has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with empire.
That's just an anti-military rant which has nothing to do with this matter. As a veteran I support your right to speak your mind. You can thank me later.
Which is another red herring. There is no such thing as a nationalized energy sector in the United States, else the CIA would have have to overthrow its own government. Most of the oil drilled in Alaska, for example, is exported to Japan, because there is only the world oil market.
Where in your fevered mind did this come from? There does not need to be a nationalized energy sector for Navy technology to be used in the civil sector. Since this technology was developed with public funds it is (or at least should be) available for civil use. Of course this would be regulated by the appropriate government agencies to assure safe use of the technology but the fuel production would be, and should be, privately owned.
As much as they've been hostile to corporate trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP. Which is to say, not at all. Nuclear power hasn't been held back by liberals, peacenicks or Green Peace. Nuclear power has been held back by the fact that it is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone. You can't square the circle of spending 15 years building a $15 billion nuclear power plant when wind and solar are far faster and cheaper to roll out, even building in capacity across the grid to address the baseline red herring.
I trust actions more than words. Democrats have been fighting nuclear power for decades. It's only when and where the tide has shifted against them that they will jump out in front and declare they've been supporting nuclear power all along. One speech by one, admittedly prominent, Democrat does not negate decades of hostility to nuclear power.
Sorry, but I have to ask: did your eyes get a little
I saw a few YouTube videos where people from the US Navy described a system that took seawater and electricity to create jet fuel. The intention is to use this system on a nuclear powered vessel so that it can produce the fuel for the aircraft it carries. Obviously a modern aircraft carrier carries a lot of aircraft, and is nuclear powered, but there are lots of other ships that could use this technology. Most every ship in the US Navy and US Coast Guard will carry one or two helicopters for the purposes of search and rescue, carrying in supplies, moving crew to and from shore or other ships, etc. These ships could use this technology to fuel those helicopters and/or any small boats used for similar purposes.
This seawater to jet fuel process doesn't have to be driven by nuclear power, I'd guess, but that's the way to go. It could be powered by sun, wind, or water, but nuclear power doesn't care about the weather. Powering it from coal or other fossil fuel is just stupid. This process doesn't have to be on a ship either, if it can be made cheap enough then it could compete with fossil fuels.
I've mentioned this before and I get stupid responses on how this is a bad idea. One reason given that it is a bad idea is because it still involved burning hydrocarbons, and burning anything is somehow bad. Another reason given that this is a bad idea is because the CO2 is taken out of the water, not the air, and therefore still contributes to global warming. First thing is that by taking the CO2 from the water the cycle is closed, any hydrocarbons it produces is from CO2 in the environment, not from deep in the ground. Second, the CO2 in the water got there from the air. Any body of water exposed to the air will reach a CO2 equilibrium with the air, any CO2 pulled from the water will then get pulled from the air.
The US Navy has demonstrated this technology and it works. All it needs is some funding so that it can be developed further and deployed.
The democrats crashed the economy before they even got into office so some nukes didn't get funding?
I should have said the licenses were withdrawn instead of "cancelled" since cancelled could imply the government interfered instead of the business losing interest in dealing with a hostile government. Also, with the licenses submitted in 2006 or 2008 and withdrawn in 2009, 2012 or 2015 then it is quite likely, and I argue highly probable, that a friendly Republican administration created an environment where people wanted to build nuclear reactors but the Democrats created an environment where the businesses decided that spending the money on licenses they were not likely going to get was bad business.
I'm not shifting the goal posts, I'm made a claim and I'm sticking to it. Your failure to understand my arguments is not my fault.
Of the 18 licenses listed on the NRC site only 5 were issued. All of the licenses were submitted before Obama took office with the possible exception of one or two that were submitted in the early months of his administration. During that time 7 were withdrawn, the license applicants walked away for whatever reason. After not getting a license for nine years can you blame them? I should not take nine years to get a license to operate a nuclear power plant. It should take more like nine months, or nine weeks.
If Westinghouse wasn't pushing 1970s dinosaurs painted green a bank might actually put up some money.
If the NRC actually had the means to license a reactor that wasn't a dusted off design from the 1970s then we'd see something new. The section in the NRC code for molten salt reactors is a set of blank pages. The NRC apparently wants AP1000 reactors so that is what it gets. If the NRC wants to see something new then they need to create rules where such designs can even meet those rules they've created.
Also, if the NRC would issue licenses in a reasonable amount of time then banks would be willing to invest. A bank cannot invest in a nuclear power plant if there is only a one out of three chance the government will actually issue a license before two presidential terms have come and gone.
Obama speaking in front of a bunch of union workers, even if it is on a nuclear power plant work site, does not mean he supports nuclear power. I look at actions, not words. If he and his party supported nuclear power then they would have been issuing licenses before the people that applied lost interest and walked away. I also found it interesting that those licenses that were issued were only for applications submitted before Obama took office, so there was already considerable money invested in these projects. Obama spoke at a nuclear power construction site in 2010 and the licenses were issued only in 2012 and 2016, election years.
You tell me that Obama is supporting nuclear power. I tell you that he's only been buying votes.
Economy of scale you goose - the "blind" bit seems spot on but the "seer" no so much. Learn about the topic before attempting to lecture the reader - if you want nukes you want them BIG so that you have shitloads of steam in one location and can get every lats little bit of energy out. The reactors themselves don't need to be big (eg. pebble bed) so long as you have a few of them within reach of your turbines.
I stated nothing to imply the size of the reactors. But since you bring it up the era of the large (gigawatt scale) nuclear reactor is likely to come to an end soon. Big reactors allow the costs of development, licensing, and so forth to be recovered more quickly. If we see a sensible change in the licensing process we can build medium sized (200 - 500 MW scale) or small (50 - 200 MW scale) reactors built on an assembly line. We already build things of this size, cost, complexity, and need for safety in things like passenger aircraft. Each aircraft is much like the other, allowing for a spreading of the cost of the development, but each is licensed separately although in a much more streamlined manner since the people licensing it know what they are dealing with from the start.
We can do the same with nuclear power plants. Make them in small enough sections to move by train or barge and stack the pieces on site like Lego blocks. The foundation and other large concrete structures would obviously be poured on site. I saw a very interesting presentation on YouTube where a nuclear engineer proposed placing something like five 200MW small modular reactors on a site with four 250MW turbines. This would make a nice gigawatt scale power plant with room to grown incrementally with additional turbines and reactors. I may not have the power ratings exact but the goal was to optimize the output with as low of cost as possible. It just happens that those sizes of reactors and turbines gave the best results.
That open hostility you imagine was not there that day was it?
The people working on the reactor were largely union members, during a mid-term election year. His presence there was likely very reluctant but necessary to avoid open hostility in closing an already started nuclear reactor, leaving these people without jobs.
And none denied either. The energy environment since 2010 has meant nobody has tried to put anything up for approval.
Seems rather pointless to submit an application when you know it will be denied, no? The people in the nuclear power industry know who their friends are. Many license applications were cancelled during the Obama administration even though they met initial approval under Bush. The price of natural gas certainly played a part, the downturn in the economy played a part.
The Democrats do not like nuclear power, but they do like unions. They'll do what ever they can to stop a nuclear power plant from being built but once started, and union workers hired, they will support it until the point when those union workers go away and they operators want to actually power it up. We saw this with Yucca Mountain. The Democrats loved the idea of digging a big hole in a mountain but when it came time to use the hole for what it was intended to be used for, storing spent nuclear reactor fuel, the Democrats stood in the way of it being licensed as a nuclear material storage site.
If the Democrats love nuclear power so much then why not allow the use of Yucca Mountain for storing nuclear material? If they didn't want the nuclear material there then why approve its construction?
We'll get nuclear power when the Pelosi and Reid Democrats die off or are otherwise removed from power.
On a side note, am I the only one to notice that US Senators tend to only leave office feet first?
Call me when the military volunteers their budgets be cut to help offset climate change because it's more effective.
I believe the US Navy gave this call a long time ago.
The US Navy wanted some nuclear powered ships but Congress crapped on them with more oil fired power plants. Now the Navy has to support these ships with oilers to bring them fuel. The US Navy has been experimenting with a hydrocarbon synthesis project that can turn seawater into jet fuel. If this technology could be brought into wide use the US Navy could fuel the aircraft on board their nuclear powered ships with fuel produced on the ship.
The US Navy would likely still have a class of ships called an "oiler" but those ships would instead of carry fuel oil from port to port they'd be producing it on board while en route. Since purification of the seawater is part of the process to produce the hydrocarbon fuel it would be conceivable for these ships to have large stores of fresh water as well, for the purposes of providing drinking water to other ships and to ports in times of emergency.
Of course the US Navy has a primary concern of keeping their ships supplied so that the crews are happy and healthy but if this also allows for reduction in CO2 added to the atmosphere then I'd hope that support for technology like this fuel synthesis would be widespread.
If the hydrocarbons are produced from the CO2 in the air then their is no net increase in the CO2 in the environment. This is what the Navy wants to do, use nuclear power to draw CO2 from the seawater (which dissolves in the water from the air) and create hydrogen from electrolysis, put them together and out comes hydrocarbons and oxygen.
Taxing fossil fuels will do nothing. There is already ample incentive to move from fossil fuels. What we need is someone interested in actually solving the problem. The Navy has shown us a solution, one that does not require economy killing taxes or ripping up our hydrocarbon based infrastructure.
Effectively we've already solved the problem, we just need people that want to see the solution implemented.
I doubt that. Replacing fossil fuels for vehicles and electricity is much harder than moving some dirt. We know how to move dirt, we've been doing that for a long time. We've been trying, and failing, to find alternatives to fossil fuels for a long time too.
We are going to be burning a lot of fossil fuels for at least thirty years. How can I say this? Easy, look at the typical lifespan of a cargo ship, passenger airplane, train, construction equipment, and so on. These are very large and expensive pieces of equipment that are not replaced on a whim. In addition to this it takes years to design and test new versions of these things. I remember the F-35 having it's "fly off" in the 1990s and it's still being tested for deployment. The transition from fossil fuels will likely take much longer than thirty years but given just the lifespan of these vehicles sets that as a lower limit.
What might allow for a faster change away from fossil fuels is an alternative source of hydrocarbons. These vehicles don't care where the hydrocarbons came from, they just need that kind of fuel because nothing else is as easy to handle, energy dense, self lubricating, and so on. The US Navy has been researching synthesized hydrocarbons and if they could just get the funding for this we could see this happen much sooner. It also would not require replacing all of our hydrocarbon infrastructure for something new.
If Congress hadn't killed the plans for more Navy nuclear powered ships then they'd be using a lot less fossil fuels. The US Navy has been researching synthesized fuels, still carbon based but derived from nuclear power and seawater, not fossil fuels. If Congress would just fund this project properly then we could see this deployed in the military very soon. After some time in real world use by the military then perhaps this synthetic fuel technology could get into civilian use too.
I've seen people in the military speak publicly on the issues of energy and the projects they fund to address it. They speak publicly on this because they need support from Congress to fund this, and Congress will only do so if the public wants them to.
I see the last election as a change of public opinion on energy. The "drill, baby, drill" people see domestic oil production as a means to stop sending so many of our warriors over to so many sandy places to die for what we can produce here. The Democrats have been openly hostile to nuclear power while Trump and the GOP have at least given lukewarm support for it.
I'm tired of so much arguing on if CAGW is real. I want to see people discuss real solutions. While many people might not like it things like domestic oil and gas production, and more pipelines, are necessary for a smooth transition away from fossil fuels. Domestic oil and gas means less fuel being burned to haul it halfway around the world. Moving oil and gas by pipes means not moving it by truck and trains.
Burning more natural gas means burning less coal and oil, which means less CO2 produced for the same energy. Even if we could produce an all electric fleet of vehicles tomorrow we'd still be burning a lot of fossil fuels for the next thirty years as we make the transition. The US military also knows this and they've been looking for ways to reduce their oil consumption. The problem is that Congress is holding them up from doing so.
Obama "approved" these nuclear reactors by speaking in front of them. The laws that allowed for their construction were signed by Bush and enacted by a Republican majority Congress. The licenses were issued before he took office or by people already at the NRC before he could change the members on the regulatory board.
His "approval" also went away after Fukushima. He spoke in front of some union workers at some nuclear power plants under construction in 2010 but made no such other approvals since.
We should be building a new nuclear power plant every month in the USA, at least, just to keep up with growing demand and the shutdown of older coal and nuclear power plants. Obama allowing a handful of nuclear reactors to continue the construction started before he took office, at existing nuclear power plant sites, is hardly the nuclear renaissance we need.
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Don't you think that batteries would help out other forms of energy too?
A big problem with coal, nuclear, or any other energy that relies on boiling water is that it does not load follow well. The way this is dealt with now is with expensive and not very fuel efficient natural gas turbines. If there is a battery system that can store up the cheap boiling water energy and release it during peaks then the boiling water energy starts to look cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable.
I do not believe that grid scale batteries will make wind and solar look better, I believe it will make them look worse. Feel free to disagree with me but I'd like to see someone actually do the math on this. My own "back of the envelope" math does not show batteries particularly helpful for making wind power affordable, reliable, and still green. Especially the "green" part of the equation. Just think about how much mining would have to be done for the materials to store enough energy to replace coal and nuclear with wind and solar.
We'd be much better off with nuclear power, even if we had a viable grid scale battery technology.
Some people waste their lives, or never really accomplish anything. John Glenn was not one of those people.
I heard a variation on that that went something like, "Most people wonder if they've made the world better than they left it, a Marine is not one of those people."
Semper Fi, Colonel, you are relieved of your duties.
I assume you were also a US Senator, an officer in the USMC, a US Navy test pilot and flight instructor, and a war veteran. This short list of accomplishments is far beyond being "meat in a can".
He was also the first person to complete a transcontinental flight that averaged supersonic speeds. He had to refuel at subsonic speeds but the average speed through the coast to coast flight exceeded that of a typical rifle bullet. That is not an easy thing to do and is something for the record books.
He is also the oldest person to date to go into space. He was a "payload specialist" where one could argue he was the payload. You might argue this accomplishment is simply being "meat in a tin can" again but just living to be 77 is an accomplishment, and he went into space at that age. If you live to be that old, and are willing to climb into a tin can that accelerates at about 9Gs, and live to talk about it for nearly 20 years then you might have some standing to claim this is nothing to celebrate.
I'm not sure that's rain that is falling on my head.
My BS meter just twitched.
I clicked on the link you gave and, yes, the EIA does say that renewable energy makes up 10% of the energy market. If you click on the breakdown on that from the page you gave and you will see that wind is 19% of that 10%. I thought we were talking about wind, not all renewable energy.
Wind, at about 2% of the total energy market is tiny. Maybe next year it will beat out wood in total energy produced.
While you are at the EIA site you can verify that nuclear power produced 9% of the energy in the USA. This is after forty years of stagnation in the market. While everyone got all excited about wind and solar we've seen nuclear power quietly provide safe, affordable, reliable, and carbon free energy. If nuclear power got the support from the government that wind had then we'd have solved our energy problems by now.
This hostility from the government towards nuclear power is one big reason why I have trouble believing in the global warming hysteria. If global warming is supposed to kill us all next Tuesday if we don't do something by noon tomorrow then we should be all about nuclear power.
I know people are all worried about another nuclear disaster but in fact the deaths from nuclear power, compared to energy produced, is safer than anything else we have by a large margin. We could make nuclear power safer yet if we'd only been building more nuclear power plants so that we can retire the old ones. It's not that the old nuclear power plants are not already very safe, they've proven their safety, it's that we can make them safer yet while reducing the price of energy too.
This hostility towards nuclear power on costs is also something that bothers me. The reason it costs so much is because we've forgotten how to build them. Costs go down with economies of scale. It's not that we'd necessarily have to build a lot of them, but we'd have to build enough that we can keep experienced engineers and technicians employed. If only we'd have been building one nuclear plant per year then the price would have gone down considerably in the time we've been subsidizing wind.
This is the same argument with wind power, we invest in it to promote development so that prices go down in the future. If it works for reducing the price of wind power then it should also apply for nuclear power. The difference between wind and nuclear though is that nuclear power is more reliable, kills fewer people and birds, and produces less carbon per energy produced.
I'm not impressed with wind power. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is a much better solution.
HVDC lines have one big problem against them, cost. These wires cost money. The losses may be minimal on paper but they also add up over time.
This is compounded by the issue that wind and solar are not cheap. For a long distance power line to pay for itself, HVDC or not, the energy on one end has to be cheaper than what one can get on their own on the other end. It's not enough that wind and solar reach price parity with coal and natural gas, they have to be cheaper. If there is a need to add storage systems to make up for demand/supply mismatches then that adds to the cost too.
People don't burn carbon based fuels to be dicks to the environment. They burn this stuff because it is cheap, reliable, plentiful, dispatchable (is that a word? it is now), safe, and people need energy to get shit done.
So many people keep talking about energy storage, carbon taxes, wind mills, and solar power just to avoid the "N" word... nuclear.
We'd have cheap, reliable, safe, and carbon free energy if only people would get over their irrational fear of nuclear power.
We've seen government subsidies for wind and solar power going on for decades and little to show for it. At the same time nuclear power has been providing 20% of our electricity. Can someone tell me the definition of insanity? Now, tell me if wind and solar subsidies do or do not meet that definition.
Pointing out that Google does not in fact run on 100% renewable energy is not "dumb fuckery". It's the truth. We can be pretty sure that Google is not running on 100% renewable power by means of energy storage because if they did they'd announce that and not this scheme of buying indulgences.
You are correct that just because the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine does not mean that one must turn to carbon based power. We know how to make safe, reliable, cheap, and carbon free energy with nuclear power.
Here's one thing that bothers me about this "green" movement. We've been spending a lot of tax money to subsidize wind and solar power but we really don't have much to show for it. People have been trying to maximize wind and solar energy collection for centuries really, and for decades with tax money and corporate "green washing". Still wind and solar provide only the tiniest fraction of energy in the world.
At the same time we've been developing nuclear power for decades. It got a big boost during World War II, and some of that big government money lasted for decades after. We still see a bit of government money in nuclear power research, mostly for US Navy projects. So, no doubt nuclear power got some government money. The difference is in the payback. Nuclear power provides something like 20% of the electricity in the USA.
Again, nuclear power is cheap, safe, reliable, and carbon free. It also exists right now. Looking towards wind, solar, and energy storage to save us is waiting for a train that might never come to the station. Nuclear power can do now what wind and solar promise to do in 20 years.
I got the picture. Rather than debating over what I wrote you are debating over what you wish I wrote. You aren't debating me, you are debating some image in your head of someone you'd rather be debating, someone that knows less than myself and holds opinions I do not hold.
I'm calling BS on this.
First, no military in the world issues AR-15 rifles as standard equipment. The AR-15 design was the basis for the M-16, M-4, and other rifles but the AR-15 as available to the civilian population is far from common in any military.
Second, an "assault rifle" is a class of weapon that is capable of burst and/or fully automatic fire. There are some true assault rifles in private possession in the USA but the people that own them would not carry them into a pizzeria to put holes in their walls. To own such a weapon one would have to pass a stringent background check, pay considerable fees in lawyers and taxes, and be required to keep it under close guard.
Third, anyone that has had an actual drill sergeant would know how to spell "sergeant".
Fourth, a drill sergeant would never call such a weapon an "assault rifle". It would be called a "rifle" or "weapon". No one in the military would bother to expend the effort in calling such things an "assault rifle" in common conversation. That term would only be used to differentiate such a weapon from a sniper rifle, machine gun, carbine, sidearm, mortar, tank, or other weapon if there was some reason one might be confused. Even then the "M" designation would likely be preferred, as in calling it a "M-16" or "M-4".
If you were in fact in the military then I suspect that you were tossed out with a BCD. Probably from calling your weapon an "assault rifle" in front of your drill sergeant one too many times.
What makes you think that any significant proportion of flight crew have or desire weapons training?
The fact that once it was available the armed crew program could not keep up with demand for training and certification. I just typed "armed flight crew" into Google and up came a news article on how more than 10% of eligible flight deck officers took advantage of the program and as many as 15% of US domestic flights have at least one armed member of the crew.
I don't know the proportion of flight crew in America who are ex-military, and of them the proportion who have weapons training and have kept it up, and who want to keep it up. But in Britain the number of pilots leaving the military and going into passenger piloting is pretty low. The large majority of flight crew have never seen a weapon outside the hands of the police at international airports and few would want the difficulty of maintaining weapons certification for themselves.
That is just a demonstration that the UK is made of "subjects" and not "citizens". A subject is the property of a ruling class, a citizen is someone that has the right to freedom and the responsibility to protect it.
So you're putting the cost of the training and the weapons and the management of the weapons (lockers in the crew's briefing room ; what to do if a crew member leaves their issued weapon at the airport they've just left ; what responsibility does the airline have for the inevitable crew member who uses a works-issue weapon to kill or threaten another crew member on the ground ; what if a crew member gets arrested for carrying their works weapon to their hotel becaue they forgot to take it from their bags?
What if? Yes, what if. There are so many "what ifs" here that are irrelevant because the same questions can be asked of anyone that is armed. There are already armed air marshals on many flights but no one seems to complain about them. The air marshals could also lose a firearm (and it happens more often than they would care to admit) but we don't ban air marshals and other law enforcement from flights.
All you are demonstrating here is an irrational fear of firearms and/or armed individuals. The flight crews are routinely tested for their health, mental and physical, given background checks, and drug tests. Oh, and THEY ALREADY FLY THE FUCKING PLANE!! If they wanted to cause harm to someone then all they'd need to do is nose dive the plane into the ground, they wouldn't need a firearm to do that.
You also complain about the cost. How much does it cost for the armed air marshals? We're already spending money on putting armed people on aircraft, we'd actually be saving money on those air marshals if we allowed the crew of these planes to volunteer for the training and certifications. How much does it cost to lose a plane to a hijacking? By arming the crew we are saving lives.
I don't hear any demand from the airlines to implement this, because they probably don't want it. Despite what some gun associations in some countries want.
The airlines don't want it because they don't want to be responsible for fighting terrorism, because if the pilots are armed then they'd have to admit that a hijacked plane is possible, because of so many things including wanting to placate those with irrational fears of firearms like yourself.
Probably the biggest point I want to make is that I have no desire to make being armed a condition of flying the plane. The pilot should be a pilot first, if that person desires to be armed then there should be no law, regulation, or policy to prevent this.
This gets back to your earlier point of flight crews potentially getting arrested for being armed where they should not. I have two solutions for this. One possible solution is have the armed pilots be considered as law enforcement. No one arrests an FBI agent for taking their work gun with them to a hotel, nei
Dildos. They'll probably make dildos.
So a coder who has read a bit of shit on wikipedia but not finished the articles is telling an engineer with experience in the electricity generation industry that? Seriously?
Someone that mentions pebble bed reactors as some sort of next step in nuclear power would seem to be missing a lot of nuclear technology developments. Pebble bed reactors have all kinds of problems.
PBRs are a compromise to appease the incumbent fuel fabricators while also trying to achieve a means to move fuel and moderator into and out of the reactor almost as if it was a fluid. This is so close to how MSRs work but with all the problems of little fragile billiard balls for fuel elements. MSRs are PBRs with the fuel elements being on the molecular level. No worrying about cracked pebbles clogging up the works. No need to "shuffle" the pebbles to keep the fuel burn consistent.
MSRs work but the powers that be don't know how to deal with molten fuel. One method tried was with pebble beds. Another was to have fuel rods but the fuel inside was made so that it would melt within the sealed tubes. Put the two together and we'd have something like a molten salt or molten metal fuel reactor. Molten salt reactor research was going well in the USA before Nixon and/or Carter killed it off. Private companies came across this research and picked up where they left off.
If the rules on licensing nuclear reactors could be changed to allow for liquid fuel reactors again then we wouldn't have to bother with those compromise designs like pebble bed reactors again.
In addition to my post above I also must point out another problem holding up nuclear power. You say you are in the mining industry. Then perhaps you are aware of the nonsensical regulation on thorium. Rare earth metals tend to be in places that also contain thorium. Thorium is currently controlled much like uranium or plutonium, it is considered a weapon grade material. This is even thought the concept of using thorium in a nuclear weapon is theoretical, and the theory is suspect since the few times thorium has been used in weapons the tests had disappointing results. They still went "boom" but only because there was enough plutonium to make it work, it just did not work well enough.
Because of these rules thorium and rare earth mining is nearly non-existent in the USA. If the NRC treated thorium as a fuel, instead of as a weapon, then we'd not only have unlimited energy under our feet but enough rare earth metals that we'd stop buying them from China and would instead likely compete with them in the world market.
I studied electrical, computer, and software engineering so I have some familiarity with the workings of a power plant. My main area of study was in digital electronic design but one cannot go down that path without some exposure to power engineering, control theory, and such that comes with a degree in electrical engineering. I got to tour a couple coal fired plants and a very pathetic tour of a pumped hydro storage dam. I plan to take more, graduate level, courses on power engineering soon.
My undergraduate education and some reading on my own tells me that wind and solar simply cannot power the world on their own. Adding storage technologies to the mix benefits nuclear power as much as wind and solar. The pumped hydro dam I toured was in the TVA. They used the dam to store up nuclear power in the winter so that there would be enough water and electricity for the summer. They could do the same for wind and solar, I suppose, but that could mean having to operate the dam at a cycle it would not be able to handle, or at least not as efficiently.
These new high temperature nuclear power plants can load follow as well as any natural gas turbine or hydro dam. Put these power plants against wind and solar and the whole idea of energy storage starts to look real silly.
The nuclear engineers have done the math, they can build these things at a price cheaper than coal, if only the NRC would allow them to.
In a few weeks we won't have Obama running out in front of a crowd of construction workers telling them how great he is at "approving" the nuclear power plant they are working on. Obama didn't sign anything to make it happen. It was started before he came to office and the Bush appointees signed off on it all. The parade started without him and he ran to the front to look like a grand marshal.
You have much to learn about nuclear power if you believe the Russians and Chinese are leading the way in nuclear reactor technology. Look up Flibe Energy and their LFTR designs. Transatomic has WAMSR. Terrestrial Energy in Canada has their small modular reactors, Integral Molten Salt Reactors I believe that they are calling it. I don't mean to imply China is not making advances, they are investing in nuclear power development too, but they are starting from what they've been able to copy from America.
The rules are in fact holding up nuclear power development in Canada and the USA. The US NRC simply does not have the means to license anything other than a solid fuel, water cooled, big containment domed reactor. While it is possible that a molten salt reactor could be built under the rules as they exist it would be a very expensive design and it would destroy many of the benefits of a liquid fuel reactor.
As I recall Russia and Japan have experimented with molten metal cooled reactors they have not had much success. Russia is at least one step ahead of the USA by having nuclear powered icebreakers. This is a technology that I'm sure the US Coast Guard would love to have.
Kirk Sorensen from Flibe Energy is quite vocal about the lack of ability to build a molten salt reactor in the USA. He's got investors for his technology but without the ability to get approval from the NRC to build a reactor we are stuck with dusted off and repainted 1970s reactors.
It's hard to not bring politics into this because we've seen the Democrats fight to keep nuclear power down for decades. They'll let a few things through when it serves their needs to buy votes but for some reason they must see nuclear power as some sort of threat. Go look at the Democrat policy platform and then compare that to the Republicans. The Democrats simply do not mention anything nuclear except to say that nuclear weapons are bad. The Republicans recognize the need to have nuclear power, at a minimum, in an "all the above" energy strategy. Some Republicans are more supportive than others but at least they see nuclear power as a benefit. The Democrats seem to want to pretend that nuclear power does not exist.
When it comes to the importance that nuclear power proves to the military there are several ways that nuclear power helps. The first is perhaps the most obvious, large naval vessels with nuclear power plants provide an extreme tactical advantage. This is best demonstrated with submarines but is also a big help with surface ships. A ship that doesn't need to take on fuel oil constantly can better defend itself and do so while traveling much farther, faster, and longer.
Military bases want nuclear power so that they can be independent of the national grid if they must. That hydrocarbon fuel synthesis technology the Navy has been developing would be huge for vehicles on land, sea, and air. Now that I think about it, this technology would also be great for spacecraft as well.
Once the NRC gets off its thumbs and stars to go down the path of small modular reactor, molten salt reactor, and high temperature reactors, then we are going to see some movement in nuclear power. Again, this comes down to politics. The Democrats don't want nuclear power and they've been in a position to kill it off most every where it's been tried for a long time. With Reid gone, Obama gone, and Pelosi as a (rather unpopular) minority leader, the Republicans have two tears to fix this problem. Let's hope that they can fix it in a way that the Democrats cannot tear apart if they get some control back.
That is just crazy talk. I will even admit that my concern of a strong arm take over of a passenger plane is far fetched. Taking over an airplane today is exceedingly difficult. Putting some sort of biological agent in aircraft fuel with the intent to spread it over a populated area by dumping the fuel is just wild.
Someone using a crop duster or sky writer plane might be more likely. Also much more likely to be successful. This is assuming someone is able to put a biological weapon in an airplane without getting killed by it before they can take off. If we assume a suicidal person doing this, which they'd almost have to be since there is a non-trivial risk of dying from the agent carried on the plane, then they'd more than likely be willing to perform some maneuver that is also suicidal and/or likely to get them arrested if/when they land safely.
Dumping the agent on a populated area, and not bring attention to it by something like a fiery crash at the end and/or a close flyby of said populated area, is counter to the idea of terrorism. It's not terror inducing if no one knows it was done and not know who did it.
This is just another chem-trail conspiracy theory with a thin wrapping of terrorism fear mongering.
I've been wondering how long this theater will go on before we see another spectacular fail. The whole reason we see this theater now is because of a security failure overcome by people that planned an attack for months or even years. The security people are looking for weapons but what of a strong arm attack?
Weapons will certainly get attention but what if there was just an overwhelming number of attackers? It might not have the same effect in that not as many innocent people would die on the place since every strong arm attacker is displacing a seat that would be taken by someone else. However they'd still get control of the aircraft and be able to fly it like a missile into whatever target they choose.
I don't know how many people it would take but someone could do the math. They'd just do an estimate on how many people it would take to stop one of their own. Take into account that not all seats will be filled, some of them will be filled with people unlikely to put up a fight. Find as many people as they can that are willing to go through with it. They don't have to be big bruiser types either, just some people that can throw a good punch, or at least provide enough chaos for the bruisers on the team to deal with any passengers that want to put up a fight. Choose a plane with the maximum seating to match your team size.
Some improvised weapons wouldn't hurt. Wrap a belt around knuckles to throw a good punch. Wear an insulated vest to soften any blows and still leave the arms free. Even use things on the plane, the seat cushions as shields, belt extenders as flails, etc. The crew can lock the door to the flight deck but they would still have plenty of time to beat down the door until the crew could land. All the while the passengers would be cowed into a corner or getting a beating.
What of armed air marshals? There's not enough of them for every flight. If there were someone armed on the plane then they'd still have to deal with something like a dozen suicidal maniacs on a plane of 150. More likely the people planning the attack could sniff out the cop and call it off for another day.
What of armed crew? That might be helpful but since the powers that be don't like the idea the program that allowed flight crew to be armed after 9/11 has been lacking funds. The way the rules have been written have also been very stupid, like requiring the pilots to lock up their weapons before they land.
All this security theater is costing real money and time. The rules on locking the door to the flight deck, removing the curtains between sections of the plane, and arming the flight crew were likely all they needed to do and cost very little. The rules on limiting the size of liquid containers are not only stupid from the start but the way they are written is so easy to bypass, just declare that the fluid is required for a medical need and it does not get tested or denied entry. Body scanners, pat downs, etc. are all worthless. Requiring ID is not only worthless but also a violation of many constitutionally protected rights, such as being able to be free from unwarranted search or to be free to peaceably assemble.
As for all the firearms they've confiscated, if they thought these people really did intend to do harm on the plane then they should be cuffed and charged with a felony. An $11,000 fine is far to lenient on people that were intent on murder and far too harsh for people that forgot to check all their pockets before getting to the airport. I can see the need to bar the carry of pepper spray and the like, a leak in one of those would be a problem during the flight. Taking knives is just stupid, if you must keep them off the plane then allow the people to arrange to have them stored or shipped.
What really pisses me off though is the taking of toy plastic hammers, bullet casing key rings, and pictures of firearms... PICTURES!
How's that? New submarines are nuclear, and new aircraft carriers are nuclear. The U.S. has been out of the battleship business for some time - so where are these new nuclear ships going to be? And even then, if they started slapping them on cruisers, you couldn't tell the difference in the military's overall energy consumption. And aside from the Navy's use of oil, the Army, Air Force, and Marines are more or less 100% driven by fossil fuels.
The US Navy has hundreds of ships, of which only a few dozen are aircraft carriers and submarines. Since the submarine power plants tend to be in the 50MW to 150MW range then I'd say any surface ship with a power plant of 50MW or larger should be capable of being nuclear powered. This might even be "cheated" down a bit since I can imagine that some compromises were made on the size of these power plants in order to minimize fuel consumption. Since a nuclear powered ship is not limited by fuel, and can in fact create it, then many more ships that would not normally be considered for nuclear power might now be suitable for it.
Also, claiming that if we cannot shift the entire military to nuclear power then we should not bother does seem odd. I know that's not what you said but that is how it could be read. What you seem to fail to comprehend is that nothing requires this technology to be used only on ships. It can be done in any location where a nuclear power plant can be located and there is access to water. Put these reactors and fuel synthesis plants on all military bases large enough to support them and the US military will not only never have to buy fuel again they could get in the business of selling excess to the community around them.
Or....Congress could completely gut every single military program and institution outside of the various Guards: Coast, National and Air. It would be more than enough for this nation's actual defense needs. Having a thousand military bases around the world and special forces deployed to 130+ countries has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with empire.
That's just an anti-military rant which has nothing to do with this matter. As a veteran I support your right to speak your mind. You can thank me later.
Which is another red herring. There is no such thing as a nationalized energy sector in the United States, else the CIA would have have to overthrow its own government. Most of the oil drilled in Alaska, for example, is exported to Japan, because there is only the world oil market.
Where in your fevered mind did this come from? There does not need to be a nationalized energy sector for Navy technology to be used in the civil sector. Since this technology was developed with public funds it is (or at least should be) available for civil use. Of course this would be regulated by the appropriate government agencies to assure safe use of the technology but the fuel production would be, and should be, privately owned.
As much as they've been hostile to corporate trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP. Which is to say, not at all. Nuclear power hasn't been held back by liberals, peacenicks or Green Peace. Nuclear power has been held back by the fact that it is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone. You can't square the circle of spending 15 years building a $15 billion nuclear power plant when wind and solar are far faster and cheaper to roll out, even building in capacity across the grid to address the baseline red herring.
I trust actions more than words. Democrats have been fighting nuclear power for decades. It's only when and where the tide has shifted against them that they will jump out in front and declare they've been supporting nuclear power all along. One speech by one, admittedly prominent, Democrat does not negate decades of hostility to nuclear power.
Sorry, but I have to ask: did your eyes get a little
I saw a few YouTube videos where people from the US Navy described a system that took seawater and electricity to create jet fuel. The intention is to use this system on a nuclear powered vessel so that it can produce the fuel for the aircraft it carries. Obviously a modern aircraft carrier carries a lot of aircraft, and is nuclear powered, but there are lots of other ships that could use this technology. Most every ship in the US Navy and US Coast Guard will carry one or two helicopters for the purposes of search and rescue, carrying in supplies, moving crew to and from shore or other ships, etc. These ships could use this technology to fuel those helicopters and/or any small boats used for similar purposes.
This seawater to jet fuel process doesn't have to be driven by nuclear power, I'd guess, but that's the way to go. It could be powered by sun, wind, or water, but nuclear power doesn't care about the weather. Powering it from coal or other fossil fuel is just stupid. This process doesn't have to be on a ship either, if it can be made cheap enough then it could compete with fossil fuels.
I've mentioned this before and I get stupid responses on how this is a bad idea. One reason given that it is a bad idea is because it still involved burning hydrocarbons, and burning anything is somehow bad. Another reason given that this is a bad idea is because the CO2 is taken out of the water, not the air, and therefore still contributes to global warming. First thing is that by taking the CO2 from the water the cycle is closed, any hydrocarbons it produces is from CO2 in the environment, not from deep in the ground. Second, the CO2 in the water got there from the air. Any body of water exposed to the air will reach a CO2 equilibrium with the air, any CO2 pulled from the water will then get pulled from the air.
The US Navy has demonstrated this technology and it works. All it needs is some funding so that it can be developed further and deployed.
The democrats crashed the economy before they even got into office so some nukes didn't get funding?
I should have said the licenses were withdrawn instead of "cancelled" since cancelled could imply the government interfered instead of the business losing interest in dealing with a hostile government. Also, with the licenses submitted in 2006 or 2008 and withdrawn in 2009, 2012 or 2015 then it is quite likely, and I argue highly probable, that a friendly Republican administration created an environment where people wanted to build nuclear reactors but the Democrats created an environment where the businesses decided that spending the money on licenses they were not likely going to get was bad business.
I'm not shifting the goal posts, I'm made a claim and I'm sticking to it. Your failure to understand my arguments is not my fault.
Of the 18 licenses listed on the NRC site only 5 were issued. All of the licenses were submitted before Obama took office with the possible exception of one or two that were submitted in the early months of his administration. During that time 7 were withdrawn, the license applicants walked away for whatever reason. After not getting a license for nine years can you blame them? I should not take nine years to get a license to operate a nuclear power plant. It should take more like nine months, or nine weeks.
If Westinghouse wasn't pushing 1970s dinosaurs painted green a bank might actually put up some money.
If the NRC actually had the means to license a reactor that wasn't a dusted off design from the 1970s then we'd see something new. The section in the NRC code for molten salt reactors is a set of blank pages. The NRC apparently wants AP1000 reactors so that is what it gets. If the NRC wants to see something new then they need to create rules where such designs can even meet those rules they've created.
Also, if the NRC would issue licenses in a reasonable amount of time then banks would be willing to invest. A bank cannot invest in a nuclear power plant if there is only a one out of three chance the government will actually issue a license before two presidential terms have come and gone.
Obama speaking in front of a bunch of union workers, even if it is on a nuclear power plant work site, does not mean he supports nuclear power. I look at actions, not words. If he and his party supported nuclear power then they would have been issuing licenses before the people that applied lost interest and walked away. I also found it interesting that those licenses that were issued were only for applications submitted before Obama took office, so there was already considerable money invested in these projects. Obama spoke at a nuclear power construction site in 2010 and the licenses were issued only in 2012 and 2016, election years.
You tell me that Obama is supporting nuclear power. I tell you that he's only been buying votes.
Economy of scale you goose - the "blind" bit seems spot on but the "seer" no so much. Learn about the topic before attempting to lecture the reader - if you want nukes you want them BIG so that you have shitloads of steam in one location and can get every lats little bit of energy out. The reactors themselves don't need to be big (eg. pebble bed) so long as you have a few of them within reach of your turbines.
I stated nothing to imply the size of the reactors. But since you bring it up the era of the large (gigawatt scale) nuclear reactor is likely to come to an end soon. Big reactors allow the costs of development, licensing, and so forth to be recovered more quickly. If we see a sensible change in the licensing process we can build medium sized (200 - 500 MW scale) or small (50 - 200 MW scale) reactors built on an assembly line. We already build things of this size, cost, complexity, and need for safety in things like passenger aircraft. Each aircraft is much like the other, allowing for a spreading of the cost of the development, but each is licensed separately although in a much more streamlined manner since the people licensing it know what they are dealing with from the start.
We can do the same with nuclear power plants. Make them in small enough sections to move by train or barge and stack the pieces on site like Lego blocks. The foundation and other large concrete structures would obviously be poured on site. I saw a very interesting presentation on YouTube where a nuclear engineer proposed placing something like five 200MW small modular reactors on a site with four 250MW turbines. This would make a nice gigawatt scale power plant with room to grown incrementally with additional turbines and reactors. I may not have the power ratings exact but the goal was to optimize the output with as low of cost as possible. It just happens that those sizes of reactors and turbines gave the best results.
That open hostility you imagine was not there that day was it?
The people working on the reactor were largely union members, during a mid-term election year. His presence there was likely very reluctant but necessary to avoid open hostility in closing an already started nuclear reactor, leaving these people without jobs.
And none denied either. The energy environment since 2010 has meant nobody has tried to put anything up for approval.
Seems rather pointless to submit an application when you know it will be denied, no? The people in the nuclear power industry know who their friends are. Many license applications were cancelled during the Obama administration even though they met initial approval under Bush. The price of natural gas certainly played a part, the downturn in the economy played a part.
The Democrats do not like nuclear power, but they do like unions. They'll do what ever they can to stop a nuclear power plant from being built but once started, and union workers hired, they will support it until the point when those union workers go away and they operators want to actually power it up. We saw this with Yucca Mountain. The Democrats loved the idea of digging a big hole in a mountain but when it came time to use the hole for what it was intended to be used for, storing spent nuclear reactor fuel, the Democrats stood in the way of it being licensed as a nuclear material storage site.
If the Democrats love nuclear power so much then why not allow the use of Yucca Mountain for storing nuclear material? If they didn't want the nuclear material there then why approve its construction?
We'll get nuclear power when the Pelosi and Reid Democrats die off or are otherwise removed from power.
On a side note, am I the only one to notice that US Senators tend to only leave office feet first?
Call me when the military volunteers their budgets be cut to help offset climate change because it's more effective.
I believe the US Navy gave this call a long time ago.
The US Navy wanted some nuclear powered ships but Congress crapped on them with more oil fired power plants. Now the Navy has to support these ships with oilers to bring them fuel. The US Navy has been experimenting with a hydrocarbon synthesis project that can turn seawater into jet fuel. If this technology could be brought into wide use the US Navy could fuel the aircraft on board their nuclear powered ships with fuel produced on the ship.
The US Navy would likely still have a class of ships called an "oiler" but those ships would instead of carry fuel oil from port to port they'd be producing it on board while en route. Since purification of the seawater is part of the process to produce the hydrocarbon fuel it would be conceivable for these ships to have large stores of fresh water as well, for the purposes of providing drinking water to other ships and to ports in times of emergency.
Of course the US Navy has a primary concern of keeping their ships supplied so that the crews are happy and healthy but if this also allows for reduction in CO2 added to the atmosphere then I'd hope that support for technology like this fuel synthesis would be widespread.
If the hydrocarbons are produced from the CO2 in the air then their is no net increase in the CO2 in the environment. This is what the Navy wants to do, use nuclear power to draw CO2 from the seawater (which dissolves in the water from the air) and create hydrogen from electrolysis, put them together and out comes hydrocarbons and oxygen.
Taxing fossil fuels will do nothing. There is already ample incentive to move from fossil fuels. What we need is someone interested in actually solving the problem. The Navy has shown us a solution, one that does not require economy killing taxes or ripping up our hydrocarbon based infrastructure.
Effectively we've already solved the problem, we just need people that want to see the solution implemented.
I doubt that. Replacing fossil fuels for vehicles and electricity is much harder than moving some dirt. We know how to move dirt, we've been doing that for a long time. We've been trying, and failing, to find alternatives to fossil fuels for a long time too.
We are going to be burning a lot of fossil fuels for at least thirty years. How can I say this? Easy, look at the typical lifespan of a cargo ship, passenger airplane, train, construction equipment, and so on. These are very large and expensive pieces of equipment that are not replaced on a whim. In addition to this it takes years to design and test new versions of these things. I remember the F-35 having it's "fly off" in the 1990s and it's still being tested for deployment. The transition from fossil fuels will likely take much longer than thirty years but given just the lifespan of these vehicles sets that as a lower limit.
What might allow for a faster change away from fossil fuels is an alternative source of hydrocarbons. These vehicles don't care where the hydrocarbons came from, they just need that kind of fuel because nothing else is as easy to handle, energy dense, self lubricating, and so on. The US Navy has been researching synthesized hydrocarbons and if they could just get the funding for this we could see this happen much sooner. It also would not require replacing all of our hydrocarbon infrastructure for something new.
If Congress hadn't killed the plans for more Navy nuclear powered ships then they'd be using a lot less fossil fuels. The US Navy has been researching synthesized fuels, still carbon based but derived from nuclear power and seawater, not fossil fuels. If Congress would just fund this project properly then we could see this deployed in the military very soon. After some time in real world use by the military then perhaps this synthetic fuel technology could get into civilian use too.
I've seen people in the military speak publicly on the issues of energy and the projects they fund to address it. They speak publicly on this because they need support from Congress to fund this, and Congress will only do so if the public wants them to.
I see the last election as a change of public opinion on energy. The "drill, baby, drill" people see domestic oil production as a means to stop sending so many of our warriors over to so many sandy places to die for what we can produce here. The Democrats have been openly hostile to nuclear power while Trump and the GOP have at least given lukewarm support for it.
I'm tired of so much arguing on if CAGW is real. I want to see people discuss real solutions. While many people might not like it things like domestic oil and gas production, and more pipelines, are necessary for a smooth transition away from fossil fuels. Domestic oil and gas means less fuel being burned to haul it halfway around the world. Moving oil and gas by pipes means not moving it by truck and trains.
Burning more natural gas means burning less coal and oil, which means less CO2 produced for the same energy. Even if we could produce an all electric fleet of vehicles tomorrow we'd still be burning a lot of fossil fuels for the next thirty years as we make the transition. The US military also knows this and they've been looking for ways to reduce their oil consumption. The problem is that Congress is holding them up from doing so.
Don't blame the military, blame Congress.
Obama "approved" these nuclear reactors by speaking in front of them. The laws that allowed for their construction were signed by Bush and enacted by a Republican majority Congress. The licenses were issued before he took office or by people already at the NRC before he could change the members on the regulatory board.
His "approval" also went away after Fukushima. He spoke in front of some union workers at some nuclear power plants under construction in 2010 but made no such other approvals since.
We should be building a new nuclear power plant every month in the USA, at least, just to keep up with growing demand and the shutdown of older coal and nuclear power plants. Obama allowing a handful of nuclear reactors to continue the construction started before he took office, at existing nuclear power plant sites, is hardly the nuclear renaissance we need.