Ah, I see. You had me going for a bit. I thought you were serious about thinking of something that no one else thought of in 150 years of burning oil to transport goods. That's cute. Though in the future you should end your post with [/sarcasm] so people don't think you've gone insane or something.
Oil is not expensive enough. It's just a matter of time.
Oil will be "expensive enough" when something comes along to replace it. We don't burn oil to be assholes to the environment, we burn it because it's the best we got right now. Wind power might replace it, but then so could nuclear power. It's not like nuclear propulsion is a new technology.
I know someone just fainted upon reading the idea of civilian shipping powered by nuclear reactors. We have a choice. We can burn oil, use nuclear power, or leave vital shipping to the whims of the weather. Nuclear powered shipping has been tried before and failed primarily on poor ship design and politics, not for any technical reasons. We've got better reactors now so it's not like they are going to melt down or something.
I've heard of proposals for a lead cooled reactor, where the reactor is surrounded by molten lead. It's probably heavy as fuck but it's in a ship, so no one cares. If there's a problem the reactor is shutdown and the lead solidifies, sealing everything inside. The lead is a neutron reflector, so if it leaks away the reactor cannot function. Probably not a good thing if your coolant leaks away but at that point the ship is likely taking on water, and water makes a good radiation shield. If a leak is detected then shut it down and dump water on it, that will solidify the lead and seal it up. There's other reactor types that could work, but lead cooled has been tried and shown to work. Nuclear powered ships can't be any worse than oil fired ships, can they?
Again it's oil, nuclear, or leaving vital shipping to the whims of the weather. There might be some future alternative but those are our choices right now.
I can see your comment history and you can see mine. I noticed that I get up moderated and you get down moderated. People find me interesting, informative, and funny enough to mod me up. Why is it do you think that you don't also get this treatment? You think that maybe it's because you are calling people morons and idiots? I do.
If you want people to take you seriously then write posts that have a complete thought, cite your sources, and be respectful of others. It's easy to dismiss people that do not substantiate their claims, call people names, and use bad grammar and spelling. Being right is not enough, you have to convince people you are right, and that's real hard to do if you are making an argument like a schoolchild on a playground.
Wait until the next version, added features will allow Chrome to: - Erase the presets on your car stereo - Leave the toilet seat up - Drop cigarette butts on your front stoop - Spit in your orange juice - Fart in the elevator - Put sugar in your gas tank - Mismatch your socks - Implement the blink tag
Are you concerned about planes crashing into your house? I've never had that problem. Do you live in a concrete bunker in fear of planes?
No, but I do make sure my truck is parked in a garage if hail is mentioned in the weather forecast. I've seen what hail can do to a solar panel, and to a patch of concrete. The concrete looks pretty much the same afterwards, the solar panel not so much.
Did you not see what the article was about? it doesn't matter if your power supply could withstand a kinetic orbital strike if a single hacker can destroy the entire electrical grid infrastructure via computer network.
I read the article and it's a bunch of crap, and so is the mention of trying to address the problem with decentralized solar power. A hail storm busting up a bunch of solar panels is many orders of magnitude more likely to disrupt power than any computer attack.
If only there was a way to move such large items from one town to the next! -_-
Yes, if only. Have you seen a windmill get moved before? Those things are huge and not trivial to move. I see the blades for the windmills going down the interstate all the time around here. One truck held up traffic for miles during rush hour because it had trouble navigating the cloverleaf with such a long trailer. I was late for class because of it. That's just one blade on one windmill. Think what would happen if a tornado tore up a field of them. They'd be out of operation for months or years as they tried to get all the bits and pieces made and moved to the site. Do you think they keep a bunch of spare parts for windmills on a shelf? Do you really think that if a storm busted up a bunch of solar panels that there's just spares lying about to fill in? I've seen what storms can do to supply chains. Generators, drywall, dust masks, gloves, bottled water, and even Pop-Tarts get hard to find after a major storm.
I've seen what high winds can do to a windmill. They'll get twisted up and bent over like a child plucking a dandelion. And solar panels on a roof? You'll find them in a cornfield... in the next county. You can nail them down and armor them up for such things but that just adds to the cost, and they are already too expensive.
If it hasn't happened in the last 70 years, why do you think it would start now?
Because Trump.
Now, I'll give a more serious answer. Because the nuclear power plants we built 40 or 50 years ago are reaching the end of their operational lifespan. They've been providing roughly 20% of our electricity since then. Building enough coal plants to replace them would be a political nightmare. Building natural gas plants to replace them might be feasible but also an economic problem. Solar and wind simply cannot replace them. There are existing nuclear power plant sites, with trained staff there, and that means a lot of people could lose their jobs. As politically difficult it may have been to build a nuclear power plant in the past it's going to get real easy to make the case real soon now. Obama kicked that can down the road for eight years, and we can't do that for another eight. It only takes one successful nuclear power plant to show it can be done again, and again, and again. With practice comes perfection. We will see nuclear power prices come down for the same reasons we saw solar collector prices come down, economies of scale, technological advancements, competition, and so on.
Humans join unions and new wage costs get passed onto poor communities.
Then ban the unions.
If people join a union to make demands then fire them all. Unions are their own worst enemy. They'd actually be useful if they didn't get so full of themselves and threaten a work stoppage to make their point. Breaking up the troublesome unions will cause a short time cost at first but in the end everyone is better off, including the workers.
What will your windmill or solar panel look like after a plane crashes into it? I don't care if your solar panels are bulletproof, they are never going to hold up to the abuse that a concrete bunker can.
This isn't rocket science.
I'm pretty sure rocket science was involved in the survivability tests of a nuclear power plant.
The point is the reduce amount of damage that can be done by one person.
Right, and no single person is going to take down a nuclear power plant, or any significant portion of the electrical grid. A hail storm, tornado, wildfire, hurricane, flood, or whatever, however can bust up a lot of windmills and solar panels for miles around. With buried power lines, and a power plant in a bunker, and people can see power restored within hours of the storm passing.
With panels, again, you can just go to wal-mart and buy a new panel.
If a bunch of solar panels and windmills get busted up then Walmart is going to run out of both real quick.
Also, you show graphs of solar panels getting cheaper but can't nuclear power get cheaper too? I know natural gas and coal prices can go up and down with market forces but nuclear power is very price insensitive to the fuel since it uses so little for so much energy. We've got an effectively unlimited supply of nuclear fuel on Earth, we'll run out of solar power (by the sun going nova) before we run out of uranium.
Battery prices are meaningless to the argument of solar energy. Batteries don't care where the electricity comes from. If batteries get cheap enough then we'll just use coal and nuclear power to charge them up at night to meet the peak demands during the day.
I've argued in favor of decentralized off-grid solar power because centralized power is vulnerable to attack.
It seems every time solar is brought up there is a mention of a "smart grid" to address issues of this thing called "night" that keeps solar collectors from providing 24/7 power. So, which is it? Do we get cheap solar energy from a "smart grid" or do we have expensive decentralized power?
If you want energy that is cheap, reliable, and decentralized then solar power cannot make any significant portion of the grid. Solar is only cheap if it is connected, and that means there's some centralized utility. If you take solar off the grid then you need storage, and that costs money.
I've argued in favor of decentralized off-grid solar power because centralized power is vulnerable to attack.
I live in the US Midwest, and we have a lot of "attacks" on the power grid. It was quite interesting to work the late shift at a call center in the middle of a rainstorm when a nearby lightning strike took out the grid power. We sat in the dark for a few seconds until the backup diesel generators started up. If that call center had decentralized solar power then the lightning strike would not have taken out the power, but that's because we'd have been running on the diesel generators since sundown.
I'm not too concerned about attacks on the power grid since we get them all the time and people have the means to deal with them. If a hacker wants to shut down a grid for a while then what does that mean in the end? Not much really.
I remember some idiot in California tried shooting up a large transformer with a rifle and was almost successful in creating a pretty big blackout. It was only because the guy goofed and missed out on cutting all the control wires for diverting power that he was not successful in making the substation go up in sparks and flames. Of course you then had some US senators call for more gun control (because in California the gun ban didn't work so we have to ban them again) and to armor up all substations (because utility prices aren't high enough already).
How do you protect solar panels from an attack? Wouldn't an idiot with a rifle be even more successful in attacking solar panels than a coal, nuclear, or natural gas power plant? I mean we can (and do) put a nuclear power plant in a big concrete dome to protect it from attack but we can't do that to solar panels. What of a hail storm? Wouldn't that turn your precious decentralized solar panels into a worthless (and toxic) busted up mess? Without a tie to the grid then how are these people supposed to get power until the solar panels are repaired? I know the answer, on site diesel generators, kind of like how we deal with grid outages now.
I'm sure that there's a lot of things we could do to secure our electrical supply. I'm also sure that solar power isn't one of those things.
Sou could have safed your time with that long post if you had understood my previous post better:)
Considering that most of your posts consist primarily of claims without citations and ad hominem attacks there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. How about next time you post a complete thought, give some means to back up your claims, and not call people idiots?
And no, I don't have the urge to read links that summarize (badly) stuff, I already know.
Apparently you didn't know that CANDU reactors can be fueled with reprocessed fuel, otherwise you would not have embarrassed yourself with the provably false statement you made. It's not like you had to read the whole thing, just reading the title would have taught you something. It's not like I'm claiming to be an expert but at least I'm not so lazy I can't click on a link to Wikipedia and read the title of the article or take a quick look for some keywords.
For a moment there I thought you were going to say after defeating the gods of earth, wind, fire, and water that Chaos himself would have to be defeated. Only then the Four Orbs will shine again, balance restored to the universe, and the time loop closed.
Then again, perhaps I've been playing too many old video games.
Warmongers don't want to give out food and our religious nuts don't care much for education & birth control.
I'll give you the part on the warmongers but the "religious nuts" part is off base.
It seems you know little of history. The entire concept of a university comes from the christian tradition of schools for the clergy, where they'd be taught not just theology but also such things philosophy, history, and the sciences. Much of what we know today comes from research done in schools started by christian churches. What came before Christianity was preserved through time by libraries maintained by these christian organizations. You can say that Jesus is a myth and the Bible a book full of fairy tales but the christian traditions is what created modern society. Those traditions include separation of church and state, religious tolerance, equality under the law, and so much we value in a free society. These things also include some pretty basic stuff like don't lie, steal, cheat, rape, or murder.
There are other religions that don't have rules against lying, cheating, stealing, raping, or murdering. Lumping them in with the Christian "religious nuts" is quite the leap of logic. Sure, Christianity may have some strange rules and customs but for the most part it's about treating others and you'd want to be treated, and take care of those in need.
You may think that Christianity has some strange rules on birth control too but I'm quite certain that keeping your pants on is 100% effective against having children. It's also a plenty more sane and compassionate than what some religious and secular customs have on controlling birth rates.
That evening peak was always there, that's what I said. There may have also been a much higher noon peak compared to what was shown in 2012 since by that time there may have been enough solar to make a dent on the top of that curve. In 2013, in real world numbers, the daily peak is already quite flat. So we've already seen California hit their peak of useful solar power to where it starts to require replacing cheap base load production with expensive peak power production.
Combined cycle natural gas is something like 60% efficient. Natural gas turbines are half to a third as efficient, meaning the same fuel burned gets half (at 30% efficiency) to 1/3rd the energy (at 20%) for the same expense in fuel. Not only does that fuel cost energy it produces green house gasses. Remember the reason we are using solar energy, to get "green" and cheap energy. If using so much solar causes us to burn so much natural gas then we are not improving things.
Nuclear power does not have this problem. You are familiar with molten salt storage for solar thermal, right? We can do the same thing with nuclear power only not use up so much land, burn so much natural gas for preheating, or kill so many birds from baking them in flight. Use a nuclear reactor to heat a molten salt and then use the salt to heat air for a turbine. It's borrowing the turbines from solar thermal and natural gas turbines but the heat comes from the reactor. These turbines can load follow.
We do this molten salt cooled reactor and an air (not steam) turbine then solar power looks to be rather pointless. Nuclear power is then cheap, reliable, safe, can load follow, doesn't kill birds, and takes no more area than a conventional nuclear power plant. It doesn't even need any new technology.
This technology was first developed in the early days of the Cold War when the US Air Force wanted a nuclear powered airplane. A plane that could stay in the air for days or weeks at a time. There was never a nuclear powered airplane but all the pieces where there. Dust that off and instead power an electric turbine and I don't care how cheap solar power gets, nuclear power will almost always be cheaper. Much of the costs will be in the capital expense, once built they will want to use it all the time so they can pay that off. Operational costs are pretty stable too, the people that watch it will be paid regardless of how much energy the produce. The variable cost will be in the uranium and thorium, which in the grand scheme of the other costs will be pennies when compared to the dollars of the other expenses.
It seems to me that when people think of nuclear they think of big old slow dinosaurs of reactors. We don't have to build them like that any more. I've heard many nuclear engineers say that even current nuclear power plants are able to load follow but they are prevented from doing so by the steam turbines. Get rid of the steam turbines and we won't even want solar power any more. The best part about the turbines is it doesn't require fundamental changes to the reactors themselves. This can be added to existing plants. Even though nothing "nuclear" is involved here it has to get approval from the notoriously slow Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Solar needs a base load source to work, like nuclear. Nuclear doesn't need solar. Wind might be cheap enough to keep around but solar is just too expensive and unreliable. Once nuclear gets on its feet then I expect solar to get knocked of theirs.
I will concede that they've had some troubles in the past, and are likely to have more in the future, but saying that nuclear power is dead in the USA is provably false.
Obama had a lukewarm at best attitude towards nuclear power. It seems Trump is actually committed to seeing nuclear power succeed. Once one is built there will be a lot of people from that project that would then be experienced builders of a nuclear power plant. So long as we keep them working they can keep their skills fresh, train more people, and costs will go down.
The disaster at Fukushima set the industry back by a decade as political and popular support for nuclear energy evaporated. The economy is growing again and people are looking for ways to get jobs. They want cheap energy. Reliable energy. Domestic energy. They want to... make America great again.
Yep, that could be a problem. Would be nice if someone did a study on that. The fact that such a study has not been done was mentioned.
What we have here is a half of a study. I'm not sure if this is a call to action, as in telling people to stop using plastic or something, or a fundraising effort of the "OMG, pollution!" kind.
I'm reminded of a "study" of some condors that showed elevated lead levels in their blood. This was used as a call to get rid of lead based ammunition in the hunting areas were the condors were known to nest. Someone asked if it was true they they were feeding the birds dead animals from local ranchers to collect their blood samples. They said they were. Then they were asked if they tested the ranch animals for lead. They said they did not. That was not a study, that was an opinion paper. The lead may have been coming from hunters, it may have been naturally occurring, and it may have come from the animals the "scientists" were feeding them. Such haphazard work on their part is why I have to question every "study" I see published.
I see the same thing here. So what if fish eat a bunch of plastic bits floating in the water. While I'm sure a lot of people would agree that plastic bits in the water is not ideal but have they shown any real harm? Also, "plastic" means a lot of things and not all of them react the same in the environment. We've been told for a long time now to take care of how we dispose of our plastics so it's not like people are just dumping the plastic bits into rivers and oceans. Unless we can show harm, and have some understanding of the source of that harm, we don't have anything to act on.
Also, unlike the case of lead or mercury we don't see plastic bits accumulating in animals. Much of the reason these plastic bits remain in the environment is that they do not break down easily. If eaten they tend to just get pooped out.
The article you linked to is meaningless unless nuclear is actually compared to something. It's a bit like someone arguing that we cannot possibly eat steak tonight because of this that and the other thing. Well, that might be true but people have to eat, otherwise people die. After looking at the options it may just turn out that in fact we can eat steak tonight.
Well, let's look at our options: - Status quo and all the pros and cons that go with it - Nuclear power - Starvation
There is no fourth option because using expensive and unreliable energy like wind and solar means reverting to a preindustrial society. You think you can run an aluminum refinery on wind power? A cement kiln on solar power? Sure, we can wait for some new technology to come along but that just means we have to choose from those three options until then. That new technology includes solar and wind that is cheaper than nuclear or coal.
(when was the last time YOU used a paper phone book)
I last used a paper phone book when my internet died and I wanted to find my ISP's phone number and complain.
nobody chucks their wastewater in the street either.
Um... RIGHT! I mean, NOBODY does that any more. Because that would be totally unsanitary and just rude to my... their neighbors. Yep, nobody does that.
I'll believe solar is much cheaper than nuclear when it reaches 20% of electricity production like nuclear power has. As the paper I linked above points out, that simply cannot happen. When solar power reaches about 6% of total grid power it starts to get real expensive.
The next big question that it raises is whether plastic-derived contaminants can be transferred from plastic-eating fish to fish-eating humans.
If eating the plastic doesn't harm the fish, and causes no harm to the people that eat the fish, then why is this in the "health and science" section of the Washington Post? I mean, this is neat and all but is this something someone other than a biologist might find interesting?
I think that perhaps they should have held on to this until they actually figured out if the plastic eating habits actually do harm. But then again, if they saw nothing so far then haven't they already proven that if it is harmful that the harm is pretty minimal?
You obviously didn't even click on the link I gave, it redirects to a Wikipedia page titled "Reprocessed uranium". It's kind of hard to miss, it's in large bold letters at the top of the page. If you read the short, three paragraph, article you will see in the last paragraph a mention of DUPIC. DUPIC is in short chopping up spent LWR fuel into little bits and recladding it in a bundle for CANDU. There is even a link to an article going into detail on how CANDU is capable of burning natural uranium, reprocessed uranium, plutonium, and thorium.
Since you are unlikely to go back to the Wikipedia page I'll post the link here in hopes that maybe you'll read this and learn something. http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_...
Then again, I'll just quote a part that I think is most relevant.
CANDU technology offers another unique option for the back end of the LWR fuel cycle, which completely avoids the need for wet reprocessing and fissile-material recovery. The "DUPIC" fuel cycle, or "direct use of spent PWR fuel in CANDU", utilizes the non-separated, non-enhanced waste product of LWRs directly as CANDU fuel (Keil, 1992).
The transfer from LWR to CANDU can be literally "direct", involving only the cutting of spent LWR fuel rods to CANDU length (~50 cm), resealing (or double-sheathing), and reengineering into cylindrical bundles suitable for CANDU geometry.
Alternatively, a dry reprocessing technology has been developed which removes only the volatile fission products from the spent LWR fuel mix (Lee, 1998; Sullivan, 1998). After removal of the cladding, a thermal-mechanical process is used to reduce the spent LWR fuel pellet to a powder, which is then sintered and pressed into CANDU-sized pellets.
The DUPIC process is much simpler than conventional wet-chemistry techniques for reprocessing, and promises to be cheaper. It presents a significant anti-proliferation benefit as well, since radioactive fission products and fissile material are not separated. In addition, since the heat load of spent DUPIC fuel is similar to that of the original spent LWR fuel, disposal requirements do not increase. However, since approximately 50% more energy can be derived from LWR fuel by burning it as DUPIC fuel in a CANDU reactor, the disposal cost is expected to be lower than either spent LWR or CANDU fuel (Baumgartner, 1998).
Between the extremes of conventional reprocessing and the DUPIC fuel cycle, a spectrum of options exists. The CANDU reactorâ(TM)s high neutron economy offers many options for exploiting the CANDU/LWR synergism, allowing customization to meet local requirements and capabilities. Pursuing these various options requires international cooperation, such as the Canada-South Korea partnership that has pioneered the DUPIC process. South Korea has a fleet of both LWR and CANDU reactors, and can thus benefit from the synergism within its existing nuclear infrastructure (Lee, 1998).
That's just one way to reprocess spent fuel. Using CANDU and DUPIC we can "burn the fuel twice" and get much more from the mined and refined uranium we have. Add to this some other simple reprocessing, like chemically separating the plutonium (reactor grade, useless for weapons) and mixing it with thorium to make fuel, and we have all kinds of ways to reprocess fuel instead of dumping it in a hole in the ground. This is effectively unlimited energy, using technology we developed decades ago, so no new technology or materials needed. We can do this now, while we wait for solar and wind power to catch up.
Probably not the best source but it's what I could find quickly and does show an image from a government study on the potential impact of too much solar power production on the grid.
Further, it should be pretty easy to mitigate with smart thermostats that take the availability of maximum PV energy to run the AC a little earlier than it would otherwise be needed, cooling the house to a temperature below the selected ideal, in anticipation of the coming greater exterior temperatures and lower insolation. Utilities could provide incentives to do this easily enough.
Right, so a utility is telling people that they can't provide power when they want it so they have to freeze in their own homes at noon and then sweat it out until the air outside cools down enough. I've heard of people "storing cold" in salt water tanks for situations like this but that can't be cheap, or at least it's certainly not free.
Here's a better idea, build some nuclear power plants.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see. You had me going for a bit. I thought you were serious about thinking of something that no one else thought of in 150 years of burning oil to transport goods. That's cute. Though in the future you should end your post with [/sarcasm] so people don't think you've gone insane or something.
Oil is not expensive enough. It's just a matter of time.
Oil will be "expensive enough" when something comes along to replace it. We don't burn oil to be assholes to the environment, we burn it because it's the best we got right now. Wind power might replace it, but then so could nuclear power. It's not like nuclear propulsion is a new technology.
I know someone just fainted upon reading the idea of civilian shipping powered by nuclear reactors. We have a choice. We can burn oil, use nuclear power, or leave vital shipping to the whims of the weather. Nuclear powered shipping has been tried before and failed primarily on poor ship design and politics, not for any technical reasons. We've got better reactors now so it's not like they are going to melt down or something.
I've heard of proposals for a lead cooled reactor, where the reactor is surrounded by molten lead. It's probably heavy as fuck but it's in a ship, so no one cares. If there's a problem the reactor is shutdown and the lead solidifies, sealing everything inside. The lead is a neutron reflector, so if it leaks away the reactor cannot function. Probably not a good thing if your coolant leaks away but at that point the ship is likely taking on water, and water makes a good radiation shield. If a leak is detected then shut it down and dump water on it, that will solidify the lead and seal it up. There's other reactor types that could work, but lead cooled has been tried and shown to work. Nuclear powered ships can't be any worse than oil fired ships, can they?
Again it's oil, nuclear, or leaving vital shipping to the whims of the weather. There might be some future alternative but those are our choices right now.
Most of this I already told you dozens of times.
Repeating it doesn't make it true.
I can see your comment history and you can see mine. I noticed that I get up moderated and you get down moderated. People find me interesting, informative, and funny enough to mod me up. Why is it do you think that you don't also get this treatment? You think that maybe it's because you are calling people morons and idiots? I do.
If you want people to take you seriously then write posts that have a complete thought, cite your sources, and be respectful of others. It's easy to dismiss people that do not substantiate their claims, call people names, and use bad grammar and spelling. Being right is not enough, you have to convince people you are right, and that's real hard to do if you are making an argument like a schoolchild on a playground.
Wait until the next version, added features will allow Chrome to:
- Erase the presets on your car stereo
- Leave the toilet seat up
- Drop cigarette butts on your front stoop
- Spit in your orange juice
- Fart in the elevator
- Put sugar in your gas tank
- Mismatch your socks
- Implement the blink tag
Yep, they are poisoning them with the dangerous chemical compound dihydrogen monoxide!
Are you concerned about planes crashing into your house? I've never had that problem. Do you live in a concrete bunker in fear of planes?
No, but I do make sure my truck is parked in a garage if hail is mentioned in the weather forecast. I've seen what hail can do to a solar panel, and to a patch of concrete. The concrete looks pretty much the same afterwards, the solar panel not so much.
Did you not see what the article was about? it doesn't matter if your power supply could withstand a kinetic orbital strike if a single hacker can destroy the entire electrical grid infrastructure via computer network.
I read the article and it's a bunch of crap, and so is the mention of trying to address the problem with decentralized solar power. A hail storm busting up a bunch of solar panels is many orders of magnitude more likely to disrupt power than any computer attack.
If only there was a way to move such large items from one town to the next! -_-
Yes, if only. Have you seen a windmill get moved before? Those things are huge and not trivial to move. I see the blades for the windmills going down the interstate all the time around here. One truck held up traffic for miles during rush hour because it had trouble navigating the cloverleaf with such a long trailer. I was late for class because of it. That's just one blade on one windmill. Think what would happen if a tornado tore up a field of them. They'd be out of operation for months or years as they tried to get all the bits and pieces made and moved to the site. Do you think they keep a bunch of spare parts for windmills on a shelf? Do you really think that if a storm busted up a bunch of solar panels that there's just spares lying about to fill in? I've seen what storms can do to supply chains. Generators, drywall, dust masks, gloves, bottled water, and even Pop-Tarts get hard to find after a major storm.
I've seen what high winds can do to a windmill. They'll get twisted up and bent over like a child plucking a dandelion. And solar panels on a roof? You'll find them in a cornfield... in the next county. You can nail them down and armor them up for such things but that just adds to the cost, and they are already too expensive.
If it hasn't happened in the last 70 years, why do you think it would start now?
Because Trump.
Now, I'll give a more serious answer. Because the nuclear power plants we built 40 or 50 years ago are reaching the end of their operational lifespan. They've been providing roughly 20% of our electricity since then. Building enough coal plants to replace them would be a political nightmare. Building natural gas plants to replace them might be feasible but also an economic problem. Solar and wind simply cannot replace them. There are existing nuclear power plant sites, with trained staff there, and that means a lot of people could lose their jobs. As politically difficult it may have been to build a nuclear power plant in the past it's going to get real easy to make the case real soon now. Obama kicked that can down the road for eight years, and we can't do that for another eight. It only takes one successful nuclear power plant to show it can be done again, and again, and again. With practice comes perfection. We will see nuclear power prices come down for the same reasons we saw solar collector prices come down, economies of scale, technological advancements, competition, and so on.
Sol will never "go nova".
We'll also never run out of nuclear fuel.
the service will be restored sometimes between Friday, 11:30 and December
Of what year?
Humans join unions and new wage costs get passed onto poor communities.
Then ban the unions.
If people join a union to make demands then fire them all. Unions are their own worst enemy. They'd actually be useful if they didn't get so full of themselves and threaten a work stoppage to make their point. Breaking up the troublesome unions will cause a short time cost at first but in the end everyone is better off, including the workers.
Don't you mean "nemeses"? There's more than one you know.
I didn't mean to quote the same line twice. The second quote was supposed to be:
Be it a tree or hacker, centralized power systems a vulnerable to attack.
For some reason I didn't catch it in the preview.
I have a video with those pesky facts too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What will your windmill or solar panel look like after a plane crashes into it? I don't care if your solar panels are bulletproof, they are never going to hold up to the abuse that a concrete bunker can.
This isn't rocket science.
I'm pretty sure rocket science was involved in the survivability tests of a nuclear power plant.
The point is the reduce amount of damage that can be done by one person.
Right, and no single person is going to take down a nuclear power plant, or any significant portion of the electrical grid. A hail storm, tornado, wildfire, hurricane, flood, or whatever, however can bust up a lot of windmills and solar panels for miles around. With buried power lines, and a power plant in a bunker, and people can see power restored within hours of the storm passing.
With panels, again, you can just go to wal-mart and buy a new panel.
If a bunch of solar panels and windmills get busted up then Walmart is going to run out of both real quick.
Also, you show graphs of solar panels getting cheaper but can't nuclear power get cheaper too? I know natural gas and coal prices can go up and down with market forces but nuclear power is very price insensitive to the fuel since it uses so little for so much energy. We've got an effectively unlimited supply of nuclear fuel on Earth, we'll run out of solar power (by the sun going nova) before we run out of uranium.
Battery prices are meaningless to the argument of solar energy. Batteries don't care where the electricity comes from. If batteries get cheap enough then we'll just use coal and nuclear power to charge them up at night to meet the peak demands during the day.
I've argued in favor of decentralized off-grid solar power because centralized power is vulnerable to attack.
It seems every time solar is brought up there is a mention of a "smart grid" to address issues of this thing called "night" that keeps solar collectors from providing 24/7 power. So, which is it? Do we get cheap solar energy from a "smart grid" or do we have expensive decentralized power?
If you want energy that is cheap, reliable, and decentralized then solar power cannot make any significant portion of the grid. Solar is only cheap if it is connected, and that means there's some centralized utility. If you take solar off the grid then you need storage, and that costs money.
I've argued in favor of decentralized off-grid solar power because centralized power is vulnerable to attack.
I live in the US Midwest, and we have a lot of "attacks" on the power grid. It was quite interesting to work the late shift at a call center in the middle of a rainstorm when a nearby lightning strike took out the grid power. We sat in the dark for a few seconds until the backup diesel generators started up. If that call center had decentralized solar power then the lightning strike would not have taken out the power, but that's because we'd have been running on the diesel generators since sundown.
I'm not too concerned about attacks on the power grid since we get them all the time and people have the means to deal with them. If a hacker wants to shut down a grid for a while then what does that mean in the end? Not much really.
I remember some idiot in California tried shooting up a large transformer with a rifle and was almost successful in creating a pretty big blackout. It was only because the guy goofed and missed out on cutting all the control wires for diverting power that he was not successful in making the substation go up in sparks and flames. Of course you then had some US senators call for more gun control (because in California the gun ban didn't work so we have to ban them again) and to armor up all substations (because utility prices aren't high enough already).
How do you protect solar panels from an attack? Wouldn't an idiot with a rifle be even more successful in attacking solar panels than a coal, nuclear, or natural gas power plant? I mean we can (and do) put a nuclear power plant in a big concrete dome to protect it from attack but we can't do that to solar panels. What of a hail storm? Wouldn't that turn your precious decentralized solar panels into a worthless (and toxic) busted up mess? Without a tie to the grid then how are these people supposed to get power until the solar panels are repaired? I know the answer, on site diesel generators, kind of like how we deal with grid outages now.
I'm sure that there's a lot of things we could do to secure our electrical supply. I'm also sure that solar power isn't one of those things.
Sou could have safed your time with that long post if you had understood my previous post better :)
Considering that most of your posts consist primarily of claims without citations and ad hominem attacks there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. How about next time you post a complete thought, give some means to back up your claims, and not call people idiots?
And no, I don't have the urge to read links that summarize (badly) stuff, I already know.
Apparently you didn't know that CANDU reactors can be fueled with reprocessed fuel, otherwise you would not have embarrassed yourself with the provably false statement you made. It's not like you had to read the whole thing, just reading the title would have taught you something. It's not like I'm claiming to be an expert but at least I'm not so lazy I can't click on a link to Wikipedia and read the title of the article or take a quick look for some keywords.
For a moment there I thought you were going to say after defeating the gods of earth, wind, fire, and water that Chaos himself would have to be defeated. Only then the Four Orbs will shine again, balance restored to the universe, and the time loop closed.
Then again, perhaps I've been playing too many old video games.
Warmongers don't want to give out food and our religious nuts don't care much for education & birth control.
I'll give you the part on the warmongers but the "religious nuts" part is off base.
It seems you know little of history. The entire concept of a university comes from the christian tradition of schools for the clergy, where they'd be taught not just theology but also such things philosophy, history, and the sciences. Much of what we know today comes from research done in schools started by christian churches. What came before Christianity was preserved through time by libraries maintained by these christian organizations. You can say that Jesus is a myth and the Bible a book full of fairy tales but the christian traditions is what created modern society. Those traditions include separation of church and state, religious tolerance, equality under the law, and so much we value in a free society. These things also include some pretty basic stuff like don't lie, steal, cheat, rape, or murder.
There are other religions that don't have rules against lying, cheating, stealing, raping, or murdering. Lumping them in with the Christian "religious nuts" is quite the leap of logic. Sure, Christianity may have some strange rules and customs but for the most part it's about treating others and you'd want to be treated, and take care of those in need.
You may think that Christianity has some strange rules on birth control too but I'm quite certain that keeping your pants on is 100% effective against having children. It's also a plenty more sane and compassionate than what some religious and secular customs have on controlling birth rates.
That evening peak was always there, that's what I said. There may have also been a much higher noon peak compared to what was shown in 2012 since by that time there may have been enough solar to make a dent on the top of that curve. In 2013, in real world numbers, the daily peak is already quite flat. So we've already seen California hit their peak of useful solar power to where it starts to require replacing cheap base load production with expensive peak power production.
Combined cycle natural gas is something like 60% efficient. Natural gas turbines are half to a third as efficient, meaning the same fuel burned gets half (at 30% efficiency) to 1/3rd the energy (at 20%) for the same expense in fuel. Not only does that fuel cost energy it produces green house gasses. Remember the reason we are using solar energy, to get "green" and cheap energy. If using so much solar causes us to burn so much natural gas then we are not improving things.
Nuclear power does not have this problem. You are familiar with molten salt storage for solar thermal, right? We can do the same thing with nuclear power only not use up so much land, burn so much natural gas for preheating, or kill so many birds from baking them in flight. Use a nuclear reactor to heat a molten salt and then use the salt to heat air for a turbine. It's borrowing the turbines from solar thermal and natural gas turbines but the heat comes from the reactor. These turbines can load follow.
We do this molten salt cooled reactor and an air (not steam) turbine then solar power looks to be rather pointless. Nuclear power is then cheap, reliable, safe, can load follow, doesn't kill birds, and takes no more area than a conventional nuclear power plant. It doesn't even need any new technology.
This technology was first developed in the early days of the Cold War when the US Air Force wanted a nuclear powered airplane. A plane that could stay in the air for days or weeks at a time. There was never a nuclear powered airplane but all the pieces where there. Dust that off and instead power an electric turbine and I don't care how cheap solar power gets, nuclear power will almost always be cheaper. Much of the costs will be in the capital expense, once built they will want to use it all the time so they can pay that off. Operational costs are pretty stable too, the people that watch it will be paid regardless of how much energy the produce. The variable cost will be in the uranium and thorium, which in the grand scheme of the other costs will be pennies when compared to the dollars of the other expenses.
It seems to me that when people think of nuclear they think of big old slow dinosaurs of reactors. We don't have to build them like that any more. I've heard many nuclear engineers say that even current nuclear power plants are able to load follow but they are prevented from doing so by the steam turbines. Get rid of the steam turbines and we won't even want solar power any more. The best part about the turbines is it doesn't require fundamental changes to the reactors themselves. This can be added to existing plants. Even though nothing "nuclear" is involved here it has to get approval from the notoriously slow Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Solar needs a base load source to work, like nuclear. Nuclear doesn't need solar. Wind might be cheap enough to keep around but solar is just too expensive and unreliable. Once nuclear gets on its feet then I expect solar to get knocked of theirs.
It took me like two minutes to find a nuclear power plant under construction in the USA.
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2017...
I will concede that they've had some troubles in the past, and are likely to have more in the future, but saying that nuclear power is dead in the USA is provably false.
Obama had a lukewarm at best attitude towards nuclear power. It seems Trump is actually committed to seeing nuclear power succeed. Once one is built there will be a lot of people from that project that would then be experienced builders of a nuclear power plant. So long as we keep them working they can keep their skills fresh, train more people, and costs will go down.
The disaster at Fukushima set the industry back by a decade as political and popular support for nuclear energy evaporated. The economy is growing again and people are looking for ways to get jobs. They want cheap energy. Reliable energy. Domestic energy. They want to... make America great again.
Yep, that could be a problem. Would be nice if someone did a study on that. The fact that such a study has not been done was mentioned.
What we have here is a half of a study. I'm not sure if this is a call to action, as in telling people to stop using plastic or something, or a fundraising effort of the "OMG, pollution!" kind.
I'm reminded of a "study" of some condors that showed elevated lead levels in their blood. This was used as a call to get rid of lead based ammunition in the hunting areas were the condors were known to nest. Someone asked if it was true they they were feeding the birds dead animals from local ranchers to collect their blood samples. They said they were. Then they were asked if they tested the ranch animals for lead. They said they did not. That was not a study, that was an opinion paper. The lead may have been coming from hunters, it may have been naturally occurring, and it may have come from the animals the "scientists" were feeding them. Such haphazard work on their part is why I have to question every "study" I see published.
I see the same thing here. So what if fish eat a bunch of plastic bits floating in the water. While I'm sure a lot of people would agree that plastic bits in the water is not ideal but have they shown any real harm? Also, "plastic" means a lot of things and not all of them react the same in the environment. We've been told for a long time now to take care of how we dispose of our plastics so it's not like people are just dumping the plastic bits into rivers and oceans. Unless we can show harm, and have some understanding of the source of that harm, we don't have anything to act on.
Also, unlike the case of lead or mercury we don't see plastic bits accumulating in animals. Much of the reason these plastic bits remain in the environment is that they do not break down easily. If eaten they tend to just get pooped out.
The article you linked to is meaningless unless nuclear is actually compared to something. It's a bit like someone arguing that we cannot possibly eat steak tonight because of this that and the other thing. Well, that might be true but people have to eat, otherwise people die. After looking at the options it may just turn out that in fact we can eat steak tonight.
Well, let's look at our options:
- Status quo and all the pros and cons that go with it
- Nuclear power
- Starvation
There is no fourth option because using expensive and unreliable energy like wind and solar means reverting to a preindustrial society. You think you can run an aluminum refinery on wind power? A cement kiln on solar power? Sure, we can wait for some new technology to come along but that just means we have to choose from those three options until then. That new technology includes solar and wind that is cheaper than nuclear or coal.
(when was the last time YOU used a paper phone book)
I last used a paper phone book when my internet died and I wanted to find my ISP's phone number and complain.
nobody chucks their wastewater in the street either.
Um... RIGHT! I mean, NOBODY does that any more. Because that would be totally unsanitary and just rude to my... their neighbors. Yep, nobody does that.
Just so we're clear, the yellow pages are NOT more popular than Jesus? Missed it by *that* much.
I believe you are mistaken.
https://www.instituteforenergy...
Nuclear is still cheaper than solar. The cost of solar power increases once it reaches a certain threshold too.
https://www.instituteforenergy...
I'll believe solar is much cheaper than nuclear when it reaches 20% of electricity production like nuclear power has. As the paper I linked above points out, that simply cannot happen. When solar power reaches about 6% of total grid power it starts to get real expensive.
From the fine article:
The next big question that it raises is whether plastic-derived contaminants can be transferred from plastic-eating fish to fish-eating humans.
If eating the plastic doesn't harm the fish, and causes no harm to the people that eat the fish, then why is this in the "health and science" section of the Washington Post? I mean, this is neat and all but is this something someone other than a biologist might find interesting?
I think that perhaps they should have held on to this until they actually figured out if the plastic eating habits actually do harm. But then again, if they saw nothing so far then haven't they already proven that if it is harmful that the harm is pretty minimal?
You obviously didn't even click on the link I gave, it redirects to a Wikipedia page titled "Reprocessed uranium". It's kind of hard to miss, it's in large bold letters at the top of the page. If you read the short, three paragraph, article you will see in the last paragraph a mention of DUPIC. DUPIC is in short chopping up spent LWR fuel into little bits and recladding it in a bundle for CANDU. There is even a link to an article going into detail on how CANDU is capable of burning natural uranium, reprocessed uranium, plutonium, and thorium.
Since you are unlikely to go back to the Wikipedia page I'll post the link here in hopes that maybe you'll read this and learn something.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_...
Then again, I'll just quote a part that I think is most relevant.
CANDU technology offers another unique option for the back end of the LWR fuel cycle, which completely avoids the need for wet reprocessing and fissile-material recovery. The "DUPIC" fuel cycle, or "direct use of spent PWR fuel in CANDU", utilizes the non-separated, non-enhanced waste product of LWRs directly as CANDU fuel (Keil, 1992).
The transfer from LWR to CANDU can be literally "direct", involving only the cutting of spent LWR fuel rods to CANDU length (~50 cm), resealing (or double-sheathing), and reengineering into cylindrical bundles suitable for CANDU geometry.
Alternatively, a dry reprocessing technology has been developed which removes only the volatile fission products from the spent LWR fuel mix (Lee, 1998; Sullivan, 1998). After removal of the cladding, a thermal-mechanical process is used to reduce the spent LWR fuel pellet to a powder, which is then sintered and pressed into CANDU-sized pellets.
The DUPIC process is much simpler than conventional wet-chemistry techniques for reprocessing, and promises to be cheaper. It presents a significant anti-proliferation benefit as well, since radioactive fission products and fissile material are not separated. In addition, since the heat load of spent DUPIC fuel is similar to that of the original spent LWR fuel, disposal requirements do not increase. However, since approximately 50% more energy can be derived from LWR fuel by burning it as DUPIC fuel in a CANDU reactor, the disposal cost is expected to be lower than either spent LWR or CANDU fuel (Baumgartner, 1998).
Between the extremes of conventional reprocessing and the DUPIC fuel cycle, a spectrum of options exists. The CANDU reactorâ(TM)s high neutron economy offers many options for exploiting the CANDU/LWR synergism, allowing customization to meet local requirements and capabilities. Pursuing these various options requires international cooperation, such as the Canada-South Korea partnership that has pioneered the DUPIC process. South Korea has a fleet of both LWR and CANDU reactors, and can thus benefit from the synergism within its existing nuclear infrastructure (Lee, 1998).
That's just one way to reprocess spent fuel. Using CANDU and DUPIC we can "burn the fuel twice" and get much more from the mined and refined uranium we have. Add to this some other simple reprocessing, like chemically separating the plutonium (reactor grade, useless for weapons) and mixing it with thorium to make fuel, and we have all kinds of ways to reprocess fuel instead of dumping it in a hole in the ground. This is effectively unlimited energy, using technology we developed decades ago, so no new technology or materials needed. We can do this now, while we wait for solar and wind power to catch up.
Cite?
http://large.stanford.edu/cour...
Probably not the best source but it's what I could find quickly and does show an image from a government study on the potential impact of too much solar power production on the grid.
Further, it should be pretty easy to mitigate with smart thermostats that take the availability of maximum PV energy to run the AC a little earlier than it would otherwise be needed, cooling the house to a temperature below the selected ideal, in anticipation of the coming greater exterior temperatures and lower insolation. Utilities could provide incentives to do this easily enough.
Right, so a utility is telling people that they can't provide power when they want it so they have to freeze in their own homes at noon and then sweat it out until the air outside cools down enough. I've heard of people "storing cold" in salt water tanks for situations like this but that can't be cheap, or at least it's certainly not free.
Here's a better idea, build some nuclear power plants.