I can agree with you for the most part. There's certain things we cannot change but what we can do is bring the infrastructure and training for getting the energy these people need to lift themselves into a first world economy. What I heard one person call this is "hammer and spanner" technology. If you show someone a common diesel engine then they can take it apart and put it back together with hand tools. People have done so for at least 100 years. Solar power takes technology beyond hand tools, something that if there is no electricity in the first place is hard to get working.
What it seems to me that many people fail to realize is that nuclear power is a "hammer and spanner" technology. It doesn't take 2018 technology to get working, it might not even take 1918 technology. We've been fashioning machines from steel for a long time, and concrete structures for far longer. We can bring these third world nations nuclear power far more easily than solar power.
The third world will find solar power worthless quite quickly because they cannot maintain this technology themselves any time soon. Show them nuclear power, which when boiled down to the basics is not all that different than a steam engine from 150 years ago. Certainly they will need to have some technology on detecting radiation and such that did not exist 150 years ago but for the most part the tools are quite basic, and the maintenance simple enough for a high school educated US Navy enlisted sailor to understand.
The US Navy has been training teenagers to operate a nuclear power plant for decades now. If we want to lift third world nations out of poverty then it will take nuclear power, I'm quite convinced of that. The alternative is letting them drill for oil, dig for coal, and generally go through the motions of how the first world got to where it is now but only delayed by 200 years, 300 years, or perhaps even more. We can let them skip over a few steps, and a century of misery and poverty, but that means bringing 2018 scientific knowledge to a society that may not even be at 1918 technology and infrastructure.
Nope. Synthetic liquid fuel ("synfuel") is typically made from either coal, or oil shale.
I agree, typically this is true. What the US Navy is working on is an atypical variation on this theme. Perhaps "synfuel" is not the best word for it since that carries the connotation of the fuel being derived from coal but then I didn't call this "synfuel", you did.
The reason the US Navy is working on this specific process is that they can get the carbon and hydrogen from seawater. The CO2 is dissolved in the water from being exposed to the atmosphere (as all seawater is exposed to the atmosphere) and the hydrogen (perhaps obviously) is from electrolysis of water. The process never used carbon from anything other than CO2, and the process of extracting the CO2 from the water has been shown to be exceedingly efficient.
You can make hydrogen from electricity, and you can make hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon dioxide (e.g., by Fischer-tropsch reactions), but at the moment that's a pretty inefficient process, and not economically competitive. (That could change, of course, with better tech).
That's my point, this did change with better tech. This technology has been demonstrated by the US Navy as what appears to be a continuous process at their facilities in Florida and DC. This isn't a chemistry lab experiment to prove the process, it's a machine shown to work out on a dock at a US Navy seaside facility. It draws water from the sea and electricity from the shore, from that it creates a fuel that approximates jet fuel to Navy specification. They need only to refine the process and scale it up. One refinement of the process is to use heat from a nuclear reactor to make the chemistry more efficient. The goal is to put machines like they developed on a nuclear powered ship such as an aircraft carrier. If it works on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier then it can work with a nuclear power plant on land.
The US Navy has been talking about this for years trying to find funding, public or private, to scale this up since if they can bring the price down even slightly then it can replace fuels the Navy buys off the market. The difference is that the fuel is not subject to the whims of trade wars, embargoes, or other political pressures. Another very vital difference is that the fuel would be produced on the ship and not need to be brought to the fleet on a tanker, improving Navy readiness considerably.
In the end all it seems to take is another oil price spike to drive this to commercial applications. What the Navy seems concerned about is seeing this come to market in some form before that so they aren't caught with a fleet of ships stuck in port in a national emergency because the ships and aircraft are out of fuel.
20.0% of electricity generated comes from Nuclear power. (0% of transportation comes from Nuclear, 0% of heating comes from Nuclear.)
Then electric cars are a myth? As are heat pumps?
Realistically, 1/3rd of energy comes from solar today, but it could easily be 100% if we can store the energy.
First, next to nothing of the energy we use today comes from solar. Second, that a big "if". Sure, "IF" we can store the energy a lot of things could happen, such as using that storage to load follow so we can use thermal power (like nuclear, coal, and natural gas) more effectively. Thermal (or steam) power plants are very efficient, cheap to run, but don't load follow very well. If we can get cheap and plentiful energy storage then we would never bother with expensive and unreliable power from wind and solar.
Nobody is going back to nuclear. It costs too much to store the waste. They're just improving the storage options.
Stated in a reply to a thread discussing Japan restarting their nuclear power plants. Were you dropped on your head as a child?
# 10: Nuclear energy can't reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Truth: Nuclear-generated electricity powers electric trains and subway cars as well as autos today. It has also been used in propelling ships for more than 50 years. That use can be increased since it has been restricted by unofficial policy to military vessels and ice breakers. In the near-term, nuclear power can provide electricity for expanded mass-transit and plug-in hybrid cars. Small modular reactors can provide power to islands like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Nantucket and Guam that currently run their electrical grids on imported oil. In the longer-term, nuclear power can directly reduce our dependence on foreign oil by producing hydrogen for use in fuel cells and synthetic liquid fuels.
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process. This is a technology that works right now. That's unlike algae based fuel which is still mostly theoretical.
If Japan had enough wind and solar power to avoid the politically problematic decision of restarting their nuclear power plants then they'd have built solar panels instead. If Japan was willing to revert to a pre-industrial economy then they'd have not bothered to restart mothballed coal plants when they ordered all the nuclear power plants shut down.
Basically what I'm saying that eventually just putting solar panels everywhere, plus storage for the night will do the trick. If you end up exceeding the daylight requirements by 50%, who cares if it's still cheaper and easier than nuclear?
I suspect that if this was even close to true that Japan would not be restarting any nuclear power plants. Japan doesn't like anything nuclear, being the only target of a nuclear weapon might have something to do with that. Japan is also not short on smart people with lots of technology, they make solar cells in Japan you know.
But then you did say "eventually". From now until that day comes Japan will have to do something. That something is restarting many old reactors and building come new ones.
Nuclear power will be with us for a very long time in some form. I say this because of the 200 or so nuclear reactors in operation by the USA roughly half of them are operated by the US Navy.
It turns out that you can in fact put a nuclear power reactor just about anywhere you like, such as on about 70% of the world's surface. They do take years of planning and construction but so do a lot of things. I recall hearing that Boeing plans out their aircraft lines out to 30 years in the future. They hit the "Y2K bug" in 1970.
There is no modern navy in the world that will power their ships with wind and solar power. There's always stories that pop up every few months or so of some company or another that plans to have some cargo ships with sails on them. Greenpeace like to talk big about their boat, Rainbow Warrior, calling it a "sailing yacht". This boat does in fact have sails, and with them it can sail about 5 knots in a good wind. What they don't like to talk about is the 1800 HP diesel engine it has. For someone that likes to go about harassing oil rigs at sea they seem rather hypocritical for using so much of the products from those oil rigs to get there.
So, how are we to expect to get people and products over the sea unless it's by nuclear power or petroleum?
People like to point out how experiments with commercial shipping by nuclear power failed in the past. Well, that happens when oil prices takes a dive. Having organizations like Greenpeace harassing the crews and owners of these boats didn't help either. That's going to have to change if we find it politically or economically problematic for shipping to use oil.
Oh, let's not forget air travel. Even if someone developed some leap in electric aircraft technology tomorrow there's going to be 30 years before Boeing uses that technology in their airplanes.
You might think our electricity will come from wind, sun, and batteries but that's something like 1/3rd of the energy we use. About 1/3rd is transportation and the remaining 1/3rd is things like industry and heating. That's not going to be from wind and sun. That's going to be nuclear, coal, or natural gas. And, again, that will be true for at least 30 years if not hundreds of years.
It seems like if the "fleet" was shutdown and all the generation was lost for 3+ years, why did they need to start turning them on now?
Because importing all that coal to make up for the lost nuclear electrical generation capacity was costing a lot of money, producing a lot of pollution, and alternatives are far more expensive.
I remember something of a joke I was once told... Do you know what a physician calls "alternative medicine" that works? Medicine.
That's what I think of when people tell me we need more "alternative energy". If "alternative energy" worked then we'd just call it "energy".
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
So some of the most valuable real estate on the planet should be flooded as gravity storage for water? That's an astonishingly unproductive idea.
So is feeding seaweed to cattle.
California is driving these ideas with laws that they believe will save the planet from global warming while they ignore far more productive means to reduce the production of global warming gasses. If they were taking this problem seriously then they'd find some smart people that know how this all works and take their advice. One that comes to mind is Dr. Patrick Moore. Dr. Moore's website: http://ecosense.me/ Here's an opinion article he wrote years ago about this: http://ecosense.me/2017/01/18/...
In the 1970s and 1980s the USA was putting nuclear power plants on line at a rate of one gigawatt of new capacity per month. This is not new technology but it is exceedingly safe, so low carbon that it produces less CO2 per kWh than "zero carbon" wind and solar, will run 24/7 for months at a time (which wind and solar could never do), and do so as cheap or cheaper than solar ever could. Maybe wind power can be cheaper but that still leaves the problems of being intermittent (which adds costs in other ways), and higher CO2. If we could build 12 nuclear power plants per year 40 years ago then I'm guessing we could build 24 per year today. And we'll have to build them that fast soon just to keep up with demand.
I hear this all the time, "but solar power is getting cheaper every day!" Well, you think it's impossible for nuclear power to get cheaper? How did solar get so cheap in the first place? My guess is it got cheap with competition, experience, economies of scale, and just generally being sold on the open market for utilities to buy. Nuclear power will get cheaper as we build them. That's because we'd gain experience, economies of scale, competition, and so on. Any complaints on nuclear power being expensive is the result of not building them for the last 40 years.
This explains why the wind and solar power advocates fear nuclear power so much. It's not because of radioactive waste or what not. They fear nuclear power because they know if anyone starts building nuclear power again then their market advantage disappears. Wind and solar cannot compete against nuclear power on price or CO2 reductions.
Oh, getting back to the hydro storage angle, storage technology cannot save wind and solar. Battery storage is not cheap. Pumped hydro storage is cheap but we'd need a lot of it to make wind and solar viable. Unless you want to see a lot of valuable land flooded then we will not have enough storage. Even if we did have storage that's cheap and plentiful then this helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Nuclear reactors like to run real steady, changing output on a nuclear reactor stresses the materials and so they don't like to change output if they don't have to. Put a big battery bank outside a nuclear power plant and the batteries load follow instead of the reactor. If someone builds a battery for wind and solar power then expect that to be used by the utility for managing their coal, nuclear, and natural gas power as well.
California is just full of astonishingly unproductive ideas. They will have to learn to embrace nuclear power or face blackouts.
You appear to be motivated to overlook some simple answers.
I did not overlook the simple answers. I've been studying the energy problem for a long time, soaking in all kinds of differing opinions for years. Solar power is simply insufficient to run a first world nation. There's nothing wrong with putting up some solar panels, and there are plenty in Israel. What they will still need is natural gas and nuclear power.
I've seen the math and there is no way to maintain a modern economy without nuclear power. Do the math yourself. Here's a website made by people that did the math and explained why nuclear power must be part of the energy policy of any nation that wants to have a modern economy: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
There are no simple answers. What I've found is that there is no solution to our future energy needs that does not include nuclear power. Distributed generation might sound nice but it destroys any economy of scale. The world will need big efficient power plants or the lights go out, this includes Israel.
Usually, turning a phone off is easy enough. It might need a password to do so - in which case you force it off by removing the battery. Oops - can't do that with some of the newer phones.
A non-removable battery is a feature, not a bug. If you want a phone that can be wiped remotely to secure your data from being taken without your permission then you want the phone to stay powered so it can receive the wipe command. Alternately the storage could be volatile and removing the battery would wipe as well.
I'm not terribly concerned if the police are inconvenienced in scraping data off our pocket computers. My electronic devices are for my convenience, not the government's.
Which is exactly why NPP's have high capital costs, the huge amount of concrete for thermal containment. Now you propose more so basically you're proposing a NPP that will never be built.
In Israel they have limited choices for energy. The nation is effectively an island because they are not on good terms with their neighbors. Building a "super-grid" like has been proposed in North America and the EU is not politically practical, making the inherently distributed solar and wind power not all that viable. Building windmills and solar panels inside their borders, when they are under near constant bombardment from their neighbors, means they'd have to keep repairing those solar collectors and windmills. I'm not saying they can't have any solar and wind power, only that they know building it within rocket range of its neighbors would be a bad idea for reliable power. Israel doesn't have a lot of oil and coal but they did find a lot of natural gas, as stated in the fine article. Much of the oil and coal they burn is imported.
If Israel wants energy independence then they need to produce what they can inside their own borders. Given their options that means lots of natural gas, lots of nuclear power, and a small bit of oil, wind, and solar.
I agree that building a hardened nuclear power plant would be expensive. I don't see a whole lot of other options. If Israel can't have nuclear power then they run the risk of running out of energy real quick. They've been living off of the good relations from the USA, UK, and other allies, for their energy. They must know that this cannot last forever, and their natural gas supplies cannot last forever either. Many of the nations in the Middle East have been stating an intention to build nuclear power, including Iran. This will mean they will want it too.
Any power plant is a prime target in Israel. A nuclear power plant would be no different. I'm guessing that they protect them very well inside bunkers. If they can afford a hardened natural gas power plant then they can afford nuclear power.
Let me know when they figure out how to do that with these new battery chemistries.
The old lead-acid batteries are recycled all the time unlike those used in electric vehicles and laptops. They can be recycled into new raw materials but not always to the purity needed for new batteries. More likely the batteries are recycled into steel alloys than anything. Photovoltaic cells are the same way, they can't be recycled into new solar panels but they might be good for use as metallurgical grade silicon.
As usual, the poor get poorer so the rich (GM/Tesla/Whoever's making EVs in Israel) can get richer.
The poor get poorer because of bad choices. The rich get richer because of good choices. There's good data on this.
One such example are that the people that buy a lot of expensive shoes are not the wealthy, it's the people that want to look wealthy. The people that save up for a pair of practical shoes tend to be able to figure out how to save in other ways. The people that buy expensive consumable items, like shoes generally are, will have a harder time getting rich.
I've heard the phrase that the poor are poor because they chose poverty. That might be simplifying it a bit too much. I'm thinking that it's more like the poor are poor because they made poor choices. In a free nation there is often very little keeping someone from attaining wealth. There's simply things that people don't choose that can bring a person to poverty but this is not the rule, only the exception.
Burning ethanol in a car engine is alcohol abuse. Ethanol is for drinking, not driving. I cry a little inside when I can't find fuel at a filling station without ethanol blended in. You can abuse alcohol if you must, just don't force me to participate.
Ev cars are full everytime you get in them in the morning.
Theres no getting in the car with the fuel light on. For most people and most usage cases a daily range of 450km is more than enough. It doesnt really matter if it takes 6 hrs to charge if youre asleep.
The same thing applies for natural gas cars. A natural gas car can fill up at home with the low pressure lines common in many houses by using a pump. They take a while to fill up this way but it doesn't matter if you are asleep.
The only time charge time matters is when you exceed 450km in a day.
With a high pressure NG fill supply at a filling station the fill up times can be kept to a few minutes. I know there's claims of getting 80% charge in 20 minutes but a natural gas car can get 100% fill in 5 minutes, and not have the problem of wear on a battery for a quick charge.
If you are in a nation where a large percentage of your electric supply comes from natural gas, such as Isreal, USA, UK, Japan, and I'm sure many more, then electric cars don't seem like a great idea. In fact they seem like a bit of a waste. Electric vehicles might offer more choices on where this electricity may come from, presumably something even cleaner than natural gas. In a tiny nation like Israel where the neighbors aren't all that friendly the ability to use solar and wind is not that great. Rockets and mortars on fragile solar collectors and windmills could lead them to energy problems, and importing this kind of energy is just handing them a rope to make a noose. A nuclear power plant on the other hand can be put inside a sturdy bunker. Use a fuel synthesis process like the US Navy has been working on and they can make natural gas for their cars even if the bombings take out power lines.
I'm thinking electric cars, and I mean pure electrics rather than hybrids of some sort, will be a fad and go out of style at some point. Or if they do hang on then they will be considered a lesser option for those not able to afford something better. Kind of like how aluminum was once considered more valuable than gold but is now cheap once the technology advanced on aluminum refining. If batteries get as cheap as people claim they will then I'm guessing the hierarchy will flip, electric cars won't be for the "one percent" but instead for the commoners.
Natural gas looks to me like a great fuel for cars. I wish Israel success in making this switch.
So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Yes and no. I recall reading somewhere that the ovens are allowed to leak up to one watt of power. Compare that to the power of WiFi or Bluetooth at milliwatts and that's a lot of noise for the signal to go through. If you have a 1200 watt microwave oven and 1 watt leaks out then that's doing pretty good to keep most of that energy in, so "poorly shielded" may not apply on that grounds. Having the oven overwhelm your Bluetooth though may make this seem quite a bit of a leak.
I'm pretty sure that such remote wipe capability is possible over WiFi. If someone subscribes to some of the more popular WiFi services this gives a very high probability that the phone can still be wiped, and higher yet if someone has subscribed to more than one.
Take myself as an example. As a university student I was on the eduroam network, which is international and often available beyond what people might recognize as a university campus since old universities tend to blend into the city they are in over time. As someone that got my phone from AT&T I was automatically subscribed to the AT&T WiFi network, which seems quite popular in many shopping centers and stores.
I'm pretty sure that removing the SIM card is insufficient for preventing a remote wipe. I'm also pretty sure that powering off the phone is verboten as that could destroy evidence. Removing the SIM card while the phone has power could destroy something as well, data and/or hardware, so that's probably something the police should not do to preserve evidence.
More people are becoming aware that their phones can tattle on them. I can imagine other measures becoming popular to keep the police out of our phones and lives.
This violates Federal Law, in particular the Magnussen-Moss Act (15 USC 2302(c)) requirement that says warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty.
If that is true then Apple needs to be taken to court and I want to hear them make their case.
I don't know if Apple would win but I can imagine how the case would go. The issue would come down to keeping user data secure, much like we've seen in cases where the government has asked Apple to break their own encryption for the purposes of gaining data for a criminal investigation. They would likely argue that a third party repair is possible but it would not allow for the recovery of any data. If you want a repair and retain your data on the device after the repair then the repairs must be performed with authorized parts. Failure to maintain this control means the security of any Apple device could be bypassed by anyone with the right tools and third party parts.
Take your pick. Do you want to be able to upgrade the SSD in the future on your Apple computer, or do you want that SSD secured from someone reading it without your permission? If you can find a way to eat your cake and have it too then I'd like to hear it.
That's what happens when you live on a Caribbean island with less than 200,000 people, I can imagine a lot of services are not available there. I grew up on a farm in the American Midwest, and there were no authorized repair centers for anything nearby. If you had something critical to work then you automatically bought two of them. We bought a lot of stuff over the phone and had it shipped to us. If it didn't work for us, it needed repair, or whatever, then we had to do without until we could ship it back and have it set right. It sucked but that's what happens when you grow up so far from a population center.
Your hardware is your choice. You can choose not to buy from vendors that don't allow user repairs. Given that a modern computer is a rather complex device, especially something so small as a laptop, cell phone, or even many desktop systems like the Mac Mini, I'm not sure what you can expect to repair yourself without special tools and training.
A secure device is inherently not user repairable. Let's make a bad car analogy. A secure car has locks that need the proper key to open and start it. If the car is designed to be easily repaired then a thief can simply swap out the locks and take the car. A really secure car would be such that even the dealers or makers of the car can't open or start it, because that means there's a master key somewhere that a thief could exploit. Losing the key, sufficient damage to the car, or some other unfortunate event, would mean a total loss on the car rather than merely a (potentially quite expensive) repair. That's what happens when something is made to be secure.
With all the stuff happening lately on people having their data stolen I'm finding it rather appealing that a computer manufacturer is taking this seriously. As with many things there is a compromise, with greater security comes lowered ability for repairs.
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I can agree with you for the most part. There's certain things we cannot change but what we can do is bring the infrastructure and training for getting the energy these people need to lift themselves into a first world economy. What I heard one person call this is "hammer and spanner" technology. If you show someone a common diesel engine then they can take it apart and put it back together with hand tools. People have done so for at least 100 years. Solar power takes technology beyond hand tools, something that if there is no electricity in the first place is hard to get working.
What it seems to me that many people fail to realize is that nuclear power is a "hammer and spanner" technology. It doesn't take 2018 technology to get working, it might not even take 1918 technology. We've been fashioning machines from steel for a long time, and concrete structures for far longer. We can bring these third world nations nuclear power far more easily than solar power.
The third world will find solar power worthless quite quickly because they cannot maintain this technology themselves any time soon. Show them nuclear power, which when boiled down to the basics is not all that different than a steam engine from 150 years ago. Certainly they will need to have some technology on detecting radiation and such that did not exist 150 years ago but for the most part the tools are quite basic, and the maintenance simple enough for a high school educated US Navy enlisted sailor to understand.
The US Navy has been training teenagers to operate a nuclear power plant for decades now. If we want to lift third world nations out of poverty then it will take nuclear power, I'm quite convinced of that. The alternative is letting them drill for oil, dig for coal, and generally go through the motions of how the first world got to where it is now but only delayed by 200 years, 300 years, or perhaps even more. We can let them skip over a few steps, and a century of misery and poverty, but that means bringing 2018 scientific knowledge to a society that may not even be at 1918 technology and infrastructure.
Nope. Synthetic liquid fuel ("synfuel") is typically made from either coal, or oil shale.
I agree, typically this is true. What the US Navy is working on is an atypical variation on this theme. Perhaps "synfuel" is not the best word for it since that carries the connotation of the fuel being derived from coal but then I didn't call this "synfuel", you did.
The reason the US Navy is working on this specific process is that they can get the carbon and hydrogen from seawater. The CO2 is dissolved in the water from being exposed to the atmosphere (as all seawater is exposed to the atmosphere) and the hydrogen (perhaps obviously) is from electrolysis of water. The process never used carbon from anything other than CO2, and the process of extracting the CO2 from the water has been shown to be exceedingly efficient.
You can make hydrogen from electricity, and you can make hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon dioxide (e.g., by Fischer-tropsch reactions), but at the moment that's a pretty inefficient process, and not economically competitive. (That could change, of course, with better tech).
That's my point, this did change with better tech. This technology has been demonstrated by the US Navy as what appears to be a continuous process at their facilities in Florida and DC. This isn't a chemistry lab experiment to prove the process, it's a machine shown to work out on a dock at a US Navy seaside facility. It draws water from the sea and electricity from the shore, from that it creates a fuel that approximates jet fuel to Navy specification. They need only to refine the process and scale it up. One refinement of the process is to use heat from a nuclear reactor to make the chemistry more efficient. The goal is to put machines like they developed on a nuclear powered ship such as an aircraft carrier. If it works on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier then it can work with a nuclear power plant on land.
The US Navy has been talking about this for years trying to find funding, public or private, to scale this up since if they can bring the price down even slightly then it can replace fuels the Navy buys off the market. The difference is that the fuel is not subject to the whims of trade wars, embargoes, or other political pressures. Another very vital difference is that the fuel would be produced on the ship and not need to be brought to the fleet on a tanker, improving Navy readiness considerably.
In the end all it seems to take is another oil price spike to drive this to commercial applications. What the Navy seems concerned about is seeing this come to market in some form before that so they aren't caught with a fleet of ships stuck in port in a national emergency because the ships and aircraft are out of fuel.
20.0% of electricity generated comes from Nuclear power.
(0% of transportation comes from Nuclear, 0% of heating comes from Nuclear.)
Then electric cars are a myth? As are heat pumps?
Realistically, 1/3rd of energy comes from solar today, but it could easily be 100% if we can store the energy.
First, next to nothing of the energy we use today comes from solar. Second, that a big "if". Sure, "IF" we can store the energy a lot of things could happen, such as using that storage to load follow so we can use thermal power (like nuclear, coal, and natural gas) more effectively. Thermal (or steam) power plants are very efficient, cheap to run, but don't load follow very well. If we can get cheap and plentiful energy storage then we would never bother with expensive and unreliable power from wind and solar.
Nobody is going back to nuclear. It costs too much to store the waste. They're just improving the storage options.
Stated in a reply to a thread discussing Japan restarting their nuclear power plants. Were you dropped on your head as a child?
# 10: Nuclear energy can't reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Truth: Nuclear-generated electricity powers electric trains and subway cars as well as autos today. It has also been used in propelling ships for more than 50 years. That use can be increased since it has been restricted by unofficial policy to military vessels and ice breakers. In the near-term, nuclear power can provide electricity for expanded mass-transit and plug-in hybrid cars. Small modular reactors can provide power to islands like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Nantucket and Guam that currently run their electrical grids on imported oil. In the longer-term, nuclear power can directly reduce our dependence on foreign oil by producing hydrogen for use in fuel cells and synthetic liquid fuels.
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process. This is a technology that works right now. That's unlike algae based fuel which is still mostly theoretical.
Here's your citation: https://oilvoice.com/Opinion/2...
If Japan had enough wind and solar power to avoid the politically problematic decision of restarting their nuclear power plants then they'd have built solar panels instead. If Japan was willing to revert to a pre-industrial economy then they'd have not bothered to restart mothballed coal plants when they ordered all the nuclear power plants shut down.
> just putting a bunch of solar panels/mirrors/wind turbines pretty much anywhere
technically speaking, also these sources are of nuclear origin, since they come from our Sun...
Technically speaking, anyone that points this out is a pedantic asshole that deserves being punched in the face.
Basically what I'm saying that eventually just putting solar panels everywhere, plus storage for the night will do the trick. If you end up exceeding the daylight requirements by 50%, who cares if it's still cheaper and easier than nuclear?
I suspect that if this was even close to true that Japan would not be restarting any nuclear power plants. Japan doesn't like anything nuclear, being the only target of a nuclear weapon might have something to do with that. Japan is also not short on smart people with lots of technology, they make solar cells in Japan you know.
But then you did say "eventually". From now until that day comes Japan will have to do something. That something is restarting many old reactors and building come new ones.
Nuclear power will be with us for a very long time in some form. I say this because of the 200 or so nuclear reactors in operation by the USA roughly half of them are operated by the US Navy.
It turns out that you can in fact put a nuclear power reactor just about anywhere you like, such as on about 70% of the world's surface. They do take years of planning and construction but so do a lot of things. I recall hearing that Boeing plans out their aircraft lines out to 30 years in the future. They hit the "Y2K bug" in 1970.
There is no modern navy in the world that will power their ships with wind and solar power. There's always stories that pop up every few months or so of some company or another that plans to have some cargo ships with sails on them. Greenpeace like to talk big about their boat, Rainbow Warrior, calling it a "sailing yacht". This boat does in fact have sails, and with them it can sail about 5 knots in a good wind. What they don't like to talk about is the 1800 HP diesel engine it has. For someone that likes to go about harassing oil rigs at sea they seem rather hypocritical for using so much of the products from those oil rigs to get there.
So, how are we to expect to get people and products over the sea unless it's by nuclear power or petroleum?
People like to point out how experiments with commercial shipping by nuclear power failed in the past. Well, that happens when oil prices takes a dive. Having organizations like Greenpeace harassing the crews and owners of these boats didn't help either. That's going to have to change if we find it politically or economically problematic for shipping to use oil.
Oh, let's not forget air travel. Even if someone developed some leap in electric aircraft technology tomorrow there's going to be 30 years before Boeing uses that technology in their airplanes.
You might think our electricity will come from wind, sun, and batteries but that's something like 1/3rd of the energy we use. About 1/3rd is transportation and the remaining 1/3rd is things like industry and heating. That's not going to be from wind and sun. That's going to be nuclear, coal, or natural gas. And, again, that will be true for at least 30 years if not hundreds of years.
What is the other 80% of electrical generation?
Mostly coal.
It seems like if the "fleet" was shutdown and all the generation was lost for 3+ years, why did they need to start turning them on now?
Because importing all that coal to make up for the lost nuclear electrical generation capacity was costing a lot of money, producing a lot of pollution, and alternatives are far more expensive.
I remember something of a joke I was once told... Do you know what a physician calls "alternative medicine" that works? Medicine.
That's what I think of when people tell me we need more "alternative energy". If "alternative energy" worked then we'd just call it "energy".
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
So they can get their own seaweed.
Then we will call this place where the cows swim out to eat seaweed Cowtown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So some of the most valuable real estate on the planet should be flooded as gravity storage for water? That's an astonishingly unproductive idea.
So is feeding seaweed to cattle.
California is driving these ideas with laws that they believe will save the planet from global warming while they ignore far more productive means to reduce the production of global warming gasses. If they were taking this problem seriously then they'd find some smart people that know how this all works and take their advice. One that comes to mind is Dr. Patrick Moore. Dr. Moore's website: http://ecosense.me/ Here's an opinion article he wrote years ago about this: http://ecosense.me/2017/01/18/...
In the 1970s and 1980s the USA was putting nuclear power plants on line at a rate of one gigawatt of new capacity per month. This is not new technology but it is exceedingly safe, so low carbon that it produces less CO2 per kWh than "zero carbon" wind and solar, will run 24/7 for months at a time (which wind and solar could never do), and do so as cheap or cheaper than solar ever could. Maybe wind power can be cheaper but that still leaves the problems of being intermittent (which adds costs in other ways), and higher CO2. If we could build 12 nuclear power plants per year 40 years ago then I'm guessing we could build 24 per year today. And we'll have to build them that fast soon just to keep up with demand.
I hear this all the time, "but solar power is getting cheaper every day!" Well, you think it's impossible for nuclear power to get cheaper? How did solar get so cheap in the first place? My guess is it got cheap with competition, experience, economies of scale, and just generally being sold on the open market for utilities to buy. Nuclear power will get cheaper as we build them. That's because we'd gain experience, economies of scale, competition, and so on. Any complaints on nuclear power being expensive is the result of not building them for the last 40 years.
This explains why the wind and solar power advocates fear nuclear power so much. It's not because of radioactive waste or what not. They fear nuclear power because they know if anyone starts building nuclear power again then their market advantage disappears. Wind and solar cannot compete against nuclear power on price or CO2 reductions.
Oh, getting back to the hydro storage angle, storage technology cannot save wind and solar. Battery storage is not cheap. Pumped hydro storage is cheap but we'd need a lot of it to make wind and solar viable. Unless you want to see a lot of valuable land flooded then we will not have enough storage. Even if we did have storage that's cheap and plentiful then this helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Nuclear reactors like to run real steady, changing output on a nuclear reactor stresses the materials and so they don't like to change output if they don't have to. Put a big battery bank outside a nuclear power plant and the batteries load follow instead of the reactor. If someone builds a battery for wind and solar power then expect that to be used by the utility for managing their coal, nuclear, and natural gas power as well.
California is just full of astonishingly unproductive ideas. They will have to learn to embrace nuclear power or face blackouts.
You appear to be motivated to overlook some simple answers.
I did not overlook the simple answers. I've been studying the energy problem for a long time, soaking in all kinds of differing opinions for years. Solar power is simply insufficient to run a first world nation. There's nothing wrong with putting up some solar panels, and there are plenty in Israel. What they will still need is natural gas and nuclear power.
I've seen the math and there is no way to maintain a modern economy without nuclear power. Do the math yourself. Here's a website made by people that did the math and explained why nuclear power must be part of the energy policy of any nation that wants to have a modern economy: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
There are no simple answers. What I've found is that there is no solution to our future energy needs that does not include nuclear power. Distributed generation might sound nice but it destroys any economy of scale. The world will need big efficient power plants or the lights go out, this includes Israel.
2018-09-??
3) Profit.
Usually, turning a phone off is easy enough. It might need a password to do so - in which case you force it off by removing the battery. Oops - can't do that with some of the newer phones.
A non-removable battery is a feature, not a bug. If you want a phone that can be wiped remotely to secure your data from being taken without your permission then you want the phone to stay powered so it can receive the wipe command. Alternately the storage could be volatile and removing the battery would wipe as well.
I'm not terribly concerned if the police are inconvenienced in scraping data off our pocket computers. My electronic devices are for my convenience, not the government's.
Which is exactly why NPP's have high capital costs, the huge amount of concrete for thermal containment. Now you propose more so basically you're proposing a NPP that will never be built.
In Israel they have limited choices for energy. The nation is effectively an island because they are not on good terms with their neighbors. Building a "super-grid" like has been proposed in North America and the EU is not politically practical, making the inherently distributed solar and wind power not all that viable. Building windmills and solar panels inside their borders, when they are under near constant bombardment from their neighbors, means they'd have to keep repairing those solar collectors and windmills. I'm not saying they can't have any solar and wind power, only that they know building it within rocket range of its neighbors would be a bad idea for reliable power. Israel doesn't have a lot of oil and coal but they did find a lot of natural gas, as stated in the fine article. Much of the oil and coal they burn is imported.
If Israel wants energy independence then they need to produce what they can inside their own borders. Given their options that means lots of natural gas, lots of nuclear power, and a small bit of oil, wind, and solar.
I agree that building a hardened nuclear power plant would be expensive. I don't see a whole lot of other options. If Israel can't have nuclear power then they run the risk of running out of energy real quick. They've been living off of the good relations from the USA, UK, and other allies, for their energy. They must know that this cannot last forever, and their natural gas supplies cannot last forever either. Many of the nations in the Middle East have been stating an intention to build nuclear power, including Iran. This will mean they will want it too.
Any power plant is a prime target in Israel. A nuclear power plant would be no different. I'm guessing that they protect them very well inside bunkers. If they can afford a hardened natural gas power plant then they can afford nuclear power.
You lost your audience somewhere between "such as" and UK or Japan ...
So sad that the loss of my audience didn't include you.
Refueling a Truck takes +30minutes, refueling a bus about 20 minutes.
That would be relevant if I stated that natural gas was a great fuel for buses and trucks.
Let me know when they figure out how to do that with these new battery chemistries.
The old lead-acid batteries are recycled all the time unlike those used in electric vehicles and laptops. They can be recycled into new raw materials but not always to the purity needed for new batteries. More likely the batteries are recycled into steel alloys than anything. Photovoltaic cells are the same way, they can't be recycled into new solar panels but they might be good for use as metallurgical grade silicon.
As usual, the poor get poorer so the rich (GM/Tesla/Whoever's making EVs in Israel) can get richer.
The poor get poorer because of bad choices. The rich get richer because of good choices. There's good data on this.
One such example are that the people that buy a lot of expensive shoes are not the wealthy, it's the people that want to look wealthy. The people that save up for a pair of practical shoes tend to be able to figure out how to save in other ways. The people that buy expensive consumable items, like shoes generally are, will have a harder time getting rich.
I've heard the phrase that the poor are poor because they chose poverty. That might be simplifying it a bit too much. I'm thinking that it's more like the poor are poor because they made poor choices. In a free nation there is often very little keeping someone from attaining wealth. There's simply things that people don't choose that can bring a person to poverty but this is not the rule, only the exception.
Burning ethanol in a car engine is alcohol abuse. Ethanol is for drinking, not driving. I cry a little inside when I can't find fuel at a filling station without ethanol blended in. You can abuse alcohol if you must, just don't force me to participate.
Ev cars are full everytime you get in them in the morning.
Theres no getting in the car with the fuel light on. For most people and most usage cases a daily range of 450km is more than enough. It doesnt really matter if it takes 6 hrs to charge if youre asleep.
The same thing applies for natural gas cars. A natural gas car can fill up at home with the low pressure lines common in many houses by using a pump. They take a while to fill up this way but it doesn't matter if you are asleep.
The only time charge time matters is when you exceed 450km in a day.
With a high pressure NG fill supply at a filling station the fill up times can be kept to a few minutes. I know there's claims of getting 80% charge in 20 minutes but a natural gas car can get 100% fill in 5 minutes, and not have the problem of wear on a battery for a quick charge.
If you are in a nation where a large percentage of your electric supply comes from natural gas, such as Isreal, USA, UK, Japan, and I'm sure many more, then electric cars don't seem like a great idea. In fact they seem like a bit of a waste. Electric vehicles might offer more choices on where this electricity may come from, presumably something even cleaner than natural gas. In a tiny nation like Israel where the neighbors aren't all that friendly the ability to use solar and wind is not that great. Rockets and mortars on fragile solar collectors and windmills could lead them to energy problems, and importing this kind of energy is just handing them a rope to make a noose. A nuclear power plant on the other hand can be put inside a sturdy bunker. Use a fuel synthesis process like the US Navy has been working on and they can make natural gas for their cars even if the bombings take out power lines.
I'm thinking electric cars, and I mean pure electrics rather than hybrids of some sort, will be a fad and go out of style at some point. Or if they do hang on then they will be considered a lesser option for those not able to afford something better. Kind of like how aluminum was once considered more valuable than gold but is now cheap once the technology advanced on aluminum refining. If batteries get as cheap as people claim they will then I'm guessing the hierarchy will flip, electric cars won't be for the "one percent" but instead for the commoners.
Natural gas looks to me like a great fuel for cars. I wish Israel success in making this switch.
So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Yes and no. I recall reading somewhere that the ovens are allowed to leak up to one watt of power. Compare that to the power of WiFi or Bluetooth at milliwatts and that's a lot of noise for the signal to go through. If you have a 1200 watt microwave oven and 1 watt leaks out then that's doing pretty good to keep most of that energy in, so "poorly shielded" may not apply on that grounds. Having the oven overwhelm your Bluetooth though may make this seem quite a bit of a leak.
I'm pretty sure that such remote wipe capability is possible over WiFi. If someone subscribes to some of the more popular WiFi services this gives a very high probability that the phone can still be wiped, and higher yet if someone has subscribed to more than one.
Take myself as an example. As a university student I was on the eduroam network, which is international and often available beyond what people might recognize as a university campus since old universities tend to blend into the city they are in over time. As someone that got my phone from AT&T I was automatically subscribed to the AT&T WiFi network, which seems quite popular in many shopping centers and stores.
I'm pretty sure that removing the SIM card is insufficient for preventing a remote wipe. I'm also pretty sure that powering off the phone is verboten as that could destroy evidence. Removing the SIM card while the phone has power could destroy something as well, data and/or hardware, so that's probably something the police should not do to preserve evidence.
More people are becoming aware that their phones can tattle on them. I can imagine other measures becoming popular to keep the police out of our phones and lives.
This violates Federal Law, in particular the Magnussen-Moss Act (15 USC 2302(c)) requirement that says warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty.
If that is true then Apple needs to be taken to court and I want to hear them make their case.
I don't know if Apple would win but I can imagine how the case would go. The issue would come down to keeping user data secure, much like we've seen in cases where the government has asked Apple to break their own encryption for the purposes of gaining data for a criminal investigation. They would likely argue that a third party repair is possible but it would not allow for the recovery of any data. If you want a repair and retain your data on the device after the repair then the repairs must be performed with authorized parts. Failure to maintain this control means the security of any Apple device could be bypassed by anyone with the right tools and third party parts.
Take your pick. Do you want to be able to upgrade the SSD in the future on your Apple computer, or do you want that SSD secured from someone reading it without your permission? If you can find a way to eat your cake and have it too then I'd like to hear it.
That's what happens when you live on a Caribbean island with less than 200,000 people, I can imagine a lot of services are not available there. I grew up on a farm in the American Midwest, and there were no authorized repair centers for anything nearby. If you had something critical to work then you automatically bought two of them. We bought a lot of stuff over the phone and had it shipped to us. If it didn't work for us, it needed repair, or whatever, then we had to do without until we could ship it back and have it set right. It sucked but that's what happens when you grow up so far from a population center.
Your hardware is your choice. You can choose not to buy from vendors that don't allow user repairs. Given that a modern computer is a rather complex device, especially something so small as a laptop, cell phone, or even many desktop systems like the Mac Mini, I'm not sure what you can expect to repair yourself without special tools and training.
A secure device is inherently not user repairable. Let's make a bad car analogy. A secure car has locks that need the proper key to open and start it. If the car is designed to be easily repaired then a thief can simply swap out the locks and take the car. A really secure car would be such that even the dealers or makers of the car can't open or start it, because that means there's a master key somewhere that a thief could exploit. Losing the key, sufficient damage to the car, or some other unfortunate event, would mean a total loss on the car rather than merely a (potentially quite expensive) repair. That's what happens when something is made to be secure.
With all the stuff happening lately on people having their data stolen I'm finding it rather appealing that a computer manufacturer is taking this seriously. As with many things there is a compromise, with greater security comes lowered ability for repairs.
I tried registering myself as an emotional support animal. They still made me pay for a seat.