So whats in the transformer in the first place? Rewinding uses the same windings. Not new ones... well new insulation. But this already changes the "months" thing. We don't need a raw supply of new transformers for the whole grid. Just as Canada didn't, even in the areas affected.
The approximately DC surge from a CME saturates the cores, this leads to high currents that can over heat just about everything within the transformer. However breakers etc will still protect many transformers from this type of failure, and all local ones are not on big enough loops to be at risk. The idea that it will completely burn out everything is not based on fact.
The UK report I read, was about a week without power for the worst (isolated) parts. But intermittent power could be supplied to all cities with a day. This was consider poorly prepared. And the use of building generators to give temporary power was not considered.
You would not be without power for months. This is not some cheap 2012 disaster flick. Canada's grid was up and running in 9 hours. A big outage would be days in parts at most. It won't "destroy" transformers outright... merely "disrupt" them (ever heard of rewinding). Many would be fixable in a reasonably short time.
The idea that everyone would just sit around twiddling their thumbs for months without power is totally laughable. That they would sit around waiting to freeze to death is plain stupid.
If you really want a space program, I don't think saving Constellation is the best way to do it. It never was about getting back into space and more about extending shuttle type contracts.
and that statistically the most effective way of reducing child abuse in this country would be to close all church-run orphanages and missions.....This would eliminate something like 99% of all child abuse,...
As the saying goes... Nobody ever go fired for buying IBM. Well that was when they wrote the book on evil monopoly. Guess nowdays it would be nobody ever got fired for buying MS.
Almost OT:
However photoshop is probably a good idea. Gimp is great, but lacks the odd must have feature for a publishing group. And once you pay for photoshop and windows and a PC... it stll doesn't show up agaist the salary.
Long periods of time, is however defined as milliseconds or so. Yes that would qualify for the island of stability, since its much longer than 10^-20 seconds. There may even be something that could last a second or so... but the calculations are really not all that definite.
Non peer reviewed paper by a well known "doomer". I did say credible sources. Even the first paragraph is a giveaway. "Policy makers don't discuss uranium resources" is demonstrably false. The IAEA have a department working on just that. Right now we are not even *looking* for uranium because what we have found is more than enough for quite some time (and this completely ignores the ocean sources). Its discussed and everyone is quite happy with the resources we have left. But hay why believe all those scientist. They didn't say what you want to hear.
According to this sort of thinking, there is not enough copper for the generators in wind turbines either. (peek copper has been coming for a long time now).
Breeders do work, and *are* working. Where did all the Pu come from? How do you think the Th "doped" fuels work? It just cheaper right now to sleep in our own crap. You would think we had learnt that lesson.
And 70 years is total BS. I don't know any credible source for that figure. Without reprocessing *existing* mines have the better part of 200 years worth. 60x that with reprocess and there's 5x that in Th. So 200*60/4.5=2600 years worth of U assuming we replace all fossil fuel with it. Then we have a another 10000 years worth of Th *at least*. Oh and the Russians have a resin that can extract U from the ocean --10x more again.
Nuclear is not a silver bullet, i will give you that. But if we don't do stupid things it can really work. Wind and solar only "work" in fantasy land. We simply use too much power. Period. Even the bloody greenie Luddites use too much power for solar/wind to work. Run the numbers.
Oh and even with the melt downs nuclear is way ahead of coal as far as safety goes. 3 mile island was an example of how safe a melt down can be. Russian military "idiots" are an example of how stupid we can be. They didn't even build a containment building, thats slack even for the former USSR standards.
Confinement has improved over a million fold in the last 20 years. Over a billion in the last 30-40 years. If we have that kind of progress in the next 20-40 years even DD fusion will be trivial. We are in this for the long haul. 20 years is not a long time. Remember that we gave the banks more money for F*** up in one year than has been invested into fusion over the full 30 years.
I really don't know why this comes up or even where the original "fact" came from. But *without* reprocessing its about 100-300 years depending on details at current consumption rates. This is land based U only. Once the price hits about 200EU per kg (IIRC) then ocean sources become economic, then you have 10x that at least. If you reprocess you get about 60x these figures. Or over 5000 years worth for land based deposits only. Th is about 5x this figure, or 25,000 years worth.
I know fusion is always "20 years away". But I really think we can get DD fusion working in that time frame. There is enough D for millions or billions of years depending on how you cut the numbers.
You said your electricity bill is three times your rent
Oh i get it. Well if wind and solar are not subsidized my rent would be less. Not because i use a lot. Just because wind/solar is really that expensive.
And, dude, are you ignoring me?
No, i was assuming from context that hydro was to "store" power for windless, cloudy days. I never said we shouldn't use a mix. But sadly wind/solar are not going to be big contributors for most of the world for the same reason hydro isn't. Some places it works. Most it doesn't. Economically its a feel good thing right now. It simply does not make sense. About the only thing that mite from the green box, is solar thermal.
It should be noted that *most* power/heat is generated from mainly one source. Fossil fuels. If you assume something has to be used for transport, then fossil fuels dominate even more.
Well when there's a rolling blackout coming your way...
Well managed/maintained grids don't work that way. "fast" power comes from ripple switch cutoffs, like hot water heating and the like. Even gas turbines can take minutes to spin up from standby (hot standby, rather than "spun" up standby), and a rolling blackout will keep tripping breakers with that kind of delay. America has some serious infrastructure issues if the grid is managed is such a way.
I also wasn't aware that nukey plants had gotten more agile.
They always could be.. but sadly the current crop of nukeys is a relic of the cold war, and all that this implies.
I often end up teaching teens. The are so just as stupid as the average adult. Even more so when it comes to computers outside facebook. Were the hell do you think average adults comes from?
Nuclear plants built in the 50's and 60's don't like begin throttled. But modern designs can load follow almost trivially. They had designs back in the 60's that could load follow too. They where just never build, well one was, the molten salt reactor (ok 2, its predecessor the aircraft reactor experiment).
As for hydro, we are close to maxed out in many countries, from both practical and greeneie reasons. Basically its hard to get permission to build a dam these days.
We are quite simply using much more power than hydro can even get close to. Wind and solar only if we pay 5x(at least) or more for electricity while ignoring availability and cover entire states/countries with panels/turbines. Including availability makes it 2x more expensive at least.
And and for the record 30sec ramp up for hydro is a pipe dream. But you don't need to ramp up that fast anyway. Most hydro is in fact not so good at peak loading. There is a lot of water mass. You can't just turn it on and off like a tap. The one we went through had a 30min ramp up time, and a slightly longer ramp down time.
1 AU is 149 598 000 km. So the area of a sphere around the sun with a radius of 1 AU is 4*pi*r*r = 2.8e23 m^2. At 1 AU we get about 1.3kW per m^2 above the atmosphere. So the total energy is 3.7e26 Watts. That's converting 4 million tons of mass into energy every second.
The "mass" would be about 700 tons. But that's *inertial* mass not gravitational mass. In fact its probably more accurate to say apparent inertial mass, in the initial rest frame. To the dude on the ship, he/she is their normal mass. But the rest of the universe will look pretty strange.
Its because there is no incentive to reduce waste. Plants pay per kWh of electricity for waste management to the fed. A more expensive plant that puts out one tenth the waste does not make financial sense. Since now they pay 10x per unit waste what a PWR does. Also PWR etc are all about once through cycles. In that regard we seem to just keep making the same mistakes.
It may be cheaper to sleep in our own excrement. But that does not mean its a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
So whats in the transformer in the first place? Rewinding uses the same windings. Not new ones... well new insulation. But this already changes the "months" thing. We don't need a raw supply of new transformers for the whole grid. Just as Canada didn't, even in the areas affected.
The approximately DC surge from a CME saturates the cores, this leads to high currents that can over heat just about everything within the transformer. However breakers etc will still protect many transformers from this type of failure, and all local ones are not on big enough loops to be at risk. The idea that it will completely burn out everything is not based on fact.
The UK report I read, was about a week without power for the worst (isolated) parts. But intermittent power could be supplied to all cities with a day. This was consider poorly prepared. And the use of building generators to give temporary power was not considered.
You would not be without power for months. This is not some cheap 2012 disaster flick. Canada's grid was up and running in 9 hours. A big outage would be days in parts at most. It won't "destroy" transformers outright... merely "disrupt" them (ever heard of rewinding). Many would be fixable in a reasonably short time.
The idea that everyone would just sit around twiddling their thumbs for months without power is totally laughable. That they would sit around waiting to freeze to death is plain stupid.
...and maybe I'll buy your games...
Maybe doesn't pay the bills.
Using a plane to get to space make about as much sense as using a train to cross the Atlantic.
If you really want a space program, I don't think saving Constellation is the best way to do it. It never was about getting back into space and more about extending shuttle type contracts.
and that statistically the most effective way of reducing child abuse in this country would be to close all church-run orphanages and missions.....This would eliminate something like 99% of all child abuse,...
Citation needed.
As the saying goes... Nobody ever go fired for buying IBM. Well that was when they wrote the book on evil monopoly. Guess nowdays it would be nobody ever got fired for buying MS.
Almost OT:
However photoshop is probably a good idea. Gimp is great, but lacks the odd must have feature for a publishing group. And once you pay for photoshop and windows and a PC... it stll doesn't show up agaist the salary.
Long periods of time, is however defined as milliseconds or so. Yes that would qualify for the island of stability, since its much longer than 10^-20 seconds. There may even be something that could last a second or so... but the calculations are really not all that definite.
Non peer reviewed paper by a well known "doomer". I did say credible sources. Even the first paragraph is a giveaway. "Policy makers don't discuss uranium resources" is demonstrably false. The IAEA have a department working on just that. Right now we are not even *looking* for uranium because what we have found is more than enough for quite some time (and this completely ignores the ocean sources). Its discussed and everyone is quite happy with the resources we have left. But hay why believe all those scientist. They didn't say what you want to hear.
According to this sort of thinking, there is not enough copper for the generators in wind turbines either. (peek copper has been coming for a long time now).
Breeders do work, and *are* working. Where did all the Pu come from? How do you think the Th "doped" fuels work? It just cheaper right now to sleep in our own crap. You would think we had learnt that lesson.
And 70 years is total BS. I don't know any credible source for that figure. Without reprocessing *existing* mines have the better part of 200 years worth. 60x that with reprocess and there's 5x that in Th. So 200*60/4.5=2600 years worth of U assuming we replace all fossil fuel with it. Then we have a another 10000 years worth of Th *at least*. Oh and the Russians have a resin that can extract U from the ocean --10x more again.
Nuclear is not a silver bullet, i will give you that. But if we don't do stupid things it can really work. Wind and solar only "work" in fantasy land. We simply use too much power. Period. Even the bloody greenie Luddites use too much power for solar/wind to work. Run the numbers.
Oh and even with the melt downs nuclear is way ahead of coal as far as safety goes. 3 mile island was an example of how safe a melt down can be. Russian military "idiots" are an example of how stupid we can be. They didn't even build a containment building, thats slack even for the former USSR standards.
Confinement has improved over a million fold in the last 20 years. Over a billion in the last 30-40 years. If we have that kind of progress in the next 20-40 years even DD fusion will be trivial. We are in this for the long haul. 20 years is not a long time. Remember that we gave the banks more money for F*** up in one year than has been invested into fusion over the full 30 years.
I really don't know why this comes up or even where the original "fact" came from. But *without* reprocessing its about 100-300 years depending on details at current consumption rates. This is land based U only. Once the price hits about 200EU per kg (IIRC) then ocean sources become economic, then you have 10x that at least. If you reprocess you get about 60x these figures. Or over 5000 years worth for land based deposits only. Th is about 5x this figure, or 25,000 years worth.
I know fusion is always "20 years away". But I really think we can get DD fusion working in that time frame. There is enough D for millions or billions of years depending on how you cut the numbers.
You said your electricity bill is three times your rent
Oh i get it. Well if wind and solar are not subsidized my rent would be less. Not because i use a lot. Just because wind/solar is really that expensive.
And, dude, are you ignoring me?
No, i was assuming from context that hydro was to "store" power for windless, cloudy days. I never said we shouldn't use a mix. But sadly wind/solar are not going to be big contributors for most of the world for the same reason hydro isn't. Some places it works. Most it doesn't. Economically its a feel good thing right now. It simply does not make sense. About the only thing that mite from the green box, is solar thermal.
It should be noted that *most* power/heat is generated from mainly one source. Fossil fuels. If you assume something has to be used for transport, then fossil fuels dominate even more.
Well when there's a rolling blackout coming your way...
Well managed/maintained grids don't work that way. "fast" power comes from ripple switch cutoffs, like hot water heating and the like. Even gas turbines can take minutes to spin up from standby (hot standby, rather than "spun" up standby), and a rolling blackout will keep tripping breakers with that kind of delay. America has some serious infrastructure issues if the grid is managed is such a way.
I also wasn't aware that nukey plants had gotten more agile.
They always could be.. but sadly the current crop of nukeys is a relic of the cold war, and all that this implies.
This is America, if your net worth is higher than or equal to 0, you are under capitalized! Get another credit card and go shopping ;)
I was under the impression that libertarians can go around quoting who ever they want.
They didn't try to take 1 billion years. Its quite a long time to have secured funding generally..
Please don't reject my story just because it came from FOX. ;-)
Yea, who cares about how credible the source is when we are "thinking of the children".
I often end up teaching teens. The are so just as stupid as the average adult. Even more so when it comes to computers outside facebook. Were the hell do you think average adults comes from?
Nuclear plants built in the 50's and 60's don't like begin throttled. But modern designs can load follow almost trivially. They had designs back in the 60's that could load follow too. They where just never build, well one was, the molten salt reactor (ok 2, its predecessor the aircraft reactor experiment).
As for hydro, we are close to maxed out in many countries, from both practical and greeneie reasons. Basically its hard to get permission to build a dam these days.
We are quite simply using much more power than hydro can even get close to. Wind and solar only if we pay 5x(at least) or more for electricity while ignoring availability and cover entire states/countries with panels/turbines. Including availability makes it 2x more expensive at least.
And and for the record 30sec ramp up for hydro is a pipe dream. But you don't need to ramp up that fast anyway. Most hydro is in fact not so good at peak loading. There is a lot of water mass. You can't just turn it on and off like a tap. The one we went through had a 30min ramp up time, and a slightly longer ramp down time.
You lost me on the last comment sorry.
the space ship does need to take the solar panel with it. Since its not really travel size....
1 AU is 149 598 000 km. So the area of a sphere around the sun with a radius of 1 AU is 4*pi*r*r = 2.8e23 m^2. At 1 AU we get about 1.3kW per m^2 above the atmosphere. So the total energy is 3.7e26 Watts. That's converting 4 million tons of mass into energy every second.
The "mass" would be about 700 tons. But that's *inertial* mass not gravitational mass. In fact its probably more accurate to say apparent inertial mass, in the initial rest frame. To the dude on the ship, he/she is their normal mass. But the rest of the universe will look pretty strange.
Its because there is no incentive to reduce waste. Plants pay per kWh of electricity for waste management to the fed. A more expensive plant that puts out one tenth the waste does not make financial sense. Since now they pay 10x per unit waste what a PWR does. Also PWR etc are all about once through cycles. In that regard we seem to just keep making the same mistakes.
It may be cheaper to sleep in our own excrement. But that does not mean its a good idea.
People freak out at anything that puts out a few rems..
They seem happy to fly. That gives em a few more rems.
Beta decay, a neutron decays into a proton and an electron. That's how Th->Pa->U and also How U->Nu->Pu.
;)
Guess you skipped/forgot high school physics