nuclear power
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No, hippy solar and wind power are a waste of time. The world can be powered on nuclear energy and only produce enough waste to fill a space about the size of a classroom. Fusion power is even better. If people stopped wasting money on space and iraq then we probably could have had it by now.
Oh, and in the long term i'm sure mining etc has killedd way more people than nuclear power. (not counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course)
Oh, and in the long term i'm sure mining etc has killedd way more people than nuclear power. (not counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course)
The wildlife in the Chernobyl evacuation zone has less genetic defect than a comparable "wild" population. I belive this was contributed to less "normal" polutants in the area due to the evacuation. Not to mention the fact that background radiation levels in the zone are lower than most areas downwind from coal fired power plants. Yes, Coal power releases way more radioactive waste that nuclear plants.DarkHyth post=18.69274.655256 said:
As to littering in space and affecting the sun. Start looking at the numbers involved people. We could launch every single gram of radioactive material into the sun and even if the rockets actually got into the sun. (They would vaporize long before getting close to actually hitting the sun. Somewhere in the vicinity of mercurys orbit if I am not completely mistaken) NOTHING would happen. Nothing. At. All. The sun could swallow a mass the size of the entire earth on the farside and we would never know it happend unless we observed it happen. Oh, and as long as a rocket has enough Delta V to break free from earths gravitational field, you can simply point it just about anywhere in the sky and no human would ever notice it /see it /run into it /whatever again. Ever.
Some random ramblings.
Nuclear waste storage has already been proven to be safe for 1.5 billion years (and counting).
In Her infinite wisdom, Mother Nature realized Her spoiled children would abuse her with smoke, sooth and carbon dioxide and set up an experiment for us to demonstrate that deep geological storage of nuclear waste is perfectly safe. At Oklo, Gabon, is a former natural nuclear fission reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
One and a half billion years ago (that's 1 500 000 000 years) enough uranium was bunched together at this site and a fission reaction started spontaneously and ran for a few hundred thousand years with an average power output of about 100kW thermal. This generated the very same kind of nuclear waste that artifical reactors produce. This waste sat there, unprotected in the rock, with water running right though it. What happened?
Nothing... nada... ingenting... absolument rien. The particulary dangerous byproducts bond very tightly to rock and as such, the nuclear waste moved mere inches, in one point five thousand million years.
The Swedish KBS-3 method of storing nuclear waste uses this knowledge gained by the Oklo site and unless someone drills 500m though rock down to the site and literally carries the waste up to the surface, pounds it into dust and then throws it up in the air, it's going to stay down there forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3
Deep geological storage of spent nuclear fuel is safe.
The Chernobyl disaster was not that lethal.
While Chernobyl indeed was a significant and serious industrial accident, it still doesn't hold a candle to some of the other disasters that mankind has created. The UN calculates that the final death tally for the accident will be about 4000. The claims you have heard of millions dead and million more children being born deformed and the area being completely unfit for human life forever and ever is nothing but hyperbole... i.e. pure bullshit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Accident
This tally we can compare with sooth and particle induced deaths from the usage of fossil fuels. Coal power for instance induces approcimately 25 deaths per Terawatthour produced. The US is instance, in 2006 - that is one single year - produced 2000 TWh from coal. Do the math children. Biofuels, while more harmless, are still not free of guilt with 7 killed per TWh.
Not even hydropower is any less innocent than Chernobyl. In 1975, the dam at Banqiao, China, collapsed. 26 000 died instantly and another 145 000 perished in the resulting epidemics and famine. That's 170 000 people killed by hydropower in a single accident. That is 40 times worse than Chernobyl!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties
All in all we surround ourselves with risks that, even in retrospect and looking at what has actually happened rather than relying on optimistic prognosises, are magnitudes worse than nuclear power. Chemical industries (remember Union Carbied at Bhopal, hm?), fossil fuels, transports of dangerous goods such as cholrine gas are all much more dangerous.
No other reactor is like Chernobyl.
Well actually there are a few of the Soviet RBMK reactors still in operation, but all of them are in the former Soviet Union and all of them are under pressure to be shut down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
The RBMK type graphite moderated nuclear reactors were built with two things in mind:
- To be made cheap
- To produce plutonium
To this end, graphite was chosen as the moderator because firstly that allows you to use unenriched uranium as opposed to using enriched unrainum that costs a bit to produce. And seconly this allows you to produce plutionum as a byproduct of running the reactor. But since you need to be inside the reactor and fiddle quite often when you use a reactor for this purpose, they decided against building something that is present in all other reactors in the world: a reactor containment. This is because such a containment meant you cannot open the reactor and extract the plutonium as fast as is needed before it is lost.
The bad part about this is two-fold. Firstly the lack of reactor containment means that when something bad happens, you have nothing stopping the fallout from escaping the building, and this is indeed what happened. Second, the graphite gives the reactor something called a positive void coefficient. In short this means that if you overheat the reactor and boil some of the coolant (i.e. get voids (bubbles) in the coolant), then the nuclear reaction speeds up. This makes the reactor even hotter, boils more coolant, makes it even hotter, boils even more coolant and so forth. This is what happened. The Chernobyl accident was not a meltdown, it was a power excursion (i.e. the reaction ran away and overheated the reactor) that caused a steam explosion.
Every other nuclear reactor in the world works the opposite, i.e. when there is voids in the coolant, the reaction slows down, cooling the reactor and stopping the coolant from boiling.
Finally, apart from the that that it is phycially impossible to do to a western reactor what they did in Chernobyl, western reactors (and indeed now the remaining RBMK reactors) have an entirely different culture of safety. The things they did at Chernobyl are by no other words appalling.
Solar and wind power will never suffice.
Solar and wind power have approximately the same environmental impact as does ncuelar power. The problem with the reneweables though is that they are not available in the volumes we'd like them to be. In Sweden we have at present approximately 800 wind turbines. Yearly they prodoce approximately 1 TWh of energy. In comparison, the 10 nuclear plants we have produce 194 TWh yearly... and we get 230 Twh from fossil fuels. Now if you want to replace nuclear and fossil fuels with wind... that means building 400 x 800 = 320 000 more wind plants. And with this I havn't taken into account the fact that the so called "A-sites", the good windy sites will run out fairly soon. So we have to factor in that we will have to place these plants at sites that aren't as good in regards to producing wind power.
Solar... well that isn't much better. While we do have an enormous influx from the sun seen on the Earth as a total, we still have to harness the power. 100% effective solar panels, at the best spot on Earth, at the best time of the day can soak up 1kW per square meter... not more. Do the math again kids and see how much solar panels you must build to replace fossil and nuclear power.
So in essence, only nuclear power can produce the volume needed to replace coal. Wind and solar are nice complements, but the investment needed to produce the number of TWh needed to replace fossil fuels makes it unrealistic to put our hopes in wind and solar... because they just don't give enough energy unless we spend huge amounts of cash on building the facilities for it.
4) Saving power will not be enough. Currently 85% of our energy is produced by fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency calculates that until 2030, our needs will have increased by approximately 60%.
But suppose there is a miracle and we instead decrease out need for energy by, say 50%. That means we can scrub fossil fuels, right? No... cut our energy need by 50% and use all that saving to decrease only the use of fossil fuels, and we still produce 70% of all our energy through fossil fuels.
So in conclusion my vote is: Nuclear Power? Yes Please!
/S
Nuclear waste storage has already been proven to be safe for 1.5 billion years (and counting).
In Her infinite wisdom, Mother Nature realized Her spoiled children would abuse her with smoke, sooth and carbon dioxide and set up an experiment for us to demonstrate that deep geological storage of nuclear waste is perfectly safe. At Oklo, Gabon, is a former natural nuclear fission reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
One and a half billion years ago (that's 1 500 000 000 years) enough uranium was bunched together at this site and a fission reaction started spontaneously and ran for a few hundred thousand years with an average power output of about 100kW thermal. This generated the very same kind of nuclear waste that artifical reactors produce. This waste sat there, unprotected in the rock, with water running right though it. What happened?
Nothing... nada... ingenting... absolument rien. The particulary dangerous byproducts bond very tightly to rock and as such, the nuclear waste moved mere inches, in one point five thousand million years.
The Swedish KBS-3 method of storing nuclear waste uses this knowledge gained by the Oklo site and unless someone drills 500m though rock down to the site and literally carries the waste up to the surface, pounds it into dust and then throws it up in the air, it's going to stay down there forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3
Deep geological storage of spent nuclear fuel is safe.
The Chernobyl disaster was not that lethal.
While Chernobyl indeed was a significant and serious industrial accident, it still doesn't hold a candle to some of the other disasters that mankind has created. The UN calculates that the final death tally for the accident will be about 4000. The claims you have heard of millions dead and million more children being born deformed and the area being completely unfit for human life forever and ever is nothing but hyperbole... i.e. pure bullshit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Accident
This tally we can compare with sooth and particle induced deaths from the usage of fossil fuels. Coal power for instance induces approcimately 25 deaths per Terawatthour produced. The US is instance, in 2006 - that is one single year - produced 2000 TWh from coal. Do the math children. Biofuels, while more harmless, are still not free of guilt with 7 killed per TWh.
Not even hydropower is any less innocent than Chernobyl. In 1975, the dam at Banqiao, China, collapsed. 26 000 died instantly and another 145 000 perished in the resulting epidemics and famine. That's 170 000 people killed by hydropower in a single accident. That is 40 times worse than Chernobyl!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties
All in all we surround ourselves with risks that, even in retrospect and looking at what has actually happened rather than relying on optimistic prognosises, are magnitudes worse than nuclear power. Chemical industries (remember Union Carbied at Bhopal, hm?), fossil fuels, transports of dangerous goods such as cholrine gas are all much more dangerous.
No other reactor is like Chernobyl.
Well actually there are a few of the Soviet RBMK reactors still in operation, but all of them are in the former Soviet Union and all of them are under pressure to be shut down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
The RBMK type graphite moderated nuclear reactors were built with two things in mind:
- To be made cheap
- To produce plutonium
To this end, graphite was chosen as the moderator because firstly that allows you to use unenriched uranium as opposed to using enriched unrainum that costs a bit to produce. And seconly this allows you to produce plutionum as a byproduct of running the reactor. But since you need to be inside the reactor and fiddle quite often when you use a reactor for this purpose, they decided against building something that is present in all other reactors in the world: a reactor containment. This is because such a containment meant you cannot open the reactor and extract the plutonium as fast as is needed before it is lost.
The bad part about this is two-fold. Firstly the lack of reactor containment means that when something bad happens, you have nothing stopping the fallout from escaping the building, and this is indeed what happened. Second, the graphite gives the reactor something called a positive void coefficient. In short this means that if you overheat the reactor and boil some of the coolant (i.e. get voids (bubbles) in the coolant), then the nuclear reaction speeds up. This makes the reactor even hotter, boils more coolant, makes it even hotter, boils even more coolant and so forth. This is what happened. The Chernobyl accident was not a meltdown, it was a power excursion (i.e. the reaction ran away and overheated the reactor) that caused a steam explosion.
Every other nuclear reactor in the world works the opposite, i.e. when there is voids in the coolant, the reaction slows down, cooling the reactor and stopping the coolant from boiling.
Finally, apart from the that that it is phycially impossible to do to a western reactor what they did in Chernobyl, western reactors (and indeed now the remaining RBMK reactors) have an entirely different culture of safety. The things they did at Chernobyl are by no other words appalling.
Solar and wind power will never suffice.
Solar and wind power have approximately the same environmental impact as does ncuelar power. The problem with the reneweables though is that they are not available in the volumes we'd like them to be. In Sweden we have at present approximately 800 wind turbines. Yearly they prodoce approximately 1 TWh of energy. In comparison, the 10 nuclear plants we have produce 194 TWh yearly... and we get 230 Twh from fossil fuels. Now if you want to replace nuclear and fossil fuels with wind... that means building 400 x 800 = 320 000 more wind plants. And with this I havn't taken into account the fact that the so called "A-sites", the good windy sites will run out fairly soon. So we have to factor in that we will have to place these plants at sites that aren't as good in regards to producing wind power.
Solar... well that isn't much better. While we do have an enormous influx from the sun seen on the Earth as a total, we still have to harness the power. 100% effective solar panels, at the best spot on Earth, at the best time of the day can soak up 1kW per square meter... not more. Do the math again kids and see how much solar panels you must build to replace fossil and nuclear power.
So in essence, only nuclear power can produce the volume needed to replace coal. Wind and solar are nice complements, but the investment needed to produce the number of TWh needed to replace fossil fuels makes it unrealistic to put our hopes in wind and solar... because they just don't give enough energy unless we spend huge amounts of cash on building the facilities for it.
4) Saving power will not be enough. Currently 85% of our energy is produced by fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency calculates that until 2030, our needs will have increased by approximately 60%.
But suppose there is a miracle and we instead decrease out need for energy by, say 50%. That means we can scrub fossil fuels, right? No... cut our energy need by 50% and use all that saving to decrease only the use of fossil fuels, and we still produce 70% of all our energy through fossil fuels.
So in conclusion my vote is: Nuclear Power? Yes Please!
/S
I doubt Fusion tech. will ever be commercially viable, I mean I worked on the problem for a solid afternoon and couldn't figure it out.
However I've heard that the U.S. Navy was working on anti-matter cannons and ballistics, which has great potential.
One of the most fearsome weapons to be invented in the 20th century isn't a bomb or a rocket but the deplete uranium slug, it's density allows it to cuts through softer metals like steel plate like butter and tends to shatter after penetration filling the air with highly radioactive particulates. The radiation induced birth defects in Baghdad jumped about 17000% (if I remember correctly) immediately after the first gulf war. Some experts have ventured that the half life could be a thousand years. The worst thing about this is they refuse to sell such rounds to the public
SORRY ABOUT GETTING OFF TOPIC, THOUGHT I'D THROW THAT IN THERE SINCE WE'RE ALL CONCERNED ABOUT WASTE
However I've heard that the U.S. Navy was working on anti-matter cannons and ballistics, which has great potential.
One of the most fearsome weapons to be invented in the 20th century isn't a bomb or a rocket but the deplete uranium slug, it's density allows it to cuts through softer metals like steel plate like butter and tends to shatter after penetration filling the air with highly radioactive particulates. The radiation induced birth defects in Baghdad jumped about 17000% (if I remember correctly) immediately after the first gulf war. Some experts have ventured that the half life could be a thousand years. The worst thing about this is they refuse to sell such rounds to the public
SORRY ABOUT GETTING OFF TOPIC, THOUGHT I'D THROW THAT IN THERE SINCE WE'RE ALL CONCERNED ABOUT WASTE
Sayvara post=18.69274.655508 said:
I'm Amnestic, and I support this message.
Can you imagine the trouble that'd get caused if we started throwing around irradiated slugs? I mean, my more cynical side says it'd be a good thing to forcibly castrate morons who obviously aren't fit to raise their children, but my nice side that cares for the world would say that the planet is already plenty screwed up. I'd rather not increase the number of birth defects, especially if you've seen how it can affect the child/their family.The worst thing about this is they refuse to sell such rounds to the public
Despite my reservations, I would support a modern nuclear power plant over a coal-fired plant. One description of a nuclear plant caught my eye - apparently it doubled as a desalination plant? Using the reactor heat to distill the water or some such? In which case something on either coast, but particularly in the southwestern US, would make sense. Every major city in the US has some degree of problem maintaining it's potable water supply. If California wants to pipe water from as far away as the Columbia River or the Great Lakes, I say go with the possibility of a nuclear ecological disaster over the certainty of a water-based ecological disaster.
You can't count on wind or solar for what the experts call "base load"; the wind changes and the sky gets cloudy sometimes, so the amount of electricity created by these sources is variable. (And then there's night...) You need something else to supplement variable sources of power, something you can dial up and down depending upon what you're getting from the variable stuff.
Biogas sounds like a good idea, but we can't capture enough of it to generate large amounts of base load power. The same goes for other "bio" fuels like biodiesel (at the moment, though there's promising work in the field of algae derivatives) and biowaste incineration. Oh, and ethanol is a bust; seriously, this corn-based fuel ethanol idea is going to result in very little (if any) net gain in domestic energy production and will end up as yet another subsidy to Big Agro. (What, you thought that family farms can create the volume of corn necessary?)
Geothermal isn't there yet, except for a few places (like Iceland) where access to superheated rock is fairly easy.
Tidal power might be a good gap filler, but only locally. You won't see it powering a grid.
Our choices on the dependable power front, at least that we can see now, are hydro-electric, fossil fuel, and nuclear.
Fossil fuel, of course, is becoming more and more taboo given the global warming concensus... unless you add sophisticated carbon capture and sequestration equipment, which starts driving the costs up.
Hydro-electric sounds great, except that North America is running out of good places to put big dams. Keep in mind that dams create lakes behind them, which takes land out of circulation and changes the local ecology. I don't see too many more, if any, being built so I'm going to rule it out.
So, nukes. Sure, the waste is nasty... but it's contained, unlike combustion generators. It's also comparitively small, and already compacted. And if you build the reactor properly, for instance with a bluddy containment dome unlike those Crazy Ivans and their open, flamable reactors, they can keep accidents confined to the plant itself.
I'm pro-nuclear power because I think it's the best option we have at the moment.
-- Steve
Biogas sounds like a good idea, but we can't capture enough of it to generate large amounts of base load power. The same goes for other "bio" fuels like biodiesel (at the moment, though there's promising work in the field of algae derivatives) and biowaste incineration. Oh, and ethanol is a bust; seriously, this corn-based fuel ethanol idea is going to result in very little (if any) net gain in domestic energy production and will end up as yet another subsidy to Big Agro. (What, you thought that family farms can create the volume of corn necessary?)
Geothermal isn't there yet, except for a few places (like Iceland) where access to superheated rock is fairly easy.
Tidal power might be a good gap filler, but only locally. You won't see it powering a grid.
Our choices on the dependable power front, at least that we can see now, are hydro-electric, fossil fuel, and nuclear.
Fossil fuel, of course, is becoming more and more taboo given the global warming concensus... unless you add sophisticated carbon capture and sequestration equipment, which starts driving the costs up.
Hydro-electric sounds great, except that North America is running out of good places to put big dams. Keep in mind that dams create lakes behind them, which takes land out of circulation and changes the local ecology. I don't see too many more, if any, being built so I'm going to rule it out.
So, nukes. Sure, the waste is nasty... but it's contained, unlike combustion generators. It's also comparitively small, and already compacted. And if you build the reactor properly, for instance with a bluddy containment dome unlike those Crazy Ivans and their open, flamable reactors, they can keep accidents confined to the plant itself.
I'm pro-nuclear power because I think it's the best option we have at the moment.
-- Steve
I vote Fusion Power.
It has been done in a few places. Just not very efficiently....yet..
Also, if we could make more than 1x10^-7 grams of Antimatter a year. Or whatever stupidly small number it is. It could be quite viable. Only problem is: How do you handle antimatter? With matter?
It has been done in a few places. Just not very efficiently....yet..
Also, if we could make more than 1x10^-7 grams of Antimatter a year. Or whatever stupidly small number it is. It could be quite viable. Only problem is: How do you handle antimatter? With matter?
I can just see some good 'ol boy poaching deer with those rounds and dying of rad. poisoning a week later. Imagine those lawsuits...Amnestic post=18.69274.655549 said:Can you imagine the trouble that'd get caused if we started throwing around irradiated slugs? I mean, my more cynical side says it'd be a good thing to forcibly castrate morons who obviously aren't fit to raise their children, but my nice side that cares for the world would say that the planet is already plenty screwed up. I'd rather not increase the number of birth defects, especially if you've seen how it can affect the child/their family.The worst thing about this is they refuse to sell such rounds to the public
1) Fusion power has yet to deliver more energy then it consumes, except in natural cases (Sol)HBrutusH post=18.69274.655657 said:
2)Making the Antimatter isn't hard at all once you've spent the money on the particle accelerators and what not. (Anti matter is actually created naturally in deep space, unfortunately the energy deficit that's cause by this production is instantly repaid by its destruction.) The problem is storing the stuff long term. And of course there's a lot of questions as to whether it interacts with the natural laws. (can't remember where I found this article: might have even been here, hmmm) http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14120-would-an-antimatter-apple-fall-up.html?feedId=space_rss20
DU isnt all that radioactive actually. See here: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/most-awful/most-awful-fears.phphoward_hughes post=18.69274.655511 said:I doubt Fusion tech. will ever be commercially viable, I mean I worked on the problem for a solid afternoon and couldn't figure it out.
However I've heard that the U.S. Navy was working on anti-matter cannons and ballistics, which has great potential.
One of the most fearsome weapons to be invented in the 20th century isn't a bomb or a rocket but the deplete uranium slug, it's density allows it to cuts through softer metals like steel plate like butter and tends to shatter after penetration filling the air with highly radioactive particulates. The radiation induced birth defects in Baghdad jumped about 17000% (if I remember correctly) immediately after the first gulf war. Some experts have ventured that the half life could be a thousand years. The worst thing about this is they refuse to sell such rounds to the public
SORRY ABOUT GETTING OFF TOPIC, THOUGHT I'D THROW THAT IN THERE SINCE WE'RE ALL CONCERNED ABOUT WASTE
Not really "outdated" tech, just lousy design and bad training for the operators. Older reactors than Chernobyl have run with excellent safety records, in part because they aren't built around huge piles of combustable graphite and *do* have large containment domes built around them *before* an accident happens.RIOT MAST3R post=18.69274.655701 said:
As to shooting waste into the Sun, it's impractical and unsafe; current boosters can't put too much waste into a Sun-injection orbit in a given launch, and there's always the chance that a rocket could go *boom* during launch. Also, some of that waste is actually really valuable stuff for radio-medicine or other nuclear-dependant industries. Someday we may want to extract that stuff from the waste.
-- Steve
The big bad thing about DU isn't it's very slight radioactivity, it's that it's a heavy metal. Heavy metals are extremely toxic, and both being fired and striking armor vaporizes part of the metal. That's why most of the world doesn't use it. The big good things about DU (why we use it) are that it's very dense and penetrates well, as you said, but also that the friction of penetration ignites it. Thus you have a projectile that not only penetrates better than anything else known to mankind, but when it penetrates it fills the interior with a flash fireball. If you're in a tank whose crew compartment is penetrated by a DU projectile, you're almost certainly dead. And so is the tank; even if the projectile itself doesn't strike anything vital, the fireball is sure to do so. But this can't be projected to nuclear power because radiation isn't the hazard in DU projectiles.howard_hughes post=18.69274.655511 said:I doubt Fusion tech. will ever be commercially viable, I mean I worked on the problem for a solid afternoon and couldn't figure it out.
However I've heard that the U.S. Navy was working on anti-matter cannons and ballistics, which has great potential.
One of the most fearsome weapons to be invented in the 20th century isn't a bomb or a rocket but the deplete uranium slug, it's density allows it to cuts through softer metals like steel plate like butter and tends to shatter after penetration filling the air with highly radioactive particulates. The radiation induced birth defects in Baghdad jumped about 17000% (if I remember correctly) immediately after the first gulf war. Some experts have ventured that the half life could be a thousand years. The worst thing about this is they refuse to sell such rounds to the public
SORRY ABOUT GETTING OFF TOPIC, THOUGHT I'D THROW THAT IN THERE SINCE WE'RE ALL CONCERNED ABOUT WASTE
Regarding solar, an average 30' by 40', 1,200 square foot house probably has a 200A panel at 120/240V, probably with a peak draw of maybe 150 amps or 36KW demand. If the panels are 33% efficient, that means at 1 watt/square meter you need 108 square meters or 1,162.5 square feet. So if that 1,200 square foot house has a shed roof oriented toward the south, it's physically feasible at 33% efficiency. But that overstates the difficulties in solar. By super-insulating the house and using fluorescent or LED lighting, very efficient appliances, solar water heating, and a geothermal (ground source) heat pump, you can reduce the power requirements for that house to perhaps 80 amps, and tyeing the heat pump into a pulse meter (for load shedding) can reduce the demand even further. Even that is only a demand - if the house is connected to the grid, there's no requirement to provide enough solar to match the demand. By providing perhaps 8KW to 12KW of solar power, our highly efficient house now has a zero net balance on its electric bill without noticeably reducing comfort or utility. At 12 KW, our required efficiency drops to 10%, assuming 1 W/S.M., roughly 112W total available solar radiation. By using more efficient panels or by using sun-tracking panels, efficiencies of 20%+ are easily available, making solar feasible for more common gabled roofs. All that is required for solar to be a significant part of our energy needs now are for solar panels to be economically feasible. All that is required for solar to be a major part of our energy needs now are for solar panels to be economically feasible AND fore much-improved energy storage methods (batteries or fuel cells) and economically feasible conversion equipment, thus allowing true off-grid operation or charging of electric or hybrid electric vehicles at night.
Regarding hydrogen I agree it's a non-starter using natural gas reformation or hydrolysis (except on a smaller scale using hydro power that would otherwise go unused), but microbial-generated or algal-generated hydrogen would be an excellent fuel. Also, hydrogen is the perfect fuel for cities. When gasoline reaches $7 to $8 per gallon (not including taxes, just cost of production), then point hydrolysis hydrogen becomes economically feasible. Again, this dollar value drops when you can harness energy that would otherwise be wasted.
It's often low levels of radiation over time that cause the worst effects. Tests carried out on animals and accidents on people have proven that it's better to take a large does of radiation once (<450,000 mrems)then a small dose every day for years. Apparently the large dose kills the cells or at least damages them so bad that it's noticeable and this allows your body to filter them off. Small amounts of radiation however only effects a few cell's DNA and over time cause cancer and other ailments. I guess the comparable situations would be getting a X-ray from an older model machine or tanning in the sun for 5 years.Xhumed post=18.69274.655712 said:DU isnt all that radioactive actually. See here: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/most-awful/most-awful-fears.phphoward_hughes post=18.69274.655511 said:I doubt Fusion tech. will ever be commercially viable, I mean I worked on the problem for a solid afternoon and couldn't figure it out.
However I've heard that the U.S. Navy was working on anti-matter cannons and ballistics, which has great potential.
One of the most fearsome weapons to be invented in the 20th century isn't a bomb or a rocket but the deplete uranium slug, it's density allows it to cuts through softer metals like steel plate like butter and tends to shatter after penetration filling the air with highly radioactive particulates. The radiation induced birth defects in Baghdad jumped about 17000% (if I remember correctly) immediately after the first gulf war. Some experts have ventured that the half life could be a thousand years. The worst thing about this is they refuse to sell such rounds to the public
SORRY ABOUT GETTING OFF TOPIC, THOUGHT I'D THROW THAT IN THERE SINCE WE'RE ALL CONCERNED ABOUT WASTE
gabemorr post=18.69274.654623 said:
I dont think so
it wasnt the ractors it was the contanmint the russians had really shitty contanmint
so that why chernobyl is the way it is today
Actually, a form of Geothermal energy is available anywhere. On most of the planet, around 10 feet below the ground, the temperature remains constant, around 50 degrees. Using a heat-pump, you can use that for air conditioning in the summer, and heating in the winter.mshcherbatskaya post=18.69274.655003 said:
Granted, you'd still need electricity to run the pumps, but it would still be cheaper than gas and oil, and if you have solar panels, or live in a country, like France, whose majority of powerplants are clean, then there's a much smaller, possibly zero, carbon footprint.
It would be viable as a fuel for propulsion, but not an energy source. The laws of conservation of matter and energy say that you'd never be able to get more energy from the antimatter than it cost to make it.HBrutusH post=18.69274.655657 said:
Just like electrolysis, it's a good way to store energy, but burning the hydrogen (combining it with O2) wont yield any more energy than it took to make it (separating it from O2). Which is why hydrogen cars wont help the environment until we get clean power plants.