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Started by ~, February 17, 2010, 04:08:34 AM

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There Has Been An Error!

Remington

#1
It's not so much the safety I'm worried about, it's the cost. As I understand they're quite expensive to build, and they take a rather long time. I'm open to the possibility though, should costs come down and a steady source of uranium is available (read: not in radical Islamist countries). I'd be fine with one in my back yard.

Don't be so quick to dismiss the renewables. The Solar and Wind industries are growing at a rate of 15-30% per year IIRC, even through the recession. There were certain places in America where wind actually became cheaper than the fossil fuels during the oil scares following Katrina, and the technology is advancing rapidly.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=energy-mcdonald-exro-technologies

Wind is also quite popular in Europe, where Germany has installed 20 GW worth of turbine farms and Denmark generates 20% of its electricity from the wind.


Solar is developing fairly fast too, although the market seems to be aiming more at 2-3KW home installations that power your home systems and feed electricity back into the grid. More of a distributed system, as opposed to centralized: the development of a smart grid is essential for this to become viable on a big scale.

Nanosolar is making strides in the utility-level solar market; the clever bastards figured out how to print PV panels with an efficiency of ~16%. Once that goes domestic (a few years), a full home installation could cost as little as $5,000 to $6,000. And yes, the design is viable. They're currently producing business and utility scale arrays; Google bought a bunch of them for their California Googleplex.
http://nanosolar.com/
http://www.celsias.com/article/nanosolars-breakthrough-technology-solar-now-cheap/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar
Is it plugged in?

Shibboleet The Annihilator

If you are really interested in solar energy or wind energy you could look into it now.

With the massive government kickbacks these things are getting you can get solar panels/shingles or wind turbines installed for close to that price now.

If you ask me, the technology that REALLY needs to catch up is energy storage (read: batteries).

E.O.T.

DUDES

          I'm not a science guy or anything, but being in the building trades, I'd have to say the shit is going on that makes all this irrelevent. However, because of the usual factors in haves vs. have nots, positive resources are not priority. Although still in early stages overall, an entire house is absolutely able to exist off the grid by being self sufficient for electricity and therefore also heat. Water is not too far behind and presently doable and in effect, just not as efficiently. A couple of years ago, building a home to this code was 40-60 thousand bucks for the systems themselves but it's rapidly becoming less.

IN MY OPINION

          Natural resources are deliberately ignored to serve profit making. Nuclear power is shear insanity. I'm not taking any heads up from the French unless it's cheese.
"a good fight justifies any cause"

Remington

Quote from: Horrendous Foreign Love Stoat on February 17, 2010, 05:03:36 AM
QuoteIt's not so much the safety I'm worried about, it's the cost.

So its not going to be as subsidized as it looks? and would not the newly created jobs, and college courses for said jobs kinda help out the economy a bit?

All energy sources are subsidized, but nuclear takes the cake. It's not uncommon for billions to change hands, just to build a reactor or two.

What would happen if you put those billions into solar/wind R+D? Or better yet, into a massive fusion crash-course program, ala the Manhattan Project?
Is it plugged in?

Remington

Quote from: Annabel the Destroyer on February 17, 2010, 05:00:16 AM
If you are really interested in solar energy or wind energy you could look into it now.

With the massive government kickbacks these things are getting you can get solar panels/shingles or wind turbines installed for close to that price now.

If you ask me, the technology that REALLY needs to catch up is energy storage (read: batteries).
That's where hydrogen comes into play.

Some form of efficient, long-term energy storage is a must if we are to switch over to renewable energy systems. The thing about renewable forms of energy is that most of them are not always on: solar panels produce no electricity in the night, nor do turbines produce power when there's no wind. We can't afford to have huge black-outs every couple of minutes, and obviously lithium-ion batteries or good ol Duracells aren't going to cut it on a nation-wide, utility-scale level.

The solution lies in hydrogen.

When water is split apart by hydrolysis, it forms H2 and O2 gases. This is pretty common grade-school science, but what about when it gets applied on a massive scale? Excess energy can used to split massive quantities of water, resulting in large amounts of explosive gases that are then liquefied and stored in underground/offshore reservoirs. Power sources based on solar, wind and other fluctuating power sources will naturally have fluctuating levels of power output (which is why the smart grid is so damn important), and secondary generation capabilities will be needed for when total power production slips below total grid demand. This is where hydrogen-oxygen combustion kicks in.

When needed during the day (or at night, when solar production bottoms out), utilities will fire up their secondary power plants and start burning the hydrogen and oxygen they've accumulated throughout the day. Same principle as gas or coal fired plants, and those old fossil-fuel plants could probably be easily re-purposed. This would provide the always-on energy buffer that coal and gas plants do today, and would dynamically balance/smooth out the fluctuations in the power supply caused by wind and solar.

The environmental impact of implimenting this would be near zero. We could re-use our old plants, produce efficient energy storage reservoirs from Earth's near-infinite supply of water, and produce no emissions by burning the fuels. Burning the H2 and O2 would of course recombine the gases into water: the same amount of water (or close enough) that originally entered the system. Tada!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage#Hydrogen

Also flywheels. I would explain about those too, but my wrists are starting to hurt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage#Flywheel
Is it plugged in?

Requia ☣

Nuclear power is cost competitive compared to other non fossil fuel options (though solar has some interesting potential, especially with the new lens IBM made).

Nor can a house survive off grid without using up fossil fuels.  There are places in the country where you can have a surplus from solar/wind, but you still need the grid to provide reliable access to power.  Storage just isn't up to the task.
Inflatable dolls are not recognized flotation devices.

Requia ☣

I should point out that Nuclear does have a problem that it uses a ton of water, which is becoming a problem in the US.
Inflatable dolls are not recognized flotation devices.

Remington

Quote from: Requia ☣ on February 17, 2010, 06:33:26 AM
Nuclear power is cost competitive compared to other non fossil fuel options (though solar has some interesting potential, especially with the new lens IBM made).

Nor can a house survive off grid without using up fossil fuels.  There are places in the country where you can have a surplus from solar/wind, but you still need the grid to provide reliable access to power.  Storage just isn't up to the task.
I think they do have off-grid solar packages, but they're much more expensive (tons and tons of batteries) and you typically need a backup gas/diesel generator for extended cloudy periods.

With a diesel generator, though, you could make your own biodiesel from waste vegetable oil.
Is it plugged in?

Cain

QuoteI'm a bit lost on the debate here, as as far as I see it, nuclear power done right, like France, works well, provides cheap and clean energy with minimal waste, there has not been a terrible nuclear disaster for quite some time now, and you can even re-use the waste to provide tasty add-ons for your army, and unique isotopes for your scientists to play with.

Actually there was a nuclear energy "incident" about once a year in France.  It was discovered nuclear scientists had in fact been manipulating the statistics or outright lying in order to avoid "causing a panic".

This resulted in the black comedy of, when Chernobyl happened, of the rest of Europe destroying food that had been downwind from the fallout and staying inside for a week, while France was portrayed as being entirely unaffected and went about their business normally, until a minor politician questioned this response.  It was then revealed the French scientists obsession with secrecy and protecting the nuclear industry actually extended to even defending Soviet mistakes, and that France should have taken the same kind of actions the rest of Europe had.

I don't know about other countries but the systematic coverup of the French nuclear industry raises worries for me about safety, generally.  If one country can do it, several others can, and probably have.

Triple Zero

Quote from: E.O.T. on February 17, 2010, 05:17:00 AMNuclear power is shear insanity.

Why?

QuoteI'm not taking any heads up from the French unless it's cheese.

I tolerate pissing on the French when it's tongue-in-cheek. Please don't do it in a serious argument. I'm not sure what to make of this, but it makes you come off as a bit bigoted "hahah lol french they stink lol" :? They're just a country like anybody else. Would you say the same thing about China or Germany? No, if anything you'd say something you could back up with something else than just the dumbest prejudice.

Sorry I don't meant to pick on you again, but this unwarranted bitching on the French just ticks me off.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.


Salty

I used to have a strong fear of nukes, sort of an irrational impulse, I suppose.

Now however, you see how much we depend on electricity, and what people are like when their televisions and toaster-ovens stop working: Absolutely Insane.

I don't think it would take much of a push for the general populous of any nation to accept anything that'll feed their ipods and HD tv's without extra effort. Especially if the threat of losing power is hyped, and the people doing the hyping are the same people swapping briefcases on new plant deals, well then they'll just have extra motivation to sell it.

Meanwhile, I am all for alternative methods. It's not that nukes themselves scare me now, as much as the people operating them. It only takes one asshole, or a small collection of them, to fuck us all in our mutated multifarious asses.

And I like them. Given the right conditions and/or applications of technologies, you don't even need to convert waste oil into biodiesel to run it. And given the right nudge (this is my idealism leaking out here) people are wonderfully capable of amazing ingenuity. Using the sun as a power source is a smart goal as it gives us enough, we just haven't come up with a feasible means of harnessing it.

But when it comes to supplying the needs of The People without a hiccup in current consumptions levels, it'll be nukes. I think.

The world is a car and you're the crash test dummy.

Doktor Howl

Quote from: Alty on February 17, 2010, 05:06:45 PM
I used to have a strong fear of nukes, sort of an irrational impulse, I suppose.

Nukes aren't the cleanest power in the world, but they are the cleanest power that can be placed anywhere.

The minor risk of an accident vs the certainty of freezing to death in the dark.  Choose.
Molon Lube

LMNO