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Charlz Guybon posted:Major advance in the R&D of fusion power. This is great news! No, it's pretty trivial news. ICF fusion is basically a jobs program for a bunch of engineers who saw the writing on the wall at the end of the Cold War and repurposed their bomb-research machines to market them to environmentalists who don't know much about physics or economics. ICF fusion is never, never going to produce commercial fusion power. First, if you read the article you'll see that this "breakeven" isn't really breakeven, it's just breakeven if you only consider the energy absorbed by the fuel. Which is only the tinest fraction of the actual input energy. First they have to turn electricity into 3 megajoules of infrared laser beam, which they then throw away half of converting it into 1.5 megajoules of ultraviolet laser beam, which they then throw away some of converting it into x-rays at the hohlraum, and about 15% of those x-rays actually impact the target. These are flashlamp-pumped lasers, which are very inefficient; the *input energy is 422 megajoules.* What'd they get out? About 8 kilojoules. End-to-end efficiency is actually about .001%. Even just considering the *laser energy*, it's about .5%. The only way you can consider that anywhere close to breaking even is if you do what they've done here, and look at it solely in terms of the vanishingly small fraction of your total energy input that actually goes into compressing the fuel. It's like looking at a gasoline energy, considering only the energy that goes into pushing a piston down and ignoring all of it that just turns right into heat and saying that the engine's 70% efficient, instead of the 17% efficient it actually is. So this isn't a significant step, it's not a major step, it's just a tiny incremental improvement. For actual real commercial fusion power, an ICF facility would have to operate at Q (the fusion gain factor) of around 60. That is, for every megajoule of input, they need to get 60 out. For a tokamak, they'd need Q=20. ITER is hoped to get Q=10. The biggest and best Q that any fusion plant has ever achieved is 1.25, and even *that* was just a theoretical value which they'd expect to have gotten had they used D-T fuel instead of the D-D fuel that particular experiment was limited to using. In addition to the grotesque inefficiencies at converting electricity into fusion yield that ICF suffers from, there's the insane cost of the fuel elements. The is frozen D-T contained within a copper-doped beryllium capsule that needs to be spherical to micron tolerances, and the surfaces of that sphere need to be smooth to *nanometer* tolerances. The beryllium must be precisely 150 microns thick, and a 5-micron hole is laser-drilled through it. The capsule in turns rests within an equally-precisely made hohlraum comprised of a gold/uranium alloy. Each one of these precision assemblies costs tens of thousands of dollars to make, assembly of the various parts also must be done to micron tolerances. And out of this, if fusion works perfectly and every bit of the fuel is used, you can expect a maximum possible energy output of 45 megajoules. That's 12.5 kilowatt-hours of energy; if you can manage the miraculous feat of 100% efficiently converting that back into electricity, you could sell that electricity for about $1.25. And they'd need to burn ~15 of these fuel elements per second, each and every second, which means they'd need to get the fabrication cost down the order of 10 cents per, a reduction of several orders of magnitude. Ain't gonna happen. It's a jobs program for bomb designers. quote:It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms - fission - rather than squashing them together in fusion. It's also markedly different from current nuclear power because that is actually capable of generating useful quantities of electricity. We could build how many LFTRs for the cost of one NIF?
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Oct 8, 2013 15:25
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Well I don't see the problem, shutting down a TRIGA is pretty easy.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyN2E75VGw4
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Oct 29, 2013 02:58
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GrumpyDoctor posted:Can we get a layman's summary of what's going on here? Sure. It's a little research reactor that's passively safe. There's a single control rod, and if you pull it out all the way the power level will go way up, from about a dozen watts when the reactor is merely critical to a few hundred megawatts when it goes supercritical because you just pulled the single control rod all the way out. Which means it heats up, and since it heats up it expands. And because it expands it's no longer in a geometry that supports a chain reaction, the distance between fuel atoms has increased enough that neutrons flying out of fission reactions aren't able to reach another fuel atom to keep the reaction going. So the reaction stops, the reactor basically shuts itself down. That process takes about 30 milliseconds, which means that the reactor puts out about 10 whole joules during that power spike.
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Oct 29, 2013 03:27
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GrumpyDoctor posted:What is it about this design that makes it unsuitable for non-research reactors? It's very small. There are larger reactor designs that incorporate passive safety.
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Oct 29, 2013 15:13
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Pander posted:So on one day, Germany's solar power could match the output of about 20 nuclear plants, yes. But nuclear runs at a high capacity factor, running almost all the time. Solar can't produce much on cloudy days, or at high latitudes in winter. So what it manages to do on a record day is fantastic, but for the year the entire solar capacity in 2011 could have been made up by 2 nuclear reactors. In 2012, it required 3. And the costs for them to be able to do that are extreme. Germany doesn't have much in the way of natural gas, so to do load-following as the solar output waxes and wanes they use coal. Lots of cruddy brown lignite. And wood. They're actually burning wood to generate electricity: 38% of their "renewable" energy comes from chopping down trees and burning them like it was the 1300s.The German love for solar is having awful environmental and economic consequences and is a really dumb and unsustainable idea, mostly because it's about the worst place you can imagine to install solar. What it has actually done is to replace a lot of nuclear power with coal power which is literally the worst thing possible. This is a great, well-footnoted article on just how mind bogglingly bad Germany's solar scheme is: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/10/04/should-other-nations-follow-germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power/ Phanatic fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Dec 13, 2013 |
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Dec 13, 2013 11:03
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Trabisnikof posted:I like how that article is by a sub-sea hydrolics engineer who lives in Houston rather than someone with knowledge about the German energy economy. I like how you engage in poisoning the well to dismiss out of hand all 29 sources he cites to support his claim, including Spiegel and Reuters. Trabisnikof posted:Uh, no...Germany gets paid for the electricity it exports. It actually gets paid a lot because it exports during peak hours and imports during off-peak hours (exporting further west and importing from the east too further helps the cost). Germany exports more electricity than any other country in the world. I like how you say that as if it's inherently a good thing. It's not. Germany "gets paid" for exporting electricity, but it doesn't *profit* from it, because what it gets paid for exporting it is less than the cost of generation. They're effectively paying other countries to use excess solar power they generate, which is wasteful and inefficient and discourages those other countries from building their own cleaner power sources: quote:On sunny summer afternoons, Germany actually exports power at a loss compared to generation costs: EUR 0.056/kWh average electricity export sale price in 2012, [18] vs EUR 0.165/kWh average lifetime cost for all German solar installed from 2000 to 2011. [14] (This is optimistically assuming a 40 year system life and 10% capacity factor — reality is probably over EUR 0.20/kWh.) German utilities often have to pay heavy industry and neighboring countries to burn unnecessary power. On sunny summer days, businesses are firing up empty kilns and furnaces, and are getting paid to throw energy away. GulMadred posted:
One of the sources going into the awful, unsubstantiated, clearly written by an incompetent Forbes article cites the German Association of Energy and Water Industries: quote:Germany still uses large amounts of the dirtiest coal, lignite, and its use is rising. Both hard coal and lignite are being burned in larger amounts in Germany, despite its climate emissions targets. In 2011 lignite accounted for 24.6 of German electricity, and this rose to 25.6 in 2012. Hard coal rose from 18.5% to 19.1%. Thus coal accounted for a higher proportion of generation, and CO2 emissions likely have risen as a result. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Dec 13, 2013 |
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Dec 13, 2013 14:34
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QuarkJets posted:In Arizona I can anecdotally say that it's becoming more popular each year, since people are noticing the nice federal and state subsidies that make installation relatively cheap. This'll change as the rent-seeking shifts. The APSC already wants the utility commission to let it pay lower rates for net-metered power, and won permission to start charging a fee to customers who have solar panels. The installed solar base goes up you're going to see more of that. It's analogous to how when just a few people have electric cars, the government wants tax credits to encourage people to buy more electric cars. But then when a lot of people have electric cars, the government wants to tax electric cars because it means not as much gas tax revenue is being collected.
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Jan 10, 2014 19:59
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Install Windows posted:Just goes to show why fuel taxes were never a particularly smart idea for permanent infrastructure funding (like just about everything, it should have been progressive income tax for that purpose). Fuel taxes are, prior to electric vehicles, a really good proxy for miles driven. Use the roads more, you pay more in tax. A progressive income tax for the same purpose provides a disincentive for people to minimize their use of the resource; if you're going to tax me the same whether I drive or not, might as well drive. They're regressive in nature, but you can offset that by other means. If you want to tax people who use the roads in order to fund the upkeep on the roads, then a fuel tax has a lot to recommend it as a way of doing so.
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Jan 10, 2014 20:57
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Install Windows posted:Yeah and the whole idea just doesn't make sense unless created with the idea that efficiency can never go up and actual usage will never go down. That'd be the case if the tax amount were set in stone, but it's not. A tax on fuel is actually a *driver* of efficiency, because it's a disincentive to use more fuel. Again, if you're taxing me by the same amount of my income no matter how much I drive on the roads, then I don't have as much incentive to purchase a fuel-efficient car. With a fuel tax, the funding of the roads falls disproportionately on the people whose vehicles cause a disproportionate amount of damage: heavy fuel-sucking SUVs and trucks (which, hey, means it stops being disproportionate). quote:Meanwhile much infrastructure maintenance doesn't actually go down with less miles driven or fuel used. Road maintenance does. Especially when there are fewer heavy vehicles being driven fewer miles. quote:And that's before you get into how most states have long used gas/diesel taxes for funding all forms of transportation That's not really an argument against fuel taxes, that's an argument against specific-purpose taxes being dumped into the general fund and used to pay for <whateverwefeellikethisweek>. quote:Especially when you consider that the richer you are the more leeway you have to avoid it and vice versa. How does one avoid a fuel tax, no matter how rich you are? If I'm Eric Schmidt and I fly around everywhere in my private jet, there's still taxes on that fuel. How does your statement there not apply similarly to income taxes? The rich don't have more leeway to avoid income taxes than poorer people do? If you want to adhere to the notion that the users of a resource should be the ones who fund it, and that that funding should be in proportion to their use, a fuel tax is a *great* way to fund the roads, until (a) you do something like not raise the tax for 20 years which constricts your revenues because one of the intended effects of the tax, to reduce fuel consumption and miles driven, has actually come to pass, and (b) fuel consumption stops being a good proxy for miles driven, which has started to happen. And then you reach the point we're at, where the general fund has to start kicking money back to the highway fund to make up for the shortfall. I haven't seen any solid answers for this. Raising the tax is complicated, because while it would raise revenues in the short-term, it's then an even larger disincentive for consuming fuel. On one hand, most of the low-hanging fruit for improving ICE fuel efficiency has been picked, it's not like we're going to start turning out 40mpg SUVs. But on the other hand, overall fuel efficiency would go up a lot if the tax seriously started incentivizing people to buy smaller vehicles. And on the other other hand, if they *did* do that, then road maintenance requirements would go down and you wouldn't need as much revenue in the first place. But that still doesn't touch (b): as more people go electric, fuel use becomes a worse proxy for miles driven. And another much-floated solution, sticking trackers in everyone's car so you can just track their miles driven directly and bill them accordingly, is politically a giant can of worms; you can't just look at the odometer, you need to track location, because otherwise you'll be taxing people on driving miles in another state, or on private roads, etc. Oregon has a voluntary scheme based on that sort of tracking, and they really really promise to destroy the personal records after 30 days, but good luck getting a lot of people to sign up for that sort of thing now, in light of Snowden's revelations, etc. If you're willing to forego the notion that the users of a thing should pay for it, okay, sure, income tax it is. But if you don't want to charge people who aren't using a thing for the use of a thing, what else can you come up with?
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Jan 10, 2014 21:30
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Trabisnikof posted:I forgot to include that one! A whole 200 tons? Wow. Imagine that. A whole dump truck for a single plant per year. That sure is a lot.
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Jan 15, 2014 00:57
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Pander posted:
Baseload's a myth, though. You know, if you assume ideal generator availability, transmission network availability, and perfect meteorological forecasting skill.
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Jan 15, 2014 01:40
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Dusseldorf posted:I would guess that you could find a number of well respected physicists who think that Fusion power is a tractable problem. *Fusion*, sure. Fusion's trivial. You can build a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor without a lot of trouble at all. Real actual fusion. The number of well-respected physicists who think that commercial fusion power, *especially* commercial ICF fusion power, who don't have a vested interest in keeping the grant money coming is probably around the bat-wing number.
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Feb 14, 2014 05:52
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amanasleep posted:In 2012 they generated the 1.8 Billion degree temperatures necessary to ignite pb11 fuel, shattering previous DPF records. The problem is that it doesn't look like pb11 fusion can actually generate net energy. This MIT paper is well-known and fairly devastating to such fusion schemes: quote:Although there have been a few proposals for fusion reactors employing plasmas far out of thermodynamic equilibrium (such as migma and inertial-electrostatic confinement), there has never been a broad, systematic study of the entire possible range of such devices. This research fills that gap by deriving fundamental power limitations which apply to virtually any possible type of fusion reactor that uses a grossly nonequilibrium plasma. Two main categories of nonequilibrium plasmas are considered: (1) systems in which the electrons and/or fuel ions possess a significantly non-Maxwellian velocity distribution, and (2) systems in which at least two particle species, such as electrons and ions or two different species of fuel ions, are at radically different mean energies. These types of plasmas would be of particular interest for overcoming bremsstrahlung radiation losses from advanced aneutronic fuels (e.g. ^3He-^3He, p-^{11}B, and p- ^6Li) or for reducing the number of D-D side reactions in D-^3He plasmas. Analytical Fokker-Planck calculations are used to determine accurately the minimum recirculating power that must be extracted from undesirable regions of the plasma's phase space and reinjected into the proper regions of the phase space in order to counteract the effects of collisional scattering events and keep the plasma out of equilibrium. In virtually all cases, this minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power, so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies, reactors employing plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium will not be able to produce net power. Consequently, the advanced aneutronic fuels cannot generate net power in any foreseeable reactor operating either in or out of equilibrium.
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Feb 14, 2014 06:41
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Pander posted:Looked at the infographic and that base article. "This has got to have a staggering number of assumptions" was the first thought that jumped to mind. It seems to be just a bunch of naive calculations: "California needs a much power, x solar + y wind + z hydro = a, the day is saved!" Great for California. What happens when California's producing more solar than it needs and it's cold in Seattle?
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Mar 4, 2014 19:41
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Making electric cars sound like IC engine cars is dumb. They should sound like the cars in the Jetsons.
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May 21, 2014 15:23
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crazypenguin posted:Yeah, I think you're nuts with that last bit, but there's actually something good to talk about in the first bit here. The obstacles of load-following with nuclear power are surmountable: http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp.pdf quote:Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.
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Jul 8, 2014 19:51
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Hedera Helix posted:I vaguely recall reading about instances where colored filters above a thin-film panel would concentrate light on it, bolstering its ability to produce power. Would this actually work, or would the filters reduce the amount of light actually reaching the panel? Reduce it relative to what? Let's say incoming irradiance is 1000 watts/m^2. If you have 1 square meter of solar cell, you can capture 1000 watts of incoming light. You could, instead of doing that, use a square meter of solar concentrator to intercept that 1000 watts of irradiance and concentrate it into an area of, say, 1/20th square meters. So you need less solar cell. But yes, you're going to lose energy in concentrating it into that smaller area, so your 1/20 m^2 solar cell won't have 1000 watts of input, it might have 500. But in any event, you're not going to get more than 1000 watts with a square meter of collector, whether the collector's a solar cell or a material that concentrates that square meter's worth of input into a smaller area of solar cell. Also, this book is great (and surprisingly funny in places, the author has a wit that's pretty much perfectly suited to this subject) and everyone should read it: http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-Mountains/dp/1605984922/ Phanatic fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 12:55
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Baronjutter posted:We used to have a specific space colonization thread, but since we don't I thought I'd ask this here. No, because as insolation drops the size/mass of your collectors becomes impractical. For our solar system/level of tech, the cutoff is around Mars. The little Spirit/Opportunity rovers used solar panels, the larger ones (Curiosity, Vikings) use RTGs. Pioneer probes going to the inner system used solar arrays, Pioneer 10 and 11 to the outer system used RTGs, as did the Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, etc. Generally; technological development pushes the boundary outward and Juno's on the way to Jupiter and will be exclusively solar-powered, but the falloff is inevitable and pronounced - Juno's solar array could produce 18,000 watts at 1AU but will be producing only 400 in Jupiter orbit. quote:If one had access to asteroids would nuclear become more of an option or would just mass producing solar and pointing it at the sun always be the cheapest option? The thing about space is that you're not talking about standard economic factors. Anything we're doing in space now or in the near-term future is going to be a net money sink, not a source of profit, so it's not the cheapest option that's going to be chosen. *Not* building and launching the Curiosity rover to mars is the cheapest option, but given that we want to do that, and the mission requirements are such-and-such, we went with an RTG to power it, even though RTGs are a ridiculously uneconomical way of generating electricity - the point of the mission isn't to be economical. As a practical matter, spacecraft are enormously mass-limited. More mass means that you need more fuel to maneuver or station-keep or change orbits, and you need more fuel to carry that fuel around until you burn it, and so on. So generally speaking, since space flight is so expensive anyway that the cost of getting that mass into space pretty much dwarfs the cost of what the mass *is*, when the mass of solar panel you'd need to generate the electricity you need to do what you need becomes greater than that of a nuclear source, you go nuclear. Under future economies, especially if you posit an arbitrarily low cost to orbit, then that changes and the particulars are going to vary by application. quote:What if one was not so close to the sun? Nuclear requires a lot of cooling and such, how could this be done in space? In space, you're fundamentally cooling by radiators. You can have coolant loops to move heat from one place to another within a spacecraft, but the only way to eject the heat into space when you're done moving it is to radiate. Radiators radiate power proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so pick a temperature that your radiator material can handle and figure out how much area you need to dissipate your thermal power, and then realize you need some multiple of that area because you can't radiate into, say, the sun. That's a downside with RTGs, because they're essentially constantly at full-throttle; a 2000-watt RTG might produce 150 watts of electrical power, but even at times when you don't need all those 150 watts of electricity you still need to dissipate 2000 watts of heat. There's still a space flight thread, even though the colonization one died, this question would be definitely on-topic there.
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Jul 22, 2014 18:28
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Baronjutter posted:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3580990
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Jul 22, 2014 19:45
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EoRaptor posted:Any orbital factory is probably going to use solar. Space isn't really a concern in space, so huge arrays are just a matter of construction and upkeep But again, *mass* is. Even if you're in orbit, you need to do stationkeeping and adjustments (the occasional avoidance maneuver if nothing else). There comes a point where the mass of panels is something you want to avoid (and the construction and upkeep issue scales with array size as well). quote:Nuclear RTG wouldn't never have enough power for serious factory work, and other types of nuclear would probably be more expensive to build than solar panels and more expensive to run as well. All are more expensive than staying home. Again, cost isn't the primary concern by definition, mission requirements are. We don't power submarines with nuclear reactors because it's less expensive than diesels, we do it because we want the things to be able to do what they do. EoRaptor posted:Panels also are a net negative to heat, which is a nice benefit. Bwuh? What do you mean by that? They're not serving to cool the thing. They can't, they're sitting in the sunlight by design. You can't cool off by radiating into that unless you're hotter than the thing you're radiating into. quote:Lunar bases would probably go nuclear due to variance in sunlight availability. Ideally fusion of some sort and scavenge fuel from the lunar surface, or fission and mine it from the local rock. Probably borrow a lot from submarines with a liquid metal reactor of some sort. Fusion is really, really hard and will probably never generate economical electricity but this is one of those cases where, again, the economics of it isn't the primary concern. It's still really, really hard though. At least on the moon you have somewhere else to dump the heat than by radiating into a vacuum. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 20:15
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EoRaptor posted:
Oh, okay, gotcha. Yeah, that's what the ISS does, there's a liquid coolant loop (ammonia) carrying the heat from the station to the radiators on the back side of the panels. quote:Lunar will probably be standard nuclear honestly, it's compact, reliable and cheap. Fusion is only given consideration because of how much He3 you'd have access to. There's actually not all that much He3, even putting aside how insanely hard He3 fusion would be. Better off digging up the abundant thorium.
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Jul 22, 2014 20:46
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Trabisnikof posted:
Yes, this. As the ultimate example, look at Palo Verde. Sure, it's located on the Gila River, but the Gila River's a dry riverbed for most of each year except at the end of the summer. It buys treated wastewater from Phoenix and boils 20 billion gallons of that each year.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:23
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Meanwhile, in the world of solar thermal: Because, you know, global warming won't kill many birds. Maybe more people would treat global warming as an environmental emergency if the people with the biggest professed interest in preserving the environment would act as if it were one.
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Aug 18, 2014 21:13
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Frogmanv2 posted:Nuclear power has major problems in Australia, because we tend to build cities in the same places that make good sites. You need huge amounts of fresh water, You need to tell this to the people who are running Palo Verde outside of Phoenix, Arizona, which is the largest power plant in the entire US and isn't located near any fresh water.
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Aug 25, 2014 14:43
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The Avweek article says:quote:This crucial difference means that for the same size, the CFR generates more power than a tokamak by a factor of 10. That also means that it's generating 10 times the neutron flux, so the same materials issues that are a potential showstopper for tokamak commercial fusion are even worse here. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 19:23
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Building a new nuclear plant on land gets people all NIMBYish, but no one seems to mind that the Navy is still building reactors on a regular basis. Couldn't they take some of their existing reactor designs and put a bunch of them on barges off the coast to provide power? Stick five of the reactors the Nimitzes use on there, and you've basically got the output of a standard US nuclear plant. Naval reactors aren't exactly designed to produce economical electricity. For one thing, they require metallic uranium that's enriched to a considerably higher degree than civilian plants (the stuff in US naval reactors is basically bomb-grade, if you got your hands on some you could build a gun-type bomb without much difficulty), because they want to extend the duration between refueling. And they almost certainly don't meet the regulatory requirements for civilian plants. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:People would freak out if the Government actually built powerplants and probably raise a huge stink. Also the Republicans would do everything to torpedo it. It's the *Republicans* who hate nuclear power now? Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 16:18
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor Very very much so. quote:550 each is well on the way to industrial scale generation. MWth = megawatts, thermal. The plant makes that much heat. We don't care about heat except insofar as we need to cool the plant. What comes out, MWe, megawatts electrical, is what matters. The point of a naval reactor is to generate steam to turn a turbine to turn reduction gears to turn a shaft to turn a prop to make the ship go, the electricity is almost incidental. The Nimitz's electrical generation capacity is around 60-70 MWe, in line with the earlier figures per reactor. quote:It looks like getting 1 GW of modern nuclear generation costs about $4-4.5b. The George H.W. Bush, with similar generation capacity, came in at $6.2b. Strip off the runways, guns, lodging for 5000 people, etc, etc, and I don't see why the cost wouldn't be competitive. See, here's the thing. As I mentioned above, naval reactors use HEU for fuel. They are a huge proliferation concern, or rather, they would be if they weren't either out at see or in ports in secure facilities guarded by lots of men with guns. They do not have the massive containment structures dictated for civilian plants. You cannot just go putting them on barges and parking them off of coastal cities. And you don't just take a nuclear aircraft carrier and "strip off" the stuff that's not a reactor and have it wind up costing *less*. The idea is literally a non-starter. They once stuck a nuclear reactor on a Liberty ship and used it to deliver 10 whole megawatts to the Panama Canal Zone for several years, but it was a low-enrichment plant and it wasn't done because it was economical to do it, *and* it was used alongside a diesel power barge that generated twice as much electricity. Know what would have been cheaper? A second diesel power barge.
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Oct 24, 2014 17:32
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The Ivanpah solar power generation facility isn't generating near as much solar power as it claimed it would: http://breakingenergy.com/2014/10/29/at-ivanpah-solar-power-plant-energy-production-falling-well-short-of-expectations/ quote:The Mojave Desert plant, built with the aid of a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee, kicked off commercial operation at the tail end of December 2013, and for the eight-month period from January through August, its three units generated 254,263 megawatt-hours of electricity, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. That’s roughly one-quarter of the annual 1 million-plus megawatt-hours that had been anticipated. As a bonus, the plant is applying for a $540 million federal grant to pay off the 1.6 billion loan. So Google and NRG put the taxpayer on the hook to build the plant, want the taxpayer to pay back the loan anyway, and still get paid when they sell the electricity on the market. Pretty sweet job if you can get it.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:58
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Pander posted:Hydro power is deceptively awful for the environment. You lose the area's natural conditions, which in some cases is a travesty (Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite was a particularly wonderful environment lost in the 30s). You also introduce great risks to industry and population centers, because dam failures, while relatively uncommon, have incredible consequences. Those risks to industry and population centers aren't just from outright dam failure. The people pointing out Hoover Dam as an area-wide panacea, take a look at this pic I took:  Floating by Phanatic, on FlickrThat's back in 2009. The water levels have continued to drop, and are at their lowest since the dam was built. The cities and farming that were a direct result of building the dam in the first place are in jeopardy of losing their water. If it drops 80 more feet, the pipes that extract water for Las Vegas will go dry, so they're building a billion-dollar expansion to be able to tap water from lower down. But if the level declines to 900 feet, then Arizona, California, and New Mexico don't get *any* water from the dam. Lake Mead gets fed from Lake Powell, which is also low. Hoover Dam's capacity is already down by about 25% because of the lower water levels. Dams are pretty lovely for the environment: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5617/
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Nov 24, 2014 15:22
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double nine posted:holy poo poo. What happened, increased water consumption, change in rainfall, supplying river changed course? 15 years of drought coupled with induced demand. Hey, look at that, we build this steady reliable water supply for the southwest to spur development, and then the increased development resulted in a water shortage!
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Nov 24, 2014 16:03
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Maybe California should stop using their water to grow grass. California should probably do a lot of things. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-drought-california-couple-in-trouble-for-not-watering-lawn/ quote:Michael and Laura Korte felt they were answering Gov. Jerry Brown's urgent call to turn off the tap.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:13
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Pander posted:Yeah. An avowedly pro-science guy like Bill Maher still listens to anti-vax poo poo. Seems hard to determine if there's a common denominator for single-issue scientific illiteracy amongst otherwise sensible people. And Bill Nye, who goes around mocking global warming deniers, is an anti-gmo nutbar. We came down from the trees too early.
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Dec 23, 2014 20:43
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Solar eclipse on Friday could cause some big problems in Europe: http://news.yahoo.com/europe-braces-unprecedented-power-issues-solar-eclipse-141647002.html;_ylt=AwrBEiK_VwhVxxAAH4XQtDMD quote:If the morning of March 20 turns out to be very sunny -- before the eclipse hides the sun -- the sudden drop-off in production could reach 34,000 Megawatts, the equivalent of 80 medium-sized conventional power plants.
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Mar 17, 2015 20:03
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Jakcson posted:This is a little off-topic, but I hope I don't get flamed too much for posting this. Didn't you just answer your own question? It'd be horribly inefficient and expensive, so no, it would not make more sense than some of our current energy gathering strategies.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:55
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Deteriorata posted:Coal and oil are 100% carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years. Coal is. Oil's not. That's why burning natural gas is a shitload cleaner than burning coal, you're burning 4 hydrogens for every carbon.
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Apr 28, 2015 17:08
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Kaal posted:Coal is used for electrical generation, and a lot of electricity is used to heat houses during the winter. In those older houses where biomass is used to heat instead of central heating, biomass directly replaces that energy cost (and in a much more efficient way than electrical room heaters). I think that you might be surprised at how many normal, residential houses still use wood fireplaces and pellet stoves. Wood fireplaces are terrible for heating. Most of the heat goes right up the chimney, and the warm air that goes out is replaced by colder air being drawn in from outside the house. No way is that more efficient than electrical room heaters. Modern wood stoves, properly installed, are useful. But fireplaces are pretty much awful.
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Apr 28, 2015 21:33
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OwlFancier posted:Of course it isn't, but my point is that if you are trying to avoid high levels of pollution, you're going to need to dump your poo poo somewhere. If you have a million people's worth of poo poo, you have to dump that poo poo somewhere. If you have a million people spread out over an area the side of Texas, you have to dump that poo poo somewhere. If you have a million people spread out over an area the size of 1/12th of Mumbai, you have to dump that poo poo somewhere. In both cases, you have the same amount of poo poo to dispose of. In one case, it's already all in a very centralized location. In the other case, it's spread out all over the place. quote:If you're trying to let nature return to greenery, that seems somewhat incompatible with dumping poo poo all over it, not to mention the increased transport costs of moving all the poo poo out of your backyard to somewhere else. See above. Same amount of poo poo to get rid of. You think getting rid of it from a much smaller centralized location takes *more* resources than getting rid of it from a much larger area? Or is what you're thinking is that a million people in Texas can each just dig a hole in their back yard and poo poo into it and that doesn't really count as pollution?
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Apr 28, 2015 22:51
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OwlFancier posted:Depends on the poo poo. That's literally how most of the world used to do it for a long time. Great, most of the world also dealt with fun things like most babies dying before they're old enough to work and yanking abcessed teeth out with wooden pliers. And in every single case, "most of the world" fled the farms for the growing, industrializing cities as soon as they got the loving chance because farming to live sucks a high hard one. There are almost 8 billion people on this planet. They're going to eat, and they're going to poo poo. Saying "Oh well it'd be better if everyone lived in much lower population densities" doesn't work. quote:And again, it's not just about waste, water and food are also far easier to get from a distributed area than from a very small space. How do you feed a city without large amounts of surrounding farmland? Huh? It's way easier to deliver water to a million people in a small city than it is to get it to a million spread out over a large area. Yes, you need large amounts of surrounding farmland to feed a city, but you know what? It's a fucklot better for everyone if that surrounding farmland is producing the maximum amount of crops/acre than it is if everyone who lives in that city decides to go out to the fields and grow just enough food for them to eat. See, oh, Cambodia, and *literally everywhere else that has been tried*.
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Apr 29, 2015 00:18
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2MW of wind turbine uses about 900 pounds of neodymium and dysprosium. Total production of *all* rare earth elements is on the order of 140,000 tons annually. US production of neodymium is a whole honking 600 tons per year. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:668091/FULLTEXT01.pdf http://www.techmetalsresearch.com/2009/03/braking-wind-wheres-the-neodymium-going-to-come-from/
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Apr 29, 2015 16:25
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silence_kit posted:Edit: ^^^^^ I'll look at that, thanks. Money quote: quote:...wind turbines armed with permanent magnets require 0.7-1 ton of neodymium alloy for every megawatt (MW) of capacity. And a single Scanwind 3500 DL wind turbine with a 3.5 MW capacity, produced by a Finnish company called The Switch, needs more than 2 tons (equal to approximately 0.6t/MW produced) of neodymium-based (Nd-Fe-B) permanent magnet material for manufacturing...In order to achieve enough wind power based electricity supply for global from Wind, Water and Sunlight (WWS) system, and increase by a factor of more than 5 in annual neodymium world production would be needed, which is quite impossible to be realized for a long time even with new extraction along with recycling measures. Seriously, man, if you look at figures saying we'd need 1/10th of *global steel production* to do this and think "That sounds reasonable, it's only 10%" you need to think about it more.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:38
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