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Kudaros posted:In any case, what do regulations for coal power plants look like in comparison? In certain parts of the US it seems that slurry spills into rivers and such are almost routine (once or twice a decade for my region), but little fanfare given despite what I imagine must be tremendous environmental damage. A lot of coal plants are very very old and are only operational because they are grandfathered in for regulations. There's actually been a fairly large switch over to natural gas as those coal plants are replaced and building "cleaner" coal plants is too onerous.
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Mar 15, 2016 06:38
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:33 |
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DrSunshine posted:Right, but it seems like the best design we have for getting heat from a reaction (be it nuclear or fossil fuels) is to basically heat up a lot of water and use the steam to turn some wheels. That hasn't changed since the 19th century! The issue I have with that is that you're losing potential energy due to frictional effects and inefficiencies in conversion for every stage you add to it. It would be (theoretically speaking) more efficient if we could somehow turn that reaction heat into current at the moment of creation, or close to it. The main efficiency loss (as you said) is the conversion of energy state. The problem is that there's not really a good way to turn coal (or uranium, etc) into electricity, and there's not really that good a way to turn heat into electricity either (without using water, etc). The efficiency I see for steam-turbine plants of all kinds is around 33-36%. That's still a sight better than solar is at the moment, even ignoring the low energy density of solar energy. computer parts fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 16:44
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With the cost of fuel right now, plug in hybrids seem like the better deal. Especially if you live within a 50 mile distance of your commute (either round trip or one way if your parking spot has a charger) since that seems to be the standard electric range on them these days.
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Apr 11, 2016 04:14
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3% for any sort of quality issues is really good, even though it's not even 3-sigma. The fact that those are non-life threatening issues makes it less of a concern though. Another issue regarding quality is that age might filter out the worst offenders. Like people didn't necessarily make houses better 60 years ago, just that the crappy ones from 60 years ago aren't around today.
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Apr 11, 2016 19:32
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Phanatic posted:
Again, failure is not a binary system. There's "not meeting specs" and there's "the consequences of not meeting specs". You're right that the first factor is fairly high, but the second factor is very low.
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Apr 11, 2016 21:33
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Phanatic posted:Car buyers don't say "Well, I have to bring the car in to the shop so they can fix the transmission, but at least it's only slightly failed and not exploded." It's like if your flight gets canceled: it doesn't really matter whether it got canceled because the inbound flight's toilet broke or it got canceled because the inbound flight's engines all sheared their bolts and fell off while landing, the inconvenience and costs are the same to you in both cases. Actually it does matter if you're not dying because of it in one case, and dying in the other.
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Apr 12, 2016 01:31
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Moinkmaster posted:
It's a little too high maintenance. The real sellers are the audio crystals that you can tape to your cables to get more audio fidelity.
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Apr 19, 2016 06:45
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Boten Anna posted:It says in the article that they have... 86% efficiency if I recall? It's in the 80% range, which seems REALLY good. That is very good efficiency, but the next question is power density. People like hydrocarbons because even though you only get ~30% efficiency, it's a lot of energy.
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May 11, 2016 17:18
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:33 |
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Pander posted:Well, if you're waiting for green energy to replace all baseload sources I have some good news for you on that front... Not in the relevant locations though.
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Sep 1, 2016 03:05
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