Yeah, you guys should definitely go and talk to the wind and solar guys. They will be like…:smack:…:smack::smack: BATTERIES! Of COURSE!! Why didn’t WE think of that??? Hell, now we can make some serious inroads against traditional electrical generation methods that Bo and Try has told us about batteries!!
Seriously. And try and get some money out of them too, since you’ve thought of this and it’s obviously never occurred to these guys. Maybe you’ve saved the planet with this timely suggestion, and perhaps earned some scratch too.
I confess XT that I assumed they were just joking. They can’t be that ignorant can they?
There are methods of energy storage such as molten sodium, kinetic energy storage using water etc. but what batteries are there that can store enough energy to supplies millions of households for a week while the weather picks up? None that I know of and none on the horizon.
If only there was some way of harnessing another type of energy, perhaps one that is abundant, renewable and incredibly energy-dense. Ah, a pipe dream I suppose.
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I confess XT that I assumed they were just joking. They can’t be that ignorant can they?
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They were totally serious and thought (and still think no doubt) that they were scoring points with those rejoinders. If you look back on some of the older threads on this subject by FX and his loyal band you’ll see pages and pages of similar stuff. I dis-recommend dipping in too deep, as that way lies madness, but maybe you’ll be ok if you just put a toe in, so to speak…
Not really realistic. I’ll post more later, but this falls under the fog of war heading. The person who could order the heroics (the PM) was not aware of the extent of the problem and there was so much conflicting information. I have a friend who is a high level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transportation and was working on no sleep for days after the Tsunami. It was a mess. The bureaucratic mindset is amazing. More on that later.
I read an account in a Japanese magazine about a guy who owned some specialized pump trucks which could have been used to fill the spent fuel pools, but he couldn’t get through to anyone who understood enough to utilize them. Stuff like that was happening. Of course, there were zillions of people with unrealistic ideas causing more noise to signal problems.
Well now I’m tempted but both you and XT have warned me off so…I’ve said my piece and will sidle out backwards. “never wrestle with a pig…” and all that.
Wise wording, since in 2012 the NRC approved construction of four new reactors at existing nuclear plants. Units 2 and 3 of the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station and Units 3 and 4 at Vogtle Electric Generating Plant. In addition, TVA’s new reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station restarted construction.
None of those seem to have any tsunami walls though :eek:
“Approving construction” is very general and vague, and all those projects are beneficiaries of corporate welfare, subsidies, and rate-payer gouging, as I said. In other words, DOE loan guarantees and advanced guaranteed cost recovery schemes that will cost rate payers billions, and will cost them many tens of billions more if the projects actually go forward. None of them will be finished before 2020, which means some unknown number of years after that, and the projects are already piling up huge overruns and delays. When they cancel the projects, rate payers and taxpayers of course will cover the billions in losses, and none of it is refundable.
You’ll show us!! With actual results!!! Wind cannot be relied upon! Sometimes the wind stops blowing all over the world for months at a time. And the sun? Ha! Sometimes the sun stops shining all over the world for months at a time.
You oughta fire off a memo real quick to the folks in Japan installing such a system right now and let them know it can never work before they go to all the trouble.
But I know how this will go- the batteries aren’t big enough for every circumstance! They weren’t installed yesterday, so forget it! That won’t get you 100% renewable power generation, so it needs to be trashed! And so on.
Watts Bar 2 is on-schedule for fuel-load in 2015. Vogtle and Summer are 2017 and 2018, respectively, and while there may be a few more delays - these are new reactor types after all - at this point they should be minimal.
Oh yeah, no “subsidies” or “gouging” at Watts Bar. TVA still has nearly the lowest rates in the country, receives no federal funding, and is operating at under its congressionally mandated debt limit.
But tell me more about new nuclear construction. Please be detailed. I’ll pass your wealth of knowledge on to my coworkers at Watts Bar, my former coworkers at Summer, and my friends at Vogtle.
Construction began in 1973! My God, that’s 40-fucking years already! This latest attempt to complete the project started in 2007 and was supposed to finished last year for $2.5 billion and now it’s maybe 2015 and it’s up to $4.5 billion. Yes, it has guaranteed cost recovery.
I look forward to any insights you may be able to provide. In the meanwhile, I had some time to do a little further reading which helped clarify a few of the things I was wondering about.
Then I moved on to Frontline’s interview with Japan’s former PM, Naoto Kan, and in so doing, I gained a *much *greater understanding of the chain of events. For anybody else unfamiliar with all of the intimate details about the response to the crisis, and wants it all explained in plain, easily accessible language, **I highly recommend reading the whole interview. He was surprisingly and refreshingly candid about the challenges and failures. Maybe he could have admitted more responsibility for some of those failures, but at least he acknowledged that they existed, which was more than I expected. Reading that interview is a really good primer for those of us who want to gain a better understanding of how it all happened, but rather not have to get bogged down in too many technical details.
Now, a bit of a disclaimer, given the thread’s vehemence: I imagine some might try to read into my endorsement of the former PM’s interview, and assume that I do so because I share his conclusions about the immediate future of nuclear power. I don’t think I do. My feelings on the issue either way are no where near as strong as most of the people in this thread seem to have. But, like everybody here, I’d like to see a move to clean, renewable, alternative energy sources ASAP. I just tend to agree with those who think “ASAP” requires intelligent implementation of *all *of our options in order to transition away from our current reliance on fossil fuels.
At the time I was quite unaware of the seriousness and dangers that were actually looming. The press, despite the lies about there being fearmongering, actually never spelled out the worst case scenarios, and that is a good thing. The worst case actually is something people don’t want to think about.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13627199&postcount=301 While the original story is long gone (of course), the reality is simple in regards to old reactors. They are not made to sustain a power outage of any time. Certainly since Fukushima we hope somebody got a clue, and they added safety features to prevent another first class disaster. It’s doubtful, since there is no information available to actually know.
The extreme danger that existed at the time, actually still is there. One bad earthquake, or another tsunami would fuck over the current situation at Fukushima, and we would be right back at the worst case scenario again. It could happen at any moment. That is the story the press ignores, and the nuclear lovers fear. It still is quite unbelievable that a State Department idiot, Julia Nesheiwat, simply avoided answering the critical question. And the press didn’t press her for an answer. They didn’t press anyone for an answer.
There’s the level of stupid we are faced with. “Goodness, I don’t even want to think what that could mean. That’s just something that we would have to really plan for it at the greatest scale. And** we’re hoping and praying that that’s not the case**.”
That pretty much sums up the response if it really does go completely off the rails. This is, in essence, the real problem with nuclear reactors. With modern power plants containing multiple reactors in a row.
If things, for whatever reason, actually get bad, it’s game over. There isn’t a solution. Much like what we see at fukushima right now, but of course a thousand times worse.
There isn’t a way to fix it. If it breaks bad, there isn’t a solution. At the heart of the fear and loathing, it’s the unspeakable truth. be it war, sabotage, earthquake, fire, flood or a meteor, or human error and stupidity, if things get bad, there isn’t any way to stop it at some point. There is no fix.
It’s what the lover of nuclear can’t ever admit, not even to themselves. That things could become so bad, even with suicide troops, there isn’t any way to stop it.
Chernobyl is considered “the worst” by most, when in reality it was sort of fixable, because it was all open, you could just keep dumping shit on it until it was safe enough to build something over it, and then build another thing over that, and keep doing that for the next 10,000 years or so.
Fukushima the problems are deep inside, and there is no way to fix it. Even the exposed cooling ponds full of their terrible dangers, even those can’t be fixed at present. It’s why it’s damn dangerous. They can’t move the danger to someplace safer. Certainly we all hope they have shored up the building, and we know they are covering all of the ruined buildings with new structures, and we all really hope there is no earthquake or other disaster to threaten the fuel ponds, before they figure out how to move the spent fuel.
Of course the groundwater issue is a real bitch. Not a small issue, because they have to deal with it for decades, or longer. You can’t stop pumping water. And the water is radioactive as hell. If the reactors weren’t leaking like crazy into the ground, it would be manageable. but it’s not.
It’s actually the dreaded “worst case” scenario of nuclear reactors. Complete meltdown. Except it’s three reactors. And four fuel ponds. And it’s just a fucking mess.
The more nuclear lovers try and spin it, the less anyone believes you.
My understanding is that they have done nothing to shore up the buildings from collapsing and making things worse. But until there are verifiable deaths from radiation beyond a reasonable doubt caused by Fukushima, this is no big deal.
The reason they have done nothing is that it is far too dangerous for construction crews to do anything to shore up the teetering structures.
Does anyone have any information on how the people who have lost their homes have been compensated? If they have.
This. Risk assessors will only tolerate so much and then it’s “impossible, once a million years, too expensive, too horrible to think about.”
That’s nuclear power guys. “Too horrible to think about.” Then it happens. Then it happens again, worse. We have a relatively small number of nuke plants now, and we want 1000s the world over? We can’t stop these things, we can’t really prepare for them, so we should not do them. Not for large scale commercial power at any rate.
Back to this… I have made quite a lot of money investing in renewable energy, very nearly doubling my money since starting in February. As for batteries, I am literally already on it, thanks. Investing in battery companies… maybe later, but besides that I am currently attempting to design and build my own. If I can pull it off, maybe I will make money off of the concept. Or maybe it will never be more than a hobby. Who knows? So far there isn’t anything to report.
But look. Solar and wind are installing ~70 gigawatts of capacity a year worldwide, increasing every year. The US total nuclear capacity stands at ~115 gigawatts (almost 350 gw globally), with little prospect for growth. From a purely investment standpoint, which looks most promising? I think the market for batteries will grow into a $100+ billion market, while nuclear seems to be in decline.
XT, what is it about nuclear power that makes you so agitated? I never see you like this- even when setting straight the most obvious trolls you proceed thoughtfully and straightforwardly. But when the topic turns to nuclear power, you go ballistic (pun intended). What’s the story?
It’s quite a quandary, especially since a well run, safe nuclear power plant, produces so little pollution, and so much power. Even knowing the dangers, I still like the idea of nuclear power, it’s an amazing thing. The ideal is so attractive. The harsh reality, so brutal and unforgiving.
They have done a lot to try and safe the plant. Every day more is being done. The estimated cost in US dollars, to fix the problem, is over 60 billion dollars. That is of course far too low, and since it is a decades long problem, odds are the cost will go up with each new disaster they can not anticipate. Like the Aug 4th quake this year. We all hope nothing worse happens there.
I find the power generation discussion interesting, like those facts there. There should be a serious thread on this.
It just doesn’t really matter to the current situation at the crippled power plant.
Safecast is a non-governmental grassroots organization that has been taking independent radiation readings in Japan since shortly after the quake. They compare and contrast their readings with official ones from both the Japanese government and other groups that have gathered data. Their data is probably better than the “official” sources simply because they have far greater resolution from a much larger pool of data. Their verdict on the situation boils down to: it’s not all that great, but you shouldn’t be losing your shit over it.
If you look back on some of the older threads on this subject by FX and his loyal band you’ll see pages and pages of similar stuff. I dis-recommend dipping in too deep, as that way lies madness, but maybe you’ll be ok if you just put a toe in, so to speak…