Well, in my defense that post was TLDR and it was all quote, with little commentary by the post-aire.
Reading lots of information is silly. Just make things up and hope nobody notices.
Like how nobody can build ten thousand windmills, and even if they could, the wind doesn’t blow all the time so it won’t work.
If you have 10,000 windmills at 1.74 MegaWatts each, that’s 17.4 Gigawatts! (or is it?)
Yeah, but that would cost over 17 billion dollars!!
Besides, nobody can put up that many windmills and get 1.74 MegaWatts average energy out of them!
Well, OK but that is a power company, and they can run that into their grid and … wait … hmmm
Meanwhile, the news from Godzilla country is pretty fucking grim.
Like when you said there were photos of radiation victims? Or when gonzomax lied about core radiation being released?
Or like how nobody could have expected a tsunami to damage reactors! When the record Meiji Sanriku Earthquake Tsunami of 1896 was measured at 125 feet.
We should be glad this one wasn’t anywhere near that, or imagine how hard it would be to convince everybody that nuclear power is safe and the Japanese planned for this.
You should use this as your sig line.
I think when people post solid facts, with links and everything, the true believer just ignores it and tries to focus on anything else. Especially a person. Facts are scary, and you can’t easily manipulate them, like you can people. For example:
1 gram of potassium = 32.3 Bq , sgives you an idea of the level of naturally occurring radioactivity. That is from the very small amount of potassium-40 that exists in potassium.
However, that is all beta decay, none of it is gamma rays.
Cesium-137, for comparism, 1 gram = 3,215,000,000,000 Bq
But it’s not a fair comparison, as the danger from C-137 is the far more destructive gamma radiation, not just the beta decay.
So saying C-137 is 10,000,000,000 times more radioactive than potassium, that isn’t the whole story. For that you have to use the other terms, which are calculated for damage to living cells.
But, when you consider that Plutonium (Pu) is 10,000,000,000 times more dangerous than C-137, you might start to see the reason for some concern over the reactors, and the burning fuel rods.
Or a big giant steam explosion, that not only wrecks the place completely, but makes it almost impossible to do anything about it until the radiation dies down.
See? People read that, and it’s all sciency and maybe scary cause they don’t understand it, so they just pretend Godzilla isn’t knocking at the door and hope he will go away.
Nah, people have jobs too, you nincompoop.
http://web.rollins.edu/~jsiry/puzzpu.html
So yes, to get that 10,000,000,000 times more dangerous number it was pulled out of your ass once again, no surprise there.
Of course, when somebody is a known liar, a lot of people don’t take their “facts” at face value.
It wasn’t just pulled out of his ass. He had no factual reason to believe it. It was a lie. He is a liar.
There is nowhere near enough land for wind to supply more than a fraction of the energy needed for the U.S.
This map shows wind gradients across the country.
At first glance it looks like a lot of places could be used for wind power. But one of the ways wind advocates tend to misrepresent this is that they don’t point out that the cost of wind power goes up dramatically when the average wind speed falls. So they’ll quote the cost of wind in the optimal locations, and then quote the amount of land available by including all the locations that have wind that could theoretically be used.
If you look at that map, the only places where wind is even remotely cost-competitive is in the areas of highest wind. The available power from wind goes up as the cube of velocity - twice the velocity equals eight times the power available to be extracted.
Looking at that map again, you’ll see that the locations of highest average wind speed are so small that they don’t even render on the map. It really only the red and purple areas that are reasonably cost-effective for wind power, and there aren’t too many of them as you can see. Of the area that there is, much of it is unavailable due to terrain, rights-of-way, access, local weather conditions due to proximity to hills and mountains, etc. Of the remaining high-quality regions that are accessible, many are already developed or being developed for wind power.
Looking at that map again, you can see a table of available power in the different regions. The areas below the dark purple provide only up to 250 w/m^2 of power. The best wind locations produce up to 1000 w/m^2 - four times the energy. These are the areas where wind has shown itself to be cost-competitive with other energy sources - but again, those regions are so small you can’t even see them at the scale of the map. By the time you’ve gotten to the dark purple areas, you need about twice as many windmills to extract the same amount of energy, which makes it cost prohibitive.
This map zooms in on Colorado, where you can see just how small the regions of optimal wind are.
Also, you need to consider transmission line losses and the need to build transmission lines to the wind farms in the first place. Because the power is so diffuse and distributed, you need a LOT of transmission lines. This means a lot of problems with rights of way - you’ll have to cross a lot of farms and towns and cities. And if the wind farm isn’t close to the community that it supplies, you lose a lot of energy in the transmission lines.
All in all, there are a lot of reasons why wind is not going to be the main source of power for America. The Department of Energy has tried to set a goal of 20% of America’s power from wind by 2030, but most people think that’s pie-in-the-sky, and I’ll be surprised if they get to 10% in the next 20 years. Currently, wind provides about 1% of America’s power. A factor of ten improvement would be quite a feat.
That’s not true either. Gamma radiation is much less destructive inside the body than beta decay is. High energy gammas will pass right through the body without interacting where betas are much more likely to interact with our atoms.
Betas are just easier to shield from the body than gamma rays.
I’ve handled Cs-137 sources hundreds of times a year and I’m still a healthy member of society.
That’s an ugly map. And old. '87? We hardly had computers in '87.
Here is a much nicer and more modern map illustrating the rapid growth of wind energy production in the US.
You’ll quickly notice Texas is really kicking it up a notch. They easily outdistance the rest of the country in wind power. Here’s an article aboutTexas wind power. There you will see that there are many days when wind power in Texas is so plentiful and cheap, the price drops to zero and they really wish they did have the transmission lines to sell it. They’re working on that.
I hope you’ll also notice that according to your wind resource map, Texas has no business producing wind power because it’s a totally crap state for wind.
And yet…
Something don’t add up, and I think it’s the nukers ain’t addin’ up.
Except that mutant skin of yours that changes to match the background. But that’s a feature, not a bug.
If you had millions of them and were able to turn them off and on, including turn them during no wind, then yes. See Cecil’s article.
But unless you post all the math and toxicology to support it, and have the utilities admit it, you are just being alarmist.
Damn straight. Every windmill that goes up is one-thousandth of a nuclear reactor, and that is money out of their pockets in government nuclear loan guarantees.
Oh, and here 1896 Sanriku earthquake - Wikipedia is the wiki article on the tsunami in 1896 someone else referenced with measured waves of 125 feet in the same part of Japan.
So planning for 125 foot waves was in order.
Speaking of tsunamis, Hawaii has been hit with some pretty high ones. I hope their nuclear power plants are rated for a 30-foot tsunami. Oh wait, Hawaii doesn’t have nuclear power plants!
Those Hawaiians, they so smart.
And yet the Texas State Energy Conservation Office has a map of Texas wind power on its own website that looks remarkably similar to the map that Sam Stone produced earlier.
Also, Sam’s map does NOT say that “Texas has no business producing wind power.” The map clearly shows a large section in the Texas panhandle that is Wind Power Class 4, as well as even larger Class 3 areas. Class 4 is generally considered a good site for a wind farm, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that “Areas designated Class 3 or greater are suitable for most utility-scale wind turbine applications, whereas class 2 areas are marginal for utility-scale applications but may be suitable for rural applications.” (If there’s one area where i think that Sam underestimates the possibilities of wind power, it’s in his rather pessimistic appraisal of the required wind levels for a viable commercial site.)
Texas is, in many ways, ideal for wind farms because it not only has viable wind levels in many parts of the state, but it also has large, open spaces to put the turbines. It’s not much use having a Class 5 or 6 area if it’s all built up with houses, or covered with old-growth forest, or if it consists of incredibly steep valleys and peaks.
Look, i think wind power is a Good Thing. Actually, i think it’s a Great Thing. I’d be really happy if every megawatt of electricity required by the people of the United States could be produced using wind power. I really would. I also happen to think that the turbines themselves look great, and are not the eyesore that some critics claim. But you can’t just put them up anywhere, and once you get through all the regulatory and property and other issues involved in getting them up, you still have to get the power itself to somewhere where people can actually use it.
While you talk about the issue of excess power and the need for transmission lines in Texas as if that were an unambiguous mark in the “Plus” column for wind power, it’s more complicated than that. As Sam notes, this power has to get where it’s going somehow, and how many people do you think want extremely high capacity power lines draped over their back yards in order to do that?
Cost-effectiveness is also an issue. Sure, in a perfect world we’d say, “Fuck the cost; we need to implement renewable energy solutions.” And in the long run that’s probably exactly what we might need to do. But your own Wiki link shows that part of the reason that wind is successful in Texas is that it enjoys the advantage of competing with a relatively high market price for electricity. Exactly how much more would you be willing to pay on your electricity bill every month? $10? $50? $200? I’d be quite happy to pay a bit more for a renewable electricity source, but there are plenty of people who are barely getting by as it is, and who would be hit hard by any significant rise in their power bill.
As for nuclear power, i was for a long time a staunch opponent, mainly for rather base political reasons. I’d still prefer it if we didn’t need to build nuclear plants, and, as i said above, i’d love it if every single megawatt could come from renewable resources. I also think that, in some areas of the country at least, we could put more emphasis on solar power generation, especially for residential use in places that get a lot of sun, like here in Southern California. But i’ve come to believe, after a fair amount of reading and a lot of wrangling with my own ingrained aversion to nuclear power, that nuclear really is a necessary measure if we all want to keep the power flowing.
And this applies especially to those of us who spend our time at places like the SDMB, and who use Google for our searches, and who watch our entertainment on Netflix or Hulu or YouTube. According to this government report (PDF), data centers accounted for 1.5% of all US electricity consumption in 2006, and projected growth is at 12% per year, meaning that these data centers will continue to double their energy use every 6-7 years. And that doesn’t even take into account the electricity powering the millions of computers and televisions and other personal equipment hooked up to the internet.
Why is it you guys can not accept an obvious truth. The big problem is the pools containing the radioactive waste. It is not the reactors themselves. The semi spent fuel rods have been exposed to the air. they are hot and dangerous. the argument that the brand new plants are much safer is irrelevant. Every plant stores spent fuel rods and radioactive waste in ponds at the site. We have them at 104 plants in America.
Then the stupidity of a one in a millinium claim. Perhaps you live in a place where people live 20 years. But TMI ,Chernobl and Japan have occurred in the last 30 years. Fermi was not a long time ago.
Sorry, maybe I’m stewpid, but I don’t get this at all.
What’s the point to be made in talking about total energy usage vs electricity?
Yep, it would be easy to save 8% but it really doesn’t matter - unless you mean to say that we have wind powered cars? Or maybe those solar powered busses are becoming so common? maybe trains powered by waves?
And why can’t nuke grow exactly - is it that hard to train people in nuclear science?
Unless the background is plaid. 