If these works are related to your profession of engineering, aren’t 180-degrees-wrong translations a bit–dangerous? Yikes!!
Not as dangerous as it sounds - engineering advice is generally translated by a professional translator who I hire. What’s bad is when amateurs in the media try to translate. For example, in one I was being asked to comment by a newspaper in SE Asia about what impact I thought a potential return to coal-powered shipping would have on transportation costs, and they made me sound like a freaking buffoon. So the only danger was to my reputation.
Well, even so, that must be aggravating.
Anyway thanks for replying.
To amplify what Una said, one of my buddies is a reactor core designer for a major company, and when he was in SE Asia working on a plant design team, I think he said that the translation team was getting paid in aggregate more than the engineers were, so concerned were they about accuracy of translation.
Perhaps this isn’t so unreasonable, considering that engineering generally involves a lot of documentation, if I’m not mistaken.
This may be worth a thread at some point, but it’s stunning to me how much documentation is needed to build a power plant, even just a “plain old coal” plant. It’s typical to see a single plant’s worth (for a plant built in the 1950’s or 1960’s) fill a 1,000+ square foot room solid with file cabinets and hanging plots. Nowadays it’s just measured in terabytes - I was on-site this spring to help a coal plant which was built less than 5 years ago, and their documentation was on the order of about 3-5 terabytes of unique data, and 15 terabytes total (one major problem with electronic files is that because they are so easy to duplicate and change, you end up with outrageous numbers of versions of files). I did a directory listing one time, and found out there were approximately 21 million files on the server.
And it can be almost impossible to find anything, because file numbers and version numbers are not kept the same. You have a case where there are 200GB of files from B&W, all of which have a unique filing system, then 200GB of files from Fluor, which have their unique system, and 100GB of files from Alstom…then on top of all of this, you have the plant imposing their own filing system and numbers. So someone yells “OMFG, scrubber bleed pump #3 motor is on fire! Which model is it so we can order a new one?” Then when you find it, you see that there are 53 versions of the design for a piddly-ass 25-hp motor, many of them with different specs, and it can take days to try to figure out what you need to order. Sometimes, you never find out, and you end up re-designing the motor from scratch.
It’s even worse when I work in Europe or Asia - example, a Portuguese power plant I worked at, which had a mix of design documents in French, German, Dutch, Russian, Italian, and English - with amazingly few in Portuguese, and absolutely none in Spanish. After a week on site I started to be able to read more languages than I ever thought I could. I don’t know how they keep anything straight, and apparently from what I saw on-site, they didn’t…
I recall in the early days of the Fukushima disaster how much trouble the plant workers had accessing vital information. The contaminated and damaged control rooms and offices was something they didn’t plan for.
Those crazy Scots. Tapping an inexhaustible clean source of energy, when they could be building reactors all along the coast.
What they don’t mention in the linked article is that Oyster 2 only generates 800kW, and has a maximum potential of 2.4MW. And the Oyster 800 project only generates 300-600kW per system, with a potential maximum of about 3MW. This entire project, in fact all their projects to date in Scotland, could be outstripped by one decent-sized wind turbine. Plus it’s sort of hidden exactly what the installed cost per kW and per kWh is, so we have no idea just how feasible this is compared to solar and wind.
one Oyster 800 = 750 homes
Waves, wind and sun. It’s almost like energy is almost free, and relatively safe, compared to nuclear, coal or even natural gas fired power plants.
Next thing you know, people are going to start thinking they can put solar cells and little windmills on their roofs or some such shit. Don’t they know huge, expensive and extremely risky nuclear reactors are the future?
Peak or sustained?
As an outside observer reading this thread, and commenting in this thread for the first time, I will say that you have come across incredibly badly. Are you in fact a pro-nuclear activist trying to make anti-nuclear activists look bad?
Quiet you. Are you trying to spoil my evil plan?
They said that the Oyster 800 is 300-600kW per system. Assume 600 - so for the Oyster 800, 600kW covers 750 homes. But a 1MW wind turbine covers only 240 to 400 homes? They seem be mixing up generation with capacity, or else they’re not being consistent.
Scotland has plenty of wind resources which could still be tapped before they have to go to things like the Oyster, is my point.
Oh, that was your point? Why didn’t you just say so?
Um…you do realize that 1MW > 600kW, right? I think that was the point…your article was bullshit and your assessment and fawning even more so. Not that this is going to surprise many people at this point.
-XT
http://www.oregonpowersolutions.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=35
They seem to be using a yearly view, so the Oyster system must be calculated at a higher sustained output.
Or their numbers could be incorrect.
Well of course.
I’m guessing it’s down to the variability of wind power. If situated well, tidal can consistently deliver up to 80% of peak allegedly, whereas wind is lucky to get 30% of peak.
That would give an annual output for tidal of 4,200,000 kWh for the tidal system, and 2,600,000 for wind. I guess they’ve done their claim on that sort of basis.
Scotland is in a hideously fortunate position for wind and wave power, with a massive coastline, and famously windy climate, all combined with a low population. There’s a good chance that we’ll be able to provide our long term energy requirements using these resources. For countries without the same ratio of coastline/windpower per person though, that’s not much use.