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Pittston2Sarasota, I wonder if you know about this blog: Georneys. It occurs to me you may like it and if you go there, you'll see that Evelyn has posted 20 interviews about Japan's crisis with her dad who is a nuclear engineer. The Dad Interviews are listed in the right side bar.
No Macrina........I am not familar with that blog........thankyou for the link to it......
AP IMPACT: Asia nuclear reactors face tsunami risk | Science Headlines | Comcast.net (http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-science/20110418/AS.Nuclear.Tsunami.Risk/ - broken link)
I respect you PITTSTON2SARASOTA so so much...your so kind...you remind me of the 'science man' on TV...so patiently explaining things...
But I think a better solution to nuclear energy would be to mandate all new homes be equipted with solar panels and a windmill...
I think large nuclear plants only benifit the companies who sell the electricity to the public...
I think every home could be energy self effeciant...and should be...
But to do so would rob the large energy companies of lot's of revenue...
So instead we're told we need these large plants or else...
And again...I respect your love or facination with nuclear energy...I just think there's other alternatives...
I wish that we could have a distributed grid where everyone makes their own power from green energy, like you envision. However, incident solar radiation and wind power isn't going to cut it for your home needs. Take the unincorporated Florida keys for example. Many days of MUCH more intense sunlight than the majority of the country, much better weather than most of the country in terms of heating costs, yet even solar-equipped homes there can't generate enough power to run their household applicances--to say nothing of A/C, heat, Electric cars, or any of the real power hogs of modern living. Thus they are bringing in utility cables to pull power from gas-fired plants.
We would need a 10-fold improvement in efficiency AND in energy capture. Thin-film solar conversion rates are below 10% and heavier equipment never beats 20%. Even if you could build a loss-less furnace or A/C (or vacuum cleaner for that matter) you simply can't extract the power you need to run your house from on-site solar and wind. To say nothing of apartment buildings or cities. Cities do an excellent job of improving the efficiency of supporting human life through mass transit/transport and the concentration of waste treatment/disposal; so we can't spread everyone out with their own little farm and solar cell without devastating the environment.
We should coat every roof in solar panels (or maybe solar water heaters, since they're more efficient) and, dam every river, and install wind turbines in every empty field. These are "cheap" (and will become more so at scale) and efficient sources of power. I would sooner see huge fields of wind turbines than a new nuke plant. However, nuke/coal/oil/gas are necessary evils for the foreseeable future. Nuke is simply the lesser (evil) of all of them.
I respect you PITTSTON2SARASOTA so so much...your so kind...you remind me of the 'science man' on TV...so patiently explaining things...
But I think a better solution to nuclear energy would be to mandate all new homes be equipted with solar panels and a windmill...
I think large nuclear plants only benifit the companies who sell the electricity to the public...
I think every home could be energy self effeciant...and should be...
But to do so would rob the large energy companies of lot's of revenue...
So instead we're told we need these large plants or else...
And again...I respect your love or facination with nuclear energy...I just think there's other alternatives...
Sponger explained it very well.....it's just not feasible and not consistent. However I believe where applicable it can be used. Remember there are already huge tax rebates in place to make your house more energy efficient; however the payback time can take decades and many people do not have the tens of thousands of dollars of money upfront to install these technologies during initial construction.
I just love Science....especially Fusion Power....Space/Cosmology...Physics etc......I'm nerdy/geeky.....I have a passion for it and enjoy educating other people....my little eyes light up.....ROFL....
I'm preparing a post on a safer nuclear reactor design with passive cool down features and another fusion/fission hybrid reactor which can dispose of most of our planet's spent nuclear fuel while also generating electricity safely. Stay tuned..
Sponger explained it very well.....it's just not feasible and not consistent. However I believe where applicable it can be used. Remember there are already huge tax rebates in place to make your house more energy efficient; however the payback time can take decades and many people do not have the tens of thousands of dollars of money upfront to install these technologies during initial construction.
I just love Science....especially Fusion Power....Space/Cosmology...Physics etc......I'm nerdy/geeky.....I have a passion for it and enjoy educating other people....my little eyes light up.....ROFL....
I'm preparing a post on a safer nuclear reactor design with passive cool down features and another fusion/fission hybrid reactor which can dispose of most of our planet's spent nuclear fuel while also generating electricity safely. Stay tuned..
Your excitement is contagious...if your excited about it, than so am I...
The AP 1000 reactors are the first new generation of Nuclear Reactors to be built in nearly 3 decades. Two reactors will be built Georgia along with 12 more in other locations........along with 6 others of various passive safety designs. The safety cooling systems can function without human intervention and without electricity.
I'll post on the Fusion/Fission Hybrid Reactor design in my next post.......they are inherently safe because the fission reaction is only iniated after a fusion pulse and fission essentially stops without the fusion input.
In this type of reactor the fusion events eliminate the need for a sustained nuclear chain reaction; this increases it's safety by many orders of magnitude.
This broadens the fuel the reactor can "burn" to include: unenriched Uranium, depleted Uranium, or even spent nuclear fuel from current reactors.
Also current designs "burn" at best a few percent of the nuclear fuel....this design can "burn" up to 90% requiring only one-twentieth the same amount of fuel for a given amount of generated power.
Instead of producing 2,500 kilograms of nuclear waste over a 50 year plant lifetime, this design produces only 100 kilograms and as mentioned can burn most of the waste from current reactor designs as fuel.
For you, and only for you...I did some research on my own, to better understand this new 'fission-fusion' concept...
And the best way I can break it down in lay mans terms is..to compare it with a 'turbo'...on a car or diesel engine...
And the same way turbos make use of the exhaust...which would be waste anyways...
This fission fusion process does the same with nuclear waste...it makes more efficient use of 'whatever'...
Interesting...
That's a fairly accurate layman's analogy......in some ways....it gets the point across.
Also remember that the fuel for Fusion/Fission reactors is of such low "quality" that it's nearly impossible to enrich it to the point of being used in nuclear weapons eliminating concerns of fuel being stolen and/or diverted for weapon's production.
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