Nuclear Power

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Its sitting on a shelf in the basement of Big Oil companies, just waiting for the day when they can no longer make a profit on oil.

They're already working on other sources. Why do you think Shell bought out Seimens Solar? Solar can have a big future too, and they know it.

All we need is a more effective way of coercing electrons to get moving when photons hit them, and we're golden. 🙂

 

[FoBoT]

Originally posted by: Gibsons

Originally posted by: mercanucaribe

No, I think you CAN meet our energy needs with wind power, if we use the jet stream. Hydro power isn't environmentally friendly.

How do you propose we extract energy from the jet stream?

really really REALLY really tall windmills? 😕

 

[Rogodin2]

Thank god I won't have to share what I have. I have a nuclear reactor 150 miles south of my homestead. It doesn't really matter to me if our country builds reactors. I also don't have children that will have to deal with the byproduct of fisson. So normal that most of you people believe that atomic energy is the remedy for the sweat crude that feeds the machine. That's the soft veil that you pull over your everydayness.

Leathworking, organic farming, metalsmithing, basic medicine, hydro, and mechanics/physics, they are what you should have experience of. You poor bastards have nothing.

Rogo

 

[Gibsons]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Its sitting on a shelf in the basement of Big Oil companies, just waiting for the day when they can no longer make a profit on oil.

They're already working on other sources. Why do you think Shell bought out Seimens Solar? Solar can have a big future too, and they know it.

All we need is a more effective way of coercing electrons to get moving when photons hit them, and we're golden. 🙂

IIRC, if you cover the entire state of New York with solar panels, you won't have enough electricity for New York City (DrPizza might confirm or deny this).

 

[Rogodin2]

Germany produces %45 of its required kw by solar. They are a shaddy 😉 country, not alot of sun compared to the U.S.

Were basically fvcked though.

Rogo

 

[everman]

Waiting for zero point energy myself, anti-matter reactors too.

But on a more serious note, it is interesting to see some good progress with solar energy due to advancements in nanotechnology. I think nuclear fission is just a stop-gap until we have better solar and wind generation capabilities, with fusion being ready "when it's ready".

There was an interesting figure about how efficient solar panels would need to be to power all of our homes but I have forgotten it, I do know the source so I'll have to look it up. I think eventually we'll get there and have lesser need for centralized power generation.

 

[Rogodin2]

I hope too EV.

I just don't see it happening unless there is a strong catalyst.

Rogo

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
Germany produces %45 of its required kw by solar. They are a shaddy 😉 country, not alot of sun compared to the U.S.

Were basically fvcked though.

Rogo

AM I reading that wrong, are you saying you actually think Germany supplies 45% of its power with solar? IF so you are wrong by several orders of magnitude.

 

[mercanucaribe]

Originally posted by: Gibsons

Originally posted by: mercanucaribe

Originally posted by: mooglekit
We need to get past the whole "nuclear is bad!" mentality. Think about it for just a minute: is it worse to pump huge amounts of pollution into the air that directly affects the health of those in nearby communities and may have a direct impact on the global climate, or to use a smaller number of more effecient nuclear plants that produce a smaller amount of waste that, though radioactive, can be effectively contained?

I'm often surprised more eco-advocates aren't jumping behind nuclear energy...you could eliminate so much pollution by eliminating fossil fuel fired power plants, and to think you can replace all of those plants with hydro and wind alone is naive.

No, I think you CAN meet our energy needs with wind power, if we use the jet stream. Hydro power isn't environmentally friendly.

How do you propose we extract energy from the jet stream?

With giant kites. I heard about technology being developed on the radio.

 

[mercanucaribe]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
Thank god I won't have to share what I have. I have a nuclear reactor 150 miles south of my homestead. It doesn't really matter to me if our country builds reactors. I also don't have children that will have to deal with the byproduct of fisson. So normal that most of you people believe that atomic energy is the remedy for the sweat crude that feeds the machine. That's the soft veil that you pull over your everydayness.

Leathworking, organic farming, metalsmithing, basic medicine, hydro, and mechanics/physics, they are what you should have experience of. You poor bastards have nothing.

Rogo

My organic farming profession is at 225. I can't find the Tome of Organic Farming to raise my cap to 300.

 

[Rogodin2]

I got it wrong-germany produces 55% of the worlds global solar energy production.

Rogo

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Gibsons
IIRC, if you cover the entire state of New York with solar panels, you won't have enough electricity for New York City (DrPizza might confirm or deny this).

Maybe with today's solar technology. If I recall correctly, the average amount of power Earth receives, taking the spherical shape into account, is 316W per square meter.
Area of New York State = 141,205 square kilometers.

1,000,000 square meters per square kilometer.


141,205,000,000 square meters.
* 316
---------------------------------
44,620,780,000,000 watts

Efficiency of solar cells today is somewhere around 13%
5,800,701,400,000 watts, or 5.8 terawatts

According to this, that's more power than the entire country consumes.


If my quick math is correct.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
Thank god I won't have to share what I have. I have a nuclear reactor 150 miles south of my homestead. It doesn't really matter to me if our country builds reactors. I also don't have children that will have to deal with the byproduct of fisson. So normal that most of you people believe that atomic energy is the remedy for the sweat crude that feeds the machine. That's the soft veil that you pull over your everydayness.

Leathworking, organic farming, metalsmithing, basic medicine, hydro, and mechanics/physics, they are what you should have experience of. You poor bastards have nothing.

Rogo

Grow a lot of radioactive weed on that homestead, do you?

 

[wetcat007]

I believe I read the US military produces well over half the nuclear waste that we are stuck with disposing. So it's not the power plants alone that are creating all the waste.

 

[Rogodin2]

Grow a lot of radioactive weed on that homestead, do you?

Downwind only 😉 Tri-cities is already known for the birth defects-nothing upwind, let alone 150 miles north. Microsoft is using the power of the dams along the columbia here, as well as Yahoo, Intuit, and Intel-so no worries.

Rogo

 

[George P Burdell]

:thumbsup: to nuclear power. It's infinitely safer and cleaner than people give it credit for.

 

[mrkun]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubbia_reactor

Edit: Also, http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5261

 

[WildHorse]

Nuclear power industry can't manage its waste.

 

[Gibsons]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: Gibsons
IIRC, if you cover the entire state of New York with solar panels, you won't have enough electricity for New York City (DrPizza might confirm or deny this).

Maybe with today's solar technology. If I recall correctly, the average amount of power Earth receives, taking the spherical shape into account, is 316W per square meter.
Area of New York State = 141,205 square kilometers.

1,000,000 square meters per square kilometer.


141,205,000,000 square meters.
* 316
---------------------------------
44,620,780,000,000 watts

Efficiency of solar cells today is somewhere around 13%
5,800,701,400,000 watts, or 5.8 terawatts

According to this, that's more power than the entire country consumes.


If my quick math is correct.

/shrug I'm a mathophobe 😉

here's what DrPizza calculated a long time ago.

Of course, it's a hypothetical problem, but it seems to me that there would be plenty to power NYC.

Area of NY State is 49576 square miles
27,878,400 square feet in a square mile
= 1,382 trillion square feet. (1.38 * 10^12 square feet)
super-quick googling turns up watts per square foot ranging from 10 to 100+
Let's go with 10 Watts per square foot.

1.38 * 10^13 Watts is produced.
Even if half of it gets wasted in transmission, etc.,
it's still 6.91*10^12 Watts
or 6.91 * 10^9 kilowatts...
6.91 BILLION kilowatts while the sun is shining...

quote:
The total energy consumed in the New York City metropolitan region approaches 8 quadrillion BTU per year (down from almost 10 quadrillion in the early 1980s). This is about 8.5% of the total U.S. energy consumption (93.8 quadrillion BTU in 1994).

Needless to say, it is difficult to translate 8 quadrillion BTU to something we can understand. This is equivalent to about 2.34 x 10"14th" kilowatt/hours of power.



Hmm... 6.91*10^9 kilowatts
times by 365 days a year and an average of 5 hours of sunlight. and

HOLY COW! It's only 1.26 * 10^13 kwh
1/10th the needs!

That amazes me, although I'm wondering if I made a careless mistake somewhere.

 

[mercanucaribe]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: Gibsons
IIRC, if you cover the entire state of New York with solar panels, you won't have enough electricity for New York City (DrPizza might confirm or deny this).

Maybe with today's solar technology. If I recall correctly, the average amount of power Earth receives, taking the spherical shape into account, is 316W per square meter.
Area of New York State = 141,205 square kilometers.

1,000,000 square meters per square kilometer.


141,205,000,000 square meters.
* 316
---------------------------------
44,620,780,000,000 watts

Efficiency of solar cells today is somewhere around 13%
5,800,701,400,000 watts, or 5.8 terawatts

According to this, that's more power than the entire country consumes.


If my quick math is correct.

How are you even going to build enough solar panels to cover NY? That's a tremendous area.

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: Gibsons

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Its sitting on a shelf in the basement of Big Oil companies, just waiting for the day when they can no longer make a profit on oil.

They're already working on other sources. Why do you think Shell bought out Seimens Solar? Solar can have a big future too, and they know it.

All we need is a more effective way of coercing electrons to get moving when photons hit them, and we're golden. 🙂

IIRC, if you cover the entire state of New York with solar panels, you won't have enough electricity for New York City (DrPizza might confirm or deny this).

You know, I had seen that statistic somewhere in the past... Then, I think in HT or someplace, I quickly redid the calculations. I'm not going to redo all the math; someone else can double check that stat.

edit: I did put "That amazes me, although I'm wondering if I made a careless mistake somewhere. " at the end... I've never bothered double checking everything.

 

[Feldenak]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
Thank god I won't have to share what I have. I have a nuclear reactor 150 miles south of my homestead. It doesn't really matter to me if our country builds reactors. I also don't have children that will have to deal with the byproduct of fisson. So normal that most of you people believe that atomic energy is the remedy for the sweat crude that feeds the machine. That's the soft veil that you pull over your everydayness.

Leathworking, organic farming, metalsmithing, basic medicine, hydro, and mechanics/physics, they are what you should have experience of. You poor bastards have nothing.

Rogo

I grew up not far from this place. Other than a mild facial tic and a slight glowing at night, I didn't suffer any adverse affects. 😉

 

[NuroMancer]

Originally posted by: Eeezee

Originally posted by: NuroMancer
One issue with Nuclear power is scalability.
They have issues ramping them up to cover demand at peak times.

Thus I think a good hybrid of water and Nuclear is a good solution.

Even if you keep a fission plant at standard use (not scaling them up for peak usage), you're getting a lot more power for the fuel required than even from oil power plants. You may not be able to scale them up as much, but who cares when your output is already so awesome?

You care because you want your AC to work when its a hot day.

DLeRium made a good point in just saying to use existing infrastructure to ramp up power on the grid at peak load times. Clean coal plants could have a fairly minimal enviromental impact if only used on occasion, and a large percentage of the grid is run off Nuclear.

But correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding was it takes quite a bit of time for a coal power pant to ramp up production as well. Thus why being able to quickly fire up hydro damns would be good.

 

[DrPizza]

Okay, it's going to bug me if I don't...

Area of NY is: 1.41089602 × 10^11 sq meters
And, I'll go with the 164 watts per square meter on average over a 24 hour day here, although I have no idea what it actually is in NY. But, I'll go higher with 20% for the solar cells...
164watts/sqm*.2=32.8watts/sqm

So, 1.41*10^11 sq meters * 32.8 watts/sqmeter =
4.62*10^12 watts = 4.62*10^9 kilowatts
Converting to energy in kilowatt hours, over the course of a year
*24 *365
4.05*10^13 kilowatt hours.
This is higher than the last time I did the calculation --> upon closer examination, I see the 164 watts per square meter is the average over the earth for 24 hours.

Using the site linked to above, the US uses roughly 100 quadrillion BTU's per year. I was uncomfortable with the terawatts, simply because watts are a rate of energy usage - did they mean we averaged that many watts at any one time? Regardless, I'll use the BTU figure:

100 000 000 000 000 000 BTUs = 2.9307107 × 10^13 kilowatt hours
(gotta love using the google search box to do conversions.)

HEY!! Look at that!!! There's enough energy for the entire country, with enough room for about 30% more, if we COVER THE ENTIRE STATE OF NY with solar panels. Sounds good to me, but put the 18 acres of solar panels for my land in some other state. Thanks.

(so, I guess I had a mistake somewhere before; oh well.)

 

[DrPizza]

Oh, one last thing... I haven't seen the sun in 2 weeks. It's cloudy in NY, so I assume we're below the global average.

On the other hand, posters in this forum from California are always bragging about how sunny it is and how wonderful the weather is. I'll tell you what: if you cover all of NY in solar panels, they're not going to work for the 5 months of the year that they're covered in snow, unless you hire a lot of kids to shovel them off.

However, suppose we cover the entire state of California with solar panels... 😀
Plus, Cali is bigger than NY.