Those reactions you references consume the aluminium man, and in case you don't realise aluminum is produced by breaking up alumina with a HUGE amount of electricty. Its not like you are getting something for nothing here, alumina is a very stable compound, thats why it is energetically favorable to release hydrogen in order to take the oxygen to oxidize the aluminium, in order to get back the aluminum you have to reduce the alumina which like I said before is a huge user of electricity. For example the Alcoa plant near ehre has its own 161kV substation and uses more electricty than a moderately sized town.
-
We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.
World's Largest Solar Power Deal
Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Modelworks
Lifer
Yes it does.
But when its all worked out, its still cheaper than using the electricity to produce hydrogen directly.
Cogman
Lifer
Not really. You don't get any energy from breaking H2O and then recombining it. One of those fundamental laws of the universe (Hess's law).
Personally, I hope to see aluminium phased out and carbon fiber take its place. Carbon fiber is stronger, lighter, and no conductive. Basically that leaves aluminum to be used in thermal transfer applications only. (and high heat environments) and removes it from things like airplanes ect. Carbon is far more abundant then aluminum is. Heck, maybe we will learn how to convert CO2 to just carbon some day, that with nuclear power could have us sitting fairly sustainable as a society. (mind you, nothing is limitless, but there is a freaking large amount of water on the earth)
ditto on that, how are you expecting to add a bunch of extra steps and somehow increase the efficiency here? Usually as a rule of thumb the more steps the less efficient, and doubly so when all these chemical reactions are invovled. Not to mention the additional financial investment to create an entire additional chemical plant to do the alumina reductions
Besides the production problem, the big sticker with hydrogen is the current requirement to carry a high pressure tank/bomb around with you for storage and transportation. This aluminum/gallium solution may provide some relief in this area if it can be kept separate from the water in the big crash. I'd be interested in the storage density of this solution. Everytime I hear somebody touting hydrogen as the big answer I picture in my mind some of the spectacular explosions we've all seen on the rocket launch pad. Whether you've succeeded in knocking the valve off a high pressure tank or dropping a big slug of aluminum pellets into the hydrogen generating system the results are for sure going to draw the interest of the news media.
firewolfsm
Golden Member
Nuclear is the easy answer. If we perfect it it can take us into the next era.
Wouldn't government taxation fiends probably favor nuclear power because it'd tend to require centralized generation plants they can meter and tax?
From what I've read, solar generation can be adapted by back-to-the-earth type individuals to live off the grid, to escape metering of their electricity consumption. Your congressmen must lie awake at night worrying over that becoming a big trend, and the tax money they couldn't rake in via "organic" solar power vs. centralized nuclear power plants.
Printed cheap solar "panel" film.
I'm not really sure where you get those crazy ideas scott, the only taxes a nuclear plant pays are property taxes and since solar panels cost 5 times as much as a nuclear plant you would get way more taxes from the increase of peopls property prices with solar panels than with a nuclear plant. So basically solar means paying 5 times as much for the same stuff, how is that an advantage?
Please see link in my previous post, showing cheap solar panel film being printed out like a newspaper is printed.
Nuclear power plant construction is fantastically expensive, ... "many dozens of partially constructed plants have been abandoned"
In a sane world fission nuclear power production has zero future, because of its fabulously high cost and unmanegable hazardous waste.
Any future for the nuclear power industry is in makling fission economically viable. Attaining economic viability is a long road of R&D.
Seemingly cheap solar power production technology (such as linked above, showing that Nanosolar can simply print out solar harvesting film cheaply) is here now, but is not yet proliferated in the marketplace.
I conjecture that a reason we're still planning big new projects to cook water instead of using new techniques is to reduce perceived riskiness of the venture (old ways are proved) to financial backers. The mere newness of techniques like cheap photovoltaic film increase perceived riskiness of the project, so the limited partnership shares fetch a lower selling price from the investors whose money finances the project.
Conclusion: I haven't seen a cost/benefit ratio comparison for nuclear v. solar, but I suspect solar does now, or else very soon will show a big advantage over nuclear in several ways, like lower cost, more environmentally friendly, easier and faster to implement, better public acceptance, and more widespread participation in making continuous technical breakthroughs.
And your instistance that solar is so cheap doesn't make it any more true. I work in the electric power industry and what you are saying is absurd. Even the people pushing solar power (the engineers, not the hippies who have no clue) but the all in costs at ~450$/MWh, meanwhile the same measure for nuclear is ~50$/MWh, I was being gernous to give you only 5 times as expensive instead of 10 which is the normally quoted number. Printing solar panels out is a neat trick and they are cheape than the older panels, but they are stil FAR from economically competitive and there is no indication they will be competetive anytime soon. Also, using unfinished nuclear reactors as a basis for saying that reactors are too expensive is silly because the reason then were unfinished is protesters managing to tie them up in the courts long enough for the utilities to just give up. Some of those reactors aren't weren't even unfinished, they were 100% ready to go and still were never allowed to start because of litigation and poor oversight by the NRC.
Modelworks
Lifer
Problem with nuclear is where do you store the waste?
Yucca mountain isn't even finished and we already have enough waste to fill it.
Yucca mountain isn't even finished and we already have enough waste to fill it.
The nuclear waste that is the problem today is not the result of generating nuclear power. It's the accummulation of all the stuff left over from nuclear weapons and the early days when they had no clue what they were doing. Even the Japanese have no problem with having a third of their electricity produced from nuclear power.
The greenies want Yucca Mountain and any other idea for the abatement of nuclear waste to fail in order to drive us back to the stone age. As long as they control the agenda Yucca Mountain and anything like it will never get off the ground.
The greenies want Yucca Mountain and any other idea for the abatement of nuclear waste to fail in order to drive us back to the stone age. As long as they control the agenda Yucca Mountain and anything like it will never get off the ground.
Cogman
Lifer
Not only that, but half of the nuclear waste is potentially reusable, but our friendly "Enviromentalists" conviced clinton that anything with the word "Nuclear" is instantly evil. So, instead of reducing nuclear waste, he cut funding to the program that was researching reusing nuclear waist. (IE, taking out a rod, cleaning it off, then reusing it. Right now they are just chucked)
As was said before, using unbuilt nuclear reactors is a bad idea, those are nearly 30 year old reactors that where abandoned when dumb people got a voice and protested one of the cleanest sources of energy available.
I find it ironic that people are so quick to say "What will we do with the waist?!?!?" and yet they fail to realize that at least we are collecting ALL the waist. So what if a little spills? We are dumping tons of waist and releasing far more radio active material from burning coal and gas then has ever leaked out from any waist storage facility right into the atomosphere. Sometimes near or in fairly populated areas.
Heck, you want something to do with the waist? I would be happy just dumping it straight into the sarhara. hundreds of miles from anything and viola, you have a dumping ground for thousands of years to come.
As was said before, using unbuilt nuclear reactors is a bad idea, those are nearly 30 year old reactors that where abandoned when dumb people got a voice and protested one of the cleanest sources of energy available.
I find it ironic that people are so quick to say "What will we do with the waist?!?!?" and yet they fail to realize that at least we are collecting ALL the waist. So what if a little spills? We are dumping tons of waist and releasing far more radio active material from burning coal and gas then has ever leaked out from any waist storage facility right into the atomosphere. Sometimes near or in fairly populated areas.
Heck, you want something to do with the waist? I would be happy just dumping it straight into the sarhara. hundreds of miles from anything and viola, you have a dumping ground for thousands of years to come.
bobsmith1492
Diamond Member
Waste, man, waste! Waste != waist unless your waist is wasting away due to lack of nutrition. Or if you're living on a garbage dump, not enough waste means your waist wastes away.
But the other half poisons the world for thousansds of years.
Interestingly, part of the waste is the used nuclear reactors themselves.
In California the San Onofre nuclear plant was originally supposed to have a service life of only about 30 years, then they said 40 years, then they built a 2nd plant beside it and I don't know what service life they claim now.
Anyway, when the service life is over, the large nuclear power plant is still sitting there on the land, not productive, but full of radioactivity for perbhaps a few thousand years. Great.
Man, you've just gotta give up on the idea of nuclear fission as a viable means of public power supply. Fusion is a different question, but fission be damned! Thank GOD construction of new nuclear fission plants has been retarded in the US by activists.
The plants are no more dangerous then any other heavy industrial site (all of which also have to be decomissioned). When you look at say a coal plant you have a square mile of fly ash containing tons of heavy metals and other poisons. Not only that but the fly ash in MORE radioactive then a nuclear plant. If you look at say any sort of chemical plant you have all kinds of deadly toxins leached into the surrounding area. The fact is that ANY sort of heavy industry produces deadly toxins. And oh just BTW solar panel manufacturing is VERY toxic, heavy metals and a wide range of organic and inorganic solvents are used in the manufacturing. Also, as for Fusion plants, they reactions produce radioation as well, you don't have the spent fuel, but you STILL have the low level radioactive waste like you are talking about.
I just really don't know how these NIMBYs expect the world to go on, you can never be 100% perfect in terms of producing no waste, but if you develop effective remediation strategies you can solve these sorts of problems. With the case of nuclear rectors you have only a TINY bit of highly radioactive waste and then a small amount of low level waste. In order to solve this you can simply bury the high level stuff 1000 ft underground, and put the low level stuff into a low level landfill, sure its not *perfect*, but it works as good as anything else in this world. Its a hell of alot better than the amount of land that is destroyed when a coal plants is decomissioned.
Cogman
Lifer
Are you serious? You tout solar power like it is a god send then say that a nuclear plant is also bad because it leaves behind a power plant once it is done? Do you know how many Acres are required for a solar plant to produce the same power as a nuclear plant? I'll give you a hint, nuclear plants win by a long shot, in the power out per footprint size a nuclear plant beats the heck out of any power generation method available.
And what is this "A nuclear plant is filled with radioactivity" garbage? Clearly you know nothing of radiation. All of a nuclear power plants radioactive materials are stored in containers that are monitored VERY closely. The materials don't leak out into the plant or touch anything else except for the containers they are in (that includes the reactor core). Just because something has been exposed to radiation doesn't mean that it is radioactive. Take yourself, for instance, you walk out into the sun every day and yet once you come inside you don't emit radiation (unless you have eaten a banana... Even then, the sun isn't what causes the radiation, the banana is).
The only way for something to emit radiation is for its atoms to decay, or for its atoms electrons to jump from a High to low energy state. Nothing else. So being exposed to radiation will do nothing except for the possible breaking of cell structure and compound bonds.
Basically, a nuclear power plant can be torn down just like any other power plant with no fear of ambient "radioactivity" The only time that isn;t possible is if there has been a major leak in the reactor (which is, in most modern nuclear reactors, contained in another sealed container).
Heck, I've stood in a facility where they stored radioactive material under about 50ft of water. The water absorbs the radiation so I would have been exposed to a very high dosage of radiation if not for that water. My point is that they could easily fill that thing up with cement, plow over it, and viola radiation gone.
You should give up this silly notion that nuclear power is evil and go do a little research in the subject rather then just bash it. The worst misinformation campaign happened in the 70's when green peace and the like labeled nuclear reactors as bad. The public still has this stupid notion that radiation will make mutants and green glowing waist, they are completely oblivious to the fact that it is very clean and very safe. In the history of nuclear reactors we have had 2 mistakes, 1 was because retards where using a 10 year old power generating reactor as a test reactor (Chernobyl), and the other because just about every safety mechanism failed. that is 2 failures out of hundreds in the beginning of the nuclear reactor history. Nothing like that has happened since. The deaths and injuries from those two failures pale in comparison to the deaths and injuries from coal, gas, and other power generating methods (Ok, so solar power is probably the only one with clean record)
Fission is a very viable solution, the rest of the world has adopted it, but we Americans are one of the few nations to get on board, and that is because we have too much misinformation about nuclear power. Sure, activist aren't always bad, but in this case they where dead wrong. I'm almost certain that less then half of the activist against nuclear power actually understood how it works (there where no nuclear physicists among them...).
KillerCharlie
Diamond Member
Any engineer will tell you it's not just efficiency they were after. They were after efficiency, cost, reliability, maintainability, manufacturability, and the list goes on and on.
Here are informative leads that interested people can delve into:
"solar power" - UCSB Bren
Edit: Well I can't bypass the html frame to link the search results I wanted to show you, so in that page at the top put the word "solar" in the search box.
I didn't say that at all. To reiterate:
South of me is San Onofre, north of me is Diablo Canyon, with a combined capacity of approximately 4,250 MW. Both nuclear generators sit on earthquake faults. In seismically active California, that's bad.
Some of our desert here in California has been used for solar power generation for a long time, most of my life or longer, but all it really amounts to is cooking water, like a nuclear fission reactor really merely cooks water.
The big new solar projects will continue that old way. I speculate old suboptimal tried-and-true tech is being planned for the big new projects because limited partnership shares can be sold to investors for a higher price; the newer methods are harder to raise money for because they're perceived as riskier, though they hold promise of eventually becoming better soon.
Solar power has a nucleus of nacent technology which I hope will get lots of funding to promote further development. New developments like photovoltaic film being printed like a newspaper is already in production (www.nanosolar.com).
"solar power" - UCSB Bren
Edit: Well I can't bypass the html frame to link the search results I wanted to show you, so in that page at the top put the word "solar" in the search box.
Grammar nazi says, "God gets capitalized."
I didn't say that at all. To reiterate:
South of me is San Onofre, north of me is Diablo Canyon, with a combined capacity of approximately 4,250 MW. Both nuclear generators sit on earthquake faults. In seismically active California, that's bad.
Some of our desert here in California has been used for solar power generation for a long time, most of my life or longer, but all it really amounts to is cooking water, like a nuclear fission reactor really merely cooks water.
The big new solar projects will continue that old way. I speculate old suboptimal tried-and-true tech is being planned for the big new projects because limited partnership shares can be sold to investors for a higher price; the newer methods are harder to raise money for because they're perceived as riskier, though they hold promise of eventually becoming better soon.
Solar power has a nucleus of nacent technology which I hope will get lots of funding to promote further development. New developments like photovoltaic film being printed like a newspaper is already in production (www.nanosolar.com).
But i mean you do realise that those two nuclear plants produce far more electricty than every single solar installation built around the entire world combined right? Heck, thats comporable to the amount of electricty produced by all the WIND installations in the entire USA combined (wind may have overtaken that number this year or maybe next?).
Cogman
Lifer
This is the point I am trying to make as well. When 2 30 year old reactors can produce as much power as all the worlds solar cells, uses far less resources, and hence produces less waste (What happens to degraded solar cells? They don't last forever, more like 10 years. So, too the dump with them) especially for the power they give out. Heck, I would rather see Wind generators get funding then solar generators (Oh, wait, they are more efficient, so something is wrong with them... Ahh, they KILL BIRDS!!). That is because even at 100% efficiency (We are about at 15% for commercial cells and 30% for experimental cells, could be off, its been a while since I looked into this) you still have a larger footprint and more waste per power generated then you would have with a nuclear reactor.
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 25K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes + WCL Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 25K
-
-
-
