Move closer to the seabreeze, Tim. My electric bill tops out in August at about $120. Only month where the windows aren't open all day.
Part of this is that mommy
freezes
if the house drops under 77 degrees F. I would guess the bill would be about $200 if we kept the thermostat at 72 d F.
Oh, and my shack is only 2500 sq. ft. under air. Not as big as your
Al Gore Mansion
....
The plant I work in does have panels on it. But, the amount of power required to run the plant is more than the panels can produce. Automated production uses alot of power.
Since I work as an engineer doing nothing but air emissions work (along with some hazmat/hazwaste), I know quite a bit a/b the power industry. Just to clarify, I'm a consultant, not and environmentalist.... the difference? I'm in it to get paid. 😉
The fun thing about this is that we can blame the tree hugging enviro-nazi's for a large portion of our air quality woes.
Back when nukes were coming on-line, the enviros said,
NO NUKES
and wanted coal plants. Now, 80% of our
carbon
emissions are produced from industrial sources. I don't know the exact numbers, but a SUBSTANTIAL portion of that is from COAL plants which the enviro nuts pushed for. Well, now they want,
NO coal!!
... well, we need power...
So, the gov decides to build a storage facility for the nuke waste in the US (Yucca Mtn). The DOE said,
no more nuke plants till we have a centralized storage facility
. Well, our friend the enviro wackos don't like Yucca Mtn. The governor of the state of NV said he was going to kill the project. Hmmm... no more nukes till we get Yucca and people want to kill it. Do you know how much and where our current nuke waste stock pile is? If consolidated, it would cover a foot ball field, three meters deep. Not a lot of waste given how many years we've been generating it. Right now it's stored individually all over the country. There have been several releases to the environment, causing health and safety issues.
Or, we can think about the quantity of emissions that have gone into the air from coal plants. I worked at an 1,100 mega Watt facility while in college for a summer. We burned ~110 railroad cars of coal PER DAY!!! Think about that on the grand scale of the whole US!! Do you know how much NOx, CO, SOx, PM, Metals, etc that is?!?!?! OR... we could have built nuke plants, put the waste in drums and kept the air a lot cleaner. Nothing like having people who say they want to protect the environment be the same ones who are causing it's destruction.
P.S. man-made global warming is BS. 100ppm (0.01%)... causing our climate to change!?!? it's not that delicate of a system!! Also, the dem's who like to say they are strong on environmental issues... ask a/b ole' Ted Kennedy and the wind farm up in his neck of the woods.... or D.S. Al Gore and his
carbon foot print
... only 20x the national average energy consumption in ONE of his houses... doh, I'm up on my soap box again.....
Like I said in another thread....
GLOBAL WARMING = FAD
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Stanky, you have never seen my
Al Gore mansion
, if you had, you would know it is only a 2,800 sq. ft. 1962 Ranch, with 3 bedrooms, being lived in by 6 people, which is only 466 square feet per person. My wife and kids are in the house all day, all summer, running the air, TV, washer and dryer constantly, I have no idea what temp they set because I'm in Bombay for a week, but I can tell you they keep it cold.
The house has no insulation, no shade, and the walls are 50% glass, for the
View of the lake
. If you wanted a more energy inefficient house, you would have to work very hard to build one!
Being a ranch, it has a very long East-West roofline, facing south, which would be perfect for solar panels. And no, we don't get any help from your fancy Sea Breeze! When it's 98 outside, it's 98 inside, unless you run the air all day, which she does. <img src=
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Sir, I resemble that remark, but only superficially!
I still don't want any Chernobles or Three Mile Islands. That is my big concern with Nukes. You can't make a
little
mistake.
So, since you seem to be an expert, maybe you'd answer a couple of questions.
How serious was TMI?
And, why do nukes have to be so big? Can you really make small, economically feasible ones?
My reason for asking about size, is the transmission problem. The lines themselves are still at risk to earthquakes, hurricanes and the like.
Too bad USA is so far behind in the production of clean, safe nuclear power, see http:/
BTW, I do know a little about power plants. Like all BSME grads at WVU, West Virginia Univ. we had to design a coal fired power plant, from coal delivery to electrical power distribution. At that time, the first nuclear plants were on line, and scheduled to take over a large percent of power production. Government regulations prevented this from happening, at least in this Country.
Caleb Tarleton
Sorry for the slow reply, been covered up with work and horse stuff.
I'm not an advocate of polluting, but I am an advocate of common sense. We have to weigh our risks. IMHO the risk of nuke problems is less than the health problems produced by coal fired power plants due to the quantity and type of pollutants emitted. 80% of Frances power comes from nukes. How many problems have we heard of? Yeah... see what I mean? Controls have come a LONG way since the days of Chernoble and TMI. Chernoble was caused by the typical over zealous communist
get-r-done
attitude. They had a known equipment problem, however a middle manager in an attempt to not disappoint his supervisor pushed ahead with a planned test of the reactor. It was easily avoidable. They should have prudently not run their scheduled test and the whole thing would have never happened. TMI from what I understand was caused by an instrumentation failure coupled with a lack of procedure and know how.
I'm sure they could be made smaller, but it's an economy of scale. Most nuke plants have a higher output than a coal plant of similar foot print. Also, given the cost of many of the components, I don't know if building multiple small facilities would make any sense. You would have a lot of duplication of jobs and that would push operational costs higher.
The thing that makes the nuke plants look big is the cooling tower. Sadly enough, you have a lot of heat that has to be dealt with and that's the best way to do it. If you just dumped or diluted the hot water into the rivers, you would cause all sorts of other ecological problems.
Can they use the waste heat to
pre-heat
the incoming water to the boiler? I presume they already do this, which should reduce the overall waste heat generated.
And I do recall some testing done with sodium as the coolant which allowed the reactor to run at higher temps and efficiency (= less waste). Did they ever move beyond the bench scale and lab scale on these?
They do all kinds of heat transfer and pre heating on power plants. The more energy they recover the better their profit margins. Even at the coal plant I worked at, they were only able to economically get the flue gas temp down to ~350 F. The nuke plants typically have a double closed loop cooling system to isolate the water that have been in contact with nuclear fuel.
Nice graphic showing the process:
http:/
I have not heard much about the sodium reactors outside of the research stage. I know there was a lot of problem with corrosion due to how caustic the molten sodium is.
So what is your take on total environmental impact between nukes and other means of production.
Will, good link. The early nukes ran at a much lower steam pressure than the coal fired. Not sure if that is still true. Tiki, see http:/
Caleb
Caleb
In case you missed it here is the comparison.
To put this in perspective, you would have to live near a nuclear power plant for over 2,000 years to get the same amount of radiation exposure you get from a single diagnostic medical X-ray. Sources: NCRP and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). See Graphics Gallery for the chart Comparison of Radiation Sources providing a visual format for easy use of this data.
No, I don't wear a dosemeter. Hopefully, there is no need.
I read the aritcle on TMI from the enclosed link. Very impressive. And, Frankly, I'd rather have a nuke than the coal plant that is in the offing here at home.
Nuke or coal, they will be a long time coming. I still don't see why we aren't doing more with wind and solar, and with a greater since of urgency.
To put this in perspective, you would have to live near a nuclear power plant for over 2,000 years to get the same amount of radiation exposure you get from a single diagnostic medical X-ray. Sources: NCRP and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). See Graphics Gallery for the chart Comparison of Radiation Sources providing a visual format for easy use of this data.
My uncle is a electrician at nuclear powerplants. He said that the sensors can be set off walking into the plant because of high (I think) radon levels in the persons home.
I think he was the one who also told me that the slag from coal power plants was more radioactive than the waste from nuclear power plants.
I also heard an interesting statistic about China today on the radio. China is putting up coal powered plants at the rate of one a week! Wow. I know a couple of years ago 75% of the concrete poured globally was is china. Better learn Chinese
I think the breeders are quite a bit more interesting. Given the quantity of uranium on the planet is fixed, the breeder is nice because it creates more fissile material which can later be used to start another reactor. i.e. we would be able to stretch our supplies MUCH further.
http:/
IMHO, the nukes can be more environmentally friendly as the waste can for the most part be containerized as opposed to openly dispersed into the atmosphere. IF the US and other countries would allow re-processing of spent fuel rods, the quantity of waste could be further decreased.
A very good read, thanks for the link(s). The reference to a Fast Breeder Reactor using the lead cooled Russian Naval propulsion does give pause however. [ try to visualize Beaker, of Muppet fame, with hair standing on end!] But, all in all a very positive, forward looking article.
I get so tired of doom and gloom.
As a boni fide tree hugger, I'm about ready to throw in the towel. It is said that culture is much like a river: it will resist change and always attempt to return to its original course. America's energy consumption has always been determined by the market place. I don't believe that will change.
Given the state of current technology, nukes may be a trees best friend.
We're kind of like ****. Hard to kill off, use up all the resources in an area, fill it with waste, and move somewhere else.
Technology has allowed us to push the biological carrying capacity of the Earth upward, but there's always a limit to everything. With greater efficiency, we can continue to thrive underneath this threshold, or multiply and push past it again.
Yuk! We can do better than that.
Okay.... how about locust?
How about centipedes? They're hard to kill and will bite you on the butt when you're asleep.
We have catterpillars - and they squash real easy <img src=
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WillR and TikiPete et al. make excellent, well informed points, and I surely hope we can get standardized nukes built as fast as possible. IMHO, 3 Mile Island LACKED a simple 1/4 inch stainless steel tube running up into the top of the containment vessel to allow the unexpected hydrogen gas to be removed: this H2 bubble drove the water down & caused the core to be exposed. Very bad consequence!
Note: I read that these Brown & Root nukes from 1970 or so (TMI = the Crystal River nuke in Florida) have all been recertified for 20 more years since hydrogen embrittlement of their container steel is apparently not as bad as originally calculated. Good news.
Note: Little or Big NiCad batteries are RECYCLABLE!
Note: We cannot eat Florida freshwater largemouth bass anymore, because they are loaded with mercury. IMHO, coal-fired power plants are the reason. The wild animals generally do not know this, but the pelicans in Tampa Bay are mostly gone, as are most of the seabirds and fish. We have lots of Hummers, Ford 350s etc. tho, permanently plugging up the Tampa Bay bridges, and running over any stupid wild animals that get in their way.....
Note: Fresh water is running out in Sarasota this week.
OK folks- tell me about the bright spots. <img src=
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Really, I'm too old to give a [censored]! Probably because I have no children.
Great day at GYC! Where were you?
Apparently whatever you have on the agenda is a pain in the butt for the rest of the world! Sorry but we need to put a big twist on most of the talk on this web it has become very twitchy!
Is that English? Perhaps you had too much ritalin as a child.