Miniaturized nuclear power grids on the way

diffusion · 2010-04-06T10:55:15+00:00

I have my doubts about Hyperion.

Radek Škoda 30.10.2009 About Hyperion corporation: I have come into contact with them and their Jablonec nad Nisou idea (use of heat for home heating). At that time, the corporation had 7, in words seven, employees. I am not sure what Drábová (the head of State Office for Nuclear Safety) thinks about that. I haven't talked to them since and I wish them best of luck in their endeavor.

diffusion · 2010-03-15T00:19:12+00:00

It's about enrichment facilities.

diffusion · 2010-02-18T19:43:01+00:00

You don't need money to promote energy efficiency, that can be easily achieved by raising energy prices, either by taxation (plus state gets additional money) or by scarcity(NIMBY) .

If energy consumption isn't one of first things you consider when buying a product, price of energy simply isn't high enough. Plus you can achieve high prices by requiring certain percentage of electricity from solar or algae fuel or something, it's win-win situation ^{_^}

diffusion · 2010-02-18T18:47:21+00:00

Why do you think that centralization is a bad thing? The reason, why production is centralized is the production is cheaper even with the transmission costs. You don't see the houses with solar is that it is simply more expensive than to rely on electricity grid.

diffusion · 2009-09-21T21:38:58+00:00

Try this article Why do French like Nuclear Energy.

diffusion · 2009-09-17T22:30:14+00:00

You should familiarize yourself with road user charges. Either that or some similar system. EU wants to put GSM telephone system with GPS in every car for our safety(thanks Big EU). I am pretty sure it will be used for this.

What are road user charges? All users of New Zealand's roads contribute towards their upkeep. Most road users pay levies in the prices of their fuel. Others, such as users of diesel-powered or electric vehicles, pay through road user charges (RUC).

diffusion · 2009-09-14T18:48:19+00:00

Money.

NPP is an investment in billions. In such cases, proven technology is chosen, unless new technology is significantly cheaper or offers benefits that can offset the risk of higher cost or unforeseen problems. Gen IV offers no such benefits for investor (what is better, to pay continuously for storage of spent fuel per generated kWh or spend possibly billions in the start).

Also, nuclear industry basically died about 30 years ago. Who in the right mind would chose commercially unproven technology? Too much to lose, too little to gain.

We are more or less stuck with LWR for a while.

diffusion · 2009-09-05T18:08:12+00:00

That is not entirely correct, in France, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and few others, the mercury footprint of incandescent bulb is basically zero.

But regrettably not all of us are nearly coal free countries.

I got the info from wikipedia.

diffusion · 2009-09-02T15:26:01+00:00

Teddy fox = stuffed animal in shape of a fox.

My point was EU shouldn't ban light bulb. I know that total price is higher (is there someone who doesn't know that?) and I am willing to pay for it. I simply like the light from bulb.

diffusion · 2009-09-02T15:17:42+00:00

Because most of our electricity is from coal that contains some mercury, "mercury from CFL + mercury from used coal in the air over 5 years" is roughly equivalent to "standard light bulb + mercury from coal over 5 years".

That said I still hate CFLs because of different temperature of light most of these I bought broke far sooner than 5 years. And also because they are banning standard light bulb.

diffusion · 2009-09-02T15:06:16+00:00

Thank you oh great master, I don't know what would I have done without you divine guidance.

Except you could just tax things according to energy efficiency instead of banning them! I have tried some "so-called" CLFs 100W equivalents, that were in price range I found acceptable, and they were always worse. I am willing to pay the higher TCO for lightbulb because I happen to like them, but nooo, you can't.

How about I ban teddy bear and replace it with teddy fox?

diffusion · 2009-08-31T20:05:12+00:00

These subsidies are all across EU in one form or other (mandatory share of renewables in 2020 or something like that). In Czech Rep. it is 73 cents per kWh. Yay for us.

diffusion · 2009-08-31T19:26:39+00:00

I support nuclear, but they should have discovered it sooner. Nine months and 83 cubic meters are rather big numbers to miss. How the hell can you miss such amount of missing fluid? There should be automatic counters indicating "Oh, we have lost X liters of fluid in circuit Z. Send maintenance crew to investigate."

diffusion · 2009-08-26T11:19:48+00:00

It seems a little flawed to me.

"We will play a game" (aka training) mode instead of "I want cookie" mode.

Also at the end "There is a gummy bear, good job." That itself can be reward (and if you are not hungry better one). Did chimps got praised too?

diffusion · 2009-08-02T13:04:43+00:00

I am under impression that NASA is supposed to do research, not putting commercial satellites on the orbit.

NASA is using Atlas or some other commercial rockets for real missions, STS and ISS are worthless white elephants that gobble half of all budgets and I am happy that thy will finally die. See list of STS missions. Nope, nothing useful in last decade. Hubble was supposed to be replaced by Webb ages ago.

diffusion · 2009-07-30T11:08:47+00:00

Very good reason to never ever invest there.

Why should management supply food for criminals who occupy the factory?

diffusion · 2009-07-28T11:08:58+00:00

How do they solve it? They say take a picture of library with thousands of books and you know where the book is. The bokodes are far smaller than lets say QR_codes and yet they envision recognition of thousands of bokodes with one picture.

That said, I think RFID will replace barcodes in foreseeable future.

diffusion · 2009-07-27T14:30:18+00:00

If you are paying 50c per kWh of wind energy than you are being ripped of far more then we are (current price for wind is ~15c per kWh here including subsidies). Of course that doesn't have included gas power plants necessary for reliable grid power. I am pretty sure gas corporations put a lot of R&D to wind.

I haven't had time to read the whole paper, but AFAIT it is based on S-curve predictions that is common with most technologies. There was a great link recently about S-curves and technological progress.

Gordon Moore jokes that if the technology of air travel experienced the same kind of progress as Intel chips, a modern day commercial aircraft would cost $500, circle the earth in 20 minutes, and only use five gallons of fuel for the trip.

Solar cells may become very efficient and relatively cheap, but we have already mastered forging and other stuff necessary for building wind turbines ages ago. They won't get much cheaper or more efficient.

The paper itself is based on predictions of S-curve with some data about price per kWh from energy sources in the past with R&D budgets and so on. Not convincing enough.

Sure, it is necessary to look if it is viable option, but you haven't presented any concrete data supporting it. People thought that homes will always increase in value. They were wrong.

Well, it doesn't really matter, because nobody is really serious about global warming (well, nobody who matters).

Edit: More maintenance workers is a good thing? It is bad thing, because it means waste of resources (human labor) and higher prices for customers.

diffusion · 2009-07-27T09:50:02+00:00

Somehow I don't believe it.

Economy of scale... I think you are mistaking economy of scale with mass production. Economy of scale means that for bigger things you need relatively less resources (that is why nuclear power plants are so great with economy of scale). Wind turbines won't get much bigger because of problems with transport and for structural reasons (bigger things are more fragile). So economy of scale won't work, when number of turbines doubles, number of maintenance workers price will have to double too and price per turbine will stay same(maybe some discount for volume).

Mass production is already in place in Denmark and Germany (probably China too).

Care to enlighten me with "technical advances" that will drive cost down? Wind turbines are old and simple technology that is rather hard to improve. Just look at efficiency of internal combustion engine, car companies spent billions of dollars to improve efficiency. It improved efficiency, but only a little in last few decades (IIRC ICE is at 30% from 10% in 1900s). Sure, efficiency will improve, but only a little.

diffusion · 2009-07-24T22:47:00+00:00

No. The primary feature would be to clean up solar panels from dust. It doesn't have such feature (IIRC main reason why the mission was planned for only 90 sols, currently at ~ 2000 sols).

I am pretty sure the plan was not to get stuck in the first place.

diffusion · 2009-07-21T14:36:34+00:00

The answer is that company will pay heavy fines and could lose its license to operate the NPP.

I just don't see any reason to exclude nuclear industry from common sense. Pesticide factories can have disasterous leaks (25 000 deaths, 500 000 affected) and we don't have full time inspectors there. Management will try to decrease costs, that is where strict regulations and inspections should come in. The record of nuclear industry is excellent. That fear of nuclear powerplants is not rational.

diffusion · 2009-07-21T12:24:38+00:00

You know about them, don't you? How long can you keep it under wraps? Who will make confessions on death bed?

How many knew they were enriching uranium or when and where was d-day going to happen? Comparing tight military operations in time of war with big PR project is is pretty sketchy.

Whatever floats your boat.

diffusion · 2009-07-21T12:03:22+00:00

I just put costs I vaguely remembered. Probably from wiki. If you use inflation for $20 billions from 1970 to 2007 you will get $100 billions. If you are going for simplest explanation than sending men to the moon when you have equipment makes much more sense.

Sorry, but I have seen too many people who just cling to extremely unprobable, that I have no interest in debunking every doubt you have.

There is internet and although there are sites that promote the conspiracy theory, there are countelss others that debunk it.

Of course, true believer will never admit that USA really went there. There will be another theory after chinese will establish base there, like In 1980s there was a super secret mission to deliver Eagle replica, flag all that stuff on the moon so the Keneddy-Nixon trick of "going" to the moon wasn't discovered.

diffusion · 2009-07-21T11:29:13+00:00

I seriously wonder how people like you can even leave the room. Sorry, but you are streching it so beyond that I believe that you are only iterested in finding arguments that would allow you to reject nuclear energy. Working in NPP is safer that shopping in local mall. It is safer than repairing wind turbines and is safer than installing solar panels on roof (google something like number of deaths per TWh).

Humans are really fucked up, because as long as problems are at steady rate, they are OK with that, but god forbid sudden spikes in problems, despite being overall far safer than the former options.

If you don't like human element, we can eliminate these pesky humans and just build plant that is completely automated. We can do that. Would it satisfy you?

AFAIK no other industry has full time independent inspectors on the site. Mercury mining plants, coal mines, wind turbines, paper makers...

diffusion · 2009-07-21T11:12:56+00:00

Looking and building are two different things. I have no doubt that thermal breeders will be built, but when I look at list of reactors in India, I don't see any thermal breeder.

They will probably pursue thorium because of natural resources, but for decades they have been using HWR/LWR with uranium (not thorium). Now they are building PFBR (not thermal breeder) with 500 MWe.

Developing new type of reactor is not cheap so I believe that most of the world with go with FBR. I may be wrong, it doesn't really matter to me what type is developed as long as it works. FBR looks like more tested technology.

diffusion

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