Journal adeyadey's Journal: Alternative power.. 9
I will start adding what I think are the more interesting posts to my journal. This one on alternative power..
I am not saying that Solar tiling would always be the *only* source of power - but that if houses did have solar tiling we would save a huge amount of power. Top that up with Wind power, Tidal power, Hydro-electric, then make sure houses use energy saving lightbulbs, are well insulated, etc, and you can have a national energy system wihich needs little or no coal/oil/nuclear.. This is not some sort fantasy - it is already starting to happen. Maybe we shouldnt cover the countryside, but what about the deserts of the world ?
>Such projects are up and running around Europe now, and pay back for themselves in a few years, even comparing to cheap "dig it up and burn" electricity.
Where, pray tell? Publications to defend your assertions?
Plenty, just Google "solar roof tiles estate"
Zero annual electricity bills for these guys - the tiles make as much electricity as they take from the grid. (ok with gas heating). Check also This link, This link , This link or This link
I scheme I recall quoted a break-even time of about 5 years - ie, even at todays prices, the houses will pay for the extra cost of solar tiling on the roofs in 5 years in terms of electricity savings - I will have to dig that link out again..
>People are scratching their heads and saying "hang on, what do you *do* with plutonium that is going to be radioactive for centuries, and has to be guarded in case some terrorist digs it up to make a dirty bomb.."
The solution is well known and widely used: you get your plutonium and you mix it with regular fissible U235 to make a combustible called MOX. Then you feed MOX into nuclear reactors for energy production. The plutonium is degraded into shorter-life elements (mostly Americanium 241) which are less toxic and need to be stored for a few years instead of a few millenia. That's what the French and other Europeans are doing since the 80s. Big bonus: You can also use plutonium coming from disarmed nuclear warheard.
You would not be suprised to learn that Greenpeace do not agree with that. The technique you describe sounds good in theory, but in practice reprocessing still generates unacceptable levels radioactive pollution and waste that is still very difficult to deal in practice. BNFL have had particular problems with liquid waste products that are very expensive to handle and dispose of safely - its the practical details that are the problem. Furthermore you have not talked about the price of nuclear. The UK (and many other countries) has squandered truely huge amounts of money on nuclear, now, it appears, with no positive end result - they are going to be left with a collection of reactor sites that are going to be very expensive to decommission and clean up. If they had invested just a fraction of that money on renewables, we would be burning a heck of a lot less coal/oil/gas now. There are actually parts of the world (ie Chernobyl) that are too radioactive to live, thanks to mistakes/miscalculations made by the nuclear power industry..
And the point is - why bother with nuclear, why take the risk? It is becoming very apparent that alternatives really can deliver cheap electricity, without the same level of pollution and waste. Furthermore, costs of solar cells will drop as volumes increase. Case in point - look at the monitor you are (probably) looking at now - if it is TFT - and think how much the price has decreased in the last few years as manufacturing techniques have improved and volumes increased.. Push the production volumes up, and have every house in the country use solar tiling..
As for your wind power argument, wind turbines are useful if noisy, but again, we are talking a few megawatts here, not the gigawatts that are currently produced by thermal plants. Wind power can not scale a thousand-fold.
Not true - the UK is setting a target of getting 20% of its power from re-newables by 2020, and a lot of that will be wind-power. There are soon to be huge offsiore wind farms in construction.. And they are not noisy, nor do they upset wildlife - same site documents the evidence.
Like with so many things, it pays to actually step back,
forget your politics for a while, and take a pragmatic view of
the science.. Ok, I will get off by soap box now..
System is not quite ready for alternative (Score:2)
The issue is not that there is not enough energy, but that it is sporadatic. So storage has to occur. In places, they use artificial hydro plants and others use batteries. Both are expensive in a number of ways. Batteries for dollars and waste is very high. Hydro requires elevation, space, and construction $. For us in the western USA, it also involves water which is more important than oil or g
Re:System is not quite ready for alternative (Score:1)
You are right to say that storage/intermittancy is one of the biggest challenges for alternatives. However the practical situation is actually not so bad as people first suggested - for wind-power, check this: Capacity Value of Wind Energy [awea.org]. Wind-power has evolved a *lot* in the last few years, the current generators are much better than they used to be. New technologies are evolving as demand/usage increases - In Hawaii [hawaii.gov] they use a giant capacitor to regulate the supply..
Re:System is not quite ready for alternative (Score:2)
Now is the time? (Score:1)
Read: Power electronics and exotic storage devices are making wind power steady enough to compete with convential electricity sources [ieee.org].. Look at some of my other replies here too - why not convert excess off peak wind power into Hydrogen for the next generation of cars?
Alternative power source (Score:1)
In our country (The Netherlands) we used to have 2 nuclear power plants (one is closed now), which where mainly used for research. The power outpu
Re:Alternative power source (Score:1)
And you think that there no other instances of negligence in the nuclear industry? Think 3-mile island, think of numerous other leaks, think that the Irish sea is the most radioactive sea in the world [corecumbria.co.uk] thanks to nuclear power.. The point is the experts have always assured the public that nuclear power is safe - now is assesment and payback time - and the truth is it doesnt add up - not only from a safety point of view, but also economics. Remember that nuclear has had truely massive amounts of money pumped i
Hmmmm... Sorry? (Score:2)
The solution is well known and widely used: you get your plutonium and you mix it with regular fissible U235 to make a combustible called MOX. Then you feed MOX into nuclear reactors for energy production. The plutonium is degraded into shorter-life elements (mostly Americanium 241) which are less toxic and need to be stored for a few years instead of a few millenia. That's what the French and other Europeans are doing since the 80s
You're mixing it up (Score:2)
You haven't read what I wrote, and you're mixing up technologies.
The Superphenix supergenerator was designed at a time when the proven reserves of uranium were very low and exhaustion was close, even for the limited consumption of the time. That was the 50s. France wasn't alone either: The Colorado uranium prospection craze [coloradohistory-oahp.org] was a testimony to the uranium shortage fears. I quote: From 1948 to 1958 the Atomic Energy Commission sustained the uranium boom by offering discovery bonuses and guaranteed prices f
Re:You're mixing it up (Score:1)
These sort of questions pretty much killed reprocessing in the UK. BNFL had real problems with economically handling and processing some of the