O.T. Deep sea wind farms

There are funded projects for molten salt reactors all around the planet.

The nice thing about MSR is it has already been done, and it works. Fusion has absorbed billions of dollars and is still 30 years off.

MSR is ideal for heating and electric vehicles.

The largest use of coal is in steelmaking. Next is aviation.

Steel makers are searching for ways to make steel that doesn't burn coal. They are turning to electricity.

Aviation is extremely energy-intensive. Some programs have started for short-range (300 km) electric passenger aircraft using batteries. Long range aircraft will need to burn kerosine for the forseeable future.

Virtual reality can reduce the need for long-distance travel, and eliminate the wear and tear on your body due to exhaustion and time zone change.

Just ask me how many times have I slept on the hard benches at Heathrow or Denver waiting for a connecting flight. Never again.

The world is changing rapidly away from coal, oil, and gas.

Solar won't heat your house at night.

Wind doesn't blow all the time.

What do you have left? Electricity.

Where do you get it?

The best place is MSR using Thorium.

Don't look at the world now. Look at what it will be.

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ientist and layman can be summarized as follows: a layman is easily fooled and is particularly susceptible to self-deception. In contrast, a scientist is easily fooled and is particularly susceptible to self-deception, and kn ows it. The ?scientific method? consists almost exclusively in techniques used to overcome self-deception. The first step in accomplis hing this is to recognize that biases exist. The danger of optimism and ske pticism bias (like the danger of the devil?for people who believe i n such things) is that so many people are unaware of its existence. "

Plumbers? Perhaps. Farmers have a huge amount of capital tied up in their l and and can get away with using it inefficiently for generations.

In Australia the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisati on (CSIRO) had a real problem getting new ideas across to farmers and got a sociologist to look at the problem, who pointed out that most farmers only took other farmers seriously. CSIRO went over to finding the most receptiv e farmer in the community and concentrating on him or her. Once they starte d making more money that the other farmers, the other farmers were willing to take the receptve farmer seriously

In your dreams. In reality, their graduate students reveal their errors.

Less extreme cases merely provide fodder for Einstein-like replacements of conventional explanations by new and better explanations. The self-deceived still get their testimonial dinners, but they aren't lavishly catered.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Except those books are cooked.

Martha's Vineyard residents don't like the idea much.

Just make them charging stations for electric barges.

Not true. The sun is going to last a lot long than our thorium reserves. Hydrogen is what our universe is made of. Thorium is a minor by-product of supernova.

They could burn hydrogen. It's a low density fuel, even when liquified, so the the long range planes that burned it would look a lot more bulbous than current jet-liners. People have foreseen how they'd look.

Sure it can. Thermal solar would work a treat - you can store a lot of energy in a tank of molten salts at around 570C.

But it blows somewhere, which is what we've got an electricity grid to deal with.

Only for nuclear enthusiasts.

Seriously polluted, and rather warmer than would suit us. The weeds will probably love it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Krw's evidence for this will be that he knows that the books have to be cooked. What he knows about European project book-keeping is that it has to be corrupt, when the reality is that it people work very hard to make sure that it isn't (much harder than their US counterparts).

The off-shore windfarms tend to be far enough off-shore that you have get well above sea level before you can see them from coast.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Wednesday, October 25, 2017 at 1:13:06 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote: ...

...

Only if the plumber needs repeat business, they just need a supply of first-time customers - we've had our share of completely incompetent plumbers that required me to fix their work after they left.

Same thing for electricians that didn't understand electricity so I had to rewire things to make them work or safe. But they had the license to do the work and I don't so I had to employ them.

kevin

hore waters to deep to allow solid foundations.

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Sea-going bats? There are fish-eating bats

but only in California. They live on small islands, and might conceivably c olonise off-shore windmills, though the the windmills would be unlikely to offer bat-friendly nesting sites. Bats can fly through domestic fans, so I doubt that a windmill blade would catch them unaware.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Probably because there isn't one.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Oil platforms seem to cope. Big windmills do push their blades well above the sea surface - the wind is faster up there, where it's energy isn't being dissipated in stirring up waves..

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Not exactly. Scandinavia collects a lot more of the national income in tax than the US does, and uses the money to support a wide range of social prog rams - universal health care, better education than the US delivers, social welfare programs that keep people sane and healthy ... James Arthur hates all of them.

The subsidies for renewable energy are only a minor factor. Denmark isn't a s worried by sea-level rise as is the Netherlands,but it's average height a bove sea-level is only 31 metres, so it's still pretty worried.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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John Larkin doesn't seem to think all that often.

Deanmark does social welfare, health and education a whole lot better than the US does, and good deal more generously (which isn't difficult).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The above paper mentions typhoons:

"The floater moving distance at the 100-kW wind turbine under stormy conditions (e.g., a typhoon)

offset design*4 that could absorb the floater moving distance. Figure 5 shows the offset profile for the 100-kW wind turbine."

and:

"During this period, the area was affected by Typhoons No. 15 and No. 16 (both of which were very strong typhoons), causing the floater to move by up to 21 m.(2) The dynamic cable withstood the significant repetitive movements produced, and remained in operation without any problems arising. The demonstration was completed safely.(3) We confirmed that the cable could be laid properly for a hybrid-spar type floater structure."

In other words, a field test of the 100kW system was field tested in 2 strong typhoons and survived quite nicely. The vertical movement was

21 meters or about 69 feet.

There's not much that can survive a rogue wave. I think the best approach would be to avoid areas where rogue waves are observed. Due to the length of the cables, the turbines would probably be located somewhere on the continental shelf, which unfortunately is where rogue waves tend to sink or damage the most shipping.

Time for a sanity check. Depending on one's sources and paranoia level, the incidence of rogue waves is allegedly 1 in 300, 1000 or

10,000 storm waves. "One theory suggests that 1 in 10,000 waves in a typical stormy sea would be a 'rogue' wave." "A more sophisticated theory does take this 'instability mechanism' into account and estimates 1 in every 1000 waves could be a rogue one." "When waves hit a current traveling in the opposite direction, the likelihood of rogue waves increases to 1 in every 300..." The typical storm wave period is about 17-20 seconds: I'll pick 20 seconds so that I don't need to find my calculator. For any random spot in a storm, a wind turbine will get hit by a rogue wave somewhere between every: 300waves/rogue * 20sec/wave / 3600sec/hr = 1.67hrs/rogue_wave and 10,000waves/rogue * 20sec/wave / 3600sec/hr = 55.6hrs/rogue_wave In other words, if I sailed offshore into a 24 hr long storm, I would get hit by anywhere between 0.5 and 14 rogues waves. At that rate, most ocean vessels caught in a storm should have been sunk long ago.

Can a floating ocean wind turbine handle 100ft waves? Probably, if the waves are not breaking. Going up and down on top of 100ft sinusoidal waves is easy enough. Doing the same on a wave that breaks under the wind turbine means that the turbine is going to fall 100ft. It won't survive that. That begs the question, what percentage of rogue waves break over or under a vessel or wind turbine? Dunno, but I'm sure is much less than the alleged incidence of rogue waves. It might even be small enough to be considered a calculated risk.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

The missing vertical scale should say "Residential Electricity Price Euro-cent/kWh.

It's usually helpful to know what the graph represents, the assumptions made in its creation, and the age and source of the data: Looks like the chart include wind and solar, but not big or small hydro, geothermal, or biofuels. That won't change the numbers much, but will move the position of countries that obtain much of their electricity from big hydro. Taxes are also included in the costs.

The above URL includes the 2015 version of the chart, which changes a few country's positions: There might be more current versions, but I couldn't find any.

One can scrape additional insights from the data and various graphs, but one item is obvious; alternative energy costs more than conventional energy.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

They subsidize it inefficiently.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

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Any fool can make that kind of claim (and one just did).

If John Larkin had wanted to be taken seriously he'd have had to tell us ho w an "efficient subsidy" would work, and how the current Danish scheme fall s short of this ideal.

Since he clearly hasn't got a clue what an "efficient" subsidy scheme woul d look like, or how the current Danish subsidy arrangements work, he's not to be taken seriously.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Of course it does. Economies of scale mean that anything used to generate " alternative energy" is produced in lower volume than the devices that are n ormally used to generate electricity.

At present, the world gets 16.4% of it's energy from hydroelectric power an d 6.3% from other renewable sources. If we boosted the other renewables to

63% of the total, we'd halve the cost of the devices used (using the standa rd rule of thumb, that says increasing the scale of manufacture by a factor of ten halves the unit cost).

Since the cost of renewable power is the capital cost of the generating uni ts, that would halve the cost of the power they produce.

What isn't mentioned in this kind of discussion is that non-renewable energ y sources are finite, and are getting harder to find and more expensive to extract. Eventually they are going to price themselves out of the market, e ven if we don't charge for the damage done by the CO2 emitted when we burn them.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

My limited understanding is that string theory is philosophy not science, since nobody has been able to define a theoretically practical experiment to falsify it.

Don't you have a local equivalent of "The Archers"? :)