OT: When Will the Next Nuclear Accident Happen?

Or it might demonstrate that you have a little too much confidence in your instruments, which are cheap because you have left out features that demanding customers feel to be necessary, and can get in more expensive instruments designed by people with a better grasp of problems that the customers think they have to deal with.

There's a lot to be said for getting close to your customers and finding out exactly what their problems. Marketing hates it when engineers do this, but it can be very helpful.

Talking without knowing what you are talking about seems to be your main - if not only - area of expertise, I noticed that.

Be the first to point to an MCA with better characteristics than ours. Actually not better, just matching. LOL. You don't have the capacity to understand what it is about but you have a comment to make, what a genius.

So the fact that the soviet authorities hushed the accident up for days and people in Belarus got exposed is a shortcoming of the nuclear industry, I see.

Yeah yeah, I know, you do think you have the brains to evaluate what I do. Keep up the delusion if it makes you feel better, I don't mind.

Read again.

It was certainly a short-coming of the Soviet nuclear industry at the time. When the industry has to take responsibility for nuclear waste that stays dangerous for some hundreds of thousands of years, there are going to be lots more opportunities for careless people to cut corners.

And you think you do. Keep up you own comforting delusion if it makes you happy.

There isn't much to read, and it isn't going to get any more impressive if I read it again.

You need to read my posts more carefully, as many times as it takes. Just because you have been brainwashed by the propaganda machine does not mean you can switch subject at will and repeat the nonsense they told you yesterday on the radio like a damaged record. Try to understand my posts first then argue.

The posts will not change indeed, your understanding might - if you are willing/capable to put enough effort.

Jeroen Belleman

Yes of course, I should have done so earlier, sorry for the noise.

You can see examples of pumped storage in every city and town. Just look at the water towers:)

At 0% energy recovery.

Is there any pumped-water storage in flatlands, where people build structures to store water?

Really? If you think a water tower yields 0% energy recovery, you must think the same thing of capacitors. Wow! Your power supply designs must be horribly inefficient.

Of course. You just responded to the mention of water towers!

No energy is wasted. It's used to provide static pressure to allow the water to be delivered. That energy has to be used anyway.

The water is distributed under pressure to every household in the city, where it is used. The pressure comes from the height of the tower, where the water is stored until it is needed. If the water was at a lake and you lived on the shore, you would have to pay for the water pump and the energy it used to supply your taps.

If you had to drill a well, you would have to lift the water to your house yourself. I once lived in a rural area and we all had wells. The water level was 6 ft below ground at our house. Across the road, they had to dig down 600 ft to get water. So drilling wells can be unpredictable.

Either way, you pay for the energy needed.

Use liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR). No meltdown, atmospheric pressure, walk-away safe, 100% burnup instead of 0.7%, vastly reduced nuclear waste than remains active for hundreds of years instead of many thousands, no need for water for cooling, can be put anywhere needed, even in the desert, can reduce transmission line losses, adapts automatically to changing loads, thorium fuel needs no processing, breeds its own fuel, examples have already run for years in the 1960's. And so on.

ITER will never produce anything except a few Phd's. If a small fraction of the money being spent on fusion were directed to thorium, there would be no need for coal, gas, solar, wind, or other sources such as hydro.

Everyone is worried about climate change, for good reason. Here is an energy source that will last essentially forever. We will never run out of thorium. It is everywhere.

Do the math on that. I think energy is wasted pushing the water up into the tower for storage.

Certainly none is recovered. A valve or a faucet or a shower head converts power to waste heat.

Wow! What a dazzling display of ignorance.

The energy is recovered by moving the water through the shower head and all the piping to get it there.

Is he really that short sighted or just willfully ignorant?

So in other words 100% of the kinetic energy of my car is 'recovered' by braking to a stop? What's Elon on about, then?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I have no idea if you are serious which would imply a level of idiocy equal to Larkins, or if you are just being a troll or if your response is for another reason I can't imagine.

Clearly the momentum of a car is important. Losing that requires more energy to make the car move again to achieve the desired goal, transportation.

The purpose of the water distribution system is to distribute the water to the many faucets and showerheads with sufficient pressure to create the spray or to fill the sink fast enough. This requires the expenditure of energy. The water tower provides a constant pressure under varying flow conditions. That is the purpose of putting that energy into the water tower. The energy wasted in getting the water to that elevation will be relatively small, but is the only waste in the tower, not the full energy expended, just the energy that is used to overcome the friction in the pipe and pump on the way to the tower. To think all of the energy is wasted is a thought process that would provide a 0% efficiency for everything it is applied to. Your car would be 0% efficient because it loses all the energy in the fuel. Your lights would be 0% efficient because all of the electrical energy put into the bulb turns into heat eventually.

The water tower is literally a hydraulic capacitor. Do the capacitors in your designs have 0% efficiency?

Please explain to me what part of the above was not clear to you previously? That is an honest question I would like an answer to.

How about "How's that Larkin Derangement Syndrome treatment coming along?" ;)

When _you_, of all people, claim that the energy used in pumping water uphill is 'recovered' by letting it run back down again via a pipe, not all synapses are firing in synchrony. You're confusing energy _conservation_ with energy _recovery_. The first happens automatically, the second you have to do on purpose.

Recovering it would involve having it run a turbine or something as it comes out of the pipe. Otherwise it's just wasted in heating up the water slightly.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

If water is pumped up into a water tower, it takes energy and the pressure at the inlet goes up as the tank fills. When is comes back down through valves, that energy is wasted as heat. One could put a turbine in the outlet path but I'm guessing that's rare.

The higher the pressure of a water distribution system, the more energy is wasted valving it down to atmospheric pressure where it's used.