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Solar cheaper than nuclear

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where people insist on =A0growing huge plots of stuff like rice and cotton.

Farmers had a model that used to work - well enough to let them make a living at any rate. Global warming is messing about with that simple - and previously useful - model.

Because the modellers can't predict the fine detail of the weather systems that pass over your house, you deny the possibility that the broader-brush climate models can capture useful information.

But where? The models do predict more evaporation, but they also take a look at the global circulation, which determines where the precipitation ends up hitting the ground.

And these studies were written up where?

Twaddle, culled from one of your idiot denialist web-sites. We've been living with low CO2 levels for the past few million years, and both plants an animals are well adapted to the situation.

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The fact that the biosphere will have to adapt to the new situation, and won't much enjoy the process, hasn't actually registered with you. The last such excursion was the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, which included several CO2 spikes as fast as the one we are currently engineering.

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It wasn't a global extinction, but there was a lot of speciation, which is to say that a lot of organisms died because they weren't well adapted to the new environment, and other organisms evolved to exploit the new ecological niches (while they lasted).

Where was the prediction published? Faux news?

Hurricanes don't grow unless the sea surface is warmer than 26.5 degrees Celcius.

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nergetics/SST/SST.html

A warmer world will have bigger areas of warm-enough ocean for a longer period of the year, and can be expected to see more and bigger hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. Actual predictions of hurricane intensity and freuqency in - say - 2100 are thin on the ground. The US NRDC

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expected 35 times more damage and six times more daeths from hurricanes in 2100 for a business-as-usual aproach to CO2 emission, which falls ratehr short of "zillions".

It is - with that 26.5C thereshold - a non-linear effect, so prediction isn't as easy bas it might be.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman
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Only Rich would be silly enough to confuse the denialists - who have sold out of real science and preach for Exxon-Mobil (and the rest of crew who gets rich by digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel)

- with the real scientists, who keep on pointing out that global warming is real and can be explained by the sort of elementatry physics that John Larkin should have learned at university.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman

That would be about 65 years, then. The half-lives of the waste products involved go up to ~700 million years for U-235.

Burying stuff isn't "disposal"; it's "out of sight, out of mind".

Reply to
Nobody

Depends on how deep, and where. If Yucca Mountain ever leaked--most unlikely--it would pollute Death Valley, which is well below sea level and has no water table worth mentioning.

Also, heavy nuclides don't go anywhere in ground water--see the Oklo natural reactor in Gabon, where the plume went something like 1 mile in a billion years.

Heavy metal stuff in general is way overblown. It's nasty if it actually gets into your blood in any serious concentration, but you have to work pretty hard for that to happen. That ugly methyl mercury pollution in Minamata, Japan, caused a lot of death and suffering, but fixing it was pretty simple--they just dredged the bay and made a silt island right there on the spot. All that mercury is still there in the silt island, but the shellfish only took a few years to be safe to eat, and it remains so.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Koning Betweter wrote in news:2010081300261987910-Koning@Stumpernl:

Burning wood IS bad for the environment; where do you think wood comes from? trees.trees make oxygen,use up CO2. And burning wood emits just as much crap into the air as coal.

You "heard". I bet the environment is not damaged by the uranium mine nearly as much as it would be from a coal mine or from destroying a forest for wood to burn.

Yes,I would. France and Japan are managing it quite nicely. All that is needed is the proper storage place and an ethical society.

that's a bit radical,dontcha think? "fills a battery"; how much useful energy do you think he gets from that?

destroying a forest for wood to burn is a pretty big "footprint". Of all the PRACTICAL methods of generating electricity in plentiful,useful amounts,nuclear is the safest,cleanest,and smallest footprint. There is no urgent need to lower one's lifestyle to be "green".

Good luck,best wishes and all that.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com
Reply to
Jim Yanik

Koning Betweter wrote in news:2010081304150769551- Koning@Stumpernl:

didn't they change that to "climate change" becuase the Earth is actually cooling?

ever read of the CYCLES of climate change? It was happening long before humans came on the scene.

BTW,the "progressives"/socialists/communists have seized upon enviro issues to further their communism;it's not really about the environment,it's about political power. They began this back in the 80's when the USSR was trying to oppose NATO muclear weapons in West Germany. IIRC,the Verona KGB files exposed this.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com
Reply to
Jim Yanik

"tm" wrote in news:i42bk3$9k0$ snipped-for-privacy@adenine.netfront.net:

much less lung disease,and fewer injuries and deaths. the nuclear industry is FAR safer.

they could also work at the waste repository. Too bad Comrade Obama wasted all that money spent on an almost finished Yucca Mountain Repository by defunding it,and instituting a new study/site search that will take DECADES to find a new safe storage site,before construction even begins.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com
Reply to
Jim Yanik

That is the point. IFF the cost of the panels

Reply to
Charlie E.

Ok, ONE MORE TIME!

If it has a half life of 700 MYrs, then it AIN'T RADIOACTIVE!

If it has a half life of 100 years, then it is MILDLY RADIOACTIVE, i.e you could live next door to it, just don't put it under your bed.

If it has a half life of less than 100 years, then USE IT AS A POWER SOURCE!

This ain't rocket science. The problems are political and psychological, not scientific!

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie E.

That's fine, if you live where it's flat, and fairly densely populated (Like NL?)

For those who live where the nearest medium sized town is over a hundred kilometers away, with mountain passes up to 10,000 feet between, it isn't an option.

That's what a lot of the western United States is like. People don't appreciate the distances involved until they've done it.

Try relying on a bicycle in rural Montana, or Colorado ;-)

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)
Reply to
Fred Abse

I don't know about a water table, but certainly at Badwater, the lowest point in Death Valley (and the driest), there is actually a pool of (undrinkable) water all year round, replenished from below. I've been there when the temperature was 119 F, and the pool was still there.

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--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)
Reply to
Fred Abse

Aha! Maybe there's some sort of ratchet mechanism to harness reciprocating motion?

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)
Reply to
Fred Abse

U-235 most definitely is radioactive. You're forgetting that it's fissile, which means that it "amplifies" decays (whether of U-235, its decay or fission products, or other radioactive elements in the waste).

Nuclear power generation relies upon fission, not spontaneous decay. If it relied upon decay, all of the weapons-grade U-235 in the world wouldn't power a small town.

This is why U-238 has negligible radioactivity compared to U-235, in spite of only having a sixfold greater half-life: U-238 isn't fissile.

Reply to
Nobody

RTGs based on natural decay have been used in space probes and for powering lighthouses.

Suitable isotopes are Pu 238 with a half life of 86 years and Sr 90 with 28 years.

While the simple RTGs are highly inefficient for electricity production, the heat generation would be sufficient to keep houses warm in cold climate.

Pu 238 would be particularly interesting to be kept in a pool of water in the basement as a part of the central heating system, since the half life is so long that you would not have to reload it during the typical life time of a house.

Of course you would have to keep burglars away, since some countries seem to be interested in Pu238 for other purposes and pay well for it:-).

Reply to
Paul Keinanen

So, if it is radioactive, then it doesn't have a half life of 100 MYrs, now does it!

Ah, fission IS spontaneous decay. Now, chain-reactions just cause LOTS of fission to occur, and U-235 is a lot less stable in the presense of extra neutrons making chain reactions more probable.

And there are plenty of power supplies that rely on spontaneoud decay, esp. for space applications.

For a nowhere man, you don't know much, do you? ;-)

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie E.

At about one-half watt of heat generated per gram, one would need quite a lot of Pu 238.

Reportedly (by the Great Dubious Source of All Information a.k.a. Wikipedia), extracting pure Pu 238 from spent reactor fuel for RTGs is not economical - it requires an expensive isotopic separation process.

It's possible to manufacture pure Pu 238 for use in RTGs, but this is also rather expensive.

The fact that plutonium forms hydrides on contact with moisture, which are pyrophoric once dried, would also be a matter that would require careful thought and design before deploying this technology en masse (to say no more!). You *really* wouldn't want to have that basement pool be drained for any reason, since the plutonium heating elements could then catch fire spontaneously.

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
     boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!
Reply to
Dave Platt

Assuming 1-10 kW heating power requirement for a small house, 2-20 kg of Pu 238 would be required. The density of Pu is quite high, so a small bottle would be sufficient to contain it.

Why would one require pure Pu 238 for heat production by natural decay?

From the heat production point of view, it would be perfectly OK, if the Pu 238 isotope is spread by some filler material.

However, there are practical problems with fuel rods recently taken out of a PWR/BWR reactor. These contain a lot of nasty short lived isotopes (half life hours to years).

After 30 years of rod storage, the situation would be quite different.

Why would I want 100 % pure Pu 238 for heat production ?

Mixing the same amount of 2-20 kg of pure Pu 238 of something else (clay or inactive uranium isotopes) would still produce the same 1-10 kW amount of heat.

Reply to
Paul Keinanen

Even quite a small pile of 100-year half life stuff will spontaneously melt, besides being about 13,000 curies _per mole_, i.e. probably

100,000 curies per kilogram. At 2 MeV per disintegration, that's in the ballpark of 300 W/kg.

You can live beside that stuff if you like, but not me, brother--and you wouldn't live there long. Some "MILDLY RADIOACTIVE".

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Okay, mild hyperbole on my part, but Badwater's quite a way from Yucca Mountain, isn't it? And fission products still don't go anywhere much in ground water.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Phil Hobbs wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net:

well,nobody is seriously saying that anyone should live "beside the stuff"; placing it in a secure underground site like Yucca Mtn or a salt mine is a reasonable,safe,and practical solution.

It's not "living beside the stuff".

the low-level radioactives are not much different than normal background radiation. In some places,that is -higher- than what the low-level stuff measures.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com
Reply to
Jim Yanik

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