Replacement Pi power supplies

Hello Jean-Pierre!

Monday February 07 2022 15:31, you wrote to me:

Depends on where used but for my message it's power generated or used. It is immaterial regarding the voltage as using power so 240 volts using 3Kw is the same as 110v the same just means a larger amount of Amps.

Vincent

Not as obvious as all that. For starters, there's quite a large greenhouse gas contribution (about 30% of what a coal plant produces) from a Uranium burner once you include the carbon contributions from building (and dismantling) the plant plus that due to uranium mining, refining and fuel rod production.

Secondly, there's not as much uranium still in the ground as a lot of people think.

Thirdly, radioactive waste disposal hasn't been properly tackled yet. There's a lot of talk about long term repositories, but the actual situation is that all the waste is still sitting in cooling ponds, etc while governments, scared of the cost of proper disposal, do bugger all about it.

Lastly, there are a lot fewer engineering firms who can build and dismantle nuclear plant than is generally realised, something like six globally so its very much an open question whether enough generation capacity can be built in time to make a difference the global warming. Especially when you consider that the engineers who built all the nuclear plant of a similar age to that running in the UK at present are now all retired or dead. About the only type of nuclear plant that's readily available these days are the compact units used to run submarines. Small, modular, relatively easy to produce, though I get the impression that refuelling them may be another matter and, anyway, imaging the fuss if anybody tried to use them to replace the current small natural gas load balancing plants, which would be the obvious way to use them. Check out

I'll stop there - excellent summary, just one thing. Thorium pebble beds have numerous issues mostly centred around pebble durability (and the side effects of the lack thereof) which are certainly more easily solved than uranium shortage and there's a lot of thorium around. I suspect that sooner or later we'll see them in the mix.

I don't believe in "the one true energy solution", we'll be using a mix of whatever the people paying the big bills think is best at the time until we can't and if that happens we're in bad place so let's hope it doesn't.

Meanwhile if Spacex's huge launcher comes within an order of magnitude of the target operating cost it will bring solar power satellites into the "maybe feasible" range. If they actually manage to sell launch capacity at $50 a kilo to orbit as promised big SPSs may well be the cheapest option for power generation. Of course there's a big IF at the start of this and I'm not holding my breath - I have a feeling the turnaround they're after is a lot harder than Musk thinks, but I'd love to be wrong.

In article (Dans l'article) snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org>, Vincent Coen snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org> wrote (écrivait) :

I would be curious to know what represent "3KW per hour" i.e.

If you use nuclear power to do the refining its far less than windmills which use enormous amounts of concrete, copper and steel - far more than nuclear.

Only 10 billion tonnes, and 4 billion in the sea, all of which is economically extractable at less than any windmill or solar panel costs.

In short with breeder technology, at leats 10,000 years.

It has been tackled and solved. Only Greens pretend it hasn't.

And shriek at the mere thought of something as radioactive as a human corpse, but one that came from inside a nuclear power station, being disposed of.

No, scared of the political shitstorm that activists would cook up. Cost buggger all to dispose of.

Imagine the long term repositories for dangerous waste that doesn't decay over time, like mercury and lead and cadmium...for some reason Greens don't mind all that.

As with 'climate change', its a pretty good bet that everything you

And how many factories are there that can turn out LCD panels? Or automatic car transmissions, or engine management systems? Or big jet engines? We had better stop using them all.

so its very much an open question whether enough generation

What global warming? We need them to keep our populations alive. Because toy windmills and solar panels wont.

I can get all the left wing woke green propganda off the TV thanks

In all engineering - as opposed to politics - there tends to be one solution or class of solutions that dominate because over all they are more or less the cheapest and most efficient way to do things.

As far as generating constant adjustable reliable energy goes, that is the gas steam or the water - but not the wind - turbine.

How you make the hot gas or steam or fast water depends on what is handy to you.

If you have coal mines, burn coal. if you have gas seams, burn gas. If you have high mountains, build dams. If you don't have any of the above, build nukes.

Remember there is nothing that can be done by a massive fleet of nuclear power stations that cannot be done far far worse, at far greater expense and far less reliability than by adding 'renewable' energy of the intermittent kind to it.

in 50 years the world will be divided into two sorts of countries, those with nuclear power, and those full of ignorant technically illiterate savages.

In article (Dans l'article) snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org>, Vincent Coen snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org> wrote (écrivait) :

Finally the Kw, is it power or consumption?

it comes into existence when you consume. When you consume electrons flow, when you don't nothing happens.

For electricity it is calculated Power = V*I Basics: 1Watt = 1A*1V

For example a vacuum cleaner of 1100Watt (1,1kW) in US (@60Hz) has

and this indicated the work that can be done by the force created when the electrons flow through

There was a swiss study that if we plant 30B trees we reduce CO2 by 30%. I have not heard it pushed by the MSM or the activists. Although there are campaigns here and there.

It is hard to not be political in sort of discussions.

We could burn anything if we had enough plants to absorb the CO2. The main problem is deforestation of the planet and greens are not doing anything about it.

On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Feb 2022 08:56:14 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie snipped-for-privacy@mydomain.invalid wrote in <stqmre$nkv$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

About greenhouse gas causing glowball warming: it is a fake story:

Look up CO2 levels over the previous millions of years with google, those were at times much higher, not many humans around back then. Same Milankovich cycles.

Al Gore's fairy tales telling to sell his stuff, an excess of [US] capitalism. Same way for jabbing everybody over and over again against a virus that is not worse than the flue and the jabs do not provide immunity -the Medical Industrial Complex. And there is their Military Industrial Complex trying to make war in Europe in Ukrain.

No radiation is not as dangerous as many are made to think, a plot originating from 'hide under the table for the nuclear bomb' media drive. Wild life at Chernobyl is thriving!

have worked with radiation, still have a live interest designed and build stuff to measure it:

I measure radiation 24/7 with YES logged by a Raspberry! And this sits next to me on the table:

Thorium _maybe_ a way out I think China is experimenting with a Thorium reactor.

Dump it in the Mariana Trench, lock up the few that start babbling about the deep sea fishes and creatures there ask them if they eat meat.

True, same way we wonder: 'How did they build those pyramids?'

Russia has some ships with small nuclear reactors that they use to power cities on the coast.

A bunch of green fanatics calling 'mama help' (or 'God help us') as the changing climate drives them to other parts of the world where they, if lucky, cook their food on campfires is a possible scenario. All that knowledge we had, replaced by rain-dances Oh wait its already happening in the US. The black revolution of lower IQ and their facilitator Precedent ByeThen

Just imagine every transport electric and the power grid fails (it often does there) no emergency vehicles no tools no instruments... Bringing a generation up with lies and fairy tales is dangerous for the species. Religious powers in the past, Viking experiment was positive for life on Mars was denied half an hour later (I remember the announcement). Those religious leaders do not allow you to know we are just like a speck of dust in an universe where there are many others and their beliefs, their fairy tales differ.

Some years back a fellow glider pilot who, professionally, specialises in designing energy-efficient buildings, told me that the average UK home uses 400 watts of electrical energy, averaged over a 24 period.

So, of course I checked my house to find it averages 300 watts. I don't have a TV or any other heavy electric energy user other than an electric oven and a kettle: all heating, including most cooking, is done on gas rings. These days I track electricity and gas prices and consumption on a spreadsheet: quite an illuminating exercse.

In article (Dans l'article) <strc7g$o83$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, Martin Gregorie snipped-for-privacy@mydomain.invalid wrote (écrivait) :

I venture to think that in fact it consumes rather 400 watts•hour (Wh).

There is one movie that sums up all: Idiocracy

You can put it that way if that's what you prefer.

What I meant was that the power draw averages to a continuous 400 watts for some sort of homogenous blend of the UK housing stock.

It doesn't much matter whether its averaged over a year, month , week or day, except that the yearly average is a better figure to quote since monthly averages will vary during a year and measurements averaged over progressively shorter time periods will be increasingly affected by weather.

The spreadsheet I use does in fact calculate average electric energy consumption over a year by totalling monthly usage and generates a daily consumption figure by dividing accumulated consumption by the days since the start of the year.

Stating the average consumption as 400 watts is precisely correct terminology, the total energy consumption would be 24h*400W or 9600 watt hours which seems about right - my own house consumes rather more as there's a powered sewage processor and active ventillation as well as all electric cooking.

I venture to think it doesn't. 400 watts continuous seems about right to me

I am nearer 1kW continuous...

As intelligent technical people we do not need political emotional narratives to form our bigoted opinions. We can use the reality of the world as it appears to be, to perform rational cost benefit analysis on various future scenarios.

These tells us the choice is between nuclear power and barbarism.

Sigh. Fossil fuels represent about a billion years of sequestered 'organic' carbon. I am sure if we covered the planet in trees we could sequester it all over again in another billion years.

You are starting from a false assumption, namely that the universe, this planet, your lifestyle, your life - that any of these are 'sustainable' or 'renewable'.

We are, if physics is to be believed, surfing an entropy wave downhill to the end of the universe and heat death.

The world is changing, It always has. It always will until life has ceased. Stop wetting your pants over it, embrace it and be happy you got to see some of it.

Its still very cold compared to various high temperature events post ice age - during which civilisations flourished, and which ended when colder climates came along.

Re: Re: Rnt Pi pPi pPi power supplies By: The Natural Philosopher to Deloptes on Tue Feb 08 2022 10:06 am

I don't think any modern political system is comparable to feudalism. Feudalism had a very specific set of traits we don't see reproduced nowadays.

Peasants more or less belonged to the noble who owned their particular piece of land. By this I mean the noble passed the laws and designated the way justice was to be done, and the laws were stacked to benefit the particular noble writing them (and their close friends).

Nobles, on the other hand, were honor bound to higher nobles, to the point lower nobles might have no posessions on their own (!) and find themselves enjoying any crumbs a higher-up wanted to share with them.

The argument that an Amazon employee is a modern peasant, and that Bezos is a modern feudal lord, only works so far:

• The Amazon employee may have a significant amount of property, the laws he has to abide to are imposed by an orthogonal organization (the government) whose relationship with Amazon is only tangential.

• Bezos is not in an honor relationship to either higher or lower lords. Specifically, nobody Bezos has made an specific deal with can demand for Amazon to save him if things go bad (equivalent of a lower lord asking for help to a higher lord). On the other hand, there is no higher lord who can demand Bezos to put the Amazon machinery to work for him (equivalent of a higher lord demmanding resources from a lower lord). The government may extract an effect such as the last one, but it would not be an honor deal sourced from a prior agreement, but a case of cohertion ("Give us Amazon or our cops will shove a baton up your ass!")

I realised we were there when the UK government spend 12 weeks debating whether it was right or wrong, harmful or harmless to let a pack of dogs chase an evil murderous verminous bunch of foxes, and less than a morning to decide to kill tens of thousands or Iraqis by invading them, on the basis of a forged document, having first killed the man who tried to tell them it was forged.