Posted on 07/29/2008 8:20:20 PM PDT by Flavius
engineering but im not very far along yet. i am trying use up some of my GI bill before it times out. i was thinking more along the lines of web references, as i dont have unlimited funds to go buy books (i have more books than i have room for them as it is) but if you have enlightening sources on this discussion, i would appreciate a specific source or two.
That's a good start. Next week, we'll work on the Torah (in Hebrew), "Elementary Surveying, Second edition" by Rayner, and "Lord Elmsworth's Annotated Whiffle" by James Hogg.
Week 3, we'll work on some science.
/johnny
For Free! Thanks to socialism in the US.
And they love geeks that ask for weird stuff like "Lord Emsworth's Annotated Whiffle".
Damn good story about a man and his pig.....
/johnny
Nuclear waste is nowhere near the killer it’s presented as. For one, burying all that waste under Yucca mountain is incredibly, unbelievably stupid. Instead we should be reprocessing it; it’s what they do in England and France and works quite well. Waste production can be lowered by surprising amounts (something like a 20-fold reduction in waste); we don’t have such facilities in this country, no not a single one, because during the 70’s our beloved congress passed a law saying there would never be one - don’t you just love the forward-looking wisdom of our congress? It was during the height of the anti-Nuke movement and the activists were busy proposing all sorts of new legislation to strangle the nuclear industry, this was one of the many proposals they were able to pass.
As far as the nuclear waste that is invariably produced the best thing to do with it would be to grind it all up into dust, send it up in a plane, and sprinkle it over the entire country. I am completely serious about that. Radiation is a natural part of our environment, turn on a Geiger counter anywhere in the world and you’ll immediately start to hear its characteristic blips, it’s picking up the natural radiation that baths us every day of our lives from the moment we are conceived to the moment we die. It’s in our bodies, in the rocks we walk over, in the foods we eat and the things we use; take a plane ride across the country and up there in the thin air you’ll be irradiated big time from the cosmic radiation that is continually falling on us from space - yet I’ve never heard anyone worry about the radiation hazard of visiting their family on the other side of the country (or planet as the case may be).
As many other things, radiation is only dangerous when it occurs in too heavy of a dose. We all know our cars produce carbon monoxide, which is deadly in high doses but harmless when diluted in the huge reservoir of our atmosphere. We all know that acetone fumes can kill as well - which is why we only use it in a ventilated area. I suppose there’s dozens of examples more, but I believe the point is obvious.
They had a big solar power facility in the movie Sahara. It was, literally, out in the middle of nowhere.
Fortune runs a good blog on all this:
http://greenwombat.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/
That's the foundation of learning.
/johnny
I think its Ausra thats building a 177mw plant in south-central California, mirrors to produce steam. And next door I think its Optisolar that wants to use photovoltaic over several square miles to produce 500 mw. The first one is permitted, the second they are trying to permit.
Good. Something else for pondscum to nationalize.
Not really, both can kill you. Of all the myriad types of industrial waste, that nuclear waste is singled out as the worst of the lot is boggling. In reality, my commonsense solution is an idea whose time will never come; just bury the stuff in a hole in the ground. It's not that big of a deal, it's gonna exponentially decay, unlike many other types of waste we produce - which lasts forever.
I don’t think he’s advocating spreading it around, he’s advocating reprocessing it, the way the French do. If a country the size of Texas has fifty-some nukes, there is no reason we shouldn’t have fifty on the books ourselves.
And reprocessing the waste.
I'd be okay with that too, but really, all we need to do is encase it in glass and push it overboard from a ship in the middle of the ocean. By the time the glass erodes, the remaining radioactivity would be a trifling fraction of its original potency.
We have produced about 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in this country during the Atomic Age. If all of it were to be dissolved evenly in just one cubic kilometer of water, weighing 1 billion metric tons, the dilution would be about 70 parts in a million. You could drink a glass of the mixture and come to no harm. And there are about 1.5 billion cubic kilometers of water in the Earth's oceans.
-ccm
in reality, my commonsense solution is an idea whose time will never come; just bury the stuff in a hole in the ground.
Maybe I spoke too soon... I think the current plan is to bury it in a hole in the ground... in the mountain near Las Vegas. Which is fine with me. Wasteful but ultimately neither dangerous nor harmful. Or reprocess what you can of it, and feed it right back into a reactor.
Whatever is left, fine, encase it in glass and stick in a tunnel under the mountain.
Another fine solution, better than the millions of tons of sludge the current coal-fired plants pump into our air.
And a likely critical problem is transmitting vital power to Europe through a few narrow channels of power lines that are highly vulnerable to terrorist attack and disruption.
The only way that western European countries could ensure a supply of "essentials" like tea and spices in the past was to militarily and governmentally dominate the origins as in colonialism. If this crazy Sahara power scheme needs to take hold they will need that kind of control. These are countries that can't even bring themselves to modify their insane immigration policies and enforce their traditional laws against the same people who would kill themselves to cut the European's electrical power coming from the North-African desert.
“They are trying to get a mega-solar plant in California permitted. 500 megawatts (I know, doesn’t sound “mega”) but it takes up 9 square miles. Yikes.”
I predict it won’t be much longer until the enviromarxists come out against solar, now that we’re actually going to build something bigger than a toy.
If they go ballistic over drilling a few holes in a couple of thousand acres of lifeless desolate tundra, imagine the conniption fit they will have once it starts sinking in that solar power means trampling over millions of acres of “fragile” desert ecosystems.
They’re only in favor of sources of energy that either don’t exist yet or don’t work. However if any of those were to ever become feasible then they will be against them.
Look at all the renewable resources that they’re beginning to be against - hydro (they’ve been against this one for a while), ethanol, wind - solar won’t be far behind.
Why we let these idiots rule (and ruin) our lives is beyond me.
http://www.aie.org.au/syd/downloads/DB-MHR%20Presentation.ppt
90+% destruction of wastes and 20 times the power to boot. zero possibility of meltdown or radioactive gas release as He is unaffected by neutron flux. the TRISO fuel has integrity to contain the remaining 10% and fission products for longer than the time-frame to decay to natural uranium levels. or go for a second pass and get it down to less than 1% and a ten thousand year decay time which we know engineered structures can isolate the FP for at least 10K years glass matrix or ceramic matrix like the TRISO particles are inert in water at any temperature and pressure for the course of tens of thousands of years.
Pebble bed reactors like THTR where developed in germany, south africa and the US but as far as I know they are not in service any more -
should uranium become a rare resource they’ll have a new go on this technology.
thats not all that easy.
If you are a healthy person a highly diluted gas mix of air and aceton fumes will have no effect on you -
but every event of a high-energy raditation quantum hits your DNA you have the chance to get cancer.
So this chance is doubled by doubling the number of events - while you can double the concentration of aceton in air a few time if you start from a high dilution without any consequence for the person breathing in it.
And waste from nuclear plants contains Pu and other alpha radiators - those will be enriched in your lungs over a longer time - so there will be a huge increase in average cancer risk if you just sprinkle that stuff over the planet.
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