You mean this bad boy! 
Posted on 06/10/2003 10:29:32 AM PDT by mvpel
They think of windmills as little things for charging batteries or broken down things littering California. I'm trying to catch people to date.
Yes, I was trying to think of a similar analogy and came up with the model T vs crown vic.
misunderestimate:LOL, I love that one. A good example of what wind could easily do is here in Iowa. We use 39 Twhr per year. We could erect 1000 66 meter windmills and produce 10 percent of that and the land used would cover about 70 sq miles. Iowa is 56,000 square miles by the way. That land would still be 90 percent as productive as farm land and each farmer would get a couple thousand bucks per year for the use of his land.
So the first obvious point is that modern windmills make a ton of electricity. The next obvious thing is that they make none when there is no wind. I prefer taking that 10 percent from wind and throttling down the gas fired peaking plants and reserving water in dams and such for hot windless summer days. I like so many other people don't trust the preported safety and cleanness of nukes and would like to reserve coal for when wind isn't available. Eventually, with a good enough grid, wind could produce a much bigger fraction.
No worries. Nuclear containment structures are the hardest of hard targets.
My understanding is that if they had tried to fly a jet into the side of a nuke plant the jet would probably have disintegrated on the side and not harmed the plant.
Correct. The finite element analysis codes certified for structural analysis of Class 1E systems all show that you might get some scarring and perhaps a fraction of an inch of spalling of the concrete, but little else. These codes have been benchmarked against real-world tests done at Sandia National Lab, including crashing jets into concrete walls similar to those built for containment and spent fuel pool structures.
But what if the dove straight down the top?
Actually, the strength of the structure is stronger on the top for hemispherical containment geometry. Transmission of forces, you see. For cylindrical containments, you'll get a bending moment for the disk-shaped roof slab, but again there is a (somewhat larger-radius) hemispherical shape to that which provides very efficient distribution of the stresses to the surrounding structures and eventually the foundation.
Coastal states have the offshore option which is really nifty. I could have mentioned N Dakota which is often called the Saudi Arabia of wind. They could install 130 gw worth of wind and produce 300 TWHR per year there which would be more than the entire midwest could use during windy days. That's 10 percent of what the whole nation uses.
What has you spooked about nuclear, oviously we have plants that have been running for years with no problem. 3 mile isalnd was not as bad as it was made out to be and Chernobyl was run by the Russians, who we know are not the most competent.
The radioactive fuel and the radioactive waste. I also believe the plants themselves are targetable for terrorists or as military targets. That would have nasty results. If you blow up any other kind of power plant all you have is a fire, not so with a nuke. I also just like windmills. Some people like Harleys and some people like airplanes. I think windmills are the niftiest man made thing around.
Don't get me wrong, i am all for clean, localized power like solar and wind can provide, but neither can provide national power right now. Solar looks much better for the future, wind is just for kicks.
I don't know why you think that since a 1 mw windmill costs about 800,000 bucks and is producing synchronous power. 1mw worth of solar panels alone costs 5 million bucks. That's just the beginning of the hardware you need to get the power to the grid.
That's great to know. I always assumed since there was steam coming out the top that they were vulnerable from that direction.
You need help and prayers. The former is up to you to find, I promise to do the latter. May the Lord comfort and protect in your hour of darkness. I was thinking the same thing yesterday as I tried to explain to my son that the exhaust plume coming form the Palo plant was not a tornado and not going to "get us". There were several moments of silence as he pondered the veracity of my explanation and I pondered an escape route in case of a "mishap" at the plant.
I like the wind option more and more.
You may be thinking of the cooling tower. That component is the most tertiary of the tertiary systems (condenser feedwater). The whole cooling tower could collapse and it would not threaten the integrity of the containment, nor cause an accident outside of the bounds of the maximum credible accident analysis. In fact, the SAR of many operating plants explicity analyzes such an event (loss of heat sink).
But no matter how developed the technology, the laws of nature are still the ultimate arbiter. And the one with primacy in this case is conservation of energy. You can't ever get more than what the source provides, and solar is limited, ultimately, by the solar constant. Solar, like wind, is a diffuse energy source. That means you have to do a lot of work (relatively speaking) to capture a useful amount, as well as live with its time-varying nature. Eventually, no matter how many technological improvments you make, you're going to come up against the inherent limits that the laws of physics and natural processes impose.
Yep, that what I'm doing.
So I'm like all those people who used to see tape drives in old movies and think they were looking at the computer.
If we put windmills along all the roads an highways that are already peppered across the country we'd probably have more than enough. In Iowa we'd have about 4 times too much.
Windmill efficiency isn't so much the issue as the cost per kwhr. That keeps dropping as windmills get bigger and as wind farms get bigger. They keep coming up with tricks to save a buck here and there.
Yup there are a ton of advantages to solar panels even today. They are modular so you can add a couple more anytime you want. On roofs they use zero space that isn't already used.
You mean this bad boy!
Good analogy. The cooling tower is 'way down the line on the balance-of-plant side. Sometimes you see editorial cartoons (drawn by people who don't really understand) showing little atom symbols (looking like a crude representation of the Bohr atom) flying out of the cooling tower. Nothing could be further from the truth. The cooling tower is the most benign of structures. Since its just dumping recirc water waste heat it comes nowhere near the primary cooling loop.
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