First Floating Wind Turbine Buoyed Off Norway 265
MonkeyClicker writes to tell us that the world's first large-scale floating turbine has been installed off the coast of Norway. A combined effort between Siemens and StatoiHydro, this marks the first foray into deeper waters due to restrictions in place that require offshore turbines to be attached to the sea bed. "The turbine in Norway will be 7.4 miles offshore where the water is 721 feet deep. It will be utility-size turbine, with a hub height of about 100 feet, capable of generating 2.3 megawatts of electricity. To address the conditions of the deep sea, the turbine will have a specially designed control system that will seek to dampen the motion from waves."
Reminds me... (Score:3, Funny)
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Future Bond location (Score:3, Interesting)
Well obviously there's potential there or they wouldn't have gone as far as they have, but I just don't understand how it doesn't tip over instead of spinning, or how they keep it pointed in the right direction. I'd love to see it in person. And I bet they use them in a future Bond film.
Re:Future Bond location (Score:4, Informative)
You do know that using wind power on the ocean goes back a ways, right? If we hadn't solved that tipping over problem some time ago, we'd never have build sailboats :-P
All that it takes is a wide keel and some ballast. You just need to be bottom heavy enough to have a low centre of gravity, and be wide enough that if one side starts to sink, buoyancy automatically corrects by lifting that side back to the water line.
For a non-moving station, these problems are simple, since you don't need to worry about maintaining mobility. Your buoy can be an air-filled plastic sphere with a lead weight bolted to the bottom. Easy. On a boat, you need to keep a more slender shape than a sphere in order to lower resistance, and you want your ballast to be as light as you can safely get away with to keep the keel fairly shallow (both for reducing resistance and weight, and allowing the ship to enter shallow water without grounding).
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You do know that sailboats heel over, right?
Deep keel. Also your views one bouyancy are real
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Bah, I typed that in a hurry. For starters, I meant to talk of both hulls and keels and conflated them. My bad.
Wide hull, deep keel. Better?
And how exactly have I got buoyancy wrong? If you're listing sideways buoyancy is (part of) what rights you. The dipping side is tries to rise up, while the rising side tries to fall down, both because they've changed in depth from where they ought to be. This is an oversimplification, but not an inaccurate one.
Re:Future Bond location (Score:4, Interesting)
A wide hull would only hinder your stability, until the width is a significant multiple of the wavelength (which btw can be hundreds of metres). What you need for stability is a narrow tower structure that extends deep into the sea so that the surface waves don't have any appreciable affect on it. The surface of the sea is chaos and a structure like this needs to endure it rather than adapt to it. See Spar Platforms [globalsecurity.org] for example.
Am I off base (Score:3, Interesting)
For suggesting that a measure of tidal power could be harvested as well here? After all, kites can be used to harvest power through the tension exerted on their cables, if I'm correct. Similarly, these turbines are going to be tethered, right? How about it?
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This particular turbine isn't tethered. That's what makes it special - the earlier models work the way you describe.
The advantage of tidal is that it's cyclical and predictable; the drawback is that it's expensive and hard to maintain. I don't think attaching it to a wind based system would lessen the drawbacks much.
Now, attaching a wind turbine to some sort of nifty power storage device to equalize it's variable output, that would be useful. Wind power would pair nicely with a hydroelectric dam, since t
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In fact it is not fixed to the seabed, it definitely is tethered otherwise it would float away. Also, wireless power transmission has not been developed yet (on this scale).
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True, but he referred to "tension exerted on their cables" as a means to generate power. I visualized his proposal as something like an buoy anchored to the seabed, which has in fact been done for previous offshore wind power systems. I'm not positive, but I don't think his idea will work if the tether is simply a line to keep the buoy from floating away.
Costs of Solar, Wind, and Nuclear Power (Score:5, Informative)
1. solar power: more than 20 cents/kwh, 10 to 14 cents/kwh
2. wind power: 5 to 7 cents/kwh, 3 to 6 cents/kwh
3. nuclear power: more than 3 cents/kwh, more than 3 cents/kwh
Here, "wind power" refers to wind turbines on land. A wind turbine at sea would surely cost more than a land-based one.
In other worse, nuclear power is still the best solution until we can significantly improve the efficiency of generating solar power and wind power.
We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation. However, no American politician has the guts to touch that topic. It is too closely tied to illegal immigration. When a faction [nytimes.com] in the Sierra Club tried to address that issue, the members of that faction were accused of being "racist".
Re:Costs of Solar, Wind, and Nuclear Power (Score:4, Insightful)
I fail to see what immigration has to do with overpopulation. Or rather, I do see, but what I see is only shortsightedness.
A person moving from place A to place B does not increase the net population of AB, but does make their negative impact on the environment B's problem. So the attitude of "if we curb immigration, we reduce pollution" omits the reality that pollution does not obey national borders. It's the attitude of "somebody else's problem", which I could frankly do without.
Of course, you could argue that immigrants moving from a poor country to a rich one will use more resources once there. That is technically correct. But the counterpoint is that richer populations have fewer children, and in the long run that immigrant is going to assimilate. If not them, then their children. And part of that assimilation is the reduction in birthrate that comes from living in the developed world.
Re:Costs of Solar, Wind, and Nuclear Power (Score:4, Insightful)
Immigrants typically have more children. Since questioning anything that is typical of immigrants is racist, much less actually punishing, this topic is verboten.
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The problem is that if you use fiscal measures to "encourage" having fewer children you are, by definition "punishing" those who have more. At the very least you are questioning the wisdom of having so many children.
You misunderstand. The reduction in birthrate I speak of has nothing whatsoever to do with punishment. No program is in place to ensure people like myself do not have many kids, and yet I can't think of a single person I've known within ten years of my age with more than 3. 1 or none is more often the case.
The cause isn't government programs, or social stigma, or any such bullshit, it's a reflection of reality. If you live in a developed country, you have an incentive (several actually), not to have as
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I can't think of a single way for a government to punish having kids that wouldn't be borderline totalitarian. Forget "racist" - "tyrannical" springs to mind. Better to let cultural assimilation do what it has always done, and assume they'll be at the average birthrate in a generation or so.
What you're missing is that we currently pay people to have children. In our modern society, removing a benefit is considered punishment.
Since immigrants tend to have more children... well, you can do the math.
Re:Costs of Solar, Wind, and Nuclear Power (Score:4, Interesting)
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Chernobyl was really only possible at Chernobyl. It wouldn't effect modern plants around the world.
If I remember right, it had something to do without the same safety concerned and most every where else implemented along with half of the plant not knowing what the other half was doing so they reacted incorrectly when people were running a drill or a test on parts of the system.
It really isn't repeatable. At best, we will get minute leakage somewhere that will most likely be detected soon and contained.
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take a look at this [lutins.org]
Anyway, I'd like to know what Chernobyl, and any nuclear accident of that scale, might cost, and I'd like this figure taken into account when considering the cost building more nuclear power plants. kthx.
Re:Costs of Solar, Wind, and Nuclear Power (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a lovely list you have there. It appears, though, your premise in posting it has two questionable basis:
1) That all the knowledge required to prevent any of those incidents was freely available to humanity before we started experimenting with nuclear power.
2) That people in the nuclear power industry don't learn from these events and design & train against them.
The acquisition of knowledge isn't 'free'- sorry, no one is smart enough to foresee everything. Once the knowledge is acquired, however, it spreads rapidly throughout the industry.
Plus, a number of the items on that list are exaggerated, and their importance 'played up' for ignorant readers. Ignorance is of course rampant on the anti-nuke side: ignorance of the specifics of radiation, lack of perspective, the inability to evaluate realistic alternatives, ignorance of the political issues (not technical ones) that dominate the 'waste debate', etc, etc.
For most anti-nukers, all they have left is 'RADIATION BAD!!!!'. If they've got anything more than that, it's "WASTE BAD." In both cases a substantial level of ignorance and the accompanying fear are an intrinsic part of the equation.
Now multiply it by the probability, and I'm just fine with that- Because the added dollar cost of this figure is utterly insignificant.
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I see your point now but I think it is largely already accounted for.
The extra protections, then safety switches and procedures, actual lock out tag out and demanding on site compliance is all an expense that can be built into the plant and operating costs rather then account for a disaster. So I guess what we could ask in addition would be could any of the expense of handling something like a Chernobyl scale disaster be either accounted for with the extra safety protections or would those protections be in
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It [Chernobyl] really isn't repeatable. At best, we will get minute leakage somewhere that will most likely be detected soon and contained.
By which you mean a huge leak draining the reactor pool into the sea [telegraph.co.uk] which would likely have been detected 10 hours later after the fuel rods had caught fire if it not for blind luck in this incident?
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If you read the article, you would have noticed that it wasn't an operating nuclear plant and the fuel wasn't in the reactors, they were being decommissioned in a cooling pond.
The chief inspector for the NII said a fire was not at risk because the rods were partly decayed and would have remained submerged in 2 feet of water. The only risk of a Chernobyl type accident here was the fear the information created to people not paying attention.
BTW, it's easy to engineer a fail safe on something like this, just p
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If you read the article, you would have noticed that it wasn't an operating nuclear plant and the fuel wasn't in the reactors, they were being decommissioned in a cooling pond.
So; the fact that the material from the reactor remains dangerous and at risk of a "supercharged radioactive fire" even when it's not actually in use any more is supposed to be a good thing????
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It's not a good thing yet it's not a bad thing either. At that state is only temporary until the rods have cooled sufficiently. Your are statistically more likely to be fatally injured in a car crash on the way to or from work then to ever be effected by decommissioned nuclear fuel rods erupting into a fire. Does that make going to work a good thing? No, it just a risk we can live with and take precautions so that it won't or is unlikely to happen.
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What is exactly the cost of a Chernobyl scale accident? Unless the possibility of such an event is reduced to zero, we should really define this figure, and be prepared to spend it if the need arises.
Yeah, totally. Also, we should calculate the cost of a 100 tom meteorite hitting California. The possibility of that isn't zero, either, so by your wonderful logic, "we should really define this figure, and be prepared to spend it if the need arises."
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Re:Costs of Solar, Wind, and Nuclear Power (Score:5, Insightful)
We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation. However, no American politician has the guts to touch that topic. It is too closely tied to illegal immigration.
Overpopulation in North-East US, Western Europe and Japan is not due to immigration. Most of the people living there are breed and born there. The major reason for growing demand for energy is not overpopulation - it is technological development. In the West as well as in the developing world.
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We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation. However, no American politician has the guts to touch that topic. It is too closely tied to illegal immigration.
Overpopulation in North-East US, Western Europe and Japan is not due to immigration. Most of the people living there are breed and born there. The major reason for growing demand for energy is not overpopulation - it is technological development. In the West as well as in the developing world.
You are aware that Japan's population is declining at a rather alarming rate, right?
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In other worse, nuclear power is still the best solution until we can significantly improve the efficiency of generating solar power and wind power.
The word "best" is not solely defined by price. When you buy a new car, do you always get the cheapest pile of shit you can get your hands on? Or do you look for something with a certain range, speed, capacity, and maintainability, in addition to it being in your budget?
We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation. However, no American politician has the guts to touch that topic. It is too closely tied to illegal immigration. When a faction [nytimes.com] in the Sierra Club tried to address that issue, the members of that faction were accused of being "racist".
Sending all the immigrants back just moves the problem of energy generation to another place in the world - but it will still be there, and the ecosystem is a global one.
Of course, americans use more energy per head of the population than ev
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We don't necessarily need to improve the efficiency of wind or solar, we can improve the cost instead...
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First of all, let me say that I am a big proponent of nuclear energy, and in particular fast-breeder reactors.
That said, those figures look silly: you do realize that 34 cents/KWh is also more than 3 cents/KWh, don't you? I even read that "article" you linked to, and it's very poorly written. I am pretty sure this is not a peer-reviewed article, because its quality is severely lacking and no scientist would give approval to its publication in this form.
In any case, the way it is written, it does NOT support
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We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation.
Wrong, that reason is overconsumption. I'm not talking about "taking more than your share"... WTF is your share? I'm talking about needless economic activity which causes the consumption of energy (i.e. purchasing of manufactured goods.) People buy all manner of shit they don't want, don't need, don't use. They leave lights on when they're not in the room. The biggest culprit, in fact, is our throwaway society. It can actually be cheaper to replace a two year old car that has light collision damage than to
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A wind turbine at sea would surely cost more than a land-based one.
Is that true per kilowatt-hour? Seems to me that ones on sea should get more wind, more consistently. Is that not enough to offset the increased costs?
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The reason charges of racism were thrown around are two-fold:
- the faction advocating control of overpopulation was basically a set of very fresh faces with
navigation maps (Score:3, Interesting)
I would be a nightmare for a captain to meet such things in high seas. As far as navigation is concerned it is a new island.
Re:navigation maps (Score:5, Informative)
This problem was solved a long time ago, chart updates are made available regularly and large vessels will be obliged to subscribe to the service. In these modern times of electronic charts (most ships use them though they are still required to carry paper charts) updates are easily applied.
Also ships have RADAR so they can see obstructions (other vessels are not marked on charts) plus another more modern invention called AIS [wikipedia.org] which allows vessels to broadcast their position, heading, course and speed and have it overlayed onto the radar plot (and the charts). You can be sure that massive floating platforms will have lights, radar reflectors and an AIS transmitter.
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In the navigation school, where I studied, we were taught that a radar and GPS are very good things, but they tend to get unserviceable at the times when you need them most. Sometimes just because a battery is low.
Yes, there are ships, which do not have a motor running all the time. In future more and more ships will use sails. Even cargo ships. This is where the wind will really work.
Putting hard
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Sun-wind-linen-cloth-drier is the most effective green power device. Still in some European and North America countries it is the tabu.
While I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote up until this point, I figured I would support this point and mention that many HOA's (home owner associations) in the US have rules forbidding the use of clotheslines in their neighborhoods. They think it makes the neighborhood look cheap and thus brings down property values. Like much of the way HOAs operate, those rules against clotheslines are just fucked up.
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The problem begins when the bulk of humanity starts to follow this fashion, this bad example. The global epidemics of flu began after the Asian and African nations began to follow a European and US habits of handshakes and 3-hug-kisses, instead of their traditional greeting bow
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But an oil rig is an expensive and relatively rare occurrence in n navigable ocean. But if they put these things in the water all over the world to produce electricity to make some districts to look luxury without clotheslines, it would be another level of complexity.
There are over 4000 oil rigs in the gulf of mexico alone. I think you underestimate just how common these things are.
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Putting hard things in the navigable waters is the bad idea as far as I am concerned.
Great, another form of NIMBY to contend with. The oceans are plenty big enough to allow for a few manmade structures here and there. It's not as if they've parked their turbine in the middle of the only available highway. And it's not as if this turbine is easily overlooked, either.
Besides, if we follow your argument, we wouldn't be able to use ships at all.
And that satellite collision had nothing to do with radar. Nobody puts any anti-collision hardware on board satellites.
Wind... what about ocean currents? (Score:3, Informative)
dampen vs. damp (Score:2, Funny)
...dampen the motion from waves...
So the waves aren't wet enough yet? Norway has strange oceans.
On the other hand, I think for the first time "inertial dampeners" is the right term to use...
(Yes, to damp is a verb too. Heavily underused. As is "dampers")
Wouldn't it be possible... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why not (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not (Score:5, Informative)
Minor quibble: The mining and transport of fuel for a nuclear reactor is a negligible cost. Uranium ore and fuel pellets are relatively safe items, at least as far as heavy metals go, and you don't need very much fuel for a reactor. Even processing it needn't be that costly, since you can use a heavy-water reactor with un-enriched or minimally enriched fuel. If you are using enriched fuel, it's still fairly cheap in terms of dollars spent per megawatt generated.
Reprocessing the waste does have a cost associated with it, and storing or disposing of the waste you can't or won't reprocess even more so, so that part of your post was correct. And of course the operational costs of a nuclear reactor are pretty high. But then, we don't know the operational costs of these new turbines yet (which is going to be higher than it ought to be, given it's a prototype).
Re:Why not (Score:5, Informative)
For a course on nuclear power, we had to analyse the lifecycle cost of a nuclear plant. The operating costs are about half of the capital costs. Decommissioning was taken as a capital cost in this context, which it at least behaves a lot like. The decommissioning has a low cost in the context raising capital for the project because it happens 30 years or so after the initial investment, so it is heavily discounted, leaving a very small contribution.
Let me see if I can dig out the spreadsheet for this...here we go. The capital costs came to 67% of the electricity generation cost (p/kWh) and the rest was taken up with operation and maintenance, including fuel purchase and waste disposal. The cost we calculated was 2.62p/kWh total, excluding the profit (cost of capital). If you ignore the initial capital investment then the cost is only about 0.8p/kWh.
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The answer you get depends on the numbers you put in. Please tell us exactly what values you used for
I think that there are a new generation of nuclear plants that may turn out to be reasonably safe. However, past experience says that everything the nuclear industry says is lies so maybe lets just calm down and see some evidence
Re:Why not (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually, you don't have to "guard he waste". The MOX process [world-nuclear.org] "burns" (transmutes, actually) more plutonium than is generated. It's used in Europe and it allows France to reduce its plutonium stockpile. The remaining mass is about 600 liters (two barrels) of medium radioactivity waste per reactor per year, which can be stored in a warehouse until their decay sufficiently. Google "nuclear fuel reprocessing mox" for much more details.
I am against the idea of burying waste (especially the nuclear kind) because
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Meanwhile, coal power plants are spewing out radioactive isotopes by the bushel because noone outside of geologists even bother that coal holds many radioactive elements.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste [scientificamerican.com]
Nuclear power plants are built to deal with radioactive materials, coal plants - not so much.
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Atleast part of this is due to 'not in my backyard' syndrome and general ignorance and fright over anything nuclear.
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Re:Why not (Score:4, Insightful)
A nuclear power plant generates about 1000 times as much power as this thing and costs only about 10 times as much (although some built in the 1970s cost only about twice as much).
Where did you get the numbers for the windmill? I was unable to find them.
I am all for nuclear (and wind! let's spread out! In different directions!) Anyway, as far as I can tell, the cost of a nuclear plant is very different from a windmill (flotilla, I suppose in this case).
Costs includes construction, fuel, security, maintenance and deconstruction. Of these, it seems likely that nuclear has lower construction and maintenance cost, while windmills (rather obviously) wins in fuel, security and probably deconstruction cost (I suppose they could simply be emptied and sunk, reusing whatever parts are reusable.).
Does anyone know a sensible comparison of these cost? I tried to read one of Bjorn Lomborg's, once, and I nearly fell of the chair laughing. Now there is a man who cannot use a calculator.
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Well, what did you expect from a professor in economics?
Sarcasm aside you should reread Bjørn Lomborgs work. Many of the conclusions and some base estimates are colored by his political convictions, but the rest of the stuff besides global warming is pretty neutral and well researched.
Re:Why not (Score:4, Insightful)
WHAT??? Only ten times more expensive? You've gotta be kidding.
Oh, you were ... 400 million NOK for a prototype v.s. 4500 million Euros (e.g. Olkiluoto 3).
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A nuclear power plant generates about 1000 times as much power as this thing
Actually, a nuclear power plant generates about FIVE THOUSAND times as much power as this thing--you forgot to include the standard duty factor for wind turbines, which is typically about 20%. Really good ones can get up to about 33%, so in fairness a nuclear power plant may generate only about 3000 times as much power as this thing, but no non-experimental reactor is going to generate as little as 1000 times.
Nuclear plants typical
Re:Why not (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, too many could be a hazard to navigation, plus there's the whole cost-benefit business, and the high maintenance costs associated with anything left in saltwater. But I'm inclined to think such an energy solution is probably worth using where available - it certainly offers an answer to the question of where we're going to fit enough windmills to be useful. This is a problem that all forms of passive energy collection suffer from to some degree.
That being said, I could put your question back at you. Can you give me a credible reason not to build nuclear power plants? And don't just trot out Chernobyl or waste issues without elaborating - show some depth in your reasoning.
Re:Why not (Score:4, Insightful)
Compare "the worst that can happen" in nuclear power to the same with solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric power. This alone should be enough to deter us from nuclear power, because no matter what, mistakes are always made and the unexpected occurs. Currently, the only method of cleaning a nuclear accident is to package and store all the radiated stuff underground. Did you see the article recently about the irradiated mud wasps? That is seriously messed up.
Before sending astronauts into space, every conceivable scenario is considered and plans are made for the just in case. Nuclear proponents never seem to want to finish solving the problems before plunging headlong into them.
Nuclear power isn't perfect. It does have serious problems. These problems need to be definatively solved before the concept as a whole is a valid solution to the energy crisis we face. Cheap power now is NOT worth the deadly problems it WILL bring. Solve the waste problem, solve the security problems, solve the what-if problems, THEN build your nuke plants. In the meantime, we can schlep our way through the problems of other truely clean energy alternatives and not sweat so much when tge mistakes are made. So power is a little more expensive, but the risk of a wind turbine taking out an entire region for generations is non-existant.
Re:Why not (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear power is complex. Maintaining a reaction takes experts with decades of education and years of training. Calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power? You should.
Unless "decades of education" was meant to include their high school diploma, I think you're exaggerating. Not that I disagree with your fundamental point; a nuclear plant does pay good money for qualified staff, and that does include paying for some of their training.
You're correct that the level of expertise needed is particular to nuclear power, but it is part of a larger cost associate with staff. No means of power generation is fully automated. Even a system like the one in TFA presumably pays somebody's wages.
Compare "the worst that can happen" in nuclear power to the same with solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric power. This alone should be enough to deter us from nuclear power, because no matter what, mistakes are always made and the unexpected occurs.
"Worst that could happen" for a hydro dam is a major flood. I'd call that unlikely, assuming the engineers and construction team did their jobs right. But then, I'd say the same about nuclear.
I'd agree that nuclear is dangerous, but disagree that the danger should deter us from using it at all. Like all technology that can go awry, caution must be used, safeguards put in place.
I'd suggest reading up on passive safety mechanisms in nuclear power. Look up "pebble bed reactors", which have the means to make the fuel fly apart if it gets too hot, halting the chain reaction. There is never a total absence of risk, but the risk can be made small enough for our purposes. The question is not: is it perfect? - the question is: is it worth it?
If the choice came down to a mix of passive power collection, coupled with either nuclear or coal, which would you pick? Assuming we could not meet all our energy needs with alternative energy alone and we needed one or the other.
Currently, the only method of cleaning a nuclear accident is to package and store all the radiated stuff underground. Did you see the article recently about the irradiated mud wasps? That is seriously messed up.
Didn't see the article. Got a link?
I am very much aware of the risks associated with radioactive contamination. I am also aware that it isn't the end of the world. There are living things in closer proximity to Chernobyl than we though possible; the assumption 20 years ago was that the reactor site and all around it would be sterile for centuries. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both rebuilt and are home to people today, a bare sixty years after being nuked (and it's not like they were rebuilt yesterday either). Yes radiation is scary. No it is not reason enough to convince me that we must abandon nuclear power.
Before sending astronauts into space, every conceivable scenario is considered and plans are made for the just in case. Nuclear proponents never seem to want to finish solving the problems before plunging headlong into them.
On this... I actually agree with you. If new reactors are going to be built, they need to be designed with the utmost care, even if that means raising the cost considerably.
What you may not realize is that even the older, less safe, water moderated reactors currently in use have an excellent safety record. The major accidents - Chernobyl and Windscale - used designs known at the time to be less than safe. The sole accident I can think of for a light water moderated design was Three Mile Island, where the safety systems actually worked. Nobody died, no contamination was released - the worst problem was actually the hysteria associated with the words "nuclear" and "accident" in the same headline.
Nuclear power isn't perfect. It does have serious problems. These problems need to be definatively solved before the concept as a whole is a valid solu
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Nuclear power is complex. Maintaining a reaction takes experts with decades of education and years of training. Calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power? You should.
Unless "decades of education" was meant to include their high school diploma, I think you're exaggerating. Not that I disagree with your fundamental point; a nuclear plant does pay good money for qualified staff, and that does include paying for some of their training.
You're correct that the level of expertise needed is particular to nuclear power, but it is part of a larger cost associate with staff. No means of power generation is fully automated. Even a system like the one in TFA presumably pays somebody's wages.
Actually, I did mean to include the hs diploma, and ... I was also exaggerating. Sry, I often speak in hyperbole to make the point easier to see. I believe groups with barely a 6th grade education could probably maintain a wind farm.
Compare "the worst that can happen" in nuclear power to the same with solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric power. This alone should be enough to deter us from nuclear power, because no matter what, mistakes are always made and the unexpected occurs.
"Worst that could happen" for a hydro dam is a major flood. I'd call that unlikely, assuming the engineers and construction team did their jobs right. But then, I'd say the same about nuclear.
I'd agree that nuclear is dangerous, but disagree that the danger should deter us from using it at all. Like all technology that can go awry, caution must be used, safeguards put in place.
I'd suggest reading up on passive safety mechanisms in nuclear power. Look up "pebble bed reactors", which have the means to make the fuel fly apart if it gets too hot, halting the chain reaction. There is never a total absence of risk, but the risk can be made small enough for our purposes. The question is not: is it perfect? - the question is: is it worth it?
If the choice came down to a mix of passive power collection, coupled with either nuclear or coal, which would you pick? Assuming we could not meet all our energy needs with alternative energy alone and we needed one or the other.
How dangerous does something have to be to deter you? btw, I'm not suggesting we dismantle all the 110 or so US plants and replace them with alternatives. I'm merely trying to stave off the flood blindly screaming for cheap nuclear power (no, you are not included in this flood,
Re:Why not (Score:5, Insightful)
A dam breaking and flooding a populated valley will basically kill everyone there. A melt-down might kill a few people and will give a slightly increase risk of cancer to many more. A terrorist group, assuming they could get either the fuel or the waste and transport it offsite without dying from radiation poisoning would be unable to much of anything with it, except leaving it somewhere it would irradiate people - they'd cause a lot more actual destruction with conventional explosives.
I'm sorry to say this, but you have it exactly backwards.
A broken dam can't be repaired, it has to be completely rebuilt, possibly redesigned (since the old design broke). And while the flood will be over in a few days, don't forget that many dams also act as water supply to nearby communities. What will they do?
A major dam breaking is a major catastrophe that makes Chernobyl look like small potatoes.
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10 years after a dam breaking you can use the land, 10 years after Chernobyl they where still guarding the wasteland. The real cost of CHernobyl was not the 56 direct deaths but the ~4,000 additional cancer deaths. The loss of a city and the 19 mi exclusion zone around the site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_alienation). Plus the constant low enforcement issue.
PS: The overall cost of the disaster is estimated at US$200 billion, taking inflation into account. This places the Chernobyl disaster as th
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The "wasteland" is in the process of turning into a forest, and is already a wildlife haven.
How many cancer deaths does the average coal power plant cause during its life?
And only those few produce power on the magnit
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Nuclear power stations are driven to improve safety, not to cut costs. Nuclear power will always be crippled by over-regulation and excessive conservatism, because the risks are just too high if things go pear (or mushroom) shaped.
Wind generator manufactures can be a lot more aggressive in cost cutting, because the consequences are a lot less severe.
In the long run, wind generators will drop in price a lot quicker.
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Nuclear power is complex. Maintaining a reaction takes experts with decades of education and years of training. Calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power? You should.
Ha ha ha. Got you there. Homer Simpson operates a nuclear power plant, and he doesn't seem like he got past the 8th grade. You need to watch more TV, you might learn something, and not be quite so ignorant of how nuclear power plants are really run.
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Compare "the worst that can happen" in nuclear power to the same with solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric power.
The last one really bugs me. Many more people have lost their lives due to damn failure than because of nuclear power plants. You should really investigate your claims.
This alone should be enough to deter us from nuclear power, because no matter what, mistakes are always made and the unexpected occurs.
By installing mechanisms aimed at multiple redundancy and self-regulation, we can basically exclude many previously feared MCAs like chernobyl and stamp down other safety breaches to statistical insignifgance. We just need the right safety culture and openness.
Solve the waste problem
The problem with final depository is mainly a political one than the science. If we
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No, in fact, we don't need to calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power. You could, certainly, but it wouldn't mean much of anything. You'd also have to go in and do the same for the engineers operating the wind turbine network. Since we're looking at big, pointless numbers why don't we throw in the cost of the design teams for both sides. And where do you stop this line of thought anyway? Include the cost of books? Housing? Food? We could get really recursive, including in the cost of
Re:Why not (Score:5, Informative)
You mean other than the fact that they're like 100x more expensive than nuclear?
I'm an Australian.. we have one experimental nuclear reactor [ansto.gov.au], 20 MW. It uses about 30 kg of uranium a year. It's used for research.. but not into power reactors. The majority of Australians are afraid of nuclear power. If you ask people on the street why they don't want nuclear power, they'll all say the same, we don't want to have to deal with the nuclear waste. Of course, this doesn't stop us from selling shitloads of uranium. The international community has threatened to prohibit the sale of Australian uranium because we don't store the spent rods, but we do reprocess them. This has non-proliferation consequences. That threat prompted the National Repository/Store Project [ret.gov.au].. but in 2004 Scrooge McJohnny Howard killed that as he did to every other infrastructure project.
Nuclear is the only option for affordable and ecological responsible power.
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The international community has threatened to prohibit the sale of Australian uranium because we don't store the spent rods, but we do reprocess them. This has non-proliferation consequences.
Okay, now I'm curious. What non-proliferation consequences are there to this policy?
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You mean other than the fact that they're like 100x more expensive than nuclear?
Building a single windmill prototype like that and sticking it alone in the ocean (with a 10 kilometer power cable) is bound to be lot more expensive per MW than building a whole farm of them. The original article also does not specify how much of that money went into development and how much went to actually building the turbine. The cost should come down quite significantly if that thing actually works as advertized and they start building them by dozens.
Your claim that nuclear is the only option for affo
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What was the cost of developing nuclear power. Just because we already paid for it doesn't mean it wasn't expensive. How many cumulative years of education does it take for a nuclear power plant to be designed, built and maintained? Why is this cost always ignored? What is the possible cost of something going terribly wrong? Another ignored cost is insurance... surely accident insurance for a nuclear plant is much higher than for
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but it definitely isn't the only or best one in long term.
Unless we go with breeder reactors, I don't even think you can call it a long term option since there is a limited amount of uranium.
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Nuclear power is the only option for affordable and ecologically responsible power
The only reason nuclear power is cheap is the bajillions the governments poured into researching the best way to make fuel for bombs. If a tenth of that had been spent researching solar power, then solar power would be cheap.
Nuclear waste, btw, really isn't all that eco-friendly. The waste is only one problem, and today this particular problem is not solved, but the solution has been postponed. Maybe someday we will be able to safely turn nuclear waste into car tires or something. Or maybe we'll never com
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Send it off into space. Plenty of space in space.
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Send it off into space. Plenty of space in space.
I always said that too... send the waste into the Sun! But its really heavy, so getting to space is really expensive. And if something goes wrong on the way there, its much worse than if we just left it lying around.
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Well, hopefully, as with many (not all though) other things that cost money, the process will perhaps get cheaper?
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The cheaper they get the more it will cost to put them somewhere. There are only so many spots where you can harness natural energy. Offshore is a good idea but somehow I doubt miles upon miles of turbine wind farm buoys are going to do wonders for marine ecology.
If you want to convince people these things can work you need to explain where we'll put them all. Show numbers explaining how we
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If you want to convince people these things can work you need to explain where we'll put them all. Show numbers explaining ...
Not really. I could just convince them that it must work because there is no other alternative.
Whose idea was centralized power, anyway? Why not decentralize power to the individual units that need it? If a single home can be built to be off grid, then all homes could be built that way. If, for the next 40 years, all new homes built were required to generate all the power they need, I think that'd get it done.
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Why haven't we found a way to capture energy from the radioactive waste and convert it to power?
Also: I'm going to keep saying it - combine wind and solar. We have technology available that could be adapted into a hybrid wind/solar installation, a wind turbine coated with thin-film solar panels would harness loads more energy in pretty much the same footprint. In Southern California, there's a wind farm just down the I-10 that would benefit greatly from this idea because of the location, up high with no obs
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Large-scale solar power production would and does use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to boil water and drive turbines. This technology doesn't need any research; it's low-tech, efficient and frankly, pretty obvious.
The problem with solar is the same as with almost all renewable energy
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Nuclear is the only option for affordable and ecological responsible power.
Yeah, accidentally drop some nuclear waste in your water supply and see how affordable and responsible it is then.
Or better yet, let a terrorist get his hands on some and do it for you.
With history as my witness, humans are not responsible. We mean well, but we have very short memories and radioactive material has a very long life.
Widespread nuclear power would be a fucking catastrophe. You think third world countries run by dictators are going to be "careful" with their reactors or their waste?
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Can someone provide me with a credible reason why we shouldn't stack these things on every coast in the world to provide nations with clean electricity? Or is nuclear power still too sexy to give up?
Because we don't yet fully understand our atmosphere. How will this impact air currents? Will that alter climates? We don't know.
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Because we don't yet fully understand our atmosphere. How will this impact air currents? Will that alter climates? We don't know.
I daresay that you would have to put up a ridiculous number of turbines before they have any effect. I mean, the world seems to have done ok with those other large scale wind blockers commonly known as office buildings....
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... and trees! Wind turbines could balance out our deforestation.
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We probably should do exactly that. When the wind is blowing, we can offset combined cycle natural gas powerplants (which ramp up or down easily). To offset coal (by far the majority of US electricity comes from coal -- it's plentiful, cheap, and the utilities don't pay directly for the environmental consequences of burning it by the trainload), you need BASELOAD generating capacity.
Baseload is the "always on" demand for energy, 24/7. Coal and nuclear are ideally suited to meet this demand: large powerplant
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That would kill many many birds, which can be a good thing. And that many wind turbines would also change the weather somewhat, but change is for good I've heard.
Re:What a waste. (Score:5, Insightful)
You do know it's a prototype, right? The first design to float freely (as opposed to earlier designs that were anchored)?
The first version always costs more. Later versions are built at a fraction the price. Such is the nature of R&D.
So, patience. Expect a solution immediately, cheaply and bug-free, and you will be endlessly disappointed with what real life has to offer. But hey, it'll open up a career in management for you :-P
Anchored (Score:3, Informative)
There are plenty of details and videos about the project on their website:
http://www.statoilhydro.com/en/TechnologyInnovation/NewEnergy/RenewablePowerProduction/Onshore/Pages/Karmoy.aspx [statoilhydro.com]
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In the very long-term (barring global catastrophes) humanity will have to start to settle the oceans, and this experiment will give us information as to how we might be able to do that in the far future.
Why?
Habitable space won't be the reason. To settle the ocean would require a fully artificial environment - one where we build every square meter we live in from the ground (or sea) up. If we're going to do that, we might as well build arcologies, and save ourselves the trouble of plugging leaks. Plus, the population growth rate is levelling off, lessening pressure to find new places to inhabit.
Because it's there? Space would be a better choice. Absence of pressure is easier to live with than overabund
Re:Think of the whales :( (Score:5, Funny)
One whale will die, whole project will be shot.
This is Norway. We kill whales for a living.
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But seriously, is the whale killing business profitable. Perhaps you can burn the blubber to generate energy.
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HAhahaha. Ha ha ha. HA. No [wikipedia.org].
You may be thinking of Iceland [wikipedia.org].