Obama Administration Tests the Waters With Ocean Power Startups 144
Stirfry192 sends this excerpt from an article discussing the Obama Administration's funding of renewable energy projects that are experimenting with hydrokinetics:
"Currently, the Department of Energy has a mandate to spend $50 million a year on backing such research. For its part, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has approved 72 permits for pilot projects over the past two years , according to its records. Ocean Renewable Energy Power Company, LLC , which has plans to build the largest ocean-based system in the U.S., is one of the companies that has won such funding. ... Virtually all hydrokinetic turbines resemble giant manual lawnmowers, a design patented by Alexander Gorlov of Northeastern University in 2001. [CEO Chris Sauer] calls what his company uses an 'advance cross-flow' model, and he says each of his 150 kilowatt units could power 50 to 75 homes. ... The company plans to install one of its 150 kilowatt turbines this year, and four next year, anchoring them near the floor of the bay, and progressively build out to 3.2 megawatts by 2014. The system would tie into Bangor Hydro Electric Co. grid."
Foolish mortals! (Score:3)
Biofouling (Score:2)
One word: biofouling. [wikipedia.org]
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You may have heard of it, it's the second section on that wiki page you cited. I skimmed it. It does not say "Impossible, abandon all hope."
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WRT "hypenated":
Is this a typo or a neologism? This could be the most significant portmanteau word added to English this Summer.
Unfortunately its usage in the original post inappropriately weakens that post's point. "Anti-biofouling" is indeed hyphenated but by no means should it be considered hyperbole.
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This could be the most significant portmanteau word added to English this Summer.
No, it's the most significant language-nazi trolling I've done this summer.
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Wow, I just learned something significant.
For all the years that there have been language-nazi trolls on slashdot, I for reasons I cannot explain always assumed that they would not engage in the creation of neologisms or new portmanteau words. I stand corrected.
So even for the language-nazis among us, the English of our forefathers is just not quite good enough for today's communications.
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Not just biofouling, but also corrosion, any metal you place around sea water will corrode, this thing is big, lots of required metal parts, in a highly corrosive environment, your $$$ per watt over the life of the unit would likely be lower with almost any other form of alternative power generation. I am all for tidal power in theory, but this is not it.
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Corrosion is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode [wikipedia.org]
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Corrosion is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode [wikipedia.org]
My boat (with several zinc anodes) would like to have a word with you. Be sure to bring some WD-40.
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I am all for tidal power in theory, but this is not it.
Unless you're a tidal power engineer, you're not qualified to make that assessment, are you?
Protip: You don't have to be professionally trained and certified in a field to be able to understand and engage in intelligent discussions about the subject matter, or to be able to have insights that the professionally trained members of the field could have possibly missed.
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Once you have suburbia, the better method is distributed power generation via solar panels and vertical wind turbines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_axis_wind_turbine [wikipedia.org] (take up less space, spin slower ie less of bird threat and quieter).
Rather than subsidising, better to buy out patents and offer them patent free (when locally manufactured). Promote development of lower cost production techniques. Most importantly promote open free of patent encumbrances (for local production) to accelerate develop
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Wind turbines don't make sense in suburbia, because they make noise. Ever been inside an operating windmill? Want to live right under one turning around on its bearings at night when you're trying to sleep, mounted to the stick structure of your house? The whole house will vibrate in any good wind.
Further, most of suburbia was designed by total fucking idiots. Houses don't face the sun! They don't even have passive solar construction, which offers a better return than any active solar technology, because it
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I suggest you read up on vertical axis wind turbines, they spin no faster than the wind the operate in hence are a lot quieter and are suitable for the suburban environment as long as the bearings are services. As for building facing, the fantasy of design versus the reality of geography and the extreme cost of attempting to force geography to twist to the fancies of design and how that in turn disrupts services like water, sewer and stormwater. Now add in population densities, access to services, function
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I suggest you read up on vertical axis wind turbines, they spin no faster than the wind the operate in hence are a lot quieter and are suitable for the suburban environment as long as the bearings are services
Solar power is one of the most dangerous types of power generation to work in mostly because of all the opportunities to fall off roofs.
As for building facing, the fantasy of design versus the reality of geography and the extreme cost of attempting to force geography to twist to the fancies of design and how that in turn disrupts services like water, sewer and stormwater. Now add in population densities, access to services, functional design requirements.
Now take into account the fact that in general, even when houses could be oriented to the sun for free, they aren't. So maybe it would only be 50%, the fact is that most people orient to the street whether it makes sense or not, which is dumb.
All dwellings require roofs, now the government investment is required to make it cost efficient for those roofs to be made of solar panels regardless of orientation, shape, pitch etc.
I think we should be putting greenhouses on roofs, they are still sensitive to orientation but less so. We can grow food in them hydr
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One word: biofouling.
Somebody call Mike Rowe.
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Re:Biofouling (Score:5, Informative)
Original poster here. I'm an oceanographer -- a physicist, not an ocean engineer, but I've talked with enough marine engineers to know about the issues. Designing instruments that operate unattended for long periods of time in the ocean without getting covered with barnacles, slime, worms, algae, and all manner of crap is one of the big unsolved problems in our field. Our best solution to the problem is to minimize the number of moving parts, and to keep most of the equipment well below the photic zone (the sunlit shallows where most of the life hangs out). Neither of these is possible for a hydrokinetic marine turbine.
(Random anecdote: another problem we have is that devices that carry electric current tend to get attacked by sharks, which have delicate electrosensory organs, so cables need special anti-shark armor.)
Another commenter mentioned corrosion: that's fairly easy to deal with using a sacrificial anode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode). But biofouling is a lot harder to deal with. I'm willing to believe that the designers of this system have a solution, but only after they've successfully operated a turbine for several years without problems.
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That picture makes me concerned it would last about a week. What happens the first time a fish, or worse, whale or shark gets sucked in...
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the expert engineers who are paid and trained to think of these things
Sadly, in a lot of industrial projects, the engineers are trained to think of these things and then paid not to think of them...
Gravitational issues? (Score:1)
So if they build a bunch of these will it cause any issues with tides, speed of rotation of the earth or anything?
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They'd have to build billions of them to have a noticeable effect. They have to be built fairly close to land; otherwise you can't get the power where you need it. The shorelines are a trivial fraction of the ocean, so even if you covered every shore with them you wouldn't absorb enough tidal energy to affect the motion of the earth.
Unlike the atmosphere, a thin layer of very non-dense air, you're talking about the motion of the entire earth, a vastly larger amount of mass, by a half-dozen orders of magni
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That is also true for poisoning the entire atmosphere. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. ;)
I think: Why do it, when you can do something that is not only way better, cheaper, easier to repair and environmentally friendly, but even has a positive effect on the environment!
I talk about Project Desertec [wikipedia.org]. (Concentrated solar power in the south + pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the north, with high-voltage DC wires in-between.)
The mirrors have been found to collect a bit of water from the air, and shade the sand
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They use waves, not tides to generate power.
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Oh Gawd...Shut the FUCK UP!
Obviously the microwave towers have scrambled you brains.
They stopped using the towers years ago because we were on to them. Now they use satellites. Much harder to detect.
hey! (Score:2)
that is less than a fraction of the Constellation program and it might produce results that benifits mankind here on earth for generations, and not some future man in year 3000 on Uranus
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fine but dont come crying to me when OPEC fucks you up the ass again
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:1)
There's an odd little paradox I've thought about. Why is it that California, a bastion of environmentalism, large bulging government, and tons of regulation, has such a relatively robust economy compared to most other US states? Cheap labor? No, there's lots of migrant workers in the US. Perhaps it's ready access to electricity and oil? No, California is pretty notorious for having higher electricity and gas prices.
Maybe, then, it has something to do with recycling. Consider Japan which has virtually
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California's economy comes from three places. Silicon Valley etc., Hollywood, and the underground black market economy dealing in trading illegal goods; just one of those goods surpassed wine last year (if not sooner) and continues to gain popularity. It has nothing to do with recycling, which is an expensive boondoggle. We lost a waste transfer plant because it could not afford to continue to operate if it has to separate people's trash. It costs more energy to recycle glass than to make new glass; we ough
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I was curious about how things stack up and was shocked to see agriculture at 2%. I figured it would be much higher.
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Real Estate is bullshit, however; it mostly involves shuffling of money from one party to another without actually doing any work. It's these other items that permit the state to exist; without the items I mentioned California would exist basically to operate ports. Los Angeles exists in its current form because of Hollywood, for example.
3.2 megawatts (Score:3)
3.2 megawatts in 2 years? Great job, guys. In 200 years you might be able to replace a coal plant.
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3.2 megawatts for a pilot project is perfectly reasonable, if it works as well as hoped they'll apply for permits to build more, and probably be granted the permits.
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And then eco-terror groups will demand endless environmental impact studies and keep the permits held up in court for a decade. The "Green" movement isn't about saving the planet. It's about blocking the progress of mankind in response to some twisted belief that they've somehow sinned against Gaia. It's where all of the disenchanted misanthropic do-nothings ran to after the fall of their beloved USSR.
I read a story years ago (don't remember who wrote it) about a future society where the government had set up a fake enemy for all the fruitcakes to protest against. At the end, the main character comments that the government was now able to build power plants, roads, and do all the things necessary to maintain civilization, since the natural born protesters were being successfully distracted.
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This is like saying "put a man in space in 2 years? Great job, guys. In 200 years you might be able to put a man on the moon."
Technology does not tend to scale linearly. Like Moore's Law these things increase exponentially.
Puns (Score:1)
I wanted to throw out some puns to counter the one in the title, but I got nothing.
You might even say that I...
Yeah I got nothing.
I still prefer point-of-use energy.... (Score:2)
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It should be noted that your so-called "private taxes" differ from real taxes in one significant way - the energy monopolies can't throw you in jail for not paying them.
Though, I'm curious - do you actually believe that the people who manufacture the hardware you'll be using for your point-of-use energy generation won't be making a profit when they sell them to you?
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It should be noted that your so-called "private taxes" differ from real taxes in one significant way - the energy monopolies can't throw you in jail for not paying them.
Though, I'm curious - do you actually believe that the people who manufacture the hardware you'll be using for your point-of-use energy generation won't be making a profit when they sell them to you?
I would think (particularly given the increasingly "conservatively" corrupt state of the SCOTUS) that you should have appended "yet" to your first sentence...and they can already use liens and court judgements that yield garnishments to throw you out of your residence (or even an apartment...you won't be able to stay in yours if enough is being garnished to make you incapable of meeting your expenses), which can be a fate worse than jail given the hazards of exposure to the elements, crime, etc.
Regarding y
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Only if you buy their product and refuse to pay for it.
Which isn't quite the same as "refuse to pay your taxes"...
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You're right, those things might actually happen!
Oh, so they're doing research to the tune of 50 mil before they try anything big. Problem solved.
The government is probably necessary (Score:3)
Any private company doing this will get railroaded by the "environmentalists." And by that in quotes I mean those people who are against progress at all costs, BANANA, and not necessarily for the environment. You know, the people that caused Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore to leave the organization.
At least with the backing of FedGov they might have a chance to get something done instead of having their project put on hold in the courts until it dies.
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Nice straw man you have there.
I'm not an environmentalist but I am a realist, perhaps even a cynic. I see the endless fuck-ups at nuclear plants in the UK and the rest of the world, mostly due to human and economic factors, and think to myself "given the choice I'd rather not trust a for-profit company to run one of these things. You can argue all you want about developing safer reactors and better re-processing but no matter what you do you will never completely eliminate that risk. When things do go wrong
Rather not trust a for-profit company? (Score:2)
Tell me, what for-profit company was in charge of the deadliest commercial nuclear power plant, ever?
Oh yeah, it wasn't a company, it was a government.
"Don't forget that the UK is part of the EU and we already buy a lot of energy from other countries"
Yes, France, which means nuclear.
"I don't know why people are so down on this. "
The tech does look interesting. That's why I wouldn't like to see it get derailed in court by environmentalists.
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You are really quite good at building straw men, aren't you?
Tell me, what for-profit company was in charge of the deadliest commercial nuclear power plant, ever?
So... your argument is that because the worst disaster ever was at a government run facility that means privately run ones are safe? Or that we can't trust the government to run things, even though I wasn't suggesting that they should?
Yes, France, which means nuclear.
Good effort once again. I was actually just pointing out that the typical argument against importing renewable energy is that we become reliant on other countries, when in face we already are. I then went on to point
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"your argument is that because the worst disaster ever was at a government run facility that means privately run ones are safe?"
No, my argument is that government isn't necessarily superior. It's a knee-jerk reaction from the left -- private enterprise sucks. Same as the knee-jerk reaction from the right -- government sucks. Either can be done well, either can be done poorly.
"I then went on to point out that we could reduce that reliance and move it to more stable, friendly countries."
Or you could go nuclea
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Over the past 30 years if there is one thing that I've seen dry up is privately funded research. It simply no longer exists..
Uh, what?
I've been working in R&D in most of the companies that I've worked for in the last twenty years. So I'm somewhat surprised to discover that I've just been imagining it.
As for this particular 'research', if the 'researcher' could make a good business case for it working and making financial sense then plenty of people would be eager to throw money at them. When they have to go to the government for taxpayers money that's pretty good evidence that there is no such case that makes any sense.
Re:You know what's not renewable about Obamski Adm (Score:4, Insightful)
As for this particular 'research', if the 'researcher' could make a good business case for it working and making financial sense then plenty of people would be eager to throw money at them. When they have to go to the government for taxpayers money that's pretty good evidence that there is no such case that makes any sense.
Exactly. Real Research does not come with a guarantee of a payoff. You may have worked in R&D devisions, but they do not do Bell Labs, Xerox PARC levels of research. These days only short term payoff kinds of research are done privately. Thanks for proving the GPs point for him.
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Exactly. Real Research does not come with a guarantee of a payoff. You may have worked in R&D devisions, but they do not do Bell Labs, Xerox PARC levels of research. These days only short term payoff kinds of research are done privately. Thanks for proving the GPs point for him.
Bell Labs doesn't do Bell Labs levels of research anymore. :(
There are still some companies investing in basic research, but even they have shifted most of it over to application-driven research with clearer near-term benefit.
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Hey check our wallet dumbass!
We can play the horses later.
Lets fund all the experimental crap we've been playing with already and pouring my damned money into, it's further ahead and a safer bet(just in case you're too thick to put that together all by yourself).
Obama isn't so left or right as he is an attention whore.( Wants re-elected and it sounds like you're ready to unzip him and say ahhhhh)
You seem to be an "intellectual" maybe you can put two plus two together for the rest of it. Should taste better
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STFU and take four Advil ,whiner.
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using intellectual as a sneer
Typical of the Teabagger know-nothing contingent.
GP wasn't using intellectual as a sneer, he was using "intellectual" as sneer. The quotes imply a false self aggrandizement that "intellectuals" do, but intellectuals do not.
So Intel's been sitting on its ass (Score:3)
For the last couple decades while all these vastly faster and more efficient processors just magically sprung from Obama's immaculate ass?
There's plenty of research being done.
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All research with a clear short term benefit in mind. How much research into quantum computing has Intel done? That's all university research at this stage with probably mostly government funding.
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All research with a clear short term benefit in mind. How much research into quantum computing has Intel done? That's all university research at this stage with probably mostly government funding.
Intel's Strategic Research Group has about $4 billion a year to spend researching next generation processors, including quantum computing. Microsoft Research has $10 billion a year, and spends a chunk of that on quantum computing research as well. The private sector dumps a ton of cash into basic, fundamental research. But it does so with an eye towards eventual economic returns, rather than research for research's sake. You'd be surprised how much actual hard, beneficial research is done by big corpor
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I'm curious how much of that research that companies do actually makes it to the light of day. Granted, university research is frequently stuck behind journal paywalls as well, but is there any comparison to be made? How much research that doesn't result in a patent actually gets published for others to use?
A surprising amount of it never reaches the light of day - as originally researched. Usually spinoffs or alternate applications do ultimately make it into the market place.
As far as universities go, it's amazing how much money is sent from the private sector to those universities to perform research. It's a "cheap" way to buy great research. A sizable chunk of research done at US universities is, in fact, funded with private funds via grants. It's not quite the "Government is the only one who ever pa
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Even PARC was for-profit (Score:2)
Ever heard of the laser printer?
It's mainly because of the GUI and such that PARC is thought of as some pure research organization. But even with the Alto Xerox tried to commercialize, in the form of the Xerox Star. They just failed.
A few times a month I hear of the esoteric stuff coming out of IBM -- stuff that won't hit the shelves for another decade, if at all.
Like I said, plenty of private research being done.
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Ok, but what private enterprise is going to fund something like the LHC the the Hubble Telescope to name a couple of things?
Moving the goalposts? (Score:2)
The claim was that NO long-term or theoretical research comes out of private funding. That is simply not true.
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Yes, I was too lazy to take the time look it up. I'd be interested is someone proved me wrong.
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There is development and improvement being done. You take an existing x86 core and you improve the manufacturing process, you shrink the process size, you rework the instruction dispatcher, you add a memory controller, you add another layer of caching. These are all relatively low risk, evolutionary improvements, with a clear and near term financial payoff. What the OP is stating is that there is no private funding for high risk research. Intel is not putting large sums of money towards finding a replac
"finding a replacement for silicon semiconductors" (Score:2)
IBM has been working on that, with carbon IIRC.
Private research is alive and well.
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When Intel hits that insurmountable wall, I see more applications of micro tubules to move water through the processor and then moving 3D. What is wrong with a .5" on a side cube with water cooling instead of a .5" on a side square?
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It's... an... experiment. To see if it's feasible.
At least someone gets it.
Also, how come the naysayers always want to put all the country's future energy eggs into one basket?
- Fusion is great, assuming it can be built.
- Fission is proven, and the newest designs significantly reduce many of the problems with the older designs. But it still has political problems.
- Hydroelectric is renewable, and fairly clean, assuming proper planning and site preparation is done.
- Biofuels (especially if sourced from by-products and waste) also work well to repla
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- Hydroelectric is renewable, and fairly clean, assuming proper planning and site preparation is done.
All correct except this. Hydro is neither renewable (dams fill in over time) nor clean (it's a gigantic mess, ecologically) and nobody should be building dams of any size. Fish ladders don't work. The bigger the dam project, the bigger the fail.
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Along with the need for the fish ladders is the problem of the vegetation that gets submerged by the lake formed by the dam. As the vegetation decomposes, it causes problems with the water in the lake killing many forms of life in the lake.
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Clearly he was wrong, and a troll, therefore he represents Republicans-- is that how it works?
Very clever jab, well done.
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To be fair, most people that would make stupid Obama name jokes tend to be Republican.
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Dunno about name jokes, but often enough Jon Stewart mocks Obama, and Ive never heard him being accused of being a Republican.
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The poster must think Obama's a communist. For the new definition of communism that is. Anyone who isn't in favor of privatizing everything has at least communist leanings.
Re:It shoule be $50 Billion on fusion! (Score:5, Informative)
Fission is not something the free market will invest in. They never have. So far it has taken government backed loans and government provided insurance just to get the plants we have. I think it is a great source of power, but he free market seem to disagree.
They only carry $375 Million in insurance on the plants and the Price-Anderson act covers over that. This act is so anti-free market that it moves civil suits to federal jurisdiction and no claimant can get punitive damages.
Re:It shoule be $50 Billion on fusion! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: $375 Million and the Price-Anderson act. So far the Fukushima disaster has cost the Japanese over $240 Billion. If something even close were to happen to a US reactor we the people are on the hook for any costs over $375 Million. No nuclear power plants will be built if it's left only to the free market.
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has cost the Japanese over $240 Billion
No. Just... no.
That's an estimate by some 'think tank' of the 'possible' total costs for the next decade. So even if it were true, it's just $25B/yr, or about 1/4 the annual cost of the war in Iraq.
It can't possibly be the total cost so far -- there's literally no way to buy stuff that is that expensive and make use of it in a constructive way in such a short period of time.
To put it another way, all money spent eventually becomes labor. Raw materials are priced essentially by the labor required to obtain t
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I think you're right, the $240 billion is probably and estimate of the total cost and may be on the high side depending on a lot of factors. But you can't tell me that the total cost of Fukushima is not going to be higher than the $375 million limit of private liability in the Price-Anderson Act and no doubt several multiples of that.
No private insurance company is willing to take on the potential liability of a nuclear plant without government guarantees to back them up.
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Maybe, but throwing around numbers that are 25x higher than a realistic estimate and pretending that it is being spent at 30x of the actual rate makes it sound like a nuclear accident would instantly bankrupt even a large insurer, when in reality it would do no such thing.
Many insurance companies could handle $1B/yr, and there's nothing wrong with governments providing extra protection, like they do with banks.
And anyway, who cares how nuclear power is insured? You either pay for it directly through the cos
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No private insurance company is willing to take on the potential liability of a nuclear plant without government guarantees to back them up.
Seems like post Fukushima many governments are willing to take on the potential liability of a nuclear plant either.
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Your grammar on that sentence was terrible. I believe you are trying to say that not many governments are willing to, but that is not what you said. Yes, some governments who don't have to worry about tsunamis and huge earthquakes got scared and decided to move away from nuclear. At the time it mostly sounded like politicians pandering for votes more than any actual good reason. Many governments have said that they are not stopping using nuclear, and they are right to say it.
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Actually, estimated at $70 billion to $240 billion for the next 10 years [greenaction-japan.org].
Hmmm, so $7 to $24 billion a year.
Lets see. Fossil fuels fine particle pollution kills over 13,000 [www.catf.us] people a year in the US, mostly from coal. So if a human life is worth $540,000 to $1,850,000, we've matched that in the human cost alone for power plants operating normally in the US.
But it looks like the value of a hum [care2.com]
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Fission is not something the free market will invest in because the fact that were still running 40yr old reactor designs, restricted from fuel reprocessing, and stuck using expensive and rare U235, in addition to all the bureaucracy needed to install a new plant, means that by the time you get the thing built, it will be several decades before you recoup its cost, at which time it's nearing its end of life and will need to be replaced.
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It's not like we aren't trying to develop new designs, it is just that so far no-one has come up with a workable one that is better than what we have. Despite the basic technology being 40 years old it has the advantage of being well tested and well understood, and therefore safe. Any time you introduce something new you have to prove that it is safe to operate, which for nuclear takes a long time and a lot of money. Even then things go wrong, fly-by-wire systems in passenger aircraft being a good example.
A
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there is only one way to answer a question no one has asked... but this one has been asked and has been successful in most cases. The easy way is a large float connected to a crank-arm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power [wikipedia.org]
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Fusion?
I had a random idea several months ago that I think might work but would be impractical in the "We need metric shit-tons of energy *NAOW!*" climate we live in.
Basically, the main problems with current fusion systems are the following:
Concentrating the plasma tight enough to release over unity energy directly often causes pinching of the magnetic confinement feild, cutting off plasma flow, and killing the fusion reaction. (A little like turning the gas up too high on a cutting torch blows the flame ou
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Or perhaps Clinton canceled the funding and Bush Jr. brought it back? But of course, the US government is a megalithic being that always acts on things the same way throughout many presidencies.
Just don't put them (Score:3)
Where a big-wig senator thinks it'll interfere with his view of the sea or his enjoyment of sailing his yacht.
Oh yeah, he's dead -- full spead ahead!
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>$350,000 per household
Citation needed or shut the fuck up.
citation [broadbandbreakfast.com]
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Well if you had been on the 13th, coherent enough to read...
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/13/2014244/The-Cost-Of-Broadband-In-Every-Rural-Home [slashdot.org]
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Nonsense. One should always be investing, even when in debt. If I'm broke, you can bet your ass that I'll borrow money to travel to job interviews. Austerity makes for good sound bites, but in practice it's a disaster.
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Call it investing in the future. Not all investments work out but you never know unless you try.
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I find in unconscionable that we are doing this with a deficit as large as ours. Exploring such things when you're in the black is one thing; there will be no return on these funds.
Are you trolling? Basic research should always continue. We won't be able to solve our problems until we learn how, and the way to do that is ... research. One cannot reasonably expect all lines of research to pay off: most don't. But the ones that do produce great rewards, and history has demonstrated, very clearly, that in the long run we've always been better off making an investment in knowledge. To not do so is shooting ourselves squarely in the foot, and selling ourselves short into the bargain.
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And what's wrong with letting the free market do the R&D?
The free market is preoccupied with next quarter's returns. There is no next quarter return with basic scientific research. Or next year. Or next 5 years.
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The markets must be forward looking, or 30 year bonds would not sell.
That's a far more civil conversation.
Thankyou for pointing out an obvious hole in my understanding. I'm glad to have learned some basic economics.
I'm not an idiot, and I'm sure in real life you aren't so aggressive and rude.
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I find in unconscionable that we are doing this with a deficit as large as ours. Exploring such things when you're in the black is one thing; there will be no return on these funds.
On the contrary, exploring alternatives to the status quo that put us in the Red is exactly the right approach to finding solutions to strip ourselves of the last century's oligopolies.
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what market, you would be taking an idea to a monoploy who has no interest
this is not tivo your talking about, its a major utility