Things that make you frown :(

shrpshtr325 said:
this is the green energy path forward with current technology, solar/wind are not energy dense enough to make harvesting cost effective, and hydro has limited availability. Nuke plants are the current best option, but noone wants to be near one because of a few well known issues so they stopped building them.
Click to expand...

It's a shame that fear and ignorance of the best and cleanest energy technology has killed it.
 
rick81721 said:
It's a shame that fear and ignorance of the best and cleanest energy technology has killed it.
Click to expand...
Fun fact, Italy had one of the best technology in nuclear energy (or so I’m being told), but soon after Chernobyl the ‘green’ party pushed for a referendum to stop using nuclear plants to produce energy. They won because of the fear created by Chernobyl. Italy is now buying energy produced by nuclear plants In France and Switzerland, plants that are located near the border anyway and thus posing as much of a thread as if they were within the country, and still has to maintain the Italian plants open at a loss since they cannot produce energy. One of my former boss is a nuclear engineer, Chernobyl happened just days before he graduated back in the ‘80s, lucky chap!
 
johnbryanpeters said:
Try substantiating that.
Click to expand...
No emission, small footprint and little waste (but really nasty). Very dangerous in case of accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima and I’m sure others) but compared to other energy sources accidents much less frequent ( think death by car accidents vs flight crashes). I’m no expert thought so don’t take my word for it.
 
Nuclear is without a doubt the cleanest most efficient energy we know of at this time. There is always a risk of accident, though, and those accidents are pretty catostrophic. The half life for waste is thousands of years and our best idea for disposal/storage is to just bury it. A lot of earth can move in a thousand years. On the earth moving note, Fukushima was all fine and dandy till an earthquake came along. All I’m saying is they need to figure out better methods of containment I guess. There are literally markets in other countries for scavengers that go looking for this shit.
 
johnbryanpeters said:
Try substantiating that.
Click to expand...

Haha how do you sequester a gas that is everywhere in the atmosphere? Nuclear waste is easy - somehow ancient Egyptians figured out 5000 years ago how to build a structure that is still intact today. You seriously think we can't build lead lined concrete bunkers in the middle of the desert that can't last at least as long?? Silly!
 
Soundguy said:
Nuclear is without a doubt the cleanest most efficient energy we know of at this time. There is always a risk of accident, though, and those accidents are pretty catostrophic. The half life for waste is thousands of years and our best idea for disposal/storage is to just bury it. A lot of earth can move in a thousand years. On the earth moving note, Fukushima was all fine and dandy till an earthquake came along. All I’m saying is they need to figure out better methods of containment I guess. There are literally markets in other countries for scavengers that go looking for this shit.
Click to expand...
The half life of some of the waste is in millions of years, not thousands. Over such time spans geology makes some very interesting and less than predictable changes.
 
Patrick said:
Limited co2. And can use methane from biomass or capped landfills. Still not there as far as scalable
Click to expand...
So I do a lot of landfill work actually, specifically burning the methane. Every single time I am told that the dollar amounts never workout to re-use the methane for energy and they just burn it off in a flare.

Wastewater treatment plants it often does make sense, even though most plants don't do it. Larger ones do. The really big ones that aren't in NYC try to use as much of their methane as possible because they buy zero electricity from utility providers and produce all of their own power through diesel/methane/natural gas. The medium sized ones can use the methane in the boilers as they need to make a lot of heat for HVAC and specifically the digesters.

NJ is mostly small plants that just burn it off as far as I can tell.
 
rick81721 said:
What does "limited co2" mean? Every fossil fuel has a limited amount of carbon it emits. You use CH4, you still have C. We should have built many more nuke plants
Click to expand...

i thought they were doing some regen stuff with ethylene for high temp applications? i guess that still
ends up with co and co2? maybe they can end up with non-combustible refrigerant ? :D

rail gun the nuke waste into the sun?

you'd think someone would come up with something useful to do with the waste rather....
 
Santapez said:
So I do a lot of landfill work actually, specifically burning the methane. Every single time I am told that the dollar amounts never workout to re-use the methane for energy and they just burn it off in a flare.

Wastewater treatment plants it often does make sense, even though most plants don't do it. Larger ones do. The really big ones that aren't in NYC try to use as much of their methane as possible because they buy zero electricity from utility providers and produce all of their own power through diesel/methane/natural gas. The medium sized ones can use the methane in the boilers as they need to make a lot of heat for HVAC and specifically the digesters.

NJ is mostly small plants that just burn it off as far as I can tell.
Click to expand...

i've seen a couple places heat the office !!!

is it just a volume problem where the equipment to make liquid methane doesn't justify multiple small "plants" ? (haha?)
almost like a truck on a garbage collection route just changes out the tanks (assuming it can burn less methane than it collects)

they look at these things in with a short term economic view - just need to change the economics.
 
Patrick said:
i've seen a couple places heat the office !!!

is it just a volume problem where the equipment to make liquid methane doesn't justify multiple small "plants" ? (haha?)
almost like a truck on a garbage collection route just changes out the tanks (assuming it can burn less methane than it collects)

they look at these things in with a short term economic view - just need to change the economics.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's volume. But the landfills I deal with tend to be old NYC or NJ landfills so they may not be huge by current landfill standards.

The ones we're currently dumping our trash into in PA/Ohio etc are more of a business and are really large so the numbers may work out better there.

Often they are long-term views. A generator is a huge capital investment and also requires maintenance and monitoring. A flare is pretty minimal up-front cost, minimal maintenance and don't require monitoring. Most older landfills that aren't large don't have anyone onsite.
 
Santapez said:
Yeah, it's volume. But the landfills I deal with tend to be old NYC or NJ landfills so they may not be huge by current landfill standards.

The ones we're currently dumping our trash into in PA/Ohio etc are more of a business and are really large so the numbers may work out better there.

Often they are long-term views. A generator is a huge capital investment and also requires maintenance and monitoring. A flare is pretty minimal up-front cost, minimal maintenance and don't require monitoring. Most older landfills that aren't large don't have anyone onsite.
Click to expand...

i was thinking collection equipment vs on-site generation.
pressurize/liquefy it for transport. it could collect for a week, then be picked-up.
I'm sure elon has already dismissed it so.....
 
johnbryanpeters said:
That's a shill site for the industry.

Uranium-238 has a half-life of 1.41 × 10 17 seconds (4.468 × 10 9 years, or 4.468 billion years).
Click to expand...

I know, I thought you'd like that since you posted an article from a bike chain wax company to "prove" paraffin is the best lubricant.

U-238 half life is irrelevant as it is not nuclear fuel or waste.

" Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years."

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html
 
shrpshtr325 said:
this is the green energy path forward with current technology, solar/wind are not energy dense enough to make harvesting cost effective, and hydro has limited availability. Nuke plants are the current best option, but noone wants to be near one because of a few well known issues so they stopped building them.
Click to expand...
We can blast the spent fuel off in to space, or maybe sky crane it down to Mars, how’s that sound? Not enough eeeeees in Green.
 
rick81721 said:
I know, I thought you'd like that since you posted an article from a bike chain wax company to "prove" paraffin is the best lubricant.

U-238 half life is irrelevant as it is not nuclear fuel or waste.

" Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years."

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html
Click to expand...
I did not try to "prove" a thing. I cited something on a wax lubricant manufacturer's site that, if you will stop frothing at the mouth and read some, leads back to some interesting chain wear and operating efficiency research. I have no position on the "best" lubricant.

U-238 is mined and some winds up in mining waste that will remain hazardous for a very long time.

Virtually no used commercial reactor fuel has been or is likely to be reprocessed.

I was working in the industry, on the design of a DNBR monitoring system, when Three Mile Island melted down and pretty much put the nuclear power companies down in the United States.

In my opinion, nuclear power would be an absolutely idiotic and immoral avenue to pursue, especially in a corporate context.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom