Fukushima-How bad is it?

[Farm Boy]

Asking about the dams isn't because I'm implying CA shouldn't do that, it's that CA gets an enormous amount of renewable energy from the fact that there are dams to generate it from. And the stuff about hail and wind damaging things is because the conditions under which renewable energy is generated in CA will not be shared everywhere. Transmission of electricity is expensive and nowhere near 100% efficient. Winters are gloomy here, the sun gets weak. But the wind does blow(but not always always). Hail happens, every year. Tornadoes annually annihilate villages and swaths of towns, how durable the infrastructure is to these things, and how expensive they are to remanufacture and repair is relevant. I am excited about solar. I doubt it will be useful as a one-shop-stop for most places in anything resembling a functional timeframe.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Asking about the dams isn't because I'm implying CA shouldn't do that, it's that CA gets an enormous amount of renewable energy from the fact that there are dams to generate it from. And the stuff about hail and wind damaging things is because the conditions under which renewable energy is generated in CA will not be shared everywhere. Transmission of electricity is expensive and nowhere near 100% efficient. Winters are gloomy here, the sun gets weak. But the wind does blow(but not always always). Hail happens, every year. Tornadoes annually annihilate villages and swaths of towns, how durable the infrastructure is to these things, and how expensive they are to remanufacture and repair is relevant. I am excited about solar. I doubt it will be useful as a one-shop-stop for most places in anything resembling a functional timeframe.

Fair enough. For the record Texas is a lot more applicable to solar...probably similar to California. But Texas and their idea of regulation is pushing for big generation site wind farms. They are more interested in producing power to export so a few big investors can profit than they are in efficiency. Big power companies absolutely hate everything California has done.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well sure! But that's back to why conservatives and progressives are better in different ways!

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well sure! But that's back to why conservatives and progressives are better in different ways!

Well, better for different people anyway.

 

[Cutlass]

Well, I guess that's nice for homeowners, like wind turbines are nice for providers and people who don't have a lot of space to coat in panels, industrial uses, etc. I have my doubts regarding "zero maintenance" solar panels being widely viable though. Tree branches, wind storms, hail, all things I'm pretty sure I'm going to guess can do a number on a solar panel, right? Bear in mind on that California dream of everyone generates "their own without a farm" still probably includes the enormous dams, right?

Regulation does deter energy system upgrades. Not always a bad thing mind you, but it does. Regulation held up windmills in my area for a couple years. Regulation holds up pipelines replacing rail cars and trucks. But sure, sometimes it doesn't.

You've got a whole farm. Suppose you take the corner of the far furthest from your house, and lease if for a wind turbine tower. That's less than an acre out of farming. Would that tower really bother you in that case?

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, better for different people anyway.

And thus spaketh naked truth from he who calls himself Tim.

You've got a whole farm. Suppose you take the corner of the far furthest from your house, and lease if for a wind turbine tower. That's less than an acre out of farming. Would that tower really bother you in that case?

Well, yes. The farm isn't all that big, and those turbines are enormous. They cast significant shadows, they're loud, and at night they blink in unison over the miles of prairie horizon like a lumbering army of giants. But would I? Yes, undoubtedly. They can be farmed around and the revenue generation is a no-brainer. But this is all entirely irrelevant. We can't lease out to a windmill, we're entirely too close to local governmental entities that would decline to permit placement.

 

[Cutlass]

Your farm may be poorly located for them. But many other farms are not. And that's really an overlooked point about renewables. They can be used in conjunction with land in use for other purposes. They take up very little land of their own.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Visited a wind farm last year and i was surprised by how noisy and big these thing are. It is scary to be under them, the huge blades looks like are going to fall off and crush you to pulp. Wouldnt like to have one next to my home.

 

[CavLancer]

Do windmills slow the Earth's rotation?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Do windmills slow the Earth's rotation?

No, that would be gigantic hydro electric projects. Windmills just alter weather patterns by removing energy from air masses.

 

[CavLancer]

I wonder though, the prevailing winds are caused by the spin of the Earth, yes? Slow that wind down, even a fraction, and the added resistance of the atmosphere not moving as fast should theoretically slow the planet, yes?

 

[red_elk]

I wonder though, the prevailing winds are caused by the spin of the Earth, yes?

As far as I know, Earth spin influences only wind direction in some cases, through Coriolis effect. Wind gets energy from the Sun, because of uneven heating of atmosphere.

 

[Cutlass]

I read an article recently saying that a space elevator would slow the Earth's rotation by about a picosecond a year. Even millions of windmills wouldn't have that much effect.

 

[Silurian]

Surely as an engineer you understand that seldom will there be something best in all cases, there are lots of things with different advantages and disadvantages.

Which is why I said "Nuclear is not the answer to climate change, we need a set of solutions that will work everywhere."

Demand for electricity is growing and it is growing faster in the "third world".

Nuclear power stations take a long time to build.
How much uranium is there left that can be cheaply mined, at the current rates of consumption we will not have a problem this century. But if there was a massive expansion to replace the electricity produced by coal where would the fuel come from. Protoptype breeder reactors have been built but have weapons production potential. There is a possibility of using other fuels but how long will it be before they are developed on an industrial fuel.



.

 

[CavLancer]

I read an article recently saying that a space elevator would slow the Earth's rotation by about a picosecond a year. Even millions of windmills wouldn't have that much effect.

You are right, I agree. The effect would be infinitesimal.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I like radioactive things. There's a whole lot you can just kind of buy online with no requirements. I have several 1 uCi sealed isotope samples (Cs-137, Na-22 (emits antimatter!), Mn-54, Tl-204, Po-210, and soon to get Co-60 too), and I was just playing with thorium and uranium ores plus a couple of their compounds (ThO2, Th(NO3)4, (NH4)2U2O7) only yesterday! The occasion was that I had just gotten a fairly cheap Russian-made gamma spectrometer, which means I can identify all sorts of gamma-emitting isotopes in the thorium and uranium decay chains along with the little isotope sources I bought, rather than just having to rely on my Geiger counter. Nonetheless, just putting all the stuff in a dresser drawer leaves radiation levels in my apartment at very near background, and much lower than those mutants in Denver who get twice as much background because they have less atmosphere to shield them from cosmic rays. To say nothing of pilots and flight attendants!

I took a Geiger counter with me on a recent flight to see friends in Texas. It was really impressive how much more radiation there is at altitude. Background rates went from ~15 counts per minute at the ground to ~400 counts per minute at 37000 feet. Pilots get more radiation exposure per year than nuclear plant workers by far, and about as much as uranium miners.

I really hope that there's a meltdown near me because then the money I wasted on stuff I couldn't afford spent pursuing my interests would suddenly come in very handy! Always wanted to find some iodine-131, and I have plenty of potassium iodide for myself and anyone around me to help block uptake if it were to come to that. My wet dream is finding enough plutonium after an accident that I could surround it with beryllium and use it as a neutron source, but nearly all reactors use low-enriched uranium, so that's not likely to happen.

Granted, nuclear meltdowns are always a mess, and I wouldn't really want to live anywhere near the Fukushima exclusion zone. But the overall release of radiation into the environment hasn't been too bad, given the scale of the disaster. Radiation scares people about 10,000 times as much as it should for its toxicity: we're talking elevated cancer rates on the order of 5.5% per sievert, and the sievert is an enormous unit of radiation equivalent to 1/4 the median lethal dose if it is taken all at once. It has this perfect combination to freak people out: it's invisible but really easy to detect with a Geiger counter, and Geiger counters near sources freak people out at levels far lower than anything dangerous.

"So what do you like to do for fun? Any hobbies?"
"Oh I like to experiment with radioactive matter"
Those are the kind of conversations I want in my life. As the one asking the question, anyhow.

 

[Bootstoots]

"So what do you like to do for fun? Any hobbies?"
"Oh I like to experiment with radioactive matter"
Those are the kind of conversations I want in my life. As the one asking the question, anyhow.

It gets better!

After I was made to get rid of most of my chemicals earlier this week by order of the city's fire marshal, I've started a new project, which I had already begun coincidentally but now will be able to devote my full attention to, with spring break coming up after an exam tomorrow: making neutrons at home! I've ordered two 5 mCi static eliminators, which contain polonium-210 trapped beneath a gold foil, behind a screen. Product description.
http://www.nrdstaticcontrol.com/pro...42-1000-staticmaster-nuclespot-alpha-ionizer/
Po-210 is great because it's nearly a pure alpha emitter - alpha particles can't penetrate the skin and are harmless on the outside, although alpha emitters are extremely dangerous internally, as Alexander Litvinenko could attest were he still alive. Normally, these things are used to ionize air and carry static charge away from objects, for a variety of reasons ranging from semiconductor manufacture to the accurate weighing of things on microgram scales - which it's actually used for in the lab for the class on aerosol measurement I'm currently taking. These little static eliminators are perfectly legal for anyone to lease for a year under an NRC general license; as long as you don't tamper with it and return it intact, it's all cool. And, as long as you don't tamper with them, the Po-210 will stay safely enclosed in the device. Safe, legal, affordable experimentation with millicurie levels of radioactive materials - what's not to love?

What I'm doing is getting two of them and two little pieces of beryllium to put on top of them, plus a bunch of plastic blocks. When an alpha particle (helium-4) hits a beryllium-9 nucleus (the only stable Be isotope), it reacts to form carbon-12 and kicks off a neutron. 10 mCi of Po-210 next to Be should generate just enough neutrons that any of several elements - certain isotopes of indium, dysprosium, europium, manganese, and a bunch of others - should be able to pick up the resulting neutrons and become very slightly radioactive - just enough that I can detect them. The plastic blocks are there as a neutron moderator, to slow down the fast neutrons coming off the alpha interactions into something slow enough for the target nuclei to capture. My dream is to get something detectable with my little gamma spectrometer, for which manganese and europium seem to be the best bets. I got both of their oxides. I'll let Carl Willis, who is an actual nuclear engineer but who plays with this stuff at home too, explain and then activate some manganese:

 

[CavLancer]

If there's an unexplained nuclear explosion and you go up in smoke, can I have your mod powers?

 

[Bootstoots]

No, but you can have anything that's left of my fifth arm if they find any pieces of it.

 

[Hygro]

Is that what you're calling it?