Is nuclear the way to go?

[Ciro Pabón]

As I have already told you, X, friend, if people really thinks that wind or solar is the future,



then as we agreed, we should take a trip to Cadarache. Ray would love it.

A stone on three balls


This is what I call a road. This building could double as pits and mechanics area


Oh... my... god! An empty lot!


Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Superconductor!


Lovely smile, Mr. Fukushima


Look, a doll house with a cherry split in half...

[Ray]

You buyin' Ciro? I'd take a trip to see a nuclear research facility any day of the week!

[xpensive]

As I have already told you, X, friend, if people really thinks that wind or solar is the future,

Then they can keep doing for the rest of their lifes for all that I care, but I'm not gonna wallet it.

Ray, you and I are are friends?

[Ray]

As I have already told you, X, friend, if people really thinks that wind or solar is the future,

Then they can keep doing for the rest of their lifes for all that I care, but I'm not gonna wallet it.

Ray, you and I are friends?

Is that a trick question? I would suppose we are friendly towards one another, I'm not sure I understand the context of the question.

[xpensive]

I'm sure that Ciro can give an adequate linguistical xplanation of the term "friend", can't you Ciro?

[Ray]

Ahhhhh. I get it now.

[xpensive]

Thought t'was a southern thang?

[Ciro Pabón]

I'm sure that Ciro can give an adequate linguistical xplanation of the term "friend", can't you Ciro?

Sure... and with a southern twang. Or is it a southern drawl?

The energy of friendship


Bazinga!

[xpensive]

Not a dry eye in sight, though I will report it to ADL for the the lack of Jewish- influence, no black hats or locks?

[Formula None]

From a security and "worst-case-scenario" perspective, distributed power generation & a good grid would be better, yeah? Solar & wind, that is. There's no one place to disable/attack/fall over during an earthquake. No one item that can go wrong and leave a bunch of people without power. Its cloudy here, but sunny over there; wind is dead here, but its windy over there... A trillion Iraq war dollars would have gone a long way to building a few hundred thousand big turbines (the non-bird slicing, bat-exploding type) while increasing our energy security with a big grid of small generators. We can't retrain a few tens of thousands (?) of coal miners to manufacture these things? BS. We just need to get the trickle-downers to invest in their own country.

[WhiteBlue]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Criticism

ITER is designed to produce approximately 500 MW of fusion power sustained for up to 1,000 seconds[13]

You have to consider that the net power is only 90%. That is a total energy of 450 GJ. It is the equivalent of a ten kg jerry can of gasoline.

ITER was originally expected to cost approximately €5billion, but the rising price of raw materials and changes to the initial design have seen that amount more than triple to €16billion.[10]

€1.6bn for the equivalent of one kg petrol seems a bit steep.

Rebecca Harms, Green/EFA member of the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, said: "In the next 50 years nuclear fusion will neither tackle climate change nor guarantee the security of our energy supply." Arguing that the EU's energy research should be focused elsewhere, she said: "The Green/EFA group demands that these funds be spent instead on energy research that is relevant to the future. A major focus should now be put on renewable sources of energy." French Green party lawmaker Noël Mamère claims that more concrete efforts to fight present-day global warming will be neglected as a result of ITER: "This is not good news for the fight against the greenhouse effect because we're going to put ten billion euros towards a project that has a term of 30-50 years when we're not even sure it will be effective."[35]

For €16bn you can install off shore wind power of 7.3 GW name plate capacity at the current rates. This capacity will result in a net capacity of 2.9 GW after elimination of low and high wind periods. The wind array will have 6.4 times the power of ITER. ITER will run for 15 minutes. The wind array will run at least 25 years. The wind array will produce 5.6 million times the energy produced by ITER. I think that the above criticism is justified.

People may say that you can run ITER several times. I do not know about that. How good is an electric power source that collapses every 15 minutes? And how often can you fire it up again. I suspect that the benefits for the real power supply in our times or the time of our children will be insignificant.

[Ray]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Criticism

ITER is designed to produce approximately 500 MW of fusion power sustained for up to 1,000 seconds[13]

You have to consider that the net power is only 90%. That is a total energy of 450 GJ. It is the equivalent of a ten kg jerry can of gasoline.

I'm assuming you mean one jerry can of gasoline worth at 100% efficiency? Because I'm not understanding your comparison of a fusion reactor in it's infancy versus 10kg of gasoline being burned.

[WhiteBlue]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Criticism

ITER is designed to produce approximately 500 MW of fusion power sustained for up to 1,000 seconds[13]

You have to consider that the net power is only 90%. That is a total energy of 450 GJ. It is the equivalent of a ten kg jerry can of gasoline.

I'm assuming you mean one jerry can of gasoline worth at 100% efficiency? Because I'm not understanding your comparison of a fusion reactor in it's infancy versus 10kg of gasoline being burned.

I'm just comparing the energy by means that have been used in the KERS debate. It is for illustrating purposes only. The objective is to establish a fusion process which is not capable of continuous power output by 2038. How long will it take until we get a usable power source from the €16bn infant? 2060? 2100?

It is nice to see that the physicists get some money to play with, but we have real power requirements in the meantime to satisfy and there are realistic means to satisfy them in the next decade. The power infrastructure industry is building up the investment to install 20 GW of wind power per annum. This will accelerate with the rising cost of fossil fuel.

The modular size of the usual wind turbines will soon approach 5MW respective 2MW net power. The world capacity for manufacturing such turbines will jump to 100,000 and more pretty soon. Just watch the Chinese enter the game. I know Chinese engineering firms which invest capacities of more than 10,000 machines/annum.

[FW17]

WB what are your thoughts on geothermal energy, they are a lot more reliable than wind.

[myurr]

For €16bn you can install off shore wind power of 7.3 GW name plate capacity at the current rates. This capacity will result in a net capacity of 2.9 GW after elimination of low and high wind periods. The wind array will have 6.4 times the power of ITER. ITER will run for 15 minutes. The wind array will run at least 25 years. The wind array will produce 5.6 million times the energy produced by ITER. I think that the above criticism is justified.

People may say that you can run ITER several times. I do not know about that. How good is an electric power source that collapses every 15 minutes? And how often can you fire it up again. I suspect that the benefits for the real power supply in our times or the time of our children will be insignificant.

Sorry WB but you're letting your prejudice and ignorance shine through here. ITER is a big science experiment and not a production power plant. It is testing the scientific theories so that in the future we'll be able to make practical fusion reactors. Of course ITER can be fired more than once, but it's goal is not to provide power to the grid.

Whether or not the implementation being tested at ITER is the right way to go, long term our only hope of meeting our ever growing energy needs is nuclear fusion. Ultimately it will also pave the way for deep space exploration, advance our understanding of physics, and lead to many other inventions and advances in civilisation and technology. Wind power will do none of those things.

Where I agree with you is that we need a shorter term solution until our scientific knowledge advances to the point that we can revolutionise our energy production with fusion. In the mean time I believe in a practical solution with multiple facets rather than a fixation on one particular type of production. Wind power should be explored as one of those facets, but it is not yet the fix all that you claim it to be.