Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
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I wasn't advocating for biofuels. Just pointing out the flaw in one common argument against them, because I dislike it when people complain about things for incorrect reasons, especially when there are plenty of reasonable reasons.
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Which is where not so many people live, so you're back to running power lines. That's obviously not insurmountable, but it's something you have to address.
There's plenty of practical experience with building and maintaining high voltage power lines. Even without using exotic stuff like superconductors. Fortunately, electricity is a very fungible product, even more so than oil.
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No idea, but governments have always meddled in the power market as politicians hate power cuts. They're bad for their reelection chances.
Fair enough, but I know some European countries were talking about cutting the subsidies and some plants were going to close because of it.
Also remember some of these plant operators were cheating by running dinosaur-powered generators at night and feeding that into the grid so they could get paid extra.
If your plant can't make a profit without huge subsidies and outright cheating, it's not going to stay in business.
Look at that plant in California, owned by Google, that isn't making as much energy as they predicted, to the point where Google's basically asking the government to give them money to pay off their construction loan.
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Fair enough, but I know some European countries were talking about cutting the subsidies and some plants were going to close because of it.
There's also the closure of coal power plants (or their conversion to other fuels) due to regulatory and/or subsidy changes. Is that a big deal? If not, why should solar be special?
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Lots of [snow] through the deserts of the southwest?
They don't even get enough sunlight in summer. I posted this around here somewhere recently, but:
More Problems for CSP: Ivanpah Solar Plant Falling Short of Expected Electricity Production
Growing pains or chronic problems for the landmark concentrating solar power plant?
July, when generation dipped to 35,967 MWh from 64,275 MWh in June
Now, this plant isn't doing PV, which means they're able to switch to burning gas, but it still shows how unreliable this stuff is.
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Uranium would be the most efficient but we would rather have thousands, if not millions, die from coal dust inhalation, well explosions, wars to secure wells, radiation exposure from burned coal, etc, than hundreds or less be exposed to some radiation from nuclear waste.
All because some idiots get into a panic every time the word "radiation" is mentioned instead of realizing that
- we are radioactive people who eat radioactive food, breathe radioactive air, and walk around in radioactive buildings, every single day of our lives
- if not for radioactivity, we likely would never have existed -- in order for evolution to work, you need something that generates mutations!
Filed under: do I have to hide a Geiger counter under the banana display?
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Certain biofuels are okay. I'm against ethanol because turning food into fuel is dumb, but biodiesel is worthwhile because it's usually made from food waste products.
At one point I was researching getting one of the used french fry oil conversion kits for my pickup but it looks like the government is only a few years away from banning it. They don't get fuel taxes from those who get their fuel for free from Micky D's.
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Certain biofuels are okay. I'm against ethanol because turning food into fuel is dumb, but biodiesel is worthwhile because it's usually made from food waste products.
Ethanol is OK, but it doesn't make sense to use just any old thing to make it. It works well with sugarcane, but sucks with corn. (OK, it's even better with barley or grapes, but I don't plan to use it as fuel in that case. ;-))
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I wonder how well they work and how well they last.
The general answer to that for any form of silicon electronics is and always will be "better than they did five years ago".
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Ethanol is OK, but it doesn't make sense to use just any old thing to make it. It works well with sugarcane, but sucks with corn.
I'm of the take that celluosic ethanol is the way to go on the ethanol front -- it's just a matter of putting enough R&D in to get there.
Filed under beats putting your yard waste in the landfill, eh?
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Sugarcane should NEVER be used to generate fuel. Instead, it needs to all be injected directly into my bloodstream.
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we are radioactive people who eat radioactive food, breathe radioactive air, and walk around in radioactive buildings, every single day of our lives
half baked goggle box do gooders telling everybody it's bad for you... pernicious nonsense!
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and then you can generate all the power for the whole world!
hmm... that reminds me of a SMBC comic that's relevant. the one with superman and power sources... i should look that up and post it but i'm lazy (also at work and that site is blocked)
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Here's a relevant FoxTrot:
Holy crap that's from 2009? Feels like I just saw it a few months ago.
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Thanks Discourse. Ignoring my image because it doesn't end in .jpg or whatever.
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Just because the current system is bad doesn't mean it has to be. Most of the world's nuclear waste policies have been created with from the following perspectives:
Sure, we could create reactors that generate lower-level waste, but that does nothing to address the problem of the high-level waste we already have, which is what my posts have primarily focused on. That high-level sludge still has tens of thousands of years before it's safe to handle in your bare hands, that means long term storage is a very real concern.
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I can think of a certain Missouri town currently hell-bent on burning itself to the ground. Let's ship all the nuclear waste there.
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There's also the closure of coal power plants (or their conversion to other fuels) due to regulatory and/or subsidy changes. Is that a big deal? If not, why should solar be special?
If you're telling me someone cannot profitably operate a coal plant without a subsidy, that may, in fact, be a big deal. It may depend on whether subsidies are normal, and whether this particular plant gets higher-than normal ones. My understanding was that Spain--again, I think it was Spain, but it might have been another country--was offering stupidly-large subsidies, on the order of 5x the actual cost of production. Again, I'm talking subsidies so large that at least one plant was running gas or diesel or whatever generators at night to feed back into the grid and get those sweet, sweet, subsidies.
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Loads of sunlight. Except for the weather usually being cloudy where I live anyway, which is a whole 'nother thing. We get more cloud than the Pacific Northwest. And more rainy days.
Wind and tidal power make more sense than solar for us. (Hydro would work too, except we've got the wrong geology and topography. The big reservoirs we have are mostly for drinking water.)
Yeah, the thing is that having sunlight isn't quite enough if the atmosphere above you is filtering out lots of various portions of the infrared spectrum. It can be OK, under certain circumstances, but most places in the EU are not really viable. For instance, that the Germans are trying for solar has more to do with politicians who think all sunlight is the same and those who would suck off at the public teet than any engineering basis. Nothing could be funnier except if the Scandinavians tried it.
Hydro is a big deal in Canada, and accounts for about 90% of power generated in some provinces. But most of Canada is pretty much tapped and has to resort to other sources. Wind was proposed as one of those, except that no one has been able to make the wind blow harder (but not too hard) during peak hours. So more gas plants it is.
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The general answer to that for any form of silicon electronics is and always will be "better than they did five years ago".
I believe that didn't apply to solar panels for a long time. But if you want to say that suddenly, after decades of stasis, the price has gotten an order of magnitude better, and the product has possibly had a dramatic increase in quality, I'll admit that's possible, but someone needs to show hard numbers.
How much high-quality Chinese stuff do you have?
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If you're telling me someone cannot profitably operate a coal plant without a subsidy, that may, in fact, be a big deal.
The typical closures I've heard about seem to have been due to regulatory changes. If a country has the price of electricity highly regulated, then it could be that no form of energy works without subsidies. I count that as another regulatory failure.
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I believe that didn't apply to solar panels for a long time. But if you want to say that suddenly, after decades of stasis, the price has gotten an order of magnitude better, and the product has possibly had a dramatic increase in quality, I'll admit that's possible, but someone needs to show hard numbers.
How much high-quality Chinese stuff do you have?
Solar is different than other silicon because it can't get smaller to work more efficiently. Perhaps this is one of the problems computer people have getting around the idea that better silicon production always results in better cost/yield, conflating Moore's Law with the silicon itself.
While there have been some advances in silicon cells, the most promising area of research appears to be graphene and/or printable cells. With printables you get a lot lower efficiency but higher yield per dollar spent. With graphene you can theoretically get good yield, but it's right now very expensive to make the stuff in the quantities needed. Either way, you still have to have a decent installation with collection point, inverter, storage, and constant maintenance.
Really, the tech right now is only slightly more viable than fusion (with a much lower payoff and needing to build up a completely different infrastructure), so we'll have to wait and see.
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How much high-quality Chinese stuff do you have?
I don't have trouble with Chinese gear. Most of it Just Works. Even the stuff not rebadged and supported by non-Chinese vendors is almost always OK these days.
China is an industrial dystopia run by self-serving totalitarian pricks who would find themselves completely at home in the C suite of any major multinational corporation, but the stuff coming out of there is simply not rubbish any more.
When I was a little kid, "Made in Japan" was adult-code for cheap shoddy plastic crap and "Made in China" was scarcely ever seen. Ten years ago, "Made in China" was code for cheap shoddy knock-off electronics. Not any more. Things change.
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Sure, we could create reactors that generate lower-level waste, but that does nothing to address the problem of the high-level waste we already have, which is what my posts have primarily focused on. That high-level sludge still has tens of thousands of years before it's safe to handle in your bare hands, that means long term storage is a very real concern.
The longer wastes remains radioactive, the less dangerous it is. That's a simple property of radiation. If the waste has a half life in the thousands of years range, it isn't very radioactive. If it is very radioactive, it will become non-radioactive very quickly.The wild card here is the chain reaction factor. Piling a bunch of normally minimally radioactive waste in the same place causes that waste to become more radioactive. There is a very simple solution to this - don't do it. Designating any site a waste site is the wrong idea. Yucca mountain is a stupid idea, Hanford was a stupid idea.
Take what's in Hanford and use it as fuel for fast reactors. That will turn it into low level waste. Stop the plans for Yucca. Do on-site reprocessing at all the current power plants and build fast reactors that use the primary plant's waste as fuel on each site. Problem solved.
If you ignore the political problems, this is the proper technical solution. If the political problems were real, then the current strategy might be a valid trade-off. But, doing it right is being traded for pandering for votes from whiners and generally being a chicken shit to avoid blame if anything ever goes wrong.
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Solar is different than other silicon because it can't get smaller to work more efficiently.
It's the same as every other commodity in that increased demand enables scaled-up production that drives prices down steeply.
And for what it's worth, it can get smaller to work more efficiently. How does 57W out of a 1cm² chip grab you?
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Not to trample on your overall point, because I am at least mildly pro-nuclear, but:
- Saying radioactivity is common and everywhere is like saying water is everywhere. Just because you drink water every day doesn't mean that if you live along the Mississippi you won't have to worry about flooding. Coal plants release a lot of radioactivity too, but they can't render a large swath of land basically uninhabitable for decades. More than other plants, putting nuclear plants away from population centers is a very reasonable thing to do.
- You don't need radioactivity for mutation. I suspect that on an evolutionary scale, most mutations are not caused by radiation, though I could be wrong.
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I suspect that on an evolutionary scale, most mutations are not caused by radiation, though I could be wrong.
More of the variation that drives evolution is down to sex than mutation in any case.
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Perhaps this is one of the problems computer people have getting around the idea that better silicon production always results in better cost/yield, conflating Moore's Law with the silicon itself.
Nonsense. I have no problem with that idea. I'm saying this is the first I've heard of it, and given that, I'd like a bit of independent verification. Has this technology been around long enough to demonstrate that it lasts in the real world as long as "traditional" solar panels? Even if they cost 1/10 what panels used to, if they only last 3-5 years, few people will probably want to replace them, because it's likely to be a lot of work.
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I think a major barrier to scaling up PVs is raw materials, no? The graphene stuff sounds interesting because it avoids the rare earth scarcity.
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Ten years ago, "Made in China" was code for cheap knock-off electronics. Not any more. Things change.
I expect that Chinese stuff will probably get better over time, although it seems like Chinese people are more concerned with cost over quality than the Japanese are, from things I've read in trade mags, other magazines, on the Internet, and so on. To the extent that's true, and to the extent that the Chinese are willing to change that, determines how fast the change from shit to good is, right?
Chinese stuff still has a justified rep as shoddy here in the US. A simple example outside the tech industry is Craftsman tools, which were high-quality until Sears started having the tools made in China. I'm pretty sure on this very forum people have talked about Chinese products suddenly getting worse in quality a year or so after initial delivery, because they switched materials or something without telling their buyers.
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a major barrier to scaling up PVs is raw materials
Silicon is the second most abundant element on Earth. Just sayin.
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A simple example outside the tech industry is Craftsman tools
Solar PV isn't "outside the tech industry".
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And they're having some interesting success with what happens when they manufacture the cells with quantum dots instead of flat slabs.
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Solar PV isn't "outside the tech industry".
Snort. Go find out what "Craftsman tools" are. Hint: "Craftsman" is a brand name.
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Snort. Go find out what "Craftsman tools" are. Hint: "Craftsman" is a brand name.
Or are you perhaps suggesting that Chinese quality is industry-dependent?
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Silicon is the second most abundant element on Earth. Just sayin.
Yes, sure, but I thought there were other ingredients (e.g., tellurium) in shorter supply. Obviously we're finding out other ways...
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I had a Chinese dirt bike that literally fell apart. The air filter was a foam element in a separate compartment near, but not in, the actual air intake, and thus was not capable of actually filtering any air. I once compared this to locking a 1 5/16" trailer ball into the seat belt latch and calling the vehicle "tow-ready".
I have a hard time taking any Chinese engineering seriously after that fine piece of hardware. IIRC I sold the remnants to some random person for $20. Literally random. Some lady knocked on my back door and wanted to buy the dirt bike by the dumpster, which she noticed hadn't moved in months.
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Or are you perhaps suggesting that Chinese quality is industry-dependent?
All my remarks on the quality of Chinese manufacture have specifically pertained to electronics. Are you perhaps suggesting that an iPhone's internals are shoddier than, say, something from Samsung?
Oh, wait. Samsung gets its stuff made in China as well.
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The longer wastes remains radioactive, the less dangerous it is. That's a simple property of radiation. If the waste has a half life in the thousands of years range, it isn't very radioactive.
Keep telling yourself that. Uranium is a well known radioactive material, used for fueling nuclear power plants and weapons. It is generally considered highly dangerous in small, yet concentrated, quantities. Know what it's half-life is? 4.5 billion years. That's something that's considered weakly radioactive. When you're talking about waste with a half-life on the order of thousands of years, that's orders of magnitudes more radioactive. Plus this stuff is concentrated, so it is highly dangerous.
The wild card here is the chain reaction factor.
No, it isn't. The people directly managing this stuff are educated enough to not pile so much material together that a critical overload is a problem. And a chain reaction is exactly why there is such a thing as a half-life anyway.
Piling a bunch of normally minimally radioactive waste in the same place causes that waste to become more radioactive.
No, it doesn't. It just concentrates the radioactive sources. It doesn't suddenly make the sources generate more radiation.
There is a very simple solution to this - don't do it. Designating any site a waste site is the wrong idea. Yucca mountain is a stupid idea, Hanford was a stupid idea.
Actually, it's not a stupid idea. It's much easier to have designated waste processing locations where you have people trained to handle the waste instead of trying to have such locations spread all over the place. Especially since there are only so many people with the necessary expertise. Also, Hanford became a waste repository by default. It started out making plutonium in WWII, then the government decided to start shipping waste from other sites there since it was such a remote location (at the time). They haven't really changed much since then.
Take what's in Hanford and use it as fuel for fast reactors.
Not really feasible. The waste at Hanford consists primarily of two things:
- Spent nuclear sub reactors. These are just cut out of the sub and buried, since sub reactors aren't really designed to be refuelable. Can't really use that waste to run another reactor.
- Radioactive sludge, which I earlier explained is also very corrosive. So much so that they have to continually monitor the waste and transfer it to new storage tanks. Not the type of thing you want in a reactor when it could literally eat through your reactor.
Also, do you even understand how fast reactors work? They require highly enriched uranium or plutonium to sustain a fission chain reaction with fast neutrons. The sludge mentioned in #2 above is primarily waste and byproducts, and doesn't contain much of the necessary fuel.
Stop the plans for Yucca.
Last I checked, the funding for those plans has already been terminated. In 2010 or 2011, IIRC. Try to keep up.
Do on-site reprocessing at all the current power plants
That isn't necessarily feasible. It might be, but good luck trying to get the funds to retrofit every existing reactor.
fast reactors that use the primary plant's waste as fuel on each site.
As mentioned earlier, fast reactors require highly enriched uranium or plutonium fuel which can sustain a fast neutron reaction. It is unlikely that the spent fuel rods from a standard nuclear reactor would meet the necessary criteria to fuel a fast reactor.
If you ignore the political problems, this is the proper technical solution. If the political problems were real
You can't ignore the political problems because the political problems are real. You can't just shake a stick and make them go away.
tl;dr: Your post was a bunch of half-assed shit that doesn't even make sense.
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It's the same as every other commodity in that increased demand enables scaled-up production that drives prices down steeply.
And for what it's worth, it can get smaller to work more efficiently. How does 57W out of a 1cm² chip grab you?
That number looks awesome, and I suppose under optimal conditions it'll be just that. My point, however, was about the thermal limits imposed by area. In a given area only so much light falls down. In essence, you can use half or even a fifth the area of current conventional systems to produce the same amount of electricity, but you'll never be able to surpass that. Laws of thermodynamics and all that.
Scientists at Airlight and IBM envision the HCPVT system providing sustainable energy to locations around the world including southern Europe, Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the southwestern part of North America, South America, Japan and Australia.
So even this system, which is so very efficient, is seen as being limited by it's own developers in where it can be best deployed.
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All my remarks on the quality of Chinese manufacture have specifically pertained to electronics. Are you perhaps suggesting that an iPhone's internals are shoddier than, say, something from Samsung?
You said Chinese products have gotten significantly better. I pointed out a place that's not true. With your latest post, are you now saying that in this one area, they are improving? Because I find that pretty unlikley.
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No, it doesn't. It just concentrates the radioactive sources. It doesn't suddenly make the sources generate more radiation.
You are the one that doesn't know the facts. When scientists found a deposit of Uranium in Gabon, Africa, they were puzzled why it had less U-235 that the rest of the earth. Everywhere else, natural Uranium is 0.72% U-235 due to the reliable and steady rate of decay of U-238. The deposits in Gabon had less because they were highly concentrated deposits 3 billion years ago, back when there was more U-238 on earth. That was enough to create self-sustained fission and run the reaction faster than it's natural rate for a million or so years.Also, what do you think the water in a standard reactor does? It literally makes the core less radioactive, that's why it's called a moderator.
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Sure, we could create reactors that generate lower-level waste, but that does nothing to address the problem of the high-level waste we already have, which is what my posts have primarily focused on. That high-level sludge still has tens of thousands of years before it's safe to handle in your bare hands, that means long term storage is a very real concern.
Once you have fast-neutron breeder-burners with on-site reprocessing, the next step is to unearth all that high-level waste and burn it down to short-time wastes that we can handle within a reasonable time span.
Saying radioactivity is common and everywhere is like saying water is everywhere. Just because you drink water every day doesn't mean that if you live along the Mississippi you won't have to worry about flooding. Coal plants release a lot of radioactivity too, but they can't render a large swath of land basically uninhabitable for decades. More than other plants, putting nuclear plants away from population centers is a very reasonable thing to do.
This is simply a function of proper plant design -- vs abominations such as Chernobyl.You don't need radioactivity for mutation. I suspect that on an evolutionary scale, most mutations are not caused by radiation, though I could be wrong.
True -- chemical mutagens are a thing as well as straight-up transcription errors.Isn't there a big issue with a non-radioactive world of missing core/mantle heating or something like that, though?
As mentioned earlier, fast reactors require highly enriched uranium or plutonium fuel which can sustain a fast neutron reaction. It is unlikely that the spent fuel rods from a standard nuclear reactor would meet the necessary criteria to fuel a fast reactor.
This is ignoring breeder-burner fast reactors such as the successfully prototyped Integral Fast Reactor design. It is true that initial startup requires higher enrichment; however, the reactor and processing loop can digest pretty much anything with actinides in it once started up.
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My point, however, was about the thermal limits imposed by area
Actually the only efficiency number really worth paying attention to is joules out per dollar spent, accounting for the entire product lifecycle. And for solar PV, that number just keeps on getting bigger.
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You are the one that doesn't know the facts. When scientists found a deposit of Uranium in Gabon, Africa, they were puzzled why it had less U-235 that the rest of the earth. Everywhere else, natural Uranium is 0.72% U-235 due to the reliable and steady rate of decay of U-238.
So I just read up on this, and it still doesn't support your earlier assertion. Your assertion was that stacking up radioactive material will always increase the radioactive decay rate. This singular instance does not support your assertion. What actually happened was that several specific criteria were met which allowed a stable fission reaction to occur an estimated 2 billion years ago. While amazing, this was not an increase in radiation.
Uranium fission involves neutrons splitting atoms, causing more neutrons to be ejected, in a chain reaction. This is not the same as any kind of radiation. The three kinds of radiation are:
- Gamma - purely electro-magnetic.
- Alpha - a helium-4 nuclei.
- Beta - an electron.
So let me state my conclusion again: the findings in Gabon do not support your claim. Combining radioactive sources does not make those sources suddenly emit more radiation.
Also, what do you think the water in a standard reactor does? It literally makes the core less radioactive, that's why it's called a moderator.
No, it doesn't make the core less radioactive. It simply blocks some of the free neutrons that are kicked out when a uranium nucleus splits. Here's a diagram of a typical Uranium nuclear fission reaction:
The chain reaction continues, with the released neutrons breaking up additional neutrons. However, when you add water to the mix, some of those neutrons don't collide with fissionable uranium atoms. They collide with the water molecules instead, thus slowing the reaction rate. The overall radioactivity of the reactor fuel is not actually reduced. Water is referred to as a moderator because it slows down the neutrons.
As explained before, neutrons are not a form of radiation, so having the water block/slow the neutrons doesn't really reduce the amount of radiation generated by the nuclear fuel.
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You said Chinese products have gotten significantly better.
I did say that. I said it in the context of a discussion on solar PV, and what I had in my mind at the time I said it was Chinese electronics.
I pointed out a place that's not true.
Yes, you pointed to one particular brand of carpenter's and mechanic's tools whose quality has allegedly declined since manufacture was offshored. Not at all sure what relevance that has in a discussion on solar PV.
With your latest post, are you now saying that in this one area, they are improving?
Anybody unaware of the steady improvement in the quality of Chinese electronics over the last twenty years has simply not been paying attention.
Because I find that pretty unlikley.
I find it pretty unlikely you've been paying attention.
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Actually the only efficiency number really worth paying attention to is joules out per dollar spent, accounting for the entire product lifecycle. And for solar PV, that number just keeps on getting bigger.
That's true, but you can't just be concerned about the joules at the source, but how much of that is actually useful. It looks like something well suited for small scale stuff in particular situations. The path to large scale is not obvious, though.
Well, unless we make roads out of them, of course.
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Simply by existing, we are everything that's wrong with the world.
If all humans die, the earth will turn into some kind of paradise.
Woah, hold on there, don't read about Earth's history. That little phase where it was a molten planet, that's just a fairy tale.
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The path to large scale is not obvious, though
The path to large scale, for solar PV, is called "mass production".
Inb4 the straw man army arrives: no solar PV advocate ever, in the whole history of ever, has ever claimed that solar PV could ever supply 100% of everybody's energy needs everywhere. This is an agreed fact. It also has no bearing at all on whether or not it's a good idea now to spend money now on making solar PV supply much more energy than it does now. "Large scale" and "total supply" are quite different ideas.
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Simply by existing, we are everything that's wrong with the world.
If all humans die, the earth will turn into some kind of paradise.
Simply by existing in the numbers we do, we are responsible for much if not most of the biodiversity loss and ecological degradation the world is currently experiencing.
If we can work out a way to reduce our replacement rate until the world human population settles to somewhere between a third and a half of what it is right now, our descendants will probably have much better lives than if we can't.
