jones, it appears you were right and I was wrong. Apparently there are catalysts for splitting water to oxygen and hydrogen. Thank you for the information.
No worries, Duane, it isn't like I know much about it. I just thought it worth pointing out that not all chemical reactions are something to dismiss out of hand due to issues of toxicity.
Splitting water makes me slightly uneasy, If we turned our water supply into making hydrogen it would be the same as turning our fields into fuel, first no food next no drinking water!
Well, except that when you turn corn into ethanol and burn that, the reaction doesn't produce corn.
I see your edit now. In principle, the reaction product is pure water. Again, I'm no chemist, but I think in a fuel cell you get exactly that, pure water. If you burn the hydrogen in air, as Duane pointed out the other gases in air can also react (because of the high temperature) to produce other products that would contaminate the water to some extent. I wouldn't want to hazard a guess what the overall effect of that would be but the water vapor would just become part of the normal water cycle and eventually fall as rain. Acid rain, maybe? Don't know how much crud there would be. Catalytic converters can deal with some of it but how much, I don't know.
Splitting water makes me slightly uneasy, If we turned our water supply into making hydrogen it would be the same as turning our fields into fuel, first no food next no drinking water!
Just collect the water out of the tailpipe if you're worried your water supply.
Some of the big dirigibles had to collect the water given off from burning their fuel in order to maintain their ballast.
One of the main product of burning hydrocarbons is water (carbon dioxide is the other big one). With hydrogen it's just water.
Yes, but it's not controlled lightning at specific intervals. Applying man made lightning at specific intervals could create a sustained standing wave within the ionosphere but at a huge energy loss. The focus with Schumann Resonance is into the air.... Tesla tried to turn that thinking upside down and direct the energy into the Earth instead after a epiphany he had during an experiment in Colorado.
Think about this ... The very act of a spark discharge represents an energy loss, but at the same time you can visually SEE the impressive power. The bait and switch is that everyone is memorized with big sparks flying everywhere, but fail to look the other direction. The sparks flying are the energy loss.... everyone should take a moment to look the other direction to find the energy gain or more accurately the energy source of Tesla's experiments.
I have to admit I don't know anything about Tesla's ideas regarding lightning. Given that we've only recently discovered sprites, elves, and of all things, terrestrial gamma ray flashes coming from thunderstorms, I'm not sure we've scratched the surface on what lightning is really all about.
The last information I had indicated there was more thorium along the Idaho/Montana border than there were known reserves of uranium in all the world. Thorium makes a great nuclear fuel, and can be used and reused. When it is finally spent, it can be stored in sealed copper tubes on the ocean floor, and just sit there for thousands of years - a tiny speck in a vast ocean covering 70% of the globe.
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Its this kind of mess that makes me go nuts!
I live in WA and we have a major issue with radio active matter leaking into the Columbia river and surrounding water ways, I also sail across oceans and would not want to sail over this radio active ocean area that people simply decide is a great place to put toxic material - clean energy is the key and nuclear energy is not as clean as one thinks.
Hmm... I wouldn't have the slightest qualm about sailing directly over a nuclear storage site three miles down on the ocean floor. Three miles of brine is a lot of shielding against a few short-lived actinides. Still, such storage isn't needed - it's just my preferred solution
But your response illustrates a common problem. As long as reactions are emotional rather than rational, and as long as what happened in weapons manufacturing 50-70 years ago is used to condemn the contemporary commercial power business, it's all moot. We'll continue to burn fossil fuels (and release mercury and CO2 into the atmosphere) and dabble with dream solutions that never amount to much.
Interestingly Hydro Electric is thousands of times more dangerous than nuclear. But no body even noticed when 170,000 people were killed by the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975
The situation in Washington State is a direct legacy of the Manhattan Project of WWII. The Hanford Area made the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan, and the by-products were stored in big tanks that never were adequate for the job.
I once worked on the Hanford Area and drove by Hanford Number One every day as I went to work. Yes, there is radioactivity leaking into the Columbia. But I am not sure it is serious at this point. And the Hanford Area is a huge chunk of land, maybe larger than Taiwan in area. If one can get clearance to drive through it to Spokane, it takes something like 4 hours to cross.
Thorium is also a by-product of rare earth miining. So it can actually be harvested while making other energy saving technologies that are greener, such as rare-earth magnets for wind energy. India has been very interested in it as such nuclear reactors do not produce weapons grade nuclear products.
It we much have a world powered with nuclear reactors, thorium could offer a saner development path. Eliminating the creation of more Plutonium with its 20,000 half-life and extreme toxicity would be a good thing.
My response was a tad emotional but its far from irrational. Radio active pollution is real nasty and last far beyond our years. Thorium appears to be a safer but...
" The fission of thorium creates long-lived fission products like technetium-99 (half-life over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository. <- THE OCEAN I SAIL OVER
If the spent fuel is not reprocessed, thorium-232 is very-long lived (half-life:14 billion years) and its decay products will build up over time in the spent fuel. This will make the spent fuel quite radio-toxic, in addition to all the fission products in it. It should also be noted that inhalation of a unit of radioactivity of thorium-232 or thorium-228 (which is also present as a decay product of thorium-232) produces a far higher dose, especially to certain organs, than the inhalation of uranium containing the same amount of radioactivity. For instance, the bone surface dose from breathing an amount (mass) of insoluble thorium is about 200 times that of breathing the same mass of uranium.
Finally, the use of thorium also creates waste at the front end of the fuel cycle. The radioactivity associated with these is expected to be considerably less than that associated with a comparable amount of uranium milling. However, mine wastes will pose long-term hazards, as in the case of uranium mining. There are also often hazardous non-radioactive metals in both thorium and uranium mill tailings."
For the record I also oppose fossil fuels.
I don't own a car, I live off grid with solar and wind generators (made from treadmills motors), eat local farmed food, walk or sail to my destinations and try to consume less material things.
I think mankind needs to think smarter throughout the entire manufacturing process including energy - [take something in] , [manufacture energy] and [place back something good]
But it is as if we have already opened Pandora's box. People live better today because of the transportation, communications, and commerce that energy provides. And yet, China is covered in a cloud of smog from coal burning that fuels its prosperity.
Should China just pull the plug on coal, and send people back to riding bicycles and living in unheated homes in the winter? Or should they shift over to nuclear energy for infrastructure and natural gas for transport?
Backwards or forwards, the world needs to get more realistic about energy policy. I thought nuclear energy would have a waste management policy in hand by now when I worked at Hanford 30 years ago. But it seems that the final destination of all spent fuel rods that are NOT for mobile military and navy reactors is the spent fuel ponds at the reactor site itself.
Nobody has wanted to budget for centralized collection, storage, and reprocessing. Doing so would just demonstrate that nuclear power generation is not profitable and has open ended costs.
Fukajima failed so dramatically for several reasons. But one of the present problems is there was a lot of spent fuel that is not being properly cooled and contained.
I have benefited from an energy rich lifestyle, but I take no comfort in having done so.
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I suspect that in the near future silted up hydro-electric dams can be resolved safely with advances in modern tunnel boring to by-pass the silt and revive the free flow of the original river. You won't have the feature of flood control that the dam claimed to provide, but the river won't suddenly cause the dam to fail and come down as a huge mud flow. The area behind the dam would just be dry and have a subterainean river through it.
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The core problem in the consumer product of choice that drives the world's economies in the automobile. And along with it an excessive thirst for energy. In 2008, the USA again bailed out the auto industry because it is the foundation of so many jobs. It seems without the auto, there is not the means to employ so many people around the world.
Are we ready to all walk or take public transport? There is a huge matrix of issues tied together.
Are we ready to all walk or take public transport?
Yep. I have not owned a car since 1996. Sitting in traffic jams for hours a day on British motorways was making me crazy. Here I take the bus, or tram or metro. In the summer the bicycle, there are bike lanes everywhere, hardly ever have to tangle with the road traffic. When I feel the need for wheels I can rent a car as and when required.
I am not sure where the forum's bondaries of politics and sound world energy policy apply, so I will make this short.
Technology can not be the savior or messiah of the world, some policy of complete management of energy consuption with its waste products is necessary and has been ignored for far too long. The individual can only do so much cutting back. Too much and he won't have a job because he is off-the-grid without transport to work or communications to find a job.
...some policy of complete management of energy consuption with its waste products...
I'm inclined to agree with you.
Trouble is the "complete management" might have to be more complete than you think.
To be really efficient people would live very close to the offices and factories they work in. Like even in the same building or campus. That's how it was done in the preindustial revolution times. You lived on the farm or village very near by. That's how it was done during the industrial revolution, factory and ship yard workers, coal miners etc, lived in houses nearby built by the company. That's how it's done with Foxcon today in China.
This is prety much outlawed in many cities of the world which have zoning regulations that dictate work, commerce, and play/living have to be in separate areas.
People are not going to like it. We have provided them with the luxury of big cars and big roads to make their comutes with so that they can live in big houses in nice areas.
It would take a strong dictator indeed to reverse all that.
Those who believe in the power of the market already know who the dictator will be. When fuel and material costs become too high people will find themselves rearranging their lives.
Odd fact of the day:
It seems that since agricultural times up till today the amount of time people spent traveling from home to work has remained constant. About one hour. Clearly we have not had much benifit from all those big cars and roads. We are still wasting a huge proportion of our lives on unproductive travel.
I also agree with both of you except ill toss in the healthy characteristic.
Before I sold my oil eater I was overweight, out of shape and things looked "typical American". My Doc said I was going to follow the typical regime that consisted of pills in the mid-40s, disease at 50 and dead right around the retirement age.
Walking is a natural fit for alternative energy and people can live without cars – they just have to be more creative.
Technology is wonderful but it needs clean energy in my opinion and that also means clean byproducts. I'm starting to wonder if its possible at all considering the politics in this world.
Clean energy on the scale that the world currenty requires it is entirely unrealistic. Even tradional wood stoves, and burning coal have their downsides. electric cars depend on electrical production and the industrial metallurgy to produce recharible batteries. Even fuel cells demand exotic materials that have negative impacts on the environment.
While GreenPeace might like to claim that it has saved the whales from extinction, Standard Oil and the export of keroscene on a world-wide scale likely did more to save them by making whale oil unprofitable. Mankind was not harvesting whales for food at the height of whaling.
Considering how long people lived in the 1800s in comparison with now, some enviromental impact is acceptible. We have gone from people being old and frail at 35 to beyond 65 and into their 80s.
Everything in moderation might be the best approach. I don't think the universe really appreciates purity in any form. Daily aerobic exercise will certainly add a lot to one's well being. Asia is full of stairs, the US has mandated elevators and ramps for the handicapped. I have doubts that there is a net benefit to the poplulation.
I'm just trying to figure out where the source of energy might be.
If gravity is not a form of energy. And a bucket of water is, by itself, not a form of energy. And yet we can get energy out of a bucket of water falling....
Does that mean the "source" of energy is the height through which it falls?
Gravity can be thought of as a field measured in m/s^2 (or more intuitively J/m/kg or N/kg), gravitational energy is measured in J, so
clearly the energy is the product of the field and the mass and the distance moved by it along the field. Gravitational field acts
on mass (as opposed to electric field that acts on charge and is measured in J/m/C (or equivalently N/C or V/m)
Actually the field does store energy, but its distributed over the whole field and proportional to the square of the field intensity
summed over volume (certainly for electric and magnetic fields - general relativity is probably subtlely different). However the
field encodes the distribution of mass or charge or current elements or whatever, so you can only interact with it by changing
that distribution. These forms are usually called potential energy.
So back to the original question - the reduction in gravitational field between the descending bucket and the whole earth means that the
gravitational field energy is being released to the bucket and earth (with the bucket getting the majority of kinetic energy as its lighter
and momentum is conserved).
Put another way you can imagine the field just due to the earth, and the field just due to the bucket, they add by superposition
to give the total field, but the field energy is non-linear (squared) in the field intensity so it is not a superposition of field energies from
the earth and bucket, hence their relative position affects the total.
Whilst it is true to say that the strength of the gravitational field drops of in proportion to the square of the distance from the object, i.e. that is non-linear, the superposition of fields from two, or more, objects is a linear addition.
That business I quoted about energy due to the height of an object, e = mgh, is a simplification. The assumption there is that the Earth is really big compared to the height we are raising an object. That is we say that the variation in gravity due to the distance change "h" is negligible.
On a larger scale, say trying to leave the Earth completely, we would have to take that inverse square law into account. The further away you are the less energy you need to lift the object that little "h" distance again.
That gives rise to the idea of "escape velocity". There is only a finite amount of energy required to lift ab object to an infinite distance from the Earth. So if your kinetic energy on leaving the Earth's surface, m*v*v/2, is sufficient you will never fall back!
I was just checking out thorium the other day. Seems it has a half life of 4 billion years, and most of it was created in the early phase of the universe when short lived, super massive stars were common. Thorium is pretty much everywhere, and is about 4x more common than uranium. So thorium itself isn't any problem.
If I understand it right, we can zap thorium with laser pulses, and generate heat enough to drive a turbine, and power the laser, and draw off energy for other uses. Instead of a traditional reactor generating heat via critical mass and a nuclear chain reaction, the thorium just gets hotter with out increasing the nuclear radiation. I probably don't understand it right, but they seem to be saying that thorium DOESN'T produce nasty by products, but is not favored because its not good for weapons. Anybody know more on this?
Thorium doesn't produce as intense a nuclear fission as uranium. But it also doesn't have plutonium as a significant resulting product.
Uranium has several isotopes. U238 is the most common at roughly 99%, but U235 is the stuff that really drives the fission and is a problem to refine.
Plutonium is an excellent stand-in for U235 and a major percentage of the the reactor fuel's spent fuel rod content. So the scheme evolved to have nuclear reactors produce enough fuel for 1000 years once they got started by making lot of plutonium via conversion from U238 within power generation reactors.
The draw backs are that plutonium makes very good bombs, a pin head of plutonium kills a person that has inhaled or ingested it within 20 minutes, and it has a 20,000 year half-live. So, the control of stockpiles of the stuff is very serious business.
Thorium is also toxic in its own way. It doesn't seem to be a hazard with direct contact to the skin in small quantities, but inhaled thorium dust will cause lung cancer. And, for use in reactors you may need to mine new supplies as it is consumed.
There are trade-offs between both. And there seem to be some exotic toxic by-products to thorium fission that I have not read about. The simple fact is that anything radioactive can cause cancer with the right exposure to it. But the more the atomic mass, the more likely it is to immediately ruin your day.
U239 is a particularly nasty isotope of uranium, but it makes excellent small portable nuclear reactors for military use and outerspace applications.
The US seems to have built the first atomic bomb with U235 from uranium ore that came from the Congo in Africa. But acquiring ore was difficult, so they quickly shifted to using a breeder reactor to make Plutonium from U238. The vast majority of the US nuclear arms arsenal is Plutonium.. something like 3000-6000 bombs were made and maybe 10 pounds of the stuff in each one. We have since downsized our bomb inventory, but the material is sitting somewhere in stockpile to be either used in nuclear power plants, or to offset another arms race.
Thorium is preferred by some pro-nuclear power people just because terrorist cannot make fission bombs with it. I suppose it could work as a dirty bomb of sorts.
I was just checking out thorium the other day. Seems it has a half life of 4 billion years, and most of it was created in the early phase of the universe when short lived, super massive stars were common. Thorium is pretty much everywhere, and is about 4x more common than uranium. So thorium itself isn't any problem.
If I understand it right, we can zap thorium with laser pulses, and generate heat enough to drive a turbine, and power the laser, and draw off energy for other uses. Instead of a traditional reactor generating heat via critical mass and a nuclear chain reaction, the thorium just gets hotter with out increasing the nuclear radiation. I probably don't understand it right, but they seem to be saying that thorium DOESN'T produce nasty by products, but is not favored because its not good for weapons. Anybody know more on this?
In my post #21 and as I understand it its still toxic. Link
All other issues aside, thorium is still nuclear energy, say environmentalists, its reactors disgorging the same toxic byproducts and fissile waste with the same millennial half-lives. Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2, says the fission materials produced from thorium are of a different spectrum to those from uranium-235, but 'include many dangerous-to-health alpha and beta emitters'.
Tickell says thorium reactors would not reduce the volume of waste from uranium reactors. 'It will create a whole new volume of radioactive waste from previously radio-inert thorium, on top of the waste from uranium reactors. Looked at in these terms, it's a way of multiplying the volume of radioactive waste humanity can create several times over.'
Yet another quote
Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – 'so these are really U-233 reactors,' says Karamoskos. This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste.
And the bottom line here...
'Even if thorium technology does progress to the point where it might be commercially viable, it will face the same problems as conventional nuclear: it is not renewable or sustainable and cannot effectively connect to smart grids. The technology is not tried and tested, and none of the main players is interested. Thorium reactors are no more than a distraction.'
The material that we dig out of the ground does not come without a price. In order to process and refine the material it takes a certain amount of "energy units"(EU's) before it becomes usable as a fuel.
My biological father and grandfather have been in the oil business as long as I can remember, and the way it was explained to me several years ago was that there is a HUGE amount of fossil fuel directly below our feet, the problem is that with the current technology we are limited as to how deep we can go to dig. Another way of saying it.... In the early 20's when our "glass" (of oil) was relatively full, it took about 1 EU worth of processing and refining to produce 100 EU's. In the 60's when our "glass" was a little less full, we were able to extract about 60 EU's for every 1 EUt we put in. Now days, with a virtually empty "glass", we only get about 9 EU's for every 1 EU we put in. Looking at alternative sources outside of fossil fuels and making a comparison, for every 1 EU we put in for Ethanol we only get about 3 EU's out, not to mention the environmental impact.
The importance of all of this, to put it bluntly, when it takes more EU's going in then how many we can extract, we are basically >>done<<. I want to emphasize done, because at the moment this is a reality we will face sooner than we think. Even though we may literally be sitting on an ocean of fossil fuel, we simply can't get to it without a diminished return. ... done
Sorry to be so doom and gloom, but we all need a reality kick in the pants for alternative solutions..
Beau,
I can well believe we are "done" when the energy required for extraction equals what we might get out.
There are those that say wind or tidal or solar is the way to go.
So far I have yet to be convinced that the cost of extraction, in energy terms, of building wind or tidal or solar plants is less than what we might might get out.
Heater ... the illusion is that we here reports that there is plenty of Oil in ground reserve. YES, that is absolutely true, but with present technology we simply can't reach any of it. Perhaps just skimming the top of what's really down there, but that "top" is as deep as we are able to go at present. What people seem to discount is the material cost required for other energy prospects. At present, I haven't heard of a solar panel manufacturing plant capable of sustaining itself to the point that it can produce it's own solar panels....<- other energy sources are required to get the job done.... Same with wind power, you don't, or at least I haven't heard of a self sustained Wind farm generating enough power to manufacture more wind turbines. That is the way of thinking that we all need to move towards, while we can, or else all of our eggs are going to be in one basket in a sinking ship.
Reguarding Beau's point of view.
I suspect most of the easy oil has been discovered and exploited, but the question of "How much oil is in the ground?" has been a game of liar's poker from the beginning.
On one hand, percieved shortages of reserves drive the price up and force more commitment to development of alternatives; on the other hand, percieved sudden expansions in reserves tend to abate fears of inflation pressures.
This is really the same with any mineral resource. Governments really do not care to report reality... it would be too inconvient to not have the wiggle room.
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Thorium...
The more I look into Thorium, it seems that the trade offs of capital investment in addtition mining and the manipulations to bring it into being a useful reactor fuel indicate that the economic costs of using it as an alternative may be moot. Just to begin with, it requires a blend of U233 and Thorium to get it working. And then it requires a breeder reactor mode of operation (just like Uranium) to get material to sustain power generaton. When you have a breeder reactor, you add another layer of processing as seperation after a breeder production run.
I simply suspect that has been investigated as an alternative and it may only be useful AFTER all the issues of processing safety and storage have been resolved.
Nuclear energy today...
The Manhattan Project and much of WWII was a global environmental disaster in its own right. Ideally, nuclear waste should be stored long-term in a solid-state, not a liquid solution. And cooling should not take place in cooling ponds, but in air-cooled towers or air-cooled caves. We haven't gotten there yet.
And when there is a dramatic failure, application and contamination of huge amounts of water seems to be the only way to prevent a melt down. The boon of nuclear fuel is that it creates vast amounts of heat that can generate steam for electricity; the down side is that fuel rods take many months.. maybe years .. to cool down after use, and water is the first choice of coolants.
So it seems that water cooling always is involved in at least one after-use phase. And that water becomes so radioactive and corrosive if the tubes that the fuel rods crack from excess heat or become damaged with age. Thus we have arrived at the Fukashima dilemma... apply lots of water with relatively poor methods to remove the radioactivity from the water after use. Hopefully, this bottleneck will finally get resolved post haste. We certainly have everyone looking for a solution.
Power generation...
The modern world depends on hundreds if not thousands of mega-watt power plants world-wide to provide us with the life-style we have (nuclear, coal-fired, fossi-fuel, natural gas, hydro-electric, and so on). Replacement of existing power plant technologies with alterantives requires decades of development and huge amounts of capital. We just can't simply go back to living beside "Walden Pond" and live well. If there is going to be change, it will be from bright young people working to enhance power generation through modernization as much as to replace conventional power with alternatives.
I worked at Hanford for less than a year, didn't feel that nuclear energy was as safe as portrayed. Most of the industry was very loyal to a good paycheck. In the 40 years since, progess in complete management of nulcear waste has not progressed anywhere near as fast as the pundits claimed it would back in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, all those reactors built in the go-go years of the 1970s are now near the end of their 30-40 year useful life.
I've no idea what is going to happen next, but it seems that the USA has already decided to shift over to fracked natural gas for power generation. It is good news for global warming, Natural gas power plants are much cheaper and faster to build than nuclear reactors. And we do need to have a reset in the nuclear industry that properly decommission old plants that are a hazard due to age or designs that were incomplete in safety features. I do believe the problems are being addressed, but my patience has worn very thin. There are other nations that are very nuclear dependent, including France, Japan, and even Taiwan. Policies for complete management of waste vary widely. For instance, Taiwan has no place to remove long-term waste to, but three operational nuclear reactor facilities.
In sum, I really dislike the idea of pull the plug on people that are benefiting from the energy produced, but am wary of any quick fixes.
As long as there are the needs for shareholders to satisfy and massive profits to be made then the viability of hunting for resources for the "good of the human race" will always be out of reach.
And the bottom line here...
... cannot effectively connect to smart grids. The technology is not tried and tested, and none of the main players is interested. Thorium reactors are no more than a distraction.'
This does not make sense. Why would any given source be unable to connect to the grid? What does being "tried and tested" have to do with anything, energy harvesting in general is not tried and tested, does that mean we should give up? The "main players" are those that control all the money from the present infrastructure, of course they are not interested in anything that requires any effort or investment. The bottom line appears to be that somebody making money wants to keep making money until the last possible instant, regardless of the consequences. But I am not an expert in these matters.
Let's get back to "energy harvesting". Which generally is taken to mean sucking little bits of power from heat, light, vibration, sound etc to power things at remote locations.
Comments
I see your edit now. In principle, the reaction product is pure water. Again, I'm no chemist, but I think in a fuel cell you get exactly that, pure water. If you burn the hydrogen in air, as Duane pointed out the other gases in air can also react (because of the high temperature) to produce other products that would contaminate the water to some extent. I wouldn't want to hazard a guess what the overall effect of that would be but the water vapor would just become part of the normal water cycle and eventually fall as rain. Acid rain, maybe? Don't know how much crud there would be. Catalytic converters can deal with some of it but how much, I don't know.
Just collect the water out of the tailpipe if you're worried your water supply.
Some of the big dirigibles had to collect the water given off from burning their fuel in order to maintain their ballast.
One of the main product of burning hydrocarbons is water (carbon dioxide is the other big one). With hydrogen it's just water.
Exactly!
Its this kind of mess that makes me go nuts!
I live in WA and we have a major issue with radio active matter leaking into the Columbia river and surrounding water ways, I also sail across oceans and would not want to sail over this radio active ocean area that people simply decide is a great place to put toxic material - clean energy is the key and nuclear energy is not as clean as one thinks.
But your response illustrates a common problem. As long as reactions are emotional rather than rational, and as long as what happened in weapons manufacturing 50-70 years ago is used to condemn the contemporary commercial power business, it's all moot. We'll continue to burn fossil fuels (and release mercury and CO2 into the atmosphere) and dabble with dream solutions that never amount to much.
I make no argument one way or the other but people have not forgotten Chernobyl and now they have Fukushima to think about.
These guys http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/191326/deaths-nuclear-energy-compared-other-causes
will argue that so far nuclear kills the least number of people in the world in proportion to the energy produced.
Interestingly Hydro Electric is thousands of times more dangerous than nuclear. But no body even noticed when 170,000 people were killed by the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=government-urged-to-step-in-to-halt-fukushima-plant-leakshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
I once worked on the Hanford Area and drove by Hanford Number One every day as I went to work. Yes, there is radioactivity leaking into the Columbia. But I am not sure it is serious at this point. And the Hanford Area is a huge chunk of land, maybe larger than Taiwan in area. If one can get clearance to drive through it to Spokane, it takes something like 4 hours to cross.
Thorium is also a by-product of rare earth miining. So it can actually be harvested while making other energy saving technologies that are greener, such as rare-earth magnets for wind energy. India has been very interested in it as such nuclear reactors do not produce weapons grade nuclear products.
It we much have a world powered with nuclear reactors, thorium could offer a saner development path. Eliminating the creation of more Plutonium with its 20,000 half-life and extreme toxicity would be a good thing.
My response was a tad emotional but its far from irrational. Radio active pollution is real nasty and last far beyond our years. Thorium appears to be a safer but...
"
The fission of thorium creates long-lived fission products like technetium-99 (half-life over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository. <- THE OCEAN I SAIL OVER
If the spent fuel is not reprocessed, thorium-232 is very-long lived (half-life:14 billion years) and its decay products will build up over time in the spent fuel. This will make the spent fuel quite radio-toxic, in addition to all the fission products in it. It should also be noted that inhalation of a unit of radioactivity of thorium-232 or thorium-228 (which is also present as a decay product of thorium-232) produces a far higher dose, especially to certain organs, than the inhalation of uranium containing the same amount of radioactivity. For instance, the bone surface dose from breathing an amount (mass) of insoluble thorium is about 200 times that of breathing the same mass of uranium.
Finally, the use of thorium also creates waste at the front end of the fuel cycle. The radioactivity associated with these is expected to be considerably less than that associated with a comparable amount of uranium milling. However, mine wastes will pose long-term hazards, as in the case of uranium mining. There are also often hazardous non-radioactive metals in both thorium and uranium mill tailings."
For the record I also oppose fossil fuels.
I don't own a car, I live off grid with solar and wind generators (made from treadmills motors), eat local farmed food, walk or sail to my destinations and try to consume less material things.
I think mankind needs to think smarter throughout the entire manufacturing process including energy - [take something in] , [manufacture energy] and [place back something good]
But it is as if we have already opened Pandora's box. People live better today because of the transportation, communications, and commerce that energy provides. And yet, China is covered in a cloud of smog from coal burning that fuels its prosperity.
Should China just pull the plug on coal, and send people back to riding bicycles and living in unheated homes in the winter? Or should they shift over to nuclear energy for infrastructure and natural gas for transport?
Backwards or forwards, the world needs to get more realistic about energy policy. I thought nuclear energy would have a waste management policy in hand by now when I worked at Hanford 30 years ago. But it seems that the final destination of all spent fuel rods that are NOT for mobile military and navy reactors is the spent fuel ponds at the reactor site itself.
Nobody has wanted to budget for centralized collection, storage, and reprocessing. Doing so would just demonstrate that nuclear power generation is not profitable and has open ended costs.
Fukajima failed so dramatically for several reasons. But one of the present problems is there was a lot of spent fuel that is not being properly cooled and contained.
I have benefited from an energy rich lifestyle, but I take no comfort in having done so.
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I suspect that in the near future silted up hydro-electric dams can be resolved safely with advances in modern tunnel boring to by-pass the silt and revive the free flow of the original river. You won't have the feature of flood control that the dam claimed to provide, but the river won't suddenly cause the dam to fail and come down as a huge mud flow. The area behind the dam would just be dry and have a subterainean river through it.
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The core problem in the consumer product of choice that drives the world's economies in the automobile. And along with it an excessive thirst for energy. In 2008, the USA again bailed out the auto industry because it is the foundation of so many jobs. It seems without the auto, there is not the means to employ so many people around the world.
Are we ready to all walk or take public transport? There is a huge matrix of issues tied together.
Technology can not be the savior or messiah of the world, some policy of complete management of energy consuption with its waste products is necessary and has been ignored for far too long. The individual can only do so much cutting back. Too much and he won't have a job because he is off-the-grid without transport to work or communications to find a job.
Trouble is the "complete management" might have to be more complete than you think.
To be really efficient people would live very close to the offices and factories they work in. Like even in the same building or campus. That's how it was done in the preindustial revolution times. You lived on the farm or village very near by. That's how it was done during the industrial revolution, factory and ship yard workers, coal miners etc, lived in houses nearby built by the company. That's how it's done with Foxcon today in China.
This is prety much outlawed in many cities of the world which have zoning regulations that dictate work, commerce, and play/living have to be in separate areas.
People are not going to like it. We have provided them with the luxury of big cars and big roads to make their comutes with so that they can live in big houses in nice areas.
It would take a strong dictator indeed to reverse all that.
Those who believe in the power of the market already know who the dictator will be. When fuel and material costs become too high people will find themselves rearranging their lives.
Odd fact of the day:
It seems that since agricultural times up till today the amount of time people spent traveling from home to work has remained constant. About one hour. Clearly we have not had much benifit from all those big cars and roads. We are still wasting a huge proportion of our lives on unproductive travel.
Before I sold my oil eater I was overweight, out of shape and things looked "typical American". My Doc said I was going to follow the typical regime that consisted of pills in the mid-40s, disease at 50 and dead right around the retirement age.
Walking is a natural fit for alternative energy and people can live without cars – they just have to be more creative.
Technology is wonderful but it needs clean energy in my opinion and that also means clean byproducts. I'm starting to wonder if its possible at all considering the politics in this world.
While GreenPeace might like to claim that it has saved the whales from extinction, Standard Oil and the export of keroscene on a world-wide scale likely did more to save them by making whale oil unprofitable. Mankind was not harvesting whales for food at the height of whaling.
Considering how long people lived in the 1800s in comparison with now, some enviromental impact is acceptible. We have gone from people being old and frail at 35 to beyond 65 and into their 80s.
Everything in moderation might be the best approach. I don't think the universe really appreciates purity in any form. Daily aerobic exercise will certainly add a lot to one's well being. Asia is full of stairs, the US has mandated elevators and ramps for the handicapped. I have doubts that there is a net benefit to the poplulation.
Gravity can be thought of as a field measured in m/s^2 (or more intuitively J/m/kg or N/kg), gravitational energy is measured in J, so
clearly the energy is the product of the field and the mass and the distance moved by it along the field. Gravitational field acts
on mass (as opposed to electric field that acts on charge and is measured in J/m/C (or equivalently N/C or V/m)
Actually the field does store energy, but its distributed over the whole field and proportional to the square of the field intensity
summed over volume (certainly for electric and magnetic fields - general relativity is probably subtlely different). However the
field encodes the distribution of mass or charge or current elements or whatever, so you can only interact with it by changing
that distribution. These forms are usually called potential energy.
So back to the original question - the reduction in gravitational field between the descending bucket and the whole earth means that the
gravitational field energy is being released to the bucket and earth (with the bucket getting the majority of kinetic energy as its lighter
and momentum is conserved).
Put another way you can imagine the field just due to the earth, and the field just due to the bucket, they add by superposition
to give the total field, but the field energy is non-linear (squared) in the field intensity so it is not a superposition of field energies from
the earth and bucket, hence their relative position affects the total.
Whilst it is true to say that the strength of the gravitational field drops of in proportion to the square of the distance from the object, i.e. that is non-linear, the superposition of fields from two, or more, objects is a linear addition.
That business I quoted about energy due to the height of an object, e = mgh, is a simplification. The assumption there is that the Earth is really big compared to the height we are raising an object. That is we say that the variation in gravity due to the distance change "h" is negligible.
On a larger scale, say trying to leave the Earth completely, we would have to take that inverse square law into account. The further away you are the less energy you need to lift the object that little "h" distance again.
That gives rise to the idea of "escape velocity". There is only a finite amount of energy required to lift ab object to an infinite distance from the Earth. So if your kinetic energy on leaving the Earth's surface, m*v*v/2, is sufficient you will never fall back!
If I understand it right, we can zap thorium with laser pulses, and generate heat enough to drive a turbine, and power the laser, and draw off energy for other uses. Instead of a traditional reactor generating heat via critical mass and a nuclear chain reaction, the thorium just gets hotter with out increasing the nuclear radiation. I probably don't understand it right, but they seem to be saying that thorium DOESN'T produce nasty by products, but is not favored because its not good for weapons. Anybody know more on this?
Uranium has several isotopes. U238 is the most common at roughly 99%, but U235 is the stuff that really drives the fission and is a problem to refine.
Plutonium is an excellent stand-in for U235 and a major percentage of the the reactor fuel's spent fuel rod content. So the scheme evolved to have nuclear reactors produce enough fuel for 1000 years once they got started by making lot of plutonium via conversion from U238 within power generation reactors.
The draw backs are that plutonium makes very good bombs, a pin head of plutonium kills a person that has inhaled or ingested it within 20 minutes, and it has a 20,000 year half-live. So, the control of stockpiles of the stuff is very serious business.
Thorium is also toxic in its own way. It doesn't seem to be a hazard with direct contact to the skin in small quantities, but inhaled thorium dust will cause lung cancer. And, for use in reactors you may need to mine new supplies as it is consumed.
There are trade-offs between both. And there seem to be some exotic toxic by-products to thorium fission that I have not read about. The simple fact is that anything radioactive can cause cancer with the right exposure to it. But the more the atomic mass, the more likely it is to immediately ruin your day.
U239 is a particularly nasty isotope of uranium, but it makes excellent small portable nuclear reactors for military use and outerspace applications.
The US seems to have built the first atomic bomb with U235 from uranium ore that came from the Congo in Africa. But acquiring ore was difficult, so they quickly shifted to using a breeder reactor to make Plutonium from U238. The vast majority of the US nuclear arms arsenal is Plutonium.. something like 3000-6000 bombs were made and maybe 10 pounds of the stuff in each one. We have since downsized our bomb inventory, but the material is sitting somewhere in stockpile to be either used in nuclear power plants, or to offset another arms race.
Thorium is preferred by some pro-nuclear power people just because terrorist cannot make fission bombs with it. I suppose it could work as a dirty bomb of sorts.
In my post #21 and as I understand it its still toxic. Link
Yet another quote
And the bottom line here...
My biological father and grandfather have been in the oil business as long as I can remember, and the way it was explained to me several years ago was that there is a HUGE amount of fossil fuel directly below our feet, the problem is that with the current technology we are limited as to how deep we can go to dig. Another way of saying it.... In the early 20's when our "glass" (of oil) was relatively full, it took about 1 EU worth of processing and refining to produce 100 EU's. In the 60's when our "glass" was a little less full, we were able to extract about 60 EU's for every 1 EUt we put in. Now days, with a virtually empty "glass", we only get about 9 EU's for every 1 EU we put in. Looking at alternative sources outside of fossil fuels and making a comparison, for every 1 EU we put in for Ethanol we only get about 3 EU's out, not to mention the environmental impact.
The importance of all of this, to put it bluntly, when it takes more EU's going in then how many we can extract, we are basically >>done<<. I want to emphasize done, because at the moment this is a reality we will face sooner than we think. Even though we may literally be sitting on an ocean of fossil fuel, we simply can't get to it without a diminished return. ... done
Sorry to be so doom and gloom, but we all need a reality kick in the pants for alternative solutions..
I can well believe we are "done" when the energy required for extraction equals what we might get out.
There are those that say wind or tidal or solar is the way to go.
So far I have yet to be convinced that the cost of extraction, in energy terms, of building wind or tidal or solar plants is less than what we might might get out.
So we are "done".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
I suspect most of the easy oil has been discovered and exploited, but the question of "How much oil is in the ground?" has been a game of liar's poker from the beginning.
On one hand, percieved shortages of reserves drive the price up and force more commitment to development of alternatives; on the other hand, percieved sudden expansions in reserves tend to abate fears of inflation pressures.
This is really the same with any mineral resource. Governments really do not care to report reality... it would be too inconvient to not have the wiggle room.
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Thorium...
The more I look into Thorium, it seems that the trade offs of capital investment in addtition mining and the manipulations to bring it into being a useful reactor fuel indicate that the economic costs of using it as an alternative may be moot. Just to begin with, it requires a blend of U233 and Thorium to get it working. And then it requires a breeder reactor mode of operation (just like Uranium) to get material to sustain power generaton. When you have a breeder reactor, you add another layer of processing as seperation after a breeder production run.
I simply suspect that has been investigated as an alternative and it may only be useful AFTER all the issues of processing safety and storage have been resolved.
Nuclear energy today...
The Manhattan Project and much of WWII was a global environmental disaster in its own right. Ideally, nuclear waste should be stored long-term in a solid-state, not a liquid solution. And cooling should not take place in cooling ponds, but in air-cooled towers or air-cooled caves. We haven't gotten there yet.
And when there is a dramatic failure, application and contamination of huge amounts of water seems to be the only way to prevent a melt down. The boon of nuclear fuel is that it creates vast amounts of heat that can generate steam for electricity; the down side is that fuel rods take many months.. maybe years .. to cool down after use, and water is the first choice of coolants.
So it seems that water cooling always is involved in at least one after-use phase. And that water becomes so radioactive and corrosive if the tubes that the fuel rods crack from excess heat or become damaged with age. Thus we have arrived at the Fukashima dilemma... apply lots of water with relatively poor methods to remove the radioactivity from the water after use. Hopefully, this bottleneck will finally get resolved post haste. We certainly have everyone looking for a solution.
Power generation...
The modern world depends on hundreds if not thousands of mega-watt power plants world-wide to provide us with the life-style we have (nuclear, coal-fired, fossi-fuel, natural gas, hydro-electric, and so on). Replacement of existing power plant technologies with alterantives requires decades of development and huge amounts of capital. We just can't simply go back to living beside "Walden Pond" and live well. If there is going to be change, it will be from bright young people working to enhance power generation through modernization as much as to replace conventional power with alternatives.
I worked at Hanford for less than a year, didn't feel that nuclear energy was as safe as portrayed. Most of the industry was very loyal to a good paycheck. In the 40 years since, progess in complete management of nulcear waste has not progressed anywhere near as fast as the pundits claimed it would back in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, all those reactors built in the go-go years of the 1970s are now near the end of their 30-40 year useful life.
I've no idea what is going to happen next, but it seems that the USA has already decided to shift over to fracked natural gas for power generation. It is good news for global warming, Natural gas power plants are much cheaper and faster to build than nuclear reactors. And we do need to have a reset in the nuclear industry that properly decommission old plants that are a hazard due to age or designs that were incomplete in safety features. I do believe the problems are being addressed, but my patience has worn very thin. There are other nations that are very nuclear dependent, including France, Japan, and even Taiwan. Policies for complete management of waste vary widely. For instance, Taiwan has no place to remove long-term waste to, but three operational nuclear reactor facilities.
In sum, I really dislike the idea of pull the plug on people that are benefiting from the energy produced, but am wary of any quick fixes.
This does not make sense. Why would any given source be unable to connect to the grid? What does being "tried and tested" have to do with anything, energy harvesting in general is not tried and tested, does that mean we should give up? The "main players" are those that control all the money from the present infrastructure, of course they are not interested in anything that requires any effort or investment. The bottom line appears to be that somebody making money wants to keep making money until the last possible instant, regardless of the consequences. But I am not an expert in these matters.
So how about harvesting energy from wine? http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/526410/wine-powered_microprocessor_fermenting_intel_labs/