patrick.net

Nomo says

"As usual, southern California is an early adopter of new ideas .... the rest of the nation will eventually follow."

Being that California if basically a bankrupt, failed Socialist/Welfare state, your assertion isn't very comforting.

RayAmerica says

Being that California if basically a bankrupt, failed Socialist/Welfare state, your assertion isn’t very comforting.

Nomo:
You're so silly! California is the only place in the entire world - regardless of the political views held by that area - that is experiencing an economic crisis, and yet you post some silliness about California being a leader in "new ideas." Perhaps if you represented yourself as the ultimate expert on pretty much everything who is a victim of the liberals, you would see the error of your ways.

At best, I'm sure that you're making an uneducated, uninformed guess about the issue. Perhaps if you got yourself some learnin' you'd realize that the way out of the economic crisis that only California faces is to follow the lead of Nevada (rely upon one single income source based on the rest of the world's economy), Michigan (rely upon an industry that pulled out years ago), New York City (thousands of workers laid off), Greece, Ireland, Dubai...

Nomograph says

As I said, conservatives will cry foul for a variety of reasons. Don’t be so black-or-white. Consider a future where *numerous* sources of renewable energy are in play, depending on what makes most sense for a particular area. Haven’t you considered that solar might be best for some areas and nuclear might be best for others? After all, you can’t exactly put a nuclear power plant on your rooftop to run your home, and likewise solar isn’t going to do much good in Seattle.

Why diversify when you have such awesome examples as the ones I mentioned above - and you have an "expert" who is eager to shove his offensive opinions down everyone's throats?

I hope you see the error of your ways now. ;)

Everyone should watch this documentary ---> http://www.oilcrashmovie.com/index2.html
It's available for instant viewing on Netflix.

pkennedy says

We don’t need power at night, we currently have enough power to recharge 85% of our cars at night if they were all electric! We dump power at night! Our power stations can’t just turn off, so they keep running. It’s a horrendous situation, it’s likely never being able to turn your car off. You would burn up so much more fuel if you had to idle it while you where at work/home!

What are you talking about? No one dumps power at night. Dump it where? Of course power generating plants can be turned off.

Renewable energy will always be a boom bust cycle until there is some kind of floor under the price of oil and coal via a tax on hydrocarbons. Oil generates 24% of electricity, coal 48%, nuclear 21%,(these numbers fluctuate) the other 7% is everything else hydro,geothermal,solar,wind etc.. As long as the price of coal and oil can drop investing in renewable energy will be limited. Even if there were a predictable return on investment for renewable energy it will obviously be a very long time before it will seriously replace coal and oil.

Actually power plants can't just be turned off. They need to keep running, like a giant idle engine. They don't need to run at peak, but they do need to keep running. Like an idle engine, they either don't produce power or it's used to store energy for later, such as putting water into a water tower. In most places it's about creating new energy only for peak power. We'll need to replace the other power at some point, but our power needs continually grow, which means we need more of each year.

Your naming is off, it's not 24% oil, it's 24% natural gas, which is a clean burning fuel to start with. Petroleum is 1%.

Poor guy. I can identify, tho. This morning I had $20.00 and now I only have $8.00 left. What to do?

Nomograph says

I don’t see his posts now that the ‘ignore’ feature is online. Life is too short to waste with that kind of person.

Every now & then I check out his comments - such as the lovely ones that he made regarding my vacuum cleaner. I'm a little bit optimistic, but I believe that he can change and become semi-human.

I wonder if Mrs. rayray has an ignore button?

Buy two or three houses in Las Vegas.

sponsor a local dirt track racer ... and buy two or three houses in Las Vegas

Zlxr says

And we are running out of space to dump garbage

Tokyo doesn't have that problem. They use trash to make landfills in Tokyo Bay.

Win-win AFAICT. They do a good job separating the trash and cleaning it, and they get new bayside real estate.

I wish we'd do this for the southern arm of the SF Bay. There's only about 300 people living between me and the bay, but it's just mud so the whole bay thing is just an economical dead zone.

Fill the Bay is what I say!

It's about collecting up viable amounts of energy. Collecting methane from sewage is likely not viable, or they would be doing it now, because it all collects in what amounts to blenders, putting a lid on it and siphoning off the methane probably wouldn't be hard.

Cows produce between 300-500L of methane gas per day! Methane is about 300 times worse than CO2. They've looked at ways of collecting methane from cows, but its horrendous. We do some pretty vile things to those animals as it is, hooking up "methane collecting" devices to them would probably be over the top. But if we were to start looking at harvesting energy from methane, that would be the place to do it.

We have lots of land area for waste, we don't really produce all that much. We produce a lot, but in the grand scheme, it's not that much. Finding a nice local area for it isn't necessarily easy. No one wants to haul garbage 100-200 miles to get away from cities, they want to dump it as close as possible which means dumping it in valuable land where people will actually notice it.

pkennedy says

Actually power plants can’t just be turned off. They need to keep running, like a giant idle engine. They don’t need to run at peak, but they do need to keep running. Like an idle engine, they either don’t produce power or it’s used to store energy for later, such as putting water into a water tower. In most places it’s about creating new energy only for peak power. We’ll need to replace the other power at some point, but our power needs continually grow, which means we need more of each year.
Your naming is off, it’s not 24% oil, it’s 24% natural gas, which is a clean burning fuel to start with. Petroleum is 1%.

Some power plants cannot be turned off on a daily basis (nuclear and large coal fired power plants). However some other types (hydro, gas) can be turned off.

A so-called unit commitment program has to be run on day-ahead basis to determine which plants will be turned On/Off to cover the forecasted load.

I just got off from work after working a 12 hour shift as one of the Reactor Operators at a nuke plant. We run as close to 100% power 24/7 unless we are in an outage, we are doing some testing requiring us to down power or something went wrong (RX trip or a down power for equipment issues).

I do think there is a place for alternatives for peak loads. I also think we should have a base load powered by nukes. We run a 24 month refuel cycle. This means for about 700 days, we can keep that turbine rolling day and night.

eewww .... neg-a-tory!

wait ... how much cash are we talkin'?

This place is a bomb! Plenty of room to spread out in complete privacy. Close to libraries and post offices, this property offers it all! Quaint rustic cottage, ready for your personal touches. A MUST SEE!

Like they used to say on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, "a million dollars here, a million dollars there... pretty soon we're talking real money."

thenuttyneutron says

I just got off from work after working a 12 hour shift as one of the Reactor Operators at a nuke plant.

Homer! I'm your biggest fan! I even bought a sculpture of your industry's creation:

http://mombocompany.com/index.htm
I bought at a gallery in New Orleans in 1995 or so, the guy's studio in Waveland MS was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina and I don't know if he's ever recovered.

Comes with booby traps?

I was referring to listing(not sold) price in 2009.

nosf41 says

pkennedy says

Actually power plants can’t just be turned off. They need to keep running, like a giant idle engine. They don’t need to run at peak, but they do need to keep running. Like an idle engine, they either don’t produce power or it’s used to store energy for later, such as putting water into a water tower. In most places it’s about creating new energy only for peak power. We’ll need to replace the other power at some point, but our power needs continually grow, which means we need more of each year.

Your naming is off, it’s not 24% oil, it’s 24% natural gas, which is a clean burning fuel to start with. Petroleum is 1%.

Some power plants cannot be turned off on a daily basis (nuclear and large coal fired power plants). However some other types (hydro, gas) can be turned off.
A so-called unit commitment program has to be run on day-ahead basis to determine which plants will be turned On/Off to cover the forecasted load.

Anyway my point was there is no dumping of electricity or energy. Why would any operator dump expensive energy or electricity? The stockholders would have a lynching party. There is enough load on the grid even at the lowest point that it will more than take up the production. Plant operators would obviously prefer to have high utilization rates since selling electricity is what pays the bills. Most nuclear, and coal/fuel oil steam plants run at full capacity all the time, called base load power plants. This is the most efficient use of these plants for both technical and financial reasons. Natural gas/fuel oil turbines and hydro are usually run as load following power plants. These get ramped up and down as the load increases and decreases.

You can store excess capacity. In Britain they do a lot of pumping. The excess electric capacity from nuclear and coal pumps water up to behind dams so it can be used for hydro generation during peaks. The US grid is so big and diverse it's not common here.

Yes my naming was off. I meant to type oil and natural gas. Oil is 3% by the way.

thenuttyneutron says

I just got off from work after working a 12 hour shift as one of the Reactor Operators at a nuke plant.

Curious: what's your professional opinion of thorium & "pebble bed"?

.... offers an open, airy, living space ...

Forgot: unclean - one owner.

Zlxr,

Do you have a good reference on the India and China household biogas generators? The big picture is that a family of four perhaps eats 2000 kcal * 4 persons * 4.2KJ/kcal = 33.6MJ worth of food energy in a day. The energy of that food is about the same as a 33.6MJ/(37MJ/L)= 0.9 L(iter) of gasoline. Some fraction of that energy remains in the waste and can then be recovered (again by some fraction) by the biogas reactor.

While some fraction of 0.9L of gasoline equivalent may be enough to cook your daily dinner, it is not a large scale solution to our heating and cooking energy needs, at least not in cool climates

If you are a hog farmer with a 1000 hogs, then we're perhaps onto something as a local solution.

Nevertheless, I definitely applaud family-sized biogas generation as a handy way to recover energy from waste. Way to go.

Here are some references:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2240/can-animal-including-human-manure-be-used-as-fuel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas#In_the_Indian_subcontinent

Unfortunately, actual efficiency figures are hard to come by.

Troy, I like the Th to U233 fuel cycle. The US will need to change many of the policies that are in place. The Thorium Fuel cycle does not even need to be in a pebble bed form. You can make a Light Water Breeder Reactor with this fuel cycle.

The only problem with this cycle is the nasty gamma producing U233 that it makes. It can be solved through technology, but I think people will have a big issue with the fuel assemblies traveling the roads to the plants. The current fuels are only alpha emitting.

I like the IFR design even more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

Such a shame that this got canceled in its last few years. This can burn just about anything as long as it is fertile.

* Correction. The current fuels are only alpha emitting until they are irradiated.

Hey, nutty:

My ex was one of many who worked on the Yucky Mountain Project - a little history for the uninformed: the project was a boondoggle in the desert that wasn't so much a study in whether it would be viable as it was an actual repository build. Spent fuel rods have been stored on site at each facility, rather than at a central area. But the NRC had contracted that it would have a solution in place long before now.

There were originally three sites chosen to study, but politics weaned it to one - the desert northwest of Las Vegas. This was a political choice, and the site wasn't ever proven to be viable. To study the site, they brought in a specially made tunneling machine that actually built the repository somewhat. Now it's effectively shut down, even though millions of dollars have been thrown at it. The dollars were not tax dollars, however - they were paid by the industry in the form of fees.

So, nutty, my question is, what is the view of the worker at a facility? Especially now that the site's shut down - how do industry workers feel about the government's promise and lack of action?

I'm guessing the federal government put up that chain link fence with barbed-wire, looks too sophisticated for a guy who lives in a shack in the woods.

pkennedy said: Collecting methane from sewage is likely not viable, or they would be doing it now
Hey down there. I know the center of the universe is SV, but you should really come and visit the East Bay some time. We do amazing stuff up here, too.

Indeed, it may make a lot more sense during these days of melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels to stop composting food waste and start turning it into renewable energy. The East Bay Municipal Utility District, for instance, has been quietly doing just that for the past few years at its giant West Oakland sewage treatment plant. EBMUD takes food waste from restaurants around the Bay Area and turns it into methane gas, which it then uses to power three on-site generators. The resulting clean electricity, in turn, helps power the treatment plant.

The Swedes, BTW, are some of the leaders in biogas production and plant design.

The problem with biogas is that it generally requires so much energy as input. Collecting trash, driving around with a team. Then sorting and preparing, then getting some gas from it, then collecting that gas, then using that gas. While there is energy there, is it the best place to really invest time, money and research? It's neat, it shows that there are possible uses for it, but in the end we need to find ways to create masses of energy every day. Even if the biogas process is really optimized, collection (aside from sewage/waste) is pretty difficult.

The "American dream" is "sudden riches"? Since fucking when?

Inheriting your wealth was always a European thing, soundly rejected by Americans (except, of course, for the anti-inheritance tax people)

These people inherited $10M and spent more than half of it on a house that they never lived in. They could have taken that $10M and put it in bonds at 3% and had enough money per year to pay for a multi million dollar house, nice cars, and good schools, pretty much anywhere in the world.

This reminds me of people who win a $20M jackpot and then proceed to live like it was $20B.

There's a company called Energy Solutions that owns a compound in the West Desert - that's west of the Great Salt Lake. Here's a bit of propaganda:

http://www.energysolutions.com/uploads/documents/NR_-_12_-_National_Resource.pdf

http://utah.hometownlocator.com/ut/tooele/clive.cfm

The repository is in a sparsely populated area of the state - think Bonneville Salt Flats. It's at 4000 feet elevation, but to my knowledge there's no river that runs thru it. It's miles & miles of salt flats and desert with hardly any people at all. Not that it makes a lot of difference... but it isn't the canyon you described.

I guess they figure that, if there's very little out there, it won't hurt anyone. All things considered, it's better than a populated area. There's an article on Wikipedia about Energy Solutions too.

Kevin says

This reminds me of people who win a $20M jackpot and then proceed to live like it was $20B.

Remember the movie Brewster's Millions? It was about a guy who inherited a shitload of money and, in order to keep it he had to spend $30 mil in 30 days with nothing to show for it. He ended up much more grounded. Sure, it was a movie - but a good lesson if there is one to be had.

I had a friend who lived in a mobile home that was owned by a woman who inherited ungodly amounts of money when her (previously unknown to her) biological father died - so the woman bought another mobile home and connected them together, then put in a pool and a climate controlled 8 car garage. It was an amazing, ugly as hell property. My friend called it her "mobile mansion," which they rented for free because they paid about $600/mo utilities and maintained the place. The woman bought a farm somewhere else, but had run thru a few husbands, etc.

The people in the story were stupid, and (as Nomo pointed out) meant to be poor.

Kevin says

The “American dream” is “sudden riches”? Since fucking when?
Inheriting your wealth was always a European thing, soundly rejected by Americans (except, of course, for the anti-inheritance tax people)

Very true, American dream was never about inheriting wealth or about buying a house and being an instant millionnaire.

It was about starting your business, working hard, and succeeding if your business is right. America is the land of the free, for a long time it was the only country where people were free to start a business without needing to know someone rich.

dude ... it's median sales price .. so the junk is gone and only good stuff is changing hands now. Things are still going down my friend.

psst ... change that to "barbedwire" and then I'll erase this post!

My question is why did the realtor slash it 50%? Ted Kaczynski is infamous. This thread got posted precisely because this land sale received national news. That is some marketing. I saw links on MSN website, CNN.com, etc. Mainstream---> it's out there.

So, yeah, while 99.9999% of us kinda cringe, somebody out there will want it precisely because the unabomber hid out there. 1.4 acres in a remote Montana area in this market ---> reduce that lot. If it is the Unabomber's 1.4 acre remote lot, raise the price.

Personally, I can't get the story out of my head where Kaczynski bragged he managed to live out there in MT on about $500 per year. He evidently saved on fertilizer for his garden vegetables, if you know what I mean.