[handlewanker]

BTW, infantry11B, lucky 911 didn't happen over a Nuke facility.....that would be something to write home about.....Dear Mom and Pops, can't talk right now, couple of fellers just popped in and the place is a mess, so we're going to be pretty active for a while.....see you later maybe....
Ian.

[MrWild]

I give you one example of what you can expect.....an area of one square kilometre gets heavily contaminated with a nuke spill from waste disposal......how much do you think the aveage person would expect in payment to go in and try to remove the hazadous material (spread over a kilometre), given that his future prospects of a long and healthy life enjoying the rewards of retirement benefits is summed up in days if not hours, like the Chernobyl "volunteers" that went into ground zero and are now very much history....that is nobody remembers their names and no monuments were made to their achievements.

The Chernobyl clean up crews... I read about this disaster quite avidly. They sent in their soldiers with BUCKETS! These guys were walking around outside in the high radiation without protection and picking up radioactive graphite by hand! There is a junkyard of earth movers too radioactive to ever use again except... The people are so poor, they go and cannibalize them for parts, and the parts? They're used in equipment that is used in public. A good book is, "We almost lost Detroit." We have enough coal to last two centuries. I'd rather face global warming of the CO2 variety than the radioactive variety

[infantry11b]

actually our US nuke facilities have a multiple level containment area and are built to handle a direct hit.
something called the cold war was the reason for it.
and if you are going to wait around for wind you will have a long wait.
and if you are going solar - well something tells me that putting half of arizona under an umbrella of solar panels is going to be a little destructive to the environment.
plus solar panels have to be dark and if the global warming nuts have their way, the darker the color the worse for the 'fake man made global warming."
remember that fool who wanted to paint everything white? well he sort of forgot something called oceans and forests. plus his equation seemed to forget the amount of energy needed to produce the paint, transport the paint, not to mention actually painting everything - he wanted all homes, roofs, streets and highways - and then there is that little thing about keeping them white.
you like you computer - well you need electricity. and your bycicle - make with oil, electricity and other energy. and the roads you want to ride it on - yep - oil products.
and your clothes, fresh foods - or do you want to try to live without heaters or refrigs?
here is a news flash for you - if you want cheap energy - go nuke.
if you want to revert to the year 1000 - fine with me - lets all go out and burn down forests for heat, forget medicine - no helicopters or hospitals - and kill every animal that we can eat.
you cant limit energy use and keep the same standard of living - not going to happen and people are not going back to 1000 no matter how many ghosts you think live under your bed.

[handlewanker]

At the moment the hysteria about vital resource depletion is gripping even the top echelons of political management to such a degree that people like Al Gore have been able to concoct a fictitious scenario by using the old numbers game, ie, the more people you see the more sales you get to make, except Al promoted a little white lie so subtly that at first it didn't appear to mean anything, but as concerned and not so concerned but vested interest people, namely some Alchemists with agendas to fulfill, realised that here was a vehicle that they could push to the very limit to appear to be doing something of vital importance and using the resources set aside for research and what better research can you do than "search" for the answer to the age old question, "when's it gonna rain/snow/shine/stop raining....the list goes on, so does the research as long as the funds pour in from concerned top advisors who really don't know what weather is and rely on the very people that "manufacture" facts to fit the weather patterns that just happen to vary like the weather...LOL.

I think the 21st century will go down as the century when the Climatologists finally found a way to make the game pay by way of a captive audience.

This might be unfair to clump all Climatologists in the same nutshell, but the real truth is....the weather will vary no matter how long they study it and hypothesise about why it is going to do what it has been doing for millions of years, and like a formular for forcasting a horse race or football pool or state lottery, no conclusive result has yet occured with any degree of accuracy, and models can only predict what has already happened....that is a fact.....it is impossible to predict a coming even by comparing the past events, and future trends never follow the same pattern.

Count up, (if you could), the amount of money spent on climate study, climate "control measures", climate spin offs and climate rip offs, and the national debt pales into insignificence by comparison.

Now that the overseas countries in Continental Europe are waning in their desire to go "windy", the realisation that too much alternative measures too soon will not only make the current resources of oil, coal, gas and Nuke derivatives more costly by diverting money to the alternative technology too soon, while there is still sufficient materials in the ground to last for a very long while yet.

It is ludicrous to pay for alternative energy production when it's cheaper to harness the cheaper resources still available, and by the time the current energy resources start to slow down then alternative measures will naturally fill in.

Anything alternative now will be out of date in ten years, and at the hundred year mark, will only be fit for museum exhibits.

Meanwhile the general public will be expected to pay for the lack of foresight by dabblers in new but too soon technology.

The windmill made today will not be around in 10 years time, worn out and obsolete, and will certainly not have paid for itself during that time span, though an interesting delve into the designers pipe dreams, but not a feasible solution by any stretch of the imagination.

The Alchemist and economists have conveniently left out factor X in their equation....the growing population boom, which will become such a huge problem on resource harvesting that even Al Gore's millions will seem like pocket money.

This is called "The inconvenient conclusion", or Yo'all won't be able to see the wood for the trees...LOL.
Ian.

[handlewanker]

Infantey11B....who you kidding, surely yourself for starters.....a Nuke facility would not sustain a hit without serious consequences even from a light aircraft dropping in on top of it unnanounced, but I expect it was designed way back when with a hundred feet of reinforced concrete on top to withstand any Nuke attack the Reds were supposed to be contemplating, except when a Nuke device goes off it makes a hole a lot deeper than a hundred feet, kiss your arse goodby.....Nuke on Nuke......double wammy....anybody in one of those facilities would be sealed in for the rest of their life.....a coupla seconds.
Ian.

[Boltz]

Hey, no argument I totally believe you. We have modern coal fired plants here in Minnesota with very clean looking exhaust. My point is that in the old days before the baghouses the submicron particles clumped on to the large soot particles and fell to the ground within a few miles of the powerplant.

Now the submicron emissions travel hundreds of miles.

Also, still looking for an answer to the question of whether state of the art nukes are thrifty enough with water to operate in the dry parts of the western US.

...........so I should believe you (who has never laid eyes on the plant) rather than my own "lying eyes"?

Sorry, I believe what I've seen and lived with. No soot on the ground, no dead or stunted plant life and no haze in the air.

[Boltz]

The original design of the containment vessels on the US nuke plants was quite robust and did anticipate a large plane collision. My concern is that the operating companies may have taken a page from the FirstEnergy cost reduction manual, which lead to an extremely unsafe condition at the Davis-Besse reactor. Those containment vessels may now be a lot more fragile than when they were built.

In order to advocate in favor of nuclear power, one must truly believe that the corporations which will operate the plants will be truthful and ethical, and that the government agencies (the NRC primarily) will be well-funded, free from corruption, efficient, and transparent. One has to believe that there won't be another Davis-Besse, and I'm not quite ready to take that leap of faith.

Infantey11B....who you kidding, surely yourself for starters.....a Nuke facility would not sustain a hit without serious consequences even from a light aircraft dropping in on top of it unnanounced, but I expect it was designed way back when with a hundred feet of reinforced concrete on top to withstand any Nuke attack the Reds were supposed to be contemplating, except when a Nuke device goes off it makes a hole a lot deeper than a hundred feet, kiss your arse goodby.....Nuke on Nuke......double wammy....anybody in one of those facilities would be sealed in for the rest of their life.....a coupla seconds.
Ian.

[infantry11b]

ok handlewanker here is what you do.
disconnect everything you have that is attached to a nuke, or oil/coal fired energy source. dams are bad too - poor fish - so that energy source is out.
don't buy or use anything that is transported over highways made by oil products, or grown or manfactured by oil or nuke energy supplied plants.
you cant kill animals to eat, and you can only eat what you can grow, but you cant use seeds from a source that had to be transported from a foreign location over all those bad roads and transported by gas cars, or trains.
you cant ride a bike as they frame was made with bad oil, and the tires are made of oil products, and the seat, well you don't need that either. and roads - stay off of them.
don't forget to throw out all your clothes - unless you grew the material to make them yourself.
now unplug your computer but before you do that let us know where you want to be buried and we will have someone come by and get you body in a year or so. it will either be death by starvation, exposure to the elements, freezing to death, bad water, etc. combined with a lack of medical care because you will not be able to call anyone to tell them you are sick - no electricity.

[jhowelb]

ok handlewanker here is what you do.
disconnect everything you have that is attached to a nuke, or oil/coal fired energy source. dams are bad too - poor fish - so that energy source is out.
don't buy or use anything that is transported over highways made by oil products, or grown or manfactured by oil or nuke energy supplied plants.
you cant kill animals to eat, and you can only eat what you can grow, but you cant use seeds from a source that had to be transported from a foreign location over all those bad roads and transported by gas cars, or trains.
you cant ride a bike as they frame was made with bad oil, and the tires are made of oil products, and the seat, well you don't need that either. and roads - stay off of them.
don't forget to throw out all your clothes - unless you grew the material to make them yourself.
now unplug your computer but before you do that let us know where you want to be buried and we will have someone come by and get you body in a year or so. it will either be death by starvation, exposure to the elements, freezing to death, bad water, etc. combined with a lack of medical care because you will not be able to call anyone to tell them you are sick - no electricity.

I disagree.........he will have died of fatal stupidity.

But we all knew that already. BTW, I've reactivated my ignore button as thr one and only reasonable response is ALL there is!

[handlewanker]

Listen up Infantry11B, I like very much oil, coal, wind,water,wood,and Nuke derived energy sources, only one thing, like Cyanide, they have to be taken in context, that is you could use Cyanide in industry for hardening steel etc, or in mining to release gold particles from the rock, but don't go adding it to your favourite drink or BBQ as a marinade....LOL.

Of all the energy sources I get the shivers at the prospect of a Nuke facility going AWOL.

I don't feel uncomfortable living near an oil or coal burning power station, but by choice I choose not to.

Many years ago the town I lived in had a private power station with 6 huge MAN 8 cylinder in line diesel generators supplying the energy needs for the town and mines.

No problem with the gennies pounding away 24/7 and the window frames a half mile away rattling when engine N0 2 came under load at peak hour, they were made in Germany in the 1920's so had been worked hard all their life.

Nuke is a different story.

I lived in UK for for the second time from 1968 to 1978, and worked on the atom plant loading chambers of Hinkley Point and Hunterston reactors, that is I machined the 6 ton sections of the fuel rod loading chambers when they were being made.....but at the same time the prospect of A Power being so close to home up river was not very mind settling.

Nuke may be seen as an answer to a one day energy source reduction problem, but with the ever increasing population growth any alternative, but not equal to current methods of energy production, will be swamped by larger increases in consumption.

The Humanoids will go on producing consumers for no good reason than that they can, and for no better reason than that they do, but by their own stupidity they will engineer their own demise, like it or not, and there's no more sorry a sight at a moment of crisis than a pile of rotting corpses that somehow have to disposed of, usually when the problem is out of control, by digging a big hole with a bulldozer and pushing the rotting pile of Friends Romans and other Countrymen into the hole ASAP without so much as a "farewell whoever you were, I knew you well" and perhaps not even a bump in the ground long afterweards to note their passing.

On the scale of things, Solar power, various, is the least productive with wind next, followed by Geo Thermal, Nuclear, Oil and Coal, probably in that order, while wood doesn't even rate a mention.

If someone with a crystal ball or psychic powers could predict the future 1% as good as they think they can predict the weather, chances are the Chronicle of Humanoid activity will end at book one.
Ian.

[handlewanker]

Good on ya' JH, go bury yo' head back in the sand, when in doubt say nothing...HUH?

[RomanLini]

...
The windmill made today will not be around in 10 years time, worn out and obsolete, and will certainly not have paid for itself during that time span, though an interesting delve into the designers pipe dreams, but not a feasible solution by any stretch of the imagination.
...

HW, you really need to stop spouting ignorance as if it were fact. Modern wind technology is viable, cost effective and generally reliable. The steel structures that support the big mills will last a very long time and the generator and bearing technology is very similar to that used in many other power stations at it would not be unreasonable to predict the windmill generator life of 25 years as specced for other power stations, possibly more as the widnmill is not at full power all the time. Blade technology is improving every year with new composite materials yeilding better power and longer blade life.

Wind is not the answer to all electricity generation or even for the bulk of electricity generation, but for you to act like it is a complete stupid failure just advertises your ignorance. Wind is used very effectively by a lot of countries. Have a look at Denmark as an example. As another example a single 10MW windmill of 150 meter diameter can supply the average energy needs of a decent sized country town of a thousand(s?) homes. This is not an insignificant power source, and it has proven field reliability AND is free from buying or mining consumables like coal. Learn more, speak less HW.

For the record I am not against coal burning power stations, especailly here in Australia where we have entire mountain ranges made from coal and relatively small population to use it. The Australian coal power stations have electrostatic scrubbers that do a good job of cleaning up the exhaust.

Boltz-

Also, still looking for an answer to the question of whether state of the art nukes are thrifty enough with water to operate in the dry parts of the western US.

Not really. Nuke power like coal or gas stations use a steam turbine to generate electricity. All the Nuke part does is generate heat, no matter what type of reactor. To generate the electricity most effectively the steam turbine needs the greatest possible temperature difference between the hot steam and the cold cooling water. So using water a few degrees colder can make a lot more electricity from the same heat generated by the nuke. Since nuke stations are very expensive the best locations are where there is very deep (cold) water available in abundance, ie coast or lakeside etc. Putting one in the middle of a desert would be a very poor use of the technology if the goal is to generate the most electricty possible from each (expensive) fuel rod.

[handlewanker]

Roman, you make me laugh with your naieve optimism.

I would bet $100 of mine against $1 of yours that current windmill technology will be gone and forgotten 20 years from now, and in 10 years those curently being made will no longer be considered viable.

A 10 MW windmill is only capable of producing 10MW when the conditions are favourable and at the max, and as Pickens Boone remarked at a wind talkers meeting down in Texas USA..."I'm outta here", and not a moment too soon or so I hear, a delay would have been financially a total disater for someone who was so dedicated to getting the wind to make his fortune, but in the end he realised which way the wind was blowing.

We will never know what the outcome of todays energy useage will lead us to, but desperate men do desperate things.

That the current energy useage is being drained at an exponential rate is without question....do the sums......a population without war, famine, pestilence or any other form of culling will in the end eat itself just to survive, and if'n it's the intention of the Humanoids to "just survive", I pity yo'all.

The entire population of this planet will all be dead in 100 years, and that's a lot of corpses to get rid of, one way or another.

Those that don't go to feed the maggots 6 feet down, (and that's still a lot of real estate) will consume more energy being converted to ashes, to end up on someone's mantlepiece in a jar to be dusted off now and again, but eventually get turfed out to be "scattered" ceremoniously to the four winds, never to be seen again, such is life and the end of it.

I get the uncomfortable feeling that the Alchemists with their crystal balls will be consulted to read the entrails of sheep once again, and so the Nuke solution will most probably be the end game, 'cos that's the newest exciting toy in their toy boxes....well it IS only 65 years old, and as technology goes that's not much experience to build a future on, and as such there have already been a number of very major disasters, enough to make the average cautious person very reticent.

The full realisation is that Nuclear technology was primarily designed to destroy with the maximum collateral damage expectation, bigger bombs, bigger booms....peacefull power production was never a consideration in the original design specifications, and 'now that you have sown the wind, you must reap the wirlwind, or the genie is out of the bottle big time.

This is like using dyanamite as a fuel to drive your car, no Nobel Prize for that notion.

My advice to yo'all is to go to Chernobyl, breathe the air, feel the vibes and say to yourselves...."this could NEVER happen again"?
Ian.

[Boltz]

As far as I can tell, the current state of the art in wind turbine design is the "Sea Titan" unit being designed by American Superconductor. The plan is to use HTS to drastically reduce the size and weight of what goes in the nacelle. This unit will be direct-driven and electronically regulated. That's right, this unit will have no gearbox, which is one of the heaviest and most failure prone parts of the turbine.

Pickens bailed because fracking technology has evolved beyond most people's wildest dreams, and a glut of cheap, clean burning natural gas is what threw a wrench in the windmill plan. Interestingly enough, cheap natgas is the nuke booster's worst enemy.

[infantry11b]

there are lots of technologies that can and should be used, but not to the exclusion of others.
even if America was totally green - what ever that really means - we still have the rest of the world burning coal, using nukes, burning natural gas, burning and consuming other oil products, trees, and all without any real controls.
the koyoto accord did nothing to regulate china, africia or india, who are the worlds largest polluters - if you want to call carbon polution.
and truth be told - this is all bs anyway. if any of you were around and a full on adult in 1975 or so you might have seen a pbs show where the issue of carbon credits was first brought up as a way of REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH and with the UN as the controling authority and collecting a tax on every credit sold. it was the un trying to create a new asset, forcing countries that actually worked to improve itself and was successful, paying the lazy ones for doing nothing. sort of a penalty for success.
global warming bs fit right into their plan, it was fake carbon arguments.
we just came out of an ice age in 1890 - but we did not have a valid way of measuring temps until farhenheit created a valid scale in 1724, right in the middle of the little ice age. so of course if you use that time as the begining it will be warmer now. sort of like putting you temp device in your cooler and than taking it ourside and claiming the earth is warming, and that man is responsible for it.
vikings colonized greenland around 1000 ad, and had farms and produced enough food until the little ice age. ever see what it takes to dig up an greenland viking grave? HEAVY EARTHMOVING EQUIPMENT! if it was as warm now as it was then we would be able to dig then up with the same tools it took to dig them originally AND WE CAN'T.
the romans talked about growing grapes for wine all year around in britian when they controlled it - that is how warm it was. today they dont even come close, so don't tell me it is warmer now and that some suv did it.
actually the warming and cooling has more to do with the sun, how close we are, the percentage of angle from perpendicular, that counts most. and if you think it does not matter, keep in mind that all that magma inside the earth determines our north and south, and hundreds of times in our history those polls switch, changing the wobble of the earth on it axis and the temperatures on the surface.
and one more thing - if it is so damn hot now, why is by beach front the same distance from the ocean it has been since 1952? why am i not under water by now?
therefore, there is no man made global warming, any change in temperature is cyclical, and having us live like we did in the year 1000 is just damn stupid.

[Ron Dunn]

It might help US readers to know that the term "wanker" in Australia literally means "chronic masturbator", but is an expression reserved for those whose actions and speech are beyond ridicule.

[handlewanker]

Going green, whatever, means you use whatever resources you have but currently don't use, and that cuts down on your dollar outgoings via imports like oil, coal etc.

I quite suscribe to the idea of the gearboxless wind turbine idea, only one moving part, which should make it also very quiet.

I'm not sure what the ratio was for the gearbox driven model but when you have to drive uphill to get the revs up to I think 3,000 rpm at the generator, that's one heck of a high gear ratio to push against.

I read about the direct drive model in the Popular Science magazine a few weeks back, and it said the generator was about 9 metres diam with rare earth permanent magnets etc, coils stationary, which is better than pushing up the final drive through a load of gears and oil.

Pickens Boone was heavily invested in the old design so he probably got out before being stung by a falling dollar and a failing technology that had no future, even for scrap parts.

Unfortunately the wind comes and goes, but the rise and fall of the tide is constant, ie it's VERY predictable, both in and out, 24/7.

Somewhere on the East coast of UK they are building underwater turbines to harness the in and out flow of the tide, which never varies in it's regularity, at least while the moon has anything to do with it.

Only problem is the turbines are fairly large underwater devices prone to corrosion from salt attack, and slow moving, and to extract the power, similar to old windmills, the rotation has to be geared up, so I can't see the advantage except for the fact that there is a constant supply of water to make it work, and it's also possible to get the flow rate up hydraulically using the water as a medium instead of a gearbox, whatever.

There's also talk about the possible damming of the Seven Estuary between England and Wales to harness the Seven bore, which also occurs on a very regular basis every day 24/7, but without the large drop in levels to harness the volume of stored water, the accumulated water capacity is also of a low nature energy wise.

It is better to have a small volume of water in a high place than a very large volume in a low place, makes the harnessing so much simpler, even though there is a higher potential energy storage in the low place.

A typical example is the undershot as opposed to the overshot water wheel which in the overshot device has the weight of many tons of water generating huge torque to the shaft, but the undershot wheel (same size) only has the force of the water flow against a few paddle blades that actually are submerged to create the torque.

No matter what method is used to harness the free energy from wind or water, the growing population boom will simply reduce all efforts to a miniscule nature when the demands for energy are spread over an increasingly larger customer base.

This is like producing more family members to work the farm because you need more family members to grow food to feed the family members that are required to work the farm to feed......exponentially it is a laugh.

I expect one day the penny will drop, but only when the Humanoids are standing shoulder to shoulder on the only land not occupied by windmills or Nuke establisments, they'll realise what exponential means.

The Japanese, oh so velly clever, have put forward a design for increasing the land space for population spread by building cities on huge floating platforms that can be moved to a new location when the old locality becomes too polluted or a bore......why they no use more condoms, muchy plenty cheaper....LOL.
Ian.

[handlewanker]

Coming from Ron Dunn, who is a self acknowledged expert on the subject of w....ng, requires no explanation, he probably had no friends to play with when he was a boy, so he had to play with himself....LOL.

In the UK, the term "handlewanker" is a metaphor for someone who works on a lathe or milling machine in the old way by turning handles that have a handle extension that looks like a carrot.....LOL.

I have heard that it's also a derivation from old German engineers who also called someone an "andvel werker" or blacksmith, whatever.
Ian.

[infantry11b]

well almost every country has coal. and according to your definition any country with coal or oil would be a natural resource they could use.
and there is nothing you could you use in this era that is not made using oil.
it's not the gears that make loud noise in windmills - its the noise of the air moving through the blades - sometimes called a low frequency grind.
and while the tide always moves, something called salt eats the hell out of metal, and plastic will not last.
now we used to use something called dams and waterwheels - but someone decided they were just so hard on fish that that source of non poluting electricity was just too hard on the fish.
and you need flowing water to run that waterwheel. that is not always available - especially if fish are your main concern rather than people.
here in the central valley of california they have decided the delta smelt - about the size of your wanker - is more important that the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and one of the most fertil land areas in the world, so the production of crops and lives of people is now less important than a very small fish that no one eats anyway.
welsome of the everchanging world of fad environmental theories.

[jhowelb]

well almost every country has coal. and according to your definition any country with coal or oil would be a natural resource they could use.
and there is nothing you could you use in this era that is not made using oil.
it's not the gears that make loud noise in windmills - its the noise of the air moving through the blades - sometimes called a low frequency grind.
and while the tide always moves, something called salt eats the hell out of metal, and plastic will not last.
now we used to use something called dams and waterwheels - but someone decided they were just so hard on fish that that source of non poluting electricity was just too hard on the fish.
and you need flowing water to run that waterwheel. that is not always available - especially if fish are your main concern rather than people.
here in the central valley of california they have decided the delta smelt - about the size of your wanker - is more important that the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and one of the most fertil land areas in the world, so the production of crops and lives of people is now less important than a very small fish that no one eats anyway.
welsome of the everchanging world of fad environmental theories.

The Delta Smelt is not even native to these waters, they are escaped bait fish.

The real objective is the destruction of the economy (read Cloward and Pivens) for Progressive goals.