> because of the deeper waters, it is only just getting started on offshore
And that they have seemed to crack that nut with floating turbines appears to open up enormous offshore capacity around the world.
Has to prove out financially, but so far the numbers are looking downright hot.
> total energy consumption in England in 2022 was 7.3 exajoules
> so electricity is about 15% of that, leaving their proposal to use 3% of the land
> area to cover 9% of the energy consumed. Not great.
But this glosses over the fact that 43% of those EJs are natural gas. 36% of that gas is for electricity. Given the switch to wind and PV this paper is assuming, one assumes that the number goes to near zero. So 7.3 x
Much of the rest of the gas goes into heating homes. Replacing those with heat pumps would reduce it by 1/3rd. So 7.3 x
Oil accounts for another 40%, which typically is 50% turned into petrol. So 7.3 x
So 7.3 - 1.13 - 1.46 - 1.37 + 0.3 = 3.56 EJ, about half the total primary energy could be removed. And maybe another 1.46 to bring us to 2.1. The number above, ~225 TWh, is about 0.8 EJ, or about 38% of this total.
Dunno about you, but getting 38% of your primary energy from 3% of the land doesn't seem that bad to me at all.
Rough percents from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:Energy_mix_of_UK.svg
I don't believe that.
Making a plutonium breeder is not a particularly difficult design problem, and has little to no overlap with civilian power plant design. Hanford Site's reactors have basically zero design in common with, say, APR-1000.
It's certainly possible to produce Pu or HEU in a civilian cycle, but it's expensive and time-consuming to the point where building a dedicated breeder is simpler, faster and cheaper. The only people who do this are the ones trying to hide their program, those who aren't just build a breeder, like Dimona.
> Dr. MacKay spoke on what UK needed to do for low CO2 energy
Yeah, but no. He mixed units that covered things up and made them sound much more difficult. For instance, on the link you provide, I selected Wind at random and immediately found this statement:
Let’s be realistic. What fraction of the country can we really imagine
covering with windmills? Maybe 10%? Then we conclude: if we covered
the windiest 10% of the country with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we
would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power
used by driving an average fossil-fuel car 50 km per day.
Which at first glance seems to doom wind as a replacement energy source. Until you recall that EV's are 95% efficient compared to a typical ICE car being 15% efficient. Even if one includes *everything* else, transmission losses, losses in the charger and inverter, etc, an EV gets 70 to 75% well-to-wheel efficiency, compared to 15 for ICE.
So, if one assumes the electrification of much transport, which he does, then those 40 kWh a day for driving immediately drops to 8. And suddenly the 20 kWh/day from wind doesn't seem so bad at all, does it?
I can add my experience, for what it is worth. I have a late 1960s home in the Toronto area. I bought a Model 3 four years ago. My daily power use went from about 16 to 18 kWh to 20 to 22. I do drive a little less than the average Canadian, but we Cannucks drive more than the average in the UK.
And then you have to note that he dismisses offshore wind based on the numbers from the Kentish flats. He goes with 3 W/m^2 and 40k km^2 of shallow water where you might install it. Well, you know, a few things have happened since 2005 when that system was installed. Like Hywind Scotland, which puts out 30 MW from 4 sqkm, or 7.5 W/m^2, well over double what he assumes, so even when you consider it's demonstrated 57% CF, that's 4.28 W/m^2, almost 50% better than what he uses and states is unreasonably good. *And* it's in deep water, which totally negates the area issue.
The last time I saw his name was a decade ago, when I was pointed to a presentation on YT. In that presentation, he does much the same thing. One of the calculations he presented was that it would be impossible for the UK to grow enough crops to make ethanol to drive cars.
Ethanol? What is this, 1973?
So I ran the same sort of calculation he did but used EV's instead of ethanol and found that one could power all the cars and light trucks with 11% of the total generation they already produce. That hardly seems like a flex. Moreover, while he uses math to show that there's no enough land in the UK bla bla, I ran the same calculation assuming EVs and PV powering them and found that you need a 1m strip of PV for every m of roadway, which is less than the width of the paved shoulders on the motorways:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/06/13/biofuel-vs-pv-stop-drinkin-the-ethanol/
So please don't pretend he is an unbiased source of good information. He had a point to make and he made it, and in the 20 years since we've moved past all of the limiting factors he claimed were unreasonably favorable and unlikely to be met in reality. Technology improved, his argument didn't.
So we were at World for March Break. I remember thinking "how is this still a thing?" as we walked by Tea Party next to Autopia. It stank. Like, *ugh*. It was like being in the 1970s again.
I'm all for history, but surely the world's most boring ride devoted to slowly moving along a simulation of being stuck in traffic could be better utilized. It takes up as much room as Tron.
> I think a lot of the blame here is on Apple, for not being clear about the accuracy of the indicator
The device was found in front of the house. Seems accurate enough to me.
There is every possibility that the device making the report was in the house.
> that may be something the swat team didn't do
I'm at a loss how this equates to "a lot of the blame" being Apple. Especially as the language is rather obvious in the app.
Indeed. I'm happy to learn it's this good.
LOLZ, TAE.
In 1992 the main guy behind the idea, Norman Rostoker, published the concept of using two storage rings to do colliding beam fusion. It's been known since the 1950s that this is not possible. A couple of people have tried to figure it out over the years, most notably Bogdan Maglich in the 70s, but as soon as you do detailed design you can show that it simply doesn't work. The idea was ignored.
In 1997 he published a new design in Science using an FRC, a plasma configuration, as a replacement for the storage ring. The next year he applied to the NRL for funding. The application shows a machine the size of a stationary diesel and a guy in a naval outfit (the one with the neckerchief!) operating it. It was handed to two guys at NRL for peer review. By lunch, they had found a dozen reasons it could not *possibly* work, so they knocked off for food and wrote it up. The proposal was so ridiculous that one of the two reviewers stated to me that they began to question his mental state.
Not to be stymied, Rostoker then published the design in IEEE claiming they would have a break-even reactor in 3 years and a commercial demo unit in 5. This immediately resulted in several letters describing several reasons why it could not possibly work. In the 25+ years since that, the company has continued to claim breakeven and demo any year now, where "any" varies from 3 to 5. To date, after *over 25 years of effort*, they have not managed to get it working as well as Scyla I from 1958 even when operating on D, and are perhaps five orders of magnitude from break-even on that fuel, meaning they are about 9 to 10 orders of magnitude away from the pB they still claim will be any day now. The project is so delayed that Rostoker died a decade ago and the zombie project keeps going.
And people keep giving them money!
Science publication: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.278.5342.1419
IEEE publication: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/822414
Naval Labs review: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA356110.pdf
List of claims of fusion any day now: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/28/voodoo-fusion-energy/
The claim is that by introducing boronated water into the exhaust they get pB fusion which then added so much additional energy they got 50% more thrust.
Not in a million billion years.
All fusion fuels have a curve that describes their reaction rate at any given temperature. If the fuel is too cool, it will not have enough energy for the ions to overcome their mutual repulsion. If it is too high, the ions will move past each other faster than the reaction takes place. The result is a poisson-like graph of temperature to reaction rate.
For pB, that curve is unusually "peaky" compared to D-T or other fuels. To get it to work, you need to have the ions collide at one of two very specific energies, and if you are even slightly off the peak the rate falls drastically. In contrast, D-T's peak is much more spread out, requires 10 times less energy, the reaction rate is 100 times faster at that peak, and the reactions release twice as much energy.
For pB, the first peak corresponds to a temperature of 10 billion K. Their engine does not run at 10 billion K. Moreover, the p and B are in a thermalized mixture at what for fusion reactors would be considered high densities, meaning the population of ions on those two peaks is a number so low it cannot be represented on a calculator. They have to meet each other at those energies, despite being in the middle of all those off-peak ions *and a bunch of oxygen and who knows what else*. The rate of pB reactions in this fuel would be like the rate of D-T reactions taking place in the air in the room you're in right now.
Moreover, to get an appreciable amount of energy from fusion, the energy from the reactions has to be recycled back to the fuel to heat it and cause the ions around it to reach the required energy levels. For that to work, you need to have that energy be deposited into the fuel faster than energy is being lost to the environment. At fusion temperatures, a primary loss channel is x-rays from bremsstrahlung. The rate of x-ray production is a combination of temperature and atomic mass.
Net energy from pB fusion is generally considered hard-to-impossible because of that last bit. To get pB reactions to work at all, you need to have very high energies, which means you're producing more x-rays that are cooling it at a very rapid rate. Moreover, the presence of the B means the net atomic mass is some 5 times that of D-D, further increasing the losses.
So in the end, pB fusion is rapidly radiating energy away at rates that are much higher than the fusion events. There is a *very* small area where the curves meet where net energy is produced, and it's a *very* small amount of net energy, and it has to be *right* on the energy peak.
And they're claiming to get net energy from this reaction by mixing it in a water plasma, Z=17.
Yeah, right.
> Advertising, the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue
You don't think Motorola has Madison Avenue advertising? Or Microsoft? Or LG? Or Sony? Or Nokia? Or Blackberry?
They all have advertizing, that's not the reason.
> changes to the cargo including an additional 3,000kg of fuel
Images of the actual logs are available in a 2015 article in The Sun:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/26256957/mh370-extra-fuel-oxygen-pilot-plan/
The first of the images shows this "additional 3,000kg of fuel". This is labelled "comp fuel". This is short for "company fuel" which is added to compensate for per-aircraft differences in fuel burn. Some planes burn more fuel, some burn less, and those that burn more add fuel on a separate line for clarity, instead of adjusting the trip fuel. That way you can calculate the fuel needed to reach your destination using the standard numbers for that model of aircraft, and then just add a bit of slush as a separate, clearly labelled line.
This is entirely routine and suggests nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, if they were planning to ditch in the ocean far short of their destination, why would they ask for *more* fuel?
As a pilot and air investigator, the author of these claims should be very much aware of this.
> It's a strange coincidence that the last engineering task that was done before it headed
> off to oblivion was topping up crew oxygen which is only for the cockpit, not for the cabin crew
Oxygen is lost naturally and has to be topped up time to time. The second image in the Sun article states "crew oxygen system replenished", which appears to be entirely ordinary. They topped it off to the nominal 1800 psi. I see no indication that the crew asked for this, and certainly, nothing to suggest this is "extra". The Sun adds that it was added "only to the cockpit", as if that were interesting, but of course, that's only because this system *only exists in the cockpit*. The cabin systems are either overhead oxygen candles or portable tanks for the cabin crew.
So this sounds like yet more balonium from someone who likes being in the newspapers.
I used to live in the country north of Toronto. Bussed to school. We had 3 to 5 snow days a year, when it would drift up to our waist.
Hasn't been a snow day in maybe 15 years now. Today, there is no snow whatsoever on the ground. Hasn't been for weeks. I have never seen anything remotely like this in my 1/2 century in the area. Normally we still have a little bit of dirty corn snow in the ditches and such well into April. It's all gone. Every flake. Since January.
Seems like they're fixing the wrong problem.
> What has happened to our engineering capabilities?
Attempts to build fusion reactors pre-date both fission and the moon shot. To be exact, the first attempt to make a fusion reactor was in 1938.
So it's not because we've lost engineering capability or can-do attitude. The same people were working on both (literally).
Fusion is just stupidly hard.
> that's only if you could process the entirety of the world's water supply
And do so more rapidly than the half life is destroying what you collected.
> The US does not have better "designs" than CANDU.
Of course they do. Even AECL does (did).
> CANDU reactors run on natural uranium. There is nothing imaginable better than that.
Running on natural uranium is one of those things that sounds great until you understand the first thing about reactors, and especially their economics.
In the 1950s, enrichment was wildly expensive and quite limited. At that time, running on natural uranium seemed like a good idea. You simply dig up the yellowcake, smelt it, presto! Of course, making that work is non-trivial, as you need more physical material to get to the same total U235 in the core, and you have to use some other form of moderator than normal water, and all sorts of other little adjustments here and there.
So ultimately you're trading off using normal water to use "normal' uranium. This produces a larger reactor design that is larger and more expensive to build, along with the need for heavy water (or graphite, as in the UK's AGR fleet which no one ever mentions) so the whole thing costs more. But we'll *totally* make up for that in reduced fuel costs and better capacity factor!
And then the cost of enrichment crashed in the early 1980s. And that was it for CANDU. All further sales evaporated. For good reason.
They picked the wrong design horse.
In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton
