Power
I've been thinking a lot about power, recently.
I'm excited for Fusion Power.
Lots of countries are getting together to build ITER - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, with the hope that by mid-century, Fusion power plants will be spread around the globe. This is a huge, huge deal (it's what they showed in Spider-man 2 - the big ball of plasma that went out of control and sucked metal things into it... can't miss it. Now, that was pretty unrealistic... but it is Hollywood, and I'm supposed to overlook that because it's "entertainment".)
Anyways. It's basically a mini-star. Every star we know of is a fusion reaction - this is where atoms fuse together due to extreme heat, with the byproduct of energy (E=mc^2, if that sounds familiar. It says that if you somehow get rid of an object (mass) then it can't just disappear [because of the conservation of energy] - instead it turns into energy... and a HUGE amount of energy... energy = mass times the speed of light (186,000 miles per second)... squared. Huge, huge huge huge huge number. Lots of energy from a very, very small amount of mass. That's how a nuclear bomb works, except those are fission - where they split an atom in two... which is not as powerful, and has some rather nasty side effects... I believe it is that when the atom splits, then those two atoms collide with two more atoms and split those... and these splitting atoms grow exponentially - a chain reaction that can get out of control. I'll come back to that.)
Stars are so intensely hot that hydrogen ions collide into each other and fuse into a larger ion, which happens to be helium. When all the hydrogen is gone, the helium will eventually start colliding to make the next element - and it goes right down the periodic table of elements (which is organized by the weight). Eventually the star gets so heavy (I think at iron or something) that it can't support it's own gravity, and it collapses on itself... into a very very small point. This can either be a black hole, or it can explode (a supernova)... in (you can imagine) a huge explosion which is often a very large amount brighter than the entire galaxy that the star existed in.
Sorry. That was a tangent. But isn't it amazing?
Anyways. By heating hydrogen to 100 million degrees C, we can create this effect. We have managed to achieve fusion... but we haven't yet produced more energy than we consume.
"By building a bigger, more powerful reactor, scientists hope to produce 500 megawatts of power from just 50 megawatts input. Fuel in the form of the hydrogen isotope deuterium is extracted from water, and the small amount of radioactive waste it yields decays to a safe level in decades. In contrast, today's nuclear fission reactors generate waste that can stay hot for thousands of years."
Isn't that amazing? 500 megawatts from 50 is incredible, and the half-life of the radioactive waste is fantastic. This could give us all the power we could ever want. The plasma (the fusing hydrogen isotopes - which is affected by magnets... would that be called ferrous? Or is that only when there is iron in a metal? Hmm. What's the word...) is held in place by a magnetic field, inside a "5.4-meter-wide doughnut-shaped vessel made of stainless steel". There are super conducting magnets and a coil on the inside (current through a wire creates a magnetic field). Then there are more crazy magnets outside - electromagnets with zero resistance, meaning that an infinite current can flow through, creating a huge amount of magnetism... 100,000 times the force of gravity (Ohms and Faraday's Laws). To get zero resistance, the magnets must be chilled to -270 degrees C, by being enclosed in a "vast cryostat" (large freezer) with supercritical helium (that's pretty cold).
Nuclear power gets a bad rap. Until recently, I didn't understand just how safe nuclear power really is. Because people don't understand it, and because of the other ways that the energy is used, it has gotten an incredible stigma.
First of all, lets look at the positive aspects of Nuclear power. Aside from the radioactive waste, there are 0 emissions. And the radioactive waste... lets put it this way. If you took all of the radioactive waste that US Nuclear power plants have created over the past 40 years of their existence, it would fill a football field to a depth of 18 feet. Lets compare that to coal. Every second, the amount of waste from the coal power plants in the US create... I think it's 30 tons. Every second. In 23 seconds, you have the amount of waste that ALL of those nuclear power plants in the US have ever created.
Granted, it has an incredibly long half-life... a piece of paper alone is enough to block most radiation... and the waste is secured in insane structures which have been dropped out of planes and blown up and such, and still haven't leaked. Now, it's still a problem... but it is such a better thing to deal with than the effects of all the other serious sources of current power-generation (save wind-power... I'll get to that.) People don't want this stuff in their backyard? People in Vegas don't' want it in their Yucca mountains? Silly! I'd bury it in my backyard, if I had one, and that would get people to stop complaining. It's not that big a risk. Except terrorism... but there are so many other vulnerabilities... this would be well guarded... and hard to steal, at the least. Oh - and as for terrorism and Nuclear power plants... in the US, the domes that cover the Nuclear reactors are incredibly sturdy. I read something years ago that said what it could withstand, and it was very substantial. If a 777 hit one dead on with a full load of fuel... there may be a problem. I'll admit that. But the same can be said for many things, and the domes are at least sturdy enough to withstand a smaller plane.
By the way, France recycles their radioactive waste. We're too scared to, for terrorist reasons. Also, the French people are overwhelmingly for Nuclear Power - and most of their country is run on it. They are well informed because their government tells them how they work and what the risks are.
Coal byproducts, by the way, are not harmless. They go into landfills, which have nice little plastic sheets under them to protect the ground. But guess what? They don't work. When rain comes, it washes away the chemicals and gets into the groundwater and makes people sick. Hell, a similar thing killed Matt Gordon's dog. That's another story. Anyway - that's just one of the negative things about coal. Also - we don't have an endless supply, and it releases CO2 into the air (GLOBAL WARMING) and other chemicals... acid rain, being one effect, I believe.
Okay. Safety. Do you know how many deaths have resulted from Nuclear Meltdowns? First, lets talk about a melt down. What's inside of a reactor.... we've got Uranium 235, which is extremely radioactive - we can create a chain reaction in this uranium (fission - described earlier) which creates an enormous amount of heat. We then pump water through the chamber (or it is in a pool of water)... which creates steam. The steam drives as turbine, which is like a backwards motor - the steam pushes magnets around, and moving magnets create electricity. The uranium is at "critical mass", and can be controlled by plutonium poles which are slid in to the reactor to absorb some of the energy (decrease heat) when needed. If this reaction were to go out of control (like if the water evaporated and the pumps stopped working, and they couldn't stop the reaction in time.. or if it got too hot and melted the plutonium). When I was a little kid I was really interested in all this - my dad used to explain to me that there wouldn't be an explosion (THAT IS A HUGE, IMPORTANT THING THAT SOME PEOPLE DONT UNDERSTAND!), the reactor would just drop into the ground... and there would be dangerous levels of radioactivity.
The closest we've come to this in America was 3-Mile-Island, in PA... near Harrisburg. No one died (though I think one guy had a heart attack from stress). No one has ever died from a nuclear-related accident in the states. If you have heard stories of people getting sick, they're not true. You need to be subjected to huge levels of radiation to get sick (which would be eventual) - in the range of thousands of milligrams, I believe. No one anywhere near Three Mile Island got more radiation than is in most peoples basements, from radon.
Chernobyl is the only full Nuclear Meltdown that this planet has had - it was in Russia, of course. Now... thing is... Russia was kind of stupid. They didn't build containment chambers... and when they had a meltdown, a fire started, and the plant burnt down... with radioactivity pouring out into the open air. This could not happen in America. Even then, only 31 people died. Workers/firefighters, I believe. Everyone else was evacuated.
I'm not saying Chernobyl wasn't a huge tragic disaster. It was. Whole towns are abandon now... it was certainly terrible. 135,000 people were evacuated. As for the fallout and radiation poisoning... there are different views. Some figures suggest that 2500 deaths from cancer can be attributed to the incident. Still other scientists have come to a very opposite conclusion: "The teams did not find any health disorders that could be directly attributed to radiation exposure. But they found high levels of stress and anxiety in both the contaminated and the control villages." It should be noted that they deliberately left out people who had lived in the 30-km radius of the forbidden zone around the reactor, and the people who cleaned up the accident.
(If you want to see some crazy footage of the area... check this site out... http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
)
But either way, that wouldn't happen in the US... and the chances of it happening are very very slim. We live with calculated risk our whole lives. We go on vacations and fly in planes, knowing that we could crash... but probably wont. We drive in cars, we cross the street, we eat fast food... and much more. Nuclear power has been twisted into this evil, scary thing... when it is the cleanest, safest power generation technique that we have available to us.... besides...
Wind Power. Solar power isn't good enough yet - it requires huge panels which are expensive to make (and actually, the process of making them creates some waste, itself..). And the sun's energy is very spread out. It's good for some things, but not for generating the kind of power we need - not yet, at least. Hydro power (dams) can destroy entire ecosystems... and aren't that easy to build or maintain. Tidal currents are just beginning to be harnessed (people are researching it now). Geothermal power is starting to be used a bit... I think in Europe... Ireland, was it?
Wind power is good. Very good. It used to be that wind-powered generators spun very very quickly, and were loud. Today, they're relatively slow ( think a blade goes around once every two seconds?). This is a fixed speed. The more wind, the more power it will generate (I think through gearing/some kind of transmission). The bigger the blades on the turbine, the slow they will turn (which is important because fast moving blades can hurt birds and such). This is because the tips of the blades are going to go the same speed (from the wind pushing it) despite their size. Think about it - it's kind of cool.
There are 0 emissions, and if placed in a windy place... they can provide a modest amount of power.
The problem? People don't like how they look. Personally, I love the way they look... and I love what they symbolize. There is a project that many of you have probably heard of... people are trying to put 130 wind turbines five miles off the coast of Cape Cod. They would be very small on the horizon - one half inch, on clear days. They would supply a maximum of 420 megawatts of electricity, which is certainly substantial. It would be a huge project, but the result would be zero-emission-generated-power and with reasonably steady winds in that area (though, not in comparison with the Midwest, which is a great location, but it's hard to get the power to anywhere that needs it) it would be a great start to windpower in this country. But people are fighting it, based mostly on aesthetic reasons. Even the Kennedys won't support it, because they have property on the cape, and don't want their view "marred". They're afraid it would hurt tourism? I would go to see it! And I wouldn't normally go otherwise!
I could talk about wind power for a long time, and if anyone's interested, or wants to start a fight... bring it on.
But right now, my fingers rather hurt, and I'm a bit tired. If I think of anything else I really wanted to add or amend, I will.
I'm excited for Fusion Power.
Lots of countries are getting together to build ITER - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, with the hope that by mid-century, Fusion power plants will be spread around the globe. This is a huge, huge deal (it's what they showed in Spider-man 2 - the big ball of plasma that went out of control and sucked metal things into it... can't miss it. Now, that was pretty unrealistic... but it is Hollywood, and I'm supposed to overlook that because it's "entertainment".)
Anyways. It's basically a mini-star. Every star we know of is a fusion reaction - this is where atoms fuse together due to extreme heat, with the byproduct of energy (E=mc^2, if that sounds familiar. It says that if you somehow get rid of an object (mass) then it can't just disappear [because of the conservation of energy] - instead it turns into energy... and a HUGE amount of energy... energy = mass times the speed of light (186,000 miles per second)... squared. Huge, huge huge huge huge number. Lots of energy from a very, very small amount of mass. That's how a nuclear bomb works, except those are fission - where they split an atom in two... which is not as powerful, and has some rather nasty side effects... I believe it is that when the atom splits, then those two atoms collide with two more atoms and split those... and these splitting atoms grow exponentially - a chain reaction that can get out of control. I'll come back to that.)
Stars are so intensely hot that hydrogen ions collide into each other and fuse into a larger ion, which happens to be helium. When all the hydrogen is gone, the helium will eventually start colliding to make the next element - and it goes right down the periodic table of elements (which is organized by the weight). Eventually the star gets so heavy (I think at iron or something) that it can't support it's own gravity, and it collapses on itself... into a very very small point. This can either be a black hole, or it can explode (a supernova)... in (you can imagine) a huge explosion which is often a very large amount brighter than the entire galaxy that the star existed in.
Sorry. That was a tangent. But isn't it amazing?
Anyways. By heating hydrogen to 100 million degrees C, we can create this effect. We have managed to achieve fusion... but we haven't yet produced more energy than we consume.
"By building a bigger, more powerful reactor, scientists hope to produce 500 megawatts of power from just 50 megawatts input. Fuel in the form of the hydrogen isotope deuterium is extracted from water, and the small amount of radioactive waste it yields decays to a safe level in decades. In contrast, today's nuclear fission reactors generate waste that can stay hot for thousands of years."
Isn't that amazing? 500 megawatts from 50 is incredible, and the half-life of the radioactive waste is fantastic. This could give us all the power we could ever want. The plasma (the fusing hydrogen isotopes - which is affected by magnets... would that be called ferrous? Or is that only when there is iron in a metal? Hmm. What's the word...) is held in place by a magnetic field, inside a "5.4-meter-wide doughnut-shaped vessel made of stainless steel". There are super conducting magnets and a coil on the inside (current through a wire creates a magnetic field). Then there are more crazy magnets outside - electromagnets with zero resistance, meaning that an infinite current can flow through, creating a huge amount of magnetism... 100,000 times the force of gravity (Ohms and Faraday's Laws). To get zero resistance, the magnets must be chilled to -270 degrees C, by being enclosed in a "vast cryostat" (large freezer) with supercritical helium (that's pretty cold).
Nuclear power gets a bad rap. Until recently, I didn't understand just how safe nuclear power really is. Because people don't understand it, and because of the other ways that the energy is used, it has gotten an incredible stigma.
First of all, lets look at the positive aspects of Nuclear power. Aside from the radioactive waste, there are 0 emissions. And the radioactive waste... lets put it this way. If you took all of the radioactive waste that US Nuclear power plants have created over the past 40 years of their existence, it would fill a football field to a depth of 18 feet. Lets compare that to coal. Every second, the amount of waste from the coal power plants in the US create... I think it's 30 tons. Every second. In 23 seconds, you have the amount of waste that ALL of those nuclear power plants in the US have ever created.
Granted, it has an incredibly long half-life... a piece of paper alone is enough to block most radiation... and the waste is secured in insane structures which have been dropped out of planes and blown up and such, and still haven't leaked. Now, it's still a problem... but it is such a better thing to deal with than the effects of all the other serious sources of current power-generation (save wind-power... I'll get to that.) People don't want this stuff in their backyard? People in Vegas don't' want it in their Yucca mountains? Silly! I'd bury it in my backyard, if I had one, and that would get people to stop complaining. It's not that big a risk. Except terrorism... but there are so many other vulnerabilities... this would be well guarded... and hard to steal, at the least. Oh - and as for terrorism and Nuclear power plants... in the US, the domes that cover the Nuclear reactors are incredibly sturdy. I read something years ago that said what it could withstand, and it was very substantial. If a 777 hit one dead on with a full load of fuel... there may be a problem. I'll admit that. But the same can be said for many things, and the domes are at least sturdy enough to withstand a smaller plane.
By the way, France recycles their radioactive waste. We're too scared to, for terrorist reasons. Also, the French people are overwhelmingly for Nuclear Power - and most of their country is run on it. They are well informed because their government tells them how they work and what the risks are.
Coal byproducts, by the way, are not harmless. They go into landfills, which have nice little plastic sheets under them to protect the ground. But guess what? They don't work. When rain comes, it washes away the chemicals and gets into the groundwater and makes people sick. Hell, a similar thing killed Matt Gordon's dog. That's another story. Anyway - that's just one of the negative things about coal. Also - we don't have an endless supply, and it releases CO2 into the air (GLOBAL WARMING) and other chemicals... acid rain, being one effect, I believe.
Okay. Safety. Do you know how many deaths have resulted from Nuclear Meltdowns? First, lets talk about a melt down. What's inside of a reactor.... we've got Uranium 235, which is extremely radioactive - we can create a chain reaction in this uranium (fission - described earlier) which creates an enormous amount of heat. We then pump water through the chamber (or it is in a pool of water)... which creates steam. The steam drives as turbine, which is like a backwards motor - the steam pushes magnets around, and moving magnets create electricity. The uranium is at "critical mass", and can be controlled by plutonium poles which are slid in to the reactor to absorb some of the energy (decrease heat) when needed. If this reaction were to go out of control (like if the water evaporated and the pumps stopped working, and they couldn't stop the reaction in time.. or if it got too hot and melted the plutonium). When I was a little kid I was really interested in all this - my dad used to explain to me that there wouldn't be an explosion (THAT IS A HUGE, IMPORTANT THING THAT SOME PEOPLE DONT UNDERSTAND!), the reactor would just drop into the ground... and there would be dangerous levels of radioactivity.
The closest we've come to this in America was 3-Mile-Island, in PA... near Harrisburg. No one died (though I think one guy had a heart attack from stress). No one has ever died from a nuclear-related accident in the states. If you have heard stories of people getting sick, they're not true. You need to be subjected to huge levels of radiation to get sick (which would be eventual) - in the range of thousands of milligrams, I believe. No one anywhere near Three Mile Island got more radiation than is in most peoples basements, from radon.
Chernobyl is the only full Nuclear Meltdown that this planet has had - it was in Russia, of course. Now... thing is... Russia was kind of stupid. They didn't build containment chambers... and when they had a meltdown, a fire started, and the plant burnt down... with radioactivity pouring out into the open air. This could not happen in America. Even then, only 31 people died. Workers/firefighters, I believe. Everyone else was evacuated.
I'm not saying Chernobyl wasn't a huge tragic disaster. It was. Whole towns are abandon now... it was certainly terrible. 135,000 people were evacuated. As for the fallout and radiation poisoning... there are different views. Some figures suggest that 2500 deaths from cancer can be attributed to the incident. Still other scientists have come to a very opposite conclusion: "The teams did not find any health disorders that could be directly attributed to radiation exposure. But they found high levels of stress and anxiety in both the contaminated and the control villages." It should be noted that they deliberately left out people who had lived in the 30-km radius of the forbidden zone around the reactor, and the people who cleaned up the accident.
(If you want to see some crazy footage of the area... check this site out... http://www.kiddofspeed.com
But either way, that wouldn't happen in the US... and the chances of it happening are very very slim. We live with calculated risk our whole lives. We go on vacations and fly in planes, knowing that we could crash... but probably wont. We drive in cars, we cross the street, we eat fast food... and much more. Nuclear power has been twisted into this evil, scary thing... when it is the cleanest, safest power generation technique that we have available to us.... besides...
Wind Power. Solar power isn't good enough yet - it requires huge panels which are expensive to make (and actually, the process of making them creates some waste, itself..). And the sun's energy is very spread out. It's good for some things, but not for generating the kind of power we need - not yet, at least. Hydro power (dams) can destroy entire ecosystems... and aren't that easy to build or maintain. Tidal currents are just beginning to be harnessed (people are researching it now). Geothermal power is starting to be used a bit... I think in Europe... Ireland, was it?
Wind power is good. Very good. It used to be that wind-powered generators spun very very quickly, and were loud. Today, they're relatively slow ( think a blade goes around once every two seconds?). This is a fixed speed. The more wind, the more power it will generate (I think through gearing/some kind of transmission). The bigger the blades on the turbine, the slow they will turn (which is important because fast moving blades can hurt birds and such). This is because the tips of the blades are going to go the same speed (from the wind pushing it) despite their size. Think about it - it's kind of cool.
There are 0 emissions, and if placed in a windy place... they can provide a modest amount of power.
The problem? People don't like how they look. Personally, I love the way they look... and I love what they symbolize. There is a project that many of you have probably heard of... people are trying to put 130 wind turbines five miles off the coast of Cape Cod. They would be very small on the horizon - one half inch, on clear days. They would supply a maximum of 420 megawatts of electricity, which is certainly substantial. It would be a huge project, but the result would be zero-emission-generated-power and with reasonably steady winds in that area (though, not in comparison with the Midwest, which is a great location, but it's hard to get the power to anywhere that needs it) it would be a great start to windpower in this country. But people are fighting it, based mostly on aesthetic reasons. Even the Kennedys won't support it, because they have property on the cape, and don't want their view "marred". They're afraid it would hurt tourism? I would go to see it! And I wouldn't normally go otherwise!
I could talk about wind power for a long time, and if anyone's interested, or wants to start a fight... bring it on.
But right now, my fingers rather hurt, and I'm a bit tired. If I think of anything else I really wanted to add or amend, I will.
posted by Ethan at
19:13
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