what happened to running cars on veg oil

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what happened to running cars on veg oil

I'd feel a lot more at ease with improvements to renewables. If all 3, (solar, wind and tide) were used, wouldn't that help with the unpredictability issue?
 
There is an image issue with nuclear. A gas explosion (inc. Hydrogen) will kill you pretty horribly too. A typical coal fried power station releases far more radioactive material and toxic heavy metals to the environment pre MWh than a nuclear plant.

Robert G8RPI.

I think what most people struggle with is producing waste they know will be lethally harmful for rest of human history.

How do you keep something safe for time span you can barely comprehend? If our civilisation was to end would the archaeology of the future be a very dangerous game?
 
I think what most people struggle with is producing waste they know will be lethally harmful for rest of human history.

How do you keep something safe for time span you can barely comprehend? If our civilisation was to end would the archaeology of the future be a very dangerous game?

Heavy metals are toxic forever too. One thing to remember is the highly active isotopes that give of high dose rates are those that decay quickly. The very long life (thousands of years) isotopes have low dose rates so are not harmful from exposure rates. For example Uranuim is used as shielding for portable high energy gamma sources used in industral radiography.
Another problem is that it is easy to detect even tiny amounts of radioactivity using low cost portable instruments. People detect and worry about tiny traces of (often natural) radiation. If it was cheap and easy to detect heavy metals and pesticides at the same (relative to health effects) levels people would be a lot more worried. The "waste" from nuclear reactors is actually mostly unused fuel but that brings up the whole issue of reprocessing. Most historic reactor designs were optimised for weapons material production not sustainable power.

Robert G8RPI.
 
I think what most people struggle with is producing waste they know will be lethally harmful for rest of human history.

And rightly so.

The issue with PWRs Hinkley included is they can only extract about 1% of the available energy from the fuel. Compared to the massive build costs the fuel is cheap, but the legacy is stuff that's dangerous for 250,000 years.

Every nuke plant we have on the planet uses solid fuels. It's done this way because the early reactors were built to make plutonium - for bombs. Nobody cared that 99% of the energy wasn't used because they wanted bombs. Britain then decided to build a reprocessing plant at Sellafield. That creates a waste as glass bricks that are safe after 250 years. In engineering terms that's nothing. Fabulous. BUT it costs a fortune to run AND it creates lots of poor quality plutonium. That's no use for bombs and PWRs cant burn it.

In the 1960s Alvin Weinburg (who invented the PWR for submarines) built a nuclear reactor that used molten uranium salts as fuel. He said PWRs were ok for subs and making bombs but fundamentally unsafe for large power plants. Weinburg's molten salt plant removed most of the safety hazards associated with PWRs. It could also fully burn the fuel, which removed the ultra long term waste fuel storage issues. In 1971, Weinburg was shut down by Richard Nixon, who wanted to support Westinghouse who made PWRs. Back then, PWRs were cheap as chips. A few years later, Three Mile Island melted down and PWR build costs went ballistic. Weinburg was proved right.


Today, we have nuclear fading away while cheap coal provides most of the worlds electricity. Nukes (PWRs and UK's AGRs) are simply too expensive - by a massive margin.

A British company (Moltex Energy) has refined the molten salt ideas to remove the problems that have to be engineered away in other designs. PWRs are made (VERY) safe with all sorts of safety systems but that pushes costs to ridiculous levels. Moltex just dont have those hazardous components so costs fall dramatically.

Their plant in Canada that will beat gas fired on costs per megawatt. It will also load-follow to fill the gaps when renewables are offline. Even better, it will burn the high level waste that's causing the long term storage problems. Moltex can even burn the plutionium that UK has stockpiled from it's reprocessing plant at Sellafield.

They can be so cheap because they have simplified the design and removed all the stuff that makes others so expensive. Hazard elimination is the ultimate safety solution and it's the lowest cost.

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USA buys it's rare earth elements (used in electronics manufacture) from China. China needs them for it's own industry so restricted supply. Obama got a right strop on about it and threatened trade sanctions.

Rare earths are always found along with thorium. It's a heavy metal but not water soluble so not a toxicity issue. However it is slightly radioactive. This is the excuse used for not mining rare earths as they get into radiological management issues.

However (again) thorium is radioactive with a 1/2 life of 14.05 billion years by alpha decay. It takes 14,050,000,000 years to decay by 50%. Alpha rays are stopped by a a piece of paper so at the rate thorium throws them off, they are really no hazard at all. But the nuke regulators demand all sorts of safety controls so the rare earths cant be mined.

The nuke safety rules have to be in place. BUT no low end limit is ever applied so we get silly rules applied to non problems. All life evolved with background ionising radiation so there has to be a safe low limit, yet we legislate as if only a zero levels are fully safe. A coal stock pile is many times more radioactive than any nuclear installation. But that's ignored - as it should be TBH.


We are not even consistent. Coal contains thorium and coal fly ash contains 10x as much, yet we build houses with fly ash concrete blocks but nobody worries about that. It's a non existent problem.


Coal ash poses absolutely no radiation risk as any emissions are well within normal background levels. Natural gas contains radon making it radioactive but its also considered a natural background so no problem.

The same rules could easily be applied to rare earth mining.

Cobalt is found along with copper and nickel and the West African mines are indeed a human rights problem. But its not beyond the wit of customer countries to demand that reasonable labour laws are applied and then make sure it happens. Australia also produces cobalt but they don't use child slave labour. So while DRC is a huge producer they can be pressurised to do the job properly.
 
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It must be all those migrating birds and bats that they kill. Not something the greenwash brigade like to announce too loudly.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/wind-energy-takes-toll-birds-now-there-s-help-ncna866336

Note how they say -

With more than 50,000 wind turbines in place across the U.S., wind power now accounts for 8 percent of the nation's energy-generating capacity
They don't say how much they generate as a percentage of power delivered they don't say how much CO2 they actually cut when compared to running gas-fired plant at best efficiently.
 
Visible moisture! How will the planet survive that?!

The visible bit just makes it clear that windturbines DO have a direct impact on the environment even if it is just local. They also affect communications and air traffic control radar.
There is no perfect solution, but people ignore the negatives of wind and solar (and even fossil fuel power) while exaggerating the dangers of nuclear.
In the short to medium term there is no low carbon alternative to nuclear fission power plants to provide base load electrical generation capacity. Running Drax on dried wood pellets, some of which are shipped across the Atlantic on ships burning heavy bunker oil and calling it zero CO2 is just plain wrong.


Robert G8RPI.
 
350,000 wind turbines would have to be built each year just to maintain the power output we have now. This would just about cover the extra electricity needed each year as demand grows.
 
It's a good thing they're not the only solution then isn't it?

Honestly, it's like some people just want the planet to get more f'd up.
For what it's worth, I'm a paying member of the Green Party, but I don't agree with their Nuclear policies, and can see that Nuclear power is our current best option for the medium term, until we're able to more efficiently store the energy generated by renewable sources while demand is low eg. overnight tidal and/or wind energy.

As far as turbines having an effect on the local climate, I'll grant you it's a concern but (and I'm no scientist or engineer) given that the whole point of renewable energies is to minimise the impact, I suspect the impact is a lot less than the equivalent CO2:kWh ratio from fossil fuel plants. As for the impact to comms and radar - my heart bleeds, I guess engineers will just have to compensate.
 
It's a good thing they're not the only solution then isn't it?

Honestly, it's like some people just want the planet to get more f'd up.
For what it's worth, I'm a paying member of the Green Party, but I don't agree with their Nuclear policies, and can see that Nuclear power is our current best option for the medium term, until we're able to more efficiently store the energy generated by renewable sources while demand is low eg. overnight tidal and/or wind energy.

As far as turbines having an effect on the local climate, I'll grant you it's a concern but (and I'm no scientist or engineer) given that the whole point of renewable energies is to minimise the impact, I suspect the impact is a lot less than the equivalent CO2:kWh ratio from fossil fuel plants. As for the impact to comms and radar - my heart bleeds, I guess engineers will just have to compensate.

I think certain people just like to argue in circles, they will literally argue that everything is bad just to have something to argue about, one minute coal is radioactive, but nuclear power is fine, where as a wind turbine might just disrupt the moisture in the air, but radio activity is ok and coal is radioactive and bad, there is literally no pleasing something because the only thing that pleases them is arguing. :rolleyes:
 
Cobalt is found along with copper and nickel and the West African mines are indeed a human rights problem. But its not beyond the wit of customer countries to demand that reasonable labour laws are applied and then make sure it happens. Australia also produces cobalt but they don't use child slave labour. So while DRC is a huge producer they can be pressurised to do the job properly.

But then they become expensive.

BEVs are only a thing because of labour exploitation and tax loopholes.

Sort the human rights and equalise tax vs fossil and see what happens to sales!
 
Cobalt is found along with copper and nickel and the West African mines are indeed a human rights problem. But its not beyond the wit of customer countries to demand that reasonable labour laws are applied and then make sure it happens. Australia also produces cobalt but they don't use child slave labour. So while DRC is a huge producer they can be pressurised to do the job properly.

just like we demand the countries currently supplying our oil give equal rights to women and glbt people
 
But then they become expensive.

BEVs are only a thing because of labour exploitation and tax loopholes.

Sort the human rights and equalise tax vs fossil and see what happens to sales!

I agree with your sentiment. Maybe we can apply the same human rights rules to Saudi Arabia and The Gulf states in general.

My point is that humans used slavery right until energy became cheap. Slaves were normal and while UK officially had no slaves at home we had very low paid land and factory workers who were slave in all but name. That didn't really resolve until cheap oil came along. Coal was cheap but only because the miners were paid **** all to get killed and maimed digging it out.

Nuclear has to be safe first and always, but then it has to be cheap. Otherwise, it has no reason to exist other than for green washing a rich economy. The current crop of ridiculously costly PWRs are just that - expensive greenwash and they still have the highly dangerous waste fuel to deal with.

There is a rapidly evolving movement towards thorium as nuclear fuel. In parts of the world uranium is seen as the devil's brew because of its attachment to nuke bombs. Those areas are now taking thorium and molten salt reactors very seriously.

Thorium is cheap and relative;y easy to process into a salt. But these plants are fundamentally safe giving the chance to be cheaper than coal. They really could solve the planet CO2 emissions problem.

Cheap enough energy can also be used for sea water dealination or even to manufacture carbon fuels for transport. They would use their high temperatures to reverse the energy conversion from carbon dioxide and water back carbon based fuels and close the loop.

Thorium is not a direct nuclear fuel. It has to be bombarded with neutrons which transmutes it to U233 (already proven to be useless as a bomb fuel). Uranium 233 is radioactive and outwardly it's nasty stuff but would be extracted on site from the primary fuel stream and never leave the reactor system. It would go back as a new fuel salt. Online fuel processing used proven chemical processes that are easy options with a liquid fuel.

Another win is that it makes no plutonium and none of the long lived actinides that plague the used uranium fuel from PWRs. Countries that have nuke bombs wont get more bombs by the simple use of low cost nuclear energy and those that want to get their own nuke bombs will do it far more cheaply and easily than via the thorium route.

Thorium and molten salt reactors would be anti proliferation because when anyone has them, their only reason to build a PWR type would be to make nuclear bombs. Their shiny new PWR can't be pretend to be a power station as is usually done.
 
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