The Ukraine War Will Go On Forever...

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 20:13:48 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

>Europeans need to start building those solar farms on the Sahara. They delver electricity at a lower price per kilowatt hour than you can get by burning fossil carbon.

\"Desertec\"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec>
\"The project failed twice due to the problem of transportation and
cost-inefficiency. The initiative was revived in 2020 with a focus on
green hydrogen, catering to both domestic demand and exports to
foreign markets.\"

\"The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa\"
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o> (18:19)
1. Lack of sufficient interties between North Africa and Europe.
2. Photoelectric is currently cheaper than concentrated solar
power[1].
3. Photovoltaic can be built locally, which is easier and cheaper
than importing electricity from remote solar farms.
4. Water, exploitation and politics.

[1] Note that the relative costs are constantly changing. This
article paints a different picture of the comparative costs:
\"The cost of Concentrated Solar Power fell by 47% between 2010 and
2019\"
<https://www.evwind.es/2020/07/29/the-cost-of-concentrated-solar-power-fell-by-47-between-2010-and-2019/76120>

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
PO Box 272 http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 3:01:33 PM UTC+10, whit3rd wrote:

On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 6:38:24 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 8:02:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

<snip>

You can just bury the rest, marking the site appropriately against future intrusions.
That solution worked for anthrax-infected critters for over a century...

The longer lived radio active isotopes stay dangerous for a few hundred thousand years.

Cuneiform script has survived for 5,400 years. If you used that script to mark your site a dangerous, few of the passers-by would be able to read what it said.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 20:13:48 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

>And the nice simple chemicals that you can get by extracting fossil carbon are better used as chemical feed-stocks rather than burnt as fuel. Only a barbarian would do that.

Perhaps we should skip some of the inefficient intermediate steps and
go directly from carbon (coal) to food:
\"Food from Coal-derived Materials by Microbial Synthesis\"
<https://www.nature.com/articles/211735b0>
(sorry about the paywall, but I couldn\'t find a free version of the
article).

\"Can Food Be Made From Coal?\" (May 1984)
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1984/05/27/can-food-be-made-from-coal/d80567ac-c656-4e0b-9f54-d505bd6d261a/>
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
PO Box 272 http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[John Doe]

Bozo says I am attracted to Fox News.

In fact, I did a little Fox News bashing in that reply.

No point in debating anything with a chronic liar like Bozo Bill Sloman.
When you refute its lies, it simply makes up more lies to cover those
prior lies. It\'s fiction never ends...

--
Anthony William Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

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Subject: Re: OT: The Ukraine War Will Go On Forever
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On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 9:45:39 AM UTC+10, John Doe wrote:
Cursitor Doom wrote:
John Doe wrote:

Actually it\'s to do with AGGRESSIVE NATO expansion to Russia\'s border
countries, since the end of the Cold War when Russia gave up those
countries.

That\'s the core issue that never seems to get a mention on CNN or any
other Western news channel for that matter. One might have thought an
operation to purge neo-Nazis from the extreme East of Ukraine would have
enjoyed popular support from the Left-of-Center crowd here, but for some
inexplicable reason, all they do is complain about it!
Here and on YouTube, too. Google recently started radically censoring YouTube
comment section replies (via zealous shadow banning). Most of the original
posts are allowed through.

Fox News and Newsmax viewers in the comment sections are ripping the skin off
of channel uploads by neocon warmongers. Different story on globalist CNN and
(especially) MSNBC. Weird.

Fox News is designed to appeal to right-wing half-wits like you. Actual news services attract a slightly saner audience.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Edward Hernandez]

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id
<sdhn7c$pkp$4@dont-email.me>:

> The troll doesn\'t even know how to format a USENET post...

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id
<sg3kr7$qt5$1@dont-email.me>:

The reason Bozo cannot figure out how to get Google to keep from
breaking its lines in inappropriate places is because Bozo is
CLUELESS...

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has continued to post incorrectly
formatted USENET articles that are devoid of content (latest example on
Wed, 20 Apr 2022 06:22:30 -0000 (UTC) in message-id
<t3o8r6$s0e$4@dont-email.me>).

NOBODY likes the John Doe troll\'s contentless spam.

Further, John Doe stated the following in message-id
<svsh05$lbh$5@dont-email.me> posted Fri, 4 Mar 2022 08:01:09 -0000
(UTC):

Compared to other regulars, Bozo contributes practically nothing
except insults to this group.

Yet, since Wed, 5 Jan 2022 04:10:38 -0000 (UTC) John Doe\'s post ratio to
USENET (**) has been 57.3% of its posts contributing \"nothing except
insults\" to USENET.

** Since Wed, 5 Jan 2022 04:10:38 -0000 (UTC) John Doe has posted at
least 1098 articles to USENET. Of which 125 have been pure insults and
504 have been John Doe \"troll format\" postings.

This posting is a public service announcement for any google groups
readers who happen by to point out that the John Doe troll does not even
follow the rules it uses to troll other posters.

u+u83qrF0I1h

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 4:00:44 PM UTC+10, jeff.li...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 20:13:48 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
bill....@ieee.org> wrote:

Europeans need to start building those solar farms on the Sahara. They delver electricity at a lower price per kilowatt hour than you can get by burning fossil carbon.
\"Desertec\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
\"The project failed twice due to the problem of transportation and
cost-inefficiency. The initiative was revived in 2020 with a focus on
green hydrogen, catering to both domestic demand and exports to
foreign markets.\"

\"The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa\"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o> (18:19)
1. Lack of sufficient interties between North Africa and Europe.

That\'s a soluble problem. The cables aren\'t cheap but more of them are getting built all the time.

> 2. Photoelectric is currently cheaper than concentrated solar power[1].

Of course it is. Why would anybody use anything else these days? When China went in for really large scale manufacturing of the University of New South Wales high efficiency solar cells, they halved the unit cost at a stroke, and killed off concentrated solar power as a viable option. This link says that unit costs have fallen 82% since 2010

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/03/solar-costs-have-fallen-82-since-2010/

> 3. Photovoltaic can be built locally, which is easier and cheaper than importing electricity from remote solar farms.

Putting a solar farm in dry place with very little cloud cover, not too far away from the equator gives you quite a bit more sunlight on the solar cells. Germany is a bit too far north to give you a good result. and land around there is expensive.

4. Water, exploitation and politics.

[1] Note that the relative costs are constantly changing. This
article paints a different picture of the comparative costs:
\"The cost of Concentrated Solar Power fell by 47% between 2010 and
2019\"
https://www.evwind.es/2020/07/29/the-cost-of-concentrated-solar-power-fell-by-47-between-2010-and-2019/76120

It does emphasis that photovoltaic generation has gotten steadily and smoothly cheaper in recent years. the economies of scale are kicking in big-time.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 4:16:49 PM UTC+10, John Doe wrote:
> Bill relies on wikishit, that\'s his problem.

Actually, I don\'t. I use it as an easily accessible source of reasonably reliable information. I do check what the links I post actually say, but Wikipedia has procedure in place for getting rid of stuff that is actually wrong, and they do seem to work.

John Doe doesn\'t like it because - like Cursitor Doom - he\'s addicted to nonsensical conspiracy theories, and Wikipedia\'s fact checking procedures throw them out an unverifiable nonsense.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 4:22:37 PM UTC+10, John Doe wrote:

> Anthony William Sloman <bill....@ieee.org> wrote:

<snip>

Fox News and Newsmax viewers in the comment sections are ripping the skin off
of channel uploads by neocon warmongers. Different story on globalist CNN and
(especially) MSNBC. Weird.

Fox News is designed to appeal to right-wing half-wits like you. Actual news services attract a slightly saner audience.

Bill says I am attracted to Fox News.

It certainly looks that way. Right-wing nitwits are their target audience.

> In fact, I did a little Fox News bashing in that reply.

Where? \" Fox News and Newsmax viewers in the comment sections are ripping the skin off of channel uploads by neocon warmongers.\"

You seem to be claiming that when Fox News publish actual news about people in government - who you call neocon warmongers - Fox News viewers who are as silly as you are complain about it.
Fox New does seem to give nitwits like you enough demented non-news opinion to keep you happy and watching.

> No point in debating anything with a chronic liar like Bill Sloman.

As if John Doe could debate anything.

> When you refute its lies, it simply makes up more lies to cover those prior lies. It\'s fiction never ends...

Jon Doe has never refuted any lie here. He seems to confuse reiterating his demented opinions with the rather more demanding process of demonstrating that what other people claim happens to be wrong. I disagree with his misapprehensions - which would be lies if he had any kind of clue about the stuff he talks about - which doesn\'t require any lying on my part.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2022 07:08, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 8:06:56 AM UTC+10, Dimiter Popoff wrote:
On 4/20/2022 0:22, David Brown wrote:
On 19/04/2022 20:29, Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
On 4/19/2022 20:39, John Larkin wrote:

snip

Perhaps, but gas and petrol are short term solutions anyway. Since
the EU (and the world) needs to do something about producing less
smoke going seriously nuclear looks like the only viable option.
Sort of like the French have done it. The main brake against nuclear
has been the fear that waste can fall in the wrong hands to build
weapons from (not the pollution nonsense the media spread for the
masses). So more spectrometry gadgets will be needed... the steam
engine I hope to build in my backyard won\'t come for free .

The big problem with nuclear power is that it takes a long time to build
the plants. (Yes, the build cost is a problem too - but it\'s a problem
that can be solved by throwing money at it, unlike the time problem.)

Of course we need to start building the nuclear power plants /now/,
while we also work on short term solutions.

Only if you haven\'t bothered to think how much you a re going to have to charge for each kilowatt hour of energy you sell to your customers to let you make a profit.

It takes a long time of course but much of it is due to over-regulation,
like Jeroen suggested.

Then again some twenty of France\'s 56 nuclear reactors were all shut down for a while recently while mistakes in the original build were corrected, Nuclear plants have got more expensive recently because we\'ve learned more about how they can go wrong. Solving problems that you can anticipate is cheaper that solving them after they\'ve made themselves obvious, but it isn\'t free,

Then the word \"nuclear\" still spells suicide for many if not all politicians - which is the biggest problem, after decades of training the public to perceive the word like this now is pay time.

It\'s taken a long time for all the problems posed by dealing with long term radio-active waste to be fully appreciated. They haven\'t been by any means solved. Nobody has yet set up a repository for long term storage - several hundreds of thousands of years - and they may never succeed. Not in my backyard is a potet slogan.

But we have no other sane option, we have to start building now indeed and cover by short term solutions.

The Australian power generation industry doesn\'t see it that way. They are building new solar farms and new wind turbines at a great rate, because they produce electricity more cheaply than any other source and quite a bit more cheaply than nuclear plants. They are starting to invest grid-scale batteries, and the Australian Federal Government is in the process of extending our biggest hydroelectric scheme to offer a lot of pumped storage.

https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

The nuclear option strikes me as totally insane at any number of levels.

Different power generation choices make sense in different places, and
have different costs (not just monetary costs - space, environment and
pollution are all costs). In Australia, solar power should be all over
the place - you have plenty of sun, and plenty of space. Here in Norway
it\'s a very different matter - solar power is much more expensive,
simply because there is not as much sun.

Nuclear power is, without any doubt in my mind, the right answer for
Norway going forward (it works for Finland and Sweden). But solar and
wind power combined with good grid storage (maybe sodium ion batteries?)
could well be the right answer for Australia.

 

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2022 08:05, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 3:01:33 PM UTC+10, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 6:38:24 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 8:02:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

snip

You can just bury the rest, marking the site appropriately against future intrusions.
That solution worked for anthrax-infected critters for over a century...

The longer lived radio active isotopes stay dangerous for a few hundred thousand years.

Cuneiform script has survived for 5,400 years. If you used that script to mark your site a dangerous, few of the passers-by would be able to read what it said.

The science doesn\'t change, even though language does. Warning signs
can be updated as needed, at minimal cost. People in the future will
still have Geiger counters and be able to check if the site is safe.
There are enough real challenges here that you don\'t need to invent
silly ones.

 

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2022 07:01, whit3rd wrote:

On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 6:38:24 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 8:02:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Nuclear waste can be stored in heavy containers that go down a hole to
an underground facility. The only way to remove it is with a crane. So
don\'t keep a crane nearby. One can be brought in when more material is
put into storage. During those times security can be increased.

What\'s the price tag for storing that for 1,000 years, 5,000 years, 10,000 years? You do realize this cost should be paid by those using the electricity, right?

Faulty reasoning, there. The onsite storage of waste (fuel, mostly) is because one of the contaminants is
plutonium, another is enriched U235, both associated with very undesirable weapons manufacture.
If one reprocessed the fuel to extract those, it\'d lower fuel costs AND the long year-count problem
alone is just about NOTHING when compared to the duration of lethality of lead and arsenic.

You can just bury the rest, marking the site appropriately against future intrusions.
That solution worked for anthrax-infected critters for over a century...

Some of the newer high-temperature molten salt processes produce much
less waste, and in particular far less of the dangerous stuff, making
waste storage easier.

I also wonder why we can\'t just wrap the stuff in a ball of steel and
concrete, and drop it in a lava lake. It\'s far denser than lava - if
you use a relatively low temperature and low viscosity lake such as the
one in Ethiopia, its going to sink far before breaking up and mixing
with all the other radioactive stuff that\'s already done there, keeping
us nice and warm from below.

(No, I haven\'t done any research or calculations on that idea - it\'s
pure speculation.)

 

[John Doe]

Eddie wants so badly to nym-shift. That\'s a no-no here, Eddie!

Eddie has never posted anything NORMAL except when it got a spanking...

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.electronics.repair/c/MesPLcGU4BE

See also...
John Doe <always.look@message.header> (astraweb)
Peter Weiner <dtgamer99@gmail.com>
Edward H. <dtgamer99@gmail.com>
Edward Hernandez <dtgamer99@gmail.com>

Eddie is an example for all newbies. Don\'t get spanked!

Spanked Eddie...

--
Edward Hernandez <dtgamer99@gmail.com> wrote:

Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.freedyn.de!newsreader4.netcologne.de!news.netcologne.de!peer02.ams1!peer.ams1.xlned.com!news.xlned.com!peer01.ams4!peer.am4.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!fx11.ams4.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Edward Hernandez <dtgamer99@gmail.com
Subject: Re: OT: The Ukraine War Will Go On Forever
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design,free.spam
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Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org sci.electronics.design:666972 free.spam:18004

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id
sdhn7c$pkp$4@dont-email.me>:

The troll doesn\'t even know how to format a USENET post...

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id
sg3kr7$qt5$1@dont-email.me>:

The reason Bozo cannot figure out how to get Google to keep from
breaking its lines in inappropriate places is because Bozo is
CLUELESS...

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has continued to post incorrectly
formatted USENET articles that are devoid of content (latest example on
Wed, 20 Apr 2022 06:22:30 -0000 (UTC) in message-id
t3o8r6$s0e$4@dont-email.me>).

NOBODY likes the John Doe troll\'s contentless spam.

Further, John Doe stated the following in message-id
svsh05$lbh$5@dont-email.me> posted Fri, 4 Mar 2022 08:01:09 -0000
(UTC):

Compared to other regulars, Bozo contributes practically nothing
except insults to this group.

Yet, since Wed, 5 Jan 2022 04:10:38 -0000 (UTC) John Doe\'s post ratio to
USENET (**) has been 57.3% of its posts contributing \"nothing except
insults\" to USENET.

** Since Wed, 5 Jan 2022 04:10:38 -0000 (UTC) John Doe has posted at
least 1098 articles to USENET. Of which 125 have been pure insults and
504 have been John Doe \"troll format\" postings.

This posting is a public service announcement for any google groups
readers who happen by to point out that the John Doe troll does not even
follow the rules it uses to troll other posters.

u+u83qrF0I1h

 

[Edward Hernandez]

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id
<sdhn7c$pkp$4@dont-email.me>:

> The troll doesn\'t even know how to format a USENET post...

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id
<sg3kr7$qt5$1@dont-email.me>:

The reason Bozo cannot figure out how to get Google to keep from
breaking its lines in inappropriate places is because Bozo is
CLUELESS...

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has continued to post incorrectly
formatted USENET articles that are devoid of content (latest example on
Wed, 20 Apr 2022 07:54:20 -0000 (UTC) in message-id
<t3oe7b$377$1@dont-email.me>).

NOBODY likes the John Doe troll\'s contentless spam.

Further, Troll Doe stated the following in message-id
<svsh05$lbh$5@dont-email.me> posted Fri, 4 Mar 2022 08:01:09 -0000
(UTC):

Compared to other regulars, Bozo contributes practically nothing
except insults to this group.

Yet, since Wed, 5 Jan 2022 04:10:38 -0000 (UTC) Troll Doe\'s post ratio
to USENET (**) has been 57.4% of its posts contributing \"nothing except
insults\" to USENET.

** Since Wed, 5 Jan 2022 04:10:38 -0000 (UTC) Troll Doe has posted at
least 1100 articles to USENET. Of which 125 have been pure insults and
506 have been Troll Doe \"troll format\" postings.

This posting is a public service announcement for any google groups
readers who happen by to point out that the John Doe troll does not even
follow the rules it uses to troll other posters.

LV0UESTEqy+A

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 07:01, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 6:38:24 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 8:02:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Nuclear waste can be stored in heavy containers that go down a hole to
an underground facility. The only way to remove it is with a crane. So
don\'t keep a crane nearby. One can be brought in when more material is
put into storage. During those times security can be increased.

What\'s the price tag for storing that for 1,000 years, 5,000 years,
10,000 years? You do realize this cost should be paid by those using
the electricity, right?

Faulty reasoning, there. The onsite storage of waste (fuel, mostly)
is because one of the contaminants is
plutonium, another is enriched U235, both associated with very
undesirable weapons manufacture.
If one reprocessed the fuel to extract those, it\'d lower fuel costs
AND the long year-count problem
alone is just about NOTHING when compared to the duration of lethality
of lead and arsenic.

You can just bury the rest, marking the site appropriately against
future intrusions.
That solution worked for anthrax-infected critters for over a century...

Some of the newer high-temperature molten salt processes produce much
less waste, and in particular far less of the dangerous stuff, making
waste storage easier.

I also wonder why we can\'t just wrap the stuff in a ball of steel and
concrete, and drop it in a lava lake. It\'s far denser than lava - if
you use a relatively low temperature and low viscosity lake such as the
one in Ethiopia, its going to sink far before breaking up and mixing
with all the other radioactive stuff that\'s already done there, keeping
us nice and warm from below.

(No, I haven\'t done any research or calculations on that idea - it\'s
pure speculation.)

That doesn\'t look sane to me. It\'s likely to spew the waste all
over the place in short order. And there isn\'t really a lot of
other radioactive stuff already down there, either.

The real solution is to hide the highly radioactive and long-
lived waste in some uninteresting, geologically stable dry rock
layer.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 5:16:33 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 07:08, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 8:06:56 AM UTC+10, Dimiter Popoff wrote:
On 4/20/2022 0:22, David Brown wrote:
On 19/04/2022 20:29, Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
On 4/19/2022 20:39, John Larkin wrote:

snip

Perhaps, but gas and petrol are short term solutions anyway. Since
the EU (and the world) needs to do something about producing less
smoke going seriously nuclear looks like the only viable option.
Sort of like the French have done it. The main brake against nuclear
has been the fear that waste can fall in the wrong hands to build
weapons from (not the pollution nonsense the media spread for the
masses). So more spectrometry gadgets will be needed... the steam
engine I hope to build in my backyard won\'t come for free .

The big problem with nuclear power is that it takes a long time to build
the plants. (Yes, the build cost is a problem too - but it\'s a problem
that can be solved by throwing money at it, unlike the time problem.)

Of course we need to start building the nuclear power plants /now/,
while we also work on short term solutions.

Only if you haven\'t bothered to think how much you a re going to have to charge for each kilowatt hour of energy you sell to your customers to let you make a profit.

It takes a long time of course but much of it is due to over-regulation,
like Jeroen suggested.

Then again some twenty of France\'s 56 nuclear reactors were all shut down for a while recently while mistakes in the original build were corrected, Nuclear plants have got more expensive recently because we\'ve learned more about how they can go wrong. Solving problems that you can anticipate is cheaper that solving them after they\'ve made themselves obvious, but it isn\'t free,

Then the word \"nuclear\" still spells suicide for many if not all politicians - which is the biggest problem, after decades of training the public to perceive the word like this now is pay time.

It\'s taken a long time for all the problems posed by dealing with long term radio-active waste to be fully appreciated. They haven\'t been by any means solved. Nobody has yet set up a repository for long term storage - several hundreds of thousands of years - and they may never succeed. Not in my backyard is a potent slogan.

But we have no other sane option, we have to start building now indeed and cover by short term solutions.

The Australian power generation industry doesn\'t see it that way. They are building new solar farms and new wind turbines at a great rate, because they produce electricity more cheaply than any other source and quite a bit more cheaply than nuclear plants. They are starting to invest grid-scale batteries, and the Australian Federal Government is in the process of extending our biggest hydroelectric scheme to offer a lot of pumped storage.

https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

The nuclear option strikes me as totally insane at any number of levels..

Different power generation choices make sense in different places, and
have different costs (not just monetary costs - space, environment and
pollution are all costs). In Australia, solar power should be all over
the place - you have plenty of sun, and plenty of space. Here in Norway
it\'s a very different matter - solar power is much more expensive,
simply because there is not as much sun.

There\'s actually more in your summer. And wind power works pretty much everywhere.

Nuclear power is, without any doubt in my mind, the right answer for
Norway going forward (it works for Finland and Sweden).

You may need to do a bit more work on your mind. Nuclear power is quite a bit more expensive than wind power.

But solar and wind power combined with good grid storage (maybe sodium ion batteries?)
could well be the right answer for Australia.

Vanadium flow batteries seem to be correct choice on technical grounds.

We\'ve got a a Tesla lithium ion grid storage battery in South Australia simply because Elon Musk could divert a hundred electric car batteries from his production line and ship them to Australia with very little effort. The economy of scale was there already.

Quite how we get to mass production with vanadium flow batteries is a more interesting question. Government intervention would work, but they\'d probably spend so long working out whether it was the right choice that Elon Musk would have sewn up the market.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 5:28:38 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 07:01, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 6:38:24 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 8:02:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Nuclear waste can be stored in heavy containers that go down a hole to
an underground facility. The only way to remove it is with a crane. So
don\'t keep a crane nearby. One can be brought in when more material is
put into storage. During those times security can be increased.

What\'s the price tag for storing that for 1,000 years, 5,000 years, 10,000 years? You do realize this cost should be paid by those using the electricity, right?

Faulty reasoning, there. The onsite storage of waste (fuel, mostly) is because one of the contaminants is
plutonium, another is enriched U235, both associated with very undesirable weapons manufacture.

Dream on. Uranium fissions into elements with atomic weights closer to 120. Some of the fission products are stable. Lots of them are radioactive.

Technicium has five isotopes with atomic weights from 95 to 99. They are all radioactive which makes technicium the lightest element with no stable isotopes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium

Most people have heard of Cobalt-60, which also shows up in nuclear reactor waste. There are lots of others.

If one reprocessed the fuel to extract those, it\'d lower fuel costs AND the long year-count problem
alone is just about NOTHING when compared to the duration of lethality of lead and arsenic.

Lead and arsenic have stable isotopes which are lethal without being radioactive. Reprocessing fuel to take out the radioactive isotope waste is an expensive idea, and you are still stuck with the long-lived radioactive isotopes, which aren\'t all that useful. Taking out the U-235 and Pu-239 would make sense, but you can use them to make bombs as well as regular nuclear reactors, which does frighten politicians.

The molten salt thorium reactor fans make a lot of fuss about the absence of plutonium, but U-233 can be used to make bombs in much the same way as plutonium. They cheerfully ignore the radioactive fission products, as you have done above.

You can just bury the rest, marking the site appropriately against future intrusions.
That solution worked for anthrax-infected critters for over a century....

A century is rather less than a couple of hundred thousand years.

> Some of the newer high-temperature molten salt processes produce much less waste, and in particular far less of the dangerous stuff, making waste storage easier.

You are actually thinking about thorium fission molten salt reactors, and they don\'t produce enough less of the dangerous stuff to make any practical difference.

I also wonder why we can\'t just wrap the stuff in a ball of steel and
concrete, and drop it in a lava lake. It\'s far denser than lava - if
you use a relatively low temperature and low viscosity lake such as the
one in Ethiopia, its going to sink far before breaking up and mixing
with all the other radioactive stuff that\'s already down there, keeping
us nice and warm from below.

(No, I haven\'t done any research or calculations on that idea - it\'s
pure speculation.)

And it could make the next volcanic eruption even more exciting than usual. Nuclear waste has shorter lived - and thus more radioactive - isotopes that stuff which hasn\'t seen a neutron since it got created in a supernova more than 4.5 billion years ago. The original shorter-lived stuff was all gone in the first billion years.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2022 14:14, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 5:16:33 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 07:08, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 8:06:56 AM UTC+10, Dimiter Popoff wrote:
On 4/20/2022 0:22, David Brown wrote:
On 19/04/2022 20:29, Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
On 4/19/2022 20:39, John Larkin wrote:

snip

Perhaps, but gas and petrol are short term solutions anyway. Since
the EU (and the world) needs to do something about producing less
smoke going seriously nuclear looks like the only viable option.
Sort of like the French have done it. The main brake against nuclear
has been the fear that waste can fall in the wrong hands to build
weapons from (not the pollution nonsense the media spread for the
masses). So more spectrometry gadgets will be needed... the steam
engine I hope to build in my backyard won\'t come for free .

The big problem with nuclear power is that it takes a long time to build
the plants. (Yes, the build cost is a problem too - but it\'s a problem
that can be solved by throwing money at it, unlike the time problem.)

Of course we need to start building the nuclear power plants /now/,
while we also work on short term solutions.

Only if you haven\'t bothered to think how much you a re going to have to charge for each kilowatt hour of energy you sell to your customers to let you make a profit.

It takes a long time of course but much of it is due to over-regulation,
like Jeroen suggested.

Then again some twenty of France\'s 56 nuclear reactors were all shut down for a while recently while mistakes in the original build were corrected, Nuclear plants have got more expensive recently because we\'ve learned more about how they can go wrong. Solving problems that you can anticipate is cheaper that solving them after they\'ve made themselves obvious, but it isn\'t free,

Then the word \"nuclear\" still spells suicide for many if not all politicians - which is the biggest problem, after decades of training the public to perceive the word like this now is pay time.

It\'s taken a long time for all the problems posed by dealing with long term radio-active waste to be fully appreciated. They haven\'t been by any means solved. Nobody has yet set up a repository for long term storage - several hundreds of thousands of years - and they may never succeed. Not in my backyard is a potent slogan.

But we have no other sane option, we have to start building now indeed and cover by short term solutions.

The Australian power generation industry doesn\'t see it that way. They are building new solar farms and new wind turbines at a great rate, because they produce electricity more cheaply than any other source and quite a bit more cheaply than nuclear plants. They are starting to invest grid-scale batteries, and the Australian Federal Government is in the process of extending our biggest hydroelectric scheme to offer a lot of pumped storage.

https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

The nuclear option strikes me as totally insane at any number of levels.

Different power generation choices make sense in different places, and
have different costs (not just monetary costs - space, environment and
pollution are all costs). In Australia, solar power should be all over
the place - you have plenty of sun, and plenty of space. Here in Norway
it\'s a very different matter - solar power is much more expensive,
simply because there is not as much sun.

There\'s actually more in your summer.

No, there is not more sun - there is less sun here in summer than you
have during your winter. There are more hours of daylight (the full 24
hours for at least some of the year, once you are above the Arctic
Circle). But the power from the sun is far lower - we are at a much
steeper angle, and have a lot more cloud cover.

And even if it were true, it would be useless - batteries can give you
some stability for day to day variation of power, but not keep you going
for half the year.

> And wind power works pretty much everywhere.

It works where there is reliable wind - the tops of hills, or in the
middle of wide plains with little interruption. Australia has lots of
plains - Norway does not. So they can only be put at the tops of hills,
and even then it has to be relatively accessible hilltops (unlike most
of our hills) relatively near people and infrastructure (unlike most of
our hills). And people don\'t want them there.

There could certainly be more off-shore wind generation in Norway, but
even that has its challenges here. We have rather sharp slopes to deep
sea, making it more expensive than when you have shallower seas available.

(We also have a big social challenge for wind power in Norway - no one
wants to see a windmill disrupting nature hillsides or sea views.
Norwegians also do not want nuclear power stations anywhere near them,
or gas power. They want to believe that we could be self-sufficient
with cheap, clean hydroelectric power if only we stopped selling
electricity abroad, and that expensive, ugly or polluting electricity
generation is a problem for other countries. It\'s not true, of course,
but it\'s hard to convince some people.)

Nuclear power is, without any doubt in my mind, the right answer for
Norway going forward (it works for Finland and Sweden).

You may need to do a bit more work on your mind. Nuclear power is quite a bit more expensive than wind power.

Nuclear power has many advantages over wind power (as well as
disadvantages). Cost in dollars is not the only measure of the best
choice of power generation. Usable land space is a premium in Norway -
nuclear takes a fraction of the space compared to wind. Accident, death
and injury rates per generated unit are negligible for nuclear power in
comparison to other methods, including wind. (The few accidents that
have occurred lead to a lot more publicity - you never year about all
the accidents involved in mounting or maintaining wind turbines.) The
impact to the environment and nature, in the way Norwegians want to see
and use their nature, would be much less with nuclear power than wind power.

Then there is the stability of the supply. For power generation, you
want a base constant stable supply, with extra generation when there are
peaks in the demand. Wind power is not stable (unless it is very high
masts out at sea), and goes up and down independently from demand.
Nuclear power (which is very stable) combined with hydroelectric (which
we have, and which can be turned up and down quickly as needed) is an
ideal combination - far better than covering half the country in
windmills and massive lithium battery arrays.

But solar and wind power combined with good grid storage (maybe sodium ion batteries?)
could well be the right answer for Australia.

Vanadium flow batteries seem to be correct choice on technical grounds.

Yes, except that vanadium is poisonous and expensive, and there is
significant energy inefficiency in the charge/discharge cycle. If
someone figured out a good basis for flow batteries that avoid these
problems, that would be good news.

The one key remaining challenge for sodium ion batteries is low number
of charge/discharge cycles. When that is solved (and I expect that to
be just a matter of time), they\'ll be great for grid storage.

We\'ve got a a Tesla lithium ion grid storage battery in South Australia simply because Elon Musk could divert a hundred electric car batteries from his production line and ship them to Australia with very little effort. The economy of scale was there already.

Quite how we get to mass production with vanadium flow batteries is a more interesting question. Government intervention would work, but they\'d probably spend so long working out whether it was the right choice that Elon Musk would have sewn up the market.

 

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2022 11:14, Jeroen Belleman wrote:

David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 07:01, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 6:38:24 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 8:02:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Nuclear waste can be stored in heavy containers that go down a hole to
an underground facility. The only way to remove it is with a crane. So
don\'t keep a crane nearby. One can be brought in when more material is
put into storage. During those times security can be increased.

What\'s the price tag for storing that for 1,000 years, 5,000 years,
10,000 years? You do realize this cost should be paid by those using
the electricity, right?

Faulty reasoning, there.   The onsite storage of waste (fuel, mostly)
is because one of the contaminants is
plutonium, another is enriched U235, both associated with very
undesirable weapons  manufacture.
If one reprocessed the fuel to extract those, it\'d lower fuel costs
AND the long year-count problem
alone is just about NOTHING when compared to the duration of
lethality of lead and arsenic.

You can just bury the rest, marking the site appropriately against
future intrusions.
That solution worked for anthrax-infected critters for over a century...

Some of the newer high-temperature molten salt processes produce much
less waste, and in particular far less of the dangerous stuff, making
waste storage easier.

I also wonder why we can\'t just wrap the stuff in a ball of steel and
concrete, and drop it in a lava lake.  It\'s far denser than lava - if
you use a relatively low temperature and low viscosity lake such as
the one in Ethiopia, its going to sink far before breaking up and
mixing with all the other radioactive stuff that\'s already done there,
keeping us nice and warm from below.

(No, I haven\'t done any research or calculations on that idea - it\'s
pure speculation.)


That doesn\'t look sane to me. It\'s likely to spew the waste all
over the place in short order. And there isn\'t really a lot of
other radioactive stuff already down there, either.

How would it \"spew the waste\" ? We don\'t see much lava leaking out.
The balls of waste would sink (though I don\'t know how deeply) before
melting apart and being spread around by currents in the mantle. The
heavy elements would gradually sink further.

(I\'m not saying you are wrong, because I certainly don\'t know that I am
right.)

The real solution is to hide the highly radioactive and long-
lived waste in some uninteresting, geologically stable dry rock
layer.

Certainly that\'s the traditional solution. The key points are to keep
enough rock between the waste and the surface to stop radiation, to
minimise the risk of getting the stuff into underground water, and to
stop people getting in to it.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 11:36:37 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 11:14, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 07:01, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 6:38:24 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 8:02:26 PM UTC-4, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Nuclear waste can be stored in heavy containers that go down a hole to
an underground facility. The only way to remove it is with a crane. So
don\'t keep a crane nearby. One can be brought in when more material is
put into storage. During those times security can be increased.

What\'s the price tag for storing that for 1,000 years, 5,000 years,
10,000 years? You do realize this cost should be paid by those using
the electricity, right?

Faulty reasoning, there. The onsite storage of waste (fuel, mostly)
is because one of the contaminants is
plutonium, another is enriched U235, both associated with very
undesirable weapons manufacture.
If one reprocessed the fuel to extract those, it\'d lower fuel costs
AND the long year-count problem
alone is just about NOTHING when compared to the duration of
lethality of lead and arsenic.

You can just bury the rest, marking the site appropriately against
future intrusions.
That solution worked for anthrax-infected critters for over a century...

Some of the newer high-temperature molten salt processes produce much
less waste, and in particular far less of the dangerous stuff, making
waste storage easier.

I also wonder why we can\'t just wrap the stuff in a ball of steel and
concrete, and drop it in a lava lake. It\'s far denser than lava - if
you use a relatively low temperature and low viscosity lake such as
the one in Ethiopia, its going to sink far before breaking up and
mixing with all the other radioactive stuff that\'s already done there,
keeping us nice and warm from below.

(No, I haven\'t done any research or calculations on that idea - it\'s
pure speculation.)


That doesn\'t look sane to me. It\'s likely to spew the waste all
over the place in short order. And there isn\'t really a lot of
other radioactive stuff already down there, either.

How would it \"spew the waste\" ? We don\'t see much lava leaking out.

Have you never seen pictures of a volcano erupting? They can throw enough ash into the stratosphere to force airlines to cancel some flights and reroute others.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/24/volcanic-ash-cloud-flight-delays-heathrow

The balls of waste would sink (though I don\'t know how deeply) before
melting apart and being spread around by currents in the mantle. The
heavy elements would gradually sink further.

(I\'m not saying you are wrong, because I certainly don\'t know that I am
right.)
The real solution is to hide the highly radioactive and long-
lived waste in some uninteresting, geologically stable dry rock
layer.

Certainly that\'s the traditional solution. The key points are to keep
enough rock between the waste and the surface to stop radiation, to
minimise the risk of getting the stuff into underground water, and to
stop people getting in to it.

The Australian solution was Synroc.

https://www.ansto.gov.au/news/new-global-first-of-a-kind-ansto-synroc-facility

I knew Lou Vance when he was an a undergraduate at Melbourne University in the 1960\'s. Smart guy.

It concentrates on keeping the radioactive atoms locked up in insoluble rock. Apparently it would work fine, but nobody seems to be actually using it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 11:28:17 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 14:14, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 5:16:33 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 07:08, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 8:06:56 AM UTC+10, Dimiter Popoff wrote:
On 4/20/2022 0:22, David Brown wrote:
On 19/04/2022 20:29, Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
On 4/19/2022 20:39, John Larkin wrote:

<snip>

It\'s taken a long time for all the problems posed by dealing with long term radio-active waste to be fully appreciated. They haven\'t been by any means solved. Nobody has yet set up a repository for long term storage - several hundreds of thousands of years - and they may never succeed. Not in my backyard is a potent slogan.

But we have no other sane option, we have to start building now indeed and cover by short term solutions.

The Australian power generation industry doesn\'t see it that way. They are building new solar farms and new wind turbines at a great rate, because they produce electricity more cheaply than any other source and quite a bit more cheaply than nuclear plants. They are starting to invest grid-scale batteries, and the Australian Federal Government is in the process of extending our biggest hydroelectric scheme to offer a lot of pumped storage.

https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

The nuclear option strikes me as totally insane at any number of levels.

Different power generation choices make sense in different places, and
have different costs (not just monetary costs - space, environment and
pollution are all costs). In Australia, solar power should be all over
the place - you have plenty of sun, and plenty of space. Here in Norway
it\'s a very different matter - solar power is much more expensive,
simply because there is not as much sun.

There\'s actually more in your summer.

No, there is not more sun - there is less sun here in summer than you
have during your winter. There are more hours of daylight (the full 24
hours for at least some of the year, once you are above the Arctic
Circle). But the power from the sun is far lower - we are at a much
steeper angle, and have a lot more cloud cover.

It\'s the same radiation source. The angle doesn\'t make any difference to the amount of light hitting a panel that is pointed at the sun. The light does go through a thicker layer of atmosphere, but that atmosphere is mostly transparent at the relevant wavelengths.

Everybody has roughly 50% cloud cover - the water goes up into the atmosphere until it condenses into cloud, then comes down again. There are places that are too far from the ocean for water vapour to get to all that often, but if you put a solar farm there you have to build an expensive high voltage transmission line to get it to the customers.

Australian venture capitalist are talking about setting up solar farms on the north coast of Australia to make power to ship through a submarine cable to Singapore, but they aren\'t trying to put them far enough inland to get away from cloud cover.

And even if it were true, it would be useless - batteries can give you
some stability for day to day variation of power, but not keep you going
for half the year.

The bulk of the Norwegian land mass is actually below the Arctic circle. The days get pretty short at midwinter, but sunlight doesn\'t turn off from equinox to equinox.

And wind power works pretty much everywhere.
It works where there is reliable wind - the tops of hills, or in the
middle of wide plains with little interruption. Australia has lots of
plains - Norway does not. So they can only be put at the tops of hills,
and even then it has to be relatively accessible hilltops (unlike most
of our hills) relatively near people and infrastructure (unlike most of
our hills). And people don\'t want them there.

Not looming above my backyard. And while \"relatively accessible hills\" may offer cheaper installation costs, there\'s no absolute barrier to spending more money to put windmills of top of slightly less accessible hills. Nuclear power generation isn\'t cheap, and windmills deliver appreciably cheaper power

There could certainly be more off-shore wind generation in Norway, but
even that has its challenges here. We have rather sharp slopes to deep
sea, making it more expensive than when you have shallower seas available..

(We also have a big social challenge for wind power in Norway - no one
wants to see a windmill disrupting nature hillsides or sea views.
Norwegians also do not want nuclear power stations anywhere near them,
or gas power. They want to believe that we could be self-sufficient
with cheap, clean hydroelectric power if only we stopped selling
electricity abroad, and that expensive, ugly or polluting electricity
generation is a problem for other countries. It\'s not true, of course,
but it\'s hard to convince some people.)

Nuclear power is, without any doubt in my mind, the right answer for
Norway going forward (it works for Finland and Sweden).

You may need to do a bit more work on your mind. Nuclear power is quite a bit more expensive than wind power.

Nuclear power has many advantages over wind power (as well as
disadvantages). Cost in dollars is not the only measure of the best
choice of power generation. Usable land space is a premium in Norway -
nuclear takes a fraction of the space compared to wind. Accident, death
and injury rates per generated unit are negligible for nuclear power in
comparison to other methods, including wind. (The few accidents that
have occurred lead to a lot more publicity - you never year about all
the accidents involved in mounting or maintaining wind turbines.) The
impact to the environment and nature, in the way Norwegians want to see
and use their nature, would be much less with nuclear power than wind power.

Fukushima. Geology isn\'t an exact science.

Then there is the stability of the supply. For power generation, you
want a base constant stable supply, with extra generation when there are
peaks in the demand. Wind power is not stable (unless it is very high
masts out at sea), and goes up and down independently from demand.
Nuclear power (which is very stable) combined with hydroelectric (which
we have, and which can be turned up and down quickly as needed) is an
ideal combination - far better than covering half the country in
windmills and massive lithium battery arrays.

You can bury the battery arrays - and Norway has enough hydroelctric power that you could use it for pumped storage. You certainly wouldn\'t need to cover anything like half the country with windmills or solar farms. About 1% of land area seems to be enough but everybody wants it to be in somebody elses back yard,.

But solar and wind power combined with good grid storage (maybe sodium ion batteries?) could well be the right answer for Australia.

Vanadium flow batteries seem to be the correct choice on technical grounds.

Yes, except that vanadium is poisonous and expensive, and there is significant energy inefficiency in the charge/discharge cycle.

Every energy storaqe scheme loses some energy between input and output. The vanadium flow cells didn\'t look much worse than everything else

Lead is poisonous and expensive too, and that doesn\'t prevent people from using lead acid batteries

> If someone figured out a good basis for flow batteries that avoid these problems, that would be good news.

Getting the plumbing watertight is all it takes.

> The one key remaining challenge for sodium ion batteries is low number of charge/discharge cycles. When that is solved (and I expect that to be just a matter of time), they\'ll be great for grid storage.

A local company - Gelion

https://gelion.com/

think that Zinc bromine is the answer. I responded to one of their job ads - you\'d think that a Ph.D. in chemistry and a lot of experience with electronics would have whetted their interest, but it didn\'t. They probably only hire their own graduate students.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney