The Ukraine War Will Go On Forever...

[whit3rd]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 5:53:12 AM UTC-7, bill....@ieee.org wrote:

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 5:28:38 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 07:01, whit3rd wrote:

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.

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...

But that wasn\'t what I was suggesting; the weapons-proliferation consequence of leaving fissile material
in the waste is only sensitive to two chemical constituents of the fuel elements. Other neutron-activated
bits of reactors aren\'t part of the reprocessing step, so most (by tonnage) waste would be buried as-is.

 

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2022 18:41, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

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.

Lava lakes do not often erupt, and rarely do so violently - violent
eruptions come from a build-up of pressure in an enclosed magma chamber,
which you don\'t get with a lake open to the air.

And the whole point of this suggestion is to have the ball sink, not
hang around waiting for an overflow of lava. The big questions are how
quickly it would sink, and how deep it could get. I don\'t know the
answers to that, and I am quite happy to be shown that a reasoned and
factual argument for why it would not sink far enough or fail to work
for other reasons.

However, you may assume that I have read the Ladybird book on volcanoes.
I am aware that volcanoes can erupt.

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.

 

[server]

Phil Allison <pallison49@gmail.com> wrote in news:538754cf-ec29-458c-
90e5-7acc4f2625b2n@googlegroups.com:

Sanctions will ruin the Russian economy.
Putin will be overthrown.

Or assassinated. But yes, it will end. The shame is that it doesn\'t
end with a dozen bunker busters bombs penetrating and destroying the
Kremlin and the war crime stupidity once and for all.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 5:46:40 AM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 18:41, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
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.

Lava lakes do not often erupt, and rarely do so violently - violent
eruptions come from a build-up of pressure in an enclosed magma chamber,
which you don\'t get with a lake open to the air.

When you are talking about radioactive waste that can still be active after 100,000 years or so \"rarely\" becomes less comforting.

And the whole point of this suggestion is to have the ball sink, not
hang around waiting for an overflow of lava. The big questions are how
quickly it would sink, and how deep it could get. I don\'t know the
answers to that, and I am quite happy to be shown that a reasoned and
factual argument for why it would not sink far enough or fail to work
for other reasons.

However, you may assume that I have read the Ladybird book on volcanoes.
I am aware that volcanoes can erupt.

But seem unwilling to process the information.

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

 

[Ricky]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 1:01:33 AM UTC-4, 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...

I don\'t believe that is true. Nuclear waste is stored onsite for longer than a few years because in the US we have no other place to store it. In fact, the US government has to pay for that on site storage because they had promised to provide a long term storage facility, and failed to do so. However...

Now that it is known there is no long term storage, will new nuclear plants be required to pay for this long term storage or will the US government (meaning all of us) have to pay for it? No wonder our taxes are so high!

--

Rick C.

-++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 3:16:33 AM UTC-4, 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 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.

What problem do you think nuclear power is the solution to, exactly?

--

Rick C.

+-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 3:28:38 AM UTC-4, 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.)

So, you think the solution to nuclear waste is to ship it to Ethiopia? Yeah, great idea!!!

--

Rick C.

+-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 5:14:49 AM UTC-4, 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.

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

We could just dress it up like Alice and give it to Ralph Kramden...

Pow! Right to the moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98qw86DsdZ0

--

Rick C.

++- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
++- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 8:53:12 AM UTC-4, bill....@ieee.org wrote:

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.

Thorium-232 is fertile, but isn\'t the U-233 the fissile part that is burned up to power the reactor? So how much U-233 would be left? I was under the impression that in a molten salt reactor the fuel is continuously cleaned of the troublesome isotopes and new fuel is fed in. I know there are a number of types, but they don\'t all get loaded once and used until they burn up the fuel.

--

Rick C.

+++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 9:28:17 AM UTC-4, 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

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..

Sounds like Norway is pretty screwed. I suggest you limit your population, \"one child\" policy sounds like a good idea. Free up some space and live like you are in Texas.

(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.)

No one? Not even when they are cold and in the dark? So you think they\'d rather see cooling towers or large plumes of coal smoke?

It is easy to stop exporting electricity, pay more for it and they will sell it to you instead of importing!

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.

Except that the total cost and the total human impact won\'t be known for thousands of years.

It\'s kind of like carving into a hillside to build a home and having to dispose of the waste slag by dumping it in your side yard, not knowing for sure what impact that will have in 20, 40 or 60 years from now. That slag looks stable, but what happens if you get a very unusual rain storm that doesn\'t move for a week or two (think Houston, TX), combined with an earth quake.. That pile of slag might impact your children who would be living in the house by then.

(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.

The accidents are a real possibility, but not the biggest danger. But I was surprised to learn just how probable an accident is. Using the numbers the US comes up with for reactor breech, JUST FROM EARTHQUAKES, factor 100 reactors, 1 in 70,000 chance per year (some are worse, much worse, the action limit is 1 in 15,000 I believe) and a 70 year lifetime of the reactor, you get around a 1 in 10 chance of a core breach with the present number of reactors. 1 in 10 is not so small really. Would you play Russian roulette with a 10 shooter? Maybe a 100 shooter, or a 1,000 shooter, but a 10 shot revolver? I think not! And that is ONLY from earthquakes!

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.

Really? That sounds very inefficient to me. How about an energy source that is cheap enough, that it can be over built by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4 and still supply all the energy required when it drops to a quarter of the needed output? Add some storage and it\'s all good!

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.

If you are going to wish for hydroelectric, then why not wish for low cost batteries? It\'s no different. France has managed to build enough hydro and pumped hydro to supply 30% of their needs. I wonder why their fluctuations are so much lower than the rest of the world? In the US we can\'t even use nuclear for 50% of our peak demand. So nuclear is not a solution unless, you add storage. That\'s essentially what hydro is, the water coming into the lake is stored until needed, because there typically is not enough of it to provide power all the time. Pumped hydro is literally stored energy from other sources. Or you use batteries or other means of storage. But it needs to be pointed out that a steady base supply has the same poor match to variable demand as intermittent sources.

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.

Poisonous??? You propose nuclear, then knock vanadium flow batteries because of poisons? WTF!!!

--

Rick C.

---- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
---- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[whit3rd]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 7:57:41 PM UTC-7, Ricky wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 1:01:33 AM UTC-4, whit3rd wrote:

[about high-level reactor waste]

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

I don\'t believe that is true. Nuclear waste is stored onsite for longer than a few years because in the US we have no other place to store it.

There\'s a storage onsite at... how many sites? They\'re ALL of them \'other place to store\' sites.

In fact, the US government has to pay for that on site storage because they had promised to provide a long term storage facility, and failed to do so. However...

Now that it is known there is no long term storage, will new nuclear plants be required to pay for this long term storage or will the US government (meaning all of us) have to pay for it? No wonder our taxes are so high!

The ability of folk to kick the problem into next year without a solution isn\'t a storage
problem, so much as a political will vacuum.
Choosing a site (or sites) is a hot-potato issue, often dropped. It isn\'t impossible. It might
be inevitable, in fact.

 

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2022 19:28, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

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.

The angle makes a /huge/ difference to the light per m² of ground area.
Yes, you can (and do) angle the panel so that it does not need to be
too big, but to get the same amount of power you need to shadow a much
larger area than you would in Australia. You can put up a bit of solar
panelling without it being too intrusive, but not much. The angle also
means that shadows from hills and mountains - which surround most towns
here - cut off much more of the direct sunlight.

The only reason Norway is as habitable as it is, is the sea - in
particular, the Gulf Stream keeps us warm. That does not contribute to
solar power generation. Surely you can understand that a country that
Australia gets more sun power than Norway!

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.

I realise you haven\'t been to Norway and know little about its climate
or geography. But you /have/ been to Australia, right?

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.

Do you ever get surprised when people call you a condescending twat?
Are you really trying to tell me the most basic geographical facts about
the country I live in?

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.

Maybe you talked to them, or perhaps wrote a covering letter. That
could have put them off.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 4:16:04 PM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 19:28, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
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.

<snip>

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.

The angle makes a /huge/ difference to the light per m² of ground area.

At the risk of doing a bit of condescension, flat ground area doesn\'t come into it.

Yes, you can (and do) angle the panel so that it does not need to be
too big, but to get the same amount of power you need to shadow a much
larger area than you would in Australia. You can put up a bit of solar
panelling without it being too intrusive, but not much. The angle also
means that shadows from hills and mountains - which surround most towns
here - cut off much more of the direct sunlight.

So you put the panels well up the hills where the slope gets a good deal closer to matching the average angle of solar incidence. There\'s a lot less shadowing up there, which also helps.

The only reason Norway is as habitable as it is, is the sea - in
particular, the Gulf Stream keeps us warm. That does not contribute to
solar power generation. Surely you can understand that a country that
Australia gets more sun power than Norway!

Obviously, but we were talking about putting up solar panels, not averaging over the surface of the whole country. When you put up that kind of straw man argument, you are inviting a condescending response.

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.

I realise you haven\'t been to Norway and know little about its climate or geography. But you /have/ been to Australia, right?

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.

Do you ever get surprised when people call you a condescending twat?

People who make a habit of posting poorly thought out comments don\'t like their sloppy thinking being pilloried.

> Are you really trying to tell me the most basic geographical facts about the country I live in?

You don\'t seem to have though too hard about what they actually mean.

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.

Maybe you talked to them, or perhaps wrote a covering letter. That could have put them off.

The cover letter did mention my age. That does put people off. But they made a fuss about their core staff being academics, and that sort of crew does tend to hire people who look clever to them by being clever in same way that they are. Industry rarely has that luxury.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 2:16:04 AM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:

On 20/04/2022 19:28, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
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.
The angle makes a /huge/ difference to the light per m² of ground area.
Yes, you can (and do) angle the panel so that it does not need to be
too big, but to get the same amount of power you need to shadow a much
larger area than you would in Australia. You can put up a bit of solar
panelling without it being too intrusive, but not much. The angle also
means that shadows from hills and mountains - which surround most towns
here - cut off much more of the direct sunlight.

The only reason Norway is as habitable as it is, is the sea - in
particular, the Gulf Stream keeps us warm. That does not contribute to
solar power generation. Surely you can understand that a country that
Australia gets more sun power than Norway!

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.
I realise you haven\'t been to Norway and know little about its climate
or geography. But you /have/ been to Australia, right?

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.
Do you ever get surprised when people call you a condescending twat?
Are you really trying to tell me the most basic geographical facts about
the country I live in?

This is the sort of crap that is common in this group, even if not commonly from you. You have no reason to be blatantly insulting like that. That is more the domain of Phil A or others. Yes, he is pointing out issues that apply to your country because that is the country being discusses. Are you PO\'d that he isn\'t throwing in the towel and say, \"Geez David, you are right!\"? Because you\'re not.

If you aren\'t interested in discussing the facts, why are you here? Why are you in this conversation? If the facts are not correct, explain why. It\'s that simple.

It is not uncommon for Bill to be in denial of some fact. He may pull up some obscure paper that doesn\'t actually say what he claims it says. When he says things that aren\'t fact, you can call him on it. But calling him a twat just shows you have no argument and you have gotten exposed and are pissed about it (Phil A\'s main mode of living).

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.

Maybe you talked to them, or perhaps wrote a covering letter. That
could have put them off.

Yes, doubling down! A good move in blackjack, but not so much in the twat domain.

--

Rick C.

---+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
---+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[David Brown]

On 21/04/2022 05:42, Ricky wrote:

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 9:28:17 AM UTC-4, 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

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.

Sounds like Norway is pretty screwed. I suggest you limit your population, \"one child\" policy sounds like a good idea. Free up some space and live like you are in Texas.

We are one of only about two or three countries in the world that
actually make a profit, rather than continuously increasing their
national debt - and we are the only such country you\'d want to live in.
We are in the top ranks for almost any measurement of countries - live
expectancy, health care, income, lack of poverty, happiness, clean air,
lack of corruption, trust in each other, democracy, low crime rates.
Yeah, we are really screwed.

We are still far from perfect, and there are certain areas where
people\'s attitudes need to change. Power generation is one of them - we
have been too used to cheap, clean power for too long, and most people
here don\'t understand how electricity import and export really works.

(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.)

No one? Not even when they are cold and in the dark? So you think they\'d rather see cooling towers or large plumes of coal smoke?

Do you ever read my posts before jumping to conclusions? Maybe I am too
long-winded and you skim over parts.

It is easy to stop exporting electricity, pay more for it and they will sell it to you instead of importing!

What a naïve fairytale world you live in!

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.

Except that the total cost and the total human impact won\'t be known for thousands of years.

We do, however, know that without a massive change to the way we get
energy, the impact to the earth and humanity within a century or so will
make the impact in a thousand years time almost irrelevant.

The long-term cost of storing nuclear waste is a can we can kick down
the road - unlike the cost of continued use of fossil fuels at the
current rate.

Solar and wind power will help, but it is not a complete solution.

It\'s kind of like carving into a hillside to build a home and having to dispose of the waste slag by dumping it in your side yard, not knowing for sure what impact that will have in 20, 40 or 60 years from now. That slag looks stable, but what happens if you get a very unusual rain storm that doesn\'t move for a week or two (think Houston, TX), combined with an earth quake. That pile of slag might impact your children who would be living in the house by then.


(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.

The accidents are a real possibility, but not the biggest danger. But I was surprised to learn just how probable an accident is. Using the numbers the US comes up with for reactor breech, JUST FROM EARTHQUAKES, factor 100 reactors, 1 in 70,000 chance per year (some are worse, much worse, the action limit is 1 in 15,000 I believe) and a 70 year lifetime of the reactor, you get around a 1 in 10 chance of a core breach with the present number of reactors. 1 in 10 is not so small really. Would you play Russian roulette with a 10 shooter? Maybe a 100 shooter, or a 1,000 shooter, but a 10 shot revolver? I think not! And that is ONLY from earthquakes!

I find your numbers hard to believe - a 1 in 10 chance per year of an
earthquake-induced reactor breach in the USA would mean a 98.5% chance
over 40 years.

Reactor designs have become safer - no one is suggesting building 1970\'s
style reactors. It is entirely possible to build nuclear power stations
that are safe even in the face of significant earthquakes.

We live with a certain degree of risk all the time. We could be hit be
a dinosaur-killing meteor, or a gamma ray burst. The Yellowstone
supervolcano could go off. An Ebola pandemic could break out.

Yes, nuclear power stations - even Thorium molten salt reactors - pose a
risk. So do hydroelectric dams, and even wind farms. Yes, there
unknown long-term impacts - do /you/ know the environmental impact that
decaying windmills will have over the next thousand years?

The one thing we know for sure, is that massive global upheaval from
climate change is Russian roulette with a single-shot gun if things
don\'t change. The other thing we know is that covering the world in
windmills will not fix it.

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.

Really? That sounds very inefficient to me. How about an energy source that is cheap enough, that it can be over built by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4 and still supply all the energy required when it drops to a quarter of the needed output? Add some storage and it\'s all good!

Have you heard of a little thing called the law of conservation of
energy? Not only can energy not be created from nothing, it cannot be
destroyed into nothing. A major challenge with windmills and solar
power is that they sometimes produce too much power than can easily be
used or transported. Overgeneration can lead to blackouts and other
problems just as much as undergeneration. Continuous overproduction
simply cannot work - what do you intend to do with all that extra energy?

Yes, storage is a big part of the solution - from short-term storage to
long-term storage. But you need a /massive/ amount of storage to
support wind and solar power in places where there can be big variations
in the weather - like Europe. Batteries can even out the differences in
supply and demand over a day, but what are you going to do if there is
little wind for two weeks?

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.

If you are going to wish for hydroelectric, then why not wish for low cost batteries?

That would be great too. But you\'d need an absurd amount of batteries
to support wind and solar power without a stable base supply. (Note
that solar power in a desert might be considered stable enough, as could
wind that is far enough off-shore and high enough in the air.)
Hydroelectric does not react as fast as batteries, and two-way pumped
storage is not as efficient, but it holds a lot more quantity.

> It\'s no different. France has managed to build enough hydro and pumped hydro to supply 30% of their needs. I wonder why their fluctuations are so much lower than the rest of the world?

France has lots of stable continuous nuclear power, and hydroelectric
that can be controlled reasonably quickly - that\'s a good combination.

> In the US we can\'t even use nuclear for 50% of our peak demand. So nuclear is not a solution unless, you add storage. That\'s essentially what hydro is, the water coming into the lake is stored until needed, because there typically is not enough of it to provide power all the time.

Yes. Different types of power generation have different characteristics
- some are more efficient, some more polluting, some require more area,
some require particular geographic or geologic features, some are easily
modulated, and so on. Nuclear is stable - you get constant output
regardless of the weather or other factors, but it takes a very long
time to raise or lower the output. Hydroelectric is at the other end -
when you have predictable changes (such as daily fluctuations) most
hydroelectric plants can ramp up or down in about 15 minutes or so.
(The fastest are under a minute.)

Pumped hydro is literally stored energy from other sources. Or you use batteries or other means of storage. But it needs to be pointed out that a steady base supply has the same poor match to variable demand as intermittent sources.

I agree - that is what I said. You can\'t run a grid on nuclear power
alone. You can\'t run it on hydroelectric alone (not even Norway has
enough mountains, rain and dammed up water for its needs any more). You
certainly can\'t run it on wind or solar power that generates randomly
and independently of demand. You need a combination, including storage.

Wider grid connections are also a major part of this - if you cover
enough of the world in your grid, it\'s likely that it is sunny or windy
/somewhere/, and a lot of your fluctuations even out in comparison to
the total load.

(Note that pumped hydroelectric requires quite specific geographical
features to work well, and the charge/discharge efficiency is low. It
is unlikely that new pumped hydroelectric storage will be used in the
future - batteries are more efficient.)

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.

Poisonous??? You propose nuclear, then knock vanadium flow batteries because of poisons? WTF!!!

Yes, vanadium is poisonous. How exactly do you think the radioactivity
and chemical poisonous of nuclear fuels and waste make vanadium
non-poisonous? All I said was that flow batteries using a less
expensive and less poisonous liquid would be better.

 

[David Brown]

On 21/04/2022 14:35, Ricky wrote:

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 2:16:04 AM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 19:28, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

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.
Do you ever get surprised when people call you a condescending twat?
Are you really trying to tell me the most basic geographical facts about
the country I live in?

This is the sort of crap that is common in this group, even if not commonly from you. You have no reason to be blatantly insulting like that. That is more the domain of Phil A or others. Yes, he is pointing out issues that apply to your country because that is the country being discusses. Are you PO\'d that he isn\'t throwing in the towel and say, \"Geez David, you are right!\"? Because you\'re not.

After trying to tell me that Norway gets as much sun power as Australia
and solar panels should be as good here as they are there, he then tries
to explain to me where the Arctic Circle goes in this country.

> If you aren\'t interested in discussing the facts, why are you here? Why are you in this conversation? If the facts are not correct, explain why. It\'s that simple.

I\'m fine with discussing facts - and correcting people, or being
corrected myself, as need be. And I\'m fine with people having different
opinions or thoughts.

But I\'m not keen on being patronised, and having someone on the other
side of the world try to tell me what things are like /here/ - right
down to simple clear facts.


Maybe I used uglier wording than was called for. Maybe \"twat\" sounds
worse to you (and possibly Bill) than it does to a Brit - it really is
not a strong term at all (and nothing even remotely in Phil A\'s class).
Maybe I have been hanging around this group too long and lowered my
standards towards the mean.

This group never has been a good place for calm and reflected
conversations. Even the most rational and knowledgeable posters here
regularly fail to listen to others in their eagerness to make their own
points - willingness to learn is close to zero, while frustration is high.

I come and go in this group - maybe it\'s time to leave for a while.
Experience shows that pretty much the same people will be saying pretty
much the same things next time I rejoin.

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 9:53:38 AM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:

On 21/04/2022 05:42, Ricky wrote:
On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 9:28:17 AM UTC-4, 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

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.

Sounds like Norway is pretty screwed. I suggest you limit your population, \"one child\" policy sounds like a good idea. Free up some space and live like you are in Texas.


We are one of only about two or three countries in the world that
actually make a profit, rather than continuously increasing their
national debt - and we are the only such country you\'d want to live in.
We are in the top ranks for almost any measurement of countries - live
expectancy, health care, income, lack of poverty, happiness, clean air,
lack of corruption, trust in each other, democracy, low crime rates.
Yeah, we are really screwed.

If you have the energy capacity of a third world country in a few years, yeah, pretty screwed.

We are still far from perfect, and there are certain areas where
people\'s attitudes need to change. Power generation is one of them - we
have been too used to cheap, clean power for too long, and most people
here don\'t understand how electricity import and export really works.


(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.)

No one? Not even when they are cold and in the dark? So you think they\'d rather see cooling towers or large plumes of coal smoke?


Do you ever read my posts before jumping to conclusions? Maybe I am too
long-winded and you skim over parts.

LOL! I like the idea of being lectured by someone who often fails to have any idea of what he is responding to.

It is easy to stop exporting electricity, pay more for it and they will sell it to you instead of importing!


What a naïve fairytale world you live in!

You said you have to burn fossil fuels because you export too much clean energy and you say I live in a fairytale world? Everything is about the price. Do you produce enough hydropower or not? If not, why not? What limits it?

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.

Except that the total cost and the total human impact won\'t be known for thousands of years.


We do, however, know that without a massive change to the way we get
energy, the impact to the earth and humanity within a century or so will
make the impact in a thousand years time almost irrelevant.

Which is irrelevant to the issue of using a potentially even more polluting energy source, just not as immediate.

The long-term cost of storing nuclear waste is a can we can kick down
the road - unlike the cost of continued use of fossil fuels at the
current rate.

That\'s my point. You want clean for your children, but you hand off nuclear waste to their children, and grandchildren, and ... with the blithe assumption that they won\'t have problems with it, thousands of years from now.


> Solar and wind power will help, but it is not a complete solution.

It won\'t be if you don\'t build it or work to make it a solution.

It\'s kind of like carving into a hillside to build a home and having to dispose of the waste slag by dumping it in your side yard, not knowing for sure what impact that will have in 20, 40 or 60 years from now. That slag looks stable, but what happens if you get a very unusual rain storm that doesn\'t move for a week or two (think Houston, TX), combined with an earth quake. That pile of slag might impact your children who would be living in the house by then.


(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.

The accidents are a real possibility, but not the biggest danger. But I was surprised to learn just how probable an accident is. Using the numbers the US comes up with for reactor breech, JUST FROM EARTHQUAKES, factor 100 reactors, 1 in 70,000 chance per year (some are worse, much worse, the action limit is 1 in 15,000 I believe) and a 70 year lifetime of the reactor, you get around a 1 in 10 chance of a core breach with the present number of reactors. 1 in 10 is not so small really. Would you play Russian roulette with a 10 shooter? Maybe a 100 shooter, or a 1,000 shooter, but a 10 shot revolver? I think not! And that is ONLY from earthquakes!


I find your numbers hard to believe - a 1 in 10 chance per year of an
earthquake-induced reactor breach in the USA would mean a 98.5% chance
over 40 years.

You need to learn to read better. Try again and this time focus on the math.

Reactor designs have become safer - no one is suggesting building 1970\'s
style reactors. It is entirely possible to build nuclear power stations
that are safe even in the face of significant earthquakes.

Every reactor in the US is evaluated on IT\'S risk, not a generic number based on something from the 70\'s. These numbers were all updated a few years ago, which is one of the reasons why Indian Point was shut down. I think it was deemed right on the limit of requiring action. I expect the numbers were fudged a bit. What are the chances it would fall exactly on the limit?

To give you an idea of the not accounted for risk of many reactors, Indian Point was reevaluated, \"The study calculates a 1.5 percent chance that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake could occur within the next 50 years.\" It was built to withstand a 6.1 earthquake. The risk of reactor core damage for Indian Point 3 was calculated to be 1:10,000.

We live with a certain degree of risk all the time. We could be hit be
a dinosaur-killing meteor, or a gamma ray burst. The Yellowstone
supervolcano could go off. An Ebola pandemic could break out.

Complete cop out of the issue. Pathetic!

Yes, nuclear power stations - even Thorium molten salt reactors - pose a
risk. So do hydroelectric dams, and even wind farms. Yes, there
unknown long-term impacts - do /you/ know the environmental impact that
decaying windmills will have over the next thousand years?

More copping out and diversion. I guess I had forgotten how bad you are at discussing a topic where you don\'t have facts to support your emotionally based opinion.

The one thing we know for sure, is that massive global upheaval from
climate change is Russian roulette with a single-shot gun if things
don\'t change. The other thing we know is that covering the world in
windmills will not fix it.

I agree on the Russian roulette, but your conclusion about wind power is fallacious.

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.

Really? That sounds very inefficient to me. How about an energy source that is cheap enough, that it can be over built by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4 and still supply all the energy required when it drops to a quarter of the needed output? Add some storage and it\'s all good!


Have you heard of a little thing called the law of conservation of
energy? Not only can energy not be created from nothing, it cannot be
destroyed into nothing. A major challenge with windmills and solar
power is that they sometimes produce too much power than can easily be
used or transported. Overgeneration can lead to blackouts and other
problems just as much as undergeneration. Continuous overproduction
simply cannot work - what do you intend to do with all that extra energy?

What???!!! How does over generation produce blackouts? Windmills and solar can always be turned off. Yeah, feather the blades of the wind turbine. Simply turn off the inverter for the solar panels. You\'re not an engineer, are you?

Yes, storage is a big part of the solution - from short-term storage to
long-term storage. But you need a /massive/ amount of storage to
support wind and solar power in places where there can be big variations
in the weather - like Europe. Batteries can even out the differences in
supply and demand over a day, but what are you going to do if there is
little wind for two weeks?

I thought had lots of hydro? Why can\'t batteries supply power for a week or two? Will you lose both solar and wind power for two weeks? Do you actually know anything about this? I expect you two week number is pure speculation. It\'s like when people who don\'t own BEVs talk about how hard they are to charge. They make up scenarios. The people who drive BEVs, well, they just drive them without a problem.

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.

If you are going to wish for hydroelectric, then why not wish for low cost batteries?

That would be great too. But you\'d need an absurd amount of batteries
to support wind and solar power without a stable base supply. (Note
that solar power in a desert might be considered stable enough, as could
wind that is far enough off-shore and high enough in the air.)
Hydroelectric does not react as fast as batteries, and two-way pumped
storage is not as efficient, but it holds a lot more quantity.

You are the one doing the wishing. I\'m just suggesting a better avenue for your wishing.

It\'s no different. France has managed to build enough hydro and pumped hydro to supply 30% of their needs. I wonder why their fluctuations are so much lower than the rest of the world?

France has lots of stable continuous nuclear power, and hydroelectric
that can be controlled reasonably quickly - that\'s a good combination.

Yes, it was. But now they seem to have significant problems trying to increase their nuclear base. Can they extend their hydropower further? Nuclear is not useful without the hydropower, or pumped hydro, or batteries.

In the US we can\'t even use nuclear for 50% of our peak demand. So nuclear is not a solution unless, you add storage. That\'s essentially what hydro is, the water coming into the lake is stored until needed, because there typically is not enough of it to provide power all the time.

Yes. Different types of power generation have different characteristics
- some are more efficient, some more polluting, some require more area,
some require particular geographic or geologic features, some are easily
modulated, and so on. Nuclear is stable - you get constant output
regardless of the weather or other factors, but it takes a very long
time to raise or lower the output. Hydroelectric is at the other end -
when you have predictable changes (such as daily fluctuations) most
hydroelectric plants can ramp up or down in about 15 minutes or so.
(The fastest are under a minute.)

Why are you posting this? We all know that. Are you just trying to sound knowledgeable?

Pumped hydro is literally stored energy from other sources. Or you use batteries or other means of storage. But it needs to be pointed out that a steady base supply has the same poor match to variable demand as intermittent sources.


I agree - that is what I said. You can\'t run a grid on nuclear power
alone. You can\'t run it on hydroelectric alone (not even Norway has
enough mountains, rain and dammed up water for its needs any more). You
certainly can\'t run it on wind or solar power that generates randomly
and independently of demand. You need a combination, including storage.

Wider grid connections are also a major part of this - if you cover
enough of the world in your grid, it\'s likely that it is sunny or windy
/somewhere/, and a lot of your fluctuations even out in comparison to
the total load.

(Note that pumped hydroelectric requires quite specific geographical
features to work well, and the charge/discharge efficiency is low. It
is unlikely that new pumped hydroelectric storage will be used in the
future - batteries are more efficient.)

Define \"low\" efficiency. My understanding is it is very efficient (without defining \"very\").

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.

Poisonous??? You propose nuclear, then knock vanadium flow batteries because of poisons? WTF!!!


Yes, vanadium is poisonous. How exactly do you think the radioactivity
and chemical poisonous of nuclear fuels and waste make vanadium
non-poisonous? All I said was that flow batteries using a less
expensive and less poisonous liquid would be better.

Yes, in the context of contrasting it with nuclear power!!! Many aspects of nuclear are both poisonous and radioactive. The best of both worlds!

--

Rick C.

--+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 10:28:08 AM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:

On 21/04/2022 14:35, Ricky wrote:
On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 2:16:04 AM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 19:28, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

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.
Do you ever get surprised when people call you a condescending twat?
Are you really trying to tell me the most basic geographical facts about
the country I live in?

This is the sort of crap that is common in this group, even if not commonly from you. You have no reason to be blatantly insulting like that. That is more the domain of Phil A or others. Yes, he is pointing out issues that apply to your country because that is the country being discusses. Are you PO\'d that he isn\'t throwing in the towel and say, \"Geez David, you are right!\"? Because you\'re not.

After trying to tell me that Norway gets as much sun power as Australia
and solar panels should be as good here as they are there, he then tries
to explain to me where the Arctic Circle goes in this country.

Because you seemed to be unaware. He was pointing out that most of the country (and most of the people) is where sun does shine and solar cells *are* still effective. If you can\'t handle a simple conversation...

If you aren\'t interested in discussing the facts, why are you here? Why are you in this conversation? If the facts are not correct, explain why. It\'s that simple.
I\'m fine with discussing facts - and correcting people, or being
corrected myself, as need be. And I\'m fine with people having different
opinions or thoughts.

But I\'m not keen on being patronised, and having someone on the other
side of the world try to tell me what things are like /here/ - right
down to simple clear facts.

See! You are being far too emotional to discuss this rationally.

Maybe I used uglier wording than was called for. Maybe \"twat\" sounds
worse to you (and possibly Bill) than it does to a Brit - it really is
not a strong term at all (and nothing even remotely in Phil A\'s class).
Maybe I have been hanging around this group too long and lowered my
standards towards the mean.

This group never has been a good place for calm and reflected
conversations. Even the most rational and knowledgeable posters here
regularly fail to listen to others in their eagerness to make their own
points - willingness to learn is close to zero, while frustration is high..

I come and go in this group - maybe it\'s time to leave for a while.
Experience shows that pretty much the same people will be saying pretty
much the same things next time I rejoin.

Or you could just cool your jets. But you are right about the scenery not changing here. There are no seasons.

--

Rick C.

--++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 10:35:49 PM UTC+10, Ricky wrote:

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 2:16:04 AM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 19:28, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
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>

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.
Do you ever get surprised when people call you a condescending twat?
Are you really trying to tell me the most basic geographical facts about
the country I live in?

David didn\'t seem to have digested their implications as well as he might have.

This is the sort of crap that is common in this group, even if not commonly from you. You have no reason to be blatantly insulting like that.
That is more the domain of Phil A or others. Yes, he is pointing out issues that apply to your country because that is the country being discusses. Are you PO\'d that he isn\'t throwing in the towel and say, \"Geez David, you are right!\"? Because you\'re not.

If you aren\'t interested in discussing the facts, why are you here? Why are you in this conversation? If the facts are not correct, explain why. It\'s that simple.

It is not uncommon for Bill to be in denial of some fact. He may pull up some obscure paper that doesn\'t actually say what he claims it says.

That\'s Flyguy. I\'m fairly sure I don\'t. When I do get stuff wrong I do admit it, but it doesn\'t happen all that often. Lot\'s of people are rather too attached to their own ideas of what constitutes a \"fact\".

When he says things that aren\'t fact, you can call him on it. But calling him a twat just shows you have no argument and you have gotten exposed and are pissed about it (Phil A\'s main mode of living).

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.

Maybe you talked to them, or perhaps wrote a covering letter. That could have put them off.

Yes, doubling down! A good move in blackjack, but not so much in the twat domain.

The cover letter did mention that I was 78 at the time, and it does seem to put people off. I don\'t see any point in trying to hide it.

-
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Friday, April 22, 2022 at 12:28:08 AM UTC+10, David Brown wrote:

On 21/04/2022 14:35, Ricky wrote:
On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 2:16:04 AM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:
On 20/04/2022 19:28, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

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.
Do you ever get surprised when people call you a condescending twat?
Are you really trying to tell me the most basic geographical facts about
the country I live in?

This is the sort of crap that is common in this group, even if not commonly from you. You have no reason to be blatantly insulting like that. That is more the domain of Phil A or others. Yes, he is pointing out issues that apply to your country because that is the country being discusses. Are you PO\'d that he isn\'t throwing in the towel and say, \"Geez David, you are right!\"? Because you\'re not.

After trying to tell me that Norway gets as much sun power as Australia
and solar panels should be as good here as they are there, he then tries
to explain to me where the Arctic Circle goes in this country.

I didn\'t tell you that Norway gets as much sun power as Australia. For a start Noway has 5% of the area of Australia, and that area is tilted further away from incoming solar radiation.

You don\'t cover the whole country with solar panels to collect solar power - you put up enough to generate the power you need, and you tilt them so the sunlight hits them more or less square on. If you put them up right each solar panel will generate much the same amount of power - averaged over the year - in Norway or Australia, but you\'ve got to work harder to get that result in Norway. Sticking them well up the sunny side of steep hills isn\'t as easy as laying down solar panels in a flat field

If you aren\'t interested in discussing the facts, why are you here? Why are you in this conversation? If the facts are not correct, explain why. It\'s that simple.

I\'m fine with discussing facts - and correcting people, or being
corrected myself, as need be. And I\'m fine with people having different
opinions or thoughts.

Though not as fine as you like to think.

But I\'m not keen on being patronised, and having someone on the other
side of the world try to tell me what things are like /here/ - right
down to simple clear facts.

Sadly, you got \"your simple clear facts\" slightly wrong, because you didn\'t think hard enough about what you were saying.

Maybe I used uglier wording than was called for. Maybe \"twat\" sounds
worse to you (and possibly Bill) than it does to a Brit - it really is
not a strong term at all (and nothing even remotely in Phil A\'s class).
Maybe I have been hanging around this group too long and lowered my
standards towards the mean.

\"Twat\" is pretty rude. I worked in the UK for 22 years, and used the word from time to time.

This group never has been a good place for calm and reflective
conversations. Even the most rational and knowledgeable posters here
regularly fail to listen to others in their eagerness to make their own
points - willingness to learn is close to zero, while frustration is high..

I come and go in this group - maybe it\'s time to leave for a while.
Experience shows that pretty much the same people will be saying pretty
much the same things next time I rejoin.

There is useful content here, but not a lot. A certain amount of ritualised squabbling gives people something to do until an interesting technical question shows up.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney