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#131
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
Pat Flannery wrote:
:They had an article in Newsweek- oil sands generate oil at $20 to $30 er barrel. And there is a HUGE oil sands operation up in Canada. It's expanding hugely, much to the chagrin of Canadian greens, because all by itself it imperils Canada's adherence to Kyoto. We buy most of the output. -- "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw |
#132
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
Fred J. McCall wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote: :They had an article in Newsweek- oil sands generate oil at $20 to $30 er barrel. And there is a HUGE oil sands operation up in Canada. Several, in fact, all located just north of Fort McMurray. (I've done some consulting for one of them.) It takes a fair amount of energy (and water!) to liberate the tar from the sand, then add hydrogen to produce light crude. There is some talk about building a nuclear reactor to supply the required power rather than rely on ATCO. -- Dave Michelson |
#133
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
Henry Spencer wrote: In article .com, Dave O'Neill wrote: Depends on the "office building", but if you consider the average home, even in the relatively sun starved UK, covering the roof in PV cells should make a typcial home a nett exporter of electricity. The problem is currently it doesn't make economic sense for the individual because energy is still so cheap. The other problem is that the storage systems needed to hang onto that energy until it's needed cost even more than the PV cells. Which is why the total set up is circa £20K. There is a good argument for a subsidised system part funded for all new builds though. Of course, the storage cells will need to be renewed too. Dave |
#134
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
In sci.space.policy Henry Spencer wrote:
In article .com, Hyper wrote: ...and the limits imposed on fission by uranium supply. Isn't the problem of supply obviated by using breeder reactors? If you build the breeder reactors, and the corresponding reprocessing plants; there are non-trivial political obstacles to doing so, not to mention some remaining technical issues with existing breeder designs. After India builds a dozen - and there are good reasons to think they will - it will be much less of a problem. Give it a couple of decades. [snip] a long-term energy infrastructure on. Breeding -- preferably U-233 from thorium rather than Pu-239 from U-238 -- would fix that, but it means restarting breeder-reactor technology work quickly, and then building a lot of breeder reactors and reprocessing plants in a hurry. A lot of that demand is in places that have far more easier access to thorium than uranium. -- Sander +++ Out of cheese error +++ |
#135
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
In sci.space.policy Henry Spencer wrote:
For example, I see no mention of the problem of keeping the collection system free of barnacles and other sea life, a problem that's never been fully solved even for ships. Bear in mind that we're talking about doing chemical processing on an enormous scale. To get 30 TW-yr worth of U-235 per year, assuming complete recovery of U-235 from natural uranium, would require complete extraction of the uranium content of about a cubic kilometer of seawater per *minute*. I'm not aware of any chemical process -- not even purification of drinking water -- which has ever been done on anything like that scale. The trick is growing the right kind of sponge as the filtration medium ;-) -- Sander +++ Out of cheese error +++ |
#136
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
Sander Vesik wrote:
After India builds a dozen - and there are good reasons to think they will - it will be much less of a problem. Give it a couple of decades. I seriously doubt this will happen soon. Breeding has very serious economic problems. Reprocessing is expensive, fabricating fuel elements containing Pu or 233U is expensive (due to the high alpha activity, particularly of the latter if it is contaminated with 232U), and ordinary uranium is still comparatively cheap. You *might* see thorium used to extend enriched uranium in once-through fuel cycles, since that avoids reprocessing. Paul |
#137
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
The point is, of course, that even the most expensive viable
alternative power source is orders of magnitude cheaper than designing, testing, building, and maintaining structures in space. |
#138
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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
On 16 May 2006 04:53:53 -0700, wrote:
Lacking anything valid to say, you just hurl insults. That kind of speaks for itself. ....His inability to post more than two-line retorts speaks volumes as well. OM -- ]=====================================[ ] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [ ] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [ ] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [ ]=====================================[ |
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