Neon John wrote:
On Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:16:29 +0000, Peter Scott
wrote:
How about opening a fitness centre and connecting all the machines to
generators, you could also charge the users to generate electricity for you,
However, I don't know what the pay back period on your capital would be? or
even how many people you would need to generate an useful amount of power.?
Don
I believe that an athlete running flat out generates about 300 watt.
Can't do that for long either. That was the problem with man-powered
flight. It was keeping up enough power to overcome the drag for long enough.
So someone running at say 15 kph on a non-powered treadmill for an hour
would generate no more than 0.3kWh of energy. Even if conversion was
100% that's only about 3p worth of electricity.
good analysis, Peter.
this whole thread illustrates the problem we nukes face. People just don't
understand the magnitude of the energy problem. A nuclear plant isn't that
large - many factories are larger. It can't make that much power, can it?
Well, as a matter of fact, it can. A typical unit generates 1,000 megawatts.
A few less, a few more and many are being uprated during outage and retrofit
but 1000 is a good number. Day in, day out, 24/7 for 18 months or more at a
time between refuelings.
Now consider Hoover Dam
http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html
It's nameplate rating is 2,080 megawatts but with a hydro plant, that's
deceptive. It can make that much power only when a specified amount of water
is available. It usually isn't. I couldn't conveniently find the AVERAGE
yearly output of Hoover dam but even if we assume that it can make its
nameplate rating all year long, that's equivalent to roughly one single two
unit nuclear plant.
There's only one Hoover dam. We can plop down nukes pretty much wherever we
want 'em.
Since this is alt.energy.home-power, let's look at one of the more often
mentioned alternatives - wind power. A typical utility wind turbine has a
nameplate rating of from 1 to 5 megawatts. That means that with everything
optimum - wind blowing at the design speed, etc, it would take from 200 to
1000 such turbines to equal ONE NUCLEAR UNIT. Remember that most plants have
two units in the US and at least one (Browns Ferry) has three.
Newer windmills are better than that. But the so are newer nuclear sets.
I make it about 1000 windmills = one nuclear station. To be RELIABLE
(see below)
According to the utility trade magazines I get, the availability factor for
wind farms is lousy - typically around 50%. That is, the farm is making, on
average, only half its nameplate rating. The causes are a combination of
(mostly) not enough wind and (partially) low equipment reliability. Lowest
bidder and all that.
The load average of large European windmills is 30%. Thats average.
Sadly the means to worst case on any given set of days, is far far worse.
Without storage or backup I estimated that a functional wind solution
requires between a 6 and 10 times overcapacity of windmills and wire
interconnects over a very large geographical area.
I.e at lest 6-10 times more wire - copper and/or aluminium - than a nice
steady nuclear station.
Windmills may be efficient in terms of cost of the actual energy, but in
every other sense..use of land area, use of materials - they are a
fecking nightmare once you look at the OVERALL picture. Not just 'how
much it costs to generate electricity from this windmill ASSUMING IT IS
ALWAYS WANTED, ALL OF IT, AND SOMEONE ELSE IS PAYING TO MAKE IT WHEN I
CANT'.
You are in the nuke indistry.. calculate for me how many watts per
square meter of land a nuclear set produces ?
The very BEST 'renewable' energy is a solar furnace in a desert, at
maybe 15W/sq meter of land. Everything else is in the 0.1-5W/sq meter
sort of area.
The UK runs on about 10% of the energy that actually falls on the land
surface of it..mutatis mutandis, that means that around 20% of the total
land area of Britain would need to be covered in 'renewable power'
stations to generate the current needs of the population. And whilst we
might be able to do on maybe half what we burn now, we cant do on 10% of it.
The sheer construction size of the renewable solutions exceeds the
amount of houses roads railway factories and airports that currently
exist by a comfortable margin. And with all this power being relatively
unreliable, you need a massive grid to balance it.
The ultimate conclusion of the renewable energy lobby would be a country
looking like a giant industrial landscape, with windmills, solar panels,
and electricity pylons criss-crossing it at 100% density, and the whole
coast surrounded by flapping windmills covering all the coastal waters.
whereas 100 nuclear power stations each the size of a medium factory
dotted round the country would do a far far cheaper job with far far
less environmental impact.
The money wasted on wind and solar "alternatives" amount to little more than a
sad joke to us nukes. And to tax- and rate-payers who have a clue.
John
--
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.neon-john.com
http://www.johndearmond.com -- best little blog on the net!
Tellico Plains, Occupied TN
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