Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

Oh look tidal power - which does not work - see posts above:

List (Oh look no American ones - why not I wonder?):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tidal_power_stations

The French story. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_Tidal_Power_Station

My favourite bit. ?

"In spite of the high development cost of the project, the costs have now been recovered, and electricity production costs are lower than that of nuclear power generation (1.8c per kWh, versus 2.5c per kWh for nuclear)."

You conveniently left something out. Here, I'll highlight it for you.

Screen-shot-2011-03-17-at-12_39_55-AM.jpg


Can you generate electricity from tidal motion? Yes. But to date, every single tidal energy project that I am aware of has run afoul of issues such as maintenance and replacement of the apparatus as needed running the price up beyond any savings or profit the unit would generate. PG&E in California wanted to construct one just like the Rance installation about fifteen years ago, but the operating numbers didn't work. So, to date, the answer to "can you generate electricity from tidal motion economically" has been "no". And remains no. And therefore it doesn't work as a commercial source of power. Need I remind you that France's electrical generation is all nationalized, with *everything* that implies? Including lack of accountability? They're pushing 'reforms' now, but still...

There are some new and radical tidal projects being tried in Maine and San Francisco (and unless it got swept away in the recent tsunami, Japan) among other places, but until and unless those prove out, the answer is still no. By the way, we've been trying tidal for over a century now, so it's not a new idea in America, and it's not 'the eeeeeeeevil nuclear lobby that blocked it' all these years. Especially not in California, where they tore down a brand new nuclear reactor in about the same time frame and the nuclear industry has next to zero influence.

You would also think that rabidly anti-nuke countries (or countries that are not now and will likely never be allowed nuclear power plants) that have extensive ocean coast line would be all over tidal power tech if it was even vaguely economically sensible, or that more would have been built in those countries that have them.

As it is, there are... Six. Total. Seven if you include the one in South Korea that's been delayed and may never be finished.

Perhaps someday tidal will make economic sense, but until some of the newer concepts prove out (which I have my doubts), the answer is 'no it doesn't work.'
 
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OK - no citation. I'll work on that for you. NB See Edit:

What I am surprised about is that the obvious question has not been asked - you may be correct in that there are issues with tidal but the amount invested to fix the issues is miniscule compared with the headlong grasp for Nuclear. I find this completely insane. We know we can build (Well the French can, they did not muck about and built loads) nuclear powerstations and if and when they fail (OK not often happens but they do) the consequences are out of all proportion wrt the benefits obtained.

At one time it was a way to generate weapons grade material so governments were happy to stump up the money and pay the costs to obtain the materials associated with weapons. I should point out that Her Majesty's Government have a double whammy of thickies in charge (they do know which knife and fork to use and to call a toilet a Lavatory but that is about the limit of their brain power) and horrible secrecy concerned with hiding incompetence.

Another problem is that this is a invitation for the "authorities" to lie using the argument "we must not panic the populace", and they will (Ukanian government are famous for it) and have done in the past.

The insurance industry will not write the liability business - so if you have a plant you can not get insurance on you know that there is something very wrong, the government carries the liability.

Finally the French tidal RACE plant I think has worked pretty well since it was built in the 1960s and as I understand it it should last about 200 years. The costs have now been met so its all profit for the next 140 years. That is an investment I think is well worth the investment.

See the list of countries looking at the technology there are two countries that do stand out and they are, of course, Korea and China - Hmmmm. So why has not America tried, going to be left behind again?

Edit/
1. Costs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Look at the US figures.

2. Insurance (Limit of liability)
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html

3. The economics issues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants

OK interweb stuff but largely backs up the information I have understood. The one strange entry is in item 1. above compare US and UK entries, how come it is so cheap in the UK and just mid priced in the US - something wrong there. I suspect the Ukanian government cooking the books actually, I trust the US over Ukania in these respects every time.
 
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America can get cheaper power from other sources at the moment. That's really it. Different countries have different resources available to them. America has a lot of coal, gas, sun, and wind in the middle. Water in the west. etc. They will build generation that they can get most cheaply. That is all Spectre is arguing.

Oh and the cost of generating the electricity is only a part of the cost. There are transmission and distribution costs as well.
 
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Yes I think you are correct - it is fine for us an Island surrounded by water, sitting on huge deposits of coal some fool decided to stop mining in the 1980s for ideological reasons (pah Mrs Thatcher - you did not always get it right - cough Poll Tax). We have huge tides as Oceanic water is squeezed between land masses, and a normally constant wind.
It did occur to me that the US does have quite a bit of coastline that they do not seem to be exploiting as far as I can see - but as you say they can make and distribute power more cheaply in other ways then why invest? I still find it interesting that Korea is investing heavily - I bet they do solve the problems SPECTRE alluded to and we will be buying their technology in the future.

Anyhoo. ...
Obama is going to Offaly in the Irish Republic to celebrate his Irish Roots. (NB WTF the man is black?) This sort of stuff pisses me right off, every bugger in America goes back to their old country (Which it seems to me is always Italy or Ireland - do not Americans come from somewhere else too?).
So is it some sort of way of getting a favour from the administration without actually doing anything what so ever tangible for the US by way of exchange?
 
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America can get cheaper power from other sources at the moment. That's really it. Different countries have different resources available to them. America has a lot of coal, gas, sun, and wind in the middle. Water in the west. etc. They will build generation that they can get most cheaply. That is all Spectre is arguing.

Oh and the cost of generating the electricity is only a part of the cost. There are transmission and distribution costs as well.

Spectre and all other pro nuclear peeps always look past the cost that is the extended storage of the waste that is not included in the cost of production. Most of that in the USA is paid for by the government directly or through subsidies that add drasticly to the cost per kw/h. It used to be the US was more then willing to pay this as it was simply a cost to get newer and better weapons. This is not the case anymore, there are tons of wepons grade material that is being removed from old weapons that is just sitting there. Congress has stalled the funding to build Yuka Mountain, so where do we store this stuff for the next few hundred thousand years? So how cheap is nuclear power now?
 
Spectre and all other pro nuclear peeps always look past the cost that is the extended storage of the waste that is not included in the cost of production. Most of that in the USA is paid for by the government directly or through subsidies that add drasticly to the cost per kw/h. It used to be the US was more then willing to pay this as it was simply a cost to get newer and better weapons. This is not the case anymore, there are tons of wepons grade material that is being removed from old weapons that is just sitting there. Congress has stalled the funding to build Yuka Mountain, so where do we store this stuff for the next few hundred thousand years? So how cheap is nuclear power now?

There are designs for new types of reactor that would use current nuclear waste as the fuel.
 
And how much waste does that leave, then?
 
And where do we store it for a few hundred thousand years?
 
Send it here:

Office of the Speaker
H-232 The Capitol
Washington, DC 20515
 
And where do we store it for a few hundred thousand years?

From wikipedia:

"Nuclear waste that lasts decades instead of millennia"

Even if the waste lasts for 100 times that it would be better. It is proved that humans can build something that lasts 2000-3000 years.
 
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Generation IV reactors (Gen IV) are a set of theoretical nuclear reactor designs currently being researched. Most of these designs are generally not expected to be available for commercial construction before 2030, with the exception of a version of the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) called the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). The NGNP is to be completed by 2021.

These are quite a ways off, and while they could consume what is currently considered waste, there are still problems with converting the fuels and protecting the waste during that process.
 
Report: 13 Illegal Immigrants Apprehended Wearing U.S. Marine Uniforms
By Joshua Rhett Miller
Published March 22, 2011

fficials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection are investigating a report that 13 illegal immigrants who were disguised as U.S. Marines were apprehended in a fake military van last week.

Clad in U.S. Marine uniforms, the illegal immigrants were apprehended at the Campo Border Patrol Westbound I-8 checkpoint at 11 p.m. on March 14 near Pine Valley, Calif., according to information received by California's El Centro Border Intelligence Center.

After the suspicious white van was subjected to secondary inspection, it was determined that the driver of the vehicle and its front seat passenger were U.S. citizens who were attempting to smuggle 13 illegal immigrants into the United States. All of the vehicle's occupants wore U.S. Marine uniforms, reportedly emblazoned with the name "Perez."

The van used in the smuggling attempt, according to the report, was a privately owned vehicle registered out of Yucca Valley, Calif., and was bearing stolen government plates that had been defaced. The center digit -- 0 -- was altered to read as an 8. Further research through multiple government agencies determined that the plate belonged to a one-ton cargo van registered to the U.S. Marine Corps.

"Agents are reminded to remain vigilant for new smuggling trends," the report concludes.

CBP spokesman Michael Friel told FoxNews.com that the agency was investigating the report. A call seeking comment from Department of Defense officials was not immediately returned.

Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Steven Pitts, a spokesman for CBP's San Diego sector, confirmed to Homeland Security Today "that [the apprehensions] did occur" and that the 11 undocumented aliens had been processed for deportation.

A total of three U.S. citizens were processed on "alien smuggling charges," Pitts told the website. The original report, however, cited two U.S. citizens.

Pitts told the website that the San Diego Naval Criminal Investigative Service's Southwest Field Office has taken the lead in investigating the incident. An investigation is ongoing, Pitts said, adding that federal charges related to the allegedly stolen vehicle could be added later.

After stopping the van, CBP agents determined that none of the van's occupants possessed military identification cards and each U.S. Marine uniform bore the name "Perez," Homeland Security Today reports.

The van entered into the United States via Mexicali, Mexico, and proceeded to Calexico, Calif., where the U.S. Marine uniforms were donned, according to Homeland Security Today.

The Campo Border Station was constructed in June 2008 and is located roughly 28 miles east of San Diego Sector Headquarters in rural East San Diego County. It is responsible for securing approximately 13.1 linear miles of the U.S.-Mexico border and 417 square miles of surrounding territory. An estimated 7,000 vehicles pass through its two checkpoints daily, according to its website.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/22/report-13-illegal-immigrants-apprehended-marine-uniforms/

http://img856.imageshack.**/img856/3699/fakemarines6408208981.jpg
 
Atomised

Posted on March 16, 2011 by George

The Fukushima crisis should not spell the end of nuclear power.

By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian?s website, 16th March 2011

The nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan is bad enough; the nuclear disaster unfolding in China could be even worse. ?What disaster??, you ask. The decision today by the Chinese government to suspend approval of new atomic power plants. If this suspension were to become permanent, the power those plants would have produced is likely to be replaced by burning coal. While nuclear causes calamities when it goes wrong, coal causes calamities when it goes right, and coal goes right a lot more often than nuclear goes wrong. The only safe coal-fired plant is one which has broken down past the point of repair.

Before I go any further, and I?m misinterpreted for the thousandth time, let me spell out once again what my position is. I have not gone nuclear. But, as long as the following four conditions are met, I will no longer oppose atomic energy.

1. Its total emissions ? from mine to dump ? are taken into account, and demonstrate that it is a genuinely low-carbon option.

2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried.

3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay.

4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes.

To these I?ll belatedly add a fifth, which should have been there all along: no plants should be built in fault zones, on tsunami-prone coasts, on eroding seashores or those likely to be inundated before the plant has been decommissioned or any other places which are geologically unsafe. This should have been so obvious that it didn?t need spelling out. But we discover, yet again, that the blindingly obvious is no guarantee that a policy won?t be adopted.

I despise and fear the nuclear industry as much as any other green: all experience hath shown that, in most countries, the companies running it are a corner-cutting bunch of scumbags, whose business originated as a by-product of nuclear weapons manufacture. But, sound as the roots of the anti-nuclear movement are, we cannot allow historical sentiment to shield us from the bigger picture. Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.

Coal, the most carbon-dense of fossil fuels, is the primary driver of manmade climate change. If its combustion is not curtailed, it could kill millions of times more people than nuclear power plants have done so far. Yes, I really do mean millions. The Chernobyl meltdown was hideous and traumatic. The official death toll so far appears to be 43: 28 workers in the initial few months and 15 civilians by 2005. Totally unacceptable, of course; but a tiny fraction of the deaths for which climate change ? through its damage to the food supply, its contribution to the spread of infectious diseases and its degradation of the quality of life for many of the world?s poorest people ? is likely to be responsible.

Coal also causes plenty of other environmental damage, far worse than the side-effects of nuclear power production: from mountaintop removal to acid rain and heavy metal pollution. An article in Scientific American points out that the fly ash produced by a coal-burning power plant

?carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.?

Of course it?s not a straight fight between coal and nuclear. There are plenty of other ways of producing electricity, and I continue to place appropriate renewables above nuclear power in my list of priorities. We must also make all possible efforts to reduce consumption. But we?ll still need to generate electricity, and not all renewable sources are appropriate everywhere. While producing solar power makes perfect sense in North Africa, in the UK, by comparison to both wind and nuclear, it?s a waste of money and resources. Abandoning nuclear power as an option narrows our choices just when we need to be thinking as broadly as possible.

Several writers for the Guardian have made what I believe is an unjustifiable leap. A disaster has occurred in a plant that was appallingly sited in an earthquake zone; therefore, they argue, all nuclear power programmes should be abandoned everywhere. It looks to me as if they are jumping on this disaster as support for a pre-existing position they hold for other reasons. Were we to follow their advice, we would rule out a low-carbon source of energy, which could help us tackle the gravest threat the world now faces. That does neither the people nor the places of the world any favours.

www.monbiot.com

Going Critical

Posted on March 21, 2011 by George

How the Fukushima disaster taught me to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd March 2011

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting(1). Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com(2). It shows that the average total dose from the Three-Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I?m not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn?t work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It?s not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren?t popular either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for both storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration ? 50 or 70% perhaps? ? renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nukes, while beyond that point, nukes have smaller impacts than renewables.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impacts on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week(3). What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources(4,5). It?s hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales; it?s not much use in Birmingham.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways ? not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain: wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad as well as most seatrout and salmon(6).

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-Century equivalent of today?s biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his new book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11 million tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11 million acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated(7).

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25 million tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption(8)) and nothing else(9). Even with a much lower population than today?s, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production ? decentralised, based on the products of the land ? is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power(10,11). Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast(12).

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/14/nuclearpower-energy

2. http://xkcd.com/radiation/

3. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/03/16/atomised/

4. http://www.monbiot.com/2010/03/01/a-great-green-rip-off/

5. http://www.monbiot.com/2010/03/12/the-german-disease/

6. Callum Roberts, 2007. The Unnatural History of the Sea. Gaia Thinking, London.

7. EA Wrigley, 2010. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, pages 37 and 39. Cambridge University Press.

8. The UK steel requirement in 2009 was 15.6m tonnes. http://www.eef.org.uk/uksteel/About-the-industry/Steel-facts/Steel-markets-UK.htm

9. EA Wrigley, as above, pages 16 and 17.

10. In the case of radioactive pollution, the 100 times is not figurative: according to Scientific American, the fly ash produced by a coal-burning power plant ?carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

11. Mark Lynas has just produced his first estimates for the amount of extra carbon dioxide which could be released as a result of the international reaction to the Fukushima crisis. http://www.marklynas.org/2011/03/176/

12. See http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/

I like his thinking here.
 
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It is not over yet, maybe you should check his thoughts on the subject in a year.
 
Record Companies Seeking 75 Trillion in damages from Lime Wire

Does $75 trillion even exist? The thirteen record companies that are suing file-sharing company Lime Wire for copyright infringement certainly thought so. When they won a summary judgment ruling last May they demanded damages that could reach this mind-boggling amount, which is more than five times the national debt.

Manhattan federal district court judge Kimba Wood, however, saw things differently. She labeled the record companies' damages request "absurd" and contrary to copyright laws in a 14-page opinion.

The record companies, which had demanded damages ranging from $400 billion to $75 trillion, had argued that Section 504(c)(1) of the Copyright Act provided for damages for each instance of infringement where two or more parties were liable. For a popular site like Lime Wire, which had thousands of users and millions of downloads, Wood held that the damage award would be staggering under this interpretation. "If plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work, defendants' damages could reach into the trillions," she wrote. "As defendants note, plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is 'more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877.'"

While Wood conceded that the question of statutory interpretation was "an especially close question," she concluded that damages should be limited to one damage award per work.

"We were pleased that the judge followed both the law and the logic in reaching the conclusion that she did," said Lime Wire's attorney, Joseph Baio of Willkie Farr & Gallagher. "As the judge said in her opinion, when the copyright law was initiated, legislatures couldn't possibly conceive of what the world would become with the internet. As such, you couldn't use legislative history. Instead, the overarching issue is reasonableness in order to avoid absurd and possibly unconstitutional outcome." Baio, who is scheduled to represent Lime Wire when the damages trial begins on May 2, joked that the money that the record companies sought from his client would be better spent on paying for health care or wiping out the national debt.

Glenn Pomerantz of Munger, Tolles & Olson, who represented 13 record company plaintiffs, did not return requests for comment.

This article first appeared on The Am Law Litigation Daily blog on AmericanLawyer.com.

Source

So, they want more money than the entire global GDP?

:lol::lol::lol:
 
So, they want more money than the entire global GDP?

:lol::lol::lol:

Maybe if they manage to capture the whole global GDP they imagine that they'll be able to control what they want to control... but since they can't shut down the Internet... to paraphrase Clarkson:

If you're watching this at the RIAA, :roflmao::roflmao:
 
This is the record industry.....
 
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