[[And the reason X-Rays have not made people comfortable with radiation is that they drop this big, heavy lead shield on you before most X-Rays. That has quite a psychological effect. It did for me as a kid with dental X-Rays. Fortunately, I got older and read these things called science books…]]

Well, tell the nurse to leave the lead shield off you the next few times. Your superior knowledge of radiation should protect your gonads from the 20 millirems per shot of a medical X-ray.

Well, I’m sorry, Barton, but I can’t live my life wondering how terrorists can misuse anything and everything I do. That way lies madness, mind killing fear and Republicanism.

Besides, as others already said, power plants are not a great place to get bomb materials anyway, so it’s moot.

“Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency”

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2749522920080228?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews&rpc=22&sp=true

I doubt that wind will ever be more than a niche solution because on the vast majority of places the wind is just to fickle to rely on.
Not being anti wind but just be practical here and yes I know they have the advantage of not irradiating everyone.

That ought to end this string of posts!

if you think that wind turbines can be dismissed in such a short post and with information that you yourself say you heard “7 years ago”, then you may have received some brain damage from reading too many creationist sites.

Get thee to a homeopath, they can treat such a problem with seaweed and honey.

I personally love wind turbines and think that they might just save this planet.

just admit it, you made the post just so that you could show that video.

[[There is a very interesting–and pessimistic–book on global warming by the British scientist James Lovelock. He makes the argument that wind farms are not practical because of the amount of land they take up.]]

That’s kind of like an argument that heavier-than-air flight is not practical, made in 1925. Wind farms are doing fine all over the world. Denmark is getting 16% of its power from them.

[[ He also dismisses biofuels for the same reason: To produce power from wind or crops, you have to deforest land, which in turn destroys the land’s ability to absorb CO2.]]

But quantitatively, you’re still ahead if you generate power from biomass rather than fossil fuels.

[[ It’s a very interesting argument that has largely been ignored. Indeed, someone only just now figured out that electric cars are bad if the electricity to recharge the batteries comes from coal-fired plants.]]

Which is an argument, not against electric cars, but against generating power from coal-fired plants.

[[Unlike most environmentalists, Lovelock actually favors nuclear power. Despite the bad press, he feels nuclear power is far less damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.]]

Despite the constant refrain of nuclear advocates to the contrary, the choice is not a dichotomy between coal and nuclear. There are other power sources available.

[[Also, while I advocate alternative power sources, those who think that wind and solar will eliminate the need for base generation capacity should spend some time becalmed in a small sailboat in the middle of a lake……at night…. ]]

The situation would be helped somewhat if there were a national smart energy grid. In the long run, I think we can probably get all our power from renewable resources. For sudden power needs, one can burn hydrogen, or in the short run, biomass ethanol or methanol.

I’m not saying we can switch to all renewables overnight. But we can almost certainly do it within this century.

[[Building towers for pumped storage hydro is basically infeasible. A quick calculation shows that a municipal water tower that’s 30 m high and has a 10 m diameter sphere on top can store 42 kWh. A power station typically produces 500 MW (or more); thus to store the power station’s output for eight hours you’d need to build a hundred thousand of the towers. Good luck making that pay.]]

Or fewer towers that were individually much larger.

I’ve also heard air compression is a possibility. Buildings full of compressed air wouldn’t necessarily have to be elevated, either.

Jeffersonian writes:

[[coal-burning plants [generate] measurable radioactivity during normal operation. ]]

Yes, more than nuclear plants during normal operation — except that no nuclear plant I’ve ever heard of has “normal operation” all the time. They all have unplanned releases.

Unlike most environmentalists, Lovelock actually favors nuclear power. Despite the bad press, he feels nuclear power is far less damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.

Thanks for the information. In retrospect, it should be clear that someone realized that failure was possible and set up to film it. Not unlike the engineering prof who filmed the Tacoma Narrowd bridge (yikes ^2)

Also, while I advocate alternative power sources, those who think that wind and solar will eliminate the need for base generation capacity should spend some time becalmed in a small sailboat in the middle of a lake……at night….

How come people are smart enough to know that an x-ray, which exposes the subject to radiation, does not hurt you when the proper safety requirements are met, but are not smart enough to think for themselves on nuclear power?

Actually, the radiation from x-rays does hurt you. Exposure to medical imaging X-rays will increase your chance of cancer; there is no safe dose. In general, though, the benefits for diagnostic purposes vastly outweigh the risks. This is not always true, however – CT scans especially expose you to much more radiation than an X-ray does (especially more modern X-ray machines), and overuse of them may be an issue.

Northeastern Pennsylvania is not the most heavily populated of areas, but my understanding is the the electricity generated by our two local wind farms (actually, I think there’s a third one slightly south of here) is sent down a series of tubes to New York and New Jersey…just like the electricity generated at our local 25-year-old nuclear power plant.

I have seen the turbines turned off in periods of high wind, which made me realize that they could also be shut off during bird migration seasons. It also appears that the turbine masts can be rotated somewhat to face the turbines directly into the wind – or is this my imagination?

You’re still stuck with the problem that you can’t just use a transformer to convert voltages, though. In recent years it has become possible to convert between AC and DC with enough efficiency that the conversion losses are made up for by the reduction in line losses. This is still only worth it for long, high-power lines, but the system is in use. Everything but the very highest voltage still runs on AC, though.

(Well, all right, at *low* voltages it has become quite easy to convert DC voltages, so that in something like a computer it’s feasible to distribute one DC voltage and have each board convert it to a more useful voltage. This is mostly useful because computers, unlike much of anything in Edison’s day, *need* DC to function. Scaling these systems up large enough to supply your house would be difficult and provide little or no advantage.)

Wind generators get a nice government subsidy and that is the main reason that they exist.

Nuclear power is as safe if not safer than other forms of power generation. Most individuals that are anti-nuclear seem to have it as an article of faith that nuclear power plants are bad and there are not enough facts, science or reasons that will make them change their minds.

The comment that even oil and nuclear power plants are not 24/7 is misleading. While nothing is perfect, I would argue that scheduled maintenance is not the same as waiting until the wind is strong enough but not too strong to generate power.

Vertical blade wind turbines are not as efficient in normal wind ranges.

The way to do pumped storage hydro is pretty much to build a normal hydro station on a lake that has the vertical drop but not the rainfall for a normal hydro station. Or you can use a normal dam during its off-season.

Peak load is actually a major concern for power companies; here for example they offer homeowners a deal where the price of electricity almost doubles during the coldest days of the winter, to enocurage people to spare the company some peak load. Nuclear plants can’t really adapt quickly to load variations, but hydro plants can, as can some designs of hydrocarbon-burning plants. Solar and wind not only can’t adapt to peak load, they have their own cycles to cope with.

Of course we need to incorporate solar and wind into our energy grid; but it will take a lot of cleverness and cost.