Macroscien said..

Razzonater said..
To change time than gravity must be changed however it is only relative to what is measured, if the sun is 1/3 smaller now than 500000 years ago it would only be able to be measured against what we know,

indeed , it will be quite interesting to know, if smart ass could come now and tell us that in the times of dinosaurs :
a) Earth was 100 km closer to Sun (?)
b) Sun was 0.ooo1% bigger (?)For some this small changes in numbers seems to be negligible but I am almost 100% sure that for devices like our everyday GPS this changes are absolutely crucial.
What I mean that exiting exact GPS satellite system NOW and Million years ago will show completely different results.

Moves away by 15cm a year apparently.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn17228-why-is-the-earth-moving-away-from-the-sun/

For the same reason the moon is moving away from the earth. The sun rotates on its axis every 24.5 days, so the tidal bulge generated by earth on the sun is always pushing ahead of earth because earth is orbiting at a slower 364 days. This winds earth up into a higher orbit, like a tennis ball in a sock.

66 million times 15 cm = 9,900 km.

p train said..
****ushima was an old plant ready to be decommissioned well before the earthquake hit

Even still, it survived that massive earthquake with no damage, remember that earthquake shifted Japan by an estimated 1 metre

It was the tsunami that did the damage, but it still survived the first wave, it was the water and debris going back out that did the real damage

Parts of Australia has pangea rock, it has not moved much in billions of years, and is not going to move much in billion more

Finland is or has built an underground storage facility, they have more issues than we do.

The waste that Australia is offering to take is only about %17 of the total global waste that is already sitting around in warehouses, ports, hospitals etc all in urban areas. It will stay in these locations until someone offers a better solution.

We are exposed to radiation often, every time we go in a plane, every time we get xrays. I don't know what thoses levels are or how comparable they are to the low level waste Australia wants to store.

Can someone smarter than me give us the comparisons?

No worries, they can stick behind your house

ThinkaBowtit said..

Mark _australia said...

A website run by an anti-nuclear group?

Yes, an anti-nuclear group website. Who else do expect will tell the other side of the story, the pro-nuclear group?? As I said, their work is accompanied by citations, authors, links. Don't focus on the one story, I put that up to show you that things can go wrong with storage, not that they will.

Have a good look around, there's a lot in there you won't be getting from the more obvious sources.

Well I seem to get criticised if I cite anything from a pro-gun website / organisation. Even if it is peer reviewed published research ;-)

My point is that article was looking for anything they could to talk it up, like the 15yrs / 200,000yrs thing which shows either a ridiculous lack of understanding of statistical probability for an author addressing scientific issues - or it was deliberate talking it up.

Considering there is currently storage in much worse locations, I don't think proposing we bury it 1000m down in the remotest place we can find is dumb.

So anyway I ask the alternate energy proponents again:

I'd like to hear from the solar / wave / wind people how they propose to power the mines, trucks, boats etc to mine all that stuff and put it together? Electric? Well then we need to cover a sh!tload more energy than just the baseload levels they add up. The sums don't work and we don't have unlimited rare earths for flash tech.

I am not anti - yes we need as much solar etc as we can! but we will not run the whole planet on solar and waves and wind.

p train said..
****ushima was an old plant ready to be decommissioned well before the earthquake hit

Even still, it survived that massive earthquake with no damage, remember that earthquake shifted Japan by an estimated 1 metre

Survived? Three...THREE reactors melted down. And fixing it is not even on the far horizon, let alone soon, or already.

****ushima didn't "survive that massive earthquake". You've been reading the fairytale pal...

And there are a crap load of "old plants" of the ****ushima era scatted across the northern hemisphere. Put some here and guess what, give it a few decades and we'd be in the same boat.

Now just imagine if nuclear power was 10 times as used as it is. Right now there are 2 large cities that have been evacuated with no sign that they will ever reurn to how they were. Admittedly thats mostly for psychological reasons and conservative health advice and not wanting to spread contamination further. Two evacuated cities is not globally a big drama (except for those directly affected) but imagine if there were 20 evacuated cities or 40 reactors melted down, which just simple statitics says is what we could expect. That would be major tracts of the earth without humans, which would be great for the wild life. If it was 10 times as popular and there were 40 melted down reactors you can bet the industry would be forced to make it safer at great cost, making it even more expensive than it already is.

Gizmo said..
I bet a few backside would be twitching if there was a clear waste dump in Central Australia.....

www.smh.com.au/national/magnitude-62-earthquake-recorded-in-central-australia-20160521-gp0ev6.html

Yes, a very timely shake up.

^^^ +1

like Ian said, some things actually don't move. So 'look we had an earthquake in the desert" is not damning to the storage model


I still await a clever enviro person who can tell me how we can have electric trucks and ships etc, to mine and transport all the stuff we need to build the solar / wind / wave infrastructure. I don't believe we can.

They can also tell me how to safely deal with some of the very very nasty stuff used in modern battery tech. And don't say underground storage

Rail guns and rockets are an awful idea, all you need is a misfire, or a bang on the way up, and you have radioactive fallout spread around the globe by jet streams. Nightmare scenario.

Ok rockets no good more unreliable human stuff bound to explode.
How about every nuclear facility has a solar powered slingshot constantly slinging 44 gallon drums into outter space all over the world

^^^ JB I do like that. They are bloody amazing. OTOH...... but - bearing in mind I am just a dumb bum non-engineer ...

(1) they claim less space required. I dunno. Think of a spinning propeller kinda turbine. They need an area the size of the blades' diameter (obviously). But these wiggling from side to side will disturb the air to either side of the individual unit. That turbulence creates inefficency over an area... what, 4x wider than the actual unit...? I dunno, how wise is it? Certainly you can't have them 2m apart....
So the selling point is considerably reduced. From the link, the layman would think you can stick these side by side for a great distance... I doubt it.


(2) the wiggle will not produce as much power in a variable airstream. The thing that makes them efficient -- lack of moving parts -- is also their downfall
When the wind drops, they stop wiggling real fast. But the inertia of a "normal" windmill keeps it rotating.
So yeah the lack of mass and moving parts is great, but if it is going 3kn - 15kn -2kn - 10kn - 1kn ......... 10sec pause...... 12kn ....... I reckon the rotational inertia of the windmill - wins.

We should really be working on CO2 storage, that would be useful as well. Freeze it , weight it down (solid C02 is lighter than water) and sink it in the Pacific. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean would keep it solid (at least that's what I think). Correct me if Im wrong on that.

Mark _australia said..
^^^ JB I do like that. They are bloody amazing. OTOH...... but..

(1) they claim less space required. I dunno. Think of a spinning propeller kinda turbine. They need an area the size of the blades' diameter (obviously). But these wiggling from side to side will disturb the air to either side of the individual unit. That turbulence creates inefficency over an area... what, 4x wider than the actual unit...? I dunno, how wise is it? Certainly you can't have them 2m apart....
So the selling point is considerably reduced. From the link, the layman would think you can stick these side by side for a great distance... I doubt it.

Agreed Mark. I think you're moving in on Betz's law for the maximum power than can be extracted from an airstream, by any means.

Whatever the device represented by A is, it has to slow down air to get energy out of it. It can't stop the air completely or the device would choke and no more air would come in. It doesn't matter what sort of device A is, or where it sits in that curvy cone of intercepted air, but slowed air just has to spread out on the exit. That's the concept where Betz applied the mathematics. Turns out there is an optimum amount of slow-down to extract the maximum power from the air intercepted. The theoretical limit is an extraction of 59% of the energy of the incoming air at the narrow end of the "cone". The best wind turbines extract 75 - 80% 0f this theoretical maximum.

Don't know how the sticks rate. Can't be too good, but they don't slice up eagles.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law

hardpole said...
We should really be working on CO2 storage, that would be useful as well. Freeze it , weight it down (solid C02 is lighter than water) and sink it in the Pacific. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean would keep it solid (at least that's what I think). Correct me if Im wrong on that.

But we need co2, it is vital for all life on Earth

Neat idea. It's a twist on pumping water uphill for hydro generation. How many kWh do you get per metre of track? Wouldn't it be easier to just winch a weight up a tower? Or spin up a big flywheel?

it's been argued before, and maybe an idealistic view - but i agree that by changing our lifestyles a bit, solar / battery tech could do the bulk of what we need living in a house and probably most small businesses

from living out of a camper with essentially 2 car batteries charged off a 200watt solar panel for a couple of months at a time, i know it's more than possible to live a fairly normal life off the grid in an adapted house if you really wanted to. i think we are wasting so much solar potential in aus, along with so many other sun ladened parts of the world, who could help offset current emissions

i think almost anyone who wanted to live primarily off the grid could set it up themselves with some know-how from a bit of internet research and jaycar


then keep the other power sources for those who truly need it


but i agree the ideal would be to find a new low-impact energy resource that can be used world wide