Your arguments against geothermal also apply to natural gas, oil and coal. The amount of heat extracted, even if the whole world adopts geothermal, is still a relatively small amount.
You don't seem to grasp what I'm saying about nuclear energy. The problem is not core radiation or cooling issues, the problem is waste disposal and liquid HLW contaminating rivers, lakes and ocean water. You choose to ignore the regularly occuring small incidents at TMI for example. Are you suggesting they don't happen? Are you suggesting that my friend who worked for the DOE is making up stories about liquid HLW being intentionally dumped into rivers? What about accidental spills of HLW when transported on roadways and rail? Are you saying those things don't happen?
Hydrogen can be stored using NiMH blocks. It's cheap, safe and it works. It's also a technology that's been around for over 40 years.
Your ignorance is as boundless as it is intentional. Try doing your homework. Lithium is prescribed in very tiny amounts and easily becomes toxic to the patient over time or if the dosage is not continuously monitored and adjusted.
A123 went bankrupt even after receiving a big stimulus grant. EV battery manufacturing in the US is in serious trouble.
Battery recycling in the US is barely profitable today with funding from the government. Over time the value of the recovered materials is expected to decrease. That will likely shift recycling to other countries like Mexico where costs might be lower, but pollution controls lower as well.
Putting in a new coal mine causes earthquakes, but that doesn't even make the news. The final mining cuts in coal mines cause earthquakes, sink holes, subsidence and other problems, but we still mine for coal. Drilling for natural gas and oil sometimes causes earthquakes. Nuclear bomb testing below ground causes earthquakes. In parts of California, a loud fart causes earthquakes. We can expect drilling for geothermal energy to cause some earhquakes. It stands to reason that they will happen. Why should that stop geothermal energy development? If we can send a robot lander to Mars, surely we can safely tap into geothermal energy. Do your homework, geothermal energy is cheaper than nuclear. It works for Iceland and Japan is moving toward geothermal and away from nuclear.
Your posts and tone shows what kind of person you are.
EV batteries used here are made in Korea and the US in OEM EV's.
Your point about the Chinese plant closoing proves my point better than yours. Even cChina has started to wise up.
You do know Lithium is taken by mouth or medicene don't you? The other materials are not used in Lithium EV batteries. Ni-cads in EV sizes are recycled as are 99% of lead batteries in the US.
I don't disagree that new nuke in the US at the moment is too expensive but that is because of Gov and the companies wanting to hold onto their power, not anything about actual nuke power. I'm not a fan of present US PWR's but newer, much smaller unherently safe one coming shortly like the Hyperion will be about $2k/kw and burn up all the waste PWR's cause so getting both power and getting rid of nuke bomb material I believe is a good thing.
Geothermal isn't cheaper and extremely limited plus has a bad habit of causing eartquakes. Where they should put Geo type heat engines is between the thermal generating plants of all kind before the condensor making more power nd cutting condensor costs. And many more widespread sources of that energy.
And this is by someone who is building both wind and tidal/river generator for future production not to mention EV's. Small wind and solar on customers homes, building beat any utility enerrgy they might pay for. Most who signed up for RE are now paying the lowest cost for p[ower.
Your just another unhinged zealot your posts clearly show, deal with it.
Check your facts. Geothermal energy is cheaper than nuclear. How many operating nuclear power plants have you inspected, repaired or live close to? I know all I need to know about nuclear waste and spills of high-level waste. My dad talked with a guy who works for the EPA who had a few interesting stories to tell about leaky tanker trucks hauling liquid, radioactive HLW (core water) as well as train tanker cars painted bright colors with stripes on them. Several of those tanker cars have been spilled over the years. The EPA handles the spill, the railroad buys the contaminated land and what was spilled is never disclosed to the public. It's just a permanent clean-up site with a 8-foot chain link fence topped with razor wire and security guards posted. A site like that exists on what used to be farm land very near my parent's residence. Some of that contaminated land was owned by my dad. My dad died from cancer last year. The guy from the EPA wouldn't tell what was spilled, only that it was bad, very bad. Something that can't be cleaned up. Welcome to the real world of "clean" nuclear energy.
I don't own a Prius nor will I ever own one. I don't like toxic storage batteries.
Your ignorance amazes me. I know a nuclear physicist who used to work for the Dept. of Energy. He used to inspect nuclear power plants for a living. He told me all I need to know about how dirty nuclear power is. Believe what you want. Keep drinking the Koolaid.
My father-in-law is an engineer and the CEO of a company that produces batteries. His company is based in Taiwan, but no longer makes batteries there. His factories are in China. His company produces batteries sold with US, Japanese and European labels on them. He was recently forced to close one of his plants in China due to pollution standards that didn't exist when the plant was built less than 10 years ago. Due to production costs, profit margins and political pressure, many Made in Japan or Made in Taiwan products are actually made in China or Korea.
Lithium, Nickel-Cadmium, Mercury and various other materials used in rechargable batteries are highly toxic.
Geothermal energy is cheaper than nuclear. Check your facts. Solar and wind are buzzworthy and the media like them. Politicians and special interest groups push for them even though they are expensive, unreliable and inefficient. Basically, wind and solar can never challenge nuclear, so the government and big power don't care about them. They can't compete. Geothermal could replace nuclear, so there is more resistance.
Nite owl you are just plain wrong. Every single coal plant, read that again, produces more radioactivity than all our nukes combined. I'm not a great fan of present nukes but facts are clear they polute far less than coal or even NG. But I'm not a fa of utilities in general either as producing one's own power in many cases is cheaper. But that is another article.
Luckily coal use is dropping fast amost down 50% from 5 yrs ago.
Your rant on EV batteries is also wrong. Most EV batteries are made in Japan, Taiwan? Korea and the US. Few are made in China. And most are made from rather low polluting materials like plastic, alum, iron, copper, lithium, phosphate, water, etc.
Wind and solar have been the largest increase in US electric accounting for all the increase production this yr. Facts are we are using less each yr as we are of oil because of eff.
One can now by solar panels for $1k/kw and whole systems for under $2k/kw plus install. Ford is actually selling PV systems with their EV's. And many EV owners do solar. On 2kw/$2k of PV I can power my modest home and charge my EV's for 20-25 yrs.
Back to EV's. What we need are lower tech, lighter, more aero EV'sfor commuting that can have small battery packs and still get 100 mile range and 80 mph. That would allow then to sell for under $15k. Sadly I don't see many available in that form.
Why is they would cut production and aftermarket sales of other cars and their replacement parts which EV's have few of. And car companies make a lot of their money from the 20x's production costs of replacement parts.
Geothermal power can provide us with a whole new area of pollution, if any of the underground stuff escapes. hydrogen sulfide and sulphur dioxide are two that get immediate attention, since they are both toxic and stinky. Besides that, importing heat from deep in the earth's crust will likely alter the climate as much as a lot of other things.
And please don't blather about "dirty" atomic power plants. THat tone affirms a complete lack of understanding of the plants here in the USA, which were NOT designed by the cost-cutting engineers responsible for the failed plants in Japan.
Hydrogeen is apoor fuel choice because of the logistics required. It flows right through most available seal materials, and it must either be kept very cold, or under a whole lot of pressure, both options are quite expensive.
I have engineered the design of equipment for geothermal, oil, coal and nuclear generating plants. We have geothermal plants in California and elsewhere in the U.S. but again they are nowhere as efficient on a cost per kW/hr basis as a nuclear power plant. Your constant use of dirty as an adjective when talking about nuclear power puts you into that group of individuals that are obstructionists and who ready to condemn without knowing the facts. Geothermal power has a whole host of problems most of which are maintenance and reliability related. Good luck with your Prius, or as I like to call them the silent killers.
Yes, the majority of the power required to provide hydrogen as fuel will come from the dirty power grid and likely most of the power will come from dirty nuclear plants. However, other countries are using geothermal power to generate their hydrogen. It's a shame we don't really consider doing the same.
Geothermal power is a little cheaper and far cleaner than nuclear power. It's actually our cheapest large-scale method of generating power excluding large-scale hydroelectric. Something to think about.
Wind power only makes sense in certain locations where there is significant wind most of the time. Ground-based, large-scale solar power generation doesn't really make sense. No power at night and reduced power on cloudy/rainy days.
If we power the grid using mostly geothermal plants, plus existing hydroelectric and some natural gas/bio-fuel plants and use hydrogen fuel cells for our vehicles we can create a sustainable system.
You're comparing the estimated radiation released by burning coal in an unshielded power plant compared to the radiation directly released by a nuclear plant's shielded core. I'm referring to the unmeasured high-level waste released and/or leaked into the rivers and in some cases the atmosphere. The total radiation footprint of a nuclear power plant when the high-level waste and regular "incidental" leaks are considered is far higher than a coal-burning plant. You are buying into pro-nuclear propaganda. If coal-burning plants posed a significant radiation hazard, shielding could be added. Also, most coal burning plants have scrubbers that significantly reduce harmful emissions.
Hydroelectric power reached it's pinnacle in the US a long time ago. You can't build hydroelectric plants without having a major impact on the environment, so they shouldn't be considered for future expansion.
Reprossessing nuclear waste into fuel generates high-level waste. Ultimately, most of the nuclear fuel will become high-level waste. Cooling water becomes high-level waste when it becomes too contaminated to use for cooling a reactor core. All of that must be stored/disposed of safely and for long term.
What do you propose we do with our growing stockpile of nuclear waste? Ship it to Mexico like we do with certain waste that we "recycle" that we don't actually recycle?
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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