Robert Galloway did say:
Fat, dumb and happy?!?! Speak for yourself. Personally, I've still got a bit o' that blood and power lust. It's got me thinking upgrading the motor in my Jet tablesaw, and removing all safety guards from my other power tools.
China is planning to use output from some of its future nuclear plants to produce hydrogen, but that's not a function of the new design. The "new design" is actually an evolution and refinement of an old one from the 1950's that the US and Europe decided not to use. The most important aspect of it is that it is largely immune to meltdown.
I believe it's called the Pebble Bed Reactor. The Pebble Bed Reactor is an advanced nuclear reactor design. This technology claims a dramatically higher level of safety and efficiency. Instead of water, it uses helium as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly. This eliminates the complex steam management system from the design, and increases the transfer efficiency (ratio of electrical output to thermal output) to about 50%.
The technology in various forms is under development by MIT, the South African power utility Eskom, General Atomic (U.S.), the Dutch company Romaha B.V., Adams Atomic Engines, a U.S. Company, and the Chinese company Chinergy, working with Tsinghua University.
FWIW,
Greg G.
I thought Sweden and France were using that design.
There simply aren't enough resources in the world for all of the population to exist at U.S./Europe standard of living.
Tim Douglass
Sounds like you're quoting the opening paragraphs of
I didn't know that. The US should take another look at it.
I thought Sweden and France used Breeder reactors.
Allen
On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 23:45:39 GMT, "Rudy" vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!:
remove ns from my header address to reply via email
No of course not. But everybody wants somebody else to take it on the jaw to fix it.
errr.. but when the Kyoto agreement has _not_ been signed, the loss of manufacturing and jobs is still happening. If all the rich nations signed the agreement and balckballed the nations that did not, then if China refused to sign, jobs would come away from China, and back to the US!
***************************************************** Have you noticed that people always run from what they _need_ toward what they want?????
two?........divide by the inverse? Well it's simple anyway......trust me, I am enlightened
Not sure about Europe. But I would not suggest any country to follow US standard of living -- just too wasteful. Whatever energy saving in using better isulation material and efficient heating system is being used up by building bigger and bigger hourses. I am sure this world will collapse if every country tries to duplicate US standard of living. The trick is not to exactly follow US standard of living.
For example, if every Chinese wants to build a house like a regular house in US suburban neighborhood. China will run out of land in a very short time. Therefore, this is impractical to expect a house like this in China -- there is just not enough land. Something that a regular Chinese should hope for is a multiple floors apartment building. Actually, this is not a bad thing to live in a city or a big town considering the fact that many US people love to live in New York City (if they can afford an apartment in NYC).
I believe one of the reason why many US people want to move out from the cities is to avoid the racial tension and the consequence of racial tension. This situation is simply not applicable to many other countries. Hence, there is less likely to have a large number of people moving out of the cities in other countries.
In other words, there is really no reason to expect everyone in the world to _be_able_ to live like US people, nor expect everyone in the world to _want_ to live like US people.
In long term, people in China will get a good living standard, and they will get this in a different way from US. They will be living in MEGA cities, instead of living in big houses in suburban.
Obviously, if someone is living in an apartment in a city, he will need fewer furnitures to fill up the empty space, will not need a lot of applicants, will not need a convection oven or a large refrigrator (because he will eat out more often than not), will not need to fool around with a lawn mower, will not need to drive a car, ...etc. He can cut down a lot of spending without affecting his quality of life.
Of course, if we strictly limit to "US standard of living", we can safely assume that the rest of the world cannot afford it.
Jay Chan
I hear you. This was exactly the reason why I said it is a "different" design instead of saying that it is a "new" design. I used this term to mean that it is "different" from the conventional nuclear power plants that we normally see in US.
Glad to hear that people is open to the idea of using nuclear power. I was wondering if someone might jump in and lecture me about the "evils" of using nuclear power.
Jay Chan
The real evil, IMHO, is in NOT using nuclear energy.
Industrial grade equipment (excluding forklifts, for the most part) almost always has a made in the USA tag on it, as far as I've seen in any factory around here. I can't imagine using a brake press that was made in China out of plastic and tin. Maybe it is all dying out, but it really doesn't seem like it on the production floor.
This one seems like another political red herring. I know it used to happen all the time, but none of the manufacturers I've worked for in the last 14 years have taken a devil-may-care attitude towards the environment. They've all invested in keeping the air and water clean, partially because of the EPA, and partially because they don't care to mess up their own backyards.
That's a lot of "ifs" for a nation to stake its economy on.
Tim Douglass
Stuff like that, eh? mahalo, jo4hn
Not gonna happen. The containment buildings are significantly harder than, say, an office building tower.
See above.
Oh no, not my bippy. OK, you're right, no nukes for me then.
Dang again. See above.
Only happens in Jane Fonda movies, and I've heard that she has a bit of a bias on an issue or two.
Yup, that's pretty much it. The anti-nuke folks have to resort to spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to scare people away from the most logical power production method we could go to for power generation.
Just think - nukes for the electric, bio-fuels for the mobile stuff. The Arabs could try to sell oil to each other. The capacity is there, but instead of spending money making bio-fuels practical, and instead of building the nuke plants to get us away from foreign oil, and instead of using domestic oil in the meantime, we keep giving lots of money to people who are neutral to us at best, and who mostly want to kill us.
Dave Hinz
More and more machines are being made overseas. In my business, molding foam plastics, the dozen of so US manufacturers are all gone. Last one was closed about a dozen years ago.
I can buy machines from Austria, Italy, Germany, Japan, Korea.
It is good to see that companies like Minster are still around but others have shut the doors. Heald, and many like them are long gone.
If you take the coal we have and process it with the abundant energy of the reactor, you don't need to use productive land for "biofuel."
Not to worry about the money. As long as the press and candidate X continue to savage those friendly to us and make friendly with those who savage us, it's wasted regardless.
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