OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

It's here already, but much too expensive for anybody to use.

And the idea of a rocket-load of nuclear waste might even not make it into low earth orbit is something that should have registered with you.

You aren't aware of much. We notice volcanoes because they spit stuff out. Dumping something nasty like radioactive waste into an active volcano for it to spit out again later isn't a great idea.

There are spots in middle of continental plates that seem to stay put for millions of years, but we'd need to know a lot more about the convection currents in the mantle before we could be all that confident about that.

A kWh is a unit of energy.

And don't be a jerk. It's admittedly easy.

It's not emitting energy all that fast.

It always amuse me when they say 'but it will be radioactive for thousands of years. Yes dear.

- In the oceans are 4 billion tonnes of radioactive waste which have been there ever since the earth was formed. Its called Uranium

- All 'renewable' energy is second or third hand nuclear power. What the f*ck do they think the Sun is?

- by several orders of magnitude the most dangerous radiation we are exposed to is sunlight.

- The earth is formed out of nuclear waste from cataclysmic supernovae. Siome of it is still radioactive.

- The atmosphere is bombarded with cosmic rays from space, which create radioactive isotopes.

By any rational metric man made nuclear waste is tiny and irrelevant and if we simply chucked in a deep part of the ocean nothing untoward would happen.

The problem isn't physics or engineering, it's mental.

kWh is correct. Little k is kilo; big K is Kelvins.

Units named after people are capitalized. Like Watt.

Its defined as THE unit of electrical energy, Wots on your bill, or does daddy pay that?

Actually, a Watt isn't necessarily an electrical measurement. It's defined as a unit of power or radiant flux.

It's formally defined in units of length, mass, and time.

Well, there was a smiley at the end.

Interesting (to me) that the UK's consumption has gone *down* about 20% over the past 50 years. Note I'm talking about the UK - the figures from that link suggest that consumption and (not surprisingly) generation have been going down for quite a while. Meanwhile, China has trebled, and India has doubled, in the past 20 years.

It's not just vehicles, though. Half of the UK's energy consumption is used for heating, and most of that is gas. A lot of pressure (currently £7500 per household) to move over to heat pumps. More pressure on the grid.

Anyway, my point is that something will have to replace the duty currently collected on petrol once EVs take hold. And it seems likely that'll be owners of electric vehicles.

There's always some plutonium-239 in them, from neutron capture by uranium-238. The uraninium-235 which fissions to produce the energy splits into pairs of isotopes

Quite a few of them are radioactive and none of them are reactor fuel.

The amusement should a reaction to the imprecision.

Some of the isotopes are radioactive - some decay rapidly and are intensely radioactive for a relatively short time and others have longer life times and stay radioactive for longer - " actinides dominate roughly 10^3 to 10^5 years after fuel use".

Uranium isn't any kind of "radioactive waste", it's just one more long-lived radioactive element that got synthesised in a supernova a couple of billions of years ago. Potassium-40 is another, but you don't need supernova to get it, though it does need a star heavier than the Sun.

The sun runs on nuclear fusion, mostly of hydrogen at the moment.

But the UV that gives a melanomas doesn't get through the skin the way gamma radiation can.

It takes a cataclysmic supernova to form anything heavier than iron.

Nuclear fusion in stars quite a bit heavier than the sun can get you up iron (which is the nucleus with the biggest mass defect).

Actually, cosmic rays produce stray neutrons, and a neutron hitting an nitrogen-14 nucleus knocks out a proton leaving you with a carbon-14 nucleus."Carbon-14 is unstable and has a half-life of 5700±30 years".

Since the Natural Philosopher doesn't know enough about what he is talking about, his claims about "any rational metric" are more of his pretentious twaddle.

And your brain is more problematic than you seem to realise.

You seem to be living in cloud cuckoo land. Being upside down, all your blood has run to your head making your thought processes sub-optimal.

Wrong.

The cyclotron (such as it was) was down at the other end of the building.

We all know it is part of your pretentious twit self-presentation. Why do you think that anybody would take you seriously?

I worked in the UK from 1971 to 1993. Over a lot of that time, Thatcher was doing her best to dismantle UK industrial production, and household heating went from electric radiators to gas-fired central heating.

Starting from a much lower base. Lenin saw rural electrification as a necessary part of the socialist revolution. It certainly makes a lot of difference to the economy.

Heat pumps deliver quite a bit more heat per unit of electrical energy fed in than an electric radiator, and the UK is starting to take home insulation seriously. Double glazing and the like.

Or it might just be that a UK government could get around to constructing a taxation system on rational basis, rather than slapping taxes on stuff more or less at random. You are about to get a new one, likely with a big enough majority to get away with being rational for a few years.

There are some small one's around in Australia's remote outback. They replace diesel generator sets that need a truckload of diesel every few weeks. They seems to work well.

You thought that you did, and you think that the conclusion is absolutely clear. You do go in for a lot of self-delusion.

Except that when anybody tries to build a nuclear power plant it seems to take a lot longer, and cost a lot more, than the initial estimates.

Renewable power is generated in much smaller modules, which can be mass produced. Big wind turbines are large, but they are still mass produced.

Theories about costs and output get tested whenever a bunch of modules get stuck together on-site and wired into the grid.

Building nuclear plants takes long enough that pretentious twits like you can spend quite a while posing as experts - and getting over-paid for their services - before their incompetence catches up with them.

Like it being splattered all over the place at the next eruption?

Jeroen Belleman

As you say. Nuclear power is a dream come true, but of course, it was too good to be true. In its current form, it's far too easy to make bombs with it. In truth, that's what it was developed for! That we can also use it to make electricity is just a useful accessory circumstance.

Jeroen Belleman

The old jokes are the best. Cloud cuckoo land was invented by Aristophanes. "The Birds" was first performed in Athens in 414 BC.

The "living upside down" joke about the southern hemisphere isn't as old, but it is a flat-earth conceit.

Sydney is 33 degrees and 52 minutes south of the equator, so my oerientaion to closer to being at right-angles to yours - 90 degrees rather than 180.

I've been a 'radiation worker' for most of my career. I *know* everyone gets between 3 and 10 uSv of radiation from natural sources every day. Most people have no idea. Yet, to work on radioactive stuff contributing just a few hundred nSv over the natural dose, we had to jump through all sorts of hoops. This isn't rational, it's politics.

Jeroen Belleman

Possibly because of the UK having less heavy industry and importing our products that rely on heavy energy usage from China or the far east etc.

Industries that were once heavy users of electricity probably had contractual agreements stating that it wouldn't be used in peak domestic times.

Is that 30% in the past 6 years mainly due to the installation of more wind turbines which produce little when the wind barely blows for periods of weeks? Possibly also solar which produces little during the winter and nothing at night. Has there been a corresponding 30% increase in the backup capacity to fill the shortfall when wind fails? If the two are not matched then it's rather silly to rely only on extra intermittent power generation, especially during a cold winter.

Although unlikely to happen within the timescales the green lobby would like there is also the move away from gas and oil to electric for central heating that will increase demand for electricity.

Not exactly. When I was a graduate student some of the graduate students working with radio-active sources weren't exactly meticulous. They didn't endanger me but it struck me that they were endangering themselves and their close colleagues.

"Jumping through hoops" is mostly applying enough pressure to persuade people to be meticulous and properly careful.

Extravagant gestures do get people's attention. It is politics, but politics is all about getting people to do the right thing. Sometimes what clowns like Donald Trump imagine to be the right thing, but we haven't perfected our society yet, and have to pick the level of imperfection that will get an adequate result.