Higher Wages = Less JOBS

[Larry Gude]

You're speaking too black and white. Waste disposal is a cost because of the politics associated with Yucca Mountain, to be sure, exacerbated by Pres Jimmy Carter's non-proliferation edict that we not use reprocessed fuel (something France does and creates only 4% of the waste per MW that we do). So, of course there are political forces involved.

But, why do we use nuclear? Market forces ("too cheap to meter"). Why do we use nukes for base-load? Market forces. Why do nukes shut down when they do for refueling outages? Market forces. Why do nuclear operators make more money than fossil fuel plants? Market forces. Why do gas plants beat out coal plants? Market forces.

It just works the way it works, with far too much politicization. But, if solar were actually better idea than nuclear, do you know what would be the proof of that? You guessed it, market forces.

No. If solar were FAR cheaper it would be artificially manipulated, like nuke, like gas and oil, to try and find some sort of balance. How far off do you suppose solar storage is whereby your panels charge batteries that can run the home all night and on cloudy days? Do you think everyone is going to just watch the entire grid go away and not shift costs onto solar, as was done with nuke, to seek balance? Do you suppose the reasons we're still blaming Jimmy Carter is because no one wants to do anything about it? That they know it would crush a lot of other jobs in other power sources?

This market you speak of is not free or open. It's controlled and it's done for good reasons from jobs to economic stability to geo politics. It's a market alright but it ain't free.

 

[Wishbone]

Then go find it. There's a tiki bar thread for morons like you. Run along. There's no need for you to declare you don't find elevated conversation entertaining let alone comprehensible. So, great. You're leaving now. So git.

You were a lot more intelligent and rational before this Pat Buchanan, Oliver Stone Conspiracy Bender you went on.

WTF happened to you? Bad alcohol? terrorist kidnapping?

 

[Gilligan]

You were a lot more intelligent and rational before this Pat Buchanan, Oliver Stone Conspiracy Bender you went on.

WTF happened to you? Bad alcohol? terrorist kidnapping?

Alien abduction....'swat I heard.

 

[GURPS]

How far off do you suppose solar storage is whereby your panels charge batteries that can run the home all night and on cloudy days?

that tech has been around a while now ..... its bloody expensive and the batteries only last about 5 yrs

The LiPo based Tesla Wall Pack could finally change that - longevity and maybe cost

 

[Gilligan]

that tech has been around a while now ..... its bloody expensive and the batteries only last about 5 yrs

The LiPo based Tesla Wall Pack could finally change that - longevity and maybe cost

Costs are coming down but the cost of a complete battery plus charge controller plus inverter large enough to run the average house is still huge. And there is the issue of battery life...

Imagine the nightmare of every home jam packed with a bank of storage batteries that have to be replaced regularly.

Hydrogen storage technologies might offer the solution....eventually. Even more expensive now though...

 

[Larry Gude]

You were a lot more intelligent and rational before this Pat Buchanan, Oliver Stone Conspiracy Bender you went on.

WTF happened to you? Bad alcohol? terrorist kidnapping?

Or, another version of events is that you haven't learned a damn thing the last 16 years.

 

[Wishbone]

My bad... Gilligans right!



And they left the probe in.

 

[Larry Gude]

Costs are coming down but the cost of a complete battery plus charge controller plus inverter large enough to run the average house is still huge. And there is the issue of battery life...

Imagine the nightmare of every home jam packed with a bank of storage batteries that have to be replaced regularly.

Hydrogen storage technologies might offer the solution....eventually. Even more expensive now though...

Case in point.


One of my uncles built a home in Maine some 20 odd years ago that cost nearly $100k more than a typical house of the same square footage built in Maine. He spent the extra dough on engineering and architects and inverters and batteries and tanks and solar panels and far more insulation than the norm.

The next? He LONG since got his money back, including various upgrades over the years in inverters and batts. Had we, as a society, been willing to promote this sort of thinking anyone who could afford a $100k house 20 some odd years ago could have afforded his house if we took into account the electrical savings and those savings been used to pay P/I on the difference AND the houses would ALL be better and keep on giving. However, our model is NOT to have things last let alone pay for themselves. The grid wasn't built for efficiency or savings. It was built for jobs and a certain amount of economic growth associated with that. We do NOT want too good or too efficient.

Another cool fact about his home? He's replaced ONE panel in all that time and the net output of these 20 year old panels is HIGHER than when they were installed. Can't have that either!

Point being we're not about best. We're about most jobs and most opportunities for those who buy and maintain gummint to get their monies worth and then some.

 

[This_person]

You defeat your own point.

EVERYONE is on their own....except the major players who make the entire markets who are...not on their own.

You're suggesting it is acceptable they cheat. It's not.

Meanwhile, even with the cheaters, other people go from obscurity to immense wealth and success. It is not players who make up the entire markets, they simply influence it. And, their influence is not total control.

 

[Gilligan]

Case in point.


One of my uncles built a home in Maine some 20 odd years ago that cost nearly $100k more than a typical house of the same square footage built in Maine. He spent the extra dough on engineering and architects and inverters and batteries and tanks and solar panels and far more insulation than the norm.

The next? He LONG since got his money back, including various upgrades over the years in inverters and batts. Had we, as a society, been willing to promote this sort of thinking anyone who could afford a $100k house 20 some odd years ago could have afforded his house if we took into account the electrical savings and those savings been used to pay P/I on the difference AND the houses would ALL be better and keep on giving. However, our model is NOT to have things last let alone pay for themselves. The grid wasn't built for efficiency or savings. It was built for jobs and a certain amount of economic growth associated with that. We do NOT want too good or too efficient.

Another cool fact about his home? He's replaced ONE panel in all that time and the net output of these 20 year old panels is HIGHER than when they were installed. Can't have that either!

Point being we're not about best. We're about most jobs and most opportunities for those who buy and maintain gummint to get their monies worth and then some.

I've completed the detail engineering for off grid hybrid systems going back probably 10 years at least. I know a little about them.

 

[This_person]

TP's post #33 explains just the surface costs of nuke that have NOITHING to do with nuke costs. Nuke power is FAR cheaper and cleaner than coal and gas and oil but it comes at enormous cost; all those other jobs.

What jobs are lost? It takes about the same number of people to run the plant, plus the same number of people who engineer, mine, and build the fuel - all who make more money. But, not prohibitively so. The real cost of nuclear is the prohibitive regulation, especially on waste.

 

[This_person]

No. If solar were FAR cheaper it would be artificially manipulated, like nuke, like gas and oil, to try and find some sort of balance. How far off do you suppose solar storage is whereby your panels charge batteries that can run the home all night and on cloudy days? Do you think everyone is going to just watch the entire grid go away and not shift costs onto solar, as was done with nuke, to seek balance? Do you suppose the reasons we're still blaming Jimmy Carter is because no one wants to do anything about it? That they know it would crush a lot of other jobs in other power sources?

This market you speak of is not free or open. It's controlled and it's done for good reasons from jobs to economic stability to geo politics. It's a market alright but it ain't free.

How far off? I'd say millennia, at least. The energy source against the energy needed is minimal at best.

You speak as though it takes no people to reprocess the fuel. This is the buggy whip argument - just because people wouldn't do one thing doesn't mean they suddenly do nothing. It means they learn new skills.

 

[Larry Gude]

What jobs are lost? It takes about the same number of people to run the plant, plus the same number of people who engineer, mine, and build the fuel - all who make more money. But, not prohibitively so. The real cost of nuclear is the prohibitive regulation, especially on waste.

If we had reasonable regulation and continued to allow nuke technology to evolve, including more modern designs and better uses of waste, nuke would LONG ago have idled miners and people who work in nat gas.

Agreed?


So, all you're doing is reinforcing the point; it's not market forces. They're artificial. And, again, from a jobs standpoint, spreading the wealth, that argument is valid.

 

[Larry Gude]

How far off? I'd say millennia, at least. The energy source against the energy needed is minimal at best.

You speak as though it takes no people to reprocess the fuel. This is the buggy whip argument - just because people wouldn't do one thing doesn't mean they suddenly do nothing. It means they learn new skills.

Buggy whip is a convenient point. Oil and gas and solar are the buggy whips to nuke. I mean, hell, it's the concentrate of what oil, gas and solar are. We've effectively subsidized the dilutes long since when the buggy whips would have been obsolete. However, again, the other options offer a spreading of wealth, income redistribution, globally. That is attractive for it's own reasons, none of which are market based.

 

[This_person]

Buggy whip is a convenient point. Oil and gas and solar are the buggy whips to nuke. I mean, hell, it's the concentrate of what oil, gas and solar are. We've effectively subsidized the dilutes long since when the buggy whips would have been obsolete. However, again, the other options offer a spreading of wealth, income redistribution, globally. That is attractive for it's own reasons, none of which are market based.

We do nothing to support coal or gas or solar globally that also causes the US to not use more nuke. Our reason for not using more nuke is TMI, Chernobyl, and a Japanese tsunami. Our massive regulations come from those things as well. There is nothing about global use of coal that means WE, in the US, have to use coal still. So, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

 

[Larry Gude]

We do nothing to support coal or gas or solar globally that also causes the US to not use more nuke. Our reason for not using more nuke is TMI, Chernobyl, and a Japanese tsunami. Our massive regulations come from those things as well. There is nothing about global use of coal that means WE, in the US, have to use coal still. So, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

TMI, nothing went wrong, It WORKED. Chernobyl, one of the worst designs possible STILL required blatant human error to make the thing go and Fukajimi, putting the freaking back up generators in the basement of a SEASIDES plant when the engineering called for them being on the ROOF had nothing to do with nuke power and everything to do with human error.

In the mean time how much juice has been used, safely, vs. oil and gas and how many deaths, how much degradation of the environment, mining, accidents and so forth? Nuke is WAY ahead in each and every category with one handicap after another hung around the neck of nuke including freezing it's technology in time.

 

[GURPS]

If we had reasonable regulation and continued to allow nuke technology to evolve, including more modern designs and better uses of waste, nuke would LONG ago have idled miners and people who work in nat gas.

Agreed?

No Not Agreed .... how are regulations unreasonable :shrug:

Nuclear Power is way more dangerous when something goes wrong
- as far as I am concerned - Gov aka the Navy should be running all nuclear power plants it is way too dangerous to trust to a public utility trying to make a profit

 

[GURPS]

tmi, nothing went wrong, it worked. Chernobyl, one of the worst designs possible still required blatant human error to make the thing go and fukajimi, putting the freaking back up generators in the basement of a seasides plant when the engineering called for them being on the roof had nothing to do with nuke power and everything to do with human error.

yes and because humans are imperfect - regulations are more stringent

windscale ?

wigner energy - built up and melted fule rods and started a massive fire

once commissioned and settled into operations, pile 2 experienced a mysterious rise in core temperature. Unlike the americans and the soviets, the british had little experience with the behaviour of graphite when exposed to neutrons. Hungarian-american physicist eugene wigner had discovered that graphite, when bombarded by neutrons, suffers dislocations in its crystalline structure, causing a build-up of potential energy. This energy, if allowed to accumulate, could escape spontaneously in a powerful rush of heat.

The sudden bursts of energy worried the operators, who turned to the only viable solution, heating the reactor core in a process known as annealing. When graphite is heated beyond 250 °c it becomes plastic, and the wigner dislocations can relax into their natural state. This process was gradual and caused a uniform release which spread throughout the core.[16]

SL-1


Human error with drawing control rod manually - led to a design change on control rod design

 

[This_person]

TMI, nothing went wrong, It WORKED. Chernobyl, one of the worst designs possible STILL required blatant human error to make the thing go and Fukajimi, putting the freaking back up generators in the basement of a SEASIDES plant when the engineering called for them being on the ROOF had nothing to do with nuke power and everything to do with human error.

In the mean time how much juice has been used, safely, vs. oil and gas and how many deaths, how much degradation of the environment, mining, accidents and so forth? Nuke is WAY ahead in each and every category with one handicap after another hung around the neck of nuke including freezing it's technology in time.

Well, TMI was also about human error - valves left shut and indicators saying they were open, and a strong desire not to "go solid" (fill the pressurizer). But, those three accidents are the main reason for a huge percentage of the regulations on plants today. The way the old owners of TMI handled it was the main reason for the scares which stopped new nukes. You're correct that the design proved how safe the plants are in America - every bad action operators could take they did, and it's still all contained and safe. But, that doesn't stop most uninformed people from thinking nukes are dangerous, and a slew of regulations.

My point is that we don't support coal globally at the expense of domestic nuclear.

 

[This_person]

No Not Agreed .... how are regulations unreasonable :shrug:

Nuclear Power is way more dangerous when something goes wrong
- as far as I am concerned - Gov aka the Navy should be running all nuclear power plants it is way too dangerous to trust to a public utility trying to make a profit

If there's one thing I'd be socialist on, this is it. You don't run nuke plants for profit - at least you shouldn't.