You do know the difference between a Baptist and a Methodist, right? The Methodist will say HI to you in the liquor store... <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

I was raised Catholic, Irish Catholic, but I don't "practice" any more. I now belong to the church of Wind, Water, Sun and Sails.

IRISH!!! Now there's something we can talk about! My Irish mother was a holy terror. Do you know the phrase; "do you want to see me get my Irish up! <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" /> <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" /> <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />" I hope not.

There were many a wooden spoon busted on my butt. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

When Bonnie and I were meeting with the priest in preparation for our wedding last year, he inquired as to what kind of a church goer I would be. When I replied with an indirect 'safe' answer, he shot more directly and said something to the effect of (as if it were perfectly acceptable), "so you'll pretty much be a major holiday guy - Christmas and Easter?". I replied "well, yeah mostly...but I have a big regatta every Easter".

What does that mean, Timbo? You stopped drinking? <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

Gotta beat you guys to the punch: God invented wheel barrows to teach us (Irish) to walk upright; then invented whiskey to keep us from ruling the world! <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

No Stank, it means I stopped confessing my sins, or trying to repent... <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

As Pete carefully emphasizes, citrus diseases keep moving to Florida, or evolving if you wish, to take advantage of the citrus monoculture. Citrus bugs do too. The industry has to stay ahead of them somehow, to survive. Then we get a little breeze in late September, and your oranges are whipped off onto the ground. What a business!

I solved the "natural gas expense for heating" 2 years ago. We turned off the gas house heat and its been off ever since. Now this is only N. Florida where it frosts my bananas sometimes.... but a 1500 watt electric heater will toast up my bathroom in 5 minutes for a quick morning shower in January, then it is turned off for the day, and we wear fuzzy clothes and go for a walk. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

This reply shows the modern Ireland.

Irish Catholic - Practise or no - Yea OK.

WTF <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" /> Does $750/mo. mean that you pay 750 dollars a month for your electricity <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

No ? Of course not - Sorry - Thick Irish <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

Unfortunately yes, I had a $750 electric bill last July and near that for August. They are the two hottest months and it's 96F every day, with an overnight low of 78, down here in the US of Africa. Remember, mid Florida is on the same latitude as Moroco.

As I mentioned earlier, the Utility co. raised their rates -considerably- after the three hurricanes and the oil prices shot up. That's why I started researching solar panels! In the fall and spring, we can turn off the air/heat and open all the windows, so the bill goes down, but it's still never cheap with 6 of us, and 4 of them are girls.

Hey, that's still a lot cheaper than the horse feed bill every month!

Move closer to the seabreeze, Tim. My electric bill tops out in August at about $120. Only month where the windows aren't open all day.

Part of this is that mommy "freezes" if the house drops under 77 degrees F. I would guess the bill would be about $200 if we kept the thermostat at 72 d F.

Oh, and my shack is only 2500 sq. ft. under air. Not as big as your "Al Gore Mansion"....

The plant I work in does have panels on it. But, the amount of power required to run the plant is more than the panels can produce. Automated production uses alot of power.

Since I work as an engineer doing nothing but air emissions work (along with some hazmat/hazwaste), I know quite a bit a/b the power industry. Just to clarify, I'm a consultant, not and environmentalist.... the difference? I'm in it to get paid. ;-)

The fun thing about this is that we can blame the tree hugging enviro-nazi's for a large portion of our air quality woes.

Back when nukes were coming on-line, the enviros said, "NO NUKES" and wanted coal plants. Now, 80% of our "carbon" emissions are produced from industrial sources. I don't know the exact numbers, but a SUBSTANTIAL portion of that is from COAL plants which the enviro nuts pushed for. Well, now they want, "NO coal!!"... well, we need power...

So, the gov decides to build a storage facility for the nuke waste in the US (Yucca Mtn). The DOE said, "no more nuke plants till we have a centralized storage facility". Well, our friend the enviro wackos don't like Yucca Mtn. The governor of the state of NV said he was going to kill the project. Hmmm... no more nukes till we get Yucca and people want to kill it. Do you know how much and where our current nuke waste stock pile is? If consolidated, it would cover a foot ball field, three meters deep. Not a lot of waste given how many years we've been generating it. Right now it's stored individually all over the country. There have been several releases to the environment, causing health and safety issues.

Or, we can think about the quantity of emissions that have gone into the air from coal plants. I worked at an 1,100 mega Watt facility while in college for a summer. We burned ~110 railroad cars of coal PER DAY!!! Think about that on the grand scale of the whole US!! Do you know how much NOx, CO, SOx, PM, Metals, etc that is?!?!?! OR... we could have built nuke plants, put the waste in drums and kept the air a lot cleaner. Nothing like having people who say they want to protect the environment be the same ones who are causing it's destruction.

P.S. man-made global warming is BS. 100ppm (0.01%)... causing our climate to change!?!? it's not that delicate of a system!! Also, the dem's who like to say they are strong on environmental issues... ask a/b ole' Ted Kennedy and the wind farm up in his neck of the woods.... or D.S. Al Gore and his "carbon foot print"... only 20x the national average energy consumption in ONE of his houses... doh, I'm up on my soap box again.....

Like I said in another thread....

GLOBAL WARMING = FAD

<img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Stanky, you have never seen my "Al Gore mansion", if you had, you would know it is only a 2,800 sq. ft. 1962 Ranch, with 3 bedrooms, being lived in by 6 people, which is only 466 square feet per person. My wife and kids are in the house all day, all summer, running the air, TV, washer and dryer constantly, I have no idea what temp they set because I'm in Bombay for a week, but I can tell you they keep it cold.

The house has no insulation, no shade, and the walls are 50% glass, for the "View of the lake". If you wanted a more energy inefficient house, you would have to work very hard to build one!

Being a ranch, it has a very long East-West roofline, facing south, which would be perfect for solar panels. And no, we don't get any help from your fancy Sea Breeze! When it's 98 outside, it's 98 inside, unless you run the air all day, which she does. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

Sir, I resemble that remark, but only superficially!

I still don't want any Chernobles or Three Mile Islands. That is my big concern with Nukes. You can't make a "little" mistake.

So, since you seem to be an expert, maybe you'd answer a couple of questions.

How serious was TMI?

And, why do nukes have to be so big? Can you really make small, economically feasible ones?

My reason for asking about size, is the transmission problem. The lines themselves are still at risk to earthquakes, hurricanes and the like.

Too bad USA is so far behind in the production of clean, safe nuclear power, see http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=352 Our Government regulations have shut down many facilities before they could go on line, Including WWPS 3 and 5 in my state of Washington.

BTW, I do know a little about power plants. Like all BSME grads at WVU, West Virginia Univ. we had to design a coal fired power plant, from coal delivery to electrical power distribution. At that time, the first nuclear plants were on line, and scheduled to take over a large percent of power production. Government regulations prevented this from happening, at least in this Country.

Caleb Tarleton

Sorry for the slow reply, been covered up with work and horse stuff.

I'm not an advocate of polluting, but I am an advocate of common sense. We have to weigh our risks. IMHO the risk of nuke problems is less than the health problems produced by coal fired power plants due to the quantity and type of pollutants emitted. 80% of Frances power comes from nukes. How many problems have we heard of? Yeah... see what I mean? Controls have come a LONG way since the days of Chernoble and TMI. Chernoble was caused by the typical over zealous communist "get-r-done" attitude. They had a known equipment problem, however a middle manager in an attempt to not disappoint his supervisor pushed ahead with a planned test of the reactor. It was easily avoidable. They should have prudently not run their scheduled test and the whole thing would have never happened. TMI from what I understand was caused by an instrumentation failure coupled with a lack of procedure and know how.

I'm sure they could be made smaller, but it's an economy of scale. Most nuke plants have a higher output than a coal plant of similar foot print. Also, given the cost of many of the components, I don't know if building multiple small facilities would make any sense. You would have a lot of duplication of jobs and that would push operational costs higher.

The thing that makes the nuke plants look big is the cooling tower. Sadly enough, you have a lot of heat that has to be dealt with and that's the best way to do it. If you just dumped or diluted the hot water into the rivers, you would cause all sorts of other ecological problems.

Can they use the waste heat to "pre-heat" the incoming water to the boiler? I presume they already do this, which should reduce the overall waste heat generated.

And I do recall some testing done with sodium as the coolant which allowed the reactor to run at higher temps and efficiency (= less waste). Did they ever move beyond the bench scale and lab scale on these?

They do all kinds of heat transfer and pre heating on power plants. The more energy they recover the better their profit margins. Even at the coal plant I worked at, they were only able to economically get the flue gas temp down to ~350 F. The nuke plants typically have a double closed loop cooling system to isolate the water that have been in contact with nuclear fuel.

Nice graphic showing the process:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power2.htm

I have not heard much about the sodium reactors outside of the research stage. I know there was a lot of problem with corrosion due to how caustic the molten sodium is.