#1
I heard that, since he was born in the US, Boris Johnson is technically eligible to be POTUS and that he is interested in the job. I'd vote for him.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
05/13/2008 15:52 Comments ||
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#2
Wonder if he could hold both jobs at the same time, Abu?
That'd get quite a few panties in a twist! :-D
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
05/13/2008 15:57 Comments ||
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#3
I wish he would attack the great taboo of England: calling England, "England". It is very important that the English get over their aversion to being English, and again regain pride in themselves and their nation.
For all the talk that their empire was damned, it did a lot more that should be praised. It uplifted the primitive and it fought the tyrant.
Much of the Pax Americana that exists today only does so because of the foundations laid before with English treasure and blood. The English tongue and the alien concepts of individual liberty and freedom go hand in hand.
Seeing the rise of America, the English were wise enough to guide our foreign policy in its infancy. The English persecuted the end of slavery in most of the world. They perpetuated their superior system of government to many lands that had never had any serious government at all.
Lands that had been part of the empire still thrive for the most part, and have retained many of the good ideas brought to their shores. Contrast that with the former French colonies, were misery, poverty and tyranny still reign as often as not.
Tomorrow, presidential candidate Sen. John McCain will be in Seattle to discuss his cap-and-trade proposal to reduce greenhouse gases and fight climate change. Some, however, aren't happy and will be protesting.
The State Democratic Party will be attacking McCain's effort to "boost his faux 'maverick bona fides,'." (By the way, the letters from "faux maverick bona fides" can be rearranged to spell "Scuba Rove Affixed A Mink" which can only be some secret code.) Get out your VRWC secret decoder rings!
How they will be doing it, however, is interesting. According to the Tacoma News Tribune, "The plan is to hire an airplane that will carry a special message to Republican John McCain, and everybody else who is paying attention." Maybe the banner will say "McCain: Faux Maverick Bona Fides." So the way they are going to attack John McCain for his climate change plan is to hire an airplane to fly around in circles burning fuel. . . . and spewing carbon dioxide, which kills polar bears! Bad Democrats! You're making Gaia weep!
If that doesn't demonstrate a contrast, I don't know what does.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/13/2008 09:34 ||
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#1
Makes about as much sense as trying to force Micheal Savage off the air to protect freedom of speech.
As the obituaries for the Clinton campaign rolled in last week, the candidate herself refused to be buried. "I'm not dead."
"I'm getting better."
"I don't want to go on the cart."
She said that she would stay in the race until there is a nominee. Most seemed to think that this meant that she would concede defeat if the Obama campaign could assemble enough pledged delegates and super-delegates to pass the magic number of 2025 or 2209 according to the Clinton campaign. But whatever the number, there will be no official nominee until the votes are cast at the party convention. What I heard in that statement was that Hillary was taking her fight to Denver.
Is this realistic? Most analysts are writing her off. But ask yourself: Does Hillary Clinton have as much gumption as Ted Kennedy did in 1980? Back then he went all the way to the convention, using many of the same arguments against Jimmy Carter that the Clinton campaign is currently employing, though he had a much weaker hand. . . .
Go read it all.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/13/2008 09:26 ||
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#1
By all means the Clintons should take a page out of Ted Kennedy's playbook for a successful presidential campaign.
WASHINGTON -- As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.
I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and they are widely sold on the Internet.
I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. . . .
I won't miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie "Fatal Attraction." In the iconic 1987 film, Close played an independent New York woman who has an affair with a married man played by Michael Douglas. When the liaison ends, the jilted woman becomes Cindy Sheehan a deranged, knife-wielding stalker who terrorizes the man's blissful suburban family. Message: Psychopathic home-wrecker, be gone. . . .
I won't miss reading another treatise by a man or woman, of the left or right, who says that sexism has had not even a teeny-weeny bit of influence on the course of the Democratic campaign. To hint that sexism might possibly have had a minimal role is to play that risible "gender card." As we all know, Democrats are just the most tolerant, compassionate, high-minded people ever! They'd never say something bad about someone's skin color, or culture, or religion, or sexual orientation, and anyone who did say something like that would be drummed out of the party post-haste like Kirk Douglas in the opening credits of Branded. Isn't that right?
/sarcasam
Most of all, I will not miss the silence.
I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't uttered a word of public outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.
Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play? Ask Obama Girl.
There are many reasons why Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/13/2008 08:22 ||
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#1
I rather liked Gerard Vanderleuns take on it, here. Basically it's one of those nasty high school cool-kid spats.
Just for the record, I despised my high-school cool-kid clique with a cold and deadly passion. School spirit was for those losers who would peak at 18 and spend the rest of their lives looking back.
#2
Or it could be that she is a grasping, deceptive, corrupt, person. Unworthy to hold the office of Senator, much less president. Gender NOT withstanding.
#3
Hate to be a nerd, Mike, but Branded starred Chuck Connors. I'll always remember the sword-breaking, epaulet-ripping scene in the intro.
Posted by: Jitch, Scourge of the Veal Cutlets ||
05/13/2008 10:11 Comments ||
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#4
I stand corrected . . . branded . . . marked with a non-nerd's shame, even.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/13/2008 10:27 Comments ||
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#5
I stand corrected . . . branded . . . marked with a non-nerd's shame, even.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/13/2008 10:27 Comments ||
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#6
Nope. Chuck Connors was in "The Rifleman", or, as Mad Magazine put it, "The Rifle, Man".
"All but one man died,
There at Bitter Creek,
And they say he ran away...
something something."
Nope. Connors.
I wish I had not wasted my RAM on that.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
05/13/2008 10:36 Comments ||
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#7
Chuck Connors was in both.
Posted by: ed ||
05/13/2008 10:47 Comments ||
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#8
I guess I did waste my RAM. Should have looked it up first.
In Rifleman, he had that slick lever action.
In Branded, he found uses for the few inches left of his sword.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
05/13/2008 10:53 Comments ||
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"If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why cant we?, asks U.S. presidential candidate John McCain. Nuclear power is a cornerstone of Senator McCains plan to combat climate change, which he is unveiling this week.
McCain thinks he is asking a simple rhetorical question. As it turns out, he is not. His question is technical, with an answer that will surprise him and most Americans. Nuclear reactors cannot possibly meet 80% of Americas power needs or those of any country whose power market dominates its region because of limitations in nuclear technology. McCain needs to find another miracle energy solution, or abandon his vow to drastically cut back carbon dioxide emissions.
Unlike other forms of power generation, nuclear reactors are designed to run flat-out, 24/7 they cant crank up their output at times of high demand or ease up when demand slows.
I'm not sure this is right. And, nukes are occasionally down for maintenance, etc., so they really can't be 24/7. But you can just take them off-line if you need to; the fixed cost is the same.
This limitation generally consigns nuclear power to meeting a power systems minimum power needs the amount of power needed in the dead of night, when most industry and most people are asleep, and the value of power is low. At other times of the day and night, when power demands rise and the price of power is high, society calls on the more flexible forms of generation coal, gas, oil and hydro-electricity among them to meet its additional higher-value needs.
If a country produces more nuclear power than it needs in the dead of night, it must export that low-value, off-peak power. This is what France does. It sells its nuclear surplus to its European Union neighbours, a market of 700 million people. That large market more than 10 times Frances population is able to soak up most of Frances surplus off-peak power.
The U.S. is not surrounded, as is France, by far more populous neighbours. Just the opposite: The U.S. dominates the North American market. If 80% of U.S. needs were met by nuclear reactors, as Senator McCain desires, Americas off-peak surplus would have no market, even if the power were given away. Countries highly reliant on nuclear power, in effect, are in turn reliant on having large non-nuclear-reliant countries as neighbours. If Frances neighbours had power systems dominated by nuclear power, they too would be trying to export off-peak power and France would have no one to whom it could offload its surplus power. In fact, even with the mammoth EU market to tap into, France must shut down some of its reactors some weekends because no one can use its surplus. In effect, France cant even give the stuff away.
Not only does France export vast quantities of its low-value power (it is the EUs biggest exporter by far), France meanwhile must import high-value peak power from its neighbours. This arrangement is so financially ruinous that France in 2006 decided to resurrect its obsolete oil-fired power stations, one of which dates back to 1968.
Frances nuclear program sprung not from business needs but from foreign policy goals. Immediately after the Second World War, Frances President, Charles de Gaulle, decided to develop nuclear weapons, to make France independent of either the U.S. or the USSR. This foreign policy goal spawned a commercial nuclear industry, but a small one Frances nuclear plants could not compete with other forms of generation, and produced but 8% of Frances power until 1973.
Then came the OPEC oil crisis and panic. Sensing that French sovereignty was at stake, the country decided to replace oil with electricity and to generate that electricity with nuclear. By 1974, three mammoth nuclear plants were begun and by 1977, another five. Without regulatory hurdles to clear and with cut-rate financing and a host of other subsidies from Euratom, the EUs nuclear subsidy agency, Frances power system was soon transformed. By 1979, Frances frenzied building program had nuclear power meeting 20% of Frances power generation. By 1983 the figure was about 50% and by 1990 about 75% and growing.
Despite the subsidies, the overbuilding effectively bankrupted Electricite de France (EdF), the French power company. To dispose of its overcapacity and stay afloat, EdF feverishly exported its surplus power to its neighbours, even laying a cable under the English Channel to become a major supplier to the UK. At great expense, French homes were converted to inefficient electric home heating. And EdF offered cut-rate power to keep and attract energy-intensive industries Pechiney, the aluminum supplier, obtained power at half of EdFs cost of production, and soon EdF was providing similar terms to Exxon Chemicals and Allied Signal.
These measures helped but not enough in 1989, EdF ran a loss of four billion French francs, a sum its president termed catastrophic. The company had a 800-billion-franc debt, old reactors that faced expensive decommissioning, and unresolved waste disposal costs. To keep lower-cost competitors out of the country, France also reneged on an EU-wide agreement to open borders up to electricity competition.
Frances nuclear program, in short, is an economic disaster, and a political one too 61% of the French public favours a phase-out of nuclear energy.
Is France a more secure, advanced and innovative country than we are?, McCain also asked. I need no answer to that rhetorical question. I know my country well enough to know otherwise.
But McCain does not know France well enough to know why nuclear powers negative record over there says nothing positive about what it can do for people over here, on this side of the Atlantic.
Posted by: john frum ||
05/13/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
"Unlike other forms of power generation, nuclear reactors are designed to run flat-out, 24/7 they cant crank up their output at times of high demand or ease up when demand slows."
Can this possibly be true? Reactors are running full out or are off entirely? If so, it's a matter of proper design I would guess.
Subs creep along at a fraction of possible reactor output for days or weeks as far as I know. I suspect an agenda by somebody warping this article. Comment by a Nuc would be welcome.
#2
This is partially true. Newer designs will make it less so. Even the author admits nuke plants can be shut down on weekends if they have to. I'll leave it to smarter rantburgers to describe how newer plant designs might affect this equation. I believe it to be significant.
Beyond the plants themselves, we also have new ways to store electrical energy, including super capacitors and a bunch of new pluggable hybrids that will be on the road by the time we finally open new nuclear plants. As importantly, there will be new technology for coordinating when these energy storage elements charge or discharge (based on need for load balancing, economic considerations, etc.). Checkout gridpoint.com if you are interested in one way of implementing this sort of 'smart grid' thinking. It can also manage backup generators so that peak power generation can become more distributed.
The net effect of these advances is that the gap between peak and base load will diminish while the flexiblity of generating capacity should at least slightly improve. This means we will be able to get a lot higher than the low 20% range we now have for nuclear power. Plus, it will take over a generation to build all the new nuke plants so this will be a gradual process.
Fundamentally, France made a good geopolitical decision. It made itself less dependent on the US for protecting access to its energy sources allowing it the luxury to conduct a typically French (amoral, cynical, often cowardly) foreign policy while making itself the dominant electricity provider in Europe. The fact that a state owned utility in a schlerotic socialist economy did poorly is a separate matter. The writer displays a bit of economic cluelessness when he thinks it odd that EdF gave discounts to huge customers who consume power at night.
#5
The old-fashioned and highly effective way to store excess electricity is to pump water uphill in a hydro scheme. The water is then ready to generate electricity at peak times.
And the UK was going down the same path as France until they discovered North Sea oil and gas.
And this is a real gem - French homes were converted to inefficient electric home heating.
All home uses of electricity are energy inefficient compared to direct combustion of hydrocarbons. What does he propose? Banning electric lights because candles are more efficient.
#6
Yeah, this is total BS. Of course, what do you expect from someone more interested in fashion and coolness than being even a little bit tech savvy. This is over twenty years naval nuclear talking. Lawrence Solomon is just another example of the sad state of journalism in the world. More interested in being a lunatic than producing factual news articles.
Solomon is saying that Nuclear plants can't load follow. Tell that to the northern utilities who has so much nuclear capacity, they HAVE to load follow. All the time. Every night. Shithead's doubtless sitting in a house powered by a nuke that's load following.
Solomon's navy nuke? He's either as big a idiot as Jimmah 'i'm no antisemite' Carter, or is viciously lying through his teeth: navy nuke reactors can load follow. I could tell you how quickly a CVN nuclear reactor can go from 0 to 100%, and any power level in between, but then I'd have to kill you. What I can tell you is that the time is in units of seconds. Ya think the navy would take delivery of a ship where, when the captain says to go half speed, NOW, only to have a swabbie 100 feet under the waterline to tell him that he can't?
There are two reasons why MOST nukes are baseload (run 100%, 24-7): ITS CHEAP POWER. Regional power control centers are REQUIRED BY LAW and Public Service Commission rules to buy the cheapest power available, and after hydro, Nuke is IT. Cheap megawatts are snapped up first, by law, and Nuke megawatts are the cheapest out there, so they are snapped up first by law and by economics. I can't tell you how cheap power is, but I have been told that the profit margin on the megawatts coming out of the nuclear units in the south are positively OBSCENE. The greenies like Solmon KNOW THIS, and it TERRIFIES them.
Now, there is a more subtle second reason why nuclear units don't normally load follow: NRC regulations require that the person who turns the knob that controls the power level at a nuclear plant MUST have a nuclear operator's licence. Thus, to do load following, the dispatcher at the region-level distribution control center has to have a nuke license. That's expensive unless you've got more than 50% nukes in your mix, because below that, you're already telling them to run flat out 100% 24/7.
If we want a lot of electric cars out there, we've GOT to get to 80% nukes: they'll be baseload, or somebody's gonna lose their performance bonus, or their jobs.
Did I hear something about pebble bed reactors recently? What does this mean? Is this the latest stuff? Do the Russians have newer stuff since the US hasn't built anything for decades?
#11
John McCain is 100% correct in his underlying premise that an innovative approach using alternative energy technologies is crucial for America to achieve greater energy independence and to lower costs for long-term economic growth.
Finally, a politician making sense about something we need to do! Hallelujah!
#13
The bonehead author assumes that all new plants will be of the old pressurized water design. Wrong.
He needs to study the newest Japanese and French reactors. He also needs to study the distribution grid. Power cna be transmitted a long ways, and pwoer losses occur in the grid. 2 AM for those california reactors is 6 AM for the NY consumers. Opening up the markets will fix the supply/demand issues, as will discounted prices for factories and other industrial consumers which run at night.
And add ot that the hybrid/electrical ehicles that will be consuming power overnight.
I think the problem of excess supply solves itself.
#16
PWR reactors can be throttled but any design that boils a fluid (e.g. coal) will have a bigger lag (minutes) than a gas turbine (seconds). The problem is how to smooth out voltage drop from spiking demand. It can be done by having excess generating capacity on line and switching it to needed sections or have local buffers (batteries, capacitors) that can absorb the excess load for the seconds to minutes until the generators can match the demand.
As for nukes, the price of nuke and coal electrity are about equal (~3¢/kWH). The price for nuke electricty can even drop with standardized design, construction, and esp., reasonable regulation. Fuel costs of nuke plants are ~0.5¢/kWH while fuel costs for coal plants are the largest expense and will continue to rise as more coal is used in power plants and substituted for oil as a raw material.
Posted by: ed ||
05/13/2008 9:48 Comments ||
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#17
What's the long range forecast for the supply of nuclear fuel for power plants? Can supply meet demand?
#18
Some of the numbers I've seen have stated between 50 and 1000 years. It all depends on price. At low prices the recoverable supply is limited to high quality mines. Raise the price and other sources become available (e.g. the uranium and thorium in coal exceed the energy value of burning the coal itself), even seawater extraction. Even if ore prices rise 10 times, the cost of electricity will by a small amount since most of the fuel cost is in the processing.
Then there are breeder reactors. Current reactors extract only about 0.5% of the possible energy from the uranium ore.
Posted by: ed ||
05/13/2008 10:11 Comments ||
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#19
Of course, Jimmy Carter banned reprocessing and closed down breeder reactor development in the US.
Posted by: john frum ||
05/13/2008 10:29 Comments ||
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#20
We can't mine uranium any more. The tailings pollute the Colorado river with radioactive waste.
#21
Base load is typically 40% or so of peak load so if we had twice as many nukes now, things would be fine even without load management or better designed power plants.
Also, there is nothing wrong with the US sending power to Canada when they need it (cold winter nights) since they send it to us when we need it (hot summer days).
#24
Long distance power distribution would want an improved national power grid, I think (international to include Canada). Hasn't part of our problem been not enough wires and transformers for really peak loads like California draws on bad days in the summer?
#26
Our problem is not enough of everything. And the left wing nut cases have been successful in standing in the way of new engergy production for 30 years. Their long running successful policy is simply "NO" to everything. No new refineries, no new power plants, no nuclear, no looking for oil in the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Gulf (except China will soon be doing it off the coast of Cuba anyway), No...sorry.. you can't touch ANWR. And we don't believe you when you say you can burn coal cleanly (Too bad, we are the world's Saudia Arabia of coal.) Wind and solar are OK but NOT in my backyard or where any rats or birds live.
This problem will need to be solved with leadership. We need someone with cojones to steamroll over these liberals and sign Executive orders to do something.
Which, all totaled equals 218,104,094 potential souls that could consume French nuclear power. So... where does the 700 million number come from? Did you just get lazy and look up Europe, Lawrence? 'cuz it sure look like it, dumbass.
#31
"excess generating capacity on line and switching it to needed sections or have local buffers "
but given the high capital cost of nukes, doesnt that kill the total cost per kwh? Isnt that the problem ALL capital intensive power sources, including solar and wind as WELL as nuke face? Isnt that the reason natural gas dominates peaking units?
Im not a technologist, but I see only two real solutions - 1. Improved power storage technology
or 2. Demand side management
This later could make nukes (and solar and wind, BTW) more viable for a larger share of total power, by reducing peaking through technical and pricing strategies.
#33
Classic flag set to 'yes' to archive this one. Once again, Rantburg University at its best.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/13/2008 14:49 Comments ||
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#34
Libhawk: breeder reactors. Make their own fuel and are highly efficiet.
As to capitalization costs, how much of that is to avoid frivolous lawsuits? A lot I bet. If government would get out of the way for the most part, and the courts woudl go to a "loser pays" system to prevent frivolous lawsuits, you'd see the costs drop significantly.
#35
"but given the high capital cost of nukes, doesnt that kill the total cost per kwh? Isnt that the problem ALL capital intensive power sources, including solar and wind as WELL as nuke face? Isnt that the reason natural gas dominates peaking units?"
Not exactly. Medium capital costs, astronomical financing costs, and extremely low fuel costs. The costs of the newest nuke units are very high were accounted to 'capital', but were actually financial due to interest piling up on construction loans while environmentalists gamed the federal complaint process to delay start-ups.
I heard of a guy who was fired from his company get back at the company by opening a small business and claimed to be a viable competitor, bidding for jobs that his former employer bid upon as well. When the government agency awarded a contract to his former company, he'd file serial SBA discrimination complaints. He reportedly boasted that he hung up multi-millions in profits for the cost of several postage stamps as the Feds took months to jump through all the paperwork hoops to address all the complaints, including the silly ones. Yes, he needed a life, and he got it by making someone else's life miserable.
People have no idea how much energy is packed in uranium.
#36
Unlike other forms of power generation, nuclear reactors are designed to run flat-out, 24/7 they cant crank up their output at times of high demand or ease up when demand slows.
Complete Bullshit, the Navy's Nuke ships do it all the time
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
05/13/2008 15:52 Comments ||
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#37
In france they dont have the same lawsuit issues, IIUC, and capital cost per KW are still pretty high. Low enough to make nukes more competive with coal for baseload power than here (where until quite recently they werent competitive for baseload) but not enough to be competitive for peak power, AFAIK.
#39
Well, even if they dropped output to 40% for eight hours at night the cost should not even double, which is still less than what I am paying today.
#40
"excess generating capacity on line and switching it to needed sections or have local buffers "
but given the high capital cost of nukes, doesnt that kill the total cost per kwh?
No. Excess generating capacity that is online but not supplying power is called "spinning reserve". It is typically a gas fired turbine plant and can supply power in a few minutes and the cost is figured into your electric bill. Because demand is highly predictable with time and weather, the amount of ready reserves can be closely matched to demand.
Buffers are important to smoothed demand spikes (i.e. brownouts) from unexpected demand. Battery banks that can instantly supply 10-15 minutes of power provide the time needed for spinning and replacement reserves to go to full power as well as reduce the amount of spinning reserves that use energy w/o contributing power to the grid.
This becomes much more important when rechargeable cars become much more common and a bunch of folks recharge at the same time (the equivalent of a bunch of folks setting their sprinklers to all go on at 2AM). Eventually there will have to be some communication link to control the time and rate of recharge.
Costwise, battery buffers are 1/2 or less the cost of gas turbine plants plus their upkeep is near zero. With mass production 10-20% the cost. But they only store electricity, not generate it.
Posted by: ed ||
05/13/2008 19:32 Comments ||
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#42
Solomon is an idiot and is obviously trying to spread disinformation.
The 100 or so nuclear plants in the US are operating out about a 97% utilization factor. That is, they are putting out, on average 97% of the power they could put out if they ran 100% rated power 24/365. The fact they don't load follow is because there is no spare capacity in them. And they do this as PTAH points out because they are the cheap producer.
The present US nuclear power owners are printing money. They are operating 20-40 year old plants long-sense paid for and most will be eligible to have their license extended 20 more years beyond their original design live time. The fuel costs are small for nuclear and so every extra kilowatt-hour is money in the bank.
The real problem is the environuts.
A nuclear plant that takes 10 years to build is very much more expensive ($billions) than the identical one built in 3years. PTAH is correct when he says that the environuts know this. Fortunately, some things have changed on the regulation side to address this.
Also, the supply of uranium and (thorium) are not an issue. The cost of nuclear energy is very insensitive to the cost of nuclear fuel and we could extract it from sea-water at a cost of that does no substantially change the economics of nuclear power and there is a 10000 year supply there. Of course one would still be able to mine it at economically viable cost for 1000 years.
And there are 3rd generation plant designs ready now. These have taken everything we have learned from running 100 plants for nearly 50 years and incorapated these changes.They will be less complicated than the previous generation and therefore safer. These are the plants that are that will be annouced in the next couple of years in the US.
Fourth generation nuclear plants will start being built in 10 to 13 years. See the General Atomics (the same people who brought us our favorite ORC slayer, the PREDITOR) GT-MHR reactor for a good example. These are exciting because
a) they have very high thermal efficiency (i.e. lower cost per kilowatt-hours)
b) small and modular design allows utilities to increase capacity in small (i.e. lower cost) amounts and can use a central control center
c) increased safety thru robust passive safety features
d) high operating temperatures allows for highly efficient generation of hydrogen during off peak
night operation. Again high efficiency means lower cost
And as #4 g(r)omgoru says, take the hydrogen (and oxygen) from a nuclear plant and the CO2 from a coal fired IGCC plant, mix together and out comes
methanol (or better yet DME which can be used in diesels as well).
What I would like for the US is to see us invest heavily in clean coal IGCC for peaking and 3rd generation nuclear power stations for baseload. IGCC can then produce methanol off-peak at night.
This can be done for about $.50/gal methanol. The
technology to do this has been in full scale commercial production in an Eastman Chemical facility in Kingsport TN since 1998. Of course the $.50/gal is pre-tax and does not account for the fact that methanol has a lower energy density than gasoline. We should also invest in converting GAS fired power plants into IGCC. And, of course, we need to start manufacturing more FFV cars and trucks.
In 10-20 years when the 4 generation nuclear power with hydrogen (and oxygen) production facilities is availible we again invest heavily in that. In addition we add CO2 capture to the IGCC plants (which are ideal suited to this). If we sent the CO2 in a pipeline to the 4 -generation nuclear plants, we would again get even more methanol. The combination of these would be a knife thru the heart of OPEC.
Anyway, the solution to our energy problems is a political one. The technology and other resources are already there.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
As the obituaries for the Clinton campaign rolled in last week, the candidate herself refused to be buried. 
Is this realistic? Most analysts are writing her off. But ask yourself: Does Hillary Clinton have as much gumption as Ted Kennedy did in 1980? Back then he went all the way to the convention, using many of the same arguments against Jimmy Carter that the Clinton campaign is currently employing, though he had a much weaker hand. . . .
By Lawrence Solomon
