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Could floating wind farms power the planet ?


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Done responsibly that would be awesome.
I'm a big proponent of both wind and solar energy development.

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We can't be involved, though. The POTUS thinks they're unsightly. 

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Caldeira points out, is that transmission cables would likely need to be laid across great distances of the ocean floor and then rise up to meet the floating turbine, stressing cables that would be difficult to repair if damaged.

Also a two-mile-high forest of cables connected to "floating" wind turbines.

Sounds like a lot more points of failure and impediment to navigation than on land.

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maybe will never happen, oil is the money maker for north amercia. we had suppose to get wind farms here but never went ahead because of oil companies. gov dont care about climate change, its all about the money

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5 hours ago, pallidin said:

Done responsibly that would be awesome.
I'm a big proponent of both wind and solar energy development.

Well, solar is only effective between a limited band.  If you get much further north than I am, it's not effective from a cost point of view due to the lower amount of sunlight. 

I hope the wind farms aren't just free floating as the blurb implied.  They will need some sort of anchor or "corral".  Great idea! What could go wrong: salt water, electricity, corrosion, electrocution.  Unless we have a zero resistance cable, how much of the generated power is going to be lost to resistance and heat before it gets to the homes?  The cold waters of the North Atlantic will help a bit with that. Icebergs may also wind up in the equation somewhere as well.  Still worth a shot, but it seems there are a bunch of safety issues to figure out.

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Any sort of energy can be converted to electricity....  Even pedestrian foot traffic. There are so many ways.

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i don't understand these clumsy devices meant to save the planet while the true solutions are already in place. Atomic energy. it's clean , safe with adequate engineering and cheap.

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3 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

Atomic energy. it's clean , safe with adequate engineering and cheap.

Thats nonsense by simple math. Atomic energy isnt clean, safe and cheap in any kind because atomic waste, including the dismantling debris of the plants, isnt "clean" and it isnt "safe" and it isnt "cheap" (to handle and to store).

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1 hour ago, toast said:

Thats nonsense by simple math. Atomic energy isnt clean, safe and cheap in any kind because atomic waste, including the dismantling debris of the plants, isnt "clean" and it isnt "safe" and it isnt "cheap" (to handle and to store).

the problem is waste indeed but there are solutions available such as transporting it to the moon or bury it deep in earths mantle. 

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2 minutes ago, qxcontinuum said:

the problem is waste indeed but there are solutions available such as transporting it to the moon or bury it deep in earths mantle. 

Neither of those are viable solutions. Transporting it to the Moon is extremely expensive and rockets aren't exactly very reliable. If a rocket caarying nuclear waste explodes during launch you have just made the problem much much worse by speading the waste into the atmosphere.

Burying it into the mantle isn't an option either. We simply can't reach the mantle with our technology and if you can't reach somewhere, how are you going to bury something there ?

I'm not against nuclear energy, it has its place, but it isn't the best solution. Besides the problems of waste and accidents its have proven to be a very expensive energy solution.

Getting back on topic we don't really need wind farms in the middle of the ocean, because there is plenty of potential in more accesible areas. Off-shore windfarms get rid of the problem of transporting the energy, because there you can still use plain old power cables to carry the electricity. Likewise there is still plenty of places on land where you can place wind farms. Just think about how much energy is sweeping through the plains of the US Mid West alone.

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1 hour ago, Noteverythingisaconspiracy said:

Neither of those are viable solutions. Transporting it to the Moon is extremely expensive and rockets aren't exactly very reliable. If a rocket caarying nuclear waste explodes during launch you have just made the problem much much worse by speading the waste into the atmosphere.

Burying it into the mantle isn't an option either. We simply can't reach the mantle with our technology and if you can't reach somewhere, how are you going to bury something there ?

I'm not against nuclear energy, it has its place, but it isn't the best solution. Besides the problems of waste and accidents its have proven to be a very expensive energy solution.

Getting back on topic we don't really need wind farms in the middle of the ocean, because there is plenty of potential in more accesible areas. Off-shore windfarms get rid of the problem of transporting the energy, because there you can still use plain old power cables to carry the electricity. Likewise there is still plenty of places on land where you can place wind farms. Just think about how much energy is sweeping through the plains of the US Mid West alone.

Now that I think of it, We can put wind mills in Congress. Plenty of hot air being generated there. And then there's the White House.....

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5 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

the problem is waste indeed but there are solutions available such as transporting it to the moon ...

You are telling, again, utter nonsense. First, there are no solutions to ship nuclear waste to the Moon; 2nd, nobody would accept the very high costs and 3rd, nobody would accept the high risk of nuclear pollution of the Earth in case of carrier failure.

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... or bury it deep in earths mantle. 

Nuclear power plants are in service for nearly 70 years now, dont you wonder why we still not have such deep located storage sites?

Edited by toast
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10 hours ago, toast said:

You are telling, again, utter nonsense. First, there are no solutions to ship nuclear waste to the Moon; 2nd, nobody would accept the very high costs and 3rd, nobody would accept the high risk of nuclear pollution of the Earth in case of carrier failure.

Nuclear power plants are in service for nearly 70 years now, dont you wonder why we still not have such deep located storage sites?

1 - Nasa is sending nuclear powered probes to space since 70's . Active plutonium is much more dangerous in smaller quantities than atomic waste. The actual cost of storing waste in third world countries or buried deep under tons of mountain rock , including lead cover layers and such would be 3 times more expansive than paying Russia to fly it in space.

2 - deep forage isn't possible yet since there was little interest in developing equipment to do it although curently there has been successful attempts to drill deeper and deeper

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9 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

1 - Nasa is sending nuclear powered probes to space since 70's . Active plutonium is much more dangerous in smaller quantities than atomic waste.

The RTG's on NASA spacecrafts countains at most 8 kg of plutonium. Currently we produce around 12.000 tons of high-level nuclear wate per year, this is the equivelant of 1,5 million RTG's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator

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The actual cost of storing waste in third world countries or buried deep under tons of mountain rock , including lead cover layers and such would

I don't know what it would cost to store waste in 3rd world countries, but do you really think it is a good idea to send material usefull for nuclear weapons and dirty bombs to 3rd world countries ?

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be 3 times more expansive than paying Russia to fly it in space.

This we can actually do some math on.

Assuming we use the Proton rocket we can currently send about 20 tons into orbit at a cost of 65 million $. Thus we would require 600 launches a year just to keep up with current production of high-level waste. This would cost 39 billion $. This assumes that the payload is all waste, so realisticly we need to double to number of launches if we encase the waste in some form of solid container. 78 billion $. Now this only brings us to low Earth orbit and if left there the waste would reenter the Earths atmosphere and that would make the problem much worse that it was to begin with, so we need to send it further away. You suggested the Moon and the Proton rocket can send around 6 tons to the Moon. So assuming half the mass is a sturdy container we need 4000 launches a year, or 260 billion $ a year. On top of that the Proton is only around 90 % reliable so you are going to have 1200 tons of high-level waste lost in launch accidents. 

Do you still think its a good idea ?

The thing is that this is one of those ideas that might seem great on paper, but once you go into the actual details it quickly shows that it is a bad idea. 

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2 - deep forage isn't possible yet since there was little interest in developing equipment to do it although curently there has been successful attempts to drill deeper and deeper

Burrying the waste underground is one of the ways being considered. Drilling deep is very expensive and not really needed.

The solution favoured is to enclose the waste in solid containers and put them into deep caverns. This way the waste is out of the way, but we can still monitor it. This seems like the most sensible idea to me.

Edited by Noteverythingisaconspiracy
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11 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

1 - Nasa is sending nuclear powered probes to space since 70's . Active plutonium is much more dangerous in smaller quantities than atomic waste. The actual cost of storing waste in third world countries or buried deep under tons of mountain rock , including lead cover layers and such would be 3 times more expansive than paying Russia to fly it in space.

2 - deep forage isn't possible yet since there was little interest in developing equipment to do it although curently there has been successful attempts to drill deeper and deeper

Noteverythingisaconspiracy was a little faster than me here and he gave you exactly the answer I would had given. But I would like to ask you, as you used the wording "active plutonium", are you in the opinion that there is "inactive plutonium" as well? :clap::lol:

Edited by toast
#@%$!!!
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14 hours ago, toast said:

Noteverythingisaconspiracy was a little faster than me here and he gave you exactly the answer I would had given. But I would like to ask you, as you used the wording "active plutonium", are you in the opinion that there is "inactive plutonium" as well? :clap::lol:

well, plutonium is an active element with a half life of approx. 24,000 years. So yeah it decays in time, i don't see why my statement is incorrect !

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I kind of like this idea of floating wind farms.

There's got to be a better way then dangling cables down to the sea floor. Perhaps convert oil tankers to store electrical charge, and then have them bring it back to shore?

Or, perhaps have the wind generators produce hydrogen in the base of the tower and then the hydrogen is tankered back to shore?

Edited by DieChecker
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On 10/11/2017 at 1:44 AM, toast said:

Thats nonsense by simple math. Atomic energy isnt clean, safe and cheap in any kind because atomic waste, including the dismantling debris of the plants, isnt "clean" and it isnt "safe" and it isnt "cheap" (to handle and to store).

I agree. Nuclear is not the future. It is a expensive dead end. 

Fukushima....

 

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4 minutes ago, DieChecker said:

I agree. Nuclear is not the future. It is a expensive dead end.

 

It's bird-shredding (not very good for the environment) windmills that are the expensive and useless dead end. Nuclear and coal (of which the UK sits on trillions of tons) are the future.

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Fukushima

How many Fukushimas have there been? Fukushima sits on an earthquake zone. Most nuclear plants don't.

Edited by Black Monk
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On 11/10/2017 at 5:10 AM, paperdyer said:

Now that I think of it, We can put wind mills in Congress. Plenty of hot air being generated there. And then there's the White House.....

They should hire my ex wife to stand in front of a wind farm :sm  but yeah quite sure politicians would work as well  !

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How many Fukushimas have there been? Fukushima sits on an earthquake zone. Most nuclear plants don't.

The Chernobyl disaster wasnt caused by geological forces, the Windscale incident wasnt caused by geological forces, the 2005 Sellafield incident wasnt cause by geological forces, the Three Mile Island incidents werent caused by geological forces etc etc etc. 

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