GM Gasoline-Electric Car

[Martin Blank]

[quote="Captain Pink";p="715840"]I am Still wondering, why you stck to that halflife issue. As I said, I was taking about the radiation time of te nuclear waste, not the halflife. even stuff with a halflife of a few years can radiate significantly hundred thousands of years, with a given mass. Just lay it down.[/quote]
I talk about the half-life, because that's what's important. Elements with short half-lives tend to be dangerous, and those with long half-lives tend to be less so.

The math alone shows you to be outright wrong. One mole of any element will decay more or less completely after 79 half-lives (one mole is ~6.022E23 atoms, and 2^79 = ~6.045E23). Therefore, a mole of plutonium-238 will be completely decayed into other products in ~7000 years, while a mole of uranium-238 will be decayed in about 336 billion years.

Let's put it another way. The LD50 (dose that provides a 50% chance of death in a human subject) for gamma radiation is about 400 rem within a short time span (measured in minutes, I believe). A material that gives off this much radiation is clearly dangerous. For sake of argument, let's say that his material has a half-life of 100 years. At 200 years, it is giving off 200 rem in that time-span. At 300 years, it's still toxic at 100 rem, inducing radiation sickness, but is not necessarily lethal. After 400 years, we're down to 50 rem, which should be handled with care, but isn't such a concern. At 1000 years, it's down to less than 400 millirem in that period of time, and women absorb that much getting a mammogram.

Short half-life means it's very dangerous for a while, but it fades off rapidly. Long half-life means its not dangerous at all. It's the medium-length half-lives that are problematic, and which can be dangerous for several tens of thousands of years. Those which radiate over several hundred thousand years are not as much a concern.

For the radiation/Person: always the question how many people live there, and how far they are away.

Radiation per person has nothing to do with how many people live there. That's why it's per person. It doesn't matter if there is only one person there, or one million people there, it's still per person.

[Captain Pink]

Oh man, this goes on my nervs!
*sigh* O.K.
@Luksi: I have one, thanks. I can look up words in it, but you know, I have a fatal atraction to typos. That is something a dictonary can not heal. You know what I mean and that mus be fine. And sorry, I accept facts, as you will see later. But I have some facts that you guys just not get through your skulls and as long as you can not convince me, I stick to them. The only one who presented facts that changed my opinion is Tower.

@Tower: Well, if that is the fact, I have to agree that this is quite problematic. I can only sugest that if a house is build, you use boilers instead of furnaces and heat pumps as a monovalent system if you already have a well or you use it bivalent with a boiler that comes with caloric value technology instead of these oversized toasters.
For the soil heatexchanger: The difference is that you do not drill a well but lay a heatexchanger about 1 or to meters in the soil. It needs more area, but it can be cheaper than drilling a well.

By many thousands of dollars? Highly unlikely.

With energy prices like here? most likely.

Radiation per person has nothing to do with how many people live there. That's why it's per person. It doesn't matter if there is only one person there, or one million people there, it's still per person.

*shivers*
radiation per person:
rem/ number of persons
It is like 1/2
or 1/4
Now tell me again that it does not matter how many people live there.

[Deacon]

Captain Pink, visit http://www.getfirefox.com and grab the installer from there. It has built-in spell checking when filling in forms like this one I'm typing in right here. You can even switch between German and English dictionaries, if you'd like. It's a nearly effortless change that can make a lot of difference.

Also...

[quote="Captain Pink";p="716151"]Now tell me again that it does not matter how many people live there.[/quote]
Can you tell my why it does matter how many people live there? If I live there, I honestly don't give a shit about how many other people live around me. I just want to know how much I am being exposed to. Obviously, it's not at any dangerous levels.

[kaiju01]

Well, I could see his confusion on the generic "per person" terminology. Pink, for a generally uniform, isotropic source of radiation, the concentration or population of the surrounding area is not important to what an individual will receive. It's merely a matter of cross-section available to radiation intensity incident on it. Rem (röntgen equivalent in man) is a measure of biological exposure. What you measure is the density integrated over the detector/receiver (per person), and you personally would not care about the full integration over the surrounding area.

[Makh]

[quote="Captain Pink";p="715840"]@Makh: Well, I did not this was a spy, but if itis so, than it does not make things any better.[/quote]
I like this one. It was just humorous remark. Do not you think it would be to overestimate American spies?

[Arres]

HEY! Our spies totally COULD have!

I have nothing of further use. I apologize for interjecting in the conversation of those MUCH more educated than I.

Go nuclear.

[HTRN]

Capt. Pink, I could not find anything for specific excise taxes for coal for home heating use. My guess is there is none, just plain ole' sales tax, if that particular state has one.

400,000 marks for construction?! That's a hair under $270K USD. For what size house? The average house being built in the US is now 2200 square feet(204 sq. meter). My guess is that the average size energy generator house in Europe is smaller probably 1500 sq. feet and under. Solar has wholesale buyback scheme in many states, where any net energy generation is paid to the homeowner at what it would cost the utility to make. This amounts to very small change, for a very large investment. a 10Kw grid tie array is on the order of 75K USD. When a "high" electric bill is $200/month(I personally have only seen my bill go over $300 once, in the ten years I've had central air), with averages the non summer months go to less than $100, it's hard to justify something that will never payback in less than a coupla decades.

Energy efficiency does not sell homes here(with notable exceptions). Large kitchens, large master baths and bedrooms, and pools do. a geothermal heat pump is roughly double the cost of conventional boiler/furnace, as it requires a ground loop. In most of the US, a well (for a vertical loop) is in the neighborhood of $2-3K to drill. For a horizontal loop, you'd need to excavate quite a bit of land, pretty far down(10-12 feet), that means you have to have the land to begin with, and then you have to dig it up. Not cheap either.


HTRN

[Martin Blank]

[quote="Captain Pink";p="716151"]

Radiation per person has nothing to do with how many people live there. That's why it's per person. It doesn't matter if there is only one person there, or one million people there, it's still per person.

*shivers*
radiation per person:
rem/ number of persons
It is like 1/2
or 1/4
Now tell me again that it does not matter how many people live there.[/quote]
4.8 rem per person means that one person in the vicinity will soak up a total of 4.8 rem per year. Two people will soak up a total of 9.6 rem per year. 196,847 people will soak up a total of 944,865.6 rem per year. That's what per person means.

At first, I thought that the language barrier was getting in the way. Now I think you're just being stubborn for the sake of it. If you trust Tower, then perhaps he could validate my numbers, and then you'll see that I know what I'm talking about.

[Deacon]

HTRN, it's not that energy efficiency doesn't sell, it's that there are so many easier, cheaper ways to do it. Don't put windows on the east and west walls of the home, for instance. Have two A/C units for two-story homes, one for each floor, and make sure they've got high seer ratings. Install a radiant barrier in the attic with plenty of insulation, absolutely jam the house with insulation that carries a high R-value, install at least double-pane windows (which is the norm, IIRC), etc. Install solar screens. Choose relatively low-energy appliances and lighting. Depending on where you live, open some windows and have a central fan sucking air up from of the house and out the attic, which can do the job of keeping the house feeling cool while using less energy than an A/C unit. Etc, etc, etc. These are all relatively inexpensive things that don't require rare and exotic technology, costing an assload to install and maintain and possibly breaking down on you with nobody around who knows how to work on it, and best of all these other ways will actually add value to the home rather than making it a weird hippie commune.

[adciv]

a geothermal heat pump is roughly double the cost of conventional boiler/furnace, as it requires a ground loop. In most of the US, a well (for a vertical loop) is in the neighborhood of $2-3K to drill. For a horizontal loop, you'd need to excavate quite a bit of land, pretty far down(10-12 feet), that means you have to have the land to begin with, and then you have to dig it up. Not cheap either.

10-12 feet? By any chance does that still have to be in soil/dirt or can it be through anything? I know in my area, once you dig down 6 inches, you hit solid clay for who knows how far. Other people I know from other states hit bedrock at 6 feet.

[Captain Pink]

4.8 rem per person means that one person in the vicinity will soak up a total of 4.8 rem per year. Two people will soak up a total of 9.6 rem per year. 196,847 people will soak up a total of 944,865.6 rem per year. That's what per person means.

Aha. This makes sense now. Still I have the question which type of radiation I would face there.

At first, I thought that the language barrier was getting in the way. Now I think you're just being stubborn for the sake of it. If you trust Tower, then perhaps he could validate my numbers, and then you'll see that I know what I'm talking about.

I am not. Still I need information to et your point. In this case, your information was misleading, at least for me.

Hehehe, this so remings me of the debate that I had with somebody about the average water use.

So what? If I say in a region of given size 2m³/(person*a) is used, it does not give you any information about how much quantity of water is used there overall. Only if i say that 300 people live there, you can say that 600m³ of water is used there per year.

400,000 marks for construction?!

Euros. I think it was a two-family house....

and pools do.

A pool must be heated the whole year through, the perfect opportunity to use CHP technology. In the cold months, you can run it at full power, heating pool and house. at summer times, you put it down to the half power and only heat your pool.

Large kitchens, large master baths and bedrooms

Energy efficiency does not negate big/comfortable living.

a geothermal heat pump is roughly double the cost of conventional boiler/furnace, as it requires a ground loop. In most of the US, a well (for a vertical loop) is in the neighborhood of $2-3K to drill. For a horizontal loop, you'd need to excavate quite a bit of land, pretty far down(10-12 feet), that means you have to have the land to begin with, and then you have to dig it up. Not cheap either.

This is why I said to Tower that I accepted, that in the US you have the problem to get this investments back. But if you already have a well, you can use it for this, too.

I could not find anything for specific excise taxes for coal for home heating use. My guess is there is none, just plain ole' sales tax, if that particular state has one.

This brings me to the idea that the taxing just works like this:
The dirtier the energy source, the lower the taxes. Not climate friendly.

The math alone shows you to be outright wrong. One mole of any element will decay more or less completely after 79 half-lives (one mole is ~6.022E23 atoms, and 2^79 = ~6.045E23). Therefore, a mole of plutonium-238 will be completely decayed into other products in ~7000 years, while a mole of uranium-238 will be decayed in about 336 billion years.

note that 1 mole plutonium is 244g.
Now lets see how long a m³ would take:

1 mole = 244 g
19.740.000g/244g ~ 81 moles
81 moles = 4,9E+25 atoms
It needs 86 halflifes to decay or ~7620 years

As math shows, I am right. If you take a theoretical mass, you can reach billions of years until it i decayed completely. I was just talking hypothetically.


And so what? You have to keep an eye on the plutonium for 7000 years or more. Just imagine this time. When we would have a piece of plutonium that decayed in this moment, it must have been created in the year 4993 BC, in the copper age!!!
Now just let some moments of worlds history fly past your inner eye, that took place in this time:
-roman empire
-birth and death of Jesus, Mohamed and Buddha
-Pompeji
-Bubonic plague
-Wars and periods of anarchy of countless numbers
-the huns
-conquering of America
-American civil war
-2 world wars
-cold war
-terrorism
...
Who tells you that we will be free of those irritating events in the future? can you assure me that this dangerous stuff will be save for all this time? I guess not. And when we talk about our nuclear waste, we are not talking about a single mole.

@Decon&HTRN:
climate friendly housing has to faces. you can try to 1. bring clean energy with highest possible efficiency into your home and 2. try to keep it in. To keep it in, you should do two things: Put a good insulation on your house and do not use windows for air exchange. More efficient is to install a supply air system with a rotation-heat exchanger, that takes the heat out of the exhaust air and warms the supply air with it. This is not exotic and does not cost "an assload".
Same goes for caloric value. I have a catalog from Buderus lying next to me. A classical boiler without caloric value with 11kWh costs 1.810 € (~2.353$, 213$/kWh). A boiler with caloric value of 15 kWh costs 2.990€ (~3887$, 259$/kWh). The 15 kWh do not include the extra of energy you get from caloric value. Typically it lies at ~20%. Reducing the price/kWh by 20% brings us to ~207$/kWh.
Also the heat pump with geothermic heat source are not more exotic than those with air as heat source. same goes for a CHP-device (It is a motor with an heat exchanger for cooling).

[adciv]

[quote="Captain Pink";p="716590"]

and pools do.

A pool must be heated the whole year through, the perfect opportunity to use CHP technology. In the cold months, you can run it at full power, heating pool and house. at summer times, you put it down to the half power and only heat your pool.[/quote]
Incorrect. Outdoor pools in the US are emptied during the winter months. They are not heated during the summer.

I could not find anything for specific excise taxes for coal for home heating use. My guess is there is none, just plain ole' sales tax, if that particular state has one.

This brings me to the idea that the taxing just works like this:
The dirtier the energy source, the lower the taxes. Not climate friendly.

Explain. Show us that Solar or Water or Wind are taxed more than Coil and Oil.

Also the heat pump with geothermic heat source are not more exotic than those with air as heat source. same goes for a CHP-device (It is a motor with an heat exchanger for cooling).

They are exotic in that they require digging. An air heat pump sits outside the home on a small slab of concrete. A geothermal requires digging a deep hole or trench.

[Martin Blank]

A cubic meter of plutonium-88? It doesn't exist. Nuclear weapons that make use of plutonium in a highly-enriched state use only a few kilos of it, and they use longer half-life isotopes. I suspect that a cubic meter of Pu-88 might be close to, if not past, critical mass.

There are safe ways of dealing with these heavily radioactive elements, including running them through breeder reactors to burn off the more dangerous elements while generating yet more power, leaving only a fraction of the original overall mass, and that mostly low-yield. In the meantime, you provide a baseline energy source that can be supplemented by solar and wind plants.

[Deacon]

BLAH BLAH BLAH NOTHING TO SEE HERE

[adciv]

Martin Blank, I'm pretty sure Pu-88 does not exist. Nuclear Weapons generally use Pu-239 or Uranium. Pu-239 is critical at 10kg and has a mass of 19.816 g/cm^3. So a meter cubed would weigh 19.8 metric tons, way past critical. Pu-238 is not used in nuclear weapons.