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Nuclear fallacies

I was trying to figure out what could possibly be the reason for maintaining a nuclear plant.

Lets take Fukushima. It generates 4.7 GWe which is a lot of electricity, so initially I thought, OK, you get all that energy from 6 reactors that don’t take all that much space, means you can cram a lot more than you would by, say solar panels.

I mean you need some 3000 square meters of space for a 100KWp solar panel installation. If you want to add solar tracking you need more space so lets be generous and say we need an acre (4046 square meters) for 100KWp.

To get to the 4.7 GW produced by Fukushima we would then need an area of approximately 1880 acres (that’s ~76 million meters) – bare with me, I know full well that comparing the power plant output with the nominal power measurements of PV panels is a stretch so this is just a mental exercise to provide scale.

Fukushima occupies 865 acres of land! That is 3500000 (three and a half million square meters) which if covered by solar tracking PV would theoretically generate 116MW.

To be more realistic let us take a real world PV installation. Koeching II is a 5.6 MW installation on an area of 15 hectares (that’s 150000 square meters, some 37 acres). For the area of Fukushima that would give us 130MW.

OK, you need a looot more space to generate the electricity with solar panels. But that is with the current underfunded and ignored state of technology.

Now imagine the 20 mile evacuation radius (aproximately 3200 square kilometers) around the Fukushima plant with solar panels and windmills. Imagine how much more effective PV technology would be if all the money we spent to “take care” of nuclear waste (never mind the money that go into operating and inspecting nuclear power plants) went into research and development of renewable energy sources.

Keep that picture in mind as you realize that the alternative might have just created another no-go zone on this planet.

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Posted by Vassilis Rizopoulos on Mar 21, 2011

Browser ABCs

Inspired by Tim Bray’s Letter Sweep

First letter browser guesses:

[A]mpelofilosofies this blog. There’s a tricky part here. Α is different from A (one is greek, the other latin). The blog actually ranks 2nd behind Google Analytics when I press the latin A. I guess I care about what traffic the blog gets than the blog itself ;)

Kevin&Kell by [B]ill Holbrook I start my day with this strip and it’s been so many years that it remains the top browser choice for www as well.

C puts up a list of some internal project servers.

D is seemingly underused because the first choice seems to be Spiegel the browser latching on the .de of the URL.

[E]l Pais for the Spanish connection.

[F]lixter which seems to be another remnant.

[G]mail even though I'm a Thunderbird user.

H is another unused letter. The browser latches on the h in http:// and gives me the Euruko 2011 site.

[I]nstapaper for the best memory help.

J gives me the Virtualmin console for this blog’s host at Joyent.

K is the same as B.

L is localhost. Natural, since I build services for a living.

M goes to my home download manager.

N and O lead both to Slashdot ([N]ews for [N]erds and the o in slashdot) which I find weird.

P is the same as E.

Q leads to my company’s intranet pages.

[R]adiobubble best radio station ever!

S is slashdot. Which goes to show that some habits are hard to break – I don’t subscribe to Slashdot’s RSS feed, I like to visit the site.

[T]witter which should not be, since I use clients 99% of the time.

G[u]ardian For the English connection. Very wierd that it does not come up with G since I visit it more often then Gmail.

V follows J.

W makes a party with B and K.

[X]KCD naturally!

[Y]outube with no other choices, really.

[Z]uehlke for the company that pays my bills for the past decade.

Now I won’t go through the greek alphabet since no URLs (that I use) contain greek letters yet and anything that comes up will most probably be newspaper articles.

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Posted by Vassilis Rizopoulos on Mar 04, 2011