Power Plant Closures

Sorry, but, like most people, I don't feel the need to spend a lot of money or time on "protecting" myself against unlikely events.

Nor do I entertain dark fantasies about civil wars, black helicopters, FEMA concentration camps, flouridated water, or the price of gold.

 

Tom, I never mentioned FEMA concentration camps, Black Helicopters or anything else of the such. Are you OK and why are you assigning narrative?

Simply put I am applying what my grandparents did during and after the great depression. Having a well stocked pantry, treat minor illness and injury and growing my own food along with the means to sustain if difficult times hit.

Gotta admit the canning, dehydrating and gardening are my favorite past time's. Family and friends in the kitchen or garden creates some great memories over good beer and laughter during autumn and harvest......some cussing when weather does not cooperate. No need to spend a lot of money but it does take time and effort. No different than any other lifestyle.

Anyways, good luck and I would suggest at the minimum a community garden, they are becoming very popular if you live in the city. Nothing better than fresh vegetable salad on a summer day.

 

So, when Barack Obama said he was going to force them to close by high taxes, you didn't believe him? That's amazing. I thought you still believed that if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance.

 

Be sure to "exercise" your generator at least once a month.

Those transfer switches can be sticky.

 

Anyone remember the last time wehrwolfen created a thread that wasn't about OBAMA?

 

I think this is a good thing; especially since It will help improve the environment; I think solar energy is the way to go anyhow; might be more expensive initially but long term will benefit in terms of a cleaner environment and the costs to produce the electricity will ultimately go down.

 

Winter is coming.

 

Gee, I thought you liked being reminded of the liar in chief.

 

Hey I'm not against the use of alternate forms of generating electricity. I've got a bank of solar panels in my back yard. Problem is in the winter time there's not enough sun and snow blocks the panels from the sun. If and when I move down South, I'm sure that solar panels will be more sufficient. In the meantime, we should hold off cutting our noses to save our face. I understand that experiments in the use of Thorium reactors to generate power is coming along. Why not wait a little longer?

See:
http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2012/09/10/responses-to-thorium-reactor-story/

http://www.thoriumenergycheaperthancoal.com/

http://lftrnow.com/

 

Thorium is still nuclear fission. It needs high-speed neutrons. That means a core of U-235 or Pu-239.

 

You are right. Read the following:

"The fuel fabrication for thorium reactors is not costly. Thorium oxide mined from the earth can be put straight into a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). Thorium is about 4 times more abundant that uranium 238. Thorium is about as abundant as lead.

A LFTR works by converting the fertile thorium into fissionable (burnable) uranium. Both the thorium and uranium are mixed with molten salts that allows the reactor to pump the ‘fuel’ around for processing and heat transfer.

A LFTR has many advantages over a light water reactor; however, there are two main features that contribute to its safety: 1) since the ‘fuel’ is liquid, the reactor is ‘self-regulating’. As the reactor heats up the molten salt expands and moves the uranium away from the core; thereby slowing the reaction. 2) liquid fuel allows a ‘safety plug’ (made of the same ‘fuel’ salt with a fan blowing across it to keep it solid) to be installed on the reactor. In the event that the pump circulating the fuel stops or the reactor needs to be shutdown, the fan stops blowing, the molten salt melts the ‘plug’ and drains into a tank designed for maximum heat transfer. This ‘drain plug’ is walk away safe since it depends upon gravity to work.

This is a great advantage over light water reactors. They all require some kind of active cooling and hence some kind of generator to run the cooling. This is what failed at Fukushima. The tsunami wiped out all of the back up generators that would have cooled the solid fuel uranium. A LFTR in the same scenario as Fukushima would have had no problems. The molten salt fuel would have drained into their tanks and solidified back to crystal salt in the tanks. Once the danger was over, the Japanese could have heated the drain tanks and pumped the molten salt back into the reactor to restart it. This technology was demonstrated at Oak Ridge National Labs in 1965 – 1969. At Oak Ridge the technicians would shut off the reactor over the weekends this way and restart it on Monday.

I recommend that you read Dr. Richard Hargraves book called “THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal.” The book was published just last month. He runs through all of the competing energy production technologies, prices them, and discusses how thorium can be cheaper than all of them." ​

The book’s website is http://www.thoriumenergycheaperthancoal.com/. It is available on Amazon.

 

Read the three little pigs. It is a fable based in common sense about preparedness. You can stick your head in the sand but there is no replacement for the electricity and if we have another cold winter like last winter, these plants are shutting down at the worst possible time. Most people that call people nuts for being prepared will be the least prepared for a problem. That is their problem.

 

Obama is the president. George Bush isn't.

I am so old I can remember when the market drove innovation, such as color television and microwave ovens, but now the rage is to force people to do as the government mandates. I was probably 60 when the verb "mandate" became popular.

I'll be happy to use solar panels when they work and they're economical. Having the government mandate I use them is stupid and offensive. The interesting thing is working people will pay for these mandates. Deadbeats will get it free and the rich don't care. I wonder what will happen to the theft of energy when the Democrats get the prices jacked up as far as they want?

 

Funny you should mention that. The cost of maintenance is a little steep for the amount of electricity I feed back to NYSEG. As it goes now I won't be breaking even for another 8 years. If I live that long?

 

I have a CO2 spewing Generator that kicks in when the power goes out.

 

Should we shut off power to the EPA and its employees first when the blackouts come?

 

TG, for being prepared. Eh? I've got many methane producing carbon based life forms living near me. They go by the names of horses and cows.

 

It's funny you should mention that. I had a friend in Hawaii who lived where there was no electrical service. He had all solar panels. Of course, his refrigerator was propane as was his hot water heater. He couldn't have a coffee maker or a toaster oven. He did have a television but no commercial channels. All it was for was watching recorded movies. When we wanted to watch movies we had to fire up the generator that ran on gasoline.

He was saving a fortune, though, as long as you didn't count replacing the huge bank of batteries under the house ever few years. That was twenty years ago but, not surprisingly, solar hasn't taken off like gangbusters in the last twenty years.

Forty years ago when I first read about solar and first read about composting toilets and read about recycling waste water and read about phones that didn't require land lines I told my wife, "Just think, soon we'll be able to buy land in the middle of no where and build a house with no outside utilities. I told her, "We can actually live on a large rock if we want." Well, darn, wrong again. I don't feel bad, though, because the so-called experts at predicting the future don't do any better than I do.