[Xort]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

But wait, nuclear power plants are enormously costly to build and maintian.

They cost a lot to build, but are rather cheap to run. But that's also highly dependant on the type of nuclear reactor. The most common reactor is an overgrown submarine reactor, a sub optimal choice to start with but still very good due to the basic nature of nuclear power. Which is a staggeringly high energy density fuel operated at a low cost.

$1:

Of all the sources of electricity, it has the highest captial costs by far. We've already established that you people don't want to pay for that right?

You don't pay for all the capital costs at once, you pay them over a set number of years. The price of nuclear power is still very close to coal, only beat by hydro. People getting power from biofuel plants, gas plants, wind and solar would pay more for non nuclear options.

So yeah if people don't want to pay for expensive power built nuclear.

$1:

Also, nuclear is not a magic fix - we still haven't figured out how to dispose of the waste and we're running out of places where we can bury it safely.

Wrong on both counts but I will give extra points for being able to sing the party line.

The solid nuclear fuel common to just about all nuclear power plants is removed mostly unused, between 80% and 95% of the fuel is still good for power use. You do need to break up the fuel and reprocess it into new fuel to be used again. That is how you dispose of the majority of the waste. Between 95% and 99% of the current 'waste' produced by a nuclear plant in terms of spent fuel. The small amount of material that can't be used in a conventional reactor or in a burn up reactor are important to deal with and do have some very real storage requirements, but the mass is grams per year on a 1000MW reactor. The only counter arguments to reprocessing is the comical weapons proliferation argument, and that it's slightly more expensive than making new fuel.

The proliferation argument is comical because every nation with nuclear power today is either already armed with nuclear weapons, or a null factor if they wanted to build nuclear weapons. In any nation with nuclear power, that nation could reprocess fuel into weapons material and no one would know if they didn't tell anyone. I'm somewhat less worried about nuclear weapons falling into the 'wrong' hands when North Korea, Pakistan and Israel are all already nuclear armed. Is the risk of Germany or Japan getting a nuclear weapon that scary? On the wider scale, if we started putting plants all over the world in every nation that wanted cheap power, their would be some issues with safety. But we have reactors designs that either make no viable material, or material so unstable that an attempt to make a bomb with them would almost surely result in a fizzle and would be putting out hard gamma rays like a lighthouse.

If weapons getting into the wrong hands was a main problem you could use heavy water reactors, or thorium cycle reactors.

Not that it matters anyway, enriched uranium can be used to make a bomb without needing anything more than separation facilities. Atomic bombs without nuclear power plants, or nuclear reactors.

As for running out of places to put it, and more directly put it in the ground, the world is a rather large place with many well suited locations. The few locations currently in use are filling. However, most of the spent fuel is still just sitting around power plants not actually being stored in locations even 1/10th as secure or safe as the suggested sites, without any real meaningful problems.

We could open any number of new underground storage locations to put the fuel and other waste materials, and in time if it became an issue we will. But right now it's a non issue and most of the fuel is cooling (in both meanings) at the power plants.

$1:

Umm no its not. It is not "direct" (which be a meaure of actual living standards, not indirect factors).

It directly predicts the standard of living.

$1:

Nor is it really relevant: are you suggesting that some guy driving a 20-year old broken down clunker that gets 12 miles per gallon has a better standard of living than someone in a brand new Mercedes who gets 25 mpg, based on the fact that the clunker is using more energy?

I'm saying that someone with a 2200W vacuum has a better vacuum than someone with a 900W one. I'm saying that using 1,000kWhrs of electricity predicts a higher standard of living than someone that uses 10kWhrs.

The more energy a person uses the more work is being down for them. Taken as a whole, the more energy that is used by an economy for the production and support of consumed goods and services moves lock and step with a higher standards of living.

$1:

I don't think people are being told to do with less any more than imposing fuel efficiency standards on cars (which has been the case since 1970's) is telling people to do more with less.

Well if a 900W vacuum is just as good as a 2200W vacuum why does it need government regulation, wouldn't the market select the better device, based off of price and ability?

Either way, I do think people are being told to do with less. So we can either quote sources back and forth, proving our belief to each other. Or agree that we are not going to agree.

$1:

Just what do you think the electricity "market rate" is, when that rate is dependent on goernment policy decisions (e.g. transmission infrastructure, etc.). I assume you're not asking for the rates on the hydro bill to also include the costs of the Nuclear plants you want?

I am talking about charging the price for the nuclear construction. Comes out to between 3 to 6 cents per kilowatt hour. The market rate is the cost of the electricity and transmission, with a slim profit for private operators and a no profit for public operators.

What I'm not talking about is giving solar and wind power a fixed price that the grid will have to buy that's well above the average price. I'm also not talking about lowering the price for industry when the terrible policy choices about the types of plants being built end up costing hugely more than expected or historical.

The market price is the cost of the service end to end, without any rebates for industry or premiums for types of power generators.

$1:

Look at everyon'es shit fit when the Ontairo Hydro 'debt retirement charge' started showing up on their bills.

Maybe the government shouldn't have dabbled with privatization, and should have kept building new power generation so they could meet demand at low cost rather than at import prices.

I'm not sure just what the logic was in breaking up the old Ontario power generation company, but it seems rather stupid.

Just how the company had almost 40 billion in debt makes me think they were not planning on paying it down which is the fault of the operator (government) rather than the customer for wanting to use power.

$1:

Again, nuclear, hydro, virtually every power source is subsidized an no one power source meets all of the grid's demands.

The degree of the subsidy is the important part. Per megawatt produced coal, gas, hydro, nuclear are low. While wind and solar are staggeringly high.

$1:

Also, you'd be surprised to learn that most of the consumer goods you enjoy today and the materials they are made of came about as the result of government subsidies - past or present. That includes the internet, fossil fules, plastics and petrochemicals, pharmaceutals, aircraft, etc. It's a very very long list.

I'm sure they have some direct or indirect subsidy, but the goal should be to limit the market deformation caused by the subsidies.

Also two wrongs don't make a right. Just because plastics are subsidized doesn't mean that we should subsidize something else.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

andyt andyt:

Again, setting a price for electricity that encourages conservation will do the same thing, without all the minutiae of regulations and enforcers of those regulations. Same for carbon energy. Just price it at its true cost, including environmental, problem solved.

We already have that. The average home uses 1000KW so there is one price for homes who use up to that amount and a higher price for homes that use more. Still they bitch.

Can you blame them? How many people have houses that have nothing but electric heat? It's not even like they can sell their homes because no one wants to buy a house where the hydro bill is more than the goddam mortgage payments.

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

So then we came out with smart metres which charge a lower rate if users shift their consumption to off-peak hours. They said "how dare the government tell me when I can and can't use electricity". On top that, they didn't change their habbits so they got billed the higher rate and had another bitch-fest.

Bullshit. The off-peak hours rate started climbing as more people started using more hydro during the off-peak hours. Besides, the whole "off-peak" hours argument is a snow job considering the weekend has the lowest rates. So, it would appear those business and industries that don't operate on Saturday and Sunday are the main culprits when it comes to energy consumption during the week.
On top of that, smart meters are not only hackable, they are responsible for at least 13 fires in Ontario. Oh sure, you can say that 13 out of how many hundreds of thousands or millions of smart meters is not concerning. But you have to ask yourself just one question, how many fires were started by hydro meters before the smart meters were installed?

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

You can't win with these people. They take their services for granted and expect to pay for nothing. Everyone's climbing up on the cross to claim that they give so much and receive so little in return, and they'd all be millionaries living in the lap of luxury if only the government hadn't robbed them blind.

They did rob us blind. We were forced into paying for an ideology, not for consistent, reliable energy generation. Ontario's shutting down of the coal fired plants still left us with over 31,000MW of generating capacity. But anyone who's lived in Ontario for any length of time would have to blind or stupid to not see how hydro rates started to skyrocket when the Liberals decided we needed some unreliable, intermittent power supply for the sake of ideology.

Of course you also either don't know or choose to ignore the fact that when Ontario has excess production, Ontario rate payers get to subsidize Quebec Hydro as Ontario PAYS them 2.5 cents/kwh to take it off our hands.
So, here we have Ontario exporting hydro at 3.2 cents/kwh, paying Quebec 2.5 cents/kwh to take excess while you and andy go on about how we're lucky we're not paying the true cost of hydro. If that's the case, considering Ontario has pretty much the highest hydro rates on the North American continent, either the rest of the continent is getting a MASSIVE deal on their power, or Ontarians are getting screwed by the Liberal govt, as usual.

[andyt]

I said nothing about Ontario's rates. What is coming more and more is governments trying to reduce power consumption because of climate change. Obama did it, with his edict. My point was the best way to reduce consumption is to price power at it's true cost, including environmental costs, including climate change. Then let people decide how much it's worth it to them to consume more power. Want a more powerful vacuum, well you have to pay for that extra power consumption at a rate that hurts. Maybe you can save on power somewhere else compared to your neighbor. That's a better solution than creating a ton of rules and bureaucracies to enforce them.

Same with fuel efficiency in cars. Tax gasoline so the cost reflects it's true costs: road costs, air pollution, medical costs from accidents and air pollution, climate change, etc. Most people will then move to more fuel efficient vehicles, with no need to legislate fuel consumption. Maybe somebody really wants/needs a higher consuming vehicle and they have to cut back somewhere else to afford it.

[DrCaleb]

andyt andyt:

My point was the best way to reduce consumption is to price power at it's true cost, including environmental costs, including climate change. Then let people decide how much it's worth it to them to consume more power. Want a more powerful vacuum, well you have to pay for that extra power consumption at a rate that hurts. Maybe you can save on power somewhere else compared to your neighbor. That's a better solution than creating a ton of rules and bureaucracies to enforce them.

Same with fuel efficiency in cars. Tax gasoline so the cost reflects it's true costs: road costs, air pollution, medical costs from accidents and air pollution, climate change, etc. Most people will then move to more fuel efficient vehicles, with no need to legislate fuel consumption. Maybe somebody really wants/needs a higher consuming vehicle and they have to cut back somewhere else to afford it.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/ ... emissions/

[Xort]

andyt andyt:

Same with fuel efficiency in cars. Tax gasoline so the cost reflects it's true costs: road costs, air pollution, medical costs from accidents and air pollution, climate change, etc. Most people will then move to more fuel efficient vehicles, with no need to legislate fuel consumption. Maybe somebody really wants/needs a higher consuming vehicle and they have to cut back somewhere else to afford it.

Why don't we start with 100% of the fuel taxes only being used on automotive related issues in directly relation to automotive cause.

No more using the fuel surtax as a general slush fund. Also spend in in proportion to were it was collected.

$1:

My point was the best way to reduce consumption is to price power at it's true cost, including environmental costs, including climate change. Then let people decide how much it's worth it to them to consume more power. Want a more powerful vacuum, well you have to pay for that extra power consumption at a rate that hurts.

Your statements are in conflict. Pay the true cost, pay a price that hurts.

Rather than adding extra costs, to try and drive people to use less power why not just build more power production and charge the price it costs plus a small profit?

You say add in a cost of using power or vehicles, will you also deduct costs from those for the utility they bring the economy and the higher efficacy? Having electric power saves us hugely just in terms of refrigeration for our food supply. It also makes something near to all consumer goods possible and economical.

Or is your 'fair use calculation' just a one sided penalty applied how and to what you think is right?

[martin14]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... hines.html

The great vacuum cleaner stampede: Panic buying hits shops as deadline looms for Brussels ban on high-powered machines

$1:

Shoppers are panic-buying powerful vacuum cleaners to beat European Union ban that comes into force next week
Last night, retailers reported that sales had soared by nearly 50 per cent, with many running out of powerful models

It's like every time Obongo talks about guns, new sales records !

[Xort]

I'm surprised that a governmental body can function when they are getting down to regulation of the power of a vacuum.

What's next regulation on the length of pencils? Maybe something on the approved color's of paint you can use, ban the overly bright ones.

[Jabberwalker]

Xort Xort:

I'm surprised that a governmental body can function when they are getting down to regulation of the power of a vacuum.

What's next regulation on the length of pencils? Maybe something on the approved color's of paint you can use, ban the overly bright ones.

Have you ever live in Quebec? The embossed writing on the pencil had better say "CHINE" and not "CHINA" or the Office de la Langue Francais makes you change them all by hand.

[Batsy2]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

Who the hell are they to dictate what you can buy?

Welcome to life inside the EUSSR, from telling is we can't buy "bent" bananas to now telling us we can't buy powerful, and therefore better, hoovers.

I'll be voting Ukip next year.