Tales From the Idiocracy - 7.11.2024
In Joe Biden’s mind, this photo depicts Vice President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Putin.
In this week’s Bonus Hour of Tales From the Idiocracy, David Blackmon and WACV 93.1 FM radio legend Greg Budell provide a hilarious state of play in Biden World, and its impacts on the future of our country.
Enjoy!
Transformers:
David may just have been having a temporary brain fart, but in case that's not the case, transformers are most commonly used in electricity distribution to reduce AC voltage. It is more efficient to transfer power across wires at higher voltages, but we all need 120AC or 240AC in our homes. Neighborhood power lines carry much higher voltage than 120V (2000V - 33KV) which is brought down to 120V by the transformer (that big can up on the pole). Longer transmission lines may carry up to 765KV. And larger transformers convert the very high voltages of long transmission to the lower voltages for neighborhood transmission.
There's also some new transmission technology using high voltage DC over long distances and that would involve transformers, but quite a bit of other equipment as well. And, of course, wind and solar plants generate DC power which must be converted before use, so a lot of discussion that touches on transformers is common these days.
A transformer alone can change AC voltage up or down (with some losses) but a transformer cannot change DC power up or down without additional (expensive) equipment. That is simply a characteristic of electromagnetics and inductance.
The additional equipment is made expensive in power applications, because it must be capable of handling such high voltages and currents. Changing DC voltages for household applications (12V at 1.5A, e.g.) makes it look cheap and easy ($5 AC adapters (bricks)) but raise that to 33KV and hundreds or thousands of amperes and it can't be done with a switching chip (1/2" 8 pin integrated circuit) and a "big" FET any more.
Future of Nuclear: Of course, who knows, but I would argue that large "traditional" nuclear plants still have a large future. SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) are the new shiny and they've been in the news quite a bit, but they have one huge, glaring disadvantage and that is lack of economy of scale.
Every cost estimate I've seen so far, puts the operating cost of electricity from SMRs significantly higher than for traditional reactors.
SMRs should have the advantage of lower cost of entry. That is, one needn't assemble and risk nearly so much capital to get them built. They should also have an advantage in flexibility, in that one doesn't always need to add a gigawatt of capacity to a grid. And there are a myriad of speculative applications for things like mobile industrial heat (cooking tar sands?) and such.
But if you need a GW or more of capacity, e.g. to firm up the Texas grid, then a large traditional reactor is still going to be your most economical solution -- assuming that the modular part of SMR doesn't succeed beyond wildest dreams and bring cost way way lower than anyone is assuming.
SMRs and the NRC have been in the (not the mainstream) news recently because congress ordered the NRC to revise and simplify the licensing process for new reactors types and the NRC just took their old, ridiculously complex and expensive procedure and added more complexity to it for new reactors.
In other words, instead of simplifying, they added complexity and expense. Sigh. Hopefully the end of the Chevron Deference creates areas in which the NRC can be hacked back, but as David mentioned, those challenges to the NRC way of doing things, if they're viable and if anyone wants to go t hrough the expense will take years to have any effect.