41–50 of 97 posts
Don't be so sure... In cinema's this year: Pandora's Promise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fm8SVLOacQ
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"we as a country don't do actual engineering" What do you mean by "actual engineering"? - the UK makes and develops satellites - designs, develops and produces a huge number of jet engines - is home to nearly all the Formula 1 teams - the Nissan car plant in Sunderland produced 500,000 cars last year which is a huge engineering challenge and is now the home to the main production of the LEAF electric car - Teeside is…
And how many of these are UK owned? Which I took to be his point, given the dig that a French company will be building the new Nuclear power plants at Hinkley Point...
(Speaking of plant inspections, the job of inspector is one of those high-stress but über-high pay seasonal jobs you never hear about. $200k+ for 6mo/yr of work, but it's ~2000hrs of work compressed into that period.)
Anyhoo, growing up I was privileged to tour a number of different power plants in the US, and -- besides the scale of things Charlie notes in the blog post -- the thing that struck me most was that even though the designs were often very similar (all PWRs of some sort), the implementations were very different. Even though reactor design may be identical between plants, all the peripheral support infrastructure and all the wiring & plumbing is unique to each plant, and keeping track of everything is hugely complex.
As an aside, and the bring relevance to HN, because of the complexity of nuclear power plants -- particularly the plumbing and backup systems -- there is a huge market for simulation services (which is something Areva pretty much owns globally at this point), which consists of both electrical/mechanical engineering and software work. They literally build a control room for a specific power plant, identical to the actual control room but with software simulating all the inputs/outputs and allowing them to run all sorts of scenarios (and to train new operators). My dad had a few job openings for software engineers who had some nuke background, and positions requiring only a few years experience were paying $100-120k base, and this is in small city Virginia (Lynchburg) where you can buy a decent house for $150k.
"Anti-rabbit defenses"?
Nothing like it will be built again because a) successive British governments over the last 30 years have buried their heads in the sand over energy policy[1] and b) we as a country don't do actual engineering anymore. Both a and b mean that our energy future likes wholly in the hands of France! [1] Say what you like about Thatcher, at least she had a halfway coherent energy story.
You missed discussing the why, which was north sea natgas. Why, we'll have natgas so cheap we won't meter it, and we'll grow rich exporting it. So why not replace every electric plant with a natgas turbine?
Wot you say its 2005 and the fields have declined so much that we're now net importers and the lights are going to go out pretty soon? In fact we need to import more than we can physically be supplied with given current infrastructure?
Whoops! Its a pity really, we may be witnessing the first "first world" country to have its electrical grid shut down in a couple years. Brownouts in summer suck, but brownouts in winter can be lethal. Its not going to be pretty.
> smelling the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers) Possibly just metal oxides or dimethylsulphide, as ozone is odourless.
Next time choose your sources more carefully. Not only ozone has smell, its name means that.
Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S384WfJ... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140900
Don't be so sure... In cinema's this year: Pandora's Promise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fm8SVLOacQ
The claim is that the particular kind of reactor (gas cooled) is unlikely to be built again. It's (apparently) more efficient than competing designs, but also larger and more complex, and it didn't really become popular. It certainly looks like more nuclear power plants in general will be built.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CocaCola is obviously a US company but the production plant in the UK has some very interesting manufacturing/engineering problems Citation needed. They are Coca Cola manufacturing plants all around the world. From Bolivia to India and from Germany to Albania, and they don't have any interesting manufacturing/engineering problems. Nothing that wasn't already solved in the US HQs anyway.
There are, but each plant (just like in every industry) will have it's own issues, targets and geography specific problems to deal with. Manufacturing isn't a setup once and repeat around the world process - as much as the people working on it would like it to be. My citation is a friends Dad who was a lead engineer on CocaCola's line. Your citation the Bolivia etc not having interesting problems would be?
Sure, but you wrote that (the UK one) "has some very interesting manufacturing/engineering problems". What you describe is perfectly normal engineering problems, that kind that any kind of factory has.
Nothing out of the ordinary, or anything that points to any special UK engineering in the UK CocaCola factories (which was what you provided it as an example of).
>My citation is a friends Dad who was a lead engineer on CocaCola's line. Your citation the Bolivia etc not having interesting problems would be?
Having visited two of them and seen the production process. Pretty much standard stuff all around. Back in the day (it's now closed) we had one even in my hometown in Europe (in a place of around 120K people).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are, but each plant (just like in every industry) will have it's own issues, targets and geography specific problems to deal with. Manufacturing isn't a setup once and repeat around the world process - as much as the people working on it would like it to be. My citation is a friends Dad who was a lead engineer on CocaCola's line. Your citation the Bolivia etc not having interesting problems would be?
>There are, but each plant (just like in every industry) will have it's own issues, targets and geography specific problems to deal with. Manufacturing isn't a setup once and repeat around the world process - as much as the people working on it would like it to be.* Sure, but you wrote that (the UK one) "has some very interesting manufacturing/engineering problems". What you describe is perfectly normal engineering p…
I think our definition of interesting is different as I find nearly anything in manufacturing interesting, standard or not, and making them better/faster is always a problem to me - I recently toured one of our suppliers who supplies our extruded parts and I was fascinated about how they use their machines, not one of which was less than 25 years old, to make useful shapes and multi material extrusions - on the surface everything was standard and run of the mill but below the surface it was much more interesting.