Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been stringing cables across the ocean for centuries now. What makes this so much harder?
Power cables are a wee different than communications cables.
Power cables are smaller.
Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
281–290 of 299 posts
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stuff in space is very vulnerable due to the high cost of shielding. How would an energy weapon in space fare against its hardened counterparts on the ground? How would it defend against clouds of shrapnel?
First you have to get the shrapnel off the ground, and into orbit. A non trivial problem if whatever is on the ground trying to launch is being heated white hot by a maser, no? And getting there has non trivial flight time too, plenty of time for it to be melted on its way. Orbit is the ‘high ground’.
High ground is beneficial because you have direct line of fire where the enemy hasn't. But there is no ground to hide behind in orbit.
So what about this orbiting duck of yours, the power station recently turned rogue?
Look, the satellites you share an orbit with are adjusting their trajectories to intercept yours. Undisturbed, they will pose collision hazards within the next days. You must fry them all before they complete the adjustments. Do you have a real time feed of their position for targeting? Bet you do, you're a supervillain after all.
But some satellites are passing behind earth, they will complete their manouvers before they emerge from earth's shadow. The first hit is predicted in just 130 hours.
But hey a bunch of missiles took off on the other side of earth, they are now on a ballistic trajectory that intercepts your station's orbit. Thanks to your flawless targeting, you manage to melt some of them. Their debris will hit anyway, your station has 19 minutes left before impact.
Meanwhile, some subs poke laser scopes out of the sea, taking shots at your station. You divert your energy from the incoming missiles, but when you try to hit one, the scope is submerged again. You produce a plume of steam.
And what is this? What was supposedly a radar array starts to beam microwaves your way. Your station overheats in seconds because it has almost no mass and lots of surface. You could've taken out maybe one of the hundreds of antennas in the array if your comms hadn't already been crippled by a laser.
As you lift your gaze from the now useless controls, the sky is lit by a tactical nuke that was hiding in a spy satellite. It happened to be close enough for a crippling EMP blow.
Fin.
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
These kind of projects are getting proposed because the business case is painfully simple. Buy electricity cheap and sell it high. Its arbitrage. The price difference needs to be just enough to pay for the debt that funded construction.
Just wait for one of Aussies famous dust storms to blow thru and scratch all the PV to shit....
Yes. If there’s one thing we Aussies can’t do well, it’s solar. /s
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 100% sure that all of the chemicals involved in Solar manufacture are less toxic to the human body than handling Plutonium. So, we can probably design enough protocols to make it safe to manufacture given we did it for far more toxic materials. So? You have to look at the amount of chemicals required to produce 1 Joule (or perhaps to install one 1 Watt of capacity). For example, 1 kg of coal is much less dangerous…
Right so pick a metric that highly favours nuclear because its been around longer. And ignore common sense that leaving inert rocks in the sun is fundamentally less dangerous than super heating water with highly toxic and unstable materials. If you can't see your bias here, I don't think I am going to change your mind. Even by your joule measure, give it time, Solar will beat that too. And even if the largest solar f…
> Right so pick a metric that highly favours nuclear because its been around longer.
Huh? It's the opposite! Being around for longer is worse for nuclear for this metric. Nuclear has a small risk of catastrophic failure (especially when used with outdated, bad designs and when operators make careless mistakes). If you only observe nuclear for a short time, say between inception to 1980, or between 1990 to 2010, that metric would look really good, because we got lucky during those times and didn't have any 'jackpots' in the accident lottery.
> And ignore common sense that leaving inert rocks in the sun is fundamentally less dangerous than super heating water with highly toxic and unstable materials.
Huh? What does common sense have to do with anything? We have actual numbers. The realised dangers come not so much from operating already installed solar panels, but mostly from (a) accidents while installing the panels, especially rooftop residential solar, and (b) the chemicals used when producing them.
Overall solar power is very, very safe over its whole life cycle; and that also includes the two dangers listed above.
> Even by your joule measure, give it time, Solar will beat that too. And even if the largest solar farm in existence started to fail or "not operate normally" we would not have to replace the top soil or bury it in sand for 20,000 years.
I don't understand your point. Yes, solar power is pretty neat, I already agree.
But we already have data showing that solar power is more dangerous than nuclear per Joule produced. We roughly know how many people slip and fall off roofs when installing solar panels. (And we have good estimates for how many people died because of nuclear accidents and because of routine operations etc.)
And yes, I agree, that accidents while installing solar panels are a ridiculously small danger per Joule of electricity produced. It's just that both nuclear power and solar power are so safe, that if you insist on making a comparison between the two, these very tiny dangers are what tips the scale.
You could also just be pragmatic and say: both of them are vastly more than 'safe enough' and any difference is pretty close to zero.
I'm fairly sure solar power will 'win' over nuclear. Mostly because it's actually politically possible to install new solar power quickly and cheaply.
Every new solar panel is a win for humanity.
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t bet on that plutonium toxicity thing. For one, most reactors aren’t going to have any plutonium (or any other radioisotope) where anyone can touch it or interact with it in any way. Concentrated Hydroflouric acid, and even pure fluorine gas however? That can be an easy turn of a tap away at most semiconductor plants. And much worse. And if you know anything about Florine, ‘much worse’ should be pretty chilling.…
But choosing nuclear power doesn't remove our need for semiconductors, so it's a bit weird to attribute that to solar. The fabrication of of panels is more analogous to fission material mining. As in you are procuring the materials that will produce energy in the future. If we get rid of nuclear power, we don't need to mine those things anymore. If we get rid of solar panels, we still need semiconductors. So I don't…
> But choosing nuclear power doesn't remove our need for semiconductors, so it's a bit weird to attribute that to solar.
Why make it binary? Nuclear power plants need less semiconductors per Joule of electricity produced than solar panels.
So obviously they don't 'remove' the need for semiconductors. But they decrease it ever so slightly compared to solar power.
Just to be clear: the dangers per Joule from the whole lifecycle of both solar power and nuclear power are both really, really small.
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#286I'm Aussie and I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government. The longest submarine power cable in the world - the Viking Link - is a mere 756 km long and cost US$2.2bn to build. Sun Cable calls for a 4,200km submarine cable to be built! I do not expect the construction cost to scale linearly and I shudder to imagine the maintenance difficulties and expenses. Back in December 2015,…
Curious if like internet cable - can there be redundancy built? Also the way data packets go - they can go literally from any of the lines and get assembled together somewhere in the network layer. But same doesn’t hold true for 3 phase power. So same that works for internet wouldn’t be applicable for power distribution.
The DC Cook Straight cable in New Zealand has 3 cables with one spare and one redundant. It can use the earth as a return path though, not sure if you could do that all the way to Singapore. DC doesn't have phases so it's not 3-phase, same with the Sun Cable.
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this length aluminium would have been used instead most likely. With a typical HVDC line not exceeding 1200mm2 conductor cross section it's about 13k tonnes, so 0,025% of global aluminium production.
At $1.127/lb of aluminum that only comes out to a bit less than $30,000 for the raw materials. That's astounding.
There's a lot more to a HVDC line than just the conductor, but ballpark estimate for a 1GW line is $1mln/km - scales accordingly with power.
Still, you could wrap the world around at the equator with this for a paltry $40bln. Now scale that 10x and you have yourself a practical global grid solution for what, $400bln? That's less than half the US military budget - absolutely doable if you get enough economies on board.
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’do have to be able to afford a million plus dollar home first during a long running cost of living crisis before I could do any such thing.
Any roof over your head, or balcony where at least some solar can be installed to reduce electricity costs, costs a million plus USD-equivalent in Australia? That seems... unlikely
We have one of the most expensive property markets in the world. An apartment is still possible for under a million however. The median for homes last I looked was due to, or had breached 1.6 million AUD with apartments at a median in the mid 800k AUD range.
Whether or not said apartment is suitable for solar however is not guaranteed. You need both a balcony large enough and in a position to capture the sun. Both things likely to push you towards the higher end of the market at 700-800k.
“Just like last year, Australia's largest capital city ranked as the second least affordable major property market in the world. With a staggering median multiple of 13.8, typical Sydney homes cost about 13 times the average household's annual income.”
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear is held to a much higher safety standard (eg in terms of deaths per Joule) than any other form of electricity production. And that includes photovoltaic! Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced.
No one has to evacuate a city when someone breaks a solar panel, though. Deaths aren’t the only parameter here. Nuclear safety events are rare, rarely fatal, but can be very large in impacted area.
nuclear safety has changed a lot. even though "walkaway-safe passively cooled" is not a technical term, but that's the design goal nowadays.
the real problem with nuclear is that the market is small, fragmented, US regulations are bad (as I elaborated upthread), so there's no real volume, no economies of scale, no healthy competition and there's basically no innovation even around the safety critical core...
Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
First you have to get the shrapnel off the ground, and into orbit. A non trivial problem if whatever is on the ground trying to launch is being heated white hot by a maser, no? And getting there has non trivial flight time too, plenty of time for it to be melted on its way. Orbit is the ‘high ground’.
High ground is beneficial because you have direct line of fire where the enemy hasn't. But there is no ground to hide behind in orbit. So what about this orbiting duck of yours, the power station recently turned rogue? Look, the satellites you share an orbit with are adjusting their trajectories to intercept yours. Undisturbed, they will pose collision hazards within the next days. You must fry them all before they c…
You realize most aimable power systems can also aim sideways, right?
And any significant orbital power station is going to have to be pretty big. Or it’s pretty pointless.
Which means it’s going to have a lot of mass.