How Bad Are Nuclear Power Plants?

Let me start this by saying that nuclear power plants are not as bad as you think they are. In this post I'm going to compare nuclear power plants to dirty power plants [coal/oil/natural gas fired power plants].

I've heard a lot of bad publicity about nuclear power plants: Nuclear power plants kill people, radiation, meltdown... but they're no better than dirty power plants:
Dirty power plants are one of the largest causes of pollution, and that kills way more people than nuclear meltdowns.

Don't get me wrong, neither of these energy solutions are good, but nuclear power plants should not be the first power plants to be torn down.

And that's my opinion for today.

Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion is the process of fusing atoms together. All atoms "want" to get to the atomic weight of iron, and so heavier and unstable elements will sometimes break apart [in a process called fission] and lighter elements in the right conditions will sometimes fuse together releasing energy. A nice example of natural fusion is the sun.

In this post though I want to write about harnessing fusion for energy. On paper the benefits of fusion to create electricity are tremendous: There is a huge amount of hydrogen in the sea that we could fuse, if we could get it working fusion could power us for a very very long time and the by product of it all is helium [which is useful, I'll try to post about that soon]. In real life fusion is more complicated: all attempts to create it have failed to get more energy out of the process than they put in [fusion requires a lot of energy to start a chain reaction].

In my opinion fusion could [and probably will be] humanity's main source of power in the distant future, but it is not a solution for our energy problem.

2014: A Golden Year For Solar Power

178. That is the number of gigawatts of solar energy in the grid right now. To get to this amount a record-breaking 40GW where added in 2014, and now the amount of solar energy in the world is 100 times the amount that we had in 2000.

Google to test self-driving cars on public roads

                                                                                                                                                                 

This summer Google will test a few of it's self-driving car prototypes on public roads in Mountain View California. After years of rigorous testing, Google is putting its cars to the ultimate test: the real-life test.
While Google envisions an autonomous taxi service, reality is still far behind. Even if the technology is ready [not yet: problems like mapping, bad weather, higher speeds and more... still exist] the worlds reaction could [and probably will] slow the project down a lot. But for anyone worrying about safety, 94% of car crashes are caused by driver error, something computers would experience a lot less frequently.
Thanks for reading.

SpaceX Crew Dragon picture

I just found a great picture of the spacecraft I wrote about yesterday:

SpaceX Crew Dragon

Earlier this month on may 6 the privately-owned American space company, SpaceX successfully tested  it's Crew Dragon spacecraft designed to be on it's first manned missions in 2017.

SpaceX which was founded in 2002 made history multiple times including in 2012 when it's "Grasshopper" spacecraft took off and landed right side up. In the same year SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft delivered cargo to the International Space Station or ISS becoming the first privately-owned company to do so.

If danger strikes the human capsule will be able to detach from the rocket and parachute in to the ocean.

Well that's it for now, see you next time :].

Graphene

Graphene is the future. Period. It is stronger than steel, extremely light, more conductive than copper and battery applications are on the way.

 For those of you who don't know graphene is a sheet carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon pattern. It's so conductive because impurities are extremely rare and so electrons can race across it's almost perfect surface.

As you can see the applications for graphene are practically endless, and I expect a transition soon.

I'll follow up on this soon, so come back.