Coolest Source of Energy: Artificial Tornadoes

[Cikomyr]

This has got to be the coolest scientific development in past months (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121278-Scientists-Developing-Tornado-Power-Plant)

Forget the Higgs Boson. THIS is the news to change the world: Tornado Power Plants!


Now taking bets to see how long until we weaponize the stuff. TORNADO BOMBS!!!

[noparlpf]

So the idea is to catalyze a tornado, but once it's going it powers itself and they just stabilise it, right? Otherwise this would be a colossal waste of energy.

[Recaiden]

I don't know. Having mass is pretty cool.

I gather from looking at some other sources that the engine needs a heat source, and was originally to make normal power plants more efficient? Not actually finding a lot about sustaining cyclones.

Means weaponizing it is probably out.

[Cikomyr]

So the idea is to catalyze a tornado, but once it's going it powers itself and they just stabilise it, right? Otherwise this would be a colossal waste of energy.

To be 100% honest, I have myself no idea how they harness energy from the stuff. All I get is that they concentrate large quantity of hot humid air at the base. From there, I don't get which sort of energy gets into the system that would operate the turbine worth an excess of energy.

Maybe the release of the hot air into the atmosphere (potential energy), and the violent wind transfer through the coriolis effect?


We need a physicist! Quick, to the Physics Bat-Signal!

http://www.redorbit.com/media/uploads/2012/05/tech-052712-003.jpg

Wrong one. I'll be right back..

[Scowling Dragon]

Oh please let this work. I REALY want to tell my children "Before we used tornadoes to power our cities we had to burn stuff!"

This looks cool but im worried that we would have to build these places far away from cities. And that too many tornadoes would disrupt the wind system or something.

[Cikomyr]

Oh please let this work. I REALY want to tell my children "Before we used tornadoes to power our cities we had to burn stuff!"

This looks cool but im worried that we would have to build these places far away from cities. And that too many tornadoes would disrupt the wind system or something.

Just imagine the poor migratory birds

[Jib]

Another idea I read about recently was a modified Nuclear system. Don't quote me on numbers because I can't find the article, but I will try to find it to link too. U-235 is the reactive Isotope of Uranium, or most commonly used. Thus generally the U-235 content must be high enough for your average reactor to run, meaning enriched uranium is required. The system they were working on would be able to maintain reactions using U-236, which is the bulk of Uranium. They are aiming to use the waste that we have built up as the fuel source for this new system.

Killing two birds with one Nuclear Reaction.

Found one related to it (http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/cities/using-nuclear-waste-prism-reactor-could-power-uk-for-500-years/3881)

And now I have to read about the Thorium Reactors~

[Coidzor]

Oh please let this work. I REALY want to tell my children "Before we used tornadoes to power our cities we had to burn stuff!"

This looks cool but im worried that we would have to build these places far away from cities. And that too many tornadoes would disrupt the wind system or something.

It'd be cool if they somehow cut down on the number of wild tornadoes though.

[Thajocoth]

Yes, let's mess with wind directions nearby by creating artificial tornadoes. That won't mess with the climate at all.

[Jib]

It shouldn't should it? I'm not a tornado expert, but they are relatively minor in the big scheme of weather systems aren't they?

[enderlord99]

It shouldn't should it? I'm not a tornado expert, but they are relatively minor in the big scheme of weather systems aren't they?

Not as much as butterflies.:smallamused:

[Morph Bark]

We've been messing around with wind to create land for ages. Why not mess around with it to create energy? :smallamused:

Yes, we've also been already doing this on a smaller scale, I know.

[Jib]

I'm kinda sad that the Nuclear route has been shot down so hard over the years. It really is the highest output option we have right now, unless there is something I am missing.

[noparlpf]

I'm kinda sad that the Nuclear route has been shot down so hard over the years. It really is the highest output option we have right now, unless there is something I am missing.

Yeah, the general danger of it.

[Coidzor]

I have to admit, it seems odd that we have not figured out some way that it wasn't dangerous by now if not initially. I keep remembering people complaining about how we've been ignoring a much better and safer way of doing it in favor of letting bad designs like Fukushima be the norm rather than mothballed back when Fukushima was still topical.

Frankly, I'd be pleased by advances in making smaller scale power generation more feasible, because while we can't really squeeze a whole lot more hoover dams out of the world, certainly there's less ecologically impacting ways we could work with rivers and the tides.

[Animastryfe]

I haven't found hard information on how this thing should work. I was hoping for a peer-reviewed article or patent, but the most detailed information on this that I have found is from this webpage of the company developing this, AVE,here (http://vortexengine.ca/english.shtml).

I am a physics student, but I have very little knowledge of fluid dynamics and essentially no knowledge of meteorology. Tornados require warm, rising air. AVE states that the heat source for warming the air once the tornado has been created "can be the natural heat content of warm humid air or can be provided in cooling towers located outside of the cylindrical wall and upstream of the deflectors. The continuous heat source for the peripheral heat exchanger can be waste industrial heat or warm seawater." So this seems that they will largely be using ambient heat to power the tornado. But from the second law of thermodynamics, the maximum efficiency of a machine is 1-(temperature of the cooler heat source)/(temperature of the hot heat source). It seems that the temperature difference between the warm air and the cool air will be very small, and thus the efficiency will be very low.

Edit: The linked webpage goes on to talk about the efficiency. I will have to look at that tomorrow.

[Jib]

Here is another page on this Idea (http://pesn.com/2005/12/14/9600210_Atmosphere_Vortex_Engine/), if you drop down along the page you will see something called a Solar Chimney. I knew this Idea seemed familiar. You build a big base around the thing, areas like deserts work good I guess. This base is designed to catch heat and direct it up the center chimney. Combine the Chimney and the Vortex Engine? In a place like the Western side of the US, you could use some of the vast southern deserts to build these things (Think Death Valley) and produce some pretty massive heat differences. I don't know about the Eastern side, but on the Western Side we have the power grid to send a great deal of juice down south, why couldn't it get sent back north?

Am I missing something about the dangers of Nuclear Power? The toxic waste is the only real danger, and if they produce a reactor that can eat the waste of current reactors, the danger levels drop much farther there right?

And if you look at major nuclear disasters. You have Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima right? Fukushima was a dated system hit by a catastrophic seismic event and a Tsunami. Then to boot, instead of taking a measure that could have reduced the event, they waited to flood the reactors because it would permanently destroy them. Chernobyl happened because un-authorized personel attempted to perform an experiment on a live reactor. The experiment even went against the protocols of the plant at that time. Then, they tried to change the experiment on the fly. It was caused by people, not an unknown force of some sort. In Soviet Russia, Reactor Tests You. Three mile Island did have design faults. Poorly designed controls that were hard to understand, combined with, Guess what, poorly trained personnel who OVERRODE the coolant system. One more was the Kyshtym disaster, which was actually worse than the Three Mile Island event (Third Worst, behind Chernobyl and Fukushima), and was caused by inadequate maintenance of the facility ( Don't know a great deal about this one). The running theme is User Error, not error of the designs. I know there are more disasters than this, but most of them are pretty minor (Three mile is pretty minor too, no noticeable damages from it beyond the plant itself).

Ind the end Nuclear energy is pretty safe, especially if you want to compare it to the toxic output from many other sources of energy, the effects of altering landscape to produce energy, or going without power. And while I do believe in Green Energy, it is not really practical yet because it can not handle our needs. On the other hand, a genuine push for Nuclear power could easily handle a massive portion of our power needs.

[Cikomyr]

aren't the CANDU reactors the safest?

[Dr.Epic]

So we can create artificial weather? And just like that, our world becomes more like G.I. Joe.

[Emmerask]

Ind the end Nuclear energy is pretty safe, especially if you want to compare it to the toxic output from many other sources of energy, the effects of altering landscape to produce energy, or going without power. And while I do believe in Green Energy, it is not really practical yet because it can not handle our needs. On the other hand, a genuine push for Nuclear power could easily handle a massive portion of our power needs.

No it really is not safe, nor is it actually cheap in fact it is the most expensive energy source there is atm.

Do you know how many reactor shutdowns, failures etc there are each year (hint the number is really high) only the public is not informed about this and the media seems to ignore it too.

Now as for the price to actually run a nuclear power plant safely well if you take away all the subsidies the last 20 reactors build in the us have a cost of 5000$ per kilowatt of capacity compared to wind energy and natural gas which has 1200 and 1000$ cost.
And this does only take into account a tiny fraction of the costs to actually store the nuclear waste safely.

If you would add the cost of storing it safely for ~100000 years (a timeframe pretty much unimaginable for a human) and add this to the power price not even bill gates (or insert other really rich persons) could effort to run even one computer on nuclear power without going broke after a year.

What we do however is to say that future generations need to pay for our power consumption thats why its "cheap" (its even then not cheaper though)

[Cyborg Mage]

No it really is not safe, nor is it actually cheap in fact it is the most expensive energy source there is atm.

Do you know how many reactor shutdowns, failures etc there are each year (hint the number is really high) only the public is not informed about this and the media seems to ignore it too.

Now as for the price to actually run a nuclear power plant safely well if you take away all the subsidies the last 20 reactors build in the us have a cost of 5000$ per kilowatt of capacity compared to wind energy and natural gas which has 1200 and 1000$ cost.
And this does only take into account a tiny fraction of the costs to actually store the nuclear waste safely.

If you would add the cost of storing it safely for ~100000 years (a timeframe pretty much unimaginable for a human) and add this to the power price not even bill gates (or insert other really rich persons) could effort to run even one computer on nuclear power without going broke after a year.

What we do however is to say that future generations need to pay for our power consumption thats why its "cheap" (its even then not cheaper though)

Let me start by saying that the vast majority of major nuclear accidents are, as mentioned before, caused by human error more than existing design flaws. While, yes, most other types of power don't poison an area of several miles when somebody makes a mistake, that can't be blamed on nuclear power itself. You can't reasonably blame a knife for cutting you when you're preparing food, that's down to a lack of care.

Secondly, wouldn't think any remotely sensible government would inform the public if a serious nuclear power plant malfunction occurred? Machines break sometimes. It's a fact of life. I'm pretty sure not every turbine in every conventional power plant in the world works perfectly 100% of the time. Should it be plastered over the national news that generator B's dynamo has stopped working? No, because while it is a mechanical failure, it's an insignificant one. Worst case scenario, maybe people have brown-outs for a few hours while it's fixed. Nothing has melted down, nothing has directly threatened the public at large, it's ultimately unimportant. Granted, there are more serious possible malfunctions for a nuclear plant, but any safety team with an ounce of sense would have prepared for that. You make it sound like nuclear power plant operators are children just waiting to press the button that melts the reactor into slag. They're not. Almost their entire career revolves around understanding the dangers nuclear power present and dealing with them. So I'm pretty sure that barring some natural disaster or terrorist attack, the area around a nuclear power plant should be pretty safe. And even then, arguing not to build a nuclear power plant because it might be hit by an earthquake is like arguing that you shouldn't go outside because you might get mugged. It's not something that can be predicted, it's unlikely, and the benefits far outweigh the small, albeit major, risk.

Next, you're talking a lot about cost but not about power generation. The largest wind farm in the states, the Alta Wind Energy Center, puts out approximately 1,690 gigawatt hours every year. Meanwhile, Fort Calhoun, the smallest nuclear power plant in the US, generates 4,170 GW-h. In other words , the smallest nuclear plant in America has well over twice the average electricity generation of the largest wind power plant. And it's actually a very big "approximately" where wind power is concerned, given that it relies on ultimately unpredictable weather patterns. Some days the plant might run just fine, some days it might be offline completely. Nuclear power is a hell of a lot more reliable. And while I can't find any cost figures for Fort Calhoun, the Alta Center has cost over $1.2 billion to finance so far. So from the looks of things, wind power plants are expensive, unreliable, and don't melt down if an entire team of trained engineers dedicated to keeping the plant safe somehow fail to do their jobs. I'm not seeing wind power as the superior power source.

Admittedly, nuclear waste is a problem, but it can be stored. It is, actually. And given that it's rather unlikely that people are allowed to just waltz into the storage chamber, I'd say the same argument for the safety of the reactors themselves applies to nuclear waste storage facilities. And an important part of this; these dangerous substances can actually be stored, as opposed to the carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and so on given out by fossil fuel power plants. Fossil fuel plants which will run out of fuel within the generation, at which point we start to run out of choice. Future generations need to have some kind of power generation in the first place, and being honest, most green sources we have aren't reliable enough to form the staple of that power generation. I doubt most people will choose a virtually complete lack of electricity over a few nuclear power power plants.

That said, I'm getting off topic. Tornado power plants? I'd have to see the design in practice before I can really render a verdict about practicality, but holy crap. It's like something out of a comic book.

[Emmerask]

Admittedly, nuclear waste is a problem, but it can be stored. It is, actually. And given that it's rather unlikely that people are allowed to just waltz into the storage chamber, I'd say the same argument for the safety of the reactors themselves applies to nuclear waste storage facilities. And an important part of this; these dangerous substances can actually be stored, as opposed to the carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and so on given out by fossil fuel power plants. Fossil fuel plants which will run out of fuel within the generation, at which point we start to run out of choice. Future generations need to have some kind of power generation in the first place, and being honest, most green sources we have aren't reliable enough to form the staple of that power generation. I doubt most people will choose a virtually complete lack of electricity over a few nuclear power power plants.


Yes the waste could be stored safely but it is not and the reason why is that it would make nuclear energy too expansive for anyone to use.

Every power created at a nuclear power plant would actually have to be priced in a way to ensure workers being able to secure the storage facility for the next 100.000 years to ensure real security not just for us but for those that may follow.
If you take inflation into account this is just not possible, what this means is that you simply can´t ensure safety with nuclear power.

Oh and the waste from fossil fuel plants actually could be dropped significantly (99%) with our current technology (and the "product" used by other factories) however its rather expansive to get running and therefore not done.

So yes I completely agree that fossil fuels are not the answer however nuclear power is even less so.

Well that was all a bit off-topic so I will stop that I guess :smallsmile:

[Erloas]

About wind and nuclear power:


Do you know how many reactor shutdowns, failures etc there are each year (hint the number is really high) only the public is not informed about this and the media seems to ignore it too. As mentioned, a shutdown can be for all sorts of things, many of which have nothing at all to do with potentially dangerous situations. We have a couple coal fired boilers and a natural gas boiler at work, and they are each shut down 2-3 times a year as a mater of course, and usually end up being taken down a few times more because of issues, but the majority of those issues have little to nothing to do with the boilers themselves, its things like leaking pipes (its water that is leaking, many power plants work the same way, they boil water and that water turns into steam and that steam turns turbines, this is how any combustion plant works, all nuclear plants (none of this water comes into contact with radioactive material), and some of the larger solar plants), problems with heat exchangers, turbines failing, fans going out, all sorts of minor things.


Now as for the price to actually run a nuclear power plant safely well if you take away all the subsidies the last 20 reactors build in the us have a cost of 5000$ per kilowatt of capacity compared to wind energy and natural gas which has 1200 and 1000$ cost.
Cost to build per KW of capacity has almost nothing at all to do with the cost of generating the power once the system is up and running. Sure, you have to recoup the startup costs, but that is spread out over the lifetime of the plant. But from what I've read and heard wind turbine have a relatively short life, and you might have to build/replace a wind turbine 3-4 times to get to the lifespan of a nuclear reactor. I have heard that the turbines in a wind tower have to be replaced or rebuilt generally after about 5-7 years, which is large percentage of the cost of the tower, even though the farm as a whole, and the rest of the parts of that tower might last 25-30 years.
And with the large number of towers in a wind farm (at about 2MW max cap per tower) you have a huge number of parts and a very large number of potential points of failure and the corresponding maintenance costs associated with it.
Then there is the question of how much of the potential power of a system is being used to calculate those costs and how much of the actual power it generates is being used. Most nuclear plants want to run close to their peak capacity and do so with little to no effort compared to running at a lower rate. Where as with wind I just read that one of the most efficient farms in the USA averages 43% of its designed capacity, meaning most wind farms run at less then that. So while you might get 500KWH out of farm X on one day you will average around 200KWH and sometimes you might not get more then 50KWH out of it. So if they are calculating that $1200 per KW capacity at peak then your average is more like $2500.


If you would add the cost of storing it safely for ~100000 years (a timeframe pretty much unimaginable for a human) and add this to the power price not even bill gates (or insert other really rich persons) could effort to run even one computer on nuclear power without going broke after a year. It isn't that expensive to keep nuclear waste. In fact, the way it is handled now, we do pay for the entire cost up front, in that we've already paid to dig the holes and we've paid for the steel and concrete bunkers and containers they are stored in and those containers are projected to last longer then the reactivity of the waste they are holding. There is no additional cost that has to be paid in 1000 years, let alone 100,000

edit:

I would also add that nuclear power reactor technology has changed a lot in the last 50 years. The new designs are significantly safer, but as far as I know, few, if any has been built with the newest designs. It was about 10 years ago that I did a lot of research on it (being in school at the time) and the technology was around then. The fuel can be made in a way where the control "rods" are built into the fuel so it is not possible to melt down. The control rods being messed with was the cause of the Chernobyl melt down. At the time there was a demo plant being planned to be built in Africa somewhere but I don't know if it happened or not. Considering how long these projects take do design, get the required permissions, and build, I doubt there would have been more the the demo plant built at this point if it even went forward. There has probably been 20+ years of nuclear technology development since the last plant was built in any developed country.

The tornado sounds interesting but I doubt it will be practical. It should be fairly easy to capture the wind energy once you did get it going. But it takes very specific conditions for a tornado to start, but even with parts of those conditions being artificially created, the overarching major weather conditions have to be right too. I don't know enough about the required conditions, but I do know there are "seasons" for tornadoes and I doubt it would be possible to start one outside those seasons or in parts of the world where they don't ever form naturally.

[Emmerask]

Hannes Alfvén, Nobel laureate in physics, described the as yet unsolved dilemma of high-level radioactive waste management: "The problem is how to keep radioactive waste in storage until it decays after hundreds of thousands of years. The geologic deposit must be absolutely reliable as the quantities of poison are tremendous. It is very difficult to satisfy these requirements for the simple reason that we have had no practical experience with such a long term project. Moreover permanently guarded storage requires a society with unprecedented stability."[12]

Thus, Alfvén identified two fundamental prerequisites for effective management of high-level radioactive waste: (1) stable geological formations, and (2) stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years. As Alfvén suggests, no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period

The spoilered part are the only reasonable assumptions that have to be met to consider nuclear waste storage safe. Everything else is not.

What we currently have are short term solutions maybe 100 years maybe less, and even those don´t work properly.
A few years back we had a huge scandal about leaking radioactive containers in Germany inside a storage mine. I´m fairly certain due to cost cutting this is pretty much happening everywhere.

[Castaras]

I thought the title said "Artificial Tomatoes" and so I was ready to come into this thread and say "Don't be silly, tomatoes aren't that great a power source." but then realised I was being silly.

I now want tomato powered batteries. :smallfrown:

[Frozen_Feet]

While, yes, most other types of power don't poison an area of several miles when somebody makes a mistake...

*cough* Oil leaks *cough*.

Seriously, though, mining, transportation and burning of oil and coal have far worse effects on our environments than any nuclear disaster so far. It's not even "poison an area of several miles when somebody makes a mistake", it is "poison an area of several miles as your daily calculated routine." When I watched news of Fukushima, I couldn't help but roll my eyes when people were worried about the nuclear plant. Burning factories to the right, HELLO?

The risks of nuclear power ar routinely overblown in contemporary discussion, while ignoring the fact that oil and coal are worse in many regards.

[The Glyphstone]

While, yes, most other types of power don't poison an area of several miles when somebody makes a mistake...
More like a dozen or so people each making half a dozen mistakes, including failing to notice the mistakes the other guys are making. It's not like nuclear engineers are unaware of how catastrophic a serious failure could be, which is why they have so many layers of fail-safes.

Nuclear waste would only have to be stored for 100,000 years if that's how long it takes for us to get cheap orbital lift capacity. The second we have a space elevator, or any other way to carry things into orbit at an economical cost, the biggest waste disposal furnace around is right next door, astronomically speaking.

Until then...tornado power plants. Awesome.

[Scowling Dragon]

Is it just me or is everything awesome just around the corner? So much brilliant inventions, yet not widespread....huh.

[Jib]

As for the toxic fuel, that is why a Reactor that actually feeds on the current waste would be beautiful. While there would still be waste afterwords, we could reduce our current amount of waste substantially. Once we get this waste to a certain level, lifting it to space as said earlier would become economically viable even without a lift, and the Sun makes a great garbage compactor/incinerator/fire and forget target.

On a related note, I looked up Fuel to Energy costs, and Uranium for a Reactor weighs in at about .72 cents per 360,000 Kilo Watts. This number does not include construction of the plant, but does anyone know what the Coal Fuel to Energy ratio is?

What I think is still the best about Nuclear power is that the technology exists and works now. Green is good, but how cost effective is it, and how many of heard of companies like Solindra (I think thats the name) Getting a retarded amount of money from the government, and failing utterly. Use that money to build Nuke plants and you know they will work. If your worried about security, pull some of our troops out of countries we have bases in, and who don't like us, and put them up at the plants. Lots of Labor, and security.

Can anyone else not wait until Cali and New York have some more rolling black outs?

[Frozen_Feet]

@Glyphstone: Shooting depleted reactor rods to space is Big Waste of Resources (Trademarked). Those things still have ~98% of their potential energy unused, nevermind other potential uses.

Really, while dangerous, you only need 10 meters of solid stone between the waste capsules and outside world to be safe. Storing them on earth will always be much less resource incentive than wasting energy to get them out of orbit.

[Morph Bark]

Is it just me or is everything awesome just around the corner? So much brilliant inventions, yet not widespread....huh.

The biggest obstacle is always finding a way to make it viable (i.e. cheap and/or with a lot of economic yield back to the investers, and even with the latter it isn't so likely if it doesn't come cheap), since otherwise companies/countries won't go for it.

Heck, I'm pretty positive if we'd be on the case more we could've easily had a moon base by now.

[Animastryfe]

I believe that I have found a mistake on their overview page (http://vortexengine.ca/english.shtml). In one of the paragraphs, they state that the "heat to work conversion efficiency of the process is approximately 15% because the heat is received at an average temperature of 15 C and given up at an average temperature of -15 C." However, those temperatures give a maximum efficiency of about 10.4% (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+-+258.15%2F288.15%29+*+100). Keep in mind that this is the absolute maximum that is theoretically possible, unless I have misunderstood their claim about the temperatures. It does not matter what kind of engine they're using; if a thermodynamic process is taking heat in from a heat source at temperature 15 degrees celsius/ 288.15 kelvin, and expelling the waste heat to a cooler heat source at -15 degrees celsius / 258.15 kelvin, then the theoretical maximum efficiency is about 10.4%.

[Bulldog Psion]

Is it just me or is everything awesome just around the corner? So much brilliant inventions, yet not widespread....huh.

That's because the brilliant, awesome inventions we already have, we're accustomed to. So we don't even notice them any more. :smallsmile:

Regardless, it would be great if the atmospheric vortex engine actually worked. Getting power from tornadoes is definitely in the "seriously cool" category.

[GnomeFighter]

The other thing about nuclear waste is that the danger has been totaly overblown.

First, the total amount of radioactive waste produced per person per year is tiny. 1 teaspoon per person per year. You could hold the amount of waste made in your lifetime in your hands if you wanted to.

Secondly this waste is not that much of a danger. It is about the same as uranium ore, stuff that is dug out of the ground. The actual level of radiation in a barrel is about the same as chucking one of the old watches with glowing radium hands in a barrel of earth.

Thirdly, I can't remember the source, but I understand that the burning of coal and oil actualy releases more radiation in to the atmosphere per person than nuclear plants produce in waste.

Finaly, waste dose NOT have to be storred for 10,000 years, only 1000 which is well within our capabilitys to keep safe. I drink in a pub almost that old.

[Cikomyr]

People. This is not a thread about Nuclear Power. It's about ARTIFICIAL TORNADOES!!