In easy terms, a nuclear power plant heats water, to create steam which spin turbines to produce electricity. In very easy terms...
Well, my idea, is to say, place 100,000 exercise bikes, attach them all to individual turbines which then feed any electricity generated into a large diode (I think that's the one that stores energy...).
Then with that, hire 400,000 people. 400,000 people, 100,000 exercise bikes, says we have enough people to cover 4 shifts in a day. So 100,000 people work six hours a day, on exercise bikes. They'd do some slimming down then.
Naturally, this idea can and never will be brought into practice, and most likely, even with 100,000 people, it wouldn't produce enough energy to feed a city. But it's a fun thought.
After all, humans are our greatest resource, and there is very few jobs that involve just hard labour any more... Alas, a man can dream. I'd love a job like that.
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Update: Kunark and I decided it's slightly more possible with 600,000 people at a 4 hour shift. With a half hour break. 150,000 people taking a break at a time.
It's also noted that this, combines with the weaker forces of solar power and wind farms, might just actually do the job <.<
Indeed. The whole big screen TV with movies and stuff was a given. IPods and stuff as well. The more you cycle the more you can charge your iPod.
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The average regular cyclist outputs about 150 watts of sustained power. With proper training (say, a full-time job of cycling to produce power), let's say they can get it up to about 250 watts. Lance Armstrong can sustain 500 watts for 20-30 minutes on those famous climbs in the French Alps. It would be quite unreasonable to assume that any mortal could sustain more than half that for the entire day. This may, in fact, be too generous.
If the power cyclist rides for 12 hours a day putting out 250 watts, that's a total of 3 kilowatt-hours generated. In my area, the most expensive power goes for about 22 cents (US) per kilowatt-hour. Our cyclist has earned a mere 66 cents US for a very hard day's work. This is third-world poverty income, if even that. That's even if the power company doesn't take any of that to run their infrastructure which delivers the power. You had the answer in your first sentence: nuclear power. Ok, it won't solve unemployment, but neither will cycling for power, with its criminally low wages. It also won't solve obesity. But it will solve global warming. Nuclear power is clean, costs about the same as traditional coal burning, and has an impeccable safety record. It's become the boogeyman because of association with nuclear bombs, but if you do the research, you find that it's exactly what the enviro-nuts have been screaming for: clean, safe, renewable. Except that they violently oppose it due to irrational fears. Nuclear power: it's the one thing that France got right. | |
I thought the sentences: "Naturally, this idea can and never will be brought into practice, and most likely, even with 100,000 people, it wouldn't produce enough energy to feed a city. But it's a fun thought" summed up the "I'm not really being serious" aspect of this post pretty well =P
Yes indeed, nuclear power is the wave of the future. And with my country being no lack of a source of nuclear material (nor places to store it, probably), I'm pretty much for it. (This prolonged drought Australia is in is starting to bug me anyway.) | |
Would those people be able to generate enough electricity to run their iPods, power the TVs, and cool the building? I think they'd be hard pressed to produce more energy then they use, much less power a city.
I vote nuclear. We just need to find a better way to manage the waste... I know! Let's launch it into space and hope it creates new life/destroys it! | |
"Scientists will eventualy stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that energy companies will place huge hamster wheels outside of convenience stores and offer free lottery tickets to people who spend five minutes running in them. The hamster wheels will be connected to power generators."
- Scott Adams, "The Dilbert Future" | |
The other aspect of this system that would be infeasible, beyond what Mike said, is the fact that the energy expended in commuting to the site of all of those exercise bikes would be more than the energy produced from riding them.
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Mike H wrote:
It's become the boogeyman because of association with nuclear bombs Don't forget B-grade movies and comic books. =P People seem to think two things about nuclear power. First, that nuclear reactors explode at the drop of the hat. They seem to think that it involves putting a couple of dozen nukes out in the desert, running an extension cord to the city, then just leaving it unmonitored. Second, that no one puts any thought into dealing with nuclear waste. Like they expect to walk into the plant and see the janitor just throwing it in the dumpster. Somehow the people designing it all just completely overlooked that aspect. 'Hey Larry, what are we meant to be doing with this stuff?' 'Oh crap, I was busy playing Tetris and completely forgot about that, let's just dump it in the lake'. Do people think our scientists are retarded? Do they think we're just guessing our way through this stuff? | |
Jtgibson wrote:
The other aspect of this system that would be infeasible, beyond what Mike said, is the fact that the energy expended in commuting to the site of all of those exercise bikes would be more than the energy produced from riding them. Heh, I guess they could ride bikes to the job. | |
They have something like this over in China(I think?). I watched it on CNN, they have excersize facilities where the machines(Treadmills and Bikes mostly) power the building, and put some power into a backup battery
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Is that how their WOW gold farmer keep fit?
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DarkView wrote:
Mike H wrote: I don't like the idea of nuclear power, and I'm well aware of both of those points. Yes, nuclear reactors are relatively safe, if they're maintained well. That's a big if. Things like Chernobyl can happen if the people running the plant do something stupid - and there will always be people doing something stupid. I'm not sure if the risk is small enough to offset the danger of something that is effectively a controlled nuclear explosion becoming an uncontrolled nuclear explosion. As for waste, yes, scientists try to come up with ways to deal with it. Problem is we currently don't have a good way of dealing with it. It'll be dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years to come. I'm not sure if we'll be able to find somewhere where we can leave something for tens of thousands of years and expect it to be the same when we come back. We can't bury it underground, because geological activity is noticeable over tens of thousands of years. We can't fire it into space, because if the rocket crashes, we can then have Major Bad Stuff happening. We could try getting it pulled into a subduction zone, but we don't know enough about how the mantle moves to be sure that it won't come flying out of volcanoes in a few thousand years time. We just don't know where to put it, and until we do, it's not a safe option. Furthermore, there's only a limited supply of uranium. Far more limited then fossil fuels. By the time we've shifted most of our power generation to nuclear, we'll have fissioned a quarter or so of the uranium we currently know about. Fusion power has its own problems. Even assuming we can get it generating plenty of energy and keep the plasma stable, which seems likely to occur at some point in the future, we still have to deal with the fact that every fusion reaction that is currently feasible for us to use in a fusion power plant spits out a helluva lot of neutrons. This is Not Good, because it means the reactor needs heavy shielding, and more importantly, the insides of the reactor will deteriorate rapidly. And then when we take out the internals of the reactor when we're repairing them, we'll have to deal with the fact that being smashed with neutrons will make the internals radioactive over time. Not radioactive to the same extent as the waste from a fission plant, but still dangerous. Aneutronic fusion would be lovely, but is even further in the future. And probably will have its own problems. I'm inherently suspicious of any magic-bullet solution to generating energy. It's a very complex problem. That's why we haven't solved it yet. | |
* - Spinning is the sport of cycling on bicycle machines.