[TML] [Merchant Shipping] Some ideas I came up with to make merchant shipping more interesing

[Tom B]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Timothy Little <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 09:05:52AM -0400, Tom B wrote:
>  > In heavy urbanization, you may have a *lot* of larger plants. So the
>  > runs might not be that long to any particular place you'd need to
>  > power.
>
>  Err, what do you mean by "larger plants"?  The typical sizes of plants
>  I'm assuming are on the order of a hundred MW or so, probably about
>  the size of a small apartment, and costing on the order of 1-2 MCr.
>  Actually very close in many ways to the suburban telephone exchanges
>  here.

200 MW *is* a larger plant! How many homes do you think that would supply?

http://www.utilipoint.com/issuealert/print.asp?id=1728

Residential Electricity Consumption

The amount of electricity consumed by a typical residential household
varies dramatically by region of the country. According to 2001 Energy
Information Administration (EIA) data, New England residential
customers consume the least amount of electricity, averaging 653
kilowatt hours (kWh) of load in a month, while the East South Central
region, which includes states such as Georgia and Alabama and
Tennessee, consumes nearly double that amount at 1,193 kWh per
household.

So, if we just eyeball 1K kWh per household as consumption, how many
homes would our 200 MW plant service? One might assume 100-200 homes I
think. If the homes were higher tech and hence probably more energy
efficient, one might assume a greater rate, perhaps double, triple or
quadruple that. Businesses, of course, are a whole other matter.

So 200 MW might support reasonably 200 homes. That is neighborhood
generation, but not true microgeneration.

But this ignores one reality: Possible issues of
security/terrorism/threat posed by having nuclear plants all over the
place. Does a TU require that these plants be closely policed? I'm not
sure - I think the inference in canon is 'not really'. But I'm not
certain there is a hard and fast answer.

But do hundred GW plants have better efficiency than hundred MW
plants? I don't know. I'd have thought so though. They certainly
concentrate any security/health risks into fewer, more manageable
locales.

>  Sure there may be links to other reactors in nearby areas for
>  redundancy and load-balancing, but I don't see any reason at all for
>  any longer-range links.
>
>  I'm not talking about microgeneration with each house having its own
>  plant.  Although, a large office building or apartment complex
>  possibly would.  A large industrial complex certainly would.
>
>
>
>
>  - Tim
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"Now, I go to spread happiness to the rest of the station. It is a
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 Thomas Paine