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Remember it’s *relative humidity*. Colder air, at high humidity levels holds less water vapour. So somewhere tropical / semi tropical like Florida is both hot and steamy, so you’ll have way more moisture in the air than somewhere like here that’s temperate oceanic. It will also fall out as mist, dew and drizzle.

The result is that indoor, heated air humidity isn’t high.

Dehumidifiers aren’t normally needed, unless you’ve some very specific damp problems or something. Normally once a building is adequately heated it won’t be damp.

The issue is that outdoors, plant growth and moss growth is likely rapid. So just means plenty of jet washing and designing surfaces that work well with moss and lichens. Slates, stone, brick etc all work well. Wood, exposed plaster etc doesn’t.

Heat pumps actually work very well here, if you’ve got the right levels of insulation. The relative shift in temperature from indoors to outdoors might only be 10 to 15°C so, you don’t have all that much heat to pump. So in general things like air-to-water systems, driving low temp radiators and/or underfloor heating are becoming popular.

I’ve installed solar panels and get a good % of my hot water on sunnier days and I’m thinking about photovoltaic panels. You can feed back into the grid what you don’t use and I’ve a lot of south facing roof, so it gets lots of light. If I plan the grants and rebates well, it could save me money.

I wouldn’t entirely cut off the gas just yet, but I think in a few years I might be looking at whether I really need it anymore.
 
Gas furnaces I don't care for they dry out the air so much makes me miserable. I prefer Heat pumps here these new ones pump out just as much heat as a furnace and even when its 0 outside . The Mitsubishi hyper heat kicks ass and I don't even have E.M. heat hooked up.

The Ruud I have in my place not so much it heats but its not warm it feels cold and its a new system.

Water heating is where gas really shines .. A 40 gallon Gas water heater can replace a much larger Electric and keep up when there is a high demand for hot water.

 I have never tried a on demand electric . I looked into one about 4 years ago and the power requirements where nuts .

 They need to get rid of Coal plants and go nuclear , Tva has Bellafonte plant about 80% done and its been sitting there like that for years. Nuclear has a bad rap that is not really fair. Thats one thing I love about living here unlike California . No rolling blacks outs . I am a liberal at heart for the most part but, I am not one of those out there in far left field throw away logic and common sense and always be P.C. correct ,screw that shit.

 Diablo canyon is California's sole reaming nuclear power plant, there closing it down in a year or two and installing Gas turbines in its place. That makes no sense at all  its  already up and running and supplies 3 million house with power and they have a power supply problem already. I don't see the how that helps anything really save for being P.C.

 

 
 
The reason to shut down Diablo canyon, and any other nuclear power plant sitting in a volatile location, is because it's a time bomb as is. Hovering very close to the San Andreas fault and only a few hours from either L.A. or SanFran.
It NEVER should have been built there in the first place.

There is an incredible amount of wealth and our countries resources in California. We certainly don't want to take unnecessary risks and threaten those. Same goes for the closing of the Indian Point reactor near NYC and for NY to put a Ban on Fracking in NY state due NYC getting it's water primarily upstate.

We all should know by now what a disaster fracking has been as well. dumb, but well intentioned I suppose.
 
Europe is very mixed on nuclear. Some EU countries are pushing ahead with new nuclear plants, mostly replacing old ones, but others, notably Germany, are just closing all of their nuclear facilities.

There’s a lot of nuclear in Europe, about 25% of overall electricity supply (France going as high as 75%) and more reactors in use than North America.

We’ve a lot of renewables and more coming on stream all the time but there’s a big debate about whether or not nuclear should form part of the next generation of energy solutions and I think different EU countries will take very different paths on that.

Ireland for example had a plan for a nuclear plant to be constructed beginning in the late 1970s. It most likely would have been a fairly standard French or US PWR design, but the Three Mile Island incident in 1979 spooked the public and there were big anti nuclear protests and then when Chernobyl happened in 1986 there was legislation passed to ban nuclear power within the state.

In hindsight, Chernobyl was a unique set of circumstances with a rather unusual and frankly very dangerous Soviet design that would absolutely never, ever have been used here, and it occurred in a culture of Soviet secrecy and fear of whistleblowing etc, but I think that accident spooked a lot of people and generally caused a very long slowing in nuclear plant construction in Western Europe, with far fewer plants being built than in the 60s and 70s.

You’re seeing a bit of a resurgence of interest in the technologies now as the demand for CO2 neutral energy i is becoming pressing, but in a lot of countries it would still be a challenging prospect to sell it to the electorate.

In more recent years the latest generation of EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) plants developed by AREVA seem extremely safe. There are layers and layers and layers of systems to prevent any kind of incident ever becoming an environmental mess, but they’ve also proven to be astronomically expensive to construct. The first three plants are running extremely late and the Flamenville 3 in France was budgeted at just over €3 billion and is currently running at over 12 billion and is more than a decade late.

That hasn’t been an unusual feature of the nuclear industry, especially with first time construction of new designs, but it doesn’t really make it a very attractive economic prospect.

There’s also a tendency to ignore astronomical decommissioning costs and on going fuel reprocessing and spent fuel storage.

It tends to make sense economically, as long as you ignore those bills or, they’re absorbed by the state somehow. However, these things are done commercially and I can’t see investors rushing in.

Perhaps, smaller modular designs may ultimately be useful but so far it’s all just prototypes and hype form various companies around the world and nuclear fusion has been just aiding the corner for the last 70 years… I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it.
 
Nuclear power is more expensive BUT is proven, clean, and can adapt more easily to demands in electricity compared to wind and solar.
 
It's a mixed bag. Even in terms of radionuclides in the atmosphere, nuclear power is low down the scale. Most of the sources of that are still the aftermath of weapons tests in the 20th century and also the burning of coal. It flings about 100x more radioactive particles into the atmosphere per kWh produced than a nuclear plant, and that’s because coal is extracted from deep underground and contains heavy metals, including elements like uranium. They’re not concentrated, but they escape in fly ash and unfiltered emissions.

Those aside, coal and other heavy fossil fuels (mostly heavy fuel oils) used in power generation are just filthy sources of energy. They throwing out all sorts of nasty chemicals, many of which are irritating or damaging to humans and some of which carcinogenic and we seem to give them a free pass. Whether the plant near to you in Europe or North America is using filters and scrubbers is somewhat irrelevant as there are cheap and cheerful coal plants lashing out pollutants elsewhere.

That’s before you even start looking at the CO2 issue!

We’ve tendency to romanticise fossil fuels because we’re used to seeing a smouldering hearth in a fireplace or toasting marshmallows on some camp fire and we tend to see nuclear through the eyes of a sci-fi disaster movie.

None of these technologies come without any cost. Renewables have the least cost, mostly just visual or nuisance impact or perhaps river diversions, but we’ve an insatiable appetite for always on, on tap energy and we’re going to have start making serious decisions.

There is an upper limit to what the planet and ecosystems, that were are utterly dependent and part of, can take. We can’t just keep going as we are, just primitively burning stuff to get energy.

Despite all of our tech and how abstracted we are from what drives it, most things we do, including probably a large part of the internet technology involved in posting this message, is still probably driven by a fire in a big box somewhere, boiling water to make steam, to spin a turbine, to drive a generator…

We like to think of ourselves as very sophisticated, but maybe we’ve just swept the dirt, grime, soot and filth under a nice technological carpet and put the really noxious industrial stuff far, far away where we’re unlikely to see it, but will be happy to use its cheap production capacity.
 
Nuclear is MUCH more expensive.
It has proven itself very volatile. Three Mile Island, The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 that has rendered the entire city of Pripyat unlivable, the 2011 accident in Japan's Fukushima Daiichi reactor. Do any of those serious accidents sound familiar? The damages they've done aren't going away anytime soon.

It is certainly NOT clean. Do YOU want to live anywhere near a radioactive toxic waste dump? The nuclear industry is desperately trying to push this fraudulent narrative in the media and sh*ts gotta stop.

Battery back-up adapts BEST and quickly to changes in demand regardless of the power source.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/chernobyl-disaster
bradfordwhite-2021122618141208316_1.png
 
The reason for the Chernobyl disaster was because of a piss-poor design with no safety features and dangerous reactor design where the chain reaction sped up when water was lost.

I really find it interesting how a majority of people on this site are environmentalists but yet are against nuclear but complain about pollution from coal plants then start complaining on how there’s not enough electricity then push for these cheap appliances that don’t do a darn thing.

If more nuclear power plants were built decades ago, there would have been a lot less pollution since there wouldn’t be as much carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
 
throwing phrases and sentences together at random

Who do you work for?

 

"I really find it interesting how a majority of people on this site are environmentalists..."

I doubt most people on THIS site are heavily concerned about environmental ecology protection.  This is a site for retro appliance collectors.  There are no badges on this site stating that it's eco-friendly.

 

That being said, WHAT is the opposite of being an environmentalists?

 

Who wouldn't want to be an environmentalists if for the name only.   You know, much like the corrupt nuclear industry is trying to do.  Trying to add a fake badge of  green friendly to their stinky product.

 

--------

"...but yet are against nuclear but complain about pollution from coal plants..." 

 

Those two things don't go together.   People have concerns about the pollution from BOTH those facilities.

 

Nuclear pollution is air born as it leaks out from time to time when the rods are changed in the plants AND it's also the pollution and threats from water leakage such as what they've had at the Florida nuclear plant and they had and the now closed New York nuclear plant... and others.  Plus of course there is the long term storage of the MANY drums of highly dangerous nuclear waste.

 

Coal pollution is air born and the dust from storing coal, plus the mining.

 

----------

 

 

"then start complaining on how there’s not enough electricity...."

 

Electric usage in the U.S. has been declining in the U.S.  No one's been complaining about a lack of electricity here.  Where did you see that?

 

------------

 

"....then push for these cheap appliances that don’t do a darn thing....."

 

Again, where on this site did you see that and how is that relevant to your statement?  This site is for Appliance collectors.  

 

-----------

"If more nuclear power plants were built decades ago, there would have been a lot less pollution since there wouldn’t be as much carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere."

 

Statistically there would have been more nuclear accidents.   There also is a tremendous amount of energy and pollution used when building these awful cement behemoths AND the pollution that's created in dealing with all the radioactive waste and that's on-going.  The nuclear industry tries to ignore that TOO.

 

------------

 

All it takes is one Chernobyl t<span style="font-size: 12pt;">ype accident to cause serious and long term damages to an entire city, as can be seen in Russia.  Only nuclear will cause that kind of UNACCEPTABLE damage.</span>

 

Solar doesn't melt down and contaminate the water and air.

 

A natural gas burning plant and coal burning plant, while creating air pollution, if they explode, it's minor and fixable.

 

Wave energy, wind energy, and hydro-powered generation may have minor impacts on the environment but they don't make the land unlivable. 

 

Nuclear <span style="text-decoration: underline;">isn't</span> fixable.  Highly dangerous! 

 

It's also insulting and suspicious that anyone would suggest it as an alternative especially with the benefits that Solar, wind, and batteries have proven.

 
 
Oh, I am going to duck and run, generally pro nuclear

As to who I work for, I WISH I could have been an engineer for Westinghouse!

 

Chernobyl was caused by a nasty, narcissist supervisor who told the operators to disable every safety feature the reactor had (it had some despite being Soviet).  That was preventable.

 

Fukushima was a very unusual condition yet only 2 people died from radiation poisoning, 20,000 died in the tsunami.  It is a lot of damage to clean up.

 

Three mile island is almost not that bad compared to these 2 but the facility was ruined.   It would not be bad had they not turned off the extra water (because no one answered the phone).

 

Nuclear power is necessary for large industrial amounts of electric power to replace coal.  Wind and solar are OK for residential and local needs and for remote areas, but it may not be enough to replace coal anytime soon.  Natural gas might still give off too much CO2 to prevent climate change. 

 

One thing I don't understand is when a nuclear plant is shut down (and it's not "shot"), why must they destroy it right away?  Why not "mothball" in case it needs used again?

 

I better hide!
 
Same distance here about 40 miles

Called Beaver Valley in Shippingport, PA.  One reactor built in 1976, the other in 1987.  It was threatened with a closure but somehow it was saved at the last minute and still in operation.
 
Beaver Valley, like other nuclear powered plants are not economically viable by their own opinions.
If it weren't for tax subsidies these aging behemoths would close down, which is what they should be doing ANYWAY because the useful life of these structures is up.

They are designed for a set amount of time. To run them passed that is foolish and dangerous. If you are only 40 miles or so from this I would think you'd be concerned.

Throw in all the damages being done to parts of PA from fracking, I feel bad for PA residents. It's a beautiful state but... there is some interesting but damaging things going on there.
 
Bob

I sincerely hope my previous comment pointing out very public issues that have happened didn't come across in an unintended way.

Issues with Centralia, the Three Mile Island disaster, and large scale fracking are unfortunate things that have happened in PA. There are similar things like that everywhere we go.

It certainly is nothing personal.
 
I grew up 35 miles from Brown's Ferry nuclear power plant in Athens, Alabama.  Several neighbors and friends parents work/ed there.  My aunt retired from there.  Before I became an RN, I tried to get a job with the TVA...but it's really hard to get on there.

https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/nuclear
https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/nuclear/browns-ferry-nuclear-plant
Browns Ferry is TVA’s first and largest site with three boiling water reactors producing about 10 percent of TVA’s total generation capacity. In 2014, Browns Ferry was the second-largest power producer in the United States.

 

https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/nuclear/sequoyah-nuclear-plant 

 

And below is the first new nuclear reactor of the 21st century

https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/nuclear/watts-bar-nuclear-plant
 

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