5 ms·
Can I have two for my house?
by hurxnid 6y ago
Can I have two for my house?
- gambiting 6y agoHalf a century ago some companies actually planned for things like that - a small nuclear reactor that you would bury under your house and it would provide you with power for decades. It went the same way the nuclear car did - the concept would work but it's just too dangerous without constant supervision.
- macNchz 6y agoI had never heard of that, but the idea of it makes me think of all my neighbors growing up in the 90s who were spending tens of thousands of dollars cleaning up contamination from leaking underground heating oil tanks. It was a major issue for people buying and selling older houses...sellers hiding knowledge of leaking tanks, surprise discoveries etc. In the worst cases the soil decontamination could cost over $100k. I can only imagine what fun these end-of-life home nuclear reactors would be causing 50 years later!
- nitrogen 6y agoI visited a home once that was built in the mid 20th century on the assumption that electricity would become too cheap to meter. The original heating system was described to me as just a bunch of resistive elements strung in the attic. I think the house actually got an award similar to LEED (or maybe it was LEED?) at its construction.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoMy parent's late 70s house has something like this. There are heating elements sandwiched between two layers of drywall in the ceiling. It actually works really well, because it heats objects rather than the air--sort of like the sun on a cool, cloudless day--but electricity is like 4x the cost of natural gas so it never gets used. Also, the attic has insufficient insulation, so half the heat would go the wrong way.
- macNchz 6y agoOh yeah my (boarding) high school had a dorm built in the “electricity will soon be too cheap to meter” era and had heating elements set into the concrete floors. It housed like 50 students and used more electricity than all of the other buildings on the 500 student campus combined. The warm floors were very nice though!
- dTal 6y agoWhat on earth do you need 20 kilowatts continuous for? That's a huge amount of power for domestic use.
- throwanem 6y agoTypical US domestic service is 24kW (120V/200A nominal at the main breaker).
- dTal 6y agoFair enough. Still, it's one thing to be specced for 24kW peak load (the breaker) and quite another to require 20kW continuous (two 10kW nuclear power plants). I still think 20kW is an awfully huge amount of power - the average US house only uses about 1 kilowatt when you smooth it out.
- User23 6y agoWhat on earth do you need more than 640k of memory for? That's a huge amount of memory for domestic use. Nobody knows what kind of innovations a huge readily available sustainable energy supply would allow, but I bet they'd be cool.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 6y ago(1) Heat. Space is cold. (-100c) (2) Cooling. Space is hot. (+400c) (3) Running the computer. (4) Running the communications gear. (5) Cooling 4+5.