Belz...
Fiend God
Well, Luddite would prefer the option that has the same disastrous results but also doesn't solve the problem...
Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant
- Thread starter DRBUZZ0
- Start date
It's not as complicated as it seems and it's sure as hell not a "conservation or nuclear" question.
The simple answer is that what we have to do is cut back CO2. The way to do this is obvious. Use less fossil fuels. How do we do this? By conserving as much energy as reasonably possible and fulfilling as much of the needs as possible we do have with energy sources that do not create CO2.
The key here is "as much of the needs as possible." Thus the question is "If we want to reduce fossil fuels as much as possible, what can provide the largest proportion of the replacement?" Because replacing 30% is better than replacing 10% and 60% is better and 80% even better.
So which can replace the MOST coal and oil? That's actually not a hard question to answer.
And as far conservation, how much should we conserve? As much as we have to. And the less we have to the better off we end up being. Fivelous energy use is one thing. Florescent lights and insulation are good. But beyond that you start loosing bigtime. And the less drastic you have to the better off you will be.
Hindmost
Illuminator
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Took me awhile to find something...take a look. A very disturbing conclusion in this report is that Japan has the only ring forging capability for the advanced design plants.
http://www.ne.doe.gov/np2010/reports/mpr2776Rev0102105.pdf
I was not involved with the manufacturing directly, however I was involved with the Yonggwang 3&4 and Ulchin 3&4 plants in Korea from start to finish including scheduling and project management. I have also visited the fabrication facilities in Korea...which were really cool. They forged their own vessel pieces, machined them and assembled them. They probably bought S/G tubes from an outside vendor, but most of the stuff they forged up and machined in-house. My company still supplied the reactor coolant pumps and we had to order the casings before the ink was dry on the contracts to get machined and to the site on time. (they were forged in Japan)
I don't know how Naval vessels are made specifically and can't find any info on that. I do know, the old B&W people make some of the components.
http://www.bwxt.com/core_competencies/nom.html
glenn
Apologies for the poor quality of the image, but this was all I could find for the construction of a naval reactor. This shows the main vessel component being prepared for fabrication of the internals and steam components and such..
As you can see though, it's not that big. Probably not beyond the capabilities of many metal manufacturing places.
As you can see though, it's not that big. Probably not beyond the capabilities of many metal manufacturing places.
Attachments
When I tried to calculate how many wind turbines we could crank out, I tried to base this on a model where that kind of production was in place and apply it to the US. If you want to make wild hypothetical assumptions, well, we've got factories with production capacities of 100 1.5 MW wind turbines monthly now. Build up 100 of these factories and TA-DA, you've got 15,000 MW a month.
As wild hypotheticals go, that's actually a lot more plausible than the nuclear vision. That scale of manufacturing exists in the real world, for starters. Quality control is less of an issue. There are fewer safety issues. You don't need to train a raft of nuclear engineers and technicians. You don't have to overcome reasonable public fears about the safety of mom-and-pop nuclear manufacturing, which is going to be a hard sell, my friend. For better or for worse, nuclear power has many more regulatory implications. And then you'd have to develop the mines to fuel the things, which isn't an issue with wind.
And despite your assertions that the fuel is inexhaustible, all the conventional economic analyses foresee bottlenecks in production now.
And if you really want to restrict the role of conservation and convert all energy to nuclear-fueled electric, you're also suggesting that we develop new automobile designs, test and manufacture them, and replace the automobile fleet in a decade. Then we retrofit all houses so that in order to "God forbid" not enable them to stand without an air conditioner, they remain leaky energy-hogs now heated even less efficiently by electrical sources. We need to convert all ocean ships, too, to nuclear, all the trucks on the road, which will be more challenging than cars and so on. How do you propose to alter cement and steel production?
Of course, if we made it a national priority, or rather a global priority, to go nuclear in ten years and converted massive resources to the cause, we could maybe make it happen, though I think there are reasonable assessments that indicate that even from a fuel perspective, we wouldn't make it.
The reason I didn't propose a massive crank-out of wind turbines is simply that I know that conservation is more economical than that kind of industrial conversion. I don't know where the line would be drawn between what we conserve and what we convert, but I know that in many cases the stumbling block to energy efficiency retrofits even now is raising the capital cost, not the long-term economy of paying for them. If you have to finance the creation of a short-lived factory to crank out industrial equipment, those options are going to look a lot better.
And given that we're all talking about the economic hardships we'll be facing those kind of dollars-and-cents decisions are what will determine a huge part of the strategy, not somebody's nuclear dreams nor someone else's wind turbine fantasy.
So let's stop with the pipe-dreams. In real world economics, this isn't going to happen.
As wild hypotheticals go, that's actually a lot more plausible than the nuclear vision. That scale of manufacturing exists in the real world, for starters. Quality control is less of an issue. There are fewer safety issues. You don't need to train a raft of nuclear engineers and technicians. You don't have to overcome reasonable public fears about the safety of mom-and-pop nuclear manufacturing, which is going to be a hard sell, my friend. For better or for worse, nuclear power has many more regulatory implications. And then you'd have to develop the mines to fuel the things, which isn't an issue with wind.
And despite your assertions that the fuel is inexhaustible, all the conventional economic analyses foresee bottlenecks in production now.
And if you really want to restrict the role of conservation and convert all energy to nuclear-fueled electric, you're also suggesting that we develop new automobile designs, test and manufacture them, and replace the automobile fleet in a decade. Then we retrofit all houses so that in order to "God forbid" not enable them to stand without an air conditioner, they remain leaky energy-hogs now heated even less efficiently by electrical sources. We need to convert all ocean ships, too, to nuclear, all the trucks on the road, which will be more challenging than cars and so on. How do you propose to alter cement and steel production?
Of course, if we made it a national priority, or rather a global priority, to go nuclear in ten years and converted massive resources to the cause, we could maybe make it happen, though I think there are reasonable assessments that indicate that even from a fuel perspective, we wouldn't make it.
The reason I didn't propose a massive crank-out of wind turbines is simply that I know that conservation is more economical than that kind of industrial conversion. I don't know where the line would be drawn between what we conserve and what we convert, but I know that in many cases the stumbling block to energy efficiency retrofits even now is raising the capital cost, not the long-term economy of paying for them. If you have to finance the creation of a short-lived factory to crank out industrial equipment, those options are going to look a lot better.
And given that we're all talking about the economic hardships we'll be facing those kind of dollars-and-cents decisions are what will determine a huge part of the strategy, not somebody's nuclear dreams nor someone else's wind turbine fantasy.
So let's stop with the pipe-dreams. In real world economics, this isn't going to happen.
Schneibster
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=:0 Pops Jacobsen's Nuclear Power Plant Manufacturing and Repair, LLC?
I hate to point it out, but this was just exactly the sort of thing Belz and I were talking about. You make an assertion, provide some references, the assertion is refuted by opposing references, and the references you provided are impeached, but somehow it's like all that never happened and you're back asserting the same thing again. No, quite frankly, all the conventional economic analyses foresee nothing of the kind, and it's been proven here multiple times.
In case you weren't watching, it seems that they're selling hybrids. Honda just had to redesign theirs because it looked too much like the standard Accord, and people want a "bubblemobile" so they can show off how ecologically conscious they are. It's getting to be a status thing, at least up in Silicon Valley near where I live.
Carbon sequestration seems to be the focus of current research. People seem to be buying replacement windows, insulation, higher efficiency furnaces and water heaters, and so forth at an alarming rate. I have a furnace installer who wants to sell me a solar powered air conditioner; claims it won't use any electricity from the mains, you don't even hook it up to the service. It seems to be happening rather quickly, at least in California. I don't suppose the Dirty East or all those red states that start with vowels are doing nearly as well, however.
I think you'll be surprised, if there's money to be made in it. And there is.
Okay maybe I'm going about this wrong. Fine. You want to have conservation by stopping people from using things like air conditioners and refrigerators and big televisions and such. We will limit our society to only the necessary uses of energy and nothing that might be considered "wasteful."
How do we do this. Here are some ways:
1. Get everyone to agree to it - No that is never going to happen. Sorry but everyone already knows conserving energy is good and that hasn't done much yet. Plus it's always extremely difficult to get people to do anything as a whole which is meaningless on an individual baisis and only works collectively. It's not workable. It won't happen. I don't care how many ads you run, it won't make a dent. People don't like being told to do something when they know that it doesn't matter whether or not they do it if everyone else does.
This is why voter turnout is so fickle and hard to do. A single vote rarely determines an election just like one air conditioner does absolutely nothing. You can't get people to do something collectively when individually they know they can cheat. Everyone considers it a non-priority because it doesn't matter if they do it or not, but that combined mentality destroys it.
Trust me, people get this message so much already and it has not driven down the energy consumption at all. Simply asking people to won't do it. And it won't matter how sincere or how much they understand how important it is, because the fact of the matter is no one person changes things and they all end up thinking "Well it won't change much if just I don't..." And you have a "no one raindrop is resonsible for the flood" situation.
2. We could outlaw things like air conditioners and say televisions can only be up to 12 inches wide and lights cannot be more than a certain wattage. Well, this is a problem, because now we have a police state. And on top of that we have to collect all the ones already out there. Plus, is it fair to outlaw them?
Really, most would say that they have to be allowed sometimes, right? What about an old person with a weak heart during a heat wave. They probably ought to have an air conditioner. Also, a big television is probably okay for a lecture hall, becasue that's better than everyone having their own. And higher power lights are needed for large public spaces.
So now we have a worse problem. We have to individually decide who is entitled to what energy usage and what is "justified" each and every device must be evaluated by some agency and the license obtained. You want an air conditioner? Apply for a permit and then wait for your hearing before the energy commission.
Bad idea.
3.
A. Reduce the amount of energy generated and avaliable and let people get by with what is considered a reasonable amount.
OR
B. Set the price high enough to reduce usage drastically.
These are really the same thing, because as soon as you limit energy usage market forces come into play which will make it astronomically expensive. You cannot both generate less and keep the price reasonable, because if you try to do that everyone will use the same and you'll just end up with a massive brownout. It's a comodety, there's no way around that.
Also imposing a "carbon tax" or some other financial method effectively does the same as raising the price. And imposting a "cap" does the same as limiting production.
So now what do we have? Well, we have just turned electricity and energy in general into a luxury item.
So people continue to eat lots of icecream, lay in the big air conditioner, watch their big television, crank the tunes and leave the lights on.... but only if they're rich.
For the middle class energy becomes a bigger issue and they have to consider it as the primary motivation in all things they do. They spend a larger portion of their income on energy and thus the standard of living decreases.
And for the lower class, you've made them live without it because it's just too expensive. Thus, the class divide has just gotten dramatically worse, because now the underclass has no hope of being able to view the internet, get their news in a timely manner, communicate and so on.
You have killed upward mobility or even the option thereof.
On top of this since consumerism has been so dramatically reduced the entire ecocomy is reduced to nothing. People don't buy products as much, nobody is needed to make them, people loose their jobs making them. There ya go..
And on top of this there is now extreme inflation. Since everything depends on energy to be produced and distributed the price of everything goes up to factor in energy. The monetary system will naturally compensate, but since you have a shortage of a vital and universal commodity (energy), it will simply spiral out of control.
AND ON TOP OF THAT: That Guatamalin farmer who was growing bananas for Americans and Europeans: The ones who unjustly demand fruit from another part of the world which takes energy to produce? Well now he can't sell his bananas to anyone because they won't buy them because they're too expensive to ship.
He cannot buy food for his family so all they can do are eat the bananas that are rotting in the fields. But unfortunately those won't sustain them, because they can't preserve them (a poor farmer would NEVER be able to afford refrigeration or canning equipment in this world) and so the bannas all end up rotting and before the next crop cycle of bannas are ready for his family (who is nutritionally deficient from living on bananas to begin with) they have all starved to death and are found in the fields clinging to rotten banas.
4. We ration energy by giving each person an allowence. This effectively is the same as number 2 and 3 combined. It has the disadvantages of both because now the governement decides how much each person is entiled to and doles it out, and on top of that when you limit something like that you can't keep market forces out of it. Just as in times like the second world war with butter and flower, people trade their ration credits and it becomes a commodity. And you're back to where you started.
But on top of this... you also have even more freelance generation. You give someone a limited amount of energy credits and they will start doing things like cutting down the trees on their property to burn to keep warm, less they waste their credits. Also, they may even burn them to make electricity.
But they won't alternatively buy solar cells for their roof, because that's never going to be a cost effective way of making their own energy. Which gets us back to the point that if you make it expensive you move people away from clean energy and toward cheap energy.
This brings us to option 5.
Where you end up going here now is that it has to be the priority to make people conserve and since all the options I've listed have diar consequences, there's only one way to do it. We do it communally. Basically you start worrying about the system as a whole and you take the choice away from people.
Instead the government micro-manages everything, telling people what tv they can buy and companies what to make and how the energy is to be used and preventing the class problem by giving money to the poor and taking it from the rich and tweaking every tiny variable in an attempt to reach equilibrium.
This is called "Communism" and the problem it presents (amoung others) is that it works when everyone independently does what they can to help the collective. That never happens. So you have the government never getting past micromanaging the lives of each and every person. Of course, it cannot ever do this. It's basically impossible. So it fails and philosophy falls apart.
You end up in a police state and the fact that you have so much power over every aspect of the lives of everyone inevitably does not mean that the government stays benevolently with it. The most ambitious rise to the top by making deals and you end up with top-down corruption and a system that looks NOTHING like the original concept was supposed to be.
Welcome to the Soviet Union.
HA! No that's not the problem with a massive cranking out of wind turbines. They're so huge and the energy density is so low that you end up in chasing your own tail or in a "Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul" situation, because you can't built wind turbines fast enough to power your factory to build wind turbines.
Get it? Massive wind turbine factories to reduce CO2 production is going to lead to a lot of juggling to try to figure out how you can build turbines efficiently enough that you don't burn more coal to power your wind turbine factory.
Hah! also because you can't. And see how conservation is not that easy. You don't just pass a law that says "Everybody has to conserve" or say "it's out policy to use less energy." That's not how it works. What you are saying is easy. But doing it is hard. Actually it's impossible
And the capital costs are the least of the economic concern. You want conservation as policy, that means restriction. That means shortages and you decapitate your economy from the get go.
Well lets define these dreams then:
My dream for a "nuclear world" is dozens of terawatts generated worldwide allowing stuff like dredging and decomposing of dioxen contaminated soil, desalination of water to reduce the strain on frehs-water reserves, thermal depolymerization of garabage, massive production of hydrogen-rich synthetic fuels. Hydrogen to power rockets and nuclear reactors flying probes to the outer reaches of the solar system.
That's a dream. Won't happen.
A nuclear realistic goal: Making it the primary power source for industrial countries within the next 30 years with better than 20% conversion in 10 years. Shutting down all coal opperations and cutting oil and gas demand in half within a few decades. Cutting CO2 from power generation to nill by 2040. And seeing massive returns much sooner.
Your wind power dream:
Windmills covering a large portion of the worlds surface and providing all power needs.
That's a dream. Won't happen:
A realistic wind power goal: provides 15% of power capacity in the next 40 years for industrial use. Provides about 6% of total energy consumption. Thus reduces carbon-based sources by 4%
That's a doable goal.
Hindmost
Illuminator
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I forget how small navy nuke plants are...even the Nimitz class reactors are just not that big. I agree, many places could make those components assuming they could meet code requirements.
The S/Gs on the big comercial plants have about 12000 tubes. They all have to be custom formed. Just drilling the tube sheet takes a long time. The shells and the reactor vessels have to be ring forged in pieces and welded together. But that is much better than before when flat pieces were forged and bent into shape One person I knew that actually welded nozzles in vessels told me it would take him two weeks per nozzle.
thanks for the info.
glenn
I think much of that has to do with the fact that they use highly enriched uranium and a very small mass. The actual fuel core is very small, so it probably is also designed to run insanely hot compared to commercial plants. With that kind of heat and pressure you may not need as big a steam generator to get good results.
Schneibster, note that I'm not saying which conclusions are correct. There are sources that say both. But most of the sources that refute a resource problem are pro-nuclear and envision a lot of non-traditional sources. The economic and resource analyses foresee a problem in the medium term. They tend not to evaluate things like uranium from seawater or granite at all.
http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/chinainstitute/nav03.cfm?nav03=59974&nav02=59973&nav01=57272
http://www.stockinterview.com/combs2.html
http://www.stockhouse.ca/bullboards/viewmessage.asp?no=16015636
http://www.stockhouse.com/bullboards/viewmessage.asp?no=16653947&t=0&all=0&TableID=0
http://www.uraniumseek.com/news/UraniumSeek/1177974242.php
http://www.uranium-stocks.net/uranium-price-confusion-especially-in-the-us-doe/
Here's a pro-nuclear site that also evaluates only conventional supplies:
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm
And here's a pro-nuclear site that recognizes that
and goes on to dispute it.
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html
And here's a pro-nuclear site that acknowledges economic analyses of supply bottlenecks:
It goes on to explain why this is irrelevant for long-term forecasting. It does this very well, and is persuasive. But I've also presented what I feel are persuasive arguments against this view. And in any event, I was addressing the potential for a massive power-up over the next decade, where issues like this are rather critical.
As one of the analyses I pointed to pointed out, gold is also recoverable from seawater. But we assume that gold extraction would drop considerably before we turned to seawater as a resource.
If we're going to drop our emissions adequately, we need to go well beyond the currently available hybrids. Hybrids deliver substantial emissions reductions in cities. Not so much on the highway. I love the idea of plug-in hybrids. But that requires a massive infrastructure overhaul, too. And it's not enough in the long run anyway.
We're going to have to do a lot of things simultaneously, I know. I'm just saying that a significant part of the drop in emissions from transportation is going to come from moving things less. More passengers per vehicle. Smaller distances between people and the places they need to go. Smaller distances between products and their markets. Because we're nowhere near the point where we have a car that runs on 10-20% of the fuel. Then there's the embodied energy of the car, too, to worry about. And road construction. And electricity is going to be tight even without trying to electrify the whole car fleet too.
What you absolutely have to restrict is the use of fossil fuels. On Friday's climate change forum, policy expert after policy expert stood up to state relentlessly that voluntary measures just don't work. So you don't have to tell people how they will reduce their emissions, but you do have to make them reduce.
Your choices are cap-and-trade, quota system, strict caps, and price signals, though there may be other mechanisms I'm not aware of. Whichever of these you choose, there will be a public demand for investment and infrastructure for the transition.
So we'll get demand for public transit, for more efficient vehicles, for retrofit financing and so on. And you'll get these long before you can make a dent in energy supply.
Of course, you'll get more demand for investment in emissions-free generation as well.
Yeah that was discussed under the "Shortages" and "limiting a commodity will force market forces to make it astronomically expensive"
You could do that... Just cap emissions and thus force conservation. Then sit back and watch the carnage as your entire economic and social system sputters, destabalizes, and then it all comes crashing down.
In California they had a situation where they had a limited amount of avaliable energy (partially due to Enron trading and such but also due to a situation where artificial price controls existed in a semi-regulated semi-deregulated market)
You know how power was conserved? By shutting it off. Rolling blackouts. Not even just planned ones either. People sucked in power. Power wasn't there. Regulators tried to compensate. Voltage dropped, transformers caught fire.
Large industries also suffered. Some mining operations went under because electricity was the primary expense.
It lasted a short time. It was limited. If that had happened on the scale you are proposing it would have not been a localized problem. It would be a world-wide catastrophic collapse of infrastructure.
But eventually it would stabalize, when the market caught up... Then as siad above... frivelous use would return. But only for the rich. The class divide enters. Inflation hits.
It would be a spectacular worldwide meltdown.
Then there was the summer a few years ago on the east coast...
Power was a bit tight. A couple plants were down for maintenance. One other had to be shut down due to a turbine failure. Hot day. But there was enough power.... just barely... Power companies issued warnings to big customers warning that they needed to conserve bigtime...
And conservation measures save the day?
No. A wire sagged and shorted on a relatively unimportant and small high tension line. Most of the eastern seaboard fell dark.
This would be normal in your world. That is, until the market begins to compensate. Eventually this would move from an every day event to happening only every few days or a couple times a month as the price sores.
But then maybe the damand would eventually go down, as inflation, market meltdowns and absolute priceouts lead to huge increases in mortality.
Hamradioguy
Pyrrhonist
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If I remember, the Yankee Rowe nuclear plant was a Naval reactor design. Wasn't very big- around 170MW, but it was built for well under $50 million and operated for 32 years. Pretty economical I think. But that was then and this is now- Permitting and design of a new nuke takes a long time and big bucks. It's an argument for standardized designs like the French do.
Of course the French have a whole different take on nuclear power. When I was in St. Pierre and Miquelon some years ago I was amazed that power for the whole island was supplied by big diesel generators running on imported oil. When I suggested to my St. Pierre host that maybe a small nuke plant might be a better alternative he said he thought that was an excellent idea. Can you imagine the reaction if you told the good folks in a place like Martha's Vineyard that they should build a nuke plant on their island?
Of course the French have a whole different take on nuclear power. When I was in St. Pierre and Miquelon some years ago I was amazed that power for the whole island was supplied by big diesel generators running on imported oil. When I suggested to my St. Pierre host that maybe a small nuke plant might be a better alternative he said he thought that was an excellent idea. Can you imagine the reaction if you told the good folks in a place like Martha's Vineyard that they should build a nuke plant on their island?
The disastrous shortages you describe were caused by unpredicted spikes in demand. I'm proposing predictable demand decreases. This should increase grid stability as all capacity remains.
Quotas, restrictions, rationing and price mechanisms have a long history of addressing needs in troubled times, and doing so successfully.
In Brazil, extended droughts a decade ago led to limited hydro-electric power which forced rationing in some states that went on for months or even years. Power was available above the quotas established, but a fine was paid. People who could easily afford the fines didn't incur them because it was considered rude and selfish to waste precious electricity. The economy grew.
During the second world war, pleasure driving was prohibited altogether in the United States. Civilian vehicles were not manufactured and gasoline was rationed, as were meat, coffee, butter, sugar, shoes, clothing and rubber. The transition was orderly. The economy grew.
The reason these sorts of economic impositions are accepted is because people recognize the problem and want to do their part. The problem we have with global warming is that the scale of the problem is not broadly recognized. Most people who buy a hybrid and change their lightbulbs feel virtuous. There is little recognition of how tiny this step is toward the 80%+ reductions necessary.
In Toronto, the local utility introduced a peaksaver programme 2 summers ago that remotely turned down air conditioners at peak to ease stress on transmission lines. They hoped to achieve 7 MW reductions. What they got was 100 MW in a couple months. A survey of respondents revealed the number 1 reason was "civic duty".
So I don't share your cynicism about people not doing anything individually that won't benefit them. And I don't share your pessimism about dire consequences.
The consequences of sticking with the status quo and just introducing new energy sources are far more dangerous. This would expend public money while driving down energy prices for everything including fossil fuels. Wasteful industry would thrive and grow, new markets for coal and oil would be found. And, as analyst after analyst pointed out, emissions would rise. It is apparent to every climate change policy analyst I've spoken to that through one mechanism or another, emissions from fossil fuels must be artificially suppressed or we have no chance at all of addressing the crisis.
A and B are related but there are slight differences in how they work out. A is hard-edged. B allows some flexibility. On extremely hot days, for example, you might still turn on your AC, but you'd want to do it less. A may not leave you the option, if your personal energy is rationed.
But because you want to achieve the same reductions overall, B has to set the price even higher than the average price of A. The differences, in practice, are not high.
There are differential quotas and scaled carbon taxes, tax credits for low income and government programs that target retrofits for lowest income tax brackets. There are a lot of creative ways of getting around the problems of energy poverty.
But you're wrong about it expanding class divides. It is rather a great social leveler. Income is one of the best indicators of carbon emissions. Make it expensive to emit and you hit the rich hardest. One holiday flight to Fiji and you basically blow your whole carbon quota for the year. Business meetings every week would basically be a thing of the past. Rich people will suddenly see the appeal of small cars, like they do in Europe where energy has been more expensive for decades. And rich people will be the first to invest in efficiencies as they arise, paving the way for price reductions as new ideas catch on.
I haven't done a systematic analysis, but I think the countries with highest energy prices tend to have smaller class divisions. Europe, for example, fares a lot better than North America.
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