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https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.10...

This paywalled paper. Ties in with this article.

It's not BS, but it is hype. The founder and CEO is this guy, who just recently published this paper on their tech. The cells reportedly lost 25% of their capacity in just 50 cycles. They also reported a "high" ionic conductivity of 3.15e-3 S cm-1, which is an order of magnitude less than traditional liquid electrolytes. They conducted their discharge tests at a mere 0,1C.

It's not BS, but it is hype. The founder and CEO is this guy, who just recently published this paper on their tech. The cells reportedly lost 25% of their capacity in just 50 cycles. They also reported a "high" ionic conductivity of 3.15e-3 S cm-1, which is an order of magnitude less than traditional liquid electrolytes. They conducted their discharge tests at a mere 0,1C.

As I understand it the unit they use in the paper, "n/kg", refers to number of micro-particles per kg of salt. If you look at the supplemental materials (which I believe is accessible free of charge, not quite sure as I'm on a university network and also have access to the whole article) you can see in Table S1 listing of both n/kg and what they call "mean MP mass" which end up being in the range 0-70 mg/kg.

Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.

1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.

Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.

2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.

Says who? There's plenty of research supporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.

3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?

No complaints. Maybe eliminating fossil fuel use entirely is a bit of a stretch, especially given our dependence on plastics and petro-chemicals, but a significant reduction needs to start now. But when thirty-six percent of the food we grow is fed to livestock, you're fooling yourself if you think that you can do that while advocating for meat consumption.

4) Also how about we stop destroying existing forests and start re-planting them?

Great idea. But then, where will we get the farmland for animal feed?

5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?

Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.

6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?

While -some- religious groups have population growth greater than average, most do not. The most influential variables in the United States are youth, fertility, and immigration. So, feel free to complain about the Mexicans, but the religious nutjobs, not so much.

Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t

The greenhouse effect is not what makes a greenhouse work. Don't believe me ? How well do you think a greenhouse with just a roof and no walls would work.

If you can't actually think for yourself

Here's a firm that trains people how to operate greenhouses

https://www.pthorticulture.com...

And before you go BBBBBBUt CO2

Water vapor the American Chemical society disagrees with you
https://www.acs.org/content/ac...

I post these because I know many people can only appear to reason and can't actually accept a fact unless it's conveyed by someone in the proper robes and religious gear.

If you think CO2 is enough to change that balance, then you better believe altering the patterns of motion and conduction are as well.

Global mean temperature of the Earth without greenhouse gasses is ~ 33C cooler than today.

Global mean temperature of the Earth without wind turbines is ~ exactly the same as today.

And the bulk of that is from water vapor, hmm why didn't link mention water except for cooling ? hmmmmmm

"Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It controls the Earth's temperature.” It's true that water vapor is the largest contributor to the Earth's greenhouse effect. On average, it probably accounts for about 60% of the warming effect

https://www.acs.org/content/ac..."

Yeah the people burning wood apparently haven't heard your sage words

https://www.acs.org/content/ac...

Nor has China which is still building new coal plants

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

Hey please don't let reality interfere with your fantasy

Perhaps not as cheaply as the Chinese process, but my understanding of what MolyCorp are doing suggests that you can indeed refine Neodymium without dumping sulfuric acid into rivers.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/9...

This isn't so much an issue with Neodymium but with the fact that we tend to buy materials from wherever they are cheapest and without a second thought for the externalized costs that went into producing them.

Radioactivity certainly is an issue if it winds up in wastewater, but if the radioactive elements can be isolated then I can't really see the issue with dumping them in the same environment. The processing is solvent based and it's not like we've "made more" radioactivity than was in the natural environment to start with..

One problem with these gene-editing treatments is that it is very hard to measure the safety of the treatment. It could be that the company tried to show how it would measure safety, but FDA wasn't satisfied with the process.

Chemical and Engineering News (probably behind a paywall) has an article about how companies are trying to come to a consensus on how to measure safety. https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceut...

A huge problem here is that DNA breaks all the time in our cells and gets repaired. That is the exact process CRISPR leverages to make its edits. So, how do you tell a natural break and mis-repair from a misdirected CRISPR edit. Not an easy thing to tell. FDA wants the applicant to show safety, not for someone else to show dangerousness. Proving a thing that is very difficult to measure in the first place is a great challenge, and may keep these treatments from advancing at FDA.

The Europeans have a similar issues with their beta-thalassemia trial. https://www.bionews.org.uk/pag...

I expect that cultured meat has the same potential to bring down the cost of meat.

Thanks to the cyanobacteria that provide the food, it looks like cultured meat has a very good environmental footprint, the only rival is poultry.

But that does not mean it will be cheap. There is a lot more expensive high tech involved in this that raising cows. I'm not seeing any predictions right now that it will even reach the price of real beef.

However, while I can't recall what it's called right now, there is an effect known in economics that making a product more efficient actually ends up using even more energy because more efficiency means cheaper cost to the consumer and that in turn drives more consumer use.

Jevons "Paradox". I put that in quotes because it has been hard to find good demonstrations of its existence, and no a priori reason to believe it is any sort of "law". Lower prices (from efficiency gains) will increase use, but the prediction that it will always, or usually, or even often, exceed efficiency gains is not well founded, nor well documented. It glaringly fails with domestic refrigerators for example (a five fold improvement in energy efficiency did not lead to a six fold increase in the number of refrigerators).

The environmental impact of shipping a tonne of batteries from east Asia is the same as the impact of shipping a tonne of steel from east Asia.

And for the record: Model 3 SR is pretty much the same weight as the similar-sized, similar-accelerating BMW 330i. Model 3 LR isn't much heavier (and is faster).

Lastly: life cycle assessments aren't conducted by guesswork and speculation. They're done in peer reviewed studies. For example.

Yes, pity for you that he is right. China LOVES to trumpet when it does something "good" in one little corner, but ignores all the "bad" it does everywhere else. Living there for 6 years, you get used to seeing how Beijing will use a singular, small initiative to claim it is doing something - and continue to not apply that initiative in 95% of the country.

For example, China claims that air pollution is getting much better. But independent measurements show a drastic difference. Go to Ningbo in the summer. Wonder why the official temperature is never over 44, even though your calibrated thermometer shows 46 or 47? Because if the official temperature is 45 or higher, then factories must have air conditioning installed. So thus, the official temperature never is above 44 - even if outside it is well above that.

Or instead, instead of playing amateur scientist on the net, the GP could listen to actual scientists who've studied the issue. ;)

The myth that just won't die.

EVs are cleaner than fossil fuel vehicles even in parts of the grid where coal dominates.

They do - https://www.acs.org/content/ac...

That's confirmation that it's a perk of membership--but I can tell you flat-out that if they're making much of an effort to let potential new members know about it, that's a distinct change from when I was getting my biochem degree. This is literally the first I heard of this particular perk. Now to see what the membership fees for me would be...

We cannot answer the first question because the manufacturers won't tell us.

Gee, if only there were a device you could use to measure the components of a vapor. And if only there were well known techniques for measuring a statistically relevant sample of e-cig vapors to get a general idea of what's in them.

Very cute, there. If you knew more about mass spectrometry you would likely know the statistical difficulties native to the method. However even if you were able to do absolute quantification of every component in a single sample, the e-cigarette market is so thoroughly un-regulated that there is no way to assert that sample as being representative of anything. A company can make a formula "ABC1" and sell it today that has a given mixture, and then sell a completely different formula "ABC1" tomorrow with all the same labels. On top of that there is no reason to expect that one company's "ABC1" is similar to their "ABC2", or that something called "ACB1" from another company is at all similar to either.

So I honestly have no data about the physics of how an e-cig works. However, I'd be very, very suprised if there are anywhere near the reactions going on in a battery powered e-cig versus combusting tobacco. If I were building an e-cig, I'd use the lowest power possible to vaporize the fluid.

One model is described at howstuffworks.com. This one they describe uses a heating element, which correlates well with verified reports of people being burned by them. It's not combustion, but it is high enough temperature to ionize the liquids so they can be inhaled.

But I'd be really, really surprised if any chemical reactions at all occur, let alone combustion or ionization. Do you have any reason to believe otherwise?

We've been able to observe chemical reactions between charged gas phase-ions for over half a century now. After all, what is an ion but a molecule with a non-zero charge? Anything with a non-zero charge will have a tendency to seek out another molecule to resolve that charge to zero.

I suspect you can count the number of detectable chemicals on your fingers and toes

That's making some pretty huge assumptions about the manufacturing process used by the companies selling the e-cigarette liquids (amongst other things).

Vaping by itself is completely harmless with nicotine being on par with caffeine in terms of harm and effects.

No
it's
not

This is nothing more than the anti cigarette brigade getting their panties in a wad over the fact that people flat out love nicotine and want to enjoy it without the bad effects of cigarettes (which are bad).

If that's what you think then maybe you should actually read the article... or the summary.

Better the young'ins be vaping rather than smoke cigarettes.

Did you bother even reading those studies before you posted them?

And if that is where it stopped we wouldn't be commenting on this story.

Study 1 only had 42 participants. Wow, I bet we're supposed to assume 42 people equal the whole of humanity right?

Study 2 claims nicotine causes damage to DNA. You know what else causes damage to DNA? Everything from food to the sun dingus. That's why our bodies developed a way to work against that with antioxidants.
http://www.whydontyoutrythis.c...

Study 3: a complete duplicate of study 2 hosted on a different server.

Did you even bother reading these studies before you posted to my reply or were you just anxiously looking around on Google for weak proof that all things nicotine are bad?

The anti smoking brigade are almost as bad as the temperence twats.

Vaping by itself is completely harmless with nicotine being on par with caffeine in terms of harm and effects.

No
it's
not

This is nothing more than the anti cigarette brigade getting their panties in a wad over the fact that people flat out love nicotine and want to enjoy it without the bad effects of cigarettes (which are bad).

If that's what you think then maybe you should actually read the article... or the summary.

Better the young'ins be vaping rather than smoke cigarettes.

And if that is where it stopped we wouldn't be commenting on this story.

Is is it true that it still takes more energy to fab the silicon, make the frames, and deploy the panels than they ever get back in their operational lifetime?

Although I'm sure Exxon would like that misinformation to stay popular, that question was put to rest long ago, both in terms of the panels themselves and the PV industry as a whole. And that's reaching back to pay for panel development when production was inefficient.

Video if you don't like reading.

Here's a link to paper by Kharecha and Hanson showing the health benefits of nuclear power to 2012. 1.8 million premature deaths avoided due to reduced air pollution.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia.

Our technology is to the point where we could prevent a recurrence of the Great Dying. All you have to do is unshackle your mind from the popular notion that the only solution to CO2 emissions is passive (reducing emissions via renewable energy sources).

CO2 (and water) are popular end-products for exothermic chemical processes (e.g. burning gasoline, cellular respiration) because it sits at an extremely low energy potential. That is, chemical processes which result in CO2 give off a lot of energy. To reverse the process, you have to put a lot of energy into the CO2 to break apart the carbon and oxygen atoms.

If you have sufficient energy, you can actively drive that reverse process. Plants do it via photosynthesis, driving it with energy from sunlight. We could do it with nuclear power - generating massive quantities of electricity (more than can reasonably be obtained from solar, wind, hydro) to decompose CO2. Generating sufficient power to offset volcanic emissions of CO2 would be incredibly expensive, but given the alternative (extinction) we're technologically capable of doing it.

The same is true if this push for renewables as the only solution to global warming fails. If renewables can't be developed quickly enough to supplant fossil fuel energy sources and CO2 levels continue to rise, at some point we concede that renewables aren't arresting CO2 levels quickly enough. Then we'll be forced to switch to nuclear power to buy ourselves more time. This is why shuttering operational nuclear plants as Germany is doing is extremely short-sighted. Nuclear is our ultimate trump card. We want to keep it ready in our back pocket as a hedge in case renewable energy can't be rolled out quickly enough.

It's interesting that you would ask other people to unshackle their minds when you so clearly have an obsessive interest in nuclear energy as a result of your autism.

cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia.

Our technology is to the point where we could prevent a recurrence of the Great Dying. All you have to do is unshackle your mind from the popular notion that the only solution to CO2 emissions is passive (reducing emissions via renewable energy sources).

CO2 (and water) are popular end-products for exothermic chemical processes (e.g. burning gasoline, cellular respiration) because it sits at an extremely low energy potential. That is, chemical processes which result in CO2 give off a lot of energy. To reverse the process, you have to put a lot of energy into the CO2 to break apart the carbon and oxygen atoms.

If you have sufficient energy, you can actively drive that reverse process. Plants do it via photosynthesis, driving it with energy from sunlight. We could do it with nuclear power - generating massive quantities of electricity (more than can reasonably be obtained from solar, wind, hydro) to decompose CO2. Generating sufficient power to offset volcanic emissions of CO2 would be incredibly expensive, but given the alternative (extinction) we're technologically capable of doing it.

The same is true if this push for renewables as the only solution to global warming fails. If renewables can't be developed quickly enough to supplant fossil fuel energy sources and CO2 levels continue to rise, at some point we concede that renewables aren't arresting CO2 levels quickly enough. Then we'll be forced to switch to nuclear power to buy ourselves more time. This is why shuttering operational nuclear plants as Germany is doing is extremely short-sighted. Nuclear is our ultimate trump card. We want to keep it ready in our back pocket as a hedge in case renewable energy can't be rolled out quickly enough.

You and Hansen, if he really said what you claim, that nuclear power is the only way out of the current situation, are wrong. You know that, everyone knows that.

It is not just us there are a lot of people who believe in nuclear power. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-nuclear_movement. If you scroll down you will see a lot of prominent names on that list. In fact the national academy of science does not think so either. They critiqued the feasibility of a 100% Wind Water and Solar solution. http://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722.full.pdf The issue, as I stated at the top of this thread, is storage. We do not have a means to store weeks worth of electricity.

E.g. in germany you can not build them at all. So ... you are 100% contradicted.

How are we contradicted? Germany is burning more coal then ever. There are times of the year where renewables produce 0 electricity forcing them to burn coal. If they kept their nuclear fleet running they would be cleaner today.

Everyone knows that nuckear power is super expensive

4th generation reactors can be factory built which will make them cheaper. It is called the economic of scales. It is why solar panels and microprocessors get better and cheaper.

no one wants it in his back yard.

I do, but I do not believe all of the bs lies about nuclear power. In fact a recent analysis says the children who grew up near nuclear power plants are healthier because they are exposed to less pollution. I know it is hard to admit you are wrong for decades, but if we are going to move forward as species you are going to have to.

Similarly, several measures to aid oil companies passed in the early 1900s remain of key importance to the industry, Healey notes. These include one provision passed in 1916 to speed up depreciation of drilling costs. A second one, the oil depletion allowance, which became law in 1926, gives oil companies a tax break for depleting an oil reservoir. President Obama has sought to end these breaks but has been overwhelmed by the opposition from industry and its congressional allies.

http://insideenergy.org/2016/1... Is maybe a better read, and details some of the same things... a bit easier to read, depending on the person. Also, almost at the end is a chart showing the historic totals, right before again talking about "first 15 years" or each.

Happy 100th birthday to the “expensing of intangible drilling costs (IDCs) and dry hole costs” exemption! (Born in 1916.) This tax break allows companies to expense the entire costs related to site improvement and drilling of a well in the year that the costs are incurred.

The 90 year old “Percentage over cost depletion deferral” (born in 1926) allows drilling companies to deduct a fixed percentage – 15 percent – of the revenue from each drill site, with some limitations. This exemption is also used by coal, timber and other mineral industries.

Given that scientists still don't know how acetaminophen works to relieve pain is it any surprise it could affect more than just the pain receptors?

The ozone problem and greenhouse gas problem are separate issues. Ozone is a comparably minor greenhouse gas compared to CO2, methane, nitrous oxide and (yes) water.

Ozone depletion in the stratosphere was and is still a major problem, driven largely by part per trillion levels of halocarbons from a variety of man-made emissions. The reason it's not being talked about so much anymore? Because Montreal Protocol regulations worked. CFC concentrations are down and the ozone hole is slowly repairing itself:

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, and so is water. The difference is that water concentrations are limited in the atmosphere: too much and it becomes a cloud and then rain. CO2 concentrations, on the other hand, can just keep rising.

Without rises in other greenhouse gases, the water concentration is such that the short term global temperature trend would be stable. Instead, since other GHG's are causing further warming, it's allowing more water to be stable in the atmosphere. That's driving global temperatures even further up, resulting in positive feedback. There's a nice ACS article about it here:

https://www.acs.org/content/ac...

With the cheap methane from fracking we can turn coal into clean burning gasoline...

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Maybe. The real question is how much does it cost per unit of water generated. To be useful it would have to generate a rather sizeable amount of water even to just cover drinking and basic cleaning needs.

Well, here's the instructions to synthesize MOF-801-P and it doesn't look super complicated. The solar input is used both for heat (to desorb the water in the MOF) and electricity (to condense the vapor), so it probably doesn't need to be a super-high-efficiency panel. The MOF contains zirconium, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, so it's not like we're dealing with platinum or rare earth elements... so, I dunno. I suspect the system wouldn't be outrageously expensive when produced at volume.

From the original paper it's around 20 Wh/L. Pretty low (lithium ion is ~200-700Wh/L or so), but this would be for grid storage, not phones/cars/etc.

This page suggests that D cells are around 20Wh. According to Wikipedia, a breadbox is (30 cm) x (15 cm) x (15 cm) = 6.75 liters, larger than the ~1L needed to match a D cell -- so it seems to pass your test =)

From the original paper, it's around 20 Wh/L. Pretty low (lithium ion is ~200-700Wh/L or so), but this would be for grid storage, not phones/cars/etc.

Not sure if it's paywalled...

It seems that they're claiming energy densities of ~20Wh/L; wikipedia quotes 250-676 Wh/L for lithium-ion, however, TFA is referring to a flow cell, so it's a bit apples and oranges...but as far as using one of these in your phone, don't hold your breath.

While probably much safer than traditional cigarettes, electronic cigarettes still carry risks. For starters the flavoured ones produce toxic and carcinogenic compounds when they are vaporized. See following link for peer reviewed paper on the subject.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Here are three peer reviewed papers that show that e-cigarette vapour causes DNA damage

https://academic.oup.com/toxsc...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

http://www.nature.com/ebd/jour...

If you need a low dose of nicotine then I would suggest gum or patches would be safer than e-cigarettes but I doubt even then that it is a zero risk choice because in general there is no such thing as zero risk choice.

No evidence for a scientific consensus on climate change? How about this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this?

I hope they do make this supercapacitor concept into reality, rather than just talk about it. For those of you who want to know what problems researchers of today are facing with producing these supercapacitors, then read this more indepth article here. http://saintlad.com/supercapac... Here are some recommended readings to further understand how these work and the current market situation for supercapacitors. Official Research Paper by University of Central Florida http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

"We're forging new ground with this project, where a positive outcome is not commercialization, but instead a clear set of instructions that can be addressed to the general public. It's a completely new way of thinking about battery research, and it could bypass the barriers holding back innovation in grid scale energy storage," Pint said.
Nice populist sentiment, BUT:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00295
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-but didn't I (we taxpayers all!) already pay for this work?

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/11/02/making-high-performance-batteries-from-junkyard-scraps/
"The work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration EPSCoR grant NNX13AB26A, the National Science Foundation graduate fellowship program under grant 1445197 and a Vanderbilt Discovery Grant. The team worked with Matt McCarthy at PSC Metals, who provided access to its scrap metal facility in support of this project."

This battery has lower energy density(20Whr/kg) than your current SLA's at (50Whr/kg)..ref

The claim of room temperature processing is also somewhat misleading.. They included an annealing step at 350C under argon atmosphere for 1 hr for processing the iron oxide nanorods.

No mention of charge efficiency, should be bettery than the 60 to 70% for SLA's, (note: Lithium ion charge efff is ~95-98%)..

Here we go again - a 'private' institution garnering information and expertise from the PEOPLE's funds - NASA and other 'public' funded agencies - - - and NASA explicitly states that they release their information on a "NON-EXCLUSIVE" license - in other words, ANYBODY can ask for, and GET, authorization to use their research.
WHY in the hell is this information locked up behind a pay-wall ?
Best guess - money hungry, and with no morale compass.

Here's the link, provided by ???? for the actual article and data ---> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/...

More info can be garnered from ---> http://pubs.acs.org/

and at ---> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/...

REALLY a pain to follow-up on, but worth the effort due to another /. contributor providing REAL information

Here we go again - a 'private' institution garnering information and expertise from the PEOPLE's funds - NASA and other 'public' funded agencies - - - and NASA explicitly states that they release their information on a "NON-EXCLUSIVE" license - in other words, ANYBODY can ask for, and GET, authorization to use their research.
WHY in the hell is this information locked up behind a pay-wall ?
Best guess - money hungry, and with no morale compass.

Here's the link, provided by ???? for the actual article and data ---> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/...

More info can be garnered from ---> http://pubs.acs.org/

and at ---> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/...

REALLY a pain to follow-up on, but worth the effort due to another /. contributor providing REAL information

Here we go again - a 'private' institution garnering information and expertise from the PEOPLE's funds - NASA and other 'public' funded agencies - - - and NASA explicitly states that they release their information on a "NON-EXCLUSIVE" license - in other words, ANYBODY can ask for, and GET, authorization to use their research.
WHY in the hell is this information locked up behind a pay-wall ?
Best guess - money hungry, and with no morale compass.

Here's the link, provided by ???? for the actual article and data ---> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/...

More info can be garnered from ---> http://pubs.acs.org/

and at ---> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/...

REALLY a pain to follow-up on, but worth the effort due to another /. contributor providing REAL information

The geoengineering that needs to be worked is one that extracts the CO2 from the air and turns it into carbon and oxygen. Make it something that runs on solar energy and generates electricity at the same time and it'll be a winner. The STEP process:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

would be something that would fix things forever, but apparently no one has actually gotten this thing to work. Somebody should. We could run it, have more and more pure carbon than you could get out of coal mines, and then recycle the carbon thru power plants to make even more electricity with _just_ CO2 as an emission, rather than CO2 plus SO2 plus mercury plus uranium plus radon plus a thousand other things not good for living things to contact.

it's extremely rare on Earth ... $2 Billion is not the limit of demand, it's the limit of supply

Do you have evidence for a large pent-up demand for deuterium that would be released by a price drop of less than five times? (That would take it down to about the price of silver.)

No. Nor would I be stupid enough to assume the price would drop just because the supply increases (processing cost may not drop). Do you have any evidence to support your claim that the price is based soley on demand? Evidence for the absurd assertion that the cost would drop to the same a silver if the supply increased by a factor five?

Hint: nobody makes anything other than tiny amounts of deuterium anymore - not due to lack of demand. (the last supplier was Canada some years ago - though at least one Chinese source is gearing up for production).

the two would be of value for fueling fusion rockets

That's a technology that does not currently exist, and which might not actually use deuterium or tritium when/if it finally gets going.

Agreed

less than one tenth of what the USA spends annually on the bullshit War on Drugs

This is an irrelevant point of comparison. I'm asking for a business case; you can claim anything is "economically viable" if you're allowed to just steal something else' budget. That argument doesn't tend to convince the people who actually control such budgets, though.

Patently and demonstrably you did not ask for a business case - you just conflated the cost of the theoretical mission with government spending and are now distract. It's hardly irrelevant, it demonstrates what the US government is happy to spend on a demonstrably pointless exercise.

it's just a by-product of potable water production.

This is a ridiculous statement which suggests that you have no idea how deuterium is actually refined,

:) Which only goes to show you are yet another ultracrepidarian /. poster. Perhaps you are a mechanical engineer that thinks industrial chemical engineering is intuitive - good luck with the job interviews.

Extracting it on Mars will require dedicated machinery and tons of additional energy, just like on Earth.

No. Read the source I provided instead of relying of what you skim-read from someone else's outdated opinion.

Red Herring alert! Can you point to the source of your claim that this fleet won't be waiting for results from surface probes (and many robotic test trips)?!

Musk already decided that we should send one million people there to build a self-sustaining society, even though he himself admitted that he doesn't have any idea how to make that latter part work economically or technologically. That was half the point of his talk...

That's a quote from you, which avoids my question. When did Mush say he wouldn't wait for surface probe results?. Hint: he didn't.

So in your alternative plan all space exploration will be using theoretical propulsion that starts from this planet ... environmentally friendly and sustainable

Electric propulsion (various styles of ion engines and plasma engines) is not "theoretical" - it's in use today on space probes and even commercial satellites - unlike the deuterium-based fusion that your plans seem to depend upon. And yes, it is more environmentally friendly and sustainable because it's literally about ten times as fuel efficient as chemical rockets.

There are various good reasons why Musk didn't select electric propulsion for his proposal, but they

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/1...

It helps if there is a working link in TFS.

Well, if I'm going to RTFA. I would have had no idea had you not pointed this out.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10...

Better version

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/1...

It helps if there is a working link in TFS.

The above doesn't bother you in any way?

Of course it bothers me that you and your merry band of trolls keep regurgitating baseless and libelous accusations.

Would it bother you if a skeptical study falsely described its methods? I bet it would.

All good studies are skeptical, including Cook et al. 2013. Your regurgitated accusations are simply wrong, that's all. Here are a few more independent skeptical studies: Doran and Zimmerman 2009 and Anderegg et al. 2010 and Verheggen 2014. Do you see a pattern yet?

I agree that it is strange NASA is publicly endorsing this utter garbage.

That's good. Now you should consider the possibility that your "utter garbage" accusation is wrong, and NASA is right.

Problem #1: 11,944 research papers which were all specifically about climate change and human influence; they removed the 7,930 "We don't know" from the numbers... (Often, deluded opponents will claim the rejected papers had "climate" as a keyword but were not about climatology; that is false: all 11,944 papers were selected from a larger such set, and were selected because they explored human-caused climate change.)

Really? Are you absolutely sure that those peer-reviewed papers didn't just have "global climate change" or "global warming" as keywords? Because that's how C13 actually selected their sample.

You seem to be incorrectly saying that every single paper which includes those keywords is an attribution study. If you were correct, you'd be able to provide 7,930 abstract quotes saying "we don't know whether global warming is caused primarily by human activities". Is it even remotely possible that those 7,930 papers just weren't attribution studies?

Try to use your approach to estimate the consensus on plate tectonics or evolution. Are abstracts which don't explicitly state that they agree with those theories actually saying "we don't know"? If that's really your position, you must also not think there's a scientific consensus about plate tectonics or evolution.

... took count of the papers which were *definitely* certain, determined that 97% of *those* support human-caused global warming, and labeled that as 97% of *all*.

No, they labeled that as 97% of papers stating a position on the primary cause of global warming. Which is true.

Problem #2: False equivocation. They took count of the number of published papers, and claimed the ratio of published papers agreeing with a position as the ratio of *scientists*. ...

Wrong. They cited Doran and Zimmerman 2009 and Anderegg et al. 2010 and Verheggen 2014 which really are surveys of scientists.

I get that you wouldn't want to take a piece of sandpaper to graphene, but what makes you think that it can't stand up to any of those things?

It looks like graphene is at least UV resistant?
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/1...

I can't find any clear information on its reactivity, other than depending on thickness and substrate material.