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If RAM held its value, there would be no need to have a distinction between RAM and "Disk". Computers would boot far faster. Databases would be right on the memory bus, with no need to "sync" to reliable storage. Many, many applications and services could be faster, simpler and more reliable.

The Machine

IBM i

I'm pretty sure there's a lot more examples of prototypes and concepts, too.

It cannot meltdown. They proved it. The reactor was designed to have a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity making meltdowns impossible.

No they did not prove it for all conceivable circumstances. They proved it for SOME conditions and methods with a specific reactor design. Your argument assumes that there is no chance of that reactor design being incorrectly engineered, no chance of improper construction or maintenance, no chance of external damage (natural disasters, war, etc), and that in all other ways the reactor cannot be compromised to induce that failure mode. And even if a meltdown were indeed impossible that's not the only possible failure of concern.

They did two tests with EBRII which tested the passive fail safe systems. They tested shutting off the primary cooling pumps and then they tested shutting down the secondary cooling systems. They did not test failure modes like the sodium pool being compromised for example. They did not test under conditions where there might be a flaw in construction. They did not test for conditions where maintenance was neglected.

Comparing Chernobyl to the EBRII or any western reactor is disingenuous.

No it is not. Chernobyl happened fundamentally because of human error (bad engineering + bad operation) which is a problem for EVERY nuclear plant design we have - even the theoretical ones. While the exact circumstance that resulted in that particular catastrophe are unlikely to be replicated closely, human stupidity and human failures have not been eliminated as risks. Claiming that EBRII was perfectly safe under all conditions is just an absurd claim without supporting evidence. Yes it appears to have been a solid design in many ways that mitigated serious failure modes under important conditions. There has been follow on designs based on what was learned from that reactor. That's a good thing and I'm glad such work is being done. But please stop it with the claims that people couldn't find a way (intentionally or unintentionally) to induce a serious catastrophic failure.

I started and have headed a large open source project for the last 10 years: (plug!) http://mooseframework.org/ (quick description: think open source COMSOL on steroids).

We have a few thousand users spread across the world... but only a fraction of them contribute monetarily back to the project. We are lucky though that we are based at a US national laboratory where we are able to use government programs in support of energy research to pay for our project.

Going open source was a measured decision that took at lot of time to come to. Ultimately, we decided that creating an open platform for science was better than trying to charge license fees... and instead of taking money from our users our model is to partner with them to write proposals for joint funding. That model is working out ok so far (some years better than others!).

However: we not only create an open source library... we rely on many as well. The two biggest ones that we use are libMesh ( http://libmesh.github.io/ ) and PETSc ( https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/ ). In both cases we have paid for full-time developers on those libraries for pretty much the entirety of our project. Sometimes we ask them to complete certain tasks for us - but for the most part the money is given with minimal strings attached so they can maintain their software and continue to make it better (not just for us, but for everyone).

For some of the smaller libraries we use we often fund work at universities associated with those projects. Sometimes it's a small amount of money - but we try to give _something_.

Everyone that is making money (for-profit or non-profit) while using open-source software should try to fund the projects you directly rely on as much as possible. Like many other things: even a little bit goes a long way. Open-source has never meant "you should use it and not monetarily support it"... people need $ to keep going.

UBS estimates the total cost to sell a Chevy Bolt is $44,200. That includes direct and indirect costs as well as dealer margin.

See graph on page 17 here: https://www.cargroup.org/wp-co...

This paper (by Argonne National Lab) goes into some detail on indirect costs for vehicle manufacturers: http://www.ipd.anl.gov/anlpubs...

This troll trifecta actually warrants real attention.

I expect to have a good time. I admit it's a little unorthodox to make a giant vat of hot buttery popcorn to companion rolling up one's sleeves (chopsticks to the rescue), but ritual does have its rewards.
____

What the US and Israel did in Iran ...

Bill Clinton is forever marked by his distancing language "that woman". Opening a composition with the word "what" is definitely heading down 'that' road. The reader is still trying to resolve the anaphor, while you slide into the equation a joint attribution "the US and Israel". Nicely done.

From Sound Reporting by J. Kern: "You may have heard TV anchors hyping a story by holding back the subject—teasing the viewer for a few seconds to try to generate curiosity ... whatever effectiveness this device may have once had has surely been worn away by decades of overuse." Except—he should have added—on certain hyperbolic forums of talk radio, where the pre-handshake "what" is artfully stretched from minutes into hours. This construction has now become the ultimate penny dog-whistle.

was a crime

And the jurisdiction that can jointly prosecute America and Israel, your identified protagonists, is what, exactly? RMS pretty much thinks the BSD license is a crime. Humanity has been trying to cram morality into an undersized tuxedo since the invention of stone tablets. (They all suspected the chisel later recovered from the top of the mountain belonged to Moses, but he didn't fit the glove—phlogiston hadn't even been invented yet, so it's no wonder they didn't fully grasp accelerated desiccation above the timber line.) "Crime" is one of the most metaphorical words in all of human language, which you've artfully embedded in predicate logic Speedo trunks: "was a".

Our parse now looks like this:

[talk radio distancing-language tease]
[offhand perpetrator lasso]
[predicate-logic Speedo trunks]
[Howl's Moving Castle morality metaphor]

You've really packed a lot in there. Kudos.

and the targeted company

The strategic target wasn't a company, it was an operation. The micro-target wasn't a company, either. It was certain pieces of industrial control machinery. Moreover, the "company" wasn't feeling the pain of this, unless they indemnified their customer against retaliatory actions of nation states (seems unlikely, based on contracts I've read).

was a German company

And that makes this different, how exactly?

They infected German process-control equipment

Echo, echo, echo.

They who? Veiled agents of Zion? Cybersecurity Seal Team Six operating under full democratic oversight? Cybersecurity ST6 operating in thrall to veiled agents of Zion?

which could have

Charles Atlas only had to shoulder the world. "Heh," says Charles. "What?" you say. "You should have seen the other guy," says Charles, at great expense of breath he can hardly afford.

I suspect he means the poor tortoise shouldering the entire meta-physical universe of all possible counterfactual outcomes, but I'm too polite to ask.

led to a nuclear leak

Anyone else in the news using the word "leak" lately? I haven't read the uranium hexafluoride SDS (formerly MSDS). Have you?

Here's how America stores this dangerous chemical: What does a depleted uranium hexafluoride cylinder look like?

This is not even inside a secure facility designed with accident mitigation in mind.

if their code was not perfect

A high bar indeed, that applies to

Well, there's Wikipedia...

The cell's energy is equal to the voltage times the charge. Each gram of lithium represents Faraday's constant/6.941 or 13,901 coulombs. At 3 V, this gives 41.7 kJ per gram of lithium, or 11.6 kWh per kg. This is a bit more than the heat of combustion of gasoline, but does not consider the other materials that go into a lithium battery and that make lithium batteries many times heavier per unit of energy.

There's a paper from a DOE lab that suggests:

On a per-unit-mass basis, the Evm values for battery production are quite large, especially when compared to the overall VMA burden. Indeed, the incremental manufacturing energy rate is 13.3 MJ/kg of vehicle whereas the values are 91 MJ/kg of Li-ion battery and 105 MJ/kg of NiMH battery (Burnham et al., 2006).

91MJ/kg for Li-ion battery manufacture to store 0.0417MJ/kg as of 2006. With 6,000 full discharge cycles, that's 250MJ of energy storage in its lifetime, or 2.75 times the energy required to make the battery itself.

It's ten years later; energy cost of Li-ion manufacturer has fallen with newer manufacture technology. Recent reports suggest anywhere from 6 to 10 times energy stored than used to create the damned things. Pumped storage (raising water behind a turbine) is 210:1 and adiabatic compressed air is 240:1.

It gets a bit worse than that: once a battery is expended, you need to remove and dispose of it. That means disassembly and recovery of the lithium, the housing, etc., along with transportation fees for the extreme weight of the thing. Adiabatic CAES requires recertification or replacement of storage tanks, hoses, fittings, pumps, and the like. The latter is going to be easier to improve than the former, so future CAES will likely be more-efficient and require less maintenance, and plants will benefit from these improvements as they upgrade tanks and turbines; future batteries will be more-efficient, but not likely to as great a degree--definitely not without inventing a whole new type of battery.

The actual cost is higher, too. Imagine the cost per kWh to stabilize a grid when you have to have people constantly remanufacturing and recovering batteries, as well as monitoring the station to make sure the battery bank isn't showing signs of failure which could lead to explosion. Compare that to the cost of people remanufacturing what is essentially a large structure (those tanks aren't going to be trucked in and bolted down; they'll be built on-site from plates and seals) 1/24 as often, and monitoring temperature and pressure for lower-criticality events (a damaged battery may run away and explode immediately; an overpressurized tank should have enough safety overhead and valves to fail more-slowly or, preferably, non-critically). It's not all about energy.

I covered this with part b) in my previous post.

Obviously higher voltages require bigger infra structure ... no idea at what you want to aim with that question however ;D

Regarding 34kV lines: those are mostly underground or only in industrial complexes above the surface.

The same distance to residential structures? yes ... as the distance already is absurdly big. However I take it you live in the USA and perhaps regulations are less strict there.

Does a MV transmission line require towers to be higher than 700 feet, do you think?
700 feet is 230m ... so no, it does not require a higher tower.

Unfortunately important stuff like power heights are missing ;D : http://solareis.anl.gov/docume...

Actually, there appears to be an economical alternative. Natural gas can be "cracked" into hydrogen gas and carbon black by bubbling it through a column of molten tin. The carbon accumulates as a removable layer on top of the tin, and pure hydrogen comes off the top of the column. Switching to a hydrogen economy would be difficult, but it certainly is doable. Disposing of the carbon black is a problem, but is minor compared to the continued emission of CO2. Might be able to pelletize the carbon and dump it into a deep ocean trench ( I can imagine the screech coming from the environmentalist at such a suggestion! Deafening! ) Going this route would provide a solution to CO2-induced global warming, but I really doubt that government has the will or competence to do it. https://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfue... http://newatlas.com/hydrogen-p...

Of course, I immediately thought to check the Mars Scorecard, but it doesn't appear to have been updated. Anyone know the current score?

The firmware changed to pass while it was being tested, so it seems the fix will be to leave the car in 'test' mode permanently. Apparently performance will suffer when that happens, but that doesn't really matter when you're stuck in a line of traffic on the freeway.......

It's a compression/peak flame temperature thing. With the high compression of a diesel engine, max economy comes at the expense of NOxide emissions.

Here is a really nice explanation of the parameters involved. It''s an old pdf scan of typewritten pages, but very clear and understandable

http://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel...

In short, you are wrong. See figure 25 from Burnham et al (PDF warning) for a nice visualization of total energy cycle CO2 emissions.

You're probably mis-remembering this debunked report. Unfortunately, it seems that that myth ("hybrids actually worse for the environment!") has grown enough legs to outrun the truth.

http://www.copyright.gov/title...
"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government"

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/...
"NEWTON Ask A Scientist program is not copyrighted formally."

Can anyone mirror the thing? Looks like the archives should be pretty easy to screenscrape and host/mirror: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/... (The astronomy archive...)

Wrong, you've totally confused yourself ignorning half-lives. There is a delay before the betas come out after an alpha is released, three betas DON'T imediately spring out, instead the "principal daughter" thorium-234 has a half-lift of over three weeks before beta comes out!

http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium...

"Uranium and its decay products primarily emit alpha radiation, however, lower levels of both beta and gamma radiation are also emitted. "

The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System. It's commonly used on particle accelerators and will interface to anything. And it's open source. Runs on Linux, Window, OSX operating systems and all hardware including Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard, etc. http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/i...

I'm curious about the capacity to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles - or any batteries - compared to the capacity to recycle, and the environmental impacts at both ends. I found this: http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/B/239.pdf.

... the energy yield is about 16,000 kJ/kg ...

How did you arrive at this figure? The energy content of 1kg of uncompressed hydrogen gas is somewhere between 120,100-141,900 kJ, or 7.5x the yield you gave. Reaching your figure would require an efficiency of less than 13.3%, but hydrogen fuel cells have a well-to-wheel efficiency of roughly double that (PDF).

The top 100 most cited papers are actually a motley crew of methods, data resources and software tools that through usability, practicality and a little bit of luck have propelled them to the top of an enormous corpus of scientific literature.

The article itself never mention 'data resources' that I saw, but there's a problem in many fields that the standards are to cite the 'first results' paper for that data ... for which the results portion may have already been disproved or otherwise be crap. There are a number of efforts working on being able to cite 'data' separately from 'results of the data', and in a manner that's consistent across all disciplines (as we don't know in advance who might make use of our data). You also run into problems, as the paper being cited may describe the initial release of the data, and not be useful to determine which edition was used (as that may be significant to recreate their results). See the Joint Declaration of Data Ctation Principlies, DataCite (metadata schema + DOI registry system), and the 2012 CODATA-ICSTI report, "Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data".

There are similar issues with software citation -- everyone's citing the announcement of the existing of the software, but how can you track who might've relied on a buggy version to let them know that they may need to re-run their analysis? I'm not as active in this field, but the arguments remain the same (giving proper attribution, documenting everything to make it reproducible, etc.). See the 2013 Knepley et.al paper, "Accurately Citing Software and Algorithms used in Publications" and the work of the Software Sustainability Institute (which also covers topics on writing better research software, as was alluded to in the article)

It's probably also work mentioning that our current ways of tracking 'importance' of papers are flawed. See the Altmetrics Manifesto for a collection of links to efforts to come up with other metrics and CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology to enable a way to classify why something was cited (it might be for criticism; in most of the cases in the article, it would be "uses method in", which not all disciples feel needs to be cited).

A miscarriage.
  http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/mole00/mole00149.htm

Here's the dirty little secret of Li-ion batteries - they hardly contain any lithium at all, maybe 1% composition by weight.

Source: Page 21 of this PDF shows that usually the lithium-based cathode (typically LiMn2O4) is only 1/3 of the overall weight of the battery, and lithium only makes up 3% of the molar weight of LiMn2O4.

In IFR the cladding is loose-fitting, so the spent fuel is extracted from that. Since it isn't oxidized but is instead in pure metallic form, no oxide reduction step by way of an acid bath is necessary. The fuel pellets are simply melted and gaseous fission products are driven off. Next the molten mass is placed in a molten salt bath and an electroplating process extracts uranium and plutonium in metallic form onto an electrode (along with a little bit of fission products - this is serves as radiation shielding, preventing theft). These are then extracted and recast into new metallic fuel rods in an injection casting step. Finally, the new fuel rods are reinserted into cladding tubes, filled with sodium and welded shut. The fission products are then vitrified in glass and sealed in dry casks for storage. What's interesting in relation to thorium reprocessing is that this isn't a theoretical process. It's been demonstrated 20 years ago and we know how to do all of the detailed steps around it. Sure you can always find improvements (like switching from a borosilicate glass to an iron phosphate glass), but the technology is ready for commercial deployment. For more details, see the ANL article on pyroprocessing. Thorium has its place for sure, but in terms of technology that's ready to deploy today, fast breeders are that technology.

As for further developments on fast reactor technology, TerraPower's reactor is a really neat approach to fast breeders, because it avoids the reprocessing step entirely, instead doing it by being really smart about their cladding design and reshuffling their fuel geometry continuously to keep the neutron economy optimal.

France has a big issue to face in the coming decade or two, which is replacement of the nuclear fleet as their reactors will be 40-50 yrs old by 2025.

Sure, but really all it takes is political will and investment in Areva's EPR.

And there's also the as-yet unresolved problem of a longterm dump site unless Bure has been definitively chosen.

That's not exactly a huge problem. This is again political in getting the NIMBY's and enviro-crazies who are going to scream bloody murder out of the way. An alternative would be for the French to get off their butts again and restart fast-reactor designs to burn the waste up (doesn't have to be a Superphenix-type reactor, but probably something more like IFR).

Other issues include the use of some nukes in load-following mode and heavy reliance on electric heating, which contributes to their overall low CO2 emissions from electricity generation.

All good modern designs are *better* at load-following, not worse. I don't see a technical problem here. Also, presumably we'd want them to rely on electric heating, as that allows them to offset household heating CO2 emissions into a zero-CO2 power source. Renewables aren't going to be much different here (things such as wood chips and similar are simply not enough to take the whole home heating push alone). The logic is quite simple: if you've got plenty of zero-CO2 electricity, move as many people to electricity for everything they need as you can. One extra bit that might be a significant benefit is nuclear co-generation for home heating, which wind & solar simply can't do.

Moreover, the current reserves will only supply about 200 years of energy _at current rates of consumption_.

Have you taken into account that current fission reactors produce less than 1% of the available energy? Breeder reactors can fix that by producing up to 100 times as much energy from the same fuel. That 200 year figure should be thousands. NIMBY and proliferation fears have slowed progress on breeders. The first (experiential) reactor was built in 1951.

My bet is that once reprocessing takes place, energy use will soar to compensate. Who wouldn't want a beamed power electric flying car?

Not everyone needs to know all of the quirks of C++ to use it. My project ( http://mooseframework.org/ ) does all of the nasty C++ stuff under the hood so that we can expose a very straightforward interface to non-computer-scientists.

It's working out well so far.

Object-oriented is still a good paradigm until the functional language people get everything figured out and there are enough computational science libraries written in functional languages. And if you want to do object-oriented and you still want to be fairly close to the metal for performance reasons then C++ is a good choice.

There are people that do object-oriented with C like the PETSc team ( http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/ )... and they have good reasons for doing so... but the result isn't necessarily less imposing to the uninitiated than C++...

I saw this link bait the other day...

We're NOT using Fortran anymore...

Many of us at the National Labs do modern, object-oriented C/C++... Like the project I'm in charge of: http://www.mooseframework.org/

There are whole labs that have completely expunged Fortran in favor of C++... Like Sandia (http://trilinos.sandia.gov) who actually went through a period in the late 90s and early 2000s where they systematically replaced all of their largest Fortan computational science codes with C++.

Those places that don't use C++ use C like the awesome PETSc library from Argonne ( http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/ ) which actually employs an object-oriented scheme in C.

The big name modern codes that are getting run on the biggest machines are generally done in C and C++.

I don't see that situation changing anytime soon as there is simply a massive amount of C and C++ libraries that will continue to provide the engine for tomorrows codes. The trend i see happening most often is utilizing C and C++ libraries with Python glue for everything doesn't need raw speed.... I think that trend will continue.

Do you really think that oil producers pay retail, or even light commercial rates? The residential end user rates for electricity were 5.4 cents in 1980 and 7.8 cents in 1990. Refineries paid a fraction of that.

Here is the study where that figure was calculated from. Refineries are, at best, 90.1% efficient, considering all inputs and outputs. If you exclude less desirable outputs like road oil and asphalt, efficiency is more like 86.4%, with refineries purchasing 39.3 TWh of electricity and 34,000 short tons of coal to produce even more.

Actually, why bother with the rust at all? You've got all the 98% pure CO2 you could want in the atmosphere, just pressurize it and get some plants breathing it and you're good to go on oxygen.

Or, you know, you could be failing spectacularly at high school level biology right there... http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bot00/bot00561.htm....

I don't know which they chose for the downblending process but if they had depleted UF6 to hand they may well have used that; it's a byproduct of centrifuge enrichment lines. It's expensive to convert the depleted UF6 back into metal unless there's a good reason. The US has about 700,000 tonnes of UF6 in storage, for example.

http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium...

CO2 is pretty well mixed in the atmosphere with the maximum variation between different locations being on the order of 10 ppm. In general it is a bit higher in the Northern Hemisphere dropping some the further south you get. Here's a paper from 2000 titled The Natural Latitudinal Distribution of Atmospheric CO2 that addresses the issue.

Name the advances and name the new technologies

Liquid fluoride thorium reactor

"This technology was first investigated at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment in the 1960s."

Not so new.

Something like the Argonne Experimental Breeder Reactor-II

EBR-II was the backbone of the U.S. breeder reactor effort from 1964 to 1994, when research was terminated.

Not so new.

Name the advances and name the new technologies

Liquid fluoride thorium reactor

"This technology was first investigated at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment in the 1960s."

Not so new.

Something like the Argonne Experimental Breeder Reactor-II

EBR-II was the backbone of the U.S. breeder reactor effort from 1964 to 1994, when research was terminated.

Not so new.

Name the advances and name the new technologies - like Pepple-Bed [wikipedia.org];which is the only one I know.

Liquid fluoride thorium reactor.
Westinghouse AP1000 reactor.
Something like the Argonne Experimental Breeder Reactor-II.

Do I claim the ultimate in safety has been achieved and is sitting on a shelf next to the holy grail waiting to be used as-is for the Final Ultimate Answer? No, but large advances in safety have been made and need to be pursued further, along with undoubtedly other fresh ideas.

You do realize that burning gasoline in your car engine doesn't change the mass of anything, right? That the mass of gas burned + mass of intake air = mass of exhaust?

... = mass of exhaust + mass equivalent of energy released

That's tiny in the case of gasoline in a car, but far from negligible for the sun:
The sun loses about four million tons per second this way.
(Although, in relative terms, it's negligible for the sun as well...)

The Mars Scorecard could really use an update.

I'm not sure whether I understood your post correctly as it seems to garbled be yes? If you doubt that RMS is objecting plugins in GCC then you're apparently new to /. and GCC.

BTW: not just Apple is pushing CLANG (and thereby LLVM), other companies include NVIDIA (CUDA uses LLVM) and IBM (CLANG was ported to Blue Gene/Q), just to name a few.

There is a ton of activity in this area. I think there is a new sulfur based solid anode on the horizon for lithium batteries that is going to reduce cost, increase capacity four-fold and dramatically reduce charge time; see http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/5834/Oak-Ridge-Labs-Scientists-Make-Lithium-Sulfur-Battery-Breakthrough.aspx and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery. I also think there is a new graphene technology that is going to make way better supercapacitors; see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6145/534.abstract. The federal government is pushing this hard too: see http://www.anl.gov/energy/batteries-and-energy-storage.

Not too far it seems. This and this are the most recent news related that google shows. At least it says that could lead to cheap manufacture.

The molten-salt reactor built in the US back in the 60s had a maximum output of 7MW thermal -- it never generated any electricity, ...

It's a bit like saying someone who built a model aircraft engine that ran for a few hours means they can design a reliable efficient cost-effective truck engine based on the same principles. Good luck with that.

The first uranium reactor, Chicago Pile 1, was built under a football stadium and never generated any power either.

Clearly every technology has to start somewhere.

electrical: ~40-70% efficient generation, 95% transmission, 70-80% efficient car. (some others have posted batteries at 99%, for example).
Gasoline:
Pumping oil: Varies wildly.
Transfer to refinery: another wildly
Refining: 88% for barrel efficiency
Other refining costs: Pumping costs withing the station 4-8 kwh per gallon
Transfer to fueling station: varies wildly
Pumping into vehicle: cheap
Use in vehicle: 20% if you're lucky

The studies I've seen mostly say that the only time your CO2 production equals that of a gasoline vehicle is if you get 100% of your power from coal.

I don't see anybody else dumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere year after year. ... and that "greenhouse" thing? It works.

How about ice? http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/env99/env99424.htm

Or cows? http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cow-emissions-more-damaging-to-planet-than-co2-from-cars-427843.html

I'm sure there's more if you scroll through a google search.

Found a source:

From page 34:

Materials
LiCoO2 0.62
Separator 0.14
Electrolyte 0.30
Anode 0.24
Materials subtotal 1.28
Overhead 0.15-0.25
Direct labor 0.18-0.24
Total manufacturing cost ~1.70

Per this, the lithium compound is indeed the single most expensive part, but not quite half of the materials alone. If we're forced to separate seawater for it, LiIon cell prices would double.

So, anyone keeping score?

Now, to properly compare apples to apples, look at this graph (on page 10) regarding the Prius motor's efficiency at various power outputs (you've probably already seen this since you mentioned it earlier). Below 5kW, it's at 25%. At 10kW, it's at 33%, and that's a realistic highway speed power output. If we can assume 33%*90% (drivetrain) we get 29.7% - with a 38% Stirling engine, if we get 90% from the rest of the system (generator, battery, controller, wiring) - and I've already posted links showing that's do-able - then if your motor exceeds 87% efficiency you come out ahead. At 5kW output you just need 67% motor efficiency to come out ahead. It's nearly a wash, plus there's lots of tricks you can pull with electric motors when you have a handful of them (vs just one engine).

We find the bulk modulus of M-carbon to be 365+/-38 GPa, thus is one of the stiffest materials known comparable to that of cubic-BN (387+/-4 GPa) and wurtzitic BN (375+/-9 GPa). ... M-carbon also shows anisotropic compressibilities along lattice axes: the a axis is stiffest [527+/-2 GPa] and the b [271+/-1] and c [267+/-1 GPa] axes are roughly equivalent ...

It seems that the anisotropy does give a lower compressibility, but not dramatically more as in graphite (weaker plane compressibility is 2.7% of the stronger plane). It's also clear that the diamond in the diamond anvil cell used to make this is damaged by the material. The picture in the Yale News article is the damaged anvil, not the M-carbon. In SEM images, it doesn't look like graphite at all, but more like fused grains. Characterization and proof of structure is done by X-ray diffraction, a standard materials science method, using synchrotrons, which are giant particle accelerators, namely ALS at LBL and APS at Argonne.

So I assume you've already contact the DoE for whatever materials they have from their Future Truck competition?

(as some of the teams were awarded grants, I assume there'd be some sort of documentation about how they achieved the improvements, so you could see if they're changes that the automobile manufacturers have already put into production models, or if there's some additional enhancements to be done.)

So I assume you've already contact the DoE for whatever materials they have from their Future Truck competition?

(as some of the teams were awarded grants, I assume there'd be some sort of documentation about how they achieved the improvements, so you could see if they're changes that the automobile manufacturers have already put into production models, or if there's some additional enhancements to be done.)

Here's a paper on this from 2002.

All they did was purchase a commercial GPS simulator, which is used by companies to develop their GPS receivers and is easily attainable. They just connect an antenna to the simulator and beam it at the direction of a GPS receiver, jam the receiver so it loses current lock, and then it'll be spoofed once it locks onto your antenna. I always thought you needed to do some super complicated math and use multiple sources since GPS relies on careful timing information to get position, but the commercial simulator handles it all for you.

In Florida? Are you serious? Does anyone else realize that unless there's a hurricane Florida (especially central Florida) is basically a dead zone for winds. That's not to say a freak wind storm couldn't occur but I've lived in some pretty windy places and never heard of a fire started by buffeting winds. Lightning, yes. I've googled for it, can someone point me to evidence of this phenomena actually happening? Having tried to get a spark or start fire by rubbing two sticks together, I can tell you that it would indeed by a freak occurrence if wind did just that.

Actually it is mostly the fact that the yeast in alcohol is limited to producing 10% alcohol before the yeast starts to die. So unless this yeast can get past 10% it will likely take the same energy to get to finished product as corn ethanol.
Fyi it takes 15700 BTU of fuel per gallon of ethanol to grow and transport the corn required. Ethanol has 114000 BTU per gallon a 8* payoff. 90% of the remaining energy used in producing ethanol is electric and still has a payoff. If you stop with hydrous ethanol (can be burned as e85, cannot be mixed with gasoline) the payoff is 2-3*. While anhydrous ethanol is more like 1.6* source: http://www.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint%20archive/Files/21_2_NEW%20YORK_04-76_0029.pdf

I note that you happily use nCi in the rest of your post.

Yep, he happily used the nCi/pCi numbers to demonstrate how useless they are without accounting for other factors like the period of time. Exactly the point he was making before going on to point out that if you were to make judgements *just* based on those numbers 1% of people would die simply from the radiation they emit naturally.