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I think you're confusing the solar furnace and the CR5. It says 88 square meter for the solar furnace. How many of the 45-pounds-per-day CR5 barrels can there be per solar furnace? Also, what portion of the waste heat from a coal-powered electric plant could be used to heat the barrels? Surely not all the heat goes into making steam for the turbines.

If one solar furnace could power 100 of the CR5s and there's enough CO2 to satisfy them, then you're talking about 250 gallons of fuel and 4500 pounds of CO2 that's being reused instead of just released. That's 946 liters and 2041 kilograms for the rest of the world, BTW. At a meager 20 miles per gallon, that would power the coal plant's maintenance fleet 5000 vehicle miles. A day. I think they might have some spare to sell to their employees at least.

If "large numbers" means 1000 per plant on average, then you're talking about each plant making 2500 gallons of fuel a day from 45,000 pounds of CO2. Given there are around 400 fossil-fuel power plants in the US, if you could get 2500 each per day, that's 1,000,000 per day. That's 365,000,000 gallons a year. At 42 gallons (159 liters) per barrel, that's 8,690,476 barrels of fuel. Remember that crude oil needs to be refined to become petrol, too. Only about 20 gallons per barrel of crude becomes gasoline. So figure it's about double, or 17 million barrels of oil not being imported (but that forgets the propane jet fuel, heating oil, etc made from the rest of the barrel) for use as gasoline.

Here's the catch with the previous paragraph: the US consumes about 20 million barrels a day, again about half as gasoline. So 1000 of these per power plant over a year would power the US auto fleet about 2 days.

But how much CO2 are we really talking here? There are two billion tons of CO2 released by coal-fired plants each year. If we could turn 90% of that (1.8 billion tons) into fuel at a rate of 45 pounds = 2.5 gallons then we're talking about 3,600,000,000,000 pounds and 200,000,000,000 gallons per year could be made. Two hundred billion gallons of gasoline. We use 10 million per day. That's 20,000 days worth of gasoline produced each year if we could find the room and perfect the technique of installing these things. That's over 50 years of gasoline at today's usage rates that we'd make each year.

If we really can make 50 years worth of gasoline or methanol each year from coal waste we're making anyway, why not? And that's just coal-fired plants in that last math. That's not including oil-powered ones or the blast furnaces at steel foundries, cement plants, and glass factories.

Also, note in TFA where it says water steam can be turned into elemental hydrogen using the exact same equipment. That sounds a bit cheaper and a lot cleaner than most current methods. Perhaps one solar furnace boils water out of the sea, and another powers the cobalt ferrite and oxygen reaction in a bunch of the CR5 reactor barrels. It's desalinization and hydrogen production from seawater without the input of electricity for hydrolysis.

I'm not a chemist, but I wonder these what devices would do with sulfur dioxide. The CR5 works by removing oxygen from the water or CO2, but does it work on SO2? If it does, will it produce Sx, SO, S2O or S202 at between 2000 and 2600 degrees C?

that's right... he isnt.

managers are just jackasses and dont have a grip on reality.

The reason being that the vast majority of corporations would be classified as criminal psychopaths if they were human beings. There is even a big documentary/movie on this point.

Funny you should say that. The front page article in the February issue of ConsciousChoice is about nuclear energy and whether it is actually greener than other traditional alternatives. And here is the main article.

Funny you should say that. The front page article in the February issue of ConsciousChoice is about nuclear energy and whether it is actually greener than other traditional alternatives. And here is the main article.

Mercury in your flu shot. . .
--Mercury in vaccines

Food. . .
Back in 1991, the first Food Pyramid Guide was slated for release in the U.S. This was delayed because of the outcry from various sectors in agriculture. The guide was re-designed by politicians and released the following year.

"When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. [. . .]

"Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour -- including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats -- at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the "revised" Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramid's base."

-Luise Light, Ed.D former USDA architect of the original version of the Food Pyramid.

--1992 Food Pyramid corrupted by USDA and Agricultural interestes

Cell Phone EM. . .

This one is a huge subject, with many studies I might reference. Anybody who wants to learn about it can do so quite easily these days. This article is a reasonably well-written piece I chose for it's capacity to communicate the basic elements of how microwave EM can affect human physiology and psychology. It is not the final word on this subject by any means. Further investigation is up to you.

Television. . .

Television has a powerful impact on the way the brain functions. Nobody argues the fact. Here is one quote which sums it up neatly. . .

"High levels of chaotic brain activity are present during challenging tasks like reading, writing, and working mathematical equations in your head. They are not present while watching TV. Levels of brain activity are measured by an electroencenograph (EEG) machine. While watching television, the brain appears to slow to a halt, registering low alpha wave readings on the EEG. This is caused by the radiant light produced by cathode ray technology within the television set. Even if you're reading text on a television screen the brain registers low levels of activity. Once again, regardless of the content being presented, television essentially turns off your nervous system."

--Article found here

Here is a larger data base of information on this subject.

So. . .

I know my first pos

Then, read James Lowen's _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong_ to see how your mind has unknowingly been filled with nationalist and consumer crap (despite your technical proclivities). Also check out Howard Zinn. Learn to live simply and frugally so you have more options:

If you have started doing all that, by now you are primed to begin to question what education really means.

And further, to even question why people need to work and what it should mean to do useful things.

You'll have time to read great minds like Bertrand Russel and Freeman Dyson.

Then you can accept you are still stuck in a stupid system.

But you'll be positioned to make the best of it and yet still see how the world can be a made better place to for the bulk of humanity and other creatures.

Always remember in your darker hours to at least ask yourself the question, "Can life be made worth living?" And in your brighter hours, remember to ask yourself if you are playing a finite (to win) game or an infinite (to play) game?

And, finally, for continual inspiration, read _Voyage From Yesteryear_ by James P. Hogan.

Now go out and take some educated risks to try to make life worth living -- despite your future happiness possibilities already almost being ruined by being convinced you that you are "bright" just because you know some technical things (same thing almost happened to me).

If promoting industrial hemp makes pro-leg's look dishonest, your idiotic (and very wrong) equation of hemp with marijuana makes you look like a member of Al Quaeda!

Cahokia burial mounds?