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I'm not remotely an expert, but I'm guessing that oxygen isn't valuable enough to go to the effort of putting energy into it to split the oxygen off. If you do everything but the splitting, then it sounds like you're describing the mineral storage method of capture [1] [2].

I guess it comes down to whether the current method (fractional distillation of air) of producing oxygen uses less energy and requires less extra carbon dioxide to be produced as a side-effect. Without knowing more, I'd guess that just because fractional distillation is what's currently used, and because it doesn't involve splitting chemical bonds, that it uses less energy than splitting CO2, but that's just a guess.

OT, but on an inflation adjusted basis, gas really isn't that expensive. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/25opec/sld004.htm 1981 stands out as the ugliest thus far.

The way I see it is that Bush wants to expand domestic production of oil to 1) bring prices down and 2) keep the money here instead of sending it to people who want to kill us.
Tell me, who's stopping us from drilling in ANWR? It's not the Alaskans!
Also, gas is cheaper today than it was in 1979 (adjusted for inflation, of course) and there is no rationing and no gas lines.

I beg to differ on the "losing" portion of your propaganda. However, we have those on the left (including the media) who WANT us to lose this thing so it looks bad for Bush. How many Al Qaeda members did we kill yesterday? How about on any day at all since 9-11? Don't know do ya. Why? It's not reported. Every single US military death is (rightfully) reported with all its gory details, but you NEVER see an enemy head-count. Well, OK, you do sometimes, but they are labeled as "Iraqi civilians killed by US forces". Fact is, we are kicking major ass in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you won't see it reported because it doesn't meet the agenda.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_ publications/company_level_imports/current/import. html

Now go piss off.

Seriously, that's awesome that you live somewhere so fully green. But, as you pointed out-- 10% of your power is *still* dirty, and according to a quick google, residential lighting accounts for roughly 9% of total residential power consumption, which you will notice is a full percentage point lower than the amount of non-renewable power generation in your area. (even assuming that there is nothing but residential use, which is fairly certain to not be the case, skewing the figures even further in favor of switching) I've also given you the benefit of the doubt on your "renewable" power sources and assumed that none of them produce any emissions at all.

You would be hard-pressed to find *any* location in the United States where it doesn't make sense to switch to CF bulbs, even assuming nobody is recycling them, and every single bulb ends up in the landfill. It's a net power reduction, and a net pollutant reduction across the board.

Even with 90% zero-emission renewable power (something that is vanishingly rare in the US)-- the switch to CF bulbs is a gain without even recycling them.

Recently, I was having a conversation about the upper limit on solar power. I hadn't done the math then, but I just trotted out a fresh napkin to satisfy my curiosity. The earth is 12756 km in diameter. That presents a 127.8 million km^2 cross section to the sun. With the napkin-math estimate of 1kW/m^2 incident at the earth's surface, there's an upper limit of 127.8 million MW of power available from the sun. Okay, so that's an absolute ceiling for terrestrial solar collection - you can't collect more energy than is incident in the first place.

Okay, now for a more practical limit. Let's put the solar collection grid on land - that's a reduction to 30%. Let's also go with solar cells that are 20% efficient - that's not too shabby, but not bleeding-edge-expensive either. (127.8 * 0.3 * 0.2) = 7.67 million MW.

Finally, how much of the available global land mass are we willing to pave over with solar cells? If I use a residential rooftop model, a 1500 sq.ft. house on a 1/4 acre (~10000 sq.ft., sorry for the non-metric-unit shift) property would be about 15%. I think that's probably a bit high, considering that houses aren't aligned for optimal solar collection, but I'm looking for the practical upper limit of solar collection opportunity. Using 15%, the available harvestable power limit becomes 1.15 million MW.

Let's compare that to current consumption stats in the US (no pun intended.) If I read this chart correctly, December of 2006 had 335.6 million MWh of power generated across all industries. There were 744 hours in December, so that equates to 451 thousand MW average continuous power generation. So the maximum solar harvest potential is only about 3x our current consumption rate? Damn, that's sobering.

For those interested in the engineering details, you can read some of the original design papers here:

LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Cryostat Design and Fabrication
http://tdserver1.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/c h_darve/public/publi/MT-17.pdf

And some viewgraphs of the relevant "spyder" supports in cross-section here:

Conceptual Design Review slides:
http://tdpc02.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/cdr/ cdr_viewgraphs/sld009.htm

And some details on strength measurement and alignment procedures:

Alignment and Strength Measurements of the LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Magnets
http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2006/conf/fermilab-con f-06-303-td.pdf

For those that want to see what this stuff looks like in pictures:

(US-DOE LHC Progress Report 1QFY02)
http://www.ch.doe.gov/offices/FAO/projects/uslhc/p ictures/acc1picqtr02.pdf

" "Cheap power" is becoming more scarce with no entity will escape the harsh reality. "

Which is why locating in states with nuclear power might have appeal.

Found via Googling, of course!

http://www.nei.org/documents/states_sc.pdf

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_gla nce/states/statessc.html

US electric consumption is roughly 1/1000 of your figures. Net 2005 generation was 4038 billion kWh (not MWh).

The insolation in mid-Kansas is about 1550 kWh/m^2/yr. At 15% efficiency, this would produce about 230 kWh/m^2/yr of electricity. Divide 4.038e12 kWh/yr by 230 kWh/m^2/yr and you get 1.76e10 m^2, or 17,600 km^2. Total impervious area in the USA (roofs, pavement, etc.) is 112610 km^2, so we'd need to put PV on about 16% of what's already covered. This can be done when we re-roof.

True, covering the rest of our energy needs would take more, but that's no reason to curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.

Every cent you spend is in turn spent on power

Would someone please explain this logic to me? I mean, I understand the logic (If I pay Sally for a hummer, she might use the money to pay off her Hummer), but I just don't think it is valid. Sure, if you plot energy use vs GNP on a log-log chart (like at GapMinder, there's a relationship between CO2 emissions (a proxy for energy use, indexed for relative environmental impact) per capita and income per capita, but there's a lot of scatter and a lot of trends that don't conform.

Here's a couple data points to mull: China went from 1.2 tons CO2 per capita and $595 in 1975 to 2.7 and $4568 in 2002. So income rose 8x while emissions rose a little over 2x. Meanwhile, the US went from $19831 income per head to 34567 from 1975 to 2002, yet emissions per head stayed basically constant (looking at energy use rather than CO2 emissions yields a ~5% increase per energy use capita in the US, 1975 to 2000, much less than the income growth).

So: I am of the impression that while wealth is correlated with energy use, it is not so tightly coupled that you can definitively declare "Every cent you spend is in turn spent on power." Whether or not that statement is right or wrong has rather large implications; I'd like to figure this out. I think it is wrong, or at least greatly oversimplified.

I just walk down to my friendly local neighborhood used CD store and buy them there. No DRM, much cheaper prices, and much better quality. But I guess in the current Big Box consumer culture of the US, if you can't get it at Best Buy, then it doesn't exist to most people. Sad.

yeah most probably wouldn't notice
according to this
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.h tm
the ps3 uses about 200watts maximum
and if you look at the cost per kwh around the US http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/electricity/e lectricity.html
and round up for the sake of argument, so say you run it for 24 hours a day, you never play any games on it, and you are paying $0.10 /kwh, that's $14.60/month

more realistically say you pay $0.10/kwh and only run f@h when you are asleep, so 8 hours a day, less than $5 a month more than you would have paid otherwise.

This page has electricity usage summaries for the United States, as well as some of the census regions.

The average over the whole US has 8.8% of electricity used in households for the purpose of lighting. This includes both indoor and outdoor lighting, but not halogen torchiere lamps. Presumably that's a deficiency in the surveys used.

Anyway, this 8.8% used for lighting is smaller than the amount used for refrigerators (13.1%), air conditioning (16.0%), electric space-heating (10.1%), or water heating (9.1%). So lighting is certainly not the principal usage of electricity in the US households. Maybe it's different in Western Europe.

Of course, it is an area where electricity usage can be improved upon. But it can't account for German households using 40% less energy than Americans (assuming that is an accurate figure).

Fraction of household electricity used for lighting, by US census region:

New England: 13.2%
Mid-Atlantic: 12.1%
New York: 15.7%
East North Central: 10.2%
West North Central: 8.6%
South Atlantic: 6.8%

OK, you seem like a reasonable person, so I'll try to sell it.

So let's get the facts out of the way: Instead of quoting lots of sources, all of which would of couse be suspect to one degree or another due to funding, politics, etc. Just have a look at http://www.ipcc.ch/ That's about the strongest scientific consensus you're ever going to see. About anything. You probably couldn't get as many scientists to agree about the gravitational constant.

Now to consequences. Yes, the world won't end. It's just going to get more unpleasant, and more expensive. Have a look at the report. Look at the rainfall predictions. Those poorer countries you see with lower rainfall are going to have more drought and people in those specific areas will die without massive aid. How's that aid thing been working out for the drought regions in Africa lately? Yes, yes, if the goverments there could all just get along, etc....

Can anyone say exactly when and which exact areas will be affected? No. Can anyone say exaclty which people will die if we legalize drunk driving? No. But neither is a good argument. The scientific fact, with as much scientific certainty as say... evolution *gasp*.... is that it will happen.

You have focused on ocean levels, but that's really a minor point compared to other affects, such as the threat to the North Atlactic current, but let's have a look. For your strawman of 10cm, I think what you've said is fairly accurate. But that's the low end of the IPCCs estimates for the next 100 years, with 88cm being the high, and no end in sight until we do something, and even then we won't see the levels stabilize for centuries after temperatures do. What do *you* think will happen with a 1m rise in the highest of the high tides? I'd say, for example, about 10% of Manhattan will flood 5-10 times a century unless massive dikes are built. There's 50 billion dollars down the drain on a tiny example.

And that's really the point. What do we (in the US) have to gain by ignoring the problem? A hundred billion per year or so in GDP on the high side: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/kyoto/cost.html
What do we stand to lose? That's a tougher number to estimate. Honestly, in the near term, say under 100 years, we won't approach that 100 billion number in the US. Other, more equatorial countries will, but we won't. In the longer run, though, it will catch up with us, and by then we will have wiped out thousands of species and hundreds of entire ecosystems. All of this is in the IPCC report. Have a look.

Where to start....

Oil went from $17 a barrel or so in 2002 to around $70 or so last summer (source

Let's think of an energy-intensive industry that's based primarily on oil. Let's say, airlines. By your logic, flight costs should have increased by 165% to 400+% in that time. I don't know about you, but I fly a lot for work, and I didn't see this. And it's not like airline prices aren't dynamic.

And how you frame the argument...

a) Sure looks like the science is continuing toward a done deal- do take the time to look into the 'it's all the sun' argument. Start with 'solar variation' and 'Attribution_of_recent_climate_change' at Wikipedia.

b) If a), then b). The biosphere is pretty good at regulating things like CO2 level as long as it's not getting pushed too hard (see: status quo)

c) Cooler planet? Who said anything about a cooler planet? The concern is to what degree the planet is hotter.

If by 'enliven' tundra you mean melt it and release all the methane that's locked up in there (thereby enhancing warming), then I agree.

My personal opinion is that reducing carbon intensity is a reasonable strategy that hedges our bets over climate uncertainty, and does not have to doom our economy. For example, in the US we can go a long way with energy conservation and efficiency, things that generally have a reasonable ROI. The US is currently 40th or so among countries in terms of emissions per unit GDP (and the difference is not attributable simply to industry mix, pop. density, etc.).

Unfortunately, debate about global warming is driven so strongly (on both sides) by ideology, that discussion on forums like ./ is becoming a real PITA

The average emissions rates in the United States from natural gas-fired generation are: 1135 lbs/MWh of carbon dioxide, 0.1 lbs/MWh of sulfur dioxide, and 1.7 lbs/MWh of nitrogen oxides. Compared to the average air emissions from coal-fired generation, natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide, less than a third as much nitrogen oxides, and one percent as much sulfur oxides at the power plant. In addition, the process of extraction, treatment, and transport of the natural gas to the power plant generates additional emissions.

The US is a huge net exporter of copyrighted materials.

I ran the numbers recently as well, here is what I came up with. Note that I didn't do any actual measurements and relied only on what I could find in google with a few minutes searching. I've made some pretty generous (read, unrealistically optimistic) assumptions about what the human body is capable of and what people will put up with to have power.

Here is a ballpark estimation of the practicality of human power generation.

Let's assume that a person who's profession was power generation would be highly fit and well suited to long hours turning a generator at high output. If such a person could maintain an electrical output of 400W for 10 hours a day he would produce 4 kilowatt hours of electrical energy (ignoring conversion loss for the sake of simplicity). This is beyond mere 'Olympic' performance and well into the realm of the 'heroic', similar to a good bicycle sprint for 10 hours.

Given a heroic muscular efficiency of 30% (beyond the human normal range of 14-27%) this 4 kilowatt hours represents about 13kWh of input power, or food. This is about 11,000 dietary calories. I'll presume that the waste heat is too low-grade for power generation, but could be used to offset living space heating requirements during cold weather.

If we feed our hero nothing but soybeans (inexpensive and fairly energy dense at 1.75cal/gram and 0.00025 cents per gram in bulk ($6.80 for 60lb) he will need about 6.25 kilos of beans a day, at a price of about $1.60.

So your human power will cost in the range of 40 cents per kilowatt hour, or about 4 times the price of grid electrical power, presuming you can find teams of heroes willing to donate their time for free.

The US consumes around 4,000,000,000,000 kilowatt hours per year. At a rate of 1460 kWh per hero per year, you will need to employ 2,700,000,000 people (almost half the world population) each year to produce the required electrical power. Feeding them will require about 6,100,000,000,000 kilos of beans a year, or about 90 times the annual US soybean crop. You may be able to reduce the number of people required slightly with a methane capture system :) You can probably increase efficiency by feeding the heros that die in the line of duty to the living heros, thereby recyling a hundred or 2 pounds of material.

A typical household in the US consumes about 30 kWh per day. Consider that this is about 8 heroes pedaling generators in your basement, consuming a 40 pound bag of soybeans each day.

Powering a typical smallish refrigerator requires about one kilowatt-hour per day, so it would only take one hero two and a half hours to keep your food cold (or, if he is charging a battery, 5 hours after losses).

A typical real person could reasonably be expected to produce 200W for an hour a day (maybe 2 for extremely dedicated individuals), certainly enough to charge small devices like laptops, but just a drop in the bucket next to the power used by a typical person.

Kinda puts the power of fossil fuels into perspective.

refs:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.ht ml
http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen.html
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?I ndicatorID=46&Country=US
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice &dbid=79
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/06032 2113511.htm
http://coachesinfo.com/category/rowing/77/
http://homepage.mac.com/moises.santillan/paper

Who do you thinks going to get the credit when they finally invent fission? The person who thought it up or those that actually made it?

I'm not sure you've written what you meant to here.

First, fission, that is, the breaking of atomic nuclei into separate clusters of particles with a concomitant release of energy, has been around on Earth for billions of years, as it's a natural phenomenon (see, eg, http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.sht ml). Doing it in a controlled way to extract energy or explosive power, well the idea is something like 100 years old, and it was brought to fruition about 60 years ago. We remember the names of both sets of people (eg, Einstein, Bohr, Oppenhiemer, Fermi, Rutherford, Teller, etc.).

Second, you probably mean fusion. That, too, is really old, as it's a natural phenomenon. Powers the Sun, you see. Now, perhaps you meant a controlled fusion reaction in order to extract energy, or explosive power. The latter has already been done, and we remember both sets of names (see the list above). Perhaps, you really meant controlled fusion reactions to extract electrical power. That's still being worked on, but saying that it will be, "finally invented," is, well, an odd turn of phrase. It *has* been invented. The ideas (see that same list above) are all pretty old. The devil, it turns out, is in the details, and the details are really, really hard. So hard and so expensive that the current best hope, ITER, requires cooperation from seven countries (if you lump all of the EU into one country). We don't know who will be running the show when ITER, or some successor, finally creates a sustainable energy-positive burn, but I hope we remember their name as well as we remember the names above.

Compact fluorescents, 50-70 lumens per watt off the shelf.

White LEDs, 30-45 lumens per watt off the shelf, 131 in the lab. And way more expensive.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/ssl/faqs.htm
http://www.cree.com/press/press_detail.asp?i=11508 34953712
http://members.misty.com/don/lede.html

Right now the reason to use LEDs is if the environment is harsh (vibrations, impacts, etc.) or if you really, really don't want to change the light often (traffic lights, or that %^#@!! bulb over my stairs). LEDs also scale down better than anything else.

Besides, we don't feel strongly enough about it to stop importing over a million barrels per day of Venezeulan oil at 70 bucks a pop. That's $25 billion dollars annually. As much as I love OSS I think $25BN might even be a little more valuable to them. Then again if national values had anything to do with money we wouldn't be sending $250BN/year to China.

In Texas, perhaps. But not in the rest of the country. I drove from NYC to Detroit and back a week ago. Gas prices ranged from $3.25 a gallon in Michigan to as high as $4.50/gallon in rural Ohio and Pennsylvania. I think the lowest I saw was about $2.75, and that was near Detroit.

Many such buyers have had to take on a 35 to 40 year mortgage.

That's not really the case. Higher education is far too expensive for most Americans. Coming out of a 4-year college program with $160,000 in debt, even after scholarships and bursaries, tends to put people in a pretty terrible position. Compare that to places like Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and even Russia. Students coming out of universities in those countries are just as capable as American graduates, but face nowhere near the financial burden (both before attending and after).

Isn't the percentage of CO2 that man produces like 1/20th that of the earths? I searched the other day for hours trying to find out what the ratio was. Here is a page from the DOE:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/gg97rpt/chap1.htm l

Sure man plays a part in this CO2 equation, and we need to change our ways, but it seems to me like the Chicken Littles have really tried to hide this "inconvenient fact" because it doesn't fit their agenda or might "confuse" the overzealous enviromentalist cheerleaders who need to be spoon fed their thoughts.

The Federal government makes more net money off the sale of a gallon of gasoline than Big Oil does.

Could you provide a source for this information? Hint: You won't find one.

Sorry, Charlie, you lose. Unfortunately, I got moderated down to oblivion for not spewing the Slashdot party line in regards to big oil, so you and no one else will probably ever read this, but here goes:

Gasoline price breakdown.

The Federal government makes 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline sold in the United States. Oil companies make, on average, 10 cents per gallon sold.

And yeah, I listed a conocophillips website. Mea culpla. Here's a government one that breaks down the component prices for gasoline:

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/gdu/gasdiesel.as p

And here's another (state) government study that breaks down cost http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/margins/index.ht ml#1-2.

And here's a graph that breaks down the profit margin for oil and gas production and refining operations:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analy sis_publications/oil_market_basics/ref_image_prof_ rate.htm

Unfortunately, it only goes out to 2001, but notice that the profitability for refining operations declines below zero after 2001. In layman's terms, that means refining is losing money.

I'm sure you're all set with data to contradict mine, so fire away, since "I won't find a source"....that implies you have lots of sources.

The Federal government makes more net money off the sale of a gallon of gasoline than Big Oil does.

Could you provide a source for this information? Hint: You won't find one.

Sorry, Charlie, you lose. Unfortunately, I got moderated down to oblivion for not spewing the Slashdot party line in regards to big oil, so you and no one else will probably ever read this, but here goes:

Gasoline price breakdown.

The Federal government makes 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline sold in the United States. Oil companies make, on average, 10 cents per gallon sold.

And yeah, I listed a conocophillips website. Mea culpla. Here's a government one that breaks down the component prices for gasoline:

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/gdu/gasdiesel.as p

And here's another (state) government study that breaks down cost http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/margins/index.ht ml#1-2.

And here's a graph that breaks down the profit margin for oil and gas production and refining operations:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analy sis_publications/oil_market_basics/ref_image_prof_ rate.htm

Unfortunately, it only goes out to 2001, but notice that the profitability for refining operations declines below zero after 2001. In layman's terms, that means refining is losing money.

I'm sure you're all set with data to contradict mine, so fire away, since "I won't find a source"....that implies you have lots of sources.

The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere can vary widely between man-made and natural sources. For example:

• USA = 1.64 Billion Metric Tons carbon released in 2005
• Borneo peat bogs = 2.5 Billion Metric Tons carbon released in 1997-98

Granted, man is basically behind the burning in Borneo...

• 5 Years of Biomass Fuel Energy Production for the USA
  
• Landfill Gas
  
• Municipal Solid Waste
  

• 5 Years of Biomass Fuel Energy Production for the USA
  
• Landfill Gas
  
• Municipal Solid Waste
  

• 5 Years of Biomass Fuel Energy Production for the USA
  
• Landfill Gas
  
• Municipal Solid Waste
  

I honestly *don't* like the idea of forcing each nation to be insular.

And forcing ourselves to be dependent upon nations which foster terrorism is desirable?

Global trade is important for efficiency.

Until about WWII, the USA was an oil exporter. The world does not depend on the US importing large amounts of its energy supply. We might as well be part of the supply side.

Kapnui can ramp up its production pretty much at will, and there's untapped new discoveries at Turangi-1, Pohokura, and Kupe, for starters.

And when they run out, what then? Gas isn't like oil. Oil is a viscous liquid and it flows more and more slowly as a field is drained. Gas flows easily through all but the tightest rocks and goes right down to zero. Lifespan of a gas field in N. America is down to about 18 months. This gives you very little time to obtain new supplies or convert to other sources.

Wars and natural disasters create temporary supply disruption, which is why reserves and diversified production should be encouraged.

Precisely why we should be working to create alternatives for the main uses for oil. Peaking oil production is already leading to military adventurism to grab resources; create ready alternatives, and the pressure to grab (and the value of what's grabbed) goes way down. If the alternative is superior in other ways, it puts even more downward pressure on the value of oil.

Any planner that never plans for disruptions from a single source is a bloody idiot.

Quite right. This is why I think our primary medium for transportation energy should be electricity rather than liquid fuels, because there are far more ways of making electricity than gasoline/ethanol. It's also much cleaner and quieter, and available from the plug at about 75 cents/gallon equivalent (after losses on the way to the wheels).

what you use as input for charcoal production affects the properties of your output; cellulosic matter varies greatly.

Does it matter? Cooper was using a range of stuff including de-ashed coal. He got his best activity from bio-chars. What you're implying is that the differences are sufficient to make a DCFC work badly, and you've cited no evidence in support.

To replace an ICE, the engine and everything it needs to run must be small, light, and resilient, tolerating cold, heat, unusual angles, vibration, and a whole host of other problems. So must it's fuel. Sure -- let's call it an engineering problem.

That's why the article says "... even heavy trucks may be too small." The analysis went forward assuming only batteries, backed up by internal combustion engines burning biofuels. Would you agree that those engineering problems have been essentially solved?

saying something is just an "engineering problem" is a cop-out.

Maybe it means that you can't deal with the problem cost-effectively with units smaller than ten megawatts. Maybe you need an eddy-current pump recirculating electrolyte through a mixer to add charcoal. (Cooper proposes pneumatic feeding.) If you can't manage this well on scales smaller than 300 megawatts, guess what - we can't manage coal-fired power on scales much smaller than that, and it's far harder to throttle a steam turbine than a fuel cell.

Nobody's even tried this on a pilot scale yet, but the commercial MCFC's are doing fine. There's a 1 MW plant at the Sierra Nevada brewery, running since 2005. Believe me, this is just "engineering problems", ones we'd be well-advised to tackle right away.

check out the "gunpowder engine" and t

Except that coal's share in California's electricity generation is one percent http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_gla nce/states/statesca.html True, they import about 20% of their electricity out of state a some of that is bound to be coal generated by still my point that electricity doesn't absolute positively have to come from coal.

We are not rapidly running out of natural gas. We're running out of domestic natural gas, but world natural gas supplies are still quite plentiful.

And, GW emissions aside, how exactly does this helps our energy security and balance of trade situations? There is considerable resistance to LNG terminals also.

Note that the US used to use a significant amount of oil for electricity generation.

A point I've made frequently. (Note that "petroleum" in that table includes refining byproducts such as petroleum coke, so the total of liquids is even less.)

The primary replacements for oil-fired electric plants were nuclear and coal. Recently we've added a lot of gas-fired capacity. We can't add more gas due to supply limits, coal is a pollution and GHG nightmare and nuclear has a 10-year or so planning horizon. The immediate problems require other solutions, and I think the primary ones are going to be wind, efficiency and cogeneration.

When it became expensive, we switched, and now oil is almost unused in this country for power generation (except for backup power). Barring some instant, "ooops, we're out of natural gas -- when the heck did that happen?" moment (which is essentially impossible), there's not going to be an electricity shortage.

Impossible? It happened to New Zealand:

The Maui gas field has been responsible for 25% of New Zealand's electricity generation. When it runs out in a year or two, not only will a multibillion dollar infrastructure become essentially obsolete overnight but New Zealand will have lost 25% of it's electricity generation capacity. If you thought New Zealand's electricity crisis was a concern it is about to get a whole lot worse.

It ain't what you don't know that'll get ya. It those things you know that ain't so.

As for a charcoal fuel cell: it's not about whether or not you can get energy from charcoal in a variety of manners. Feeding it and removing the byproducts, even in a slurry, is the problematic element -- especially when you factor in the cost of making your charcoal consistent enough.

Consistent? It only has to be fine enough (and ball mills are very good at guaranteeing that). The actual feeding is an engineering problem; if engineers can build gravimetric feeders for powdered coal in furnaces which require steady flames, the management of a carbonate bath which needs feeding every half-hour or so can't be all that difficult. And here's what the originators say about ash:

The ash in coal may be chemically extracted and thereby reduced to levels below 0.5% at minimal cost and energy penalty. At this level, its impact on electrolyte life no longer limits cell economy.

In other words, you're going to need to deal with other things before the electrolyte composition changes enough to bother you. More about ash on pages 11-12 of this PDF.

As for charcoal itself, its production is a lossy process. Much of the original energy is contained in the released gasses -- namely CO, H2, and volatile oils/tars -- but they're mixed in with lots of CO2 and H2O, making for less efficient combustion (not to mention the energy loss involved with the process heat).

Quite right! Charcoal produced by flash carbonization yields about half the input energy as gas and heat (a pyrolysis process driven by external heat would convert more to carbon and le

One small Whisson windmill on the roof of a suburban house could keep your taps flowing. Biggies on office buildings, whoppers on skyscrapers, could give independence from the city's water supply.

Whoo-hoo, that's a great idea! Now, instead of a single, central, easily regulated and maintained water supply we can have hundreds or thousands of separate water supplies, each with their own, probably increased, potential for contamination. Just think of all the new economic opportunities generated by the upsurge of water-borne illness and poisoning from contaminated water!

Yes, this entire article sounds like a load of hooey. We already have vertical windmills that can extract power from wind regardless of direction (which is probably why this guy hasn't gotten a patent yet). As for practical extraction of water from the air, I'd bet that you can't get more than a dozen gallons per day out of a small (less than 30 feet tall) windmill. That might be enough for a small household's drinking water, but I don't think it would cover cleaning needs (dishes, clothes and bathing).

1. Citrix offers Word pocessing & spreadsheet capabilities for dumb terminals.
2. 50+% of the cycles on the average desktop machine are wasted - even when the person is 'busy' - heck, unless I am compiling something my system is idling at less than 30% usage most of the time - and I have 20+ windows open & active.
3. The number of companies using internal web apps for custom software is growing.

• 75(W/seat)*100(seats)/1000(w/Kw)=7.5Kw continuous savings
• 7.5Kw(continuous)-> 7.5KwH/Hr
• 24*365=8760 Hr/Year
• 7.5KwH/Hr*8760Hr/Year= 65700KwH/Year
• $.20/KwH * 65700KwH/Year = $13,140.00/year

The US uses about 17.4 quads/year of gasoline, and another 8.7 quads/year of distillate (diesel and heating oil). This is about 7640 billion kWh, or about 1.9 times total US electric energy consumption. Losses would increase this figure considerably. You're not going to supply this by electrolysis from nuclear powerplants, because nobody is stupid enough to try.

The US uses about 17.4 quads/year of gasoline, and another 8.7 quads/year of distillate (diesel and heating oil). This is about 7640 billion kWh, or about 1.9 times total US electric energy consumption. Losses would increase this figure considerably. You're not going to supply this by electrolysis from nuclear powerplants, because nobody is stupid enough to try.

Regarding wind, at the cost level it is competitive with solar but it has more troubles fitting in. HOAs don't always want the towers needed to get the turbines into the wind flow. Some places are just sheltered. A plant that makes wind turbines has a similar advantage to one that makes solar panels: As it continues to produce, it is just making more and more capacity. A coal plant has fixed capacity and so you need to build another, but then you put a greater strain on fuel supply so it gets more expensive instead of cheaper. So, both solar and wind production facilities should make electricity somewhat less expensive going forward. Right now, the convenience of roofs has us concentrating on solar and we can offer fixed rate long term contract at the same rate people are paying now. Wind should be offered in the future though. Take a look at any of the links at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html to find out more. The calculator is set to an estimated 2.1% annual rate increase for utility supplied power compared to about 4.1% between 1969 and 2005, years when the inflation adjusted cost was the same http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec8_39. pdf. You'll enjoy the fact that the only place we don't compete yet is with hydro in the North West, another renewable.

Also, I don't appreciate this article's attempt to conflagrate electricity generation with fuel production.

Few are worried about us running out of sources of electricity, due to coal, nuclear, and decreasing costs of renewables. It's vehicle fuels that are the issue of concern.

And some of the proposals are just plain stupid, like running vehicles on charcoal that it's embarassing that they even mentioned them in passing.

Quoting from:

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc _nus_mbblpd_a.htm

"U.S. Motor Gasoline Consumption 9,159,000 barrels/day (384.7 million gallons/day)"

Gas weighs about 6 pounds per gallon, so the US uses about 1.1 million tons of gas *per day*. Random numbers from the internet say that if you magic that wheat into corn, you would end up with about 1.2 billion gallons of ethanol. That's four day's usage. If my numbers are horrible(I used 56 pounds/bushel and 2.8 gallons/bushel), it might be 5 or ten. I don't know how the productivity of corn and wheat compare, etc, but it isn't that much fuel. Devoting the entire US crop of corn, all 8 billion bushels of it, to ethanol production yields about 60 days of usage. I didn't bother to account for the fact that ethanol has quite a bit less energy per gallon than gasoline.

It isn't about a food shortage, it's about it simply not even being close to enough energy.

If cars all of the sudden get 3 times more efficient, maybe, but those crops are pretty dependent on diesel at the moment, and nobody is pumping diesel off the fields of Nebraska just now(that I can tell, perhaps they are being quiet about it; if I were running an energy surplus biodiesel farm/plant in a self supporting manner I would be loud as hell about it).

I live less than 2 miles away from a nuclear reactor. It doesn't bother me, because I know that if something does go seriously wrong there, I'm close enough that I would probably die within minutes, instead of living for years with horrible radiation sickness. Always look on the bright side ;)

Total yearly average electricity cost for New Jersey is $1,052.76.

Michael Strizki heats and cools his house year-round and runs a full range of appliances including such power-guzzlers as a hot tub and a wide-screen TV without paying a penny in utility bills.

My guess is that this means two things: Mr. Strizki uses more electricity than the "average" house, and if his house used conventional utilities is yearly bill would be much higher than the national average. I say this because ~85% of New Jersey homes are heated by something other than electricity, the vast majority of being natural gas and includes hot water heating (lost the hard link to the EIA page).

Also, the average Mid-Atlantic home uses 1,001 gallons of gasoline/year according to the EIA using their most recent statistics that are from calendar year 2001 (the year that the article is citing as the National average expenditure on gasoline was $1520 that year); considering that gas is now $2.32/gal in the Mid Atlantic region, his fuel costs would be significantly higher than the ~$1300 they were in 2001.

Total yearly energy costs for a household in New Jersey are now significantly higher than they were in 2001; the really rough numbers show that the current average New Jersey home gets much closer to that $4000 number than it did in 2001.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab does fusion research and development, and because it is Department of Energy funded everything there, including salaries, is available to the public on request.

many armchair nuclear advocates are unaware of this and think the reactors run on magic beans and not a very energy intensive enrichment process

The cost of obtaining the uranium and setting it up to be a fuel process, while incredibly expensive per ton, has the advantage that a 1GW light water reactor will only go through about 160 tons of it a year. While extremely expensive, compared to the amount of power generated it's considered an insignificant expense. Consider that a coal plant can go through 10,000 tons of coal a day in comparison.

but it is certainly not carbon neutral as many liars have been saying - in the long run it is lower on carbon than even natural gas turbines but the zero emissions claim is false.

Again, where did I claim that it was carbon neutral?

There is work on using more plentiful fuels which don't require as intensive a process (accelerated thorium reactors) which can even be supplimented by unprocessed high grade waste and weapons material - but it is still not at a commercial state.

Just like fusion isn't possible today. My point is that we have all these extremely dirty and nasty coal power plants in operation today, that release all sorts of nasty chemicals into the enviroment every day. At least the nuclear industry keeps ahold of them*. Besides, enriching fuel to the point that a nuclear reactor can use it is a far simpler business than creating weapons grade stuff.

All these plants are designed with a limited lifespan in mind, and are set up to be decommisioned at some point. We keep extending their lifespan because nobody's been able to get through the red tape to build new plants. What I'm proposing is building enough nuclear stations to shut down all the dirty coal ones, then replace the old nuclear stations.

Sure, by the time we get to shutting down the gen1 and 2 reactors in operation now we may be building pebble beds, thorium plants, proton beam, whatever. But power plants work on a decades long cycle. Even if we magically cracked practical power generation using fusion tomorrow, I'd be willing to bet that there would still be fission and coal plants in operation 40 years from now, lacking a concerted replacement effort.

Say I, as EO, instituted a massive building effort resulting in the construction of 10 1GW replacement stations per year. It'd still take 26 years before the last coal plant was shut down. Figure increases and growth and it'd be closer to 30, even with continued expansion of wind and solar.

here I'm really talking about nuclear power plants for civilian use anyway, which is still not in a highly developed state. Building a lot of dinosaur plants would be an economic disaster for all apart from a few profiteers leeching off the state - let these nuclear companies with no changes in decades design something decent first.

What do you mean 'not in a highly developed state'? While it's true that no new plants have been built in the USA for decades, many have been built around the world. New plants have been built in China, Korea, Japan, France, etc... Besides the pebble bed reactors, we have 4th gen light water reactors that compete favorably with the design.

Building a lot of dinosaur plants would be an economic disaster for all apart from a few profiteers leeching off the state - let these nuclear companies with no changes in decades design something decent first.

Like I've said, I wouldn't be building dinosaur plants(coal). We need more power. Heck, Texas is pushing for building 10 new GW coal plants. I'd rather they built nuclear, much cleaner. And the whole no changes in decades is false. While progress has been stalled in the USA, it has progressed elsewhere in the world. New technologies have been developed, but to impliment them would require construction of new plants, and that hasn't been politically possible in the USA for decades.

*Not

"Suppose we have another Alexandrian library fire (maybe thanks to Islamicists this time) and we collectively forget about the nasties buried deep underground - until some enterprising miners in a newly emerging industrial society find out the hard way."

this immediately reminded me of a material i was reading some time ago. after a long search i found the text - but it had pictures, envisioning different designs and concepts. the design was pretty awful (and current text page also is badly formatted ;) ), but it was the content that was very interesting.

so, here's the text only :
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html
if anybody knows where this material could be found with the images of concepts, please, post here. the images really help to better envision the magnitude of the problem (though the text is very good and descriptive, too).

it seems that something from those suggestions is accepted :
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0115.sht ml

spent waste is about 25-30 tonnes per reactor per year... There are 104 licensed reactors in the US alone...

so, minimum of 2500 tonnes per year. and a maximum of 3120 tonnes per year. And that's /just/ the US.

Assuming recovery of useful material mentiond in a another post, that's still 500 to 624 tonnes of nuclear garbage per year.

Any one have stats on
(A) Cost per weight of lift (some sites said 10k/lb is a myth, and another mentioned a reuseable boost that could to 1.4k/lb, I'd like a decent verifiable source.
(B) Does anyone know how much cargo we have lifted into space at this point total (mass), or how much we can lift per year?

Thanks.

Regardless, the numbers *don't* look feasable for this kind of operation.

The Department of Defense is trying to start something, to justify an invasion of Canada in a few years. Canada has oil.

And when used with FlexFuel, [GM full size SUVs are] using less fossil fuels - even including the fully burdened fossil fuel costs of ethanol - than Prius and Civic hybrid drivers, in addition to contributing to lower overall greenhouse gas emissions.

You need extremely high compression ratios, and ridiculously high tempuratures entering the turbine. Show me a 50% effecient turbine which can fit in a car without a ton of casing.

Chrysler was reaching peak efficiency over 80% (but not average efficiency, just peak) in the sixties: http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html. And another tasty tidbit from the same page: "The present performance and economy of the Turbine are comparable to a conventional car with a standard V-8 engine. The engine will operate satisfactorily on diesel fuel, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, JP-4 (jet fuel), and mixtures thereof. And, even more interesting, it is possible to change from one of these fuels to another without any changes or adjustments to the engine. The users of the cars also will appreciate the many other advantages of the turbine engine." A lot has changed in turbines in the last forty years... for the better.

Also a company called capstone has a CARB-certified (california air quality review board - those of us on the left coast have to care about such things) turbine: See bottom of http://www.microturbine.com/news/photos.asp?id=2. The engine puts out 30 kW and has excellent emissions. 30kW is only about 40 horsepower, but consider that when you are cruising on the freeway in a typical car, you're using 25 horsepower or less (depending on speed and aerodynamics.) A small battery pack is enough to provide regenerative braking and buffer turbine power, since they do have spin up/down time.

capstone's engine doesn't use a system like chrysler's motor did to recirculate heat into the intake, which can improve efficiency (as you suggest.) Turbines can today achieve 40+% electrical efficiency @ full output (http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/ 02/Hybrid/Hybrids2Treece.PDF (PDF)... capstone also has an engine with two primary modes, a 300kW mode for passing power (~400HP!) and a 100kW mode for cruising power... (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=12070 8&p=irol-newsArticle_Print&ID=931851&highlight=) clearly this engine is meant for buses and trucks as passenger cars don't need so much power, although it is fun.

Since I've never even mentioned fuel cells, this is 100% straw man.

We've discussed the reasons batteries aren't practical; I'm moving on.

damned near anything that will burn under compression can be burned in a turbine engine.

The same goes for a diesel engine... It's the conversion that makes it impractical. So what's the advantage now?

The turbine has one moving part. Your proposal to use multiple flywheels means there are several moving parts - all of which must rotate at turbine speed or better. It also allows you to use liquid fuel, which has substantially higher energy density and in fact has a higher energy density than the theoretical limit on a chemical battery.

Flywheels have major repercussions for crash safety. Of course, so do liquid fuels - although if we took safety as seriously in average driving as we do in racing, we'd all be a lot safer because we'd have racing fuel cells (tanks) instead of the cheap bullshit stamped sheet metal crap we use now. And this continues to be an option and probably one that would be taken more seriously if you had a hot turbine engine in the car.

Higher speeds also mean more inefficiency due to loss.

Higher speed is no less effecient than m

Incandescent bulbs get dimmer over time, too, leaving a powdery residue on the inside of the bulb (hence the purpose for halogen bulbs). That said, you're right that compact fluorescent bulbs suffer much faster lumen reduction. I'm not sure why this is the case, though. There are linear fluorescent bulbs available with 95% lumen maintenance, which is actually better than incandescent bulbs. Why isn't such technology showing up in compact fluorescent bulbs? Too expensive, I'm guessing....

For a nice graph of the lumen maintenance of different types of bulbs, check out http://www.netl.doe.gov/ssl/PDFs/lifetimeWhiteLEDs _aug16_r1.pdf.