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www.inel.gov

Naval Reactors Facility

The accident report archive. SL-1 info at the bottom of the page in pdf format.

Ever hear about the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory? It was put together after WWII for alot of the nuclear projects. Most of the naval nuclear stuff was developed there, and the navy has kept all of it's used cores (think of how many nuclear ships and submarines there have been over the years, and many had more than one core over their lifetime), and you can read about that here:



So, effectively, there IS a long-term storage facility for waste in the U.S.

But what a lot of people don't realize is that there have been some fairly large accidents there. The army had a poorly designed reactor that basically blew up (steam explosion due to extreme power excursion) in 1961. Data on that is availible at the bottom of this page (big pdf's) under the freedom of information act:



There have been other accidents at the INEL and many have released radioactive contaminants to the environment. The effects on the environment, surrounding area, surrounding people have arguably been nil. The location of the INEL makes a lot of sense despite potential geological instability due to it's extremely desolate location. It continues to be a productive facility, and research from it provides valid and viable techniques for environmental cleanup/decontamination effort should an accident occur.

So why fight Yucca? The INEL facility is probably less secure and is certainly more prone to accidents (due to active reactors, testing, etc.) than a facility simply storing spent fuel. The severity of the accidents that have occurred (and the results of decontamination/cleanup) show that environmental impact can be controlled in the case of an accident. It seems like a buried storage facility makes a hell of a lot of sense, but I guess we could vitrify the waste in glass blocks and throw it into the sea as some less scrupulous countries have.

Ever hear about the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory? It was put together after WWII for alot of the nuclear projects. Most of the naval nuclear stuff was developed there, and the navy has kept all of it's used cores (think of how many nuclear ships and submarines there have been over the years, and many had more than one core over their lifetime), and you can read about that here:



So, effectively, there IS a long-term storage facility for waste in the U.S.

But what a lot of people don't realize is that there have been some fairly large accidents there. The army had a poorly designed reactor that basically blew up (steam explosion due to extreme power excursion) in 1961. Data on that is availible at the bottom of this page (big pdf's) under the freedom of information act:



There have been other accidents at the INEL and many have released radioactive contaminants to the environment. The effects on the environment, surrounding area, surrounding people have arguably been nil. The location of the INEL makes a lot of sense despite potential geological instability due to it's extremely desolate location. It continues to be a productive facility, and research from it provides valid and viable techniques for environmental cleanup/decontamination effort should an accident occur.

So why fight Yucca? The INEL facility is probably less secure and is certainly more prone to accidents (due to active reactors, testing, etc.) than a facility simply storing spent fuel. The severity of the accidents that have occurred (and the results of decontamination/cleanup) show that environmental impact can be controlled in the case of an accident. It seems like a buried storage facility makes a hell of a lot of sense, but I guess we could vitrify the waste in glass blocks and throw it into the sea as some less scrupulous countries have.

Oh wait, we're just pumping that into the atmosphere directly. Never mind. Definitely continue with that. But nuclear, now that's bad news.
</rant>

Seriously, though, consider for a moment if we actually attempted to contain the 13,000,000 [short] tons of sulfur dioxide alone we produce each _year_ (a number semi-intelligently pulled from a DOE report from 1998.) 77,000 tons of solid waste doesn't seem all that difficult to handle by comparison, even considering how much of a pain in the butt it is to handle nukes.

By the way, as for "how do you label something so nobody will open it after you've been dead 1,000 years?" The answer: don't. If we put all this stuff inside a big pyramid, every archaeologist and their brother will be drooling, chisel in hand, to bust in--especially if it's got exotic looking warnings. Stick it halfway through a mountain and put some sticks over the entrance and you might get lucky and nobody will touch it by accident. No icon stands up over time ... when was the last time you saw the skull-and-crossbones warning on a bottle and assumed there was treasure inside?

I've been to various places in the 'bread basket' of the US. Kansas, Nebraska, etc. Lots of wide open land. Are installations of solar farms in these areas as disruptive? Are they disruptive?

Annual gas usage in the US: 400 million gallons

Just a note ahead of time. Some of the cars listed below are only available in certain parts of California and are only available in relatively low numbers.

Pure Electric:

2002 The Nissan Altra EV (pilot?)
2002 Ford Thi!nk City
2002 Toyota Rav4-EV
2002 Lido Motors Lido
2002 Ford Ranger EV (fleet only?)
2002 Nissan HyperMini (pilot only?)
Selectria Force (out of production?)

Hybrids:

2003 Honda Civic Hybrid
2002 Honda Insight
2002 Toyota Prius

Web Sites of Interest:

EV World
US DoE Alternative Fuel Car Buying Guide (many listed)
US DoE Alternative Fuel Vehicle Listing (many listed)
California ZEV Buyers Guide

I would say that does not inclue gasoline

This DOE site has a good amount of information about fuel-efficient cars. Among other things there is a list of this model year's hybrid cars.

HEVs have several advantages over conventional vehicles:

• Regenerative braking capability helps minimize energy loss and recover the energy used to slow down or stop a vehicle.
• Engines can be sized to accommodate average load, not peak load, which reduces the engine's weight.
• Fuel efficiency is greatly increased (hybrids consume significantly less fuel than vehicles powered by gasoline alone).
• Emissions are greatly decreased.
• HEVs can reduce dependency on fossil fuels because they can run on alternative fuels.
• Special lightweight materials are used to reduce the overall vehicle weight of HEVs.

It's called a fan. Most systems include that feature. Where you direct the warm air is up to you.

Many people do overrate the actual amount of heat generated. If your power supply is less than 1,000 watts, you can't even create as much heat as a toaster. Just a furnace fan uses 750 watts. An electric furnace is 8,500 watts.

And those aren't "fossil" fuels, they're abiogenic except for coal. It's not a matter of using it all, it's a matter of whether we use it faster than it trickles up.

There - now you can do all the training offline :)

Great, so, where's the patch that turns it into a The Sims-style system for the Army Corps of Engineers, where you go around installing solar roofs and handing out educational systems to disadvantaged third-world nations?

The only way to win is to not breed the festering terrorists that the marines have to shoot at in the first place.

Other info: State Energy Data Report for 1999 from the DOE. (The 2000 report isn't due out until Dec. 2002.)

Other info: State Energy Data Report for 1999 from the DOE. (The 2000 report isn't due out until Dec. 2002.)

How many people can hold the handle that turns the crank? Or in modern terms, how much juice can you reasonably throw at these beautiful monsters!?

So with this in mind, I don't think it's too off-topic to mention this article which talks about the gutting of funding for fuel cells. Or this student research paper site which talks about the inherent economy of different sources of energy in various terms. (Warning! They are pro-nuclear, so YMMV!) Also, if you are interested in where this topic takes you you should stop off here to follow up on whatever takes your fancy as far as energy production goes. They've got a veritable mountain of info. Check out their hydrogen economy stuff.

Whoever thought up the names of the two machines needs to get a grant or something! Green Destiny, mmmmmmm! Q, grooowwwl!

I've read more than you ever have.

Ooops. How did you find that out so quickly? Omniscience is hard to beat. I'll never have such fast access to hard facts.

You win. Now I know you know better.

Got me. There is no oil or gas near the Caspian Sea. Neither is the USA interested in a pipeline through Afghanistan. Maybe just paranoid delusions spread by some left-wing faction of the DOE.

And although having started to read at the age of 4, 34 years ago, I still like to learn from the best. Therefore, I humbly ask you to give me some reading suggestions that will enlighten me on the True Course of Events and demystify all these left-wing lies (in my ignorance I didn't even know they where left-handed, let alone left-winged) and conspiracy theories I've been told.

I've never even read about "Illuminati", except in fiction works. It's clear that I'm no match for a sub-genius, nay, a genius like you.

I've read more than you ever have.

Ooops. How did you find that out so quickly? Omniscience is hard to beat. I'll never have such fast access to hard facts.

You win. Now I know you know better.

Got me. There is no oil or gas near the Caspian Sea. Neither is the USA interested in a pipeline through Afghanistan. Maybe just paranoid delusions spread by some left-wing faction of the DOE.

And although having started to read at the age of 4, 34 years ago, I still like to learn from the best. Therefore, I humbly ask you to give me some reading suggestions that will enlighten me on the True Course of Events and demystify all these left-wing lies (in my ignorance I didn't even know they where left-handed, let alone left-winged) and conspiracy theories I've been told.

I've never even read about "Illuminati", except in fiction works. It's clear that I'm no match for a sub-genius, nay, a genius like you.

"Yeah!! There's so much oil in Afghanistan its not even funny!"

Uh, no, but there is TONS in Turkmenistan and we have been wanting a pipeline through Afghanistan for a long time now. Why do think we were so in favor of supporting a top advisor to the El Segundo, California-based UNOCAL Corporation as the interim prime minister? Haven't you been paying attention? Or do you just use what ABC McNews tells (or doesn't tell you) to form your perception of reality?

Christ, wake the fuck up. No wonder the rest of the world thinks we are ignorant jingos.

Solar is my favorite energy source for splitting water.

To support a transportation system even remotely comparable to today's using hydrogen as a fuel would require a completely unrealistic amount of solar plant capacity.

In 1999, the world used 38.7 million barrels of petroleum a day for transportation. That is about 82 quads (10^15 BTU) per year in energy. That is an average of 1 million megawatts. The total world electricity consumption is about 13 x 10^12 kW hours per year, or an average of 1.5 million megawatts.

That is, you would need nearly *all* the electricity used by the world to produce the fuel energy used for transportation, assuming 100% efficient conversion.

The total solar energy hitting the earth's surface in a year is about 10,000 quads. At 30% cell efficiency, you would have to cover about 10% of the world land area with PV cells, neglecting efficiency losses due to clouds, etc., just to provide for today's transportation usage.

Oil isn't really used any more in the U.S. for Electricity generation.

You are correct! I was suprised to note that:

2000 Net generation: 3.8 trillion kilowatthours
Coal 52%
Nuclear 20%
Gas 16%
Hydro 7%
Oil 3%
Non-hydro Renewable 2%

Still, the transportation industry is heavily dependent on petroleum, and if we switched from petroleum to hydrogen-based or electric, we would need to bump the power generation correspondingly - which still means nukes, because all of the others above are limited.

Solar energy is a pratically infinite source of energy, and we have not even begun to tap its potential. Sooner or later we are gonna run out of oil, and solar is the future. this shows that we dont big ugly solar farms to get the same result

The main problem is the terrible efficiency at which the current collection methods operate. It turns out that once you add everything up, you come up with a power/pollution ratio for solar energy which is far above that of fossil fuels.

Sandia Labs Solar Thermal Facilities

DOE Whitepaper

Concentrating Solar Power

IMHO, this technology could be that disrutptive technology (ala GNU/Linux) that could upset the current status quo in energy generation. If these systems were deployed equitorially around the entire globe, it would definitely be a good start to significantly reducing our dependence on non-renewable fuels.

As for solar panels power/pollution ration, I'd be interested in seeing some actual stats. I have heard it stated that there has been an enourmous amount of politics (go figure) surrounding various solar cell efficiency studies sponsered by the DOE since their initial rise to fame in the 70's. The Oil industry has a vested interest in keeping us hooked up to their pipelines.

As with any disruptive technology, there are likely large forces at work to supress it's wide spread deployment. The powers that be have no vested interest in producing non-polluting, cheap energy for the masses. It would shift the power of production away from large industry and back to common man. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I have been known to be wrong.

Also, people like to bitch a lot about the aesthetics of large scale solar installations (of any kind) but they never seem to talk about the blight of fossil-fuel based production plants and pipelines, nor the environmental impact that the latter have. I'd rather have millions of acres of large reflecting mirrors and photovoltaic systems producing renewable clean energy over environmentally damaging fossil fuel systems any day.

EOM

Always the realist, eh? I agree with your theory that vast supplies of oil will not suddenly disappear. I also agree with your logical cycle of "increased price/reduced dependency" which will magically wean us from oil just as a child might be switched from breast milk to formula.

What you fail to take into account is the evil and greed of those who control the oil. Last I checked there are a lot Bad People in the world. The supply of oil to the US can, has been, and will be disrupted. America's oil reserves can't snap into action on a moments notice, and when they are running, the price of oil will be a lot more than what we're used to. Add to that the terror effect and watch the lines at the gas station form up. Look up the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. Here's a bunch of fun data. I doubt the 'end' of fossil fuels will be as peaceful as you predict.

Unfortunately, fissionable stuff is running out just as quickly as burnable.

True, since neither one is running out any time soon.

Breeder reactors could keep us going for millenia, and there's enough natural gas in the form of gas hydrates in the deep oceans to last several hundred years at least.

For Mr. Cite-Geek below,

Nuclear Fuel:
"Known uranium reserves are sufficient to supply the world's needs for many centuries"

"The use of
breeder reactors could extend the availibility of nuclear fission resources another 100,000 years."

Gas hydrates:

[Two regions off the Carolinas] contain more than 70 times the 1989 gas consumption of the United States

"Worldwide, estimates of the natural gas potential of methane hydrates approach 400 million trillion cubic feet -- a staggering figure compared to the 5,000 trillion cubic feet that make up the world's currently known gas reserves.

Let's see YOUR cites, Greenie.

Nobody knows how much oil is left. The best we have are "estimates", which themselves have have significant degrees of uncertainty. Based on my reading, I'd say the amount of actual known reserves might vary by a factor of 2-3x due to various players hiding their cards and understating or overstating their known/suspected reserves. It's not in each players' interest to disclose how little or large their reserves are.

And I'd guess current estimates of reserves could underestimate actual supply by 10-1000x based on what we don't know about geological areas around the world, about how oil is formed, about how to efficiently extract it. While these might not effect "reserves" under a strict version of your definition, they obviously would affect "supply" which I think was what your initial question was asking ('how much oil is left?')

With those caveats in mind, I offer you two links to address your question.

The US Department of Energy's global reserve estimates, and

a mid-2001 analysis of defining and analyzing the primary sources of global reserve figures by Jean Laherrere. I can't vouch for his analysis (the chart on the bottom of page 5 shows reported reserves going up but his analysis of them going down, something I haven't read closely enough to understand) since I've only run across it today, and a website named oilcrisis.org might indicate some bias, but I've seen his name before and its a resource worth checking out if you want to know how much oil is left.

--LP

Links, please? I'd like to know where you got all this information, because frankly, I don't believe it.

EIA estimates that, based on recent USGS estimates of the global oil resource base, worldwide oil production is likely to continue increasing for more than three decades.

The Department of Energy defines petroleum as: "A generic term applied to oil and oil products in all forms, such as crude oil, lease condensate, unfinished oils, petroleum products, natural gas plant liquids, and nonhydrocarbon compounds blended into finished petroleum products."

And, of course, that something isn't "that big a deal in the overall scheme of things" doesn't mean it isn't worth trying to prevent. It does mean that there are other things more important to try to prevent, and if a choice has to be made (and a choice always has to be made at some point, because that's how the real world works), we should handle the more important things first.

Yes, but Iraq was provided millions of dollars of miliary equipment from the U.S. in the '80s (to fund its war against Ayatollah Khomeini). Cheney's company helped rebuilt Iraq's oil industry after the Gulf War.

The U.S. was convicted of war crimes due to the way it conducted the Gulf War. It's estimated that 500,000 Iraqi children have died during the U.S. embargo (even though Iraq is still America's fourth largest oil supplier).

The situation isn't so black and white.

You might be remembering something like this site.

Using microwave energy on sulfur gas to provide large scale lighting
Sulfurlamp.com has a picture of the bulb containing the Sulfur
Two sulfur lamp, hollow light guide retrofit lighting systems demonstrated at Portland, Oregon with pictures of the light and the lighting system installed at the premises
Google search on microwave sulfur lamp
Google search on microwave sulfur lamp fusion Lighting

Some Experiments

Fluorescent tube in a Microwave
Microwaving high-pressure sodium vapor lamps

This looks like a niche product. It's not even clear that Fusion Lighting is still in business. Their web site is essentially defunct. Their web site used to have some nice pictures of glass bulbs and more info, but now, it's just a starter page.

First, unused cycles are ordinarily "optimized out" by my CPU. In other words, it runs slower and consumes less electricity when not being used. Most modern CPUs go into a low-power-consumption mode when not actively performing real processing. (If you doubt this, check your CPU temperature while it's been sitting idle with a blank screen for an hour or two. Compare that to the temperature after playing an hour of Quake III or even just running a graphics intensive screen saver for an hour. I know I could certainly feel the difference when I was running the distributed.net client at home. I just wish I had metered it.) So, I "hereby grant BDE the right to access and use the unused computing power" is another way of saying I will freely donate my electricity. Let's find out just how "free" that is.

First, let's assume that I pay $.0816/kWh for electricity (the 1999 national consumer average (page 14).) Let's also assume that I leave the computer powered on constantly (because I do.) Finally, let's assume that my computer consumes 60W when idle, but 120W when actively crunching numbers (because it's an Athlon.) So that's an extra 60W/hr I would unknowningly consume on behalf of Kazaa.

• 60W/hr x 8766 hours/year = 525960 watt-hours per year.
• 525960 / 1000 = 525.960 kWh per year
• 525.960 * $.0816/kWh = $42.91 per year.

Look at it a different way: Assume there are 2,000,000 KaZaa users.

• 60W/hr * 2,000,000 = 120,000,000 watt-hours.

Is it still so unreasonable to ask them to say "Click here to agree with the above and oh, by the way, we're going to use about $40 worth of your electricity per year", or does something a bit more drastic have to happen?

The interesting thing about gravity is that it isn't well understood by modern physics.
Totally untrue. General relativity is understood very well. Predictions for Binary pulsar systems agree very well with observation (many decimal places).

General relativity is fine, but we have no way of reconciling it with quantum physics. Or rather, we have a bunch of competing theories, but none of them is proven yet. Discovery magazine listed as one of it's 11 unanswered questions for modern physics "What is gravity?". Maybe you should write in and explain it to them? :)

The Standard Model of particle physics does not account for gravity. It is assumed there is a carrier particle for gravity called the gravitron, but this has not been detected. If anyone is still reading this thread, many many illuminating links can be found from this google search.

See this DOE link which shows "Average Revenue per Kilowatthour for the Residential Sector by State and Utility, 2000".

They are all around 6 cents /KWh.

0.1 KW (100 watts) constant * 24 * 365 * $.06 = $52.56 per year.

Hybrid Electric Vehicles are neat too:

Honda Insight: 61/68mpg manual, 57/56 automatic
Toyota Prius: 52/45mpg automatic
Honda Civic Hybrid: 48/47mpg manual, 46/51 automatic

Listen to your friends at the DOE They say methane hydrate is so prevalent it would take us a thousand years to use it all up even if we all wire our houses up as high voltage plasma labs and commute a hundred miles to work and it wouldn't require a fuel cell infrastructure to be useful. So, relax, turn on some of those lights, run the dryer for an extra cycle. Leave the door open with the air conditioner on. There's plenty of energy and there always will be.

If you just hate burning dead swamp muck, there's the pages at Sandia with Bush himself saying how concentrated solar using nothing but mirrors could also easily handle the US power needs in a space the size of lake mead.

The question isn't "is there an answer to the problem?" as much as a question of "what exactly is the problem we're trying to answer and who decided it was a problem?"
I'm proud of having been liberal to the point of extremisim all my life and hope I always will be, but the evidence seems to suggest that burning oil is nowhere near as bad for the environment as many people have feared in the past and this crap about running out of oil twenty years from now has been going on since at least the seventies. I think it would be more realistic to assume that these alternatives will only become useful when they become cheap and that this is not such a terrible thing.
I think there is room for the MP3 analogy, but it's not going to happen with hydrogen. The infrastructure trade-off makes it no different than existing oil and gas, much more likely to be revolutionary in the sense of MP3, Divx is going to be high powered nanotech solar panels. Now that is what scares the shit out of petroleum companies because there's no infrastructure to control. Their product becomes irrelevant. As long as you've got abundant electricity, powering up a fuel cell car is not a problem and electric kicks ass all over diesel for torque.

The U.S. Department of Energy reports that 8.7% of electricity generated comes from natural gas. I would think it would be technically feasible to convert these plants to hydrogen, since it would probably use similar pipeline and boiler design. The CO2 emissions decrease would be substantial.

It would be interesting to see the effect of burning hydrogen and putting a lot more water vapor into the air... (Looks like rain again today!)

Remember that movie "The Arrival" ? Power-plants, I mean teraform factories.

Btw, you know there's a form of solid methane called Methane Hydrate on the ocean floor?

Ooops. Try this

I can't believe the arrogance of this poster! There is so much work that is being done in this area, and this geek thinks he can just solve all the problems while goofing off at work? Before you or anyone wastes any more time, please take a look at a small sample of the good info that is already out there: Tons of info!,DOE's Hydro Porgram, The old shut down coean thermal program, and a good survey from the CA energy commission.

Actually, if the handheld trickle charged from a PV coating, it would extend battery life significantly, if not indefinitely. Most people don't use their handheld anywhere near 8 hours a day. Next generation combination gameboy, handheld, cellphone, wireless web, etc. may have a much higher duty cycle and the trickle charging effect may not be enough to help significantly.

Cheap PV is not even close for the rest of the world to tell the oil-producing nations to stuff it. Breakthroughs in energy storage are also essential. The tranportation sector used 26.6 percent of the total USA energy demand in 2000. But consumed 68% of the petroleum used. Why? -- primarily storage density, convenience, and portability. Coal is messy for end-consumers, nuclear & hydro are not portable (as are non-solar renewables). This leaves petroleum as a practical transportation energy source.

Duty cycle is very important for PV charged devices. Daily commute on PV charged electric vehicles, no problem. Driving from Chicago to Disneyland for vacation, big problem. Hybrid vehicle with PV charging, and gasoline burner to charge system when duty cycle is extended sounds great. Problem is energy storage density in the batteries

The Honda Insight hybrid is a good consumer design hybrid because it does not attempt to store a significant amount of power -- only 6.5 amp hours (144 volt). This is enough to run the 10 KW electric motor at full power for 5.6 minutes. To make PV trickle charged vehicles useful for the typical consumer, energy storage must be improved, and that has been only slowly getting better.

Cheap PV charging for long-haul trucking, etc. does not help significantly because the duty cycle is simply insurmountable, but could be useful for running the refrigeration units, or reducing energy costs, but these types of vehicles will still need a means to quickly take of fuel / recharge while in use.

Finally, the energy storage mechanism is just as big of a problem for distributed grid power. Electricity is produced on demand, and only rarely stored becaused there is not an economical method to store/retrieve large amounts of energy. Due to large differences in peak/nighttime energy cost off the grid, there are some systems in place that work, but none of them are really economical for large scale deployment, and they also lose a large fraction of the energy. Energy trasnmission losses are generally under 5%, mostly much lower. Store/release energy loses are sometimes higher than 30% (pump water uphill at night, flow downhill through a turbine at peak -- one of the more successful methods BTW). Possible energy storage methods include : better batteries, rechargable fuel-cell (aka battery), synthetic hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or other substitute for petroleum.

I'm not knocking cheap PV, but don't think this solves all of our energy problems. You want to be as rich as Bill G, solve the energy storage problem. If you would be happy just being as rich as your average billionare, solve the problem with converting all the cheap PV direct current into alternating current (with small loss in a low-cost, low-maint device, able to sync with the grid)

Anyway, I always view these chicken little reports as a communist "Lets screw the US!" ploy

First off:

BWAHAHAHAHA! What decade are you from, man?

Second, and hopefully less denegrating: I concern myself with US policies because I am first and foremost a US citizen. I want my drinking water and air to be clean so that me and mine can live healthy lives if we chose to do so. I would hope that our government and various NGO's would pressure whatever governments are polluting the environment to try and stop it, but when I bitch about the US it is because I live there.

Now, there is that little matter of the US's disproportionally large demand for energy. And most of that is being generated from coal powered plants, which are definately *not* clean, even if you discount CO2 as a factor. Russia and Japan haven't signed Kyoto because *combined* they consume less than half of the energy that the US does. If the world's major polluter refuses to play, why should they? (For the record, I do think that they should sign it regardless of what the US does.)

In any case, you seem to be saying that because other nation's sin that it is OK if we do so. In other words, that two wrongs make a right. They do not.

"Also, you say 'right now' in your post - it's right now and looking like forever. There haven't been any new nuke plants commissioned since 1979. All orders after 1973 have been cancelled. Nuclear power is on its way out as a consumer power supply."

Wrong wrong wrong! No new nuclear plants have been ordered since 1979. There were several plants that completed construction and low power testing and received full power licenses all through the 1980's and even the first part of the 1990's! Look up the Seabrook Station (1990) in NH and check out it's entering commercial service date. Also ANO2 (1980), San Onofre (1984), Diablo Canyon (1985), Commanche Peak (1993), Watts Bar (1996). I could go on and on. But facts aren't going to dissuade you obviously, never mind.

It actually is a potential reality, though:

http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/factsheets/pr oject/Proj070.pdf

And here is a picture of a small disc of transparent aluminum

Ahh, Google, my friend.

Given that we spend over $500 billion on electricity every year here in the US, we could probably afford to spend a little more on technology that is finally coming of age.

Just realise, that for example, 10,000,000,000 neutrinos pass through our fingernail each second. Do you feel it?

But, of course, this claim is total BS, but it makes for a funny article.. ;)

Why, instead fo it, we do not invest the cost of B2 bombers program into Fusion research..

From a cursory Google search, at the time of the invasion there was no solid evidence of Somalia oil riches. It borders an oil rich area, and two geologists found promising signs after performing nine core tests, but it wasn't known if any potential reserves were extractable. These current goverment figures show Somalia has close to the lowest oil reserves in the world. According to the CIA factbook, Somalia today has a total of just 15 km of oil pipeline.

The crux of Chomsky's argument is that the US sent in troop to secure oils resources. I can't find any figures from qualified sources that they exist. A decade after the fact, have Chomsky's reasoning been confirmed?

Practical? A quick browse of TrainWeb revealed that a typical locomotive diesel cranks out about 4500 horsepower, which is about 3.4 megawatts. The DOE expects fuel cell efficiency to reach 75% by 2015, whereas diesels peak at about 45%. So figure a fuel-cell-powered locomotive would require about 2MW. Energy Research Corp. is developing multi-megawatt generators for the Navy, so a rail version isn't too great of a stretch. One of DOE's goals in this same timeframe is to cut the cost of fuel cell energy to two-thirds that of a diesel generator, so a fuel-cell locomotive may even be cost effective before long.

&nbsp&nbsp ddb (who has a vague, grainy-black-and-white childhood memory of seeing a steam-powered freight, ca. 1958)

Check out geothermal cooling. Dig about 5 - 7 feet down into the ground and you've got a consistent temperature *year 'round*. The temperature happens to be ideal for cooling in the summer and heating in the winter.

It'd be *ultra geek* if you could set up a processor cooler based on this technology.