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In the high power industry, resistive loads often do use water. Usually just as a coolant though.

You do have more than a theory... I saw one article where a dumpster was filled with water, and electrodes passed a current though the water as a make-shift test load for a small-scale hydro dam.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/power/tech_access/docs/ 37_hydropower_for_remote_alaskan_community.cfm

Fuck you. It's our desert, not yours. When Nevada builds a nuclear power plant, maybe we'll consider it.

The truth is that presently, we don't know of a cleaner, ecologically-safer way to generate power than fission.

Really? What about this, this, or this.

You are only looking at a very narrow slice of the big picture.

Both of you are scum.

I do believe that is false economy. The wear on the receptacle and plug itself will likely cause premature replacement of either. Meaning...

You will pay more for parts than for the electricity ($1.25 for the entire lifetime of the device, or, about 30 cents yearly).

The fact is, the scientists are releasing a paper about science, and the fact it has political ramifications is just sad.

"Just scientists" don't organize to engage in "public advocacy, and educational activities focus[ing] on global environmental problems, climate change, energy policy and technology, transportation reform, sustainable agriculture and biotechnology, arms control, and nuclear power safety."

It's a fucking POLITICAL group of scientists. As the grandparent said, that doesn't necessarily make their claims incorrect, but to deny that they are politically motiviated WHEN THEY THEMSELVES claim to just plain pathetic.

The UCS site is currently slashdotted. The quote above is from http://www.eere.energy.gov/bro/neen/resources/ucs. html

The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid that can barely keep up with the current demand.

Any major failure in the system can cause a cascading failure of the entire section of the grid. That is a horrible design.

The grid in the North East US is supplied by horribly inefficient and antiquated power lines that were struggling to keep up thirty years ago. That they are still in use today is an outright crime.

Unfortunately the real cause of the black out is not ever going to be patched and another blackout is as inevitable as this last one was.

So, no, that tank won't go three times farther on H2 than on diesel. It will actually have only 1/3 the range.

As usual, distorted facts are reported on Slashdot as gospel.

Biodiesel
Alcohol fuels
Biomass
Thermal Depolymerization

All viable ways to "grow" sources of energy...

...and maybe if we give the farmers something useful to grow (Energy crops), we won't have to pay them to not grow anything (ween them off subsidies - Nearly $75 billion spent last year in the US alone to keep farmers employed because there isn't a market for the stuff they grow). May as well earn their money growing sometihng useful!

Not like the market for energy is going to be going anywhere anytime soon, and this might just put the US back-in-black in terms of energy production vs. usage. With the USA's crop production capacity we might even be able to generate a surplus and export it...
=Smidge=

Why, exactly, is hydrogen a pipe dream? My father works for the DOE on hydrogen, and while there certainly are challenges with the technology, I'm not sure it's wise to write it off as a "pipe dream"... ??

Starting around 14:14 EDT, FE's control room operators lost the alarm function that provided audible and visual indications when a significant piece of equipment changed from an acceptable to problematic condition. Shortly thereafter, the EMS system lost a number of it's remote control consoles. Next it lost the primary server computer that was hosting the alarm functions and then the backup server such that all functions that were being supported on thes servers were stopped at 14:54 EDT. ... FE's system operators remaind unaware ... [and used] outdated system condition information they did have to discount information from others ...

Note also that they lost their state estimator due to poor data feeds and formats - a direct result of using M$ "standards".

I imagine that the Blaster worm worked it's way onto the network, disabled all terminals and made the poor little GE system puke. The data was available in digital form, page 29:

...the operators can potentially continue to use the EMS ... via repetitive, continuous manuall scanning of numerous data status points located within the multitude of idividual diplays available ... it would be difficult for the operator to identifiy quickly the most relavant of the many screens available.

They kept getting good data, even at their teminals, but the alarm program was broken.

.."stalled" while processing an alarm event, such that the process began to run in a manner that failed to complete the processing of that alarm or produce any other valid output. In the mean time, new inputs - system conditions data that needed to be reviewd for possible alarms - built up in and then overflowed the process input buffers."

It only gets uglier from there. Remote data terminals failing, datalinks down, all sorts of Microsoft induced problems. It's very easy, even without seeing the name to know who to blame. Only Microsoft could perpetuate such a widespread and massive failure.

"It is important to note that there is no "national power grid" in the
United States. In fact, the continental United States is divided into three
main power grids:

• The Eastern Interconnected System, or the Eastern Interconnect
  
• The Western Interconnected System, or the Western Interconnect
  
• The Texas Interconnected System, or the Texas Interconnect

The answer is a hydrogen fuel cell generator in every home. Each private home will have it's own power source and we shall be independant of the power grid. And no diesel fog! Check it out here.

• 1 Gallon of Gas contains 132x10^6 joules of energy, equivalent to 125,000 BTU, 36.650 kwh(kilo-watt-hours), 31,000 food calories.
  
• A 70mpg Hybrid sips 0.52 kwh/mile, the average 20mpg car uses 1.76 kwh/mile and The Hummer H2 wastes 3.7 kwh/mile or more.
  
• Electric Vehicles use from 0.2 to 0.6 kwh/mile, that's up to 18 times more efficient. EV Album
  
• 7.5 Billion miles at 0.4 kwh/mile is just 3,000 Giga-Watt-Hours, as compared to 13,000 GWH. 23% as much power.
  
• America currently produces 27.3 Giga-Watts-Hours per day with wind power alone.AWEA
  

RTFP

6pm EST, Sept 12, 2003, after repeated nmappings and traceroutes (as curious /.ers try to find out why their site melted, what they were running, etc.), Department of Homeland Security claims that site is under cyber-attack.

5 pints of gasoline (70,000 BTUs) vs 3.4 pounds of hydrogen (175,000 BTUs)

and they shit alot.

The same techniques can be applied to sewage treatment, and the energy produced can reduce or eliminate the cost of sewage treatment, and may possibly produce enough to create a revenue stream for whatever municipalities go this route.

Sewage is not the only source of biogas produced by New York, there is also the 2100 acre Fresh Kills Landfill. Landfill to electric programs are being implemented, as seen by this report on renewable energy sources in Pennsylvania.

As for the proximity of farms to large cities, you'd be surprised, there are large agricultural areas in New York (State), New Jersey, and Connecticut that are much closer to New York than where most of the city's power now comes from.

Renewable resources are never going to eliminate the energy conglomerates, but they may take away a little of thier business, reduce the cost of energy, and possibly help municipalities to balance thier budgets (ie: reduce taxes).

and they shit alot.

The same techniques can be applied to sewage treatment, and the energy produced can reduce or eliminate the cost of sewage treatment, and may possibly produce enough to create a revenue stream for whatever municipalities go this route.

Sewage is not the only source of biogas produced by New York, there is also the 2100 acre Fresh Kills Landfill. Landfill to electric programs are being implemented, as seen by this report on renewable energy sources in Pennsylvania.

As for the proximity of farms to large cities, you'd be surprised, there are large agricultural areas in New York (State), New Jersey, and Connecticut that are much closer to New York than where most of the city's power now comes from.

Renewable resources are never going to eliminate the energy conglomerates, but they may take away a little of thier business, reduce the cost of energy, and possibly help municipalities to balance thier budgets (ie: reduce taxes).

Try here. They have all sorts of goodies on their website. Guides to energy efficient housing, appliances, calculators, and links to other resources.

All your rare nuclear ore belongs to us!

2 CH3-OH + 3 O2 -> 2 CO2 + 4 H2O

i.e. 2 mols (64 grams) Methanol will produce 4 mols (72 grams) of water. Where does the water go? (And when will /. allow  tags?)

Does anyone know what the energy balance is from that reaction? There are some slides here but my chem classes were too long ago. In other words - considering the actual efficiency of these fuel cells, how much water will be produced for, say, an energy of 50 Wh, which is kinda typical for a modern LiIon battery?

Once hydrides take off. Storage shouldn't be as big an issue.

The entire United States of America can be converted to wind powered electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area

I guess we can shut down all our other powerplants then: according to Wind Farms and Wind Farmers, the Tehachapi Wind Farm in California is 40 square miles (25000+ acres), and the San Gorgonio Pass farm is even bigger at 70 sq miles... They don't say how big the Altamont Pass farm is, just that these are the three largest windfarms in the world, so I expect it to be similarly sized...

I was under the impression that the "hydrogen-based economy" would actually transport its energy around in a more easily handled form, e.g. methanol which can be trucked around and handled more easily than pure hydrogen.

To me, this paper appears to be saying: "If the hydrogen economy is based around this arbitrary and unworkable assumption we made, bad things would happen!" Well, okay...

Why aren't these billionaires exploring the depths of the oceans as James "King of the World" Cameron does?

Surely there's interesting stuff down there, like nucular radiation-enlarged squids, slime monsters and maybe a Godzilla-like creature or two.

Are any of them funding research into solar cells, wind technology, tidal power or geothermal or is it all a great big ego boost?

"And you believe a guy whose family is heavily invested in the oil industry?"

Well, considering how back in late January the Bush Administration rejoined the Internationa Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project (details of the move here), the one that the Clinton Administration pulled out of in 1998, I'd say "yes."

Actually the Carnot cycle puts a limit on the conversion of heat energy into any other form of energy (kinetic, potential, electrical, magnetic, chemical, nuclear, etc). However, heat is the only form of energy so limited. Other conversions, say chemical => electrical are only limited by the second law of thermodynamics. For that matter, converting any other energy to heat can be very efficient. Electrical energy => heat, for example.

So, something like a microturbine is limited to ~30% efficiency for electricity generation. Larger plants can get up to 35% efficiency. A fuel cell has no such limit and could potentially reach into the 90% range for efficiency of electricity generation. Hybrid fuel cell-turbine generation systems are being tested which have efficiencies of over 50% and they speculate that they could hit 70% or more. The problem with such a system is that the upfront cost is very high and it does not get offset by the savings in fuel. Not yet, anyway.

Remember too that conversion of any energy to heat can be very efficient. Natural gas furnaces can be extremely efficient, as high as 97%. That's because converting chemical energy => heat is not a Carnot limited process, and is only limited by the second law of thermodynamics.

Actually the Carnot cycle puts a limit on the conversion of heat energy into any other form of energy (kinetic, potential, electrical, magnetic, chemical, nuclear, etc). However, heat is the only form of energy so limited. Other conversions, say chemical => electrical are only limited by the second law of thermodynamics. For that matter, converting any other energy to heat can be very efficient. Electrical energy => heat, for example.

So, something like a microturbine is limited to ~30% efficiency for electricity generation. Larger plants can get up to 35% efficiency. A fuel cell has no such limit and could potentially reach into the 90% range for efficiency of electricity generation. Hybrid fuel cell-turbine generation systems are being tested which have efficiencies of over 50% and they speculate that they could hit 70% or more. The problem with such a system is that the upfront cost is very high and it does not get offset by the savings in fuel. Not yet, anyway.

Remember too that conversion of any energy to heat can be very efficient. Natural gas furnaces can be extremely efficient, as high as 97%. That's because converting chemical energy => heat is not a Carnot limited process, and is only limited by the second law of thermodynamics.

Apparently in salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana coast.

• Energy efficiency. If the environmental arguments don't grab you, perhaps the monetary ones would. With an insulative value of > R50 and signifigant thermal mass, straw bale homes pose a variety of advantages on both the heating and cooling fronts. What advantages/disadvantages do other technologies hold?
• Sustainability of the construction methods. Now as a fan of people like Julian Simon, I don't tend to be much impressed by arguments that we're "running out of raw materials!". Human ingenuity tends to make the supply of raw materials infinite, simply by changing what is considered valuable. That said, here in CA there are vast quantities of rice straw that (as of 2000) it is illegal to burn. That means that not only is it ecologically friendly to use that "waste product" of agriculture, it is also extremely affordable!
• Last, but not least, is the economics of the whole idea of housing. Even in a "white collar" job that is considered privileged by most, housing is quite expensive. Where I live (in the central valley) the wages for IT professionals is 1/2 to 1/3 the wages in the Bay Area. Housing is proportionally less expensive, but new houses with small lots in my city start around $200k. Spending 250-300k is not difficult... but I don't have that kind of money yet and am not eager to commit to a 30 year $300k mortgage. In part my solution is to choose building methods that are inherently less expensive and that allow for the possibility of significant 'unskilled' labor in the construction of the home. Not only does this satisfy my pocketbook, but being involved in the construction, design, etc satisfies my hobbyist side.

Two-stroke engines are great contributors to the incredible pollution of places like Dhaka or New Delhi. India is trying to get away from the ill-maintained motor scooters on gas/oil mixtures to hydrogen or, even more practical given the amount of animal manure available there, methanol. Discussion here with insight from a guy working in this problem. Fossil fuels just won't cut it because of the double headed monster of carbon fuel pollution and a multiplier effect of unmaintained equipment burning that same fuel.

I don't have the numbers with me but it wasn't hard to show that it takes a lot of wind to generate a single GGE (gallon of gasoline equivalent) of hydrogen. However, considering the vast subsidies we pay for oil (not even counting military and environmental expenses), it seems clear that there is a lot of money to be made.

Regarding the "chicken and egg" problem of "who wants to buy a hydrogen car if there are no hydrogen stations" and "who wants to build hydrogen stations if there are no hydrogen cars", a strategy had occurred to me. Begin the program by providing energy to businesses and cities to run stuff other than cars. There's no reason you couldn't use hydrogen to generate the electricity used in a factory or city water plant. From the brief economic analysis I did it looked feasible to locate fuel cells at the desination (where the electricity is needed) and deliver & store the hydrogen there.

The customer could remain on the power grid to provide backup power in case there was a hydrogen deliver problem (it's new so there will be problems. If they have excess generating capacity there's no reason they couldn't sell power back into the grid.

Using hydrogen in this way would reduce the company's or city's pollution output and might make them eligible for pollution credits (if the US ever decides to join the Kyoto Protocol or something similar).

Selling hydrogen to individual customers with large demand and few & fixed locations would provide a simpler business model as hydrogen production is getting started. As such producers/distributors proliferate, setting up H2-gas stations will be more feasible.

If we don't do it soon in the US then Europe or someone else will do it first and we'll miss out on the economic advantages of controlling market direction.

Another DOE page

I don't have the numbers with me but it wasn't hard to show that it takes a lot of wind to generate a single GGE (gallon of gasoline equivalent) of hydrogen. However, considering the vast subsidies we pay for oil (not even counting military and environmental expenses), it seems clear that there is a lot of money to be made.

Regarding the "chicken and egg" problem of "who wants to buy a hydrogen car if there are no hydrogen stations" and "who wants to build hydrogen stations if there are no hydrogen cars", a strategy had occurred to me. Begin the program by providing energy to businesses and cities to run stuff other than cars. There's no reason you couldn't use hydrogen to generate the electricity used in a factory or city water plant. From the brief economic analysis I did it looked feasible to locate fuel cells at the desination (where the electricity is needed) and deliver & store the hydrogen there.

The customer could remain on the power grid to provide backup power in case there was a hydrogen deliver problem (it's new so there will be problems. If they have excess generating capacity there's no reason they couldn't sell power back into the grid.

Using hydrogen in this way would reduce the company's or city's pollution output and might make them eligible for pollution credits (if the US ever decides to join the Kyoto Protocol or something similar).

Selling hydrogen to individual customers with large demand and few & fixed locations would provide a simpler business model as hydrogen production is getting started. As such producers/distributors proliferate, setting up H2-gas stations will be more feasible.

If we don't do it soon in the US then Europe or someone else will do it first and we'll miss out on the economic advantages of controlling market direction.

Another DOE page

Check AWU about the possibilities at these facilities.

Also, check these:

Sandia

Los Alamos

Argonne

Brookhaven

Pacific Northwest

Lawrence Berkeley

Lawrence Livermore

Oak Ridge

And there are other other national labs that I did not mention.

The part I like best is that the CO2 produced is not only less of a greenhouse gas than the mathane, but since it comes from the grass and grain that the cows ate, it is completely renewable, and we can take it back out of the air by growing more grass and grain.

It would be interesting to see how much of my natural gas bill I could save by digesting lawn clippings, old newspapers, and other garbage I would normally have dumped in a landfill. By skipping the cow phase, I lose the milk, but I should get more methane per pound of grass.

The data here seem to indicate that pig and chicken farmers would get twice the methane that the dairy farmer gets. And handling the waste from pig farms is a big problem that this may help solve.

More info here.

There is a new kind of drill bit with bidirectional 1Mbps bandwidth built-in. Check out the press release.

"The key to the new system is a unique non-contacting coupler embedded in connections between 30-foot long sections of drill pipe. The coupler permits data to be sent across the connection and on through a high-speed cable attached to the inner pipe wall."

Well, I know I'm in the minority here, but as an employee of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose security rules come from the U.S. Department of Energy I can say that all of our janitors have a background check.

I guess sometimes the signals of affection are a bit too subtle? (See page 2 of chapter 8 of our Vice President's (in)famous energy policy to see what I mean...)

--LP

P.S. FYI, Canada and the oil sands are mentioned explicitly on page 8 in that chapter.
P.P.S. By the way, whoever came up with naming gummy tar "oil sands" deserves a marketing medal in my book.

I guess sometimes the signals of affection are a bit too subtle? (See page 2 of chapter 8 of our Vice President's (in)famous energy policy to see what I mean...)

--LP

P.S. FYI, Canada and the oil sands are mentioned explicitly on page 8 in that chapter.
P.P.S. By the way, whoever came up with naming gummy tar "oil sands" deserves a marketing medal in my book.

It is true that we don't use all that much from the mideast. The US uses roughly 6mil barrels/day. 45% of that is from local production. Canada at 15%, Saudi and Venezuela at 14% and Mexico at 12%. (PDF Data here)

We get 14% of our oil from the Middle east, while Europe and Asia get near 100% (minus whatever local production they have in each country.) However, the theory that we're interested in Mideast oil to stop other countries from forming militaries is silly, they couldn't form (successful) militaries without oil, unless they went to non-conventional, which Asia/Europe already has access too. More likely, as much as oil is a concern at all, it stems from the reality that any decrease in Mideast supply would increase worldwide price. We'd still have the same availability, just paying more for it.

I used to work in Oak Ridge in the nuclear program years ago and those guys LOVE to consider using liquid metals to cool things. Back in the 1970s it was the the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which was gonna turn plentiful inert (U-238) uranium into vast quantities of power-packed plutonium in a machine cooled with liquid sodium. Wow - CRBR never got built.

Logically, a layperson would consider a liquid metal to be a very dangerous material to have around, but if you've already got pounds and pounds of plutonium you are juggling around, sodium doesn't seem so nasty anymore. They would still be talking about using sodium if it weren't so darn reactive - read corrosive. That's where our friend lithium comes in - less reactive, less corrosive. Ha.

There aren't any electric generator turbines that run on liquid lithium pressure so there's gonna be a lithium-to-water-to-steam heat exchanger loop in there somewhere in a functional fusion powerplant. Lithium is gonna come in contact with water somehow, by accident (or design) and make hydrogen gas which is not only explosive, but turns into radioactive tritium when bombarded by the neutrons put out by ANY reactor - fission or fusion.

Playing around with explosive hydrogen gas near a reactor is often done deliberately and may be a hidden agenda here. Don't kid yourself - America needs tritium. It is a prime ingredient in nuclear weapons and however much of it you've got, you've only got half that much 12 years later. This means unless you replenish your tritium stockpile you loose half of your nuclear weapons arsenal every 12 years. So far this hasn't been a problem because we are retiring nukes rapidly after winning the Cold War and we are scavinging tritium for our online weapons from the ones we retire. Sooner or later the US will run out of recycled tritium.

We used to make tritium at Savannah River Nuclear Plant but that was closed for environmental reasons years ago. Now the US is going to refurbish that old reactor and start it back up. Sooner or later we're gonna have to switch over to something else besides World War II factories like Savannah River. When that happens, and it's a fusion reactor with a lithium core, remember that there's something else in going on with that liquid metal coolant...

There is no reason for a government weapons lab to spend money from its budget unless there is some benefit to be reaped for the organization itself.

Listen. Sandia is a DOE lab, and the DOE has its hand in all sorts of pure scientific research that has nothing to do with the military. Sandia is only partly a weapons lab and pure research is exactly the purpose of much of the DOE budget.

The Department of Energy, along with the NSF and the NIH, sponsors virtually all of the pure scientific research done in this country. They don't "get" anything from researching the genome, money-wise, just as they don't from the pure physics research which is funded through the DOE. It just represents the tiny percent of the national budget that keeps a bunch of America's best minds busy trying to improve the state of mankind.

Most of this research, by the way, has nothing to do with energy. It's just that congress happened to put this sort of research in the hands of the DOE back when it was still the Atomic Energy Commision.

Jefferson Labs with support from the DoE and Southeastern Universities Research Association have created a the most powerful tunable laser that uses a particle accelerator's electron beam as its source of light. It's called the Free Electron Laser (FEL) and has been able to produce such items as this with a greater quality and at less cost (cost=power consumption). This laser has many potential uses, including usage in military targeting systems for offensive and defensive (like disarming a nuke from miles away) systems. It could also be used to produce man-made fabrics that have been altered at a microscopic level to be as soft as wool (of course, creating such nano-fibers as this article claims to be so unique). Interesting, huh?