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There's a lot of discussion about some of these problems in the various agencies tasked with documenting nuclear waste sites. Perhaps most famously, the WIPP:
Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Excerpts here)

It's a great read. One of the most critical determinations by the interdisciplinary team was that the most detailed information wasn't necessarily the most important or useful. You need multiple layers of messaging, when trying to convey something to people 10000 years from now who probably don't speak the same language. The most basic being: "There is a message here"

There's a lot of discussion about some of these problems in the various agencies tasked with documenting nuclear waste sites. Perhaps most famously, the WIPP:
Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Excerpts here)

It's a great read. One of the most critical determinations by the interdisciplinary team was that the most detailed information wasn't necessarily the most important or useful. You need multiple layers of messaging, when trying to convey something to people 10000 years from now who probably don't speak the same language. The most basic being: "There is a message here"

• Residential furnaces and boilers
• Mobile home furnaces
• Small furnaces
• Residential water heaters
• Direct heating equipment
• Pool heaters
• Distribution transformers, MV dry-type and liquid immersed
• Electric motors (1200 hp)
• Incandescent reflector lamps
• Fluorescent lamps
• Incandescent general service lamps
• Fluorescent lamp ballasts
• Residential dishwashers
• Ranges and ovens (gas and electric) and microwave ovens
• Residential clothes dryers
• Room air conditioners
• Packaged terminal air conditioners and heat pumps
• Residential central air conditioners and heat pumps
• Ceiling fan light kits (other than those with standards prescribed by EPACT 2005)
• Residential dehumidifiers
• Commercial clothes washers
• Refrigerated bottle or canned beverage vending machines
• Ice cream freezers; self-contained commercial refrigerators, freezers, and refrigerator-freezers without doors; and remote-condensing commercial refrigerators, freezers and refrigerator-freezers

(source)(pdf). Sure, the wall wart is small potatoes. Lots of these items are small bits individually, and they all have to pass a cost/benefit test (the cost of the incremental improvement must be less than the financial savings). When you add up all the bits and bobs, the cumulative impact is significant. It's not like DOE started with wall warts. It focused initially on the biggest opportunities, and works its way down the list. It's only because /.ers have lots more wall warts than the common man that it's even newsworthy for us.

http://energy.gov/eere/article...

For mobile users till that gets fixed.

As I posted below, it seems pretty obvious you would use fuel cells instead of batteries for an electric aircraft... from your energy density link compressed hydrogen has an even better energy density (142 MJ/kg) than jet fuel (46 MJ/kg)!

The cost of hydrogen production is estimated to become close to gasoline production over the next decade or so, but there is a huge pollution benefit to using fuel cells which could drive adoption quicker.

The currently very low cost of oil is probably the main thing that would keep airplanes from going electric soon.

It is still a complete mess in terms of storage, especially when cryogenic, and when you combine it with some carbon to make it easier to store we're back at methan (which also works in fuel cells) or some other kind of jet fuel.

I don't really see any use for pure hydogen systems, beside upper stages of rather short lived rockets (and even there they are developing methan based engines, because of the problems with pure hydrogen).

As I posted below, it seems pretty obvious you would use fuel cells instead of batteries for an electric aircraft... from your energy density link compressed hydrogen has an even better energy density (142 MJ/kg) than jet fuel (46 MJ/kg)!

The cost of hydrogen production is estimated to become close to gasoline production over the next decade or so, but there is a huge pollution benefit to using fuel cells which could drive adoption quicker.

The currently very low cost of oil is probably the main thing that would keep airplanes from going electric soon.

... you have to have a highly pressurized tank to hold it, and leakage is a problem because hydrogen molecules are so small, so you're not going to get great range, and you've got a highly pressurized tank of highly combustible gas in your vehicle, which is a really bad thing if you have a crash.

This is really not as big of an issue as you seem to think (see here, from Sandia NL). Liquid natural gas vehicles have been around for decades with similar technology to H2 storage, and while risk factors are slightly different we don't hear news stories of LNG vehicles exploding any more that we do petroleum (not newsworthy) or battery (a few high profile Tesla Model S issues come to mind) cars bursting into flames. While technical challenges of increasing energy density and cost efficiency remain for on-board H2 storage, current tanks are quite safe.

The advances in material science and fuel cell technology since the 90's have been remarkable - so I don't understand why you would discount H2 as a fuel on the "its already been tried" basis. That's like saying (ca. 2010) "I had a PDA in the 90's and it was awful, so why are so many companies making smartphones now?" These companies have intelligent and knowledgeable engineers (and maybe a few managers too); hopefully their expert opinion informed the choice to pursue H2 vehicles and it has potential to become a via transportation energy option.

Hydrogen has a higher diffusivity than helium. Seems to be about 25% higher.[PDF]

That seems to be about diffusion of gaseous things within H2, not diffusion of H2 through solids.

Since I've never heard of such a thing, please provide a link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...
http://www.google.co.uk/search...

Note: given that hydrogen, even when diatomic, is smaller than Helium,

Really? The atomic radius of Helium is 31pm http://periodictable.com/Prope... whereas the bond length for H2 is 74 pm http://www.wiredchemist.com/ch...

Helium, it doesn't need to be "soluble" in metal to diffuse better.

I like hopw you've never heard of it, can't be arsed to google, then use disparaging scare quotes because you want to be a consescending. Turns out you should have googled. It's a real thing.

The tiny stuff could be nuked easily enough, but the really big stuff would just create a lot of really big (and now somewhat radioactive) rubble to carpet-bomb whatever place gets the impact.

This is a common myth. The reality is that simulations show that nuclear weapons can readily both deflect large asteroids without destroying them, or alternatively destroy them into bits too small to pose a threat and with too much momentum to reform into a large impactor. And even if that wasn't the case, there's also significant dispute among experts to the popularly repeated concept that a bunch of small pieces are worse than one big piece, as smaller pieces come in at varying time and thus spread out the heat load, ejecta load, etc, experience more burnup, produce much less powerful tsunamis that don't "echo" around the Earth as much, etc.

There's really no other option that has the sort of combination of A) near term technology, B) little lead time to deploy, C) minimal lead time required for effective deflection, D) low odds of failure, and E) capability of deflecting very large objects with small payloads - nuclear detonation, whether via standoff deflection or explosive disassembly, in is better than all or almost all competitors in every single category (kinetic impactors are slightly better in some categories but provide orders of magnitude less deflection capability for a given payload size)

They have no students. They operate no schools.

That's true because DoE is the Department of Energy which has nothing to do with education.

They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.

What specific "bullshit federal regulations" are you referring to?

Anything - We have us here, a true Teabagger, who thinks the only thing the Government should do is pay for his hoveround, and his medicine - but not anyone elses, cuz thatz socialism! -

They have no idea about anything, but they are very enthusiastic about hating everything else as long as they get theirs.

They have no students. They operate no schools.

That's true because DoE is the Department of Energy which has nothing to do with education.

They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.

What specific "bullshit federal regulations" are you referring to? The Department of Education by far the smallest cabinet department and with the exception of the No Child Left Behind act (mandated by CONGRESS) they really don't have much involvement in the day to day running of schools in the US. The ED coordinates federal assistance, enforces civil rights, and collects data. They are not heavily involved in determining curricula or standards (outside of NCLB), they do not accredit schools and compared to most countries the US is hugely decentralized in education.

Assuming it's pure methane, that would be ~23k BTU/lb, or about 2.5B BTU/hour.

At around $1.80 per Million BTU, that's about $4,500 worth of gas leaking out per hour. About $3.2M/month.

Not good, by any means, but I think dollars puts it into better scale.

You should notice too that wind power purchase agreements under 3 cents a kwh http://energy.gov/eere/article... Nuclear energy is finished.

Computer geeks are used to plug their gadgets into electric grid and assume it must be easy to do with cars too, and the grid will become clean and efficient auto-magically somehow. Natural gas cost is something like 1-2 cents/kWh but converted it to stable electricity and delivered to you home it can cost 10 cents or whole 40 at times in California.

Some people at CARB have different opinions. E.g. look at page 7:
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...

I have seen that movie multiple times, along with every other dystopian movie ever created worth watching. However, technological improvement appears to be exponential, so you really need to look at shorter periods of history to get an idea of where things are trending.

For instance, the last 5 ~ 10 years has resulted in some technological breakthroughs that should greatly change the traditional views of overpopulation. We are increasingly doing more with less, such that the concept of "over population" is becoming an increasingly meaningless term.

That's what we feel too. When wind units are allowed to bid negative offers, because their operations costs are offset by government-funded renewable energy credits, it distorts the market to the point that traditional generation cannot compete. This is why the "expiration" of the Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit was such a big deal, in that everyone had to "break ground" by 12/31/2014, which is why there is a flood of windpower energy this year. You cannot build transmission this fast.

http://energy.gov/savings/rene...

http://www.nrel.gov/electricit...

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mi...

Sounds like they weren't following the guidelines that they recommend for the energy industry.

here. (Warning: 50 page graphics intensive PDF.)
Optical path on page 26. 6Gb of raw data every 17 seconds (page 32).

Well a couple of good places to start for standards in this area would first be the NERC CIP standard and once you have got that down then proceed to the Cybersec Procurement Language for Energy Delivery Systems (warning PDF) for a set of industry best practices that are highly encouraged to be in vendor contracts. While they are written for energy management systems the ideas and regulations should mostly be applicable to all other systems that need computer security as well.

I don't know the government subsidy/tax credit, what is the law in Texas regarding wind power? Is there any real subsidy?

There are a variety of renewables credits/subsidies, both federal and state. You can find some of the choices here (this is the Texas list);

http://energy.gov/savings/sear...

Nope. Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning with their own money. Musk bought in with other investors later on, and then fired the founders and made up the story about him founding it.

Musk and other investors raised a total of about $180m between 2003 and 2009. Tesla was always on the brink of bankruptcy until this: http://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesl... happened.

Read the SpaceX story as a homework.

To US Energy Dept. estimated, in 2012, that there is ~12GW worth of power that could be tapped from existing, non-power-producing dams. That's handily 10% more hydro than what we've got now.

That same report estimates a potential for 65GW of new hydro power installations (85GW if you allow trampling of federal protected lands).

The reason hydro isn't talked about is because of uninformed people like you who think there's no additional capacity.
=Smidge=

Erm, so you define efficiency by the percentage of gas that is burned? Or what is your breathing argument supposed to mean?

Consider that an Electric range is going to be wasting a huge amount of the heat anyways. So in that case, for stove, yeah, it's pretty much how efficiently it's burning the gas.

Or, to put it another way, how many kWh does a electric stove use compared to how many kWh equivalents does the NG stove use? Then figure that if the NG is being burned at a power plant to produce the electricity, the power plant is only 50% efficient. So as long as the NG appliance is more than 50% efficient at producing usable heat, it's more efficient than the electric one.

For heat retention, as for a furnace, my standard is indeed heat retained.

Far over 50% of the heat is just wasted through the exhaust, unless you have high efficient heating systems where you might approach 75%-80%, I really doubt americans have that.

For your information, I'm pretty sure it'd be illegal to sell a heating system that's wasting 50% of the heat up the pipe in the USA. You have this picture of Americans being energy wasters, but in my experience while we do have our crappy homes, we're a lot closer to Europeans than most think.

"Might approach 75-80%"? My boiler isn't the best, but when I bought it it was the best in my size range. It's 85%. And I'm about 10% less efficient than the 'best' products because, again, at the time, they simply didn't make a small enough condensing unit that can take the acidic condensation from oil.

And yes, that means that, at least during normal operations, it's pulling 85% of the heat from the burned oil into the water. Any higher and I'd have condensation, which adds some complexity, especially with oil and such due to the acid.

As for water heaters, even the crapiest one I could find has an energy factor of .59, and the energy factor includes standby losses! So if it's almost 60% efficient at delivering BTUs worth of hot water when you include standby and circulation losses, it has to be better at getting the heat into the water in the first place. Wrap it with a insulating blanket and the EF will go up.

So, personal example, 85%. BTW, my boiler also provides my hot water as well as heating my house, so that's my 'overall' efficiency. Crappiest water heater I could quickly find: .59. Best I found: .68 - A larger tank, more insulation, equates to more efficiency.

Apparently even in coal-centric areas, an EV still pollutes less than an ICE.

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.php

Did a google serach for "which states use the most coal" which garnered a list of coal producing states. Took those as an initial test using Wyoming. EV was still better than an ICE. Also tried zip codes for states which do not produce but import large amounts, that was harder as only imports and production seem to be easily found in list form as opposed to who gets the largest % of power from coal plants. Wyoming was a good mark though at 60% of power from coal. EV is still cleaner than ICE.

The only case I could see ICEs being cleaner than coal would be a state that gets >60% of its power from coal, and EV take rate goes very high in the state like 80% of the population and creates enough energy demand for new (coal) plants thus creating a lot of unused baseline power being generated from coal. However, if a state were to massively adopt EV I imagine they would also want to adopt cleaner power plant tech like natural gas, nuclear, or possibly even a renewable mix rather than spin up new coal plants.

Natural gas from gas wells is not just burned off or vented. It is sold. There is flaring from some oil wells that produce natural gas. The linked DoE study aims to lower the cost of wind power well below the cost of natural gas, so your main point seems mistaken. http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...

First off, Tesla's SCs are about to jump to 160 KW range.
Secondly, there are 2 other types of fast DC chargers. That leads to the US having more than 770 stations with these. Go to the search options and change to DC fast only.
Third, if you change the connectors to Tesla and J1772, you can see what the Tesla has as options. As such, this shows that Tesla is NOT a joke, or a niche product.

However, the others ARE niche products because if you turn off Tesla on the connectors and turn on J1772, along with chademo, you realize that massive car companies have NO intention of building out a real network.
What is needed is to get Apple and Google to build new electric car companies predicated on Tesla electric. That will force all others to join on due to fear of losing ground to companies that are superior to theirs.

in fact, the cars from before about 1950's burned gasoline, ethanol, diesel, or ..... kerosene. As such, they worked with the fueling stations that existed for heaters and lanterns.

And yet, most car makers and oil companies want to push H2
while Musk continues to push plain old electricity.
I wonder who is likely to win considering that in another 3 years, the Tesla model 3 will costs around 35K and they will be making 250K cars / year? That will put them in ~ top 25 car makers.

in fact, the cars from before about 1950's burned gasoline, ethanol, diesel, or ..... kerosene. As such, they worked with the fueling stations that existed for heaters and lanterns.

And yet, most car makers and oil companies want to push H2
while Musk continues to push plain old electricity.
I wonder who is likely to win considering that in another 3 years, the Tesla model 3 will costs around 35K and they will be making 250K cars / year? That will put them in ~ top 25 car makers.

preheating isn't needed with modern diesel mixes. Some pump oils (such as used on the Dalton) will start at -35C. #1 diesel turns to wax at -40C and will still turn over in a fairly well maintained engine at -20C. Should you find yourself in a situation of needing to start an engine in -50C like they do at the far North end of the Dalton after dropping a load of pipe or whatever, additives such as ethanol (which freezes at -114C) are added to the fuel in the tank to prevent it waxing.

Figures: http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afd...

I would add (6) Many states have regulations making it impossible to do what Musk is doing. I live in Republican-Controlled Virginia, where I can't buy solar panels from Musk's SolaryCity, which has a location 20 minutes away from me in Washington DC and more locations in Maryland, because my state has pretty much given Dominion Power a monopoly on supplying electricity here, giving them exclusive rights to net-metering--which they have made cost-prohibitive to implement, and the company has actually successfully sued organizations that install solar panels.

Just a few, easy to find sources of the multitudes of tax credits. Not to hard to find unless you are specifically not looking for them.

http://energy.gov/savings/busi...

http://en.openei.org/wiki/Corp...

operating costs for 61 nuclear sites in 2012. The average came to $44/MWh

Add to that construction costs, decommissioning costs and nuclear fuel reprocessing / storage costs and you've got one very expensive method of producing electricity.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

Why aren't there more nuclear fuel reprocessing plants? Because it's horrendously expensive.
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar...

Cost of building maintaining, removing new Wind farms?
Less than $36.5 per MWh
Wind Technologies Market Report

With the numerous ways of matching and storing wind energy,nuclear can not compete

Wind power is continuously getting cheaper, solar power is continuously getting cheaper and there is good reason for that to continue. Storage technologies are also getting cheaper. Solar is set to become the 2nd cheapest form of energy, after Wind.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...

http://i1.wp.com/cleantechnica...

Wind Technologies Market Report

$25 per mWh is the price agreed in the power purchase agreement (PPA), so it is not "I wish" it is actual contractual average price paid over a bunch of contracts - some are cheaper.

Page 11, subsidies over 20 years amounting to 1.15c per kwh

Wind still getting cheaper: 2013 Wind PPA Prices In US Interior Averaged 2.1 Cents/ KWH

Can a gas powered station give 10, 20 or 30 year price guarantees?

" I don't see the savings when you still have to build the NG plant..."

1. Is gas free?
2. Gas has a carbon footprint when generating, wind doesn't.
3. Wind will be around for billions of years, Gas won't, it makes sense to ration gas as much as possible. Right now we are glutting on gas. Current estimates for gas are that it will last 40-100 years and the lions share of it is in Russia.
4. Gas is not the only type of complementing power, there is solar, geothermal, solar thermal, heat exchange, hydro, pumped hydro, battery storage, compress air storage etc.

Wind Technologies Market Report Page 11 "wind power price trends" The subsidies amount to 1.15c per kWh for a total real cost of 3.65c over 20 years by which point the wind farm will be paid for and modern wind generators are built to last 40 years, after that the wind farm could be upgraded at substantially reduced cost.

Reminder that oil, gas including fracking are subsidised and nuclear is supported by incentives/guarantees. Coal has massive external costs which would make it the most expensive if those were included in the price (they should be).

The report with the 25$ per mWh figure is written by the US dept' of energy. The $ figure is what will be paid for the wind energy rather than some hypothesised amount.

I actually don't believe 100% in CO2 caused global warming but think it is likely and prudent to guard against damaging the worlds atmosphere.

Note, the link you gave is looking backwards at cost, the govt report I linked is new (aug2014) and looking at future cost which is course the more relevant amount.

That one project comes nowhere near the total scope of the upgrades planned an in progress. Despite the delays, work is in fact continuing even per your own article.

For a glimpse at the larger picture, consider:

http://energy.gov/oe/downloads...

Google search indeed, Mr. Coward.
=Smidge=

From what I've understood, fuel-cell technology has mainly been held back by the expensive platinum catalyst that's been required, but this may be changing. Once the technology can be proven to be practical we can then focus on designing the necessary infrastructure.

Besides, most of the advances in electric vehicles can also be applied to fuel-cell vehicles, so there's nothing wrong with keeping the technology alive.

For Japan or America?
For America, here you go. All 12, in 4 locations.
What is interesting is that the price of these would be equal to about $7/gal gas.

Look I realize you are a clueless idiot. So this reply isn't for you. It's for everyone else who looks at this thread and thinks, well isn't 3% better than 70%?

First, there's what should be the nail in this coffin. People like dywolf define as a success, nay an unequivocal success, a business that just happens not to go bankrupt in five years after receiving one of these very ample loan guarantees (this part, "section 1705" started in 2009 due to passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in that year). It's "one of the most successful loan programs the government has ever run" to use dywolf's words.

Imagine if a sports team defined as an "unequivocal success" and "one of the most successful seasons we've ever had" merely because 97% of their team showed up for preseason practice with maybe one or two games actually played by the point they start to brag. And as long as 89% of the team sticks around through the end of the season, whether or not they ever win any games, then they'll meet expectations too.

The expectations are absurdly low.

Second, he conflates different loan guarantee programs. Solyndra and Tesla weren't in the same program and Tesla's loan wasn't a loan guarantee, but rather a low interest loan. This point is a bit pedantic, but I just want to point out yet another symptom of dywolf's ignorance in this matter.

Third, the cited, biggest success of this "program", Tesla is massively subsidized by both the federal government and the state of California. I believe the subsidies are large enough to make the difference between a successful company and also-ran.

There was an earlier discussion of a major "bond manager" of Tesla stating that the company should drop auto manufacture altogether and go full bore into car batteries. At the time, it didn't make sense why someone would suggest that. That now strikes me as further evidence that Tesla doesn't actually make cars that would be profitable on their own.

I don't think Tesla is unusual in being heavily subsidized, but rather that is a typical feature of the businesses which picked up these sorts of loans.

Moving on, dywolf and several others have conflated the loan guarantee program with a variety of risky business activities such as venture capital, leveraged buyouts, or growth equity, spinning some bullshit about how "conservative" the investments were (from the link "an actual 5% loss rate is exceptionally conservative").

Note what they don't compare this program to - actual private lending. An actual 3% loss over five years is bad. While those levels were being hit by banks during the real estate crisis and subsequent recession, that resulted in banks collapsing, not bankers high-fiving each other over the unequivocal success of their lending programs.

Why should we consider VC-level risk appropriate for what should be mundane industrial project lending? Venture capitalists have more or less the same universal strategy. They put small amounts of money (and often technical or business expertise lacking by the founders of the startup) into a startup. The startup proves itself by meeting whatever goals have been set. Then those that survive to that point may get funded further by the VC or by other investors. Every such investment is graduated. They don't dump half a billion dollars in and hope the business works out.

This strategy of dumping huge sums in and building huge projects is completely alien to how the private world does investments in new, untried things.

Then there's my fifth point, there's absolutely

Here is a nice believeable breakdown for home energy use:

http://energy.gov/energysaver/...

Space heating is the biggest use of home energy, followed by water heating and AC. Most of the rest of the stuff is pretty trivial.

Also remember that if you need space heating anyway, the excess heat produced by appliances in living spaces is not going to waste.

http://www.ecoseed.org/renewables/bioenergy/ethanol/15100-u-s-air-force-completes-alcohol-to-jet-fuel-test-flight

Civilian aviation isn't leaving ethanol on the sidelines either http://www.afdc.energy.gov/pdfs/2894.pdf

I'm 100% against legislatively requiring corn-based ethanol in our pumps but it doesn't help to have uninformed kooks on my side.

No public R&D. A lot of behind the scenes R&D continued, especially in the military. In fact the best source of nuclear energy research is pretty bloody obvious if you stop to think about it. The USN http://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/d... read the pretty brochure. Unless of course corporate interests have completely screwed it up but very likely a solid core of compact safe nuclear energy generation research tools and people remain. So what government, not fucking industry, needs to do is kick the ball and get in moving as a matter of priority likely based around the USNs existing expertise.

AC OP has overstated the simplicity of the electric grid but his main point is still valid. Power is a bit like cable TV, everybody gets the same subscriptions. People don't care what power plant has generated their energy. As long as power is available within certain parameters it's good. People do care a lot which bits they receive from a network. If they get their colleagues email instead of their own it's mostly worse than not getting email at all. The storage and processing of information is continually changing to adapt to needs of all kinds of organisations and people. If you compare the number of people working in electric utilities to the number of people working in IT I'd say IT is about 10 times as complex.

utility workforce http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...
IT workforce http://www.globalization101.or...

Let's examine your citations:

https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms.

So you have an industry PR site.

A site by organizations who actually operate 4th gen test reactors. A site that the U.S. Department of Energy links to for more information, http://www.energy.gov/ne/artic....

http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...

a shitty Wordpress blog written by climate change skeptics

Interesting, google found that page and I went with it since it seemed to say nothing beyond quoting General Atomic's specs on their reactor. If you follow the link they provide to General Atomics they do indeed state that the waste of previous gen reactors is used as fuel and that the waste of the 4th gen reactors is indeed short lived and only needs hundreds of years of storage. Unfortunately they do so with terrible hover over animated graphics, http://www.ga.com/energy-multi..., so I stuck to the summary since it was plain text that could be cut and pasted. BTW, General Atomics are the people who have been building reactors for decades. So these climate deniers clearly got the science correct on this reactor. When the truth happens to be on the side of liars, liars can indeed tell the truth, which seems to be the case here. Again, this page does nothing more than quote General Atomics. Apologies for not offering the General Atomics link directly and going with this summary. I assumed readers could manage clicking on the General Atomics link themselves, did you have some difficulty doing so? Or were you only interesting in the messenger and not the message (the science)?

http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...

a motivational speaker

And the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.

The reality is that salesmen have made a lot of bold claims for gen 4 reactors, but so far they are unproven and somewhat dubious.

That's a strange characterization of organizations that the US Department of Energy refers people to for more information on 4th gen reactors, organizations who operate 4th gen test reactors and companies who will actually build 4th gen reactors and have been reactors for decades.

Bullshit, in this they are against stupid laws trying to handwave the economic reality because "hurrr durrr green energy!!".

You are so far off base, you are on the wrong planet. The Koch bros are about screw the planet, screw everyone else, even screw themselves for a little short-sighted short-term monetary profit.

There are certain harsh economic realities that unfettered markets do not deal with correctly. Generating energy from coal has great negative externalities. IOW, the Koch bros are not paying for the cost of dealing with all the pollution their plants generate.

Another thing unfettered markets don't deal with correctly is limited resources. Those resources might be fossil fuels in the ground or the capacity of the atmosphere to hold carbon emissions without disastrous effects on the human race. If the wisest policy involves not using up these resources as fast as possible then unfettered markets don't do the right thing.

Even if we accept your unstated assumption that the subsidies of the fossil fuel industries do not dwarf those of renewables, it still makes sense to subsidize renewables. Partly due to the current subsidies, the cost of renewables is dropping. It is in the best interest of the human race to switch over to renewables before we run out of non-renewables and before the waste products of non-renewables make the planet uninhabitable.

Blind faith in the infallibility of markets is part and parcel of the greed is good mentality that continues to wreak havoc on our economy and on our social stability. These are the harsh economic realities the Koch bros are ignoring.

The IMF opinion is indeed nonsensical, but fossil fuels are subsidized.

In 2009:

        Tenaska's Taylorville Energy Center – loan coverage $2.6 billion for a 730 MW coal-fired IGCC with CCS.
        Leucadia's Indiana Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.6 billion to produce Substitute Natural Gas (syngas) from coal for sale to customers in Indiana, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.
        Leucadia's Mississippi Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.689 billion to produce syngas from petroleum coke feedstock, for sale to electric utilities in the region, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.

Subsidies identical to the type received by Tesla and Solyndra both.

In July 2013, the US Department of Energy made available $8 billion in loan guarantees to the fossil fuel industry, again, the identical type of subsidy received by Tesla. For an industry that has been recording record profits for the past 6 years.

So either stop claiming Solyndra received a subsidy or stop claiming fossil fuel industries don't receive any. You can't have it both ways.

In addition you have to replace a whole bunch of brand new highly efficient and scrubbed power stations, and totally shut down steel production.
Metallurgic coal (coke) is essential for steel production. That pushes steel production to other countries, causing a world wide shortage, and we end up paying more and they end up polluting more.

Coal gasification projects, current and planned, would all be wiped out exactly when they are needed.

You can't simply look at the market cap of coal industry companies on Yahoo and sum them all up.
Like most plans, this is a simplistic and simple minded approach. It would never work

Seems like your problem is solved. The problem of finding the correct materials to build the walls with is certainly not fully decided yet but it is not the main problem and certainly not a deal breaker.

Far from a solved problem, and in fact one of the major issues being addressed by fusion research. You can see this as one of the main four goals for the Fusion Energy Sciences program under the DoE, and the subject of dedicated research projects like IFMIF. While ITER will be exposing materials to reactor levels of neutron flux, the materials involved will receive no where near the necessary amount of total cumulative neutron flux in a reactor running 24/7 for power production.

On a related note, the decision to have remote handling of the wall and diagnostic components is a huge part of the growth in cost of ITER. Not only does it complicate things to make sure parts can be assembled by remote manipulation instead of directly by some technician, the decision to do so was made after some design work was already done on diagnostics. A lot of backtracking had to be done on that design work to accommodate the new requirements and allow fine tuning and aligning of equipment remotely.

The main problem is about the stability of the plasma. Or to be more specific: that there would be sufficient rotation of the plasma to create enough heat to have a sustainable "burning" plasma.

While stability is the main science component being researched, it has more to do with having the right profiles of pressure and current so that stuff doesn't spill out or snap (like making sure a pile has the right shape so it can't avalanche). Heating comes from injection of beams of particles and radio energy. For a burning plasma in a reactor though, a majority of the energy should be coming from the fusion reactions and not external heating.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/ve...

Your standards are low. Americans own over 1.2 cars per driver. So a 2-driver house has 2.4 cars, or about half of all 2-driver households have 3 cars.

With the statistics as they are, it seems you are the one that's out of touch.

No... You are misunderstanding what they mean by vehicles per licensed driver. Taking a look at Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States) licensed passenger vehicles includes Vans, Trucks, cars, etc. a good percentage of which are used for business. In other words, the average family does not have 3 vehicles as you are arguing, but actually 2 or less. The difference is made up by vehicles owned by small businesses, farms, etc. for specific business use. If you dig deep, you'll find that the statistics do not mean what you think they mean.

Secondly, this says nothing about how much the average family pays for cars. Most families that I know have an older car that is used for the daily commute and a bigger hauling vehicle to ferry their kids around. The cars that they do own are valued less than one Tesla. They couldn't afford, either financially or or opportunistically, swapping two cars for one Tesla.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/ve...

Your standards are low. Americans own over 1.2 cars per driver. So a 2-driver house has 2.4 cars, or about half of all 2-driver households have 3 cars.

With the statistics as they are, it seems you are the one that's out of touch.

U.S. HEU Disposition Program has been up and running for several years now.

There are even plans for down blending weapons grade Plutonium and burning the resulting MOX fuel in various reactors.

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