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A worm with a similar complexity as stuxnet could give a lot of new meaning to crashing flying vehicles to big buildings

they use windows for their laptops but not critical systems. besides, what kind of idiots(government) would attack the INTERNATIONAL Space Station? pissing off the whole planet isnt exactly a good idea.

A worm with a similar complexity as stuxnet could give a lot of new meaning to crashing flying vehicles to big buildings

This phenomena is quite well studied, and seems to be producing relatively linear effects. It was discovered in the 70's or so. It's refered to as transcranial direct current stimulation and just a few months ago there was a study on visual memory about the same.
It's not really new and revolutionary, it's just that the previous studies haven't been able to be worded as "OMG BRAINOVERKLOCKING!" and thus haven't generated the same interest.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/direct-current-stimulation-more-than.html

There are many rare-earth materials but as far as Neodymium and magnets are concerned, Neodymium is probably going to get replaced by Fe16N2 magnets as soon as they figure out how to mass-produce the particular crystal that makes this type of magnet. Of course the nice thing is no exotic rare-earth materials required.

Here's some random reference that describes it: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/fe16n2-crystals-most-magnetic-material.html You could probably find a better one but you won't because you're too lazy!

BTM

will do little to nothing for space exploration until we gain the ability to lift stuff into orbit on a massive scale.

This is the kind of shit we need

Brilliant. Let's all rely on nuclear energy, which, if it were the primary replacement for fossil fuels, would run out even faster than oil.

Simply wrong. Patently false. The ocean contains 4 billion tons of uranium. That's 850 years in crap reactors. In good reactors, 100000 years or more. But, even then, there's also the impact of erosion, that puts more uranium back in to the ocean. Some numbers suggest that billions of years might be possible with erosion. It's irrelevant, because we'll probably have unimaginable energy sources in 800 years.

Unless you're arguing that the earth's resources are not actually finite

Not in any significant way. Those resources are vast. 100's to 1000's of times greater than what the doomers say they are. The doomers say that known those resources will be used up in X years, and fail to take into account that in X years, because of price increases, known reserves will be bigger than they are now. Capitalists will: recycle the materials, find methods of mining lower concentrations, and find new reserves. In the 1980's, the doomers said that we would run out of chromium and some other metals by 1990-2000. Julian Simon said, no, we won't. He took a bet on metal prices, and won. The prices of chromium and the other metals fell through the floor. If resources were becoming scarcer, why would this happen, over and over, as Simon points out in the ultimate resource? Because the principles of scarcity and doom are wrong. Simply wrong. It's not trendy, but the truth never is.

Are we living in the movie Idiocracy, where morons can make patently irrational suggestions like this, and get modded up to 5?

The problem is that the truth is patently irrational. Heavy objects don't fall faster. The doomers are probably not morons, but they are insane. They keep saying and doing the same things, over and over again, and expecting different results. Doomsday is always 10 years away, and will forever be. When we travel the galaxy in spaceships, people will be scared that there might not be enough chrome to plate there wings.

The whole point of ITER was to "demonstrate" that the science is settled. Apparently "the science" is fully settled. Nevertheless they've made several serious design flaws, and are seriously behind schedule (and below expected results for what they've done too). Nevertheless, they're charging ahead, and all smart people hope they succeed.

Btw, there are fusion reactors in most large hospitals, for neutron production. They're called "fusors" and they're basically a rolled up television display. Additionally these (very simple) devices are used for scientific research in most universities. They're very reliable, but have Q levels around 0.1 up to 0.3 for professionally constructed ones.

Imho, I think the American research plan is smarter than the European one. At the very least for the simple fact that Europe is throwing all their eggs in the same (proven to be somewhat unreliable) basket. America may be underfunding fusion research, absolutely, but at least America's underfunding 5 different attempts (including steam-based fusion, my favorite). But there are others, and there are even hybrid machines (meant to do research and to produce fusion, e.g. Z-pinch, or the Z-machine). Also there are several American tokamaks, just in case that's the solution after all.

The tokamak approach banks on pushing back to all forces that act on a fusing plasma, and it's like placing 2000000 small propellors on the ground to control a raging thunderstorm. I'm not saying it will never work, but I'll be utterly amazed. There are other approaches. Hydrogen bombs, on the plus side, they're proven to be effective. On the downside ... well ask some pacific ex-islands ... they know. Then there's inertial confinement fusion, where you generate a number of (relatively) small forces that converge on the same point. For a short time, huge forces will act on this small point, generating fusion. Steam-based fusion is an example, but so is laser fusion, and essentially Z-pinch too. There's also the polywell, an evolution of the only type of fusion rector in commercial use, the fusor, which is a fusor with a magnetic field to replace the fusor grids (google "should google go nuclear ?"). There's even a few attempts that involve principles that boil down to shooting high pressure gas in what's essentially a funnel, resulting in huge pressures just behind the end of the funnel. And I don't really understand how the Z-pinch is supposed to work.

So we must have simulations of C. elegans little brain running, right?
Nope, not even close. We are still in the early stages of simply characterizing the behavior of these 302 neurons.

You are 25 years behind in your reading. C. elegans is *old* stuff, the state of the art in brain simulations is Felis Catus .

NO, QuantumG is not one of my aliases.

And No, I don't make comments designed to piss people off. However, that is often the effect when they find out their reality or opinion is wrong or simple doesn't make sense in the real world.

Here is a good source of reactor information. Here is another source of reactors as of 2010.Be cautious because they don't clearly date their articles so it might be a few years old and all you have to do is search for the reactor names and find out if they are under construction still or built and in operation. And yes, I do understand that it is a propaganda site pushing nuclear power as it's the website of the nuclear trade organization claiming to represent the world. But that is where the information is and you can simply search for them in google and find independent sources on the costs and operations.

Now if costs is a concern, then I suggest you take a look at this wikipedia article. Yes, I know it's wikkipedia but it's referenced and you can validate the claims with a simple search is you choose to. But if you notice the costs estimates which include actual costs, you will see that cost is highly influenced by the country of installation as well as type of unit. Most are within the op's price range, some are over it. With units like the GenIII AP1000 units, the buildings are pretty much modular and construction costs can be controlled pretty well. But as you notice with their installation in Vogtle, the cost is not only higher by about 4b, but a transmission line upgrade of about 3 billion had to be installed too.

The official site: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html And some price info (unofficial of course): http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/06/nvidia-tesla-supercomputer-for-1500-to.html

  The maximum velocity for any spacecraft is not 0.1 C, it's dependent on the velocity of the exhaust (specific impulse) and more.

  Here's a fairly good article for laymen.

SB

As for the topic at hand, like fusion reactors the main problem will be getting MORE energy than you consume. There's no point in doing something like this if you spend 2 megawatts running the laser and only get 1.9 megawatts back from your star.

Perhaps a smarter move would be to figure out how to harness the star we already have

Of course, the teams of physicists on the project haven't thought of that! Let's go send them an email and save them from their headache. In actuality, getting more energy out than in is going to happen. The real problem is sustaining the reaction. here's a random link and here is another but you can google "inertial confinement fusion" for yourself if you like.

It's kind of funny that this happened around the time when MIT researchers talk about the posible impact of massively deployed wind turbines

Pardon the bad source, but I don't have time to really look into it.

"Getting killed in a car accident, by contrast, is 4,300 times more likely."

Then by all means, let us not mix our metaphors.

According to the latest WHO report on preventable deaths world wide http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/avoidable-deaths-worldwide-scope-of.html 1.3 million people die annually from car accidents.

Dividing by 4300 gives us 302 (rounded to whole number) people annually suffering an injury from battery boomage while on an airplane. The question of 'acceptable collateral damage' aside, that's 25 chances per month for an inflight laptop flameout. Not studied was how likely one of these is to cause an accident, with or without fatalities.

So much for governmental oversight agency produced 'reassuring' statistics.

Nuclear weapons are inherently difficult weapons to create, and to even dream of doing to you need to the fissile material, which is even harder to obtain.

100 years ago, the very concept of nuclear weapons was unknown.
75 years ago, nuclear weapons just did not exist and chain reactions were just theorized.
50 years ago, only a few nations had them - and after devoting several years of dedicated development and billions of dollars of outlay.
Today the reason why the Nuclear Club is fairly small is not because of difficulty or cost but because many nations agreed (sometimes with arms behind back or guns to head) not to develop them.

A similar path can be seen for flight (barely exists 100 years ago -> today people build awesome airplanes in their garage as a fun hobby), electronics (today's hackers and circuit benders fart around with more computational power than major universities had at one point within living memory), medicine (kids are doing genetic manipulation at home for fun just a bit over 50 years after our modern understanding of DNA) and more. I hope you see how this curve works....

Gathering Uranium from the ocean now is possible and proven and in just 50 years could be as simple as oceanic harvesting with some custom nanobots or other methods. There ought to be some u235 in there. The rest of the process - and I'm just thinking in 50 years - would be pathetically easy and quite accessible.

If nukes are the big problem in just the next 50 years, I will be surprised and relieved. Even as an NYC resident, I fear the mushroom cloud less than the earnest homebrewer coming up with a "Captain Tripps" or "White Plague" virus and releasing it on purpose or by accident. Why bomb part of a city when one can wipe out an entire population? What, you say? Why that would be dumb - it would kill off everybody. Not if it were targeted towards certain ethnic groups, perhaps not even killing everyone - just the men or the women or maybe just their kids. What is nuking one city compared to the psychological and demographic blow of forcing a nation to bury its children in mass graves via an nearly untraceable method?

...that patents on genes are a "necessary evil", because research into genomics is really, really, really expensive...

But it's not expensive anymore!. The price of sequencing is dropping like you won't believe it, and even if the computational requirements are high, I suspect that's not such a big barrier to entry with the recent ubiquity of cloud computing. Try google gene sequencing price, and see what you get. What other costs are there, apart from researchers? Did I miss something?

I fear that by the time the new state of things is realized, one or two companies with good automated sequencing-analysis-patenting scripts will have locked up the market.

Firstly stop being xenophobic.
Maybe the name is Bangalore because of this?
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/intel-makes-single-chip-cloud-computer.html
"This represents the latest achievement from Intel's Tera-scale Computing Research Program. The research was co-led by Intel Labs Bangalore, India, Intel Labs Braunschweig, Germany and Intel Labs researchers in the United States. "
And Intel is an international company headquartered in the US. Intel gets just 20% of its revenue from the Americas
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/businesswire/2009/10/13/businesswire130140595.html

And Bangalore has nothing to do with the current or the previous US recession. India imports more from the US than it exports to the US. Hence the US has a trade surplus with India. The current crisis was caused by reckless behavior by American financial institutions and the American housing bubble and it has affected the rest of the world.

Stop being so driven by hatred and country sentiments. We all live in this same world, are humans, dependant on each other and deserve respect from all other human beings. Hatred is so 2008.... grow up.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/11/lasermotive-has-qualified-for-900000.html

Actually, I've found the latest VASIMR progress quite interesting, but that article seemed more intent on promoting Canada than feeding news. Heck, the ISS mission has been known since 2007.

A google search was also able to come up with an article with a lot more meat. This explains that the project is working towards 200MW ion rockets (MUCH more powerful than the earlier .3kW), would be powered by a cheap nuke drive instead of solar panels, and they believe it's doable by 2020. Similar info is in PopSci this month.

Now if they could just get that dense plasma fusion device (see Slashdot yesterday) to power the craft instead of fission, that would be cool... yeah, I know I'm pipe dreaming again, but I can't help it.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/potential-microbial-and-algae-biofuel.html

Wow!

2.5 MW.

That's really going to replace those 1,000 MW single nuclear reactors.

Wow, what'ja know, there are wind turbines bigger than 2.5 MW. Erect 10 5 MW or 5 10 MW wind turbines a month for 10 months and you add 1,000 MW of capacity. If work is done all year you've added 1.2 GW. How long will that nuclear power plant of yours take to build? And don't say a year. Construction on Finland's Olkiluoto 3 reactor started in 2005. It was originally scheduled to start operations this year, 2009, but is 3 years behind schedule and isn't expected to start until 2011-12. Also it's cost overrun is EUR1.5 billion so far. And you can't complain that is because of US regulations, nor because of the inexperience of the builders. One of those contractors is the French government owned Areva, Siemens is another. Both companies have experience building nuclear power plants.

Falcon

4. There are billions of tons of uranium in seawater.

But can you economically extract it?

Dr Masao Tamada, of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, has developed a fabric made primarily of irradiated polyethylene that is able to soak up the minute amounts of uranium - around 3.3 parts per billion - in the seawater.

Dr Tamada hopes to secure funding to construct an underwater uranium farm
covering nearly 400 square miles that would meet one-sixth of Japan's annual uranium requirements. Unranium From Sea Water On A Large Scale Update

The optimistic projection puts the cost at double that of the market price in 2007.

• hyperion power
• babcock and wilcox
• NuScale power
• sandia labs
• tsinghua university

not to mention south africa's PBMR, and the travelling wave reactor (intellectual ventures). It's simple - make a mass-producable, small, efficient reactor, use it to boil water at both the pressure and temperature of your average coal-fired power plant, and *turn off the burning of coal altogether*. And do it in scale.

That way, there isn't a horrendous capital cost (pocket nuke reactors are small and you are only replacing the boiler), the fuel is cheaper, and as a side benefit current coal plants increase their capacity factor from ~75% to above 90%.

This is really the only way to combat global warming in a way that profits everybody; it allows developing countries to leverage their experience in building coal-fired power plants to build carbon-neutral sources, and given the factory approach is comprehensively scalable, as scalable as producing fighters or bombers in WWII.

We have to do this. We have to stop dicking around with solutions that only work 15% of the way, have appallingly low capacity factors (for 53 days in a row, the windmills in denmark produced basically nada in the way of electricity, texas has an average of 8.7% capacity (ref: here ).

The stakes are too high. I encourage everyone to watch:

http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller

which shows the true state of our affairs with regards to the climate (the person introducing Mr. Miller says, in short, "He's going to tell us all how we are really fucked".

Looking at the evidence, I agree with him.

Ed

• hyperion power
• babcock and wilcox
• NuScale power
• sandia labs
• tsinghua university

not to mention south africa's PBMR, and the travelling wave reactor (intellectual ventures). It's simple - make a mass-producable, small, efficient reactor, use it to boil water at both the pressure and temperature of your average coal-fired power plant, and *turn off the burning of coal altogether*. And do it in scale.

That way, there isn't a horrendous capital cost (pocket nuke reactors are small and you are only replacing the boiler), the fuel is cheaper, and as a side benefit current coal plants increase their capacity factor from ~75% to above 90%.

This is really the only way to combat global warming in a way that profits everybody; it allows developing countries to leverage their experience in building coal-fired power plants to build carbon-neutral sources, and given the factory approach is comprehensively scalable, as scalable as producing fighters or bombers in WWII.

We have to do this. We have to stop dicking around with solutions that only work 15% of the way, have appallingly low capacity factors (for 53 days in a row, the windmills in denmark produced basically nada in the way of electricity, texas has an average of 8.7% capacity (ref: here ).

The stakes are too high. I encourage everyone to watch:

http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller

which shows the true state of our affairs with regards to the climate (the person introducing Mr. Miller says, in short, "He's going to tell us all how we are really fucked".

Looking at the evidence, I agree with him.

Ed

I was going to post the exact same thing. :-(

It would be hard to use for launches today, because it'd fry some satellites, but check this out, if you haven't seen it.

You mean like this Toshiba unit? That's specced at 200 kW, way short of the power needs of a warship.
The USN has been looking into nuclear power recently (the past few years) as part of their program to design a replacement for the Nimitz-class carrier (and a new cruiser class as well, iirc). I don't know the outcome of that process, though.
this may be relevant

Off earth colonies are the only way to insure that all of mankind will not be wiped out by a extinction event like a comet/asteroid strike. One major strike and that is it for mankind. A lunar colony is a cheap alternative for the continuance of the human race. Eventually other colonies could be set up. There are other locations that have even a lower delta v than the moon. In any event for now our only insurance is Colbert's DNA riding on the space station but as noted above, the space station will be deorbited in a few years. $100 billion burnt up with very little science to show for it. Add the shuttle development costs of $176 billion and you could have paid for a lunar colony. Had the money used for the shuttle been spent on nuclear space propulsion we would have a ship with a 1,000 ton payload instead of a shuttle with 60,000 lb payload. We need a colony that is eventually self sustaining for the continuance of mankind. As they say, the meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will escape to the stars.

Oh, yeah, put a smiley face on this and it'll be Toppin' Fresh for the kids. "Look, Mommy! It's ... the Pillsbury Doughtower! Can I climb him, pleeeaaassse?"

Heck, if you're gonna mess with inflatables and a lot of mass, why not just make a strong lightweight carbon-nanotube/aluminum alloy airfield and float the thing way up there in the sky with near-space to orbit aircraft/spacecraft? Perfect for Han Solo!

Nebel recently claimed in an interview that he expects to know if Polywell will work or not in 18-24 months. Not a long wait, really...

There are some other funded projects that might work (and some that probably won't). It would be good for the world if at least one did. Maybe it is time to buy shares in an electric car-builder...?

General Fusion seems the coolest; steam driven pistons! :-)

Re: availability of nuclear fuel

The Japanese are working on technology for extracting uranium from seawater, their current process, scaled, would cost $100-$800/lb and they have hopes of getting it down to competitive with current market price ($65/lb). Even at $400/lb, it wouldn't be too expensive, fuel is a small part of the overall expense, because the energy density is so high.

Much research is being done on "deep burn" technology, which would get ~99% of energy out of the fuel instead of 5%. It would also reduce the waste problem to negligible levels (much smaller amount of waste, much shorter half live). And it would consume the existing waste.

Added together and uranium can keep the world powered for thousands of years, and that is assuming 100 times the current world electrical usage, all supplied by nuclear fission. And there is three times as much thorium as uranium available.

"The reason why we can't do this separation is because we don't want to encourage rogue nations like Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons."

And they are developing their own uranium refining capacity anyway, making the restriction moot.

The most sensible strategy would be to "deep-burn" nuclear fuel in a power plant (perhaps using a series of different reactor designs). This extends the fuel supply by at least a factor of 20, reduces the volume of waste by a lot, and eliminated the long term radioactivity of the waste entirely.

I agree. I want to get off this rock.

Also, if we just want to use Orion to lift materials into space, we can subject it to higher Gs and use fewer nukes.

See http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/03/if-nuclear-cannon-jump-started-space.html - and read the second section.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/jovion-corporation-gets-patent-for-zero.html
Full patent (pdf) http://www.calphysics.org/Patent7379286.pdf

How is this supposed to work? I don't get it...

1. gas gets pushed through micro-cavities (small enough for the casimir effect to work)
2. ???
3. "free" energy from heated gas

I try to provide links so I may support my position and so that people not simply assume I'm making stuff up.

As do I, I was just mentioning that you got a little basic there - I generally post links for any specific statistics or information, not general stuff.

However neither solar nor wind should need nearly as much of either than a nuclear power plant will.

Solar, well, it depends a LOT on the specifics of the installation. Biggest user of concrete would probably be a stand alone plant with concrete supports, but you could probably substitute metal for a lot of concrete. On the other hand, the concrete needed for monopole type wind turbines will surprise you.

Though I'm not sure I'd think 200 pylons for 5 megawatt wind turbines would use less concrete and steel than a 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant.

First, I'd like to apologize for crashing your machine. I simply ended up closing the browser after a while. Today I saved the pdf before opening it, works fine. Apparently Adobe's downloading system is messed up.
Do you have a counter for the Berkeley study, showing that wind needing 10 times the steel and 4 times the concrete per MW? (Duplicating the nice html link with the excerpt)
Back on topic - Have you ever seen how much concrete goes into putting footings in for a simple chain link fence? Now consider your 5MW turbine.
Some relevant parts, pulled from the article:
"The machine has the capability of generating approximately 17 GWh of power a year" - 17 GWh/year. Including a 90% capacity factor, a 1GW nuclear plant would produce ~7,884 GWh You'd need 463 turbines to equal the power generation of the nuke plant. Much longer, and you'll be looking at 2 GW plants, right now 1 GW is on the low end for 'big' plants, 1.4 and even 1.6 GW are showing up.
"Winds as low as 3.5 m/s will disengage the electromagnetic disc brakes and the turbine should have peak performance during winds of 13 m/s. Winds of 25 m/s or more will cause the turbine to cut-out."
Minimum wind to produce power: 7.8mph, Max: 55mph, Max power: 29mph.
"The world's largest wind turbine, a 120-meter (394-feet) behemoth" - It's 120 meters tall, and given even the lightweight blades is a monopole design, requiring a good base to withstand the wind in all weather.
Hmm - 45 foot tower, requires a base 3' deep, 6' in diameter. 1/15th in depth, double the depth as width. Scale that up, the 120 meter tower would require a base 8 meters deep, 16 meters wide - 1.6k cubic meters of concrete. To replace the nuke plant you'd need 740k m^3 of concrete.

How much would the nuke plant itself take? Modern nuclear reactors need less than 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt of average capacity. Alternate site, Berkeley study(PDF warning)

So, using 1970s figures, of which modern plants are designed to 'use even less', a GW plant would require only 190k m^3 of concrete. 40k tons of steel (Imagine how much steel those 463 turbines would need!)

Oh - found a link to that 5MW turbine with steel usage - 1100 tons of steel PER TOWER, for the tower alone. Various parts in the 425 ton head are also made of steel. 509.3k tons of steel to replace that nuke plant. 469k more tons than the

I didn't exactly need links to such simple near universal construction materials as concrete, steel, cement, and such. I'm well aware of the nuclear cycle.

It's not like wind doesn't need them either - and a stand alone solar complex will use them as well. For solar, roof mounts would be the lightest, structural material wise, but photovoltaic panels use all sorts of nasty stuff anyways.
Nuclear has very low life-cycle CO2 emissions - scroll down a bit for the chart. Coal is 966-1306, Gas 439-688, Solar PV 100-280, Wind 10-48, Nuclear 9-21.
Interesting article on green nuclear power
I'd rather directly link the referenced UC Berkeley study - but This should do:
Wind: 460 Metric tons steel, 870 cubic meters concrete for 1 MW
Nuclear: 40 MT steel, 190 m^3 concrete
Coal: 98 MT, 160 m^3 (there only for comparison purposes)
Update - found it! - but doesn't want to download completely on my system.

While Uranium mining and refining is fairly nasty, the trick is that you need so little of it - You'd end up mining more cadmium and other rare and nasty minerals for photovoltaic panels.

Yes I have. "Hooked on Subsidies: Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power" is one. CATO, a Freemarket Institute, also has articles that say something about coal subsidies.

But you lose the bonus points, my article still has relevance, since 'Hooked on Subsidies' only mentions putting it up against coal, which I don't consider a viable clean alternative, even with 'clean' and carbon sequestration. For the energy produced the subsidies on wind/solar are far, far higher than nuclear. And yes, I do consider 'rebates' subsidies.

Not that I necessarily object to all subsidies. For example, energy efficiency deductions. I don't think insulation and other energy saving measures should be factored into real estate taxes. Yes, I include solar panels and such in there. Call it my 'people shouldn't be penalized for owning a quality house'. Not a big house, not a fancy house, but a quality one - safe, efficient, well insulated, etc... People shouldn't be penalized for painting their shack and installing good windows.

Oh, and your syngas link brings up an interesting point. If I got my way, the building of the 300 or so plants needed to shut down our actively carbon emitting power plants would free up a LOT of coal for syngas activities. I know it can be done - the Germans did it during WWII. Economically? That's a better question. Personally, I prefer the idea of algae trays in the desert for biodiesel and biogasoline.

Also Nuclear is still a greenhouse gas emitter. Concrete is the third biggest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and concrete is the largest input cost in terms of building a Nuclear plant.

More FUD. Nuclear plants use far less concrete per megawatt capacity than wind turbines, and their lifecycle CO2 emissions are correspondingly smaller (but they're both orders of magnitude below coal, so it's a moot point)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/07/per-peterson-information-on-steel-and.html

Actually it's too dense. At high speeds (significant fractions of lightspeed) a magnetic scoop acts like a very effective braking system in interstellar gas. A Bussard type ramscoop rocket could only be expected to reach about 0.12c even with highly efficient engines.

And that's not even taking into consideration the problems Bussard found the required magnetic field would cause to passengers.

Of course Bussard came up with a better idea anyway: the QED. This requires Bussard's Inertial Electrostatic Fusion power source to work, but is probably just as close to being a reality as the proposal in TFA.

See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

and here:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/12/micro-fusion-for-space-propulsion-and.html

Those wouldn't be as tall as the 200-300 meter towers you'd need to be able to replace your prototypical 1GW nuke plant with less than a couple thousand towers, and B: Rare, which means we don't have a large enough sample size to determine likelihood of a fatal accident in the fatalities per Twh you can measure with nuke plants.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

I RTFA, but I'm still a bit snowjobbed because it's pretty light on detail.

There are more details at the following links:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/university-of-texas-at-austin-proposes.html

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/how-long-until-there-is-capable-fusion.html

I RTFA, but I'm still a bit snowjobbed because it's pretty light on detail.

There are more details at the following links:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/university-of-texas-at-austin-proposes.html

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/how-long-until-there-is-capable-fusion.html

I wonder how those numbers will scale up if a country like China replaced all it's coal with nuclear.

56-70 confirmed for Chernobyl*. Considering the 50 year history of nuclear power, we average less than 2 deaths a year, even including it. Any arguments about cancer deaths also has to deal with the cancer deaths from coal plant pollution. The only power death's I'm aware of since Chernobyl was a couple of Japanese workers who violated about a phone book's of regulations, didn't use the proper equipment and safety measures; preferring to mix the stuff in a stainless steel bucket in quantities far exceeding what they were supposed to.

In 2001, we produced ~ 2.5k TWh of electricity from nuclear sources; 16% of the world's electricity. Coal is 40%.

Build up to 4X as many nuke plants as we currently have and we'd be able to shut off all the coal plants.

Going by our average of 2 nuclear power deaths a year, that'd increase to 8 a year. Big whoopty do. Well, except for the unlucky 8 - but I'd rather sacrifice 8 than 100,000.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

*Sorry, but I tend to discount greenpeace's numbers as an outlier. I've seen no evidence that they considered chemical pollution(the USSR wasn't very clean), tobacco use, heck the very contamination from dirty coal plants.

The alternative forms of energy gets TONS more money anyway, with far less regulation, and almost ZERO requirement of actually doing anything useful.

From this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
I'd say that Nuclear & fossil get $7.1 billion, while all renewables + conservation get $7.4 billion; not tons more, and not an order of magnitude as the AC above suggests.
If the charts on this page are to believed:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/09/us-energy-subsidies-updated.html
then the share of money over the period 1950-2006 devoted to renewables comes to 6%.

The problem with Thorium is that it's a decade or two away from commercial use. India needs power NOW. And oh, they aren't mothballing their Thorium programme -- if anything progress has been good.

I have seen a number of schemes that talk about dumping mass amounts of something into the ocean (before I had read about iron oxide to encourage plankton growth). This is yet another great example. Or not so great, in that the prospect of totally unbalancing the ocean in basically a light terraforming effort should scare the bejeebus out of anyone.

If you must do something, consider please measures which only affect things that are already artificial and man made by nature - like changing cement production to sequester CO2. That approach will do just as much (possibly more) for carbon reduction without the potential for mass species extinction.

Not for much longer, I suspect. . .

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/latest-update-on-bussard-fusion.html

If the experiments they are conducting now prove successful, we could plausibly see the first power-generating demonstration plants inside of five years, not fifty.

...we switch from chemical rockets to nuclear ones. Chemical reactions just don't have the power-per-mass ratio that nuclear ones do.

We need to move our solar power generation to space... Except that this, too, does not scale.

Sure, it does... provided we can move the required masses around. And we can, with something like a closed-cycle gas-core nuclear engine that uses hydrogen to cool the core, and then spits it out as exhaust. The hydrogen can't be made radioactive, so the exhaust is totally clean, and I've seen (reusable) designs that'll lift a thousand tons to orbit in one shot.

Use nuclear power when it makes sense (large power-to-mass ratios needed) and solar for the rest.

Hush, you can't go and say Nuclear like that! It's External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion, natch.