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Conferences that require peer-reviewed acceptance of the papers are what I consider tech conferences. As someone that has ONE published IEEE paper (NOT as the first author) and helped with another, internal-reviewed, government, paper as an intern, there is literally no comparison between something like Collision Conference, or the local promote-tech conferences I go to in New Mexico, and an actually peer reviewed conference. None. They have literally nothing in common, except that they both are nominally conferences.

The promote-tech conferences are filled with wild optimism, alcohol, and dumbassery. The peer reviewed conferences are filled with super hardcore academics, and very high end engineers, actually driving technology forward. It is easy to pay to go to these tech parties, including purchasing "speaker" spots, and much more difficult to get accepted to a high end research conference as a speaker. I believe Defcon is sort of in the middle. I applied for a full speaking spot there, was rejected, but then offered a lightning talk spot, and then was offered a lighting talk backup spot there before I could reply to the lighting spot talk. I declined. Defcon to me seems like a cross between the two, but closer to the party type of event than the academic type of event.

First: blatant advertisement which makes me a sad panda.

Second: Their technology is nothing new or revolutionary and not fit for actually useful parts either.
The whole things is, in the end, still just pressure less sintering with less binding material than other 3D printers.
Problem: Sintered parts are not very robust. They might make paperweights with that technique but never, lets say, tubine engine blades.

It is quite unfortunate as a suitable technology already exists but is still rather obscure: LENS (laser engineered net shaping) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Because of the beam pressure, the parts are as robust as if they were forged.

Unfortunately there is not all that much literature on this topic, but I did find one pdf article:
http://www.sandia.gov/mst/pdf/...

Go read a book on radioactive half life

You're the one claiming radiation isn't a problem. Prove it's safe. I have the US Nuclear waste guidelines that say it isn't.

The rest of your comment is just speculation on future gains in solar energy collection that may never come.

Actually we know the amount of solar energy that hits the earth. It is quite actually more energy in a single hour than we use as a planet in an entire YEAR. linky With 10% efficiency (which we're above now) a total of less than 1% of the earths surface would produce more energy than we need.

If radioactive waste concerns you then answer me this, where do you think all the materials for the solar panels come from? Mining, no?

Nice straw man. Radiation is all about concentration. Naturally it isn't concentrated much at all...hence the need to massively refine it to use in fission.

You also conflate construction costs with infrastructure costs. A solar panel requires, currently but not forever, exotic materials that are mined ONCE for 20+ years of operation. Uranium must mine many many tons for every hour of operation. Uranium mining will produce far more of this release than solar ever will. But if you can prove that mining for solar would be higher than ongoing uranium mining, please provide it.

This theoretical potential represents more energy striking the earthâ(TM)s surface in one and a half hours (480 EJ) than worldwide energy consumption in the year 2001 from all sources combined (430 EJ)

EJ = exajoule. That's a bit under a factor of 10,000 (I should have said 4 orders of magnitude not 5). In other words, the Earth dissipates away all that sunlight energy every day and my view is that human activity would have to be of similar magnitude before there is a heat dissipation problem.

This instantly reminded me of an 80's movie called Runaway with Tom Selleck, who is a part of a special task force to hunt down and destroy malfunctioning "runaway" robots.

Their handguns could lock on a target and program the bullets just before firing to stay on their target, although they looked more like miniature rocket based missiles with their own tiny engines and guidance fins.

I remember a number of the larger scenes giving a bullet-point-of-view type thing as the target goes running away and try to evade the shots by going around corners and obstacles, even purposely missing other people, before embedding into their target and exploding.

http://xirdalium.net/2012/02/1...

The above link has a picture of the bullet from this movie, and even goes on about a real prototype from Sandia National Laboratories back in 2012

https://share.sandia.gov/news/...

I wonder how much these two groups worked together on these.

Nuclear power has already been tried on a merchant ship.

The problem is the manpower to operate it just doesn't scale well to something as small as a ship. The reactor itself scales just fine and performed admirably (used about 163 pounds of uranium or a hair over one gallon, instead of 29 million gallons of fuel oil during its 10 years of operation). But the additional manpower and training needed to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor instead of a diesel engine killed its cost-effectiveness at transporting cargo. You're basically using the same amount of trained staff as needed to operate a reactor to power a small city (a few hundred MW), except you're only powering a ship (74 MW).

Maybe molten salt reactors or some other tech will be easy enough to maintain that nuclear could supplant diesel for cargo ships. But it isn't going to happen with light water reactors. Even the U.S. Navy sees this lower limit, and uses diesel or gas turbine engines in anything as small as a cruiser (the previous Virginia-class cruisers were nuclear, but the current Ticonderoga-class uses gas turbine engines).

...aren't birds renewable resources too? :) ...and desert tortoises? :)

Frankly, the bigger problem is the possible impact to airplanes: http://energy.sandia.gov/?p=19...

You scale this stuff up enough, and pretty soon there isn't anywhere to fly planes safely.

Firstly... 10^-15 is WAY beyond what most scientific codes care about. Most nonlinear finite-element codes generally shoot for convergence tolerances between 1e-5 and 1e-8. Most of the problems are just too hard (read: incredibly nonlinear) to solve to anything beyond that. Further, 1e-8 is generally WAY beyond the physical engineering parameters for the problem. Beyond that level we either can't measure the inputs, have uncertainty about material properties, can't perfectly represent the geometry, have discretization error etc., etc. Who cares if you can reproduce the exact same numbers down to 1e-15 when your inputs have uncertainty above 1e-3??

Secondly... lots of the best computational scientists in the world would disagree:

http://www.openfoam.org/docs/u...
http://libmesh.sourceforge.net...
http://www.dealii.org/
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/ind...
http://trilinos.sandia.gov/

I could go on... but you're just VERY wrong... and there's no reason to spend more time on you...

No. The B612 people's math is demonstrably wrong, or at least very misleading.

...There are only a few hundred noteworthy craters on earth over the past few hundred-million-years. That works out to "not one per century".

Make no mistake -- I think we should prepare for and defend against them, and I'm in favor of the satellite and conversation on the topic. But the numbers in this study are difficult to swallow and I accuse the hopefully well-intentioned people behind B612 of some under-founded alarmism.

Did you actually read the article? The statement from B612 was "The foundation says the CTBTO data would suggest that Earth is hit by a multi-megaton asteroid - large enough to destroy a major city if it occurred over such an area - about every 100 years." Since there was a very famous one just over a century ago in Siberia (1908) that most definitely would have destroyed a major city if it had been hit it is not all obvious that there is any exaggeration here. And notice that it did NOT leave a crater. Computer modelling shows that this is the norm for megaton asteroid explosions, not the exception - most asteroids are rocky conglomerates that would dump their energy into massive atmospheric explosions and leave no craters, even as the fiery plasma jets from the sky lay waste to the surface of the Earth. The asteroids that form craters are megaton range iron asteroids (only ~1% of meteors are iron based on Antarctic data), or extremely large (hundreds of megaton yield) rocky ones.

They've been doing this on solar cells for a while.

http://energy.sandia.gov/wp/wp...
http://www.solexel.com/Interso...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...

All the energy mankind consumes on Earth is a sparrow's fart compared to the energy the entire Earth gets from the sun:

See http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf

So even if we increased our energy consumption by ten times, the amount of waste heat it might generate is negligible.

.

It is, of course, tempting to dismiss his extreme claims as some sort of mental aberration -- perhaps resulting from his having hit the jackpot with the sale of his company for, by some accounts, between $3B and $4B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.

On the other hand, he did sell his company for between $3B and $B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.

Moreover, if we give the initial statement in Clark's Laws any credence: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.", RHN's age and the fact that he is commenting on his specialization should be given some weight.

With this in mind, I would ask you to review the linked presentation -- which I located at Sandia's website (and of which I recommend you commit to memory lest it disappear down the memory hole) -- made by RHN at Sandia in 2006. Note he proposes an "Extraction System Organization" with a budget rising to $300B/year by 2015.

In particular, I found this item interesting:

Collectors and Analysts have no need to know how extraction system works (this knowledge should be highly restricted) – users need only know extraction system’s capabilities and how to use it.

CAUTION: Some obviously psychotic individuals claim there to be a deep relationship between credit card companies and the surveillance state. They should be locked up for their own safety.

I dunno, the Z machine at Sandia looks pretty nice.

At least for physics...

Solid state
Quantum espresso
Abinit
GPAW

Particle physics
The famous Geant4

Molecular dynamics
LAMMPS
Amber

etc... etc.. etc... I could post links all day.

I'm not really sure who this article is directed at, biologists I guess...

No, but outputting a mixture of just 4 pure wavelengths works well in initial studies.

an incandescent bulb puts out about 52 lumens per watt.

If only! "An upper limit for incandescent lamp luminous efficacy (LER) is around 52 lumens per watt, the theoretical value emitted by tungsten at its melting point" (wikipedia). In fact a 40W tungsten bulb outputs 12.6 lumens/watt, up to 17.5 for a 100W bulb. Incandescent bulbs aren't even in the ballpark anymore.

As to whether some people assume all light is equal, I suppose some do. But others take it very seriously. It is not an overlooked issue.

Well some of it is pretty cool: the Sandia cooler

Btw. anyone know what happened to above tech? Seemed very promising, has been a while since announced, but so far I haven't seen any commercial products built around this...?

""saves the planet"(from what?)"
from an extreme over abundance of CO2.

Since this technology was done by Sandia and works, it isn't Cold Fusion; which has never worked. Now, this specific company might be committing fraud, sure.

https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html

" just because it's claimed to be "carbon-neutral" (it hides the carbon generation further up the supply chain)"
care to explain?
With this technology, you would use Wind, Solar or Nuclear to power it. Hopefully we could use it it 'scrub' the CO2 down to preindustrialized levels.

No we should all go singing praises and assume the problem is solved; but that doesn't mean we should ignore possible solution. It only means we should use science and critical thinking to find out if it works, the cost, and scalability.

Sandia National Labs was doing this, using solar energy to drive the process, five years ago.

Sandia's Sunshine to Petrol project

Sandia National Labs was doing this, using solar energy to drive the process, five years ago.

Sandia's Sunshine to Petrol project

Time to move on towards what works, and is not so expensive: Sandia's Z-machine: https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/nuclear_fusion/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/fusion-energy-breaking-even/ http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2012/09/18/sandia-lab-releases-info-on-a-new-type-of-fusion-device/

Yeah, one of the last things I heard out of Sandia on the subject some years ago (maybe '08? Nope, actually all the way back in 2007) was them turning the electrical pulse circuitry into a "lunchbox"-size unit that could be stacked in parallel with others, and rapid fired. And it was like "yeah, yeah, road to economical fusion power blah blah blah where are the sparkies?"

I'd suggest that they should keep the old Z-machine running for tourists to ooh and ahhh over on tours of the production fusion reactor (it's not like they won't have the power to run it), but as the world's largest source of X-rays that's probably not a good idea either.

The photos of the Z machine have to be seen to be believed, and even then, it is grade A sci-fi: http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/

Middle right photo - Pretty sure I've seen that room before. Shortly thereafter I was hitting head crabs with a crowbar.

Yeah, I remember when we had the MIT fusion research Slashdot Interview, and they showed the graph that was presented in the 70s showing how soon they could have fusion given various funding levels.

The saddest part was of the various scenarios like "fusion in 10 years", "fusion in 20 years", there was a "fusion never" line where funding was never sufficient to yield breakeven fusion, and then there was overlaid a new "actual funding" line which was significantly lower than that. :(

P.S. Personally my money is on Sandia, but that's just because the old Z-Machine was the most fucking awesome thing ever. EVER. I admit this is not a rational scientific argument, and that a working Z-pinch fusion device would not look like that at all, but come on!

The photos of the Z machine have to be seen to be believed, and even then, it is grade A sci-fi: http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/ The "Z pinch" is an alternative method of containing the hot plasma. Tokomak reactors use magnetic confinement of a continuous plasma, while the Z machine uses inertial confinement for shorter lived plasmas. IIRC the web of lightning shown in Sandia's publicity photos is produced when thousands of tungsten filaments are vaporized in order to generate x-rays. The fuel pellet sits in the center and the X-rays compress it into criticality -- if it sounds like an H-bomb, that's because it probably is.

Ugh ....
Maryland - Goddard Space Flight Center
New Mexico - AF Research Lab - Space Vehicles, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs
Colorado - Ball, Raytheon, etc
California - JPL, Livermore Labs and way too many others to list
Virginia - Navy Research Lab, Wallops Island
Texas - UT Dallas, Texas A&M, Johnson Space Center, many more
Arizona - Orbital Sciences Corp., GD, etc
Tennessee - Oakridge
Alabama - U.S. Space and Rocket Center
Utah -Space Dynamics Laboratory, L3
Florida - Kennedy, ATK and many more
Alaska - Kodiak Island

The space industry is spread out over the entire country. This list could go on and on. Saying it is only Florida and Texas that benefit is mildly absurd. I agree with the idea, but it isn't nearly as narrow as that.

Another terrible article summary.

In 2010, a solid-state device at 0.67THz was achieved. In 2012, that effort is up to 0.85 THz. Progress is slow, but continuing.

Diode-type CMOS imagers for terahertz radiation have been built. Those convert terahertz radiation into DC, which can then be amplified by standard techniques. But diodes don't have gain. That's why the original article emphasizes that this new device has gain.

There are terahertz lasers, waveguides, antennas, and other components that work up there. The situation is much like radar during WWII; there were a few components that could do specific things at radar frequencies (then 60MHz to 1.2GHz), but general electronics wasn't there yet. Most of the electronics in radars of that period ran at far lower speeds. They still worked.

Maybe I just didn't get the message, but what draws heat away from the die itself? This setup probably does away with thermal paste and similar junctions...

The other thing is that hydrodynamic bearings are only self-supporting and quasi-frictionless after a threshold RPM is reached. Before the whole setup is spinning fast enough for hydrodynamic effects to take over, it's going to grind against the chip die, and unless they came up with something good, it's going to destroy it on startup...

Take a look at the presentation on the parent site: https://ip.sandia.gov/techpdfs/Sandia%20Cooler%20presentation.pdf

There's an underside view of the mechanism, itself. As others have said, it's a spinning heatsink on top of a baseplate, and the presentation includes a visual the thermal interface between plate & die. I imagine arctic silver isn't going anywhere. The airgap is between the spinning heatsink and the baseplate (also well-illustrated in the presentation).

Sure, there are a number of technologies that can be developed for hauling cargo, another option is quicklaunch. No problem there at all. However that doesn't answer my question. But if there is a review of the design, I'd better first take a look at it first. Maybe they didn't cover the gen2 design? There is just one problem: there is no review to be found. If you go to the website of Sandia, and search for startram, you get 0 hits. If you google for sandia national laboratories "murder squad" you only get references to the same startram press release style article, copied over and over again on different blogs and news sites. Not a single article mentioning the review is kind enough to link to it. By now it's getting very, very suspicious. Is there even a "murder squad"? What are their other accomplishments? Are they even connected to the sandia national laboratory?

Care to explain? I'm really confused and I think I'm starting to smell a corpse in the closet.

agreeded - i want this mixed with the extremely impressive heat sink/fan design where the majority of the heat sink was spun as the blades rather than a fan forcing air on to a surface area..

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/07/new-heat-sink-could-slash-us-e.html

http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2010/100258.pdf

Which should be an extremely cheap design to licence if not free as it was published by a government agency. it's more than 2 years old, requires no new tech to be built, just a difference in how we machine and build parts. why can't we buy these yet? when could we see these made out of this new fun composite compound? do i need to just give up and go down the the local machine shop and make it my self?

Don't forget the Z-Machine, Sandia Lab's contribution to the fusion technology race.

up North where the states refuse to allow them

Err...

This reminds me of a device by Sandia National Labs of a micro-electromechanical steam engine. Sandia's device uses resistive heating to vapourise the water and capillary forces retract the piston.
Anyone in-the-know care to comment on the relative merits and the relative scales?

http://www.sandia.gov/energy-water/docs/121-RptToCongress-EWwEIAcomments-FINAL.pdf

Table B-1 on page 65.

This rotating heat exchanger geometry places the thermal boundary layer in an accelerating frame of reference. Placing the boundary layer in this non-inertial frame of reference adds a new force term to the Navier-Stokes equations, whose steady state solution governs the functional form of the heat-sink-impeller flow field [Schlichting, 1979]. At a rotation speed of several thousand rpm, the magnitude of this centrifugal (in the frame of reference of the boundary layer) force term is as such that as much as a factor of ten reduction in average boundary layer thickness is predicted [Cobb, 1956]. Unlike techniques such as air jet impingement cooling, the mechanism for boundary layer thinning in the air bearing heat exchanger does not rely on a process that entails dissipation of significant amounts of energy, nor is the boundary layer thinning effect localized in a small area. Rather, the centrifugal force generated by rotation acts on all surfaces simultaneously, and all portions of the finned heat sink are subject to the resulting boundary layer thinning effect. For the limiting case of flat rotating disk, an exact solution of the Navier-Stokes equation is possible and indicates that the magnitude of the boundary-layer thinning effect is constant as a function of radial position.

(Emphasis added.)

How well do bearings conduct heat?

Again, the technical document makes it clear that the rotating heat sink is not coupled via a bearing to the surface it's cooling. Rather there is a very thin layer of air separating them. Naively one might think that this layer of air (generally a poor heat conductor) would become limiting, and there would be poor heat transfer from the hot plate to the rotating heat sink. However they address this:

Heat flows from the stationary aluminum base plate to the rotating heat-sink-impeller through this 0.03-mm-thick circular disk of air. As shown later in Figure 18, this air-filled thermal interface has very low thermal resistance and is in no way a limiting factor to device performance; its cross sectional area is large relative to its thickness, and because the air that occupies the gap region is violently sheared between the lower surface (stationary) and the upper surface (rotating at several thousand rpm). The convective mixing provided by this shearing effect provides a several-fold increase in thermal conductivity of the air in the gap region.

So, basically by keeping the air gap very thin (30 microns), and by substantially shearing/mixing this thin air disk, its thermal conductivity can be sufficient to transfer heat up into the rotating fins. Overall a rather clever design.

WTF happened to /.

I agree a lot of junk gets posted to Slashdot. But in this case, a link was actually provided to a good technical document that answers many questions, provides schematics, and shows graphs of various performance measures.

Try this.

Anyway, what required a supercomputer 14 years ago should be relatively routine these days, so if you've got a sufficiently well-preserved skull that you can CAT/ MRI scan it to get the internal dimensions of the air spaces, and can make reasonable assumptions about the soft tissues, then you should be able to get some idea about the sounds that could be made.

Add in some artistic interpretation ... lather, rinse, repeat.

Some of the rest could be filled in with hydro... a reservoir is a huge energy store, and more reliance on local solar/wind would let us keep the reservoirs topped up for when we need them.

Then coal would be a last resort. After all, nature can absorb CO2, we don't need to eliminate carbon emissions, just reduce them to a sustainable level.

All that said, I'm not opposed to nuclear either. $12 billion cleanup is an awful lot, yet the US consumes 21e6 barrels per day, which at current pricing is over $2e9 per day or $14e9 per week... that is, a $12e9 cleanup is less than we spend on crude oil alone in a single week - not counting the environmental and geopolitical costs of oil. Expensive solutions are viable for expensive problems.

Question: Why does everyone seem so focused on Solar cells, which as everyone points out wear out, will need cooling at these temps, etc, instead of molten salt solar power where the more heat you create the better it runs and the heat stored in the salt itself can be used as a battery? Was there a hidden gotcha I haven't heard about, or is there some sort of kickback or subsidy for cell production?

Because it seems to me that cells are just the wrong direction to go. With Molten Salt it is basically a big tank and focusing mirrors which will make for lower costs, the life of the unit as a whole should beat cells, and the salt as a battery helps deal with the storage problems. So why so much focus on cells?

• New reactor paves the way for efficiently producing fuel from sunlight
• Sandia's Sunshine to Petrol project seeks fuel from thin air
• Making Gasoline from Carbon Dioxide

We need to stop conflating petroleum's source with its capacity as a "battery". We are always going to need hydrocarbons for plastics, oils, etc. Also, the energy density of gasoline, at ~45 MJ/kg, is orders of magnitude better than the best battery technology available.

It would be awesome to run reverse combustion at large-scale nuclear facilities. It would benefit from improved efficiency at the nuclear plants due to running the reaction on thermal energy rather than going through the relatively inefficient step of thermal to electrical conversion. This approach would be, by definition, carbon neutral. Hell, if we wanted to remove CO2 from the atmosphere we could just run the plants in overtime and pump the hydrocarbons back into the geological reservoirs we drained in the past (would the EPA have a problem with that? Hmm...)

The potential benefits are significant: a single point solution that retains all the current infrastructure investment in petroleum distribution/consumption, no issues with hydrocarbon "self-discharge" like batteries/ultracaps have, excellent energy density, etc. We will always need hydrocarbons, so why wean ourselves off of them?

...just don't conflate the use of hydrocarbons with their source. If we can make the source clean/renewable, then what further problems exist? I freely admit much more research & engineering is necessary in this field, but all of these prognostications engage in similar thought exercises (including TFA).

Sandia says "along a journey by train across Kazakhstan to Kurchatov; while it was at another interim storage pad there; and along a truck route to a long-term concrete storage pad in northeast Kazakhstan." Wiki says "In its heyday Kurchatov (which was known by its postal code Semipalatinsk-16) was a closed city, one of the most secretive and restricted places in the Soviet Union."

In a few months, when new satellite data is uploaded to your favorite map site, these should be fun to find. http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/110128.html says "transport nuclear materials 1,860 miles by train across the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_stations_in_Kazakhstan has two maps of railways in Kazahkstan. The Sandia site also has pictures.

No it's not. There is for all piratical purposes unlimited amounts of oil in the planet. We're getting to the lower ores, the tars and sluge, basically. Once we're below that, we've got air and water. That's why many, many people are looking to that unlimited oil resource (sky and water and sun), so that won't happen. There has never been a non-localized shortage on earth in history.

Here's some of the best links in this regard:
1. The synthesis of gasoline and diesel with nuclear energy (PDF).
2. The Sandia CR-5 thermochemical engine (PDF).
3. Windfuels.

Oil will never run dry, ever. Right now, we throw out waste biomass equivalent to 20% of our oil consumption, and about 50% of our oil consumption. Cut oil use by 50% (even lead-acid plug-in hybrids can achieve this), and we don't need any of the above technologies. We just need the same stuff the South Africans currently use to turn coal into diesel.

Oh, and I should mention that natural gas, not oil, (really hydrogen) is the primary component of the "oil-based" fertilizers. A lot more of that than oil. In fact, ammonia was originally produced by using hydrogen form water and electricity from hydroelectric powerplants.

This is Slashdot. There are many self styled experts here. Some know what they're talking about. Many do not. Tread with care.

Right.

You have some things going for you here. First, your problem is controlling water and sewerage plants. Those don't need to be connected to external systems. In contrast, power grid control systems do, because there are financial systems which interconnect to the operational systems. (Read PJM 101 to get a sense of what that's like for the nation's biggest power grid.)

Second, your system isn't that big. You probably have only one control center. The problems of securing a system with one control center and a hierarchical structure have been worked out. Distributed systems are much tougher.

Third, you're doing a new system, and can do it right. The big problems are with legacy systems that have built-in security holes.

Fourth, help is available. Sandia has a center for SCADA security, funded by DOE and Homeland Security.

Finally, if there's trouble, it will probably involve an employee. That's been the case in existing incidents. Make sure that there's no one person with the keys to everything.

There are a variety of good posts here (among the chaff). The post by @bigjeff5 and the anonymous coward post amendment. For standards and an understanding of the risk metrics Sandia labs has a great set of documents for SCADA security http://www.sandia.gov/ccss/ , never mind all the FUD. You'll have to decide on whether you want a best in class, good enough, or what you can afford and wherever the three vectors meet at a solution. Technically there is no reason for SCADA to be a risk. Experience though tells us there are plenty of reasons to push the SCADA operational component into the risk category. Not being able to afford to keep the utility operational engineers employed because the technical SCADA solution cost three times your budget is the risk I usually see. What you'll need is an experienced person to act as a trusted third party and there are a lot of them out there in the real world. Be wary of people who talk about security, technical issues, operating systems, and other elements in black and white terms. They rarely have the real world experience to understand real world issues in implementation. Since you appear to be talking about water and in the United States (pardon if not) you are likely highly regulated. You will also need to balance the new requirements and regulations for implementing SCADA devices too.

Sandia Labs is working on a system that uses solar energy to capture CO/CO2 and convert it back to hydrocarbons. Will be interesting to see if they can get it to scale and what efficiencies they get.

Unfortunately the linked article doesn't contain enough meat for meaningful discussion. If this is just another fairly blind application of Jevons Paradox (soon to become a slashdot meme!) then I'm not too interested.

Except if you follow the reference given in that link, you find that this was a test facility; the article may have meant that this is the first molten-salt solar plant used in production, not just for testing purposes.

Nuclear power is far, far, far cleaner than fossils. What would you rather have? A concrete box of toxic nastyness, or a mist of global warming inducing toxic nastyness all over the place. I agree that we should move to solar and other sources (by the time nuke runs out, I think we'll be flying around the galaxy on zero point energy modules). I actually don't think the suns energy is "a limitation" it is actually far, far more than 15 billion Americans would use. Continuing on the GP's theme, I think the most promising technology in this regard is thermochemical technology. If we coat just 5% of the Sahara desert with this technology, we can make oil for 6 billion Americans.

Yes, it won't require all that much, but iridium is rarer than platinum, and it's still obnoxious to have iridium. Can't we use scrap iron instead?

You and all alike will be dragged into the atomic age, kicking and screaming. Forget the horses and buy a hummer. And if not, the sun shall reverse the process. And even then, there is renewable petroleum at your local restaurant.

Just so you understand, nuclear has insanely high EROEI. Solar has 20X EROEI. We currently have the technology to do electricity to liquids at %63 percent. I would do this in my house, but I could not get the required catalysts, nor would anyone want to have 50+ atm in their house. Solar PV can provide real gasoline and oil at $9 a gallon currently (actually a few years ago). Wind turbines could potentially do it at less than $3 a gallon. Solar thermal is cheaper. Possibly less if you use the thermochemical engines linked.

Here's the process. Electricity is used to make hydrogen by dipping some stainless steel plates in baking soda. This can be up to %70 efficient. Then, baking soda would be heated to release CO2. The CO2 and the hydrogen would be heated by concentrated sunlight. Once they are heated, the same process the Nazi's and New Zealanders (what a combo) and the same process used to make methanol industrially today will kick in (%80-90). And you will have petroleum. Next time I can do my own project in a real lab, this will be it. Also, since it is %63 efficient, solar will have a real 12.6 EROEI. You and the likes of you can go back to horses, but I'm not going to stop the Chinese guys from taking your land while they drive their nuclear powered hummers.