Slashdot Mirror

Today, 50 years later, we still don't have the faintest idea about what to do with nuclear refuse. Until this problem is solved, suggesting nuclear as the one solution to every energy problem is at best short-sighted.

Yep, throwing the pollution in the atmosphere and groundwater, like with fossil fuel plants, is clearly safer than concentrating the waste in one place. That's why I toss my trash all over the neighborhood, rather than bag it for the trash man every week.

BTW, even "clean" coal plants throw out more radiation than nuclear plants, plus they have nice things like arsenic which doesn't have a half life to worry about. Here is one link for your perusal: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Instead of comparing nuclear power to mythical power plants that are free and non-polluting, perhaps it would be more helpful to compare it to things that are actually around. Some places can economically use solar power to great effect, but you should worry about whatfossil fuel plants are throwing into the environment before complaining about the horrors of nuclear waste.

Michael Shermer, a competitive cyclist and "Skeptic" columnist for Scientific American wrote an article called The Doping Dilemma on this very subject. It examines the doping issue using gaming theory to analyze the costs and payoffs of doping and suggests ways to make doping never pay off.

Here is a pretty good analysis from game theory on what we could actually do to reduce doping. Bottom line - increased penalties.

Carnegie Mellon University good enough for you?

Scientific American reported that "The fuel in the thrusters that Phoenix used to land on Mars was made of hydrazine, not perchlorate."
http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=perchlorate-found-on-mars-makes-soi-2008-08-04

There are many different kinds of storage for energy. The sun is where ALL earth energy originates. Period. If you can't live on a parcel of land and live off of the energy contained within it, you don't live sustainably. That being said, we don't all have to live in the desert or underwater... the energy resources of an entire nation can be distributed fairly efficiently to it's population.

This article said it would cost 420b in subsidies to make it cost effective to change 35% of the energy to a renewable form by 2050. Let's assume they're way off, and it costs twice as much. So we end up with 2.5 trillion dollars to get us switched over completely. Hell, just double it again to be sure. So five trillion dollars... which could easily be paid by halving our war budget for only ten years, and about twenty if we aren't wasting it on a war.

If we're not willing to pay that price, then we probably deserve to slip into history with a whimper.

Conservation yields more benefits than anything else, as does a sensible immigration and birth control policy -- incentives that reward, but not so much as to punish those with different lifestyles.

I understand your trepidation, but being a deer in headlights isn't a rational response to our predicament. There are many roads to success, but only one to failure, and that's apathy.

the biggest problem is that it's very expensive to buy sufficient panels to generate 1000W of power

It depends on what you consider expensive. Five Sharp 224W Solar Panels, each costing $1200, would cost $6000 and generate more than 1000W.

The biggest problem with solar power is that we can't generate enough power and not the fact that we can't store it.

Do you know more than those who write for SciAm? SciAm published an article, "A Solar Grand Plan", detailing how the US can produce "69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar power by 2050." Potential wind power is even greater. The Rocky Mountains from Canada to Texas alone, Oilman and Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is proposing this, has enough potential wind energy to provide the US with electricity. Actually his plan is for independence from imported oil. Use of the wind would allow natural gas fueled power plants to be closed then the gas coulf be used as vehicle fuel.

Falcon

Large Study Finds No Link between Marijuana and Lung Cancer

My sister once fell out of a tree, so all girls must fall out of trees, right? Oh, wait, you mean your anecdotal evidence of your 5th grade classmates or girlfriend or that one class you had IS meaningless? Wow! Who would have thought of that! But don't blame yourself, turns out evolution http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results made you that way

While I agree with you and the other posters who say that we can't rely on any one single energy source, I don't think anyone (or at least anyone credible) is suggesting that we do.

But there's still a big problem with your post. What's needed to make wind power systems reliable isn't just other energy systems, it is some form of energy storage that allows energy to be stockpiled for future use. One possible solution to that problem is storing the energy as compressed air as detailed in the Solar Grand Plan detailed in the Jan. 08 issue of Scientific American. These systems are already in use, with the oldest such system dating to 1978, so they are proven technology. I have trouble picturing a situation where the wind would drop off statewide all at the same time, so the short spin-up time of the turbines should not be a factor. As the energy level produced by the wind mills drops off, more and more of the compressed air turbines can be brought online to balance the output. Properly designed, such a system could be virtually automatic. These systems aren't completely carbon-neutral, since they do require burning some natural gas to keep the compressed air turbines from freezing up, but that is a reasonable trade off under the circumstances.

PV production will never by high enough for Middle America to bid on them, they will never provide Energy Independence

So you are more qualified than the researchers than came up with "A Solar Grand Plan"? Their plan says solar power can generate 69% of the US's electricity by 2050. You also know more than the billionaire Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens, Jr? He's announced a plan to eliminate the need for imported oil. His plan is to erect wind turbines through middle America from Canada to Mexico. The electricity that can be produced is enough to close all the LNG, liquefied natural gas power plants in the US. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States published by the National Renewable Energy Labs details the wind resources in the US. Picken's plan is to use all the LNG as fuel for vehicles thus replacing imported oil.

Falcon

I wouldn't call coal powerstations more ecologically safe than nuclear powerstations: "The waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts"

The oil market is extremely volatile right now, and the reason for that is that the big investors know that if demand drops significantly, they're going to lose their asses.

September? This bubble could go on for years. All we need is the LA times to have four^H^H^H^Hthree missiles on the front page. Oh yes, notice the ground-plumes of the third and "fourth" ones--HTF did the Times editor miss that?

A massive country wide nuclear power plant building spree would need to take place. Right now we have over 100 nuke plants that supply 20% of our electricity

Nuclear power isn't needed. By 2050 solar power could provide 69% of the US's electrical needs. Wind can also supply a lot, I read where the Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to supply the lower 48 states but I didn't find a reference. Then a lot of waste heat goes up smokestacks daily. Here's a quote from TFA: "Here's a Maxwell House coffee roaster in Duval County. They're roasting beans, so all that heat has to go somewhere. About twelve megawatts' worth of potential electricity is going up the stack." In Hawaii about 30% of the big Island's, Puna, is from geothermal power. Geothermal sources produced about 13,000 gigawatt hours in California in 2007, with more available.

Add all these together and every coal fired plant should be able to be closed without any more nuclear power plants being built and still have plenty of electricity.

Falcon

I think we're thinking of different studies. I found the link to mine (an interesting read, but hardly scientific gospel): http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-expert-mind

It seems I remembered a select portion of the article; it describes a study which used chess as a study to find how expertise in a field in dependent upon training. By repeated exposure to situations and, sometimes, a knowledge of background theory, more information is available from the same data because more detailed extrapolation is possible.

Similarly, by training in a fighting art/sport, more opportunities present themselves when faced with an opponent than those obvious to a beginner. The mental process in each case appears similar to me; a rapid and correct (or at least useful) analysis of the situation results from the ability gained in practise. The main difference in sparring is that a substantial portion of time has to be spent making the body capable of reliably doing what you're asking it to do.

For reference, both my sparring and my chess are mediocre.

Last summer for the most part, and there are some projections that it will melt completely by the end of this summer.

=Smidge=

That's a possibility, but I don't think it's an overly likely one.

My bet is that the difference between Northern and Southern ice cover trends is a lot more obvious if you care to look for it: Soot.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=impure-as-the-driven-snow

Money quote: "and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming."

Not that this is Scientific American talking here, which is hardly a hotbed of AGW skepticism, to put it extremely mildly.

So "just" clean up all those dirty soot-emitting Chinese factories, and the Arctic will start freezing more.

This policy has the advantage of being A Really Fucking Good Idea(TM) whether you're a true believer in AGW all the way over to denying it completely.

Of course, in the real world, not only do we not discuss China's possible particulate-based contribution to GW, we even exempt them from even discussions about adhering to Kyoto, despite the fact that they've been the largest global C02 emitter two years running now and the rate of increase is accelerating...

Actually, according to this plan from Scientific American, the energy can be stored as compressed air underground. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan I'm not sure I agree 100%, but it's an interesting article, with recommendations on paying for it as well.

We have stopped adapting a long time ago. âSomewhere around the time we invented fire, hunting, farming...âSince then we adapt everything AROUND US to ourselves.

Evidence of human evolution after having developed fire, hunting, farming evolution:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=african-adaptation-to-dig

And here's an BBC-news article that looks at evidence for the rate of evolution actually increasing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7132794.stm

I could also speculate that by our modern societies putting more worth on technical & scientific expertise, we could have a selection pressure that selects for smarter people, which would be evolution as well. Yes, we force our environment to adapt to us to a massive degree, but that still doesn't exclude us adapting to it. We can do both at the same time.

Google "recent human evolution"

I doubt evolution ever really can stop unless extremely advanced aliens catpure & domesticate us into a line of pure-breed pets...

Doing some quicky cost analysis, guides my point of view towards the idea that the benefits (a couple cents cheaper gas in a decade or so) out weight the cost (more exploited land).

But then again I'm okay with the current "shortage" of oil, since we might slowly ween ourselves back from the gross, and inexcusable, excess lead to by the false sense of infinite resources/entitlement. Its a dose of reality, something we need in America.

Personally, I'm mixed on the entire thing. We have no shortage of oil and the price ain't all that expensive. O.k. we do have a temp. fuel price issue because we have to compete with everyone else to buy the damned stuff. I've been reading about N.S. SAVANNAH
http://www.marad.dot.gov/Offices/MSP/Ship_Operations/NSS/index.htm . Read up on that ship. Basically there wasn't any tech. reason why we shouldn't have nuclear civilian cargo ships. The poor ship was doomed because of the PR stunt thing, but it worked and made a profit. The real hidden cons where that those specialists got more money due to all those nuclear related classes that they had to attend, and those that supervised them usually made more money and complained to their union. Oh, and that half the ship was a cargo ship/half was a passenger PR ship. It was built as a tech demo and the tech worked fine. They then complained that it wasn't economical, well it was never built to be.

This link is about 100% solar/hydrogen powered home http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hydrogen-house&page=2
The home works. It cost the guy $100K of his money, $400K of government grants, and a $3 million car to make it work. I'm sorry, but the tech may be there, but I'd rather us focus on building cost effective tech. Nuclear powered ships, trains, and airplanes make far more sense than solar powered homes at this point in time.

As for vegan oil, how many cars do you think our current crop of vegetable oil will power? I would be shocked if it were more than 1%. Actually, I looked it up:

About the only thing I agree with McCain on is that we need one heck of a lot more nuclear power plants.

I totally disagree with McCain, and you, on this. More nuclear power plants are not needed, and those in operation now can be shutdown. Sciam has the article "A Solar Grand Plan" explaining how solar power can provide "supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050." Then the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States details the wind energy potential of the continental US. The Rocky Mountains alone contains enough potential wind power. A sizable portion of energy can be sourced by geothermal sources as well. Then there's recoverable waste heat. Many megawatts of wasted heat goes up smoke stacks daily. But possibly the biggest source of energy is the negawatt, energy that's not needed. Combined with tidal and other energy sources there is no need for nuclear power plants.

But our global diplomatic stance, Iraq (drawing down), Afghanistan (stepping it up), health care, taxes, net neutrality, education, Supreme Court nominations, transparency and information availability from government - all of these are why I'm voting for Obama.

These are the same reasons I currently support Bob Barr as the Libertarian candidate. If the election were today or tomorrow I'd vote for Barr. But between McCain and Obama I'd vote for Obama.

Off topic, but when you have elephants that recognise themselves in the mirror, apes that can plan tool usage ahead of time, parrots that grasp the concept of zero, and so on, I'm personally honestly no longer convinced claims like this can be made so easily.

This http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-color-of-plants-on-other-worlds recent article on Scientific American gives more details.

Thank you.

The ignorance on nuclear reactors tends to irk me. I remember reading an Iron Man comic once, where Iron Man goes into the cooling tower, pulls out the reactor core, and throws it up into space, where it blows up in a nuclear explosion.

Problems being, as you noted the nuclear core is not in the cooling tower, and nuclear cores can't blow up like a nuclear bomb. Nuclear Physics 101. It just can't happen.

Fission bombs are set off by the rapid forming of a critical mass, either by joining two halves of a critical mass together in a millisecond's time, or, as with plutonium, by rapid implosion, usually of a sphere, causing the material to rapidly condense into a critical mass. (roughly described - I am not a nuclear physicist, so don't go all picky on the fine details everyone). It's an incredibly precise thing to get right. It doesn't just happen. Form the critical mass too slowly, and you create a whole lot of heat and radiation, but no boom.

I imagine that most of the fearful public does not understand this, even on a rudimentary level, and equates nuclear reactors with nuclear bombs. How many people think that Chernobyl was a nuclear explosion? Most I talk to. The no-nukes zealots commonly exploit this fear and ignorance. They are not interested in science, but in their ideology.

The waste produced by a coal plant is more radioactive than nuclear waste. We would have far less radioactive waste with nuclear power than with coal.

It may be related to a 2005 discovery published in the Scientfic American that combine organosilanes with water in the presence of a rhenium based catalyst to produce hydrogen.

It may be related to a 2005 discovery published in the Scientfic American that combine organosilanes with water in the presence of a rhenium based catalyst to produce hydrogen.

I think (and so do several leading experts) that too much skepticism, especially when applied too early, is detrimental to creative thought - and lack of creativity WILL hurt you as a scientist or engineer, perhaps even more than a lack of critical thought. I wouldn't be too hasty to run off and start doubting everything.

If you was a farmer, would you be growing dent corn or regular corn? If you answered dent corn or I don't know, then you most likely wouldn't be growing food. The vast majority of corn grown is dent corn which isn't use for food except maybe starches and animal feed.

On another note, Farmers usually plant 20,000-60,000 (Even as high as 80,000) corn plants per acre. Typically, 35 - 40k is common, at least in my area. With a 40,000 plant population, you are going to get around 200-210 bushels of corn which translates into about 28 tons or 25 metric tons (tonne) per acre (65% moisture). Now, according to this site, you can get about 5.2 metric tons of switch grass per hectare (around 7 acres). So that is around 175 tonnes for corn compared to around 5 tonnes for switch grass. You don't need to plow and seed switch grass, I assume it is the typical 2-3 cuttings a year like with hay though so some bailing and repeated cutting passes would probable make up for the plowing and seeding and it would probably be equal in fuel usage because fuel rate is calculated by PTO work.

Now the interesting part, you get around 28% product above what it costs to make the ethanol (the article says 25%) with corn. With the switch grass, you would get around 540% (per the article). Now the article is considering using the pulp as fuel for the refining process with switch grass but I assume that using silage from the corn crop could produce similar results if it wasn't ground up and left in the field. But you would likely gain around 49 tonnes of potential energy using the corn compared to 28 tonnes of potential energy going with switch grass in it's place. Now assuming the end product is going to be worth the same amount and the costs would be adjusted to reflect this in the pricing which means it would be better off to plant the switch grass on marginal lands in flood planes or other non-tillable and poor producing lands. Specking Soybeans in it every so often could possible take care of the nitrogen problems but a lot of the low lying marginal lands are already run off filters for existing crops which means they get carryover from fertilizers already in use.

I really don't think it would be beneficial to plant that instead of an existing crop unless the land is already so poor that it doesn't yield right on existing crops like corn. I don't see too much difference between silage and switch grass so an added benefit of planting corn might be a small amount of usable cellulose material that could be sold in addition to existing crop prices. You wouldn't want to do it every year but every other or maybe even every 3 years in between the last rotation might be a considerable source of product. It would take some work to store it but you might get about the same amount of material as if you harvested switch grass. There should be about 1 ton of silage ( metric tonne) for every 5 or 6 or so bushels of corn which translates to around 40 tons (about 36 tonnes) per acre (280 tons and 256 tonnes per hectare) which surprisingly is more then a crop of switch grass and is currently a by product tossed on the ground (it serves more of a purpose then waste though).

Are you perhaps referring to this article from 2001 which suggests that cosmic rays (which are different from emissions from the Sun, btw) intensify the effect of CFCs?

I suggest that you first read through the resources on realclimate.org on solar forcing, where it has been extensively discussed, and if you wish to dispute their findings, then please attack the science, not the scientist.

I've been reading the SciAm version of the article recommended by another poster, and it says that the universe started as a low entropy state. I don't understand how you can consider a largely homogeneous blob a low entropy state. What am I missing?

Thanks,
-l

The article the slashdot summary links to is basically a drastically shortened version of this recent article in Scientific American, plus a nutshell presentation of this paper.

How about publication in Scientific American?

science is in and has been in for a while.

Maybe you should learn some more about it - there's plenty of references and original source material there for you to read.

The latest Scientific American has an interesting article on the current state of the art of how to tell whether a photo has been doctored. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=digital-image-forensics

I read an article in the last year that talked about using liquid hydrogen to cool super conducting transmission lines and also being used as an infrastructure to distribute hydrogen for use in cars, fuel cells, etc...

Me too. It was this article in Scientific American.

Your correct. But the US Media is running out of things to scare the people about.

Articles like this have been published in science magazine too though. From "SciAm", "Can Science Save the Banana?"[podcast].

There was a Scientific American podcast about the demise of the banana on April 23, 2008. It was interesting--they actually went down to South America and took a tour of a banana farm. There are some photos on the site as well.

http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=7BA7726C-EBE6-29DB-B21F7FF464B293E9

Chok-sa!

Quoting from the slide show link:

It's a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.

The whole philosophy of perception that this quote embodies is fundamentally wrong. As an example of this, take a look at the first so-called "illusion" in the slideshow: the Edward Adelson checkerboard-and-shadon example. This is called an "illusion" on the basis that our eyesight "misleads us" by telling us that a light square in the shadow is lighter than a dark one in the light, whereas they are, supposedly, "the same color." By "the same color," what they seem to mean is that the stimulus, i.e., the rays of light reflected or emitted from the squares that hit our retina, have the same spectrum and intensity.

What they're missing is that the point of vision, and perception in general, isn't to give us information about the rays of light that hit the retina. What vision does is give us information about the objects in our environment, which reflect or emit rays of light. The reason we see the two squares as having different colors, despite the fact that our retinas are getting the exact same pointwise stimulus from them, is because the visual system, using contextual information about light and shadow across the whole scene, can figure out that the surface spectral reflectivity of the two squares must be different. Square B looks lighter than square A because the visual system judges, correctly, that it must reflect more light. Or put alternatively: the visual system figures out that if the two squares were in the same light, the point stimulus from the reflected light rays would be different.

This is accurately reproducing an aspect of the physical reality of the outside world; vision is accurately reproducing the spectral reflectivity of surfaces in our environment, at the apparent expense of failing to reproduce the spectral distribution of the rays of light that hit our retina. But of course, the answer to that one is that the rays of light aren't the object of visual perception, they're just the means.

Seeing the squares as different colors is not an illusion. There is only one visual illusion in that example, and they don't remark on it: the illusion of seeing, in a flat surface, a 3D scene with light and shadow. The judgement that the two squares have different colors follows from that, because in the real-world scene the image depicts, those squares would in fact be surfaces with different colors when seen under the same light.

Can someone please explain the "illusion" behind the grey tiles?

http://www.sciam.com/media/gallery/2B21EB44-BA10-8BF8-02EDC7FC3DF3CDEF_1.jpg

It challenged the reader to print out the image, cut out the two squares and compare them, which I did. Fair enough, sqaure A is a bit darker than the other light grey squares (didn't notice that prior to printing it out) but it is still much lighter than square B.

Are my eyes messed up? Or my brain? :P

Link to the one-page/print version of the dictionary article and the meat of the illusion article
Also, a summary of the illusion article: The brain uses context, rather than absolute sampling.

Link to the one-page/print version of the dictionary article and the meat of the illusion article
Also, a summary of the illusion article: The brain uses context, rather than absolute sampling.

Drug use is alive and well in the US, and aging well:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=when-im-sixty-four

4> Along with that new infrastructure, you will have an entirely new level of security issues. I invite you to consider the explosive potential of a hydrogen tanker being used by "youths" as an improvised FAE.

"If Hydrogen-Fueled Aircraft Were Used, the Collapse of World Trade Center would Not Have Happened".

But I am in agreement that we should be building nuclear power plants

And create more problems?

I would try to find more ways to replace fossil fuels with electricity as well as finding more non-fossil alternatives.

In "A Solar Grand Plan" Sciam lays out how solar power can provide the US with 69% of it's energy needs by 2050. And the US has enough potential wind power to supply a lot of energy to the US as well. Other sources of energy are biofuels including hydrogen produced by algae, geothermal, and tidal power.

i think the whole CO2 debate is nonsense anyway

SO all those scientists are wrong?

CO2 sequesturing should be a cheap alternative given CO2 is heavier than air. once it's in the ground it'll stay there

Oh really? Tell that to those living around Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun.

solar and wind on the other hand is hopeless at supplying base load. BASE LOAD you tree huggers. learn what it is.

And research is being done on storage, in "A Solar Grand Plan" Sciam says solar power can provide 69% of the US's energy needs by 2050. TFA goes over some of the research on storage. Base Load? Geothermal is a base load.

Here is a picture for you:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss

No, I'm pretty sure that's just stock photography of an IBM Deskstar after one week of use.

99% of the data on the drive was recovered actually.

Here is a non-slashdotted article (so far).
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia/

There's three pictures in total. One of them was of the inside of the drive and it didn't look scorched at all - there was some kind of metallic spray pattern on the inside but other than that the platters were still shiny and the ribbon cables undamaged.

What's interesting about that pic is the upside-down surface-mount chip sitting on the orange ribbon cable, and the matching (empty) solder pads underneath it.

I was about to speculate that the heat of re-entry melted the solder, but there's at least one are other surface-mount component immediately adjacent to the chip, and it's still attached to the same ribbon cable. (On the other hand, that small discrete part, likely a resistor or capacitor, would be more likely to adhere to the ribbon cable due to surface tension of the solder, which might not be the case for the heavier chip.)

On the gripping hand, maybe the photograph was taken immediately after the chip was desoldered using hot-air equipment. (Since it's upside-down and I don't have any pictures of hard drive internals handy, I'm not sure what the chip is, nor if there'd be any value in removing it. A flash device might hold useful data such as bad block maps and/or SMART-related drive operating parameters, etc...)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss Has a more robust site and the orig tale.