Slashdot Mirror

Environmentally nuclear is vastly better than all the other serious energy sources.

Prove it.

Now that I asked fro proof I'll provide my own evidence which supports my position as well as contradicts yours. "Report: Wind the Best Energy; Nuclear, Coal and Ethanol the Worst". "For Cheap Clean Energy, Go Geothermal, Study Says". "Oregon Geothermal Energy = Baseload Energy".

Wind and solar are not serious energy sources as is hinted by how much subsidies they need

By that criteria nuclear power is not a serious energy source because it needs massive subsidies. Not only does it need guarantied loans but it also needs it's liability limited and government disposal of it's waste. All alternative energy sources put together including geothermal, solar, tidal, wind, even biofuels only get a fraction of the subsidies nuclear power gets. "While renewable energy may require subsidies for the immediate future, nuclear power needs subsidies forever." From the Financial Times:

"'But those hoping for handouts would be disappointed. The "incentives" for nuclear and carbon capture and storage are only there to "help a nascent sector grow', he said."

"We are not going to achieve a competitive [nuclear] sector by handing out subsidies... we are not in the business of giving out subsidies. We are in the business of maintaining a level playing field."

"It's telling that the 'level playing field' the industry wants and the one the government wants bear little resemblance to each other."

Something is still going to need to provide the power to run the aluminium foundries and nuclear is the cleanest, safest long term solution for that.

Neither you nor anyone else has proven that nuclear power is clean yet I have provided evidence solar and wind are clean. Such as 2 of the links I provide above. Studies linked to say both wind and geothermal and cheaper and cleaner than nuclear. Now will you provide links to evidence says nuclear is cleaner?

Lets run through the check lists.

I provide evidence that this list is wrong, where is yours saying you're right? And for one on that list, "Wind is nice but it's unpredictable and bigger wind farms kill migrating birds", buildings cats, and cars kill more birds than turbines.

Try again.

Together they can never provide more than 20% of the grids needs simply for stability reasons. This is pretty much a hard cap, once you get more than that from unpredictable sources rolling blackouts start to become a real problem.

So you know more about solar power than the writers of the SciAm article "A Solar Grand Plan", and know more about wind power than the writers of a new study in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science" as well as those who created the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States at the National Renewable Energy Lab? What is your degree in and where did you get it so that you're smarter than they are? The SciAm article says that by 2050 solar energy can provide 69% of the US's electrical needs. The National Acad

Coal releases more radioactive waste than nuclear. Citation here.

From April 11, 2008. Not 2009, 2008

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-drug-protects-against-radiation-damage

So THAT'S what happened to the martians!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=perchlorate-found-on-mars-makes-soi-2008-08-04

Ummm, no, sorry, I don't work in quant, nice failure at assuming while discussing assumptions though.

And the reason we know the frequency of major geomagnetic storms is because of ice core samples whose stratified layers can yield details about Earth's atmosphere going back thousands of years. And unlike you, I don't get my info from a site that looks like something geocities vomited up.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bracing-for-a-solar-superstorm

And I picture you as someone too lazy to do any actual research into a subject before making unfounded assumptions, especially since even a 5 second Google search yields more credible sources than yours, which contradicts most of your post, as I've explained. I'm sure I certainly wouldn't want to hire you to help me with anything relating to EMC if you do business the same way you post on Slashdot.

For all those interested, Scientific American has the story.

The May issue of scientific american had an interesting article about the slow loss of atmospheric gasses into space...

how-planets-lose-their-atmospheres ...which suggests that the early earth had a lot more water and a denser atmosphere. It also, obviously, had a lot more CO2, vast quantities of which are now locked up in the form of rock (limestone) and organic matter.

Let me reword my statement: If the pilot decided to abort the landing, I would see no reason to fault them. And sometimes pushing your luck will bite you even if you were successful in the past. It's hard to tell whether you are lucky or good or a combo without at least a hundred or so "trials". A related story about the Red Baron and probability:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=news-bytes-red-baron-lucky
   

-

The idea those sound funny, and i've been laughing at a lot of the comments here, but chicken feathers are just waste and nearly free, so what could be cheaper to use for a hydrogen tank?

-

Fuel Cell Feed | Electric Vehicle Feed @ Feed Distiller

First off, directed != broadcast. Doesn't matter? Fine. It doesn't have to. Second off, show me your 200MW bluetooth device. You must have quite some range on that. I'm not an environmentalist, and I like nuclear power (when handled responsibly). With regard to your question about why arguments from the position of ignorance are allowed, I will have to contend by saying that they worked pretty well for this guy until everyone decided he must be forcefully outed and silenced. "Either get on the side of science or get away from a computer"? I draw an interesting parallel, if I don't say so myself. I don't hate science, I don't hate advancement, and I don't hate progress. I hate people who take a stance without considering all the possibilities and leap to conclusions without extensive testing. Do your cell phones and bluetooth earpieces cause cancer? Most studies say no, but after five seconds of google work, I found this and this. Are those real or are they more people "just as stupid as someone arguing against evolution.."? I don't know. Obviously there are contridictory results, so someone has to be wrong. There is an awful lot of money invested in cell phones. Which one is the disinformation coming from? I can't tell because I don't know who to trust.

How do the dates in this article fit in with what you are saying? Article:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-taming-of-the-cat

(The gist of the article is that all house cats come from Middle Eastern stock, probably because of agriculture)

Yeah, it was an article on Scientific American, maybe. England is working on using cell networks as a way to track stealth planes.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=0009EAC2-0FF3-1E40-89E0809EC588EEDF

I vaguely remember that it works by basically looking for "holes" in the network. If you were listening to a particular cell tower, and the signal gets weirdly reflected or disappears, it might be a stealth plane.

There may be enough wind in the world to supply our need 40 times over, but is the cost of tapping the energy source competitive with the cost of coal, gas, or nuclear power?

All of this get subsidies, as well as pass costs to others. Coal slurry spills happen all too frequently. Mountain top removal contaminates a lot of land. As does uranium mining. Without government subsidies nuclear power isn't even profitable. Though natural gas emits a lot less CO2 than coal when burned it releases a lot more methane, which is more than 20 tymes as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Then it needs pipelines to deliver it.

Well, actually, just because those two articles found negative aspects of nuclear power price, I dug out the following page about nuclear power in Finland. Here the price of nuclear power was EUR 2.37 c/kWh, when the closest second one, coal was 2.81 c/kWh. Wind power was somewhere around 5 c/kWh. The point is, maybe the US are unable to build profitable nuclear power, but that doesn't make nuclear power unprofitable. The same stands for uranium mining. Just because the US has one/some mines that have issues, is no reason to condemn uranium mining in general, at least with modern methods.

The problem with this model is that it is predicated on highly distributed wind farms. This means extending the grid out to 200 miles offshore and covering the mountains and plains with it. We just don't have that much copper, as Scientific American points out. Wind sounds good, but only nuclear gives us the point-source density needed to allow distribution to population centers with our available copper constraints.

There may be enough wind in the world to supply our need 40 times over, but is the cost of tapping the energy source competitive with the cost of coal, gas, or nuclear power?

All of this get subsidies, as well as pass costs to others. Coal slurry spills happen all too frequently. Mountain top removal contaminates a lot of land. As does uranium mining. Without government subsidies nuclear power isn't even profitable. Though natural gas emits a lot less CO2 than coal when burned it releases a lot more methane, which is more than 20 tymes as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Then it needs pipelines to deliver it.

We know that there are all sorts of natural energy sources around us, but its the financial cost that keeps us from recovering it.

More like it's politics. If financial costs were that important there would be no nuclear power. As I said before even coal gets subsidies. "Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies". In "My Climate Bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!' Rep Edward Markey goes over some of the subsidies different energy sources get.

The molten salt thing looks promising.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night

As do zinc air batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc-air_battery

Perhaps NASA will have a breakthrough with modern flywheel batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_battery

Or some simple solution we think isn't feasible will be once we reduce energy expectations, such as the solution they already have in Nepal for their electric vehicles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD1gPAoJdHA

Yes, those vehicles probably aren't safe around Excursions and Escalades, but if you restricted vehicle sizes on roads we could stop killing our society with convenience.

I think the real point of the submission is that If "WE" the community want to code, volunteer to test "as I did here" and think about the whole just a little more, then we'd all be better off for it. I wish I knew how to code, and perhaps I would lend a hand. (Anyone can suggest were to start? I am a fast learner who understands scripting/html and did a little Basic in school +10 years ago.)

For some reason (maybe because I watched it last night?) this reminds me of that line in the movie The Devil Wears Prada where she laughs and Meryl Streep lays into her about fashion and how the color sweater she was wearing was decided in that room. To her it didn't matter, but it is still important, otherwise we'd all look like fools. Remember the 70's?

I kid, but consider this article (Scienticfic American, "The Sorriest Animal") about what separates us from other animals. Part of the article talks about self esteem and needing to feel accepted. That is why we do just about anything we do outside of survival, because on some level it is. What I do not understand is why we can't wake up as a species and think seriously about the collective and what is best for all. We could build starships in 20-30 years, IF we looked for and purposely exploited our talent and treated each other with respect. But I truly believe we must first respect ourselves in order to respect others. But how can we do that, when we do not even consider that to be accepted, we need to accept others and assist, as they will be better to do for us.

To put another way, you have to think about yourself many times. Being quote selfish can be the most unselfish thing you do at times. If you aren't there, then things are completely out of your control. It may smell of It's a Wonderful Life, but if you truly think about the influences that we all have, that you yourself has, then you may understand my point.

Actually, magnetic disks have exponentially increased in capacity since the 50s. In fact, the rate of increase has been higher than the growth of transistor count.

See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kryders-law

Meanwhile, coal power plants are spewing out radioactive isotopes by the bushel because noone outside of geologists even bother that coal holds many radioactive elements.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Nuclear power plants are built to deal with radioactive materials, coal plants - not so much.

The Urban Car weighs just 772 pounds (350 kilograms), can reach speeds of 50 miles (81 kilometers) per hour, and has a range of more than 200 miles (322 kilometers).

While my Jeep may be heavier, it too on a full tank of gas has a range of 200 miles, and can reach speeds of 50 MPH. And it won't struggle on a hill and I can take my groceries home. I'll be more interested in a car like this that would more practical for the family life. But it is interesting that the engineers will soon post the entire design on the wiki, and anyone can lease the it for free, modify it, and manufacture their own vehicle. 40 Fires Foundation is a forum to develop energy-efficient cars using an open source approach.

Bull Hockey.

The "Secret" to raising smart kids is to instill in them a work ethic. I don't see how this is any different. Providing incentive to work harder at a task and achieve results, rather than simply stumble into them due to your 'natural talent' is pretty much the default story of how people become successful.

Your arguement seems to boil down to "convincing kids to work harder is bad because kids who work harder will look better than kids who don't". Of course kids who work harder are going to come off better, that's sort of the point. Given the rest of your comment is a rambling complaint against people who test well but can't perform, I don't exactly understand how you could possibly bitch about a method which actually convinces the children to perform well so you can accurately test them at their real performance level rather than at their "I could give a shit, why should I care what my score is." level.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

Amazing how little press it's gotten.

Topical and timely:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-planets-lose-their-atmospheres

I read somewhere, but I can't remember where, that there's actually more bacteria cells than human cells in the average person....

After a quick googling I found it's even more surprising than that: 10 to 1! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-humans-carry-more-bacterial-cells-than-human-ones

The obesity epidemic is a load of bullshit. BMI doesn't even measure fat. You know what's worse than obesity, the real epidemic killing people around the world? Malnutrition and famine. In fact, being overweight can improve your lifespan over normal weight and significantly over underweight individuals.

http://www.scientificamerican.com

The three surveys--medical measurements collected in the early 1970s, late 1970s and early 1990s, with subjects matched against death registries nine to 19 years later--indicate that it is much more likely that U.S. adults who fall in the overweight category have a lower risk of premature death than do those of so-called healthy weight. The overweight segment of the "epidemic of overweight and obesity" is more likely reducing death rates than boosting them. "The majority of Americans who weigh too much are in this category," Campos notes.

Counterintuitively, "underweight, even though it occurs in only a tiny fraction of the population, is actually associated with more excess deaths than class I obesity," says Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the CDC. Flegal led the study, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 20 after undergoing four months of scrutiny by internal reviewers at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute and additional peer review by the journal.

when I just read this article linked from the main page.

Judging by a large portion of the people I work with, and the cruft found between their keyboards when they whine their keys aren't working correctly, I'd say the study is spot on.

Although completely off topic, you may want to read this and this before you make any more comments about your drug policy.

In a nutshell: the Socialists and Communists in Portugal came together and said that drug (ab)users are patients, not criminals, and should be offered treatment options. Those dealing should still be criminalized. The cost of the treatment options would be much less than the cost of incarceration.

After 5 years of full implementation, drug use has dropped in all levels. AIDS infections dropped by 75%. Overall health levels have risen, as was the goal. And the negative possible result of these "patient" laws was that Portugal would be a drug mecca. It has not, since dealing is still treated as harsh as before.

The FDA can't even tell the cosmetic industry to stop including toxic ingredients in their products (like lead, formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane, etc)

How this intelligent gentlemen gets to this conclusion gets me a bit confused...

The risks, while no doubt ultimately manageable, of playing with pluripotent cells are neither trivial nor theoretical. They have this nasty habit of turning into good old tumors.

Now, if you don't like the FDA, or think that the FDA approval process needs to be modified, great. That is a perfectly legitimate position, and might even be true(the situation is complex enough that it probably varies a bit from case to case). However, if that is so, just say so. A strategy of attempting piecemeal exemptions for various powerful biological interventions is just bullshit.

It's like the difference between being a libertarian and having an accountant in the cayman islands.

Isn't that an oxymoron? Kinda like dry water?

you need a differential equation system with delay. The big issue are the one or two weeks where an infected individual remains asymptomatic but already infectious. Solving DEs with delay is hard, and chaotic solutions are quite common. A more common modeling technique is a complex network statistical approach, such as when they modeled the whole city of Portland http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=if-smallpox-strikes-portl

Don't show them this http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hackers-can-steal-from-reflections about using reflections viewed with a telescope to see screen images.

Nor about the gathering of keypress data from radio signals of keyboards or from indirectly viewing a CRT monitor on a dull surface.

No windows and Faraday cubicles is the only way to go ...

Scientific American had an article on this in the august 2007 issue.
http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa025&articleID=B1027B68-E7F2-99DF-352186A04761EB7F/
It seems to really come from a defunct company named Thinking Machines which appears to have been mostly absorbed by Sun (at least the brains of the company)

A lot of people think that talent is something innate that you are born with and if you don't have it, then you can never develop it to the same level as those 'naturals.' I'm not really sure where this idea comes from, I think it might be because people look at those talented ones, and don't see how they can acheive the same level of excellence, so they come up with explanations why it is impossible.

In any case, to the contrary, there is a Scientific American article that addresses the topic, and even goes a bit into how to teach your kid to become a chess genius (as the Pulgar family did, for example).

Michael Howe at Cambridge has spent the last 20 years or so studying child geniuses such as Mozart. He argues convincingly that talents are not something innate, but rather something that can be learned.

Finally there was a slashdot discussion which is also rather interesting.

In the end, all the hard evidence is on the side that 'natural ability' is something that can be developed, and most evidence to the contrary is just 'gut instinct' or a conclusion people arrive at from their own personal observation. If you disagree (and have read the evidence) then I would love to hear your viewpoint.

Here is a better explanation. This topic has been covered before many times.

http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?articleI D=959FBD96-E7F2-99DF-341F959A7DA2A292&chanID=sa003

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007A73 5-759A-1CDD-B4A8809EC588EEDF

Just because he's good a chess doesn't mean that he is good at general purpose strategy. The article below is about what makes a person an expert at chess. While it doesn't discuss how transitive skills are to any depth, it does state that winning at chess does equal = tons of domain knowledge in chess and the discipline to refine and broaden that knowledge through practice. In short, it's possible that chess skills may not transition to other fields at all.

"Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well"

http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=s a006&colID=1&articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E8341 4B7F4945

TFA fails to see the big picture and that compatative cost is not the only value.

Heres how it could be made to work.

Liquid hydrogen is the coolant for superconducting wires for your power grid.
These reduce the energy lost between power plant and the home.
Seeing as you are pumping hydrogen around anyway... you may as well go into the distribution business.

A quick google found these links

http://www.supercables.com/News_and_links/press%20 releases/20010528_first_service.html

http://scientificamerican.com/print_version.cfm?ar ticleID=00003872-159C-1498-959C83414B7F0000

and

http://www.conectus.org/xxtechnology.html

Has some cool pictures

In case anyone else prefers one, nearly ad-free, page over 6 skinny pages full of blinky bits.

The problem isn't technology, it's cooperation.

Some time ago, I read an article by Tim Berners-Lee which starts off with a description of a technology (semantic web) aided lifestyle where your car will automatically book itself for an oil change with your mechanic, and that type of thing. The thing is, we have all the knowledge and technology to make that kind of stuff happen *today*, yet I still don't think we will see it will happen any time soon.

The problem is that to take things to the next level like that, we need *extensive* ongoing cooperation between hundreds and thousands of people, organizations, and companies - where such cooperation might not have any short term payoff, or the long term payoff might not be in the best financial interest of those involved (ie, Microsoft realizing a universal platform neutral programming language like Java would mean people don't need Windows). I mean, hell, we can't even get broad agreement on a single XML Word Processing format.

Our problems now are more systemic than technologic. We aren't leveraging what we have.

Ummm, let's see now. The age of Earth is 4.35 billion years, and we just know of the Third Atmosphere that's existed for around 1 billion years, and very little of what was before that.

Never mind, out of the billion years of our present atmosphere's existence, we have observed data of about about 300 years and deduced data of around a couple of hundred thousand years.

Of course, let's leave all that aside for the moment. A few hundred years ago, due to the Maunder minima, Earth's temperature dropped down and the climate became colder. And in the past, the planet has been a lot hotter than it is today. And of course, a lot of the CO2 in the atmosphere is because of volcanic activity and the like, something which humans have no control over. Not to mention the fact that we are at the end of an ice-age - and that we do not even know if Global Warming is bad - it may actually have helped us from going into another ice age [1].

And right, there are like really accurate models of the weather, right? I mean, we all see how well our models take into consideration things like solar activity, volcanic activity and other things - which we can very accurately predict. Right? Right? Oh wait. We can't. And even ignoring all this, the only science behind the community is one of consensus, not real science.

Before you go browbeating others, look at some publications - the probability values of some of those predictions are not even in the high 50s. Their p values are chosen to be manipulative, they work more by deducing "educated guess" causal behvaiors from correlations. Blah.

The day that the climatologists can to the dot predict the weather and climate will be the day I buy into their work - it can't even be called a theory, because a theory requires a basis, not a consensus.

[1] Refer leading palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman's work

Scientific American had a very interesting article on the history of this sort of thing. Unfortunately, you probably have to pay for that article if you don't already subscribe.

http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=s a006&colID=1&articleID=0002CE79-C967-12DB-88228341 4B7F0000
The article talks about a type of harware based on magnetism that allows the hardware to be reprogrammed.

Another interesting point about this new type of hardware is that it does not need a clock.

His Brain, Her Brain from the May 2005 Scientific American.

The Inequality Taboo by Charles Murray, in the current Commentary magazine, this online version has more notes and references.

Right. I read an article in Scientific American on hibernation which discussed this also. I thought it still has a way to go before testing on humans.

Here is the link http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chan ID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000B97C7-074E-1289-BC20 83414B7F0000
Unfortunately, it is just a synopsis for the digital version you have to buy.

Although this project isn't strictly "wrapped around" (pardon the pun) Berners-Lee's semantic web, but rather an external semantic "space" defined by a conceptual foundation and then refined by users in the inteface, it still fails to address to metatag/metdata problem, namely:

1) The metadata sink. Creating an "mSpace" around classical composers is one thing. Doing the same on "quantum mechanics and philosophy" is another. As you broaden the concept, you have to depend on a more-refined framework of contextual and categorical distinctions. Eventually, you may be creating more metadata than data.

2) The metadata reflection problem. Metadata, in that it is not the data itself, cannot possibly reflect every notion, category of thought or context -- many of those things depend on the user's own interaction with the data (e.g. what you find "funny" I may find "dumb."). And, as often mentioned, metadata may in fact be missing, ouright misleading or incomplete.

IMHO, though metadata projects such as these are intriguing, the true "holy grail" of classifying data is understanding context. Thus, why worry about metadata when you have the data write there in front of you? Even a statistical anaysis of word/phrase frequency over say, 100 pages returned by Google on "quantum mechanics and philosophy" can yield concepts and connections without any metadata creation/foundation at all (i.e. the user analyzing the key words/phrases can make those connections on his/her own).

Clearly I'm biased, as I work on software for OS X that does just this, but still, I honestly believe that creating more data, just to describe what is an increasingly massive corpus (the web), is the wrong solution to the "understanding" problem.

If linking words to an encyclopedia is your definition of the semantic web, you might want to read this article by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?arti cleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21&catI D=2

I will be eager to see this magazine! I was very bummed about the demise of the "Amateur Scientist" column from Scientific American. You can get that wonderful column on a CD (yes, that has my ref id in it) or read recent articles online. The old articles are the best--how to construct electron/proton accelerators & the like.

This is probably nitpicking on something only used to illustrate a point in relation to computer science, but, apart from the very true rebuttal in the other reply to this post, I need to point out that 'science' is absolutely NOT a black and white field.

It's a common misconception that everything pertaining to 'science' and 'scientific fact' is indeed just that, fact, and thus set in stone for ever.

One look at the '50, 100 & 150 years ago from scientific american' page in that publication is enough to realise how often 'scientific fact' is utterly and completely, and often laughably, wrong. And it would be beyond hubris to think in our day and age it is any different.

Here's another link to a similar story at Scientific American if your interested:

I am glad Bill Nye is still participating in science. Its unfortunate that his reputation seemed to have suffered in the scientific community after his Disney show Bill Nye the Science Guy, and is now relegated to working on the show 'Battle Bots' for comedy central.

An interesting article / interview from Scientific American also mentions a wide contempt in the scientific community for scientists engaging the public, for example it is likely Carl Sagan was denied membership to the national academy of sciences because he was on television. As well a scientist deserving of the Nobel Prize, who wrote children's books, was also ridiculed.

Is it no wonder why the public is so science ignorant when scientists are punished for speaking to and educating them. Hopefully, with Bill Nye as the example, scientists will be more willing to engage the public.