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The biggest hand waving always comes with decommissioning

Okay, I'll wave my hands about and gobble about 'decommissioning'.

People tend to increase over time. Energy use increases over time. Globally we are not even close to providing the whole world with a grid coverage and capacity that provides the comfortable existence we ourselves would not tolerate losing. Every renewable dream has us whizzing around in electric vehicles. But this could come true only if the future is nuclear. The renewable numbers just don't work out, even when you imagine a magical solution to the storage problem, and especially when you include ground transportation.

So where did this 'decommissioning fable' come from? When was it decided --- and by whom --- that ~60 or so years hence there must be a desolate public park at every site chosen for a gigawatt nuclear plant, today?

Suggest to anyone that a water or sewage treatment plant cannot cost what it costs, it must also gather funds to fund its own destruction and demise and people will shake their heads. But this is crazy! The sewage will always flow downhill to here. We're not going to move a water plant, tear the pipes out of the ground and route them somewhere else. Oh, it's soo much different.

But is it really? Who is telling us we will be using less energy in the future? Should we listen to them?

Decommissioning funds gathered for nuclear plants may seem like a great idea, but it has also become an awful idea. It does not make nuclear energy any safer. It has promoted technological sloth, dissuaded investors from supporting (and injecting R&D to improve) the only clean base load energy source on the table. It has handicapped nuclear from being THE cheapest source of energy. It has enabled the most short-sighted and fuck-stupid forms of corporate vandalism. This is because when anyone owns or acquires an aging nuclear plant, they are faced with a choice --- whether to re-invest and re-structure to replace aging components, as they would for any other source, or trigger its destruction and unlock the magic chest of decommission funding. Getting a little kick to the balance sheet by rendering a productive energy source into a blight on the landscape, something intentionally broken that cannot be fixed.

Such as the Kewaunee Power Station which went offline in 2013 despite that it is in good condition, has maintained a healthy balance sheet, perfect safety record, operating license extended to 2033 and had six months' fuel left in the reactor. All because Dominion is riding the natural gas 'glut' at this brief moment in time. When the glut peaks out Dominion will invest in some other, dirtier short-term solution.

We should be upgrading these plants and taking them to the next level as we do with every other utility. Given the gigawatt-year track record they have demonstrated It is ludicrous to assume that any nuclear plant operating today deserves to be destroyed rather than upgraded. There are too few of them and they are too precious.

Do not feed the vultures.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

The biggest hand waving always comes with decommissioning

Okay, I'll wave my hands about and gobble about 'decommissioning'.

People tend to increase over time. Energy use increases over time. Globally we are not even close to providing the whole world with a grid coverage and capacity that provides the comfortable existence we ourselves would not tolerate losing. Every renewable dream has us whizzing around in electric vehicles. But this could come true only if the future is nuclear. The renewable numbers just don't work out, even when you imagine a magical solution to the storage problem, and especially when you include ground transportation.

So where did this 'decommissioning fable' come from? When was it decided --- and by whom --- that ~60 or so years hence there must be a desolate public park at every site chosen for a gigawatt nuclear plant, today?

Suggest to anyone that a water or sewage treatment plant cannot cost what it costs, it must also gather funds to fund its own destruction and demise and people will shake their heads. But this is crazy! The sewage will always flow downhill to here. We're not going to move a water plant, tear the pipes out of the ground and route them somewhere else. Oh, it's soo much different.

But is it really? Who is telling us we will be using less energy in the future? Should we listen to them?

Decommissioning funds gathered for nuclear plants may seem like a great idea, but it has also become an awful idea. It does not make nuclear energy any safer. It has promoted technological sloth, dissuaded investors from supporting (and injecting R&D to improve) the only clean base load energy source on the table. It has handicapped nuclear from being THE cheapest source of energy. It has enabled the most short-sighted and fuck-stupid forms of corporate vandalism. This is because when anyone owns or acquires an aging nuclear plant, they are faced with a choice --- whether to re-invest and re-structure to replace aging components, as they would for any other source, or trigger its destruction and unlock the magic chest of decommission funding. Getting a little kick to the balance sheet by rendering a productive energy source into a blight on the landscape, something intentionally broken that cannot be fixed.

Such as the Kewaunee Power Station which went offline in 2013 despite that it is in good condition, has maintained a healthy balance sheet, perfect safety record, operating license extended to 2033 and had six months' fuel left in the reactor. All because Dominion is riding the natural gas 'glut' at this brief moment in time. When the glut peaks out Dominion will invest in some other, dirtier short-term solution.

We should be upgrading these plants and taking them to the next level as we do with every other utility. Given the gigawatt-year track record they have demonstrated It is ludicrous to assume that any nuclear plant operating today deserves to be destroyed rather than upgraded. There are too few of them and they are too precious.

Do not feed the vultures.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Aerial, or underground, that is the question.

BOTH in the future, but keep in mind that none of these day to day repairs have anything to do with re-tooling the grid, which would will take $ trillions of dollars.

Aerial power lines are the practical rule in many towns and cities because space is tight and there is already ~80 years of infrastructure under ground. Ours has two electric utilities, in some intersections their feeders cross on two upper levels. In new subdivisions electric primaries have been buried in alleys with ground level transformers but in most places it's pole transformers and drop wires.

I routinely dig water and sewer mains in these places and cannot describe the rush of raking a backhoe tooth against a buried primary that was ~2.5' off the mark crossing over our sewer main. No flash-pow, it was just there. When it was laid boring crew did not realize their tool had gone halfway through a customer's sewer tap, not plugging it completely but breaking our main and causing problems for years. Imagine a rotating plumber's snake grinding against a 7kV power line (not in conduit). I still feel that electricity needs to be underground as a rule but in these areas better mapping to the inch would be a plus, and each utility presents its own locating challenge.

Aerial lines suck during ice storms and high winds and there is a constant battle with trees, but the plus is that everything is out of reach of people and floods, and the power company can visually inspect everything right up to your home. Considering the level of danger this is a BIG plus. And when you realize that the cost of putting everything underground in your neighborhood is an incredible capital expense that would not yield a single erg of new energy... well, I say don't hold your breath, live with it.

High voltage pylons between cities are another matter entirely. If a few buildings in your neighborhood go dark it's an inconvenience, but what of when whole cities go dark? There are too few alternate paths in our long haul grid. There is also the need to move to HVDC to couple the grids, to build more redundant overlapping 'loops'. This would improve efficiency and survivability. Here is where State and Federal government could make a real difference.

We have these superhighways you see, and all that is missing is a method to cut-and-drop a channel into them. We should be building electric pipelines in addition to oil pipelines. Robert Faulkner is a lone voice in this HVDC wilderness, and I tell of his quest in this Slashdot post.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
  To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
  To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

Aerial, or underground, that is the question.

BOTH in the future, but keep in mind that none of these day to day repairs have anything to do with re-tooling the grid, which would will take $ trillions of dollars.

Aerial power lines are the practical rule in many towns and cities because space is tight and there is already ~80 years of infrastructure under ground. Ours has two electric utilities, in some intersections their feeders cross on two upper levels. In new subdivisions electric primaries have been buried in alleys with ground level transformers but in most places it's pole transformers and drop wires.

I routinely dig water and sewer mains in these places and cannot describe the rush of raking a backhoe tooth against a buried primary that was ~2.5' off the mark crossing over our sewer main. No flash-pow, it was just there. When it was laid boring crew did not realize their tool had gone halfway through a customer's sewer tap, not plugging it completely but breaking our main and causing problems for years. Imagine a rotating plumber's snake grinding against a 7kV power line (not in conduit). I still feel that electricity needs to be underground as a rule but in these areas better mapping to the inch would be a plus, and each utility presents its own locating challenge.

Aerial lines suck during ice storms and high winds and there is a constant battle with trees, but the plus is that everything is out of reach of people and floods, and the power company can visually inspect everything right up to your home. Considering the level of danger this is a BIG plus. And when you realize that the cost of putting everything underground in your neighborhood is an incredible capital expense that would not yield a single erg of new energy... well, I say don't hold your breath, live with it.

High voltage pylons between cities are another matter entirely. If a few buildings in your neighborhood go dark it's an inconvenience, but what of when whole cities go dark? There are too few alternate paths in our long haul grid. There is also the need to move to HVDC to couple the grids, to build more redundant overlapping 'loops'. This would improve efficiency and survivability. Here is where State and Federal government could make a real difference.

We have these superhighways you see, and all that is missing is a method to cut-and-drop a channel into them. We should be building electric pipelines in addition to oil pipelines. Robert Faulkner is a lone voice in this HVDC wilderness, and I tell of his quest in this Slashdot post.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
  To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
  To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

This is one of my primary goals in life. Get nuclear more accepted in the US, then start building Thorium reactors across the country.

Glad to hear it! If we love our children, there really is nothing quite as important.

For every 1000kg of U-233 bred with thorium in a LFTR, ~15kg of Pu-238 is produced. Here is Kirk Sorensen discussing the waste stream of a two-fluid LFTR and a series of slides.

So every 1 gigawatt LFTR reactor would produce the necessary amount of Pu-238 to fuel ~3 Voyager-class (4.5kg) space probes, every year. Beyond Voyager's simple purpose and its 400 watt electronics package, think of what our space probes could do with more energy. Locomotion, drilling, small maneuvering adjustments or a steady acceleration using ion thrusters.

For more, see my letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
and the the collected rants of the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

This is one of my primary goals in life. Get nuclear more accepted in the US, then start building Thorium reactors across the country.

Glad to hear it! If we love our children, there really is nothing quite as important.

For every 1000kg of U-233 bred with thorium in a LFTR, ~15kg of Pu-238 is produced. Here is Kirk Sorensen discussing the waste stream of a two-fluid LFTR and a series of slides.

So every 1 gigawatt LFTR reactor would produce the necessary amount of Pu-238 to fuel ~3 Voyager-class (4.5kg) space probes, every year. Beyond Voyager's simple purpose and its 400 watt electronics package, think of what our space probes could do with more energy. Locomotion, drilling, small maneuvering adjustments or a steady acceleration using ion thrusters.

For more, see my letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
and the the collected rants of the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

Lyft and Uber drivers should have to follow the same not-free regs as taxi drivers. things like displaying a hack lic, certification of insurance or bonding, and penalties for systematic race discrimination are things that taxi drivers and their companies are required to follow. Undercutting these is not a good idea.

Uber's insurance is explained here, and its legalese can be found here. I haven't looked for Lyft's policy, but I assume that Lyft's policy can be just as easily found.

penalties for systematic race discrimination are things that taxi drivers and their companies are required to follow.

And yet despite all those penalties, racial discrimination still happens systematically during peak hours. During peak hours, taxi drivers can easily pretend not to have seen someone hailing them down if they know they can easily pick up someone else just as easily.

And in a way, Uber and Lyft's processes nicely solve that problem, since for them, they're not allowed to pick up people who are hailing them visually. They can only pick up the people that have hailed them electronically through a mobile app. So choosing your customer based on skin color is much less of a possibility for Uber and Lyft drivers, because now there is an electronic paper trail if a driver suddenly decides not to pick up a potential customer he has agreed to pick up electronically.

The electronic process of ordering rides through a mobile app also solves the problem of displaying a license. By ordering a ride through Uber, you see the picture, you see the id, and you see the rating of who's going pick you up before they do pick you up. Just try to get that level of information the next time you call for a Yellow cab, you won't get it.

Not only that but in a few big cities, where the number of medaillons stays stagnant despite the desperate need of additional taxis on the road during peak hours, Uber and Lyft are serving the needs of an underserved market. Because I can tell you, in my personal experience, it's not just black people that can't find a cab sometimes. As a white person who sometimes really needs a cab in San Francisco during peak hours, I've simply given up trying to find one. I can only assume that only customers from five star hotels and hot supermodels can catch cabs during those hours, because I see many cabs during those times, and I've used my phone to call cab companies as well, but those cabs are certainly not stopping for me, or they have the light on signaling that they're on their way to pick up someone else.

If I really need a car after work for some reason, I'll drive my car in, clogging up the system even more, and I'll risk paying insane parking fees for the entire day (despite the fact that I might only need the car for a fraction of that time, to go somewhere after 5 PM, that's not easily reached with public transportation).

Imagine how we must look from their perspective. Like gods peering down on them from the heavens with magical devices that grant us powers. Can you imagine if we as a people encountered beings who were just as advanced from us as we are from those tribes. Hell even a mere 100 years of progress would seem miraculous to us to say nothing of eons. Imagine how we would look to someone from 1914.

There is a screenplay out there based roughly on this premise: https://www.scribd.com/doc/135...

The money is being punished and so the Constitution does not apply.

Right. Here is an example of a complaint, filed against $13,630 of US currency. Note how they refer to the "Defendant Currency" in this document.

I wonder if I could file a civil forfeiture complaint against the holdings of Boeing or Lockheed as "used or intended to be used for the purchase of political favors".

Going to post anonymously for this one. Cisco had 2 switching/routing teams that took the brunt of this round of cuts. A few years ago, they acquired a start up called Nuova to build datacenter solutions. They made a lot of noise about FCoE but that was likely a smokescreen for the rest of the datacenter products they were developing. FCoE meant they were developing their own switches and while the business unit that Nuova was part of grew at a rate that met or exceeded shareholder expectations, they left it alone. But things slipped a bit (granted, it was company wide, UCS was still profitable though), and that was all the excuse that was needed. The team responsible for the Nexus line has been folded in with the older Cisco switching/routing team. They have continued to ship jobs over to India. If anyone is familiar with UCSM, that engineering is being done in Bangalore, that's coded in San Jose), a lot of QA has been moved over there, but there have been just enough issues with other engineering done there that not too much went that way on this round. Hardware engineers took a number of cuts. I'd say to expect fewer ASICs from Cisco (but consider the networking companies that don't build any silicon at all). They have stated they want to focus on software (considering things like UCS Director and UCS Central, this makes some sense). They are trying to adopt Agile practices, part of that are some work environments have been converted to being totally open, there are some lockers employees can use for the day to secure stuff, but they otherwise have a desk in an open floor plan (it looks like one of the accounting floors from an old movie). I suspect new grads have fewer objections to that environment than experienced engineers closer to the middle of their careers. I expect to see a continued movement of jobs to Bangalore. There are those managers fighting tooth and nail to keep engineering here, but digging around the news for the past 5+ years shows a steady stream of jobs moved over there, done in such a way that they don't trigger the 'outsource shaming' laws in the US. I don't think the new blood will stay at Cisco long, I suspect the smart ones will see how Cisco has behaved in the past and will get in on the next great startup, or create their own. The next tier will follow the leaders that exit. It's pretty much what we would expect from Silicon Valley. I give Cisco a 50/50 chance at this point. Internally, one engineering VP has not said much other than to direct employees to https://www.scribd.com/doc/235309368/Escape-Velocity-Overview/. Is Cisco trying to reinvent itself in the same way as Apple? They have floundered on so many other attempts, their various failures in consumer electronics, video platforms that don't seem to have become a big part of CDN networks, and it seems that VoIP has become stagnate too. "The Internet of Everything" is what thy are publicly talking about, but are there still people at the company with the talent to find a killer app for the idea? Would they want to come forward withing Cisco, or would they be more likely to found their own startup instead?

Well you can keep on being a fan boy and a cheerleader all you want

Thanks kindly. !! Back by popular demand !!

CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT LFTR FANBOI

It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ... some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs ... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available ... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop ... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B ... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels ... a move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum) ... utility-scale so-called 'renewables' non-solutions have a gazillion points of failure, gigawatt LFTR plants few, and it is my belief they will save NOT fail us ... aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers ... with LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer ... do it for the children ... and you my friend -- you would look especially good in space ... an Admiral Rickover fact check (severe tire damage) ... LNT (linear no threshhold) needs re-examination ... no I'm not risk adverse, just risk conscious ... one must sift past the fear-hype, especially regards Fukushima ... a look at Electricity in the Time of Cholera ... on the new coal powered IBM Power8 chips ... Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.

Think of me as the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest,

Well you can keep on being a fan boy and a cheerleader all you want

Thanks kindly. !! Back by popular demand !!

CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT LFTR FANBOI

It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ... some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs ... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available ... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop ... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B ... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels ... a move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum) ... utility-scale so-called 'renewables' non-solutions have a gazillion points of failure, gigawatt LFTR plants few, and it is my belief they will save NOT fail us ... aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers ... with LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer ... do it for the children ... and you my friend -- you would look especially good in space ... an Admiral Rickover fact check (severe tire damage) ... LNT (linear no threshhold) needs re-examination ... no I'm not risk adverse, just risk conscious ... one must sift past the fear-hype, especially regards Fukushima ... a look at Electricity in the Time of Cholera ... on the new coal powered IBM Power8 chips ... Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.

Think of me as the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest,

I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.

Congratulations on achieving ~22% nuclear electricity in July 2014.

My state of no-nuke Oklahoma is powered by natural gas and coal (which arrives by train), considers itself a nexus of wind power but after decades of investment, hundreds of turbines and probably much more money spent --- net generation of mostly-wind ~809GWh for July is still less than the ~855GWh that would have been generated that month by the single two-reactor Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant. That is... if it had not been the only nuclear plant in the United States cancelled after construction began, in 1982.

Oklahoma sits on the border of the three North American grid interconnects. I have been trying to convince the powers that be and Halliburton Corporate to embrace molten salt research, to no avail so far.

This is my first reply here because I can easily clarify the question of why, when and how disclosures were made and address some misconceptions.

The "court order" mentioned above came down in August 2012, see e.g. http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-to-oracle-google-did-you-pay-off-bloggers/, approximately four months after a voluntary, proactive disclosure I had made in April 2012, see http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/04/oracle-v-google-trial-evidence-of.html#oracledisclosure. Oracle attached that previous disclosure to its response to the court order:

Oracle has retained Florian Mueller, author of the blog FOSS Patents, www.fosspatents.com, as a consultant on competition-related matters, especially relating to standards-essential patents. Oracle notes that Mr. Mueller fully disclosed his relationship with Oracle in a blog posting dated April 18, 2012; that Oracle retained him after he had begun writing about this case; and that he was not retained to write about the case. Mr. Mueller is a frequent critic of Oracle and was a leading advocate against Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc., which led to Oracle's ownership of Sun's Java IP portfolio. A copy of Mr. Mueller's disclosure is attached as Exhibit A at 5.

I disclosed consulting work for Microsoft in October 2011, see http://www.fosspatents.com/2011/10/study-on-worldwide-use-of-frand.html. At that point, no judge had asked for a disclosure, nor has this happened to date. I did it because it was the right thing to do.

At the end of last month I shut down my consulting firm in order to focus on my (Android and iOS) app development project. I'm still blogging, but less than before.

My consulting business had served numerous clients, not just Microsoft and Oracle. There were dozens of investment banks and funds who paid me to answer questions or participate in conference calls. I also did research for a couple of law firms and a German car manufacturer (that company allows me to refer to them like this but not to disclose the name, just industry and country).

I wish all others commenting on these types of issues were equally transparent.

All you have to do in order to be accepted to an Ivy is be black and write a halfassed essay.

This story was posted a couple of days ago:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Yes, which is rediscussion of even older topic [26-Dec-2013] Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy Well... if stories can be redished then I can recup hiccup my own muckraking comment from it [evil laugh] Where will it end??

---cut here---

SO to summarize every /. solar energy thread...

THE MANY: why don't [greedy, evil] utilities just build smart grids and [benevolent] governments just enforce buy-back at retail? Or [to make up for perceived greediness] more than retail? Plus [free money] incentives for home owners in Pleasantville [no multifamily unit or slum dwellings need apply] to buy the stuff. And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me.

THE FEW: Grid already running near peak capacity because it was never built out for surplus, it was built as needed. Energy costs for base load generation plants is volatile and variable. Capital spent on new base load generation NOT re-designing and re-building infrastructure in Your Little Neighborhood.

THE MANY: but solar and wind generate during [daytime not night, never mind Winter] peak hours and so will we once the government gives us free money to buy all this great solar stuff so it's all good and when this [unlikely miracle] happens those base load plants can just bug off. While we're operational that is. We'll stay connected to the grid for old time's sake and to sell our power to the [evil] power company. Storage batteries will come along and will solve everything. For a day at least.

THE FEW: Who's willing to run some the odds that a geographically dispersed network of solar/wind hipsters each feeding a little bit into the grid is sure to keep it stable and keep this 24x7 factory running? What are the odds of a cascading domino failure triggered by the first untoward event, where the hipsters and tiny federally-subsidized hipster companies will drop off the grid quickly, like flies, to satisfy their own local needs?

THE MANY: Fuck the factory, and fuck those other grid people who do not embrace small scale or personal power solutions. They're probably wasting loads of energy anyway.

THE FEW: Okay, imagine trying to light a sports stadium with ten million tiny Christmas tree bulbs. The kind wired in series where whole sections go dark when one bulb fails. Now imagine that on the supply side, with a truly incomprehensible number of possible points of failure in place, instead of the historically reliable method of a few, professionally maintained gigawatt plants that generate baseload energy 24x7...

THE MANY: Sounds great! It would probably be good for the planet too.

THE FEW: [double facepalm] Troll us into oblivion why don't you.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
  To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
  To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

This story was posted a couple of days ago:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Yes, which is rediscussion of even older topic [26-Dec-2013] Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy Well... if stories can be redished then I can recup hiccup my own muckraking comment from it [evil laugh] Where will it end??

---cut here---

SO to summarize every /. solar energy thread...

THE MANY: why don't [greedy, evil] utilities just build smart grids and [benevolent] governments just enforce buy-back at retail? Or [to make up for perceived greediness] more than retail? Plus [free money] incentives for home owners in Pleasantville [no multifamily unit or slum dwellings need apply] to buy the stuff. And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me.

THE FEW: Grid already running near peak capacity because it was never built out for surplus, it was built as needed. Energy costs for base load generation plants is volatile and variable. Capital spent on new base load generation NOT re-designing and re-building infrastructure in Your Little Neighborhood.

THE MANY: but solar and wind generate during [daytime not night, never mind Winter] peak hours and so will we once the government gives us free money to buy all this great solar stuff so it's all good and when this [unlikely miracle] happens those base load plants can just bug off. While we're operational that is. We'll stay connected to the grid for old time's sake and to sell our power to the [evil] power company. Storage batteries will come along and will solve everything. For a day at least.

THE FEW: Who's willing to run some the odds that a geographically dispersed network of solar/wind hipsters each feeding a little bit into the grid is sure to keep it stable and keep this 24x7 factory running? What are the odds of a cascading domino failure triggered by the first untoward event, where the hipsters and tiny federally-subsidized hipster companies will drop off the grid quickly, like flies, to satisfy their own local needs?

THE MANY: Fuck the factory, and fuck those other grid people who do not embrace small scale or personal power solutions. They're probably wasting loads of energy anyway.

THE FEW: Okay, imagine trying to light a sports stadium with ten million tiny Christmas tree bulbs. The kind wired in series where whole sections go dark when one bulb fails. Now imagine that on the supply side, with a truly incomprehensible number of possible points of failure in place, instead of the historically reliable method of a few, professionally maintained gigawatt plants that generate baseload energy 24x7...

THE MANY: Sounds great! It would probably be good for the planet too.

THE FEW: [double facepalm] Troll us into oblivion why don't you.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
  To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
  To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

and under our new fine print if the driver get's in accident you can get sued as well.

Putting the initial joke aside, here is the actual insurance policy from Uber.

There is actually nothing wrong with it, as far as I can tell.

You dont need to wonder, you need to read:

http://pando.com/2014/03/22/re...

http://pando.com/2014/01/23/th...

Some estimates put it as high as $9 billion.

This wasn't just about cold calling. The chilling effects were far more reaching. It's just that the documented evidence only referred specifically to cold calling, so that is what can be proved. In reality this was much more of a "gentleman's agreement" and it had the effect of driving down wages at dozens of large companies possibly affecting ~1 million workers. If you think it stopped with just poaching and had no other effect, you are being naive. Google actually had to raise some salaries due to Facebook not participating.

Here are just some of the companies involved:
  Google
  Apple, Inc
  Comcast Corporation
  DoubleClick
  Genentech
  IBM Corporation (Junior hires okay—also applies to subsidiaries)
  Illumita
  Intel Corporation
  Intuit
  Microsoft
  Oglivy
  WPP
  AOL, Inc.
  Ask.com
  Clear Channel Communications, Inc.
  Dell, Inc.
  Earthlink, Inc
  Virgin Media, Inc. (Formerly NTL, Inc.)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2136...

http://pando.com/tag/techtopus...

FAA has already admitted that their C&D letters are not really C&D letters and have no force of law. Look at the Equasearch v FAA case history and findings. http://www.scribd.com/doc/2343...

No, HVDC is good enough. You don't need 99% efficiency at 10x the cost of 90% efficiency. It's just not worth it. Besides, I doubt the efficiency of superconductors with their associated refrigeration would be competitive with HVDC anyway, or why else is it that HVDC is the market leader for long haul transmission right now?

I agree, HVDC can be made to work above or (preferably) below ground with a suitable amount of aluminum cross section and/or heat sink. There are some interesting calculations for 5-288GW transmission lines in this paper Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security which I use as a reference for raw capacity and conductor size. But Faulkner's 1-4 million VDC dream is unlikely in an age where practical Voltage Source Converters operate at ~345kV.

Faulkner is a hero of mine, we seem to share a feeling of urgency about re-structuring the grid to HVDC. His firm is desperately trying to make trench-friendly passively cooled HVDC 'elpipe' a reality, which sadly, is not gaining traction. In the supposed richest and cleverest country on Earth it grieves me to read this,

• [from his website] " How do we acquire customers? This is the hard part. Though I am convinced that high capacity underground power transmission is absolutely required for us to move to a clean energy future, there is zero chance that a utility in North America or Europe will be a first adopter. We are looking to several places that need to innovate, and are less risk averse than the US (Brazil, India, China for example). There is no chance of a quick success, nor is there any other viable option that can deliver high transmission capacity underground, passively cooled; this will be a long term investment. But I see no other viable alternative for building a supergrid. Why do I continue to pursue such a difficult area as Long Distance Power Transmission? If not me, then who? The utilities believe in change that is so incremental that it cannot possibly deliver the degree of innovation that is needed to address global warming. They continue to build primarily high voltage AC lines, and point-to-point HVDC lines, when what is clearly needed is a change to multi-terminal HVDC systems (like the Atlantic Wind Connection), but arranged in loops to be self-redundant. The major suppliers to the utilities are nearly as risk averse as the utilities themselves. Utility mantras include such things as "underground is ten times as expensive as overhead lines" which is not true. Change will come, and it will be disruptive. Must we accept the self-fulfilling prophesies that keep us stuck?"

Forgive me... but will someone please give this man some fucking money?

There is a proposal afoot to build an HVDC submarine ring around the UK. A ring structure is the way to go -- with several overlapping rings across North America. They provide fault tolerance and (I've read recently somewhere) it would simplify load management if sources would design for and 'push' towards loads in a particular direction. Ring HVDC also optimizes plant design.

Tres Amigas SuperStation aims to bridge the North American East/West/Texas interconnects with superconducting HVDC at 5GW (scalable to 30GW). Their business model seems ENRONian with the twist they they'd actually own some unique infrastructure and not just leech-suck from others'. But is this project just a proving ground for superconductors? I wonder how the non-superconductor options would work out.

___
Please see Thorium

quoting the report:

"a person s negligent if he does something that a reasonably careful person would not do in the same situation or fails to do somethign that a reasonably careful person would do in the asme situation". ...
"to establish the crime of vehicular manslaughter, the People would be required to prove that Wood's encroachment into the bicycle lane, nuder the circumstances, was negligent." ...
"the fact that Wood did not apply his brakes or swerve to avoid the collision indicates that he did not see or notice Olin until the moment of impact." ...
"Wood's entry of 'Yes I...' followed by '][\NOKKO' is also consisten with him utilizing his MDC at the time of collision" ...
"Based on all of these circumstances, the People cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Wood's momentary distraction in the perfomance of his duties constituted a failure to use reasonable care"

So... he was negligent, he was negligent, he was neglegent. But in summary, he wasn't negligent. Either that or texting while driving isn't negligent. Which I'm pretty sure has gone onto the books in most states by now. If he felt he had to respond immedidately to a message with obvious indications of serious urgency (such as keywords like "bro") he should have done like the same advice he would have given anyone else while ticketing them for texting while driving, "next time, pull over and do your texting from the shoulder".

I also found this particularly insulting in the latter part of the report:

"It is significant to note that the driver in the vehicle directly behind Wood's patrol vehicle, Andrwe McCown, also failed to see Olin in the bicycle lane prior to the collision"

Look back at the witness accouns and see "something equally significant that we aren't going to mention again":

Ashley McCown was the passenger in that vehicle. (the one following Woods patrol car) She stated that she noticed Olin in the bicycle lane prior to the collision"

Of course the driver of the following car didn't see Olin, he doesn't have xray vision to look through the patrol car, his passenger is in the correct place to see around into the right bicycle lane. It look s like the person writing that report was making a number of stretches trying to justify not pressing charges?

Someone with more time on their hands needs to type up and post that report online in searchable format. I can't help but wonder if they deliberately put it up in image format to meet their legal requirements without making it easily quoteable and searchable...

The principles behind patents and copyright are sound, the current implementations are, on the other hand, absurd. If someone could steal your ideas and/or work and beat you to the market, what incentive would you have to create it in the first place? That is the situation that patents and copyright were meant to overcome.

The old saying was "Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door", and to a large extent, this was true. In the current day (thinking software) however, the first guy is being allowed to not only patent his mouse trap, but the very idea of the mouse trap. His patent effectively blocks everyone from building a mouse trap, regardless of implementation (unless they can work out a license deal $$$). The allowance of overly broad patent terms is what is stifling innovation.

The current implementation of copyright similarly stifles innovation. (IMHO, software should not be patentable, but copyrighted.) In terms of copyright reform, this is a great place to start: http://www.scribd.com/doc/1136...

Aw C'mon, everybody's whining about the subsidies and 'net metering hardware' that needs to be installed and maintained at each point of presence -- aside from the purchase of the solar and wind units themselves... at the core of it are a few folks discovering that power utilities are not as eager as they like them to be.

For solar It's just a politics-entitlement issue because, frankly, the power these solar installations push back onto the grid is too tiny for the 'trouble' they cause. I am SO GLAD that my small midwest city has none of this DAMNED FOOLISHNESS going on. We can see what our electrical co-ops pay by the kilowatt for reliable grid power and we see the salaries of the fine people who maintain it, and it's pretty much in parity.

The power grid is a massive tuned circuit which uses frequency to regulate power flow. Several regions such as Oklahoma, Florida and the Northeast already contain enough intermittent energy sources to create real problems with distribution, today. Electrical Engineer Andrew Dodson lays out a few of these problems at this fascinating presentation at the recent Thorium Energy Conference in Chicago, showing plots of dissonant waves hundreds of miles across caused by the onset and outset of wind surges. He describes the "single machine infinite bus" model that grid engineers design for and how it is being compromised in this followup interview.

Here is someone who has devoted his career to grid stability, understands it completely -- and what is his own take?

A TRILLION DOLLARS to retrofit the grid to accommodate so-called renewables. That's without putting a single additional megawatt on the grid. He even advocates the build out of a parallel grid for variable sources to protect the essential 24/7 machinery of power generation, which can incur physical damage from these effects -- allowing us to concentrate new infrastructure for tuning reactive load to a few buffer points.

Sounds great down the road. We need reliable baseload power cheaper than coal first.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Aw C'mon, everybody's whining about the subsidies and 'net metering hardware' that needs to be installed and maintained at each point of presence -- aside from the purchase of the solar and wind units themselves... at the core of it are a few folks discovering that power utilities are not as eager as they like them to be.

For solar It's just a politics-entitlement issue because, frankly, the power these solar installations push back onto the grid is too tiny for the 'trouble' they cause. I am SO GLAD that my small midwest city has none of this DAMNED FOOLISHNESS going on. We can see what our electrical co-ops pay by the kilowatt for reliable grid power and we see the salaries of the fine people who maintain it, and it's pretty much in parity.

The power grid is a massive tuned circuit which uses frequency to regulate power flow. Several regions such as Oklahoma, Florida and the Northeast already contain enough intermittent energy sources to create real problems with distribution, today. Electrical Engineer Andrew Dodson lays out a few of these problems at this fascinating presentation at the recent Thorium Energy Conference in Chicago, showing plots of dissonant waves hundreds of miles across caused by the onset and outset of wind surges. He describes the "single machine infinite bus" model that grid engineers design for and how it is being compromised in this followup interview.

Here is someone who has devoted his career to grid stability, understands it completely -- and what is his own take?

A TRILLION DOLLARS to retrofit the grid to accommodate so-called renewables. That's without putting a single additional megawatt on the grid. He even advocates the build out of a parallel grid for variable sources to protect the essential 24/7 machinery of power generation, which can incur physical damage from these effects -- allowing us to concentrate new infrastructure for tuning reactive load to a few buffer points.

Sounds great down the road. We need reliable baseload power cheaper than coal first.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Aw C'mon, everybody's whining about the subsidies and 'net metering hardware' that needs to be installed and maintained at each point of presence -- aside from the purchase of the solar and wind units themselves... at the core of it are a few folks discovering that power utilities are not as eager as they like them to be.

For solar It's just a politics-entitlement issue because, frankly, the power these solar installations push back onto the grid is too tiny for the 'trouble' they cause. I am SO GLAD that my small midwest city has none of this DAMNED FOOLISHNESS going on. We can see what our electrical co-ops pay by the kilowatt for reliable grid power and we see the salaries of the fine people who maintain it, and it's pretty much in parity.

The power grid is a massive tuned circuit which uses frequency to regulate power flow. Several regions such as Oklahoma, Florida and the Northeast already contain enough intermittent energy sources to create real problems with distribution, today. Electrical Engineer Andrew Dodson lays out a few of these problems at this fascinating presentation at the recent Thorium Energy Conference in Chicago, showing plots of dissonant waves hundreds of miles across caused by the onset and outset of wind surges. He describes the "single machine infinite bus" model that grid engineers design for and how it is being compromised in this followup interview.

Here is someone who has devoted his career to grid stability, understands it completely -- and what is his own take?

A TRILLION DOLLARS to retrofit the grid to accommodate so-called renewables. That's without putting a single additional megawatt on the grid. He even advocates the build out of a parallel grid for variable sources to protect the essential 24/7 machinery of power generation, which can incur physical damage from these effects -- allowing us to concentrate new infrastructure for tuning reactive load to a few buffer points.

Sounds great down the road. We need reliable baseload power cheaper than coal first.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

With LFTR you would not need to use an expensive and power hogging Reverse Osmosis plant to desalinate seawater. A thorium reactor is an excellent and efficient way to desalinate seawater by the tons per minute. The gigawatts of free power are also a plus.

In Kirk Sorensen's TEAC 2013 presentation he describes using waste heat for this purpose -- showing a concept drawing of a LFTR electric/water plant next to the ocean. Am I certain that LFTR could be sited safely on the shore and be completely submerged by a tsunami or hurricane with no resulting disaster? Absolutely! Would he be able to convince some forward-thinking country such as Qatar to place these in the desert to ensure a source of fresh water in some post-petroleum future? Yep.

What of the United States? I'm afraid that the prospect of siting a new nuclear project on the coast -- or more generally, any parcel of land that would be contested by locals -- is remote. The regions which surround lakes, rivers and coastline are completely settled (and defended) by people.

My idea is to build out LFTR inland in areas less likely to be contested by humans, such as along existing cross-country transmission line corridors, in compact configurations that might even fit within the cleared right-of-way path directly beneath them; multiple 1GW reactors sharing turbine and active fuel reprocessing infrastructure.

My hope is to place such a surplus of power onto the grid that by the ocean even 'wasteful' reverse osmosis techniques or some scale-up of vacuum desalinization might be practical... and acceptable to the locals.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

With LFTR you would not need to use an expensive and power hogging Reverse Osmosis plant to desalinate seawater. A thorium reactor is an excellent and efficient way to desalinate seawater by the tons per minute. The gigawatts of free power are also a plus.

In Kirk Sorensen's TEAC 2013 presentation he describes using waste heat for this purpose -- showing a concept drawing of a LFTR electric/water plant next to the ocean. Am I certain that LFTR could be sited safely on the shore and be completely submerged by a tsunami or hurricane with no resulting disaster? Absolutely! Would he be able to convince some forward-thinking country such as Qatar to place these in the desert to ensure a source of fresh water in some post-petroleum future? Yep.

What of the United States? I'm afraid that the prospect of siting a new nuclear project on the coast -- or more generally, any parcel of land that would be contested by locals -- is remote. The regions which surround lakes, rivers and coastline are completely settled (and defended) by people.

My idea is to build out LFTR inland in areas less likely to be contested by humans, such as along existing cross-country transmission line corridors, in compact configurations that might even fit within the cleared right-of-way path directly beneath them; multiple 1GW reactors sharing turbine and active fuel reprocessing infrastructure.

My hope is to place such a surplus of power onto the grid that by the ocean even 'wasteful' reverse osmosis techniques or some scale-up of vacuum desalinization might be practical... and acceptable to the locals.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

With LFTR you would not need to use an expensive and power hogging Reverse Osmosis plant to desalinate seawater. A thorium reactor is an excellent and efficient way to desalinate seawater by the tons per minute. The gigawatts of free power are also a plus.

In Kirk Sorensen's TEAC 2013 presentation he describes using waste heat for this purpose -- showing a concept drawing of a LFTR electric/water plant next to the ocean. Am I certain that LFTR could be sited safely on the shore and be completely submerged by a tsunami or hurricane with no resulting disaster? Absolutely! Would he be able to convince some forward-thinking country such as Qatar to place these in the desert to ensure a source of fresh water in some post-petroleum future? Yep.

What of the United States? I'm afraid that the prospect of siting a new nuclear project on the coast -- or more generally, any parcel of land that would be contested by locals -- is remote. The regions which surround lakes, rivers and coastline are completely settled (and defended) by people.

My idea is to build out LFTR inland in areas less likely to be contested by humans, such as along existing cross-country transmission line corridors, in compact configurations that might even fit within the cleared right-of-way path directly beneath them; multiple 1GW reactors sharing turbine and active fuel reprocessing infrastructure.

My hope is to place such a surplus of power onto the grid that by the ocean even 'wasteful' reverse osmosis techniques or some scale-up of vacuum desalinization might be practical... and acceptable to the locals.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Possibly this [Numerical Analysis of Open-Ended Coaxial Line Probes and Its Application to in-Vivo Dielectric Measurements. Paul McArthur at Kings College, University of London (1989)] is his thesis?

In your glass tower, yes.

In the real world, not so much.

Here is an example of one of the world's most optimized pieces of software: x264. It's also one of the few real-world loads that can take advantage of multiple processor and SSE. So how much speedup did this incredible piece of software see with AVX2, which DOUBLED the width of the integer pipelines?

FIVE PERCENT! Yup, that's it!

All that work for so very little improvement, because in the REAL WORLD data does not align on perfect AVX2 boundaries, and data fetch is as much of a hindrance as the actual processing of that data. Read more about WHY this is the best that could be done here, if you don't mind paying for SCRIBD.

Parading around test results form something like Passmark is just self-delusion. It only tests that the features do in-fact work, and these tests tend to work directly from cache in small data sets that are usually not branch-heavy. IT gives score for number of MIPS, but does not take into account the fact that most real software can't actually make use of these features at-speed.

And when they increase the vector size yet-again to 512-bits wide in a year, it will once-again be a limited real-world improvement, because optimization of real loads is hard, and auto-vectorization of arbitrary loads is even harder problem to solve. So Intel keeps adding new features, and they keep adding about 5-7% each (real world). So I don't see how you get above 3x from those puny performance increases, while not deluding yourself.

Ok, let's have this conversation. I'm assuming you've actually read a decent portion of his writing, since you seem to support the claim that it reeks of misogyny, and that you're not just parroting back claims from a bunch of people trying to fit it to a narrative (who haven't read it themselves either) right? It's available here if you haven't: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2259...

So let's talk. The boy clearly shows signs of blatant narcissism. In the first couple pages he brags about having visited 4 countries by the time he was 3, as if any child that age could gain anything meaningful from that experience. He goes on to describe a facile and warped world view, including how much joy he took in excluding his arch rival (a boy) from his 6th birthday party, classifying being denied entry to a roller coaster ride at 7 because of his height as "an injustice", and overall demonstrates a clear love of power, money, and status in settings that have no bearing on gender whatsoever. Where's the misogyny there?

He talks at length about how he refused to get a "low class retail job" because he's "an intellectual who's destined for greatness." He decides he'll be a screenwriter for about 2 weeks until he realizes they don't make much money, and then bails on it. He takes a college class, but quits halfway through because he's physically disgusted by the site of a happy couple sitting together every day. He took a janitorial job out of desperation, then quite after 5 hours because it was so beneath him. Where's the misogyny there?

There's a lot of misogynistic expression as well, of course. At one point he tells his mother that she should "sacrifice her happiness to secure his future" by marrying a rich guy she only wants to date. And yes, there's a lot of ranting about how women ignore him. But if you actually read even a little bit of it, it becomes very clear that this is a fundamentally delusional person no matter what gender he's talking about.

If you actually look at what he says, it's clear that he feels entitled to EVERYTHING. Not just women, but money, power, respect, friendship, and luxury. He's clearly not able to connect well with other people, and he basically viewed women as a prop in the perfect life of adoration that he felt he was owed. Is that misogynistic? Certainly. But taken as a whole his delusion was no more misogynistic than it was hateful of the entire human race indiscriminate of gender. Hell, he even killed twice as many men as women.

So then why is it that the outcry over this tragedy has immediately become slanted towards "violence against women!! men are terrible!!" The kid had horrific attitudes toward literally everybody around him, and was clearly an entitled little shit in every aspect of his life. In his world view all women were sluts and all men were intellectual nitwits and brutes, and NONE of them deserved to live if they got in his way. He outright said as much. Yet the social reaction to this not only emphasizes the effect it has on women, it actively EXCLUDES people from talking about the effect it has on men, and implicitly tries to lump all men in as perpetrators of the distorted mindset that Elliot Rodger had toward the world. It's divisive and bigoted, and frankly it's fucking disgusting.

I'd be very keen on seeing Occulus VR's legal response to this.

As much as people seem to be bashing ZeniMax, after reading their complaint there are some very key points that Mr Carmack and Occulus VR will have a very hard time disputing or disproving. One of the key things being that Mr Carmack was under a 'work for hire' clause in his contract, and that not only did some work on the Rift take place in ZeniMax (iD) premesis (even reported on video by The Verge), and they used ZeniMax equipment, but they also communicated via ZeniMax owned email accounts. Like it or not, Mr Carmack was now effectively producing ZeniMax IP. That is the point to a 'work for hire' clause. The clause can even cover stuff done in spare time if it can be held up as directly related to ZeniMax IP, which it now was.

The actual complaint filing makes for some interesting reading. Of course it has to be read with some pretty big grains of salt. I do find it hard to believe that ZeniMax actively pursued VR tech in a significant way before John worked on the Rift (that is not to say they didn't work on it at all). I do think that John rather than ZeniMax itself was a huge help for Occulus VR, but as John was subject to a 'work for hire' clause that work was now ZeniMax IP. 'Work for hire' clauses are not uncommon, and Mr Carmack probably should have known better, but I'd guess he got carried away in the 'this is a cool idea - I must make it work' mindset.

Anyway, that is just my $0.02

"Law enforcement around the world has teamed-up to arrest 97 for buying/using Blackshades malware, which can remotely seize control of a victim's computer"

What Operating System does this malware run on, or aren't we allowed to mention Microsoft Windows. ref

I would pick apart the article in more detail, but I suspect other people have already beat me to it.

Yeah, I had started to jot down a list of (yawn) never mind----

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT LFTR FANBOI

It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ...
some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs ... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available ... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop ... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B ... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels ... a move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum) ... utility-scale so-called 'renewables' non-solutions have a gazillion points of failure, gigawatt LFTR plants few, and it is my belief they will save NOT fail us ... aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers ... with LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer ... do it for the children ... and you my friend -- you would look especially good in space ... an Admiral Rickover fact check (severe tire damage) ... LNT (linear no threshhold) needs re-examination ... no I'm not risk adverse, just risk conscious ... one must sift past the fear-hype, especially regards Fukushima ... a look at Electricity in the Time of Cholera ... on the new coal powered IBM Power8 chips ... Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.

Think of me as the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburt

I would pick apart the article in more detail, but I suspect other people have already beat me to it.

Yeah, I had started to jot down a list of (yawn) never mind----

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT LFTR FANBOI

It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ...
some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs ... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available ... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop ... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B ... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels ... a move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum) ... utility-scale so-called 'renewables' non-solutions have a gazillion points of failure, gigawatt LFTR plants few, and it is my belief they will save NOT fail us ... aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers ... with LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer ... do it for the children ... and you my friend -- you would look especially good in space ... an Admiral Rickover fact check (severe tire damage) ... LNT (linear no threshhold) needs re-examination ... no I'm not risk adverse, just risk conscious ... one must sift past the fear-hype, especially regards Fukushima ... a look at Electricity in the Time of Cholera ... on the new coal powered IBM Power8 chips ... Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.

Think of me as the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburt

I accessed The Well when it was a dial-up BBS (at great expense!) and devoured the Whole Earth Catalog. You are one -- if not 'the' -- most notable environmentalist to 'break ranks' on the topic of nuclear energy. On this topic you are a great orator, for you do not merely have the gift of calmly and diplomatically dispelling myths, at the same time you clearly communicate a love for people and a love for the most awesome aspects of modern technology, the 'keepers' such as rural electrification. I am also an staunch advocate for LFTR and my heart is gladdened to hear you mention it.

My question is, has your position and persistence on the topic of nuclear energy brought you joy... or grief?

[ Check out the 2010 Brand/Jacobson debate on nuclear energy and the documentary Pandora's Promise [2013] ]
___
Bumps to a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8>Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

I accessed The Well when it was a dial-up BBS (at great expense!) and devoured the Whole Earth Catalog. You are one -- if not 'the' -- most notable environmentalist to 'break ranks' on the topic of nuclear energy. On this topic you are a great orator, for you do not merely have the gift of calmly and diplomatically dispelling myths, at the same time you clearly communicate a love for people and a love for the most awesome aspects of modern technology, the 'keepers' such as rural electrification. I am also an staunch advocate for LFTR and my heart is gladdened to hear you mention it.

My question is, has your position and persistence on the topic of nuclear energy brought you joy... or grief?

[ Check out the 2010 Brand/Jacobson debate on nuclear energy and the documentary Pandora's Promise [2013] ]
___
Bumps to a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8>Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

I accessed The Well when it was a dial-up BBS (at great expense!) and devoured the Whole Earth Catalog. You are one -- if not 'the' -- most notable environmentalist to 'break ranks' on the topic of nuclear energy. On this topic you are a great orator, for you do not merely have the gift of calmly and diplomatically dispelling myths, at the same time you clearly communicate a love for people and a love for the most awesome aspects of modern technology, the 'keepers' such as rural electrification. I am also an staunch advocate for LFTR and my heart is gladdened to hear you mention it.

My question is, has your position and persistence on the topic of nuclear energy brought you joy... or grief?

[ Check out the 2010 Brand/Jacobson debate on nuclear energy and the documentary Pandora's Promise [2013] ]
___
Bumps to a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8>Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.

Friend, please take a look at my mini-essay Electricity in the Time of Cholera.

We're talking about 7 billion people here. We all want access to clean water, sanitation, washing machines and electric lights. Half of the women in the world today wash clothes by hand. In rural areas 7 of 8 Africans, half of all South Asians, in total an estimated 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity.

What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.

Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.

Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.

If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.

Friend, please take a look at my mini-essay Electricity in the Time of Cholera.

We're talking about 7 billion people here. We all want access to clean water, sanitation, washing machines and electric lights. Half of the women in the world today wash clothes by hand. In rural areas 7 of 8 Africans, half of all South Asians, in total an estimated 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity.

What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.

Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.

Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.

If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.

Friend, please take a look at my mini-essay Electricity in the Time of Cholera.

We're talking about 7 billion people here. We all want access to clean water, sanitation, washing machines and electric lights. Half of the women in the world today wash clothes by hand. In rural areas 7 of 8 Africans, half of all South Asians, in total an estimated 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity.

What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.

Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.

Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.

If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Walk yourself through the steps, support structure and equipment that would be required to pull that off balanced against the likelihood of getting caught. Then you might sleep better. Evil ones tend to choose easier paths.

"Hello --- Doc --- I'm having trouble getting to sleep lately. The sheep are wearing strange equipment, some carry rolls of blueprints in their mouth. But the most bizarre thing is, they're counting down not up. I tried flipping my mattress over but I just wound up underneath it. What should I do??"

But more seriously, what we have here is a reminder that Insider threats are the most serious challenge confronting ___________ in today's world, Captain Obvious says. This modern post-9/11 genre has its roots in the classical Reader's Digest series Hints From Heloise, in which a calm trusted voice would soothe troubled housewives with too much time on their hands by suggesting tiny improvements and shortcuts like cutting empty bleach bottles into new, functional shapes and experimenting with food. Don't just think outside the box, why not cut the front off the boxes, paint them with cheerful latex colors and stack them in the closet to organize shoes. Occasionally something insightful and amazing has arisen from it such as the triple-Decker grill cheese sandwich.

But more seriously, the Stanford Scholars are capitalizing on the general condition of the times, camping out at the triple-Decker sandwich where Hints from Heloise, Safety Culture and the Security Culture meet. They are paving a new lecture circuit. And (if you skim down TA) Obviously a series of "don't assume" posters. Dilbert's boss has the whole set. Some are hung upside down.

Go to Vegas and ask anyone who makes 100k+ a year doing security what works and they'll tell you that a general, intelligent sense of situational awareness is best. Let your people watch lots of people so they can learn to read people. A set of SIMPLE guidelines and procedures to follow, the freedom to share suspicious with superiors with confidentiality and without prejudice and you're done. You've assembled the best security machine possible.

But that should be obvious too.

I believe that there is a move afoot to capitalize on the post-Fukushima radiation fear as applied to operating nuclear power plants, in the same way that there was a dirty bomb rad-fad some years past. And yes, some of the threat is coming from within. I speak of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent 'shocking' news item "Uneven enforcement suspected at nuclear plants which was covered here at Slashdot. Where an organization charged with security oversight stoops to insinuation and fear-mongering in the press even though doing so is an admission of incompetence. I am forced to conclude that some useless eaters have invaded the Security and Safety cultures. On that I have already spoken my piece. Warning: severe tire damage.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

Walk yourself through the steps, support structure and equipment that would be required to pull that off balanced against the likelihood of getting caught. Then you might sleep better. Evil ones tend to choose easier paths.

"Hello --- Doc --- I'm having trouble getting to sleep lately. The sheep are wearing strange equipment, some carry rolls of blueprints in their mouth. But the most bizarre thing is, they're counting down not up. I tried flipping my mattress over but I just wound up underneath it. What should I do??"

But more seriously, what we have here is a reminder that Insider threats are the most serious challenge confronting ___________ in today's world, Captain Obvious says. This modern post-9/11 genre has its roots in the classical Reader's Digest series Hints From Heloise, in which a calm trusted voice would soothe troubled housewives with too much time on their hands by suggesting tiny improvements and shortcuts like cutting empty bleach bottles into new, functional shapes and experimenting with food. Don't just think outside the box, why not cut the front off the boxes, paint them with cheerful latex colors and stack them in the closet to organize shoes. Occasionally something insightful and amazing has arisen from it such as the triple-Decker grill cheese sandwich.

But more seriously, the Stanford Scholars are capitalizing on the general condition of the times, camping out at the triple-Decker sandwich where Hints from Heloise, Safety Culture and the Security Culture meet. They are paving a new lecture circuit. And (if you skim down TA) Obviously a series of "don't assume" posters. Dilbert's boss has the whole set. Some are hung upside down.

Go to Vegas and ask anyone who makes 100k+ a year doing security what works and they'll tell you that a general, intelligent sense of situational awareness is best. Let your people watch lots of people so they can learn to read people. A set of SIMPLE guidelines and procedures to follow, the freedom to share suspicious with superiors with confidentiality and without prejudice and you're done. You've assembled the best security machine possible.

But that should be obvious too.

I believe that there is a move afoot to capitalize on the post-Fukushima radiation fear as applied to operating nuclear power plants, in the same way that there was a dirty bomb rad-fad some years past. And yes, some of the threat is coming from within. I speak of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent 'shocking' news item "Uneven enforcement suspected at nuclear plants which was covered here at Slashdot. Where an organization charged with security oversight stoops to insinuation and fear-mongering in the press even though doing so is an admission of incompetence. I am forced to conclude that some useless eaters have invaded the Security and Safety cultures. On that I have already spoken my piece. Warning: severe tire damage.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

And the US is not an ruled by an oligarchy?" http://www.scribd.com/doc/2184...

If you care to read the news it was Russia that was providing financial support to Ukraine, and when a pro-Russia government was democratically elected the United States overthrew the elected government through a coup and the use of US mercenaries.

You think that a commercial scale Thorium reactor could be developed and built for $4B?

Yes.
Because fusion is hard,
and LFTR is easy.
Comparatively speaking.

The second one would cost half as much. The 20th one might cost as much as an airplane.

And using closed cycle Brayton it could be sited anywhere, even far away from a major source of water. And as far away from people, who tend to congregate around water, as desired.

The present regulatory apparatus, which is wholly oriented to a solid fuel water reactor technology that carries risk of decay heat meltdown, steam and hydrogen explosion, large scale venting of radioactivity -- needs to be reevaluated and adjusted rationally for this technology -- which carries none of these risks.

With due and fond respect for the things that helped us become civilized people... it is time to end the age of steam and fossil fuel.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

You think that a commercial scale Thorium reactor could be developed and built for $4B?

Yes.
Because fusion is hard,
and LFTR is easy.
Comparatively speaking.

The second one would cost half as much. The 20th one might cost as much as an airplane.

And using closed cycle Brayton it could be sited anywhere, even far away from a major source of water. And as far away from people, who tend to congregate around water, as desired.

The present regulatory apparatus, which is wholly oriented to a solid fuel water reactor technology that carries risk of decay heat meltdown, steam and hydrogen explosion, large scale venting of radioactivity -- needs to be reevaluated and adjusted rationally for this technology -- which carries none of these risks.

With due and fond respect for the things that helped us become civilized people... it is time to end the age of steam and fossil fuel.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

This is not a rant on bioengineering per se. Humans deliberately producing Things with desirable traits is as old as rain. But when I see folks attempting to leverage marginally successful processes into solutions to Big Problems by reducing the margins... I have to take a step backwards to glimpse more of the picture.

If you are going to involve 'new' plants (or animals) in the production of energy, pause to think.

1. Energy required by humans is a monster growing exponentially. This monster EATS. This is inevitable. If you only have 1.3 children, someone else will have 4.3, if you conserve, they won't. Enforcement leads to conflict, escalation and war, the biggest energy waster of them all. So Big Problems must be eliminated, not achieved by legislation and (imagined) compliance.

2. The most cherished notions of sustainability and conservation involve taking a snapshot -- preserving Gaia as it exists today. In other words we are not obsessed with creating new forms of life because we are bored with the old ones. Though fluorescing pigs are really cool. Every little push for biofuels, even given 4x improvement in process efficiency, directly feeds the monster and his appetite is increasing too quickly.

(Such as the ongoing advance of the great Human Palm Oil Desert across Asia. This phenomenon permits Europeans to obtain diesel fuel and maintain their small tracts of land in pristine state, while the devastation wrought by Palm Oil monoculture remains comfortably distant.)

There is NO such thing as a sustainable biological source of energy on the scales we do and will consume it. Period. Advocates of biofuels imagine happy farmers that would be glad to drop what they are doing and make fuel inefficiently. And unused tracts of land, such as Brooklyn, in which these massive bio-chemical endeavors would reside. This is fantasy. There are only large scale Unintended Consequences down this path. And every corner of the Earth is now claimed and defended by people who would rather keep it as it is -- biologically.

3. There is only ONE source of energy that could scale quickly to power the grid, leaving hydrocarbons for fuel and chemical precursors (plastic, fertilizer) until their clean replacements arise. And eventually through separation of hydrogen from water and nitrogen from air, those too.

It's nuclear, and more specifically liquid fuel reactors.

4. Instead of BADLY transforming our biosphere with yet more engineered plant monocultures -- and if you thought food was intrusive wait 'till you run the numbers on energy -- energy production needs to become limitless, small, efficient, self contained, safe and clean.

Wouldn't you rather plant roses?
___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

This is not a rant on bioengineering per se. Humans deliberately producing Things with desirable traits is as old as rain. But when I see folks attempting to leverage marginally successful processes into solutions to Big Problems by reducing the margins... I have to take a step backwards to glimpse more of the picture.

If you are going to involve 'new' plants (or animals) in the production of energy, pause to think.

1. Energy required by humans is a monster growing exponentially. This monster EATS. This is inevitable. If you only have 1.3 children, someone else will have 4.3, if you conserve, they won't. Enforcement leads to conflict, escalation and war, the biggest energy waster of them all. So Big Problems must be eliminated, not achieved by legislation and (imagined) compliance.

2. The most cherished notions of sustainability and conservation involve taking a snapshot -- preserving Gaia as it exists today. In other words we are not obsessed with creating new forms of life because we are bored with the old ones. Though fluorescing pigs are really cool. Every little push for biofuels, even given 4x improvement in process efficiency, directly feeds the monster and his appetite is increasing too quickly.

(Such as the ongoing advance of the great Human Palm Oil Desert across Asia. This phenomenon permits Europeans to obtain diesel fuel and maintain their small tracts of land in pristine state, while the devastation wrought by Palm Oil monoculture remains comfortably distant.)

There is NO such thing as a sustainable biological source of energy on the scales we do and will consume it. Period. Advocates of biofuels imagine happy farmers that would be glad to drop what they are doing and make fuel inefficiently. And unused tracts of land, such as Brooklyn, in which these massive bio-chemical endeavors would reside. This is fantasy. There are only large scale Unintended Consequences down this path. And every corner of the Earth is now claimed and defended by people who would rather keep it as it is -- biologically.

3. There is only ONE source of energy that could scale quickly to power the grid, leaving hydrocarbons for fuel and chemical precursors (plastic, fertilizer) until their clean replacements arise. And eventually through separation of hydrogen from water and nitrogen from air, those too.

It's nuclear, and more specifically liquid fuel reactors.

4. Instead of BADLY transforming our biosphere with yet more engineered plant monocultures -- and if you thought food was intrusive wait 'till you run the numbers on energy -- energy production needs to become limitless, small, efficient, self contained, safe and clean.

Wouldn't you rather plant roses?
___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

I would blame Obama, but that doesnt fit the same time window.

That doesn't stop people.

A Third Of Louisiana Republicans Blame Obama For Hurricane Katrina Response Under Bush

(poll data here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/1619... )