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World's Largest Solar Plants Planned In California
Pickens writes "Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles, that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. 'If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big,' said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. OptiSolar will employ enough of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project to generate 550 MW. Meanwhile, SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW-worth of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plains Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent from following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. 'These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy,' said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E."
Reader thefickler notes some related news that researchers have developed a method of collecting infrared rays at night to supplement day-time solar power.
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
If they intend to travel in time, they'll need 1.21 gigawatts.
12.5 square miles of silicon, and it still generates less than a single average sized block of a nuclear power plant (~1000 MW).
In case anyone wants some perspective on that 550 MW figure, the US uses about 430 GW of electricity on average.
That's gonna suck in the first hailstorm they have.
20 percent in watt, 18 months? I'd like to see that!
26MW. That pretty much proves scalability. The rest is just a matter of actually scaling up.
I'm surprised that photovoltaic is more cost effective than solar thermal. Using fresnel lenses that focus on heat exchangers that double as turbines, it can be cheaper than coal. See here:
http://www.celsias.com/article/utahs-solar-fired-furnace-power-california-less-co/
How about removing the tax credits for ALL forms of energy so we can have an undistorted idea of what the energy costs from each method, hmmmm?
Oh wait, the oil industry won't like this, will they?
When we use taxes to distort the markets for policy, the special moneyed interests ALWAYS get it so it benefits them and makes the intended result moot. Which means screwing over the folks who it was supposed to help in the first place.
We are never going to get one fifth of our energy from renewable in two years in this state. It ain't going to happen. Californians are under this delusion that passing a law can change reality. We're rather stupid that way.
We simply don't have the technology to produce 20% of our current electricity from renewable source within two years. This law will either be ignored or the state will end up suing itself for non-compliance. We might be able to do it if we dammed up some major rivers but we couldn't build the dams and get them filled in time.
We'll eventually get cheap and efficient solar cells we can roof our houses and pave our streets with. But bulldozing twelve and a half square miles to erect mirrors is going to cause a lot of permanent damage to the environment for almost negligible gain. It's stupid in a way only California can be stupid.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
And they're spending more than all the money ever printed to buy Calif* land instead of the nearest non Calif* land.
I still like nuclear.
The plant that's 4 miles from my house sits on less than 1 square mile and produces over 2300 MW, day or night.
The 12.5 square miles of flat desert land may be no problem out west, but finding several hundred acres of flat land here in the Appalachians just isn't happening. Besides, we'd have to cut down all the trees.
before deregulation, we had solar farms, but the energy companies conspired to to make false blackouts and drive the price up(ENRON, PG&E) . THey left the solar farms go into disrepair and then simply tore them down. So when I hear about this, I think this is just a scam
Sometimes I wonder why the most aggressive, arrogant and most stupid posts get modded up.
Then I remember they are pro-nuclear and this is slashdot, where nuclear energy is good and no number or facts will ever change that.
After all, you can still call people hippies and
cults and think yourself to be so brave to be politically incorrect. You are not brave when you are an asshole, you are simply an asshole.
Nuclear power means nuclear weapons. The two are inseperable. The only way to eliminate nuclear weapons is to destroy nuclear technology and ensure that nobody ever rediscovers it. The only way to ensure the end of nuclear proliferation is to cease development of nuclear technology in ALL FORMS, and destroy any existing nuclear technology.
The supposed benefits of nuclear power (which I find highly dubious and false) do not justify the continued existence of weapons which can destroy all life on the planet.
ahhh, right after an OD of coffee and a slashcrap news story!
What's the TCO cents/kw? If it's not economical then the money simply goes to someone else to put gas in their Ford 250.
and go stand under a lightning bolt. :)
That's crazy. Seems the more practical approach is build a solar array in space! This way you always have sunshine 24/7 with no worries of bad weather. More importantly land on earth can be left alone.
The only concern I have about the space solar array is the method of transferring the energy towards earth's receiving stations using microwaves in megawatt power range. This would certainly cook some peeps if they ever misaligned the energy beam. I guess this will dispel the "spontaneous combustion theory."
that'd be a Sequoia, right? Hence California.
....mine's the one with the little windmill on the lapel.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I think that's more an issue with a specific plant design than with the technology in general.
It is not even specific to nuclear power plants.
But if you produce eletricity by generating heat
(like you do in a nuclear power plant, or any plant where you burn oil or coal), you emit heat.
By theremodynamics you even in other cases have to
generate more "disorder" which you easiest do by generating heat. That has to go somewhere.
Can't you use radiative closed-cycle cooling, like in a big automobile engine?
The problem here is the radiator. When you generate 1 Gigawatt of power, you have to get rid
of between 0.5 and 9 Gigawatt of heat.
So you have to either radiate the hole energy
or heat something like air or water or get the
heat somewhere else.
The easiest way is evaporating water. The second
is heating water. But for those you need water.
Then you have heating air or radiating. But both
is simply not feasable with that amount of power.
Do you want to create a hair-dryer with 1GW of power? (strong enough to blow the air far enough to not bake the whole area around it. I doubt you would have much electricity left after that.
And just radiating thus amount of power would
need a gigantic radiator, or one really hot.
(Though hotter than the inner cooling-cycles of the plant does not make sense). But if you pump
the stuff around in many square kilometers of
radiators, it might be cool enough to not fry the birds in the air. But then you again have needed vast amounts of area.
How cost competitiveness works?
"...which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010...it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources..".
This sounds like a mandated state requirement, and competition only against those competitors who are worse than you.
Long Live the Glorious Marxist Republic of California!
The desert is not full of human life. When we protect the environment, we ought to do it protect human interests, not because the environment has some moral rights. When you train a cat to use a litter box, do you do it because you believe the carpet has moral rights and needs to be protected? Well, I do it so I don't have to deal with the smell.
The desert simply doesn't have much to offer man except mineral resources and wide-open tracks of land for exactly these kinds of projects.
I see what you mean about nuclear power too. But on the other hand, nuclear power is so plentiful that if, as a condition of constructing them, we have to locate them far from population centers and live with transmission losses, so be it. They're still our best bets.
Whatever technology they use it'll be out of date before they finish installing 12.5 square miles of the stuff, and replacing it will mean starting from zero.
Compare this with thermal plants (mirrors focused on something to heat it up). The mirrors and focusing system remains the same, you just change the central element.
Thermal plants are far more sensible at the moment. This plan is yet another example of environmentalism gone mad.
No sig today...
Why do so many people seem to assume that local, government-backed monopolies with large territories are the most efficient way to generate and distribute electricity?
It can be efficient to have gas-fired units generate for 15 square blocks or a single factory.
I'd much rather see wind-mills and solar panels scattered all through suburbia, with lots of competition, than big "wind farms" or "solar farms" in just a few places. It'd be better from the anti-terrorism angle, too.
Economist Walter J. Primeaux (U of Texas at Austin, U of Illinois) researched these unnatural monopolies back in the 1970s and 1980s. Other economists looked into the X efficiencies created merely because there was competition, even if it was only on the basis of quality of service. There were dozens and dozens of articles in the journals, the trade publications, and a few popular media reporting on the advantages of competition, though they hardly reached most main-stream media radar screens. Vail and Insull created quite a bit of meme-inertia with their propaganda campaign of a century ago.
And why isn't the government just paying to put solar on everyones roof and doing away with a major part of the grid? Save at both ends. Self-enforced conservation and fewer costly infrastructure requirements. Of course, then the corporate and government swine can't screw the public.
As I understand it, photovoltaic panels are useful on cloudy days, while solar thermal installations only work in full sun.
An ancestor of mine was killed in the works of a water powered grist mill in 1747. Another was killed in a buggy accident in 1911. I can drive in half an hour to the site of a coal mine disaster that killed over 200. If we build wind mills by the tens of thousands it's going to cost lives.
So, what would it cost to replace California's carbon point sources with 'renewable' (I know it costs energy to make these things) energy? I'll share my math, others can expand:
It says here that California in 2007 used 230,931 of 'non-renewable' energy. It says here that California's peak demand was 52,863 MW when total usage was 265,000 GWH (2002). Adjusting to the current levels, a 14% increase, we get a current peak of 60,264 MW.
So, if these solar plants can produce a combined 800MW, you'd need 75 of these projects to handle peak energy generation. If we factor in 10% for transmission losses, and another 14% increase over the next six years (while they get built) then you're looking at 94 of these projects, which is really two projects, so 188 plants, or by 2020, 214 plants, using 1,338 square miles of desert. That's only 5% of the Mojave Desert, ignoring mountains, ignoring environmentalist lawsuits preventing destruction of desert habitat, not thinking about what happens when Joshua trees want to grow up under solar panels (Monsanto Roundup?).
So, that's 18 plants a year to build. It's probably possible, though what that would cost in rare earth elements, and what would the construction of such project do to the market prices of those rare elements? I don't know, except to think it would be bad.
OK, so how about replacing natural gas, outside of electricity generation? Using the information from here it says that half of the natural gas is consumed for electricity generation, so we can double that part of the number for the total energy budget of electricity and natural gas. That increases the GWH total to 298,962 GWH, or a 29% increase. So, we're up to 276 solar projects.
So, how about converting all the motor vehicles to plug-ins? It says here that CA uses about 24 Billion gallons of transportation fuels a year. This calculator puts that at 3,032,000,000 GW, or if divided by the number of hours in the year, gives 345,881 GWH (TODO: check units?). So, add to our current total and multiply by 2.16 and get 596 solar projects, at 3725 square miles, or about 15% of the Mojave Desert, and 50 of these solar projects a year to get CA largely carbon-neutral by 2020.
Now, this is a bit of a simplification. This is meeting peak demand with current generation. There might be some opportunity for storage, though demand somewhat parallels light availability. What is the quoted efficiency, average (during what time period) or max? This doesn't count wind power as I don't know the rules of thumb for standby generation (I heard recently 90% standby needed to be in production for wind to account for variability and startup time). I'm assuming no new hydro will be built (probably safe). I'm assuming solar won't get more efficient (it will). I'm assuming the installed solar won't lose efficiency over time (it will). I don't know what the proper rule of thumb is for calculating demand based on time-of-day usage. etc. So, it's much complicated, but I wanted to understand what scope people were talking about when they advocate an all-solar solution.
I'm also counting nuclear as 'non-renewable' in this calculation as folks who want all-solar usually are anti-nuclear. If you factor in the existing nuclear generation it gets a bit better. If you wanted to power CA on all-nuclear instead you'd need about 300 reactors covering 22 square miles of land, if they're like the 1.6GW one they proposed in Fresno. Or you could use newer, safer technologies instead and clean up our existing nuclear waste by feeding stuff currently bound for Yucca Mountain into these reactors and
My God, it's Full of Source!
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An internet means copyright violations. The two are inseperable. The only way to eliminate copyright violations is to destroy internet technology and ensure that nobody ever rediscovers it. The only way to ensure the end of internet proliferation is to cease development of internet technology in ALL FORMS, and destroy any existing internet technology.
The supposed benefits of internets (which I find highly dubious and false) do not justify the continued existence of copyright violations which can destroy all life in Hollwood.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Everything's big in America!
Delicious copy pasta!
I'm sorry I don't have a reference handy, but last month the European Union announced a solar plant project that will take a good chunk of the Sahara desert to power all of Europe, so I guess that would be the biggest plant in the world.
Mr. Burns?
What?
I'm curious what the carbon impact of 12.5 square miles of solar panels vs 12.5 square miles of forest.
On the one hand you're not burning oil, on the other you're preventing light from reaching massive amounts of land, so no plant life will exist there.
Granted you can cover the deserts with solar panels, but beyond that would it be worse than burning fossil fuels?
How about:
Gee, this might be good news. I've seen people respond cynically to some of these posts about solar and alternative energy because they assume nothing will really be done about it. Well, here's proof of practical application.
Glad my state is setting an example.
There's a lot of solar power generation going into Mojave. This project is only one of the ones going in or already running. Right now, there's about half a gigawatt of installed solar capacity at Mojave. Several companies are putting in new plants. Some use solar panels, some use concentrator cells, and some use mirrors to heat oil to make steam.
About 10 GW is needed to cover peak Southern California air conditioning load. That's what to go for, and at peak-hour bulk power prices, it makes money. Solar power and air conditioning load peak at the same time, which works out nicely. (Wind is cheaper but somewhat random. Even averaged over a wide area, you get maybe 80-90% uptime at best, so you need other sources which are "dispatchable", that is, will deliver power when asked. About 15% of capacity can be met from wind wind without a need for extra dispatchable capacity.)
10GW in 10 years is well within reach, and will probably happen from commercial activity. 10GW in 2 years is unlikely, but 10GW in 5 years is probable.
This won't help with base load. California's base load is about 19GW; that's the low level at night. That should be on nuclear power. California has about 4GW of nuclear power now, (two plants, 4 reactors) and that needs to be increased by about a factor of 4 to 5.
Siting nuclear power plants may be a solveable problem. It used to be hard to find sites for prisons, but small towns with declining industry started competing for them, and now Northern California has many prisons, all in rather remote areas. A similar competitive approach might be used to site nuclear plants. All new plants should be in green earthquake zones, toward the eastern edge of the state.
If both of those things get done, most of the rest of California's power will come from existing hydropower sources, with peaking from natural gas. Al Gore's
How will you dump the waste heat in the desert? ANY thermal plant works by, in effect, charging a toll on heat flowing from a source (focal point of a mirror, a fire, a nuclear reaction, etc) to a sink (cooling tower, large body of water, dry air cooling structure, etc.). If a nuclear plant has so much trouble dumping the heat in an arid region, why won't a solar thermal plant have the same trouble? (Or even more if the source temperature is less that the 500C or so for a reactor.)
Sadly, that *is* how a lot of people think. Not only that, but they did a survey years back and found that a huge chunk of people thought Three Mile Island was a near-Chernobyl level disaster with deaths and lots of released radiation, rather than an fine example that even those old safety systems actually worked.
The bulk of the human race is living in a fantasy world where about 5/6 of what they believe is utter bullshit. And it seems pretty constant across the globe. Different areas just have local varieties of bullshit.
So these plants will generate 800 MWe peak using 12.5 square miles.
For reference, Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles, so they will be a bit larger than half of Manhattan.
"Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California
Oh wait ...
Well, so long as it near Paso Robles or Carissa Plains, I won't worry overmuch.
Who cares if it is out of date? It will still generate the promised amount of KW hours, for the next few decades.
While most concerns may not be logical, historically there's been a lot of misinformation and outright deception produced by the pro-nuclear crowd. Look at the cover-ups that invariably accompany nuclear accidents. Look at the reaction of business interests after the 3 mile island accident ("nothing to see here, move along").
Same with Yucca mountain. Apparently there was misinformation broadcast about the actual safety of that site. So, you can denegrate the anti-nuclear crowd as a bunch of tree-hugging Luddites, but I respect their fears (note: I like the idea of nuclear power but I want to see a change in the arrogant, dismissive way nuclear power is advocated).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The problem isn't that oil companies are getting tax breaks
I'll be the last person in line demanding any kind of windfall profits tax, but oil companies get a 'depletion allowance'. That is, they can sell their oil, then write off that oil as no longer being an asset, much like you'd depreciate a fixed asset.
One or the other, not both. And oil in the ground won't 'go bad' in our lifetimes.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Why would anyone put capitol at risk in the people republic of California? The State Legislature may confiscate the investmet and use the money to buy votes. It has already done this to power distribution companies by requiring them to sell power at less than cost, putting them into bankruptcy.
It makes absolutely no sense for anyone to put capitol at risk in California. If you make a profit you are rich and therefore a suitable target for confiscation.
California is a third world country that does not know it yet.
Deserts seem to have no problems radiating their daytime heat into the night sky - so well that they can get below freezing. Either fin fans or a ground loop could be used as the heat sink.
It's called the spotlight fallacy, and by trying to attach it to environmentalism, you're making use of the fallacy yourself. Hypocrite.
RE the article on how to collect infrared rays at night - way to violate the third law of thermodynamics! They seem to be proposing to absorb infrared rays and rectify the electromagnetic rays somehow. The only way this would be possible - even theoretically - is if the absorber were kept at a lower temperature than the incoming rays, yet I see no mention of this and I get the impression that someone is blissfully unaware of certain well known truths in physics (e.g. the third law, which states that entropy must increase). To spell it out, without a heat sink the proposed idea would provide a way to convert heat (not a heat difference) into usable energy, which violates the third law.
The
The enrichment technology is the only real bottleneck these days, in particular the tricky bits of technology needed to build centrifuges that can enrich to weapons quality.
The actual bomb designs are extremely widely published these days, at least for simple fission bombs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Nice troll. It's always in the run-up to an election that the right-wing shills come out in-force.
How many 3rd world countries do you know that have a larger economy than all but 8 (out of 190) countries (ironically, including the USA) around the world?
There isn't ONE state, country, city, municipality, etc., that hasn't, at one time or another, done something a bit unfair and/or short-sighted. Just try and name one.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Come to Australia, mate. I have a hibiscus that wants that title. Last time I gave it an audit it was in the process of taking over a sheep station in the far north of Queensland.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
By reprocessing it we can reduce it to zero. We can remove and recycle all of the transuranic elements from spent nuclear fuel. All you have left is uranium (which occurs naturally, so could hardly be considered nuclear waste) and fission products, which will decay over a few hundred years into non-radioactive substances.
If we use the breeder cycle, we can eliminate all waste except the fission products, and we'll get more total energy too.
But reprocessing fuel eliminates on of the main benefits of Nuclear - cost. Reprocessing as it is done today is expensive. A pound of reprocessed fuel is more expensive to produce than a pound or mined and enriched uranium. If we were to switch to molten salt reactors, reprocessing would be much less expensive because it would eliminate the need for handling fuel elements (molten salt reactors have a liquid core).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDixxAS820U
Portugal has started work on what will be the world's biggest solar power plant - a 52,000 photovoltaic module, 11-megawatt facility covering a 60-hectare south-facing hillside in the southern Alentejo region.
According to the BBC, the cost of the monster 'leccy factory is 58m - or £40m in old money - for which the Portuguese will get enough juice for 8,000 homes.
The project is funded by General Electric Energy Financial Services who've provided the cash for indigenous renewable energy power company Catavento's eco-friendly initiative.
Catavento's Piero Dal Maso declared: "The Serpa solar power project, along with other renewable energy initiatives, helps lay the foundation for Portugal's energy future. The project takes maximum advantage of the excellent environmental conditions in Portugal for solar power."
However, and as many of you might have spotted, supplying green juice to just 8,000 homes will hardly allow Portugal to tell OPEC to take a running jump. Dal Maso admitted: "It is a drop, but we think in Portugal that it will make sense to use renewables to get away from oil issues and the dependency on energy from outside which we have in Portugal."
The plant will, once completed, have another green string to its bow: the solar panels will be mounted two metres off the ground, allowing sheep to graze the grass below in delicious shade. ®
If we collect the infrared rays then won't all those cute animations have to be rewritten to show a different method of heating? What will be reflected back by the CO2?
I come from a 30 career of electronic manufacturing infrastructure stuff. It scares me to think of the environmental cost of manufacturing a 12 square mile silicon chip. And yes, I'm thinking about the cost of most of the stuff involved in doing it... the chemical required, the electrical power (enormous, but I don't have a kJ number) building the plant to do it, the people to do it, the whole enchilada). Do you know that most of the power requirement was from COAL? Jeeeeezeeee
Jack Karle ""Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you: Jesus Christ and the American G.I. One died for
The Earth receives around 150,000 TW in solar irradiation.
You could create 1,000 large nuclear power plants each dissipating 1 GW of waste heat for a total of 1 TW, and it would still only amount to 1/150,000 of what we receive from the Sun.
In other words, on the planetary scale, the effect of such "collosal" heat dissipation is effectively nil, totally unmeasurable.
Local heating is much more relevant of course, but you don't put those 1,000 power plants in the same spot.
Perhaps because heat radiates at x^4 degree of the temperature difference? i.e. a 500* difference radiates out at 625x as fast as a 100* difference.
The key to this is that, say in a stirling engine, a big hunk of solid metal aka a heat sink can take a 500* delta, whereas a pipe that carries a fluid (non-evaporative cooling tower) generally has pressures issues with that delta.
Wake me when it actually goes online.
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ManBearPig is real. It has entered our world through the portal from the Imaginationland. It's half man, half bear, and half pig. We have to stop it before it kills more human.
Excelsior!
Whatever technology they use it'll be out of date before they finish installing 12.5 square miles of the stuff
Meaning what? Not the latest and greatest? I'm not aware of a rush to decommission other types of power plants just because they aren't the latest and greatest.
and replacing it will mean starting from zero.
Why? I can't think of any power generation technology that is more modular than PV solar. Why couldn't you swap out or add newer panels?
Thermal plants are far more sensible at the moment.
I don't know the specifics of the renewable energy mandate PG&E is working under, but I would expect that any solar qualifies. And it seems they (PG&E) would choose the best type of plant for their needs. I'm not saying you're wrong about PV vs. thermal solar, but with the number of dollars at stake, I'm pretty sure someone has done a comparative analysis of many different options (including ignoring the mandate and facing any fines and penalties that would result).
California essentially has a direct democracy. That means the majority of the people making any given decision aren't experts on the subject. The results are conveniently public, which means we can all point and laugh.
California is special though. They do something like that approximately once a week.
Also, you should check your math. Since California only accounts for just over 10% of the US economy, it's not just unlikely... It's mathematically impossible for California's economy to be larger than the US economy.
No, it isn't. Remember Deregulation? Enron? That was good old California doing the Republican thing, and letting power companies set their own prices. Doing the opposite now can only be a good thing.
CA has a more balanced electorate than most states, with about 45% voting Republican, often electing Republican governors (like the current Governator), and in the not-too distant past, being won by Republican presidential candidates. There are numerous Republican House Reps from CA, including good old "Duke" Cunningham (Mr. Kickbacks himself) and Jerry Lewis (Ranked #1 in Federal Government Pork).
The idea that CA is some bastion of socialism couldn't be further from the truth. With a couple more years of Mexicans streaming over the border, and it'll go even more to the right.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
13% actually, which is FAR larger than any other of the 50 states, even the geographically larger ones like TX. The CA population is #1, but not much larger than several other states.
And if CA starts to slip, the rest of the US, and in fact the world, is in very deep trouble. Most of the world's airplanes are developed, designed, built, tested, etc., in CA. The vast majority of the jet engine industry is located in CA. All the major technology companies are centrally located in CA: Intel, AMD, Google, Sun, IBM, etc. Hollywood is still turning out TV shows and movies that are shown around the world. Pretty much everything that the US has, that other countries want to buy (keeping the trade deficit from ballooning) is being developed in CA. Forget a couple measly little banks... If CA starts having economic problems, the US is in worse trouble than it has ever seen.
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That may be true as far as engineering tolerances go, but as far as design knowledge goes, I thought the design of the 1945 "Fat Man" bomb was pretty widely disseminated by now, so you could just use that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think you misread my comment as having partisan bias.
Neither party has cornered the market on stupidity. If you look at other comments in my thread, you'll see that I've picked on them for having such a direct democracy... Not for being a bastion of socialism.
In California, you live/do business at the whim of the voters. There is no other state that operates that way. We have a representative republic for good reason.
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
You're right. Oops.