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New Sunlight Reactor Produces Fuel
eldavojohn writes "A new reactor developed by CalTech shows promise for producing renewable fuel from sunlight. The reactor hinges on a metal oxide named Ceria that has very interesting properties at very high temperatures. It exhales oxygen at very high temperatures and inhales oxygen at very low temperatures. From the article, 'Specifically, the inhaled oxygen is stripped off of carbon dioxide (CO2) and/or water (H2O) gas molecules that are pumped into the reactor, producing carbon monoxide (CO) and/or hydrogen gas (H2). H2 can be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells; CO, combined with H2, can be used to create synthetic gas, or "syngas," which is the precursor to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Adding other catalysts to the gas mixture, meanwhile, produces methane. And once the ceria is oxygenated to full capacity, it can be heated back up again, and the cycle can begin anew.' The only other piece of the puzzle is a large sunlight concentrator to raise the temperature to the necessary 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The team is working on modifying and refining the reactor to require a lower temperature to achieve the two-step thermochemical cycle. Another issue is the heat loss which the team claims could be reduced to improve efficiency to 15% or higher. Since CO2 is an input, the possibility exists for coal and power plants to collect CO2 emissions to be used in this process which would effectively allow us to "use the carbon twice." Another idea listed is that a "zero CO2 emissions" is developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.' The team's work was published last month in Science."
Another idea listed is that a "zero CO2 emissions" is developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.'
So basically, it would be a solar-powered station that could run around the clock using methane as a storage medium. I know that for as awesome as this sounds, it is equally unlikely to ever come to fruition to the extent that it is explained here.
The summary covers a lot of it, but this is pretty fascinating (if it reaches production): something that can be added to the exhaust of a fossil fuel power generation station that reduces the carbon footprint and provides fuel to use in either that or other processes in addition to supplying oxygen for other processes. All it really takes is concentrated sunlight for an energy source.
I'd be interested to see in a few years what other uses are figured out for it.
We live in interesting times...
World Energy Problems Solved!
4th Time This Month
So it was *mostly* CalTech guys, using Swiss equipment for testing and further development.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I've discovered a system that allows sunlight, groundwater, airborne CO2, and a few other elements to be converted into substances which can easily be used for heating fuel, building materials, and even in some cases food. It's really amazing, and costs relatively little to set up and even less to maintain. It's also aesthetically pleasing, so you get very little complaint from the NIMBY crowd. In fact, this system is so simple that you'll often find it in the front and back yards of ordinary single-family homes, apartment buildings, and office complexes.
Not that this idea isn't potentially nifty, of course.
I am officially gone from
I think the goal is more to get something good out of removing CO2, instead of a very slow and gradual change of benefiting the atmosphere.
Mind you, if the goal was to just remove CO2, they do have plans to build new skyscrapers with trees up high.
Effectively what they're doing is turning sunlight into chemical energy. The process sounds complex at first glance, so can it be more efficient than other methods of capturing solar energy? From a technical POV the percentage of sunlight captured is interesting. But from a business POV the costs are interesting, and I think overall more important: real estate footprint, amortized capital costs, and operational costs. Where do these fall relative to other methods?
That strange and exotic metal Cerium, is it at least cheaper than gold? How rare is this? Admittedly it sucks to have our oil stuck under their sand, but trading it for our Cerium stuck in their jungle is not a better solution either.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I believe we've been thinking of it for decades ... but, apparently, it's hard to actually do on a large scale and affordably. At least, that's kinda the impression I've gotten over the years.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's been thought of. Time and time again. "Thinking of it" is not, and never has been, the issue. The issue has been "how do we harness this in a way that is at least as economic and effective as fossil fuels?" And that's where every solution has failed so far. Because even though the sun produces a tremendous amount of energy, collection thereof is unreliable down on the ground, and the technology to do so is expensive.
Putting stuff into space resolves the reliability issue, but only multiplies the cost.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
The gigantic ball of "burning energy" is the sun. It doesn't show up every day---we do, as we rotate around the globe, alternating being in the shady side and the sunny side of the earth.
Also, the resource may be free, but the cost of utilizing it isn't. It's like the gold and other precious metals dissolved in the ocean water. This "free" resource is there. You could extract more gold than your most wild dreams. The cost of extracting the precious metals from the seawater, however, will be quite significant---especially compared to the value of what you extracted.
Actually, it's Pacific Tech.
True, but you can release the energy later, at a different location, or in more concentrated bursts. All of which could make the energy more useful.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I find it truly amazing that we can utilize this gigantic ball of burning energy that shows up every single day to help power things on Earth. Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
Absolutely. We should send ships to that gigantic ball of burning energy to bring some back to Earth for our needs. Someone call Cillian Murphy!
So, the only real novel thing here is utilizing solar energy to heat the backwards fuel cell. The "reactor" isn't really new.
Anyhow, If they can make it work reliably, efficiently, and cost effectively, they may be on to something.
This has already been discussed two years ago here http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/01/06/1620228/Scientists-Recycle-CO2-with-Sunlight-to-Make-Fuel.
You would think with someone who can manage to type out the chemical chain you would know the sun doesn't shine at night. SO you need to STORE the energy.
But no, you go on poo-pooing the idea without bothering to think in any logical or rational manner. We certainly don't have enough people like that already~
Have you considered working for Glen Beck?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes the sun does not shine at night indeed and there are some losses in converting sun rays into a usable energy using regular solar panels. But exactly the same issues are present in the proposed co2+h2o reactor project.
This is old stuf, but the metals originally proposed are not rare and the patent has expired. I did a piece about it here.. http://www.greencheck.nl/index.php?/archives/279-De-Rare-Earth-Mythe.html It shows the patents and the reactions proposed. Supressed technology is reintroduced as an invention. Cerium spiked up 600 perscent last august..
I'm getting a little tired of all this future tech stuff that sounds like it will solve all of our problems, but never seems to come to fruition. throw this one on the list with Transporters and Warp drives.
This does not make any sense. A simple chemical reaction of methane burning is
CH4 + 2*O2 -> CO2 + 2*H2O + 890 kJ/mol energy freed during the process.. So in order to convert CO2 and water back to methane and oxygen you need to spend the same 890 kJ/mol energy. Okay, you get the energy from the sun, but why not to use the sun to generate the energy directly without doing the CO2 conversion back and forth?
Because we're "experts" at storing, stockpiling, and using methane gas, but attempts to store sunlight for later use, perhaps by bouncing it between two parallel mirrors or something, is way beyond our (current) technology.
Also ask a petrochemical engineer about the way cool things you can make given a large supply of methane. Pretty much any organic chemistry compound (with pretty obvious exceptions, like you're going to need some metal atoms from somewhere if you want to make organometallics, amines are going to need nitrogen, etc)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Actually, the sun will slowly grow hotter and we'll find that the Earth will be uninhabitable well before the point where it will reach the red giant stage. Maybe only a half billion years or so.
What can the environmental community possibly find wrong with this?
Probably will end up as something like "producing the required 10 pounds of cerium causes environmental damage equivalent to burning 10 kilobarrels of crude oil, yet only produces energy equivalent to 1 kilobarrel equivalent of burned crude oil before the catalyst disintegrates or whatever" So you'd be 9 kilobarrels ahead if you'd just burn the crude oil.
Very much like how making corn alcohol is a great way to manufacture the equivalent of one barrel of crude oil, assuming you're willing to burn the equivalent of two barrels of crude oil to make that one barrel equivalent..
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sorry, but every time I see solar (or geothermal or wind or tidal) as described as "renewable", I get pissed off.
How exactly do you think we would "renew" the sun when it runs out of energy? Use a big laser to push photons back in?
--Joe
There are certain applications where hydrocarbon energy storage makes sense. High power electric motors and batteries are still very expensive compared to an internal combustion engine of the same output. Batteries simply don't have the power density to run airliners. It's easier to ship fuel to generators at remote outposts than charged batteries.
If you were simply dumping this energy back onto the grid, you are correct. You would just use a normal solar plant directly. The 40% efficiency conversion you would get with a collecting tower and heat engine would far exceed the hoped for 15% conversion you get out of this device, and the subsequent 40% conversion when burning it.
I find it truly amazing that we can utilize this gigantic ball of burning energy that shows up every single day to help power things on Earth. Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
MTBF, on an annualized basis, is almost exactly 12 hours. On a month to month basis, especially in polar areas, it approaches zero roughly once per year.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This reactor produces one of the most important components of a Hydrogen Bomb, and thus should be banned! And everybody knows that reactors are evil, and will cause the China Syndrome (whatever that is), which will kill us all. Reactors are well known to explode in a nuclear conflagration, as well as poisoning everyone within a 1000 mile radius before they do!
Of course environmentalists are going to hate this.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Except that we're not allowed to build these reactors with actual "plants". "Plants" cannot be patented due to some "prior art" BS. Everybody knows we can't make technological or economic progress without venture capital, patents, copyrights, licensing agreements, enforceable contracts, corporate lobbying, government regulations, outsourcing, offshoring, executive bonuses, business lunches, corporate gifts, executive perks, and high profit margins.
Duh!
While a "hydrogen economy" in whatever broad implementation is a fine idea in theory, there is one extremely important detail that must be done very carefully right from the start. The leakage of hydrogen gas must be kept to an absolute minimum. Why? Simple! Just multiple any X amount of leakage you choose, per person, by a couple billion users in a scaled-up hydrogen economy. Now factor in the simple fact that all leaked hydrogen will naturally rise through the atmosphere to the ozone layer, and that ozone is naturally "hypergolic" with hydrogen --the two chemicals instantly react. If you thought the effect of chlorocarbons was bad for the ozone layer, well, "you ain't seen nothin' yet", as the saying goes, if a large hydrogen economy doesn't do everything it can to keep hydrogen gas leakage to an absolute minimum.
Since when do plants store energy in a way that's efficiently useful to us? You can't build a car that runs off your bags of mowed grass, you can build a car that runs off H2. This is no joke.
Technically, isn't almost all power we currently use solar power? That energy we're releasing when burning fossil fuels came from the sun, stored by the plants millions of years ago. The process in this article is essentially the same idea, just on timescales more acceptable to humans.
Wind and hydro power are just indirect solar power, too. I think the only non-solar power we use is nuclear and geothermal, both of which are releasing the stored power from the previous star that went supernova and created all those heavy elements (so, star power, but not Solar (as in from Sol, our current sun)).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You're wrong. Corn ethanol is slightly positive, just darn near not and it loses out cost wise without subsidies.
Indeed, this part made no sense to me. Why would you put energy into producing a methane only to burn it for electricity?
The whole point of going to methane/syngas/ethanol is because you can store it and transport it, and use it for applications that require more concentrated energy than solar or batteries will give you. You're going to have unnecessary losses if you use it to generate electricity. You'd be better off just running a steam generator off the solar furnace.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Which is why we use this to make Methane that we can use during those periods.
Oil is going nowhere fast, no matter where all the replacements come from.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
CO + 2O2 -> CO2 + O3
So, we end up with ground level ozone and CO2. Yay.
You can generate heat and electricity from hay. A cogen plant can burn almost anything, in fact.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
"The only other piece of the puzzle is a large sunlight concentrator to raise the temperature to the necessary 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit."
or better yet, rather than wait for some pie in the sky orbital solar array... how about use a nuclear reactor so we can make this a viable option NOW and get the infrastructure in place. Once these devices are in common use, it would be economically prudent to convert them to solar power as soon as the tech was available. Making hydrocarbon fuels from nuclear power would be a huge step in the right direction, this all green or nothing attitude is what's killing progress in the field.
Hmm... If nobody has to work, then why would the people that work on WOW want to continue to do so?
Because my car can burn methane, sunshine does not seem to have the same propelling effect.
I think you're ripe for the other version of the joke: Yes, I can, in fact, build a car that runs off bags of mowed grass and other biofuels. And not only that, its exhaust can be recycled for energy. What's more, it can handle rough terrain, and even -- get this -- self-replicate!
It's called a horse.
(And currently, ethanol is a [crappy] way of having plants store sunlight energy in form cars can use, after a little processing.)
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Using a cryogenic separator, pull CO2 out of air (now considered a waste product or at best sold as dry ice) and use it as feedstock, and power the ceria reactor with solar during the day and thorium at night... Then reformulate (again, using thorium power) into common hydrocarbon motor fuels or other hydrocarbon-based product (fertilizers, plastics, etc) precursors.
Unless, of course, you build a gigantic Solar plant that can provide power for all phases of the process, but given that we have the thorium for hundreds if not thousands of years, and with reprocessing we can likely fit a year's national waste in a cube van, not implementing modern, safe, molten-salt reactors would be the most obnoxious form of NIMBYism and eco-luddism..
We've been using coal for thousands of years for various purposes.
It may have become more prevalent, but fossil fuels have been in use for a long time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You know, it's people like you that keep us from the Star Trek future of tolerance, peace and plenty that Osama bin Laden is trying to lead us into.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is the downside of the interwebz and google. Dumb people don't know they're dumb anymore. They can google for some out-of-context fact or figure and assume they know it all.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Could be useful for producing fuel and possibly oxygen at the same time on Mars. While the sunlight intensity is about 43% vs earth, atmospheric diffusion is less so the solar energy arriving at the surface is about 59% of earth. The effect of much lower gas pressure is beyond my powers of deduction. One thing the article glosses over is whether the process produces free oxygen during the heating phase, which would be very useful on Mars.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The entire Northeast was considering secession during the War of 1812, even to the extent of convening a meeting to discuss secession in Hartford in 1814 (closed door) and recommending out a bunch of constitutional amendments making it harder to declare war, etc. Essentially hobbling the Federal Government. Which was funny coming from a party called Federalists.
The pro-British slant of the Federalists of the time (some even considered getting back together with Britain in preference to Madison's Virginian-dominated Democratic-Republican government) essentially made them unelectable from that point forward, hastening the demise of the party. The war ended while the conference was in session, making them look particularly idiotic. Also, Jackson's victory in New Orleans sort of stole their thunder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Convention
Just to point out that the South weren't the only secessionist idiots in the union, and not the only people who believed that states had retained the right to secede.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Since when do plants store energy in a way that's efficiently useful to us?
My house is heated by energy stored in 30-40 year old plants (growing on my land).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Technically... the Sun is still shining at night, just not on you. I think it has to do with the Earth rotating and stuff... :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I wouldn't say horribly inefficient. Most polycrystalline silicon cells get 12-15%, which isn't too bad. Some research groups have made PV cells that get 40-60%. The problem is that they don't do direct fuel conversion - you have to then use the electricity to do electrolysis or drive other chemical processes, which are inevitably going to be lossy. So you get 12-15%, run it through two or three processes that are 10-50% efficient, and suddenly you have 1% or less solar-to-fuel efficiency. Which, yeah, totally sucks.
And solar concentrators take a ton of space. This process runs at 1500 celsius or higher, so you can't just do it in a trough. You need a tower or dish system, which take up huge amounts of space.
I always see so many stories about up coming technologies with almost no info on when it will be available to the masses, just some sort of working on fine tuning, or last minute issues, or have complications for funding...never, will be sold publicly in 2 years, deal has been signed with xxx to manufacture product.
Please shut your trap, you are making too much sense.....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
Because it involves a risky and highly experimental procedure called 'going outside'. Our best scientific minds admit they have no adequate theoretical model of the conditions in that realm of existence, but intensive computational simulation techniques suggest that it may contain 'girls'.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Too inspirational for /.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Well, if we could get it to operate net-positive with a solar photovoltaic system to extract CO2 from the air, they'll probably cheer.
Granted, I like this idea. I've considered a wood-and-charcoal and solid-to-liquid fuel economy on sustainable forresting; but fossil-to-CO2 with buffers isn't so bad either. The problem is, of course, we don't create a huge dense CO2 cloud with this; drawing enough CO2 from the atmosphere to produce fuel will cause massive environmental damage, while drawing CO2 from burned fossil fuel exhaust collected at emissions source will work.
You have to realize that trees are extremely efficient and all that CO2 in the atmosphere for one disperses and also becomes sugar through plants and trees absorbing it; and at the same time you have the ocean absorbing the stuff, which eventually becomes condensed and compressed at the bottom, and slowly pressurized through slow reactions into frozen methane. There's a lot of reasons why we can't just suck CO2 out of the air; but capturing at the source will work great.
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The entire Northeast was considering secession during the War of 1812, even to the extent of convening a meeting to discuss secession in Hartford in 1814 (closed door) and recommending out a bunch of constitutional amendments making it harder to declare war, etc. Essentially hobbling the Federal Government. Which was funny coming from a party called Federalists.
Well, a couple of things here:
1) The Hartford Convention rejected secession.
2) Nothing in the Hartford Convention's resolutions even suggested nullification or secession.
3) Most importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, no one in the Northeast (or, indeed, anywhere but the South) would dare openly fly a flag of rebellion today, as some of those in the South still do. Hell, Mississippi still has the Confederate battle flag as part of its state flag.
That's why I used the word "still". There are still those in the South who consider the Union's victory a bad thing.
portable energy density. Right now, you still can't beat oil. When oil gets too expensive, you won't be able to affordably create and distribute the means to use substitutes.
As for electrical power, there are lots of solutions, none of which will make a corporation money (solar tower turbines, ubiquitous small scale hydropower, ubiquitous wind and wave power, ubiquitous slow wave hydropower in the Mississippi, ubiquitous solar, geothermal in some spots), so you can forget those.
My suggestion? Dig in and prepare yourself for a long, unpleasant adjustment.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
i've long thought that amoung "environmentalists", a further distinction needs to be made between the rational ones and the loonies, hippies, and people afraid of weasel-words like "chemicals" etc.
you could almost split environmentalists down the middle along the lines of pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear and you'd get most of the reasonable ones on one side and the loons on the other.
lol. mods have no sense of humour.
What about sending one of these to Mars with a nuclear reactor instead of sunlight for the heat source, and using it to make rocket fuel for a return vehicle?
Or is this basically the same thing that Robert Zubrin proposed 15 years ago?
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
No, it's solar and solar is automatically good. Hmm. With "solar" being automaticaly good and "reactor" being automatically bad, what would this be? Gad? Bood? Aneurysm-inducingly mind-boggling?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
What in the world will the climate change doomsayers have to say when CO2...A DANGEROUS GAS is used and taken out of the atmosphere...
I guess mostly they will complain about boring news. Nothing exciting happening, like hurricanes, floods, droughts. No sharks swimming down Main Street. There will be mild summers and winters, no extreme temperatures without the atmosphere receiving that extra energy kick from CO2.
CO2 is found in the atmosphere at concentrations of a few hundred ppm. Extracting sufficient CO2 from the air to make this work economically would be non-trivial. I like the suggestion in the article to capture coal emissions and recycle them via this process to methane or syngas, but even that would involve some real engineering challenges. All that being said, I'm glad they're looking into this - it seems to have some potential as an energy source.
(slips on John C. Dvorak buzzkill hat...)
...back to you."
[...developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.']
Uh, this sounds like a perpetual motion machine scam. These researchers might be deluding themselves. In the process, we'll waste (via gov't funding grants) asstons of money on pursuing an unfeasible, impractical, but tantalizing idea.
A few flashy startups will be created later, promising viable technology that's always "just ahead." You know...along the lines of hydrogen fuel cell scams. The technology will seem new to Wall St. analysts and newsies each time.
Channeling and paraphrasing the inimitable Lewis Black, "Green Jobs! Green Jobs! What can I say?!
USNG: 14TPU4605
... and capture CO2 with chemical scrubbers.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't pursue this technology, but it's likely to take as long to get this to production as it would to just switch to electric cars. I agree that it's still worthwhile to do for the other reasons you suggest, though.
The only reason secession was taken off the table at Hartford was the realization that even suggesting it would be considered treason at the time by the rest of the country and would likely provoke an armed response.
Their attempt to tone down their message opposing the existing government didn't stop many people in New England at the time from talking about secession, and didn't stop the rest of the country from believing that their goal. Hence, the political damage to the Federalists.
As for nullification - Calhoun wasn't the only one that believed in that, either. Jefferson and Madison were the original authors of the nullification theory. Hell, Andrew Jackson himself made a few noises regarding nullification in the 1800-10 period when he was a Tennessee state official. Later, when he was President, his mind changed. Fancy that.
The New England crowd were the ultimate winners in the battle to define the United States. It's no wonder that there isn't any secessionist feeling in that area. Now, contrast what happened to the South - is there any reason why you would expect such feelings to go away? They got beaten soundly and its become their origin myth - the Lost Cause. It'll persist forever at some level.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I don't think there's enough CO2 in air (a few hundred ppm) to make this practical. Using the waste gas stream from a coal fired plant (as suggested in TFA) would probably be a better option.
It would be tough to use a thorium reactor to power this. Per TFA, it's more than just getting the ceria to a certain temperature - you have to hit it with light that contains some substantial amount of UV (that's why they had to get to Switzerland - so they could use a solar simulator). I guess you could build a bunch of special light fixtures, and power them with electricity, but... that would likely be pretty expensive. You'd probably be better served to just run the thing during the daytime.
A high oxygen level would make it more feasible for land animals to once again become gigantic. I look forward (in a future incarnation), to hiding from a 50-foot-tall housecat.
It seems like sci-fi, but it's really just simple physics. (Although I don't know if the calculations work out). And it would probably happen a lot faster than millions of years.
I know my plan is to start a power station that uses poor children as fuel a la Jonathan Swift.
The only reason secession was taken off the table at Hartford was the realization that even suggesting it would be considered treason at the time by the rest of the country and would likely provoke an armed response.
But that's a fundamental difference between the secessionists of the South and the Hartford Convention: The South wanted to secede. The word "treason" used against them wasn't a deterrent. And as for armed conflict: The South fired the first shot. The Hartford Convention never had the support for secession. That's mostly a myth that was perpetuated by the South.
Their attempt to tone down their message opposing the existing government didn't stop many people in New England at the time from talking about secession, and didn't stop the rest of the country from believing that their goal. Hence, the political damage to the Federalists.
The Federalists were discredited because the Democratic-Republicans played up the Hartford Convention as if it was disloyal.
As for nullification - Calhoun wasn't the only one that believed in that, either. Jefferson and Madison were the original authors of the nullification theory. Hell, Andrew Jackson himself made a few noises regarding nullification in the 1800-10 period when he was a Tennessee state official. Later, when he was President, his mind changed. Fancy that.
What do Jefferson and Madison both have in common? They were both Virginians. Nullification suited them, because they were both concerned about the federal government superseding the interests of the different regions of the country. (IMHO, Jefferson is much more of a bastard than history gives him credit for. If it wasn't for the Declaration of Independence, I'd have no use at all for him.)
I actually don't know very much about Jackson, but I suspect that as a Southern politician, he had to tow that line while he was in Tennessee. Of course, you're right that when you're president, federal power looks a lot better to you. (That would include both Jefferson and Madison, by the way.)
The New England crowd were the ultimate winners in the battle to define the United States. It's no wonder that there isn't any secessionist feeling in that area. Now, contrast what happened to the South - is there any reason why you would expect such feelings to go away? They got beaten soundly and its become their origin myth - the Lost Cause. It'll persist forever at some level.
One might expect a sound thrashing to deaden a person's enthusiasm for rebellion and treason, I would think. Especially when the cause of the Civil War was the preservation of slavery. (There's a persistent myth that it was states' rights or tariffs, but if you want to know what it was really about, read the declarations of secession of the states in the Confederacy.)
I am an environmentalist, in that I think only people who are so stupid as to be bordering on sub human could possibly think that what we do to our environment doesn't effect us. I feel, and this is a moral point, that people who disregard the ill effects of their actions on the lives of others don't really deserve their own. It's only fair.
I also can't stand idiots who do stupid things like argue against dredging Port Phillip Bay (something I didn't support) to let large ships in but then go and say we can't build a major port at Hastings (which already has deep see access and is closer to our major industries). Because the mangroves their are not found anywhere else? They are found right the way around Western Port!! Idiots!
This is where you lost me. I'm assuming you think anyone who is anti nuclear is a loon.
For my country, I am anti-nuclear and anyone who is pro nuclear for my country is a loon. Current technology only allows for fission, which is a dirty and inefficient power source. I have read estimates that for us to switch from the brown coal we currently burn to modern fission, our total CO2 output will rise over the life of the plants. And there is still the waste problem to consider, it's still not resolved, and no we don't want to bury it inland here and have to get into our ground water thank you very much.
I live in a country with the highest levels of solar radiation on the planet that also has an enormous coastline. Parts of it sit in some very reliable low altitude wind currents. We have large reserves of natural gas. Those of us who think solar thermal, wind and tidal power supplemented by natural gas are the way to go are a hell of a lot more rational, from both an environmental and economic point of view.
I don't therefore I'm not.
. . . because CO is so much better for the environment, and we don't go to any special effort to get rid of it.
Wait, shit.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
There. Fixed that for you.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Sure, thorium's fun and all, but if you build a powerful enough solar furnace, surely that's all you really need. Why bother with building another completely different type of furnace to heat the thing at night when you need it to cool down at some point anyway? I hate obnoxious NIMBYism and eco-luddism almost as much as I hate over engineering for the sake of using a pet technology.
I don't therefore I'm not.
And why did they come to the US to invent things?
Your brain is not a computer.
i'd be interested in seeing those stats (as another Melbournite).
btw, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
i'm not saying go down the pressurized water reactor path (with it's associated "waste" problems), but i think that nuclear power presents far more possibilities than those that have been investigated, like the ability to get rid of all that nuclear waste by burning it for power (including the lighter fission products).
also, being of anglo-celtic descent, i am well aware of the solar radiation problem australia has. however, i'd also like to see figures relating to the amount of power current practical solar can get us, and the carbon cost of implementing all that.
i don't mind the wind farms.
usually what i (glibly) say to nuclear kneejerk types is "why not mine it? surely it's dangerous to have all that radioactive stuff just sitting underground in a world heritage area", but of course this is said in sarcasm.
though nuke may not be the most elegant solution, it is a realistic one at least in theory. the blind fear of it by the public and legislators i think is a major obstacle in lowering carbon emissions while maintaining industry and our own decadent lifestyles (come on, we don't really need tellies that big do we?).
aside - on the port at Hastings thing, i doubt anyone would notice :) it's a grey and smelly area in an oasis of lovely coastline. i'd say it's the perfect place to build a port, so long as the monash freeway doesn't get any more clogged than it is already.
During the night you are located in an area on the sphere that is earth where there is no shining happening, and 'night' describes not an universal span of time but rather a span of time tied to a location on the surface of the earth. The places where the Sun is shining are 'day' time and locations, the places where it isn't are defined as 'night'.
Indeed, during night the Sun does shine _somewhere_, but it does not shine 'at night'.
(Modified to include the concept of midnight sun, but that's just a special case)
- These characters were randomly selected.
The trouble with mining it is it disperses it. The tailings have to go somewhere, travelling dust. I get that what you're saying is tongue in cheek, but I personally feel that we (as humans) have gone as far down the fission path as is worth going for now.
Just like the way Americans adopted NTSC and had colour telly way before we adopted PAL, I think we're better off waiting for the superior tech. I agree nuclear power holds a lot of possibilities, but I lean towards fusion and I can't for the life of me figure out how burning the waste from a fission reactor would be a good idea.
I'll try to dig up the study I read, it was largely around the construction, transport and processing costs.
What I do know is that solar thermal power is way more efficient than anything that can be practically done on a large scale using current photovoltaic tech. It also offers much simpler short term (as in overnight) energy storage solutions.
We have so much land that has the sun beating down on it all year round that has been effected by salinity and over farming, why are we not putting that to use and stopping the brain drain of our solar experts moving to California and Europe? We also have the raw materials needed to build enough solar thermal that even running at 5% efficiency, we could power our own country for the next few centuries with no problem, and by then fusion may be more feasible.
Regarding Hastings, Kennet ripped all the rail infrastructure out of Post Melbourne then Bracks/Brumby went ahead with the dredging, so now larger ships carry more into a port where the only option to get freight to the South East is the Monash while the South East industry is growing and the traditional inner West is being converted to apartments and offices. Turning Western Port Highway into a Freeway, upgrading the Stony Point line and putting in a rail link from say Sommerville to Dandenong would definitely reduce traffic on the Monash. It would also make the coal exports from Victoria a lot simpler (and they will be happening for a while yet). Trouble is these things are guided by bureaucracy and self interest more than basic engineering.
I don't therefore I'm not.
cos they used to have the money for expensive long term research.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
... is that you're solving a problem that the Navy doesn't have. For one thing, there's no requirement to be able to recondition your CO2 scrubbers at sea. And the current system for generating O2 and removing CO2 (and other gases - the current system needs to and does remove other stuff) is perfectly serviceable. The only way this ceria based system is ever going to be in contention to replace electrolysis/scrubbing is if it could get the job done at a significantly lower cost - and given that you'd have to do a ton of R&D to get this thing into a deployable state, that seems pretty unlikely.
I'm not sure it is positive once you take into account the extra oil derivatives consumed by the extra transportation required.
Ya, as I said, "I think it has to do with the Earth rotating and stuff..." :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Thing I don't get is where does the Co2 come from? If the reactor some how captures it from ambient airflow over the device, then that's *amazing*. But if they actually have to *assume* a good flow of concentrated Co2 from somewhere, isn't that adding to the cost? Sucking Co2 out of the air would become a whole new industry, expensive enough in its own right! And if they are talking about using Co2 captured from some fossil fuel plant, then, ummm, isn't that defeating the whole point? It's still addicted to fossil fuels.
And there is still the waste problem to consider, it's still not resolved,
So, what do you do with all the coal ash yo are generating? If it came from a nuclear power plant, it would be considered radioactive enough to require special handling and storage. But since it comes from a coal plant, the radioactive ash is simply dumped somewhere and forgotten.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Where did I say burning coal is a good idea?
Congratulations! You carefully selected a sentence that out of context misrepresents the argument it was taken from and made a rhetorical attack on it! A most commendable display of wilful ignorance! Bravo sir!
You might want to have a good hard look at yourself to figure out if you are pro-nuke purely because you think everyone who is anti-nuke is a hippy and you don't like hippies. If you find that to be the case, consider that by adopting that attitude, you are as bad as the knee jerk anti-nuke hippy types. Although based on your debating style, I don't actually have a lot of faith in your capacity for rational thought, so the result of any self assessment is probably a forgone conclusion.
Good luck
I don't therefore I'm not.
You just want to criticize southerners.
I come to this conclusion because you fail to recognize the big difference between the 1814 Hartford plotters and the 1861 secessionists in the South. The difference was that the 1814 crew got what they wanted: an end to the war, before they even stopped meeting. Instead, the 1861 crew got nothing: not even the Crittenden Compromise, which would have been small stakes to trade for 618k lives and untold economic destruction. As you note, we're still paying the price for this through Southern nostalgia for antebellum times as well as the actual fighting of the war.
Yes, the Civil War was about slavery. It was about the successful attempt of the abolitionist minority in the North to dictate public policy in the short term. They were responsible for the war far more than the secessionists of the South. First, a series of provocations (think John Brown, though that was hardly the only incident - repeated attempted nullifications of the Fugitive Slave Law were also provocations*), unwillingness to compromise and then a failure to evacuate Moultrie and Sumter on territory that Lincoln knew was considered South Carolinian sovereign territory. He knew what he'd get, and he got it.
How close he came to failure in both 1862 and 1864 is the really interesting part. Through little direct action of his own, he was saved nonetheless - perhaps this was what Washington called "Providence" in similar circumstances a century before. Postwar, the elimination of representative government in large swathes of the country and a lengthy military occupation essentially provided the wherewithal to pass the 13th-15th amendments. Oh yeah, let's not forget the requirement to ratify the amendments as a condition of states being readmitted to the Union. Can you say extortion? Then, a failure of will in the North resulted in the abrupt end of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, which was probably worse than slavery itself had been, particularly at the nadir in Wilson's administration.
* These state nullifications of the Federal Fugitive Slave law put the lie to the whole "only the South believed in states' rights" canard you were repeating a few posts ago.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You just want to criticize southerners.
Not all Southerners, no. Just Lost Cause Southerners, really. The kind of people who fly the Confederate flag and want to celebrate secession (as South Carolina is doing). My original post was simply pointing out that there are still Southerners that pine for the Confederacy and secession (although not necessarily together), so using the South as an example of the pinnacle of patriotism might be a wee bit misplaced.
I come to this conclusion because you fail to recognize the big difference between the 1814 Hartford plotters and the 1861 secessionists in the South. The difference was that the 1814 crew got what they wanted: an end to the war, before they even stopped meeting. Instead, the 1861 crew got nothing: not even the Crittenden Compromise, which would have been small stakes to trade for 618k lives and untold economic destruction. As you note, we're still paying the price for this through Southern nostalgia for antebellum times as well as the actual fighting of the war.
The Hartford Convention got an end to the war, not because of anything they did, but because of events on the ground. And if you look at the Hartford Convention's report, they got nothing they asked for in the report.
The "small stakes" you talk about in the Crittenden Compromise basically amounted to everything the South was asking for: A permanent recognition of slavery in the South and enforcement of the fugitive slave laws in the North. The amount of human suffering that would've been brought by this compromise (remember: the permanent recognition of the South to have slavery) would've been staggering.