I don't think we are *anywhere* close to peak nuclear.
The Candu reactor NOW can use thorium as part of it's fuel load. It can burn unenriched uranium. It can also use spent fuel from light water reactors. And in doing so can remove 60% of the actinide series hot elements.
As others have pointed out, the current price of U is a tiny part of the cost of nuclear power. As the price goes up, it gets economical to go after less rich ore.
My dad worried about peak oil, and peak coal in the 30's. It's almost a century later. Simple crude may be peaking. We have more carbon in tarsand in Alberta than there is oil in the rest of the world. I thought natural gas was past peak, and bought a high efficiency boiler for my house. New discoveries have caused the price of gas to plummet.
I will consider peak nuclear when I see the level of searching for it approach the level for the search for oil. Right now I don't see anything like that level of activity.
We MAY be faced with a production shortfall if we build a bunch of light water enriched fuel reactors.
You have presented a far more insightful answer. My comment was intended to be glib rebuttal to a comment that implied that it was a quick easy fix.
Soot: Course particulates wash out fairly fast. Fine particulates in the upper atmosphere act to cool the surface. Fine particulates near the surface. Don't know. The latest plant at Genesee (my neighbor) has no visible plume at all. They really are quite good at cleaning up their emissions.
C02: I think the IR that can be blocked by CO2 is mostly blocked now. I suspect that further CO2 releases will have an increasingly marginal effect. Still some. Beyond my knowledge to calculate.
Thermal: Overall a 1 GW solar photoelectic plant will be a worse thermal source than at 1 GW coal plant -- at the location. The solar plant will locally put in about 9 GW of thermal (figureing 10% efficient cells) The Coal plant about 2 GW thermal (figuring 33% thermal efficiency) If you take into account the light that would be absorbed anyway by the land the solar plant is on, that 9 GW is much smaller. Comes out to pretty much of a wash either way. But the coal plant is adding energy that hasn't been seen for a long time.
This post shows that the issue is complicated. All the posential solutions have difficulties. At present my take on the potential answers:
1. If we are going to burn coal, burn it in solid carbon fuel cells. This has the advantage of much greater efficiencies, and the CO2 is already separated for sequesterization. This technology is still experimental.
2. If we are going to do solar, solar thermal shows more promise, with the potential to store enough heat for night time operations. Photo solar has promise for off grid use, but currently, battery technology is a sticking point. (The thought of recycling a household's worth of lead acid batteries every three years for every household is daunting.) Both technologies require specific climates to be efficient. (But see Germany. If ever there was a place where solor shouldn't work...)
3. Wind for suitable sites mixes better with agricultural, pastoral, and recreational use than does solar. Of the completely renewable sources, I think it is cheaper per generated watt hour.
4. High altitude wind power is an interesting concept that avoids most of the intermittency problems.
5. If EEStor's batacitor is real and comes to market it will change the entire picture, both for stationary and mobile energy use.
6. Nuclear may be part of the solution. Frankly I would prefer to have a nuclear reactor as a neighbor than the 2.5 GW coal-thermal plant that I have now. (And I mean neighbor-- Its mine starts 1 mile from my house.)
But the earth has an average albedo of around, what, 0.3? So a black solar collector will warm the planet compared to a patch of typical land.
In fact I doubt we can cover enough of the planet to make a difference that way globally. But a sufficiently large solar power array may make a hot spot, creating a large thermal air upwelling, and have a constant cloud perched at the top of it.
During WWII much of the uranium for the Manhattan Project came from Unranium City's Eldorado mine. It ran 0.25% Uranium. Currently the biggest producer in Saskatchewan is the Rabbit Lake mine -- they are working with an ore body that runs 30% U. Yup. 120 times as rich.
Even at $200 per pound the cost of U for reactors is small.
Given the difficulty of travel on the Canadian Shield, and similar land in what was the USSR, I suspect that there are very large quantities of U remaining to be discovered.
As to the threat of breeder reactor plutonium proliferation:
1. Reactor materials need to be a few percent to be useable for power generation. Weapons have to close to 100%.
2. Plutonium is difficult to work with. Even ignoring it's radioactivity, it's poisonous, has chemistry similar enough to other materials that getting it pure is hard, is flamable, is difficult to machine, has a bunch of different crystalline states over the span of working and storage temperatures.
The Bighorn dam on the North Saskatchewan river is used for peaking power this way. 90+% of the water is let through the turbines between 5 and 7 p.m. Most of it is let in 20-60 second bursts. They go from zero load to nearly max (10 MW) in a couple seconds, while the coal plants pick up the load. Then back down to zero. While 10 MW is peanuts, using it to shave peak demand means the boilers at the coal plants can be run closer to optimum efficiency.
I agree with you with regard to solar power. I live near Edmonton, only Latitude 54. Even here solar is a poor option, as our greatest need is at the time of minimum sun.
House scale wind is a bad bet at the best of times. The energy gradient with height makes it silly to build at this scale. Larger towers in our parks and school yards are a better bet locally, but given the large variability in wind and terrain, wind farms are even more practical.
Wind farms are practical given correct siting. Southern Alberta has several now, and is looking to expand -- currently limited by our transmission line capacity.
As to the impact of pulling all our energy from wind: The net effect of wind in general is to move excess heat from the equator to the pole. Slowing this down, creates a larger delta T. My bet is that even if we powered the planet with wind energy, giving every person on the planet the amount of energy a north american uses, that the change in delta T would be buried in the measurement uncertainty.
Has anyone demonstrated even a local climatological effect from a wind farm?
High altitude wind turbines may become practical, and can provide power with only seasonal variation instead of hourly variation.
Certainly the environmental impact of large areas of solar cells is something to be considered. Usually however in the setups I've seen, less than 50% of the land can be actually be used. The net effect is to create a patchwork. Since there are many plants that grow in partial shade, I don't see this as insurmountable. It will change the environment. Not certain if the change will be bad or good.
A lot of the area that best suited for solar power is land that is not productive in the biological sense -- the number of grams of carbon fixed per square meter per year is small. The patchwork shade may actually increase both productivity and diversity.
A large enough area covered even 50% with solar cells will change the local albedo. The area will get hotter, and create it's own wind.
However even in our climate a south facing window is a net heat gain over the heating season. As I write the temp has been going between -7 at night to +7 in the day. We heat two bathrooms that are on the north side of the house. We run a fire in the living room for about 3 hours in the evening. The rest of the heating is waste heat from living and passive solar.
In much of the north, the most economical energy action we can undertake is to re-insulate our houses. Take off the siding, add 4" or 6" of breathable styrofoam, put the siding back on. I live with 10,000 (F) degree heating days. If you are at 60 degrees, you have an even colder climate, unless you are on the Left Coast.
Working on a neighborhood scale instead of a individual house scale, solar ponds may be viable. I haven't crunched the numbers accurately, but to first order, a volume of water the same volume as the house heated to 180F will heat it for the year. This assumes an effective house envelope of R4 including windows and air leakage, a floor plan in the proportions of the golden rectangle, two floors, and a heating season of 250,000 degree hours. It ignores solar gain by the house. It ignores loses moving heat from the store to the house.
I've read of a shop in Montana that is mostly solar heated even at -20F. Home made system. 2x4 air space on the south wall. When the temp at the top of the airspace is warmer than the shop, a furnace fan exchanges air between the air space and the shop. This makes for a workable environment from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, longer hours in fall and spring.
This idea is not as viable here. Montana is as cold as my part of Alberta, but even in mid winter they get substantially more sun than we do. Here it is necessary to either have supplemental heat mid-winter or to figure out a way to store heat on an annual basis.
In remote locations wind power may have a very good return. A friend in a small northern community said that he paid 25 cents / kwhr. That was when
At present a greenhouse on a sunny day needs an air exchange every 90 seconds. I have a home made rather leaky 8x8 foot (2.4 x 2.4 m for the imperially challenged) greenhouse. With the doors and windows closed it regularly gets 20 C (36 F for the metrically impaired) warmer than outside. This despite having 200 gallons of water in pails.
Vermont winters can be daunting, and keeping the place 20 or 30 degrees warmer may be looked on with some favour. A similarly raised Vermont summer would make Mississippi seem cool and refreshing.
Now one of the advantages of taller greenhouses is that convection is more effective at venting them. Perhaps a suitable controlled iris at the dome peak will be sufficient.
Of course if you have enough venting to keep from cooking people, keeping it inflated may be a challenge.
You also will have a temperature differential across that membrane. 20-40 degrees worth. This will result in constant condensation on the inside of the surface, which will slide sideways to find some irregularity and drip off. This is a problem in greenhouses. It results in some poor plant getting 5-6 times as much water as it's neighbors. I've seen it erode a 2" deep hole in potting soil. And that's from only 3 feet up. Nice fat drips from 500 feet up. New form of Chinese Water Torture.
Let the surface of the dome get too cold, and snow may not melt off the top. Now it's really dark inside.
In winter you may get frost forming on the either the membrane or the support system. Now you have the potential of sheets of ice falling from the roof.
Of course one of the options is to make the dome covering partially silvered. The human eye is logrithmic in it's sensitivity to light. You could block 95% of the sunlight and still have a brightly lit town. Plants would not be happy.
Such a dome probably wouldn't get cold enough for temperate trees to change colour in the fall, nor would they get cold enough to fulfill the chilling requirement for the buds to open. (Sugar Maple require 1000 hours of temperatures below -35 F to break bud the next spring. Other trees have more complicated timing. Evolved to meet the problems of January thaws, and late spring freezes.)
NASA has 'weather' in the vehicular assembly building. And it isn't even transparent.
Were I evil emperor in this Vermont town, I'd start smaller. Park. Golf course. School yard. Shopping mall.
For 8 years I had windows clients and FreeBSD servers.
Most of the clients were re-imaged nightly with a complicated script that set $COMPUTERNAME to be equal to the name returned by reverse lookup of their IP address which was set by dhcp.
I understood the argument against identical SIDs to be that SIDs were used to create the individual user accounts, and that duplicated SIDs meant that users on two machines could have the same UID, which meant that user A on machine 1 could pretend to be user B on machine 2.
In my case the only IDs on local machines were system IDs. All user IDs were at the domain level.
So I didn't worry about SIDs. As far as I know this never came back to bite me.
I'll admit there was a large amount of furious hand waving. Key idea is that the land pool is large compared to the air pool.
The key concept: The atmospheric pool is small compared to other pools. By slight shifts of the equilibrium constants between pools, we can set the level in the atmosphere.
Carbon pooling doesn't necessarily depend on arable land mass.
No one considers the northern boreal forest to be arable. But it is a large carbon pool. Not clear how to make it larger.
Peat bogs are a net carbon sink. As the arctic warms, lots of peat bogs will have much longer growing seasons. Of course thawing permafrost will make a mess.
Incorporating charcoal into soil (terra preta) has enormous potential as a carbon sink -- (Yes, arable land is a small fraction, but I understand that existing terra preta soils are many feet thick, and comprise up to 15% carbon.) By itself, not a complete answer. But an effective step.
The key concept: The atmospheric pool is small compared to other pools. By slight shifts of the equibrium constants between pools, we can set the level in the atmosphere.
Even the exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean is controversial. I've read of time constants as low as 55 years and as high as 12,000 years. What's the mixing depth? What is the deep ocean exchange rate. Buffering capacity.
Carbon fraction of most top soils is only a few percent. That of subsoils are even less. The terra preta soils are an exception to this.
Consider: A square foot of land has about a ton of air sitting on it. (15 psi * 144) 350 ppm is CO2.
That turns into.75 lbs of CO2. The mass fraction of C is 12/44. Gives you 0.2 lbs of C per square foot.
Typical top soils are a few inches to a foot. Soil runs about twice the density of water -- call it 120 lb/cubic foot. So if we had a foot of top soil, with 5% organic matter in it, it would amount to 6 lbs of organic matter. Assume that most of that is in the form of carbohydrates -- cellulose. Mass fraction of C in cellulose is 12/30. So a bit over two pounds of Carbon per square foot in the soil.
Even if soil carbon is continuously converted back to CO2 in the atmosphere, the soil carbon pool is several times larger than the atmospheric pool. Changing our land usage to increase the size of this pool can have an effect on the atmosphere.
Was that a mis-print 4000 tons of diesel for 3900 hectares?
Let's see:
My Deutz has a 20 gallon tank. Working hard, I can use that tank in a day. Call it 2.5 gallons per hour. If it was water, that would be 20 lbs.
Ploughing with a 3 bottom plough does a strip about 4 feet wide. Moves about 2 mph so that's 12 square feet per second. That's about 43,000 square feet per hour or just under an acre. 2.5 acres per hectare. So it would be about 50 lbs of fuel per hectare.
The fertilizer numbers are about right. 100 lbs of fertilizer per acre works out to 500 tons for 4000 hectares.
Keep in mind that 3900 hectares is 15 square miles. Not your average homestead.
Lots of people try and discard computer systems quickly.
But: How long did it take to learn the interface for your pencil? If you're a clutz, like me, it took 3-4 years of grade school to get bad at it.
I remember spending 20 minutes every day doing exercises in palmer method penmanship for grades 5-8. Only thing that did was give me a cursive Q that no one else recognizes.
Typing class in high school was an hour a day for a semester. At the end of that I could type faster than I could write, but I can't type as fast as most people talk.
When I'm writing, my head gets ahead of my fingers, and sentences get left incomplete, paragraphs run together. It's better with typing, worse with writing.
When doing math, most of my mistakes happen when my head gets too far ahead of my pencil -- the pencil is busy doing the recopy bits from the previous equation, and I drop bits.
An equation entry system that was more or less wysiwyg on the screen, but as fast or faster to enter than pencil would be a boon to teaching mathematics. It would be well worth investing 50-100 hours of high school class time to learn.
THEN computers could highlight errors as you type.
NO one has a computer aided instruction program for math where all the steps are done on the computer screen, and the computer verifies that the steps are correct.
Many highschool teachers lit and social teachers require that homework, particularly essays, be typed. No one requires typed math homework.
I started as a school teacher. Got burned out after a decade.
Went to work as a lab tech at the University physics dept, just in time to be there for the transition of vax + dos running terminal programs to unix boxen.
Did that for 15 years.
Now I'm a tree farmer.
That doesn't make me a living yet, but this year we sold about $20K worth of trees with operating expenses about half that.
In winter I do some web work and freelance photoshop.
My wife supports me -- she's a freelance editor. The house is paid for. The truck is paid for. The car is paid for next spring. We have no debt on the tree farm. (One of the things we agreed to when I started it.)
We're not hurtin' but we aren't maxing out our RRSP's either. It will be a few years yet before we do the kitchen reno. I'll probably do the bathroom reno after Christmas. Did the bedroom and converted a half bath to full bath last year.
So: My advice to you:
* Figure out what your new income is going to be. * Set up an automatic withdrawal on your bank account to transfer to savings enough money to make your present IT salary the same as your projected salary. * Live on this for 6 months. Meanwhile this builds up a cushion account, which if you are like me is a huge stress reliever.
If you are going to need retraining for your new career: Ask your boss if you can go part time. If you are a 24/7 business they may be quite happy to allow this especially if you are willing to take the crap shifts that most people don't want. They also may give you your walking papers the same day, so don't do this until a month before your training starts.
I won't buy new windows. The ROI is way too long. My present windows are R2. At a heating season of 250,000 degree heating hours per year, and R2 window loses me about 125,000 BTU/square foot/year. It also gains me about 100,000 btu/year if it faces south. But ignore that. 125,000 btu is 1/8 of a gigajoule -- about $5 delivered via the natural gas line. Three years losses of a 20 square foot window are $300. I just replace such a window. (grouse flew through it) Cost me $1200. For an R2 window, no better than what the grouse smashed. R8 windows are possible, but at 3 times the price, and not clear that htey will last for 30 years -- which is the simple payback time. And at 30 years, lost opportunity costs are no longer insignificant.
Based on this, I would be willing to pay more than my original $50. But remember that I have to buy the blinds, curtains, or panels too.
In general I won't invest in an action to save money unless it has a simple payback (ignoring lost opportunity costs, ignoring the value of my time) of under 3 years.
If something is a matter of convenience, then it has to compete for funding with beer and paperback novels.
Window blind openers are a convenience.
Net effect: I won't be an early adopter.
However if peripheral readers (temp, humidity, illumination etc.) and their communication to the master controler get cheap, AND the effectors (turn lights on/off, power step motor 300 steps THAT way) get reasonable AND they can communicate through wi-fi or it's equivalent, then there are lots of things to do.
If there are lots of things to do, then there is a large market, and the price gets cheap.
Much like computers. Few people want a DEC PDP-11 taking up a room in their house. But we now have 4 computers at home, not counting the embedded ones.
And, of course the answer is right now, is that it's not worth that much. Greenhouse control systems costs thousands.
Most of these things that I want don't need full automation but rather just need local dumb feedback controls. Full automation centralizes the control.
However a lot of this stuff is just plain hard to find.
Home hardware carries a bazillion brands of thermostats, but if you ask for a differential thermostat you get blank looks.
I'd do my window curtain thing, if I could find a way to do it for say, $50 per window plus the curtains, and keep it unugly enough to keep my wife happy.
Thermisters are dirt cheap. A simple circuit, a relay, a geared down reversible motor. In bulk such a system should cost under $10 to make.
(And before someone cracks, "If it's so easy, why don't you do it!"
* Having a clue as to the state of the art, and having intimate knowledge of how to apply it aren't the same.
* I grow trees. I don't design electronics.
* I don't want to manage any more than I do now. There is enough management involved in a tree farm, let alone a startup company.
For me the large obstacle is the cost of the peripheral stuff.
What would I use it for:
1. Solar hot water panel control. When the water in the top of the collector is warmer than the water in the storage tank, turn on the pump. If the water temp is less than 4 degrees C, drain the system.
2. Solar/+storage. The above, but if the storage tank is above 50C, and the outside temp is above 20C then divert surplus hot water to deep burried crawlspace heating pipe. If outside temp is below 20C divert to shallow buried crawlspace heating pipe.
4. If water level in the sump is mroe than 2 inches abvoe the normal turn on point, raise hell.
5. I have to blow snow tommorow. At midnight turn on the plug that the tractor is plugged into, so it has a chance of starting in the morning.
6. Someone has driven through the gate to the tree yard. Wait. Oh, they went on to the gas well lease. Ignore it.
7. Someone has driven through the gate to the tree yard. They didn't go to the gas lease. Send me a message.
8. Green house temp is above 30. Spray mist between the two poly layers. Collect hot water in stratified storage tank.
9. Green house temp is above 33 degrees, open vents, start fans.
10. Green house temp is above 35 degrees. Send me a message. 12 Greenhouse temp is below 4 degrees. Raise hell. 11. Green house temp is below X and time of day is Y. Circulate hot water from storage tank through heater coils. 13. Greenhouse temp is below 4 degrees. Raise hell.
14. It's after sunset and the outside temp is below 10 C. Close the curtains.
15. It daytime, and the outside temp is -20C. Open curtains only if the light intensity is greater than XX
AND I want to do this and not have to run huge amounts of wire.
And I want devices to tell me that they will need a new battery soon, or that they are off line. (Ok the system has to tell me that.)
I heard, but have not confirmed, that under US copyright law if a publisher gets a request for an out of print book, they must deliver the book within a year, or they can lose publication rights to the book. You can pick up publication rights, subject to the original royalty paid to the copyright owner.
Anyone know if this is true?
Could google send out a million letters, and take over publication rights to a million out of print books?
Does an ebook constitute a 'publication' for the purpose of this law?
I too have ideas for better mousetraps. However I don't have the resources nor the desire to start a company.
My vision of invention heaven would be if there were companies that would take a well described idea, patent it, and market it, taking the bulk of the profit for themselves. To me having 5% of a large pie is better than having the entirety of a mini-tart.
If this is really a concern for teaching, then perhaps the problem should be scaled down virtually:
Suppose that you implement virtual i386's with 4 MB ram and a 40 MB hard drive. Write a special driver for it to add a 80 ms delay for each disk access. Now instantiate 1000 copies of this VM on a machine or small cluster. This effectively turns a 3 GHz machine into a 3 MHz machine (Actually slower because of VM host overhead)
Each machine above is 1/1000 of a real machine. Now instead of needing a 10 PB data source you can get by with 10 TB. Class sets of 10 TB arrays is not unreasonable.
The data set is large compared to the resources of an individual VM. It's still large compared to the entire array of machines. (Data set is 2500 times the size of the entire VM array)
While learning this, students would start with a single VM and a smaller data set, and as the class progresses, they would get 2, 4, 8, 16... VMs and apply various algorithms for inter-machine communication.
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I don't think we are *anywhere* close to peak nuclear.
The Candu reactor NOW can use thorium as part of it's fuel load. It can burn unenriched uranium. It can also use spent fuel from light water reactors. And in doing so can remove 60% of the actinide series hot elements.
As others have pointed out, the current price of U is a tiny part of the cost of nuclear power. As the price goes up, it gets economical to go after less rich ore.
My dad worried about peak oil, and peak coal in the 30's. It's almost a century later. Simple crude may be peaking. We have more carbon in tarsand in Alberta than there is oil in the rest of the world. I thought natural gas was past peak, and bought a high efficiency boiler for my house. New discoveries have caused the price of gas to plummet.
I will consider peak nuclear when I see the level of searching for it approach the level for the search for oil. Right now I don't see anything like that level of activity.
We MAY be faced with a production shortfall if we build a bunch of light water enriched fuel reactors.
You have presented a far more insightful answer. My comment was intended to be glib rebuttal to a comment that implied that it was a quick easy fix.
Soot: Course particulates wash out fairly fast. Fine particulates in the upper atmosphere act to cool the surface. Fine particulates near the surface. Don't know. The latest plant at Genesee (my neighbor) has no visible plume at all. They really are quite good at cleaning up their emissions.
C02: I think the IR that can be blocked by CO2 is mostly blocked now. I suspect that further CO2 releases will have an increasingly marginal effect. Still some. Beyond my knowledge to calculate.
Thermal: Overall a 1 GW solar photoelectic plant will be a worse thermal source than at 1 GW coal plant -- at the location. The solar plant will locally put in about 9 GW of thermal (figureing 10% efficient cells) The Coal plant about 2 GW thermal (figuring 33% thermal efficiency) If you take into account the light that would be absorbed anyway by the land the solar plant is on, that 9 GW is much smaller. Comes out to pretty much of a wash either way. But the coal plant is adding energy that hasn't been seen for a long time.
This post shows that the issue is complicated. All the posential solutions have difficulties. At present my take on the potential answers:
1. If we are going to burn coal, burn it in solid carbon fuel cells. This has the advantage of much greater efficiencies, and the CO2 is already separated for sequesterization. This technology is still experimental.
2. If we are going to do solar, solar thermal shows more promise, with the potential to store enough heat for night time operations. Photo solar has promise for off grid use, but currently, battery technology is a sticking point. (The thought of recycling a household's worth of lead acid batteries every three years for every household is daunting.)
Both technologies require specific climates to be efficient. (But see Germany. If ever there was a place where solor shouldn't work...)
3. Wind for suitable sites mixes better with agricultural, pastoral, and recreational use than does solar. Of the completely renewable sources, I think it is cheaper per generated watt hour.
4. High altitude wind power is an interesting concept that avoids most of the intermittency problems.
5. If EEStor's batacitor is real and comes to market it will change the entire picture, both for stationary and mobile energy use.
6. Nuclear may be part of the solution. Frankly I would prefer to have a nuclear reactor as a neighbor than the 2.5 GW coal-thermal plant that I have now. (And I mean neighbor-- Its mine starts 1 mile from my house.)
But the earth has an average albedo of around, what, 0.3?
So a black solar collector will warm the planet compared to a patch of typical land.
In fact I doubt we can cover enough of the planet to make a difference that way globally. But a sufficiently large solar power array may make a hot spot, creating a large thermal air upwelling, and have a constant cloud perched at the top of it.
During WWII much of the uranium for the Manhattan Project came from Unranium City's Eldorado mine. It ran 0.25% Uranium. Currently the biggest producer in Saskatchewan is the Rabbit Lake mine -- they are working with an ore body that runs 30% U. Yup. 120 times as rich.
Even at $200 per pound the cost of U for reactors is small.
Given the difficulty of travel on the Canadian Shield, and similar land in what was the USSR, I suspect that there are very large quantities of U remaining to be discovered.
As to the threat of breeder reactor plutonium proliferation:
1. Reactor materials need to be a few percent to be useable for power generation. Weapons have to close to 100%.
2. Plutonium is difficult to work with. Even ignoring it's radioactivity, it's poisonous, has chemistry similar enough to other materials that getting it pure is hard, is flamable, is difficult to machine, has a bunch of different crystalline states over the span of working and storage temperatures.
The Bighorn dam on the North Saskatchewan river is used for peaking power this way. 90+% of the water is let through the turbines between 5 and 7 p.m. Most of it is let in 20-60 second bursts. They go from zero load to nearly max (10 MW) in a couple seconds, while the coal plants pick up the load. Then back down to zero. While 10 MW is peanuts, using it to shave peak demand means the boilers at the coal plants can be run closer to optimum efficiency.
I agree with you with regard to solar power. I live near Edmonton, only Latitude 54. Even here solar is a poor option, as our greatest need is at the time of minimum sun.
House scale wind is a bad bet at the best of times. The energy gradient with height makes it silly to build at this scale. Larger towers in our parks and school yards are a better bet locally, but given the large variability in wind and terrain, wind farms are even more practical.
Wind farms are practical given correct siting. Southern Alberta has several now, and is looking to expand -- currently limited by our transmission line capacity.
As to the impact of pulling all our energy from wind: The net effect of wind in general is to move excess heat from the equator to the pole. Slowing this down, creates a larger delta T. My bet is that even if we powered the planet with wind energy, giving every person on the planet the amount of energy a north american uses, that the change in delta T would be buried in the measurement uncertainty.
Has anyone demonstrated even a local climatological effect from a wind farm?
High altitude wind turbines may become practical, and can provide power with only seasonal variation instead of hourly variation.
Certainly the environmental impact of large areas of solar cells is something to be considered. Usually however in the setups I've seen, less than 50% of the land can be actually be used. The net effect is to create a patchwork. Since there are many plants that grow in partial shade, I don't see this as insurmountable. It will change the environment. Not certain if the change will be bad or good.
A lot of the area that best suited for solar power is land that is not productive in the biological sense -- the number of grams of carbon fixed per square meter per year is small. The patchwork shade may actually increase both productivity and diversity.
A large enough area covered even 50% with solar cells will change the local albedo. The area will get hotter, and create it's own wind.
However even in our climate a south facing window is a net heat gain over the heating season. As I write the temp has been going between -7 at night to +7 in the day. We heat two bathrooms that are on the north side of the house. We run a fire in the living room for about 3 hours in the evening. The rest of the heating is waste heat from living and passive solar.
In much of the north, the most economical energy action we can undertake is to re-insulate our houses. Take off the siding, add 4" or 6" of breathable styrofoam, put the siding back on. I live with 10,000 (F) degree heating days. If you are at 60 degrees, you have an even colder climate, unless you are on the Left Coast.
Working on a neighborhood scale instead of a individual house scale, solar ponds may be viable. I haven't crunched the numbers accurately, but to first order, a volume of water the same volume as the house heated to 180F will heat it for the year. This assumes an effective house envelope of R4 including windows and air leakage, a floor plan in the proportions of the golden rectangle, two floors, and a heating season of 250,000 degree hours. It ignores solar gain by the house. It ignores loses moving heat from the store to the house.
I've read of a shop in Montana that is mostly solar heated even at -20F. Home made system. 2x4 air space on the south wall. When the temp at the top of the airspace is warmer than the shop, a furnace fan exchanges air between the air space and the shop. This makes for a workable environment from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, longer hours in fall and spring.
This idea is not as viable here. Montana is as cold as my part of Alberta, but even in mid winter they get substantially more sun than we do. Here it is necessary to either have supplemental heat mid-winter or to figure out a way to store heat on an annual basis.
In remote locations wind power may have a very good return. A friend in a small northern community said that he paid 25 cents / kwhr. That was when
At present a greenhouse on a sunny day needs an air exchange every 90 seconds. I have a home made rather leaky 8x8 foot (2.4 x 2.4 m for the imperially challenged) greenhouse. With the doors and windows closed it regularly gets 20 C (36 F for the metrically impaired) warmer than outside. This despite having 200 gallons of water in pails.
Vermont winters can be daunting, and keeping the place 20 or 30 degrees warmer may be looked on with some favour. A similarly raised Vermont summer would make Mississippi seem cool and refreshing.
Now one of the advantages of taller greenhouses is that convection is more effective at venting them. Perhaps a suitable controlled iris at the dome peak will be sufficient.
Of course if you have enough venting to keep from cooking people, keeping it inflated may be a challenge.
You also will have a temperature differential across that membrane. 20-40 degrees worth. This will result in constant condensation on the inside of the surface, which will slide sideways to find some irregularity and drip off. This is a problem in greenhouses. It results in some poor plant getting 5-6 times as much water as it's neighbors. I've seen it erode a 2" deep hole in potting soil. And that's from only 3 feet up. Nice fat drips from 500 feet up. New form of Chinese Water Torture.
Let the surface of the dome get too cold, and snow may not melt off the top. Now it's really dark inside.
In winter you may get frost forming on the either the membrane or the support system. Now you have the potential of sheets of ice falling from the roof.
Of course one of the options is to make the dome covering partially silvered. The human eye is logrithmic in it's sensitivity to light. You could block 95% of the sunlight and still have a brightly lit town. Plants would not be
happy.
Such a dome probably wouldn't get cold enough for temperate trees to change colour in the fall, nor would they get cold
enough to fulfill the chilling requirement for the buds to open. (Sugar Maple require 1000 hours of temperatures below -35 F to break bud the next spring. Other trees have more complicated timing. Evolved to meet the problems of January thaws, and late spring freezes.)
NASA has 'weather' in the vehicular assembly building. And it isn't even transparent.
Were I evil emperor in this Vermont town, I'd start smaller. Park. Golf course. School yard. Shopping mall.
The idea of burning the label into the skin brings a whole new meaning to 'branding' and 'brand power'
Endless confusion on Madison Avenue
For 8 years I had windows clients and FreeBSD servers.
Most of the clients were re-imaged nightly with a complicated
script that set $COMPUTERNAME to be equal to the name returned by reverse lookup of their IP address which was set by dhcp.
I understood the argument against identical SIDs to be that SIDs were used to create the individual user accounts, and that duplicated SIDs meant that users on two machines could have the same UID, which meant that user A on machine 1 could pretend to be user B on machine 2.
In my case the only IDs on local machines were system IDs. All user IDs were at the domain level.
So I didn't worry about SIDs. As far as I know this never came back to bite me.
I'll admit there was a large amount of furious hand waving.
Key idea is that the land pool is large compared to the air pool.
The key concept: The atmospheric pool is small compared to
other pools. By slight shifts of the equilibrium constants
between pools, we can set the level in the atmosphere.
Carbon pooling doesn't necessarily depend on arable
land mass.
No one considers the northern boreal forest to be arable. But it is a large carbon pool. Not clear how to make it larger.
Peat bogs are a net carbon sink. As the arctic warms, lots
of peat bogs will have much longer growing seasons. Of
course thawing permafrost will make a mess.
Incorporating charcoal into soil (terra preta) has enormous
potential as a carbon sink -- (Yes, arable land is a small fraction, but I understand that existing terra preta soils
are many feet thick, and comprise up to 15% carbon.) By itself, not a complete answer. But an effective step.
The key concept: The atmospheric pool is small compared to
other pools. By slight shifts of the equibrium constants
between pools, we can set the level in the atmosphere.
Even the exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean is
controversial. I've read of time constants as low as 55 years and as high as 12,000 years. What's the mixing depth?
What is the deep ocean exchange rate. Buffering capacity.
Carbon fraction of most top soils is only a few percent.
That of subsoils are even less. The terra preta soils are an exception to this.
Consider: A square foot of land has about a ton of air sitting on it. (15 psi * 144) 350 ppm is CO2.
That turns into .75 lbs of CO2. The mass fraction of C is 12/44. Gives you 0.2 lbs of C per square foot.
Typical top soils are a few inches to a foot. Soil runs
about twice the density of water -- call it 120 lb/cubic
foot. So if we had a foot of top soil, with 5% organic
matter in it, it would amount to 6 lbs of organic matter.
Assume that most of that is in the form of carbohydrates --
cellulose. Mass fraction of C in cellulose is 12/30.
So a bit over two pounds of Carbon per square foot in
the soil.
Even if soil carbon is continuously converted back to CO2 in the atmosphere, the soil carbon pool is several times larger than the atmospheric pool. Changing our land usage to increase the size of this pool can have an effect on the atmosphere.
Was that a mis-print 4000 tons of diesel for 3900 hectares?
Let's see:
My Deutz has a 20 gallon tank. Working hard, I can use
that tank in a day. Call it 2.5 gallons per hour.
If it was water, that would be 20 lbs.
Ploughing with a 3 bottom plough does a strip about 4 feet
wide. Moves about 2 mph so that's 12 square feet per second.
That's about 43,000 square feet per hour or just under an acre. 2.5 acres per hectare. So it would be about 50 lbs
of fuel per hectare.
The fertilizer numbers are about right. 100 lbs of fertilizer
per acre works out to 500 tons for 4000 hectares.
Keep in mind that 3900 hectares is 15 square miles. Not
your average homestead.
Diesels run with a very high compression ratio so they produce relatively larger amounts of NOx NOx is nitrogen
that plants can use.
Unburned oil seems to be a fertilizer. Small oil spills
are lush and green the next summer.
Large amounts of CO2 may make the water in the soil acidic enough to release phosphorus and micro nutrients from the rock.
Don't KNOW that this is happening. Just postulating ideas.
Lots of people try and discard computer systems quickly.
But: How long did it take to learn the interface for
your pencil? If you're a clutz, like me, it took 3-4 years
of grade school to get bad at it.
I remember spending 20 minutes every day doing exercises in
palmer method penmanship for grades 5-8. Only thing that did
was give me a cursive Q that no one else recognizes.
Typing class in high school was an hour a day for a semester.
At the end of that I could type faster than I could write, but I can't type as fast as most people talk.
When I'm writing, my head gets ahead of my fingers, and sentences get left incomplete, paragraphs run together. It's
better with typing, worse with writing.
When doing math, most of my mistakes happen when my head gets too far ahead of my pencil -- the pencil is busy doing the
recopy bits from the previous equation, and I drop bits.
An equation entry system that was more or less wysiwyg on the screen, but as fast or faster to enter than pencil would be a boon to teaching mathematics. It would be well worth investing 50-100 hours of high school class time to learn.
THEN computers could highlight errors as you type.
NO one has a computer aided instruction program for math
where all the steps are done on the computer screen, and
the computer verifies that the steps are correct.
Many highschool teachers lit and social teachers require that homework, particularly essays, be typed. No one requires typed math homework.
chips with button holes so they can be sewn to the fabric
printed circuits.
I'm starting my third career.
I started as a school teacher. Got burned out after a decade.
Went to work as a lab tech at the University physics dept,
just in time to be there for the transition of vax + dos running terminal programs to unix boxen.
Did that for 15 years.
Now I'm a tree farmer.
That doesn't make me a living yet, but this year we sold about
$20K worth of trees with operating expenses about half that.
In winter I do some web work and freelance photoshop.
My wife supports me -- she's a freelance editor.
The house is paid for. The truck is paid for. The car is
paid for next spring. We have no debt on the tree farm. (One of the things we agreed to when I started it.)
We're not hurtin' but we aren't maxing out our RRSP's either. It will be a few years yet before we do the kitchen reno. I'll probably do the bathroom reno after Christmas. Did
the bedroom and converted a half bath to full bath last
year.
So: My advice to you:
* Figure out what your new income is going to be.
* Set up an automatic withdrawal on your bank account
to transfer to savings enough money to make your present IT
salary the same as your projected salary.
* Live on this for 6 months. Meanwhile this builds up a
cushion account, which if you are like me is a huge stress reliever.
If you are going to need retraining for your new career:
Ask your boss if you can go part time. If you are a 24/7
business they may be quite happy to allow this especially
if you are willing to take the crap shifts that most people
don't want. They also may give you your walking papers the
same day, so don't do this until a month before your training
starts.
I downloaded the ISO. Attempted to boot it under Sun
virtualbox.
Alas. All I get is a blinking underscore.
I won't buy new windows. The ROI is way too long. /year. It also gains me about 100,000
My present windows are R2. At a heating season of 250,000
degree heating hours per year, and R2 window loses me about
125,000 BTU/square foot
btu/year if it faces south. But ignore that. 125,000 btu
is 1/8 of a gigajoule -- about $5 delivered via the natural gas line. Three years losses of a 20 square foot window are
$300. I just replace such a window. (grouse flew through it) Cost me $1200. For an R2 window, no better than what the grouse smashed. R8 windows are possible, but at 3 times the price, and not clear that htey will last for 30 years -- which is the simple payback time. And at 30 years, lost
opportunity costs are no longer insignificant.
Based on this, I would be willing to pay more than my original
$50. But remember that I have to buy the blinds, curtains, or panels too.
In general I won't invest in an action to save money unless
it has a simple payback (ignoring lost opportunity costs,
ignoring the value of my time) of under 3 years.
If something is a matter of convenience, then it has to compete for funding with beer and paperback novels.
Window blind openers are a convenience.
Net effect: I won't be an early adopter.
However if peripheral readers (temp, humidity, illumination
etc.) and their communication to the master controler get
cheap, AND the effectors (turn lights on/off, power step motor 300 steps THAT way) get reasonable AND they can
communicate through wi-fi or it's equivalent, then there
are lots of things to do.
If there are lots of things to do, then there is a large market, and the price gets cheap.
Much like computers. Few people want a DEC PDP-11 taking
up a room in their house. But we now have 4 computers at home, not counting the embedded ones.
And, of course the answer is right now, is that it's not worth that much. Greenhouse control systems costs thousands.
Most of these things that I want don't need full automation but rather just need local dumb feedback controls. Full
automation centralizes the control.
However a lot of this stuff is just plain hard to find.
Home hardware carries a bazillion brands of thermostats, but
if you ask for a differential thermostat you get blank looks.
I'd do my window curtain thing, if I could find a way to do it
for say, $50 per window plus the curtains, and keep it
unugly enough to keep my wife happy.
Thermisters are dirt cheap. A simple circuit, a relay, a
geared down reversible motor. In bulk such a system should
cost under $10 to make.
(And before someone cracks, "If it's so easy, why don't you do it!"
* Having a clue as to the state of the art, and having
intimate knowledge of how to apply it aren't the same.
* I grow trees. I don't design electronics.
* I don't want to manage any more than I do now. There
is enough management involved in a tree farm, let alone
a startup company.
For me the large obstacle is the cost of the peripheral stuff.
What would I use it for:
1. Solar hot water panel control. When the water in the
top of the collector is warmer than the water in the storage
tank, turn on the pump. If the water temp is less than 4
degrees C, drain the system.
2. Solar/+storage.
The above, but if the storage tank is above 50C,
and the outside temp is above 20C then divert surplus hot water to deep burried crawlspace heating pipe. If outside
temp is below 20C divert to shallow buried crawlspace heating
pipe.
4. If water level in the sump is mroe than 2 inches abvoe the normal turn on point, raise hell.
5. I have to blow snow tommorow. At midnight turn on the
plug that the tractor is plugged into, so it has a chance
of starting in the morning.
6. Someone has driven through the gate to the tree yard.
Wait. Oh, they went on to the gas well lease. Ignore it.
7. Someone has driven through the gate to the tree yard.
They didn't go to the gas lease. Send me a message.
8. Green house temp is above 30. Spray mist between the
two poly layers. Collect hot water in stratified storage tank.
9. Green house temp is above 33 degrees, open vents, start
fans.
10. Green house temp is above 35 degrees. Send me a message.
12 Greenhouse temp is below 4 degrees. Raise hell.
11. Green house temp is below X and time of day is Y.
Circulate hot water from storage tank through heater coils.
13. Greenhouse temp is below 4 degrees. Raise hell.
14. It's after sunset and the outside temp is below 10 C. Close the curtains.
15. It daytime, and the outside temp is -20C. Open curtains
only if the light intensity is greater than XX
AND I want to do this and not have to run huge amounts of wire.
And I want devices to tell me that they will need a new
battery soon, or that they are off line. (Ok the system has
to tell me that.)
Why does it weigh 250 lbs?
GPS: 4 oz.
Camera 8 oz each. 4? 6? 3 pounds.
Small box linux with big honking hard drive. 3 lbs?
Monopod support. 3 lbs.
So we are talking 10 lbs total.
Add another 5 lbs for batteries to keep it going all day.
Upgrade the cameras to something with a real lens and still rain proof -- + 2lbs.
So at this point we're under 20 lbs.
This is a level that you could put in a back pack and get the truly back country trails.
(Please Google: I'd like to bid on the contract for Willmore Wilderness. Please, please, pretty please?)
I heard, but have not confirmed, that under US copyright law if a publisher gets a request for an out of print book, they must deliver the book within a year, or they can lose publication rights to the book. You can pick up publication rights, subject to the original royalty paid to the copyright owner.
Anyone know if this is true?
Could google send out a million letters, and take over publication rights to a million out of print books?
Does an ebook constitute a 'publication' for the purpose of this law?
Yes. SGBotsford@gmail.comWhat you could do:
I too have ideas for better mousetraps. However I don't have the resources nor the desire to start a company.
My vision of invention heaven would be if there were companies that would take a well described idea, patent it, and market it, taking the bulk of the profit for themselves. To me having 5% of a large pie is better than having the entirety of a mini-tart.
If this is really a concern for teaching, then perhaps the problem should be scaled down virtually:
Suppose that you implement virtual i386's with 4 MB ram and a 40 MB hard drive. Write a special driver for it to add a 80 ms delay for each disk access. Now instantiate 1000 copies of this VM on a machine or small cluster. This effectively turns a 3 GHz machine into a 3 MHz machine (Actually slower because of VM host overhead)
Each machine above is 1/1000 of a real machine. Now instead of needing a 10 PB data source you can get by with 10 TB. Class sets of 10 TB arrays is not unreasonable.
The data set is large compared to the resources of an individual VM. It's still large compared to the entire array of machines. (Data set is 2500 times the size of the entire VM array)
While learning this, students would start with a single VM and a smaller data set, and as the class progresses, they would get 2, 4, 8, 16... VMs and apply various algorithms for inter-machine communication.