True, but this is different. SpaceX funded the development of its Falcon rockets almost entirely with private funding, and they are selling rides at a fixed price, rather than the "cost-plus" accounting that has been the standard for NASA since the 60's. Also, NASA has had a much "lighter touch" in the Dragon development than they've traditionally had with other contractors. They set the goals and guidelines (and provided a LOT of expertise and some funding too) but allowed SpaceX a lot of freedom to solve the problems in their own way. Elon can't say enough about how grateful he is for NASA's help. But by the same token, NASA officials are quick to note how "different" this has been from the previous business-as-usual.
Regardless, I agree this is a "Big F---ing Deal" (as V.P. Biden might say). I've been looking forward to this mission for a LONG TIME. It's damn satisfying to see it all coming together at last.
I missed the live broadcast because the bastards opened the hatch an hour an a half early. The flight director, Holly Ridings, had warned they might be "a bit early" in yesterday's press briefing, but I had no idea they'd be that early.
Anyway, it's cool to have it all ship-shape and working fine. I was amused by Don Pettit's comment: "It smells inside like a new car!";-)
Although I think the SLS would be an awesome rocket, I ain't holding my breath... we'll be lucky to see that thing fly by 2025, if ever. In the meantime, Falcon Heavy and others will already have captured the heavy lift market. So really, why bother?
Actually, Moon Express is doing something along those lines in their GLXP mission. It won't be dedicated to Earth observations, but it will be a telescope on the moon, which will still be pretty cool.
Irrelevant. The THTR-300 was a pebble-bed design. The GP is specifically talking about LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor). Using molten fluoride salts as the fuel medium is a huge safety enhancement, since the reactor can work at ambient pressure. There's no need for high pressure steam handling (nor high pressure Helium, as in the THTR design), which vastly simplifies the plumbing. And with liquid fuel, there's no chance of getting a "pebble" caught in the pipes, which is what caused the THTR accident in 1986.
With solid fuel, you still have to worry about Xenon buildup causing degradation of the fuel. With LFTR, the Xenon gas just bubbles to the top where it can be collected and sold. Furthermore, LFTR uses "wet" chemistry to constantly reprocess the fuel on the fly, which is impossible with ANY solid-fuel design.
There are a ton of other advantages to LFTR, but rather than writing them all down here, I suggest you actually watch the GP's video, or better yet this one which is much more detailed. (Note: the first few minutes of this video is a somewhat disjointed summary of the rest... it "settles down" to a normal narrative after that.)
Actually, it would have made ALL the difference. If LFTR's had been used at Fukushima instead of BWR's, there would not have been ANY release of radioactive material. In the event of an emergency shutdown, the liquid fuel/salt simply drains into a storage tank below the reactor. This tank is design optimized for managing decay heat, so no mechanical cooling is required. (This is just one of several advantages of liquid fuel over solid fuel rods, which must remain inside the reactor, and therefore have to be actively cooled for many days after a shutdown.)
Even in a catastrophic containment failure (eg: a 2000lb bomb), most of the fuel will still find its way down the drain to the storage tank. But whatever fuel escapes to the environment will be MUCH easier to manage. Instead of a high-pressure steam eruption carrying isotopes into the air, liquid fuel just falls on the ground and solidifies. Granted, that wouldn't be much help in a tsunami, but then again, a tsunami would never have breached containment in the first place. And since LFTR's can be air-cooled, you wouldn't have to site them near the water anyway.
The only Scrooge McDuck comic I remember from youth was the one where there was a gold rush on the moon. Rather than going for the gold, Scrooge knew the best way to profit was by providing goods and services to the miners. So they set up a Lunar General Store and had some adventures... my memory gets fuzzy after that, sorry. Anyway, I second your point about the educational aspect of those comics.
The most plausible scheme I've heard is to use electrodynamic tether propulsion to first collect the big stuff (spent booster stages, etc.) and move it to a central "junk yard" orbit. For the smaller stuff, they could use a pulsed laser to zap anything in range, giving a little nudge each time. Eventually this way you could slow it down enough to where it's orbit would naturally decay into the atmosphere.
I recently heard of an idea to put a small inverter circuit in (under) each individual PV cell. This was a side point in a lecture on a different topic, so they didn't explain the details, but the idea was that this would simplify the equipment needs downstream from the array. Also, they claimed that this made each panel more resilient because damage to one cell would not affect the entire panel. Sorry I can't recall the citation, I've been watching a bunch of this stuff on YouTube lately and don't remember who said it (might have been one of the Stanford lectures).
Anyway, to your "bigger problem" point, there's a lot of work being done on every facet of the solar market, from new technology to new business models. More venture capital is going into renewables than "traditional" energy methods, and this trend is increasing. You're right that PV cells now cost less than all the other stuff in a residential solar installation, but this is a good thing, it's a sing of progress. And it's a huge market opportunity for the next guy who comes along and figures out how to do all that "other" stuff cheaper than the competition.
I more or less agree with you that we're not quite there yet, but we're well on the way, and making good progress.
But there are MANY other links which would give you the same insight. Just google around on "winning the oil endgame" and you'll find plenty.
Executive summary: When you do a radical re-think of the whole system, you can usually find mutually-reinforcing savings that multiply your advantage. For example, if you're buying insulation for your house, you might assume a standard graph of diminishing returns... because that's what your Econ teacher always said. But if you spend enough on insulation you may find that you don't need a furnace at all... and if you don't need a furnace, you don't need all the duct-work, etc.. And that savings can far outweigh the cost of the insulation, so you end up with a LOWER capital outlay for a house that is CHEAPER to maintain.
Amory Lovins, the guy in the video linked above, has exactly this kind of house. He lives in the Rocky Mountains at around 7000ft elevation, and he doesn't have a heater AT ALL. In fact, they've been growing bananas (at 7000ft in the Rockies) for the last 30 years.
Bottom line: RMI makes most of its money from consulting, teaching clients how to drastically cut their energy usage. Their clients include a lot of "surprising" names, such as Wal-Mart and the Pentagon.
The transition is already underway, it's just taking a while to get through some thick skulls here and there...;-)
AGW proponents want us to change transportation, construction, agriculture, etc, making almost everything in life more expensive.
It's odd that so few/.ers seem to know this, but "going green" is actually much cheaper than business as usual. Amory Lovins has been demonstrating this for decades already. RMI makes most of its money by consulting with the likes of 3M, IBM, the Pentagon, etc. on how to save TONS of money by investing in efficiency.
It's time to put this myth to bed, once and for all. Going "green" is NOT more expensive, it's actually much cheaper. And this is why more and more companies are ALREADY investing in this area.
Re: Giving democracy a bad name... Having lived in Taiwan for 20 years, believe me, I have my problems with China. But I have to admit, they are going balls-out on the clean-tech front, putting my home country (USA) to shame. They subsidize their solar PV industry so much that they have raised the bar worldwide on price (this is the real reason Solyndra went under, their business model depended on PV cells costing $4/w, but China drove the price down to $1.25/w). They are actively working on molten-salt Thorium fuel nuclear power. They are moving aggressively on electric vehicle adoption. Etc., etc....
By comparison, the US gov't is deadlocked over transferring $4B/yr in subsidies from oil companies (who manifestly don't need them anymore) to R&D in clean energy. But unfortunately our "democracy" has devolved into a sham, with legislation sold to the highest bidder. As just one example, during the healthcare debate a couple of years ago, an overwhelming majority (70-plus percent) favored a "public option" (including 80% of Democrats and around 55% of Republicans), but it was never seriously considered.
Democracy is fantastic when it works, but not so much when it's broken.
Meanwhile, the Chinese gov't is run by technocrats. Our gov't is probably 3/4's lawyers and poli-sci grads; theirs is 3/4's engineers. Obviously they have their share of corruption too, but somehow they have crept ahead of us in some important areas.
Ironically, the USA is boosted by the fruits of its excess... allowing a handful of people to get filthy rich has produced some truly forward-thinking do-gooders like these Planetary Resources guys, Elon Musk, etc.. OTOH, we also have the likes of David Koch to deal with... you win some, you lose some...
The moon has a LOT more than just water. People tend to forget that the moon has been sweeping up asteroids for quite a while. Granted, you have to find them and dig them up, but logistically there's a lot to be said for moon mining. It's close enough to use robots controlled from Earth, reducing the need for autonomous AI software. It's gravity well is conveniently shallow, and even the common regolith is chock-full of good stuff like oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium, etc..
But Planetary Resources is focused on a very limited set of targets, the small subset of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA's) that are so "close" to us (in terms of delta-v) that they are actually easier to reach than the moon.
Can't say I blame them for all the testing, given the potential risks involved. It's frustrating as hell to put up with the delays, but we space geeks ought to be used to that by now.
One thing I'm curious about is whether or not they're going to try recovering the booster stages on this launch. Musk has said in the past that they're going to "keep trying until we get it right," but with all they've got riding on this mission already, I wouldn't be surprised if they skip that in order to concentrate everything on rendezvous and berthing. Still, it would be quite a feat if they could pull off that stunt as well on this launch.
The definition of "just engineering" depends on what the goal of engineering is. Musk's stated goal with SpaceX is to make life multi-planetary, and he has identified the most crucial enabler of that goal as rockets that are rapidly and completely reusable (IOW, what the shuttle was supposed to be). They are already selling launches (Falcon Heavy) for less than $1000/lb to LEO, but the big break will come when they crack the reusability barrier. That will open up a whole new range of possibilities and markets.
This may be "just" an engineering problem, but the ramifications are huge.
Yes, just like Grumman, Martin, McDonnell and others relied on NASA back on the 60's, or like all their predecessors relied on NACA in the 30's and 40's. The big difference is that SpaceX is selling launches at a guaranteed price, rather than the usual "cost-plus" contracts that have plagued the space program for decades. And SpaceX is hardly without competition... Orbital is running their first ISS re-supply mission this summer. Frankly, this is a step in the right direction. And when you get down to brass tacks, you can't argue with the fact that SpaceX keeps delivering payloads to orbit at prices that even the Chinese can't match.
No, the Fukushima reactors had nothing like the kind of inherent passive-safety features of the MSR/LFTR architecture. The fuel is dissolved in the molten salt. In a shutdown, both the fuel and the heat are dumped to a holding tank which is designed for heat dissipation and neutron absorption. MSR's can't overheat, because the liquid medium expands with heat, which decreases fuel density relative to neutron flux, thus throttling back the rate of fission. Because there's no water in the reactor, there's no hydrogen to worry about.
Also, since salts don't even melt until ~300C, and don't boil until ~1500C (depending on the salt), you don't need a "pressure" vessel at all. The entire reactor runs at ambient pressure, obviating the need for complex, expensive, multiple-redundant cooling systems.
They produce lots of extremely high radioactive waste just like any other type of fission reactor.
No, they don't. MSR's burn most of their waste products. And the ones that are left over are much less in quantity and easier to deal with. Also, the liquid fuel makes it fairly easy to separate things with chemical processes. Not to mention Xenon gas, which is a huge issue with PWR/BWR's... with MSR it just bubbles to the top where you can collect it and sell it.
He addresses this issue in the interview. Basically, the delta-v required to reach Mars is not much more than the moon, because Mars has an atmosphere that can be used for aero-braking. The moon has no atmosphere, so you have to spend a lot of fuel to land there. He also says that Mars is better suited to human habitation because it has more water, etc..
I disagree with him on this point (the moon's proximity to Earth makes it a lot easier to overcome those challenges) but hey, it's his money, so more power to him. I'm just happy to see somebody actually making a serious effort.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't blame them, of course. Just being snarky...
True, but this is different. SpaceX funded the development of its Falcon rockets almost entirely with private funding, and they are selling rides at a fixed price, rather than the "cost-plus" accounting that has been the standard for NASA since the 60's. Also, NASA has had a much "lighter touch" in the Dragon development than they've traditionally had with other contractors. They set the goals and guidelines (and provided a LOT of expertise and some funding too) but allowed SpaceX a lot of freedom to solve the problems in their own way. Elon can't say enough about how grateful he is for NASA's help. But by the same token, NASA officials are quick to note how "different" this has been from the previous business-as-usual.
Regardless, I agree this is a "Big F---ing Deal" (as V.P. Biden might say). I've been looking forward to this mission for a LONG TIME. It's damn satisfying to see it all coming together at last.
I missed the live broadcast because the bastards opened the hatch an hour an a half early. The flight director, Holly Ridings, had warned they might be "a bit early" in yesterday's press briefing, but I had no idea they'd be that early.
Anyway, it's cool to have it all ship-shape and working fine. I was amused by Don Pettit's comment: "It smells inside like a new car!" ;-)
Although I think the SLS would be an awesome rocket, I ain't holding my breath... we'll be lucky to see that thing fly by 2025, if ever. In the meantime, Falcon Heavy and others will already have captured the heavy lift market. So really, why bother?
Actually, Moon Express is doing something along those lines in their GLXP mission. It won't be dedicated to Earth observations, but it will be a telescope on the moon, which will still be pretty cool.
Ironically, his family came from America. He's named after his grandfather Elon, who lived in Minnesota.
Funny Elon Musk quote: "I think it'd be cool to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Just, hopefully, not at the point of impact."
It's near the end of this video.
Not quite the same thing.
Irrelevant. The THTR-300 was a pebble-bed design. The GP is specifically talking about LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor). Using molten fluoride salts as the fuel medium is a huge safety enhancement, since the reactor can work at ambient pressure. There's no need for high pressure steam handling (nor high pressure Helium, as in the THTR design), which vastly simplifies the plumbing. And with liquid fuel, there's no chance of getting a "pebble" caught in the pipes, which is what caused the THTR accident in 1986.
With solid fuel, you still have to worry about Xenon buildup causing degradation of the fuel. With LFTR, the Xenon gas just bubbles to the top where it can be collected and sold. Furthermore, LFTR uses "wet" chemistry to constantly reprocess the fuel on the fly, which is impossible with ANY solid-fuel design.
There are a ton of other advantages to LFTR, but rather than writing them all down here, I suggest you actually watch the GP's video, or better yet this one which is much more detailed. (Note: the first few minutes of this video is a somewhat disjointed summary of the rest... it "settles down" to a normal narrative after that.)
> Wouldn't have helped Fukushima though
Actually, it would have made ALL the difference. If LFTR's had been used at Fukushima instead of BWR's, there would not have been ANY release of radioactive material. In the event of an emergency shutdown, the liquid fuel/salt simply drains into a storage tank below the reactor. This tank is design optimized for managing decay heat, so no mechanical cooling is required. (This is just one of several advantages of liquid fuel over solid fuel rods, which must remain inside the reactor, and therefore have to be actively cooled for many days after a shutdown.)
Even in a catastrophic containment failure (eg: a 2000lb bomb), most of the fuel will still find its way down the drain to the storage tank. But whatever fuel escapes to the environment will be MUCH easier to manage. Instead of a high-pressure steam eruption carrying isotopes into the air, liquid fuel just falls on the ground and solidifies. Granted, that wouldn't be much help in a tsunami, but then again, a tsunami would never have breached containment in the first place. And since LFTR's can be air-cooled, you wouldn't have to site them near the water anyway.
The only Scrooge McDuck comic I remember from youth was the one where there was a gold rush on the moon. Rather than going for the gold, Scrooge knew the best way to profit was by providing goods and services to the miners. So they set up a Lunar General Store and had some adventures... my memory gets fuzzy after that, sorry. Anyway, I second your point about the educational aspect of those comics.
The most plausible scheme I've heard is to use electrodynamic tether propulsion to first collect the big stuff (spent booster stages, etc.) and move it to a central "junk yard" orbit. For the smaller stuff, they could use a pulsed laser to zap anything in range, giving a little nudge each time. Eventually this way you could slow it down enough to where it's orbit would naturally decay into the atmosphere.
I recently heard of an idea to put a small inverter circuit in (under) each individual PV cell. This was a side point in a lecture on a different topic, so they didn't explain the details, but the idea was that this would simplify the equipment needs downstream from the array. Also, they claimed that this made each panel more resilient because damage to one cell would not affect the entire panel. Sorry I can't recall the citation, I've been watching a bunch of this stuff on YouTube lately and don't remember who said it (might have been one of the Stanford lectures).
Anyway, to your "bigger problem" point, there's a lot of work being done on every facet of the solar market, from new technology to new business models. More venture capital is going into renewables than "traditional" energy methods, and this trend is increasing. You're right that PV cells now cost less than all the other stuff in a residential solar installation, but this is a good thing, it's a sing of progress. And it's a huge market opportunity for the next guy who comes along and figures out how to do all that "other" stuff cheaper than the competition.
I more or less agree with you that we're not quite there yet, but we're well on the way, and making good progress.
AC's don't have the right to call "troll" on others... But what the hey... you want numbers, here ya go...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMTCNOlozTA
Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMTCNOlozTA
Sorry, I forgot to include a link in my post above. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_EKZvb7gc8
But there are MANY other links which would give you the same insight. Just google around on "winning the oil endgame" and you'll find plenty.
Executive summary: When you do a radical re-think of the whole system, you can usually find mutually-reinforcing savings that multiply your advantage. For example, if you're buying insulation for your house, you might assume a standard graph of diminishing returns... because that's what your Econ teacher always said. But if you spend enough on insulation you may find that you don't need a furnace at all... and if you don't need a furnace, you don't need all the duct-work, etc.. And that savings can far outweigh the cost of the insulation, so you end up with a LOWER capital outlay for a house that is CHEAPER to maintain.
Amory Lovins, the guy in the video linked above, has exactly this kind of house. He lives in the Rocky Mountains at around 7000ft elevation, and he doesn't have a heater AT ALL. In fact, they've been growing bananas (at 7000ft in the Rockies) for the last 30 years.
Bottom line: RMI makes most of its money from consulting, teaching clients how to drastically cut their energy usage. Their clients include a lot of "surprising" names, such as Wal-Mart and the Pentagon.
The transition is already underway, it's just taking a while to get through some thick skulls here and there... ;-)
AGW proponents want us to change transportation, construction, agriculture, etc, making almost everything in life more expensive.
It's odd that so few /.ers seem to know this, but "going green" is actually much cheaper than business as usual. Amory Lovins has been demonstrating this for decades already. RMI makes most of its money by consulting with the likes of 3M, IBM, the Pentagon, etc. on how to save TONS of money by investing in efficiency.
It's time to put this myth to bed, once and for all. Going "green" is NOT more expensive, it's actually much cheaper. And this is why more and more companies are ALREADY investing in this area.
Re: Giving democracy a bad name... Having lived in Taiwan for 20 years, believe me, I have my problems with China. But I have to admit, they are going balls-out on the clean-tech front, putting my home country (USA) to shame. They subsidize their solar PV industry so much that they have raised the bar worldwide on price (this is the real reason Solyndra went under, their business model depended on PV cells costing $4/w, but China drove the price down to $1.25/w). They are actively working on molten-salt Thorium fuel nuclear power. They are moving aggressively on electric vehicle adoption. Etc., etc....
By comparison, the US gov't is deadlocked over transferring $4B/yr in subsidies from oil companies (who manifestly don't need them anymore) to R&D in clean energy. But unfortunately our "democracy" has devolved into a sham, with legislation sold to the highest bidder. As just one example, during the healthcare debate a couple of years ago, an overwhelming majority (70-plus percent) favored a "public option" (including 80% of Democrats and around 55% of Republicans), but it was never seriously considered.
Democracy is fantastic when it works, but not so much when it's broken.
Meanwhile, the Chinese gov't is run by technocrats. Our gov't is probably 3/4's lawyers and poli-sci grads; theirs is 3/4's engineers. Obviously they have their share of corruption too, but somehow they have crept ahead of us in some important areas.
Ironically, the USA is boosted by the fruits of its excess... allowing a handful of people to get filthy rich has produced some truly forward-thinking do-gooders like these Planetary Resources guys, Elon Musk, etc.. OTOH, we also have the likes of David Koch to deal with... you win some, you lose some...
Personally, I think the most important thing for the USA right now is to end corporate personhood.
The moon has a LOT more than just water. People tend to forget that the moon has been sweeping up asteroids for quite a while. Granted, you have to find them and dig them up, but logistically there's a lot to be said for moon mining. It's close enough to use robots controlled from Earth, reducing the need for autonomous AI software. It's gravity well is conveniently shallow, and even the common regolith is chock-full of good stuff like oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium, etc..
But Planetary Resources is focused on a very limited set of targets, the small subset of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA's) that are so "close" to us (in terms of delta-v) that they are actually easier to reach than the moon.
Can't say I blame them for all the testing, given the potential risks involved. It's frustrating as hell to put up with the delays, but we space geeks ought to be used to that by now.
One thing I'm curious about is whether or not they're going to try recovering the booster stages on this launch. Musk has said in the past that they're going to "keep trying until we get it right," but with all they've got riding on this mission already, I wouldn't be surprised if they skip that in order to concentrate everything on rendezvous and berthing. Still, it would be quite a feat if they could pull off that stunt as well on this launch.
The definition of "just engineering" depends on what the goal of engineering is. Musk's stated goal with SpaceX is to make life multi-planetary, and he has identified the most crucial enabler of that goal as rockets that are rapidly and completely reusable (IOW, what the shuttle was supposed to be). They are already selling launches (Falcon Heavy) for less than $1000/lb to LEO, but the big break will come when they crack the reusability barrier. That will open up a whole new range of possibilities and markets.
This may be "just" an engineering problem, but the ramifications are huge.
Yes, just like Grumman, Martin, McDonnell and others relied on NASA back on the 60's, or like all their predecessors relied on NACA in the 30's and 40's. The big difference is that SpaceX is selling launches at a guaranteed price, rather than the usual "cost-plus" contracts that have plagued the space program for decades. And SpaceX is hardly without competition... Orbital is running their first ISS re-supply mission this summer. Frankly, this is a step in the right direction. And when you get down to brass tacks, you can't argue with the fact that SpaceX keeps delivering payloads to orbit at prices that even the Chinese can't match.
> Believing in god because you'll go to hell if you don't.
Atheists don't believe in hell either. What a silly argument.
So did the Fukushima reactors.
No, the Fukushima reactors had nothing like the kind of inherent passive-safety features of the MSR/LFTR architecture. The fuel is dissolved in the molten salt. In a shutdown, both the fuel and the heat are dumped to a holding tank which is designed for heat dissipation and neutron absorption. MSR's can't overheat, because the liquid medium expands with heat, which decreases fuel density relative to neutron flux, thus throttling back the rate of fission. Because there's no water in the reactor, there's no hydrogen to worry about.
Also, since salts don't even melt until ~300C, and don't boil until ~1500C (depending on the salt), you don't need a "pressure" vessel at all. The entire reactor runs at ambient pressure, obviating the need for complex, expensive, multiple-redundant cooling systems.
They produce lots of extremely high radioactive waste just like any other type of fission reactor.
No, they don't. MSR's burn most of their waste products. And the ones that are left over are much less in quantity and easier to deal with. Also, the liquid fuel makes it fairly easy to separate things with chemical processes. Not to mention Xenon gas, which is a huge issue with PWR/BWR's... with MSR it just bubbles to the top where you can collect it and sell it.
Spend an hour or two learning about Thorium, it could be a real game changer.
He addresses this issue in the interview. Basically, the delta-v required to reach Mars is not much more than the moon, because Mars has an atmosphere that can be used for aero-braking. The moon has no atmosphere, so you have to spend a lot of fuel to land there. He also says that Mars is better suited to human habitation because it has more water, etc..
I disagree with him on this point (the moon's proximity to Earth makes it a lot easier to overcome those challenges) but hey, it's his money, so more power to him. I'm just happy to see somebody actually making a serious effort.