The name "Premiere" kind of implies thay want to do hit and run elections. I expect though by the end of the first act, the audience will decide the show is not ready for prime time and will vote with their feet. -- Solar power the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
I read the whole thing, long, chatty, but beguiling. You proably don't want to shorten it. I think this is about right. When my friend's kids got his computer hopelessly infected with spyware, his friend sent over a clean HD with a system on it, and we put that one in and mounted the old one for the data. He's got a tag on his box so running widows seems legit enough, it just happened to come on a new hard drive from a friend. The hard drive cost money, not the system. So, yes, my friend would rather have what he is used to (his old system without spyware) and there was not a big moral dilemma.
To me the big thing is that windows does not work all that well and it is better to avoid the frustration of saying, "Geez, I paid money for this?"
If there is a problem with linux, it seems interesting. Maybe there'll be a cool fix that someone has worked out. With windows is is just another MS hassle. It is easier for me to be patient with linux. But, my friend isn't going to see the interest. If he ever switched to linux, I think he'll be equally frustrated if there are problems. What is interesting is that while MS problems persist, the linux problems seem to get fewer all the time. There will likely be a point where it just works better in so many ways that word will get around. -- Solar power the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
The two main objections I see to fusion right now are 1) too little too late and 2) thermal pollution. Both might be dealt with, the second more easily.
Renewables turn out to be very inexpensive. There is an energy plan going around call Energize America http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/18/62733/6577 that includes a chart that takes selectively from this link: http://www.crest.org/repp_pubs/pdf/subsidies.pdf. So, the big dramatic number which shows up in the chart is that the subsidy for nuclear power in its first 15 years of development was $15/kWh generated, which is comapred to wind at $0.46/kWh generated. There are problems with making such comparisons because some problems are harder than others and take more time to develop. But there is some validity too. From the pdf, the number for solar is about $7/kWh generated. Nuclear power converges towards a subsidy of $0.012/kWh which can't reduce much further owing to the the arrangements on liability and waste that fusion, solar and wind will not face so they can tend to zero. Note that this subsidy makes the actual cost of nuclear power higher than for coal. So, now that wind is cheaper than both coal and nuclear power and solar is headed towards an even lower price, where will fusion fit in? It's first 15 years, subsidy per kWh generated is infinite; again we see the problem of picking a fixed span. But, can it beat solar on price? Most plans have a replacement of the lithium blanket every couple of years so you have to work in a very hot environment and do precision machine work. This kind of effort is going to be similar to refueling in a nuclear plant. I think this alone makes the lowest possible cost for (big) fusion about $0.04/kWh. But it looks good for solar to get to 0.007/kWh. So, even if you have to pay for storage, the base cost of the power generation is going to be hard to beat. Another thing about renewable energy is that once it is in place, there won't be much reason to change. Thus, the market for fusion would only be for new generation. But, new generation may not be much needed when fusion is ready because the world population is projected to stabilize about then so energy markets may not be experiencing much growth.
The problem of thermal pollution is perhaps not so hard. This one is easily handled with dilution. But, you do need a place to dilute and that usually means a river. Just as we have run out of rivers to dam, a large deployment of fusion may run out of rivers to warm. This already happens for nuclear power in Europe in the summer time.
I usually find a way to celebrate when fusion reaches a mile stone. But I think we'll end up using it in niche applications like propulsion and dark outposts, perhaps in the oceans and space. The power-to-weight ratio should make it attractive for the outer solar system for example. The power-to-weight ratio for those lab-grown cells that you dislike is the main reason solar power is chosen for work in the inner solar system. 17% efficient silicon is about 200 times better than coal on the surface of the earth. On orbit the 30% efficeint cells are about 3000 times better than coal given the better sunlight and lack oxygen. Durable 50% efficient cells will be here before fusion I think. The article I cited has commercialization in three years. These are intended for soldiers in the field.
Actually, solar cells are more efficient than plants but in fact, lab cells have greater than 40% efficiency, and in practice, algae based fuel production only reaches about 15% efficiency which is lower than commercial solar panels (19% efficiency). There could be lower costs in using ponds and such, but it is not a more efficient use of surface area. So far, accelerated algae growth is dependent on a concentrated source of CO2, a coal or gas fired power plant at commercial scale: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.
The amount of fuel needed for fusion is tiny but it will likely be deuterium so producing hydrogen does not get you far.
Nuclear power plants can be moderated, but they are designed to run at nameplate capacity. Attempting to use them as dispatchable sources takes extra engineering. You might do the engineering, but this also raises operating costs.
I hesitate to call thermal storage a battery just as I would a dam. But, here is a link describing Solar One in Nevada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One. You may want to follow some of the links there. As you'll see, the intent is to supply California, not the whole nation. As Washington supplies Southern California, this not at all usual: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/coast-to-coast.html. Again, the 80 by 80 miles thing is an example to get people to understand that energy density is not a problem for renewable energy. No one is proposing carrying it out this way. Roofs on homes can provide 46% of all the generation we use now, and more than 100% of the residential electricity use. That is for 17% efficient systems. In this case there is no need for new transmission capacity. I don't think you are quite understanding that the number used for the roof calculation was taken from the center of the country and was appropriate to panels. There is no Iowa thing going on. Please read more carefully. This is all explained.
With regard to the freebee, that is also explained. Many people point to the storage in plugin hybrids as being enough for most commutes plus night time use of electricity. On the other hand, this is not all that smart. Transportation grade batteries are pretty special and using them for household storage is not a great use of their specialization. But, what PG&E is positioning itself to take advantage of it that degraded transportation grade batteries are still better than most batteries so they'll use the batteries coming out of cars for stationary storage. This is also explained. Yes, nothing is free, but both the cost for transportation and the cost for stationary use is reduced owing to the extended use of the batteries. Moving the electricity around is done with wires, something PG&E has experience with. Now, here is the importance of distinguishing thermal storage from batteries: Thermal storage stores energy well with a high energy density, at least with the molten salts used at Solar One. But, it only makes sense if you store it this way prior to conversion to electricity. You are going from high entropy to low and so lose about two thirds of the energy in the conversion. (All thermal generation is like this including coal and nuclear.) Light, like electricity is low entropy, so if you are using quantum mechanical means to convert light to electricity you do not suffer the entropy problems that thermal systems have. Your digital camera, for example, has about 80% conversion efficiency though this is effected using a bias voltage so you can't turn a detector into an energy device. But, PV cells do do this using the doping gradient though they are bandwidth limited owing to the energy bandgap. Laboratory cells already manage greater than 40% efficiency owing to careful matching of bandgaps to the incident light energy quanta. They'll surpass 50% in a couple of years. So, you do not want to lose this efficiency gain by converting to thermal energy and then back to electricity. Batteries do a much better job at preserving the low entropy of electricity because they try to work with a single degree of freedom, a chemical latch. Some lithium batteries are 99% efficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(electricity) #Conversion_to_energy. You can get better than 90% transmission efficiency over 2000 miles with high voltage DC http://www.abbaustralia.com.au/c
20% effciency means 20% of what the Sun provides. If you look a little deeper, the solar number is for a concentrator and such thermal plants are being built with thermal storage. No batteries, just dispatchable solar power with a good match to changes in seasonal demand. And, that 80 by 80 miles covers the whole energy use of the entire country, not just Nevada and not just electric generation. It is just an example. Other places will use panels, that is kind of the point of looking at what roof space is available. As pointed out, the batteries to make panels work 24/7 come basically as a freebee from transportation.
Nuclear power has economic, environmental, safety, proliferation and sustainablility issues that are intelocking and have not been adequately addressed. In my opinion, the economic issues, together with operational costraints http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewables -displace-nukes-first.html will lead to much less nuclear power in the future. It will be displaced by renewable energy. Take a look at the numbers again. Remember that wind is cheaper than nuclear power by a lot and solar will be even cheaper than wind shortly. Thin film solar is already on the market and growing rapidly. One more pass, and I think you'll be persuaded. I don't have a crystal ball, but when money is involved, you can usually tell which way things will go. --
Get going with solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Now 17, David hit on the idea of building a model breeder reactor, a nuclear reactor that not only generates electricity, but also produces new fuel. His model would use the actual radioactive elements and produce real reactions. His blueprint was a schematic in one of his father's textbooks.
Ignoring safety, David mixed his radium and americium with beryllium and aluminum, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil, forming a makeshift reactor core. He surrounded this radioactive ball with a blanket of small foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, tenuously held together with duct tape.
"It was radioactive as heck," David says, "far greater than at the time of assembly." Then he began to realize that he could be putting himself and others in danger.
When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac.
It is wise to avoid making false accusations, and doing so anonymously is extraordinarily lacking in honor. Your lack of expertise is so glaring that this is the only excuse I can find for you: you have no education.
Ever the coward. Come back when you can read. He built a reactor. If he was not successful in making it go the way he wanted it to, that is a different matter. Working with thorium is obviously dangerous as this case makes clear.
That is kind of a neat way of estimating the roofs. You can find a caluculation that takes a different approach here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/roof-pitch.htm l. You'll see that you are incorrect is saying that the area needed is the size of Arizona. An area that is 80 by 80 miles will do it.
You are also incorrect on the durability of solar panels. They last 25 years at better than 80% rated capacity and will likely last 100 years at better than 40%.
On wind, current capacity is 74 thousand MW, so your contention that thousands of megawatts can't be generated seems a little strange given that it is already happening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power.
I see a difference in intinsic safety between fission and fusion. Both are basically limited by the capacity of the environment to carry away excess heat so that even though the energy release from fusion is much higher than for fission, we won't be building fusion reactors that are more powerful that fission reactors. Thus, working at the same scale we have, for fission, a chain reaction that is controlled by working right on the edge of runaway or, for fusion, an induced reaction working where a faster reaction rate takes more energy. Becaue of this difference, you don't get the potential for a huge spike in energy release with fusion that you have with fission and so containment only has to handle the energy release the plant is designed to produce anyway rather than a much higher energy release. This makes fusion intrinsically safe and fission intrinsically dangerous. More and more safety mechanisims for fission can help. Going to smaller reactor designs can help. Nuclear propulsion, for example, is less of a concern than commercial nuclear power.
Another big difference is that there is no need for very long term storage of the waste from fusion. But, waste aside, the big safety problem with commercial scale fission is greed. Scaling reactors back to managable energies on the safety side loses ecomonies-of-scale than make nuclear power competitive with coal. Putting short term profit ahead of public safety is encouraged by relieving the industry of liability for accidents. So, our nuclear safety problems are structural and it is not clear that a further elaboration of defence-in-depth can fully compensate for these flaws. Fisson power is a little funny in that on the better-cheaper-faster triangle you only get to choose one. With fusion we are on the better-cheaper side right now.
Solar and wind power fit the bill of being clean and local. A lot of our nuclear fuel these days comes from Russian weapons stockpiles. But the process of diluting it back down from weapons grade to fuel grade is not going all that well. In an accident in Tennessee last year that was covered up until congress stepped in, the plant managers thought that a big spill of highly enriched uranium soulution, enough to cause the kind of accident that killed 2 people in Japan 1999, was natural uranium. There were two places where the spill might have accumulated and cause criticality. That is pretty poor materials control if you don't know what it is that you are working with.
Uranium reserves are estimated to be about 85 years at present use. Plans to extend the life of nuclear power all pretty much include breeder reactors (such as thorium reactors) and have unresolved fuel cycle problems. Fast breeder reactors are also illegal in the US owing to proliferation concerns. Their prototypes have also tended to melt down.
The new reactor being planned for Calvert Cliffs has an estimated price tag of $2.50/Watt for construction alone, though with federal loan guarranties included in the Senate Energy Bill, this price will likely rise substantially. The price compares poorly with wind and solar, both at about $1.30/watt to build, but with much less in the way of operating costs, and obviously no fuel or long term waste disposal costs.
The level of effort put into fusion has not really been that large. You hear about it, but compared to the Manhatten Project, out of which nuclear power came, it gets much less in the way of GDP. Renewables get even less than that. This was deliberate. The idea was to give it enough effort so that it would be ready when oil and coal ran out. The problem is that at the time, the growth in the use of coal and oil was not foreseen. So, fusion is actually right about on schedule. When it is here, there may be some trouble siting it since nuclear power plants squat on some of the better cooling resources and our storage in place policy for nuclear waste may keep these prime resources tied up for hundreds of years. But, wind was 20% of new generation in 2006 and is growing at 50% per year, while solar is growing at 30% per year and this should accelerate as the silicon purification bottleneck clears. So, fusion may enter a market that is already dominated by clean inexpensive power and thus find only niche applications in any case. -- Go solar the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Gen IV does not finish design for 25 years. The new reactor that is moving forward the fastest is Calvert Cliffs 3, a run-of-the-mill light water reactor. I suspect this one will have trouble. While the nuclear power industry is talking about global warming all the time now, they seem pretty foolish to be betting on a sea level reactor as their first new project since the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters made clear what a problem nuclear power is. The rise in sea level is 5 cm every 15 years and the rate is doubling every 15 years, so from its current level http://www.realclimate.org/images/sealevel_2.jpg, in 45 years you get 35 cm of sea level rise, enough to make the foundations pretty soggy. That would be about halfway through the life of the plant. 90 years out you get more than 3 meters with a doubling projection. That makes a very difficult mess to clean up. Think New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward. There is more to read about this problem here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/cliffhanger.ht ml, including a link to a study on proposed sea level reactors in the UK.
Radiation is not just photons. There is a good point here. While there are very few nuclear reactions going on on the surface of the Sun, mainly spalations from accelerated protons, there are accelerated protons from the corona (the same) that impinge on the Earth's magnetosphere and are deflected. It is the Sun's magnetic field, rather than escaping fusion products, that are responsible for the high energy particle flux.
Interesting that the 16 coldest years occured before 1980 in the US. Globally, there is only one year as warm as the coldest year after 1990 prior to 1970. The trend is a lot stronger than the noise. --
Solar power with no installation cost: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
Do you suggest otherwise? The issue raise here is about the hottest year, not the hottest decade. As noted in the article, the trend is not affected by the corrections. In the present work, 2001 goes off the top 10 list and 1938 comes on. The statement half of the 10 hottest years on record have occured in the 90s or latter becomes 40% have. With this window (ten hottest years) you need only wait a year or two to get back to the same statement. 1938 is unlikely to remain on the list for long. A more interesting question is how soon 1934 rolls of that list. With an accelerated warming trend, how's three decades sound? That's right. The forecast with the greatest limitation on future CO2 emissions that I know of, by Dave Rutledge, has 0.6 degrees of warming by 2037: http://rutledge.caltech.edu/. That makes a year with the temperature of 1934 a 0.7 degree excursion, below the current list cutoff. Warming is better than steroids at making records fall. -- Switch to solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html
The tone of the blog does not match the tone of the reply which is quite polite. I addition, the correction does not change conclusions. The main result appears to be robust. There will continue to be corrections of unintended erors as well as improved methodology. The latest IPCC report appears to underpredict current sea level rise, an error in the opposite direction, if you like to cast this as a political fight. Errata are a well worn mechanism is science and this is what we have here.
Actually, it is letting the voters decide on a one person one vote basis. That is what it means to win the popular vote. An aspect of the post 9-11 situation is that funding for better security did not go first to where the greatest risks were. One can be fairly certain that this was owing to party politics. There are republicans in New York, but they don't count in the presidential race, so it is OK to risk their lives to be sure that boodogle money is sent to red states. With one person one vote, you might not be so cavalier about your voters' lives. But, you never really know with this crowd. Oh, but wait, they lost the popular vote....
One person one vote seems like a principle that might be worth trying despite your worries. Maryland is not proposing to make the Senate proportional at this point.
I think the idea is that the President is president of the whole country and so the American voters should decide. Maryland does have a large city though. Maybe all future Presidents should come from Baltimore. Wouldn't mind President Pelosi getting sworn in next week I think. She comes from Baltimore. Just wish they wouldn't go on vacation with so much investigating to do....
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The name "Premiere" kind of implies thay want to do hit and run elections. I expect though by the end of the first act, the audience will decide the show is not ready for prime time and will vote with their feet.s -selling-solar.html
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I read the whole thing, long, chatty, but beguiling. You proably don't want to shorten it. I think this is about right. When my friend's kids got his computer hopelessly infected with spyware, his friend sent over a clean HD with a system on it, and we put that one in and mounted the old one for the data. He's got a tag on his box so running widows seems legit enough, it just happened to come on a new hard drive from a friend. The hard drive cost money, not the system. So, yes, my friend would rather have what he is used to (his old system without spyware) and there was not a big moral dilemma.
s -selling-solar.html
To me the big thing is that windows does not work all that well and it is better to avoid the frustration of saying, "Geez, I paid money for this?"
If there is a problem with linux, it seems interesting. Maybe there'll be a cool fix that someone has worked out. With windows is is just another MS hassle. It is easier for me to be patient with linux. But, my friend isn't going to see the interest. If he ever switched to linux, I think he'll be equally frustrated if there are problems. What is interesting is that while MS problems persist, the linux problems seem to get fewer all the time. There will likely be a point where it just works better in so many ways that word will get around.
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The two main objections I see to fusion right now are 1) too little too late and 2) thermal pollution. Both might be dealt with, the second more easily.
7 that includes a chart that takes selectively from this link: http://www.crest.org/repp_pubs/pdf/subsidies.pdf. So, the big dramatic number which shows up in the chart is that the subsidy for nuclear power in its first 15 years of development was $15/kWh generated, which is comapred to wind at $0.46/kWh generated. There are problems with making such comparisons because some problems are harder than others and take more time to develop. But there is some validity too. From the pdf, the number for solar is about $7/kWh generated. Nuclear power converges towards a subsidy of $0.012/kWh which can't reduce much further owing to the the arrangements on liability and waste that fusion, solar and wind will not face so they can tend to zero. Note that this subsidy makes the actual cost of nuclear power higher than for coal. So, now that wind is cheaper than both coal and nuclear power and solar is headed towards an even lower price, where will fusion fit in? It's first 15 years, subsidy per kWh generated is infinite; again we see the problem of picking a fixed span. But, can it beat solar on price? Most plans have a replacement of the lithium blanket every couple of years so you have to work in a very hot environment and do precision machine work. This kind of effort is going to be similar to refueling in a nuclear plant. I think this alone makes the lowest possible cost for (big) fusion about $0.04/kWh. But it looks good for solar to get to 0.007/kWh. So, even if you have to pay for storage, the base cost of the power generation is going to be hard to beat. Another thing about renewable energy is that once it is in place, there won't be much reason to change. Thus, the market for fusion would only be for new generation. But, new generation may not be much needed when fusion is ready because the world population is projected to stabilize about then so energy markets may not be experiencing much growth.
Renewables turn out to be very inexpensive. There is an energy plan going around call Energize America http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/18/62733/657
The problem of thermal pollution is perhaps not so hard. This one is easily handled with dilution. But, you do need a place to dilute and that usually means a river. Just as we have run out of rivers to dam, a large deployment of fusion may run out of rivers to warm. This already happens for nuclear power in Europe in the summer time.
I usually find a way to celebrate when fusion reaches a mile stone. But I think we'll end up using it in niche applications like propulsion and dark outposts, perhaps in the oceans and space. The power-to-weight ratio should make it attractive for the outer solar system for example. The power-to-weight ratio for those lab-grown cells that you dislike is the main reason solar power is chosen for work in the inner solar system. 17% efficient silicon is about 200 times better than coal on the surface of the earth. On orbit the 30% efficeint cells are about 3000 times better than coal given the better sunlight and lack oxygen. Durable 50% efficient cells will be here before fusion I think. The article I cited has commercialization in three years. These are intended for soldiers in the field.
Actually, solar cells are more efficient than plants but in fact, lab cells have greater than 40% efficiency, and in practice, algae based fuel production only reaches about 15% efficiency which is lower than commercial solar panels (19% efficiency). There could be lower costs in using ponds and such, but it is not a more efficient use of surface area. So far, accelerated algae growth is dependent on a concentrated source of CO2, a coal or gas fired power plant at commercial scale: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.
The amount of fuel needed for fusion is tiny but it will likely be deuterium so producing hydrogen does not get you far.
Nuclear power plants can be moderated, but they are designed to run at nameplate capacity. Attempting to use them as dispatchable sources takes extra engineering. You might do the engineering, but this also raises operating costs.
.html. Again, the 80 by 80 miles thing is an example to get people to understand that energy density is not a problem for renewable energy. No one is proposing carrying it out this way. Roofs on homes can provide 46% of all the generation we use now, and more than 100% of the residential electricity use. That is for 17% efficient systems. In this case there is no need for new transmission capacity. I don't think you are quite understanding that the number used for the roof calculation was taken from the center of the country and was appropriate to panels. There is no Iowa thing going on. Please read more carefully. This is all explained.
I hesitate to call thermal storage a battery just as I would a dam. But, here is a link describing Solar One in Nevada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One. You may want to follow some of the links there. As you'll see, the intent is to supply California, not the whole nation. As Washington supplies Southern California, this not at all usual: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/coast-to-coast
With regard to the freebee, that is also explained. Many people point to the storage in plugin hybrids as being enough for most commutes plus night time use of electricity. On the other hand, this is not all that smart. Transportation grade batteries are pretty special and using them for household storage is not a great use of their specialization. But, what PG&E is positioning itself to take advantage of it that degraded transportation grade batteries are still better than most batteries so they'll use the batteries coming out of cars for stationary storage. This is also explained. Yes, nothing is free, but both the cost for transportation and the cost for stationary use is reduced owing to the extended use of the batteries. Moving the electricity around is done with wires, something PG&E has experience with. Now, here is the importance of distinguishing thermal storage from batteries: Thermal storage stores energy well with a high energy density, at least with the molten salts used at Solar One. But, it only makes sense if you store it this way prior to conversion to electricity. You are going from high entropy to low and so lose about two thirds of the energy in the conversion. (All thermal generation is like this including coal and nuclear.) Light, like electricity is low entropy, so if you are using quantum mechanical means to convert light to electricity you do not suffer the entropy problems that thermal systems have. Your digital camera, for example, has about 80% conversion efficiency though this is effected using a bias voltage so you can't turn a detector into an energy device. But, PV cells do do this using the doping gradient though they are bandwidth limited owing to the energy bandgap. Laboratory cells already manage greater than 40% efficiency owing to careful matching of bandgaps to the incident light energy quanta. They'll surpass 50% in a couple of years. So, you do not want to lose this efficiency gain by converting to thermal energy and then back to electricity. Batteries do a much better job at preserving the low entropy of electricity because they try to work with a single degree of freedom, a chemical latch. Some lithium batteries are 99% efficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(electricity) #Conversion_to_energy. You can get better than 90% transmission efficiency over 2000 miles with high voltage DC http://www.abbaustralia.com.au/c
20% effciency means 20% of what the Sun provides. If you look a little deeper, the solar number is for a concentrator and such thermal plants are being built with thermal storage. No batteries, just dispatchable solar power with a good match to changes in seasonal demand. And, that 80 by 80 miles covers the whole energy use of the entire country, not just Nevada and not just electric generation. It is just an example. Other places will use panels, that is kind of the point of looking at what roof space is available. As pointed out, the batteries to make panels work 24/7 come basically as a freebee from transportation.
s -displace-nukes-first.html will lead to much less nuclear power in the future. It will be displaced by renewable energy. Take a look at the numbers again. Remember that wind is cheaper than nuclear power by a lot and solar will be even cheaper than wind shortly. Thin film solar is already on the market and growing rapidly. One more pass, and I think you'll be persuaded. I don't have a crystal ball, but when money is involved, you can usually tell which way things will go.s -selling-solar.html
Nuclear power has economic, environmental, safety, proliferation and sustainablility issues that are intelocking and have not been adequately addressed. In my opinion, the economic issues, together with operational costraints http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewable
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It is wise to avoid making false accusations, and doing so anonymously is extraordinarily lacking in honor. Your lack of expertise is so glaring that this is the only excuse I can find for you: you have no education.
Ever the coward. Come back when you can read. He built a reactor. If he was not successful in making it go the way he wanted it to, that is a different matter. Working with thorium is obviously dangerous as this case makes clear.
How cowardly to make such accusations, and how inaccurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn. Getting a complete collection of elements requires a breeder. Nice try.s -selling-solar.html
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Get fusion on your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
That is kind of a neat way of estimating the roofs. You can find a caluculation that takes a different approach here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/roof-pitch.htm l. You'll see that you are incorrect is saying that the area needed is the size of Arizona. An area that is 80 by 80 miles will do it.
t ml.
s -selling-solar.html
You are also incorrect on the durability of solar panels. They last 25 years at better than 80% rated capacity and will likely last 100 years at better than 40%.
On wind, current capacity is 74 thousand MW, so your contention that thousands of megawatts can't be generated seems a little strange given that it is already happening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power.
Nuclear power is a little bit inflexible. Choosing plants that are on the seacoast may not be the best example of a reliable energy source: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/cliffhanger.h
Once you see the problem with your calcualtions, I think you'll be much more optimistic about the renewable energy future.
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I see a difference in intinsic safety between fission and fusion. Both are basically limited by the capacity of the environment to carry away excess heat so that even though the energy release from fusion is much higher than for fission, we won't be building fusion reactors that are more powerful that fission reactors. Thus, working at the same scale we have, for fission, a chain reaction that is controlled by working right on the edge of runaway or, for fusion, an induced reaction working where a faster reaction rate takes more energy. Becaue of this difference, you don't get the potential for a huge spike in energy release with fusion that you have with fission and so containment only has to handle the energy release the plant is designed to produce anyway rather than a much higher energy release. This makes fusion intrinsically safe and fission intrinsically dangerous. More and more safety mechanisims for fission can help. Going to smaller reactor designs can help. Nuclear propulsion, for example, is less of a concern than commercial nuclear power.
Another big difference is that there is no need for very long term storage of the waste from fusion. But, waste aside, the big safety problem with commercial scale fission is greed. Scaling reactors back to managable energies on the safety side loses ecomonies-of-scale than make nuclear power competitive with coal. Putting short term profit ahead of public safety is encouraged by relieving the industry of liability for accidents. So, our nuclear safety problems are structural and it is not clear that a further elaboration of defence-in-depth can fully compensate for these flaws. Fisson power is a little funny in that on the better-cheaper-faster triangle you only get to choose one. With fusion we are on the better-cheaper side right now.
Solar and wind power fit the bill of being clean and local. A lot of our nuclear fuel these days comes from Russian weapons stockpiles. But the process of diluting it back down from weapons grade to fuel grade is not going all that well. In an accident in Tennessee last year that was covered up until congress stepped in, the plant managers thought that a big spill of highly enriched uranium soulution, enough to cause the kind of accident that killed 2 people in Japan 1999, was natural uranium. There were two places where the spill might have accumulated and cause criticality. That is pretty poor materials control if you don't know what it is that you are working with.
s -selling-solar.html
Uranium reserves are estimated to be about 85 years at present use. Plans to extend the life of nuclear power all pretty much include breeder reactors (such as thorium reactors) and have unresolved fuel cycle problems. Fast breeder reactors are also illegal in the US owing to proliferation concerns. Their prototypes have also tended to melt down.
The new reactor being planned for Calvert Cliffs has an estimated price tag of $2.50/Watt for construction alone, though with federal loan guarranties included in the Senate Energy Bill, this price will likely rise substantially. The price compares poorly with wind and solar, both at about $1.30/watt to build, but with much less in the way of operating costs, and obviously no fuel or long term waste disposal costs.
The level of effort put into fusion has not really been that large. You hear about it, but compared to the Manhatten Project, out of which nuclear power came, it gets much less in the way of GDP. Renewables get even less than that. This was deliberate. The idea was to give it enough effort so that it would be ready when oil and coal ran out. The problem is that at the time, the growth in the use of coal and oil was not foreseen. So, fusion is actually right about on schedule. When it is here, there may be some trouble siting it since nuclear power plants squat on some of the better cooling resources and our storage in place policy for nuclear waste may keep these prime resources tied up for hundreds of years. But, wind was 20% of new generation in 2006 and is growing at 50% per year, while solar is growing at 30% per year and this should accelerate as the silicon purification bottleneck clears. So, fusion may enter a market that is already dominated by clean inexpensive power and thus find only niche applications in any case.
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That seems to be our problem right now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/cliffhanger.ht ml and http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-mexicans-c onspire.html. That last one is meant partly in fun. The Sierra Club likes Bill Richardson's energy policy.
Gen IV does not finish design for 25 years. The new reactor that is moving forward the fastest is Calvert Cliffs 3, a run-of-the-mill light water reactor. I suspect this one will have trouble. While the nuclear power industry is talking about global warming all the time now, they seem pretty foolish to be betting on a sea level reactor as their first new project since the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters made clear what a problem nuclear power is. The rise in sea level is 5 cm every 15 years and the rate is doubling every 15 years, so from its current level http://www.realclimate.org/images/sealevel_2.jpg, in 45 years you get 35 cm of sea level rise, enough to make the foundations pretty soggy. That would be about halfway through the life of the plant. 90 years out you get more than 3 meters with a doubling projection. That makes a very difficult mess to clean up. Think New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward. There is more to read about this problem here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/cliffhanger.ht ml, including a link to a study on proposed sea level reactors in the UK.
Radiation is not just photons. There is a good point here. While there are very few nuclear reactions going on on the surface of the Sun, mainly spalations from accelerated protons, there are accelerated protons from the corona (the same) that impinge on the Earth's magnetosphere and are deflected. It is the Sun's magnetic field, rather than escaping fusion products, that are responsible for the high energy particle flux.
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There are also possible photon-magnetic field interactions though with a low coupling: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=&articleI
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You want to be careful with that stuff. There was a boy who built a breeder in his mother's shed in the ninties using thorium. He was arrested again at the beginning of this month for stealing smoke detectors. He does not look so healthy in his mugshot: http://freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/200708 03/NEWS04/70803062. Sad story. There just isn't any such thing as clean fission. It makes a mess every time.s -selling-solar.html
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Interesting that Huricane Flossie http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_ep4+shtml /204039.shtml?5day?large#contents has grown in strength of the last 6 hours with maximum sustained winds up 10 mph to 85 mph. It is heading roughly in the direction of Hawaii. Its path looks a little like what I remember from Iniki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Iniki_1992_trac k.png. Might want to wait to the end of the season before counting up the storms.s -selling-solar.html
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Interesting that the 16 coldest years occured before 1980 in the US. Globally, there is only one year as warm as the coldest year after 1990 prior to 1970. The trend is a lot stronger than the noise.s -selling-solar.html
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Do you suggest otherwise? The issue raise here is about the hottest year, not the hottest decade. As noted in the article, the trend is not affected by the corrections. In the present work, 2001 goes off the top 10 list and 1938 comes on. The statement half of the 10 hottest years on record have occured in the 90s or latter becomes 40% have. With this window (ten hottest years) you need only wait a year or two to get back to the same statement. 1938 is unlikely to remain on the list for long. A more interesting question is how soon 1934 rolls of that list. With an accelerated warming trend, how's three decades sound? That's right. The forecast with the greatest limitation on future CO2 emissions that I know of, by Dave Rutledge, has 0.6 degrees of warming by 2037: http://rutledge.caltech.edu/. That makes a year with the temperature of 1934 a 0.7 degree excursion, below the current list cutoff. Warming is better than steroids at making records fall.s -selling-solar.html
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The tone of the blog does not match the tone of the reply which is quite polite. I addition, the correction does not change conclusions. The main result appears to be robust. There will continue to be corrections of unintended erors as well as improved methodology. The latest IPCC report appears to underpredict current sea level rise, an error in the opposite direction, if you like to cast this as a political fight. Errata are a well worn mechanism is science and this is what we have here.
You may have forgotton who won the popular vote in 2000 I think.
Actually, it is letting the voters decide on a one person one vote basis. That is what it means to win the popular vote. An aspect of the post 9-11 situation is that funding for better security did not go first to where the greatest risks were. One can be fairly certain that this was owing to party politics. There are republicans in New York, but they don't count in the presidential race, so it is OK to risk their lives to be sure that boodogle money is sent to red states. With one person one vote, you might not be so cavalier about your voters' lives. But, you never really know with this crowd. Oh, but wait, they lost the popular vote....
One person one vote seems like a principle that might be worth trying despite your worries. Maryland is not proposing to make the Senate proportional at this point.
I think the idea is that the President is president of the whole country and so the American voters should decide. Maryland does have a large city though. Maybe all future Presidents should come from Baltimore. Wouldn't mind President Pelosi getting sworn in next week I think. She comes from Baltimore. Just wish they wouldn't go on vacation with so much investigating to do....
Some (two I think) states do split their electoral vote.s -selling-solar.html
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