Thats how you would think it works eh ? Sadly no. Any chemical dumped any-old-how is legal unless specifically forbidden by a law or regulation. And the EPA is only allowed to make such regulations after obtaining scientiffic evidence of harm - even then outright bans are reserved for only the most severe 'no safe dosage exists' stuff like lead - others they can only limit how much you are allowed to dump, or how you are required to dispose of it. Sadly even this pro-business, anti-citizen system is still deemed to much of a regulatory 'burden' by the wealthy donors of republican representatives. So they kick back like mad. We had proof all lead is deadly in 1955. We had proof, undeniable physical proof that the natural lead level of the atmosphere is zero - from the greatest expert on lead detection in the world - in 1960. We finally managed to get a law against it in 1985. How many millions of people died to safe oil companies a few pennies per tonne ? And yet those pennies are so sorely missed that they will do anything they can to gutt the EPA even further. This bill has no intention of getting anything published - the EPA already publishes everything it is legally allowed to. This bill is written to make the information they cannot publish unusable and effectively legalize every known people killer when the evidence that it killed people is their private medical data.
Thos bill is nothing but a blatant attempt to make it legal for rich people to pour arsenic in your drinking water. But people do nlot like it when governments let rich people do things which would get you and me the (fulle deserved) death penalty on a terrorism charge... so they have to use underhanded tricks like pretending its about scientific integrity. Lamar Smith is the creationist moron who took a snowball to congress and claimed it disproves climate science. The man does not give a fuck about science - on the contrary he despises science and scientists. If he wanted to defend the scientiffic method he would first have to learn what it is. He thinks it means 'read the bible'. Simce the bible does not mention hexavalent chromium it cannot possibly be a real bad thing ?
They aren't. They are interested in rendering it unusable in order to castrate the EPA. They want to poison people for money, so they want to deprive the EPA of the evidence that the poison is poisonous.
>Why prey tell would you think it is appropriate for the Federal EPA to base a ruling one a "one-time event", wouldn't regulating a "one-time event" after the event be an oxymoron?
Only if the "one time event" had natural causes. If it was man-made then, by definition, it can happen again - and the PERFECT time to make a law against a bad thing is when it's only happened once so far. That's how you KEEP it a one-time-event.
>If it is a one-time event and there is no physical evidence, just people's write-ups of it, that shouldn't be enough for the EPA to justify rules.
Of course there is physical evidence of the event. But the impact on the victims - that evidence is in their bodies, what other evidence could possibly exist ? Do you deny that physical harm to a person is evidence that something can harm them ? And what if the person has since died ? Does the event stop having happened because the evidence was cremated ?
>It is indeed scientific data, it is simply too weak to support scientific conclusions, let alone rules or laws. Hence the law.
The law has, always had, and always MUST have a lower standard than science - because unlike science there IS such a thing as a legal truth. There's no such thing as a scientific truth. If it would have been good enough to cite in a court of law as evidence of harm, it's scientific evidence enough for a law. If actionable harm has been caused by something, that's evidence enough to make a preventative law and avert future harm. There can just about never be such a thing as overreach here. These laws prevent cold-blooded, brutal murder of people who have ZERO opportunity to defend themselves. The single most critical reason for having any government at all - is to have laws of the kind the EPA enforces.
How exactly do you "independently reproduce" the data on a one-time event ? Most of this data is private medical data gathered under extremely specific situation after specific one-time events - to determine whether or not those events did harm and should be prevented in future.
There is no way to reproduce most of this data without flagrantly violating scientific and medical ethics anyway. "Patient had X level of lead in his blood, and showed symptoms Y and Z" is valid scientific data. But it's not reproducible because PUTTING X level of lead in somebody else's blood is a fucking crime against humanity !
The EPA has never kept a secret about a single piece of science it has used.
But, on occasion, they have used science that is kept secret by something else, like the law. Private medical data for example - can be the most reliable scientific data there is for determining polution damage - but it is also illegal to publish it publicly.
The republicans have been pushing versions of this bill for years and years - and it has NOTHING to do with science, it's about trying to destroy the EPA because (annoyingly) EPA regulations cost money from their rich friends. NOT dumping shit in your drinking water is more expensive than dumping it there. Every time this bill has been proposed every major science organisation and scientist in the USA has opposed it. You'd think if it were 'good for science' then the scientists (remember most of them have nothing professionally to do with the EPA) would be cheering - not complaining !
They complain - because what the bill CLAIMS to do and what it is nakedly INTENT on doing have nothing in common with each other.
This bill is really very simple: it's Lamar Smith sucking off the Koch brothers, which is basically what he does for a living.
Why would I need to "accept" a point I never argued AGAINST ? The fact is that whether it is better to bring the gas closer and build a nearby generator or build a generator near the gas and run a long line doesn't have ONE answer. It depends entirely on the specifics of the situation. What's the terain like between the gas and the town ? It's generally easier and cheaper to run a line over a mountain than a pipe. How far apart are they ? Too far and a pipeline will beat a transmission line every time.
And that has been my point all along. Sometimes - it will be better to run a line, sometimes it will be better to lay a pipe - and sometimes it will be better to send the gas somewhere else and use some other resource to service this particular town.
The west-east gas-pipeline is over 4000km. That's rather more than 2,385km - in fact it's nearly twice as much. That pipeline is currently being extended -when phase 2 is completed it will be close to 9000km long. There are two more phases planned after that, but their exact end-points haven't been finalized so no idea how much longer it would be. But even if they just add as much as phase II does, that would bring us to over 15000km
Oh what a pity that apparently no engineers in China had heard of HVDC...
Like I said- "long" is relative. 2,385km is, indeed, seriously long for a powerline. But it's really not impressive next to what we can do with gas lines.
>As coal declines and wind power ramps up, those numbers will trade places.
Unlikely. Firstly we're not replacing all coal with wind, solar makes up more of the replacement than wind does. Secondly wind numbers for new installations are going down as more recent designs have been improved to be safer for birds (it makes economic sense because killing birds also damages the expensive wind generators which is costly), there's no reason to assume this trend won't continue (meanwhile no attempt was ever made to reduce the numbers for coal). Eventually coal numbers may reach zero if we phase it out entirely, and wind will certainly go up from where it is - but it's highly unlikely that it will ever get anywhere near the number that coal has now. So "trade places" is not even slightly an accurate description.
>I am saying that if you stand under a turbine in an area where birds are flying near the blades, you'll see birds that were killed by it lying on the ground. And if you stand in a place where humans have settled and cats are not prohibited - you will find birds killed by cats. More often actually. I never said this wasn't a factor, it is, and it's a factor that engineers are putting active resources into mitigating it's just not nearly as big a factor as some people would have us believe.
>Over time, we'll cull the species that can't avoid the blades and deaths will decline Species ? Probably not - but we will likely cull the individuals who are least good at avoiding moving obstacles like that which, on top of the aforementioned engineering efforts will bring numbers down further. Excessive death by any human activity, if not enough to bring about extinction causes adaptation - often rapidly. As it stands there is a growing number of African elephants being born without tusks. 300 years of the biggest tuskers getting hunted first has been seriously favoring the smaller-toothed ones for having babies. This is rapid evolution due to a massive pressure on the population (elephant numbers today are well under 1000th of what they were 300 years ago). Those with no tusks at all probably rarely procreated at all in the past, making it a rare mutation, but since humans started getting serious about ivory hunting that mutation became a major life-prolonger, and so got to be spread over a much larger percentage of each subsequent generation - while the overall SIZE of each subsequent generation shrank on the same timeline. So soon something that was a one in a million rarity can come to be 20% or more of the (now much smaller) total.
I would put that on par with companies who fund say research into better routing protocols. RedHat didn't create the linux kernel - or the commons environment around it, it was already there, and they could then profit from contributing to it's advancement. Other companies like IBM did the same.
But it started outside of private enterprise as a non-profit endeavor. At the time he started it Linus was a student in Finnland, a country where studies are entirely free, arguably then - since his study costs was born by the public freeing him up to be able to put resources into his pet project - it was actually started with (some) public funding by a private non-profit. But public funding, like I said, need not mean "state" funding. A kickstarter for a non-profit "all can use it" project would also be "publicly" funded - but may have no government involvement at all. For it to become a technological commons on which a widespread range of companies can profit and compete even as they collaborate in it's improvement as Linux or the Internet has become - you need a non-profit starting point to establish a commons worth investing in without owning.
I made no attacks whatsoever, and there was certainly nothing personal about my speculating about what kind of conditions may justify the cost factors for building a lossless transmission system. It was just idle speculation and it, like the mention of superconductors, was not my key point -just a tangential thought I found interesting.
Yes, I'm aware that the losses for HVDC is significantly less than for AC. I'm also aware that a gas-pipeline is not actually lossless since it costs energy to run the pumps and the longer the pipeline the more energy you have to spend moving the gas around. In the vast majority of cases (indeed all the situations I can imagine) though, the losses on the latter are hugely smaller than on the former.
We do build long-range power-lines. The Cabora-Bassa line I mentioned does exist, and it's quite long. As in - you need an airplane to get from one end to the other in under a week long. But it's a fraction of the length of some of the gas pipelines out there. We build those things to connect different CONTINENTS to each other. I'm not aware of a single transcontinental power-transmission line anywhere in the world, let alone an intercontinental one.
"Long" is a relative term - what is "long" in a "long range power line" is really "not very long at all" in the world of gas pipelines.
Actually I was quoting my dad... an engineer who designs power grids for a living. Pretending HVDC is some magic bullet that makes long range transmission a non issue is just silly. Like all engineering problems power grid design is a taking series of trade offs and constructing the solution which solves the specific scenario in the most efficient and economical way. Whether that is long range or local, ac or dc, solar or gas or coal or wind, overhead or underground... these questions never have one right answer. The best answer for this grid will be a unique combination of answers to those and other questions. Finding the best combination of answers for a particular location is what they pay him the big bucks for.
That one is such bullshit. The high estimate for birds killed by wind power is about 290-thousand a year - or a thousand times less than the number of birds killed by cats. And, for coal the high estimate is 790-million a year. Coal kills more birds than any other power generation technology - and it beats out wind 30 times over.
>gobble up real-estate and cover it with semi-toxic panels for solar This concern is real, but largely overblown - considering the vast majority of solar real estate is otherwise useless (to humans or the environment) real estate like rooftops.
>all forms of electricity production have their prices. True but these prices are not all the same - in fact they aren't even similar.
You get the same outcome if you look at immediate human deathtolls - coal is orders of magnitude higher than anything else, including nuclear. Coal kills millions of people every year. And even if you exclude mining and pollution deaths - just the deaths in coal construction outnumber the total deathtoll from all nuclear accidents ever several times over. Some Trump cabinet member tried to sell that argument on the radio yesterday too - that no energy is really clean so we may as well use dirty coal.But it's a bullshit argument. It's like saying "No food is free so we may as well all eat caviar".
Nuclear suffers from being huge. Huge is bad. Megaprojects almost always end up being way over-budget and even further over deadline. This is a problem in all mega-project construction and Nuclear falls into that category. Coal sometimes as well - and when it does those plants also, always, way over budget and deadline. Part of the problem is that the sheer scale of the projects make accurate budgeting and planning almost impossible. There's just so much room for mistakes, errors and unexpected events that it's impossible to foresee them all, or even estimate how much fudge factor build in for them. The other is that these things take so long - the longer a project takes the more chance there is for changes way outside it to actually impact it (things like new laws getting passed).
There's the fact that megaprojects must inevitably demand mega-management teams - so you end up with all the worst problems of burocracy, whether they be government or corporate (or most commonly both) which further adds to the mix. You have endless opportunities for skimming and corruption and kickbacks - and that adds both cost and time. You have a massive work-force - which makes you particularly sensitive to labour market fluctuations.
You could do what Dubai did prepping for the soccer world cup and kill 1400 people a year by just not bothering to make the construction work safe (which is what happens when you have lax regulations ) but you would STILL be overbudget and over-time (as they were). Ultimately - at the scale where nuclear builds have to operate - these things will always be a problem. It's a major downside of anything that has to be done at that scale.
And yes, it's subject to a lot of regulation - megaprojects usually are - because they have to be. Where the regulation is absent they are STILL always late and overbudget - they just kill a lot more people, so you may as well have the regulation.
DC lines are cheaper because they need less wires - you can use the ground as a return wire, and a lighter, smaller cable can carry power over the same distance. There's a downside though - anything generator by a dynamo (that's basically everything except solar) generates AC. So to use DC you have to build rectifiers on one end and then put an alternator on the other end to make it useful to all the AC based tech you want to power. That adds a (huge) cost, so HVDC only makes sense over long enough distances that the savings in cabling exceed the new costs in conversion. HVDC isn't that new anyway. The line between the Cabora-Bassa hydropower station in Mozambique and Johannesburg in South Africa is an HVDC line and that was built in the 1990s.
But HVDC still has losses because the main cause of losses is the fact that conductors have resistance. We're a LONG way from superconductors that are cheap enough to build lossless long-range powerlines out off. Just the cooling for current ones would make it prohibitively expensive. Frankly it's unlikely that will ever happen - we've had a hundred years of designing grids around mostly using relatively nearby power sources. The only way it would make sense to go build a line like that is if you discovered some kind of power generator that produced enough power for the whole world at near-zero cost, but it only worked in one place (yeah, I'm not even going to guess what that might be).
And there is a class in between which is could be done either way but turns out better when it is done with public funding.
Farming food ? Historically government is bad at this.
Building roads ? Historically government has been the best way to do this, toll roads only work in certain very narrow conditions. And we all benefit when everybody can use the road without paying for use.
The internet fits in that middle group. Lots of large private networks were built around the same time - but they didn't take off like the internet. The internet did exactly because it LACKED an owner. The web followed a similar pattern. It's been said that in the early 1990s every company was wondering "How can I make the web mine" while Tim Berners-Lee was asking "How can I make the web yours". Designing the technology was not the hard part, in fact some of those large privately owned networks had technology that was, arguably, far more advanced than the internet technology at the time. Yet they didn't become the internet - because to BE an internet you needed a hands-off approach, and a willingness to let everybody use it and evolve it and expand it in all sorts of ways without trying to make money out of them all. A central controller or owner would have prevented it from succeeding. The internet was the exact OPPOSITE of a tragedy of the commons - it was a technology that couldn't happen UNLESS it was a commons. You need some sort of public funding to establish a commons - that may or may not involve a government but it has to be public and devoid of profit motive. Profit-seeking companies can make use of the commons AFTER it's established (and provided it's either designed or managed in such a way that they cannot in the process take control of all of it) - but they cannot establish it. Well maybe they could - but they never would, there's no visible way to profit from it.
Nowhere is government doing any less - it's subsidizing a service for the poor same as before. It's just made it MUCH harder for new providers to offer the subsidized service.
This is a flagrant attempt to use government bureaucracy to protect entrenched businesses by making it much harder for new companies to compete. This is, in fact, a republican government doing the EXACT thing it always accuses democrats of doing. Turns out you can do it just as easily by repealing regulations as by creating them - all you have to do is ensure you end up with a situation where the burdens involved in entering a market is massive, and you give a huge bonus to those already in there. When a regulation ENSURES poor people also gets service, or makes sure your water is drinkable - then the trade-off is worthwhile. When it actually REDUCES the availability of services to the poor (like this does) then you have all the usual problems of deregulation (the reasons democrats and progressives tend to oppose it) but you don't EVEN get the supposed benefits of more competition in the market.
Basically - Pai has, once again, found a way to screw Americans with the worst of all worlds as an outcome. The problem with Ajit Pai is, he is just as evil as anybody else Trump has appointed - but unlike the rest of them, he is actually competent. He doesn't just have evil ideas, he is capable of executing them.
Actually - this could be somewhat valuable to the massive projects running right now to archive government science data in case the current administration decides to purge any of it.
If you had bothered to read the thread you would find that I rather fully addressed your false argument already, I don't feel like repeating myself. I'll just summarize. No rights of consequence are lost, none whatsoever.
Well let's see - by the time Obama was first elected Iraq had already cost an estimated 4 Trillion dollars - that would fund NASA's wildest dreams for decades.
That was not the final bill - after all Iraq didn't end the day Obama took the oath. You wanna take a guess at what Afghanistan has cost by now ?
>You wouldn't have to land on the Moon with the same ship you left Earth in.
We've never done that. Dedicated lunar landers have been the only way we ever landed. Lunar-Orbital-Rendezvous is how we actually managed to land on the moon - and it meant landing in a dedicated lander with just enough fuel to get down and back into lunar orbit. The only difference is, in the past, we carried the lander along with the main ship.
Basic appollo process: Saturn 5 multi-stage rocker lifts payload into orbit. Payload consists of Command Module and Lunar Lander. Command Module has nice big fuel tank, and a nice vaccuum rocket engine. Lunar lander is removed from payload holder. Command Module flips over backwards and docks with the lunar lander. Command module lifts orbit to intersect the moon, carries lunar lander along Command module burns retrograde until captured into lunar orbit. Command module lowers orbit to low-lunar-orbit. Two astronaughts transfer to lunar lander. One remains on command module. Lunar lander undocks and lands (later models included the lunar rover) Astronauts do stuff. Lunar lander launches into low lunar orbit Lunar lander rendezvous with command module Lunar lander docks with command module Astronauts transfer back to command module. Command Module undocks from lunar lander. Lunar lander is discarded. Command module burns prograde until it escape lunar orbit to return to earth orbit (returning is cheaper than going since you don't need a capture burn when your target is the same sphere of influence as the body you're escaping from is in). Lower periapse into atmo. Discard engines and fuel tanks. Pod uses airbraking and parachutes to land.
It's a pretty complex set of steps. The only change YOU'VE made is to have the lunar lander waiting near the moon rather than cart it along. This does make the command-module cheaper to launch - but since you had to launch the lander at some point, it still costs the same (more actually). It can be efficient if that lander is reusable - since now the energy to get it there the first time benefits multiple trips - but this means you need to be able to refuel it up there, which adds it's own costs.
That's a common mistake - no, it doesn't work that way - because objects in space are under influence of gravity - and that slows you down. More-over to actually go to another planet you can't just fly straight, you're going from one moving object to another, across a space-time curved by gravity.
You need to raise your velocity until it's high enough to escape earth's sphere of influence (simplified) - that's a minimum, and do it such that your subsequent orbit around the sun will intersect the orbit of mars AT A TIME WHEN MARS IS AT THE SAME PLACE IN IT'S ORBIT.
That means you need to depart at a good time (when the subsequent solar orbit part is cheapest in fuel). Finally when you are crossing Mars' orbit you will be at an escaping velocity - so you have to slow down enough to get capture, and you have to do that BEFORE you can escape. That's a few hours at most.
You simply cannot take too long thrusting up and down if you are actually doing space travel. You need to reach your goal speeds in reasonable timeframes. That's one reason we only really use Ion thrusters on small probes - they just put out too little thrust. Sure they are fuel efficient but with such little thrust moving anything heavier into an interplanetary orbit will become a nightmare. They are ideal for orbital maneuvers around the same planetary body however - you can take as long as you want with those. Even if the thrust for the manuever would take longer than your orbital period - you can just split it up into multiple burns, and each time you get to the right point in the orbit you burn a bit more and gradually raise/lower the other end of the orbit as needed.
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Thats how you would think it works eh ? Sadly no. Any chemical dumped any-old-how is legal unless specifically forbidden by a law or regulation. And the EPA is only allowed to make such regulations after obtaining scientiffic evidence of harm - even then outright bans are reserved for only the most severe 'no safe dosage exists' stuff like lead - others they can only limit how much you are allowed to dump, or how you are required to dispose of it. Sadly even this pro-business, anti-citizen system is still deemed to much of a regulatory 'burden' by the wealthy donors of republican representatives.
So they kick back like mad. We had proof all lead is deadly in 1955. We had proof, undeniable physical proof that the natural lead level of the atmosphere is zero - from the greatest expert on lead detection in the world - in 1960. We finally managed to get a law against it in 1985. How many millions of people died to safe oil companies a few pennies per tonne ?
And yet those pennies are so sorely missed that they will do anything they can to gutt the EPA even further.
This bill has no intention of getting anything published - the EPA already publishes everything it is legally allowed to. This bill is written to make the information they cannot publish unusable and effectively legalize every known people killer when the evidence that it killed people is their private medical data.
Thos bill is nothing but a blatant attempt to make it legal for rich people to pour arsenic in your drinking water. But people do nlot like it when governments let rich people do things which would get you and me the (fulle deserved) death penalty on a terrorism charge... so they have to use underhanded tricks like pretending its about scientific integrity. Lamar Smith is the creationist moron who took a snowball to congress and claimed it disproves climate science. The man does not give a fuck about science - on the contrary he despises science and scientists. If he wanted to defend the scientiffic method he would first have to learn what it is. He thinks it means 'read the bible'. Simce the bible does not mention hexavalent chromium it cannot possibly be a real bad thing ?
They aren't. They are interested in rendering it unusable in order to castrate the EPA.
They want to poison people for money, so they want to deprive the EPA of the evidence that the poison is poisonous.
The court system is reactive and expensive. Two things that make it completely fucking useless for the topic.
>Why prey tell would you think it is appropriate for the Federal EPA to base a ruling one a "one-time event", wouldn't regulating a "one-time event" after the event be an oxymoron?
Only if the "one time event" had natural causes. If it was man-made then, by definition, it can happen again - and the PERFECT time to make a law against a bad thing is when it's only happened once so far. That's how you KEEP it a one-time-event.
>If it is a one-time event and there is no physical evidence, just people's write-ups of it, that shouldn't be enough for the EPA to justify rules.
Of course there is physical evidence of the event. But the impact on the victims - that evidence is in their bodies, what other evidence could possibly exist ? Do you deny that physical harm to a person is evidence that something can harm them ? And what if the person has since died ? Does the event stop having happened because the evidence was cremated ?
>It is indeed scientific data, it is simply too weak to support scientific conclusions, let alone rules or laws. Hence the law.
The law has, always had, and always MUST have a lower standard than science - because unlike science there IS such a thing as a legal truth. There's no such thing as a scientific truth. If it would have been good enough to cite in a court of law as evidence of harm, it's scientific evidence enough for a law. If actionable harm has been caused by something, that's evidence enough to make a preventative law and avert future harm.
There can just about never be such a thing as overreach here. These laws prevent cold-blooded, brutal murder of people who have ZERO opportunity to defend themselves. The single most critical reason for having any government at all - is to have laws of the kind the EPA enforces.
How exactly do you "independently reproduce" the data on a one-time event ? Most of this data is private medical data gathered under extremely specific situation after specific one-time events - to determine whether or not those events did harm and should be prevented in future.
There is no way to reproduce most of this data without flagrantly violating scientific and medical ethics anyway. "Patient had X level of lead in his blood, and showed symptoms Y and Z" is valid scientific data. But it's not reproducible because PUTTING X level of lead in somebody else's blood is a fucking crime against humanity !
The EPA has never kept a secret about a single piece of science it has used.
But, on occasion, they have used science that is kept secret by something else, like the law. Private medical data for example - can be the most reliable scientific data there is for determining polution damage - but it is also illegal to publish it publicly.
The republicans have been pushing versions of this bill for years and years - and it has NOTHING to do with science, it's about trying to destroy the EPA because (annoyingly) EPA regulations cost money from their rich friends. NOT dumping shit in your drinking water is more expensive than dumping it there.
Every time this bill has been proposed every major science organisation and scientist in the USA has opposed it. You'd think if it were 'good for science' then the scientists (remember most of them have nothing professionally to do with the EPA) would be cheering - not complaining !
They complain - because what the bill CLAIMS to do and what it is nakedly INTENT on doing have nothing in common with each other.
This bill is really very simple: it's Lamar Smith sucking off the Koch brothers, which is basically what he does for a living.
Why would I need to "accept" a point I never argued AGAINST ? The fact is that whether it is better to bring the gas closer and build a nearby generator or build a generator near the gas and run a long line doesn't have ONE answer. It depends entirely on the specifics of the situation.
What's the terain like between the gas and the town ? It's generally easier and cheaper to run a line over a mountain than a pipe. How far apart are they ? Too far and a pipeline will beat a transmission line every time.
And that has been my point all along. Sometimes - it will be better to run a line, sometimes it will be better to lay a pipe - and sometimes it will be better to send the gas somewhere else and use some other resource to service this particular town.
The west-east gas-pipeline is over 4000km. That's rather more than 2,385km - in fact it's nearly twice as much. That pipeline is currently being extended -when phase 2 is completed it will be close to 9000km long. There are two more phases planned after that, but their exact end-points haven't been finalized so no idea how much longer it would be. But even if they just add as much as phase II does, that would bring us to over 15000km
Oh what a pity that apparently no engineers in China had heard of HVDC...
Like I said- "long" is relative. 2,385km is, indeed, seriously long for a powerline. But it's really not impressive next to what we can do with gas lines.
>As coal declines and wind power ramps up, those numbers will trade places.
Unlikely. Firstly we're not replacing all coal with wind, solar makes up more of the replacement than wind does. Secondly wind numbers for new installations are going down as more recent designs have been improved to be safer for birds (it makes economic sense because killing birds also damages the expensive wind generators which is costly), there's no reason to assume this trend won't continue (meanwhile no attempt was ever made to reduce the numbers for coal). Eventually coal numbers may reach zero if we phase it out entirely, and wind will certainly go up from where it is - but it's highly unlikely that it will ever get anywhere near the number that coal has now. So "trade places" is not even slightly an accurate description.
>I am saying that if you stand under a turbine in an area where birds are flying near the blades, you'll see birds that were killed by it lying on the ground.
And if you stand in a place where humans have settled and cats are not prohibited - you will find birds killed by cats. More often actually. I never said this wasn't a factor, it is, and it's a factor that engineers are putting active resources into mitigating it's just not nearly as big a factor as some people would have us believe.
>Over time, we'll cull the species that can't avoid the blades and deaths will decline
Species ? Probably not - but we will likely cull the individuals who are least good at avoiding moving obstacles like that which, on top of the aforementioned engineering efforts will bring numbers down further. Excessive death by any human activity, if not enough to bring about extinction causes adaptation - often rapidly. As it stands there is a growing number of African elephants being born without tusks. 300 years of the biggest tuskers getting hunted first has been seriously favoring the smaller-toothed ones for having babies. This is rapid evolution due to a massive pressure on the population (elephant numbers today are well under 1000th of what they were 300 years ago). Those with no tusks at all probably rarely procreated at all in the past, making it a rare mutation, but since humans started getting serious about ivory hunting that mutation became a major life-prolonger, and so got to be spread over a much larger percentage of each subsequent generation - while the overall SIZE of each subsequent generation shrank on the same timeline. So soon something that was a one in a million rarity can come to be 20% or more of the (now much smaller) total.
I would put that on par with companies who fund say research into better routing protocols. RedHat didn't create the linux kernel - or the commons environment around it, it was already there, and they could then profit from contributing to it's advancement. Other companies like IBM did the same.
But it started outside of private enterprise as a non-profit endeavor. At the time he started it Linus was a student in Finnland, a country where studies are entirely free, arguably then - since his study costs was born by the public freeing him up to be able to put resources into his pet project - it was actually started with (some) public funding by a private non-profit. But public funding, like I said, need not mean "state" funding. A kickstarter for a non-profit "all can use it" project would also be "publicly" funded - but may have no government involvement at all.
For it to become a technological commons on which a widespread range of companies can profit and compete even as they collaborate in it's improvement as Linux or the Internet has become - you need a non-profit starting point to establish a commons worth investing in without owning.
I made no attacks whatsoever, and there was certainly nothing personal about my speculating about what kind of conditions may justify the cost factors for building a lossless transmission system. It was just idle speculation and it, like the mention of superconductors, was not my key point -just a tangential thought I found interesting.
Yes, I'm aware that the losses for HVDC is significantly less than for AC. I'm also aware that a gas-pipeline is not actually lossless since it costs energy to run the pumps and the longer the pipeline the more energy you have to spend moving the gas around. In the vast majority of cases (indeed all the situations I can imagine) though, the losses on the latter are hugely smaller than on the former.
We do build long-range power-lines. The Cabora-Bassa line I mentioned does exist, and it's quite long. As in - you need an airplane to get from one end to the other in under a week long. But it's a fraction of the length of some of the gas pipelines out there. We build those things to connect different CONTINENTS to each other. I'm not aware of a single transcontinental power-transmission line anywhere in the world, let alone an intercontinental one.
"Long" is a relative term - what is "long" in a "long range power line" is really "not very long at all" in the world of gas pipelines.
Actually I was quoting my dad... an engineer who designs power grids for a living.
Pretending HVDC is some magic bullet that makes long range transmission a non issue is just silly. Like all engineering problems power grid design is a taking series of trade offs and constructing the solution which solves the specific scenario in the most efficient and economical way. Whether that is long range or local, ac or dc, solar or gas or coal or wind, overhead or underground... these questions never have one right answer. The best answer for this grid will be a unique combination of answers to those and other questions. Finding the best combination of answers for a particular location is what they pay him the big bucks for.
>Kill birds
That one is such bullshit. The high estimate for birds killed by wind power is about 290-thousand a year - or a thousand times less than the number of birds killed by cats. And, for coal the high estimate is 790-million a year. Coal kills more birds than any other power generation technology - and it beats out wind 30 times over.
>gobble up real-estate and cover it with semi-toxic panels for solar
This concern is real, but largely overblown - considering the vast majority of solar real estate is otherwise useless (to humans or the environment) real estate like rooftops.
>all forms of electricity production have their prices.
True but these prices are not all the same - in fact they aren't even similar.
You get the same outcome if you look at immediate human deathtolls - coal is orders of magnitude higher than anything else, including nuclear. Coal kills millions of people every year. And even if you exclude mining and pollution deaths - just the deaths in coal construction outnumber the total deathtoll from all nuclear accidents ever several times over.
Some Trump cabinet member tried to sell that argument on the radio yesterday too - that no energy is really clean so we may as well use dirty coal.But it's a bullshit argument. It's like saying "No food is free so we may as well all eat caviar".
Nuclear suffers from being huge. Huge is bad. Megaprojects almost always end up being way over-budget and even further over deadline. This is a problem in all mega-project construction and Nuclear falls into that category. Coal sometimes as well - and when it does those plants also, always, way over budget and deadline. Part of the problem is that the sheer scale of the projects make accurate budgeting and planning almost impossible. There's just so much room for mistakes, errors and unexpected events that it's impossible to foresee them all, or even estimate how much fudge factor build in for them. The other is that these things take so long - the longer a project takes the more chance there is for changes way outside it to actually impact it (things like new laws getting passed).
There's the fact that megaprojects must inevitably demand mega-management teams - so you end up with all the worst problems of burocracy, whether they be government or corporate (or most commonly both) which further adds to the mix. You have endless opportunities for skimming and corruption and kickbacks - and that adds both cost and time. You have a massive work-force - which makes you particularly sensitive to labour market fluctuations.
You could do what Dubai did prepping for the soccer world cup and kill 1400 people a year by just not bothering to make the construction work safe (which is what happens when you have lax regulations ) but you would STILL be overbudget and over-time (as they were).
Ultimately - at the scale where nuclear builds have to operate - these things will always be a problem. It's a major downside of anything that has to be done at that scale.
And yes, it's subject to a lot of regulation - megaprojects usually are - because they have to be. Where the regulation is absent they are STILL always late and overbudget - they just kill a lot more people, so you may as well have the regulation.
What ? You think DC lines don't have losses ?
DC lines are cheaper because they need less wires - you can use the ground as a return wire, and a lighter, smaller cable can carry power over the same distance. There's a downside though - anything generator by a dynamo (that's basically everything except solar) generates AC. So to use DC you have to build rectifiers on one end and then put an alternator on the other end to make it useful to all the AC based tech you want to power. That adds a (huge) cost, so HVDC only makes sense over long enough distances that the savings in cabling exceed the new costs in conversion. HVDC isn't that new anyway. The line between the Cabora-Bassa hydropower station in Mozambique and Johannesburg in South Africa is an HVDC line and that was built in the 1990s.
But HVDC still has losses because the main cause of losses is the fact that conductors have resistance. We're a LONG way from superconductors that are cheap enough to build lossless long-range powerlines out off. Just the cooling for current ones would make it prohibitively expensive. Frankly it's unlikely that will ever happen - we've had a hundred years of designing grids around mostly using relatively nearby power sources. The only way it would make sense to go build a line like that is if you discovered some kind of power generator that produced enough power for the whole world at near-zero cost, but it only worked in one place (yeah, I'm not even going to guess what that might be).
Gas pipelines don't suffer transmission losses.
Anything ? No. Not at all.
But some things ? Yes.
And there is a class in between which is could be done either way but turns out better when it is done with public funding.
Farming food ? Historically government is bad at this.
Building roads ? Historically government has been the best way to do this, toll roads only work in certain very narrow conditions. And we all benefit when everybody can use the road without paying for use.
The internet fits in that middle group. Lots of large private networks were built around the same time - but they didn't take off like the internet. The internet did exactly because it LACKED an owner. The web followed a similar pattern. It's been said that in the early 1990s every company was wondering "How can I make the web mine" while Tim Berners-Lee was asking "How can I make the web yours". Designing the technology was not the hard part, in fact some of those large privately owned networks had technology that was, arguably, far more advanced than the internet technology at the time. Yet they didn't become the internet - because to BE an internet you needed a hands-off approach, and a willingness to let everybody use it and evolve it and expand it in all sorts of ways without trying to make money out of them all. A central controller or owner would have prevented it from succeeding. The internet was the exact OPPOSITE of a tragedy of the commons - it was a technology that couldn't happen UNLESS it was a commons.
You need some sort of public funding to establish a commons - that may or may not involve a government but it has to be public and devoid of profit motive.
Profit-seeking companies can make use of the commons AFTER it's established (and provided it's either designed or managed in such a way that they cannot in the process take control of all of it) - but they cannot establish it. Well maybe they could - but they never would, there's no visible way to profit from it.
Nowhere is government doing any less - it's subsidizing a service for the poor same as before. It's just made it MUCH harder for new providers to offer the subsidized service.
This is a flagrant attempt to use government bureaucracy to protect entrenched businesses by making it much harder for new companies to compete. This is, in fact, a republican government doing the EXACT thing it always accuses democrats of doing. Turns out you can do it just as easily by repealing regulations as by creating them - all you have to do is ensure you end up with a situation where the burdens involved in entering a market is massive, and you give a huge bonus to those already in there.
When a regulation ENSURES poor people also gets service, or makes sure your water is drinkable - then the trade-off is worthwhile. When it actually REDUCES the availability of services to the poor (like this does) then you have all the usual problems of deregulation (the reasons democrats and progressives tend to oppose it) but you don't EVEN get the supposed benefits of more competition in the market.
Basically - Pai has, once again, found a way to screw Americans with the worst of all worlds as an outcome. The problem with Ajit Pai is, he is just as evil as anybody else Trump has appointed - but unlike the rest of them, he is actually competent. He doesn't just have evil ideas, he is capable of executing them.
Actually - this could be somewhat valuable to the massive projects running right now to archive government science data in case the current administration decides to purge any of it.
this site just broke the record for "fastest I've ever bookmarked anything".
If you had bothered to read the thread you would find that I rather fully addressed your false argument already, I don't feel like repeating myself. I'll just summarize. No rights of consequence are lost, none whatsoever.
Well let's see - by the time Obama was first elected Iraq had already cost an estimated 4 Trillion dollars - that would fund NASA's wildest dreams for decades.
That was not the final bill - after all Iraq didn't end the day Obama took the oath. You wanna take a guess at what Afghanistan has cost by now ?
>You wouldn't have to land on the Moon with the same ship you left Earth in.
We've never done that. Dedicated lunar landers have been the only way we ever landed. Lunar-Orbital-Rendezvous is how we actually managed to land on the moon - and it meant landing in a dedicated lander with just enough fuel to get down and back into lunar orbit. The only difference is, in the past, we carried the lander along with the main ship.
Basic appollo process:
Saturn 5 multi-stage rocker lifts payload into orbit. Payload consists of Command Module and Lunar Lander.
Command Module has nice big fuel tank, and a nice vaccuum rocket engine.
Lunar lander is removed from payload holder.
Command Module flips over backwards and docks with the lunar lander.
Command module lifts orbit to intersect the moon, carries lunar lander along
Command module burns retrograde until captured into lunar orbit.
Command module lowers orbit to low-lunar-orbit.
Two astronaughts transfer to lunar lander. One remains on command module.
Lunar lander undocks and lands (later models included the lunar rover)
Astronauts do stuff.
Lunar lander launches into low lunar orbit
Lunar lander rendezvous with command module
Lunar lander docks with command module
Astronauts transfer back to command module.
Command Module undocks from lunar lander.
Lunar lander is discarded.
Command module burns prograde until it escape lunar orbit to return to earth orbit (returning is cheaper than going since you don't need a capture burn when your target is the same sphere of influence as the body you're escaping from is in).
Lower periapse into atmo.
Discard engines and fuel tanks.
Pod uses airbraking and parachutes to land.
It's a pretty complex set of steps. The only change YOU'VE made is to have the lunar lander waiting near the moon rather than cart it along. This does make the command-module cheaper to launch - but since you had to launch the lander at some point, it still costs the same (more actually). It can be efficient if that lander is reusable - since now the energy to get it there the first time benefits multiple trips - but this means you need to be able to refuel it up there, which adds it's own costs.
That's a common mistake - no, it doesn't work that way - because objects in space are under influence of gravity - and that slows you down. More-over to actually go to another planet you can't just fly straight, you're going from one moving object to another, across a space-time curved by gravity.
You need to raise your velocity until it's high enough to escape earth's sphere of influence (simplified) - that's a minimum, and do it such that your subsequent orbit around the sun will intersect the orbit of mars AT A TIME WHEN MARS IS AT THE SAME PLACE IN IT'S ORBIT.
That means you need to depart at a good time (when the subsequent solar orbit part is cheapest in fuel). Finally when you are crossing Mars' orbit you will be at an escaping velocity - so you have to slow down enough to get capture, and you have to do that BEFORE you can escape. That's a few hours at most.
You simply cannot take too long thrusting up and down if you are actually doing space travel. You need to reach your goal speeds in reasonable timeframes.
That's one reason we only really use Ion thrusters on small probes - they just put out too little thrust. Sure they are fuel efficient but with such little thrust moving anything heavier into an interplanetary orbit will become a nightmare. They are ideal for orbital maneuvers around the same planetary body however - you can take as long as you want with those. Even if the thrust for the manuever would take longer than your orbital period - you can just split it up into multiple burns, and each time you get to the right point in the orbit you burn a bit more and gradually raise/lower the other end of the orbit as needed.