And I presume they have a mode that sheds the heat outside- this loses the CHP part of the equation
My argument is that, given when peaking is needed, this will be the primary mode of operation. Meaning the heat side -- the only advantage to putting it in homes -- turns from a benefit to a cost.
It's burning natural gas, so it's easy to be clean.
So are standard peakers, but they benefit from much greater efficiencies of scale.
raditional electricity generation wastes 2/3 of the input energy as "waste" heat; these don't (as long as they put in 80+% of their hours during heating season).
Which they won't.
The pure economics of adding the generator are kind of blah
There are some serious problems with this home generation concept.
1) When is extra peaking most in demand? In the middle of the day in July, when everyone's AC comes on. How much home heating is generally needed in the middle of the day in July when everyone's AC comes on? Not bloody much. But you're going to have the full heat output of a car engine pumping into your house; there's no way water heating alone will justify that.
2) Instead of spending the capital costs to build a couple really big peakers, they're going be building millions of tiny individual peakers, each with their own pollution controls? I can't imagine that would be even *remotely* cost-competitive. Or as clean.
Here's an excellent article on one of the more famous tree-spiking injuries. And remember while reading this that it's written by an environmentalist who *opposes* the practice of tree spiking. Some excerpts:
-----------
L-P has never been known to spend too much time maintaining equipment or worrying about worker safety. But in the weeks preceding the tree spiking incident, conditions had gotten worse than usual. The bandsaw blade was wobbling when it ran, and cracks had begun to appear in it. But when George and other workers complained, Edwards shined them on, saying the new blades were not in yet, and they would have to ma1ke do. "That blade was getting so bad," said George, "That I almost didn't go to work that day."...
The next thing he knew, George was lying on the floor covered with his own blood. "I knew I was dying. And all I could think about was Dick Edwards, and all the shit he gave me when I complained about the saw. I tried to get up, but they pushed me back down. I tried to beckon to Edwards so he would come close enough for me to get my hands around his throat in a death grip. If I had to die, I wanted to take that bastard with me."...
LP didn't call the press right away, but when they did they had a field day. "Tree Spiking Terrorism," screamed the headline in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. And even though there was no evidence that Earth First! was involved, the Eureka Times-Standard proclaimed, Earth First! Blamed for Worker's Injuries." Mendocino County Sheriff Shea put out a widely quoted press release that was almost gleeful in its condemnation.
"This heinous and vicious criminal act is a felony offense, punishable by imprisonment in State Prison for up to three years," he wrote, "Still undetermined in the investigation is the motive of the suspect or suspects, to deter logging operations or inflict great bodily injury and death upon lumber processing personnel," Even Louisiana-Pacific President Harry Merlo got into the fray, blaming "terrorism in the name of environmental goals" for George's injury.
Meanwhile, George and Laurie Alexander had a different take on the incident. "I'm against tree spiking," George told the press from his hospital bed. "But I don't like clearcutting either." Laurie also tried to include L-P in the list of culprits. "I hate L-P," she told me. "I like trees." But the press wouldn't print a word Laurie said, and George's comments about mill safety and clearcutting were mentioned in only one news article, by Eric Brazil of the San Francisco Examiner....
No matter what you think of LP's forest practices, this much should be clear: George Alexander is not the enemy. He has no say over his bosses' policies, either in or out of the mill. I have heard Earth First!ers say that doesn't matter, he shouldn't be working at an LP mill. Well, I shouldn't be driving a car either, but that doesn't make it okay to put a bomb in it.
After George refused to go on tour denouncing us, he was forced to return to work at L-P before his injuries even healed. His and Laurie's baby was about to be born, he needed money, and there were not many jobs where he and his family live. George got worker's compensation for the time he was off work, but LP didn't offer him a cent for the trauma and hardship he suffered. They made a big public show of putting up a $20,000-dollar reward for the information leading to the conviction of the spiker, but George Alexander had to file a lawsuit against Louisiana Pacific to get anything at all. And while the company was crying crocodile tears over his injuries in public, in private they were fighting him tooth and nail over his damage claim. He ended up with just $9,000 and an involuntary transfer to night shift. "They used my name all over the country," George told me. "Then they laid me off when the mill closed down."
You said it yourself. People who deliberately go out of their way not to hurt anyone should not be lumped in with people who crash planes into skyscrapers. They're both criminals, but the latter is in an entirely different league of Evil.
As for the ELF: Come on, guys, if you're going to break the law and destroy stuff, at least base your actions on science, not pseudoscience. I might sympathize somewhat if you all blew up something that was causing *actual* environmental degradation. All you did was annoy AM radio listeners.
Nonsense; power plants get phased out all the time. New Source Review has helped ensure that (random example), but even before it, it still happened all the time. Old plants get progressively more expensive to operate. Once all of the plant's steel is practically corroded through, it's cheaper just to scrap the plant and build a new one.
There simply hasn't been a new oil refinery built in the US in DECADES, despite numerous failures due to age, safety and environmental issues, immense profit for oil companies, and an endless cycle of refining capacity shortages in the US driving prices ever higher.
You're barking up the wrong tree. My father is the CEO of one of the US's largest refiners. They're nearly done with expanding one of their refineries to be the largest in the US. The main reason there haven't been new refineries is that it's cheaper just to expand their existing ones. A refinery is very unlike a power plant. There's a huge number of different units all feeding to each other. Individual units get shuttered all the time, they're scrapped for metal/parts, and the space gets reused.
Absolutely not. Wind is already almost cost-competitive with coal (there are a few places where it's cheaper than coal already even without the feed-in). 30 years ago, wind was about 90 cents per kilowatt hour. The tech keeps improving; heck, a good chunk of recent costs were simply due to a turbine and tower production shortfall. Now, wind can't make up more than about 30% of the grid without either generator backup or long-term storage (such as large hydro reservoirs, pumped or standard). But that'd still be 30% of the grid.
EGS works all over the country. Do a google image search for the following: geothermal potential
However, if this scales up:
I'd bet on ten to one odds that won't be more cost-effective than just straight solar-thermal.
I see no reason why it couldn't be expanded, however. They're starting small, and that's fine, but it would seem like the upper bound is to have solar provide 100% of the power on sunny days (during peak hours), and coal provide the rest. Sort of like SEGS in California, which provides 90% with solar and the other 10% with natural gas.
Sometimes insisting on that last 20% means sacrificing the other 80%.
We can get the 20% later. In time these plants will be phased out, and by then, we should have a better long-distance transmission grid and cheaper power storage. And, in fact, that 80%-ish reduction in coal that this tech could bring about is actually a bigger difference than it may seem, because by reducing coal demand, we'll begin phasing out subbitumenous coal and lignite (the dirtier kinds). In 15-20 years, I hope to see fossil fuels mainly taking up a "reserve" power role, making up for shortfalls in renewables, rather than being a primary generation mechanism in their own right.
And, FYI, IMHO, hydroelectric power is anything but green (moreso in some places than others, mind you). It's utterly devastated the Colorado River ecosystem. Tidal can also be really problematic. I am a fan of solar, wind, and geo, though.
Coal doesn't have to be produced by MTR. One can both object to MTR and support reducing the coal consumption of our existing plants. It's not economically realistic to phase out all of our existing coal plants, but if we can eliminate 4/5ths of their coal consumption, that'd be a huge victory.
Why wouldn't environmentalists be happy with this? I consider myself one and think this is great news. Too many people focus on 100% solutions. You don't need to eliminate 100% of coal in the short term. Reducing coal consumption by 80% or so by having solar provide heat during peak hours (daytime) would still be a huge benefit.
Agreed; this is ridiculous. Less range than your average e-bike and more expensive than your average e-bike. Who would buy this? Heck, you could buy a 60-70mph, 35-60 mile range electric motorcycle for just a few $k more.
My concerns about this product is that flash degrades per write cycle, so the smaller the disk you have, the faster you wear through it. Since this sound like just a small buffer, I'd have concerns about it having a short lifespan.
Quite true, although without any animal products whatsoever, you'll need to farm bacteria for B12. It's the only dietary nutrient that is generally impossible for a vegan to get in sufficient quantities without supplement.
When I formed my business and needed to establish patent protection around my lead product, my first instinct was to hire a lawyer. However, my father advised me to contact the USPTO for their input on whether they thought it necessary first. So I called their help line and asked them whether it would be wise to hire an attorney rather than do it myself. Their response was, basically (to paraphrase), "Duh! This is a complex legal matter!"
As for carbon, there is actually a process now that'll take electricity and CO2 and produce CO and O using electricity and a semiconductor. You can take the CO and use it as feedstock to get more carbon, or combine it with hydrogen and get diesel fuel.
Not sure which process you're referring to. It seems the most likely to me that at least one which will be done is the Sabatier process, which involves CO2 + 4H2 = CH4 + 2 H2O on an alumina catalyst. NASA is already investigating its use for CO2 scrubbing in space. But no matter what reaction you use, it takes a lot of energy. And your CO2 must first be concentrated, which means a compressor, and compressors like to break (I'm sure the dust will be no help to that!). And building a new one on Mars will be no trivial task.
I was worried about Nitrogen, but we may be in luck. Analysis of the mars lander showed perchlorate salts, which may include ammonium perchlorate, which can be easily processed into oxygen, nitrogen, and water by simply adding heat.
May. But ammonium is just one possible cation out of many. We've found lots of other cations on mars so far, but as of yet, no ammonium. Hopefully we will...
I do agree, however, that any tech we develop is likely to have ramifications back at home. If there's one thing that I think the history of technology has made quite clear, it's that disruptions in technological paradigms tend to have much broader ramifications than just what they were designed for. For a modern example, the obvious choice is the computer; few ever dreamed of the vast range of applications computer technology would lead to. Without "revolutions", technology tends to stagnate onto incremental improvements in known processes. Mars' unusual abundances and scarcities may necessitate significant research into radically different production processes and substitute materials, which in turn could have those sort of desirable ripple effects back here on Earth. Hopefully.
A real concern on Mars is "missing elements". We know there's ample iron, silicon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, manganese, magnesium, titanium, calcium, and a number of trace elements at the surface, for example (recovery processes will have varying degrees of complexities, consumable parts, and imported feedstocks). But what about nitrogen? Or fluorine? For example, right now, to get nitrogen on Mars, we'd have to extract the 2.7% from the atmosphere that's 1% as dense as ours -- not exactly easy or low energy. And we have *no* source of fluorine right now (it's very likely there, but who knows where), which is -- among other things -- needed to refine aluminum energy-and-cost-effectively (even if you import all of your cryolite, a small amount still gets consumed in the process), as well as to make teflon coatings that are so critical to so many things. Oh, and to refine uranium, too. We know of no realistic carbon sources on Mars apart from the 1%-as-dense-as-ours atmosphere (carbon being needed for bloody everything, including steel smelting and consumable anode production for aluminum), and that's locked up in CO2, so getting carbon in a workable form for most other process feedstocks is going to involve a lot of compression, heat management, and Sabatier synthesis (including an energy-intense hydrogen feedstock) for low volume production. It's really freaking daunting, the more you think about it. One can hope that we find better local feedstocks, but if not... ugh.
And just ignoring resource... Mars is a nasty environment to be making anything. You have low ability to lose heat and electrostatic dust that likes to cling to everything (including motors and seals). And places like steel foundries are not exactly tame environs. And then you need casting houses, metal shops, etc all suitable for the martian environment. It's a huge infrastructure investment, esp. when you consider that they'll have to be largely robotic, which means a *lot* of R&D money.
There's just so much you need. You need power (nuclear or solar -- both daunting, for the scale that is needed). You need steel (and its associated alloying agents and fluxing agents -- including calcite), aluminum, probably titanium, probably copper, probably nickel, probably calcium, silicon (in the long term), many metal alloys, a wide variety of ceramics (for transformer cores, radiation-hardened electronics components, magnets, capacitors, resistors, varistors, abrasives, etc); plastics (a freaking huge range of them, with widely varying properties that often prevent substitution -- you need an entire petrochemical industry because you can't, say, substitute PVC for teflon or whatnot), as well as widely varying part production processes (for a random example, some plastic fibers are reeled up from a sulfuric acid bath) and plastic additives and other non-hydrocarbon feedstocks (such as various acids); epoxies; graphite; clothing (both indoor and pressure/heated outdoor); CO2 scrubbers; lubricants; hydraulic fluids; solvents; dyes; abrasives; food; personal items; medications; and on and on and on. Every time you delve deeper into any single issue, the more you find it's a medusa with its tentacles reaching into everything else.
So yes, there's much that can be done locally, but there are going to be huge import chains from Earth for a long, long time. And one can only *hope* that they'll be able to find local deposits of everything that they need in the long run, and that they don't have to transport them halfway around the planet.
Absolutely correct. However, do you know how many industrial chemicals we need to sustain modern life even here on Earth, let alone in a pressure-and-life-support-required environment of Mars? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands.
And note that I didn't even go into part production -- just raw materials.
Building a self-sustaining colony on Mars is certainly achievable. But the technological effort required is incredibly daunting. I don't expect any Mars colony to be physically capable of cutting the tether to Earth within many hundreds of years. What I would expect, if a *serious* effort toward colonization is achieved, is for new industrial processes to keep coming online, with harder-to-get feedstocks and parts shipped from Earth. Being 100% self sustaining may not be an achievable goal during the next century, but, say, 90% sustainable by mass could probably be done. Albeit at *huge* cost...
You didn't do what I stated. Tracking *everything back*, and everything needed to make that, and so forth. Let's just say, for example, you needed to make a replacement teflon seal. Let's go with a greatly oversimplified version. You first need a fluorspar mine. The fluorspar enters a crusher. It can then optionally undergo dense material separation (the ore is poured into a substance slightly denser than fluorspar's 1.4 g/cm^3 density, so it floats to the top; on Mars, this would probably best be organic farm-produced liquids, such as oils, or perhaps dense petroleum compounds). It then goes to a ball mill where it is crushed to a fine powder, and mixed into a slurry. Then any number of the following can happen: the slurry can be slowly pumped upwards in a jig; the lighter materials like fluorspar make it to the top more readily than the heavier contaminants. The slurry can go on to a shaking table - an expanse with riffles parallel to the flow which vibrates; the heavy minerals get deposited on earlier riffles (the vibration encourages them to move of to the side).
After the fluorspar is concentrated by any number of the above, it is mixed with a slight excess of 93-99% sulfuric acid in a kiln in a continuous process. HF gas is released, leaving tailings of silica, carbon, sulfur, calcium carbonate, phosphorus pentoxide, and a host of other tailings generally not worth recovering mixed in with bulk fluorogypsum.
Gaseous HF is condensed enough to liquify it to remove impurities such as SO2 and SiF4, which remain gasseous. The condensed HF is 99.98% pure. The exhaust gasses, which still contain some HF, are mixed with sulfuric acid in an absorption column. The sulfuric acid is then mixed back in with the original process stream in another absorption column. This concentrates the fluorosilic acid and precipitates silica, which can then be removed (and if desired, purified and used in other processes).
An alternative production route to HF is through using byproduct fluorosilicic acid, using a process developed by Kvaemer Process Technology AG of Switzerland. The fluorosilicic acid is concentrated and reacted with concentrated sulfuric acid to produce a mixture of SiF4, HF and H2SO4. This is fed into the same concentration/scrubbing system described above.
In either method, the concentration of the recirculating sulfuric acid must be maintained. Integration with the sulfuric acid production process would be nice to this effect.
Note that hydrofluoric acid is best stored in plastic or teflon-coated containers. It has varying degrees of compatabilities with metals (lead works reasonably well), but famously eats through glass despite being a weak acid (the fluorine ion is more problematic than the hydrogen ion). In addition to this, all general concentrated acid storage methods should apply.
Now we need sulfuric acid.
Sulfuric acid is a fundamental industrial chemical. While many methods have been discovered throughout the ages for sulfuric acid production, one of the most promising for Mars is "relatively" simple. Iron sulfates are heated in the presence of oxygen and steam. The sulfates absorb progressively more oxygen, before finally releasing a sulfur trioxide and leaving behind iron oxide. The sulfur trioxide combines with the steam and enters a condenser lined with many radiators/heat exchangers, where it precipitates out as concentrated sulfuric acid. The input iron sulfates are cycled through in a batch process, with new sulfates added into the reaction chamber at the top and hot iron oxide removed from the base (which can then be sent on to steel production).
Potentially, raw, highly sulfur-rich iron ore could be ground in a ball mill, dumped into the reaction chamber, and baked; while some heat would be wasted heating non-sulfates, it would pass straight into steel production from there, utilizing the gained heat. Note that the entire system, from the moment that the ore enters the reacti
Extremely well put. There's little on Mars to bootstrap a civilization with. Back in the pioneer days, you could show up with nothing more than the clothes on your back, a hatchet, a musket, a small chunk of lead, and a shot mold (plus a little food and water to keep you going until you got settled). Earlier human settlers didn't even bring such modern weaponry with them and did just fine, knapping knives and spearpoints and arrowheads.
That sort of thing doesn't work on Mars. Colonists will be entirely dependent on modern technology to merely keep the things that keep them alive running. Try tracing back random pieces of modern technology to all of their component parts/materials, and all of those's component parts/materials, and so forth, with the components needed for manufacturing/refining along the way, and if any of those are consumable, trace those back. The challenge of building a colony is ridiculously daunting. This wouldn't be a colony; it's going to be a base. A cramped life support shelter with more and more things breaking every year. They'll be living largely off what they brought from Earth and what gets sent as resupply until the day they die (with the possible exception of local ice and a few other things).
Oh, and as for a single global patent system: *Please*, bring it on! Do you know how much you have to pay to extend your patent into each market country you want to go to? It's many thousands of dollars for *every country* (except the EU, which has a single patent system). While that's chump change for someone like Microsoft, that's a massive hurdle for small businesses.
There are actually some admirable parts of the US patent system. For example, disclosure. You can disclose your product in the US up to a year before you file your patent. In Europe, there's no grace period. What the lack of a grace period means in practice is that startups that don't know any better get bitten while established companies don't. A grace period also lets startups try to raise money to fund development of their product before you have to fork out $10k to get it patented. In general, that aspect of the US system is small business friendly.
In terms of software, while it used to be really bad, I think US patent law is moving in the right direction -- it looks like ultimately they'll allow software patents, but they're going to have to be a *lot* less general and a *lot* more in depth. Which is a good thing. I think all patents should have a shorter term, especially software patents (these days, if you can't turn a profit in 5-10 years, you're not going to -- and the public domain is more important than ever). But that's no reason to throw out the system altogether.
I've taken a much softer stance toward our patent system after I got involved with it in the process of starting a business. Now our trademark system... ugh, don't get me started. I may not be able to trademark my business's name because there's a company that sells Asian videos and eyeglasses under the same name, and they got shoved into the computer catch-all category '9' with me simply because their videos are downloadable online. Everything even tangentially related to computers gets shoved into category 9, but beanwhile, there are separate classes for, for example, "precious metals" versus "common metals" (and all sorts of things like that).
Re:Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Real
on
Tetris Improves Your Brain
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't know whether it applies broadly or just to this particular game, but I can state that Tetris had a profound impact on my wife's quality of life. She was born with brain damage from a lack of oxygen due to pregnancy complications. This left her epileptic and with extremely poor muscle control/coordination. She used to get made fun of in school because kids thought she was mentally retarded because she moved slowly and awkwardly (just the opposite, really -- she was the first woman to ever get a scholarship to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology). As a child, however, at the recommendation of her doctor, her parents encouraged her to play Tetris and other hand-eye-coordination / reaction time games a lot, something she continued all the way through college. The parts of her brain that affect motor control are still damaged, but EEGs now show that other parts of her brain have taken up the slack. You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.
Slashdot Mirror
And I presume they have a mode that sheds the heat outside- this loses the CHP part of the equation
My argument is that, given when peaking is needed, this will be the primary mode of operation. Meaning the heat side -- the only advantage to putting it in homes -- turns from a benefit to a cost.
It's burning natural gas, so it's easy to be clean.
So are standard peakers, but they benefit from much greater efficiencies of scale.
raditional electricity generation wastes 2/3 of the input energy as "waste" heat; these don't (as long as they put in 80+% of their hours during heating season).
Which they won't.
The pure economics of adding the generator are kind of blah
As with my point #2.
There are some serious problems with this home generation concept.
1) When is extra peaking most in demand? In the middle of the day in July, when everyone's AC comes on. How much home heating is generally needed in the middle of the day in July when everyone's AC comes on? Not bloody much. But you're going to have the full heat output of a car engine pumping into your house; there's no way water heating alone will justify that.
2) Instead of spending the capital costs to build a couple really big peakers, they're going be building millions of tiny individual peakers, each with their own pollution controls? I can't imagine that would be even *remotely* cost-competitive. Or as clean.
I just don't buy it.
Here's an excellent article on one of the more famous tree-spiking injuries. And remember while reading this that it's written by an environmentalist who *opposes* the practice of tree spiking. Some excerpts:
-----------
L-P has never been known to spend too much time maintaining equipment or worrying about worker safety. But in the weeks preceding the tree spiking incident, conditions had gotten worse than usual. The bandsaw blade was wobbling when it ran, and cracks had begun to appear in it. But when George and other workers complained, Edwards shined them on, saying the new blades were not in yet, and they would have to ma1ke do. "That blade was getting so bad," said George, "That I almost didn't go to work that day." ...
The next thing he knew, George was lying on the floor covered with his own blood. "I knew I was dying. And all I could think about was Dick Edwards, and all the shit he gave me when I complained about the saw. I tried to get up, but they pushed me back down. I tried to beckon to Edwards so he would come close enough for me to get my hands around his throat in a death grip. If I had to die, I wanted to take that bastard with me." ...
LP didn't call the press right away, but when they did they had a field day. "Tree Spiking Terrorism," screamed the headline in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. And even though there was no evidence that Earth First! was involved, the Eureka Times-Standard proclaimed, Earth First! Blamed for Worker's Injuries." Mendocino County Sheriff Shea put out a widely quoted press release that was almost gleeful in its condemnation.
"This heinous and vicious criminal act is a felony offense, punishable by imprisonment in State Prison for up to three years," he wrote, "Still undetermined in the investigation is the motive of the suspect or suspects, to deter logging operations or inflict great bodily injury and death upon lumber processing personnel," Even Louisiana-Pacific President Harry Merlo got into the fray, blaming "terrorism in the name of environmental goals" for George's injury.
Meanwhile, George and Laurie Alexander had a different take on the incident. "I'm against tree spiking," George told the press from his hospital bed. "But I don't like clearcutting either." Laurie also tried to include L-P in the list of culprits. "I hate L-P," she told me. "I like trees." But the press wouldn't print a word Laurie said, and George's comments about mill safety and clearcutting were mentioned in only one news article, by Eric Brazil of the San Francisco Examiner. ...
No matter what you think of LP's forest practices, this much should be clear: George Alexander is not the enemy. He has no say over his bosses' policies, either in or out of the mill. I have heard Earth First!ers say that doesn't matter, he shouldn't be working at an LP mill. Well, I shouldn't be driving a car either, but that doesn't make it okay to put a bomb in it.
After George refused to go on tour denouncing us, he was forced to return to work at L-P before his injuries even healed. His and Laurie's baby was about to be born, he needed money, and there were not many jobs where he and his family live. George got worker's compensation for the time he was off work, but LP didn't offer him a cent for the trauma and hardship he suffered. They made a big public show of putting up a $20,000-dollar reward for the information leading to the conviction of the spiker, but George Alexander had to file a lawsuit against Louisiana Pacific to get anything at all. And while the company was crying crocodile tears over his injuries in public, in private they were fighting him tooth and nail over his damage claim. He ended up with just $9,000 and an involuntary transfer to night shift. "They used my name all over the country," George told me. "Then they laid me off when the mill closed down."
-----------
My view: Perhaps if the sawmills didn't give
You said it yourself. People who deliberately go out of their way not to hurt anyone should not be lumped in with people who crash planes into skyscrapers. They're both criminals, but the latter is in an entirely different league of Evil.
As for the ELF: Come on, guys, if you're going to break the law and destroy stuff, at least base your actions on science, not pseudoscience. I might sympathize somewhat if you all blew up something that was causing *actual* environmental degradation. All you did was annoy AM radio listeners.
Nonsense; power plants get phased out all the time. New Source Review has helped ensure that (random example), but even before it, it still happened all the time. Old plants get progressively more expensive to operate. Once all of the plant's steel is practically corroded through, it's cheaper just to scrap the plant and build a new one.
There simply hasn't been a new oil refinery built in the US in DECADES, despite numerous failures due to age, safety and environmental issues, immense profit for oil companies, and an endless cycle of refining capacity shortages in the US driving prices ever higher.
You're barking up the wrong tree. My father is the CEO of one of the US's largest refiners. They're nearly done with expanding one of their refineries to be the largest in the US. The main reason there haven't been new refineries is that it's cheaper just to expand their existing ones. A refinery is very unlike a power plant. There's a huge number of different units all feeding to each other. Individual units get shuttered all the time, they're scrapped for metal/parts, and the space gets reused.
Absolutely not. Wind is already almost cost-competitive with coal (there are a few places where it's cheaper than coal already even without the feed-in). 30 years ago, wind was about 90 cents per kilowatt hour. The tech keeps improving; heck, a good chunk of recent costs were simply due to a turbine and tower production shortfall. Now, wind can't make up more than about 30% of the grid without either generator backup or long-term storage (such as large hydro reservoirs, pumped or standard). But that'd still be 30% of the grid.
EGS works all over the country. Do a google image search for the following: geothermal potential
However, if this scales up:
I'd bet on ten to one odds that won't be more cost-effective than just straight solar-thermal.
I see no reason why it couldn't be expanded, however. They're starting small, and that's fine, but it would seem like the upper bound is to have solar provide 100% of the power on sunny days (during peak hours), and coal provide the rest. Sort of like SEGS in California, which provides 90% with solar and the other 10% with natural gas.
Sometimes insisting on that last 20% means sacrificing the other 80%.
We can get the 20% later. In time these plants will be phased out, and by then, we should have a better long-distance transmission grid and cheaper power storage. And, in fact, that 80%-ish reduction in coal that this tech could bring about is actually a bigger difference than it may seem, because by reducing coal demand, we'll begin phasing out subbitumenous coal and lignite (the dirtier kinds). In 15-20 years, I hope to see fossil fuels mainly taking up a "reserve" power role, making up for shortfalls in renewables, rather than being a primary generation mechanism in their own right.
And, FYI, IMHO, hydroelectric power is anything but green (moreso in some places than others, mind you). It's utterly devastated the Colorado River ecosystem. Tidal can also be really problematic. I am a fan of solar, wind, and geo, though.
Coal doesn't have to be produced by MTR. One can both object to MTR and support reducing the coal consumption of our existing plants. It's not economically realistic to phase out all of our existing coal plants, but if we can eliminate 4/5ths of their coal consumption, that'd be a huge victory.
Why wouldn't environmentalists be happy with this? I consider myself one and think this is great news. Too many people focus on 100% solutions. You don't need to eliminate 100% of coal in the short term. Reducing coal consumption by 80% or so by having solar provide heat during peak hours (daytime) would still be a huge benefit.
There is a the pennyfarthing was replaced by the safety bicycle [wikipedia.org].
Huh. So... can I bike if I want to? Can I leave my friends behind?
Agreed; this is ridiculous. Less range than your average e-bike and more expensive than your average e-bike. Who would buy this? Heck, you could buy a 60-70mph, 35-60 mile range electric motorcycle for just a few $k more.
My concerns about this product is that flash degrades per write cycle, so the smaller the disk you have, the faster you wear through it. Since this sound like just a small buffer, I'd have concerns about it having a short lifespan.
Quite true, although without any animal products whatsoever, you'll need to farm bacteria for B12. It's the only dietary nutrient that is generally impossible for a vegan to get in sufficient quantities without supplement.
When I formed my business and needed to establish patent protection around my lead product, my first instinct was to hire a lawyer. However, my father advised me to contact the USPTO for their input on whether they thought it necessary first. So I called their help line and asked them whether it would be wise to hire an attorney rather than do it myself. Their response was, basically (to paraphrase), "Duh! This is a complex legal matter!"
Hire an attorney.
As for carbon, there is actually a process now that'll take electricity and CO2 and produce CO and O using electricity and a semiconductor. You can take the CO and use it as feedstock to get more carbon, or combine it with hydrogen and get diesel fuel.
Not sure which process you're referring to. It seems the most likely to me that at least one which will be done is the Sabatier process, which involves CO2 + 4H2 = CH4 + 2 H2O on an alumina catalyst. NASA is already investigating its use for CO2 scrubbing in space. But no matter what reaction you use, it takes a lot of energy. And your CO2 must first be concentrated, which means a compressor, and compressors like to break (I'm sure the dust will be no help to that!). And building a new one on Mars will be no trivial task.
I was worried about Nitrogen, but we may be in luck. Analysis of the mars lander showed perchlorate salts, which may include ammonium perchlorate, which can be easily processed into oxygen, nitrogen, and water by simply adding heat.
May. But ammonium is just one possible cation out of many. We've found lots of other cations on mars so far, but as of yet, no ammonium. Hopefully we will...
I do agree, however, that any tech we develop is likely to have ramifications back at home. If there's one thing that I think the history of technology has made quite clear, it's that disruptions in technological paradigms tend to have much broader ramifications than just what they were designed for. For a modern example, the obvious choice is the computer; few ever dreamed of the vast range of applications computer technology would lead to. Without "revolutions", technology tends to stagnate onto incremental improvements in known processes. Mars' unusual abundances and scarcities may necessitate significant research into radically different production processes and substitute materials, which in turn could have those sort of desirable ripple effects back here on Earth. Hopefully.
A real concern on Mars is "missing elements". We know there's ample iron, silicon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, manganese, magnesium, titanium, calcium, and a number of trace elements at the surface, for example (recovery processes will have varying degrees of complexities, consumable parts, and imported feedstocks). But what about nitrogen? Or fluorine? For example, right now, to get nitrogen on Mars, we'd have to extract the 2.7% from the atmosphere that's 1% as dense as ours -- not exactly easy or low energy. And we have *no* source of fluorine right now (it's very likely there, but who knows where), which is -- among other things -- needed to refine aluminum energy-and-cost-effectively (even if you import all of your cryolite, a small amount still gets consumed in the process), as well as to make teflon coatings that are so critical to so many things. Oh, and to refine uranium, too. We know of no realistic carbon sources on Mars apart from the 1%-as-dense-as-ours atmosphere (carbon being needed for bloody everything, including steel smelting and consumable anode production for aluminum), and that's locked up in CO2, so getting carbon in a workable form for most other process feedstocks is going to involve a lot of compression, heat management, and Sabatier synthesis (including an energy-intense hydrogen feedstock) for low volume production. It's really freaking daunting, the more you think about it. One can hope that we find better local feedstocks, but if not... ugh.
And just ignoring resource... Mars is a nasty environment to be making anything. You have low ability to lose heat and electrostatic dust that likes to cling to everything (including motors and seals). And places like steel foundries are not exactly tame environs. And then you need casting houses, metal shops, etc all suitable for the martian environment. It's a huge infrastructure investment, esp. when you consider that they'll have to be largely robotic, which means a *lot* of R&D money.
There's just so much you need. You need power (nuclear or solar -- both daunting, for the scale that is needed). You need steel (and its associated alloying agents and fluxing agents -- including calcite), aluminum, probably titanium, probably copper, probably nickel, probably calcium, silicon (in the long term), many metal alloys, a wide variety of ceramics (for transformer cores, radiation-hardened electronics components, magnets, capacitors, resistors, varistors, abrasives, etc); plastics (a freaking huge range of them, with widely varying properties that often prevent substitution -- you need an entire petrochemical industry because you can't, say, substitute PVC for teflon or whatnot), as well as widely varying part production processes (for a random example, some plastic fibers are reeled up from a sulfuric acid bath) and plastic additives and other non-hydrocarbon feedstocks (such as various acids); epoxies; graphite; clothing (both indoor and pressure/heated outdoor); CO2 scrubbers; lubricants; hydraulic fluids; solvents; dyes; abrasives; food; personal items; medications; and on and on and on. Every time you delve deeper into any single issue, the more you find it's a medusa with its tentacles reaching into everything else.
So yes, there's much that can be done locally, but there are going to be huge import chains from Earth for a long, long time. And one can only *hope* that they'll be able to find local deposits of everything that they need in the long run, and that they don't have to transport them halfway around the planet.
Absolutely correct. However, do you know how many industrial chemicals we need to sustain modern life even here on Earth, let alone in a pressure-and-life-support-required environment of Mars? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands.
And note that I didn't even go into part production -- just raw materials.
Building a self-sustaining colony on Mars is certainly achievable. But the technological effort required is incredibly daunting. I don't expect any Mars colony to be physically capable of cutting the tether to Earth within many hundreds of years. What I would expect, if a *serious* effort toward colonization is achieved, is for new industrial processes to keep coming online, with harder-to-get feedstocks and parts shipped from Earth. Being 100% self sustaining may not be an achievable goal during the next century, but, say, 90% sustainable by mass could probably be done. Albeit at *huge* cost...
See this and try to claim that it's even remotely comparable.
You didn't do what I stated. Tracking *everything back*, and everything needed to make that, and so forth. Let's just say, for example, you needed to make a replacement teflon seal. Let's go with a greatly oversimplified version. You first need a fluorspar mine. The fluorspar enters a crusher. It can then optionally undergo dense material separation (the ore is poured into a substance slightly denser than fluorspar's 1.4 g/cm^3 density, so it floats to the top; on Mars, this would probably best be organic farm-produced liquids, such as oils, or perhaps dense petroleum compounds). It then goes to a ball mill where it is crushed to a fine powder, and mixed into a slurry. Then any number of the following can happen: the slurry can be slowly pumped upwards in a jig; the lighter materials like fluorspar make it to the top more readily than the heavier contaminants. The slurry can go on to a shaking table - an expanse with riffles parallel to the flow which vibrates; the heavy minerals get deposited on earlier riffles (the vibration encourages them to move of to
the side).
After the fluorspar is concentrated by any number of the above, it is mixed with a slight excess of 93-99% sulfuric acid in a kiln in a
continuous process. HF gas is released, leaving tailings of silica, carbon, sulfur, calcium carbonate, phosphorus pentoxide, and a host of other
tailings generally not worth recovering mixed in with bulk fluorogypsum.
Gaseous HF is condensed enough to liquify it to remove impurities such as SO2 and SiF4, which remain gasseous. The condensed HF is 99.98%
pure. The exhaust gasses, which still contain some HF, are mixed with sulfuric acid in an absorption column. The sulfuric acid is then mixed back
in with the original process stream in another absorption column. This concentrates the fluorosilic acid and precipitates silica, which can then be
removed (and if desired, purified and used in other processes).
An alternative production route to HF is through using byproduct fluorosilicic acid, using a process developed by Kvaemer Process Technology
AG of Switzerland. The fluorosilicic acid is concentrated and reacted with concentrated sulfuric acid to produce a mixture of SiF4, HF and
H2SO4. This is fed into the same concentration/scrubbing system described above.
In either method, the concentration of the recirculating sulfuric acid must be maintained. Integration with the sulfuric acid production
process would be nice to this effect.
Note that hydrofluoric acid is best stored in plastic or teflon-coated containers. It has varying degrees of compatabilities with
metals (lead works reasonably well), but famously eats through glass despite being a weak acid (the fluorine ion is more problematic than the hydrogen
ion). In addition to this, all general concentrated acid storage methods should apply.
Now we need sulfuric acid.
Sulfuric acid is a fundamental industrial chemical. While many methods have been discovered throughout the ages for sulfuric acid
production, one of the most promising for Mars is "relatively" simple. Iron sulfates are heated in the presence of oxygen and steam. The sulfates
absorb progressively more oxygen, before finally releasing a sulfur trioxide and leaving behind iron oxide. The sulfur trioxide combines with the steam
and enters a condenser lined with many radiators/heat exchangers, where it precipitates out as concentrated sulfuric acid. The input iron sulfates are
cycled through in a batch process, with new sulfates added into the reaction chamber at the top and hot iron oxide removed from the base (which can then
be sent on to steel production).
Potentially, raw, highly sulfur-rich iron ore could be ground in a ball mill, dumped into the reaction chamber, and baked; while some heat
would be wasted heating non-sulfates, it would pass straight into steel production from there, utilizing the gained heat. Note that the entire
system, from the moment that the ore enters the reacti
Ever heard of terminal illness?
Extremely well put. There's little on Mars to bootstrap a civilization with. Back in the pioneer days, you could show up with nothing more than the clothes on your back, a hatchet, a musket, a small chunk of lead, and a shot mold (plus a little food and water to keep you going until you got settled). Earlier human settlers didn't even bring such modern weaponry with them and did just fine, knapping knives and spearpoints and arrowheads.
That sort of thing doesn't work on Mars. Colonists will be entirely dependent on modern technology to merely keep the things that keep them alive running. Try tracing back random pieces of modern technology to all of their component parts/materials, and all of those's component parts/materials, and so forth, with the components needed for manufacturing/refining along the way, and if any of those are consumable, trace those back. The challenge of building a colony is ridiculously daunting. This wouldn't be a colony; it's going to be a base. A cramped life support shelter with more and more things breaking every year. They'll be living largely off what they brought from Earth and what gets sent as resupply until the day they die (with the possible exception of local ice and a few other things).
But you know people would volunteer nonetheless.
Oh, and as for a single global patent system: *Please*, bring it on! Do you know how much you have to pay to extend your patent into each market country you want to go to? It's many thousands of dollars for *every country* (except the EU, which has a single patent system). While that's chump change for someone like Microsoft, that's a massive hurdle for small businesses.
At least we have the PCT... It's a start...
There are actually some admirable parts of the US patent system. For example, disclosure. You can disclose your product in the US up to a year before you file your patent. In Europe, there's no grace period. What the lack of a grace period means in practice is that startups that don't know any better get bitten while established companies don't. A grace period also lets startups try to raise money to fund development of their product before you have to fork out $10k to get it patented. In general, that aspect of the US system is small business friendly.
In terms of software, while it used to be really bad, I think US patent law is moving in the right direction -- it looks like ultimately they'll allow software patents, but they're going to have to be a *lot* less general and a *lot* more in depth. Which is a good thing. I think all patents should have a shorter term, especially software patents (these days, if you can't turn a profit in 5-10 years, you're not going to -- and the public domain is more important than ever). But that's no reason to throw out the system altogether.
I've taken a much softer stance toward our patent system after I got involved with it in the process of starting a business. Now our trademark system... ugh, don't get me started. I may not be able to trademark my business's name because there's a company that sells Asian videos and eyeglasses under the same name, and they got shoved into the computer catch-all category '9' with me simply because their videos are downloadable online. Everything even tangentially related to computers gets shoved into category 9, but beanwhile, there are separate classes for, for example, "precious metals" versus "common metals" (and all sorts of things like that).
I don't know whether it applies broadly or just to this particular game, but I can state that Tetris had a profound impact on my wife's quality of life. She was born with brain damage from a lack of oxygen due to pregnancy complications. This left her epileptic and with extremely poor muscle control/coordination. She used to get made fun of in school because kids thought she was mentally retarded because she moved slowly and awkwardly (just the opposite, really -- she was the first woman to ever get a scholarship to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology). As a child, however, at the recommendation of her doctor, her parents encouraged her to play Tetris and other hand-eye-coordination / reaction time games a lot, something she continued all the way through college. The parts of her brain that affect motor control are still damaged, but EEGs now show that other parts of her brain have taken up the slack. You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.