I've read variations on this a lot of times and it always worries me.
A.) It takes a hell of a lot of technicians to run a sub reactor. How comfortable are you with adding, oh, thirty crew members to your complement just to run the reactor?
B.) Sub reactors work as well as they do in part *because* of all that water around them. Water conducts heat well and has a formidable thermal mass. Vacuum is the opposite. How many tons of water are you up for pushing out of the gravity well for your "not a big deal" reactor?
C.) Another factor in cooling is yet more tons of pumps and valves, most of which have been designed for fifty years to take advantage of gravity. Gawd knows a sub has to be able to keep running even with some degree of shift in attitude but I can't help thinking that zero-g would be a whole different kettle of neutrons.
D.) In addition, sub reactors haven't run as flawlessly as most people assume. Just including the scrams listed in, say, Blind Man's Bluff, we've seen some pretty damn scary reactor failures. Given how reliably we have found that the military covers up failures, even decades later, we have to assume that however many failures we know about, the actual safety record is even worse. I wouldn't be so ready to take their word for it or believe the conclusions of fanboys like Tom Clancy if I were you.
E.) Having said all of that, if we're going to talk about nuclear power in space, why don't we talk about existing successful examples of nuclear power IN SPACE? Voyager, anybody? Nuclear power is used in space all the time. RTGs have been in use since before most of the people on this site were born. Let's give them the cred they (and their designers and builders) deserve.
Usually I don't bother saying this kind of thing, but dude, please at least spell simple words correctly if you're going to go so very far into the realm of the questionable. You do your credibility no favors at all by talking about "particals" that are "avaliable" in "interteller space". Though, come to think of it, you do very effectively convey the impression that you don't give a damn if what you say makes any sense or not. Which, given your comments, may be entirely appropriate after all.
cyber-warfare is the next major battleground
Maybe I'm reading an ambiguous statement wrong but I just wanted to point out that this is a battleground where combat is already constant, hotly contested, and very serious. And I agree with you, it's one where "nearly anyone can play". One specific thing I've wondered about is that I've read quite a few reports about schools for hacking (and virii tracked back to) the Philippines and we're well aware that the Philippines has been a staging area for terrorists for well over a decade now. In fact, there were pre-9/11 gatherings there of folks connected to Al Qaida that are listed high as things our TLAs should have paid more attention to that could have prevented the attacks.
Now, I'm as averse to blaming "the terrorists" for everything as anybody but they are real, there are many factions, and they do attack people. And from what I've read about Bin Laden's setup (iirc, there was a good piece in Parameters recently) his people are as high tech as it gets.
So, yes, we do need to worry about malware that makes spam and even most rootkits look delightful by comparison. Maybe we should all look again at the recent/. piece on Windows being used to drive things like 911 systems. And then *really* fight for open source.
Okay, from the top.
It looks like my impression of what those tanks were for was wrong. Kinda. We've seen enough references in this thread to cooling systems for power lines, and especially to the emergency cooling problems when something goes wrong, that I suspect that this is part of what I was hearing about.
But, of course, I always made it clear that I wasn't sure. You know, like when I wrote: Because, iirc, many of the . .., and doing these lines might not be all that big a deal in some ways.
I never thought that this was a trivial problem. More importantly, I never *said* that this was a trivial problem. In fact, if you look around this thread you'll find something like four or five comments by me saying things like "wow, we really need some numbers before we can even estimate what this means" and "my, this sounds mighty complicated to me; we're going to have issues."
Nothing I wrote was "silly", nor something that would only be said by an ignorant 14 year old, let alone "pulled from nether regions" of anything, fuck you very much.
As for your basic point about how expensive cooling pipes can be, see my later post. I've now looked at the site linked to higher up in this thread and their info about what I suspect is the kind of vacuum-jacket pipe you seem to think is the only "real" option and I say again, you have no fucking clue whatsover. Just as I suspected, you are thinking of high-precision, lab quality and/or food-safe quality equipment meant to run to totally different specs than a case like this would require. Frankly, as I pointed out above, with a budget like this, on a scale like this, you could damn near just keep a few thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen pouring into each mile of pipe every day and if you could handle the venting somehow, it just wouldn't matter. Am I a cryogenics expert? No, but you might be surprised how much I do know about such things and how carefully thought out my conclusions here are. But then I'm used to operating in the world of doing very ambitious things on a tiny budget with whatever the frack works. Which is, I guess, appropriate for a guy who went to a school that had its own particle accelerator. Or used to live in a group house with its own machine shop, chemistry lab and (this was the eighties) minicomputer link.
Not to mention that I don't think you have any idea at all what constitutes "expensive" or "complex" relative to a project like this. Pipe costs, say, a hundred dollars a foot? Whatever. Half a million dollars per mile just isn't serious money in a case like this.
So, bottom line, you were sorta right about one particular and utterly idiotic about your conclusions. Like NASA engineers claiming that Virgin or Rutan's people can't possibly get work done for those budgets, you need to step out of your world and see how the rest of us are doing things.
Try it; you might like it.
Okay, maybe this is a stupid question but I really don't think that it is.
- Liquid nitrogen is cheap. The more of it you need, hence the larger your machinery for making it, the cheaper it gets.
- We're talking about a hundred million dollar system here, just in construction and maintenence costs. Not to mention the billions of dollars worth of services that would depend on it.
- If your insulation is at all effective, the amount of liquid nitrogen required to cool a given stretch of cable is pretty small, since the whole cross-section of cable is something like two centimeters, including part of the cladding.
This being the case, maybe it would be cheaper all around to just keep two or three hundred liters of "extra" liquid nitrogen in tanks connected to the system every mile or so. If the system is leaky, who cares? As long as you're making liquid nitrogen faster than you're leaking it and you are keeping the stuff flowing effectively to the leak, it's just not that big a deal. Keep in mind that at retail prices "two or three hundred liters" is about four hundred bucks worth. Maybe. Relative to the cost and importance of a system like this, a few hundred bucks, even the cost of the equipment to make that liquid nitrogen, is a rounding error.
Let me be more specific. I was asking the original poster, AC though he or she may be, if they knew the operating cost of a conventional 500 KV line. Though obviously it would be nice to have the estimates for a superconducting line, too. Seems like at the moment we're all puttering around without some pretty important numbers.
I'm waiting for enough of these that these networks could be used, along with their switching systems, as calculating engines. Why?
So I can want a beowulf cluster of these, of course.
*ducks*
Well, TFA says that a major point of this system is provide redundancy. That there is supposed to be a whole network of these things built for precisely that reason.
As for dimensions and mass, the picture made it look like the amount of superconductor was tiny. Maybe half a kilogram per meter; maybe less. Which makes that mass insignificant and it becomes a problem simply of length of cable times the amount of coolant required to chill an area one centimeter or so in diameter, including waste.
So if I turned off my freezer all I'd have to do to keep the low temperature would be to "top up" the cooling agent to maintain heat lost through the insulation? Isn't that what refrigerators do already?
Nope. Refrigerators have a compressible fluid whose purpose is to be cycled over and over. Totally different purpose from liquid nitrogen, whose purpose is to be frickin' cold and bleed off heat as the thing being cooled and the liquid nitrogen try to comparatively equalize their temperatures.
Oh, NOW I get it. You think that I'm not actually seeing liquid nitrogen tanks. That "supercooling" with liquefied gases anywhere outside of labs and special installations is just absurd.
Oh. You're convinced that your theory trumps my reality.
Okay, now that I know the nature of your clue-impairment, I went to Flickr and it took me all of about five seconds to find this and this and this and, oh, whatever. I guess that somebody's just working really hard to fake what I think I'm seeing. I would ask you to explain it to me but you seem a little het up. Maybe you just need to sit down and have a nice cup of tea. Btw, for future reference, I used to get great results cooling mine off with liquid nitrogen. The professor in charge of our lab used to love to watch it jump out of the top of my cup. Should I explain to you why that happens?
This post, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Okay, first of all, I have no idea what "theory" you think I put forward that you needed to so manfully deride.
It's nice to see that somebody has already addressed your "expensive liquid nitrogen" line. And, frankly, it sounds to me like YET AGAIN we have a case here of somebody who didn't RTFA.
Did I misuse the term "supercooled" as it is used in your little world? Because that is, indeed, the term I have heard used more than once from people who do this for a living.
Maybe you either have no idea of the amount of capital that is normal for work like this, or you didn't read "in some ways" in my post or you're yet another person who, because you've gotten used to only working in an obsessively precise environment with absolutely specialized equipment and order your paper towels in individually certified packets by FedEx from Black Box at ten dollars a sheet, you've forgotten that out here in the rest of the world, much of this can be done far, far cheaper. You want to argue costs on keeping things at the relevant temperatures? Talk to the folks at American Semiconductor. Or, for that matter, the offices of IEEE Spectrum, where, iirc, they know a little bit about physics and system design, too.
Obviously you're right. Nothing can be kept at liquid nitrogen temperatures in any container costing less than fifty thousand dollars. Evidently when we used to carry the stuff around in styrofoam picnic coolers we were somehow exempt from the laws of physics. But, hell, we never took it that seriously since the couple thousand dollar beastie in the lab above us could always make us a few more gallons, so it just wasn't that big a deal. But then, this was 1982. Maybe the technology just isn't able to handle that kind of demand anymore.
As for "the same city that has steam tunnel explosions", yeah, it is. That's part of what these lines are supposed to replace. If you had read the article you might know that.
Until I got to your last paragraph I assumed that you were just giving a more specific rehash of what I had just written. Then I got to your last paragraph and it looks like somehow you think that we disagree.
"Toxins come in all shapes and sizes."? I couldn't agree more. In fact, I thought that this was exactly what I was saying.
Various kinds of researchers "have looked for the nanotechnological aspects of the human machine for decades"? Yes, I know. We've looked at plenty of things on that scale for decades, or longer, and clearly still have a very long ways to go. Don't think so? Ask any psychopharmacologist about how much we understand about the mechanisms of our most common medications for just about everything in the DSM.
Sure, we've studied and tested plenty. But not enough to be ready to stop.
"ill-informed people who take everything at face value"?
Dude, you clearly have no idea of who you are talking to.
And if you think that scientists "have no dog in the fight" then you clearly don't understand that dynamic either.
As for "enjoying a modern lifestyle" with or without nanotech, one can do without many things. I would hate to think what the world would be like if we decided to only do those things that we had to do. Especially since, in my experience, most people have no idea at all which things around them are necessary and which are discretionary.
Yes, you could be right, in some ways. But that's the point. We don't know. But we can predict that the result will be different somehow without even necessarily knowing which variables will shift in which directions. I don't know about you, but to me any time that is true, I'm going to want to know, and document, quite a lot about what is going on.
One of the characteristic sights on New York City streets is big tanks of liquid nitrogen standing on the sidewalk, steaming away, with lines running from them down a manhole. Why? Because, iirc, many of the telephone company switching systems already run supercooled and when a repair needs to be done they need supplementary chilling.
You might be surprised how little different it would be to have power lines running superconducting in parts of NYC. With the vastly complex infrastructure already in place, doing these lines might not be all that big a deal in some ways.
I keep wondering about that number re cooling costs. How much is that affected by insulation? By how close to capacity the lines are run at? By scheduled maintenence? I dunno about you, but in my experience, operating costs of complex systems are very subject to change. And seeing how much money the contractors stand to make from building these, they're going to tend to estimate low on cost and high on efficiency, just as they have for nuclear power plants, incineration plants, and so on.
Am I saying that the lossiness and cooling costs numbers are too optimistic? For now, probably yes. But in terms of thinking of the long term promise of the technology, those numbers are probably too pessimistic to at least the same degree.
Well, in a perfect world (we can at least hope) lines would be kept a bit below theoretical optimum temperature and surrounded with some high thermal mass cladding within the insulation. That would at least buy some time for the system to get repaired. Since you're dealing with a cylindrical cross-section your surface area to volume ratio is at least as good as it can get to minimize heating.
There are many, many ways to build a system to manage loss of coolant, nuclear reactor scrambles being obvious extreme versions. Some of these approaches could be used in a case like this. But we're dealing with Con Ed here, the guys who neglected maintenance such that we ended up having three major blackouts in ten years. So I'm not optimistic. The only thing that we should remember is that at least in theory such problems are somewhat addressable, not least by just the kind of rerouting that this system is supposed to make much easier and faster.
Why is that, do you think? There seems to be something about cities in Arizona that makes the residents, um, different. I've heard every big city around there described, in terms of culture, as "Los Angeles with none of the redeeming features".
Why is this not OT? Because in some ways the old joke really is true. California is the future. And if we're going to look at future demand for things like gadgets, then what y'all want is disproportionately important to help determine what users everywhere will want in ten years or so.
So, that having been said, please, can you explain to me why Arizona people are the way that they are?
Please go back and read what I wrote. Some nanoparticles are anything but "inert".
Why worry? Because without a lot of testing things like this can happen. I guarantee that if YOU were the one dying of multiple organ failure from a supposedly safe new drug, you would be just a little miffed that they hadn't tested it more.
Slashdot Mirror
A.) It takes a hell of a lot of technicians to run a sub reactor. How comfortable are you with adding, oh, thirty crew members to your complement just to run the reactor?
B.) Sub reactors work as well as they do in part *because* of all that water around them. Water conducts heat well and has a formidable thermal mass. Vacuum is the opposite. How many tons of water are you up for pushing out of the gravity well for your "not a big deal" reactor?
C.) Another factor in cooling is yet more tons of pumps and valves, most of which have been designed for fifty years to take advantage of gravity. Gawd knows a sub has to be able to keep running even with some degree of shift in attitude but I can't help thinking that zero-g would be a whole different kettle of neutrons.
D.) In addition, sub reactors haven't run as flawlessly as most people assume. Just including the scrams listed in, say, Blind Man's Bluff , we've seen some pretty damn scary reactor failures. Given how reliably we have found that the military covers up failures, even decades later, we have to assume that however many failures we know about, the actual safety record is even worse. I wouldn't be so ready to take their word for it or believe the conclusions of fanboys like Tom Clancy if I were you.
E.) Having said all of that, if we're going to talk about nuclear power in space, why don't we talk about existing successful examples of nuclear power IN SPACE? Voyager, anybody? Nuclear power is used in space all the time. RTGs have been in use since before most of the people on this site were born. Let's give them the cred they (and their designers and builders) deserve.
Usually I don't bother saying this kind of thing, but dude, please at least spell simple words correctly if you're going to go so very far into the realm of the questionable. You do your credibility no favors at all by talking about "particals" that are "avaliable" in "interteller space". Though, come to think of it, you do very effectively convey the impression that you don't give a damn if what you say makes any sense or not. Which, given your comments, may be entirely appropriate after all.
You're probably right. When we build *our* system of superconducting power lines, we'll have to do better ;->
cyber-warfare is the next major battleground /. piece on Windows being used to drive things like 911 systems. And then *really* fight for open source.
Maybe I'm reading an ambiguous statement wrong but I just wanted to point out that this is a battleground where combat is already constant, hotly contested, and very serious. And I agree with you, it's one where "nearly anyone can play". One specific thing I've wondered about is that I've read quite a few reports about schools for hacking (and virii tracked back to) the Philippines and we're well aware that the Philippines has been a staging area for terrorists for well over a decade now. In fact, there were pre-9/11 gatherings there of folks connected to Al Qaida that are listed high as things our TLAs should have paid more attention to that could have prevented the attacks.
Now, I'm as averse to blaming "the terrorists" for everything as anybody but they are real, there are many factions, and they do attack people. And from what I've read about Bin Laden's setup (iirc, there was a good piece in Parameters recently) his people are as high tech as it gets.
So, yes, we do need to worry about malware that makes spam and even most rootkits look delightful by comparison. Maybe we should all look again at the recent
Okay, from the top. ., and doing these lines might not be all that big a deal in some ways.
It looks like my impression of what those tanks were for was wrong. Kinda. We've seen enough references in this thread to cooling systems for power lines, and especially to the emergency cooling problems when something goes wrong, that I suspect that this is part of what I was hearing about.
But, of course, I always made it clear that I wasn't sure. You know, like when I wrote: Because, iirc, many of the . .
I never thought that this was a trivial problem. More importantly, I never *said* that this was a trivial problem. In fact, if you look around this thread you'll find something like four or five comments by me saying things like "wow, we really need some numbers before we can even estimate what this means" and "my, this sounds mighty complicated to me; we're going to have issues."
Nothing I wrote was "silly", nor something that would only be said by an ignorant 14 year old, let alone "pulled from nether regions" of anything, fuck you very much.
As for your basic point about how expensive cooling pipes can be, see my later post. I've now looked at the site linked to higher up in this thread and their info about what I suspect is the kind of vacuum-jacket pipe you seem to think is the only "real" option and I say again, you have no fucking clue whatsover. Just as I suspected, you are thinking of high-precision, lab quality and/or food-safe quality equipment meant to run to totally different specs than a case like this would require. Frankly, as I pointed out above, with a budget like this, on a scale like this, you could damn near just keep a few thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen pouring into each mile of pipe every day and if you could handle the venting somehow, it just wouldn't matter. Am I a cryogenics expert? No, but you might be surprised how much I do know about such things and how carefully thought out my conclusions here are. But then I'm used to operating in the world of doing very ambitious things on a tiny budget with whatever the frack works. Which is, I guess, appropriate for a guy who went to a school that had its own particle accelerator. Or used to live in a group house with its own machine shop, chemistry lab and (this was the eighties) minicomputer link.
Not to mention that I don't think you have any idea at all what constitutes "expensive" or "complex" relative to a project like this. Pipe costs, say, a hundred dollars a foot? Whatever. Half a million dollars per mile just isn't serious money in a case like this.
So, bottom line, you were sorta right about one particular and utterly idiotic about your conclusions. Like NASA engineers claiming that Virgin or Rutan's people can't possibly get work done for those budgets, you need to step out of your world and see how the rest of us are doing things.
Try it; you might like it.
Okay, maybe this is a stupid question but I really don't think that it is.
- Liquid nitrogen is cheap. The more of it you need, hence the larger your machinery for making it, the cheaper it gets.
- We're talking about a hundred million dollar system here, just in construction and maintenence costs. Not to mention the billions of dollars worth of services that would depend on it.
- If your insulation is at all effective, the amount of liquid nitrogen required to cool a given stretch of cable is pretty small, since the whole cross-section of cable is something like two centimeters, including part of the cladding.
This being the case, maybe it would be cheaper all around to just keep two or three hundred liters of "extra" liquid nitrogen in tanks connected to the system every mile or so. If the system is leaky, who cares? As long as you're making liquid nitrogen faster than you're leaking it and you are keeping the stuff flowing effectively to the leak, it's just not that big a deal. Keep in mind that at retail prices "two or three hundred liters" is about four hundred bucks worth. Maybe. Relative to the cost and importance of a system like this, a few hundred bucks, even the cost of the equipment to make that liquid nitrogen, is a rounding error.
Let me be more specific. I was asking the original poster, AC though he or she may be, if they knew the operating cost of a conventional 500 KV line. Though obviously it would be nice to have the estimates for a superconducting line, too. Seems like at the moment we're all puttering around without some pretty important numbers.
I'm waiting for enough of these that these networks could be used, along with their switching systems, as calculating engines. Why?
So I can want a beowulf cluster of these, of course.
*ducks*
Well, TFA says that a major point of this system is provide redundancy. That there is supposed to be a whole network of these things built for precisely that reason.
As for dimensions and mass, the picture made it look like the amount of superconductor was tiny. Maybe half a kilogram per meter; maybe less. Which makes that mass insignificant and it becomes a problem simply of length of cable times the amount of coolant required to chill an area one centimeter or so in diameter, including waste.
But if it's a superconducting line, then what does power have to do with cooling requirements?
I'm not trying to disagree with you, just get information. Can you point me to documents that, erm, document those "60-75%" numbers?
So if I turned off my freezer all I'd have to do to keep the low temperature would be to "top up" the cooling agent to maintain heat lost through the insulation? Isn't that what refrigerators do already?
Nope. Refrigerators have a compressible fluid whose purpose is to be cycled over and over. Totally different purpose from liquid nitrogen, whose purpose is to be frickin' cold and bleed off heat as the thing being cooled and the liquid nitrogen try to comparatively equalize their temperatures.
Sorry about that. Obviously I misstated it. What I get for rushing.
Oh, NOW I get it. You think that I'm not actually seeing liquid nitrogen tanks. That "supercooling" with liquefied gases anywhere outside of labs and special installations is just absurd.
Oh. You're convinced that your theory trumps my reality.
Okay, now that I know the nature of your clue-impairment, I went to Flickr and it took me all of about five seconds to find this and this and this and, oh, whatever. I guess that somebody's just working really hard to fake what I think I'm seeing. I would ask you to explain it to me but you seem a little het up. Maybe you just need to sit down and have a nice cup of tea. Btw, for future reference, I used to get great results cooling mine off with liquid nitrogen. The professor in charge of our lab used to love to watch it jump out of the top of my cup. Should I explain to you why that happens?
This post, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Okay, first of all, I have no idea what "theory" you think I put forward that you needed to so manfully deride.
It's nice to see that somebody has already addressed your "expensive liquid nitrogen" line. And, frankly, it sounds to me like YET AGAIN we have a case here of somebody who didn't RTFA.
Did I misuse the term "supercooled" as it is used in your little world? Because that is, indeed, the term I have heard used more than once from people who do this for a living.
Maybe you either have no idea of the amount of capital that is normal for work like this, or you didn't read "in some ways" in my post or you're yet another person who, because you've gotten used to only working in an obsessively precise environment with absolutely specialized equipment and order your paper towels in individually certified packets by FedEx from Black Box at ten dollars a sheet, you've forgotten that out here in the rest of the world, much of this can be done far, far cheaper. You want to argue costs on keeping things at the relevant temperatures? Talk to the folks at American Semiconductor. Or, for that matter, the offices of IEEE Spectrum, where, iirc, they know a little bit about physics and system design, too.
Obviously you're right. Nothing can be kept at liquid nitrogen temperatures in any container costing less than fifty thousand dollars. Evidently when we used to carry the stuff around in styrofoam picnic coolers we were somehow exempt from the laws of physics. But, hell, we never took it that seriously since the couple thousand dollar beastie in the lab above us could always make us a few more gallons, so it just wasn't that big a deal. But then, this was 1982. Maybe the technology just isn't able to handle that kind of demand anymore.
As for "the same city that has steam tunnel explosions", yeah, it is. That's part of what these lines are supposed to replace. If you had read the article you might know that.
Until I got to your last paragraph I assumed that you were just giving a more specific rehash of what I had just written. Then I got to your last paragraph and it looks like somehow you think that we disagree.
"Toxins come in all shapes and sizes."? I couldn't agree more. In fact, I thought that this was exactly what I was saying.
Various kinds of researchers "have looked for the nanotechnological aspects of the human machine for decades"? Yes, I know. We've looked at plenty of things on that scale for decades, or longer, and clearly still have a very long ways to go. Don't think so? Ask any psychopharmacologist about how much we understand about the mechanisms of our most common medications for just about everything in the DSM.
Sure, we've studied and tested plenty. But not enough to be ready to stop.
"ill-informed people who take everything at face value"?
Dude, you clearly have no idea of who you are talking to.
And if you think that scientists "have no dog in the fight" then you clearly don't understand that dynamic either.
As for "enjoying a modern lifestyle" with or without nanotech, one can do without many things. I would hate to think what the world would be like if we decided to only do those things that we had to do. Especially since, in my experience, most people have no idea at all which things around them are necessary and which are discretionary.
Yes, you could be right, in some ways. But that's the point. We don't know. But we can predict that the result will be different somehow without even necessarily knowing which variables will shift in which directions. I don't know about you, but to me any time that is true, I'm going to want to know, and document, quite a lot about what is going on.
One of the characteristic sights on New York City streets is big tanks of liquid nitrogen standing on the sidewalk, steaming away, with lines running from them down a manhole. Why? Because, iirc, many of the telephone company switching systems already run supercooled and when a repair needs to be done they need supplementary chilling.
You might be surprised how little different it would be to have power lines running superconducting in parts of NYC. With the vastly complex infrastructure already in place, doing these lines might not be all that big a deal in some ways.
I keep wondering about that number re cooling costs. How much is that affected by insulation? By how close to capacity the lines are run at? By scheduled maintenence? I dunno about you, but in my experience, operating costs of complex systems are very subject to change. And seeing how much money the contractors stand to make from building these, they're going to tend to estimate low on cost and high on efficiency, just as they have for nuclear power plants, incineration plants, and so on.
Am I saying that the lossiness and cooling costs numbers are too optimistic? For now, probably yes. But in terms of thinking of the long term promise of the technology, those numbers are probably too pessimistic to at least the same degree.
Well, in a perfect world (we can at least hope) lines would be kept a bit below theoretical optimum temperature and surrounded with some high thermal mass cladding within the insulation. That would at least buy some time for the system to get repaired. Since you're dealing with a cylindrical cross-section your surface area to volume ratio is at least as good as it can get to minimize heating.
There are many, many ways to build a system to manage loss of coolant, nuclear reactor scrambles being obvious extreme versions. Some of these approaches could be used in a case like this. But we're dealing with Con Ed here, the guys who neglected maintenance such that we ended up having three major blackouts in ten years. So I'm not optimistic. The only thing that we should remember is that at least in theory such problems are somewhat addressable, not least by just the kind of rerouting that this system is supposed to make much easier and faster.
So what is the typical cost per year to keep a mile of 500 KV line running?
Why is that, do you think? There seems to be something about cities in Arizona that makes the residents, um, different. I've heard every big city around there described, in terms of culture, as "Los Angeles with none of the redeeming features".
Why is this not OT? Because in some ways the old joke really is true. California is the future. And if we're going to look at future demand for things like gadgets, then what y'all want is disproportionately important to help determine what users everywhere will want in ten years or so.
So, that having been said, please, can you explain to me why Arizona people are the way that they are?
Please go back and read what I wrote. Some nanoparticles are anything but "inert".
Why worry? Because without a lot of testing things like this can happen. I guarantee that if YOU were the one dying of multiple organ failure from a supposedly safe new drug, you would be just a little miffed that they hadn't tested it more.