...so instead of making snarky remarks on the internet about unrealistic building standards and people making the bad choice of being born in a poor country, better pray for those who will lose their lives in that monster.
Wilma had wind speeds of 240 km/h at the time it made landfall in Mexico. Haiyan had wind speeds of 315 km/h when it made landfall (highest wind at landfall ever recorded). Knowing that structural stress on buildings goes approximately with the square of the wind speed (kinetic energy and things), that's almost twice as powerful. Many general aviation airplanes (for example the cessna 172) have "never exceed speeds" that are lower than 315 km/h; in other words, if you make a dive and reach that kind of speed, you're at risk of your airplane disintegrating. I have strong doubts about the economic feasibility of building houses that can reliably withstand such wind speeds, especially in poorer countries. It's like trying to mount a house on top of a (non-American) high-speed train and take it to top speed.
I've read all your posts in this thread and you've made it abundantly clear that you don't really understand the concepts in my GP post nor their real-life implications. The other people who answered to your posts seem to agree with me, so unless you're going to pull the "everyone is crazy but me" card, you need to work on your writing skills rather than blaming everyone else's reading skills. So, if you have any interest at all in having an honest good-faith intellectual discourse (which I'm starting to doubt), please, please go do some reading on the subject. Otherwise it is pointless to continue this conversation.
Your first sentence is factually false. If it were true, wind energy would be phenomenally profitable right now
You may need to work a bit on your reading comprehension. If I would have stopped writing after my first sentence, you might have a point, but my second sentence (starting with "only") nicely explains why what I said doesn't make wind energy phenomenally profitable. Also, I said "very little" (not "no") and "maintenance problems" (not "maintenance requirements"). The difference being that, while everything requires maintenace, it becomes a problem if it jeopardises profitability.
All that said, I do admit I applied a slight bit of hyperbole (but nowhere near "factually false"). What I meant is, one can make a turbine that is lighter on maintenance. It will be more expensive and and yield less power that its competitors, so you'd need more surface area and upfront investment for the same power output. It's even possible that a complete wind farm of these things will require just as much maintenance per unit of power because of having more turbines. Even assuming this isn't the case, in the real world, upfront investment is commonly made possible by loans, which have to be paid off. And business people are not highly interested in investing in anything that won't turn to profit in the next 10-15 years (unless the promise of profit is huge). Higher upfront investment for the same yield is a competitive problem; your "it has effectively no other costs" is an oversimplification. So all these economic factors taken into account, turbine design is what it is, with a maintenance cost that - in an ideal world - would lead to the highest possible profit for wind farm operators (within physical constraints). If maintenance costs are far beyond that sweet spot, then someone somewhere down the line didn't do their job right.
As for wind energy being more expensive than coal, I never said otherwise (see my opinion on energy policy). The problem with coal is that you're taking relatively pure carbon that is buried underground by nature, or in other words sequestered by nature in the most efficient possible form, and converting it all to CO2. I'm very pessimistic about the economic feasibility of sequestering the CO2 output of a coal plant; what is sure is that the current (admittedly immature) sequestration technology makes coal unprofitable altogether. And if you just let the CO2 go into the atmosphere, some people will argue that the ultimate economical cost of coal, including the economic effect of climate change on future generations, is far higher than wind. One cannot say with 100% certainty whether that's true or not, but current data strongly suggests it is, and there's the precautionary principle...
I'm very much anti-coal; the environmentalists that are fighting for a quick and complete end of nuclear power are fighting the wrong battle and I'm just as angry about it as you are. I do, however, believe (again just like you) that something needs to be done about those very old and unsafe nuclear plants (represented in large parts of the world by the GE Mark I), and about the on-site storage of spent fuel. The gap left behind by removing coal (and very old nuclear plants that cannot economically be made safer) should be filled in by all possible means that emit as little CO2 as possible, perhaps including newer and safer nuclear technologies for base load, but also solar for catching up the day peak in hot regions where a lot of air conditioning is used, wave power, wind in regions with sufficiently consistent and strong wind, and where necessary a little bit of biomass and natural gas to fill up lulls in wind (yes, even though the latter emits CO2). And a modest increase in electricity cost is an acceptable price to pay for that.
Finally, I don't believe a huge baroque scheme of government intervention is required to implement the above soluti
I am now completely convinced that you have NEVER had any contact with design/construction/building of any kind of medium or large power plant.
Neither have you, captain obvious. You just get your one-sided view from whatever your family members feel like ranting about. I read a lot about engineering (especially power generation), and between that and my educational background, I can participate well in technical discussions with engineers. Not that any of this matters - not only because design/construction/building of a power plant has very little to do with the statements in my posts, but also because technical discussion are about the merit of the argument (and its citations), not the person making it. "Being a visitor to a techie site" (to use your words), you'd better get used to that.
Back to the technical discussion: a lot of what you says rings true (though it doesn't seem to contradict much of what I said). However, I have to point out that a lot of the technologies you're talking about are pretty mature. For the example of steam turbines, current technology is already very efficient, and incremental improvements in material science can only yield low single-digit percentage increases in efficiency. It is an engineer's source of sustenance and job satisfaction to squeeze out these last few %, and they can really obsess about it (which is probably the reason for your one-sided focus). For the rest of us, these small improvements are cool to have, and worth paying engineers for, but they won't make or break a technology. In modern eyes, the steam turbines (and their operating temperatures, heat exchangers,...) of 100 years ago are woefully inefficient, but that didn't stop them from being highly profitable.
Of course, when we get to fusion, things get a bit more tentative. You seem to be rooting for the tokamak approach (which is one of the more promising ones), but the different approaches share some material requirements. And although there are indeed substantial material challenges in fusion (though they're more about dealing with neutron flux than with heat), the physics challenges are far worse. Remember we haven't yet demonstrated we are capable of sustaining a profitable fusion reaction, nor do we know which of the different approaches will eventually succeed in doing so.
To take the example of your heat exchangers: instead of building a small high-temperature heat exchanger close to the reaction, one could build a big low-temperature heat exchanger at a longer distance. Granted, doing so incurs its own challenges - especially the cooling of equipment that necessarily needs to be close to the reaction - and may push some of the approaches outside of the realm of the feasible (the magnets in the tokamak approach would become especially problematic), but that's not my point. My point is that by the time we get the physics to work (likely not any time soon), we can probably make do with the materials we have and make a contraption that will look inefficient in the eyes of later generations, but be profitable nevertheless.
This is not to say that I don't support the materials research in Japan - it is very likely to become useful in the future one way or another. The materials aspect of fusion is a challenge to be addressed - it's just not the most important one at the moment.
False. Even the materials from 20 years ago can be used to engineer a modestly-sized wind turbine that is built like a brick shithouse and has very little maintenance or lifespan problems. Only its deployment will be a lot less cost-effective than competing turbines. A similar thing goes for RPM: these things are deliberately built for optimal performance in a certain window of wind speeds, which inherently compromises their performance (or even ability to operate) at very different wind speeds. It's all about engineering tradeoffs and cost competition. If you have good statistics on the prevailing conditions (including things such as gusts and turbulence) at a certain location, you can tailor your turbine design to optimal functioning at that location. This will include a certain amount of downtime due to exceptionally high winds, which is offset by higher efficiency at more common wind speeds. You can also tailor its life span and maintenance cost, though you'll need to compromise on other desirable properties (procurement cost, size, efficiency) for that. If a competitor comes around who saves cost by decreasing engineering margins, and the costumer is not aware of the higher failure rates and maintenance costs, then you lose. The pessimistic scenario you're describing would indicate you need to fire your engineers (or switch engineering firm if you're the customer, or call into question the measurements of the conditions). Especially if they start making excuses like "we don't have the right materials".
That's not to say materials don't play a role. The tradeoffs between durability, procurement cost, efficiency, wind speed range,... can be made a lot more attractive by better materials. But the problems you're describing? Those are signs of incompetence somewhere down the line.
You on the other hand strike me as someone who has read far too much people who have no education in mechanical engineering related to power generation and just shoot off beautiful political slogans. Most of which aren't rooted in reality, but are based on wishful thinking, which is why there's a massive coal build up going on in "we're transitioning to wind!" Germany. Because people cannot face reality, and instead base large plans on wishful thinking. Which ends up doing the exact opposite of what it's supposed to achieve.
Finished? Nice strawman. As a scientist, I'm merely debating technicalities. I do have an opinion on sustainable energy, of course, but it's quite nuanced. You will see below that it's very different from what you're assuming it is.
My opinion? Stop the bullshit, quickly push research into fission, build thorium reactors and update the current older generation nuclear plants to modern standards to avoid Fukushima-style failures. At the same time massively overfund the material research facility in Japan that is working on solving the fusion's material problems to expedite functional deuterium-tritium fusion reactor's arrival.
As mentioned in our other discussion, material science is not what is holding fusion back. I don't understand where that bizarre materials obsession of yours comes from - are your family members working on materials, perhaps?
Anyhow, the exact thing you're accusing me of actually apply to you. Yes, funding for fusion research should be a multiple of what it is now, but I'm not so naive as to think this alone (coupled with building fission plants based on not-yet-mature technology) will solve all our problems overnight. Fusion still has significant fundamental milestones to pass, and no-one can predict when that will happen. What can be reasonably predicted is that from the reaching of these milestones onwards, it will be 30 more years before a significant fraction of the world's energy needs are met by fusion; that's just how things go in any kind of industry (ask your family members). So we need something in the intervening time. Thorium is not ready for prime-time either (though I could see it beating fusion), and its economic profitability is unclear. What's ready for prime time are some of the newer generation uranium-based fission reactors, but the political and financial (including insurance) costs are not as favorable as they were in in the nuclear boom period. Compared to that, alternative energy sources are available right now, and are advancing at a steady and rapid pace. If you compare their complete lifecycle cost to the current lifecycle cost of a new nuclear plants, they're pretty close. They each have their weak spots, but those are largely complementary, so from a pure availability perspective, an all-of
What we need is not materials to withstand fusion itself, but materials that could retain their physical properties near it with proper cooling. This is the same as with any other power generation process based on heat exchangers.
I'm not denying there is research being done on the material aspects you describe, but it is not what is holding fusion back, by far. It is merely a footnote in the field of fusion research, which is (sadly) still struggling to sustain a fusion reaction long enough and intensely enough to be economically feasible.
As for your first claim, kindly cite sources. So far even Germans, who invested untold billions and massive amount of political capital are buckling. Surely if you were correct, they would have massive problems they currently have?
Give me your sources, horse-master, and I shall give you mine. What "massive problems" are you talking about that are related to material science? A few wind turbines blown down by a recent storm?
Disclosure: I have direct family members working in large companies who have indoctrinated me with their one-sided view on things.
FTFY.
Really, no offense; even scientists and engineers who actively try to be unbiased are prone to become biased by having a financial stake in something. I noticed that in myself when I was trading stock, and I was actively on the lookout for bias creeping into my thought processes. The only solution that seemed to work was selling the stock. Now if you're biased in favor of your employer, you'd probably think twice before going down that road...
Solar needs new materials for the grid, as well as new materials for the panels that are significantly more efficient and durable than current ones.
Wind needs materials that are significantly stronger than current ones while withstanding wear and tear significantly better than current ones.
Profitability of alternative energy technologies is often measured over the lifetime of such technologies. Current figures suggest that neither wind nor solar needs your improvements in durability (though they're always welcome of course).
Fusion needs materials that are significantly stronger than current ones, while withstanding extreme temperatures significantly better than current ones.
Fail! The coulomb barrier to fusion is orders of magnitude stronger than any chemical bond can be. There is no solid that can contain a process with an acceptable fusion yield and there never will be. This is why "cold fusion" (or more precisely, low-energy fusion devices) won't produce net gain. There is a diverse set of approaches through which various groups are trying to attain commercially viable fusion, and they all share one property: the heating/confinement is (at least partially but usually fully) electromagnetic in nature.
In other news, not all science is material science.
It looks like you just publicly stepped, no, stomped on the big sore toe of a demographic that has the capability of making your online life hell. I hope you thought that one through. Any last words before going off the grid?
You might want to go up a few posts in this thread. To the AC who stated "If he ever robbed anyone, yep. I'm okay with capital punishment", got slammed for that, then apparently defended by you (though it now becomes clear you probably were not defending them, you just missed the context of the post you replied on).
Though I acknowledge this is a tangent on a discussion thread that is already a tangent on TFA, I would like to add that in most contexts, it's a bit disingenuous to just say "people can kill without a gun, so there should be no legal difference between someone who carries a gun and someone who doesn't".
Sure, unarmed people can kill, but it's orders of magnitude more difficult. It requires a certain amount of physical strength and skill, and a lot of determination. Most people would back off if their target starts bleeding significantly or passes out. For example, even though I have the required martial arts training, I don't think I could muster the sheer brutality to willfully beat someone to dead. Only a tiny minority of of unarmed brawls result in permanent damage; most are not even reported to the authorities. The same cannot be said of gunfights; the odds of walking away from one unscathed are relatively low even compared to knife fights.
The other difference is that handguns are expressly designed to kill people quickly and easily at ranges compatible with indoor and peacetime urban situations, which distinguishes them not only from baseball bats, hammers and kitchen knives, but also from rifles and shotguns, which in comparison are cumbersome weapons, and more suitable for hunting. This is reflected in the statistics on the website you kindly provided: a full half of homicides is committed with handguns.
So to get back on topic: police forces all over the world have different methods of dealing with suspects who carry a firearm and those who don't ("think: "he's got a gun!") Would you argue that's unfair discrimination? I wouldn't. This is not to say I agree with the court's reasoning - there is quite a difference between the ability to wipe potential evidence for a copyright protection case from a hard drive and the ability to quickly and easily kill people. My point is more that it was pretty irrelevant of girlintraining to drag guns into this debate. But yeah, some people seem to be obsessed by dragging guns into everything...
Some people still use old polluting 20th-century technology that results in a lot of money being given to shady figures in the middle east who are suspected of passing it on to known terrorist organizations (and we're not even talking about climate change yet). You're absolutely right that making the people who use said old technology carry a disproportionate share of the burden of road maintenance is not fair in the absolute sense of the word, but if you're really gonna pick nits, neither are a lot of other taxes. A fuel tax does, however, incentivize people to move to 21st-century technology that doesn't carry the aforementioned disadvantages. And it introduces that incentive in a relatively free-market fashion; you just change one of the boundary conditions (cost of fuel) and allow the market to adapt however it sees fit, which seems less of a heavy-handed regulatory interference than the current administration's plan to gradually outlaw the most fuel-inefficient cars. Incidentally, it's also administratively simpler, easier on people's privacy, and carries less overhead cost to implement. Unless you're a dug-in innovation-averse multibillion-dollar industry, what's not to like?
Suppose you, as a government, perceive a need to tax something car-related. From almost any point of view (environmental, privacy, overhead cost, administrative complexity,...), the logical thing to do would be to tax the fuel (or increase that tax). Any point of view but that of the oil industry, that is. This makes the argument pretty compelling that behind closed doors, those in charge in Oregon probably wanted an increased fuel tax, only to see it commuted (pun not intended) to a milage tax under pressure from the oil lobby.
In any other country, such would be labeled "corruption". It's easy to have one of the lower corruption rates in the world if you redefine the term...
Your unsubstantiated claim may conceivably be true, but how about, you know, HANDGUNS?
Otherwise, nice try. If you aren't a lawyer, then you really missed your calling.
Slashdot Mirror
s/pray for/think of/
Happy now... you empty headed animal food trough wiper?
...so instead of making snarky remarks on the internet about unrealistic building standards and people making the bad choice of being born in a poor country, better pray for those who will lose their lives in that monster.
Wilma had wind speeds of 240 km/h at the time it made landfall in Mexico. Haiyan had wind speeds of 315 km/h when it made landfall (highest wind at landfall ever recorded). Knowing that structural stress on buildings goes approximately with the square of the wind speed (kinetic energy and things), that's almost twice as powerful. Many general aviation airplanes (for example the cessna 172) have "never exceed speeds" that are lower than 315 km/h; in other words, if you make a dive and reach that kind of speed, you're at risk of your airplane disintegrating. I have strong doubts about the economic feasibility of building houses that can reliably withstand such wind speeds, especially in poorer countries. It's like trying to mount a house on top of a (non-American) high-speed train and take it to top speed.
I've read all your posts in this thread and you've made it abundantly clear that you don't really understand the concepts in my GP post nor their real-life implications. The other people who answered to your posts seem to agree with me, so unless you're going to pull the "everyone is crazy but me" card, you need to work on your writing skills rather than blaming everyone else's reading skills. So, if you have any interest at all in having an honest good-faith intellectual discourse (which I'm starting to doubt), please, please go do some reading on the subject. Otherwise it is pointless to continue this conversation.
Go look up "prisoner's dilemma" and "Nash equilibrium". And hand in your geek card on your way out.
Close. '123456' tops Adobe password list.
Also, I know this doesn't need a reference, but just for those who like a good nostalgic laugh.
Your first sentence is factually false. If it were true, wind energy would be phenomenally profitable right now
You may need to work a bit on your reading comprehension. If I would have stopped writing after my first sentence, you might have a point, but my second sentence (starting with "only") nicely explains why what I said doesn't make wind energy phenomenally profitable. Also, I said "very little" (not "no") and "maintenance problems" (not "maintenance requirements"). The difference being that, while everything requires maintenace, it becomes a problem if it jeopardises profitability.
All that said, I do admit I applied a slight bit of hyperbole (but nowhere near "factually false"). What I meant is, one can make a turbine that is lighter on maintenance. It will be more expensive and and yield less power that its competitors, so you'd need more surface area and upfront investment for the same power output. It's even possible that a complete wind farm of these things will require just as much maintenance per unit of power because of having more turbines. Even assuming this isn't the case, in the real world, upfront investment is commonly made possible by loans, which have to be paid off. And business people are not highly interested in investing in anything that won't turn to profit in the next 10-15 years (unless the promise of profit is huge). Higher upfront investment for the same yield is a competitive problem; your "it has effectively no other costs" is an oversimplification. So all these economic factors taken into account, turbine design is what it is, with a maintenance cost that - in an ideal world - would lead to the highest possible profit for wind farm operators (within physical constraints). If maintenance costs are far beyond that sweet spot, then someone somewhere down the line didn't do their job right.
As for wind energy being more expensive than coal, I never said otherwise (see my opinion on energy policy). The problem with coal is that you're taking relatively pure carbon that is buried underground by nature, or in other words sequestered by nature in the most efficient possible form, and converting it all to CO2. I'm very pessimistic about the economic feasibility of sequestering the CO2 output of a coal plant; what is sure is that the current (admittedly immature) sequestration technology makes coal unprofitable altogether. And if you just let the CO2 go into the atmosphere, some people will argue that the ultimate economical cost of coal, including the economic effect of climate change on future generations, is far higher than wind. One cannot say with 100% certainty whether that's true or not, but current data strongly suggests it is, and there's the precautionary principle...
I'm very much anti-coal; the environmentalists that are fighting for a quick and complete end of nuclear power are fighting the wrong battle and I'm just as angry about it as you are. I do, however, believe (again just like you) that something needs to be done about those very old and unsafe nuclear plants (represented in large parts of the world by the GE Mark I), and about the on-site storage of spent fuel. The gap left behind by removing coal (and very old nuclear plants that cannot economically be made safer) should be filled in by all possible means that emit as little CO2 as possible, perhaps including newer and safer nuclear technologies for base load, but also solar for catching up the day peak in hot regions where a lot of air conditioning is used, wave power, wind in regions with sufficiently consistent and strong wind, and where necessary a little bit of biomass and natural gas to fill up lulls in wind (yes, even though the latter emits CO2). And a modest increase in electricity cost is an acceptable price to pay for that.
Finally, I don't believe a huge baroque scheme of government intervention is required to implement the above soluti
I am now completely convinced that you have NEVER had any contact with design/construction/building of any kind of medium or large power plant.
Neither have you, captain obvious. You just get your one-sided view from whatever your family members feel like ranting about. I read a lot about engineering (especially power generation), and between that and my educational background, I can participate well in technical discussions with engineers. Not that any of this matters - not only because design/construction/building of a power plant has very little to do with the statements in my posts, but also because technical discussion are about the merit of the argument (and its citations), not the person making it. "Being a visitor to a techie site" (to use your words), you'd better get used to that.
Back to the technical discussion: a lot of what you says rings true (though it doesn't seem to contradict much of what I said). However, I have to point out that a lot of the technologies you're talking about are pretty mature. For the example of steam turbines, current technology is already very efficient, and incremental improvements in material science can only yield low single-digit percentage increases in efficiency. It is an engineer's source of sustenance and job satisfaction to squeeze out these last few %, and they can really obsess about it (which is probably the reason for your one-sided focus). For the rest of us, these small improvements are cool to have, and worth paying engineers for, but they won't make or break a technology. In modern eyes, the steam turbines (and their operating temperatures, heat exchangers,...) of 100 years ago are woefully inefficient, but that didn't stop them from being highly profitable.
Of course, when we get to fusion, things get a bit more tentative. You seem to be rooting for the tokamak approach (which is one of the more promising ones), but the different approaches share some material requirements. And although there are indeed substantial material challenges in fusion (though they're more about dealing with neutron flux than with heat), the physics challenges are far worse. Remember we haven't yet demonstrated we are capable of sustaining a profitable fusion reaction, nor do we know which of the different approaches will eventually succeed in doing so.
To take the example of your heat exchangers: instead of building a small high-temperature heat exchanger close to the reaction, one could build a big low-temperature heat exchanger at a longer distance. Granted, doing so incurs its own challenges - especially the cooling of equipment that necessarily needs to be close to the reaction - and may push some of the approaches outside of the realm of the feasible (the magnets in the tokamak approach would become especially problematic), but that's not my point. My point is that by the time we get the physics to work (likely not any time soon), we can probably make do with the materials we have and make a contraption that will look inefficient in the eyes of later generations, but be profitable nevertheless.
This is not to say that I don't support the materials research in Japan - it is very likely to become useful in the future one way or another. The materials aspect of fusion is a challenge to be addressed - it's just not the most important one at the moment.
False. Even the materials from 20 years ago can be used to engineer a modestly-sized wind turbine that is built like a brick shithouse and has very little maintenance or lifespan problems. Only its deployment will be a lot less cost-effective than competing turbines. A similar thing goes for RPM: these things are deliberately built for optimal performance in a certain window of wind speeds, which inherently compromises their performance (or even ability to operate) at very different wind speeds. It's all about engineering tradeoffs and cost competition. If you have good statistics on the prevailing conditions (including things such as gusts and turbulence) at a certain location, you can tailor your turbine design to optimal functioning at that location. This will include a certain amount of downtime due to exceptionally high winds, which is offset by higher efficiency at more common wind speeds. You can also tailor its life span and maintenance cost, though you'll need to compromise on other desirable properties (procurement cost, size, efficiency) for that. If a competitor comes around who saves cost by decreasing engineering margins, and the costumer is not aware of the higher failure rates and maintenance costs, then you lose. The pessimistic scenario you're describing would indicate you need to fire your engineers (or switch engineering firm if you're the customer, or call into question the measurements of the conditions). Especially if they start making excuses like "we don't have the right materials".
That's not to say materials don't play a role. The tradeoffs between durability, procurement cost, efficiency, wind speed range,... can be made a lot more attractive by better materials. But the problems you're describing? Those are signs of incompetence somewhere down the line.
Engineers are among the most unbiased people you will find.
Sorry to burst your bubble:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/extremist-engineers
http://atheism.about.com/b/2009/08/04/engineers-terrorism-and-creationism.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jan/02/extremism-engineering
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html?_r=0
You on the other hand strike me as someone who has read far too much people who have no education in mechanical engineering related to power generation and just shoot off beautiful political slogans. Most of which aren't rooted in reality, but are based on wishful thinking, which is why there's a massive coal build up going on in "we're transitioning to wind!" Germany. Because people cannot face reality, and instead base large plans on wishful thinking. Which ends up doing the exact opposite of what it's supposed to achieve.
Finished? Nice strawman. As a scientist, I'm merely debating technicalities. I do have an opinion on sustainable energy, of course, but it's quite nuanced. You will see below that it's very different from what you're assuming it is.
My opinion? Stop the bullshit, quickly push research into fission, build thorium reactors and update the current older generation nuclear plants to modern standards to avoid Fukushima-style failures. At the same time massively overfund the material research facility in Japan that is working on solving the fusion's material problems to expedite functional deuterium-tritium fusion reactor's arrival.
As mentioned in our other discussion, material science is not what is holding fusion back. I don't understand where that bizarre materials obsession of yours comes from - are your family members working on materials, perhaps?
Anyhow, the exact thing you're accusing me of actually apply to you. Yes, funding for fusion research should be a multiple of what it is now, but I'm not so naive as to think this alone (coupled with building fission plants based on not-yet-mature technology) will solve all our problems overnight. Fusion still has significant fundamental milestones to pass, and no-one can predict when that will happen. What can be reasonably predicted is that from the reaching of these milestones onwards, it will be 30 more years before a significant fraction of the world's energy needs are met by fusion; that's just how things go in any kind of industry (ask your family members). So we need something in the intervening time. Thorium is not ready for prime-time either (though I could see it beating fusion), and its economic profitability is unclear. What's ready for prime time are some of the newer generation uranium-based fission reactors, but the political and financial (including insurance) costs are not as favorable as they were in in the nuclear boom period. Compared to that, alternative energy sources are available right now, and are advancing at a steady and rapid pace. If you compare their complete lifecycle cost to the current lifecycle cost of a new nuclear plants, they're pretty close. They each have their weak spots, but those are largely complementary, so from a pure availability perspective, an all-of
What we need is not materials to withstand fusion itself, but materials that could retain their physical properties near it with proper cooling. This is the same as with any other power generation process based on heat exchangers.
I'm not denying there is research being done on the material aspects you describe, but it is not what is holding fusion back, by far. It is merely a footnote in the field of fusion research, which is (sadly) still struggling to sustain a fusion reaction long enough and intensely enough to be economically feasible.
As for your first claim, kindly cite sources. So far even Germans, who invested untold billions and massive amount of political capital are buckling. Surely if you were correct, they would have massive problems they currently have?
Give me your sources, horse-master, and I shall give you mine. What "massive problems" are you talking about that are related to material science? A few wind turbines blown down by a recent storm?
Disclosure: I have direct family members working in large companies who have indoctrinated me with their one-sided view on things.
FTFY.
Really, no offense; even scientists and engineers who actively try to be unbiased are prone to become biased by having a financial stake in something. I noticed that in myself when I was trading stock, and I was actively on the lookout for bias creeping into my thought processes. The only solution that seemed to work was selling the stock. Now if you're biased in favor of your employer, you'd probably think twice before going down that road...
Solar needs new materials for the grid, as well as new materials for the panels that are significantly more efficient and durable than current ones.
Wind needs materials that are significantly stronger than current ones while withstanding wear and tear significantly better than current ones.
Profitability of alternative energy technologies is often measured over the lifetime of such technologies. Current figures suggest that neither wind nor solar needs your improvements in durability (though they're always welcome of course).
Fusion needs materials that are significantly stronger than current ones, while withstanding extreme temperatures significantly better than current ones.
Fail! The coulomb barrier to fusion is orders of magnitude stronger than any chemical bond can be. There is no solid that can contain a process with an acceptable fusion yield and there never will be. This is why "cold fusion" (or more precisely, low-energy fusion devices) won't produce net gain. There is a diverse set of approaches through which various groups are trying to attain commercially viable fusion, and they all share one property: the heating/confinement is (at least partially but usually fully) electromagnetic in nature.
In other news, not all science is material science.
It looks like you just publicly stepped, no, stomped on the big sore toe of a demographic that has the capability of making your online life hell. I hope you thought that one through. Any last words before going off the grid?
You might want to go up a few posts in this thread. To the AC who stated "If he ever robbed anyone, yep. I'm okay with capital punishment", got slammed for that, then apparently defended by you (though it now becomes clear you probably were not defending them, you just missed the context of the post you replied on).
Encore! Now do an ad hominem on Thomas Jefferson.
All the way distracting from the trivial observation that uninformed people will cast uninformed votes.
+1 Insightful, pretty please? This single comment (in addition to the one by IamTheRealMike two more posts up) is what it all boils down to.
Oh yeah, because all the other civilized countries that punish almost any given crime much lighter than the US are full of feuds and mob justice?
Pray tell, is there anything that can make you take your eyes off your navel?
Since when does "robbing" imply "killing"? I know a few people who got robbed, and none of them sustained any physical harm in the process.
No what? What part of my post do you disagree with? What arguments do you have to do so? Your statement does not contradict anything I said.
Though I acknowledge this is a tangent on a discussion thread that is already a tangent on TFA, I would like to add that in most contexts, it's a bit disingenuous to just say "people can kill without a gun, so there should be no legal difference between someone who carries a gun and someone who doesn't".
Sure, unarmed people can kill, but it's orders of magnitude more difficult. It requires a certain amount of physical strength and skill, and a lot of determination. Most people would back off if their target starts bleeding significantly or passes out. For example, even though I have the required martial arts training, I don't think I could muster the sheer brutality to willfully beat someone to dead. Only a tiny minority of of unarmed brawls result in permanent damage; most are not even reported to the authorities. The same cannot be said of gunfights; the odds of walking away from one unscathed are relatively low even compared to knife fights.
The other difference is that handguns are expressly designed to kill people quickly and easily at ranges compatible with indoor and peacetime urban situations, which distinguishes them not only from baseball bats, hammers and kitchen knives, but also from rifles and shotguns, which in comparison are cumbersome weapons, and more suitable for hunting. This is reflected in the statistics on the website you kindly provided: a full half of homicides is committed with handguns.
So to get back on topic: police forces all over the world have different methods of dealing with suspects who carry a firearm and those who don't ("think: "he's got a gun!") Would you argue that's unfair discrimination? I wouldn't. This is not to say I agree with the court's reasoning - there is quite a difference between the ability to wipe potential evidence for a copyright protection case from a hard drive and the ability to quickly and easily kill people. My point is more that it was pretty irrelevant of girlintraining to drag guns into this debate. But yeah, some people seem to be obsessed by dragging guns into everything...
Go look up the FBI crime stats. I'll wait. Hell, I'll even be the nice guy and provide you with the link! .... See? Told ya so.
Thanks for the link. I did say it may conceivably be true; my beef was the lack of reference, which is now remedied.
The point being, as stated by OP, that "[people] can kill without a gun."
Point.
Some people still use old polluting 20th-century technology that results in a lot of money being given to shady figures in the middle east who are suspected of passing it on to known terrorist organizations (and we're not even talking about climate change yet). You're absolutely right that making the people who use said old technology carry a disproportionate share of the burden of road maintenance is not fair in the absolute sense of the word, but if you're really gonna pick nits, neither are a lot of other taxes. A fuel tax does, however, incentivize people to move to 21st-century technology that doesn't carry the aforementioned disadvantages. And it introduces that incentive in a relatively free-market fashion; you just change one of the boundary conditions (cost of fuel) and allow the market to adapt however it sees fit, which seems less of a heavy-handed regulatory interference than the current administration's plan to gradually outlaw the most fuel-inefficient cars. Incidentally, it's also administratively simpler, easier on people's privacy, and carries less overhead cost to implement. Unless you're a dug-in innovation-averse multibillion-dollar industry, what's not to like?
Suppose you, as a government, perceive a need to tax something car-related. From almost any point of view (environmental, privacy, overhead cost, administrative complexity,...), the logical thing to do would be to tax the fuel (or increase that tax). Any point of view but that of the oil industry, that is. This makes the argument pretty compelling that behind closed doors, those in charge in Oregon probably wanted an increased fuel tax, only to see it commuted (pun not intended) to a milage tax under pressure from the oil lobby.
In any other country, such would be labeled "corruption". It's easy to have one of the lower corruption rates in the world if you redefine the term...
Your unsubstantiated claim may conceivably be true, but how about, you know, HANDGUNS ?
Otherwise, nice try. If you aren't a lawyer, then you really missed your calling.