Didn't mean that paper was the only one, just meant to chime in that it was (probably still is) one of the big players. I mean, there are those who also say that a close relative of hemp competes with the psychopharmaceutical industry. Also there's the fact that marijuana was primarily used by immigrants and other people with considerably less pull, and one can see how it became prohibited.
I think the biggest changing force would be to get the junk food industry lobbying - imagine what marijuana legalization would do to their profits. What other state of mind do you find someone throwing a pizza in the oven, deciding that's taking too long so puts a burrito in the microwave only to polish off a bag of Cheeto's and some Twizzlers before noshing down on the rest.
Wind turbines are only useful in limited areas, and their construction causes pollution and takes up a fair amount of land. Furthermore, the base-load energy from them is really not all that great. In some places they do make perfect sense to use, but those are the exception, not the rule.
Current solar cell technology is quite dirty, and you end up with a piece of toxic waste that has to be disposed of at the end. Further technological development may ameliorate some of the negative effects, but I doubt it will be clean before the point where we have large amounts of industrial production of nanotubes. Maybe in the future, but not now. Additionally, the expected power return really isn't enough for us. Yes, there are some places where solar makes perfect sense, but it is not the only answer.
Biomass? Seems nice and natural. I used to be 100% behind this until I actually dug into the facts. Currently biofuel production is quite energy inefficient if the total cradle to grave energy costs (read: diesel and gasoline) of the intense agriculture required to grow the feedstock plus the energy required for thermal depolymerization of the organic compounds to make them into a usable form. Additionally, the agriculture required takes up immense amount of land. Sugar cane is currently the only plant which has any real proven use as a biofuel, and that only grows adequately in moist tropical regions. Scaling up sugar cane production to the levels needed to power any significant proportion of society's energy needs would therefore decimate the rainforests with all of the associated ecological effects that would pose. This is already happening in parts of Southeast Asia. EU nations which were purchasing cane based biofuels then put stipulations that the cane can not be grown in recent cut rainforests, so the cane replaced much of the existing farmland, forcing the locals to slash and burn rainforests to replace their farmland, or revert to bushmeat to supplement their diets. Finally, biofuels on an industrial level are necessarily the result of extremely intense modern agriculture. That means large amounts of fertilizers are used, which contribute significantly to eutrophication of natural bodies of water. Intense agriculture also significantly disturbs the soil, contributing heavily to soil erosion, further degrading the water which was already impacted. For an example of the damage that intense terrestrial agriculture can have on natural aquatic systems, read into the crown of thorns starfish and it's effect on the Great Barrier Reef. And remember, this is an ocean environment with massive amounts of water flowing through in underwater currents diluting and carrying a large amount of the fertilizers and sediments away. The result to freshwater systems can be even more dramatic.
Again, I do believe there are many places where biofuel use is appropriate, especially if it can be done efficiently with reprocessed wastes. Extracting enough energy from biofuels to power modern society would, however, cause massive environmental damage.
IIRC, the paper industry was at least as influential in getting anti-marijuana (and through that anti-hemp) laws passed in the United States, particularly Friedrich Weyerhäuser a large captain in the wood pulp and paper industry. He also had a decent toehold in the media through print, and spread anti-marijuana FUD via this power, convincing the public to demand anti-marijuana laws. It seems likely that his actions were out of self interest in that hemp also makes fibers which are quite decent at making paper, as evidenced by the pro-legalization's point that the constitution was written on hemp paper.
That's something I've been thinking about... where else would viruses originate in the fist place? They are obligate parasites, meaning that they can not reproduce without their host. I can not think of many places in the world where DNA (or RNA, since we are talking about retroviruses) exists in large numbers along with ribosomes to provide successful translation of the accessory proteins needed to properly exit the cell and then reinfect a new cell. I guess I'm claiming that viruses originated as transposons that gained the ability to leave the cell and subsequently infect a new one. I suppose it's possible that viruses arose from abiogenesis, but it just seems more likely that viruses in general initially arose through excision from a host genome. I suppose the postulate that viruses arose from abiogenesis is more likely than the theory that complete living cells arose from abiogenesis, but with life you only need to encode for one out of a very large pool successful replicators. There is a level of specificity in viruses that could have arisen from evolution, but I feel could be adequately explained by a biogenic source, such as genome excision.
Viruses are indeed not affected by antibiotics, as they primarily affect bacteria. There are a whole host of antivirals which do indeed fit into the category of "drug" to which they can build up a resistance, as antivirals tend to operate on a very specific subunit of a molecule (either genomic or proetnaceous.)
Most of the junk in your DNA has been put to some use
Actually, that is pretty much false. About 2% of our DNA does anything to encode for protein. As a reference, the article states that about 8% of our DNA is relegated to fossil viruses (much of this bulk being redundant copies of the same of very similar viruses.)
You do realize that the only way to get rid of the first two problems is to... legalize and regulate.
Show me a recreational drug which has been removed from the streets by law enforcement and I might give your argument credence. Your argument just gives credence to the philosophy of legalizing drugs.
You want to eliminate addiction? Raise the quality of life of potential addicts. scientific studies lend evidence to this hypothesis.
And failure to administer properly? People will be far more likely to seek information on safer use (I agree that abuse is never safe, but many of the negative side affects can be addressed) if they will not get in trouble for doing so. A street dealer is only interested in showing the method of administration that is most likely to cause addiction. Granted, many legal recreational drug vendors (E.G. the tobacco industry) haven't shown much willingness to prevent addiction, but at least it is possible to regulate the industry somewhat if it is legal. Regulation of a black market industry is impossible. More importantly, taxes from legalized drugs could be used to fund treatment programs and allow targeting of at risk individuals to show opportunities other than drugs.
I'm not saying that legalization is a panacea, but it has been demonstrated that prohibition of recreational substances has any effect on levels of use. Instead it funds and is indeed the basis of vast violent criminal organizations and the enforcement of prohibition laws drains society of huge sums of money that would better be spent elsewhere, raising the quality of life of potential addicts to the point where they do not need to use drugs to escape the pain of life.
1) stuff from below is bad.
Well better tell that to the volcanos and under sea islands that spew crap into the air and ocean.
Stuff from below is perfectly safe? Better tell that to those impacted by acid mine drainage.
Fossil water isn't needed. Actually water may not be the best carrier of heat to use, but if used water doesn't need to be pumped up. A closed loop can pump surface water down where it is heated up then it comes back up where a heat pump then extracts the heat.
While this method reduces the risk of pollution, it does not eliminate it completely. There is a significant chance that the "fossil water" is under considerable pressure, and would be forced out of the holes drilled to pipe the fluids used to transfer heat. The extreme conditions also mean that any part of the system would require significant inspections and maintenance.
What extra heat? Where you see "waste heat", I see another energy source. And efficiency requires more of that heat energy to be extracted. If the water is hot it still has plenty of energy that can be used.
Extracting more of that "heat waste" will realistically not increase the efficiency of the system. Essentially, the power plant in a geothermal electrical generator are not powered by the fact that underground water is hot. They are powered by the gradient in temperature between that hot underground water and wherever the waste heat is pumped to. Almost any attempt to recapture this waste heat, such as with thermocouples, will in essence insulate the cooling mechanism, reducing the efficiency of the primary generators. Why not use the rising air from the heat from a nuclear cooling tower to power a turbine to get more electricity out? Because then the ability of the cooling towers to cool the liquid is decreased, and would have to be compensated for, likely by pushing more air through the towers with a device similar to a fan. By applying the laws of thermodynamics, it becomes obvious that due to unavoidable inefficiencies running the fans will take more energy than the turbines at the top of the cooling towers gain, otherwise this becomes a free energy device.
Cogeneration is a completely different concept, as thermodynamically you are not attempting to generate extra power from the system, rather you are essentially turning the heated buildings into massive heat sinks for the nuclear (or geothermal, or even coal/oil fired) power plant.
There may be, however, one scenario in which re-using the waste heat at the end of the life cycle in geothermal power generation would work, if some of the waste heat from off peak periods is stored until peak demand periods and used to run an ancillary generator system to make up some of the difference between base and peak load.
I am not saying that the technology used in the linked article is snake oil, it is simply not applicable to the electricity generation industry. It is more applicable to other industries in which the waste heat is truly waste and not the result of trying to create a large heat differential as needed to run a heat engine which spins turbines, powering generators which then produce electricity.
Well, at least we both agree that cogeneration is a good thing in certain circumstances. And I'm not honestly implying that the risks inherent with geothermal make the whole thing a no-go. They are in all likelihood significantly less than the risks of other energy production methods in a large number of circumstances. I'm just saying that there are risks and drawbacks that have to be considered. This may mean that geothermal power is not appropriate for certain locations, such as sensitive habitats which could be greatly disturbed by normal operation, or put at risk in case of failure. Then again, a nuclear fission plant would pose the same and likely greater risks in these situations, as would fossil fuels. Hydro or wind power may be more or less appropriate depending on exactly why that particular habitat is classified as sensitive.
I guess what I'm saying is that, while there are many places where geothermal energy is appropriate, some circumstances would make it a poor choice. And I got caught up in the mental exercise of figuring out what possible hazards geothermal presents and simply hadn't yet gotten to the point of asking where in particular would it be appropriate.
I guess I made it sounds like Geothermal is a bad idea, I was just cautioning that it is not perfect. In reality, our energy needs will only be filled by a mix of technologies, using what is most appropriate for a given need. Nukes, geothermal, wind power, solar, and fossil all have their benefits and drawbacks, making them best suited for different situations. Geothermal seems to be an almost perfect fit for grid electricity and heating in Iceland, while solar and potentially bio-products working well in arid to tropical regions. The USA is large enough and geographically/climatologically (not to mention politically) diverse enough that a mix of energy resources is the only way we are going to be able to maintain any sort of growth or even maintain our current standards of living.
While properly working geothermal is in theory clean, in actuality there are several hazards associated with it.
The first is localized ground/surface water pollution. The water pulled from deep geothermal springs has many chemicals dissolved in it that are not normally found in high concentrations in surface waters (since they are not common, organisms have not adapted to them, hence they are often toxic.) Simply returning the water back underground is feasible in the short term, the aforementioned chemicals combined with the high heat render the water quite corrosive at times, and considering the high pressure desired to efficiently pump heat out of the ground, some spillage or at least seepage is eventually all but guaranteed. The risks posed by these soluents may very well be less than petroleum, but they are non-negligible.
Extra heat must be dispelled from some point in the power plant to maintain a thermal gradient. Efficiency requires a high level of heat transfer, so the excess heat will have to be dumped into the environment. The level of energy transfer will likely be similar to that of a nuclear power plant of similar power rating. The most likely solution for ejection of heat at these levels (100 megawatt?) would be by transfer to a freshwater source (as saltwater corrosion would make maintenance far more expensive) likely fluvial such as a stream or river as the water flow would ensure a constant supply of cool water. Warming up freshwater systems also has a non-zero effect on the native habitat, generally negative, but sometimes can be managed to increase productivity of fisheries. The need to expel the heat also means the geothermal power plant will be located close to a river or stream, meaning any leaks in the system will allow the aforementioned dissolved minerals to leach into the water, either directly through surface flow or possibly through groundwater flow which would be much more difficult to detect and have much more long lasting effects as the entire groundwater reserve would have to be purged before the system returns to normal.
If direct ejection into freshwater systems is not feasible, then the water will have to be cooled in a cooling tower, which introduces inefficiencies into the system as the tower must be powered, and requires a source of fresh or even de-mineralized water to avoid salt buildup in the tower. Again, this issue has to be dealt with in other thermal energy plants, such as nuclear, so is not that big of a strike against geothermal, but is still non-zero.
In some locations, the "excess" heat can be repurposed for municipal heating, such as is done in Iceland. In this case, the excess heat becomes an asset rather than a liability. However, few locations consistently cold enough to actually benefit from waste heat have a high enough population density where their worldwide environmental impact would be significant, even if they used less "green" methods of energy production. High population densities that will start thirsting for more and more energy are generally found in temperate to tropical or even arid climates and therefore the waste heat from geothermal sources is a definite liability to the majority of the world.
Yes, there may be a gratis copy of the newspaper at Burger King. And the AP DOES receive financial benefit from that newspaper sitting there... because Burger King leaves the ads in. If Burger King were to put copies of all the newspaper stories out with advertisements stripped out, then they would probably get a cease and desist fairly quickly. That could be construed as similar to a search engine displaying the bulk of what is displayed in a news story. I don't think the AP is so much looking to stop the current methods of Google or Microsoft Live so much as preventing news aggregators from crawling websites and posting essentially the whole article. The latter would probably fall under copyright infringement, and likely commercial copyright infringement, as the aggregator would no doubt stip the ads from the original work and put their own in to make money off the venture. While there is indeed some controversy over whether making copies of a work for personal use constitutes intellectual property theft, making wholesale copies of a protected work for profit is probably seen as A Bad Thing(tm) even by a decent portion of libertarian leaning Slashdotters (not implying that the majority of Slashdotters are libertarian, just referring to the subset of Slashdotters who are libertarian as a drastic example.)
Nope... Midwest Express still exists, although they may be bought out by AirTran by the end of the year. And they currently serve chocolate chip cookies baked in-flight. Much better than a bag of nuts, and not really that much more effort or cost.
That doesn't necessarily scale in the United States. The trip from London to Edinburgh is what... 400 miles? To get from New York to Chicago would be about 800 miles, twice as long of a trip. About 8 hours traveling the same speed (and I doubt you'd get trains averaging 100 miles per hour in the US, There would likely be stops between, and I don't think putting a high speed line would be really cost effective over such a large distance... airlines make more sense for rapid cross country travel in the US.
To take a train from New York to LA would end up taking over a day, even at 100 miles per hour. Likely, it would take from 2-3 days. Not to mention a passenger train actually costs more money to operate than an airline. I recall hearing in a speech given by Norman Mineta (transportation secretary at the time) that the amount that Amtrak is subsidized for a one way train ride from Florida to Texas could by two round trip tickets on a flight instead. Granted, organizational inefficiencies probably carry a large portion of the blame there, but the simple fact that it takes a lot longer on a train means you are paying employees for a longer period of service for a given trip.
And the bill gives law enforcement new tools to combat threats to our citizens from international terrorists to local drug dealers."
-- President George W. Bush - March 9, 2006, regarding USA PATRIOT
Improvement and Reauthorization Act
The Patriot Act Reauthorization Includes The Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act Of 2005. This bill introduces commonsense safeguards that will make many ingredients used in methamphetamine manufacturing more difficult to obtain in bulk and easier for law enforcement to track. For example, the bill places limits on large-scale purchases of over-the-counter drugs that are used to manufacture methamphetamines- and requires stores to keep these ingredients behind the counter or in locked display cases. It increases penalties for smuggling and selling methamphetamines.
-both from www.whitehouse.gov
The STATED INTENT of the PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Actact is to go after more than just terrorists.
Nascar and wrestling are extremely popular and profitable sports. Budweiser makes up about half of beer sales in the U.S. Bush was re-elected.
I think you underestimate the number of rednecks out there... look at a map and see how much area is densely urban. The rest of the country is primarily rednecks.
It isn't that difficult to imagine a chemical could create a similar barrier in a world based on an organic solvent. Essentially, all that is needed is a compound that is polar along the majority of the length and non-polar at one or both ends. Replacing the phosphorous that caps a phospholipid with a more ionic chemical may even be enough to do the trick, as the neighboring carbons on the chain would donate a partial charge, reducing their solubility in an organic solvent. If that would fail, replacing several methyl groups along part of the length of the lipid chain with phosphate groups should do the trick. An appropriate configuration would result in a chain that is mostly hydrophilic which would form the inside of a lipid bilayer. The hydrophobic end would be miscible in methane, and so form the outside of the bilayer. I would assume that H bonding between the hydrogen of methyl groups within the hydrophilic portion of the chain and phosphate groups would hold the strands together quite nicely in an organic solvent.
With appropriate modifications, phospholipids would work quite well as a functional cell barrier in an organic solvent. They would simply be turned inside out. In fact, a lot of the chemistry involved with terrestrial life would be basically backwards. Sugars would largely be non-miscible while fats would be dissolved quite readily. Proteins would be configured in an opposite manner with hydrophilic portions tending to be folded into the middle rather than the outside. I suppose it would become difficult to transfer salts, however they may be completely unnecessary in an organic solvent based chemical life-form. Remember, the salts of our body are very close the salinity of the ocean (actually, closer to that of brackish water, such as an estuary.) I find it very likely that we simply evolved to best utilize our terrestrial environment.
I don't think humans will sit outside basking in the rays of Jupiter anytime soon. But I see know reason why it is not feasible that life could arise on Titan, or even for humans to someday engineer some sort of life to seed Titan with.
Slashdot Mirror
hence the "close relative of hemp."
Didn't mean that paper was the only one, just meant to chime in that it was (probably still is) one of the big players. I mean, there are those who also say that a close relative of hemp competes with the psychopharmaceutical industry. Also there's the fact that marijuana was primarily used by immigrants and other people with considerably less pull, and one can see how it became prohibited.
I think the biggest changing force would be to get the junk food industry lobbying - imagine what marijuana legalization would do to their profits. What other state of mind do you find someone throwing a pizza in the oven, deciding that's taking too long so puts a burrito in the microwave only to polish off a bag of Cheeto's and some Twizzlers before noshing down on the rest.
And addressing the human element will be left as a trivial exercise for the reader
Wind turbines are only useful in limited areas, and their construction causes pollution and takes up a fair amount of land. Furthermore, the base-load energy from them is really not all that great. In some places they do make perfect sense to use, but those are the exception, not the rule.
Current solar cell technology is quite dirty, and you end up with a piece of toxic waste that has to be disposed of at the end. Further technological development may ameliorate some of the negative effects, but I doubt it will be clean before the point where we have large amounts of industrial production of nanotubes. Maybe in the future, but not now. Additionally, the expected power return really isn't enough for us. Yes, there are some places where solar makes perfect sense, but it is not the only answer.
Biomass? Seems nice and natural. I used to be 100% behind this until I actually dug into the facts. Currently biofuel production is quite energy inefficient if the total cradle to grave energy costs (read: diesel and gasoline) of the intense agriculture required to grow the feedstock plus the energy required for thermal depolymerization of the organic compounds to make them into a usable form. Additionally, the agriculture required takes up immense amount of land. Sugar cane is currently the only plant which has any real proven use as a biofuel, and that only grows adequately in moist tropical regions. Scaling up sugar cane production to the levels needed to power any significant proportion of society's energy needs would therefore decimate the rainforests with all of the associated ecological effects that would pose. This is already happening in parts of Southeast Asia. EU nations which were purchasing cane based biofuels then put stipulations that the cane can not be grown in recent cut rainforests, so the cane replaced much of the existing farmland, forcing the locals to slash and burn rainforests to replace their farmland, or revert to bushmeat to supplement their diets. Finally, biofuels on an industrial level are necessarily the result of extremely intense modern agriculture. That means large amounts of fertilizers are used, which contribute significantly to eutrophication of natural bodies of water. Intense agriculture also significantly disturbs the soil, contributing heavily to soil erosion, further degrading the water which was already impacted. For an example of the damage that intense terrestrial agriculture can have on natural aquatic systems, read into the crown of thorns starfish and it's effect on the Great Barrier Reef. And remember, this is an ocean environment with massive amounts of water flowing through in underwater currents diluting and carrying a large amount of the fertilizers and sediments away. The result to freshwater systems can be even more dramatic.
Again, I do believe there are many places where biofuel use is appropriate, especially if it can be done efficiently with reprocessed wastes. Extracting enough energy from biofuels to power modern society would, however, cause massive environmental damage.
IIRC, the paper industry was at least as influential in getting anti-marijuana (and through that anti-hemp) laws passed in the United States, particularly Friedrich Weyerhäuser a large captain in the wood pulp and paper industry. He also had a decent toehold in the media through print, and spread anti-marijuana FUD via this power, convincing the public to demand anti-marijuana laws. It seems likely that his actions were out of self interest in that hemp also makes fibers which are quite decent at making paper, as evidenced by the pro-legalization's point that the constitution was written on hemp paper.
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day.
Teach a man how to 419 and he can fish for a lifetime.
That's something I've been thinking about... where else would viruses originate in the fist place? They are obligate parasites, meaning that they can not reproduce without their host. I can not think of many places in the world where DNA (or RNA, since we are talking about retroviruses) exists in large numbers along with ribosomes to provide successful translation of the accessory proteins needed to properly exit the cell and then reinfect a new cell. I guess I'm claiming that viruses originated as transposons that gained the ability to leave the cell and subsequently infect a new one. I suppose it's possible that viruses arose from abiogenesis, but it just seems more likely that viruses in general initially arose through excision from a host genome. I suppose the postulate that viruses arose from abiogenesis is more likely than the theory that complete living cells arose from abiogenesis, but with life you only need to encode for one out of a very large pool successful replicators. There is a level of specificity in viruses that could have arisen from evolution, but I feel could be adequately explained by a biogenic source, such as genome excision.
Viruses are indeed not affected by antibiotics, as they primarily affect bacteria. There are a whole host of antivirals which do indeed fit into the category of "drug" to which they can build up a resistance, as antivirals tend to operate on a very specific subunit of a molecule (either genomic or proetnaceous.)
Most of the junk in your DNA has been put to some use
Actually, that is pretty much false. About 2% of our DNA does anything to encode for protein. As a reference, the article states that about 8% of our DNA is relegated to fossil viruses (much of this bulk being redundant copies of the same of very similar viruses.)
You do realize that the only way to get rid of the first two problems is to... legalize and regulate.
Show me a recreational drug which has been removed from the streets by law enforcement and I might give your argument credence. Your argument just gives credence to the philosophy of legalizing drugs.
You want to eliminate addiction? Raise the quality of life of potential addicts. scientific studies lend evidence to this hypothesis.
And failure to administer properly? People will be far more likely to seek information on safer use (I agree that abuse is never safe, but many of the negative side affects can be addressed) if they will not get in trouble for doing so. A street dealer is only interested in showing the method of administration that is most likely to cause addiction. Granted, many legal recreational drug vendors (E.G. the tobacco industry) haven't shown much willingness to prevent addiction, but at least it is possible to regulate the industry somewhat if it is legal. Regulation of a black market industry is impossible. More importantly, taxes from legalized drugs could be used to fund treatment programs and allow targeting of at risk individuals to show opportunities other than drugs.
I'm not saying that legalization is a panacea, but it has been demonstrated that prohibition of recreational substances has any effect on levels of use. Instead it funds and is indeed the basis of vast violent criminal organizations and the enforcement of prohibition laws drains society of huge sums of money that would better be spent elsewhere, raising the quality of life of potential addicts to the point where they do not need to use drugs to escape the pain of life.
1) stuff from below is bad.
Well better tell that to the volcanos and under sea islands that spew crap into the air and ocean.
Stuff from below is perfectly safe? Better tell that to those impacted by acid mine drainage.
) Salt water is corrosive and bad for power plants.
Better tell that to the navy--they have ships floating in it! and they pump it through their nuclear reactors.
I'll ask about the navy's budget.. the US Navy fleet alone spent $4.4B in corrosion and corrosion related maintenance and repair. Corrosion also adversely affects system readiness and personal safety. That's around 25% of the navy's maintenance budget.
Fossil water isn't needed. Actually water may not be the best carrier of heat to use, but if used water doesn't need to be pumped up. A closed loop can pump surface water down where it is heated up then it comes back up where a heat pump then extracts the heat.
While this method reduces the risk of pollution, it does not eliminate it completely. There is a significant chance that the "fossil water" is under considerable pressure, and would be forced out of the holes drilled to pipe the fluids used to transfer heat. The extreme conditions also mean that any part of the system would require significant inspections and maintenance. What extra heat? Where you see "waste heat", I see another energy source. And efficiency requires more of that heat energy to be extracted. If the water is hot it still has plenty of energy that can be used.
Extracting more of that "heat waste" will realistically not increase the efficiency of the system. Essentially, the power plant in a geothermal electrical generator are not powered by the fact that underground water is hot. They are powered by the gradient in temperature between that hot underground water and wherever the waste heat is pumped to. Almost any attempt to recapture this waste heat, such as with thermocouples, will in essence insulate the cooling mechanism, reducing the efficiency of the primary generators. Why not use the rising air from the heat from a nuclear cooling tower to power a turbine to get more electricity out? Because then the ability of the cooling towers to cool the liquid is decreased, and would have to be compensated for, likely by pushing more air through the towers with a device similar to a fan. By applying the laws of thermodynamics, it becomes obvious that due to unavoidable inefficiencies running the fans will take more energy than the turbines at the top of the cooling towers gain, otherwise this becomes a free energy device.
Cogeneration is a completely different concept, as thermodynamically you are not attempting to generate extra power from the system, rather you are essentially turning the heated buildings into massive heat sinks for the nuclear (or geothermal, or even coal/oil fired) power plant.
There may be, however, one scenario in which re-using the waste heat at the end of the life cycle in geothermal power generation would work, if some of the waste heat from off peak periods is stored until peak demand periods and used to run an ancillary generator system to make up some of the difference between base and peak load.
I am not saying that the technology used in the linked article is snake oil, it is simply not applicable to the electricity generation industry. It is more applicable to other industries in which the waste heat is truly waste and not the result of trying to create a large heat differential as needed to run a heat engine which spins turbines, powering generators which then produce electricity.
Well, at least we both agree that cogeneration is a good thing in certain circumstances. And I'm not honestly implying that the risks inherent with geothermal make the whole thing a no-go. They are in all likelihood significantly less than the risks of other energy production methods in a large number of circumstances. I'm just saying that there are risks and drawbacks that have to be considered. This may mean that geothermal power is not appropriate for certain locations, such as sensitive habitats which could be greatly disturbed by normal operation, or put at risk in case of failure. Then again, a nuclear fission plant would pose the same and likely greater risks in these situations, as would fossil fuels. Hydro or wind power may be more or less appropriate depending on exactly why that particular habitat is classified as sensitive.
I guess what I'm saying is that, while there are many places where geothermal energy is appropriate, some circumstances would make it a poor choice. And I got caught up in the mental exercise of figuring out what possible hazards geothermal presents and simply hadn't yet gotten to the point of asking where in particular would it be appropriate.
I guess I made it sounds like Geothermal is a bad idea, I was just cautioning that it is not perfect. In reality, our energy needs will only be filled by a mix of technologies, using what is most appropriate for a given need. Nukes, geothermal, wind power, solar, and fossil all have their benefits and drawbacks, making them best suited for different situations. Geothermal seems to be an almost perfect fit for grid electricity and heating in Iceland, while solar and potentially bio-products working well in arid to tropical regions. The USA is large enough and geographically/climatologically (not to mention politically) diverse enough that a mix of energy resources is the only way we are going to be able to maintain any sort of growth or even maintain our current standards of living.
I'd have modded your post up if I could.
While properly working geothermal is in theory clean, in actuality there are several hazards associated with it.
The first is localized ground/surface water pollution. The water pulled from deep geothermal springs has many chemicals dissolved in it that are not normally found in high concentrations in surface waters (since they are not common, organisms have not adapted to them, hence they are often toxic.) Simply returning the water back underground is feasible in the short term, the aforementioned chemicals combined with the high heat render the water quite corrosive at times, and considering the high pressure desired to efficiently pump heat out of the ground, some spillage or at least seepage is eventually all but guaranteed. The risks posed by these soluents may very well be less than petroleum, but they are non-negligible.
Extra heat must be dispelled from some point in the power plant to maintain a thermal gradient. Efficiency requires a high level of heat transfer, so the excess heat will have to be dumped into the environment. The level of energy transfer will likely be similar to that of a nuclear power plant of similar power rating. The most likely solution for ejection of heat at these levels (100 megawatt?) would be by transfer to a freshwater source (as saltwater corrosion would make maintenance far more expensive) likely fluvial such as a stream or river as the water flow would ensure a constant supply of cool water. Warming up freshwater systems also has a non-zero effect on the native habitat, generally negative, but sometimes can be managed to increase productivity of fisheries. The need to expel the heat also means the geothermal power plant will be located close to a river or stream, meaning any leaks in the system will allow the aforementioned dissolved minerals to leach into the water, either directly through surface flow or possibly through groundwater flow which would be much more difficult to detect and have much more long lasting effects as the entire groundwater reserve would have to be purged before the system returns to normal.
If direct ejection into freshwater systems is not feasible, then the water will have to be cooled in a cooling tower, which introduces inefficiencies into the system as the tower must be powered, and requires a source of fresh or even de-mineralized water to avoid salt buildup in the tower. Again, this issue has to be dealt with in other thermal energy plants, such as nuclear, so is not that big of a strike against geothermal, but is still non-zero.
In some locations, the "excess" heat can be repurposed for municipal heating, such as is done in Iceland. In this case, the excess heat becomes an asset rather than a liability. However, few locations consistently cold enough to actually benefit from waste heat have a high enough population density where their worldwide environmental impact would be significant, even if they used less "green" methods of energy production. High population densities that will start thirsting for more and more energy are generally found in temperate to tropical or even arid climates and therefore the waste heat from geothermal sources is a definite liability to the majority of the world.
Yes, there may be a gratis copy of the newspaper at Burger King. And the AP DOES receive financial benefit from that newspaper sitting there... because Burger King leaves the ads in. If Burger King were to put copies of all the newspaper stories out with advertisements stripped out, then they would probably get a cease and desist fairly quickly. That could be construed as similar to a search engine displaying the bulk of what is displayed in a news story. I don't think the AP is so much looking to stop the current methods of Google or Microsoft Live so much as preventing news aggregators from crawling websites and posting essentially the whole article. The latter would probably fall under copyright infringement, and likely commercial copyright infringement, as the aggregator would no doubt stip the ads from the original work and put their own in to make money off the venture. While there is indeed some controversy over whether making copies of a work for personal use constitutes intellectual property theft, making wholesale copies of a protected work for profit is probably seen as A Bad Thing(tm) even by a decent portion of libertarian leaning Slashdotters (not implying that the majority of Slashdotters are libertarian, just referring to the subset of Slashdotters who are libertarian as a drastic example.)
Nope... Midwest Express still exists, although they may be bought out by AirTran by the end of the year. And they currently serve chocolate chip cookies baked in-flight. Much better than a bag of nuts, and not really that much more effort or cost.
That doesn't necessarily scale in the United States. The trip from London to Edinburgh is what... 400 miles? To get from New York to Chicago would be about 800 miles, twice as long of a trip. About 8 hours traveling the same speed (and I doubt you'd get trains averaging 100 miles per hour in the US, There would likely be stops between, and I don't think putting a high speed line would be really cost effective over such a large distance... airlines make more sense for rapid cross country travel in the US.
To take a train from New York to LA would end up taking over a day, even at 100 miles per hour. Likely, it would take from 2-3 days. Not to mention a passenger train actually costs more money to operate than an airline. I recall hearing in a speech given by Norman Mineta (transportation secretary at the time) that the amount that Amtrak is subsidized for a one way train ride from Florida to Texas could by two round trip tickets on a flight instead. Granted, organizational inefficiencies probably carry a large portion of the blame there, but the simple fact that it takes a lot longer on a train means you are paying employees for a longer period of service for a given trip.
And I forgot to post a link to this article
Nascar and wrestling are extremely popular and profitable sports. Budweiser makes up about half of beer sales in the U.S. Bush was re-elected.
I think you underestimate the number of rednecks out there... look at a map and see how much area is densely urban. The rest of the country is primarily rednecks.
Don't forget conservation biology while you're at it. It's obvious how that's just a gateway to COMMUNISM!!!
Here... stick this fish in your ear. That should help you out.
I'm looking forward to owning beautiful beach-front property on Arizona Bay.
It isn't that difficult to imagine a chemical could create a similar barrier in a world based on an organic solvent. Essentially, all that is needed is a compound that is polar along the majority of the length and non-polar at one or both ends. Replacing the phosphorous that caps a phospholipid with a more ionic chemical may even be enough to do the trick, as the neighboring carbons on the chain would donate a partial charge, reducing their solubility in an organic solvent. If that would fail, replacing several methyl groups along part of the length of the lipid chain with phosphate groups should do the trick. An appropriate configuration would result in a chain that is mostly hydrophilic which would form the inside of a lipid bilayer. The hydrophobic end would be miscible in methane, and so form the outside of the bilayer. I would assume that H bonding between the hydrogen of methyl groups within the hydrophilic portion of the chain and phosphate groups would hold the strands together quite nicely in an organic solvent.
With appropriate modifications, phospholipids would work quite well as a functional cell barrier in an organic solvent. They would simply be turned inside out. In fact, a lot of the chemistry involved with terrestrial life would be basically backwards. Sugars would largely be non-miscible while fats would be dissolved quite readily. Proteins would be configured in an opposite manner with hydrophilic portions tending to be folded into the middle rather than the outside. I suppose it would become difficult to transfer salts, however they may be completely unnecessary in an organic solvent based chemical life-form. Remember, the salts of our body are very close the salinity of the ocean (actually, closer to that of brackish water, such as an estuary.) I find it very likely that we simply evolved to best utilize our terrestrial environment.
I don't think humans will sit outside basking in the rays of Jupiter anytime soon. But I see know reason why it is not feasible that life could arise on Titan, or even for humans to someday engineer some sort of life to seed Titan with.
The claim sounded a bit outrageous to me when I first heard it, as well.