And last gen pressurized water reactors are not it. LFTR. Simple to say, easy to build and the correct answer according to the father of nuclear power. Safer by orders of magnitude than Uranium based reactors and requiring far less to build and maaintain, it's also able to burn up a lot of the radiocative 'waste' from the old model reactors. Runs hotter at normal sea level pressures and is walk-away safe.. these things could start being built inside of a few years. There has already been one that ran safe for thousands of hours.. the only thing that would need to be done to start using them is developing a commercial variant from the test reactors. years and we could start retiring coal plants across the world. As a bonus they could be far more useful in manufacturing, smelting, desalinization as well as artificial fuel creation from carbon 'waste' to make a regenerative cycle liquid fuel that is a drop in replacement for our current gas and diesel fuels. It is the correct answer to the question 'how do we reduce carbon emissions and provide enough power for a 21st century world?'
and this is why our founding fathers thought education was so important. For a democracy (even a representative one) it's even MORE so. "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one" Benjamin Franklin said that, and it's as true today as it ever was. For any government to say it's in our best interest to NOT have the ability or right to privacy in order to 'protect' us is completely full of shit.
Sigh. Just.. sigh. Ok, break down a power plant into 2 parts then, and we'll make this easier to grasp. ONE part makes heat. The other part takes the heat and converts it into power. Ok... the part that converts the heat into power, that will still have to be there.. the part that makes heat, you remove that and put a fusion reactor there instead. Now currently gas turbine is the go-to sexy for power generation. It's relatively cheap to build, easy to maintain and doesn't have a huge footprint. Most of the current crop of fusion reactors being worked on (other than the tokamak) would be equivalent to the footprint and cost of the gas turbines and have one very important bonus.. NO FUEL cost, or very small compared to chemical generators like coal and gas turbines.
That even discounts that some of the more radical fusion reactors won't pan out. Aneutronic fusion is the apotheosis of power generation.. there IS no conversion from heat to electricity. The reaction gives on 'beams' of supercharged beta particles and ions which are captured (for lack of a better word) directly generating electricity. This reactor could be housed in a building so small it wouldn't look any bigger than a residence.
There's also the tech-we-won't-use, a LFTR. It would be an incredibly cheap reactor to build, it's operating cost would be extremely low and have a footprint very similar to that of a gas turbine plant. As an added bonus the byproduct of extra heat it produces could be put to use creating manufactured liquid fuels that would be drop in replacements for gasoline and diesel.. to de-salinize water and heat enough to power industrial plants for things like smelting etc. it's fuel is cheap as dirt and it can even use the leftover waste from a heavy water reactor AS fuel. Pretty much an engineers' dream.. just not allowed to be built or pursued.
I mean, now we know Gygax stole D&D, Jobs stole the mouse and the desktop OS from PARC, Gates stole (bought) DOS from another guy.. holy shit. Can you imagine if the actual creators of these things had managed to cash in on their ideas instead of the icons we now venerate?
I recently stumbled on a somewhat similar situation, albeit on a much smaller scale. I recently decided that I wanted to update my 3+ year old S3 Samsung phone. it's in perfect working order, but there are new apps etc that I can't run on it, so I figured 'time to Cyanogen-mod this puppy!" I very quickly found out that the last update that was pushed to my phone, something almost like 2 years ago, purposely blew a 'q fuse', rending my phone unchangeable. In my opinion this was done maliciously and has caused me financial harm; if I could flash my phone with a newer os I would not need to buy one which is exactly what the carrier obviously wanted to prevent.
I know this is a trivial example compared to the expense of your tractor.. but it's becoming more and more common. Another example, my motorcycle has a computerized fuel injection system that is locked. It uses a proprietary software program to make changes to it.. I was forced to buy an after market fuel controller to make changes to the fuel map, basically an 'adder' only. The onboard ECM is more than capable of handling the increased fuel demand I need to support the after-market modifications that I made, but I'm locked out of the system and are unable to make changes to it.
As long as people continue with their blithe uncaring attitude about the gadgets and hardware they 'buy' w/out understanding what's in them it's only going to get worse and worse. Copyright law needs to change, and drastically. The attitude that 'doesn't matter as long as the corp makes a profit' has to stop as well. Forced obsolescence is NOT ok..locking people out of the things they own is not ok. This message needs to become important.
Ok, I'll grant you that our current nuclear reactors leave a lot of long-lived transuranic elements with extremely long half-lives. That's why In most of the enlightened posts up to now (that you probably didn't read or can't understand) people are suggesting newer and better designed reactors. A Thorium based reactor, especially one that is in a liquid fluoride moderator has NO long lived (at least none longer than say 100 years or so) fission products. Most of the ones it DOES produce would be useful in medical research and other scientific endeavors, AND to top it off, the current waste that we have laying around can be BURNT OFF in them. That's right, the leftover mess from 60 years or so of playing with nuclear power can be safely disposed of, making useful power instead.
Your supposition that we'll all be back to beating on rocks at some undetermined point in time is fatalistic at best. I can say that the cornerstone of a modern society is POWER. Before we harnessed chemical energy in a large scale manner that power came from people in the form of slavery. At every juncture in the timeline of humanity when there was a breakthrough in the production and dissemination of power the standard of living for the common man improved dramatically. There are huge swaths of humanity that still do not have access to the limited resources of dinosaur fuel we used predominantly today. You want to raise up the poor unwashed masses around the globe, and feed them better? Provide them with affordable cheap and safe power. Without power, agriculture, sanitation, construction etc etc etc are stifled. With it, clean water is made easy, sewage treatment becomes trivial, medicine, education, clothing, heating, cooling etc etc etc, all become possible. Cheap plentiful power is the ONLY way to advance the cause of the human race. PERIOD. Fossil fuels can not provide it for all of us. "Renewables' like solar and wind can provide trickles of what's needed, but they'll never ever be able to completely meet the needs of an advanced society.
I am disgusted by the droves of mindless nay-sayers who vilify nuclear power without any understanding of what it is they talk about. Endlessly belching out their vitriolic toxic idea that they've parroted from others w/out understanding what it is that they are talking about. You're worried about education in remote places in the world? How about we review what our own children are learning in the schools in our first world countries. When children know more about the pop-top 40 charts than they do the periodic chart of the elements, that's a problem. When modern adults can tell you all about pookie's day on some reality show but can't tell you anything about the history of the human race, that's a problem. I say take away their goddamned 'selfie-sticks' and give them a slide rule, and the know-how to use them!
When they look at the cost of power plants, they always go with the old gen1 or 2 style multi-billion dollar nuclear plants from 40 or 50 years ago. There are dozens of better and safer ways to build nuclear power plants and that includes the new sexy ideas of small 'unattended' modular power reactors. Then there are the innovative designs that rewrite the whole idea behind nuke power altogether, like LFTR reactors. Hell, even if you don't go full bore Thorium reactors there are a lot of intermediate designs that use fluorine salts as a moderator and other of that ilk as well. If we put a fraction of the time and energy into building modern reactors as we did to upgrade fucking cell phones we'd all have a modular reactor in our neighborhoods by now. Jesus.. can we prioritize at all here people?
in people's minds when they go to vote. These corporate shills only want to get themselves into a position of authority so they can extort more money out of corporations to buy their support and influence. I've said this before.. if we don't find a way to detach elected officials from the bribe money they get (excuse me, I mean 'donations') there won't be any gov't left. I would love to hear the explanation this guy could spin should he be brought to task on this... I'm sure he would defend it as 'American' to try to get ahead in life or some such shit. We need a new Mission/Vision statement in gov't.. 'of the PEOPLE and for the PEOPLE, not the corporate interests!" What kills me is the number of led-by-the-nose run of the mill people that will side WITH this clown even against their own interests.
I would say, until you walked a mile in THEIR shoes etc etc. Did you even read the linked article? They already have 3 solar farms. They have very valid concerns about the property values as well as the agricultural heritage of the area. The proposed location of the solar farm would have been 50ft from peoples houses and too close to the state route it would run alongside. In other words whoever wrote the original article should be vlillified, NOT the residents of this town.
Tell them all that the sun is really just an out-of-control nuclear power plant showering them continuously with solar radiation! That'll fix their wagon. Next generation will have our first fully formed Morlock society in NC.
The Legislative branch is supposed to represent the PEOPLE of this country, not just it's CEO's. The laws they are trying to repeal on ones that are supposed to help not just Americans, but the whole world to have cleaner air, cleaner water and be more sustainable. The problem is these wack-jobs have been convinced that there is no way us poor little human beings can ever change our planet in any significant way; that's the purview of 'THE CREATOR". I've had this diatribe spewed at me every time I've tried to talk intelligently about carbon emissions, global warming, you name it. It's almost boiler plate (direct from Fox News I'm sure) "I can stand on a mountain top and look at the majesty of the earth and KNOW that GOD created all things, and nothing man can do will change it!". I don't know where this rhetoric came from, but it's almost the same wording. If for nothing else, the ultra-conservative religious right have GOT to have the best PR machine since the original theological spin doctors a 1000 years ago.
The people making the laws are the same ones pushing the H!B agenda...the laws in this country increasingly do not favor it's constituents, rather it's capitalists and those who can afford to 'buy' the laws to ensure their profits.
A single worker usually doesn't have the political and legal acumen to be able to represent themselves in negotiations. Like it or not, there is strength in numbers. A company can callously fire or mistreat an employee w/out the support of his fellow workers, it's considerably harder to do so when there is an organization that watches out for his rights. I will agree that there is corruption and graft in the unions, but that is true of ANY organization once it becomes large and established. A board of directors have their own (and supposedly their stockholders)) best interests at heart and will do anything to maximize that profit margin. Having a counterbalance like a union to look out for the welfare of the workers, and in a lot of cases the company itself is a good thing.
This happened at my job year ago.. albeit in a much lower tier job working an internal help desk. I fortunately escaped the help desk months before it was dissolved and started working as a local IT guy in the same company. Ever since that episode, I've told my boss and anyone else in the hierarchy, I do not care what you offer me.. when you decide that it's a viable alternative to give my job to someone else for less pay.. you've decided I'm supernumerary and I will NOT train my replacement. I am not racist, or in any way derisive of other cultures but in the case where the Indian group took over the help desk that I worked at it was in no way 'better' for anyone, other than possibly whatever middle manager managed to get a promotion off of the backs of the 'saving's he managed to make. To this day I have to deal with the incompetence and ignorance of this off shore help desk on a daily basis. As commonly practiced, as soon as you train up someone to do the job, they move on to greener pastures and you start all over again with another untrained and unusable new trainee. It's an abhorrent practice.
so that just maybe people will wake up to the world we live in. We've given over most of our rights and just expect that the corporations are some benign entity that just can't wait to do something else for us. A few more blatant slaps across the face would do people good I say.
Can we get the cell phone companies in on this too please? Maybe the banks too?
We have lost ourselves in an attempt to be politically correct in this society. Here's what I mean..
A young man sees a a young girl and finds her attractive and approaches her. Not physically restraining her, or drugging her or any other form of persuation other than expressing interest. and by the current ideology of militant feminists he has committed rape. No, I'm not kidding.. as defined by rabid feminists simply by trying to communicate that he is attracted to a female in a perfectly normal way he has made 'unwanted advances' and made her uncomfortable by 'forcing her' to say no, or to say she's not interested.
There is a current trend in some colleges to create 'safe zones' for women.. in essence, a place where no males are allowed to enter. According to some, merely having a biological male in their presence makes them feel as if they are in danger of being raped. The inherent sexism in this is lost on them.. only women need to be protected and shielded and only their rights should be respected. I read yesterday where they are trying to expand that so that it specifically lists 'white people' as well.. because minorities can't feel equal or unpersecuted unless there aren't any white people around. To entertain EITHER of these odious ideas is not only unconstitutional it's madness. Rape should have very clear definitions... talking to someone is NOT rape. LOOKING at someone is not rape. Having consensual sex with someone that is inebriated is NOT rape. It may be poor judgement on both parties involved, but it's NOT rape.
There are several video's I've seen on the net that explain it some.. we can already convert x-rays and streams of electrons into an electrical potential...we just haven't tried to do it in an industrial capacity. I'm not a physicist or anything, but it appears from the video that the 'beams' of x-rays and streams of ions are directed over small foil plates or antenna looking structures.
The current test reactor they've built fits inside the bay of a car garage. Granted it's a test reactor but if/when they can reach the point where they are producing more power than they need to sustain the reaction, getting useful power out of it won't be a major challenge.
Aneutronic fusion, should it pan out (and it is certainly making some serious headway) is like the holy grail of power production!!! It's so good it's almost like a fairy tale come true. A way to produce power directly to electricity w/out having to convert nuclear-->heat---->electricity. Not only that, but it would be very very small, have very little infrastructure costs (shielding and containment) and be walkaway safe to operate, w/out almost no long term radioactivity to worry about. AND!!! it can be used for propulsion, providing direct thrust from it's own reaction as well as being an excellent source of huge power supply for Hall type thrusters.
In MY utopia of intelligent design, the worlds electricity needs are met with aneutronic fusion, while it's industrial needs for actual heat/power and fuel production for liquid fuel vehicles is met by LFTR reactors, and to burn up the mistakes of our current nuclear programs, as well as to generate the isotopes needed for medical research and treatments.
ITER and the other BIG fusion projects may or may not someday produce something that could be useful, other than the research they generate. A fusion plant that requires that large a facility and infrastructure costs to build just aren't ever going to be a viable source for our energy needs. We need compact efficient and mass produceable means of generating power and heat.. ITER doesn't and won't ever fit that bill.
We've all been anesthetized by the constant daily 'AMAZING NEW BATTERY TECH AROUND THE CORNER!' articles over the past X years.. but this one doesn't sound like they are doing the 'if only we could do X' to make it work commercially.. these guys even suggest you could start right now with a room full of DVD burners. they even state there's a startup company already started on making the stuff commercially for the market. I for one will remain a bit optimistic on this one...
I don't think we'll see this tech in Tesla's car in the next 5 years, or maybe even in cell phones in that time period. I DO expect we'll see it in stuff like medical gear and in solar panels. That bit where the backside of a solar cell could have a sheet of ultra caps on it capable of storing all the energy it captured...so a meter square of solar panel on a sunny day that could store lets say a kw/hour in itself. That could def be useful. A BIG part of the cost of a home solar system for off-grid is the battery storage. Not to mention the weight and hazard of deep cycle acid cells. Collection and storage in one place, lightweight and maint. free? High voltage transmission to prevent line losses? Oh yah.. I can see this cracking the home solar thing WIDE open, and that's just one industry my tiny little mind can think of.
I like the fact that the 'old' reactors do not get any kind of credit. The incentive should be for newer, better designed reactors. The one that makes the most sense economically (for a lot of different reasons) are Thorium based reactors, especially LFTR designs. The problem with Uranium and Plutonium based power plants is you NEED a breeder reactor to fuel them. Th based designs can breed their own fuel and are orders of magnitude safer. Changing the rules on classification of the handling of nuclear materials would solve enormous problems, such as allowing rare earth mines to be re-opened and generate a huge revenue stream here in country as well. Doesn't hurt that we're going to need all those rare earth magnets for all the electric cars and wind farms either....
In fact, I watched an very interesting proposal by someone in the state legislature in one of the western states of the US that was trying to push a proposal to use a LFTR reactor to turn their coal (primary source of income for the state) into liquid fuel because the cost would be negligible with a super high heat thorium reactor. No need to make fancy next-gen generators.. they could exactly model the already proven design they had at Oak Ridge to provide the heat and hey presto! Instant liquid fuel that is 100% compatible with our current liquid fuel infrastructure. While not ideal this does open the door to better applications.. like harvesting the C02 needed for the reaction from the air, thereby making the reaction sustainable and essentially carbon neutral. All you need is lots of power to make it happen, specifically lots of power in the form of heat. Stop playing with fresnel lenses and start building LFTR's damn it!
I think we might be overlooking a couple of other issues here.. if these kids don't have a computer at home in this day and age... their parents might not WANT them to have one. I know some 'impoverished' folks and although they might shop at goodwill for clothes and eat off of subsidized cards in the generic aisle, the one thing they ALL have is a computer. AND a relatively powerful smart phone. There are certain 'luxuries' in the US that have literally become ubiquitous. If someone doesn't have a computer or easy access to one, there's very possibly another reason than money.
If fusion in general is the holy grail, then aneutronic fusion would be the 2nd coming of (fill in a mythological deity of your choice). Fascinating stuff really, and the group that is working on it (in a GARAGE in Jersey I believe) have already attained as high an output energy as any of the big players in the field like ITER and LIF on a shoestring budget. Not only is it incredibly smaller/cheaper to operate than any of the other approaches so far (other than possibly the MIT sponsored methods) it's also got one HUGE benefit... little to no radiation and practically NO waste whatsoever. It's also a damn near perfect propulsion system for interplanetary travel. You can keep your Tokomak's and laser igniters.. I'll go with aneutronic fusion with a side of liquid fluoride thorium reactor's for industrial use. These 2 technologies together can and will 'save the world' from itself.
There's a problem with your argument there chief... this is a game that is about to release. I'ts not an alpha.. from the video I just watched the company is about to release 'Ashes' for purchase.
DX11 is dead tree man. Might as well use that same argument a few years ago with DX9.. when M$ moves on with it's API, you either get onboard or you're left in the dust. I've been hoping for years and years that someone could make the push for OpenGL to become competitive again but that's not gonna happen. At least with DX12 being based off of Mantle, you will have the Vulkan equivalent that is almost code identical so games can work as well off of Win10 as on it. I want to see Linux and Mac games released at the same time as windows games and running just as fast. Thats what will open up the field to everyone finally.
The other thing that is glaringly obvious is that the fastest AMD chips are suck for gaming with this API. I had hoped that Mantle would really bolster up the AMD cpu performance in gaming, but that was almost embarrassing to look at; the I3 is faster than AMD's flagship processor in this game. Ouch.
Wind and solar cannot, and will not EVER replace more concentrated means of generating power. They are useful and serve a purpose but by no means are they energy dense enough and compact enough to depend on for our total needs If we ever want to bring the whole world up to a 1st world standard of living and try to derail the climate change we've already caused it HAS to be done with something more than pinwheels and mirrors.
Have you ever seen the figures on how much infrastructure cost there is in building your magical solar and wind farms? It's mind boggling...the concrete, the steel, the C02 emissions alone make it untenable large scale and long term. If it were the silver bullet, why the hell aren't more countries using it? Power storage, I agree that any and all advancements we make there are necessary, critical even.
Actually, the holy grail of fusion is aneutronic fusion. There's a group working on it that is literally doing their experiments in a garage in Jersey, and they have already exceeded the technical landmarks of the multi-billion dollar ITER in only a very short time. All other power generation designs require that we still use a heat engine to create electricity. The Aneutronic Fusion gives off massively charged 'jets' of positively and negatively charged streams which can be captured to generate electricity DIRECTLY. No conversion losses. It's also got the 'side effect' of using one of those jets of charged particles as thrust.. as in put it on a spacecraft and reach intra-solar bodies in weeks or months. Oh, it's also got the advantage of not giving off neutron radiation. at all. In fact, they are stating that after shutting it down you could safely walk into the reaction area in 30 min or so.
To me, THIS and a LFTR reactor working together would be the best possible power generation going forward. The benefits you could from a really hot LFTR reactor for making liquid fuels from C02, burning up old 'spent' fuel from conventional fission reactors and for the medical isotopes it generates just makes too much sense NOT to use them.
Slashdot Mirror
And last gen pressurized water reactors are not it. LFTR. Simple to say, easy to build and the correct answer according to the father of nuclear power. Safer by orders of magnitude than Uranium based reactors and requiring far less to build and maaintain, it's also able to burn up a lot of the radiocative 'waste' from the old model reactors. Runs hotter at normal sea level pressures and is walk-away safe.. these things could start being built inside of a few years. There has already been one that ran safe for thousands of hours.. the only thing that would need to be done to start using them is developing a commercial variant from the test reactors. years and we could start retiring coal plants across the world.
As a bonus they could be far more useful in manufacturing, smelting, desalinization as well as artificial fuel creation from carbon 'waste' to make a regenerative cycle liquid fuel that is a drop in replacement for our current gas and diesel fuels. It is the correct answer to the question 'how do we reduce carbon emissions and provide enough power for a 21st century world?'
and this is why our founding fathers thought education was so important. For a democracy (even a representative one) it's even MORE so. "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one" Benjamin Franklin said that, and it's as true today as it ever was. For any government to say it's in our best interest to NOT have the ability or right to privacy in order to 'protect' us is completely full of shit.
Sigh. Just.. sigh. Ok, break down a power plant into 2 parts then, and we'll make this easier to grasp. ONE part makes heat. The other part takes the heat and converts it into power. Ok... the part that converts the heat into power, that will still have to be there.. the part that makes heat, you remove that and put a fusion reactor there instead. Now currently gas turbine is the go-to sexy for power generation. It's relatively cheap to build, easy to maintain and doesn't have a huge footprint. Most of the current crop of fusion reactors being worked on (other than the tokamak) would be equivalent to the footprint and cost of the gas turbines and have one very important bonus.. NO FUEL cost, or very small compared to chemical generators like coal and gas turbines.
That even discounts that some of the more radical fusion reactors won't pan out. Aneutronic fusion is the apotheosis of power generation.. there IS no conversion from heat to electricity. The reaction gives on 'beams' of supercharged beta particles and ions which are captured (for lack of a better word) directly generating electricity. This reactor could be housed in a building so small it wouldn't look any bigger than a residence.
There's also the tech-we-won't-use, a LFTR. It would be an incredibly cheap reactor to build, it's operating cost would be extremely low and have a footprint very similar to that of a gas turbine plant. As an added bonus the byproduct of extra heat it produces could be put to use creating manufactured liquid fuels that would be drop in replacements for gasoline and diesel.. to de-salinize water and heat enough to power industrial plants for things like smelting etc. it's fuel is cheap as dirt and it can even use the leftover waste from a heavy water reactor AS fuel. Pretty much an engineers' dream.. just not allowed to be built or pursued.
I mean, now we know Gygax stole D&D, Jobs stole the mouse and the desktop OS from PARC, Gates stole (bought) DOS from another guy.. holy shit. Can you imagine if the actual creators of these things had managed to cash in on their ideas instead of the icons we now venerate?
I recently stumbled on a somewhat similar situation, albeit on a much smaller scale. I recently decided that I wanted to update my 3+ year old S3 Samsung phone. it's in perfect working order, but there are new apps etc that I can't run on it, so I figured 'time to Cyanogen-mod this puppy!" I very quickly found out that the last update that was pushed to my phone, something almost like 2 years ago, purposely blew a 'q fuse', rending my phone unchangeable. In my opinion this was done maliciously and has caused me financial harm; if I could flash my phone with a newer os I would not need to buy one which is exactly what the carrier obviously wanted to prevent.
I know this is a trivial example compared to the expense of your tractor.. but it's becoming more and more common. Another example, my motorcycle has a computerized fuel injection system that is locked. It uses a proprietary software program to make changes to it.. I was forced to buy an after market fuel controller to make changes to the fuel map, basically an 'adder' only. The onboard ECM is more than capable of handling the increased fuel demand I need to support the after-market modifications that I made, but I'm locked out of the system and are unable to make changes to it.
As long as people continue with their blithe uncaring attitude about the gadgets and hardware they 'buy' w/out understanding what's in them it's only going to get worse and worse. Copyright law needs to change, and drastically. The attitude that 'doesn't matter as long as the corp makes a profit' has to stop as well. Forced obsolescence is NOT ok..locking people out of the things they own is not ok. This message needs to become important.
Ok, I'll grant you that our current nuclear reactors leave a lot of long-lived transuranic elements with extremely long half-lives. That's why In most of the enlightened posts up to now (that you probably didn't read or can't understand) people are suggesting newer and better designed reactors. A Thorium based reactor, especially one that is in a liquid fluoride moderator has NO long lived (at least none longer than say 100 years or so) fission products. Most of the ones it DOES produce would be useful in medical research and other scientific endeavors, AND to top it off, the current waste that we have laying around can be BURNT OFF in them. That's right, the leftover mess from 60 years or so of playing with nuclear power can be safely disposed of, making useful power instead.
Your supposition that we'll all be back to beating on rocks at some undetermined point in time is fatalistic at best. I can say that the cornerstone of a modern society is POWER. Before we harnessed chemical energy in a large scale manner that power came from people in the form of slavery. At every juncture in the timeline of humanity when there was a breakthrough in the production and dissemination of power the standard of living for the common man improved dramatically. There are huge swaths of humanity that still do not have access to the limited resources of dinosaur fuel we used predominantly today. You want to raise up the poor unwashed masses around the globe, and feed them better? Provide them with affordable cheap and safe power. Without power, agriculture, sanitation, construction etc etc etc are stifled. With it, clean water is made easy, sewage treatment becomes trivial, medicine, education, clothing, heating, cooling etc etc etc, all become possible. Cheap plentiful power is the ONLY way to advance the cause of the human race. PERIOD. Fossil fuels can not provide it for all of us. "Renewables' like solar and wind can provide trickles of what's needed, but they'll never ever be able to completely meet the needs of an advanced society.
I am disgusted by the droves of mindless nay-sayers who vilify nuclear power without any understanding of what it is they talk about. Endlessly belching out their vitriolic toxic idea that they've parroted from others w/out understanding what it is that they are talking about. You're worried about education in remote places in the world? How about we review what our own children are learning in the schools in our first world countries. When children know more about the pop-top 40 charts than they do the periodic chart of the elements, that's a problem. When modern adults can tell you all about pookie's day on some reality show but can't tell you anything about the history of the human race, that's a problem. I say take away their goddamned 'selfie-sticks' and give them a slide rule, and the know-how to use them!
When they look at the cost of power plants, they always go with the old gen1 or 2 style multi-billion dollar nuclear plants from 40 or 50 years ago. There are dozens of better and safer ways to build nuclear power plants and that includes the new sexy ideas of small 'unattended' modular power reactors. Then there are the innovative designs that rewrite the whole idea behind nuke power altogether, like LFTR reactors. Hell, even if you don't go full bore Thorium reactors there are a lot of intermediate designs that use fluorine salts as a moderator and other of that ilk as well. If we put a fraction of the time and energy into building modern reactors as we did to upgrade fucking cell phones we'd all have a modular reactor in our neighborhoods by now. Jesus.. can we prioritize at all here people?
in people's minds when they go to vote. These corporate shills only want to get themselves into a position of authority so they can extort more money out of corporations to buy their support and influence. I've said this before.. if we don't find a way to detach elected officials from the bribe money they get (excuse me, I mean 'donations') there won't be any gov't left. I would love to hear the explanation this guy could spin should he be brought to task on this... I'm sure he would defend it as 'American' to try to get ahead in life or some such shit. We need a new Mission/Vision statement in gov't.. 'of the PEOPLE and for the PEOPLE, not the corporate interests!" What kills me is the number of led-by-the-nose run of the mill people that will side WITH this clown even against their own interests.
I would say, until you walked a mile in THEIR shoes etc etc. Did you even read the linked article? They already have 3 solar farms. They have very valid concerns about the property values as well as the agricultural heritage of the area. The proposed location of the solar farm would have been 50ft from peoples houses and too close to the state route it would run alongside. In other words whoever wrote the original article should be vlillified, NOT the residents of this town.
Tell them all that the sun is really just an out-of-control nuclear power plant showering them continuously with solar radiation! That'll fix their wagon. Next generation will have our first fully formed Morlock society in NC.
The Legislative branch is supposed to represent the PEOPLE of this country, not just it's CEO's. The laws they are trying to repeal on ones that are supposed to help not just Americans, but the whole world to have cleaner air, cleaner water and be more sustainable. The problem is these wack-jobs have been convinced that there is no way us poor little human beings can ever change our planet in any significant way; that's the purview of 'THE CREATOR". I've had this diatribe spewed at me every time I've tried to talk intelligently about carbon emissions, global warming, you name it. It's almost boiler plate (direct from Fox News I'm sure) "I can stand on a mountain top and look at the majesty of the earth and KNOW that GOD created all things, and nothing man can do will change it!". I don't know where this rhetoric came from, but it's almost the same wording. If for nothing else, the ultra-conservative religious right have GOT to have the best PR machine since the original theological spin doctors a 1000 years ago.
The people making the laws are the same ones pushing the H!B agenda...the laws in this country increasingly do not favor it's constituents, rather it's capitalists and those who can afford to 'buy' the laws to ensure their profits.
A single worker usually doesn't have the political and legal acumen to be able to represent themselves in negotiations. Like it or not, there is strength in numbers. A company can callously fire or mistreat an employee w/out the support of his fellow workers, it's considerably harder to do so when there is an organization that watches out for his rights. I will agree that there is corruption and graft in the unions, but that is true of ANY organization once it becomes large and established. A board of directors have their own (and supposedly their stockholders)) best interests at heart and will do anything to maximize that profit margin. Having a counterbalance like a union to look out for the welfare of the workers, and in a lot of cases the company itself is a good thing.
This happened at my job year ago.. albeit in a much lower tier job working an internal help desk. I fortunately escaped the help desk months before it was dissolved and started working as a local IT guy in the same company. Ever since that episode, I've told my boss and anyone else in the hierarchy, I do not care what you offer me.. when you decide that it's a viable alternative to give my job to someone else for less pay.. you've decided I'm supernumerary and I will NOT train my replacement. I am not racist, or in any way derisive of other cultures but in the case where the Indian group took over the help desk that I worked at it was in no way 'better' for anyone, other than possibly whatever middle manager managed to get a promotion off of the backs of the 'saving's he managed to make. To this day I have to deal with the incompetence and ignorance of this off shore help desk on a daily basis. As commonly practiced, as soon as you train up someone to do the job, they move on to greener pastures and you start all over again with another untrained and unusable new trainee. It's an abhorrent practice.
so that just maybe people will wake up to the world we live in. We've given over most of our rights and just expect that the corporations are some benign entity that just can't wait to do something else for us. A few more blatant slaps across the face would do people good I say.
Can we get the cell phone companies in on this too please? Maybe the banks too?
We have lost ourselves in an attempt to be politically correct in this society. Here's what I mean..
A young man sees a a young girl and finds her attractive and approaches her. Not physically restraining her, or drugging her or any other form of persuation other than expressing interest. and by the current ideology of militant feminists he has committed rape. No, I'm not kidding.. as defined by rabid feminists simply by trying to communicate that he is attracted to a female in a perfectly normal way he has made 'unwanted advances' and made her uncomfortable by 'forcing her' to say no, or to say she's not interested.
There is a current trend in some colleges to create 'safe zones' for women.. in essence, a place where no males are allowed to enter. According to some, merely having a biological male in their presence makes them feel as if they are in danger of being raped. The inherent sexism in this is lost on them.. only women need to be protected and shielded and only their rights should be respected. I read yesterday where they are trying to expand that so that it specifically lists 'white people' as well.. because minorities can't feel equal or unpersecuted unless there aren't any white people around. To entertain EITHER of these odious ideas is not only unconstitutional it's madness. Rape should have very clear definitions... talking to someone is NOT rape. LOOKING at someone is not rape. Having consensual sex with someone that is inebriated is NOT rape. It may be poor judgement on both parties involved, but it's NOT rape.
There are several video's I've seen on the net that explain it some.. we can already convert x-rays and streams of electrons into an electrical potential...we just haven't tried to do it in an industrial capacity. I'm not a physicist or anything, but it appears from the video that the 'beams' of x-rays and streams of ions are directed over small foil plates or antenna looking structures.
The current test reactor they've built fits inside the bay of a car garage. Granted it's a test reactor but if/when they can reach the point where they are producing more power than they need to sustain the reaction, getting useful power out of it won't be a major challenge.
THIS!!!
Aneutronic fusion, should it pan out (and it is certainly making some serious headway) is like the holy grail of power production!!! It's so good it's almost like a fairy tale come true. A way to produce power directly to electricity w/out having to convert nuclear-->heat---->electricity. Not only that, but it would be very very small, have very little infrastructure costs (shielding and containment) and be walkaway safe to operate, w/out almost no long term radioactivity to worry about. AND!!! it can be used for propulsion, providing direct thrust from it's own reaction as well as being an excellent source of huge power supply for Hall type thrusters.
In MY utopia of intelligent design, the worlds electricity needs are met with aneutronic fusion, while it's industrial needs for actual heat/power and fuel production for liquid fuel vehicles is met by LFTR reactors, and to burn up the mistakes of our current nuclear programs, as well as to generate the isotopes needed for medical research and treatments.
ITER and the other BIG fusion projects may or may not someday produce something that could be useful, other than the research they generate. A fusion plant that requires that large a facility and infrastructure costs to build just aren't ever going to be a viable source for our energy needs. We need compact efficient and mass produceable means of generating power and heat.. ITER doesn't and won't ever fit that bill.
We've all been anesthetized by the constant daily 'AMAZING NEW BATTERY TECH AROUND THE CORNER!' articles over the past X years.. but this one doesn't sound like they are doing the 'if only we could do X' to make it work commercially.. these guys even suggest you could start right now with a room full of DVD burners. they even state there's a startup company already started on making the stuff commercially for the market. I for one will remain a bit optimistic on this one...
I don't think we'll see this tech in Tesla's car in the next 5 years, or maybe even in cell phones in that time period. I DO expect we'll see it in stuff like medical gear and in solar panels. That bit where the backside of a solar cell could have a sheet of ultra caps on it capable of storing all the energy it captured...so a meter square of solar panel on a sunny day that could store lets say a kw/hour in itself. That could def be useful. A BIG part of the cost of a home solar system for off-grid is the battery storage. Not to mention the weight and hazard of deep cycle acid cells. Collection and storage in one place, lightweight and maint. free? High voltage transmission to prevent line losses? Oh yah.. I can see this cracking the home solar thing WIDE open, and that's just one industry my tiny little mind can think of.
I like the fact that the 'old' reactors do not get any kind of credit. The incentive should be for newer, better designed reactors. The one that makes the most sense economically (for a lot of different reasons) are Thorium based reactors, especially LFTR designs. The problem with Uranium and Plutonium based power plants is you NEED a breeder reactor to fuel them. Th based designs can breed their own fuel and are orders of magnitude safer. Changing the rules on classification of the handling of nuclear materials would solve enormous problems, such as allowing rare earth mines to be re-opened and generate a huge revenue stream here in country as well. Doesn't hurt that we're going to need all those rare earth magnets for all the electric cars and wind farms either....
4 letters... L F T R
In fact, I watched an very interesting proposal by someone in the state legislature in one of the western states of the US that was trying to push a proposal to use a LFTR reactor to turn their coal (primary source of income for the state) into liquid fuel because the cost would be negligible with a super high heat thorium reactor. No need to make fancy next-gen generators.. they could exactly model the already proven design they had at Oak Ridge to provide the heat and hey presto! Instant liquid fuel that is 100% compatible with our current liquid fuel infrastructure. While not ideal this does open the door to better applications.. like harvesting the C02 needed for the reaction from the air, thereby making the reaction sustainable and essentially carbon neutral. All you need is lots of power to make it happen, specifically lots of power in the form of heat. Stop playing with fresnel lenses and start building LFTR's damn it!
I think we might be overlooking a couple of other issues here.. if these kids don't have a computer at home in this day and age... their parents might not WANT them to have one. I know some 'impoverished' folks and although they might shop at goodwill for clothes and eat off of subsidized cards in the generic aisle, the one thing they ALL have is a computer. AND a relatively powerful smart phone. There are certain 'luxuries' in the US that have literally become ubiquitous. If someone doesn't have a computer or easy access to one, there's very possibly another reason than money.
If fusion in general is the holy grail, then aneutronic fusion would be the 2nd coming of (fill in a mythological deity of your choice). Fascinating stuff really, and the group that is working on it (in a GARAGE in Jersey I believe) have already attained as high an output energy as any of the big players in the field like ITER and LIF on a shoestring budget. Not only is it incredibly smaller/cheaper to operate than any of the other approaches so far (other than possibly the MIT sponsored methods) it's also got one HUGE benefit... little to no radiation and practically NO waste whatsoever. It's also a damn near perfect propulsion system for interplanetary travel. You can keep your Tokomak's and laser igniters.. I'll go with aneutronic fusion with a side of liquid fluoride thorium reactor's for industrial use. These 2 technologies together can and will 'save the world' from itself.
There's a problem with your argument there chief... this is a game that is about to release. I'ts not an alpha.. from the video I just watched the company is about to release 'Ashes' for purchase.
DX11 is dead tree man. Might as well use that same argument a few years ago with DX9.. when M$ moves on with it's API, you either get onboard or you're left in the dust. I've been hoping for years and years that someone could make the push for OpenGL to become competitive again but that's not gonna happen. At least with DX12 being based off of Mantle, you will have the Vulkan equivalent that is almost code identical so games can work as well off of Win10 as on it. I want to see Linux and Mac games released at the same time as windows games and running just as fast. Thats what will open up the field to everyone finally.
The other thing that is glaringly obvious is that the fastest AMD chips are suck for gaming with this API. I had hoped that Mantle would really bolster up the AMD cpu performance in gaming, but that was almost embarrassing to look at; the I3 is faster than AMD's flagship processor in this game. Ouch.
Wind and solar cannot, and will not EVER replace more concentrated means of generating power. They are useful and serve a purpose but by no means are they energy dense enough and compact enough to depend on for our total needs If we ever want to bring the whole world up to a 1st world standard of living and try to derail the climate change we've already caused it HAS to be done with something more than pinwheels and mirrors.
Have you ever seen the figures on how much infrastructure cost there is in building your magical solar and wind farms? It's mind boggling...the concrete, the steel, the C02 emissions alone make it untenable large scale and long term. If it were the silver bullet, why the hell aren't more countries using it? Power storage, I agree that any and all advancements we make there are necessary, critical even.
Actually, the holy grail of fusion is aneutronic fusion. There's a group working on it that is literally doing their experiments in a garage in Jersey, and they have already exceeded the technical landmarks of the multi-billion dollar ITER in only a very short time. All other power generation designs require that we still use a heat engine to create electricity. The Aneutronic Fusion gives off massively charged 'jets' of positively and negatively charged streams which can be captured to generate electricity DIRECTLY. No conversion losses. It's also got the 'side effect' of using one of those jets of charged particles as thrust.. as in put it on a spacecraft and reach intra-solar bodies in weeks or months. Oh, it's also got the advantage of not giving off neutron radiation. at all. In fact, they are stating that after shutting it down you could safely walk into the reaction area in 30 min or so.
To me, THIS and a LFTR reactor working together would be the best possible power generation going forward. The benefits you could from a really hot LFTR reactor for making liquid fuels from C02, burning up old 'spent' fuel from conventional fission reactors and for the medical isotopes it generates just makes too much sense NOT to use them.