Except... Brazil has a corrupt culture. Just like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. What I'm saying is, although people all over the world would do whatever they can get away with, in those countries, lack of an expectation of ethics, lack of others shaming those who don't bother to even try to pretend they're ethical beings, that throws the whole game down the tubes. But at least those four countries I mentioned above don't have extreme poverty in large scale. Brazil is riddled with politicians that hire their electoral lieutenants with a cozy govt job, that buy the vote of the poorest (sometimes for a month's food for a poor family). The federal govt in power has been taken red handed buying support in congress with CASH more than once. The first scandal took about 4 yrs to go to trial, with mass convictions, however now they're scheming to replace a supreme court justice with one more sympathetic with the ones convicted so they can have their sentences reduced upon appeal. The scandals pile on. But 10% of the population is below the poverty line, and the next 30% gets paid just enough to eat and clothe themselves, and most of those 40% have pitiful education. They don't understand how much more valuable even a half good politician is over what we have in power. Our public health and education is a disgrace. And all professionals behind those areas only complain about their salaries, as if getting paid is the root solution to the problem. The problem is they're used to going through the motions, our culture has no hint of excellence, of self sacrifice for the common good, even the good part of individualism. The other root cause is the catholic church, with their humbleness/poverty is good, teaching others to cope instead of to aspire. If we were 2/3 of the good protestant + jewish religion, our country would be much better off. But the middle class finally was awaken. The Internet changed everything.
GE/Hitachi S-PRISM sodium cooled integral fast reactor is one example of a modular solution. It's meant to installed with 4 thermal units and 2 generator units on a single site, but each thermal unit could be shutdown separately, reducing production by just 25%. Is factory built, and can be installed on decommissioned coal thermal plant sites.
However, this is what GE/Hitachi says. I can't say they aren't overstating things a little / a lot.
They're fishing around the world to find someone that will fund their first plant.
Other interesting characteristics: - Passively safe, uses low pressure, high temperature core, the sodium and the fuel is already molten, there's nothing nuclear to meltdown, increases in pressure passively reduces the reaction - Water corrodes steel, while Sodium doesn't, designed for continuous operations for twice as long as water reactors, and much longer total design life - Sodium does have a few issues with reactivity with water and oxygen, however there is no relief valve like water reactors have, all sodium releases that happened on older IFR reactors never caused any external contamination or personal contamination, sodium fires are drastically less serious than hydrogen buildup explosion in a water reactor - Has a pool of sodium underneath the reactor, so any loss of coolant (that is designed never to happen) is immediately replaced - Has a bunch of holes even lower, where fuel will fall to in case of a shutdown, completely killing the reaction - Able to use almost any kind of nuclear fuel (un enriched uranium, depleted uranium, plutonium, thorium as well as transuranic elements that poison water reactors) - This is their main selling point trying to sell their project to countries with large stockpiles of water reactor nuclear waste (UK, France, Japan, USA, Canada) - Has on site nuclear reprocessing, meant just to remove end fission elements (with half lifes lower than 100 yrs or higher than 100000 yrs). All elements that must be removed for water reactors that are still highly radioactive are kept, and burn into much lower radioactivity elements. - can be set to breed fuel for other IFR plants, this is completely different from breeding weapons grade plutonium, its just meant to mix depleted uranium and thorium (lower radiation stuff compared to enriched uranium and plutonium) with higher radioactivity stuff, so part of this fuel can then be taken to a new IFR plant to start it up, the way I understand it, it can't start on depleted uranium alone, but once started, depleted uranium can be added forever to keep it running - nuclear fuel for an IFR plant is kept mixed with highly undesirable elements for weapons grade reprocessing - actinides like Americium, Curium, and undesirable isotopes of plutonium, making proliferation issues almost a non issue (it's a lot easier to breed plutonium from uranium using a research reactor than trying to separate any weapons grade isotopes from the rest of the nuclear fuel). And since there's no reason to move fuel off site except for starting up another reactor, it's much easier to detect diversion of high radioactivity fuel from much lower radioactivity waste
Again, so say the designers of this stuff. Great stuff if there's no crap that isn't mentioned.
Andrea Rossi has three operational 1MW plants, and a report from a group of reputable scientists backing him up to counter all that say he's a big con men. Besides, he's been working on this for too long to be any typical kind of con men. If he were one, he would have already made a couple million bucks and them disappeared with the money. Initially I made the mistake of being his cheerleader early on, as 18 months passed I grew really skeptical, but with the report, I'm back to being a believer. I want him to succeed, but don't all of us that have no vested interest in oil or coal ? Besides, if his method was a hoax, why would he had so much trouble getting a patent on it. If it doesn't work, just give the men a patent. The fact he's having so much trouble getting a patent is another factor that tells me there's a lot of meat behind his tech, and big coil / big coal are very worried. His last move is he's offering a 1MW thermal (low temp steam) reactor for one customer willing to pay just for the actual heat output, no big money down. That's far more consistent with an honest business man trying to break into a huge market with little funding than a con men trying to make big bucks.
Hydrogen fuel cells have 80% direct electricity generation efficiency. The remaining 20% energy is pure H2O steam, if you don't need the heat, you can increase efficiency to close to 90% with co-generation. If you need that heat for non electricity production, you have essentially 100% efficiency combined efficiency.
The natural gas reformer that produces hydrogen from natural gas in also exothermic. And the CO2 produced can be easily sequestered.
The reformer don't need to run at the same site as the fuel cells. You can have a few large reformer sites for a metro area, and distribute the hydrogen to smaller hydrogen fuel cell plants placed in areas where 100% of the heat can be used (industries, large businesses). Since hydrogen fuel cells produce only electricity and steam, and are modular down to 100KW, they can be placed only in places where their steam can be 100% used for their heat instead of co-generation.
It looks like 1 CH4 + 2 H2O => CO2 + 4 H2, has 20% less energy (the reformer process), I'll assume 100% of that energy will be wasted just sustaining the reformer process, but 100% of the H2 through the fuel cell producing electricity only directly and using all steam for heat (far more efficient than a boiler). Considering that a boiler isn't 100% efficient, it looks like combined efficiency would be in the 90% range (considering natural gas that don't need to be used for the boiler in the process). And isolating the CO2 from the system is FAR easier than on a thermal plant. And you end up with a large supply of H2 for use in fuel cell cars, until we can produce H2 efficiently from a renewable method.
Producing electricity from H2 on site is far more valuable to some customers that demand 100.00000% uptime, like data centers, hospitals, anywhere the regular grid would require a large backup generator.
Natural gas fuel cells (on site reformer) are being used today at many of the largest data centers of the world, for their cost reductions. With the CO2 reduction just a nice bonus, not the core reason. And those sites can sell back that base load excess capacity they might have, in contrast with the off peak nature of Solar PV feed back into the grid. Part of those savings come from the natural gas fuel cell being cheaper than a large UPS + large backup generator or large battery pack.
One nice place to place a large fuel cell power station is a oil refinery, that needs lots of heat for its industrial processes. Usually has the natural gas pipe coming in already. The reformer can be used to produce syn gas that can be used to produce synthetic fuels without Oil.
The hydrogen economy has many substantial advantages beyond just higher efficiency.
Thanks for correcting the number, so it's about 1/3 more efficient, but has many more advantages than just electricity yield. I think when you consider the combined economical/environment advantages, it would be about 50% more efficient all around.
With hydrogen fuel cell cars, then the system is less than half as carbon intensive than Oil extraction, transportation, refining and burning gasoline in a Prius for transportation, that is using the H2 from the reformer on a fuel cell car.
The issue is economical. As far as burning light/heavy water reactor nuclear waste, the way to go is Sodium Cooled IFR reactors, that burn existing nuclear sludge, in the end producing waste that has less than 1% of the radioactiviy of the nuclear sludge that fed it, and can burn depleted uranium too, and thorium too. Those reactors will be the solution to use the remainder of the nuclear waste, as we move to a nuclear free world in the near future. Those will be the last reactors to be shutdown eventually. Resulting spent nuclear fuel from IFR reactors take just a few dozen yrs to have just a few times more radioactivity than the original raw uranium ore. In about 100 yrs their spent fuel is just as radioactive as raw uranium, but have almost no uranium, since it used 99,5% of the original nuclear yield of the ore. It's now mostly transmuted to atoms about half the nuclear weight, just two or three quick nuclear decays away from completely stable (non radioactive) elements. Except that unlike you that seem to have utter faith on those proposing new nuclear technologies, I have read the GE/Hitachi PRISM reactor stuff, but I'll only believe when they put their money where their mouth is and build the first fully operational reactor out of their own pocket, instead of waiting for govt handouts/subsidies first.
Brownouts ? I don't live in the US anymore, I lived there 1993-2002. I had zero blackouts/brownouts except for extreme weather in the entire time. Lived in New Hampshire/Florida, worked part of the time in Massachusetts and traveled around the US as a consultant (over 30 states). I now live in Brazil, where I was born. Here we have major blackouts from time to time due to insufficient peak load generating facilities and neglect to the long distance power grid. But even then, those are about once a year events, in the peak dry season, when many of our huge dams have their reservoirs getting danger low, and only in drier than usual years. Anyhow, look at my post before. Nuclear power is not viable anymore. Technically 3rd and 4th gen nukes are safe enough, but just too expensive when you take into consideration interest on the total investment, with money invested for a long time before the plant is operational. Solar PV and Wind Turbines begin producing in just a few months after receiving the turbines / solar panels, as long as transmission lines are operational. And we need to incentive people to buy solar heating solutions, that are far more economical than solar PV (truly a slam dunk investment). Solar PV tied to the grid in Brazil is practically non existent, no feed in tariffs. The Govt is a major stake holder in our largest hydro plants, few nuclear plants, NG thermal and long distance power distribution, so they don't want the competition from home / commercial PV.
There are many solutions that will be ready long before a nuke project started today. Natural Gas Fuel Cell power plants are twice as efficient as thermal natural gas plants, so produce half the pollution for the same electricity and their exhaust makes it very easy to sequester just the CO2 (without the steam), since the reformer that produces the CO2 is a completely separate stage from the fuel cell that produces only water. Since Fuel Cells are modular, those plants will produce over 99% of their capacity over 99% of the time, something that no nuclear reactor can match over 20 yrs. This technology is already available, but still undergoing significant cost declines, but since those plants take less than half the time from conception to becoming operational than a nuke reactor, even if those projects wait another 2-3 yrs when this technology becomes really affordable, it will still be online before the nuke one. There's room to increase our wind production by at least 20x before we begin to talk about the best areas in the world for wind electricity being saturated. Let's do that. Oh, and LENR is coming. It's a reality. No matter how much Fission and hot Fusion interests try to kill (smear) LENR, it will become a reality in just a few years, and like fuel cells, it will be completely modular, we will be able to run them at home, at our business, in factories, producing combined electricity and heat on site. In just 5 yrs we'll see there's no need for nuclear reactors any more.
The sun doesn't provide enough energy to go even 200mph with passenger load. Taking off alone would be impossible. Power to weight is critical in aircraft. If instead you consider a fairly large airship, with the whole upward surface covered by solar panels, that should produce enough HP to transport as many people as the helium would allow to float. But that would go at less than 100mph, even with the best solar panels demonstrated in labs (40%).
You obviously miss the fact that papers that could cause billions of US$ in yearly research budgets to go bust do get shutdown if some excuse can be found against said papers. The mainstream nuclear physics research is working on the ultimate research money pit, hot fusion. If Andrea's device works, it will kill hot fusion research, and many scientists that currently enjoy a stable career with no short term pressure for results will find themselves in search of another job. That's the real reason Cold Fusion in general has been rejected by mainstream physics/chemists publications, it threatens billions of dollars in research grants. And the fact that it also threatens coal, natural gas and oil profits also don't help their case. Cold Fusion has everything going against them, to many economic interests will be seriously damaged if Cold Fusion goes mainstream.
China is the only GNSS system that is playing the proprietary card and their typical behavior of cloning other's people work without compensation.
1 - China was initially interested in a partnership with Europe towards Galileo, however it seems they wanted to invest a little and get 100% of the satellite expertise that Europe has and that China wants. 2 - China's own GNSS system, Beidou or Compass II, has been operating for like two years, and still no ICD's were made public (it's promised to come out anytime now), while the norm is that GNSS civil system ICD is published before said system even starts launching (Beidou has been launching satellites for like 4 years I *think*). ICD is the documentation necessary to use that system. There's a GPS civilian ICD, a Galileo ICD, a Glonass civilian ICD and so forth.
In end, China is not a democracy, China is a dictatorship (by comitee), and they do everything they can that isn't blatantly wrong to benefit their own industry and their own national interests, including blatant industrial espionage, cloning foreign technology in violation of international patents, and many other behavior I consider obscene.
The only way we can try to force China to respect international law and customs is to repeat that statement ad nauseoum, until they bother to change.
I advise against depending on either Glonass or Beidou, because they don't come from a government with a history of international cooperation and respect for its own international commitments, Russia is similar to China in its end result, but with different issues.
But having a GNSS receiver capable of using all four GNSS systems will be amazing, it will automatically use GLONASS and Beidou when its working and ignore it if there's trouble, accuracy will easily get to better than 1 meter in places where today GPS just has barely has enough signals to work at all (as long as the receiver is dual frequency). Today we're lucky to have 10-12 satellites in view, with four systems we should see 30 satellites minimum even in mountain terrain, and about 12 in urban canyons.
L1/L2 and L5 frequency was originally assigned to GPS, so in order for anybody else to use that frequency they need to coordinate with the US Air Force. But that's by design, there is no need for a yield provision as long as the signals were designed to co-exist and everyone follows the agreed designs. The ITU is the authority that coordinates worldwide usage of air frequencies.
Plus the military signals operate on the orthogonal polarity to the civilian signals and that polarity is exclusive to GPS. All airborne signals can use the vertical and horizontal polarity as two completely separate signals. In the case of L5, the signal uses both polarities (one for the positioning signal, the other for the dataless or pilot signal).
The CDMA encoding that all signals on L1/L2/L5 use is very robust and interference resistant (from similar power signals), allowing for dozens of simultaneous signals in the same band on the same region of the earth. Notice that each satellite broadcasts a 50 to 250 bits per second signal, so there's a huge margin of safety, considering the base signal runs at 1-10 mega baud (resulting in 20000 to 200000 bauds per bit).
Not 100% true, QZSS broadcasts L2C as well. L2C and their military counterparts operate on the same frequency but with orthogonal signals. The US only has the military side to himself. But that's true for L1 as well.
The greatest mistake of every modern war was thinking that your adversary didn't learn anything from the previous conflicts. The French, British and Germany armies today are smaller but almost just as technologically advanced as the US. Are you forgetting they're all part of NATO ???
A war between the US and Europe is absolutely impossible. The economic dependency is so huge, both sides would be devastated economically. Having some distrust at some level and not wanting to depend totally on each other is normal, but extrapolating that to a war is just utterly crazy. Even an outright war between the US and Russia today is close to impossible, due to the economic dependency and the cost of that alone. Even though Europe doesn't have a whole lot of nukes, for instance, the UK has ballistic nuclear submarines capable of destroying perhaps the whole eastern seaboard of the US if they launched all their nukes at that US region.
Wrong in both accounts. Turning one satellite affects a huge area of the world. And the US doesn't have any means to sell decryption cards to individual users as that encrypted signal is the military signal, they would be selling access to the military GPS signal which is very tightly regulated. Allowing non trusted (paying) customers access to the military signal allows other military powers to spoof (generate artificial signals with wrong data, but that would be accepted by the military GPS users), creating a huge safety risk. No way in hell this will EVER happen.
GPS, Galileo both use the frequency bands known as L1 and L5. Other systems are planned to use those frequencies as well. GPS uses in total three frequencies: L1,L2 and L5. Galileo uses L1, L5 and a frequency just before the L5 band. Many other systems use L1 and L5 as well (WAAS, QZSS, EGNOS, plus a few more) The overlap isn't 100%.
That's complete FUD. GPS is firmly advertised as a free resource to the world. Selective Availability is gone with GPS III satellites, the feature is just not there anymore. And finally, should the US being charging for GPS usage, then there's Glonass, Beidou and other systems, that would gain popularity. The US certainly don't want to loose their mainstream edge they currently enjoy with the GPS system. You have no idea what you're talking about. There are three main reasons for Galileo: 1 - The US doesn't grant military signal to Europe civilian users, even law enforcement. Only NATO armed forces have some kind of access to GPS military signal. Galileo will supply an encrypted secure signal for all authorized European users (that the EU decides should have access) 2 - GPS performance is good, but it's not guaranteed. The GPS system was devised as an 18 satellite constellation, and even though it currently has 29 operational satellites, there's no firm commitment that more than 24 satellites will be operational always. Europe's aviation enhancement system (EGNOS) is planned to combine GPS+Galileo+GLONASS for ultra reliable/ultra accurate aircraft navigation, while the American counterpart (WAAS) has no current plans to incorporate GLONASS or Galileo. EGNOS already supports GPS+GLONASS. Should GPS constellation strenght drop to 21 satellites, many of the requirements for WAAS would be lost without Galileo or GLONASS to help. 3 - There are provisions for an encrypted paid service for commercial Galileo users. Such service would be similar to the secure service, but could be switched of separately.
That said, item 1 and 3 would only be useful when Galileo reaches full constellation strength of 30 satellites, there are no immediate plans for that. There are currently plans for just a basic 18 satellite constellation.
each GPS satellite covers a 4000+ km radius. Actually the DoD strategy to deny GPS usage in case of war is to deploy regional jammers, shutting down a single GPS satellite right on top of Iran will affect Europe/China/India somewhat, shutting three or four satellites to render the signal unuseable for 3D ranging over Iran will certainly disrupt GPS performance over a 2000+ km radius (all estimates, but if anything, I'm underestimating the numbers). You guys seem to ignore that right now there's GPS/GLONASS fully operational and Beidu almost operational. The cat's totally out of the bag. Galileo won't change that. Plus regional GNSS systems such as Japan's QZSS (one satellite operational, at least three planned) and India's system to being launches soon. Galileo is a much lesser threat than Glonass and Beidu, since Russia/China aren't allies to NATO.
People like to criticize other's work. Normal. It's interesting however to understand what's claimed before criticizing. Disclaimer: I believe that cold fusion is true, however I'm not sold on Rossi's technology being viable or being safe yet. To his credit, he stated a few times this is model T, that means, it's an early device for real world use. He's not claiming his device is refined enough for all uses. He might have trouble creating steam with enough temperature/pressure to make for efficient electricity generation (compared to steam from Natural Gas/Coal or even CSP Solar). At this point he's just shooting for proving his device produces a large power surplus. Perhaps adequate for ambient heating (replacing natural gas/heating oil furnaces), plus other uses where temperatures in that order are good enough. The guy is both eccentric (like most great scientists/inventors of all times), and paranoid of other's stealing his ideas. That certainly ends up amplifying criticism against him. He's not interested in sharing his technology with the world until he has it patented, however it's questionable if he'll ever be able to obtain a worldwide patent that would prevent competition, since there's prior work even on Nickel+Hydrogen cold fusion. And obviously there are tons of scientists and dirty power propaganda bloggers which are hellbent on shutting him down, since he's a huge threat to hot fusion research and would destroy a lot of shareholder value of energy mining and oil businesses.
>Not only does Windows 8 and the upcomming Office run on ARM, there is already a production ready ARM laptop that's going to be sold. >Image larger than iPad battery life and weeks of standby, a full HD resolution, accelerated x264 full HD video playback. Internet Explorer 10 full acceleration and DX11.
Right design, wrong operating system. Scratch Windows, add Linux. I have been running Linux only on x86 for the last 12 years. In the last few, I even got rid of flash and other proprietary binary only linux software. I don't want an ARM desktop, I want an ARM laptop (not a tablet, not a netbook). The only external connections I would like to see that would make my laptop feel like a desktop is many e-sata connectors, so I can hook up many external hard drives when I'm home/in the office, and no, gigabit ethernet isn't a replacement for that. So I could go 100% Linux/ARM. Specially since we'd expect using an NVidia Kal El CPU, that NVidia would release an ARM version of their proprietary graphics driver, and that's if nouveau isn't almost perfect by then.
Your employer buy electricity for 10 cents/kWh ? Is that a large consumer paying wholesale rates ? That's about 1/3 of what I pay retail here in Brazil.
Latency isn't a copper issue... Between 100Mbps copper and 100Mbps fiber you should get the same latency. Now if you compare a Gbps PON (fiber) access with a 10Mbps ADSL, then of course the ADSL will have much higher latency. I have a 12Mbps/1,2Mbps ADSL2+ link and I can ping the ISP's router with less than 10ms delay.
You have a lot of correct points, I would just like to add...
There are organic solar panels that avoid those toxic chemicals. They're still evolving in cost and performance, but in this decade solar panels made of organic materials should become the majority of PV panels built. Also PV panels are supposed to produce 50+% of their production capacity 20+ years into usage, and by then we should have a recycling program in place. Except for warranty, PV panels could be used for 30+ years, as long as there's rooftop space left, leave them working, even at a reduced capacity.
Wind energy kills birds... It's doesn't kill that many birds. And it kills birds, not people. Wind turbines with 10MW power ratings are coming in the next year or two, in comparison, the Hoover Dam has 2080MW capacity and Itaipu (in Brazil) has 14000MW. So a mere 208 10MW turbines would have power production rivaling the hoover dam. Of course wind isn't baseline production, while hydro is, but you get the idea.
I agree that no nuclear power plants should be built in areas prone to serious earthquakes/tsunamis. So Japan should have been far more careful in choosing construction sites for their nuclear power plants. Hurricanes aren't that serious a threat since they come with days fore warning.
In reality, the major issue today is why US and some other countries don't reprocess their nuclear waste. Nuclear reprocessing reduces nuclear waste to less than 10% of the original volume/weight. Also, there are reactors that can burn the waste from regular reactors, why not build a few of those and run it with all nuclear waste from the world ? In the end there will still be some nuclear waste, but perhaps just a few percent of the original waste.
But for areas with plenty of sun and/or wind, nuclear can be avoided, using large CSP power plants, large wind farms. In Spain there are already a few CSP plants that produce power 24x7, using molten salt as an energy buffer in the night.
This is NOT a big deal. Every new wireless telephony increases bandwidth by at least 10x. Basic GSM to basic 3G (UMTS) did that. From EDGE to HSxPA same thing. From HSxPA to LTE same. While doubling performance is good, 5G networks needs to increase bandwidth 5x fold at an absolute minimum in order to be of any interest to wireless carriers. And notice that today's wireless is full duplex a far as the user is concerned, but it happens using separate upstream/downstream channels. The biggest bottleneck is that both channels are shared among hundreds of users and that's where the congestion lies. The 5G idea that was discussed is having all phones act as intelligent repeaters, allowing for very low power transmissions where user density is highest, the lowest power transmissions are, the more often spectrum can be reused dynamically by those repeaters. Also this could help with the shadow spots, since all it would take is one user in contact with the tower and with a shadow spot to illuminate that spot with signal. Also it would be expected to involve 10x more basestations in the form of femtocells / nanocells, using the same low power principle. Wireless communications will never ever be not even close as efficient as wired communications for bandwidth intensive applications. Unlimited plans were always a fish and bait scheme, designed to create interest and dependency, until they limited bandwidth to increase revenue (i.e. jack up the prices).
If 10% of the population wanted patent reform it would happen in a few years at the most. The issue is most people don't care or don't care enough about this. Democracy is the best alternative to political system. However a Democracy with lazy population is very little better than a dictatorship. Democracy with highly educated, enlightened people is something that doesn't quite exist in all but less than a dozen countries in the world. And most of those countries are small, like less than 20 million people.
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Except... Brazil has a corrupt culture. Just like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece.
What I'm saying is, although people all over the world would do whatever they can get away with, in those countries, lack of an expectation of ethics, lack of others shaming those who don't bother to even try to pretend they're ethical beings, that throws the whole game down the tubes.
But at least those four countries I mentioned above don't have extreme poverty in large scale.
Brazil is riddled with politicians that hire their electoral lieutenants with a cozy govt job, that buy the vote of the poorest (sometimes for a month's food for a poor family). The federal govt in power has been taken red handed buying support in congress with CASH more than once. The first scandal took about 4 yrs to go to trial, with mass convictions, however now they're scheming to replace a supreme court justice with one more sympathetic with the ones convicted so they can have their sentences reduced upon appeal.
The scandals pile on. But 10% of the population is below the poverty line, and the next 30% gets paid just enough to eat and clothe themselves, and most of those 40% have pitiful education. They don't understand how much more valuable even a half good politician is over what we have in power.
Our public health and education is a disgrace. And all professionals behind those areas only complain about their salaries, as if getting paid is the root solution to the problem. The problem is they're used to going through the motions, our culture has no hint of excellence, of self sacrifice for the common good, even the good part of individualism.
The other root cause is the catholic church, with their humbleness/poverty is good, teaching others to cope instead of to aspire. If we were 2/3 of the good protestant + jewish religion, our country would be much better off.
But the middle class finally was awaken. The Internet changed everything.
GE/Hitachi S-PRISM sodium cooled integral fast reactor is one example of a modular solution.
It's meant to installed with 4 thermal units and 2 generator units on a single site, but each thermal unit could be shutdown separately, reducing production by just 25%.
Is factory built, and can be installed on decommissioned coal thermal plant sites.
However, this is what GE/Hitachi says. I can't say they aren't overstating things a little / a lot.
They're fishing around the world to find someone that will fund their first plant.
Other interesting characteristics:
- Passively safe, uses low pressure, high temperature core, the sodium and the fuel is already molten, there's nothing nuclear to meltdown, increases in pressure passively reduces the reaction
- Water corrodes steel, while Sodium doesn't, designed for continuous operations for twice as long as water reactors, and much longer total design life
- Sodium does have a few issues with reactivity with water and oxygen, however there is no relief valve like water reactors have, all sodium releases that happened on older IFR reactors never caused any external contamination or personal contamination, sodium fires are drastically less serious than hydrogen buildup explosion in a water reactor
- Has a pool of sodium underneath the reactor, so any loss of coolant (that is designed never to happen) is immediately replaced
- Has a bunch of holes even lower, where fuel will fall to in case of a shutdown, completely killing the reaction
- Able to use almost any kind of nuclear fuel (un enriched uranium, depleted uranium, plutonium, thorium as well as transuranic elements that poison water reactors) - This is their main selling point trying to sell their project to countries with large stockpiles of water reactor nuclear waste (UK, France, Japan, USA, Canada)
- Has on site nuclear reprocessing, meant just to remove end fission elements (with half lifes lower than 100 yrs or higher than 100000 yrs). All elements that must be removed for water reactors that are still highly radioactive are kept, and burn into much lower radioactivity elements.
- can be set to breed fuel for other IFR plants, this is completely different from breeding weapons grade plutonium, its just meant to mix depleted uranium and thorium (lower radiation stuff compared to enriched uranium and plutonium) with higher radioactivity stuff, so part of this fuel can then be taken to a new IFR plant to start it up, the way I understand it, it can't start on depleted uranium alone, but once started, depleted uranium can be added forever to keep it running
- nuclear fuel for an IFR plant is kept mixed with highly undesirable elements for weapons grade reprocessing - actinides like Americium, Curium, and undesirable isotopes of plutonium, making proliferation issues almost a non issue (it's a lot easier to breed plutonium from uranium using a research reactor than trying to separate any weapons grade isotopes from the rest of the nuclear fuel). And since there's no reason to move fuel off site except for starting up another reactor, it's much easier to detect diversion of high radioactivity fuel from much lower radioactivity waste
Again, so say the designers of this stuff. Great stuff if there's no crap that isn't mentioned.
Andrea Rossi has three operational 1MW plants, and a report from a group of reputable scientists backing him up to counter all that say he's a big con men. Besides, he's been working on this for too long to be any typical kind of con men. If he were one, he would have already made a couple million bucks and them disappeared with the money.
Initially I made the mistake of being his cheerleader early on, as 18 months passed I grew really skeptical, but with the report, I'm back to being a believer. I want him to succeed, but don't all of us that have no vested interest in oil or coal ?
Besides, if his method was a hoax, why would he had so much trouble getting a patent on it. If it doesn't work, just give the men a patent.
The fact he's having so much trouble getting a patent is another factor that tells me there's a lot of meat behind his tech, and big coil / big coal are very worried.
His last move is he's offering a 1MW thermal (low temp steam) reactor for one customer willing to pay just for the actual heat output, no big money down.
That's far more consistent with an honest business man trying to break into a huge market with little funding than a con men trying to make big bucks.
Hydrogen fuel cells have 80% direct electricity generation efficiency. The remaining 20% energy is pure H2O steam, if you don't need the heat, you can increase efficiency to close to 90% with co-generation. If you need that heat for non electricity production, you have essentially 100% efficiency combined efficiency.
The natural gas reformer that produces hydrogen from natural gas in also exothermic.
And the CO2 produced can be easily sequestered.
The reformer don't need to run at the same site as the fuel cells. You can have a few large reformer sites for a metro area, and distribute the hydrogen to smaller hydrogen fuel cell plants placed in areas where 100% of the heat can be used (industries, large businesses).
Since hydrogen fuel cells produce only electricity and steam, and are modular down to 100KW, they can be placed only in places where their steam can be 100% used for their heat instead of co-generation.
It looks like 1 CH4 + 2 H2O => CO2 + 4 H2, has 20% less energy (the reformer process), I'll assume 100% of that energy will be wasted just sustaining the reformer process, but 100% of the H2 through the fuel cell producing electricity only directly and using all steam for heat (far more efficient than a boiler).
Considering that a boiler isn't 100% efficient, it looks like combined efficiency would be in the 90% range (considering natural gas that don't need to be used for the boiler in the process).
And isolating the CO2 from the system is FAR easier than on a thermal plant.
And you end up with a large supply of H2 for use in fuel cell cars, until we can produce H2 efficiently from a renewable method.
Producing electricity from H2 on site is far more valuable to some customers that demand 100.00000% uptime, like data centers, hospitals, anywhere the regular grid would require a large backup generator.
Natural gas fuel cells (on site reformer) are being used today at many of the largest data centers of the world, for their cost reductions. With the CO2 reduction just a nice bonus, not the core reason. And those sites can sell back that base load excess capacity they might have, in contrast with the off peak nature of Solar PV feed back into the grid. Part of those savings come from the natural gas fuel cell being cheaper than a large UPS + large backup generator or large battery pack.
One nice place to place a large fuel cell power station is a oil refinery, that needs lots of heat for its industrial processes. Usually has the natural gas pipe coming in already. The reformer can be used to produce syn gas that can be used to produce synthetic fuels without Oil.
The hydrogen economy has many substantial advantages beyond just higher efficiency.
Thanks for correcting the number, so it's about 1/3 more efficient, but has many more advantages than just electricity yield.
I think when you consider the combined economical/environment advantages, it would be about 50% more efficient all around.
With hydrogen fuel cell cars, then the system is less than half as carbon intensive than Oil extraction, transportation, refining and burning gasoline in a Prius for transportation, that is using the H2 from the reformer on a fuel cell car.
The issue is economical.
As far as burning light/heavy water reactor nuclear waste, the way to go is Sodium Cooled IFR reactors, that burn existing nuclear sludge, in the end producing waste that has less than 1% of the radioactiviy of the nuclear sludge that fed it, and can burn depleted uranium too, and thorium too.
Those reactors will be the solution to use the remainder of the nuclear waste, as we move to a nuclear free world in the near future. Those will be the last reactors to be shutdown eventually.
Resulting spent nuclear fuel from IFR reactors take just a few dozen yrs to have just a few times more radioactivity than the original raw uranium ore.
In about 100 yrs their spent fuel is just as radioactive as raw uranium, but have almost no uranium, since it used 99,5% of the original nuclear yield of the ore.
It's now mostly transmuted to atoms about half the nuclear weight, just two or three quick nuclear decays away from completely stable (non radioactive) elements.
Except that unlike you that seem to have utter faith on those proposing new nuclear technologies, I have read the GE/Hitachi PRISM reactor stuff, but I'll only believe when they put their money where their mouth is and build the first fully operational reactor out of their own pocket, instead of waiting for govt handouts/subsidies first.
Brownouts ?
I don't live in the US anymore, I lived there 1993-2002. I had zero blackouts/brownouts except for extreme weather in the entire time. Lived in New Hampshire/Florida, worked part of the time in Massachusetts and traveled around the US as a consultant (over 30 states).
I now live in Brazil, where I was born. Here we have major blackouts from time to time due to insufficient peak load generating facilities and neglect to the long distance power grid. But even then, those are about once a year events, in the peak dry season, when many of our huge dams have their reservoirs getting danger low, and only in drier than usual years.
Anyhow, look at my post before. Nuclear power is not viable anymore. Technically 3rd and 4th gen nukes are safe enough, but just too expensive when you take into consideration interest on the total investment, with money invested for a long time before the plant is operational. Solar PV and Wind Turbines begin producing in just a few months after receiving the turbines / solar panels, as long as transmission lines are operational.
And we need to incentive people to buy solar heating solutions, that are far more economical than solar PV (truly a slam dunk investment).
Solar PV tied to the grid in Brazil is practically non existent, no feed in tariffs. The Govt is a major stake holder in our largest hydro plants, few nuclear plants, NG thermal and long distance power distribution, so they don't want the competition from home / commercial PV.
There are many solutions that will be ready long before a nuke project started today.
Natural Gas Fuel Cell power plants are twice as efficient as thermal natural gas plants, so produce half the pollution for the same electricity and their exhaust makes it very easy to sequester just the CO2 (without the steam), since the reformer that produces the CO2 is a completely separate stage from the fuel cell that produces only water.
Since Fuel Cells are modular, those plants will produce over 99% of their capacity over 99% of the time, something that no nuclear reactor can match over 20 yrs.
This technology is already available, but still undergoing significant cost declines, but since those plants take less than half the time from conception to becoming operational than a nuke reactor, even if those projects wait another 2-3 yrs when this technology becomes really affordable, it will still be online before the nuke one.
There's room to increase our wind production by at least 20x before we begin to talk about the best areas in the world for wind electricity being saturated. Let's do that.
Oh, and LENR is coming. It's a reality. No matter how much Fission and hot Fusion interests try to kill (smear) LENR, it will become a reality in just a few years, and like fuel cells, it will be completely modular, we will be able to run them at home, at our business, in factories, producing combined electricity and heat on site.
In just 5 yrs we'll see there's no need for nuclear reactors any more.
The sun doesn't provide enough energy to go even 200mph with passenger load. Taking off alone would be impossible.
Power to weight is critical in aircraft.
If instead you consider a fairly large airship, with the whole upward surface covered by solar panels, that should produce enough HP to transport as many people as the helium would allow to float. But that would go at less than 100mph, even with the best solar panels demonstrated in labs (40%).
You obviously miss the fact that papers that could cause billions of US$ in yearly research budgets to go bust do get shutdown if some excuse can be found against said papers.
The mainstream nuclear physics research is working on the ultimate research money pit, hot fusion.
If Andrea's device works, it will kill hot fusion research, and many scientists that currently enjoy a stable career with no short term pressure for results will find themselves in search of another job.
That's the real reason Cold Fusion in general has been rejected by mainstream physics/chemists publications, it threatens billions of dollars in research grants.
And the fact that it also threatens coal, natural gas and oil profits also don't help their case.
Cold Fusion has everything going against them, to many economic interests will be seriously damaged if Cold Fusion goes mainstream.
China is the only GNSS system that is playing the proprietary card and their typical behavior of cloning other's people work without compensation.
1 - China was initially interested in a partnership with Europe towards Galileo, however it seems they wanted to invest a little and get 100% of the satellite expertise that Europe has and that China wants.
2 - China's own GNSS system, Beidou or Compass II, has been operating for like two years, and still no ICD's were made public (it's promised to come out anytime now), while the norm is that GNSS civil system ICD is published before said system even starts launching (Beidou has been launching satellites for like 4 years I *think*). ICD is the documentation necessary to use that system. There's a GPS civilian ICD, a Galileo ICD, a Glonass civilian ICD and so forth.
In end, China is not a democracy, China is a dictatorship (by comitee), and they do everything they can that isn't blatantly wrong to benefit their own industry and their own national interests, including blatant industrial espionage, cloning foreign technology in violation of international patents, and many other behavior I consider obscene.
The only way we can try to force China to respect international law and customs is to repeat that statement ad nauseoum, until they bother to change.
I advise against depending on either Glonass or Beidou, because they don't come from a government with a history of international cooperation and respect for its own international commitments, Russia is similar to China in its end result, but with different issues.
But having a GNSS receiver capable of using all four GNSS systems will be amazing, it will automatically use GLONASS and Beidou when its working and ignore it if there's trouble, accuracy will easily get to better than 1 meter in places where today GPS just has barely has enough signals to work at all (as long as the receiver is dual frequency). Today we're lucky to have 10-12 satellites in view, with four systems we should see 30 satellites minimum even in mountain terrain, and about 12 in urban canyons.
L1/L2 and L5 frequency was originally assigned to GPS, so in order for anybody else to use that frequency they need to coordinate with the US Air Force.
But that's by design, there is no need for a yield provision as long as the signals were designed to co-exist and everyone follows the agreed designs.
The ITU is the authority that coordinates worldwide usage of air frequencies.
Plus the military signals operate on the orthogonal polarity to the civilian signals and that polarity is exclusive to GPS.
All airborne signals can use the vertical and horizontal polarity as two completely separate signals. In the case of L5, the signal uses both polarities (one for the positioning signal, the other for the dataless or pilot signal).
The CDMA encoding that all signals on L1/L2/L5 use is very robust and interference resistant (from similar power signals), allowing for dozens of simultaneous signals in the same band on the same region of the earth. Notice that each satellite broadcasts a 50 to 250 bits per second signal, so there's a huge margin of safety, considering the base signal runs at 1-10 mega baud (resulting in 20000 to 200000 bauds per bit).
Not 100% true, QZSS broadcasts L2C as well. L2C and their military counterparts operate on the same frequency but with orthogonal signals. The US only has the military side to himself. But that's true for L1 as well.
The greatest mistake of every modern war was thinking that your adversary didn't learn anything from the previous conflicts.
The French, British and Germany armies today are smaller but almost just as technologically advanced as the US. Are you forgetting they're all part of NATO ???
A war between the US and Europe is absolutely impossible.
The economic dependency is so huge, both sides would be devastated economically.
Having some distrust at some level and not wanting to depend totally on each other is normal, but extrapolating that to a war is just utterly crazy. Even an outright war between the US and Russia today is close to impossible, due to the economic dependency and the cost of that alone. Even though Europe doesn't have a whole lot of nukes, for instance, the UK has ballistic nuclear submarines capable of destroying perhaps the whole eastern seaboard of the US if they launched all their nukes at that US region.
Wrong in both accounts. Turning one satellite affects a huge area of the world. And the US doesn't have any means to sell decryption cards to individual users as that encrypted signal is the military signal, they would be selling access to the military GPS signal which is very tightly regulated. Allowing non trusted (paying) customers access to the military signal allows other military powers to spoof (generate artificial signals with wrong data, but that would be accepted by the military GPS users), creating a huge safety risk.
No way in hell this will EVER happen.
GPS, Galileo both use the frequency bands known as L1 and L5. Other systems are planned to use those frequencies as well.
GPS uses in total three frequencies: L1,L2 and L5.
Galileo uses L1, L5 and a frequency just before the L5 band.
Many other systems use L1 and L5 as well (WAAS, QZSS, EGNOS, plus a few more)
The overlap isn't 100%.
That's complete FUD. GPS is firmly advertised as a free resource to the world. Selective Availability is gone with GPS III satellites, the feature is just not there anymore. And finally, should the US being charging for GPS usage, then there's Glonass, Beidou and other systems, that would gain popularity. The US certainly don't want to loose their mainstream edge they currently enjoy with the GPS system.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
There are three main reasons for Galileo:
1 - The US doesn't grant military signal to Europe civilian users, even law enforcement. Only NATO armed forces have some kind of access to GPS military signal. Galileo will supply an encrypted secure signal for all authorized European users (that the EU decides should have access)
2 - GPS performance is good, but it's not guaranteed. The GPS system was devised as an 18 satellite constellation, and even though it currently has 29 operational satellites, there's no firm commitment that more than 24 satellites will be operational always. Europe's aviation enhancement system (EGNOS) is planned to combine GPS+Galileo+GLONASS for ultra reliable/ultra accurate aircraft navigation, while the American counterpart (WAAS) has no current plans to incorporate GLONASS or Galileo. EGNOS already supports GPS+GLONASS. Should GPS constellation strenght drop to 21 satellites, many of the requirements for WAAS would be lost without Galileo or GLONASS to help.
3 - There are provisions for an encrypted paid service for commercial Galileo users. Such service would be similar to the secure service, but could be switched of separately.
That said, item 1 and 3 would only be useful when Galileo reaches full constellation strength of 30 satellites, there are no immediate plans for that. There are currently plans for just a basic 18 satellite constellation.
each GPS satellite covers a 4000+ km radius. Actually the DoD strategy to deny GPS usage in case of war is to deploy regional jammers, shutting down a single GPS satellite right on top of Iran will affect Europe/China/India somewhat, shutting three or four satellites to render the signal unuseable for 3D ranging over Iran will certainly disrupt GPS performance over a 2000+ km radius (all estimates, but if anything, I'm underestimating the numbers).
You guys seem to ignore that right now there's GPS/GLONASS fully operational and Beidu almost operational. The cat's totally out of the bag. Galileo won't change that. Plus regional GNSS systems such as Japan's QZSS (one satellite operational, at least three planned) and India's system to being launches soon.
Galileo is a much lesser threat than Glonass and Beidu, since Russia/China aren't allies to NATO.
People like to criticize other's work. Normal.
It's interesting however to understand what's claimed before criticizing.
Disclaimer: I believe that cold fusion is true, however I'm not sold on Rossi's technology being viable or being safe yet.
To his credit, he stated a few times this is model T, that means, it's an early device for real world use. He's not claiming his device is refined enough for all uses.
He might have trouble creating steam with enough temperature/pressure to make for efficient electricity generation (compared to steam from Natural Gas/Coal or even CSP Solar).
At this point he's just shooting for proving his device produces a large power surplus. Perhaps adequate for ambient heating (replacing natural gas/heating oil furnaces), plus other uses where temperatures in that order are good enough.
The guy is both eccentric (like most great scientists/inventors of all times), and paranoid of other's stealing his ideas. That certainly ends up amplifying criticism against him. He's not interested in sharing his technology with the world until he has it patented, however it's questionable if he'll ever be able to obtain a worldwide patent that would prevent competition, since there's prior work even on Nickel+Hydrogen cold fusion.
And obviously there are tons of scientists and dirty power propaganda bloggers which are hellbent on shutting him down, since he's a huge threat to hot fusion research and would destroy a lot of shareholder value of energy mining and oil businesses.
>Not only does Windows 8 and the upcomming Office run on ARM, there is already a production ready ARM laptop that's going to be sold.
>Image larger than iPad battery life and weeks of standby, a full HD resolution, accelerated x264 full HD video playback. Internet Explorer 10 full acceleration and DX11.
Right design, wrong operating system. Scratch Windows, add Linux.
I have been running Linux only on x86 for the last 12 years.
In the last few, I even got rid of flash and other proprietary binary only linux software.
I don't want an ARM desktop, I want an ARM laptop (not a tablet, not a netbook).
The only external connections I would like to see that would make my laptop feel like a desktop is many e-sata connectors, so I can hook up many external hard drives when I'm home/in the office, and no, gigabit ethernet isn't a replacement for that.
So I could go 100% Linux/ARM. Specially since we'd expect using an NVidia Kal El CPU, that NVidia would release an ARM version of their proprietary graphics driver, and that's if nouveau isn't almost perfect by then.
Your employer buy electricity for 10 cents/kWh ? Is that a large consumer paying wholesale rates ? That's about 1/3 of what I pay retail here in Brazil.
Latency isn't a copper issue... Between 100Mbps copper and 100Mbps fiber you should get the same latency.
Now if you compare a Gbps PON (fiber) access with a 10Mbps ADSL, then of course the ADSL will have much higher latency.
I have a 12Mbps/1,2Mbps ADSL2+ link and I can ping the ISP's router with less than 10ms delay.
You have a lot of correct points, I would just like to add...
There are organic solar panels that avoid those toxic chemicals. They're still evolving in cost and performance, but in this decade solar panels made of organic materials should become the majority of PV panels built. Also PV panels are supposed to produce 50+% of their production capacity 20+ years into usage, and by then we should have a recycling program in place. Except for warranty, PV panels could be used for 30+ years, as long as there's rooftop space left, leave them working, even at a reduced capacity.
Wind energy kills birds... It's doesn't kill that many birds. And it kills birds, not people. Wind turbines with 10MW power ratings are coming in the next year or two, in comparison, the Hoover Dam has 2080MW capacity and Itaipu (in Brazil) has 14000MW. So a mere 208 10MW turbines would have power production rivaling the hoover dam. Of course wind isn't baseline production, while hydro is, but you get the idea.
I agree that no nuclear power plants should be built in areas prone to serious earthquakes/tsunamis. So Japan should have been far more careful in choosing construction sites for their nuclear power plants. Hurricanes aren't that serious a threat since they come with days fore warning.
In reality, the major issue today is why US and some other countries don't reprocess their nuclear waste. Nuclear reprocessing reduces nuclear waste to less than 10% of the original volume/weight. Also, there are reactors that can burn the waste from regular reactors, why not build a few of those and run it with all nuclear waste from the world ? In the end there will still be some nuclear waste, but perhaps just a few percent of the original waste.
But for areas with plenty of sun and/or wind, nuclear can be avoided, using large CSP power plants, large wind farms. In Spain there are already a few CSP plants that produce power 24x7, using molten salt as an energy buffer in the night.
This is NOT a big deal. Every new wireless telephony increases bandwidth by at least 10x. Basic GSM to basic 3G (UMTS) did that. From EDGE to HSxPA same thing. From HSxPA to LTE same.
While doubling performance is good, 5G networks needs to increase bandwidth 5x fold at an absolute minimum in order to be of any interest to wireless carriers.
And notice that today's wireless is full duplex a far as the user is concerned, but it happens using separate upstream/downstream channels. The biggest bottleneck is that both channels are shared among hundreds of users and that's where the congestion lies.
The 5G idea that was discussed is having all phones act as intelligent repeaters, allowing for very low power transmissions where user density is highest, the lowest power transmissions are, the more often spectrum can be reused dynamically by those repeaters. Also this could help with the shadow spots, since all it would take is one user in contact with the tower and with a shadow spot to illuminate that spot with signal. Also it would be expected to involve 10x more basestations in the form of femtocells / nanocells, using the same low power principle.
Wireless communications will never ever be not even close as efficient as wired communications for bandwidth intensive applications. Unlimited plans were always a fish and bait scheme, designed to create interest and dependency, until they limited bandwidth to increase revenue (i.e. jack up the prices).
If 10% of the population wanted patent reform it would happen in a few years at the most.
The issue is most people don't care or don't care enough about this.
Democracy is the best alternative to political system. However a Democracy with lazy population is very little better than a dictatorship.
Democracy with highly educated, enlightened people is something that doesn't quite exist in all but less than a dozen countries in the world. And most of those countries are small, like less than 20 million people.