At least your opinion is backed up by facts and reasoning, unlike the AC's.
Fact: Humans today, on the whole, live better lives than they ever have before.
Brighter colors and whiter whites is only a small fraction of what makes our quality of life so much better. For example, modern medical care has prevented far more death, retardation, and disabilities than modern industry has created short of the sheer population increases it's enabled.
(Pretty pointless to have a 1mSv/year limit when you have had a population of millions living in twice that for a couple of millennium without any measurable problems.)
Indeed, this is even measurable. 1mSv/year is average, if variations caused significant differences in cancer rates you'd expect it to readily show in in areas like Colorado vs Mississippi.
This is a fallacy. The threshold should be set on the estimated benefits of a higher threshold vs the estimated harm from the additional radiation. The background radiation has nothing to with it.
Bingo. Consider that the likely alternatives if you kill nuclear power are coal and natural gas. Realistically speaking you'd have to consider the harm from coal pollution for every kWh burned, which I'd easily say is going to be more. Natural Gas is far cleaner, but still has some pollution issues even without considering global warming. With this in mind, loosening nuclear power restrictions can actually save lives if you use it as an opportunity to prevent more coal or NG plants.
but the panels need to be replaced after about a decade.
You're using very old information. Current generation solar panels are guaranteed to produce 80% of original power after 25 years. The original 'modern' panel is still working 60 years later, and there are lots of evidence they last at least 30.
Though I agree on the nuclear power. I'd be building at least 300 new reactors if I could. It's just that in my original post I was saying that using solar electricity to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere is stupid, especially at those efficiencies. Note that I said 'Even in'; I didn't mean to say that it was the most efficient option.
And yes, synthetic hydrocarbons produced from nuclear power would be a welcome alternative, though I still hold hope for algae based biodiesel/fuel*.
*You can get oil and diesel out of the fats, ethanol or gasoline equivalent out of the carbohydrates.
So basically you're saying that now is the perfect time to be doing this research so that it can possibly reach useful levels by the time fossil fuels have been largely phased out within some jurisdictions?
Depends. I don't mind research, indeed I love it. But research isn't magic; there's a definite 'law of reducing returns' out there in general, especially when we're playing with energy. There are huge numbers of vastly different ways to reduce or sequester CO2.
As for the wolves, very interesting article. I don't think it'll work everywhere, but we can duplicate at least some of it.
Indeed. For the foreseeable future you'll reduce CO2 more by using the panels to displace coal power and even Natural Gas. Only after you've shut ALL of them down and still need to reduce CO2 does this make sense.
Even in ~20 years we'd be better off doing something like use all the retiring EV batteries* to help stabilize the grid and shift solar power to the 7-9 pm peak.
*10 years for EVs to actually reach significant market penetration, 10 years more before people start replacing the batteries in them.
As Google expands beyond Web search and seeks a foothold in the automotive market, the company's eagerness has begun to reek of arrogance to some in Detroit, who see danger as well as promise in Silicon Valley.
Danger to their present business models, you mean.
Personally, I think that Tesla would be an excellent company to talk with. Elon Musk speaks their language.
Which would be odd, seeing as how in US parlance 'fridge magnet' does indeed mean a magnet intended to attach to your fridge, typically containing advertising or cute sayings, or holding things like sheets of your kid's art up.
Per wiki a typical fridge magnet is 5 mt, or.005 Tesla. So this experiment is more like 3000X as strong as a fridge magnet.
This thing is 10X as strong as most of my 'fridge' magnets, but then I like to play with neodymium ones.
Going by my experience, their 'fridge magnets' would hold to a fridge very well without requiring excessive strength to pull off. Most of mine you have to think about it a bit.
For example: for the first year after purchasing your first handgun, that's the single most likely cause of death in your life, approaching almost 50% of deaths.
Wouldn't that be the cart leading the horse? If you're committing suicide with a gun in 'under a year' my first thought is that there's a very good chance you bought the gun specifically contemplating suicide.
The suicide problem is huge, and we're not actually losing all that many young adults to anything else. Disease is down, car fatalities are down, other accidental deaths are down, etc...
I feel like it would be extraordinarily intellectually dishonest of me to accept handguns as public health issue, and not alcohol. They are both serious concerns and need to be acknowledged as they are, not stewed in pots of rhetoric.
I agree. Heck, my proposals of fixing schools and our mental healthcare system would actually address suicide as well as violence and other crimes, so bonus.
As I understand relevant statutes, such as the corresponding US statute (17 USC 512), protections like "common carrier" and "safe harbor" stop applying once there exist "red flag" facts that reasonably should alert a provider to a subscriber's wrongdoing.
Well, a solution to that is that once notified of legal proceedings, you shut off your anonymous AP.
The problem with suing them is that you can only target the corp's assets. Structuring it in such a way that the 'company' doesn't actually have any is pretty standard.
I'm thinking that the BATFE needs to come inspect them to make sure they're in full compliance with the NFA. The regulations are completely different between being a government agency like a police department and a commercial company like a 501(c)(3). I'm also willing to bet that they use government letterhead to purchase restricted stuff.
BATFE: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives NFA: National Firearms Act. Federal law regul
For comparison, an RFID reader has the same FCC-imposed limits as WiFi, an EIRP of 4W (or put another way, a 1W transmitter with a typical 6dBi antenna).
RFID readers are also generally bigger than a cell phone, utilize a protocol developed specifically for low power(Bluetooth is incredibly complex and high-powered in comparison, actually doing handshakes and stuff), don't do any more than transmit a number(essentially), and work at ranges a whole lot less than 200 meters.
If we could build a wireless power receiver that doesn't need a specific power transmitter that can transmit powerfully enough to be heard at a couple hundred meters into something the size of a dime ALL small consumer devices would be looking to use it. Bye-bye chargers for the most part would only be the first step.
Prosecutor,"You should have never said that fellow. You're responsible for what other people do on your router. So lets see what other criminal activities they did before we sentence you to just a couple years of jail."
Personally, I'm thinking about experiments in tsunami protection which involves rods/posts set up in such a way it creates a resonance effect that disrupts the whole thing, reflecting the energy back upon itself. Neat stuff, but I'm not an expert and am probably not using the right words.
Still, setting up some massive wind turbines in the correct patterns should have the same effect at massively less cost, and actually provide power to boot.
but as the day approaches and the reality of replacing the German nuclear base load supply with Russian gas, gigawatts of domestic coal expansion and French nuclear exports sets in the policy will probably be set aside.
Especially with the prospect that Russia might turn off the gas again... It's done it before.
According to this article, wholesale electric power contract prices in Germany and neighboring countries peaked last November at 50.50 Euro/MWh, which I believe works out to just under 7 cents/KWh. Ask folks in California whether that's "outrageously expensive".
That's wholesale price. Consumers never see that.
Even better, due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available, the price of non-renewable power is sometimes actually dropping to or below zero [businessinsider.com]. That's right, there were apparently brief intervals where nuclear and coal plants were paying customers to draw power from them.
It's not exactly a free market then, is it? How would you like to walk into a store for product X - and be told that you can't buy Brand A at $y, because you're required to buy Brand B at 10x $y? Because B is green. Let's say that $y > $100
At this moment the US has choosen to increase the oil production, which means that it will take longer to get your ROI on solar panels.
Natural gas production, you mean. The amount of oil burned for electricity is insignificant for the cost of electricity. Meanwhile cheap NG generators burning cheap NG producing electricity is keeping the cost of utility electricity low, increasing your ROI.
Every licensed installer in my state charges 6-10x the wholesale panel price and will only do a fixed bid install that is about 4x the T+M labor cost.
Citation? Which state? My Anecdote: I walked into the solar place in my town and the first thing they proposed when I laid out my situation was that I do the install myself. About the only labor I couldn't do myself would be the final hookup. They'd provide the plans and instructions.
I'm not seeing any requirements to use a licensed installer here. It might be a state/city requirement.
In effect I can put up the 100 or so pannels to meet my current needs for 30k including skilled labor yet the cheapest installer it looking for 100+ with the government programs taking it back down to 80 meaning they are making 70+k on whats quoted as a 2 day job with a 5 man crew.
100 panels? How much electricity do you use? 25 would cover the average household in the USA(10,837 kWh/year, each panel producing 437 kWh/year, even in the middle of the country). Standard panels today are 250-300 watts each. Even the cheapest pallet of 20 300 watt modules will run you $5,270, or $26,350 in panels alone, without racking or inverters(~$4.5k). Checking other online sites shows similar pricing.
As such, wanting it done for $30k means the workers would be doing it for free. The $70k worth of 'labor' does seem inappropriate.
you're confusing coal with graphite or something else composed of elemental carbon.
Nope, just oversimplified. That's why I said 'essentially'. You're not getting energy on average burning the other stuff. Even natural gas isn't 100% CH4.
I was simply trying to explain why you have less CO2 emissions when you burn gas instead of coal.
It seems Germany is leading the way in showing, by example, that every bit of American futzing about solar power and unions is, to put it down hard, a load of cultish crap designed to make rich people much richer.
Couldn't one say the same about solar in Germany? After all, Germany is paying 36.25 cents per kWh, the USA is paying 8-17.
and now they've shown you can run 50% of an industrial economy off the power of the sun
Actually they've shown that you can reach 50% during a sunny national holiday when most of the industrial equipment is turned off. Going by annual energy production they're more at 5%.
Hawaii would actually be a bit better, but they have their own problems relating to having so much solar installed it's a threat to grid stability.
And I say this as a guy who was seriously looking at putting panels on my roof. In Alaska.
but how does gas significantly reduce carbon emmissions?
An energy source doesn't need to be 'carbon free' to reduce CO2 emissions. Coal is essentially pure carbon, while natural gas is a carbon fixed to four hydrogens. Burning Coal yields pure CO2(in theory), burning CH4 gives you CO2 and H2O Burning coal: C + O2 -> CO2. Approximately 2,249 lbs per MWh. CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O Approximately 1,135 lbs of CO2 per MWh, or half that of Coal.
In all cases, energy efficiency improvement investment is signfiicantly undervalued in terms of carbon reduction return.
I'm not so sure about this part. I still constantly see 'save energy'! reminders that assume I still run incandescents, set the AC to 60F and the heat to 80F, have single pane windows and no insulation while running a HVAC system from the '70s.
While there are still those types out there, I think they're in a distinct minority at this point. At least in my area so many of the appliances in the store are energy star rated that I think NOT having the rating is a kiss of death. Instead, I think the big energy wasters now are more institutional. I still see people who don't have to pay for the electricity using their own money attempting to light the sky, for example.
But I definitely agree with you on the nuclear power. Especially if we can get our heads out of our asses and put in co-generation systems - 6pm on a cold December is also a good point for great demand for heat.
Slashdot Mirror
At least your opinion is backed up by facts and reasoning, unlike the AC's.
Fact: Humans today, on the whole, live better lives than they ever have before.
Brighter colors and whiter whites is only a small fraction of what makes our quality of life so much better. For example, modern medical care has prevented far more death, retardation, and disabilities than modern industry has created short of the sheer population increases it's enabled.
(Pretty pointless to have a 1mSv/year limit when you have had a population of millions living in twice that for a couple of millennium without any measurable problems.)
Indeed, this is even measurable. 1mSv/year is average, if variations caused significant differences in cancer rates you'd expect it to readily show in in areas like Colorado vs Mississippi.
This is a fallacy. The threshold should be set on the estimated benefits of a higher threshold vs the estimated harm from the additional radiation. The background radiation has nothing to with it.
Bingo. Consider that the likely alternatives if you kill nuclear power are coal and natural gas. Realistically speaking you'd have to consider the harm from coal pollution for every kWh burned, which I'd easily say is going to be more. Natural Gas is far cleaner, but still has some pollution issues even without considering global warming. With this in mind, loosening nuclear power restrictions can actually save lives if you use it as an opportunity to prevent more coal or NG plants.
but the panels need to be replaced after about a decade.
You're using very old information. Current generation solar panels are guaranteed to produce 80% of original power after 25 years. The original 'modern' panel is still working 60 years later, and there are lots of evidence they last at least 30.
Though I agree on the nuclear power. I'd be building at least 300 new reactors if I could. It's just that in my original post I was saying that using solar electricity to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere is stupid, especially at those efficiencies. Note that I said 'Even in'; I didn't mean to say that it was the most efficient option.
And yes, synthetic hydrocarbons produced from nuclear power would be a welcome alternative, though I still hold hope for algae based biodiesel/fuel*.
*You can get oil and diesel out of the fats, ethanol or gasoline equivalent out of the carbohydrates.
So basically you're saying that now is the perfect time to be doing this research so that it can possibly reach useful levels by the time fossil fuels have been largely phased out within some jurisdictions?
Depends. I don't mind research, indeed I love it. But research isn't magic; there's a definite 'law of reducing returns' out there in general, especially when we're playing with energy. There are huge numbers of vastly different ways to reduce or sequester CO2.
As for the wolves, very interesting article. I don't think it'll work everywhere, but we can duplicate at least some of it.
Indeed. For the foreseeable future you'll reduce CO2 more by using the panels to displace coal power and even Natural Gas. Only after you've shut ALL of them down and still need to reduce CO2 does this make sense.
Even in ~20 years we'd be better off doing something like use all the retiring EV batteries* to help stabilize the grid and shift solar power to the 7-9 pm peak.
*10 years for EVs to actually reach significant market penetration, 10 years more before people start replacing the batteries in them.
Huh, never heard that. Any citation on Musk saying that?
Tesla's existing cars are actually reasonably priced for their luxury/performance envelope.
As Google expands beyond Web search and seeks a foothold in the automotive market, the company's eagerness has begun to reek of arrogance to some in Detroit, who see danger as well as promise in Silicon Valley.
Danger to their present business models, you mean.
Personally, I think that Tesla would be an excellent company to talk with. Elon Musk speaks their language.
Which would be odd, seeing as how in US parlance 'fridge magnet' does indeed mean a magnet intended to attach to your fridge, typically containing advertising or cute sayings, or holding things like sheets of your kid's art up.
Per wiki a typical fridge magnet is 5 mt, or .005 Tesla. So this experiment is more like 3000X as strong as a fridge magnet.
This thing is 10X as strong as most of my 'fridge' magnets, but then I like to play with neodymium ones.
Going by my experience, their 'fridge magnets' would hold to a fridge very well without requiring excessive strength to pull off. Most of mine you have to think about it a bit.
Oh, and 16T is enough to levitate a frog.
But the logical extreme of modern-day Libertarianism is Anarchism.
Slippery slope fallacy. That I support having *limited* government does not mean that I support *NO* government.
Someone might be seeking damages or criminal penalties for what was done before the AP was switched off.
Then, like a coffee shop you provide what information you have about those who connected, and move on.
For example: for the first year after purchasing your first handgun, that's the single most likely cause of death in your life, approaching almost 50% of deaths.
Wouldn't that be the cart leading the horse? If you're committing suicide with a gun in 'under a year' my first thought is that there's a very good chance you bought the gun specifically contemplating suicide.
The suicide problem is huge, and we're not actually losing all that many young adults to anything else. Disease is down, car fatalities are down, other accidental deaths are down, etc...
I feel like it would be extraordinarily intellectually dishonest of me to accept handguns as public health issue, and not alcohol. They are both serious concerns and need to be acknowledged as they are, not stewed in pots of rhetoric.
I agree. Heck, my proposals of fixing schools and our mental healthcare system would actually address suicide as well as violence and other crimes, so bonus.
As I understand relevant statutes, such as the corresponding US statute (17 USC 512), protections like "common carrier" and "safe harbor" stop applying once there exist "red flag" facts that reasonably should alert a provider to a subscriber's wrongdoing.
Well, a solution to that is that once notified of legal proceedings, you shut off your anonymous AP.
The problem with suing them is that you can only target the corp's assets. Structuring it in such a way that the 'company' doesn't actually have any is pretty standard.
I'm thinking that the BATFE needs to come inspect them to make sure they're in full compliance with the NFA. The regulations are completely different between being a government agency like a police department and a commercial company like a 501(c)(3). I'm also willing to bet that they use government letterhead to purchase restricted stuff.
BATFE: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives
NFA: National Firearms Act. Federal law regul
For comparison, an RFID reader has the same FCC-imposed limits as WiFi, an EIRP of 4W (or put another way, a 1W transmitter with a typical 6dBi antenna).
RFID readers are also generally bigger than a cell phone, utilize a protocol developed specifically for low power(Bluetooth is incredibly complex and high-powered in comparison, actually doing handshakes and stuff), don't do any more than transmit a number(essentially), and work at ranges a whole lot less than 200 meters.
If we could build a wireless power receiver that doesn't need a specific power transmitter that can transmit powerfully enough to be heard at a couple hundred meters into something the size of a dime ALL small consumer devices would be looking to use it. Bye-bye chargers for the most part would only be the first step.
Prosecutor,"You should have never said that fellow. You're responsible for what other people do on your router. So lets see what other criminal activities they did before we sentence you to just a couple years of jail."
Common Carrier protection.
Personally, I'm thinking about experiments in tsunami protection which involves rods/posts set up in such a way it creates a resonance effect that disrupts the whole thing, reflecting the energy back upon itself. Neat stuff, but I'm not an expert and am probably not using the right words.
Still, setting up some massive wind turbines in the correct patterns should have the same effect at massively less cost, and actually provide power to boot.
but as the day approaches and the reality of replacing the German nuclear base load supply with Russian gas, gigawatts of domestic coal expansion and French nuclear exports sets in the policy will probably be set aside.
Especially with the prospect that Russia might turn off the gas again... It's done it before.
According to this article, wholesale electric power contract prices in Germany and neighboring countries peaked last November at 50.50 Euro/MWh, which I believe works out to just under 7 cents/KWh. Ask folks in California whether that's "outrageously expensive".
That's wholesale price. Consumers never see that.
Even better, due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available, the price of non-renewable power is sometimes actually dropping to or below zero [businessinsider.com]. That's right, there were apparently brief intervals where nuclear and coal plants were paying customers to draw power from them.
It's not exactly a free market then, is it? How would you like to walk into a store for product X - and be told that you can't buy Brand A at $y, because you're required to buy Brand B at 10x $y? Because B is green. Let's say that $y > $100
At this moment the US has choosen to increase the oil production, which means that it will take longer to get your ROI on solar panels.
Natural gas production, you mean. The amount of oil burned for electricity is insignificant for the cost of electricity. Meanwhile cheap NG generators burning cheap NG producing electricity is keeping the cost of utility electricity low, increasing your ROI.
Every licensed installer in my state charges 6-10x the wholesale panel price and will only do a fixed bid install that is about 4x the T+M labor cost.
Citation? Which state? My Anecdote: I walked into the solar place in my town and the first thing they proposed when I laid out my situation was that I do the install myself. About the only labor I couldn't do myself would be the final hookup. They'd provide the plans and instructions.
I'm not seeing any requirements to use a licensed installer here. It might be a state/city requirement.
In effect I can put up the 100 or so pannels to meet my current needs for 30k including skilled labor yet the cheapest installer it looking for 100+ with the government programs taking it back down to 80 meaning they are making 70+k on whats quoted as a 2 day job with a 5 man crew.
100 panels? How much electricity do you use? 25 would cover the average household in the USA(10,837 kWh/year, each panel producing 437 kWh/year, even in the middle of the country). Standard panels today are 250-300 watts each. Even the cheapest pallet of 20 300 watt modules will run you $5,270, or $26,350 in panels alone, without racking or inverters(~$4.5k). Checking other online sites shows similar pricing.
As such, wanting it done for $30k means the workers would be doing it for free. The $70k worth of 'labor' does seem inappropriate.
you're confusing coal with graphite or something else composed of elemental carbon.
Nope, just oversimplified. That's why I said 'essentially'. You're not getting energy on average burning the other stuff. Even natural gas isn't 100% CH4.
I was simply trying to explain why you have less CO2 emissions when you burn gas instead of coal.
It seems Germany is leading the way in showing, by example, that every bit of American futzing about solar power and unions is, to put it down hard, a load of cultish crap designed to make rich people much richer.
Couldn't one say the same about solar in Germany? After all, Germany is paying 36.25 cents per kWh, the USA is paying 8-17.
and now they've shown you can run 50% of an industrial economy off the power of the sun
Actually they've shown that you can reach 50% during a sunny national holiday when most of the industrial equipment is turned off. Going by annual energy production they're more at 5%.
Hawaii would actually be a bit better, but they have their own problems relating to having so much solar installed it's a threat to grid stability.
And I say this as a guy who was seriously looking at putting panels on my roof. In Alaska.
but how does gas significantly reduce carbon emmissions?
An energy source doesn't need to be 'carbon free' to reduce CO2 emissions. Coal is essentially pure carbon, while natural gas is a carbon fixed to four hydrogens. Burning Coal yields pure CO2(in theory), burning CH4 gives you CO2 and H2O
Burning coal:
C + O2 -> CO2. Approximately 2,249 lbs per MWh.
CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O Approximately 1,135 lbs of CO2 per MWh, or half that of Coal.
In all cases, energy efficiency improvement investment is signfiicantly undervalued in terms of carbon reduction return.
I'm not so sure about this part. I still constantly see 'save energy'! reminders that assume I still run incandescents, set the AC to 60F and the heat to 80F, have single pane windows and no insulation while running a HVAC system from the '70s.
While there are still those types out there, I think they're in a distinct minority at this point. At least in my area so many of the appliances in the store are energy star rated that I think NOT having the rating is a kiss of death. Instead, I think the big energy wasters now are more institutional. I still see people who don't have to pay for the electricity using their own money attempting to light the sky, for example.
But I definitely agree with you on the nuclear power. Especially if we can get our heads out of our asses and put in co-generation systems - 6pm on a cold December is also a good point for great demand for heat.