They'd simply start growing grapes and such, right?
About the time you could grow wheat in Greenland, you could grow Grapes in England.
It might seem odd, but look at maps of the world - warmer temperatures actually increase viable cropland, there's lots and lots of land in Siberia, Canada, and Alaska that could be farmed if temperatures were a bit warmer. Growing seasons would increase for states like North Dakota, and even in Florida the orange belt would widen a bit.
Does that even out the loss of coastal areas due to the rise of ocean level? Probably not. We have plenty of farm land as is.
My personal solution ties neatly with other issues - I hate the pollution of coal plants, so I'd be replacing them with other power sources such as nuclear.
A solar thermal plant burning into the ground doesn't put radioactive waste into groundwater and the air...
Yeah, but pure sodium isn't that great either.
it's not the sodium (not a salt by the way)
Yes, it's a metal with a relatively low melting point. But yeah, I was getting my reactor types a bit confused. Molten salt and molten sodium reactors have a fair bit in common when it comes to the benefits.
Core catchers are actually substantially harder and more expensive to build for sodium cooled reactors, since the sodium is so good at eating through stuff.
It's good, but given that it's a known issue, it's reduced mostly to expense
Gen4 reactors simply aren't ready for prime time... and the most attractive one (MSR) is farthest away. You're not going to get appreciable power out of them in a decade without cutting corners.
True, sadly enough. I think we were actually closer in the past before some of the most promising research was shut down.
.. if you are going to invest in nuclear you have to invest in Thorium breeders, less waste and a more plentiful fuel.
You got that I'd be building standard Uranium reactors from 1 line? I'd be building a mix of standard, breeder, and yes, thorium.
A solar thermal plant melting the central tower because of shoddy engineering is an unfortunate loss... a molten sodium cooled breeder springing a good leak and melting down into the ground is a huge fucking disaster.
Are you aware that many of the newest solar thermal designs are going to use molten sodium themselves, as a thermal storage system in order to be able to provide power at night and possibly during cloudy days?
As for springing a leak - the whole reason to go to molten salt is that it enables higher temperature reactors at environmental pressures - no pressure vessel to possibly burst. After that you only have to worry about corrosion. Even then, reactors typically come with multiple 'pan' like structures to capture any leaks.
The real reason why nuclear is so popular, is that the real problems, and therefore the real cost, only comes after the power has been generated.
Dealing with nuclear waste isn't actually all that hard - just ask the French. It helps that a gigawatt sized nuclear plant only produces around 1 train car of it a year(and most of the car is still shielding). An Olympic pool sized cooling pool can contain ~ 20 years of waste.
During operation, a portion of the monies collected for the electricity generated goes towards waste disposal and the eventual decommissioning of the plants. Given the plants that have been extended another 20 years past their original 40, there should be more than plenty enough money to return the plant to a green site, assuming they don't chose to build another plant on the site.
Like I said - Our disposal problems are mostly political in nature.
I figure the Japanese PM's position is more one of placation - once the economics are pointed out to him, it's make vague promises until he's out of office and/or the issue is forgotten.
That would be separate from making serious upgrades in Japan's nuclear safety programs, of course.
I've always thought that the nuclear power plant disaster in Japan was the result of poor planning, not the fault of the technology itself. The plant went into emergency shutdown because of the quake but it was the tsunami that really did the damage because... they didn't think a tsunami that high was likely?!?!
To be fair, Fukushima is one of the oldest plants in the world - older even than Chernobyl and TMI.
Which is why I'm with you - build NEW nuclear plants.
Personally, in the USA I'd select the nastiest polluting power plant in the USA(it'll probably be coal), then find a suitable spot somewhere in the area and build a nuclear plant capable of replacing it plus at least 50%. Shut down the old coal plant. Use the extra electricity to drop utility rates and shut down more expensive means of generating power. Pick the next worst plant and repeat.
Meanwhile, do serious projects to get solar panels on many roofs south of the mason-dixon line, starting with solar water heaters. Keep building wind turbines in areas like North Dakota.
focus so much on a single pet tech that they have, and believe it to be the answer to all problems.
Good point. I've been accused of this before, then I generally point to them where I've pointed out that my 'ideal' electricity mix for a carbon-neutral future is around 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% 'other'.
My problem is that I get caught up defending nuclear against the solar/wind fanboys.
I tend to not include too much gas generation from things like organic waste because I envision that being used for mobile applications like cars.
If you look at raw numbers, a fraction of a % of the land area of the earth could more than meet ALL of our energy demands - and not just electricity either. Yes, that's at solar electric panel efficiencies.
The problem? The cost of exploiting that resource is currently a couple OOM more than we can afford. Same with drilling for geothermal - for much of the world, you'd have to drill to quite hilarious, thus expensive, depths.
Low grade nuclear waste, in comparison, is easy stuff. And we DO have plans to dispose of the stuff. We have working disposal areas for the low grade stuff.
Heck, disposing of the high grade stuff is mostly a political problem - not an engineering one. My vote is for reprocessing. The remaining waste has a much shorter half life once you've removed the still useful transuranics.
I wonder what this is supposed to accomplish? Making sure that the parents know the assignment was done?
Of course, it's a rather lousy method given how easy getting a different email address is today, nor that 'most' people stay logged into their email accounts - kids starts up family computer sends out email using parent's account. Done.
Oddly enough it's probably going to replace aluminum more - while aluminum is less conductive than copper, it's sufficiently cheaper(and lighter) that you can simply pile more on and come up with a cable of larger diameter that actually conducts better for the same cost as a copper wire.
On the other hand, it's sufficiently more of a pain in the butt when it comes to connections* that most home wiring is copper - which I don't think is going to be replaced by a system that uses liquid nitrogen anytime soon.
*Basically the problem is that aluminum also expands more when heated. Combine larger diameter wire that expands and contracts more and you need connectors with better designs than what copper needs. If you only have a couple connections every few miles, that needs to be weather-proof, for large gauge cable, tamper resistant, and capable of massive amounts of current, making them for aluminum isn't a significant additional cost, at least compared to the additional wire cost if you went with copper.
Like Axis said, it's a lot cheaper if made on site. Also, as I understand it the way superconducting power lines are made(there are a few already), they're made of liquid-proof, but not gas tight highly insulated cables.
As the cable is superconducting, you don't have heat buildup from resistance, so it's all environmental. You simply have enough space around the tubes for the nitrogen to disburse. Nitrogen is non-toxic, though you might want an O2 mask in some circumstances.
As the nitrogen is a liquid, they only need to keep pumping more in as small amounts of it boil off.
I remember an article about it a while back - they were replacing 11 oil cooled power lines with 3 superconducting. The electricity needed to keep the lines cold was projected to be less than what was needed to pump the oil, much less what was lost as heat in the pipes.
Not a great citation, but I did buy a house(a pretty large contract, wouldn't you say), with the sellers in a completely different state, using a mix of scan and email and fax. All involving physical signatures.
You can google it a bit, but technically speaking, verbal contracts can be legally binding. Where they get into trouble is that there is typically little to no record of them, making them difficult to enforce. So the question of 'legally binding' isn't really a True/False until it goes to court. It's more of a range. At the bottom would be verbal contracts. A step up would be a standard written contract, next would be one witnessed by a public notary(who will affix their seal), then one prepared by a lawyer, etc...
All the various forms of signature don't affect the legality of the contract. It doesn't even 'need' to be a signature. A mark or even a stamp can be considered sufficient(remember the disabled!). The signature is essentially a mark of consent, however you choose to make it. Why a signature instead of a check or an X? It's an anti-fraud measure, no more, no less.
Indeed - the problem with 'robosigning' was that you had unqualified people signing documents they didn't review saying that they were qualified and indeed reviewed the documents.
Whether you use a physical pen is mostly a question of how easy/difficult your signature is to forge. If somebody notices that every single one of your signatures are identical, they might be able to copy it out of a document and forge it by copy and paste, but really, they can do that anyways.
With the fax machine, one just drops the stack in, verify the fax successfully transmitted, task complete.
I purchased a house last year. The sellers were no longer in the state. I had no access (at the time) to a fax machine, they had no access to a scanner.
So the contract had to be shipped back and forth a dozen or so times. We aren't set up for digital signatures, so the contract had to be printed and rescanned(whether for email or fax) numerous times.
The fax copies tended to lose resolution faster, however I noticed what I feel to be a large problem with printing scanned documents, at least when they're scanned to PDF - the default printing settings don't print the document full size, it insists on shrinking the document so it can fit the old margins into the printable area. Just in case you wrote something there, I guess(we didn't). Not a big problem if you're only doing it once, but if you have to do it a dozen times (offer, counteroffer, clarification, acceptance, inspections, etc...)
By the end what had started as.5" margins was up to 2.5", maybe more. Smaller text = problems when dealing with the limited resolution of faxes.
For anybody NOT in the know, the previous bit by the AC is from 'A Clockwork Orange', as MOPC acrynym'd.
Heck, we see it in real life language. Consider the sheer number of synonyms for such 'unclean' organs as the penis and vagina. Heck, back in the day in certain areas and classes of people they made deliberate games of messing with the language. Not that I think that youths having to be a bit more creative about their insults is a bad thing...
All this list does is disrupt proper discourse - a student using inappropriate words should have said inappropriate use brought up to them. They shouldn't have their homework rejected because they talked about 'screwing the leg onto the table'. The insulter will just make a new word bad.
Used in entertainment or as a way to promote the nazi ideology is forbidden,
One would think that using them as bad guys in a movie set just before WWII (Raiders of the Lost Ark was set in 1936, Last Crusade in 1938) would be okay, but I guess that Germany is still a touch sensitive about it.
I know it's not a 'documentary', but it was still a period piece.
I mentioned nothing about withholding treatment. I mentioned breeding techniques. Withholding treatment would be ineffective; the disease isn't actually deadly enough.
What it'd amount to is that once we determined the genetic factors leading to immunity that we place heavy motivators towards breeding with immune individuals, perhaps even using artificial insemination. Not knowing how the immunity works - whether it's dominant or resessive is only 1 question, I can't make a complete plan, of course.
Well, the first part is 'it varies' - from hardly any infected T-Cells, to so many infected that are triggering that the immune system collapses. My concern is that even infected T-Cells do their job until the HIV triggers; so you could have a lot of infected T-Cells dying, it's just that in this case they're dying early without releasing a payload of HIV. So somebody with a well supressed HIV infection might have over 50% of the cells infected, but most aren't actively producing HIV.
I know that you can do fine without an immune system for a short period; but I also know it's pretty standard to keep you in isolation for that period.
So my thing would be: Step 1: Get you in as good health as practical Step 2: Stick you in isolation Step 3: Provide treatment Step 4: Release from isolation once tests show that immunity has sufficiently recovered
There's a rather big difference between T-cells, which is what HIV infects, and "the whole human."
I agree; at most you'd likely have to stick the person into an isolation area as the die-off of T-Cells blows an HIV infection into an advanced case of AIDS in a matter of hours. Of course, once HIV is purged T-Cells would quickly return to normal levels, probably a couple weeks.
A vaccine is a matter of genetic engineering, that's all.
You don't even need advanced direct genetic engineering; You could probably almost completely spread immunity in ~10 generations using traditional(if draconian) breeding techniques.
While the N specification does indeed enable the use of 5GHz, the vast majority of equipment I've seen can only operate in the 2.4GHz range.
Thus, spend the money, get equipment capable of operating at 5Ghz, and you're probably gold even past the point when the rest of convention goers start doing it, due to the vastly larger signal space.
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They'd simply start growing grapes and such, right?
About the time you could grow wheat in Greenland, you could grow Grapes in England.
It might seem odd, but look at maps of the world - warmer temperatures actually increase viable cropland, there's lots and lots of land in Siberia, Canada, and Alaska that could be farmed if temperatures were a bit warmer. Growing seasons would increase for states like North Dakota, and even in Florida the orange belt would widen a bit.
Does that even out the loss of coastal areas due to the rise of ocean level? Probably not. We have plenty of farm land as is.
My personal solution ties neatly with other issues - I hate the pollution of coal plants, so I'd be replacing them with other power sources such as nuclear.
A solar thermal plant burning into the ground doesn't put radioactive waste into groundwater and the air ...
Yeah, but pure sodium isn't that great either.
it's not the sodium (not a salt by the way)
Yes, it's a metal with a relatively low melting point. But yeah, I was getting my reactor types a bit confused. Molten salt and molten sodium reactors have a fair bit in common when it comes to the benefits.
Core catchers are actually substantially harder and more expensive to build for sodium cooled reactors, since the sodium is so good at eating through stuff.
It's good, but given that it's a known issue, it's reduced mostly to expense
Gen4 reactors simply aren't ready for prime time ... and the most attractive one (MSR) is farthest away. You're not going to get appreciable power out of them in a decade without cutting corners.
True, sadly enough. I think we were actually closer in the past before some of the most promising research was shut down.
.. if you are going to invest in nuclear you have to invest in Thorium breeders, less waste and a more plentiful fuel.
You got that I'd be building standard Uranium reactors from 1 line? I'd be building a mix of standard, breeder, and yes, thorium.
A solar thermal plant melting the central tower because of shoddy engineering is an unfortunate loss ... a molten sodium cooled breeder springing a good leak and melting down into the ground is a huge fucking disaster.
Are you aware that many of the newest solar thermal designs are going to use molten sodium themselves, as a thermal storage system in order to be able to provide power at night and possibly during cloudy days?
As for springing a leak - the whole reason to go to molten salt is that it enables higher temperature reactors at environmental pressures - no pressure vessel to possibly burst. After that you only have to worry about corrosion. Even then, reactors typically come with multiple 'pan' like structures to capture any leaks.
The real reason why nuclear is so popular, is that the real problems, and therefore the real cost, only comes after the power has been generated.
Dealing with nuclear waste isn't actually all that hard - just ask the French. It helps that a gigawatt sized nuclear plant only produces around 1 train car of it a year(and most of the car is still shielding). An Olympic pool sized cooling pool can contain ~ 20 years of waste.
During operation, a portion of the monies collected for the electricity generated goes towards waste disposal and the eventual decommissioning of the plants. Given the plants that have been extended another 20 years past their original 40, there should be more than plenty enough money to return the plant to a green site, assuming they don't chose to build another plant on the site.
Like I said - Our disposal problems are mostly political in nature.
Not quite, but close. You could have built enough nuclear plants to provide 24/7 power easily enough though.
I believe that we should have a mix of powers, and nuclear would only be one of them.
I figure the Japanese PM's position is more one of placation - once the economics are pointed out to him, it's make vague promises until he's out of office and/or the issue is forgotten.
That would be separate from making serious upgrades in Japan's nuclear safety programs, of course.
I've always thought that the nuclear power plant disaster in Japan was the result of poor planning, not the fault of the technology itself. The plant went into emergency shutdown because of the quake but it was the tsunami that really did the damage because... they didn't think a tsunami that high was likely?!?!
To be fair, Fukushima is one of the oldest plants in the world - older even than Chernobyl and TMI.
Which is why I'm with you - build NEW nuclear plants.
Personally, in the USA I'd select the nastiest polluting power plant in the USA(it'll probably be coal), then find a suitable spot somewhere in the area and build a nuclear plant capable of replacing it plus at least 50%. Shut down the old coal plant. Use the extra electricity to drop utility rates and shut down more expensive means of generating power. Pick the next worst plant and repeat.
Meanwhile, do serious projects to get solar panels on many roofs south of the mason-dixon line, starting with solar water heaters. Keep building wind turbines in areas like North Dakota.
focus so much on a single pet tech that they have, and believe it to be the answer to all problems.
Good point. I've been accused of this before, then I generally point to them where I've pointed out that my 'ideal' electricity mix for a carbon-neutral future is around 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% 'other'.
My problem is that I get caught up defending nuclear against the solar/wind fanboys.
I tend to not include too much gas generation from things like organic waste because I envision that being used for mobile applications like cars.
If you look at raw numbers, a fraction of a % of the land area of the earth could more than meet ALL of our energy demands - and not just electricity either. Yes, that's at solar electric panel efficiencies.
The problem? The cost of exploiting that resource is currently a couple OOM more than we can afford. Same with drilling for geothermal - for much of the world, you'd have to drill to quite hilarious, thus expensive, depths.
Low grade nuclear waste, in comparison, is easy stuff. And we DO have plans to dispose of the stuff. We have working disposal areas for the low grade stuff.
Heck, disposing of the high grade stuff is mostly a political problem - not an engineering one. My vote is for reprocessing. The remaining waste has a much shorter half life once you've removed the still useful transuranics.
I wonder what this is supposed to accomplish? Making sure that the parents know the assignment was done?
Of course, it's a rather lousy method given how easy getting a different email address is today, nor that 'most' people stay logged into their email accounts - kids starts up family computer sends out email using parent's account. Done.
Oddly enough it's probably going to replace aluminum more - while aluminum is less conductive than copper, it's sufficiently cheaper(and lighter) that you can simply pile more on and come up with a cable of larger diameter that actually conducts better for the same cost as a copper wire.
On the other hand, it's sufficiently more of a pain in the butt when it comes to connections* that most home wiring is copper - which I don't think is going to be replaced by a system that uses liquid nitrogen anytime soon.
*Basically the problem is that aluminum also expands more when heated. Combine larger diameter wire that expands and contracts more and you need connectors with better designs than what copper needs. If you only have a couple connections every few miles, that needs to be weather-proof, for large gauge cable, tamper resistant, and capable of massive amounts of current, making them for aluminum isn't a significant additional cost, at least compared to the additional wire cost if you went with copper.
Like Axis said, it's a lot cheaper if made on site. Also, as I understand it the way superconducting power lines are made(there are a few already), they're made of liquid-proof, but not gas tight highly insulated cables.
As the cable is superconducting, you don't have heat buildup from resistance, so it's all environmental. You simply have enough space around the tubes for the nitrogen to disburse. Nitrogen is non-toxic, though you might want an O2 mask in some circumstances.
As the nitrogen is a liquid, they only need to keep pumping more in as small amounts of it boil off.
I remember an article about it a while back - they were replacing 11 oil cooled power lines with 3 superconducting. The electricity needed to keep the lines cold was projected to be less than what was needed to pump the oil, much less what was lost as heat in the pipes.
Not a great citation, but I did buy a house(a pretty large contract, wouldn't you say), with the sellers in a completely different state, using a mix of scan and email and fax. All involving physical signatures.
You can google it a bit, but technically speaking, verbal contracts can be legally binding. Where they get into trouble is that there is typically little to no record of them, making them difficult to enforce. So the question of 'legally binding' isn't really a True/False until it goes to court. It's more of a range. At the bottom would be verbal contracts. A step up would be a standard written contract, next would be one witnessed by a public notary(who will affix their seal), then one prepared by a lawyer, etc...
All the various forms of signature don't affect the legality of the contract. It doesn't even 'need' to be a signature. A mark or even a stamp can be considered sufficient(remember the disabled!). The signature is essentially a mark of consent, however you choose to make it. Why a signature instead of a check or an X? It's an anti-fraud measure, no more, no less.
Indeed - the problem with 'robosigning' was that you had unqualified people signing documents they didn't review saying that they were qualified and indeed reviewed the documents.
Whether you use a physical pen is mostly a question of how easy/difficult your signature is to forge. If somebody notices that every single one of your signatures are identical, they might be able to copy it out of a document and forge it by copy and paste, but really, they can do that anyways.
With the fax machine, one just drops the stack in, verify the fax successfully transmitted, task complete.
I purchased a house last year. The sellers were no longer in the state. I had no access (at the time) to a fax machine, they had no access to a scanner.
So the contract had to be shipped back and forth a dozen or so times. We aren't set up for digital signatures, so the contract had to be printed and rescanned(whether for email or fax) numerous times.
The fax copies tended to lose resolution faster, however I noticed what I feel to be a large problem with printing scanned documents, at least when they're scanned to PDF - the default printing settings don't print the document full size, it insists on shrinking the document so it can fit the old margins into the printable area. Just in case you wrote something there, I guess(we didn't). Not a big problem if you're only doing it once, but if you have to do it a dozen times (offer, counteroffer, clarification, acceptance, inspections, etc...)
By the end what had started as .5" margins was up to 2.5", maybe more. Smaller text = problems when dealing with the limited resolution of faxes.
Why are the Alaska schools hosting and promoting this? Alaska is NOT a good site for renewable energy:
Sure it is, properly managed. It's just not the same solutions as for the lower 49.
Solar works well in the summer, 23 hours of sunlight can do that. In the winter, my current choice would be biomass fired CHP.
Living in Alaska myself, my first thought was perhaps a miniature biomass CHP(Combined Heat&Power) utilizing a stirling engine.
Basically, you burn wood, the heat drives a small stirling engine that generates a few watts, with the waste heat recovered to help heat the home.
20% electricity, 60% heat.
For anybody NOT in the know, the previous bit by the AC is from 'A Clockwork Orange', as MOPC acrynym'd.
Heck, we see it in real life language. Consider the sheer number of synonyms for such 'unclean' organs as the penis and vagina. Heck, back in the day in certain areas and classes of people they made deliberate games of messing with the language. Not that I think that youths having to be a bit more creative about their insults is a bad thing...
All this list does is disrupt proper discourse - a student using inappropriate words should have said inappropriate use brought up to them. They shouldn't have their homework rejected because they talked about 'screwing the leg onto the table'. The insulter will just make a new word bad.
Used in entertainment or as a way to promote the nazi ideology is forbidden,
One would think that using them as bad guys in a movie set just before WWII (Raiders of the Lost Ark was set in 1936, Last Crusade in 1938) would be okay, but I guess that Germany is still a touch sensitive about it.
I know it's not a 'documentary', but it was still a period piece.
I mentioned nothing about withholding treatment. I mentioned breeding techniques. Withholding treatment would be ineffective; the disease isn't actually deadly enough.
What it'd amount to is that once we determined the genetic factors leading to immunity that we place heavy motivators towards breeding with immune individuals, perhaps even using artificial insemination. Not knowing how the immunity works - whether it's dominant or resessive is only 1 question, I can't make a complete plan, of course.
Good point. Forgot to stick the 'without total population collapse' in there. Immune individuals are only a couple percent at the moment.
Well, the first part is 'it varies' - from hardly any infected T-Cells, to so many infected that are triggering that the immune system collapses. My concern is that even infected T-Cells do their job until the HIV triggers; so you could have a lot of infected T-Cells dying, it's just that in this case they're dying early without releasing a payload of HIV. So somebody with a well supressed HIV infection might have over 50% of the cells infected, but most aren't actively producing HIV.
I know that you can do fine without an immune system for a short period; but I also know it's pretty standard to keep you in isolation for that period.
So my thing would be:
Step 1: Get you in as good health as practical
Step 2: Stick you in isolation
Step 3: Provide treatment
Step 4: Release from isolation once tests show that immunity has sufficiently recovered
There's a rather big difference between T-cells, which is what HIV infects, and "the whole human."
I agree; at most you'd likely have to stick the person into an isolation area as the die-off of T-Cells blows an HIV infection into an advanced case of AIDS in a matter of hours. Of course, once HIV is purged T-Cells would quickly return to normal levels, probably a couple weeks.
A vaccine is a matter of genetic engineering, that's all.
You don't even need advanced direct genetic engineering; You could probably almost completely spread immunity in ~10 generations using traditional(if draconian) breeding techniques.
While the N specification does indeed enable the use of 5GHz, the vast majority of equipment I've seen can only operate in the 2.4GHz range.
Thus, spend the money, get equipment capable of operating at 5Ghz, and you're probably gold even past the point when the rest of convention goers start doing it, due to the vastly larger signal space.