Neither actually uses a panel, unless you count the roof on top of the tower. it's not something you add to a house, it's something you design in. unfortunately most houses being built in the USA today are framed in cheap timber
Nothing wrong with cheap timber; the problem is that they're not increasing the framing appropriately. Another would be not putting in proper foundations.
sheathed in cheap manufactured wood products which don't hold up over time and which release dioxins when they burn
You made me look up 'dioxin' and wood burning. It doesn't seem to be something associated with 'cheap' treated wood products, it's what you get when you burn wood, period.
What's your alternative? The plywood sheathing they put on houses here then cover with a wrap then put siding on should be able to easily last over a century. The siding might not, and there's always accidents/building no longer need situations.
further sheathed in sheet rock commonly made from fly ash from coal plants,
Don't think ranting about recycling is going to make your point...
and covered with a plywood and paper roof with about a maximum twenty year lifespan.
'Paper' roof? Are you referring to the tar paper that goes under shingles and stuff? Because we get around 50-60 up here. Now, my first post wasn't one of my longest, but I have complained multiple times about houses in Arizona being built almost identically to houses in Florida and North Dakota. We're talking about three extremely different situations - one you have mostly dry heat, another mostly wet heat, and the last bone-chilling cold. They dictate different home designs, yet we don't.
Down south I'm much more for metal roofs, and they work even up in ND, my roof is partially metal. My house is also old with like a dozen different slopes up there.
And they don't even bother to orient them to the sun; being parallel to the street is considered to be more important. They're big piles of shit all around.
Everyone would want the highest power possible. The law would have the opposite affect of its promoters.
You're probably right. Don't have the source available at the moment, but I remember reading that when fast food joints in some location was forced to put calories on their menu, the average number of calories per meal purchased went UP.
However - Yale and NYU study of McD's, Wendys, BK, and KFC: "they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008."
Here in the United States, I happened to be listening to NPR and them talking about the National Secrets Act.
Basically, since the '50s there has been a precedent where the government simply says 'revealing this would harm national security' and any lawsuit was thrown out.
The original case that went before the Supreme Court and this precedent was set involved a bomber crash that killed 3 civilian contractors.
The USAF consistently argued that revealing the accident report would harm national security. The lower court said fine and found against the.gov. The appeals court said the same. The supreme court overturned it, without ever even asking to privately see the accident report.
Couple years ago one of the daughters finally got ahold of the declassified accident report - which even unredacted didn't contain anything that was classified or unknown back then.
Basically, I understand the need for governments to keep secrets. I just think that there needs to be a review process. You don't need to let everybody view classified documents when a lawsuit comes up, but an independent, neutral party would be a good idea.
Heck, we manage to have military trials where classified evidence is presented, I'm sure that we could come up with Something, even if it was - 'We can't tell you what happened due to national security issues, but here's some money to go away'.
Hmmm, can't find the source I skimmed yesterday, bit of googling for other sources seems to suggest the figure is closer to your $5M estimate, perhaps the source I used was counting some sort of subsidy, maybe I read it wrong, or maybe it was just bullshit, I'm not sure.
It's possible; many renewable projects like to hide just how much they cost. I still remember where a guy got 50% of his solar install paid for, PLUS an annual payoff of about what his electric bill USED to be and it was still going to take a decade to pay off the loan paying his average electric bill towards the loan.
I think the reason they built the plant in TFA was to answer some of the other questions you're asking.;)
Thing is, I think that a few sensors, taking up no more than a dozen square meters, should be able to answer the power question - even then, regional power figures are known. Of which most I've heard says that it's not enough to provide 5MW 24/7 even in the summertime at that location. Actual efficiency numbers are unknown, but should be known to within a few percent by the engineers.
There's a lot of other questions/engineering tricks to work out, which is why I accept it as a test plant even at that expense. It's just that I generally find that, outside of computing, orders of magnitude drops in expense is rare.
Take electric cars - My general view is that there's nothing wrong with them that a battery that holds twice as many kwh at half the expense can't solve. All the parts in an EV can be broken down into individual components that are already common. Most of it's just a car. The electric motor, the battery, inverters, all already in existence. The controller is the unique part, but even that's mostly just components and programming to tie the parts together. The components aren't that expensive in bulk, and the programming costs aren't that different than keeping up on ECU programming for gasoline and diesel engines.
For these solar plants, it's not like they're going to come up with mirrors, motor systems, salts, pipes, turbines, etc... That are all an order of magnitude cheaper. Or, lacking von neumann machines, saving an order of magnitude in labor expenses.
That same equipment can be used to process other 35mm film. discarding it instead of selling it or giving it to a person or company that can use it is purely dumb.
Can it? From my readings kodachrome was a rather different process than other films. In another fashion it's been legacy for a while; it may not be worth it to use it to process other 35mm films because newer, cheaper, more efficient machines exist for processing those films, the equipment was kept around solely to keep processing kodachrome because the newer machines couldn't without uneconomical modification.
Dag nab it, why did slashdot kill my euro symbols? Why allow dollars but not euros? And I'm at work, where they've done something to the browser/proxy server so my preview is useless.
The other films (Velvia, primarily) are favored precisely because they distort reality. Velvia is particularly inaccurate - take a picture of one of your Hispanic friends and see what the skin tone looks like. Then do the same with Kodachrome, and with a Nikon DSLR. The Nikon will be almost perfectly accurate, the Kodachrome will be almost as good with the very slightest greenish cast, and the Velvia will look like you spray-painted her face with Candy-Apple Red car paint.
Huh... I was going off the posts of a semi-professional photographer who went into the color details of how Kodachrome was 'brighter' than reality. Perception can be weird, I know.
A 5MW windmill can be up and running for about 1.5M euros
Do you happen to have a source on that? I know that at the moment it's like $1.3 per , but last I heard wind turbines were running $2/watt and up.
So I might believe 5M, but not less than a third of that.
60M for 5MW is 12($15.60) per watt, which is kinda, sorta, acceptable for a test plant. But I'd say costs would have to come down nearly an order of magnitude for this to be truly economical.
I'd also want to know if that 30k m^2 can actually RUN that plant at 5MW all day and night, on average. What sort of capacity factor are we looking at?
Rereading my post, I think that I screwed up a bit. 15 wouldn't be the average age for a mother, 15 and some large fraction would be the average age for a mother's FIRST birth.
Sounds like a good and healthy model, but it needs some work.
It's a two line slashdot post for a relatively revolutionairy cultural model. Of course it 'needs work'.;)
My model already partially exists. While not generally a 'good' thing, with teen pregnancies I know it's fairly common for the grandparents to take custody of the child. Because it's not 'standard', there's all sorts of issues - the 'responsable' females from 'responsable' families are typically the ones that avoid teen pregnancies. Grandparents might be little, if any better off than the teen parents.
Minor point being that having a child will interfere with you becoming a financially secure and ready thirty year old.
Why? The teenager's role in the raising of the child is minimal. The Grandparents are the ones paying for everything.
Larger point being that at the age of thirty, you don't suddenly stop wanting to have kids.
When you've already had kids and are currently raising a batch of grandkids? Besides, the ages are flexible. If the 'teens' are having kids from 15-19, that's four years, enough for 2-4 children. That makes the grandparents that are going to be doing the raising 30-38. 48-56 for when the kids get out of the house.
If you're not getting grandbabies, sure, keep popping out babies at 30. It's just that the need for things like artificial insemination, fertility treatments, and such are almost an order of magnitude higher.
I'm basing all this on the average of around 2 kids per family we currently have, by the way. Replacement.
Are the having them with the fifteen year olds? Doubling up the burden of looking after their own and their childrens kids?
1. Preferably not. I'm not looking to stir up husband/wife too much, and double the age(on average) is a bit much. 2. If they're rich/able enough. Then again, looking at my family tree, my family seems to be able to care for children well into their 60s.
I'll fully admit, it's not a 'perfect' system.
Though if you go with the idea that somebody can parent for a child into their 60s, on average, you'd be able to skip a generation if necessary.
Basically, treat my multi-generational care plan as more a guide than a blueprint. Sure, you have the 'ideal', but the odds that any given extended family will follow it completely will be virtually nil. This really wouldn't be different than the current 'parents raise their own children' scheme we have right now - I have cousins that were raised by their grandparents(mostly), cousins raised by aunts, various step-fathers and mothers, etc...
You make a good point, though in terms of biological readyness, I think the actual 'best' time to have a baby on average is like 15. Waiting until you're 25 is NOT better than doing it at 21 or even 18 or younger.
Western people tend to actually wait LONG after the best biological time for things like mental and financial readyness.
I've actually proposed a system/culture where teenagers have the babies, but the teen's parents, who are far more financially and mentally mature do the raising.
Given the age groups, that's a 15 year old(average) giving birth, then the 30 year old grandparents doing the raising.
How does it ever 'make sense' for adults to start having sex with children before they have reached puberty? It does not matter how short life expectancies are. Sex with children just isn't going to produce more children.
From what I remember, I'm not a professional historian, a lot of the records we DO have are for the better off types of the time. The lowest of the Peasents don't have the record-keeping until later.
That means assets. Back in the day most marriages(where assets were involved) were economic alliances, if not political ones. The parents would make the deal whenever they could, keeping in mind that 'most' did want the best for their kids. Sometimes marrying a daughter off at nine might make the best sense at the time. Deal would normally be struck for the consumation to wait until a later date. Which even I'll fully admit would normally happen earlier than I'm comfortable with.
I'd also be careful of confusing 'minimum marriage ages' and actual marriage ages. As mentioned, just because menarch happened a little bit later than is normal today doesn't mean that there weren't variations. There have been cases of girls getting pregnant at 12. The 'world record' is FIVE. *shudder*
In an age where the median life expectency was something like 36, yes, there was intense pressure for women to be having kids as soon as they were able. This was generally signaled by menarch, which, while not happening all the time at 12, did happen.
You did read the part of 'It is a problem with all religious forms of marriage as far as I know.' - Meaning he certainly wasn't considering it solely a problem of the Catholic church.
Personally, I'd say 'arranged marriage' instead of 'religious marriage'.
As for the 14 part - that wouldn't be prepubescent, as puberty 'typically' occurs between 11-14 in girls and 13-16 in boys.
14 is still 'ick' for me, but I have to be honest that there are a number of 14 year olds who's hormones are telling them that they're ready. They really aren't, but hormones are powerful.
First, the nuclear power industry pretty much has the best safety record going. Per dollar of product produced, it kills the least amount of people. Let's see, in the past decade it's killed, what, 3 people (the 3 Japanese workers in a reprocessing plant that got stupid by using a steel bucket instead of the multi-million machine intended for the purpose). Just this year, in the USA, for oil and natural gas we have the Deepwater horizon, which killed 11. China regularly loses hundreds each year, we lost 25 in the explosion at Massey this year. 34 miners lost their lives the year before in various incidents.
Second - Let's look at Yankee Rowe - third commerical nuclear reactor. Shut down early due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle. Cost: $36M in 1960, $209M in 2k dollars Decommission: $450M($567M), worst case. $320M($403M) is the 'basis average'. During it's life, Yankee Rowe produced 34 Billion kwh, achieving a sub-performing 74% capacity factor - most of the newer reactors still in service are well over 90%. So, going by an average 3 cents a kwh, that's $1.02B in electricity produced. That leaves $244M for operations and profit during it's time. So not very expensive, though not as good as would be hoped. If you go by the worst case decommission costs. Basis average would be a lot better, as would it have been if the reactor had lasted it's expected lifetime.
Third - You have got to be kidding me. 19.4% in 2007
Fourth - So nuclear power needs loan guarantees to proceed. Wind and Solar power need cash subsidies, often in excess of half their cost! Heck, your 'clean coal' got more subsidies than nuclear - $29.81/MWh for 'clean coal', Solar $24.34 and wind around $23.37, nuclear got only $1.59/MWh
In total dollars: Refined Coal: $2,156M Solar: $14M Wind: $724M Nuclear: $1,267M
The biggest problem with coal is air pollution. There is technology available to reduce pollution to negligible levels, but nobody wants to use it because it's "too expensive". Instead of flushing a few Billion down the toilet with nuclear power, we could put that money into clean coal technology.
Still have the problems with fly ash and such, so it's still not 'clean', and at that point your 'clean coal' is more expensive to install than nuclear, as well as more expensive to operate.
You're assuming it gets 50% of the oil out with each pass. It probably does not.
And you're assuming I was talking about Costner's device. I was talking about a theoretical one.
It's also illegal to dump a 75% water - 25% oil mix, that isn't clean enough.
I refer back to what I said near the end of my post - 'I figure many of these ships spend more time going to shore to drop off contaminated seawater/oil than they do skimming it. These ideas are to allow them to stay out there longer, picking up more oil, on average.'
You have a limited number of ships. They have a limited amount of storage. It takes X amount of time to skim, Y time to process(if they do so), and Z time to get back to a port to dump off the contaminated oil/water mix of whatever percentage. We'll assume that storage/treatment on shore are effectively limitless.
Thus, the challenge is to get as much oil out of the water as possible. I figure that X+Y<Z. Thus, processing to concentrate the oil allows a skimmer ship to stay out a relatively short amount of time longer enabling it to store substantially more oil, allowing it to, over time, haul more oil out.
Another point is that the environment IS capable of disposing of the oil we've released, it's just that it'd suck for quite a bit longer. A 30% oil/water mix will take much longer than 3X the disposal of a 10% oil/water mix, which will take a lot longer than a 1% mix.
[quoteCostner's centrifuge apparently does get the water clean enough to dump, but it can only handle oil/water mixes where the oil and water are both nice and smooth. The stuff in the Gulf is like a mouse - it is clumpy and sticky, and so does not work well at all in the centrifuge.[/quote]
Which is a point to consider. From reading, the Dutch systems handle clumpy just fine, they just don't get it as clean as costner's. Maybe a joint effort?
Acoustic triggers are, by law, required on all offshore rigs in Norway and several other countries. Norway is, quite simply, the gold standard for sea drilling, and you have no idea what you are talking about.
Great, fine, dandy. My point would be that an acoustic trigger would be secondary to the lack of a functioning shutoff. An acoustic trigger is there merely as yet another backup to close a valve. A valve that, at Deepwater Horizon, didn't work. Whether due to being bad before the accident or damaged by it, it didn't work, and still doesn't.
If there was a shutuff still intact even without an acoustic trigger, we'd have had a robot down there to manually shut the well off within a week, not three months later with a fancy cap.
As twisteddk and bigzigga mentioned, there were actually 2 controls that failed, and when they DID send a robot down('Hotstab'), it failed. The BOP was the primary safety device, and it failed utterly.
As such, the balance of evidence is that the 'acoustic trigger' wouldn't have done anything in this case.
Given what happened, I'm more for redundent shutoff valves, two BOPs, something. Still not sure the second shutoff valve would have worked; don't know enough about why the primary BOP failed. Don't even know if there were other cutoffs. Do know that the rig sinking/crashing onto the site is part of the problem, to what extent, I don't know.
You stop drilling and figure out a way to attach a failsafe to this thing. Maybe you can't replace the BOP itself, but don't try to tell me that you can't rig a mechanism to it that will prevent an oil leak should the BOP fail.
The GP mentioned 'stop working', which is different than 'stop drilling'. There's many phases to drilling an oil well - one of which is replacing the drilling mud that was inserted while drilling with cement in such a way as to create a liner.
As sleazyridr mentioned, they weren't actively drilling at the time of the explosion. Indeed, they were in the process of shutting the well down to replace the mobile drilling platform with a permanent well platform.
How will this be done? Probably nuclear fission and high capacity breeder reactors. Because they can't be water cooled, they will have to be designed from the ground up to be able to use as much heat as possible for energy, and radiate either into the ground, or into space any energy that it can't use.
Well, you'd still probably have to ship quite a bit of water to use in the primary cooling/turbine generation systems, but I think 'radiate into the ground' is an excellent suggestion when average temperature at the sites they're proposing for the moon sits at -35.
I live up in ND, and it only fairly rarely gets that cold in the wintertime. 12" of sprayed foam insulation would help for both atmospheric containment and temperature shielding, but you're still going to lose a lot of heat, especially if the size of the base ends up being as big as I'd think it would.
OTOH, 500F temperature swing would give you very good levels of heat-extraction, nearly that of nuclear reactors. With a difference between -173C(280F) and 242F(117C), water might not be the best choice. Boiling water reactors heat up to around 285C(550F). I might actually use Ethanol instead- freezes below -114C(-174F), boils at 78C(173F).
You'd need some mega-engineering to make effective use of it though, I think.
Still, might be an idea - Nuclear for life support/critical functions, solar for industry/not time critical requirements/backup.
Another thought is how much riskier is it to continue working even if the blowout preventer isn't working?
A well isn't like a car - you can't just stop doing work on it. Or perhaps it'd be better to say that perhaps it's riskier to stop working on it just because the preventer is broken.
You order a replacement/repair parts ASAP, of course, but when it comes to industrial equipment, sometimes you can't just 'stop work'.
Heck, if it's that important, have spare parts on hand, even have a redundant system set up.
As others mentioned, 'the bank loan' is a clue - it pretty much predated credit cards.
Air travel was, real money wise, an order of magnitude more expensive, and credit an order of magnitude more difficult to get.
I'd hesitate to say 'where the credit crisis originated', heck, many people are advocating a return to those times as a solution to prevent 'the credit crisis' from happening again.
You know, back in the day when to get a loan you had to prove income, ability to repay, and the bank that issued your loan kept it so they had good reason to make sure you could?
If the latter, you're more likely worth about $300 a year to them. Credit card companies are usually glad to get rid of customers like that.
Hmm... It depends, I guess. That's $300/year off of around $1,250 of capital. And a pretty secure investment at that, for credit card companies.
I'm kinda the same, pay no interest, charge just over a grand a month, and they always seem happy with me. Send me lots of 'transfer your balance' checks, but whatever.
Had my card number stolen recently, they fedexed me a new card.
Which would you rather have? $300/year from somebody who pays their bill every month or somebody who tends to pay every other month, pays hundreds of interest on their $15k debt, but has a 50-50 chance of declaring bankruptcy any given year?
I also understand that the Dutch also have technology to separate oil and water, though all I know about that is that it doesn't meet EPA regs for release water.
Still, even if a device/technique only had a 50% efficiency, as long as it was cheap it'd still be worth it...
IE take a 50/50 oil/water mix. After 'treatment' you store the 75% oil mix and dump the 75% water mix. Or, depending on how cheap/effective it is, you run the stuff through a second pass - store 88% pure oil and release 88% pure water. Sure, it's not very pure, but you're almost doubling the amount of oil you can store.
How to run the device:
Device 1: Input 50/50, release 75% oil/75% water streams
Device 2: Takes 75% water, runs again - 88% water output(back to ocean), 66% water mix goes back to Device 1
Device 3: Takes 75% oil, runs again, 88% oil goes to tank, 66% oil mix goes back to device 1
With the proper piping you'd be able to reconnect it to run the devices piped different ways to handle different percentages of oil/water. Little oil? Run 1-2-3 to concentrate the oil. Lots? Just pipe straight to the tanks, perhaps 1-2-3 to pull out what water you can.
I figure many of these ships spend more time going to shore to drop off contaminated seawater/oil than they do skimming it. These ideas are to allow them to stay out there longer, picking up more oil, on average.
For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea. A device which could easily have prevented the BP spill, but wasn't used, because it wasn't a requirement.
Sure about that? The accident blew through the blowout preventer.
I remember reading about the pressures involved, they're higher than present in most guns...
I'm not sure a separate shutoff device would have functioned itself, otherwise I'd have expected them to have gotten the well shut off a lot quicker - simply drop a valve onto the remains of the header, weld it on however they need to, then shut the valve. Not spend three months designing something that wouldn't look out of place on a rocket.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither actually uses a panel, unless you count the roof on top of the tower. it's not something you add to a house, it's something you design in. unfortunately most houses being built in the USA today are framed in cheap timber
Nothing wrong with cheap timber; the problem is that they're not increasing the framing appropriately. Another would be not putting in proper foundations.
sheathed in cheap manufactured wood products which don't hold up over time and which release dioxins when they burn
You made me look up 'dioxin' and wood burning. It doesn't seem to be something associated with 'cheap' treated wood products, it's what you get when you burn wood, period.
What's your alternative? The plywood sheathing they put on houses here then cover with a wrap then put siding on should be able to easily last over a century. The siding might not, and there's always accidents/building no longer need situations.
further sheathed in sheet rock commonly made from fly ash from coal plants,
Don't think ranting about recycling is going to make your point...
and covered with a plywood and paper roof with about a maximum twenty year lifespan.
'Paper' roof? Are you referring to the tar paper that goes under shingles and stuff? Because we get around 50-60 up here. Now, my first post wasn't one of my longest, but I have complained multiple times about houses in Arizona being built almost identically to houses in Florida and North Dakota. We're talking about three extremely different situations - one you have mostly dry heat, another mostly wet heat, and the last bone-chilling cold. They dictate different home designs, yet we don't.
Down south I'm much more for metal roofs, and they work even up in ND, my roof is partially metal. My house is also old with like a dozen different slopes up there.
And they don't even bother to orient them to the sun; being parallel to the street is considered to be more important. They're big piles of shit all around.
Everyone would want the highest power possible. The law would have the opposite affect of its promoters.
You're probably right. Don't have the source available at the moment, but I remember reading that when fast food joints in some location was forced to put calories on their menu, the average number of calories per meal purchased went UP.
Ah - Stanford study of Starbucks: 6% Fewer calories
However - Yale and NYU study of McD's, Wendys, BK, and KFC:
"they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008."
Just googled it. Diagram seems to indicate an almost building within a building, at substantial additional cost.
Here in the United States, I happened to be listening to NPR and them talking about the National Secrets Act.
Basically, since the '50s there has been a precedent where the government simply says 'revealing this would harm national security' and any lawsuit was thrown out.
The original case that went before the Supreme Court and this precedent was set involved a bomber crash that killed 3 civilian contractors.
The USAF consistently argued that revealing the accident report would harm national security. The lower court said fine and found against the .gov. The appeals court said the same. The supreme court overturned it, without ever even asking to privately see the accident report.
Couple years ago one of the daughters finally got ahold of the declassified accident report - which even unredacted didn't contain anything that was classified or unknown back then.
Basically, I understand the need for governments to keep secrets. I just think that there needs to be a review process. You don't need to let everybody view classified documents when a lawsuit comes up, but an independent, neutral party would be a good idea.
Heck, we manage to have military trials where classified evidence is presented, I'm sure that we could come up with Something, even if it was - 'We can't tell you what happened due to national security issues, but here's some money to go away'.
Hmmm, can't find the source I skimmed yesterday, bit of googling for other sources seems to suggest the figure is closer to your $5M estimate, perhaps the source I used was counting some sort of subsidy, maybe I read it wrong, or maybe it was just bullshit, I'm not sure.
It's possible; many renewable projects like to hide just how much they cost. I still remember where a guy got 50% of his solar install paid for, PLUS an annual payoff of about what his electric bill USED to be and it was still going to take a decade to pay off the loan paying his average electric bill towards the loan.
I think the reason they built the plant in TFA was to answer some of the other questions you're asking. ;)
Thing is, I think that a few sensors, taking up no more than a dozen square meters, should be able to answer the power question - even then, regional power figures are known. Of which most I've heard says that it's not enough to provide 5MW 24/7 even in the summertime at that location. Actual efficiency numbers are unknown, but should be known to within a few percent by the engineers.
There's a lot of other questions/engineering tricks to work out, which is why I accept it as a test plant even at that expense. It's just that I generally find that, outside of computing, orders of magnitude drops in expense is rare.
Take electric cars - My general view is that there's nothing wrong with them that a battery that holds twice as many kwh at half the expense can't solve. All the parts in an EV can be broken down into individual components that are already common. Most of it's just a car. The electric motor, the battery, inverters, all already in existence. The controller is the unique part, but even that's mostly just components and programming to tie the parts together. The components aren't that expensive in bulk, and the programming costs aren't that different than keeping up on ECU programming for gasoline and diesel engines.
For these solar plants, it's not like they're going to come up with mirrors, motor systems, salts, pipes, turbines, etc... That are all an order of magnitude cheaper. Or, lacking von neumann machines, saving an order of magnitude in labor expenses.
That same equipment can be used to process other 35mm film. discarding it instead of selling it or giving it to a person or company that can use it is purely dumb.
Can it? From my readings kodachrome was a rather different process than other films. In another fashion it's been legacy for a while; it may not be worth it to use it to process other 35mm films because newer, cheaper, more efficient machines exist for processing those films, the equipment was kept around solely to keep processing kodachrome because the newer machines couldn't without uneconomical modification.
Dag nab it, why did slashdot kill my euro symbols? Why allow dollars but not euros? And I'm at work, where they've done something to the browser/proxy server so my preview is useless.
The other films (Velvia, primarily) are favored precisely because they distort reality. Velvia is particularly inaccurate - take a picture of one of your Hispanic friends and see what the skin tone looks like. Then do the same with Kodachrome, and with a Nikon DSLR. The Nikon will be almost perfectly accurate, the Kodachrome will be almost as good with the very slightest greenish cast, and the Velvia will look like you spray-painted her face with Candy-Apple Red car paint.
Huh... I was going off the posts of a semi-professional photographer who went into the color details of how Kodachrome was 'brighter' than reality. Perception can be weird, I know.
A 5MW windmill can be up and running for about 1.5M euros
Do you happen to have a source on that? I know that at the moment it's like $1.3 per , but last I heard wind turbines were running $2/watt and up.
So I might believe 5M, but not less than a third of that.
60M for 5MW is 12($15.60) per watt, which is kinda, sorta, acceptable for a test plant. But I'd say costs would have to come down nearly an order of magnitude for this to be truly economical.
I'd also want to know if that 30k m^2 can actually RUN that plant at 5MW all day and night, on average. What sort of capacity factor are we looking at?
You can still buy (better) slide film.
I'd have to agree; Long before digital Kodachrome had become something of a niche market.
Many of those who used it did so for the same reasons some people prefer tube amps over digital ones.
Sure, it's a distortion; but it's a pleasing distortion.
Still, I'm sure somebody will come out with a 'kodachrome' filter that can render your images to look more like kodachrome in post-process.
Rereading my post, I think that I screwed up a bit. 15 wouldn't be the average age for a mother, 15 and some large fraction would be the average age for a mother's FIRST birth.
Sounds like a good and healthy model, but it needs some work.
It's a two line slashdot post for a relatively revolutionairy cultural model. Of course it 'needs work'. ;)
My model already partially exists. While not generally a 'good' thing, with teen pregnancies I know it's fairly common for the grandparents to take custody of the child. Because it's not 'standard', there's all sorts of issues - the 'responsable' females from 'responsable' families are typically the ones that avoid teen pregnancies. Grandparents might be little, if any better off than the teen parents.
Minor point being that having a child will interfere with you becoming a financially secure and ready thirty year old.
Why? The teenager's role in the raising of the child is minimal. The Grandparents are the ones paying for everything.
Larger point being that at the age of thirty, you don't suddenly stop wanting to have kids.
When you've already had kids and are currently raising a batch of grandkids? Besides, the ages are flexible. If the 'teens' are having kids from 15-19, that's four years, enough for 2-4 children. That makes the grandparents that are going to be doing the raising 30-38. 48-56 for when the kids get out of the house.
If you're not getting grandbabies, sure, keep popping out babies at 30. It's just that the need for things like artificial insemination, fertility treatments, and such are almost an order of magnitude higher.
I'm basing all this on the average of around 2 kids per family we currently have, by the way. Replacement.
Are the having them with the fifteen year olds? Doubling up the burden of looking after their own and their childrens kids?
1. Preferably not. I'm not looking to stir up husband/wife too much, and double the age(on average) is a bit much.
2. If they're rich/able enough. Then again, looking at my family tree, my family seems to be able to care for children well into their 60s.
I'll fully admit, it's not a 'perfect' system.
Though if you go with the idea that somebody can parent for a child into their 60s, on average, you'd be able to skip a generation if necessary.
Basically, treat my multi-generational care plan as more a guide than a blueprint. Sure, you have the 'ideal', but the odds that any given extended family will follow it completely will be virtually nil. This really wouldn't be different than the current 'parents raise their own children' scheme we have right now - I have cousins that were raised by their grandparents(mostly), cousins raised by aunts, various step-fathers and mothers, etc...
You make a good point, though in terms of biological readyness, I think the actual 'best' time to have a baby on average is like 15. Waiting until you're 25 is NOT better than doing it at 21 or even 18 or younger.
Western people tend to actually wait LONG after the best biological time for things like mental and financial readyness.
I've actually proposed a system/culture where teenagers have the babies, but the teen's parents, who are far more financially and mentally mature do the raising.
Given the age groups, that's a 15 year old(average) giving birth, then the 30 year old grandparents doing the raising.
How does it ever 'make sense' for adults to start having sex with children before they have reached puberty? It does not matter how short life expectancies are. Sex with children just isn't going to produce more children.
From what I remember, I'm not a professional historian, a lot of the records we DO have are for the better off types of the time. The lowest of the Peasents don't have the record-keeping until later.
That means assets. Back in the day most marriages(where assets were involved) were economic alliances, if not political ones. The parents would make the deal whenever they could, keeping in mind that 'most' did want the best for their kids. Sometimes marrying a daughter off at nine might make the best sense at the time. Deal would normally be struck for the consumation to wait until a later date. Which even I'll fully admit would normally happen earlier than I'm comfortable with.
I'd also be careful of confusing 'minimum marriage ages' and actual marriage ages. As mentioned, just because menarch happened a little bit later than is normal today doesn't mean that there weren't variations. There have been cases of girls getting pregnant at 12. The 'world record' is FIVE. *shudder*
In an age where the median life expectency was something like 36, yes, there was intense pressure for women to be having kids as soon as they were able. This was generally signaled by menarch, which, while not happening all the time at 12, did happen.
You did read the part of 'It is a problem with all religious forms of marriage as far as I know.' - Meaning he certainly wasn't considering it solely a problem of the Catholic church.
Personally, I'd say 'arranged marriage' instead of 'religious marriage'.
As for the 14 part - that wouldn't be prepubescent, as puberty 'typically' occurs between 11-14 in girls and 13-16 in boys.
14 is still 'ick' for me, but I have to be honest that there are a number of 14 year olds who's hormones are telling them that they're ready. They really aren't, but hormones are powerful.
I'd recommend looking at this post.
First, the nuclear power industry pretty much has the best safety record going. Per dollar of product produced, it kills the least amount of people. Let's see, in the past decade it's killed, what, 3 people (the 3 Japanese workers in a reprocessing plant that got stupid by using a steel bucket instead of the multi-million machine intended for the purpose). Just this year, in the USA, for oil and natural gas we have the Deepwater horizon, which killed 11. China regularly loses hundreds each year, we lost 25 in the explosion at Massey this year. 34 miners lost their lives the year before in various incidents.
Second - Let's look at Yankee Rowe - third commerical nuclear reactor. Shut down early due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle.
Cost: $36M in 1960, $209M in 2k dollars
Decommission: $450M($567M), worst case. $320M($403M) is the 'basis average'.
During it's life, Yankee Rowe produced 34 Billion kwh, achieving a sub-performing 74% capacity factor - most of the newer reactors still in service are well over 90%.
So, going by an average 3 cents a kwh, that's $1.02B in electricity produced. That leaves $244M for operations and profit during it's time. So not very expensive, though not as good as would be hoped. If you go by the worst case decommission costs. Basis average would be a lot better, as would it have been if the reactor had lasted it's expected lifetime.
Third - You have got to be kidding me. 19.4% in 2007
Fourth - So nuclear power needs loan guarantees to proceed. Wind and Solar power need cash subsidies, often in excess of half their cost! Heck, your 'clean coal' got more subsidies than nuclear - $29.81/MWh for 'clean coal', Solar $24.34 and wind around $23.37, nuclear got only $1.59/MWh
In total dollars:
Refined Coal: $2,156M
Solar: $14M
Wind: $724M
Nuclear: $1,267M
The biggest problem with coal is air pollution. There is technology available to reduce pollution to negligible levels, but nobody wants to use it because it's "too expensive". Instead of flushing a few Billion down the toilet with nuclear power, we could put that money into clean coal technology.
Still have the problems with fly ash and such, so it's still not 'clean', and at that point your 'clean coal' is more expensive to install than nuclear, as well as more expensive to operate.
You're assuming it gets 50% of the oil out with each pass. It probably does not.
And you're assuming I was talking about Costner's device. I was talking about a theoretical one.
It's also illegal to dump a 75% water - 25% oil mix, that isn't clean enough.
I refer back to what I said near the end of my post - 'I figure many of these ships spend more time going to shore to drop off contaminated seawater/oil than they do skimming it. These ideas are to allow them to stay out there longer, picking up more oil, on average.'
You have a limited number of ships. They have a limited amount of storage. It takes X amount of time to skim, Y time to process(if they do so), and Z time to get back to a port to dump off the contaminated oil/water mix of whatever percentage. We'll assume that storage/treatment on shore are effectively limitless.
Thus, the challenge is to get as much oil out of the water as possible. I figure that X+Y<Z. Thus, processing to concentrate the oil allows a skimmer ship to stay out a relatively short amount of time longer enabling it to store substantially more oil, allowing it to, over time, haul more oil out.
Another point is that the environment IS capable of disposing of the oil we've released, it's just that it'd suck for quite a bit longer. A 30% oil/water mix will take much longer than 3X the disposal of a 10% oil/water mix, which will take a lot longer than a 1% mix.
[quoteCostner's centrifuge apparently does get the water clean enough to dump, but it can only handle oil/water mixes where the oil and water are both nice and smooth. The stuff in the Gulf is like a mouse - it is clumpy and sticky, and so does not work well at all in the centrifuge.[/quote]
Which is a point to consider. From reading, the Dutch systems handle clumpy just fine, they just don't get it as clean as costner's. Maybe a joint effort?
Just reading, noted that the BOP for deepwater HAD a 'deadman switch', just not the acoustic shutoff.
It was noted that they tried to use a robot to activate the BOP manually, and that failed as well.
If nothing else, this accident points out that a failure can cost you BILLIONS, which will pay for a lot of safety measures elsewhere.
Acoustic triggers are, by law, required on all offshore rigs in Norway and several other countries. Norway is, quite simply, the gold standard for sea drilling, and you have no idea what you are talking about.
Great, fine, dandy. My point would be that an acoustic trigger would be secondary to the lack of a functioning shutoff. An acoustic trigger is there merely as yet another backup to close a valve. A valve that, at Deepwater Horizon, didn't work. Whether due to being bad before the accident or damaged by it, it didn't work, and still doesn't.
If there was a shutuff still intact even without an acoustic trigger, we'd have had a robot down there to manually shut the well off within a week, not three months later with a fancy cap.
As twisteddk and bigzigga mentioned, there were actually 2 controls that failed, and when they DID send a robot down('Hotstab'), it failed. The BOP was the primary safety device, and it failed utterly.
As such, the balance of evidence is that the 'acoustic trigger' wouldn't have done anything in this case.
Given what happened, I'm more for redundent shutoff valves, two BOPs, something. Still not sure the second shutoff valve would have worked; don't know enough about why the primary BOP failed. Don't even know if there were other cutoffs. Do know that the rig sinking/crashing onto the site is part of the problem, to what extent, I don't know.
You stop drilling and figure out a way to attach a failsafe to this thing. Maybe you can't replace the BOP itself, but don't try to tell me that you can't rig a mechanism to it that will prevent an oil leak should the BOP fail.
The GP mentioned 'stop working', which is different than 'stop drilling'. There's many phases to drilling an oil well - one of which is replacing the drilling mud that was inserted while drilling with cement in such a way as to create a liner.
As sleazyridr mentioned, they weren't actively drilling at the time of the explosion. Indeed, they were in the process of shutting the well down to replace the mobile drilling platform with a permanent well platform.
How will this be done? Probably nuclear fission and high capacity breeder reactors. Because they can't be water cooled, they will have to be designed from the ground up to be able to use as much heat as possible for energy, and radiate either into the ground, or into space any energy that it can't use.
Well, you'd still probably have to ship quite a bit of water to use in the primary cooling/turbine generation systems, but I think 'radiate into the ground' is an excellent suggestion when average temperature at the sites they're proposing for the moon sits at -35.
I live up in ND, and it only fairly rarely gets that cold in the wintertime. 12" of sprayed foam insulation would help for both atmospheric containment and temperature shielding, but you're still going to lose a lot of heat, especially if the size of the base ends up being as big as I'd think it would.
OTOH, 500F temperature swing would give you very good levels of heat-extraction, nearly that of nuclear reactors. With a difference between -173C(280F) and 242F(117C), water might not be the best choice. Boiling water reactors heat up to around 285C(550F). I might actually use Ethanol instead- freezes below -114C(-174F), boils at 78C(173F).
You'd need some mega-engineering to make effective use of it though, I think.
Still, might be an idea - Nuclear for life support/critical functions, solar for industry/not time critical requirements/backup.
Another thought is how much riskier is it to continue working even if the blowout preventer isn't working?
A well isn't like a car - you can't just stop doing work on it. Or perhaps it'd be better to say that perhaps it's riskier to stop working on it just because the preventer is broken.
You order a replacement/repair parts ASAP, of course, but when it comes to industrial equipment, sometimes you can't just 'stop work'.
Heck, if it's that important, have spare parts on hand, even have a redundant system set up.
As others mentioned, 'the bank loan' is a clue - it pretty much predated credit cards.
Air travel was, real money wise, an order of magnitude more expensive, and credit an order of magnitude more difficult to get.
I'd hesitate to say 'where the credit crisis originated', heck, many people are advocating a return to those times as a solution to prevent 'the credit crisis' from happening again.
You know, back in the day when to get a loan you had to prove income, ability to repay, and the bank that issued your loan kept it so they had good reason to make sure you could?
If the latter, you're more likely worth about $300 a year to them. Credit card companies are usually glad to get rid of customers like that.
Hmm... It depends, I guess. That's $300/year off of around $1,250 of capital. And a pretty secure investment at that, for credit card companies.
I'm kinda the same, pay no interest, charge just over a grand a month, and they always seem happy with me. Send me lots of 'transfer your balance' checks, but whatever.
Had my card number stolen recently, they fedexed me a new card.
Which would you rather have? $300/year from somebody who pays their bill every month or somebody who tends to pay every other month, pays hundreds of interest on their $15k debt, but has a 50-50 chance of declaring bankruptcy any given year?
I also understand that the Dutch also have technology to separate oil and water, though all I know about that is that it doesn't meet EPA regs for release water.
Still, even if a device/technique only had a 50% efficiency, as long as it was cheap it'd still be worth it...
IE take a 50/50 oil/water mix. After 'treatment' you store the 75% oil mix and dump the 75% water mix. Or, depending on how cheap/effective it is, you run the stuff through a second pass - store 88% pure oil and release 88% pure water. Sure, it's not very pure, but you're almost doubling the amount of oil you can store.
How to run the device:
Device 1: Input 50/50, release 75% oil/75% water streams
Device 2: Takes 75% water, runs again - 88% water output(back to ocean), 66% water mix goes back to Device 1
Device 3: Takes 75% oil, runs again, 88% oil goes to tank, 66% oil mix goes back to device 1
With the proper piping you'd be able to reconnect it to run the devices piped different ways to handle different percentages of oil/water. Little oil? Run 1-2-3 to concentrate the oil. Lots? Just pipe straight to the tanks, perhaps 1-2-3 to pull out what water you can.
I figure many of these ships spend more time going to shore to drop off contaminated seawater/oil than they do skimming it. These ideas are to allow them to stay out there longer, picking up more oil, on average.
For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea. A device which could easily have prevented the BP spill, but wasn't used, because it wasn't a requirement.
Sure about that? The accident blew through the blowout preventer.
I remember reading about the pressures involved, they're higher than present in most guns...
I'm not sure a separate shutoff device would have functioned itself, otherwise I'd have expected them to have gotten the well shut off a lot quicker - simply drop a valve onto the remains of the header, weld it on however they need to, then shut the valve. Not spend three months designing something that wouldn't look out of place on a rocket.