No: you want a design that stop instantly the moment you stop pressing the plug, not the other way around (in other words: a dead-man's switch).
I like the liquid thorium design - in the prototype plant they shut the reactor off for the night by turning the cooling system off.
How that worked is that the reactor vessel had a drain in it. The drain had a fan/cooler such that when they pumped the reaction mass into it(using a different heating system to melt it), the drain was cold enough to solidify the mass, plugging the drain. Turn the cooling system off, the drain plug heats up and liquifies(the vessel itself might heat up a little, but well within design tolerances). With the drain clear, the reaction mass drains out of the reactor into a sort of ice cube tray array that separated the mass into sub-critical amounts, where not enough heat is generated to keep the mass liquid, so the whole kit solidifies.
When the researchers came back in the morning, they'd fire up the heating system to re-melt the cubes and pump the mass back into the reactor. A cooling fan pointed at the drain would solidify the mass wanting to drain back to the trays. Once plugged, a critical mass could be built in the reactor vessel, and the operation of the reactor would resume.
What comes out will be, without any processing really, be valuable reactor fuel. With some processing it can be made into a lot of valuable things, including the reactor fuel.
You're still going to have to process it to get reactor fuel. The important thing is that it's the radioactivity that makes reprocessing used fuel rods expensive, because said radioactivity tends to contaminate things.
If you store the used rods in a reactor pool for ~30 years, then in an above ground cask for another 30-60, as you say, the radioactivity is a tiny fraction of what it used to be. That means that it doesn't contaminate things nearly as much, thus will be something like an order of magnitude easier/cheaper to reprocess. You stuff the non-useful radioactives, and other materials you can't be bothered to separate, into another cask.
Alternatively, it could also be used as a self contained system that would learn the best strategy for your normal commute, but then it would have no benefit on roads you haven't driven before.
I think you could cover 99% of my driving with less than 100 routes. Especially if I get into the habit of telling the car where I'm planning on going.
That's something of a question, isn't it? What does "meaningful human control" translate to? Does it mean that a human has to okay each weapon discharge? Does it mean that we aren't supposed to release a swarm of von neumann kill-bots with 'destroy everything' as a goal? What if we release them in an area with orders to kill any humans with weapons that don't have a valid IFF signal?
In addition, I've seen with UN weapon ban treaties that they're sometimes used as a 'we don't have them, so you shouldn't either' tool. Who's closest to these sorts of weapons? The USA. Who's NOT going to agree with any treaty limiting the effective use of these weapons? The USA. Rendering the ban useless.
My GPS has the option for me to tell it that the 'route ahead is blocked', IE 100 yards, 500, etc....
The problem is that this is NOT a simple operation to do, it requires half a dozen selections to utilize. Not one I'd recommend on the fly, as opposed to pulling over and working on it.
And, of course, if you turn off onto the detour or something, it starts recalculating, and recalculating... Never giving you the time to tell it X road is unavailable at that spot.
Then again, in-dash GPS can be stupid as well. The car dad rented when we were visiting his parents would lock the GPS controls while the car was moving. Even though I was in the passenger seat working on it...
The problem isn't that the GPS is wrong, the problem is that the user is in error. In the Iceland case, the driver made a typo and wound up going to a similarly-named road 250 miles away. Had he entered the correct street name, he would likely have made it to his destination without a problem. I'm guessing the Belgium-Croatia case is similar.
One problem I've seen is that phone and small screen GPS sucks at providing you with the overall picture. Now, yes, I'm old school and grew up consulting actual maps, and regularly obtaining updated paper road maps. I would generally get one of those atlases that had a highway map for the whole USA, as well as a more detailed one for each state. I would then get updated maps on occasion for the specific state I was going to/traveling through.
Anyways, what I'm seeing here is a classic problem they're constantly trying to drill into the heads of students doing math or science work - the estimate. "Does my answer make any sense?". IE stuff like calculating the maximum separation between Earth & Mars and getting 30km. That makes no sense.
I see two options for sanity checking GPS - the easiest should be to look at the total length of the trip - if you're staying in town and it's telling you that the destination is 250 miles away, there's an issue. The other is looking at a map of the route the GPS is proposing. But that's difficult with a small screen.
If the pipeline provided benefits, they were overshadowed by other factors.
Just remember that all I said was that the pipeline was 'often' used as shelter or movement. You talk about the MRC overstating things - Some environmentalists predicted that the pipeline would drive the caribou to extinction(back when the pipeline was built). Hyperbole much?(not referring to you).
A thing about solar panels is that they cover far more area - the pipeline is basically about as wide as a two-lane highway. It's long, but very narrow. A solar plant would have panels all over providing shade. This might allow more like in the areas.
Speed Variance and Its Influence on Accidents. - Citation that variations in speed kill more than speed itself, that highway speeds tend to have more to do with design of the highway and not posted limit, and that as you move the speed limit signs away from the design speed, variance in driving speed and accident rates go up.
I thought that about carabou but info on it seems to be mixed on an ideological basis.
Except I was talking specifically about the effects of the pipeline. As your links state - there's many more factors than just that.
The pipeline didn't really affect them much at all. Certainly not negatively, on average.
You can't cite herd declines more than 40 years after the installation as the fault of the pipeline. Statistically speaking, pipelines are the least spill inclined of the common transport methods.
Also, creating a huge shaded area should create an interesting micro-climate underneath the power plant.
This. From my admittedly limited ecological studies, there's not a lot of life out in the 'high desert'. Instead, the life there tends to cling(relatively) to sheltered bits.
Increasing the amount of shelter could drastically increase the amount of life in the desert by providing more shelter. Much like how rather then disrupting and killing off wildlife, the trans-alaskan pipeline is often used as a travel lane and shelter by the caribou, moose, and such.
Sidebar: Any chance that was an actual experiment to document what would happen? I'm not saying it would be right to jeopardize people like that, but you have to know how the system will react.
Nope, the professional driver was just being a moron. The cars have extensive logging though, so they knew precisely what happened.
So far your "simple" scenario has yet to be validate by anybody, and so far all these tests require a driver in the seat ready to take controls.
From all the documentation about google cars I've seen, while a professional driver ready to take control is required, the self-driving car will continue to drive until the driver takes positive action to over-ride it.
That's actually how one of the accidents happened - the google car was braking to a stop, the pro disabled it and hit the gas into the back end of the car ahead of him. The car attempts to keep itself safe. Getting 'stuck' is a bigger problem than getting into an accident.
This bizarre model in which the car drives, except when it doesn't, and with no clear demarcation between is damned near impossible to make sense of.
If the car decides it's got no idea what to do, and it just says "you're in charge", and before you even know what's happening you're in an accident.. and the logs say "human was driving, his fault", you're screwed. Or, worse, someone builds in code which lies and just says "human was driving" 5 minute before any crash is triggered (so they can avoid liability).
Hell, they're already doing just the opposite. Remember the Hyundai superbowl commercial? Within a certain speed range the car will emergency brake itself to prevent a collision - and that's with a human driver at the wheel.
Given the VW scandal, I think that car companies are going to be under more intense scrutiny for a while. The only time I've heard about self-driving cars that will toss control to a driver were extreme-alpha builds, manned by professional drivers. Modern self-driving cars have the opposite problem - they're designed to stop safely if there's a problem, and not proceed if they don't understand what's going on.
Tossing control to a driver while traveling at 50+ mph moments before an accident isn't something any professional is going to allow. "Cattle car" is a good analogy. Worst case, it stops safely on the side of the road and buzzes for assistance. That's an acceptable failure mode.
How about ZERO inefficiency by just plugging your damn car in?
There's still loss from the cable, and the transformer that's in the charging unit - whether in the car or in the exterior charger. You can get rid of that transformer when you're using induction.
As for the danger, at the voltages and amps we're looking at, it actually IS dangerous if it wasn't for that said cables are very much NOT simple, containing sensors to limit voltage potential to what's needed to detect a connection. Something like 1V until it's done a handshake, then it can ramp up to 400V or more.
Counterpoint: The autobahn, with no speed limits for most of it and a lower accident rate. Also, note the 'studies have shown', IE actual study results trump your hypothesis.
You bust the aggressive little bitches for unsafe driving.
You are signing us all up for that bullshit with your hairbrained plan.
Note what I said: studies have shown. IE the real-world results of tests removing speed limit signs was fewer accidents. So you don't get to presume that 'outliers will cause more accidents'.
Matter of fact, you just pass some law about unsafe driving and let the cops worry about that, the outliers get busted even faster.
If anything I expressed was 'self driving cars render it all moot'. IE we don't have the accidents because people aren't driving(outside of race tracks and such).
Except for the credit card reader, unless everything is going to be free in La-La Land.
Well, outside of La-La land they can just use wireless billing or subscription services, you know?
Anyway, people (and entrepreneurs) will still want the adjacent shop to buy their booze and fags when they top up, so a few charging pillars wont make much difference.
Note how I said buses and taxis. Not vehicles that can be EVs spend that much time in parking lots. Also, on road charging.
Though as batteries keep getting cheaper such ideas become financially less feasible compared to just adding more batteries.
although as I said even a hard connection could be automated.
As I mentioned as well, remember Tesla's automated charger?
Yes, there's a few ways to do wireless charging. Given that in this context we're talking about inductive charging and that's what I was talking about(even though I didn't specify it) I'm not sure why you're bringing up the other ways.
When you're making a charge array as large as that for a wireless car, it's actually quite efficient over the relatively few inches from the charger to the car's receiver. So the losses aren't 'huge'.
Now, you're actually right about the additional batteries - when I last read about these ideas, EV batteries were running about double the expense per kWh, so minimizing them was a consideration.
As for gas and diesel powered buses - there's several problems with them: First, diesel has gotten a lot more expensive over the years, though it's currently in a valley. Electric could be cheaper(if not for battery expense). The second is pollution - the more combustion we can get out of the cities, the better. Third is maintenance - said buses are used enough to get quite expensive, EVs can actually be more durable.
Of course public transport is the best if it is cost effective and convenient and unfortunately I have yet to see or hear of a city where this is the case.
It wouldn't surprise me. There have been studies showing that removing speed limit signs actually improve safety as well, because people tend to drive at a safe speed. When weather is bad, people tend to still try to drive the speed limit. When weather is good, it actually increases the variation in speeds. And it's less speed that kills, it's variations in speed.
That being said, I don't know if the effects would stack - it might be better to have no speed limit AND the white line, or no white line with a speed limit, but having neither or both is less safe. Or it might be situational.
I just hope that self driving cars renders it all moot, though the mental processing involved is interesting.
At the scale they're doing induction charging, it's actually quite efficient. Part of it is that you don't need a separate transformer to get the voltage to the right level for the car. You're only loosing a percent or so for the systems they're examining.
Though it still does not explain why induction might be better than using a conventional dock, especially for an automated car.
Okay, have you seen tesla's automated charge connector? It's like something out of a bad horror movie.
Still, a list in no particular order: More resistant against vandals doesn't take up real estate with a charging station No need for a person to hook up the charger(or a horror movie snake-thing) faster connection no need to play with adapters no cables to trip over ability to embed charger at stop lights, bus stops(for electric buses), taxi stops(for taxis), and such for a 'quick top-off'. Might not matter for a Tesla type car, but for a electric bus? Might be the difference between getting through en entire day and having to swap out the batteries for a bus or taxi.
Slashdot Mirror
No: you want a design that stop instantly the moment you stop pressing the plug, not the other way around (in other words: a dead-man's switch).
I like the liquid thorium design - in the prototype plant they shut the reactor off for the night by turning the cooling system off.
How that worked is that the reactor vessel had a drain in it. The drain had a fan/cooler such that when they pumped the reaction mass into it(using a different heating system to melt it), the drain was cold enough to solidify the mass, plugging the drain. Turn the cooling system off, the drain plug heats up and liquifies(the vessel itself might heat up a little, but well within design tolerances). With the drain clear, the reaction mass drains out of the reactor into a sort of ice cube tray array that separated the mass into sub-critical amounts, where not enough heat is generated to keep the mass liquid, so the whole kit solidifies.
When the researchers came back in the morning, they'd fire up the heating system to re-melt the cubes and pump the mass back into the reactor. A cooling fan pointed at the drain would solidify the mass wanting to drain back to the trays. Once plugged, a critical mass could be built in the reactor vessel, and the operation of the reactor would resume.
What comes out will be, without any processing really, be valuable reactor fuel. With some processing it can be made into a lot of valuable things, including the reactor fuel.
You're still going to have to process it to get reactor fuel. The important thing is that it's the radioactivity that makes reprocessing used fuel rods expensive, because said radioactivity tends to contaminate things.
If you store the used rods in a reactor pool for ~30 years, then in an above ground cask for another 30-60, as you say, the radioactivity is a tiny fraction of what it used to be. That means that it doesn't contaminate things nearly as much, thus will be something like an order of magnitude easier/cheaper to reprocess. You stuff the non-useful radioactives, and other materials you can't be bothered to separate, into another cask.
Alternatively, it could also be used as a self contained system that would learn the best strategy for your normal commute, but then it would have no benefit on roads you haven't driven before.
I think you could cover 99% of my driving with less than 100 routes. Especially if I get into the habit of telling the car where I'm planning on going.
That's something of a question, isn't it? What does "meaningful human control" translate to? Does it mean that a human has to okay each weapon discharge? Does it mean that we aren't supposed to release a swarm of von neumann kill-bots with 'destroy everything' as a goal? What if we release them in an area with orders to kill any humans with weapons that don't have a valid IFF signal?
In addition, I've seen with UN weapon ban treaties that they're sometimes used as a 'we don't have them, so you shouldn't either' tool. Who's closest to these sorts of weapons? The USA. Who's NOT going to agree with any treaty limiting the effective use of these weapons? The USA. Rendering the ban useless.
My GPS has the option for me to tell it that the 'route ahead is blocked', IE 100 yards, 500, etc....
The problem is that this is NOT a simple operation to do, it requires half a dozen selections to utilize. Not one I'd recommend on the fly, as opposed to pulling over and working on it.
And, of course, if you turn off onto the detour or something, it starts recalculating, and recalculating... Never giving you the time to tell it X road is unavailable at that spot.
Then again, in-dash GPS can be stupid as well. The car dad rented when we were visiting his parents would lock the GPS controls while the car was moving. Even though I was in the passenger seat working on it...
The problem isn't that the GPS is wrong, the problem is that the user is in error. In the Iceland case, the driver made a typo and wound up going to a similarly-named road 250 miles away. Had he entered the correct street name, he would likely have made it to his destination without a problem. I'm guessing the Belgium-Croatia case is similar.
One problem I've seen is that phone and small screen GPS sucks at providing you with the overall picture. Now, yes, I'm old school and grew up consulting actual maps, and regularly obtaining updated paper road maps. I would generally get one of those atlases that had a highway map for the whole USA, as well as a more detailed one for each state. I would then get updated maps on occasion for the specific state I was going to/traveling through.
Anyways, what I'm seeing here is a classic problem they're constantly trying to drill into the heads of students doing math or science work - the estimate. "Does my answer make any sense?". IE stuff like calculating the maximum separation between Earth & Mars and getting 30km. That makes no sense.
I see two options for sanity checking GPS - the easiest should be to look at the total length of the trip - if you're staying in town and it's telling you that the destination is 250 miles away, there's an issue. The other is looking at a map of the route the GPS is proposing. But that's difficult with a small screen.
If the pipeline provided benefits, they were overshadowed by other factors.
Just remember that all I said was that the pipeline was 'often' used as shelter or movement. You talk about the MRC overstating things - Some environmentalists predicted that the pipeline would drive the caribou to extinction(back when the pipeline was built). Hyperbole much?(not referring to you).
A thing about solar panels is that they cover far more area - the pipeline is basically about as wide as a two-lane highway. It's long, but very narrow. A solar plant would have panels all over providing shade. This might allow more like in the areas.
You could have, you know, asked for citations?
Speed Variance and Its Influence on Accidents. - Citation that variations in speed kill more than speed itself, that highway speeds tend to have more to do with design of the highway and not posted limit, and that as you move the speed limit signs away from the design speed, variance in driving speed and accident rates go up.
Montana: No Speed Limit Safety Paradox Montana highways at safest without speed limits
Is Every Speed Limit Too Low? - again notes that changing the speed limits doesn't actually change the median speed people drive on the road.
I thought that about carabou but info on it seems to be mixed on an ideological basis.
Except I was talking specifically about the effects of the pipeline. As your links state - there's many more factors than just that.
The pipeline didn't really affect them much at all. Certainly not negatively, on average.
You can't cite herd declines more than 40 years after the installation as the fault of the pipeline. Statistically speaking, pipelines are the least spill inclined of the common transport methods.
Also, creating a huge shaded area should create an interesting micro-climate underneath the power plant.
This. From my admittedly limited ecological studies, there's not a lot of life out in the 'high desert'. Instead, the life there tends to cling(relatively) to sheltered bits.
Increasing the amount of shelter could drastically increase the amount of life in the desert by providing more shelter. Much like how rather then disrupting and killing off wildlife, the trans-alaskan pipeline is often used as a travel lane and shelter by the caribou, moose, and such.
Sidebar: Any chance that was an actual experiment to document what would happen? I'm not saying it would be right to jeopardize people like that, but you have to know how the system will react.
Nope, the professional driver was just being a moron. The cars have extensive logging though, so they knew precisely what happened.
So far your "simple" scenario has yet to be validate by anybody, and so far all these tests require a driver in the seat ready to take controls.
From all the documentation about google cars I've seen, while a professional driver ready to take control is required, the self-driving car will continue to drive until the driver takes positive action to over-ride it.
That's actually how one of the accidents happened - the google car was braking to a stop, the pro disabled it and hit the gas into the back end of the car ahead of him. The car attempts to keep itself safe. Getting 'stuck' is a bigger problem than getting into an accident.
This bizarre model in which the car drives, except when it doesn't, and with no clear demarcation between is damned near impossible to make sense of.
If the car decides it's got no idea what to do, and it just says "you're in charge", and before you even know what's happening you're in an accident .. and the logs say "human was driving, his fault", you're screwed. Or, worse, someone builds in code which lies and just says "human was driving" 5 minute before any crash is triggered (so they can avoid liability).
Hell, they're already doing just the opposite. Remember the Hyundai superbowl commercial? Within a certain speed range the car will emergency brake itself to prevent a collision - and that's with a human driver at the wheel.
Given the VW scandal, I think that car companies are going to be under more intense scrutiny for a while. The only time I've heard about self-driving cars that will toss control to a driver were extreme-alpha builds, manned by professional drivers. Modern self-driving cars have the opposite problem - they're designed to stop safely if there's a problem, and not proceed if they don't understand what's going on.
Tossing control to a driver while traveling at 50+ mph moments before an accident isn't something any professional is going to allow. "Cattle car" is a good analogy. Worst case, it stops safely on the side of the road and buzzes for assistance. That's an acceptable failure mode.
How about ZERO inefficiency by just plugging your damn car in?
There's still loss from the cable, and the transformer that's in the charging unit - whether in the car or in the exterior charger. You can get rid of that transformer when you're using induction.
As for the danger, at the voltages and amps we're looking at, it actually IS dangerous if it wasn't for that said cables are very much NOT simple, containing sensors to limit voltage potential to what's needed to detect a connection. Something like 1V until it's done a handshake, then it can ramp up to 400V or more.
heh. Not really - they're very efficient today, and would only be powered when there's a vehicle to charge on top of them.
That being said, it'd be cheaper to just put those types up in housing.
But with an automated bus/taxi fleet (or even a manned one), the vehicle that's running low on juice can be swapped out for a freshly charged one
Swapping means you need an extra bus, and they're expensive. You can do maintenance checks daily, not 'per charge'.
Rather than forklifting batteries, have a dedicated robot doing it that undoes the bolts and replaces the battery.
Counterpoint: The autobahn, with no speed limits for most of it and a lower accident rate. Also, note the 'studies have shown', IE actual study results trump your hypothesis.
You bust the aggressive little bitches for unsafe driving.
yet we're going to throw away all sorts of power as useless heat (which the world does not need!) just to solve your first-world convenience problems?
The systems aren't that less efficient. At those scales, induction charging is only a percent or two less efficient than a cable hook-up.
You are signing us all up for that bullshit with your hairbrained plan.
Note what I said: studies have shown. IE the real-world results of tests removing speed limit signs was fewer accidents. So you don't get to presume that 'outliers will cause more accidents'.
Matter of fact, you just pass some law about unsafe driving and let the cops worry about that, the outliers get busted even faster.
If anything I expressed was 'self driving cars render it all moot'. IE we don't have the accidents because people aren't driving(outside of race tracks and such).
IE a subscription service, right?
Except for the credit card reader, unless everything is going to be free in La-La Land.
Well, outside of La-La land they can just use wireless billing or subscription services, you know?
Anyway, people (and entrepreneurs) will still want the adjacent shop to buy their booze and fags when they top up, so a few charging pillars wont make much difference.
Note how I said buses and taxis. Not vehicles that can be EVs spend that much time in parking lots. Also, on road charging.
Though as batteries keep getting cheaper such ideas become financially less feasible compared to just adding more batteries.
although as I said even a hard connection could be automated.
As I mentioned as well, remember Tesla's automated charger?
Yes, there's a few ways to do wireless charging. Given that in this context we're talking about inductive charging and that's what I was talking about(even though I didn't specify it) I'm not sure why you're bringing up the other ways.
When you're making a charge array as large as that for a wireless car, it's actually quite efficient over the relatively few inches from the charger to the car's receiver. So the losses aren't 'huge'.
Now, you're actually right about the additional batteries - when I last read about these ideas, EV batteries were running about double the expense per kWh, so minimizing them was a consideration.
As for gas and diesel powered buses - there's several problems with them: First, diesel has gotten a lot more expensive over the years, though it's currently in a valley. Electric could be cheaper(if not for battery expense). The second is pollution - the more combustion we can get out of the cities, the better. Third is maintenance - said buses are used enough to get quite expensive, EVs can actually be more durable.
Of course public transport is the best if it is cost effective and convenient and unfortunately I have yet to see or hear of a city where this is the case.
Europe.
It wouldn't surprise me. There have been studies showing that removing speed limit signs actually improve safety as well, because people tend to drive at a safe speed. When weather is bad, people tend to still try to drive the speed limit. When weather is good, it actually increases the variation in speeds. And it's less speed that kills, it's variations in speed.
That being said, I don't know if the effects would stack - it might be better to have no speed limit AND the white line, or no white line with a speed limit, but having neither or both is less safe. Or it might be situational.
I just hope that self driving cars renders it all moot, though the mental processing involved is interesting.
At the scale they're doing induction charging, it's actually quite efficient. Part of it is that you don't need a separate transformer to get the voltage to the right level for the car. You're only loosing a percent or so for the systems they're examining.
Though it still does not explain why induction might be better than using a conventional dock, especially for an automated car.
Okay, have you seen tesla's automated charge connector? It's like something out of a bad horror movie.
Still, a list in no particular order:
More resistant against vandals
doesn't take up real estate with a charging station
No need for a person to hook up the charger(or a horror movie snake-thing)
faster connection
no need to play with adapters
no cables to trip over
ability to embed charger at stop lights, bus stops(for electric buses), taxi stops(for taxis), and such for a 'quick top-off'. Might not matter for a Tesla type car, but for a electric bus? Might be the difference between getting through en entire day and having to swap out the batteries for a bus or taxi.