you need to plug in as well, the solar part is purely to extend the life of the battery.
Like some of the proposed vehicles that put a panel up on the roof to run the AC? While not capable of keeping up with speeds approaching 40mph, much less the 65-75 I'd require for a standard commuter*, said solar panel could indeed provide a 'cripple charge' allowing you to creep somewhere where there's a power outlet. On the other hand, so couldn't a tow truck with a beefy alternator. Or a hefty deep cycle battery you 'jump' into the system.
And remember - I figured on covering the entire car with them when I made my area calculation. Cell placement wouldn't be optimal for power generation; you'd have to compromise to keep your windows usable, have decent aerodynamics, etc... Going paint on wouldn't get you any more surface area. You'd still be better putting the panels or paint up on your roof.
On to the paint itself - what's the efficiency? This site suggests 6%, with a maximum of 30% - which would be what I figured when doing my calculations. You see, I was being generous to the solar cells. Basically, by making the initial estimate generous, you determine whether the idea is worth a closer look.
Combining an EV with solar panels isn't normally going to be patent worthy. What would be worthy of a patent is if you came up with a new twist in the interfacing of the two. IE you designed a new charging system or some such. It would be 'engineering' in that you're actually working out the specifics and necessary design parameters.
How about i give you an idea off the top of my head...for a car that runs itself with almost no power source other then momentum.
One word: Flywheel. We're working on them. The issue is keeping the mass/weight down. If you drop the weight, you can compensate by increasing the rotation speed of the flywheel - 2X the velocity = 4X the energy. Thing is, interesting things happen if a flywheel breaks at 100k RPM. And by 'interesting', I mean 'explosive'. And at 100k rpm the flywheel is under a LOT of stress. It gets interesting(read: Expensive) trying to build a flywheel capable of lasting under those strains. When you're trying to replace the energy of a gas tank, even if you only need a third of the energy because your motor is 90+ percent efficient, you're talking about quite a bit of energy. At least gasoline is limited in it's burn rate to oxygen availability. A broken flywheel is quite happy to discharge all of it's energy at once, regardless of the situation. And you're looking at half a dozen to a dozen sticks of dynamite worth of energy.
The problem with comparing a car to a wound watch is that a watch only needs to move two or three hands and maybe a few date wheels. The energy demands are small. A car, on the other hand has a number of spots where energy is lost. You have engine losses, accessory losses(using your headlights, for example, increases the drag the alternator puts on the engine), rolling friction(train tracks have less friction, thus lower fuel consumption per mile), and air drag friction. It takes a significant amount of energy to satisfy all these demands and keep the car moving. Internal combustion engines didn't become dominant because they're efficient, they became dominant because their fuel source is relatively, both incredibly dense and cheap. Around 40mph, air friction becomes the biggest drain.
we could develop efficiency in establishing the system needed to run 12 alternators...or maybe even 20 alternators on the same car, using these gears and lever methods...so now you have a self powered car per say, with a battery that charges as you move....the more you move the more energy you reproduce.
Ohhhhkaaay... This is something of a head banger. You're basically talking about a perpetual motion machine, and they don't w
The engineering degree wouldn't come out to play until actual engineering made an appearance.
Sigh...
Somebody piped up that they'd been working on a solar-powered car out at the local airport.
1. An EV takes about 1kwh to go 1 mile. 2. The sun's power on the surface is ~ 1.4kW/m^2. 3. Average footprint of a car: Honda Civic: 4.5Mx1.4M, surface area: 6.5m^2, being generous. No loss for windows, the car's covered in solar panels, etc... Math: 40mph@1kwh/mile = 40kwh/hour = 40 kw needed. 6.5m^2*1.4kW/m^2 = 9kW, assuming 100% effective solar cells. More likely 1.8-2.7kw assuming real world 20-30% efficient cells.
So the solar cells are producing ~6% of the power necessary for the car. Even with batteries, you'd need 16-17 hours of sun for every hour of operation. You'd be better off putting the panels on your roof and feeding to the grid then using the grid to charge your electric car, than to risk the expensive and fragile cells in an accident.
As for the $5 of 'fuel' to get it started, I have no clue. What kind of fuel is it? Heck, I don't even know if they're proposing using electric solar panels. It could be a solar steam engine for all I know, but the energy requirements are the same, and a solar steam engine would present efficiency problems of it's own, especially on a mobile platform(basically, solar steam scales up well, it's best used for huge, static, power production plants).
Do you agree with my math? Is there something missing? Competition solar 'cars' work by weighing less than go carts, operating in a desert during the summer(and hoping for no clouds), having low maximum speeds, extreme profiling, limited to the driver, no cargo room, little to no considerations for safety in a crash. Which wouldn't work for a 'family commuter'.
Do you have a specific proposal in that page you'd like for me to comment on? Keep in mind on any 'patent suppression' that patents expire, and to get one requires people to register that idea. After the expiration, anybody can take the patent documentation to build their own device.
Read it, don't believe it for a number of reasons.
1. Vague 2. Imprecise estimates 3. Mentions stuff that violates the laws of thermodynamics - specifically with the electric motors. Alternators cost drag to get their power, and because they're not 100% efficient, said drag is greater than the power gained. Basically, regenerative braking works because you're getting rid of the energy tied into momentum anyways. You don't want to run 4 alternators to charge the battery when you're cruising. Or the system was an early case of regenerative braking, and since it was invented before I was born, either it doesn't work or at least isn't economical. Or is already implimented in a modernized way, and therefore 4. 'Batteries acting as capacitors' - WTF? 5. Hydrogen power - we've known how to turn water into O2 and H2 for centuries. Efficiency - that's a problem. Oh, and most of the water schemes are actually hydrogen schemes. 6. Steam - I'm a fan of the Doble steam car. Great ideas, just, well, efficiencies - cost and mpg are on a razor edge.
As jcnnghm said, you need to adjust the tinfoil. And make sure it's not lead laced foil from China.
1. Water doesn't compress. You're probably thinking about compressed air 2. Compressed air is a known science. After all, we've been running tools off it since before we had good electric motors. 3. Energy density and efficiency, sadly, are lacking. Both in compressing in the first place and extracting it later. 4. A container capable of holding enough air volume for significant travel is huge, heavy, and expensive. Also dangerous in an accident. 5. Patents are out in the open. Buying and burying the patent would only buy 7 years before it's open sourced and anybody can build one. 6. Compressed air wouldn't really have a 'mpg' that corresponds to gasoline or diesel usage. Same with electric vehicles. They're so different that any comparison that depends on 'equivalent to X mpg' are so abstract to be almost useless. What do you go by? Energy? 90% efficient electric vehiles don't need that much energy. Cost? The battery depreciation raises costs substantially if it's included. What do you pay per gallon of gasoline, and what do you pay per kwh?
If any project was threatening to come in 5 years late at double in cost, should money just be thrown at it?
For most projects? Heck no. But this is a research project - and it isn't like a computer game where you need X research points for that fancy new tech. You don't really know how much it's going to end up costing; you can't even be sure it'll work. You can only throw resources at it(scientists, equipment, money, time) and hope to get something useful back.
All you can do is make your best guess and hope you're right. In many cases, coming in at double the cost is more normal than coming in on budget - after all, we're doing something that hasn't been done before.
They probably HAVE done the steps you mention - but that costs money as well, and it ends up being cheaper to only partially step back and rebuild.
If I'm building a skyscraper I'd expect it to be within 10% of budget when done. If I'm building the first solar powered skyscraper robotic greenhouse with pollution filtering equipment, if I come in within 50% of original cost estimates it's an excuse for a party.
There's 'agressive' funding, and there's just getting stupid. One of the other posters mentioned a non-tokamak design that currently has a flaw - it required too much computing power for the necessary modeling until recently.
There's a lot of non-nuclear research going on that can solve some/many of the problems we currently have with fusion.
But does that make it a bad deal? Even if you have to scale up by three times to get the equivalent energy, is the cost (at scale) going to be substantially higher than that of nuclear? (When you take into account the government-subsidized costs of waste-management, fuel re-processing, security, ensuring non-proliferation when developing countries seek to implement it, etc.) I'm asking this as a question--- it's not rhetorical.
In the USA waste disposal isn't subsidized - Nuclear power plant operators, by law, pay a tarrif per kwh in exchange for the government disposing of it. To date, there are lawsuits going on because the government hasn't. Instead the nuclear power plant operators have had to figure out their own storage solutions to date.
Bring in actual recycling and the amount of stuff needing storage goes down by at least a factor of 10, and the time it needs to be stored by a factor more like 100. At those waste levels your typical nuclear plant site can store waste indefinitly.
For security and safety, well, NK now has 'the bomb', how much longer will non-proliferation be a factor when everybody who wants the bomb has it? Security from terrorists? There are far easier targets than even a lightly guarded nuke plant - they're designed to make getting to the materials difficult, after all. They're more likely to get themselves killed trying.
This is a big deal. But my guess is that we're overestimating the base load power requirement.
The problem is that Wind&Solar aren't demand based systems either. Solar may factor well with air conditioning, but what if a substantial portion of the population paint their roof white* and drive electric cars in a decade? Heck, install a 500 gallon or so tank**, then use the water in it to provide heat/cooling in a load leveling fashion.
While nuclear plants are generally base load in the USA due to them having the cheapest marginal cost per kwh, they are capable of working in a load following mode where they can economically produce between 40-70% of their maximum capacity
[quote]Even with a large nuclear component, it seems to me that industry is going to have to move to a more flexible "operate when power is cheapest" model anyway. [/quote]
Industry already does this. But you have to remember the large capital costs for equipment and manpower requirements - they might like it best when power is cheap, but lose money slower by staying operating even when the price spikes.
*Among other energy efficiency improvements that reduce the need for and energy costs of air conditioning. **Properly sized for the actual heating demand.
My little family has cut our carbon footprint by about 70 percent over the past 10 years, just by doing little sensible things.
The problem is that even if the entire developed world reduced their footprint 70%, the raising of the third world to the same standard of living, and therefore energy use, swamps your savings.
IE, you going from 1.0 to.3 is far outweighed by the 10 chinese going from.1 to.3
For this we need more than conservation - we need to address the generation side as well.
I was seriously disappointed with ITER when I read it wasn't even designed to have the option to install power generation equipment.
From my understanding of the technology, fusion should scale well. Double the dimensions, use 4 times as much energy to get the fusion reaction going, but get 8 times the energy back.
If building a *true* plant costs a trillion dollars or euros, fine, but it'd better produce enough power that 2-3 of them can power the entire United States or Europe. I've estimated before that 400 new 1 GW fission plants could replace every existing nuclear/coal plant, making our electricity more or less carbon neutral. Those 400 plants would cost ~$800-1200 Billion. Economy of scale might make it approach the low end more.
I say 2 because you need redundancy. 400 nuclear plants would have plenty of redundancy. Heck, with some agreements and a bunch of superconducting cables, one in Canada, Mexico, and the USA should provide enough power.
Lacking cable and unwilling to pay for it, I'm currently watching airbender on DVD from netflix.
First there's the FBI warning. For like 30 seconds. Then there's no less than 6 segments of spongebob advertising that I can't skip to go to the menu to play the more interesting, slightly more adult anime.
If I'd downloaded it off the internet, it would have been free and advertising free.
What advantage does getting the legal copy give me again?
The only problem that I think this would help is in catching various criminals, of US citizenship or not, attempting to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Plain old illegal? Who cares. One that's committed murder - we care.
Due to custody battles - it now takes BOTH parent's permission for minors to travel overseas - even if the other parent isn't custodial.
In the US police _can_ arrest you without good reason, and then simply charge you with resisting arrest which is natural and reasonable behaviour for most people.
They sometimes try; it normally gets thrown out in court if there's not reasonable cause to believe that it was actual, serious resisting arrest. That's supposed to take serious fighting/evading the police, not simply failing to obey an officer's every command instantly.
Besides, isn't there are term for a non-arrest arrest in Britain? I've heard there's a not-really stated policy to do this to as many people as possible to get them into the DNA database.
Very good point. I'd also say that this caste type system is also present in India and other areas.
Get a true caste believer and they'd have no problems telling you that the job may be essential and difficult; but it's still unclean, and the caste to do those jobs are a necessary evil, and they should keep doing it so the clean types don't have to.
BUT, there's legal assumptions as long as there's reason to believe the warrant's valid.
IE You challenge it in court, not on site.
Same with false arrest - sure, the arrest can be ruled illegal later, along with various penalties and payments, but you're still going to be screwed if you resist arrest.
I think it's along the 'two wrongs don't make a right', and that you don't want people resisting arrest/warrants left and right on the basis that they're invalid - before their invalidity is proved in court.
Heck, this ruling is still subject to appeal - overruling at higher courts is still possible.
Well, the fewer miles you drive, the less gas you're using, whether the vehicle gets 5 mpg or 50.
If you only use it a few times a year to it's fullest, then it might be better to rent, but you're back to the fact that you already have this vehicle, and it's cheaper to use it vs buying a new one.
Honestly enough, I forgot 1 important context point - You do this figuring when you'd be buying a new vehicle anyways.
I fully admit people's situations are different. That's why I list my conditions, along with the occasional note of what happens if the condition changes. Your heavy vehicle gets even less milage than I assume? Commuter makes more sense. Use it less often? At some point it's cheaper to rent a truck when you need it. Drive more when you don't need it? Commuter makes more sense. Get a discount on insurance for putting low miles on the expensive heavy vehicle each year? Oil changes/maintenance substantially more expensive? So many options...
Did I ever goof... I apologize, somehow I managed to skim over all the imperial notations.
Those aren't bad looking cars, and I wouldn't mind having one, though I think the Renault looks a bit light.
I tried driving a couple of 46mpg cars back last year, but couldn't stand them, the engine whined way too much at highway speeds(most of my driving).
I'd LOVE to see more diesel vehicles over here, unfortuantly our emissions standards weighting makes them more difficult to produce/import, and for a while diesel spiked MUCH higher than gasoline. Oh, and there's the whole mess from back when I was a kid about diesel cars not being powerful/reliable.
Very true. This is why confined areas with relatively large nitrogen gas tanks require all sorts of sensors - it's something that takes out a scientist/technician a year.
Reading about it, you can lose consiousness even faster with nitrogen, and without even noticing. It's faster than drowning because you don't notice and keep breathing - and the pure(r) nitrogen atmosphere actually pulls the oxygen out of your blood along with the CO2.
Hmm... Because they're zippy, fun cars? At least the minis. Never driven/ridden in a smart.
Still - It shows that there is a market for those vehicles. Now consider the ratio between micros, sedans, SUVs, vans, and pickups.
I'm willing to bet that there are still a lot more SUVs and pickups on the roads than micros.
As the price of gas goes up, people shift away from the gas guzzelers. I think that's a better solution than more regulation, even though I WANT more economical vehicles, I often can't make the math add up.
Personally, I'd prefer a hatchback diesel, but couldn't find any last time I went looking.
What it is doing is giving us a small, easy to park "right sized" vehicle to serve our around town driving. It looks more economical than going everywhere in the truck, but it isn't.
I've done this math multiple times, and I have to agree. I generally post it whenever somebody goes on about people who are driving trucks/SUVs empty. My math has it generally being more economical if:
1. You're using the features of the truck/suv at least 2 days a month. This is versus renting a suitable vehicle those days, with a bit of penalty on renting for 'hassle'. 2. I generally use 20 vs 30 mpg, for 40 I increase the cost of the 'commuter' substantially because you're looking at a hybrid. 3. I assume 15k miles a year. Drive more on the commuter, and it makes sense sooner. 4. I normally consider maintenance a wash, and ignore completely registration and insurance. When I do figure on it, I'll use $600/year.
Unless you can get a used vehicle unusually cheap, and such vehicles often end up costing due to reliability or repairs, and drive a LOT I just can't make the math work.
However, the big question to me is, how do the automakers control which vehicles are sold? They can offer 18 different models that run at 50 mpg, and 1 model that runs at 30, and there's nothing saying that everybody won't run out and buy the 30 mpg car.
Same method they use now - small cars are generally the loss-leaders now while the 'big profits' were in the SUVs - they subsidize the cost of the small cars in order to make them cheap enough that people buy them, improving their fleet mpg in order to meet requirements.
It doesn't actually cost that much to build a larger vehicle over a small one - you still have to have a steering wheel, generally people want a stereo, and a suspension system capable of carrying twice the weight isn't twice the cost.
I'm not a particularly big fan of taxing everything, but that just might be a better way than pushing through regulations like this. Slowly raising the gas prices will gently change the consumer preference and the car makers will have to adapt, vs the hard top-down approach like this.
Not to mention that it'll avoid problems like SUVs - where the increasing cost and lack of features due to mileage and emission requirements that applied only to cars actually drove people to buying mileage figure exempt SUVs and trucks.
The market will find loopholes to regulations. Economic conditions, like gas is expensive? People will find ways to conserve, often in even better ways.
Personally, I'm just the opposite. As I'm browsing through something, I tend to open up new tabs for stuff that's interesting, because I don't want to interupt my reading of the current page. Then I go through the tabs, closing them when I'm finished.
Then there's the slashdot thing - where I use a new tab to post a comment without losing my place on the thread.
I have to say that with my widescreen monitor that I now have more 'freespace' on the sides than the top or bottom any more.
The monitor is so wide that it's more effort to read auto linebreaked text most of the time, and on stuff that's been manually line breaked, it's normally to a width a third or even a quarter the monitor's width.
A: A GPU had, until fairly recently, only a 1 high slot. Even with 2 slots, it has less room for cooling than the CPU, where weight actually matters more than size. B: Transistors. The site dates from 2006, but mentions that my core 2 duo has ~291 million transistors. A G800GTX has 680M, and my research shows that the 4890 this review is about has 959 Million. Even a Core 2 Quad is 582M, and we know they cost a bit more for a given speed rating. A GT200 is listed as 1.4 Million.
Slashdot Mirror
you need to plug in as well, the solar part is purely to extend the life of the battery.
Like some of the proposed vehicles that put a panel up on the roof to run the AC? While not capable of keeping up with speeds approaching 40mph, much less the 65-75 I'd require for a standard commuter*, said solar panel could indeed provide a 'cripple charge' allowing you to creep somewhere where there's a power outlet. On the other hand, so couldn't a tow truck with a beefy alternator. Or a hefty deep cycle battery you 'jump' into the system.
And remember - I figured on covering the entire car with them when I made my area calculation. Cell placement wouldn't be optimal for power generation; you'd have to compromise to keep your windows usable, have decent aerodynamics, etc... Going paint on wouldn't get you any more surface area. You'd still be better putting the panels or paint up on your roof.
On to the paint itself - what's the efficiency? This site suggests 6%, with a maximum of 30% - which would be what I figured when doing my calculations. You see, I was being generous to the solar cells. Basically, by making the initial estimate generous, you determine whether the idea is worth a closer look.
Combining an EV with solar panels isn't normally going to be patent worthy. What would be worthy of a patent is if you came up with a new twist in the interfacing of the two. IE you designed a new charging system or some such. It would be 'engineering' in that you're actually working out the specifics and necessary design parameters.
How about i give you an idea off the top of my head...for a car that runs itself with almost no power source other then momentum.
One word: Flywheel. We're working on them. The issue is keeping the mass/weight down. If you drop the weight, you can compensate by increasing the rotation speed of the flywheel - 2X the velocity = 4X the energy. Thing is, interesting things happen if a flywheel breaks at 100k RPM. And by 'interesting', I mean 'explosive'. And at 100k rpm the flywheel is under a LOT of stress. It gets interesting(read: Expensive) trying to build a flywheel capable of lasting under those strains. When you're trying to replace the energy of a gas tank, even if you only need a third of the energy because your motor is 90+ percent efficient, you're talking about quite a bit of energy. At least gasoline is limited in it's burn rate to oxygen availability. A broken flywheel is quite happy to discharge all of it's energy at once, regardless of the situation. And you're looking at half a dozen to a dozen sticks of dynamite worth of energy.
The problem with comparing a car to a wound watch is that a watch only needs to move two or three hands and maybe a few date wheels. The energy demands are small. A car, on the other hand has a number of spots where energy is lost. You have engine losses, accessory losses(using your headlights, for example, increases the drag the alternator puts on the engine), rolling friction(train tracks have less friction, thus lower fuel consumption per mile), and air drag friction. It takes a significant amount of energy to satisfy all these demands and keep the car moving. Internal combustion engines didn't become dominant because they're efficient, they became dominant because their fuel source is relatively, both incredibly dense and cheap. Around 40mph, air friction becomes the biggest drain.
we could develop efficiency in establishing the system needed to run 12 alternators...or maybe even 20 alternators on the same car, using these gears and lever methods...so now you have a self powered car per say, with a battery that charges as you move....the more you move the more energy you reproduce.
Ohhhhkaaay... This is something of a head banger. You're basically talking about a perpetual motion machine, and they don't w
Science degree, actually.
The engineering degree wouldn't come out to play until actual engineering made an appearance.
Sigh...
Somebody piped up that they'd been working on a solar-powered car out at the local airport.
1. An EV takes about 1kwh to go 1 mile.
2. The sun's power on the surface is ~ 1.4kW/m^2.
3. Average footprint of a car: Honda Civic: 4.5Mx1.4M, surface area: 6.5m^2, being generous. No loss for windows, the car's covered in solar panels, etc...
Math:
40mph@1kwh/mile = 40kwh/hour = 40 kw needed.
6.5m^2*1.4kW/m^2 = 9kW, assuming 100% effective solar cells. More likely 1.8-2.7kw assuming real world 20-30% efficient cells.
So the solar cells are producing ~6% of the power necessary for the car. Even with batteries, you'd need 16-17 hours of sun for every hour of operation. You'd be better off putting the panels on your roof and feeding to the grid then using the grid to charge your electric car, than to risk the expensive and fragile cells in an accident.
As for the $5 of 'fuel' to get it started, I have no clue. What kind of fuel is it? Heck, I don't even know if they're proposing using electric solar panels. It could be a solar steam engine for all I know, but the energy requirements are the same, and a solar steam engine would present efficiency problems of it's own, especially on a mobile platform(basically, solar steam scales up well, it's best used for huge, static, power production plants).
Do you agree with my math? Is there something missing? Competition solar 'cars' work by weighing less than go carts, operating in a desert during the summer(and hoping for no clouds), having low maximum speeds, extreme profiling, limited to the driver, no cargo room, little to no considerations for safety in a crash. Which wouldn't work for a 'family commuter'.
Do you have a specific proposal in that page you'd like for me to comment on? Keep in mind on any 'patent suppression' that patents expire, and to get one requires people to register that idea. After the expiration, anybody can take the patent documentation to build their own device.
would argue that anime is defined by the art style
If you go by art style, Avatar is closer to Anime than many Animes, as defined as 'cartoon from Japan'.
It's so heavily influenced that I'd consider it a hybrid.
Anyways, I support supporting the artists; it's WHY I have a netflix account, why I buy books and DVDs, etc...
Still, when DRM or other stupid decisions makes the real version more annoying than the pirated version, I start asking myself why I'm buying it...
Do you really want a fairly ethical person like myself asking this? Because if I'm questioning, others are already pirating.
Read it, don't believe it for a number of reasons.
1. Vague
2. Imprecise estimates
3. Mentions stuff that violates the laws of thermodynamics - specifically with the electric motors. Alternators cost drag to get their power, and because they're not 100% efficient, said drag is greater than the power gained. Basically, regenerative braking works because you're getting rid of the energy tied into momentum anyways. You don't want to run 4 alternators to charge the battery when you're cruising. Or the system was an early case of regenerative braking, and since it was invented before I was born, either it doesn't work or at least isn't economical. Or is already implimented in a modernized way, and therefore
4. 'Batteries acting as capacitors' - WTF?
5. Hydrogen power - we've known how to turn water into O2 and H2 for centuries. Efficiency - that's a problem. Oh, and most of the water schemes are actually hydrogen schemes.
6. Steam - I'm a fan of the Doble steam car. Great ideas, just, well, efficiencies - cost and mpg are on a razor edge.
Need I go on?
As jcnnghm said, you need to adjust the tinfoil. And make sure it's not lead laced foil from China.
1. Water doesn't compress. You're probably thinking about compressed air
2. Compressed air is a known science. After all, we've been running tools off it since before we had good electric motors.
3. Energy density and efficiency, sadly, are lacking. Both in compressing in the first place and extracting it later.
4. A container capable of holding enough air volume for significant travel is huge, heavy, and expensive. Also dangerous in an accident.
5. Patents are out in the open. Buying and burying the patent would only buy 7 years before it's open sourced and anybody can build one.
6. Compressed air wouldn't really have a 'mpg' that corresponds to gasoline or diesel usage. Same with electric vehicles. They're so different that any comparison that depends on 'equivalent to X mpg' are so abstract to be almost useless. What do you go by? Energy? 90% efficient electric vehiles don't need that much energy. Cost? The battery depreciation raises costs substantially if it's included. What do you pay per gallon of gasoline, and what do you pay per kwh?
If any project was threatening to come in 5 years late at double in cost, should money just be thrown at it?
For most projects? Heck no. But this is a research project - and it isn't like a computer game where you need X research points for that fancy new tech. You don't really know how much it's going to end up costing; you can't even be sure it'll work. You can only throw resources at it(scientists, equipment, money, time) and hope to get something useful back.
All you can do is make your best guess and hope you're right. In many cases, coming in at double the cost is more normal than coming in on budget - after all, we're doing something that hasn't been done before.
They probably HAVE done the steps you mention - but that costs money as well, and it ends up being cheaper to only partially step back and rebuild.
If I'm building a skyscraper I'd expect it to be within 10% of budget when done. If I'm building the first solar powered skyscraper robotic greenhouse with pollution filtering equipment, if I come in within 50% of original cost estimates it's an excuse for a party.
There's 'agressive' funding, and there's just getting stupid. One of the other posters mentioned a non-tokamak design that currently has a flaw - it required too much computing power for the necessary modeling until recently.
There's a lot of non-nuclear research going on that can solve some/many of the problems we currently have with fusion.
But does that make it a bad deal? Even if you have to scale up by three times to get the equivalent energy, is the cost (at scale) going to be substantially higher than that of nuclear? (When you take into account the government-subsidized costs of waste-management, fuel re-processing, security, ensuring non-proliferation when developing countries seek to implement it, etc.) I'm asking this as a question--- it's not rhetorical.
In the USA waste disposal isn't subsidized - Nuclear power plant operators, by law, pay a tarrif per kwh in exchange for the government disposing of it. To date, there are lawsuits going on because the government hasn't. Instead the nuclear power plant operators have had to figure out their own storage solutions to date.
Bring in actual recycling and the amount of stuff needing storage goes down by at least a factor of 10, and the time it needs to be stored by a factor more like 100. At those waste levels your typical nuclear plant site can store waste indefinitly.
For security and safety, well, NK now has 'the bomb', how much longer will non-proliferation be a factor when everybody who wants the bomb has it? Security from terrorists? There are far easier targets than even a lightly guarded nuke plant - they're designed to make getting to the materials difficult, after all. They're more likely to get themselves killed trying.
This is a big deal. But my guess is that we're overestimating the base load power requirement.
The problem is that Wind&Solar aren't demand based systems either. Solar may factor well with air conditioning, but what if a substantial portion of the population paint their roof white* and drive electric cars in a decade? Heck, install a 500 gallon or so tank**, then use the water in it to provide heat/cooling in a load leveling fashion.
While nuclear plants are generally base load in the USA due to them having the cheapest marginal cost per kwh, they are capable of working in a load following mode where they can economically produce between 40-70% of their maximum capacity
[quote]Even with a large nuclear component, it seems to me that industry is going to have to move to a more flexible "operate when power is cheapest" model anyway. [/quote]
Industry already does this. But you have to remember the large capital costs for equipment and manpower requirements - they might like it best when power is cheap, but lose money slower by staying operating even when the price spikes.
*Among other energy efficiency improvements that reduce the need for and energy costs of air conditioning.
**Properly sized for the actual heating demand.
My little family has cut our carbon footprint by about 70 percent over the past 10 years, just by doing little sensible things.
The problem is that even if the entire developed world reduced their footprint 70%, the raising of the third world to the same standard of living, and therefore energy use, swamps your savings.
IE, you going from 1.0 to .3 is far outweighed by the 10 chinese going from .1 to .3
For this we need more than conservation - we need to address the generation side as well.
I was seriously disappointed with ITER when I read it wasn't even designed to have the option to install power generation equipment.
From my understanding of the technology, fusion should scale well. Double the dimensions, use 4 times as much energy to get the fusion reaction going, but get 8 times the energy back.
If building a *true* plant costs a trillion dollars or euros, fine, but it'd better produce enough power that 2-3 of them can power the entire United States or Europe. I've estimated before that 400 new 1 GW fission plants could replace every existing nuclear/coal plant, making our electricity more or less carbon neutral. Those 400 plants would cost ~$800-1200 Billion. Economy of scale might make it approach the low end more.
I say 2 because you need redundancy. 400 nuclear plants would have plenty of redundancy. Heck, with some agreements and a bunch of superconducting cables, one in Canada, Mexico, and the USA should provide enough power.
Lacking cable and unwilling to pay for it, I'm currently watching airbender on DVD from netflix.
First there's the FBI warning. For like 30 seconds. Then there's no less than 6 segments of spongebob advertising that I can't skip to go to the menu to play the more interesting, slightly more adult anime.
If I'd downloaded it off the internet, it would have been free and advertising free.
What advantage does getting the legal copy give me again?
Illegal immigrants - who really cares?
The only problem that I think this would help is in catching various criminals, of US citizenship or not, attempting to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Plain old illegal? Who cares. One that's committed murder - we care.
Due to custody battles - it now takes BOTH parent's permission for minors to travel overseas - even if the other parent isn't custodial.
In the US police _can_ arrest you without good reason, and then simply charge you with resisting arrest which is natural and reasonable behaviour for most people.
They sometimes try; it normally gets thrown out in court if there's not reasonable cause to believe that it was actual, serious resisting arrest. That's supposed to take serious fighting/evading the police, not simply failing to obey an officer's every command instantly.
Besides, isn't there are term for a non-arrest arrest in Britain? I've heard there's a not-really stated policy to do this to as many people as possible to get them into the DNA database.
Very good point. I'd also say that this caste type system is also present in India and other areas.
Get a true caste believer and they'd have no problems telling you that the job may be essential and difficult; but it's still unclean, and the caste to do those jobs are a necessary evil, and they should keep doing it so the clean types don't have to.
BUT, there's legal assumptions as long as there's reason to believe the warrant's valid.
IE You challenge it in court, not on site.
Same with false arrest - sure, the arrest can be ruled illegal later, along with various penalties and payments, but you're still going to be screwed if you resist arrest.
I think it's along the 'two wrongs don't make a right', and that you don't want people resisting arrest/warrants left and right on the basis that they're invalid - before their invalidity is proved in court.
Heck, this ruling is still subject to appeal - overruling at higher courts is still possible.
Well, the fewer miles you drive, the less gas you're using, whether the vehicle gets 5 mpg or 50.
If you only use it a few times a year to it's fullest, then it might be better to rent, but you're back to the fact that you already have this vehicle, and it's cheaper to use it vs buying a new one.
Honestly enough, I forgot 1 important context point - You do this figuring when you'd be buying a new vehicle anyways.
I fully admit people's situations are different. That's why I list my conditions, along with the occasional note of what happens if the condition changes. Your heavy vehicle gets even less milage than I assume? Commuter makes more sense. Use it less often? At some point it's cheaper to rent a truck when you need it. Drive more when you don't need it? Commuter makes more sense. Get a discount on insurance for putting low miles on the expensive heavy vehicle each year? Oil changes/maintenance substantially more expensive? So many options...
Did I ever goof... I apologize, somehow I managed to skim over all the imperial notations.
Those aren't bad looking cars, and I wouldn't mind having one, though I think the Renault looks a bit light.
I tried driving a couple of 46mpg cars back last year, but couldn't stand them, the engine whined way too much at highway speeds(most of my driving).
I'd LOVE to see more diesel vehicles over here, unfortuantly our emissions standards weighting makes them more difficult to produce/import, and for a while diesel spiked MUCH higher than gasoline. Oh, and there's the whole mess from back when I was a kid about diesel cars not being powerful/reliable.
Very true. This is why confined areas with relatively large nitrogen gas tanks require all sorts of sensors - it's something that takes out a scientist/technician a year.
Reading about it, you can lose consiousness even faster with nitrogen, and without even noticing. It's faster than drowning because you don't notice and keep breathing - and the pure(r) nitrogen atmosphere actually pulls the oxygen out of your blood along with the CO2.
Hmm... Because they're zippy, fun cars? At least the minis. Never driven/ridden in a smart.
Still - It shows that there is a market for those vehicles. Now consider the ratio between micros, sedans, SUVs, vans, and pickups.
I'm willing to bet that there are still a lot more SUVs and pickups on the roads than micros.
As the price of gas goes up, people shift away from the gas guzzelers. I think that's a better solution than more regulation, even though I WANT more economical vehicles, I often can't make the math add up.
Personally, I'd prefer a hatchback diesel, but couldn't find any last time I went looking.
What it is doing is giving us a small, easy to park "right sized" vehicle to serve our around town driving. It looks more economical than going everywhere in the truck, but it isn't.
I've done this math multiple times, and I have to agree. I generally post it whenever somebody goes on about people who are driving trucks/SUVs empty. My math has it generally being more economical if:
1. You're using the features of the truck/suv at least 2 days a month. This is versus renting a suitable vehicle those days, with a bit of penalty on renting for 'hassle'.
2. I generally use 20 vs 30 mpg, for 40 I increase the cost of the 'commuter' substantially because you're looking at a hybrid.
3. I assume 15k miles a year. Drive more on the commuter, and it makes sense sooner.
4. I normally consider maintenance a wash, and ignore completely registration and insurance. When I do figure on it, I'll use $600/year.
Unless you can get a used vehicle unusually cheap, and such vehicles often end up costing due to reliability or repairs, and drive a LOT I just can't make the math work.
However, the big question to me is, how do the automakers control which vehicles are sold? They can offer 18 different models that run at 50 mpg, and 1 model that runs at 30, and there's nothing saying that everybody won't run out and buy the 30 mpg car.
Same method they use now - small cars are generally the loss-leaders now while the 'big profits' were in the SUVs - they subsidize the cost of the small cars in order to make them cheap enough that people buy them, improving their fleet mpg in order to meet requirements.
It doesn't actually cost that much to build a larger vehicle over a small one - you still have to have a steering wheel, generally people want a stereo, and a suspension system capable of carrying twice the weight isn't twice the cost.
As a European (British, but I consider it a region of Europe), I find it strange that 42mpg seems so draconian.
First:
US Gallon: 3.785 liters
British Gallon: 4.546 L
You have 20% more gasoline in that gallon than we do.
So a US 30mpg car becomes a 36mpg car in your terms. The 42mpg requirement, 50mpg average for the fleet.
So your Octavia might be below the new requirements, requiring a vehicle like your wife's to lift up the average.
Make a bit more sense now?
I'm not a particularly big fan of taxing everything, but that just might be a better way than pushing through regulations like this. Slowly raising the gas prices will gently change the consumer preference and the car makers will have to adapt, vs the hard top-down approach like this.
Not to mention that it'll avoid problems like SUVs - where the increasing cost and lack of features due to mileage and emission requirements that applied only to cars actually drove people to buying mileage figure exempt SUVs and trucks.
The market will find loopholes to regulations. Economic conditions, like gas is expensive? People will find ways to conserve, often in even better ways.
Personally, I'm just the opposite. As I'm browsing through something, I tend to open up new tabs for stuff that's interesting, because I don't want to interupt my reading of the current page. Then I go through the tabs, closing them when I'm finished.
Then there's the slashdot thing - where I use a new tab to post a comment without losing my place on the thread.
I have to say that with my widescreen monitor that I now have more 'freespace' on the sides than the top or bottom any more.
The monitor is so wide that it's more effort to read auto linebreaked text most of the time, and on stuff that's been manually line breaked, it's normally to a width a third or even a quarter the monitor's width.
When I'm playing games, of course, I don't care.
This site suggests a couple possibilities.
A: A GPU had, until fairly recently, only a 1 high slot. Even with 2 slots, it has less room for cooling than the CPU, where weight actually matters more than size.
B: Transistors. The site dates from 2006, but mentions that my core 2 duo has ~291 million transistors. A G800GTX has 680M, and my research shows that the 4890 this review is about has 959 Million. Even a Core 2 Quad is 582M, and we know they cost a bit more for a given speed rating. A GT200 is listed as 1.4 Million.
That's quite a difference.