part of the "or even two". System designs vary, as you say. I was trying to picture a kind of sliding scale. First the existing tank is upsized to better work with supply-based heating. After a point, you cease with that and go to two tanks, sometimes due to the shape of the space you have available, and sometimes because you're installing solar heating. Which is indeed 'normally' a small heating tank and a larger storage tank which you pre-heat with solar. Or wood, heat pump, etc...
Anyways, I dislike the idea of having the solar roofs be on wheels for a couple reasons:
Wind Resistance. If you don't have it anchored down, wind(or thieves) can spirit it away much easier.
Power connection - should be permanent.
Basically, unless the wheels are a lot more robust than what I'm picturing, you'd have to 'roll it inside' for severe weather, which I'd really prefer to avoid.
Lets install a $20,000 battery in a house and replace it every ten years.
How about you buy a ~$3k '70%' used EV battery, then use it for ~10 years until it gets to 30% or so, at which point you finally send it to the recyclers before buying a new one?
Of course, that would entail both a massively increased number of strong EVs to supply the 'retired' batteries, and probably so much solar that you're encouraged to charge at work when the sun's out.
I'm sorry that I often forget my disclaimers like 'excluding outliers', 'average situation only', etc...
As nospam mentioned, there might be a problem with your house. Now, I'm no expert, but I'd need some more information to do an assessment: square footage of the south facing side of your house annual kwh usage
For example, I'm an outlier. I'd have to completely cover my south-facing roof with solar panels to match my usage, but I live in Alaska.
Some things that might be 'nice to know': Have you ever had an energy audit of your house done? Do you know what the R-Value of your walls/roof is? What's the SEER for your air conditioner? If you're using more than 3X the power that could be generated by solar for your roof, you may be better served by installing more insulation, replacing a marginal HVAC system with a more efficient one, etc...
Heck, I pointed out that solar panels can help cut HVAC requirements by their mere presence - they're not normally installed directly on the roof, so that few inches acts as insulation(and can even create a heat chimney effect to keep things even cooler), preventing direct sunlight from heating the roof extra, increasing cooling needs.
I thought solar was supposed to allow us to use less fossil fuels like natural gas and not more.
90% efficient burners means you end up using less natural gas than you would using electric appliances, with the natural gas being burned at the electric plant.
It's not the 'best' of plans, but it would still reduce our CO2 emissions, especially if it's displacing coal. That being said, something like a 'retired' Tesla Model-S battery with half it's capacity remaining would be able to run most electric appliances, even if you might need a system smart enough to not turn on the water heater and the stove at the same time.
Feed into a small molten salt reservoir buried in the yard to pull out of at night?
As jklovanc said, that only works when you're powering a turbine via heat. It would be a highly wasteful system to transform that electricity into heat, only to turn it back into electricity again. LiIon batteries are around 80-90% efficient at transformation, the suggested heat system would be lucky to hit 30%. Especially when you consider economy of scale when it comes to insulation.
Now, a small heat reservoir like a BIG hot water tank that can also provide heating to the house itself if necessary would work. Especially since the heat differential should be low enough to use a heat pump for it.
As for the water heater - 'On Demand' means that when the customer/home owner asks for hot water, he gets hot water. You're thinking about a supply-driven system, which many water heaters actually are for a cut from the electric company. A 50 gallon tank is generally good for a shower or two before things become unacceptably cold, even up here where the water from the well is only a degree or so above freezing. Switching to a bigger water heater, or even two, isn't out of the question, especially if you install solar thermal heaters.
Only true if there is something else to supply electricity at night.
Good point, I should have remembered to stick a 'net zero' in there. You could do it with a battery, but like I said, expense is the biggest issue, not room.
The main concern for solar hasn't been one of the space necessary for a long time. Partially covering something like half the south-facing side of a roof has been sufficient to cover a home's needs for quite some time. A few more percent in panel efficiency would only decrease the coverage necessary.
Like for most things, the real killer has been cost. Smaller footprints are good, reduces cost and increases flexibility(you don't NEED to take down that one tree...). Today it's getting to the point that we need to work to make installs cheaper, including the inverter, which of the items that can fail, currently have the lowest warranty period as well. If you 'plan' on replacing it once it's out of warranty, you'll go through 3 inverters per replacement of the solar panels. Yes, both actually last longer than that, but it's an expense to be wary of.
Personally, in order to manage cost I like to propose 'dual use' applications - solar panels on a roof can act as a solar barrier and reduce the heat load in the house, reducing electricity needs for HVAC even as it supplies electricity for the very same HVAC. My latest 'idea', which is far from unique, is the 'solar car park'. We know people like parking in the shade, and solar panels are typically* strong enough that you can use them directly for roofing material as long as your roof is either small enough or you don't need it to be absolutely tight(like for a house). A few dribbles won't hurt a car but the shade certainly would be nice.
So you mount the panels up over your parking lot(or driveway), and you come out to a shaded, and therefore not blazing hot, car. You park at the store and again, don't come back to a blazing hot car. As a bonus, it'll even extend the life of your paint job and interior, as well as help protect any sensitive electronics that don't like baking in a hot vehicle.
*Some are, some aren't, but it's easy enough to specify/check.
Just for comparison, let's take a "12day fine". For someone with 10k income, that's a $328 fine. For someone with 100k income, that's $3280.
Systems vary, buy it'd actually be a $164 fine. Buried in the fine print is that they figure that 50% of your income is needed just for 'living expenses'. I'm not sure if that's based on actual income, a minimum or median income figure. But it shouldn't matter on the low end.
As for the rich person fighting the fine, well, over in Europe 'loser pays' tends to be common. If it's a relative 'slam dunk' case, even at the higher fine amount you'd quickly end up paying out more to fight it than simply paying it.
In either case, it's still more fair than our current one which will quite happily break a poor person while amounting to an insignificant additional tax on a rich one.
That's one of the quirks - Record it with 'intent' to publish and you're a porn business, and paying for sex is legal. Don't record it and you're hiring a prostitute, which is illegal in most areas.
Pretty much my thought. The car company sells them the cameras for something like $100/vehicle, they decide to take it up enough that they at least start purchasing cars with the camera, but then cooler heads prevail and shut the program down
If you like to 'drive fast' 'on the way to work or the grocery store' you probably shouldn't be driving, or at least should pay heavily for the privilege of making things more dangerous for the rest of us.
You can still have your fun while driving in the designated areas that are generally called 'race tracks'.
It's worth $1M 'on paper' because it hasn't been sold in 3 generations, and the closest 'similar' land that was sold was sold to developers because it happened to be closer to the city, and it was sold for $10k/acre. Never mind that the markets have shifted, and developers aren't interested in 'this' farmer's land because there's more land between him and the city anyways.
Meanwhile, due to tax laws, it'd cost the farmer more to 'fix' the assessment than it's worth, seeing as how, as long as it's farmland, it only gets assessed property taxes at $10/acre value anyways(and even that's deductible).
As for the "day scale" for tickets, it won't have much effect on the "rich".
Really? What's your justification?
When someone does something dangerous, or actually does harm, no ticket is ever written -- when I was rear-ended, destroying my car, the idiot soccer mom that did it received no ticket at all.
The guy who rear-ended me, however, did.
And they'll have even less effect on the poor, as this will make their tickets even less.
Given that we're talking about theoretical fines, how can you say this? It's simple enough, just have a minimum fine. So the 'poor' aren't getting off any better, well, at least the ones who actually pay their fines today, seeing as how, going by news reporting from Ferguson and elsewhere, many don't. Hell, it was one of the talking points that Ferguson was spending more money jailing people for not paying fines than said people were even capable of paying.
Meanwhile, the 'rich' have to worry about fines actually amounting to real money, and they gotta know the cops are going to be looking for that sweet payoff.
I'm actually pro-death, I'm for killing everybody, eventually.;)
To actually be serious, you're presenting a false dilemma. I do not view it as cognitively dissonant to be both against the imprisonment(not just execution) of innocents, while supporting imprisonment and execution in specific cases.
I mean, I'm sure that if I accused you of being for the imprisonment of innocents you'd disagree. I'm completely capable of supporting the death penalty while acknowledging that, rarely, an innocent party may be wrongfully executed. A tragedy, but not really all that more tragic than the dozens of innocents who die in prison every year. It doesn't mean that I'm 'for killing innocents'. So no, I'm not picking one of your artificially limited positions.
That being said, if you start restricting executions to serial killers, spree killers, and hitmen, the odds of 'getting it wrong' go way down. When you only have to convict a dude of 3 murders to qualify them for the death penalty, when you have conclusive evidence for 12, it's not that hard.
"Even with a confession". I think confessions are crap most of the time. They're extorted and tricked out of the suspect more often than not, targeting those of diminished or lower mental ability. While we're on the topic - MOST bad convictions I've read about, where the person sentenced to death was later found innocent(mostly before their execution, thankfully), involve serious amounts of police and/or prosecutor misconduct, which has me howling(and writing my representatives, they know me well, my goal is to write them at least monthly on SOMETHING) for THEM to spend time in prison.
Well, while perhaps insightful, I feel the need to point out that your post missed the point. I was zeroed in on 'divestment theory', specifically deconstructing the link mdsolar posted.
I do NOT object to increasing the funding of renewable energies. I DO think we're headed for trouble if we don't adjust. I just think that 'divestment' as a political statement is worthless. Making an educated guess that fossil fuel companies are going to be in trouble in the future is NOT a political statement while still being a reason to divest yourself of those products.
Personally, I look at the state of our infrastructure and figure that we have approximately 10 years of fossil fuel usage left even under a crash replacement program, and we're not doing 'crash' anything.
I certainly hope my next vehicle is 'alternate fueled', but I'm afraid that I might have to hang on to my Toyota for another decade.
Having read that, a central core of the divestment theory amounts to "to bankrupt them morally."
That assumes the corporation, like most corporations, wasn't already morally bankrupt to begin with. I mean, US tobacco companies are still plodding along, how more morally bankrupt can you get than them? Even the fossil fuel companies can at least point out all the positives their products bring - fuel for your vehicles so you can move around, energy to heat and cool your homes, keep your computers running, etc...
So, I have to ask, if the values being divested are too small to affect their stock price, are being readily bought by others, and they've already given up on changing said companies by actually buying enough stock to get on the board, how is it supposed to be effective? What's the goal?
When you acknowledge that they already don't have 'morals' to bankrupt. That you're not changing the stock price, you're not depriving them of capital or credit, you're not changing anything.
Putting money into renewable energy helps the renewable energy fields, but is currently, on average, a riskier investment than the traditional companies, many of which have put a lot of money into renewables themselves.
I probably read less than 1% of the papers published in my field, but if there is a specific topic I need to research, I often can't find enough papers that focus on what I need. So, from my point of view, there aren't enough studies.
I took a writing class where I had to write 'scientific' papers. On my chosen topic, admittedly very narrow(but that's kind of what the teacher wanted), I found myself having to kind of 'circle' my chosen target with tangential studies. I ended up writing into the review paper that here's my hypothesis, it's supported, at least in theory, by the results of these studies(and the same 3 names popped up in quite a few of them), but that the topic itself doesn't appear to be directly studied, so it would be useful to get some direct measurements.
Oh, and as the AC mentioned, I had to discard a couple studies where I couldn't access more than the abstract, even using my university credentials.
I think we'll have exhausted fossil and easily-extractable uranium well before that point.
Personally, I think that 'easily extractable uranium' will continue for quite some time even if we massively increase usage of it because we haven't done the survey work for it like we have oil. In other words - as the price of it starts rising, we'll start exploring more, and find more deposits. At some point we'll start seriously using breeder reactors and thorium as well.
Extracting it from seawater would be about 10X as costly as current methods(but I think that was when the US & Russia were selling off their weapon stockpiles...), but it's so relatively cheap against the cost of the power plant that even 10X as expensive uranium only raises your power costs by something like 1 cent a kWh.
That being said, I WANT more power conservation and renewable energy use, but I hate coal more, and see nuclear as a better 'short term' replacement for it.
It takes work to make a room that can withstand the pressure(see how pressure chambers are built.
Now, we can do the same thing while keeping the pressure up via injecting a neutral gas, such as Nitrogen. Heck, with Nitrogen you can have the room be fairly leaky(think airplane leaky), and because N2 is harmless as long as it's not displacing too much oxygen, having the area outside the execution chamber being well ventilated is enough.
I don't understand why filling a chamber with CO2 or some other gas is not the current method.
The human body uses CO2 levels to 'detect' asphyxiation. While 'quick', filling a chamber with CO2 would be quite stressful to the condemned as they'd experience all the effects of asphyxiation - gasping, hyperventilation, etc...
That's why you use pretty much anything BUT CO2. Helium, Nitrogen, Argon, etc... It's just that Nitrogen tends to be the cheapest and most readily available of the industrial gasses. Put an 'air freshener' in the vent and they can't smell a thing, and even talking won't clue them in on that the gas has been switched.
I prefer nitrogen because CO can be dangerous to others very quickly if the gas chamber isn't 'purged' correctly before they open it up, if there's a leak, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
part of the "or even two". System designs vary, as you say. I was trying to picture a kind of sliding scale. First the existing tank is upsized to better work with supply-based heating. After a point, you cease with that and go to two tanks, sometimes due to the shape of the space you have available, and sometimes because you're installing solar heating. Which is indeed 'normally' a small heating tank and a larger storage tank which you pre-heat with solar. Or wood, heat pump, etc...
Your post almost sounds like an advertisement...
Anyways, I dislike the idea of having the solar roofs be on wheels for a couple reasons:
Wind Resistance. If you don't have it anchored down, wind(or thieves) can spirit it away much easier.
Power connection - should be permanent.
Basically, unless the wheels are a lot more robust than what I'm picturing, you'd have to 'roll it inside' for severe weather, which I'd really prefer to avoid.
That sounds more like a police corruption issue to me though.
Perhaps removing the fear that the person you're writing the ticket to won't be able to 'afford it' would help.
Lets install a $20,000 battery in a house and replace it every ten years.
How about you buy a ~$3k '70%' used EV battery, then use it for ~10 years until it gets to 30% or so, at which point you finally send it to the recyclers before buying a new one?
Of course, that would entail both a massively increased number of strong EVs to supply the 'retired' batteries, and probably so much solar that you're encouraged to charge at work when the sun's out.
I'm sorry that I often forget my disclaimers like 'excluding outliers', 'average situation only', etc...
As nospam mentioned, there might be a problem with your house. Now, I'm no expert, but I'd need some more information to do an assessment:
square footage of the south facing side of your house
annual kwh usage
For example, I'm an outlier. I'd have to completely cover my south-facing roof with solar panels to match my usage, but I live in Alaska.
Some things that might be 'nice to know':
Have you ever had an energy audit of your house done? Do you know what the R-Value of your walls/roof is? What's the SEER for your air conditioner? If you're using more than 3X the power that could be generated by solar for your roof, you may be better served by installing more insulation, replacing a marginal HVAC system with a more efficient one, etc...
Heck, I pointed out that solar panels can help cut HVAC requirements by their mere presence - they're not normally installed directly on the roof, so that few inches acts as insulation(and can even create a heat chimney effect to keep things even cooler), preventing direct sunlight from heating the roof extra, increasing cooling needs.
I thought solar was supposed to allow us to use less fossil fuels like natural gas and not more.
90% efficient burners means you end up using less natural gas than you would using electric appliances, with the natural gas being burned at the electric plant.
It's not the 'best' of plans, but it would still reduce our CO2 emissions, especially if it's displacing coal. That being said, something like a 'retired' Tesla Model-S battery with half it's capacity remaining would be able to run most electric appliances, even if you might need a system smart enough to not turn on the water heater and the stove at the same time.
Feed into a small molten salt reservoir buried in the yard to pull out of at night?
As jklovanc said, that only works when you're powering a turbine via heat. It would be a highly wasteful system to transform that electricity into heat, only to turn it back into electricity again. LiIon batteries are around 80-90% efficient at transformation, the suggested heat system would be lucky to hit 30%. Especially when you consider economy of scale when it comes to insulation.
Now, a small heat reservoir like a BIG hot water tank that can also provide heating to the house itself if necessary would work. Especially since the heat differential should be low enough to use a heat pump for it.
As for the water heater - 'On Demand' means that when the customer/home owner asks for hot water, he gets hot water. You're thinking about a supply-driven system, which many water heaters actually are for a cut from the electric company. A 50 gallon tank is generally good for a shower or two before things become unacceptably cold, even up here where the water from the well is only a degree or so above freezing. Switching to a bigger water heater, or even two, isn't out of the question, especially if you install solar thermal heaters.
Only true if there is something else to supply electricity at night.
Good point, I should have remembered to stick a 'net zero' in there. You could do it with a battery, but like I said, expense is the biggest issue, not room.
The main concern for solar hasn't been one of the space necessary for a long time. Partially covering something like half the south-facing side of a roof has been sufficient to cover a home's needs for quite some time. A few more percent in panel efficiency would only decrease the coverage necessary.
Like for most things, the real killer has been cost. Smaller footprints are good, reduces cost and increases flexibility(you don't NEED to take down that one tree...). Today it's getting to the point that we need to work to make installs cheaper, including the inverter, which of the items that can fail, currently have the lowest warranty period as well. If you 'plan' on replacing it once it's out of warranty, you'll go through 3 inverters per replacement of the solar panels. Yes, both actually last longer than that, but it's an expense to be wary of.
Personally, in order to manage cost I like to propose 'dual use' applications - solar panels on a roof can act as a solar barrier and reduce the heat load in the house, reducing electricity needs for HVAC even as it supplies electricity for the very same HVAC. My latest 'idea', which is far from unique, is the 'solar car park'. We know people like parking in the shade, and solar panels are typically* strong enough that you can use them directly for roofing material as long as your roof is either small enough or you don't need it to be absolutely tight(like for a house). A few dribbles won't hurt a car but the shade certainly would be nice.
So you mount the panels up over your parking lot(or driveway), and you come out to a shaded, and therefore not blazing hot, car. You park at the store and again, don't come back to a blazing hot car. As a bonus, it'll even extend the life of your paint job and interior, as well as help protect any sensitive electronics that don't like baking in a hot vehicle.
*Some are, some aren't, but it's easy enough to specify/check.
Just for comparison, let's take a "12day fine". For someone with 10k income, that's a $328 fine. For someone with 100k income, that's $3280.
Systems vary, buy it'd actually be a $164 fine. Buried in the fine print is that they figure that 50% of your income is needed just for 'living expenses'. I'm not sure if that's based on actual income, a minimum or median income figure. But it shouldn't matter on the low end.
As for the rich person fighting the fine, well, over in Europe 'loser pays' tends to be common. If it's a relative 'slam dunk' case, even at the higher fine amount you'd quickly end up paying out more to fight it than simply paying it.
In either case, it's still more fair than our current one which will quite happily break a poor person while amounting to an insignificant additional tax on a rich one.
That's one of the quirks - Record it with 'intent' to publish and you're a porn business, and paying for sex is legal. Don't record it and you're hiring a prostitute, which is illegal in most areas.
Pretty much my thought. The car company sells them the cameras for something like $100/vehicle, they decide to take it up enough that they at least start purchasing cars with the camera, but then cooler heads prevail and shut the program down
I like to drive fast
If you like to 'drive fast' 'on the way to work or the grocery store' you probably shouldn't be driving, or at least should pay heavily for the privilege of making things more dangerous for the rest of us.
You can still have your fun while driving in the designated areas that are generally called 'race tracks'.
It's worth $1M 'on paper' because it hasn't been sold in 3 generations, and the closest 'similar' land that was sold was sold to developers because it happened to be closer to the city, and it was sold for $10k/acre. Never mind that the markets have shifted, and developers aren't interested in 'this' farmer's land because there's more land between him and the city anyways.
Meanwhile, due to tax laws, it'd cost the farmer more to 'fix' the assessment than it's worth, seeing as how, as long as it's farmland, it only gets assessed property taxes at $10/acre value anyways(and even that's deductible).
As for the "day scale" for tickets, it won't have much effect on the "rich".
Really? What's your justification?
When someone does something dangerous, or actually does harm, no ticket is ever written -- when I was rear-ended, destroying my car, the idiot soccer mom that did it received no ticket at all.
The guy who rear-ended me, however, did.
And they'll have even less effect on the poor, as this will make their tickets even less.
Given that we're talking about theoretical fines, how can you say this? It's simple enough, just have a minimum fine. So the 'poor' aren't getting off any better, well, at least the ones who actually pay their fines today, seeing as how, going by news reporting from Ferguson and elsewhere, many don't. Hell, it was one of the talking points that Ferguson was spending more money jailing people for not paying fines than said people were even capable of paying.
Meanwhile, the 'rich' have to worry about fines actually amounting to real money, and they gotta know the cops are going to be looking for that sweet payoff.
I'm actually pro-death, I'm for killing everybody, eventually. ;)
To actually be serious, you're presenting a false dilemma. I do not view it as cognitively dissonant to be both against the imprisonment(not just execution) of innocents, while supporting imprisonment and execution in specific cases.
I mean, I'm sure that if I accused you of being for the imprisonment of innocents you'd disagree. I'm completely capable of supporting the death penalty while acknowledging that, rarely, an innocent party may be wrongfully executed. A tragedy, but not really all that more tragic than the dozens of innocents who die in prison every year. It doesn't mean that I'm 'for killing innocents'. So no, I'm not picking one of your artificially limited positions.
That being said, if you start restricting executions to serial killers, spree killers, and hitmen, the odds of 'getting it wrong' go way down. When you only have to convict a dude of 3 murders to qualify them for the death penalty, when you have conclusive evidence for 12, it's not that hard.
"Even with a confession". I think confessions are crap most of the time. They're extorted and tricked out of the suspect more often than not, targeting those of diminished or lower mental ability. While we're on the topic - MOST bad convictions I've read about, where the person sentenced to death was later found innocent(mostly before their execution, thankfully), involve serious amounts of police and/or prosecutor misconduct, which has me howling(and writing my representatives, they know me well, my goal is to write them at least monthly on SOMETHING) for THEM to spend time in prison.
Not really.
Well, while perhaps insightful, I feel the need to point out that your post missed the point. I was zeroed in on 'divestment theory', specifically deconstructing the link mdsolar posted.
I do NOT object to increasing the funding of renewable energies. I DO think we're headed for trouble if we don't adjust. I just think that 'divestment' as a political statement is worthless. Making an educated guess that fossil fuel companies are going to be in trouble in the future is NOT a political statement while still being a reason to divest yourself of those products.
Personally, I look at the state of our infrastructure and figure that we have approximately 10 years of fossil fuel usage left even under a crash replacement program, and we're not doing 'crash' anything.
I certainly hope my next vehicle is 'alternate fueled', but I'm afraid that I might have to hang on to my Toyota for another decade.
Like I said: "already given up on changing said companies by actually buying enough stock to get on the board..."
They were also, I think, a bit lazy about defining 'engagement' and the required scope.
it's a bit like a politician worrying about 1% of the vote, in a demographic that's not particularly for them anyways.
Which is why I defined 'enough stock to obtain representation on the board of directors'. Because then you do have a visible vote.
Having read that, a central core of the divestment theory amounts to "to bankrupt them morally."
That assumes the corporation, like most corporations, wasn't already morally bankrupt to begin with. I mean, US tobacco companies are still plodding along, how more morally bankrupt can you get than them? Even the fossil fuel companies can at least point out all the positives their products bring - fuel for your vehicles so you can move around, energy to heat and cool your homes, keep your computers running, etc...
So, I have to ask, if the values being divested are too small to affect their stock price, are being readily bought by others, and they've already given up on changing said companies by actually buying enough stock to get on the board, how is it supposed to be effective? What's the goal?
When you acknowledge that they already don't have 'morals' to bankrupt. That you're not changing the stock price, you're not depriving them of capital or credit, you're not changing anything.
Putting money into renewable energy helps the renewable energy fields, but is currently, on average, a riskier investment than the traditional companies, many of which have put a lot of money into renewables themselves.
I probably read less than 1% of the papers published in my field, but if there is a specific topic I need to research, I often can't find enough papers that focus on what I need. So, from my point of view, there aren't enough studies.
I took a writing class where I had to write 'scientific' papers. On my chosen topic, admittedly very narrow(but that's kind of what the teacher wanted), I found myself having to kind of 'circle' my chosen target with tangential studies. I ended up writing into the review paper that here's my hypothesis, it's supported, at least in theory, by the results of these studies(and the same 3 names popped up in quite a few of them), but that the topic itself doesn't appear to be directly studied, so it would be useful to get some direct measurements.
Oh, and as the AC mentioned, I had to discard a couple studies where I couldn't access more than the abstract, even using my university credentials.
I think we'll have exhausted fossil and easily-extractable uranium well before that point.
Personally, I think that 'easily extractable uranium' will continue for quite some time even if we massively increase usage of it because we haven't done the survey work for it like we have oil. In other words - as the price of it starts rising, we'll start exploring more, and find more deposits. At some point we'll start seriously using breeder reactors and thorium as well.
Extracting it from seawater would be about 10X as costly as current methods(but I think that was when the US & Russia were selling off their weapon stockpiles...), but it's so relatively cheap against the cost of the power plant that even 10X as expensive uranium only raises your power costs by something like 1 cent a kWh.
That being said, I WANT more power conservation and renewable energy use, but I hate coal more, and see nuclear as a better 'short term' replacement for it.
It takes work to make a room that can withstand the pressure(see how pressure chambers are built.
Now, we can do the same thing while keeping the pressure up via injecting a neutral gas, such as Nitrogen. Heck, with Nitrogen you can have the room be fairly leaky(think airplane leaky), and because N2 is harmless as long as it's not displacing too much oxygen, having the area outside the execution chamber being well ventilated is enough.
What, and screw with the balance of the missile? We already have enough problems with them hitting things we don't want them to hit.
I don't understand why filling a chamber with CO2 or some other gas is not the current method.
The human body uses CO2 levels to 'detect' asphyxiation. While 'quick', filling a chamber with CO2 would be quite stressful to the condemned as they'd experience all the effects of asphyxiation - gasping, hyperventilation, etc...
That's why you use pretty much anything BUT CO2. Helium, Nitrogen, Argon, etc... It's just that Nitrogen tends to be the cheapest and most readily available of the industrial gasses. Put an 'air freshener' in the vent and they can't smell a thing, and even talking won't clue them in on that the gas has been switched.
I prefer nitrogen because CO can be dangerous to others very quickly if the gas chamber isn't 'purged' correctly before they open it up, if there's a leak, etc...