Though I used the word censorship, I wasn't referring to the First Amendment. Obviously these guys don't have legal grounds to sue, or this would be in the courts already (assuming US courts haven't been compromised by the past 40 years of right-wing dominance, another story).
The problem is, the government works for us. We, the taxpayers, pay for these services, including responsible and accurate scientific information. Because we, through our representatives, created and staffed them, we respect and trust government agencies. People who work at government agencies have a lot of credibility. If our representative goverment has placed mid-level bureaucrats in agencies for the purpose of muzzling some of their people in order to suppress information we need, they are violating the trust we place in them.
Unfortunately, we only have the opportunity to kick our government to the curb every 2 years - and that'll only work if our election system hasn't been compromised by 40 years of right-wing dominance. Unfortunately, I'm hearing from a lot of scientists who ARE seeking new employers - in other nations. Unless things change real soon, the US is close to driving off a very big cliff...
If a reputable scientist is threatened with loss of his job if he does a television interview, it doesn't matter how many websites he puts up, he can't get the message out as effectively as he otherwise could. Censorship, plain and simple.
If anybody has any doubts about the science, please take your pick of the following three sites - all excellent material, from historical, science, and political perspectives:
I used to support NPR quite a bit. We set up our bill-pay to donate something every month. I no longer do, and I've never listened to a PodCast. NPR is acting just like the RIAA, blaming free downloads for their lack of sales. The problem is the content, not the free downloads.
Yes, some NPR content is still great, but they've succumbed to two deadly temptations:
easy money from corporations in exchange for less agressive reporting
inside-the-beltway cozying-up-to-those-in-power thinking for their Washington DC programming (the news shows)
On the latter, I saw the NPR ombudsman attacking Terry Gross after her Bill O'Reilly interview, I saw the firing of Bob Edwards, but I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I heard their treatment of John Kerry vs. President Bush after the debates in 2004. Either they weren't watching the same debates I saw, or their minds are warped from proximity to power. Whatever, they get no more money from me.
Having Air America around has definitely helped my sanity. Plus it's free, sponsored by commercials from companies and organizations that don't actually seem that bad...
Woah, I knew there were a lot of global warming (or "human causation") deniers on slashdot, but I hadn't checked here in a while - didn't realize it was this bad! No wonder I don't come here much any more.
For all y'all's edification, I STRONGLY recommend:
Uh, somebody's paying money to do something in space. Sounds good to me, the more the better. What would be wrong with advertising on the side of ISS? The Russians have raised money for their space program by advertisements on the side of rockets for years. Money for space has to come from somewhere - why not from private interests willing to throw it away on stuff like this, rather than out of your and my tax dollar?
Yeah, let's do the science stuff too, sure, if there's really an interest. But have you ever noticed that NASA's budget is about 3 times that of the National Science Foundation (though that's scheduled to double over the next few years) - space gets money for much more than science; why not stuff like this that the average person can enjoy?
Unfortunately, our democratic process is itself the cause of polarization. It's intrinsic to winner-takes-all competition: the two strongest competitors gain adherents at the expense of others, and membership naturally splits 50/50 for the following reasons:
* You want to root for the winner because their win, glory, or even part of some cash reward etc. comes back to you
* The more the winner is sure of winning, the less they care about their supporters; conversely the closer the race, the more attention both those running and those rooting for the two sides give to each other; the media in the middle also stands to gain the most from the closest races.
Way back in ancient Rome we had the precedent of the chariot racing factions - initially there were just red and white, then blue and green were added, and eventually took over (merged with) the red and white, so there were only two again.
Kind of reminds you of Star Wars Sith Lords, huh...
Anyway, whether ancient or modern, what happens is that the two sides get fanatically loyal adherents, and then the rest of the population sort of follows along with the loyalists they know, and the cultural impact goes way beyond the competition itself. In ancient Constantinople (Eastern Roman Empire), the blue and green factions from chariot racing extended to supporters of different candidates for emperor, with bloody battles in the streets when the opportunity for change arose. Conservatives of all stripes now feel they have to be opposed to evolution and human causation of global warming, for instance, even if twenty years ago 90 percent of them would have reasonably left scientific issues to the scientists.
So how do we get the chariot-racing element out of our democratic system of government? Somehow we need to build something that rewards consensus decision-making, not polarization... any bright ideas out there?
Tim had his bike on display at the National Space Society - HAL-5 booth at the Las Cruces X-Prize Cup event last October. I didn't see them turn on the motor though!
Well, according to this Gen IV roadmap, they're looking at a variety of technical solutions, but it's very much an R&D phase for probably the next 20 years. Actual near-term deployment of new reactors (the stuff they're talking about in the US for 2014+, and which some in the nuclear industry maybe trying to pass off as a new generation of reactors) are basically standardized versions of current systems; certainly not of the integral fast reactor type.
Re:He3 production on Earth misses the point
on
Return to the Moon
·
· Score: 1
Oh, the other point on neutrons: they cannot be controlled simply with electromagnetic fields. In principle, high energy protons can be slowed down via RF techniques without touching any material body; neutrons need to be in contact with materials to capture their energy.
Re:He3 production on Earth misses the point
on
Return to the Moon
·
· Score: 1
Schmitt proposes running with a He3:D ratio of 3:1, to reduce D-D reactions; He3+He3 makes He4 and 2 protons, so no neutrons there. Neutrons are definitely trouble as far as irradiating the surrounding materials; if you can cut the neutron numbers a factor of 10 (as this proposal claims to) then you can have much longer-lived reactor chambers and much less waste in the end.
IEC is "hot" fusion in the sense that the nuclei are moving fast when they fuse, but it is NOT "hot" in the thermal sense where the plasma has reached a high-temperature (even short-lived) equilibrium as all the other cases are (except muon-catalyzed, where the equilibrium needed is only low temperature); the ions are not moving randomly, but rather focused to collide at the center of the unit. Once they pass through the center they slow down again, they don't stick around getting hot there.
As I say, I'm certainly not convinced; but he makes a better case than you seem to want to admit.
Oh, on point 3 - yes of course at the 1 Watt scale you're putting in a lot more energy than you're getting out. The first step for any energy source is of course to get to the point of positive energy return - but the real point you need to get to is positive economic return; in principle both should come from scaling the technology up to large enough sizes - that is, if the technology even has any potential for positive energy return in the first place. Which IEC fusion may not - sorry if I didn't make that clear in the review.
He3 production on Earth misses the point
on
Return to the Moon
·
· Score: 1
The only point of using He3 as a fusion fuel is to reduce neutron production and the consequent radiation hazards. If you're creating He3 using vast streams of fission reactor neutrons, for instance, you're depending on something that Schmitt would like to eliminate.
Not that I think radiation is that much of a problem that it requires this, but there is a rational argument in Schmitt's approach.
Now, would you mind explaining what other "whole range of potential fusors" I omitted in the review? I actually didn't mention magnetic confinement in the article at all, rather I referred to "creating very hot and dense plasmas", which is exactly what magnetic, inertial, and even desktop bubble fusion are trying to do (inertial and bubble create the plasmas for only a brief period, but they are essentially equilibrium systems, as opposed to the highly nonequilibrium case here). Quadrupling the temperature requirement is a pretty darn hard additional constraint on those systems, already struggling to prove they can reach breakeven.
At least - I'm in the middle of reading Harrison Schmitt's latest book - Return to the Moon - which goes into this in some detail. And no need for nuclear powered rockets, though he does seem to think something a bit bigger than the old Saturn V would help.
Why did you say you'd not seen an explanation, and then admit you had?
Human contributions are small relative to the natural cycles (biology, oceans, volcanoes), but enough to put things out of balance. That's what the fuss is all about. Without any greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, Earth's average temperature would be about -20 degrees C, so there's obviously a major natural greenhouse effect. We're providing an artificial perturbation that has recently amounted to enough to be noticeable, and will continue to grow relentlessly unless we start perturbing the system less.
I strongly recommend Real Climate and The Discovery of Global Warming, sites that explain the science in understandable terms from real experts (I would take stuff from Wikipedia with a big lump of salt).
Floating ice will make no difference due to hydrostatic balance. The difference in sea level comes from warming of ocean water itself and resulting expansion, and melting of continental glaciers - Greenland probably most worrisome right now.
Those particulates that the clean air act got rid of in the 80's and 90's, caused cooling up to the 70's. They also caused smog, acid rain, lots of health problems etc. so it's a good thing we got rid of them. But the aerosols masked the warming trend for a while. Pretty well understood in the models.
I wasn't referring to the driving characteristics (though those are fine) - just the nerdy buttons and do-dads and dashboard display; and the comfortable seats etc. Really there's nothing about it that I find the least annoying, it's just about perfect. My previous car was about as cheap as I could get, so this was a big step up in comfort and convenience...
No, comparing to a Corolla that's $3-4000 cheaper than a Camry is not a fair monetary comparison, if you're trying to look at the money issue - at least the recent Prius models are very nice cars.
And, while his Figure 14 talks about the retention of value, he doesn't include resale value in any of the earlier cost figures on which all the arguments are based.
So the early math in the article is definitely off-base.
Never heard of fewer mechanical systems, but there's definitely less wear and tear - I think the main thing is the gasoline engine never runs at high torque, low RPM's, rather it always runs at an optimal rate - and it's running less since the batteries let it shut off for a lot of the time you're driving.
Also there's less wear and tear on the brakes for hybrids with regen braking - the physical brakes don't come into it at all until you really brake hard.
He compares the Prius to a Corolla; really it's closer in quality and size to a Camry, which is much closer in price.
Also, the value retention part of it is key in treating it as an investment, but "OmniNerd" doesn't do that, he's just calculating the change in monthly payments. That completely invalidates the monetary comparison from the start.
I.e. the "Math" here is off base, by quite a lot.
Plus, my '05 Prius is very fun to drive, wouldn't trade it for just about anything (well, maybe one of those $40,000 sports cars...)
The problem is the spectrum spread - even if you're 90% efficient for red light, you're wasting more than half the energy content of the blue light. And if you're 90% for blue, that's generally the cutoff; you get nothing out of red at all. You can already get efficiencies over 50% with photovoltaics at a single wavelength but the real test is can you handle normal sunlight. That's why multi-junction cells do well (and are close to 40% in the lab) - they are optimized for several different wavelengths, instead of just one.
Slashdot Mirror
then come back and we can talk about reality, not political hype.
Though I used the word censorship, I wasn't referring to the First Amendment. Obviously these guys don't have legal grounds to sue, or this would be in the courts already (assuming US courts haven't been compromised by the past 40 years of right-wing dominance, another story).
The problem is, the government works for us. We, the taxpayers, pay for these services, including responsible and accurate scientific information. Because we, through our representatives, created and staffed them, we respect and trust government agencies. People who work at government agencies have a lot of credibility. If our representative goverment has placed mid-level bureaucrats in agencies for the purpose of muzzling some of their people in order to suppress information we need, they are violating the trust we place in them.
Unfortunately, we only have the opportunity to kick our government to the curb every 2 years - and that'll only work if our election system hasn't been compromised by 40 years of right-wing dominance. Unfortunately, I'm hearing from a lot of scientists who ARE seeking new employers - in other nations. Unless things change real soon, the US is close to driving off a very big cliff...
If a reputable scientist is threatened with loss of his job if he does a television interview, it doesn't matter how many websites he puts up, he can't get the message out as effectively as he otherwise could. Censorship, plain and simple.
Yes, some NPR content is still great, but they've succumbed to two deadly temptations:
On the latter, I saw the NPR ombudsman attacking Terry Gross after her Bill O'Reilly interview, I saw the firing of Bob Edwards, but I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I heard their treatment of John Kerry vs. President Bush after the debates in 2004. Either they weren't watching the same debates I saw, or their minds are warped from proximity to power. Whatever, they get no more money from me.
Having Air America around has definitely helped my sanity. Plus it's free, sponsored by commercials from companies and organizations that don't actually seem that bad...
Woah, I knew there were a lot of global warming (or "human causation") deniers on slashdot, but I hadn't checked here in a while - didn't realize it was this bad! No wonder I don't come here much any more.
For all y'all's edification, I STRONGLY recommend:
The Discovery of Global Warming
Real Climate
A Few Things Ill-Considered
I'll come back when y'all have read those, ok?
Link here: Speculations on the Future of Science - it's a movable type blog, so moderated comments welcome...
Uh, somebody's paying money to do something in space. Sounds good to me, the more the better. What would be wrong with advertising on the side of ISS? The Russians have raised money for their space program by advertisements on the side of rockets for years. Money for space has to come from somewhere - why not from private interests willing to throw it away on stuff like this, rather than out of your and my tax dollar?
Yeah, let's do the science stuff too, sure, if there's really an interest. But have you ever noticed that NASA's budget is about 3 times that of the National Science Foundation (though that's scheduled to double over the next few years) - space gets money for much more than science; why not stuff like this that the average person can enjoy?
Unfortunately, our democratic process is itself the cause of polarization. It's intrinsic to winner-takes-all competition: the two strongest competitors gain adherents at the expense of others, and membership naturally splits 50/50 for the following reasons:
* You want to root for the winner because their win, glory, or even part of some cash reward etc. comes back to you
* The more the winner is sure of winning, the less they care about their supporters; conversely the closer the race, the more attention both those running and those rooting for the two sides give to each other; the media in the middle also stands to gain the most from the closest races.
Way back in ancient Rome we had the precedent of the chariot racing factions - initially there were just red and white, then blue and green were added, and eventually took over (merged with) the red and white, so there were only two again.
Kind of reminds you of Star Wars Sith Lords, huh...
Anyway, whether ancient or modern, what happens is that the two sides get fanatically loyal adherents, and then the rest of the population sort of follows along with the loyalists they know, and the cultural impact goes way beyond the competition itself. In ancient Constantinople (Eastern Roman Empire), the blue and green factions from chariot racing extended to supporters of different candidates for emperor, with bloody battles in the streets when the opportunity for change arose. Conservatives of all stripes now feel they have to be opposed to evolution and human causation of global warming, for instance, even if twenty years ago 90 percent of them would have reasonably left scientific issues to the scientists.
So how do we get the chariot-racing element out of our democratic system of government? Somehow we need to build something that rewards consensus decision-making, not polarization... any bright ideas out there?
Tim had his bike on display at the National Space Society - HAL-5 booth at the Las Cruces X-Prize Cup event last October. I didn't see them turn on the motor though!
Well, according to this Gen IV roadmap, they're looking at a variety of technical solutions, but it's very much an R&D phase for probably the next 20 years. Actual near-term deployment of new reactors (the stuff they're talking about in the US for 2014+, and which some in the nuclear industry maybe trying to pass off as a new generation of reactors) are basically standardized versions of current systems; certainly not of the integral fast reactor type.
Oh, the other point on neutrons: they cannot be controlled simply with electromagnetic fields. In principle, high energy protons can be slowed down via RF techniques without touching any material body; neutrons need to be in contact with materials to capture their energy.
Schmitt proposes running with a He3:D ratio of 3:1, to reduce D-D reactions; He3+He3 makes He4 and 2 protons, so no neutrons there. Neutrons are definitely trouble as far as irradiating the surrounding materials; if you can cut the neutron numbers a factor of 10 (as this proposal claims to) then you can have much longer-lived reactor chambers and much less waste in the end.
IEC is "hot" fusion in the sense that the nuclei are moving fast when they fuse, but it is NOT "hot" in the thermal sense where the plasma has reached a high-temperature (even short-lived) equilibrium as all the other cases are (except muon-catalyzed, where the equilibrium needed is only low temperature); the ions are not moving randomly, but rather focused to collide at the center of the unit. Once they pass through the center they slow down again, they don't stick around getting hot there.
As I say, I'm certainly not convinced; but he makes a better case than you seem to want to admit.
Oh, on point 3 - yes of course at the 1 Watt scale you're putting in a lot more energy than you're getting out. The first step for any energy source is of course to get to the point of positive energy return - but the real point you need to get to is positive economic return; in principle both should come from scaling the technology up to large enough sizes - that is, if the technology even has any potential for positive energy return in the first place. Which IEC fusion may not - sorry if I didn't make that clear in the review.
The only point of using He3 as a fusion fuel is to reduce neutron production and the consequent radiation hazards. If you're creating He3 using vast streams of fission reactor neutrons, for instance, you're depending on something that Schmitt would like to eliminate.
Not that I think radiation is that much of a problem that it requires this, but there is a rational argument in Schmitt's approach.
Now, would you mind explaining what other "whole range of potential fusors" I omitted in the review? I actually didn't mention magnetic confinement in the article at all, rather I referred to "creating very hot and dense plasmas", which is exactly what magnetic, inertial, and even desktop bubble fusion are trying to do (inertial and bubble create the plasmas for only a brief period, but they are essentially equilibrium systems, as opposed to the highly nonequilibrium case here). Quadrupling the temperature requirement is a pretty darn hard additional constraint on those systems, already struggling to prove they can reach breakeven.
I thought he told his story to the NY Times over a year ago, before he was fired?
At least - I'm in the middle of reading Harrison Schmitt's latest book - Return to the Moon - which goes into this in some detail. And no need for nuclear powered rockets, though he does seem to think something a bit bigger than the old Saturn V would help.
Why did you say you'd not seen an explanation, and then admit you had?
Human contributions are small relative to the natural cycles (biology, oceans, volcanoes), but enough to put things out of balance. That's what the fuss is all about. Without any greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, Earth's average temperature would be about -20 degrees C, so there's obviously a major natural greenhouse effect. We're providing an artificial perturbation that has recently amounted to enough to be noticeable, and will continue to grow relentlessly unless we start perturbing the system less.
I strongly recommend Real Climate and The Discovery of Global Warming, sites that explain the science in understandable terms from real experts (I would take stuff from Wikipedia with a big lump of salt).
Floating ice will make no difference due to hydrostatic balance. The difference in sea level comes from warming of ocean water itself and resulting expansion, and melting of continental glaciers - Greenland probably most worrisome right now.
Hope you're still there - here's the explanation:
the nowadays accepted interpreation [is] that the cooling was largely caused by sulphate aerosols
Those particulates that the clean air act got rid of in the 80's and 90's, caused cooling up to the 70's. They also caused smog, acid rain, lots of health problems etc. so it's a good thing we got rid of them. But the aerosols masked the warming trend for a while. Pretty well understood in the models.
I wasn't referring to the driving characteristics (though those are fine) - just the nerdy buttons and do-dads and dashboard display; and the comfortable seats etc. Really there's nothing about it that I find the least annoying, it's just about perfect. My previous car was about as cheap as I could get, so this was a big step up in comfort and convenience...
No, comparing to a Corolla that's $3-4000 cheaper than a Camry is not a fair monetary comparison, if you're trying to look at the money issue - at least the recent Prius models are very nice cars.
And, while his Figure 14 talks about the retention of value, he doesn't include resale value in any of the earlier cost figures on which all the arguments are based.
So the early math in the article is definitely off-base.
Never heard of fewer mechanical systems, but there's definitely less wear and tear - I think the main thing is the gasoline engine never runs at high torque, low RPM's, rather it always runs at an optimal rate - and it's running less since the batteries let it shut off for a lot of the time you're driving.
Also there's less wear and tear on the brakes for hybrids with regen braking - the physical brakes don't come into it at all until you really brake hard.
He compares the Prius to a Corolla; really it's closer in quality and size to a Camry, which is much closer in price.
Also, the value retention part of it is key in treating it as an investment, but "OmniNerd" doesn't do that, he's just calculating the change in monthly payments. That completely invalidates the monetary comparison from the start.
I.e. the "Math" here is off base, by quite a lot.
Plus, my '05 Prius is very fun to drive, wouldn't trade it for just about anything (well, maybe one of those $40,000 sports cars...)
The problem is the spectrum spread - even if you're 90% efficient for red light, you're wasting more than half the energy content of the blue light. And if you're 90% for blue, that's generally the cutoff; you get nothing out of red at all. You can already get efficiencies over 50% with photovoltaics at a single wavelength but the real test is can you handle normal sunlight. That's why multi-junction cells do well (and are close to 40% in the lab) - they are optimized for several different wavelengths, instead of just one.