The quoted factor of 40 improvement is a comparison against unconcentrated solar cells, which nobody uses. At present, all the solar generating plants in the world use mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the solar cells, thereby greatly increasing performance.
The "factor of 4" improvement refers to how much they've improved over their previous results; it does not refer to an improvement over currently-deployed technology.
But the question is, how much does this technology improve performance relative to currently-deployed mirror concentration? And, what is the cost relative to currently-deployed mirror concentration?
1. Transmission of electricity from the midwest to California would entail tremendous transmission losses. By way of comparison, at present the longest transmission line in the country is the pacific intertie from northern Oregon to Los Angeles, which is an HVDC line; at only ~800 mi it loses 15% of everything it transmits.
2. Most of the natural gas in this country is used for heating homes directly and would not be freed up for powering cars.
3. Oftentimes there are "low pressure" weather fronts which span large geographical areas and last for several days, resulting in practically no wind for hundreds of miles. As a result, we would need nearly 100% backup capacity for the windmills. This could be solved using pumped storage but that would add to capital expenditure.
4. Unfortunately, the areas which have tremendous wind resources in this country (and therefore wouldn't require long-distance HVDC lines) already generate almost none of their electricity from natural gas. Places like Illinois get their electricity from coal or nuclear. Thus, very little natural gas would be freed up for cars. It's in California that we get most of our electricity from natural gas but we have inadequate wind resources and HVDC lines to the midwest would entail the transmission losses I indicated above.
5. HVDC lines from the midwest to california or NY would require large capital expenditures.
...Don't get me wrong, I think wind power will be an important part of our future energy mix.
However I think an even better idea would be to replace all the natural gas-fired turbines in california with nuclear plants. Doing so would actually free up tremendous amounts of natural gas to use as automotive fuel, because california has a huge population, and it gets most of its electricity from natural gas which could be freed up.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve. As far as your typical affluent conservative is concerned, the market has efficiently "solved" the problem.
In a food shortage where prices have shot up, it becomes profitable to put into use marginal land for agriculture that wasn't used before. In other words, production increases. So it would help to "cure the shortage". At the same time, wasteful consumption declines, for example, meat-eating in 3rd world countries declines, because producing one calorie of beef requires 9 calories of feedstock grain.
I'm certainly not trying to minimize the terrible hardship food prices have imposed on poor people, but I don't see how economics is to blame.
Of course, maybe the market theory of production increases in response to increased prices, is not correct. However your comment did not even correctly state the theory--instead you attributed a belief to "affluent conservatives" which they don't actually hold. I can see two possible reasons: 1) you are setting up a weak straw man; or 2) you do not know what they think, and you disagree with a mistaken notion of their views.
One more thing. It's worth noting that the food shortage was caused by two things: 1) a government ethanol program which diverted a large fraction of the corn product to auto fuels; and 2) sporadic flooding in various areas of the midwest which happens on occasion and is difficult to predict. One of those causes (the first) was a result of violating the market...
Two things about this kind of argument always make me laugh. First, the market will be helpless if there really is no alternative.
Is there really no alternative to the flat-screen technology we use now? What about organic LED screens? And, is there no material other than gallium which would serve? Is copper the only conductive metal?
Copper is used because it's better than any other fairly cheap alternative; but it's certainly not the only possibility. Couldn't we use fiber optic cables for network cables?
And second, when there is an alternative, it may be something so drastically different than our current standard of living
Would it be a drastic change in our standard of living to adopt alternatives like fiber optics and OLEDs?
Invoking the "free market" is just another way to say "humans will find a way to survive".
Are people who invoke the free market really saying that? Have you summarized their views correctly?
most people who claim to be hardline capitalists will clamor for government intervention to save them from their horrible fate
How do you know they will respond that way? I doubt they would clamor for gov't intervention, because no government intervention would produce more gallium if none remains in the earth's surface.
Only we may be able to get around that if we as an intelligent group use some of these resources BEFORE they're too scarce to help us develop alternatives, since we have the potential to be a lot less reactionary than a dumb market system.
The market system is not a dumb system, and anyone who knows anything about futures markets etc knows that they're certainly not reactionary. The market is predictive and attempts to use all available information of all discounted future price movements. (If you've never heard anything like that before, then you should read about it first). As a result, the market would start preparing for the exhaustion of zinc or any other elements years before it occurs, by increasing the price gradually and in advance so that the available stocks will go to the best available uses. That is the function of speculation, "futures markets (my emphasis)", and so on.
Let me answer a potential objection. What if there really is no alternative to indium, and we really are about to run out?
In that case, no economic system would produce more of it. The only issue would be how to allocate what we have, which is the function of prices. Suppose the price of indium or some other rare earth element skyrocketed years before its exhaustion (which always causes howls from the left: "SPECULATORS ARE DRIVING UP THE PRICE", but anyway). In that case, would companies really throw away huge sums of money by using now-expensive indium indiscriminately? Would companies use copper wires that are now 40x as expensive as fiber optics?
I'm not saying the market will solve all problems, but allocation of scarce resources is something it does fairly well.
That's dumb. As dirty as coal plants are, they are far cleaner than the equivalent power output from internal combustion engines.
No. Coal plants are about 45% efficient and burn a fuel which is almost entirely carbon. Your car's engine is about 25% efficient and gets half its energy from breaking carbon bonds and the other half from hydrogen.
As a result, coal plants are only very slightly better than your car's engine. Coal plants are more efficient, but the fuel they burn is far dirtier.
If you have a diesel car, then replacing it with an electric car would increase CO2 emissions if it were indirectly powered by a coal plant.
IIRC, heating oil is a an oil fraction which could not easily be converted into petroleum for cars.
Oil naturally consists of hydrocarbons of various lengths which are refined into various fuels (kerosene, gasoline, diesel, etc). Since the ratios of these fuels are not what the market wants, the oil companies have "cracking plants" which can convert some hydrocarbons to others (diesel to gasoline, etc).
However there are some hydrocarbons which are very heavy and very difficult to convert to anything else. Since those hydrocarbons can't be used for powering cars, they are treated as "waste oil" and sold at prices similar to non-cartel fossil fuels (natural gas). Since that oil can be burned, it's used for heating.
In the US during the 1970s there were bumper stickers which said: "Split wood, not atoms".
I don't even like to think what the environmental consequences would be if we replaced nuclear power by cutting down the forests and burning the wood for energy.
There are unconfirmed reports of Al Qaeda on the moon. Furthermore, we have it from very reliable sources that Saddam has been working to establish lunar colonies in order to mine the tritium there for use in hydrogen bombs. We must not wait until there is a mushroom cloud over Earth.
We shall blow up the moon ourselves, if necessary. Nobody can deny us our right of self-defense against the moon. If the French happen to think the idea of blowing up the moon is silly, then we'll rename food products just to spite them ("terrestrial fries"). Anyway, the French don't have the right to oppose our ideas because they're only French and they don't even run the planet anymore, much less the solar system.
There has been an ongoing plan for years to build a bullet train from San Francisco, through Silicon Valley, through Los Angeles, to San Diego.
Unfortunately, progress is very slow for several reasons. First, the state of CA is always in a fiscal crisis. Second, there is a mountain range north of Los Angeles that is very earthquake-prone and would require digging a tunnel through. Third, the train would require building high-speed tracks in areas that are already densely populated which would require evicting current residents; and doing that kind of thing is more difficult nowadays.
[Nano] could bring Intel's Atom platform to its knees: clock speeds as high as 1.8 GHz or as low as 1.0 GHz with a maximum power draw of only 5 watts!
Intel's chip has a power draw of less than 2.5 watts for the highest-clocked chip. I don't see how a power draw that's twice that amount would bring Intel's atom to its knees.
Also, I don't understand this necessity for cheesy bad-action-flick terminology ("Intel's chip brought to it's knees!") when all that has happened is a bit player releasing a product with no performance figures.
by definition, all nations and all continents on this earth have access to the sun, even Antarctica. Some nations, due to their geographic position on the globe, simply have better "sunlight" than others.
At present, solar thermal costs $0.20/KwH busbar in places like Death Valley. Even in scorched deserts, the price of solar thermal is more than twice the price of nuclear. In cloudy northern climates the economics would be worse.
However, countries like Germany, Poland, and the UK could conceivably be supplied with power from solar thermal because they're close enough to Spain and Northern Africa that transmission over HVDC lines would be feasible without too much loss. But the cost would be greater than the $0.20/KwH busbar mentioned above.
Of course, if you had read the article, you'd know that these solar plants use no special material, except aluminium. Building and maintaining these thermal solar plants would probably cost a lot less than, say, building equivalent nuclear plants. And, to stay with this example, it would last longer and produce zero radioactive materials.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. The capital cost of building a nuclear power plant is far less than building a solar thermal plant with the same power output. To build a 1GW solar thermal plant would take miles of glass, mirrors, and concrete. (The largest solar thermal plant until recently was an enormous plant in California's death valley which only produces something like 200MW).
With both nuclear power and solar thermal, the major costs are initial capital expenditures. Solar thermal is more than twice as expensive as nuclear at present because the initial expenditures are much higher for a given power output.
Unlike the author of the article, I doubt that solar thermal will ever be economically competitive with nuclear power. If there were drastic reductions in the prices of concrete, turbines, and construction, then the price of nuclear power would be reduced by as much as solar thermal, and the present price disparity would remain. And if the cost of borrowing were reduced (a huge part of the cost of both nuclear and solar thermal) then the price of nuclear would be reduced by as much as solar thermal.
It seems likely that nuclear power will have greater price reductions than solar thermal. Solar thermal is an extremely low-tech solution that's essentially the same as it was decades ago and whose price almost entirely depends on things like the price of construction and the cost of borrowing. Whereas nuclear power continues to experience significant cost-saving technological developments like passive safety systems.
The article actually overstated the losses from storing heat as molten salt. The molten salt from solar thermal plants is stored in an enormous thermos with insulated dual walls with a vacuum between the walls. If I recall the losses due to heat dissipation are less than 10% per day. And of course there is no conversion loss since the power was from heat originally, and they're storing heat. With solar thermal, it's not really a problem that the Sun only shines during the day.
The one thing in the article I disagreed with was the cost estimates. Right now, solar thermal costs more than $0.20/KwH which is the busbar cost. (The estimates must take into account the capital cost of the molten salt storage facility!). Since the solar thermal plant is basically glass tubes, concrete, salt, a big thermos for holding the molten salt, and turbines, I doubt very much that the price of it all will decrease drastically as the author claims. It seems to me that any drastic reduction in the price of concrete, turbines, or construction would reduce the price of nuclear power and other competitors as much as solar thermal, so the present disparity in cost would remain. At present solar thermal is more than twice as expensive as nuclear.
A minority of people in the IT profession have a low level of emotional maturity. Everyone already knows that. Thus, the author shouldn't have been surprised when he encountered such a person. He should have quit immediately when he recognized it.
If the CTO of a company is a "problem child" then he should have quit right when he found that out.
You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen / Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine / You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life / See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen
Lookheed also took out a license and confirmed [eestor's] claims regarding energy density (ten times that of lead acid batteries).
I read the article you linked, and it doesn't seem to claim that. In the article, Lockheed said "We haven't personally tested their [eestor's] prototypes yet."
Electricity travels just fine. Distance losses are trivially overcome by the sheer amount of irradiation available.
Electricity does not "travel just fine" over long distances. Even using HVDC cables, we would lose almost all the electricity to transmission losses. Furthermore, the distance losses are not "trivially overcome" by the sheer amount of irradiation. If we lost 95% of the energy to transmission losses then it would require 20x as many solar panels in the Sahara. Since solar power (from solar thermal, not photovoltaics) is already 2-3x more expensive than the alternatives-- well, you do the math. (Or try to).
It's a bit difficult to believe that your post was modded up to 5, but I suppose I should stop being surprised by these things.
Mankind's projected peak power needs by 2020 or so amount to about 22 TW. Yeah. 22, not 22,000.
It means very little to point out the theoretical maximum amount of energy which could be derived from some source. I've heard people make the same argument with regard to geothermal energy: there's enough heat in the core of the earth to supply 10,000x our energy needs, etc. Of course, exploiting anything more than a very small fraction of that would be extremely difficult.
So throw stupid statements like "three forms of base-load energy, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear" in the rubbish bin of irrelevancy, and tap what is effectively an infinite supply (and if that's not enough, place solar arrays into LEO).
The last time I checked, putting an object into "LEO" (low earth orbit) would cost about $10,000/kg. One kg of solar panels would generate very little electricity.
There are hundreds of times more permanently irradiated deserts in the world than would be needed to supply Mankind's power needs for the forseeable future. What's more, they're spread around the world, so base load is as easy to supply as peak, without storage.
There are substantial transmission losses when transporting electricity over long distances. Granted, using HVDC, we could limit conductance losses. Still, even with HVDC, the longest cables in the world are limited to a thousand miles or so because the losses would be unacceptable beyond that. For example, with the california/oregon 65 intertie, which is one of the longest HVDC transmission cables in the world, there are losses of over 10%. Proposed interties from Canada to San Francisco would all involve peak losses of more than 20%. If we were to build HVDC lines from the Sahara to the Northeast United States, not only would it be exorbitantly expensive but almost all the electricity would be lost in transmission.
And please don't say "superconductors." It would be prohibitively expensive to have even 20 miles of superconducting cables.
So dear Gwyneth, think again. You've just been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a costly mistake.
Gwyneth has not been sold the brooklyn bridge, insofar as nuclear power is cost-competitive and is not a "costly mistake."
All that's lacking is the will to do so --- especially the will to act against the greed of those who are currently making megabucks off fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
Nope. What's lacking is a lossless transmission medium. Also, we lack photovoltaics that are anywhere near cost-competitive.
The latter (photovoltaics being too expensive) may change in the next 10 years, which will make solar energy feasible and competitive for things like peak shaving in desert cities. But solar won't be a feasible form of baseload energy for awhile. Although solar energy could be stored using molten salt (for solar thermal) or hydro, doing so involves additional capital expenditure and would delay the cost-competitiveness of solar.
Nobody serious has ever suggested running HVDC lines from the Sahara to the Northeastern US, not even the proponents of solar power.
The recommended advice of replacing fats with carbohydrates was repeated so often and so forcefully by everyone, that it's now printed on the back of almost every box of food in the country, in the form of the "USDA food pyramid". It was so often repeated that when I was a child (in the 1970s) things like wonder bread with a bit of margarine were considered health foods (lots of carbs, no saturated fat).
I had always assumed that the medical community had done large-scale long-term studies demonstrating that such a diet led to an increase in lifespan, a reduction in disease, and a loss of unhealthy pounds. Apparently, such studies were never done.
But then the massive Harvard Nurses Heatlh Study was performed, ending in the mid-1990s. In that study, researchers followed 40,000 nurses for decades, in what was the largest and most comprehensive study on human nutrition ever. The study found that replacing fats with carbohydrates had absolutely no effect on longevity or disease. Furthermore, replacing butter with margarine (the standard dietary advice for decades) led to no benefit either. IIRC, the only nurses who lived longer and had less disease were those who ate nutrient-dense monounsaturated fats like almonds and cashews.
As a result of the Harvard Nurses Health Study, researchers in nutrition quietly dropped their assumptions about dietary fats causing disease.
I still can't believe it. The standard dietary advice from 1960 to 1990 must have been the single largest pseudoscientific load of crap in modern history. What a colossal embarrassment. If the USDA publicly admits that it was mistaken then it will be a long time before people trust it again.
Indeed, there are many examples of microorganisms which have reinvented some fundamental process of life. One interesting example is radiotrophic fungus. Radiotrophic fungus gets its energy directly from gamma radiation, instead of photosynthesis. It doesn't require sunlight, and it doesn't need to eat any other organic material.
It's just like the Dr Who episode entitled "Eldrat Lives," in which there's a creature that needs to visit nuclear reactors on Earth to get energy to survive.
Scientists were probably surprised when they examined the Chernobyl reactor and found a form of fungus living there which survives by gaining energy directly from gamma radiation.
I assume your post was intended as a troll, but it was modded up to 5, so...
Tesla was a genius and could have done so much more for the world if only things weren't controlled by rich people with no vision further than how much money they can make, right away, off an idea.
Tesla got vast sums of money as investment from JP Morgan and others. His labs were lavishly funded. Even his idea for an enormous power plant at Niagara Falls was funded by JP Morgan and Westinghouse; once completed, the Niagara Falls power plant supplied the entire city of Buffalo and assured the victory of his belief in AC power.
Or that he died broke and alone because people like Edison stole his ideas and robbed him blind.
Tesla died broke because he spent his millions building labs, and because he cared little for money. (Although Edison had robbed him).
Tesla's failure is a perfect example of capitalism at work.
Tesla wasn't a "failure". He was widely acclaimed as a great genius, his ideas won out, and he revolutionized the world during his own lifetime.
Your car's internal combustion engine is about 25% efficient, whereas a pulverized coal plant approaches 50% efficiency. Which means that using an electric car reduces the amount of energy wasted by half, if we ignore minor electrical losses due to resistance in power lines, battery losses, etc. This factor would appear to favor EVs.
However, another factor to bear in mind, is that coal is much dirtier than gasoline. All the energy from coal is derived from breaking carbon bonds, thus more C02. IIRC coal generates about twice as much C02 for a given amount of energy compared to gasoline.
Yet another factor to bear in mind, however, is that electric cars could take advantage of off-peak electricity if you recharge them overnight. Which would allow the EV driver to use energy that would otherwise have been wasted because pulverized coal and nuclear plants do not reduce their power production during off-peak periods.
On net balance, it would appear that driving electric cars powered by coal-generated electricity would produce moderately lower C02 emissions as driving gasoline-powered cars, depending on how much off-peak electricity is used and thus how many new coal-burning plants would have to be built.
Of course, it would be much smarter to generate the electricity for EVs from nuclear power. But that would be opposed by the environmental movement, because of its relentless (and largely successful) campaign to increase C02 emissions. The environmental movement has forced a change from nuclear power to coal burning over the last several decades in this country. As a result, there would be a lesser benefit to EVs even if they were economical because their widespread adoption would require the construction of new coal plants (how many would depend on how much on-peak energy requirements increased).
The actual data indicates that during 2001-2006 tech salaries grew at 1-2% (which is less than inflation), and during 2006-2007 they grew at at 5% (which is more than inflation).
An obvious hypothesis is that the techie market was in disarray following the dotcom meltdown, during which techies lost real (inflation-adjusted) income. But now the market has recovered, and techies are experiencing wage gains faster than inflation because of cyclic recovery and pent-up demand.
Note that techie salaries are still below their Y2001 levels in inflation-adjusted terms. But then again, techie salaries were probably abnormally high during that period.
independent discovery of the atom bomb, first orbital probe, first pictures of the far side of the moon, etc.
Although the Soviet Union had many important scientific discoveries, the independent discovery of the atom bomb wasn't among them. The soviets made their first atom bomb by stealing US designs through espionage. The earliest soviet bombs closely resembled early US bombs.
The real problem is that the format of the information changes frequently, and varies between platforms./proc/cpuinfo, for example, varies widely between x86, ppc and sparc... It's exactly this sort of inattention to detail that makes me not enjoy developing on Linux.
I think that's just a consequence of the freewheeling, patchwork nature of OSS in general. Granted, BSD may be better than Linux with regard to the kernel (I understand they have a more traditional, hierarchical development approach). But FreeBSD is still distributed with all the OSS tools which are made by different programmers all over the world. We must expect things like different conf file formats, different command-line option formats, different doc standards, etc. BSD may not have that in the kernel, but they have it everywhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
The quoted factor of 40 improvement is a comparison against unconcentrated solar cells, which nobody uses. At present, all the solar generating plants in the world use mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the solar cells, thereby greatly increasing performance.
The "factor of 4" improvement refers to how much they've improved over their previous results; it does not refer to an improvement over currently-deployed technology.
But the question is, how much does this technology improve performance relative to currently-deployed mirror concentration? And, what is the cost relative to currently-deployed mirror concentration?
1. Transmission of electricity from the midwest to California would entail tremendous transmission losses. By way of comparison, at present the longest transmission line in the country is the pacific intertie from northern Oregon to Los Angeles, which is an HVDC line; at only ~800 mi it loses 15% of everything it transmits.
2. Most of the natural gas in this country is used for heating homes directly and would not be freed up for powering cars.
3. Oftentimes there are "low pressure" weather fronts which span large geographical areas and last for several days, resulting in practically no wind for hundreds of miles. As a result, we would need nearly 100% backup capacity for the windmills. This could be solved using pumped storage but that would add to capital expenditure.
4. Unfortunately, the areas which have tremendous wind resources in this country (and therefore wouldn't require long-distance HVDC lines) already generate almost none of their electricity from natural gas. Places like Illinois get their electricity from coal or nuclear. Thus, very little natural gas would be freed up for cars. It's in California that we get most of our electricity from natural gas but we have inadequate wind resources and HVDC lines to the midwest would entail the transmission losses I indicated above.
5. HVDC lines from the midwest to california or NY would require large capital expenditures.
...Don't get me wrong, I think wind power will be an important part of our future energy mix.
However I think an even better idea would be to replace all the natural gas-fired turbines in california with nuclear plants. Doing so would actually free up tremendous amounts of natural gas to use as automotive fuel, because california has a huge population, and it gets most of its electricity from natural gas which could be freed up.
In a food shortage where prices have shot up, it becomes profitable to put into use marginal land for agriculture that wasn't used before. In other words, production increases. So it would help to "cure the shortage". At the same time, wasteful consumption declines, for example, meat-eating in 3rd world countries declines, because producing one calorie of beef requires 9 calories of feedstock grain.
I'm certainly not trying to minimize the terrible hardship food prices have imposed on poor people, but I don't see how economics is to blame.
Of course, maybe the market theory of production increases in response to increased prices, is not correct. However your comment did not even correctly state the theory--instead you attributed a belief to "affluent conservatives" which they don't actually hold. I can see two possible reasons: 1) you are setting up a weak straw man; or 2) you do not know what they think, and you disagree with a mistaken notion of their views.
One more thing. It's worth noting that the food shortage was caused by two things: 1) a government ethanol program which diverted a large fraction of the corn product to auto fuels; and 2) sporadic flooding in various areas of the midwest which happens on occasion and is difficult to predict. One of those causes (the first) was a result of violating the market...
Is there really no alternative to the flat-screen technology we use now? What about organic LED screens? And, is there no material other than gallium which would serve? Is copper the only conductive metal?
Copper is used because it's better than any other fairly cheap alternative; but it's certainly not the only possibility. Couldn't we use fiber optic cables for network cables?
Would it be a drastic change in our standard of living to adopt alternatives like fiber optics and OLEDs?
Are people who invoke the free market really saying that? Have you summarized their views correctly?
How do you know they will respond that way? I doubt they would clamor for gov't intervention, because no government intervention would produce more gallium if none remains in the earth's surface.
The market system is not a dumb system, and anyone who knows anything about futures markets etc knows that they're certainly not reactionary. The market is predictive and attempts to use all available information of all discounted future price movements. (If you've never heard anything like that before, then you should read about it first). As a result, the market would start preparing for the exhaustion of zinc or any other elements years before it occurs, by increasing the price gradually and in advance so that the available stocks will go to the best available uses. That is the function of speculation, "futures markets (my emphasis)", and so on.
Let me answer a potential objection. What if there really is no alternative to indium, and we really are about to run out?
In that case, no economic system would produce more of it. The only issue would be how to allocate what we have, which is the function of prices. Suppose the price of indium or some other rare earth element skyrocketed years before its exhaustion (which always causes howls from the left: "SPECULATORS ARE DRIVING UP THE PRICE", but anyway). In that case, would companies really throw away huge sums of money by using now-expensive indium indiscriminately? Would companies use copper wires that are now 40x as expensive as fiber optics?
I'm not saying the market will solve all problems, but allocation of scarce resources is something it does fairly well.
No. Coal plants are about 45% efficient and burn a fuel which is almost entirely carbon. Your car's engine is about 25% efficient and gets half its energy from breaking carbon bonds and the other half from hydrogen.
As a result, coal plants are only very slightly better than your car's engine. Coal plants are more efficient, but the fuel they burn is far dirtier.
If you have a diesel car, then replacing it with an electric car would increase CO2 emissions if it were indirectly powered by a coal plant.
IIRC, heating oil is a an oil fraction which could not easily be converted into petroleum for cars.
Oil naturally consists of hydrocarbons of various lengths which are refined into various fuels (kerosene, gasoline, diesel, etc). Since the ratios of these fuels are not what the market wants, the oil companies have "cracking plants" which can convert some hydrocarbons to others (diesel to gasoline, etc).
However there are some hydrocarbons which are very heavy and very difficult to convert to anything else. Since those hydrocarbons can't be used for powering cars, they are treated as "waste oil" and sold at prices similar to non-cartel fossil fuels (natural gas). Since that oil can be burned, it's used for heating.
In the US during the 1970s there were bumper stickers which said: "Split wood, not atoms".
I don't even like to think what the environmental consequences would be if we replaced nuclear power by cutting down the forests and burning the wood for energy.
There are unconfirmed reports of Al Qaeda on the moon. Furthermore, we have it from very reliable sources that Saddam has been working to establish lunar colonies in order to mine the tritium there for use in hydrogen bombs. We must not wait until there is a mushroom cloud over Earth.
We shall blow up the moon ourselves, if necessary. Nobody can deny us our right of self-defense against the moon. If the French happen to think the idea of blowing up the moon is silly, then we'll rename food products just to spite them ("terrestrial fries"). Anyway, the French don't have the right to oppose our ideas because they're only French and they don't even run the planet anymore, much less the solar system.
There has been an ongoing plan for years to build a bullet train from San Francisco, through Silicon Valley, through Los Angeles, to San Diego.
Unfortunately, progress is very slow for several reasons. First, the state of CA is always in a fiscal crisis. Second, there is a mountain range north of Los Angeles that is very earthquake-prone and would require digging a tunnel through. Third, the train would require building high-speed tracks in areas that are already densely populated which would require evicting current residents; and doing that kind of thing is more difficult nowadays.
Intel's chip has a power draw of less than 2.5 watts for the highest-clocked chip. I don't see how a power draw that's twice that amount would bring Intel's atom to its knees.
Also, I don't understand this necessity for cheesy bad-action-flick terminology ("Intel's chip brought to it's knees!") when all that has happened is a bit player releasing a product with no performance figures.
At present, solar thermal costs $0.20/KwH busbar in places like Death Valley. Even in scorched deserts, the price of solar thermal is more than twice the price of nuclear. In cloudy northern climates the economics would be worse.
However, countries like Germany, Poland, and the UK could conceivably be supplied with power from solar thermal because they're close enough to Spain and Northern Africa that transmission over HVDC lines would be feasible without too much loss. But the cost would be greater than the $0.20/KwH busbar mentioned above.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. The capital cost of building a nuclear power plant is far less than building a solar thermal plant with the same power output. To build a 1GW solar thermal plant would take miles of glass, mirrors, and concrete. (The largest solar thermal plant until recently was an enormous plant in California's death valley which only produces something like 200MW).
With both nuclear power and solar thermal, the major costs are initial capital expenditures. Solar thermal is more than twice as expensive as nuclear at present because the initial expenditures are much higher for a given power output.
Unlike the author of the article, I doubt that solar thermal will ever be economically competitive with nuclear power. If there were drastic reductions in the prices of concrete, turbines, and construction, then the price of nuclear power would be reduced by as much as solar thermal, and the present price disparity would remain. And if the cost of borrowing were reduced (a huge part of the cost of both nuclear and solar thermal) then the price of nuclear would be reduced by as much as solar thermal.
It seems likely that nuclear power will have greater price reductions than solar thermal. Solar thermal is an extremely low-tech solution that's essentially the same as it was decades ago and whose price almost entirely depends on things like the price of construction and the cost of borrowing. Whereas nuclear power continues to experience significant cost-saving technological developments like passive safety systems.
The article actually overstated the losses from storing heat as molten salt. The molten salt from solar thermal plants is stored in an enormous thermos with insulated dual walls with a vacuum between the walls. If I recall the losses due to heat dissipation are less than 10% per day. And of course there is no conversion loss since the power was from heat originally, and they're storing heat. With solar thermal, it's not really a problem that the Sun only shines during the day.
The one thing in the article I disagreed with was the cost estimates. Right now, solar thermal costs more than $0.20/KwH which is the busbar cost. (The estimates must take into account the capital cost of the molten salt storage facility!). Since the solar thermal plant is basically glass tubes, concrete, salt, a big thermos for holding the molten salt, and turbines, I doubt very much that the price of it all will decrease drastically as the author claims. It seems to me that any drastic reduction in the price of concrete, turbines, or construction would reduce the price of nuclear power and other competitors as much as solar thermal, so the present disparity in cost would remain. At present solar thermal is more than twice as expensive as nuclear.
A minority of people in the IT profession have a low level of emotional maturity. Everyone already knows that. Thus, the author shouldn't have been surprised when he encountered such a person. He should have quit immediately when he recognized it.
If the CTO of a company is a "problem child" then he should have quit right when he found that out.
You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen /
Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine /
You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life /
See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen
I read the article you linked, and it doesn't seem to claim that. In the article, Lockheed said "We haven't personally tested their [eestor's] prototypes yet."
Electricity does not "travel just fine" over long distances. Even using HVDC cables, we would lose almost all the electricity to transmission losses. Furthermore, the distance losses are not "trivially overcome" by the sheer amount of irradiation. If we lost 95% of the energy to transmission losses then it would require 20x as many solar panels in the Sahara. Since solar power (from solar thermal, not photovoltaics) is already 2-3x more expensive than the alternatives-- well, you do the math. (Or try to).
Speaking of which...
It's a bit difficult to believe that your post was modded up to 5, but I suppose I should stop being surprised by these things.
It means very little to point out the theoretical maximum amount of energy which could be derived from some source. I've heard people make the same argument with regard to geothermal energy: there's enough heat in the core of the earth to supply 10,000x our energy needs, etc. Of course, exploiting anything more than a very small fraction of that would be extremely difficult.
The last time I checked, putting an object into "LEO" (low earth orbit) would cost about $10,000/kg. One kg of solar panels would generate very little electricity.
There are substantial transmission losses when transporting electricity over long distances. Granted, using HVDC, we could limit conductance losses. Still, even with HVDC, the longest cables in the world are limited to a thousand miles or so because the losses would be unacceptable beyond that. For example, with the california/oregon 65 intertie, which is one of the longest HVDC transmission cables in the world, there are losses of over 10%. Proposed interties from Canada to San Francisco would all involve peak losses of more than 20%. If we were to build HVDC lines from the Sahara to the Northeast United States, not only would it be exorbitantly expensive but almost all the electricity would be lost in transmission.
And please don't say "superconductors." It would be prohibitively expensive to have even 20 miles of superconducting cables.
Gwyneth has not been sold the brooklyn bridge, insofar as nuclear power is cost-competitive and is not a "costly mistake."
Nope. What's lacking is a lossless transmission medium. Also, we lack photovoltaics that are anywhere near cost-competitive.
The latter (photovoltaics being too expensive) may change in the next 10 years, which will make solar energy feasible and competitive for things like peak shaving in desert cities. But solar won't be a feasible form of baseload energy for awhile. Although solar energy could be stored using molten salt (for solar thermal) or hydro, doing so involves additional capital expenditure and would delay the cost-competitiveness of solar.
Nobody serious has ever suggested running HVDC lines from the Sahara to the Northeastern US, not even the proponents of solar power.
The recommended advice of replacing fats with carbohydrates was repeated so often and so forcefully by everyone, that it's now printed on the back of almost every box of food in the country, in the form of the "USDA food pyramid". It was so often repeated that when I was a child (in the 1970s) things like wonder bread with a bit of margarine were considered health foods (lots of carbs, no saturated fat).
I had always assumed that the medical community had done large-scale long-term studies demonstrating that such a diet led to an increase in lifespan, a reduction in disease, and a loss of unhealthy pounds. Apparently, such studies were never done.
But then the massive Harvard Nurses Heatlh Study was performed, ending in the mid-1990s. In that study, researchers followed 40,000 nurses for decades, in what was the largest and most comprehensive study on human nutrition ever. The study found that replacing fats with carbohydrates had absolutely no effect on longevity or disease. Furthermore, replacing butter with margarine (the standard dietary advice for decades) led to no benefit either. IIRC, the only nurses who lived longer and had less disease were those who ate nutrient-dense monounsaturated fats like almonds and cashews.
As a result of the Harvard Nurses Health Study, researchers in nutrition quietly dropped their assumptions about dietary fats causing disease.
I still can't believe it. The standard dietary advice from 1960 to 1990 must have been the single largest pseudoscientific load of crap in modern history. What a colossal embarrassment. If the USDA publicly admits that it was mistaken then it will be a long time before people trust it again.
Indeed, there are many examples of microorganisms which have reinvented some fundamental process of life. One interesting example is radiotrophic fungus. Radiotrophic fungus gets its energy directly from gamma radiation, instead of photosynthesis. It doesn't require sunlight, and it doesn't need to eat any other organic material.
It's just like the Dr Who episode entitled "Eldrat Lives," in which there's a creature that needs to visit nuclear reactors on Earth to get energy to survive.
Scientists were probably surprised when they examined the Chernobyl reactor and found a form of fungus living there which survives by gaining energy directly from gamma radiation.
I assume your post was intended as a troll, but it was modded up to 5, so...
Tesla got vast sums of money as investment from JP Morgan and others. His labs were lavishly funded. Even his idea for an enormous power plant at Niagara Falls was funded by JP Morgan and Westinghouse; once completed, the Niagara Falls power plant supplied the entire city of Buffalo and assured the victory of his belief in AC power.
Tesla died broke because he spent his millions building labs, and because he cared little for money. (Although Edison had robbed him).
Tesla wasn't a "failure". He was widely acclaimed as a great genius, his ideas won out, and he revolutionized the world during his own lifetime.
Anyway...
I think I could estimate.
Your car's internal combustion engine is about 25% efficient, whereas a pulverized coal plant approaches 50% efficiency. Which means that using an electric car reduces the amount of energy wasted by half, if we ignore minor electrical losses due to resistance in power lines, battery losses, etc. This factor would appear to favor EVs.
However, another factor to bear in mind, is that coal is much dirtier than gasoline. All the energy from coal is derived from breaking carbon bonds, thus more C02. IIRC coal generates about twice as much C02 for a given amount of energy compared to gasoline.
Yet another factor to bear in mind, however, is that electric cars could take advantage of off-peak electricity if you recharge them overnight. Which would allow the EV driver to use energy that would otherwise have been wasted because pulverized coal and nuclear plants do not reduce their power production during off-peak periods.
On net balance, it would appear that driving electric cars powered by coal-generated electricity would produce moderately lower C02 emissions as driving gasoline-powered cars, depending on how much off-peak electricity is used and thus how many new coal-burning plants would have to be built.
Of course, it would be much smarter to generate the electricity for EVs from nuclear power. But that would be opposed by the environmental movement, because of its relentless (and largely successful) campaign to increase C02 emissions. The environmental movement has forced a change from nuclear power to coal burning over the last several decades in this country. As a result, there would be a lesser benefit to EVs even if they were economical because their widespread adoption would require the construction of new coal plants (how many would depend on how much on-peak energy requirements increased).
The actual data indicates that during 2001-2006 tech salaries grew at 1-2% (which is less than inflation), and during 2006-2007 they grew at at 5% (which is more than inflation).
An obvious hypothesis is that the techie market was in disarray following the dotcom meltdown, during which techies lost real (inflation-adjusted) income. But now the market has recovered, and techies are experiencing wage gains faster than inflation because of cyclic recovery and pent-up demand.
Note that techie salaries are still below their Y2001 levels in inflation-adjusted terms. But then again, techie salaries were probably abnormally high during that period.
None of this is really that surprising.
Although the Soviet Union had many important scientific discoveries, the independent discovery of the atom bomb wasn't among them. The soviets made their first atom bomb by stealing US designs through espionage. The earliest soviet bombs closely resembled early US bombs.
I think that's just a consequence of the freewheeling, patchwork nature of OSS in general. Granted, BSD may be better than Linux with regard to the kernel (I understand they have a more traditional, hierarchical development approach). But FreeBSD is still distributed with all the OSS tools which are made by different programmers all over the world. We must expect things like different conf file formats, different command-line option formats, different doc standards, etc. BSD may not have that in the kernel, but they have it everywhere else.