An electrical powerplant for plane. More economical to have APU supply power for things like lights & AC than to need to spin up engines when sitting on tarmac. The grandparent post is indicating the wheels (ground propulsion) will be driven by an electric motor powered by the APU.
On ICE I don't have clue. ICE is usually internal combustion engine but that doesn't make sense here. Propulsion on a conventional pasenger liner is from the jet engines which are obviously turbines not internal combustion.
Nobody owns their old box so when they upgrade the old box goes back to the cable company.
Like I said it is possible but hardly cheap.
Paying for a PVR which does realtime h.264 from compressed HDMI output while still having to rent a $5 box from cable company which can only record single channel at a time and requires some clunky external IR blaster to control.
Never said it is impossible just that it won't be cheap & easy.
I mean if you want a high quality multi-tuner HD PVR w/ lots of options and is compatible w/ cable buy a TIVO HD.
The idea that somehow using multiple cable boxes sending HDMI output which is then snatched and compressed down by h.264 in real time is going to be cheaper or better solution is kinda silly.
3-4 mbps isn't "plenty" for h.264. h.264 is good but it isn't that good.
h.264 achieves about comparable quality as mpeg2 w/ roughly half the bitrate.
OTA HDTV is 19Mbps mpeg2. Comparable quality w/ h.264 is in the 8mbps to 12mbps range depending on the content.
The last mile doesn't have the bandwidth for that "simultaneously" as you indicate, not even close. Higher quality HD (comparable to Bluray) would be even more bandwidth.
Lastly even IF networks could handle that they certainly wouldn't at current prices.
The reality is as long as the ratio between viewer : content remains high broadcast systems (OTA, sat, cable) make a lot of sense. Internet delivery makes more sense for less popular content.
Average person watches about 30 hours of content per week. Assume it is only 30 hours per household. That is about 540GB per household per month. A significant strain on current networks and even worse that 90%+ of it is duplicated across millions of households.
upstream channels are at a low frequncy (usually around 210Mhz) this is "below" channel 2 on CATV lineup.
downstream DOCSIS channel can be any channel available. No reason why they can't be located at a frequencies well above basic cable frequencies. Usually basic cable channels are in a block of frequencies making trapping rather easy.
The cable companies will never do it because they aren't required to. Encrypting is cheaper than trapping. Eventually analog cable is going away so if they encrypt everything except OTA channels (required by law) then there essentially is no cable stealing without breaking encyrption. In essence casual piracy goes away.
No need to trap, no need to put filters or blocks (and have people remove them) simply encrypt everything and let STB unlock what they are suppose to see.
Bad for consumer,. good for cable company (higher compliance at lower cost). Stil there is no reason why filter/trap would cause problems w/ DOCSIS.
You are aware that HDMI has nothing to do w/ how cable feeds are encrypted and how cable card unlocks those paid fees right.
That a PVR connected to an HDMI output would be capturing uncompressed video. While it can be compressed again it won't be easy, won't be real time, and won't be cheap.
Even that doesn't get around the fact that you can only record a single channel (what is being output over HDMI) and thus would still need a cable STB and some when to communicate to that box.
I think it is funny/sad that people think a crypto break in an unrelated technology suddenly unlocks everything.
Early on that was the case but lately the cable cos have gotten better. They still hate it but installing pair of cable cards in my TIVO was easy. I later got a second TIVO and they installed a single "m" cable card (which can control up to 4 tuners) which was even easier.
Bad news for cable companies I dropped cable a year later
Natural gas plant is very cheap but fuel is expensive. Coal plant is rather capital intensive but the fuel is cheap.
This means existing coal plants were the plant is a sunk cost coal is very cheap (old coal) however emission standards have tightened in the US and that makes new coal plant construction prohibitive. There have been less than a handful of coal plants built in last 10 years (but dozens of natural gas turbines). The number of coal plants is falling because the rate of replacement is slower than the rate construction.
If there ever is a carbon tax it hurts coal the most (CO2 emissions for coal is about 2x that of natural gas). Nobody in the US wants to take a risk on building a new coal plant (which may requires 20 years of operation to break even on capital costs) in such an uncertain environment.
Coal plants aren't cheap they are actually rather capital intensive (not as much as nuclear) but far more than natural gas.
The only advantage coal has is the fuel source is cheap. Once you start trying to "clean" it then it isn't cheap anymore.
Nobody has "clean" coal. When someone says "clean coal" they mean carbon-light coal. Even if you remove all the CO2 from coal emissions you are still left with the worst possible combination of industrial pollutants. Average coal plant releases more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant. Add to that arsenic, mercury, cadmium, all about 3 dozen other "baddies".
Even if you could somehow make the smokestake of the coal plant perfectly clean (both low carbon and no industrail pollutants) you haven't gotten rid of the pollution. Less emissions = more fly ash. I mean it doesn't go away.
Fly ash is the most toxic substance man makes with maybe the exception of nuclear power. The issue is scope and scale. A nuclear power plant might produce 1 20ton spent fuel rod assembly every year. A coal plant producing the same amount of energy will produce thousands of tons of utterly toxic fly ash.
20 tons vs thousands of tons. Far easier to come up with a solution to safely dispose of spent fuel rods than store (forever) thousands of tons of spent fly ash.
Well I agree however the reason most of the greenies support CO2 from air is because it is "carbon neutral".
take Co2 from air -> convert to liquid fuel -> burn ->return carbon to air.
If you are taking carbon from the ground well: a) you aren't going to find the "green power" people supporting that. a) you don't need a reactor just liquify coal.
Far easier, far higher efficiency. Of course not really sure what the benefit would be going from one dirty carbon fuel source to another one.
The largest cost when it comes to synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons is the energy needed to produce hydrogen.
True if you have abundant high concentration free carbon. If you have "rare" carbon bonded with oxygen that isn't true.
So while you may be technically right it wasn't the "solution" proposed. Also is your goal is just a cheap liquid hydrocarbon regardless of the "carbon cost" then just liquify coal.
As such it is energy intensive to produce CO2 from air.
Virtually all commercial CO2 is produced from methane because CO2 from air is too expensive.
I can understand why you would be confused w/ all the talk about CO2 in the atmosphere but it is only ~400ppm. Another way to visualize it is imagine a football stadium with 10,000 people in it. Now imagine they represent composition of air. Only 4 of them would be CO2. Finding, extracting, and storing the 4 out of 10,000 is energy intensive.
Now if you have a huge CO2 sink (like building reactor need coal plant, steel refinery, or active volcano) that would change the economics.
In CA they deregulsted ONLY the wholesale power. Retail pricing was heavily regulated (and virtually impossible to change).
So that means when you power company needed more higher cost power it COULDN'T raise the price it charged you but wholesales could charge whatever they wanted.
So there were times when the power company (person providing delivery and billing) would have had to buy power and then sell it for less than what they were buying. They opted for rolling blackouts instead.
I mean imagine that with any other industry. Say you run restaurant and the govt says you can't charge more than $20 for steak but then there is a bad year for livestock and your operating cost is $25 a streak. Are you going to lose $5 on each steak or simply not sell steak when price is too high? Most likely you would opt for a "rolling blackout" on streak.
Safety systems in Western reactors are passive meaning they require constant operator input and reactor feedback in expected range to continue.
One example is electromagnetic grapples on control rods. In a loss of power scenario you can't keep the reactor going. Without electricity the grapples will release and gravity will lower control rods. At chernobyl the control rods were below the reactor thus they couldn't be passively inserted. The design was also flawed. The tip of the control rods was made of graphite. Graphite is a moderator. When all the control rods were inserted for a few seconds the moderation of the reactor actually increased as it forced water aside and brought graphite (very strong moderator) in close proximity to the fuel.
Another example in neutron poison. In the presence of neutron poison the reactor will have insufficient neutron economy to sustain fission. While that safety system does have a manual trigger it also has a backup. The neutron poison is held under pressure connected to reactor pressure vessel via heat sensitive valves. If reactor temperature climbs outside operating range the valves will melt and the neutron poison will flood the reactor.
Even if you wanted to in either of those conditions (electrical power loss, or core temperature spike) you couldn't keep the reactor running.
Chernobyl was designed to "go" until proper conditions make it stop. Western reactors are designed to "stop" unless proper conditions (and human input) allow it to go.
You could blow up the control room for a western reactor and the reactor would simply shutdown predictably and reliably when it loses signal from control room.
Until stupidity can overcome physics we are safe. Many of these designs were implemented after TMI. At TMI we trusted the humans too much. The reactor was trying to shutdown it was human failure that forced the reactor to keep operating outside specified tolerances.
Occasionally US reactors will simply SCRAM without any human input, It may takes hours of even days to determine what combination of conditions prevented the reactor from operating.
Price-Anderson to date has cost US taxpayers $0.00.
The US has never had a containment structure breech. In fact it has never had any reactor pressure vessel burst thus that is 2 barriers which would both have to be defeated to have a release like Chernobyl.
There are numerous factors that make an accident on the scope and scale of Chernobyl impossible in the US. This isn't to say some future US reactor couldn't have a core event but it would be more limited in scope.
Western reactors are all negative void coefficient designs. As the reactor heats up and water turns into steam this lowers the moderating effect of the water and slows down fission rate. Chernobyl was positive void design. As water flashed into steam the graphite in reactor continued to moderate the reactor. The fission rate (and thus heat) continued to increase creating a virtuous cycle.
Western reactors don't use graphite in the core (graphite burns when exposed to oxygen at reactor temperatures) this created an effective dispersal mechanism at Chernobyl for radioactive material.
Western reactors have containment dome. Once the core was breeched at chernobyl there was no barrier to radioactive dispersal.
Western reactors have redundant passive safety features. Chernobyl had safety systems but over the years many had been bypassed and jury rigged.
You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.
Correction a Chernobyl sized accident every 40 years would cost $0.08 (I'll trust your math) however in the western world depsite hundreds of operating reactors (with combined operate life in millions of hours) that has never happened.
A smaller more contained accident (like say 3 mile island) every 50-100 years would be a rounding error on the cost of energy.
Nothing like the utterly staggering and completely unsustainable 1.25 cents per kWh given to sustainable energy.
Nuclear would do fine too if it go an utterly unsustainable "renewable energy" credit of 1.25 cent per kWh wholesale.
That is roughly 25% of wholesale power price. Many wind farms sell power in middle of a night at a loss (litterally pay people to take power) because if they don't they lose the 1.25 cent per kWh credit.
Let me know when wind/solar can produce 100 GW of power without a 25% subsidy.
Reality: - sustainable energy: growing market only with an unsustainable 25% wholesale power subsidy.
Chernobyl is the worst possible example to illustrate the risk of Western style nuclear reactors.
Chernobyl is positive void coefficient reactor. Simply put as it gets hotter, the water turns to steam and that INCREASES the rate of fission (which leads to more heat -> more steam -> more fission).
Everyone knew Chernobyl was unsafe even the Soviets. They didn't build a containment dome because it costs money. The same country was intentionally starving its own people by the millions (the "famine" in Ukraine). The risks were well known. For years western powers asked/begged/pleaded for the Soviets to shutdown Chernobyl or build a containment dome. They simply didn't care.
Positive void coefficient reactors are prohibited for power generation in the United States.
The Chernobyl equivalent of a auto would be one that once it goes out of control it can only go faster. Literally physics would prevent the car from slowing no matter what is done. The only possible outcome is a highspeed impact. Actually the auto equivalent of Chernobyl is a Toyota.
Slashdot Mirror
APU is auxillery power unit.
An electrical powerplant for plane. More economical to have APU supply power for things like lights & AC than to need to spin up engines when sitting on tarmac. The grandparent post is indicating the wheels (ground propulsion) will be driven by an electric motor powered by the APU.
On ICE I don't have clue. ICE is usually internal combustion engine but that doesn't make sense here. Propulsion on a conventional pasenger liner is from the jet engines which are obviously turbines not internal combustion.
What old cable boxes?
Nobody owns their old box so when they upgrade the old box goes back to the cable company.
Like I said it is possible but hardly cheap.
Paying for a PVR which does realtime h.264 from compressed HDMI output while still having to rent a $5 box from cable company which can only record single channel at a time and requires some clunky external IR blaster to control.
Never said it is impossible just that it won't be cheap & easy.
I mean if you want a high quality multi-tuner HD PVR w/ lots of options and is compatible w/ cable buy a TIVO HD.
The idea that somehow using multiple cable boxes sending HDMI output which is then snatched and compressed down by h.264 in real time is going to be cheaper or better solution is kinda silly.
Really. Ouch. Squeeze Squeeze.
I dropped cable couple years ago. OTA. Yeah its only mpeg2 but has plenty of bandwith (although station can screw that up to w/ sub channels).
$2 and most cable companies support m-cards now (handles multiple tuners in single device per card).
Bad news it is only a matter of time before analog goes away. That is some premo valuable bandwidth that crappy low rez analog channels are using.
Cable channels put 2 HD or about 5 SD digital chanels in the same space as a single analog channel.
Secure VPN tunnel to an annoymizing service that doesn't maintain records. If you are real paranoid just chain multiple providers
3-4 mbps isn't "plenty" for h.264. h.264 is good but it isn't that good.
h.264 achieves about comparable quality as mpeg2 w/ roughly half the bitrate.
OTA HDTV is 19Mbps mpeg2. Comparable quality w/ h.264 is in the 8mbps to 12mbps range depending on the content.
The last mile doesn't have the bandwidth for that "simultaneously" as you indicate, not even close. Higher quality HD (comparable to Bluray) would be even more bandwidth.
Lastly even IF networks could handle that they certainly wouldn't at current prices.
The reality is as long as the ratio between viewer : content remains high broadcast systems (OTA, sat, cable) make a lot of sense. Internet delivery makes more sense for less popular content.
Average person watches about 30 hours of content per week. Assume it is only 30 hours per household. That is about 540GB per household per month. A significant strain on current networks and even worse that 90%+ of it is duplicated across millions of households.
Kinda defeats the purpose of HDTV. Analog SD mpeg2 compressed. I wouldn't call it a DVD quality but to each his own.
So why not buy a TIVO?
Stable, customizable, easily hackable to support up to 1TB of DVR space (plus another 1TB external).
You can find some used ones cheap on ebay.
Trapping ins't a problem w/ DOCSIS.
upstream channels are at a low frequncy (usually around 210Mhz) this is "below" channel 2 on CATV lineup.
downstream DOCSIS channel can be any channel available. No reason why they can't be located at a frequencies well above basic cable frequencies. Usually basic cable channels are in a block of frequencies making trapping rather easy.
The cable companies will never do it because they aren't required to. Encrypting is cheaper than trapping. Eventually analog cable is going away so if they encrypt everything except OTA channels (required by law) then there essentially is no cable stealing without breaking encyrption. In essence casual piracy goes away.
No need to trap, no need to put filters or blocks (and have people remove them) simply encrypt everything and let STB unlock what they are suppose to see.
Bad for consumer,. good for cable company (higher compliance at lower cost). Stil there is no reason why filter/trap would cause problems w/ DOCSIS.
You had a VCR which decoded digital QAM? I think not.
STB = set top box?
Does anyone balance their set top box on top of their 2" thick plasma or LCD TV anymore?
You are aware that HDMI has nothing to do w/ how cable feeds are encrypted and how cable card unlocks those paid fees right.
That a PVR connected to an HDMI output would be capturing uncompressed video. While it can be compressed again it won't be easy, won't be real time, and won't be cheap.
Even that doesn't get around the fact that you can only record a single channel (what is being output over HDMI) and thus would still need a cable STB and some when to communicate to that box.
I think it is funny/sad that people think a crypto break in an unrelated technology suddenly unlocks everything.
Not true.
Cable card itself is simply an authorization & decryption mechanism.
It needs a HOST. That host can be a TIVO or Moxi, or computer or TV w/ cable card slot.
the HOST specification doesn't support two way communication.
Tomorrow an agreed upon host spec could be created and cable card would work fine with that.
Early on that was the case but lately the cable cos have gotten better. They still hate it but installing pair of cable cards in my TIVO was easy. I later got a second TIVO and they installed a single "m" cable card (which can control up to 4 tuners) which was even easier.
Bad news for cable companies I dropped cable a year later
Sure at 10x the cost. Renewable energy isn't free.
Got of diferentiate between old coal & new coal.
Natural gas plant is very cheap but fuel is expensive.
Coal plant is rather capital intensive but the fuel is cheap.
This means existing coal plants were the plant is a sunk cost coal is very cheap (old coal) however emission standards have tightened in the US and that makes new coal plant construction prohibitive. There have been less than a handful of coal plants built in last 10 years (but dozens of natural gas turbines). The number of coal plants is falling because the rate of replacement is slower than the rate construction.
If there ever is a carbon tax it hurts coal the most (CO2 emissions for coal is about 2x that of natural gas). Nobody in the US wants to take a risk on building a new coal plant (which may requires 20 years of operation to break even on capital costs) in such an uncertain environment.
Coal plants aren't cheap they are actually rather capital intensive (not as much as nuclear) but far more than natural gas.
The only advantage coal has is the fuel source is cheap. Once you start trying to "clean" it then it isn't cheap anymore.
Nobody has "clean" coal. When someone says "clean coal" they mean carbon-light coal. Even if you remove all the CO2 from coal emissions you are still left with the worst possible combination of industrial pollutants. Average coal plant releases more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant. Add to that arsenic, mercury, cadmium, all about 3 dozen other "baddies".
Even if you could somehow make the smokestake of the coal plant perfectly clean (both low carbon and no industrail pollutants) you haven't gotten rid of the pollution. Less emissions = more fly ash. I mean it doesn't go away.
Fly ash is the most toxic substance man makes with maybe the exception of nuclear power. The issue is scope and scale. A nuclear power plant might produce 1 20ton spent fuel rod assembly every year. A coal plant producing the same amount of energy will produce thousands of tons of utterly toxic fly ash.
20 tons vs thousands of tons. Far easier to come up with a solution to safely dispose of spent fuel rods than store (forever) thousands of tons of spent fly ash.
Well I agree however the reason most of the greenies support CO2 from air is because it is "carbon neutral".
take Co2 from air -> convert to liquid fuel -> burn ->return carbon to air.
If you are taking carbon from the ground well:
a) you aren't going to find the "green power" people supporting that.
a) you don't need a reactor just liquify coal.
Far easier, far higher efficiency. Of course not really sure what the benefit would be going from one dirty carbon fuel source to another one.
The largest cost when it comes to synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons is the energy needed to produce hydrogen.
True if you have abundant high concentration free carbon. If you have "rare" carbon bonded with oxygen that isn't true.
So while you may be technically right it wasn't the "solution" proposed. Also is your goal is just a cheap liquid hydrocarbon regardless of the "carbon cost" then just liquify coal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_liquefaction
Hell with economies of scale it could be cheaper than oil.
As such it is energy intensive to produce CO2 from air.
Virtually all commercial CO2 is produced from methane because CO2 from air is too expensive.
I can understand why you would be confused w/ all the talk about CO2 in the atmosphere but it is only ~400ppm. Another way to visualize it is imagine a football stadium with 10,000 people in it. Now imagine they represent composition of air. Only 4 of them would be CO2. Finding, extracting, and storing the 4 out of 10,000 is energy intensive.
Now if you have a huge CO2 sink (like building reactor need coal plant, steel refinery, or active volcano) that would change the economics.
In CA they deregulsted ONLY the wholesale power.
Retail pricing was heavily regulated (and virtually impossible to change).
So that means when you power company needed more higher cost power it COULDN'T raise the price it charged you but wholesales could charge whatever they wanted.
So there were times when the power company (person providing delivery and billing) would have had to buy power and then sell it for less than what they were buying. They opted for rolling blackouts instead.
I mean imagine that with any other industry. Say you run restaurant and the govt says you can't charge more than $20 for steak but then there is a bad year for livestock and your operating cost is $25 a streak. Are you going to lose $5 on each steak or simply not sell steak when price is too high? Most likely you would opt for a "rolling blackout" on streak.
Not true. Stupidity can't overcome physics.
Safety systems in Western reactors are passive meaning they require constant operator input and reactor feedback in expected range to continue.
One example is electromagnetic grapples on control rods. In a loss of power scenario you can't keep the reactor going. Without electricity the grapples will release and gravity will lower control rods. At chernobyl the control rods were below the reactor thus they couldn't be passively inserted. The design was also flawed. The tip of the control rods was made of graphite. Graphite is a moderator. When all the control rods were inserted for a few seconds the moderation of the reactor actually increased as it forced water aside and brought graphite (very strong moderator) in close proximity to the fuel.
Another example in neutron poison. In the presence of neutron poison the reactor will have insufficient neutron economy to sustain fission. While that safety system does have a manual trigger it also has a backup. The neutron poison is held under pressure connected to reactor pressure vessel via heat sensitive valves. If reactor temperature climbs outside operating range the valves will melt and the neutron poison will flood the reactor.
Even if you wanted to in either of those conditions (electrical power loss, or core temperature spike) you couldn't keep the reactor running.
Chernobyl was designed to "go" until proper conditions make it stop. Western reactors are designed to "stop" unless proper conditions (and human input) allow it to go.
You could blow up the control room for a western reactor and the reactor would simply shutdown predictably and reliably when it loses signal from control room.
Until stupidity can overcome physics we are safe. Many of these designs were implemented after TMI. At TMI we trusted the humans too much. The reactor was trying to shutdown it was human failure that forced the reactor to keep operating outside specified tolerances.
Occasionally US reactors will simply SCRAM without any human input, It may takes hours of even days to determine what combination of conditions prevented the reactor from operating.
Price-Anderson to date has cost US taxpayers $0.00.
The US has never had a containment structure breech. In fact it has never had any reactor pressure vessel burst thus that is 2 barriers which would both have to be defeated to have a release like Chernobyl.
There are numerous factors that make an accident on the scope and scale of Chernobyl impossible in the US. This isn't to say some future US reactor couldn't have a core event but it would be more limited in scope.
Western reactors are all negative void coefficient designs. As the reactor heats up and water turns into steam this lowers the moderating effect of the water and slows down fission rate. Chernobyl was positive void design. As water flashed into steam the graphite in reactor continued to moderate the reactor. The fission rate (and thus heat) continued to increase creating a virtuous cycle.
Western reactors don't use graphite in the core (graphite burns when exposed to oxygen at reactor temperatures) this created an effective dispersal mechanism at Chernobyl for radioactive material.
Western reactors have containment dome. Once the core was breeched at chernobyl there was no barrier to radioactive dispersal.
Western reactors have redundant passive safety features. Chernobyl had safety systems but over the years many had been bypassed and jury rigged.
You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.
Correction a Chernobyl sized accident every 40 years would cost $0.08 (I'll trust your math) however in the western world depsite hundreds of operating reactors (with combined operate life in millions of hours) that has never happened.
A smaller more contained accident (like say 3 mile island) every 50-100 years would be a rounding error on the cost of energy.
Nothing like the utterly staggering and completely unsustainable 1.25 cents per kWh given to sustainable energy.
Nuclear would do fine too if it go an utterly unsustainable "renewable energy" credit of 1.25 cent per kWh wholesale.
That is roughly 25% of wholesale power price. Many wind farms sell power in middle of a night at a loss (litterally pay people to take power) because if they don't they lose the 1.25 cent per kWh credit.
Let me know when wind/solar can produce 100 GW of power without a 25% subsidy.
Reality:
- sustainable energy: growing market only with an unsustainable 25% wholesale power subsidy.
Chernobyl is the worst possible example to illustrate the risk of Western style nuclear reactors.
Chernobyl is positive void coefficient reactor. Simply put as it gets hotter, the water turns to steam and that INCREASES the rate of fission (which leads to more heat -> more steam -> more fission).
Everyone knew Chernobyl was unsafe even the Soviets. They didn't build a containment dome because it costs money. The same country was intentionally starving its own people by the millions (the "famine" in Ukraine). The risks were well known. For years western powers asked/begged/pleaded for the Soviets to shutdown Chernobyl or build a containment dome. They simply didn't care.
Positive void coefficient reactors are prohibited for power generation in the United States.
The Chernobyl equivalent of a auto would be one that once it goes out of control it can only go faster. Literally physics would prevent the car from slowing no matter what is done. The only possible outcome is a highspeed impact. Actually the auto equivalent of Chernobyl is a Toyota.