Every so often, Hollywood et al come up with some new technology that "improves" the experience.
Sometimes, these are quite good. THX, for example. More often, they're just "ok".
The good:
I can see 3D being used to very good effect when the story has the right kind of overwhelming scenery that (and this is the key) is integral to or at least relates closely to the plot.
Avatar did that part of it pretty well. We had a colorful world with surprising depth relationships (floating mountains, lots of flight scenes, etc) that played well in 3D. The acrobatic abilities of the Na'vi were a core part of their lifestyle, rather than just something tacked on, and that worked well in 3D
Personally, I think the script could have been done better, but then again, no one is going to give me a fair fraction of a billion dollars to make a movie. They will give it to James Cameron.
The bad: It's the current gimmick. Like Sensurround with its vibrations was in the 70s.
Movies are being made in 3D whether it makes a major addition to an existing set of scenery/plot or not. And, in many of the current crop of 3D films, they insert scenes just for the 3D effect.
Regardless of the technical prowess, you can't substitute for the old maxim "Good Story, told well."
From a brief nosing round the web, it looks like this is an alkali-aluminosilicate glass (whereas normal glass is soda lime glass, and Pyrex is borosilicate). It not tremendously stronger than normal glass before it's chemically treated to strengthen it.
The main trick other than the hardening (That I found. Obviously Corning wouldn't reveal all of it. I just found general info, not detailed info you'd need to duplicate it.) is that it's overflowed from a small trouch while in liquid form, and the two streams from either side of the trough fuse underneath which gives it a very smooth starting finish. They mention it's not usually neccesary to lap or polish it for its final finish.
I'm guessing that it's mostly worked into shape before the chemical treatment is done, as that would simplify the working.
The chemical treatment looks to effectively be a chemically mediated prestressing, by leeching out the existing sodium near the surface in the glass, and replacing it with potassium ions which are larger. This puts the surface into a stressed condition. This would also indicate that the strength would not stay linear with increasing thickness, as replacing the ions would be harder the farther they had to diffuse into the glass.
Further, it looks like a pretty expensive process as it involves soaking the finished glass in molten potassium salts at several hundred degrees for some period of time.
Far easier to steal a medical source. There are more of them, they're widely distributed under varying security conditions, the containers they're in aren't as robust and the radioactive materials are more effective when dispersed.
Stealing even a small nuclear power plant doesn't strike me as particularly easy.
Please tell me you're just trolling. DHS may have their problems, but believe me a dirty bomb being used in the right sort of place would be a major deal.
It may not be that effective as a weapon of mass destruction, but the response that results would make it a weapon of mass disruption.
Imagine, if you will, someone steals a medical source from a hospital on Manhattan (thus possibly avoiding radiation monitors set up after 9-11 that they'd encounter trying to move it a longer distance), and manages to reasonably finely spread it around the Wall Street financial district, or the diamond mart, or one of the tunnels to the island, or etc, whatnot before they get stopped. Regardless of the real health threat to anyone, it would shut down that area for days while it was decontaminated, and investigated.
If you think Manhattan is too well protected, then Chicago and the CBOT, etc, etc. There are large numbers of targets for it, and you can't protect them all. You don't even need to do a good job for it to be effective. Just the perception will be enough.
If you think that the radiation hazard would be a deterrent, think again. Suicide bombers seem to be rather common round the world these days.
Oh, I know about organic dust. I live a couple blocks from a grain elevator that had a dust explosion in the 60s. And that' not the only nearby mishap with fairly ordinary materials that can be hazardous in the right circumstances.
My oldest brother had worked for the railroad and they asked him to come back for that one. Among other work, he was helping unload a car full of TNT that had been knocked off the tracks by the explosion while some of the fires were still burning. Probably not all that dangerous, really, but not very reassuring.
I regularly drive through a town a little north of me, Crescent City, IL, which had the downtown leveled with a BLEVE from LPG cars when I was a kid. Video (Russian language.): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic-YJYb7xL8
We have a weird mix of tolerating some types of risk that probably should be more closely controlled while getting bent out of shape over ones that are far lower risk.
That gets beyond my level of knowledge on that as to how tightly controlled the humidity levels in Monju or similar plants are. Even looking at the video from when they sent in workers to inspect the plant after the leak, it wasn't clear how tightly sealed that area was. It looked like it was fairly tight, but whether you could lower it enough to be helpful and still have it be reasonable for humans to work in, I'm not sure. Maybe someone else in the discussion knows.
In any case, sodium getting loose from the piping is something to avoid in the first place.
Thanks for pointing that out and it's good to actually find someone taking a nuclear power thread seriously for once.
Ditto. Too often these discussions degenerate pretty quickly.
And I definitely agree with you that more research needs to be done. IFR was a project I think should have been persued, but wasn't going to be an instant solution to all our problems. Advanced reactor designs don't just spring into being overnight and even continuing the funding for it didn't guarantee that it would fully work out to commercial standards. I think it had a good chance, though.
Nuclear power is a complex beast not just in the technical areas, but also in the political, risk balancing and economic ones. It looks like we may see another round of nuclear power plant building in the US. But it's not there yet. Some of the advanced reactor designs discussed may be useful in the future, but again, they aren't there yet.
There are really only two things I'm sure of about our energy future. First, it won't be one source that will be needed. Second, regardless of the sources we choose to develop and use, there will be problems. (How's that for pretty useless generalities?;)
Expanding nuclear may be a part of that, but I'm also for using a lot of other things when they make sense economically. Renewables and efficiency improvements will (and already have) play a part, but again, they won't be the full solution. Personally, I'd like to see a lot more passive solar incorporated into building and housing designs.
Fossil fuel is king right now, but there are big and well known problems with it. I'd like to move away from it where possible.
Did the temperature sensor actually weaken the structure and cause the leak? Obviously not. It simply failed to carry the message that something else was wrong.
No. The failure was in a sensor tube extended into the flow of the sodium in a pipe. This wasn't in the primary cooling where you'd get neutron activation. It was in the secondary system. It hadn't been designed properly (and possibly had a defective weld) and broke in the flow. That released the non-radioactive sodium, and some of it caught fire or at least reacted with the water in the air. Most of it ended up on the floor. It was a vibration induced stress failure, not due to embrittlement or overheat.
You haven't provided a cite or quote for that 80's stuff
Sorry, but much of that particular one was Lovins himself talking at the University of Illinois in the late 80s. I'd love to give you video, but streaming and cellphone cams were a dream at that time. I doubt you'll consider my memory credible, regardless that it is eyewitness testimony.
As to the quote on a cheap clean source of power : The Mother Earth-Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22
"If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other."
I did take a bit more time to look at his more detailed paper (from RMI, not published in peer review as it wouldn't bear up under that) Four Nuclear Myths. For starts, the papers he references come to the exact opposite conclusion to what he says about the relative land use. But he uses the numbers selectively comparing a result from one paper to another. The original paers each come to different conclusions than Lovins. That's hardly good scientific procedure there. And this is from just with a quick perusal round the net. Hardly the kind of work that one would expect in a quality study. (Disclaimer: That comes from a pro-nuke site. Unfortunately, unlike Lovins, I don't do this for a living so I'm limited in the depth I can research "on the spot".)
Secondly, the Atlantic article you cite talks about savings from efficiency. That's hardly something to dispute. But Lovins wasn't the main driver for that. Money and the California State Government were. I'm quite happy to exploit effiency for all that's economical, but it's not the panacea that he claims.
This particular horse is happy to drink the water of real energy efficiency. But claiming that nuclear uses less land than wind or solar comes closer to koolaid, IMHO.
Given a choice between Lovins and Stewart Brand, I'll go with Brand in a minute.
One other disclaimer, I'm still kind of boggled that Foresight Institute put Lovins on its board of advisors. I don't consider him to rate up with people like Larry Lessig, Marvin Minsky or Ray Kurzweil, but YMMV. So, it's reasonable to consider me a bit less than neutral source on him.
A chance to avoid a major international incident? I'd hardly expect the US government to take that one lying down regardless of the actual value.
Space exploration doesn't exist in isolation. And right now, few politicians are going to seriously propose abandoning the ISS or just handing our part over to the international partners. I can just see the fun an opposing nominee would have with that. "We built a 100gigabuck or more station and my opponent wants to just give it up." I remember the reaction when Bush et al was wanting to de-orbit it in 2015 (my own included). Further, the other partners would need to come up with substitutes for our contributions both monetary and technical if they kept it going.
Up until recently, the lack of power, the restrictions on crew size, the ongoing construction meant that little could be done with the ISS. I wish that some of the facilities hadn't been cancelled (the centrifuge module for a biggie). Just because we were foolish about its uses in the past doesn't mean we have to continue to be so. Again, I think just shutting it down would invoke the baby and bathwater comparison.
The one area that really can't be duplicated without building something else like the ISS is the ability to study long term effects of microgravity on the human body. The Vomit Comet is great for some things, but the time duration is limited. If Bigelow Aerospace or some other gets their commercial station running, then that's a different story. But, again, it's not there yet.
But fortunately there'll never be another fire in a sodium reactor!
Sure there will. Just like there will be fires and explosions at refineries. You see, we keep this hazardous material called gasoline around all over the place often in completely unsuitable and uncontrolled storages.
Unlike that, the sodium is in a containment building and subject to a lot of controls. All you're saying is that it's a hazardous material to work with. Given. But it's one that can be managed pretty easily.
We work with a lot of dangerous stuff in industrial society, even in things we don't think of as hazardous. Try working next to a hydrogenation plant in a cooking oil factory sometime. High temperatures, hot oil, hydrogen, catalysts. Mix those and it'll be happy to go boom. Yum. Yum.
BN 600 has had minor sodium fires, and it's gone back online quickly. Monju had a bad sodium fire and it was held up going back online due to human problems rather than technical ones.
(Completely ignoring the fact that Lovins claimed in the 80s we really wouldn't need more power. A claim that disregarded the modernization of much of the world. His "negawatts" of efficiency never materialized and were likely unachieveable.)
Ok. Just from the linked paper: Lovins claims that the unreliability of wind is not a real problem. Yet, we see in today's slashdot articles a report that recently turbines had to be shut down due to grid disruption. Yes, it's a soluble problem, but you can't just dismiss it the way Lovins does.
He's hard to pin down as the paper the original AC (You?) linked to is short on specifics. Chasing his arguments gets to be sort of a whack-a-mole game. He mentions that building mounted PV will be able to supply the worlds energy needs. Thus he says that nuclear has a much greater use of ground space. I find that an unconvincing argument to say the least.
That's just a couple of instant examples from that one paper. I'm guessing you want highly researched and specific answers to his generalities. We have here the asymmetry of one side being able to link to a prepared PDF from RMI, and I have to chase down chains of articles in order to find out just what he's claiming these days. One could make a career out of that.
Yes, sodium gets activated by the neutrons. Yes, it's highly radioactive then. But, it's quite short lived (15 hours for Na-24, 2.6 years for Na-22) so it's not as big a problem as you imply. Na-22 is a beta decay, so that's not problematic. Na-24 is the one that has dangerous radiation as it emits gammas. But with a 15 hour half life, it decays very quickly.
The daughter products aren't a problem either (Ne-22 and Mg-24), they're both stable.
You mean like the liquid sodium Russian BN600 (600 MW electric fast breeder power plant) that's been running since 1980?
It's had some problems, but nothing that couldn't be repaired and put back online.
Or maybe like the Japanese Monju plant? It had a sodium fire, but that was due to a bad design on a temperature sensor rather than anything to do with sodium itself as a coolant. It's back online now. Much of the reason it took so long was due to a scandal with the management covering up and the resulting court cases. It wasn't the technical problems that stopped it for all that time but the legal/political ones.
Sodium reactors have been around since the 50s at least. Yes, there are problems with embrittlement and the reactivity of the coolant, but it's hardly a show stopper. They're known and manageable problems.
What led to the shutdown of the program was the opposition of John Kerry and others, not technical problems with the sodium coolant.
I thought it was interesting the reason given when the cancellation of the IFR was mentioned in Clinton's first state of the union speech. It was that we would never need it, and thus it was a waste of money.
Lovins isn't just against nuclear for the (IMHO rather simplistic) economic arguments he gives here.
Back in the 80s he was asked what he would think of a truly cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy. He said it would a great disaster. Why? Because he felt that given any concentrated source of energy, humans would use it to wreak havoc on nature. Thus, it would be better to only have diffuse and limited sources.
So I'm a bit skeptical of his real motives in putting this out.
I will give him this, he's at least fairly consistent. I went to see one of his talks in the 80s, and he was basicly on a similar message with respect to the economy of nuclear power.
He also said that we really didn't need any new sources of power, that conservation and limiting of our growth/what we did meant that we already had enough. At the time, I remarked that he was allowing no chance for less developed populations (India and China) to increase their standard of living, but that wasn't addressed.
He's got a fairly appealing line of talk but when you start really looking, it doesn't measure up.
That's a more general problem than just with the shuttle. What do they plan to fly on their HLV? Read the linked articles in the original post about the HLV study. It's all speculative at the moment, of the form "we could do this, or that". We're not terribly sure just where we're going to go other than maintaining presence at the ISS. I'd like that situation to improve, because a firm (but fairly open ended) goal helps direct a course for research better than just a general research funding intitiative.
My personal preference is still return to the moon to set up a base and learn about running a long duration base close to home rather than way over at Mars. But, I'm not wedded to that. Want an asteroid mission? Fine. Mars direct? Not my first choice, but I could easily be persuaded. I just want to keep pushing outward. LEO if that's all we can get. Out farther into the Solar system if we can get that.
As to the shuttle, it depends on how long you delay the first of the extra flights. It might end up being a cargo and crew flight just because we haven't planned anything, and it would take more time to get something more useful planned and built. When I say a low rate of launches, it could be every 2-3 years and still keep the capability around. Remember, this is mostly insurance. If Soyuz and or the follow on manned launcher doesn't work out, we've still got at least something that can be pretty quickly configured to take on those jobs.
By the time you fly the second one, surely (if not even for the first) something more substantial could be on board. I hate to say "launch it and they will come" but I've yet to see a problem of no proposals once you announce that you've got a flight to LEO leaving in a few years, especially one that can have human intervention with heavy payloads. One wonders what Bigelow Aerospace, for example, could do with a dedicated shuttle flight with a 3 year lead time.
Well, regardless of the scientific merits, continuing access to ISS is one of the main points that can sell putting money into SpaceX and other private ventures in the near term. Once again, it may not be what we wanted, but it's what we've got.
Virgin Galactic and some others are gearing up for non-orbital tourist work on their own dime at the moment, but there aren't a whole lot of other manned projects I'd consider advanced contenders at the moment that don't in part rely on providing services to the government. The push for a man rated Falcon 9 certainly does.
I'd go more along with your ideas of doing away with NASA if I thought they had a lot of chance of working. The money saved likely wouldn't be spent on space at all if you didn't have an existing (and politically workable) space related entity to put it toward. That won't change without massive change of the whole government budget process which is, to say the least, a pretty ambitious goal. I'll settle for smaller ones.
Right now the political process is, again, not what we want, but what we've got. And I advise using it shamelessly to get something more to our liking.
(Odd how the discussions never change at some level. This is pretty much the same discussion that was happening in the 1980s on usenet. It's now SpaceX rather than AmRoc/Conestoga, etc.)
Well, I'm sure that Elon Musk et al would like to present that as a done deal. But, they don't have a man rated rocket fully operational yet. I do think that ultimately it's a good solution.
Their latest test was very impressive. But, it's just one step on a several year track to being able to provide manned access to the ISS.
Both Soyuz and the shuttle are fully operational now. Not just likely to be in the future. I've watched a lot of projects that looked good not work out for whatever reason. And it's usually not purely technical. (American Rocket, anyone? It can be argued that mostly failed due to an automobile accident.)
I wasn't particularly arguing in favor of the congressional plan as far as the shuttle derived vehicle. I'm largely agnostic as to what sort of manned access we end up with. I just want to continue to have it. Private launchers would be great. They aren't ready yet. Neither is this proposed HLV based on shuttle tech.
What I was arguing for was a reduced shuttle program as a backup regardless of what we end up deciding to develop for the next launcher. The shuttles are aging, but they currently work. Use Soyuz as a bridge for access to the ISS, but don't rely on it as a sole source. Fly an occasional shuttle flight to keep the team practiced and the facilities checked out. Fully retire the shuttles when you actually have the next launch system ready.
If you don't have the money to develop the next launcher without completely shutting down the existing program, that indicates to me you probably just don't have the money, period. And that requires different aproaches, and gets us into the polical football arena that Perens mentioned.
The phrase "baby with the bathwater" comes to mind here. NASA does some things that no other US entity currently does.
We're about to rely on a foreign country as our sole source supplier for manned access to the ISS for at least several years. We don't have a backup. Just as you say NASA is a political football, international relations can be just as unpredictable. Right now we have a shortage of Pu-238 for RTGs in part because we felt we could buy what we needed from the Russians. That's fine. It's a good source for it. But, we didn't move ahead with funding for getting DOE ready to produce more. There's a contract dispute with the Russians that no one anticipated, and that's left us looking for other alternatives.
I prefer to keep a couple of shuttles around and launching at a low rate rather than just relying on Soyuz. Expensive, and hopefully unneeded, but most insurance is like that.
It gives us a backup that won't take years to be ready. Ultimately, a man rated Falcon 9 or some other private launcher would be a good solution. But, we don't have it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Every so often, Hollywood et al come up with some new technology that "improves" the experience.
Sometimes, these are quite good. THX, for example. More often, they're just "ok".
The good:
I can see 3D being used to very good effect when the story has the right kind of overwhelming scenery that (and this is the key) is integral to or at least relates closely to the plot.
Avatar did that part of it pretty well. We had a colorful world with surprising depth relationships (floating mountains, lots of flight scenes, etc) that played well in 3D. The acrobatic abilities of the Na'vi were a core part of their lifestyle, rather than just something tacked on, and that worked well in 3D
Personally, I think the script could have been done better, but then again, no one is going to give me a fair fraction of a billion dollars to make a movie. They will give it to James Cameron.
The bad:
It's the current gimmick. Like Sensurround with its vibrations was in the 70s.
Movies are being made in 3D whether it makes a major addition to an existing set of scenery/plot or not. And, in many of the current crop of 3D films, they insert scenes just for the 3D effect.
Regardless of the technical prowess, you can't substitute for the old maxim "Good Story, told well."
"OLD people resist change, news at 11"
Yeah, yeah. Screw you. Harsh letter to follow.
Now, come closer so I can whack you with my cane, you rotten kid!
From a brief nosing round the web, it looks like this is an alkali-aluminosilicate glass (whereas normal glass is soda lime glass, and Pyrex is borosilicate). It not tremendously stronger than normal glass before it's chemically treated to strengthen it.
The main trick other than the hardening (That I found. Obviously Corning wouldn't reveal all of it. I just found general info, not detailed info you'd need to duplicate it.) is that it's overflowed from a small trouch while in liquid form, and the two streams from either side of the trough fuse underneath which gives it a very smooth starting finish. They mention it's not usually neccesary to lap or polish it for its final finish.
I'm guessing that it's mostly worked into shape before the chemical treatment is done, as that would simplify the working.
The chemical treatment looks to effectively be a chemically mediated prestressing, by leeching out the existing sodium near the surface in the glass, and replacing it with potassium ions which are larger. This puts the surface into a stressed condition. This would also indicate that the strength would not stay linear with increasing thickness, as replacing the ions would be harder the farther they had to diffuse into the glass.
Further, it looks like a pretty expensive process as it involves soaking the finished glass in molten potassium salts at several hundred degrees for some period of time.
Far easier to steal a medical source. There are more of them, they're widely distributed under varying security conditions, the containers they're in aren't as robust and the radioactive materials are more effective when dispersed.
Stealing even a small nuclear power plant doesn't strike me as particularly easy.
Please tell me you're just trolling. DHS may have their problems, but believe me a dirty bomb being used in the right sort of place would be a major deal.
It may not be that effective as a weapon of mass destruction, but the response that results would make it a weapon of mass disruption.
Imagine, if you will, someone steals a medical source from a hospital on Manhattan (thus possibly avoiding radiation monitors set up after 9-11 that they'd encounter trying to move it a longer distance), and manages to reasonably finely spread it around the Wall Street financial district, or the diamond mart, or one of the tunnels to the island, or etc, whatnot before they get stopped. Regardless of the real health threat to anyone, it would shut down that area for days while it was decontaminated, and investigated.
If you think Manhattan is too well protected, then Chicago and the CBOT, etc, etc. There are large numbers of targets for it, and you can't protect them all. You don't even need to do a good job for it to be effective. Just the perception will be enough.
If you think that the radiation hazard would be a deterrent, think again. Suicide bombers seem to be rather common round the world these days.
Thanks for the correction. I misread my source, and you're right, it's not just a beta.
Oh, I know about organic dust. I live a couple blocks from a grain elevator that had a dust explosion in the 60s. And that' not the only nearby mishap with fairly ordinary materials that can be hazardous in the right circumstances.
Over in Decatur, IL they destroyed a rail yard when LPG cars were damaged and blew up: http://www3.gendisasters.com/illinois/13000/decatur-il-tank-cars-explode-july-1974
My oldest brother had worked for the railroad and they asked him to come back for that one. Among other work, he was helping unload a car full of TNT that had been knocked off the tracks by the explosion while some of the fires were still burning. Probably not all that dangerous, really, but not very reassuring.
I regularly drive through a town a little north of me, Crescent City, IL, which had the downtown leveled with a BLEVE from LPG cars when I was a kid. Video (Russian language.): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic-YJYb7xL8
We have a weird mix of tolerating some types of risk that probably should be more closely controlled while getting bent out of shape over ones that are far lower risk.
That gets beyond my level of knowledge on that as to how tightly controlled the humidity levels in Monju or similar plants are. Even looking at the video from when they sent in workers to inspect the plant after the leak, it wasn't clear how tightly sealed that area was. It looked like it was fairly tight, but whether you could lower it enough to be helpful and still have it be reasonable for humans to work in, I'm not sure. Maybe someone else in the discussion knows.
In any case, sodium getting loose from the piping is something to avoid in the first place.
Thanks for pointing that out and it's good to actually find someone taking a nuclear power thread seriously for once.
Ditto. Too often these discussions degenerate pretty quickly.
And I definitely agree with you that more research needs to be done. IFR was a project I think should have been persued, but wasn't going to be an instant solution to all our problems. Advanced reactor designs don't just spring into being overnight and even continuing the funding for it didn't guarantee that it would fully work out to commercial standards. I think it had a good chance, though.
Nuclear power is a complex beast not just in the technical areas, but also in the political, risk balancing and economic ones. It looks like we may see another round of nuclear power plant building in the US. But it's not there yet. Some of the advanced reactor designs discussed may be useful in the future, but again, they aren't there yet.
There are really only two things I'm sure of about our energy future. First, it won't be one source that will be needed. Second, regardless of the sources we choose to develop and use, there will be problems. (How's that for pretty useless generalities? ;)
Expanding nuclear may be a part of that, but I'm also for using a lot of other things when they make sense economically. Renewables and efficiency improvements will (and already have) play a part, but again, they won't be the full solution. Personally, I'd like to see a lot more passive solar incorporated into building and housing designs.
Fossil fuel is king right now, but there are big and well known problems with it. I'd like to move away from it where possible.
But claiming that nuclear uses less land than wind or solar
That should be "more", obviously.
Must be getting old. Previewed it twice and still missed that one.
Did the temperature sensor actually weaken the structure and cause the leak? Obviously not. It simply failed to carry the message that something else was wrong.
No. The failure was in a sensor tube extended into the flow of the sodium in a pipe. This wasn't in the primary cooling where you'd get neutron activation. It was in the secondary system. It hadn't been designed properly (and possibly had a defective weld) and broke in the flow. That released the non-radioactive sodium, and some of it caught fire or at least reacted with the water in the air. Most of it ended up on the floor. It was a vibration induced stress failure, not due to embrittlement or overheat.
You haven't provided a cite or quote for that 80's stuff
Sorry, but much of that particular one was Lovins himself talking at the University of Illinois in the late 80s. I'd love to give you video, but streaming and cellphone cams were a dream at that time. I doubt you'll consider my memory credible, regardless that it is eyewitness testimony.
As to the quote on a cheap clean source of power : The Mother Earth-Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22
"If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other."
I did take a bit more time to look at his more detailed paper (from RMI, not published in peer review as it wouldn't bear up under that) Four Nuclear Myths. For starts, the papers he references come to the exact opposite conclusion to what he says about the relative land use. But he uses the numbers selectively comparing a result from one paper to another. The original paers each come to different conclusions than Lovins. That's hardly good scientific procedure there. And this is from just with a quick perusal round the net. Hardly the kind of work that one would expect in a quality study. (Disclaimer: That comes from a pro-nuke site. Unfortunately, unlike Lovins, I don't do this for a living so I'm limited in the depth I can research "on the spot".)
For one possible comparison: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006802
That's done for the Nature Conservancy, not some pro-nuke group. It comes to the opposite conclusion from Lovins.
Secondly, the Atlantic article you cite talks about savings from efficiency. That's hardly something to dispute. But Lovins wasn't the main driver for that. Money and the California State Government were. I'm quite happy to exploit effiency for all that's economical, but it's not the panacea that he claims.
This particular horse is happy to drink the water of real energy efficiency. But claiming that nuclear uses less land than wind or solar comes closer to koolaid, IMHO.
Given a choice between Lovins and Stewart Brand, I'll go with Brand in a minute.
One other disclaimer, I'm still kind of boggled that Foresight Institute put Lovins on its board of advisors. I don't consider him to rate up with people like Larry Lessig, Marvin Minsky or Ray Kurzweil, but YMMV. So, it's reasonable to consider me a bit less than neutral source on him.
A chance to avoid a major international incident? I'd hardly expect the US government to take that one lying down regardless of the actual value.
Space exploration doesn't exist in isolation. And right now, few politicians are going to seriously propose abandoning the ISS or just handing our part over to the international partners. I can just see the fun an opposing nominee would have with that. "We built a 100gigabuck or more station and my opponent wants to just give it up." I remember the reaction when Bush et al was wanting to de-orbit it in 2015 (my own included). Further, the other partners would need to come up with substitutes for our contributions both monetary and technical if they kept it going.
Up until recently, the lack of power, the restrictions on crew size, the ongoing construction meant that little could be done with the ISS. I wish that some of the facilities hadn't been cancelled (the centrifuge module for a biggie). Just because we were foolish about its uses in the past doesn't mean we have to continue to be so. Again, I think just shutting it down would invoke the baby and bathwater comparison.
The one area that really can't be duplicated without building something else like the ISS is the ability to study long term effects of microgravity on the human body. The Vomit Comet is great for some things, but the time duration is limited. If Bigelow Aerospace or some other gets their commercial station running, then that's a different story. But, again, it's not there yet.
But fortunately there'll never be another fire in a sodium reactor!
Sure there will. Just like there will be fires and explosions at refineries. You see, we keep this hazardous material called gasoline around all over the place often in completely unsuitable and uncontrolled storages.
Unlike that, the sodium is in a containment building and subject to a lot of controls. All you're saying is that it's a hazardous material to work with. Given. But it's one that can be managed pretty easily.
We work with a lot of dangerous stuff in industrial society, even in things we don't think of as hazardous. Try working next to a hydrogenation plant in a cooking oil factory sometime. High temperatures, hot oil, hydrogen, catalysts. Mix those and it'll be happy to go boom. Yum. Yum.
BN 600 has had minor sodium fires, and it's gone back online quickly. Monju had a bad sodium fire and it was held up going back online due to human problems rather than technical ones.
(Completely ignoring the fact that Lovins claimed in the 80s we really wouldn't need more power. A claim that disregarded the modernization of much of the world. His "negawatts" of efficiency never materialized and were likely unachieveable.)
Ok. Just from the linked paper: Lovins claims that the unreliability of wind is not a real problem. Yet, we see in today's slashdot articles a report that recently turbines had to be shut down due to grid disruption. Yes, it's a soluble problem, but you can't just dismiss it the way Lovins does.
He's hard to pin down as the paper the original AC (You?) linked to is short on specifics. Chasing his arguments gets to be sort of a whack-a-mole game. He mentions that building mounted PV will be able to supply the worlds energy needs. Thus he says that nuclear has a much greater use of ground space. I find that an unconvincing argument to say the least.
That's just a couple of instant examples from that one paper. I'm guessing you want highly researched and specific answers to his generalities. We have here the asymmetry of one side being able to link to a prepared PDF from RMI, and I have to chase down chains of articles in order to find out just what he's claiming these days. One could make a career out of that.
Yes, sodium gets activated by the neutrons. Yes, it's highly radioactive then. But, it's quite short lived (15 hours for Na-24, 2.6 years for Na-22) so it's not as big a problem as you imply. Na-22 is a beta decay, so that's not problematic. Na-24 is the one that has dangerous radiation as it emits gammas. But with a 15 hour half life, it decays very quickly.
The daughter products aren't a problem either (Ne-22 and Mg-24), they're both stable.
You mean like the liquid sodium Russian BN600 (600 MW electric fast breeder power plant) that's been running since 1980?
It's had some problems, but nothing that couldn't be repaired and put back online.
Or maybe like the Japanese Monju plant? It had a sodium fire, but that was due to a bad design on a temperature sensor rather than anything to do with sodium itself as a coolant. It's back online now. Much of the reason it took so long was due to a scandal with the management covering up and the resulting court cases. It wasn't the technical problems that stopped it for all that time but the legal/political ones.
Sodium reactors have been around since the 50s at least. Yes, there are problems with embrittlement and the reactivity of the coolant, but it's hardly a show stopper. They're known and manageable problems.
What led to the shutdown of the program was the opposition of John Kerry and others, not technical problems with the sodium coolant.
I thought it was interesting the reason given when the cancellation of the IFR was mentioned in Clinton's first state of the union speech. It was that we would never need it, and thus it was a waste of money.
To say the least, I disagreed.
Lovins isn't just against nuclear for the (IMHO rather simplistic) economic arguments he gives here.
Back in the 80s he was asked what he would think of a truly cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy. He said it would a great disaster. Why? Because he felt that given any concentrated source of energy, humans would use it to wreak havoc on nature. Thus, it would be better to only have diffuse and limited sources.
So I'm a bit skeptical of his real motives in putting this out.
I will give him this, he's at least fairly consistent. I went to see one of his talks in the 80s, and he was basicly on a similar message with respect to the economy of nuclear power.
He also said that we really didn't need any new sources of power, that conservation and limiting of our growth/what we did meant that we already had enough. At the time, I remarked that he was allowing no chance for less developed populations (India and China) to increase their standard of living, but that wasn't addressed.
He's got a fairly appealing line of talk but when you start really looking, it doesn't measure up.
That's a more general problem than just with the shuttle. What do they plan to fly on their HLV? Read the linked articles in the original post about the HLV study. It's all speculative at the moment, of the form "we could do this, or that". We're not terribly sure just where we're going to go other than maintaining presence at the ISS. I'd like that situation to improve, because a firm (but fairly open ended) goal helps direct a course for research better than just a general research funding intitiative.
My personal preference is still return to the moon to set up a base and learn about running a long duration base close to home rather than way over at Mars. But, I'm not wedded to that. Want an asteroid mission? Fine. Mars direct? Not my first choice, but I could easily be persuaded. I just want to keep pushing outward. LEO if that's all we can get. Out farther into the Solar system if we can get that.
As to the shuttle, it depends on how long you delay the first of the extra flights. It might end up being a cargo and crew flight just because we haven't planned anything, and it would take more time to get something more useful planned and built. When I say a low rate of launches, it could be every 2-3 years and still keep the capability around. Remember, this is mostly insurance. If Soyuz and or the follow on manned launcher doesn't work out, we've still got at least something that can be pretty quickly configured to take on those jobs.
By the time you fly the second one, surely (if not even for the first) something more substantial could be on board. I hate to say "launch it and they will come" but I've yet to see a problem of no proposals once you announce that you've got a flight to LEO leaving in a few years, especially one that can have human intervention with heavy payloads. One wonders what Bigelow Aerospace, for example, could do with a dedicated shuttle flight with a 3 year lead time.
Well, regardless of the scientific merits, continuing access to ISS is one of the main points that can sell putting money into SpaceX and other private ventures in the near term. Once again, it may not be what we wanted, but it's what we've got.
Virgin Galactic and some others are gearing up for non-orbital tourist work on their own dime at the moment, but there aren't a whole lot of other manned projects I'd consider advanced contenders at the moment that don't in part rely on providing services to the government. The push for a man rated Falcon 9 certainly does.
I'd go more along with your ideas of doing away with NASA if I thought they had a lot of chance of working. The money saved likely wouldn't be spent on space at all if you didn't have an existing (and politically workable) space related entity to put it toward. That won't change without massive change of the whole government budget process which is, to say the least, a pretty ambitious goal. I'll settle for smaller ones.
Right now the political process is, again, not what we want, but what we've got. And I advise using it shamelessly to get something more to our liking.
(Odd how the discussions never change at some level. This is pretty much the same discussion that was happening in the 1980s on usenet. It's now SpaceX rather than AmRoc/Conestoga, etc.)
Well, I'm sure that Elon Musk et al would like to present that as a done deal. But, they don't have a man rated rocket fully operational yet. I do think that ultimately it's a good solution.
Their latest test was very impressive. But, it's just one step on a several year track to being able to provide manned access to the ISS.
Both Soyuz and the shuttle are fully operational now. Not just likely to be in the future. I've watched a lot of projects that looked good not work out for whatever reason. And it's usually not purely technical. (American Rocket, anyone? It can be argued that mostly failed due to an automobile accident.)
I wasn't particularly arguing in favor of the congressional plan as far as the shuttle derived vehicle. I'm largely agnostic as to what sort of manned access we end up with. I just want to continue to have it. Private launchers would be great. They aren't ready yet. Neither is this proposed HLV based on shuttle tech.
What I was arguing for was a reduced shuttle program as a backup regardless of what we end up deciding to develop for the next launcher. The shuttles are aging, but they currently work. Use Soyuz as a bridge for access to the ISS, but don't rely on it as a sole source. Fly an occasional shuttle flight to keep the team practiced and the facilities checked out. Fully retire the shuttles when you actually have the next launch system ready.
If you don't have the money to develop the next launcher without completely shutting down the existing program, that indicates to me you probably just don't have the money, period. And that requires different aproaches, and gets us into the polical football arena that Perens mentioned.
The phrase "baby with the bathwater" comes to mind here. NASA does some things that no other US entity currently does.
We're about to rely on a foreign country as our sole source supplier for manned access to the ISS for at least several years. We don't have a backup. Just as you say NASA is a political football, international relations can be just as unpredictable. Right now we have a shortage of Pu-238 for RTGs in part because we felt we could buy what we needed from the Russians. That's fine. It's a good source for it. But, we didn't move ahead with funding for getting DOE ready to produce more. There's a contract dispute with the Russians that no one anticipated, and that's left us looking for other alternatives.
I prefer to keep a couple of shuttles around and launching at a low rate rather than just relying on Soyuz. Expensive, and hopefully unneeded, but most insurance is like that.
It gives us a backup that won't take years to be ready. Ultimately, a man rated Falcon 9 or some other private launcher would be a good solution. But, we don't have it yet.
Hokay! I'll take fries with that!