Only an idiot would try to use photo-voltaic cells for large scale power generation. Solar thermal is much more efficient and has the advantage of being able to use heat sequestering with molten salt or oil to power a turbine 24/7.
I believe that is because most people who claim to be environmentalists don't give a damn about the environment or the advancement of their own species.
This is patently not true. There is a long term solution to nuclear waste. toss it in a feeder/breeder reactor and use it to make more electricity.
By the time you are done with it you have two kinds of waste products... Those with a half life so small that storing it for a few years will eliminate its radiation hazard. Those with a half life so long that they are no more a radiation hazard than natural granite.
Wow, that is almost exactly what I would have said.
There is only one green power source that can meet all the energy needs of mankind. And it is glowing green. Nuclear power is the only way to go.
Modern feeder/breeder reactors can run almost indefinitely without producing hazardous levels of waste. They can consume the "waste" of older less efficient nuclear plants as fuel and eliminate nearly all waste storage and processing hazards. They can be constructed with current technology and are compact and can be hardened against attacks both by hostile humans and the environment.
Solar thermal power offers a competitive set of features with acceptable trade-offs by taking advantage of the thermo-nuclear furnace in the sky. Solar thermal uses current technology, has a lower initial cost of investment and completely eliminates the minuscule waste issues of modern nuclear power. Using heat sequestering it can provide power 24/7. However it can be easily damaged by adverse weather and human action, consumes much more property and has a limited geographic area of optimal deployment.
ever heard the phrase "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"? Its part of the foundation of at least the American legal system.
Heck, what about video game patches, add ons, downloads of Linux distros, etc, etc, etc. All of these are entirely legal, and all of them can use P2P.
The difference is that you're not sitting at the end of the pipe watching your P2P bits arrive, while the phone and video and streaming audio users are. If your phone service has to compete with your P2P service, which would you rather have go badly?
If you are downloading a distro, and at the same time you place a VoIP phone call, what do you do if the audio is all broken up? Do you pause the torrent client to get better phone service? I do*. Now, put the torrent client in your neighbor's house, where you don't have have the ability to pause your neighbor's download when you want to use the phone. Is it fair?
And before you cry "but the bandwidth! the bandwidth! I paid for the bandwidth!" bandwidth is NOT the same as capacity. If you want a guarantee of capacity, sign a contract to rent a fiber between you and your server. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that it's a multi-use, multi-user network, it's shared, and there will be packet loss when it's saturated.
* well I did when I had Vonage.
what if you are watching the bits? The company I work for is developing live video streaming using a P2P protocol.
Illegal file sharing is wrong and there should be consequences for it. It is however not theft. Theft involves taking something away from another. With filesharing, ownership and possession remain with the originator.
What is theft is the extension of copyright, erosion of fair use and bypassing of the courts that media companies are bribing governments around the world to achieve. And its not theft from an individual, it is theft from the public domain, it is theft from us all.
These 3 strikes laws are intended to circumvent the courts and allow media companies to extort real people into paying them with no burden of proof or legal recourse.
And the United States of America consists of 50 independent sovereign states and 3 territories out of the 91 states in North America (US, Canada, Mexico, apologies to the smaller Caribbean and Central American states). Or at least, the states started as sovereign until a certain president violated the constitution to wage war against the Confederacy over their legal and rightful succession.
either: a: the photon is released has a longer wavelength and thus less energy. b: the rate is "nearly" 100%, as in sometimes it absorbs a photon and produces heat.
There are many parts of the US where owning and driving a car is mandatory if you want to work. There are vast tracts of rural land where there is no public transportation. If you live there, and want to work at all, you need to drive a car. It is the rural working poor that are hardest hit by things like required auto insurance and increased fuel and mileage costs, not those who live in cities where work is available within walking/biking distance.
I am not assuming that lack of nuclear fuel means insufficient energy. Solar is more than capable of supplying the worlds energy needs all on its own. Unless you consider the the actual environment.
Much of the world has very poor isolation due to high latitudes or frequent cloud cover. Solar power plants are very susceptible to periodic bad weather, a tornado, hurricane or strong hail storm hitting a solar power plant will destroy it. Bad weather can potentially cover a large region for days. With an exclusive reliance on solar those regions would need massive energy storage potential.
I favor nuclear power for its ability to work effectively anywhere, with a high degree of reliability.
I am sure that we will either develop something better than nuclear power in the millennium or two it will take to consume all the worlds nuclear fuel (assuming we also use a sizable amount of solar energy) or modern civilization will fall into chaos and electricity and automobiles will be spoken of to children in much the same way that dragons and wizards are today.
I can tell you which one I think is more likely to occur. But I am trying very hard to be an optimist.
Three mile Island had virtually no real effect on the environment. You would get more additional radiation from a two way commercial aircraft trip across the pacific than you would from spending a few years living in the shadow of the plant. It had such a deep psychological impact because it occurred 1 week after the movie "The China Syndrome" was released in theaters.
Chernobyl is what happens when you shut off every redundant safety feature of a power plant and then run it at full power for days on end. I would hardly call it an accident. I would also point out that at least one study indicated that there was only one cancer related death in a civilian as a result of Chernobyl (if you discount the soldiers and workers that were forced to clean up the reactor) and the area is now one of the largest and healthiest wild game preservers in the former soviet union with native wildlife showing little or no harmful effects in recent years.
A modern feeder-breeder reactor is capable of burning the spent fuel of previous generations reactors, weapons grade fuel, and normal nuclear fuel. While doing this, it is conservatively 10 times more efficient (could be up to 100 or more times more efficient, but AFAIK nothing like that has actually been built yet) and produces waste that will become neutral in hundreds of years instead of the thousands that conventional spent fuel will take. This is a short enough time span that we know we can build structures to contain it for the entire duration of the potential harm.
Nuclear power is the only realistic and reliable green energy. Note that I am including solar power when I say nuclear due to the fact that the sun is essentially an enormous nuclear furnace.
Yes, solar thermal plants can be made using the same steam turbines and generators used by coal, gas power plants to produce energy from high pressure steam.
If one adds an additional component of a heat reservoir such as molten salt, a solar plant is even capable of providing electricity through night and cloudy days (depending on the duration of reduced insolation and the capacity of the thermal reservoir of course) without requiring any advancement in battery technology.
However, I really do not appreciate him lumping nuclear power in with inferior bio fuels and carbon sequestering. Proper use of feeder-breeder reactors can effectively eliminate nuclear waste from uranium reactors and provide power for the entire world for many hundreds of years (all on its own). Add to that the potential of thorium reactors using a more plentiful fuel and nuclear power makes a perfect compliment to solar for regions not blessed with great weather.
Meanwhile the drilling and pressure issues of carbon sequestering mean that the excess energy extracted is marginalized while the risk of a geologic release of billions of tons of CO2 due to fissures or shifting could kill thousands or even millions if close enough to a major city.
Biofuel is not a renewable resource. To meet our gasoline needs alone we would need a corn field larger than the continental US. Even with switchgrass we would need ~25% of the surface of the US to meet our gasoline needs. Consider for a moment that modern farming is already devastating the aquifers that will take 10s to 100s of thousands of years to replenish naturally.
Wind has some potential but can never be used for base load due to the fact that weather on earth is inherently unpredictable, producing squalls that can overload a power grid with to much wind or starve it with periods of calm over nearly continental spans.
Indeed. Modern Feeder-Breeder reactors are safe, environmentally friendly and efficient.
They can not only produce 10 times more energy for a given supply of uranium, but they could cure the worlds problem of disposing of long term nuclear waste by using it as recycled fuel. Not only this, but what little waste is produced has a short enough half-life to be a threat for a manageable few hundreds of years instead of thousands. They do not have the land use ecological impact that solar does.
Combined with balanced use of solar thermal and tapping Americas northern and offshore oil and natural gas reserves, it presents us the option of becoming completely independent of both foreign energy and dirty coal that we currently burn (fun fact: the average US coal plant releases more radioactive waste into the environment than a conventional nuclear power plant).
The infrastructure SF is implementing is admirable. The vision I have for a good future also includes electrified railways and highways with charging rails that allow drivers to run off of grid power on longer trips, allowing us to remove the use of oil as a significant factor in transportation cost throughout the continental US even with the current generation of relatively low power density batteries.
Re:Revenge of the Nerds...
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think dork covers it.;)
Re:Revenge of the Nerds...
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I disagree. a Geek may be an intellectual master of his field. But they are clueless outside of that field, including in social interaction. A nerd has a broader field of interest and expertise. What the two have in common is that we are both smart and share a common aspect of "freak" culture.
I am a nerd, I am equally at home behind a computer screen, under a car with a wrench, in a shop making furniture or in the arms of my lovable little goth chick.
It has to do with partial pressure of a gas in relation to the escape velocity of the planet. All planets loose their atmosphere given a sufficient amount of time. Having higher gravity slows this process because a smaller portion of the molecules making up the atmosphere have a vector of motion with a magnitude greater than EV that does not intercept another molecule.
Earth still has its atmosphere not only due to its higher gravity, but also because it is still volcanically active. The release of gas from inside the earth is sufficient to replenish much or all of the gas lost at the moment.
It took mars millions, possibly billions of years to loose its initial atmosphere and the atmosphere released from its early volcanism. And the same fate will eventually befall the earth when our mantle cools and hardens.
funny as it sounds. I wasn't even allowed to listen to country as a child. I was allowed to listen to both kinds of music. Christian and Gospel. As a result my family kept the radio locked away for emergencies.
I spent most of my life thinking I hated music. It was only later that I found out that I liked it, just that the only music I was allowed to listen to sucked.
Its called the "doctrine of first sale" and it is a fundamental aspect of capitalism and is legally protected in the US. Corporatist evangelicals have tried to subvert this through legal means (they failed in the US, but succeeded in parts of the EU), so in return they attempt to do so through technological means.
Slashdot Mirror
Because its much more difficult to modify or remotely delete a paper book without the "owners" knowledge or permission?
Only an idiot would try to use photo-voltaic cells for large scale power generation. Solar thermal is much more efficient and has the advantage of being able to use heat sequestering with molten salt or oil to power a turbine 24/7.
I believe that is because most people who claim to be environmentalists don't give a damn about the environment or the advancement of their own species.
This is patently not true. There is a long term solution to nuclear waste. toss it in a feeder/breeder reactor and use it to make more electricity.
By the time you are done with it you have two kinds of waste products...
Those with a half life so small that storing it for a few years will eliminate its radiation hazard.
Those with a half life so long that they are no more a radiation hazard than natural granite.
Wow, that is almost exactly what I would have said.
There is only one green power source that can meet all the energy needs of mankind. And it is glowing green. Nuclear power is the only way to go.
Modern feeder/breeder reactors can run almost indefinitely without producing hazardous levels of waste. They can consume the "waste" of older less efficient nuclear plants as fuel and eliminate nearly all waste storage and processing hazards. They can be constructed with current technology and are compact and can be hardened against attacks both by hostile humans and the environment.
Solar thermal power offers a competitive set of features with acceptable trade-offs by taking advantage of the thermo-nuclear furnace in the sky. Solar thermal uses current technology, has a lower initial cost of investment and completely eliminates the minuscule waste issues of modern nuclear power. Using heat sequestering it can provide power 24/7. However it can be easily damaged by adverse weather and human action, consumes much more property and has a limited geographic area of optimal deployment.
ever heard the phrase "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"? Its part of the foundation of at least the American legal system.
Heck, what about video game patches, add ons, downloads of Linux distros, etc, etc, etc. All of these are entirely legal, and all of them can use P2P.
The difference is that you're not sitting at the end of the pipe watching your P2P bits arrive, while the phone and video and streaming audio users are. If your phone service has to compete with your P2P service, which would you rather have go badly?
If you are downloading a distro, and at the same time you place a VoIP phone call, what do you do if the audio is all broken up? Do you pause the torrent client to get better phone service? I do*. Now, put the torrent client in your neighbor's house, where you don't have have the ability to pause your neighbor's download when you want to use the phone. Is it fair?
And before you cry "but the bandwidth! the bandwidth! I paid for the bandwidth!" bandwidth is NOT the same as capacity. If you want a guarantee of capacity, sign a contract to rent a fiber between you and your server. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that it's a multi-use, multi-user network, it's shared, and there will be packet loss when it's saturated.
* well I did when I had Vonage.
what if you are watching the bits? The company I work for is developing live video streaming using a P2P protocol.
I feel exactly the same way.
Illegal file sharing is wrong and there should be consequences for it. It is however not theft. Theft involves taking something away from another. With filesharing, ownership and possession remain with the originator.
What is theft is the extension of copyright, erosion of fair use and bypassing of the courts that media companies are bribing governments around the world to achieve. And its not theft from an individual, it is theft from the public domain, it is theft from us all.
These 3 strikes laws are intended to circumvent the courts and allow media companies to extort real people into paying them with no burden of proof or legal recourse.
And the United States of America consists of 50 independent sovereign states and 3 territories out of the 91 states in North America (US, Canada, Mexico, apologies to the smaller Caribbean and Central American states). Or at least, the states started as sovereign until a certain president violated the constitution to wage war against the Confederacy over their legal and rightful succession.
speak for yourself, I don't mind if I she swallows.
Bowling Balls are not single molecules. They are constructed with a weighted core surrounded by a polymer resin.
However, pure crystals are technically very large molecules. And they can get very large.
either:
a: the photon is released has a longer wavelength and thus less energy.
b: the rate is "nearly" 100%, as in sometimes it absorbs a photon and produces heat.
Then I used notepad.exe
Now I use notepad++
There are many parts of the US where owning and driving a car is mandatory if you want to work. There are vast tracts of rural land where there is no public transportation. If you live there, and want to work at all, you need to drive a car. It is the rural working poor that are hardest hit by things like required auto insurance and increased fuel and mileage costs, not those who live in cities where work is available within walking/biking distance.
I am not assuming that lack of nuclear fuel means insufficient energy. Solar is more than capable of supplying the worlds energy needs all on its own. Unless you consider the the actual environment.
Much of the world has very poor isolation due to high latitudes or frequent cloud cover. Solar power plants are very susceptible to periodic bad weather, a tornado, hurricane or strong hail storm hitting a solar power plant will destroy it. Bad weather can potentially cover a large region for days. With an exclusive reliance on solar those regions would need massive energy storage potential.
I favor nuclear power for its ability to work effectively anywhere, with a high degree of reliability.
I am sure that we will either develop something better than nuclear power in the millennium or two it will take to consume all the worlds nuclear fuel (assuming we also use a sizable amount of solar energy) or modern civilization will fall into chaos and electricity and automobiles will be spoken of to children in much the same way that dragons and wizards are today.
I can tell you which one I think is more likely to occur. But I am trying very hard to be an optimist.
Three mile Island had virtually no real effect on the environment. You would get more additional radiation from a two way commercial aircraft trip across the pacific than you would from spending a few years living in the shadow of the plant. It had such a deep psychological impact because it occurred 1 week after the movie "The China Syndrome" was released in theaters.
Chernobyl is what happens when you shut off every redundant safety feature of a power plant and then run it at full power for days on end. I would hardly call it an accident. I would also point out that at least one study indicated that there was only one cancer related death in a civilian as a result of Chernobyl (if you discount the soldiers and workers that were forced to clean up the reactor) and the area is now one of the largest and healthiest wild game preservers in the former soviet union with native wildlife showing little or no harmful effects in recent years.
A modern feeder-breeder reactor is capable of burning the spent fuel of previous generations reactors, weapons grade fuel, and normal nuclear fuel. While doing this, it is conservatively 10 times more efficient (could be up to 100 or more times more efficient, but AFAIK nothing like that has actually been built yet) and produces waste that will become neutral in hundreds of years instead of the thousands that conventional spent fuel will take. This is a short enough time span that we know we can build structures to contain it for the entire duration of the potential harm.
Nuclear power is the only realistic and reliable green energy. Note that I am including solar power when I say nuclear due to the fact that the sun is essentially an enormous nuclear furnace.
Yes, solar thermal plants can be made using the same steam turbines and generators used by coal, gas power plants to produce energy from high pressure steam.
If one adds an additional component of a heat reservoir such as molten salt, a solar plant is even capable of providing electricity through night and cloudy days (depending on the duration of reduced insolation and the capacity of the thermal reservoir of course) without requiring any advancement in battery technology.
However, I really do not appreciate him lumping nuclear power in with inferior bio fuels and carbon sequestering. Proper use of feeder-breeder reactors can effectively eliminate nuclear waste from uranium reactors and provide power for the entire world for many hundreds of years (all on its own). Add to that the potential of thorium reactors using a more plentiful fuel and nuclear power makes a perfect compliment to solar for regions not blessed with great weather.
Meanwhile the drilling and pressure issues of carbon sequestering mean that the excess energy extracted is marginalized while the risk of a geologic release of billions of tons of CO2 due to fissures or shifting could kill thousands or even millions if close enough to a major city.
Biofuel is not a renewable resource. To meet our gasoline needs alone we would need a corn field larger than the continental US. Even with switchgrass we would need ~25% of the surface of the US to meet our gasoline needs. Consider for a moment that modern farming is already devastating the aquifers that will take 10s to 100s of thousands of years to replenish naturally.
Wind has some potential but can never be used for base load due to the fact that weather on earth is inherently unpredictable, producing squalls that can overload a power grid with to much wind or starve it with periods of calm over nearly continental spans.
Google? try looking up words like "CANDU", "Thorium reactor", "Regenerative reactor", "Feeder-breeder reactor" etc.
Indeed. Modern Feeder-Breeder reactors are safe, environmentally friendly and efficient.
They can not only produce 10 times more energy for a given supply of uranium, but they could cure the worlds problem of disposing of long term nuclear waste by using it as recycled fuel. Not only this, but what little waste is produced has a short enough half-life to be a threat for a manageable few hundreds of years instead of thousands. They do not have the land use ecological impact that solar does.
Combined with balanced use of solar thermal and tapping Americas northern and offshore oil and natural gas reserves, it presents us the option of becoming completely independent of both foreign energy and dirty coal that we currently burn (fun fact: the average US coal plant releases more radioactive waste into the environment than a conventional nuclear power plant).
The infrastructure SF is implementing is admirable. The vision I have for a good future also includes electrified railways and highways with charging rails that allow drivers to run off of grid power on longer trips, allowing us to remove the use of oil as a significant factor in transportation cost throughout the continental US even with the current generation of relatively low power density batteries.
I think dork covers it. ;)
I disagree. a Geek may be an intellectual master of his field. But they are clueless outside of that field, including in social interaction. A nerd has a broader field of interest and expertise. What the two have in common is that we are both smart and share a common aspect of "freak" culture.
I am a nerd, I am equally at home behind a computer screen, under a car with a wrench, in a shop making furniture or in the arms of my lovable little goth chick.
It has to do with partial pressure of a gas in relation to the escape velocity of the planet. All planets loose their atmosphere given a sufficient amount of time. Having higher gravity slows this process because a smaller portion of the molecules making up the atmosphere have a vector of motion with a magnitude greater than EV that does not intercept another molecule.
Earth still has its atmosphere not only due to its higher gravity, but also because it is still volcanically active. The release of gas from inside the earth is sufficient to replenish much or all of the gas lost at the moment.
It took mars millions, possibly billions of years to loose its initial atmosphere and the atmosphere released from its early volcanism. And the same fate will eventually befall the earth when our mantle cools and hardens.
funny as it sounds. I wasn't even allowed to listen to country as a child. I was allowed to listen to both kinds of music. Christian and Gospel. As a result my family kept the radio locked away for emergencies.
I spent most of my life thinking I hated music. It was only later that I found out that I liked it, just that the only music I was allowed to listen to sucked.
Its called the "doctrine of first sale" and it is a fundamental aspect of capitalism and is legally protected in the US. Corporatist evangelicals have tried to subvert this through legal means (they failed in the US, but succeeded in parts of the EU), so in return they attempt to do so through technological means.