Sample text: "Jason Scott, 13, is a terminally ill patient of [one of several diseases], and his one passion in life is to [various hobbies, including collecting AOL disks, pop tabs, Montana Gold 55 grain Full Metal Jacket.223 ammo, etc.] and his [mother, sister, uncle] has announced that he would like to get into the Guinness Book of Records..."
Status: TRUE until someone does some brief and simple research and discovers it is FALSE.
they are standing inside a Somebody Else's Problem field
What a golden phrase that is, brief yet descriptive. Thank you!
A Somebody Else's Problem field is no simple menace or obstacle, it is a projection of ill-tempered or incompetent energy. It can be intricate, beautiful or funny when viewed from a distance, like one of those biohazard crop circles. But you must make your way through them every day. You must be wary of strange invisible energies converging at sharp edges and central lobes. And often many overlap which compounds complexity.
It's better than up to your ass in alligators when your original objective was to drain the swamp, which is colorful but has become over-used. The swamp suggests one's foray into uncharted territory, the alligators are nameless, unpredictable and numerous entities like the (boring) onslaught of evil-minded adversaries in a video game. Life is not that simple anymore.
This is the 21st Century. We have aerials and DEM and LIDAR of the swamp, the alligators show a unique IR/pattern signatures on the terrain of endeavor, and all of them are fitted with radio collars (cell phones) anyway. You KNOW these alligators, you signed contracts with them. You hired them. And yet your navigation through the predictable messes and petty drama is not so much an obstacle as a dance -- as if one must tip-toe through a forest stepping only on the shifting shadows of leaves so as to avoid upsetting the sunlight.
Everyone's Problem fields surround us all. Now that talk is cheap and global the economy and the lobotomy and the deficit and the crisis, the ecotastrophe and the asteroid interception problem and the toilet paper shortage in Venezuela, these things affect us all.
It's overwhelming.But now armed with the simple phrase, standing in Someone Else's Problem field I can imagine these problems are projected onto me like the epic dinosaur battle projected onto Professor Falken's face as he describes the futility of it all and how useless it is to try. Perhaps I can just step aside from the projector beam without some alligator biting me on the ass.
Basically, the x-rays will ignite the surface of the asteroid instead. If the material in the asteroid is sub-optimal for this purpose, there have been designs of turning a nuclear bomb into a kinetic weapon that should work in this regard. Basically the bomb sits in an x-ray reflective shell, and when the bomb explodes, the x-rays bounce around the shell before the exploded bits of the bomb destroy it and exit an aperture. At the end of the aperture is a large, dense block of x-ray absorbing material. This material is vaporized by the x-rays and is all traveling in a similar direction as the x-rays were all going in that general direction. This plasma moving at relativistic speeds then slams into the target like a nuclear shot gun blast. IIRC, this design was built for using nuclear bombs against space ships and it was estimated that it could direct 95% of the energy of the bomb at the intended target.
We all love Delta-V-expensive solutions that involve maneuvering 'beside' or 'landing on' a threat (which by definition is heading straight towards us at 10-30kps. There are no cloverleafs in space, people!:) Landing Bruce Willis is out. Doing anything gentle or slow is out.I propose these be shelved for the 'Emergency' context. Parameters are strict. The best we might achieve is some 45 or less approach angle. By this I mean the vehicle's course, the explosion can be directed broadside, as timing allows. The final sequence of events requires precise micro/nanosecond timing. We know our computers are up to it.
Are the warheads? We know how to make warheads that detonate on timing, pressure and 'contact'. But speed is relative and conditions in atmosphere is a cushy affair, a device falling at terminal velocity or missile propelled. Can we assuredly produce a weapon that can range itself accurately or trigger in vacuum, on or just before contact at ~40kps?
And there should be at least three complete missions of them en route, each lagging far enough to escape detonation effects, have enough time to analyze a failure, upload firmware, or adjust course in case we have partial success. And it would br really nice if each mission embodied more than one general approach, or the ability to reconfigure for an alternate strategy... just in case there it becomes clear after the first that the primary will not work. And even an idea that shapes force of a nuclear explosion is a massive fail if a technical snafu has it pointing the wrong direction.
[swims back and forth] "click." TFA here I come. Don't tell anyone. [opens and closes mouth] Oh Gawd, it's Engadget [enables golly gee-whiz filter] "...dropped to 8 seconds in 2013 -- about one second less than a goldfish" Now that's... Huh? Sorry, I missed that. [eats a bubble] "Thankfully, it's not all bad. While tech is hurting attention spans overall, it also..." Yeah something good right? Not in the mood for good news. I'll click on something blue. Oh it's the actual study! "Click". [swims back and forth] Oops, advertising.microsoft.com? Hello. It's about Canadians. [spits out bubble] That's nice. What a nice couple. [something something] "and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention" Glad I'm a goldfish then. We're still not at the research report yet. "Click." Oops, a dialog. "Download the Canadian attention spans research report (2.0M) Download the infographic (173K)" Now why would I just want to get the infographic...? Oh! I get it! THIS IS the attention span test! "Click: the report" [plays on bubble Ferris wheel as PDF loads] That woman is either taking a picture or is trying to scroll text by moving the computer up and down. She had to stand up to scroll to the top of the page. License plate "71"?. Hmmm. [scroll] "Think digital is killing attention spans? Think again." I read this twice, so my opinion is back to what it originally was. [yadda yadda] "Good news! It's not as bad as you think." [continuous sirens in the distance] Tornado warning! [rain/branches beat on window] Maybe it IS as bad as I think. [wind shrieks] Confound this nuisance. [lightning strikes!] [Power goes out] [minutes pass] [sirens stop] [power comes on] "AMI BIOS" "Select profile" "Welcome" "starting wlnotify.dll" [sleeps with eyes wide open CLICK HERE FOR IMPORTANT INFO] [open browser] [access slashdot] "Welcome to AT&T (The Fucking Modem)" What the fuck. [looks at lights] DSL not up. It's NAT-ting my browser traffic to itself. F'king UVERSE. "Click to run diagnostics." Okay. Click. "Enter modem access code." FUCK. [fortunately fishbowl is next to modem and curvature magnifies tiny sticker] [enters 10 digit number] "Ethernet/DSL/PTM: Pass Authentication:Fail" Their computer rebooting after 10 minutes? I thought nothing was slower than XP. [5 minutes pass] [reload] "Authentication: Pass" [tabs remembered by voodoo magick] First thing that's gone right. [glances up] MUSICAL SOUNDTRACK BEGINS FUCK! OH NOOOOOOOOES! (every icon next to every browser tab has been replaced by an AT&T DEATHSTAR logo. the only reason this is not in all caps is slashdot's lameness filter. shhhh. don't wake up the lameness filter) On no, AT&T Is in my mind. I can feel it. Do I have NATty favicon corruption? [warily, with nervous dread} "192.168.1.254/favicon.ico" [ENTER] [hideous 32x32 AT&T icon fills screen] [exit viewer] NOO! What brain-dead thweep would serve favicon from a NAT-redirected router? [slaps Firefox around] It's all your fault! I should downgrade you to 1992! Favicon support! [AT&T logo still icon on all tabbed sites] THAT LOGO, it keeps winking and blinking at me! I'm insane! [thrashes about, bumps on glass] Do we have a potion for this? Yesss. A potion [rustles about in bubble castle] [opens js console] var fS = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/favicon-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIFaviconService); [squeak] (have old js console it always squeaks) fS.expireAllFavicons(); [squeak] [whoosh!] [all icons missing] Already, an
âoeOur team of experts will investigate how best to show this to pilots in the cockpit and develop guidance to most effectively modify the aircraftâ(TM)s flight path to avoid populated areas or prevent sonic booms.
Yes. On Sunday it will do this. But Monday thru Saturday this technology will be used to test methods for waging Cymatic Warfare... in which fighter planes slave their autopilots to a central computer that flies them in passes towards a target zone from several vectors, such that the sonic boom interfaces-to-ground converge at the same instant. We have yet to see what might happen as standard building materials are subject to this type of harmonically amplified sonic energy. By Saturday afternoon we'll know.
Because there is no such thing as a single-use technology.
Great informative lecture I hadn't seen before. But why might I decide to feature a link to IndieGoGo campaign and Morgan Freeman instead of headlining it...? Good question.
Well for one thing, the Emergency Asteroid Defence Project and the IndieGoGo campaign represents a group of people who have decided the threat is actionable and has decided on a specific course of action. People in motion -- regardless of skill set -- will always be the greatest arbiters of change. If the mere presence of a good lecture was sufficient to motivate people, it would have had more than 650 views by now. WHEN the Indie campaign hits $200,000 we'll have a newsworthy item to help shape public perception of the danger, and a few lucky folks will have some cool shoulder patches and bumper stickers.
The best part of possessing totems such as these is explaining their purpose to others.
HAIV is an idea that -- once built -- is deployable on any time scale. If they were pre-positioned in orbit or on the Lunar surface they could intercept as soon as humanly possible in a scenario where doing absolutely nothing is worse. To the folks here who pose gentle solutions that would require years to work, that's nice, but your have to ask yourself Where are we getting these extra years from? Some propose interception as 'the object makes its closest (non-impact) pass', that's nice, but which object are we talking about?
I'm talking about the one we'll discover tomorrow that arrives within six months. Or weeks. That is the specific challenge EADP/HAIV is addressing.
One thing bothers me though. About 8 minutes into the lecture he presents an 'average' of 100 persons per year from asteroid deaths (a statistical munging of millennia of zero followed by billions in a day) with the risk from lightning... as if time and percent of human population lost are simple coefficients in some insurance game. I pose not only that these averages are not 'actionable' figures, they are the result the application of statistics in a context where it is absurd (to put it kindly). Besides, his figures are based an extrapolation from the ~10% objects we know about.
The insurance game is a form of the gambler's fallacy, which works both ways. The day before the KT impact there was the same chance of it occurring as the day after. How we assess risk for bad things that could happen has a greater effect on our survival than all the good ones. In learning about this threat and the magnitude of its consequences, you have bitten into the apple. There is no turning back.
You used the word "impossible" in relation to something space-related, Space Nutter Central Command is already a beehive of activity as nerds put up the 1960s space posters and prepare the proper religious rites to send out responses...
Point out something makes no physical sense, 99 times out of a hundred you'll something along the lines of "on my desk is a computer with a 3TB hard drive". Etc etc etc
I'm with you there. Until we do something astoundingly new and amazing with our technology, miniaturization (even Moore's Law) is an angels on the head of a pin exercise. Tech stocks will probably be flying high on the day of the 'next' KT impact.
Great idea! In the spirit of the underwater skeleton 'tea party' in the Colorado River, in tribute to the artist -- space permitting -- it would be really cool if a large unmanned asteroid intercept vehicle could have a windowed 'bridge' with a pair of plastic skeletons seated in lawn chairs. Their grinning skulls would be the last thing that nasty old space rock ever sees.
They did duck and cover under about 40-100 cm of moist dirt, thus saving the most gentle of the flock from the global pizza or roasting oven of falling impact debris. KT-event: the most delicious of the apocalypses.
Ten thousand billion tons of ejecta, ~30 x Mount Everest. Effects of the KT impact event presented by Rusty Schweickart. ~1 meter of the world's oceans boiled off. 70% of all life wiped out. Bad scales and feathers day. Good mammal hair day. If you like Hollywood panic and CGI, Evacuate Earth and Catastrophe/4: KT
Think on how great it would feel to stop something like that from happening again.
...and how do you propose to BUILD any of this perennial childish sci-fi nonsense?
With our hands, making less than minimum wage. The robots will be busy taking over our jobs on Earth.
The Chinese/Russians/South Koreans will probably be on the moon by 2040, Japan plans an unmanned base by 2020 and Japan/India announced intent to have a permanent base by 2030 but more likely a decade later. A study in grey. Bear in mind that these are visible nation-states but there will be also be an invisible multinational corporate hand behind the early adopters. There will also be a forward-thinking billionaires practicing their Mandarin, Russian and Japanese in the mirror because they're fed up with endless politics.
Notice I didn't pair up the United States with anyone for Lunar exploration, because way things have been going we'll probably be paired up with Iran, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia and (post-revolution) Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Morocco, (and still) Iraq and Afghanistan to make portions of Earth more closely resemble the surface of the Moon.
Beam enough laser light at the object to heat its surface to the point that it ablates
Another extreme light solution, also reliant on melting its surface are giant parabolic mirrors deployed near the object. This interesting discussion points out some of the realities of gathering and focusing sunlight.
Once our civilization hits Stage 1.5 on the Kardashev scale we might revisit an idea proposed in 1993 by Paul Birch, How to Move a Planet through the use of what he calls a 'solar windmill' to transfer angular momentum between the sun and planets. It's Rube Goldberg as hell!
"We conclude that through the use of high-velocity dynamic compression member to apply forces efficiently, planetary orbits can be modified on convenient engineering timescales ~30 years, that the cost of such operations is not excessive in conjunction with terraforming or artificial-planet-building projects, that energy can be converted to and from orbital energy with little loss, and that the technique may also apply to the regularisation of stellar motions."
Then we could just bob the Earth and scoot it out of the way. If lowly earthworms are deserving of our protection, surely an asteroid may be.
A tennis racket of sunlight, as in a change of albedo on part of an object's surface using a light colored mesh, has been proposed for Apophis [2036]. Looks promising for known longer term threats which require small adjustment. From the paper Predicting the Earth encounters of (99942) Apophis [2007] p.13,
"altering the energy absorption and emission properties of a few hundred square meters of its surface (i.e., a 40 x 40 m patch) as late as 2018 could divert Apophis from impact in 2036; that is, the currently unknown distribution of thermal properties across Apophis can make the difference between an impact and a miss. Implementations of such a deïection might include depositing materials on Apophis' surface similar to the Kapton or carbon-ïber mesh sheets being considered for solar sails. With areal densities of 3 to 5 g m^-2 420 to 700 kg of carbon-ïber mesh could cover ~35-100% of the surface of Apophis in material with an emissivity of 0.4 to 0.9. For Kapton, static charge build-up in thematerial or asteroid due to solar UV exposure could aid deployment to the surface in such a low gravity environment. If an actionable hazard is found to exist, it would be necessary to move an object's entire uncertainty region (not just the nominal trajectory) away from the Earth. To provide margin adequate to cover all unknowns for Apophis, larger albedo modiïcations might be required. The modiïcation required will therefore depend on the predicted size of the trajectory uncertainty region in 2036 and thus on the asteroid's physical properties."
You need a moon base (not manned) to do this right. Then you throw moon rocks at the impending impactor. Doing it from a smaller gravity well means you can sling them into space more easily via something like a magnetic rail gun (yes, you need to put the moon rocks into a container made of iron / steel so it works with a mag solution).
+1 Insightful
A series of mass-produced kinetic impactors launched from the lunar surface by an EM rocket sled, each a ferrous metal cylinder containing lunar regolith with some propellent, attitude jets for course correction, (perhaps) a main engine for additional impact velocity. The probability of several or many reaching target is high. I give you a gold star. We could even retaliate against Mars.
It could be used to target Earth too, let's hope to be mature enough to resist. And hopefully its accuracy is better than Popeye's Pappy as he attempts a warning shot across the bow.
The atomic clock might be the only thing working after we are gone.
Isotopes will be decaying, but there will be no one and nothing to count the decays. But what ever is the last thing actually running, you can be sure it will be running Windows NT. For more on this and a brief history of the circumstances which brought our modern world to its knees, see my own little parable about technological angst and global catastrophe, The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future
Topic: Ask Slashdot: After We're Gone, the Last Electrical Device Still Working? Reply Subject: Who cares? Response: I don't care. I think that it isn't a interisting problem.
Analysis: Looks like this dim bulb has gone out. Tally: Currently at 999 Points of Light Who: A Child Left Behind What: Passionate declaration of indifference. When: 42 years after men last walked on the Moon. Where: March For Apathy 2015 [cancelled] Why: Dissonant aggressive demotivational pathos. What: 's the use. How: Did we get here? Further Reading on this Topic: Failed Slashdot submission,
"Paul Rosenberg has uncovered some surprising new evidence that manned space travel is not only possible, it has actually been achieved using decades-old technology. Some 40 years in the making, a tale too amazing to remain untold. With a few quaint photographs he asks, could we build this? The answer is no. Or is it? It is uplifting to read that "Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars..." for it must take something really compelling to prevent us from reaching the stars, and he has nailed it. This essay makes the case that the headliner of 2052 may well be: Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 80-Year Old Technology. I can hardly wait! Down with robots."
The number of Japanese who oppose nuclear power is now in excess of 80%.
It's hard to know without a link, but are you referring to the March 2014 NHK poll where the 80% actually represents those asked if Japan should 'scrap some or all plants', not necessarily abandon nuclear power? Where 37% are 'very concerned' that another Fukushima may happen, but the majority are 50% 'slightly concerned' or 14% 'not concerned'? And when asked whether plants should be restarted, 44% (presumably those 'very concerned' and a few more) said NO, 11% said plants should 'go on-line soon'... and the most astounding figure of all: 44% are 'undecided'.
Let me pause for a moment in earnest admiration of the Japanese people. In the USA it seems we hardly ever admit to being 'undecided' on any hot issue, even in anonymous polls. It's always this-or-that. Or better go with this because we dislike people who like that. Or something like that. To have 44% of Japanese polled choose 'undecided' to me means two things: the issue is in a state of flux, surely... but more impressively, these people must be weighing more than one important factor in their deliberation. Good for them. I honestly hope that in the end they do not follow Germany's knee-jerk lead of economic austerity via energy poverty.
I'm sorry you think I should be ashamed for thinking that the world press should be ashamed of itself. A good resource for tallying shame is Hiroshima Syndrome run by nuke industry veteran Leslie Corrice. Not only has he covered the accident from its first days, he has consistently called out disinformation and unwarranted speculation in the press (Japanese and other) with a fine attention to detail. Also, like any journalist should and usually doesn't, he segregates his editorial opinions from the news. And some of those are eye-opening.
It is widely accepted that Japan could construct nuclear weapons in a matter of a few months at most, and maintains that capability for defence. It allows Japan to remain a non-nuclear state while still giving it the option to acquire nuclear weapons quickly if the situation escalates. Wikipedia has some information for you: Japanese nuclear weapon program: De_facto_nuclear_state
WOW. What a sorry-ass Wikipedia page that is. It really pisses me off. Someone created a page that chronicles the budding nuclear weapons program of the Empire of Japan under Emperor Hirohito while the country was at war. After which there was no real continuity, government or military or otherwise.
To which someone has added a suggestively worded postscript (was that you, Donald Rumsfeld?) that implies that an internationally vetted atoms-for-peace fuel reprocessing program and some HEU for research purposes is practically a dastardly "screwdriver's turn away" from nuclear weapons. The irony of this WikiPropaganda burns, for the construction of at least one reprocessing facility is one of the broken promises my own government had made to the nuclear power industry. I'm glad we did not build one now, or we'd have a footnote like that too.
Let us waste no time here. We must invade Japan and confiscate the screwdrivers.
I swear by my life and my love of it --- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. ~John Galt
This not only applies to freedom from coercion, but also liberation from having to address your tender concern of whether or not my own philosophy is flawed. But it is funny... you sound a lot like Senator McCarthy...
India's Thorium research is promising but a little sad, they have spent so much effort to make it useable as solid fuel, even before discovering that they are sitting on one of the world's largest reserves of uranium. Thorium in liquid fuel would be an efficiency win for every continent with an extremely small mining footprint. Thorium as solid fuel does not offer enough benefit over uranium, until or unless uranium becomes scarce.
With reference to your link to Gardner's thesis, although it is interesting a long document on parameters to monitor on large grids outside of the main interconnections is unlikely to make any sense to anyone who has not been involved with electricity transmission (as I was for part of the 1990s). What was your motivation to link the item? Is it some attempt to add some weight to your criticism of other alternative energy sources by showing off your level of understanding?
Just a document I discovered recently that introduces principles of grid monitoring and explains some of NERC's policies, with the 'whys' --- but not in NERC's own language, which is so thick with implied context and acronyms as to require a decoder ring. A well written dissertation is a publicly accessible resource that can be as informative as industry-specific textbooks (which I generally cannot afford). Layman-readable grid stuff is not easy to find on the Internet these days. I'm trying to bootstrap on EE energy transmission topics, also trying to better understand the phenomenon of subsynchronous resonance as described by Andrew Dodson at TEAC6.
IMHO alternative energies should stand on their own merits and infighting between fans of differing alternative energies (eg. solar, wind, nuclear) is often a sign of being unable to express those merits.
I'm sure you'll let me know if I fail to express them.;-) I'd love to imagine a world in which all available energy alternatives could be scaled up in a political vacuum based solely on their potential to enhance our survival... but money and time are involved, and things get ugly. As long as you have folks saying we should scale wind and solar but specifically not nuclear, which they certainly do around here, I feel compelled to speak out too.
Just an example of the ugliness of money: Dodson suggests in the presentation linked above that "You have reliable service providers being forced to accept unreliable inputs. They call renewable energy 'negative loads'. Many long lines in the western Interconnect are currently being series-compensated, so the torsional amplification issues are only going to increase. Ten Trillion dollars in transmission grid upgrades might allow us to start integrating some of these renewable power plants, and that's without a single megawatt being put on the grid." On these forums wind and solar is being 'sold' over other sources by cents per kWh, as if the issue of subsynchronous 'grid storms' from variable input and the money required to address it is not part of the solution. Some might choose to think of this as deceptive.
I prefer to see it as a state of unresolved investigation. We should all learn more about the infrastructure that makes modern life possible. I would love to see ten trillion dollars spent on the grid, but not necessarily to install a series of band-aids that mitigate storm conditions at the expense of (yet more) loss. We should achieve seamless transfer coast to coast. By my present understanding the best plan may be for all sources to push HVDC into a series of overlapping loops that span the continent, and from that push HVAC into the grid-islands of today. The high energy components to achieve this AC/DC transfer are now mostly science fiction, but hopefully the best kind -- just around the corner.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. Any links on grid learning resources welcome!
Actually in identifying some solar/wind promoters as anti-nuclear --- just a few but boy are they shrill --- I think I've hit the nail on the head.
Let's take a look at nuclear power in Japan, shall we. Japan is a small, energy-resource-poor country which has leveraged its technology to become a financial and industrial giant, in many areas out-producing the United States even before we outsourced to China. Some ~50 nuclear reactors were supplying ~30% of the nation's electricity in 2011. But that 30% is a misleadingly small figure in terms of estimable value, for even as rural Japan was finally being electrified those nuclear plants had been powering the factories and steel mills that put it on the world map. From being the first victim of nuclear war to putting its first reactor on-line in 1966, Japan is one of the world's greatest success stories and owes a great deal of its meteoric rise as a world power to those nuclear plants.
The Japanese are aware of this. It is why they responsibly reprocess their spent fuel, it is why they continued to expand their nuclear base even after the US Three Mile Island mishap, even after a pseudo-environmentalist sect (coal barons by proxy) in the United States began to suppress the advancement and innovation of this technology. The Fukushima Daiichi plant went on-line in 1971 and not one person in this part of the world seems to find it appropriate to recognize the many gigawatt-years of service it has contributed. We will honor a retired warship for its years of service, but if a nuclear power plant has fallen on hard times we will kick it like a dying dog and stamp the life out of it. Perhaps my allusion shocks you.
I go even further to describe as twisted and sick the way world press marginalized the unfolding tragedy of ~15,000 deaths to dwell on the minutiae of radiation release, and (worse yet) gathered anti-nuclear celebrities to continually supply worst-case scenarios, most of them absurd, scientifically deceptive and some outright dishonest. It represents a tabloid moment of which the entire human race should be ashamed. And yet? Even in the immediate aftermath of the disaster when all were in shock, merely 70% of Japanese believed that Japan should reduce its reliance on nuclear energy. There is reason to believe that this percentage is falling as the years pass, as they have re-elected a Prime Minister who vows to restore nuclear power to its previous levels. Perhaps the Japanese, for all this tragedy, are possessed of a certain clarity that is slipping away in the United States.
The second issue is nuclear weapons. One reason that the government wants nuclear power is so that it can build weapons at short notice.
Dissing conventional nuclear power on the grounds that it supports weapons manufacture is complicated. Suggesting that it is 'easy' or 'quick' or even 'feasible' (as opposed to refinement of natural uranium) is disingenuous. Rod Adams attempts to dispel this pervasive myth here and more recently here, and it is an uphill battle because politicians take their talking points from anti-nuke celebrities, not scientists or nuclear engineers. When the claim that terrorists could produce true fission weapons from nuclear plants breaks down, many seek refuge in the idea of a so-called 'dirty
Slashdot Mirror
Sample text: "Jason Scott, 13, is a terminally ill patient of [one of several diseases], and his one passion in life is to [various hobbies, including collecting AOL disks, pop tabs, Montana Gold 55 grain Full Metal Jacket .223 ammo, etc.] and his [mother, sister, uncle] has announced that he would like to get into the Guinness Book of Records..."
Status: TRUE until someone does some brief and simple research and discovers it is FALSE.
But will they be able to stop it? FALSE.
they are standing inside a Somebody Else's Problem field
What a golden phrase that is, brief yet descriptive. Thank you!
A Somebody Else's Problem field is no simple menace or obstacle, it is a projection of ill-tempered or incompetent energy. It can be intricate, beautiful or funny when viewed from a distance, like one of those biohazard crop circles. But you must make your way through them every day. You must be wary of strange invisible energies converging at sharp edges and central lobes. And often many overlap which compounds complexity.
It's better than up to your ass in alligators when your original objective was to drain the swamp, which is colorful but has become over-used. The swamp suggests one's foray into uncharted territory, the alligators are nameless, unpredictable and numerous entities like the (boring) onslaught of evil-minded adversaries in a video game. Life is not that simple anymore.
This is the 21st Century. We have aerials and DEM and LIDAR of the swamp, the alligators show a unique IR/pattern signatures on the terrain of endeavor, and all of them are fitted with radio collars (cell phones) anyway. You KNOW these alligators, you signed contracts with them. You hired them. And yet your navigation through the predictable messes and petty drama is not so much an obstacle as a dance -- as if one must tip-toe through a forest stepping only on the shifting shadows of leaves so as to avoid upsetting the sunlight.
Everyone's Problem fields surround us all. Now that talk is cheap and global the economy and the lobotomy and the deficit and the crisis, the ecotastrophe and the asteroid interception problem and the toilet paper shortage in Venezuela, these things affect us all.
It's overwhelming.But now armed with the simple phrase, standing in Someone Else's Problem field I can imagine these problems are projected onto me like the epic dinosaur battle projected onto Professor Falken's face as he describes the futility of it all and how useless it is to try. Perhaps I can just step aside from the projector beam without some alligator biting me on the ass.
Basically, the x-rays will ignite the surface of the asteroid instead. If the material in the asteroid is sub-optimal for this purpose, there have been designs of turning a nuclear bomb into a kinetic weapon that should work in this regard. Basically the bomb sits in an x-ray reflective shell, and when the bomb explodes, the x-rays bounce around the shell before the exploded bits of the bomb destroy it and exit an aperture. At the end of the aperture is a large, dense block of x-ray absorbing material. This material is vaporized by the x-rays and is all traveling in a similar direction as the x-rays were all going in that general direction. This plasma moving at relativistic speeds then slams into the target like a nuclear shot gun blast. IIRC, this design was built for using nuclear bombs against space ships and it was estimated that it could direct 95% of the energy of the bomb at the intended target.
I second that. Masterful tech writing.
This description of Orion propulsion also describes the 'Casaba-Howitzer', a one-shot Orion optimized for a narrow, fast plasma jet. Here objective is more similar to Orion than punching through armor: the most complete, reliable and (as much as possible) directed transfer of energy. The Casaba-Howitzer concept is not even in the declassified SDI flava stuff that DOE is permitted to talk about.
We all love Delta-V-expensive solutions that involve maneuvering 'beside' or 'landing on' a threat (which by definition is heading straight towards us at 10-30kps. There are no cloverleafs in space, people! :) Landing Bruce Willis is out. Doing anything gentle or slow is out. I propose these be shelved for the 'Emergency' context. Parameters are strict. The best we might achieve is some 45 or less approach angle. By this I mean the vehicle's course, the explosion can be directed broadside, as timing allows. The final sequence of events requires precise micro/nanosecond timing. We know our computers are up to it.
Are the warheads? We know how to make warheads that detonate on timing, pressure and 'contact'. But speed is relative and conditions in atmosphere is a cushy affair, a device falling at terminal velocity or missile propelled. Can we assuredly produce a weapon that can range itself accurately or trigger in vacuum, on or just before contact at ~40kps?
And there should be at least three complete missions of them en route, each lagging far enough to escape detonation effects, have enough time to analyze a failure, upload firmware, or adjust course in case we have partial success. And it would br really nice if each mission embodied more than one general approach, or the ability to reconfigure for an alternate strategy... just in case there it becomes clear after the first that the primary will not work. And even an idea that shapes force of a nuclear explosion is a massive fail if a technical snafu has it pointing the wrong direction.
The price of failure is death. And embarrassment.
let the world burn. it would certainly make for an interesting tuesday.
Tuesday Afternoon
Where's The Walrus?
Fly Like An Eagle
Tomita: Planets
[swims back and forth] "click." TFA here I come. Don't tell anyone.
[opens and closes mouth] Oh Gawd, it's Engadget [enables golly gee-whiz filter]
"...dropped to 8 seconds in 2013 -- about one second less than a goldfish"
Now that's... Huh? Sorry, I missed that. [eats a bubble]
"Thankfully, it's not all bad. While tech is hurting attention spans overall, it also..."
Yeah something good right? Not in the mood for good news. I'll click on something blue.
Oh it's the actual study! "Click". [swims back and forth] Oops, advertising.microsoft.com? Hello.
It's about Canadians. [spits out bubble] That's nice. What a nice couple.
[something something] "and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention"
Glad I'm a goldfish then. We're still not at the research report yet. "Click." Oops, a dialog.
"Download the Canadian attention spans research report (2.0M)
Download the infographic (173K)"
Now why would I just want to get the infographic...? Oh!
I get it! THIS IS the attention span test! "Click: the report"
[plays on bubble Ferris wheel as PDF loads]
That woman is either taking a picture or is trying to scroll text by moving the computer up and down.
She had to stand up to scroll to the top of the page. License plate "71"?. Hmmm. [scroll]
"Think digital is killing attention spans? Think again."
I read this twice, so my opinion is back to what it originally was.
[yadda yadda] "Good news! It's not as bad as you think."
[continuous sirens in the distance] Tornado warning! [rain/branches beat on window]
Maybe it IS as bad as I think. [wind shrieks] Confound this nuisance. [lightning strikes!]
[Power goes out] [minutes pass] [sirens stop] [power comes on]
"AMI BIOS" "Select profile" "Welcome" "starting wlnotify.dll"
[sleeps with eyes wide open CLICK HERE FOR IMPORTANT INFO ]
[open browser] [access slashdot] "Welcome to AT&T (The Fucking Modem)" What the fuck.
[looks at lights] DSL not up. It's NAT-ting my browser traffic to itself. F'king UVERSE.
"Click to run diagnostics." Okay. Click. "Enter modem access code." FUCK.
[fortunately fishbowl is next to modem and curvature magnifies tiny sticker] [enters 10 digit number]
"Ethernet/DSL/PTM: Pass Authentication:Fail" Their computer rebooting after 10 minutes?
I thought nothing was slower than XP. [5 minutes pass] [reload] "Authentication: Pass"
[tabs remembered by voodoo magick] First thing that's gone right. [glances up]
MUSICAL SOUNDTRACK BEGINS FUCK! OH NOOOOOOOOES!
(every icon next to every browser tab has been replaced by an AT&T DEATHSTAR logo.
the only reason this is not in all caps is slashdot's lameness filter. shhhh. don't wake up the lameness filter)
On no, AT&T Is in my mind. I can feel it. Do I have NATty favicon corruption?
[warily, with nervous dread} "192.168.1.254/favicon.ico" [ENTER] [hideous 32x32 AT&T icon fills screen]
[exit viewer] NOO! What brain-dead thweep would serve favicon from a NAT-redirected router?
[slaps Firefox around] It's all your fault! I should downgrade you to 1992! Favicon support!
[AT&T logo still icon on all tabbed sites] THAT LOGO, it keeps winking and blinking at me! I'm insane!
[thrashes about, bumps on glass] Do we have a potion for this? Yesss. A potion [rustles about in bubble castle]
[opens js console]
var fS = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/favicon-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIFaviconService);
[squeak] (have old js console it always squeaks)
fS.expireAllFavicons(); [squeak]
[whoosh!] [all icons missing] Already, an
âoeOur team of experts will investigate how best to show this to pilots in the cockpit and develop guidance to most effectively modify the aircraftâ(TM)s flight path to avoid populated areas or prevent sonic booms.
Yes. On Sunday it will do this. But Monday thru Saturday this technology will be used to test methods for waging Cymatic Warfare... in which fighter planes slave their autopilots to a central computer that flies them in passes towards a target zone from several vectors, such that the sonic boom interfaces-to-ground converge at the same instant. We have yet to see what might happen as standard building materials are subject to this type of harmonically amplified sonic energy. By Saturday afternoon we'll know.
Because there is no such thing as a single-use technology.
Why bother with Morgan Freeman or Indiegogo for asteroids when there is real information out there.
[...] What can we do against asteroids (again 90 minutes with an expert):
[Dr. Stan Love's NEA lecture]
Great informative lecture I hadn't seen before. But why might I decide to feature a link to IndieGoGo campaign and Morgan Freeman instead of headlining it...? Good question.
Well for one thing, the Emergency Asteroid Defence Project and the IndieGoGo campaign represents a group of people who have decided the threat is actionable and has decided on a specific course of action. People in motion -- regardless of skill set -- will always be the greatest arbiters of change. If the mere presence of a good lecture was sufficient to motivate people, it would have had more than 650 views by now. WHEN the Indie campaign hits $200,000 we'll have a newsworthy item to help shape public perception of the danger, and a few lucky folks will have some cool shoulder patches and bumper stickers.
The best part of possessing totems such as these is explaining their purpose to others.
HAIV is an idea that -- once built -- is deployable on any time scale. If they were pre-positioned in orbit or on the Lunar surface they could intercept as soon as humanly possible in a scenario where doing absolutely nothing is worse. To the folks here who pose gentle solutions that would require years to work, that's nice, but your have to ask yourself Where are we getting these extra years from? Some propose interception as 'the object makes its closest (non-impact) pass', that's nice, but which object are we talking about?
I'm talking about the one we'll discover tomorrow that arrives within six months. Or weeks. That is the specific challenge EADP/HAIV is addressing.
One thing bothers me though. About 8 minutes into the lecture he presents an 'average' of 100 persons per year from asteroid deaths (a statistical munging of millennia of zero followed by billions in a day) with the risk from lightning... as if time and percent of human population lost are simple coefficients in some insurance game. I pose not only that these averages are not 'actionable' figures, they are the result the application of statistics in a context where it is absurd (to put it kindly). Besides, his figures are based an extrapolation from the ~10% objects we know about.
The insurance game is a form of the gambler's fallacy, which works both ways. The day before the KT impact there was the same chance of it occurring as the day after. How we assess risk for bad things that could happen has a greater effect on our survival than all the good ones. In learning about this threat and the magnitude of its consequences, you have bitten into the apple. There is no turning back.
You used the word "impossible" in relation to something space-related, Space Nutter Central Command is already a beehive of activity as nerds put up the 1960s space posters and prepare the proper religious rites to send out responses...
Don't forget the Theremin Spaaace Music and especially that mechanical clicking sound as Robbie The Robot prepares to speak. We Space Nutters love it because it reminds us of an Olivetti adding machine.
Point out something makes no physical sense, 99 times out of a hundred you'll something along the lines of "on my desk is a computer with a 3TB hard drive". Etc etc etc
I'm with you there. Until we do something astoundingly new and amazing with our technology, miniaturization (even Moore's Law) is an angels on the head of a pin exercise. Tech stocks will probably be flying high on the day of the 'next' KT impact.
I'd love to see them fly into an asteroid.
Great idea! In the spirit of the underwater skeleton 'tea party' in the Colorado River, in tribute to the artist -- space permitting -- it would be really cool if a large unmanned asteroid intercept vehicle could have a windowed 'bridge' with a pair of plastic skeletons seated in lawn chairs. Their grinning skulls would be the last thing that nasty old space rock ever sees.
You get points for style.
They did duck and cover under about 40-100 cm of moist dirt, thus saving the most gentle of the flock from the global pizza or roasting oven of falling impact debris. KT-event: the most delicious of the apocalypses.
Ten thousand billion tons of ejecta, ~30 x Mount Everest. Effects of the KT impact event presented by Rusty Schweickart. ~1 meter of the world's oceans boiled off. 70% of all life wiped out. Bad scales and feathers day. Good mammal hair day. If you like Hollywood panic and CGI, Evacuate Earth and Catastrophe/4: KT
Think on how great it would feel to stop something like that from happening again.
...and how do you propose to BUILD any of this perennial childish sci-fi nonsense?
With our hands, making less than minimum wage. The robots will be busy taking over our jobs on Earth.
The Chinese/Russians/South Koreans will probably be on the moon by 2040, Japan plans an unmanned base by 2020 and Japan/India announced intent to have a permanent base by 2030 but more likely a decade later. A study in grey. Bear in mind that these are visible nation-states but there will be also be an invisible multinational corporate hand behind the early adopters. There will also be a forward-thinking billionaires practicing their Mandarin, Russian and Japanese in the mirror because they're fed up with endless politics.
Notice I didn't pair up the United States with anyone for Lunar exploration, because way things have been going we'll probably be paired up with Iran, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia and (post-revolution) Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Morocco, (and still) Iraq and Afghanistan to make portions of Earth more closely resemble the surface of the Moon.
How about shooting some tethers at it and deploying a counter-weight (rocket-powered?) to the object to swing it out of orbit? Make it into a Bola?
David French proposes Trajectory Diversion of an Earth-Threatening Asteroid via Massive, Elastic Tether-Ballast System [2010], although the time frame for the large objects he modeled was upwards of a decade. But IF you do have decades and the materials challenges of the tether (bluntly pointed out in Wired Magazine [2009]) are solved, it offers a low-tech solution that would not require constant vigilance or active control.
Or a massive light saber flung with a cosmic atlatl.
Beam enough laser light at the object to heat its surface to the point that it ablates
Another extreme light solution, also reliant on melting its surface are giant parabolic mirrors deployed near the object. This interesting discussion points out some of the realities of gathering and focusing sunlight.
Once our civilization hits Stage 1.5 on the Kardashev scale we might revisit an idea proposed in 1993 by Paul Birch, How to Move a Planet through the use of what he calls a 'solar windmill' to transfer angular momentum between the sun and planets. It's Rube Goldberg as hell!
"We conclude that through the use of high-velocity dynamic compression member to apply forces efficiently, planetary orbits can be modified on convenient engineering timescales ~30 years, that the cost of such operations is not excessive in conjunction with terraforming or artificial-planet-building projects, that energy can be converted to and from orbital energy with little loss, and that the technique may also apply to the regularisation of stellar motions."
Then we could just bob the Earth and scoot it out of the way. If lowly earthworms are deserving of our protection, surely an asteroid may be.
one million tennis rackets.
A tennis racket of sunlight, as in a change of albedo on part of an object's surface using a light colored mesh, has been proposed for Apophis [2036]. Looks promising for known longer term threats which require small adjustment. From the paper Predicting the Earth encounters of (99942) Apophis [2007] p.13,
"altering the energy absorption and emission properties of a few hundred square meters of its surface (i.e., a 40 x 40 m patch) as late as 2018 could divert Apophis from impact in 2036; that is, the currently unknown distribution of thermal properties across Apophis can make the difference between an impact and a miss. Implementations of such a deïection might include depositing materials on Apophis' surface similar to the Kapton or carbon-ïber mesh sheets being considered for solar sails. With areal densities of 3 to 5 g m^-2 420 to 700 kg of carbon-ïber mesh could cover ~35-100% of the surface of Apophis in material with an emissivity of 0.4 to 0.9. For Kapton, static charge build-up in thematerial or asteroid due to solar UV exposure could aid deployment to the surface in such a low gravity environment. If an actionable hazard is found to exist, it would be necessary to move an object's entire uncertainty region (not just the nominal trajectory) away from the Earth. To provide margin adequate to cover all unknowns for Apophis, larger albedo modiïcations might be required. The modiïcation required will therefore depend on the predicted size of the trajectory uncertainty region in 2036 and thus on the asteroid's physical properties."
Any chance that you might consider posting "Ask Slashdot" articles in the "Ask Slashdot" section in the future? Please?
I believe the proper forum for this question is "Ask Slashdot". Please re-post your question there.
Confetti?
Yes, confetti has been is proposed. Tony [Zuperro? Curse you Discovery for no proper screen credit] has an interesting but incredibly elaborate idea that involves maneuvering a million tons of dust into the path of an object.
You need a moon base (not manned) to do this right. Then you throw moon rocks at the impending impactor. Doing it from a smaller gravity well means you can sling them into space more easily via something like a magnetic rail gun (yes, you need to put the moon rocks into a container made of iron / steel so it works with a mag solution).
+1 Insightful
A series of mass-produced kinetic impactors launched from the lunar surface by an EM rocket sled, each a ferrous metal cylinder containing lunar regolith with some propellent, attitude jets for course correction, (perhaps) a main engine for additional impact velocity. The probability of several or many reaching target is high. I give you a gold star. We could even retaliate against Mars.
It could be used to target Earth too, let's hope to be mature enough to resist. And hopefully its accuracy is better than Popeye's Pappy as he attempts a warning shot across the bow.
Discovery of an underwater skeleton 'tea party' in the Colorado River provides ample proof that the human race is worth saving.
The atomic clock might be the only thing working after we are gone.
Isotopes will be decaying, but there will be no one and nothing to count the decays. But what ever is the last thing actually running, you can be sure it will be running Windows NT. For more on this and a brief history of the circumstances which brought our modern world to its knees, see my own little parable about technological angst and global catastrophe, The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future
Postscript to the story: Internet of Things security concerns! Must. Implement. Granular. Crypto.. Yep, we're on track.
Topic: Ask Slashdot: After We're Gone, the Last Electrical Device Still Working?
Reply Subject: Who cares?
Response: I don't care. I think that it isn't a interisting problem.
Analysis: Looks like this dim bulb has gone out.
Tally: Currently at 999 Points of Light
Who: A Child Left Behind
What: Passionate declaration of indifference.
When: 42 years after men last walked on the Moon.
Where: March For Apathy 2015 [cancelled]
Why: Dissonant aggressive demotivational pathos.
What: 's the use.
How: Did we get here?
Further Reading on this Topic: Failed Slashdot submission,
Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 40-Year Old Technology
TheRealHocusLocus writes
"Paul Rosenberg has uncovered some surprising new evidence that manned space travel is not only possible, it has actually been achieved using decades-old technology. Some 40 years in the making, a tale too amazing to remain untold. With a few quaint photographs he asks, could we build this? The answer is no. Or is it? It is uplifting to read that "Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars..." for it must take something really compelling to prevent us from reaching the stars, and he has nailed it. This essay makes the case that the headliner of 2052 may well be: Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 80-Year Old Technology. I can hardly wait! Down with robots."
Thanks kindly! Will do.
The number of Japanese who oppose nuclear power is now in excess of 80%.
It's hard to know without a link, but are you referring to the March 2014 NHK poll where the 80% actually represents those asked if Japan should 'scrap some or all plants', not necessarily abandon nuclear power? Where 37% are 'very concerned' that another Fukushima may happen, but the majority are 50% 'slightly concerned' or 14% 'not concerned'? And when asked whether plants should be restarted, 44% (presumably those 'very concerned' and a few more) said NO, 11% said plants should 'go on-line soon'... and the most astounding figure of all: 44% are 'undecided'.
Let me pause for a moment in earnest admiration of the Japanese people. In the USA it seems we hardly ever admit to being 'undecided' on any hot issue, even in anonymous polls. It's always this-or-that. Or better go with this because we dislike people who like that. Or something like that. To have 44% of Japanese polled choose 'undecided' to me means two things: the issue is in a state of flux, surely... but more impressively, these people must be weighing more than one important factor in their deliberation. Good for them. I honestly hope that in the end they do not follow Germany's knee-jerk lead of economic austerity via energy poverty.
I'm sorry you think I should be ashamed for thinking that the world press should be ashamed of itself. A good resource for tallying shame is Hiroshima Syndrome run by nuke industry veteran Leslie Corrice. Not only has he covered the accident from its first days, he has consistently called out disinformation and unwarranted speculation in the press (Japanese and other) with a fine attention to detail. Also, like any journalist should and usually doesn't, he segregates his editorial opinions from the news. And some of those are eye-opening.
It is widely accepted that Japan could construct nuclear weapons in a matter of a few months at most, and maintains that capability for defence. It allows Japan to remain a non-nuclear state while still giving it the option to acquire nuclear weapons quickly if the situation escalates. Wikipedia has some information for you: Japanese nuclear weapon program: De_facto_nuclear_state
WOW. What a sorry-ass Wikipedia page that is. It really pisses me off. Someone created a page that chronicles the budding nuclear weapons program of the Empire of Japan under Emperor Hirohito while the country was at war. After which there was no real continuity, government or military or otherwise.
To which someone has added a suggestively worded postscript (was that you, Donald Rumsfeld?) that implies that an internationally vetted atoms-for-peace fuel reprocessing program and some HEU for research purposes is practically a dastardly "screwdriver's turn away" from nuclear weapons. The irony of this WikiPropaganda burns, for the construction of at least one reprocessing facility is one of the broken promises my own government had made to the nuclear power industry. I'm glad we did not build one now, or we'd have a footnote like that too.
Let us waste no time here. We must invade Japan and confiscate the screwdrivers.
I swear by my life and my love of it ---
that I will never live for the sake of another man,
nor ask another man to live for mine.
~John Galt
This not only applies to freedom from coercion, but also liberation from having to address your tender concern of whether or not my own philosophy is flawed. But it is funny... you sound a lot like Senator McCarthy...
India's Thorium research is promising but a little sad, they have spent so much effort to make it useable as solid fuel, even before discovering that they are sitting on one of the world's largest reserves of uranium. Thorium in liquid fuel would be an efficiency win for every continent with an extremely small mining footprint. Thorium as solid fuel does not offer enough benefit over uranium, until or unless uranium becomes scarce.
With reference to your link to Gardner's thesis, although it is interesting a long document on parameters to monitor on large grids outside of the main interconnections is unlikely to make any sense to anyone who has not been involved with electricity transmission (as I was for part of the 1990s). What was your motivation to link the item? Is it some attempt to add some weight to your criticism of other alternative energy sources by showing off your level of understanding?
Just a document I discovered recently that introduces principles of grid monitoring and explains some of NERC's policies, with the 'whys' --- but not in NERC's own language, which is so thick with implied context and acronyms as to require a decoder ring. A well written dissertation is a publicly accessible resource that can be as informative as industry-specific textbooks (which I generally cannot afford). Layman-readable grid stuff is not easy to find on the Internet these days. I'm trying to bootstrap on EE energy transmission topics, also trying to better understand the phenomenon of subsynchronous resonance as described by Andrew Dodson at TEAC6.
IMHO alternative energies should stand on their own merits and infighting between fans of differing alternative energies (eg. solar, wind, nuclear) is often a sign of being unable to express those merits.
I'm sure you'll let me know if I fail to express them. ;-) I'd love to imagine a world in which all available energy alternatives could be scaled up in a political vacuum based solely on their potential to enhance our survival... but money and time are involved, and things get ugly. As long as you have folks saying we should scale wind and solar but specifically not nuclear, which they certainly do around here, I feel compelled to speak out too.
Just an example of the ugliness of money: Dodson suggests in the presentation linked above that "You have reliable service providers being forced to accept unreliable inputs. They call renewable energy 'negative loads'. Many long lines in the western Interconnect are currently being series-compensated, so the torsional amplification issues are only going to increase. Ten Trillion dollars in transmission grid upgrades might allow us to start integrating some of these renewable power plants, and that's without a single megawatt being put on the grid." On these forums wind and solar is being 'sold' over other sources by cents per kWh, as if the issue of subsynchronous 'grid storms' from variable input and the money required to address it is not part of the solution. Some might choose to think of this as deceptive.
I prefer to see it as a state of unresolved investigation. We should all learn more about the infrastructure that makes modern life possible. I would love to see ten trillion dollars spent on the grid, but not necessarily to install a series of band-aids that mitigate storm conditions at the expense of (yet more) loss. We should achieve seamless transfer coast to coast. By my present understanding the best plan may be for all sources to push HVDC into a series of overlapping loops that span the continent, and from that push HVAC into the grid-islands of today. The high energy components to achieve this AC/DC transfer are now mostly science fiction, but hopefully the best kind -- just around the corner.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. Any links on grid learning resources welcome!
Actually in identifying some solar/wind promoters as anti-nuclear --- just a few but boy are they shrill --- I think I've hit the nail on the head.
Let's take a look at nuclear power in Japan, shall we. Japan is a small, energy-resource-poor country which has leveraged its technology to become a financial and industrial giant, in many areas out-producing the United States even before we outsourced to China. Some ~50 nuclear reactors were supplying ~30% of the nation's electricity in 2011. But that 30% is a misleadingly small figure in terms of estimable value, for even as rural Japan was finally being electrified those nuclear plants had been powering the factories and steel mills that put it on the world map. From being the first victim of nuclear war to putting its first reactor on-line in 1966, Japan is one of the world's greatest success stories and owes a great deal of its meteoric rise as a world power to those nuclear plants.
The Japanese are aware of this. It is why they responsibly reprocess their spent fuel, it is why they continued to expand their nuclear base even after the US Three Mile Island mishap, even after a pseudo-environmentalist sect (coal barons by proxy) in the United States began to suppress the advancement and innovation of this technology. The Fukushima Daiichi plant went on-line in 1971 and not one person in this part of the world seems to find it appropriate to recognize the many gigawatt-years of service it has contributed. We will honor a retired warship for its years of service, but if a nuclear power plant has fallen on hard times we will kick it like a dying dog and stamp the life out of it. Perhaps my allusion shocks you.
I go even further to describe as twisted and sick the way world press marginalized the unfolding tragedy of ~15,000 deaths to dwell on the minutiae of radiation release, and (worse yet) gathered anti-nuclear celebrities to continually supply worst-case scenarios, most of them absurd, scientifically deceptive and some outright dishonest. It represents a tabloid moment of which the entire human race should be ashamed. And yet? Even in the immediate aftermath of the disaster when all were in shock, merely 70% of Japanese believed that Japan should reduce its reliance on nuclear energy. There is reason to believe that this percentage is falling as the years pass, as they have re-elected a Prime Minister who vows to restore nuclear power to its previous levels. Perhaps the Japanese, for all this tragedy, are possessed of a certain clarity that is slipping away in the United States.
The second issue is nuclear weapons. One reason that the government wants nuclear power is so that it can build weapons at short notice.
Dissing conventional nuclear power on the grounds that it supports weapons manufacture is complicated. Suggesting that it is 'easy' or 'quick' or even 'feasible' (as opposed to refinement of natural uranium) is disingenuous. Rod Adams attempts to dispel this pervasive myth here and more recently here, and it is an uphill battle because politicians take their talking points from anti-nuke celebrities, not scientists or nuclear engineers. When the claim that terrorists could produce true fission weapons from nuclear plants breaks down, many seek refuge in the idea of a so-called 'dirty