Warning the US military about the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive in 1968 South Vietnam. Listening to Soviet manned space missions and missile tests. Tunnels under embassies and distant submarine missions.
Yes, from their genesis as a Black Chamber there has been some amazing derring-do
But I DO get the impression that something happened recently -- within in the past 20 years -- that has prepared the Agency to pull out all the stops and go whole-vacuum-cleaner on everyone.
Look at what remains in plain sight of UNITED STATES SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTIVE 18 [27 July 1993] I liken this document to a 'Posse Comitatus Act' of domestic SIGINT. While some may be inclined to vivisect its language into a series of loopholes, each redaction leading down some great rabbit hole of collateral permissiveness... I am grateful that it has existed in some form.
Directive 18, and other post-Church apparatus is a clue that there were people within the Agency who were personally shocked to learn of the excesses of those SHAMROCK years. People who realized that if such things became hard-coded into the establishment, some day there may not be a 'home' worth coming home to. A paradise for future Stalins, a trove of cradle-to-grave intercepts. Where are those people today and what do they think?
The idea presented now seems to be of a past 10 year flood of contractors with 'self written clearances', linguists, the cloud and political requests that have re shaped the domestic missions.
The post-9/11 moron intelligentsia horde -- a flood of younger recruits who have signed away some of their own rights in the granting of Secret and above, what a rush that is, like taking the red pill -- may be privy to front ends like PRISM which sounds essentially like a value-added data portal.
I am not interested in them. Those agents are the 'secret consumers' whose access is supposed to be compartmentalized. They are the boy scouts on their best behavior.
I am interested in who started the program of backbone taps with dark-fiber shunts and assembl;ed the data for the back-end. The shadow-Google that had begun crawling fiber communications systematically and (in time) ever more completely, with complete and casual disregard to the almost wholly domestic nature of what was being tapped. I think alleged Level 3 compliance is the tip the iceberg, a few choice conduits of convenience. I also think there may be a few taps buried out there in the wind-swept American heartland, say where a road crew appeared one evening and did a mysteriously meticulous job of cleaning up afterward.
Here's my completely hypothetical timeline, I wonder how close it is to reality.
In the 1980s we have indications (Bamford, Puzzle Palace) that continental-yet border communications links were prime targets, just as they had always been out of country.
The 1990s would have been the time this scaled up quickly with no adherence to Charter or Directive 18 intended. Perhaps the Principals were sold on the idea that all communications were to be parsed but (magically) only jurisdictional traffic was to be forwarded. The bandwidth of dark fiber leading from these intercept points would yield a clue as to whether the architects believed this convenient fiction.
Post 9/11 all stops are removed, but a great deal of the back-end is already in place.
And now the Fizzle-Zap-Utah facility and it's brethren whose primary purpose may not merely be to process but to store un-parsed data whose retention violates the spirit (and possibly letter) of Directive 18. A trove for future despots
Pushing 50 is an adventure. Find an entirely new direction, start a new life chapter.
I am a 1970s-onward computer tech turned 1990s-onward BSD/Linux sysadmin who helped start a Freenet and two ISPs, the first back in the 'dark ages' before AOL got its first ip address. Then after a 8 year gap in my IT resume (I had rejoined a family business) I discovered not only do 40-somethings have difficulty competing for other new hires... in this brave new world you cannot even walk in and introduce yourself anymore, it's fill out this form on our website and we'll call you back.
No one ever called back, not even for a boring graveyard shift telecom job. I now work fixing water main breaks and jetting sewers and doing light construction, I'm in better physical shape than I was at 18. The best part of it is when you clean sewers you're not expected to take your work home with you.
The worst part is when your buddies bring you their old 512mb netbooks and ask you to load Windows 8 onto them. It hurts to say no and it's sometimes hard to explain why.
The US is choosing the path of aggression instead of the path of civilized behavior. This is a strategy designed by fools.
It is called "game theory". It is a virus that teaches that the only way to achieve a predictable result is to cheat, steal and lie. Because everyone else does.
There are two kinds of people in this world, those who will lean into its principles thinking that (despite its ugly face) there is some shred of real science hidden underneath because of its (apparent) success in helping to model animal behaviors. But if Lassie played by the rules of Game Theory she'd leave Timmy down in the well because it would achieve a predictable result as opposed to the uncertain course of action where she'd have to try save him again, and might fail. If that makes sense to you then congratulations, you're a Game Theorist.
And those like myself who see Game Theory applied by or to anything human as a mental disorder masquerading as a tool. One of our training wheels for disaffected hypocrites.
The folks at Enron imagined themselves Game Theorists but it turned out they were just being assholes.
Conspirational racketeering isn't so hot either because it leads to the formation of larger committees over time to help hide its existence and effect.
I will always strive to be an unpredictable coefficient in any theory. My favorite sport is Drunkard's Walk Philosophy. You never know where you are morally speaking but eventually you find your way home.
Are you referencing the 1920's, where the rich had no limits and they gobbled up everything and the entire economy tanked(1929, great depression, etc), so we put limits on them, taxed them, built infrastructure, and we had a really good run afterward?
I do not think a substantive amount of working capital was raised by placing higher tax burden on the rich (if the Wealth Tax Act of 1935 is what you mean). It skimmed off only income and there was no attempt to go after existing asset holdings such as stocks.
Later another targeted 'tax the rich' effort was to go after Undistributed Corporate earnings, only exempting monies redistributed as wages and dividends. The idea was the veritable Corporation was like unto a bellowing cow unwilling to be milked. Cows leading up to the market crash retained almost half their milk (cash on hand) using for such things as expansion (perceived as positive) and minting tycoons (perceived as negative, the Monopoly Man was originally a hated caricature in cartoons). This massive amount of retained milk led to the explosion of 1929.
Under the tax the Stockholder and the Employee were each to be handed a teat and the government would grab a third. This left only one teat because cows have four teats. I had to look it up. But the tax capped off at 27% so even if you say one-third we're going to need a lot more teats here to get these here ratios correct. The best way would be to abandon the teat standard and assign one hundred 'fiat' teats to each cow so we could talk real percentages. Cows would be required to turn in their teats and would be issued 100 fiat-teats at fair market value. Which leaves us with the problem that Stockholder and Employee each only have two hands. I had to look it up. So we must abandon the hand standard as well to facilitate all this teat grasping. This cow analogy is coming apart at the seams. Oh dear. This happens every time I attempt to discuss economics.
But anyway the Undistributed Profits Tax itself was scaled down and finally repealed amidst fierce opposition because it was argued successfully that it would have a chilling effect on industry through prevention of Good Expansion and Healthy Acquisition.
((( All this occurring in the grand old days of politics when Real Men had the TIME to read what they were deciding on, and especially, the COURAGE to REPEAL undesired legislation. In this modern time laws are assembled by teams of rhesus monkeys snarling at each other as they manipulate and stack colored and shaped objects, each with a phrase binding in some special interest or exception, some objects supplied by lobbyist rats. The result is glued together (voted into law) and when opposition and confusion arises they send in another team of monkeys to 'fix' it bigger still. No one ever tears anything down. )))
Back towards the topic... we had a 'good run' under Roosevelt's New Deal not (in my opinion) because at the time it was honestly believed that getting off the gold standard was the right thing to do and he set out to do it..
Is it? That's a difficult one. The problem is like any designer drug, the first time an economy abandons a precious metal standard there is a one-shot injection of dreamlike optimism that becomes the new reality. At the outset everyone feels empowered because there is new capital available.
I think Ben Bernanke honestly believes that he can reproduce the conditions of the New Deal by injecting and easing. But the Roosevelt drug has worn off and it simply does not work. It worked once because people were exchanging gold for something they thought was of greater value. They weren't but the act of exchange itself is what jump-started everything and created new wealth (as opposed to just more money). Today your average person reacts with complete incomprehension to monetary policy changes. Too many factors and n
Might I suggest one of those whiteboard-and-voiceover videos like the ones produced by RSA Animate? If you can cram a synopsis of your views into a video under five minutes long, I'd be willing to bet you could achieve a much bigger change in public opinion.
I'm not going to deny that nuclear has a tremendous ability to scale up. I know it can!
[...] Oh, are you talking about thorium reactors? I think a lot of your arguments against renewables (too expensive, too much research required, not feasible, blah blah blah) would also apply to this technology. Doubt my opinion? Perhaps you'd like to refer to the report from the Union of Atomic Scientists entitled Thorium: Not a near-term commercial nuclear fuel." You have to admit that at this point commercially viable thorium-generated power is vapor ware.
[...] You no doubt think I'm a knee-jerk partisan relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data.
Well I most certainly do not. You present yourself well and your aversion to nuclear energy and desire to jump into and 'crack' the remaining hurdles to solar is very clear.
There is a tremendous difference between the way the world was burning coal in the previous two centuries and the way it is burned today. Likewise nuclear fission needs a serious 'tune up'. Our light and heavy water reactors extract dismally small amounts of energy from fuel and leave long-term actinides in their wake.
But in my opinion the LFTR designs being proposed are so radically different in terms of efficiency, safety, containment and (with active processing) residual waste that it is a tragedy for me to see people draw straight line comparisons between LFTR and 'present day commercial nuclear power'. If it were not for the nuclear weapons program and its mandates nuclear would mean LFTR already, today.
I do not advocate solar and wind for base load energy ON ANY SCALE (as in, abort!) and I do want to see LFTR developed quickly to commercial deployment. I come to this conclusion on one single criteria only.
SURVIVAL.
With LFTR technology we can achieve a single building that will withstand any weather or seismic conditions (and no, it need not be sited near a large body of water) that will generate gigawatts of power, with years' worth of barely-radioactive thorium seed fuel stored in the closet. With active processing none of the long-lived isotopes will form and the harmful lifespan of this waste (of greatly reduced volume compared with spent solid fuel) is ~300 years. This is a BEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION.
With wind and solar -- even once we develop more efficient heat transfer or photovoltaics and more efficient turbines, there is a certain energy storage problem which I might refer to as vaporware. All the batteries presently in the world might power our grids for ten minutes. But okay, I will grant you as-yet-undeveloped storage battery tech, giant lithium chocolate bars the size of skyscrapers.
All of these solar/wind/storage 'solutions' collectively contain millions of discrete and precision parts spread over a large area that must (by their nature) be completely exposed to the elements. As opposed to a single self-contained building that merely outputs process heat or electricity.
What a logistical nightmare wind and solar are, even when they are working. Imagine trying to light a sports arena with Christmas lights. Only now imagine this on the supply side. It is mad in a way that has nothing to do with the 'ultimate promise' of these energy sources. It is a logistical nightmare. Nay, impossibility.
But okay I'll grant you the (remote) possibility that this will all fall into place within 50 years or so, who knows how many open pit rare earth mines will be opened up to achieve the chemical storage feat. Or hydrological or compressed air 'storage' with its laughable efficiency (how many million acres of solar panels again?) or environmental blights. Let's say it's all good, and it's done. There are now one hundred million discrete parts in our base load energy system that are somehow working in concert (again, as opposed to a few LFTR buildings) We are now 100% solar and wind, day and (one, two) nights. That was hard.
Snowden's revelations are merely more specifics coming to light, this has been fought in court before, recently.
In 2008 Congress amends the FISA act to absolve the telecom companies (granting "retroactive immunity") of liability for VOLUNTARILY HELPING the government conduct illegal warrantless mass surveillance. Remember we are talking about fiber optic taps here to listen to everyone, not forwarding specific data pursuant to a warrant or court order.
Here's the trick: the FISA law was amended two years into the Hepting court case. Why the retroactive immunity clause? Because EFF was WINNING.
Never mind that the scope of the surveillance cited in the case FAR EXCEEDED the conditions of FISA. Never mind that the case was in progress. A circuit judge decided that the FISA law was applicable, and (even more shocking to me) allowed Congressional action to disrupt and destroy an ongoing Judicial due process of law.
Blackmail? I'm running out of alternative theories.
"In Hepting v. AT&T, EFF sued the telecommunications giant on behalf of its customers for violating privacy law by collaborating with the NSA in the massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications."
"Evidence in the case included undisputed evidence provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA."
[...] "In July, 2008, after a long and contentious battle in Congress, the government and AT&T were awarded the so-called retroactive immunity from liability under the controversial FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which was enacted in response to our court victories in Hepting."
[...] "In June of 2009, a federal judge dismissed Hepting and dozens of other lawsuits against telecoms. EFF appealed that decision but it was affirmed, and in October, 2012, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case."
Interesting you say volcanic dust could shut down solar. Despite at least two volcanoes shutting down a large part of air travel I have not seen any indication of solar panels being affected
Thanks for listening. We have not yet experienced a Big One in the industrial age.
The most recent global weather phenomenon that has been ascribed to volcanism was "1816, the year without a Summer", triggered by an eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. "In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil."
Another global climate event of even greater magnitude occurred in 535AD which is presumed to have been an eruption of another Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa. David Keys has researched this extensively and has found many historical references to this event, also see the fascinating PBS documentary Catastrophe! available on-line: Part 1, Part 2. From Cassiodorus [Italy, 536AD] "The sun... seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun's heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany an eclipse prolonged through almost a whole year.
Both events are accompanied by reports of unusual weather besides the dimming, massive crop failure. They should send a shiver through anyone who envisions that the United States might some day rely on solar or wind for base load energy. It's a slate wiper
And those are just garden-variety volcanic eruptions, though severe. Yellowstone has erupted on average every 600,000 years and the last one was 630,000 years ago. A flock of geologist-birds will descend to peck my eyes out if I should whisper "any day now", but at least, a Yellowstone event of some magnitude should be part of anyone's 100-year plan. BBC did a great two hour docudrama depicting possible effects, Supervolcano [2006] along with companion program Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone
And that's not even bringing up the possibility of a significant sized meteor impact, which would be certain to generate a global plume of aerosols. So a bad day for plants is a bad day for solar energy and history has recorded these events as lasting for months and years.
How can they be sure the sun reduction will not lead to an Ice age? They have looked at how much the reduction is predicted (in the worse case) to be and how much the CO2 increase is predicted to be.
There are so many effectors besides pure chemical CO2 that are emerging as factors. Some of them like Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays effecting cloud formation, after years of deliberate marginalization (see this documentary). And some long-suspected avenues which have not been explored enough (my opinion) such as study of aerosol particulates like carbon black and their effect on climate, which suffered a setback with the tragic loss of the Glory satellite. Just two serious, possibly game changing factors. Until I see more of these angles play out to my own satisfaction -- a period in which they are rationally explored and not just 'rebutted', dismissed or ignored by pure-CO2 ca
As for myself? I would like to see falsifiable predictions.
How moderate and scientific of you to say, well spoken. But that would completely upset the most popular 'canard' (great word) of devastating sea rise that is being sold and re-told. It's the most effective way to terrify small children who are instinctively afraid of being drowned.
Now there is a gentleman in the Philippines who is on hunger strike because he is convinced that we -- the carbon emitting 'others' -- have sent them this killer typhoon.
This is our doing. James Hansen (I am so glad he left NASA) was chided by weather forecasting professionals and climate scientists alike for putting out his own view that hurricanes (from Katrina onwards) have this statistically significant blame factor. In our time, right now. This increasingly pissed off NASA because not only was he out on a scientific limb, but his hurricane musings were far out-pacing any news coverage of NASA's other endeavors. Talk about mission creep.
To those seeking carbon taxation and treaties, There is no time even to wait for even short-term falsifiable hypotheses. We must skip directly to the conclusions to achieve maximum panic right now.
As opposed to garden variety man eating cockroaches. All cockroaches are man eaters as conditions permit, but these couldn't wait. Living in the tropics I was occasionally awakened by a large cockroach gnawing, or what ever it is they do, on a toenail. Makes you feel glad to be alive.
"But why can't high-voltage lines be run underground?" Don't you think someone would have done it by now if it were feasible?
Glad you asked. I'm trying to convince people not only is it feasible, it is high time to get on with it.
Air isn't a very good dielectric and in wet weather it gets even worse, see this list of insulator breakdown voltages. Glass has 40-100 times the dielectric strength of air, so yes, HVDC conduits ARE possible in standard sized trenches.
You have to realize that when most of the country was spanned, suspended cable on tall pylons in their wide right-of-way corridors was the cheapest and fastest way to do it. In many areas the real estate presently used for these, some of which is very valuable, can be reclaimed as it moved below ground.
Here is one company with a design for trench-able electric pipes that could handle 15 gigawatts at 800kv. That's 2.5 times Las Vegas summer peak load. No superconductors or refrigeration, just lots of aluminum. You'll also see a sad note at the bottom, "I have so far found that US-based venture capital investors will not take an interest in the elpipe because it is "too big, too long term."
This "too big, too long term" dismissal is symptom of serious problems. Venture capital investors, some who already have great-grandchildren, are refusing to even approach infrastructure repair and re-build projects in North America. What do they think the world will be like in 50 years if these things are not done?
Although you'll see a lot of talk about HVDC helping to make wind and solar 'renewables' more practical, I don't think so, because for base load power they are too expensive at any price.
Neither wind nor solar would save us from extinction in the case of a long harsh Winter or a climate disrupting global dust cloud event. On that point alone I believe every penny spent on big wind and big solar is wasted. I want my children to survive.
For the big picture on how I believe HVDC pipelines and reliable scalable base load power is the way to go, see
Let companies who really care, keep a tally of individual accounts under scrutiny, total transactional records captured for surveillance purposes: a set of standard metrics for the moment and cumulative by month and year.
Let this information be placed into the Canary meta-tag of every web result for everyone, and let web browsers and plugin developers find ways to display this information on the borders of the page.
People could watch the numbers grow over time easily, and could maintain a constant vigilance and awareness of this problem. What you're accomplishing is the same aim as these companies issuing regular bulletins you must fetch and read.
Its inclusion into the very protocol of the Web and placed on the status areas of browsers by default, would send a clear message that we are not amused.
If the government counters that releasing real-time stats on surveillance orders should be censored for reasons of National Security, let that one fly all the way to the Supreme Court.
The rhino would provide valuable partner to achieve wildfire control in forested and urban settings. This species would quickly achieve a comfortable equilibrium with humans, and would be far less invasive than, say, Red Box vending machines.
Oklahoma is the only state I've found that commonly has ethanol-free gas available (but good luck finding anything higher than 91 octane).
Yup, and most Okies stay away from ethanol gas in droves. Stations that proclaim "100% gas" are most popular and the chains that cannot avoid it (like Loves) have just put on little stickers that say "we will purchase E10 or regular gas, whichever is cheaper, to pass the savings on to our customers" or some such.
"Can the US be weaned off ethanol?"
What kind of question is that? It's like asking if a fish can be weaned off a bicycle. Sort of missing out on that that whole imposed-on-us, thing. My Dad just scraped molasses out of the carburetor of his Astro Van.
This whole fuel contamination policy thing was cooked up by people who have thirty grand to spill on shiny new things... but mostly the Cash For Clunkers re-tards and their automotive manufacturing cronies who want to get the last of the reliable self-repairable vehicles off the road and put shady tree mechanics out of business. Sure feels like a hostile invasion from here.
HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN All your base load are belong to US You are on the way to destruction. What you say?? Make your time.
Every time some company like Google announces funding for some Tempest or Solaris farm somewhere I wince. It's not the money, it's the very idea of the thing. The Internet is 24/7, and they're supposed to be the smartest guys & gals in the room. How can they get behind and forge ahead on something that won't even solve their own problems?
How did this decades-long solar slash wind fixation even begin?? Why don't at least half the folks out there pause and say, "wait a minute... what are we trying to accomplish?" I'm developing an honest resentment to those so-called 'green' things, and believe me it's not comfortable or fun. Truth is, wind and solar smell bad.
They smell like grid-down Darwin In Action DEATH. If I can easily imagine some awful Event that would render all solar and wind technology useless overnight, for a week or longer... who else can? Take your pick: Dust from a volcanic event or asteroid impact, or a Winter storm with Arctic air meeting warm moist air from the South that sweeps diagonally across the continent with freezing rain, leaving inches of ice accumulation, road and rail impassible.
Or a Little Ice Age. We are more vulnerable to harsh Winter conditions than we were in 1650-1700. Electricity powers everything. Some scientists are baffledby the sun's behavior lately, but Professor Lockwood and the Washington Post aren't: Sun activity is in free fall, but you shouldn’t expect a new little ice age. I did a triple-facepalm when atmospheric physicist Joanna Haigh said, "Even under the most optimistic scenario [of minimal global warming and a deep solar minimum] the solar cooling would only just offset greenhouse gas warming. So no ice age.” Just like that. Human carbon emissions will offset a global weather phenomenon that lasted some 70-300 years. What makes her so sure?
Wind and Solar for grid energy are Rube Goldberg engineering disasters. So many precision cast moving parts out there in the elements, blades that rely on brakes and oil-filled transmission boxes. Everything subject to freeze and fail sooner than intended, and it's all in faraway places with branch feeders running to it at great expense, so it can solve your energy problems completely. Or maybe 20%. Some day. Some times. Not as much as expected. After the first calamity strikes, not at all.
Power plants are strong buildings with machinery inside built to withstand the worst of the elements. The best of these are completely self-contained, generate gigawatts of power and can stock months of fuel. Three guesses.
Solar and Wind grid energy farms are spacious gardens of delicate -- and ultimately useless -- garbage that never would have and will not ensure our survival, built at great expense in an atmosphere of dreamlike foolishness that has got to stop this minute.
My children deserve better. This is madness, people! Ape-shit madness! When discussing base load grid power, especially with aging infrastructure and an uncertain economic outlook... these sources should have been laughed out of the room. Google deserves better, as do we. This is an existential threat. Their money at this point would be better spent on T-shirts for natural gas producers and coal miners.
Or just perhaps... a commitment to fast-track thorium, a national effort on the same scale that put men on the moon. So we can crack this energy thing for the next thousand years, and go to the moon again.
And let's send women to the moon. It's their turn.
That should be "we have an EARLY 20th-century energy grid".
It was friggin' amazing when it was built, a time when few could even envision multi-gigawatt cities such as Las Vegas.
It all began with the dramatic and brutal the battle of the currents. Tesla/Westinghouse AC was the right choice for small scale and the subscriber level, enabling the use of transformers to step voltage. The self-synchronizing 60 cycle grid grew, and in the age of miracles (practically) no one objected to corridors of uninsulated cable suspended between power plants, which grew to become the mighty pylons of today. Unlike the trans-continental railroad however, Eastern and Western grids cannot meet without a DC interface. At 60 cycles there is too much span across them to achieve stable synchronization.
Yet Edison's DC is needed today -- for the long haul, to re-configure the grid for greater current capacity and efficiency, better bridge existing grids allow massive direct energy transfer coast to coast. Burying these lines brings protection from natural disaster such as cataclysmic ice storms, Yellowstone or what ever. We'll also be able to reclaim much of the real estate presently allocated to these corridors.
[Faulkner, 2005] "There are different trade-offs for AC versus DC power transmission. For example, voltage can only be taken up to about 500,000 volts (500 kV) for an overhead AC power line because beyond that, power dissipation through dielectric loss becomes severe. Voltage for DC overhead power lines can be taken up to double the maximum AC voltage, to about 1000 kV (one million volts from ground potential; 2 million volts between the conductors); beyond that, power dissipation through corona discharge becomes severe. Underground DC power lines can use even higher voltage, and can be quite large; the main factors limiting size and design details are the need to insulate the conductor and to dissipate heat. Wire diameter is limited for AC transmission lines, whether overhead or buried, due to the âoeskin effectâ that prevents an AC current from penetrating to the center of a large wire, whereas a DC line can be arbitrarily thick. For these and other reasons, underground high capacity power lines are necessarily DC.
The simplest way electric power could be sent coast to coast is to build power lines based on conductors with much lower electrical resistance than any long distance power lines in service today. These âoeelectric pipelinesâ can be either conventional conductor or superconductor-based, in principle. The superconductor approach to electric pipelines has gotten some press and research interest, but is not technically ready to deploy yet. There is also a more pedestrian way to decrease the electrical resistance of a power transmission line: use more conductor..."
Faulkner goes on to describe several electric pipeline projects with projected cost.
YOU ARE STANDING on a narrow ledge facing a smooth cliff. It's a long way down. You slide your left foot along the ledge and set your weight onto it.
But your heel rocks ever so slightly. There was a tiny ridge next to it, a feature not visible to the eye, and your heel has slipped off of it. The angle of your foot has changed in such a way that if you stood upright you'd be leaning away from the cliff.
Thoughts of the abyss are ever present and a dull wordless roar of panic is rising -- but your mind turns away from the roar and you allow yourself to become analytical. A surging notion flows towards your heel which needs to stretch and move (which way?? Is this the right way??) and it is done.
A moment of tenseness as the heel has settled and stiffened into its new angle. Your thoughts brush past the leg which trembles as if its muscles are being instructed to move also (no! The heel is enough!), eye and inner ear are waiting for confirmation that you are all right. The world is silent and still.
You are waiting for the simple and instinctive confirmation of balance. In a moment you will sense it, your mind will roll completely over in relief and grasp lofty topics, how far to go, is that a bird's nest, time to glance at the view.
But not at this moment. You are still waiting for balance.
What if that moment does not arrive?
Woke up. Got out of bed. We arrive every day whether or not we travel. Sleep is nature's way of restoring and preserving mental balance. It is a journey of chemically induced stupor as mental pathways of context valley are visited and revisited, erosion becomes memory becomes self. Things that interest us, worry us, concern us or beg us to action arise during sleep; they may appear as vividly as if awake or deeply veiled in symbolism. Even boredom and a yearning for excitement has its turn as the sleeping mind free-associates in ways that may seem fantastic or absurd, they move in eccentric yet stable orbits bound by the gravitational center of self. There are many ways we recover balance during sleep that are too easily dismissed by the waking mind. You may be impulsive and decisive while awake, come to some reluctant but firm conclusion. If you have glossed over something important, unpleasant, it will return to you while asleep. Like the reality of the cliff, trapped within sleep there is no way to avoid it. So in sleep we face our fears and live through them to the end. Be it resolve to action, acceptance or curiosity in new directions -- sleep is necessary to meld impulsive actions into convictions.
Is America getting enough sleep? Do we completely awaken?
Dragged a comb across my head. A greasy comb dipped in Wild Root Cream Oil. Muscle cars and cheap oil, Route 66, returned veterans, Crusader Rabbit, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Engelbert Humperdinck, the Stones, Iron Butterfly. Culture an ever changing whirlwind spanning yesterday and tomorrow; but the day after tomorrow is strange to those born last week. A great many of us carry memories of times so different from those of younger generations, an incredible divide has formed. Opinions may differ but stories matter also, and it is through stories we communicate. Despite the great many options available to connect with one another there is scarcely time these days for storytelling and story-listening. The young seek their fortunes and seek places, returning only for shared meals and brief small-talk. As the learning process has become cyclical and seasonal so has our interaction with those younger and older: as necessary, when necessary. Many today exist in a between-time where survival is of great importance and the here and now is a lonely place to be, distanced from family and friends of our youth. Our eldest vaguely recall a time when more stars were visible and there was leisure in the evening hours for big-talk. Some day they,
Those who advocate taking energy storage down to the building or subscriber level are living in a dream. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful dream! But this €20,000 unit cost will not magically come into existence. Those who envision lithium or (eventually it comes down to) lead acid batteries to the point where their effect is even detectable at grid scales are proposing an environmental nightmare in the manufacture and mass deployment of such things. Which thankfully will not come to pass because the investment capital is not there.
I go with solutions that are massive, central, run by the same people who (reliably) supply your electricity, and do not rely on evil large multipliers of objects constructed from rare earth elements or poisonous heavy metals.
I'm talking about something simple and inherently non-toxic, stored kinetic energy and rotation of heavy balanced cylinders in a near-vacuum. I vote fewer that are really big rather than many. Hoover Dam tech. Despite Beacon's bankruptcy in 2011 there are players who hope to salvage the concept using gimbals for stabilization.
I like the idea of kinetic energy storage solutions because if they were massive, centrally located and well constructed, the components would be mechanical parts that might have a smaller replacement cost than an equivalent amount of battery technology, whose chemical composition changes with age. It also fits well with my assertion that we should convert our long haul energy corridors (and generation facilities along those corridors) to native HVDC for a true inter-connected continental (and ultimately global) grid.
Activate the material by irradiating it with neutrons and turn it into very short-lived isotopes which then decay into stable ones and release heat.
I'd leave it to someone familiar with fusors and LFTR to say whether the neutron flux would be sufficient to sustain a 'sub critical LFTR'... but Stuart Henderson delivers a fascinating lecture on Thorium Energy from Accelerator Driven Reactors at TEAC4 in 2012. He is envisioning a passive reactor that is sub-critical when the beam is off, as you have suggested. He says it is essentially an 'energy amplifier'.
Also of note, David LeBlanc of Terrestrial Energy has a vision of Denatured Molten Salt Reactors he shared at TEC5, giving some compelling reasons why single fluid designs offer improved proliferation resistance for small reactors. One of his designs is intended to remain 'sealed' for ~30 years and defer the processing of transuranics, while ensuring its content remains a cocktail of isotopes that would be useless to weapon makers.
Accelerator driven thorium is an interesting idea. I sense a bit of good-natured 'WTF factor' response among those pursuing fissile/fertile Thorium designs. I am sure that they envision their reactor designs may some day become the nuclear reactor equivalent of the modern flush toilet -- a device so simple and elegant that despite cosmetics its form and function would change little over the years.
Using an accelerator to supply neutrons to start a thorium breeding cycle might seem silly when a pinch of uranium could do the trick.
Using an accelerator to keep a thorium reactor going might seem like a waste of (potential) energy for the effort spent designing such things, when keeping a critical breeding concentration of thorium in a properly designed system could do the trick.
Kirk Sorenson is frequently asked about proliferation concerns. He deals with the subject several points in Thorium Remix 2011 and his style has at times encouraged detractors of nuclear energy to believe that he (and other thorium advocates) are casually dismissing proliferation risk.
I see the same things they are seeing, and what I perceive is more of a shrug than a dismissal. To understand the nuance of that you have to see things from their point of view. They are trying to generate heat and electricity.
The flat-fact is that not only is uranium mined and processed to high enrichment world-wide... and produced in water reactors... there are enough ready-made nuclear weapons out there, both known and unaccounted-for (Greetz Israel) that at the current yearly rate of deployment (none) they will last forever.
Wrong hands you say? Only a matter of time. Weaponized uranium will surface eventually just as weaponized anthrax did.
Therefore try to put yourself in the shoes of a reactor designer who is on the brink of solving the world's energy problems for the foreseeable future. This is heady stuff. Not only would the problem be 'solved', it could have effects far beyond even the utopian staples like electric cars and bootstrapping third-world economies. All this could start to happen as soon as we pick a winner and decide that the approach is acceptably safe.
(Looking around) guys and gals... could it be that as the days tick by, our failure to reach consensus and express resolve in solving the problem is unacceptably dangerous?
I do. And I'm not alone. I believe Nuclear energy is just fire, the finest and most noble thing we have yet tamed. If we turn away from it at this point -- in a world of 7 billion people -- it would be a disaster. Taking into consideration who we are today and what we would become as the energy begins to run out. I do not wish my children or their children to experience tha
An electricity grid needs either some big stable supplies or a lot of diversity and over provisioning to be able to keep up with demand spikes
The US was on a steady path leading to a nuclear grid until 1977, when Carter declared a moratorium on spent fuel processing. This caused more concern than alarm in the nuclear power industry, whose plants all had pools for temporary storage. Everyone thought it would be ironed out shortly, the government would step in to manage a secure facility to recycle plutonium and store long term waste. Then the China Syndrome [movie,1979], Three Mile Island [incident,1979] occured 12 days apart and everything came to a halt.
The only notable grid building that has occurred since then haas been the steady accumulation of coal-fired power plants over the years, a slight increase in nuclear, and only recently a shift to natural gas. That's it. There's your electrical grid.
Everything else has been incorrect projections and wasted money. Discussion of coal and natural gas power generation a topic? Nope, actually there has been twenty years of hype on solarand wind, alternatives that are regiional at best, and upon any climate disruption that would generate cloud cover or disrupt wind patterns (no matter what the storage technology) would be a slate-wiper. Solar and Wind have presumed the building of branch feeders, there never was money for that. T. Boone Pickens lost his shirt on wind or let us say, provided a cautionary tale for other billionaires.
Solar subsidies will not just dry up... they will disappear overnight as the true crisis begins. Be it economic implosion or reigning in of government spending, the correction will be huge and sudden.
So now we are riding the crest of a natural gas glut which may last 30 years. I am hesitant to drop the 'hundreds' of years figure because it would be achieved with escalating difficulty and they wish to mass export it out of the country today. After that things looks pretty bleak. More coal??
That is why folks like me seem kind of desperately agitated on these forums at times. We're not adverse to personal self-sufficiency or conservation, we just see a terrible crisis ahead.
Part of the reason for the agitation in these discussions is that we are being presented with a steady stream well-meant suggestions for personally navigating the crisis, as if a little money ahead and a bit of ingenuity can mitigate the risk. And we do sense risk and danger.
That is why when we discuss the state of the grid we tend to sweep wind and solar off the table. Too aggressively, sure -- it is an aspect of our sense of dread, NOT an insensitivity to the usefulness and and cleverness of those sources.
We feel pressed on the matter. We are thinking of a long harsh Winter, just ONE country-wide ice storm which is possible, a serious further economic downturn, and the prospect of going to war over oil (again) or the dollar losing its reserve strength (happening!). All of these things, along with a hypothetical ~30 year glut of natural gas means there is perhaps still time to save the grid (and our way of life) if we get serious about fission and LFTR now, urgently.
Otherwise we are heading for THIS: a true blackout American Blackout. Never mind the unlikely cyberattack scenario, I do not even believe a Carrington Even EMP would take out that many points at once... and their time frame is a little extreme, "Day 10" events might occur at Week 10...
Thorium LFTRs would not in themselves save us if our lo
You know, I'd go with "citation needed", but how about I just bust this myth right here and now.
Put up yer dukes, them's debatin' words!
Thorium reactors require uranium
A Two fluid LFTR requires a small amount of fissile to bootstrap a sustaining thorium reaction. It is mixed into the salt.
They are not any safer than conventional reactors on this basis.
Wrong. Your statement merely indicates that you have a zero-tolerance attitude towards the use of uranium, not that you have insight into LFTR. You are comparing a few pounds of fissile to seed a one-time LFTR startup with tons of uranium a light-water reactor consumes (actually 99.5% wasted) in a year.
A shorter explanation of just how much of a pipe dream thorium reactors are is here
A longer and more intellectually satisfying explanation of the LFTR concept is can be found here
along with the caveat that dropping a bomb on one would be a very messy affair.
...with effects and hazards confined to the radius of the blast itself, where the radioactive salts will go sub-critical and just sit there, not reacting with water or air until they can be gathered, contained and eventually recycled. Which would be soon. That is a best possible solution. But really, how does this scenario compare to anything else on the scales of energy production today?
How would you compare a bombed LFTR to the same bomb setting alight an entire oil depot, a pipeline, massive piles of coal, or a seam of coal underground? Or taking out the LNG tanks that could level the port of Houston? Or going straight to for the source, the 1991 fires of Kuwait? Attitudes are choices after all and if you're on Slashdot, chances are you've chosen civilization. Seems to me that LFTR would offer a terrorist a poor bang for the buck. It would be merely taken out of service, generate lots of overtime until it's cleaned up. No one over the ridge need evacuate.
To obtain gigawatts of carbon-neutral electricity that could go on for thousands of years, cheaply, how could you possibly beat that?
The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.
This passage mystifies me most of all. The 'frozen' plug is comprised of the same salts as the rest of the loop. It is being actively kept 'just' cool enough by a refrigeration unit. Extreme runaway heat from too much fissile would melt it quickly, as would shut-down of the refrigeration unit. There are no real 'moving parts' here to jam or be subject to corrosion.
Perhaps by 'impurities' you are imagining some sort of solid crust that might build up on the plug itself. I don't know the chemistry well enough to answer that. But existence of the plug does not preclude other ways of manually draining the loop. Anyway it just sounds like a case for good engineering and vigilance.
Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other.
As any other what? Now you are taking a zero-tolerance position for any technology that relies on any sort of maintenance at all. It is an absurd place to stand, and places you among those who honestly believe that when unexpected hazards present themselves, people will run like terrified rabbits into the forest to hide.
History does not support that idea. There are smart and brave people attending gigawatt reactors, and you cannot solve the world's energy problems with a Play-Doh Fun Factory.
And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.
That's just a nope. You're jousting us with windmills.
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
Okay say wind and solar $10k either way. You sound like someone who might have $10k in the bank. I say that gently with the utmost respect. Congratulations!
But you have to realize that in order to truly declare that these things have the 'capability', everyone must somehow ante-up the amount required, which they cannot... so your ability to pay will naturally result in the subsidizing of your neighbor's 'share'. Somehow.
There is a great value to be self-sufficient, but real grid solutions must be on the scale of whole {cities,states,countries,continents}. I sympathize with the sell-back fees, that whole "sell power back" idea was conceived with good intentions and sold long before the technical and liability issues were settled.
Even as a home owner on the road to complete energy self-sufficiency, your fate is bound with that of those around you. People who live hand to mouth in crackerbox apartments and trailer parks, your on-grid neighbors, and the vast majority of people who consider the electricity problem solved when (and if) they can afford to pay the bill. I barely can and I work for the city.
What this means is that everyone -- including yourself and myself, must come together to decide what is the best way to power the grid to resolve this crisis. We must do it in such a way that it will benefit everyone and bring the billed cost-per-KwH down substantially.
Reducing the cost of living is the same as creating wealth, in fact it is the best and only sustainable way to create wealth.
The grid must become the priority, be healed first. Otherwise those individuals who achieve self-sufficiency would become islands in the darkness as the grid fails and everyone else will naturally be drawn to the light. That would be a dangerous thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Warning the US military about the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive in 1968 South Vietnam.
Listening to Soviet manned space missions and missile tests.
Tunnels under embassies and distant submarine missions.
Yes, from their genesis as a Black Chamber there has been some amazing derring-do
But I DO get the impression that something happened recently -- within in the past 20 years -- that has prepared the Agency to pull out all the stops and go whole-vacuum-cleaner on everyone.
Look at what remains in plain sight of UNITED STATES SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTIVE 18 [27 July 1993] I liken this document to a 'Posse Comitatus Act' of domestic SIGINT. While some may be inclined to vivisect its language into a series of loopholes, each redaction leading down some great rabbit hole of collateral permissiveness... I am grateful that it has existed in some form.
Directive 18, and other post-Church apparatus is a clue that there were people within the Agency who were personally shocked to learn of the excesses of those SHAMROCK years. People who realized that if such things became hard-coded into the establishment, some day there may not be a 'home' worth coming home to. A paradise for future Stalins, a trove of cradle-to-grave intercepts. Where are those people today and what do they think?
The idea presented now seems to be of a past 10 year flood of contractors with 'self written clearances', linguists, the cloud and political requests that have re shaped the domestic missions.
The post-9/11 moron intelligentsia horde -- a flood of younger recruits who have signed away some of their own rights in the granting of Secret and above, what a rush that is, like taking the red pill -- may be privy to front ends like PRISM which sounds essentially like a value-added data portal.
I am not interested in them. Those agents are the 'secret consumers' whose access is supposed to be compartmentalized. They are the boy scouts on their best behavior.
I am interested in who started the program of backbone taps with dark-fiber shunts and assembl;ed the data for the back-end. The shadow-Google that had begun crawling fiber communications systematically and (in time) ever more completely, with complete and casual disregard to the almost wholly domestic nature of what was being tapped. I think alleged Level 3 compliance is the tip the iceberg, a few choice conduits of convenience. I also think there may be a few taps buried out there in the wind-swept American heartland, say where a road crew appeared one evening and did a mysteriously meticulous job of cleaning up afterward.
Here's my completely hypothetical timeline, I wonder how close it is to reality.
In the 1980s we have indications (Bamford, Puzzle Palace) that continental-yet border communications links were prime targets, just as they had always been out of country.
The 1990s would have been the time this scaled up quickly with no adherence to Charter or Directive 18 intended. Perhaps the Principals were sold on the idea that all communications were to be parsed but (magically) only jurisdictional traffic was to be forwarded. The bandwidth of dark fiber leading from these intercept points would yield a clue as to whether the architects believed this convenient fiction.
Post 9/11 all stops are removed, but a great deal of the back-end is already in place.
And now the Fizzle-Zap-Utah facility and it's brethren whose primary purpose may not merely be to process but to store un-parsed data whose retention violates the spirit (and possibly letter) of Directive 18. A trove for future despots
And to St. Peter I must say
I learned my lesson well
You see, I worked at NSA
Now send me down to hell...
I wonder what the old-school NSA people think of this era of No Adult Supervision. Perhaps some Anonymous Cowards would give us a hint.
Pushing 50 is an adventure. Find an entirely new direction, start a new life chapter.
I am a 1970s-onward computer tech turned 1990s-onward BSD/Linux sysadmin who helped start a Freenet and two ISPs, the first back in the 'dark ages' before AOL got its first ip address. Then after a 8 year gap in my IT resume (I had rejoined a family business) I discovered not only do 40-somethings have difficulty competing for other new hires... in this brave new world you cannot even walk in and introduce yourself anymore, it's fill out this form on our website and we'll call you back.
No one ever called back, not even for a boring graveyard shift telecom job. I now work fixing water main breaks and jetting sewers and doing light construction, I'm in better physical shape than I was at 18. The best part of it is when you clean sewers you're not expected to take your work home with you.
The worst part is when your buddies bring you their old 512mb netbooks and ask you to load Windows 8 onto them. It hurts to say no and it's sometimes hard to explain why.
The US is choosing the path of aggression instead of the path of civilized behavior. This is a strategy designed by fools.
It is called "game theory". It is a virus that teaches that the only way to achieve a predictable result is to cheat, steal and lie. Because everyone else does.
There are two kinds of people in this world, those who will lean into its principles thinking that (despite its ugly face) there is some shred of real science hidden underneath because of its (apparent) success in helping to model animal behaviors. But if Lassie played by the rules of Game Theory she'd leave Timmy down in the well because it would achieve a predictable result as opposed to the uncertain course of action where she'd have to try save him again, and might fail. If that makes sense to you then congratulations, you're a Game Theorist.
And those like myself who see Game Theory applied by or to anything human as a mental disorder masquerading as a tool. One of our training wheels for disaffected hypocrites.
The folks at Enron imagined themselves Game Theorists but it turned out they were just being assholes.
Conspirational racketeering isn't so hot either because it leads to the formation of larger committees over time to help hide its existence and effect.
I will always strive to be an unpredictable coefficient in any theory. My favorite sport is Drunkard's Walk Philosophy. You never know where you are morally speaking but eventually you find your way home.
Why did NSA infect 50,000 computer networks?
Lack of adult supervision. I really mean that.
Are you referencing the 1920's, where the rich had no limits and they gobbled up everything and the entire economy tanked(1929, great depression, etc), so we put limits on them, taxed them, built infrastructure, and we had a really good run afterward?
I do not think a substantive amount of working capital was raised by placing higher tax burden on the rich (if the Wealth Tax Act of 1935 is what you mean). It skimmed off only income and there was no attempt to go after existing asset holdings such as stocks.
Later another targeted 'tax the rich' effort was to go after Undistributed Corporate earnings, only exempting monies redistributed as wages and dividends. The idea was the veritable Corporation was like unto a bellowing cow unwilling to be milked. Cows leading up to the market crash retained almost half their milk (cash on hand) using for such things as expansion (perceived as positive) and minting tycoons (perceived as negative, the Monopoly Man was originally a hated caricature in cartoons). This massive amount of retained milk led to the explosion of 1929.
Under the tax the Stockholder and the Employee were each to be handed a teat and the government would grab a third. This left only one teat because cows have four teats. I had to look it up. But the tax capped off at 27% so even if you say one-third we're going to need a lot more teats here to get these here ratios correct. The best way would be to abandon the teat standard and assign one hundred 'fiat' teats to each cow so we could talk real percentages. Cows would be required to turn in their teats and would be issued 100 fiat-teats at fair market value. Which leaves us with the problem that Stockholder and Employee each only have two hands. I had to look it up. So we must abandon the hand standard as well to facilitate all this teat grasping. This cow analogy is coming apart at the seams. Oh dear. This happens every time I attempt to discuss economics.
But anyway the Undistributed Profits Tax itself was scaled down and finally repealed amidst fierce opposition because it was argued successfully that it would have a chilling effect on industry through prevention of Good Expansion and Healthy Acquisition.
((( All this occurring in the grand old days of politics when Real Men had the TIME to read what they were deciding on, and especially, the COURAGE to REPEAL undesired legislation. In this modern time laws are assembled by teams of rhesus monkeys snarling at each other as they manipulate and stack colored and shaped objects, each with a phrase binding in some special interest or exception, some objects supplied by lobbyist rats. The result is glued together (voted into law) and when opposition and confusion arises they send in another team of monkeys to 'fix' it bigger still. No one ever tears anything down. )))
Back towards the topic... we had a 'good run' under Roosevelt's New Deal not (in my opinion) because at the time it was honestly believed that getting off the gold standard was the right thing to do and he set out to do it..
Is it? That's a difficult one. The problem is like any designer drug, the first time an economy abandons a precious metal standard there is a one-shot injection of dreamlike optimism that becomes the new reality. At the outset everyone feels empowered because there is new capital available.
I think Ben Bernanke honestly believes that he can reproduce the conditions of the New Deal by injecting and easing. But the Roosevelt drug has worn off and it simply does not work. It worked once because people were exchanging gold for something they thought was of greater value. They weren't but the act of exchange itself is what jump-started everything and created new wealth (as opposed to just more money). Today your average person reacts with complete incomprehension to monetary policy changes. Too many factors and n
Might I suggest one of those whiteboard-and-voiceover videos like the ones produced by RSA Animate? If you can cram a synopsis of your views into a video under five minutes long, I'd be willing to bet you could achieve a much bigger change in public opinion.
Thanks for your kind words, and what a great idea! I love those RSA animates, especially the one on 21st Century Enlightenment which ends with a quote by Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world... indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
I'm not going to deny that nuclear has a tremendous ability to scale up. I know it can!
[...] Oh, are you talking about thorium reactors? I think a lot of your arguments against renewables (too expensive, too much research required, not feasible, blah blah blah) would also apply to this technology. Doubt my opinion? Perhaps you'd like to refer to the report from the Union of Atomic Scientists entitled Thorium: Not a near-term commercial nuclear fuel." You have to admit that at this point commercially viable thorium-generated power is vapor ware.
[...] You no doubt think I'm a knee-jerk partisan relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data.
Well I most certainly do not. You present yourself well and your aversion to nuclear energy and desire to jump into and 'crack' the remaining hurdles to solar is very clear.
There is a tremendous difference between the way the world was burning coal in the previous two centuries and the way it is burned today. Likewise nuclear fission needs a serious 'tune up'. Our light and heavy water reactors extract dismally small amounts of energy from fuel and leave long-term actinides in their wake.
But in my opinion the LFTR designs being proposed are so radically different in terms of efficiency, safety, containment and (with active processing) residual waste that it is a tragedy for me to see people draw straight line comparisons between LFTR and 'present day commercial nuclear power'. If it were not for the nuclear weapons program and its mandates nuclear would mean LFTR already, today.
I do not advocate solar and wind for base load energy ON ANY SCALE (as in, abort!) and I do want to see LFTR developed quickly to commercial deployment. I come to this conclusion on one single criteria only.
SURVIVAL.
With LFTR technology we can achieve a single building that will withstand any weather or seismic conditions (and no, it need not be sited near a large body of water) that will generate gigawatts of power, with years' worth of barely-radioactive thorium seed fuel stored in the closet. With active processing none of the long-lived isotopes will form and the harmful lifespan of this waste (of greatly reduced volume compared with spent solid fuel) is ~300 years. This is a BEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION.
With wind and solar -- even once we develop more efficient heat transfer or photovoltaics and more efficient turbines, there is a certain energy storage problem which I might refer to as vaporware. All the batteries presently in the world might power our grids for ten minutes. But okay, I will grant you as-yet-undeveloped storage battery tech, giant lithium chocolate bars the size of skyscrapers.
All of these solar/wind/storage 'solutions' collectively contain millions of discrete and precision parts spread over a large area that must (by their nature) be completely exposed to the elements. As opposed to a single self-contained building that merely outputs process heat or electricity.
What a logistical nightmare wind and solar are, even when they are working. Imagine trying to light a sports arena with Christmas lights. Only now imagine this on the supply side. It is mad in a way that has nothing to do with the 'ultimate promise' of these energy sources. It is a logistical nightmare. Nay, impossibility.
But okay I'll grant you the (remote) possibility that this will all fall into place within 50 years or so, who knows how many open pit rare earth mines will be opened up to achieve the chemical storage feat. Or hydrological or compressed air 'storage' with its laughable efficiency (how many million acres of solar panels again?) or environmental blights. Let's say it's all good, and it's done. There are now one hundred million discrete parts in our base load energy system that are somehow working in concert (again, as opposed to a few LFTR buildings) We are now 100% solar and wind, day and (one, two) nights. That was hard.
I propose we hire the Mafia to step in and finish the cleanup. On time and under budget.
History repeats itself.
Hepting vs. AT&T
Snowden's revelations are merely more specifics coming to light, this has been fought in court before, recently.
In 2008 Congress amends the FISA act to absolve the telecom companies (granting "retroactive immunity") of liability for VOLUNTARILY HELPING the government conduct illegal warrantless mass surveillance. Remember we are talking about fiber optic taps here to listen to everyone, not forwarding specific data pursuant to a warrant or court order.
Here's the trick: the FISA law was amended two years into the Hepting court case. Why the retroactive immunity clause? Because EFF was WINNING.
Never mind that the scope of the surveillance cited in the case FAR EXCEEDED the conditions of FISA. Never mind that the case was in progress. A circuit judge decided that the FISA law was applicable, and (even more shocking to me) allowed Congressional action to disrupt and destroy an ongoing Judicial due process of law.
Blackmail?
I'm running out of alternative theories.
___
Hepting vs.AT&T (2006-2012, R.I.P.)
"In Hepting v. AT&T, EFF sued the telecommunications giant on behalf of its customers for violating privacy law by collaborating with the NSA in the massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications."
"Evidence in the case included undisputed evidence provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA."
[...] "In July, 2008, after a long and contentious battle in Congress, the government and AT&T were awarded the so-called retroactive immunity from liability under the controversial FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which was enacted in response to our court victories in Hepting."
[...] "In June of 2009, a federal judge dismissed Hepting and dozens of other lawsuits against telecoms. EFF appealed that decision but it was affirmed, and in October, 2012, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case."
Interesting you say volcanic dust could shut down solar. Despite at least two volcanoes shutting down a large part of air travel I have not seen any indication of solar panels being affected
Thanks for listening. We have not yet experienced a Big One in the industrial age.
The most recent global weather phenomenon that has been ascribed to volcanism was "1816, the year without a Summer", triggered by an eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. "In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil."
Another global climate event of even greater magnitude occurred in 535AD which is presumed to have been an eruption of another Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa. David Keys has researched this extensively and has found many historical references to this event, also see the fascinating PBS documentary Catastrophe! available on-line: Part 1, Part 2. From Cassiodorus [Italy, 536AD] "The sun ... seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun's heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany an eclipse prolonged through almost a whole year.
Both events are accompanied by reports of unusual weather besides the dimming, massive crop failure. They should send a shiver through anyone who envisions that the United States might some day rely on solar or wind for base load energy. It's a slate wiper
And those are just garden-variety volcanic eruptions, though severe. Yellowstone has erupted on average every 600,000 years and the last one was 630,000 years ago. A flock of geologist-birds will descend to peck my eyes out if I should whisper "any day now", but at least, a Yellowstone event of some magnitude should be part of anyone's 100-year plan. BBC did a great two hour docudrama depicting possible effects, Supervolcano [2006] along with companion program Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone
And that's not even bringing up the possibility of a significant sized meteor impact, which would be certain to generate a global plume of aerosols. So a bad day for plants is a bad day for solar energy and history has recorded these events as lasting for months and years.
How can they be sure the sun reduction will not lead to an Ice age?
They have looked at how much the reduction is predicted (in the worse case) to be and how much the CO2 increase is predicted to be.
There are so many effectors besides pure chemical CO2 that are emerging as factors. Some of them like Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays effecting cloud formation, after years of deliberate marginalization (see this documentary). And some long-suspected avenues which have not been explored enough (my opinion) such as study of aerosol particulates like carbon black and their effect on climate, which suffered a setback with the tragic loss of the Glory satellite. Just two serious, possibly game changing factors. Until I see more of these angles play out to my own satisfaction -- a period in which they are rationally explored and not just 'rebutted', dismissed or ignored by pure-CO2 ca
As for myself? I would like to see falsifiable predictions.
How moderate and scientific of you to say, well spoken. But that would completely upset the most popular 'canard' (great word) of devastating sea rise that is being sold and re-told. It's the most effective way to terrify small children who are instinctively afraid of being drowned.
The data is there but gets lost in the noise. Sea level rise is 4-8 in/century, no evidence of acceleration but some land subsidence (land height changes) accounting for regional difference.
Now there is a gentleman in the Philippines who is on hunger strike because he is convinced that we -- the carbon emitting 'others' -- have sent them this killer typhoon.
This is our doing. James Hansen (I am so glad he left NASA) was chided by weather forecasting professionals and climate scientists alike for putting out his own view that hurricanes (from Katrina onwards) have this statistically significant blame factor. In our time, right now. This increasingly pissed off NASA because not only was he out on a scientific limb, but his hurricane musings were far out-pacing any news coverage of NASA's other endeavors. Talk about mission creep.
To those seeking carbon taxation and treaties, There is no time even to wait for even short-term falsifiable hypotheses. We must skip directly to the conclusions to achieve maximum panic right now.
Pretty soon, dinosaurs will be pouring out of the hollow earth.
Or cockroaches that start fires by rubbing their cerci together.
As opposed to garden variety man eating cockroaches. All cockroaches are man eaters as conditions permit, but these couldn't wait. Living in the tropics I was occasionally awakened by a large cockroach gnawing, or what ever it is they do, on a toenail. Makes you feel glad to be alive.
"But why can't high-voltage lines be run underground?"
Don't you think someone would have done it by now if it were feasible?
Glad you asked. I'm trying to convince people not only is it feasible, it is high time to get on with it.
Air isn't a very good dielectric and in wet weather it gets even worse, see this list of insulator breakdown voltages. Glass has 40-100 times the dielectric strength of air, so yes, HVDC conduits ARE possible in standard sized trenches.
You have to realize that when most of the country was spanned, suspended cable on tall pylons in their wide right-of-way corridors was the cheapest and fastest way to do it. In many areas the real estate presently used for these, some of which is very valuable, can be reclaimed as it moved below ground.
Here is one company with a design for trench-able electric pipes that could handle 15 gigawatts at 800kv. That's 2.5 times Las Vegas summer peak load. No superconductors or refrigeration, just lots of aluminum. You'll also see a sad note at the bottom, "I have so far found that US-based venture capital investors will not take an interest in the elpipe because it is "too big, too long term."
This "too big, too long term" dismissal is symptom of serious problems. Venture capital investors, some who already have great-grandchildren, are refusing to even approach infrastructure repair and re-build projects in North America. What do they think the world will be like in 50 years if these things are not done?
Another company working on HVDC circuit breaker (check that photo, looks like fun). Also check out Roger W. Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security for some calculations on how much aluminum we're talking about.
Although you'll see a lot of talk about HVDC helping to make wind and solar 'renewables' more practical, I don't think so, because for base load power they are too expensive at any price.
Neither wind nor solar would save us from extinction in the case of a long harsh Winter or a climate disrupting global dust cloud event. On that point alone I believe every penny spent on big wind and big solar is wasted. I want my children to survive.
For the big picture on how I believe HVDC pipelines and reliable scalable base load power is the way to go, see
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Let companies who really care, keep a tally of individual accounts under scrutiny, total transactional records captured for surveillance purposes: a set of standard metrics for the moment and cumulative by month and year.
Let this information be placed into the Canary meta-tag of every web result for everyone, and let web browsers and plugin developers find ways to display this information on the borders of the page.
People could watch the numbers grow over time easily, and could maintain a constant vigilance and awareness of this problem. What you're accomplishing is the same aim as these companies issuing regular bulletins you must fetch and read.
Its inclusion into the very protocol of the Web and placed on the status areas of browsers by default, would send a clear message that we are not amused.
If the government counters that releasing real-time stats on surveillance orders should be censored for reasons of National Security, let that one fly all the way to the Supreme Court.
The rhino would provide valuable partner to achieve wildfire control in forested and urban settings. This species would quickly achieve a comfortable equilibrium with humans, and would be far less invasive than, say, Red Box vending machines.
Fire protection demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ81dcD1N8s
Working with humans: assisting in tree-climbing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNUUKirMfVM
Oklahoma is the only state I've found that commonly has ethanol-free gas available (but good luck finding anything higher than 91 octane).
Yup, and most Okies stay away from ethanol gas in droves. Stations that proclaim "100% gas" are most popular and the chains that cannot avoid it (like Loves) have just put on little stickers that say "we will purchase E10 or regular gas, whichever is cheaper, to pass the savings on to our customers" or some such.
"Can the US be weaned off ethanol?"
What kind of question is that? It's like asking if a fish can be weaned off a bicycle. Sort of missing out on that that whole imposed-on-us, thing. My Dad just scraped molasses out of the carburetor of his Astro Van.
This whole fuel contamination policy thing was cooked up by people who have thirty grand to spill on shiny new things... but mostly the Cash For Clunkers re-tards and their automotive manufacturing cronies who want to get the last of the reliable self-repairable vehicles off the road and put shady tree mechanics out of business. Sure feels like a hostile invasion from here.
Cue the music.
Now you look me with a scorn
Then you eat up all my corn
We gonna chase
Those crazy baldheads
Chase those crazy
Baldheads out of town
~Bob Marley
For great justice.
HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN
All your base load are belong to US
You are on the way to destruction.
What you say??
Make your time.
Every time some company like Google announces funding for some Tempest or Solaris farm somewhere I wince. It's not the money, it's the very idea of the thing. The Internet is 24/7, and they're supposed to be the smartest guys & gals in the room. How can they get behind and forge ahead on something that won't even solve their own problems?
How did this decades-long solar slash wind fixation even begin?? Why don't at least half the folks out there pause and say, "wait a minute... what are we trying to accomplish?" I'm developing an honest resentment to those so-called 'green' things, and believe me it's not comfortable or fun. Truth is, wind and solar smell bad.
They smell like grid-down Darwin In Action DEATH. If I can easily imagine some awful Event that would render all solar and wind technology useless overnight, for a week or longer... who else can? Take your pick: Dust from a volcanic event or asteroid impact, or a Winter storm with Arctic air meeting warm moist air from the South that sweeps diagonally across the continent with freezing rain, leaving inches of ice accumulation, road and rail impassible.
Or a Little Ice Age. We are more vulnerable to harsh Winter conditions than we were in 1650-1700. Electricity powers everything. Some scientists are baffledby the sun's behavior lately, but Professor Lockwood and the Washington Post aren't: Sun activity is in free fall, but you shouldn’t expect a new little ice age. I did a triple-facepalm when atmospheric physicist Joanna Haigh said, "Even under the most optimistic scenario [of minimal global warming and a deep solar minimum] the solar cooling would only just offset greenhouse gas warming. So no ice age.” Just like that. Human carbon emissions will offset a global weather phenomenon that lasted some 70-300 years. What makes her so sure?
Wind and Solar for grid energy are Rube Goldberg engineering disasters. So many precision cast moving parts out there in the elements, blades that rely on brakes and oil-filled transmission boxes. Everything subject to freeze and fail sooner than intended, and it's all in faraway places with branch feeders running to it at great expense, so it can solve your energy problems completely. Or maybe 20%. Some day. Some times. Not as much as expected. After the first calamity strikes, not at all.
Power plants are strong buildings with machinery inside built to withstand the worst of the elements. The best of these are completely self-contained, generate gigawatts of power and can stock months of fuel. Three guesses.
Solar and Wind grid energy farms are spacious gardens of delicate -- and ultimately useless -- garbage that never would have and will not ensure our survival, built at great expense in an atmosphere of dreamlike foolishness that has got to stop this minute.
My children deserve better. This is madness, people! Ape-shit madness! When discussing base load grid power, especially with aging infrastructure and an uncertain economic outlook... these sources should have been laughed out of the room. Google deserves better, as do we. This is an existential threat. Their money at this point would be better spent on T-shirts for natural gas producers and coal miners.
Or just perhaps... a commitment to fast-track thorium, a national effort on the same scale that put men on the moon. So we can crack this energy thing for the next thousand years, and go to the moon again.
And let's send women to the moon. It's their turn.
Some Google Talks. They should listen.
That should be "we have an EARLY 20th-century energy grid".
It was friggin' amazing when it was built, a time when few could even envision multi-gigawatt cities such as Las Vegas.
It all began with the dramatic and brutal the battle of the currents. Tesla/Westinghouse AC was the right choice for small scale and the subscriber level, enabling the use of transformers to step voltage. The self-synchronizing 60 cycle grid grew, and in the age of miracles (practically) no one objected to corridors of uninsulated cable suspended between power plants, which grew to become the mighty pylons of today. Unlike the trans-continental railroad however, Eastern and Western grids cannot meet without a DC interface. At 60 cycles there is too much span across them to achieve stable synchronization.
Yet Edison's DC is needed today -- for the long haul, to re-configure the grid for greater current capacity and efficiency, better bridge existing grids allow massive direct energy transfer coast to coast. Burying these lines brings protection from natural disaster such as cataclysmic ice storms, Yellowstone or what ever. We'll also be able to reclaim much of the real estate presently allocated to these corridors.
[Faulkner, 2005] "There are different trade-offs for AC versus DC power transmission. For example, voltage can only be taken up to about 500,000 volts (500 kV) for an overhead AC power line because beyond that, power dissipation through dielectric loss becomes severe. Voltage for DC overhead power lines can be taken up to double the maximum AC voltage, to about 1000 kV (one million volts from ground potential; 2 million volts between the conductors); beyond that, power dissipation through corona discharge becomes severe. Underground DC power lines can use even higher voltage, and can be quite large; the main factors limiting size and design details are the need to insulate the conductor and to dissipate heat. Wire diameter is limited for AC transmission lines, whether overhead or buried, due to the âoeskin effectâ that prevents an AC current from penetrating to the center of a large wire, whereas a DC line can be arbitrarily thick. For these and other reasons, underground high capacity power lines are necessarily DC.
The simplest way electric power could be sent coast to coast is to build power lines based on conductors with much lower electrical resistance than any long distance power lines in service today. These âoeelectric pipelinesâ can be either conventional conductor or superconductor-based, in principle. The superconductor approach to electric pipelines has gotten some press and research interest, but is not technically ready to deploy yet. There is also a more pedestrian way to decrease the electrical resistance of a power transmission line: use more conductor..."
Faulkner goes on to describe several electric pipeline projects with projected cost.
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My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
YOU ARE STANDING on a narrow ledge facing a smooth cliff. It's a long way down. You slide your left foot along the ledge and set your weight onto it.
But your heel rocks ever so slightly. There was a tiny ridge next to it, a feature not visible to the eye, and your heel has slipped off of it. The angle of your foot has changed in such a way that if you stood upright you'd be leaning away from the cliff.
Thoughts of the abyss are ever present and a dull wordless roar of panic is rising -- but your mind turns away from the roar and you allow yourself to become analytical. A surging notion flows towards your heel which needs to stretch and move (which way?? Is this the right way??) and it is done.
A moment of tenseness as the heel has settled and stiffened into its new angle. Your thoughts brush past the leg which trembles as if its muscles are being instructed to move also (no! The heel is enough!), eye and inner ear are waiting for confirmation that you are all right. The world is silent and still.
You are waiting for the simple and instinctive confirmation of balance. In a moment you will sense it, your mind will roll completely over in relief and grasp lofty topics, how far to go, is that a bird's nest, time to glance at the view.
But not at this moment.
You are still waiting for balance.
What if that moment does not arrive?
Woke up. Got out of bed. We arrive every day whether or not we travel. Sleep is nature's way of restoring and preserving mental balance. It is a journey of chemically induced stupor as mental pathways of context valley are visited and revisited, erosion becomes memory becomes self. Things that interest us, worry us, concern us or beg us to action arise during sleep; they may appear as vividly as if awake or deeply veiled in symbolism. Even boredom and a yearning for excitement has its turn as the sleeping mind free-associates in ways that may seem fantastic or absurd, they move in eccentric yet stable orbits bound by the gravitational center of self. There are many ways we recover balance during sleep that are too easily dismissed by the waking mind. You may be impulsive and decisive while awake, come to some reluctant but firm conclusion. If you have glossed over something important, unpleasant, it will return to you while asleep. Like the reality of the cliff, trapped within sleep there is no way to avoid it. So in sleep we face our fears and live through them to the end. Be it resolve to action, acceptance or curiosity in new directions -- sleep is necessary to meld impulsive actions into convictions.
Is America getting enough sleep?
Do we completely awaken?
Dragged a comb across my head. A greasy comb dipped in Wild Root Cream Oil. Muscle cars and cheap oil, Route 66, returned veterans, Crusader Rabbit, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Engelbert Humperdinck, the Stones, Iron Butterfly. Culture an ever changing whirlwind spanning yesterday and tomorrow; but the day after tomorrow is strange to those born last week. A great many of us carry memories of times so different from those of younger generations, an incredible divide has formed. Opinions may differ but stories matter also, and it is through stories we communicate. Despite the great many options available to connect with one another there is scarcely time these days for storytelling and story-listening. The young seek their fortunes and seek places, returning only for shared meals and brief small-talk. As the learning process has become cyclical and seasonal so has our interaction with those younger and older: as necessary, when necessary. Many today exist in a between-time where survival is of great importance and the here and now is a lonely place to be, distanced from family and friends of our youth. Our eldest vaguely recall a time when more stars were visible and there was leisure in the evening hours for big-talk. Some day they,
I see unwelcome trends.
Those who advocate taking energy storage down to the building or subscriber level are living in a dream. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful dream! But this €20,000 unit cost will not magically come into existence. Those who envision lithium or (eventually it comes down to) lead acid batteries to the point where their effect is even detectable at grid scales are proposing an environmental nightmare in the manufacture and mass deployment of such things. Which thankfully will not come to pass because the investment capital is not there.
I go with solutions that are massive, central, run by the same people who (reliably) supply your electricity, and do not rely on evil large multipliers of objects constructed from rare earth elements or poisonous heavy metals.
I'm talking about something simple and inherently non-toxic, stored kinetic energy and rotation of heavy balanced cylinders in a near-vacuum. I vote fewer that are really big rather than many. Hoover Dam tech. Despite Beacon's bankruptcy in 2011 there are players who hope to salvage the concept using gimbals for stabilization.
I like the idea of kinetic energy storage solutions because if they were massive, centrally located and well constructed, the components would be mechanical parts that might have a smaller replacement cost than an equivalent amount of battery technology, whose chemical composition changes with age. It also fits well with my assertion that we should convert our long haul energy corridors (and generation facilities along those corridors) to native HVDC for a true inter-connected continental (and ultimately global) grid.
___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Activate the material by irradiating it with neutrons and turn it into very short-lived isotopes which then decay into stable ones and release heat.
I'd leave it to someone familiar with fusors and LFTR to say whether the neutron flux would be sufficient to sustain a 'sub critical LFTR' ... but Stuart Henderson delivers a fascinating lecture on Thorium Energy from Accelerator Driven Reactors at TEAC4 in 2012. He is envisioning a passive reactor that is sub-critical when the beam is off, as you have suggested. He says it is essentially an 'energy amplifier'.
Also of note, David LeBlanc of Terrestrial Energy has a vision of Denatured Molten Salt Reactors he shared at TEC5, giving some compelling reasons why single fluid designs offer improved proliferation resistance for small reactors. One of his designs is intended to remain 'sealed' for ~30 years and defer the processing of transuranics, while ensuring its content remains a cocktail of isotopes that would be useless to weapon makers.
Accelerator driven thorium is an interesting idea. I sense a bit of good-natured 'WTF factor' response among those pursuing fissile/fertile Thorium designs. I am sure that they envision their reactor designs may some day become the nuclear reactor equivalent of the modern flush toilet -- a device so simple and elegant that despite cosmetics its form and function would change little over the years.
Using an accelerator to supply neutrons to start a thorium breeding cycle might seem silly when a pinch of uranium could do the trick.
Using an accelerator to keep a thorium reactor going might seem like a waste of (potential) energy for the effort spent designing such things, when keeping a critical breeding concentration of thorium in a properly designed system could do the trick.
Kirk Sorenson is frequently asked about proliferation concerns. He deals with the subject several points in Thorium Remix 2011 and his style has at times encouraged detractors of nuclear energy to believe that he (and other thorium advocates) are casually dismissing proliferation risk.
I see the same things they are seeing, and what I perceive is more of a shrug than a dismissal. To understand the nuance of that you have to see things from their point of view. They are trying to generate heat and electricity.
The flat-fact is that not only is uranium mined and processed to high enrichment world-wide... and produced in water reactors... there are enough ready-made nuclear weapons out there, both known and unaccounted-for (Greetz Israel) that at the current yearly rate of deployment (none) they will last forever.
Wrong hands you say? Only a matter of time. Weaponized uranium will surface eventually just as weaponized anthrax did.
Therefore try to put yourself in the shoes of a reactor designer who is on the brink of solving the world's energy problems for the foreseeable future. This is heady stuff. Not only would the problem be 'solved', it could have effects far beyond even the utopian staples like electric cars and bootstrapping third-world economies. All this could start to happen as soon as we pick a winner and decide that the approach is acceptably safe.
(Looking around) guys and gals... could it be that as the days tick by, our failure to reach consensus and express resolve in solving the problem is unacceptably dangerous?
I do. And I'm not alone. I believe Nuclear energy is just fire, the finest and most noble thing we have yet tamed. If we turn away from it at this point -- in a world of 7 billion people -- it would be a disaster. Taking into consideration who we are today and what we would become as the energy begins to run out. I do not wish my children or their children to experience tha
An electricity grid needs either some big stable supplies or a lot of diversity and over provisioning to be able to keep up with demand spikes
The US was on a steady path leading to a nuclear grid until 1977, when Carter declared a moratorium on spent fuel processing. This caused more concern than alarm in the nuclear power industry, whose plants all had pools for temporary storage. Everyone thought it would be ironed out shortly, the government would step in to manage a secure facility to recycle plutonium and store long term waste. Then the China Syndrome [movie,1979], Three Mile Island [incident,1979] occured 12 days apart and everything came to a halt.
The only notable grid building that has occurred since then haas been the steady accumulation of coal-fired power plants over the years, a slight increase in nuclear, and only recently a shift to natural gas. That's it. There's your electrical grid.
Everything else has been incorrect projections and wasted money. Discussion of coal and natural gas power generation a topic? Nope, actually there has been twenty years of hype on solarand
wind, alternatives that are regiional at best, and upon any climate disruption that would generate cloud cover or disrupt wind patterns (no matter what the storage technology) would be a slate-wiper. Solar and Wind have presumed the building of branch feeders, there never was money for that. T. Boone Pickens lost his shirt on wind or let us say, provided a cautionary tale for other billionaires.
Solar subsidies will not just dry up... they will disappear overnight as the true crisis begins. Be it economic implosion or reigning in of government spending, the correction will be huge and sudden.
So now we are riding the crest of a natural gas glut which may last 30 years. I am hesitant to drop the 'hundreds' of years figure because it would be achieved with escalating difficulty and they wish to mass export it out of the country today. After that things looks pretty bleak. More coal??
That is why folks like me seem kind of desperately agitated on these forums at times. We're not adverse to personal self-sufficiency or conservation, we just see a terrible crisis ahead.
Part of the reason for the agitation in these discussions is that we are being presented with a steady stream well-meant suggestions for personally navigating the crisis, as if a little money ahead and a bit of ingenuity can mitigate the risk. And we do sense risk and danger.
That is why when we discuss the state of the grid we tend to sweep wind and solar off the table. Too aggressively, sure -- it is an aspect of our sense of dread, NOT an insensitivity to the usefulness and and cleverness of those sources.
We feel pressed on the matter. We are thinking of a long harsh Winter, just ONE country-wide ice storm which is possible, a serious further economic downturn, and the prospect of going to war over oil (again) or the dollar losing its reserve strength (happening!). All of these things, along with a hypothetical ~30 year glut of natural gas means there is perhaps still time to save the grid (and our way of life) if we get serious about fission and LFTR now, urgently.
Otherwise we are heading for THIS: a true blackout American Blackout. Never mind the unlikely cyberattack scenario, I do not even believe a Carrington Even EMP would take out that many points at once... and their time frame is a little extreme, "Day 10" events might occur at Week 10...
Thorium LFTRs would not in themselves save us if our lo
You know, I'd go with "citation needed", but how about I just bust this myth right here and now.
Put up yer dukes, them's debatin' words!
Thorium reactors require uranium
A Two fluid LFTR requires a small amount of fissile to bootstrap a sustaining thorium reaction. It is mixed into the salt .
They are not any safer than conventional reactors on this basis.
Wrong. Your statement merely indicates that you have a zero-tolerance attitude towards the use of uranium, not that you have insight into LFTR. You are comparing a few pounds of fissile to seed a one-time LFTR startup with tons of uranium a light-water reactor consumes (actually 99.5% wasted) in a year.
A shorter explanation of just how much of a pipe dream thorium reactors are is here
A longer and more intellectually satisfying explanation of the LFTR concept is can be found here
along with the caveat that dropping a bomb on one would be a very messy affair.
...with effects and hazards confined to the radius of the blast itself, where the radioactive salts will go sub-critical and just sit there, not reacting with water or air until they can be gathered, contained and eventually recycled. Which would be soon. That is a best possible solution. But really, how does this scenario compare to anything else on the scales of energy production today?
How would you compare a bombed LFTR to the same bomb setting alight an entire oil depot, a pipeline, massive piles of coal, or a seam of coal underground? Or taking out the LNG tanks that could level the port of Houston? Or going straight to for the source, the 1991 fires of Kuwait? Attitudes are choices after all and if you're on Slashdot, chances are you've chosen civilization. Seems to me that LFTR would offer a terrorist a poor bang for the buck. It would be merely taken out of service, generate lots of overtime until it's cleaned up. No one over the ridge need evacuate.
To obtain gigawatts of carbon-neutral electricity that could go on for thousands of years, cheaply, how could you possibly beat that?
The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.
This passage mystifies me most of all. The 'frozen' plug is comprised of the same salts as the rest of the loop. It is being actively kept 'just' cool enough by a refrigeration unit. Extreme runaway heat from too much fissile would melt it quickly, as would shut-down of the refrigeration unit. There are no real 'moving parts' here to jam or be subject to corrosion.
Perhaps by 'impurities' you are imagining some sort of solid crust that might build up on the plug itself. I don't know the chemistry well enough to answer that. But existence of the plug does not preclude other ways of manually draining the loop. Anyway it just sounds like a case for good engineering and vigilance.
Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other.
As any other what? Now you are taking a zero-tolerance position for any technology that relies on any sort of maintenance at all. It is an absurd place to stand, and places you among those who honestly believe that when unexpected hazards present themselves, people will run like terrified rabbits into the forest to hide.
History does not support that idea. There are smart and brave people attending gigawatt reactors, and you cannot solve the world's energy problems with a Play-Doh Fun Factory.
And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.
That's just a nope. You're jousting us with windmills.
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
Okay say wind and solar $10k either way. You sound like someone who might have $10k in the bank. I say that gently with the utmost respect. Congratulations!
But you have to realize that in order to truly declare that these things have the 'capability', everyone must somehow ante-up the amount required, which they cannot... so your ability to pay will naturally result in the subsidizing of your neighbor's 'share'. Somehow.
There is a great value to be self-sufficient, but real grid solutions must be on the scale of whole {cities,states,countries,continents}. I sympathize with the sell-back fees, that whole "sell power back" idea was conceived with good intentions and sold long before the technical and liability issues were settled.
Even as a home owner on the road to complete energy self-sufficiency, your fate is bound with that of those around you. People who live hand to mouth in crackerbox apartments and trailer parks, your on-grid neighbors, and the vast majority of people who consider the electricity problem solved when (and if) they can afford to pay the bill. I barely can and I work for the city.
What this means is that everyone -- including yourself and myself, must come together to decide what is the best way to power the grid to resolve this crisis. We must do it in such a way that it will benefit everyone and bring the billed cost-per-KwH down substantially.
Reducing the cost of living is the same as creating wealth, in fact it is the best and only sustainable way to create wealth.
The grid must become the priority, be healed first. Otherwise those individuals who achieve self-sufficiency would become islands in the darkness as the grid fails and everyone else will naturally be drawn to the light. That would be a dangerous thing.
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My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate