The Russians had weakened the Germans long before US landed any troops. The war was shortened, but Germany was doomed to loose when their last offensive in 1943 failed.
You're making no sense. Are we talking WWI or WWII? If we're talking WWI, then Russia actually lost the war. If we're talking WWII (which I must assume from the date), then the only thing that weakened Germany was Hitler's insistence on continuing to advance through Russia. He had equipped his troops poorly for such a long assault and ended up wasting a tremendous number of resources. All of which has nothing to do with the fact that Britian, the U.S., and Russia were allied against Germany.
The Brits had been doing a damn fine job of fighting the war, but they didn't have enough resources to mount a true offensive until the US came onboard. Without the Yankee support, the Brits would have continued fighting a defensive war. The Germans could have simply continued to pound Britain and Russia while they regrouped and built more powerful weapons. Instead, the US bombers and air support helped ensure that the German infrastructure was destroyed.
How to actually do it reliably? (possible in theory, how practical is it)
Put a warhead on the end of a Pegasus booster. Pegasus is what put the current GPS network in the sky, and it would be very effective at bringing it back down. In fact, the earliest tests used the booster as a missile to destroy dead satellites.
This act would de facto declaration of war; quite different from just switching of access to someone, which is barely an extended middle finger.
I'm thinking that an existing war would be the primary reason why the US would do something like this.
It's just this fucking arrogance that makes the US the most hated country of all.
Many may think that Americans are arrogant, but when it comes to the military situation, it's hard to disagree with over a dozen aircraft carriers (most nuclear), a few dozen subs, some of the best equipped ground troops in the world, a massive arsenal of Hydrogen Bombs and Neutron Bombs, hundreds of support and supply vessels, hundreds of tanks that can outrun, outgun, and outlast anything else on the ground, air support that can fire DU rounds that can blow up even the most hardened installation, a mothballed but ready fleet of battleships, propositioned weapons around the world, heavy lifting planes and boats to move weapons anywhere in the world, etc., etc., etc.
The US is NOT the country you want to mess with. And thankfully the US is usually not the country that wants to mess with anyone else. Even though the conditions are somewhat different from WWI & WWII, you can be sure that the US would be the one who would grudgingly clean up other people's military mess.
Keep in mind that WWI was over within a year of the US's entry to the war. And that was prior to our buildup of powerful sea, air, and land weapons.
WWII might have gone very different for Europe had the Japanese not sparked the public into action. Yamamoto knew damn well that American ingenuity would eventually overcome the rigid social structure of the Japanese. He gave Japan about 6 months before the US war machine would become unstoppable. He was right. The US lost battle after battle for about 6 months, where after things started going very badly for Japan.
On the European front, the US poured massive brainpower and engineering into development of RADAR and air superiority. The Brits invented the RADAR, and had excellent fighter planes. But they took RADAR to the US to make it a viable war weapon, and the US was able to add heavy bombers, and highly survivable fighter planes (Thunderbolt anyone?).
The Germans had the technological advantage, but their technology lacked practicality. Jet fighters, Rocket planes, V-1 and V-2 flying bombs, etc. all found that their technological advantage was also their weakness. For example, the fighter pilots called the rocket planes "Blow Jobs" because they'd go by so fast that they really had no time to make much of an attack run. The fighters and bombers would stay out of their way until they ran out of fuel, and then they would destroy them.
Hate the US all you want. But unless the EU gets in gear and starts building up a REAL military, it will be the US who saves your ass.
An EU-US war is madness plain and simple. It's not going to happen.
I didn't say it was going to. I said that the EU relies heavily on the US for protection. Many EU nations are happily decreasing their military standing instead of being properly prepared for conflicts. Sweden is a perfect example of this. They've downright gutted their military!
The Russians storming west is more likely than (1), which isn't saying much. The Russian conventional army is really not what it used to be, after years of underfunding.
The Russian military was never much of anything. Russia obtained its troops by drafting them as soon as they hit 18. (Every male in Russian society has to serve in the military for at least one term.) Here they were offered the reward of becoming an officer if they had talent. Becoming an officer meant becoming a member of the Communist party. Becoming a Communist meant that you received a spacious apartment, money, wonderful foods, and other things that the rest of the population didn't have.
You could also become a member of the party by showing ability in areas of science, engineering, and sports. Failure to become a Communist member doomed you to never live anything more than the life of a poor man.
The only reason why Russia is not a threat is that they need the rest of the world (especially the US) to help them out of their collapsed economy. Once that is fixed, there's a very real chance that another power hungry maniac could misuse Russia's arsenal.
is just nuts. China decides to invade the EU for extra space? Picking out just about the only place on the planet more crowded than China itself?
Actually, I said that China would most likely pick a fight with the US.
If I was a European military planner I'd be worried about the dodgy nations on the doorstep, rather than the three other big players. Belarus, for instance, is ruled by a complete and utter fruitcake dictator. And as we expand we'll have more neighbours like that - if Turkey joins up we'll have Iraq right on the EU frontier. That's the sort of thing we'll need to be thinking about.
True. But many of them will argue that their current military forces are sufficient to deal with such "primitive" militaries. Too bad they have no experience with Guerilla warfare...
And as the expanding EU bumps up against such difficulties, we may need to conduct our own military operations, probably without American support - and sometimes, I would imagine, with outright opposition from Washington. That's why we need our own GPS-equivalent. It would be, at the very least, a diplomatic embarrassment to launch a war of which America disapproved, while relying on America's satellites to guide our missiles;-)
Indeed. It would be wise for the EU to develop their military. But as I stated before, many EU countries are disarming instead. This situation only increases the EU's dependence on US aid to defend itself against attackers.
The truly messed up part is that many European nations (*cough*Sweden*cough*) would need to rely on the US military in the case of a major assault. The EU has troops and weapon systems, but it's doubtful they would be sufficient to defend against a major superpower. While many Europeans are upset over Iraq, the US is unlikely to be the aggressor in any major European conflict. That leaves two other possibilities:
1. Someone more intelligent than Putin takes over Russia and uses Putin's communist-like infrastructure to once again impose a military state. 2. China decides that they have the most people in the world and that someone else should give up some land to support them.
While the second is more likely, either one would spell defeat for the European Union. Only the US currently has the necessary military power to stop another superpower. On the upside, China might be more inclined to take on the US first since we have more undeveloped land. It wouldn't be much of a war though. We'd fight until the Chinese start lobbing nukes. Once that happens, China can kiss their population goodbye when a few neutron bombs fall.
The whole point of getting the fuel from the ocean is to make it cheaper. By making the fuel cheaper, it becomes more cost effective to simply make the rocket a little bigger. The interesting part about the aforementioned Sea Dragon project was that the study showed that rockets are pretty much a fixed cost. The bigger you make them, the cheaper they get. That's why the idea behind the Sea Dragon was to build something the size of our largest ocean going vessels in a shipyard, then drag it out to sea where it could be fueled by a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.
The reason why NASA didn't pursue the project was because the government no longer wanted big rockets. All they wanted was a token project that displayed the fact that the U.S. was still the leader in space technology. Beyond that, Nixon's administration wanted NASA dead. Thus NASA had to make a hurculean effort to build a craft that "sort of" met all the stupid requirements that were thrown at it. The end result was technologically impressive (kudos to the engineers!), but was never going to be cost effective.
You believe the myths that say public (read: government) ventures are more efficient or work better than private?
No, I'm saying that private ventures know "good enough" when they see it. If it costs your private company an extra $50 mil to improve fuel efficiency by 3%, why do it? Just build a bigger *$%^ing rocket!
Usually you're talking only a few miles off shore. That way, the rocket can launch toward the rest of the ocean (making for plentiful abort options) and any rockets that are destroyed don't land on people's heads. That's pretty much the same reason why NASA launches from Florida. Although I've never quite understood why they don't manufacture fuel on site. Probably has something to do with special additives and/or purity levels that improve the fuel combustion. A private venture might be slightly less concerned with the same levels of fuel efficiency.
...are the actual space ships. I'm definitely looking forward to many of the X-Prize contenders, but so far they're only building simple rockets to go up and down. It's a great in-between stage, but I'm looking forward to the day when orbital rockets will be built.
The one caveat to that is that a manned orbital rocket would probably be launched from the ocean rather than land. The reason for that is that water makes a plentiful rocket fuel. Tote along a reactor (nuclear is preferable, but diesel will do), convert sea water to LHOx, and launch your rocket. (This was the premise behind the Sea Dragon craft.) While a nuclear generator would probably be out of the range of a private company, using a diesel and/or solar reactor to make the fuel could cut the costs of the launch considerably.
Ah, I see. As long as the Amish don't *use* modern technology, they're fine with it. Their primary concern is the temptations brought about by such technology. They figure that by doing everything the hard way, they won't be tempted.
BTW, I checked a map. They must be getting some serious competition from Westby cheese. IMNHO, Westby produces the absolute BEST cheese curds anywhere. I'd always grab a freshly made bag of them every time I was up in Westby for business. (I used to work for a livestock genetics company up there. You can probably guess which one.)
So, you need the neutron flux. It is only between the neutron source (plasma) and the lithium blanket.
I think it depends on the reactor design. In any case, the neutron flux can still make a lot of stuff radioactive. It isn't magically clean just because it's fusion.
Furthermore, Chernobyl was not caused by a boiler or whatever.
The boiler wasn't the core of the problem, but it was responsible for spreading the materials. When you have a lot of water under pressure, it can violently explode if heat is dumped into too fast. This was what happened in the case of Chernobyl. Something like a Pebble Bed reactor will simply evac its gasses if the pressure gets too high. Once your moderator is evacuated, the reaction stops.
There's a new one. Are you sure they're actually Amish? The German Baptists seem to be a lot like Amish, but they're a bit more open to modern technology. And they tend to live in the same areas as the Amish.
But my point is that it isn't dangerous if it lasts 10,000 (or even 1,000) years. The radioactivity from such substances is so low that it doesn't add much of anything to the existing background radiation. You can literally count minutes to hours between each radio-particle release.
Don't believe the media FUD. The scary stuff lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a hundred years. The media intentionally confuses this stuff with the thousands of years stuff so that you'll freak out and make more news about how you don't want that "thousands of years" of stuff in your backyard.
Don't tell me that you understand thermal reactor designs but you're unaware of the Pebble Bed Reactor? It's currently considered one of the safest reactor designs ever considered. It doesn't (generally) allow for a reactor as powerful as some of the larger ones already in existence, but you can run multiple reactors in parallel, thus allowing for greater redundancy on your power grid.
Put hydroelectric dams on it and you have a powerful stable, and cool looking powersource.
Then you can put a bunch of water pumps around the base and supply your city's basic needs....combined with a source of nuclear fusion, it makes the perfect way to generate power for the robots!
Do yourself a favor sometime and figure out how many watts of power the sun casts per square meter of land on a hot day. You'll probably find that it's not much more than 20-30 watts of power. With that in mind, you might want to calculate how many ACRES of solar panels you'd need to produce the same multi-megawatt power generation of a coal or nuclear plant.
50-100 years is way better than tens of thousands of years, as with fission waste.
Did you ever consider that the stuff that lasts thousands of years isn't very radioactive? You still have a conservation of mass and energy issue. If it lasts 10 seconds, it's radioactive enough to kill you were you stand. If it lasts 10,000 years, then it's probably not much more radioactive than the potassium in your bones.
and the only radio activity is the Neutron bombarded walls of the chamber which dissipate quickly enough to not be a big problem
What do you think happens to the Neutron bombarded materials? (Hint: They can become radioactive.) Fusion produces a tremendously strong neutron flux. So strong, that very few materials survive being near the process. Obviously, your choice in containment materials can make all the difference in HOW radioactive we're talking.
Personally, I don't think we'll quite get the hang of fusion inside Earth's gravity well. Once in space, we can allow the Fusion to bleed off its neutron flux like the Sun does. Thus it might be very useful for space-based power generation and propulsion. But here on Earth, fission is a much more viable energy source. Our biggest problem is that most of the reactor designs are from the 50's and 60's, when we were just starting to understand nuclear power. With hindsight firmly in place, plus ~500 commercial reactors, a hundred or so military reactors, and a few hundred research reactors currently in service, we have the knowledge and technology to create very safe reactor designs. Hell, just removing the 19th century boiler design out of the equation makes something like Chernobyl impossible.
The real problem right now is government fear over terrorism. The U.S. government forces plants to keep potentially useful materials sitting in pools of water or buried in the ground instead of being used in commercial ventures. Some of that stuff can be reprocessed into nuclear fuel, and some of it has uses in medical, electronic, and aerospace fields. None of it is useful to "terrorists" until it's reprocessed into fissionable fuel. (Don't get me started on the uselessness of a dirty bomb.)
So place the solar panels on the garage instead of the car
Actually, I was more concerned with parking garages than home garages. The majority of city cars spend a lot of time in the deep, dark bowels of these things.
You can have more surface area, and you won't have the dent in the aerodynamic and weight efficiency with having all those solar panels on a car.
If the panels are built into the frame, it's not a big deal. Having a black top instead of (insert car color here) might put a dent in its style, but it shouldn't bother its aerodynamics or weight any.
Even worse, new research into radio communications suggests that other civilizations may not be putting out radio transmissions that we can receive. For example, Ultra Wide Band transmissions look to us like a burst of static, while Quantum Entanglement allows for a message to be communicated without the use of electromagnetic radiation.
Assuming that there is another civilization out there (a long shot itself) and that they developed along similar lines as ourselves (an even longer shot), then there would only be a window of about 100-200 years to capture any radio signals they might have sent.
Re:No...it's not the "holy grail"
on
Solar Cells Get Boost
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But energy generation crosses into energy storage. His point was that you could use a hydrogen fuel cell as a way of collecting and storing solar energy while your car is not in use. Most people only drive a few hours per day. The rest of the day their car sits.
Now there simply isn't enough energy in sunlight to power a car with solar panels. (If there was, we'd all be crispy critters.) But if you can store that energy up over a period of time, you can make your car much more efficient, perhaps even independent of fueling stations.
It's a nice thought anyway. Until you realize that a large portion of the cars get stored in garages.:-/
When WebVan was around, they were *extremely* popular. So popular, that everyone would wave at the delivery guy as he drove by. I myself was an extremely happy customer as it saved me from having to carry a lot of groceries home. (I didn't have a car at the time.)
I think that WebVan's problem had less to do with a poor business model, and everything to do with scaling the business way too fast. They burned through a tremendous amount of cash every time they entered a new market. As a result, they were left with very little operating funds. They always figured that they'd be able to get more funding. Unfortunately, you can always count on VC investors to go to extremes. They over funded during the boom, and they simply wouldn't fund at all during the bust.
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The Russians had weakened the Germans long before US landed any troops. The war was shortened, but Germany was doomed to loose when their last offensive in 1943 failed.
You're making no sense. Are we talking WWI or WWII? If we're talking WWI, then Russia actually lost the war. If we're talking WWII (which I must assume from the date), then the only thing that weakened Germany was Hitler's insistence on continuing to advance through Russia. He had equipped his troops poorly for such a long assault and ended up wasting a tremendous number of resources. All of which has nothing to do with the fact that Britian, the U.S., and Russia were allied against Germany.
The Brits had been doing a damn fine job of fighting the war, but they didn't have enough resources to mount a true offensive until the US came onboard. Without the Yankee support, the Brits would have continued fighting a defensive war. The Germans could have simply continued to pound Britain and Russia while they regrouped and built more powerful weapons. Instead, the US bombers and air support helped ensure that the German infrastructure was destroyed.
How to actually do it reliably? (possible in theory, how practical is it)
Put a warhead on the end of a Pegasus booster. Pegasus is what put the current GPS network in the sky, and it would be very effective at bringing it back down. In fact, the earliest tests used the booster as a missile to destroy dead satellites.
This act would de facto declaration of war; quite different from just switching of access to someone, which is barely an extended middle finger.
I'm thinking that an existing war would be the primary reason why the US would do something like this.
It's just this fucking arrogance that makes the US the most hated country of all.
Many may think that Americans are arrogant, but when it comes to the military situation, it's hard to disagree with over a dozen aircraft carriers (most nuclear), a few dozen subs, some of the best equipped ground troops in the world, a massive arsenal of Hydrogen Bombs and Neutron Bombs, hundreds of support and supply vessels, hundreds of tanks that can outrun, outgun, and outlast anything else on the ground, air support that can fire DU rounds that can blow up even the most hardened installation, a mothballed but ready fleet of battleships, propositioned weapons around the world, heavy lifting planes and boats to move weapons anywhere in the world, etc., etc., etc.
The US is NOT the country you want to mess with. And thankfully the US is usually not the country that wants to mess with anyone else. Even though the conditions are somewhat different from WWI & WWII, you can be sure that the US would be the one who would grudgingly clean up other people's military mess.
Keep in mind that WWI was over within a year of the US's entry to the war. And that was prior to our buildup of powerful sea, air, and land weapons.
WWII might have gone very different for Europe had the Japanese not sparked the public into action. Yamamoto knew damn well that American ingenuity would eventually overcome the rigid social structure of the Japanese. He gave Japan about 6 months before the US war machine would become unstoppable. He was right. The US lost battle after battle for about 6 months, where after things started going very badly for Japan.
On the European front, the US poured massive brainpower and engineering into development of RADAR and air superiority. The Brits invented the RADAR, and had excellent fighter planes. But they took RADAR to the US to make it a viable war weapon, and the US was able to add heavy bombers, and highly survivable fighter planes (Thunderbolt anyone?).
The Germans had the technological advantage, but their technology lacked practicality. Jet fighters, Rocket planes, V-1 and V-2 flying bombs, etc. all found that their technological advantage was also their weakness. For example, the fighter pilots called the rocket planes "Blow Jobs" because they'd go by so fast that they really had no time to make much of an attack run. The fighters and bombers would stay out of their way until they ran out of fuel, and then they would destroy them.
Hate the US all you want. But unless the EU gets in gear and starts building up a REAL military, it will be the US who saves your ass.
An EU-US war is madness plain and simple. It's not going to happen.
;-)
I didn't say it was going to. I said that the EU relies heavily on the US for protection. Many EU nations are happily decreasing their military standing instead of being properly prepared for conflicts. Sweden is a perfect example of this. They've downright gutted their military!
The Russians storming west is more likely than (1), which isn't saying much. The Russian conventional army is really not what it used to be, after years of underfunding.
The Russian military was never much of anything. Russia obtained its troops by drafting them as soon as they hit 18. (Every male in Russian society has to serve in the military for at least one term.) Here they were offered the reward of becoming an officer if they had talent. Becoming an officer meant becoming a member of the Communist party. Becoming a Communist meant that you received a spacious apartment, money, wonderful foods, and other things that the rest of the population didn't have.
You could also become a member of the party by showing ability in areas of science, engineering, and sports. Failure to become a Communist member doomed you to never live anything more than the life of a poor man.
The only reason why Russia is not a threat is that they need the rest of the world (especially the US) to help them out of their collapsed economy. Once that is fixed, there's a very real chance that another power hungry maniac could misuse Russia's arsenal.
is just nuts. China decides to invade the EU for extra space? Picking out just about the only place on the planet more crowded than China itself?
Actually, I said that China would most likely pick a fight with the US.
If I was a European military planner I'd be worried about the dodgy nations on the doorstep, rather than the three other big players. Belarus, for instance, is ruled by a complete and utter fruitcake dictator. And as we expand we'll have more neighbours like that - if Turkey joins up we'll have Iraq right on the EU frontier. That's the sort of thing we'll need to be thinking about.
True. But many of them will argue that their current military forces are sufficient to deal with such "primitive" militaries. Too bad they have no experience with Guerilla warfare...
And as the expanding EU bumps up against such difficulties, we may need to conduct our own military operations, probably without American support - and sometimes, I would imagine, with outright opposition from Washington. That's why we need our own GPS-equivalent. It would be, at the very least, a diplomatic embarrassment to launch a war of which America disapproved, while relying on America's satellites to guide our missiles
Indeed. It would be wise for the EU to develop their military. But as I stated before, many EU countries are disarming instead. This situation only increases the EU's dependence on US aid to defend itself against attackers.
how about the nukular winter that would follow
What of it? While most of the infrastructure would be destroyed, we'd still have enough knowledge to build new generators, hydroponics, etc.
The truly messed up part is that many European nations (*cough*Sweden*cough*) would need to rely on the US military in the case of a major assault. The EU has troops and weapon systems, but it's doubtful they would be sufficient to defend against a major superpower. While many Europeans are upset over Iraq, the US is unlikely to be the aggressor in any major European conflict. That leaves two other possibilities:
1. Someone more intelligent than Putin takes over Russia and uses Putin's communist-like infrastructure to once again impose a military state.
2. China decides that they have the most people in the world and that someone else should give up some land to support them.
While the second is more likely, either one would spell defeat for the European Union. Only the US currently has the necessary military power to stop another superpower. On the upside, China might be more inclined to take on the US first since we have more undeveloped land. It wouldn't be much of a war though. We'd fight until the Chinese start lobbing nukes. Once that happens, China can kiss their population goodbye when a few neutron bombs fall.
The whole point of getting the fuel from the ocean is to make it cheaper. By making the fuel cheaper, it becomes more cost effective to simply make the rocket a little bigger. The interesting part about the aforementioned Sea Dragon project was that the study showed that rockets are pretty much a fixed cost. The bigger you make them, the cheaper they get. That's why the idea behind the Sea Dragon was to build something the size of our largest ocean going vessels in a shipyard, then drag it out to sea where it could be fueled by a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.
The reason why NASA didn't pursue the project was because the government no longer wanted big rockets. All they wanted was a token project that displayed the fact that the U.S. was still the leader in space technology. Beyond that, Nixon's administration wanted NASA dead. Thus NASA had to make a hurculean effort to build a craft that "sort of" met all the stupid requirements that were thrown at it. The end result was technologically impressive (kudos to the engineers!), but was never going to be cost effective.
You believe the myths that say public (read: government) ventures are more efficient or work better than private?
No, I'm saying that private ventures know "good enough" when they see it. If it costs your private company an extra $50 mil to improve fuel efficiency by 3%, why do it? Just build a bigger *$%^ing rocket!
ansporting a truckload of water to wherever you please is a small matter.
Um... try a few thousand tons of the stuff.
Usually you're talking only a few miles off shore. That way, the rocket can launch toward the rest of the ocean (making for plentiful abort options) and any rockets that are destroyed don't land on people's heads. That's pretty much the same reason why NASA launches from Florida. Although I've never quite understood why they don't manufacture fuel on site. Probably has something to do with special additives and/or purity levels that improve the fuel combustion. A private venture might be slightly less concerned with the same levels of fuel efficiency.
...are the actual space ships. I'm definitely looking forward to many of the X-Prize contenders, but so far they're only building simple rockets to go up and down. It's a great in-between stage, but I'm looking forward to the day when orbital rockets will be built.
The one caveat to that is that a manned orbital rocket would probably be launched from the ocean rather than land. The reason for that is that water makes a plentiful rocket fuel. Tote along a reactor (nuclear is preferable, but diesel will do), convert sea water to LHOx, and launch your rocket. (This was the premise behind the Sea Dragon craft.) While a nuclear generator would probably be out of the range of a private company, using a diesel and/or solar reactor to make the fuel could cut the costs of the launch considerably.
Oh, and it's environmentally friendly.
Ah, I see. As long as the Amish don't *use* modern technology, they're fine with it. Their primary concern is the temptations brought about by such technology. They figure that by doing everything the hard way, they won't be tempted.
BTW, I checked a map. They must be getting some serious competition from Westby cheese. IMNHO, Westby produces the absolute BEST cheese curds anywhere. I'd always grab a freshly made bag of them every time I was up in Westby for business. (I used to work for a livestock genetics company up there. You can probably guess which one.)
So, you need the neutron flux. It is only between the neutron source (plasma) and the lithium blanket.
I think it depends on the reactor design. In any case, the neutron flux can still make a lot of stuff radioactive. It isn't magically clean just because it's fusion.
Furthermore, Chernobyl was not caused by a boiler or whatever.
The boiler wasn't the core of the problem, but it was responsible for spreading the materials. When you have a lot of water under pressure, it can violently explode if heat is dumped into too fast. This was what happened in the case of Chernobyl. Something like a Pebble Bed reactor will simply evac its gasses if the pressure gets too high. Once your moderator is evacuated, the reaction stops.
K & K Cheese, outside of Cashton.
Amish cheese.
There's a new one. Are you sure they're actually Amish? The German Baptists seem to be a lot like Amish, but they're a bit more open to modern technology. And they tend to live in the same areas as the Amish.
Westby or Carr Valley?
*sigh* The best perk about working in the Wisconsin dairy industry was the cheese.
But my point is that it isn't dangerous if it lasts 10,000 (or even 1,000) years. The radioactivity from such substances is so low that it doesn't add much of anything to the existing background radiation. You can literally count minutes to hours between each radio-particle release.
Don't believe the media FUD. The scary stuff lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a hundred years. The media intentionally confuses this stuff with the thousands of years stuff so that you'll freak out and make more news about how you don't want that "thousands of years" of stuff in your backyard.
Don't tell me that you understand thermal reactor designs but you're unaware of the Pebble Bed Reactor? It's currently considered one of the safest reactor designs ever considered. It doesn't (generally) allow for a reactor as powerful as some of the larger ones already in existence, but you can run multiple reactors in parallel, thus allowing for greater redundancy on your power grid.
Put hydroelectric dams on it and you have a powerful stable, and cool looking powersource.
...combined with a source of nuclear fusion, it makes the perfect way to generate power for the robots!
Then you can put a bunch of water pumps around the base and supply your city's basic needs.
Do yourself a favor sometime and figure out how many watts of power the sun casts per square meter of land on a hot day. You'll probably find that it's not much more than 20-30 watts of power. With that in mind, you might want to calculate how many ACRES of solar panels you'd need to produce the same multi-megawatt power generation of a coal or nuclear plant.
50-100 years is way better than tens of thousands of years, as with fission waste.
Did you ever consider that the stuff that lasts thousands of years isn't very radioactive? You still have a conservation of mass and energy issue. If it lasts 10 seconds, it's radioactive enough to kill you were you stand. If it lasts 10,000 years, then it's probably not much more radioactive than the potassium in your bones.
and the only radio activity is the Neutron bombarded walls of the chamber which dissipate quickly enough to not be a big problem
What do you think happens to the Neutron bombarded materials? (Hint: They can become radioactive.) Fusion produces a tremendously strong neutron flux. So strong, that very few materials survive being near the process. Obviously, your choice in containment materials can make all the difference in HOW radioactive we're talking.
Personally, I don't think we'll quite get the hang of fusion inside Earth's gravity well. Once in space, we can allow the Fusion to bleed off its neutron flux like the Sun does. Thus it might be very useful for space-based power generation and propulsion. But here on Earth, fission is a much more viable energy source. Our biggest problem is that most of the reactor designs are from the 50's and 60's, when we were just starting to understand nuclear power. With hindsight firmly in place, plus ~500 commercial reactors, a hundred or so military reactors, and a few hundred research reactors currently in service, we have the knowledge and technology to create very safe reactor designs. Hell, just removing the 19th century boiler design out of the equation makes something like Chernobyl impossible.
The real problem right now is government fear over terrorism. The U.S. government forces plants to keep potentially useful materials sitting in pools of water or buried in the ground instead of being used in commercial ventures. Some of that stuff can be reprocessed into nuclear fuel, and some of it has uses in medical, electronic, and aerospace fields. None of it is useful to "terrorists" until it's reprocessed into fissionable fuel. (Don't get me started on the uselessness of a dirty bomb.)
So place the solar panels on the garage instead of the car
Actually, I was more concerned with parking garages than home garages. The majority of city cars spend a lot of time in the deep, dark bowels of these things.
You can have more surface area, and you won't have the dent in the aerodynamic and weight efficiency with having all those solar panels on a car.
If the panels are built into the frame, it's not a big deal. Having a black top instead of (insert car color here) might put a dent in its style, but it shouldn't bother its aerodynamics or weight any.
Even worse, new research into radio communications suggests that other civilizations may not be putting out radio transmissions that we can receive. For example, Ultra Wide Band transmissions look to us like a burst of static, while Quantum Entanglement allows for a message to be communicated without the use of electromagnetic radiation.
Assuming that there is another civilization out there (a long shot itself) and that they developed along similar lines as ourselves (an even longer shot), then there would only be a window of about 100-200 years to capture any radio signals they might have sent.
But energy generation crosses into energy storage. His point was that you could use a hydrogen fuel cell as a way of collecting and storing solar energy while your car is not in use. Most people only drive a few hours per day. The rest of the day their car sits.
:-/
Now there simply isn't enough energy in sunlight to power a car with solar panels. (If there was, we'd all be crispy critters.) But if you can store that energy up over a period of time, you can make your car much more efficient, perhaps even independent of fueling stations.
It's a nice thought anyway. Until you realize that a large portion of the cars get stored in garages.
When WebVan was around, they were *extremely* popular. So popular, that everyone would wave at the delivery guy as he drove by. I myself was an extremely happy customer as it saved me from having to carry a lot of groceries home. (I didn't have a car at the time.)
I think that WebVan's problem had less to do with a poor business model, and everything to do with scaling the business way too fast. They burned through a tremendous amount of cash every time they entered a new market. As a result, they were left with very little operating funds. They always figured that they'd be able to get more funding. Unfortunately, you can always count on VC investors to go to extremes. They over funded during the boom, and they simply wouldn't fund at all during the bust.