Sorry to tell you, but the whole He-3 story is a bunch of crap.Neither is He-3 rare, as it is absolutely no problem to make Tritium out of Lithium - you just need to wait 11 years for half the tritium to turn into He-3.
That said, D-He-3 fusion is as hard to achieve as D-D and certainly much harder than D-T fusion. Worse yet, in D-He3 fusion there is a parasitic D-D fusion process that is actually favoured (by nature) over D-He-3. The whole thing is just irrelevant and a huge strawman.
I wouldn't call ITER cheap either, but it's an international project (and the Chinese aren't locked out, as is currently the case on the ISS) and the cost is distributed over several decades and billions of people. Germany's share is on the order of $2bn over 35 years. That's $0.70 per capita per year. Much less than a lottery ticket, but with much better chances than 1 in 140mio for winning the jackpot.
I haven't really found a concise statement on this so far. Assuming the current state of the art in plasma dynamics, how do fusion reactors scale with respect to size and magnetic field strength? Both in terms of the Q value of D-T reactions and D-D reactions. So, what happens when you scale up the size or magnetic field strength by a factor of 2?
(What Q values have been achieved with D-D fusion anyway? I've seen 0.7 for JET in a real-world D-T trial in 1997. What's typical fori D-D? How much effort does it take to get D-D to the current level of D-T?)
There is nothing quite as easily available in Germany. When Google Market was replaced by Google Play, a lot of Germans (myself included) were quite upset that none of the rumors became true that it would support payment via paypal.
Yes, wirecards are an option - but they are more expensive and just another hassle dealing with yet another firm (and forking yet another part of my money over to them).
The russian Soyuz is a very similar construction in terms of the safety systems. They intermittently reduced the size of the crew to 2 cosmonauts, after a crew of 3 died in Soyuz 11 by asphyxation. An air-valve stuck open during reentry. This changed with better pressure suits and some improvements of the Soyuz spaceship and rocket, to accomodate a crew of three in pressure suits.
Either SpaceX equips its astronauts with a better pressure suit (like the biosuit) or they'll have to make do with a crew of 5 for the time being. Not too much of a loss in the latter case and certainly a good idea in the former.
The tsunami in 1896 (and the other in 1933) were much less worse than the one of 2011. The flood walls for both cities and nuclear power plants alike were built to defend against exactly those kinds of tsunamis.
Of course the disaster could have been mitigated, just by proper placing of emergency generators and having enough of them. 2 per reactor is just not enough, having one of them right next to the coast and the other in the basement in a tsunami-prone area is even worse so.
Common cause failure has been discussed for decades. Those discussions weren't heeded in Fukushima Daiichi, they were in other countries and they were in the other two power plants.
Sorry, but I don't have a credit card and I couldn't pay for any google apps however much I wanted to. I can't buy coupons for google market/play with cash, I can't use wire transfer, I can't use paypal...
It's not the quality of the apps, it's not the quality of the handsets, it's not the screen resolution or any of the other canards serving as reasons. It's the business model.
You're barking up the wrong tree. The fact is, that nobody can earn any of my money with google apps, for the simple reason that google won't take any of it. I don't have a credit card, as do a lot of people outside of the USA. I could pay for apple apps, if I had any apple products by buying coupons at a local store for cash.
Don't you agree that giving you customers the ability to pay in a way that is even remotely convenient for them, is a bit of prerequisite for any income whatsoever?
Germany is getting gas from Russia, preferentially. During the cold-spell in february, Gazprom reduced gas deliveries to Germany for exactly one day, quite unlike deliveries to all the Eastern European countries that were much harder hit. Who cares about people freezing to dead, so long as it's not in Germany? Oh, of course, Germans refuse to get their own gas from fracking. Based on (justified) fears about the chemicals being used, they (unjustifiably) banned the whole industry, instead of merely banning the use of harmful chemicals.
Germany is also proudly wasting 2.3mio ha of agricultural land to make biogas, bioethanol and biodiesel. In 2010 Russia lost 10mio tons of wheat to the worst drought in 100 years. Supposedly, this caused price inflation on the world food markets. Well, Germany could have harvested 18mio tons of wheat on that land in 2010.
For all the talk about carbon neutral energy, Germany is turning towards burning more coal. Having mostly stopped to mine its own coal (except lignite), it is importing ever greater amounts of the stuff from abroad. Poland used to be the largest exporter of coal to Germany, but it too is phasing out coal mining in the coming years. Southern Africa and Australia are now focussing on the Asian market, leaving such trustworth partners as Russia and Columbia to take up the slack.
Meanwhile the Green party is proposing schemes to provide electricity to Germany with renewables leaving reserves of less than 2 weeks before lights go out (if storage is filled to the top!). Using efficiency values based on lower heating values (instead of higher heating values that they use everywhere else), ignoring energy cost of storage, assuming methane-storage round-trip efficiencies of 50% (current technology barely allows for 30%) and obfuscating the monetary cost has always been par for the course, so I won't complain about that anymore. Did I mention they oppose vital high voltage power lines for their damage in the environment and unsightliness, while demanding tens of thousands wind turbines to be build as soon as possible?
If you can't even figure out that you can't figure out a problem - because there is something wrong with the problem - then you didn't understand what math is all about. Hint: It's not about rote memorization of solution recipes.
The US used 140mio tons of corn for fuel-ethanol in 2010 (this is easy to google), that alone is 6% of the total grain production of 2400 million tons (some 800mio tons of corn, 650mio tons of rice, 600mio tons of wheat are the three big ones - FAO figures for 2007 straight from wikipedia. I don't think they are terribly unreliable in this case.). That's 6% for about half the global production of fuel-ethanol.
Then, there is the diesel substitute. Europe is producing some 10mio tons of this (again, about half the global production), yields are typically 1t/ha from rape-seed in Europe. Wheat yields are on the order of 8t/ha, corn is 10t/ha. So, that's another 80mio tons of grain not being produced.
I have no figures for corn-cob-mix used in methane production, which is popular in Germany, but I think you can see from 50% of the world ethanol production (USA) and 50% of the worlds diesel substitutes (in the EU) what the scale of this whole thing looks like.
Just because nobody can influence those pesky processes that created islands in oceans and didn't put those islands closer together, doesn't improve the data. Our data about other stars don't improve the least little bit from the fact that they are so far away from us.
Garbage in is garbage out, even if you're not responsible for your input being garbage.
Look at the last decade of the graph and it is flat.
In the meantime, even if you insist that this trend needs to continue for another 20 or 30 years before it is established, read my original "(Score:-1 Troll)" posting and you will find that I suggest reducing our use of coal, oil and natural gas anyway in the meantime. Which just so happens to be what everybody else is saying, including those behind the most bogus and apocalyptic claims in climate "science". The problem with those is, that in 20 or 30 years, when people will (as far as I can tell) laugh the apocalypticists out of the room, they may very likely conclude that *everything* they said was a lie - which is patently false.
There is an effect of CO2 on climate, it's just not nearly as bad as the propaganda says, which is trying to put the worst possible spin on climate change on the assumption that otherwise nobody will do anything. The result are overreactions to the point of burning some 10% of the worlds grain harvest in order to reduce CO2 emissions (which they don't) and save the world from starving because of climate change (or so their claims go). When people can rationalize burning food in order to safe people from starving, something is very wrong with their perception of reality.
Statistics can be a scientific tool, if you're careful. Calling a model with a statistical certainty of 99% "virtually certain", however, is unacceptable. For the simple reason, that out of 100 models or experiments, at least one will unavoidably produce such results. Given the amount of data available and the number of models being created, a mere 99% is just not enough. Particle physicists insist for very good reason on 6-sigma-signals - a certainty of 99.9999% that your result is not just a statistical figment. And even then, it is plausible that your result may merely be the result of systematic errors, rather than statistical ones. The faster-than-light neutrinos were the result of such an error - the measurment itself easily had that 6-sigma certainty. (I seem to remember it being something as absurd as 15 sigma.)
That's wrong. It was not a misprint, the article appeared exactly as it was written and it was written exactly with the intention of writing 2035 and not 2350, because the IPCC article was based on a false news report on a scientific paper. As you could read here on slashdot 2 years ago.
And even the revised date has since been found out to be false, as the glaciers that weren't measured are growing and make up for the losses measured thus far. They weren't measured because they were less convenient to measure, and understandably so, because the terrain is simply very difficult. But it is shoddy science to take a non-representative sample of glaciers and extrapolate the total ice-loss of all glaciers from their average ice-loss, without reporting any of the caveats arising from the necessarily bad sample. That said, out of about 200,000 glaciers worldwide, only 0.075% were actually measured in the last decade (with some areas such as the Alps being heavily over-represented) and those 0.075% necessarily form the base on which scientific claims have made. A base which is just too small to make any claims.
As Wittgenstein said:"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
According to the IPCC report 2007, the Himalayan glaciers ought to have melted in 2035. (The word was in there prior to changing the sentence, though not afterwards.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to tell you, but the whole He-3 story is a bunch of crap.Neither is He-3 rare, as it is absolutely no problem to make Tritium out of Lithium - you just need to wait 11 years for half the tritium to turn into He-3.
That said, D-He-3 fusion is as hard to achieve as D-D and certainly much harder than D-T fusion. Worse yet, in D-He3 fusion there is a parasitic D-D fusion process that is actually favoured (by nature) over D-He-3. The whole thing is just irrelevant and a huge strawman.
I wouldn't call ITER cheap either, but it's an international project (and the Chinese aren't locked out, as is currently the case on the ISS) and the cost is distributed over several decades and billions of people. Germany's share is on the order of $2bn over 35 years. That's $0.70 per capita per year. Much less than a lottery ticket, but with much better chances than 1 in 140mio for winning the jackpot.
I haven't really found a concise statement on this so far. Assuming the current state of the art in plasma dynamics, how do fusion reactors scale with respect to size and magnetic field strength? Both in terms of the Q value of D-T reactions and D-D reactions. So, what happens when you scale up the size or magnetic field strength by a factor of 2?
(What Q values have been achieved with D-D fusion anyway? I've seen 0.7 for JET in a real-world D-T trial in 1997. What's typical fori D-D? How much effort does it take to get D-D to the current level of D-T?)
But that's natural radioactivity. That's the kind of radioactivity that doesn't cause cancer. (Don't ask.)
Exactly those. Just read up on the Shaanxi Earthquake in 1556, when almost a million people died in such caves.
But hey, it's energy efficient and it's not radioactive. Who cares about the people who die without any radioactivity involved?
It's a matter of resolution. It won't run at 800x480 or anything less.
There is nothing quite as easily available in Germany. When Google Market was replaced by Google Play, a lot of Germans (myself included) were quite upset that none of the rumors became true that it would support payment via paypal.
Yes, wirecards are an option - but they are more expensive and just another hassle dealing with yet another firm (and forking yet another part of my money over to them).
The russian Soyuz is a very similar construction in terms of the safety systems. They intermittently reduced the size of the crew to 2 cosmonauts, after a crew of 3 died in Soyuz 11 by asphyxation. An air-valve stuck open during reentry. This changed with better pressure suits and some improvements of the Soyuz spaceship and rocket, to accomodate a crew of three in pressure suits.
Either SpaceX equips its astronauts with a better pressure suit (like the biosuit) or they'll have to make do with a crew of 5 for the time being. Not too much of a loss in the latter case and certainly a good idea in the former.
The tsunami in 1896 (and the other in 1933) were much less worse than the one of 2011. The flood walls for both cities and nuclear power plants alike were built to defend against exactly those kinds of tsunamis.
Of course the disaster could have been mitigated, just by proper placing of emergency generators and having enough of them. 2 per reactor is just not enough, having one of them right next to the coast and the other in the basement in a tsunami-prone area is even worse so.
Common cause failure has been discussed for decades. Those discussions weren't heeded in Fukushima Daiichi, they were in other countries and they were in the other two power plants.
Sorry, but I don't have a credit card and I couldn't pay for any google apps however much I wanted to. I can't buy coupons for google market/play with cash, I can't use wire transfer, I can't use paypal ...
It's not the quality of the apps, it's not the quality of the handsets, it's not the screen resolution or any of the other canards serving as reasons. It's the business model.
Just take my money and shut up.
You're barking up the wrong tree. The fact is, that nobody can earn any of my money with google apps, for the simple reason that google won't take any of it. I don't have a credit card, as do a lot of people outside of the USA. I could pay for apple apps, if I had any apple products by buying coupons at a local store for cash.
Don't you agree that giving you customers the ability to pay in a way that is even remotely convenient for them, is a bit of prerequisite for any income whatsoever?
I hate abstracts. But I do have the abstract feeling, that the efficiency is not very high.
Germany is getting gas from Russia, preferentially. During the cold-spell in february, Gazprom reduced gas deliveries to Germany for exactly one day, quite unlike deliveries to all the Eastern European countries that were much harder hit. Who cares about people freezing to dead, so long as it's not in Germany? Oh, of course, Germans refuse to get their own gas from fracking. Based on (justified) fears about the chemicals being used, they (unjustifiably) banned the whole industry, instead of merely banning the use of harmful chemicals.
Germany is also proudly wasting 2.3mio ha of agricultural land to make biogas, bioethanol and biodiesel. In 2010 Russia lost 10mio tons of wheat to the worst drought in 100 years. Supposedly, this caused price inflation on the world food markets. Well, Germany could have harvested 18mio tons of wheat on that land in 2010.
For all the talk about carbon neutral energy, Germany is turning towards burning more coal. Having mostly stopped to mine its own coal (except lignite), it is importing ever greater amounts of the stuff from abroad. Poland used to be the largest exporter of coal to Germany, but it too is phasing out coal mining in the coming years. Southern Africa and Australia are now focussing on the Asian market, leaving such trustworth partners as Russia and Columbia to take up the slack.
Meanwhile the Green party is proposing schemes to provide electricity to Germany with renewables leaving reserves of less than 2 weeks before lights go out (if storage is filled to the top!). Using efficiency values based on lower heating values (instead of higher heating values that they use everywhere else), ignoring energy cost of storage, assuming methane-storage round-trip efficiencies of 50% (current technology barely allows for 30%) and obfuscating the monetary cost has always been par for the course, so I won't complain about that anymore. Did I mention they oppose vital high voltage power lines for their damage in the environment and unsightliness, while demanding tens of thousands wind turbines to be build as soon as possible?
True. But that's the problem. It's not random at all. E.g. only covering the lower glaciers, not those at higher altitude in the Himalaya.
If you can't even figure out that you can't figure out a problem - because there is something wrong with the problem - then you didn't understand what math is all about. Hint: It's not about rote memorization of solution recipes.
The US produces almost half of the worlds corn.
*I* claimed nothing of the sort.
The US used 140mio tons of corn for fuel-ethanol in 2010 (this is easy to google), that alone is 6% of the total grain production of 2400 million tons (some 800mio tons of corn, 650mio tons of rice, 600mio tons of wheat are the three big ones - FAO figures for 2007 straight from wikipedia. I don't think they are terribly unreliable in this case.). That's 6% for about half the global production of fuel-ethanol.
Then, there is the diesel substitute. Europe is producing some 10mio tons of this (again, about half the global production), yields are typically 1t/ha from rape-seed in Europe. Wheat yields are on the order of 8t/ha, corn is 10t/ha. So, that's another 80mio tons of grain not being produced.
I have no figures for corn-cob-mix used in methane production, which is popular in Germany, but I think you can see from 50% of the world ethanol production (USA) and 50% of the worlds diesel substitutes (in the EU) what the scale of this whole thing looks like.
Just because nobody can influence those pesky processes that created islands in oceans and didn't put those islands closer together, doesn't improve the data. Our data about other stars don't improve the least little bit from the fact that they are so far away from us.
Garbage in is garbage out, even if you're not responsible for your input being garbage.
Look at the last decade of the graph and it is flat.
In the meantime, even if you insist that this trend needs to continue for another 20 or 30 years before it is established, read my original "(Score:-1 Troll)" posting and you will find that I suggest reducing our use of coal, oil and natural gas anyway in the meantime. Which just so happens to be what everybody else is saying, including those behind the most bogus and apocalyptic claims in climate "science". The problem with those is, that in 20 or 30 years, when people will (as far as I can tell) laugh the apocalypticists out of the room, they may very likely conclude that *everything* they said was a lie - which is patently false.
There is an effect of CO2 on climate, it's just not nearly as bad as the propaganda says, which is trying to put the worst possible spin on climate change on the assumption that otherwise nobody will do anything. The result are overreactions to the point of burning some 10% of the worlds grain harvest in order to reduce CO2 emissions (which they don't) and save the world from starving because of climate change (or so their claims go). When people can rationalize burning food in order to safe people from starving, something is very wrong with their perception of reality.
Statistics can be a scientific tool, if you're careful. Calling a model with a statistical certainty of 99% "virtually certain", however, is unacceptable. For the simple reason, that out of 100 models or experiments, at least one will unavoidably produce such results. Given the amount of data available and the number of models being created, a mere 99% is just not enough. Particle physicists insist for very good reason on 6-sigma-signals - a certainty of 99.9999% that your result is not just a statistical figment. And even then, it is plausible that your result may merely be the result of systematic errors, rather than statistical ones. The faster-than-light neutrinos were the result of such an error - the measurment itself easily had that 6-sigma certainty. (I seem to remember it being something as absurd as 15 sigma.)
And why, then, is this graph flat towards the end?
That's wrong. It was not a misprint, the article appeared exactly as it was written and it was written exactly with the intention of writing 2035 and not 2350, because the IPCC article was based on a false news report on a scientific paper. As you could read here on slashdot 2 years ago.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/01/23/2211222/claims-of-himalayan-glacier-disaster-melt-away
And even the revised date has since been found out to be false, as the glaciers that weren't measured are growing and make up for the losses measured thus far. They weren't measured because they were less convenient to measure, and understandably so, because the terrain is simply very difficult. But it is shoddy science to take a non-representative sample of glaciers and extrapolate the total ice-loss of all glaciers from their average ice-loss, without reporting any of the caveats arising from the necessarily bad sample. That said, out of about 200,000 glaciers worldwide, only 0.075% were actually measured in the last decade (with some areas such as the Alps being heavily over-represented) and those 0.075% necessarily form the base on which scientific claims have made. A base which is just too small to make any claims.
As Wittgenstein said:"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
According to the IPCC report 2007, the Himalayan glaciers ought to have melted in 2035. (The word was in there prior to changing the sentence, though not afterwards.)