I won't believe a word about this, unless the full study is available for checking and has been independently reproduced. And when I write "available" I don't mean "you can purchase this paper for the wee lil' sum of 40 Euros".
Sorry, but just about any time I actually read the papers that articles on slashdot or anywhere else are about, the result is typically quite different in the actual paper or the methods employed have obvious holes like insufficient data. The more politically relevant the topic, the worse it gets. Hence, I won't take a word of this seriously.
And that, folks, is how you can tell apart arrogant people who are spouting propaganda from arrogant people who don't. The guys spouting the propaganda habitually make up lies. They put words into people's mouths that they would have liked them to have said, because it would prove their point.
Google finds exactly one place on the whole of the internet, in which this quote appears:
Japan Marks 3rd Anniversary of Tsunami Disaster - Slashdot slashdot.org/.../japan-marks-3rd-anniversary-of-tsunami-disaster Slashdot 1 hour ago -... else (Score:2). by JoeyRox (2711699) writes: "An unfortunate wave and harmless radiation that inconvenienced a small group of our citizens"...
You may recognize this as your very own sorry piece of shit.
There's one concept YOU don't seem to understand. LIFE. It sort of goes on. When people choose to live in Japan, or anywhere else on the planet for that matter, they're probably not thinking of all the ways they might die. They think of all the ways they might LIVE. People LIVE for LIFE, not for death.
Then I wonder why people are so upset about Fukushima Daiichi. You know. Life sort of goes on and people are probably not thinking of all the ways they migth die. They think of all the ways they might live... so, no probs man. People just move to another place and live. Where's the problem? Why is everybody complaining about it?
Have you ever thought about whether you would accept your own argument, if it came from whoever is talking to you? In this case, obviously not.
I know very well how wikipedia works. And I know what it looks like when something is broken. When the number of dead people from an earthquake gets pushed down to the point that it constitutes a minor point, something is broken. And no, this is not a conspiracy. It is perfectly sufficient that people, like you, publicly play down the importance of cities being destroyed and thousands of people being killed. Just as you do right here in your post.
Let me explain one thing: It does not matter if the towns are being rebuilt (in fact, they are not, because the areas are now designated as unfit for human habitation because they are threatened by tsunamies), you will not see thousands of people coming back from the sea, one by one, no matter what you rebuild and no matter how quickly you rebuild.
That's a vital concept right there: DEATH. It's sort of permanent. It does not have a half life. It does not get washed away by rainwater. (Unlike about one half the cesium, so far, that was released from the reactors.) It doesn't go away by decontamination. DEAD people are DEAD. They even have the nerve to STAY DEAD.
You may disagree with that. I'm sure your view will not be share by many other people.
And no, the brunt of the blame must not go to TEPCO, but to a society that has proven, time and again, to be incapable of planning for catastrophes. That is, to deal with earthquakes that only occur a few times per century in way that does not lead to thousands, tens of thousands or even over one hundred thousand deaths - such as the Tokyo earthquake 91 years ago.
And I'm NOT talking about building 15m high flood walls along the coast. I'm talking about simple measures such as making sure that designated evacuation areas will not get flooded even when a tsunami is higher than expected. It would have saved the lives of thousands of people. But it is obvious from the lack of such measures, that the society as a whole was incapable to even contemplate that possibility. TEPCO is to blame only insofar as it is one small part of this society that prefers to feign mere bravery instead of committing to true preperation in the face of disasters, that are sure to happen again and again.
You're absolutely right that the money is not a solution especially because it would put them into an eternal hell of discrimination (which is already the case because a lot of Japanese treat anybody who got anywhere near radioactivity as if they had some infectious disease). I was tempted to write more on this, but the comment was long enough as it was and I thought the reference to the tsunami victims was enough to show the problems with that.
The most important thing that should be done is to talk rationally about radioactivity. But so long as the anti-nuclear shills keep screaming at the top of their lungs, this is not going to happen - but this is exactly where the psychological problems and the trauma are coming from. It is also where a lot of deaths are coming from and the reason why the evacuations that were supposedly going to safe peoples lives were so incredibly botched that people people died in the vehicles they were evacuated in. Which is hardly surprising, when hospitals are evacuated and incapacitated patients are put in hospital gowns and driven for over 100km without any medical attention.
The blame for the terrible death of those people rests solely with an international movement that is spreading fear and panic in order to gain political power, without any regard for the people they harm. And this harm is much worse than the radiation they claim to be protecting people from.
At least none in the designated evacuation buildings deemed to be safe and high enough, where hundreds upon hundreds of people died. Where are the eyewitness reports of how those were crushed? (Oh right.) Where are the accusations of mayors and emergency planners who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people?
One thing is for sure. You don't care about people. You don't care about their lives, as was made abundantly clear on wikipedia. You don't care about what people lost. Some 400.000 people lost everything, in many cases even friends and relatives, not to mention everything in their households. Documents, photos, clothes. Their homes? That goes without saying. And that's the problem.
I wanted to make the suggestion that everyone of the 100,000 or so people affected by the nuclear accident be paid half a million dollars. A family of four would get $2,000,000. Enough to start a new life. The problem is not the cost. $50bn is about a year's worth of coal, oil and gas being imported to replace nuclear power in Japan. The problem is the other 400,000 who will rightfully say that their losses were so much worse, that they should easily be entitled to get even more money.
Yes, it's a terrible accident and an avoidable one as well. It has been known since 1966 (p.50) that the Mark I BWR containment is unable to withstand a meltdown under any conditions, because it is too small. In case of a meltdown you either vent the containment in a controlled manner, or it leaks uncontrolled. Japan only saw the need to install filtered containment vents in any of its nuclear power plants in 2013... they must have had a problem in one of their nuclear plants or something. Strangely enough, neither Germany or France needed that kind of reminder to get to that point. They did it a quarter of a century before that. (And yes, it was after Chernobyl. But it's not like the Japanese never heard about that one.)
Sure, hundreds of thousands in Fukushima prefecture will get cancer. They are right.
Why? Because, as the japanese ministry of health reported in 2006 - some 43% of women and 53% of men get cancer at some point in their lives in Japan. And there are several hundred thousand people in Fukushima prefecture, hence the perfectly accurate and totally meaningless prediction.
So, instead of protests *for* better regulation and better technical equipment, all we'll see are protests *against* oil.
As usual, the power hungry activists will not attempt to solve the problem, but instead use the problem to gain more power for themselves. I have never seen any activist trying to solve the problem they are protesting. The protests are just their PR campaigns to get more political power. Saving people's lives? It's not about protesting against exploding tank cars, it's about protesting against oil.
Unfortunately, solving the exploding oil-car problem would legitimize the oil production, so as any self-righteous activist can easily see, you cannot allow companies to actually do something against that. Not only would the publicity and media spectacle of exploding oil tank cars go away, the company that would actually solve the problem would be... like... legitimate! So, screw the tanks. Let the explode! We must protest against oil!
Why do you think your sparsely inhabited backwater on this planet is representative for the global car market? And for that matter, why do Tesla owners here in this thread and elsewhere think *they* are in any way representative for any population on this planet whatsoever, with the exception of the upper 0.5%?
Is your smug superiority superior enough to buy everyone else an electric car who can't afford to pay a cool $60,000 or $85,000 for theirs?
Well, they want to sacrify about 20-30% payload (out of about 16 tons) to do the flyback. They also separate the first stage at Mach 6, or 1.8 km/s. But that's after leaving most of the atmosphere behind and overcoming a lot of the gravity losses during launch. So the actual energy budget is better than it seems to be. Still, the second stage has to do more work than it normally would - some 6km/s are left. About 5/6th of the second stage, including payload, must be fuel. But the engine weighs less than 700kg and tanks for kerosine and LOX only have about 2-3% of the mass of the fuel they contain. So, there is plenty left for the payload.
All of which makes the whole thing a lot more feasible with a lot less fuel than you'd ordinarily assume.
When you sell a new product, there are four cases:
A) Your product is better and more expensive. B) Your product is better and cheaper. C) Your product is worse and cheaper. D) Your product is worse and more expensive.
There is only one case which will fail to materialize any significant sales, in case you didn't notice: it's D.
Tesla just about managed to get into the A category by having a roadster that is genuinely better than the competition in many, though not all, respects. It's a sports car, people are prepared to make compromises for performance. Most of all, they are prepared to make compromises in terms of the price. While the superiority of the Model S is limited to bragging rights, while range issues where addressed by brute force, that is in fact a unique selling point to a certain demographic that doesn't mind spending as much money on one car as other people would spend on five. Bragging rights aside, the Model S is still an inferior product compared to most other cars, including those of similar or much lower price.
Most other electric cars are firmly in the D category. They are both worse and more expensive. None of this is a game breaker by itself, but the combination is. The leaf is too limited by its battery to get even roughly in the territory of a normal car and it has no reserves to drive at higher speeds while still maintaining acceptable range. That's a non-issue for the Tesla, due to a huge battery pack and an equally huge price to go with it.
What nobody has done so far, is move into the C category. It doesn't matter if your product is worse, if you can sell it at a cheaper price than all the rest. We've seen this work with netbooks. Given full basic functionality, performance is much less of an issue than linear extrapolation would have you expect. You can sell a product at half price that has much less than a quarter of the performance in several metrics, so long as it still has full functionality. You could sell electric cars at half the price of the cheapest conventional cars - that is roughly 3-4000 euros - if they are still cars. An aerodynamic two-seat half-width car (passengers sitting behind each other, not next to each other), that can drive about 70km/h is enough for most needs in a city and limited over-land travel. Given the low price expectations are much lower. Given the smaller size and lower speed, much less energy is consumed. A 4 kWh battery could yield a range of about 100km, with some extra margin. Even a conventional wall outlet can charge this battery within an hour.
Most problems associated with high cost of electric cars are down to large size, high speeds, high weight and high range requirements, making large batteries an absolute necessity. Once you back away from large size and high speeds of conventional cars, the rest follows automatically. A small, relatively slow car needs 4kWh / 100km. A conventional car needs about four times as much, about 16kWh/ 100km. A battery that has only a quarter of the capacity can be charged in a quarter of the time. It is also just a quarter of the price, so it matters less if quick charging wears it down faster. The result is a much cheaper and much lighter car, that certainly doesn't need carbon fibre parts to save a few pounds. You could use something as pedestrian as a steel tube frame and still get a 300kg car.
500kt is large ever since people figured out how to actually *hit* anything with the darn things.
Back in the 50ies and 60ies you could easily be off by a mile and they'd still call it a bullseye. A few miles off wasn't unusual at all. That's not because they thought this is good, but because they knew it was the best they could do. Thus, in order to destroy a target you can't hit, you had to get a much bigger bomb in the general vicinity of your target. Because you didn't expect to be hit directly, people started building bunkered silos for their bombs and rockets. In order to destroy those, even if you couldn't expect to hit them, you needed even bigger bombs.
The better the targeting, the smaller the bombs became. Then bunker busters were developed that could not only hit a target the size of a few hundred meters size, they could also bury themselves in the ground by some 50m and explode there, with much greater effect in terms of shock waves. These days, a few 100kt is all you need to destroy anything you want.
In fact, for the most part, you don't need any nuclear weapons to destroy most things out there. Simply because of the accuracy of modern weaponry. Part of this is GPS, but since this is likely the first thing to be destroyed in a big war, people developed inertial guidance and other navigation systems that can do without it. Hence, 500kt is a big bomb these days and people are unlikely to build bigger ones for the foreseeable future. If only because it is much more effective hit several targets with a couple of warheads than just one or two with a big one.
It's a good idea and, like all good ideas, somebody already had it. It's called subcritical reactor. But it's nuclear fission technology and so, as usual in the last two or three decades, nobody really gives a shit.
It's just that the "pleasant bonus" isn't there. It's red herring.
I would be much less upset if this wasn't being called a fusion power project, because it simply isn't. And it hurts the credibility of the very real fusion power projects out there that can actually be scaled to be what they claim to be. NIF is just going to be yet another example people will hold up when they claim that fusion power is a sham and shouldn't be funded.
It's at best 5 times better. (21MeV from fusion of H-2 and H-3 vs. 200MeV from fission of U-235 or Pu-239). But since you won't use pure tritium and deuterium, and instead something like partially tritated lithium deuteride, where you breed your tritium from lithium in-situ, the ratio drops further to something like a factor of 3. In terms of volume (which is important for MIRVs), you'll find that using uranium is in fact *better* by a factor of 3 to 5.
And it isn't going to be lighter in any case, since you'll need some sort of a tamper anyway - and you might as well use uranium for that while you're at it.
What the NIF is all about is compressing D-T fuel by radiation pressure and finding out what kind of profile of the radiation pressure pulse has the highest yield. That's exactly what you do when you want to get a bigger bang out of the nuclear weapons you have, because your NATIONAL DICK isn't big enough yet to properly display your "patriotic" manlihood to the rest of the world that you feel like you have to dominate completely in order to feel like you've accomplished something.
By the way, the rest of the world doesn't agree with you oversized national libido, even if most countries officials don't say so openly.
Currently, they put in over 100 times as much energy into the lasers as they get out in term. Not to mention the energy it takes to engineer the fuel capsule or the inconvenient fact that it takes hours or days to properly set up and align everything, or that lasers at this kind of power level tend to wear down rather quickly. What they get out is 17kJ per shot. In order to get as little as 1MW of electricity out of this thing, you'll need a yield of 200.000.000.000 kJ per day. Plus whatever you need to keep the lasers running. (Currently 2000 kJ per shot.)
The "this is a potential fusion power plant" argument is a red herring.
Then do as you say and you'll find out you're wrong. Example: Castle Bravo had a yield of 15 megatons, 10 of which were fission, only 5 were fusion. This is a common feature of actually weaponized "hydrogen" bombs and most of those devices tested by the US somewhere down in the Pacific where they didn't care what happened with the fallout.
The Soviets, on the other hand, realized that since they had to test on their own territory, they best reduce the fission yield of their test devices as much as possible to cut down the fallout. Their largest bomb hat a yield of 50 megatons, with only 1.5 megatons of fission yield. But they could have added 50 megatons of fission yield at any time by replacing the lead tamper with natural uranium (which was in fact the original plan) and presumably another 50 or so by using highly enriched uranium in its place.
D-T Fusion releases seriously fast neutrons (some 17 MeV) that can split any kind of uranium and makes fission much more efficient, because you don't need to rely soley on the chain reaction to give you enough neutrons before the whole thing blows apart.
Well, there are people who know that FOUR 1GW nuclear power plants produce about 32TWh per year.
Now if somebody says that their 4GW power plant produces 6.4TWh per year, then yes, I do have the audacity to claim that this is worse than 32TWh per year. It is also worse than the 8TWh a single 1GW nuclear power plant would produce.
That's not about thinking I'm smarter than anybody. It just means that I know enough mathematics to evaluate that 8 > 6.4 and 32 > 6.4.
In real life, you're just trying to avoid thinking about it, because writing insults on the internet is so much more fun than thinking.
Instead of: "Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of far-left environmental groups," says Schweikert. "For far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions."
He should have said: "Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of capitalist corporations," says Schweikert. "For far too long, government agencies have approved regulations that have placed a crippling burden on the environment in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions."
You mean, after running off into the ocean, it evaporates again and comes back down as rain. Whereas fracking removes the water, resulting in a lowering of sea levels of roughly one micrometer per year. This reduces the average area of sea surface evaporating water by some 0.3 square kilometers or 100 acres worldwide.
Yes, you are completely right. This will reduce the amount of rainfall available in dry areas of the US.
Even though one might argue that pumping the water into the crust will depress the crust into the mantle and lift areas along the edge of the continental crust instead, once isostatic equilibrium has been achieved, thus offsetting a few nanometers per year in the long run and increase the sea surface available for evaporation by as much as a few acres!
Slashdot Mirror
I won't believe a word about this, unless the full study is available for checking and has been independently reproduced. And when I write "available" I don't mean "you can purchase this paper for the wee lil' sum of 40 Euros".
Sorry, but just about any time I actually read the papers that articles on slashdot or anywhere else are about, the result is typically quite different in the actual paper or the methods employed have obvious holes like insufficient data. The more politically relevant the topic, the worse it gets. Hence, I won't take a word of this seriously.
No it doesn't.
And that, folks, is how you can tell apart arrogant people who are spouting propaganda from arrogant people who don't. The guys spouting the propaganda habitually make up lies. They put words into people's mouths that they would have liked them to have said, because it would prove their point.
Google finds exactly one place on the whole of the internet, in which this quote appears:
Japan Marks 3rd Anniversary of Tsunami Disaster - Slashdot ... else (Score:2). by JoeyRox (2711699) writes: "An unfortunate wave and harmless radiation that inconvenienced a small group of our citizens" ...
slashdot.org/.../japan-marks-3rd-anniversary-of-tsunami-disaster
Slashdot
1 hour ago -
You may recognize this as your very own sorry piece of shit.
It seems like nobody noticed. But the parent and the guy who wrote the wordpress article are one and the same person. Me.
There's one concept YOU don't seem to understand. LIFE. It sort of goes on. When people choose to live in Japan, or anywhere else on the planet for that matter, they're probably not thinking of all the ways they might die. They think of all the ways they might LIVE. People LIVE for LIFE, not for death.
Then I wonder why people are so upset about Fukushima Daiichi. You know. Life sort of goes on and people are probably not thinking of all the ways they migth die. They think of all the ways they might live ... so, no probs man. People just move to another place and live. Where's the problem? Why is everybody complaining about it?
Have you ever thought about whether you would accept your own argument, if it came from whoever is talking to you? In this case, obviously not.
I know very well how wikipedia works. And I know what it looks like when something is broken. When the number of dead people from an earthquake gets pushed down to the point that it constitutes a minor point, something is broken. And no, this is not a conspiracy. It is perfectly sufficient that people, like you, publicly play down the importance of cities being destroyed and thousands of people being killed. Just as you do right here in your post.
Let me explain one thing: It does not matter if the towns are being rebuilt (in fact, they are not, because the areas are now designated as unfit for human habitation because they are threatened by tsunamies), you will not see thousands of people coming back from the sea, one by one, no matter what you rebuild and no matter how quickly you rebuild.
That's a vital concept right there: DEATH. It's sort of permanent. It does not have a half life. It does not get washed away by rainwater. (Unlike about one half the cesium, so far, that was released from the reactors.) It doesn't go away by decontamination. DEAD people are DEAD. They even have the nerve to STAY DEAD.
You may disagree with that. I'm sure your view will not be share by many other people.
And no, the brunt of the blame must not go to TEPCO, but to a society that has proven, time and again, to be incapable of planning for catastrophes. That is, to deal with earthquakes that only occur a few times per century in way that does not lead to thousands, tens of thousands or even over one hundred thousand deaths - such as the Tokyo earthquake 91 years ago.
And I'm NOT talking about building 15m high flood walls along the coast. I'm talking about simple measures such as making sure that designated evacuation areas will not get flooded even when a tsunami is higher than expected. It would have saved the lives of thousands of people. But it is obvious from the lack of such measures, that the society as a whole was incapable to even contemplate that possibility. TEPCO is to blame only insofar as it is one small part of this society that prefers to feign mere bravery instead of committing to true preperation in the face of disasters, that are sure to happen again and again.
You're absolutely right that the money is not a solution especially because it would put them into an eternal hell of discrimination (which is already the case because a lot of Japanese treat anybody who got anywhere near radioactivity as if they had some infectious disease). I was tempted to write more on this, but the comment was long enough as it was and I thought the reference to the tsunami victims was enough to show the problems with that.
The most important thing that should be done is to talk rationally about radioactivity. But so long as the anti-nuclear shills keep screaming at the top of their lungs, this is not going to happen - but this is exactly where the psychological problems and the trauma are coming from. It is also where a lot of deaths are coming from and the reason why the evacuations that were supposedly going to safe peoples lives were so incredibly botched that people people died in the vehicles they were evacuated in. Which is hardly surprising, when hospitals are evacuated and incapacitated patients are put in hospital gowns and driven for over 100km without any medical attention.
The blame for the terrible death of those people rests solely with an international movement that is spreading fear and panic in order to gain political power, without any regard for the people they harm. And this harm is much worse than the radiation they claim to be protecting people from.
At least none in the designated evacuation buildings deemed to be safe and high enough, where hundreds upon hundreds of people died. Where are the eyewitness reports of how those were crushed? (Oh right.) Where are the accusations of mayors and emergency planners who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people?
One thing is for sure. You don't care about people. You don't care about their lives, as was made abundantly clear on wikipedia. You don't care about what people lost. Some 400.000 people lost everything, in many cases even friends and relatives, not to mention everything in their households. Documents, photos, clothes. Their homes? That goes without saying. And that's the problem.
I wanted to make the suggestion that everyone of the 100,000 or so people affected by the nuclear accident be paid half a million dollars. A family of four would get $2,000,000. Enough to start a new life. The problem is not the cost. $50bn is about a year's worth of coal, oil and gas being imported to replace nuclear power in Japan. The problem is the other 400,000 who will rightfully say that their losses were so much worse, that they should easily be entitled to get even more money.
Yes, it's a terrible accident and an avoidable one as well. It has been known since 1966 (p.50) that the Mark I BWR containment is unable to withstand a meltdown under any conditions, because it is too small. In case of a meltdown you either vent the containment in a controlled manner, or it leaks uncontrolled. Japan only saw the need to install filtered containment vents in any of its nuclear power plants in 2013 ... they must have had a problem in one of their nuclear plants or something. Strangely enough, neither Germany or France needed that kind of reminder to get to that point. They did it a quarter of a century before that. (And yes, it was after Chernobyl. But it's not like the Japanese never heard about that one.)
Sure, hundreds of thousands in Fukushima prefecture will get cancer. They are right.
Why? Because, as the japanese ministry of health reported in 2006 - some 43% of women and 53% of men get cancer at some point in their lives in Japan. And there are several hundred thousand people in Fukushima prefecture, hence the perfectly accurate and totally meaningless prediction.
Also, I guess I'd be the first "oil shill" arguing for more governmental regulation. Don't you think so?
First: If I was an "oil shill" I'd know about it. I'm not.
Second: If I said it *after* the protests start, then you'd say that what I said is worthless, because I said it after the fact.
I'm not being defensive. It's just activists using circular reasoning and self-defeating arguments all the time.
So, instead of protests *for* better regulation and better technical equipment, all we'll see are protests *against* oil.
As usual, the power hungry activists will not attempt to solve the problem, but instead use the problem to gain more power for themselves. I have never seen any activist trying to solve the problem they are protesting. The protests are just their PR campaigns to get more political power. Saving people's lives? It's not about protesting against exploding tank cars, it's about protesting against oil.
Unfortunately, solving the exploding oil-car problem would legitimize the oil production, so as any self-righteous activist can easily see, you cannot allow companies to actually do something against that. Not only would the publicity and media spectacle of exploding oil tank cars go away, the company that would actually solve the problem would be ... like ... legitimate! So, screw the tanks. Let the explode! We must protest against oil!
Why do you think your sparsely inhabited backwater on this planet is representative for the global car market? And for that matter, why do Tesla owners here in this thread and elsewhere think *they* are in any way representative for any population on this planet whatsoever, with the exception of the upper 0.5%?
Is your smug superiority superior enough to buy everyone else an electric car who can't afford to pay a cool $60,000 or $85,000 for theirs?
Rumor has it, that they'll have one heck of a torchlight at the landing spot.
Well, they want to sacrify about 20-30% payload (out of about 16 tons) to do the flyback. They also separate the first stage at Mach 6, or 1.8 km/s. But that's after leaving most of the atmosphere behind and overcoming a lot of the gravity losses during launch. So the actual energy budget is better than it seems to be. Still, the second stage has to do more work than it normally would - some 6km/s are left. About 5/6th of the second stage, including payload, must be fuel. But the engine weighs less than 700kg and tanks for kerosine and LOX only have about 2-3% of the mass of the fuel they contain. So, there is plenty left for the payload.
All of which makes the whole thing a lot more feasible with a lot less fuel than you'd ordinarily assume.
When you sell a new product, there are four cases:
A) Your product is better and more expensive.
B) Your product is better and cheaper.
C) Your product is worse and cheaper.
D) Your product is worse and more expensive.
There is only one case which will fail to materialize any significant sales, in case you didn't notice: it's D.
Tesla just about managed to get into the A category by having a roadster that is genuinely better than the competition in many, though not all, respects. It's a sports car, people are prepared to make compromises for performance. Most of all, they are prepared to make compromises in terms of the price. While the superiority of the Model S is limited to bragging rights, while range issues where addressed by brute force, that is in fact a unique selling point to a certain demographic that doesn't mind spending as much money on one car as other people would spend on five. Bragging rights aside, the Model S is still an inferior product compared to most other cars, including those of similar or much lower price.
Most other electric cars are firmly in the D category. They are both worse and more expensive. None of this is a game breaker by itself, but the combination is. The leaf is too limited by its battery to get even roughly in the territory of a normal car and it has no reserves to drive at higher speeds while still maintaining acceptable range. That's a non-issue for the Tesla, due to a huge battery pack and an equally huge price to go with it.
What nobody has done so far, is move into the C category. It doesn't matter if your product is worse, if you can sell it at a cheaper price than all the rest. We've seen this work with netbooks. Given full basic functionality, performance is much less of an issue than linear extrapolation would have you expect. You can sell a product at half price that has much less than a quarter of the performance in several metrics, so long as it still has full functionality. You could sell electric cars at half the price of the cheapest conventional cars - that is roughly 3-4000 euros - if they are still cars. An aerodynamic two-seat half-width car (passengers sitting behind each other, not next to each other), that can drive about 70km/h is enough for most needs in a city and limited over-land travel. Given the low price expectations are much lower. Given the smaller size and lower speed, much less energy is consumed. A 4 kWh battery could yield a range of about 100km, with some extra margin. Even a conventional wall outlet can charge this battery within an hour.
Most problems associated with high cost of electric cars are down to large size, high speeds, high weight and high range requirements, making large batteries an absolute necessity. Once you back away from large size and high speeds of conventional cars, the rest follows automatically. A small, relatively slow car needs 4kWh / 100km. A conventional car needs about four times as much, about 16kWh/ 100km. A battery that has only a quarter of the capacity can be charged in a quarter of the time. It is also just a quarter of the price, so it matters less if quick charging wears it down faster. The result is a much cheaper and much lighter car, that certainly doesn't need carbon fibre parts to save a few pounds. You could use something as pedestrian as a steel tube frame and still get a 300kg car.
500kt is large ever since people figured out how to actually *hit* anything with the darn things.
Back in the 50ies and 60ies you could easily be off by a mile and they'd still call it a bullseye. A few miles off wasn't unusual at all. That's not because they thought this is good, but because they knew it was the best they could do. Thus, in order to destroy a target you can't hit, you had to get a much bigger bomb in the general vicinity of your target. Because you didn't expect to be hit directly, people started building bunkered silos for their bombs and rockets. In order to destroy those, even if you couldn't expect to hit them, you needed even bigger bombs.
The better the targeting, the smaller the bombs became. Then bunker busters were developed that could not only hit a target the size of a few hundred meters size, they could also bury themselves in the ground by some 50m and explode there, with much greater effect in terms of shock waves. These days, a few 100kt is all you need to destroy anything you want.
In fact, for the most part, you don't need any nuclear weapons to destroy most things out there. Simply because of the accuracy of modern weaponry. Part of this is GPS, but since this is likely the first thing to be destroyed in a big war, people developed inertial guidance and other navigation systems that can do without it. Hence, 500kt is a big bomb these days and people are unlikely to build bigger ones for the foreseeable future. If only because it is much more effective hit several targets with a couple of warheads than just one or two with a big one.
It's a good idea and, like all good ideas, somebody already had it. It's called subcritical reactor. But it's nuclear fission technology and so, as usual in the last two or three decades, nobody really gives a shit.
It's just that the "pleasant bonus" isn't there. It's red herring.
I would be much less upset if this wasn't being called a fusion power project, because it simply isn't. And it hurts the credibility of the very real fusion power projects out there that can actually be scaled to be what they claim to be. NIF is just going to be yet another example people will hold up when they claim that fusion power is a sham and shouldn't be funded.
It's at best 5 times better. (21MeV from fusion of H-2 and H-3 vs. 200MeV from fission of U-235 or Pu-239). But since you won't use pure tritium and deuterium, and instead something like partially tritated lithium deuteride, where you breed your tritium from lithium in-situ, the ratio drops further to something like a factor of 3. In terms of volume (which is important for MIRVs), you'll find that using uranium is in fact *better* by a factor of 3 to 5.
And it isn't going to be lighter in any case, since you'll need some sort of a tamper anyway - and you might as well use uranium for that while you're at it.
Yeah, I made a mistake there. It's either 200,000,000 kJ per day or 200,000,000,000 J per day or 200,000,000,000 kJ per day to get 1GW and not 1MW.
What the NIF is all about is compressing D-T fuel by radiation pressure and finding out what kind of profile of the radiation pressure pulse has the highest yield. That's exactly what you do when you want to get a bigger bang out of the nuclear weapons you have, because your NATIONAL DICK isn't big enough yet to properly display your "patriotic" manlihood to the rest of the world that you feel like you have to dominate completely in order to feel like you've accomplished something.
By the way, the rest of the world doesn't agree with you oversized national libido, even if most countries officials don't say so openly.
Currently, they put in over 100 times as much energy into the lasers as they get out in term. Not to mention the energy it takes to engineer the fuel capsule or the inconvenient fact that it takes hours or days to properly set up and align everything, or that lasers at this kind of power level tend to wear down rather quickly. What they get out is 17kJ per shot. In order to get as little as 1MW of electricity out of this thing, you'll need a yield of 200.000.000.000 kJ per day. Plus whatever you need to keep the lasers running. (Currently 2000 kJ per shot.)
The "this is a potential fusion power plant" argument is a red herring.
Then do as you say and you'll find out you're wrong. Example: Castle Bravo had a yield of 15 megatons, 10 of which were fission, only 5 were fusion. This is a common feature of actually weaponized "hydrogen" bombs and most of those devices tested by the US somewhere down in the Pacific where they didn't care what happened with the fallout.
The Soviets, on the other hand, realized that since they had to test on their own territory, they best reduce the fission yield of their test devices as much as possible to cut down the fallout. Their largest bomb hat a yield of 50 megatons, with only 1.5 megatons of fission yield. But they could have added 50 megatons of fission yield at any time by replacing the lead tamper with natural uranium (which was in fact the original plan) and presumably another 50 or so by using highly enriched uranium in its place.
D-T Fusion releases seriously fast neutrons (some 17 MeV) that can split any kind of uranium and makes fission much more efficient, because you don't need to rely soley on the chain reaction to give you enough neutrons before the whole thing blows apart.
Well, there are people who know that FOUR 1GW nuclear power plants produce about 32TWh per year.
Now if somebody says that their 4GW power plant produces 6.4TWh per year, then yes, I do have the audacity to claim that this is worse than 32TWh per year. It is also worse than the 8TWh a single 1GW nuclear power plant would produce.
That's not about thinking I'm smarter than anybody. It just means that I know enough mathematics to evaluate that 8 > 6.4 and 32 > 6.4.
In real life, you're just trying to avoid thinking about it, because writing insults on the internet is so much more fun than thinking.
Instead of: "Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of far-left environmental groups," says Schweikert. "For far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions."
He should have said: "Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of capitalist corporations," says Schweikert. "For far too long, government agencies have approved regulations that have placed a crippling burden on the environment in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions."
I'm sure slashdot would have agreed.
The hypocrisy is strong in this discussion.
You mean, after running off into the ocean, it evaporates again and comes back down as rain. Whereas fracking removes the water, resulting in a lowering of sea levels of roughly one micrometer per year. This reduces the average area of sea surface evaporating water by some 0.3 square kilometers or 100 acres worldwide.
Yes, you are completely right. This will reduce the amount of rainfall available in dry areas of the US.
Even though one might argue that pumping the water into the crust will depress the crust into the mantle and lift areas along the edge of the continental crust instead, once isostatic equilibrium has been achieved, thus offsetting a few nanometers per year in the long run and increase the sea surface available for evaporation by as much as a few acres!