No! It never was! You can say that it's a "surprising result which needs to be confirmed," but you can't say "you're wrong, because theory says you're wrong."
Criticizing an experiment for not agreeing with theory is a horrible viewpoint. Experiments should get the benefit of the doubt until they're going against other experiments. As you point out.
Wait, that's a crappy argument. I mean, a really, really crappy one.
By that argument, you could say that Ray Davis's experiment didn't work, because it didn't agree with the Standard Model, so it obviously must have been wrong.
Ray Davis built the first neutrino detection experiment and found that there was only about a third of the neutrinos coming from the Sun that you would expect.
We now know that he was right - the Standard Model was (slightly) wrong, although in hindsight it should've been relatively obvious.
Saying "their experiment doesn't work because it doesn't agree with the Standard Model" is horrible science. The Standard Model is a theory. It doesn't describe reality. It's a -guess- for how the world works - a well founded, well supported guess, and the best one we have, but still a guess. If you find that the world works in a different way, that doesn't mean your experiment must be wrong.
There are plenty of other reasons to criticize cold fusion (the lack of repeatability being the main one) but "it doesn't agree with current theory" is about the worst criticism you can give.
That's kindof the crux of the problem, actually. Assuming their measurements are right (that's a bit of an assumption, but there are quite a few people who claim that Pd-D cells generate excess heat, so maybe it's not THAT crazy) they're correct that it has to be nuclear - the energy density required is too high for it to be chemical.
But it doesn't have to be -fusion-. Palladium is past iron, so -in theory- you can gain energy by transmuting it downward, and some of them are claiming that they're seeing elements after the cell was run that weren't there before.
I'm not saying they're right, of course. It's still physics that would break with standard nuclear physics, but I'm always surprised that they keep pushing it as -fusion-, when they clearly don't understand (and admit that they don't understand!) what (if anything) is going on.
Note, incidentally, that if you read, for instance, the DOE report on anomalous heat from D-Pd cells, that both sides of the discussion are at fault here. A fair number of the criticisms ("your explanation doesn't agree with current theory, so it must be wrong!" even when the explanation is essentially "it must be nuclear, but we have no idea how") and arguments on both sides are pretty crappy.
At best, it accounts for what it accounts for: stellar light from the observable universe getting redshifted, and some fraction of it getting reemitted in IR.... preventing us from seeing the stars whose light gets completely absorbed.
Now, if you're saying "the CIBR isn't bright enough to account for that", you're right. But that's a subtler problem than Olber's paradox.
The CMB is only evidence of photon decoupling from a plasma phase.
The CMB is evidence that there once weren't stars. That's finite enough for most people.
"We're only halfway up [the cycle] and we're already 50 percent worse [in terms of storms]. To me, that's a compelling issue that needs to be confronted."
Yes. They do, in fact know about the cycle.
Many scientists have studied past hurricanes
Yah, sure. That doesn't mean these guys are wrong. Scientists, y'know, discover stuff. And while a link hadn't been found before, it's entirely possible that it has been found now.
"We have not observed a long-term increase in the intensity or frequency of Atlantic hurricanes. Actually, 1991-1994 marked the four quietest years on record (back to the mid-1940s) with just less than 4 hurricanes per year.".
Which is what makes this new study actually news.
Note that NOAA is saying "we haven't seen a long-term increase in hurricane intensity".
This study now says "well, now you have, because there is one."
It should also be noted that this study studied all hurricane regions, not just the Atlantic region.
Olber's Paradox is actually easily solved using just dust extinction. Curiously, the Wikipedia article doesn't allow for this as a solution, as they say "well, that'd produce uniform radiation in another band, and we don't see that" even though we do: the cosmic infrared background radiation.
You also could have an inflationary period (where space expands faster than the speed of light) which shoves all of the Universe outside of your cosmic horizon. That'd work, too.
The better answer for "why don't we believe the Universe is eternal?" is the CMB. It's really hard to imagine the CMB being formed by anything other than the Universe in a compact, highly dense form.
FTL is not bunk because gawd/allah/odin/yahweh/ram said so. FTL is bunk because it ameaningless state in a classical timelike metric.
That's funny. An object taking less than the light travel time to travel a given distance as viewed from the rest frame of the destinations? Sure, that's possible - the Alcubierre metric allows for that, as well as any variety of multiply connected spacetimes.
Heck, faster than light in the terms of "how far is object X away from me now minus how far object X was away from me yesterday divided by a day" is certainly possible - if the Universe is accelerating, then eventually things will be moving faster than light away from you - they'll be past your cosmic horizon.
What?!?!?!?! Where? Nobody in the legit academia has produced "cold fusion" (because it's also meaningless).
In a sense, this is similar to what the grandparent mentioned. There are people looking into similar things to the Pons & Fleischmann deuterated palladium cell system. Some of them still call it "cold fusion" - most call it something else.
In their case, they have a setup, it does something weird, energy balance really only leaves nuclear reactions (though not necessarily fusion, palladium is past iron) possible. But academia in general is skeptical and continues to attach the term "cold fusion", which is silly.
But still, criticizing people who use that term for historical reasons is quite harsh.
In no uncertain terms, physical space is increasingly irrelevant.
Tell that to the asteroid that's barreling down on us (and make no mistake, there is one - we just don't know where or how far away it is).
This navel-contemplation point of view is interesting. But that nasty "real world" will get in the way from time to time.
If you want a more esoteric argument, also consider that it's entirely possible that human information space is limited by physical space. That is, we simply don't explore possible avenues because of the physical space we're in. This is usually called "necessity is the mother of invention."
I'm a bachelor living in a small-ish suburban home. The odds are extremely slim that I'm going to live in this house for 40 years.
Doesn't matter. You've got a capital cost that you've invested into your house: $3000. That'll raise the price of your house when you sell it. If I were setting the price myself, I'd probably up it about $5000 if the average monthly savings is $50/month - the person buying the house will pay $25/month in interest (at 6%) to cover the extra $5000, which means they still win out. But at the least it's going to be like $2500 or more.
According to the Appraisal Institute, in 2004, a solar power system increased home value by $20,000 for every $1000 it lowers annual operating costs. That would make this worth $12,000. This number's likely gone down given the cost of solar panels, but maybe not, as it's probably just based on the average interest rates.
(being optimistic about how long the panels hold up to Minnesota winters.)
Minnesota solar panel use is pretty common. Solar panels are pretty robust. 10 years is way too low. At least 20, likely more. Certain solar panels will, in fact, last longer than your roof. Which means that hey, they decrease the cost of replacing your roof!
What's 12% interest on $3000 over ten years?
12% interest is high even for credit cards. But why wouldn't you want to take out a home improvement loan? That is, in fact, what you're doing. Several banks over percentage-point discounts for solar panel home equity loans.
I have friends who wouldn't want to put a $20 garden gnome outside their house, let alone a $3000 easy-to-damage solar array.
The only reason I don't do it is because I can't. Most people do forget to consider the fact that it is a home improvement, and therefore, the per-month cost savings are pretty much free considering the capital improvement gains.
Ethanol is about as akin to photovoltaics as the heat generated from a lump of radioactive material is to a nuclear power plant. Sure, both extract energy from the same source, but the efficiency with which they do so is orders of magnitude different.
Chlorophyll is at most 11% efficient to carbohydrates. In reality it's more like 3%-6%. This doesn't even consider the cost of harvesting the biofuel or conversion into carbohydrates, which likely pushes it down an insane amount.
Commercial solar panels are 15% to electricity. Of course, the problem is that ethanol is considered for fuel replacement, and you can't use solar panels to power a car., battery power isn't anywhere near large enough, and electricity->fuel source->motive power is ridiculously inefficient. But if you could, they'd be orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of space utilization. Using ethanol to generate electricity is extraordinarily inefficient. The low capital cost of ethanol generation might make ethanol more cost-efficient for about a year, but I highly, highly doubt that it'd be longer than that. It might not even be, considering the cost of an ethanol plant.
The two are fundamentally different technologies. Solar panels for electricity have real competition from direct solar heating (solar power towers) but that competition is very, very dependent on the solar panel lifetime (currently... pretty much unmeasured. They used to quote 20 years. It's not 20 years.), cost, and efficiency, all of which are likely to improve.
I still doubt that ethanol (from plants - as in, the kind of plants we eat) is even the best way to go. As I noted above, in plants, chlorophyll -> carbohydrates is a factor of 3 less efficient than it could be. If ethanol started to be used, I'm pretty sure that someone would come up with a much more direct chemical chain than using plants, which waste energy on that whole "growing" thing.
The Keremey report concluded that there was no danger from these spikes.
Yes, but they were, in fact, explosions. It's just that the explosions were contained. The pressure spikes were something like 30 pounds per square inch or so, if memory serves? That's, uh, enough to damage things if not material isn't strong enough.
The "and detonated the resulting hydrogen" part was badly worded. I didn't mean to imply that the core detonated the hydrogen, just that the resulting hydrogen detonated as well.
Well, I guess saying "some of the resulting hydrogen detonated as well" would be even more clear. I probably should've said "Three Mile Island had an explosion", as well. It's not like an explosion caused the problem. But saying that nuclear reactors don't go "boom" is a little silly, especially when TMI was probably only a few days away from going boom, and Chernobyl definitely went boom.
No, because the oxygen was consumed by the zircronium. Basic fire triangle. Fuel plus ignition source minus oxygen equals no fire.
There was danger for a very, very serious explosion. They realized what was going on in enough time (thanks in part to the minor explosions) to prevent a major explosion. If memory serves, a lot of what was done in the later stage was done to deal with the hydrogen bubble which had built up.
In any case, the containment vessel still would've been enough. But you would've had a lot of injured/dead workers.
The entire point of what I was saying is that nuclear reactors can, and do blow up. They don't blow up like a nuclear bomb, no, but all designs of nuclear reactors can blow up. That doesn't mean they're not safe, but it does mean there's always risk.
The ceramic coatings on PBR designs melt far hotter than the reactors are capable of producing, so they are passively safe.
PBRs do have the benefit that they have a guaranteed negative void coefficient, which in some sense, makes them "nuclear safe". But they're still a reactor.
PBR systems still boil water. Not as primary coolant, true, but they still do. I'm not entirely sure that the helium that's typically used as coolant couldn't boil and blow up, as well. That would depend on the design.
One of the main reasons PBRs are economically effective is because they don't use a containment building. To me, that's just crazy. You've got a ton of power in a small area. That's always going to have the potential to go "boom". You're just asking Nature to find a way.
Interestingly, one of the things that's important to realize is that nuclear reactors are so few currently that you can pretty much ignore double and triple failures as "never going to happen". But they're few because of the economics/politics/social ramifications. The people who are pushing nuclear reactors as "safe" currently do need to realize that if you scale up a design from, say, 10 reactors in the world to 1000 reactors in the world, you're going to have problems you didn't see in the original 10.
I am not sure what you design to "contain" a blast like that.
You build a containment vessel.
The fact that one couldn't be built economically for a reactor the size of Chernobyl just tells you that Chernobyl's design was stupid.
All reactors that rely on boiling liquid to gas to generate electricity or anything else can potentially blow up, if the liquid boils to excessive pressure. Building one such reactor without a containment vessel to handle an explosion is stupid. It's doubly stupid if you've got radioactive material near said possible bomb.
(even Chernobyl didn't realy explode, it released a huge cloud of radioactive gas)
What do you mean by "explode"? Are you thinking "turn into a nuclear bomb" explode? If so, yah, I agree, but that's mainly because reactors aren't built to be a bomb. Chernobyl did blow up - the boiler definitely exploded. Blew the roof off of the building. Several other things blew up, too. Heck, there was a seismic event recorded near Chernobyl at the same time, so I think it's safe to say there was an explosion.
Three Mile Island was an explosion, too. The core became exposed, boiled away a ton of water (and split it into hydrogen and oxygen), and detonated the resulting hydrogen as well.
If you're trying to say that nuclear reactors don't turn into a nuclear bomb, I'd agree with you. But all reactors that burn things and boil liquid into gas under lots of pressure for electricity can explode.
Now, it's perfectly possible to contain that explosion (using a containment building) but saying "oh, nuclear reactors are safe, they can't explode" is a little false. They can explode, and they would spew a lot of radioactivity. It's just that there are a lot of safeguards built in. Forgetting this means you could end up with a situation like Chernobyl, where the system was built with only partial containment. With a coal reactor, you might be able to get away with that, although it would still make a giant mess. With a nuclear reactor, you absolutely cannot.
Even a catestophic coolant lose doesn't result in a meltdown
While they can't meltdown, I'm not sure that doesn't mean they can't blow up. Chernobyl was a boiler explosion followed by a meltdown - unless I don't understand pebble bed reactors, they still use a gas turbine, which means there's gas under pressure. If that blows up, the resulting mass would be pretty annoying, depending on exactly how large the explosion was.
Of course, all reactors based on burning things can have a boiler explosion, but not all of them would spew radioactive fuel if they did.
If the money that went into space exploration or military research went directly into research for civilian use, it would be much more productive at producing consumer technology.
That sounds logical, but is it true? Suppose you tried to invest money into research for, say, I dunno, teleoperated construction machinery. Also suppose there wasn't really any need for it - there's no real demand.
Are you sure that the research would still continue?
Now suppose instead that same research is being done for lunar construction techniques. Which sounds more interesting? Which do you think is going to actually get more people interested in doing it?
Your response might be "if there's no demand, it's pointless" which is wrong, as inventions often create demand after they're invented - because people didn't see the potential beforehand.
I guess, in some way, you can say that "pure science is what we do to keep smart people interested." Which seems fair to me.
It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.
ah well, except that we have tens, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of space elevator to pay for, maintain and operate.
True. But why did the elevator cost that much? Launch costs.
Once you've got one elevator, the next becomes much cheaper. (It actually just becomes the pretty much cost of the interest for the debt that you've paid to build it. If it was built by a government entity, then it'd be virtually free.)
It has to be able to handle lots of lifts to pay for itself.
Which means you just deploy more elevators. Once it becomes economically feasible to launch the first elevator, pretty much regardless of its lift capacity (within reason), it should be reasonable to scale it up to handle any climber speed.
Double implies 2 nearly equally bright stars in close proximity.
Eh. It depends. Really, optical doubles are pointless from an astrophysics point of view, so it's just amateur astronomers who are interested in them basically as a test of the fidelity of the telescope.
There's no real definition for optical double. Note the "33 Doubles" page linked. Many of those doubles aren't equally bright at all. It's just that if you look at them with one size telescope, it looks like one star. With a bigger telescope, you can resolve the dim companions.
Altair has quite a few companions visible at higher magnification.
Yah, it's a screw up (no one really cares if it's got an optical counterpart), but someone likely confused "double" and "binary", which isn't surprising.
Ignoring the fact that the name's origin initially comes from the fact that it was a last gasp from Square at the time, there's probably other reasons why the series started out that way.
Every single game in the Final Fantasy series is an apocalyptic story. The world is ending in every single one.
Each one, therefore, is a Final Fantasy - the Final Fantasy for that world. (Okay, Final Fantasy X-2 screwed the pooch on that one, but hey, it's fan service anyway. It should've been called something else.)
I know most people use the "last gasp" justification for it, but it does make sense from a story perspective as well. There is a common thread for all Final Fantasy games - "win, or the world ends." As an example, Dragon Quest VII's story would not have fit well, nor would Breath of Fire III. Final Fantasies tend to be a bit more "over the top" - "hi, I'm going to smash the world to bits", "hi, I'm going to wipe out all time", etc.
How doesn't it lower the launch costs? They've already done what they describe. They could build a rover right now which would build those cells on the Moon. It would be limited by the supply of the solar cell material, which could be replenished.
I'm missing something. Is there some reason the thin-film material couldn't be replenished?
First off, electromagnetic tether reboosting doesn't yet exist. I support research in it
Which... is what "designing" is. If you said "we want to design a maintenance free satellite" the first thing you'd do is go out and dump money into research for stuff like electrodynamic propulsion.
Why do you keep bringing up fossil fuels?
Because they're proven to scale. While I mostly agree that solar thermal is a good thing, for some reason the rest of the industry doesn't seem to agree. The original test plant in the US is now being used for cosmic ray detection. Unless there are plans in the US that I'm unaware of. There are some plants being built in Europe, I know, but not in the US.
You're talking creating debt to reduce a trade deficit at essentially 1:1, which is purely foolish.
No, it's not (*). Governments can control the debt they have. They cannot control a deficit in trade. One case gives you economic problems which you, yourself, can manage. The other case gives you economic problems which another country forces upon you. Governments having debt is not a bad thing - it gives them some control over their economy. Countries having a trade deficit is a bad thing.
(*: It depends what you mean by 1:1. Really, you'd want to incur debt to reduce the trade deficit such that the increase in taxes from the reduction at least pays the premiums for the debt borrowed.)
It wasn't that big a deal. Basically the only reason it was an "emergency" is because the situation "could've been bad". But it wasn't. It was just a faulty reading - i.e., a false alarm.
Feel free to call him an "Exelon flack", but then I'll have to find you and beat you. The tritium leaks are a bigger deal, but the emergency was nothing.
Which is curious, because the substrate is - by weight - the largest component of the solar cells. If nothing else, the ability to create the substrate reduces the launch weight dramatically. And yes, they did demonstrate actually making the solar cell, not just the substrate. It's just that the cell was deposited on, not made in situ.
And isn't "launch weight" all that really matters? Who cares if you need to resupply a rover with 10 kg of solar cell material if it can make 100 MW worth of solar power with it?
Not with adaptive optics on laser power beaming.
You said it was small fractions of one percent. That was microwave power beaming. The reason that laser power beaming is chosen in the Edwards design is because with microwave power beaming you lose the beam.
It's not small fractions of one percent for microwave power beaming. It's 50% or higher with the right choice of receiver and transmitter sizes.
A much, much easier task. I'd wager 50/50 that someone wins it.
Curiously enough, you usually don't start with the most difficult task first, because by doing easier tasks, you're smarter when you take on the harder task.
And you're much more pessimistic than I am. I'd say there's a 10% chance at best that someone doesn't win that.
NASA's last estimate determined launch costs would need to be less than 500$/kg to make it realistic.
Eh. You can afford to spend more money on power that won't go up in price in the future. Besides, those estimates were more appropriate for a business than for a government.
And as for stationkeeping, it's not like you can't design a satellite to last nearly forever. It's just that no one does, because no one needs to. There've been plenty of ideas about stationkeeping a satellite using electromagnetic tethers and other mechanisms. They're just not economical. Why? Because typical satellites have a short lifespan. Now, if you had a satellite that had to have a long lifespan, that's different.
Yah, they're not practical now. So what? Spend $1B on research on them for 5 years and they will be. There's no economic pressure to develop one right now, and so - curiously - any current implementation we have of it is completely unfeasible.
But anyway, space power is expensive so long as we (the US) have ridiculous quantities of cheap coal available. We do, now. And lots of people think that it'll stay that way forever. I'm not so optimistic. Not because we'll run out, but for plenty of other reasons. Now, if we were a country that got most of our power from oil... that's a much, much different question.
In exchange for creating debt, which is even worse.
Depends on the amount, and the amount that the trade deficit was reduced. I have no doubt that most economists would agree that creating moderate debt to reduce the trade deficit (and the projected future trade deficit) greatly is an obvious tradeoff. Short term debt is worth it if it fundamentally changes the viability of your economy.
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Which would have been a reasonable thing to say
No! It never was! You can say that it's a "surprising result which needs to be confirmed," but you can't say "you're wrong, because theory says you're wrong."
Criticizing an experiment for not agreeing with theory is a horrible viewpoint. Experiments should get the benefit of the doubt until they're going against other experiments. As you point out.
Wait, that's a crappy argument. I mean, a really, really crappy one.
By that argument, you could say that Ray Davis's experiment didn't work, because it didn't agree with the Standard Model, so it obviously must have been wrong.
Ray Davis built the first neutrino detection experiment and found that there was only about a third of the neutrinos coming from the Sun that you would expect.
We now know that he was right - the Standard Model was (slightly) wrong, although in hindsight it should've been relatively obvious.
Saying "their experiment doesn't work because it doesn't agree with the Standard Model" is horrible science. The Standard Model is a theory. It doesn't describe reality. It's a -guess- for how the world works - a well founded, well supported guess, and the best one we have, but still a guess. If you find that the world works in a different way, that doesn't mean your experiment must be wrong.
There are plenty of other reasons to criticize cold fusion (the lack of repeatability being the main one) but "it doesn't agree with current theory" is about the worst criticism you can give.
That's kindof the crux of the problem, actually. Assuming their measurements are right (that's a bit of an assumption, but there are quite a few people who claim that Pd-D cells generate excess heat, so maybe it's not THAT crazy) they're correct that it has to be nuclear - the energy density required is too high for it to be chemical.
But it doesn't have to be -fusion-. Palladium is past iron, so -in theory- you can gain energy by transmuting it downward, and some of them are claiming that they're seeing elements after the cell was run that weren't there before.
I'm not saying they're right, of course. It's still physics that would break with standard nuclear physics, but I'm always surprised that they keep pushing it as -fusion-, when they clearly don't understand (and admit that they don't understand!) what (if anything) is going on.
Note, incidentally, that if you read, for instance, the DOE report on anomalous heat from D-Pd cells, that both sides of the discussion are at fault here. A fair number of the criticisms ("your explanation doesn't agree with current theory, so it must be wrong!" even when the explanation is essentially "it must be nuclear, but we have no idea how") and arguments on both sides are pretty crappy.
At best, it accounts for what it accounts for: stellar light from the observable universe getting redshifted, and some fraction of it getting reemitted in IR. ... preventing us from seeing the stars whose light gets completely absorbed.
Now, if you're saying "the CIBR isn't bright enough to account for that", you're right. But that's a subtler problem than Olber's paradox.
The CMB is only evidence of photon decoupling from a plasma phase.
The CMB is evidence that there once weren't stars. That's finite enough for most people.
Are you sure? From the article...
Yes. They do, in fact know about the cycle.
Many scientists have studied past hurricanes
Yah, sure. That doesn't mean these guys are wrong. Scientists, y'know, discover stuff. And while a link hadn't been found before, it's entirely possible that it has been found now.
"We have not observed a long-term increase in the intensity or frequency of Atlantic hurricanes. Actually, 1991-1994 marked the four quietest years on record (back to the mid-1940s) with just less than 4 hurricanes per year.".
Which is what makes this new study actually news.
Note that NOAA is saying "we haven't seen a long-term increase in hurricane intensity".
This study now says "well, now you have, because there is one."
It should also be noted that this study studied all hurricane regions, not just the Atlantic region.
Well, there's Obler's Paradox for one.
Olber's Paradox is actually easily solved using just dust extinction. Curiously, the Wikipedia article doesn't allow for this as a solution, as they say "well, that'd produce uniform radiation in another band, and we don't see that" even though we do: the cosmic infrared background radiation.
You also could have an inflationary period (where space expands faster than the speed of light) which shoves all of the Universe outside of your cosmic horizon. That'd work, too.
The better answer for "why don't we believe the Universe is eternal?" is the CMB. It's really hard to imagine the CMB being formed by anything other than the Universe in a compact, highly dense form.
Or it could be because you spelled Tiananmen wrong.
FTL is not bunk because gawd/allah/odin/yahweh/ram said so. FTL is bunk because it ameaningless state in a classical timelike metric.
That's funny. An object taking less than the light travel time to travel a given distance as viewed from the rest frame of the destinations? Sure, that's possible - the Alcubierre metric allows for that, as well as any variety of multiply connected spacetimes.
Heck, faster than light in the terms of "how far is object X away from me now minus how far object X was away from me yesterday divided by a day" is certainly possible - if the Universe is accelerating, then eventually things will be moving faster than light away from you - they'll be past your cosmic horizon.
What?!?!?!?! Where? Nobody in the legit academia has produced "cold fusion" (because it's also meaningless).
In a sense, this is similar to what the grandparent mentioned. There are people looking into similar things to the Pons & Fleischmann deuterated palladium cell system. Some of them still call it "cold fusion" - most call it something else.
In their case, they have a setup, it does something weird, energy balance really only leaves nuclear reactions (though not necessarily fusion, palladium is past iron) possible. But academia in general is skeptical and continues to attach the term "cold fusion", which is silly.
But still, criticizing people who use that term for historical reasons is quite harsh.
In no uncertain terms, physical space is increasingly irrelevant.
Tell that to the asteroid that's barreling down on us (and make no mistake, there is one - we just don't know where or how far away it is).
This navel-contemplation point of view is interesting. But that nasty "real world" will get in the way from time to time.
If you want a more esoteric argument, also consider that it's entirely possible that human information space is limited by physical space. That is, we simply don't explore possible avenues because of the physical space we're in. This is usually called "necessity is the mother of invention."
I'm a bachelor living in a small-ish suburban home. The odds are extremely slim that I'm going to live in this house for 40 years.
Doesn't matter. You've got a capital cost that you've invested into your house: $3000. That'll raise the price of your house when you sell it. If I were setting the price myself, I'd probably up it about $5000 if the average monthly savings is $50/month - the person buying the house will pay $25/month in interest (at 6%) to cover the extra $5000, which means they still win out. But at the least it's going to be like $2500 or more.
According to the Appraisal Institute, in 2004, a solar power system increased home value by $20,000 for every $1000 it lowers annual operating costs. That would make this worth $12,000. This number's likely gone down given the cost of solar panels, but maybe not, as it's probably just based on the average interest rates.
(being optimistic about how long the panels hold up to Minnesota winters.)
Minnesota solar panel use is pretty common. Solar panels are pretty robust. 10 years is way too low. At least 20, likely more. Certain solar panels will, in fact, last longer than your roof. Which means that hey, they decrease the cost of replacing your roof!
What's 12% interest on $3000 over ten years?
12% interest is high even for credit cards. But why wouldn't you want to take out a home improvement loan? That is, in fact, what you're doing. Several banks over percentage-point discounts for solar panel home equity loans.
I have friends who wouldn't want to put a $20 garden gnome outside their house, let alone a $3000 easy-to-damage solar array.
Solar shingles don't look like a garden gnome.
The only reason I don't do it is because I can't. Most people do forget to consider the fact that it is a home improvement, and therefore, the per-month cost savings are pretty much free considering the capital improvement gains.
Anyway, ethanol is essentially solar power
... pretty much unmeasured. They used to quote 20 years. It's not 20 years.), cost, and efficiency, all of which are likely to improve.
Ethanol is about as akin to photovoltaics as the heat generated from a lump of radioactive material is to a nuclear power plant. Sure, both extract energy from the same source, but the efficiency with which they do so is orders of magnitude different.
Chlorophyll is at most 11% efficient to carbohydrates. In reality it's more like 3%-6%. This doesn't even consider the cost of harvesting the biofuel or conversion into carbohydrates, which likely pushes it down an insane amount.
Commercial solar panels are 15% to electricity. Of course, the problem is that ethanol is considered for fuel replacement, and you can't use solar panels to power a car., battery power isn't anywhere near large enough, and electricity->fuel source->motive power is ridiculously inefficient. But if you could, they'd be orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of space utilization. Using ethanol to generate electricity is extraordinarily inefficient. The low capital cost of ethanol generation might make ethanol more cost-efficient for about a year, but I highly, highly doubt that it'd be longer than that. It might not even be, considering the cost of an ethanol plant.
The two are fundamentally different technologies. Solar panels for electricity have real competition from direct solar heating (solar power towers) but that competition is very, very dependent on the solar panel lifetime (currently
I still doubt that ethanol (from plants - as in, the kind of plants we eat) is even the best way to go. As I noted above, in plants, chlorophyll -> carbohydrates is a factor of 3 less efficient than it could be. If ethanol started to be used, I'm pretty sure that someone would come up with a much more direct chemical chain than using plants, which waste energy on that whole "growing" thing.
The Keremey report concluded that there was no danger from these spikes.
Yes, but they were, in fact, explosions. It's just that the explosions were contained. The pressure spikes were something like 30 pounds per square inch or so, if memory serves? That's, uh, enough to damage things if not material isn't strong enough.
The "and detonated the resulting hydrogen" part was badly worded. I didn't mean to imply that the core detonated the hydrogen, just that the resulting hydrogen detonated as well.
Well, I guess saying "some of the resulting hydrogen detonated as well" would be even more clear. I probably should've said "Three Mile Island had an explosion", as well. It's not like an explosion caused the problem. But saying that nuclear reactors don't go "boom" is a little silly, especially when TMI was probably only a few days away from going boom, and Chernobyl definitely went boom.
No, because the oxygen was consumed by the zircronium. Basic fire triangle. Fuel plus ignition source minus oxygen equals no fire.
There was danger for a very, very serious explosion. They realized what was going on in enough time (thanks in part to the minor explosions) to prevent a major explosion. If memory serves, a lot of what was done in the later stage was done to deal with the hydrogen bubble which had built up.
In any case, the containment vessel still would've been enough. But you would've had a lot of injured/dead workers.
The entire point of what I was saying is that nuclear reactors can, and do blow up. They don't blow up like a nuclear bomb, no, but all designs of nuclear reactors can blow up. That doesn't mean they're not safe, but it does mean there's always risk.
The ceramic coatings on PBR designs melt far hotter than the reactors are capable of producing, so they are passively safe.
PBRs do have the benefit that they have a guaranteed negative void coefficient, which in some sense, makes them "nuclear safe". But they're still a reactor.
PBR systems still boil water. Not as primary coolant, true, but they still do. I'm not entirely sure that the helium that's typically used as coolant couldn't boil and blow up, as well. That would depend on the design.
One of the main reasons PBRs are economically effective is because they don't use a containment building. To me, that's just crazy. You've got a ton of power in a small area. That's always going to have the potential to go "boom". You're just asking Nature to find a way.
Interestingly, one of the things that's important to realize is that nuclear reactors are so few currently that you can pretty much ignore double and triple failures as "never going to happen". But they're few because of the economics/politics/social ramifications. The people who are pushing nuclear reactors as "safe" currently do need to realize that if you scale up a design from, say, 10 reactors in the world to 1000 reactors in the world, you're going to have problems you didn't see in the original 10.
I am not sure what you design to "contain" a blast like that.
You build a containment vessel.
The fact that one couldn't be built economically for a reactor the size of Chernobyl just tells you that Chernobyl's design was stupid.
All reactors that rely on boiling liquid to gas to generate electricity or anything else can potentially blow up, if the liquid boils to excessive pressure. Building one such reactor without a containment vessel to handle an explosion is stupid. It's doubly stupid if you've got radioactive material near said possible bomb.
(even Chernobyl didn't realy explode, it released a huge cloud of radioactive gas)
What do you mean by "explode"? Are you thinking "turn into a nuclear bomb" explode? If so, yah, I agree, but that's mainly because reactors aren't built to be a bomb. Chernobyl did blow up - the boiler definitely exploded. Blew the roof off of the building. Several other things blew up, too. Heck, there was a seismic event recorded near Chernobyl at the same time, so I think it's safe to say there was an explosion.
Three Mile Island was an explosion, too. The core became exposed, boiled away a ton of water (and split it into hydrogen and oxygen), and detonated the resulting hydrogen as well.
If you're trying to say that nuclear reactors don't turn into a nuclear bomb, I'd agree with you. But all reactors that burn things and boil liquid into gas under lots of pressure for electricity can explode.
Now, it's perfectly possible to contain that explosion (using a containment building) but saying "oh, nuclear reactors are safe, they can't explode" is a little false. They can explode, and they would spew a lot of radioactivity. It's just that there are a lot of safeguards built in. Forgetting this means you could end up with a situation like Chernobyl, where the system was built with only partial containment. With a coal reactor, you might be able to get away with that, although it would still make a giant mess. With a nuclear reactor, you absolutely cannot.
Even a catestophic coolant lose doesn't result in a meltdown
While they can't meltdown, I'm not sure that doesn't mean they can't blow up. Chernobyl was a boiler explosion followed by a meltdown - unless I don't understand pebble bed reactors, they still use a gas turbine, which means there's gas under pressure. If that blows up, the resulting mass would be pretty annoying, depending on exactly how large the explosion was.
Of course, all reactors based on burning things can have a boiler explosion, but not all of them would spew radioactive fuel if they did.
If the money that went into space exploration or military research went directly into research for civilian use, it would be much more productive at producing consumer technology.
That sounds logical, but is it true? Suppose you tried to invest money into research for, say, I dunno, teleoperated construction machinery. Also suppose there wasn't really any need for it - there's no real demand.
Are you sure that the research would still continue?
Now suppose instead that same research is being done for lunar construction techniques. Which sounds more interesting? Which do you think is going to actually get more people interested in doing it?
Your response might be "if there's no demand, it's pointless" which is wrong, as inventions often create demand after they're invented - because people didn't see the potential beforehand.
I guess, in some way, you can say that "pure science is what we do to keep smart people interested." Which seems fair to me.
A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.
There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.
It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.
ah well, except that we have tens, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of space elevator to pay for, maintain and operate.
True. But why did the elevator cost that much? Launch costs.
Once you've got one elevator, the next becomes much cheaper. (It actually just becomes the pretty much cost of the interest for the debt that you've paid to build it. If it was built by a government entity, then it'd be virtually free.)
It has to be able to handle lots of lifts to pay for itself.
Which means you just deploy more elevators. Once it becomes economically feasible to launch the first elevator, pretty much regardless of its lift capacity (within reason), it should be reasonable to scale it up to handle any climber speed.
Double implies 2 nearly equally bright stars in close proximity.
Eh. It depends. Really, optical doubles are pointless from an astrophysics point of view, so it's just amateur astronomers who are interested in them basically as a test of the fidelity of the telescope.
There's no real definition for optical double. Note the "33 Doubles" page linked. Many of those doubles aren't equally bright at all. It's just that if you look at them with one size telescope, it looks like one star. With a bigger telescope, you can resolve the dim companions.
Altair is NOT double.
A double star is not a binary star.
Altair has quite a few companions visible at higher magnification.
Yah, it's a screw up (no one really cares if it's got an optical counterpart), but someone likely confused "double" and "binary", which isn't surprising.
Ignoring the fact that the name's origin initially comes from the fact that it was a last gasp from Square at the time, there's probably other reasons why the series started out that way.
Every single game in the Final Fantasy series is an apocalyptic story. The world is ending in every single one.
Each one, therefore, is a Final Fantasy - the Final Fantasy for that world. (Okay, Final Fantasy X-2 screwed the pooch on that one, but hey, it's fan service anyway. It should've been called something else.)
I know most people use the "last gasp" justification for it, but it does make sense from a story perspective as well. There is a common thread for all Final Fantasy games - "win, or the world ends." As an example, Dragon Quest VII's story would not have fit well, nor would Breath of Fire III. Final Fantasies tend to be a bit more "over the top" - "hi, I'm going to smash the world to bits", "hi, I'm going to wipe out all time", etc.
Here, lets look at their description.
How doesn't it lower the launch costs? They've already done what they describe. They could build a rover right now which would build those cells on the Moon. It would be limited by the supply of the solar cell material, which could be replenished.
I'm missing something. Is there some reason the thin-film material couldn't be replenished?
First off, electromagnetic tether reboosting doesn't yet exist. I support research in it
Which... is what "designing" is. If you said "we want to design a maintenance free satellite" the first thing you'd do is go out and dump money into research for stuff like electrodynamic propulsion.
Why do you keep bringing up fossil fuels?
Because they're proven to scale. While I mostly agree that solar thermal is a good thing, for some reason the rest of the industry doesn't seem to agree. The original test plant in the US is now being used for cosmic ray detection. Unless there are plans in the US that I'm unaware of. There are some plants being built in Europe, I know, but not in the US.
You're talking creating debt to reduce a trade deficit at essentially 1:1, which is purely foolish.
No, it's not (*). Governments can control the debt they have. They cannot control a deficit in trade. One case gives you economic problems which you, yourself, can manage. The other case gives you economic problems which another country forces upon you. Governments having debt is not a bad thing - it gives them some control over their economy. Countries having a trade deficit is a bad thing.
(*: It depends what you mean by 1:1. Really, you'd want to incur debt to reduce the trade deficit such that the increase in taxes from the reduction at least pays the premiums for the debt borrowed.)
Blah, blah, blah, overblown blah blah blah.
It wasn't that big a deal. Basically the only reason it was an "emergency" is because the situation "could've been bad". But it wasn't. It was just a faulty reading - i.e., a false alarm.
Feel free to call him an "Exelon flack", but then I'll have to find you and beat you. The tritium leaks are a bigger deal, but the emergency was nothing.
I could give a flying flip about the backing ;)
Which is curious, because the substrate is - by weight - the largest component of the solar cells. If nothing else, the ability to create the substrate reduces the launch weight dramatically. And yes, they did demonstrate actually making the solar cell, not just the substrate. It's just that the cell was deposited on, not made in situ.
And isn't "launch weight" all that really matters? Who cares if you need to resupply a rover with 10 kg of solar cell material if it can make 100 MW worth of solar power with it?
Not with adaptive optics on laser power beaming.
You said it was small fractions of one percent. That was microwave power beaming. The reason that laser power beaming is chosen in the Edwards design is because with microwave power beaming you lose the beam.
It's not small fractions of one percent for microwave power beaming. It's 50% or higher with the right choice of receiver and transmitter sizes.
A much, much easier task. I'd wager 50/50 that someone wins it.
Curiously enough, you usually don't start with the most difficult task first, because by doing easier tasks, you're smarter when you take on the harder task.
And you're much more pessimistic than I am. I'd say there's a 10% chance at best that someone doesn't win that.
NASA's last estimate determined launch costs would need to be less than 500$/kg to make it realistic.
Eh. You can afford to spend more money on power that won't go up in price in the future. Besides, those estimates were more appropriate for a business than for a government.
And as for stationkeeping, it's not like you can't design a satellite to last nearly forever. It's just that no one does, because no one needs to. There've been plenty of ideas about stationkeeping a satellite using electromagnetic tethers and other mechanisms. They're just not economical. Why? Because typical satellites have a short lifespan. Now, if you had a satellite that had to have a long lifespan, that's different.
Yah, they're not practical now. So what? Spend $1B on research on them for 5 years and they will be. There's no economic pressure to develop one right now, and so - curiously - any current implementation we have of it is completely unfeasible.
But anyway, space power is expensive so long as we (the US) have ridiculous quantities of cheap coal available. We do, now. And lots of people think that it'll stay that way forever. I'm not so optimistic. Not because we'll run out, but for plenty of other reasons. Now, if we were a country that got most of our power from oil... that's a much, much different question.
In exchange for creating debt, which is even worse.
Depends on the amount, and the amount that the trade deficit was reduced. I have no doubt that most economists would agree that creating moderate debt to reduce the trade deficit (and the projected future trade deficit) greatly is an obvious tradeoff. Short term debt is worth it if it fundamentally changes the viability of your economy.