The panels wouldn't have to be any more rugged than standard ones - they're going to be "up on the roof."
Also, your theory of "cars will run off the road and people will crash into the posts" isn't really supported by actual highway use. If you were right, then every tunnel or narrow road would be a horrible deathtrap - and they're not, by a large margin.
At worst, you just put a guard rail along the sides of the road. It would be insanely cheaper than the solar roads themselves.
You don't have to "roof" the highway, anyway - just build a one-sided overhang from the panels. By angling it, you get as much energy from a single eight foot wide panel as you would from a highway-width one. At worst, just build the thing ten feet off the side of the road, still on the right-of-way, and be done with it.
In any case, building a simple frame to hold relatively lightweight solar panels is certainly going to be much, much cheaper than completely re-engineering a modern two-lane highway with transparent materials and super-ruggedized solar panels, to boot....and while tempered glass is certainly a strong material in some senses, it becomes much, much weaker when it gets even mildly scratched, or when struck with a heavy object. Like when a car rolls along it with a few pieces of gravel stuck in its tires, or when something falls off a large truck. Asphalt and concrete are much more damage-tolerant in this respect.
They wouldn't have to ruggedize the panels to let cars drive on them, they could angle them for better efficiency, and they could repair most of the things that will go wrong without having to shut down the roads.
For that matter, they could BUILD the damned thing without shutting down the roads.
The FAS also claimed that more-precise weapons back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s would cause nuclear war.
And that a missile defense system would cause nuclear war (except for the one the Soviets built and still use, of course).
Oddly enough, over the last half-century, none of the things the FAS said would increase the chances of a nuclear war actually caused a nuclear war. The things that nearly caused WWIII were things they never actually mentioned...
I'm sorry, but which designs do you think use multiple A-bombs to trigger a fusion weapon?
Every single one ever fielded as a weapon used one (1) fission device to trigger a fusion reaction, which then caused more fission. That's just _how they work_.
Most of the weapons the US fielded over the last half-century were pretty small, in comparison, due to being more efficient and intended for use in air-launched/dropped weapons and ICBM warheads.
Now, maybe you got confused by the MIRV concept - where they used multiple fusion weapons in one missile - but no, that "multiple A-bombs to trigger fusion" thing is just wrong. I only mentioned the Tsar Bomba because it used multiple fission cores to boost the overall yield. It was never a useful device, in general.
If true, it's quite frightening. H bombs currently require multiple small A bombs to triggter, and the bomb casing is also typically made out of non-weapons grade uranium which reflects and focuses the A-bomb blasts onto the tritium and deuterium core.
First, no, you don't need "multiple small A bombs to trigger" a fusion detonation. You need one. You can make multi-stage weapons like the Tsar Bomba, nobody seems to nowadays.
Second, you can supposedly make the tamper out of a lot of different materials (even lead) - but even if you decided to use uranium, any country with a big enough program to make an A-bomb would have a crapload of uranium metal sitting around.
You do not understand how classified etc works. It's not about the markings it's about the content.
I beg to differ. Back when I was in the USN, I had a Secret clearance, and if it's been pulled, I've never been notified. (It certainly should have been by now, as I got out in early '73.) I never had access to the type of classified information we're talking about here, but I do know that for most people, if a document isn't marked as Classified, the default assumption is that it isn't.
If you had a Secret clearance back then, it was changed to "inactive" when you left the service. There's almost certainly a piece of paper that you signed when you got out. It's possible to reinstate that clearance within 24 months, but after that time lapses without an active clearance, you have to be re-cleared.
Most people may believe that part about "if it wasn't marked, it's not classified," but it's a false assumption, and when they gave you the initial briefings for that clearance way back when, they certainly told you.
More to the point, a lot of the information in the Clinton emails was initially classified and marked as such - but someone took the markings off when they sent it. For that matter, if you know something classified and merely re-type it into an email, it's still classified. In a position like Secretary of State, a LOT of things are "classified by nature."
HVDC interconnectors work great, but not through areas where there are a lot of violent people who like blowing up things that belong to Europeans.
There are a few places they could install underwater HVDC lines, but it would be tough to find someone to fund the multiple billions of dollars in hardware it would take.
To get any good out of that much electrical power, you'd need a huge market to sell it to.
Europe wouldn't be it - too far away, across the Mediterranean. The rest of Africa? Maybe once the political landscape settles down. No bets on that one, though.
Sell electricity to the locals? The poor ones? In a region where oil prices are naturally low?
Build a whole bunch of new industries to use it? You're in a chicken-and-the-egg situation there. Nobody would build the factories until the power was ready, and nobody is going to build the solar system until they know they can sell the power. Then, of course, you need to ship raw materials in, and train a whole generation of factory workers from scratch, in a relatively short period.
And, as others have mentioned, solar plants in deserts have the "sand question" to deal with. Beside the whole issue of sandblasted glass, you have to keep them clean, which means, in general, water. Which is in incredibly short supply in the Sahara.
Of course, the authors admit these issues, but handwave it with "state involvement," which means "we need to get governments to pay for this silly thing."
Because solar farms, while really cool-looking from the air, look like miles and miles of supporting hardware from ground level.
The plan is basically "turn a farm community into an island surrounded by several square miles of industrial plants." People move to the country to get away from such things, it's not surprising that they're resisting having their property values trashed because someone decides to take a bunch of government cash to build the darned things.
The total height of the statues would be about a foot, if you're scaling them to actual projected sea level rise from the long-term trend since the start of AGW.
If you take the "extreme" current predictions, they'd have to be about three feet tall.
...was online for years and years with "For Sale" groups, and some stores already had set up there. Before that, you'd see occasional "for sale" postings in a lot of groups.
...but not about giving your personal information to political parties?
Then you're, well, a little naive. Maybe not a little.
Which is more likely to abuse the information - a small magazine devoted to individual rights, or the two major political parties?
Which of them have the resources to actually abuse that information on a grand scale, including lots of manpower and skilled database programmers on staff?
Of course, the Dems and the GOP probably have most of that data already, but let's not help them fill in the gaps so easily, okay?
That solution might work - but it would have to work on possibly-already-dead tape from the 1960s and 70s (which is often turning into dust already). There's a lot of archive stuff that's been sitting in old storage rooms for decades that's pretty much just a random pile of chemicals by now.
There's also a real possibility that they all got thrown away after I left - since there was nothing to play them on (and not much chance of a replacement at that point), it wouldn't surprise me.
A side note: this same library had a number of nitrate films in the collection, including what was supposedly a copy of one episode of "Victory At Sea," the classic documentary. In particular, they were stored in the middle of the REST of the collection. Extremely flammable and old, degrading nitrate films. When I found the first one, I opened the can CAREFULLY on the concrete loading dock, found it was just mush, and arranged to have it destroyed safely. I spent a bit of the next couple of days finding another dozen in similar condition and disposing of them too.
Nope. It was some weird experimental machine, the IVC was relatively popular in comparison. Like I said, only four built, ever. Wasn't compatible with ANYTHING.
I can't remember the manufacturer, but it wasn't any of the big names.
I was working in a college media library, and there were several stacks (over 70 tapes in total) of 2" reel-to-reel video tape from the 1960s and 1970s - recordings off air from Public Television, mostly. Some of them were of local shows nobody even seemed to remember, and others were from live performances at the Dallas station or of live feeds from PBS. There was a live Alvin Ailey dance troupe local show from the late 1960s, if I recall correctly.
The problem was that they were recorded in a rare two-inch format - and only four machines that used it were ever even built (no, it wasn't 2" quadruplex, there were still lots of those at the time). I couldn't find a working machine, and the only one I could dig up was missing major parts (like the heads). So unless someone builds a new one from scratch just to read those tapes, all of that is going to disappear - if it hasn't already.
Someone will apply, get rejected, and sue, because they were turned down due to age, income level, number of children, political affiliation, type of job - or any of the other hundred reasons to sue for housing discrimination.
"Highly curated" is just another term for "we don't want your smelly kind here, peasant!"
You really, REALLY need to learn the difference between "marginal" and "effective" tax rates.
"Marginal" would be the "94%" you think they paid. "Effective" would be the much, much lower number they actually paid (30% or less), because they could deduct pretty much EVERYTHING, including that company-supplied summer house (with full staff), the nice apartment in the office building (along with staff), chauffered limo, et cetera - and those benefits weren't taxable, like they are now.
Right now, the marginal rate for someone making a million dollars a year is about 39%. The effective rate is about 29%. Yeah, you might note that rich people are paying about the same percentage on their incomes. You could also notice that middle class and below is paying less (while the bottom quartile or so is getting, effectively, a ten percent bonus from negative taxes).
Capital gains taxes were also much lower than marginal rates - half or less, and in many years, there was NO taxation on many long-term capital gains. There were a lot of (perfectly legitimate and acceptable) ways to avoid paying taxes on what we would call "income" now, but wasn't considered such back then.
...and that marginal tax rate of 90% featured a ridiculous amount of deductions, along with a lot of things that didn't qualify as "income."
Overall, the effective tax rate (as in the amount actually paid after deductions) was slightly LOWER for rich people in the 1950s than it is right now.
The worker mentioned in the story had a total dose of about 20 millisieverts, and included his work at another plant plus the Fukushima dose. Some reports made it seem higher, but they were adding the 15.7 mSv in twice.
One worker, who was exposed to 670 mSv, has about a seven percent higher chance of developing cancer sometime in his life. The rest had smaller doses.
On the other hand, two workers died from heart attacks brought on by heat exhaustion caused by the radiation suits.
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The panels wouldn't have to be any more rugged than standard ones - they're going to be "up on the roof."
Also, your theory of "cars will run off the road and people will crash into the posts" isn't really supported by actual highway use. If you were right, then every tunnel or narrow road would be a horrible deathtrap - and they're not, by a large margin.
At worst, you just put a guard rail along the sides of the road. It would be insanely cheaper than the solar roads themselves.
You don't have to "roof" the highway, anyway - just build a one-sided overhang from the panels. By angling it, you get as much energy from a single eight foot wide panel as you would from a highway-width one. At worst, just build the thing ten feet off the side of the road, still on the right-of-way, and be done with it.
In any case, building a simple frame to hold relatively lightweight solar panels is certainly going to be much, much cheaper than completely re-engineering a modern two-lane highway with transparent materials and super-ruggedized solar panels, to boot. ...and while tempered glass is certainly a strong material in some senses, it becomes much, much weaker when it gets even mildly scratched, or when struck with a heavy object. Like when a car rolls along it with a few pieces of gravel stuck in its tires, or when something falls off a large truck. Asphalt and concrete are much more damage-tolerant in this respect.
Build 1000 km of above-the-road arrays.
They wouldn't have to ruggedize the panels to let cars drive on them, they could angle them for better efficiency, and they could repair most of the things that will go wrong without having to shut down the roads.
For that matter, they could BUILD the damned thing without shutting down the roads.
The FAS also claimed that more-precise weapons back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s would cause nuclear war.
And that a missile defense system would cause nuclear war (except for the one the Soviets built and still use, of course).
Oddly enough, over the last half-century, none of the things the FAS said would increase the chances of a nuclear war actually caused a nuclear war. The things that nearly caused WWIII were things they never actually mentioned...
I'm sorry, but which designs do you think use multiple A-bombs to trigger a fusion weapon?
Every single one ever fielded as a weapon used one (1) fission device to trigger a fusion reaction, which then caused more fission. That's just _how they work_.
Most of the weapons the US fielded over the last half-century were pretty small, in comparison, due to being more efficient and intended for use in air-launched/dropped weapons and ICBM warheads.
Now, maybe you got confused by the MIRV concept - where they used multiple fusion weapons in one missile - but no, that "multiple A-bombs to trigger fusion" thing is just wrong. I only mentioned the Tsar Bomba because it used multiple fission cores to boost the overall yield. It was never a useful device, in general.
"Analytics." Heh.
If true, it's quite frightening. H bombs currently require multiple small A bombs to triggter, and the bomb casing is also typically made out of non-weapons grade uranium which reflects and focuses the A-bomb blasts onto the tritium and deuterium core.
First, no, you don't need "multiple small A bombs to trigger" a fusion detonation. You need one. You can make multi-stage weapons like the Tsar Bomba, nobody seems to nowadays.
Second, you can supposedly make the tamper out of a lot of different materials (even lead) - but even if you decided to use uranium, any country with a big enough program to make an A-bomb would have a crapload of uranium metal sitting around.
You do not understand how classified etc works. It's not about the markings it's about the content.
I beg to differ. Back when I was in the USN, I had a Secret clearance, and if it's been pulled, I've never been notified. (It certainly should have been by now, as I got out in early '73.) I never had access to the type of classified information we're talking about here, but I do know that for most people, if a document isn't marked as Classified, the default assumption is that it isn't.
If you had a Secret clearance back then, it was changed to "inactive" when you left the service. There's almost certainly a piece of paper that you signed when you got out. It's possible to reinstate that clearance within 24 months, but after that time lapses without an active clearance, you have to be re-cleared.
Most people may believe that part about "if it wasn't marked, it's not classified," but it's a false assumption, and when they gave you the initial briefings for that clearance way back when, they certainly told you.
More to the point, a lot of the information in the Clinton emails was initially classified and marked as such - but someone took the markings off when they sent it. For that matter, if you know something classified and merely re-type it into an email, it's still classified. In a position like Secretary of State, a LOT of things are "classified by nature."
HVDC interconnectors work great, but not through areas where there are a lot of violent people who like blowing up things that belong to Europeans.
There are a few places they could install underwater HVDC lines, but it would be tough to find someone to fund the multiple billions of dollars in hardware it would take.
To get any good out of that much electrical power, you'd need a huge market to sell it to.
Europe wouldn't be it - too far away, across the Mediterranean. The rest of Africa? Maybe once the political landscape settles down. No bets on that one, though.
Sell electricity to the locals? The poor ones? In a region where oil prices are naturally low?
Build a whole bunch of new industries to use it? You're in a chicken-and-the-egg situation there. Nobody would build the factories until the power was ready, and nobody is going to build the solar system until they know they can sell the power. Then, of course, you need to ship raw materials in, and train a whole generation of factory workers from scratch, in a relatively short period.
And, as others have mentioned, solar plants in deserts have the "sand question" to deal with. Beside the whole issue of sandblasted glass, you have to keep them clean, which means, in general, water. Which is in incredibly short supply in the Sahara.
Of course, the authors admit these issues, but handwave it with "state involvement," which means "we need to get governments to pay for this silly thing."
Because solar farms, while really cool-looking from the air, look like miles and miles of supporting hardware from ground level.
The plan is basically "turn a farm community into an island surrounded by several square miles of industrial plants." People move to the country to get away from such things, it's not surprising that they're resisting having their property values trashed because someone decides to take a bunch of government cash to build the darned things.
Which means that the scientists report to a guy in regular clothes instead of a military uniform.
At least it would be cheap to do.
The total height of the statues would be about a foot, if you're scaling them to actual projected sea level rise from the long-term trend since the start of AGW.
If you take the "extreme" current predictions, they'd have to be about three feet tall.
...was online for years and years with "For Sale" groups, and some stores already had set up there. Before that, you'd see occasional "for sale" postings in a lot of groups.
I bought a book advertised in a post in 1989.
The tiny gun magazine, of course. The political parties and newspapers actually have reputations to lose.
When did that start? Not in the last couple of decades, anyway.
Besides, have you ever heard how gun nuts talk?
Yeah, all that "we have actual civil rights, and the Constitution codifies them" jazz.
What lunatics.
...but not about giving your personal information to political parties?
Then you're, well, a little naive. Maybe not a little.
Which is more likely to abuse the information - a small magazine devoted to individual rights, or the two major political parties?
Which of them have the resources to actually abuse that information on a grand scale, including lots of manpower and skilled database programmers on staff?
Of course, the Dems and the GOP probably have most of that data already, but let's not help them fill in the gaps so easily, okay?
I didn't remember it as being an Ampex, but it might have been the VR-8000. The timeline's about right.
I found a photo online, and that looks like the photo of the one from back then.
That solution might work - but it would have to work on possibly-already-dead tape from the 1960s and 70s (which is often turning into dust already). There's a lot of archive stuff that's been sitting in old storage rooms for decades that's pretty much just a random pile of chemicals by now.
There's also a real possibility that they all got thrown away after I left - since there was nothing to play them on (and not much chance of a replacement at that point), it wouldn't surprise me.
A side note: this same library had a number of nitrate films in the collection, including what was supposedly a copy of one episode of "Victory At Sea," the classic documentary. In particular, they were stored in the middle of the REST of the collection. Extremely flammable and old, degrading nitrate films. When I found the first one, I opened the can CAREFULLY on the concrete loading dock, found it was just mush, and arranged to have it destroyed safely. I spent a bit of the next couple of days finding another dozen in similar condition and disposing of them too.
At least videotape doesn't catch fire so easily.
Nope. It was some weird experimental machine, the IVC was relatively popular in comparison. Like I said, only four built, ever. Wasn't compatible with ANYTHING.
I can't remember the manufacturer, but it wasn't any of the big names.
I ran into a related issue about 25 years ago.
I was working in a college media library, and there were several stacks (over 70 tapes in total) of 2" reel-to-reel video tape from the 1960s and 1970s - recordings off air from Public Television, mostly. Some of them were of local shows nobody even seemed to remember, and others were from live performances at the Dallas station or of live feeds from PBS. There was a live Alvin Ailey dance troupe local show from the late 1960s, if I recall correctly.
The problem was that they were recorded in a rare two-inch format - and only four machines that used it were ever even built (no, it wasn't 2" quadruplex, there were still lots of those at the time). I couldn't find a working machine, and the only one I could dig up was missing major parts (like the heads). So unless someone builds a new one from scratch just to read those tapes, all of that is going to disappear - if it hasn't already.
Someone will apply, get rejected, and sue, because they were turned down due to age, income level, number of children, political affiliation, type of job - or any of the other hundred reasons to sue for housing discrimination.
"Highly curated" is just another term for "we don't want your smelly kind here, peasant!"
...and, again, that "94%" wasn't really 94%.
You really, REALLY need to learn the difference between "marginal" and "effective" tax rates.
"Marginal" would be the "94%" you think they paid. "Effective" would be the much, much lower number they actually paid (30% or less), because they could deduct pretty much EVERYTHING, including that company-supplied summer house (with full staff), the nice apartment in the office building (along with staff), chauffered limo, et cetera - and those benefits weren't taxable, like they are now.
Right now, the marginal rate for someone making a million dollars a year is about 39%. The effective rate is about 29%. Yeah, you might note that rich people are paying about the same percentage on their incomes. You could also notice that middle class and below is paying less (while the bottom quartile or so is getting, effectively, a ten percent bonus from negative taxes).
Capital gains taxes were also much lower than marginal rates - half or less, and in many years, there was NO taxation on many long-term capital gains. There were a lot of (perfectly legitimate and acceptable) ways to avoid paying taxes on what we would call "income" now, but wasn't considered such back then.
...and that marginal tax rate of 90% featured a ridiculous amount of deductions, along with a lot of things that didn't qualify as "income."
Overall, the effective tax rate (as in the amount actually paid after deductions) was slightly LOWER for rich people in the 1950s than it is right now.
You want to arrest the GAO for fraud, for doing their actual job?
That's who wrote the report. Americans for Tax Reform just reported on it.
The worker mentioned in the story had a total dose of about 20 millisieverts, and included his work at another plant plus the Fukushima dose. Some reports made it seem higher, but they were adding the 15.7 mSv in twice.
One worker, who was exposed to 670 mSv, has about a seven percent higher chance of developing cancer sometime in his life. The rest had smaller doses.
On the other hand, two workers died from heart attacks brought on by heat exhaustion caused by the radiation suits.
...have the same problem. They don't multitask.
One user at a time, and there's a minimum amount of time for it to be useful.