Alternatively, they could just let it cool down a bit before trying, which is what was done at TMI. (It's being disassembled now) and will be done at Chernobyl (which will take a bit longer as the mess is bigger there)
The only "problem" at Fukushima which needs immediate attention is to plug the leaks that are allowing low level radionucleides into the ocean. Theyr'e not actually dangerous levels but people are spooked.
Of course thorium plants produce nuclear waste - less than 1% of the waste of current technology on the output side and they avoid throwing away 90% of the mined uranium on the input side.
It's kind of like comparing a prius with a coal roller and saying they're both bad because they emit CO2
Fukushima was a 60 year old design operating 10 years past its designed shutdown date with lax safety oversight that survived a major earthquake and SCRAMed without incident. What killed it was the tsunami flooding the generators that drove the pumps providing cooling water and the management had been repeatedly warned about the location of those before the plant was even switched on.
Noone died. Noone got more than slightly irradiated. 27k people died in the Tsunami and 1500 people in the evacuation - including hospital patients abandoned mid-operation due to antinuclear hysteria when there was plenty of time to do things safely and carefully.
Chernobyl was a 60+ year old design that the west tried and gave up on because it was just too dangerous to use. It was also past its design life.
75 people died there. the legacy of the firefighters is more attributable to them not being able to obtain healthcare after the event (people were afraid radioactivity was like a contagious disease) and the thyroid scans might have found a lot of irregularities, but so have thyroid scans in other countries without nuclear accidents to blame.
Windscale was a _military_ reactor producing plutonium for bombs. Military systems have always played fast and loose with safety, and the mess at Hanford is there for the same reason.
Radioactivity is not a bogeyman. You can thank the "greens" for that. I'd far rather live next to a current nuclear plant than 20 miles downwind of a coal one (you can see the plume of the coal plant in cancer stats) and MSRs will be thousands of times safer than current systems.
Firstly, by using molten salt systems you avoid 99% of the safety issues that plague current systems - by eliminating water.
Yes, water in nuclear systems really is that bad(*). Alvin Weinberg invented the light water nuclear reactor for submarines as a proof of concept (using uranium(**) because that's what was available, not because it was the best fuel) and was seriously alarmed at the scaling of those small systems to the massive scales and pressures of the civil nuclear industry.
His solution was the Oak Ridge Experiment and if Nixon hadn't killed it in 1972, we'd probably have hundreds deployed now.
Secondly: The amount of nuclear waste produced by a 1GW nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is a huge amount. Absolutely mind boggling - enough to fill a single olympic size swimming pool in fact - and it's safe to handle in 300 years or less, not 30,000
(**) Current nuclear plants remove and dispose of fuel when it's down to 99% intact. Yes, intact - as in less than 1% of the available energy has been extracted. Uranium must be enriched to be usable as nuclear fuel, resulting in (at least) 88% of the mined metal being discarded(***) before it sees the inside of a reactor - and the electrical costs of enrichment using centrifuges are so high that it's a classified military secret - looked at that way, uranium is a silly choice for fuel.
(***) "depleted uranium" - a chemically toxic heavy metal and a vital ingredient in making "hydrogen" bombs.
(*) Yes, i did these out of order. Fission reactions are self-limiting at about 1100C. Water starts dissassociating into hydrogen/oxygen at these temperatures, so water-moderated system are kept at "only" 450C - but water that hot has to be pressurised to at least 20atm and is corrosive, so you have something in the middle of your nuclear plant which wants to flash to 1450 times its volume if it escapes and which is actively digging its way out of the pipes its circulating in. It also means that any nasty radioactives which get out of the fuel rods are circulating in the water - so you have possibly radioactive steam condensing to something which can trivially enter the biosphere. Water is extremely dangerous if a reactor goes "prompt critical" (which may put 20GW into the water for a short period in a 100MW reactor) The steam explosion which results is what killed 3 people at Snake River and blew the top off the reactor building at Chernobyl. If the water in a conventional reactor stops circulating and boils off, then reactions between it and the zirconium cladding of fuel rods produces hydrogen - this is what happened at Fukushima. And the fuel rods themselves are problematic. The fuel is ceramic pellets of uranium oxide, but various fission products are gasses, which pressurises the inside of the rods and quickly reduces the pellets to powder due to stress cracking. Some of those gasses are neutron poisons which prevent a reactor being throttled down and back up quickly - the reactor will stay at low output and if you try to force it, will snap to prompt critical - which gives you another steam explosion. The risk of steam explosions is what makes a reactor building so large. It has to contain all that steam - remember 1 gallon of water becomes 1450 gallons of steam and when released from 20atm pressure that's going to happen in a matter of seconds.
Molten salt systems eliminate most of these problems and when run on Thorium (actually U233, which is derived from thorium during operation), can eat just about all high level waste from conventional nuclear systems and the systems run _extremely_ hot (good thermal efficiency in your turbines) but are self limiting (the salt can't boil, so it doesn't need to be pressurised) The problem is that the US military didn't like it (almost impossible to extract weapons-grade plutonium due to contamination with other isotopes) and Nixon's cronies didn't like it because it didn't give jobs to his SoCal consitutents. So, instead the US tried breeder reactors cooled with Sodium.
Or to put it another way, the world's coal plants release enough radioactive material each year to be the equivalent of more than half a dozen Chernobyls.
There's at least 500 million years of readily obtainable thorium reserves alone and molten salt systems (as at Oak Ridge) with online reprocessing is the only viable way to go forward.
Whichever country is first to commercialise MSR technology is going to be the economic powerhouse of the 21st century, simply on the basis of sales to the developing world - for the simple reason that even if the entire western world stopped burning carbon tomorrow, they can more than make up the difference whilst bootstrapping their economies to levels comparable with the developed ones.
You really are barking up the wrong tree on this, to the point of buffoonery.
Company and personal taxation has nothing to do with industrial competitiveness. Look at Germany for one example. What makes the most difference is institutionalised corruption.
The USA has amongst the lowest effective company taxation rates in the world and the highest protectionist trading barriers.
It also has the worst healthcare availablity and population lifespan averages in the OECD - both stats are still falling. It is failing to maintain infrastructure and primary/secondary education for the general population is amongst the poorest in the world It has an increasing level of poverty, currently unmatched since the end of the 1930s depression, but still getting worse.
It has a _myriad_ of damaging legislated monopolies (especially in the telecommunications sector(*)) which act as a handbrake on local economies as do the multitude of trading barriers the USA has erected over the years in an era when the rest of the world is tearing their ones down (here's a clue: "Free trade" works in both directions. At the moment the USA is screaming about that from the rooftops, demanding open access for its businesses in other countries, whilst preventing companies from other countries having the same open access into the USA)
(*) all the CLECs are gone. AT&T may not sell phones anymore, but it has reassembled itself in ways the antitrust laws can't touch, without all the pesky universal service obligations imposed in the 1930s antitrust settlements. As for the US mobile market, that has no effective competition across most of the country.
This has happened against a background of "lowering taxes" since the 1980s and at the moment USA company tax rates are the lowest effective level they've been for over 100 years. Coupled with that, personal effective taxation for the rich has declined radically - to the point where the number of loopholes enacted means that most of the USA Fortune 100 pay NO tax whatsoever and many of the rich pay an _effective_ rate of 1-2% at most. (forget marginal rates, what matters is the effective rate)
There has been a political lurch to the right that's been going on since the end of the 1960s and accelerated markedly towards facism after 2001. The term "inverted totalitarianism" is worth looking up.
You're living in a new Gilded Age, but without the increasing industrialisation and citizen participation in government which characterised the last one. Rather tellingly, the Progressive Reforms which undid many of the inequities of the Gilded Age are being deliberately destroyed for the benefit of a privileged few. Furthermore, over the last 70 years a particularly nasty and quite zealous religious sect has managed to insinuate itself into all levels of USA government and is now actively trying to tear down the constitutional barriers that were written to try and prevent any religious interests from achieving this kind of undermining of the secular state.
As someone living outside the USA, your self-inflicted social problems, religious extremism and increasing parochialism provide me with amusement and increasing employment opportunities. Quite frankly after 60 years of the USA stomping around the world many of us are quite happy to kick back with popcorn and watch your country implode, however we'd prefer that the resulting mess didn't take the rest of the world down with it and we'd prefer someone sane was looking after the nukes.
We are in the 3rd industrial revolution and you either need to adapt or become another footnote in history. Complacency and yearning for the old days are not an option. You are no longer the largest economy in the world and well on the way to becoming number three, nor are you the most politically influential country anymore and the mantle of 'most free country' left for other shores many years ago - The USA doesn't even make the top ten in most scales - and you're even down to #38 on the scale of human rights.
> Oh, the "people in charge" don't know about the bad bearings? You must mean the managers.... yeah, the managers don't know s***, but the journeyman factory worker does. Why they weren't fixing it I can't guess.
You assume "factory" = full of mechanists (not operators). This is only a minority of the cases.
In particular this was mostly garment factories and in one case the bearings were shrieking so badly you had to shout to be heard over it.
"The US taxes are why companies have fled the USA"
Most companies didn't "flee" the USA. They simply found that you can extract more value in the short term if you drop R&D, sweat your assets and buy in stuff from a 3rd party, then sell it with a markup.
This has nothing to do with taxes and _EVERYTHING_ to do with the myopic focus on quarterly profits to the exclusion of everything else. It's a slightly larger shell game than day trading but has the same outcome (innovation is stifled, and without innovation you can only rest on your laurels for a short period unless you can rely on protectionism)
On top of this average, there can be marked local increases in sea level.
If the Atlantic conveyor (Gulf stream) is interrupted, one of the effects would be an _immediate_ mean sea level rise along the North American eastern seaboard of around 3 feet, with the greatest rise in the Chesapeake Bay area.
Changes in prevailing winds also affect regional sea levels quite markedly.
"the dire predictions being made are invalid being overstated alarmist over reactions to what we are seeing."
Are they?
So far the worst case stuff that was being predicted is happening 20 years earlier than expected and if the Leptav Sea clathrate methane emissions(*) destabilise the Siberian continental shelf as it looks increasingly likely to be the case, we could see a Storegga-style outgassing which will result in much worse things than simple climate change(**)
(*) Which are cause by incursions of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean (**) Look up "Anoxic oceanic events" and ponder that more than half our breathable oxygen comes from the oceans.
"SLS block 2 will be 130,000 lbs to LEO, and 50,000 pounds to Trans-Mars Injection, and that is a significant difference."
Sea Dragon was intended to be 500,000 pounds to LEO and that was designed in the mid 1950s.
Since the end of the space race the thing that's hamstrung developing bigger rockets hasn't been the technology but the _demand_ - and the demand has been set by countries building lainchers telling customers what's available.
An analogy is the way the telcos used to dictate how much bandwidth was needed in communications networks and plan 2 decades ahead for growth the way _they_ wanted it. Customers might have wanted more bandwidth but telcos would simply decline to provide it to attach an unaffordable price tag. It took a maverick coming in (C&W and the FLAG projects) to break that model internationally - and they assessed demand by talking to customers to find out what they really wanted.
SpaceX (and the other private launchers) is the rocketry equivalent. It's posted a growth plan and listened to feedback from customers. Some steps have been iterated on, but what's clear is that there _is_ demand for heavy payloads if the launchers are available and the price is right. SpaceX's plan is missions to Mars, so they need 500+ tons to LEO capabilities. The customers lining up to buy payload space are paying for R&D to make bigger rockets happen. We might actually see 500ton class launches less than a century after Sea Dragon was originally intended to launch, but instead of an end in itself, it will be merely a stepping stone on the way to the rest of the solar system.
"payloads that might take three launches on a smaller rocket that can be handled by 1 SLS launch will be less expensive."
Assuming that SpaceX or someone else hasn't come up with a booster capable of 3x the payload already.
Fuel costs are the least important part of the rocketry equation.
They didn't mattered hugely in the space race days either. The _actual_ problem was getting enough payload (including fuel) into space in a single launch to do the job at hand (going to the moon and back without the crew dying) and having rockets powerful enough to lift that - which is why F1 rocket engines were pretty much the Top Fuel Dragsters of their day. The problem is that efforts have been focussed on that mode of operation ever since.
What SpaceX have done is to step back and say "what happens if we don't stress the engines so much?, If we add some extra fuel and try to bring the thing back?, If we sacrifice some weight for durability?" - and the answers are starting to become apparent.
The Space Race was all about going as far as possible with the limited resources available, but what's required for regular space travel is _efficient_ use of the resources according to costs - engines are expensive, fuel isn't.
"The USA and Soviet Union performed a major jumpstart of rocket science back in the 50's and 60's "
The moon race bought many short term gains, but in the long run it severely damaged the US space effort and nearly extinguished the space program entirely - despite the expenditure for every year in the 1960s being less than americans spent on pizza deliveries in each of those years (or outboard motors)
That's because it was a race to see who could get bragging rights to be the first to plant a flag somewhere. Once it was over, the politicians no longer cared. The media no longer cared as it was always pushed as a race - and the race was over, the other guy lost. The public no longer cared because they mainly only cared due to the media coverage and the entire jingoistic cold war thing.
Space _research_ was arguably put back 30 years by the moon race, and rocket science has been hamstrung by a notion of dependence on finely tuned, fragile systems operating within a whisker of self-destruction ever since. If you want reliable deliveries, you use a van, not a ferrari (or a pickup with a ferrari engine) - for the simple reason that supercars are finnicky beasts which frequently display their skitterishness by catching fire for no apparent reason.
"We" (humans, not just the USA) really should be revisting the Big Dumb Booster concept. Sea Dragon might be outlandishly large but the first stage was designed from the outset to be recoverable without using landing barges or retrorockets - simple ballistic recovery, washout and refill with no turbopumps in sight to blow up - and 500 tons to LEO is nothing to sneeze at for an estimated $100million (in 1994 dollars)
Elon's on the right track with low-stressed launchers (and it's arguable that the russians were also on the right track with the N1), but the problem is that to be cheap to orbit you need to be _big_ and to be _big_ you have to take financial risks (shuttle was _big_ but far too fiddly. 3 times the capacity should only cost 1.5 times as much to launch, if that. The cost is in the research, not in the fuel as Elon's pointed out a number of times)
It's been argued that if someone was to take the risk of building a Sea Dragon and it failed they'd be out by several billion dollars. On the other hand if it worked, they'd have succeeded in single handedly destroying the entire global space industry as it exists, overnight.
"Private enterprise generally does a terrible job on anything that is a public good"
A balanced economy doesn't usually let private enterprise handle such things without sharp oversight, or even let private contractors bid on such things without oversight. Otherwise you get things like the nuclear plant which got utterly fucked to the point of abandonment because the private contractors cheated on concrete pours and reinforcing.
Unfortunately, in the period since the late 1960s, the US has embraced a mindset that business must return profit above all else and at all other costs (including sustainability of the market), which results in an environment where quarterly returns worshipped by Wall Street become the overriding dictating factor in the way companies are operated even if it results in the self-destruction of the company. Under such conditions, companies act in a sociopathic manner and sociopaths are able to rise to positions of power - which is bad news as they don't care about the good of the company or of society as a whole.
It's no small surprise that increasing levels of innovation are occurring outside the USA, whilst the US slowly stagnates and starts eating its own children.
Given that Shuttle's original mission was supposed to be to _build_ a space station and bring large pieces back down if necessary - not to run supply missions - is that a great surprise?
Most of the lifespan of the vehicle was wasted flailing around trying to find missions to justify having humans in space, in what was primarily a propaganda flag-waving exercise. The massive size of the thing (and its wings) resulted in the dangerous design decision to piggyback the orbiter instead of stacking it - with the USAF walking away as a result, despite the fact that the USAF were the ones who demanded the crossrange capabilities that forced the existence of the wings and massive size increases to accomodate them.
Shuttle is a classic example of how requiring something to be all things to all possible users resulted in a camel (or if you're less kind, a platinum-plated turd). I've seen and worked on many other such projects over the years (thankfully most get cancelled once the mission creep ends up recognised for what it is) and feel that in 20-30 years time the F35 will be pointed out as a similar example.
It's also an example of how pork barrel politics gets people killed (boosters made so far from launch site that the limiting factors on componentry were the diameter and curve of rail tunnels along the transport route, in order to keep a ICBM maker in business - and that was only one aspect of the issues)
SpaceX has a contract specifying that they will deliver payload X to destination Y. Not "using method Z and components ABC" - THAT is what gives them the freedom to experiment and innovate.
Incidentally, cars worldwide might have benefitted from emissions legislation that said the same thing (set goal only) and left how to achieve it to the makers, instead of having US lawmakers dictate precisely how things were to be done and emissions treated, in order to favour american carmakers.
You're describing the USA mobile and landline markets, which are NOT competitive environments and are regarded internationally as some of the most restricted in the world.
US Telcos have managed to regain and maintain legislated local monopolies since the breakup of AT&T - in fact the whole thing has reassembled itself quite nicely and specifically to a size and structure where the FTC and FCC won't step in, minus that pesky universal service obligation that was imposed after the antitrust settlements back in the 1930s.
There are _no_ CLECs left in the USA. Landline companies argue that mobiles are an effective competitor, whilst mobile companies are well-cushioned from real competeition and as such have no incentive to reduce prices. On top of that, US mobile consumers still have that crazy setup where they have to pay to _receive_ calls, unlike almost the entire rest of the world.
The simplistic (and valid) explanation for this is "graft". The USA is one of the most bureaucratic environments to work under and large enough payments to the right people really does make things quickly happen the way large companies want - although they call it "lobbying", or "protecting local business"(*) to try and pretend it's something else.
(*) The USA is also one of the most protectionist markets on the planet. "Free trade" does not mean "you can't sell your stuff here, but we have the right to dump our stuff on you" - that's cartel behaviour.
"The internet has destroyed this model of billing completely. "
Yup. Those were the days when the telcos decided how much bandwidth you wanted and dictated the terms of everything.
The FLAG cable project was where it changed. Up to that point all the long-haul cables were owned by Telcos and they mostly had cozy agreements based on monopoly control of communications gatewaying out of the country each one was based in. The model was already creaking as telcos struggled to contain demand but when FLAG went live is when the dam broke.
Is the unemployment rate "at a historic low" because people are genuinely finding employment?
Or is it like that because it's become hard to get unemployment benefits and keep on them if you can't find a job?
It's most certainly the latter in the UK - and people are ending up on horrific "zero hours contracts" - where they might get a couple of hours work per week. That's nowhere near enough to pay bills, but it allows the government to classify them as "employed" even if "zero hours" really does mean _ZERO_ hours. The compounding part of that is that people are working 3 or more such contracts, still getting nowhere near enough hours to actually survive, but that is being classified as 3 or more jobs.
When you start asking hard questions such as "full time equivalents", the employment stats suddenly start being impossible to get hold of, with regional governments either stating they don't collect that information or "commercial sensitivity"
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, they could just let it cool down a bit before trying, which is what was done at TMI. (It's being disassembled now) and will be done at Chernobyl (which will take a bit longer as the mess is bigger there)
The only "problem" at Fukushima which needs immediate attention is to plug the leaks that are allowing low level radionucleides into the ocean. Theyr'e not actually dangerous levels but people are spooked.
Thorium reactors provide an easy way to deal with uranium and plutoium waste - throw it in, it'll burn up eventually.
Yes, thallium is a problem but the easiest way to deal with it is to throw it back into the reactor and break it down.
Of course thorium plants produce nuclear waste - less than 1% of the waste of current technology on the output side and they avoid throwing away 90% of the mined uranium on the input side.
It's kind of like comparing a prius with a coal roller and saying they're both bad because they emit CO2
"nuclear is already one of the most expensive forms of energy available"
Given that uranium is expensive to mine (it's about as rare as gold) and we toss out 99.9% of it, that should not be surprising.
Uranium is a rotten fuel for nuclear reactors.
It's ideal if you want to make plutonium for nuclear weapons, but it's a rotten fuel for nuclear reactors.
Fukushima was a 60 year old design operating 10 years past its designed shutdown date with lax safety oversight that survived a major earthquake and SCRAMed without incident. What killed it was the tsunami flooding the generators that drove the pumps providing cooling water and the management had been repeatedly warned about the location of those before the plant was even switched on.
Noone died. Noone got more than slightly irradiated. 27k people died in the Tsunami and 1500 people in the evacuation - including hospital patients abandoned mid-operation due to antinuclear hysteria when there was plenty of time to do things safely and carefully.
Chernobyl was a 60+ year old design that the west tried and gave up on because it was just too dangerous to use. It was also past its design life.
75 people died there. the legacy of the firefighters is more attributable to them not being able to obtain healthcare after the event (people were afraid radioactivity was like a contagious disease) and the thyroid scans might have found a lot of irregularities, but so have thyroid scans in other countries without nuclear accidents to blame.
Windscale was a _military_ reactor producing plutonium for bombs. Military systems have always played fast and loose with safety, and the mess at Hanford is there for the same reason.
Radioactivity is not a bogeyman. You can thank the "greens" for that. I'd far rather live next to a current nuclear plant than 20 miles downwind of a coal one (you can see the plume of the coal plant in cancer stats) and MSRs will be thousands of times safer than current systems.
Firstly, by using molten salt systems you avoid 99% of the safety issues that plague current systems - by eliminating water.
Yes, water in nuclear systems really is that bad(*). Alvin Weinberg invented the light water nuclear reactor for submarines as a proof of concept (using uranium(**) because that's what was available, not because it was the best fuel) and was seriously alarmed at the scaling of those small systems to the massive scales and pressures of the civil nuclear industry.
His solution was the Oak Ridge Experiment and if Nixon hadn't killed it in 1972, we'd probably have hundreds deployed now.
Secondly: The amount of nuclear waste produced by a 1GW nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is a huge amount. Absolutely mind boggling - enough to fill a single olympic size swimming pool in fact - and it's safe to handle in 300 years or less, not 30,000
(**) Current nuclear plants remove and dispose of fuel when it's down to 99% intact. Yes, intact - as in less than 1% of the available energy has been extracted. Uranium must be enriched to be usable as nuclear fuel, resulting in (at least) 88% of the mined metal being discarded(***) before it sees the inside of a reactor - and the electrical costs of enrichment using centrifuges are so high that it's a classified military secret - looked at that way, uranium is a silly choice for fuel.
(***) "depleted uranium" - a chemically toxic heavy metal and a vital ingredient in making "hydrogen" bombs.
(*) Yes, i did these out of order. Fission reactions are self-limiting at about 1100C.
Water starts dissassociating into hydrogen/oxygen at these temperatures, so water-moderated system are kept at "only" 450C - but water that hot has to be pressurised to at least 20atm and is corrosive, so you have something in the middle of your nuclear plant which wants to flash to 1450 times its volume if it escapes and which is actively digging its way out of the pipes its circulating in. It also means that any nasty radioactives which get out of the fuel rods are circulating in the water - so you have possibly radioactive steam condensing to something which can trivially enter the biosphere.
Water is extremely dangerous if a reactor goes "prompt critical" (which may put 20GW into the water for a short period in a 100MW reactor) The steam explosion which results is what killed 3 people at Snake River and blew the top off the reactor building at Chernobyl.
If the water in a conventional reactor stops circulating and boils off, then reactions between it and the zirconium cladding of fuel rods produces hydrogen - this is what happened at Fukushima.
And the fuel rods themselves are problematic. The fuel is ceramic pellets of uranium oxide, but various fission products are gasses, which pressurises the inside of the rods and quickly reduces the pellets to powder due to stress cracking. Some of those gasses are neutron poisons which prevent a reactor being throttled down and back up quickly - the reactor will stay at low output and if you try to force it, will snap to prompt critical - which gives you another steam explosion.
The risk of steam explosions is what makes a reactor building so large. It has to contain all that steam - remember 1 gallon of water becomes 1450 gallons of steam and when released from 20atm pressure that's going to happen in a matter of seconds.
Molten salt systems eliminate most of these problems and when run on Thorium (actually U233, which is derived from thorium during operation), can eat just about all high level waste from conventional nuclear systems and the systems run _extremely_ hot (good thermal efficiency in your turbines) but are self limiting (the salt can't boil, so it doesn't need to be pressurised) The problem is that the US military didn't like it (almost impossible to extract weapons-grade plutonium due to contamination with other isotopes) and Nixon's cronies didn't like it because it didn't give jobs to his SoCal consitutents.
So, instead the US tried breeder reactors cooled with Sodium.
Or to put it another way, the world's coal plants release enough radioactive material each year to be the equivalent of more than half a dozen Chernobyls.
There's at least 500 million years of readily obtainable thorium reserves alone and molten salt systems (as at Oak Ridge) with online reprocessing is the only viable way to go forward.
Whichever country is first to commercialise MSR technology is going to be the economic powerhouse of the 21st century, simply on the basis of sales to the developing world - for the simple reason that even if the entire western world stopped burning carbon tomorrow, they can more than make up the difference whilst bootstrapping their economies to levels comparable with the developed ones.
Hello China. Yes, I'll take 10.
You really are barking up the wrong tree on this, to the point of buffoonery.
Company and personal taxation has nothing to do with industrial competitiveness. Look at Germany for one example.
What makes the most difference is institutionalised corruption.
The USA has amongst the lowest effective company taxation rates in the world and the highest protectionist trading barriers.
It also has the worst healthcare availablity and population lifespan averages in the OECD - both stats are still falling.
It is failing to maintain infrastructure and primary/secondary education for the general population is amongst the poorest in the world
It has an increasing level of poverty, currently unmatched since the end of the 1930s depression, but still getting worse.
It has a _myriad_ of damaging legislated monopolies (especially in the telecommunications sector(*)) which act as a handbrake on local economies as do the multitude of trading barriers the USA has erected over the years in an era when the rest of the world is tearing their ones down (here's a clue: "Free trade" works in both directions. At the moment the USA is screaming about that from the rooftops, demanding open access for its businesses in other countries, whilst preventing companies from other countries having the same open access into the USA)
(*) all the CLECs are gone. AT&T may not sell phones anymore, but it has reassembled itself in ways the antitrust laws can't touch, without all the pesky universal service obligations imposed in the 1930s antitrust settlements. As for the US mobile market, that has no effective competition across most of the country.
This has happened against a background of "lowering taxes" since the 1980s and at the moment USA company tax rates are the lowest effective level they've been for over 100 years. Coupled with that, personal effective taxation for the rich has declined radically - to the point where the number of loopholes enacted means that most of the USA Fortune 100 pay NO tax whatsoever and many of the rich pay an _effective_ rate of 1-2% at most. (forget marginal rates, what matters is the effective rate)
There has been a political lurch to the right that's been going on since the end of the 1960s and accelerated markedly towards facism after 2001. The term "inverted totalitarianism" is worth looking up.
You're living in a new Gilded Age, but without the increasing industrialisation and citizen participation in government which characterised the last one. Rather tellingly, the Progressive Reforms which undid many of the inequities of the Gilded Age are being deliberately destroyed for the benefit of a privileged few. Furthermore, over the last 70 years a particularly nasty and quite zealous religious sect has managed to insinuate itself into all levels of USA government and is now actively trying to tear down the constitutional barriers that were written to try and prevent any religious interests from achieving this kind of undermining of the secular state.
As someone living outside the USA, your self-inflicted social problems, religious extremism and increasing parochialism provide me with amusement and increasing employment opportunities. Quite frankly after 60 years of the USA stomping around the world many of us are quite happy to kick back with popcorn and watch your country implode, however we'd prefer that the resulting mess didn't take the rest of the world down with it and we'd prefer someone sane was looking after the nukes.
We are in the 3rd industrial revolution and you either need to adapt or become another footnote in history. Complacency and yearning for the old days are not an option. You are no longer the largest economy in the world and well on the way to becoming number three, nor are you the most politically influential country anymore and the mantle of 'most free country' left for other shores many years ago - The USA doesn't even make the top ten in most scales - and you're even down to #38 on the scale of human rights.
> Oh, the "people in charge" don't know about the bad bearings? You must mean the managers.... yeah, the managers don't know s***, but the journeyman factory worker does. Why they weren't fixing it I can't guess.
You assume "factory" = full of mechanists (not operators). This is only a minority of the cases.
In particular this was mostly garment factories and in one case the bearings were shrieking so badly you had to shout to be heard over it.
"The first two paragraphs make it pretty clear that Musk disapproves of casual expressions of racism."
If you know anything about Elon's history and that of the country where he grew up, you know _WHY_ he "disapproves".
Oh and it's not just disapproval. Elon's got a long history of actively opposing racism.
"The US taxes are why companies have fled the USA"
Most companies didn't "flee" the USA. They simply found that you can extract more value in the short term if you drop R&D, sweat your assets and buy in stuff from a 3rd party, then sell it with a markup.
This has nothing to do with taxes and _EVERYTHING_ to do with the myopic focus on quarterly profits to the exclusion of everything else. It's a slightly larger shell game than day trading but has the same outcome (innovation is stifled, and without innovation you can only rest on your laurels for a short period unless you can rely on protectionism)
On top of this average, there can be marked local increases in sea level.
If the Atlantic conveyor (Gulf stream) is interrupted, one of the effects would be an _immediate_ mean sea level rise along the North American eastern seaboard of around 3 feet, with the greatest rise in the Chesapeake Bay area.
Changes in prevailing winds also affect regional sea levels quite markedly.
"the dire predictions being made are invalid being overstated alarmist over reactions to what we are seeing."
Are they?
So far the worst case stuff that was being predicted is happening 20 years earlier than expected and if the Leptav Sea clathrate methane emissions(*) destabilise the Siberian continental shelf as it looks increasingly likely to be the case, we could see a Storegga-style outgassing which will result in much worse things than simple climate change(**)
(*) Which are cause by incursions of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean
(**) Look up "Anoxic oceanic events" and ponder that more than half our breathable oxygen comes from the oceans.
"SLS block 2 will be 130,000 lbs to LEO, and 50,000 pounds to Trans-Mars Injection, and that is a significant difference."
Sea Dragon was intended to be 500,000 pounds to LEO and that was designed in the mid 1950s.
Since the end of the space race the thing that's hamstrung developing bigger rockets hasn't been the technology but the _demand_ - and the demand has been set by countries building lainchers telling customers what's available.
An analogy is the way the telcos used to dictate how much bandwidth was needed in communications networks and plan 2 decades ahead for growth the way _they_ wanted it. Customers might have wanted more bandwidth but telcos would simply decline to provide it to attach an unaffordable price tag. It took a maverick coming in (C&W and the FLAG projects) to break that model internationally - and they assessed demand by talking to customers to find out what they really wanted.
SpaceX (and the other private launchers) is the rocketry equivalent. It's posted a growth plan and listened to feedback from customers. Some steps have been iterated on, but what's clear is that there _is_ demand for heavy payloads if the launchers are available and the price is right. SpaceX's plan is missions to Mars, so they need 500+ tons to LEO capabilities. The customers lining up to buy payload space are paying for R&D to make bigger rockets happen. We might actually see 500ton class launches less than a century after Sea Dragon was originally intended to launch, but instead of an end in itself, it will be merely a stepping stone on the way to the rest of the solar system.
"payloads that might take three launches on a smaller rocket that can be handled by 1 SLS launch will be less expensive."
Assuming that SpaceX or someone else hasn't come up with a booster capable of 3x the payload already.
Fuel costs are the least important part of the rocketry equation.
They didn't mattered hugely in the space race days either. The _actual_ problem was getting enough payload (including fuel) into space in a single launch to do the job at hand (going to the moon and back without the crew dying) and having rockets powerful enough to lift that - which is why F1 rocket engines were pretty much the Top Fuel Dragsters of their day. The problem is that efforts have been focussed on that mode of operation ever since.
What SpaceX have done is to step back and say "what happens if we don't stress the engines so much?, If we add some extra fuel and try to bring the thing back?, If we sacrifice some weight for durability?" - and the answers are starting to become apparent.
The Space Race was all about going as far as possible with the limited resources available, but what's required for regular space travel is _efficient_ use of the resources according to costs - engines are expensive, fuel isn't.
"The USA and Soviet Union performed a major jumpstart of rocket science back in the 50's and 60's "
The moon race bought many short term gains, but in the long run it severely damaged the US space effort and nearly extinguished the space program entirely - despite the expenditure for every year in the 1960s being less than americans spent on pizza deliveries in each of those years (or outboard motors)
That's because it was a race to see who could get bragging rights to be the first to plant a flag somewhere. Once it was over, the politicians no longer cared. The media no longer cared as it was always pushed as a race - and the race was over, the other guy lost. The public no longer cared because they mainly only cared due to the media coverage and the entire jingoistic cold war thing.
Space _research_ was arguably put back 30 years by the moon race, and rocket science has been hamstrung by a notion of dependence on finely tuned, fragile systems operating within a whisker of self-destruction ever since. If you want reliable deliveries, you use a van, not a ferrari (or a pickup with a ferrari engine) - for the simple reason that supercars are finnicky beasts which frequently display their skitterishness by catching fire for no apparent reason.
"We" (humans, not just the USA) really should be revisting the Big Dumb Booster concept. Sea Dragon might be outlandishly large but the first stage was designed from the outset to be recoverable without using landing barges or retrorockets - simple ballistic recovery, washout and refill with no turbopumps in sight to blow up - and 500 tons to LEO is nothing to sneeze at for an estimated $100million (in 1994 dollars)
Elon's on the right track with low-stressed launchers (and it's arguable that the russians were also on the right track with the N1), but the problem is that to be cheap to orbit you need to be _big_ and to be _big_ you have to take financial risks (shuttle was _big_ but far too fiddly. 3 times the capacity should only cost 1.5 times as much to launch, if that. The cost is in the research, not in the fuel as Elon's pointed out a number of times)
It's been argued that if someone was to take the risk of building a Sea Dragon and it failed they'd be out by several billion dollars. On the other hand if it worked, they'd have succeeded in single handedly destroying the entire global space industry as it exists, overnight.
"Private enterprise generally does a terrible job on anything that is a public good"
A balanced economy doesn't usually let private enterprise handle such things without sharp oversight, or even let private contractors bid on such things without oversight. Otherwise you get things like the nuclear plant which got utterly fucked to the point of abandonment because the private contractors cheated on concrete pours and reinforcing.
Unfortunately, in the period since the late 1960s, the US has embraced a mindset that business must return profit above all else and at all other costs (including sustainability of the market), which results in an environment where quarterly returns worshipped by Wall Street become the overriding dictating factor in the way companies are operated even if it results in the self-destruction of the company. Under such conditions, companies act in a sociopathic manner and sociopaths are able to rise to positions of power - which is bad news as they don't care about the good of the company or of society as a whole.
It's no small surprise that increasing levels of innovation are occurring outside the USA, whilst the US slowly stagnates and starts eating its own children.
Given that Shuttle's original mission was supposed to be to _build_ a space station and bring large pieces back down if necessary - not to run supply missions - is that a great surprise?
Most of the lifespan of the vehicle was wasted flailing around trying to find missions to justify having humans in space, in what was primarily a propaganda flag-waving exercise. The massive size of the thing (and its wings) resulted in the dangerous design decision to piggyback the orbiter instead of stacking it - with the USAF walking away as a result, despite the fact that the USAF were the ones who demanded the crossrange capabilities that forced the existence of the wings and massive size increases to accomodate them.
Shuttle is a classic example of how requiring something to be all things to all possible users resulted in a camel (or if you're less kind, a platinum-plated turd). I've seen and worked on many other such projects over the years (thankfully most get cancelled once the mission creep ends up recognised for what it is) and feel that in 20-30 years time the F35 will be pointed out as a similar example.
It's also an example of how pork barrel politics gets people killed (boosters made so far from launch site that the limiting factors on componentry were the diameter and curve of rail tunnels along the transport route, in order to keep a ICBM maker in business - and that was only one aspect of the issues)
SpaceX has a contract specifying that they will deliver payload X to destination Y. Not "using method Z and components ABC" - THAT is what gives them the freedom to experiment and innovate.
Incidentally, cars worldwide might have benefitted from emissions legislation that said the same thing (set goal only) and left how to achieve it to the makers, instead of having US lawmakers dictate precisely how things were to be done and emissions treated, in order to favour american carmakers.
You beat me to it. I was thinking the same thing.
You're describing the USA mobile and landline markets, which are NOT competitive environments and are regarded internationally as some of the most restricted in the world.
US Telcos have managed to regain and maintain legislated local monopolies since the breakup of AT&T - in fact the whole thing has reassembled itself quite nicely and specifically to a size and structure where the FTC and FCC won't step in, minus that pesky universal service obligation that was imposed after the antitrust settlements back in the 1930s.
There are _no_ CLECs left in the USA. Landline companies argue that mobiles are an effective competitor, whilst mobile companies are well-cushioned from real competeition and as such have no incentive to reduce prices. On top of that, US mobile consumers still have that crazy setup where they have to pay to _receive_ calls, unlike almost the entire rest of the world.
The simplistic (and valid) explanation for this is "graft". The USA is one of the most bureaucratic environments to work under and large enough payments to the right people really does make things quickly happen the way large companies want - although they call it "lobbying", or "protecting local business"(*) to try and pretend it's something else.
(*) The USA is also one of the most protectionist markets on the planet. "Free trade" does not mean "you can't sell your stuff here, but we have the right to dump our stuff on you" - that's cartel behaviour.
"The internet has destroyed this model of billing completely. "
Yup. Those were the days when the telcos decided how much bandwidth you wanted and dictated the terms of everything.
The FLAG cable project was where it changed. Up to that point all the long-haul cables were owned by Telcos and they mostly had cozy agreements based on monopoly control of communications gatewaying out of the country each one was based in. The model was already creaking as telcos struggled to contain demand but when FLAG went live is when the dam broke.
"There's no incoming phone calls on pay phones"
That depends on the country.
USA payphones have their number written on them, to make it even easier to be called back.
Is the unemployment rate "at a historic low" because people are genuinely finding employment?
Or is it like that because it's become hard to get unemployment benefits and keep on them if you can't find a job?
It's most certainly the latter in the UK - and people are ending up on horrific "zero hours contracts" - where they might get a couple of hours work per week.
That's nowhere near enough to pay bills, but it allows the government to classify them as "employed" even if "zero hours" really does mean _ZERO_ hours.
The compounding part of that is that people are working 3 or more such contracts, still getting nowhere near enough hours to actually survive, but that is being classified as 3 or more jobs.
When you start asking hard questions such as "full time equivalents", the employment stats suddenly start being impossible to get hold of, with regional governments either stating they don't collect that information or "commercial sensitivity"