Methodology and predictions of experts are ALWAYS off.
Even in the early 1980s no one was predicting the ubiquity of mobile phones and in the 1990s, marrying mobile phones to tablet computers was a pipe dream.
Technological predictions of the future are about 50:50 2 years out and get worse as the predicted period goes further out. On the other hand ecological ones have proven to be chillingly accurate over long periods.
One of the more "interesting" problems with solar manufacture is the cost externality being incurred downstream of the chinese manufacturing plants. Solar PV could still prove to be one of the larger environmental disasters mankind has inflicted on itself.
in any case, concentrating on renewables distracts from the far larger problem - that when all is said and done, renewables can just about match existing electrical generation capacity, but electrical generation currently only accounts for about 40% of carbon emissions. Reducing those emissions (heating, industrial processes, transportation) requires increased electrical generation capacity - a factor of 6-8 or so.
The $64-trillion question is where is that capacity going to come from and when will the world accept that reducing carbon emissions means making some (currently) unpalatable decisions.
Aside from the off-color humor, Cleopatra was greek (ptolomy dynasty) and lived closer to our time than the time when those pyramids were built - they were already 3000 years old when she was alive, 2000 years ago.
Yes, the pyramids really are that old.
Yes Egypt has been invaded by many groups.
No, we don't know much about the ethnicity or culture of the time when they were built.
Yes, Subsaharan Africa had some extremely advanced cultures and kingdoms - and did so right up to about the 15th century when the Portuguese systematically flattened just about every coastal city they could locate.
The pollution problems (mainly hydrofluric acid leaks) associated with solar panel production in China have the potential to wreck the potable drinking water of at least 40 million people downstream of the factories.
Right now there's a huge waste lake that noone knows how to deal with. If it breaches, the consequences will be catastrophic. Just because it's not happening in _your_ backyard doesn't mean it's not a problem associated with the technology.
Part of the problem is that radiation is a vastly overdemonised bogeyman that is made out to be far more dangerous than it is.
There are parts of Cornwall, Yorkshire and downtown Helsinki that are more naturally radioactive than any part of Fukushima province. For that matter so is Denver Colorado thanks to its altitude.
Aircrew receive even higher high energy radiation doses and they're not exactly dying like flies.
And all of that is _dwarfed_ by the annual radiation dose experienced by a smoker thanks to the polonium naturally present in the tobacco and which ends up fizzing away in lungs for 20 years.
The rate of cancers amongst Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was 4% higher than the rest of the population and the rate of cancers in both cities from 1950 to 1990 was 0.25% above comparable locations elsewhere.
Compare that to the rates around Love Canal or Minimata Bay.
It seems that low levels of ionising radiation are fairly benign (we've lived with them for billions of years) and higher levels either kill you or damage your immune system temporarily - at which point you might die of the common cold, but assuming you don't, you _will_ recover. You're far more likely to find Bart's 3-eyed fish downstream of a coal ash slurry pond than a nuclear plant.
The world's coal plants emit enough radium alone to match a half dozen chernobyl events each year, but nooone cares about that. It's not visible so it doesn't matter.
European plants pay into a decommissioning fund over their operational lifespan. This has worked well so far.
The american model of selling the plant at the end of its span to a shell company which then goes bust and leaves the government with cleanup costs is yet another scam, but that's not unusual in the USA - where the Duke plant was killed by corrupt contractors who didn't bother building to specification, resulting in massive cost overruns as Duke tried to get the regulators to approve the work that had been done.
If you have LFTRs, then you operate at 600-800C, instead of 350-400, which means you can reject heat to air on the cold side and still have high thermal efficiency in your turbines.
That in turn means you can site your power plants well away from water and faultlines. (rivers tend to follow faults)
Even if you do choose to site near water for greater thermal efficiency, your plant can sit idle at 1100C and not melt down.
The problem with nuclear teakettles isn't the nuclear part, it's the water.
"because reactors are practically all sited where they can be flooded"
They're sited where they are because BWR plants have to use large bodies of water as a heatsink or suffer staggeringly poor thermal efficiency.
The basic problem is that the _inside_ of a fuel rod sits around 1000-1100C, whilst the water can only get to 400-450C - meaning it's bloody hot, under shitloads of pressure and as a result both corrosive and wanting to explode. Adding boric acid to the mix is just gilding the lily.
Fission reactions top out about 1150C due to doppler effects. Therefore what you want is a primary coolant which boils above this temperature and doesn't catch fire (so no sodium, thanks). That's where molten salts come in. No boiling means no pressurisation, means no massive pressure vessels, means no risk of radioactive steam leaks, etc.
Current fission reactors are already 300,000 times safer than coal and that's including every military incident as well as the civil ones. LFTRs have the potential to make that at least an order of magnitude better, if not 2 orders plus. They will come, and they're vastly more efficient than uranium - not throwing away 85-90% of your input material before it sees the inside of a reactor and 99% of what does see the inside of the reactor is going to see to that, never mind the issue of the energy costs of enriching uranium for fuel being so high the USA regards it as a military secret.
Fusion _might_ be viable in my great-grandchildrens' lifetime. Maybe. We can't afford to wait until then to stop burning carbon and in order to achieve that we need to increase electrical production capacity in developed countries by a factor of around 6-10 over current levels, AS WELL as allowing for similar production capacity for 5 billion more people in developing countries.
Rewnewables at best can just match existing electrical production. Nukes isn't an option, it's a necessity.
It was still recoverable even after the tsunami, but Tepco manglement were more concerned about saving face than saving the plant.
And for that matter, GE told Tepco _during construction_ to put the diesel generators on higher ground. Tepco management smiled and said they would, then continued doing exactly what they'd set out to do in the first place.
Even without the seawall if the generators had been better sited, the situation would have been salvagable.
If Tepco hadn't dragged their feet asking for help, emergency generators could have been shipped in before the meltdown was inevitable.
If engineers had vented the hydrogen, there wouldn't have been explosions. The halflife of the radioactives in them is only a few hours and hydrogen mostly goes straight up. They were trying to allow the radioactivity to die down. Bad idea.
If tepco had paid attention to the safety reports, then not only would the seawall have been worked on, but cooling water intakes wouldn't have clogged. Salt water might have trashed the cores but it would have stopped a meltdown.
"Surprising someone with additional fees at checkout time is a shitty business practice"
And you can refuse to pay.
Surprising someone with additional fees AFTER they've paid and actively preventing them from taking or using what they've already paid for is extortion.
WRT hyperloop being suspended overhead - yes, but that was proposed for smaller diameter tubes with light loading. In any case you can effectively do that with high speed rail too - the chinese run much of their nationwide 300-350km/h(*) high speed rail network on elevated sections as it's easier than grading the ground.
The issue is that whilst it may be elevated, you're still going to need a cleared space under the tubes, if only to install them in the first place.
(*) Speed limits were reduced to 300km/h after the crashes a couple of years back. Increases back to 350km/h were announced recently.
"I'm also not sure how realistic frequent depots are, since you've got to consider that unlike rail, roads, etc, where you can essentially just pull off on a relatively cheap siding, a hyperloop depot will require several miles of (or very powerful) linear motor for acceleration and deceleration"
That's something I'm unsure of too. These issues need exploring for long-term viability, including questions like "Do you need the evacuated tube for low speed local running?"
WRT merging/routing traffic, in the long term whether cargo or passengers this is something that will need addressing and given the nature of evacuated tubes the added complication of stub switching needs to be considered.
The question of "is it useful for cargo" comes down to this point: If it's not being used, it's losing money. Cargo can soak up capacity outside of peak passenger periods and ensure consistent revenue - and in terms of income per cubic foot moved, cargo generates a lot more than passengers do. Even in aviation where mass is critical, cargo is an important component of passenger flight economics - to the point that airlines flying A380s don't increase the seating from ~550 up to the max 850pax, because it cuts too much into the cargo carrying capacity,
"If there is no reason to face forwards it is better to face backwards for safety reasons."
People insist on facing forwards. You can take care of that by rotating the pod after the doors are closed or using other illusions to make them think they're facing the direction of travel as they take their seat.
"I also recall discussions of trans-continental lines, New York to LA at truly ridiculous speeds."
With high speed rail, it makes more sense for me to take a train from London to Paris than it does to fly. It's faster doorstep-to-doorstep.
Hyperloop could easily supplant that and at the same time take the "faster than flying" equation out to 1500 miles or so. With pressure mounting to cut carbon emissions, aviation is going to be facing stuff competition from ground-based transportation that's "almost" as quick whilst being electrically driven.
1: Once you start going fast, the majority of air resistance on a train is skin resistance along the sides. You could have a squared off nose and it'd make very little difference. Noses are primarily sculpted to stop them lifting and you're expending tens of megawatts just pushing air aside.
2: Rail is only profitable for freight and only just got past "barely profitable" with the advent of containerisation. All that wagon-load handling along with freight yards, etc was a massive drain on resources as well as a vulnerability for theft.
3: Passenger rail simply isn't profitable and never will be directly. The wins come from knock-on effects such as reductions in car numbers and associated vehicle infrastructure in urban areas as well as substantial pollution reductions and _that_ is why most european countries run ~80% subsidies on their passenger rail systems. I can't see hyperloop being directly profitable either.
4: Hyperloop pods can carry anything - as long as they're large enough.
Passenger transport is subject to ebbs and flows (ie, peak periods) and will need freight to make up the difference. The problem is that unless the freight is containerised, handling costs will eat up any pricing advantage.
You could use aviation containers but they're not particularly robust and in general are packed/unpacked like railway wagons of the old days (airfreight has similar handling and theft problems to that of rail in the old days)
In any case, there's been a standard intermodal container size in play for over 60 years and it doesn't make sense to have a new transport system that's incapable of accomodating it. My pick is that unless hyperloop is built to a diameter large enough to handle pods capable of carrying shipping containers, it will have a hard job breaking even in the long term.
A hyperloop with podded freight containers means that unlike rail you can intersperse freight and passenger operation on the same lines without major handling problems and ideally you can run the pods from depot to depot, meaning less handling damage and lower costs. Overnight you can increase the ratio of freight to passenger operations.
Because of the nature of the operation, running 2 tubes is a non-starter.
You'll need to run 4 for resiliance. This allows you to shut down one line for maintenance without interrupting traffic. The alternative of overnight shutdowns and 6 hour windows to get 25 minutes of work done by the time you get everything into and out of a worksite is a nightmare regularly endured by London Underground, resulting in some sections of tunnels still running on century-old track because they can't shut them down for long enough to replace the stuff without causing massive disruptions for 12 million people.
But at this point you have a problem. The original right of way for small diameter hyperloop tubes has grown to about the same size as a dual-track railway line. What do you do? On one hand it will cost a fortune to install but on the other it will be much cheaper to operate than conventional rail.
I ran across it in an article around 2008 written as the market started experiencing a major glut and frackers were under increasing financial pressure. That pointed to the Koch brothers being behind it the rule. I can't find it either.
In addition, well operators are generally only allowed to cease production for a short period before losing their lease rights. That's documented in a number of places.
I don't know where you get your "radioactive leaks" meme from.
Monitoring of those wrecks and of the three dumped reactors from the Lenin (nuclear icebreaker) have shown that radioactivity is barely detectable 50cm from the reactors and totally undetectable from 2 metres away
The Lenin reactors in particular have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the years because they lie very close to Norwegian territorial waters and they were/are rightfully worried about them.
So far the concensus is "leave them where they are, it's safer than trying to lift them"
The recyleability of lead-acid batteries approaches 100% (the lead is perfectly suited to making new batteries), so the only time the EPA needs to get involved is when someone's being a dickhead about disposal.
"With natural-gas fracking you generally want to use it ASAP"
It's worse than that. In the USA you are _required_ to sell oil and gas as soon as you have the well working. You can't cap it and hold back until the market price is right.
The result is a vicious boom-bust cycle with attendant massive price swings.
"Unfortunately for nuclear, natural gas has become too cheap to compete with"
For a while.
1: Gas won't last forever 2: The CO2 emissions are still significant. 3: "Sequestration" costs approximately 2/3 of the energy produced by burning the gas in the first place and as such when it becomes required it'll instantly render carbon-emitting power stations too expensive to run.
The problem is that the utilities are looking in the short term, not thinking 2 decades out.
Slashdot Mirror
Methodology and predictions of experts are ALWAYS off.
Even in the early 1980s no one was predicting the ubiquity of mobile phones and in the 1990s, marrying mobile phones to tablet computers was a pipe dream.
Technological predictions of the future are about 50:50 2 years out and get worse as the predicted period goes further out. On the other hand ecological ones have proven to be chillingly accurate over long periods.
One of the more "interesting" problems with solar manufacture is the cost externality being incurred downstream of the chinese manufacturing plants. Solar PV could still prove to be one of the larger environmental disasters mankind has inflicted on itself.
in any case, concentrating on renewables distracts from the far larger problem - that when all is said and done, renewables can just about match existing electrical generation capacity, but electrical generation currently only accounts for about 40% of carbon emissions. Reducing those emissions (heating, industrial processes, transportation) requires increased electrical generation capacity - a factor of 6-8 or so.
The $64-trillion question is where is that capacity going to come from and when will the world accept that reducing carbon emissions means making some (currently) unpalatable decisions.
Aside from the off-color humor, Cleopatra was greek (ptolomy dynasty) and lived closer to our time than the time when those pyramids were built - they were already 3000 years old when she was alive, 2000 years ago.
Yes, the pyramids really are that old.
Yes Egypt has been invaded by many groups.
No, we don't know much about the ethnicity or culture of the time when they were built.
Yes, Subsaharan Africa had some extremely advanced cultures and kingdoms - and did so right up to about the 15th century when the Portuguese systematically flattened just about every coastal city they could locate.
"Solar panel problems only affect small areas."
The pollution problems (mainly hydrofluric acid leaks) associated with solar panel production in China have the potential to wreck the potable drinking water of at least 40 million people downstream of the factories.
Right now there's a huge waste lake that noone knows how to deal with. If it breaches, the consequences will be catastrophic. Just because it's not happening in _your_ backyard doesn't mean it's not a problem associated with the technology.
Part of the problem is that radiation is a vastly overdemonised bogeyman that is made out to be far more dangerous than it is.
There are parts of Cornwall, Yorkshire and downtown Helsinki that are more naturally radioactive than any part of Fukushima province. For that matter so is Denver Colorado thanks to its altitude.
Aircrew receive even higher high energy radiation doses and they're not exactly dying like flies.
And all of that is _dwarfed_ by the annual radiation dose experienced by a smoker thanks to the polonium naturally present in the tobacco and which ends up fizzing away in lungs for 20 years.
The rate of cancers amongst Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was 4% higher than the rest of the population and the rate of cancers in both cities from 1950 to 1990 was 0.25% above comparable locations elsewhere.
Compare that to the rates around Love Canal or Minimata Bay.
It seems that low levels of ionising radiation are fairly benign (we've lived with them for billions of years) and higher levels either kill you or damage your immune system temporarily - at which point you might die of the common cold, but assuming you don't, you _will_ recover. You're far more likely to find Bart's 3-eyed fish downstream of a coal ash slurry pond than a nuclear plant.
The world's coal plants emit enough radium alone to match a half dozen chernobyl events each year, but nooone cares about that. It's not visible so it doesn't matter.
European plants pay into a decommissioning fund over their operational lifespan. This has worked well so far.
The american model of selling the plant at the end of its span to a shell company which then goes bust and leaves the government with cleanup costs is yet another scam, but that's not unusual in the USA - where the Duke plant was killed by corrupt contractors who didn't bother building to specification, resulting in massive cost overruns as Duke tried to get the regulators to approve the work that had been done.
The other point about molten salt systems:
If you have LFTRs, then you operate at 600-800C, instead of 350-400, which means you can reject heat to air on the cold side and still have high thermal efficiency in your turbines.
That in turn means you can site your power plants well away from water and faultlines. (rivers tend to follow faults)
Even if you do choose to site near water for greater thermal efficiency, your plant can sit idle at 1100C and not melt down.
The problem with nuclear teakettles isn't the nuclear part, it's the water.
"because reactors are practically all sited where they can be flooded"
They're sited where they are because BWR plants have to use large bodies of water as a heatsink or suffer staggeringly poor thermal efficiency.
The basic problem is that the _inside_ of a fuel rod sits around 1000-1100C, whilst the water can only get to 400-450C - meaning it's bloody hot, under shitloads of pressure and as a result both corrosive and wanting to explode. Adding boric acid to the mix is just gilding the lily.
Fission reactions top out about 1150C due to doppler effects. Therefore what you want is a primary coolant which boils above this temperature and doesn't catch fire (so no sodium, thanks). That's where molten salts come in. No boiling means no pressurisation, means no massive pressure vessels, means no risk of radioactive steam leaks, etc.
Current fission reactors are already 300,000 times safer than coal and that's including every military incident as well as the civil ones. LFTRs have the potential to make that at least an order of magnitude better, if not 2 orders plus. They will come, and they're vastly more efficient than uranium - not throwing away 85-90% of your input material before it sees the inside of a reactor and 99% of what does see the inside of the reactor is going to see to that, never mind the issue of the energy costs of enriching uranium for fuel being so high the USA regards it as a military secret.
Fusion _might_ be viable in my great-grandchildrens' lifetime. Maybe. We can't afford to wait until then to stop burning carbon and in order to achieve that we need to increase electrical production capacity in developed countries by a factor of around 6-10 over current levels, AS WELL as allowing for similar production capacity for 5 billion more people in developing countries.
Rewnewables at best can just match existing electrical production. Nukes isn't an option, it's a necessity.
It was still recoverable even after the tsunami, but Tepco manglement were more concerned about saving face than saving the plant.
And for that matter, GE told Tepco _during construction_ to put the diesel generators on higher ground. Tepco management smiled and said they would, then continued doing exactly what they'd set out to do in the first place.
Even without the seawall if the generators had been better sited, the situation would have been salvagable.
If Tepco hadn't dragged their feet asking for help, emergency generators could have been shipped in before the meltdown was inevitable.
If engineers had vented the hydrogen, there wouldn't have been explosions. The halflife of the radioactives in them is only a few hours and hydrogen mostly goes straight up. They were trying to allow the radioactivity to die down. Bad idea.
If tepco had paid attention to the safety reports, then not only would the seawall have been worked on, but cooling water intakes wouldn't have clogged. Salt water might have trashed the cores but it would have stopped a meltdown.
"Surprising someone with additional fees at checkout time is a shitty business practice"
And you can refuse to pay.
Surprising someone with additional fees AFTER they've paid and actively preventing them from taking or using what they've already paid for is extortion.
But you can still depreciate the equipment per standard calculations.
WRT hyperloop being suspended overhead - yes, but that was proposed for smaller diameter tubes with light loading. In any case you can effectively do that with high speed rail too - the chinese run much of their nationwide 300-350km/h(*) high speed rail network on elevated sections as it's easier than grading the ground.
The issue is that whilst it may be elevated, you're still going to need a cleared space under the tubes, if only to install them in the first place.
(*) Speed limits were reduced to 300km/h after the crashes a couple of years back. Increases back to 350km/h were announced recently.
"I'm also not sure how realistic frequent depots are, since you've got to consider that unlike rail, roads, etc, where you can essentially just pull off on a relatively cheap siding, a hyperloop depot will require several miles of (or very powerful) linear motor for acceleration and deceleration"
That's something I'm unsure of too. These issues need exploring for long-term viability, including questions like "Do you need the evacuated tube for low speed local running?"
WRT merging/routing traffic, in the long term whether cargo or passengers this is something that will need addressing and given the nature of evacuated tubes the added complication of stub switching needs to be considered.
The question of "is it useful for cargo" comes down to this point: If it's not being used, it's losing money. Cargo can soak up capacity outside of peak passenger periods and ensure consistent revenue - and in terms of income per cubic foot moved, cargo generates a lot more than passengers do. Even in aviation where mass is critical, cargo is an important component of passenger flight economics - to the point that airlines flying A380s don't increase the seating from ~550 up to the max 850pax, because it cuts too much into the cargo carrying capacity,
"Elon didn't invent maglev technology, the electric car, or the solar panel."
He didn't even invent the hyperloop concept. It's been floating around for at least 60 years.
"If there is no reason to face forwards it is better to face backwards for safety reasons."
People insist on facing forwards. You can take care of that by rotating the pod after the doors are closed or using other illusions to make them think they're facing the direction of travel as they take their seat.
"I also recall discussions of trans-continental lines, New York to LA at truly ridiculous speeds."
With high speed rail, it makes more sense for me to take a train from London to Paris than it does to fly. It's faster doorstep-to-doorstep.
Hyperloop could easily supplant that and at the same time take the "faster than flying" equation out to 1500 miles or so. With pressure mounting to cut carbon emissions, aviation is going to be facing stuff competition from ground-based transportation that's "almost" as quick whilst being electrically driven.
A couple of nits.
1: Once you start going fast, the majority of air resistance on a train is skin resistance along the sides. You could have a squared off nose and it'd make very little difference. Noses are primarily sculpted to stop them lifting and you're expending tens of megawatts just pushing air aside.
2: Rail is only profitable for freight and only just got past "barely profitable" with the advent of containerisation. All that wagon-load handling along with freight yards, etc was a massive drain on resources as well as a vulnerability for theft.
3: Passenger rail simply isn't profitable and never will be directly. The wins come from knock-on effects such as reductions in car numbers and associated vehicle infrastructure in urban areas as well as substantial pollution reductions and _that_ is why most european countries run ~80% subsidies on their passenger rail systems. I can't see hyperloop being directly profitable either.
4: Hyperloop pods can carry anything - as long as they're large enough.
Passenger transport is subject to ebbs and flows (ie, peak periods) and will need freight to make up the difference. The problem is that unless the freight is containerised, handling costs will eat up any pricing advantage.
You could use aviation containers but they're not particularly robust and in general are packed/unpacked like railway wagons of the old days (airfreight has similar handling and theft problems to that of rail in the old days)
In any case, there's been a standard intermodal container size in play for over 60 years and it doesn't make sense to have a new transport system that's incapable of accomodating it. My pick is that unless hyperloop is built to a diameter large enough to handle pods capable of carrying shipping containers, it will have a hard job breaking even in the long term.
A hyperloop with podded freight containers means that unlike rail you can intersperse freight and passenger operation on the same lines without major handling problems and ideally you can run the pods from depot to depot, meaning less handling damage and lower costs. Overnight you can increase the ratio of freight to passenger operations.
Because of the nature of the operation, running 2 tubes is a non-starter.
You'll need to run 4 for resiliance. This allows you to shut down one line for maintenance without interrupting traffic. The alternative of overnight shutdowns and 6 hour windows to get 25 minutes of work done by the time you get everything into and out of a worksite is a nightmare regularly endured by London Underground, resulting in some sections of tunnels still running on century-old track because they can't shut them down for long enough to replace the stuff without causing massive disruptions for 12 million people.
But at this point you have a problem. The original right of way for small diameter hyperloop tubes has grown to about the same size as a dual-track railway line. What do you do? On one hand it will cost a fortune to install but on the other it will be much cheaper to operate than conventional rail.
I ran across it in an article around 2008 written as the market started experiencing a major glut and frackers were under increasing financial pressure.
That pointed to the Koch brothers being behind it the rule. I can't find it either.
In addition, well operators are generally only allowed to cease production for a short period before losing their lease rights. That's documented in a number of places.
I don't know where you get your "radioactive leaks" meme from.
Monitoring of those wrecks and of the three dumped reactors from the Lenin (nuclear icebreaker) have shown that radioactivity is barely detectable 50cm from the reactors and totally undetectable from 2 metres away
The Lenin reactors in particular have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the years because they lie very close to Norwegian territorial waters and they were/are rightfully worried about them.
So far the concensus is "leave them where they are, it's safer than trying to lift them"
The recyleability of lead-acid batteries approaches 100% (the lead is perfectly suited to making new batteries), so the only time the EPA needs to get involved is when someone's being a dickhead about disposal.
"With natural-gas fracking you generally want to use it ASAP"
It's worse than that. In the USA you are _required_ to sell oil and gas as soon as you have the well working. You can't cap it and hold back until the market price is right.
The result is a vicious boom-bust cycle with attendant massive price swings.
A large chunk of the "struggle against regulators" has been due to contractors not building to spec in the first place.
The project has had insufficient oversight from the outset and the amount of fraud that went on is impressive. Land of the kickback and all that....
"Unfortunately for nuclear, natural gas has become too cheap to compete with"
For a while.
1: Gas won't last forever
2: The CO2 emissions are still significant.
3: "Sequestration" costs approximately 2/3 of the energy produced by burning the gas in the first place and as such when it becomes required it'll instantly render carbon-emitting power stations too expensive to run.
The problem is that the utilities are looking in the short term, not thinking 2 decades out.
"You can't purchase a separate radio license any more - I tried in the mid-1990s."
Is your name Eric and do you have a cat detector van?
"And quite the challenge it is."
It needs to be nuclear-thermal and noone's willing to invest in that kind of tech (yet)