At the time he made it, he was "rather focussed" on making it possible for miners to not blow their hands off, which was happening regularly with nitroglycerine.
Bear in mind that Toyota spent 30 years developing 60kW gas turbine vehicles before finally admitting they were impractical and finally giving up in the mid 1990s.
However the multiple-input continuously-variable gearbox, associated drivetrain and computer control technology were directly inherited by the 2nd generation Prius (the first gen was more closely related to railway diesel-electric tech than anything else)
The technological children of "failed" projects are oftimes more important than the fact of the failure.
Hydrogen tech is unlikely to ever be practical but materials technology driven by its development may well be a gamechanger in future.
"When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both side"
Then you and every other idiot on the road is probably following too close and you all need to redo your Driver's Ed classes
In any case it's not just "Maps and GPS", it's also intertial nav - my 2003 Nissan has this as an integral part of the Navigation system to cope with urban canyons - and real time traffic updates broadcast over broadcast FM subcarriers that my aforementioned Nissan also uses to reroute around blockages.
12 years on from that technology you can add real time map updates (iridium, etc in addition to mobile data services) and feedback from other drivers on the road (waze and friends mean the data can be democratised and is less susceptable to rogue operators), although this is starting to be automated and drivers are merely adding commentary.
In another decade you can add direct V2V communications so that when there's a problem around the corner your car knows about it within seconds, not minutes. Whether that's a monkey or a machine at the wheel, it makes decisions easier when you know what 's ahead.
90% of drivers do it because they have to, not because they enjoy it. They will happily let the computers take over.
90%+ of crashes and dings are the fault of one or more drivers. Insurance companies know that and the most likely long-term trend will be _punitive_ insurance premiums if you insist on manually driving your own vehicle.
"Don't put AI up against ridiculous situations. Put them up against realistic obstacles, which we might actually have a chance of seeing in our lifetimes. Road construction. Temporary obstacles with police directing traffic. Blizzards. Temporarily flooded road. Parking lots or garages."
The most likely thing in such cases will be a button for "override, proceed - SLOWLY - until obstacle passed"
As for parking and parking lots, computers have already demonstrated they're far better at handling these than most monkeys.
"What if it's already in the middle of the road? What if it isn't a cat after all, just a piece of cat-sized rubbish? Does it stop stationary in the middle of the road indefinitely?"
No, it changes lanes and goes around it.
You're also assuming the monkey can't get out of the car and kick the offending object to the kerb.
"But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it,"
That kind of thing would be a rare event if the tailgating driver was criminally charged - as he/she should be.
There's a reason for safe following distance laws and what you've described is an argument in favour of more AI in charge of cars, not less.
"If something steps out in front of it at a distance too close to be able to stop in time"
Then the driver hasn't been paying attention. Nothing "just steps out" and an observant driver will have seen the pedestrian heading for the roadway long before it sets foot on it.
An AI controlled car is far more likely to have been slowing down long before the human even noticed.
In most parts of the world the law is that you must be able to stop in the distance of clearly visible road in front of you, or half that if there is no centreline (narrow roads).
Speed limits are secondary to that - they're the velocity you must not exceed (most are arbitrary) - and you _can_ be charged with speeding if you're driving too fast for the conditions but below the posted limits, or dangerous driving if you're being completely stupid and doing things like driving 60mph in fog with 20 foot visibility.
The vast majority of road crashes are completely avoidable, which is why they shouldn't be called accidents.
Most crashes happen because cars know the laws of physics far better than the monkey at the controls.
An autonomous vehicle is a far more cautious driver than any human will be because if they're outside their parameters they'll either stop or go very slowly (overconfidence on the monkey's part is a big contributor) and they don't get impatient (which is a huge failing on the monkey's part and one which is inherent to their operating system), nor do they miss things like spotting the feet of the kid about to step out from between 2 parked cars 40 feet ahead (monkeys have terrible trouble coping with more than 2-3 inputs)
If the monkey is allowed to direct an autonomous vehicle but not given direct control, having hard limits imposed would reduce crash rates dramatically. The outcry about "loss of control" is the paradox, because the vehicle has _more_ control.
"the deregulated phone industry of the USA offers no such safe haven."
Did someone repeal the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) when I wasn't looking? It was enacted specifically because of fax spam and making a claim under it is about 10 minutes work (note the company being schilled for, file a small claims action against them, claim triple damages if it's wilful - easy $1500)
"But they aren't as pleasing to the ears with the various order harmonics, and they don't clip in the same fashion as real tube amps."
If I'm listening to a recording, I don't _want_ distortion. Soft-top clipping (which mostly gives even-harmonic distortion) may be more pleasing to the ear than hard clipping (which pushes odd harmonics) but it's still distortion.
On the other hand, if there's a guitar (or other instrument) plugged in, distortion is an intrinsic part of the overall sound. Otherwise you might as well just have 1960s Joan Baez wound up to ear-bleeding volume.
Someone posted elsewhere that now would be an ideal time for VW to make sure that _all_ its dirty laundry is aired. (aka "please take these other offences into consideration")
It's fairly clear that all makers have been gaming the system (various ones have been caught: EG, caterpilar/cummins a couple of years back, Ford about a decade ago and VW 40 years ago) to some degree or another and by stepping forward with everything now VW puts the onus on the others to also step forward or face a major ass-kicking if it's found later on that they kept quiet.
That said: NOX control is a very blunt instrument on the "sledgehammer to crack a nut" scale. Unlike CO, NOX emissions are only a problem in limited geographical areas and the tradeoff is higher CO2 emissions/poorer milage and more PM2 fine soot output (even on gasoline engines). Rather than mandating blanket emissions controls to cater to worst case conditions and given that sensing technology is far better now than it was a decade ago (let alone 40 years ago), perhaps cars should be allowed to sniff the air and work out what actual pollution levels are, where they are (maybe even shutting down the IC engine and moving to all-electric mode in extreme situations).
This (of course) can only be allowed if the EPA and other regulators are able to randomly test production samples to ensure they're complying (if you really want to not let the makers know which car's being tested, buy it off a dealer lot, etc) and come down like a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch on any maker found to be cheating.
It's worth noting that in London UK, vehicles only account for about 1/2 of the NOX emissions within the "north/south circular" ring roads (a decade ago it was 2/3), with the rest being contributed almost entirely by natural gas/oil-fired household heating systems. Those same stationary sources are also big offenders in the particulate emission department. The UK imposed NOX limits on stationary heating/boiler systems in 2003 but it's worth noting that almost all the NOX being emitted is from installations older than that (condensing boilers emit essentially zero and post-2003 non-condensing designs only 10% of unregulated levels.)
Even with that, NOX levels are only "of concern" inside the inner London ring road (this is a zone about 5 miles across) and effectively non-existent outside the North/South Circular routes (this is a zone about 20 miles across).
On really bad days, NOX controls on automobiles are "not enough" and on not-so-bad days, the sub-PM10s emitted by both diesels and ever-more restricted gasoline engines are a much bigger worry - to the point where some of the worst roads are sprayed with "glue" every night to try and make get as much "stuck down" as possible during peak traffic periods.
At some point the authorities are going to have to mandate replacement of old stationary heating sources but most of the people using these old systems either can't afford to replace them or have enough political clout to make life hard.
"Our Dean has enforced a long standing policy that all royalties for faculty-authored text books sold on our campus go to a student scholarship fund so our faculty cannot benefit from sales at our university."
I've seen similar rules at various universities.
The local captive bookshop and/or publishers ALWAYS ensure that the academics in question get a kickback.
It's about using the best cost solution for the _entire_system_, not about lithium vs lead acid
For solar thermal stations, the issue us storing the heat unti its ready to use,
For Solar PV, it's electrical energy.
Pumped hydro is 1: Not particularly efficient (but capable of massive surge currents) and 2: Highly dependent on having suitable geology. There are only a few sites capable of being used for this purpose and their overall capacity is a couple of hours peaking at absolute most. It's cheaper than batteries where it's available, but it's not particularly available.
Compressed air is absurdly inefficient even if the storage is "free"
_ALL_ of these storage/regeneration systems have poor efficiency and substantial maintenance costs that have to be factored in. Even if the storage systems are "free" (salt mines etc), having to double/treble/more the number of generators needed to maintain your _average_ output is not, nor is maintaining them and you have to now factor in the added complexity of control gear to decide where power is routed on a second-to-second basis as well as the cost and maintenance associated with the regeneration equipment.
I still haven't seen any arguments that trump nuclear power other than the "nooooclear baaaad" mantra. This isn't Animal Farm and the stats speak for themselves. It's funny how every single possible cost of a nuke plant is counted against it whilst those promoting the economics of XYZ other method mange to forget various associated costs including human lives.
eg: Even if you don't count externalised costs of emissions and oceanic mercury polllution from coal along with the direct human costs, the cleanup costs of coal plant tailing ponds dwarfs that of cleaning up nuclear plant (EU nuke plants charge costs towards cleanup as part of ongoing operation so even if the operator goes bust, there's a cleanup fund available without having to dip into governmental budgets) - and there are _thousands_ of those sites across the USA.
For solar, everyone is prepared to rave on about PV without counting the environmental costs of manufacture (which have already far outweighed any possible income from generation and the cleanup hasn't even started yet) and Solar Thermal comes with documented ecological costs, whilst not being particularly practical - the Californian plant can't even supply all the houses in its area, let alone the wide swathes of a state that would be needed for Solar Thermal to be a practical solution.
For Wind: the operating and amortised costs of turbines are such that without subsidies power prices would need to at least quadruple to make them profitable - and that's without even taking into account the factor of a 2-mile exclusion zone around each one (the blades have been known to go at least a mile when they break) and the factor that the big ones have a tendency to catch fire (gearbox problems) or destroy their gearboxes in high winds with monotonous regularity.
Tidal schemes: The few which have been tried have been quietly shut down again. They're just not practical (Scaling issues kick in. Small ones work fine but bringing them up to sizes needed for industrial scale generation simply doesn't work economically)
I really _really_ wish that alternative energy sources were actually practical as a full replacement for coal/gas/oil. They're not. They simply don't scale to the sizes required to replace current demands, let alone vastly increased future ones.
0C or 5C or even 35C is a minor variation compared to the 300+C at the mirror focal point. It's that area which will be subjected to the greatest thermal cycling stresses and will break down fastest if allowed to cool overnight.
Dirty mirrrors/water marking are absolutely minor concerns - the first is usually taken care of with in desert environments with an integral automated brush which sweeps the mirror daily (these have been used on solar farms for 20+ years) and the second would affect less than 1% of the mirror surface.
Bearings are already produced which can exclude the kind of dust in question (unless someone cuts corners) and again, this stuff has been around on desert solar farms for a long time.
It's worth noting that the Nevada solar thermal plant has a gas-fired system alongside to keep it warm overnight - and the efficiency of _that_ system is substantially lower than was originally claimed, resulting in the plant being on the verge of uneconomic to operate even with subsidies - effectively the entire system uses only about 10-20% less gas than simply running an equivalent capacity gas-fired power station 24*7 and a gas plant would have been a lot cheaper to construct, plus constructable near demand/existing piplines.
If Morocco chooses the same route to keep the molten salt from freezing they will probably encounter the same issue. The other big issue to deal with is saharan sandstorms and shifting dunes. Unlike dune mitigation techniques used in open desert (ie, to keep roads open) The wind shadows caused by towers and mirrors on a solar farm are perfect places for sand to start building up.If it costs too much in energy to get rid of it then the plant will be uneconomic.
"What's needed is to have another MSR/LFTR built, say 20 - 50 MW, run it for at least 3 years with >60% uptime"
Indeed.
Bear in mind that the "frequently shut down" part of the ORNL plant was mostly "friday afternoons, because noone wanted to stay around during the weekend and look after it" and "tests to ensure it could be restarted quickly" (which it could be). It could be throttled from high to low and back again almost as quickly as a hydro system - which is not only substantially better than conventional nuke systems, it's also substantially better than most thermal plants other than OCGTs and smaller diesel piston systems (cogen systems take a long time to cycle up/down)
And that one of the prime requirements for new generation nuclear _is_ the ability to throttle up/down quickly. You simply can't do that _at all_ with fuel rod or pebble-based systems, as the neutron poisons which build up in the sealed units under such circumstances constrain throttle-up to "several hours' delay".
Until MSRs are commercially practical, conventional nukes are the best way forward. The waste problem is several orders of magnitude less complicated than that of coal (300 years cooling results in low level waste) and several more orders of magnitude smaller than a coal plant's tailings pond (a swimming-pool's worth of waste over the life of the plant rather than several square miles of ash slurry). The big bad nooclear bogeyman is less worrying when you shine a light on him and don't let your system get corrupted by beancounters (or "experimenters") compromising the safety designs (several USA reactor control rooms, including TMI), bypassing interlocks (Chernobyl), or running plants far beyond their design lifespan (Fukushima), or do stupid things like using molten sodium as your coolant (various breeder reactors but the example I'm thinking of specifically is Monju) or run exposed graphite in the core (Chernobyl and Windscale/Sellafield - although the latter was a military reactor producing plutonium for bombs)
Once MSRs _are_ commercially viable (Fusion may happen but it's realistically at least a century away and we don't have that much time to wean ourselves off carbon) then the fact that they can load-follow and easily idle means a lot of the complication in the current grid can be done away with. More importantly they're likely to do so at rates which mean that Solar(PV|Thermal) and Wind become even more hopelessly uneconomic than they already are.
Discounting Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the entire worldwide death/injury toll from mad-made nuclear effects (military and civilian) in the last 70 years is far less than 1 year's road deaths in a tiny country like New Zealand (331 died there in 2012). If you take out the military incidents, the number comes down to less than 100 and most of those (41-56 depending on the source) are people who died fighting the fire at Chernobyl. Putting it in perspective: That's less than one _day_ of United States road deaths (average 99/day in 2012).
I really don't like the idea of building new water cooled/moderated nuke plants on safety grounds but I don't see that "we" (the planetary population) have much choice. We need viable base-load alternatives to carbon _now_, not in 30 years' time (solar and wind can never provide wide-area baseload, even with storage systems in place) and we need to take into account a quadrupling of demand in the developed world (replacement of carbon-based winter heating systems and more-electric vehicles), plus at least 50 times more as the developing world moves ahead (energy and potable water access are the driving forces behind most wars and refugee crises. If you want to start heading those off, you need to stop dropping bombs and start building energy systems.)
"It is in an environment which will be naturally tough on the system"
That's an understatment and a half.
I'd give it a decade or less before the thermal cycling (deserts get _cold_ at night, even equatorial ones) results in astronomical maintenance costs and kills the project. Going from 300+C daytime to more or less zero every day is going to be hell on the mirrors and focal points and that's before weather factors are factored in.
"I'd imagine that solar thermal does pretty well in regards to waste and ecological damage."
Deserts and other environments which are ideal for solar-thermal are extremely fragile ecosystems. Just the fact of having the stuff there and people wandering around them is extremely damaging.
"The only issue with the plant is that it's upwind from the Phoenix area,"
If "we" got water away from the fuel, being upwind of anything wouldn't matter. Nuclear plants don't "explode" in the A-bomb sense, they vent radioactive steam and/or hydrogen if they get too hot, or in worst case you get a pipe/boiler burst.
These things happen no matter how safe you make the system, so commonsense should dictate that radioactives can't get dissolved into the water in the first place (molten sodium is particularly stupid. You should use a coolant at the bottom of the chemical energy curve not one which is going to burn furiously if there's a leak)
Slashdot Mirror
We need Lofstrom loops and skyhooks.
This is small stuff. OK for getting people to LEO but not much more than that.
At the time he made it, he was "rather focussed" on making it possible for miners to not blow their hands off, which was happening regularly with nitroglycerine.
Humans don't do well around those things the first few times they encounter them. Some never do master them.
Bullshit. My car's nav system has a specific "road ahead closed" function that's one button on the dashboard.
It's 12 years old and the tech has only improved since then.
"but don't really know the address or proper name such as that italian place downtown, you know the one with the good meatballs"
'OK google. search restaurants, italian, downtown, meatballs
OK google Navigate to result N, go.'
and that's with existing technology.
Bear in mind that Toyota spent 30 years developing 60kW gas turbine vehicles before finally admitting they were impractical and finally giving up in the mid 1990s.
However the multiple-input continuously-variable gearbox, associated drivetrain and computer control technology were directly inherited by the 2nd generation Prius (the first gen was more closely related to railway diesel-electric tech than anything else)
The technological children of "failed" projects are oftimes more important than the fact of the failure.
Hydrogen tech is unlikely to ever be practical but materials technology driven by its development may well be a gamechanger in future.
"When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both side"
Then you and every other idiot on the road is probably following too close and you all need to redo your Driver's Ed classes
In any case it's not just "Maps and GPS", it's also intertial nav - my 2003 Nissan has this as an integral part of the Navigation system to cope with urban canyons - and real time traffic updates broadcast over broadcast FM subcarriers that my aforementioned Nissan also uses to reroute around blockages.
12 years on from that technology you can add real time map updates (iridium, etc in addition to mobile data services) and feedback from other drivers on the road (waze and friends mean the data can be democratised and is less susceptable to rogue operators), although this is starting to be automated and drivers are merely adding commentary.
In another decade you can add direct V2V communications so that when there's a problem around the corner your car knows about it within seconds, not minutes. Whether that's a monkey or a machine at the wheel, it makes decisions easier when you know what 's ahead.
90% of drivers do it because they have to, not because they enjoy it. They will happily let the computers take over.
90%+ of crashes and dings are the fault of one or more drivers. Insurance companies know that and the most likely long-term trend will be _punitive_ insurance premiums if you insist on manually driving your own vehicle.
"Don't put AI up against ridiculous situations. Put them up against realistic obstacles, which we might actually have a chance of seeing in our lifetimes. Road construction. Temporary obstacles with police directing traffic. Blizzards. Temporarily flooded road. Parking lots or garages."
The most likely thing in such cases will be a button for "override, proceed - SLOWLY - until obstacle passed"
As for parking and parking lots, computers have already demonstrated they're far better at handling these than most monkeys.
"What if it's already in the middle of the road? What if it isn't a cat after all, just a piece of cat-sized rubbish? Does it stop stationary in the middle of the road indefinitely?"
No, it changes lanes and goes around it.
You're also assuming the monkey can't get out of the car and kick the offending object to the kerb.
"But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it,"
That kind of thing would be a rare event if the tailgating driver was criminally charged - as he/she should be.
There's a reason for safe following distance laws and what you've described is an argument in favour of more AI in charge of cars, not less.
"If something steps out in front of it at a distance too close to be able to stop in time"
Then the driver hasn't been paying attention. Nothing "just steps out" and an observant driver will have seen the pedestrian heading for the roadway long before it sets foot on it.
An AI controlled car is far more likely to have been slowing down long before the human even noticed.
In most parts of the world the law is that you must be able to stop in the distance of clearly visible road in front of you, or half that if there is no centreline (narrow roads).
Speed limits are secondary to that - they're the velocity you must not exceed (most are arbitrary) - and you _can_ be charged with speeding if you're driving too fast for the conditions but below the posted limits, or dangerous driving if you're being completely stupid and doing things like driving 60mph in fog with 20 foot visibility.
The vast majority of road crashes are completely avoidable, which is why they shouldn't be called accidents.
Most crashes happen because cars know the laws of physics far better than the monkey at the controls.
An autonomous vehicle is a far more cautious driver than any human will be because if they're outside their parameters they'll either stop or go very slowly (overconfidence on the monkey's part is a big contributor) and they don't get impatient (which is a huge failing on the monkey's part and one which is inherent to their operating system), nor do they miss things like spotting the feet of the kid about to step out from between 2 parked cars 40 feet ahead (monkeys have terrible trouble coping with more than 2-3 inputs)
If the monkey is allowed to direct an autonomous vehicle but not given direct control, having hard limits imposed would reduce crash rates dramatically. The outcry about "loss of control" is the paradox, because the vehicle has _more_ control.
Or, you find that the taxi company buys AI cars and dispenses with drivers (which are the single largest expense)
Name, job title and phone number of govt employees are a matter of public record (or should be) and as such exposable under FOIA in any case.
The fact that this is regarded as secret says far more about a government than it does about the people publishing it.
"the deregulated phone industry of the USA offers no such safe haven."
Did someone repeal the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) when I wasn't looking? It was enacted specifically because of fax spam and making a claim under it is about 10 minutes work (note the company being schilled for, file a small claims action against them, claim triple damages if it's wilful - easy $1500)
"But they aren't as pleasing to the ears with the various order harmonics, and they don't clip in the same fashion as real tube amps."
If I'm listening to a recording, I don't _want_ distortion. Soft-top clipping (which mostly gives even-harmonic distortion) may be more pleasing to the ear than hard clipping (which pushes odd harmonics) but it's still distortion.
On the other hand, if there's a guitar (or other instrument) plugged in, distortion is an intrinsic part of the overall sound. Otherwise you might as well just have 1960s Joan Baez wound up to ear-bleeding volume.
Someone posted elsewhere that now would be an ideal time for VW to make sure that _all_ its dirty laundry is aired. (aka "please take these other offences into consideration")
It's fairly clear that all makers have been gaming the system (various ones have been caught: EG, caterpilar/cummins a couple of years back, Ford about a decade ago and VW 40 years ago) to some degree or another and by stepping forward with everything now VW puts the onus on the others to also step forward or face a major ass-kicking if it's found later on that they kept quiet.
That said: NOX control is a very blunt instrument on the "sledgehammer to crack a nut" scale. Unlike CO, NOX emissions are only a problem in limited geographical areas and the tradeoff is higher CO2 emissions/poorer milage and more PM2 fine soot output (even on gasoline engines). Rather than mandating blanket emissions controls to cater to worst case conditions and given that sensing technology is far better now than it was a decade ago (let alone 40 years ago), perhaps cars should be allowed to sniff the air and work out what actual pollution levels are, where they are (maybe even shutting down the IC engine and moving to all-electric mode in extreme situations).
This (of course) can only be allowed if the EPA and other regulators are able to randomly test production samples to ensure they're complying (if you really want to not let the makers know which car's being tested, buy it off a dealer lot, etc) and come down like a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch on any maker found to be cheating.
It's worth noting that in London UK, vehicles only account for about 1/2 of the NOX emissions within the "north/south circular" ring roads (a decade ago it was 2/3), with the rest being contributed almost entirely by natural gas/oil-fired household heating systems. Those same stationary sources are also big offenders in the particulate emission department. The UK imposed NOX limits on stationary heating/boiler systems in 2003 but it's worth noting that almost all the NOX being emitted is from installations older than that (condensing boilers emit essentially zero and post-2003 non-condensing designs only 10% of unregulated levels.)
Even with that, NOX levels are only "of concern" inside the inner London ring road (this is a zone about 5 miles across) and effectively non-existent outside the North/South Circular routes (this is a zone about 20 miles across).
On really bad days, NOX controls on automobiles are "not enough" and on not-so-bad days, the sub-PM10s emitted by both diesels and ever-more restricted gasoline engines are a much bigger worry - to the point where some of the worst roads are sprayed with "glue" every night to try and make get as much "stuck down" as possible during peak traffic periods.
At some point the authorities are going to have to mandate replacement of old stationary heating sources but most of the people using these old systems either can't afford to replace them or have enough political clout to make life hard.
"Our Dean has enforced a long standing policy that all royalties for faculty-authored text books sold on our campus go to a student scholarship fund so our faculty cannot benefit from sales at our university."
I've seen similar rules at various universities.
The local captive bookshop and/or publishers ALWAYS ensure that the academics in question get a kickback.
It's about using the best cost solution for the _entire_system_, not about lithium vs lead acid
For solar thermal stations, the issue us storing the heat unti its ready to use,
For Solar PV, it's electrical energy.
Pumped hydro is 1: Not particularly efficient (but capable of massive surge currents) and 2: Highly dependent on having suitable geology. There are only a few sites capable of being used for this purpose and their overall capacity is a couple of hours peaking at absolute most. It's cheaper than batteries where it's available, but it's not particularly available.
Compressed air is absurdly inefficient even if the storage is "free"
_ALL_ of these storage/regeneration systems have poor efficiency and substantial maintenance costs that have to be factored in. Even if the storage systems are "free" (salt mines etc), having to double/treble/more the number of generators needed to maintain your _average_ output is not, nor is maintaining them and you have to now factor in the added complexity of control gear to decide where power is routed on a second-to-second basis as well as the cost and maintenance associated with the regeneration equipment.
I still haven't seen any arguments that trump nuclear power other than the "nooooclear baaaad" mantra. This isn't Animal Farm and the stats speak for themselves. It's funny how every single possible cost of a nuke plant is counted against it whilst those promoting the economics of XYZ other method mange to forget various associated costs including human lives.
eg: Even if you don't count externalised costs of emissions and oceanic mercury polllution from coal along with the direct human costs, the cleanup costs of coal plant tailing ponds dwarfs that of cleaning up nuclear plant (EU nuke plants charge costs towards cleanup as part of ongoing operation so even if the operator goes bust, there's a cleanup fund available without having to dip into governmental budgets) - and there are _thousands_ of those sites across the USA.
For solar, everyone is prepared to rave on about PV without counting the environmental costs of manufacture (which have already far outweighed any possible income from generation and the cleanup hasn't even started yet) and Solar Thermal comes with documented ecological costs, whilst not being particularly practical - the Californian plant can't even supply all the houses in its area, let alone the wide swathes of a state that would be needed for Solar Thermal to be a practical solution.
For Wind: the operating and amortised costs of turbines are such that without subsidies power prices would need to at least quadruple to make them profitable - and that's without even taking into account the factor of a 2-mile exclusion zone around each one (the blades have been known to go at least a mile when they break) and the factor that the big ones have a tendency to catch fire (gearbox problems) or destroy their gearboxes in high winds with monotonous regularity.
Tidal schemes: The few which have been tried have been quietly shut down again. They're just not practical (Scaling issues kick in. Small ones work fine but bringing them up to sizes needed for industrial scale generation simply doesn't work economically)
I really _really_ wish that alternative energy sources were actually practical as a full replacement for coal/gas/oil. They're not. They simply don't scale to the sizes required to replace current demands, let alone vastly increased future ones.
0C or 5C or even 35C is a minor variation compared to the 300+C at the mirror focal point. It's that area which will be subjected to the greatest thermal cycling stresses and will break down fastest if allowed to cool overnight.
Dirty mirrrors/water marking are absolutely minor concerns - the first is usually taken care of with in desert environments with an integral automated brush which sweeps the mirror daily (these have been used on solar farms for 20+ years) and the second would affect less than 1% of the mirror surface.
Bearings are already produced which can exclude the kind of dust in question (unless someone cuts corners) and again, this stuff has been around on desert solar farms for a long time.
It's worth noting that the Nevada solar thermal plant has a gas-fired system alongside to keep it warm overnight - and the efficiency of _that_ system is substantially lower than was originally claimed, resulting in the plant being on the verge of uneconomic to operate even with subsidies - effectively the entire system uses only about 10-20% less gas than simply running an equivalent capacity gas-fired power station 24*7 and a gas plant would have been a lot cheaper to construct, plus constructable near demand/existing piplines.
If Morocco chooses the same route to keep the molten salt from freezing they will probably encounter the same issue. The other big issue to deal with is saharan sandstorms and shifting dunes. Unlike dune mitigation techniques used in open desert (ie, to keep roads open) The wind shadows caused by towers and mirrors on a solar farm are perfect places for sand to start building up.If it costs too much in energy to get rid of it then the plant will be uneconomic.
"What's needed is to have another MSR/LFTR built, say 20 - 50 MW, run it for at least 3 years with >60% uptime"
Indeed.
Bear in mind that the "frequently shut down" part of the ORNL plant was mostly "friday afternoons, because noone wanted to stay around during the weekend and look after it" and "tests to ensure it could be restarted quickly" (which it could be). It could be throttled from high to low and back again almost as quickly as a hydro system - which is not only substantially better than conventional nuke systems, it's also substantially better than most thermal plants other than OCGTs and smaller diesel piston systems (cogen systems take a long time to cycle up/down)
And that one of the prime requirements for new generation nuclear _is_ the ability to throttle up/down quickly. You simply can't do that _at all_ with fuel rod or pebble-based systems, as the neutron poisons which build up in the sealed units under such circumstances constrain throttle-up to "several hours' delay".
Until MSRs are commercially practical, conventional nukes are the best way forward. The waste problem is several orders of magnitude less complicated than that of coal (300 years cooling results in low level waste) and several more orders of magnitude smaller than a coal plant's tailings pond (a swimming-pool's worth of waste over the life of the plant rather than several square miles of ash slurry). The big bad nooclear bogeyman is less worrying when you shine a light on him and don't let your system get corrupted by beancounters (or "experimenters") compromising the safety designs (several USA reactor control rooms, including TMI), bypassing interlocks (Chernobyl), or running plants far beyond their design lifespan (Fukushima), or do stupid things like using molten sodium as your coolant (various breeder reactors but the example I'm thinking of specifically is Monju) or run exposed graphite in the core (Chernobyl and Windscale/Sellafield - although the latter was a military reactor producing plutonium for bombs)
Once MSRs _are_ commercially viable (Fusion may happen but it's realistically at least a century away and we don't have that much time to wean ourselves off carbon) then the fact that they can load-follow and easily idle means a lot of the complication in the current grid can be done away with. More importantly they're likely to do so at rates which mean that Solar(PV|Thermal) and Wind become even more hopelessly uneconomic than they already are.
Discounting Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the entire worldwide death/injury toll from mad-made nuclear effects (military and civilian) in the last 70 years is far less than 1 year's road deaths in a tiny country like New Zealand (331 died there in 2012). If you take out the military incidents, the number comes down to less than 100 and most of those (41-56 depending on the source) are people who died fighting the fire at Chernobyl. Putting it in perspective: That's less than one _day_ of United States road deaths (average 99/day in 2012).
I really don't like the idea of building new water cooled/moderated nuke plants on safety grounds but I don't see that "we" (the planetary population) have much choice. We need viable base-load alternatives to carbon _now_, not in 30 years' time (solar and wind can never provide wide-area baseload, even with storage systems in place) and we need to take into account a quadrupling of demand in the developed world (replacement of carbon-based winter heating systems and more-electric vehicles), plus at least 50 times more as the developing world moves ahead (energy and potable water access are the driving forces behind most wars and refugee crises. If you want to start heading those off, you need to stop dropping bombs and start building energy systems.)
"It is in an environment which will be naturally tough on the system"
That's an understatment and a half.
I'd give it a decade or less before the thermal cycling (deserts get _cold_ at night, even equatorial ones) results in astronomical maintenance costs and kills the project. Going from 300+C daytime to more or less zero every day is going to be hell on the mirrors and focal points and that's before weather factors are factored in.
"I'd imagine that solar thermal does pretty well in regards to waste and ecological damage."
Deserts and other environments which are ideal for solar-thermal are extremely fragile ecosystems. Just the fact of having the stuff there and people wandering around them is extremely damaging.
"The only issue with the plant is that it's upwind from the Phoenix area,"
If "we" got water away from the fuel, being upwind of anything wouldn't matter. Nuclear plants don't "explode" in the A-bomb sense, they vent radioactive steam and/or hydrogen if they get too hot, or in worst case you get a pipe/boiler burst.
These things happen no matter how safe you make the system, so commonsense should dictate that radioactives can't get dissolved into the water in the first place (molten sodium is particularly stupid. You should use a coolant at the bottom of the chemical energy curve not one which is going to burn furiously if there's a leak)
"In addition, any second or third world country undertaking a nuc energy project is going to come under intense scrutiny."
China is more than willing to sell anyone a civil nuclear plant, complete with the security systems and staff required to run it.