Nice troll, sounds really impressive (apart from the fact that you can't spell "latent"). I wonder how many people reading it failed to realise that every single "fact" presented was complete fiction?
I would tend to agree that intuitively it just doesn't add up to me, the amount of energy we could remove is such a tiny proportion of the total energy in the atmosphere.
I think it would be interesting to find out who paid for the study - rumour has it the nuclear industry is making a huge PR effort to discredit wind power atm.
I've heard numerous times that for the same power output, a nuclear reactor generates less radioactive material than, say, a coal fired plant.
The thing you're missing is that this is complete bullshit. Coal contains a miniscule amount of uranium - uranium is only very weakly radioactive. Fission products on the other hand are many orders of magnitude more reactive.
Doing what you suggest with *unused fuel* probably would be no worse than coal emissions, but doing it with waste fission products would be very very bad, Chernobyl only released a small proportion of its waste to the atmosphere.
...since at times in the recent (geologically speaking) past the climate has been significantly warmer than today and the coral survived then. Something the global-warming-doomsday brigade have seen fit to ignore.
It's also worth noting that damage due to pollutants tends to get *under*reported as everyone's so keen to blame global warming. We need to do more to actually reduce the amount of shit we tip into the oceans, rather than bleating about how everyone *else* should stop using their cars.
The solution to that is simple. You make new fuel of the waste.
Sorry, doesn't work like that. The fuel rods have to be removed from the reactor not when the U235 is exhausted, but when the fission products start to build up. These fission products are orders of magnitude more radioactive than the original fuel was, and when present in any quantity will poison the nuclear reactions. This will happen after only a small proportion of the U235 has fissioned. "Reprocessing" simply consists of seperating out the unused fuel from the fission products so you get a second chance to use the remaining fuel.
Fast breeder reactors are a solution to an entirely different problem, i.e. converting unusable U238 into fissionable Pu239. There is currently no way to deal with fission products except waiting a few thousand years for the worst of the radioactivity to die away. It's also difficult to handle because with the extreme levels of radioactivity it generates there is also a lot of heat, if you encased it in concrete and buried it, it would just burn it's way out and end up in the groundwater.
Nuclear waste is a problem that already has a solution, and a solution that is ecologically sound and very much in line with recycling and reuse.
So this thing seems to generate about 4 x 55 gallon drums worth of waste over a 30 year period, or an average of 1 drum every 7.5 years.
That's one drum per 7.5 years per village of 700 people. And perhaps you'd check how much it costs to deal with one drum of high-level waste (i.e. store it for the 50000 or so years it will take to become safe).
if you boil water with it it leaves a residue that is apparently more toxic than cyanide, so you have to scrub the kettle clean after each cup
ROFLMAO, if you get a residue left in your kettle it's limescale, which is completely harmless. Whoever told you that must have been killing themselves laughing at the thought of you obsessively scrubbing your kettle out!
Dropping a few hundred metres won't impact that much, and the downwards velocity you gain while falling is truly negligeable compared to the delta-v an orbit-capable rocket needs.
X-prize rockets are *nowhere near* orbit capable, delta-v around 1400ms-1 compared to 10000ms-1 (just 2% of the kinetic energy!)
This is completely wrong for a whole variety of reasons.
For a start the mechanisms of atmosphere leakage aren't pressure dependent, this means if Mars' atmosphere *was* leaking, it wouldn't stop at the current 6-7mb - there would be next to nothing left at all. Another obvious point is that Titan has a thicker atmosphere than Earth, and a much lower escape velocity than Mars.
In order to lose a molecule from the atmosphere, that molecule has to reach escape velocity, as you say.
Average KE of a gas molecule at 300K (hotter than Mars ever gets), E1 is ~ 4.1E-21J. Escape velocity of Mars is ~ 5000ms-1 KE of an N2 molecule (the lightest molecule we're interested in) at escape velocity, E2 is ~ 2.9E-19J. Therefore, according to Boltzmann's distribution the proportion of gas molecules which will reach escape velocity is 1/e(E2/E1), which is ~3.4E-31. In other words, it is really *really* rare for a gas molecule to get escape velocity thermally. Mars does not lose atmosphere this way.
The other mechanism which deserves looking at is solar wind, if a high-energy particle collides with a molecule in the atmosphere it may impart enough KE for it to reach escape velocity. This is actually the main way atmosphere is lost from Mars, and also from Earth. It's worth noting that Earth actually loses *more* atmosphere this way, being closer to the sun, but in both cases the amount is still utterly negligible.
So, if we can magic up an atmosphere for Mars, ala KSR, it *will* stay there.
The real reason Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth is this. Early in the solar system's history the solar wind flux was many orders of magnitude greater than today - this is known as the Sun's T Tauri phase. At this time the solar wind *could* strip the atmosphere from the inner planets, nothing closer in than Jupiter could hold an atmosphere. Mars being small and light, it cooled relatively rapidly and stopped significant outgassing before the T Tauri phase was over. Earth cooled more slowly, and continued outgassing for longer after the T Tauri phase, leaving us with a thicker atmosphere.
Science has no evidence what so ever that life can exist in those conditions, in fact, it has evidence that it can not (put any known life in that situation and it dies)
That argument is completely wrong, any life will die if placed in an unsuitable environment.
A naked human will die rapidly in the Arctic, does that prove polar bears can't exist? A human will die rapidly underwater, does that prove fish can't exist?
off topic: I have always wondered how would one cook one of the animals (seen crabs on tv) that live near the volcanic outputs?
<g> a pottery kiln should do it, failing that a blast furnace? On second thoughts, maybe best served cold?
Re:Impact on the environment (and the ground)
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
That is an idiotic design. If you use conventional conductors in the cable, then we can also use the cable as a big powerline from space.
I suggest you try calculating the resistance of a cable of 2 mm2 cross-sectional area and 36000km long - you might find transmission losses would be a little high. As in you'd be hard pushed to measure *any* power at the other end at all.
Will everyone saying how cool this is *please* read the article properly, not just look at the pictures.
They are *not* claiming to have a new material, their "product" is simply a triangulated braced beam made of carbon or glass fibre. Woohoo, a well designed braced beam made of carbon fibre is lighter than a solid block of steel, well that's a major advance for engineering. NOT. The only slightly unusual feature is that the bracing extends beyond the longitudinal members, but if that significantly improved strength/weight ratio, everyone would be doing it already. In fact, some quick back-of-the-envelope work suggests that its a fair bit worse.
Structures made of carbon/glass composites are way to expensive to make to be any use in buildings (production is very labour-intensive), and I see nothing on their website to suggest they have successfully addressed this.
My guess is their business plan depends on either getting bought by someone clueless, or abusing the patent system to get royalties from general engineering companies. On that subject, I would really like to know what exactly they think is worthy of a patent? The angle of the bracing?
Now you don't even have to be online to have your number stolen.
Like you ever did need to be online to get your number stolen - easiest way to steal credit card numbers is to get a job in a retail outlet and record numbers of customers cards.
This is *the* classic error in security thinking - only consider the hardware, ignore the human factors.
How do you explain taxi services and forms of public transportation? You can't tell me that these don't cut into auto sales. Why have a car when you live and work in downtown Chicago? Or even take a bike.
The government endorses public transportation, but it shuns public music distribution channels? What the fuck is up with that?
This isn't too far off what happened - Los Angeles being the best known example. It's only really since the smog problem got too bad to ignore that the US government has started even pretending to support public transport.
It might be something to do with a country's cultural background as to whether you buy or download for free.
I very much doubt it, did you even read the links in the article?
The UK has always suffered outrageous pricing for CDs, and it hasn't really got any worse over the last few years. On the other hand, prices in the US have inflated by something like 20% over the last few years, to come close to UK prices. And it's now reaching the limit of what people are prepared to pay. Not that this stops the record industry somehow claiming that without the evil internet people would gladly hand over an ever-increasing and open-ended proportion of their income.
Other side of the argument
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I know this isn't going to be a very popular argument, but here goes anyway...
Surely if they knew the envelopes they were sending out would crash some servers, then that was at best highly irresponsible behaviour. Yes, in an ideal world all software would have no bugs and all sysadmins would be omnipotent, but I don't see that happening any time soon:-). I don't believe that ORBZ has the right to go around DOSing servers that they consider to be inadequately set up - effectively electing themselves judge, jury *and* executioners.
If ORBZ behaved a bit less arrogantly I suspect they would make fewer enemies.
"Sailing in 1,000-foot-long ships with nine massive junk-style sails"
That's seriously big by modern standards (the QE2 is 963 feet long to get some idea).
Could they really build ships that big in those days? I've certainly never heard of archaeologists finding remains of ancient ships even close to that size. If the chinese really could build ships that size then, I am very, very impressed, but I've got serious doubts.
You will burn at least as much fuel as would be needed to reach escape velocity (in your example a great deal more as most of it will be wasted opposing the Earth's gravity).
In the case of the black hole, supplying energy from the "ground" would be impossible and even if you could turn the entire mass of the rocket into pure energy you would never have enough fuel to escape.
This would seem to support the theory that variations in solar activity are very significant in determining climate. It is known that the output of the sun is slightly higher during periods of high solar activity. We are just about at the peak of a solar cycle at the present, and the last few cycles have been strong, and it would appear that this is affecting the climate on both planets.
This graph from this report shows a striking correlation between the length of solar cycles and mean temperature over the last hundred years (interesting that the length of the cycle should give the best correlation - the authors suggest the shorter solar cycles correspond to higher solar output).
Also, there is considerable historical evidence that the current change in climate is really pretty small beer compared to what has happened in the past:
"The Norwegian farmer Folke Vilgerdson made the first attempt to settle in Iceland in about 865 AD... He lost his cattle in a severe winter and disappointed went back to Norway after having seen a fjord filled up by sea ice. Therefore he called the country Iceland. Only a few years later, in 874, Ingolf Arnason succeeded. He was followed by many others, and settlement was completed in 930 AD... In 982, Erik the Red discovered new land West of Iceland. He called it Greenland; according to the Greenlander Saga this was only to persuade people to follow him... But the O(18) curve suggests that the name described a reality... So the drastic climatic change [warming] late in the ninth century may be part of the reason why Iceland and Greenland did not get the opposite names." (Dansgaard: Palaeo-Climatic Studies on Ice Cores, in Oeschger, Messerli and Svilar, 1980).
Here is another account, also suggesting that Greenland had a suprisingly comfortable climate at the time.
I think this is the wrong way round, you need actually need ice crystals to generate static charge. Mountain ranges where it is too cold for there to be any possibility of liquid water still get thunderstorms (in fact mountains tend to get very frequent thunderstorms). Also, even in warm areas most of a thunderstorm is at high enough altitude to be ice rather than water.
The reason why there is no lightning at the poles is that there is almost no precipition or convection currents - IIRC the poles get less precipitation than the Sahara desert!
Slashdot Mirror
Nice troll, sounds really impressive (apart from the fact that you can't spell "latent"). I wonder how many people reading it failed to realise that every single "fact" presented was complete fiction?
Who on earth modded up this dribble?
We have slightly less fuel at out disposal, so we wish the reaction to go a little faster.
I think it would be interesting to find out who paid for the study - rumour has it the nuclear industry is making a huge PR effort to discredit wind power atm.
The thing you're missing is that this is complete bullshit. Coal contains a miniscule amount of uranium - uranium is only very weakly radioactive. Fission products on the other hand are many orders of magnitude more reactive.
Doing what you suggest with *unused fuel* probably would be no worse than coal emissions, but doing it with waste fission products would be very very bad, Chernobyl only released a small proportion of its waste to the atmosphere.
It's also worth noting that damage due to pollutants tends to get *under*reported as everyone's so keen to blame global warming. We need to do more to actually reduce the amount of shit we tip into the oceans, rather than bleating about how everyone *else* should stop using their cars.
Will you give it to the public domain?
You can read considerably more than you could possibly want to know from the weekly updates on www.armadilloaerospace.com.
The fuel is a mixture of 50% peroxide and methanol, nothing revolutionary, just a nice solution to the problem.
Sorry, doesn't work like that. The fuel rods have to be removed from the reactor not when the U235 is exhausted, but when the fission products start to build up. These fission products are orders of magnitude more radioactive than the original fuel was, and when present in any quantity will poison the nuclear reactions. This will happen after only a small proportion of the U235 has fissioned. "Reprocessing" simply consists of seperating out the unused fuel from the fission products so you get a second chance to use the remaining fuel.
Fast breeder reactors are a solution to an entirely different problem, i.e. converting unusable U238 into fissionable Pu239. There is currently no way to deal with fission products except waiting a few thousand years for the worst of the radioactivity to die away. It's also difficult to handle because with the extreme levels of radioactivity it generates there is also a lot of heat, if you encased it in concrete and buried it, it would just burn it's way out and end up in the groundwater.
Nuclear waste is a problem that already has a solution, and a solution that is ecologically sound and very much in line with recycling and reuse.
You don't have a clue what you're talking about.
IIRC it's vitamin D that polar animals store, the reason being that they can't photosynthesise more during the long polar winter.
That's one drum per 7.5 years per village of 700 people. And perhaps you'd check how much it costs to deal with one drum of high-level waste (i.e. store it for the 50000 or so years it will take to become safe).
ROFLMAO, if you get a residue left in your kettle it's limescale, which is completely harmless. Whoever told you that must have been killing themselves laughing at the thought of you obsessively scrubbing your kettle out!
X-prize rockets are *nowhere near* orbit capable, delta-v around 1400ms-1 compared to 10000ms-1 (just 2% of the kinetic energy!)
For a start the mechanisms of atmosphere leakage aren't pressure dependent, this means if Mars' atmosphere *was* leaking, it wouldn't stop at the current 6-7mb - there would be next to nothing left at all. Another obvious point is that Titan has a thicker atmosphere than Earth, and a much lower escape velocity than Mars.
In order to lose a molecule from the atmosphere, that molecule has to reach escape velocity, as you say.
Average KE of a gas molecule at 300K (hotter than Mars ever gets), E1 is ~ 4.1E-21J.
Escape velocity of Mars is ~ 5000ms-1
KE of an N2 molecule (the lightest molecule we're interested in) at escape velocity, E2 is ~ 2.9E-19J.
Therefore, according to Boltzmann's distribution the proportion of gas molecules which will reach escape velocity is 1/e(E2/E1), which is ~3.4E-31.
In other words, it is really *really* rare for a gas molecule to get escape velocity thermally. Mars does not lose atmosphere this way.
The other mechanism which deserves looking at is solar wind, if a high-energy particle collides with a molecule in the atmosphere it may impart enough KE for it to reach escape velocity. This is actually the main way atmosphere is lost from Mars, and also from Earth. It's worth noting that Earth actually loses *more* atmosphere this way, being closer to the sun, but in both cases the amount is still utterly negligible.
So, if we can magic up an atmosphere for Mars, ala KSR, it *will* stay there.
The real reason Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth is this. Early in the solar system's history the solar wind flux was many orders of magnitude greater than today - this is known as the Sun's T Tauri phase. At this time the solar wind *could* strip the atmosphere from the inner planets, nothing closer in than Jupiter could hold an atmosphere. Mars being small and light, it cooled relatively rapidly and stopped significant outgassing before the T Tauri phase was over. Earth cooled more slowly, and continued outgassing for longer after the T Tauri phase, leaving us with a thicker atmosphere.
That argument is completely wrong, any life will die if placed in an unsuitable environment.
A naked human will die rapidly in the Arctic, does that prove polar bears can't exist? A human will die rapidly underwater, does that prove fish can't exist?
off topic: I have always wondered how would one cook one of the animals (seen crabs on tv) that live near the volcanic outputs?
<g> a pottery kiln should do it, failing that a blast furnace? On second thoughts, maybe best served cold?
I suggest you try calculating the resistance of a cable of 2 mm2 cross-sectional area and 36000km long - you might find transmission losses would be a little high. As in you'd be hard pushed to measure *any* power at the other end at all.
- First, the moon's mass is unevenly distributed giving it a "wonky" gravitational field which destabilises close orbits.
- Second, the earth's gravity will begin to dominate quite quickly when you move further away from the moon.
The Apollo missions only stayed in orbit around the moon for a short period, without corrections their orbits would have decayed rapidly.The L4 and L5 points *would* be stable, but these would tend to accumulate dust which might be a problem for a telescope.
They are *not* claiming to have a new material, their "product" is simply a triangulated braced beam made of carbon or glass fibre. Woohoo, a well designed braced beam made of carbon fibre is lighter than a solid block of steel, well that's a major advance for engineering. NOT. The only slightly unusual feature is that the bracing extends beyond the longitudinal members, but if that significantly improved strength/weight ratio, everyone would be doing it already. In fact, some quick back-of-the-envelope work suggests that its a fair bit worse.
Structures made of carbon/glass composites are way to expensive to make to be any use in buildings (production is very labour-intensive), and I see nothing on their website to suggest they have successfully addressed this.
My guess is their business plan depends on either getting bought by someone clueless, or abusing the patent system to get royalties from general engineering companies. On that subject, I would really like to know what exactly they think is worthy of a patent? The angle of the bracing?
Like you ever did need to be online to get your number stolen - easiest way to steal credit card numbers is to get a job in a retail outlet and record numbers of customers cards.
This is *the* classic error in security thinking - only consider the hardware, ignore the human factors.
The government endorses public transportation, but it shuns public music distribution channels? What the fuck is up with that?
This isn't too far off what happened - Los Angeles being the best known example. It's only really since the smog problem got too bad to ignore that the US government has started even pretending to support public transport.
I very much doubt it, did you even read the links in the article?
The UK has always suffered outrageous pricing for CDs, and it hasn't really got any worse over the last few years. On the other hand, prices in the US have inflated by something like 20% over the last few years, to come close to UK prices. And it's now reaching the limit of what people are prepared to pay. Not that this stops the record industry somehow claiming that without the evil internet people would gladly hand over an ever-increasing and open-ended proportion of their income.
Surely if they knew the envelopes they were sending out would crash some servers, then that was at best highly irresponsible behaviour. Yes, in an ideal world all software would have no bugs and all sysadmins would be omnipotent, but I don't see that happening any time soon :-). I don't believe that ORBZ has the right to go around DOSing servers that they consider to be inadequately set up - effectively electing themselves judge, jury *and* executioners.
If ORBZ behaved a bit less arrogantly I suspect they would make fewer enemies.
That's seriously big by modern standards (the QE2 is 963 feet long to get some idea).
Could they really build ships that big in those days? I've certainly never heard of archaeologists finding remains of ancient ships even close to that size. If the chinese really could build ships that size then, I am very, very impressed, but I've got serious doubts.
In the case of the black hole, supplying energy from the "ground" would be impossible and even if you could turn the entire mass of the rocket into pure energy you would never have enough fuel to escape.
This graph from this report shows a striking correlation between the length of solar cycles and mean temperature over the last hundred years (interesting that the length of the cycle should give the best correlation - the authors suggest the shorter solar cycles correspond to higher solar output).
Also, there is considerable historical evidence that the current change in climate is really pretty small beer compared to what has happened in the past:
"The Norwegian farmer Folke Vilgerdson made the first attempt to settle in Iceland in about 865 AD... He lost his cattle in a severe winter and disappointed went back to Norway after having seen a fjord filled up by sea ice. Therefore he called the country Iceland. Only a few years later, in 874, Ingolf Arnason succeeded. He was followed by many others, and settlement was completed in 930 AD... In 982, Erik the Red discovered new land West of Iceland. He called it Greenland; according to the Greenlander Saga this was only to persuade people to follow him... But the O(18) curve suggests that the name described a reality... So the drastic climatic change [warming] late in the ninth century may be part of the reason why Iceland and Greenland did not get the opposite names." (Dansgaard: Palaeo-Climatic Studies on Ice Cores, in Oeschger, Messerli and Svilar, 1980).
Here is another account, also suggesting that Greenland had a suprisingly comfortable climate at the time.
The reason why there is no lightning at the poles is that there is almost no precipition or convection currents - IIRC the poles get less precipitation than the Sahara desert!