And the neutrons which caused the U-238 to fission did not come from the U-238, but from the D-T fusion reaction. This is why I'm skeptical about this U-238 reactor; I have no information to indicate that the neutron spectrum emitted by fissioning U-238 is capable of sustaining a chain reaction at all.
Fermi's reactor in Chicago (the first) used natural uranium (almost all U-238) as fuel.
But the only part that was actually producing energy (fissions) was the 0.7% which was U-235; the 99.3% which was U-238 was just along for the ride (and eating up the occasional neutron).
Well... no, not really. I'm told that near the end of a fuel cycle, a conventional pressurized water reactor (light water, not a CANDU) is producing the majority of its power output from plutonium fission. The breeder's claim to fame is that it can breed more fissionable fuel than it burns.
The "waste" which is U-235 depleted but plutonium enriched must be further processed to produce weapons-grade material.
Well... no, not a bit. Spent PWR fuel contains quite a bit of plutonium, but it is essentially useless for making bombs. A PWR cycle lasts a couple of years, more or less, and bombards the fuel like mad. U-238 absorbs neutrons and becomes U-239, which beta-decays to Np-239, which beta-decays to Pu-239. While some of the Pu-239 gets fissioned further down the line, some more of it captures a passing neutron and doesn't fission. It becomes Pu-240, or even Pu-241. These are isotopes with very different half-lives (much shorter) and much higher spontaneous fission rates.
This is all-important for making a bomb. U-235 has a half-life of around 700 million years, and making a bomb with it is easy: squeeze together a prompt-supercritical mass, and wait a few milliseconds. Pu-239 is tricky, because its half-life is only about 25000 years and you have very little time to get it into a prompt-supercritical configuration before a spontaneous fission starts the reaction going. If the reaction starts too soon, the bomb blows itself apart into a sub-critical configuration before releasing much energy and all you have is a fizzle. Now imagine dealing with a substantial fraction of Pu-240 (half-life 6564 years or Pu-241 (half-life 14 years).
Bomb-grade material is made in special reactors which allow the fuel to be irradiated relatively briefly at a low level, and then removed and processed to remove the plutonium. This is specifically to avoid the production of enough higher isotopes of plutonium to be a problem. The stuff coming out of a power reactor after a full fuel cycle is dirty as hell, but amateur proliferators are not going to be able to make a serious bomb (as opposed to dirty weapon) out of it. This is why we had few objections to building pressurized-water reactors for North Korea; they are essentially proliferation-proof.
For 25 years we have banned reprocessing even to the level needed for use as fuel because of the concern is could be stolen and further enriched.
I doubt that it's quite that simple. The real problem is that the plant required to refine fuel-grade Pu from spent power reactor fuel uses the exact same chemical processes as the plant which refines bomb-grade Pu from depleted uranium rods held briefly in a neutron flux for transmutation purposes. If you have a world full of people reprocessing it would be very hard to put a finger on the ones who are making weapons, so the US decided we had enough uranium to put the kibosh on all reprocessing just to set a good example.
I think we should have gone with the Integral Fast Reactor, but it seems to have succumbed to the fundamentalist anti-nukes (who probably couldn't figure out that there are medical and explosive grades of nitroglycerine either...).
Unfortunately, the article is so deficient in technical details that it's impossible to answer that question without quite a bit more information. As just one example of how ill-written the article is, there is no explanation of how the reactor is supposed to accomodate the accumulation of neutron-absorbing fission products over its multiple-decade period of operation.
What exactly does the U-238 become after all this?
It becomes fission products. Some of the nucleons (protons and neutrons) become free neutrons which are not absorbed before they beta-decay to protons (hydrogen nuclei).
Wouldn't the steam be affected by the extreme heat?
That depends how extreme the heat is. You will also have some radiolytic decomposition of the steam, and everything else in the reactor. The displacement of atoms within metallic crystals causes "radiation embrittlement", which will put a limit on the run-time of such a reactor even if the fuel is effectively infinite.
Fission products are lighter nuclei which result from the fission of heavier ones. Some fission products are themselves radioactive, some are not. Pretty much all of them are useless as nuclear fuel.
Radiolysis is the radiation-induced breakdown of chemical compounds. A gamma ray or a fast neutron has more than enough energy to smash a water molecule apart, and this process will produce free radicals such as hydrogen and hydroxyl ions. If those radicals get together, you can get products such as hydrogen gas and hydrogen peroxide, and hydrogen peroxide decomposes pretty quickly to oxygen and water again.
You'd be better off reading an intro on the web, but I hope this whets your appetite for more learning.
According to the Antarctic meteor researcher I know, you have to pack out everything that will not degrade by itself. Feces won't decay when frozen, so you have to bring them with you. You can pee on the ice, because the urea breaks down under solar UV and decomposes into carbon dioxide and ammonia; since it degrades just fine, leaving it is SOP.
I don't know why people don't use solar heat to freeze-dry the turds (to lighten them), after which you could burn them. In the 24-hour light of Antarctic summer this seems like a no-brainer.
two posts ago, you were alleging that Mr. Lomborg was not providing enough references, and now you have changed course 180% and are alleging that he has provided too many sources, and that this is `because he doesn't want his sources checked'.
On the contrary. In this post, I said "Lomborg reproduces one graph (or is it two?) and gives a lot of assertions with a pile of footnotes, but does not actually bring in any hard data which puts force behind his conclusions." (Note the complaint about volume of footnotes versus actual information content in the original.) And in this comment, I said "it is very difficult to find the exact reference - which appears to be Lomborg's intent; not to inform but to obfuscate."
There is no contradiction, no matter how much you might want to find one. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit" appears to be Lomborg's credo.
(just as you backed down from claiming to have read the whole book to now claiming to have read two eight-page chapters...
Again with the comprehension problem. First link above: "unless the book is a great deal more comprehensive and balanced than the extremely shallow and biased excerpts I've had the time to read..."
The full record of this exchange is on-line and can be read by anyone. Don't you feel ridiculous now?
Face it. Your objections to Lomborg are dogmatic, not scientific, or you would be producing examples to back up your claims.
What part of "and blows off phenomena with extensive deleterous effects such as the recurrent forest/peat bog fires in Indonesia" didn't you understand?
I'd rip Lomborg apart more comprehensively if I'd had time to finish the chapter on energy (I haven't yet seen if he's projected the production peak of the Persian Gulf) and go through the section on global warming. My research in those areas is much broader than forestry. Unfortunately for you, I'm not going to bother to do this on a rush-rush basis for a lousy Slashdot thread; I have other things to do with my life.
On the contrary. I'm as serious as a heart attack.
Far from being `content-free', the chapter you choose to cite (on Forestation) has eighty-six footnotes citing a very wide range of sources.
Eighty-seven. But most of those are repeats, and rather than starting with full cites for the first footnote in each chapter Lomborg uses very abbreviated back-references. In such a huge volume of footnotes it is very difficult to find the exact reference - which appears to be Lomborg's intent; not to inform but to obfuscate. He doesn't want the sources checked.
Quite seriously, are we really supposed to take your complaint seriously, when the only thing you find to say is that one particular eight-page chapter in the midst of a five-hundred page large-format trade paperback does not have more graphs? Really?
It should contain the data from which the conclusions are drawn, no? This it does not do.
if you'll actually read those footnotes (on pages 375-378 of the paperback edition) you'll find that in addition to citing a range of sources, they add considerable discussion of the subject at hand.
Some of them do. The place where I started when I began looking through them (p. 376) has next to no discussion or additional information.
Lomborg also throws around a lot of estimates without providing any empirical support for them. For instance, in footnote 816 he mentions that the figure of 15% edge effect is drawn from a 1 km range of influence, while a smaller range (such as 100 meters) leads to lower figures (6%). He cites no research to justify his preference for the lower figure. This is true everywhere I've looked; Lomborg always argues that effects are likely to be better than the estimate, never worse.
And your next complaint is what? That he doesn't interrupt a chapter on oil supplies for a disquisition on mideast politics? I thought you were alleging that his book was political...
No, the problem is that the book alleges to be a scholarly and unbiased treatment, while in actuality it is a hatchet-job. It dismisses difficult and contentious issues with a wave of the hand. Take the offending section (page 121):
Oil can be found all around the world, but the largest resources by far are to be found in the Middle East - it is estimated that somewhere between 50 and 65 percent of the global reserves are found there.[fn 867] Consequently, it is also imperative for our future energy supply that this region remains reasonably peaceful. [fn 868]
Never once does Lomborg entertain the possibility that politics is inevitably tied up with energy in that part of the world more than any other, and that the very phenomenon of taking so much of the world's energy supply from that region (and giving huge amounts of money and power to fundamentalist theocrats and despots) could make it impossible to carry out the imperative for peace - unless it is a peace of the Western conqueror, a possibility I find abhorrent.
There are many such implications, but not of them are examined. This would be a serious flaw in any such work, but Lomborg happens to be the topic of discussion today.
Well, as I have read the book through, and found it to be entirely a presentation of statistics which no one is contesting...
Not quite true. I have seen others contest the statistics as biased, selected to support Lomborg's desired conclusion. As IANAstatistician, I am not in a position to say one way or the other.
I would be very interested to hear any examples of where you believe it is `biased' and `a crock'.
I've been through parts of the book since I wrote the above, and the entire chapter on forests is nearly content-free. Lomborg reproduces one graph (or is it two?) and gives a lot of assertions with a pile of footnotes, but does not actually bring in any hard data which puts force behind his conclusions. Furthermore, he mentions one caveat which calls his entire thesis into question (that it is difficult to characterize forest cover well using the means we have ready to hand, thus we could be losing a huge amount of value without being able to measure it using metrics such as multispectral satellite scans), and blows off phenomena with extensive deleterous effects such as the recurrent forest/peat bog fires in Indonesia.
In the chapter on energy, he says that it is imperative to ensure peace in the Persian Gulf region... and then dismisses the issue, as if the consequences of either doing so (Pax Americana) or failing to do so are acceptable; the idea that we might have no tenable alternative to severely reducing dependence on Persian Gulf energy supplies is too problematic for him to dwell on it, so he ignores it.
I've only had time to read a few pages of excerpts which appear to be from the intro, the full chapter on forests and the beginning of the chapter on energy. This book has got to have dozens more serious howlers like the above.
The Economist editorial is also content-free, providing no factual basis for the criticism of the Danish committee.
If you want to know why Lomborg's book is such a crock, you have to go through it. I admit that I have not read the entire thing, but unless the book is a great deal more comprehensive and balanced than the extremely shallow and biased excerpts I've had the time to read, I think that the Danes are spot-on with their rebuke.
Not that every knee-jerk response to Lomborg is necessarily any better, but you can't give either side a free pass in these matters.
Whatever the faults of the SciAm critique (which I have not read, because SciAm has long since been dumbed down below the point where it carries anything worthwhile), I have read parts of Lomborg's thesis (excerpted in Skeptic). My informed appraisal: Lomborg did exactly what the committee claims that he did (select his sources to support his thesis), which is the antithesis of science.
Lomborg's opponents come across as a bunch of fundamentalist ranters (you could probably run the response in Skeptic through a sed script and make it into a pretty good approximation of an anti-abortion screed), but that does not excuse Lomborg's faults. The Skeptical Environmentalist should stand on its own merits; from all unbiased accounts including my own, it fails miserably.
Interestingly enough they said that the star had a prior recorded "shedding" of material in the 1940's, which begs the question "Is this normal?"
Apparently, yes. There are lots of "planetary nebulae" out there, which are composed of the outer layers lost by aging, dying stars. From what little I understand (IANAastronomer) a great deal of the carbon in the universe is shed by stars which are too small to go supernova, but which nonetheless manage to get it from their cores to their outer layers and then blow it off into space. Some of those things are practically exhaling Buckyballs.
Even supernovae are not exempt. The star Sanduleak whatever, which appears to have been the source of SN 1987A, was a blue star; apparently it had shed its red-giant outer layers as a nebula and had stripped down to little more than its core before it blew.
Your rant has so many errors it's hard to list them.
Texas is a net importer of oil these days.
Major automakers don't build electrics because gasoline is cheaper at the pump and much more convenient for long or irregular trips.
Cars like the "Think" are dinky and expensive because they are low-volume production items. Low-volume production cars are expensive for the same reasons.
Detroit makes (or re-badges) cars like the "Think" and the EV-1 rather than hybrids because government policy demands ZEVs, and not even the Honda Insight is a ZEV.
The right question to ask is "What policy changes will fix the perverse incentives and give us the optimal result?" The answer is not simple, but given the situation of the USA it is going to incorporate some mix of the following:
A carbon tax, harmonized with the rest of the industrialized world. This will promote wind, solar and nuclear and devalue coal and oil (and natural gas to a lesser extent).
Duties on imported goods from nations which have not implemented the carbon tax, so as not to create a perverse incentive to produce goods less efficiently in nations not under the regime.
A risk tax on petroleum in particular, because so much of it comes from nations which support terrorism and/or are dictatorships (including Venezuela for all intents and purposes). This will make gasoline cost quite a bit more at the pump.
A large reduction in taxes on e.g. wages, so that net purchasing power of the average consumer doesn't change much... but the incentives change a lot due to the difference at the margin.
Programs to use all fuels more efficiently. I know for a fact that we can squeeze twice as much out of a gallon of petroleum or a cubic foot of natural gas, it is just a matter of doing it. If the marginal cost goes up a lot, everyone will be looking for ways to do just that and you will see results.
One of these days I hope to have time to lay out all the facts behind the positive assertions like that last.
... without breeding to another element or other extraordinary measures, such as bombardment by 14.7 MeV neutrons such as are produced by D-T fusion (the depleted uranium case on a fusion bomb adds substantially to the explosive yield, but I digress).
A CANDU and a PWR both burn the same fuel(s): U-235 and some part of the plutonium they breed. The PWR requires enriched uranium because the light-water moderator absorbs too many neutrons to sustain a chain reaction without it. A CANDU eliminates the neutron absorbance problem using deuterium (heavy water) instead, so it can get by with natural uranium (AAMOF, a CANDU can burn "spent" PWR fuel).
And the Manhattan reactors were graphite-moderated, not D2O-moderated IIRC.
Au contraire, they are perfectly suited for breeders (and as I recall, at least one nation [India?] made its first nuclear device with material from a CANDU). A CANDU is set up for continuous refuelling, which makes it a very simple matter to have short irradiation cycles of depleted-uranium elements and then reprocess them for high-purity Pu-239. Russian RMBK reactors are similar in that respect. It is US-style pressurized-water reactors which have to be shut down cold for re-arranging the core, which forces long fuelling cycles which inevitably contaminates all plutonium with lots of the higher isotopes 240 and 241; these are very problematic for bomb-makers, but no difficulty so far as using it for reactor fuel AFAIK.
All that excess horsepower has to be fed. It needs fuel, which has to come in via the supply lines. Every one of these gas-sucking monsters adds to the non-fighting mass of supply clerks, drivers and ships required to actually get the fighting part of the army to its engagements.
Which is why the lack of a diesel-hybrid drivetrain for this so-called SmartTruck makes it one of the dumbest things to come down the pike in a long time. Burning less fuel cuts down on the supply chain bulk and cost, and then you get added benefits of less noise and heat (lower observability) and possible stealth modes when running on the traction battery alone (slow, but you don't sneak around in a hurry) make all kinds of tactics possible. Yet this has been ignored.
I have a pocket full of chemical reactors which can reach a temperature of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit within a half-second of initiation, and can be used to start many highly destructive reactions.
But don't tell anyone I own a book of matches, okay?
but coal ash is. Currently, aside from the proton/boron-11 reaction (which yields 3 alpha particles) and deuterium-He3, I'm unaware of any fusion reaction which does not yield high-energy neutrons. The neutrons from deuterium-tritium fusion come out at 14.1 MeV, I don't recall the value for D-D fusion (which yields helium-3 and a neutron). High-energy neutrons create radioactive stuff by transmuting other nuclei.
The current state of fusion energy is pretty bad (way below a self-sustaining reaction) but this could still be used as a neutron source to drive a sub-critical fusion-fission reactor. Anyone who opposes fission power because of the spent-fuel issue wouldn't find this to be an improvement. (I would, because high-energy neutrons would be useful for transmuting fission products themselves, extracting their remnant energy and transforming them into stable isotopes. But I'm a geek and a technophile.)
Defective HV regulator tubes on some old color TVs turned some of them into rather nasty X-ray generators; you didn't have to do anything.
Imagine all the little kiddies with their noses practically against the screen, getting dosed with ionizing radiation all the while. Or sitting in front of it, knees up, gonads up close and unshielded. One wonders if there would be identifiable effects from this... no time to check.
Unless I am badly mistaken, you are quite wrong: the forgiveness of a loan is considered to be income by the IRS, and you do have to pay taxes on it. I doubt that it makes any difference why the loan was forgiven (or declared "bad"), so don't complain if auditors come knocking on your door soon.
Some of the arguments are self-refuting through contradiction. Consider the points previously cited:
The Americans had to show a success in getting to the moon, because they were locked in competition with the Russians.
It is impossible to send men to the moon, because they would be killed by the radiation.
From this, two conclusions are inescapable:
The competition with the Russians was pointless, because the Russians could not have sent men to the moon either.
The Russians were too stupid to know this, because they kept building the N-1 booster despite the knowledge that they could not put men on the moon. Yet they did.
Making such a conspiracy theorist look like a complete idiot in front of their friends and family is a good way to get them to shut up, and if they are afraid to talk about such nonsense for fear of a severe beating about the concepts with logic, the meme will stop spreading. The real problem is that most people are so ignorant that they have nothing to use as a template for calibration of their bullshit filter.
A synthetic aperture system gives you virtual antennas by its design, and a lens system can have many feedpoints. I have no time to do the calculations right now, but at some size of lens you can have a "retina" which divides the ground into "cells" and lets you see more or less one cell per receptor.
This doesn't help the aerial system distinguish the computer on the ground from the leaky microwave next to it, or the portable phone in the next room. For that, you do need a directional antenna at the ground to make the WiFi "louder" at the aerial station, and to bring in the aerial station better than the local off-axis interference.
Dunno what you can do about microwave ovens and cordless phones (switch channels? use directional antennas at the ground stations?) but I think I detailed how you could distinguish tens of thousands of WiFi terminals on the ground in this post.
... is so that cellphone providers can continue to operate, because otherwise one phone in an airplane would blank out its assigned frequency over huge swaths of the cellular network instead of just over the cell it's "in".
This does suggest a nasty way to DoS an entire cellphone network. I hope nobody thinks of it... oops, too late!
a problem I see with WiFi or any other wireless tech that uses a contention based modulation scheme, is that the collision domain becomes so large with such great line of sight.
If you can throw antenna size or processing power at the problem, this can be solved.
The collision domain is both temporal and angular. If the system has a single, omnidirectional antenna, your criticism is dead on-target; however, only fools would think about trying to do that, as even cellular towers are far more sophisticated. What the balloon would likely have is either a microwave lens antenna (or a large array of them) built into the balloon (you can make something with a very high refractive index at microwave frequences using a bit of aluminum foil in a very light plastic foam) or a completely synthetic aperture phased-array antenna. The former is probably heavier, the latter requires lots of DSPs - but if Iridium sats can do it, a balloon probably can. What the antennas do for you is to allow two transmitters separated by a sufficient angle to be heard separately and distinctly even if they are transmitting simultaneously; they do not collide any more than the images of two stars shining simultaneously have to collide on an astrophotograph unless they are very close together in angle.
Slashdot Mirror
And the neutrons which caused the U-238 to fission did not come from the U-238, but from the D-T fusion reaction. This is why I'm skeptical about this U-238 reactor; I have no information to indicate that the neutron spectrum emitted by fissioning U-238 is capable of sustaining a chain reaction at all.
There are ways to get energy directly from fission of U-238, but they require very fast neutrons such as are created in a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction.
Then the Canadians must be smarter than the Russians, because the Canadians actually did it.This is all-important for making a bomb. U-235 has a half-life of around 700 million years, and making a bomb with it is easy: squeeze together a prompt-supercritical mass, and wait a few milliseconds. Pu-239 is tricky, because its half-life is only about 25000 years and you have very little time to get it into a prompt-supercritical configuration before a spontaneous fission starts the reaction going. If the reaction starts too soon, the bomb blows itself apart into a sub-critical configuration before releasing much energy and all you have is a fizzle. Now imagine dealing with a substantial fraction of Pu-240 (half-life 6564 years or Pu-241 (half-life 14 years).
Bomb-grade material is made in special reactors which allow the fuel to be irradiated relatively briefly at a low level, and then removed and processed to remove the plutonium. This is specifically to avoid the production of enough higher isotopes of plutonium to be a problem. The stuff coming out of a power reactor after a full fuel cycle is dirty as hell, but amateur proliferators are not going to be able to make a serious bomb (as opposed to dirty weapon) out of it. This is why we had few objections to building pressurized-water reactors for North Korea; they are essentially proliferation-proof.
I doubt that it's quite that simple. The real problem is that the plant required to refine fuel-grade Pu from spent power reactor fuel uses the exact same chemical processes as the plant which refines bomb-grade Pu from depleted uranium rods held briefly in a neutron flux for transmutation purposes. If you have a world full of people reprocessing it would be very hard to put a finger on the ones who are making weapons, so the US decided we had enough uranium to put the kibosh on all reprocessing just to set a good example.I think we should have gone with the Integral Fast Reactor, but it seems to have succumbed to the fundamentalist anti-nukes (who probably couldn't figure out that there are medical and explosive grades of nitroglycerine either...).
Fission products are lighter nuclei which result from the fission of heavier ones. Some fission products are themselves radioactive, some are not. Pretty much all of them are useless as nuclear fuel.
Radiolysis is the radiation-induced breakdown of chemical compounds. A gamma ray or a fast neutron has more than enough energy to smash a water molecule apart, and this process will produce free radicals such as hydrogen and hydroxyl ions. If those radicals get together, you can get products such as hydrogen gas and hydrogen peroxide, and hydrogen peroxide decomposes pretty quickly to oxygen and water again.
You'd be better off reading an intro on the web, but I hope this whets your appetite for more learning.
I don't know why people don't use solar heat to freeze-dry the turds (to lighten them), after which you could burn them. In the 24-hour light of Antarctic summer this seems like a no-brainer.
There is no contradiction, no matter how much you might want to find one. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit" appears to be Lomborg's credo.
Again with the comprehension problem. First link above: "unless the book is a great deal more comprehensive and balanced than the extremely shallow and biased excerpts I've had the time to read..."The full record of this exchange is on-line and can be read by anyone. Don't you feel ridiculous now?
What part of "and blows off phenomena with extensive deleterous effects such as the recurrent forest/peat bog fires in Indonesia" didn't you understand?I'd rip Lomborg apart more comprehensively if I'd had time to finish the chapter on energy (I haven't yet seen if he's projected the production peak of the Persian Gulf) and go through the section on global warming. My research in those areas is much broader than forestry. Unfortunately for you, I'm not going to bother to do this on a rush-rush basis for a lousy Slashdot thread; I have other things to do with my life.
Lomborg also throws around a lot of estimates without providing any empirical support for them. For instance, in footnote 816 he mentions that the figure of 15% edge effect is drawn from a 1 km range of influence, while a smaller range (such as 100 meters) leads to lower figures (6%). He cites no research to justify his preference for the lower figure. This is true everywhere I've looked; Lomborg always argues that effects are likely to be better than the estimate, never worse.
No, the problem is that the book alleges to be a scholarly and unbiased treatment, while in actuality it is a hatchet-job. It dismisses difficult and contentious issues with a wave of the hand. Take the offending section (page 121): Never once does Lomborg entertain the possibility that politics is inevitably tied up with energy in that part of the world more than any other, and that the very phenomenon of taking so much of the world's energy supply from that region (and giving huge amounts of money and power to fundamentalist theocrats and despots) could make it impossible to carry out the imperative for peace - unless it is a peace of the Western conqueror, a possibility I find abhorrent.There are many such implications, but not of them are examined. This would be a serious flaw in any such work, but Lomborg happens to be the topic of discussion today.
In the chapter on energy, he says that it is imperative to ensure peace in the Persian Gulf region... and then dismisses the issue, as if the consequences of either doing so (Pax Americana) or failing to do so are acceptable; the idea that we might have no tenable alternative to severely reducing dependence on Persian Gulf energy supplies is too problematic for him to dwell on it, so he ignores it.
I've only had time to read a few pages of excerpts which appear to be from the intro, the full chapter on forests and the beginning of the chapter on energy. This book has got to have dozens more serious howlers like the above.
If you want to know why Lomborg's book is such a crock, you have to go through it. I admit that I have not read the entire thing, but unless the book is a great deal more comprehensive and balanced than the extremely shallow and biased excerpts I've had the time to read, I think that the Danes are spot-on with their rebuke.
Not that every knee-jerk response to Lomborg is necessarily any better, but you can't give either side a free pass in these matters.
Lomborg's opponents come across as a bunch of fundamentalist ranters (you could probably run the response in Skeptic through a sed script and make it into a pretty good approximation of an anti-abortion screed), but that does not excuse Lomborg's faults. The Skeptical Environmentalist should stand on its own merits; from all unbiased accounts including my own, it fails miserably.
(Fscking Slashdot response timer!)
Even supernovae are not exempt. The star Sanduleak whatever, which appears to have been the source of SN 1987A, was a blue star; apparently it had shed its red-giant outer layers as a nebula and had stripped down to little more than its core before it blew.
- Texas is a net importer of oil these days.
- Major automakers don't build electrics because gasoline is cheaper at the pump and much more convenient for long or irregular trips.
- Cars like the "Think" are dinky and expensive because they are low-volume production items. Low-volume production cars are expensive for the same reasons.
- Detroit makes (or re-badges) cars like the "Think" and the EV-1 rather than hybrids because government policy demands ZEVs, and not even the Honda Insight is a ZEV.
The right question to ask is "What policy changes will fix the perverse incentives and give us the optimal result?" The answer is not simple, but given the situation of the USA it is going to incorporate some mix of the following:- A carbon tax, harmonized with the rest of the industrialized world. This will promote wind, solar and nuclear and devalue coal and oil (and natural gas to a lesser extent).
- Duties on imported goods from nations which have not implemented the carbon tax, so as not to create a perverse incentive to produce goods less efficiently in nations not under the regime.
- A risk tax on petroleum in particular, because so much of it comes from nations which support terrorism and/or are dictatorships (including Venezuela for all intents and purposes). This will make gasoline cost quite a bit more at the pump.
- A large reduction in taxes on e.g. wages, so that net purchasing power of the average consumer doesn't change much... but the incentives change a lot due to the difference at the margin.
- Programs to use all fuels more efficiently. I know for a fact that we can squeeze twice as much out of a gallon of petroleum or a cubic foot of natural gas, it is just a matter of doing it. If the marginal cost goes up a lot, everyone will be looking for ways to do just that and you will see results.
One of these days I hope to have time to lay out all the facts behind the positive assertions like that last.A CANDU and a PWR both burn the same fuel(s): U-235 and some part of the plutonium they breed. The PWR requires enriched uranium because the light-water moderator absorbs too many neutrons to sustain a chain reaction without it. A CANDU eliminates the neutron absorbance problem using deuterium (heavy water) instead, so it can get by with natural uranium (AAMOF, a CANDU can burn "spent" PWR fuel).
And the Manhattan reactors were graphite-moderated, not D2O-moderated IIRC.
Which is why the lack of a diesel-hybrid drivetrain for this so-called SmartTruck makes it one of the dumbest things to come down the pike in a long time. Burning less fuel cuts down on the supply chain bulk and cost, and then you get added benefits of less noise and heat (lower observability) and possible stealth modes when running on the traction battery alone (slow, but you don't sneak around in a hurry) make all kinds of tactics possible. Yet this has been ignored.
But don't tell anyone I own a book of matches, okay?
The current state of fusion energy is pretty bad (way below a self-sustaining reaction) but this could still be used as a neutron source to drive a sub-critical fusion-fission reactor. Anyone who opposes fission power because of the spent-fuel issue wouldn't find this to be an improvement. (I would, because high-energy neutrons would be useful for transmuting fission products themselves, extracting their remnant energy and transforming them into stable isotopes. But I'm a geek and a technophile.)
Imagine all the little kiddies with their noses practically against the screen, getting dosed with ionizing radiation all the while. Or sitting in front of it, knees up, gonads up close and unshielded. One wonders if there would be identifiable effects from this... no time to check.
Unless I am badly mistaken, you are quite wrong: the forgiveness of a loan is considered to be income by the IRS, and you do have to pay taxes on it. I doubt that it makes any difference why the loan was forgiven (or declared "bad"), so don't complain if auditors come knocking on your door soon.
- The Americans had to show a success in getting to the moon, because they were locked in competition with the Russians.
- It is impossible to send men to the moon, because they would be killed by the radiation.
From this, two conclusions are inescapable:- The competition with the Russians was pointless, because the Russians could not have sent men to the moon either.
- The Russians were too stupid to know this, because they kept building the N-1 booster despite the knowledge that they could not put men on the moon. Yet they did.
Making such a conspiracy theorist look like a complete idiot in front of their friends and family is a good way to get them to shut up, and if they are afraid to talk about such nonsense for fear of a severe beating about the concepts with logic, the meme will stop spreading. The real problem is that most people are so ignorant that they have nothing to use as a template for calibration of their bullshit filter.This doesn't help the aerial system distinguish the computer on the ground from the leaky microwave next to it, or the portable phone in the next room. For that, you do need a directional antenna at the ground to make the WiFi "louder" at the aerial station, and to bring in the aerial station better than the local off-axis interference.
Dunno what you can do about microwave ovens and cordless phones (switch channels? use directional antennas at the ground stations?) but I think I detailed how you could distinguish tens of thousands of WiFi terminals on the ground in this post.
This does suggest a nasty way to DoS an entire cellphone network. I hope nobody thinks of it... oops, too late!
The collision domain is both temporal and angular. If the system has a single, omnidirectional antenna, your criticism is dead on-target; however, only fools would think about trying to do that, as even cellular towers are far more sophisticated. What the balloon would likely have is either a microwave lens antenna (or a large array of them) built into the balloon (you can make something with a very high refractive index at microwave frequences using a bit of aluminum foil in a very light plastic foam) or a completely synthetic aperture phased-array antenna. The former is probably heavier, the latter requires lots of DSPs - but if Iridium sats can do it, a balloon probably can. What the antennas do for you is to allow two transmitters separated by a sufficient angle to be heard separately and distinctly even if they are transmitting simultaneously; they do not collide any more than the images of two stars shining simultaneously have to collide on an astrophotograph unless they are very close together in angle.