Given that most of the things you're interested in communicating with are more or less on the horizontal plane, you could make a directional antenna which just avoids shooting much energy at the sky or the ground. A vertical colinear is one such antenna. With that, you should be able to get 1000 feet range pretty easily; you can probably do better if you're willing to sacrifice some gain in the across-street direction for better gain up and down the street.
Pick up some ARRL antenna manuals and see if you don't get some ideas. --
the legal limits on trnasmitted power are still really low - like 1 W RMS (according to the article - I thought it was 1mW RMS...
That's 1 W or +36 dBm ERP, which is equivalent to 4 watts (36 dB over a milliwatt) in the most favored direction.
There are a bunch of problems that will have to be solved before this can really work in the real world. They are:
The "hidden transmitter" problem. If the system uses anything like a collision-detection system, two units which can't hear each other can repeatedly disrupt each other's attempts to reach a third one which can hear both of them. You've got to have some kind of arbitration or polling system to deal with this, and only polling works well at high densities.
Access to limited resources. Having 5 MBPS access to somebody's AP is nice, but if you've got 10 people trying to work through the associated 768 kbps DSL to the internet, you've got a serious congestion problem.
Allocation of resources. If someone's DSL provider charges by the unit of traffic, who's going to pay the extra fees to keep the AP open to the public?
The solution to some of those issues is to route traffic over the air from AP to AP instead of going through the wired network, but that only works if you're not too many hops from "home".
Some of these issues have been faced by hams with their pioneering work with packet radio, but it's all got to be adapted and re-implemented to suit the medium. --
Since you are posting from RIT, I assume you are in the USA.
You need to learn the history of the First Amendment, which goes back to the complaints underlying the Declaration of Independence. One of the most influential pamphlets leading up to the DoI, "Common Sense", was published and distributed anonymously. Do you think that the Founders would have even considered a Constitution which would allow political speech to be suppressed merely because the author refused to be identified? Not a chance, and the courts have repeatedly ruled consistently with this. --
The last time I was to such a debate, it ended when one of the IPCC folks managed to throw a well-known forgery on the overhead. He was caught, and that concluded it.
Eh? That's a serious charge. Was it an actual member of the IPCC or just someone trying to present the IPCC's case? Do you have any further documentation I could review?
It wouldn't be hard to tell people that we need to pour out more CO_2 to prevent the next ice-age, if you had the PR machine to do it.
Oh, I agree entirely. But the problem is that it's much easier to go and burn a lot of fossil carbon as an incidental thing if it turns out that we need to, than it is to stop burning fossil carbon once we've based most of our economy on it. Besides, we're typically using at least twice as much energy as we need to to accomplish our desired ends, and sometimes 10 times as much. Done correctly, the savings from efficiency would pay for themselves and we'd have no regrets even if global warming turns out to be flawed models and a minor burp in the solar cycle. To my mind, that means we ought to just do that without arguing about it; that's what I mean by "better safe than sorry". --
Normally I'd agree with you, and the lifespan of a solar panel is typically much longer than the lifespan of a car (though you could design them to be detached and used separately afterward as part of a recycling scheme). On the other hand, there's no guarantee that you'd have a connection between the panel (or electrical grid) and the car when you wanted one, and then there is what is perhaps the most important thing: public awareness. Driving around in a car covered with solar cells makes a statement that driving a car with a plug does not. --
The current track appears to be toward a 5.8 C (10.4 F) warming by the year 2100. Even a one degree F change in this trend would be highly consequential, IMHO.
Even if we threw a significant part of the US federal budget solely aimed at helping reducing greenhouse emissions such as CO2 and water vapor, the US alone would affect only a tiny fraction of a degree of warming per year. And no one is going to want to be holding the bag when we find out we crippled our economy and wasted trillions of dollars reducing emissions only to see no discernible effects, say, within a decade.
It took upwards of 20 years before the ban on DDT yielded unambiguous improvement in the state of the bald eagle and peregrine falcon. With regard to the rest of that paragraph,
There's only a tiny fraction of a degree of warming per year, period. But the USA accounts for about 20% of global CO2 emissions, and any technology developed by the USA will be usable by much of the world. That increases its impact.
Technology is one of the USA's most lucrative exports. Efficiency technology could be added to the list.
Our current practices in areas like architecture are so bad that savings of 60% and more can be achieved for zero capital cost; the savings mount up year after year. By simply prohibiting old, inefficient practices we could build huge amounts of savings of both energy and money into our economy. Imposing taxes on inefficiency (instead of, say, income) would create a continuing incentive to invest in better technology even if the investment horizon was artificially short compared to the lifespan of the equipment. If there's anything that's known about human behavior, it's that people apply a ridiculously high discount rate (30% per year or more) to efficiency-related savings. This makes no sense ecologically, economically, or any other way.
We'd probably see great political results. The reduced clout of the oil dictatorships in politics and finance cannot help but improve the state of the entire world.
My idea of what the US economy would look like with carbon emissions 90% below the present day would fill an entire web site, and I'm having enough difficulties writing letters to my congresscritters; I can't possibly illustrate it here. But I don't think we'd have to accept a quality of life lower than today's, and certainly nothing resembling "living in caves".
And the borehole graph shows warming well before the industrial age. Do you not agree that even if we were to completely cease polluting now, we'd still see warming?
Yes, it does (note, we were cutting and burning forests in the 16th century). Yes, we would probably still see warming even if we cut back 80% today, because the oceans are still heating up and will take decades to stabilize. Is that an excuse to make things even more extreme? I don't think so, I think it's an argument for better action as fast as we can implement it.
As if the US didn't have enough ill will towards them, let's try bullying every country into doing our environmental will.
You forgot, it's a lot of the less-developed countries which have the most to lose from warming and the consequent drying (Africa) and rise in sea levels (Bangladesh, island nations). It's political jiu-jitsu; they asked for it, they have to go along for the ride. And go along they would, because they wouldn't be able to back out on their own demands. --
While public suspicion may be increased due to the errors in reporting, this doesn't have anything to do with the reliability of the science at the base of it. Besides, is anyone going to bother to upgrade the editorial rigor when so much of the public is turned off by anything that resembles quantitative analysis?
This is just another example of dumbing-down, and we're not going to see it reverse until the public educates itself and demands better of both the news media and the political commentators (I note that the link you provided was not to a scientific paper, but to an editorial site: opinionjournal.com). As long as people have no idea how to even read the real reports, the spinmeisters can say whatever they want and they will be believed by the part of the electorate which is suitably indoctrinated. This serves the spinmeisters and their masters, because the last thing they want is people who think for themselves and cannot be controlled. (Did I miss a <cynicism> tag there?) --
The graph you reference shows that the earth may be warming (according to that dataset), and even at an accelerating pace, but how do we know that we are causing the warming?
What level of confidence will satisfy you? I think that 50% is enough to start taking action. It's my impression that we're well over 95% confident at the moment. It's pretty hard to deny that if you dump a whole lot of stuff that's infrared-opaque into the atmosphere, that it's going to trap infrared more effectively. Unless you reduce the amount of heat coming in to compensate, a really simple calculation says it's going to get warmer. How much warmer we don't know due to the complexity of positive and negative feedback loops, but change such an important forcing function as CO2 concentration and you're going to see an effect.
That's a potentially more frightening scenario, the thought that the earth might be warming and we can't do a damn thing about it.
Is that an excuse for not doing what we can to reduce the problem? And once again you're arguing that ignorance is an excuse to do nothing.
And what do you plan to do to bring so-called developing countries into line? Kyoto gave them free reign and gave the US the shaft, but that's not a solution.
(That's free rein, as in letting a horse run free.) I have the same gripe about Kyoto. Since I am not in a policy-writing position, I don't think it's productive to expound upon it here. Suffice it to say that the US and EU could probably get a large part of the world (including China) to fall in line by denying foreign aid and trading rights. We still have things they want. --
Borehole temperature data conclusively proves that the climate is warming, and at an accelerating pace. We don't have a mere 100 years of data, we have 500 years of data in the ground and all we have to do is use techniques which go back to Fourier to read it. If John Daly can't explain the facts, he's obviously not balanced is he?
Satellite temperature records don't reflect the measurements on the ground. Nobody knows why yet, but what are you going to put more stock in: records from physical thermometers (a very well-understood measurement system) on the ground where people, crops and wildlife exist, or satellite radiometers which give discrepant readings from the physical thermometers for unknown reasons and may be giving some kind of systematic error that is not yet understood? My money's on the mercury, not the infrared.
And Slashdot, please stop mimicking the liberal media mindset that the earth is undeniably warming, and furthermore that "everyone" agrees with that statement. They don't. Climate science is still a region of massive debate and we can't just say with certainty what the climate will be like in 100 years.
MJ, please stop parroting the SEPP/GEC party line that human activity isn't warming the climate, and on the minuscule chance that it is it isn't doing any harm to our interests. Sure, we don't know what the climate will be like in 100 years. What I do know is that we are far less likely to have unwanted, undesirable and destructive changes in it if we avoid altering the atmosphere's infrared transparency before we have a solid understanding of the way it behaves. Better safe than sorry, you understand. --
Note that it's not a scientific-quality graph, and the X axis is probably mis-labelled. If you looked at some other sites you can probably find a better graph. This page has a graph with better labelling, maybe done by the same news flunky, maybe by a more clueful one. --
Speaking of flames, we haven't even considered what happens to objects sitting around near a rocket launch or landing site. Vertical landing does not mean rockets can take off and land in "any old parking lot" !!?? Can you say, "Dude, where's my car?"
An aircraft with an emergency may use any landing field it can reach; that's international law (which China has seen fit to violate, but that's another flamewar). You could just as easily aim for a field, sports stadium (if empty), or anything else. If you're starting from 20 miles up it's pretty easy to select a target within a 20 mile circle.
There's no way a giant flamethrower is going to be allowed to come down over any heavily populated area.
Why not? Concordes do, and they use afterburners (flamethrowers) on takeoff.
Rockets would need their own special takeoff and landing facilities, and if they didn't land right next to the fueling site (yikes!) they would have to be hauled there, carefully.
Not necessarily. If the condition of the craft and the site allow, you could just send out a fuel truck to give it enough juice to hop to a more hospitable site. The advantage of the VTVL is that it can come down in a random field and be in condition to fly again; there's no way you're going to do that with a glider of any type, which will be a collection of scrap after an emergency landing at all but the most favorable sites.
The goal is to use a regular airport, which rockets will not do.
The Space Shuttle can't use most regular airports, is too heavy to be flown out of most regular airports on its carrier aircraft, and neither it nor the VentureStar could be re-launched from a regular airport if it had to make an emergency landing. VTVL is another story; if you can prepare a pad for it, it can go. That's likely to be cheaper than maintaining a one-of-a-kind airplane to carry things around when they land somewhere other than the launch site. --
I've been wondering what sort of efficiency gains one could derive from a vehicle that used a hybrid-electric engine (using gas, ethanol, hydrogen, etc., in the combustion engine) or a fuel cell along with a layer of photovoltaic cells.
Most cars seem to have enough area on the hood, roof and trunk to accomodate the equivalent of about 2 120-watt solar panels, perhaps 3. If you consider that the car might get the equivalent of 6 hours of full sun per day, that yields 1440 to 2160 watt-hours on a sunny day.
If you assume that a hybrid car that is capable of running as a pure electric (which the Honda Insight cannot, and the Toyota Prius can barely do) has similar energy consumption to a pure electric, you are probably talking between 170 and 250 watt-hours per mile (probably less in traffic due to the low speeds). That would give you between 6 and 13 solar-powered miles per (sunny) day.
I live close to work because I hate long commutes. If I could get a car that could do even 6 miles/day on solar, I could go all week without burning any gasoline or using any other source of energy. --
The Space Shuttle has been using the "nice friendly atmosphere" to land without fuel for about the last 20 years.
It sure has. It's also been paying a very large payload penalty for carrying a large wing (and its essential heat shielding) into orbit and back every time, and its high landing speed (about 200 knots) means that there are very few runways in the world which can take a Shuttle orbiter. The vertical-landing machine can come down in any old parking lot in a pinch, and if the fuel required to brake and touch down weighs less than the wing and associated structure you have a win any way you count it. --
Reusable rockets are great, but using fuel as a brake for Earth landings is dumb, dumb, dumb. The atmosphere is readily available, and you don't have to haul it up with you.
Okay. How are you going to get the nice, free atmosphere to bring you gently to a stop as you touch the ground?
All space vehicles do the vast majority of their braking from orbit using air drag, so the remaining issue is subsonic braking and landing. You can do this with wings, you can do this with parachutes (mostly) or you can do it with rockets. Since a re-usable rocket will have to have the engines along for the landing anyway, it is just a question of whether the fuel weighs more than the necessary wings or parachutes. --
You probably don't want to be launching anything out of a mine shaft at supersonic speeds. (You probably don't want to be launching anything until you have the engines running, as it would be bad to find yourself thousands of feet in the air on a ballistic trajectory without thrust... but that's another issue.) Since you don't really need the ultra-high performance of magnetic propulsion, you might as well put a discarding sabot (cradle) on the bottom of the vehicle and launch it with steam. Recover the sabot by parachute or something. If you can pop out of the tube at 500 MPH, you've just saved the equivalent of about (pops up the calculator) 23 seconds of accelerating vertically at 2 G's thrust, which would otherwise cost you (assuming 430 seconds specific impulse, more calculator action) almost 10% of your fully-fuelled mass. You'll lose some of that to increased air drag from going so fast so low, but that's still a lot. --
Based on the limited and informal associations I have with nuclear engineers, most US citizens became afraid of Nuclear power right around the time of the Three Mile Island accident.
I think there was a substantial paranoid faction even before that. One of the reasons that nuclear plants were having so much trouble being built in the 70's was because of lawsuits from "environmentalists" (who had obviously never thought about global warming as a danger). These lawsuits halted construction on many plants, while the interest costs on the construction bonds kept right on going up. This is, not coincidentally, the reason why nuclear power is denounced as "too expensive". Sure, anything would be too expensive if you took out a 22% per annum loan to finance it and then had your completion delayed by ten years! --
The chief objection to this model is that the breeder reactors also create weapons grade fissionable material(plutonium).
And that objection is completely bogus. To be weapons-grade, Pu has to have a very low level of Pu-240 and Pu-241; the spontaneous fission rate of these isotopes makes it far more difficult to make a bomb (you have to assemble a supercritical mass before the chain reaction starts, because the bomb starts dis-assembling itself almost the instant it begins self-heating). The production of weapons-grade Pu involves taking depleted uranium and irradiating it very briefly to make some Pu-239, then reprocessing it. If you irradiate the fuel for much longer, you start burning some of the Pu-239 that you've already made and you breed some of the Pu-239 into higher isotopes (not all neutron captures result in fission). The fuelling cycle of a weapons reactor is a few weeks, and the power level is rather low; the fuelling cycle of a pressurized-water reactor is a couple of years, and the fuel may crank out 50,000 megawatt-days per ton before it is replaced. That's a lot of work, a lot of neutron bombardment and a lot of higher isotopes of Pu. The Pu is still fine for fuel, but it absolutely sucks for making bombs; nobody in their right mind would bother.
Leave some fission products in to make it "hot", and the people who weren't in their right minds wouldn't survive long enough to do anything with the fuel they stole. --
IIRC, conversion efficiencies of silicon solar cells are in the high single digits for amorphous silicon and low to mid-teens for single-crystal. Efficiencies for inverters can be upwards of 80%; Trace Engineering quotes the peak efficiency of their SunTie series synchronous inverters at 92% or 94%, depending on the model (spec sheet). --
That's a good insight (moderator!), and I think it's confirmed by experience 55 years ago. After the Allies got done pounding Germany and Japan into rubble, the latter had to build from scratch. Since their investment in old stuff was gone, they re-built with all new stuff. 30 years later, the USA's legacy plants and equipment were old and inefficient and not doing very well in competition with Japan's plants which had been rebuilt to what was state of the art several decades later.
The third world is in the same situation of having little infrastructure. They didn't lose it, they never had it, but the fundamental issue is the same: they are building from scratch. Instead of piles of copper phone lines, they are wiring with cellular and optical fiber right off. Some are still hauling coal and diesel fuel to run small, inefficient and unreliable generators, but solar panels have come down to the point where they are cheaper than diesel fuel and far cheaper than cutting swaths for high-tension transmission lines through the countryside. Are they "ahead" of us? I'm not sure about "ahead", but they are getting more for their money doing it the "green" way than they would doing it the old way. You can argue about the politics and science making sense, but you can't argue about the dollars and cents. --
You can buy, off the shelf, electronic-ballast CF lamps with Edison bases. Their flicker frequency is in the KHz; I am sensitive to stroboscopic effects and I have never detected any from one of these lamps. If you pick one up and it doesn't feel like it has a chunk of iron in the ballast, it's electronic.
You can get a cheap Lights of America CF circlite that even does 3-way dimming in your same old lamp fixture. Same light output as a 150-watt incandescent, for 34 watts max. Best of all, you'll have trouble telling the light color from the last bulb (it's a pinkish-warm color, not the bluish "cool white").
BTW, the flicker frequency of an iron-ballast fluorescent is twice the line frequency. You'd be really exaggerating by comparing it to a 50 Hz or 60 Hz monitor refresh. --
... but I have been using Edison-style fluorescents (both circlite and folded-tube) for about seven years. I'm also a couple of thousand miles away from California. --
I have read articles claiming that the intermittent power is desired by the wealthy classes. It goes something like this:
Intermittent power makes it impossible for the poor and lower-middle class people to have appliances we consider basic, such as refrigerators and microwave ovens.
This forces the people to depend on vendors and shops for perishable foods and cooking fuel.
The shops and fuel merchants are owned by the wealthy, who get healthy markups.
Reliable electricity would allow people to buy food less frequently and shop for price, and use electricity for cooking instead of fuel. This would replace high-margin sales by the shops with a few "white goods", further revenue going to the utility operator.
Accordingly, the wealthy classes do not want reliable electricity as it would cut into their immediate profits.
Cell phones in rural areas that are cut off from the power grid ?:-)
Sure. The cell site goes on a mountain and is powered by solar panels. It communicates back to the wired network via a microwave link. Anyone who can see the mountain can usually get through to it with a reasonably small cell phone, and if you've got a panel to keep its batteries charged you've got communication. Ham radio repeaters have been running on solar energy for years, and when you come down to it there's not a whole lot of difference between a 2m or 440 MHz repeater and a cell site except the scale. --
Slashdot Mirror
Pick up some ARRL antenna manuals and see if you don't get some ideas.
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There are a bunch of problems that will have to be solved before this can really work in the real world. They are:
- The "hidden transmitter" problem. If the system uses anything like a collision-detection system, two units which can't hear each other can repeatedly disrupt each other's attempts to reach a third one which can hear both of them. You've got to have some kind of arbitration or polling system to deal with this, and only polling works well at high densities.
- Access to limited resources. Having 5 MBPS access to somebody's AP is nice, but if you've got 10 people trying to work through the associated 768 kbps DSL to the internet, you've got a serious congestion problem.
- Allocation of resources. If someone's DSL provider charges by the unit of traffic, who's going to pay the extra fees to keep the AP open to the public?
- The solution to some of those issues is to route traffic over the air from AP to AP instead of going through the wired network, but that only works if you're not too many hops from "home".
Some of these issues have been faced by hams with their pioneering work with packet radio, but it's all got to be adapted and re-implemented to suit the medium.--
You need to learn the history of the First Amendment, which goes back to the complaints underlying the Declaration of Independence. One of the most influential pamphlets leading up to the DoI, "Common Sense", was published and distributed anonymously. Do you think that the Founders would have even considered a Constitution which would allow political speech to be suppressed merely because the author refused to be identified? Not a chance, and the courts have repeatedly ruled consistently with this.
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Normally I'd agree with you, and the lifespan of a solar panel is typically much longer than the lifespan of a car (though you could design them to be detached and used separately afterward as part of a recycling scheme). On the other hand, there's no guarantee that you'd have a connection between the panel (or electrical grid) and the car when you wanted one, and then there is what is perhaps the most important thing: public awareness. Driving around in a car covered with solar cells makes a statement that driving a car with a plug does not.
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- There's only a tiny fraction of a degree of warming per year, period. But the USA accounts for about 20% of global CO2 emissions, and any technology developed by the USA will be usable by much of the world. That increases its impact.
- Technology is one of the USA's most lucrative exports. Efficiency technology could be added to the list.
- Our current practices in areas like architecture are so bad that savings of 60% and more can be achieved for zero capital cost; the savings mount up year after year. By simply prohibiting old, inefficient practices we could build huge amounts of savings of both energy and money into our economy. Imposing taxes on inefficiency (instead of, say, income) would create a continuing incentive to invest in better technology even if the investment horizon was artificially short compared to the lifespan of the equipment. If there's anything that's known about human behavior, it's that people apply a ridiculously high discount rate (30% per year or more) to efficiency-related savings. This makes no sense ecologically, economically, or any other way.
- We'd probably see great political results. The reduced clout of the oil dictatorships in politics and finance cannot help but improve the state of the entire world.
My idea of what the US economy would look like with carbon emissions 90% below the present day would fill an entire web site, and I'm having enough difficulties writing letters to my congresscritters; I can't possibly illustrate it here. But I don't think we'd have to accept a quality of life lower than today's, and certainly nothing resembling "living in caves". Yes, it does (note, we were cutting and burning forests in the 16th century). Yes, we would probably still see warming even if we cut back 80% today, because the oceans are still heating up and will take decades to stabilize. Is that an excuse to make things even more extreme? I don't think so, I think it's an argument for better action as fast as we can implement it. You forgot, it's a lot of the less-developed countries which have the most to lose from warming and the consequent drying (Africa) and rise in sea levels (Bangladesh, island nations). It's political jiu-jitsu; they asked for it, they have to go along for the ride. And go along they would, because they wouldn't be able to back out on their own demands.--
This is just another example of dumbing-down, and we're not going to see it reverse until the public educates itself and demands better of both the news media and the political commentators (I note that the link you provided was not to a scientific paper, but to an editorial site: opinionjournal.com). As long as people have no idea how to even read the real reports, the spinmeisters can say whatever they want and they will be believed by the part of the electorate which is suitably indoctrinated. This serves the spinmeisters and their masters, because the last thing they want is people who think for themselves and cannot be controlled. (Did I miss a <cynicism> tag there?)
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Satellite temperature records don't reflect the measurements on the ground. Nobody knows why yet, but what are you going to put more stock in: records from physical thermometers (a very well-understood measurement system) on the ground where people, crops and wildlife exist, or satellite radiometers which give discrepant readings from the physical thermometers for unknown reasons and may be giving some kind of systematic error that is not yet understood? My money's on the mercury, not the infrared.
MJ, please stop parroting the SEPP/GEC party line that human activity isn't warming the climate, and on the minuscule chance that it is it isn't doing any harm to our interests. Sure, we don't know what the climate will be like in 100 years. What I do know is that we are far less likely to have unwanted, undesirable and destructive changes in it if we avoid altering the atmosphere's infrared transparency before we have a solid understanding of the way it behaves. Better safe than sorry, you understand.--
Note that it's not a scientific-quality graph, and the X axis is probably mis-labelled. If you looked at some other sites you can probably find a better graph. This page has a graph with better labelling, maybe done by the same news flunky, maybe by a more clueful one.
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If you assume that a hybrid car that is capable of running as a pure electric (which the Honda Insight cannot, and the Toyota Prius can barely do) has similar energy consumption to a pure electric, you are probably talking between 170 and 250 watt-hours per mile (probably less in traffic due to the low speeds). That would give you between 6 and 13 solar-powered miles per (sunny) day.
I live close to work because I hate long commutes. If I could get a car that could do even 6 miles/day on solar, I could go all week without burning any gasoline or using any other source of energy.
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All space vehicles do the vast majority of their braking from orbit using air drag, so the remaining issue is subsonic braking and landing. You can do this with wings, you can do this with parachutes (mostly) or you can do it with rockets. Since a re-usable rocket will have to have the engines along for the landing anyway, it is just a question of whether the fuel weighs more than the necessary wings or parachutes.
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You probably don't want to be launching anything out of a mine shaft at supersonic speeds. (You probably don't want to be launching anything until you have the engines running, as it would be bad to find yourself thousands of feet in the air on a ballistic trajectory without thrust... but that's another issue.) Since you don't really need the ultra-high performance of magnetic propulsion, you might as well put a discarding sabot (cradle) on the bottom of the vehicle and launch it with steam. Recover the sabot by parachute or something. If you can pop out of the tube at 500 MPH, you've just saved the equivalent of about (pops up the calculator) 23 seconds of accelerating vertically at 2 G's thrust, which would otherwise cost you (assuming 430 seconds specific impulse, more calculator action) almost 10% of your fully-fuelled mass. You'll lose some of that to increased air drag from going so fast so low, but that's still a lot.
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Leave some fission products in to make it "hot", and the people who weren't in their right minds wouldn't survive long enough to do anything with the fuel they stole.
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For an antidote to Michio Kaku, read this appraisal of the actual dangers of the deliberate injection of plutonium into the air or water of a city. Kaku is waaaay overstating the dangers.
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IIRC, conversion efficiencies of silicon solar cells are in the high single digits for amorphous silicon and low to mid-teens for single-crystal. Efficiencies for inverters can be upwards of 80%; Trace Engineering quotes the peak efficiency of their SunTie series synchronous inverters at 92% or 94%, depending on the model (spec sheet).
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The third world is in the same situation of having little infrastructure. They didn't lose it, they never had it, but the fundamental issue is the same: they are building from scratch. Instead of piles of copper phone lines, they are wiring with cellular and optical fiber right off. Some are still hauling coal and diesel fuel to run small, inefficient and unreliable generators, but solar panels have come down to the point where they are cheaper than diesel fuel and far cheaper than cutting swaths for high-tension transmission lines through the countryside. Are they "ahead" of us? I'm not sure about "ahead", but they are getting more for their money doing it the "green" way than they would doing it the old way. You can argue about the politics and science making sense, but you can't argue about the dollars and cents.
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You can get a cheap Lights of America CF circlite that even does 3-way dimming in your same old lamp fixture. Same light output as a 150-watt incandescent, for 34 watts max. Best of all, you'll have trouble telling the light color from the last bulb (it's a pinkish-warm color, not the bluish "cool white").
BTW, the flicker frequency of an iron-ballast fluorescent is twice the line frequency. You'd be really exaggerating by comparing it to a 50 Hz or 60 Hz monitor refresh.
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... but I have been using Edison-style fluorescents (both circlite and folded-tube) for about seven years. I'm also a couple of thousand miles away from California.
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- Intermittent power makes it impossible for the poor and lower-middle class people to have appliances we consider basic, such as refrigerators and microwave ovens.
- This forces the people to depend on vendors and shops for perishable foods and cooking fuel.
- The shops and fuel merchants are owned by the wealthy, who get healthy markups.
- Reliable electricity would allow people to buy food less frequently and shop for price, and use electricity for cooking instead of fuel. This would replace high-margin sales by the shops with a few "white goods", further revenue going to the utility operator.
- Accordingly, the wealthy classes do not want reliable electricity as it would cut into their immediate profits.
Is there any truth to this?--
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