The answer is easy: the gas and wind groups should join forces.
When they have enough wind, switch the gas systems to standby.
When there is not enough wind, then crank up the gas systems.
In addition, they should look into energy storage such as flywheel and/or compressed air.
These will help fill in the gap between when the wind dies down and the gas turbines spin up.
Heck, wanna really have fun? Have surplus wind energy electrolize water into hydrogen and and oxygen, and store the hydrogen to feed the gas turbines. Or, use plasma incinerators to convert garbage into syngas and burn that instead of natural gas. If you did that you would not even need the natural gas people.
Heck you could sell the excess back to the natural gas people!
Would it not be more cost effective to add more main memory to the machine? Main memory would be a lot faster than SSD ram. Also I have a concern that frequently updated blocks (like your file system superblocks) would not get written out to disk in a timely fashion.
Now, maybe you could do it safely if the device had RRD ram to handle the caching, SSD flash ram to handle power outages, a rechargable battery or ultra cap to provide power to write the RRD ram to flash ram after a power outage, and a controller to handle all this. You would need to implement all the normal os buffer caching and writebacks as well.
Lets face it, Obama's change, coupled with the funding neglect of Congress for the past 6 years, means we have effectively handed the future of space to China and India. If you want a career in space, better learn Chinese.
What would have been better is to give the unmanned projects over to private industry. Every time we loose a human, we spend 2 years in pause while the rest of the world catches up.
If we loose an unmanned mission, we don't stop the entire program.
When private industry shows a better launch record than NASA (and in a decade or so I believe they will), then maybe we should consider giving them manned programs.
Note: NOTHING stops private industry from doing it now.
I actually think Scotty had a more realistic view then Geordi. Sure, it would take one hour. If that were the only thing you were working on and you didn't get any interruptions.
And your double checking is simply "Computer: verify results" and the answer is always "Results verified".
Welcome to the real world where that never happens.
Requests get piled on top of requests.
And then there are the "This is an emergency, and I'm sure it will only take you a minute because you never seem to be working enough" type calls.
The world where even something as simple as adding floating point numbers can give you different results depending on the order you add them.
The world without Heisenberg compensators.
And the REALLY sad truth of all this is that if you do kill yourself working unpaid overtime, giving up your vacation and your health and personal life and succeed, what is your reward? You are then *EXPECTED* to do this from now on, and if you don't, your slacking off and not being a team player.
Either that or you are expected to train your outsourcing replacement in India with everything you know because you are being laid off.
Owner: I just bought 50 gold plated facuets, put them into the house your renovating.
Builder looking at the blueprints for the two bathrooms: where do you want them?
Owner: I don't care, just put them in because I paid for them.
Builder: how did you pay for them?
Owner: oh, I decided that your electrical upgrade is not needed. The guy who installed it, what's his name, Thomas Edison? I'm sure there is plenty of capacity to handle the fifty ton HVAC and my million volt tesla coil. And if not its your fault. Oh yes and I need it in one month, not six. I'm having my daughters wedding reception here.
Vendors grossly over selling what they can do.
How many times has your company bet on a future product of a vendor that is the best thing since sliced bread and will be available in 3 months,
and then 3 months after that, and then 6 months after that, and then a year after that, and then 3 months after that, etc.
And when it finally comes out most of the pie in the sky features you were depending on don't really work.
But they say it will work in the next version.
Real Soon Now.
Star Trek style management: Managers who think their crew are Scotty who pulls off a miracle every week.
Its never been done, we don't have time to do it right, but its got to work right the first time given not enough resources.
Sure it works on Star Trek, its in the script.
FYI: I love the Star Trek series, but I also know the difference between fiction and reality.
Changing requirements: tell me, who could build a house if you were changing the design every week? One week its a ranch, next week its an apartment building, next week its solar power, next week its wind power, next week it has 5 bathrooms instead of one, next week the bathrooms get moved to different areas of the house, next week the water supply gets moved to the other end of the house. And by the way, we need to cut your budget and move up the deployment date.
Doesn't that sound like what happened to Duke Nukem Forever?
Big Bang deployments. Designs where a completely new design replaces an old one. No system wide testing (remember the Hubble? The system wide test was deleted to save money.). The old system is torn out, the new system is thrown in, and everything has to work the first time because you can't go back. And there are no facilities for debugging or diagnostics or changes because of course the programmers got everything right the first shot.
Ignoring your own staff.
Staff does a detailed bakeoff of competing products and chooses the clear winner. Manager goes with the looser because he owns stock in that company. Company deploys product, deployment goes badly, manager blames staff.
Note: these are composite examples from many sources I have gotten over the years. They are not against any one company.
But I think they are indicative of the industry as a whole.
And that is sad.
Using jammers is a bad idea, is illegal in this country, and can make you lawsuit fodder for unintended consequences. Jammers usually aren't very accurate, so other services can also be jammed. Not just those on nearby frequences, but look through the harmonics as well. And they go far beyond the intended area. Years ago there was a case where someone appeared to be jamming aircraft traffic control radio. It would happen the same time every day. When they found it, it was a vcr that had some leaky rf signals coming out! And this was not even meant to be a jammer. Everything today runs over radio communications. Cause an airplane to crash, a pacemaker to malfunction, accidentally jam a police radio and let a murderer get away, you will make the lawyers very rich.
Better idea: in the areas that can not have cell phone traffic, rebuild the areas with faraday shields.
Lets just hope that these guys learn from the Germans and have a GOOD BACKUP of the private key for the CA. Although, I wonder how much the manufacturer of the cards would be willing to pay the operators to "loose" the backup tape.
Light has an attractive and repulsive component. Sounds like Star Trek deflector and tractor beams to me. Who knows what they will be able to do with this in a hundred years or so.
One of the big problems of windmills is that the availability does not match demand. When there is high demand, send all power to consumers. During low demand, run the artificial trees. It should not matter much if the CO2 is being removed at midnight or at noon. So you have a win (Wind power to consumers) and another win (removal of excess carbon dioxide) in a single plant.
Can this type of powerplant actually blow up and cause a nuclear explosion? I'm not sure if it's possible.
The short answer: no.
The long answer: off the top of my head there are the following differences:
Enrichment: bombs are usually 90+% U235 or Pu239. Reactors are typically under 10 percent.
Neutron criticallity: bombs are sub microsecond critical. Reactors use thermal neutrons for criticallity, where criticallity is expressed in multiple seconds. Analogy: think of how fast a jaguar moves and how fast a snail moves. That shows how fast the energy can come out.
Trans-uranic wastes. Bombs are almost pure plutonium 239 or U235. The reaction can go from zero to explosion in milliseconds. Reactors, on the other hand, have waste products that randomly absorb and emit lots of neutrons, thus wrecking any kind of mass buildup.
Lets go through a good library and see what we should censor:
History of explosives: gota get rid of all that Nobel stuff, dynamite you know
World War 1: all that stuff on chemical weapons
Space program: that stuff on guidance, rockets, remote sensing, remote control
Electronics: all those remote detonators
Chemistry: Gota get rid of those periodic tables, the bonding sequences contain hints on explosives
Photography: you can use cameras to map out your target
Civil engineering: those books can tell you how to blow up buildings, dams, and bridges
History and warfare: greek, roman, persian, just about every war ever fought, and every technical innovation that has come from them.
Computer science: you can use those computers to plan terrorist attacks.
So what is left? Britney Spears and Paula Abdul?
If that is the choice, give me the terrorists along with the knowledge.
When are these vacuum heads going to finally learn that knowledge itself is not dangerous, its what you do with it.
Excuse me, but why the hell did you test for that in the first place?
It was during the debugging phase. We got it to occur, and then turned off one machine at a time. When all the machines on the segment were off and the switch was still jabber isolated we all went "WTF?!" and then started unplugging cables.
Years ago we had a 10BT nic go defective so that whenever the nic was plugged into the switch it would obliterate traffic on that segment. The fun part: EVEN IF THE NIC WAS NOT PLUGGED INTO THE PC. Luckily that happened in one of the few areas that had switches at the time, everything else was one huge flat lan.
JFK IS NOT DEAD.
The CIA cloned him and that was what was really shot.
He faked his death so that he could live with Marylon Monroe, who also faked her death,
and they are currently living on Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro with their good friend Jimmy Hoffa.
A fake conspiracy of who really killed JFK was drawn up to give the nut jobs who think everything is a conspiracy something to chew on,
leaving just enough evidence to keep them going.
To manufacture the evidence the Borg brought back a federation replicator which is powered by a V8 with a 500 mile per gallon carbarator with those tablets that convert water into fuel.
If it seems like Deja-vu, its just another gliche in the Matrix.
Yes a network of intelligent cars can match the fuel economy of a fleet of hybrid cars. But there is a big diffence.
Hybrid cars are available NOW, inteligent cars are not.
Hybrid cars can use exising roads NOW, intelligent cars need infrastructure retrofits.
Hybrid cars can coexist with other cars on the road.
I have my doubts as to how well intelligent cars will intermix with non intelligent cars.
And I'm willing to bet that plug in hybrids with smart chargers that can make use of intermittent surplus energy would be even better for the environment.
Long term, yes intelligent car networks will hopefully provide many benefits, and we should start planning for them. But hybrids can help us out now.
This may have come from a misquote. In the late 70's there was a book, "The Curve of Binding Energy", written by someone by the name of Taylor. He said that a terrorist group could build a nuclear device capable of destroying the World Trade Center, and the WTC could hold about one hundred thousand people.
This got misquoted in the press as being able to destroy a city of one hundred thousand people, big difference.
Unfortunately its been too many years, I don't recall what he expected the yield to be, so I can't plug it into my nuclear weapons effects calculator.
not even counting the thorium that can be transmuted into U-233
Wow. Where does that recipe drop? I can only transmute it into arcanite.
Thorium converts with a neutron into U-233 which is fissionable.
The good news and bad news of U-233 is that (if memory serves) a fission has an average of 1.3 neutrons released.
That makes it a real pain to put into a bomb, and less of a pain to put into a reactor.
U-235 has an average of 2 neutrons per fission, which means you can loose half the neutrons and be ok.
With U-233 you need to keep almost all the neutrons, which also means you can't run the reactor long as the waste products kill the reaction faster than a U235 reactor.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...
on
The Coming Uranium Crisis
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Is it not possible to make a kind of single-tub washer-drier reactor that starts with uranium, then in turn uses the plutonium produced for a further nuclear fission?
Actually that is what happens in a normal PWR uranium reactor. The reaction starts with U-235 which fission, giving off more neutrons.
Some of the neutrons hit U238, which converts it into NP239, which decays into Pu239.
Hit the Pu239 with another neutron, and depending on the speed and probability, you either get a fission and more neutrons, or the neutron is absorbed and you get Pu240 and Pu241. Both of these will give off a neutron at some random point in the future. The spontonous neutrons from Pu240 and Pu241 are not a problem in a reactor, but they threaten premature detonation if you put it into a bomb.
What kills the reaction before most of the uranium is used up are the waste products.
The waste products absorb the neutrons and kill the reaction.
We have plenty of uranium and plutonium, if WE RECYCLE the spent fuel. Something like 80% of the uranium is not used due to the buildup of waste products that kill the reaction.
Recycle the spent fuel, extract the uranium, and send it back into the reactor.
This will have the added benefit of lowering the long term radiological risk of the waste.
It's a time honored tradition to sue your customers. Just ask the RIAA.
Or ask SCO, or by proxy, Microsoft. Almost nothing will get me to move faster away from a vendor than that vendor suing because he didn't like what I chose.
What would be next? Suing over the car I drive?
I chose inorganic because the complexity of toxicology is at least an order of complexity less than organic. Organic toxins are far more lethal than inorganics assuming you have not been "immunized" against the toxin. I know immunize is not the right word, I've forgotten the correct word.
Its the term for the effect that the body can build up a resistence to organic compounds like Botulism toxin if given in small enough amounts. Generally Botulism toxin is the most lethal injected (ingested?) compound. So now instead of the three sided triangle, you now have to add another dimension of exposure over time.
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The answer is easy: the gas and wind groups should join forces. When they have enough wind, switch the gas systems to standby. When there is not enough wind, then crank up the gas systems. In addition, they should look into energy storage such as flywheel and/or compressed air. These will help fill in the gap between when the wind dies down and the gas turbines spin up.
Heck, wanna really have fun? Have surplus wind energy electrolize water into hydrogen and and oxygen, and store the hydrogen to feed the gas turbines. Or, use plasma incinerators to convert garbage into syngas and burn that instead of natural gas. If you did that you would not even need the natural gas people. Heck you could sell the excess back to the natural gas people!
Now, maybe you could do it safely if the device had RRD ram to handle the caching, SSD flash ram to handle power outages, a rechargable battery or ultra cap to provide power to write the RRD ram to flash ram after a power outage, and a controller to handle all this. You would need to implement all the normal os buffer caching and writebacks as well.
Lets face it, Obama's change, coupled with the funding neglect of Congress for the past 6 years, means we have effectively handed the future of space to China and India. If you want a career in space, better learn Chinese. What would have been better is to give the unmanned projects over to private industry. Every time we loose a human, we spend 2 years in pause while the rest of the world catches up. If we loose an unmanned mission, we don't stop the entire program. When private industry shows a better launch record than NASA (and in a decade or so I believe they will), then maybe we should consider giving them manned programs. Note: NOTHING stops private industry from doing it now.
I actually think Scotty had a more realistic view then Geordi. Sure, it would take one hour. If that were the only thing you were working on and you didn't get any interruptions. And your double checking is simply "Computer: verify results" and the answer is always "Results verified". Welcome to the real world where that never happens. Requests get piled on top of requests. And then there are the "This is an emergency, and I'm sure it will only take you a minute because you never seem to be working enough" type calls. The world where even something as simple as adding floating point numbers can give you different results depending on the order you add them. The world without Heisenberg compensators.
Either that or you are expected to train your outsourcing replacement in India with everything you know because you are being laid off.
Note: these are composite examples from many sources I have gotten over the years. They are not against any one company. But I think they are indicative of the industry as a whole. And that is sad.
I'm sure the Peoples Republic of China, North Korea, Cuba, etc, would love this program.
Using jammers is a bad idea, is illegal in this country, and can make you lawsuit fodder for unintended consequences. Jammers usually aren't very accurate, so other services can also be jammed. Not just those on nearby frequences, but look through the harmonics as well. And they go far beyond the intended area. Years ago there was a case where someone appeared to be jamming aircraft traffic control radio. It would happen the same time every day. When they found it, it was a vcr that had some leaky rf signals coming out! And this was not even meant to be a jammer. Everything today runs over radio communications. Cause an airplane to crash, a pacemaker to malfunction, accidentally jam a police radio and let a murderer get away, you will make the lawyers very rich.
Better idea: in the areas that can not have cell phone traffic, rebuild the areas with faraday shields.
Lets just hope that these guys learn from the Germans and have a GOOD BACKUP of the private key for the CA. Although, I wonder how much the manufacturer of the cards would be willing to pay the operators to "loose" the backup tape.
Light has an attractive and repulsive component. Sounds like Star Trek deflector and tractor beams to me. Who knows what they will be able to do with this in a hundred years or so.
One of the big problems of windmills is that the availability does not match demand. When there is high demand, send all power to consumers. During low demand, run the artificial trees. It should not matter much if the CO2 is being removed at midnight or at noon. So you have a win (Wind power to consumers) and another win (removal of excess carbon dioxide) in a single plant.
Coming up next on Mythbusters :-).
The short answer: no.
The long answer: off the top of my head there are the following differences:
So what is left? Britney Spears and Paula Abdul? If that is the choice, give me the terrorists along with the knowledge. When are these vacuum heads going to finally learn that knowledge itself is not dangerous, its what you do with it.
It was during the debugging phase. We got it to occur, and then turned off one machine at a time. When all the machines on the segment were off and the switch was still jabber isolated we all went "WTF?!" and then started unplugging cables.
Years ago we had a 10BT nic go defective so that whenever the nic was plugged into the switch it would obliterate traffic on that segment. The fun part: EVEN IF THE NIC WAS NOT PLUGGED INTO THE PC. Luckily that happened in one of the few areas that had switches at the time, everything else was one huge flat lan.
JFK IS NOT DEAD. The CIA cloned him and that was what was really shot. He faked his death so that he could live with Marylon Monroe, who also faked her death, and they are currently living on Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro with their good friend Jimmy Hoffa.
A fake conspiracy of who really killed JFK was drawn up to give the nut jobs who think everything is a conspiracy something to chew on, leaving just enough evidence to keep them going. To manufacture the evidence the Borg brought back a federation replicator which is powered by a V8 with a 500 mile per gallon carbarator with those tablets that convert water into fuel.
If it seems like Deja-vu, its just another gliche in the Matrix.
Long term, yes intelligent car networks will hopefully provide many benefits, and we should start planning for them. But hybrids can help us out now.
This may have come from a misquote. In the late 70's there was a book, "The Curve of Binding Energy", written by someone by the name of Taylor. He said that a terrorist group could build a nuclear device capable of destroying the World Trade Center, and the WTC could hold about one hundred thousand people. This got misquoted in the press as being able to destroy a city of one hundred thousand people, big difference.
Unfortunately its been too many years, I don't recall what he expected the yield to be, so I can't plug it into my nuclear weapons effects calculator.
Thorium converts with a neutron into U-233 which is fissionable. The good news and bad news of U-233 is that (if memory serves) a fission has an average of 1.3 neutrons released. That makes it a real pain to put into a bomb, and less of a pain to put into a reactor. U-235 has an average of 2 neutrons per fission, which means you can loose half the neutrons and be ok. With U-233 you need to keep almost all the neutrons, which also means you can't run the reactor long as the waste products kill the reaction faster than a U235 reactor.
Actually that is what happens in a normal PWR uranium reactor. The reaction starts with U-235 which fission, giving off more neutrons. Some of the neutrons hit U238, which converts it into NP239, which decays into Pu239. Hit the Pu239 with another neutron, and depending on the speed and probability, you either get a fission and more neutrons, or the neutron is absorbed and you get Pu240 and Pu241. Both of these will give off a neutron at some random point in the future. The spontonous neutrons from Pu240 and Pu241 are not a problem in a reactor, but they threaten premature detonation if you put it into a bomb.
What kills the reaction before most of the uranium is used up are the waste products. The waste products absorb the neutrons and kill the reaction.
We have plenty of uranium and plutonium, if WE RECYCLE the spent fuel. Something like 80% of the uranium is not used due to the buildup of waste products that kill the reaction. Recycle the spent fuel, extract the uranium, and send it back into the reactor. This will have the added benefit of lowering the long term radiological risk of the waste.
Or ask SCO, or by proxy, Microsoft. Almost nothing will get me to move faster away from a vendor than that vendor suing because he didn't like what I chose. What would be next? Suing over the car I drive?
I chose inorganic because the complexity of toxicology is at least an order of complexity less than organic. Organic toxins are far more lethal than inorganics assuming you have not been "immunized" against the toxin. I know immunize is not the right word, I've forgotten the correct word. Its the term for the effect that the body can build up a resistence to organic compounds like Botulism toxin if given in small enough amounts. Generally Botulism toxin is the most lethal injected (ingested?) compound. So now instead of the three sided triangle, you now have to add another dimension of exposure over time.