Granted, an individual coder could have written the code. However, the code QA team would have had to avoid testing with the other popular DOS at the time to have missed it. The integration team would have had to avoid DR DOS as well in their testing. The production group would have had to ignore reports that came in from the field that there was a problem with DR DOS. The beta distribution group then refused to send a copy of the beta to Digital Research so that they could "fix" DR DOS.
Bottom line is that it wasn't one coder. This was multiple people in multiple departments in many different capacities where none of them did the right thing. Was it a directive from the board, a group of executives, or the dominant culture at Microsoft? Who knows. Frankly, who cares? It was certainly deliberate.
Instead of fixating on "this one's integrated with KDE" and "this one allows profiles so you can keep your color choices", Mindterm allows SSH access from any computer with a Java-enabled browser. In many ways, that's more useful to me than the differences between the reviewed terminal emulators.
When I'm at the console, a terminal is a terminal. My choice of shell makes a bigger difference to me. When I'm not at the console, it's easier to find a Java enabled browser than someone willing to let you install Putty (if it's a Windows box).
Instead of deciding which jewel-studded hammer you'd prefer to use, I'm much more interested in the hammer that does the job but is easier to carry around or fits on my belt.
Designing for a specific resolution is a bad thing. Agreed. But what most of us were talking about is a specific minimum resolution. Fixed width layouts aren't a 640x480 vs. 800x600 issue. They're a print layout vs. web layout culture thing.
A) >95% of all clients are 800x600 or above. I don't see why this can't be a baseline. For clients such as PDAs and WebTV, just make a dedicated stylesheet instead of shoehorning into the desktop layout paradigm. Also, I've seen designs where horizontal scrolling is a compelling design decision...as long as it only scrolls in one direction (ie. horizontally and not vertically).
B) Agreed. All web sites are constantly under construction in some form or another.
C) This is technological bigotry. Javascript can be used to reduce the network traffic and make immediate client UI reactions. This can be a good thing. Is it abused? Sure, but so is plain HTML sometimes. Java, same story, more advanced applications. For example, the Mindterm SSH client is a Java applet. It allows access to that particular server (and only that server) from any Java enabled browser anywhere in the world. Comes in pretty darned handy for me when I need to get on my box remotely but still respecting security. I have seen games and utilities in Flash that cannot be done otherwise on the web. Without widespread development and adoption of SVG/SMIL, Flash is the only way to get some things done. Are Flash adverts annoying? Certainly, but so are static image adverts. There is nothing inherently evil or bad about these technologies. In fact, your arguments sound conspicuously like those of diehard gopher, archie, and usenet users who derided the web...basically for being too popular. Popularity breeds misuse, no matter the topic or tool.
D) Agreed.
E) I almost agree. You can specify by name as long as you provide fallbacks. (eg. font-family: 'Avant Garde', 'Zaph Dingbats', 'Times New Roman', serif;) There's a difference between accepting that not everyone has you favored font and completely discarding its use.
F) Agreed. This is a good test for many audible and braille readers. It is also good for programmatic access of your site by search engines, proxies, and crawlers. Semantic markup is the way to go. Just be sure to avoid the use of CSS directives like "display: none;" which many accessibility readers understand and avoid as well. Just say no to FIR.
G) More bigotry. Should frames be used less than they currently are? Sure, I can agree with that. But there are legitimate uses for frames and iframes; Uses that cannot be adequately replicated without using frames.
H) Wholeheartedly agree.
I) Wholeheartedly disagree. There are definite times when this practice is called for. Especially for web applications instead of publish-oriented, static web content. If you concerned about popups, get a browser that blocks popups. If a site pops up a window and you don't like it, don't go to the site. It personally doesn't bother me when used in a context that makes sense.
J) Yes, graceful degradation is a good thing. Semantic markup and judicious use of CSS is the way to go. As far as layout, I have no problem giving NS3/IE3 a look comparable to lynx/links. Content accessibility is important for every client, but appearance for these obsolete browsers is close to the bottom of my priority list.
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All of the above issues are turning the Web into a mish-mash of unreadable, un-navigable garbage. If enough people refuse to stay on badly designed sites, the sites will die. Eventually, practices will change--hopefully.
Bull. Bad UI decisions have turned the Web into this. Bad UIs can be found everywhere, not just in the Web. That's what UI specialists are for. Just because you're a coder who hates Flash doesn't make you the cat's meo
Could you be more specific? Do you mean a veriably sized center area with boxes on either side or just a header, footer, and a content area in the middle? If it's the latter, why not specify the header and footer to be "display: block"? I have the distinct feeling that I'm misunderstanding you though...
I guess I'm coming from the point of view of CSS Zen Garden. I consider those to be complex and compelling layouts with CSS. My own site has fixed sizes where appropriate (raster images), but a mostly variable layout. Font resizing works to stretch things out. Resizing the browser opens the content area. What am I missing?
1) Not all pictures are suited to a scalable graphics format. (eg. Continuous tone images for which JPEGs are appropriate.)
2) Current CSS does not allow for portable image scaling. CSS3 has this support, but it will be some time before CSS3 can be considered a baseline.
3) The use of tables vs. CSS has little to do with the issue of resolution scaling. A table-based page can be made to dynamically resize its contents, and a CSS-based page can be (for online news outlets, is commonly made to) be a pixel perfect, fixed print publication analog.
Web layout should no longer be done in pixels, period. This will even -look- a lot better, not to mention fit a lot more resolutions, once SVG or similar vector-rendering support is built into browsers.
4) Of course layout should be done in pixels. Computer displays are in pixels. What else would you use? Inches? Font sizing? What do those mean on a 15" monitor versus a 21" monitor? I believe what you mean is that layout should be done in vectors rather than rasters. See note #1.
This shouldn't be far off for Mozilla, and IE will have to catch up.
5) The Adobe SVG plugin has been available for IE for quite a while now -- and scriptable too. Developers haven't adopted it. Flash is vector-based and very small, but many (most?) of the slashdot community derides its use.
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Does IE have its issues? Absolutely. Its (lack of) standards support consistently frustrates me. But then again, Netscape 4.x consistently frustrated me before IE. All of these "in a perfect world" rants don't work in the real world.
Want SVG? Where are the tools? Illustrator? Not everyone wants to steal a copy or pay that much money. Sodipodi? Good, but not for most professionals nor for absolute beginners.
If you can do graphics programming and have the time, help get the SVG implementation in Mozilla up to snuff and get those tools together. If you can't, you've got to wait and use the tools that are available. Life sucks. Get used to it and do the best you can with what you've got. Fight the battles you can win.
Web accessibility; Standards support; Reduce usage of tables for layout; Make alternate stylesheets for multiple clients. Fight the battles you can win.
However, you will only need a working knowledge of the first three (i.e., XML, JavaScript, and Style Sheets) in order to start this tutorial. The remaining languages and technologies will be introduced as we encounter them in the process of building XulNote.
In other words, in order to get started, you need to understand data organization, basic logic, and basic layout. Anyone who has made a web page with DHTML has these prerequisites, and that's a lot of "anyones." Hell, using even basic DHTML will have taught you DOM.
The rest of the tech is covered in the tutorial itself. All of it is using the concept of Separation of Concerns. Where do you put the structure of your documents? XML (XUL). How do handle events and call object methods? JavaScript. How do you make it look pretty? CSS. How do you set labels and do internationalization? RDF. How do you make objects that can be called in any language without making explicit language bindings? XPCOM. Etc. Want to change the look without breaking the event handlers? Edit the CSS. That's SoC. In this case, people could call it MVC (Model/View/Controller) as well.
It was a public beta. Testers saw this message a lot and contacted Digital Research about it. Digital Research requested a copy of the Windows beta. Microsoft refused. After the public release, DR-DOS was patched in a week, but the PR damage had already been done. Even long after the error message went away, pundits were still harping on about potential compatibility problems even though no actual problems showed up. Only that artificial error message, purposely cryptic, needlessly worrisome, and produced by Microsoft to illegally kill off a competitor.
The "filter" CSS property is a proprietary extension to IE. It is not now nor ever will be part of the W3C CSS3 spec.
As an aside, Mozilla has supported opacity/transparency as well for a while now through its proprietary "-moz-opacity" CSS property. The main difference here is that while it's clear that you are using a browser-specific extension with Mozilla, the IE variant appears like any other CSS property, and you may not realize that you are in IE-only land.
But if proprietary extensions don't bother you, "-moz-opacity: 0.93" and "-moz-opacity: 0.3" will give the same effect to your post-its as the filter attribute does.
However the real news item here is that the new Firefox code -- like Safari 1.2 before it -- supports the "opacity" property as specified by the W3C CSS3 color module working draft. Perhaps it will be incorporated in the IE7 hack for compatibility.
...except that no region gets 365 days of cloudless days. Tell ya what. I'll split the difference. 250 days equivalent of sunshine in exchange for 6 hours per day. Fair? (My intention to find the answer, not to get a particluar result.)
So.9kWh/m^2/day * 250 days = 225kWh/m^2/year. 16,404,444,444.44 m^2 for US total. (Commercial electric is only 3.691 trillion kWh... I neglected to remove some industry which does not pull from the main grid.)
16,404 square kilometers. 6,333.79 square miles.
I stand corrected. Hmmm...
$540.95 for the 155W model. Going down to a square meter and 150W is $523.50. Let's factor economy of scale. What would be fair? This type of cell, while cheaper than the rest, still requires a cleanroom for construction. 30% of the normal price? $174.50 per square meter.
16,404,444,444.44 square meters (needed for total US power) * $174.50 per square meter = $2,862,575,555,554.78. Almost $3 trillion is unacceptable.
Hmmm... What would be an amount we could handle? $500 billion? (I don't know. Just throwing out numbers.) At 150W/m^2, panels would need to hit $30.48/m^2 in order to hit the $500 billion (admittedly arbitrary) mark. So how much with wind? Granted, the inital cost is amortized over the life of the cell. That's still a $16.66 billion per year assuming a 30 year panel lifespan.
I'll have to look into this. Specifically I'd like to compare to costs of nuclear (yes, including cleanup costs). Today, nuclear is cheaper, but I don't know by how much. Decreasing solar cell costs complicate things greatly since you pointed out my 3-order-of-magnitude error.
1.367kW/m^2 instantaneous... 8.2kWH/m^2 per day. Your estimate seemed a little low. But now I see that you were simply accounting for nominal loss. So 1kW/m^2 and thus 6kWH/m^2 per day. My mistake for missing the correct units.
Adjusted 100 square miles comes out to 3,884,982,165kWH total output at 100% efficiency. 0.105% of total US demand with 100 sq. miles. 95,007 square miles at 100% for all US needs. 190,014 sqaure miles needed for 50% efficient cells. 950,007 sqaure miles needed to 10% efficient -- 26.9% of all US land area.
You'll note that I said, "human history." This is significantly less time than 100,000 years. Less than 10,000 unless you count cave paintings.
Of course, every light-water reactor ever built has leaks too. The difference is that when sodium leaks you have a fire, when water leaks you don't.
No, water just flashes into steam and leaves exposed cores. I never said the use of sodium was perfectly safe. Nothing is. However, you said that every reactor has had a sodium-related accident. I simply pointed out that this is not the case.
With modern implosion designs it is quite likely that you could get a very significant yield from IFR plutonium; imagine what a 1kt explosion in downtown Manhattan would do.
Since you seem well-versed in plutonium, perhaps you would like to share with us what happens after a nuclear explosion? The explosion is the fission, yes? So the amount of plutonium actually released into the environment would be conspicuously small, yes? The explosion would be the most dangerous element by far. I would imagine that a 1 kiloton blast would be much cheaper, less detectable, and easier to produce with non-nuclear material. If you really wanted to make a good dirty bomb, why not use conventional materials with an arsenic payload? Arsenic is many times more deadly to humans than plutonium given the same dosage, it is hard to remove from an area once released, and has a longer halflife than plutonium (it never decays).
As far as states acquiring nuclear weapons - an IFR gives them access to a neutron source suitable for blanket breeding (note that blanket breeding can produce any grade of Pu you wish, including very low Pu-240-content stuff). It also gives them the technology for isotope separation, since as you point out, the plant also contains a separation facility.
So? Why wouldn't they use chemical separation?
First of all, they would need a PUREX-type plant - something that does not exist in the IFR cycle.
Second, the input material is so fiendishly radioactive that the processing facility would have to be more elaborate than any PUREX (Plutonium-URanium EXtraction) plant now in existence. The operations would have to be done entirely by remote control, behind heavy shielding, or the operators would die before getting the job done. The installation would cost millions, and would be very hard to conceal.
Third, a routine safeguards regime would readily spot any such modification to an IFR plant, or diversion of highly radioactive material beyond the plant.
Fourth, of all the ways there are to get plutonium - of any isotopic quality - this is probably the all-time, hands-down hardest.
Or...
A terrorist or hostile nation could simply bomb a hydroelectric dam and do more damage in power loss, property damage, and drowning over a wider area. Or maybe just light a match in the wrong place in a natural gas or oil plant? Set a coal bed on fire? Those fires rage on for decades. Like in Centralia, PA. Or bust out with assault rifles in the middle of Times Square. Much much easier and more effective than compromising an IFR plant.
Wrong. The average insolation in the US is 6 hours of peak sun per day, no desert required (ie 6000 Wh/sq. meter per day). For a flat panel, the deviation from the best southern nevada site to the worst northern washington state site is only 2-to-1!
Thanks, I did not know that about the deviation. I learned something today. Actually, it was recently mentioned to me that Arizona would not be the best location because excessive heat reduces efficiency.
However, I was under the impression from sources like NASA among others that the Solar Constant was only in fact 1,367W per square meter. Far be it from me to agree with rocket scientists.
8-12% is a little low. Current product cell efficiency are around 14-18%, and Concentrators w/ multijunctions get 30%. But who cares?
First of all, the use of concentrators is not useful here. Why? If you concentrate three square meters of sunlight with optics down to a square meter panel, you are still taking up three square meters of solar energy, not one. Optics may reduce the amount of panels that need to be created, but they don't really change the equation. And for the record, I care.
As for efficiency, multijunctions are extremely expensive and not the kind of panel you find on people's homes. The versions that don't break the bank (only cost ~$30K to make a roof of them) are between 8-12% efficient. Don't believe me? Let's quote from your own Solarbuzz.com link:
Module efficiency Commercial crystalline photovoltaic modules efficiency typically ranges from 10 to 13 %. However, you must be aware, that the solar cell efficiency doesn't equal the module efficiency. The module efficiency is usually 1 to 3 % lower than the solar cell efficiency due to glass reflection, frame shadowing, higher temperatures etc. Table 1 represent some features of different solar module types. Amorphous modules have the lowest price, yet their lifetime is short and their efficiency is up to 8 % only.
That's your source, not mine. The question really is, does 8-12% efficiency do the job?
So let's do some actual math shall we? 1.367kW per square meter at 100% efficiency. 2,589,988.11 square meters (1 square mile) * 1.367kW * 6 hours per day * 250 days (I'm being generous with days without rain, fog, snow, etc.) = 5,310,770,619.555kWH. That is hard limit. That's your potential at 100% efficiency (in other words, unattainable) with 100 square miles. That's 0.144% of the total US demand. A better number would be 69,444 square miles needed at 100% efficiency. 50% efficiency lab samples would take 138,888 square miles. Once again, this is larger than the size of Arizona (113,635 square miles)! 690,444 square miles at 10% efficiency (much more likely efficiency). The US (including Alaska) is 3,537,438 square miles. That's 19.5% of all US land area used for solar panels. And you'll please note that I've been more than generous with my calculations.
Once again, repeat after me: It doesn't matter how much you are willing to pay.
Comparisons with the Iraq war are unnecessary and frankly irrelevant. The supply simply isn't there at any cost. Solar and wind alone cannot do the job; Especially solar. A 5kg weight will never be more than 5kg. A 5cm object is a 5cm object. And 1.367kW/m^2 is the total amount of solar energy that hits the Earth.
You misunderstand. When I said "every tract of land," I was referring to the amount of area that has sufficient levels of wind. This means, for example, North Dakota (the windiest state) becomes one big wind farm. Ever thought what slowing that much wind down would do to weather patterns, pollination rates, agriculture in the area, etc.?
As for the American Wind Energy Association... 6,374MW? Ummm... Someone is lying. How can I tell? 6,374,000 kilowatts * 365 days * 24 hours = 55,836,240,000 kilowatt-hours. That's 55.8 billion kilowatt-hours. So they're saying that if the US ran at capacity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would come out less than the actual total US electricity output (3.691 trillion kilowatt-hours from the power industry)? Methinks someone replaced a comma with a decimal "by mistake."
What's the biggest output per wind turbine? 5MW? 1,275 of them running at 100% would give 6,374MW. That seems quite doable. Oh wait! 6,374MW was a bullshit number. Let's check back with the actual numbers. 3,691,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours / 365 days / 24 hours. I get 421,347MW (421,347,032kW). What about you? and of course, that's an average, not an actual capacity. Usage is not the average. Actual usage would be higher in some parts of the year and lower in others. Lots of peaks an valleys in between.
But let's use 421,347MW / 5MW per turbine. 84,269 of them. Not bad I guess. Oh wait! That was if they are all the 5MW model running at 100% capacity 100% of the time. How much space is taken up by more than 84,269 windmills? When I look on the hillsides, a few dozen take up a non-trivial amount of space and they're much smaller than the 5MW models.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't use wind. Quite the contrary. Diversity in energy production is always a good thing. Keeping all of your eggs in just one basket is asking for trouble. But something is rotten in the state of Wind-mark.
I'll leave it to you to check my math. I await your response with bated breath.
Correct, it is biased. Everything is biased except raw numbers (not including statistics). A more important question would be, "Did you find any falsehoods in that source?"
That said, I'll answer a few of your good points.
Embrittlement resulting from bombardment with neutrons, usually encountered in metals that have been exposed to a neutron flux in the core of a reactor. In steels, neutron embrittlement is evidenced by a rise in the ductile-to-brittle transition temperature. - results of a Google search
It would be naive to think that nuclear engineers are not intimately familiar with this phenomenon. Can you point out an occurance of neutron embrittlement that has gone unchecked and/or caused an accident? Nuclear power has been in use for fifty years. Surely if it were a serious problem, it would have shown itself by now.
Second, I assume that your 2,000 year assessment was by taking an expected uranium reserve of less than 50 years and multiplying by the expected efficiency of IFRs over LWR/BWRs? Unfortunately this fails to take into account the amount of spent fuel sitting in pools at nuclear plants. This is fuel as well and still retains approximately 98% of its energy potential. Yes, the current generation of LWR are that inefficient and current legislation does not allow nuclear fuel reprocessing. I also fails to take into account the aging stockpiles of nuclear weapons. This is fuel as well. Even without getting into uranium collection from the oceans, I'm sorry sir, but the longevity of this fuel source far exceeds two thousand years.
Third, sodium is indeed highly reactive with water and air. But liquid sodium and metallic sodium have been used successfully in various industries for some time. There is a great deal of experience with that substance. As far as the claim, "Every fast-neutron sodium reactor design ever built has had some serious accidents related to sodium," this is false. Yes, there has been the incident in Japan in 1995 -- the Monju reactor accident which caused no deaths, no injuries, and no damage to the reactor itself. The EBR-II, the prototype test bed for IFR/AFR reactors, was in operation for twenty years with a sodium pool. "Every" fast-neutron sodium reactor? By the way, just how many have been built thus far? (I don't know, but it's certainly a very small number -- statistically insignificant)
In response to your plutonium usage as a bomb, it is important to note that not a single bomb has ever been made from traditional nuclear power-generated spent fuel. Ever. In any country. That said, one can make a bomb from Uranium as well. As far as plutonium goes, the plutonium that is most useful to power generation (the heat-generating isotopes) are precisely the kind of plutonium you don't want for weapons. Plutonium-bearing material taken from anywhere in the IFR cycle is so ornery, because of inherent heat, radioactivity and spontaneous neutrons, that making a bomb with it without chemical separation of the plutonium would be essentially impossible - far, far harder than using today's reactor-grade plutonium.
Now keep in mind that plutonium is never intended to leave an IFR. Ever. There are no shipments "to and from" an IFR. There are only shipments "to." The processing facilities are on-site. And the only plutonium to enter the site is plutonium that already exists in the form of spent fuel or weapons. IFR/AFRs, if you completely disregard the power generation qualities, are still the only large-scale method of disposing of transuranics that I am aware of. What's the alternative? Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years?
Once again, because this bears repeating, spent fuel from a nuclear reactor designed solely for power generation has never before been used by any country to make a nuclear weapon. It would be
But some claim the radioactivity is carried around on ocean currents to end up in our fish and on our beaches.
Perhaps the "some" they refer to would be Greenpeace? This wouldn't be the folks who took sand from a beach they claimed was contaminated, took it back to their UK office, and screamed bloody murder about how toxic the stuff was, would it? When it came to light that they didn't have a permit for toxic material and they were close to schools, a bunch of folks called them on it. Suddenly the story changed. "The sand we took is not toxic after all...but the beach really is!"
Harrisburg/US, 28 March 1979 A combination of technical failures and human error leads to a partial-meltdown in the core of Unit 2 reactor of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Radioactive gases are released, some 3,500 children and pregnant women are evacuated.
All technically true. There was a partial meltdown. Unfortunately Greenpeace is banking on the fact that most people don't realize that a meltdown refers to the fuel, not the plant. Yes, it's true that radioactive gases were released. What they conveniently fail to mention is that most estimates of radioactivity were less than 100mrem (250mrem is average background radiation we are all exposed to each year), that there was no wind to speak of that day so the radiation didn't leave the plant, that no workers on the site became sick that day or since due to its effects even though they had the most immediate exposure, etc. I especially love the note about pregnant women and children. It did not mention the total number of people evacuated. It did not say that 3,500 pregnant women and children were harmed in any way whatsoever. What happened was that before any harm could possibly come to them (or men and non-pregnant women presumably), they were evacuated from the area. As it turns out, it wasn't necessary.
For that matter, the page fails to mention in its "short overview of accidents" that the total list of accidents is impressively small for fifty years of nuclear power reasearch and production.
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But I digress. This isn't about political opportunists... err... Greanpeace.
Looking at your link, I read, "Worst case scenario it gets thrown back up by volcanoes." Curious. Is this a worst case because people believe that the radioactive material will be spit out over populated areas without first being encased in lava? Or is it because if an eruption occurs, the nuclear material would become entombed in tons of molten rock?
It then talks about mixing with concrete and putting it into stainless steel drums. I was under the impression that they were mixed with glass so as to be non-reactive, but I could be wrong.
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But once again, I digress. Personally, I'm in favor of land-based temporary storage at which time IFR/AFR reactors (and other 4th generation designs) would be built to use this waste as fuel. Kill two birds with one stone: process the transuranic waste into shorter-lived isotopes while producing enough electricity to decommision the coal, oil, and natural gas plants.
You'll note that they don't say how long this research will take. They have all sorts of timetables for construction and decommission -- despite a final design I might add -- but no schedule as to when the research will be done. Thirty years? Fifty years? You will forgive my skepticism as fusion has been "almost there" for the last thirty years. "In ten years" has been spoken so many times, you'd think ten years last forever.
Most nuclear waste is encased in glass. Not put into a bottle, mind you. Rather the material is mixed together and fired with glass. There really isn't much leakage involved since glass is highly nonreactive.
Ocean currents would probably do a good job of dispersion. Sufficient dilution wouldn't seem to be a problem either.;-)
Good wind areas, which cover 6% of the contiguous U.S. land area, have the potential to supply more than one and a half times the current electricity consumption of the United States. Technology under development today will be capable of producing electricity economically from good wind sites in many regions of the country.
In other words, 6% of the contiguous US land area would have to be covered with windmill farms.
How many windmills is that? A million? With maximum outputs of about 3MW per wind turbine (standard amount if I'm not mistaken), it would take a million give or take. I was under the impression that a million wind turbines would take up 19% of the total land area. Can they be placed more densely packed than I was led to believe, are there turbines that substantially exceed 3MW, or was someone calculating potential wind energy instead of actual hardware and materials?
How much does each windmill cost? (I don't know.) How much would a million of them cost?
What would be the effect of taking that much energy out of wind patterns? Would rainfall in the region be affected? Regional temperatures? Flowering plant pollination rates?
I'm not attacking nor trolling. I'm honestly curious. All of the studies I have seen about wind either cover environmental concerns (usually related to birds and relatively small numbers of wind turbines) or potential power output. Never both. At this point, I don't care about the politics. I trust the math and verifiable numbers.
All that said, again I feel it necessary to point out that I am not against solar nor wind. Quite the contrary. I just don't see them economically replacing coal. However, from a purely civil standpoint, I would love to see more residences with solar if for no other reason than major blackouts like the one in northeast North America wouldn't have been as severe.
Thermal depolymerization hasn't been tested in large-scale environments yet. Yes, I know about the turkey plant. Take a closer look at the offal tonnage. Now look up the amount of oil we drill and import every year. It's promising technology, sure. But it's still far too immature to be basing any real hopes on yet.
As for hydrogen, it's not an energy source. Pure hydrogen must be collected. That requires energy. Hydrogen is an energy storage medium. You still need the power plants to collect it.
As of May 31, 2002, there are 104 commercial nuclear generating units that are licensed to operate in the United States. (Note: the Brown's Ferry unit 1 has been shut down since 1985 but retains a license). The U.S. reactors are of two basic types: 69 units are pressurized water reactors (PWRs) totaling 65,100 net megawatts (electric) and 35 units are boiling water reactors (BWR) totaling 32,300 net megatwatts (electric). - Energy Information Administration (Department of Energy)
104...err...103 units (Brown's Ferry is still down) supply 20% of all electricity in this country. 20% from 103 plants.
So let's say $2 billion per 1,000MW reactor ($2,000 per kilowatt is a high estimate if plants were rolled out in greater frequency and used a common cookie cutter design instead of the custom work current ones require, but it'll do for now). About 200 plants would replace all of the coal plants. That's $400B. What was the cost of the war in Iraq again?
300 more plants than we have today (at an average of 1,000MW per plant) would handle the current US demand for electricity. $600B. Mind you, this doesn't have to be purchased all at once. The costs can be amortized over several years.
Expensive? Certainly. An easy solution. Not really. Possible? Yes.
Cheaper than solar cells when you figure that 200 square meters (size of a house) of solar panels cost about $30,000? Hell... Let's work on the economy of scale. We'll say $10,000 per house-sized set of panels. Let's see... 294,313,298,879.85 square meters in Arizona... Divide by 200... 1,471,566,494.39925 house-sized panel clusters... Multiply by $10,000 per cluster... Hmmm... $14.7 trillion dollars. Even if you cut production costs for solar panels to 10% of its current cost, you're still looking at $4.4 trillion. And completely covering Arizona still isn't enough power to cover even a quarter of US demand.
It ain't a question of easy solutions. Easy solutions went out the door long before we were born. At this point, it's about running the numbers and seeing which adds up. Nuclear ain't cheap and easy, but it's cheaper, easier, and much more realistic than the alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, an individual coder could have written the code. However, the code QA team would have had to avoid testing with the other popular DOS at the time to have missed it. The integration team would have had to avoid DR DOS as well in their testing. The production group would have had to ignore reports that came in from the field that there was a problem with DR DOS. The beta distribution group then refused to send a copy of the beta to Digital Research so that they could "fix" DR DOS.
Bottom line is that it wasn't one coder. This was multiple people in multiple departments in many different capacities where none of them did the right thing. Was it a directive from the board, a group of executives, or the dominant culture at Microsoft? Who knows. Frankly, who cares? It was certainly deliberate.
I think using the term "Netzis" qualifies for Goodwin's Law.
Mindterm.
Instead of fixating on "this one's integrated with KDE" and "this one allows profiles so you can keep your color choices", Mindterm allows SSH access from any computer with a Java-enabled browser. In many ways, that's more useful to me than the differences between the reviewed terminal emulators.
When I'm at the console, a terminal is a terminal. My choice of shell makes a bigger difference to me. When I'm not at the console, it's easier to find a Java enabled browser than someone willing to let you install Putty (if it's a Windows box).
Instead of deciding which jewel-studded hammer you'd prefer to use, I'm much more interested in the hammer that does the job but is easier to carry around or fits on my belt.
A) >95% of all clients are 800x600 or above. I don't see why this can't be a baseline. For clients such as PDAs and WebTV, just make a dedicated stylesheet instead of shoehorning into the desktop layout paradigm. Also, I've seen designs where horizontal scrolling is a compelling design decision...as long as it only scrolls in one direction (ie. horizontally and not vertically).
B) Agreed. All web sites are constantly under construction in some form or another.
C) This is technological bigotry. Javascript can be used to reduce the network traffic and make immediate client UI reactions. This can be a good thing. Is it abused? Sure, but so is plain HTML sometimes. Java, same story, more advanced applications. For example, the Mindterm SSH client is a Java applet. It allows access to that particular server (and only that server) from any Java enabled browser anywhere in the world. Comes in pretty darned handy for me when I need to get on my box remotely but still respecting security. I have seen games and utilities in Flash that cannot be done otherwise on the web. Without widespread development and adoption of SVG/SMIL, Flash is the only way to get some things done. Are Flash adverts annoying? Certainly, but so are static image adverts. There is nothing inherently evil or bad about these technologies. In fact, your arguments sound conspicuously like those of diehard gopher, archie, and usenet users who derided the web...basically for being too popular. Popularity breeds misuse, no matter the topic or tool.
D) Agreed.
E) I almost agree. You can specify by name as long as you provide fallbacks. (eg. font-family: 'Avant Garde', 'Zaph Dingbats', 'Times New Roman', serif;) There's a difference between accepting that not everyone has you favored font and completely discarding its use.
F) Agreed. This is a good test for many audible and braille readers. It is also good for programmatic access of your site by search engines, proxies, and crawlers. Semantic markup is the way to go. Just be sure to avoid the use of CSS directives like "display: none;" which many accessibility readers understand and avoid as well. Just say no to FIR.
G) More bigotry. Should frames be used less than they currently are? Sure, I can agree with that. But there are legitimate uses for frames and iframes; Uses that cannot be adequately replicated without using frames.
H) Wholeheartedly agree.
I) Wholeheartedly disagree. There are definite times when this practice is called for. Especially for web applications instead of publish-oriented, static web content. If you concerned about popups, get a browser that blocks popups. If a site pops up a window and you don't like it, don't go to the site. It personally doesn't bother me when used in a context that makes sense.
J) Yes, graceful degradation is a good thing. Semantic markup and judicious use of CSS is the way to go. As far as layout, I have no problem giving NS3/IE3 a look comparable to lynx/links. Content accessibility is important for every client, but appearance for these obsolete browsers is close to the bottom of my priority list.
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Bull. Bad UI decisions have turned the Web into this. Bad UIs can be found everywhere, not just in the Web. That's what UI specialists are for. Just because you're a coder who hates Flash doesn't make you the cat's meo
Could you be more specific? Do you mean a veriably sized center area with boxes on either side or just a header, footer, and a content area in the middle? If it's the latter, why not specify the header and footer to be "display: block"? I have the distinct feeling that I'm misunderstanding you though...
I guess I'm coming from the point of view of CSS Zen Garden. I consider those to be complex and compelling layouts with CSS. My own site has fixed sizes where appropriate (raster images), but a mostly variable layout. Font resizing works to stretch things out. Resizing the browser opens the content area. What am I missing?
Do you have an example link?
2) Current CSS does not allow for portable image scaling. CSS3 has this support, but it will be some time before CSS3 can be considered a baseline.
3) The use of tables vs. CSS has little to do with the issue of resolution scaling. A table-based page can be made to dynamically resize its contents, and a CSS-based page can be (for online news outlets, is commonly made to) be a pixel perfect, fixed print publication analog.
4) Of course layout should be done in pixels. Computer displays are in pixels. What else would you use? Inches? Font sizing? What do those mean on a 15" monitor versus a 21" monitor? I believe what you mean is that layout should be done in vectors rather than rasters. See note #1.
5) The Adobe SVG plugin has been available for IE for quite a while now -- and scriptable too. Developers haven't adopted it. Flash is vector-based and very small, but many (most?) of the slashdot community derides its use.
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Does IE have its issues? Absolutely. Its (lack of) standards support consistently frustrates me. But then again, Netscape 4.x consistently frustrated me before IE. All of these "in a perfect world" rants don't work in the real world.
Want SVG? Where are the tools? Illustrator? Not everyone wants to steal a copy or pay that much money. Sodipodi? Good, but not for most professionals nor for absolute beginners.
If you can do graphics programming and have the time, help get the SVG implementation in Mozilla up to snuff and get those tools together. If you can't, you've got to wait and use the tools that are available. Life sucks. Get used to it and do the best you can with what you've got. Fight the battles you can win.
Web accessibility; Standards support; Reduce usage of tables for layout; Make alternate stylesheets for multiple clients. Fight the battles you can win.
In other words, in order to get started, you need to understand data organization, basic logic, and basic layout. Anyone who has made a web page with DHTML has these prerequisites, and that's a lot of "anyones." Hell, using even basic DHTML will have taught you DOM.
The rest of the tech is covered in the tutorial itself. All of it is using the concept of Separation of Concerns. Where do you put the structure of your documents? XML (XUL). How do handle events and call object methods? JavaScript. How do you make it look pretty? CSS. How do you set labels and do internationalization? RDF. How do you make objects that can be called in any language without making explicit language bindings? XPCOM. Etc. Want to change the look without breaking the event handlers? Edit the CSS. That's SoC. In this case, people could call it MVC (Model/View/Controller) as well.
It was a public beta. Testers saw this message a lot and contacted Digital Research about it. Digital Research requested a copy of the Windows beta. Microsoft refused. After the public release, DR-DOS was patched in a week, but the PR damage had already been done. Even long after the error message went away, pundits were still harping on about potential compatibility problems even though no actual problems showed up. Only that artificial error message, purposely cryptic, needlessly worrisome, and produced by Microsoft to illegally kill off a competitor.
The "filter" CSS property is a proprietary extension to IE. It is not now nor ever will be part of the W3C CSS3 spec.
As an aside, Mozilla has supported opacity/transparency as well for a while now through its proprietary "-moz-opacity" CSS property. The main difference here is that while it's clear that you are using a browser-specific extension with Mozilla, the IE variant appears like any other CSS property, and you may not realize that you are in IE-only land.
But if proprietary extensions don't bother you, "-moz-opacity: 0.93" and "-moz-opacity: 0.3" will give the same effect to your post-its as the filter attribute does.
However the real news item here is that the new Firefox code -- like Safari 1.2 before it -- supports the "opacity" property as specified by the W3C CSS3 color module working draft. Perhaps it will be incorporated in the IE7 hack for compatibility.
...except that no region gets 365 days of cloudless days. Tell ya what. I'll split the difference. 250 days equivalent of sunshine in exchange for 6 hours per day. Fair? (My intention to find the answer, not to get a particluar result.)
.9kWh/m^2/day * 250 days = 225kWh/m^2/year.
So
16,404,444,444.44 m^2 for US total. (Commercial electric is only 3.691 trillion kWh... I neglected to remove some industry which does not pull from the main grid.)
16,404 square kilometers.
6,333.79 square miles.
I stand corrected. Hmmm...
$540.95 for the 155W model. Going down to a square meter and 150W is $523.50. Let's factor economy of scale. What would be fair? This type of cell, while cheaper than the rest, still requires a cleanroom for construction. 30% of the normal price? $174.50 per square meter.
16,404,444,444.44 square meters (needed for total US power) * $174.50 per square meter = $2,862,575,555,554.78. Almost $3 trillion is unacceptable.
Hmmm... What would be an amount we could handle? $500 billion? (I don't know. Just throwing out numbers.) At 150W/m^2, panels would need to hit $30.48/m^2 in order to hit the $500 billion (admittedly arbitrary) mark. So how much with wind? Granted, the inital cost is amortized over the life of the cell. That's still a $16.66 billion per year assuming a 30 year panel lifespan.
I'll have to look into this. Specifically I'd like to compare to costs of nuclear (yes, including cleanup costs). Today, nuclear is cheaper, but I don't know by how much. Decreasing solar cell costs complicate things greatly since you pointed out my 3-order-of-magnitude error.
My thanks.
950,070 square miles needed for 10% efficiency -- 26.9% of all US land area.
1.367kW/m^2 instantaneous... 8.2kWH/m^2 per day. Your estimate seemed a little low. But now I see that you were simply accounting for nominal loss. So 1kW/m^2 and thus 6kWH/m^2 per day. My mistake for missing the correct units.
Adjusted 100 square miles comes out to 3,884,982,165kWH total output at 100% efficiency.
0.105% of total US demand with 100 sq. miles.
95,007 square miles at 100% for all US needs.
190,014 sqaure miles needed for 50% efficient cells.
950,007 sqaure miles needed to 10% efficient -- 26.9% of all US land area.
Mea culpa.
I'd be suprised if any lava completely lacked radioactivity. You remember where the stuff comes from, right?
You'll note that I said, "human history." This is significantly less time than 100,000 years. Less than 10,000 unless you count cave paintings.
No, water just flashes into steam and leaves exposed cores. I never said the use of sodium was perfectly safe. Nothing is. However, you said that every reactor has had a sodium-related accident. I simply pointed out that this is not the case.
Since you seem well-versed in plutonium, perhaps you would like to share with us what happens after a nuclear explosion? The explosion is the fission, yes? So the amount of plutonium actually released into the environment would be conspicuously small, yes? The explosion would be the most dangerous element by far. I would imagine that a 1 kiloton blast would be much cheaper, less detectable, and easier to produce with non-nuclear material. If you really wanted to make a good dirty bomb, why not use conventional materials with an arsenic payload? Arsenic is many times more deadly to humans than plutonium given the same dosage, it is hard to remove from an area once released, and has a longer halflife than plutonium (it never decays).
So? Why wouldn't they use chemical separation?
First of all, they would need a PUREX-type plant - something that does not exist in the IFR cycle.
Second, the input material is so fiendishly radioactive that the processing facility would have to be more elaborate than any PUREX (Plutonium-URanium EXtraction) plant now in existence. The operations would have to be done entirely by remote control, behind heavy shielding, or the operators would die before getting the job done. The installation would cost millions, and would be very hard to conceal.
Third, a routine safeguards regime would readily spot any such modification to an IFR plant, or diversion of highly radioactive material beyond the plant.
Fourth, of all the ways there are to get plutonium - of any isotopic quality - this is probably the all-time, hands-down hardest.
Or...
A terrorist or hostile nation could simply bomb a hydroelectric dam and do more damage in power loss, property damage, and drowning over a wider area. Or maybe just light a match in the wrong place in a natural gas or oil plant? Set a coal bed on fire? Those fires rage on for decades. Like in Centralia, PA. Or bust out with assault rifles in the middle of Times Square. Much much easier and more effective than compromising an IFR plant.
However, I was under the impression from sources like NASA among others that the Solar Constant was only in fact 1,367W per square meter. Far be it from me to agree with rocket scientists.First of all, the use of concentrators is not useful here. Why? If you concentrate three square meters of sunlight with optics down to a square meter panel, you are still taking up three square meters of solar energy, not one. Optics may reduce the amount of panels that need to be created, but they don't really change the equation. And for the record, I care.
As for efficiency, multijunctions are extremely expensive and not the kind of panel you find on people's homes. The versions that don't break the bank (only cost ~$30K to make a roof of them) are between 8-12% efficient. Don't believe me? Let's quote from your own Solarbuzz.com link:That's your source, not mine. The question really is, does 8-12% efficiency do the job?
So let's do some actual math shall we? 1.367kW per square meter at 100% efficiency. 2,589,988.11 square meters (1 square mile) * 1.367kW * 6 hours per day * 250 days (I'm being generous with days without rain, fog, snow, etc.) = 5,310,770,619.555kWH. That is hard limit. That's your potential at 100% efficiency (in other words, unattainable) with 100 square miles. That's 0.144% of the total US demand. A better number would be 69,444 square miles needed at 100% efficiency. 50% efficiency lab samples would take 138,888 square miles. Once again, this is larger than the size of Arizona (113,635 square miles)! 690,444 square miles at 10% efficiency (much more likely efficiency). The US (including Alaska) is 3,537,438 square miles. That's 19.5% of all US land area used for solar panels. And you'll please note that I've been more than generous with my calculations.
Once again, repeat after me: It doesn't matter how much you are willing to pay.
Comparisons with the Iraq war are unnecessary and frankly irrelevant. The supply simply isn't there at any cost. Solar and wind alone cannot do the job; Especially solar. A 5kg weight will never be more than 5kg. A 5cm object is a 5cm object. And 1.367kW/m^2 is the total amount of solar energy that hits the Earth.
You misunderstand. When I said "every tract of land," I was referring to the amount of area that has sufficient levels of wind. This means, for example, North Dakota (the windiest state) becomes one big wind farm. Ever thought what slowing that much wind down would do to weather patterns, pollination rates, agriculture in the area, etc.?
As for the American Wind Energy Association... 6,374MW? Ummm... Someone is lying. How can I tell? 6,374,000 kilowatts * 365 days * 24 hours = 55,836,240,000 kilowatt-hours. That's 55.8 billion kilowatt-hours. So they're saying that if the US ran at capacity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would come out less than the actual total US electricity output (3.691 trillion kilowatt-hours from the power industry)? Methinks someone replaced a comma with a decimal "by mistake."
What's the biggest output per wind turbine? 5MW? 1,275 of them running at 100% would give 6,374MW. That seems quite doable. Oh wait! 6,374MW was a bullshit number. Let's check back with the actual numbers. 3,691,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours / 365 days / 24 hours. I get 421,347MW (421,347,032kW). What about you? and of course, that's an average, not an actual capacity. Usage is not the average. Actual usage would be higher in some parts of the year and lower in others. Lots of peaks an valleys in between.
But let's use 421,347MW / 5MW per turbine. 84,269 of them. Not bad I guess. Oh wait! That was if they are all the 5MW model running at 100% capacity 100% of the time. How much space is taken up by more than 84,269 windmills? When I look on the hillsides, a few dozen take up a non-trivial amount of space and they're much smaller than the 5MW models.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't use wind. Quite the contrary. Diversity in energy production is always a good thing. Keeping all of your eggs in just one basket is asking for trouble. But something is rotten in the state of Wind-mark.
I'll leave it to you to check my math. I await your response with bated breath.
That said, I'll answer a few of your good points.
It would be naive to think that nuclear engineers are not intimately familiar with this phenomenon. Can you point out an occurance of neutron embrittlement that has gone unchecked and/or caused an accident? Nuclear power has been in use for fifty years. Surely if it were a serious problem, it would have shown itself by now.
Second, I assume that your 2,000 year assessment was by taking an expected uranium reserve of less than 50 years and multiplying by the expected efficiency of IFRs over LWR/BWRs? Unfortunately this fails to take into account the amount of spent fuel sitting in pools at nuclear plants. This is fuel as well and still retains approximately 98% of its energy potential. Yes, the current generation of LWR are that inefficient and current legislation does not allow nuclear fuel reprocessing. I also fails to take into account the aging stockpiles of nuclear weapons. This is fuel as well. Even without getting into uranium collection from the oceans, I'm sorry sir, but the longevity of this fuel source far exceeds two thousand years.
Third, sodium is indeed highly reactive with water and air. But liquid sodium and metallic sodium have been used successfully in various industries for some time. There is a great deal of experience with that substance. As far as the claim, "Every fast-neutron sodium reactor design ever built has had some serious accidents related to sodium," this is false. Yes, there has been the incident in Japan in 1995 -- the Monju reactor accident which caused no deaths, no injuries, and no damage to the reactor itself. The EBR-II, the prototype test bed for IFR/AFR reactors, was in operation for twenty years with a sodium pool. "Every" fast-neutron sodium reactor? By the way, just how many have been built thus far? (I don't know, but it's certainly a very small number -- statistically insignificant)
In response to your plutonium usage as a bomb, it is important to note that not a single bomb has ever been made from traditional nuclear power-generated spent fuel. Ever. In any country. That said, one can make a bomb from Uranium as well. As far as plutonium goes, the plutonium that is most useful to power generation (the heat-generating isotopes) are precisely the kind of plutonium you don't want for weapons. Plutonium-bearing material taken from anywhere in the IFR cycle is so ornery, because of inherent heat, radioactivity and spontaneous neutrons, that making a bomb with it without chemical separation of the plutonium would be essentially impossible - far, far harder than using today's reactor-grade plutonium.
Now keep in mind that plutonium is never intended to leave an IFR. Ever. There are no shipments "to and from" an IFR. There are only shipments "to." The processing facilities are on-site. And the only plutonium to enter the site is plutonium that already exists in the form of spent fuel or weapons. IFR/AFRs, if you completely disregard the power generation qualities, are still the only large-scale method of disposing of transuranics that I am aware of. What's the alternative? Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years?
Once again, because this bears repeating, spent fuel from a nuclear reactor designed solely for power generation has never before been used by any country to make a nuclear weapon . It would be
I personal favorite Greenpeace quote is on their nuclear campaign web pages, the one on nuclear reactor accidents.All technically true. There was a partial meltdown. Unfortunately Greenpeace is banking on the fact that most people don't realize that a meltdown refers to the fuel, not the plant. Yes, it's true that radioactive gases were released. What they conveniently fail to mention is that most estimates of radioactivity were less than 100mrem (250mrem is average background radiation we are all exposed to each year), that there was no wind to speak of that day so the radiation didn't leave the plant, that no workers on the site became sick that day or since due to its effects even though they had the most immediate exposure, etc. I especially love the note about pregnant women and children. It did not mention the total number of people evacuated. It did not say that 3,500 pregnant women and children were harmed in any way whatsoever. What happened was that before any harm could possibly come to them (or men and non-pregnant women presumably), they were evacuated from the area. As it turns out, it wasn't necessary.
For that matter, the page fails to mention in its "short overview of accidents" that the total list of accidents is impressively small for fifty years of nuclear power reasearch and production.
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But I digress. This isn't about political opportunists... err... Greanpeace.
Looking at your link, I read, "Worst case scenario it gets thrown back up by volcanoes." Curious. Is this a worst case because people believe that the radioactive material will be spit out over populated areas without first being encased in lava? Or is it because if an eruption occurs, the nuclear material would become entombed in tons of molten rock?
It then talks about mixing with concrete and putting it into stainless steel drums. I was under the impression that they were mixed with glass so as to be non-reactive, but I could be wrong.
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But once again, I digress. Personally, I'm in favor of land-based temporary storage at which time IFR/AFR reactors (and other 4th generation designs) would be built to use this waste as fuel. Kill two birds with one stone: process the transuranic waste into shorter-lived isotopes while producing enough electricity to decommision the coal, oil, and natural gas plants.
You'll note that they don't say how long this research will take. They have all sorts of timetables for construction and decommission -- despite a final design I might add -- but no schedule as to when the research will be done. Thirty years? Fifty years? You will forgive my skepticism as fusion has been "almost there" for the last thirty years. "In ten years" has been spoken so many times, you'd think ten years last forever.
Most nuclear waste is encased in glass. Not put into a bottle, mind you. Rather the material is mixed together and fired with glass. There really isn't much leakage involved since glass is highly nonreactive.
;-)
Ocean currents would probably do a good job of dispersion. Sufficient dilution wouldn't seem to be a problem either.
Great post. Good food for thought.
">3.7 million megawatt/hours"
That should have been >3.7 billion megawatt-hours.
How many windmills is that? A million? With maximum outputs of about 3MW per wind turbine (standard amount if I'm not mistaken), it would take a million give or take. I was under the impression that a million wind turbines would take up 19% of the total land area. Can they be placed more densely packed than I was led to believe, are there turbines that substantially exceed 3MW, or was someone calculating potential wind energy instead of actual hardware and materials?
How much does each windmill cost? (I don't know.) How much would a million of them cost?
What would be the effect of taking that much energy out of wind patterns? Would rainfall in the region be affected? Regional temperatures? Flowering plant pollination rates?
I'm not attacking nor trolling. I'm honestly curious. All of the studies I have seen about wind either cover environmental concerns (usually related to birds and relatively small numbers of wind turbines) or potential power output. Never both. At this point, I don't care about the politics. I trust the math and verifiable numbers.
All that said, again I feel it necessary to point out that I am not against solar nor wind. Quite the contrary. I just don't see them economically replacing coal. However, from a purely civil standpoint, I would love to see more residences with solar if for no other reason than major blackouts like the one in northeast North America wouldn't have been as severe.
Thermal depolymerization hasn't been tested in large-scale environments yet. Yes, I know about the turkey plant. Take a closer look at the offal tonnage. Now look up the amount of oil we drill and import every year. It's promising technology, sure. But it's still far too immature to be basing any real hopes on yet.
As for hydrogen, it's not an energy source. Pure hydrogen must be collected. That requires energy. Hydrogen is an energy storage medium. You still need the power plants to collect it.
So let's say $2 billion per 1,000MW reactor ($2,000 per kilowatt is a high estimate if plants were rolled out in greater frequency and used a common cookie cutter design instead of the custom work current ones require, but it'll do for now). About 200 plants would replace all of the coal plants. That's $400B. What was the cost of the war in Iraq again?
300 more plants than we have today (at an average of 1,000MW per plant) would handle the current US demand for electricity. $600B. Mind you, this doesn't have to be purchased all at once. The costs can be amortized over several years.
Expensive? Certainly. An easy solution. Not really. Possible? Yes.
Cheaper than solar cells when you figure that 200 square meters (size of a house) of solar panels cost about $30,000? Hell... Let's work on the economy of scale. We'll say $10,000 per house-sized set of panels. Let's see... 294,313,298,879.85 square meters in Arizona... Divide by 200... 1,471,566,494.39925 house-sized panel clusters... Multiply by $10,000 per cluster... Hmmm... $14.7 trillion dollars. Even if you cut production costs for solar panels to 10% of its current cost, you're still looking at $4.4 trillion. And completely covering Arizona still isn't enough power to cover even a quarter of US demand.
It ain't a question of easy solutions. Easy solutions went out the door long before we were born. At this point, it's about running the numbers and seeing which adds up. Nuclear ain't cheap and easy, but it's cheaper, easier, and much more realistic than the alternatives.