ITER is expected to be finished in 2019 and start full experiments in 2027. It isn't expected to maintain fusion pulse for more than few minutes or generate any electricity. Once/if they make real research progress, next stage may be DEMO, it may be 2 GW plant, but is not expected to be commercial and is basically vaporware. First commercial station will be after DEMO some time too far in the future.
And in between, we already have very stable fusion plant up in the sky every day. It is called "Sun" and provides more than enough of cheap energy right now, and it gets cheaper each year. I doubt that bringing part of it to Earth would make things easier or reduce your electricity bill, rather the opposite. Though of course it is important for science progress, maybe some space travel and similar things.
Assuming you only doing 0% to 50% charging, it takes around 20 minutes at supercharger. So you need 3000-4000A for 2 minutes. Or increase voltage. As such batteries do not exist yet, you can only speculate how they may work. E.g high temperature superconductors are in used commercially since last decade, allow current for 200 times more than copper, and liquid nitrogen is cheap. I personally would not pay much for 2 minutes charge option - it is not a track racing, and only few of my trips need recharging on the road, so these minutes are of little value to me, I would spend the time stopping/eating/stretching anyway.
Existing Tesla superchargers can ouput around 300-400A. Wire inside the car is reported to be #2 AWG, nothing special. While it looks huge current for household application, it is nothing new in the industry and it is well known how to handle it and how to increase it to much higher amperage. Maximum amperage is only used at the very beginning of of empty battery charging anyway, so if battery would be able to take 400A all the time, it would reduce full charging time to about half without changing anything in the charger.
You can always ban it from your own computer (as I do) and leave other people alone to do what they want. HTML5 vs ActionScript is like macro-assembler vs C++. Even just for video playing, what kind of "support" is it if you need to make 2 video versions with different codecs to get it to play across browsers? Yes Flash is buggy and insecure, but if you need to replace it, you should go and make something better or at least as good as it was instead of just breaking things around.
How dumb it would be to trust KGB guys to do anything in your computer in the first place? "There is no such thing as a former KGB man" - V. Putin. They all cooperate with their authorities. Even if somebody would not want, they are obliged to do that if they want to do business in Russia and stay alive.
It is absolutely not true that Fukushima problems do not exist elsewhere. Hydrogen buildup and containment break up is possible in many other reactors too and is not addressed properly.
Three Miles Island accident has released unknown amount of radioactivity to atmosphere. Containment was breached to some extent and Three Mile Island operators ordered the dumping of radioactive water into the Susquehanna River Randall Thompson, a health physics technician employed to monitor radioactive emissions at TMI after the accident, said "I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000" http://www.southernstudies.org...
You may manage risks, but you can't eliminate them if they exist by design. From business perspective, best risk management is to form LLC, skip on one per 1000 year risks as they are hard to manage anyway, and bankrupt LLC when it really happens. And you can always lobby legislators to limit your liability for "greater good".
There is nothing wrong with living near fossil fuel plant. It will not melt and if it will get fire or something, nothing will happen to you. They release their waste high above the ground and living next to the plant means you are not directly affected. Wind turbines may be annoying if you live 500 feet to them, but 10 miles away you would not know about them and would not need to make evacuation plans, and they are usually not build in urban areas where land is expensive.
People in Kiev or Fukushima also lived and had no problem (or rather nobody asked their opinion) until they had to evacuate fast. Or stay in place to help government to pretend nothing serious has happened and save face at the expense of their health. Northern Scandinavia hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl downwind where rain has fallen is still contaminated, decades later.
RBMK reactors are of course not safe of course because they don't have good enough containment, but they didn't have any accidents that were as serious as Three Mile Island accident except for Chernobyl one, which was caused by operator action with safety systems deliberately turned off. They are still running in Russia and not exploding every year. And you can't just assume containment makes everything safe automagically. As was proven in Fukushima #1, contaiments break because of hydrogen explosion, and vents do not always work in accident. Do you know that some of these vents in US plants should be opened manually, which may be hard to do in case of serious accident?
You can only fix as much as you have money for, as bandaids cost money too. And who is going to pay for it if it is commercial project and should remain profitable? You have Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act and liability is limited anyway. Regulators and regulated are working in the same nuclear industry and are friends effectively.
The design is more or less inherently unsafe in any case, it is still possible to end with melted core and it is too bad even if containment is left intact. You can read the same criticism about US plants as for Fukushima ones: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com...
There are plenty of skeptics for today's nuclear reactors as well. At some time above ground nuclear weapon testing was perfectly acceptable both by US and Soviets, but what is acceptable has changed over decades. It is more than likely that if you build "latest and greatest design" reactor today, it would be considered hopelessly unsafe and dangerous 40 years later, this is license period in the US. And you can't reduce that term much, as you need to recoup huge capital costs to build.
My point is that you can't predict everything, it is impossible, or if you try to cover each once a 10000 year case, it makes whole project too expensive and it doesn't pay off. Often you can only look at the past and say that this and that was too risky, you should have had reactor cover, do not conduct experiments on production reactor, or do not place all backup electric supply under ground level when it can be flooded, each time something different. You learn from mistakes, and in nuclear power a single mistake can be too expensive for the whole society as it was proven few times.
RBMK (Chernobyl) reactors also were advertised as absolutely fail-safe in their time. In fact it didn't blow up because of just design error, but because of some operator experiment went wrong. And you can get permits for nuclear reactors today. The problem is that they do not pay off. Capital costs are too big, natural gas is cheaper, especially in the US.
And the only reason nuclear is possible at all is that governments want related nuclear technology for military purposes and push all the insurance costs and accident risk on taxpayers. Do you want to live near nuclear plant? I don't, no matter how new and shiny with latest "bug-free" design it is.
Yes, and we should jail all glove manufacturers. They are guilty of hiding fingerprints of criminals and terrorists. They should be able to provide fingerprints, after all, criminals keep hands hands in gloves made by them!
Imagine how many murderers it would be possible to catch early if everybody would have camera in his/her bedroom, directly connected to authorities! They can store recorded data in secure location and nobody would have access to it without judge order (sure). After all, security is most important.
You may call him moron if you are better CEO than him and think his task was to "run this company". It is just your assumption that his task was to run company, I think you may be completely wrong and his task was to sell this company business to MS. Either way this business was run down long before him to the point of no return. And he sold what was left for good money, what else do you want?
You can always charge from regular outlet at the place you are staying, or use not so fast Level 2 charger. Sure it doesn't work for people you stay in driver's seat 16 hours per day, so EV is not good for them. Most don't keep driving all the time.
Few people in Eastern Europe want to become slaves of Russian Empire again. And they are free to go and do whatever they want now, I would suggest you to look up dictionary, what is the meaning of word "slavery" if you don't know. Greece has an option to leave eurozone and use whatever currency they want and manage their economy whatever way they want, and it was German politicians who suggested leaving eurozone now. They don't want to leave no matter what.
How many wheels do you really need to invent? Such devices were for sale for professional auto thieves at Warsaw marketplace a decade ago. They don't always work though if remote has separate buttons for lock and unlock.
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ITER is expected to be finished in 2019 and start full experiments in 2027. It isn't expected to maintain fusion pulse for more than few minutes or generate any electricity. Once/if they make real research progress, next stage may be DEMO, it may be 2 GW plant, but is not expected to be commercial and is basically vaporware. First commercial station will be after DEMO some time too far in the future.
And in between, we already have very stable fusion plant up in the sky every day. It is called "Sun" and provides more than enough of cheap energy right now, and it gets cheaper each year. I doubt that bringing part of it to Earth would make things easier or reduce your electricity bill, rather the opposite. Though of course it is important for science progress, maybe some space travel and similar things.
Assuming you only doing 0% to 50% charging, it takes around 20 minutes at supercharger. So you need 3000-4000A for 2 minutes. Or increase voltage. As such batteries do not exist yet, you can only speculate how they may work. E.g high temperature superconductors are in used commercially since last decade, allow current for 200 times more than copper, and liquid nitrogen is cheap. I personally would not pay much for 2 minutes charge option - it is not a track racing, and only few of my trips need recharging on the road, so these minutes are of little value to me, I would spend the time stopping/eating/stretching anyway.
Existing Tesla superchargers can ouput around 300-400A. Wire inside the car is reported to be #2 AWG, nothing special. While it looks huge current for household application, it is nothing new in the industry and it is well known how to handle it and how to increase it to much higher amperage. Maximum amperage is only used at the very beginning of of empty battery charging anyway, so if battery would be able to take 400A all the time, it would reduce full charging time to about half without changing anything in the charger.
Overheating or not depends on cooling and it is not impossible to do.
You can always ban it from your own computer (as I do) and leave other people alone to do what they want. HTML5 vs ActionScript is like macro-assembler vs C++. Even just for video playing, what kind of "support" is it if you need to make 2 video versions with different codecs to get it to play across browsers?
Yes Flash is buggy and insecure, but if you need to replace it, you should go and make something better or at least as good as it was instead of just breaking things around.
In Chrome you need plugin, like "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" one.
How dumb it would be to trust KGB guys to do anything in your computer in the first place?
"There is no such thing as a former KGB man" - V. Putin. They all cooperate with their authorities. Even if somebody would not want, they are obliged to do that if they want to do business in Russia and stay alive.
It is absolutely not true that Fukushima problems do not exist elsewhere. Hydrogen buildup and containment break up is possible in many other reactors too and is not addressed properly.
Three Miles Island accident has released unknown amount of radioactivity to atmosphere. Containment was breached to some extent and Three Mile Island operators ordered the dumping of radioactive water into the Susquehanna River
Randall Thompson, a health physics technician employed to monitor radioactive emissions at TMI after the accident, said "I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000"
http://www.southernstudies.org...
You may manage risks, but you can't eliminate them if they exist by design. From business perspective, best risk management is to form LLC, skip on one per 1000 year risks as they are hard to manage anyway, and bankrupt LLC when it really happens. And you can always lobby legislators to limit your liability for "greater good".
There is nothing wrong with living near fossil fuel plant. It will not melt and if it will get fire or something, nothing will happen to you. They release their waste high above the ground and living next to the plant means you are not directly affected.
Wind turbines may be annoying if you live 500 feet to them, but 10 miles away you would not know about them and would not need to make evacuation plans, and they are usually not build in urban areas where land is expensive.
People in Kiev or Fukushima also lived and had no problem (or rather nobody asked their opinion) until they had to evacuate fast. Or stay in place to help government to pretend nothing serious has happened and save face at the expense of their health. Northern Scandinavia hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl downwind where rain has fallen is still contaminated, decades later.
Of course it can be powered by batteries, at certain cost and time.
RBMK reactors are of course not safe of course because they don't have good enough containment, but they didn't have any accidents that were as serious as Three Mile Island accident except for Chernobyl one, which was caused by operator action with safety systems deliberately turned off. They are still running in Russia and not exploding every year.
And you can't just assume containment makes everything safe automagically. As was proven in Fukushima #1, contaiments break because of hydrogen explosion, and vents do not always work in accident. Do you know that some of these vents in US plants should be opened manually, which may be hard to do in case of serious accident?
You can only fix as much as you have money for, as bandaids cost money too. And who is going to pay for it if it is commercial project and should remain profitable? You have Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act and liability is limited anyway. Regulators and regulated are working in the same nuclear industry and are friends effectively.
The design is more or less inherently unsafe in any case, it is still possible to end with melted core and it is too bad even if containment is left intact. You can read the same criticism about US plants as for Fukushima ones:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com...
There are plenty of skeptics for today's nuclear reactors as well. At some time above ground nuclear weapon testing was perfectly acceptable both by US and Soviets, but what is acceptable has changed over decades. It is more than likely that if you build "latest and greatest design" reactor today, it would be considered hopelessly unsafe and dangerous 40 years later, this is license period in the US. And you can't reduce that term much, as you need to recoup huge capital costs to build.
My point is that you can't predict everything, it is impossible, or if you try to cover each once a 10000 year case, it makes whole project too expensive and it doesn't pay off. Often you can only look at the past and say that this and that was too risky, you should have had reactor cover, do not conduct experiments on production reactor, or do not place all backup electric supply under ground level when it can be flooded, each time something different. You learn from mistakes, and in nuclear power a single mistake can be too expensive for the whole society as it was proven few times.
RBMK (Chernobyl) reactors also were advertised as absolutely fail-safe in their time. In fact it didn't blow up because of just design error, but because of some operator experiment went wrong.
And you can get permits for nuclear reactors today. The problem is that they do not pay off. Capital costs are too big, natural gas is cheaper, especially in the US.
And the only reason nuclear is possible at all is that governments want related nuclear technology for military purposes and push all the insurance costs and accident risk on taxpayers. Do you want to live near nuclear plant? I don't, no matter how new and shiny with latest "bug-free" design it is.
Pumped storage hydroelectric plants are nothing new and many operate around the world. Energy efficiency is 70%-80%.
Yes, and we should jail all glove manufacturers. They are guilty of hiding fingerprints of criminals and terrorists. They should be able to provide fingerprints, after all, criminals keep hands hands in gloves made by them!
Imagine how many murderers it would be possible to catch early if everybody would have camera in his/her bedroom, directly connected to authorities! They can store recorded data in secure location and nobody would have access to it without judge order (sure). After all, security is most important.
Of course it wasn't an option. There is no profit in this business when you compete against multiple competitors in South East Asia.
You may call him moron if you are better CEO than him and think his task was to "run this company". It is just your assumption that his task was to run company, I think you may be completely wrong and his task was to sell this company business to MS. Either way this business was run down long before him to the point of no return. And he sold what was left for good money, what else do you want?
You can always charge from regular outlet at the place you are staying, or use not so fast Level 2 charger.
Sure it doesn't work for people you stay in driver's seat 16 hours per day, so EV is not good for them. Most don't keep driving all the time.
Few people in Eastern Europe want to become slaves of Russian Empire again. And they are free to go and do whatever they want now, I would suggest you to look up dictionary, what is the meaning of word "slavery" if you don't know. Greece has an option to leave eurozone and use whatever currency they want and manage their economy whatever way they want, and it was German politicians who suggested leaving eurozone now. They don't want to leave no matter what.
How many wheels do you really need to invent? Such devices were for sale for professional auto thieves at Warsaw marketplace a decade ago. They don't always work though if remote has separate buttons for lock and unlock.