> a launched solar PV plant runs with 100% yield 24/7 the who,e year
And the exact same panels on the ground run at a relative 15 to 30% yield. So you might get three to six times as much energy by launching it into space. Yet that requires thousands of times more energy to launch.
A common/. meme is to complain about the patent system having allowed a bunch of "do it on a computer" BS, but this entire concept basically boils down to "do it in space" and the nerds who have never worked in the field all its a great idea. It's not.
> There are plenty of design studies that vary from all physics to heavy economics
Indeed, and every single one of them that's not written by the fusion research establishment universally states with overwhelming numbers that it will not be competitive.
Go ahead and look up Euratom's numbers. They predict that fusion will be the most expensive form of power even 100 years out, after 50 years of design refinement.
People who actually work in the power industry have been saying this since the 1970s. The fusion community simply circled its wagons and ignored it.
> Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission. Part
Which is funny, when one considers they are being installed faster than fission was at any time in history, and people are turning off their coal plants because they can't compete.
I find it amazing the lengths that people will go to in order to avoid accepting the measurable facts that are staring them right in the face.
> even though natural gas turbines cost three times that of coal and fission
Natural gas turbines cost about 1/2 coal plant, and 1/3rd to 1/5th that of a fission plant. Look on page 11 of this:
> To compete with a one GW fission power plant would require three GW capacity wind and/or solar
Sure, and as they already cost less than 1/3rd as much, this part is already solved. In fact, to put actual numbers to it, CF adjusted CAPEX for wind is about $4.50 compared to fission at $7.60. It's almost half as expensive even after building three times as much of it. And whereas fission costs keep going up (current average price for all western in-construction reactors is over $9) the price of wind power continues to decline at rates never before seen.
Anyone looking at a chart of LCoE over the last 25 years would be *ape shit crazy* to suggest starting a fission reactor at this point in time. At a minimum you're going to wait to see if the Gen 3+ reactors don't continually overrun their price estimates, which they have.
It makes no difference if this device "works" or not, no one will use it commercially.
That's because the cost of the equipment needed to extract the energy from the system costs only a little less then an entire wind farm producing the same amount of energy. This problem effects any heat engine type source, including coal and fission, which is why no one is building these any more. Natural gas turbines, hydro, wind and PV do not have this portion of the system. These sources have always been, or recently scaled down to, prices points below the older sources.
There's really not a lot of math involved, and people have been running the numbers since the 1970s. In spite of repeated statements from the power industry that they're not interested, the fusion field keeps sending out press reports like this one about how they're going to save the world. Meanwhile wind and PV are the two fastest growing power sources in history, and by the time any of these devices work the grid will have already completed its switch.
A small number of know-nothings will now protest something about direct conversion in aneutronic systems, ignoring the fact that not one such device has come within multiple orders of magnitude of working, and we have very good reason to believe they never will.
Others will protest that wind can't do X and Y, and in this case they're absolutely right. But unfortunately they don't pay for the construction. The banks actually pay for the construction, and they're giving all the money to the wind farms regardless of X and Y.
If you want to run the numbers yourself, I wrote down some of them a couple of years ago: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
No no no, we definitely do NOT know that. Wiping out one population makes way for others that will definitely take up the niche. Those are currently being outcompeted by the existing population, but if you kill that off, that 1% remaining gets the whole thing to itself. This is what drives evolution.
So the question is, and always should be, whether or not those 1% are more benign *to us* than the 99% we currently have. Bacteria don't measure their success based on what happens to us, only what happens to them. Its very possible that the ones that are unsuccessful against other bacteria are perfectly successful in attacking us.
You have to be careful with these things, as the continual stream of stories right here on/. note. We have been putting anti-bacterial crap in everything around us, and now we are seeing the outcome of those decisions. Are we better off than in 1940? Absolutely yes. Are we better off than 1985? That is highly debatable.
This technique will clearly work forever, because we all know that bacteria populations do not evolve to take advantage of useful niches when other populations wane.
After all, there's no real advantage to taking over a nice warm, wet, mobile and highly interacting environment that accounts for a large percentage of the entire planet's land mammal biomass.
Right. So what they're going to do is make yet another "Tesla killer" that sells to a few thousand rich people, and leave all the people that bought a Jetta in the cold. The net effect of this on overall emissions will be basically zero.
Perhaps they would be better off spending this on making a diesel hybrid PEH drivetrain that could equip 80% of the cars they sell? This is a move that takes far less development, would cost less in real dollar terms, and would *drastically* reduce overall real-world emissions.
So it has lots of provisions. Are countries free to pick the ones they want to enforce? There's a seize-at-border clause, does everyone have to invoke it? Or are these all options?
Hmm, I get crappy fake versions of the pop I like after buying some machine and shooting spritz that my grandfather used to have in a fancy glass bottle.
You'd have to drink a *whole lot* of pop to make that worthwhile, and I suspect if you do you could get bulk purchases of coke for even less.
"NASA astronaut Mae Jemison schools treat science like the class where fun goes to die. "Kids come out of the chute liking science. They ask, 'How come? Why? What's this?' They pick up stuff to examine it. We might not call that science, but it's discovering the world around us," says Jemison. "Once we get them in school, we turn science from discovery and hands-on to something you're supposed to do through rote memorization"
That doesn't describe any school I've ever been to.
It certainly doesn't describe my high school, which was mostly experiment based.
And it certainly doesn't describe my daughter's high school, which is pretty much entirely experiment based.
As far as my limited sample goes (which included a number of high schools in the area) the curriculum is much more experimental than when I was in school, and I wouldn't call my classes anything remotely like rote memorization.
Maybe she should do some more experiments on schooling.
Slashdot Mirror
> a launched solar PV plant runs with 100% yield 24/7 the who,e year
And the exact same panels on the ground run at a relative 15 to 30% yield. So you might get three to six times as much energy by launching it into space. Yet that requires thousands of times more energy to launch.
A common /. meme is to complain about the patent system having allowed a bunch of "do it on a computer" BS, but this entire concept basically boils down to "do it in space" and the nerds who have never worked in the field all its a great idea. It's not.
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-maury-equation-redux/
John and I had an exchange after he published a similar report some time ago.
In spite of pointing out the mathematical impossibility of the concept, here he is again pushing the same pipe dream.
It doesn't answer *chart questions*?
Is that a *problem* or a *feature*?
>Don't worry. The US will have ground troops go in long before that happens.
You win the internet for today.
Birds did too.
> There are plenty of design studies that vary from all physics to heavy economics
Indeed, and every single one of them that's not written by the fusion research establishment universally states with overwhelming numbers that it will not be competitive.
Go ahead and look up Euratom's numbers. They predict that fusion will be the most expensive form of power even 100 years out, after 50 years of design refinement.
People who actually work in the power industry have been saying this since the 1970s. The fusion community simply circled its wagons and ignored it.
> Wind power, right now, costs three times what nuclear power costs, right now
*sigh*
Every reference from the last couple of years says the exact opposite. EVERY one.
How can you possibly believe this? What sources are you reading that say this?
> Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission. Part
Which is funny, when one considers they are being installed faster than fission was at any time in history, and people are turning off their coal plants because they can't compete.
I find it amazing the lengths that people will go to in order to avoid accepting the measurable facts that are staring them right in the face.
> even though natural gas turbines cost three times that of coal and fission
Natural gas turbines cost about 1/2 coal plant, and 1/3rd to 1/5th that of a fission plant. Look on page 11 of this:
https://www.lazard.com/media/1777/levelized_cost_of_energy_-_version_80.pdf
> To compete with a one GW fission power plant would require three GW capacity wind and/or solar
Sure, and as they already cost less than 1/3rd as much, this part is already solved. In fact, to put actual numbers to it, CF adjusted CAPEX for wind is about $4.50 compared to fission at $7.60. It's almost half as expensive even after building three times as much of it. And whereas fission costs keep going up (current average price for all western in-construction reactors is over $9) the price of wind power continues to decline at rates never before seen.
Anyone looking at a chart of LCoE over the last 25 years would be *ape shit crazy* to suggest starting a fission reactor at this point in time. At a minimum you're going to wait to see if the Gen 3+ reactors don't continually overrun their price estimates, which they have.
It makes no difference if this device "works" or not, no one will use it commercially.
That's because the cost of the equipment needed to extract the energy from the system costs only a little less then an entire wind farm producing the same amount of energy. This problem effects any heat engine type source, including coal and fission, which is why no one is building these any more. Natural gas turbines, hydro, wind and PV do not have this portion of the system. These sources have always been, or recently scaled down to, prices points below the older sources.
There's really not a lot of math involved, and people have been running the numbers since the 1970s. In spite of repeated statements from the power industry that they're not interested, the fusion field keeps sending out press reports like this one about how they're going to save the world. Meanwhile wind and PV are the two fastest growing power sources in history, and by the time any of these devices work the grid will have already completed its switch.
A small number of know-nothings will now protest something about direct conversion in aneutronic systems, ignoring the fact that not one such device has come within multiple orders of magnitude of working, and we have very good reason to believe they never will.
Others will protest that wind can't do X and Y, and in this case they're absolutely right. But unfortunately they don't pay for the construction. The banks actually pay for the construction, and they're giving all the money to the wind farms regardless of X and Y.
If you want to run the numbers yourself, I wrote down some of them a couple of years ago: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
> It's still better than the alternative.
No no no, we definitely do NOT know that. Wiping out one population makes way for others that will definitely take up the niche. Those are currently being outcompeted by the existing population, but if you kill that off, that 1% remaining gets the whole thing to itself. This is what drives evolution.
So the question is, and always should be, whether or not those 1% are more benign *to us* than the 99% we currently have. Bacteria don't measure their success based on what happens to us, only what happens to them. Its very possible that the ones that are unsuccessful against other bacteria are perfectly successful in attacking us.
You have to be careful with these things, as the continual stream of stories right here on /. note. We have been putting anti-bacterial crap in everything around us, and now we are seeing the outcome of those decisions. Are we better off than in 1940? Absolutely yes. Are we better off than 1985? That is highly debatable.
Whoa, nice.
This technique will clearly work forever, because we all know that bacteria populations do not evolve to take advantage of useful niches when other populations wane.
After all, there's no real advantage to taking over a nice warm, wet, mobile and highly interacting environment that accounts for a large percentage of the entire planet's land mammal biomass.
> Phaeton
Right. So what they're going to do is make yet another "Tesla killer" that sells to a few thousand rich people, and leave all the people that bought a Jetta in the cold. The net effect of this on overall emissions will be basically zero.
Perhaps they would be better off spending this on making a diesel hybrid PEH drivetrain that could equip 80% of the cars they sell? This is a move that takes far less development, would cost less in real dollar terms, and would *drastically* reduce overall real-world emissions.
> The software is only available to those who have US based accounts
Nope, my account is listed in Canada. Always has been. You're wrong.
"The software has only been available to users in the U.S.,"
Works fine in Canada from day one. Even includes the major Canadian newspapers and magazines.
Nice research.
So it has lots of provisions. Are countries free to pick the ones they want to enforce? There's a seize-at-border clause, does everyone have to invoke it? Or are these all options?
Hmm, I get crappy fake versions of the pop I like after buying some machine and shooting spritz that my grandfather used to have in a fancy glass bottle.
You'd have to drink a *whole lot* of pop to make that worthwhile, and I suspect if you do you could get bulk purchases of coke for even less.
Seriously, how did that become a thing?
If you don't get the reference:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=3bABwDOExOMC&pg=PA135
Sadly similar, 43 years later.
> the price they've come up with is eye-popping: $5 billion.
Apple claims to have sold 13 million iPhones on launch weekend. Assuming an average price of $800, that's 10 billion in two days.
So this doesn't impress me much. Or at all. I suspect its at least an order of magnitude higher than their estimate.
"may one day help scientists develop better treatments for diseases"
Enough already! Any post with this statement in it should be placed in the same bit bucket as "supermoon".
I strongly suspect OS X already runs on ARM and is doing that as we speak.
"Apple is also claiming a level of gaming performance on par with dedicated game consoles"
Which is just one more reason I can't understand why they didn't put this in the new Apple TV, and instead put in the older A8.
The resolution of the iPhone is basically 1080p, and according to the benches, the A9 can drive it to (as they put it) "console level performance".
The A8 can't. And since that's what's going into the ATV, that means the games on the new ATV will *not* have "console level performance".
WHY?!?!
No, don't say it's production quantities. Apple will sell 20x iPhones and iPads as ATVs (or more), this is a rounding error.
Form factor changed too, so if you needed more room for heat or power, that's not an issue either.
"NASA astronaut Mae Jemison schools treat science like the class where fun goes to die. "Kids come out of the chute liking science. They ask, 'How come? Why? What's this?' They pick up stuff to examine it. We might not call that science, but it's discovering the world around us," says Jemison. "Once we get them in school, we turn science from discovery and hands-on to something you're supposed to do through rote memorization"
That doesn't describe any school I've ever been to.
It certainly doesn't describe my high school, which was mostly experiment based.
And it certainly doesn't describe my daughter's high school, which is pretty much entirely experiment based.
As far as my limited sample goes (which included a number of high schools in the area) the curriculum is much more experimental than when I was in school, and I wouldn't call my classes anything remotely like rote memorization.
Maybe she should do some more experiments on schooling.
85% here in Toronto.
> Not really impressive if you consider what it cost to accomplish.
Two statements here:
"Not really impressive"
If you think supplying power at lower end-user prices than in the 1980s is not impressive, you've allowed your politics to ruin your brain.
" if you consider what it cost to accomplish."
What it cost to accomplish was "install the lowest cost form of power ever" and "make a grid to interconnect it".
The ultimate proof is on the bill. If power is selling for less now than it did in the past, it succeeded. End of story.