> You get cash back because Visa/MC are charging so much extra
In this case, not just the fee they normally charge, but an extra fee you'll never know about. Then they give you a small chunk of that.
It's a scam. Retailers should be allowed to refuse these cards, like they did when it was only Discover doing it. But now Visa does it and tells retailers they'll cut off all access unless they bend over.
Another solution would be to simply require a yearly fee on the cards, say $100, that the user pays.
Anyone remember Apple in the early-1990s? Coming down off a high of realizing they could charge $6000 for a computer, the company felt invincible and practically started chasing every Next Big Thing that came along. It didn't make a difference whether they had any background in it, whether anyone in their market wanted it, or whether it really was going to be the Next Big Thing - if someone said it was, they were on it!
By the mid-90s it was clear the company was in utter disarray. Teams throughout the company were chasing products as mundane as X.400 servers while at the same time offering the ridiculously designed PowerTalk that, for all purposes, rendered the server useless. Meanwhile no one could be bothered to work on anything as dull as the OS, which became a ridiculous collection of warts on bags. Copeland was the most obvious symptom of this problem, not the end result.
And then came Jobs. First he fires most everyone while personally interviewing new hires. Almost all ongoing projects were cancelled outright, even ones that maybe shouldn't have. Lots of utter trash, like OpenDoc and CyberDog, were thankfully killed, although people still lament HyperCard to this day. In any event, within ONE YEAR the iMac was introduced and by 2000 the Mac lineup was completely overhauled and greatly simplified. THEN they did iPod.
I believe the lesson to be learned here is that any company, no matter how large, can only do so many *new* things well. That number appears to be somewhere around two. You can continue improving existing lines, but radical change requires the entire employee base to pull in the same direction, and maintaining cohesion at that level on too many projects is simply not going to work.
So...
It is really a good time for MS to be doing a watch? The phone and tablet efforts are still completely up in the air. I don't run a multi-billion dollar company (and I'm very happy to say that) but it seems pretty clear that jumping into yet another product category while *every one* of their other categories needs major work seems extreme unwise to me. Hell, Windows 8 is universally detested. That needs to be addressed first.
> Smarter countries than the USA are racing ahead with smarter U235 reactor designs and thorium reactors.
Hmmm, let's see:
India - been trying to commercialize thorium reactors for, what, 45 years now? How many are in commercial operation? Zero? Right.
Canada - so convinced of the future of nuclear power that they sold off the entire reactor division of AECL for $15 million and a $770 million tax right-off (so basically negative $750 million).
China - the latest saviour for everyone's flavour-of-the-month design, but also the country that builds and installs more PV and wind than any other, at somewhere between 5 and 10 times the *planned* reactor build-out, if that wasn't on hold.
Hey look, I'm a "known renewable troll". Yay, I'm famous!
> First of all, LCoE ignores the cost of integrating intermittent wind and solar into the grid
Which is why everyone is building wind and not nuclear, I guess.
> Those cheap wind turbines require an economically infeasible storage and transmission infrastructure
Which is why Lazard, and enormous economic forecaster, is the one making these numbers.
> The Chinese are now building AP1000s for a quarter of the cost
So they say, but they also say they are building wind turbines for a quarter of the cost
> Picking the most expensive first of a kind nuclear build ever is hardly representative of the cost of nuclear.
The Lazard numbers were averages, with error bars.
> Fuel cost is negligible today,
Wind is free. Last time I checked that was cheaper than "negligible".
> Read about ThorCon [c4tx.org] for what is possible
A device designed by a guy with exactly zero experience in reactor design, worked on as a home project? Right, ok.
> as compact brayton cycle turbines become available
Which, of course, would have the exact same effect on any other power source that uses them, which means everything else would get cheaper too, and reactors would retain their cost disadvantage.
> If you can reach the fabled "breakeven point" of nuclear fusion, you'll have opened up an > entire new source of clean, reliable, safe, renewable and abundant energy
Total BS.
Consider NIF, for instance. They're about 1/3rd of the way to ignition - which is way beyond breakeven. According to them, they're actually at breakeven already, although their definition is bologna.
The fuel capsule costs about $1 million. The value of the energy it releases is about 5 cents. Over the 40 years they've been actively working on ICF, the energy levels continue to climb, while the economics continue to decline.
Breakeven is like getting a lead balloon to fly - doing it is cool, but it doesn't mean you'll be catching the 6PM Led Zeppelin to London.
> Fusion has the potential to fuel all energy needs and future ones with minimal waste
For infinite cost.
Sheesh, how do people not understand this fundamental point? There are hundreds of forms of energy out there, thousands. We don't use them because they cost to much. Fusion costs more. Even if the price of energy goes up, that means we'll use one of the thousands we're not using now. There is an infinity of money between now and fusion.
> Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs
No.
But you make the common mistake of assuming that fission isn't being built because of NIMBY. Fission isn't being built because of $8 to $10 overnight CAPEX.
So, is your LFTR three times cheaper to build than a AP1000? With all that plumbing? Are you sure? Because it has to be - three times cheaper.
Since the average fission plant has a CF around 85% to 90%, and the average wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%, that means that in energy-equivalent terms, wind has an equivalent cost of about $4 to $5. As a result, the *unsubsidized* LCoE of wind is less than fission. Scroll back to page 2.
So until you can figure out a way to chop the overnight CAPEX of fission plants by a factor of two, and reduce the fuel cost to zero while you're at it. Add to that the need to borrow massive unsecured loans, the inherent risk of long construction times, and the continual habit of going 2x over budget, and the banks run screaming from nuclear.
> Thorium reactors are incredibly difficult to make products for a bomb in any practical way
You mean *conventional fission bomb* using *conventional recovery techniques*. If one does not make those two invisible assumptions, the entire argument falls apart.
It is, for instance, *trivially* easy to make any number of radiological weapons using a thorium plant, including dumping the salts into a water supply.
It is also somewhat easy to use the neutron flux to breed fissiles, which will make a bomb just fine.
And one can extract fissiles from the fuel, it will simply be more expensive and dangerous. But certainly not impossible on either measure.
> He explained that tokomak shaped reactors generate the magnetic field with the plasma itself, > but he did not explain how the magnetic field is being generated apparently by the containment cylinder itself
According to the diagrams, it appears this is a conventional linear mirror device on the outside, with two superconducting loops on the inside. The resulting field looks like two olden-faire circular circus tends sewn together at the open ends - pointy at both ends, widest at the "rings" just in from the tips, and narrowing again slightly in the center.
Several points:
1) in spite of suggesting otherwise, there are lots of open lines at both ends 2) this seems like MFTR and LDX combined 3) the lifetime of the inner loops is going to be close to zero, which means the CF will be terrible
As the person that wrote most of the article you're linking to: no. NERVA was a relatively linear upgrade to the H-2 in performance terms, and there were H-2 upgrades that would have closed the gap to a degree (H-2T for instance).
There *are* nuclear engine designs that are much more efficient than this, like the gas-core design. They would have definitely make Mars a reasonable shot, but they are inherently "leaky" and suitable only for use in space. That's fine, but it pre-supposes you have the infrastructure to get them up there, and we didn't.
Finally, Congress wasn't shutting down NERVA, they were shutting down Mars. They repeatedly told NASA that they would not receive funding for a Mars shot from the late 1960s right through to the 1990s, but the NASA folks just kept pushing here and there trying to sneak it in.
> I found it interesting that 55 pounds of deuterium is needed as fuel, but only a few grams of tritium > ('bred' from lithium) is needed, since part of the nuclear reaction makes tritium to feed back into the reaction.
They all do that.
At least in theory, no one's actually *done* it yet, and there's serious questions about whether or not one actually can do it.
Slashdot Mirror
> You get cash back because Visa/MC are charging so much extra
In this case, not just the fee they normally charge, but an extra fee you'll never know about. Then they give you a small chunk of that.
It's a scam. Retailers should be allowed to refuse these cards, like they did when it was only Discover doing it. But now Visa does it and tells retailers they'll cut off all access unless they bend over.
Another solution would be to simply require a yearly fee on the cards, say $100, that the user pays.
> Products like the BlackBerry Passport (number 2 selling unlocked phone on Amazon right now)
Wow, there's an example of faint praise.
> Chinese company acquired 51%, only to have another Chinese company buy a 40% stake in the next company he ended up at.
This is a problem why?
If you don't like it, stop sending them all your money.
> Bullshit. I upgraded to 8. Love it.
Everyone else hates Windows 8.
Sadly isn't quite as catchy as Everyone else loves Ned Flanders.
> Just because the faggots you pal around with on the internet shit their diapers
Ahh, a true vulgarian.
Anyone remember Apple in the early-1990s? Coming down off a high of realizing they could charge $6000 for a computer, the company felt invincible and practically started chasing every Next Big Thing that came along. It didn't make a difference whether they had any background in it, whether anyone in their market wanted it, or whether it really was going to be the Next Big Thing - if someone said it was, they were on it!
By the mid-90s it was clear the company was in utter disarray. Teams throughout the company were chasing products as mundane as X.400 servers while at the same time offering the ridiculously designed PowerTalk that, for all purposes, rendered the server useless. Meanwhile no one could be bothered to work on anything as dull as the OS, which became a ridiculous collection of warts on bags. Copeland was the most obvious symptom of this problem, not the end result.
And then came Jobs. First he fires most everyone while personally interviewing new hires. Almost all ongoing projects were cancelled outright, even ones that maybe shouldn't have. Lots of utter trash, like OpenDoc and CyberDog, were thankfully killed, although people still lament HyperCard to this day. In any event, within ONE YEAR the iMac was introduced and by 2000 the Mac lineup was completely overhauled and greatly simplified. THEN they did iPod.
I believe the lesson to be learned here is that any company, no matter how large, can only do so many *new* things well. That number appears to be somewhere around two. You can continue improving existing lines, but radical change requires the entire employee base to pull in the same direction, and maintaining cohesion at that level on too many projects is simply not going to work.
So...
It is really a good time for MS to be doing a watch? The phone and tablet efforts are still completely up in the air. I don't run a multi-billion dollar company (and I'm very happy to say that) but it seems pretty clear that jumping into yet another product category while *every one* of their other categories needs major work seems extreme unwise to me. Hell, Windows 8 is universally detested. That needs to be addressed first.
> I expect the can shed an order of magnitude off launch costs.
So do I, but the problem is THREE ORDERS of magnitude.
> dramatically reducing what needs to be lifted
Even if you have to lift zero, you're still better off on the ground.
> Smarter countries than the USA are racing ahead with smarter U235 reactor designs and thorium reactors.
Hmmm, let's see:
India - been trying to commercialize thorium reactors for, what, 45 years now? How many are in commercial operation? Zero? Right.
Canada - so convinced of the future of nuclear power that they sold off the entire reactor division of AECL for $15 million and a $770 million tax right-off (so basically negative $750 million).
China - the latest saviour for everyone's flavour-of-the-month design, but also the country that builds and installs more PV and wind than any other, at somewhere between 5 and 10 times the *planned* reactor build-out, if that wasn't on hold.
> Growing, not dead.
It's just a flesh wound!
Hey look, I'm a "known renewable troll". Yay, I'm famous!
> First of all, LCoE ignores the cost of integrating intermittent wind and solar into the grid
Which is why everyone is building wind and not nuclear, I guess.
> Those cheap wind turbines require an economically infeasible storage and transmission infrastructure
Which is why Lazard, and enormous economic forecaster, is the one making these numbers.
> The Chinese are now building AP1000s for a quarter of the cost
So they say, but they also say they are building wind turbines for a quarter of the cost
> Picking the most expensive first of a kind nuclear build ever is hardly representative of the cost of nuclear.
The Lazard numbers were averages, with error bars.
> Fuel cost is negligible today,
Wind is free. Last time I checked that was cheaper than "negligible".
> Read about ThorCon [c4tx.org] for what is possible
A device designed by a guy with exactly zero experience in reactor design, worked on as a home project? Right, ok.
> as compact brayton cycle turbines become available
Which, of course, would have the exact same effect on any other power source that uses them, which means everything else would get cheaper too, and reactors would retain their cost disadvantage.
Wow, some comeback there AC.
> If you can reach the fabled "breakeven point" of nuclear fusion, you'll have opened up an
> entire new source of clean, reliable, safe, renewable and abundant energy
Total BS.
Consider NIF, for instance. They're about 1/3rd of the way to ignition - which is way beyond breakeven. According to them, they're actually at breakeven already, although their definition is bologna.
The fuel capsule costs about $1 million. The value of the energy it releases is about 5 cents. Over the 40 years they've been actively working on ICF, the energy levels continue to climb, while the economics continue to decline.
Breakeven is like getting a lead balloon to fly - doing it is cool, but it doesn't mean you'll be catching the 6PM Led Zeppelin to London.
> I also really like orbital solar following PG&E's design strategy
OMG.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-maury-equation/
> Is that the study from the other day that was summarily dismissed because
> it made up bogus costs for nuclear power, to make wind look better?
Ummm, no.
Maybe you should google up Lazard.
> as you are including both subsidies and non-generation costs
Sorry, are you replaying to my post?
If so, I think you need to look up the definition of overnight costs.
> Look up "energy return on investment" if you want to know more.
I did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#Economic_influence_of_EROEI
Wind outperforms nuclear, 180%. PV is 70% of nuclear.
So, you were saying?
> Fusion has the potential to fuel all energy needs and future ones with minimal waste
For infinite cost.
Sheesh, how do people not understand this fundamental point? There are hundreds of forms of energy out there, thousands. We don't use them because they cost to much. Fusion costs more. Even if the price of energy goes up, that means we'll use one of the thousands we're not using now. There is an infinity of money between now and fusion.
> Nobody has built a large-scale reactor of this type
Yup.
> I am not saying we should not do it, quite the opposite.
The *only* question is "how much can we do it for".
If it's over $4 a watt, and I'd say the chance of that is 99%, then there's no point trying.
> Let's say I had a tested, working LFTR design
Ok.
> Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs
No.
But you make the common mistake of assuming that fission isn't being built because of NIMBY. Fission isn't being built because of $8 to $10 overnight CAPEX.
So, is your LFTR three times cheaper to build than a AP1000? With all that plumbing? Are you sure? Because it has to be - three times cheaper.
> nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms
I had to look this up because I thought you were wrong. But you're not. Georgia has crap for wind:
http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_resource_maps.asp?stateab=ga
What up with that?
> It doesn't matter how safe modern fission designs are;
It makes no difference one way or the other.
Modern fission plants cost between $8 and $10/Watt. Wind turbines cost about $1.50/Watt. See page 11:
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
Since the average fission plant has a CF around 85% to 90%, and the average wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%, that means that in energy-equivalent terms, wind has an equivalent cost of about $4 to $5. As a result, the *unsubsidized* LCoE of wind is less than fission. Scroll back to page 2.
So until you can figure out a way to chop the overnight CAPEX of fission plants by a factor of two, and reduce the fuel cost to zero while you're at it. Add to that the need to borrow massive unsecured loans, the inherent risk of long construction times, and the continual habit of going 2x over budget, and the banks run screaming from nuclear.
Did you click the same link? I went to an article on spheromaks.
BTW, there is *ample* evidence spheromaks don't work.
> In all the fusion research the key question is, "Is it producing more energy than it consumes?"
That's stage one, technical feasibility. Then you get to stage two, economic feasibility...
"Is it producing enough electricity to sell that it covers the interest payments on the CAPEX it took to build it?"
Even if we get stage one, so far it is *extremely* clear that tokamaks and ICF will *not* *ever* be able to pass stage two.
New devices like this may, but in any event, both large and small devices are still not even at stage one.
> Thorium reactors are incredibly difficult to make products for a bomb in any practical way
You mean *conventional fission bomb* using *conventional recovery techniques*. If one does not make those two invisible assumptions, the entire argument falls apart.
It is, for instance, *trivially* easy to make any number of radiological weapons using a thorium plant, including dumping the salts into a water supply.
It is also somewhat easy to use the neutron flux to breed fissiles, which will make a bomb just fine.
And one can extract fissiles from the fuel, it will simply be more expensive and dangerous. But certainly not impossible on either measure.
> He explained that tokomak shaped reactors generate the magnetic field with the plasma itself,
> but he did not explain how the magnetic field is being generated apparently by the containment cylinder itself
According to the diagrams, it appears this is a conventional linear mirror device on the outside, with two superconducting loops on the inside. The resulting field looks like two olden-faire circular circus tends sewn together at the open ends - pointy at both ends, widest at the "rings" just in from the tips, and narrowing again slightly in the center.
Several points:
1) in spite of suggesting otherwise, there are lots of open lines at both ends
2) this seems like MFTR and LDX combined
3) the lifetime of the inner loops is going to be close to zero, which means the CF will be terrible
Chance of success: 10%
As the person that wrote most of the article you're linking to: no. NERVA was a relatively linear upgrade to the H-2 in performance terms, and there were H-2 upgrades that would have closed the gap to a degree (H-2T for instance).
There *are* nuclear engine designs that are much more efficient than this, like the gas-core design. They would have definitely make Mars a reasonable shot, but they are inherently "leaky" and suitable only for use in space. That's fine, but it pre-supposes you have the infrastructure to get them up there, and we didn't.
Finally, Congress wasn't shutting down NERVA, they were shutting down Mars. They repeatedly told NASA that they would not receive funding for a Mars shot from the late 1960s right through to the 1990s, but the NASA folks just kept pushing here and there trying to sneak it in.
> I found it interesting that 55 pounds of deuterium is needed as fuel, but only a few grams of tritium
> ('bred' from lithium) is needed, since part of the nuclear reaction makes tritium to feed back into the reaction.
They all do that.
At least in theory, no one's actually *done* it yet, and there's serious questions about whether or not one actually can do it.
Ugg, this BS again.
No matter how many billions you spend, you're not going to make a Chevette go faster than the speed of light.
You can't point at funding as a problem for fusion. The problems are technical and economic. No amount of money will fix that.