> The folks at Lawrence Livermore took a nice big step earlier this year
No they didn't. They used a timed implosion to improve their numbers. This caused a tiny part of the fuel to create net energy compared to the energy that reached it. Then put out a press release saying they hit break even.
So here's the problems. One is that the method used will not work for actual *ignition*, the I in NIF. It's a hack, demo ware intended to impress. Further, they carefully chose a definition of break even that no one in their right mind would ever agree with.
The events gave off between 13 and 17 kJ of energy.
The input into the fuel was somewhere between 150 and 250 kJ. That's not break even.
The input into the hologram was about 1 MJ. That's certainingly not break even.
The output from the laser was about 4 MJ. This isn't looking good...
The input to the lasers was over 400 MJ...
When you put in 400,000 and get back 17, you don't call that break even.
> Fusion don't suffer from safety related issues that fission plants suffer from
Bologna, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Tritium production, and to a lesser extend materials protection, requires massive amounts of lithium metal. This is normally in the form of a liquid "blanket" sandwiched between two metal container walls. Some modern designs use lithium trapped in a porous solid matrix, but this requires more lithium and eliminates online processing. Anyway, there's about a 1 meter width of this stuff, which adds up to hundreds of tonnes and billions of dollars, which is why no one is going to build one of these things.
So here's the thing, lithium is highly flammable. Just ask Tesla. And in the case of a fusion reactor, its filled with tritium. Tritium is extremely dangerous, it mimics hydrogen, so if its in a fire it combines with oxygen in the air to form T2O, which goes up into the air and falls back down as radioactive rain.
Now what could cause such a problem? Well, for one, the reactor volume is surrounded by extremely powerful magnets under ridiculous amounts of stress. If one were to fail it would effectively explode with the same sort of results as a compressor blade failure. If a chunk goes THAT way instead of THIS way, it cuts the reactor core in half and out goes all the lithium. Solid systems would definitely improve safely under this failure mode, but, as I said, only at the cost of serious capacity factor effects and the inability to perform online processing.
Yes yes, I'm perfectly aware of aneutronic solutions, but very basically, they don't work.
> There would no longer be shortages of energy because fuel is ubiquitous
LOLZ. Have you ever seen what you need to do to get D out of [H|D]2O? It's an enormous, massively expensive industrial plant that is an ecological disaster waiting to happen. The only major plant in north america, in Kinkardine, had to be shut down. They still refuse to allow anyone to use the land:
> Therefore, the LHC is a boondoggle waste of money and a failure.
Yes. The LCH was built with the express intent of finding the Higgs. Why? Because we already found all the other particles in the SM. So, literally, they had nothing else to do.
We already all agree it exists, know all of its properties, and have narrowed down its possible mass to a small range. Literally all LCH will do is add decimal points to the mass.
> Generation IV nuclear reactor are much closer to comercialison
Given that fusion is infinity away from commercialization, you may wish to re-phrase your statement.
> There are 5 designs,( LFTR is one of them) and they all promise many advantages.
So did the Gen III designs. Yet when we actually try to build them, we ended up with massive cost and time overruns, just like the Gen II and Gen I reactors. Right now there are about a dozen Gen III's actually under construction
The industry has an astonishing ability to blame everyone else for it's problems. In spite of a 40 year string of failures, both technical and more commonly economic, it's never their fault. It's the greenies, or the government, or the bankers, or NIMBY. But it's never that the projects are so large and complex that no one really knows how to do construction planning for it. And it couldn't possibly be a problem that the main ingredient in the construction has gone up in price five times since 2000. Yet we still hear the claims that the *next* design will be the one that fixes everything.
> Well, since the whole purpose of fusion reactors is to make commercially useful power
Bingo. There are several definitions of work that you need to consider. One is "the thing does something". It's fair to say a car "works" if it can travel under its own power from one side of your yard to the other. But that's not *really* working, no one is going to buy a car that can only go 10 yards. To meet that definition of "working" it has to be able to drive around on roads at reasonable speeds for reasonable distances. But even then, the CEO of the company has yet another definition of "work", which means "it sells". For instance, the Edsel was a pretty advanced piece of engineering, which didn't sell. By any reasonable definition, it "didn't work".
Single parts of a typical fusion reactor cost more than an entire wind turbine producing the same amount of power. Or natural gas turbine, or solar panels, or practically any other source of power being built today. We *know*, for a fact, that fusion will never be able to meet that last definition of "work". It is the Edsel of the energy world.
Sort of, I cut off the entire bottom of the post somehow. Here's the status of the other Gen III and similar systems that are not currently on the market:
GE/Hitachi ABWR: The first Gen III design to be built. Two successful starts in Japan, another four delayed. Very *very* bad startup CF due to problems on the turbine side, but suspect that will improve somewhat. It had better, or these will be cash disasters on the Darlington A scale. All turned off following Fukishima, not helping their CF at all. Taiwan reactor hopelessly delayed. US reactors delayed and then cancelled. Further sales appear extremely unlikely.
System 80+ Not really a Gen III design according to some, but on the list for completeness. Three S80's (not the 80+) built at Palo Verde. No further sales prospects. Team and design purchased by GE, Combustion Engineering left the industry.
Mitsubishi APWR: Built to compete with ABWR in Japan and US. No sales, effort cancelled. Misubishi is likely out of the industry, but who knows now.
AECL EC-6 and ACR-1000: Only real sales prospect was for a ACR-1000 at Darlington B. Rumors of a second plant for industrial steam for oil sand production turned out to be a mistake. Darlington cancelled in 2013 after price came in way higher than the government could afford ($26 billion was the low estimate). AECL was immediately broken up and the reactor design department sold off to a Quebec engineering firm for a few million dollars, along with a massive tax write-down that was more than they paid for the company.
Siemens: Out of the industry. Part of EPR, but managed to avoid that nightmare just in time.
B&W mPower: B&W has essentially closed their reactor division.
All of UK: Out of the industry. Considering purchase of EPR for Hinkley, but given their experiences with that design it's anyone's guess what will happen.
> The major reason for the large capital expenditure of nuclear power is that a lot > of reactors are quite large and need expensive containment.
Too true.
> There are proposals to build modular reactors
Proposals. When someone bends metal, let be know.
> Hydropower also is a large capital expenditure
Not even close. Excluding China for the simple reason that I don't believe either their accounting or their exchange rates, the last two hydro super-projects were Itaipu and La Grande, which both came in just over $1 a watt, ~$1.20 for Itaipu and a little less for La Grande. This is no small feat considering the locations of both. Of course they were built before concrete doubled in price, but even considering that they would be *far far* less expensive than any Gen III reactor. Grand Inga is budgeted at $80 billion, around $2/W, based on the latest materials costs.
> we really should have built new cheaper and safer reactors
Newer designs are not cheaper. In fact, in spite of herculean efforts on the part of the industry, they're generally more expensive.
There are basically three "newer" designs that are actually available on the market, the EPR, AP1000 and ABWR. Other designs like the APWR, ACR-1000 and similar are dead, while others like the VVER are unlikely to be sold outside Russian client states, who get them basically for free.
Here's a current report on all of the ones that are still standing:
EPR, four under construction, one approved for short-term: Olkiluoto's EPR is currently billed at E8.5 billion, about three times the original estimate. Construction is halted. Flamanville's EPR has gone even higher. Taishan's EPR's are both at least two years behind schedule (they were supposed to be on the grid last year, now they're scheduled for next year). I don't know what that does on the cost side in China. Hinkley Point C is, well, no one really knows what's going on any more
AP1000, four under construction in China, four in the US, several others approved: Summer's two AP1000s are both delayed at least 18 months, leading to a credit rating drop for the companies involved. Vogtle's two AP1000 reactors are already billions over budget, and have just announced another series of delays. Delays cost $2 million a day. Sanmen and Haiyang are both at least a year behind schedule. Haiyang 1 was last updated to begin operation in May, Levy County's two AP1000 last accounting put it over $11 a Watt, at which point Duke gave up and kept everyone's money.
That's not to say this is universal, nor the fault of the designs. Spiralling material costs account for much of this. But having your costs controlled by time of construction on one hand and materials costs on the other is a bad place to be, they often conflict. If you want to get the materials cheaper you have to wait, which drives up soft costs, if you try to get it quicker to help there you drive up materials costs. And when interest rates are at historical lows and materials costs are skyrocketing, these sorts of things are going to happen.
> While nuclear isn't perfect, the paranoia about potential nuclear accidents means it isn't commercially viable.
That, or maybe...
1) the $7.60/W CAPEX, which is over seven times that of wind or natural gas 2) the multi-year lead times which means significant economic risk in an era of they-can-only-go-up interest rates 3) construction costs that invariably go very very wrong and leave the investors holding the bag 4) banks which have been watching all of this for 40 years and consider it to be a toxic investment
Yeah, or maybe it's a bunch of patchouli scented long-hairs that are keeping the industry down. Like they way they kept down hi way construction, urban sprawl and whale hunting. Its a sad comment on an industry who's own supporters claim it's been brought to its knees by a group that can't get a job at Starbucks.
Wholesale prices in Ontario have been falling for several years. You can track them in realtime here:
http://www.ieso.ca
I think you're confusing wholesale and retail. Retail rates have been rising. That's because Ontario Hydro didn't spend a dime on the network for 45 years and the entire grid needs replacement, while running up about $20 billion in debts due to Darlington and Ernie Eave's brilliant "keep the price low" plan which really meant "run up Hydro's debt". As both of these effects are addressed, you get to pay more. We're nowhere near finished, so get used to it.
The same is true for practically every other north american jurisdiction, I don't know enough about europe to say.
> Translation: we've overproduced by such an amount that we're paying for people take our crap.
Another translation: due to decreased economic activity as industry moves to China, along with improved efficiency in household consumption and in the market in general, the existing generation assets we have are no longer needed as overall demand lowers.
Example: Ontario has been decommissioning nukes and coal plants for 10 years now and still has negative pricing at night. Exact same reasons.
> Electricity rates have been rising in America [inflationdata.com].
Because there was no major CAPEX for about 30 years. Nothing says profit like doing nothing and getting paid for it.
As to the real costs of generation, they've continued falling throughout. Which is what you'd expect, as the tech gets better. Right now base load on the Ontario interconnects is selling for (checking as I type...) 2.37 cents/kWh. This is around the lowest is has *ever* been, NOT accounting for inflation (when you add that, it's WAY the lowest). Last night it was negative.
And, unlike Lightening, USB isn't widely used as a mechanical connector on top of being data. My iPhone doesn't work in most iPhone/iPod docks, but my USB keyboard doesn't have that requirement.
> Not specially. It depends on the satellite altitude
If it's anywhere above the atmosphere, which, being a satellite, it is, then the limit is at about five times that due to atmospheric diffraction. You need multiple times the limit in order to process the results into something near your diffraction limit. That's why WorldView-2 had an aperture about 2m to get 50cm resolution. Plus it was launched sun-sync at ~700 km, which I suspect is where WV-3 will sit too.
He's currently 39, which means this took place in the 1980s. A dog could "hack" NASA in the 1980s. Hell, they were already so far back down the other side of that bell curve of interest, they were talking about it as passé in "Out of the Inner Circle" which was published in 85.
> Apple is all about the consumer space, and very little about business. > Microsoft is all about the business space, and very little about the consumer
I'm not sure either company is happy about this, nor planned on it (not that you claimed either).
But of the two, which is in a better place? It seems business was perfectly happy with XP and 2007 running on older machines. There seems to be little reason for them to upgrade.
Consumers upgrade because they can and the products are low-end, but they don't buy software for $5000 a seat.
The crossover is the phone, and Apple's won that one hands down.
> bright, outspoken fellow who is working on his Masters in utility Electrical engineering
So has he ever worked in the power industry?
No?
Ok then.
> They're sitting in cubicles
So let me get this straight, you're complaining about studies made by university departments and professors, and as a counterexample you want me to trust a guy who is also in university but hasn't even graduated yet?
Yeah, I'll get right on that.
> From all I've learned from people working on these problems whom I trust
And from what I've learned by *actually working on these problems*, I have no concerns. 20 to 25% deployment should be trivial and basically zero cost. We're at about 5% in the US today, so there's nothing to worry about now, if ever (you can always stop deploying).
Case and point: here in Canada we're already getting over 1/2 of our electricity from renewables. Last time I checked out grid is doing just fine.
> Because it has diverted resources away from more serious problems and more sensible approaches.
Let me guess, the lifter. When you get a commercial model working you call me ok?
In the meantime we're installing wind and PV faster than any other power source in history, so everyone's a little too busy actually working to listen to people sitting in hotel meeting rooms clapping each other on the back championing the next great thing from the nuclear industry.
No, it's not, and the many, many studies on this demonstrate that it's not.
Avoided costs due to less CAPEX expenditures on the parts of the companies offsets *some* of the cost of rollback. The debate is purely over how much. Depending on the source, it's either slightly negative, flat, or slightly positive.
> The solar industry hasn't reached a "tipping point" because solar power is still not cost-competitive
*sigh* PV and wind are the fastest growing power sources in the world, and they are growing even faster in areas where they are *not* subsidized. In the US, where people have to jump through hoops to do rooftop, wind is #1 and PV is #2.
Solar *has* reached a tipping point, and it *is* cost-competitive, which is why all the financials companies are freaking out:
> Utility grade PV is a horrendous waste of land. If we swapped all the worlds nuclear capability > with solar we'd end up wasting more land than a few nuclear accidents ever did
Slashdot Mirror
> The folks at Lawrence Livermore took a nice big step earlier this year
No they didn't. They used a timed implosion to improve their numbers. This caused a tiny part of the fuel to create net energy compared to the energy that reached it. Then put out a press release saying they hit break even.
So here's the problems. One is that the method used will not work for actual *ignition*, the I in NIF. It's a hack, demo ware intended to impress. Further, they carefully chose a definition of break even that no one in their right mind would ever agree with.
The events gave off between 13 and 17 kJ of energy.
The input into the fuel was somewhere between 150 and 250 kJ. That's not break even.
The input into the hologram was about 1 MJ. That's certainingly not break even.
The output from the laser was about 4 MJ. This isn't looking good...
The input to the lasers was over 400 MJ...
When you put in 400,000 and get back 17, you don't call that break even.
> Fusion don't suffer from safety related issues that fission plants suffer from
Bologna, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Tritium production, and to a lesser extend materials protection, requires massive amounts of lithium metal. This is normally in the form of a liquid "blanket" sandwiched between two metal container walls. Some modern designs use lithium trapped in a porous solid matrix, but this requires more lithium and eliminates online processing. Anyway, there's about a 1 meter width of this stuff, which adds up to hundreds of tonnes and billions of dollars, which is why no one is going to build one of these things.
So here's the thing, lithium is highly flammable. Just ask Tesla. And in the case of a fusion reactor, its filled with tritium. Tritium is extremely dangerous, it mimics hydrogen, so if its in a fire it combines with oxygen in the air to form T2O, which goes up into the air and falls back down as radioactive rain.
Now what could cause such a problem? Well, for one, the reactor volume is surrounded by extremely powerful magnets under ridiculous amounts of stress. If one were to fail it would effectively explode with the same sort of results as a compressor blade failure. If a chunk goes THAT way instead of THIS way, it cuts the reactor core in half and out goes all the lithium. Solid systems would definitely improve safely under this failure mode, but, as I said, only at the cost of serious capacity factor effects and the inability to perform online processing.
Yes yes, I'm perfectly aware of aneutronic solutions, but very basically, they don't work.
> There would no longer be shortages of energy because fuel is ubiquitous
LOLZ. Have you ever seen what you need to do to get D out of [H|D]2O? It's an enormous, massively expensive industrial plant that is an ecological disaster waiting to happen. The only major plant in north america, in Kinkardine, had to be shut down. They still refuse to allow anyone to use the land:
http://www.kincardinenews.com/2013/12/23/opg-seeks-final-approvals-to-clear-former-heavy-water-plant-site-for-reuse
> Therefore, the LHC is a boondoggle waste of money and a failure.
Yes. The LCH was built with the express intent of finding the Higgs. Why? Because we already found all the other particles in the SM. So, literally, they had nothing else to do.
We already all agree it exists, know all of its properties, and have narrowed down its possible mass to a small range. Literally all LCH will do is add decimal points to the mass.
Is that worth $10 billion? I don't think so.
> Generation IV nuclear reactor are much closer to comercialison
Given that fusion is infinity away from commercialization, you may wish to re-phrase your statement.
> There are 5 designs,( LFTR is one of them) and they all promise many advantages.
So did the Gen III designs. Yet when we actually try to build them, we ended up with massive cost and time overruns, just like the Gen II and Gen I reactors. Right now there are about a dozen Gen III's actually under construction
The industry has an astonishing ability to blame everyone else for it's problems. In spite of a 40 year string of failures, both technical and more commonly economic, it's never their fault. It's the greenies, or the government, or the bankers, or NIMBY. But it's never that the projects are so large and complex that no one really knows how to do construction planning for it. And it couldn't possibly be a problem that the main ingredient in the construction has gone up in price five times since 2000. Yet we still hear the claims that the *next* design will be the one that fixes everything.
> Well, since the whole purpose of fusion reactors is to make commercially useful power
Bingo. There are several definitions of work that you need to consider. One is "the thing does something". It's fair to say a car "works" if it can travel under its own power from one side of your yard to the other. But that's not *really* working, no one is going to buy a car that can only go 10 yards. To meet that definition of "working" it has to be able to drive around on roads at reasonable speeds for reasonable distances. But even then, the CEO of the company has yet another definition of "work", which means "it sells". For instance, the Edsel was a pretty advanced piece of engineering, which didn't sell. By any reasonable definition, it "didn't work".
Which brings us to:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
Single parts of a typical fusion reactor cost more than an entire wind turbine producing the same amount of power. Or natural gas turbine, or solar panels, or practically any other source of power being built today. We *know*, for a fact, that fusion will never be able to meet that last definition of "work". It is the Edsel of the energy world.
> Wow! Facts!
Sort of, I cut off the entire bottom of the post somehow. Here's the status of the other Gen III and similar systems that are not currently on the market:
GE/Hitachi ABWR:
The first Gen III design to be built.
Two successful starts in Japan, another four delayed. Very *very* bad startup CF due to problems on the turbine side, but suspect that will improve somewhat. It had better, or these will be cash disasters on the Darlington A scale. All turned off following Fukishima, not helping their CF at all.
Taiwan reactor hopelessly delayed.
US reactors delayed and then cancelled.
Further sales appear extremely unlikely.
System 80+
Not really a Gen III design according to some, but on the list for completeness. Three S80's (not the 80+) built at Palo Verde. No further sales prospects. Team and design purchased by GE, Combustion Engineering left the industry.
Mitsubishi APWR:
Built to compete with ABWR in Japan and US. No sales, effort cancelled. Misubishi is likely out of the industry, but who knows now.
AECL EC-6 and ACR-1000:
Only real sales prospect was for a ACR-1000 at Darlington B. Rumors of a second plant for industrial steam for oil sand production turned out to be a mistake. Darlington cancelled in 2013 after price came in way higher than the government could afford ($26 billion was the low estimate).
AECL was immediately broken up and the reactor design department sold off to a Quebec engineering firm for a few million dollars, along with a massive tax write-down that was more than they paid for the company.
Siemens:
Out of the industry. Part of EPR, but managed to avoid that nightmare just in time.
B&W mPower:
B&W has essentially closed their reactor division.
All of UK:
Out of the industry. Considering purchase of EPR for Hinkley, but given their experiences with that design it's anyone's guess what will happen.
> It is also why Entergy decommissioned Vermont Yankee this year.
That an Hydro Quebec practically giving away power.
Did you know there's half a year of Canada's entire electrical use stored in Grande Baliene as I write this? HALF a YEAR.
> The major reason for the large capital expenditure of nuclear power is that a lot
> of reactors are quite large and need expensive containment.
Too true.
> There are proposals to build modular reactors
Proposals. When someone bends metal, let be know.
> Hydropower also is a large capital expenditure
Not even close. Excluding China for the simple reason that I don't believe either their accounting or their exchange rates, the last two hydro super-projects were Itaipu and La Grande, which both came in just over $1 a watt, ~$1.20 for Itaipu and a little less for La Grande. This is no small feat considering the locations of both. Of course they were built before concrete doubled in price, but even considering that they would be *far far* less expensive than any Gen III reactor. Grand Inga is budgeted at $80 billion, around $2/W, based on the latest materials costs.
> It is uncompetitive to manufacture steel in Germany at current prices
It is uncompetitive to manufacture steel anywhere that has any sort of realistic exchange rates.
What, you didn't notice that steel companies in the US, Canada, England, France and Japan are also shutting down?
We ALL do.
> we really should have built new cheaper and safer reactors
Newer designs are not cheaper. In fact, in spite of herculean efforts on the part of the industry, they're generally more expensive.
There are basically three "newer" designs that are actually available on the market, the EPR, AP1000 and ABWR. Other designs like the APWR, ACR-1000 and similar are dead, while others like the VVER are unlikely to be sold outside Russian client states, who get them basically for free.
Here's a current report on all of the ones that are still standing:
EPR, four under construction, one approved for short-term:
Olkiluoto's EPR is currently billed at E8.5 billion, about three times the original estimate. Construction is halted.
Flamanville's EPR has gone even higher.
Taishan's EPR's are both at least two years behind schedule (they were supposed to be on the grid last year, now they're scheduled for next year). I don't know what that does on the cost side in China.
Hinkley Point C is, well, no one really knows what's going on any more
AP1000, four under construction in China, four in the US, several others approved:
Summer's two AP1000s are both delayed at least 18 months, leading to a credit rating drop for the companies involved.
Vogtle's two AP1000 reactors are already billions over budget, and have just announced another series of delays. Delays cost $2 million a day.
Sanmen and Haiyang are both at least a year behind schedule. Haiyang 1 was last updated to begin operation in May,
Levy County's two AP1000 last accounting put it over $11 a Watt, at which point Duke gave up and kept everyone's money.
That's not to say this is universal, nor the fault of the designs. Spiralling material costs account for much of this. But having your costs controlled by time of construction on one hand and materials costs on the other is a bad place to be, they often conflict. If you want to get the materials cheaper you have to wait, which drives up soft costs, if you try to get it quicker to help there you drive up materials costs. And when interest rates are at historical lows and materials costs are skyrocketing, these sorts of things are going to happen.
> I consider my an environmentalists, but a sane one.
Perhaps you might want to stop referring to yourself in the multiple when telling us how sane you are.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
It is if the cost of the raw materials has doubled in the last couple of years.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/WPU132?data_tool=XGtable
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/WPU1321?data_tool=XGtable
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/copper/all/
> While nuclear isn't perfect, the paranoia about potential nuclear accidents means it isn't commercially viable.
That, or maybe...
1) the $7.60/W CAPEX, which is over seven times that of wind or natural gas
2) the multi-year lead times which means significant economic risk in an era of they-can-only-go-up interest rates
3) construction costs that invariably go very very wrong and leave the investors holding the bag
4) banks which have been watching all of this for 40 years and consider it to be a toxic investment
Yeah, or maybe it's a bunch of patchouli scented long-hairs that are keeping the industry down. Like they way they kept down hi way construction, urban sprawl and whale hunting. Its a sad comment on an industry who's own supporters claim it's been brought to its knees by a group that can't get a job at Starbucks.
> You obviously don't live in Ontario.
Wholesale prices in Ontario have been falling for several years. You can track them in realtime here:
http://www.ieso.ca
I think you're confusing wholesale and retail. Retail rates have been rising. That's because Ontario Hydro didn't spend a dime on the network for 45 years and the entire grid needs replacement, while running up about $20 billion in debts due to Darlington and Ernie Eave's brilliant "keep the price low" plan which really meant "run up Hydro's debt". As both of these effects are addressed, you get to pay more. We're nowhere near finished, so get used to it.
The same is true for practically every other north american jurisdiction, I don't know enough about europe to say.
> Translation: we've overproduced by such an amount that we're paying for people take our crap.
Another translation: due to decreased economic activity as industry moves to China, along with improved efficiency in household consumption and in the market in general, the existing generation assets we have are no longer needed as overall demand lowers.
Example: Ontario has been decommissioning nukes and coal plants for 10 years now and still has negative pricing at night. Exact same reasons.
> Electricity rates have been rising in America [inflationdata.com].
Because there was no major CAPEX for about 30 years. Nothing says profit like doing nothing and getting paid for it.
As to the real costs of generation, they've continued falling throughout. Which is what you'd expect, as the tech gets better. Right now base load on the Ontario interconnects is selling for (checking as I type...) 2.37 cents/kWh. This is around the lowest is has *ever* been, NOT accounting for inflation (when you add that, it's WAY the lowest). Last night it was negative.
And, unlike Lightening, USB isn't widely used as a mechanical connector on top of being data. My iPhone doesn't work in most iPhone/iPod docks, but my USB keyboard doesn't have that requirement.
I suspect this will be a very smooth switch.
> Not specially. It depends on the satellite altitude
If it's anywhere above the atmosphere, which, being a satellite, it is, then the limit is at about five times that due to atmospheric diffraction. You need multiple times the limit in order to process the results into something near your diffraction limit. That's why WorldView-2 had an aperture about 2m to get 50cm resolution. Plus it was launched sun-sync at ~700 km, which I suspect is where WV-3 will sit too.
> hacking Nasa at age 13
He's currently 39, which means this took place in the 1980s. A dog could "hack" NASA in the 1980s. Hell, they were already so far back down the other side of that bell curve of interest, they were talking about it as passé in "Out of the Inner Circle" which was published in 85.
> Apple is all about the consumer space, and very little about business.
> Microsoft is all about the business space, and very little about the consumer
I'm not sure either company is happy about this, nor planned on it (not that you claimed either).
But of the two, which is in a better place? It seems business was perfectly happy with XP and 2007 running on older machines. There seems to be little reason for them to upgrade.
Consumers upgrade because they can and the products are low-end, but they don't buy software for $5000 a seat.
The crossover is the phone, and Apple's won that one hands down.
For now.
> bright, outspoken fellow who is working on his Masters in utility Electrical engineering
So has he ever worked in the power industry?
No?
Ok then.
> They're sitting in cubicles
So let me get this straight, you're complaining about studies made by university departments and professors, and as a counterexample you want me to trust a guy who is also in university but hasn't even graduated yet?
Yeah, I'll get right on that.
> From all I've learned from people working on these problems whom I trust
And from what I've learned by *actually working on these problems*, I have no concerns. 20 to 25% deployment should be trivial and basically zero cost. We're at about 5% in the US today, so there's nothing to worry about now, if ever (you can always stop deploying).
Case and point: here in Canada we're already getting over 1/2 of our electricity from renewables. Last time I checked out grid is doing just fine.
> Because it has diverted resources away from more serious problems and more sensible approaches.
Let me guess, the lifter. When you get a commercial model working you call me ok?
In the meantime we're installing wind and PV faster than any other power source in history, so everyone's a little too busy actually working to listen to people sitting in hotel meeting rooms clapping each other on the back championing the next great thing from the nuclear industry.
> No, it is a correct argument
No, it's not, and the many, many studies on this demonstrate that it's not.
Avoided costs due to less CAPEX expenditures on the parts of the companies offsets *some* of the cost of rollback. The debate is purely over how much. Depending on the source, it's either slightly negative, flat, or slightly positive.
> The solar industry hasn't reached a "tipping point" because solar power is still not cost-competitive
*sigh* PV and wind are the fastest growing power sources in the world, and they are growing even faster in areas where they are *not* subsidized. In the US, where people have to jump through hoops to do rooftop, wind is #1 and PV is #2.
Solar *has* reached a tipping point, and it *is* cost-competitive, which is why all the financials companies are freaking out:
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/ce17780900c3d223633ecfa59/files/Lazard_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_v7.0.1.pdf
> Utility grade PV is a horrendous waste of land. If we swapped all the worlds nuclear capability
> with solar we'd end up wasting more land than a few nuclear accidents ever did
I see no numbers to back this up.
I do, however, have an alternate set of my own:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/revenge-of-the-electric-oil-sands/