"the microwave downlink gets misaligned and burns down the city block next to the ground station."
Which they "solve" by placing the ground stations in the middle of nowhere. Which of course raises all the transmission-to-the-customer problems that this system was supposed to solve.
I'm not sure any of these were due to Scully, directly. I believe it's much more accurate to say that Scully didn't stop other people from launching these "great ideas". He was focussing his energies on "the company", marketing and distribution. These are fine things, but not the job of the CEO.
So you had every middle manager running around producing whatever pet project they were interested in. If someone thought it was a good idea to have multiple SKUs for different stores, presto! A game console? Sure, sounds great! Anything any magazine said was the next big thing? We're on it!
Ironically, in one history I read Scully was portrayed as the "no guy" because he nixed Star Trek.
> It's much harder to do that when you have a huge codebase that's a decade old
Very much agreed. But it's not just Apple, it's the entire category.
The iPhone was the big bang of smartphones. Everything after that was, to a great degree, an iPhone.
There has certainly been some innovation in this space since. Apple's introduced retina, siri, passbook. Google's got Now, which is really under-utilized so far I think, and will likely become dramatically more important in the future IMHO. We have always-on from Moto, Nokia's cameras, Sony's waterproofing, etc. All of these are real advances.
But the problem is that each of these is "here or there". As such, they represent only minor incremental improvements (with the exception of Now and Siri perhaps) that are being applied to only one or another platform. These are, sadly, features, not paradigms.
And if you look at the numbers you'll see why it says that. It uses pricing from about 2008 for the PV, which was twice the CAPEX of "advanced nuclear". However, this article shows that the opposite is true, Duke's plant was $11 and FirstSolar is putting in plants under $2.
You didn't actually run the calculator did you? You stopped after clicking on the first link, right?
Try this, select 25 years for the period, 1900 for capital cost, 15% for the capacity factor, and zero out the rest of the inputs. That gives you 12.6 cents.
Now change the capital cost to 11250 and the capacity factor to 90%. That gives you 10.9 cents.
In other words, if nuclear fuel was free, required no maintenance for 25 years, and has zero decommissioning costs, PV is still only 1.5 cents more than nuclear.
Now you can put in your own numbers for the cost of fuel and maintenance, the links provide plenty of data for both cases.
The entire nuclear renaissance was based on predicted CAPEX in the $4 to $5 range, which is where the numbers start working. But we now have three real-world quotes - Vogtle came in at just over $7, Darlington B at $8.25 (low estimate) and now we have Duke at over $11. At those prices the LCoE is going to be double that of NG. Of course no one is going to build at these prices.
The cost of capital is almost always the #1 cost in any power plant, the exception being NG and coal.
"Scaling solar or wind up to 2.2 GW takes vastly more land area and requires adequate base load generation, which wasn't figured into your cost"
Oh geez, this tired old bromide.
Nuclear is not widely throttleable and unable to deal with peak demand. peak demand is normally about 50% higher than base, on average, and even higher in the summer. In order to fill out the peaks, every watt of nuclear requires about 0.6 watts of some fast reacting system, on average. In the US this was utterly dominated by coal and is quickly moving to NG. Nuclear plants require more backup than wind (because there's more of it), but I don't see anyone suggesting we should add the cost of those peakers to the cost of nuclear. Yet I see that argument 100% of the time (as in this case right here) when alternatives are being discussed.
Please stop spreading misleading information. You're making the world a worse place. You have Google right there, educate yourself.
We tend to build large power plants far from large groups of people. High-tension wires are much, much less expensive than plumbing water back the same distance. Where we do build them, the amount of grey water tends to be tiny.
I should note the NG peakers, which are rapidly replacing a significant portion of North America's generation mix, do not have to use cooling water, or at least nowhere near the same amount.
> ALL of your bombings and attacks are ONLY coming from ONE group
Uggg. This is true only when "your" = "USA" and "ALL" = "my only limited recent history".
Threats change. The al Qaeda threat came out of nowhere because we were too busy looking at the fUSSR. Your suggestion is advocating that we make this same mistake again.
Randomized machine testing solved the US's hijacking wave of the early 1970s (anyone even remember that happened?) and it's solved the same problem for many threats in many situations
Bringing fallible human logic into the equation, full of gaming, politics and personal "feelings", is precisely the way to get hit again.
SOME solar cells contain heavy metals. Those are the CdTe thin-film models which were in vogue for a while but largely out of the market today. In these, the metals are locked in compounds which make them no less safe that the poisonous chlorine gas or flammable sodium metal in your salt. The panels people are actually buying today, pSi and mSi, do not contain heavy metals. They consist almost entirely of silicon, with a small amount of silver, aluminum and copper wiring.
"and their manufacturing releases greenhouse gases such as sulfur hexafluoride"
Their manufacture USED TO release GHG's, but the industry has reduced leakage to just about zero since about 2007.
"For instance, Richard Pike of the Royal Society of Chemistry provocatively determined that electric cars, if widely adopted, stood to lower Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions by just 2 percent, given the U.K.’s electricity sources."
Now think about this for this statement to make any sense whatsoever, Pike is saying that if we all switched our cars, an astonishing technological change, that the generation would *not* change.
In fact, the opposite is much more likely. As I type this wind turbines are going up all across the UK, and they are lobbying to be the European end of the Iceland-Europe undersea HVDC link. The first of these, especially, is a perfect counterpart for electric cars or PIH's.
By the time significant numbers of electric cars are on the road, the generation mix will have already been radically altered.
"Last year, a U.S. Congressional Budget Office study found that electric car subsidies “will result in little or no reduction in the total gasoline use and greenhouse-gas emissions of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next several years.”"
Well *duh*. With very few electric cars on the road, it's pretty obvious to everyone they'll have little impact.
"The lifetime difference in greenhouse-gas emissions between vehicles powered by batteries and those powered by low-sulfur diesel, for example, was hardly discernible"
Considering that adding batteries to a diesel engine decreases it's GHG emissions by about 1/3rd, this seems unlikely unless you select places in the world where the majority of the power comes from crappy coal plants. Like the US, or China. You know, like this
"University of Tennessee studied five vehicle types in 34 Chinese cities"
Argue all you want, the math, as noted in the link above, is clear.
> You know ARM chipsets are going to have it because it is going to come bundled with Android
Looking over the list of common ARM SoC's using in Android, I see that about 50% support VP8 decode, and about 5% support encode. The relative numbers for H.264 are 100% and (something smaller I can't really quantify).
It's too early to call for VP9, of course, but VP8's update was poor to middling. The "just because it's google" argument is not a strong one.
> Turning solar panel power production on and off should be pretty much instant
Almost, you simply vary a test load on the panel.
> Let's go naive and assume those are evenly spread across the year: 15000/365 =~ 41kWh/day.
Gebus, really? I burn an average of 12 to 13 kWh/day. And I still have a bunch of halogens to switch to LED, and a 20-year-old blower motor in my furnace. I'm pretty sure I can get down to about 10 kWh without *too* much trouble.
> That means that the volume of cells required to store a day of electricity usage
Ahhh, but you don't need to do that. Recall that night-time use is about 1/2 of daytime (depending on where you are). Also recall that PV isn't the only power source. It's highly likely that there is already enough base load from clean sources to provide night-time use. So in reality, all you need is enough storage to let the grid operator turn on their peakers. 15 to 30 minutes is enough. So maybe $500 of batteries.
Of course up here in The Great White North it's even easier, we have 50% of a year's supply sitting in Quebec right now:
What efficiency? Watts/dollar? Also note: one has a built in energy storage system.
As to watts/dollar, you actually mean $/W, and to answer that, large scale plants are going in around $1.85/W. That's *almost* the cheapest form of power in CAPEX terms, only NG is cheaper (a little over $1) while hydro is about the same. Everything else is more expensive; coal is about $2 with no capture, wind is around $4 to $6 (although that's surely outdated) and nuclear is about $6 to $8.
So if you're in a situation where there's not a lot of accessible debt, like right now, and you want to deploy as much new power as you can, like we do, then you're likely putting in NG, solar and wind above all others, like we are.
Yes it would probably take 20 years to get the first thorium reactors up, running, and certified for commercial use
At which point it would take another 15 to 20 years to get them into commercial production. So we're looking around 2050, at the earliest.
This is not a solution to a problem that we actually have.
but politics happen the be the biggest barrier here, not technology
Oh bologna. The "biggest barrier here" is indeed technology - other technologies that are outcompeting nuclear.
Best-case scenarios for Vogtle's new-build is between 6.6 and 8.4 cents/kWh. First Solar just signed a deal in NM at 5.79 cents/kWh. Almost every wind turbine in the US goes in between 5 and 6 cents. NG plants are quoting anywhere from 4.1 to 6.5.
Why bother investing several decades and multiple billions of dollars to get a power source that's already uncompetitive? PV and wind is going to be a lot cheaper than 6 cents in 25 years, even *with* storage.
Here's some reading material, albeit a bit out of date:
It will cost something like 15 billion to clean up the plant, and another $110 billion to decontaminate the surrounding area.
That's four orders of magnitude over "mega", so "Megadisaster" applies IMHO.
More to the point, if one puts in that price tag, let alone the independent estimates of $250 billion, that's the most expensive power source they have.
Slashdot Mirror
"the microwave downlink gets misaligned and burns down the city block next to the ground station."
Which they "solve" by placing the ground stations in the middle of nowhere. Which of course raises all the transmission-to-the-customer problems that this system was supposed to solve.
> astronauts failing to keep up with exercise programs
This is absolutely not true.
> I'd like to see a followup on unmodified mice to see if they also benefit
Bingo!
Oh, right...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine
> but because people are stupid and fall for lame marketing
I'm going to write this one down, so I can haunt you when you grow up.
> Sculley, who fractured the Mac lineup
I'm not sure any of these were due to Scully, directly. I believe it's much more accurate to say that Scully didn't stop other people from launching these "great ideas". He was focussing his energies on "the company", marketing and distribution. These are fine things, but not the job of the CEO.
So you had every middle manager running around producing whatever pet project they were interested in. If someone thought it was a good idea to have multiple SKUs for different stores, presto! A game console? Sure, sounds great! Anything any magazine said was the next big thing? We're on it!
Ironically, in one history I read Scully was portrayed as the "no guy" because he nixed Star Trek.
> Thing is Jobs didn't invent stuff. He took what was available and polished it.
Not polished, put together. Like when you put a gas engine on a carriage and now you have a car. The sum is greater than the parts.
This is the definition of invention. If you don't believe that, go watch Connections. The original series.
" see how a company is test-growing a relative of sugarcane, which is expected to yield 5 times the ethanol per acre compared to corn."
So, in other words, the same yield as sugarcane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
They're growing a relative to sugarcane that produces Ethanol like sugarcane? Stop the presses!
> It's much harder to do that when you have a huge codebase that's a decade old
Very much agreed. But it's not just Apple, it's the entire category.
The iPhone was the big bang of smartphones. Everything after that was, to a great degree, an iPhone.
There has certainly been some innovation in this space since. Apple's introduced retina, siri, passbook. Google's got Now, which is really under-utilized so far I think, and will likely become dramatically more important in the future IMHO. We have always-on from Moto, Nokia's cameras, Sony's waterproofing, etc. All of these are real advances.
But the problem is that each of these is "here or there". As such, they represent only minor incremental improvements (with the exception of Now and Siri perhaps) that are being applied to only one or another platform. These are, sadly, features, not paradigms.
And if you look at the numbers you'll see why it says that. It uses pricing from about 2008 for the PV, which was twice the CAPEX of "advanced nuclear". However, this article shows that the opposite is true, Duke's plant was $11 and FirstSolar is putting in plants under $2.
> Your link only asserts that for renewables
You didn't actually run the calculator did you? You stopped after clicking on the first link, right?
Try this, select 25 years for the period, 1900 for capital cost, 15% for the capacity factor, and zero out the rest of the inputs. That gives you 12.6 cents.
Now change the capital cost to 11250 and the capacity factor to 90%. That gives you 10.9 cents.
In other words, if nuclear fuel was free, required no maintenance for 25 years, and has zero decommissioning costs, PV is still only 1.5 cents more than nuclear.
Now you can put in your own numbers for the cost of fuel and maintenance, the links provide plenty of data for both cases.
The entire nuclear renaissance was based on predicted CAPEX in the $4 to $5 range, which is where the numbers start working. But we now have three real-world quotes - Vogtle came in at just over $7, Darlington B at $8.25 (low estimate) and now we have Duke at over $11. At those prices the LCoE is going to be double that of NG. Of course no one is going to build at these prices.
The LCoE is dominated by CAPEX.
http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
"Wow, that's a simplistic argument"
Uhh, ok, lets see why you think so
"No total cost of ownership"
The cost of capital is almost always the #1 cost in any power plant, the exception being NG and coal.
"Scaling solar or wind up to 2.2 GW takes vastly more land area and requires adequate base load generation, which wasn't figured into your cost"
Oh geez, this tired old bromide.
Nuclear is not widely throttleable and unable to deal with peak demand. peak demand is normally about 50% higher than base, on average, and even higher in the summer. In order to fill out the peaks, every watt of nuclear requires about 0.6 watts of some fast reacting system, on average. In the US this was utterly dominated by coal and is quickly moving to NG. Nuclear plants require more backup than wind (because there's more of it), but I don't see anyone suggesting we should add the cost of those peakers to the cost of nuclear. Yet I see that argument 100% of the time (as in this case right here) when alternatives are being discussed.
Please stop spreading misleading information. You're making the world a worse place. You have Google right there, educate yourself.
That was, of course...
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/the-nuclear-renaissance-continues-apace/
The two reactors were 1,100 MW each, a total of 2.2 GW.
The price tag was $24.7 billion.
So that's 24.7 / 2.2 = $11.23 per watt!
Natural gas turbines are about $1 a watt. PV's going in under $2. Wind is about $6.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/the-nuclear-reontinues-apace/
Talk about click bait. Can the topic header be edited after posting to save everyone having to waste their time?
"Why not? Why not use turd-water to cool plants?"
We tend to build large power plants far from large groups of people. High-tension wires are much, much less expensive than plumbing water back the same distance. Where we do build them, the amount of grey water tends to be tiny.
I should note the NG peakers, which are rapidly replacing a significant portion of North America's generation mix, do not have to use cooling water, or at least nowhere near the same amount.
> ALL of your bombings and attacks are ONLY coming from ONE group
Uggg. This is true only when "your" = "USA" and "ALL" = "my only limited recent history".
Threats change. The al Qaeda threat came out of nowhere because we were too busy looking at the fUSSR. Your suggestion is advocating that we make this same mistake again.
Randomized machine testing solved the US's hijacking wave of the early 1970s (anyone even remember that happened?) and it's solved the same problem for many threats in many situations
Bringing fallible human logic into the equation, full of gaming, politics and personal "feelings", is precisely the way to get hit again.
Start with the math
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Now let's look at some of the statements
"Solar cells contain heavy metals"
SOME solar cells contain heavy metals. Those are the CdTe thin-film models which were in vogue for a while but largely out of the market today. In these, the metals are locked in compounds which make them no less safe that the poisonous chlorine gas or flammable sodium metal in your salt. The panels people are actually buying today, pSi and mSi, do not contain heavy metals. They consist almost entirely of silicon, with a small amount of silver, aluminum and copper wiring.
"and their manufacturing releases greenhouse gases such as sulfur hexafluoride"
Their manufacture USED TO release GHG's, but the industry has reduced leakage to just about zero since about 2007.
"For instance, Richard Pike of the Royal Society of Chemistry provocatively determined that electric cars, if widely adopted, stood to lower Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions by just 2 percent, given the U.K.’s electricity sources."
Now think about this for this statement to make any sense whatsoever, Pike is saying that if we all switched our cars, an astonishing technological change, that the generation would *not* change.
In fact, the opposite is much more likely. As I type this wind turbines are going up all across the UK, and they are lobbying to be the European end of the Iceland-Europe undersea HVDC link. The first of these, especially, is a perfect counterpart for electric cars or PIH's.
By the time significant numbers of electric cars are on the road, the generation mix will have already been radically altered.
"Last year, a U.S. Congressional Budget Office study found that electric car subsidies “will result in little or no reduction in the total gasoline use and greenhouse-gas emissions of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next several years.”"
Well *duh*. With very few electric cars on the road, it's pretty obvious to everyone they'll have little impact.
"The lifetime difference in greenhouse-gas emissions between vehicles powered by batteries and those powered by low-sulfur diesel, for example, was hardly discernible"
Considering that adding batteries to a diesel engine decreases it's GHG emissions by about 1/3rd, this seems unlikely unless you select places in the world where the majority of the power comes from crappy coal plants. Like the US, or China. You know, like this
"University of Tennessee studied five vehicle types in 34 Chinese cities"
Argue all you want, the math, as noted in the link above, is clear.
> You know ARM chipsets are going to have it because it is going to come bundled with Android
Looking over the list of common ARM SoC's using in Android, I see that about 50% support VP8 decode, and about 5% support encode. The relative numbers for H.264 are 100% and (something smaller I can't really quantify).
It's too early to call for VP9, of course, but VP8's update was poor to middling. The "just because it's google" argument is not a strong one.
Now what are you hoping to achieve, introducing facts on /. in the middle of a flame fest?
> Turning solar panel power production on and off should be pretty much instant
Almost, you simply vary a test load on the panel.
> Let's go naive and assume those are evenly spread across the year: 15000/365 =~ 41kWh/day.
Gebus, really? I burn an average of 12 to 13 kWh/day. And I still have a bunch of halogens to switch to LED, and a 20-year-old blower motor in my furnace. I'm pretty sure I can get down to about 10 kWh without *too* much trouble.
> That means that the volume of cells required to store a day of electricity usage
Ahhh, but you don't need to do that. Recall that night-time use is about 1/2 of daytime (depending on where you are). Also recall that PV isn't the only power source. It's highly likely that there is already enough base load from clean sources to provide night-time use. So in reality, all you need is enough storage to let the grid operator turn on their peakers. 15 to 30 minutes is enough. So maybe $500 of batteries.
Of course up here in The Great White North it's even easier, we have 50% of a year's supply sitting in Quebec right now:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/the-energy-storage-myth/
What efficiency? Watts/dollar? Also note: one has a built in energy storage system.
As to watts/dollar, you actually mean $/W, and to answer that, large scale plants are going in around $1.85/W. That's *almost* the cheapest form of power in CAPEX terms, only NG is cheaper (a little over $1) while hydro is about the same. Everything else is more expensive; coal is about $2 with no capture, wind is around $4 to $6 (although that's surely outdated) and nuclear is about $6 to $8.
So if you're in a situation where there's not a lot of accessible debt, like right now, and you want to deploy as much new power as you can, like we do, then you're likely putting in NG, solar and wind above all others, like we are.
Yes it would probably take 20 years to get the first thorium reactors up, running, and certified for commercial use
At which point it would take another 15 to 20 years to get them into commercial production. So we're looking around 2050, at the earliest.
This is not a solution to a problem that we actually have.
but politics happen the be the biggest barrier here, not technology
Oh bologna. The "biggest barrier here" is indeed technology - other technologies that are outcompeting nuclear.
Best-case scenarios for Vogtle's new-build is between 6.6 and 8.4 cents/kWh. First Solar just signed a deal in NM at 5.79 cents/kWh. Almost every wind turbine in the US goes in between 5 and 6 cents. NG plants are quoting anywhere from 4.1 to 6.5.
Why bother investing several decades and multiple billions of dollars to get a power source that's already uncompetitive? PV and wind is going to be a lot cheaper than 6 cents in 25 years, even *with* storage.
Here's some reading material, albeit a bit out of date:
http://web.mit.edu/ceepr/www/publications/workingpapers/2009-004.pdf
It will cost something like 15 billion to clean up the plant, and another $110 billion to decontaminate the surrounding area.
That's four orders of magnitude over "mega", so "Megadisaster" applies IMHO.
More to the point, if one puts in that price tag, let alone the independent estimates of $250 billion, that's the most expensive power source they have.