This is just he first phase of the law. By 2020, all incandescent bulbs (including halogens) with with commonly used power outputs will be effectively banned by increasing efficiency requirements.
I am against the ban for several reasons. Only about 10% of the electricity we produce is used for lighting, and a good bit of this is already high-efficiency lighting. CFL and LED bulbs are not universal replacements for simple incandescent bulbs. There are several applications where either the environment (heat, cold, enclosure) or other requirements (color rendering) make incandescent bulbs preferable. In many cases, the heat from incandescent bulbs is a useful by-product -- they heat occupied rooms in the winter time and they melt snow from traffic light. Ironically, saving energy my not be the best thing for the environment. It may be better to build newer, cleaner and higher efficiency generating stations rather than keeping older ones running.
It is also worth mentioning that there are many PCB manufactures and assembly houses that will make a couple of PC boards for you and install all the BGAs DQN, FQN, and power pad packages for you for just a few hundred dollars.
Even today's 'high efficiency' halogen lights only produce about 10 lumens per watt. By 2020, all general purpose lights must produce 45 lumens per watt. This effectivly bans all current forms of incandescent lights.
I loved his columns, I have many of his books. I wrote him several times (in the days before email!) with comments on his columns and he always wrote back. I went to see him talk when he has in town. I will miss him.
I have been pro-nuclear all my life. I toured a nuclear plant when I was about 10 years old (back when you could do that sort of thing) and I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. TMI did not phase me. Neither did Chernobyl. I've never believed that nuclear waste disposal is really that technically difficult or expensive (you put in deep in the ground and leave the heck alone). But Fukushima has me wavering. The bottom line is that the containment structure did not work. I had always been under the assumption that the containment structures would hold under just about any imaginable condition with little more than a few puffs of slightly radioactive steam. Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build, they are expensive to operate and when something does go wrong the direct costs of the damages are almost unimaginably high (what is the worth of a few hundred square miles of property that cannot be farmed or inhabited in our children's children's lifetime? And what it an inland river were contaminated instead of the ocean? The more I rationally evaluate it, the more I come to the conclusion that we are going to have to shut them all down.
Ingesting very small amounts of Pu will (probably) not hurt you. The toxicity of Pu is grossly exaggerated. It is chemically toxic like most heavy metals, but there is nothing really special about its toxicity as a chemically. All isotopes of Pu are radioactive, the longer lived isotopes are less radioactive than the shorter lived isotopes. There is nothing special about the radioactivity from Pu 239 (half life of 24K years) that makes it more hazardous than any other radioactive material. If you are concerned about long half lives, the U-238 that is released from burning coal has a half live of 4.4 billion years.
When you 'remove' the mercury from smoke, where does it go? It does not go away, it has to be put somewhere just like the waste products from nuclear power generation. The only real difference is scale. Nuclear produces only a small fraction of the toxic waste that is produced from burning coal, but that waste is a great deal more toxic. Which is easier to deal with? A billion tons of slightly toxic waste or a a thousand tons of highly toxic waste?
What are these 'cheaper' renewable that you are talking about? Do you really believe that there is some massive conspiracy to keep cheap, plentiful, reliable, and renewable power off the market? Or is this the renewable power that you are convinced that would surely be invented if only enough money were spend on it? If you have a way to produce electricty for a few cents a kilowatt hour using renewables, go for it. You have an unlimited worldwide market.
At US$0.10 / kilowatt hour, that would be $120 worth of juice in a new laptop. That really can't be right, so it is obvious that they are not simply counting revolutions of a power meter.
So what does it mean? Did they use the same math to figure out how many megajoules it takes to deliver a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Do you count the manufacturing energy costs in making all the equipment (circuit breaker panel, circuit breaker, wire, insulation, wall box, outlet, etc.) that delivers the power from the meter to the wall plug? Do you count the megajoules required to mine the coal, manufacture a train, manufacture a power station, and as well as thermal losses at the power plant?
Laptops don't use a lot of power anyway, newer laptops don't use a lot less power than older laptops so I am not surprised by the results. The bottom line is that if you cannot show an economic advantage to upgrading (you can cover the cost of the upgrade based on the energy saved in a reasonable time) is it probably not worth upgrading for the sake of saving energy.
How many hours a day can this plant produce 392MW? Maybe 8? The article does not say, but my bet is that generting capacity is only about 3% of Fukashima.
Really? Remember when BP would not release video footage from the underwater robots monitoring the oil plume from the well? Remember how they kept to their very low estimate of the amount leaking from the well? Remember how the first expert that CNN hire to analyze the footage said BP's estimate was off by at least a factor of 10? Who was right? (Of course, BP later denied making any estimate at all claiming they were using the Coast Guard's estimate based on the amount of oil on the surface.)
Why not get rid of a lot of stop signs? Are stop signs that require a complete stop really safer than a yield? I see so many that seem unnecessary. Could low volume intersections be made smart so that stopping (or even slowing) is only required if there is oncoming traffic?
The article makes absolutely no sense. There are no supporting details.
She travelled 3 hours by motorcycle taxi and waited three days to charge her cell phone? How many things are wrong with that picture?
She spent $80 on solar panels primarily to charge a cell phone? Again, what is wrong with that picture?
Sounds like there is a market for cell phone charges that are either hand cranked, solar powered, or apparently motor-cycle powered. What would solar cell capable of keeping a cell phone fully charged cost?
What is the cost break-down of this lighting system? How much is being spent on the solar cells? How long are the storage batteries going to last? What are the competing technologies?
If a village of 20 homes needed a few watts (25W?) of power each day for 4 hours after sundown every day, what else could be purchased for $1600 plus the cost the ongoing cost of replacing the storage batteries?
This is how is works in my head. I can look at the problem and tell you almost instantly that the answer is about 100,000 (33,333 1/3 * 3)and in a few seconds tell you that the answer is probably closer to 105,000 (35,000 * 3). Are these anwser 'close enough' to solve the real problem at hand?
Electric cars will fail, and series hybrids like the Chevy Volt will succeed. When the batteries run low a gas generator keeps the batteries charged enough to power the vehicle. This is brilliant: I get my electric car for my short daily commutes, but I still have gas for those rare times when I need to drive hundreds of miles in a day. I have the best of both worlds with no sacrifices..
And all those other times when you are not driving 100 miles in a day you are lugging around a heavy and useless generator. That you paid good money for. And when you are driving more than 100 miles a day, you are lugging around huge battery packs that are doing very little good (outside of some regenerative braking and acceleration boost which are negligible on the Interstate at a constant speed.) It sounds to me like the worst of both worlds. I think I would rather have a small all electric car to get me to work on a daily basis and a large gas SUV for longer trips (and it would be great if I could just rent the SUV when I needed it.)
And no, you cannot get anywhere close to 80% efficiency with gas-in, electricty out turbines.
Helium will never be impossible to get, even in large quantities. Stop worrying!
The atmosphere is 5ppm helium. That is not a lot of concentration, but we have a lot of atmosphere. But we will never even get to the point of needing to recover it from the atmosphere. Helium is present in most natural gas well in concentrations of 1000's of ppm. Most of that cannot be economically recovered at this time because helium is cheap, and recovery is expensive. We are not 'wasting' helium through use, we are 'wasting' helium by not recovering it in the first place.
If an area has to be higher than the idealized surface to be 'level' (to keep a ball from rolling) won't that be an area that has stronger local gravity?
Interesting... the Indian ocean is nearly 100 meters too shallow.
I am not sure how the situation can be worsened. At this point, they need a temporary solution that will slow the venting of the oil into the ocean until the relief well(s) can be completed. The idea is not to try to 'equalize' the well. Pumping would be a dynamic fix. The pressure would only remain as long as pumping continued. They may find that the seawater forms viscous clathrates in what is left of the riser pipe further slowing the oil flow. If sea water won't work, then pump in clay (yes, tanker after tanker after tanker of it). Unless of course they were lying about stopping the oil flow with the top kill while pumping, in which case, never mind.
One article said that the oil flow stopped while they were pumping in the mud. Why not continue the pumping operation with seawater to keep the pressure in the BOP as high as possible?
Slashdot Mirror
This is just he first phase of the law. By 2020, all incandescent bulbs (including halogens) with with commonly used power outputs will be effectively banned by increasing efficiency requirements.
I am against the ban for several reasons. Only about 10% of the electricity we produce is used for lighting, and a good bit of this is already high-efficiency lighting. CFL and LED bulbs are not universal replacements for simple incandescent bulbs. There are several applications where either the environment (heat, cold, enclosure) or other requirements (color rendering) make incandescent bulbs preferable. In many cases, the heat from incandescent bulbs is a useful by-product -- they heat occupied rooms in the winter time and they melt snow from traffic light. Ironically, saving energy my not be the best thing for the environment. It may be better to build newer, cleaner and higher efficiency generating stations rather than keeping older ones running.
It is going to cost me about $20K to have the trees removed that currently shade my roof... the cost going green!
It is also worth mentioning that there are many PCB manufactures and assembly houses that will make a couple of PC boards for you and install all the BGAs DQN, FQN, and power pad packages for you for just a few hundred dollars.
Or just buy new flat screen TV.
I should fire up my Apple ][.
Even today's 'high efficiency' halogen lights only produce about 10 lumens per watt. By 2020, all general purpose lights must produce 45 lumens per watt. This effectivly bans all current forms of incandescent lights.
I loved his columns, I have many of his books. I wrote him several times (in the days before email!) with comments on his columns and he always wrote back. I went to see him talk when he has in town. I will miss him.
I have been pro-nuclear all my life. I toured a nuclear plant when I was about 10 years old (back when you could do that sort of thing) and I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. TMI did not phase me. Neither did Chernobyl. I've never believed that nuclear waste disposal is really that technically difficult or expensive (you put in deep in the ground and leave the heck alone). But Fukushima has me wavering. The bottom line is that the containment structure did not work. I had always been under the assumption that the containment structures would hold under just about any imaginable condition with little more than a few puffs of slightly radioactive steam. Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build, they are expensive to operate and when something does go wrong the direct costs of the damages are almost unimaginably high (what is the worth of a few hundred square miles of property that cannot be farmed or inhabited in our children's children's lifetime? And what it an inland river were contaminated instead of the ocean? The more I rationally evaluate it, the more I come to the conclusion that we are going to have to shut them all down.
Ingesting very small amounts of Pu will (probably) not hurt you. The toxicity of Pu is grossly exaggerated. It is chemically toxic like most heavy metals, but there is nothing really special about its toxicity as a chemically. All isotopes of Pu are radioactive, the longer lived isotopes are less radioactive than the shorter lived isotopes. There is nothing special about the radioactivity from Pu 239 (half life of 24K years) that makes it more hazardous than any other radioactive material. If you are concerned about long half lives, the U-238 that is released from burning coal has a half live of 4.4 billion years.
When you 'remove' the mercury from smoke, where does it go? It does not go away, it has to be put somewhere just like the waste products from nuclear power generation. The only real difference is scale. Nuclear produces only a small fraction of the toxic waste that is produced from burning coal, but that waste is a great deal more toxic. Which is easier to deal with? A billion tons of slightly toxic waste or a a thousand tons of highly toxic waste?
What are these 'cheaper' renewable that you are talking about? Do you really believe that there is some massive conspiracy to keep cheap, plentiful, reliable, and renewable power off the market? Or is this the renewable power that you are convinced that would surely be invented if only enough money were spend on it? If you have a way to produce electricty for a few cents a kilowatt hour using renewables, go for it. You have an unlimited worldwide market.
At US$0.10 / kilowatt hour, that would be $120 worth of juice in a new laptop. That really can't be right, so it is obvious that they are not simply counting revolutions of a power meter.
So what does it mean? Did they use the same math to figure out how many megajoules it takes to deliver a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Do you count the manufacturing energy costs in making all the equipment (circuit breaker panel, circuit breaker, wire, insulation, wall box, outlet, etc.) that delivers the power from the meter to the wall plug? Do you count the megajoules required to mine the coal, manufacture a train, manufacture a power station, and as well as thermal losses at the power plant?
Laptops don't use a lot of power anyway, newer laptops don't use a lot less power than older laptops so I am not surprised by the results. The bottom line is that if you cannot show an economic advantage to upgrading (you can cover the cost of the upgrade based on the energy saved in a reasonable time) is it probably not worth upgrading for the sake of saving energy.
How many hours a day can this plant produce 392MW? Maybe 8? The article does not say, but my bet is that generting capacity is only about 3% of Fukashima.
Really? Remember when BP would not release video footage from the underwater robots monitoring the oil plume from the well? Remember how they kept to their very low estimate of the amount leaking from the well? Remember how the first expert that CNN hire to analyze the footage said BP's estimate was off by at least a factor of 10? Who was right? (Of course, BP later denied making any estimate at all claiming they were using the Coast Guard's estimate based on the amount of oil on the surface.)
Excuse me while I put on my lead-foil hat.
Lets do the math a different way:
10,000 deaths a year * $25,000,000 per death = $250 Billion dollar per year problem.
10 Billion starts per year (I think you are way low here):
$250B / 10B = $25 liability per start
By your math, you liabilty is $25 every time you start your car. That sounds a little high to me.
I don't like it. It was not broken.
Why not get rid of a lot of stop signs? Are stop signs that require a complete stop really safer than a yield? I see so many that seem unnecessary. Could low volume intersections be made smart so that stopping (or even slowing) is only required if there is oncoming traffic?
The article makes absolutely no sense. There are no supporting details.
She travelled 3 hours by motorcycle taxi and waited three days to charge her cell phone? How many things are wrong with that picture?
She spent $80 on solar panels primarily to charge a cell phone? Again, what is wrong with that picture?
Sounds like there is a market for cell phone charges that are either hand cranked, solar powered, or apparently motor-cycle powered. What would solar cell capable of keeping a cell phone fully charged cost?
What is the cost break-down of this lighting system? How much is being spent on the solar cells? How long are the storage batteries going to last? What are the competing technologies?
If a village of 20 homes needed a few watts (25W?) of power each day for 4 hours after sundown every day, what else could be purchased for $1600 plus the cost the ongoing cost of replacing the storage batteries?
This is how is works in my head. I can look at the problem and tell you almost instantly that the answer is about 100,000 (33,333 1/3 * 3)and in a few seconds tell you that the answer is probably closer to 105,000 (35,000 * 3). Are these anwser 'close enough' to solve the real problem at hand?
Possums are one of the few wild mammals that really don't carry rabies. Being slashdot I felt obligated to point that out.
It would typically take me a whole week (168 hours) to drive the 375 miles to use up that much charge.
Electric cars will fail, and series hybrids like the Chevy Volt will succeed. When the batteries run low a gas generator keeps the batteries charged enough to power the vehicle. This is brilliant: I get my electric car for my short daily commutes, but I still have gas for those rare times when I need to drive hundreds of miles in a day. I have the best of both worlds with no sacrifices..
And all those other times when you are not driving 100 miles in a day you are lugging around a heavy and useless generator. That you paid good money for. And when you are driving more than 100 miles a day, you are lugging around huge battery packs that are doing very little good (outside of some regenerative braking and acceleration boost which are negligible on the Interstate at a constant speed.) It sounds to me like the worst of both worlds. I think I would rather have a small all electric car to get me to work on a daily basis and a large gas SUV for longer trips (and it would be great if I could just rent the SUV when I needed it.)
And no, you cannot get anywhere close to 80% efficiency with gas-in, electricty out turbines.
Helium will never be impossible to get, even in large quantities. Stop worrying!
The atmosphere is 5ppm helium. That is not a lot of concentration, but we have a lot of atmosphere. But we will never even get to the point of needing to recover it from the atmosphere. Helium is present in most natural gas well in concentrations of 1000's of ppm. Most of that cannot be economically recovered at this time because helium is cheap, and recovery is expensive. We are not 'wasting' helium through use, we are 'wasting' helium by not recovering it in the first place.
If an area has to be higher than the idealized surface to be 'level' (to keep a ball from rolling) won't that be an area that has stronger local gravity?
Interesting... the Indian ocean is nearly 100 meters too shallow.
So in 2-3 years, I should be able to pick up a used Tesla Roadster for about $10K? I can't wait!
You get the feeling that 90% of these statistics are made up?
I am not sure how the situation can be worsened. At this point, they need a temporary solution that will slow the venting of the oil into the ocean until the relief well(s) can be completed. The idea is not to try to 'equalize' the well. Pumping would be a dynamic fix. The pressure would only remain as long as pumping continued. They may find that the seawater forms viscous clathrates in what is left of the riser pipe further slowing the oil flow. If sea water won't work, then pump in clay (yes, tanker after tanker after tanker of it). Unless of course they were lying about stopping the oil flow with the top kill while pumping, in which case, never mind.
One article said that the oil flow stopped while they were pumping in the mud. Why not continue the pumping operation with seawater to keep the pressure in the BOP as high as possible?