I don't know about the coal number, but your tonnage for the Uranium may be off unless you are talking about unprocessed ore maybe. The 64,000 ton figure is the amount of nuke fuel consumed in the US since inception of nuclear power here (or 50 years or so).
The Xsan press release is the most interesting to me because it's a long lead time pre-annoucement. Now most companies don't bat an eye with preannoucements. They toss them out like crazy often with an eye to just stoke the stock price or FUD competition. But there is such a thing as a good pre-annoucement.
That is not something Apple does much if at all for its products. While silence until shipping is a good move (I would say) in the consumer space. It's bad for the Enterprise space. Apple has been criticized and justifiably so for not pre-announcing key technology so developers and enterprises can plan accordingly.
Now I agree that it's probably better to err on the side of less pre-announcement, but Apple took this to too much of an extreme.
I think this is an indication that Apple is 'getting it' more and more regarding Enterprise/Pro markets.
I would agree completely. The Fine is meaningless except as a form of wealth transfer from the US to Europe (and as such that part of it actually pisses me off though I have no love for MS). Fines don't change business practices directly (unless they are ongoing) which is why I really LIKE the other part of Monty's resolution, the part about requiring direct changes to business practices. That will be great for the high tech industry worldwide and so I praise the European regulators for this move.
At the close of 1996, AAPL had 1.7 billion is cash. And unlike today, AAPL had about 1 billion in debt plus other liabilities. And S&P indicated that 5 months later (May 5, 1997), Apple's net cash position was $374 million after "net losses of more than $1.6 billion over the past 18 months".
So I'd say that the situation was pretty dire. Maybe AAPL could have kept burning through their cash for longer than 3 months, but it doesn't look like they could have lasted more than 1 year. Three months of life before financial collapse looks entirely possible. Something had to be done in the summer of 1997 or Apple would have been toast.
Steve Jobs did an absolutely amazing job saving this company.
The DirecTV receivers with TiVo includes TWO tuners so this is not a problem at all for those models. It's a really nice feature of these receivers. Not sure why only DirecTV customers can use them.
d
Look, just because I haven't found joints in my addict Son's bedroom doesn't mean he doesn't still have a drug problem.
Saddam's Iraq had the means, the people, the technology, the money, the equipment, and most importantly the Will to build AND use these weapons at any point in the future. They built and used them in the past as no one debates.
Assuming he did stop making WMD and really destoyed all the stocks (which I doubt), It is nevertheless totally naive to think Saddam wouldn't go right back to building these weapons at the nearest opportunity.
So to me, it is largely irrelevant weather you find the "joints" as far as justification goes. Removing the "drug supply" is more than reason enough to justify getting rid of the Ba'ath Party and Saddam Hussein.
It's a really slick, fin-shaped device/antenna plus software; it records web radio or on-air broadcasts, pauses live radio, records scheduled shows, USB powered, uses the Mac hard disk for DVR-- er, DAR?, will transfer recordings to your iPod... all for $69.
I think the point is that Mac OS X *the software* has a long history of doing exactly what this one guy said it did not; and had been evolving from a very advanced point while the alternatives were in diapers. It's even better today.
ALSO: most observers consider the Apple purchase of NeXT a reverse take-over. Practically the entire exec team is NeXT execs: legal VP, hardware VP, software VPs, application VPs, and of course the CEO to name a few. By some measure Apple is a rebranding of NeXT. Plus NeXT itself wasn't some radom company, it was Steve Jobs' company, a company that in many ways delivered the Mac that Apple could have had had he not been forced out.
Actually compamies would probably love to build extra grid capacity but seeing how Govt rules prevent this in terms of interstate transfer, nothing gets done until days like today. We need LESS regulation of the grid and then maybe enterprising companies would jump in and address the demand.
Re:This makes me think of .....
on
More on Spintronics
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Gravity is a bending of space-time caused by matter. In order for the warp in space-time to move faster than light, the mass causing the warp in space must also move faster than light, which is impossible.
Not true. Suppose you have two masses rotating each other like the Moon around the earth. Space time curvature is changing as this happens. One moment it's shaped like X, the next like Y. A test mass will see a lag time in the shape of its local spacetime due to this movement. That is, when the masses are eclipsed, they won't appear or "feel" that way at a distance where the test mass is because the image of the masses AND the spacetime curvature changes go at the speed of light. Einstein referred to these spacetime changes as gravity waves and they are a form of energy. If the masses are really large (like rotating neutron stars) the energy in these waves could be significant and it's hoped that gravity wave detectors may be able to detect them.
This is because in order for gravitons to create gravity, they'd have to jump between all objects in the universe constantly... it's a bunch of hogwash.
Quantum Mechanics says much the same thing about all particles. Their wave function is smeared out everywhere it's just that the probability is very small that an electron, say, is a mile from it's nucleus. Now everyone will agree that Gravity and Quantum Mechanics are not unified very well with existing theory; but your explanation doesn't give evidence that gravitons don't exist. I've illustrated that like a oscillating charge which creates electromagnetic waves, an oscillating mass can create gravity waves (oscillations is the shape of spacetime). Since we agree quanta of such energy exists (photons) why not gravitons?
The parent should be modded all the way up to an article in and of itself. Buy.com is lying about the most basic stat, and the media is just buying it.
That link indicates that instead of 14,000 acres, 16,000 square miles is needed. And all that area addresses NOT 100% of US demand, but only 20%. So it looks like I was right to be suspicious of your numbers.
And considering insurance. This is a good point. But how many significant nuclear accidents have their been in the US since the 50s? TMI 1979; that's it. There have been other incidents, but that was the only serious one; and no one died and the plant is still operating. The upshot is that since inception in 1957, this act has resulted in basically nil payout/cost to taxpayers.
The fact is that there are far more deadly and far more numerous accidents in other industries (like chemical plants) every year much less over 40 plus. And I don't see these boys getting walloped by insurance rates that jack their costs n-fold.
I seriously doubt that insurance adequately adjusted for the risk would cost much. The concern I have is with the irrational fear of nuclear power. That combined with our general out-of-control tort process could result in irrational insurance rates that don't reflect the real risk -- at least in the short term. Nevertheless, I'd like to see this like most other forms of govt subsidies phased out. I believe after an initial spike, insurance rates would come down to something reasonable once the insurance companies were able to weigh the risks throughly.
In addition liability cost for the current PWR plants would not apply for passively safe designs like the new Pebble Bed Reactors. The latter are designed to avoid an accident even with the total loss of coolant flow. They can't meltdown -- as field tests in the US and Europe have shown. Hence the former worst case scenario is not possible which means less liability and less insurance cost for any new plants that use such a design.
Finally, I think your disposal cost argument is weak. The volume of nuke waste is so tiny that shipping and even temp storage are not huge costs; and storage of every bit of the stuff permanently at Yucca is therefore also not a problem; and costs for the latter are already sunk. Decommissioning is 10% of capex but decades in the future. And plants are getting new commissions for extra life of 20 or more years like clockwork. that means the decommissioning is fractions of a cent in terms of the amortized cost.
Re:financial downside much larger
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
The entire United States of America can be converted to wind powered electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much oak forest lost in California each year.
Really? Aren't you being misleading? Is this a Stanford where every square inch of land is covered by the footprint of a windmill? What spacing between windmills would actually be needed in practice? How much land would actually have to be used in practice? What wind load does your 14000 acres assume? Would not more turbines be needed for some areas less blessed with wind? I could probably stack every power poll in California vertically on Stanford's campus too with no room between poles. That doesn't mean they aren't eyesores anyway despite being spread out over the whole state.
Now if this is for real w/o distortion and in practice I can get that much power and only have to consume that little land, then I'd be surprised and impressed. And I'd be more interested in wind certainly as at least a more significant chunk of the total energy picture.
The heavily subsidized typical cost for U.S. nuclear power is around $0.12/kwh. That's with a blanket insurance policy courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act, and doesn't include the cost of waste disposal and other externalites like terrorism and natural disaster vulnerability, which can not be measured until it's too late.
Actually operating a nuke plant even in the super-expensive US is 2 cents/kWh [Utility Data Institute] The cost then is all wrapped up in the amortized capex for the Plant. And with standardization like in France you can get that plant cost down big time. Combining that effort with the new advanced reactor designs, and you have the cheapest energy out there.
Decommissioning costs are about 10% of the initial capex. But their present value is so small that they contribute only a few percent to the amortized cost. In the US this amounts to less than $0.002/kWh. So big farking deal.
d
Re:Permanent eyesores & small impact
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
Thats still alot of homes. Andi wouldn't say 2% of New England is a small part of the big picture. Thats actually fairly impressive for 130 windmills.
I'll grant you that.
That's quite the downside though, wouldn't you say? Its possible that downside could affect us here in the US, should the structure containing the disaster collaspe.
I don't agree. We've been living with possibility of such risk for some time now (Chemical Plants in our midst). The odds are just too small. The risk/reward is in favor of nuclear vs fossil fuels. And the latest plant designs drop the odds of an accident so low as to be ridiculous (meteor strike low) [See: Pebble Bed Reactor Design]...while the risk of environmental damage due to oil pipelines, tankers, strip mining, coal mine fires, and burning of those fuels isn't a question of probability. It's happening right now.
The other downside you forget is what to do with the spent fuel rods. I'd just as soon not have that stuff around anywhere.
You're a little paranoid about that. The total cumulative volume of nuclear waste produced in the US over 50 years wouldn't fill a warehouse covering a football field.
d
Re:Permanent eyesores & small impact
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
You said: "You can't just keep cramming it into a mountain forever."
Yes you can. Do you know how much volume we're talking about? The total weight of all fuel generated in the US from Nuke plants since inception (about 50 years ago) of it use is 77000 tons. And for a big chunk of those last 5 decades Nukes were cranking 20% of US power.
Now you may be thinking: wow... 77000 tons. that's a lot. I'm telling you it's nothing. Here are some calcs using the football field metaphor that's been used before to help visualize size...
77000 tons of waste 62 lbs/ft3 density of water (nuke waste is denser) 2000 lbs/ton 154000000 lbs of waste 2483870.968 ft3 of waste at density of water 120 yards long of a football field 50 yards wide of a football field 6000 yd2 area of football field 3 ft/yd 9 ft2/yd2 54000 ft2 45.99761051 ft high of water covering a football field 15.3325 yds high of water covering a football field
I know of lots of warehouses bigger than this. Remember this isn't volume of waste per year. It's volume produced cumulatively over decades.
Now as for Coal alone there are Mountains that have been strip mined; less than one days worth of ore hauling is bigger than this. One supertanker has for more volume than this.
If all US power were nuclear over the last 50 years (rather than just 20% for much of that time), this pile would be only about 5 times higher. Big farking deal. Small price to pay in terms of long term storage in exchange for no green house gas emissions for 5 decades, no NOx, no acid rain, no coal mining, and no imports of oil at least for purposes of producing power.
We'd still have emissions for fueling cars and non-power uses of oil, but man it would be a lot less. And heck, why not build a few more nuke plants to handle the extra load of charging cars and creating H2? Now you would have the potential for a nearly an emission free future.
And creating these plants does not need to be as expensive as it has historically been in the US. The French model of standardization combined with the latest reactor designs should take the capex of these plants if built in the future way way down and also boost their safety. And nothing is cheaper than nuke power in terms of fuel cost vs energy produced by that fuel.
Permanent eyesores & small impact
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think at one time people though Power Lines looked cool. They were a novelty when they were new and not a lot of people had seen one. Now they are about the worst of a city's common eyesores. The same thing applies to Wind Turbines. At some point they will be viewed just like power lines. Ugggg-LY!
And these windmills won't in fact make a dent in the big picture. People want the people near Cape Cod to suck it up for the greater good. But this project would not improve the greater good as defined by green house gas production. The article said they would handle 75% of local power needs but that was only 1.8% of New England. And the damaged view would be permanent.
Now if the people of New England really wanted to (as the article says) produce power "without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil" AND in addition do so with an absolute minimum use of land and shoreline, they would build a typical modern Nuke plant in the multi-GW range. That would impact much more than 1.8% of the region's power needs.
The only downside to Nukes is a Chernobyl-like operating mess. But that has proved extremely rare (one such event in the history of Nuclear Power, 50+ years) and probably even less likely by an order of magnitude given the plant designs and operating policies in Europe, Japan, and the US vs. the former Soviet Union. I'd rather live with that risk than the risk presented by thousands of trolling supertankers in the world's oceans.
Say what you want about the French, these folks know Nuclear power. Imagine if the US were 70% emission free power like they are. Electric cars would suddenly make sense, hydrogen economy would make sense... because the ultimate source of the juice was emission free.
You mean BSD and Linux supporters/ditributors don't refer to these OSes as being Unix-like or Unix-based in any way? Come on!
That cats out of the bag.
d
Re:new technique for displays?
on
Mastering Light
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· Score: 1
I think you misunderstand the previous post... think... why do you have red/green/blue? It's to mix the colors to get the desired color for that spot. Well, suppose that you just needee one element that could give THAT desired color with no additional mixing?
As a crude approximation, 90% of the time is due to 10% of the code.
I think with respect to web programming, this is itself a myth. This rule of thumb seems to have reached the popular consciousness of developers in the 80s when desktop apps ruled. This was a time when each additional user adds a CPU. And it's true; in such a world, you don't worry about that other 90%. But when you have a fixed number CPUs shared by vastly more clients, you need to worry about more than just the 10% most offending code.
In addition, I've found that programmers can be Soooo lazy that even the 90/10 isn't true in practice. I've seen the same expensive mistakes happen all over nearly every page of a web app.
This is why so many intranet and internet applications seem slow. People put-off worrying about performance until the last step (just like they are told to). And then it might be too late.
Developers get lulled into thinking everything's fine. Seems fast enough to them. But they are one user. Hundreds or thousands of real users will hit their app. If it's just OK for one, it's probably not OK for hundreds. Even if things seem lightning quick to you, they may not be for the hoard.
In a lot of cases, performance can't be gained just by optimizing the little things here and there. In these cases, you often have to restructure how you approach things app-wide; you find yourself tweaking sections of almost every module. Or yanking out nice abstractions in favor of going bare metal. That takes even more time to do after the fact.
My rule of thumb with web apps is actually to:
Worry about performance throughout development.
Time all page responses.
Work on a slow machine.
If you are developing a app, you will be irritated by a slow DB fetch, too many redundant fetches, or too much processing. YOU don't want to wait. YOU will be highly motivated to speed things up just for your own productivity. Budding performance issues will be detected early when structural changes are less expensive (if deemed needed). At the end of the project, you will be fixing bugs, not re-architecting for performance.
From Apple's POV, they don't need to change Windows dominance. Just getting a few % points of those Win shops could double or triple AAPL's profits.
Researched these things
on
Gas Goes Solid
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Hydrates are quite interesting.
Right out of College about 13 years ago I joined one of those huge Oil Companies and the main thing I did there for 2 years was study gas hydrates. The reason we studied them was in order to *prevent* their formation which is the opposite of what this article talks about. The problem with hydrates in the oil business is that under high pressure and low temperature they form... and guess what conditions predominate in undersea pipelines?
When oil comes from the formation, it is almost always mixed with water and some varying amount of gas or other hydrate forming HCs. Everything is fine up the wellbore and near the wellhead, but not too far away from the wellhead the fluid starts getting cold and these solid particles form. They can clog a pipeline if you don't take countermeasures. One is to run a device called a "pig" through the pipeline to clean them out. Another is to install insulation, heated lines, or inject lots of chemicals like MeOH to suppress the hydrates. But all of these things start increasing the production cost and/or decreasing capacity.
So our research looked into creating chemicals that you could inject in very small volumes near the wellhead to inhibit the formation of hydrates.
Anyway, all this hydrate study did make people think about the application of hydrates in the transport of natural gas (NG). I think it's a very interesting idea. Currently to get NG from a remote place to market, you need lots of big expensive gas turbines driving massive refrigeration equipment to create Liquified NG (LNG). Then you need these huge, wild looking LNG tankers. Then you need special port facilities to handle the super-cold LNG. The up front capex is so massive (think 10 billion plus for many potential projects) that no one just pays that upfront hoping the customers will show up. No. You get agreements on paper stretching out 30 years with customers and only THEN do you give the green light to the project.
Hydrates certainly wouldn't need near the compressor/turbine expense of LNG development, and there might be a sweet spot in terms of pressurization and temperature you might strike. However the rest of the economics I'm not too sure about. If most of the cost of a project is the tankers and you need a lot more of them for Hydrate, then you might be better off with LNG. The other huge thing in LNG's favor is that we know it works and can calculate a cost.
One interesting idea I saw floated once was the creation of hydrate subs. Huge deepsea vessels that would be able to stay cold and high pressure just by virtue of being well below the sea surface where those conditions are natural. Now unlike a typical sub, these guys would never surface and so would not need thick walls to handle pressure differences inside and out.
Imagine one of these things scooping up hydrate from the ocean floor and carting it off to a disassociation plant on the seabed (preferably in a subsea canyon as closs to the coast as possible) that evaporated the hydrate gas into a regular gas pipeline.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the coal number, but your tonnage for the Uranium may be off unless you are talking about unprocessed ore maybe. The 64,000 ton figure is the amount of nuke fuel consumed in the US since inception of nuclear power here (or 50 years or so).
Includes stock?
So in other words, there is no proof.
That is not something Apple does much if at all for its products. While silence until shipping is a good move (I would say) in the consumer space. It's bad for the Enterprise space. Apple has been criticized and justifiably so for not pre-announcing key technology so developers and enterprises can plan accordingly.
Now I agree that it's probably better to err on the side of less pre-announcement, but Apple took this to too much of an extreme.
I think this is an indication that Apple is 'getting it' more and more regarding Enterprise/Pro markets.
I would agree completely. The Fine is meaningless except as a form of wealth transfer from the US to Europe (and as such that part of it actually pisses me off though I have no love for MS). Fines don't change business practices directly (unless they are ongoing) which is why I really LIKE the other part of Monty's resolution, the part about requiring direct changes to business practices. That will be great for the high tech industry worldwide and so I praise the European regulators for this move.
I do that too... but I'm on a Mac. It's actually possible you know.
At the close of 1996, AAPL had 1.7 billion is cash. And unlike today, AAPL had about 1 billion in debt plus other liabilities. And S&P indicated that 5 months later (May 5, 1997), Apple's net cash position was $374 million after "net losses of more than $1.6 billion over the past 18 months".
So I'd say that the situation was pretty dire. Maybe AAPL could have kept burning through their cash for longer than 3 months, but it doesn't look like they could have lasted more than 1 year. Three months of life before financial collapse looks entirely possible. Something had to be done in the summer of 1997 or Apple would have been toast.
Steve Jobs did an absolutely amazing job saving this company.
d
The DirecTV receivers with TiVo includes TWO tuners so this is not a problem at all for those models. It's a really nice feature of these receivers. Not sure why only DirecTV customers can use them. d
Saddam's Iraq had the means, the people, the technology, the money, the equipment, and most importantly the Will to build AND use these weapons at any point in the future. They built and used them in the past as no one debates.
Assuming he did stop making WMD and really destoyed all the stocks (which I doubt), It is nevertheless totally naive to think Saddam wouldn't go right back to building these weapons at the nearest opportunity.
So to me, it is largely irrelevant weather you find the "joints" as far as justification goes. Removing the "drug supply" is more than reason enough to justify getting rid of the Ba'ath Party and Saddam Hussein.
d
Already exists ... at least on Mac OS X:
Radio Shark
It's a really slick, fin-shaped device/antenna plus software; it records web radio or on-air broadcasts, pauses live radio, records scheduled shows, USB powered, uses the Mac hard disk for DVR-- er, DAR?, will transfer recordings to your iPod... all for $69.
d
I guess that is because the USA has taken more then 50% of the worlds wealth I think the word you meant to say as "created" instead of "taken".
ALSO: most observers consider the Apple purchase of NeXT a reverse take-over. Practically the entire exec team is NeXT execs: legal VP, hardware VP, software VPs, application VPs, and of course the CEO to name a few. By some measure Apple is a rebranding of NeXT. Plus NeXT itself wasn't some radom company, it was Steve Jobs' company, a company that in many ways delivered the Mac that Apple could have had had he not been forced out.
dave
Actually compamies would probably love to build extra grid capacity but seeing how Govt rules prevent this in terms of interstate transfer, nothing gets done until days like today. We need LESS regulation of the grid and then maybe enterprising companies would jump in and address the demand.
Not true. Suppose you have two masses rotating each other like the Moon around the earth. Space time curvature is changing as this happens. One moment it's shaped like X, the next like Y. A test mass will see a lag time in the shape of its local spacetime due to this movement. That is, when the masses are eclipsed, they won't appear or "feel" that way at a distance where the test mass is because the image of the masses AND the spacetime curvature changes go at the speed of light. Einstein referred to these spacetime changes as gravity waves and they are a form of energy. If the masses are really large (like rotating neutron stars) the energy in these waves could be significant and it's hoped that gravity wave detectors may be able to detect them.
This is because in order for gravitons to create gravity, they'd have to jump between all objects in the universe constantly... it's a bunch of hogwash.
Quantum Mechanics says much the same thing about all particles. Their wave function is smeared out everywhere it's just that the probability is very small that an electron, say, is a mile from it's nucleus. Now everyone will agree that Gravity and Quantum Mechanics are not unified very well with existing theory; but your explanation doesn't give evidence that gravitons don't exist. I've illustrated that like a oscillating charge which creates electromagnetic waves, an oscillating mass can create gravity waves (oscillations is the shape of spacetime). Since we agree quanta of such energy exists (photons) why not gravitons?
The parent should be modded all the way up to an article in and of itself. Buy.com is lying about the most basic stat, and the media is just buying it.
OK, here goes...
First off, your link is broken. However here's one yanked from another post:
American Wind Energy Association
That link indicates that instead of 14,000 acres, 16,000 square miles is needed. And all that area addresses NOT 100% of US demand, but only 20%. So it looks like I was right to be suspicious of your numbers.
And considering insurance. This is a good point. But how many significant nuclear accidents have their been in the US since the 50s? TMI 1979; that's it. There have been other incidents, but that was the only serious one; and no one died and the plant is still operating. The upshot is that since inception in 1957, this act has resulted in basically nil payout/cost to taxpayers.
The fact is that there are far more deadly and far more numerous accidents in other industries (like chemical plants) every year much less over 40 plus. And I don't see these boys getting walloped by insurance rates that jack their costs n-fold.
I seriously doubt that insurance adequately adjusted for the risk would cost much. The concern I have is with the irrational fear of nuclear power. That combined with our general out-of-control tort process could result in irrational insurance rates that don't reflect the real risk -- at least in the short term. Nevertheless, I'd like to see this like most other forms of govt subsidies phased out. I believe after an initial spike, insurance rates would come down to something reasonable once the insurance companies were able to weigh the risks throughly.
In addition liability cost for the current PWR plants would not apply for passively safe designs like the new Pebble Bed Reactors. The latter are designed to avoid an accident even with the total loss of coolant flow. They can't meltdown -- as field tests in the US and Europe have shown. Hence the former worst case scenario is not possible which means less liability and less insurance cost for any new plants that use such a design.
Finally, I think your disposal cost argument is weak. The volume of nuke waste is so tiny that shipping and even temp storage are not huge costs; and storage of every bit of the stuff permanently at Yucca is therefore also not a problem; and costs for the latter are already sunk. Decommissioning is 10% of capex but decades in the future. And plants are getting new commissions for extra life of 20 or more years like clockwork. that means the decommissioning is fractions of a cent in terms of the amortized cost.
Really? Aren't you being misleading? Is this a Stanford where every square inch of land is covered by the footprint of a windmill? What spacing between windmills would actually be needed in practice? How much land would actually have to be used in practice? What wind load does your 14000 acres assume? Would not more turbines be needed for some areas less blessed with wind? I could probably stack every power poll in California vertically on Stanford's campus too with no room between poles. That doesn't mean they aren't eyesores anyway despite being spread out over the whole state.
Now if this is for real w/o distortion and in practice I can get that much power and only have to consume that little land, then I'd be surprised and impressed. And I'd be more interested in wind certainly as at least a more significant chunk of the total energy picture.
The heavily subsidized typical cost for U.S. nuclear power is around $0.12/kwh. That's with a blanket insurance policy courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act, and doesn't include the cost of waste disposal and other externalites like terrorism and natural disaster vulnerability, which can not be measured until it's too late.
Actually operating a nuke plant even in the super-expensive US is 2 cents/kWh [Utility Data Institute] The cost then is all wrapped up in the amortized capex for the Plant. And with standardization like in France you can get that plant cost down big time. Combining that effort with the new advanced reactor designs, and you have the cheapest energy out there.
Decommissioning costs are about 10% of the initial capex. But their present value is so small that they contribute only a few percent to the amortized cost. In the US this amounts to less than $0.002/kWh. So big farking deal.
d
I'll grant you that.
That's quite the downside though, wouldn't you say? Its possible that downside could affect us here in the US, should the structure containing the disaster collaspe.
I don't agree. We've been living with possibility of such risk for some time now (Chemical Plants in our midst). The odds are just too small. The risk/reward is in favor of nuclear vs fossil fuels. And the latest plant designs drop the odds of an accident so low as to be ridiculous (meteor strike low) [See: Pebble Bed Reactor Design] ...while the risk of environmental damage due to oil pipelines, tankers, strip mining, coal mine fires, and burning of those fuels isn't a question of probability. It's happening right now.
The other downside you forget is what to do with the spent fuel rods. I'd just as soon not have that stuff around anywhere.
You're a little paranoid about that. The total cumulative volume of nuclear waste produced in the US over 50 years wouldn't fill a warehouse covering a football field.
d
You said: "You can't just keep cramming it into a mountain forever."
Yes you can. Do you know how much volume we're talking about? The total weight of all fuel generated in the US from Nuke plants since inception (about 50 years ago) of it use is 77000 tons. And for a big chunk of those last 5 decades Nukes were cranking 20% of US power.
Now you may be thinking: wow... 77000 tons. that's a lot. I'm telling you it's nothing. Here are some calcs using the football field metaphor that's been used before to help visualize size...
77000 tons of waste
62 lbs/ft3 density of water (nuke waste is denser)
2000 lbs/ton
154000000 lbs of waste
2483870.968 ft3 of waste at density of water
120 yards long of a football field
50 yards wide of a football field
6000 yd2 area of football field
3 ft/yd
9 ft2/yd2
54000 ft2
45.99761051 ft high of water covering a football field
15.3325 yds high of water covering a football field
I know of lots of warehouses bigger than this. Remember this isn't volume of waste per year. It's volume produced cumulatively over decades.
Now as for Coal alone there are Mountains that have been strip mined; less than one days worth of ore hauling is bigger than this. One supertanker has for more volume than this.
If all US power were nuclear over the last 50 years (rather than just 20% for much of that time), this pile would be only about 5 times higher. Big farking deal. Small price to pay in terms of long term storage in exchange for no green house gas emissions for 5 decades, no NOx, no acid rain, no coal mining, and no imports of oil at least for purposes of producing power.
We'd still have emissions for fueling cars and non-power uses of oil, but man it would be a lot less. And heck, why not build a few more nuke plants to handle the extra load of charging cars and creating H2? Now you would have the potential for a nearly an emission free future.
And creating these plants does not need to be as expensive as it has historically been in the US. The French model of standardization combined with the latest reactor designs should take the capex of these plants if built in the future way way down and also boost their safety. And nothing is cheaper than nuke power in terms of fuel cost vs energy produced by that fuel.
I think at one time people though Power Lines looked cool. They were a novelty when they were new and not a lot of people had seen one. Now they are about the worst of a city's common eyesores. The same thing applies to Wind Turbines. At some point they will be viewed just like power lines. Ugggg-LY!
And these windmills won't in fact make a dent in the big picture. People want the people near Cape Cod to suck it up for the greater good. But this project would not improve the greater good as defined by green house gas production. The article said they would handle 75% of local power needs but that was only 1.8% of New England. And the damaged view would be permanent.
Now if the people of New England really wanted to (as the article says) produce power "without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil" AND in addition do so with an absolute minimum use of land and shoreline, they would build a typical modern Nuke plant in the multi-GW range. That would impact much more than 1.8% of the region's power needs.
The only downside to Nukes is a Chernobyl-like operating mess. But that has proved extremely rare (one such event in the history of Nuclear Power, 50+ years) and probably even less likely by an order of magnitude given the plant designs and operating policies in Europe, Japan, and the US vs. the former Soviet Union. I'd rather live with that risk than the risk presented by thousands of trolling supertankers in the world's oceans.
Say what you want about the French, these folks know Nuclear power. Imagine if the US were 70% emission free power like they are. Electric cars would suddenly make sense, hydrogen economy would make sense... because the ultimate source of the juice was emission free.
d
You mean BSD and Linux supporters/ditributors don't refer to these OSes as being Unix-like or Unix-based in any way? Come on! That cats out of the bag. d
I think you misunderstand the previous post... think... why do you have red/green/blue? It's to mix the colors to get the desired color for that spot. Well, suppose that you just needee one element that could give THAT desired color with no additional mixing?
d
I think with respect to web programming, this is itself a myth. This rule of thumb seems to have reached the popular consciousness of developers in the 80s when desktop apps ruled. This was a time when each additional user adds a CPU. And it's true; in such a world, you don't worry about that other 90%. But when you have a fixed number CPUs shared by vastly more clients, you need to worry about more than just the 10% most offending code.
In addition, I've found that programmers can be Soooo lazy that even the 90/10 isn't true in practice. I've seen the same expensive mistakes happen all over nearly every page of a web app.
This is why so many intranet and internet applications seem slow. People put-off worrying about performance until the last step (just like they are told to). And then it might be too late.
Developers get lulled into thinking everything's fine. Seems fast enough to them. But they are one user. Hundreds or thousands of real users will hit their app. If it's just OK for one, it's probably not OK for hundreds. Even if things seem lightning quick to you, they may not be for the hoard.
In a lot of cases, performance can't be gained just by optimizing the little things here and there. In these cases, you often have to restructure how you approach things app-wide; you find yourself tweaking sections of almost every module. Or yanking out nice abstractions in favor of going bare metal. That takes even more time to do after the fact.
My rule of thumb with web apps is actually to:
- Worry about performance throughout development.
- Time all page responses.
- Work on a slow machine.
If you are developing a app, you will be irritated by a slow DB fetch, too many redundant fetches, or too much processing. YOU don't want to wait. YOU will be highly motivated to speed things up just for your own productivity. Budding performance issues will be detected early when structural changes are less expensive (if deemed needed). At the end of the project, you will be fixing bugs, not re-architecting for performance.dave
From Apple's POV, they don't need to change Windows dominance. Just getting a few % points of those Win shops could double or triple AAPL's profits.
Hydrates are quite interesting.
... and guess what conditions predominate in undersea pipelines?
Right out of College about 13 years ago I joined one of those huge Oil Companies and the main thing I did there for 2 years was study gas hydrates. The reason we studied them was in order to *prevent* their formation which is the opposite of what this article talks about. The problem with hydrates in the oil business is that under high pressure and low temperature they form
When oil comes from the formation, it is almost always mixed with water and some varying amount of gas or other hydrate forming HCs. Everything is fine up the wellbore and near the wellhead, but not too far away from the wellhead the fluid starts getting cold and these solid particles form. They can clog a pipeline if you don't take countermeasures. One is to run a device called a "pig" through the pipeline to clean them out. Another is to install insulation, heated lines, or inject lots of chemicals like MeOH to suppress the hydrates. But all of these things start increasing the production cost and/or decreasing capacity.
So our research looked into creating chemicals that you could inject in very small volumes near the wellhead to inhibit the formation of hydrates.
Anyway, all this hydrate study did make people think about the application of hydrates in the transport of natural gas (NG). I think it's a very interesting idea. Currently to get NG from a remote place to market, you need lots of big expensive gas turbines driving massive refrigeration equipment to create Liquified NG (LNG). Then you need these huge, wild looking LNG tankers. Then you need special port facilities to handle the super-cold LNG. The up front capex is so massive (think 10 billion plus for many potential projects) that no one just pays that upfront hoping the customers will show up. No. You get agreements on paper stretching out 30 years with customers and only THEN do you give the green light to the project.
Hydrates certainly wouldn't need near the compressor/turbine expense of LNG development, and there might be a sweet spot in terms of pressurization and temperature you might strike. However the rest of the economics I'm not too sure about. If most of the cost of a project is the tankers and you need a lot more of them for Hydrate, then you might be better off with LNG. The other huge thing in LNG's favor is that we know it works and can calculate a cost.
One interesting idea I saw floated once was the creation of hydrate subs. Huge deepsea vessels that would be able to stay cold and high pressure just by virtue of being well below the sea surface where those conditions are natural. Now unlike a typical sub, these guys would never surface and so would not need thick walls to handle pressure differences inside and out.
Imagine one of these things scooping up hydrate from the ocean floor and carting it off to a disassociation plant on the seabed (preferably in a subsea canyon as closs to the coast as possible) that evaporated the hydrate gas into a regular gas pipeline.
dave