The good news is that even if we use up all the natural uranium, there are solutions like accelerator powered fission that can use abundant natural Thorium as a self-breeding fuel.
The problem with the whole "peak oil" concept is that increasing price of oil increases reserves. Strangely enough, humanity does not know where "all the oil is". As we look around the world for oil, we are finding it everywhere. There is more oil in deeper areas and offshore than was ever expected. These deposits sometimes are more expensive to pump, but become economically viable at only slightly higher oil prices (like the kinds we are experiencing right now).
For example, oil production in South and Central America has doubled from 3M barrels per day to 6M barrels per day since 1982. In the same time, Europe ramped up from 3.5M barrels per day to 6M barrels per day, most offshore from Norway and UK. Africa and Asia have both added 2M barrels per day in that time frame.
Here are two recent oil discoveries:
May 20, 2004 - Apache Corp. announced that its Stickle-1 well has discovered oil within the WA-12-R retention lease in the Exmouth Sub-Basin of the Carnarvon Basin offshore Western Australia. It is Apache's third wildcat discovery in the play within the last 10 months, with an oil column comparable to that of the two earlier discoveries.
21/05/2004 - Anglo-Dutch energy major Royal Dutch/Shell said that it had made its first commercial oil discovery in the eastern part of its Northeast Abu Gharadig (NEAG) concession in Egypt's Western Desert, Reuters reported. The company said in a statement that the Sheiba 18-3 well in the concession had tested up to 1,600 barrels of 36 degree API oil per day and 0.9 million cubic feet (25,480 cu meters) of gas per day.
Breeder reactors have not caught on because uranium remains fairly cheap, especially compared with the high cost of reformed breeded fuel. Uranium is cheap because there have been few nuclear reactors built since 1970.
If enough non-breeding nuclear reactors are built, the price of uranium will probably increase, which will make breeders become economically feasible.
New Discoveries - last 30 days
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 2, Informative
May 14, 2004--Portrush Petroleum Corporation is pleased to announce the results from the Mission River Oilfield in the Gulf Coast region of Texas, near Corpus Christi, in Refugio County, Texas...Out of the 120 cores removed from the well-bore 44 were analyzed as having "probable Production" of oil, natural gas and/or condensate (light oil carried in the gas streams)...Due to tremendous improvement in energy industry technology, rising prices for energy products and vast expansion of market outlook, the gas bearing strata in particular and thinner oil-bearing horizons previously penetrated but never produced during the original development era (1920-1950), many were overlooked or then unidentified oil and natural gas sands were left behind as being "non commercial".
The Scotsman, UK - Apr 20, 2004 CAIRN Energy, the Edinburgh-based oil and gas exploration group, today announced a third and "potentially significant" oil discovery in Rajasthan, India...
Kerr-McGee makes deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil discovery - Apr 19, 2004... reported Monday the discovery of more than 250 ft of net high-quality hydrocarbon pay, primarily oil, with its Ticonderoga discovery well and initial sidetrack...
May. 18, 2004 - Daugherty Resources went looking for natural gas in Eastern Kentucky early this year and got "a costly surprise." It struck oil. "We certainly didn't expect to find the oil field we found," the Lexington company's CEO, William S. Daugherty, said yesterday.
Connacher Reports First Quarter Results - May 11, 2004... Thirteen wells were drilled in the period. All were cased. - A significant oil discovery was made at Tompkins, Saskatchewan.
14/05/04 Oil Search Limited (OSH) this morning reported to shareholders that logging of their 25% jointly owned Neheb-1 well in Yemen has been completed. The oil and gas explorer explained that the data received has indicated the presence of hydrocarbons in surrounding sandstone.
Tullow Oil plc 2003 Preliminary Results... In May the company announced a significant oil discovery on the Acajou prospect, southeast of Espoir
May 5 -- Goodrich Petroleum Corporation today announced a Cotton Valley discovery on its North Minden Prospect in Rusk County, Texas.
May 12, 2004 - WOODSIDE Petroleum Ltd may have struck commercial oil in a new exploration well in Western Australia's Exmouth Sub-basin....etc...
Please see this article in the Spring 2004 Regulation magazine which states:
There is not, and never has been, an oil crisis or gap. Oil reserves are not dwindling. The Middle East does not have and has never had any "oil weapon"...There is no indication that non-opec oil is getting more expensive to find and develop. Statements about non-OPEC nations' "dwindling reserves" are meaningless or wrong.
Re:Start by banning plastics for consumables
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
Bioplastics are only slightly more expensive than petroleum-based plastics. Expect price decreases in cellulase enzymes to make the price compeitive shortly.
Re:Let's not forget synthetics...and politics...
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
Production and reserves depend on price. When the price goes up, expect new reserves to come online (because you can afford them), and expect production to increase (because people, at least non-OPEC countries, want to make more money).
While I think you are right regarding spectrum pricing of some sort, it is wrong to hold broadcaster's accountable. The FCC creates the rules for how spectrum can be used.
DTV is the first example of providing some flexibility in content devliery. You've got 19 Mbps of MPEG-2 transport stream bandwidth in DTV. Some stations deliver multiple standard-definition streams, other deliver a high-quality high-definition stream, and others combine standard and high def in the same bandwidth.
Some stations even encapsulate IP as part of their DTV stream and deliver broadcast IP services.
What plan are you thinking of? The US DTV plan has always been to move stations out of channels 52-69 and auction that spectrum after the DTV transition.
Today, halfway through the transition, there are actually fewer empty TV channels because almost every station has an analog and a digital channel.
ObFAQ: only 10% of americans now depend on over-the-air reception for television.
On the medical side, US production of just medical devices was $77 billion in 2002. We actually have a trade surplus in medical technology.
And there will be plenty of biotech research to do in the US. Already there are 1,457 biotechnology companies in the United States. The U.S. biotech industry spent $15.7 billion on research and development in 2001.
Industrial biotechnology manufacturing, like chemical manufacturing, is not particularly labor-intensive, thus it will probably be done wherever there is demand, rather than being exclusively outsourced outside the US.
I think US stem-cell research policy is leading to a drain of researchers to Europe and Asia though.
I am not saying the US will have a "lock" on any of these evolving industries, but the US will certainly have plenty of innovative opportunities for economic growth.
We do have to realize that we are in a world of global competition, even for advanced products, but the truth is the US has always been in competition with Europe, we've also been in competition with Japan for 30 years, and the standards of living of both of those places has risen dramatically, as well as that of the US. Now it is the turn of India and China. There will be some displacements of certain industries, but overall everyone will get richer and we all will be better off.
Makes me wonder just what products we're counting on for future economic growth?
Industrial biotechnology - harnessing the power of genetics to create self-replicating factories of novel enzymes for complex biochemistry. Including bio-based polymers, sunlight-to-hydrogen, and many other products.
Medical technology - especially drugs, where the US still leads. And stem cells, where the US may be dropping the ball. Globally aging societies will pay incredible money to stay well. By staying well, older people will contribute more the the global economy.
Nanotechnology - starting out with novel nanomaterials, moving onto nanosystems for micro-industrial processes, and combined with the other technologies for DNA chip analyzers, etc.
Telecommunication - we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.
At a recent conference I worked, we provided 802.11b wireless Internet access. Lots of people were complaining about the conenction, so I fired up NetStumbler and noticed that there was an Ad-Hoc node on the same channel and same SSID as our AP.
Evidently, a lot of the "automagic" features on laptops to find and connect to an AP decided to connect to the Ad-Hoc node (in Ad-Hoc mode, of course).
Also I am really of the impression that the existence of an Ad-Hoc node on the same channel as an AP causes severe degredation of the channel throughput. Maybe someone can confirm/deny this.
Anyway, I used my amateur radio transmitter hunting skills to track down the guy stuck on Ad-Hoc mode, including wrapping a cone of aluminum foil around my PCMCIA 802.11b card to give it some directionality. I finally found the guy, asked him to turn off his wireless card. He said he had no idea what Ad-Hoc mode was...
By the way, this attack would be a killer way to distribute a virus at a trade show...I suppose someone could even have a trojan horse AP to do something like that as well.
Hey, I've been waiting for someone with deep pockets to come along so I could make this happen since about 1999...although maybe it would be more affordable as BitTorrent than broadcast...
Data point: my calculus in high school was taught in tandem with intro physics, so that we could apply the calc we learned on day in math class in physics class the next day.
Because these were not AP classes, I basically had to retake them in college.
But on the whole, I had a much better calculus and physics education in high school than in college (The Johns Hopkins University).
Re:I remember something like this in D.C.
on
Directed Sound
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· Score: 1
In the US Capitol, "The half-dome shape of National Statuary Hall produces an acoustical effect whereby, in some spots, a speaker many yards away may be heard more clearly than one closer at hand. The modern-day echoes occur in different locations from those in the 19th century, when the floor and ceiling of the hall were different."
H.264 and Windows Media 9 (aka VC-9) get better compression mainly through: 1) better coding mechanisms for coefficients (arithmetic coding, for instance) and 2) moving away from the simple block model of MPEG-1/2, and letting the block sizes and shapes be more adaptive.
By having different sizes and shapes of blocks, you can compress more without the nasty blockiness artifacts looking so bad.
I don't think there is much magical about wavelets, they are doing the same thing through multiresolution analysis that H.264 and VC-9 are doing with different size / shape blocks.
PBS has no R&D unit per se like the BBC has. PBS also does no production, thus it does not own rights to its shows, but only provides licensed distribution of that programming as well as satellite interconnection to public television stations.
That isn't to say that no R&D happens at PBS. Recently PBS developed the ACE highly automated and integrated master control model, aimed at reducing costs at public television stations. PBS also played a significant technical role in the development of closed captioning.
I have one of the early thumb drive/camera combos. I notice that many of them need a lot of light to take a picture. Mine won't even let you try to take a picture in dim lighting. Outdoors, they work OK.
Slashdot Mirror
The good news is that even if we use up all the natural uranium, there are solutions like accelerator powered fission that can use abundant natural Thorium as a self-breeding fuel.
The problem with the whole "peak oil" concept is that increasing price of oil increases reserves. Strangely enough, humanity does not know where "all the oil is". As we look around the world for oil, we are finding it everywhere. There is more oil in deeper areas and offshore than was ever expected. These deposits sometimes are more expensive to pump, but become economically viable at only slightly higher oil prices (like the kinds we are experiencing right now).
For example, oil production in South and Central America has doubled from 3M barrels per day to 6M barrels per day since 1982. In the same time, Europe ramped up from 3.5M barrels per day to 6M barrels per day, most offshore from Norway and UK. Africa and Asia have both added 2M barrels per day in that time frame.
Here are two recent oil discoveries:
May 20, 2004 - Apache Corp. announced that its Stickle-1 well has discovered oil within the WA-12-R retention lease in the Exmouth Sub-Basin of the Carnarvon Basin offshore Western Australia. It is Apache's third wildcat discovery in the play within the last 10 months, with an oil column comparable to that of the two earlier discoveries.
21/05/2004 - Anglo-Dutch energy major Royal Dutch/Shell said that it had made its first commercial oil discovery in the eastern part of its Northeast Abu Gharadig (NEAG) concession in Egypt's Western Desert, Reuters reported. The company said in a statement that the Sheiba 18-3 well in the concession had tested up to 1,600 barrels of 36 degree API oil per day and 0.9 million cubic feet (25,480 cu meters) of gas per day.
Breeder reactors have not caught on because uranium remains fairly cheap, especially compared with the high cost of reformed breeded fuel. Uranium is cheap because there have been few nuclear reactors built since 1970.
If enough non-breeding nuclear reactors are built, the price of uranium will probably increase, which will make breeders become economically feasible.
May 14, 2004--Portrush Petroleum Corporation is pleased to announce the results from the Mission River Oilfield in the Gulf Coast region of Texas, near Corpus Christi, in Refugio County, Texas...Out of the 120 cores removed from the well-bore 44 were analyzed as having "probable Production" of oil, natural gas and/or condensate (light oil carried in the gas streams)...Due to tremendous improvement in energy industry technology, rising prices for energy products and vast expansion of market outlook, the gas bearing strata in particular and thinner oil-bearing horizons previously penetrated but never produced during the original development era (1920-1950), many were overlooked or then unidentified oil and natural gas sands were left behind as being "non commercial".
..
...
...etc...
The Scotsman, UK - Apr 20, 2004
CAIRN Energy, the Edinburgh-based oil and gas exploration group, today announced a third and "potentially significant" oil discovery in Rajasthan, India.
Kerr-McGee makes deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil discovery - Apr 19, 2004... reported Monday the discovery of more than 250 ft of net high-quality hydrocarbon pay, primarily oil, with its Ticonderoga discovery well and initial sidetrack
May. 18, 2004 - Daugherty Resources went looking for natural gas in Eastern Kentucky early this year and got "a costly surprise." It struck oil. "We certainly didn't expect to find the oil field we found," the Lexington company's CEO, William S. Daugherty, said yesterday.
Connacher Reports First Quarter Results - May 11, 2004... Thirteen wells were drilled in the period. All were cased. - A significant oil discovery was made at Tompkins, Saskatchewan.
14/05/04 Oil Search Limited (OSH) this morning reported to shareholders that logging of their 25% jointly owned Neheb-1 well in Yemen has been completed. The oil and gas explorer explained that the data received has indicated the presence of hydrocarbons in surrounding sandstone.
Tullow Oil plc 2003 Preliminary Results... In May the company announced a significant oil discovery on the Acajou prospect, southeast of Espoir
May 5 -- Goodrich Petroleum Corporation today announced a Cotton Valley discovery on its North Minden Prospect in Rusk County, Texas.
May 12, 2004 - WOODSIDE Petroleum Ltd may have struck commercial oil in a new exploration well in Western Australia's Exmouth Sub-basin.
Please see this article in the Spring 2004 Regulation magazine which states:
There is not, and never has been, an oil crisis or gap. Oil reserves are not dwindling. The Middle East does not have and has never had any "oil weapon"...There is no indication that non-opec oil is getting more expensive to find and develop. Statements about non-OPEC nations' "dwindling reserves" are meaningless or wrong.
Bioplastics are only slightly more expensive than petroleum-based plastics. Expect price decreases in cellulase enzymes to make the price compeitive shortly.
Production and reserves depend on price. When the price goes up, expect new reserves to come online (because you can afford them), and expect production to increase (because people, at least non-OPEC countries, want to make more money).
COFDM is used for European DTV. Here in the US, we use 8-VSB (vestigial sideband) modulation for terrestrial digital television.
While I think you are right regarding spectrum pricing of some sort, it is wrong to hold broadcaster's accountable. The FCC creates the rules for how spectrum can be used.
DTV is the first example of providing some flexibility in content devliery. You've got 19 Mbps of MPEG-2 transport stream bandwidth in DTV. Some stations deliver multiple standard-definition streams, other deliver a high-quality high-definition stream, and others combine standard and high def in the same bandwidth.
Some stations even encapsulate IP as part of their DTV stream and deliver broadcast IP services.
What plan are you thinking of? The US DTV plan has always been to move stations out of channels 52-69 and auction that spectrum after the DTV transition.
Today, halfway through the transition, there are actually fewer empty TV channels because almost every station has an analog and a digital channel.
ObFAQ: only 10% of americans now depend on over-the-air reception for television.
The cable environment is much more controlled than the over-the-air environment.
On the medical side, US production of just medical devices was $77 billion in 2002. We actually have a trade surplus in medical technology.
And there will be plenty of biotech research to do in the US. Already there are 1,457 biotechnology companies in the United States. The U.S. biotech industry spent $15.7 billion on research and development in 2001.
Industrial biotechnology manufacturing, like chemical manufacturing, is not particularly labor-intensive, thus it will probably be done wherever there is demand, rather than being exclusively outsourced outside the US.
I think US stem-cell research policy is leading to a drain of researchers to Europe and Asia though.
I am not saying the US will have a "lock" on any of these evolving industries, but the US will certainly have plenty of innovative opportunities for economic growth.
We do have to realize that we are in a world of global competition, even for advanced products, but the truth is the US has always been in competition with Europe, we've also been in competition with Japan for 30 years, and the standards of living of both of those places has risen dramatically, as well as that of the US. Now it is the turn of India and China. There will be some displacements of certain industries, but overall everyone will get richer and we all will be better off.
Makes me wonder just what products we're counting on for future economic growth?
Industrial biotechnology - harnessing the power of genetics to create self-replicating factories of novel enzymes for complex biochemistry. Including bio-based polymers, sunlight-to-hydrogen, and many other products.
Medical technology - especially drugs, where the US still leads. And stem cells, where the US may be dropping the ball. Globally aging societies will pay incredible money to stay well. By staying well, older people will contribute more the the global economy.
Nanotechnology - starting out with novel nanomaterials, moving onto nanosystems for micro-industrial processes, and combined with the other technologies for DNA chip analyzers, etc.
Telecommunication - we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.
At a recent conference I worked, we provided 802.11b wireless Internet access. Lots of people were complaining about the conenction, so I fired up NetStumbler and noticed that there was an Ad-Hoc node on the same channel and same SSID as our AP.
Evidently, a lot of the "automagic" features on laptops to find and connect to an AP decided to connect to the Ad-Hoc node (in Ad-Hoc mode, of course).
Also I am really of the impression that the existence of an Ad-Hoc node on the same channel as an AP causes severe degredation of the channel throughput. Maybe someone can confirm/deny this.
Anyway, I used my amateur radio transmitter hunting skills to track down the guy stuck on Ad-Hoc mode, including wrapping a cone of aluminum foil around my PCMCIA 802.11b card to give it some directionality. I finally found the guy, asked him to turn off his wireless card. He said he had no idea what Ad-Hoc mode was...
By the way, this attack would be a killer way to distribute a virus at a trade show...I suppose someone could even have a trojan horse AP to do something like that as well.
People who don't like top 40 have XM radio...
Besides, why do we want more analog FM transmitters in a digital world?
Hey, I've been waiting for someone with deep pockets to come along so I could make this happen since about 1999...although maybe it would be more affordable as BitTorrent than broadcast...
Data point: my calculus in high school was taught in tandem with intro physics, so that we could apply the calc we learned on day in math class in physics class the next day.
Because these were not AP classes, I basically had to retake them in college.
But on the whole, I had a much better calculus and physics education in high school than in college (The Johns Hopkins University).
In the US Capitol, "The half-dome shape of National Statuary Hall produces an acoustical effect whereby, in some spots, a speaker many yards away may be heard more clearly than one closer at hand. The modern-day echoes occur in different locations from those in the 19th century, when the floor and ceiling of the hall were different."
Come to the Pro-MPEG Meeting 21 in Santa Fe, NM, USA May 10-11, 2004...
H.264 and Windows Media 9 (aka VC-9) get better compression mainly through: 1) better coding mechanisms for coefficients (arithmetic coding, for instance) and 2) moving away from the simple block model of MPEG-1/2, and letting the block sizes and shapes be more adaptive.
By having different sizes and shapes of blocks, you can compress more without the nasty blockiness artifacts looking so bad.
I don't think there is much magical about wavelets, they are doing the same thing through multiresolution analysis that H.264 and VC-9 are doing with different size / shape blocks.
Is the BBC going to present SMPTE a draft standard for carrying Dirac essence in an MXF container?
Or does it map into an MPEG-2 transport stream or they will use OP-ATOM for wrapping in MXF or something like that?
PBS has no R&D unit per se like the BBC has. PBS also does no production, thus it does not own rights to its shows, but only provides licensed distribution of that programming as well as satellite interconnection to public television stations.
That isn't to say that no R&D happens at PBS. Recently PBS developed the ACE highly automated and integrated master control model, aimed at reducing costs at public television stations. PBS also played a significant technical role in the development of closed captioning.
Schottky developed the theory of metal-semiconductor point-contact diodes in 1938.
I have one of the early thumb drive/camera combos. I notice that many of them need a lot of light to take a picture. Mine won't even let you try to take a picture in dim lighting. Outdoors, they work OK.
US exports to India were over $4 billion in 2003.
Services account for 43% of U.S. exports to India.