Good stuff about the fast breeder reactors - I just don't think your sources are correct about the economic costs.
I got the cost figures out of Popular Science. An article from about a year ago for pebble beds. That's pretty good.
In other words, hardly anything - there's a baby off peak hydro down the road from me that has two 350MW turbines.
Yeah your right. 110 MW isn't much. But you can put in many pebble bed reactors at one station to get a couple gigawatts for a giant power station. It would still be very cheap.
Breeders are already seeing service in France
Look up some info about one that was decomissioned in France a couple of years back - I can't recall how many workers died. It isn't listed as a nuclear accident since the sodium killed them, and not radiation.
I never knew that. It does seem like liquid sodium would be pretty dangerous. It may interest you that other breeder reactors that use heavy water instead of liquid sodium. One coolant/moderator being researched for use in fast breeders is helium. A fast breeder using helium would be great. Helium does not become radioactive. A fast breeder using helium would be extremly safe. Obviosly it doesn't have the chemical dangers of sodium.
They sell Archos MP3 players for $205 on Pricewatch right now. They have 6 gigs of storage for half the price of an iPod. However, no firewire, just MP3. I think the iPod is waaaaaaay overpriced. They just have no competition. Who else has a large HD, firewire, nice display, pretty styling, etc? Until Archos comes out with a firewire Jukebox, I think the ipod will remain $399. Now what the @##$ is this? $499 for an MP3 player? That's insane. You could get a cheap computer for that amount of money!
Apple charges too much. That's how they screwed themselves over out of most of their home computer market in the 80's. Back in the early to mid eighties, Apple was really the only game in town for non-techie home computer users. Then they jacked up their prices cause they figured they had a monopoly. Then microsoft and ibm took over the home computer market. It's Apple's own damn fault that they are not the dominant computer company. Then they also made numerous other titanically bad business decisions, such as stopping Apple clones and other stuff.
They make good products, but I'm not going to spend 1700 dollars on an iMac. I can't spend that much money on somthing that my present Windoze XP(free version:-P)/Linux box would beat out anyway.
Before you Apple fans begin to flame me: I once had an apple. It was my favorite computer of all time. I miss it. I just can't afford a Mac. Under my opinion, Apple has mega-smart engineers and shitty marketers. I still think Macs are a tad overpriced.
I think tidal power is a great idea in some places where it would be profitable. I know of only a few such places, however. I don't think this is going to help the energy situation much. However, every little bit helps, as they say.
Actualy, even with that factored in, it's still very cheap. It used to be around 5 cents a KW hour. The last few years they have enhanced quite a few things. Now it is around 3-4 cents a KW hour, slightly below the cost of coal power. That includes ALL operating costs. That makes nuke power the cheapest form of energy now available. They are developing the even more safe pebble bed reactors now. Those are absolutely meltdown proof. The fuel is encased in graphite that will contain it for 1 million years. The fuel's maximum temperature would be below the melting point of uranium. The coolant is helium, which cannot pick up radiation, so there is no danger from coolant loss, as in other designs. Also, the pebble bed is even cheaper today's reactors. The pebble bed reactor is modular and provides 110 MW of power. It can be added on to existing power stations.
Another great tech we need to make use of is fuel reprocessing. Spent nuclear fuel contains quite a bit of plutonium and U-235 that can be used as fuel. Reproccesing takes these valuable isotopes out of spent fuel. This reduces the costly mining and refining of uranium. While used in France, Japan, and many other countries with great sucess, reprocessing was banned in the US under the Carter Admin.
One more thing is breeding reactors. Uranium in the ground is composed of 2 isotopes: U-235 and U-238. Naturally, it is about.7% U-239 and 99.3% U-235. U-238 is worthless. It does not fission. To fission, you need to increase the concentration of U-235. This is done by vaporizing the uranium and putting it into a centrifuge. They have ever so little slightly different densities, so the two isotopes seperate a little. This is done many times until you have about a 2-3% concentration of U-235. This is a major cost of nuclear power.
Anyway, reactors have been built before that transform U-238 into Plutonium-239. These are fast breeder reactors. Instead of water they usualy use a liquid sodium moderator, which does not slow neutrons down much(allowing easier transmutation but makes fissioning more difficult). Anyway, you have the reactor core which emits neutrons. These strike a blanket of U-238 . When the neutrons hit the U-238 they transform into fissionable Pu-239. In this manner breeder reactors make more fuel than they use. This would make nuclear power cheaper yet and dramatically slash the amount of mining needed to supply plants with fuel. I've heard that with regular reactors we have around 500 years of fuel left. If we switched to breeders, it would be over a billion years of nuclear fuel. Breeders are already seeing service in France and are under development in other countries.
BTW, if I made a typo, just tell me about it. I do that a lot. I'll correct myself.
This won't solve our energy problems. It will help some though. It is only worth putting tidal plants in areas with large differences between high and low tide. These places are few and far between. Even when they do put plants in these places, they only produce a fraction of the power of a convetional plant.
To really solve the energy crisis w/o polluting, we need to build more nuclear power plants.
It's not so bad as people think. It doesn't pollute like coal. It's not expensive like natural gas. (which, BTW, also pollutes)
Coal pollutes too much. We'd be overrun with smog, much more so than if we used gasoline engines. We don't have enough oil to be energy independant. Natural gas is too expensive and we will run out of it in about 30 years. That leaves us with nuclear. Nuclear power is not as dangerous as people think. Also, a Chernobyl-scale meltdowns in U.S. PWR are impossible. The Chernobyl reactor was a crappy commie RBMK reactor with no containment building. Of course we had the TMI reactor problem. However, that killed or injured no one. And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl.
Fears of nuclear power are overblown. Radiation is just like any other pollutant. And you need a shyteload of radiation to really harm you. Nuclear power has killed a grand total of 35-50 people in it's entire exsistence. Coal power has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people.
Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power. Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium into the atmosphere!!! The study is here. Nuclear power is also cheap. With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal.
There is not mountains of nuclear waste made by our plants. Each plant only uses several tons pounds of uranium a year. That would fit in an area just a few feet square. The total amount of waste ever created for a whole family for their whole lives would fit in a shoebox. If we reprocessed our fuel, it would fit in a pill bottle. Compare that to mountains of highly toxic coal waste with arsenic, cyanide, and other good stuff that just sits on the ground and leaches poisons into the groundwater.
Nuclear waste storage is very good. It's not like they are hauling it around in thin metal barrels like the environmentalists want you to think. No. The waste is transported in thick metal containers that have been tested by being thrown off cliffs, rammed into locomotives, and all sorts of crap. In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 1,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there.
Huh, it uses battery power. Well then, that makes the rifle thing easier.
BTW, the Sciam article shows plans for a laser that uses a capicitor made with foil and pcb electronic board. The capicitor made with this setup would be a couple feet wide. Some other people's designs call for a capicitor made with garbage bag plastic and foil. I think this is a better design because it has better capacitance. Anyway, for the rifle thing, I was thinkin' you could use the plastic and foil and just kind of put it into folds to save space, so you wouldn't have a 3 foot wide rifle. (of course each fold would have to be seperated! Need to use some kind of nonconducting support.)
Also, the Sciam design is not powerful enough. It produces 60 milliwatts. There are other designs with larger lasers that can make over 500 MW. That would be enough power to ionize air.
Anyway, a rifle of this design would weigh about 3 pounds, and be 1 meter long. The power supply and battery would be carried on your back and maybe weigh 20 lbs.
Anyway, this laser thing is very dangerous. Not only the electric beam, but the capacitor. The capicitor would be charged with 15,000 volt electricity. Nothing to screw with. People have been electrocuted when building homemade lasers before.
The best site for homebuilt lasers is Sam's Laser FAQ, Here
[epa.gov] Union of concerned scientists. [ucsusa.org]
I would not trust the Union of Concerned Scientists. They are kind of a radical environmental group. Just use other resources.
I would have to disagree with the EPA'S report. The vast majority of climatologists think global warming has nothing to to with CO2 emissions. Just refer to Lexta's information above.
I am quite sick of seeing Tesla being touted as some kind of a misunderstood genius repressed by the evil scientific community. Yeah, he was lucky and had some good ideas but the rest of his ideas such as getting energy out of thin air and death rays are just bollocks.
Actualy the death rays part is not bullocks. They are developing that right now. It's not too complicated. Tesla himself actualy did conduct experiments with these rays.
Heres how they work:
You have two ultraviolet nitrogen lasers. (no need to be very large. An output of a fraction of a watt each)
You point these two UV nitrogen lasers at your intended target. The UV beams ionize the air, making it conductive. Then you shoot high-voltage electricity down the path made by the two lasers. The two lasers and the target make a complete circuit.
If you had some time on your hands, an interest in entering the Darwin Awards, and some electrical knowledge you could do this at home. A nitrogen laser is very simple. The lasing chamber is a plexiglass cylinder filled with low pressure nitrogen. There is then just 2 foil electrodes running down the sides. The electrodes are hooked up to a very simple Blumlein circuit. It's powered by a 15 KV power supply. Unlike other lasers, nitrogen does not need mirrors or anthing like that. You can find directions on the internet.
Anyway, you could then rig up the HV electricity to shoot down the beams pretty easy.
Also, with some time and ingeniuty, you could probably get it into rifle form, powered by a 12V battery and a High Voltage power sup. designed especialy for 12V batteries. That would kick ass.
Right now they are developing somthing like this, a non-lethal stun-gun kind of weapon for cops. It will be able to shoot 2 kilometers. The reason why cops aren't already using this is that a beam weapon using nitrogen lasers would fry someone's optic nerve right quick. A half a watt of the horribly burn-o-rific wavelengh of UV light that comes out of nitrogen lasers is very bad.
They are trying to develop another type of UV laser that operates at a safer wavelength, that is not harmful. Right now, this type of laser is the size of a suitcase. They are trying to size it down to hand-held size. If my memory serves me right, the company is called HSVT, or something like that.
One more thing: The coolest thing is that these guns ionize oxygen. They would make a green glow!! Kind of like the pulse gun on UT. Another thing: These are worthless for war. All that you need to protect yourself against this weapon is a tin foil suit.
Often I lay awake in bed into the wee hours of the morning wondering about the location, size, and strengh of Earth's gravitaional anomalies.
Finally, I will know!
Also, fun fact: Gravity is negative energy. The negative gravity energy of an object exactly balances out the positive mass. This way the total energy of the universe is 0. That means the big bang did not violate conservation of energy. It was just a vacuum fluctuation.
Since the total energy of the big bang vacuum flucuation was zero, it can last forever. This is in contrast to most microscopic vacuum fluctuations that only exist for short periods of time.
I've done this. Take lit matches and put them in the microwave. They will make blue or white bursts of plasma. It's great fun!! Also try steel wool.It makes all sorts of sparks. If you take a paperclip and bend it so the two ends are about 3 cm away from each other, you can make a great arc that can melt stuff.
The plasma thing with the match works because the flame is plasma. Plasma absorbs microwaves. The microwave energy heats the flame more, superheating air around it, and it makes a big burst of brillianltly bright plasma, sometimes. Ive had huge bursts that go up to the top of the microwave out of a little burning match.
It is completly safe to you. Absolutely safe. Once the microwave is off the plasma/arc/whatever instantly dissapears since it's power source is cut off. It may not be safe for your microwave.
To be safe with you microwave, take these steps:
1. Have a cup of water off in the corner of you microwave. This prevents your magnetron from overheating by absorbing excess microwaves. Yes, it may reduce the intensity of the plasma a little, but it saves your microwave. If you do this, there is no real way of hurting your microwave. The magnetron can't be fried if you got some water in there. The worst that could happen is you could get scorch marks in your microwave.
2. Limit the time to about 20 secs. The cup of water should prevent anything bad from happening. Just to be safe though.
Also, use matches, not a candle. A candles' flame is not hot enough to absorb enough microwaves to make a good plasma.
But, even small turbines would be kind of large for the soldier. PV's or thermocouples get 30%. And you are right. Very good turbines get 50% or above.
However, the turbines needed to make ~10 KW would weigh a couple hundred pounds. PV's or thermocouples would weigh less than 20 LBS. So what if you'd have to carry 3 extra gallons of gas?
well based on scriptural principles it would be about 6000 years old, thing is, placing blind faith in science is no better than placing blind faith in anything else
The bible's estimation is grossly inaccurate. At least science's 14.5 B year old universe was in the ballpark. But I see you point. However, the scientific method almost always produces results that are either very close or exact. You certainly can't claim that the bible gets scientific stuff anywhere close to right. Like the Flood, creation, etc, etc. It's grossly innacurate.
The speed at which a galaxy forms has nothing to do with its distance from us. Light travels 299,792,458 m/s (in a vacuum) no matter how fast the galaxy forms.
Yeah. I know that. You misunderstood me. I was just saying that maybe the universe was still created 15 billion years ago. To account for this very old (14 byo) object found, I was just saying that maybe galaxies formed faster than we thought. Maybe they only took 1B years to form, instead of 3 billion, which could account for this 14 billion year old object.
However, I really think that the universe is just older than we thought. I doubt a galaxy would form in 1 billion years. The universe is probably 17 B Y O.
Their rifles aren't $2000. I they are using Kalishnikovs (it's hard to spell, but it sounds cool) you can get those from arms dealers in some countries for $200.
Anyway, our soldiers are obviosly vastly better than the shit beater soldiers that we usualy fight against.
Like in Somalia. There was 19 Americans dead. Somthing like several hundred Somalis.
Just a thought, but you might be able to power it with thermocouples. If you have propane or better yet gasoline (pre-heated and vaporized, like in a camp stove) you could make enough heat to generate enough electricity on the thermocouples to power the suit.
Also, when I was watching Tomorrow's World, they were talking about this special electric car. It burns propane. But the combustion chamber is surrounded by these special photovoltaics.
These photovoltaics work off of very high intensity infrared heat, over 800 degrees. The show said that just a couple square feet of these could get enough electricity to power a car.
Yeah. I make typos like that. But obviosly I meant cubic miles. Square miles is 2 dimensional. You'd have a very hard time doing anything with that amount of matter.
Anyway, 1,000 square miles is enough. We're talking about 10 atom thick solar cells. Very, very, very thin. Actualy, that might be an overestimate. I've seen figures of only 100 cubic miles needed.
Also, this isn't a star trek dyson sphere. It's just solar arrays floating in orbit so as to capture all of the light. The materials need not be strong.
I am a very poor typist. I meant 1,000,000 seconds, not a billion. A million seconds is 2000 times 500. If you had a rocket with a billion seconds, that would be pretty cool, despite violating the theory of relativity.
When I screw up like that, just try to figure out what I meant.
Soldiers who survived a tank hit with depleted uranium ammunition would likely have kidney uranium levels of 4 micrograms per gram. They could get kidney poisoning from the bullets.
OH MY GOD! Those poor people could be getting heavy metal poisoning from those high-explosive shells we're trying to kill them with!!!
Uranium is dangerous, but not for the reason you'd think.
The radioactivity of depleted uranium is very low. Lower than uranium ore, oddly enough. That is due to the fact that the ore has radium, but the pure metal doesn't. Anyway, if it's less radioactive than ore, it's not to bad at all. Uranium Ore is not a radiological hazard. They make fiestaware plates out of it. And those are perfectly safe.
Anyway, uranium is dangerous because it is a heavy metal, like lead. You wouldn't want to eat it. However, I think this article and these studies are a little sensationalistic. They said you need 1 microgram per gram of kidney. Most soldiers got.005 grams. I think people are getting a bit worked up about this.
Sorry, got to add somthing: For laser propulsion, you need to have a giant gossamer fresnel lens about 600 miles wide around the orbit of Saturn in order to focus the beam onto the lasersail.
Also, lasersails can seperate into 2 parts to stop. 1 part is left behind. The laser focuses light on this sail. It reflects back onto the other sail, stopping it. Once at the target star system, a Dyson sphere can be constructed around that star.
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Good stuff about the fast breeder reactors - I just don't think your sources are correct about the economic costs.
I got the cost figures out of Popular Science. An article from about a year ago for pebble beds. That's pretty good.
In other words, hardly anything - there's a baby off peak hydro down the road from me that has two 350MW turbines.
Yeah your right. 110 MW isn't much. But you can put in many pebble bed reactors at one station to get a couple gigawatts for a giant power station. It would still be very cheap.
Breeders are already seeing service in France
Look up some info about one that was decomissioned in France a couple of years back - I can't recall how many workers died. It isn't listed as a nuclear accident since the sodium killed them, and not radiation.
I never knew that. It does seem like liquid sodium would be pretty dangerous. It may interest you that other breeder reactors that use heavy water instead of liquid sodium. One coolant/moderator being researched for use in fast breeders is helium. A fast breeder using helium would be great. Helium does not become radioactive. A fast breeder using helium would be extremly safe. Obviosly it doesn't have the chemical dangers of sodium.
They sell Archos MP3 players for $205 on Pricewatch right now. They have 6 gigs of storage for half the price of an iPod. However, no firewire, just MP3. I think the iPod is waaaaaaay overpriced. They just have no competition. Who else has a large HD, firewire, nice display, pretty styling, etc? Until Archos comes out with a firewire Jukebox, I think the ipod will remain $399. Now what the @##$ is this? $499 for an MP3 player? That's insane. You could get a cheap computer for that amount of money!
:-P)/Linux box would beat out anyway.
Apple charges too much. That's how they screwed themselves over out of most of their home computer market in the 80's. Back in the early to mid eighties, Apple was really the only game in town for non-techie home computer users. Then they jacked up their prices cause they figured they had a monopoly. Then microsoft and ibm took over the home computer market. It's Apple's own damn fault that they are not the dominant computer company. Then they also made numerous other titanically bad business decisions, such as stopping Apple clones and other stuff.
They make good products, but I'm not going to spend 1700 dollars on an iMac. I can't spend that much money on somthing that my present Windoze XP(free version
Before you Apple fans begin to flame me: I once had an apple. It was my favorite computer of all time. I miss it. I just can't afford a Mac. Under my opinion, Apple has mega-smart engineers and shitty marketers. I still think Macs are a tad overpriced.
I think tidal power is a great idea in some places where it would be profitable. I know of only a few such places, however. I don't think this is going to help the energy situation much. However, every little bit helps, as they say.
Actualy, even with that factored in, it's still very cheap. It used to be around 5 cents a KW hour. The last few years they have enhanced quite a few things. Now it is around 3-4 cents a KW hour, slightly below the cost of coal power. That includes ALL operating costs. That makes nuke power the cheapest form of energy now available. They are developing the even more safe pebble bed reactors now. Those are absolutely meltdown proof. The fuel is encased in graphite that will contain it for 1 million years. The fuel's maximum temperature would be below the melting point of uranium. The coolant is helium, which cannot pick up radiation, so there is no danger from coolant loss, as in other designs. Also, the pebble bed is even cheaper today's reactors. The pebble bed reactor is modular and provides 110 MW of power. It can be added on to existing power stations.
.7% U-239 and 99.3% U-235. U-238 is worthless. It does not fission. To fission, you need to increase the concentration of U-235. This is done by vaporizing the uranium and putting it into a centrifuge. They have ever so little slightly different densities, so the two isotopes seperate a little. This is done many times until you have about a 2-3% concentration of U-235. This is a major cost of nuclear power.
Another great tech we need to make use of is fuel reprocessing. Spent nuclear fuel contains quite a bit of plutonium and U-235 that can be used as fuel. Reproccesing takes these valuable isotopes out of spent fuel. This reduces the costly mining and refining of uranium. While used in France, Japan, and many other countries with great sucess, reprocessing was banned in the US under the Carter Admin.
One more thing is breeding reactors. Uranium in the ground is composed of 2 isotopes: U-235 and U-238. Naturally, it is about
Anyway, reactors have been built before that transform U-238 into Plutonium-239. These are fast breeder reactors. Instead of water they usualy use a liquid sodium moderator, which does not slow neutrons down much(allowing easier transmutation but makes fissioning more difficult). Anyway, you have the reactor core which emits neutrons. These strike a blanket of U-238 . When the neutrons hit the U-238 they transform into fissionable Pu-239. In this manner breeder reactors make more fuel than they use. This would make nuclear power cheaper yet and dramatically slash the amount of mining needed to supply plants with fuel. I've heard that with regular reactors we have around 500 years of fuel left. If we switched to breeders, it would be over a billion years of nuclear fuel. Breeders are already seeing service in France and are under development in other countries.
BTW, if I made a typo, just tell me about it. I do that a lot. I'll correct myself.
To really solve the energy crisis w/o polluting, we need to build more nuclear power plants.
It's not so bad as people think. It doesn't pollute like coal. It's not expensive like natural gas. (which, BTW, also pollutes)
Coal pollutes too much. We'd be overrun with smog, much more so than if we used gasoline engines. We don't have enough oil to be energy independant. Natural gas is too expensive and we will run out of it in about 30 years. That leaves us with nuclear. Nuclear power is not as dangerous as people think. Also, a Chernobyl-scale meltdowns in U.S. PWR are impossible. The Chernobyl reactor was a crappy commie RBMK reactor with no containment building. Of course we had the TMI reactor problem. However, that killed or injured no one. And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl.
Fears of nuclear power are overblown. Radiation is just like any other pollutant. And you need a shyteload of radiation to really harm you. Nuclear power has killed a grand total of 35-50 people in it's entire exsistence. Coal power has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people.
Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power. Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium into the atmosphere!!! The study is here. Nuclear power is also cheap. With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal.
There is not mountains of nuclear waste made by our plants. Each plant only uses several tons pounds of uranium a year. That would fit in an area just a few feet square. The total amount of waste ever created for a whole family for their whole lives would fit in a shoebox. If we reprocessed our fuel, it would fit in a pill bottle. Compare that to mountains of highly toxic coal waste with arsenic, cyanide, and other good stuff that just sits on the ground and leaches poisons into the groundwater.
Nuclear waste storage is very good. It's not like they are hauling it around in thin metal barrels like the environmentalists want you to think. No. The waste is transported in thick metal containers that have been tested by being thrown off cliffs, rammed into locomotives, and all sorts of crap. In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 1,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there.
Sorry. I screwed up. I'm doing this from memory, you see. The pcb board obviosly uses the copper already on it. I will screw my head on next time.
Huh, it uses battery power. Well then, that makes the rifle thing easier.
BTW, the Sciam article shows plans for a laser that uses a capicitor made with foil and pcb electronic board. The capicitor made with this setup would be a couple feet wide. Some other people's designs call for a capicitor made with garbage bag plastic and foil. I think this is a better design because it has better capacitance. Anyway, for the rifle thing, I was thinkin' you could use the plastic and foil and just kind of put it into folds to save space, so you wouldn't have a 3 foot wide rifle. (of course each fold would have to be seperated! Need to use some kind of nonconducting support.)
Also, the Sciam design is not powerful enough. It produces 60 milliwatts. There are other designs with larger lasers that can make over 500 MW. That would be enough power to ionize air.
Anyway, a rifle of this design would weigh about 3 pounds, and be 1 meter long. The power supply and battery would be carried on your back and maybe weigh 20 lbs.
Anyway, this laser thing is very dangerous. Not only the electric beam, but the capacitor. The capicitor would be charged with 15,000 volt electricity. Nothing to screw with. People have been electrocuted when building homemade lasers before.
The best site for homebuilt lasers is Sam's Laser FAQ, Here
[epa.gov] Union of concerned scientists. [ucsusa.org]
I would not trust the Union of Concerned Scientists. They are kind of a radical environmental group. Just use other resources.
I would have to disagree with the EPA'S report. The vast majority of climatologists think global warming has nothing to to with CO2 emissions.
Just refer to Lexta's information above.
I am quite sick of seeing Tesla being touted as some kind of a misunderstood genius repressed by the evil scientific community. Yeah, he was lucky and had some good ideas but the rest of his ideas such as getting energy out of thin air and death rays are just bollocks.
Actualy the death rays part is not bullocks. They are developing that right now. It's not too complicated. Tesla himself actualy did conduct experiments with these rays.
Heres how they work:
You have two ultraviolet nitrogen lasers. (no need to be very large. An output of a fraction of a watt each)
You point these two UV nitrogen lasers at your intended target. The UV beams ionize the air, making it conductive. Then you shoot high-voltage
electricity down the path made by the two lasers. The two lasers and the target make a complete circuit.
If you had some time on your hands, an interest in entering the Darwin Awards, and some electrical knowledge you could do this at home. A nitrogen laser is very simple. The lasing chamber is a plexiglass cylinder filled with low pressure nitrogen. There is then just 2 foil electrodes running down the sides. The electrodes are hooked up to a very simple Blumlein circuit. It's powered by a 15 KV power supply. Unlike other lasers, nitrogen does not need mirrors or anthing like that. You can find directions on the internet.
Anyway, you could then rig up the HV electricity to shoot down the beams pretty easy.
Also, with some time and ingeniuty, you could probably get it into rifle form, powered by a 12V battery and a High Voltage power sup. designed especialy for 12V batteries. That would kick ass.
Right now they are developing somthing like this, a non-lethal stun-gun kind of weapon for cops. It will be able to shoot 2 kilometers. The reason why cops aren't already using this is that a beam weapon using nitrogen lasers would fry someone's optic nerve right quick. A half a watt of the horribly burn-o-rific wavelengh of UV light that comes out of nitrogen lasers is very bad.
They are trying to develop another type of UV laser that operates at a safer wavelength, that is not harmful. Right now, this type of laser is the size of a suitcase. They are trying to size it down to hand-held size. If my memory serves me right, the company is called HSVT, or something like that.
One more thing: The coolest thing is that these guns ionize oxygen. They would make a green glow!! Kind of like the pulse gun on UT. Another thing: These are worthless for war. All that you need to protect yourself against this weapon is a tin foil suit.
Often I lay awake in bed into the wee hours of the morning wondering about the location, size, and strengh of Earth's gravitaional anomalies.
Finally, I will know!
Also, fun fact: Gravity is negative energy. The negative gravity energy of an object exactly balances out the positive mass. This way the total energy of the universe is 0. That means the big bang did not violate conservation of energy. It was just a vacuum fluctuation.
Since the total energy of the big bang vacuum flucuation was zero, it can last forever. This is in contrast to most microscopic vacuum fluctuations that only exist for short periods of time.
Just melt the CD's. It's not that hard.
I've done this. Take lit matches and put them in the microwave. They will make blue or white bursts of plasma. It's great fun!! Also try steel wool.It makes all sorts of sparks. If you take a paperclip and bend it so the two ends are about 3 cm away from each other, you can make a great arc that can melt stuff.
The plasma thing with the match works because the flame is plasma. Plasma absorbs microwaves. The microwave energy heats the flame more, superheating air around it, and it makes a big burst of brillianltly bright plasma, sometimes. Ive had huge bursts that go up to the top of the microwave out of a little burning match.
It is completly safe to you. Absolutely safe. Once the microwave is off the plasma/arc/whatever instantly dissapears since it's power source is cut off. It may not be safe for your microwave.
To be safe with you microwave, take these steps:
1. Have a cup of water off in the corner of you microwave. This prevents your magnetron from overheating by absorbing excess microwaves. Yes, it may reduce the intensity of the plasma a little, but it saves your microwave. If you do this, there is no real way of hurting your microwave. The magnetron can't be fried if you got some water in there. The worst that could happen is you could get scorch marks in your microwave.
2. Limit the time to about 20 secs. The cup of water should prevent anything bad from happening. Just to be safe though.
Also, use matches, not a candle. A candles' flame is not hot enough to absorb enough microwaves to make a good plasma.
But, even small turbines would be kind of large for the soldier. PV's or thermocouples get 30%. And you are right. Very good turbines get 50% or above.
However, the turbines needed to make ~10 KW would weigh a couple hundred pounds. PV's or thermocouples would weigh less than 20 LBS. So what if you'd have to carry 3 extra gallons of gas?
well based on scriptural principles it would be about 6000 years old, thing is, placing blind faith in science is no better than placing blind faith in anything else
The bible's estimation is grossly inaccurate. At least science's 14.5 B year old universe was in the ballpark. But I see you point. However, the scientific method almost always produces results that are either very close or exact. You certainly can't claim that the bible gets scientific stuff anywhere close to right. Like the Flood, creation, etc, etc. It's grossly innacurate.
The speed at which a galaxy forms has nothing to do with its distance from us. Light travels 299,792,458 m/s (in a vacuum) no matter how fast the galaxy forms.
Yeah. I know that. You misunderstood me. I was just saying that maybe the universe was still created 15 billion years ago. To account for this very old (14 byo) object found, I was just saying that maybe galaxies formed faster than we thought. Maybe they only took 1B years to form, instead of 3 billion, which could account for this 14 billion year old object.
However, I really think that the universe is just older than we thought. I doubt a galaxy would form in 1 billion years. The universe is probably 17 B Y O.
This may mean that the universe is much older. Maybe 17 billion.That is just weird. For so long, the universe has been 14.5 B.
Or maybe galaxies just formed faster than we thought.
Their rifles aren't $2000. I they are using Kalishnikovs (it's hard to spell, but it sounds cool) you can get those from arms dealers in some countries for $200.
Anyway, our soldiers are obviosly vastly better than the shit beater soldiers that we usualy fight against.
Like in Somalia. There was 19 Americans dead. Somthing like several hundred Somalis.
Just a thought, but you might be able to power it with thermocouples. If you have propane or better yet gasoline (pre-heated and vaporized, like in a camp stove) you could make enough heat to generate enough electricity on the thermocouples to power the suit.
Also, when I was watching Tomorrow's World, they were talking about this special electric car. It burns propane. But the combustion chamber is surrounded by these special photovoltaics.
These photovoltaics work off of very high intensity infrared heat, over 800 degrees. The show said that just a couple square feet of these could get enough electricity to power a car.
Yeah. I make typos like that. But obviosly I meant cubic miles. Square miles is 2 dimensional. You'd have a very hard time doing anything with that amount of matter.
Anyway, 1,000 square miles is enough. We're talking about 10 atom thick solar cells. Very, very, very thin. Actualy, that might be an overestimate. I've seen figures of only 100 cubic miles needed.
Also, this isn't a star trek dyson sphere. It's just solar arrays floating in orbit so as to capture all of the light. The materials need not be strong.
I am a very poor typist. I meant 1,000,000 seconds, not a billion. A million seconds is 2000 times 500. If you had a rocket with a billion seconds, that would be pretty cool, despite violating the theory of relativity.
When I screw up like that, just try to figure out what I meant.
With the Dyson sphere, I'm talking REALLY ADVANCED. It would make Star Trek look like cave men.
I'm sorry.
.005 micrograms. Just a typo.
In the gulf war, they used DU as armor for our tanks. The only thing that could penetrate them was DU rounds, which the Iraqis didn't have.
Soldiers who survived a tank hit with depleted uranium ammunition would likely have kidney uranium levels of 4 micrograms per gram. They could get kidney poisoning from the bullets.
OH MY GOD! Those poor people could be getting heavy metal poisoning from those high-explosive shells we're trying to kill them with!!!
Uranium is dangerous, but not for the reason you'd think.
.005 grams. I think people are getting a bit worked up about this.
The radioactivity of depleted uranium is very low. Lower than uranium ore, oddly enough. That is due to the fact that the ore has radium, but the pure metal doesn't. Anyway, if it's less radioactive than ore, it's not to bad at all. Uranium Ore is not a radiological hazard. They make fiestaware plates out of it. And those are perfectly safe.
Anyway, uranium is dangerous because it is a heavy metal, like lead. You wouldn't want to eat it. However, I think this article and these studies are a little sensationalistic. They said you need 1 microgram per gram of kidney. Most soldiers got
Sorry, got to add somthing: For laser propulsion, you need to have a giant gossamer fresnel lens about 600 miles wide around the orbit of Saturn in order to focus the beam onto the lasersail.
Also, lasersails can seperate into 2 parts to stop. 1 part is left behind. The laser focuses light on this sail. It reflects back onto the other sail, stopping it. Once at the target star system, a Dyson sphere can be constructed around that star.