Holy bad data, batman! You have so many numbers wrong my head is spinning. Try this:
needs to be compressed to 1000+ atmospheres Standard H2 pressure in most modern tanks is 700 bars, not 1000. 350 bar is also quite ok since it contains 2/3 of the hydrogen you get at 700 (hint: no ideal gas at those pressures). Very little to be gained by going to 1000 bars.
[to generate H2] first you need to generate the electricity. That's usually from a coal plant operating at 45% efficiency at best Or it could be wind farm, or a solar plant, or any of those pesky renewables that do not want to produce power exactly when we need it. So instead of dumping it, you make hydrogen with that extra zero-emission power. That, and combined-cycle gas plants can be 60% efficient.
the electrolysis is about 65% efficient at best That's a number for alkaline electrolysis, PEM electrolysis can go much higher. Some cheat and define efficiency with enthalpy instead of Gibbs free energy, which gives them efficiencies close to 100%, but somewhere between 80-90% is realistic.
put the hydrogen through a fuel cell which can be 90% efficient in the lab, but peaks at about 70% efficient in commercial applications Actually no, no one has ever seen 90%, not even in the lab, but a common efficiency in usage is about 60%.
And by the way you did not mention the significant losses for hydrogen compression, which are not a showstopper but do motivate research in e.g. hydride compressors for hydrogens running on waste heat instead of mechanical power.
gasoline ICEs, which are currently about 25%-30% efficient That's your main mistake. This value holds only at their maximum efficiency, which is almost never where they operate. You also fail to account that gasoline does not grow on trees, it needs to be extracted as oil, refined and distributed. The whole Well-to-Wheel efficiency of gasoline is about 10% on a good day.
You might have noted I wrote, "OO support as C++", where I meant "well thought-out OO support". There is OO in Matlab, but it's just like claiming Fortran has OO support. Technically true, but added as an afterthought, and most code out there does not use it.
you somehow missed that semi-colons are not statement terminators
Why yes you could write without them, but then you would get an echo on every assignment on the prompt. No sane person would do that in production code. In practice, all statements in M-files need to be semicolon-terminated.
You should have known this if you had actually worked with even a modicum of MatLab script.
FYI I was on Matlab/Simulink several years (before moving to Scilab, Octave and C++), and I actually held a course in Matlab for undergrads at a Max Planck Institute when I worked in Germany.
[...] because those files are binary and very large
No VCS is meant to do this, neither Git, SVN and certainly not CVS. Those files don't belong in a VCS because you cannot make a diff between them. Small binary files (e.g. icons in a website) are a small nuisance, but there is no point in storing large binary blobs in a VCS regularly. What you need is a backup system, not a version-control system.
(2) permanently delete those files that I know I will no longer need
SVN allows to do this with svndumpfilter (and I was unaware CVS had any way to do this). And no it should not be made any easier, no one should be allowed to monkey around with the repository history with any less than admin rights. If you find yourself regularly removing files from a VCS, it means you have been adding too many useless files. Again, you want backup for this, not VCS.
MatLab is an old, crufty, feature-creeped script engine that I try to hold myself away from as much as I can. As a researcher and academic (got up to post-doc), Matlab is indeed ubiquitous in academia, but it's mostly due to entrenched positions. I see fewer and fewer people using Matlab these days, and that's a good thing.
Matlab is by all means not a fourth-generation programming language: it is procedural just like Fortran, which it supplanted in academia, but it does not have type-checking as C, it does not have OO support as C++, it does not do away with semicolons as end-of-line markers like Python; true, it has some advance features like OO and some functional programming, but (almost) nobody uses them, and most Matlab code is a horrible cruft made by self-not-so-well-taught academics. There is nothing in Matlab you cannot do better in Python with scipy, numpy, matplotlib and pandas. Or with declarative PLs like Modelica.
Matlab is also known for outrageous prices, leveraging on the fact their customer base are universities with big pockets and small administrative brains, and large corporations: they split their code base in many small chunks, and for each you need to pay more and more: as the saying goes, In Matlab you cannot do shit unless you buy a licence for the Toilet Paper toolbox.
The study is by Emission Analytics, and here is the original link (as opposed to TFA from The Telegraph).
Note some misleading elements from TFA: they show only the three smaller classes for UK cars, seemingly indicating that small cars are the worst gas guzzlers, whereas cars with higher engine sizes are actually much worse according to the original study (see the graph). So the lesson is: still buy a small car, just not a very small one for best fuel efficiency.
Another interesting bit that is not in TFA is that the data for US cars is different: there, cars between 1 and 3 liters in volume (I assume this is the large majority of the car pool) have less than half the mileage. Also, the smallest US cars are actually the most efficient of any class, even though their efficiency is below UK average.
Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. What could be simpler?
0 is a cold winter day, and 100 is a hot summer day.
Yeah right, with your system you need to wait at least six months to calibrate a thermometer.
Besides, different places on Earth have different extreme temperatures. The same place on Earth has different extreme temperatures from year to year.
Water is a good reference because it freezes and boils at the same temperature everywhere, with minimal deviation for atmospheric pressure (that can in any case be easily compensated for), and the test can be arranged with the simplest tools; any kitchen can marshal ice and boiling water within minutes.
And in any case, the right temperature unit is the kelvin. Why is anyone even considering negative temperatures? Molecules cannot move with negative velocity!
I thought undercover agents would be trained to conjure up a fake identity on the spot, even under duress, and keep it consistent with any information the interrogating party may have.
For the record, Finland is not part of Scandinavia, since they speak a completely unrelated language. Scandinavia plus Finland and others are correctly referred to as The Nordic Countries".
Think of [Hambach Tagebau] as an anti-nuclear exclusion zone, like Fukushima but getting bigger instead of being cleaned up..
Quite ridiculous proposition: you cannot get cancer by entering the mine, nor is it incompatible with human life, and once depleted the mine reverts to normal soil on which you can grow crops. See the map of open-pit mines near Cologne that you mentioned, and compare the satellite images of the same area. Notice how the areas of previous development (Frechen, Zukunft-West, Bergheim) have been re-converted to agriculture.
Try doing that in Chernobyl, smartass.
Also: I know Muricans have issues with proper units of measure, but the size of the Fukushima exclusion zone is a semi-circle with a 20 km radius. That gives 3.14*20*20/2 or 625 square kilometres, 13 times the size of Garzweiler.
That is correct, but other companies do offer mobile coverage on board: I have flown with SAS planes with on-board GSM, and whereas I did not try it (waaay too expensive rates, it's the new iteration of the airplane phone) I got signal on my device.
You still have to put the device in flight mode for take-off and landing, I assume because a few hundred mobile phones moving at several hundred km/h can overload or confuse ground stations.
WiFi is also made available only when cruising over 3000 metres, I assume because the Internet connection travels over the same data channel the GSM. You can't really play Youtube over the slow connection, but checking mail and reading newspaper is OK.
Of course you can be exposed for a short period of time to 500 times the legal concentration of most chemicals. The "legal limit" is usually designed so that regular, 8-hour daily exposure has no long-term health effects, just like the legal radiation limits. Granted, legal limits back then were less conservative.
Then of course it depends how you are exposed. ingestion is not the same as having skin contact. Methanol has a legal limit of 200 ppm, but I can put my hand in liquid methanol (by definition 1 million ppm, 5000 times the legal limit) for a short time and suffer no consequences.
You can for looking at kiddie porn, or threatening somebody, but those things were illegal before we had an internet.
Same you can say about any country with the imprisonment mark. It was illegal to mock Mohammed in Pakistan before the Internet, and now too. The imprisonment icon means, "you can go to jail after unwarranted, sweeping wiretapping of your Internet connection".
[...]made open threats against the west, repeatedly defied the United Nations, refused nuclear weapon inspections, and ultimately defied UN resolution 1441.
You realise that if you change "West" with "Iran" and make "resolution 1441" into "a bunch of UN resolutions" you get a description fitting Israel, right? And if you change "West" with "India" it becomes Pakistan? With "South Korea" it becomes North Korea? With "Taiwan" the PRC (well not the UN part since they have veto right)? The world is full of militaristic nations threatening neighbours and defying UN resolutions. Cannot see any invasions there, possibly because these countries are either allies, or pose a credible military challenge, or are not sitting on a bunch of oil.
This is why Iraq was invaded by a coalition made of mostly the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Poland, Portugal, and Denmark with 33 other countries providing some form of troop support.
You are either disingenuous or a complete fool. Iraq was invaded because it was an easy prey, rich in oil resources and with a nonexistent defense capacity. Generals could be bribed off the field. It was an overwhelmingly US operation, with some support from a subservient UK, and only nominal support from a bunch of countries thrown in only for the effect of inflating the number you quoted. Some of these countries did not even have an army (Iceland, Palau, Micronesia, Solomon Islands), others were countries looking to appease the US (most Eastern European countries) or failed states whose leaders could be bought (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan).
The casus belli was that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing WMDs for Al-Quaeda; at least according to Colin Powell. That was a big, fat lie by the US. It was even less credible of a Polish invasion of Germany in 1939 (at least Poland had an army: Saddam Hussein had neither WMDs nor Al-Qaeda), and the execution of the invasion was a textbook war of aggression, the punishment for which in Nuremberg was death by hanging.
Indeed that is correct, Chinese do not like cheese. However the mummies are from the Xiahoe tomb complex in the Xinjiang, whose name in Chinese means "New Frontier". People there are more central Asian than Han Chinese, and China gained control of the area only in the 17th century. Still today, Chinese characters are used side-by-side with Arabic in street signs and such (see Urumqi train station for example).
Point being, culture there is different, and was not even in contact with Han Chinese at the time of the mummies.
Considering the price tag of a ship, a few cameras pointing at the sea in every direction is pretty simple and cheap; that's a proper watch. Also, for the requirement of rendering assistance, you can have a remotely controlled hatch and an emergency stock of fresh water and canned food.
That's why the cargo and the ship are insured. The shipping company would not give a damn since they are not losing anything. In addition, it will be much more acceptable for western governments to make paying a ransom a felony when no lives are involved.
Shortly, pirates will learn they cannot extract quick money from hijacking a ship.
Nuclear is, and always has been, an economic failure. No one ever built and operated a nuclear plant without one form or another for government subsidies (such as Price-Anderson in the US). The gargantuan investment costs have always offset the cheap running costs. That's why no one ever built nuclear on its own money—but it's a great way to suck money out of the government for gigantic projects.
New nuclear power plants are insanely expensive, look at Finland's Olkiluoto that now is expected to cost 8.5 billion euros from an initial estimate of 3 billions (and it's not finished yet).
That, and we in Europe have decided we don't like nuclear. Even if the fable that nuclear is cheap were true, I'd rather spend double my energy bills to avoid nuclear, thanks; my energy bill is not so high anyway.
Finally: nuclear power can only provide base load anyway. You can't ramp it up and down to follow demand.
Probably the most similar to Snowden was the German man who alerted the rest of the world to the German re-armament.
Carl von Ossietzky had a name that deserves to be remembered. The committee members resigned because they held positions in the government and would cause a diplomatic incident: the two were actually a socialist and a liberal (see the Norwegian Wikipedia for the details). The criticisms you report came from the conservative press, such as Aftenposten, Morgenbladet, and poet, Nobel laureate and Nazi sympathiser Knut Hamsun (who was condemned by other intellectuals such as Nordahl Grieg).
unbefugtem öffentlichen Zugänglichmachen über eine sogenannte Tauschbörse
That translates to "having made publicly available without authorisation over a so-called exchange forum". The key is "Zugänglichmachen", i.e. they must upload something in order to be prosecutable.
When I lived in Germany, I remember colleagues telling me of acquaintances who received similar letters (for generic filesharing, typically movies), who then caved in and paid. This is however not so common and no one told me they actually received these letters (and most people did download TV series and movies, by their own admission). I still believe these letters are sent randomly, hoping to intimidate people who are likely to have downloaded something.
But you sought to disguise that fact in your comment. You also need very clean water, which is not free.
Aside from the fact that I did not disguise anything, water is absolutely not a significant cost. You just need a simple deionising unit. Compared to the rest of the plant, it's peanuts.
Electrolysis is terribly inefficent, if it was worth doing, that is how we'd get our hydrogen.
Huh, no, electrolysis is actually very efficient, 70-90%. The problem is that you need to provide the electricity yourself instead of using a energy-rich feedstock (natural gas).
We already have natural gas cars and they are good, but not nearly 10 times better than gas cars. You sure aren't going to get further improvement beyond that by using hydrogen.
Incorrect, you are going to get a significant improvement with hydrogen. Hydrogen can be converted with current fuel cell technology with 50% efficiency into electricity (and from there mechanical power), natural gas or gasoline cannot come anywhere near that, mostly because they need to go through combustion.
I am a researcher working in hydrogen & fuel cells, so I'll just spill the beans:
And the hydrogen probably takes up more space than a gallon of gas (a guess --- does someone know?).
It does, but not so much. Storing H2 at 700 bar requires a hefty pressure tank. They are fairly safe but that doesn't make them lighter. That's why hydrogen is suited for larger vehicles (family wagon, SUVs, long-range trips, trucks etc.). Short range is better served by batteries.
What are we destroying to make the hydrogen?
If you have cheap electricity, then it's water. You electrolyse it at the station and do not need to ship hydrogen around or build a gas network. You can also reform natural gas, which is cheaper, but then you need to clean the hydrogen really well: requirements on purity are 99.99% hydrogen, and other components are very severely limited (e.g. sulphur down to 4 parts per billion). It is debatable whether the purity standard is really necessary, though, it may be unnecessarily strict.
Main reason not to use electricity directly, as in batteries: batteries are heavier, and if you want to double energy storage in a battery car you need to double the batteries (which is not going to double the range—the batteries are heavy too). If you want to double the energy storage in a hydrogen car, you only need to double the hydrogen storage, the fuel cell (the expensive part) is still the same. And hydrogen storage is not nearly as heavy as its battery equivalent, also factoring in that fuel-cell conversion is about 50% efficient.
Why is investing in a new infrastructure -- hydrogen distribution --- a good thing?
As I said above, a good alternative is not to have the infrastructure, but to produce and compress hydrogen locally at the station. The idea is that even with all the losses (hydrogen production, compression, fuel cell) the system is still more efficient that oil (drilling, extraction, transport, refining to gasoline, transport, combustion engine). More importantly, hydrogen can be produced starting from anything: natural gas, oil, solar, you name it. Gasoline comes only from oil (or coal if you want to go Fischer-Tropsch, but that's not really efficient and has large emissions).
Does this process change the net amount of water in the ecosystem in a way that would have impact in 50 years?
No, the quantities are minimal compared to the oceans. Any day you will have far more water passing through your shower than out of your exhaust. 100 km of travel in a fuel-cell Mercedes B-class (yes I drove it:-) produce about 9 kg (i.e. 9 liters) of water. Besides, that hydrogen was produced from water from the biosphere anyway, so no balance is disrupted.
No, no, no, you don't understand what we are talking about here.
First, this is hydrogen, a gas with a molecule so small it can diffuse through steel. I have never seen a rubber hose used for hydrogen and I think I know why it would leak like the sieve it would be. In the appropriate conditions hydrogen can leak through steel so fast it can sustain a continuous fire (which by heating only promotes more permeation). Natural gas is a very tame fuel compared to hydrogen.
Second, a flammable gas, like hydrogen or NG, in an environment with lot of electronics (none of it ATEX-certified I presume) generates a mother load of safety issues I can't even begin to grasp the magnitude of. No data centre currently has to deal with gas explosions, and if nothing else the insurance costs will go through the roof.
This would be only an enormous risk for no gain whatsoever.
Efficiency of conversion for gas (any gas) compression and expansion is pretty poor, and requires turbomachinery for high yields (which are not so high). In addition to that you would need strong piping for the compressed air (the FC gases run at atmospheric pressure), and you open the gates to a whole new class of problems with high-pressure equipment.
Really, electricity is the most efficient and convenient way to move power around. Efficiency is essentially 100% with proper cabling and safety is well understood. I have no idea what advantages one might harvest from using fuel cells in that context.
Mind you: I am a researcher in fuel cells. I lead a multi-million project in fuel cells, dammit. There are lots of good applications for fuel cells, this is not one of them. This is as stupid as fuelling a vibrator with gasoline.
I'm sure you've read several dozen articles by now about how various data centers were built in various parts of the country due to low electricity costs, only to find that once they had built it, the utilities and local municipalities decided to jack the rates up.
And how are they not going to do the same for natural gas, or any other form of energy? The one you describe is a regulatory problem, not a technical one.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy bad data, batman! You have so many numbers wrong my head is spinning. Try this:
You might have noted I wrote, "OO support as C++", where I meant "well thought-out OO support". There is OO in Matlab, but it's just like claiming Fortran has OO support. Technically true, but added as an afterthought, and most code out there does not use it.
Why yes you could write without them, but then you would get an echo on every assignment on the prompt. No sane person would do that in production code. In practice, all statements in M-files need to be semicolon-terminated.
FYI I was on Matlab/Simulink several years (before moving to Scilab, Octave and C++), and I actually held a course in Matlab for undergrads at a Max Planck Institute when I worked in Germany.
No VCS is meant to do this, neither Git, SVN and certainly not CVS. Those files don't belong in a VCS because you cannot make a diff between them. Small binary files (e.g. icons in a website) are a small nuisance, but there is no point in storing large binary blobs in a VCS regularly. What you need is a backup system, not a version-control system.
SVN allows to do this with svndumpfilter (and I was unaware CVS had any way to do this). And no it should not be made any easier, no one should be allowed to monkey around with the repository history with any less than admin rights. If you find yourself regularly removing files from a VCS, it means you have been adding too many useless files. Again, you want backup for this, not VCS.
MatLab is an old, crufty, feature-creeped script engine that I try to hold myself away from as much as I can. As a researcher and academic (got up to post-doc), Matlab is indeed ubiquitous in academia, but it's mostly due to entrenched positions. I see fewer and fewer people using Matlab these days, and that's a good thing.
Matlab is by all means not a fourth-generation programming language: it is procedural just like Fortran, which it supplanted in academia, but it does not have type-checking as C, it does not have OO support as C++, it does not do away with semicolons as end-of-line markers like Python; true, it has some advance features like OO and some functional programming, but (almost) nobody uses them, and most Matlab code is a horrible cruft made by self-not-so-well-taught academics. There is nothing in Matlab you cannot do better in Python with scipy, numpy, matplotlib and pandas. Or with declarative PLs like Modelica.
Matlab is also known for outrageous prices, leveraging on the fact their customer base are universities with big pockets and small administrative brains, and large corporations: they split their code base in many small chunks, and for each you need to pay more and more: as the saying goes, In Matlab you cannot do shit unless you buy a licence for the Toilet Paper toolbox.
Long story short: Matlab is the Perl of academia.
The study is by Emission Analytics, and here is the original link (as opposed to TFA from The Telegraph).
Note some misleading elements from TFA: they show only the three smaller classes for UK cars, seemingly indicating that small cars are the worst gas guzzlers, whereas cars with higher engine sizes are actually much worse according to the original study (see the graph). So the lesson is: still buy a small car, just not a very small one for best fuel efficiency.
Another interesting bit that is not in TFA is that the data for US cars is different: there, cars between 1 and 3 liters in volume (I assume this is the large majority of the car pool) have less than half the mileage. Also, the smallest US cars are actually the most efficient of any class, even though their efficiency is below UK average.
Yeah right, with your system you need to wait at least six months to calibrate a thermometer.
Besides, different places on Earth have different extreme temperatures. The same place on Earth has different extreme temperatures from year to year.
Water is a good reference because it freezes and boils at the same temperature everywhere, with minimal deviation for atmospheric pressure (that can in any case be easily compensated for), and the test can be arranged with the simplest tools; any kitchen can marshal ice and boiling water within minutes.
And in any case, the right temperature unit is the kelvin. Why is anyone even considering negative temperatures? Molecules cannot move with negative velocity!
I thought undercover agents would be trained to conjure up a fake identity on the spot, even under duress, and keep it consistent with any information the interrogating party may have.
For the record, Finland is not part of Scandinavia, since they speak a completely unrelated language. Scandinavia plus Finland and others are correctly referred to as The Nordic Countries".
Quite ridiculous proposition: you cannot get cancer by entering the mine, nor is it incompatible with human life, and once depleted the mine reverts to normal soil on which you can grow crops. See the map of open-pit mines near Cologne that you mentioned, and compare the satellite images of the same area. Notice how the areas of previous development (Frechen, Zukunft-West, Bergheim) have been re-converted to agriculture.
Try doing that in Chernobyl, smartass.
Also: I know Muricans have issues with proper units of measure, but the size of the Fukushima exclusion zone is a semi-circle with a 20 km radius. That gives 3.14*20*20/2 or 625 square kilometres, 13 times the size of Garzweiler.
That is correct, but other companies do offer mobile coverage on board: I have flown with SAS planes with on-board GSM, and whereas I did not try it (waaay too expensive rates, it's the new iteration of the airplane phone) I got signal on my device.
You still have to put the device in flight mode for take-off and landing, I assume because a few hundred mobile phones moving at several hundred km/h can overload or confuse ground stations.
WiFi is also made available only when cruising over 3000 metres, I assume because the Internet connection travels over the same data channel the GSM. You can't really play Youtube over the slow connection, but checking mail and reading newspaper is OK.
Of course you can be exposed for a short period of time to 500 times the legal concentration of most chemicals. The "legal limit" is usually designed so that regular, 8-hour daily exposure has no long-term health effects, just like the legal radiation limits. Granted, legal limits back then were less conservative.
Then of course it depends how you are exposed. ingestion is not the same as having skin contact. Methanol has a legal limit of 200 ppm, but I can put my hand in liquid methanol (by definition 1 million ppm, 5000 times the legal limit) for a short time and suffer no consequences.
Yes you can, google up Justin River Carter. He made a hyperbolic, sarcastic comment on Facebook, and he's looking at up to 10 years in jail. Another case is Cameron D'Ambrosio's. The magic word is terrorism: if anyone is scared by what you say or says they are, you are fornicated.
Same you can say about any country with the imprisonment mark. It was illegal to mock Mohammed in Pakistan before the Internet, and now too. The imprisonment icon means, "you can go to jail after unwarranted, sweeping wiretapping of your Internet connection".
You realise that if you change "West" with "Iran" and make "resolution 1441" into "a bunch of UN resolutions" you get a description fitting Israel, right? And if you change "West" with "India" it becomes Pakistan? With "South Korea" it becomes North Korea? With "Taiwan" the PRC (well not the UN part since they have veto right)? The world is full of militaristic nations threatening neighbours and defying UN resolutions. Cannot see any invasions there, possibly because these countries are either allies, or pose a credible military challenge, or are not sitting on a bunch of oil.
You are either disingenuous or a complete fool. Iraq was invaded because it was an easy prey, rich in oil resources and with a nonexistent defense capacity. Generals could be bribed off the field. It was an overwhelmingly US operation, with some support from a subservient UK, and only nominal support from a bunch of countries thrown in only for the effect of inflating the number you quoted. Some of these countries did not even have an army (Iceland, Palau, Micronesia, Solomon Islands), others were countries looking to appease the US (most Eastern European countries) or failed states whose leaders could be bought (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan).
The casus belli was that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing WMDs for Al-Quaeda; at least according to Colin Powell. That was a big, fat lie by the US. It was even less credible of a Polish invasion of Germany in 1939 (at least Poland had an army: Saddam Hussein had neither WMDs nor Al-Qaeda), and the execution of the invasion was a textbook war of aggression, the punishment for which in Nuremberg was death by hanging.
Indeed that is correct, Chinese do not like cheese. However the mummies are from the Xiahoe tomb complex in the Xinjiang, whose name in Chinese means "New Frontier". People there are more central Asian than Han Chinese, and China gained control of the area only in the 17th century. Still today, Chinese characters are used side-by-side with Arabic in street signs and such (see Urumqi train station for example).
Point being, culture there is different, and was not even in contact with Han Chinese at the time of the mummies.
Considering the price tag of a ship, a few cameras pointing at the sea in every direction is pretty simple and cheap; that's a proper watch. Also, for the requirement of rendering assistance, you can have a remotely controlled hatch and an emergency stock of fresh water and canned food.
That's why the cargo and the ship are insured. The shipping company would not give a damn since they are not losing anything. In addition, it will be much more acceptable for western governments to make paying a ransom a felony when no lives are involved.
Shortly, pirates will learn they cannot extract quick money from hijacking a ship.
Nuclear is, and always has been, an economic failure. No one ever built and operated a nuclear plant without one form or another for government subsidies (such as Price-Anderson in the US). The gargantuan investment costs have always offset the cheap running costs. That's why no one ever built nuclear on its own money—but it's a great way to suck money out of the government for gigantic projects.
New nuclear power plants are insanely expensive, look at Finland's Olkiluoto that now is expected to cost 8.5 billion euros from an initial estimate of 3 billions (and it's not finished yet).
That, and we in Europe have decided we don't like nuclear. Even if the fable that nuclear is cheap were true, I'd rather spend double my energy bills to avoid nuclear, thanks; my energy bill is not so high anyway.
Finally: nuclear power can only provide base load anyway. You can't ramp it up and down to follow demand.
Carl von Ossietzky had a name that deserves to be remembered. The committee members resigned because they held positions in the government and would cause a diplomatic incident: the two were actually a socialist and a liberal (see the Norwegian Wikipedia for the details). The criticisms you report came from the conservative press, such as Aftenposten, Morgenbladet, and poet, Nobel laureate and Nazi sympathiser Knut Hamsun (who was condemned by other intellectuals such as Nordahl Grieg).
That translates to "having made publicly available without authorisation over a so-called exchange forum". The key is "Zugänglichmachen", i.e. they must upload something in order to be prosecutable.
When I lived in Germany, I remember colleagues telling me of acquaintances who received similar letters (for generic filesharing, typically movies), who then caved in and paid. This is however not so common and no one told me they actually received these letters (and most people did download TV series and movies, by their own admission). I still believe these letters are sent randomly, hoping to intimidate people who are likely to have downloaded something.
Aside from the fact that I did not disguise anything, water is absolutely not a significant cost. You just need a simple deionising unit. Compared to the rest of the plant, it's peanuts.
Huh, no, electrolysis is actually very efficient, 70-90%. The problem is that you need to provide the electricity yourself instead of using a energy-rich feedstock (natural gas).
Incorrect, you are going to get a significant improvement with hydrogen. Hydrogen can be converted with current fuel cell technology with 50% efficiency into electricity (and from there mechanical power), natural gas or gasoline cannot come anywhere near that, mostly because they need to go through combustion.
I am a researcher working in hydrogen & fuel cells, so I'll just spill the beans:
It does, but not so much. Storing H2 at 700 bar requires a hefty pressure tank. They are fairly safe but that doesn't make them lighter. That's why hydrogen is suited for larger vehicles (family wagon, SUVs, long-range trips, trucks etc.). Short range is better served by batteries.
If you have cheap electricity, then it's water. You electrolyse it at the station and do not need to ship hydrogen around or build a gas network. You can also reform natural gas, which is cheaper, but then you need to clean the hydrogen really well: requirements on purity are 99.99% hydrogen, and other components are very severely limited (e.g. sulphur down to 4 parts per billion). It is debatable whether the purity standard is really necessary, though, it may be unnecessarily strict.
Main reason not to use electricity directly, as in batteries: batteries are heavier, and if you want to double energy storage in a battery car you need to double the batteries (which is not going to double the range—the batteries are heavy too). If you want to double the energy storage in a hydrogen car, you only need to double the hydrogen storage, the fuel cell (the expensive part) is still the same. And hydrogen storage is not nearly as heavy as its battery equivalent, also factoring in that fuel-cell conversion is about 50% efficient.
As I said above, a good alternative is not to have the infrastructure, but to produce and compress hydrogen locally at the station. The idea is that even with all the losses (hydrogen production, compression, fuel cell) the system is still more efficient that oil (drilling, extraction, transport, refining to gasoline, transport, combustion engine). More importantly, hydrogen can be produced starting from anything: natural gas, oil, solar, you name it. Gasoline comes only from oil (or coal if you want to go Fischer-Tropsch, but that's not really efficient and has large emissions).
No, the quantities are minimal compared to the oceans. Any day you will have far more water passing through your shower than out of your exhaust. 100 km of travel in a fuel-cell Mercedes B-class (yes I drove it :-) produce about 9 kg (i.e. 9 liters) of water. Besides, that hydrogen was produced from water from the biosphere anyway, so no balance is disrupted.
No, no, no, you don't understand what we are talking about here. First, this is hydrogen, a gas with a molecule so small it can diffuse through steel. I have never seen a rubber hose used for hydrogen and I think I know why it would leak like the sieve it would be. In the appropriate conditions hydrogen can leak through steel so fast it can sustain a continuous fire (which by heating only promotes more permeation). Natural gas is a very tame fuel compared to hydrogen. Second, a flammable gas, like hydrogen or NG, in an environment with lot of electronics (none of it ATEX-certified I presume) generates a mother load of safety issues I can't even begin to grasp the magnitude of. No data centre currently has to deal with gas explosions, and if nothing else the insurance costs will go through the roof. This would be only an enormous risk for no gain whatsoever.
Efficiency of conversion for gas (any gas) compression and expansion is pretty poor, and requires turbomachinery for high yields (which are not so high). In addition to that you would need strong piping for the compressed air (the FC gases run at atmospheric pressure), and you open the gates to a whole new class of problems with high-pressure equipment.
Really, electricity is the most efficient and convenient way to move power around. Efficiency is essentially 100% with proper cabling and safety is well understood. I have no idea what advantages one might harvest from using fuel cells in that context.
Mind you: I am a researcher in fuel cells. I lead a multi-million project in fuel cells, dammit. There are lots of good applications for fuel cells, this is not one of them. This is as stupid as fuelling a vibrator with gasoline.
And how are they not going to do the same for natural gas, or any other form of energy? The one you describe is a regulatory problem, not a technical one.