Studying material science in the context of fission feels a little bit like powering my car on Fabrigé eggs and bald eagle heads, when you consider the costs of most of the materials in the core. Of course, we all know that fission is wildly economical despite that.
My question is, how insane does it get with fusion material sciences?
A nagging question about these fusion devices they've been talking about: How do they plan on extracting the energy from the reaction?
By convection/conduction with waste products being ejected from the "reactor" (not a bad term, imho)? By radiation?
Are they intended to be connected to some thermodynamic cycle or something more exotic? What kind of heat transfer temperatures are people talking about? Several thousand kelvins, or something more conventional?
While I have no doubt that Dr. Bussard's heart (and science) is in the right place, he wasn't a terribly good frontman for this project in that lecture. He came awfully close to blaming his own failure on a cabal of conspiring fellow scientists--just about the clearest sign of pseudoscience, by anyone's standards.
If you're looking for investors in a room of savvy geeks without a physics background, there's few things you should try harder to avoid than to be mistaken for a quack.
It reminds me of a time when I was in middle school, and my mother had a bit of a faith panic which led to her to try to make up for several years of religious doldrums in the family. One of the first things she did was drag me to an adult Bible class at the local M.S. Lutheran church.
Now, I don't know what a Bible class is supposed to be, but our first lesson set the tone. The pastor in charge made a whistle-stop tour of all the conservative talking points--sex, the Media, welfare, etc.--and finally landed on evolution. He then proceeded to tell us all about his "friend," the biologist. This biologist friend of his had told him a bunch of anecdotes about carbon-14 dating, such as that it had identified some mollusk as being several hundred million years old despite being fresh.
This is of course utter horseshit, as carbon-14 levels taper off into nothingness in a few tens of thousands of years, and the pastor no more had a biologist friend than I have an imaginary one. But it just illustrated to me how cynical YEC's can be when they know they're fighting for Truth. The saying that everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts comes to mind here. It's not that the YEC audience doesn't listen to the facts, it's that, for them, something as abstract as billion year evolutionary time spans doesn't have any concrete facts, and they're as good of a judge as anyone to choose between what this pastor says about science, and what they hear in class.
reactor start up can in fact easily take a couple of days.
What does that matter? A large coal-fired unit can easily take a full day to come online from cold start. Either way, your reserve capacity (gas turbines, sometimes diesel) is going to be the first thing coming online.
Saying that "Nowadays one tries to break power generation up into much smaller parts" is a flat-out lie. Plants are as big as ever, and the majority of the baseline generating capacity being built today is many hundreds of megawatts for coal, and over a gigawatt per reactor for nuclear.
Someday, hundreds--or perhaps thousands--of years from now, members of some future religious organization will gather and pray at the foot of your WAILING WALL OF TEXT.
(At this point, I should mention that De Beers also tightly controls the diamond cutter workforce -- any diamond cutter who cuts for a company other than De Beers is immediately cut off from doing any De Beers work)
The diamond cutter workforce is also dominated by Hasidic Jews. When I first saw a documentary on the industry, I thought it was an odd combination, but then, it came to me. Hundreds of years ago, there's this guy, and he's thinking:
"Hmmmm... I've got all these diamonds; now who can I hire that has experience in precision cutting work where any mistake has grave consequences...
It might not have much to do with your point, but to give you an idea of the scale of our mercury problem, 50 lbs of mercury is roughly the yearly output of an unscrubbed, medium-sized (100-500 MW) power plant. If you've ever ridden over a coal pile, it is mind blowing to think that there's only a few cubic inches of the stuff in the whole damn hill.
As you can imagine, it's not terribly easy to measure in the flue gas.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm imagining the investors as Statler & Waldorf.
molten Li + H2O, BFF
Studying material science in the context of fission feels a little bit like powering my car on Fabrigé eggs and bald eagle heads, when you consider the costs of most of the materials in the core. Of course, we all know that fission is wildly economical despite that.
My question is, how insane does it get with fusion material sciences?
A nagging question about these fusion devices they've been talking about: How do they plan on extracting the energy from the reaction?
By convection/conduction with waste products being ejected from the "reactor" (not a bad term, imho)? By radiation?
Are they intended to be connected to some thermodynamic cycle or something more exotic? What kind of heat transfer temperatures are people talking about? Several thousand kelvins, or something more conventional?
This is at once brilliant and deeply evil.
If I had mod points you'd be "+5 Underrated"
While I have no doubt that Dr. Bussard's heart (and science) is in the right place, he wasn't a terribly good frontman for this project in that lecture. He came awfully close to blaming his own failure on a cabal of conspiring fellow scientists--just about the clearest sign of pseudoscience, by anyone's standards.
If you're looking for investors in a room of savvy geeks without a physics background, there's few things you should try harder to avoid than to be mistaken for a quack.
Time to put a check by the "Volunteer Fire Brigade" on the "City Ordinances" menu.
Of mesotheliosis?
It reminds me of a time when I was in middle school, and my mother had a bit of a faith panic which led to her to try to make up for several years of religious doldrums in the family. One of the first things she did was drag me to an adult Bible class at the local M.S. Lutheran church.
Now, I don't know what a Bible class is supposed to be, but our first lesson set the tone. The pastor in charge made a whistle-stop tour of all the conservative talking points--sex, the Media, welfare, etc.--and finally landed on evolution. He then proceeded to tell us all about his "friend," the biologist. This biologist friend of his had told him a bunch of anecdotes about carbon-14 dating, such as that it had identified some mollusk as being several hundred million years old despite being fresh.
This is of course utter horseshit, as carbon-14 levels taper off into nothingness in a few tens of thousands of years, and the pastor no more had a biologist friend than I have an imaginary one. But it just illustrated to me how cynical YEC's can be when they know they're fighting for Truth. The saying that everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts comes to mind here. It's not that the YEC audience doesn't listen to the facts, it's that, for them, something as abstract as billion year evolutionary time spans doesn't have any concrete facts , and they're as good of a judge as anyone to choose between what this pastor says about science, and what they hear in class.
Wouldn't that leave us some serious questions about its magnetic field?
Actually, the very word for guided missile is "robot" in several languages.
Why, because the page took 2 minutes to load?
Mod parent down.
Saying that "Nowadays one tries to break power generation up into much smaller parts" is a flat-out lie. Plants are as big as ever, and the majority of the baseline generating capacity being built today is many hundreds of megawatts for coal, and over a gigawatt per reactor for nuclear.
...craniectomy!
Civilization has truly turned south when the first thing people think of when they hear "full metal gates" is animu instead of R. Lee Ermey.
Someday, hundreds--or perhaps thousands--of years from now, members of some future religious organization will gather and pray at the foot of your WAILING WALL OF TEXT .
You can't see me now, but my pupils have gone "Mr. Sparkle"
If you were using a .22, it's clear that you merely intended to prolong its suffering.
Studies have confirmed repeatedly that IQ is a poor indicator of one's pimping skills.
I guess that depends on you definition of "satellite"
* squinting my eyes *
"C... H... A??"
"Hmmmm... I've got all these diamonds; now who can I hire that has experience in precision cutting work where any mistake has grave consequences...
"I've got it!"
It might not have much to do with your point, but to give you an idea of the scale of our mercury problem, 50 lbs of mercury is roughly the yearly output of an unscrubbed, medium-sized (100-500 MW) power plant. If you've ever ridden over a coal pile, it is mind blowing to think that there's only a few cubic inches of the stuff in the whole damn hill.
As you can imagine, it's not terribly easy to measure in the flue gas.
Don't worry about .cx; Bob Goatse was deported several years ago.
I heard he's an entrepreneur on the Cook Islands now, though...