The solar constant is the total EM radiation from the Sun, not just visible light! Not only is most of that filtered by the atmosphere ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Solar_Spectrum.png ), but you're losing a bunch more in that conversion efficiency of solar panels is quite narrow in bandwidth.
I'm one of those silly people that builds their own equipment ^_^
The quiet environment is actually not as necessary as you imagine, since one nice way to listen is by using in-ear-canal headphones, such as Etymotic ones. They provide something like 30 dB isolation from outside sound in mid and high frequencies. Combine this with the fact that the ear can pick out a signal several dB below the noisefloor (because noise is broadband whereas signal generally isn't), and one can begin to see that 24-bit audio may make sense (noise-shaped dithered 16-bit can only manage the ear's 120 dB range in a narrow part of the frequency range). Of course, it's hard to make electronics reach such low distortion, and drivers, be they headphones or speakers, have even higher distortion (though it tends to be predominantly linear distortion, unlike the electronics where the problem is the exponential gain of transistors or the 3/2 power law gain of tubes).
The waste is dangerous but it can be put away. Many things are dangerous. Basic statistics show that being in a car on the road is much more dangerous for you, as an average citizen of the world, than a 100-fold increase in nuclear waste.
>"Nuclear energy is crazy dangerous"
What the...these are panicky, paranoid-sounding terms.
"I can't believe nuclear is still even discussed!!"
I actually can't believe this comment is made in all seriousness by a Slashdotter. Tell me, do you specialize in eating organic foods and listening to new age music?
It seems one has to export the.tex from LyX and convert manually with xetex. That defeats the advantage LyX brings of showing a preview of the document.
This isn't a subjective matter, the way, say, the arts are. When dealing with objective things, such as what can meet energy needs with minimal probability of damage (such as genetic due to radioactive waste), then there can only exist ONE right answer. And, in this case, it is clearly mine.
Uranium ore is quite limited indeed. That's why we need breeders which significantly increase efficiency. Then there's thorium which also works as fuel, and there's a lot of that around. And finally, there's a huge amount of uranium in seawater. In combination, we have several centuries of fission. Fusion is a pipe dream? Let's see some references. Clearly governments think otherwise if they're putting many billions of dollars into the construction of ITER. You seriously think they don't have expectations that it is going to work? Your post is devoid of any argument, just hand-waving nonsense.
>"Focus your attention to the US - not overseas."
Why? I live in Canada. Amazing, isn't it, that slashdot has an international membership! *rolleyes* Provinces like Alberta and Ontario here are getting ready to start building new nuclear plants.
>"There are ZERO nuclear plants in the works to be built."
Even in the US, this is absolutely, 100%, false. Things may be at early stages, but yes new plants are in the works. Your info is outdated.
>"There hasn't been an order for a new nuclear reactor since early 1970s. The last nuclear reactor to be built was completed in 1996"
So?
>"Never underestimate he magnitude of lemmings who blindly follow those who talk the loudest yet have no clue what they are actually talking about."
So true! And thanks for demonstrating with your post how someone can loudly talk about something he has no clue about.
You're an idiot. The solar constant is measured at the top of the atmosphere, which renders your estimate only meaningful for space-based solar. Huge swaths of the spectrum are filtered away by the atmosphere.
Next, governments aren't spending multiple billions of dollars in ITER because they expect fusion to fail. This isn't about a breakthrough; it's the working out of the practical engineering issues. Fission incorporating breeders and thorium will give you at least several centuries, and I'll be damned if fusion doesn't replace it long before that.
I have nothing against solar, except when it's suggested it can ever provide a large fraction of the world's energy needs (considering current levels of industrialization, that will grow a good tenfold if sufficient energy is provided). Certainly it is not nearly as bad as wind power (the poor birds...)
Why're you so paranoid about even properly managed, limited quantity waste? The marginal increase in background radiation compared to what's already there is inconsequential.
> "breeder reactors are not a magic pill"
There's no magic pill, but this is the only practical solution.
> "500 years from now"
By then we'd have switched to fusion and mining the moon for tritium, and perhaps space-based solar. In the unlikely case we're still relying on fission, by then it will be practical to simply send off waste into space. These are rather trivial things to accomplish over a span of a few centuries.
My prediction: if we don't turn to nuclear now, peak oil is going to destroy civilization. Of course, that would be quite to the taste of many environmentalists.
The smaller amount that breeder reactors produce means that it's practical to process such waste in the waste transmuter developed at CERN, which renders it essentially harmless.
Breeder reactors have much more than 200 years, since once we run out of uranium, we can start using throium as fuel, and there's quite a bit of that. If even after a few centuries we haven't gotten fusion working yet, we'd still be OK because we'll start extracting the huge amounts of uranium from seawater.
You are wrong. I'm on Shaw (Canada) and every time I change my router's MAC, I get issued a new IP address. Moreover, I change the MAC randomly--I change a digit or two in random positions to a random hex digit. In only a few cases did this not work and I had to try a different MAC (from what I remember, these were either the first or last couple of digits, I forget which).
Am I the only one that thought the last line, "In scientific terms, Astropulse is a sky survey that searches for microsecond transient radio pulses." was easier to understand, in its brevity, than the supposedly layman explanation preceding it?
That's why I rarely listen to modern recordings. Unless you buy from the few brands that specifically avoid this, you end up with something with a dynamic range that makes a turntable seem good (ironic, considering increased dynamic range is the CD's big sound-quality-related benefit over records).
Nuclear development is still where most resources should be poured into. Advanced breeder reactors, and longer term, fusion projects like ITER, are the only solution that can provide for a long time the amounts of energy needed to sustain progress and accommodate the exploding energy needs of underdeveloped and third world countries as they start industrializing. You'd have to cover the planet in solar panels and windmills if you wanted to use those technologies instead. It almost makes me wonder if that isn't the reason greens are pushing them--they know they would curb progress due to inadequate generation capacity. Never underestimate the megalomania of luddites and back-to-nature creeps.
The US situation is not primarily an economic slump, it's a financial system problem (or meltdown, according to some of the more pessimistic outlooks). They are related but not identical things.
It is often the case that a legitimate concern may be mistaken for mere trolling, when in fact it is an issue that the presenter cares about deeply. Don't rush to judgment.
Slashdot Mirror
The solar constant is the total EM radiation from the Sun, not just visible light! Not only is most of that filtered by the atmosphere ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Solar_Spectrum.png ), but you're losing a bunch more in that conversion efficiency of solar panels is quite narrow in bandwidth.
I'm one of those silly people that builds their own equipment ^_^
The quiet environment is actually not as necessary as you imagine, since one nice way to listen is by using in-ear-canal headphones, such as Etymotic ones. They provide something like 30 dB isolation from outside sound in mid and high frequencies. Combine this with the fact that the ear can pick out a signal several dB below the noisefloor (because noise is broadband whereas signal generally isn't), and one can begin to see that 24-bit audio may make sense (noise-shaped dithered 16-bit can only manage the ear's 120 dB range in a narrow part of the frequency range). Of course, it's hard to make electronics reach such low distortion, and drivers, be they headphones or speakers, have even higher distortion (though it tends to be predominantly linear distortion, unlike the electronics where the problem is the exponential gain of transistors or the 3/2 power law gain of tubes).
The waste is dangerous but it can be put away. Many things are dangerous. Basic statistics show that being in a car on the road is much more dangerous for you, as an average citizen of the world, than a 100-fold increase in nuclear waste.
>"Nuclear energy is crazy dangerous"
What the...these are panicky, paranoid-sounding terms.
"I can't believe nuclear is still even discussed!!"
I actually can't believe this comment is made in all seriousness by a Slashdotter. Tell me, do you specialize in eating organic foods and listening to new age music?
At the time I posted that reply, his score was only 2...
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
It seems one has to export the .tex from LyX and convert manually with xetex. That defeats the advantage LyX brings of showing a preview of the document.
Clever. Too bad most /.ers won't get the reference.
This isn't a subjective matter, the way, say, the arts are. When dealing with objective things, such as what can meet energy needs with minimal probability of damage (such as genetic due to radioactive waste), then there can only exist ONE right answer. And, in this case, it is clearly mine.
First part: exaggerated problems which are in fact low risk and practically manageable. Last paragraph: unbridled, and unjustified, optimism.
I don't get it :?
Uranium ore is quite limited indeed. That's why we need breeders which significantly increase efficiency. Then there's thorium which also works as fuel, and there's a lot of that around. And finally, there's a huge amount of uranium in seawater. In combination, we have several centuries of fission. Fusion is a pipe dream? Let's see some references. Clearly governments think otherwise if they're putting many billions of dollars into the construction of ITER. You seriously think they don't have expectations that it is going to work? Your post is devoid of any argument, just hand-waving nonsense.
>"Focus your attention to the US - not overseas."
Why? I live in Canada. Amazing, isn't it, that slashdot has an international membership! *rolleyes* Provinces like Alberta and Ontario here are getting ready to start building new nuclear plants.
>"There are ZERO nuclear plants in the works to be built."
Even in the US, this is absolutely, 100%, false. Things may be at early stages, but yes new plants are in the works. Your info is outdated.
>"There hasn't been an order for a new nuclear reactor since early 1970s. The last nuclear reactor to be built was completed in 1996"
So?
>"Never underestimate he magnitude of lemmings who blindly follow those who talk the loudest yet have no clue what they are actually talking about."
So true! And thanks for demonstrating with your post how someone can loudly talk about something he has no clue about.
You're an idiot. The solar constant is measured at the top of the atmosphere, which renders your estimate only meaningful for space-based solar. Huge swaths of the spectrum are filtered away by the atmosphere.
Next, governments aren't spending multiple billions of dollars in ITER because they expect fusion to fail. This isn't about a breakthrough; it's the working out of the practical engineering issues. Fission incorporating breeders and thorium will give you at least several centuries, and I'll be damned if fusion doesn't replace it long before that.
I have nothing against solar, except when it's suggested it can ever provide a large fraction of the world's energy needs (considering current levels of industrialization, that will grow a good tenfold if sufficient energy is provided). Certainly it is not nearly as bad as wind power (the poor birds...)
Why're you so paranoid about even properly managed, limited quantity waste? The marginal increase in background radiation compared to what's already there is inconsequential.
> "breeder reactors are not a magic pill"
There's no magic pill, but this is the only practical solution.
> "500 years from now"
By then we'd have switched to fusion and mining the moon for tritium, and perhaps space-based solar. In the unlikely case we're still relying on fission, by then it will be practical to simply send off waste into space. These are rather trivial things to accomplish over a span of a few centuries.
My prediction: if we don't turn to nuclear now, peak oil is going to destroy civilization. Of course, that would be quite to the taste of many environmentalists.
I'm sorry, but if you are not a troll, then you're either extremely naive and brainwashed by green propaganda, or a misanthrope.
The smaller amount that breeder reactors produce means that it's practical to process such waste in the waste transmuter developed at CERN, which renders it essentially harmless.
Breeder reactors have much more than 200 years, since once we run out of uranium, we can start using throium as fuel, and there's quite a bit of that. If even after a few centuries we haven't gotten fusion working yet, we'd still be OK because we'll start extracting the huge amounts of uranium from seawater.
You are wrong. I'm on Shaw (Canada) and every time I change my router's MAC, I get issued a new IP address. Moreover, I change the MAC randomly--I change a digit or two in random positions to a random hex digit. In only a few cases did this not work and I had to try a different MAC (from what I remember, these were either the first or last couple of digits, I forget which).
Am I the only one that thought the last line, "In scientific terms, Astropulse is a sky survey that searches for microsecond transient radio pulses." was easier to understand, in its brevity, than the supposedly layman explanation preceding it?
That's why I rarely listen to modern recordings. Unless you buy from the few brands that specifically avoid this, you end up with something with a dynamic range that makes a turntable seem good (ironic, considering increased dynamic range is the CD's big sound-quality-related benefit over records).
Huh? This sounds somewhere in octave 7, so it's not even 4 kHz. 19 kHz my ass.
Funny; I thought of just the opposite when I read the article: anti-nuclear movements exercising pressure on him.
Nuclear development is still where most resources should be poured into. Advanced breeder reactors, and longer term, fusion projects like ITER, are the only solution that can provide for a long time the amounts of energy needed to sustain progress and accommodate the exploding energy needs of underdeveloped and third world countries as they start industrializing. You'd have to cover the planet in solar panels and windmills if you wanted to use those technologies instead. It almost makes me wonder if that isn't the reason greens are pushing them--they know they would curb progress due to inadequate generation capacity. Never underestimate the megalomania of luddites and back-to-nature creeps.
The US situation is not primarily an economic slump, it's a financial system problem (or meltdown, according to some of the more pessimistic outlooks). They are related but not identical things.
It is often the case that a legitimate concern may be mistaken for mere trolling, when in fact it is an issue that the presenter cares about deeply. Don't rush to judgment.
The fact that he's in the minority opinion does not mean he is wrong about this subject. Consensus does not make scientific truth.