There are well-respected scientists still working on LENR/LANR reactions a.k.a. Cold Fusion. Peter_L._Hagelstein is one of them. He teaches a LANR class at MIT. His initial interest in the field was to debunk the claims, the evidence he saw convinced him otherwise. For the past years he has been systematically performing the experiments that determine the conditions for when it works and when it does not work. I.e., he appears to be an entirely legitimate scientists investigating a phenomenon that is not well understood but could have tremendous impact; this is the quintessential science.
ECat may well be fraudulent. Many characteristics of known frauds exist. If you examine the work of Hagelstein and others, you will not see similar evidence of fraud. You will see the work you would associate with scientists doing what they do best, examining the data, proposing theories, testing theories, sharing ideas and data.
The initial experiements that "debunked" cold fusion did not actually do so. In the case of the Princeton debunking, the actual data showed some over-unity behavior that was edited out before releasing the results. These experience were performed in a "race" to replicate and/or debunk because the claims were so exceptional. One could argue that those interested in debunking the claims were motivated by external factors. But others that disputed the claims have no evidence that they were externally motivated to do so.
I am not saying that they will ever be successful in making something commercially viable (though many are convinced this will happen). I am hopeful that this can happen as this would certainly be cheaper and cleaner than hot fusion much less fission. The actual environmental impact would be less than renewable energy technologies as well.
Well, since the whole purpose of fusion reactors is to make commercially useful power, it is pretty clear that we do not have a working fusion reactor by any reasonable definition.
Despite having spent billions (22 Billion USD on hot fusion research by US alone) on the problem so far, with billions yet to come, we do not have working fusion reactors. Even ITER will just be a prototype with no power generation at all. Cost to develop commercially, unknown but bound to be a lot of money.
The US alone has also spent around 15 Billion developing Fast Breeder reactors, and has little to show for it. Other countries have similar experience.
Estimated cost to develop commercial LFTR reactors seems to be in the range 3 - 20 Billion USD. A commercial LFTR prototype seems to be likely 1 billion USD by most observers.
And you still have to build the reactors -- that won't be cheap either. Every known possible solution to replacing our energy infrastructure has a large economic cost, and significant to large environmental cost as well. Kind of the way large-scale engineering works.
Yet the cost of doing nothing will be larger yet, at least eventually. Peak fossil fuel is coming sooner or later, even if you master shale and methane hydrates with high recovery rates and limited environmental impact. There are a lot of third-world people in this world that would gladly join the first-world lifestyle which puts a severe constraint on expanding fossil fuels usage to match the growth in demand.
Personally, the combination of LFTR and renewable sources seems most likely to me to be commercially successful by 2050. Why, because the needed development seem to be within or nearly withing the capabilities of current engineering in both cases. Engineers are very happy to deliver good enough when the perfect seems unattainable.
You have to be more even more patient than they are for a probe. To accelerate from low earth orbit to escape velocity the 1e-7 m/s^2 will take 1080 years. Enough for orbit maintenance, probably. Enough for probes, no not really -- No one plans for missions spanning thousands of years.
No, the question is how fast can it accelerate the average potato. NASA reported 30-50 mN of thrust., call it 40. The average potato is about 375 grams, call is 400 even so math is real east. F=m*a or a = F / M or 1e-7 m/sec^2. So, accelerate for 1 year and you reach the break-neck speed of 31.5 meters per second or 70.5 mph
It is going to take a long time to get that potato to Alpha Centauri. Especially considering that you have to also accelerate the mass of the Q-drive unit itself and the energy source to supply the Q-drive.
Now if the effect is real and the efficiency and can be improved you still have something potentially useful in-deed for satellites. You could even maneuver asteroids if you had lots of patience.
TMI safety both failed and succeeded depending upon how you look at things.
It failed to prevent a partial meltdown of the reactor core.
It failed to prevent a significant release of radiation to the general environment as 15 curies (560 GBq) of iodine-131 (the most concering portion due to biological uptake to the thyroid)
It succeeded in terms of avoiding the wide-scale problems of Fukushima or Chernobyl
It failed in terms of public opinion of nuclear power being a reasonably source of energy production. Nuclear plant construction in US was virtually shut down after this, no new licenses till 2012.
Let's see, Pacific, Indian, Atlantic, Arctic. You mean there are 76 more oceans out there. And if you count the southern there is another 95 of those suckers.
On the contrary, the mammoth was a work animal. Work animals and food animals are very well preserved in terms of extinction rates.All you have to do it visit the lot of Bedrock Mammoth and you would see the wide selection of available animals.
Cs-237 is pretty hot, half life of about 30 yrs. How about
Pu-239.435 kg U-235 12500 kg U-238 80,400 kg.
I am sure these sound scary to most people, though Cs-237 is presumably a significant component of the nuclear release in question.
Of course they sound much worse because you can make nukes out of these and that increases the radiation release rate by many orders of magnitude and that mushroom cloud, etc.
To Americans it's Cesium not Caesium, then again most American don't really know what that it is. And most don't understand radiation either.
Conveniently, there is an even better comparison. You have to disperse all of the radioactive soil into the air to make a similar comparison. We don't actually pump soil into the air though. We do however burn coal.
Webpage According to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the average radioactivity per short ton of coal is 17,100 millicuries/4,000,000 tons, or 0.00427 millicuries/ton. This figure can be used to calculate the average expected radioactivity release from coal combustion.
Converting this to metric equates to about 0.174 MBq/ton (metric ton).
WebpageLargest coal plant in America burns 11 millions tons of coal per year.
Now 11,000,000 tons * 0.174 MBq / ton is 1.914e6 MBq -- a bit less than the twice the totally scary 1 trillion Bq
The average coal plant burns coal with around 0.5 trillion Bq / year
Now, not all of the radiation get released into the atmosphere, a lot of it ends up in the ash. But the ash is stored in ponds and left in piles on the ground, so its not a terrible improvement in terms of safe radioactive containment.
I would settle for nice modular neighborhood-scale TFTR reactors for now. I don't expect to see Mr. Fusion in the years I have left. I don't expect Congress to contribute to either of these either. I might wish they get rid of some unneeded regulations, but I have little hope of this happening either.
In actual fact, the ComCast internet service is not too bad. It is just their customer support, pricing, monopoly status and general arrogance that make them among the most hated company in existence.
The other interesting thing in the article was Google showing their IPv6 traffic was now around 4% up looked the perhaps the upward bend at the beginning of an s-Curve.
According to scientist, the common view is that the linear no-threshold model is actually the flawed viewpoint. See this article for a pro-radiation view that is not commonly reported. Although most people will scoff, there is actual evidence that a little ionizing radiation is good for you.
Yes, I would participate in the study that installs a radioactive source in your house (at reasonably low levels) because I believe the data that I have been able to find in the past.
Under the proposed terms of the merger, the combined Comcast / Time Warner will divest themselves of some of their users due to anti trust concerns. I am in that group to be divested.
Go ahead a look up what kind of telescope you need for this, your choice for wavelength. Poster was saying, mass drivers were useless in space war because you could dodge. Painting it black was a joke because it does not matter at all.
A 10 kg sphere of DU is conveniently almost exactly 5 cm in diameter. Let me save you some trouble, the Hubble has a resolution of about 0.1 arcseconds, which means a football stadium on the moon (about 384,000 km) is needed to resolve as a single pixel on the Hubble CCD's (radar has worse resolution, higher frequency gives better resolution). So for convenience, lets assume our slug is exactly 20000 times smaller in diameter, which means it would have to be 20000 times closer (19.2 km) to be imaged by the Hubble -- giving you a grand total of 0.001 seconds to dodge the incoming round. A additional problem, you have to be pointing your telescope directly at the slug in order to see it. High mag. scopes have a limited field of field. Also, due to orbital mechanics and a long time of flight you could easily lob thousands of slugs on different trajectories all designed to arrive at the time time.
K/E weapons are truly difficult to defend against. Now, a 10 kg slug at 20 kps exceeds the capabilities for any existing railgun I know of, it won't for long though, maybe a few decades. It will still be a heavy piece of equipment for some time to come. But given sufficient motivation they will eventually end up is space unless we find something better first.
It is a very narrow beam, but they don't point it in our direction. Imagine a then wedge of laser/maser, etc. light being broadcast outward radially on a continuous basis. As the planet rotates, the wedge sweeps pretty much every angle. As you see the wedge only when it points directly at you, it appears to blink very rapidly
Not if you paint it black. Forget that, what kind of magic telescope do you have to see a 10 kilo slug of depleted uranium fired at 20 kps to give you any chance to see it it time?
Your point is well taken. Here is one suggested action. Try to wake up the sheep, enough to actually make a difference. Post the article to facebook. Here is how I posted it to my account.
I'm not much of a conspiracy guy, but our gov. is getting really out of control and scary. This is in my mind a pretty credible source. http://www.theguardian.com/com... -- that does not guarantee that is in fact true, but I believe that it is.
Clearly there are other ways. Write / call the appropriate politicians, etc. You know more possibilities, no need for me to rant here.
Remembering it is not enough. Lots of people "remember" Johnny Carson and Rachael Welch (or Gabor or someone else) petty their cat while visiting Johnny and when asked,"Would you like to pet my pussy?" Replied yes if you get that cat out of the way.
Supposedly censors allowed this to pass because the potentially offending word was actually ok because it can and did refer to a cat.
Never happened. If you think about censorship as it was have been in the 70's they would never have allowed this. Though her supposed comment was not offensive and could have theoretically passed (still highly doubleful), there is not way that Johnny's response would have been allowed.
Yet, many people "remember" this event just fine. They were watching Johnny. They add details, they were watching with Mom or Dad who refused "to explain" it. Yet it never happened.
Truth is becoming harder and harder to prove with modern technology. People watched the planes running into the 2nd tower on live television. Yet, the technology exists to edit realtime video to make this possible as a cover story. Eyewitness accounts are unrealiable. Deja vu is something that happens because of a glitch in the matrix.
Slashdot Mirror
There are well-respected scientists still working on LENR/LANR reactions a.k.a. Cold Fusion. Peter_L._Hagelstein is one of them. He teaches a LANR class at MIT. His initial interest in the field was to debunk the claims, the evidence he saw convinced him otherwise. For the past years he has been systematically performing the experiments that determine the conditions for when it works and when it does not work. I.e., he appears to be an entirely legitimate scientists investigating a phenomenon that is not well understood but could have tremendous impact; this is the quintessential science.
ECat may well be fraudulent. Many characteristics of known frauds exist. If you examine the work of Hagelstein and others, you will not see similar evidence of fraud. You will see the work you would associate with scientists doing what they do best, examining the data, proposing theories, testing theories, sharing ideas and data.
The initial experiements that "debunked" cold fusion did not actually do so. In the case of the Princeton debunking, the actual data showed some over-unity behavior that was edited out before releasing the results. These experience were performed in a "race" to replicate and/or debunk because the claims were so exceptional. One could argue that those interested in debunking the claims were motivated by external factors. But others that disputed the claims have no evidence that they were externally motivated to do so.
I am not saying that they will ever be successful in making something commercially viable (though many are convinced this will happen). I am hopeful that this can happen as this would certainly be cheaper and cleaner than hot fusion much less fission. The actual environmental impact would be less than renewable energy technologies as well.
This Seems like a more likely source to me -- after all, not that many koalas.
Well, since the whole purpose of fusion reactors is to make commercially useful power, it is pretty clear that we do not have a working fusion reactor by any reasonable definition.
Despite having spent billions (22 Billion USD on hot fusion research by US alone) on the problem so far, with billions yet to come, we do not have working fusion reactors. Even ITER will just be a prototype with no power generation at all. Cost to develop commercially, unknown but bound to be a lot of money.
The US alone has also spent around 15 Billion developing Fast Breeder reactors, and has little to show for it. Other countries have similar experience.
Estimated cost to develop commercial LFTR reactors seems to be in the range 3 - 20 Billion USD. A commercial LFTR prototype seems to be likely 1 billion USD by most observers.
And you still have to build the reactors -- that won't be cheap either. Every known possible solution to replacing our energy infrastructure has a large economic cost, and significant to large environmental cost as well. Kind of the way large-scale engineering works.
Yet the cost of doing nothing will be larger yet, at least eventually. Peak fossil fuel is coming sooner or later, even if you master shale and methane hydrates with high recovery rates and limited environmental impact. There are a lot of third-world people in this world that would gladly join the first-world lifestyle which puts a severe constraint on expanding fossil fuels usage to match the growth in demand.
Personally, the combination of LFTR and renewable sources seems most likely to me to be commercially successful by 2050. Why, because the needed development seem to be within or nearly withing the capabilities of current engineering in both cases. Engineers are very happy to deliver good enough when the perfect seems unattainable.
Can't Purina use them in Zombie Chow? If so, I would rather feed that to the neighborhood zombies instead of my own gray matter?
You have to be more even more patient than they are for a probe. To accelerate from low earth orbit to escape velocity the 1e-7 m/s^2 will take 1080 years. Enough for orbit maintenance, probably. Enough for probes, no not really -- No one plans for missions spanning thousands of years.
Oops, off by a factor of 10. 1 year give 3.15 m/sec 7.05 m[h
No, the question is how fast can it accelerate the average potato. NASA reported 30-50 mN of thrust., call it 40. The average potato is about 375 grams, call is 400 even so math is real east. F=m*a or a = F / M or 1e-7 m/sec^2. So, accelerate for 1 year and you reach the break-neck speed of 31.5 meters per second or 70.5 mph
It is going to take a long time to get that potato to Alpha Centauri. Especially considering that you have to also accelerate the mass of the Q-drive unit itself and the energy source to supply the Q-drive.
Now if the effect is real and the efficiency and can be improved you still have something potentially useful in-deed for satellites. You could even maneuver asteroids if you had lots of patience.
I must be one of those grammar Nazi's too, because I laughed at this joke.
TMI safety both failed and succeeded depending upon how you look at things.
It failed to prevent a partial meltdown of the reactor core.
It failed to prevent a significant release of radiation to the general environment as 15 curies (560 GBq) of iodine-131 (the most concering portion due to biological uptake to the thyroid)
It succeeded in terms of avoiding the wide-scale problems of Fukushima or Chernobyl
It failed in terms of public opinion of nuclear power being a reasonably source of energy production. Nuclear plant construction in US was virtually shut down after this, no new licenses till 2012.
Let's see, Pacific, Indian, Atlantic, Arctic. You mean there are 76 more oceans out there. And if you count the southern there is another 95 of those suckers.
Holy cow, wait till Exxon finds out!
On the contrary, the mammoth was a work animal. Work animals and food animals are very well preserved in terms of extinction rates.All you have to do it visit the lot of Bedrock Mammoth and you would see the wide selection of available animals.
Cs-237 is pretty hot, half life of about 30 yrs. How about
Pu-239 .435 kg
U-235 12500 kg
U-238 80,400 kg.
I am sure these sound scary to most people, though Cs-237 is presumably a significant component of the nuclear release in question.
Of course they sound much worse because you can make nukes out of these and that increases the radiation release rate by many orders of magnitude and that mushroom cloud, etc.
To Americans it's Cesium not Caesium, then again most American don't really know what that it is. And most don't understand radiation either.
Conveniently, there is an even better comparison. You have to disperse all of the radioactive soil into the air to make a similar comparison. We don't actually pump soil into the air though. We do however burn coal.
Webpage According to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the average radioactivity per short ton of coal is 17,100 millicuries/4,000,000 tons, or 0.00427 millicuries/ton. This figure can be used to calculate the average expected radioactivity release from coal combustion.
Converting this to metric equates to about 0.174 MBq/ton (metric ton).
WebpageLargest coal plant in America burns 11 millions tons of coal per year.
Now 11,000,000 tons * 0.174 MBq / ton is 1.914e6 MBq -- a bit less than the twice the totally scary 1 trillion Bq
The average coal plant burns coal with around 0.5 trillion Bq / year
Now, not all of the radiation get released into the atmosphere, a lot of it ends up in the ash. But the ash is stored in ponds and left in piles on the ground, so its not a terrible improvement in terms of safe radioactive containment.
I would settle for nice modular neighborhood-scale TFTR reactors for now. I don't expect to see Mr. Fusion in the years I have left. I don't expect Congress to contribute to either of these either. I might wish they get rid of some unneeded regulations, but I have little hope of this happening either.
In actual fact, the ComCast internet service is not too bad. It is just their customer support, pricing, monopoly status and general arrogance that make them among the most hated company in existence.
The other interesting thing in the article was Google showing their IPv6 traffic was now around 4% up looked the perhaps the upward bend at the beginning of an s-Curve.
According to scientist, the common view is that the linear no-threshold model is actually the flawed viewpoint. See this article for a pro-radiation view that is not commonly reported. Although most people will scoff, there is actual evidence that a little ionizing radiation is good for you.
Yes, I would participate in the study that installs a radioactive source in your house (at reasonably low levels) because I believe the data that I have been able to find in the past.
Under the proposed terms of the merger, the combined Comcast / Time Warner will divest themselves of some of their users due to anti trust concerns. I am in that group to be divested.
But if the merger goes through, I get divested out of ComCast.
On the one hand, expletive of choice Comcast
On the other hand, expletive of choice, no more Comcast, woot!
Clearly my loyalties are divided on this issue.
True I think Acme was first, but don't put your portable hole in your bag of holding.
Go ahead a look up what kind of telescope you need for this, your choice for wavelength. Poster was saying, mass drivers were useless in space war because you could dodge. Painting it black was a joke because it does not matter at all.
A 10 kg sphere of DU is conveniently almost exactly 5 cm in diameter. Let me save you some trouble, the Hubble has a resolution of about 0.1 arcseconds, which means a football stadium on the moon (about 384,000 km) is needed to resolve as a single pixel on the Hubble CCD's (radar has worse resolution, higher frequency gives better resolution). So for convenience, lets assume our slug is exactly 20000 times smaller in diameter, which means it would have to be 20000 times closer (19.2 km) to be imaged by the Hubble -- giving you a grand total of 0.001 seconds to dodge the incoming round. A additional problem, you have to be pointing your telescope directly at the slug in order to see it. High mag. scopes have a limited field of field. Also, due to orbital mechanics and a long time of flight you could easily lob thousands of slugs on different trajectories all designed to arrive at the time time.
K/E weapons are truly difficult to defend against. Now, a 10 kg slug at 20 kps exceeds the capabilities for any existing railgun I know of, it won't for long though, maybe a few decades. It will still be a heavy piece of equipment for some time to come. But given sufficient motivation they will eventually end up is space unless we find something better first.
It is a very narrow beam, but they don't point it in our direction. Imagine a then wedge of laser/maser, etc. light being broadcast outward radially on a continuous basis. As the planet rotates, the wedge sweeps pretty much every angle. As you see the wedge only when it points directly at you, it appears to blink very rapidly
Not if you paint it black. Forget that, what kind of magic telescope do you have to see a 10 kilo slug of depleted uranium fired at 20 kps to give you any chance to see it it time?
Your point is well taken. Here is one suggested action. Try to wake up the sheep, enough to actually make a difference. Post the article to facebook. Here is how I posted it to my account.
I'm not much of a conspiracy guy, but our gov. is getting really out of control and scary. This is in my mind a pretty credible source. http://www.theguardian.com/com... -- that does not guarantee that is in fact true, but I believe that it is.
Clearly there are other ways. Write / call the appropriate politicians, etc. You know more possibilities, no need for me to rant here.
What makes you think they don't monetize this already. How else do you get funds needs for black projects.
Remembering it is not enough. Lots of people "remember" Johnny Carson and Rachael Welch (or Gabor or someone else) petty their cat while visiting Johnny and when asked,"Would you like to pet my pussy?" Replied yes if you get that cat out of the way.
Supposedly censors allowed this to pass because the potentially offending word was actually ok because it can and did refer to a cat.
Never happened. If you think about censorship as it was have been in the 70's they would never have allowed this. Though her supposed comment was not offensive and could have theoretically passed (still highly doubleful), there is not way that Johnny's response would have been allowed.
Yet, many people "remember" this event just fine. They were watching Johnny. They add details, they were watching with Mom or Dad who refused "to explain" it. Yet it never happened.
Truth is becoming harder and harder to prove with modern technology. People watched the planes running into the 2nd tower on live television. Yet, the technology exists to edit realtime video to make this possible as a cover story. Eyewitness accounts are unrealiable. Deja vu is something that happens because of a glitch in the matrix.