Both George Bushes probably wish they had been in on the hydrogen bandwagon a little earlier, so that Turkey pipeline which was recently punctured could have been built with thermos insulation and internal revacumation pumps.
With all the depleted uranium they left lying around, it's not like it matters anymore. Most armed Iraqis can probably puncture all but the most heavily armored pipes, given close enough range. Talk about a quagmire.
Anyway, with water and air, you can transport hydrogen as electricity, so maintaining the existing electrical grid will do the trick. The penalty for conversion back and forth is about 50%, with the right kind of proton enchange membrane (which has to be kept clean and free from erosion), and which goes up with lengthier transmissions. There are both inorganic (e.g., Pt, Pd) and organic proton echange membranes. If you are interested in this science, you should follow the stories about conductive carbon filament and nanotube production. Carbon nanotubes will likely be extremly effective for high-density hydrogen storage, although there might be a way to do it with filaments and certain topologies of substrates. I wish I knew more about the chemistry of organic proton exchange membranes, too, but I suppose that's what the patent literature is for these days.
No matter how you slice it, there is no reason that wind power should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2020.
Is THAT what the original UNIX source code looks like? I'm going to have nightmares
That's Bourne for you, he didn't like C's punctuation.
sh(1) has remained very stable from the late 1970s through the present. That coding style had a lot to do with it. sh(1)'s stability insured that features were added as external commands instead of shell builtins, as everyone from MS NT, DEC VMS, IBM JCL did, making scripts not so backwards-compatible. That in turn enforced unix's component software tools philosophy.
Granted, the crescent wing flex is what gives it differential pitch control, which is another new technology it's pioneering.
It can take a 600 lb. payload to 70,000 feet, so I'm sure that eventually fleets will be used for theater radars. Keeping them out of the storms should be easy, because it can exceed 150 mph at those altitudes.
It's not so much a saftey issue as a cost issue. All the UAVs save the brass some very serious coin, and after combat proofs in Afganistan they know it now more than ever, and so they want more. AWACS are very cool but very expensive for the kind of tedious patrol where they serve the best purpose.
...They acknowledged that much is still unknown about the hydrogen cycle and that technologies could be developed to curtail hydrogen releases, mitigating the problem....
Nejat Veziroglu, president of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy and director of the Clean Energy Research Institute at the University of Miami, expressed skepticism about the Cal Tech findings.
"Leakage will be much less than what they are considering," he said....
Cal Tech scientist Tracey Tromp, another of the authors, said that with advanced warnings of a problem, a hydrogen energy infrastructure could be fashioned to allow more control of leaks and reduce the adverse environmental impact.
this craft doesn't look like it would do too well in a storm.
First, what makes you think it can take more than an AWACS? There is only one way to find out. It's uninhabited, so we can know for sure what it will take, instead of having to approximate the question.
A gentleman from Dryden phoned me this morning to explain that the night flight didn't happen because there were two leaks, one on the fuel cell air compressor, and another on the cooling system for the air compressor. They were probably related. I recommended duct tape.
it appears that Sweden is dismantling its welfare state
I am under the different impression that all their 6% of the population that were in retraining programs three years ago got jobs at Volvo, Ikea, Ericson, and/or one of Sweden's many vibrantly thriving small businesses.
Having lived in the UK and the United States, I've seen nothing proving that "progressive" (aka. liberal) policies do anything but keep the poor poor (tax any extra money they make, remove the incentive to work harder or retrain) and fuel the fires of class warfare.
Do you know the meaning of progressive taxation? It is like the "flat tax," only with brackets. Someday accountants will have access to continious function technology.
The fact is, Sweden's middle class has been growing, while the U.S. middle class has been shrinking. A shrinking middle class puts a society on a collision course with riots and increases the crime rate.
"After testing on this system is finished this summer, we will focus on development of a fully regenerative system that could fly up to six months or more,â he added.
Del Frate said a production version of the Helios with the regenerative fuel cell system is of interest to NASA for environmental science, the military and AeroVironment for various roles, primarily as a stratospheric telecommunications relay platform.
The latter role will be the focus of a flight demonstration planned for September at PMRF, in which the Helios Prototype will carry advanced broadband Internet connectivity and antenna systems developed by Japan's Communication Research Laboratory and the Telecommunications Advancement Organization of the Japanese Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Post and Telecommunications.
If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.
Under the U.S. form of government, we are getting decade-record levels of unemployment and crime, but at least the rich are a little richer, if you don't coun't externalities like the crime rate and overall property values.
Just don't count on all those nearly three million newly-unemployed people to vote on election day. I wouldn't put it past Bush to do something "exciting" right before election day. After all, you have a guy who claimed that he didn't tell anyone about his drunk driving conviction because he was trying to protect his daughters, but he doesn't ask the Secret Service to lift a finger to keep them from being caught drinking underage. He simply can not be trusted. How many times did he leave the "have you ever been convicted" question blank on Texas election forms? However, there is still hope.
Correct: we have a 400 year supply of coal, and it needs to last us 400,000 years. We are already halfway through our oil and converting coal to synthetics is much more expensive than using hydrogen from windpower.
If the entire planet converted to wind power in 30 years, it would take another 300 years to remove the extra heat from the last 300 years of fossil fuel use. Until we get control of it, we won't be able to pick an optimal CO2 concentration value for the planet.
DARPA hasn't been the most likely place to find the most important work funded, for almost ten years, at least. They used to be a leader in automatic speech recognition, but they haven't been doing much more than dictation and command-and-control for a while now.
Now if we could only reduce the wingspan, buy bottled hydrogen (double thermos tanks with internal revacumation pumps are expensive) at the hardware store, and agree on a common transponder format, then we would be halfway there.
The problem [includes] stopping short of full intelligent analysis of the profiling data.
True. Here in the U.S., the government doesn't publish jurisdictional correlations between crime victimization rates and economic numbers like residential and commercial real estate values, and total household employment (nonfarm and farm, payroll and self-employment.) Between those three values, there are three correlations, and six possible arrows of causation. Some of the data are recorded by census tract, and some are recorded by precinct. It should be easy to convert such measures to counties, but it is not always easy.
However, it seems that many officials do have an intuitive sense that when the crime rate goes up, property values go down, and when jobs are created, then property values go up and crime goes down. Therefore, creating jobs with education is nearly universally superior to creating jobs with war (e.g., "security" jobs != job security.) There are a lot of officials who still don't understand that, many of whom are corrupt, but most of whom are simply ignorant.
There are deeper root causes that people don't want to examine because it could upset their convenient view of the world and/or cost them time and money to solve properly.
It would help if they would stop using the "unemployment rate" when they would be better off with the "job creation rate." Nobody knows what the optimal unemployment rate is, but everyone wants the number of employed people to increase, primarily because that's the only way we can pay for all the unemployable people.
It would also help if they would stop using "flat tax" when they mean "progressive taxation." Keeping the high tax brackets from allowing the middle class to shrink is perhaps the most important of all, since class warfare is so evil.
Another thing that would help would be to stop laying off teachers. Anyone who wants a military much larger than they think it really should be, should really look again at the lines of causation.
Nobody ever said life would be a cakewalk. However, with excellent math there will always be a way.
The entire concept of mandatory insurance is foreign to free markets.
Perhaps you are a "Libertarian" or an "Objectivist." If so, then I should ask your model for ambulance funding.
In any case, if you think mandatory insurance is a form of taxation, then what do you think bankruptcy court is? Do you believe that bankrupt debtors should commit their relatives to indentured servitude? If you want to live in an efficient world free from involuntary servitude, then "socialist" insurance is the best compromise to accept.
You happily accept the massive subsidies of wind power yet decry any hint of a subsidy for nuclear power.
On the contrary, I quoted $0.12/kwh for nuclear, a low, subsidized price for it.
From an economic standpoint "externalities" are a non-issue
On the contrary, the term is from economics.
Human cost of catastrophe: Yes, this is a theoretical problem....
with very practical implications.
You're also not discussing the externalities of wind, like the energy needed to construct and transport the wind generators, and the personell to maintain them, etc.
On the contrary, the $0.04/kwh is the unsubsidised, fully amortized cost, which will remain accurate if the turbines sold today have a maintenance cost proportional to those sold in the recent past.
I'll frankly agree with you in that the externalities of nuclear power are probably greater than wind. But so what?
So, do you think they make the amortized cost more or less than wind?
Am I misunderstanding you or are you saying that windmills LITERALLY extract greenhouse gases from the air? Or are you saying there is a NET reduction in greenhouse gasses because wind power offsets the greenhouse gases generated by oil burning plants?
Neither: using wind power takes energy directly from the atmosphere, where increased greenhouse gasses force more to accumulate. Therefore, using wind power mitigates the effects of greenhouse gasses. Nuclear power, on the other hand, produces more heat than would have otherwise been added to the planet, had those isotopes been left to decay in their unrefined form. Terrestrial fusion is even worse.
...how ineffecient it is to use water....
About 55% +/- 15%, making the unsubsidized cost of cleanly stored wind power about $0.07/kwh, or a nickle less than subsidized fission.
What makes you think I'm not [shilling for nuclear power]?
I assume you've conceded my point that, discounting regulatory and insurance issues, nuclear power *IS* cheaper to produce than wind
I most certainly have not.
You are telling me that catastrophy insurance costs nothing because there have thus far been no outlays, yet you are unwilling to accept the free-market commercial cost of such insurance as a subsidy. The essential contradiction of your position is clear.
You also have no apparent respect or concern for the externalities, such as waste disposal, weapons proliferation, or the human cost of the potential catastrophies which are so great that the market alone is unwilling to bear them.
Alternative forms of power (like wind) have DIRECT subsidies, in the form of lucrative tax credits
As well they should, since extracting wind energy from the atmosphere is a direct form of greenhouse gas mitigation. Mining uranium uses fossil fuel.
you didn't bother to address the other issues, such as the intermittent and unreliable nature of wind power
you're just shilling for the wind power
companies.
Ha! I wish someone was paying me for this. I have no financial interest in any wind power companies. Not for want of trying, though. Why are there no U.S. stocks or mutual funds devoted primarily to wind power? There are lots of private companies that take a minimum $1M ("accredited") investment. Why hasn't someone made a mutual fund out of those yet?
But here on Slashdot, I'm in it for the karma.
How do I know you aren't shilling for the nuclear business?
It's also important to study the asteroids, because the only way off of the Earth is to hollow out an asteroid, build a thermos surface inside, get it spinning, fit it with nuclear power, and send it on a gravity assist route.
Such ships will take multiple lifetimes to build, several dozen generations to travel in, multiple lifetimes to disembark, and they need to be good enough to be able to turn around and come back in the event of an un
[The Price-Anderson Act nuclear subsidy]
is due to onerous regulations that require nuclear power plants to operate with billions in insurance.
No, all other kinds of power plants must operate with commercial insurance. Nuclear is the only type which has a blanket exemption from those requirements of market-rate insurance.
If nuclear power plants had to operate with commercial insurance, nuclear power would cost more than $0.40/kwh, and that doesn't even include the cost of waste disposal.
Nuclear is the most heavily subsidized form of power generation.
If the design required helium, then they should have scrapped the design.
s/scrapped/revised
In general, the size and shape of the thing was really good. However, the materials were a big problem for the engineers, and they were tight-lipped about exactly why, but one of them spilled the beans.
When you transition from He to H, you need to defend against sparks. Someone thought that conductive paint would do the trick, but they didn't see that using thermite paint was defeating the whole purpose.
What they really wanted was stainless steel, low-weight chicken wire on the outside of the membrane. This was likely rejected for aesthetic reasons, with form over function.
It's also missing audio multimedia messaging. I.e., you can't record a voice message and send it as a clip. It only has MIDI MMS for ring tones (bleh.)
Slashdot Mirror
With all the depleted uranium they left lying around, it's not like it matters anymore. Most armed Iraqis can probably puncture all but the most heavily armored pipes, given close enough range. Talk about a quagmire.
Anyway, with water and air, you can transport hydrogen as electricity, so maintaining the existing electrical grid will do the trick. The penalty for conversion back and forth is about 50%, with the right kind of proton enchange membrane (which has to be kept clean and free from erosion), and which goes up with lengthier transmissions. There are both inorganic (e.g., Pt, Pd) and organic proton echange membranes. If you are interested in this science, you should follow the stories about conductive carbon filament and nanotube production. Carbon nanotubes will likely be extremly effective for high-density hydrogen storage, although there might be a way to do it with filaments and certain topologies of substrates. I wish I knew more about the chemistry of organic proton exchange membranes, too, but I suppose that's what the patent literature is for these days.
No matter how you slice it, there is no reason that wind power should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2020.
me 2
That's Bourne for you, he didn't like C's punctuation.
sh(1) has remained very stable from the late 1970s through the present. That coding style had a lot to do with it. sh(1)'s stability insured that features were added as external commands instead of shell builtins, as everyone from MS NT, DEC VMS, IBM JCL did, making scripts not so backwards-compatible. That in turn enforced unix's component software tools philosophy.
Granted, the crescent wing flex is what gives it differential pitch control, which is another new technology it's pioneering.
It can take a 600 lb. payload to 70,000 feet, so I'm sure that eventually fleets will be used for theater radars. Keeping them out of the storms should be easy, because it can exceed 150 mph at those altitudes.
It's not so much a saftey issue as a cost issue. All the UAVs save the brass some very serious coin, and after combat proofs in Afganistan they know it now more than ever, and so they want more. AWACS are very cool but very expensive for the kind of tedious patrol where they serve the best purpose.
The Cal Tech study seems to be a little extreme:
First, what makes you think it can take more than an AWACS? There is only one way to find out. It's uninhabited, so we can know for sure what it will take, instead of having to approximate the question.
A gentleman from Dryden phoned me this morning to explain that the night flight didn't happen because there were two leaks, one on the fuel cell air compressor, and another on the cooling system for the air compressor. They were probably related. I recommended duct tape.
Well, storms vary in intensity. Those that
I am under the different impression that all their 6% of the population that were in retraining programs three years ago got jobs at Volvo, Ikea, Ericson, and/or one of Sweden's many vibrantly thriving small businesses.
Do you know the meaning of progressive taxation? It is like the "flat tax," only with brackets. Someday accountants will have access to continious function technology.
The fact is, Sweden's middle class has been growing, while the U.S. middle class has been shrinking. A shrinking middle class puts a society on a collision course with riots and increases the crime rate.
Why would daddy want to risk doctor bills for tuberculosis?
I read the Secret Service kept them out of jail, when the law said they were supposed to be there.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
May 29 Press Release
June 7 Press Release
If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.
Under the U.S. form of government, we are getting decade-record levels of unemployment and crime, but at least the rich are a little richer, if you don't coun't externalities like the crime rate and overall property values.
Just don't count on all those nearly three million newly-unemployed people to vote on election day. I wouldn't put it past Bush to do something "exciting" right before election day. After all, you have a guy who claimed that he didn't tell anyone about his drunk driving conviction because he was trying to protect his daughters, but he doesn't ask the Secret Service to lift a finger to keep them from being caught drinking underage. He simply can not be trusted. How many times did he leave the "have you ever been convicted" question blank on Texas election forms? However, there is still hope.
If the entire planet converted to wind power in 30 years, it would take another 300 years to remove the extra heat from the last 300 years of fossil fuel use. Until we get control of it, we won't be able to pick an optimal CO2 concentration value for the planet.
DARPA hasn't been the most likely place to find the most important work funded, for almost ten years, at least. They used to be a leader in automatic speech recognition, but they haven't been doing much more than dictation and command-and-control for a while now.
Now if we could only reduce the wingspan, buy bottled hydrogen (double thermos tanks with internal revacumation pumps are expensive) at the hardware store, and agree on a common transponder format, then we would be halfway there.
True. Here in the U.S., the government doesn't publish jurisdictional correlations between crime victimization rates and economic numbers like residential and commercial real estate values, and total household employment (nonfarm and farm, payroll and self-employment.) Between those three values, there are three correlations, and six possible arrows of causation. Some of the data are recorded by census tract, and some are recorded by precinct. It should be easy to convert such measures to counties, but it is not always easy.
However, it seems that many officials do have an intuitive sense that when the crime rate goes up, property values go down, and when jobs are created, then property values go up and crime goes down. Therefore, creating jobs with education is nearly universally superior to creating jobs with war (e.g., "security" jobs != job security.) There are a lot of officials who still don't understand that, many of whom are corrupt, but most of whom are simply ignorant.
It would help if they would stop using the "unemployment rate" when they would be better off with the "job creation rate." Nobody knows what the optimal unemployment rate is, but everyone wants the number of employed people to increase, primarily because that's the only way we can pay for all the unemployable people.
It would also help if they would stop using "flat tax" when they mean "progressive taxation." Keeping the high tax brackets from allowing the middle class to shrink is perhaps the most important of all, since class warfare is so evil.
Another thing that would help would be to stop laying off teachers. Anyone who wants a military much larger than they think it really should be, should really look again at the lines of causation.
Nobody ever said life would be a cakewalk. However, with excellent math there will always be a way.
Best wishes.
Perhaps you are a "Libertarian" or an "Objectivist." If so, then I should ask your model for ambulance funding.
In any case, if you think mandatory insurance is a form of taxation, then what do you think bankruptcy court is? Do you believe that bankrupt debtors should commit their relatives to indentured servitude? If you want to live in an efficient world free from involuntary servitude, then "socialist" insurance is the best compromise to accept.
On the contrary, I quoted $0.12/kwh for nuclear, a low, subsidized price for it.
On the contrary, the term is from economics.
with very practical implications.
I most certainly have not.
You are telling me that catastrophy insurance costs nothing because there have thus far been no outlays, yet you are unwilling to accept the free-market commercial cost of such insurance as a subsidy. The essential contradiction of your position is clear.
You also have no apparent respect or concern for the externalities, such as waste disposal, weapons proliferation, or the human cost of the potential catastrophies which are so great that the market alone is unwilling to bear them.
As well they should, since extracting wind energy from the atmosphere is a direct form of greenhouse gas mitigation. Mining uranium uses fossil fuel.
I'm sorry. I already addressed this by explaining hydrogen storage using proton exchange membrane-based electrolysis and fuel cells several times on this story, but apparently not in this comment thread.
Ha! I wish someone was paying me for this. I have no financial interest in any wind power companies. Not for want of trying, though. Why are there no U.S. stocks or mutual funds devoted primarily to wind power? There are lots of private companies that take a minimum $1M ("accredited") investment. Why hasn't someone made a mutual fund out of those yet?
But here on Slashdot, I'm in it for the karma.
How do I know you aren't shilling for the nuclear business?
No, raptor is an entire order, not a species. All birds of prey are raptors.
Altamont pass just has a huge number of birds to begin with. No bird species are endangered by wind power. Other things kill orders of magnitude more birds.
On the contrary, that idea is generally a myth.
Sorry my parent post was truncated.
Such ships will take multiple lifetimes to build, several dozen generations to travel in, multiple lifetimes to disembark, and they need to be good enough to be able to turn around and come back in the event of an un
No, all other kinds of power plants must operate with commercial insurance. Nuclear is the only type which has a blanket exemption from those requirements of market-rate insurance.
If nuclear power plants had to operate with commercial insurance, nuclear power would cost more than $0.40/kwh, and that doesn't even include the cost of waste disposal.
Nuclear is the most heavily subsidized form of power generation.
Perhaps the electrolysis uses a fuel cell running in reverse?
s/scrapped/revised
In general, the size and shape of the thing was really good. However, the materials were a big problem for the engineers, and they were tight-lipped about exactly why, but one of them spilled the beans.
When you transition from He to H, you need to defend against sparks. Someone thought that conductive paint would do the trick, but they didn't see that using thermite paint was defeating the whole purpose.
What they really wanted was stainless steel, low-weight chicken wire on the outside of the membrane. This was likely rejected for aesthetic reasons, with form over function.
Overall score: Utilitarians: 10, Aesthetes: -50
It's also missing audio multimedia messaging. I.e., you can't record a voice message and send it as a clip. It only has MIDI MMS for ring tones (bleh.)