If they're so clean and safe, how come you can't get insurance to build one, and how come they're always built away out in the wilds?
Well, for one thing they need to be built next to a large body of water to act as a thermal reservoir. This is one of the primary concerns about nuclear plants in that they raise the temperature of the local water so much that it increases the growth of algae and thus suffocating the local fish.
NIMBY is the primary reason they are out in the boon docks. On the plus side, that should make it easier for them make a security perimeter fairly far away from the reactor (so any truck bomb would go off/be disabled well before it got close to a reactor, even on a suicide attack).
D'oh! 4.2 billion not million. So I guess it would be plenty of energy for the country if even only 5% of Arizona was covered (based on these wildly optimistic numbers).
There are more efficient methods for producing energy from the sun at larger scales:
Today's high efficiency solar cells can convert about 17% of the energy that hits them to electricity. That 2 trillion kWh becomes 3.4 million kWh in a hurry.
The best efficiencies that I have found that solar plants can achieve is 30%.
Power is generated only during daylight hours. When the sun goes down, the lights go out. Some means of energy storage (batteries, etc.) must be implemented in order to keep the lights on.
Most solar plants have a large thermal reservoir underground that stores heat generated during the day. This reservoir can be tapped (just as efficiently as during sunny days) on cloudy days and at night.
System inefficiencies can decrease the amount of available power by as much as 50%. Battery storage and power inverters aren't terribly efficient. I'll be optimistic and figure that we can cap the system losses at 25%, leaving us with 255 million kWh delivered to the transmission lines.
Not applicable in the case of a solar plant.
A good BOE number for household energy consumption is 100 kWh per day. So using my best case estimates above, and assuming no transmission line losses (which usually are around 30 to 40 percent and would be more if the transmission lines reached across the entire country), covering the entire state of Arizona with solar cells would provide electricity to 2.55 million households. You couldn't even power California.
Using your starting estimate of 2 trillion kWh per day (which, while optimistic, is correct given your assumptions) and using a system efficiency of 30% and a transmission loss of 30%, and your assumption of 100kWh of power per houshold per day, it looks like Arizona would produce enough power to serve 4.2 million households. Enough to power about 1/3 of California. But more than enough for Arizona.
At retail, the cost of photovoltaic modules is about $5 per watt. The literature doesn't really say if that's per watt delivered, or per watt generated (i.e. before system losses or after). If we assume that it's after system losses and that government could work a miracle and actually pay less than retail (say $1 per watt) then for our fictional 255 million kilowatt system, that'd be a paltry $255 billion for the solar cells.
The photovoltaic cells make up only 25 to 50 percent of the entire cost of a system. Taking that into consideration, cost of the entire system would be between $750 billion and $1 trillion.
I don't have any references of the costs per watt for solar plants, but I'm sure it is substantially less than solar cells. The best I could find is that some sites claim that California uses the most cheaply produced energy from solar power in the world (using solar plants of course). Nearly the entire cost would be up front since the plants need very little maintenance and no fuel.
Manufacturing photovoltaic cells involves the use of many hazardous chemicals (mostly the same as used by the semiconductor industry).
Not applicable to mirrors which are just coated with melted sand (basically).
Energy storage systems have many toxic materials, are prone to leakage, have limited duty life, and are expensive to dispose of safely.
Not if the energy storage system is a thermal reservoir of hot water or molten sand.
Manufacturing photovoltaics requires a lot of energy. Payback time (i.e. the cell generating as much energy as it cost to produce) is from six months to ten years, depending on the cell's efficiency and where it's deployed.
Photovoltaics have a limited lifecycle, and become less efficient as they get older. The entire array would have to be replaced in 20 years or less. Batteries would have to be rep
In a way it was more effecient in that it bypassed the middle man (the grocery store). Rather, it directly delivered to your house, picking up old bottles at the same time. This would also reduce refrigeration usage since it would never be sitting in storage or on a store shelf.
You would need to have more information to determine whether this method is more or less efficient than getting the milk from a grocery store.
True, but the dessert would have absorbed some amount of that heat as well which now would be under shadow. Depending on what climatologist you believe the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere would more than make up for the capture of the radiation that would have been reflected to space (stat coming straight from my a** but I believe it is correct).
Also, if this where replacing a coal or nuclear plant it could cause a net reduction of heat (since the plant has to produce a bunch of waste heat to generate power). Not to mention the plusses of cleaning up the air vs. the coal plant (such as reducing mercury and sulfur content).
Sure, but not that wasteful if enough people where doing it. Compared to having pizza delivered it isn't that wasteful. A better policy today would be for stores to simply sell milk in glass bottles (at higher cost than ones in plastic) but give money back on the return of the bottle (as Coke used to do).
The nice thing about having the bottles delivered to your home is that there is less chance of the bottle being destroyed during delivery or return (since it is handled by a professional).
Not really. The individually wrapped sliced sheese was just an example. The US is certainly more wasteful than it has been in the past. A few decades ago, most people got their milk delivered in a bottle which was then reused by the milk company. Coke and other soft drinks where sold in bottles that were also generally reused by the manufacturer. Now everything comes in disposable stuff, often wrapped by more disposable stuff. Not only is this wasteful, but it fills up landfills at a faster clip.
you would need to cover the whole damned Earth in mirrors to meet our electricity needs.
No you wouldn't. For the US, you would need to cover most of Arizona I believe. There's about 1 kw/m^2 of energy coming from the sun so you certainly wouldn't need to cover the whole earth with mirrors.
With zero vetoes so far it would seem he controls the legislature as well. And if it weren't for filibusters he would be having an enormous amount of influence in the judiciary as well.
Because I get annoyed by these constant referrals to hollow rhetoric generated by the Bush campaign. I don't expect to change his mind, just want people who read that tripe to understand that they are, in fact, reading tripe.
Researchers have estimated that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis - many of them women and children - died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
than would have been expected otherwise, based on the death rate before the war.
So these are additional deaths. Obviously most of the armed forces there from the US and Britain that have been killed would be alive as well.
The problem with the retorical question "Is the world better without Saddam?" is that we didn't get rid of Saddam for free and the question is formed in such a way to ignore this cost. A more realistic question is "Was it worth getting rid of Saddam given the cost involved?" which we could debate (as you mention in your reply). Most of Bush's arguments are hollow retorical statements like the above and distorting statements made by Kerry (like saying "I'll never give a veto to another country over US security" implying Kerry would, despite the fact that Kerry has said essentially the same thing as Bush has on the subject). The opposite extreme would be for Kerry to go around telling people "I'm not going to tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves while we do whatever I feel needs to be done for our own security" which he clearly has not done.
The world would be even better off without Osama Bin Laden. It would also be better off if the 100,000+ Iraqis and 1000+ Americans were still alive. Or are you saying it's worth that many lives (and counting) to get rid of one person. Then there's the thousands upon thousands of injured and permanently disabled people.
consts are especially helpful in reading complex C++ code (so long as there are no const_cast functions or too many mutable variables). It is a nice way of telling whether a parameter is strictly an 'in' or an 'inout/out' using CORBA parlance. Nearly all of the code I've ever seen has far too few comments so syntatic sugar like this can greatly speed up comprehension of what the code is doing. It also makes it easier to port the code (well, interface anyway) to more strictly defined languages (like CORBA IDL). How can it possibly obfuscate the code? (with the premise that const_cast and mutable variables aren't used in abundance, which is bad programming practice anyway)
It can be a pain in the ass to consistently use consts (because member functions called on const parameters must be const functions which in turn must only call const member functions) but I've never heard any complaints about reading the code.
Evolution doesn't allow such things in they types of numbers we're experiencing.
Why not? The very great majority of allergies are not life-threatening. Evolution never evolves perfect organisms, simply strives towards evolving organisms that reproduce well.
Just for an easy example, what benefit do appendixes give to humans? How many people would die every year from appendicitis if it wasn't for modern surgery (modern meaning within the last 100-150 years)?
what would Zarqawi and his friends be doing? Knitting? Playing squash?
Actually, according to my sources, one of his good friends (Mr B Laden) has been spending a substantial amount of time knitting and playing squash lately.
I don't know what evidence you are referring to but I have seen pictures of the county I'm living in (Boulder county in Colorado) dating from just after the turn of the century showing numerous glaciers. Now virtually all of them are gone. In other parts of the world glaciers are disapearing as well.
The heat island effect is rather basic and every meterologist I know (one person granted) is quite aware of that (for example, at the NCAR -- National Center for Atmospheric Research -- website they have a disclaimer for their weather station including mention of the heat island effect). I'm sure most of the scientists take that into account in their studies. Also, that would only has a sizeable effect on sunny, summer days. It's quite reduced in winter, especially at more northern latitudes.
Over 2/3 of military personnel and families support President Bush.
That may be, but I wonder what portion of people in the forces that have been stationed in Iraq feel. I recently stayed at a hotel in Kansas where a couple of squads of troops (army) had stayed the night. I overheard one of the commanders mention at breakfast the next day that he was upset having to tell his active forces in Iraq that they would be coming back 15 days from now only to have to say it again a few days later over and over again. He followed up with a comment saying he didn't know what he was going to do if Bush was re-elected (implying from my point of view that he was considering leaving the forces).
I've also heard from another guy who served in the air force (guard) in Iraq and had not re-enlisted (basically, he came off as neutral about the war). The only other guy I've talked to that has been active in the military (before the war by several years) had been very upset with Clinton for stretching the forces too thinly. I can only imagine what guys like him would think now.
No one in the Bush administration has ever stated that Saddam Hussein or Iraq was directly involved in the September 11th attacks.
That assertion comes from a former administration official, ironically the former head of ant-terrorism Richard Clark. In an interview he also states:
"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."
Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."
In addition, I wonder what some of the formal economic advisers would say as well as other former administration officials who have been resigned (ie fired). Keep in mind that these formal officials were (and still are) highly qualified for the jobs they had, not just some random wackos.
Please let's not stray off into an "Iraq War was a mistake argument" (based on intel prior to the war, most believed at the time it was a good decision - hind site is always 20-20).
I'm not most people. I'll quote my own journal entry that I made at the time of the war starting:
First of all, I think the diplomacy by the Bush administration is some of the worst by an American government in recent memory. I also have serious doubts about his advisers as several of them, including Dick Cheney, wrote a paper some years ago encouraging the Bush I administration to preemptively attack Iraq.
The responsibility of the president, as defined by the Constitution, mostly resides with international affairs. In addition, he usually has the final say on bills that are passed (with the exception being bills on which Congress overrides the veto). I feel he has, without any competition, done the worst job with foreign affairs of any president within the past 50 years. He has never vetoed any bills (a first for any president), which is somewhat surprising given how awful some of them were (*cough* budget *cough*) and would have forced the parties in Congress to work together to override the veto or compromise on some of the pork being put into the budget and other bills where ample amounts of pork was placed.
He seems to ignore information which he doesn't want to hear (such as the advice of his first economic adviser) and is much too myopic to be president of the US.
It is probably going to take 1 to 2 decades for the US to rebuild its reputation around the world if Bush loses this election, much longer if he gets another 4 years.
In short, we went to Iraq for the wrong reasons (the main one he went on and on about was that Iraq was an imminent thread and *currently* had stockpiles of WMDs, both of which are absolutely false). Simply ignoring some of our closest allies and bullying the rest into joining us was a catastrophic mistake.
Fiscal irresponsibility and the fact the Republicans don't seem capable of controlling Congress and the Executive simultaneously with an iota of discipline are the other reasons I'm not voting for Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for one thing they need to be built next to a large body of water to act as a thermal reservoir. This is one of the primary concerns about nuclear plants in that they raise the temperature of the local water so much that it increases the growth of algae and thus suffocating the local fish.
NIMBY is the primary reason they are out in the boon docks. On the plus side, that should make it easier for them make a security perimeter fairly far away from the reactor (so any truck bomb would go off/be disabled well before it got close to a reactor, even on a suicide attack).
D'oh! 4.2 billion not million. So I guess it would be plenty of energy for the country if even only 5% of Arizona was covered (based on these wildly optimistic numbers).
The best efficiencies that I have found that solar plants can achieve is 30%.
Most solar plants have a large thermal reservoir underground that stores heat generated during the day. This reservoir can be tapped (just as efficiently as during sunny days) on cloudy days and at night.
Not applicable in the case of a solar plant.
Using your starting estimate of 2 trillion kWh per day (which, while optimistic, is correct given your assumptions) and using a system efficiency of 30% and a transmission loss of 30%, and your assumption of 100kWh of power per houshold per day, it looks like Arizona would produce enough power to serve 4.2 million households. Enough to power about 1/3 of California. But more than enough for Arizona.
I don't have any references of the costs per watt for solar plants, but I'm sure it is substantially less than solar cells. The best I could find is that some sites claim that California uses the most cheaply produced energy from solar power in the world (using solar plants of course). Nearly the entire cost would be up front since the plants need very little maintenance and no fuel.
Not applicable to mirrors which are just coated with melted sand (basically).
Not if the energy storage system is a thermal reservoir of hot water or molten sand.
You would need to have more information to determine whether this method is more or less efficient than getting the milk from a grocery store.
s/dessert/desert/
Also, if this where replacing a coal or nuclear plant it could cause a net reduction of heat (since the plant has to produce a bunch of waste heat to generate power). Not to mention the plusses of cleaning up the air vs. the coal plant (such as reducing mercury and sulfur content).
The nice thing about having the bottles delivered to your home is that there is less chance of the bottle being destroyed during delivery or return (since it is handled by a professional).
m=meter -- big difference (several orders of magnitude)
Not really. The individually wrapped sliced sheese was just an example. The US is certainly more wasteful than it has been in the past. A few decades ago, most people got their milk delivered in a bottle which was then reused by the milk company. Coke and other soft drinks where sold in bottles that were also generally reused by the manufacturer. Now everything comes in disposable stuff, often wrapped by more disposable stuff. Not only is this wasteful, but it fills up landfills at a faster clip.
Since when are power plants built in downtown anywhere? If I had to choose between a coal plant or a nuclear one I'd pick nuclear any day.
No you wouldn't. For the US, you would need to cover most of Arizona I believe. There's about 1 kw/m^2 of energy coming from the sun so you certainly wouldn't need to cover the whole earth with mirrors.
With zero vetoes so far it would seem he controls the legislature as well. And if it weren't for filibusters he would be having an enormous amount of influence in the judiciary as well.
Because I get annoyed by these constant referrals to hollow rhetoric generated by the Bush campaign. I don't expect to change his mind, just want people who read that tripe to understand that they are, in fact, reading tripe.
I will refer you to the report. Choice quote:
So these are additional deaths. Obviously most of the armed forces there from the US and Britain that have been killed would be alive as well.
The problem with the retorical question "Is the world better without Saddam?" is that we didn't get rid of Saddam for free and the question is formed in such a way to ignore this cost. A more realistic question is "Was it worth getting rid of Saddam given the cost involved?" which we could debate (as you mention in your reply). Most of Bush's arguments are hollow retorical statements like the above and distorting statements made by Kerry (like saying "I'll never give a veto to another country over US security" implying Kerry would, despite the fact that Kerry has said essentially the same thing as Bush has on the subject). The opposite extreme would be for Kerry to go around telling people "I'm not going to tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves while we do whatever I feel needs to be done for our own security" which he clearly has not done.
The world would be even better off without Osama Bin Laden. It would also be better off if the 100,000+ Iraqis and 1000+ Americans were still alive. Or are you saying it's worth that many lives (and counting) to get rid of one person. Then there's the thousands upon thousands of injured and permanently disabled people.
That universe has a name. That name is Japan.
It can be a pain in the ass to consistently use consts (because member functions called on const parameters must be const functions which in turn must only call const member functions) but I've never heard any complaints about reading the code.
Why not? The very great majority of allergies are not life-threatening. Evolution never evolves perfect organisms, simply strives towards evolving organisms that reproduce well.
Just for an easy example, what benefit do appendixes give to humans? How many people would die every year from appendicitis if it wasn't for modern surgery (modern meaning within the last 100-150 years)?
Actually, according to my sources, one of his good friends (Mr B Laden) has been spending a substantial amount of time knitting and playing squash lately.
Congress should impose much more rigorous safeguards, including a requirement that all computer code be made public.
Or did you miss that one?
What, are you saying these guys don't look professional? Got to agree with you on the flip-flops, though.
The heat island effect is rather basic and every meterologist I know (one person granted) is quite aware of that (for example, at the NCAR -- National Center for Atmospheric Research -- website they have a disclaimer for their weather station including mention of the heat island effect). I'm sure most of the scientists take that into account in their studies. Also, that would only has a sizeable effect on sunny, summer days. It's quite reduced in winter, especially at more northern latitudes.
That may be, but I wonder what portion of people in the forces that have been stationed in Iraq feel. I recently stayed at a hotel in Kansas where a couple of squads of troops (army) had stayed the night. I overheard one of the commanders mention at breakfast the next day that he was upset having to tell his active forces in Iraq that they would be coming back 15 days from now only to have to say it again a few days later over and over again. He followed up with a comment saying he didn't know what he was going to do if Bush was re-elected (implying from my point of view that he was considering leaving the forces).
I've also heard from another guy who served in the air force (guard) in Iraq and had not re-enlisted (basically, he came off as neutral about the war). The only other guy I've talked to that has been active in the military (before the war by several years) had been very upset with Clinton for stretching the forces too thinly. I can only imagine what guys like him would think now.
That assertion comes from a former administration official, ironically the former head of ant-terrorism Richard Clark. In an interview he also states:
In addition, I wonder what some of the formal economic advisers would say as well as other former administration officials who have been resigned (ie fired). Keep in mind that these formal officials were (and still are) highly qualified for the jobs they had, not just some random wackos.
I'm not most people. I'll quote my own journal entry that I made at the time of the war starting:
The responsibility of the president, as defined by the Constitution, mostly resides with international affairs. In addition, he usually has the final say on bills that are passed (with the exception being bills on which Congress overrides the veto). I feel he has, without any competition, done the worst job with foreign affairs of any president within the past 50 years. He has never vetoed any bills (a first for any president), which is somewhat surprising given how awful some of them were (*cough* budget *cough*) and would have forced the parties in Congress to work together to override the veto or compromise on some of the pork being put into the budget and other bills where ample amounts of pork was placed.He seems to ignore information which he doesn't want to hear (such as the advice of his first economic adviser) and is much too myopic to be president of the US.
It is probably going to take 1 to 2 decades for the US to rebuild its reputation around the world if Bush loses this election, much longer if he gets another 4 years.
In short, we went to Iraq for the wrong reasons (the main one he went on and on about was that Iraq was an imminent thread and *currently* had stockpiles of WMDs, both of which are absolutely false). Simply ignoring some of our closest allies and bullying the rest into joining us was a catastrophic mistake.
Fiscal irresponsibility and the fact the Republicans don't seem capable of controlling Congress and the Executive simultaneously with an iota of discipline are the other reasons I'm not voting for Bush.