Because we as Americans do not understand what a trade off means.
We want clean energy but we don't want power facilities near our homes. Nuclear is clean however it needs to be done right and there are too many complaining about the scary Nuclear and are unfortunally happy when they see a problem with a facility because it shows they are right.
Except a more responsible approach would be to support nuclear energy understand that it will be a long term investment and make sure it is done right and any mistakes will need to be fixed the right way before damage comes along, can solve many of our big pressing problems and only create smaller manageable problems.
It seems to me that the observation is not true. Everyone past grammar school math is able to do tradeoffs: it gets tricky only when somebody rigs the incoming data....as in when subsidies are generously maintained. Few people would be interested in solar if they had to pay upfront the real prices. One of my pet peeves on renewables is that here in Europe we have Carbon Credits, which in my view could be a great idea: find out how much CO2 has been emitted, by unit of energy produced or saved through efficient use, and pay a sum to everyone that improves on that, coming from those who do not improve. Make the grid operator the "referee" of the system, and watch"tradeoffs" at work. Electricity producers heavily subsidizing combined heat and electricity production, for example: it's happened where I live (Torino, Italy). the local utility is getting a fat check by selling carbon credits for all thermal plants it takes out of the system. The big issue comes when you lose this "ideological purity", and start to put other sort of subsidies into place which distort the signaling system that we usually call "price". Solar, for example, is right out; in terms of CO2 taken out per dollar, it's like trying to make a viable mass transit system using only Bugatti Veyrons, but Joe Public is actually far from knowing that, because all the price informations are taken out of his view and charged via general taxation/higher general electricity bills. Tell him the truth, and tradeoffs will come back.
one of the things that irks me about the nuke debate is how much it hinges on how much it costs to build a nuclear plant, while for example germany spends 8 billion euros a year in direct moneys to solar producers, and god knows how much it spent on subsidizing the panel build, added infrastructure, elastic supply to get in when solar output falls, etc. All of this money, and I quote, "Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times."
To summarize: only in transfers, NOT in total subsidy costs, Germans each years are paying themselves, meaning some taxpayers are paying other taxpayers through electricity bills, the amount of money needed to build one of finland's new reactor from scratch, after cost overruns, and a simple neat multiplication by 2. Ain't life splendid?
"...put them closer to the actual users and cut transmission losses and costs. Why the hell aren't we doing it yet?"
Exactly! Here in Europe we had a cold spell of a few weeks and the French, with their dozens of nuclear reactors had to import electricity from Germany, who shut theirs down after the Japanese 'incident'.
French officials were grinding their teeth, they had predicted the Germans the opposite would happen in winter.
The Germans have tons of solar roofs and while it was cold as hell, the sun shone quite nicely as well as the wind was blowing.
Sources? I freely admit that I do not speak german, but a friend of mine who does told me that Der Spiegel had this article stating that net net, solar production was negligible this winter."[..]The only thing that's missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.[...]"
Interesting, but how much energy does it take to run this thing? (they call it a 'battery', but I don't think it actually generates electricity). Many of the places that are short on fresh water are also short on electricity (especially "green" energy), so this may not be as helpful as it sounds.
True, but there are many countries that would be all agog if it would work more efficiently than reverse osmosis, places where salt water is abundant but drinking water is scarce, and energy is (relatively) abundant; think Persian Gulf states, north africa coastal states etc.
I hope you do not mind if I extend a little, on the political hazards involved in the debate.
Nail, hit head.
Nuclear power done right brings a lot to the table:
1: It is energy dense, so it doesn't take up valued land. Solar and wind farms are great, but energy losses through wires cause those to become not feasible.
2: A reprocessing, "breeder" reactor can reduce the need for high level waste dumps.
3: Reactor fuel is relatively cheap and abundant. When uranium becomes an issue, there is always thorium (although that is still a research leap ahead.)
4: Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this.
And it only will get better. The reactors in use today are designs built when disco was in fashion and people wore leisure suits. Modern reactor designs are generations ahead in safety, usability, and economy than the existing reactors that are on life support. Take an implemention of a traveling wave reactor. If done right, there would be zero need to enrich uranium, and the by-products are useful items.
Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused.
I'm happy to see some sort of energy progress in the US other than gas and oil.
1.energy density: a whole relatively small community must buy into the project, and since the workforce of the reactor while in operation must necessarily be highly qualified ( at least to make us gullible citizens think that someone is in control), the payoff is not usually in jobs; economic kickbacks tend to go out of hand, so it's difficult to find a place for a nuke;
4: "Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this", but people like my wife are afraid of flying, all the while leisurely zipping around town in a very small car that gets absolutely no attention. "Honey, do you know that when brakes sound like that it means that they're at the end of the tether?". I am italian, and the grounding of the Costa Concordia has been the talk of the town. Eleven people died, on about a total of 4.000 between crew and passengers. It's 0.27%.Sorry for the ruthlessness, but it's like me saying to her: "Honey, remember that if you have an accident in which the car is a wreck, you risk being killed or injured by the 400th car you write off". Sorry, human minds do not quote odds, or rather, our ancestral instinct does not work for very small or very big odds, look up Kahneman and Tversky.
"Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused." Absolutely true, and no one knows that more than the politicians. If they really thought that Nuclear power was part of the necessary diversification of supply, they should have spent some money on reactors and research. If they thought that it was a nightmare, they should have decommissioned at once. As it is, "let sleeping dogs lie" is the watchword. Italy does not produce nuclear energy, but it farms it off to the french and buys it at inflated prices; Germany has decided to decommission in the future, just enough to let the price tag sink in and do its sensous dance.
Well then do not eat shrimp or fish or clams or mussels that came from the gulf.
The gulf has seen bad spills before (Ixtoc I). Oil seeps into gulf naturally. The Gulf of Mexico does get oil in it all the time and has been for 1000s of years. It might be one of the best places to have a spill. Which really ticks the environmental people off. Don't get me wrong, spills are bad and should be avoided. They going to happen at some point for some reason. Steps should always be taken to minimize them.
I recall from memory, and I do not have an online account with them, but on the print edition of Scientific American a few years back there was a report of an experiment on the space shuttle, in which they tried to estimate the natural seepage of hydrocarbons in the gulf of mexico by photo analisys of day views, since the oil slicks had a different reflectivity. The photos were quite amazing, it was really pervasive.
The US is willing to invest heavily in upgrading old avionics while keeping the source for all the software. Would you buy a piece of military hardware knowing that the aging paranoid warcrazy manufacturer may have retained the ability to disable all those planes with the flip of a switch?
as a humble citizen in a western european country, the answer is "Yes", because the odds of some effing pseudo goverment taking over here and eliminating my civil rights is much higher than having the same happen in the US. call it life insurance.
It's been tried before. think "six day war", or" Zero vs. p38 lightning". Unless you plan on a offensive war against a naif opponent, the better plane will accept or deny fighting at HIS will, not yours. For it to work, the diffference in numbers must be enormous, like ten to one, and the Rafale is not ten times as cheap as an F35 in TCO.
think of it this way: two fighters, one with a detection and missile range of 30 miles, the other with a detection and missile range of 50 miles. the first always wants to get in close and personal, the other wants to stay off the dogfight as much as he can. Left to themselves, I'd accept odds of 2-3 to 1 against the longer range fighter.
Sure, the F 16 Falcon was patterned exactly on that concept: cheap, very manouverable, but its viability stood on two premises which over time have mostly fallen over the wayside:
1. Missile weapons would continue to have a very low kill probability, and their kill probabilty vs. small and agile targets like the F 16 itself would be even lower;
2. the possibility of having a stealth aircraft with no meaningful compromise on operational capabilities was remote.
For what I consider the ultimate analisis, grab a good biography of John Boyd, the story of the F 16 is usually worth the book by itself.
I've been working twenty years in an organized environment, and now I do the same job in a company I started with two partners. Guess what? The "product" aspect, that took 35 hours a week, now takes half the time, leaving time for...the burocratic aspects that the companies I worked for provided, but most importantly, marketing. So some lessons here:
1. no matter how few organized meetings you do, try slashing them in half. and then in half. stop when the people involved meet informally. then forbid them to do so. wait for the squeal, then accept suggestions. Lo and behold, you'll end up getting more work done.
2. from time to time, do a lottery. "programmers" vs. "janitors" vs. "human resources", to see if tiding up the office works, etc. you'll be surprised.
3.no matter how many or how few you make, do extended feedback. it really does not matter to see last week's meeting minutes, go back to see what the crowd was saying six months back. "did I really SAY that? what a schmuck!" it gives a big feedback on what's important and what is not.
I think that the whole Article is based on a false premise, i.e. that the two approaches are different, while in reality the Apple model is a (successful) subset of the Google model. In Google, no committee or burocracy has control of the creation model, same as in Apple. in Steve Jobs' Apple, only one person had the control of the innovation process; in Google apparently no one has it, it seems a bit like trying to see in the dark by tossing ping pong balls and hearing the sounds.
They DO have one thing in common: no one is tasked of "organizing the process", so the burocracy priesthood, "fill the proper form", " there's no time at the next committee, we have quarterly reports; would june next year suit you?", is nowhere to be seen, or rather is firmly put into place as a service to the cutting edge part, design, production and marketing. The parts of the company that are usually overpowering in a normal organizations are simply not there on a decision making level.
Incidentally, and I quote "John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments" has a sysiphean task; It's the existence of these layers that makes the organizations wilt in the face of change, not their inadequacy, so I think his business card in my view should state "lost causes" as a specialty.
Um... you do know what the F2p model is right? it's a giant DLC farm (if you want anything good you pay for it), and if you're only there for free you exists as a product to keep some other sucker paying 100 dollars a month for the game. That's what F2P is. Free to play is in no way free. They're going to try and hook you into 'well I spend 10 dollars, what's 10 more?" or "well I could spend 15 dollars a month on WoW, why not 15 dollars for that new Tank or gold to buy tanks or whatever. If there isn't one person paying 150 dollars for every 9 people who pay nothing they're going out of business as would Blizzard if they had no subscription revenue. If you aren't the sucker paying 150 dollars a month then their goal is to make you into that sucker, or you to die for that sucker to feel good about his 150 dollars a month.
Which works remarkably well at generating revenue, and is a perfectly valid business model. But one should be under no illusion what they're doing.
Me and my son both play World of tanks. He's never shelled out a dime, while I admit I bought a tank, and generally spent some money on the game. I did it with the perfect knowledge that there's no free lunch in life: the company releasing it is not a benevolent fund. Having said that, I like this social model best: the company must strike a balance between making money and keeping the numbers of free players up, while satisfying paying customers, so even blatant attempts to generate revenue imply walking a fine moral line on their part: there's no way the model could accomodate a player with a Challenger 2 tank in a world war II setting. All the other player would quit the battle immediately, and would probably quit the game too. And tell their friends. Getting money on used games is an unrelated business. imagine that I bought a DRM protected game for myself. i'd play a while, but it would probably end in my son's computer, as it usually does. Lo and behold, I should pay for that? Luckily, it will not matter. It might generate a bit of revenue, but since it's mostly nonrecurring, it does not move the stock prices, so it's not worth the hassle. It might serve to lobby the goverment to make resale illegal tough, or at least to surtax organizations who act as middlemen.
from wikipedia: "The chief drawback to residual fuel oil is its high initial viscosity, particularly in the case of No. 6 oil, which requires a correctly engineered system for storage, pumping, and burning. Though it is still usually lighter than water (with a specific gravity usually ranging from 0.95 to 1.03) it is much heavier and more viscous than No. 2 oil, kerosene, or gasoline. No. 6 oil must, in fact, be stored at around 100 F (38 C) heated to 150 F (66 C)–250 F (121 C) before it can be easily pumped, and in cooler temperatures it can congeal into a tarry semisolid. The flash point of most blends of No. 6 oil is, incidentally, about 150 F (66 C). Attempting to pump high-viscosity oil at low temperatures was a frequent cause of damage to fuel lines, furnaces, and related equipment which were often designed with lighter fuels in mind."
As I see it, it could be preferable to try and salvage the ship and tow it away, as long as the fuel inside is not a big problem, due to the winter temperature; it's also stranded not too far away from docking facilities as the crow files.
I'll note too that they fail to provide incentives for keeping your usage low. For example, from AT&T, for $15 a month, I can get 200 MB / month of data. For $25, I can get 2 GB / month. So, my wife, who was routinely using around 250 MB a month, upgraded to the 2 GB a month... and once she did, she started doing things like frequently streaming video to her phone. After all, she'd have to use eight times as much data as she used to before she'd exceed her new cap, so why shouldn't she?
It gets worse, though. For my work, I need to be able to remotely access the machines I work on at a moment's notice. I can't guarantee I'll always have a wi-fi connection available if I get an emergency call from the boss, so I have tethering. However, AT&T won't let me pay, say, a few extra dollars a month and use tethering with my 200 MB / month plan. Instead, I have to pay for their tethering plan, which gives me 4 GB / month of data, with tethering, for $45 a month. There is no lower option that allows tethering.
So now I've started watching videos online. I didn't bother getting 3g on the iPad I got myself for Christmas either... why pay the carrier another fee, when I can tether the iPad to the phone and actually get some use out of that 4 GB a month I'm having to pay for?
I would've been happy to give AT&T $5 a month for tethering and stay on my $15 a month, 200 MB / month plan, and not change my habits of using the phone at all. But if they're going to require me to pay $45 a month for a 4 GB plan in order to get tethering, I'm going to damn well increase my usage! Otherwise, I'm paying an additional $20 a month for nothing.
If I wind up using, say, 1 GB a month, I'm actually being charged 4.5 cents per MB. Before, with my 200 MB plan, I was being charged 7.5 cents per MB. If I somehow managed to use all 4 GB in a month, I'd be charged 1.125 cents per MB.
When the carriers effectively are giving steep discounts to "data hogs", what do they think is going to happen? If I had to buy 4 GB at my old plan's rate, I'd pay $300 for it. You can bet I'd be watching my usage carefully in that case! As it is, I *have* to pay for 4 GB a month, so I try to use as much of it as I can!
You have to understand the economics at the shareholder level. Let's suppose that AT&T, instead of throttling usage, switched to a cents per megabite scheme. Ideally, they'd have the best of both worlds: they'd invest their clients money to expand capacity where and when needed, high capacity users would pay more than low capacity user, etc.
Now step back and imagine that you are AT&T's investor relation manager, at a big convention. A big name analyst steps up and asks: " How much of the data revenue is variable?"
The "right" answer is:"none", because money managers are keen to pay more for fixed revenue than for a variable one (I am a money manager meself); so such a switch would probably lop off hundreds of million bucks from AT&T market cap, assuming the same total revenue, simply because it's impossible to guarantee that average revenue per user stays constant. So, the economic incentive for AT&T is to maximize the number of users subscribing to higher paying fixed price contracts, not to reduce usage per customer. One sure way to do it is to make the goods seem scarce, hence the wailing about bandwidth hogs.
They won't close the strait, they need the oil money, and couldn't stand doing a favor for their middle-eastern rivals by raising oil prices and driving western oil business to rival OPEC nations.
They won't get far showing off more powerful weapons, the Saudi's and the Pakistani's won't like it, and the Iranian's risk provoking military action from them, more than from the US.
The US media are a bunch of drama-thirsty morons who are looking to make a big deal out of this issue. Just ignore Iran, nothing will come of this. The Iranian government has nothing to gain from this, except the PR battle, saying "HA! we were strong enough to drive off the US!" even though we already know this is a total bluff.
If anything, they will start a conflict with neighboring nations, which in the most extreem of worst-case scenarios, could lead to a middle-eastern version of the Great War, and then the US can come in and support are already battle-fatigued allies against the Iranian aggressors with considerably less effort than what it took in Iraq these past 8 years.
You have to love the Iranians....what they are actually exposing is not a material change in the balance of power, only a change in the willingness to use it. If the US could make a credible threat to Iranian oil terminals, (communicated via back channel to the Chinese customers, maybe? with a Saudi rep by your side with a megabillion dollar oil contract?) all this fracas would taper off.
Eventually, a fading US would simply switch from a "sea control" strategy to a "sea denial" one...the persian gulf would essentially become an isolated lake, after a pipeline building binge. Iran would be stuck with a couple oil exporting terminals facing the indian ocean in the gulf of Oman , exposed to the whims of any and all navies bent on laying a mine or two, or selling out to somebody else, which barring Turkey taking a decidedly turn for the worse, can only be Russia. How about "Putin for prez" when Ahmadinejad stands down? Do not mistake me, I think the Iranians are well and truly mad....the more they bluster, the more controlling the pipeline passing through Syria into the med seems palatable to the Saudis, who do not and cannot love them, and do not share the us foibles about using whatever means available to save themselves.
You are a space nut, and this is good. Yep, what more tempting target than an asteroid with hundreds of tons of metals difficult to achieve on Earth as rare earths, titanium, chromium, etc.? Maybe even silver and gold. The problem is that unfortunately many people think:
1) can be transformed into a weapon?
the subject seems to imply that there's a panel manufacturing problem. In reality, there's a "new economic policy" problem: practically all the demand is government issued, and the private sector has been sucked up in the maelstrom. As in the original plan, I expect a full nationalization will ensue, on economic grounds
Here in Italy, solar has been heavily pushed via two mechanisms: one is that via tax rebates, building a solar plant is incentivized. the second is that ALL the energy produced is retired by the grid at a heavily increased price, and the increased price is then passed on to the consumers via the electricity bill. Private use is incentivised even more, since there's a counter at thee production level: a user/producer gets paid the higher price on all production, and pays his consumption at the lower general level. It goes without saying that this is a much bigger incentive than using a "net" mechanism, by which only the excess energy produced over consumption gets paid. The necessary build of conventional energy plants to guarantee continous production is done by the general electric utilities, and spread on the bills accordingly. The construction boom has been huge.
The rationale behind my saying that this will all end up in public hands is that most of the "industrial" establishment of solar plant has been funded by banks, with little money coming out of the equity investors' purse. An uncontrolled shrinkage of the incentive schemes would cause a big banking problem; helping the banks is not considered the thing now; and taxing Joe Public to give money to people who could convince banks to sink millions into a tax haven is a problem too, so nothing like a giant nationalization of the existing plants would work. Would it help the First Solars of the world? nooooo, because as much as public servants love to spend other people's money, many other investments are more profitable even on a CO2 standpoint. in less than 10 years, the city where I live has become the first in district heating in Europe; the local utility built, in less than three years, a combined gas and steam plant that by selling surplus heat in winter reaches an efficiency of 85%.
The Kindle Fire will pave the way, not because people will choose it over the iPad, but because it is opening the market on the low price range, and for people (like myself) that use computers to compute, and midsize tablets for light duty tasks. Of course, the Nook is also helping develop this market. They both prove that there is a sub $300 market for basic tablets that can surf, watch movies, be good book readers, and serve in areas where even a laptop is too large, and a netbook is not efficient.
Rest assured, the iPad will still dominate the large tablet market, it is just that the new products aren't trying to compete and are instead focusing on growing the market in places that the iPad never entered.
In the family, we're avid readers, and as a group we already own three Amazon kindles. But my daughter asked for a Kindle Fire, she wants to be able to see videoclips and such. as much as the Ipad is a more polished platform, the price/accessibility offer of the Fire, and the eventual competition that will turn up, is too compelling.
[...]"The only scenarios I think HD wins are if you're either so small that you can back up to a portable drive, or you're so big that backup window (time) becomes the primary concern, screw the costs. Otherwise, I see it as burning money and manpower (more money)."
I own a small business where data are both small and sensitive, and we use portable encrypted HDD drives, brought offsite each day. We once had a telecom company Snafu, and we were perfectly able to set up a makeshift office at home. the only caveat was that customers were able to contact us only on our mobile numbers and not on the usual fixed line. To me, that's the equivalent of losing everything to a fire, and surviving as a going concern.
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Because we as Americans do not understand what a trade off means. We want clean energy but we don't want power facilities near our homes. Nuclear is clean however it needs to be done right and there are too many complaining about the scary Nuclear and are unfortunally happy when they see a problem with a facility because it shows they are right. Except a more responsible approach would be to support nuclear energy understand that it will be a long term investment and make sure it is done right and any mistakes will need to be fixed the right way before damage comes along, can solve many of our big pressing problems and only create smaller manageable problems.
It seems to me that the observation is not true.
Everyone past grammar school math is able to do tradeoffs: it gets tricky only when somebody rigs the incoming data....as in when subsidies are generously maintained. Few people would be interested in solar if they had to pay upfront the real prices.
One of my pet peeves on renewables is that here in Europe we have Carbon Credits, which in my view could be a great idea: find out how much CO2 has been emitted, by unit of energy produced or saved through efficient use, and pay a sum to everyone that improves on that, coming from those who do not improve. Make the grid operator the "referee" of the system, and watch"tradeoffs" at work. Electricity producers heavily subsidizing combined heat and electricity production, for example: it's happened where I live (Torino, Italy). the local utility is getting a fat check by selling carbon credits for all thermal plants it takes out of the system.
The big issue comes when you lose this "ideological purity", and start to put other sort of subsidies into place which distort the signaling system that we usually call "price". Solar, for example, is right out; in terms of CO2 taken out per dollar, it's like trying to make a viable mass transit system using only Bugatti Veyrons, but Joe Public is actually far from knowing that, because all the price informations are taken out of his view and charged via general taxation/higher general electricity bills. Tell him the truth, and tradeoffs will come back.
one of the things that irks me about the nuke debate is how much it hinges on how much it costs to build a nuclear plant, while for example germany spends 8 billion euros a year in direct moneys to solar producers, and god knows how much it spent on subsidizing the panel build, added infrastructure, elastic supply to get in when solar output falls, etc.
All of this money, and I quote, "Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times." To summarize: only in transfers, NOT in total subsidy costs, Germans each years are paying themselves, meaning some taxpayers are paying other taxpayers through electricity bills, the amount of money needed to build one of finland's new reactor from scratch, after cost overruns, and a simple neat multiplication by 2. Ain't life splendid?
The future of energy is using less energy :
we already do this, witness the size and capacity of the batteries in mobile phones, etc.
"...put them closer to the actual users and cut transmission losses and costs. Why the hell aren't we doing it yet?"
Exactly! Here in Europe we had a cold spell of a few weeks and the French, with their dozens of nuclear reactors had to import electricity from Germany, who shut theirs down after the Japanese 'incident'. French officials were grinding their teeth, they had predicted the Germans the opposite would happen in winter. The Germans have tons of solar roofs and while it was cold as hell, the sun shone quite nicely as well as the wind was blowing.
Sources? I freely admit that I do not speak german, but a friend of mine who does told me that Der Spiegel had this article stating that net net, solar production was negligible this winter."[..]The only thing that's missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.[...]"
Bazynga!!!!!
Interesting, but how much energy does it take to run this thing? (they call it a 'battery', but I don't think it actually generates electricity). Many of the places that are short on fresh water are also short on electricity (especially "green" energy), so this may not be as helpful as it sounds.
True, but there are many countries that would be all agog if it would work more efficiently than reverse osmosis, places where salt water is abundant but drinking water is scarce, and energy is (relatively) abundant; think Persian Gulf states, north africa coastal states etc.
Nail, hit head.
Nuclear power done right brings a lot to the table:
1: It is energy dense, so it doesn't take up valued land. Solar and wind farms are great, but energy losses through wires cause those to become not feasible.
2: A reprocessing, "breeder" reactor can reduce the need for high level waste dumps.
3: Reactor fuel is relatively cheap and abundant. When uranium becomes an issue, there is always thorium (although that is still a research leap ahead.)
4: Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this.
And it only will get better. The reactors in use today are designs built when disco was in fashion and people wore leisure suits. Modern reactor designs are generations ahead in safety, usability, and economy than the existing reactors that are on life support. Take an implemention of a traveling wave reactor. If done right, there would be zero need to enrich uranium, and the by-products are useful items.
Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused.
I'm happy to see some sort of energy progress in the US other than gas and oil.
1.energy density: a whole relatively small community must buy into the project, and since the workforce of the reactor while in operation must necessarily be highly qualified ( at least to make us gullible citizens think that someone is in control), the payoff is not usually in jobs; economic kickbacks tend to go out of hand, so it's difficult to find a place for a nuke;
4: "Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this", but people like my wife are afraid of flying, all the while leisurely zipping around town in a very small car that gets absolutely no attention. "Honey, do you know that when brakes sound like that it means that they're at the end of the tether?".
I am italian, and the grounding of the Costa Concordia has been the talk of the town. Eleven people died, on about a total of 4.000 between crew and passengers. It's 0.27%.Sorry for the ruthlessness, but it's like me saying to her: "Honey, remember that if you have an accident in which the car is a wreck, you risk being killed or injured by the 400th car you write off". Sorry, human minds do not quote odds, or rather, our ancestral instinct does not work for very small or very big odds, look up Kahneman and Tversky.
"Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused."
Absolutely true, and no one knows that more than the politicians. If they really thought that Nuclear power was part of the necessary diversification of supply, they should have spent some money on reactors and research. If they thought that it was a nightmare, they should have decommissioned at once. As it is, "let sleeping dogs lie" is the watchword. Italy does not produce nuclear energy, but it farms it off to the french and buys it at inflated prices; Germany has decided to decommission in the future, just enough to let the price tag sink in and do its sensous dance.
Well then do not eat shrimp or fish or clams or mussels that came from the gulf.
The gulf has seen bad spills before (Ixtoc I). Oil seeps into gulf naturally. The Gulf of Mexico does get oil in it all the time and has been for 1000s of years. It might be one of the best places to have a spill. Which really ticks the environmental people off. Don't get me wrong, spills are bad and should be avoided. They going to happen at some point for some reason. Steps should always be taken to minimize them.
I recall from memory, and I do not have an online account with them, but on the print edition of Scientific American a few years back there was a report of an experiment on the space shuttle, in which they tried to estimate the natural seepage of hydrocarbons in the gulf of mexico by photo analisys of day views, since the oil slicks had a different reflectivity. The photos were quite amazing, it was really pervasive.
What about a towel? It's about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
It doubles as one, but the instructions to do so are written in Vogon poetry.
The US is willing to invest heavily in upgrading old avionics while keeping the source for all the software. Would you buy a piece of military hardware knowing that the aging paranoid warcrazy manufacturer may have retained the ability to disable all those planes with the flip of a switch?
as a humble citizen in a western european country, the answer is "Yes", because the odds of some effing pseudo goverment taking over here and eliminating my civil rights is much higher than having the same happen in the US. call it life insurance.
It's been tried before. think "six day war", or" Zero vs. p38 lightning". Unless you plan on a offensive war against a naif opponent, the better plane will accept or deny fighting at HIS will, not yours. For it to work, the diffference in numbers must be enormous, like ten to one, and the Rafale is not ten times as cheap as an F35 in TCO.
think of it this way: two fighters, one with a detection and missile range of 30 miles, the other with a detection and missile range of 50 miles. the first always wants to get in close and personal, the other wants to stay off the dogfight as much as he can. Left to themselves, I'd accept odds of 2-3 to 1 against the longer range fighter.
Sure, the F 16 Falcon was patterned exactly on that concept: cheap, very manouverable, but its viability stood on two premises which over time have mostly fallen over the wayside:
1. Missile weapons would continue to have a very low kill probability, and their kill probabilty vs. small and agile targets like the F 16 itself would be even lower;
2. the possibility of having a stealth aircraft with no meaningful compromise on operational capabilities was remote.
For what I consider the ultimate analisis, grab a good biography of John Boyd, the story of the F 16 is usually worth the book by itself.
I've been working twenty years in an organized environment, and now I do the same job in a company I started with two partners. Guess what? The "product" aspect, that took 35 hours a week, now takes half the time, leaving time for...the burocratic aspects that the companies I worked for provided, but most importantly, marketing.
So some lessons here:
1. no matter how few organized meetings you do, try slashing them in half. and then in half. stop when the people involved meet informally. then forbid them to do so. wait for the squeal, then accept suggestions. Lo and behold, you'll end up getting more work done.
2. from time to time, do a lottery. "programmers" vs. "janitors" vs. "human resources", to see if tiding up the office works, etc. you'll be surprised.
3.no matter how many or how few you make, do extended feedback. it really does not matter to see last week's meeting minutes, go back to see what the crowd was saying six months back. "did I really SAY that? what a schmuck!" it gives a big feedback on what's important and what is not.
I think that the whole Article is based on a false premise, i.e. that the two approaches are different, while in reality the Apple model is a (successful) subset of the Google model.
In Google, no committee or burocracy has control of the creation model, same as in Apple. in Steve Jobs' Apple, only one person had the control of the innovation process; in Google apparently no one has it, it seems a bit like trying to see in the dark by tossing ping pong balls and hearing the sounds.
They DO have one thing in common: no one is tasked of "organizing the process", so the burocracy priesthood, "fill the proper form", " there's no time at the next committee, we have quarterly reports; would june next year suit you?", is nowhere to be seen, or rather is firmly put into place as a service to the cutting edge part, design, production and marketing. The parts of the company that are usually overpowering in a normal organizations are simply not there on a decision making level.
Incidentally, and I quote "John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments" has a sysiphean task; It's the existence of these layers that makes the organizations wilt in the face of change, not their inadequacy, so I think his business card in my view should state "lost causes" as a specialty.
Um... you do know what the F2p model is right? it's a giant DLC farm (if you want anything good you pay for it), and if you're only there for free you exists as a product to keep some other sucker paying 100 dollars a month for the game. That's what F2P is. Free to play is in no way free. They're going to try and hook you into 'well I spend 10 dollars, what's 10 more?" or "well I could spend 15 dollars a month on WoW, why not 15 dollars for that new Tank or gold to buy tanks or whatever. If there isn't one person paying 150 dollars for every 9 people who pay nothing they're going out of business as would Blizzard if they had no subscription revenue. If you aren't the sucker paying 150 dollars a month then their goal is to make you into that sucker, or you to die for that sucker to feel good about his 150 dollars a month.
Which works remarkably well at generating revenue, and is a perfectly valid business model. But one should be under no illusion what they're doing.
Me and my son both play World of tanks. He's never shelled out a dime, while I admit I bought a tank, and generally spent some money on the game. I did it with the perfect knowledge that there's no free lunch in life: the company releasing it is not a benevolent fund.
Having said that, I like this social model best: the company must strike a balance between making money and keeping the numbers of free players up, while satisfying paying customers, so even blatant attempts to generate revenue imply walking a fine moral line on their part: there's no way the model could accomodate a player with a Challenger 2 tank in a world war II setting. All the other player would quit the battle immediately, and would probably quit the game too. And tell their friends.
Getting money on used games is an unrelated business. imagine that I bought a DRM protected game for myself. i'd play a while, but it would probably end in my son's computer, as it usually does. Lo and behold, I should pay for that?
Luckily, it will not matter. It might generate a bit of revenue, but since it's mostly nonrecurring, it does not move the stock prices, so it's not worth the hassle. It might serve to lobby the goverment to make resale illegal tough, or at least to surtax organizations who act as middlemen.
from wikipedia:
"The chief drawback to residual fuel oil is its high initial viscosity, particularly in the case of No. 6 oil, which requires a correctly engineered system for storage, pumping, and burning. Though it is still usually lighter than water (with a specific gravity usually ranging from 0.95 to 1.03) it is much heavier and more viscous than No. 2 oil, kerosene, or gasoline. No. 6 oil must, in fact, be stored at around 100 F (38 C) heated to 150 F (66 C)–250 F (121 C) before it can be easily pumped, and in cooler temperatures it can congeal into a tarry semisolid. The flash point of most blends of No. 6 oil is, incidentally, about 150 F (66 C). Attempting to pump high-viscosity oil at low temperatures was a frequent cause of damage to fuel lines, furnaces, and related equipment which were often designed with lighter fuels in mind."
As I see it, it could be preferable to try and salvage the ship and tow it away, as long as the fuel inside is not a big problem, due to the winter temperature; it's also stranded not too far away from docking facilities as the crow files.
Oderint dum metuant, as Caligula is reported to have said. Of course, the concept is as old as history.
I'll note too that they fail to provide incentives for keeping your usage low. For example, from AT&T, for $15 a month, I can get 200 MB / month of data. For $25, I can get 2 GB / month. So, my wife, who was routinely using around 250 MB a month, upgraded to the 2 GB a month... and once she did, she started doing things like frequently streaming video to her phone. After all, she'd have to use eight times as much data as she used to before she'd exceed her new cap, so why shouldn't she?
It gets worse, though. For my work, I need to be able to remotely access the machines I work on at a moment's notice. I can't guarantee I'll always have a wi-fi connection available if I get an emergency call from the boss, so I have tethering. However, AT&T won't let me pay, say, a few extra dollars a month and use tethering with my 200 MB / month plan. Instead, I have to pay for their tethering plan, which gives me 4 GB / month of data, with tethering, for $45 a month. There is no lower option that allows tethering.
So now I've started watching videos online. I didn't bother getting 3g on the iPad I got myself for Christmas either... why pay the carrier another fee, when I can tether the iPad to the phone and actually get some use out of that 4 GB a month I'm having to pay for?
I would've been happy to give AT&T $5 a month for tethering and stay on my $15 a month, 200 MB / month plan, and not change my habits of using the phone at all. But if they're going to require me to pay $45 a month for a 4 GB plan in order to get tethering, I'm going to damn well increase my usage! Otherwise, I'm paying an additional $20 a month for nothing.
If I wind up using, say, 1 GB a month, I'm actually being charged 4.5 cents per MB. Before, with my 200 MB plan, I was being charged 7.5 cents per MB. If I somehow managed to use all 4 GB in a month, I'd be charged 1.125 cents per MB.
When the carriers effectively are giving steep discounts to "data hogs", what do they think is going to happen? If I had to buy 4 GB at my old plan's rate, I'd pay $300 for it. You can bet I'd be watching my usage carefully in that case! As it is, I *have* to pay for 4 GB a month, so I try to use as much of it as I can!
You have to understand the economics at the shareholder level.
Let's suppose that AT&T, instead of throttling usage, switched to a cents per megabite scheme. Ideally, they'd have the best of both worlds: they'd invest their clients money to expand capacity where and when needed, high capacity users would pay more than low capacity user, etc.
Now step back and imagine that you are AT&T's investor relation manager, at a big convention. A big name analyst steps up and asks: " How much of the data revenue is variable?"
The "right" answer is:"none", because money managers are keen to pay more for fixed revenue than for a variable one (I am a money manager meself); so such a switch would probably lop off hundreds of million bucks from AT&T market cap, assuming the same total revenue, simply because it's impossible to guarantee that average revenue per user stays constant. So, the economic incentive for AT&T is to maximize the number of users subscribing to higher paying fixed price contracts, not to reduce usage per customer. One sure way to do it is to make the goods seem scarce, hence the wailing about bandwidth hogs.
They won't close the strait, they need the oil money, and couldn't stand doing a favor for their middle-eastern rivals by raising oil prices and driving western oil business to rival OPEC nations.
They won't get far showing off more powerful weapons, the Saudi's and the Pakistani's won't like it, and the Iranian's risk provoking military action from them, more than from the US.
The US media are a bunch of drama-thirsty morons who are looking to make a big deal out of this issue. Just ignore Iran, nothing will come of this. The Iranian government has nothing to gain from this, except the PR battle, saying "HA! we were strong enough to drive off the US!" even though we already know this is a total bluff.
If anything, they will start a conflict with neighboring nations, which in the most extreem of worst-case scenarios, could lead to a middle-eastern version of the Great War, and then the US can come in and support are already battle-fatigued allies against the Iranian aggressors with considerably less effort than what it took in Iraq these past 8 years.
You have to love the Iranians....what they are actually exposing is not a material change in the balance of power, only a change in the willingness to use it. If the US could make a credible threat to Iranian oil terminals, (communicated via back channel to the Chinese customers, maybe? with a Saudi rep by your side with a megabillion dollar oil contract?) all this fracas would taper off.
Eventually, a fading US would simply switch from a "sea control" strategy to a "sea denial" one...the persian gulf would essentially become an isolated lake, after a pipeline building binge. Iran would be stuck with a couple oil exporting terminals facing the indian ocean in the gulf of Oman , exposed to the whims of any and all navies bent on laying a mine or two, or selling out to somebody else, which barring Turkey taking a decidedly turn for the worse, can only be Russia. How about "Putin for prez" when Ahmadinejad stands down?
Do not mistake me, I think the Iranians are well and truly mad....the more they bluster, the more controlling the pipeline passing through Syria into the med seems palatable to the Saudis, who do not and cannot love them, and do not share the us foibles about using whatever means available to save themselves.
You are a space nut, and this is good. Yep, what more tempting target than an asteroid with hundreds of tons of metals difficult to achieve on Earth as rare earths, titanium, chromium, etc.? Maybe even silver and gold. The problem is that unfortunately many people think: 1) can be transformed into a weapon?
Yes, witness "the moon is a harsh mistress" by Robert Heinlein, circa 1966
2) can be transformed into a weapon? (not repeated unintentionally, seriously)
Ditto
3) When will I profit from it in a month?
the moment you'll find a technology to extract the reverse Delta-V to produce propellant.
the subject seems to imply that there's a panel manufacturing problem. In reality, there's a "new economic policy" problem: practically all the demand is government issued, and the private sector has been sucked up in the maelstrom. As in the original plan, I expect a full nationalization will ensue, on economic grounds
Here in Italy, solar has been heavily pushed via two mechanisms: one is that via tax rebates, building a solar plant is incentivized. the second is that ALL the energy produced is retired by the grid at a heavily increased price, and the increased price is then passed on to the consumers via the electricity bill. Private use is incentivised even more, since there's a counter at thee production level: a user/producer gets paid the higher price on all production, and pays his consumption at the lower general level. It goes without saying that this is a much bigger incentive than using a "net" mechanism, by which only the excess energy produced over consumption gets paid.
The necessary build of conventional energy plants to guarantee continous production is done by the general electric utilities, and spread on the bills accordingly. The construction boom has been huge.
The rationale behind my saying that this will all end up in public hands is that most of the "industrial" establishment of solar plant has been funded by banks, with little money coming out of the equity investors' purse. An uncontrolled shrinkage of the incentive schemes would cause a big banking problem; helping the banks is not considered the thing now; and taxing Joe Public to give money to people who could convince banks to sink millions into a tax haven is a problem too, so nothing like a giant nationalization of the existing plants would work.
Would it help the First Solars of the world? nooooo, because as much as public servants love to spend other people's money, many other investments are more profitable even on a CO2 standpoint. in less than 10 years, the city where I live has become the first in district heating in Europe; the local utility built, in less than three years, a combined gas and steam plant that by selling surplus heat in winter reaches an efficiency of 85%.
The Kindle Fire will pave the way, not because people will choose it over the iPad, but because it is opening the market on the low price range, and for people (like myself) that use computers to compute, and midsize tablets for light duty tasks. Of course, the Nook is also helping develop this market. They both prove that there is a sub $300 market for basic tablets that can surf, watch movies, be good book readers, and serve in areas where even a laptop is too large, and a netbook is not efficient.
Rest assured, the iPad will still dominate the large tablet market, it is just that the new products aren't trying to compete and are instead focusing on growing the market in places that the iPad never entered.
In the family, we're avid readers, and as a group we already own three Amazon kindles. But my daughter asked for a Kindle Fire, she wants to be able to see videoclips and such. as much as the Ipad is a more polished platform, the price/accessibility offer of the Fire, and the eventual competition that will turn up, is too compelling.
Surfing porn all day does not make one an internet expert.
Hush. I put it on my resume and my employer bought it.
So when I email my wife, I'll write, "Don't meet me at the 5:10pm train and don't pick up my shirts at the laundry." Neat, huh?
You're probably one of the very few dudes that has a wife that listens..
It's not a wife. It's an encrypted husband.
This car can be parked free anywhere on the planet and it's immune from speeding tickets!
[...]"The only scenarios I think HD wins are if you're either so small that you can back up to a portable drive, or you're so big that backup window (time) becomes the primary concern, screw the costs. Otherwise, I see it as burning money and manpower (more money)."
I own a small business where data are both small and sensitive, and we use portable encrypted HDD drives, brought offsite each day. We once had a telecom company Snafu, and we were perfectly able to set up a makeshift office at home. the only caveat was that customers were able to contact us only on our mobile numbers and not on the usual fixed line.
To me, that's the equivalent of losing everything to a fire, and surviving as a going concern.