They were. And it appears that SpaceX has a large number of launches. Many more than what they claim, and a great deal more than what the critics claim. 4 FH launches for spaceX is going to be pretty exciting.
I have to wonder, if USAF will now back SpaceX building FXX?
Well, just to point out, the delta IV-H already takes 13 tonnes to GEO. As such, FH, along with DIV-H, will likely double the size of sats to 10-12 T.
And Astrium is working on the 5ME,Though, SLOWLY is the word. I did notice that earlier this year, the ESA coughed up another 100M euros for it. However, Astrium/ESA suffers the same issues as old space: lots of money to accomplish anything. IOW, 100M Eu is more of a study than actual work being done.
Regardless, I think that the new norm will become 10-12T for sats. And with FH charging about 1/3 of Delta and 1/2 of China, Russia or ESA, I suspect that the prime launch system will become FH.
The means that SpaceX will use to lower their price is to have enough launches that their fixed overhead becomes a minor issue. Right now, launches have a high fixed costs due to too few launches. SpaceX's plan is that FH launches once every 2 months and that F9 launches monthly or even twice a month. That allows them to drop not just the launch pad, but also their launch crew (who are typically on a salary, not hourly), as well as manufacturing costs.
To take this a step further, SpaceX intends to have 8 launches next year, and 12-14 in 2014. That allows them to have their QA under control as well. With this high of a rate, SpaceX will likely not need a back-up for the FH WRT launching sats. OTOH, if we are to go to the moon, we really need two or more systems of similar sizes. Or simply constrain the loads to the smaller of the LVs.
So, you mean fixing their money against western money by 50% or moer, even though it is against WTO, IMF, and even the Clinton-China Agreement is not enough? How about massive dumping on the western market? Or subsidizing what is sent here? All illegal per the agreements.
Or the massive amounts of spies here. I have dealt with 2 spies already. One was working hard to get access to equipment that was ITARed (we had massive issues sending it to UK). This guy went so far as to offer bribes for it.
How about the fact that their Space Station is open to the military only? That means that they are putting manned military systems up in space.
I could go on and on and on. But even their own studies are about how to defeat USA, followed by EU. Yes, they want to break NATO and then attack USA, followed by EU.
BTW, most of us westerners think in terms of civilians in control. That is standard with democracies. That is NOT the case in China. It is shared between the communist party AND the military. Do not look at what we see as the top ppl there. Look at what the military says and does. THAT is the real power in China.
First off, military != economics. They are totally different issues.
Secondly, the US, in fact, the west, still produces loads of chips. It is not impossible to scale it back up.
From a security POV, the west SHOULD keep the manufacturing in-house. As it is, the Chinese gov. subsidized electronics, AE, etc. to get the tech from the west. It is in the west's best interest to simply walk away from this. At least where it concerns our military.
Ideally, we will use that to re-start the consumer side as well.
Chinese leaders are in a cold war with the west. As such, it is far cheaper and easier to be able to shut down an adversaries equipment if you are manufacturing it for them. If the west would quit being foolish, they would insist on equipment made in secured companies. And Google has already proved that nothing in China is secured from the gov.
A capacitor is a battery in the same way that an electric motor is an internal combustion engine, only much more efficient, faster, and with better torque. Hopefully, that helps you.
Hydrogen is the absolutely the WORST way to go. Costly to seperate from H2O. Fuel Cells remain costly, so you have to burn as an ICE or a thermal system.
Far cheaper to convert excess electricity to heat and then feed that into a thermal system. Back it up with Natural gas.
you have storage. What is needed is to push electric cars that plug-in and give back. To really do that, they should have capacitors, not batteries.
In addition, a very smart move is to have cheap batteries and thermal storage. With thermal storage, you can change excess electricity into heat (alabit at a loss of efficiency), and then convert again back to electricity as needed. The real advantage is that Natural Gas (including coal converted to methane) can be burned on those days when AE and the storage does not meet demands. In fact, the ideal situation is if you have days in which you KNOW ahead of time that it will likely need extra energy (such as hot days to run ACs), you heat the thermal at night and use that as well as the NG.
What is unproven? Thorium? Works great. See Fort. St. Vrain plant. Never a single issue with the reactor (the back end was a TOTALLY different issue).
From Wikipedia:
"Facility contractors introduced safety concerns on several occasions. In one of the more serious incidents, contractor personnel damaged hydraulic units, allowing hydraulic fluid to spray over reactor control cables. The same crew then performed welding operations to equipment located above the control cables. Hot slag fell onto the material used to contain the hydraulic fluid and ignited it, along with the fluid on the control cables. The fire involved the cables for five minutes, and 16 essential control cables were damaged. The contractor personnel then failed to inform plant personnel of the situation and the reactor was in operation for several hours in this condition."
Sounds really safe. Plus it was not a commercial scale nuclear plant, so wouldn't prove the economic and safety viability of one anyway.
The IFR? Well, S-PRISM is being developed right now by GE and will be trialed at DOE around 201[56]. Things actually look good for it.
So your evidence that the technology is proven is a research reactor that suffered numerous problems and something that hasn't been built yet. I bet you wonder why people are not lining up to invest in these things.
And GE has a deal with the UK.
They are not even in the negotiations. Too expensive, even with massive subsidy.
You should have read the entire wiki, rather than individual parts that you wanted:
The plant was technically successful, especially towards the very end of its operating life, but was a commercial disappointment to its owner. Being one of the first commercial HTGR designs, the plant was a proof-of-concept for several advanced technologies, and correspondingly raised a number of early adopter problems that required expensive corrections.
Basically, the reactor part worked great. Nobody faults it. What failed is that GA had done some work in the back-end that was a disaster. Yet, NONE of that affected the thorium reactor.
Now, as to the small size:
The reactor had an electrical power output of 330MW (330 MWe), generated from a thermal power 842 MW (842 MWth).
Sorry to disappoint you, but the average reactor size of the 60s was about this size.
The Japanese reactor actually had ONE issue. They have had very few flaws.
Yes, that one was major, but it is now known.
The IFR is nothing more than a simple sodium cooled reactor in which the fuel is pulled out via robotics and manipulated. Where will that robotics design come from? Why from the current MOX and uranium processing plants that we have all over the world.
What is unproven? Thorium? Works great. See Fort. St. Vrain plant. Never a single issue with the reactor (the back end was a TOTALLY different issue).
The IFR? Well, S-PRISM is being developed right now by GE and will be trialed at DOE around 201[56]. Things actually look good for it.
Yes, the plant IS more expensive. After all, it has to re-process 'waste' fuel, in an automated fashion. And GE has a deal with the UK. Basically, once DOE has trialed it and NRC approves it, the UK will allow it to be built to process your waste fuel. In fact, it will go up around 2018.
Economically, nukes DO work, though they are more expensive then coal that is allowed to burn without a single thought about pollution.
And yet, the development is going on. Basically, the question is, how can we speed it up to get SAFE reactors to the site? I do not think that nuke is a total solution, but it needs to be part of our energy matrix.
I myself would like to see us come up with an electric policy in which we limit an energy type to less than 1/3 of the input. For example, fossil fuel should account for no more than 1/3 of our energy, which is currently 60-65%). AE, with wind, solar, geo-thermal, and hydro is around 15-20%. And nukes account for 19%. In time, as AE is better developed, esp. geo-thermal, we need to move off fossil fuel and nukes over to AE.
First off, it never should have been built in Nevada. The best site was west Texas. But it was a decision that Poppa Bush made, hence the reason why NV was chosen.
Second, there is loads of energy in nuclear 'waste'. We should be burning it up. Right now, we are talking about transporting loads of 'waste' all over the USA. Instead, on all of the sites that are to be retired, we could instead put up a number of new GE IFR reactors. These would then be loaded with a small amount of normal nuke fuel, that is then mixed with on-site waste. Then in the future, nothing but on-site 'waste' fuel would be added. So, would there be waste from this? Absolutely. But NONE of it would be useful for a regular bomb (but it would work for a dirty bomb). In addition, the worst of it would be done within 200 years, rather than 20,000 years.
Note the difference with this approach. Basically, you have a site that has active cooling, transmission lines, generators, etc. and some old reactors. You put up enough GE reactor to replace one or more of the old ones, start it, and then start the destruction of one or more of the old reactors. Basically, you keep the site going to provide power. At the same time, we put up a NEW reactor that is based on a NEW design with physics behind it that prevents melt downs.
Hopefully, we speed up development.
on
NRC Chairman Resigns
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
We need a number of new reactors. In particular, we need the micro to medium size reactors that can be built in a factory. In addition, we need GE's IFR (to burn up nuke 'waste'), as well as thorium reactors.
No. It is not the spacex fanboys that are the problems. The same ones that want to kill NASA would not care if it was SpaceX, OSC, or even Russia. They simply want NASA dead. There are many that support BOTH SpaceX AND NASA. I do (disclaimer: I have worked for NASA and have a clue of how useful they are).
The ones to blame are those that either want to kill all gov, or simply want NASA dead.
First off, Canada will simply build a pipeline to the west or the east. Not a problem for them. IOW, this WILL be coming.
Instead, what O SHOULD be doing, is pushing as modified NAT GAS act, along with more money for electric cars and bio-energy.
The NAT GAS act should be modified to quickly get commercial vehicles as well NG refueling moving as quickly as possible. Instead of 1B a year for 5 years, it should start out at 3B, and decrease.5B each year. Basically, that will spend 10B over 6 years. The money for it should come from a tax on the pipeline.
Likewise, there should be an increase in spending on bio-energy, in particular, for Joules Energy and other Algae based systems.
Also, there are means to convert coal into Methane. One of them is Great Point Energy which just got 1B from China. But there are others.
Finally, a bigger push to instead electric chargers makes sense.
Now, why do this? Because keystone is NOT about bringing oil/gasoline to America. It is about exporting it mostly to China. Great. China will take this from someplace. Since China uses tariffs (both exports and imports) to fund most of its development, it is time to make use of these products destined for China to also make the west move to a cleaner solution.
most LEDs last longer than CFLs. Unless you buy rather expensive CFLs, they will last ~1 years if they are left on 24x7. Sadly, the cheap LEDs cost about $4-5 and last 1-2 years. To be fair, if you are going to buy cheap junk, then at this time, skip all of the LED and stick with CFLs.
Now, if you are looking to save money over a 10-30 year period, then go with a DECENT LED bulb. Few of the bulbs that you buy are decent. Buy a phillips (made with phillips LEDs), or better yet, buy a switch (which has solved the heat issue).
LG and GE are pure junk. They are made with poor quality material and do not put out the lumens that they claim. GE actually does not make bulbs. They are paid for their labels. A number of chinese manufacturers are producing these and paying x amount of money to GE to put their label on them. In fact, you can get 2 boxes of bulbs with same outer package and the bulbs are PHYSICALLY different.
All LED bulbs have DC converters. My guess is that you bought some GE or Chinese junk. It simply will not last long. Do not waste your money on that. The Phillips and even better the Switch Light Bulbs, are the way to go.
The problem with LEDS (and CFLs) is not the bulbs, but the power converters inside. In every case, they produce a load of heat. One approach for the bigger bulbs is to add in a fan. Of course, many of those are being built by cheap low quality chinese manufacturers. A 10-30 year bulb will last only 1-2 years. IOW, they are PURE JUNK. This ESP. includes the GE bulbs (that are not even produced by GE, but simply re-labeled chinese junk). The phillips at least use Phillips LEDs which are of better quality, but not as good as say Cree.
So, what is the RIGHT approach for this?
Switch light bulb immerses the power in oil and then allows passive cooling. They have multiple patents on this. And will shortly have a 100 w bulb on the market. They are in final testing of it. These use the same Philips LEDs, but the passive cooling will allow this to actually last what is claimed. And all for under $30.
Slashdot Mirror
They were. And it appears that SpaceX has a large number of launches. Many more than what they claim, and a great deal more than what the critics claim. 4 FH launches for spaceX is going to be pretty exciting.
I have to wonder, if USAF will now back SpaceX building FXX?
Well, just to point out, the delta IV-H already takes 13 tonnes to GEO. As such, FH, along with DIV-H, will likely double the size of sats to 10-12 T.
And Astrium is working on the 5ME,Though, SLOWLY is the word. I did notice that earlier this year, the ESA coughed up another 100M euros for it. However, Astrium/ESA suffers the same issues as old space: lots of money to accomplish anything. IOW, 100M Eu is more of a study than actual work being done.
Regardless, I think that the new norm will become 10-12T for sats. And with FH charging about 1/3 of Delta and 1/2 of China, Russia or ESA, I suspect that the prime launch system will become FH.
The means that SpaceX will use to lower their price is to have enough launches that their fixed overhead becomes a minor issue. Right now, launches have a high fixed costs due to too few launches. SpaceX's plan is that FH launches once every 2 months and that F9 launches monthly or even twice a month. That allows them to drop not just the launch pad, but also their launch crew (who are typically on a salary, not hourly), as well as manufacturing costs.
To take this a step further, SpaceX intends to have 8 launches next year, and 12-14 in 2014. That allows them to have their QA under control as well. With this high of a rate, SpaceX will likely not need a back-up for the FH WRT launching sats. OTOH, if we are to go to the moon, we really need two or more systems of similar sizes. Or simply constrain the loads to the smaller of the LVs.
So, you mean fixing their money against western money by 50% or moer, even though it is against WTO, IMF, and even the Clinton-China Agreement is not enough? How about massive dumping on the western market? Or subsidizing what is sent here? All illegal per the agreements.
Or the massive amounts of spies here. I have dealt with 2 spies already. One was working hard to get access to equipment that was ITARed (we had massive issues sending it to UK). This guy went so far as to offer bribes for it.
How about the fact that their Space Station is open to the military only? That means that they are putting manned military systems up in space.
I could go on and on and on. But even their own studies are about how to defeat USA, followed by EU. Yes, they want to break NATO and then attack USA, followed by EU.
BTW, most of us westerners think in terms of civilians in control. That is standard with democracies. That is NOT the case in China. It is shared between the communist party AND the military. Do not look at what we see as the top ppl there. Look at what the military says and does. THAT is the real power in China.
First off, military != economics. They are totally different issues.
Secondly, the US, in fact, the west, still produces loads of chips. It is not impossible to scale it back up.
From a security POV, the west SHOULD keep the manufacturing in-house. As it is, the Chinese gov. subsidized electronics, AE, etc. to get the tech from the west. It is in the west's best interest to simply walk away from this. At least where it concerns our military.
Ideally, we will use that to re-start the consumer side as well.
Chinese leaders are in a cold war with the west. As such, it is far cheaper and easier to be able to shut down an adversaries equipment if you are manufacturing it for them. If the west would quit being foolish, they would insist on equipment made in secured companies. And Google has already proved that nothing in China is secured from the gov.
Or you have a voltage regulator on the way out before the multiple loads.
A capacitor is a battery in the same way that an electric motor is an internal combustion engine, only much more efficient, faster, and with better torque. Hopefully, that helps you.
Hydrogen is the absolutely the WORST way to go. Costly to seperate from H2O. Fuel Cells remain costly, so you have to burn as an ICE or a thermal system. Far cheaper to convert excess electricity to heat and then feed that into a thermal system. Back it up with Natural gas.
you have storage. What is needed is to push electric cars that plug-in and give back. To really do that, they should have capacitors, not batteries.
In addition, a very smart move is to have cheap batteries and thermal storage. With thermal storage, you can change excess electricity into heat (alabit at a loss of efficiency), and then convert again back to electricity as needed. The real advantage is that Natural Gas (including coal converted to methane) can be burned on those days when AE and the storage does not meet demands. In fact, the ideal situation is if you have days in which you KNOW ahead of time that it will likely need extra energy (such as hot days to run ACs), you heat the thermal at night and use that as well as the NG.
You need to read this.
Basically, that was the prototype for IFR. Most importantly, it worked GREAT.
What is unproven? Thorium? Works great. See Fort. St. Vrain plant. Never a single issue with the reactor (the back end was a TOTALLY different issue).
From Wikipedia:
"Facility contractors introduced safety concerns on several occasions. In one of the more serious incidents, contractor personnel damaged hydraulic units, allowing hydraulic fluid to spray over reactor control cables. The same crew then performed welding operations to equipment located above the control cables. Hot slag fell onto the material used to contain the hydraulic fluid and ignited it, along with the fluid on the control cables. The fire involved the cables for five minutes, and 16 essential control cables were damaged. The contractor personnel then failed to inform plant personnel of the situation and the reactor was in operation for several hours in this condition."
Sounds really safe. Plus it was not a commercial scale nuclear plant, so wouldn't prove the economic and safety viability of one anyway.
The IFR? Well, S-PRISM is being developed right now by GE and will be trialed at DOE around 201[56]. Things actually look good for it.
So your evidence that the technology is proven is a research reactor that suffered numerous problems and something that hasn't been built yet. I bet you wonder why people are not lining up to invest in these things.
And GE has a deal with the UK.
They are not even in the negotiations. Too expensive, even with massive subsidy.
You should have read the entire wiki, rather than individual parts that you wanted:
The plant was technically successful, especially towards the very end of its operating life, but was a commercial disappointment to its owner. Being one of the first commercial HTGR designs, the plant was a proof-of-concept for several advanced technologies, and correspondingly raised a number of early adopter problems that required expensive corrections.
Basically, the reactor part worked great. Nobody faults it. What failed is that GA had done some work in the back-end that was a disaster. Yet, NONE of that affected the thorium reactor.
Now, as to the small size:
The reactor had an electrical power output of 330MW (330 MWe), generated from a thermal power 842 MW (842 MWth).
Sorry to disappoint you, but the average reactor size of the 60s was about this size.
The Japanese reactor actually had ONE issue. They have had very few flaws. Yes, that one was major, but it is now known. The IFR is nothing more than a simple sodium cooled reactor in which the fuel is pulled out via robotics and manipulated. Where will that robotics design come from? Why from the current MOX and uranium processing plants that we have all over the world.
UK NDA signs contract with GE Hitachi for study on Prism reactors for Pu disposition
And per the deal with the EU, ZERO subsidies are allowed on nukes.
What is unproven? Thorium? Works great. See Fort. St. Vrain plant. Never a single issue with the reactor (the back end was a TOTALLY different issue).
The IFR? Well, S-PRISM is being developed right now by GE and will be trialed at DOE around 201[56]. Things actually look good for it.
Yes, the plant IS more expensive. After all, it has to re-process 'waste' fuel, in an automated fashion. And GE has a deal with the UK. Basically, once DOE has trialed it and NRC approves it, the UK will allow it to be built to process your waste fuel. In fact, it will go up around 2018.
Economically, nukes DO work, though they are more expensive then coal that is allowed to burn without a single thought about pollution.
And yet, the development is going on. Basically, the question is, how can we speed it up to get SAFE reactors to the site? I do not think that nuke is a total solution, but it needs to be part of our energy matrix.
I myself would like to see us come up with an electric policy in which we limit an energy type to less than 1/3 of the input. For example, fossil fuel should account for no more than 1/3 of our energy, which is currently 60-65%). AE, with wind, solar, geo-thermal, and hydro is around 15-20%. And nukes account for 19%. In time, as AE is better developed, esp. geo-thermal, we need to move off fossil fuel and nukes over to AE.
First off, it never should have been built in Nevada. The best site was west Texas. But it was a decision that Poppa Bush made, hence the reason why NV was chosen.
Second, there is loads of energy in nuclear 'waste'. We should be burning it up. Right now, we are talking about transporting loads of 'waste' all over the USA. Instead, on all of the sites that are to be retired, we could instead put up a number of new GE IFR reactors. These would then be loaded with a small amount of normal nuke fuel, that is then mixed with on-site waste. Then in the future, nothing but on-site 'waste' fuel would be added. So, would there be waste from this? Absolutely. But NONE of it would be useful for a regular bomb (but it would work for a dirty bomb). In addition, the worst of it would be done within 200 years, rather than 20,000 years.
Note the difference with this approach. Basically, you have a site that has active cooling, transmission lines, generators, etc. and some old reactors. You put up enough GE reactor to replace one or more of the old ones, start it, and then start the destruction of one or more of the old reactors. Basically, you keep the site going to provide power. At the same time, we put up a NEW reactor that is based on a NEW design with physics behind it that prevents melt downs.
We need a number of new reactors. In particular, we need the micro to medium size reactors that can be built in a factory. In addition, we need GE's IFR (to burn up nuke 'waste'), as well as thorium reactors.
The problem is that far too many US companies want to sell into China so they are willing to give away everything just to make a few quick bucks.
No. It is not the spacex fanboys that are the problems. The same ones that want to kill NASA would not care if it was SpaceX, OSC, or even Russia. They simply want NASA dead. There are many that support BOTH SpaceX AND NASA. I do (disclaimer: I have worked for NASA and have a clue of how useful they are).
The ones to blame are those that either want to kill all gov, or simply want NASA dead.
First off, Canada will simply build a pipeline to the west or the east. Not a problem for them. IOW, this WILL be coming.
.5B each year. Basically, that will spend 10B over 6 years. The money for it should come from a tax on the pipeline.
Instead, what O SHOULD be doing, is pushing as modified NAT GAS act, along with more money for electric cars and bio-energy.
The NAT GAS act should be modified to quickly get commercial vehicles as well NG refueling moving as quickly as possible. Instead of 1B a year for 5 years, it should start out at 3B, and decrease
Likewise, there should be an increase in spending on bio-energy, in particular, for Joules Energy and other Algae based systems.
Also, there are means to convert coal into Methane. One of them is Great Point Energy which just got 1B from China. But there are others.
Finally, a bigger push to instead electric chargers makes sense.
Now, why do this? Because keystone is NOT about bringing oil/gasoline to America. It is about exporting it mostly to China. Great. China will take this from someplace. Since China uses tariffs (both exports and imports) to fund most of its development, it is time to make use of these products destined for China to also make the west move to a cleaner solution.
And yet, until Switch, nobody had.
Stay incandescent or halogen. CFLs/LEDs have power converters that need to have lower temps.
most LEDs last longer than CFLs. Unless you buy rather expensive CFLs, they will last ~1 years if they are left on 24x7. Sadly, the cheap LEDs cost about $4-5 and last 1-2 years. To be fair, if you are going to buy cheap junk, then at this time, skip all of the LED and stick with CFLs.
Now, if you are looking to save money over a 10-30 year period, then go with a DECENT LED bulb. Few of the bulbs that you buy are decent. Buy a phillips (made with phillips LEDs), or better yet, buy a switch (which has solved the heat issue).
LG and GE are pure junk. They are made with poor quality material and do not put out the lumens that they claim. GE actually does not make bulbs. They are paid for their labels. A number of chinese manufacturers are producing these and paying x amount of money to GE to put their label on them. In fact, you can get 2 boxes of bulbs with same outer package and the bulbs are PHYSICALLY different.
All LED bulbs have DC converters. My guess is that you bought some GE or Chinese junk. It simply will not last long. Do not waste your money on that. The Phillips and even better the Switch Light Bulbs, are the way to go.
The problem with LEDS (and CFLs) is not the bulbs, but the power converters inside. In every case, they produce a load of heat. One approach for the bigger bulbs is to add in a fan. Of course, many of those are being built by cheap low quality chinese manufacturers. A 10-30 year bulb will last only 1-2 years. IOW, they are PURE JUNK. This ESP. includes the GE bulbs (that are not even produced by GE, but simply re-labeled chinese junk). The phillips at least use Phillips LEDs which are of better quality, but not as good as say Cree.
So, what is the RIGHT approach for this?
Switch light bulb immerses the power in oil and then allows passive cooling. They have multiple patents on this. And will shortly have a 100 w bulb on the market. They are in final testing of it. These use the same Philips LEDs, but the passive cooling will allow this to actually last what is claimed. And all for under $30.