Well, that will take my local robotic McDonald's down to only two employees- one manager and one stockboy/server.
Now all they need to do is automate the freezer-to-kitchen-robot connection and the kitchen-robot-to-customer connection, and they'll be able to operate it with only a manager.....
A damn long time at $199/chip. My question is, if you're using this for an embedded solution, why wouldn't you just go down to Fry's and pick up an x86 archetecture AMD motherboard instead? With memory, it will cost you less.
Get a laptop and an ATIWonder PCMCIA card and a GPS unit. Hook camera and video recorder to card. Use GPS Software and camera software in 2 windows, overlaying the GPS software window so that you get the camera output with the GPS output beneath/beside it. Videotape screen output.
What is so hard about this that there are only 16 replies?
Had this discussion earlier. The mean temperature of the waste stored at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is 80 Degrees Centigrade- year around. Doesn't matter how much of it you have either. And since that energy is largely generated by isotopes with long half lives- shielding a few tens of CCs at the end of a thermocouple would generate energy from that thermocouple for a VERY long time, certainly hundreds if not thousands of years.
No offense taken- it's a general problem in the makeup of corporations and what I see in the right wing in particular- not a single industry problem.
I said neoconservatives and I meant it- Republicans in general are NOT profiteers, but neoconservatives ARE. As time goes on I believe there will be a split in the Republican Party- and since those with the most campaign contributions have a tendency to win elections, the ethical side of conservativism will lose.
Stockholders in the end will vote with their wallets, not their ethics- the very nature of SEC regulations encourages corporations to make whatever decisions necessary to have a good three month bottom line. Same thing with consumers. Our current system rewards those with bad ethics- and sell off the unprofitable companies who allow ethics to get in the way of business. It's happening throughout the markets, and oil will go the way of everything else- to maximum profit and minimum ethics.
The oil industry has a good relationship with the state, and any negligence would almost certainly be dealt with harshly.
For now, yes. The worry of the neoconservatives taking control of the Judiciary, the Executive Branch and the legeslature though is that since profit is the holy grail of motives for the neoconservatives, such negligence would NOT necessarily be dealt with as harshly in the future- and in fact, since negligence is more profitable than cleanups, what is profitable will eventually win out over what is right. That's the danger of corporatism. The corporation is not necessarily as ethical as the executives running it- it's only as ethical as the stockholders and government force it to be. Beyond that, corporations have only ONE ethic- profit. What is the most profitable is what will be done eventually- even if it's only profitable in the short run.
It's been a while since my high school physics course, but I understood that the whole concept of "Half-life" means that radioactive material simply becomes less radioactive over time, creating a curve that slowly approaches "non-radioactive", rather than a linear progression from Full to Empty. Only the left hand "highly radioactive" side of the curve is useful for power production, but the much, much longer "decreasingly radioactive" period is still hazardous to humans. It wouldn't break down to stable isotopes for many thousands of years.
Depends on the isotopes- some of them have incredibly short half lives. But you only need high radioactivity for power production if you're doing high power production like boiling water to create steam to spin a turbine. By comparison- low power RTGs which may result in only a few watts of power are of an entirely different sort of reaction- the standard decay does just fine for low power production even if you only get a 10% conversion. By the time NO usefull energy is coming out of the reaction (not very little, but none) the radiation has died down so much that the standard solar radiation is stronger- and thus the thermocouple no longer works because there is no temperature differential to take advantage of. At that point, it's also no longer hazardous to humans. Basically, that's the whole idea behind a low-power RTG; take advantage of the energy density of the long term low-radioactivity to generate power for an incredibly long ammount of time (the 30-40 year mark is for Strontium-90; Plutonium could take 1600 years even to see a slight decrease in power, and many thousands of years after that would still be generating power. Iodide-75 (If I remember the isotope number correctly) has a 6 day half life and a nuclear battery built out of it would be dead within a few years.)
Exactly- this rainforest lies between my house and the ocean, 60 miles away, in the Coastal Range. The Cascade Range/Siskyous also has significant rain forest coverage still. Both, however, are nonvirgin- largely 80-year-old replants. Very LITTLE virgin old growth remains (of the 2000 year old 6-meter diameter variety). And we've found that we've now got enough human settlement that without some very long range planning and removal of excess material from the region, devestating fires happen quite regularly.
The problem, as I see it, isn't the workers- it's the corporation over them. The individual workers would certainly be very carefull about spills and the like- but unless forced by law, the coporate profit takers thousands of miles away from the actual well heads won't be as protective of surrounding areas. And just this week we had the reminder of just how incredibly heartless the profit motive can be- with the aniversary of the Bhopal Disaster in India which has NOT been cleaned up and probably won't be at this point (at least Dow Chemical, who bought the plant in a merger, has no plans for cleaning up the site). If an accident happens, and with the entire idea of the Superfund defunded- who will do the clean up exactly?
I live in Oregon- home of the Pacific Northwest rainforest. You should come visit sometime- I guarantee that Oregon's environmental laws won't allow it to be truly extinct anytime soon (mainly because of that replant-three-for-every-tree-taken law). The rainforest stretches from Northern California to British Columbia- and yes, environmental laws are the main obstacle to large scale logging operations here.
Before you write off people as kooks on a single statement, you should make sure that statement is incorrect. Just because a forest isn't a tropical jungle doesn't mean it can't fit the definition of being a rainforest (which is just a forest thick enough so that the leaves of trees, or in the case of the Oregon Rainforest, the pine needles, trap enough water to drip pretty much continously- and block out view of the sky).
I was under the impression it was also used because it generated a higher power output, am I incorrect there?
Not entirely incorrect- but for household use you won't need a particularily HIGH power output.
If so, then this sounds like something worth researching, however it's not in the same vein as "nuclear power" that we all currently know. Which is good!
Which is the REAL point I was trying to get to- not all nuclear power is equal.
First off, RTGs don't address the radiation issue. While Pu238 is an alpha emitter, it creates just as nasty of a mix of daughter isotopes as controlled fission reactions. Using a "thermocouple" means that you're power efficiency will be 10% with current tech, 20% with upcoming tech - pretty pathetic. You won't be left with "a lump of lead" - you're left with a radioactive-as-heck lump of lead, residual plutonium, and tons of nasty high level waste daughter products. The size of a soup can? Then you're talking about generation of a few watts only (RTGs have very low power density, just extreme energy density), so what you're discussing would only make sense if you were handing out to individual people RTGs. If that's not proliferation, than proliferation has no meaning.
Enough shielding takes care of the radioactivity- by the time it stops generating electricity, the radioactivity has already broken everything down into stable isotopes. As for proliferation- I consider that to be largely the unreasonable expectation of power politics for their power to not cause trouble. Far better than that would be to stop playing power politics.
No, it can't melt down. But in every other respect, its a far worse situation, and uneconomical at bat. AND, the plutonium itself has to be generated in fission reactors to begin with, because you get it from neutron bombardment of U-238. So, in short, this is a bloody crazy idea.
Actually- nuclear batteries can work just as well with U-238 BEFORE bombardment. All you need is an isotope that decays slowly and provides a temperature differential to the surrounding environment. Period. That's all that is required.
And nuclear batteries are even safer- not enough material to cause meltdown at all (or even anything close to critical mass), and all radiation is contained behind a 4" lead shield. Thermocouple generates electricity merely from the differential in temperature- no moving parts at all.
Plus, we can theoretically use existing nuclear waste for the fissible material.
strontium-90 isn't the only heat producing isotope- any isotope will do as long as it is fissible. Nasa just uses strontium-90 for it's extremely predictable lifespan and even decay curve. No need to be that picky for household power. Heck- take it from the current nuclear waste from the big reactors- most of that stuff will stay at 80C for decades with no further refinement at all. Or the naturally occuring uranium outcropings that produce radon gas in some older homes. What it is won't matter to the humans around it once it is sealed behind 4" of lead on all sides.
In Oregon, the fishing industry is indeed up in arms about dams- what I don't understand is why we don't use the solution of sustainable fish hatcheries (in which we pay near-to-the-ocean riverfront owners to create pebble-bed fish hatchery pools with temperature controled water, setting asside the land forever for new salmon and sturgeon spawning)?
Cool- we'll get to raise citrus fruit in Oregon, have even milder winters- and stronger winds to boot as the temperature differential between the equator and the arctic gets greater, which will allow us to generate even more energy.
Wind energy isn't necessarily scalable: there's a finite amount of land onto which you can erect windmills, and the planet ain't makin' more of it until the Mid-Atlantic Ridge breaks the surface.
What, exactly, is there stopping us from planting windmills on the Mid-Atlantic ridge right now? Just how far down is it?
Not entirely true that it has NO effect; geothermal is used quite widely in Klamath Falls, OR (high in the Cascades in a geologically active area) and it was blamed for causing the Quake of 1992 (and subsequent aftershocks).
Nothing like industrial machinery stretching across hill and dale to make you want to get out an enjoy mother nature.
Have you ever SEEN a modern wind farm? No ugly industrial machinery in sight- just big, beautiful kinetic sculptures that look like old-fashioned airplane tripellars (what's the real word I'm looking for for a three-bladed propeller?). I wouldn't mind having one in my back yard, personally.
Gee, maybe because a broken solar panel doesn't decimate the land for hundreds of miles and render it uninhabitable for hundreds of years?
Neither does a low-radioactivity nuclear battery.
Maybe because when the sun goes down, you don't have a pile of lethal garbage that can kill you for thousands of years left over?
With a NASA style thermocouple battery, when the power runs out (after 20-30 years, depending on half-life of the element involved) the only thing left over is a lump of lead the size of a soup can- which can then be recycled into a new nuclear battery. So this argument simply doesn't apply to all forms of nuclear power.
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Well, that will take my local robotic McDonald's down to only two employees- one manager and one stockboy/server.
Now all they need to do is automate the freezer-to-kitchen-robot connection and the kitchen-robot-to-customer connection, and they'll be able to operate it with only a manager.....
A damn long time at $199/chip. My question is, if you're using this for an embedded solution, why wouldn't you just go down to Fry's and pick up an x86 archetecture AMD motherboard instead? With memory, it will cost you less.
Under adultery- possibly, though when the facts came out, no worse than Father Abraham himself....
Sex != Treason and theivery. Blowjobs ain't in the 10 commandments.
Even if he was of the same race.....it's amazing what a partisan Black Republican will do to make sure his white guy wins.
Get a laptop and an ATIWonder PCMCIA card and a GPS unit. Hook camera and video recorder to card. Use GPS Software and camera software in 2 windows, overlaying the GPS software window so that you get the camera output with the GPS output beneath/beside it. Videotape screen output.
What is so hard about this that there are only 16 replies?
Had this discussion earlier. The mean temperature of the waste stored at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is 80 Degrees Centigrade- year around. Doesn't matter how much of it you have either. And since that energy is largely generated by isotopes with long half lives- shielding a few tens of CCs at the end of a thermocouple would generate energy from that thermocouple for a VERY long time, certainly hundreds if not thousands of years.
No offense taken- it's a general problem in the makeup of corporations and what I see in the right wing in particular- not a single industry problem.
I said neoconservatives and I meant it- Republicans in general are NOT profiteers, but neoconservatives ARE. As time goes on I believe there will be a split in the Republican Party- and since those with the most campaign contributions have a tendency to win elections, the ethical side of conservativism will lose.
Stockholders in the end will vote with their wallets, not their ethics- the very nature of SEC regulations encourages corporations to make whatever decisions necessary to have a good three month bottom line. Same thing with consumers. Our current system rewards those with bad ethics- and sell off the unprofitable companies who allow ethics to get in the way of business. It's happening throughout the markets, and oil will go the way of everything else- to maximum profit and minimum ethics.
The oil industry has a good relationship with the state, and any negligence would almost certainly be dealt with harshly.
For now, yes. The worry of the neoconservatives taking control of the Judiciary, the Executive Branch and the legeslature though is that since profit is the holy grail of motives for the neoconservatives, such negligence would NOT necessarily be dealt with as harshly in the future- and in fact, since negligence is more profitable than cleanups, what is profitable will eventually win out over what is right. That's the danger of corporatism. The corporation is not necessarily as ethical as the executives running it- it's only as ethical as the stockholders and government force it to be. Beyond that, corporations have only ONE ethic- profit. What is the most profitable is what will be done eventually- even if it's only profitable in the short run.
It's been a while since my high school physics course, but I understood that the whole concept of "Half-life" means that radioactive material simply becomes less radioactive over time, creating a curve that slowly approaches "non-radioactive", rather than a linear progression from Full to Empty. Only the left hand "highly radioactive" side of the curve is useful for power production, but the much, much longer "decreasingly radioactive" period is still hazardous to humans. It wouldn't break down to stable isotopes for many thousands of years.
Depends on the isotopes- some of them have incredibly short half lives. But you only need high radioactivity for power production if you're doing high power production like boiling water to create steam to spin a turbine. By comparison- low power RTGs which may result in only a few watts of power are of an entirely different sort of reaction- the standard decay does just fine for low power production even if you only get a 10% conversion. By the time NO usefull energy is coming out of the reaction (not very little, but none) the radiation has died down so much that the standard solar radiation is stronger- and thus the thermocouple no longer works because there is no temperature differential to take advantage of. At that point, it's also no longer hazardous to humans. Basically, that's the whole idea behind a low-power RTG; take advantage of the energy density of the long term low-radioactivity to generate power for an incredibly long ammount of time (the 30-40 year mark is for Strontium-90; Plutonium could take 1600 years even to see a slight decrease in power, and many thousands of years after that would still be generating power. Iodide-75 (If I remember the isotope number correctly) has a 6 day half life and a nuclear battery built out of it would be dead within a few years.)
It's about 3/4ths of a year's wages at the Ohio Arts Etch-a-Sketch factory....
Exactly- this rainforest lies between my house and the ocean, 60 miles away, in the Coastal Range. The Cascade Range/Siskyous also has significant rain forest coverage still. Both, however, are nonvirgin- largely 80-year-old replants. Very LITTLE virgin old growth remains (of the 2000 year old 6-meter diameter variety). And we've found that we've now got enough human settlement that without some very long range planning and removal of excess material from the region, devestating fires happen quite regularly.
The problem, as I see it, isn't the workers- it's the corporation over them. The individual workers would certainly be very carefull about spills and the like- but unless forced by law, the coporate profit takers thousands of miles away from the actual well heads won't be as protective of surrounding areas. And just this week we had the reminder of just how incredibly heartless the profit motive can be- with the aniversary of the Bhopal Disaster in India which has NOT been cleaned up and probably won't be at this point (at least Dow Chemical, who bought the plant in a merger, has no plans for cleaning up the site). If an accident happens, and with the entire idea of the Superfund defunded- who will do the clean up exactly?
I live in Oregon- home of the Pacific Northwest rainforest. You should come visit sometime- I guarantee that Oregon's environmental laws won't allow it to be truly extinct anytime soon (mainly because of that replant-three-for-every-tree-taken law). The rainforest stretches from Northern California to British Columbia- and yes, environmental laws are the main obstacle to large scale logging operations here.
Before you write off people as kooks on a single statement, you should make sure that statement is incorrect. Just because a forest isn't a tropical jungle doesn't mean it can't fit the definition of being a rainforest (which is just a forest thick enough so that the leaves of trees, or in the case of the Oregon Rainforest, the pine needles, trap enough water to drip pretty much continously- and block out view of the sky).
I was under the impression it was also used because it generated a higher power output, am I incorrect there?
Not entirely incorrect- but for household use you won't need a particularily HIGH power output.
If so, then this sounds like something worth researching, however it's not in the same vein as "nuclear power" that we all currently know. Which is good!
Which is the REAL point I was trying to get to- not all nuclear power is equal.
First off, RTGs don't address the radiation issue. While Pu238 is an alpha emitter, it creates just as nasty of a mix of daughter isotopes as controlled fission reactions. Using a "thermocouple" means that you're power efficiency will be 10% with current tech, 20% with upcoming tech - pretty pathetic. You won't be left with "a lump of lead" - you're left with a radioactive-as-heck lump of lead, residual plutonium, and tons of nasty high level waste daughter products. The size of a soup can? Then you're talking about generation of a few watts only (RTGs have very low power density, just extreme energy density), so what you're discussing would only make sense if you were handing out to individual people RTGs. If that's not proliferation, than proliferation has no meaning.
Enough shielding takes care of the radioactivity- by the time it stops generating electricity, the radioactivity has already broken everything down into stable isotopes. As for proliferation- I consider that to be largely the unreasonable expectation of power politics for their power to not cause trouble. Far better than that would be to stop playing power politics.
No, it can't melt down. But in every other respect, its a far worse situation, and uneconomical at bat. AND, the plutonium itself has to be generated in fission reactors to begin with, because you get it from neutron bombardment of U-238. So, in short, this is a bloody crazy idea.
Actually- nuclear batteries can work just as well with U-238 BEFORE bombardment. All you need is an isotope that decays slowly and provides a temperature differential to the surrounding environment. Period. That's all that is required.
And nuclear batteries are even safer- not enough material to cause meltdown at all (or even anything close to critical mass), and all radiation is contained behind a 4" lead shield. Thermocouple generates electricity merely from the differential in temperature- no moving parts at all.
Plus, we can theoretically use existing nuclear waste for the fissible material.
Having trouble finding exact bills- but got loads of press about it in the last few days:
o ntentid=2727 e cord.cfm p hp 9 537 y .jsp?story=589884 s h_sets_out_p.html
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?c
http://www.wilderness.org/Library/Documents/BushR
http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/mt_archives/000223.
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-9
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120604G.shtml
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/stor
http://bobwhitson.typepad.com/howlings/2004/12/bu
strontium-90 isn't the only heat producing isotope- any isotope will do as long as it is fissible. Nasa just uses strontium-90 for it's extremely predictable lifespan and even decay curve. No need to be that picky for household power. Heck- take it from the current nuclear waste from the big reactors- most of that stuff will stay at 80C for decades with no further refinement at all. Or the naturally occuring uranium outcropings that produce radon gas in some older homes. What it is won't matter to the humans around it once it is sealed behind 4" of lead on all sides.
In Oregon, the fishing industry is indeed up in arms about dams- what I don't understand is why we don't use the solution of sustainable fish hatcheries (in which we pay near-to-the-ocean riverfront owners to create pebble-bed fish hatchery pools with temperature controled water, setting asside the land forever for new salmon and sturgeon spawning)?
Cool- we'll get to raise citrus fruit in Oregon, have even milder winters- and stronger winds to boot as the temperature differential between the equator and the arctic gets greater, which will allow us to generate even more energy.
I'm sorry- did you mean there was a down side?
Wind energy isn't necessarily scalable: there's a finite amount of land onto which you can erect windmills, and the planet ain't makin' more of it until the Mid-Atlantic Ridge breaks the surface.
What, exactly, is there stopping us from planting windmills on the Mid-Atlantic ridge right now? Just how far down is it?
Not entirely true that it has NO effect; geothermal is used quite widely in Klamath Falls, OR (high in the Cascades in a geologically active area) and it was blamed for causing the Quake of 1992 (and subsequent aftershocks).
Nothing like industrial machinery stretching across hill and dale to make you want to get out an enjoy mother nature.
Have you ever SEEN a modern wind farm? No ugly industrial machinery in sight- just big, beautiful kinetic sculptures that look like old-fashioned airplane tripellars (what's the real word I'm looking for for a three-bladed propeller?). I wouldn't mind having one in my back yard, personally.
Gee, maybe because a broken solar panel doesn't decimate the land for hundreds of miles and render it uninhabitable for hundreds of years?
Neither does a low-radioactivity nuclear battery.
Maybe because when the sun goes down, you don't have a pile of lethal garbage that can kill you for thousands of years left over?
With a NASA style thermocouple battery, when the power runs out (after 20-30 years, depending on half-life of the element involved) the only thing left over is a lump of lead the size of a soup can- which can then be recycled into a new nuclear battery. So this argument simply doesn't apply to all forms of nuclear power.