Safety is of course a government responsibility, paid for by the taxes that the EDF pays the government.
Security is also a government responsibility, also paid for by the taxes that the EDF pays the government.
Where's the subsidy?
Are those extra taxes that industries that don't require extra safety and security don't need? Otherwise, this is your subsidy right there.
Or do you mean that if I decide to do something extremely dangerous, it's the government's job to bear the costs of making it safe? Should the government pay for regular checkups for my car to see if it's still safe enough for the road? Should the government pay for my airbags?
Public safety and security are government responsibilities -- up to a degree. But if an industry requires extra safety features, it's only fair to have the industry bear the costs. Especially if competing technologies don't have those added risks.
They may not receive a bag of cash from the government, but if the government bears part of the costs of operation, that's still an indirect subsidy.
Don't forget operating cost. Including handling and storage of nuclear waste. Nuclear power plants have higher operating costs than other plants. Solar plants have lower costs.
I missed one detail from your post: nanoscale guidance and maneuvering systems. That'd probably work. For accuracy, that is. How you get nanoscale guidance and maneuvering systems to work is a different problem that you'll still need to solve.
The reason for rocks is two fold : light and particle beams are subject to an inverse square law with distance. The spot size of the light or particle beam over a distance of light-years will quickly rise to the point that nearly all of the energy being beamed to your spaceship is wasted.
So how are you going to shoot rocks with greater accuracy than a particle beam? As far as I understand, a sufficiently long particle accellerator can be as accurate as you need it to be. And charged particles have the advantage that a mag sail can easily be very large. Which brings me to another question: how are you going to catch that beam of rock?
I'm suddenly reminded of the Casini. There was a bit of worry surrounding it because it carried several kilograms (32 I think?) of Plutonium, which is quite a lot more dangerous than Uranium if it burns up in the atmosphere.
Unless you keep the actual acceleration down the problem would be the fact that anything above 15 - 20 gravities and all of your passengers will pass out, and anything above say 40 - 50 and you'll turn them all into paste. Of course,if the trip is long enough, any sort of constant acceleration, even if is just a few gravities would be much faster than a single acceleration stage followed by coasting and an equally short deceleration.
A few gravities? Ion engines work with tiny fractions of a g. The long trip + continuous accelleration is the entire point of the things.
Any solution where you don't have to bring your reaction mass with you, fixes the problem. I'd rather use light or charged particles than rocks, though.
Mass is an invariant, it doesn't increase with speed. "Relativistic mass" isn't really helpful, as a concept, as it leads to confusion - if what you said was true, the usable energy in the fuel would be frame-of-reference dependent, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Didn't Einstein write something interesting about this?
Hydro has a cap: you can get only so much in a country.
For some countries, it's a pretty high cap, though.
If you choose solar and wind, you'll have to choose also between fossil and nuclear, for backup when the wind does not blow during the night... or you might have a tough talk with those evil corporations that hide the technology for super-capacitors:-P.
No need for super capacitors. There's plenty of ways to store energy.
Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself. Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Note that the fuel cost for nuclear is a small part of the cost. Huge increases in fuel cost wouldn't be as bad as other power sources.
Why will we have to get our power from wind and solar in the long run? There's no reason why nuclear fission couldn't provide all the worlds power for the next 100 years.
All the world's power for 100 years? Do we have that much uranium? From what I understand, we don't.
I can't find a direct quote from a reliable report, but a quick google gives me lots of quotes, claims and the occasional report that energy subsidies are really fuzzy and hidden, but also that nowhere in the world has ever been any nuclear energy been produced without some sort of government support. If it's not the construction and operation of the plant itself that's subsidized, it's various secondary costs (storing the waste, safety and security, etc) that's covered by the government.
I did find a claim where EDF promised to build 4 nuclear plants in the UK without any taxpayer money (which sounded like it's unusual) and another article where they said they'd never build nuclear plants in the UK unless they'd be subsidized.
It sounds completely backwards to me that student loans have worse conditions than regular loans. I'm paying 3% over my loan. I could refinance if I wanted, but obviously nobody can offer me anything close to that rate. I'm also not in a hurry to pay it back (faster than the (low) required yearly amount anyway). Investing gives me far better returns.
But if the only two possible choices for a leader were Stalin or Hitler, and Stalin was better than Hitler then he would be the best choice. Nuclear or fossil are the only two choices for power, we must choose whichever is better.
Firstly, coal isn't the only fossil fuel. Natural gas is quite a bit cleaner and more efficient. But even fossil in general and nuclear aren't our only two options. We can get a lot of power from wind and solar. And in the long run, we'll have to.
Well, unless fusion takes off, of course, but so far, it hasn't been able to fulfill its promise. And in the mean time, we've got that huge fusion plant in the sky that we're ignoring completely.
It's the same in Europe. Ages ago I heard that Netherland imported nuclear-generated electricity from France, and it was subsidized by both governments in order to be competitive.
Admittedly, durable energy gets a tax break so it's also subsidized, but at least it lacks the polution problems of fossil and fission. And the end result of those tax breaks is that green energy is actually slightly cheaper than fossil-generated electricity.
I don't understand the inkjet thing, myself - I have a laser I paid about $800 for in 2002 and I've replaced the toner once (I think). I can replace it with another (same model) for $150 and expect it to last a decade - why buy an inkjet?
Well, in 2002, an inkjet cost less than $80. Of course with all the ink cardridges since then, you'd still end up with about $800, but it seemed very cheap back then.
Nowadays you've got laserprinters for $100, so I think inkjets are obsolete now.
Having said that, movie theatres supposedly make next to nothing on ticket sales. That money goes to the owners of the film. Where the theatres make money is selling 5 cents worth of popcorn for $4.50 and 2 cents worth of soda-pop for $5.00.
It's similar to ink jet printers sold at a loss and cartridges for ridiculous prices. Or game consoles at a loss and $70 per game to make up for that. It's a retarded business model, and I wouldn't mind if it was made illegal. In any case, I never buy food or drink at a movie theatre.
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Safety is of course a government responsibility, paid for by the taxes that the EDF pays the government.
Security is also a government responsibility, also paid for by the taxes that the EDF pays the government.
Where's the subsidy?
Are those extra taxes that industries that don't require extra safety and security don't need? Otherwise, this is your subsidy right there.
Or do you mean that if I decide to do something extremely dangerous, it's the government's job to bear the costs of making it safe? Should the government pay for regular checkups for my car to see if it's still safe enough for the road? Should the government pay for my airbags?
Public safety and security are government responsibilities -- up to a degree. But if an industry requires extra safety features, it's only fair to have the industry bear the costs. Especially if competing technologies don't have those added risks.
They may not receive a bag of cash from the government, but if the government bears part of the costs of operation, that's still an indirect subsidy.
Don't forget operating cost. Including handling and storage of nuclear waste. Nuclear power plants have higher operating costs than other plants. Solar plants have lower costs.
I missed one detail from your post: nanoscale guidance and maneuvering systems. That'd probably work. For accuracy, that is. How you get nanoscale guidance and maneuvering systems to work is a different problem that you'll still need to solve.
You'd still have to get your charged particles from somewhere. That means bringing reaction mass with you.
No it doesn't. You take a big asteroid, build a big accellerator from one end to the other, and then shoot the asteroid's mass at the ship.
The reason for rocks is two fold : light and particle beams are subject to an inverse square law with distance. The spot size of the light or particle beam over a distance of light-years will quickly rise to the point that nearly all of the energy being beamed to your spaceship is wasted.
So how are you going to shoot rocks with greater accuracy than a particle beam? As far as I understand, a sufficiently long particle accellerator can be as accurate as you need it to be. And charged particles have the advantage that a mag sail can easily be very large. Which brings me to another question: how are you going to catch that beam of rock?
I'm suddenly reminded of the Casini. There was a bit of worry surrounding it because it carried several kilograms (32 I think?) of Plutonium, which is quite a lot more dangerous than Uranium if it burns up in the atmosphere.
Unless you keep the actual acceleration down the problem would be the fact that anything above 15 - 20 gravities and all of your passengers will pass out, and anything above say 40 - 50 and you'll turn them all into paste. Of course,if the trip is long enough, any sort of constant acceleration, even if is just a few gravities would be much faster than a single acceleration stage followed by coasting and an equally short deceleration.
A few gravities? Ion engines work with tiny fractions of a g. The long trip + continuous accelleration is the entire point of the things.
Any solution where you don't have to bring your reaction mass with you, fixes the problem. I'd rather use light or charged particles than rocks, though.
(I'm not a rocket scientist, though.)
Mass is an invariant, it doesn't increase with speed. "Relativistic mass" isn't really helpful, as a concept, as it leads to confusion - if what you said was true, the usable energy in the fuel would be frame-of-reference dependent, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Didn't Einstein write something interesting about this?
Easily? You are joking, right? I don't think beaming anything to orbital target millions miles away (a rocket on it's way to Mars) is easy
All the more reason to develop this technology.
Wind and solar are more expensive than nuclear, even if the fuel increased 100x in cost.
Not really. Wind and solar use no fuel, and their cost can only go down from here.
Hydro has a cap: you can get only so much in a country.
For some countries, it's a pretty high cap, though.
If you choose solar and wind, you'll have to choose also between fossil and nuclear, for backup when the wind does not blow during the night ... or you might have a tough talk with those evil corporations that hide the technology for super-capacitors :-P .
No need for super capacitors. There's plenty of ways to store energy.
Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself. Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Note that the fuel cost for nuclear is a small part of the cost. Huge increases in fuel cost wouldn't be as bad as other power sources.
Worse than wind and solar, though.
This silly meme of nuclear energy as the only saviour of the human race needs to die. There are plenty of alternatives.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that Greenpeace fights quite a bit harder against fossil fuels than Exxon.
Except that we don't have to choose between Stalin, Hitler, Ford, and Chevvy. We do have to choose between fossil fuels and nuclear for base power.
No, we have to choose between fossil, nuclear, solar, wind and hydro.
Why will we have to get our power from wind and solar in the long run? There's no reason why nuclear fission couldn't provide all the worlds power for the next 100 years.
All the world's power for 100 years? Do we have that much uranium? From what I understand, we don't.
I can't find a direct quote from a reliable report, but a quick google gives me lots of quotes, claims and the occasional report that energy subsidies are really fuzzy and hidden, but also that nowhere in the world has ever been any nuclear energy been produced without some sort of government support. If it's not the construction and operation of the plant itself that's subsidized, it's various secondary costs (storing the waste, safety and security, etc) that's covered by the government.
I did find a claim where EDF promised to build 4 nuclear plants in the UK without any taxpayer money (which sounded like it's unusual) and another article where they said they'd never build nuclear plants in the UK unless they'd be subsidized.
It sounds completely backwards to me that student loans have worse conditions than regular loans. I'm paying 3% over my loan. I could refinance if I wanted, but obviously nobody can offer me anything close to that rate. I'm also not in a hurry to pay it back (faster than the (low) required yearly amount anyway). Investing gives me far better returns.
But if the only two possible choices for a leader were Stalin or Hitler, and Stalin was better than Hitler then he would be the best choice. Nuclear or fossil are the only two choices for power, we must choose whichever is better.
Firstly, coal isn't the only fossil fuel. Natural gas is quite a bit cleaner and more efficient. But even fossil in general and nuclear aren't our only two options. We can get a lot of power from wind and solar. And in the long run, we'll have to.
Well, unless fusion takes off, of course, but so far, it hasn't been able to fulfill its promise. And in the mean time, we've got that huge fusion plant in the sky that we're ignoring completely.
It's the same in Europe. Ages ago I heard that Netherland imported nuclear-generated electricity from France, and it was subsidized by both governments in order to be competitive.
Admittedly, durable energy gets a tax break so it's also subsidized, but at least it lacks the polution problems of fossil and fission. And the end result of those tax breaks is that green energy is actually slightly cheaper than fossil-generated electricity.
Also I think it is good to point out that Nuclear power is much much safer for the populace than coal power is.
If Stalin is a better person than Hitler, that doesn't make him a good guy.
(Sorry, couldn't think of a car analogy.)
I'm really not as afraid of, I dunno, Exxon as compared to "Green""Peace" with respects to global warming.
Are you suggesting that Greenpeace is in favour of fossil fuels while Exxon is against it?
I don't understand the inkjet thing, myself - I have a laser I paid about $800 for in 2002 and I've replaced the toner once (I think). I can replace it with another (same model) for $150 and expect it to last a decade - why buy an inkjet?
Well, in 2002, an inkjet cost less than $80. Of course with all the ink cardridges since then, you'd still end up with about $800, but it seemed very cheap back then.
Nowadays you've got laserprinters for $100, so I think inkjets are obsolete now.
Lack of smelly foodstuffs would also add to the quality of the experience, I agree.
Having said that, movie theatres supposedly make next to nothing on ticket sales. That money goes to the owners of the film. Where the theatres make money is selling 5 cents worth of popcorn for $4.50 and 2 cents worth of soda-pop for $5.00.
It's similar to ink jet printers sold at a loss and cartridges for ridiculous prices. Or game consoles at a loss and $70 per game to make up for that. It's a retarded business model, and I wouldn't mind if it was made illegal. In any case, I never buy food or drink at a movie theatre.