The "Tiger Moth" was genetically identical. What you are referring to is not evolutionary, it is something called "gene expression," just ask a comparative mammalian phylologist. The neighborhood where I live has mostly gray squirrels. The same squirrels are sometimes all black, sometimes all white. Same animal, and no, the white is not albino. It is just white (I can see their eyes are not red). If you live in a neighborhood with squirrels, you may occasionally spot the rarity. I think the white ones are harder to predate (aka 'hunt') in the winter, so I see a similarity to the Tiger Moth you mentioned earlier. Aside from SUVs and the occasional punk kid, few things hunt squirrels in my neighborhood. Still, if it is a squirrel or a moth, the patterns of coloration are just the same. I've seen this in other animals as well. Go look up gene expression. Wikipedia offers a very complicated and complete explanation, but I boil it down to this:
Gene Expression is like a small function in a big program that usually doesn't get run, but sometimes, if things are just right, it gets run a lot.
Mr. Williams, kindly rethink your statement about silence regarding 60 years of nuclear power. There is no "they." It is not that anyone is silent, it is that you are not reading what is out there.
If anyone wants to know where the #1 source of airborne, man-made radiation is, they need go no further than a lump of coal. Nuclear power plants require employees to wear film strips, much like those we see in cameras. The strips change chemistry and appearance with radiation. Ask a nuke worker how their rad levels are. They know. Oh, and if such a worker ever gets a medical treatment involving radioactive material, be it a barium enema (whee!) or chemotherapy, they would set off all the safety sensors in the facility if they went onsite, and trigger an immediate shutdown (unless you're from Soviet Russia, and you disabled the safety features because you wanted to try an exciting experiment in Chernobyl, which didn't work 4 months ago, because those safety triggers shut you down, but this time, you turned them off!).
Back to the lump of coal. The average coal plant, say 1000 MW, produces 5.2 tons of uranium (6% fissile), and 12.8 tons of thorium. Where does it go? Up into the atmosphere, as soot. Where does it come from? It is a rock. It comes from a dark hole in the ground, maybe W. Virginia. Nuclear power plants are closed systems. They don't combust materials and breathe oxygen. Every once in a while, the control rods need to be replaced, along with some pipes and such. The equivalent nuclear plant to said coal plant produces one standard shipping container full of rad "waste" per year. All reactors designed in N. America and many in Europe and Japan are planned with storage space for the rad waste, on-site.
One thing we could do, is once every 10 years, fill up a small freighter with the rad waste containers of the world's reactors, ship it to the Bikini Atoll, and drop the load 30 feet offshore. The metal will corrode eventually, but before that it will be covered with coral.
You know, I don't care a hoot about carbon dioxide, it has never done me much harm. Ozone is produced en masse by lightning strikes in the troposphere, and nobody can beat the mess made by a single, violent volcanic eruption. I do want to see the end of combustive power systems, because we don't need competition for oxygen. Living where I do, I can vouch for my corner of the planet and say it ain't getting any warmer. I do care about airborne radioactive particulates (aka soot) and rad waste. The coconut trees and oceanic coral have proven their value to society, I think we should reward them with a higher status in our world culture by making them the guardians of rad waste. If a lone coconut should travel thousands of leagues, well, shoot, it's not going to hurt anyone more than a barium enema. At least it isn't in the air.
Why did I put the waste of rad waste in quotes, you wonder? Well, from where do you think the barium and iodine and whatever ungodly stuff is in chemotherapy comes? A hole in the ground? No, that waste serves medical purposes. The rest of it could be put into a different reactor design, in accordance with the reactor families planned out in the 40's and 50's, but nobody has spent the research dollars to go far with them.
Final note: I heard a rumor that the prescription drug "Lunesta" contains a coconut extract. Is that why they have glowing butterflies in their ads?
Yes, because compared to Moses, the average Slashdot user, spiritually is what, now? Moses wrote Genesis, although I don't know if he penned it or had a scribe.
Oh no. The day-age theorist argument again. If you use that concordance properly, you will note that the usage is not "Back in Caesar's day..." for the Hebrew word 'Yom.' It is used hundreds of times throughout the Bible. The only time it appears to mean more than a single cycle of light and dark (or the period of light only) is when it is applied with a modifier. Even Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (are there others?) states that for the word to mean anything other than a single revolution of the earth (or just the sunlight portion), requires a modifier, such as an enumeration, or something meaning several, or a period of days.
So, some day, the gamma rays may wipe out our ozone layer, but is that the Judgement Day, where a third of the world's waters boil up, and a third of the lands are consumed with fire? Holy death star, indeed!
Solar. Boy, I should take a picture. There's a corporate headquarters for Great River Energy with a windmill (they finally started it up) and a whole roof of solar cells. I love it when the solar cells are buried deep in snow. It makes for a great Christmas card. Someone I know in their IT dept. says that two Cisco 7500 routers consume 25% of the peak power of this monstrous windmill. That being said, it definitely has that ol' Sim City look to it.
Thanks, EricFerris. I will make good use of this information. I hope you will consider doing something for your community like prepare an RF "health and safety" brochure. I know that sounds odd, but I've done one a "kid's safety on the internet" as there's lots of people who don't know very much about which what you know quite a lot. Sure, other people may have made such things, but this one would be yours. Maybe a new year's resolution accomplishment is in there somewhere? Take care.
Thank you for your post, it was informative... If you don't mind, I have more questions for you, since you seem accustomed to the subject. If my memory serves me correctly, and sometimes it does not (if you ask my wife, anyway), there's a power equation related to the intensity of a signal. Something like-- if you get closer to the transmitter by a unit of distance, your measure of intensity goes up by the square of the reading at the previous distance. Is that right?
Going back to the SAR units, if I want to reduce my radiation exposure by a factor of 10, to perhaps 0.14 W/kg, how far away should I put my cell phone from the side of my head?
For what it is worth, I do turn my cell phone off when I go to sleep, my wireless router is on a vacation timer and turns off during the family's sleeping hours. I also use a corded/hands-free headset when using my cellphone because of a general "respect" for radiation. It'd be nice to know even rough numbers about this sort of health topic.
Thank you for the articles in wikipedia. It's been a few years since I looked at Project Pluto, nice to see it being maintained as an encyclopedia article. I didn't know about the X-6, though, most interesting. I will look around for the results of the research.
Aha, someone stumbled on my nuclear commercial aircraft idea already! I think zero isn't entirely realistic, there's go-kart racing (much more fun with that lovely smell), NASCAR, and so on, which is really about the Internal Combustion Engine and little else. Chainsaws need to be non-electric, I think. I had an electric, cordless lawnmower, and it did the job, but kept winding down towards the end, and was a very, very heavy lawnmower. The Friendly Machines / iRobot lawnmowers with multiple but smaller blades are a more intelligent approach, but it does, like the cars, all hinge on energy capacity and motor HP.
Okay, back to the nuclear aircraft. Back in the 50's they designed a nasty little weapon called Project Pluto. It was a supersonic, unshielded reactor on wings that would fly around indefinitely at low altitudes over our the homelands of our enemies, bombarding them with harmful radiation. So, my idea of a commercial, nuclear aircraft differs only in appropriate shielding, crash core safety, and probably subsonic speeds. I would also suggest that a good cooling design can make use of the heat in a thrust capacity, which makes the engine that much more efficient. Commercial airplanes are roughly the same size as tactical nuclear ships, so size is not the issue. Mass is. Since they have "glassed" steel, I think they can also "glass" tungsten, and that would make for a very solid shield. One benefit of this idea is that when a carbon-based aircraft crashes, it is engulfed in flames. A nuclear aircraft would not have that same effect. The key is really core safety. The entire airplane needs to be built around a failsafe to detect a collision, explosion from terrorist weapons, and so forth, but perform a core shutdown in seconds.
Alright, to back up what I said, I had a conversation with a technician who was headed to the Iron Range to work on a corn pellet power plant (I think this is agricultural waste) out there. I asked him why, at the tremendous windmill farms in California, there are always a fair number that are not spinning. His answer was that they turn them on and off to maintain voltage, and then went on to talk about voltage, which was a topic I didn't think was tied to power generation but transmission. As to what kind of technician he is, he was working with some sort of visual object language which built logic to control the power plant. It looked like a flowchart, but it was the logic system that controlled the plant.
In your post above, you make some seemingly conflicting statements about Hydroelectric power. The supply is the reservoir, is it not? Perhaps you could rewrite that.
Thanks for speaking up; I would appreciate more depth in an additional response, and perhaps a more informed explanation as to why there's always a good number of windmills at a windmill farm sitting at a standstill. Before talking to this guy, I had always assumed it was a mechanical breakdown.
If you're interested in superconductors, check out the Physics program at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Allen Goldman is the Dean of the dept. and is doing related work. Anyone who has an interest in superconductors should do all they can with their enthusiasm. On the other side of things, if you have an interest in developing video games for the rest of your life, you should develop other skill areas, just in case the market is saturated already.
Nice nickname. You must be into superconductors, and your real name is Barry. When you consider that the larger vehicles are less per-mile efficient than the smaller ones, due largely to the fact that those rolling power systems need to carry both raw fuels and the plants themselves, I would be much inclined to agree that efficiency is greater at immobile facilities, despite the energy loss due to conversion and transmission. Does anyone know how to do a total energy equation on moving a car?
I've never heard of a reactor plan that does not have accommodations for onsite waste storage. Prairie Island 1 and 2 have onsite storage, and the additional cost for more rad waste casks (the plant got re-rated for additional service life) is the responsibility of Excel Energy, according to the state legislation.
The return on investment for Nuclear is a payoff in under 18 months of operation. Yes, there was a total of $1Bn offered up by the US Govt. to spur on the first states brave enough to build a new plant since 1979. It is not necessary, it is a "prize" so to speak. That's why there are approximately 30 licenses in front of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission right now.
Now, if you'd been talking about Solar Power, I'd be more inclined to agree with you with the viability only through subsidies. Nuclear power is as cheap or cheaper than coal, and it always has been. An average 1000MWe nuclear plant produces one contained 53' trailer load of vitrified rad waste per year, and all plants have been designed and approved for on-site storage for the duration of the plant. Over 50 years ago, our innovative American scientists developed a "stepper" reactor family design that actually consumes the rad waste, so in a total system, the 2N+2 radioactive family produces a full cycle with no long-term (more than 30 years) waste. Let's not forget that nuclear waste is also used for medical nuclear therapy and imaging.
Electric Cars + Nuclear power grid = 0 harmful energy emissions, nationally, except for the occasional campfire, gas stoves, and our entire space program.
I'll give anyone who currently agrees with the parent post a "by" on mass ignorance fed by the media and under-educated educators, but only a little bit longer. There's a big discussion tonight on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, during their green week. After tonight, you can't even blame the media for people having this wrong.
There's room for solar power, wind power, and deep-sea hydro power, but pound-for-pound, watt-for-watt, wind and solar cannot be our primary energy grid technology. For one, they depend on the weather, which is unreliable from a regional power grid perspective. For two, if you take a KWh from Solar and stand it next to the KWh from Nuclear, Solar produces a quantity of toxic waste during manufacturing (which is always toxic, forever), and Nuclear produces a quantity of rad waste during operation (enrichment takes over a dozen possible forms, including centrifuge, laser, and aerodynamics). Noting that solar cells eventually break down, but nuclear reactors in our grid today are being re-rated for now up to 60 years of operation, I wonder what the toxic waste to rad waste (and I've established it is reusable) ratio is, given a single KWh of electricity.
Small power generation, like solar and wind, is great from a grid management perspective, because a grid operator can shut down or bring up a solar or wind service more easily than a large power plant. They need to do this to control voltage fluctuations and meet demand.
Okay, I will bite:
How can a solar panel absorb more radiation than is produced, much less 3000x more?
Unless you are talking about a collector with mirrors aimed at it, that statement doesn't make a lot of sense on its own.
Mylar is a pretty good reflector, and apart from the fact that it tears a bit, maybe with some threading through it, you could get maybe 50x the benefit. Divide my big number by 50, and you have 1/10th the cost of a single Space Shuttle launch. Factor back in that I deflated launch per pound costs by 25x, though, and you are still talking multiple years of NASA budget. All for what? A high-maintenance power station, which loses the vast majority of its energy transmitting it down to earth. Compare that to the development cost of a fast neutron reactor the size of a tractor trailer: 10-30x the power, no "launch mishaps," no "solar flare-ups," plus it doesn't blot out the sky. A square mile 75 miles up is visible with plain sight and even a mild case of myopia.
Switch off Coke. I hold out for a decent root beer or ginger ale, which lists cane sugar. Michigan and Wisconsin seem to invest in higher quality soda pop as a market. Must be the beer-drinker sophistication up there having cause and effect.
On-topic, May I say, leave it to the Pentagon to come up with a very expensive, orbital approach to blot out the sun. Has anyone given any thought to some math here? if the current stats are that 11% of the surface of the earth needs to be covered with solar panels to meet current demand (and stave off the evils of global paranoia), what would it mean if even 1% of the solar radiation never hits the surface? I read that about 80 of 180 Peta-watts of energy reaches the surface of the Earth, but more poignantly, what kind of pollution would be generated by the lifting vessels that put untold thousands of square miles of what amounts to delicate circuit boards into space?
Ooh, another math topic: cost. Let's have some fun. Including the beam-down mechanisms, let's say it is 1 pound per 10 square feet. One square mile is 2,7878,400 square feet, right? 5280x5280. That is equivalent to 13,939.2 tons. Let's pretend that NASA actually delivered their promise of $200 / pound on putting something into orbit, instead of the $5000 per pound you can get today in Russia. The price tag of a single square mile of solar panels into orbit is USD $5,575,680,000. Construction of a 1-square mile quantity of terrestrial solar panels (and the land grading, etc.) in Portugal is proposed at about $600 Million, a negligible cost. Even 100x that much is negligible compared to orbital lift costs.
The Pentagon must be ignoring lift costs to conjure this sort of thing. Some little twittery scientist pretending everything is free and they are just at liberty to invent their own reality, then give American taxpayers the bill for their folly.
Do not sully the good name of the Knights Templar with such blasphemy, o heretic! Seriously, though, what are you talking about, or is this random humor? I don't know much other than historical war facts about the Knights Templar.
The article is inconsistent on monkey violence. They mention throwing rocks and leaving poison out. I would say that pegging a monkey square on their noggin with a well-chucked shard of flint constitutes harm, and poison, well, it's not known for being gentle.
I have decided not to travel to countries where monkeys roam free. Furthermore, if I ever meet someone who actually considers monkeys to be gods, I'm going to have a nice, well-rounded discussion on SURVIVAL. The last thing we need is ol' King Louie discovering the secret of the man-flower from Mowgli. When the monkeys set the village ablaze, then, I think the villagers will either start monkey slaughtering, and welcome the threat of a roof over their heads, bars or otherwise.
Does this village in Kenya constitute "rural sprawl?"
Thank you for introducing me to a few concepts in your response. I am glad that charity has had a way of making you generous in response. I wonder what I have left to learn as a programmer myself. This week, I registered a sourceforge project. I don't make my living programming, but I do work in software. I think I'm headed in the right direction, but I always have someone to talk to if I ever feel I've wandered from the path I should follow, and there are some days where I know I've wandered.
Let's all hope you put that college education to good use and did not, for instance, get a job building a slot machine which had a $1 to $10 credits bug!
Seriously, though, with this Richard Pryor -- Superman 2 kind of good fortune, what exactly did you end up doing with your "bank blessings?"
Proof that the Western World is getting decadent: we can't beat stupidity out of our children anymore. It is a simple psychological tool, called the stick. Sometimes the stick works with one kid, and sometimes only the carrot works. Thus the oligarchy of our courts becomes the law of the Western World. Lawyers are not altruistic individuals, therefore not well-suited to making laws. Some laws only exist because someone was greedy enough to sue. Isn't it great? The only thing worse that I can think of is the over-protectiveness attitude in American government, which is why the shootings in Columbine High School violated 19 laws. Like another half-dozen were gonna stop the determined angry youth?
To that point, some kids really, really, need the carrot, and the stick is a bad idea. Just the same, spare the rod, spoil the child. Ignore the child, spoil the community.
Since when did a Communist dictatorship think of its people? Kim Jong Il is up to something... something sinister. I can only imagine what diabolical plot will befall the world when the evil dictator gets ahold of a breeding program for giant rabbits (the likes of which belong in a Teletubbies show), mixes in some radioactive waste, and voila!
Nothing good can come from this. We should prepare ourselves. What if the evil dictator decides to give them a bloodlust and long, gnashing teeth?
Amen to that! Everyone is complaining about game systems availability, but what about the wife, the truly interactive "We?" Note to self (and countless youths): if you want her to kiss you, do the dishes. If you want her to do something more, get off the computer/Wii and spend time talking to her.
Slashdot Mirror
The "Tiger Moth" was genetically identical. What you are referring to is not evolutionary, it is something called "gene expression," just ask a comparative mammalian phylologist. The neighborhood where I live has mostly gray squirrels. The same squirrels are sometimes all black, sometimes all white. Same animal, and no, the white is not albino. It is just white (I can see their eyes are not red). If you live in a neighborhood with squirrels, you may occasionally spot the rarity. I think the white ones are harder to predate (aka 'hunt') in the winter, so I see a similarity to the Tiger Moth you mentioned earlier. Aside from SUVs and the occasional punk kid, few things hunt squirrels in my neighborhood. Still, if it is a squirrel or a moth, the patterns of coloration are just the same. I've seen this in other animals as well. Go look up gene expression. Wikipedia offers a very complicated and complete explanation, but I boil it down to this:
Gene Expression is like a small function in a big program that usually doesn't get run, but sometimes, if things are just right, it gets run a lot.
If anyone wants to know where the #1 source of airborne, man-made radiation is, they need go no further than a lump of coal. Nuclear power plants require employees to wear film strips, much like those we see in cameras. The strips change chemistry and appearance with radiation. Ask a nuke worker how their rad levels are. They know. Oh, and if such a worker ever gets a medical treatment involving radioactive material, be it a barium enema (whee!) or chemotherapy, they would set off all the safety sensors in the facility if they went onsite, and trigger an immediate shutdown (unless you're from Soviet Russia, and you disabled the safety features because you wanted to try an exciting experiment in Chernobyl, which didn't work 4 months ago, because those safety triggers shut you down, but this time, you turned them off!).
Back to the lump of coal. The average coal plant, say 1000 MW, produces 5.2 tons of uranium (6% fissile), and 12.8 tons of thorium. Where does it go? Up into the atmosphere, as soot. Where does it come from? It is a rock. It comes from a dark hole in the ground, maybe W. Virginia. Nuclear power plants are closed systems. They don't combust materials and breathe oxygen. Every once in a while, the control rods need to be replaced, along with some pipes and such. The equivalent nuclear plant to said coal plant produces one standard shipping container full of rad "waste" per year. All reactors designed in N. America and many in Europe and Japan are planned with storage space for the rad waste, on-site.
One thing we could do, is once every 10 years, fill up a small freighter with the rad waste containers of the world's reactors, ship it to the Bikini Atoll, and drop the load 30 feet offshore. The metal will corrode eventually, but before that it will be covered with coral.
You know, I don't care a hoot about carbon dioxide, it has never done me much harm. Ozone is produced en masse by lightning strikes in the troposphere, and nobody can beat the mess made by a single, violent volcanic eruption. I do want to see the end of combustive power systems, because we don't need competition for oxygen. Living where I do, I can vouch for my corner of the planet and say it ain't getting any warmer. I do care about airborne radioactive particulates (aka soot) and rad waste. The coconut trees and oceanic coral have proven their value to society, I think we should reward them with a higher status in our world culture by making them the guardians of rad waste. If a lone coconut should travel thousands of leagues, well, shoot, it's not going to hurt anyone more than a barium enema. At least it isn't in the air.
Why did I put the waste of rad waste in quotes, you wonder? Well, from where do you think the barium and iodine and whatever ungodly stuff is in chemotherapy comes? A hole in the ground? No, that waste serves medical purposes. The rest of it could be put into a different reactor design, in accordance with the reactor families planned out in the 40's and 50's, but nobody has spent the research dollars to go far with them.
Final note: I heard a rumor that the prescription drug "Lunesta" contains a coconut extract. Is that why they have glowing butterflies in their ads?
Yes, because compared to Moses, the average Slashdot user, spiritually is what, now? Moses wrote Genesis, although I don't know if he penned it or had a scribe.
Oh no. The day-age theorist argument again. If you use that concordance properly, you will note that the usage is not "Back in Caesar's day..." for the Hebrew word 'Yom.' It is used hundreds of times throughout the Bible. The only time it appears to mean more than a single cycle of light and dark (or the period of light only) is when it is applied with a modifier. Even Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (are there others?) states that for the word to mean anything other than a single revolution of the earth (or just the sunlight portion), requires a modifier, such as an enumeration, or something meaning several, or a period of days. So, some day, the gamma rays may wipe out our ozone layer, but is that the Judgement Day, where a third of the world's waters boil up, and a third of the lands are consumed with fire? Holy death star, indeed!
Solar. Boy, I should take a picture. There's a corporate headquarters for Great River Energy with a windmill (they finally started it up) and a whole roof of solar cells. I love it when the solar cells are buried deep in snow. It makes for a great Christmas card. Someone I know in their IT dept. says that two Cisco 7500 routers consume 25% of the peak power of this monstrous windmill. That being said, it definitely has that ol' Sim City look to it.
Thanks, EricFerris. I will make good use of this information. I hope you will consider doing something for your community like prepare an RF "health and safety" brochure. I know that sounds odd, but I've done one a "kid's safety on the internet" as there's lots of people who don't know very much about which what you know quite a lot. Sure, other people may have made such things, but this one would be yours. Maybe a new year's resolution accomplishment is in there somewhere? Take care.
Going back to the SAR units, if I want to reduce my radiation exposure by a factor of 10, to perhaps 0.14 W/kg, how far away should I put my cell phone from the side of my head?
For what it is worth, I do turn my cell phone off when I go to sleep, my wireless router is on a vacation timer and turns off during the family's sleeping hours. I also use a corded/hands-free headset when using my cellphone because of a general "respect" for radiation. It'd be nice to know even rough numbers about this sort of health topic.
Thank you for the articles in wikipedia. It's been a few years since I looked at Project Pluto, nice to see it being maintained as an encyclopedia article. I didn't know about the X-6, though, most interesting. I will look around for the results of the research.
Okay, back to the nuclear aircraft. Back in the 50's they designed a nasty little weapon called Project Pluto. It was a supersonic, unshielded reactor on wings that would fly around indefinitely at low altitudes over our the homelands of our enemies, bombarding them with harmful radiation. So, my idea of a commercial, nuclear aircraft differs only in appropriate shielding, crash core safety, and probably subsonic speeds. I would also suggest that a good cooling design can make use of the heat in a thrust capacity, which makes the engine that much more efficient. Commercial airplanes are roughly the same size as tactical nuclear ships, so size is not the issue. Mass is. Since they have "glassed" steel, I think they can also "glass" tungsten, and that would make for a very solid shield. One benefit of this idea is that when a carbon-based aircraft crashes, it is engulfed in flames. A nuclear aircraft would not have that same effect. The key is really core safety. The entire airplane needs to be built around a failsafe to detect a collision, explosion from terrorist weapons, and so forth, but perform a core shutdown in seconds.
In your post above, you make some seemingly conflicting statements about Hydroelectric power. The supply is the reservoir, is it not? Perhaps you could rewrite that.
Thanks for speaking up; I would appreciate more depth in an additional response, and perhaps a more informed explanation as to why there's always a good number of windmills at a windmill farm sitting at a standstill. Before talking to this guy, I had always assumed it was a mechanical breakdown.
If you're interested in superconductors, check out the Physics program at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Allen Goldman is the Dean of the dept. and is doing related work. Anyone who has an interest in superconductors should do all they can with their enthusiasm. On the other side of things, if you have an interest in developing video games for the rest of your life, you should develop other skill areas, just in case the market is saturated already.
I think the best thing you can do right now is take this excitement and pursue it by reading. Go to the official sites and learn.
Nice nickname. You must be into superconductors, and your real name is Barry. When you consider that the larger vehicles are less per-mile efficient than the smaller ones, due largely to the fact that those rolling power systems need to carry both raw fuels and the plants themselves, I would be much inclined to agree that efficiency is greater at immobile facilities, despite the energy loss due to conversion and transmission. Does anyone know how to do a total energy equation on moving a car?
I've never heard of a reactor plan that does not have accommodations for onsite waste storage. Prairie Island 1 and 2 have onsite storage, and the additional cost for more rad waste casks (the plant got re-rated for additional service life) is the responsibility of Excel Energy, according to the state legislation.
Now, if you'd been talking about Solar Power, I'd be more inclined to agree with you with the viability only through subsidies. Nuclear power is as cheap or cheaper than coal, and it always has been. An average 1000MWe nuclear plant produces one contained 53' trailer load of vitrified rad waste per year, and all plants have been designed and approved for on-site storage for the duration of the plant. Over 50 years ago, our innovative American scientists developed a "stepper" reactor family design that actually consumes the rad waste, so in a total system, the 2N+2 radioactive family produces a full cycle with no long-term (more than 30 years) waste. Let's not forget that nuclear waste is also used for medical nuclear therapy and imaging.
Electric Cars + Nuclear power grid = 0 harmful energy emissions, nationally, except for the occasional campfire, gas stoves, and our entire space program.
I'll give anyone who currently agrees with the parent post a "by" on mass ignorance fed by the media and under-educated educators, but only a little bit longer. There's a big discussion tonight on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, during their green week. After tonight, you can't even blame the media for people having this wrong.
There's room for solar power, wind power, and deep-sea hydro power, but pound-for-pound, watt-for-watt, wind and solar cannot be our primary energy grid technology. For one, they depend on the weather, which is unreliable from a regional power grid perspective. For two, if you take a KWh from Solar and stand it next to the KWh from Nuclear, Solar produces a quantity of toxic waste during manufacturing (which is always toxic, forever), and Nuclear produces a quantity of rad waste during operation (enrichment takes over a dozen possible forms, including centrifuge, laser, and aerodynamics). Noting that solar cells eventually break down, but nuclear reactors in our grid today are being re-rated for now up to 60 years of operation, I wonder what the toxic waste to rad waste (and I've established it is reusable) ratio is, given a single KWh of electricity.
Small power generation, like solar and wind, is great from a grid management perspective, because a grid operator can shut down or bring up a solar or wind service more easily than a large power plant. They need to do this to control voltage fluctuations and meet demand.
How can a solar panel absorb more radiation than is produced, much less 3000x more?
Unless you are talking about a collector with mirrors aimed at it, that statement doesn't make a lot of sense on its own.
Mylar is a pretty good reflector, and apart from the fact that it tears a bit, maybe with some threading through it, you could get maybe 50x the benefit. Divide my big number by 50, and you have 1/10th the cost of a single Space Shuttle launch. Factor back in that I deflated launch per pound costs by 25x, though, and you are still talking multiple years of NASA budget. All for what? A high-maintenance power station, which loses the vast majority of its energy transmitting it down to earth. Compare that to the development cost of a fast neutron reactor the size of a tractor trailer: 10-30x the power, no "launch mishaps," no "solar flare-ups," plus it doesn't blot out the sky. A square mile 75 miles up is visible with plain sight and even a mild case of myopia.
On-topic, May I say, leave it to the Pentagon to come up with a very expensive, orbital approach to blot out the sun. Has anyone given any thought to some math here? if the current stats are that 11% of the surface of the earth needs to be covered with solar panels to meet current demand (and stave off the evils of global paranoia), what would it mean if even 1% of the solar radiation never hits the surface? I read that about 80 of 180 Peta-watts of energy reaches the surface of the Earth, but more poignantly, what kind of pollution would be generated by the lifting vessels that put untold thousands of square miles of what amounts to delicate circuit boards into space?
Ooh, another math topic: cost. Let's have some fun. Including the beam-down mechanisms, let's say it is 1 pound per 10 square feet.
One square mile is 2,7878,400 square feet, right? 5280x5280. That is equivalent to 13,939.2 tons. Let's pretend that NASA actually delivered their promise of $200 / pound on putting something into orbit, instead of the $5000 per pound you can get today in Russia. The price tag of a single square mile of solar panels into orbit is USD $5,575,680,000. Construction of a 1-square mile quantity of terrestrial solar panels (and the land grading, etc.) in Portugal is proposed at about $600 Million, a negligible cost. Even 100x that much is negligible compared to orbital lift costs.
The Pentagon must be ignoring lift costs to conjure this sort of thing. Some little twittery scientist pretending everything is free and they are just at liberty to invent their own reality, then give American taxpayers the bill for their folly.
Do not sully the good name of the Knights Templar with such blasphemy, o heretic! Seriously, though, what are you talking about, or is this random humor? I don't know much other than historical war facts about the Knights Templar.
I have decided not to travel to countries where monkeys roam free. Furthermore, if I ever meet someone who actually considers monkeys to be gods, I'm going to have a nice, well-rounded discussion on SURVIVAL. The last thing we need is ol' King Louie discovering the secret of the man-flower from Mowgli. When the monkeys set the village ablaze, then, I think the villagers will either start monkey slaughtering, and welcome the threat of a roof over their heads, bars or otherwise.
Does this village in Kenya constitute "rural sprawl?"
Thank you for introducing me to a few concepts in your response. I am glad that charity has had a way of making you generous in response. I wonder what I have left to learn as a programmer myself. This week, I registered a sourceforge project. I don't make my living programming, but I do work in software. I think I'm headed in the right direction, but I always have someone to talk to if I ever feel I've wandered from the path I should follow, and there are some days where I know I've wandered.
Seriously, though, with this Richard Pryor -- Superman 2 kind of good fortune, what exactly did you end up doing with your "bank blessings?"
To that point, some kids really, really, need the carrot, and the stick is a bad idea. Just the same, spare the rod, spoil the child. Ignore the child, spoil the community.
Nothing good can come from this. We should prepare ourselves. What if the evil dictator decides to give them a bloodlust and long, gnashing teeth?
Amen to that! Everyone is complaining about game systems availability, but what about the wife, the truly interactive "We?" Note to self (and countless youths): if you want her to kiss you, do the dishes. If you want her to do something more, get off the computer/Wii and spend time talking to her.
Like the terrorists won't figure out how to create an antidote for the sedation, and preload their systems with it? Come on.