There is a common misconception that nuclear reactors cannot be turned off or throttled except every other year. However the French turn off their nuclear reactors and use the heated water to keep power generation going for a certain amount of time as a common operation. If you want storage you are going to increase total system costs for the renewables which were already more expensive than nuclear and coal to begin with.
I didn't see the math for the renewable subsidies which dwarf those of nuclear. Particularly when you consider the amount of useful energy generated by them in a year is much less. If you were in the middle of the 1970s energy crisis wouldn't you have built the reactors? I would. In fact I would still build them today. Much better than burning lignite.
Germany’s energy companies are expected to give to the government part of the windfall profits generated by extending the lifetime of nuclear power stations, with the funds used to invest in renewable energy.
...
Relations between the energy sector and government were soured by Berlin’s plans for raising €2.3bn ($2.9bn) a year via a tax on nuclear fuel rods – part of its separate attempts to reduce the country’s public sector deficit. This tax is now expected to be time limited.
Nuclear is in fact subsidizing an anti-economic "renewable" energy expansion.
There was a surge of subsidy-driven spending in Spain’s photovoltaic sector, with €23bn invested since 2002 – a quarter of that in 2008 alone. The annual cost of subsidies for all renewables reached €5bn last year and could hit €6.3bn this year.
Spanish newspaper El Mundo found that between November and January, 4500 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar energy were sold to the electricity grid between midnight and seven in the morning. It has been suggested that some plants in the regions of Castilla-La-Mancha, Canarias and Andalucía have been using diesel generators connected to their solar panel arrays to illegally benefit from government subsidies.
The Ancient Testament also says you shouldn't mix wool with linen or something like that. Quite often the rules exist for a reason or set of reasons which were forgotten with time and simply taken as gospel or whatever. I would probably cover my face in a sandstorm but the veil practices for muslim women go quite a bit further than this. There are some studies which point that solar exposure increases libido in women for example.
In the year 2054, the entire defence budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.- Norman Augustine
If you think that is bad, check out the time between the Chinese J-8 first flight and entry into service on Wikipedia. Something about a "Cultural Revolution" or whatever...
Centrifuge technology has made it much easier to get the fuel. Most nation states could manufacture nuclear weapons if they felt like it at this point. There are a couple of nations with centrifuge programs at this time. The question then is how to deliver them. There is more to it than just designing the bomb itself.
IIRC in the Iraqi War they eventually removed Apaches from service while they kept the Cobras and Warthogs on service. Something about it being a large and slow target for AA fire. I remember seeing an Apache which looked like swiss cheese on TV around that time.
A lot of advances have been made including helicopters without a tail rotor. But the helicopters in the current US (and other) arsenals do not have any of these changes. Helicopter development has mostly stalled since probably the 1980s (except for the weapons systems). Proof of that is that the US Army had to unmothball Chinooks because their Blackhawks kept dropping like stones in the high altitudes of Afghanistan.
Nah. Their Iran-Iraq war performance was pretty horrible in the beginning because in Iran theology trumped military experience and know-how. Only later on when they got regular military in their forces were they able to start turning the tide around (yet they still had to resort to human-wave tactics to win). The main problem with invading Iran is that it is a mountainous earthquake prone shithole similar to Afghanistan but only larger. The country has a much larger population than Iraq and is close to developing nuclear weapons. Norway in comparison has better weapons but next to no population in comparison.
The Russians produce the AK-101 which uses NATO ammo rounds for export. IIRC some NATO countries also have specialized weapons which can use ex-Warsow pact ammo. In the end you can just pick up the enemy weapons and use the rounds. It is probably not likely that you will capture the rounds and fail to capture at least some weapons during an invasion.
The reasons for the different calibers existing are varied. The 7.62mm NATO weapons use that spec because it was similar enough to the 0.303 inch rounds favored by the US at the time the weapons were designed. This way you could use the same tools to manufacture the ammo. The Russians AFAIK developed the AK-47 as an answer to the German Kurz rifle. Like in the Kurz designed the Russians used an intermediate cartridge with the same bullet as their current rifle rounds but a reduced propellant charge to reduce recoil and make the cartridge lighter. The weapons also reflect different doctrines. In the NATO case it is mostly about designing the weapon to be an accurate long range rifle at the expense of making it less practical for more close quarters or urban combat. In the AK-47's case the weapon was developed by someone who was concerned about developing a weapon which would be optimized for urban combat.
The new 5.56 mm rounds were developed afterwards. There is currently a trend to move to an intermediate round (larger than 5.56 mm) because of experiences fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The next weapons to be developed will probably have larger bullets and the propellants will be encased in plastic or be caseless.
Most casualties in WWII were Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese which employed all sorts of means to "control" the Chinese population including chemical warfare. They also attacked an US base with a military strike prior to the US declaration of war on Japan. It is not like the Japanese were some sort of warm and fuzzy character from tinseltown.
Quite often the Muslims caught Animistic people from Africa as slaves and sold them to European merchants who then sold them to work in the Americas or whatever colony.
It is even worse than that. In Germany they charge special taxes on nuclear power generators to subsidize the wind and solar power generators. Guess what will happen once they close all the nuclear reactors... They are increasingly importing energy from France which generates most of their power on nuclear as well. Their "alternative" to nuclear is actually burning filthy low quality lignite coal. I would rather live next to a nuclear reactor.
One of the reasons the Spanish economy is on the brink was the large renewable subsidies. They probably have every kind of solar power generator in the country including solar towers, parabolic troughs, etc. The last time a country tried these alternative energy schemes was Brazil with their plan to use alcohol in automobiles. It always takes decades before the technology gets cost effective enough. In the meantime you have to face self-imposed large scale misery. Brazil's saving grace was that they eventually reduced alcohol production costs and discovered oil offshore...
Well, it was good enough to get the Chinese into the race. They now have the three largest solar cell manufacturers in the world. The manufacturing cost of solar panels has also come down due to improved production processes. The cost is now around the mythical $1/Watt where solar is supposed to be effective enough to compete with grid generated power. The issue is that it still is intermittent and you still need to buy an inverter to use the power.
Solar power is nuclear fusion power... It is just that the reactor is really far away. The problem is one of cost effectiveness. Once solar panels are price competitive people will use them. Yet it is still an intermittent energy source so you will need some storage mechanism or backup generator increasing the system costs further.
Removing nuclear fission from the equation is stupid. It is cheap and plentiful, safer than most alternatives, and you either use it or lose it. All U-235 on Earth is going to decay eventually so either we use it before it decays or we will never be able to use it anymore. Solar panels are not necessarily clean. Silicon solar panels fabrication in particular uses solvents and acids in the manufacturing process which must be disposed of or recycled at a steep cost. Given that most solar panel production is currently in China I wouldn't be surprised to find out they simply dumped the toxic waste it into a nearby pond or river.
The problem with temperature gradients in the ocean is that the temperature difference is too small for a heat engine to have decent performance. Try reading about OTEC power plants. Large and expensive infrastructure built in the ocean. Even if you use ammonia as the heat fluid the performance is crap.
You would expect the people living in the harsh climate would know better how to dress to live in it than someone else who doesn't. Their clothes were designed for the environment. Some people think they can live with the heat just by removing their clothes. But when temperatures are over 40C you are either in the shade (i.e. wearing clothes to block the sun) or you will get heatstroke quickly. Particularly if you do not have lots of water around to rehydrate. At those temperatures you are better off covering your entire body with baggy clothes.
Actually I have read a couple of studies on how such fabrics behave under intense sunlight. The performance is better than you would expect. The fabric needs to have small holes so sweat can vent out and given those hole dimensions black fabric actually behaved better than white fabric. White fabrics are not a perfect reflector for all light frequencies and the black fabric radiated heat away very effectively. Color was not very important in the whole scheme of things.
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There is a common misconception that nuclear reactors cannot be turned off or throttled except every other year. However the French turn off their nuclear reactors and use the heated water to keep power generation going for a certain amount of time as a common operation. If you want storage you are going to increase total system costs for the renewables which were already more expensive than nuclear and coal to begin with.
I didn't see the math for the renewable subsidies which dwarf those of nuclear. Particularly when you consider the amount of useful energy generated by them in a year is much less. If you were in the middle of the 1970s energy crisis wouldn't you have built the reactors? I would. In fact I would still build them today. Much better than burning lignite.
Not really. You still need to declare variables, state their type, etc.
Everyone knows decent programming languages were designed by people with beards. Since COBOL was designed by Grace Hopper it doesn't qualify.
FWIW you can nearly build an AP1000 nuclear reactor a year with that tax. Each reactor would generate 1154 MWe baseload power.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d99ebe6c-b90d-11df-99be-00144feabdc0.html
Germany’s energy companies are expected to give to the government part of the windfall profits generated by extending the lifetime of nuclear power stations, with the funds used to invest in renewable energy.
...
Relations between the energy sector and government were soured by Berlin’s plans for raising €2.3bn ($2.9bn) a year via a tax on nuclear fuel rods – part of its separate attempts to reduce the country’s public sector deficit. This tax is now expected to be time limited.
Nuclear is in fact subsidizing an anti-economic "renewable" energy expansion.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/275db4d0-6cdf-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html
There was a surge of subsidy-driven spending in Spain’s photovoltaic sector, with €23bn invested since 2002 – a quarter of that in 2008 alone. The annual cost of subsidies for all renewables reached €5bn last year and could hit €6.3bn this year.
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/465409/spanish_nighttime_solar_energy_fraud_unlikely_in_uk.html
Spanish newspaper El Mundo found that between November and January, 4500 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar energy were sold to the electricity grid between midnight and seven in the morning. It has been suggested that some plants in the regions of Castilla-La-Mancha, Canarias and Andalucía have been using diesel generators connected to their solar panel arrays to illegally benefit from government subsidies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_Brazil
The Ancient Testament also says you shouldn't mix wool with linen or something like that. Quite often the rules exist for a reason or set of reasons which were forgotten with time and simply taken as gospel or whatever. I would probably cover my face in a sandstorm but the veil practices for muslim women go quite a bit further than this. There are some studies which point that solar exposure increases libido in women for example.
Well they seem to manufacture composites just fine. The problem is everything else but the airframe...
Nah the fighter pilot was W.
In the year 2054, the entire defence budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.- Norman Augustine
If you think that is bad, check out the time between the Chinese J-8 first flight and entry into service on Wikipedia. Something about a "Cultural Revolution" or whatever...
Centrifuge technology has made it much easier to get the fuel. Most nation states could manufacture nuclear weapons if they felt like it at this point. There are a couple of nations with centrifuge programs at this time. The question then is how to deliver them. There is more to it than just designing the bomb itself.
IIRC in the Iraqi War they eventually removed Apaches from service while they kept the Cobras and Warthogs on service. Something about it being a large and slow target for AA fire. I remember seeing an Apache which looked like swiss cheese on TV around that time.
A lot of advances have been made including helicopters without a tail rotor. But the helicopters in the current US (and other) arsenals do not have any of these changes. Helicopter development has mostly stalled since probably the 1980s (except for the weapons systems). Proof of that is that the US Army had to unmothball Chinooks because their Blackhawks kept dropping like stones in the high altitudes of Afghanistan.
Nah. Their Iran-Iraq war performance was pretty horrible in the beginning because in Iran theology trumped military experience and know-how. Only later on when they got regular military in their forces were they able to start turning the tide around (yet they still had to resort to human-wave tactics to win). The main problem with invading Iran is that it is a mountainous earthquake prone shithole similar to Afghanistan but only larger. The country has a much larger population than Iraq and is close to developing nuclear weapons. Norway in comparison has better weapons but next to no population in comparison.
The reasons for the different calibers existing are varied. The 7.62mm NATO weapons use that spec because it was similar enough to the 0.303 inch rounds favored by the US at the time the weapons were designed. This way you could use the same tools to manufacture the ammo. The Russians AFAIK developed the AK-47 as an answer to the German Kurz rifle. Like in the Kurz designed the Russians used an intermediate cartridge with the same bullet as their current rifle rounds but a reduced propellant charge to reduce recoil and make the cartridge lighter. The weapons also reflect different doctrines. In the NATO case it is mostly about designing the weapon to be an accurate long range rifle at the expense of making it less practical for more close quarters or urban combat. In the AK-47's case the weapon was developed by someone who was concerned about developing a weapon which would be optimized for urban combat.
The new 5.56 mm rounds were developed afterwards. There is currently a trend to move to an intermediate round (larger than 5.56 mm) because of experiences fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The next weapons to be developed will probably have larger bullets and the propellants will be encased in plastic or be caseless.
Most casualties in WWII were Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese which employed all sorts of means to "control" the Chinese population including chemical warfare. They also attacked an US base with a military strike prior to the US declaration of war on Japan. It is not like the Japanese were some sort of warm and fuzzy character from tinseltown.
Quite often the Muslims caught Animistic people from Africa as slaves and sold them to European merchants who then sold them to work in the Americas or whatever colony.
It is even worse than that. In Germany they charge special taxes on nuclear power generators to subsidize the wind and solar power generators. Guess what will happen once they close all the nuclear reactors... They are increasingly importing energy from France which generates most of their power on nuclear as well. Their "alternative" to nuclear is actually burning filthy low quality lignite coal. I would rather live next to a nuclear reactor.
One of the reasons the Spanish economy is on the brink was the large renewable subsidies. They probably have every kind of solar power generator in the country including solar towers, parabolic troughs, etc. The last time a country tried these alternative energy schemes was Brazil with their plan to use alcohol in automobiles. It always takes decades before the technology gets cost effective enough. In the meantime you have to face self-imposed large scale misery. Brazil's saving grace was that they eventually reduced alcohol production costs and discovered oil offshore...
Well, it was good enough to get the Chinese into the race. They now have the three largest solar cell manufacturers in the world. The manufacturing cost of solar panels has also come down due to improved production processes. The cost is now around the mythical $1/Watt where solar is supposed to be effective enough to compete with grid generated power. The issue is that it still is intermittent and you still need to buy an inverter to use the power.
Solar power is nuclear fusion power... It is just that the reactor is really far away. The problem is one of cost effectiveness. Once solar panels are price competitive people will use them. Yet it is still an intermittent energy source so you will need some storage mechanism or backup generator increasing the system costs further.
Removing nuclear fission from the equation is stupid. It is cheap and plentiful, safer than most alternatives, and you either use it or lose it. All U-235 on Earth is going to decay eventually so either we use it before it decays or we will never be able to use it anymore. Solar panels are not necessarily clean. Silicon solar panels fabrication in particular uses solvents and acids in the manufacturing process which must be disposed of or recycled at a steep cost. Given that most solar panel production is currently in China I wouldn't be surprised to find out they simply dumped the toxic waste it into a nearby pond or river.
The problem with temperature gradients in the ocean is that the temperature difference is too small for a heat engine to have decent performance. Try reading about OTEC power plants. Large and expensive infrastructure built in the ocean. Even if you use ammonia as the heat fluid the performance is crap.
You would expect the people living in the harsh climate would know better how to dress to live in it than someone else who doesn't. Their clothes were designed for the environment. Some people think they can live with the heat just by removing their clothes. But when temperatures are over 40C you are either in the shade (i.e. wearing clothes to block the sun) or you will get heatstroke quickly. Particularly if you do not have lots of water around to rehydrate. At those temperatures you are better off covering your entire body with baggy clothes.
Actually I have read a couple of studies on how such fabrics behave under intense sunlight. The performance is better than you would expect. The fabric needs to have small holes so sweat can vent out and given those hole dimensions black fabric actually behaved better than white fabric. White fabrics are not a perfect reflector for all light frequencies and the black fabric radiated heat away very effectively. Color was not very important in the whole scheme of things.