Apparently you've never seen a piece of software called an "Appserver" or a "Database", or even something almost as complicated called an "Operating System". They all manage to do just fine with large numbers of processors. In fact, my own experience confirms that appservers like having lots of processors, and with even the most minimal care, can use them to vastly accelerate your code.
dude, we don't get significant electricity from oil. The next time someone talks about "save elecricity and we won't have to buy so much oil..." i'm going to puke. We make elecricity from three primary sources, in order of magnitude (always wanted to say that).
1) Coal. 2) Nuclear. 3) Natural Gas.
These three combined are essentially all our electricity (90+%).
As for generating hydrogen, cars are about the least useful thing Hydrogen can do. It turns out LOTS of industrial processes (like producing gasoline from crude oil) depend heavily on H2 gas. Something like (don't have exact numbers) 1/3 of our natural gas consumption goes to produce hydrogen (by stripping the carbon from CH4) that is then used to refine crude oil, produce margarine, or make Ammonia for fertilizers. If we could efficiently generate hydrogen without using natural gas, that would be a substantial step in the right direction. Obviously hybrids are basically the other half of this.
Given lots of cheap H2, we can thermally depolymerize pretty much anything (sewage, trash, agricultural waste, etc...) into diesel oil, and that would pretty much eliminate our need for fossil oil.
The other main side of it is electricity. Coal power plants produce something like half of the country's CO2 emissions. A cheap source of hydrogen would pretty much eliminate the other half (the car side), and a good source of electricity would eliminiate the Coal half.
I would propose nuclear for both fronts, reactors can produce both hydrogen and electricity, but that's just me. If you want to pay 30x as much for wind power, be my guest. You'll only have to build and maintain a billion (literally, a billion) windmills. That's about one windmill ever 100 meters in every direction throughout the US, hardly a trivial task, but if you want to pay for 1,000,000,000 windmills then who am I to say otherwise. I'd rather take the ~2,000 reactors it would take, but once again, that's just me.
Unfortunately the natural gas of north america is fast diminishing. Within a decade we'll be importing natural gas from the same guys who sell us oil today. This is hardly a long term solution.
We could however try to use bio diesel as much as possible, and use nuclear generated H2 to replace Natural Gas generated H2, and that would help on both fronts. Using heat pump style heating instead of natural gas would also be helpful, but only if we don't have power plants burning natural gas to produce electricity, as we do today.
Don't even get me started on coal though. If we're not going to go nuclear, then scratch those last two proposals, as using coal produced electricity for those would make things worse rather than better.
and most of that material is water, perhaps about a bathtub full, hardly worthy of note.
A more interesting comparison is something like total energy required and ore required. Assume we have two raw materials, rock and electricity. How much rock and how much electricity does it take to generate this thing. You can throw in water as a third raw material if you wish, but usually it's fairly unimportant.
Seems almost "warcraft" like, but that would be the logical way to measure things.
"This computer took 2 tons of ore, 5 MegaWatt hours of electricity, and 500 gallons of water, in the process it released X grams of CO2 (directly, not double counting the energy here....) and X grams of non-recycled industrial waste. "
Would be quite simple at that point, don't you think? Just make every product have a sticker saying as much, and then any product assembled from disparate pieces can just sum their contributions, add in anything else consumed in the assembly and testing, and sticker the result.
Fluorescents also don't work very well in low temperatures or high humidity (outside, or in bathrooms), so the're somewhat picky. Also, CF bulbs are generally larger and only come in "white", no color choices (that I've ever seen).
In terms of cost though, a CF bulb will clobber a current LED bulb, it puts out more light per watt, and lasts about as long, furthermore it doesn't dim (much) as it ages. Also, CF bulbs are cheaper ($5 or $6 bucks, less if you look around a little, and these are NYC prices).
Basically, the world would be much better off if there was a $5.00 tax on each incandescent bulb. Use CF bulbs in all the normal indoor fixtures, and then either use LED bulbs where CFs don't work, or bite the bullet and pay the tax. It would save us collectively a mountain of money and energy.
Good points across the board. In fact, hydrogen is a real pain to work with, and they might be better off converting it to something like methanol (or perhaps ethanol, if that can be done). Such conversions from raw hydrogen to simple alcohols can often be done with somewhat better than 50% (maybe 75%) efficiency already, and would have the side effect of making the fuel much easier to work with.
The real consumer of hydrogen is actually industry. A good means of producing hydrogen fairly cheaply (*cough* nuclear-thermal-breakdown *cough*) could help industry immensely by replacing most of the natural gas needed for producing things like gasoline and amonia by way of hydrogen. They could also pretty easily thermally de-polymerize trash (and any sort of organic waste) into oils and gasses of virtually any composition by adding more or less hydrogen as needed.
That's the realy tactic we should take, but of course we won't, because environmentalists despise all things nuclear, andwould much rather have hydrogen generated from electricity from coal burning power plants than an actual clean and carbon free fuel.
Actually, the scientists know exactly what to do with them. Pyro-metalurgy, partitioning, and then burial of a few of the partitions. It's the rabid NIMBYists who don't know what to do about it, and unfortunately, the decision appears to be theirs to make.
Dare to dream. We'd need something on the order of 1 billion windmills to provide for all our energy needs.
Think about what a mess 300 million people have made of the country, now think of three HUGE windmills per person. And of course they don't work when there's no wind, so we'd need a HUGE distribution grid as well as powerlines going to each and every one of those 1 billion installations. This is something like 1 windmill every 100 meters in every direction throughout the continental US.
Who will build these billion windmills, who will maintain them and the powerlines strung all over the country? Who will tolerate the windmills in suburbia, Manhattan, Yellowstone, ANWR, etc.....Who will put up with the blackouts during heat waves (which tend to have very little wind).
Do some basic math and you'll weep every time someone says we could get all our energy from windmills.
1) Use voting machines like the ones Nevada developed. Fully electronic, don't allow mistakes, and let the voter verify their receipt, and then have it dropped in the ballot box.
2) Privacy concerns aside, in order to vote you should have to provide a thumb print. Already if the feds want your prints they can just grab your voter registration card and dust it, so this wouldn't really change anything. After the election, woe to anyone who has more than one thumb print floating around.
3) Everyone votes. None of this "if you're convicted..." or "if you've moved lately...." or anything else. If you vote in a state, you pay taxes there (in addition to anywhere else you need to pay taxes), so you're penalized for not voting in your home state, but it can be done. If you vote in two places, see #2 above. Once we start letting people be stripped of the right to vote, where does it end. You say felons can't vote, I would say churchgoers shouldn't be able to vote (separation of church and state?), it never ends. In addition, the purge lists end up as a tool for descrimination. Most of the people on those lists nationwide DO NOT belong there. Just check it after the fact and punish anyone who voted twice.
Those would be my reforms. In addition, states should all function like Maine. You get a vote for winning each congressional district, and two more for winning the state overall.
Actually, I was rushed, so my response was sub standard. However, keep in mind that we could use breeders, which would make roughly 200 times as much fuel available (because they can use it all, rather than about.5% like current reactors). There is no reason we can't use breeders, breeder reactors were used to generate much of our nuclear weapons stockpile, for instance. It's a proven technology, and only the (so called) environmentalists hold it back. My numbers are correct, assuming breeders. 5 billion tons is enough to provide for all human consumed energy for roughly 100 years, even assuming reasonable rates of growth and low power conversion efficiencies.
Fortunately, 5 billion tons is not the extend of our true reserves. With electricity at $.04/KWh we find that roughly a million (10^9) joules costs about $10. Since Uranium produces 10^13 joules of electrical power (in a reactor that's a little less than 30% efficient) we find that the cost of the elecricity produced from a pound of Uranium is about 10^5 dollars, or roughly 100 thousand dollars. Until the cost of raw Uranium (per pound) approaches this figure, the uranium cost will be a rounding error. That means that the real price that could be supported by fast breeders is somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars per pound, rather than the rediculous $130/pound number that the site shows.
The simplest way to resolve this is just to take a simple, dilute source that could be processed for less than 1,000/pound, figure out how much is in that, and then take that as a lower bound. For Uranium, seawater is a pretty good place to start. Granite also has plenty, but seawater makes the calculations really easy...
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohe n. html
So, with fast breeders capable of supporting Uranium prices of $100,000/ton, how much Uranium do we have (worst case scanrio, we never find more on land and we use seawater once we use what we've already found), about 7 million years. Maybe a little less if we go buck wild with the energy use and use inefficient everything.
If we don't have fusion by 7 million years from now, we deserve to be in the dark. Also, note that there is at least 3x as much Thorium as Uranium, and breeders can use that too, so really we're pushing 30 million years as a lower bound once all is said and done.
Of course, if you think I'm being too optimistic, then just slash those figures by a factor of 2, 5, 10, 1000, doesn't matter, it's still a REALLY long time.
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/u/u ra nium-reserves.htm
This indicates that there are proven reserves of Uranium up to at least 5 million tons.
Here's some tables of energy content on fuels....
http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/EN ER GY_POLICY/tables.html
The total energy needs of the world are currently around 10^21 joules. A breeder reactor could burn U-238 just like U-235, and would get a little more energy out of it than it gets from U-235.
5 million tons of Uranium....
5*10^6*7.4*10^16 = 4*10^23, or at least 100 years proven.
The price of Uranium could go to thousands of dollars per ton before it became unuseable as a power source, soo that 5 million tons is a vast underestimate. At a few grand we're dealing with probably something like a billion tons or more.
You didn't distinguish, so neither did I. China produces less CO2 than the US, it is true, however they produce more of essentially every other kind of pollution. When people say "air pollution" I assume they're talking mostly about the stuff that would give you lung cancer eventually (lead, mercury SO4, NOX, O3, etc...), rather than the relatively benign emissions that cause a more long term global problem (CO2 and CFCs come to mind).
Of all the components of air pollution I just mentioned, China is vastly worse on alll of them except CO2, and with their coal based economy they'll be producing more CO2 soon anyway (though not per capita). You talk of a society that respects the environment, china is not it. It is only an economic accident that they don't produce much CO2, not the result of some long standing policy.
I address nuclear waste in my other posts, I won't repeat it all here. You can easily look up what the scientific establishment wants done with it. Some things to look up... "pyrometalurgical" would be a good place to start. You can also find a table of isotopes and easily calculate how much actual waste would be produced in the course of generating all the world's energy for a year, it's not much. It would easily fit in even a medium sized ship.
Also, keep in mind that of nuclear waste, most of the elements are either...
1) Stable already 2) Short lived (a few decades or less half life). 3) Actinides that can be burned by a fast reactor.
Just for fun, go through those tables and calculate what fraction of the nuclear waste doesn't fall into one of those categories (long lived, but not burnable), it's a very VERY small fraction. Simple extraction from the waste stream would make most of these issues a non-issue.
Furthermore, radioactive waste becomes safe with time, which is more than can be said of heavy metals like Mercury and Lead. Coal plants spew both (in HUGE quantities) into the atmosphere, so much so that most fish throughout the world is now significantly tainted by mercury, almost entirely due to coal burning. However, lets assume these heavy metals can be sequeestered, what then. You want nuclear waste containment to last until the waste is safe (X thousand years.....), so clearly by the same logic the containers to hold mercury and lead waste should have to last forever, as those wastes will never be safe. Nuclear is already held to a standard that would be impossibly high for any other industry, and that's ok because there is so little nuclear waste that it's not such a problem too do this. The problem comes when people claim that this impossibly high standard is not nearly enough, and though coal can kill 20,000 people a year in the US alone, nuclear must conclusively prove that it will never (over the course of millions of years to come) harm anybody in order to be even considered as an alternative. That's just insanity.
Your numbers are WAYYYY off. No reputable source will claim anything less than 100 years, and it's stretching reality to claim that it's less than 1000 with even the bare minimum of care.
Uranium is more common than Tin, and it doesn't take very much to produce a lot of energy. The cost of the Uranium itself is a rounding error in the cost of the electricity from nuclear power, consequently the market could tolerate HUGE prices for it and still be just fine. Yeah, at the rediculously low current prices of Uranium, we only have maybe 100 years worth of supply, but at reasonable prices (prices where perhaps 1/3 of the price of electricity comes form the price of Uranium) that number would be at least in the thousands of years.
You are literally smoking crack. I've been to Chunking (spelling is probably incorrect) and when you step off the airplane, the pollution is so bad you can taste it. The sky is brown 365 days a year there, and the Yangze river is an open sewer, the color of the water matches the color of the sky, brown.
The ocean near the chinese mainland is completely brown, the same color as a rainpuddle on an especially filthy street. In the US, the sky is blue (outside of texas), and the water usually is too. When you fly back from China (as I did), you see the water and sky off the north american west coast and it's a color of saphire that you forgot existed. It sure doesn't exist in china.
You should acutally go to this place you claim to know of, it would be an eye opener. If you hurry, you can see the three gorges before they are flooded forever (maybe).
Unfortunately, the radical greens have shot down the only really viable means for radically reducing CO2 output, nuclear power. It seems odd to see them whine on one hand about too much CO2, and then whine on the other hand that people would *gasp* actually consider using a CO2 free source of electricity.
If you want to reduce CO2, ban coal. Simple as that. Coal is responsible for more than half of our CO2 (correct me if my numbers are wrong), and banning it would do more than anything else. Just get rid of coal and leave people with the choice of either paying ludicrous prices for gas power, or using nuclear. The NIMBYism would end real quick as soon as people couldn't choose to just pollute the whole world evenly and cheaply with coal burning.
Nothing else would matter much other than that. Natural Gas and Oil produce far less CO2 per unit of energy than coal, and they'll run out anyway within a couple of decades, so it's a really bounded problem. Coal however has sufficient supply, and produces so much CO2 per unit of energy, that it's the only one that could truly decimate the planet. It's also responsible for all the fish you eat being loaded with mercury and lead, and it releases more radioactive gunk into the atmosphere than all the world's nuclear powerplants (including cherenoble) ever did.
And this would be made worse by Kyoto. The only way to prevent pollution from being exported is to have GLOBAL restrictions on pollution. Local restrictions just cause the polluters to move around, global restrictions will actually cause them to clean up. Kyoto doesn't apply over much of the world, so it's a local restriction, and won't be very helpful.
The Kyoto protocol was specifically designed to hamper american economic dominance, is it such a wonder that we didn't sign it? I'm probably more of an environmentalist than most of the environmentalists, but give me a break. A treaty that places tight restrictions on CO2 coming from developed countries, but no restrictions what so ever on developing countries like China is really going to just result in dirty industries moving to china where they can get away from all pollution controls. There's no reason to ask the US taxpayers to actually pay for an outsourcing of thier jobs when the net result will actually be to increase worldwide pollution, now is there.
If the treaty had reasonable constraints on all countries, then the US should sign it, but a treaty that seeks to move dirty industries from the US (and EU, though to a lesser degree) where they at least have to watch their sulfur and NOX emissions to a country like China where it's the wild west, should not be signed by the US or anyone else.
A far more effective policy would be to put a global price tag on CO2 emissions, and then hold EVERY country responsible, using the UN and WTO to fine those that failed to pony up their fraction of the costs. That would actually make sense, but to say it's forbidden here, but if you move over some imaginary line, then you're free to pollute all you want, that's just stupid.
ok, exactly my point, and you're demonstrating the green position quite well.
Where do you get the other half, you know, the half you do use?
Do you get it from coal or nuclear? You see, you're left with exactly the same choices whether you're generating 1 watt or 2 watts, so what's the point of bringing up conservation issues as if that somehow changes the playing field and makes new options for power generation viable, they don't.
Nuclear is better than coal for producing any (reasonable) number of watts, so your disputes about the actual number of watts needed bring nothing to the argument and are really nothing more than an attempted diversion. Very republican of you.
If you can come up with a theory explaining why only needing 10^18 joules a year rather than 2*10^18 joules a year fundamentally changes the economic/social comparison of coal and nuclear, then I'd love to hear it, otherwise, please stick to the point.
This is not insightful. Uranium is more common than tin, and it will not run out in our lifetimes. There are very few countries on earth without sufficient uranium to keep them fueled for many decades to come.
Nuclear power can generate as much energy as we need, for at least several million years.
Now, we might be able to conserve energy, but how much? Are you going to go without air conditioning? Are you going to go without lights, radio, television?
As long as people use energy, we'll have to generate energy, whether it's a little or a lot. This concept seems to be completely beyond the greens, who seem to think that if we all used half as much energy we wouldn't have to generate the rest.
Since it's accepted that we will need some quantity of energy (whether its a little or a lot), there's no reason to get it from coal as opposed to nuclear, no matter how much or little it is. Nuclear is simply better. It kills fewer people, releases no pollution, and is actually cheaper once you start factoring in medical costs. It also doesn't cause the world's fish stocks to be laced with mercury (as they are today).
Nucler power could wean the US off of coal and (partially) natural gas, a laudable goal, but not oil. Oil isn't used to make electricity, and nuclear power isn't used to fill up cars.
When plug in hybrids are available, nuclear will be able to mostly eliminate oil, but not before.
However, in the meantime, we should be building up our nuclear capacity so we can ditch coal/natural gas, and then when the day comes that we all have plug in hybrids, sure nuclear will partially eliminate oil.
Until then we can use bio-diesel. Please don't even mention hydrogen unless you know what you're talking about. Generating hydrogen for industrial processes (including oil refining) is a decent use for nuclear as well, but it's not going to be too useful for cars, as it takes up too much space, even whe compressed or cryogenically liquified.
They only mirror the results because CNN adjusted them to remove this little embarrassment.
If you saw the exit polls when the polls actually closed (9-10 oclock or so) they favored John Kerry by a significant (2-4%) margin. Only later (around 1:00 am) did the exit polls start to drift towards the actual numbers reported by the polls.
Where did these numbers come from? Were there more exit poll results reported at 1:00 AM? It seems odd that this little discrepency was silently corrected once it was determined who would "win". I'm not a conspiracy thorist, but presumably the exit polls that were inaccurate at 10:00 when the polls closed should still be inaccurate this morning, but that is not the case.
We should be somewhat careful about crafting radical public policy changes in response to terrorist attacks however. Whether they are right or wrong, changing our policies after an attack will be percieved as victory, then it's open season. Every nut job with some explosives thinks that all he has to do is kill enought people and he'll get official US sponsorship for his cause, not good.
I'm not saying they're wrong about everything, I'm just saying that attempts at appeasement are probably going to be counterproductive. Especially considering that I think the actual friction between the middle east is more closely modeled as the friction between democracy and theocracy, rather than imperial power vs imperial subjects. If you think about it, a lot of places have been (and still are) dominated by imperialism, but there is only one middle east, what's different about the fundamentalist islamic countries as compared to, say, Colombia. It's probably not the degree of foreign domination, or the access to a simple (perhaps illicit) source of work free income, yet the outcome is different, the biggest difference I can see is national structure. Colombia is an oligarchy (nominally a democracy), and Iran (Afghanistan was) is a theocracy (give or take). Even N. Korea doesn't really directly sponsor terrorists, and they have it worse than anybody, in addition to having flat out more weapons than any of the middle eastern countries.
I think the simplistic "we screwed them, now they try to kill us, lets be nice to them" view has some merit, but there is so much more complexity than that. Radically different world views cause extreme friction between the countries sponsoring them. Free market vs. Communism almost caused a world war, and Democracy (or even Atheism) vs Theocracy (or fundamentalism) is having the same effect.
The good news is that eventually theocracy will simply sink into a sea of atheism (judging by history), and this problem will go away on its own, just as communism did. The bad news is that until that happens, if we appease one madman, we'll just have ten more jump up to take his place. You may think they'd be happy to just let us live our lives if we lefft them alone, but I don't think so. Witness the muslims eradicating the christians from Sudan, for instance.
There are no simple answers, and this is the difference between the presidential canidates. Bush always thinks that things are black and white, and there is a simple answer for everything. Kerry sees nuance, and neither completely supports nor completely opposes most courses of action, and a small ammendment to a bill can change his mind either way. People see this as weakness, rather than as the wisdom that it is. Don't fall into the same trap. This is a genuinely hard problem, and "quick fixes" will leave us worse off than we were before.
Now, I'm not going to get into whether the Iraq war was right or wrong, as that's really a small parrt of a pre-existing problem. Furthermore, despite the best efforts of Bush to make it into a disaster, it might just turn out OK in the end anyway, only time will tell. What is a little more certain is that it wouldn't have improved on its own, so it seems that not a whole lot was lost by our course of action, but Bush's insistence on using it as an exuse to rob the american public negates any actual (as opposed to fabricated) justification there may have been in the first place.
Given that we are where we are, I don't think that just pulling the troops from Iraq would cause anything other than a bloody mess. Nor do I think that siding with one side or the other over Israel/Palestine would actually make anybody happy. In fact, I think that even complete detachment from the middle east for the US wouldn't help much (at this point), and might even start a few wars (civil or otherwise). Any of these simplistic courses of action are probably doomed to failure. I don't think hatred for us will be diminished if we leave the area and allow massive genocides and wars to occur. Much
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This is supposed to be funny, right?
Apparently you've never seen a piece of software called an "Appserver" or a "Database", or even something almost as complicated called an "Operating System". They all manage to do just fine with large numbers of processors. In fact, my own experience confirms that appservers like having lots of processors, and with even the most minimal care, can use them to vastly accelerate your code.
Perhaps I'm just an insane genius though.
dude, we don't get significant electricity from oil. The next time someone talks about "save elecricity and we won't have to buy so much oil..." i'm going to puke. We make elecricity from three primary sources, in order of magnitude (always wanted to say that).
1) Coal.
2) Nuclear.
3) Natural Gas.
These three combined are essentially all our electricity (90+%).
As for generating hydrogen, cars are about the least useful thing Hydrogen can do. It turns out LOTS of industrial processes (like producing gasoline from crude oil) depend heavily on H2 gas. Something like (don't have exact numbers) 1/3 of our natural gas consumption goes to produce hydrogen (by stripping the carbon from CH4) that is then used to refine crude oil, produce margarine, or make Ammonia for fertilizers. If we could efficiently generate hydrogen without using natural gas, that would be a substantial step in the right direction. Obviously hybrids are basically the other half of this.
Given lots of cheap H2, we can thermally depolymerize pretty much anything (sewage, trash, agricultural waste, etc...) into diesel oil, and that would pretty much eliminate our need for fossil oil.
The other main side of it is electricity. Coal power plants produce something like half of the country's CO2 emissions. A cheap source of hydrogen would pretty much eliminate the other half (the car side), and a good source of electricity would eliminiate the Coal half.
I would propose nuclear for both fronts, reactors can produce both hydrogen and electricity, but that's just me. If you want to pay 30x as much for wind power, be my guest. You'll only have to build and maintain a billion (literally, a billion) windmills. That's about one windmill ever 100 meters in every direction throughout the US, hardly a trivial task, but if you want to pay for 1,000,000,000 windmills then who am I to say otherwise. I'd rather take the ~2,000 reactors it would take, but once again, that's just me.
Unfortunately the natural gas of north america is fast diminishing. Within a decade we'll be importing natural gas from the same guys who sell us oil today. This is hardly a long term solution.
We could however try to use bio diesel as much as possible, and use nuclear generated H2 to replace Natural Gas generated H2, and that would help on both fronts. Using heat pump style heating instead of natural gas would also be helpful, but only if we don't have power plants burning natural gas to produce electricity, as we do today.
Don't even get me started on coal though. If we're not going to go nuclear, then scratch those last two proposals, as using coal produced electricity for those would make things worse rather than better.
and most of that material is water, perhaps about a bathtub full, hardly worthy of note.
A more interesting comparison is something like total energy required and ore required. Assume we have two raw materials, rock and electricity. How much rock and how much electricity does it take to generate this thing. You can throw in water as a third raw material if you wish, but usually it's fairly unimportant.
Seems almost "warcraft" like, but that would be the logical way to measure things.
"This computer took 2 tons of ore, 5 MegaWatt hours of electricity, and 500 gallons of water, in the process it released X grams of CO2 (directly, not double counting the energy here....) and X grams of non-recycled industrial waste. "
Would be quite simple at that point, don't you think? Just make every product have a sticker saying as much, and then any product assembled from disparate pieces can just sum their contributions, add in anything else consumed in the assembly and testing, and sticker the result.
It's more complicated than this.
Fluorescents also don't work very well in low temperatures or high humidity (outside, or in bathrooms), so the're somewhat picky. Also, CF bulbs are generally larger and only come in "white", no color choices (that I've ever seen).
In terms of cost though, a CF bulb will clobber a current LED bulb, it puts out more light per watt, and lasts about as long, furthermore it doesn't dim (much) as it ages. Also, CF bulbs are cheaper ($5 or $6 bucks, less if you look around a little, and these are NYC prices).
Basically, the world would be much better off if there was a $5.00 tax on each incandescent bulb. Use CF bulbs in all the normal indoor fixtures, and then either use LED bulbs where CFs don't work, or bite the bullet and pay the tax. It would save us collectively a mountain of money and energy.
Good points across the board. In fact, hydrogen is a real pain to work with, and they might be better off converting it to something like methanol (or perhaps ethanol, if that can be done). Such conversions from raw hydrogen to simple alcohols can often be done with somewhat better than 50% (maybe 75%) efficiency already, and would have the side effect of making the fuel much easier to work with.
The real consumer of hydrogen is actually industry. A good means of producing hydrogen fairly cheaply (*cough* nuclear-thermal-breakdown *cough*) could help industry immensely by replacing most of the natural gas needed for producing things like gasoline and amonia by way of hydrogen. They could also pretty easily thermally de-polymerize trash (and any sort of organic waste) into oils and gasses of virtually any composition by adding more or less hydrogen as needed.
That's the realy tactic we should take, but of course we won't, because environmentalists despise all things nuclear, andwould much rather have hydrogen generated from electricity from coal burning power plants than an actual clean and carbon free fuel.
Actually, the scientists know exactly what to do with them. Pyro-metalurgy, partitioning, and then burial of a few of the partitions. It's the rabid NIMBYists who don't know what to do about it, and unfortunately, the decision appears to be theirs to make.
Dare to dream. We'd need something on the order of 1 billion windmills to provide for all our energy needs.
Think about what a mess 300 million people have made of the country, now think of three HUGE windmills per person. And of course they don't work when there's no wind, so we'd need a HUGE distribution grid as well as powerlines going to each and every one of those 1 billion installations. This is something like 1 windmill every 100 meters in every direction throughout the continental US.
Who will build these billion windmills, who will maintain them and the powerlines strung all over the country? Who will tolerate the windmills in suburbia, Manhattan, Yellowstone, ANWR, etc.....Who will put up with the blackouts during heat waves (which tend to have very little wind).
Do some basic math and you'll weep every time someone says we could get all our energy from windmills.
1) Use voting machines like the ones Nevada developed. Fully electronic, don't allow mistakes, and let the voter verify their receipt, and then have it dropped in the ballot box.
2) Privacy concerns aside, in order to vote you should have to provide a thumb print. Already if the feds want your prints they can just grab your voter registration card and dust it, so this wouldn't really change anything. After the election, woe to anyone who has more than one thumb print floating around.
3) Everyone votes. None of this "if you're convicted..." or "if you've moved lately...." or anything else. If you vote in a state, you pay taxes there (in addition to anywhere else you need to pay taxes), so you're penalized for not voting in your home state, but it can be done. If you vote in two places, see #2 above. Once we start letting people be stripped of the right to vote, where does it end. You say felons can't vote, I would say churchgoers shouldn't be able to vote (separation of church and state?), it never ends. In addition, the purge lists end up as a tool for descrimination. Most of the people on those lists nationwide DO NOT belong there. Just check it after the fact and punish anyone who voted twice.
Those would be my reforms. In addition, states should all function like Maine. You get a vote for winning each congressional district, and two more for winning the state overall.
Hardly objective, but....
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.h
In any case, what's an order of magnitude between friends. It's more than 0 (or 1 in a really bad year for nuclear), and that should be sufficient.
Actually, I was rushed, so my response was sub standard. However, keep in mind that we could use breeders, which would make roughly 200 times as much fuel available (because they can use it all, rather than about
Fortunately, 5 billion tons is not the extend of our true reserves. With electricity at $.04/KWh we find that roughly a million (10^9) joules costs about $10. Since Uranium produces 10^13 joules of electrical power (in a reactor that's a little less than 30% efficient) we find that the cost of the elecricity produced from a pound of Uranium is about 10^5 dollars, or roughly 100 thousand dollars. Until the cost of raw Uranium (per pound) approaches this figure, the uranium cost will be a rounding error. That means that the real price that could be supported by fast breeders is somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars per pound, rather than the rediculous $130/pound number that the site shows.
The simplest way to resolve this is just to take a simple, dilute source that could be processed for less than 1,000/pound, figure out how much is in that, and then take that as a lower bound. For Uranium, seawater is a pretty good place to start. Granite also has plenty, but seawater makes the calculations really easy...
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/coh
So, with fast breeders capable of supporting Uranium prices of $100,000/ton, how much Uranium do we have (worst case scanrio, we never find more on land and we use seawater once we use what we've already found), about 7 million years. Maybe a little less if we go buck wild with the energy use and use inefficient everything.
If we don't have fusion by 7 million years from now, we deserve to be in the dark. Also, note that there is at least 3x as much Thorium as Uranium, and breeders can use that too, so really we're pushing 30 million years as a lower bound once all is said and done.
Of course, if you think I'm being too optimistic, then just slash those figures by a factor of 2, 5, 10, 1000, doesn't matter, it's still a REALLY long time.
Does that answer your question?
Here's a few....
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/u/
This indicates that there are proven reserves of Uranium up to at least 5 million tons.
Here's some tables of energy content on fuels....
http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/E
The total energy needs of the world are currently around 10^21 joules. A breeder reactor could burn U-238 just like U-235, and would get a little more energy out of it than it gets from U-235.
5 million tons of Uranium....
5*10^6*7.4*10^16 = 4*10^23, or at least 100 years proven.
The price of Uranium could go to thousands of dollars per ton before it became unuseable as a power source, soo that 5 million tons is a vast underestimate. At a few grand we're dealing with probably something like a billion tons or more.
You didn't distinguish, so neither did I. China produces less CO2 than the US, it is true, however they produce more of essentially every other kind of pollution. When people say "air pollution" I assume they're talking mostly about the stuff that would give you lung cancer eventually (lead, mercury SO4, NOX, O3, etc...), rather than the relatively benign emissions that cause a more long term global problem (CO2 and CFCs come to mind).
Of all the components of air pollution I just mentioned, China is vastly worse on alll of them except CO2, and with their coal based economy they'll be producing more CO2 soon anyway (though not per capita). You talk of a society that respects the environment, china is not it. It is only an economic accident that they don't produce much CO2, not the result of some long standing policy.
I address nuclear waste in my other posts, I won't repeat it all here. You can easily look up what the scientific establishment wants done with it. Some things to look up... "pyrometalurgical" would be a good place to start. You can also find a table of isotopes and easily calculate how much actual waste would be produced in the course of generating all the world's energy for a year, it's not much. It would easily fit in even a medium sized ship.
Also, keep in mind that of nuclear waste, most of the elements are either...
1) Stable already
2) Short lived (a few decades or less half life).
3) Actinides that can be burned by a fast reactor.
Just for fun, go through those tables and calculate what fraction of the nuclear waste doesn't fall into one of those categories (long lived, but not burnable), it's a very VERY small fraction. Simple extraction from the waste stream would make most of these issues a non-issue.
Furthermore, radioactive waste becomes safe with time, which is more than can be said of heavy metals like Mercury and Lead. Coal plants spew both (in HUGE quantities) into the atmosphere, so much so that most fish throughout the world is now significantly tainted by mercury, almost entirely due to coal burning. However, lets assume these heavy metals can be sequeestered, what then. You want nuclear waste containment to last until the waste is safe (X thousand years.....), so clearly by the same logic the containers to hold mercury and lead waste should have to last forever, as those wastes will never be safe. Nuclear is already held to a standard that would be impossibly high for any other industry, and that's ok because there is so little nuclear waste that it's not such a problem too do this. The problem comes when people claim that this impossibly high standard is not nearly enough, and though coal can kill 20,000 people a year in the US alone, nuclear must conclusively prove that it will never (over the course of millions of years to come) harm anybody in order to be even considered as an alternative. That's just insanity.
Your numbers are WAYYYY off. No reputable source will claim anything less than 100 years, and it's stretching reality to claim that it's less than 1000 with even the bare minimum of care.
Uranium is more common than Tin, and it doesn't take very much to produce a lot of energy. The cost of the Uranium itself is a rounding error in the cost of the electricity from nuclear power, consequently the market could tolerate HUGE prices for it and still be just fine. Yeah, at the rediculously low current prices of Uranium, we only have maybe 100 years worth of supply, but at reasonable prices (prices where perhaps 1/3 of the price of electricity comes form the price of Uranium) that number would be at least in the thousands of years.
You are literally smoking crack. I've been to Chunking (spelling is probably incorrect) and when you step off the airplane, the pollution is so bad you can taste it. The sky is brown 365 days a year there, and the Yangze river is an open sewer, the color of the water matches the color of the sky, brown.
The ocean near the chinese mainland is completely brown, the same color as a rainpuddle on an especially filthy street. In the US, the sky is blue (outside of texas), and the water usually is too. When you fly back from China (as I did), you see the water and sky off the north american west coast and it's a color of saphire that you forgot existed. It sure doesn't exist in china.
You should acutally go to this place you claim to know of, it would be an eye opener. If you hurry, you can see the three gorges before they are flooded forever (maybe).
Unfortunately, the radical greens have shot down the only really viable means for radically reducing CO2 output, nuclear power. It seems odd to see them whine on one hand about too much CO2, and then whine on the other hand that people would *gasp* actually consider using a CO2 free source of electricity.
If you want to reduce CO2, ban coal. Simple as that. Coal is responsible for more than half of our CO2 (correct me if my numbers are wrong), and banning it would do more than anything else. Just get rid of coal and leave people with the choice of either paying ludicrous prices for gas power, or using nuclear. The NIMBYism would end real quick as soon as people couldn't choose to just pollute the whole world evenly and cheaply with coal burning.
Nothing else would matter much other than that. Natural Gas and Oil produce far less CO2 per unit of energy than coal, and they'll run out anyway within a couple of decades, so it's a really bounded problem. Coal however has sufficient supply, and produces so much CO2 per unit of energy, that it's the only one that could truly decimate the planet. It's also responsible for all the fish you eat being loaded with mercury and lead, and it releases more radioactive gunk into the atmosphere than all the world's nuclear powerplants (including cherenoble) ever did.
And this would be made worse by Kyoto. The only way to prevent pollution from being exported is to have GLOBAL restrictions on pollution. Local restrictions just cause the polluters to move around, global restrictions will actually cause them to clean up. Kyoto doesn't apply over much of the world, so it's a local restriction, and won't be very helpful.
This is a troll, but I'll bite.
The Kyoto protocol was specifically designed to hamper american economic dominance, is it such a wonder that we didn't sign it? I'm probably more of an environmentalist than most of the environmentalists, but give me a break. A treaty that places tight restrictions on CO2 coming from developed countries, but no restrictions what so ever on developing countries like China is really going to just result in dirty industries moving to china where they can get away from all pollution controls. There's no reason to ask the US taxpayers to actually pay for an outsourcing of thier jobs when the net result will actually be to increase worldwide pollution, now is there.
If the treaty had reasonable constraints on all countries, then the US should sign it, but a treaty that seeks to move dirty industries from the US (and EU, though to a lesser degree) where they at least have to watch their sulfur and NOX emissions to a country like China where it's the wild west, should not be signed by the US or anyone else.
A far more effective policy would be to put a global price tag on CO2 emissions, and then hold EVERY country responsible, using the UN and WTO to fine those that failed to pony up their fraction of the costs. That would actually make sense, but to say it's forbidden here, but if you move over some imaginary line, then you're free to pollute all you want, that's just stupid.
ok, exactly my point, and you're demonstrating the green position quite well.
Where do you get the other half, you know, the half you do use?
Do you get it from coal or nuclear? You see, you're left with exactly the same choices whether you're generating 1 watt or 2 watts, so what's the point of bringing up conservation issues as if that somehow changes the playing field and makes new options for power generation viable, they don't.
Nuclear is better than coal for producing any (reasonable) number of watts, so your disputes about the actual number of watts needed bring nothing to the argument and are really nothing more than an attempted diversion. Very republican of you.
If you can come up with a theory explaining why only needing 10^18 joules a year rather than 2*10^18 joules a year fundamentally changes the economic/social comparison of coal and nuclear, then I'd love to hear it, otherwise, please stick to the point.
This is not insightful. Uranium is more common than tin, and it will not run out in our lifetimes. There are very few countries on earth without sufficient uranium to keep them fueled for many decades to come.
Nuclear power can generate as much energy as we need, for at least several million years.
Now, we might be able to conserve energy, but how much? Are you going to go without air conditioning? Are you going to go without lights, radio, television?
As long as people use energy, we'll have to generate energy, whether it's a little or a lot. This concept seems to be completely beyond the greens, who seem to think that if we all used half as much energy we wouldn't have to generate the rest.
Since it's accepted that we will need some quantity of energy (whether its a little or a lot), there's no reason to get it from coal as opposed to nuclear, no matter how much or little it is. Nuclear is simply better. It kills fewer people, releases no pollution, and is actually cheaper once you start factoring in medical costs. It also doesn't cause the world's fish stocks to be laced with mercury (as they are today).
Nucler power could wean the US off of coal and (partially) natural gas, a laudable goal, but not oil. Oil isn't used to make electricity, and nuclear power isn't used to fill up cars.
When plug in hybrids are available, nuclear will be able to mostly eliminate oil, but not before.
However, in the meantime, we should be building up our nuclear capacity so we can ditch coal/natural gas, and then when the day comes that we all have plug in hybrids, sure nuclear will partially eliminate oil.
Until then we can use bio-diesel. Please don't even mention hydrogen unless you know what you're talking about. Generating hydrogen for industrial processes (including oil refining) is a decent use for nuclear as well, but it's not going to be too useful for cars, as it takes up too much space, even whe compressed or cryogenically liquified.
They only mirror the results because CNN adjusted them to remove this little embarrassment.
If you saw the exit polls when the polls actually closed (9-10 oclock or so) they favored John Kerry by a significant (2-4%) margin. Only later (around 1:00 am) did the exit polls start to drift towards the actual numbers reported by the polls.
Where did these numbers come from? Were there more exit poll results reported at 1:00 AM? It seems odd that this little discrepency was silently corrected once it was determined who would "win". I'm not a conspiracy thorist, but presumably the exit polls that were inaccurate at 10:00 when the polls closed should still be inaccurate this morning, but that is not the case.
Something odd happened here, don't accept cnn's exit poll numbers.
We should be somewhat careful about crafting radical public policy changes in response to terrorist attacks however. Whether they are right or wrong, changing our policies after an attack will be percieved as victory, then it's open season. Every nut job with some explosives thinks that all he has to do is kill enought people and he'll get official US sponsorship for his cause, not good.
I'm not saying they're wrong about everything, I'm just saying that attempts at appeasement are probably going to be counterproductive. Especially considering that I think the actual friction between the middle east is more closely modeled as the friction between democracy and theocracy, rather than imperial power vs imperial subjects. If you think about it, a lot of places have been (and still are) dominated by imperialism, but there is only one middle east, what's different about the fundamentalist islamic countries as compared to, say, Colombia. It's probably not the degree of foreign domination, or the access to a simple (perhaps illicit) source of work free income, yet the outcome is different, the biggest difference I can see is national structure. Colombia is an oligarchy (nominally a democracy), and Iran (Afghanistan was) is a theocracy (give or take). Even N. Korea doesn't really directly sponsor terrorists, and they have it worse than anybody, in addition to having flat out more weapons than any of the middle eastern countries.
I think the simplistic "we screwed them, now they try to kill us, lets be nice to them" view has some merit, but there is so much more complexity than that. Radically different world views cause extreme friction between the countries sponsoring them. Free market vs. Communism almost caused a world war, and Democracy (or even Atheism) vs Theocracy (or fundamentalism) is having the same effect.
The good news is that eventually theocracy will simply sink into a sea of atheism (judging by history), and this problem will go away on its own, just as communism did. The bad news is that until that happens, if we appease one madman, we'll just have ten more jump up to take his place. You may think they'd be happy to just let us live our lives if we lefft them alone, but I don't think so. Witness the muslims eradicating the christians from Sudan, for instance.
There are no simple answers, and this is the difference between the presidential canidates. Bush always thinks that things are black and white, and there is a simple answer for everything. Kerry sees nuance, and neither completely supports nor completely opposes most courses of action, and a small ammendment to a bill can change his mind either way. People see this as weakness, rather than as the wisdom that it is. Don't fall into the same trap. This is a genuinely hard problem, and "quick fixes" will leave us worse off than we were before.
Now, I'm not going to get into whether the Iraq war was right or wrong, as that's really a small parrt of a pre-existing problem. Furthermore, despite the best efforts of Bush to make it into a disaster, it might just turn out OK in the end anyway, only time will tell. What is a little more certain is that it wouldn't have improved on its own, so it seems that not a whole lot was lost by our course of action, but Bush's insistence on using it as an exuse to rob the american public negates any actual (as opposed to fabricated) justification there may have been in the first place.
Given that we are where we are, I don't think that just pulling the troops from Iraq would cause anything other than a bloody mess. Nor do I think that siding with one side or the other over Israel/Palestine would actually make anybody happy. In fact, I think that even complete detachment from the middle east for the US wouldn't help much (at this point), and might even start a few wars (civil or otherwise). Any of these simplistic courses of action are probably doomed to failure. I don't think hatred for us will be diminished if we leave the area and allow massive genocides and wars to occur. Much