I'd never really thought of this, but it makes good sense both militarily and environmentally.
It doesn't make sense environmentally. Biofuels produced by plants or animals are a dead end, the efficiency is just too low and in some cases even negative.
Algae-based fuels may have a chance, and once solar cells make electricity dirt cheap then turning hydrogen into e.g. methane may have a chance too. Until then, the only alternative to fossil oil is to turn coal into oil, which is even worse for the environment.
Actually it is dead easy these days. You buy an inverter which plugs into any socket. It doesn't support "island mode", so if the grid power fails, the solar power goes out too.
They are not universally legal, so check the local laws. They are about as safe as anything gets when electricity is involved.
I bet it wouldn't have helped to keep the reactors running. Almost all large power plants require grid power in order to run, very few are equipped for running in "island mode".
Once 30 years have passed without incident, the industry and the regulators get complacent. The same thing happens in e.g. finance.
We have the technology to make nuclear power perfectly safe. It is just too tempting to cut a corner here or there when nothing bad has happened for a long time.
There is a similar situation in Denmark with the website Boliga. They attempt to list all properties which are for sale along with information about price changes and what the properties were sold for in the past (if that information is public). Real estate brokers and sellers are not particularly interested in buyers getting access to such information and so they are trying various things to block Boliga from providing that service. So far the competition authorities have forced the brokers to not block access to Boliga's scrapers, but this does not extend to photos.
Of course that means that the independent brokers who are not part of the collusion called Dansk Ejendomsmæglerforening are getting excellent exposure on Boliga, simply because their properties show up with photos...
In a free market, if you can sell certificates for $5 with lousy security and $10 with decent security, and you have a 10% risk of losing everything with lousy security and 0% with decent security, the companies with decent security go bankrupt rapidly. After all, why pay $10 when you get the same for $5? A breach of ANY registrar is as bad as a breach of YOUR registrar.
I hate MSSQL as much as anyone, but it does (in later versions at least) support cursors and ROW_NUMBER. It is a bit silly to not support FETCH FIRST in 2011, but hey, it's doing better than Oracle.
Backwards compatibility does not prevent Oracle from supporting FETCH FIRST. See Limiting result sets. Row value constructors wouldn't be a problem to handle either, especially since Oracle already has the functionality just with a silly syntax.
Yes you can load follow with nuclear. However, you don't save anything except a bit of nuclear fuel when you do that. Since nuclear fuel is approximately free compared to the fixed expenses of running a reactor, you are just throwing energy away.
The problems with nuclear are waste and safety. If you can get someone else to build a reactor for you in some random country, you are avoiding the problems and still reaping the benefits. Why would anyone be against that?
The French reactors are run by the government monopoly and they have the luxury of government-guaranteed loans and liability limits. Buying electricity from France gives you the benefits of nuclear power with none of the drawbacks.
Steady output is useless when demand is variable. And before you say "France does load-following nuclear", remember that getting less power for the same amount of money is easy and pointless. If nuclear is to save us, it needs to be able to provide peak power, and that means that maximum output has to be cut 75% or 80% to get total for 24 hours to compare to proper load-following generation like gas fired power plants.
A lot fewer than those who run their 7kW+ climate control systems 24x7. Or water heaters. Or dehumidifiers. Etc.
Approximately no one then. Climate control systems and water heaters and dehumidifiers automatically regulate their power use to the requirements. They do not use maximum power continually.
Sure, they probably estimate that the risk to their fortunes from climate change is larger than the cost of having to pay a bit more for energy. It is certainly likely that their position is based on a cost/benefit analysis. Is that a bad thing? Liberalism is based on the belief that if we all do what is best for ourselves, that will lead to the best overall outcome for us all.
According to the wikipedia page on Solar energy, total solar flux for the Earth is 3,850,000 EJ. Primary energy use of the entire world population is listed as 487 EJ. Assuming that this solar flux is evenly spread over land and ocean (certainly wrong, but probably not horribly wrong), that leaves 1,155,000EJ on land surface. Panels are actually more like 10% efficient, although you can do a bit better where it really matters with solar thermal. So then we're at 115,000EJ, which means that we need to cover less that 0.5% of land surface with solar collectors. If we place the solar collectors smartly instead of randomly, we can probably cut that in half too. So yes, 3% of the land surface if we go with 5 times the total energy use of the world today. Again according to Wikipedia, 40% of land surface is in use for some kind of farming/pasture.
You increase the cost of producing energy until its cost equals its production cost plus negative externalities (pollution etc). Then the invisible hand sorts out who gets to fly to the South Pacific and who gets a PC.
Hint: Energy would have to become AWFULLY expensive to prevent Page and Brin from flying to the South Pacific.
You are vastly underestimating the amount of solar power available. It is true that all exponential growth must eventually come to an end, but at the point when we collect even 1% of the solar power available, 700W for every person in the world will be a completely trivial amount.
Solar power requires completely trivial amounts of land compared to farming, at least if we contend ourselves with using perhaps 5 times as much energy as we use today. I think most people could handle that sacrifice.
So, when these people come saying how you need to bike to work, or buy a hybrid, and it's so great that gas prices are high because they encourage people to do these things just remember: You and 25 others have to do that to balance out one weekend trip.
When a rich person buys a Ferrari, they use resources and manpower which could have provided 13 people with cars. When they do that, it means that you and 25 other people have to double how long you make a car last to balance out just one Ferrari.
There are rich people arguing for increased taxes right now. Do you call them hypocrites when they don't call for taxes which make everyone equally well off? Have you completely given up on capitalism?
Rich people are allowed to use more energy than poor people. That is one of the very fundamental differences between rich people and poor people. Energy is currently priced too low, but fixing that does not mean that poor people get to use as much as rich people.
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I'd never really thought of this, but it makes good sense both militarily and environmentally.
It doesn't make sense environmentally. Biofuels produced by plants or animals are a dead end, the efficiency is just too low and in some cases even negative.
Algae-based fuels may have a chance, and once solar cells make electricity dirt cheap then turning hydrogen into e.g. methane may have a chance too. Until then, the only alternative to fossil oil is to turn coal into oil, which is even worse for the environment.
The Russians use nuclear icebreakers. That doesn't really scale for most commercial traffic, and now you don't need them in summer anymore.
The Google TV's from Sony use Intel chips according to their own marketing at least. Will Sony give up on Google TV or switch to ARM?
Actually it is dead easy these days. You buy an inverter which plugs into any socket. It doesn't support "island mode", so if the grid power fails, the solar power goes out too.
They are not universally legal, so check the local laws. They are about as safe as anything gets when electricity is involved.
I bet it wouldn't have helped to keep the reactors running. Almost all large power plants require grid power in order to run, very few are equipped for running in "island mode".
My claim is also that it is impossible to ensure a sufficient level of regulation. After 30 years, society forgets why the rules were put in place.
One of the few exceptions are religious prohibitions, but I am not sure that letting monks run the nuclear power plants is the right answer.
Once 30 years have passed without incident, the industry and the regulators get complacent. The same thing happens in e.g. finance.
We have the technology to make nuclear power perfectly safe. It is just too tempting to cut a corner here or there when nothing bad has happened for a long time.
We need an "Internet Terms of Use". "Anything on the internet that was meant to be accessible by the public is automatically public domain.
Are you sure that is what you want? It would mean that you could not apply the GPL to downloadable software.
I'm an advocate of abolishing copyright so I'm all in favour of course.
There is a similar situation in Denmark with the website Boliga. They attempt to list all properties which are for sale along with information about price changes and what the properties were sold for in the past (if that information is public). Real estate brokers and sellers are not particularly interested in buyers getting access to such information and so they are trying various things to block Boliga from providing that service. So far the competition authorities have forced the brokers to not block access to Boliga's scrapers, but this does not extend to photos.
Of course that means that the independent brokers who are not part of the collusion called Dansk Ejendomsmæglerforening are getting excellent exposure on Boliga, simply because their properties show up with photos...
In a free market, if you can sell certificates for $5 with lousy security and $10 with decent security, and you have a 10% risk of losing everything with lousy security and 0% with decent security, the companies with decent security go bankrupt rapidly. After all, why pay $10 when you get the same for $5? A breach of ANY registrar is as bad as a breach of YOUR registrar.
I hate MSSQL as much as anyone, but it does (in later versions at least) support cursors and ROW_NUMBER. It is a bit silly to not support FETCH FIRST in 2011, but hey, it's doing better than Oracle.
Backwards compatibility does not prevent Oracle from supporting FETCH FIRST. See Limiting result sets. Row value constructors wouldn't be a problem to handle either, especially since Oracle already has the functionality just with a silly syntax.
Encryption does not prevent DoS. Duh.
Yes you can load follow with nuclear. However, you don't save anything except a bit of nuclear fuel when you do that. Since nuclear fuel is approximately free compared to the fixed expenses of running a reactor, you are just throwing energy away.
The problems with nuclear are waste and safety. If you can get someone else to build a reactor for you in some random country, you are avoiding the problems and still reaping the benefits. Why would anyone be against that?
The French reactors are run by the government monopoly and they have the luxury of government-guaranteed loans and liability limits. Buying electricity from France gives you the benefits of nuclear power with none of the drawbacks.
Steady output is useless when demand is variable. And before you say "France does load-following nuclear", remember that getting less power for the same amount of money is easy and pointless. If nuclear is to save us, it needs to be able to provide peak power, and that means that maximum output has to be cut 75% or 80% to get total for 24 hours to compare to proper load-following generation like gas fired power plants.
A lot fewer than those who run their 7kW+ climate control systems 24x7. Or water heaters. Or dehumidifiers. Etc.
Approximately no one then. Climate control systems and water heaters and dehumidifiers automatically regulate their power use to the requirements. They do not use maximum power continually.
Sure, they probably estimate that the risk to their fortunes from climate change is larger than the cost of having to pay a bit more for energy. It is certainly likely that their position is based on a cost/benefit analysis. Is that a bad thing? Liberalism is based on the belief that if we all do what is best for ourselves, that will lead to the best overall outcome for us all.
According to the wikipedia page on Solar energy, total solar flux for the Earth is 3,850,000 EJ. Primary energy use of the entire world population is listed as 487 EJ. Assuming that this solar flux is evenly spread over land and ocean (certainly wrong, but probably not horribly wrong), that leaves 1,155,000EJ on land surface. Panels are actually more like 10% efficient, although you can do a bit better where it really matters with solar thermal. So then we're at 115,000EJ, which means that we need to cover less that 0.5% of land surface with solar collectors. If we place the solar collectors smartly instead of randomly, we can probably cut that in half too. So yes, 3% of the land surface if we go with 5 times the total energy use of the world today. Again according to Wikipedia, 40% of land surface is in use for some kind of farming/pasture.
T
100kW for 100 average homes? What exactly are they smoking? You can't even run a hair dryer in all 100 homes for that.
How many people run hair dryers 24x7?
You increase the cost of producing energy until its cost equals its production cost plus negative externalities (pollution etc). Then the invisible hand sorts out who gets to fly to the South Pacific and who gets a PC.
Hint: Energy would have to become AWFULLY expensive to prevent Page and Brin from flying to the South Pacific.
You are vastly underestimating the amount of solar power available. It is true that all exponential growth must eventually come to an end, but at the point when we collect even 1% of the solar power available, 700W for every person in the world will be a completely trivial amount.
Solar power requires completely trivial amounts of land compared to farming, at least if we contend ourselves with using perhaps 5 times as much energy as we use today. I think most people could handle that sacrifice.
So, when these people come saying how you need to bike to work, or buy a hybrid, and it's so great that gas prices are high because they encourage people to do these things just remember: You and 25 others have to do that to balance out one weekend trip.
When a rich person buys a Ferrari, they use resources and manpower which could have provided 13 people with cars. When they do that, it means that you and 25 other people have to double how long you make a car last to balance out just one Ferrari.
There are rich people arguing for increased taxes right now. Do you call them hypocrites when they don't call for taxes which make everyone equally well off? Have you completely given up on capitalism?
Rich people are allowed to use more energy than poor people. That is one of the very fundamental differences between rich people and poor people. Energy is currently priced too low, but fixing that does not mean that poor people get to use as much as rich people.