Thanks for showing what you can do with statistics. I think Mark Twain did something similar, showing that since the Mississippi river was getting four miles longer every year, by now it would be sticking into the gulf of Mexico about 300 miles.
You totally overlook the fact that 15x background is just an average, in reality you have micro-particles putting out many REM at their surface, which is what your lungs are exposed to once you inhale the particles. Your lung does not feel any better knowing its "average" dose is millirems-- what's significant is that one particle banging out REMS to the adjacent DNA. It does the nearby DNA no good to know that 10^22 other nucleotides are not being cleaved.
Plus your thyroid and many fish concentrate radioactive iodine and other elements by factors of, say, 10,000 and more.
The nuke industry just loves to bruit-about average numbers, even though they're totally meaningless.
Wrongo Bub. TMI was a huge disaster for the nuclear industry, as it revealed that the status quo was totally inadequate.
So many aspects of the design, thought to be first rate, turned out to be totally foobar. The stuck valve, a critical item, turned out to be prone to sticking, as it was based on a valve designed to handle high-fat raw milk, an excellent lubricant. The control room design was worse than useless, with critical water-level guages hidden off in a corner. A computer system that ran 20 minutes behind real-time. Dozens of blinking and hypnotizing alarms, with no hierarchy of priority. Total unmitigated disaster.
Investors rightly saw that what had been touted as the best of all possible worlds was actually quite awful.
And it was not a "small controlled release". The original overflows into the auxiliary buildings was uncontrolled and could be measured at 15 times above background level many miles away.
There are two very simple scaling laws at play here.
First off the wind power intercepted goes up as the square of the rotor length. So larger is better, a lot larger is a whole lot better. You also get the free benefit of stronger winds as you have to raise the center point as to not hit the ground.
Next the power goes up as the CUBE of the wind speed. So it really pays big to find a real windy spot.
So your basic $30,000 small, low windmill placed on your typical house are real big losers.
A coal plant is very slow to start up, so it can't be used to replace solar power when it gets cloudy. For that you need a gas or oil powered peaking plant, just like I wrote.
>As for being able to get a loan for 30 years, it is easy to wrap it into a mortgage.
You miss the point. It's unlikely the installation will last 30 years in Florida. After the first good hurricane you'd be paying TWO loans. And so on.
>there are many solar panels over 30-years-old that are up and running just fine.
We care not a whit about the long-tail of very expensive solar panels used by the phone companies. We're more interested in the longevity of typical cells used in Florida. Even the trade associations give 20 to 25 year lifetimes, and that may be for a useless degradation to 50% power.
You're fudging. You can't just tap into the grid, most places have negative extra capacity. Even if you did there's a cost involved. And having to run AC a lot is not a plus for your side, it just jacks up the amount of solar panels needed. It's basically insane to collect electricity at 15% efficiency to run individual AC units when a solar boiler could collect 100% to make chilled water at more than triple the efficiency. Madness.
And playing the futures market does not make a watt-hour of renewable energy or save anybody a penny-- it just moves some money from one set of gamblers to others.
You're fudging the numbers. You have to borrow TODAY, and the loan can't go out for 30 years as the panels are unlikely to last that long. I assumed they'd last 20 years, so you're perpetually paying $2,200 a year at least. And you can't count subsidies or rebates or tax credits as that's just robbing everyone else to subsidize you, or if every place had these panels you'd just be robbing yourself. And Florida doesn't use coal very much, mostly very expensive natural gas to run the generators. And yes, you forgot the cost of those generators and power lines.
Ah, no. This is the same company that did the math for putting up wind turbines at their nuclear plant, saw the dismal numbers, and went ahead and BUILT THEM ANYWAY. Even though there is not a single spot in Florida that's consistently windy enough to even approach break-even.
Photovoltaics will be cost-effective as soon as you see non-govt, non-utility folks putting their money into them with no muni bonds, legislative mandates or tax incentives. Not any decade anytime soon.
But let's see how much this is going to cost John Q. Resident.
$300 million divided by say 20,000 residents is $15K/resident. Add in the cost of money and amortization and you're talking at least $2,200 a year.
Plus they need to build a regular power station to handle 100% of the load for when it gets cloudy and rainy, which in Florida is a non-negligible part of the time. Plus the power lines to bring in all that power to the city. No, you can't assume the rest of their system has that much extra capacity in lines or generators.
It's not a terribly attractive deal for the actual ratepayers.
>But some of these projects, if the Nuking had been done then, would now be ready to use because the radioactive shit would have decayed mostly. What if the digging had been done fifty years ago, and we could now extract the oil shale? Why not blow some shit up now so it will be pre-blown up and decayed when we need it.
Nice idea, but the 90+% of the Plutonium that does not fission does not decay. It has a 28,000 year half life, so the oil and gas you drain out 50 years later still has 99.4% of the original Plutonium, which is not a good thing to breathe after you burn the oil and gas.
Seeing as terrestrial photovoltaics are loike 8x more expensive than other power sources, orbital ones should be literally and figuratively, out of sight.
This is what happens when they try to legislate green laws with total disregard to the laws of economics and thermodnamics.
I wonder what California ratepayers are going to say. They already pay the highest rates in the nation IIRC. This scheme can't come in under 30x the average cost of power. What a clusterfarg.
In general, good intentions are overruled by individual and corporate greed and sneakyness.
The lawmakers may spend an hour thinking over the consequences of a bill, while the folks affected have all sorts of time and inclination to poke holes in the laws. Guess which side usually wins?
It was tried back in the 60's with "project Plowshare". Blowing up new harbors, blowing up gas wells, etc, etc, etc. Did not pan out. Radioactive gas spewing into your home through the cooktop, not a big win. Radioactive dust and water from making a new harbor, not too keen either, and this was before peta and greenpeace et al.
As just one data point, a certain place replaced a COBOL app that ran with millisecond response time just fine on a 2 megabyte 1 MIPS mainframe, replaced it with a spankin' fresh Java app that ran about 2000 times slower on an 8 gig 16-CPU, 800MHz very expensive water-cooled mainframe.
Now it could have been due to having a bunch of neophyte Java weenies doing the coding, but I'm just sayin', when there's three orders of speed and 3.5 orders of RAM, there may be something significant in the implementation language.
I wish journalists would either learn a little bit about electricity, or not write about it.
This story has things kinda sideways when not completely wrong.
"Power factor" has been known about for over 100 years now. It's not anything new or particularly bad in CCFL's. Lots of industrial loads and electric vehicles have inherently bad power factors, all of which can be controlled at the source, the transmission line, or at the load with, guess what, "power factor controllers".
Anything with a switching-mode power supply will have, unless corrected, a lousy power factor. With most homes having a TV or computer or two, all with SMPS's, the bad power factor is already in the house. CCFL's wil only make a minor contribution.
And NO, definitely NOT, the power plant does not have to generate the extra watts- they're imaginary watts-- voltage when there's no current, and current when there's no voltage. Since power is voltage TIMES current, when one of them is zero there is no real power being drawn.
There is a *slight* increase in losses as higher amps being draws do result in a *very small* extra loss in the intervening wires.
When they get real simple 100-year old princiles wrong, how much can you trust the other "facts" in the article?
There is no point in arguing about wattage of your hair dryer. We're talking about the power available on a solar vehicle, not the maximum power of some rather poorly chosen simile.
The real point is that a solar powered vehicle is only going to have one or two horsepower available at best on a very sunny day-- fine for a bicycle or rickshaw but not so good for the kind of vehicle most of us need.
Your typical bathroom outlet starts getting hot at anything over ten amps, 1200 watts, which is not even twice as much. And since the hair-dryer was a simile to begin with....
it's going to slow down to 70.7%
>If there were no batteries to average out the ups and downs.
Batteries have to be carried uphill too, so you gain some and you lose some.
A hair dryer draws around 750 watts, which is a convenient number too, as that's about 1 horsepower. Let's assume the electric motor is 100% efficient too, just for simplicity.
So you're saying the car can do 60MPH on one horsepower.
That's quite doable with a very aerodynamic design and low-friction tires.
But the hill-climbing ability is mighty weak. One horsepower can lift 550 pounds one foot per second.
So if this vehicle and rider weight 550 pounds, it's going to slow down to 70.7% of 60 MPH if it encounters a hill with a 60 foot rise per mile, just a bit under 1% slope. A 3% slope is going to slow it to a crawl. Not too good anyplace but Kansas.
And no, you don't get it all back on the downhill slope.
It's not a failure, it's part of the learning curve. Every large rocket design, except maybe for the Sat 5 had multiple launch failures the first few times. The US Atlas had like FIVE blowups before a successful launch. Ditto the Redstone and Jupiter and Vanguard. The Atlas was never very reliable, blowing up a good 25% of the time.
What's mildly of concern was if the NK's had sufficient telemetry downlink to figure out what went wrong this time so they can try harder in those weak areas next time.
It's hard to imagine a software glitch causing this exact behavior. And what's the problem with having Po-po HQ in a high crime area? Saves on commuting, at the very least.
AT least two police stations in my city are right in the heart of crime areas. But the rest are in less crimey areas. What's the problem?
(10) Just trying to spell vinyl will mess you up. (9) One word: boomerang (pattern). (8) With vinyl floors you can skate indoors and hit your head on the far wall.
(7) 100% vinyl floors on basement apartments. The noise from the guy upstairs with the stepmaster will drive anyone crazy.
(6) Most houses have vinyl floors somewhere. If you visit autistic homes and snoop around, you will almost always find some.
(5) One word: Plastics.
(4) If this were true then workers in the umbrella, raincoat, new car seat-installing, and shower-curtain industry would be drooling morons. More than expected, anyway.
(3) One word: falafel (Phalafel?) (Phatalate?)
(2) How can you resist not counting the squares each day to make sure none have gone missing?
(1) And the last one: Don't vinyl floor tiles also have formaldehyde plasticizers and asbestos fillers?
Next time I want to make a sloppy kindergarden finger-paint drawing I'm so there!
X-Y sensing pads have a long and dismal history-- They work fine for the first day but the slightest bit of moisture or grunge or wear and they go downhill in a hurry.
It's possible to sometimes find a really good engineer that can do several of these areas, but since the OP was so new, it's unlikely he'd be able to recognize the renissance EE.
Everybody has strong and weak areas. If this product involves a considerable investment, you don't want the whole project depending on one engineer being Mr. Wonderful and Mr. Perfect.
This industry has such a short memory. Some of you may remember the HP computer, the one with the butterfly on the screen? And the smiling actors touching the screen? HP blew about $85 million dollars advertising that computer and technology.
It turned out people did not like touching their screens, for many reasons:
(1) If the room temp is above 75F or your nervous about getting this paper done on time, you'll leave a smudge every time you touch the anti-reflective coating.
(2) A finger is not a very precise pointing tool.
(3) After 30 minutes of pointing you get the heavy-arm syndrome, or if you persist, the B-24 pilot arm. (B-24 had an extremely hard to turn and pull steering yoke-- B-24 pilots could be distinguished by their Schwartzernegger-sized biceps.).
(4) The third time your finger misses the "save" menu item and hits "exit", you swear and give up using the touchscreen.
Yes, I know, youngsters, you think touchscreen technology has improved over the last 15 years, but human fingers and arms and sweat glands have not.
If you're going to make a commercial product, and you want it to be manufacturable and have high yield and work reliably for more than a week, you need a lot of expert help.
You need an EE to design the circuit.
Then you need a manufacturing EE to redesign the circuit so it does not use any rare or known unreliable or hard to surface mount or single sourced parts.
Then you need a quality engineer who will redesign things so the hot voltage regulator is not right next to the electrolytic capacitors, and shuffle the pcb traces so they're less likely to short out from tin whiskers, and rearrange them for better ESD protection, and they will test it in an environmental chamber for performance over a wide temperature range.
Then you'll need a standards EE who will make sure it meets EU and US standards for safety and toxicity and flammability and electromagnetic emissions.
Then you need someone on site at the manufacturing facility to do QA and make sure they don't divert your product into the black or grey market.
Then you need enough extra time and money to do the whole thing over again if the original design still turns out to be unmanufacturable or have poor yield or reliability.
Don't feel too bad, when Apple set up their own disk drive manufacturing facility, the yield even after extensive tweaking was only about 40%. And that's with huge amounts of money and lots of experienced engineers in the area.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for showing what you can do with statistics. I think Mark Twain did something similar, showing that since the Mississippi river was getting four miles longer every year, by now it would be sticking into the gulf of Mexico about 300 miles.
You totally overlook the fact that 15x background is just an average, in reality you have micro-particles putting out many REM at their surface, which is what your lungs are exposed to once you inhale the particles. Your lung does not feel any better knowing its "average" dose is millirems-- what's significant is that one particle banging out REMS to the adjacent DNA. It does the nearby DNA no good to know that 10^22 other nucleotides are not being cleaved.
Plus your thyroid and many fish concentrate radioactive iodine and other elements by factors of, say, 10,000 and more.
The nuke industry just loves to bruit-about average numbers, even though they're totally meaningless.
Wrongo Bub.
TMI was a huge disaster for the nuclear industry, as it revealed that the status quo was totally inadequate.
So many aspects of the design, thought to be first rate, turned out to be totally foobar. The stuck valve, a critical item, turned out to be prone to sticking, as it was based on a valve designed to handle high-fat raw milk, an excellent lubricant.
The control room design was worse than useless, with critical water-level guages hidden off in a corner. A computer system that ran 20 minutes behind real-time. Dozens of blinking and hypnotizing alarms, with no hierarchy of priority.
Total unmitigated disaster.
Investors rightly saw that what had been touted as the best of all possible worlds was actually quite awful.
And it was not a "small controlled release". The original overflows into the auxiliary buildings was uncontrolled and could be measured at 15 times above background level many miles away.
There are two very simple scaling laws at play here.
First off the wind power intercepted goes up as the square of the rotor length. So larger is better, a lot larger is a whole lot better. You also get the free benefit of stronger winds as you have to raise the center point as to not hit the ground.
Next the power goes up as the CUBE of the wind speed. So it really pays big to find a real windy spot.
So your basic $30,000 small, low windmill placed on your typical house are real big losers.
>Over 25% of the energy in Florida is from coal.
A coal plant is very slow to start up, so it can't be used to replace solar power when it gets cloudy. For that you need a gas or oil powered peaking plant, just like I wrote.
>As for being able to get a loan for 30 years, it is easy to wrap it into a mortgage.
You miss the point. It's unlikely the installation will last 30 years in Florida. After the first good hurricane you'd be paying TWO loans. And so on.
>there are many solar panels over 30-years-old that are up and running just fine.
We care not a whit about the long-tail of very expensive solar panels used by the phone companies. We're more interested in the longevity of typical cells used in Florida. Even the trade associations give 20 to 25 year lifetimes, and that may be for a useless degradation to 50% power.
You're fudging. You can't just tap into the grid, most places have negative extra capacity. Even if you did there's a cost involved.
And having to run AC a lot is not a plus for your side, it just jacks up the amount of solar panels needed. It's basically insane to collect electricity at 15% efficiency to run individual AC units when a solar boiler could collect 100% to make chilled water at more than triple the efficiency. Madness.
And playing the futures market does not make a watt-hour of renewable energy or save anybody a penny-- it just moves some money from one set of gamblers to others.
You're fudging the numbers. You have to borrow TODAY, and the loan can't go out for 30 years as the panels are unlikely to last that long. I assumed they'd last 20 years, so you're perpetually paying $2,200 a year at least. And you can't count subsidies or rebates or tax credits as that's just robbing everyone else to subsidize you, or if every place had these panels you'd just be robbing yourself. And Florida doesn't use coal very much, mostly very expensive natural gas to run the generators. And yes, you forgot the cost of those generators and power lines.
Ah, no. This is the same company that did the math for putting up wind turbines at their nuclear plant, saw the dismal numbers, and went ahead and BUILT THEM ANYWAY. Even though there is not a single spot in Florida that's consistently windy enough to even approach break-even.
Photovoltaics will be cost-effective as soon as you see non-govt, non-utility folks putting their money into them with no muni bonds, legislative mandates or tax incentives. Not any decade anytime soon.
Okay, solar-powered city!
But let's see how much this is going to cost John Q. Resident.
$300 million divided by say 20,000 residents is $15K/resident. Add in the cost of money and amortization and you're talking at least $2,200 a year.
Plus they need to build a regular power station to handle 100% of the load for when it gets cloudy and rainy, which in Florida is a non-negligible part of the time. Plus the power lines to bring in all that power to the city. No, you can't assume the rest of their system has that much extra capacity in lines or generators.
It's not a terribly attractive deal for the actual ratepayers.
>But some of these projects, if the Nuking had been done then, would now be ready to use because the radioactive shit would have decayed mostly.
What if the digging had been done fifty years ago, and we could now extract the oil shale? Why not blow some shit up now so it will be pre-blown up and decayed when we need it.
Nice idea, but the 90+% of the Plutonium that does not fission does not decay. It has a 28,000 year half life, so the oil and gas you drain out 50 years later still has 99.4% of the original Plutonium, which is not a good thing to breathe after you burn the oil and gas.
Seeing as terrestrial photovoltaics are loike 8x more expensive than other power sources, orbital ones should be literally and figuratively, out of sight.
This is what happens when they try to legislate green laws with total disregard to the laws of economics and thermodnamics.
I wonder what California ratepayers are going to say. They already pay the highest rates in the nation IIRC. This scheme can't come in under 30x the average cost of power. What a clusterfarg.
In general, good intentions are overruled by individual and corporate greed and sneakyness.
The lawmakers may spend an hour thinking over the consequences of a bill, while the folks affected have all sorts of time and inclination to poke holes in the laws. Guess which side usually wins?
It was tried back in the 60's with "project Plowshare". Blowing up new harbors, blowing up gas wells, etc, etc, etc. Did not pan out. Radioactive gas spewing into your home through the cooktop, not a big win. Radioactive dust and water from making a new harbor, not too keen either, and this was before peta and greenpeace et al.
As just one data point, a certain place replaced a COBOL app that ran with millisecond response time just fine on a 2 megabyte 1 MIPS mainframe, replaced it with a spankin' fresh Java app that ran about 2000 times slower on an 8 gig 16-CPU, 800MHz very expensive water-cooled mainframe.
Now it could have been due to having a bunch of neophyte Java weenies doing the coding, but I'm just sayin', when there's three orders of speed and 3.5 orders of RAM, there may be something significant in the implementation language.
I wish journalists would either learn a little bit about electricity, or not write about it.
This story has things kinda sideways when not completely wrong.
"Power factor" has been known about for over 100 years now. It's not anything new or particularly bad in CCFL's. Lots of industrial loads and electric vehicles have inherently bad power factors, all of which can be controlled at the source, the transmission line, or at the load with, guess what, "power factor controllers".
Anything with a switching-mode power supply will have, unless corrected, a lousy power factor. With most homes having a TV or computer or two, all with SMPS's, the bad power factor is already in the house. CCFL's wil only make a minor contribution.
And NO, definitely NOT, the power plant does not have to generate the extra watts- they're imaginary watts-- voltage when there's no current, and current when there's no voltage. Since power is voltage TIMES current, when one of them is zero there is no real power being drawn.
There is a *slight* increase in losses as higher amps being draws do result in a *very small* extra loss in the intervening wires.
When they get real simple 100-year old princiles wrong, how much can you trust the other "facts" in the article?
There is no point in arguing about wattage of your hair dryer. We're talking about the power available on a solar vehicle, not the maximum power of some rather poorly chosen simile.
The real point is that a solar powered vehicle is only going to have one or two horsepower available at best on a very sunny day-- fine for a bicycle or rickshaw but not so good for the kind of vehicle most of us need.
A hair dryer draws around 750 watts
>That's one weak hairdryer.
Your typical bathroom outlet starts getting hot at anything over ten amps, 1200 watts, which is not even twice as much. And since the hair-dryer was a simile to begin with....
it's going to slow down to 70.7%
>If there were no batteries to average out the ups and downs.
Batteries have to be carried uphill too, so you gain some and you lose some.
Let's do the math on this one.
A hair dryer draws around 750 watts, which is a convenient number too, as that's about 1 horsepower. Let's assume the electric motor is 100% efficient too, just for simplicity.
So you're saying the car can do 60MPH on one horsepower.
That's quite doable with a very aerodynamic design and low-friction tires.
But the hill-climbing ability is mighty weak.
One horsepower can lift 550 pounds one foot per second.
So if this vehicle and rider weight 550 pounds, it's going to slow down to 70.7% of 60 MPH if it encounters a hill with a 60 foot rise per mile, just a bit under 1% slope. A 3% slope is going to slow it to a crawl. Not too good anyplace but Kansas.
And no, you don't get it all back on the downhill slope.
It's not a failure, it's part of the learning curve. Every large rocket design, except maybe for the Sat 5 had multiple launch failures the first few times. The US Atlas had like FIVE blowups before a successful launch. Ditto the Redstone and Jupiter and Vanguard. The Atlas was never very reliable, blowing up a good 25% of the time.
What's mildly of concern was if the NK's had sufficient telemetry downlink to figure out what went wrong this time so they can try harder in those weak areas next time.
It's hard to imagine a software glitch causing this exact behavior. And what's the problem with having Po-po HQ in a high crime area? Saves on commuting, at the very least.
AT least two police stations in my city are right in the heart of crime areas. But the rest are in less crimey areas. What's the problem?
(10) Just trying to spell vinyl will mess you up.
(9) One word: boomerang (pattern).
(8) With vinyl floors you can skate indoors and hit your head on the far wall.
(7) 100% vinyl floors on basement apartments. The noise from the guy upstairs with the stepmaster will drive anyone crazy.
(6) Most houses have vinyl floors somewhere. If you visit autistic homes and snoop around, you will almost always find some.
(5) One word: Plastics.
(4) If this were true then workers in the umbrella, raincoat, new car seat-installing, and shower-curtain industry would be drooling morons. More than expected, anyway.
(3) One word: falafel (Phalafel?) (Phatalate?)
(2) How can you resist not counting the squares each day to make sure none have gone missing?
(1) And the last one: Don't vinyl floor tiles also have formaldehyde plasticizers and asbestos fillers?
Okay!
Next time I want to make a sloppy kindergarden finger-paint drawing I'm so there!
X-Y sensing pads have a long and dismal history-- They work fine for the first day but the slightest bit of moisture or grunge or wear and they go downhill in a hurry.
And this differs from the for over 20-years available touchpads, how?
Resistive papers have been used for oh, 70 years now, ever since the Western Union Teledeltos fax machines, circa 1938.
I recall my father using those sheets to simulate heat flow inside the CDC 8600. A ten cent analog computer of sorts.
It's possible to sometimes find a really good engineer that can do several of these areas, but since the OP was so new, it's unlikely he'd be able to recognize the renissance EE.
Everybody has strong and weak areas. If this product involves a considerable investment, you don't want the whole project depending on one engineer being Mr. Wonderful and Mr. Perfect.
This industry has such a short memory. Some of you may remember the HP computer, the one with the butterfly on the screen? And the smiling actors touching the screen? HP blew about $85 million dollars advertising that computer and technology.
It turned out people did not like touching their screens, for many reasons:
(1) If the room temp is above 75F or your nervous about getting this paper done on time, you'll leave a smudge every time you touch the anti-reflective coating.
(2) A finger is not a very precise pointing tool.
(3) After 30 minutes of pointing you get the heavy-arm syndrome, or if you persist, the B-24 pilot arm. (B-24 had an extremely hard to turn and pull steering yoke-- B-24 pilots could be distinguished by their Schwartzernegger-sized biceps.).
(4) The third time your finger misses the "save" menu item and hits "exit", you swear and give up using the touchscreen.
Yes, I know, youngsters, you think touchscreen technology has improved over the last 15 years, but human fingers and arms and sweat glands have not.
Lotsa good and horrible advice above.
If you're going to make a commercial product, and you want it to be manufacturable and have high yield and work reliably for more than a week, you need a lot of expert help.
You need an EE to design the circuit.
Then you need a manufacturing EE to redesign the circuit so it does not use any rare or known unreliable or hard to surface mount or single sourced parts.
Then you need a quality engineer who will redesign things so the hot voltage regulator is not right next to the electrolytic capacitors, and shuffle the pcb traces so they're less likely to short out from tin whiskers, and rearrange them for better ESD protection, and they will test it in an environmental chamber for performance over a wide temperature range.
Then you'll need a standards EE who will make sure it meets EU and US standards for safety and toxicity and flammability and electromagnetic emissions.
Then you need someone on site at the manufacturing facility to do QA and make sure they don't divert your product into the black or grey market.
Then you need enough extra time and money to do the whole thing over again if the original design still turns out to be unmanufacturable or have poor yield or reliability.
Don't feel too bad, when Apple set up their own disk drive manufacturing facility, the yield even after extensive tweaking was only about 40%. And that's with huge amounts of money and lots of experienced engineers in the area.
You need a whole lot more than a PCB house.