(since I just meta-modded your "insightful" mod "unfair", because you are complaining about a solved problem....)
Green Car Congress reports a Li-ion cell from A123Systems with phosphate chemistry (no thermal runaway like cobalt oxide) and a charge to over 90% capacity in 5 minutes.
This is not vaporware, this is product going into high-end power tools as I write this. If the cost can be brought down with experience or some sacrifice of charge/discharge rate will make it cheaper (a 10-minute charge wouldn't bother me), it's more than good enough for a killer electric car.
This isn't the first serious electric car to crush a Ferrari in the 1/8 mile; the tzero (from AC Propulsion) came before it. The tzero with Li-ion batteries has a range of nearly 300 miles and can go from LA to Las Vegas non-stop - and it's even faster.
You can feed electricity from places like Iowa to Illinois and the Dakotas to Minnesota and Wisconsin relatively easily.
Add to that the fact land in several of those states is much more expensive.
Even in "urban" states, there's often plenty of farmland. Farmers love wind-turbine operators; they can get $2000 a year rent for a 1/4 acre pad, which is ten times as much as they might gross on the whole acre next to it.
If they can't cover 100% of their power needs with wind in South Dakota
South Dakota can cover 26% of the electricity demand of the whole freaking country. Texas can cover 30%. Montana has about.3% of the nation's population but could cover 26% of the national electricity requirements; if they developed all the potential, they'd get about 129 kW per capita! If cheap energy draws development away from certain overpopulated and ecologically stressed areas... GOOD!
Biodiesel works pretty well. The best method probably involves algae grown under glass plates.
Glass plates are impermeable to CO2, so you'd have to supply it from something other than the atmosphere. That source better be renewable... and you'd have the same problem with nuclear inputs, plus you can't take advantage of the billion years of engineering that nature has done on photosynthetic systems.
doubling nuclear capacity would do more towards reducing CO2 emissions than doubling wind capacity.
That's true, but US wind capacity is on track to double about every 2.3 years (up 35% in 2005) and world capacity in about 2 years (up 43% last year). The new generation of US nuke plants won't be going on-line until about 2018; by that time, the US may be installing 50 GW or more of wind per year (about 15 GW average at 30% capacity factor).
I'm pro-nuke, but nuclear's share looks likely to get smaller before it gets larger. Gas is going to fall off; the expansion in consumption looks to be driven by wind and coal.
Show me the coal plant where the emissions can be contained in concrete casks on the plant site, and decay away with half-lives of 30 years or less for most of it.
That's the thing about cadmium, arsenic and mercury; they're poisonous forever.
DC-DC converters are standard equipment; some have efficiencies in the high 90% range. One typical method is to use an inductor as an energy-storage element; a voltage down-converter will pulse the input voltage and use a diode to "freewheel" the inductor when it is not being actively driven, and an up-converter will use a transistor to short the inductor output to ground to store magnetic energy and then direct current through a diode to the output when the transistor is off.
They use bus bars because the voltages are low and the currents are high.
Of course, this just vindicates Tesla. Shipping low-voltage DC around a facility, whether ancient telephone switching center or modern server farm, is a lossy affair without big, fat wires to keep the voltage drops down (losses rise as the SQUARE of current; P = I^2 R). Centralizing the AC-DC conversion a few yards away where heat can be handled better is sensible (just making power supplies which can be cooled with ambient air would save a lot on A/C), but moving it even a fraction of a mile makes no sense without superconductors.
Not that I agree with kraut, but I've got plenty of disagreements with you.
The only way to stop global warming were for the people of the world to collectively reduce their usage of energy and lower their standard of living.
Desperately poor people do more damage to their environment, even at the expense of their viability. Proof: Haiti.
(this should be too obvious for me to have to say it but...) The only way to stop global warming is to reverse the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This is not the same as reducing energy use. We can use all the wind power we want (1.2 TW available in the CONUS alone). We can use nuclear. We can do something about sources of nitrous oxide and methane (a bugaboo that hits Europe hard). We can even burn coal as long as we stuff the carbon back underground where it came from. We can wrap our houses in really good insulation to keep heat in instead of burning fuel to replace losses.
just remember that our great and global civilization wont be the first to have underestimated their effect on nature.
Oh, definitely true.
I believe we are PAST the point of no return.. at this point we might as well just try to find ourselves another planet, or work on technologies that make sure our civilization can survive the future.
The thing to do is use the same capabilities which let us change things so far in the direction they've gone, and instead use them to change things back.
Have you looked at the Keeling curve? The seasonal swings in CO2 concentration are still much bigger than the annual rise. If we could grab enough of that carbon before it goes back into the atmosphere and stash it away, we could level the trend. Think about possibilities for a while, and study (starting with chem and physics). No telling what you might come up with.
I got them where the AC did, at Home Depot in the $9.99 6-pack package. This offer might not be available on-line, but they're right there at the checkout lanes.
The CF bulb is 32 times the cost of the incandescent.
Even at that price, the incandescent burns enough energy to make up the difference in < 2000 hours. I've paid $20 for some 3-way circle-tube CF's. I've gotten my money's worth out of them.
Several dimmer switched on the site are under $10. A dimmer switch will dim several lights at once.
Light output of an incandescent is proportional to the 3.1 to 3.4 power of applied voltage. If you run the dimmer down to where the bulb is only taking 25% power (about what the CF consumes relative to the incandescent), you won't have any useful light output; the
For the cost of 4 bulbs and a switch I can have nearly, if not more, energy savings and better lighting as a single CF bulb.
Cost of a 60-watt incandescent (1000 hour lifespan): 60 cents. Power used over 1000 hours: 60 kWh. Cost of power over 1000 hours: $4.80 Total cost for 1000 hours: $5.40
Cost of 17-watt CF (60-watt equivalent, in 6-pack from Home Depot): $1.75, with tax. Fraction of lifespan used in 1000 hours: 10% Total cost of CF for 1000 hours: 17.5 cents Power used over 1000 hours: 17 kWh Cost of power over 1000 hours: $1.52 Total outlay for first 1000 hours: $3.27 Value of remaining bulb lifespan: $1.57 Total cost for 1000 hours: $1.70
Appraisal of you: you're much more dogmatic than geekishly analytical. Turn in your geek badge to security on the way out of Slashdot.
Based on you not understanding the sarcasm, my guess is that English is not your first language.
Based on you setting up a straw man of the argument made by the GGGparent comment, you don't understand English either. Add hypocrisy to your list of faults.
Either the universe is indeterministic on all levels, or it is deterministic on all levels and we just don't have all the information.
The concept of De Broglie wavelength indicates that it's indeterminate on all levels, but the indeterminacies can be far too small to measure. This is why classical mechanics works.
You're making irrelevant and nonsensical quibbles about physics to try to score rhetorical points. This is about what I expect of someone who has bought into something as idiotic as the idea of the Marxist dialectic. If the only conceptual tool you have is a hammer....
But you are neck-and-neck with creationists for the record.
So in other words, you've just flipped definitions on me, and are now claiming a deterministic universe given enough information. Welcome to ID.
You'd have to be pretty ignorant (or a liar) to maintain that a probability distribution implies determinism. Heck, even classical mechanics can be shown to lead to unpredictability given inevitable errors of measurement (chaos). Then again, your username implies that you've swallowed some pretty ignorant crap and not blinked an eye, so maybe you aren't consciously lying. Maybe you just don't care about reality, or aren't smart enough to understand it.
The limitations on Alberta tar sands are the availability of natural gas (for processing and conversion of the bitumen to synthetic crude) and water.
There are other limits on energy sources, and those are the EROEI and the total available. OTEC requires a lot of capital and has fairly small energy margins (works best when there's a good market for the byproducts of fresh water and cooling), so it might not be practical in many places. At least there's a lot of it, at least until until global warming eliminates the supply of deep cold water. (Half-smiley.)
There are several camps of believers worldwide (Xian, Muslim, certainly others which have not come to my attention lately) which take any contradiction of their articles of faith - no matter how principled or supported by fact - as an attack on their faith and themselves.
This is especially common in Muslim countries, but the violent attack from the Kansas yahoos shows that the same thing is not just possible but happens here. The parallels with the various "Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" are obvious.
The whole point of using an IQ test instead of a math or vocabulary test is that IQ changes little over time. Individuals have good and bad days, but population scores are relatively stable.
It goes without saying that this test needs to be repeated with a larger group. If there's a way to prevent a large population with distinctly sub-normal IQ's from gumming up the works on the job, in schools, the criminal justice system... we'd be far better off. Maybe all we need is a test like the one for the cystic fibrosis trait, to find people who shouldn't have children with each other.
fight the system that is destroying our creative original thinkers before they have the educational foundation to start thinking anything valuable. The eventual cost to society is simply inestimable.
Is it somehow our fault for not being illegal immigrants who Wal-Mart can pay less than minimum wage to?
I fear you've mis-attributed responsibility here. The flood of illegals and the gutting of the INS is due more to business interests. However, the effect on teenagers doesn't depend on how the illegals got the jobs (just that they did).
And log in. Being a teenager doesn't mean you can't establish a worthwhile reputation by being insightful.
The teenagers aren't anti-teenager (duh!). So who are you talking about?
Yet as a group, teenagers sure are very ostracized, looked down, and picked on.
You might have noticed that teenagers are less well-socialized, less acquainted with work (as illegal aliens have taken many of the jobs once performed by teenagers as professionals-in-training), and otherwise contemptuous of the virtues of the society which makes their comfortable lives possible.
Call it anti-boorishness, anti-hypocrisy, anti-jerk. But until kids get sneered at for saying "Yes, sir" and helping old ladies across the street, don't call this country anti-teenager.
It's certainly not a good reason for the British to let him in. One more freeloader on an already-taxed NHS? And people wonder why the BNP is getting traction.
It looks like your H.S. science teacher was wrong, and taught you a myth as fact.
Here's where you can do something good. Find that absorption spectrum, if you can. Take it, mail it, whatever... get it to your old teacher. Make sure that s/he doesn't repeat that particular bit of misinformation ever again.
the very reason that they made that band unlicensed was because it's right in the sweet spot for absorbtion by water.
Maybe you'd like to provide evidence to refute this:
in the liquid, individual water molecules are organized into transient ring structures, in which rotation is "hindered": that is, they can't rotate without banging into a neighboring molecule. Thus, there are no resonant transitions in the microwave region. Absorption takes place when the random motions of neighboring molecules allow a given molecule to follow the applied field for a short distance, after which it bangs into a neighbor, converting the motion into heat. This process involves all sorts of orientations of the molecules, and doesn't have any specific characteristic frequency but instead a wide range of frequencies: in particular, 2450 MHz plays no role, and 2300 or 2600 MHz would work just as well (but in the US the FCC would be after you). The use of 2450 MHz is a historical artifact having to do with frequencies licensed for industrial use, not related to any specific property of molecular or liquid water.
Slashdot Mirror
Green Car Congress reports a Li-ion cell from A123Systems with phosphate chemistry (no thermal runaway like cobalt oxide) and a charge to over 90% capacity in 5 minutes.
This is not vaporware, this is product going into high-end power tools as I write this. If the cost can be brought down with experience or some sacrifice of charge/discharge rate will make it cheaper (a 10-minute charge wouldn't bother me), it's more than good enough for a killer electric car.
This isn't the first serious electric car to crush a Ferrari in the 1/8 mile; the tzero (from AC Propulsion) came before it. The tzero with Li-ion batteries has a range of nearly 300 miles and can go from LA to Las Vegas non-stop - and it's even faster.
Don't trapped miners already beat on the walls to signal their position? I distinctly recall reading that the Sago miners did just that.
You can feed electricity from places like Iowa to Illinois and the Dakotas to Minnesota and Wisconsin relatively easily.
Even in "urban" states, there's often plenty of farmland. Farmers love wind-turbine operators; they can get $2000 a year rent for a 1/4 acre pad, which is ten times as much as they might gross on the whole acre next to it. South Dakota can cover 26% of the electricity demand of the whole freaking country. Texas can cover 30%. Montana has aboutTexas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Dakota, Montana, probably Minnesota.
I'm pro-nuke, but nuclear's share looks likely to get smaller before it gets larger. Gas is going to fall off; the expansion in consumption looks to be driven by wind and coal.
That's the thing about cadmium, arsenic and mercury; they're poisonous forever.
Here's a page including schematics of boost and buck converters, and one with a schematic for a glow-plug converter.
Of course, this just vindicates Tesla. Shipping low-voltage DC around a facility, whether ancient telephone switching center or modern server farm, is a lossy affair without big, fat wires to keep the voltage drops down (losses rise as the SQUARE of current; P = I^2 R). Centralizing the AC-DC conversion a few yards away where heat can be handled better is sensible (just making power supplies which can be cooled with ambient air would save a lot on A/C), but moving it even a fraction of a mile makes no sense without superconductors.
(this should be too obvious for me to have to say it but...) The only way to stop global warming is to reverse the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This is not the same as reducing energy use. We can use all the wind power we want (1.2 TW available in the CONUS alone). We can use nuclear. We can do something about sources of nitrous oxide and methane (a bugaboo that hits Europe hard). We can even burn coal as long as we stuff the carbon back underground where it came from. We can wrap our houses in really good insulation to keep heat in instead of burning fuel to replace losses.
Oh, definitely true. The thing to do is use the same capabilities which let us change things so far in the direction they've gone, and instead use them to change things back.Have you looked at the Keeling curve? The seasonal swings in CO2 concentration are still much bigger than the annual rise. If we could grab enough of that carbon before it goes back into the atmosphere and stash it away, we could level the trend. Think about possibilities for a while, and study (starting with chem and physics). No telling what you might come up with.
Cost of a 60-watt incandescent (1000 hour lifespan): 60 cents.
Power used over 1000 hours: 60 kWh.
Cost of power over 1000 hours: $4.80
Total cost for 1000 hours: $5.40
Cost of 17-watt CF (60-watt equivalent, in 6-pack from Home Depot): $1.75, with tax.
Fraction of lifespan used in 1000 hours: 10%
Total cost of CF for 1000 hours: 17.5 cents
Power used over 1000 hours: 17 kWh
Cost of power over 1000 hours: $1.52
Total outlay for first 1000 hours: $3.27
Value of remaining bulb lifespan: $1.57
Total cost for 1000 hours: $1.70
Appraisal of you: you're much more dogmatic than geekishly analytical. Turn in your geek badge to security on the way out of Slashdot.
You're making irrelevant and nonsensical quibbles about physics to try to score rhetorical points. This is about what I expect of someone who has bought into something as idiotic as the idea of the Marxist dialectic. If the only conceptual tool you have is a hammer....
There are other limits on energy sources, and those are the EROEI and the total available. OTEC requires a lot of capital and has fairly small energy margins (works best when there's a good market for the byproducts of fresh water and cooling), so it might not be practical in many places. At least there's a lot of it, at least until until global warming eliminates the supply of deep cold water. (Half-smiley.)
I got through to Machine Design on the first attempt.
This is especially common in Muslim countries, but the violent attack from the Kansas yahoos shows that the same thing is not just possible but happens here. The parallels with the various "Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" are obvious.
It goes without saying that this test needs to be repeated with a larger group. If there's a way to prevent a large population with distinctly sub-normal IQ's from gumming up the works on the job, in schools, the criminal justice system... we'd be far better off. Maybe all we need is a test like the one for the cystic fibrosis trait, to find people who shouldn't have children with each other.
And log in. Being a teenager doesn't mean you can't establish a worthwhile reputation by being insightful.
Call it anti-boorishness, anti-hypocrisy, anti-jerk. But until kids get sneered at for saying "Yes, sir" and helping old ladies across the street, don't call this country anti-teenager.
And mod grandparent down.
It's certainly not a good reason for the British to let him in. One more freeloader on an already-taxed NHS? And people wonder why the BNP is getting traction.
Here's where you can do something good. Find that absorption spectrum, if you can. Take it, mail it, whatever... get it to your old teacher. Make sure that s/he doesn't repeat that particular bit of misinformation ever again.