I see you'd rather put words in somebody's mouth than ask them what they meant.
If it takes the Chinese twice as much CO2 to produce a dollar's worth of goods as it takes the USA, is it better for the world to have goods produced in China? China uses antiquated technology in many of its primary industries, but makes up for the inefficiencies with cheap labor. Many Chinese cities are terribly polluted from the byproducts of coal combustion without pollution controls (reminiscent of the Soviet bloc); many homes are heated by coal stoves rather than natural gas or even "town gas", and the environmental and human costs are high. The savings appear to be plowed into an increasingly aggressive military, with which the dictatorship is threatening democratic Taiwan and oppressing Tibet.
It would be well worth it to force China to divert some of its resources into cleaning up its mess and preventing it from getting worse. If China was only as efficient as the current US average, it would make a huge difference both for China and for the world.
Mr. Tesla is one of the more underrated scientists of the 20th century. From his coil to his steam turbine (which goes fast enough to cause it to break apart under centrifical (or is it centrifugal? I can never remember the difference) force
A great many turbines will break apart if they lose their loads and overspeed, standard reaction-type steam turbines and many water turbines among them. The virtue of the Tesla turbine is that its pieces are very simple, its vice is that it is woefully inefficient compared to a standard bladed turbine (which you would have learned had you wondered why they were not used everywhere by now and followed the question with research).
Tesla earned kudos for the invention of the AC distribution system and the induction motor, which made possible the fractional-horsepower motor (one of which I am enjoying right now, as it is powering the fan keeping me comfortable). His experiments in wireless power transmission do not belong in the same category.
Worse than that: your mention of them in the same posting proves that it was easier for you to learn to post on Slashdot than to learn what you are talking about, and therefore that computers are too easy to use.;-)
I'm aware of an inductive transfer system used in car steering wheels, of all places. The clock-spring wires used to connect to the rotating part of the wheel had some difficulties, so at least one air-bag manufacturer went wireless to power the air-bag electronics and communicate the command data to the bag and the status data back to the stationary part.
ferralis asks about distance, but doesn't mention the size of the objects on either side. This is crucial if you are trying to use magnetic coupling, because the range of the near field is determined by the size of the objects. However, it would not surprise me if you could get good coupling over a distance of 2-4 inches, using frequencies in the 27 MHz ISM band, using tuned coils. As ferralis is not a double-E he is not going to be building this himself, so he can ask the RF engineer to insert a "seek" circuit on the transmitter which pulses briefly but only remains on if it detects the load from the receiver coil in close proximity. (This is how a grid-dip meter works.)
If you can force the relative orientation of the transmitter and receiver, you can probably improve coupling by using ferrite "loopstick" cores for the coils and let the relative permeability work its magic.
I bet they won't produce as much power as solar cells for the same area of sunlight.
Typical efficiency of silicon solar cells is 15% or so, and if I recall correctly the Luz concentrating solar plants were able to beat 20% (I could be wrong, a search did not turn up any solid information).
But that doesn't matter. There is no shortage of sunlight; the problem is the expense of collecting it. This makes the most important metric $/W instead of W/m^2, and cutting $/W is the worthiest goal for the widest variety of uses. To that end, Energy Innovations came up with the idea of a small multi-mirror concentrator system feeding a Stirling cycle generator. 200 watts for $200, or $1/peak watt. The last I heard they had put the Stirling engine on the back burner due to development costs and were going to market with a concentrating photovoltaic system instead. We're going to have to wait, I guess (or license their patents).
The problem with using water is that it is an immiscible fluid, and much of the oil will tend to remain stuck in pores in the rock rather than flow out under the small bouyancy forces caused by water.
You can get around this by using a non-polar solvent instead of water. Liquid carbon dioxide is good for this, with two further benefits:
CO2 is a byproduct of combustion, so is plentiful, and
Putting CO2 into the earth is a good way of sequestering it, so using recovered CO2 to dissolve and lift oil can simultaneously help meet CO2-reduction targets.
The real interesting times will come when (I'm sure it's when, not if) energy from solar becomes so cheap that we wind up using it to perform environmental remediation. We might wind up making crude-like oil and pumping it back into the earth just to put excess carbon away. We are already able to make "light sweet" oil from organic goo using thermal depolymerization, so taking it to that conclusion it is only a matter of purpose and scale.
Insulin is the start of a long chain
on
Yoda The Mouse Turns 4
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Maybe you won't have to mess with insulin, if something else further down the chain of effects (and more specific to aging) can be tweaked instead.
And don't give up on this being useful. Have you followed the rate of improvement in assays and genetic screening, not to mention the huge leap in DNA sequencing? The way things are moving, we might be able to go from discovery of the biochemical basis of slower aging to confirmation in broad populations to "dietary supplements" that will give you many of the benefits in just a few years. Certified drugs will take longer, but you'll be able to use the same tests to confirm that your supplements are having the desired effect.
I'm no expert, but I doubt most homes use more than 0.5kWh at anything other than peak times (weekday evenings and weekend afternoons).
KWH are a measure of energy. You do not speak of power consumption in kilowatt-hours any more than you speak of engine power in gallons of fuel. Power is a rate of transfer of energy, so you speak of gallons/hour for power supplied to an engine and watts or kilowatts for power supplied to your computer. To get energy consumption you multiply power by time; kilowatts*hours = KWH, surprise!
This has been a free service of the Original, Legitimate Deputies of the Physics Help And Roving Tutor System (OLD PHARTS).
The hydrofoils are going to do the same thing that every lifting surface does: they will generate tip vortices. These vortices represent lost energy; the intelligent thing to do would be to situate the power turbines so that they counter-rotate in the vortices and recapture the vortex energy.
Bonus points for tilting the turbine so as to generate a lift moment downward and use it to produce some of its own downforce.
Speaking as a native-born citizen of the USA, the US isn't doing terribly well either; we still subsidize the consumption of oil (via "depletion allowances", defense costs not allocated to users, and other tax benefits) and do stupid things like promoting the consumption of natural gas for electric generation while the supply of NG is shrinking. Just because our policy is different from the Eurosocialists' doesn't mean it's smart.
We already have a lot of fuel-saving technologies which will pay for themselves nicely at current prices (let alone future prices), yet adoption has been very slow. I can think of a number of causes:
Tax subsidies which have the effect of paying users not to change.
Outmoded regulations which slow or even block desirable change.
Interest groups which resist changes which threaten their way of doing business.
Simple inertia.
As an example of 3 and 4, I hold up the continued widespread use of stick-built construction when SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels) leak a lot less heat, have next to zero air leakage when properly installed, and save a lot of time and labor in the construction. They also reduce the use of wood. We should be promoting or mandating their use where feasible and training builders and building inspectors in their proper installatino. Are we? No. I'll bet there are a lot of union carpenters who like it that way.
Another is the relative lack of CHP (Combined Heat and Power, or cogeneration) systems in the USA vs. Europe. This may be due to power regulations which make it impossible to obtain a market price for the production of small generators, or far too expensive to connect to the grid save as a pure consumer. Again, this is something which can be fixed with proper regulatory changes.
There are questions not answered in the article about the snail, such as the handling of the variable output of the tidal power systems versus the contrary schedule of grid demand. These things must be dealt with; unfortunately, they are beyond the scope of small news items. What's truly a pity is that news editors don't think they are sufficiently important to collect links for further study.
I parked a number of times at the (old) Austin airport, and noticed that the acres upon acres of asphalt would have been a great place to hang solar panels over. "Shingling" carports with some sort of solar collector would have had the dual benefit of generating energy and keeping the vehicles below from cooking in the sun (one wonders how much those cars contributed to smog from evaporative fuel emissions; you can't purge a vapor-recovery canister when the car isn't operating).
Of course, one could always work on making the NERVA more lightweight -- but do you really want to optimize a nuclear reactor for mass, rather than safety? I didn't think so.
Why not do both?
Long ago I recall reading about a successor to NERVA, dubbed Dumbo (after the flying elephant). The limitations of NERVA were due to the design of the reactor (using reasonably standard fuel "pins" in a coolant/propellant) which gave it rather low limits for its rate of heat transfer and thus thrust. The idea of Dumbo was to redesign the fuel elements to be something like corrugated cardboard, with fissionable fuel in one half of the corrugations and open passages through the other halves. You'd have fuel elements composed of washers of some refractory, non-hydrogen-embrittling metal and Ruffles-style corrugated plates between them with the top half of the wavy plate full of fuel. The amount of surface area this would give you would be an order of magnitude or more above a standard design, so the potential heat transfer for a given delta-T would have more or less the same multiplier. Heat transfer translates directly to power level and to thrust. With modern machine welding, electrical-discharge machining and automated inspection I'll bet that such elements could be fabricated to a very high degree of isolation of fission products while keeping the performance near the theoretical limit.
More recently, DoD was talking about a heavy-lift hybrid nuclear rocket using a pebble-bed reactor design and anhydrous ammonia propellant (which might dissociate under the heat, lowering the MW of the exhaust from 17 toward 8.5 and further boosting the impulse). To allay the concerns of the environmentalists, it would have been boosted by a conventional first stage and only brought critical once it was high enough to expel things above the atmosphere. I don't recall the application, it might have been pop-up laser stations for ballistic missile defense.
We both know and can do a lot more now than we did then. If we really wanted to do it, we could do it. I have seen and walked around one of the NERVA nozzles, and I think it's a shame that such capability has never been put to use. The places we could have gone, the things we could have seen...
The threshold for FEC reporting is $200 to a campaign. The obvious solution presents itself: donate $199, and persuade all your friends and relatives who share your leanings to do likewise. Voila, nobody is obliged to say that you donated, and a campaign which is receiving lots of money from people who obviously don't want to be named isn't likely to go beyond the law's requirements.
For extra credit you can send $100 money orders (purchased with cash) in the names of people you look up in the phone book... or in Chicago, the obituaries.
I think your kuro5hin piece missed the possibility of non-electrolytic sources of hydrogen and the conversion of H2 to liquids such as methanol, but that paper does a good job of covering the issue from what I've had time to read. I believe that the killer technology for transportation is not hydrogen, it's either the methanol-burning fuel cell or the lithium-ion battery.
One good link deserves another. See this EPRI study which I found linked from this page. I warn you in advance, that EPRI paper can keep you busy for days.
But it lets the utility keep rates down for everyone. Altruism lives, I guess.
Typically, customers on interruptible or DSM plans get substantial rate breaks (more of the really expensive peak power can be sold to other customers at premium markups). And everyone benefits from a grid that doesn't go down - it isn't altruism, it's enlightened self-interest.
If every car parked at home or work plugs into the grid, you have more generating capacity than you will need in the near future. (It is quoted that the power output of one year of US car sales exceeds the installed generating capacity of the entire world).
If not true, it's pretty close. If you assume sales of 1.2 million units/month and an average of 100 KW (134 HP) per unit, annual engine power would be 1.44 terawatts; total nameplate electric generation capacity in the USA is around 700 gigawatts.
The problem with any such scheme is that current motor fuel is derived from a commodity which is rising rapidly in price, and the future panacea-fuel (hydrogen) has very difficult unsolved problems with production and also storage suitable for vehicles.
Moreover, grids are deliberately designed (1950s or not) to channel energy where it's needed. This prevents overloading or underpowering.
I'm sorry, but the second sentence is just false. The assumption of the grid is that there is always sufficient generating capacity to meet the instantaneous demand. If demand exceeds supply for any reason, part or all of the system can be under-powered. This is what happened on 8/14/2003: lines carrying power to portions of Ohio went down, causing local plants to overload and trip off-line and beginning the cascade of failures.
When ever there is a power outage, a grid must be brought back up slowly.
This is why it is so important to prevent large outages. Small-scale load shedding is a vast improvement over any big failure. Systems which can react to an under-power situation fast enough to dump a few neighborhoods or plants before the generators or lines have to trip off will prevent outages from growing larger.
Cutting off customers is a poor substitute for demand-side management. When there's a run on, say, toilet paper or gasoline, prices rise or suppliers run out. Latecomers delay their consumption and everyone has an incentive to decide how important it is to have the goods right now vs. later; there is no way to bring down the toilet-paper supply system. We have no such buffer like this for electricity; because of the false assumption that electricity will always be available when you flip the switch, too many people flipping the switch can cause everyone's power to go down. We need to address this sooner rather than later.
Although I hate calling a bug a "feature", the fact is that blackouts are often a testament to fault-detection which could otherwise overload a grid and cause more substantial problems that would take longer to resolve.
Fault detection is one thing. A faulty response to detection of a fault is another; if the system reacts to a shortage of generation capacity by cutting off generation rather than consumption, the protective systems act to decrease reliability. We may need measures such as mandatory utility control over air-conditioners (the major loads during summer demand peaks) in order to get a handle on this problem.
The figures you quoted admit that NASA's current budget is still about 60% as much as it was during Apollo in constant dollars, and that is ignoring the fact that a dollar buys one hell of a lot more technology today than it did then (the CPU that runs the dashboard of your new car has hundreds of times as much computing horsepower as the entire Apollo 11 vehicle).
Let's tell the government toadies and rent-seekers to fuck off and see what that money will buy when we apply all of it to the goals we really want. I'm sure that those of us who actually care about space would be thrilled by the answer.
I'm not sure of exact performance differences between SRBs and LRBs.
There are many differences. Solid rocket motors have lower specific
impulse (thrust*time for a given amount of fuel), cannot be throttled, and
require the entire fuel storage area to be a combustion chamber; they make
up for this by being relatively simple and have fewer (though more dangerous)
failure modes. Liquid motors have typically higher specific impulse,
can be designed to be throttled, and mostly use relatively light, low-pressure
tankage (some are "pressure fed", but no heavy boosters today use this
design). The cost is that they have many more parts to manufacture,
more moving parts and more failure modes.
Won't this take more time?
The administration has decided to fly Shuttle until the ISS is complete. This seems silly to me; it ought to be a fairly simple matter to build multiple
copies of new ISS modules and use some as test payloads (inside a shroud) for
a Shuttle-derived heavy-lift booster. Being able to put 5 modules into
orbit with one launch would drastically hasten the completion of the ISS.
I'm sure the NASA which put Apollo on the moon could have put together a
vehicle built from Shuttle engines at least as fast as the Saturn 1B was
cobbled together. If it took 4 years to go to first flight, I'd be
surprised. (It would not be flying people, so you could risk a lot
more on the first flight. Or you could fly a couple modules and use
the balance of the mass-budget to loft a few tons of food and some big
honkin' tanks of oxygen and water. If a Shuttle got stuck at the ISS
after that, they'd have the supplies to wait for a good long time.)
(Goodness knows what you'd do for the boosters to get the thing off the ground; clustering so many solid rockets would have a very high
probability of failure.)
LRBs possibly?
I doubt it. The biggest liquid motor that I know of that is still in production is the Russian RD-180; as used on the Atlas III it has a thrust of 860 klbs. The
SRB has 3.3 million pounds of thrust at sea level, so you'd need approximately
four RD-180's to replace one SRB and the 660-ton vehicle would need more than
50 of them. This looks like a recipe for death by complexity. Even
if you could build F1's again, you would need about 29 of them to loft that
660-ton vehicle. This calls for another solution.
Long ago, someone put forth a proposal for what they called a Big Dumb
Booster. The concept was to build tanks out of steel plate, fill them
with diesel oil fuel and nitric acid oxidizer, and pressurize them with
steam (no turbopumps). The affair would have been built in a shipyard
rather than an aerospace factory, launched from the ocean and recovered
by impact into the water (I have no idea how it was supposed to avoid
damage from this). No turbopumps means no pumps to fail; if I am not
mistaken the combination of nitric acid and diesel will self-ignite (or you
spike the first slug of fuel with UDMH, I'm not sure which), so you just
open the valves and go. The simplicity of the affair makes it look
like it would scale very well. If you were seriously going to make a
booster to put 660 tons into LEO, this sounds about like the ticket for
the first stage; they would be too dumb to fail easily and cheap enough that
you could afford to lose (or discard) them regularly.
Doing a quick Google search for "big dumb booster" I found this history which happens to mention the 550-ton-to-orbit Sea Dragon. I can't seem to find any reference to the concept I remember, so I might have it wrong.
The main difference from the STS being that the shuttle has its main engine on the spacecraft, while Buran was lifted entirely by Energia rocket and attached liquid rocket boosters (i.e. spacecraft did not do any lifting of its own).
Now, as far as I know, nobody else including NASA has anything like this. While Energia design could be relatively easily used for lifting cargo other than Buran, I'm not sure the Shuttle main engine could be that easily ported or even comparable in power.
The major difference between Energiya/Buran and Shuttle is the choice of configuration; an Energiya can carry anything within certain size/mass/CG constraints because the cargo is just cargo, while Shuttle can only fly with the Orbiter because the hydrogen engines are attached to it. This does not mean that it would be overly difficult to bolt a bunch of SSME's onto a different airframe so that we could fly 100 tons of cargo instead of 20 tons of cargo inside 80 tons of obsolete spaceplane; on the contrary, putting a new vehicle together would probably be cheaper than keeping the Shuttle program going until 2008.
Could we use Shuttle components to put together a rocket that would launch 660 tons? If we scale from the 3-engine, 100-ton Shuttle we'd need to cluster 20 SSMEs for such a thing. I don't think this is within the realm of practicality, but 200 tons looks fairly reasonable from my relatively in-expert point of view. (Goodness knows what you'd do for the boosters to get the thing off the ground; clustering so many solid rockets would have a very high probability of failure.)
NASA's funding in 1965 was a little under 4% of the national budget or $5,250 million (the equiv. of $24,696 million in 2002). Meanwhile, FY 2002 saw a budget of $14,868 million - less than 1% of the national budget.
I really hate to see statistics abused like this.
First, in 1965 the national budget did not include much money for certain programs which have exploded since then (for example, most of the Great Society stuff like Medicare). Comparing fractions of the budget without adjusting for huge changes in the portion of GNP which goes through the government makes any comparison suspect.
Second, the economy is several times as big now as it was then. Is something less important if you allocate 1% of 4*x to it instead of 4% of x?
Third, we have already solved many of the technical and engineering problems required to do the things we want to do in space (I think we should put a permanent population on Mars, others may differ). For instance, we already know how to maintain people in space for months at a time. We know how to handle ultra-cryogens such as liquid hydrogen; we now use them routinely in rocket boosters and other applications. We don't need to spend money to re-invent these wheels.
What NASA really needs is a mission and a reform of its bureaucratic mentality so that it can pursue it properly. It doesn't need more money, it needs to shed the albatross of the enormously expensive and obsolete Shuttle program so that the money can do something more useful than paying for an army of government contractors.
I notice that this is an "air conditioner", not a refrigerator or freezer. Some of the suggestions (including one of mine) are capable of producing temperatures well below freezing, but this is overkill if the need is only to keep something below 80 F.
If you only need to keep something small below 80 F or so (like, a computer?), you can get really dumb-ass simple. Fit the comp for liquid cooling, use one small solar panel and a DC pump to push ground water through the cooling system. Your total power needs for this might be merely tens of watts unless your ground water lies a long way down or is really hot (don't try this in Yellowstone or Iceland).
If you're trying to keep people cool, you can still be elegant yet cheap. Lithium bromide is one such system; it doesn't cool much, but it has such a powerful love for water that it makes a superb dessicant. What you do is to evaporate water into the space to be cooled, then remove humidity by running the air past the LiBr solution. You regenerate the diluted LiBr solution by heating it to boil off some of the water and bring it back to full strength (solar heat works well here). Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you live in an area which is hot and dry rather than hot and humid, you can dispense with the LiBr and just evaporate water. This is called a "swamp cooler"; many places in the south-west are lousy with them.
Those things don't run on ammonia AFAIK, and never have.
The manufacturer and other people say otherwise. If you look in a 1960's Encyclopedia Brittanica you will find some excellent diagrams of the Electrolux ammonia-absorption refrigeration cycle (better than the second link above).
Ammonia is widely used in industrial-scale compression refrigeration systems. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than fluorine/carbon compounds.
Grid-intertie inverters are required to have anti-islanding systems which shut them off within a specified time if they lose the connection to the grid. If you have such an inverter, you won't have power during the grid outage but you won't fry linemen either (and the mfgr has a much bigger insurance policy than you do).
Slashdot Mirror
If it takes the Chinese twice as much CO2 to produce a dollar's worth of goods as it takes the USA, is it better for the world to have goods produced in China? China uses antiquated technology in many of its primary industries, but makes up for the inefficiencies with cheap labor. Many Chinese cities are terribly polluted from the byproducts of coal combustion without pollution controls (reminiscent of the Soviet bloc); many homes are heated by coal stoves rather than natural gas or even "town gas", and the environmental and human costs are high. The savings appear to be plowed into an increasingly aggressive military, with which the dictatorship is threatening democratic Taiwan and oppressing Tibet.
It would be well worth it to force China to divert some of its resources into cleaning up its mess and preventing it from getting worse. If China was only as efficient as the current US average, it would make a huge difference both for China and for the world.
Tau's Law: Any sufficiently clueless claim is indistinguishable from a troll.
Tesla earned kudos for the invention of the AC distribution system and the induction motor, which made possible the fractional-horsepower motor (one of which I am enjoying right now, as it is powering the fan keeping me comfortable). His experiments in wireless power transmission do not belong in the same category.
Worse than that: your mention of them in the same posting proves that it was easier for you to learn to post on Slashdot than to learn what you are talking about, and therefore that computers are too easy to use. ;-)
ferralis asks about distance, but doesn't mention the size of the objects on either side. This is crucial if you are trying to use magnetic coupling, because the range of the near field is determined by the size of the objects. However, it would not surprise me if you could get good coupling over a distance of 2-4 inches, using frequencies in the 27 MHz ISM band, using tuned coils. As ferralis is not a double-E he is not going to be building this himself, so he can ask the RF engineer to insert a "seek" circuit on the transmitter which pulses briefly but only remains on if it detects the load from the receiver coil in close proximity. (This is how a grid-dip meter works.)
If you can force the relative orientation of the transmitter and receiver, you can probably improve coupling by using ferrite "loopstick" cores for the coils and let the relative permeability work its magic.
But that doesn't matter. There is no shortage of sunlight; the problem is the expense of collecting it. This makes the most important metric $/W instead of W/m^2, and cutting $/W is the worthiest goal for the widest variety of uses. To that end, Energy Innovations came up with the idea of a small multi-mirror concentrator system feeding a Stirling cycle generator. 200 watts for $200, or $1/peak watt. The last I heard they had put the Stirling engine on the back burner due to development costs and were going to market with a concentrating photovoltaic system instead. We're going to have to wait, I guess (or license their patents).
You can get around this by using a non-polar solvent instead of water. Liquid carbon dioxide is good for this, with two further benefits:
- CO2 is a byproduct of combustion, so is plentiful, and
- Putting CO2 into the earth is a good way of sequestering it, so using recovered CO2 to dissolve and lift oil can simultaneously help meet CO2-reduction targets.
The real interesting times will come when (I'm sure it's when, not if) energy from solar becomes so cheap that we wind up using it to perform environmental remediation. We might wind up making crude-like oil and pumping it back into the earth just to put excess carbon away. We are already able to make "light sweet" oil from organic goo using thermal depolymerization, so taking it to that conclusion it is only a matter of purpose and scale.And don't give up on this being useful. Have you followed the rate of improvement in assays and genetic screening, not to mention the huge leap in DNA sequencing? The way things are moving, we might be able to go from discovery of the biochemical basis of slower aging to confirmation in broad populations to "dietary supplements" that will give you many of the benefits in just a few years. Certified drugs will take longer, but you'll be able to use the same tests to confirm that your supplements are having the desired effect.
This has been a free service of the Original, Legitimate Deputies of the Physics Help And Roving Tutor System (OLD PHARTS).
Bonus points for tilting the turbine so as to generate a lift moment downward and use it to produce some of its own downforce.
We already have a lot of fuel-saving technologies which will pay for themselves nicely at current prices (let alone future prices), yet adoption has been very slow. I can think of a number of causes:
- Tax subsidies which have the effect of paying users not to change.
- Outmoded regulations which slow or even block desirable change.
- Interest groups which resist changes which threaten their way of doing business.
- Simple inertia.
As an example of 3 and 4, I hold up the continued widespread use of stick-built construction when SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels) leak a lot less heat, have next to zero air leakage when properly installed, and save a lot of time and labor in the construction. They also reduce the use of wood. We should be promoting or mandating their use where feasible and training builders and building inspectors in their proper installatino. Are we? No. I'll bet there are a lot of union carpenters who like it that way.Another is the relative lack of CHP (Combined Heat and Power, or cogeneration) systems in the USA vs. Europe. This may be due to power regulations which make it impossible to obtain a market price for the production of small generators, or far too expensive to connect to the grid save as a pure consumer. Again, this is something which can be fixed with proper regulatory changes.
There are questions not answered in the article about the snail, such as the handling of the variable output of the tidal power systems versus the contrary schedule of grid demand. These things must be dealt with; unfortunately, they are beyond the scope of small news items. What's truly a pity is that news editors don't think they are sufficiently important to collect links for further study.
I parked a number of times at the (old) Austin airport, and noticed that the acres upon acres of asphalt would have been a great place to hang solar panels over. "Shingling" carports with some sort of solar collector would have had the dual benefit of generating energy and keeping the vehicles below from cooking in the sun (one wonders how much those cars contributed to smog from evaporative fuel emissions; you can't purge a vapor-recovery canister when the car isn't operating).
Long ago I recall reading about a successor to NERVA, dubbed Dumbo (after the flying elephant). The limitations of NERVA were due to the design of the reactor (using reasonably standard fuel "pins" in a coolant/propellant) which gave it rather low limits for its rate of heat transfer and thus thrust. The idea of Dumbo was to redesign the fuel elements to be something like corrugated cardboard, with fissionable fuel in one half of the corrugations and open passages through the other halves. You'd have fuel elements composed of washers of some refractory, non-hydrogen-embrittling metal and Ruffles-style corrugated plates between them with the top half of the wavy plate full of fuel. The amount of surface area this would give you would be an order of magnitude or more above a standard design, so the potential heat transfer for a given delta-T would have more or less the same multiplier. Heat transfer translates directly to power level and to thrust. With modern machine welding, electrical-discharge machining and automated inspection I'll bet that such elements could be fabricated to a very high degree of isolation of fission products while keeping the performance near the theoretical limit.
More recently, DoD was talking about a heavy-lift hybrid nuclear rocket using a pebble-bed reactor design and anhydrous ammonia propellant (which might dissociate under the heat, lowering the MW of the exhaust from 17 toward 8.5 and further boosting the impulse). To allay the concerns of the environmentalists, it would have been boosted by a conventional first stage and only brought critical once it was high enough to expel things above the atmosphere. I don't recall the application, it might have been pop-up laser stations for ballistic missile defense.
We both know and can do a lot more now than we did then. If we really wanted to do it, we could do it. I have seen and walked around one of the NERVA nozzles, and I think it's a shame that such capability has never been put to use. The places we could have gone, the things we could have seen...
What the hell are we waiting for?
For extra credit you can send $100 money orders (purchased with cash) in the names of people you look up in the phone book... or in Chicago, the obituaries.
One good link deserves another. See this EPRI study which I found linked from this page. I warn you in advance, that EPRI paper can keep you busy for days.
The problem with any such scheme is that current motor fuel is derived from a commodity which is rising rapidly in price, and the future panacea-fuel (hydrogen) has very difficult unsolved problems with production and also storage suitable for vehicles.
Cutting off customers is a poor substitute for demand-side management. When there's a run on, say, toilet paper or gasoline, prices rise or suppliers run out. Latecomers delay their consumption and everyone has an incentive to decide how important it is to have the goods right now vs. later; there is no way to bring down the toilet-paper supply system. We have no such buffer like this for electricity; because of the false assumption that electricity will always be available when you flip the switch, too many people flipping the switch can cause everyone's power to go down. We need to address this sooner rather than later.
Fault detection is one thing. A faulty response to detection of a fault is another; if the system reacts to a shortage of generation capacity by cutting off generation rather than consumption, the protective systems act to decrease reliability. We may need measures such as mandatory utility control over air-conditioners (the major loads during summer demand peaks) in order to get a handle on this problem.Let's tell the government toadies and rent-seekers to fuck off and see what that money will buy when we apply all of it to the goals we really want. I'm sure that those of us who actually care about space would be thrilled by the answer.
I'm sure the NASA which put Apollo on the moon could have put together a vehicle built from Shuttle engines at least as fast as the Saturn 1B was cobbled together. If it took 4 years to go to first flight, I'd be surprised. (It would not be flying people, so you could risk a lot more on the first flight. Or you could fly a couple modules and use the balance of the mass-budget to loft a few tons of food and some big honkin' tanks of oxygen and water. If a Shuttle got stuck at the ISS after that, they'd have the supplies to wait for a good long time.)
I doubt it. The biggest liquid motor that I know of that is still in production is the Russian RD-180; as used on the Atlas III it has a thrust of 860 klbs. The SRB has 3.3 million pounds of thrust at sea level, so you'd need approximately four RD-180's to replace one SRB and the 660-ton vehicle would need more than 50 of them. This looks like a recipe for death by complexity. Even if you could build F1's again, you would need about 29 of them to loft that 660-ton vehicle. This calls for another solution.Long ago, someone put forth a proposal for what they called a Big Dumb Booster. The concept was to build tanks out of steel plate, fill them with diesel oil fuel and nitric acid oxidizer, and pressurize them with steam (no turbopumps). The affair would have been built in a shipyard rather than an aerospace factory, launched from the ocean and recovered by impact into the water (I have no idea how it was supposed to avoid damage from this). No turbopumps means no pumps to fail; if I am not mistaken the combination of nitric acid and diesel will self-ignite (or you spike the first slug of fuel with UDMH, I'm not sure which), so you just open the valves and go. The simplicity of the affair makes it look like it would scale very well. If you were seriously going to make a booster to put 660 tons into LEO, this sounds about like the ticket for the first stage; they would be too dumb to fail easily and cheap enough that you could afford to lose (or discard) them regularly.
Doing a quick Google search for "big dumb booster" I found this history which happens to mention the 550-ton-to-orbit Sea Dragon. I can't seem to find any reference to the concept I remember, so I might have it wrong.
The major difference between Energiya/Buran and Shuttle is the choice of configuration; an Energiya can carry anything within certain size/mass/CG constraints because the cargo is just cargo, while Shuttle can only fly with the Orbiter because the hydrogen engines are attached to it. This does not mean that it would be overly difficult to bolt a bunch of SSME's onto a different airframe so that we could fly 100 tons of cargo instead of 20 tons of cargo inside 80 tons of obsolete spaceplane; on the contrary, putting a new vehicle together would probably be cheaper than keeping the Shuttle program going until 2008.
Could we use Shuttle components to put together a rocket that would launch 660 tons? If we scale from the 3-engine, 100-ton Shuttle we'd need to cluster 20 SSMEs for such a thing. I don't think this is within the realm of practicality, but 200 tons looks fairly reasonable from my relatively in-expert point of view. (Goodness knows what you'd do for the boosters to get the thing off the ground; clustering so many solid rockets would have a very high probability of failure.)
First, in 1965 the national budget did not include much money for certain programs which have exploded since then (for example, most of the Great Society stuff like Medicare). Comparing fractions of the budget without adjusting for huge changes in the portion of GNP which goes through the government makes any comparison suspect.
Second, the economy is several times as big now as it was then. Is something less important if you allocate 1% of 4*x to it instead of 4% of x?
Third, we have already solved many of the technical and engineering problems required to do the things we want to do in space (I think we should put a permanent population on Mars, others may differ). For instance, we already know how to maintain people in space for months at a time. We know how to handle ultra-cryogens such as liquid hydrogen; we now use them routinely in rocket boosters and other applications. We don't need to spend money to re-invent these wheels.
What NASA really needs is a mission and a reform of its bureaucratic mentality so that it can pursue it properly. It doesn't need more money, it needs to shed the albatross of the enormously expensive and obsolete Shuttle program so that the money can do something more useful than paying for an army of government contractors.
I did mention dessicant systems, nearly two days before your post.
If you only need to keep something small below 80 F or so (like, a computer?), you can get really dumb-ass simple. Fit the comp for liquid cooling, use one small solar panel and a DC pump to push ground water through the cooling system. Your total power needs for this might be merely tens of watts unless your ground water lies a long way down or is really hot (don't try this in Yellowstone or Iceland).
If you're trying to keep people cool, you can still be elegant yet cheap. Lithium bromide is one such system; it doesn't cool much, but it has such a powerful love for water that it makes a superb dessicant. What you do is to evaporate water into the space to be cooled, then remove humidity by running the air past the LiBr solution. You regenerate the diluted LiBr solution by heating it to boil off some of the water and bring it back to full strength (solar heat works well here). Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you live in an area which is hot and dry rather than hot and humid, you can dispense with the LiBr and just evaporate water. This is called a "swamp cooler"; many places in the south-west are lousy with them.
Ammonia is widely used in industrial-scale compression refrigeration systems. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than fluorine/carbon compounds.
Grid-intertie inverters are required to have anti-islanding systems which shut them off within a specified time if they lose the connection to the grid. If you have such an inverter, you won't have power during the grid outage but you won't fry linemen either (and the mfgr has a much bigger insurance policy than you do).