The article is vague. No mention of whether there were any false positives. People will get fed up really quickly if told to evacuate and no quake comes.
Also, it's not clear to me that what their predicting ("hotspots") is the same thing as predicting when an earthquake will happen. How long do individual "hotspots" exist in one place?
Still, earthquake and other Earth-sci prediction simulations can be useful. Just probably better for long-term planning than individual predictions.
Re:Well I'll be damned
on
Nuclear Batteries
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The primary downsides to Nuclear Batteries is that they are expensive and they don't scale. They are expensive because the nuclear materials are very rare and expensive to process. If we started using these materials in massive quantities, it's a certainty that the prices would drop. They are not scalable, because the amount of materials required means that a few hundred watts is the largest device one could construct with a reasonable size, weight, and expense.
Actually, the point of this article is batteries that scale *down* rather than up. One of the stumbling blocks for miniturized mechanics (MEMS,e tc.) has been the lack of a comparably sized power source. Sure, you can have MEMS accelerometers powered off of your car battery (to sense when to deploy your airbags). But if you want to sever the tether and keep things at a micro scale, you must scale the power to that scale.
Also worth noting, the batteries mentioned in the article actually operate on a different principle than RTGs. The T in RTG stands for "thermoelectric." The article talks about generating power using peizioelectrics. See the figure (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur e/sep04/0904nucf1.html).
There also is an interesting sidebar comparing the amount of radioisotope needed for such batteries to current commercial applications in which radioisotopes are used (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur e/sep04/0904nucsb1.html). Individual devices sound tame enough, but I think the real problem will be disposal - especially when everyone has one in their cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is vague. No mention of whether there were any false positives. People will get fed up really quickly if told to evacuate and no quake comes.
Also, it's not clear to me that what their predicting ("hotspots") is the same thing as predicting when an earthquake will happen. How long do individual "hotspots" exist in one place?
Still, earthquake and other Earth-sci prediction simulations can be useful. Just probably better for long-term planning than individual predictions.
Actually, the point of this article is batteries that scale *down* rather than up. One of the stumbling blocks for miniturized mechanics (MEMS,e tc.) has been the lack of a comparably sized power source. Sure, you can have MEMS accelerometers powered off of your car battery (to sense when to deploy your airbags). But if you want to sever the tether and keep things at a micro scale, you must scale the power to that scale.
Also worth noting, the batteries mentioned in the article actually operate on a different principle than RTGs. The T in RTG stands for "thermoelectric." The article talks about generating power using peizioelectrics. See the figure (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur e/sep04/0904nucf1.html).
There also is an interesting sidebar comparing the amount of radioisotope needed for such batteries to current commercial applications in which radioisotopes are used (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur e/sep04/0904nucsb1.html). Individual devices sound tame enough, but I think the real problem will be disposal - especially when everyone has one in their cell phone.