Most people drive their car to work in the morning, and home at night, and maybe to the grocery store, kids soccer practice, or movie theater a couple of times a week. Most cars are sitting doing jack squat for 22+ hours a day, so I don't see this as a problem.
Not only that, but anyone who's ever lived in the midwest has already had to deal with plugging in their block heaters during the winter time. It takes thirty seconds to grab a cord and plug it in. It's also notable that many restaurants and shopping centers in those areas have electrical outlets in their parking lots - it's really not a big deal.
Of course, charging batteries draws far more power than keeping a block heater running, so you'd want to meter the electricity. It would be pretty simple: you deposit money into something that looks like a parking meter, and it fills your car up. This way, you'd at least be getting something for your money when you pay for parking, instead of just paying a tax on driving.
A selected point-by-point reply, not to the AC but to the article:
Nuclear energy is still too expensive and too dangerous. Huge amounts of water are needed in a time of increasing water shortage. Uranium supplies are limited.
Huge amounts of water, yes; huge amounts of drinking-quality water, no. We're talking about running heat exchangers. It just so happens that a large natural body of water is a pretty good heatsink, so drawing cold water from a lake and dumping warm water back into it works well. It's also notable that this doesn't actually use any water. Even water turned to steam isn't used up, as every third grade student knows.
The risks are minimized or declared technically surmountable.
Is there anything to suggest that the risks are, in fact, insurmountable? A nuclear reactor is just a big process control design problem: it's not very different from a large chemical plant. In and around every major city are chemical plants with tanks of high pressure sulfur dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, benzene, and a million other deadly chemicals. Accidents are rare, and when they happen (Bhopal anyone?), they can be a LOT worse than the worst conceivable nuclear disaster. Yet, for some reason, we still make plastics and refine oil.
At the same time, renewable energies are denounced as uneconomical, with their potential marginalized in order to underscore the indispensability of nuclear energy.
Maybe they're denounced as uneconomical because, well, they are. I would love to see it proven otherwise... the renewable energy industry needs to put up or shut up. Start making large amounts of power and selling it at a profit.
Trivializing the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl is part of this strategy.
Yes, this is part of the strategy - except it's not trivialization, but rather a refusal to continue blowing it out of proportion. We can debate the death toll all we want. Both the nuclear and chemical industries have had their disasters, but no one is suggesting we live without plastics. For the record: Bhopal: 2000 people dead immediately, 6000 dead later, estimates of 150 thousand injured. But really, the thing that makes Chernobyl practically irrelevant today is that it was the result of braindead operating procedures at plant in a crumbling soviet system, run by unqualified personnel, with important operating characteristics kept as military secrets, based on a fundamentally flawed design. It's ridiculous to compare modern nuclear energy to that.
The deployment of nuclear energy is the result of gigantic mechanisms of subsidization and privilege.... Between 1974 and 1992, $168 billion was spent on nuclear energy and only $22 billion on renewables.
True. It's also notable that the author called $22B on renewable power research "practically nothing." I'd say that's actually a lot of money for power sources that have yet to contribute anything meaningful to the nation's electrical output. That said, there have been legitimate reasons to question whether nuclear power could survive without government subsidies. No one these days is saying that nuclear power is the cheapest option... if we want least-cost, we continue burning coal. Renewable energy can't survive without subsidies either. I'm not an economist, and this is a complex topic about which much more could be said.
Uranium reserves estimated at a maximum 60 years refer to the number of plants currently in operation.
I'm getting somewhat tired of seeing this statement thrown around. For the last bloody time, the mining industry quotes reserves based on known minable tonnages. If demand for U goes up, companies start exploring for it. Uranium prices go up, allowing previously uneconomic deposits to become reserves. The price of nuclear fuel is almost trivial compared to the
Interesting, thanks. I guess I shouldn't have limited myself to the officially available extensions when trying Firefox. For now, I'm sticking with Opera though. From what you've said, FF does almost everything that Opera does... but Opera is the defender, and a challenger has to offer something above and beyond the defender if I'm to spend my time switching.
Firefox needs to do something truly innovative to win me over, but as is, it's already far superior to what most people are using.
Things firefox still doesn't have, even with all the extensions:
-Support for session management, including... --The ability to resume sessions after shutdown or (rare) crashes --Save/Close/Resume any number of sessions -Format override at the push of a button -Image override, again, with a single button -Nearly perfect page zooming -Dozens of little UI features like... --Paste and Go in the URL bar --Go To URL for any piece of selected text --The ability to close a tab by middle clicking it --Incredibly comprehensive keyboard support --The ability to copy the URL of any conceivable page, frame, image, or link with two clicks
There's tons more, but it comes down to the issue of refinement. Opera has been through so many revisions that the interface has essentially been perfected. It was the first browser to do tabbed browsing, popup blocking, user-agent spoofing, search toolbars, mouse gestures - all the things that firefox users praise their browser for.
It's kind of a shame to see this sort of innovation go unrewarded as free alternatives rip off all the best features of Opera.
That's nothing. I've seen a LaserJet 4 with 170'000 pages, and there was nothing to suggest it was near the end of its useful life. They replaced it with a newer HP though, because the print speed was proving too slow for the reams of paper students would constantly demand of it.
What you say might be remotely plausible if it weren't for the fact that companies think on timescales of roughly 1-10 years. Come to think of it, ten years is rare - I doubt many companies outside the fields of mining, drug research, or aerospace would consider projects with that kind of payback period. Most companies only care about next quarter's results. The company, as an entity in and of itself, is only concerned with maximimizing return for its owners. If it completely ceases to exist in 20 years, but returned good profits for its investors in its lifetime, the company was a success.
My point is just that companies are perfectly willing to self destructively cannibalize the entire American economy for the sake of short-term profits.
You're using a CRT based rear projection set, and it overscans. It's a necessary design compromise in such a large tube to counteract the effect of nonlinear beam velocity at the tube edge. Your TV is being fed the proper signal, it just chops off a bit. DLP and LCD sets don't do this. Some tube-based sets rescale and digitally process everything that comes in through component input - slight quality loss, but no overscan.
As for only a few resolutions working... indeed, your TV is designed for a few fixed-sync modes, and pretty much nothing else.
Uranium mining, and mining in general, is essentially non-polluting. It's simply a material handling excersize - large diesel vehicles move broken rock around underground. The only emissions are from the engines, and they're comparable to those in large trucks.
Ore processing, on the other hand, has a waste stream, but it's simply a slurry of finely pulverized waste rock. It has a very small amount of uranium left in it, and some other radioactive waste minerals. This waste stream, known as tailings, is perpetually contained in holding ponds.
People will sometimes refer to uranium tailings as being some sort of environmental disaster, but really, it's perfectly safe to be around them. They don't cause cancer, they're not highly radioactive... they're just mud.
Nuclear fuel isn't just shoveled around like coal - in the West, fuel is very carefully monitored and accounted for. Even if it weren't, consider that slightly enriched uranium, or mixed oxide plutonium fuel is totally useless for the creation of anything but a dirty bomb (which is itself more of a scare tactic than a legitimate threat). Fuel enrichment to bomb grade material is incredibly complex and expensive - well outside the means of any terrorist organization.
As for barely-legitimate third world governments, no one has suggested giving them nuclear power. But if we had to supply hostile areas with nuclear energy, we could locate the plants in a stable place and simply use transmission lines. It's not really an issue though; the third world can keep burning coal. Their per-capita energy consumption is low enough not to be a major problem for a few more decades. The environmental disasters of the third world are deforestation, desertification, and other such unsustainabe land-use practices. Followed by that, some places like Tehran are chokingly polluted by a fleet of ancient cars running on low-grade leaded gasoline. The environmental impact of CO2 isn't the issue there - it's the human health hazard posed by tailpipe emissions full of lead, uncombusted hydrocarbons, NOx, ozone, and particulates.
The Kyoto Protocol is nothing but a giant scheme for the reallocation of wealth under the guise of environmental protection, and I for one support Bush in rejecting it outright.
Russia supports it because, due to its post communist industrial collapse, the treaty essentially requires nothing of them. In fact, it gives them excess CO2 production credits that they can trade on the international market.
The main failing of the treaty is that it was drafted in a completely different geopolitical climate, one in which China had yet to start its rapid growth toward a major industrial power. It treats China as a developing country, requiring absolutely no CO2 output reduction on its part.
This has the side effect of giving them an enormous advantage: Kyoto would have us willingly cripple our own industrial output to allow China more advantage than its lax environmental laws and cheap labour already allow.
And really, for what? CO2 output reduction is an inevitability anyway. Within the next decade or so, we will have heavy hybrids that are able to charge themselves using household AC. Half of the people in major cities will be able to have zero-emission morning commutes. That alone will go a large way toward significantly reducing CO2 output. It's ridiculous to force a political solution to a technical problem.
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Not only that, but anyone who's ever lived in the midwest has already had to deal with plugging in their block heaters during the winter time. It takes thirty seconds to grab a cord and plug it in. It's also notable that many restaurants and shopping centers in those areas have electrical outlets in their parking lots - it's really not a big deal.
Of course, charging batteries draws far more power than keeping a block heater running, so you'd want to meter the electricity. It would be pretty simple: you deposit money into something that looks like a parking meter, and it fills your car up. This way, you'd at least be getting something for your money when you pay for parking, instead of just paying a tax on driving.
Huge amounts of water, yes; huge amounts of drinking-quality water, no. We're talking about running heat exchangers. It just so happens that a large natural body of water is a pretty good heatsink, so drawing cold water from a lake and dumping warm water back into it works well. It's also notable that this doesn't actually use any water. Even water turned to steam isn't used up, as every third grade student knows.
Is there anything to suggest that the risks are, in fact, insurmountable? A nuclear reactor is just a big process control design problem: it's not very different from a large chemical plant. In and around every major city are chemical plants with tanks of high pressure sulfur dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, benzene, and a million other deadly chemicals. Accidents are rare, and when they happen (Bhopal anyone?), they can be a LOT worse than the worst conceivable nuclear disaster. Yet, for some reason, we still make plastics and refine oil.
Maybe they're denounced as uneconomical because, well, they are. I would love to see it proven otherwise... the renewable energy industry needs to put up or shut up. Start making large amounts of power and selling it at a profit.
Yes, this is part of the strategy - except it's not trivialization, but rather a refusal to continue blowing it out of proportion. We can debate the death toll all we want. Both the nuclear and chemical industries have had their disasters, but no one is suggesting we live without plastics. For the record: Bhopal: 2000 people dead immediately, 6000 dead later, estimates of 150 thousand injured. But really, the thing that makes Chernobyl practically irrelevant today is that it was the result of braindead operating procedures at plant in a crumbling soviet system, run by unqualified personnel, with important operating characteristics kept as military secrets, based on a fundamentally flawed design. It's ridiculous to compare modern nuclear energy to that.
True. It's also notable that the author called $22B on renewable power research "practically nothing." I'd say that's actually a lot of money for power sources that have yet to contribute anything meaningful to the nation's electrical output. That said, there have been legitimate reasons to question whether nuclear power could survive without government subsidies. No one these days is saying that nuclear power is the cheapest option... if we want least-cost, we continue burning coal. Renewable energy can't survive without subsidies either. I'm not an economist, and this is a complex topic about which much more could be said.
I'm getting somewhat tired of seeing this statement thrown around. For the last bloody time, the mining industry quotes reserves based on known minable tonnages. If demand for U goes up, companies start exploring for it. Uranium prices go up, allowing previously uneconomic deposits to become reserves. The price of nuclear fuel is almost trivial compared to the
Interesting, thanks. I guess I shouldn't have limited myself to the officially available extensions when trying Firefox. For now, I'm sticking with Opera though. From what you've said, FF does almost everything that Opera does... but Opera is the defender, and a challenger has to offer something above and beyond the defender if I'm to spend my time switching.
Firefox needs to do something truly innovative to win me over, but as is, it's already far superior to what most people are using.
Things firefox still doesn't have, even with all the extensions:
-Support for session management, including...
--The ability to resume sessions after shutdown or (rare) crashes
--Save/Close/Resume any number of sessions
-Format override at the push of a button
-Image override, again, with a single button
-Nearly perfect page zooming
-Dozens of little UI features like...
--Paste and Go in the URL bar
--Go To URL for any piece of selected text
--The ability to close a tab by middle clicking it
--Incredibly comprehensive keyboard support
--The ability to copy the URL of any conceivable page, frame, image, or link with two clicks
There's tons more, but it comes down to the issue of refinement. Opera has been through so many revisions that the interface has essentially been perfected. It was the first browser to do tabbed browsing, popup blocking, user-agent spoofing, search toolbars, mouse gestures - all the things that firefox users praise their browser for.
It's kind of a shame to see this sort of innovation go unrewarded as free alternatives rip off all the best features of Opera.
Sig: "Under W the US is a big geek: Technically powerful, but not popular."
No, under W the US is a big bully: physically powerful, intellectually deficient, and incredibly aggressive. The lack of popularity follows from that.
That's nothing. I've seen a LaserJet 4 with 170'000 pages, and there was nothing to suggest it was near the end of its useful life. They replaced it with a newer HP though, because the print speed was proving too slow for the reams of paper students would constantly demand of it.
What you say might be remotely plausible if it weren't for the fact that companies think on timescales of roughly 1-10 years. Come to think of it, ten years is rare - I doubt many companies outside the fields of mining, drug research, or aerospace would consider projects with that kind of payback period. Most companies only care about next quarter's results. The company, as an entity in and of itself, is only concerned with maximimizing return for its owners. If it completely ceases to exist in 20 years, but returned good profits for its investors in its lifetime, the company was a success.
My point is just that companies are perfectly willing to self destructively cannibalize the entire American economy for the sake of short-term profits.
You're using a CRT based rear projection set, and it overscans. It's a necessary design compromise in such a large tube to counteract the effect of nonlinear beam velocity at the tube edge. Your TV is being fed the proper signal, it just chops off a bit. DLP and LCD sets don't do this. Some tube-based sets rescale and digitally process everything that comes in through component input - slight quality loss, but no overscan.
As for only a few resolutions working... indeed, your TV is designed for a few fixed-sync modes, and pretty much nothing else.
Uranium mining, and mining in general, is essentially non-polluting. It's simply a material handling excersize - large diesel vehicles move broken rock around underground. The only emissions are from the engines, and they're comparable to those in large trucks.
Ore processing, on the other hand, has a waste stream, but it's simply a slurry of finely pulverized waste rock. It has a very small amount of uranium left in it, and some other radioactive waste minerals. This waste stream, known as tailings, is perpetually contained in holding ponds.
People will sometimes refer to uranium tailings as being some sort of environmental disaster, but really, it's perfectly safe to be around them. They don't cause cancer, they're not highly radioactive... they're just mud.
Nuclear fuel isn't just shoveled around like coal - in the West, fuel is very carefully monitored and accounted for. Even if it weren't, consider that slightly enriched uranium, or mixed oxide plutonium fuel is totally useless for the creation of anything but a dirty bomb (which is itself more of a scare tactic than a legitimate threat). Fuel enrichment to bomb grade material is incredibly complex and expensive - well outside the means of any terrorist organization. As for barely-legitimate third world governments, no one has suggested giving them nuclear power. But if we had to supply hostile areas with nuclear energy, we could locate the plants in a stable place and simply use transmission lines. It's not really an issue though; the third world can keep burning coal. Their per-capita energy consumption is low enough not to be a major problem for a few more decades. The environmental disasters of the third world are deforestation, desertification, and other such unsustainabe land-use practices. Followed by that, some places like Tehran are chokingly polluted by a fleet of ancient cars running on low-grade leaded gasoline. The environmental impact of CO2 isn't the issue there - it's the human health hazard posed by tailpipe emissions full of lead, uncombusted hydrocarbons, NOx, ozone, and particulates.
The Kyoto Protocol is nothing but a giant scheme for the reallocation of wealth under the guise of environmental protection, and I for one support Bush in rejecting it outright.
Russia supports it because, due to its post communist industrial collapse, the treaty essentially requires nothing of them. In fact, it gives them excess CO2 production credits that they can trade on the international market.
The main failing of the treaty is that it was drafted in a completely different geopolitical climate, one in which China had yet to start its rapid growth toward a major industrial power. It treats China as a developing country, requiring absolutely no CO2 output reduction on its part.
This has the side effect of giving them an enormous advantage: Kyoto would have us willingly cripple our own industrial output to allow China more advantage than its lax environmental laws and cheap labour already allow.
And really, for what? CO2 output reduction is an inevitability anyway. Within the next decade or so, we will have heavy hybrids that are able to charge themselves using household AC. Half of the people in major cities will be able to have zero-emission morning commutes. That alone will go a large way toward significantly reducing CO2 output. It's ridiculous to force a political solution to a technical problem.