Solar photovoltaic is about the most costly way possible to reduce carbon emissions. these guys are offering to offset carbon emissions for $5.50 per tonne, which is way, way, way more cost efficient.
Consider two options: you spend about $7000 for a solar panel system putting out 2.1 kilowatt hours per day. Alternatively, you leave the money in the bank and use the interest to buy offsets.
At, say, 5% interest, you can offset 63 tonnes annually. The solar panel system would offset well under a tonne.
Nuclear power results in a very small amount of highly toxic solid waste, which has happily been contained safely in casks for decades. Coal-fired power stations release gargantuan quantities of toxic gaseous waste that is presently doing enormous environmental damage.
It may well be possible to safely contain the wastes from coal-fired power, but to claim that it will necessarily be easier than nuclear is more than slightly presumptuous.
The reactors aboard an aircraft carrier do more than just run the lights, they can push the whole thing at speeds in excess of 40 knots (how much in excess isn't exactly talked about -- but even that is more than fast enough to water ski behind!).
Considering that the US and Russian navies have operated floating nuclear reactors for many years, there's no particularly reason that a securely moored nuclear reactor couldn't also operate safely.
Whether this particular reactor is safe or not is another question, of course.
But have a look at the map. They can *already* destroy most of Seoul with artillery and rocket launchers anyway; nuclear weapons don't really add much to the threat to South Korea.
The only really plausible target for an aircraft-delivered nuke is Japan, and if you have a look at the map, Japan is quite a long way from North Korea. The Japanese have an extensive collection of ground-based radars, as well as E-3 Sentry and E2-C Hawkeye aircraft. Not to mention that the South Koreans have their own air defence network, There are also USAF bases in Okinawa and northern Honshu.
If they can fly any of their ancient, non-stealthy aircraft past all of that, that will be one impressive feat of flying.
Or, at least, no aircraft worth a damn. Their air force, for the most part, consists of a large collection of Chinese copies of 50's and 60's era Soviet fighters, with a very small number of MiG-29's of uncertain servicability. Their fuel supplies are reportedly extremely limited, so training is probably also extremely low. Any military aircraft they put up that go anywhere near foriegn territory will be shot out of the sky in very short order.
Secondly, their state airline (such as it is) doesn't fly anywhere near the United States, Japan, or South Korea. It flies into Beijing, Shenyang, Vladivostok, and Bangkok. Given the current state of things, if a North Korean airliner went anywhere but its scheduled routes it would also be shot out of the sky in short order.
Maybe you're right. But if you are, why are you telling me this? Go buy some shares in silver miners and make out like a bandit.
And if this is really the case, why isn't silver attracting the stockmarket buzz that even two-bit uranium explorer, to take one random example, is right now?
Your point is, essentially, that plastics are important. Which is obviously true.
However, you can get essentially any hydrocarbon feedstock you want for producing plastics from reprocessing coal, or for that matter biomass. Yes, the cost is higher, but not outrageously so. For the high-value products you mention like drugs, the cost of switching to alternative feedstocks will be almost infinitesimal in the scheme of things.
We make fertiliser using the Haber process, which requires hydrogen and nitrogen as feedstocks. The hydrogen is currently obtained from natural gas.
However, hydrogen can be obtained through coal gasification, or, if it came down to it, through electrolysis of water using electricity from any source, and research is currently going on into how to do high-temperature electrolysis (where most of the energy required is supplied as heat rather than electricity) at an industrial scale.
Any other "irreplaceable" petroleum products you'd like to add to the reasons we are supposedly doomed?
All commodities have gone up in price lately. On first glance, silver's price rise doesn't look in the least unusual in that context. For instance, on current spot prices, gold is about 51.6 times more expensive than silver, which doesn't look particularly unusual when you look at the historical relationship between those two prices.
Hardly compelling evidence for a massive shortage of silver.
I would agree that we also overspend on treating adults in their last months of life as well. My point was mainly in regards to research into things like childhood cancers, which are statistically very rare but because people feel they are so tragic they receive disproportionate amounts of research funding instead of less politically saleable things like medical mistake reduction (which kills more Americans than car accidents).
The reason why children make up a relatively small part of health spending is because they don't get seriously ill very often.
Look, you can do the economic analysis with a spreadsheet, and it'll almost certainly come out that it's more expensive than just buying your power off the grid - that is, unless you live in a remote location where it's going to cost you a lot of money to be grid-connected.
A cheaper environmentally-friendly option in many locations is to buy "green power", where your power provider agrees to buy some or all of your power from renewable sources. Where I live (Victoria, Australia), there are rules about how this works, so that the company can't just count the renewables (such as existing hydro) that they would have used anyway; they have to buy additional renewables and less fossil fuel. I buy green power. Alternatively, there are companies selling "carbon offsets", where they take your money and invest it in otherwise economically unviable projects that reduce carbon emissions.
Neither has the satisfaction of being able to point to your own environmentally-sound generator in your backyard, but they (assuming that the scheme you sign up to is administered properly) can achieve the same net effect at lesser cost.
Mr Wilson has clearly given a lot of pleasure to many Slashdot readers. So, as a thank you, some of them might wish to ensure that his last few months of his life more comfortable.
If you're looking to do the most good for the most people per dollar, money invested in, say, vaccine distribution or malaria prevention is always going to outweigh helping anybody living in the West. And that includes US Army veterans and sick kiddies (in fact, the treatment of Western children with life-threatening illnesses is arguably the single most overfunded branch of the medical profession). But it's only human to want to help out those who we feel a connection with in some way. And Mr. Wilson's work has made a connection with many Slashdotters. I'm not among them, I haven't read it. But if, for example, Linus Torvalds or Joss Wheedon turned up destitute on my doorstep, I'd help them out (even though in both cases them ending up destitute would indicate some very poor life decisions), to thank them for what they've given me.
You're confusing correlation and causation. The Soviets may have had plenty of military, but they also had the biggest socialised medicine scheme you've ever seen.
The countries with space programs are the ones big enough and rich enough to afford it, and the desire to impress one's neighbours. First it was the USA and the Soviets. Then it was the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese (no, the Europeans and Japanese don't have their own crewed launch vehicles, but the Europeans are planning to build one). The Indians are in the advanced stages of a moon probe. Key common factors: big economies. Key differences: almost everything else.
This article veers off on a very strange tangent. It segues into two analysts disagreeing about whether the F-22 can replace the JSTARS and AWACS - which are two modified airliners carrying big honking radars and other monitoring gear used for electronic surveillance (big honking radar) and battle management. One of the analysts even mentions Osama Bin Laden to support his argument. What Osama has to do with it isn't particularly clear; he's not going to be blinding satellites, shooting down AWACS planes, or indeed assembling armies for which big airborne radars are useful for defeating any time soon.
In fact, what any of these completely unrelated points has to do with each other is not at all clear to me.
Entirely ridding the world of nuclear weapons is not obvious, and it's not a no brainer. In fact, it's virtually impossible. The technology can't be uninvented, and if the existing nuclear powers completely disarmed it would leave them and the rest of the world open to nuclear blackmail.
The Economist did an excellent article earlier this year (one of their best efforts for a long time in an increasingly mediocre magazine) about the practical difficulties of nuclear disarmament. It's behind their subscription wall, but if you're interested I thoroughly recommend you go get a copy from your local library.
The details of India and Pakistan's nuclear arsenals are not well known. Globalsecurity.org has some guesstimates, which place India's arsenal at less than 100. It's not clear whether they've mastered multi-stage devices or not, either. However, this probably doesn't make much difference; if they've mastered boosted fission designs that's probably easily enough to make a weapon as big as most contemporary Western designs anyway. Pakistan's stockpile is of similar magnitude, and there's no reports of the use of a multi-stage design.
Both countries have IRBMs that can easily reach each other (and parts of China), but not the West.
Being able to quick charge *would* be kind of handy. If you have to hot-swap the things, that means you need to engineer them to be easily removable from the chassis, means there would probably have to be industry wide agreement on standard form factors (so you could go to a refilling station and simply swap out an empty module for a full one), and so on. If you can just plug in an electric cable to do it, all those issues go away.
Even so, if they could deliver what they're promising, even without the quick charge, it'd be the biggest thing since the internal combustion engine. Probably bigger, because it'd revolutionise the stationary energy sector as well.
As I mentioned in the previous post, the volume of the device is about 27 litres, and on my previous calculations there's 112,000 joules per second of heat energy to absorb. If the thing was made of water (one of the highest specific heat capacities of common materials), it takes 4.18 joules to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius when the water is at 25 degrees. So assuming a mass of 27 kilograms, the thing is going to generate enough heat to increase its temperature by almost exactly 1 degree per second. Thermal mass isn't going to get you out of trouble; you're going to need to actively conduct that heat elsewhere.
OK, the amount of energy stored in these babies is about 187 megajoules, and the volume is 27 litres. Assuming, say, 5% of that isn't stored and is released as heat in the charging process, you've got about 9.35 kilowatt hours worth of energy released as heat, in five minutes. So, that capacitor, to take a rough guess, would be the equivalent of a 112-kilowatt resistive heater.
They'd better have a pretty chunky cooling system if they want to charge the thing that fast. Anybody know how much thermal energy an internal combustion engine's water cooling system has to dispose of, as a basis for comparison? (remember, a lot of the excess thermal energy in an ICE goes out the exhaust pipe).
Proposals for similar things have been presented on Slashdot for years. None of them seems to have gotten close to deployment.
Of course, this doesn't mean that I think that research into the concept should stop or anything; materials science continues to improve, and as time goes on maybe somebody will hit on a design concept that will actually work. But I wouldn't expect this kind of thing to start appearing in your laptop computer any time soon.
As a long time Wikipedia contributor I'd make the following points:
The whole point of a free content project like Wikipedia is that people can do with it what they will, provided it remains free. That's the whole point of free content.
Wikipedia is not perfect. While many of the criticisms that have been levelled at it are unfair, some are well-made; many of them have been argued cogently by Wikipedians themselves. Larry himself has made some useful criticisms.
If Larry and his collaborators can build something that represents a complementary service to Wikipedia, or even ultimately supplants Wikipedia, that will be a good thing, because it will be because they've built something different and/or better than Wikipedia. That's the only way it can happen. As long as the content stays free, ultimately it doesn't really matter whose servers it resides upon.
I wish Larry the best of luck with his new endeavour.
Brazil is a special case - a middle-income country with a huge agricultural export sector and a climate suitable for growing sugar cane, which is where all the ethanol comes from. What it does can't be replicated in the United States, Europe, or most importantly China and India.
...and you'd pretty much have to devote every piece of arable land in the United States to growing it to get enough for the US's vehicle fleet. Which wouldn't leave much for little things, like, um, food.
Biodiesel from fast-growing algae might be a goer. Biodiesel from conventional crops is a stunt.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider two options: you spend about $7000 for a solar panel system putting out 2.1 kilowatt hours per day. Alternatively, you leave the money in the bank and use the interest to buy offsets. At, say, 5% interest, you can offset 63 tonnes annually. The solar panel system would offset well under a tonne.
It may well be possible to safely contain the wastes from coal-fired power, but to claim that it will necessarily be easier than nuclear is more than slightly presumptuous.
Whether this particular reactor is safe or not is another question, of course.
The only really plausible target for an aircraft-delivered nuke is Japan, and if you have a look at the map, Japan is quite a long way from North Korea. The Japanese have an extensive collection of ground-based radars, as well as E-3 Sentry and E2-C Hawkeye aircraft. Not to mention that the South Koreans have their own air defence network, There are also USAF bases in Okinawa and northern Honshu.
If they can fly any of their ancient, non-stealthy aircraft past all of that, that will be one impressive feat of flying.
Secondly, their state airline (such as it is) doesn't fly anywhere near the United States, Japan, or South Korea. It flies into Beijing, Shenyang, Vladivostok, and Bangkok. Given the current state of things, if a North Korean airliner went anywhere but its scheduled routes it would also be shot out of the sky in short order.
And if this is really the case, why isn't silver attracting the stockmarket buzz that even two-bit uranium explorer, to take one random example, is right now?
However, you can get essentially any hydrocarbon feedstock you want for producing plastics from reprocessing coal, or for that matter biomass. Yes, the cost is higher, but not outrageously so. For the high-value products you mention like drugs, the cost of switching to alternative feedstocks will be almost infinitesimal in the scheme of things.
However, hydrogen can be obtained through coal gasification, or, if it came down to it, through electrolysis of water using electricity from any source, and research is currently going on into how to do high-temperature electrolysis (where most of the energy required is supplied as heat rather than electricity) at an industrial scale.
Any other "irreplaceable" petroleum products you'd like to add to the reasons we are supposedly doomed?
Hardly compelling evidence for a massive shortage of silver.
The reason why children make up a relatively small part of health spending is because they don't get seriously ill very often.
A cheaper environmentally-friendly option in many locations is to buy "green power", where your power provider agrees to buy some or all of your power from renewable sources. Where I live (Victoria, Australia), there are rules about how this works, so that the company can't just count the renewables (such as existing hydro) that they would have used anyway; they have to buy additional renewables and less fossil fuel. I buy green power. Alternatively, there are companies selling "carbon offsets", where they take your money and invest it in otherwise economically unviable projects that reduce carbon emissions.
Neither has the satisfaction of being able to point to your own environmentally-sound generator in your backyard, but they (assuming that the scheme you sign up to is administered properly) can achieve the same net effect at lesser cost.
If you're looking to do the most good for the most people per dollar, money invested in, say, vaccine distribution or malaria prevention is always going to outweigh helping anybody living in the West. And that includes US Army veterans and sick kiddies (in fact, the treatment of Western children with life-threatening illnesses is arguably the single most overfunded branch of the medical profession). But it's only human to want to help out those who we feel a connection with in some way. And Mr. Wilson's work has made a connection with many Slashdotters. I'm not among them, I haven't read it. But if, for example, Linus Torvalds or Joss Wheedon turned up destitute on my doorstep, I'd help them out (even though in both cases them ending up destitute would indicate some very poor life decisions), to thank them for what they've given me.
The countries with space programs are the ones big enough and rich enough to afford it, and the desire to impress one's neighbours. First it was the USA and the Soviets. Then it was the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese (no, the Europeans and Japanese don't have their own crewed launch vehicles, but the Europeans are planning to build one). The Indians are in the advanced stages of a moon probe. Key common factors: big economies. Key differences: almost everything else.
In fact, what any of these completely unrelated points has to do with each other is not at all clear to me.
The Economist did an excellent article earlier this year (one of their best efforts for a long time in an increasingly mediocre magazine) about the practical difficulties of nuclear disarmament. It's behind their subscription wall, but if you're interested I thoroughly recommend you go get a copy from your local library.
Both countries have IRBMs that can easily reach each other (and parts of China), but not the West.
Even so, if they could deliver what they're promising, even without the quick charge, it'd be the biggest thing since the internal combustion engine. Probably bigger, because it'd revolutionise the stationary energy sector as well.
As I mentioned in the previous post, the volume of the device is about 27 litres, and on my previous calculations there's 112,000 joules per second of heat energy to absorb. If the thing was made of water (one of the highest specific heat capacities of common materials), it takes 4.18 joules to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius when the water is at 25 degrees. So assuming a mass of 27 kilograms, the thing is going to generate enough heat to increase its temperature by almost exactly 1 degree per second. Thermal mass isn't going to get you out of trouble; you're going to need to actively conduct that heat elsewhere.
They'd better have a pretty chunky cooling system if they want to charge the thing that fast. Anybody know how much thermal energy an internal combustion engine's water cooling system has to dispose of, as a basis for comparison? (remember, a lot of the excess thermal energy in an ICE goes out the exhaust pipe).
Of course, this doesn't mean that I think that research into the concept should stop or anything; materials science continues to improve, and as time goes on maybe somebody will hit on a design concept that will actually work. But I wouldn't expect this kind of thing to start appearing in your laptop computer any time soon.
I wish Larry the best of luck with his new endeavour.
Brazil is a special case - a middle-income country with a huge agricultural export sector and a climate suitable for growing sugar cane, which is where all the ethanol comes from. What it does can't be replicated in the United States, Europe, or most importantly China and India.
Biodiesel from fast-growing algae might be a goer. Biodiesel from conventional crops is a stunt.