Thorium reactors have already been built, worked for years, and produced a lot of power. This is more than can be said for fusion.
LFTRs do not only exist on paper. Nobody has yet demonstrated fusion with a net output of power (e.g. a useful, power producing fusion reactor has NEVER been built, so far as I know).
I do have some hopes for the Polywell fusion reactor concept the Navy is funding some R&D on, but they are pretty tight lipped so far on how that research is going, so it's not something I feel comfortable advocating. LFTR, on the other hand, having been demonstrated to some extent, I feel comfortable advocating.
The way I look at it, Democracy is just a civil war, fought with ballots instead of swords. It is an alternative to civil war. Really, that's what it comes down to.
The minority can either accept the will of the majority, or their only recourse is civil war. In the end, it's designed to minimize the amount of bloodshed, nothing more, nothing less.
"First of all there is the trust we can have in people managing these beasts"
* The physics and chemistry of LFTRs is very favorable for safety. Still need trained professionals building and running them, but they should be an order of magnitude safer - no high pressure steam, no hydrogen explosions, passive cooling.
"Third there is the timing problem. We are late to the train."
But, perhpas you can be "on-time" for the LFTR train. Catch an early train and beat most others to the destination.
"(also notice we did not have plans for an erichment plant, so we would have to buy enriched uranium...)"
* Nice thing about LFTRs is, while they need an initial startup charge of enriched fissile material (a "seed" if you will), they do not need on-going enriched fuel. After you have a few up and running, the existing LFTRs should be able to provide the fissile startup seed for new LFTRs. Also, don't need Uranium.
There is a lot of Thorium in the world (probably some in Italy, but not sure), and since almost no one is using it (at least yet), it should be cheap - it's currently a waste product of other industrial mining activities.
I agree. I would also add that if nuclear power has lost the support of the majority of people in the country, then those who view it as necessary for progress need to go out and start trying to convince people to change their minds. You don't just say "I know better than you", in a democracy. You convince other people to join you.
You know, try to educate people.
The other thing I would say is that these types of decisions aren't "forever". The Nuclear Industry can still operate in some countries, and if they could go for more than 25 years without a plant exploding and spewing fairly large amounts of radioactive stuff out into the air, groundwater, and ocean, the public will get more comfortable with it.
I would not be surprised if, in another 25 years or 30, Germany and/or Italy change their minds and begin building nuclear plants again. (By then, "nuclear" may well mean a fusion reactor, or we might still be using fission, who knows).
That said, I do also agree that many people are really overblowing the real human consequences (in terms of health effects which will likely result) from Fukushima. I'm pro-nuclear, but if the majority of households in a country vote against nuclear power, well, that's democracy.
That Bluefish looks pretty cool. I've often wished for something similar (I just went and watched the little intro video).
There's some few things where a GUI approach can be really nice - like picking colors, for example, in certain cases. Does Bluefish offer a gui color picker, then when you pick the color, it inserts the hexcode or rgb(x, y, z) into the code for you?
Also, if you happen to need to create a static table with some data, it's kind of nice to be able to use a gui for creating all the rows and columns (sure, you can do it in the text editor, but it's a pain to create all the tr and td elements, and make sure you have the right number in each row, etc). If you want to delete a column, that's always a P.I.T.A. Does bluefish provide any method of making table creation/maintenance easier?
I've struggled with this over the years - the IT department at a lot of Universities is completely separate from any college or program. They'll get the bright idea of doing something not supported on Linux (they'll usually try to support Mac as it has greater representation among the general population), then the CS departments and students, maybe the IT academic department (that is, the department which TEACHES IT as opposed to the University-wide department which MANAGES IT), and maybe some of the scientists (Physicists, Chemists, etc) who use Linux have to complain that IT broke compatibility, and *hopefully* it gets fixed.
In an ideal world, IT would consult users about PROPOSED changes, incorporate feedback about such problems, and find solutions, beforehand. Yeah, right.
Yeah, I'm mean, seriously, at this point it's a GIVEN that some University students and faculty will be using other operating systems - Mac especially, and pretty much any University that has a Computer Science, Software Development, or IT program should have classes in which students are at least exposed to Unix/Linux and are taught how to do development and/or administration for Unix and Unix-like systems (as they are used a lot in Enterprise IT).
You shouldn't even have to ASK about Mac and Linux compatibility this late in the game - IT should KNOW that they need to provide compatibility with those OSes.
The good news is, that unless you are using some exotic extension to WiFi (like requiring some sort of Active Directory-based login before you can even get an IP address), Mac and Linux users WILL BE compatible with a WiFi network already, as it is an IEEE standard which both have supported for about 10 years.
Apple has been greatly limiting their audience for years. Why should they change now?
But, in their defense. ..Microsoft hasn't backported a number of technologies that are part of Vista and Win 7 (for example, XP kinda-sorta has IPv6 compatibility, but IIRC, I've seen a number of warnings that XP's IPv6 stack is missing a lot of functionality).
Yeah, totally bogus. I read your link, I'm simply not convinced that many researches researched it, came up with the WHO report, but THOSE TWO GUYS know the TRUTH.
I'm accepting the WHO report until the consensus changes. I admit, I'm not a health scientist, and can't really evaluate any of the reports. So, I have to ask myself, WHO do I believe? I'll go with the World Health Organization and affiliated science academies that contributed to the report.
"Has the damage of any other industrial energy production caused as much environmental damage, injury or loss of life as the nuclear incidents we have seen so far?"
The kicker here is, virtually all injury and loss of life is attributable to Chernobyl, and that was actually fairly low - according to the World Health Organization, there will probably be around 4000 deaths attributable to Chernobyl, mostly from cancer, and most of the cancer is treatable (one big problem might be the issue of people whose cancer might be treatable, but unable to afford medical care).
There will likely be far fewer deaths/cancers from Fukushima (but time will tell).
I think we can still do a lot to make reactors safer than they already are, but they are *already* one of the safest sources of power generation on the planet.
Saudio Arabia is beginning to run out of oil - they haven't "run out", but they are having a hard time increasing production and will likely be going into decline soon.
Why do I mention this? The most optimistic marketers the gas industry employs only feel comfortable saying we have "about 100 years' supply of natural gas" - and before you say "well there's lots more UNDISCOVERED gas", those 100 year figures INCLUDE their best estimates on undiscovered gas.
Also, 100 years is based upon current levels of consumption. If we replace our nuclear plants ( currently, 20% of U.S. Electric Generation) with natural gas, we run more buses, trucks, and automobiles on natural gas, and we export gas to other countries around the world, that 100 year supply will quickly become a 50 year or 30 year supply.
Of course, there is the possibility that during that time, we can significantly ramp up other sources of methane, like using human waste, animal waste, plant mass, garbage, etc + methane producing bacteria (that is, the bacteria digest the waste/garbage, and excrete methane as a byproduct), and we may discover newer, deeper sources of methane to drill out of the earth.
But, it's likely that new sources of methane will just get ever more expensive to extract, and harder and harder over time to 'scale up' to the levels we need.
I'm not anti-natural gas, by the way; neither am I anti-wind, anti-solar, or anti-nuclear. I'm one of the 'breadbasket' folks - I think every source has a role to play, some bigger than others.
I just think that nuclear has the potential to play one of the largest roles, in terms of providing a lot of baseload power, and that if we can get economies of scale going (by taking mass manufacturing approach with small modular reactors, like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or the IFR/PRISM reactor), we can get nuclear power to be very cheap. We're not there today, but I do think there's a lot of potential to get nuclear power to be 1/2 - 1/10 the cost it is today.
NatGas we have "known" reserves for "about 100 years"; Nuclear power, we have known reserves for "about 100,000 years".
But, we've got an industry that has essentially been fully stalled for 30 years.
The best way to improve ANY technology is iterative development - make a generation of the technology that is as good as you can right now, then learn lessons about how it can be improved (and benefit from improvements that have occurred in other related fields such as materials science, physics, manufacturing, computing, etc), to design and build a new, improved version. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is how computers today are thousands of times better in every possible feature than computers made just 40 years ago - because we've had probably close to 40 generations of computer technology be iterated through in those 40 years.
The thing is, nuclear basically hasn't iterated AT ALL for the past 30 years (although we are basically ready to iterate a new generation of reactors right now). Folks like "Friends of the Earth" (FOE) don't want us to improve our nuclear plants and make them safer. They do everything in their power to prevent better designs (like the AP1000) from being certified.
They'd rather see us continue using older technology until it gets shut down, than to iterate new, better generations of the technology.
I'm pretty sure that most of the people I've seen talking about using pebbles, don't use steam to run the turbines. Most of the discussions I've seen, IIRC, plan to use an inert gas such as Helium or Nitrogen for the primary coolant loop?
However, I would think there's still some (probably very small, but not zero) possibility of environmental water getting into the reactor.
I don't know if they actually care about *being* environmentally friendly, but I'm pretty sure that they like to at least *appear* to be environmentally friendly, because, I believe, a lot of their customers are concerned about the environment, and are supporters of solar and wind power.
I could be wrong, I admit, but that's the distinct impression I get.
Why would it be hard to re-purpose sections of the building for use by other companies? It seems like this will be, more or less, general-purpose office space. You could as easily have an accounting company, a law firm, or the corporate headquarters of virtually any small/medium company in a part of the building.
The building is a ring, right? So, a few degrees (or if you prefer, a few tenths of a radian) of the circumference could be 'partitioned off', given its own entrance and be leased out.
Jobs mentioned using natural gas to generate their energy. This being Apple, I'm a bit surprised they aren't planning to cover the roof with PV panels, or perhaps use the big empty space in the middle of the building to build a solar-thermal tower, with a field of mirrors surrounding the buildings. Maybe throw up a few of the big Wind Turbines to augment the solar.
That would, however, interfere with them making the rest of the campus be greenspace with lots of trees, which they want. Still, at least the PV panels on the roof would seem a no-brainer for Apple.
Demographics are meaningless in this case. Let's say you're right (I have no idea whether you are or not) that, "a majority of conservatives seem to be a bit older (40s and up); a lot of them probably don't even know how to edit a Wikipedia page. .."
How many people does it take to deface a Wikipedia page? So, even if it's true that most the Repubs have no idea how to change a Wikipedia article, it only takes 1. Or maybe a small handful.
It's sort of like arguing "The majority of muslims aren't radical terrorists, and don't know how to fly planes, so radical islamic terrorists can't be responsible for destroying the World Trade Center towers."
The first statement being true doesn't make the second statement true. They are logically disconnected.
Bzzzt. Try again. I'm not talking about login systems like the login prompt on a Windows or Linux box.
I'm talking about encrypted files - like zip files, 7-zip files, and TrueCrypt volumes, etc. With such files, it may be possible that a third party gets a copy (for example, you lose a DVD or laptop which has a copy of the encrypted file on it).
With such files, typically, a strong random key is used to encrypt the data itself, and then a password is used to encrypt that key.
So, the key is only as secure as the password used to encrypt it.
Your answer still completely fails to answer this situation - you cannot impose a processing delay in data file formats.
That's the situation I care about. The situation you are talking about, like the login prompt on Linux box, is as you say - you can impose a delay. Unless the person has physical access to your box and can reboot it with their own boot disk/USB drive. Then it's game over, unless the hard drive is encrypted, but again, they could try to decrypt the hard drive if you've used a weak password to protect the encryption key.
I remember reading a write-up about that back when the gawker media password file leak happened. One of the schemes, I think it might have been the LanMan hash, effectively reduced all passwords of any length to a sequence of like 7 or 8 character passwords, because it hashed each section of the password separately - e.g. it would hash the first 7 characters, and store that, then hash the second 7 characters.
So, to find the full password, you just lookup one 7 character password in the rainbow table, then the next 7 characters, etc. Since each individual lookup takes like 1/1000 of a second on a modern computer, you could instantly crack any length password 'hashed' with that scheme.
You assume the only use of passwords is for "online" systems where an artificial delay can be imposed by the server.
What about encrypted files? How are you going to impose a delay on someone trying to decrypt the file on their own computer, potentially using different software than what you used (e.g. the software you used might impose a delay, but maybe they have written their own implementation, or modified an open-source version, to skip the delay and continue full speed ahead)?
This could be more of an issue for something like a zip file, 7-zip file, truecrypt volume, etc. Something where the encrypted data is local, and protected by a password. Think of a stolen DVD or USB hard drive which you had put stuff on.
In such a case, the attacker can hook the device up to their own computer, which will NOT enforce any artificial delays. In such a case, the only thing protecting your data would be the complexity of the password itself, and of the algorithm from which an encryption key is derived from the password.
I don't really think you've addressed my questions:
That video you linked routinely shows anywhere from 25% to 50% of the US under clouds at the same time - that's a pretty big drop in supply.
"A particular Ohio city is not an island (btw, there has never been a time in recorded history when a city in Ohio has had only five days of sun in 2 months)."
Huh. Go look at the statistic for April and May of this year that we just got off of. Maybe 5 days isn't exactly the right number, maybe it's 10. The point is, it was cloudy and rainy for virtually the entire months of April AND May. I know because I just lived through it.
Yes, a city isn't an island, it's attached to the grid.
Are you suggesting that some areas of the country will purchase capacity and be producing on the order of 100% more energy capacity than they would be expecting to use (e.g. if most of the East Coast is seriously underpowered because virtually everything from Mississippi to Main is under a giant storm system for most of a day)?
You seem to be saying that shipping very large amounts of power across very large distances will not be a problem? I know that advances are being made in superconductors and HVDC lines to reduce losses when transmitting power long distances, but again, if you have several days in a row where a large portion of the country are only producing 10% or 30% of the power they need, that seems like setting the stage for problems.
Natural gas has has limited supply and is pretty expensive (we're in a period where, from what I've seen, NatGas prices have come down a fair amount, because of an explosion of Shale Gas drilling. That may last us a few decades (The Gas Industry Marketers like to proclaim we have 100 years of gas to produce; if you look into the numbers, that's actually about 80 years at current levels of consumption - but we are starting to increase Gas exports to places like China, we are talking about building new Gas power plants, using Gas to supplement Wind and Solar, and even use Gas for transportation - if we try to do all those things, that 80 year supply of gas could become 40 years).
I think we need to think long term. I'm not convinced we can rely on "cheap natural gas" for centuries.
Don't get me wrong, I DO think that solar and wind can, and will play a significant role in our energy mix in the future. I just have not seen a good, strong argument that convinces me that you can reach that 80-100% level.
I see more of a future where Solar and Wind might provide around 40-50%, with a little gas and coal (hopefully CCS coal) maybe being around 10%, and safer nuclear for the other 40-50%.
I don't really like our current Light Water Reactor technology, but I'm pretty optimistic about the potential for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.
The short description of the LFTR is that it can burn off the waste from our current nuclear reactors, reducing that waste from a 200,000 year problem to a 200 year problem. We *really* need to burn off our waste anyhow, so if for NO OTHER REASON, we need to investigate doing this.
It uses Thorium as the primary fuel, which is about 5X more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium (every State in the USA has Thorium, pretty much every country has Thorium). But here's the kicker - you need about 1/200 the Thorium as you do Uranium for a nuclear reactor of equivalent output. This means much less mining, and much less waste.
With Thorium reactors, a few mines could power the entire country - it should only take one or two tons of Thorium per year to run a reactor - 1 ton Thorium yields roughly a GW-Year of electrical power.
So, if we want to generate 200GW per year, we need about 200 tons of Thorium per year - that doesn't sound like very much, compared to the millions of tons of coal a year that we need.
Finally, the reactor design has several characteristics which should make much safer than LWRs (although LWRs aren't terribly dangerou
I think that solar has a lot of potential in places like TX, NV, CA, NM, AZ, etc.
Here in Ohio, we just came off a stretch during the spring where in 2 months we had like 5 days of sunshine. It wasn't just Ohio either; most of the United States East of the Mississippi was being affected by this cloud cover all at the same time for those two months.
There are companies building solar power plants in Ohio. I just don't understand how that makes any sense? If we convert a significant part of our grid to solar, what are we going to do when you have 2 months of clouds? That doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
I think a lot of "renewables" supporters would say, "supplement the Solar with Wind - during that 2 months of storms, the wind was blowing plenty".
Ok, so now we have to build, whatever Ohio consumes in power - say 5GW - of solar AND 5 GW of Wind. We also have to build plenty of storage to back that up, to even out the peaks and valleys in demand, and there's still NO guarantee you couldn't have a long stretch of days (say a week or two) where it's neither very sunny nor very windy (maybe you can generate power from both the solar plants and the wind plants, but perhaps they're each only generating at 5-10% capacity).
I don't understand how "renewables" supporters ever think it could make sense to depend entirely on solar and wind for 80 - 90% (I'm sure some of them would think 100% is a good idea) of our nation's power.
You have to build FAR more capacity - my statement above, with the example of building 5GW of each isn't really accurate, I think, either. They both have relatively low "capacity factors". So, if your state needs a 5GW supply, you probably need to build like 10GW of each.
Yes, I'm making up some somewhat arbitrary numbers, but the point is valid - with renewables, you basically need both wind and solar, and you need both to have nameplate capacity that is significantly in excess of your desired power level, AND you need lots of storage.
Renewables advocates like to say nuclear is too expensive, but I don't see how the combination of Solar PLUS Wind PLUS storage can become cheaper than nuclear - even as expensive as nuclear is.
On the issue of storage, some people might counter that storage would be good even if you're building nuclear, but it really wouldn't be necessary - just perhaps, advantageous.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you're unfamiliar with eminent domain?
Thorium reactors have already been built, worked for years, and produced a lot of power. This is more than can be said for fusion.
LFTRs do not only exist on paper. Nobody has yet demonstrated fusion with a net output of power (e.g. a useful, power producing fusion reactor has NEVER been built, so far as I know).
I do have some hopes for the Polywell fusion reactor concept the Navy is funding some R&D on, but they are pretty tight lipped so far on how that research is going, so it's not something I feel comfortable advocating. LFTR, on the other hand, having been demonstrated to some extent, I feel comfortable advocating.
The way I look at it, Democracy is just a civil war, fought with ballots instead of swords. It is an alternative to civil war. Really, that's what it comes down to.
The minority can either accept the will of the majority, or their only recourse is civil war. In the end, it's designed to minimize the amount of bloodshed, nothing more, nothing less.
Sounds like Italy might be a good candidate to be an early adopter of the LFTR - Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.
"First of all there is the trust we can have in people managing these beasts"
* The physics and chemistry of LFTRs is very favorable for safety. Still need trained professionals building and running them, but they should be an order of magnitude safer - no high pressure steam, no hydrogen explosions, passive cooling.
"Third there is the timing problem. We are late to the train."
But, perhpas you can be "on-time" for the LFTR train. Catch an early train and beat most others to the destination.
"(also notice we did not have plans for an erichment plant, so we would have to buy enriched uranium...)"
* Nice thing about LFTRs is, while they need an initial startup charge of enriched fissile material (a "seed" if you will), they do not need on-going enriched fuel. After you have a few up and running, the existing LFTRs should be able to provide the fissile startup seed for new LFTRs. Also, don't need Uranium.
There is a lot of Thorium in the world (probably some in Italy, but not sure), and since almost no one is using it (at least yet), it should be cheap - it's currently a waste product of other industrial mining activities.
I agree. I would also add that if nuclear power has lost the support of the majority of people in the country, then those who view it as necessary for progress need to go out and start trying to convince people to change their minds. You don't just say "I know better than you", in a democracy. You convince other people to join you.
You know, try to educate people.
The other thing I would say is that these types of decisions aren't "forever". The Nuclear Industry can still operate in some countries, and if they could go for more than 25 years without a plant exploding and spewing fairly large amounts of radioactive stuff out into the air, groundwater, and ocean, the public will get more comfortable with it.
I would not be surprised if, in another 25 years or 30, Germany and/or Italy change their minds and begin building nuclear plants again. (By then, "nuclear" may well mean a fusion reactor, or we might still be using fission, who knows).
That said, I do also agree that many people are really overblowing the real human consequences (in terms of health effects which will likely result) from Fukushima. I'm pro-nuclear, but if the majority of households in a country vote against nuclear power, well, that's democracy.
That Bluefish looks pretty cool. I've often wished for something similar (I just went and watched the little intro video).
There's some few things where a GUI approach can be really nice - like picking colors, for example, in certain cases. Does Bluefish offer a gui color picker, then when you pick the color, it inserts the hexcode or rgb(x, y, z) into the code for you?
Also, if you happen to need to create a static table with some data, it's kind of nice to be able to use a gui for creating all the rows and columns (sure, you can do it in the text editor, but it's a pain to create all the tr and td elements, and make sure you have the right number in each row, etc). If you want to delete a column, that's always a P.I.T.A. Does bluefish provide any method of making table creation/maintenance easier?
I've struggled with this over the years - the IT department at a lot of Universities is completely separate from any college or program. They'll get the bright idea of doing something not supported on Linux (they'll usually try to support Mac as it has greater representation among the general population), then the CS departments and students, maybe the IT academic department (that is, the department which TEACHES IT as opposed to the University-wide department which MANAGES IT), and maybe some of the scientists (Physicists, Chemists, etc) who use Linux have to complain that IT broke compatibility, and *hopefully* it gets fixed.
In an ideal world, IT would consult users about PROPOSED changes, incorporate feedback about such problems, and find solutions, beforehand. Yeah, right.
Yeah, I'm mean, seriously, at this point it's a GIVEN that some University students and faculty will be using other operating systems - Mac especially, and pretty much any University that has a Computer Science, Software Development, or IT program should have classes in which students are at least exposed to Unix/Linux and are taught how to do development and/or administration for Unix and Unix-like systems (as they are used a lot in Enterprise IT).
You shouldn't even have to ASK about Mac and Linux compatibility this late in the game - IT should KNOW that they need to provide compatibility with those OSes.
The good news is, that unless you are using some exotic extension to WiFi (like requiring some sort of Active Directory-based login before you can even get an IP address), Mac and Linux users WILL BE compatible with a WiFi network already, as it is an IEEE standard which both have supported for about 10 years.
Apple has been greatly limiting their audience for years. Why should they change now?
But, in their defense. . .Microsoft hasn't backported a number of technologies that are part of Vista and Win 7 (for example, XP kinda-sorta has IPv6 compatibility, but IIRC, I've seen a number of warnings that XP's IPv6 stack is missing a lot of functionality).
Yeah, totally bogus. I read your link, I'm simply not convinced that many researches researched it, came up with the WHO report, but THOSE TWO GUYS know the TRUTH.
I'm accepting the WHO report until the consensus changes. I admit, I'm not a health scientist, and can't really evaluate any of the reports. So, I have to ask myself, WHO do I believe? I'll go with the World Health Organization and affiliated science academies that contributed to the report.
"Has the damage of any other industrial energy production caused as much environmental damage, injury or loss of life as the nuclear incidents we have seen so far?"
The kicker here is, virtually all injury and loss of life is attributable to Chernobyl, and that was actually fairly low - according to the World Health Organization, there will probably be around 4000 deaths attributable to Chernobyl, mostly from cancer, and most of the cancer is treatable (one big problem might be the issue of people whose cancer might be treatable, but unable to afford medical care).
There will likely be far fewer deaths/cancers from Fukushima (but time will tell).
I think we can still do a lot to make reactors safer than they already are, but they are *already* one of the safest sources of power generation on the planet.
Mdsolar links to a csmonitor article. Are you saying the csmonitor article is a troll?
Honestly, it doesn't matter who the submitter of a story is, what matters is the story they link to.
Saudio Arabia is beginning to run out of oil - they haven't "run out", but they are having a hard time increasing production and will likely be going into decline soon.
Why do I mention this? The most optimistic marketers the gas industry employs only feel comfortable saying we have "about 100 years' supply of natural gas" - and before you say "well there's lots more UNDISCOVERED gas", those 100 year figures INCLUDE their best estimates on undiscovered gas.
Also, 100 years is based upon current levels of consumption. If we replace our nuclear plants ( currently, 20% of U.S. Electric Generation) with natural gas, we run more buses, trucks, and automobiles on natural gas, and we export gas to other countries around the world, that 100 year supply will quickly become a 50 year or 30 year supply.
Of course, there is the possibility that during that time, we can significantly ramp up other sources of methane, like using human waste, animal waste, plant mass, garbage, etc + methane producing bacteria (that is, the bacteria digest the waste/garbage, and excrete methane as a byproduct), and we may discover newer, deeper sources of methane to drill out of the earth.
But, it's likely that new sources of methane will just get ever more expensive to extract, and harder and harder over time to 'scale up' to the levels we need.
I'm not anti-natural gas, by the way; neither am I anti-wind, anti-solar, or anti-nuclear. I'm one of the 'breadbasket' folks - I think every source has a role to play, some bigger than others.
I just think that nuclear has the potential to play one of the largest roles, in terms of providing a lot of baseload power, and that if we can get economies of scale going (by taking mass manufacturing approach with small modular reactors, like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or the IFR/PRISM reactor), we can get nuclear power to be very cheap. We're not there today, but I do think there's a lot of potential to get nuclear power to be 1/2 - 1/10 the cost it is today.
NatGas we have "known" reserves for "about 100 years"; Nuclear power, we have known reserves for "about 100,000 years".
But, we've got an industry that has essentially been fully stalled for 30 years.
The best way to improve ANY technology is iterative development - make a generation of the technology that is as good as you can right now, then learn lessons about how it can be improved (and benefit from improvements that have occurred in other related fields such as materials science, physics, manufacturing, computing, etc), to design and build a new, improved version. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is how computers today are thousands of times better in every possible feature than computers made just 40 years ago - because we've had probably close to 40 generations of computer technology be iterated through in those 40 years.
The thing is, nuclear basically hasn't iterated AT ALL for the past 30 years (although we are basically ready to iterate a new generation of reactors right now). Folks like "Friends of the Earth" (FOE) don't want us to improve our nuclear plants and make them safer. They do everything in their power to prevent better designs (like the AP1000) from being certified.
They'd rather see us continue using older technology until it gets shut down, than to iterate new, better generations of the technology.
I'm pretty sure that most of the people I've seen talking about using pebbles, don't use steam to run the turbines. Most of the discussions I've seen, IIRC, plan to use an inert gas such as Helium or Nitrogen for the primary coolant loop?
However, I would think there's still some (probably very small, but not zero) possibility of environmental water getting into the reactor.
I don't know if they actually care about *being* environmentally friendly, but I'm pretty sure that they like to at least *appear* to be environmentally friendly, because, I believe, a lot of their customers are concerned about the environment, and are supporters of solar and wind power.
I could be wrong, I admit, but that's the distinct impression I get.
Why would it be hard to re-purpose sections of the building for use by other companies? It seems like this will be, more or less, general-purpose office space. You could as easily have an accounting company, a law firm, or the corporate headquarters of virtually any small/medium company in a part of the building.
The building is a ring, right? So, a few degrees (or if you prefer, a few tenths of a radian) of the circumference could be 'partitioned off', given its own entrance and be leased out.
What's so hard about that?
Jobs mentioned using natural gas to generate their energy. This being Apple, I'm a bit surprised they aren't planning to cover the roof with PV panels, or perhaps use the big empty space in the middle of the building to build a solar-thermal tower, with a field of mirrors surrounding the buildings. Maybe throw up a few of the big Wind Turbines to augment the solar.
That would, however, interfere with them making the rest of the campus be greenspace with lots of trees, which they want. Still, at least the PV panels on the roof would seem a no-brainer for Apple.
Demographics are meaningless in this case. Let's say you're right (I have no idea whether you are or not) that, "a majority of conservatives seem to be a bit older (40s and up); a lot of them probably don't even know how to edit a Wikipedia page. . ."
How many people does it take to deface a Wikipedia page? So, even if it's true that most the Repubs have no idea how to change a Wikipedia article, it only takes 1. Or maybe a small handful.
It's sort of like arguing "The majority of muslims aren't radical terrorists, and don't know how to fly planes, so radical islamic terrorists can't be responsible for destroying the World Trade Center towers."
The first statement being true doesn't make the second statement true. They are logically disconnected.
Bzzzt. Try again. I'm not talking about login systems like the login prompt on a Windows or Linux box.
I'm talking about encrypted files - like zip files, 7-zip files, and TrueCrypt volumes, etc. With such files, it may be possible that a third party gets a copy (for example, you lose a DVD or laptop which has a copy of the encrypted file on it).
With such files, typically, a strong random key is used to encrypt the data itself, and then a password is used to encrypt that key.
So, the key is only as secure as the password used to encrypt it.
Your answer still completely fails to answer this situation - you cannot impose a processing delay in data file formats.
That's the situation I care about. The situation you are talking about, like the login prompt on Linux box, is as you say - you can impose a delay. Unless the person has physical access to your box and can reboot it with their own boot disk/USB drive. Then it's game over, unless the hard drive is encrypted, but again, they could try to decrypt the hard drive if you've used a weak password to protect the encryption key.
I remember reading a write-up about that back when the gawker media password file leak happened. One of the schemes, I think it might have been the LanMan hash, effectively reduced all passwords of any length to a sequence of like 7 or 8 character passwords, because it hashed each section of the password separately - e.g. it would hash the first 7 characters, and store that, then hash the second 7 characters.
So, to find the full password, you just lookup one 7 character password in the rainbow table, then the next 7 characters, etc. Since each individual lookup takes like 1/1000 of a second on a modern computer, you could instantly crack any length password 'hashed' with that scheme.
You assume the only use of passwords is for "online" systems where an artificial delay can be imposed by the server.
What about encrypted files? How are you going to impose a delay on someone trying to decrypt the file on their own computer, potentially using different software than what you used (e.g. the software you used might impose a delay, but maybe they have written their own implementation, or modified an open-source version, to skip the delay and continue full speed ahead)?
This could be more of an issue for something like a zip file, 7-zip file, truecrypt volume, etc. Something where the encrypted data is local, and protected by a password. Think of a stolen DVD or USB hard drive which you had put stuff on.
In such a case, the attacker can hook the device up to their own computer, which will NOT enforce any artificial delays. In such a case, the only thing protecting your data would be the complexity of the password itself, and of the algorithm from which an encryption key is derived from the password.
I don't really think you've addressed my questions:
That video you linked routinely shows anywhere from 25% to 50% of the US under clouds at the same time - that's a pretty big drop in supply.
"A particular Ohio city is not an island (btw, there has never been a time in recorded history when a city in Ohio has had only five days of sun in 2 months)."
Huh. Go look at the statistic for April and May of this year that we just got off of. Maybe 5 days isn't exactly the right number, maybe it's 10. The point is, it was cloudy and rainy for virtually the entire months of April AND May. I know because I just lived through it.
Yes, a city isn't an island, it's attached to the grid.
Are you suggesting that some areas of the country will purchase capacity and be producing on the order of 100% more energy capacity than they would be expecting to use (e.g. if most of the East Coast is seriously underpowered because virtually everything from Mississippi to Main is under a giant storm system for most of a day)?
You seem to be saying that shipping very large amounts of power across very large distances will not be a problem? I know that advances are being made in superconductors and HVDC lines to reduce losses when transmitting power long distances, but again, if you have several days in a row where a large portion of the country are only producing 10% or 30% of the power they need, that seems like setting the stage for problems.
Natural gas has has limited supply and is pretty expensive (we're in a period where, from what I've seen, NatGas prices have come down a fair amount, because of an explosion of Shale Gas drilling. That may last us a few decades (The Gas Industry Marketers like to proclaim we have 100 years of gas to produce; if you look into the numbers, that's actually about 80 years at current levels of consumption - but we are starting to increase Gas exports to places like China, we are talking about building new Gas power plants, using Gas to supplement Wind and Solar, and even use Gas for transportation - if we try to do all those things, that 80 year supply of gas could become 40 years).
I think we need to think long term. I'm not convinced we can rely on "cheap natural gas" for centuries.
Don't get me wrong, I DO think that solar and wind can, and will play a significant role in our energy mix in the future. I just have not seen a good, strong argument that convinces me that you can reach that 80-100% level.
I see more of a future where Solar and Wind might provide around 40-50%, with a little gas and coal (hopefully CCS coal) maybe being around 10%, and safer nuclear for the other 40-50%.
I don't really like our current Light Water Reactor technology, but I'm pretty optimistic about the potential for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.
The short description of the LFTR is that it can burn off the waste from our current nuclear reactors, reducing that waste from a 200,000 year problem to a 200 year problem. We *really* need to burn off our waste anyhow, so if for NO OTHER REASON, we need to investigate doing this.
It uses Thorium as the primary fuel, which is about 5X more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium (every State in the USA has Thorium, pretty much every country has Thorium). But here's the kicker - you need about 1/200 the Thorium as you do Uranium for a nuclear reactor of equivalent output. This means much less mining, and much less waste.
With Thorium reactors, a few mines could power the entire country - it should only take one or two tons of Thorium per year to run a reactor - 1 ton Thorium yields roughly a GW-Year of electrical power.
So, if we want to generate 200GW per year, we need about 200 tons of Thorium per year - that doesn't sound like very much, compared to the millions of tons of coal a year that we need.
Finally, the reactor design has several characteristics which should make much safer than LWRs (although LWRs aren't terribly dangerou
I have a question related to location. . .
I think that solar has a lot of potential in places like TX, NV, CA, NM, AZ, etc.
Here in Ohio, we just came off a stretch during the spring where in 2 months we had like 5 days of sunshine. It wasn't just Ohio either; most of the United States East of the Mississippi was being affected by this cloud cover all at the same time for those two months.
There are companies building solar power plants in Ohio. I just don't understand how that makes any sense? If we convert a significant part of our grid to solar, what are we going to do when you have 2 months of clouds? That doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
I think a lot of "renewables" supporters would say, "supplement the Solar with Wind - during that 2 months of storms, the wind was blowing plenty".
Ok, so now we have to build, whatever Ohio consumes in power - say 5GW - of solar AND 5 GW of Wind. We also have to build plenty of storage to back that up, to even out the peaks and valleys in demand, and there's still NO guarantee you couldn't have a long stretch of days (say a week or two) where it's neither very sunny nor very windy (maybe you can generate power from both the solar plants and the wind plants, but perhaps they're each only generating at 5-10% capacity).
I don't understand how "renewables" supporters ever think it could make sense to depend entirely on solar and wind for 80 - 90% (I'm sure some of them would think 100% is a good idea) of our nation's power.
You have to build FAR more capacity - my statement above, with the example of building 5GW of each isn't really accurate, I think, either. They both have relatively low "capacity factors". So, if your state needs a 5GW supply, you probably need to build like 10GW of each.
Yes, I'm making up some somewhat arbitrary numbers, but the point is valid - with renewables, you basically need both wind and solar, and you need both to have nameplate capacity that is significantly in excess of your desired power level, AND you need lots of storage.
Renewables advocates like to say nuclear is too expensive, but I don't see how the combination of Solar PLUS Wind PLUS storage can become cheaper than nuclear - even as expensive as nuclear is.
On the issue of storage, some people might counter that storage would be good even if you're building nuclear, but it really wouldn't be necessary - just perhaps, advantageous.