How many plants move around? How many animals use photosynthesis to get the energy to move around? What is the ratio of plannts / animals in the world?
If evolution is a teacher it is telling us that sunlight is so diffuse that you need vast areas of collectors to power even a small number of things that move about. Unfortunately, we want to move a lot of stuff using minimal impact on our surroundings, so we want something less diffuse in nature.
I think focusing sunlight to thermolyse water in that way might violate thermodynamics. I think you'd need to get closer to the sun. Maybe someone can give us hard numbers...
The sun's surface temperature is more than 5000 C , so the laws of thermodynamics certainly don't prevent you from reaching 2500 C using the light emitted from it.
No, I'm merely saying that the fact that you can invent many different ways of doing soemthing is in no way an indication that fundamental problems with it will suddenly vanish. It is not rational to expect solar to suddenly become a silver bullet merely because there is a lot of proposed ways to make solar cells.
Perhaps an analogy is in order. There are LOADS of ways to convert nuclear energy into electricity. There's turbines, direct electrostatic conversion, magnetohydrodynamics, thermoelectric solid state devices, sterling engines, brayton cycles, thermochemical hydrogen production, high temperature electrolysis, etc etc...
Now despite of this you don't see people randomly assuming the price of nuclear is going to drop by a factor of ten within "a few years", because people know that with nuclear, as with solar, and as with coal, the most efficient ( in watts/dollar terms ) generation scheme is to heat one side of a turbine and cool the other one. The other techniques, while interesting from a scientific perspective, are simply inferior in one way or another. They may be inefficient, fragile, may not scale, may involve expensive materials / maintainence etc...
What gets on my nerves with the way these solar technologies are described as major breakthroughs is that they ALWAYS, without exception, are described as something which will revolutionise the energy situation, without as much as a shed of proof that they will even be economical, durable, efficient... They are always along the lines of "Here is yet another way to use solar energy, IF it turns out to be cheap ( which we have no evidence suggesting it will be ) THEN it will change the world.".
That's not a breakthrough, it's speculation of greener grass with no evidence to back it up.
It is easy to get a breakthrough in one criteria if you shaft the other ones.
As an example, you could very well produce hydrogen very efficiently from sunlight without any fancy tech by simply focusing enough sunlight to raise the temperature to 2500 C, at which point water spontaneously separates into hydrogen and oxygen through thermolysis. This would be possible completely without moving parts, no toxic materials, and no new technology.
Problem? It would be much more expensive than making hydrogen from natural gas.
This is why these vapourware stories are so useless. There will be a vast number of ways to convert solar energy into hydrogen or electricity, I could start listing various ways to do it in all kinds of elabourate manners, but it does not mean any of them are good, nor does it mean any one of them is likely to be more efficient than simply using a conventional steam turbine and solar concentrators.
Seriously, what you are attempting to beat is something which, depending on temperature achieved, can have up to 40% conversion efficiency, economies of scale, and uses well tested technology. When you can beat solar thermal then you can start trying to have a go at nuclear or coal, which have a number of other advantages. Simply finding yet another way to convert solar energy into useful work is quite a different thing from solving our energy problems.
Really all you need to do is quickly bring two sub-critical lumps of weapons-grade fissile material together and BOOM.
Ok, if you say so. However, just a few catches.
How large lumps? What shapes should they be? How pure do they need to be? How quickly do you need to bring them together? How long will they have to stay together? How powerful will the explosion be? How powerful explosives do you need to bring them together quick enough? Will you need a neutron source to ensure the chain reaction begins at the right moment? If so, how will you build it? Will you use Polonium-Beryllium or D-T fusion? How do you ensure the neutron source triggers at the right time? When should the chain reaction start to ensure a powerful yield? How many neutrons does your neutron source produce? Does it produce the same number of neutrons every time? Is the fissile material you use pure enough for a gun triggered design (hint, plutonium will not be)? If not, how do you build an implosion type weapon? What explosives can you use for the explosive lenses? What shape should the lenses have? What is the detonational velocity of the explosives you use?
Otherwise I agree with you. Once you have worked out those tiny details there, and a couple of others like them, you just need to bring two pieces together. Of course, this all assumes you have the fissile material to begin with. Weapons grade Uranium is not exactly easy to manufacture, and getting Plutonium-239 pure enough from Pu-240 that you can use a simple "bring the pieces together" design is extremely challenging.
Bah, when I wrote that up I made a change to the incoming numbers because I realised you can't easily stack uranium 100m high, and I seem to have missed by one factor of ten when converting the energy consumption to joules. The required area for 800 years would indeed be 100 square kilometers , but as I mentioned above, that is still just 10 kilometers each way, and if you reprocess it so the fission products decay you only need to store it for 300 years anyway.
Here is the corrected calculation:
The number of Uranium atoms in 10 million metric tonnes is roughly: 1 / 238 * 10^7 * 6 * 10^23 = 2.5 * 10^30 Each of these give you 200 million electron volt, so in total: 5 * 10^38 eV = 8 * 10^20 J US total energy consumption is roughly 3.3 TW = 3.3 * 10^12 W , and that includes ALL energy, heating transportation etc... There is roughly 31536000 seconds in a year, so at a power consumption of 3.3 TW the US consumes roughly: 1 * 10^20 J per year.
If space is your concern, think about the square miles needed to permanently store the nuclear waste.
I'll bite. The energy stored in chemicals bounds, such as those found in oil, plant material, sugar, batteries and so on, are usually a couple of electron volts. To ionize an hydrogen atom, as an example, requires about 13.6 electron volt. Now, the energy released when splitting one Uranium atom is roughly 200 million electron volts.
So how much space do we need then? Well, lets say we use something like a 1000m x 1000m x 10m storage space. That is, one square kilometer 10m high. That would fit 200 million metric tonnes of uranium. However, we are storing the fission products rather than uranium, so lets say half that as a rough estimate. In fact, lets account for cooling ducts and packaging and so on, and reduce the density by a factor of 20. So 10 million metric tonnes of uranium. How long would 10 million tonnes of uranium last?
The number of Uranium atoms in 10 million metric tonnes is roughly: 1 / 238 * 10^8 * 6 * 10^23 = 2.5 * 10^31 Each of these give you 200 million electron volt, so in total: 5 * 10^39 eV = 8 * 10^21 J US total energy consumption is roughly 3.3 TW = 3.3 * 10^12 W , and that includes ALL energy, heating transportation etc... There is roughly 31536000 seconds in a year, so at a power consumption of 3.3 TW the US consumes roughly: 1 * 10^19 J per year.
Thus our Uranium would last for roughly 800 years.
So there you have it. At pressent energy consumption rates, even a waste dump of just a few square kilometers would be perfectly capable to hold all the spent fuel that would be generated for almost a milennium under the assumption ALL energy was from fission. If you think I have done something wrong somewhere, or if you are against reprocessing, feel free to increase the required area by a factor of 100 or so, the area would still just be ten kilometers each way. Also, note that if propperly reprocessed and burnt in fast breeder reactors the waste decays to natural levels within 300 years, so we would not actually ever fill our repository, which has space for 800 years.
Storing the spent fuel is not a technical problem, the contribution to the price of power is less than 10%, and even without any further improvements in technology it can be easily achieved with traditional materials. The "problem" is that idiots keep demanding, and then opposing, things like yucca mountain, which is nothing but a fantastic waste of taxpayers money. The argument for it has been that we must not burden future generatiosn with looking after a nuclear waste repository. Somehow the same argument does not apply to the emissions from fossil fuels, or to the elements used to create solar panels, many of which are rather toxic INDEFINATELY.
I'm sorry but you're a moron. Nowadays the life expetancy of a 20 year old diagnosed early with HIV is as high as 49 years in some countries. Without treatment it is measured in single digits. In addition people on antiretroviral drugs are dramatically less likely to transmit the disease to others than those who are not. I'd argue that you have fuck all idea what you are talking about and that you hence ought to shut up.
So how much cadmium is needed, and how much leaks during the manufacturing process? Given that the opposition to nuclear power worries about toxic materials that decay with time, one would imagine there would be some concern about carcinogens that remain a danger forever, and cannot be destroyed.
If this is indeed the case it would seem a bit strange that it has not been detected before. I mean with all the climate change debate going on there has been quite close scrutiny of the estimates of CO2 going into and out of the atmosphere, so if this is as big a carbon sink as described it would have to mean that the other sinks ( i.e the ocean and the biosphere ) are less potent than previously assumed.
I know of the shady tactics used by teh RIAA, but even thou I have been reading slashdot and groklaw for years, I was nto aware of the extent to which these companies have systematically and intentionally violated even the most basic court principles with the intention to scare ordinary people. Let them hang I say...
Oh, and well done Ray, I will be saving this article as an example of why we need due process.
Just a point for you too re nuclear power. It may outlast us but Uranium reserves are not infinite either. Now if we could only get Fusion happening...
Fission of one Uranium atom produces aproximately 200 MeV of energy. Fusion of one deuterium and one tritium atom produces "only" 14 MeV. It is only if you count "per weight" that fusion gives more energy than fission. When you count per atom fission is much more powerful.
Now in terms of resource availability it is true that we would have enough energy for millions or even billions of years with fusion since the required deuterium and lithium is abundant in seawater. Guess what, the same is true for Uranium.
Uranium is actually a fairly common metal and nowhere close to running out. When people talk about Uranium running out they are talking about the cheapest currently utilised deposits. However Uranium is only some 10% of the cost of nuclear power so even doubling the cost of recovery would increase the cost of nuclear energy by only 10%, and if you use breeder reactors you can divide fuel consumption by a factor of 100, which would allow you to use orders of magnitude more expensive uranium and still end up at pressent fuel costs.
Uranium availability is NOT an issue. The US could power its entire energy demand for hundreds of years using just the uranium left in its nuclear waste.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
That people would consider garbage like that insightful is a good reason why elementary logic should be taught at school. Consider:
elderly scientist A: "It is impossible to travel to Mars." elderly scientist B: "It is impossible to be right when claiming it is impossible to travel to Mars."
By Clarke's rule both these scientists are likely to be wrong, so which is it ? It is about as naive as those peopel who claim you can never know anything with 100% certainty. If that was the case then we certainly couldn't know it ( at least not for sure ), and thus it falls over on itself. Note that "There are some things we CAN know with 100% certainty" does not cause similar difficulties. Indeed, a famous philosopher provided a quite insightful example, yet the naive continue to parrot Popper, even thou his claims are quite obviously self-defeating. It is remarkable how many educated people, even physicists, will believe in a paradox simply because it has become popular.
The current liberal (in the European sense, that is right-wing market liberals) have excelled in demolishing unions (which increases the relative power of producers), privatise public sectors, have deep tie-ins with commercial interests (f.i. Carl Bildt, the former Prime Minister and current Foreign Minister, couldn't understand the conflict of interest in possessing a huge portfolio of Russian oil and natural gas stocks AND residing over the political negotiation on Russian pipelines); and of course, pushing through the FRA legislation.
Oh come on, the left wing has governed Sweden for 75% of the last century and you are blaming the current administration that has been in power for 2 years ? Are you seriously naive enough to believe this has anything to do with our economic system, and that things would be better if we used some more socialist policy? Reinfeldt, Person , Bildt, Sahlin , Shyman, Karlson it will make fuck all difference because left and right, liberal and conservative, they are all politicians and politicians like to have power. Getting rid of corporations or changing the economic system is not the answer, forcing government transparency is. The problem is of course that the only ones who can make the government more transparent is the people who run the government, and they don't want to. Yea, you could vote for the pirate party and hope that the rest of the population get a clue and do the same, but unfortunately people are more obsessed about weather they get 80% or just 75% in unemployment benefit, or if they get to pay 30% tax or 35%. Democracy tends to be a secondary concern of the electorate, and THAT is the real problem.
Mars' magnetic field has not always been as weak as it is now. One theory is that as it's core cooled, the magnetic field vanished, allowing the solar wind to penetrate and blow away the atmosphere. If this turns out to be accurate it might be possible to teraform mars ( or rather, repair it ) by creating a magnetic field through artificial means.
This world isn't black and white, and neither is the EU commision. Yes, they have done bad things ( thou I'd like to remind you that this is a proposal, not yet a law ) but they have also done a lot of good. They are one of the few authorities in the world that tries to restrict Microsoft's monopoly. They have taken serious measures towards limiting global warming, and numerous EU regulations to limit exposure to toxic materials and substances has come from the EU.
You may argue that the goo dthings the EU has brought would have happened anyway, but the same may be said about the bad things. As with most things in this world things are not quite black and white, yet people find it a lot easier to complain than recognise what has been done correctly.
I mean really... Does anyone with a lick of sense actually give their real name to a free web-based service?
You do realise you give LOTS of mail servers WAY more private information every time you send or RECIEVE a non-encrypted e-mail, right? Mommy wrote you saying happy birthday and signed her message with her full name? Your employer, coworker or friends ever wrote you an e-mail ? Seriously, if you worry about google knowing your full name I think you should probably panic right about now given that everybody who has ever sent you an e-mail FROM gmail has given google a hell of a lot more info about you. Heck chances are that using just data stored by google it is possible to deduce the names of the majority of your coworkers, a good portion of your friends, where you live, a good number of your interests, as well as the birthday of your uncle.
That people get worked up about things like google knowing their name tells you a whole lot about just how little they realise about what google knows.
It is downright obvious you cant have one quota for every group that could be discriminated against, so what makes discrimination against women more serious than discrimination against old people, or black for that matter ? The only somewhat serious argument I have heard in response is that women is a larger fraction of society which is exactly why it is MORE important to deal with discrimination against minorities like transsexuals, the blind or buddists. The law exists to protect people who are too few, too weak too disorganised or otherwise uncapable of defending themselves. To argue that it is more important to protect women from discrimination because there is more of them is the exact opposite of this. It gives benefit to the many while ignoring the discrimination of the few. To introduce quotas for women while not doing so for other minorities is very bad from an ethical point of view, and this in combination with the fact that it isn't practical to have quotas for all minorities, is strong evidence that quotas just isn't the right way to do things.
Nuclear can be safer, but it simply costs too much. I fact, it's the most expensive of the alternative options. Safe or not, it's only a stop gap until other systems are running.
Note that their study included decomissioning costs for nuclear ( not that it makes a difference, most of France's reactors quote numbers in the hundreds of millions for decomissioning while the cost of building them was several billions ).
Seriously, the bullshit about nuclear being expensive is simply not true unless you look at excessive cost overruns imposed by frivolous legal challenges and governments delaying projects without good reason. In contrast Japan's recent ABWR projects were completed on time and under budget, but then they don't let groups like greenpeace file nonsense legal claims halfway through construction, forcing companies to delay half-finished projects, thus losing hundreds of millions in costs due to ticking interest rates.
It is true that Areva had some issues with their latest reactor in Finland ( mainly because decades of negligence has left Europe without the expertise to build reactors ), but given that the EPR reactors are designed to be about 30% cheaper than coal, even doubling the costs won't make them as expensive per unit of energy as wind power.
The only way you could arrive at the nonsense conclusion that Nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar is if you ignore all problems the renewables have, while grossly exagerating the costs of nuclear ( perhaps by quoting numbers from the 50ies and compare them to the forecasted numbers for solar in 2030 ), or if you use return of investment figures from a country like germany, where utilities are forced to buy wind power from you at a high price weather it is profitable or not.
Interestingly this is typically what is done. Solar enthusiasts quote prices to achieve 1W in equatorial peak output ( i.e noon in the sahara dessert ) , wind power enthusiasts typically quote the price the consumer in Germany or Sweden pays, failing to mention that those countries have either subsidised the price or outright forced companies to invest in wind power at a loss, without allowing nuclear to progress ( both Sweden and Germany has banned investments into nuclear following influence from green parties that hold a very small minority of votes ).
But nooooo, we will not look at reality, we will use greenpeace's massaged statistics and ignore retarded government policy , despite the fact that France and Japan keeps proving us wrong. As an environmentalist and physicist I'm very bitter. Sweden could have got rid of fossil fuels by now if it had not been for the retarded nuclear phaseout, instead our carbon emissions keep increasing amid politicians who claim to be environmentally friendly even as they replace our domestic nuclear capacity with Danish and Finish coal.
Slashdot Mirror
How many plants move around? How many animals use photosynthesis to get the energy to move around? What is the ratio of plannts / animals in the world?
If evolution is a teacher it is telling us that sunlight is so diffuse that you need vast areas of collectors to power even a small number of things that move about. Unfortunately, we want to move a lot of stuff using minimal impact on our surroundings, so we want something less diffuse in nature.
The sun's surface temperature is more than 5000 C , so the laws of thermodynamics certainly don't prevent you from reaching 2500 C using the light emitted from it.
No, I'm merely saying that the fact that you can invent many different ways of doing soemthing is in no way an indication that fundamental problems with it will suddenly vanish. It is not rational to expect solar to suddenly become a silver bullet merely because there is a lot of proposed ways to make solar cells.
Perhaps an analogy is in order. There are LOADS of ways to convert nuclear energy into electricity. There's turbines, direct electrostatic conversion, magnetohydrodynamics, thermoelectric solid state devices, sterling engines, brayton cycles, thermochemical hydrogen production, high temperature electrolysis, etc etc...
Now despite of this you don't see people randomly assuming the price of nuclear is going to drop by a factor of ten within "a few years", because people know that with nuclear, as with solar, and as with coal, the most efficient ( in watts/dollar terms ) generation scheme is to heat one side of a turbine and cool the other one. The other techniques, while interesting from a scientific perspective, are simply inferior in one way or another. They may be inefficient, fragile, may not scale, may involve expensive materials / maintainence etc...
What gets on my nerves with the way these solar technologies are described as major breakthroughs is that they ALWAYS, without exception, are described as something which will revolutionise the energy situation, without as much as a shed of proof that they will even be economical, durable, efficient... They are always along the lines of "Here is yet another way to use solar energy, IF it turns out to be cheap ( which we have no evidence suggesting it will be ) THEN it will change the world.".
That's not a breakthrough, it's speculation of greener grass with no evidence to back it up.
It is easy to get a breakthrough in one criteria if you shaft the other ones.
As an example, you could very well produce hydrogen very efficiently from sunlight without any fancy tech by simply focusing enough sunlight to raise the temperature to 2500 C, at which point water spontaneously separates into hydrogen and oxygen through thermolysis. This would be possible completely without moving parts, no toxic materials, and no new technology.
Problem? It would be much more expensive than making hydrogen from natural gas.
This is why these vapourware stories are so useless. There will be a vast number of ways to convert solar energy into hydrogen or electricity, I could start listing various ways to do it in all kinds of elabourate manners, but it does not mean any of them are good, nor does it mean any one of them is likely to be more efficient than simply using a conventional steam turbine and solar concentrators.
Seriously, what you are attempting to beat is something which, depending on temperature achieved, can have up to 40% conversion efficiency, economies of scale, and uses well tested technology. When you can beat solar thermal then you can start trying to have a go at nuclear or coal, which have a number of other advantages. Simply finding yet another way to convert solar energy into useful work is quite a different thing from solving our energy problems.
Ok, if you say so. However, just a few catches.
How large lumps?
What shapes should they be?
How pure do they need to be?
How quickly do you need to bring them together?
How long will they have to stay together?
How powerful will the explosion be?
How powerful explosives do you need to bring them together quick enough?
Will you need a neutron source to ensure the chain reaction begins at the right moment?
If so, how will you build it? Will you use Polonium-Beryllium or D-T fusion?
How do you ensure the neutron source triggers at the right time?
When should the chain reaction start to ensure a powerful yield?
How many neutrons does your neutron source produce?
Does it produce the same number of neutrons every time?
Is the fissile material you use pure enough for a gun triggered design (hint, plutonium will not be)?
If not, how do you build an implosion type weapon?
What explosives can you use for the explosive lenses?
What shape should the lenses have?
What is the detonational velocity of the explosives you use?
Otherwise I agree with you. Once you have worked out those tiny details there, and a couple of others like them, you just need to bring two pieces together. Of course, this all assumes you have the fissile material to begin with. Weapons grade Uranium is not exactly easy to manufacture, and getting Plutonium-239 pure enough from Pu-240 that you can use a simple "bring the pieces together" design is extremely challenging.
Bah, when I wrote that up I made a change to the incoming numbers because I realised you can't easily stack uranium 100m high, and I seem to have missed by one factor of ten when converting the energy consumption to joules. The required area for 800 years would indeed be 100 square kilometers , but as I mentioned above, that is still just 10 kilometers each way, and if you reprocess it so the fission products decay you only need to store it for 300 years anyway.
Here is the corrected calculation:
The number of Uranium atoms in 10 million metric tonnes is roughly:
1 / 238 * 10^7 * 6 * 10^23 = 2.5 * 10^30
Each of these give you 200 million electron volt, so in total:
5 * 10^38 eV = 8 * 10^20 J
US total energy consumption is roughly 3.3 TW = 3.3 * 10^12 W , and that includes ALL energy, heating transportation etc...
There is roughly 31536000 seconds in a year, so at a power consumption of 3.3 TW the US consumes roughly:
1 * 10^20 J per year.
I'll bite. The energy stored in chemicals bounds, such as those found in oil, plant material, sugar, batteries and so on, are usually a couple of electron volts. To ionize an hydrogen atom, as an example, requires about 13.6 electron volt. Now, the energy released when splitting one Uranium atom is roughly 200 million electron volts.
So how much space do we need then? Well, lets say we use something like a 1000m x 1000m x 10m storage space. That is, one square kilometer 10m high. That would fit 200 million metric tonnes of uranium. However, we are storing the fission products rather than uranium, so lets say half that as a rough estimate. In fact, lets account for cooling ducts and packaging and so on, and reduce the density by a factor of 20. So 10 million metric tonnes of uranium. How long would 10 million tonnes of uranium last?
The number of Uranium atoms in 10 million metric tonnes is roughly:
1 / 238 * 10^8 * 6 * 10^23 = 2.5 * 10^31
Each of these give you 200 million electron volt, so in total:
5 * 10^39 eV = 8 * 10^21 J
US total energy consumption is roughly 3.3 TW = 3.3 * 10^12 W , and that includes ALL energy, heating transportation etc...
There is roughly 31536000 seconds in a year, so at a power consumption of 3.3 TW the US consumes roughly:
1 * 10^19 J per year.
Thus our Uranium would last for roughly 800 years.
So there you have it. At pressent energy consumption rates, even a waste dump of just a few square kilometers would be perfectly capable to hold all the spent fuel that would be generated for almost a milennium under the assumption ALL energy was from fission. If you think I have done something wrong somewhere, or if you are against reprocessing, feel free to increase the required area by a factor of 100 or so, the area would still just be ten kilometers each way. Also, note that if propperly reprocessed and burnt in fast breeder reactors the waste decays to natural levels within 300 years, so we would not actually ever fill our repository, which has space for 800 years.
Storing the spent fuel is not a technical problem, the contribution to the price of power is less than 10%, and even without any further improvements in technology it can be easily achieved with traditional materials. The "problem" is that idiots keep demanding, and then opposing, things like yucca mountain, which is nothing but a fantastic waste of taxpayers money. The argument for it has been that we must not burden future generatiosn with looking after a nuclear waste repository. Somehow the same argument does not apply to the emissions from fossil fuels, or to the elements used to create solar panels, many of which are rather toxic INDEFINATELY.
I'm sorry but you're a moron. Nowadays the life expetancy of a 20 year old diagnosed early with HIV is as high as 49 years in some countries. Without treatment it is measured in single digits. In addition people on antiretroviral drugs are dramatically less likely to transmit the disease to others than those who are not. I'd argue that you have fuck all idea what you are talking about and that you hence ought to shut up.
So how much cadmium is needed, and how much leaks during the manufacturing process? Given that the opposition to nuclear power worries about toxic materials that decay with time, one would imagine there would be some concern about carcinogens that remain a danger forever, and cannot be destroyed.
If this is indeed the case it would seem a bit strange that it has not been detected before. I mean with all the climate change debate going on there has been quite close scrutiny of the estimates of CO2 going into and out of the atmosphere, so if this is as big a carbon sink as described it would have to mean that the other sinks ( i.e the ocean and the biosphere ) are less potent than previously assumed.
Mayeb they could do it in a super position ? Har! har! har!
Ahhhh! They confused be by difference in future and past. This explain may, why great jedi master in strange order speak.
I know of the shady tactics used by teh RIAA, but even thou I have been reading slashdot and groklaw for years, I was nto aware of the extent to which these companies have systematically and intentionally violated even the most basic court principles with the intention to scare ordinary people. Let them hang I say...
Oh, and well done Ray, I will be saving this article as an example of why we need due process.
Fission of one Uranium atom produces aproximately 200 MeV of energy. Fusion of one deuterium and one tritium atom produces "only" 14 MeV. It is only if you count "per weight" that fusion gives more energy than fission. When you count per atom fission is much more powerful.
Now in terms of resource availability it is true that we would have enough energy for millions or even billions of years with fusion since the required deuterium and lithium is abundant in seawater. Guess what, the same is true for Uranium.
Uranium is actually a fairly common metal and nowhere close to running out. When people talk about Uranium running out they are talking about the cheapest currently utilised deposits. However Uranium is only some 10% of the cost of nuclear power so even doubling the cost of recovery would increase the cost of nuclear energy by only 10%, and if you use breeder reactors you can divide fuel consumption by a factor of 100, which would allow you to use orders of magnitude more expensive uranium and still end up at pressent fuel costs.
Uranium availability is NOT an issue. The US could power its entire energy demand for hundreds of years using just the uranium left in its nuclear waste.
That people would consider garbage like that insightful is a good reason why elementary logic should be taught at school. Consider:
elderly scientist A:
"It is impossible to travel to Mars."
elderly scientist B:
"It is impossible to be right when claiming it is impossible to travel to Mars."
By Clarke's rule both these scientists are likely to be wrong, so which is it ? It is about as naive as those peopel who claim you can never know anything with 100% certainty. If that was the case then we certainly couldn't know it ( at least not for sure ), and thus it falls over on itself. Note that "There are some things we CAN know with 100% certainty" does not cause similar difficulties. Indeed, a famous philosopher provided a quite insightful example, yet the naive continue to parrot Popper, even thou his claims are quite obviously self-defeating. It is remarkable how many educated people, even physicists, will believe in a paradox simply because it has become popular.
Oh come on, the left wing has governed Sweden for 75% of the last century and you are blaming the current administration that has been in power for 2 years ? Are you seriously naive enough to believe this has anything to do with our economic system, and that things would be better if we used some more socialist policy? Reinfeldt, Person , Bildt, Sahlin , Shyman, Karlson it will make fuck all difference because left and right, liberal and conservative, they are all politicians and politicians like to have power. Getting rid of corporations or changing the economic system is not the answer, forcing government transparency is. The problem is of course that the only ones who can make the government more transparent is the people who run the government, and they don't want to. Yea, you could vote for the pirate party and hope that the rest of the population get a clue and do the same, but unfortunately people are more obsessed about weather they get 80% or just 75% in unemployment benefit, or if they get to pay 30% tax or 35%. Democracy tends to be a secondary concern of the electorate, and THAT is the real problem.
Mars' magnetic field has not always been as weak as it is now. One theory is that as it's core cooled, the magnetic field vanished, allowing the solar wind to penetrate and blow away the atmosphere. If this turns out to be accurate it might be possible to teraform mars ( or rather, repair it ) by creating a magnetic field through artificial means.
knew things were bad in Asutralia and Canada, but not that they were THAT bad.
Not really , name the file: mymusicfile.mp3.asf , Windows does the rest for you.
A circle of pairs of stone pillars with a big stone lying horizontally across the top of each pair.
This world isn't black and white, and neither is the EU commision. Yes, they have done bad things ( thou I'd like to remind you that this is a proposal, not yet a law ) but they have also done a lot of good. They are one of the few authorities in the world that tries to restrict Microsoft's monopoly. They have taken serious measures towards limiting global warming, and numerous EU regulations to limit exposure to toxic materials and substances has come from the EU.
You may argue that the goo dthings the EU has brought would have happened anyway, but the same may be said about the bad things. As with most things in this world things are not quite black and white, yet people find it a lot easier to complain than recognise what has been done correctly.
You do realise you give LOTS of mail servers WAY more private information every time you send or RECIEVE a non-encrypted e-mail, right? Mommy wrote you saying happy birthday and signed her message with her full name? Your employer, coworker or friends ever wrote you an e-mail ? Seriously, if you worry about google knowing your full name I think you should probably panic right about now given that everybody who has ever sent you an e-mail FROM gmail has given google a hell of a lot more info about you. Heck chances are that using just data stored by google it is possible to deduce the names of the majority of your coworkers, a good portion of your friends, where you live, a good number of your interests, as well as the birthday of your uncle.
That people get worked up about things like google knowing their name tells you a whole lot about just how little they realise about what google knows.
It is downright obvious you cant have one quota for every group that could be discriminated against, so what makes discrimination against women more serious than discrimination against old people, or black for that matter ? The only somewhat serious argument I have heard in response is that women is a larger fraction of society which is exactly why it is MORE important to deal with discrimination against minorities like transsexuals, the blind or buddists. The law exists to protect people who are too few, too weak too disorganised or otherwise uncapable of defending themselves. To argue that it is more important to protect women from discrimination because there is more of them is the exact opposite of this. It gives benefit to the many while ignoring the discrimination of the few. To introduce quotas for women while not doing so for other minorities is very bad from an ethical point of view, and this in combination with the fact that it isn't practical to have quotas for all minorities, is strong evidence that quotas just isn't the right way to do things.
Citation needed ?
Britain's Royal Academy of Engineeringc ertainly don't agree with you:
http://www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report2.pdf
Note that their study included decomissioning costs for nuclear ( not that it makes a difference, most of France's reactors quote numbers in the hundreds of millions for decomissioning while the cost of building them was several billions ).
Seriously, the bullshit about nuclear being expensive is simply not true unless you look at excessive cost overruns imposed by frivolous legal challenges and governments delaying projects without good reason. In contrast Japan's recent ABWR projects were completed on time and under budget, but then they don't let groups like greenpeace file nonsense legal claims halfway through construction, forcing companies to delay half-finished projects, thus losing hundreds of millions in costs due to ticking interest rates.
It is true that Areva had some issues with their latest reactor in Finland ( mainly because decades of negligence has left Europe without the expertise to build reactors ), but given that the EPR reactors are designed to be about 30% cheaper than coal, even doubling the costs won't make them as expensive per unit of energy as wind power.
Also, before somebody starts going on about Nuclear not being CO2 neutral due to CO2 being emitted when structural materials is produced. The same applies to wind and solar, and nuclear is in fact THE energy source with lowest CO2 emissions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Greenhouse_emissions_by_electricity_source.PNG
The only way you could arrive at the nonsense conclusion that Nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar is if you ignore all problems the renewables have, while grossly exagerating the costs of nuclear ( perhaps by quoting numbers from the 50ies and compare them to the forecasted numbers for solar in 2030 ), or if you use return of investment figures from a country like germany, where utilities are forced to buy wind power from you at a high price weather it is profitable or not.
Interestingly this is typically what is done. Solar enthusiasts quote prices to achieve 1W in equatorial peak output ( i.e noon in the sahara dessert ) , wind power enthusiasts typically quote the price the consumer in Germany or Sweden pays, failing to mention that those countries have either subsidised the price or outright forced companies to invest in wind power at a loss, without allowing nuclear to progress ( both Sweden and Germany has banned investments into nuclear following influence from green parties that hold a very small minority of votes ).
But nooooo, we will not look at reality, we will use greenpeace's massaged statistics and ignore retarded government policy , despite the fact that France and Japan keeps proving us wrong. As an environmentalist and physicist I'm very bitter. Sweden could have got rid of fossil fuels by now if it had not been for the retarded nuclear phaseout, instead our carbon emissions keep increasing amid politicians who claim to be environmentally friendly even as they replace our domestic nuclear capacity with Danish and Finish coal.
Actually there's just 4 levels:
1 - Windows
2 - OSX
3 - Ubuntu
4 - Any other *nix