Many here (and elsewhere, in the Real World) noted the bizarre disconnect between the treatment of Martin Shkreli (who deserved what he got, and more) and Elizabeth Holmes who was running a far vaster scheme to defraud but mysteriously seemed to escape any real personal consequences. A lot of that had to do with they way she smartly spread money around, getting a lot of movers and shakers on the board so that they could have a cut of the pie, and intercede on her behalf.
The news that she was getting funding for another scheme... err start-up... was flabbergasting. It is about time that her shenanigans caught up with her so that perhaps she will pay a real price, not just cough up (most of) her ill gotten gains.
The people preaching that slapping giant solar panels on good farmland are just idiots.
Please provide evidence that such people even exist. This is a straw-man.
There are no solar plants located on good farmland in the U.S., and no proposals to build any. Only 25% of the area of the United States is farmland, so no need to use it for solar farms.
There is a lot of interest in putting wind turbines on farm land, since it requires negligible space, and the farm belt of the plains is also the U.S. wind belt, and the farmers are happy to get a monthly check from a share of the power produced in exchange for doing nothing.
And we have Federal mandates requiring that corn be raised to produce fuel ethanol even though that is a net energy waste, and is raises the cost of fuel (i.e. it is in effect a tax to support the corn farmer). So we are already paying money to take crop land out of food production to make fuel, but at a net energy cost. Now that is just idiotic.
Nuclear produces 805 TWh, which makes it hard to be to be excited by 2.5 gigawatts of solar. Total solar output in the US, after two decades of investment, is less than 2 TWh.
Umm... no. In 2017 the actual solar electricity production was 52 TWh not "less than 2". Solar and wind combined were 307 TWh. Add in geothermal (yeah, that's a thing too) and renewables rise to 319 TWh (I leave off hydropower as it is a resource that is fully exploited at this point).
You are excessively optimistic about coal's potential.
There are no carbon taxes in the U.S. and no national regulatory mandates to reduce CO2 emissions. A fair number of states have them, which changes their electricity buying habits, but the primary reason that coal plants are being shut down (U.S. coal consumption has dropped back to 1980s levels) is that natural gas power plants are cheaper to operate, even when the cost of new construction is taken into account.
Coal plants have a lot of inherent difficulties that keep the costs high, compared to natural gas. Coal is a solid, dirty fuel, full of abrasive ash, sulfur, and other toxic materials that is awkward and expensive both to handle (compared to gas) and to deal with when it is burned, which results in expensive operating, equipment and maintenance costs, and more plant down-time. The purchase price of the fuel is cheap, but everything else about it (manpower, site storage, handling equipment, combustion systems, post combustion processing) is more difficult and expensive. Calling a truly modern coal plant, with all the required equipment to minimize non-CO2 pollution emissions so that it can be called clean "cheap" is simply wrong.
And then you simply ignore the plain fact that the cost of carbon capture has to be added to that cost. This is effectively a carbon tax, and for coal will be twice what it is for natural gas, and of course wind, solar, and nuclear pay nothing for it.
Further, the time when CO2 extraction from the air becomes an important thing (i.e. on a scale that it affects the national power market in a major way), coal will not come back - because this is so far in the future (decades) that coal will have passed from the scene and the fossil fuel that will get a boost will be natural gas.
Instead of moving it around, storing it in batteries and getting it when you need it makes a lot of sense...
Moving it around is the way to go, when that is all you need. 800 KVDC long distance lines lose very little power, even a 3000 km run loses less than any form of storage. And you do need to move it around anyway, better to build a robust modern system to do this (though high voltage DC transmission is a technology that has been in use for almost a century).
What we need is some way to store energy in addition to just moving it around. A collection of the most cost-efficient options (generation, transmission and storage).
At the moment the problem is not how much dust will be on the solar panels after the storm. It is that it will lose all power during the storm, the heaters will stop working, and will then be unable to reactivate afterward.
The story reports an optical depth of the dust storm of tau=10.8. This is astoundingly dark. The transmittance of light through the atmosphere is 1/e^tau so that only 1/50,000 (0.002%) of the sunlight is getting through! It is effectively perpetual night there right now. This is probably darker than even the heaviest storm clouds on Earth (which only go up to blocking 1/20,000 of the sun light). Thus far the storm has cut off power for six days.
Although the storm also moderates temperature, since it prevents radiation cooling at night, it also means that the day time high temperatures are not reached either, so that the heaters have to be cranked up constantly (though not to the level of coldest night chill), with no power replacing what is being drained from the batteries.
It the batteries drain to the level that they can no longer supply the heaters then whether there is dust on the panels after the storm ends will be moot. Opportunity will be dead.
You mean along the right-of-way and accesses already used by electricity and telephone landlines? This is already a solved problem. Like everywhere else, you lay fiber along the same routes.
Because the National Radio Quiet Zone prohibits WiFi, satellite internet, and cell service in a large part of W. Va. to protect radio astronomy telescopes from interference. The "lack of Internet" is due to this, I suspect, not because of poverty or lack of will.
Fiber, as specified by the poster to which you are replying, does not interfere with radiotelescopes. In 2000 than they had landlines running to 95.3% of all housing units in West Virginia. It can be done with fiber as well.
If they have telephones and electricity, and they do, then broadband can be deployed there as well, and it will be easier than the original installation of either of those earlier services since service corridors, conduits, etc. already exist. In 2000 95.3% of all housing units in West Virginia had landline telephones.
It may take something like the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 to make it happen, but that is the point. Representatives of rural areas should be pushing for this hard.
The Netherlands in fact is number TWO in the world in food exports, as measure by value! $93 billion vs $150 billion for the U.S.
This is possible because the focus on high value vegetable crops (not cheap tonnage grains) and by having a large food processing industry. A lot of that value, is processing value-added, and may not even be from raw foods that The Netherlands produces itself, but imports.
If you read TFA (I know,/.) you find out very quickly. The printer is a robotic cement/concrete squirting arm that builds up the structure, replacing manual labor required to do traditional form setting and removal.
The very short piece leaves lots and lots of questions - installation of utilities, how is rebar being placed (if it is), is this regular cement/concrete or some special formulation, etc.
One of those advantages is that the concrete printer has the ability to lay concrete only where it is needed constructively. Traditionally poured concrete is solid, and contains much more concrete than is needed constructively. More is being used, which is bad for CO2 emissions, because with producing cement a lot of this greenhouse gas is released.
With 3D concrete printing, very fine concrete structures are possible. In the traditional pouring of concrete, the formwork determines the shape of concrete. With concrete prints, builders will soon be able to make concrete details as small as a pea, and round, hollow or convex shapes. This makes concrete buildings and constructions with completely new forms possible.
Another new option is the printing of different types, qualities and colors of concrete, all in one integrated product. This means that a complete wall can be printed with all necessary functionalities. Such a wall has to be reinforced with fibers of wire that insulate, and on the outside must be kept dirt-repellent, and on the inside a layer that ensures pleasant acoustics. Further, it contains the required recesses and internal drainage pipes of waterproof concrete. This makes the construction process much faster.
It also has some pictures of the cement being printed.
Still leaves me with questions about the engineering involved though.
The summary references two different projects with different focuses, which confuses the issue and led to me also making a couple of posts here which addressed one by not the other.
The Carbon Engineering fuel scheme, mentioned toward the bottom, and the one Gates invested in, produces zero CO2 emissions fuel from atmospheric CO2 using green electricity, and could be used to capture excess solar or wind power production when there is insufficient demand. The idea behind this project is to produce carbon-neutral liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Obviously such a plan is not going to compete in applications where electricity can be used directly, but i could be used to power airliners and ships though. This plan does not result in any removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
The headline paper addresses the problem of actually reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere and focuses on the cost of carbon capture from the atmosphere and specifies that they are envisioning "injection and geological storage" for permanent sequestration not producing fuel from this. It is a proposal for the cheapest way to remove CO2 that has already entered the atmosphere. This scheme is not to make a product, or any money from the process, it is investigating the cheapest way to remove the CO2 which, yes, it not going to be free (much less profitable). Obviously this is not going to happen until someone puts into place a revenue source to fund it.
Using natural gas to partly power this process makes sense, the CO2 produced by oxidizing the methane is ending up being sequestered with the CO2 removed from the atmosphere, and it cheaper than using only electricity to power the process.
Of course a scheme like this is not going to be deployed until we reach a point where our existing stationary CO2 sources (natural gas power plants, cement plants, etc.) are already being captured and sequestered because that is far than cheaper that pulling CO2 out of the air.
I should clarify - the summary discusses two different proposals, though referencing one more briefly toward the bottom - the Carbon Engineering start-up to produce actual fuel from the atmosphere, not just capture CO2 which must then be permanently sequestered somehow. This is the one I am commenting on here, not the carbon removal only scheme.
We are seeing the first prototypes and commercial proposals for electricity driven aircraft, but they will never, ever replace liquid fuel airliners. Moving one person intercontinental distances on an airplane consumes 450 kg of kerosene. There is no way you are getting that kind of energy out of a battery.
Electric aircraft will be short range air-taxi type systems.
"Crucially, the lowest-cost design, optimized to produce and sell alternative fuels made from the captured carbon dioxide, could already be profitable with existing public policies in certain markets (see “The carbon-capture era may finally be starting”). "
So they are extracting it, converting it to fuel, and reselling it. Wont that put it right back where it came from?
Where do you think "it" (carbon dioxide) "came from"? The published plan for Carbon Engineering is to actually capture CO2 from the air. When combined with hydrogen produced from electricity you get a dense storable fuel that is carbon-neutral. Using it releases no CO2. They are either removing it directly from the atmosphere, or are capturing it from a stationary source which would otherwise release it to the atmosphere.
Capturing CO2 from a stationary source which would otherwise release it to the atmosphere accomplishes the same thing (until we are able to rid ourselves of such sources almost entirely) and is likely much easier and would be a good initial step to establish the industry.
It remains to be seen whether making fuel with captured CO2 and hydrogen will be economical on a large scale on Earth, but I bet it will have niche uses at least.
But developing this technology for use on Earth may assist future Mars exploration.
Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" and related proposals (you don't have to buy into his grand plan to appreciate the value of its components) relies on producing fuel on Mars for return trips, and to power exploratory vehicles, from the carbon dioxide and water that is found there. This would use a nuclear reactor to provide the electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, the first of which would be store cryogenically, the second of which would be converted into methane from the CO2 that makes up most of the Martian atmosphere. which would then also be stored the same way.
Although you can use hydrogen as a rocket fuel directly, it has a couple of big problems - its very low density, and its very low boiling point. It is much harder to store, and to use in a vehicle. The rocket engine performance of methane or propane is quite good and would be much easier to work with.
When the samples reached 500 to 820C, the rover’s instruments detected a range of so-called aromatic, aliphatic and thiophenic vapours. The science team believes these are breakdown products of even larger organic molecules, similar to those found in coal, which were trapped in the Martian rocks in the distant past.
Clearly we need to create a permanent base of Mars to stake our claim to Martian coal!
All valid points. And then there is the small problem that the windows don't open for some reason.
Can't imagine why.
But of course you brought a tool with you that is suitable for shattering that window, and completely breaking it out so you can make your exit! And I am sure that the TSA agent let you take that tool on board so that you would have it ready at your seat just in case.
Slashdot Mirror
Many here (and elsewhere, in the Real World) noted the bizarre disconnect between the treatment of Martin Shkreli (who deserved what he got, and more) and Elizabeth Holmes who was running a far vaster scheme to defraud but mysteriously seemed to escape any real personal consequences. A lot of that had to do with they way she smartly spread money around, getting a lot of movers and shakers on the board so that they could have a cut of the pie, and intercede on her behalf.
The news that she was getting funding for another scheme... err start-up... was flabbergasting. It is about time that her shenanigans caught up with her so that perhaps she will pay a real price, not just cough up (most of) her ill gotten gains.
No, you are not!
The people preaching that slapping giant solar panels on good farmland are just idiots.
Please provide evidence that such people even exist. This is a straw-man.
There are no solar plants located on good farmland in the U.S., and no proposals to build any. Only 25% of the area of the United States is farmland, so no need to use it for solar farms.
There is a lot of interest in putting wind turbines on farm land, since it requires negligible space, and the farm belt of the plains is also the U.S. wind belt, and the farmers are happy to get a monthly check from a share of the power produced in exchange for doing nothing.
And we have Federal mandates requiring that corn be raised to produce fuel ethanol even though that is a net energy waste, and is raises the cost of fuel (i.e. it is in effect a tax to support the corn farmer). So we are already paying money to take crop land out of food production to make fuel, but at a net energy cost. Now that is just idiotic.
Nuclear produces 805 TWh, which makes it hard to be to be excited by 2.5 gigawatts of solar. Total solar output in the US, after two decades of investment, is less than 2 TWh.
Umm... no. In 2017 the actual solar electricity production was 52 TWh not "less than 2". Solar and wind combined were 307 TWh. Add in geothermal (yeah, that's a thing too) and renewables rise to 319 TWh (I leave off hydropower as it is a resource that is fully exploited at this point).
You are excessively optimistic about coal's potential.
There are no carbon taxes in the U.S. and no national regulatory mandates to reduce CO2 emissions. A fair number of states have them, which changes their electricity buying habits, but the primary reason that coal plants are being shut down (U.S. coal consumption has dropped back to 1980s levels) is that natural gas power plants are cheaper to operate, even when the cost of new construction is taken into account.
Coal plants have a lot of inherent difficulties that keep the costs high, compared to natural gas. Coal is a solid, dirty fuel, full of abrasive ash, sulfur, and other toxic materials that is awkward and expensive both to handle (compared to gas) and to deal with when it is burned, which results in expensive operating, equipment and maintenance costs, and more plant down-time. The purchase price of the fuel is cheap, but everything else about it (manpower, site storage, handling equipment, combustion systems, post combustion processing) is more difficult and expensive. Calling a truly modern coal plant, with all the required equipment to minimize non-CO2 pollution emissions so that it can be called clean "cheap" is simply wrong.
And then you simply ignore the plain fact that the cost of carbon capture has to be added to that cost. This is effectively a carbon tax, and for coal will be twice what it is for natural gas, and of course wind, solar, and nuclear pay nothing for it.
Further, the time when CO2 extraction from the air becomes an important thing (i.e. on a scale that it affects the national power market in a major way), coal will not come back - because this is so far in the future (decades) that coal will have passed from the scene and the fossil fuel that will get a boost will be natural gas.
Double hours, as it is also translated, originated in Sumeria. They predate 2000 BCE.
The would be moving water back and forth between surface reservoirs and the deep well bed. No need to dump any water.
Instead of moving it around, storing it in batteries and getting it when you need it makes a lot of sense...
Moving it around is the way to go, when that is all you need. 800 KVDC long distance lines lose very little power, even a 3000 km run loses less than any form of storage. And you do need to move it around anyway, better to build a robust modern system to do this (though high voltage DC transmission is a technology that has been in use for almost a century).
What we need is some way to store energy in addition to just moving it around. A collection of the most cost-efficient options (generation, transmission and storage).
At the moment the problem is not how much dust will be on the solar panels after the storm. It is that it will lose all power during the storm, the heaters will stop working, and will then be unable to reactivate afterward.
The story reports an optical depth of the dust storm of tau=10.8. This is astoundingly dark. The transmittance of light through the atmosphere is 1/e^tau so that only 1/50,000 (0.002%) of the sunlight is getting through! It is effectively perpetual night there right now. This is probably darker than even the heaviest storm clouds on Earth (which only go up to blocking 1/20,000 of the sun light). Thus far the storm has cut off power for six days.
Although the storm also moderates temperature, since it prevents radiation cooling at night, it also means that the day time high temperatures are not reached either, so that the heaters have to be cranked up constantly (though not to the level of coldest night chill), with no power replacing what is being drained from the batteries.
It the batteries drain to the level that they can no longer supply the heaters then whether there is dust on the panels after the storm ends will be moot. Opportunity will be dead.
Why don't you do that and give us a summary of the results rather than handing out homework assignments to everyone?
If you have a point, make the point yourself.
You mean along the right-of-way and accesses already used by electricity and telephone landlines? This is already a solved problem. Like everywhere else, you lay fiber along the same routes.
Because the National Radio Quiet Zone prohibits WiFi, satellite internet, and cell service in a large part of W. Va. to protect radio astronomy telescopes from interference. The "lack of Internet" is due to this, I suspect, not because of poverty or lack of will.
Fiber, as specified by the poster to which you are replying, does not interfere with radiotelescopes. In 2000 than they had landlines running to 95.3% of all housing units in West Virginia. It can be done with fiber as well.
If they have telephones and electricity, and they do, then broadband can be deployed there as well, and it will be easier than the original installation of either of those earlier services since service corridors, conduits, etc. already exist. In 2000 95.3% of all housing units in West Virginia had landline telephones.
It may take something like the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 to make it happen, but that is the point. Representatives of rural areas should be pushing for this hard.
The Netherlands in fact is number TWO in the world in food exports, as measure by value! $93 billion vs $150 billion for the U.S.
This is possible because the focus on high value vegetable crops (not cheap tonnage grains) and by having a large food processing industry. A lot of that value, is processing value-added, and may not even be from raw foods that The Netherlands produces itself, but imports.
If you read TFA (I know, /.) you find out very quickly. The printer is a robotic cement/concrete squirting arm that builds up the structure, replacing manual labor required to do traditional form setting and removal.
The very short piece leaves lots and lots of questions - installation of utilities, how is rebar being placed (if it is), is this regular cement/concrete or some special formulation, etc.
Some of these questions are answered at the Project Milestone website.
One of those advantages is that the concrete printer has the ability to lay concrete only where it is needed constructively. Traditionally poured concrete is solid, and contains much more concrete than is needed constructively. More is being used, which is bad for CO2 emissions, because with producing cement a lot of this greenhouse gas is released.
With 3D concrete printing, very fine concrete structures are possible. In the traditional pouring of concrete, the formwork determines the shape of concrete. With concrete prints, builders will soon be able to make concrete details as small as a pea, and round, hollow or convex shapes. This makes concrete buildings and constructions with completely new forms possible.
Another new option is the printing of different types, qualities and colors of concrete, all in one integrated product. This means that a complete wall can be printed with all necessary functionalities. Such a wall has to be reinforced with fibers of wire that insulate, and on the outside must be kept dirt-repellent, and on the inside a layer that ensures pleasant acoustics. Further, it contains the required recesses and internal drainage pipes of waterproof concrete. This makes the construction process much faster.
It also has some pictures of the cement being printed.
Still leaves me with questions about the engineering involved though.
The summary references two different projects with different focuses, which confuses the issue and led to me also making a couple of posts here which addressed one by not the other.
The Carbon Engineering fuel scheme, mentioned toward the bottom, and the one Gates invested in, produces zero CO2 emissions fuel from atmospheric CO2 using green electricity, and could be used to capture excess solar or wind power production when there is insufficient demand. The idea behind this project is to produce carbon-neutral liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Obviously such a plan is not going to compete in applications where electricity can be used directly, but i could be used to power airliners and ships though. This plan does not result in any removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
The headline paper addresses the problem of actually reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere and focuses on the cost of carbon capture from the atmosphere and specifies that they are envisioning "injection and geological storage" for permanent sequestration not producing fuel from this. It is a proposal for the cheapest way to remove CO2 that has already entered the atmosphere. This scheme is not to make a product, or any money from the process, it is investigating the cheapest way to remove the CO2 which, yes, it not going to be free (much less profitable). Obviously this is not going to happen until someone puts into place a revenue source to fund it.
Using natural gas to partly power this process makes sense, the CO2 produced by oxidizing the methane is ending up being sequestered with the CO2 removed from the atmosphere, and it cheaper than using only electricity to power the process.
Of course a scheme like this is not going to be deployed until we reach a point where our existing stationary CO2 sources (natural gas power plants, cement plants, etc.) are already being captured and sequestered because that is far than cheaper that pulling CO2 out of the air.
Rock caves might appear air tight, but they are not.
Decommissioned wells are not rock caves. And they did manage to sequester methane for hundreds of millions of years.
I should clarify - the summary discusses two different proposals, though referencing one more briefly toward the bottom - the Carbon Engineering start-up to produce actual fuel from the atmosphere, not just capture CO2 which must then be permanently sequestered somehow. This is the one I am commenting on here, not the carbon removal only scheme.
We are seeing the first prototypes and commercial proposals for electricity driven aircraft, but they will never, ever replace liquid fuel airliners. Moving one person intercontinental distances on an airplane consumes 450 kg of kerosene. There is no way you are getting that kind of energy out of a battery.
Electric aircraft will be short range air-taxi type systems.
This seems like a bad joke. According to TFA:
"Crucially, the lowest-cost design, optimized to produce and sell alternative fuels made from the captured carbon dioxide, could already be profitable with existing public policies in certain markets (see “The carbon-capture era may finally be starting”). "
So they are extracting it, converting it to fuel, and reselling it. Wont that put it right back where it came from?
Where do you think "it" (carbon dioxide) "came from"? The published plan for Carbon Engineering is to actually capture CO2 from the air. When combined with hydrogen produced from electricity you get a dense storable fuel that is carbon-neutral. Using it releases no CO2. They are either removing it directly from the atmosphere, or are capturing it from a stationary source which would otherwise release it to the atmosphere.
Capturing CO2 from a stationary source which would otherwise release it to the atmosphere accomplishes the same thing (until we are able to rid ourselves of such sources almost entirely) and is likely much easier and would be a good initial step to establish the industry.
It remains to be seen whether making fuel with captured CO2 and hydrogen will be economical on a large scale on Earth, but I bet it will have niche uses at least.
But developing this technology for use on Earth may assist future Mars exploration.
Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" and related proposals (you don't have to buy into his grand plan to appreciate the value of its components) relies on producing fuel on Mars for return trips, and to power exploratory vehicles, from the carbon dioxide and water that is found there. This would use a nuclear reactor to provide the electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, the first of which would be store cryogenically, the second of which would be converted into methane from the CO2 that makes up most of the Martian atmosphere. which would then also be stored the same way.
Although you can use hydrogen as a rocket fuel directly, it has a couple of big problems - its very low density, and its very low boiling point. It is much harder to store, and to use in a vehicle. The rocket engine performance of methane or propane is quite good and would be much easier to work with.
From TFA:
When the samples reached 500 to 820C, the rover’s instruments detected a range of so-called aromatic, aliphatic and thiophenic vapours. The science team believes these are breakdown products of even larger organic molecules, similar to those found in coal, which were trapped in the Martian rocks in the distant past.
Clearly we need to create a permanent base of Mars to stake our claim to Martian coal!
The word continues to have both meanings, chemists using it to mean molecules containing carbon...
More precisely molecules containing carbon-hydrogen bonds. CO2 contains carbon, but is considered inorganic.
All valid points. And then there is the small problem that the windows don't open for some reason.
Can't imagine why.
But of course you brought a tool with you that is suitable for shattering that window, and completely breaking it out so you can make your exit! And I am sure that the TSA agent let you take that tool on board so that you would have it ready at your seat just in case.
The proper response to that would be "WH-O-O-O-O-SH!" (a loud whoosh, it being a jet plane and all).