What are the security issues in using these rods for domestic heating? Surely there's 'dirty bomb' implications? Do you have any real world examples of this kind of use?
Personally, if we can turn today's nuclear 'waste' into fuel for breeder reactors and run the world for the next 500 years, without having to dig up any new uranium in the meantime, then I for one will just say "Thank you, job well done" to the 10% of waste that is left, vitrify it, and let it rest in peace.
(I don't really want to imagine the future RTG newscasts. "Yes, the trade centre collapsed, and it was heated with RTG's... the entire bay area is now being evacuated for the next few decades as cleanup crews move in.)
Yes, Integral Fast-Breeder Reactors (IFR's) are meant to 'eat' 90% of today's nuclear 'waste' (which becomes fuel) and then reduce the remaining 10% waste to stuff that's so hot, most of it burns itself out within 300 years. However there are small amounts of it that remain radioactive for much longer periods of time... so, depending on the economics, we might separate out the really bad, long-lived stuff (because apparently some of the other Fission Products are actually useful to industry anyway), vitrify them in glass, and drop them in the ocean near a subduction zone. Apparently the glass will survive quite deep water pressures, and as the ocean floor is getting new sediment dumped the stuff will just get buried deeper, and deeper...
The exciting thing is that with breeder technology, the world could run off existing nuclear waste for the next 500 years without opening a single new uranium mine. With breeder technology, even the background uranium and thorium in GRANITE becomes energetically and eventually economically viable (when thinking about uranium supplies in a million years or so).
Once we have mined our 8.2 billion tons of perfectly ordinary and unremarkable rock and dirt, we need to extract the nuclear fuel. This could be done by grinding, chemical treatment, pyroprocessing or whatever is most suitable for the particular minerals in question. We may get a reasonable estimate to the upper bounds of the energy required for this process by assuming the ore is completely melted. The power required to melt the same mass of silicon (the second most common element in Earth's crust after oxygen) is about 723 GW.y. It is likely that the whole separation process could be accomplished with less than 1TW.y of energy. This operation corresponds to an extraction and milling rate of 260 tonnes of crust each second.
What is the size of the resource? Let's assume that only the portion of continental crust currently under dry land is exploited for its uranium and thorium content, to a depth of roughly four kilometres (the deepest mine currently operating is the TauTona mine in Carletonville, South Africa at 3,900m, and the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia is 12,262m). This represents a reserve of 20 trillion tonnes of fertile and fissile fuel, capable of powering our 100TW civilisation for 200 million years. This is the span of time separating us from the dawn of the Jurassic Period, when the supercontinent Pangaea was starting to break apart into Laurasia and Gondwana. Dinosaurs were just beginning to make their mark on the world, and the allosaurus, stegosaurus and diplodocus were yet to evolve.
It will be a very long time before whoever comes after us in the far distant future will need to worry about mining ordinary crust. The science is clear: There is more than enough high grade uranium ore in the short term to allow us to transition to a completely nuclear-powered economy during this century, and a supply of fuel for the breeder reactors of the future so vast as to leave no doubt that nuclear power is completely sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word for far beyond the probable lifetime of our civilisation, and indeed, of our species.
What are your favourite *free* or open source PC games? Action, shooters, adventure, strategy (Does anyone play Freeciv?), whatever? What are the *coolest* free games in graphics, story, etc? Cheers.
I'd love to know what salaries coders get? I'm considering a career move, and am just thinking of doing a few TAFE certificates to get in the ground level on a help desk somewhere... but a few years of night school down the track, who knows?
The Corporatocracy might not have much say. Global democracy is nudging forward, bit by bit on multiple fronts. As Africa and South America both nudge, in slow baby steps, towards their own versions of the European Union, and even a Central Asian union looks possible, there will be increasing calls for trillions in currency exchange fees to be cut by instituting one global currency.
I'll just point out that by not doing this in the west, we are effectively extracting phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium from our fields and pumping it into rivers and oceans. We then burn a load of fuel to dig up more phosphorus and calcium elsewhere and burn natural gas to produce nitrates to put back on the fields. It's dumb.
It's not only dumb, it's dangerous, as we are fast approaching peak phosphorus but it will take years to adapt our sewerage and agricultural systems around the new realities when peak phosphorous affects world phosphorus prices. One podcast I heard from the University of Technology, Sydney, Sustainable Future's Institute mentioned something like 25 years to really prepare for peak phosphorus. They recommended starting early because we're going to have to get the departments of waste to talk to the departments of agriculture, etc. Huge infrastructure changes coming!
Except that you can ALSO charge your Better Place compatible electric car at home, and at the shops, and at work. When they go into an area they try to make a standard charging infrastructure around the city, where ALL shops with Better Place charging points are fed into your smart-GPS device. (But "Doh!" all the slashdot users say, they chose microsoft to write the software!)
Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.
However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.
This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.
Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.
They sell you the car, but they own the battery.
Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).
Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.
Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.
However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.
Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.
"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."
However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips
It sounds like you need to spend some time here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place Just like in the "olden days" the King's messenger didn't wait overnight for the horses to rest & recharge their 'batteries', but swapped them out, Better Place has come up with the battery standards that are so good Tokyo is trialling TAXIS out on this Battery-swap system, and they'll NEVER get a chance to just sit still and charge for 8 hours! I can't believe there are slashdotters that don't know about Better Place, especially when HSBC just invested $350 million in Better Place and the CEO is all over "The Economist" podcast. They're coming to San Francisco, Hawaii, Tokyo, Canberra... and at a price / km at about half the price of oil, it's simply going to CHANGE THE WORLD people!
Some of the best stories ever written involve "design by committee". Why, this one time were were playing this game involving lots of dice and dwarves and Elves, and I'm sure we all sat around and had this adventure and in the end it became a story...
Would it be possible (given enough time and energy and XYZ magic technobabble) to put a giant Mars sized 'filter' between Mars and the Sun that would let only the **good** light through, cut out the bad radiation, AND stop the solar wind blowing away the atmosphere?
I'm no physicist, so I don't know if photons can blow away the atmosphere, but if we prevented the solar wind, surely then gravity would take over and keep the atmosphere in? (If we really wanted to? It would probably be easier just to build our own little ONeil habitats... but there's just something about terraforming another planet as a backup ecosystem... Polar Bears on Mars, now that's conservation!)
Just like the J-curve? Except that being self aware, some of our behaviour under stresses operates in an S-curve. Witness the reduction in population growth speeds in first world countries. (The so-called "Demographic transition" that occurs when women are empowered and have an education, and paradoxically less children die during childhood.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying the importance of a steady state population and economy. I=PAT is true, of course! (Impact = Population * Affluence/Consumption * Technology). It's just that changing population trends is like turning a huge oil tanker, while changing technologies is more like driving a sports-boat.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I=PAT. Say Impact is divided into 'first world comfortable lifestyles' with modern technologies, and assume "Affluence/Consumption" for such a system is described as 1 unit. So we have Impact = 6.5 billion people * 1 unit of first world consumption * Technology. Now this is where it gets interesting. Today's technology is very very bad, and lets say it is a multiplier of 2 units! So now we have an Impact of 13 billion, and the planet is dying. But if we wean off the fossil fuels over the next 30 years, and develop better ecocities that don't need as many materials and / or energy in the first place, and develop fantastic new "Cradle to Cradle" manufacturing systems etc... our T might drop to 0.5! So even if the population hits 9 billion, the Impact = 9 billion * Affluence of 1 unit of first world consumption * TECHNOLOGY OF 0.5, and we have an Impact of 4.5 billion units of consumption, even though the population is at 9 billion.
I'm hopeful that a variety of Technology chances can do this, and bring sustainable prosperity and economic security to the 3rd world which will eventually bring about the demographic transition and help save our planet. Green chemistry, green manufacturing and green energy technologies will gradually reduce the vast quantities of raw materials we mine, and that recycling, reducing, and replacing our need for various ores through new materials and new construction techniques will gradually improve our chances once all the good ore bodies are used up. If things get bad enough, we can crunch through the bedrock and extract various metals at low ppm, as long as we have enough nuclear/renewable/fusion energy to do so! And then the next generation plants out the wasteland, or they even see the huge mining pit as something to put a huge dome over and turn into a micro-climate ecosystem park (in the need to preserve biodiversity in the face of climate change). Logan's Run, but for nature? Who can say? Stranger cultural paradigm shifts have happened, and I'm not just using that word to sanctify a strange idea. Now how on earth did I get from an enormous mining pit being turned into some sort of terraformed eco-dome when discussing overpopulation? I must be reading slashdot too frequently!;-)
In a world where 15 of the top 30 oil producing nations have peaked and are in decline, where the last time we found more oil than we burn was way back in 1981, and where we're now burning it about 5 times faster than we're finding it, and major oil men are projecting new projects will not replace decline from those nations already peaked out and in terminal decline, then I say: YEAH! I agree with you!
What I find irrational is government and corporate denial of the imminence of peak oil. Who wants to upgrade airport runways when oil is about to start declining at 3, 4, or 5% a year? Who wants billions spent on new highways? Who will be driving on them in 10 years? And why the heck hasn't the world legislated that all new cars are "Better Place" EV battery-swap compliant? It's the best way we have today of 'quick-charging' a battery when you reach the 160km limit... rather than charging for 7 hours, just drive in and the automated system swaps the old battery out and replaces it with a new one in less time than it takes to fuel a gasoline / petroleum vehicle!
Hybrid schmybrid, I want a light EV that gets REALLY good km / electricity charge ratio, not weighed down by an Internal Combustion Engine.
If I ran the world, you KNOW I'd be mandating that at least GM (Government Motors) had to be Better Place compliant. But when electricity works out to 80 cents a litre equivalent price of gasoline (per KM travelled), then you KNOW the marketplace will be demanding Better Place / Renault Nissan vehicles anyway. And if Toyota, Ford, GM, and everyone else don't get on board, well too bad for them.
I love science journalism because I'm not a scientist, and the science papers I've tried to read are more about impressing the potential buyers of the new product / impressing peers / getting college funding, etc, and so try to use plenty of 'big words'. Now I'm not completely unintelligent, but I'm from an Arts background. Thus Science Journalism is often the only way I get to know what these guys are talking about when they are not hiding behind the mystical veil of technospeak. So, I try to listen to Sciam podcast, The Science Show (Australian), Dr Karl (Australian) and Science Friday to keep up. Other than an enquiring mind, it's all I have.
Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.
However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.
This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.
Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.
They sell you the car, but they own the battery.
Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).
Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.
Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.
However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.
Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.
"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."
However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips (less than 5%)."
But that 20% efficient solar technology is only that efficient for 6 hours a day, whereas these solar updraft chimney's are baseload. So an hour or more of heat? Do you have a source for that? Because the even though these things are not very efficient with the solar energy they get for the real estate they occupy, that doesn't matter in cheaper real estate areas for baseload renewable power.
Solar PV's good for rooftops to reduce city daytime consumption and avoid building a few more power plants, and where the real estate prices are high... but the overnight problem just doesn't go away. These solar updraft chimneys' are SO big that the small heat differential on the ground below and the even lower temperature 1km up above the chimney top are enough to create 24 hour winds, and even maintain that heat differential during a week of overcast or rain. Snow might be another matter, unless they have a mechanism for cleaning the glass and stopping the snow building up.
Where does Symphony sit in comparison to OpenOffice? How many big corporations use it, what kind of backing and user adoption does it have, what are the numbers, advantages over OO, or will LS come to dominate the open source world?
According to the article "the system utilizes is an external video camera that captures images". Now if they can use some of the new super-small video camera lenses and fit them into a round comfortable forward facing front-band that sits over the eyes like a pair of glasses or goggles, we might have a user-friendly device. Now if only we could make this 'band' as fashionable as Geordi's, we might really be getting somewhere!
The only real drawback might be some engineers staring into the sun and going blind on purpose for all that La-Forge microscopic infrared and other wavelength advantage.
I mean, Chief Tyrol just used a infra-red beam and it showed up Galactica's problems real well, but this is the real world right?
Why can infrastructure like this not be built in the U.S.? Because we don't have 300 million unskilled laborers who will work their ass off for a few bucks a day. We don't have a government that has the authority to just displace hundreds of people in order to build a subway station without going through a lot of red tape. In order to keep up with China in this area, we'd have to give up a lot of the values we treasure for the sake of progress, which is something most of us here on./. wouldn't do.
If world oil price were to rise to $300 a barrel as a permanent new pricing mechanism, don't you think that some emergency "war-time" economy and legislative actions would be taken by the Federal government to help wean your country off oil?
Electrifying fast-speed rail everywhere across the USA is a brilliant idea. Your nation uses 20% of the world's oil and double the per capita use of the EU. You are highly exposed to high oil prices that will eventuate after peak oil hits. Fast rail and electrifying car transport systems (around a battery-swap system like Better Place) is not just about saving fuel, not just about reducing Co2 emissions, not just about reducing local air pollution in cities, not just about saving money, not just about energy independence, not just about providing local jobs through either green energy or 3rd Gen nuclear (which turns your radioactive waste dumps into FUEL dumps as 3rd Gen eats nuclear waste!) but it is about NATIONAL SECURITY!
And if it is saucer-shaped with the main population and military assets, one would probably end up putting on a lower deck where shuttle craft could land. Now, depending on your propulsion systems you'd probably want them as far away from your saucer section as possible, and so for stability I suggest adding 2 long thrusters pointing out the back, attached by Y-wing up to higher positions lateral to the saucer but behind.
Now in an emergency, one would probably want to be able to separate out the living quarters from a critically maimed shuttle bay and thruster rear end, and so we have the 'saucer separation' emergency action. However, the downside could just possibly be that landing the saucer is a bitch!
Slashdot Mirror
What are the security issues in using these rods for domestic heating? Surely there's 'dirty bomb' implications? Do you have any real world examples of this kind of use?
Personally, if we can turn today's nuclear 'waste' into fuel for breeder reactors and run the world for the next 500 years, without having to dig up any new uranium in the meantime, then I for one will just say "Thank you, job well done" to the 10% of waste that is left, vitrify it, and let it rest in peace.
(I don't really want to imagine the future RTG newscasts. "Yes, the trade centre collapsed, and it was heated with RTG's... the entire bay area is now being evacuated for the next few decades as cleanup crews move in.)
The exciting thing is that with breeder technology, the world could run off existing nuclear waste for the next 500 years without opening a single new uranium mine. With breeder technology, even the background uranium and thorium in GRANITE becomes energetically and eventually economically viable (when thinking about uranium supplies in a million years or so).
As Finrod claims:
Thanks mate, I owe you one.
What are your favourite *free* or open source PC games? Action, shooters, adventure, strategy (Does anyone play Freeciv?), whatever? What are the *coolest* free games in graphics, story, etc? Cheers.
I'd love to know what salaries coders get? I'm considering a career move, and am just thinking of doing a few TAFE certificates to get in the ground level on a help desk somewhere... but a few years of night school down the track, who knows?
Cool. I'm striking the first match! That would be one hell of a squeaky-pop test! Hmmmmm, squeaky.
The Corporatocracy might not have much say. Global democracy is nudging forward, bit by bit on multiple fronts. As Africa and South America both nudge, in slow baby steps, towards their own versions of the European Union, and even a Central Asian union looks possible, there will be increasing calls for trillions in currency exchange fees to be cut by instituting one global currency.
Yes, I'm a fanboi of global government, and these are my arguments for it.
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/solutions/reform-global-government/
See the preview here.
http://www.worldvotenow.com/
Oh man, my eyes! I just had an image of him in a gladiator suit again... eeewwheheehwhehwhwhehaaarrrgh!
I'll just point out that by not doing this in the west, we are effectively extracting phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium from our fields and pumping it into rivers and oceans. We then burn a load of fuel to dig up more phosphorus and calcium elsewhere and burn natural gas to produce nitrates to put back on the fields. It's dumb.
It's not only dumb, it's dangerous, as we are fast approaching peak phosphorus but it will take years to adapt our sewerage and agricultural systems around the new realities when peak phosphorous affects world phosphorus prices. One podcast I heard from the University of Technology, Sydney, Sustainable Future's Institute mentioned something like 25 years to really prepare for peak phosphorus. They recommended starting early because we're going to have to get the departments of waste to talk to the departments of agriculture, etc. Huge infrastructure changes coming!
This comment was marked 'insightful'? Why has my sense of humour been activated by an 'insightful' comment... oh no... what's happening to my brain?
Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.
However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.
This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.
Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.
They sell you the car, but they own the battery.
Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).
The CEO Shai Agassi gave a presentation at his TED talk.
Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars, Video on TED.com
Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.
Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.
However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.
Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.
"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."
However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips
No no no! These are not real objections when the company sells you the car, but maintains ownership of the battery! "Physical labor" of swapping batteries? Are you serious? Don't tell me you haven't seen the Better Place battery swap automated station? http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/video-better-places-automated-electric-vehicle-battery-switch/
It sounds like you need to spend some time here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place Just like in the "olden days" the King's messenger didn't wait overnight for the horses to rest & recharge their 'batteries', but swapped them out, Better Place has come up with the battery standards that are so good Tokyo is trialling TAXIS out on this Battery-swap system, and they'll NEVER get a chance to just sit still and charge for 8 hours! I can't believe there are slashdotters that don't know about Better Place, especially when HSBC just invested $350 million in Better Place and the CEO is all over "The Economist" podcast. They're coming to San Francisco, Hawaii, Tokyo, Canberra... and at a price / km at about half the price of oil, it's simply going to CHANGE THE WORLD people!
Some of the best stories ever written involve "design by committee". Why, this one time were were playing this game involving lots of dice and dwarves and Elves, and I'm sure we all sat around and had this adventure and in the end it became a story...
Would it be possible (given enough time and energy and XYZ magic technobabble) to put a giant Mars sized 'filter' between Mars and the Sun that would let only the **good** light through, cut out the bad radiation, AND stop the solar wind blowing away the atmosphere?
I'm no physicist, so I don't know if photons can blow away the atmosphere, but if we prevented the solar wind, surely then gravity would take over and keep the atmosphere in? (If we really wanted to? It would probably be easier just to build our own little ONeil habitats... but there's just something about terraforming another planet as a backup ecosystem... Polar Bears on Mars, now that's conservation!)
Just like the J-curve? Except that being self aware, some of our behaviour under stresses operates in an S-curve. Witness the reduction in population growth speeds in first world countries. (The so-called "Demographic transition" that occurs when women are empowered and have an education, and paradoxically less children die during childhood.)
;-)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying the importance of a steady state population and economy. I=PAT is true, of course! (Impact = Population * Affluence/Consumption * Technology). It's just that changing population trends is like turning a huge oil tanker, while changing technologies is more like driving a sports-boat.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I=PAT. Say Impact is divided into 'first world comfortable lifestyles' with modern technologies, and assume "Affluence/Consumption" for such a system is described as 1 unit. So we have Impact = 6.5 billion people * 1 unit of first world consumption * Technology. Now this is where it gets interesting. Today's technology is very very bad, and lets say it is a multiplier of 2 units! So now we have an Impact of 13 billion, and the planet is dying. But if we wean off the fossil fuels over the next 30 years, and develop better ecocities that don't need as many materials and / or energy in the first place, and develop fantastic new "Cradle to Cradle" manufacturing systems etc... our T might drop to 0.5! So even if the population hits 9 billion, the Impact = 9 billion * Affluence of 1 unit of first world consumption * TECHNOLOGY OF 0.5, and we have an Impact of 4.5 billion units of consumption, even though the population is at 9 billion.
I'm hopeful that a variety of Technology chances can do this, and bring sustainable prosperity and economic security to the 3rd world which will eventually bring about the demographic transition and help save our planet. Green chemistry, green manufacturing and green energy technologies will gradually reduce the vast quantities of raw materials we mine, and that recycling, reducing, and replacing our need for various ores through new materials and new construction techniques will gradually improve our chances once all the good ore bodies are used up. If things get bad enough, we can crunch through the bedrock and extract various metals at low ppm, as long as we have enough nuclear/renewable/fusion energy to do so! And then the next generation plants out the wasteland, or they even see the huge mining pit as something to put a huge dome over and turn into a micro-climate ecosystem park (in the need to preserve biodiversity in the face of climate change). Logan's Run, but for nature? Who can say? Stranger cultural paradigm shifts have happened, and I'm not just using that word to sanctify a strange idea. Now how on earth did I get from an enormous mining pit being turned into some sort of terraformed eco-dome when discussing overpopulation? I must be reading slashdot too frequently!
In a world where 15 of the top 30 oil producing nations have peaked and are in decline, where the last time we found more oil than we burn was way back in 1981, and where we're now burning it about 5 times faster than we're finding it, and major oil men are projecting new projects will not replace decline from those nations already peaked out and in terminal decline, then I say: YEAH! I agree with you!
What I find irrational is government and corporate denial of the imminence of peak oil. Who wants to upgrade airport runways when oil is about to start declining at 3, 4, or 5% a year? Who wants billions spent on new highways? Who will be driving on them in 10 years? And why the heck hasn't the world legislated that all new cars are "Better Place" EV battery-swap compliant? It's the best way we have today of 'quick-charging' a battery when you reach the 160km limit... rather than charging for 7 hours, just drive in and the automated system swaps the old battery out and replaces it with a new one in less time than it takes to fuel a gasoline / petroleum vehicle!
Hybrid schmybrid, I want a light EV that gets REALLY good km / electricity charge ratio, not weighed down by an Internal Combustion Engine.
If I ran the world, you KNOW I'd be mandating that at least GM (Government Motors) had to be Better Place compliant. But when electricity works out to 80 cents a litre equivalent price of gasoline (per KM travelled), then you KNOW the marketplace will be demanding Better Place / Renault Nissan vehicles anyway. And if Toyota, Ford, GM, and everyone else don't get on board, well too bad for them.
I love science journalism because I'm not a scientist, and the science papers I've tried to read are more about impressing the potential buyers of the new product / impressing peers / getting college funding, etc, and so try to use plenty of 'big words'. Now I'm not completely unintelligent, but I'm from an Arts background. Thus Science Journalism is often the only way I get to know what these guys are talking about when they are not hiding behind the mystical veil of technospeak. So, I try to listen to Sciam podcast, The Science Show (Australian), Dr Karl (Australian) and Science Friday to keep up. Other than an enquiring mind, it's all I have.
Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.
However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.
This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.
Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.
They sell you the car, but they own the battery.
Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).
The CEO Shai Agassi gave a presentation at his TED talk.
Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars, Video on TED.com
Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.
Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.
However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.
Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.
"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."
However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips (less than 5%)."
Chapter 5:21-22
My favourite piece ever to explore how quickly we could retrofit suburbia around walking distance plans is Worldchanging: My Other Car is a Bri
But that 20% efficient solar technology is only that efficient for 6 hours a day, whereas these solar updraft chimney's are baseload. So an hour or more of heat? Do you have a source for that? Because the even though these things are not very efficient with the solar energy they get for the real estate they occupy, that doesn't matter in cheaper real estate areas for baseload renewable power.
Solar PV's good for rooftops to reduce city daytime consumption and avoid building a few more power plants, and where the real estate prices are high... but the overnight problem just doesn't go away. These solar updraft chimneys' are SO big that the small heat differential on the ground below and the even lower temperature 1km up above the chimney top are enough to create 24 hour winds, and even maintain that heat differential during a week of overcast or rain. Snow might be another matter, unless they have a mechanism for cleaning the glass and stopping the snow building up.
Where does Symphony sit in comparison to OpenOffice? How many big corporations use it, what kind of backing and user adoption does it have, what are the numbers, advantages over OO, or will LS come to dominate the open source world?
The only real drawback might be some engineers staring into the sun and going blind on purpose for all that La-Forge microscopic infrared and other wavelength advantage.
I mean, Chief Tyrol just used a infra-red beam and it showed up Galactica's problems real well, but this is the real world right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geordi_La_Forge
Why can infrastructure like this not be built in the U.S.? Because we don't have 300 million unskilled laborers who will work their ass off for a few bucks a day. We don't have a government that has the authority to just displace hundreds of people in order to build a subway station without going through a lot of red tape. In order to keep up with China in this area, we'd have to give up a lot of the values we treasure for the sake of progress, which is something most of us here on ./. wouldn't do.
If world oil price were to rise to $300 a barrel as a permanent new pricing mechanism, don't you think that some emergency "war-time" economy and legislative actions would be taken by the Federal government to help wean your country off oil?
Electrifying fast-speed rail everywhere across the USA is a brilliant idea. Your nation uses 20% of the world's oil and double the per capita use of the EU. You are highly exposed to high oil prices that will eventuate after peak oil hits. Fast rail and electrifying car transport systems (around a battery-swap system like Better Place) is not just about saving fuel, not just about reducing Co2 emissions, not just about reducing local air pollution in cities, not just about saving money, not just about energy independence, not just about providing local jobs through either green energy or 3rd Gen nuclear (which turns your radioactive waste dumps into FUEL dumps as 3rd Gen eats nuclear waste!) but it is about NATIONAL SECURITY!
And if it is saucer-shaped with the main population and military assets, one would probably end up putting on a lower deck where shuttle craft could land. Now, depending on your propulsion systems you'd probably want them as far away from your saucer section as possible, and so for stability I suggest adding 2 long thrusters pointing out the back, attached by Y-wing up to higher positions lateral to the saucer but behind.
Now in an emergency, one would probably want to be able to separate out the living quarters from a critically maimed shuttle bay and thruster rear end, and so we have the 'saucer separation' emergency action. However, the downside could just possibly be that landing the saucer is a bitch!
I saw it on this movie once. They dug a really deep hole and stuck a nuke in it!!
;-)
I mean, this couldn't have just been a Friday night B-grade Sci-Fi could it??? I mean, it has NEVER been done before...