Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Fusion as is, is a money sink and a jobs progra (Score 1) 196

$100 million is nothing compared to the scope of the problem. The Manhattan project was around $25 billion over about 4 years. The Apollo program cost $170 billion over about 15 years. The reason why fusion hasn't worked yet is simply because it hasn't been funded to those levels yet.

Comment Re:Hello, Barack? This is kettle (Score 1) 196

The notions that solar power doesn't work and that solar power hurts utility company's profits are not mutually exclusive. It is called negative power prices. Due to laws requiring utilities to buy wind and solar power at any time, combined with the inability to store or transport natural gas supplies due to lack of pipelines, the cost of electricity often becomes negative where the power company pays customers to waste electricity because of unpredictable excess capacity. This hurts utility company earnings as well as being wasteful and counterproductive to the economy and environment.

Comment Re:So... (Score 5, Interesting) 500

Oh yeah? Just ask this guy. He was absolutely arrested for not consenting to a search by lying cops. And as shown in the video, the prosecutor states that if he wasn't lucky to have had a clear recording they would have no qualms about and would have gotten away with lying to convict him. The linked video is full of all sorts of blatant gestapo corruption on the part of the cops AND the court (at one point the judge called the sheriff to arrest him for not letting the prosecutor see exculpatory evidence, when sheriff arrived he simply told the judge he couldn't arrest him for that).

Comment Re:We need nuclear. (Score 1) 551

Thorium is not fuel, it is only fertile material which can be turned into Uranium in a breeder reactor (which requires high-enriched uranium or plutonium to operate). Thorium has the same properties as Uranium in terms of risk of melting down. Making a reactor melt-down-proof is a matter of reactor and coolant type, not fuel. Same goes for nature of spent fuel/radioactive waste. The only real advantage of using thorium as a breeder material instead of natural uranium is that it is more common and cheaper.

Comment Re:Economic problems with hydrogen power (Score 2) 551

There's a simpler way of looking at the electric car conundrum. Of all the energy used in the industrialized world, about half is used for transportation in the form of oil. In order to replace all cars with electrics, we would have to literally double all electric generation and transmission capability. No small undertaking.

Comment Re:No, because they are not compatible (Score 4, Informative) 551

Actually that is not true either. The plants were in fact originally designed to load follow and were only later adapted to constant full power operation based on economic factors. It is not hard at all to engineer the plants to load follow. And xenon poisoning has nothing to do with it, the primary challenge is in axial offset control which becomes more difficult later in the cycle, but only because the cycles are optimized to run at constant full power with maximum fuel loading. It would only require modest adjustments typical of cycle-to-cycle operational changes to design to load follow. IAANE.

Comment Re:No, because they are not compatible (Score 1) 551

Everyone one of your points is entirely false.

1) No. Wind and solar vary with clouds and wind patterns and have no correlation to usage patterns. Renewables do not cut into anyone's profits, only natural gas does that with massive oversupply with lack of storage/transmission capability. In fact, renewables tend to be big profit cash cows for industries because of government subsidies that pay for them to build them, even when and where they don't work, and then they get to write off the losses from taxes. Why do you think there are so many idle wind power farms all over the country?

2) Renewables are also highly centralized in that they are totally dependent on federal government subsidies and all the cronyism and corruption that comes along with it. The rest of point two I won't even go into as it is just loony bullshit.

3) What do you think causes the cost overruns? Environmentalist protests and lawsuits. Nice catch 22 there.

Comment Re:No, because they are not compatible (Score 1) 551

Wind and solar have variable output, so they need to be partnered with flexible power generation. Nuclear is fundamentally inflexible because you can't quickly ramp up or down electricity output from a nuclear power plant.

See this short video for a nice explanation of the incompatibility:
http://www.ilsr.org/coal-nucle...

Wrong. Nuclear power can load follow (ramp up and down rapidly to meet instantaneous demand) perfectly fine. They just typically do not because they are large baseload plants and there is no reason to run them anything lower than 100% when you need fossil fuel plants to make up the difference. IAANE.

Comment Re:PHB's strike again (Score 4, Informative) 207

The most egregious example of administrator disconnect, as uncovered by Feynman, was the notion that the O-rings had a safety factor of 3 because they were on burned through 1/3 of the way on previous launches:

Instead of being very concerned that variations of poorly understood conditions might reasonably create a deeper erosion this time, it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term ,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.

Comment Re:Egocentrism (Score 1) 517

And while people do say all those things, none of them are the official position of a major political party in the U.S.

"I was told by voting section management that cases are not going to be brought against black defendants on [behalf] of white victims."

--J. Christian Adams, US Department of Justice under Eric Holder (link)

Comment Re:Primary goal was disposal, not energy (Score 1) 148

The issue is not the average energy price across the country. The problem is local, where natural gas is produced in such abundance but cannot be stored or transported, they practically give it away, which nuclear (nor coal or any other generation method aside from hydro) can compete with.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser." -- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew"

Working...