Way too many people to continue consumption of fossil fuels at current rates, but the planet will support considerably more if we adopt responsible technologies, such as the Liquid fluoride thorium reactor. Observe that developed countries do not experience exponential population growth; their growth is typically only slightly greater than the replacement rate. So, one we have an inexpensive and ubiquitous means of energy production, we can focus on raising the standard of lining for the rest of the world, and the problem will solve itself. (Along with many other social problems created by contention over energy resources.)

Beyond that, it is silly to be concerned about population problems; there is plenty of space off world.

You haven't addressed the most relevant point: cost. It is as prohibitive today as it was decades ago, and so will it be decades from now. There is simply no solution to the fundamental problems, and pretending that there is, is a dangerous fantasy which distracts from real and practical solutions. If molten salt reactor technology was pursued rather than set aside by politicians, we would be energy independent today, or close to it. Furthermore, we could be exporting these reactors throughout the world, where energy and clean water are desperately needed. We need to invest in technologies that have the potential to solve the very real problems facing us, both social and otherwise.

The energy density of renewables is simply too low and requires massive resources to harvest it, in terms of both materials and land, and also ongoing maintenance and replacement. The low capacity factor and remote locations will also require enormous growth of the distribution network, which is not economically viable when the infrastructure is idle 80% of the time, to say nothing of the completely intractable energy storage problems. Base load energy sources such as gas are still required, so don't forget to factor in that cost as well. When all is accounted for, the panels could be free and it still wouldn't make sense. Nuclear is also an option for base load, but then why bother with the renewables at all?

Neodymium aside, concrete and steel require considerable energy input to create in such quantities, primarily from fossil fuels. We talk about lost land to contamination from nuclear accidents, but that is nothing compared to the amount of land that would be permanently unusable due to wide scale renewables, to say nothing of natural habitat destruction. Even hydro is very destructive and land intensive.

Finally, solar and wind are labor intensive, and while that might create jobs, it is not a constructive use of human abilities, any more than having those people slaving away in coal mines would be. As we are better able to exploit the atom, we should have the luxury of working not only less time, but on more intellectual satisfying endeavors. The purpose of jobs programs should not be to keep people busy with mindless work.

The important thing, is that we get away from fossil fuels as soon as possible; their cost in terms of life (including resource wars) and environmental damage is simply too great. I would advocate conventional nuclear, but only as a stopgap measure until advanced reactors can be developed and deployed. Little could be worse though than maintaining the status quo, and preventing the replacement of aging reactors with newer and safer options.

The land will be fine either way, just so long as we have the water to irrigate it and fertilizer to feed it. Incidentally, an abundance of energy will provide for both, and land will remain arable unless we select the future of energy poverty advocated by many proponents of solar and wind.

One has to acknowledge that clean, cheap energy will be crucial to solving our problems, regardless of how bad they become. Arguing about climate change is a pointless distraction; we can and need to address two other critical problems facing us today: energy and pollution. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors can fully address those problems, and many more. We must focus on realistic solutions to these problems.

Without an abundant source of clean and cheap energy, we are well and truly fucked.

God help us all if you ever receive that patent.

Innovation is nothing but the combination of existing ideas, which are very occasionally novel in some way. Even so, no innovation is deserving of monopolistic protections, which are inevitably harmful to all. The greatest of innovations, which are arguably most deserving, do the greatest harm by limiting or outright preventing widespread use of such ideas. Think of what would happen if key energy technology patents fell into the hands of a fossil fuel corporation? Even with a less hostile corporation, patents will inevitably impede progress, at a time in which the need is greatest. This has already happened with NiMH battery patents delaying electric cars. Also, the industrial revolution was basically postponed for 20 years on account of Watt's patent on the steam engine.

It will be bitterly ironic if the Chinese commercialize the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, and succeed in securing extensive monopoly protection on foundational innovations. All of the crusades of the US in exporting our draconion IP law, and for what? We will have locked ourselves out of our own energy future, for the sake of media cartel profits. No one deserves to profit at the expense of the rest of humanity.

Patents should not exist at all. In a world with billions of people, someone else would have thought of that "novel" idea anyway, and chances are, already has. It is not right to deprive the countless people arriving at the same ideas from also benefitting from their employment. It is unheard of for people to mine patents for ideas; they are the exclusive domain of litigators, and nothing but a damper on progress.

Nor do they want one. GE and the others in the nuclear industry won't touch the MSR--they make their money from expensive fuel manufacturing contracts, not plants. There is no fuel manufacturing with an MSR, so it kills their business model.

Helium turbines are actually significantly smaller than steam turbines per unit power. Supercritical CO2 turbines are far smaller, though would need to be sited near water. From what I have read, the quantity of Helium required is just not significant enough to pose concerns on either cost or availability.

The LFTR coupled with an advanced gas turbine offers great potential cost reductions, due to the much smaller containment, reactors, and associated turbines. Initial plants should probably focus on proven steam turbines, but the potential is there, and realizing it is inevitable. This technology is simply not available to conventional low-temperature plants.

Well, the problem was not with the popular imagination, but the poor policy making. The US would be fully energy independent today, and nuclear would be a brilliant, thriving industry, if only it had proceeded in a different direction. Indeed, the entire world would be a very different place, with the proliferation of cheap, safe energy, and reduced friction over fossil fuel resources. Maybe not too cheap to meter, but energy cheaper than from coal is quite possible with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. So are synthetic fuels from nuclear heat cheaper than from oil. As an additional benefit over current reactors, water can be desalinated with the rejected heat. All of this, with unparalleled safety, while addressing all of the waste concerns of present reactors.

Instead of pursing the safer, cleaner, and immensely more efficient liquid thorium reactors. The government poured billions into funding the competing liquid metal fast breeder: a fundamentally inferior solid fueled design which requires an immensely greater amount of fissile material, as all fast reactors do. (Plutonium in this case). There are numerous other downsides, but it suffices to say that the molten salt reactor program was cancelled when Alvin Weinberg questioned the safety prospects of the prevailing light water reactors and the direction of the plutonium breeder program. (This is the very person who invented the prevailing reactor technology, so who is more qualified to make such judgements? Now that the politics have played out, and his fears have been realized, perhaps it is time to revisit the liquid thorium reactor.

Now we face energy scarcity, horrific pollution, and accelerating destruction of our environment on a global scale, not to mention the results of climate charge. Please take the time to increase awareness of this technology; it isn't merely some theoretical hope, they ran a reactor successfully for years. It was and still is a genuine solution to all of our energy ills, which requires nothing but the will to embrace it. Learn more at Energy From Thorium, and please take the time to contact your representatives.

That's just the thing--there is no "given bandwidth". The limit you refer to is relevant for a single channel over a wire, or a single transmitter. For the spectrum though, you are effectively allowed an infinite number of transmitters/receivers. By legislating exclusive use of nearly all frequencies, we are killing any potential growth in that direction.

Distinguishing the signals is very much the practical limiting factor, but the capacity is there, and technology will continue to improve. We have barely scratched the surface of what will become possible with phased array antennas. Based on typical usage, people assume that wireless is a shared medium, but it is not. It is fundamentally point to point. (Optical is easy; RF is much harder, and subject to antenna limitations. Sure, there are limitations, but the point holds.)

It wouldn't take a zillion dollars, but it would require a pervasive quality optical network for all of those tiny cells to attach to. We need that anyway though, and that suffers from much the same problem: the carriers are perfectly happy leaving the network to rot. We desperately need public ownership of the plant, and the resulting competition amongst ISPs. Likewise, we need public ownership of a sizable chunk of spectrum. Without that, there is nothing to drive innovation and improvement of the respective mediums--there will always be some corporation focused on protecting their monopoly position, not improving the network.

Photons don't interact with each other, and don't "fill up" anything. What is at issue, is our poor usage of the spectrum, and insistance on treating it like exclusive property. Any number of people can communicate on the very same frequencies, and in the very same space, just as long as there is a way to distinguish the communications. Fortunately, nature provides each device with a unique "address": its location in space. As technology improves, we can continue to make ever better use of the same spectrum--or at least we could if legislation didn't actively prevent it.

In essence, it comes down to building more towers, and I'm not aware of any unsurmountable barriers to a company with the will and cash. Of course, it is easier to just prop up the model of artificial scarcity with prices to match.

Rather than clinging to the outdated concept of a scarce spectrum, regulatory agencies should start giving it back to the public, and encourage the proper use of it. Highly dense, low-power, ultra wide-band communications. It is the natural evolution of wifi: per-home micro-cells attached to home fibre, running open Internet protocols. We could easily have extremely high-performance ubiquitous wireless networking, if massive corporations weren't so busy propping up artificial scarcity and walling everything off.

The obvious "home use" would be holography. The next use (at home) is inside of a holographic optical storage device. IIRC, this 1W green laser is the very component that is keeping these devices from the mass market.

Sadly, since a skyhook is not attached to the earth, it misses one of the key advantages of a space elevator: the earth itself supplying the necessary angular momentum. For an elevator, only potential energy must be supplied, and that rapidly gets cheaper the further up you go. Past geo-synchronous orbit it is entirely free, but velocity still increases linearly with height. (Keep in mind that the kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity; paying for that energy directly is very expensive.)

With a skyhook, not only must you pay for the initial velocity, you can't arbitrarily choose the final delta-v, so there is still a considerable amount of energy that needs to be supplied, compounded with the extra fuel that must be carried to do so. Not to mention the continual input of energy to overcome atmospheric drag and maintain height. (If the up/down traffic isn't balanced, this is even more expensive, so you also need to consider the cost of moving that mass through space in the first place.) It would probably still be an improvement, but it would be complicated and could never hope to match the exceptionally low costs made possible by an elevator.

In terms of practicality, it may not require such exotic materials, but it would be that much more costly to orbit (and impart angular momentum to) such an enormous mass.

Pebble bed reactors are not as ideal as claimed, and Germany gave up on the program considering the array of problems. Perhaps some may have solutions, but fundamentally, it is still a solid fueled reactor with the associated problems. Solid fueled reactors can not efficiently burn up the fuel due to structural damage, resulting in long-lived actinides, fission products, and unburned fuel to be disposed of, with no possibility of recycling or access to the valuable fission products. (Such as medical isotopes.) So, the safety comes at the expense of inefficient fuel use and a magnified waste stream, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years.

What you really want is a Liquide Fluoride Thorium Reactor. It burns very nearly 100% of the fuel, producing very few actinides in the process. The actinides are the main concern with nuclear waste; without them, most of the fission products will have decayed to safe levels in a few hundred years. (In fact, most of them within 10 years..) Online fuel reprocessing ensures that there is no excess nuclear fuel or waste in the reactor. Coupled with a thermal spectrum reactor, this ensures that the very minimum of radioactive material is required for operation, and only a small fraction of that in conventional reactors of a comparable power output.

Of course, a LFTR is also walk away safe, requires no fuel fabrication, no further mining (is a byproduct of rare earth mining), can burn existing spent nuclear fuel and weapons materials, is scalable over a large range of sizes, can be sited anywhere, and can be mass produced at a cost cheaper than coal. There is a wealth of information available at Energy from Thorium.

From Maglev project gets go-ahead:

Japan's transport ministry has ordered the construction of infrastructure for magnetically levitated trains, putting the country's project for next-generation high-speed rail service fully on track.

The ministry on Friday ordered the Central Japan Railway Company, or JR Tokai, to build maglev train tracks between Tokyo and Nagoya.

Maglev trains boast a maximum operating speed of 500 kilometers per hour, and could travel the 340 kilometers between the 2 cities in just 40 minutes.

The ministry told JR Tokai to build the tracks on an almost straight route, using underground tunnels to pass beneath a mountain range.

The firm plans to start an environmental assessment this year and begin construction in 3 years.

Maglev trains are to start operating between Tokyo and Nagoya in 2027 and between Tokyo and Osaka in 2045.

The project is expected to cost 9 trillion yen, or nearly 113 billion dollars.
Friday, May 27, 2011 17:04 +0900 (JST)

The first leg is specified at 340km, and the total appears to be roughly 500km. At nearly 9 trillion yen, that would be 18*10^9 yen/km, or about 350 million dollars a mile. That looks ridiculously expensive, though a significant part of that may be drilling through mountain ranges. Often the maglev components themselves are insignificant compared to the necessary ground work, or securing rights of way.

Still, I'm curious how much of that cost could be avoided by opting for an Inductrack based system instead. Inductrack is an elegant passive magnetic levitation system, which is vastly cheaper than conventional systems due to its profound simplicity. It also seems likely that they chose a nearly straight path, exactly because of the excessive track cost. If that is the case, the path flexibility afforded by using a cheaper technology, may have allowed for significantly less ground work and a more attractively priced system.

In a country like the US with large flat expanses, Inductrack would make for an excellent intercity transit network. The costs are very reasonable, even when compared with conventional high-speed rail.

You conveniently exclude the nuclear testing in Nevada, which is claimed to have released 20 times the amount of radioactive Iodine over Chernobyl. The problem isn't so much the Iodine, as the fact that no one was told, and so preventative measures were not taken. That is not the case now, unless you are proposing some sort of worldwide conspiracy to cover it all up this time.

As others have mentioned, the Mercury in the oceans is of much greater concern, and not being able to eat fish worldwide. Pollution from coal is vastly more damaging, and most of that has no half life. Consider that Mercury is only a small part of what coal is putting straight into our environment, and have a look at the rest. An interesting fact, is that we could extract almost 15 times the chemical energy of coal, if we burned the included Uranium and Thorium in reactors instead of dumping it into the environment.

Copyright holders (and more typically mere owners) are the parasites, expecting to paid indefinitely for the same work. Google does the minimum necessary to respect copyright, and expecting anything more is unreasonable. If you wanted money in exchange for your own photos, you should have sold them. Copyrights, like patents and other forms of intellectual monopoly, are detrimental to society, and we would all be better off if they ceased to exist.

If you are at least making an effort, I am sympathetic to the difficulty of adjusting to a new business model. Clearly, some organizations are not though, and I, along with many others, will cheer on their demise.