I don't agree, aluminium is not easy to ignite at all in any kind of sustained way, unless you melt it and turn it into a spray, or you powder it (but then a lot of powders are pretty damn flammable), or you use high oxygen partial pressures.

Whereas, magnesium is not that hard to ignite, and it self sustains at normal atmospheric oxygen partial pressures.

For how many kilowatts though?

The price of solar panels is getting down to about $1/watt (peak) right now, and you get about 1-2 kWh per kW (peak) per day production depending on your latitude and climate.

It's unclear that they 'aren't doing anything illegal'. Even the New York Stock Exchange itself was fined after the flash crash.

Whether it is ethical or not, I suspect that the people involved will shortly be making a 'voluntary payment,' probably 'without admitting wrongdoing' after the regulators have asked pointed questions comparing the actions of their bot against those of the relevant standards.

Outwitting other bots isn't a crime, but market manipulation is.

You're not allowed to run prices down, purely to get them on the upswing.

And that's specifically what he seems to have been doing.

This isn't a technical problem, it's an ethical problem. The markets aren't there for this sort of thing, they're primarily there to fund businesses.

It's certainly not a 'hoax'. Coal contains (to varying degrees) all of these pollutants.

Coal plants do often have filters these days, but always:

http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerp...

the emissions are significant, and not everything gets filtered out.

Also the filtering is expensive and the carbon dioxide that coal emits is becoming a *massive* problem. Although carbon capture has been trialled, it makes coal non competitive with other technologies.

I can't speak to the chemical plants near you but with nuclear power, you always have incredibly dirty radioactive materials inside a container, with lots of complex plumbing leading into it, and under worst case conditions that stuff can potentially always get into the air and water and get spread far and wide.

Although in principle we could make it never fail over the lifetime of human beings, in practice, we as a species, don't know how to do that, and the proliferative effects of nuclear power and their association with nuclear bombs cannot be underestimated either.

To make nuclear power completely safe, is like trying to make water not wet. It's built into the nature of what we are doing with the materials, for utility-scale nuclear power they are always on the edge of melting down.

Because of these inherent properties it's also never been cheap; the extensive containment and safety you need to engage in, seriously impairs the economics and what you have to do to get around that problem, renders it an inflexible source of power. You have to run it essentially flat out to get the kWh price down to reasonable figures. The most successful systems (like in France) have hydroelectricity or other additional flexible supplies to balance out the power. But if you have that anyway, then overall, technologies like wind power are now usually cheaper and incredibly less risky and easier to install, and compared to nuclear power which is a more mature technology, still getting significantly cheaper over time.

Throwing money at such inherently risky technology like nuclear power to try to make it less risky is not a wise investment right now, and all the signs are that it is only getting less wise with time, other technologies are rapidly rendering it moot.

In Japan, they found at one point that there was a possibility of it *seriously* going to hell in a hand basket.

If the wind had been really wrong, it would have put serious fallout over Tokyo; which would have been really, really, really bad. While few people would have died, the economic disruption would have been (without any hyperbole) unbelievably stupendous.

http://world.time.com/2012/02/...

You can tell me all you want that this kind of accident can never happen, but I just don't believe it. We have no reason to think that Chernobyl or Fukushima were the worse cases, nor that these kinds of failures cannot happen again worse.

Even the channel hasn't been done. There's a railway connection, but not a road. There would be much bigger ventilation issues with a road.

And even the channel tunnel lost money, lots of money.

Some say he punched an innocent person in the mouth-

others say he's the cash cow of the BBC-

But we just know him as... unemployed.

Yeah, and if you think about it, the OS's disk buffer is an array and it's already allocated. ;)

We already are starting to cut CO2 emissions. The installation of wind power is doubling every 1-3 years. Already it's a few percent of total energy per year, imagine how big it will be in ten years. The emissions didn't grow this year, that's probably mostly wind power, next year, emissions will probably start to come down.

So no, I don't necessarily think it will take international commitments, it will take people not blocking wind power. Wind is about the cheapest source of energy there is, that can be very widely deployed, allowing for the negative effects of fossil fuel emissions on human health, and the actual real-world medical costs of that.

Actually rapid charge isn't that bad; you normally only rapid charge to 80%. It's rapid charging to 100% that's the most problematic.

Not only cost though.

People just like having great cars. Electric cars are quiet, zippy, reliable and easy to use. When you go back to a fossil fuel car afterwards, it's like going back in time.

> So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency;

To some extent. The main problem is that it flattens the battery more quickly and impacts range in winter time, the actual cost of the heater for an hour or two is generally relatively trivial compared to the other costs of running the car.

The newer electric cars have much less of an issue though. Instead of using electric heaters they run the air conditioner in reverse (it's an 'air source heat pump' in fact) and most of the heat energy then comes from the external environment rather than resistive heating. The heat pump uses about 1/3 of the power.