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Submission + - Fill me up with, em, "Water Please", and "Change My Battery!" (phinergy.com)

wanfuse123 writes: "A rawcell.com admin came across an interesting website, Phinergy.com demonstrates aluminum-air battery able to power car for 1000 miles The gist of it is that metal-air batteries generate electricity through the oxidation of aluminum. Turning it to Aluminum Oxide with the assistance of water. Fifty-five pounds of plates can power the car for 1000 miles, needing a water refill every 200 miles. I had suggested using a system for capturing the water from the air that way stops wouldn't be necessary. Others have suggested that the plates would weigh 82 pounds when they needed replacement. A network of recovery sites would need to be setup. The company believes cars with the device could go on sale as early as 2017. I am curious about the Slashdot crowds opinions on this game changing technology!"

Comment We need to Capture a LARGE Asteroid with Value (Score 1) 106

We should be looking at getting the technology to capture LARGE asteroids instead of planning a mission to mars. If we use government funds to push private industries into getting a large rock with value into moons orbit it can provide us with a source of material to help us colonies space which is a much better goal than trying to visit mars with humans. We can continue use robots to explore mars while we work on mining space rocks for rare earths for earth and also for space and for a moon base. Perhaps it would be even better to capture a comet since the most valuable space element is water. http://rawcell.com/

Comment 16 Ways to Save the Planet #8 (Score 2) 158

I just finished writing an article on 16 ways to save the planet. Number 8 was to institute a efficiency standards. Design a moving goal post to keep pressing the issue in a sort of energy efficiency Mores Law. Currently our brains are a million times more efficient than the computers we run and at the same time are a million times more powerful! If we press the issue and put money into it we can build the technology to get our computers to match the efficiency of the human brain. There already has been several designs proposed to make this happen including using old analog types of computer designs instead of digital ones which are far more efficient for some things. Also designing chips to come up with correct answers using the chaos and noise rather than by overriding the noise by pushing high voltage differences between 1's and 0's.

Comment Re:Totally unworkable (Score 1) 115

The fact is we have enough Thorium to power the US for a 1000 years from ONE mountain PASS. That's right ONE mountain pass will supply the US with 100% of it's needs for 1000 years! There is enough Thorium in that mountain pass to shovel it into a bin and nearly use it without processing (when compared with conventional reactor refining) to supply us with 1000 years at current energy consumption for every last WATT we use. That link points to facts about Thorium as a fuel.

Comment Re:Record radiation levels ... (Score 2) 63

This is a publicity stunt. It's meant to show how the streets look O.K. to be filled with people again. It's the silent radiation killer that is the problem as everyone knows. Fukushima is a peering legacy like Chernobyl before it about the dangers of conventional generation I, II, and III nuclear reactors. We should have been long off these types of reactors. If we had been investing like the most brilliant minds said about Thorium (since 1940's) we would have had 73 years to develop them and we would all be driving around Thorium powered cars by now. With a million times the power density of coal, and much higher power density than current nuclear meltdown prone nuclear reactors we could be free of energy concern for 1000 years. No Melt Downs and No Global Warming and abundant cheap energy.

Comment Re:Totally unworkable (Score 1) 115

That's what I have been trying to tell the Slashdot crowd at every chance I can. I am willing to bet with a 4 year effort similar to the 4 years of the Manhattan project (1942-1945) where we went from ground zero ( No Pun Intended) to a developed nuclear bomb for 23 Billion in 2013 dollars that we could over come the materials problem for such high temperatures (700 degrees Celsius) and high neutron flux. I have actually proposed a workable solution for this problem (although it would be a little expensive) but others have proposed alternate materials for the inner reactor container. There is only a few other problems which haven't been resolved to make the generation IV reactors viable. On the other hand the fusion reactors will take another 50 years to commercialize. It will be great when they do so it's a worthy investment. Although they aught to invest in alternatives other than Tokamaks. You can read about generation IV reactors here or about India's Thorium Reactor which comes online this year.

Comment Save the Planet: 16 Ways (Score 1) 94

I wrote an article on things we can do to save the planet. It was meant for the Digg crowd but some might want to read it here. One of the ways was to buy up the remainder of the rain forest. It's expensive that's true but as they say there is probably a cure for cancer in there somewhere! Save the Planet: 16 Ways

Comment OS less installs and thread level virtualization (Score 1) 286

The next competition is going to be in OS less installs and thread based virtualization for servers, workstations and mobile devices. I am sure all the major plays will jump on the band wagon. As far as VMWare, I have been running my VMWare install for 4 years and have only needed to reboot it once and that was probably my fault when I had a routing loop. VMware is very stable. VirtualBox is less so but then again its a type 2 hypervisor ( I use the term hypervisor loosely so don't call me out on it) compared to ESX's type 1 hypervisor. Xen is a pain to get running. And my proxmox 2.0 install on Debian with KVM simply just works although it doesn't easily support lots of features ( at least it didn't 4 years ago when I used it). Being able to live migrate an infrastructure is very valuable. Having Purple screens of death or guest lockups or host lockups doesn't fly in the enterprise. Virtualization is rapidly becoming like a utility company, everyone expects it and no one wants to pay for it. Same will happen to all parts of the computer industry including programmers when the A.I gets good enough. There is no job that is safe in the world, everything and everyone can be replaced with something cheaper, faster or better. http://rawcell.com/

Comment Re:Topsoil-based fuels are wrongheaded in every wa (Score 1) 238

You should read my articles before you point me out for not reading yours. The reason I didn't read your article is it keeps crashing my chrome browser. Also as far as algae, I said nothing about algae, I posed it as a question. It is interesting about algae being able to use any type of water but is it a viable solution right now? Why are we not using it? In the case of LFTR reactors they are not being used today because of the reasons I outlined here: Ulterior Motives. I would be interested in seeing more about the algae solution. Is it being tested? Is it actually producing fuel? What's the power density of the fuel? The CO2 output of the fuel per gallon? Please re-post your your well thought out document in HTML please so I can read it. You stated, "Recycling plastics waste does not make money. Also, where do you think the carbon in algae comes from, the moon?" You are wrong plastic waste recycling can supply us with 74 billion dollars per year in gas at today's prices ( By the way no one is paying me to promote this solution.) With the cost of recycling in USA we would earn 147.16 billion in 10 years. That assumes a life time of the recycling plants of 10 years which is an extremely conservative estimate and is probably closer to 30 years. You said, "There are many technical hurdles between now and a future in which such a reactor would be a suitable replacement for transportation fuel. " Those hurdles are no greater than the hurdles that the US undertook in creating an atomic bomb, or in landing on the moon. With a Manhattan style project which originally took 4 years in the 1940's we could overcome the technical hurdles. Also it isn't a LFTR type of Thorium reactor, but India will have their first 500 MWe plant running in 2013! Six more will follow in the next few years that are meant for commercial use. If India can do it then why can't the US do it? You said, "If you use beats, you will also need lyrics." Very witty, it seems you pay more attention to spelling than substance. I would suggest you read my articles before you judge them as being wrong unlike your article it doesn't crash ones browser to read. (By the way I wouldn't point this out except your being so nasty.) I include all the math necessary to come to my conclusions in my article. I guess it's easier to point out spelling mistakes than it is to read a mathematical analysis of substance. Generation IV reactors can provide the whole US economy with an energy solution for 1000 years. That's every last Watt of power. Can algae do the same? By the way nothing in my first statement statement indicated that there was a reason to not use algae as a solution. On the contrary I feel we should use almost all forms of alternative energy sources. With the exclusion of the use of ethanol. I didn't bother pointing out that your document crashes my browser, I guess I should have pointed that out originally but I assumed it was my browser that had the problem and just posed the questions instead.

Comment Re:Topsoil-based fuels are wrongheaded in every wa (Score 1) 238

I would be interested in seeing more about fuel from algae, as for corn based, I know it is not a good thing. It makes no sense and under no circumstance will it ever become a viable solution. It's good to see that this uses otherwise wasted land, but can it be scaled. If they could find a plant species to use that would grow in land that has no vegetation whatsoever like maybe desert. Then it might make sense. But you would still have the problem with supplying it with water which is becoming ever an increasing precious substance. What's the difference using beats in this respect? I venture none. As for algae, doesn't one run into the same problem, what's the difference? Anyone? Let's invest as heavily in Air Carbon Capture by recycling plastics waste to pay for it and in development of generation IV nuclear reactors based on methods that don't use lot's of Uranium (as in non spent Uranium. Spent Uranium is O.K. since those types of reactors get rid of the long term waste. If we invested in generation IV nuclear reactors, we could convert all our coal plants for 1.6 Trillion in capital cost..

Comment Re:And by Renewable Power Sources (Score 1) 262

Soul Powered. The apple followers put their heart and soul into following Apple. It's good to see that Apple is doing something with their money that is worth while. Google is doing a lot of the same. I am sure it's because it's good PR but I certainly like to hear about it. I just wish that Apple and Google would invest in building a network of Air Carbon Capture devices. Funding the Air Carbon Capture with the profits made from building a network of plastic recycling units. We waste 37,000,000 tons of plastic each year that can be turned into millions of gallons of fuel and sold for a huge profit.

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