Not quite. Peak demand in California is between 6 to 7PM, peak solar production is approximately 12 noon. Peak load does not drop signficantly until well after sunset.

Decommissioning costs are still a lot less than it would cost to build the plant now. Letting the plant cool down for a few years makes the process simpler and safer, though the reactor vessel is going to be a challenge.

Something on the order of 97% of the atmosphere's mass is below 90,000'. 100km is an arbitrary value for the start of space, as the air at 100km is too thick to orbit and too thin to fly in (except dynamic soaring?). In imperial units, 100,000' seems to be the upper limit for flying and 100 miles is about the lower limit for orbiting.

The Perlan II sounds like it will handle like an unpowered U2 - where the planes ceiling will be defined by the "coffin corner" were the low speed stall (classic stall) approaches the high speed stall (Mach tuck from transonic airflow). Perhaps they will be using a more refined airfoil than the U2 to increase the Mach number for high speed stall.

IIRC, the pre-Perlan I sailplane altitude record of approx 47,000 feet was set sometime in the 1960's, surprising it took that long for someone to break that.

I first heard about use of series capacitors in an electric power systems class, 1H 1975, so they have been around for quite a while. It would seem to me that the caps should be able to withstand the DC potential set up by a Carrington event.

Any component for a high voltage transmission line is going to be gigantic. Google term "power transmission line series capacitors" should get you started.

An alternative way of minimizing the effects of a severe solar storm on the grid would be placing series capacitors on the long AC transmission lines. This is done already to increase power transfer capacity of some lines.

Since the solar flare is visible many hours before CME hits, the utilities should have time to configure the grid for the storm. The oerative word here is "should".

Not that much. A typical Tc99m scan involves injection a bit over a billion (10E9) bq per person, albeit half life is only 6 hours. Reminds me of a "warning sticker" for a CB radio - "Danger 5,000 milliwatts".

I agree wholeheartedly that the pot is more similar to the Jetboil in principle than different. There is a difference in details in that the Jetboil is designed for lighter weight and better heat transfer efficiency than the pot at the expense of a more fragile design.

I don't there is anyone in the US who was born in 1897 or earlier.

There was an article or two in the likes of Mechanix Illustrated or related magazine about the US Army experimenting with ammonia fueled engines. Reports indiacted that engines would function, but had not been developed to the point of practicality. Shudder to think what kind of NOx levels are present in the exhaust.

I remember Newton's inverse square law, but magnetic dipoles were more than two centuries after his time.

That sounds like a reasonable guess as to what is going on. The hot plasma is conductive and the Johnson noise may produce enough current to emit detectable radiation. My recollection was that the sky noise temp at 50 MHz was on the order of 3,000K, and the plasma from the meteor trail is likely to be considerably hotter than that.

TFA had the 200 inch Hale telescope on a fictional geogrphical location, Mt. Palomar. The real name is Palomar Mountain. A minor detail, and very common error, but it is the same kind of error the author was complaining about.

The benefits in the modest increase in efficiency are not so much from reduced energy usage, but the higher efficiency reduces the amount of waste heat that has to be removed from the PCU. The higher junction temperatures allowable with SiC makes the cooling task even easier. What has Toyota excited is that the PCU with SiC is much smaller than the PCU with standard silicon power devices.

Except that Boeing, Convair, Douglas and Lockheed figured out how to put windows on pressurized airliners before the Comet flew.