Yeah, it may be kind of elaborate, but if it can serve as an advertising platform in a busy station that function of it may pay for the machine over the life of it.

Fascinating. So electrolysis is the main driving force of this reaction....

If they could somehow install nuclear plants capable of running a sulfur iodine cycle, they could probably achieve 50% efficency, probably enough to obviate the need for at-sea resupply.

Probably. But many thermochemical processes fail to achieve 100% efficiency. So i'm not sure how efficient this one would work. And @$0.1/kw that's probably the figure for electricity, not thermal energy. I think most chemical conversion processes use thermal energy not electrolysis.

Assuming that this process is 10% efficent let's take a look at the numbers.

Let's say you can dedicate half of the 1.1GWT (thermal) of the nimitz to aviation fuel production, if you're holding off coast.

And let's assume conservativley that the process is 20% efficent.

Diesel (pretty close to JP1) has an energy density of 35 MJ/L. This means at 20% efficency you'll be needing 175mj to create 1 liter of JP1.

At 1/2 1GWT you're looking at about 3 liters of fuel per second, or about 172,000 liters a day, or about 40,000 gallons. The nimitz has about 3 million gallons of fuel capacity so the refueling time of the entire tank from 0 would be around 2 months. According to this article here

http://large.stanford.edu/cour... (Also about marine jet fuel fabrication, provides some of the hard numbers) 3 million gallons is enough to refuel the onboard fleet about 20 times. So onboard fuel production would provide 1/3 of a full tank of gas for each aircraft onboard per day. Not terribly good, or bad.

Unless you're Australia.

If the BTC were used to purchase a lambo or tesla roadster, it would probably get someone's attention..

Perhaps somebody should create a folding at home/cancer research coin, that gives each person who dedicates CPU time a folding coin, with increasing difficulty. Once any research is commercialized with the results of the computations, a 50% share of the patent is disbursed to the coin holders. CPU calculations and GPU calculations would be separated and compensated differently. Like a CPU computation is worth 20x more than a GPU computation, because GPU computations can only solve certain problems and CPU computations are still needed.

If the bitcoin/litecoin swarm were dedicated like this to a research cause, the coins would gain inherent value once a commercialized therapy were implemented, like stocks, and would probably pay dividends, supporting a minimum price floor and adding a concrete value to the calculation based coins for the first time. No?

Heat is the input energy. It takes heat to actuate the muscle. After it cools it stops resisting the tension. My guess is that heat is applied through nichrome wire. Although being able to actuate at 130c makes me think you could use polyethylene coils to make a waste heat recovery engine via a reciprocating pull on a flywheel

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Here Is the wikipedia article on lithium air batteries. If not 10x then atleast gasoline equivalent energy storage is possible. Are you saying that you would need a lithium hydrogen battery to reach 10x potential? The lithium air battery doesn't carry a cathode so it can hold more charge per weight so that's why I assumed it would live up to the 5-15x claim on wikipedia.

This may on the surface be true. But the primary technological challenge with electric vehicles is battery technology, and this has been under development for a century and a half. Maybe even 2. Even still, though rechargeable batteries have gone up in capacity maybe 10x, it is still not anywhere near competing with ICE vehicles cost effectively. That will come when the air-chemistry batteries hit the market, with another 10x increase in energy storage per volume/weight due to negating the need to carry your cathode. (or is it anode?)

Looks like for microsoft to preserve profitability it may have to continue to branch out of its core competency, windows. Perhaps it's following in Apples footsteps in a sense, branching away from personal computing to consumer electronics.

i think he was referencing an air compressor.

a forklift battery can be had for about 5k and stores like 30-50kwh of power and will work well within its 20 hour rate for the average house. no sense in using an electric car when forklift batteries are designes to run day in and day out for a decade in even more strenous conditions. And lord knows we have enough lead and sulfur. recondition or recycle when done and little environmental damage running into the future.

are you paying 3.8 euros a litre? seriously? because that's what 6x would equate to... where do you live? netherlands? finland? sweden?

They're not electrolysing hydrogen out of the water they're removing the oxygen dissolved in it.