Kim,
“Years ago I thought the future was Chinese franchised pebble beds all over the world, with the Chinese supplying and recovering the pebbles. What has come of that?”
The Chinese are building a modular pebble bed reactor, the first one should begin operation next year.
Some photo’s from the component manufacturing facility and actual installation site in this IAEA presentation.
Willis, I echo your 4 point rebuttal of Dolan’s points, with a couple of additions.
Firstly, the rape/prostitutes thing that Dolan cited gives me (a woman) the creeps, as well as being in no way analogous. Keep your sick fantasies to yourself, pal. And, do not try to pull the wool over our eyes by claiming that sex services, which operate in a real market, have anything to do with your peculiar construct of economics.
Then, we are into Gucci handbags (those danged women again!) – another case of voluntary buyers and sellers. So what?
As other have explained at length and in detail, “externalities” are just Trojan horses. A polio vaccination for a child might cost $2, but the benefit of that child not getting polio is enormous to her and to her society. A cost/benefit analysis is much more useful, but that is what the fans of “externalities” dread most.
Even if the worst predictions of climate alarmists were true, on a cost/benefit analysis we should not impoverish ourselves and other around the globe as a way of dealing with it.
You, sir, are a charlatan, and a creep. Given your views on sexual interactions, I am glad that you live on another continent.
Peter Lang said:
“- The US ramped up production of aircraft carriers over 18 months in 1942-43 so it was producing them in 100 days. That is from first work to complete and fully loaded with aircraft and weapons. That was what one country could do 70 years ago.”
With massive government assistance and coordination.
Currently there is 450 ton international space station with crew of 6 which has been continuously occupied for 12 years which has been flying at around 400 km above Earth [at orbital inclination of 51 degrees- it's path will fly from 51 degrees latitude, north and south]. It flies over 80% of the Earth’s surface, it has been largely funded by US taxer payers, and has involved many astronauts from different countries. Russia has been a major
partner, and Russia has been solely responsible for getting crew to the station, since the end of US shuttle program. Last month, SpaceX flew it’s first non-experimental cargo flight to ISS, a notable event occurred in which 1 of it’s 9 engines failed, yet the Falcon-9 was still able to successful deliver cargo to ISS. Other countries- Japan and European space agency- have delivered cargo to ISS, but for next few years, only Russia flies crews to and from the station.
International Space Station [ISS} involves about 1/2 of NASA's manned space program budget, the other half is being spent to develop a rocket, which eventually is planned to be larger than the Saturn V [the largest and most successful rocket ever built, which landed crew on the Moon].
It was the Saturn V rocket which allow the US to send crew to the Moon, in less than decade or “before the end of the decade” [the 1960 decade] and
beat the Soviets to the Moon. A vision offered by JFK [in a famous speech] who later assassinated, but this goal was continued by other US presidents. Ultimately, the Saturn V [the workhorse of Apollo] delivered a total of 12 crew to the lunar surface, it had 11 successful launches which
includes the launch of first US station space station, Skylab, then the
Saturn V was scrapped, to be replaced with the Shuttle program.
So after few decades of the Shuttle program, NASA is returning to idea of developing a heavy lift rocket. A 130 ton payload to Low Earth Orbit [LEO]
and Saturn V was about 100 tons to LEO. So NASA is planning to make
the largest rocket ever made and could take over a decade to develop it.
And this program is called SLS [which critics call the Senate Launch System, but it's official name is the Space Launch System].
I think the 130 ton payload rocket will never fly, but instead will be cancelled before this stage of rocket development is achieved- I would like a reality in which NASA could develop a relatively cheap, reliable heavy lift rocket- something like or better than the Saturn V- but I think it’s not likely in the cards.
The SLS is being developed incrementally with first development version being a 70 ton to LEO rocket, which btw, is bigger than any currently available- and could be the largest rocket available in the world at that time. But this first launch is vaguely scheduled in 2017 with the 130 ton version available in sometime in 2030′s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
Wiki, criticism:
“Others suggest it will cost less to use an existing rocket (Atlas V, Delta IV, Falcon 9) or proposed derivative (Falcon Heavy), with on-orbit assembly and refuelling as needed, rather than develop a new launch vehicle for space exploration without competition for the whole design. Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin suggested that a heavy lift vehicle should be developed for $5 billion on fixed-price requests for proposal, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said his company could build one for $2.5 billion.
The Augustine commission proposed an option for a commercial 75 metric ton launcher with lower operating costs, and noted that a 40 to 60 metric ton launcher can support exploration. ”
Btw, the Falcon Heavy is a rocket which could lift 70 tons to LEO- and Atlas V, Delta IV also has possible variants on the drawing table, capable of around 50 to 60 tons.
And Atlas V and Delta IV currently are the biggest US launch vehicle- both these programs were developed by US military to deliver US defense satellite, with total develop [both launchers, in program called EELV] for 2 billion dollars- most of this money paying for launches- it was agreement to buy a certain amount launches at agree upon prices]
The Falcon 9 development cost was privately funded, and Elon Musk
says would built Falcon Heavy if given government funding of 2.5 billion.
And keep in mind, NASA is spending about 3 billion a year for it’s 70 ton rocket [which is suppose to evolve into 130 ton] which the 70 version might be ready in 2017. So NASA already spent over 6 billion, and by 2017 will have spent well over 12 billion.
And 2.5 billion is less than 12 billion.
And the 2.5 billion funding would be like EELV, would be agreeing to buying launches before starting to building the rocket.
The problem with large rockets [anything over 50 tons] is the lack of market [this size rocket is not needed to launch satellites].
It is possible Elon Musk will build it’s Falcon Heavy without such “market guarantees”- build it they come sort of thing, which has been his approach with developing the Falcon 9.
For the time being, NASA is going to spent 1/2 of budget it’s human spaceflight on ISS and 1/2 on developing a Heavy Lift rocket And Human Spaceflight is a bit less than 1/2 of NASA’s total budget.
What I think, and is mentioned in Wiki criticism of SLS program [above]
is what NASA *should do* is develop a system of refueling spacecraft in space. Which is even vaguely a new idea, it was the assumed path of getting to Moon, prior to Saturn V. The advantage going to route of the Saturn V, was it was a faster way to get to the Moon. Using one rocket, which launches crew, which can land on the Moon and return safely.
Instead of multiple rockets, and having system of docking and refueling a spacecraft- there little certainly of how one does this *exactly* and there is still some doubt about how exactly one does this- this uncertainty
would translate into taking more time.
But the SLS path of getting to the Moon after 2030, is hardly the definition of quick. And developing a system of re-fueling spacecraft could get us to the Moon by 2020- and in total costs be much cheaper.
And what I am saying is not unknown or even really debatable, but it
can be ignored and denied by NASA’s bureaucracy. I just don’t think it ignored forever- and why I think that ultimately the 130 ton SLS will never fly.
If you have a system of re-fueling spacecraft in space [and one could say that ISS has been doing this for 12 years- it needs to be re-boosted or fall from the sky] then one does not need 100 ton lift rockets to get to
the Moon- or even Manned Mars. Instead one could go the Moon with the existing rockets. Existing rockets which which in addition to US, many countries already have: Japan, China, European space agency, and India*.
*”Of seven launches over nearly 12 years, India’s largest rocket has notched only two successes and one partial success. The last fully successful flight occurred in September 2004.
But, ISRO is, if nothing else,doggedly persistent. In April, the Indian space agency will attempt to launch a GSLV rocket fitted with its second domestically produced cryogenic upper stage. ”
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2012/12/09/india-to-try-again-with-cryogenic-upper-stage-after-long-gap/
Why go to the Moon [or Mars or anywhere with humans]. This gets into the whole human vs robot debate. Which I find *boring*.
I make it as short as possible. We would not have a manned space program, at this time, if we did not have a robust commercial satellite market [robots], but we would not have a planetary robotic exploration program without a human space flight program.
Or people arguing for robot only exploration of space, argue it is cheaper, but in long term it much more expensive AND the public would
not support it. Human spaceflight in long term can be vastly cheaper and
it’s something the public wants.
And key aspect of why robots can be seen as cheaper, is you can throw away the hundred million dollar robot- rarely do you need to bring the robot back to Earth.
Getting back to Earth is fundamentally, relatively cheap. And it can made a lot cheaper. If you make it cheaper, using humans is cheaper than robots.
A key aspect of returning to Earth cheaply is having rocket fuel available
in Space. If rocket fuel were available on the Moon, even it hideously high price, having people going to the Moon would be 1/2 the current costs.
The key to having rocket fuel on the Moon, is having water on the Moon.
There could be a billion tons of water on the Moon. A billion tonnes water on Earth, is all over the place. It rains this much in rain storm.
It’s a small pond or lake. But on the Moon there could concentration of water in polar regions which if added all up, could exceed a billion tonnes. But all that needed on the moon is less than 1 million tonnes.
A 100 tonnes would enough for lunar program. And as little as 10,000 tons could make it economically viable to mine and transform the space
environment.
What is needed is for the polar region of the Moon to be explored to determine whether there is minable [can mine somewhere around 10,000 tons fairly easily which includes mine this amount within a short enough period of time- years]. You need to mine enough, in order to make it economically viable- to pay the high costs need to start such an operation. No different than in order successful mine off shore oil you need enough minable oil. It’s around that scale of cost development,
though oil has ready market for it’s product, and lunar water is a bit more complicated in terms of available market.
So a ton of lunar water is fair cheap at million dollars. And obviously
a million tons of water at such price is trillion dollars. And billion tones is 1000 trillion dollars. One can’t expect to sell million tons for 1 trillion dollars- market factors don’t work that way, maybe 100 billion, but that
getting ahead of things. With only 10,000 tons at million per tons, one only has gross of 10 billion. So it’s trickier to pull this off, but within the realm of possible. NASA doing this, dream on. But private markets could do it. And this is what I am talking about.
So if you had lunar water commercially mined and selling water at million dollars of ton. Which may be 2 or even 3 million ton, one has 1/2 the cost of crew going to the Moon because there would rocket fuel available. But one doesn’t even need to mine lunar water and make rocket fuel, and sell it, one manage lower cost by around 1/2, by shipping rocket fuel from earth, at low cost. Or having rocket fuel available on the moon for 20 or 30 million a ton makes going to the Moon a lot easier and therefore lower cost- even if you paying fairly high price for the rocket fuel.
The reason any commercial provider of rocket fuel would charge a lower price, is to increase the demand for rocket fuel.
If you had unreasonably high demand for lunar rocket fuel, one could less it for less than 10,000 per ton, but 2 million per ton for rocket fuel [1 million or less for water] would be reasonable considering market demand within decade or two of time.
Or before 1 million tons of water [out of possible 1 billion tonnes of more]
is mined and sold the price could drop by 1/10th or 1/20th, but by the time the millionth ton is mined, could take several decades before this much demand is reached. But getting to point of any rocket fuel at whatever could seen as a reasonable price, is the biggest cost reduction to sending crew to the Moon- it makes humans cheaper than robots- but of course you still want robots, you lowered their costs by some amount and made them even more useful/valuable.
Or the big problem with mining lunar water is market size- humans not robots would be biggest market element. Having some kind commercial lunar mining operation run solely by robots, is pointless and non-economical- it’s self defeating. Though using as much robots that make economical sense, is a good idea.
Having tel-operated machines using workers on Earth controlling them would probably a must for any business plan. But the machines would assisting, rather than the myth that the use of machines are going replace humans completely.
Johanna
Agree with your endorsement of the four points and your denouncing of the sexual points made which seem inappropriate and creepy. Hopefully Mr Dolan-who has many interesting things to dsay can find some better analogies
tonyb
In my parents generation, there is a disturbing belief that, since government put a person on the moon just by decreeing it so (and spending tons of money), that government can do anything. Therefore, in their mind, the government can decree that we have batteries that are good enough for electric cars (for example) and it will be so.
However, there is a drastic difference in government decrees core government functions such as military matters (and let’s face it, that’s what NASA was all about), and their ability to end hunger, poverty, etc by likewise decreeing its end. One of the reasons I no longer count myself as a “liberal” is that liberals have one answer for everything — a massive, powerful, expensive, intrusive government program, at the highest possible level of government. And as a government employee, I can assure you, there is nothing magical about government to fix those issues by decree, no matter how big and powerful and massive and expensive the program.
mosh – WRT Sun Catalytix, a friend of mine had a solar water heating system installed. Lots of plumbing and tanks. Expensive stuff. In the Catalytix system, lots of pipes and tanks. Has to contain hydrogen which is notoriously difficult to do. Metals exposed to elemental hydrogen can undergo hydrogen belittlement with subsequent failure. Hydrogen is extremely flammable and burns with a colorless flame which is hard to see. This is high tech and will require maintenance. This does not look like a good third world solution to me.
You are right, however, about going small in the third world. The solution needs to be easy to maintain and be low cost for materials and installation. It is a tall order.
In China, the government took the reins and installed energy infrastructure. This is a possible solution for the rest of the third world. But due to the horrendous governments in charge – or not in charge – in most third world countries, that also is a tall order.
Other than that, I don’t believe the more centralized solution is precluded as you seem to believe.
Tony, I have not been able to discover anything of substance that is new or interesting in Dolan’s work, but perhaps you could point me to something?
Peter Lang said:
“Yes, there are a few cases where renewables have a role to play,”
Far more than a few. A century from now the idea of burning coal or oil will seem archaic and fission unnecessary. It will all be renewable, cheap, and readily available. Solar energy will be the energy of human civilization as we rely on the fusion power plant that we’ve had for billions of years and tap into it’s energy with amazing efficiency. It will be local and green and renewable. Big central power plants will seem as absurd as a central power plant for a philodendron. Every home and business will supply its own energy and any excess will be feed to a smart grid. Even now technicians in labs the world over are nearly giddy with the exciting breakthroughs they see close at hand in artificial photosynthesis. Copy this blog post down.
That should be hydrogen embrittlement, not belittlement.
Solar energy will be the energy of human civilization
And what if you’re wrong? And if you are correct, at what cost? What evidence do you have of this?
I mention earlier that I find it disturbing that Apollo-influenced liberals believe that government can decree that anything is so, and it will be so. I daily experience a high level of government failure and mediocrity in my job. BTW, weren’t such predictions made about “the end of the century” meaning 12 years ago? Weren’t we supposed to have colonies on the moon by now?
So yeah, like so many other predictions from the global warming crowd, I’m writing this down. And I intend on haunting every last one of ‘em, asking them about their predictions, in the coming years — especially if they went out of their way to be derisive and dismissive and made money from the thing (not saying that you do, but many in fact do).
Absolutely. Artificial photosynthesis will be the big game changer. Why burn yesterday’s stored sunlight when you can power everything from today’s far more efficiently.
Here is the difference between F3_defective() used in the poster and F3_full() calculated with a full window.
http://i49.tinypic.com/2zylcgh.png
This is the elephant in the room. Talking of mK accuracy when you have 154mK distortion giving the _illusion_ that your CO2 model is fitting the data is a joke.
Note the end value is 154mK ahead of the poster’s “F3(AGW)” , that is somewhat worse than the difference of 140mK when compared to the non filtered function as I had previously done.
As Pekka points out the filtered exponential function will get progressively further above the analytic F3 as the slope increases.
Insisting on the same filter being applied to all curves just adds another 14mK to the error.
“The Skeptical Warmist | December 19, 2012 at 9:27 am |
Peter Lang said:
“- The US ramped up production of aircraft carriers over 18 months in 1942-43 so it was producing them in 100 days. That is from first work to complete and fully loaded with aircraft and weapons. That was what one country could do 70 years ago.”
With massive government assistance and coordination.”
“1939 $673,792,000
1940 $1,137,608,000
1941 $4,465,684,000
1942 $21,149,323,000
1943 $31,043,134,000
1944 $21,796,913,000
1945 $29,190,924,000
1946 $24,171,930,000
1947 $4,647,136,000
1948 $3,693,256,000″
http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/budget.htm
How can 1.7c from co2 NOT dominate? Do you really think nature will produce more than 1c total temp change to 2100? Why? It hasn’t produced more than a few tenths of a c per 200 years over any period in at least the last 2000 years. Even the 20th century saw 0.8c and a good deal of that must have been co2 if cs is 1.7 leaving nature in the dust.
You know David, when battleing blindingly stupid arguments one must make blindingly stupid statements in the hopes that idiots would look at the data.
Just my personal crusade against the “No warming since 19xx meme,” whhich is a pervasive and blindinly stupid meme.
For those still following this topic, here’s a great summary of a few of the advances in Artificial Photosynthesis and different approaches being pursued in 2012:
http://ucs.berkeley.edu/energy/2012/06/biofuels/artificial-photosynthesis-now-a-reality/
In short, huge breakthroughs in cost and efficiency were the hallmark of the industry research in 2012 and this trend is already set to continue in the coming years. Some form of direct solar/artificial photosynthesis will be a big part of the decentralized smart electrical distribution grid in the not too distant future.
Peter Lang, I know enough to know that we live in Extremistan and that the future human technology will be decided by that which seems on the very edges of the possible today. Centralized nuke power plants hardly fall in this category.
lolwot, you write “So I take it you don’t find nick Lewis’s argument for 1.6c sensitivity compelling. But you demand the ipcc should? Staggering.”
I assume you are referring to my message. You completely ignore what I have written. I find Nic Lewis’s estimate of 1.6 C for climate sensitivity as a strong indication that previous estimates by the IPCC were exaggerated. That is all. If you want to claim that if Nic is correct, then previous IPCC estimates were not exaggerated, I would like to see your logic for this conclusion.
So that is all I deduce from Nic’s estimation. I maintain that the way Nic did his estimations results in a maximum value for climate sensitivity; not an accurate estimate.
Please address the issue as to whether previous IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity have been exaggerated. That is the issue. Nothing else.
Bob Droege: Except that Ocean heat content has about doubled in the last 16 years.
There is an obvious problem with the scaling of the graph: it begins with negative heat content in 1960. You can not infer a “doubling” from the right-hand end of the graph.
“Just my personal crusade against the “No warming since 19xx meme,” whhich is a pervasive and blindinly stupid meme.”
There hasn’t been much warming since 1940, and little of none
since 1997.
How is this vaguely stupid as compared idea that we getting hotter,
that significantly bad things have happen due to insignifcant amounts of warming [barely measurable] and that our future
includes Greenland melting, or even more ludicrous Antarctic melting.
That children should fear for their life and the future is doomed.
