Now here's a cool car

Really???

Seems to me that the transistor came out of Bell Labs.

Seems to me that the IC came out of Texas Instruments.

Yes, I'll agree to this and in fact it is my point. Guv'ment has become
to great provider of corporate welfare and it is more important to
analyze why this became so.

Well, if you look at California, there's a perfect example on guv'ment
running amuck.

Ah... OK, you were/are a beneficiary!

JT

 

I would never advocate a path that would be unnecessarily risky but a
risk that is manageable. Nukes are just that and the only viable
interim solution to the nation's energy needs.

Continued dependence on foreign oil is folly at best and downright
dangerous regarding national security and economically as well.

If the private sector had the same freedom of movement regarding
innovation that it had forty or fifty years ago, we might well be
enjoying a new source of energy that meets the needs of consumers as
well as being environmentally friendly.

But I'll never see such at this point in time...

JT

 

To be totally correct about it, Bell labs invented the transistor,
Geophysical Systems Inc. bought the rights to manufacture it from Bell labs
and renamed the company from GSI to Texas Instruments. Now, whether or not
Bell labs did the research with Govt. investment is a whole other question.

True. Jack Kilby has a Nobel prize for it.

 

Good point.

Back a zillion or so years ago, I did a couple of contracts for the
technical support (sub)contractor for the Safeguard R&D program on
Kwajalein. The project management was by Bell Labs and later I learned
that they were told that they had to do this because they were the only
entity that was capable of such a complex program.

Imagine that... The guv'ment actually telling a business entity that
they had to take a contract! And, it was up to Bell Labs to succeed
with a minimum of interference which certainly is not the case today.

The plus side is that since AT&T was in charge, benefits were good even
for us lowly subcontractors...

JT

 

That's not a goal at all. Taken one way, it's an unsatisfiable set of
constraints. Taken another way, it's an ambiguous one.

If you want to both "BEST deliver people where they want to go", and
"deliver people where they want to go with the least harmful impact on
the environment", it's unsatisfiable. If you want to balance delivery
with impact on the environment, it's ambiguous.

Not likely. In the US, a state court just ruled that a nuke
supplying 30% of the power to New York City has to shut down because
its water output is too hot. Now, it's possible to produce
electricity with a minimum of conventional pollutants, and it's even
possible to produce it with a minimum of CO2 (with a nuke). But you
can't produce electricity without heat. The standards are
impossible.

 

So what's your option? Kill all the fish by boiling them in the case
of your NY reactor.

 

The water doesn't come out even close to boiling temperature.

Con Ed wanted to put in cooling towers when the plant was built in the
60's (Units 2 and 3), but Riverkeeper opposed them because they'd spoil
the view (not like Buchan's scenic - it's a shithole)

In any case, NY's ruling affects virtually every power plant of any
type, in the state. I'd love to see the owners just pack up and leave -
IP going off line alone would make electric service in the area a
nightmare (it's 1/3rd NYC's generating capacity). There's a number of
other plants in the area of various sizes affected by this ruling, too.
Most owner/operators are national - they can just go elsewhere, and
nobody's proposing any new construction of useable size. Why bother,
when the state's attitude is to drive everyone out.

 

:

You'd like to see Atlas shrug?

 

Not a court. It was the state's Department of Environmental Conservation.

 

If it were possible, the greens would find some other excuse to demand
shutdown. Their movement isn't really about saving the earth; it's about
destroying civilization because they hate humans.

 

So that soft, green glow has been around so long it doesn't even
keep you awake does it?

--
..



"You show me ONE poster who says you have even one part
per million of a good name, and I'll show you a sock." - Bill
"the Roadie" Carton

 

Yeah, but I have lotsa company!

Ol' Honda Civics and Studebakers... Simple elegance..

JT

 

As much amusement as having electricity shortages in NYC would provide
to people elsewhere, I think it's pretty clear what the better option
is, to all but die-hard anti-human environmentalists. Dead fish it
is.

 

You really believe that? I think you're pretty stupid.

 

When Indian Point 2 & 3 were being planned, Con Ed wanted to build
cooling towers. The environmentalists opposed them, because it would
'spoil the view'.

Cooling towers aren't a bad thing, but they do have the disadvantage of
drawing a bit of power - on a large plant like IP, you'd be looking at
something like 20 - 40 MW per unit. That's all pumping losses (!).

IIRC, Palo Verde is unique in the world for being the only nuke that's
not near a river or body of water. The plant uses recycled sewage for
the condensers...

 

Setting aside the irony of a Randroid complaining about somebody hating
civilization, there's an element of severe stupidity to
"environmentalists"* who support policies that drive up energy costs in
urban areas. It drives out businesses, and they leave the city for less
energy-efficient places that use more energy (in terms of electricity
and transportation usage) and depend on heavily subsidized roads and
parking lots. That does nothing but harm the environment, both from the
standpoint of climate change and the ecological rape wrought by suburban
sprawl.

* The people in question often aren't environmentalists though. They're
just suburban NIMBYs whose concern is very local. However, I would
guess there are often alliances between both groups and even perhaps a
common delusion that each shares the other's concerns.

 

I think you haven't been paying attention. There's a very large
subset of the green movement which opposes any practical means of
large-scale power generation. They were all for wind until people
started building windmills, and they're dead-set against solar thermal
generation (but not solar panels, which are too costly and inefficient
to work on a large scale).

 

Trying to moving low-grade heat 40 miles probably isn't going to work.