Brian Wang will be on Fast Forward Radio (the Speculist blog on Blog Talk Radio) I will be speaking with Rand Simberg, Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon about Moon colonies and Newt Gingrich’s proposed permanent moon base. The talk will start at 8pm PST February 1pm and will be recorded. My Recent articles on moon …
Rising greenhouse gases are causing roughly 380 Terawatts less heat to escape from the atmosphere. Result: the planet is warming. The warming due to the 16 Terawatts from waste heat produced by humans is tiny in comparison. If the demand for power grew to 5000 Terawatts, it would warm the planet by 3 °C. If …
I am fairly regularly asked about the peer reviewed sources for my deaths per terawatt hour articles and my lifetime deaths per twh from energy article. Reporters or university students will ask if my articles have been submitted for peer review and been published. No, I have not submitted and gotten my articles on deaths …
1. Power Engineering – China saw its nuclear power generation in 2011 hit 87.4 billion kilowatt-hours, a jump of 16.95% on-year, according to recent figures released by China Electricity Council. This was an increase of 17.3 TWh from 2010 2. The capacity factor of Indias 20 operational nuclear reactors, adding up to an installed capacity …
Researchers at Rice University are using carbon nanotubes as the critical component of a robust terahertz polarizer that could accelerate the development of new security and communication devices, sensors and non-invasive medical imaging systems as well as fundamental studies of low-dimensional condensed matter systems. It is the most effective polarizer ever reported; it selectively allows …
Lawrence Krauss (physicist and author of the Physics of Star Trek) wrote in New Scientist that Newt Gingrich’s proposal to put a permanent base on the moon will have to cost about $1 trillion because the International Space station cost $150 billion and the Space Shuttle program cost over $200 billion. Apparently once the government …
Reason – Based on data from hundreds of programs, policy analyst John D. Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U.S. government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to …
HyperV Technologies is trying to develop minirailguns for the world’s first commercially viable fusion reactor technology. Their research could result in the development of a controlled hot fusion reactor that is scalable to provide between 100 MW and 2,000 MW of clean base load electric power. There was a 20 page presentation from June of …
Raytheon Company has been awarded a $10 million contract from Naval Sea Systems Command to develop a pulsed power system that will enable railguns to fire projectiles without explosive charges or rocket motors. The contract for the preliminary design of a Pulse Forming Network (PFN) is part of a larger effort by the U.S. Navy …
The computer industry has become almost fixated on power issues. Power-per-watt is the new metric for CPUs and GPUs, and everything from chips to data centers are now power-limited. The Tilera corp. has developed a series of multicore processors which could dramatically reduce power consumption for certain computing tasks. For tasks not requiring floating-point performance, …
Nanoletter – Water desalination is an important approach to provide fresh water around the world, although its high energy consumption, and thus high cost, call for new, efficient technology. Here, we demonstrate the novel concept of a “desalination battery”, which operates by performing cycles in reverse on our previously reported mixing entropy battery. Rather than …