The long anticipated Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway will start a one-month trial operation on Wednesday, before its formal launch in late June. The railway authority has also decided that the fastest train service between the two mega-cities will make an extra stop in Nanjing (capital of Jiangsu province), according to an official with the transport bureau …
Nuclear Fusion Journal – Creation of a high-temperature plasma through merging and compression of supersonic field reversed configuration plasmoids (H/T Talk Polywell) A new device, the Inductive Plasma Accelerator, was employed to simultaneously form and accelerate two oppositely directed field reversed configurations (FRCs) where the relative velocity (600 km s−1) of the plasmoids was much …
Partha Ranganathan is Hewlett Packard’s Principal Investigator for HPs exascale datacenter project and is an expert on data center design. Modern data centers are not nearly as efficient as they could be and waste prodigious amounts of energy. Unless these inefficiencies are addressed, exascale supercomputers and data centers will never be feasible. In an interview …
New footage has been released of the moment Japan’s tsunami hit the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It was taken from the cellphone of a worker at the plant. The video shows the giant wave generated by the historic March 11 earthquake crashing over the plant’s seawall and engulfing the facility, with one sheet of spray …
According to a Lancet Study in 2007, compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to a study of the health …
Earth System Dynamics journal – Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences The availability of wind power for renewable energy extraction is ultimately limited by how much kinetic energy is generated by natural processes within the Earth system and by fundamental limits of how much of the wind power can …
Merthyr Vale Colliery was a coal mining facility above the town of Aberfan (Wales, England). For approximately 50 years, millions of cubic metres of debris from the mine had been deposited on the side of Merthyr Mountain. On October 21st, 1966, heavy rains brought a torrential flood of liquefied debris rushing down the mountain and …
I previously wrote an article about deaths per TWH by energy source, which looked at annual deaths by energy source. This had some cumulative effects worked in as air pollution accumulates and then people have increasing health problems and then die. Air pollution from fossil fuels that were used decades ago can be part of …
The three major economic mega-urban zones are the pearl river delta in the south (merging into one 42 million person city) and Yangtze River delta around Shanghai and the Bohai economic rim Geoffrey West and the Sante Fe Institute performed a study of cities and found that if the size of a city doubles, then, …
Lawyers replaced by Artificial Intelligence for eDiscovery
Here is a Center for Disease Control description of the oil and gas extraction industry deaths Oil and gas extraction (i.e., removing oil and natural gas from the ground) is a growing industry in the United States, employing approximately 380,000 workers in 2006. In recent years, activity in this industry has increased substantially, from an …