In the Grist article by Amory Lovins: “stewart brands nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic” In its first half-century, nuclear power fell short of its forecast capacity by about 12-fold in the U.S. and 30-fold worldwide, mainly because building it cost several-fold more than expected, straining or bankrupting its owners This is referring …
Amory Lovins wrote an article on Grist primarily making the case that nuclear power is not economic and has a 30+ page pdf on the “Four Myths of Nuclear” This will be the first of a few articles where I show where Lovins is wrong. Firstly he talks about gross dollar or energy amounts. Those …
1. Activelink, a subsidiary of Panasonic, is working on power enhancing partial exoskeletons This includes dual arm loaders (like in the Aliens 2 Movie), which will help someone lift 100 kilograms or more. They will not be ready for commercial use before 2015. Activelink also has powerwalker amplifiers, which are similar to springwalkers, power stilts …
For high frequency electromagnetic light waves in the frequency range of several 100,000 gigahertz (500,000 GHz corresponds to yellow light with 600 Nm wavelength), one needs very small antennas, which are not larger than a half light wave length, thus maximally 350 nanometers (1 nanometer = 1 millionth millimeter). The scientists of the DFG Heisenberg …
Superconducting magnets have been built with 33.8 Tesla fields and 45-70 Tesla superconducting magnets appear likely to be developed over the next two years. Magnets at 60 Tesla field strength will enable testing of gravitational field propulsion. The so-called “hyperdrive” concept won the 2005 American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics award for the best nuclear …
There will Definitely Be a Lot of CO2 Generated for Energy Production for Decades There will be plenty of natural gas and coal for many decades to centuries. Unconventional natural gas and underground coal gasification are likely to provide affordable fossil fuel for a long time. The THAI (Toe Heel Air Injection) oil recovery process …
David Calkins is a roboticist who is the President of the Robotics Society of America. He has taught robotics at San Fransisco State University, designed and built hundreds of robots and has worked with NASA on the robotics education project. He recently created a company to produce robots for the home. There are two embedded …
The Carnival of Space 124 is up at “We are all in the gutter” This site contributed a look at orbital launch guns from new light gas gun proposals to ram accelerators to underground nuclear cannons. Bad Astronomy has a NASA’s Swift satellite snapshot of the Andromeda galaxy in the ultraviolet spectrum. Discovery Space news …
In a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters, however, MIT researchers present a new algorithm that could exponential speed solutions of systems of linear equations — whose solution is crucial to image processing, video processing, signal processing, robot control, weather modeling, genetic analysis and population analysis, to name just a few applications. Researchers at …
Todd Ditmire of the University of Texas will talk about the present and future of the university’s Texas Petawatt Laser program at the Optical Society’s (OSA’s) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO; Oct. 11 to 15, 2009, San Jose, CA). At present the Texas Petawatt Laser producing pulses at the petawatt (10^15 W) power level, …
There has been a renaissance of renewed construction for nuclear fission. Hundreds of nuclear fission reactors were built in the 1970s in the US and then in the 1980s in France and other places. Now there is renewed activity in China, Russia, India, South Korea and other places. This is a good thing and there …