Renewable Energy

[Molochio]

Your entire argument hinges on these patents existing. Cite that they exist, and that you're not just following the mad ramblings of an insane conspiracy theorist?

Cite that you actually understand the basic laws of physics?

The argument form that I have offered, Modus Tollens, is valid and the red herrings that you present to me are fallacious.

Whether or not I am versed in the basic laws of physics is irrelevant, and Tesla was not a fictional character who produced fictional works.
You may take it upon yourself to study the details of his work, if you are not familiar with it, and return when you have a worthwhile consideration not built upon improper reasoning.

[Molochio]

You can not discount the validity of Tesla's work on the basis that an atomic bomb was researched and used. The government WOULD and did build such a bomb, even if the "earthquake machine" was a viable option for the same reason it has developed such a wide array of fighter jets.

Except, of course, that Tesla's work would have made the entire atom bomb program unnecessary. Remember: The atom bomb project was done because the Allies were afraid Germany would be able to deploy their superweapons first. So why not deploy these Tesla wonder weapons immediately?

Really, there are only two reasonable conclusions:

1) Tesla's work was taken by the government, found to be crackpot or impractical, hence they started research on something else (The atom bomb)

2) Tesla's work was taken by the government, found to be viable, and was hidden away during a worldwide life or death struggle. While at the same time they decided to develop a whole new branch of superweapons because they'd like a little variety on how they destroyed their cities.

Your position - #2 - is full of "What ifs" and "Maybes" that it becomes a completely irrational argument.

Your two conclusions BOTH support my argument, which states:


If Tesla free energy studies are ridiculous, then the government ignored them.
The government did not ignore them.
Therefore, Tesla free energy studies are not ridiculous.

In truth, the reasoning for your Tesla weapons development argument is flawed, as it is built upon the fallacy, Appeal to Ignorance. In which:

Lack of evidence for side M (molochio) is taken to be evidence for side Z (zinegata) in an instance in which the burden of proof happens to rest on side Z.

In addition to that, this entire line of thought has NO bearing upon our deliberation as we are not debating whether or not Tesla designed viable weapons of mass destruction, so your argument is dismissed.

[Starmaker]

The very idea that the government wouldn't ever invest in bad or unreasonable research is laughable. They've invested in trying to make gay bombs, weaponizing dolphins, and hundreds of really shitty ideas with poor or false science behind them.

I mean, the US intelligence community still uses polygraphs and that shit has been debunked as terrible science for decades.

Pigasus awards:
1981 — The Pentagon for spending $6 million to determine whether burning the photo of a Soviet missile would destroy the missile.
1996 — Scientist/physicist Ed May, who headed the CIA "remote viewing" project.
2004 — Awarded to the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, who paid $25,000 to Dr. Eric W. Davis (PhD, FBIS) at a Las Vegas company called Warp Drive Metrics to study the "conveyance of persons by psychic means" and "transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes."

Sadly, Petrik and his filters didn't get an award yet, perhaps because this is kleptocracy in action, not "well-meaning" retardedness on part of the officials.

For instance, we totally know how to get a Fusion reaction going. But we have absolutely no clue as to how we can control the energy released by this reaction except to level an entire city.

The current designs (DEMO, not ITER), if they work, will provide electricity at ten time the current domestic consumer price (more if staff salaries are accounted for). My friends trolled Shafranov with these stats at a conference in 2007.

The argument form that I have offered, Modus Tollens, is valid and the red herrings that you present to me are fallacious.

Is dat sum copypasta? STFU troll, and read How To Be Persuasive, you'll be more entertaining.

[Zinegata]

If Tesla free energy studies are ridiculous, then the government ignored them.
The government did not ignore them.
Therefore, Tesla free energy studies are not ridiculous.

Fallacy. Just because the government did not ignore something, doesn't mean it's ridiculous. K has already nailed you on this one. Government support/interest is not an absolute indicator of viability.

For instance, the government approved a combined gun/missile system for the Sheridan light tank. This proved to be impractical because firing the gun tended to damage the missile guidance system of the weapon. Hence, despite government support, the system proved to be ridiculous.

As I have provided one example that shows a project can be ridiculous despite having government support, one can only conclude that your "logic" is actually on crack.

Really, you can apply your giberish posting style all you want to seem as though you're being logical, but your entire case is based on false premises and fallacies. That you're applying the Wall of Ignorance and selectively ignoring key facts which unravel your points make talking to you all but useless.

So... unless you start posting actual evidence (and by that, I mean links with certifiable sources), people will rightly continue to dismiss your views as that of a crackpot who has played too much Red Alert. Welcome to the real world.

[Molochio]

Spouting the idiotic idea that the government is holding on to some super-secret free energy technology is like whipping out your dick and pissing all over every single scientist and engineer working in industry, academia, and the government working to fix the energy crisis and simultaneously pissing on every single science-related money granting agency in the federal government, from the National Science Foundation to DARPA to NASA.

I guess what I'm trying to say is fuck you idiot, you don't know shit.

My argument form is valid and the idea has a foundation in undeniable FACT.
This biased rant of yours is built upon preconceived notions, your own personal opinions, which are not supported by any recognizable form of logic, and a meaningless ad hominem.

You do not even address my premise.
If you are humanly incapable of proper reasoning, it is a waste of time to speak to me about pissing on scientists.

[Molochio]

This is problematic for your argument because the government DOES NOT care about ridiculous nonfunctional patents, with no practical applications, enough to secure them and privatize them for exclusive holding.

I think you should check out World's Wackiest Inventions and a host of similar books. Some of this stuff is seriously messed up.

As for free energy, I think Molochio's talking about Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower {OK, Wikipedia, Tesla, Broadcasting}. As for what he patented, Wikipedia has provided us with a nice list.

When Tesla died, all his papers were, in fact, seized by the US government and declared Top Secret until they could be gone through. They were eventually released to relatives in Yugoslavia and are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.

And FWIW, "Wardenclyffe" is an awesome name that I'm totally gonna use for one of my characters.

Thank you, Maj.
This is a fine reference.

@Orion, K, Orca, and Virgil: You all make VERY good points against the premise upon which my argument is built and if the premise is proven to be false, I will gladly dismiss this line of thought, as flawed.

[Koumei]

1981 — The Pentagon for spending $6 million to determine whether burning the photo of a Soviet missile would destroy the missile.

What?

The current designs (DEMO, not ITER), if they work, will provide electricity at ten time the current domestic consumer price (more if staff salaries are accounted for). My friends trolled Shafranov with these stats at a conference in 2007.

On-topic for energy production... one of my friends opposes the Greens because "They have no vision for real sustainable energy in the future" (in other words "They don't support wasting Uranium on nuclear reactors to power the country).

I point out that they have ideas involving solar panels (if only Australia had some kind of big empty place like a desert, where the sun could shine strongly) and that nuclear is a shitty option not because of "A crappy Soviet reactor once melted down and fucked the place up for 'the foreseeable future'", but because it won't last long and we have better uses for it.

He replies "Thorium reactors" and that apparently is THE FUTURE. I did a little research, and I think he might be thinking specifically of breeder plants/reprocessing (as he said Thorium plants can be "powered by chucking nuclear waste back into it so it gets rid of nuclear waste to produce more power!") Are breeders and reprocessing going to make enough of a difference for nuclear energy to be worth the costs of building them and the "digging all this shit up"? How about the MAGIC OF THORIUM?

tl;dr can I just laugh at the idea of thorium reactors solving everything and being the future of power?

[Username17]

Thorium has advantages as a nuclear fuel:

• It's more common than Uranium.
• You actually use the common isotope instead of the rare isotopes.

So right there it is a lot easier to imagine building a society on Thorium reactors than Uranium reactors. Like, you could possibly actually do that. Unfortunately, and you knew there was going to be an unfortunately, it's incredibly dirty and there are a lot of steps involved that create "miscellaneous actinides".

What you do is you pump an extra Proton into Thorium 232 and turn it into Uranium 233 by shooting Neutrons at a blob of Thorium and watching beta particles squeeze out the other end. This makes a very radioactively unstable intermediary which you harvest for energy. But of course, not all of the stuff reacts "properly" and percentages of the stuff end up as various sundry radioactive elements.

There are various systems that either make fuel pebbles or just have everything churning away in a big molten salt pit, and absolutely none of them have produced the sort of "clean" results that people want. The actual results include "miscellaneous actinides" and there really isn't any way around that.

It doesn't run on its own waste, it doesn't run on waste generally. It runs on Thorium with a Uranium catalyst and spits out Lead with a lot of Radium, Actinium, Polonium, Radon and Bismuth in it and trace amounts of Plutonium and Protactium. Thorium boosters claim that we can keep running the reaction until everything turns to lead, and I suppose that if we were willing to wait five hundred million years that would be true.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

The very idea that the government wouldn't ever invest in bad or unreasonable research is laughable. They've invested in trying to make gay bombs...

I've never heard this one before. Is this a bomb to kill the gays or to make people gay or what?

[Surgo]

Some guy gave a talk here 3 months ago about using a molten salt thorium reactor to replace uranium reactors, and it made a lot of sense -- only it's impossible to get anything past the atomic regulatory committee without spending a ton of money, so it probably wouldn't happen in the US.

Then yesterday I read that China was building reactors using that exact technology. Go figure!

I don't actually recall the actinide issue Frank is discussing -- maybe it was slightly different, or maybe I just need to go back and reread. Watch this space.

What I'm trying to say is I'm pretty sure you can't laugh about the idea of thorium reactors. They might work really well -- they're an old technology that just never got developed because they were less useful for running submarines. True story.

My argument form is valid and the idea has a foundation in undeniable FACT.

No, it's based on an enormous leap of faith. That the government was interested in Tesla's research is both fact and valid, which you might note I have not disputed. That that makes it in any way valid is magical thinking.

[violence in the media]

The very idea that the government wouldn't ever invest in bad or unreasonable research is laughable. They've invested in trying to make gay bombs...

I've never heard this one before. Is this a bomb to kill the gays or to make people gay or what?

It was a proposed chemical weapon. The basic idea was to overwhelm enemy troops with a pheromone attack so that they'd be too busy humping each other to fight.

Gay Bomb

[tzor]

That's enthopy, not energy. You need to remember this one rule.

No it's not. Matter and energy can only be turned into other forms of matter/energy.

You said "energy." Matter can be turned into energy. End of story.

Matter/Energy is generally conserved; except when it's not.

Fortunately, such violations of the law only occur on the quantum level.

The sun wastes more energy when it farts than we would ever need as a planet. Our little tiny planet gets all the energy it needs.

The problem with this line of thinking is that amount of energy released has very little to do with one's ability to properly control and direct that energy.

For instance, we totally know how to get a Fusion reaction going. But we have absolutely no clue as to how we can control the energy released by this reaction except to level an entire city.

Finally: Energy needs are rising. And the sun ain't gonna be there forever. Even if we turn out mass solar power arrays, we're essentially just "borrowing" energy of a star that will eventually run out. Much like how we're currently "borrowing" energy by burning the long-dead corpses of dinosaurs.

First of all, I'm not talking about recreating the sun, (fusion reactors still require more energy to initiate the fusion conditions than you get from the reaction) I'm talking about collecting the energy from the sun. It's actually damn easy to do. It's just that you can't throw a power cord from the earth to Earth Moon L4/L5 Orbit. (Never mind Earth/Sun L4/L5 Orbit.)

The energy of the sun will outlast the earth. Literally. Unless you want to move the earth out of earth orbit, because the sun will eventually expand long before it looses all fusion power. This is in those timelines where humans as we know them today probably won't exist.

[Daiba]

Matter/Energy is generally conserved; except when it's not.

Fortunately, such violations of the law only occur on the quantum level.

It's been a few years since I studied QM, but I'm pretty sure this is a misconception arising from mistaking the mean energy of a system for the actual energy of a system (which is very difficult to know, especially within short time intervals).

[Username17]

Some guy gave a talk here 3 months ago about using a molten salt thorium reactor to replace uranium reactors, and it made a lot of sense -- only it's impossible to get anything past the atomic regulatory committee without spending a ton of money, so it probably wouldn't happen in the US.

It's called Molten Salt Reactors.

It works. We did it. The project was abandoned. It makes a lot of fluoride salts and miscellaneous actinides, so it's basically incredibly dirty and creates mixtures of chemically distinct toxic heavy metal salts, many of whom have low vapor pressures. The effects on the environment are... not particularly good.

And it's not something you can fit into a ship, so it lacks even that advantage of nuclear reactors.

-Username17

[tzor]

Tzor, why do you think we can't estimate the amounts of carbon put into the air or taken out of the air by various things?

Seriously, our estimates of those things are pretty damn good. Mostly because carbon doesn't get created or destroyed by chemical reactions, it merely changes composition.

I short, that's a really really weird argument. Do you honestly believe that we were unable to measure sulfur outputs when we made Sulfer cap-n-trade in the 90s? If that was true, how were we able to use cap-n-trade to effectively reduce acid rain? Because historically, that totally happened.

-Username17

I don't want to be billed on an "estimate."

There are a lot of estimates that are pretty damn incomplete. Plants, for example consume and generate CO2, depending on a variety of complex factors. Trying to estimate the net CO2 effect of a field left to go to grass for cattle grazing is ...

OK so with that let's talk sulphur. Here is the wiki article.

In Phase I, half the total reductions were required by January 1, 1995, largely by requiring 110 electric power generating plants (261 units in 21 states) to cut sulfur dioxide emission rates to 2.5 lbs/million British thermal units (mmBtu). Each of these generating units was identified by name and location, and a quantity of emissions allowances were specified in the statute in tons of allowable SO2 emissions per year.[3]

For comparison, new generating units built since 1978 were required to limit sulfur dioxide to a "lowest achievable emissions rate" of about 0.6 lbs/mmBtu. Coal with 1.25% sulfur and 10,000 Btu/lb produces sulfur dioxide emissions of 2.5 lbs/mmBtu, with lower emissions produced by either lower sulfur content or higher Btu content.[4]

The innovative, market based SO2 allowance trading component of the Acid Rain Program allowed utilities to adopt the most cost effective strategy to reduce SO2 emissions. Every Acid Rain Program operating permit outlines specific requirements and compliance options chosen by each source. Affected utilities also were required to install systems that continuously monitor emissions of SO2, NOx, and other related pollutants in order to track progress, ensure compliance, and provide credibility to the trading component of the program. Monitoring data is transmitted to EPA daily via telecommunications systems.

So, let's recap: limited sources were controlled and those sources were monitored at the source's expense. We weren't doing "estimates" we were doing measurements and daily sampling.

[tzor]

It's been a few years since I studied QM, but I'm pretty sure this is a misconception arising from mistaking the mean energy of a system for the actual energy of a system (which is very difficult to know, especially within short time intervals).

In physics, a virtual particle is a particle that exists for a limited time and space, introducing uncertainty in its energy and momentum due to the uncertainty principle. Because energy and momentum in quantum mechanics are time and space derivative operators, then due to Fourier transforms their spans are inversely proportional to time duration and position spans, respectively.

The virtual particle forms of massless particles, such as photons, do have mass (which may be either positive or negative) and are said to be off mass shell. They are allowed to have mass (which consists of "borrowed energy") because they exist for only a temporary time, which in turn gives them a limited "range". This is in accordance with the uncertainty principle which allows existence of such particles of borrowed energy, so long as their energy, multiplied by the time they exist, is a fraction of Planck's constant.

Virtual particles around black hole event horizons is also one of those sratch you head and stare in wonder theories, especially when viewed with the notion that anti-particles are particles traveling backwards in time. See Hawking radiation.

[Daiba]

Yes, I understand that you were talking about virtual particles, etc. My point is that the "borrowed energy" conception, while a very useful way to think about various QM interactions/processes, is wrong. Here's a wiki explanation of why, which is clearer than what my caffeine craving brain provided earlier:

Another common misconception is that the energy-time uncertainty principle says that the conservation of energy can be temporarily violated – energy can be "borrowed" from the Universe as long as it is "returned" within a short amount of time.[14] Although this agrees with the spirit of relativistic quantum mechanics, it is based on the false axiom that the energy of the Universe is an exactly known parameter at all times. More accurately, when events transpire at shorter time intervals, there is a greater uncertainty in the energy of these events. Therefore it is not that the conservation of energy is violated when quantum field theory uses temporary electron-positron pairs in its calculations, but that the energy of quantum systems is not known with enough precision to limit their behavior to a single, simple history. Thus the influence of all histories must be incorporated into quantum calculations, including those with much greater or much less energy than the mean of the measured/calculated energy distribution.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertaint ... _principle

[K]

Your entire argument hinges on these patents existing. Cite that they exist, and that you're not just following the mad ramblings of an insane conspiracy theorist?

Cite that you actually understand the basic laws of physics?

The argument form that I have offered, Modus Tollens, is valid and the red herrings that you present to me are fallacious.

Whether or not I am versed in the basic laws of physics is irrelevant, and Tesla was not a fictional character who produced fictional works.
You may take it upon yourself to study the details of his work, if you are not familiar with it, and return when you have a worthwhile consideration not built upon improper reasoning.

Did someone get a B on his quiz for Intro. to Logic class and now thinks he can craft arguments?

Maybe you missed the part where valid argument structures can be used to create false and/or nonsensical arguments? Like, really easily. Your teacher should have mentioned it on the first day.

[Starmaker]

First of all, I'm not talking about recreating the sun, (fusion reactors still require more energy to initiate the fusion conditions than you get from the reaction)

Just to clarify things about fusion.
First, we probably won't be able to recreate the chain of reactions in the sun, ever, because it starts with two protium nuclei combining to form one deuterium nuclei.

Fusion reactors will be using the 2.0nd (D-D, preferably) or 2.5th (D-T) stages. Deuterium is present on Earth in larger quantities and is not radioactive. Tritium is radioactive; storing and using large quantities of tritium presents a complex engineering problem. Achieving ignition on tritium is substantially easier and will probably happen in our lifetimes.

Two basic principles have been proposed: steady state reactors and pulse reactors.

A pulse reactor is essentially a very small bomb. The #1 and #2 problems with pulse reactors are that no one knows how to collect energy* and how to shoot fast enough to be in any way viable.
*

Note that Wikipedia says collecting energy from pulse reactors will be so much easier. To make a stupid analogy, a steady state reactor is like a 30 meter high insane scuplture of T-bars welded together, and a pulse reactor is like a 20 kg metal ball, and the task is to break any of them with your bare hands.

The #1 problem with steady state reactors is the lack of construction materials that (1) won't fucking melt and (2) won't gobble up radioactive tritium to be released when you least expect it. Ignition (self-sustaining reaction) has not been achieved but it's largely a matter of time and funding.

ITER will likely achieve ignition (shutdown in 2038), DEMO (preliminary experiments start in 2033) is supposed to actually produce consumable energy and PROTO (to be constructed when pigs learn to fly at supersonic speeds) will hopefully be commercially viable. ITER and DEMO are D-T reactors, which means delicious, delicious tritium, slippery like an eel dipped in KY, poisoning everything with radiation. Note, however, that even D-D reactors won't be super clean because runaway neutrons will fuck up the reactor walls.

[cthulhu]

So, let's recap: limited sources were controlled and those sources were monitored at the source's expense. We weren't doing "estimates" we were doing measurements and daily sampling.

I'm unclear why you don't think that is a possibility for power generation.

[tzor]

So, let's recap: limited sources were controlled and those sources were monitored at the source's expense. We weren't doing "estimates" we were doing measurements and daily sampling.

I'm unclear why you don't think that is a possibility for power generation.

That is a quote from a post I made about how a "carbon" tax using computer models and estinations is vastly different from the "sulfur dioxide" tax using limited sources of the polution and tight monitoring.

What is "that" you are referring to?

[cthulhu]

That is a quote from a post I made about how a "carbon" tax using computer models and estinations is vastly different from the "sulfur dioxide" tax using limited sources of the polution and tight monitoring.

What is "that" you are referring to?

It's not different, because we can just use the sampling approach for the overwhelming majority of consumption.

Your difficulty is totally imaginary - the major sources of carbon production are solid fuel, gaseous and liquid fuel power plants, metallurgy and cement manufacturing and both of those can easily be measured by similar approaches for sulphur.

The only exception is transportation - which isn't hard to tax, because we have great proxies built in!

Airtransport: We already tax the airlines per kilometer travelled by plane type! As we know how much carbon each type of plane emits, this is fucking easy to tax.

Trucks and cars: We already tax petrol & deisel. Just tax it a bit more! You can also tax car registration if you want, similar to smog regulations!

Woohoo, issued solved.

Trains: Use electricity! Some use diesel and is the closet thing to a problem here!

When you say you cannot measure it accurately, you are

A) Spreading FUD - most consumption can be measured accurately

B) The exception might be transport.. but that isn't fucking hard.

Are you seirously complaining we cannot actually measure carbon emission from land use changes as well? Because we totally can.

[name_here]

I've heard that a problem with pulse reactors is also that they produce "bursts" of energy that put a higher peak stress on the collecting equipment than equivalent steady-state reactors.

I was under the impression that reactors which collected energy already existed, but don't have the power to even run themselves, much less generate enough for anything else to use.

[Molochio]

@K: Not in the least.
I have already acknowledged that your observations prove that my premise is flawed, and agreed to dismiss this argument. Tesla and his work can join the colostomy bag of failed ideas and absurdities along with the dolphin warriors and gay bombs.

People have been wrong before.

[tzor]

It's not different, because we can just use the sampling approach for the overwhelming majority of consumption.

OK, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. That electric meter you have on your house. We are removing it. We can model your average electric consumption to know how much we will bill you for your electrical use from now on.

And the same can apply to your food bill, and all your other bills as well.

I know you claimed to have cut down on your food bill, but our models don't give a rat's ass. PAY UP!

Your difficulty is totally imaginary - the major sources of carbon production are solid fuel, gaseous and liquid fuel power plants, metallurgy and cement manufacturing and both of those can easily be measured by similar approaches for sulphur.

WHAT PART DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND? SULFUR WAS NEVER ESTIMATED. IT WAS MEASURED. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.

I would also like to point out there is no sulfur sinks, as there are with carbon. It was put up or shut up for the coal plants, nothing more. carbon taxes gives carbon credits to farmers, etc, all with numbers that come straight out of Al Gore's ass, along with an extra dose of methane.