James Lovelock has endorsed nuclear power.
It will be interesting to see if this creates a major schism in the watermelon community. This was always the rational position for environmentalists to take, if they really believed that carbon release was harmful, but environmentalists have rarely been rational. Either that, or they had some…other…agenda.
I’m still fuming.
I dropped Patricia off at LAX this morning on my way to work, to fly to Florida. She had a 7:40 flight.
She usually carries on, but today she had a couple pieces of luggage to check, so we decided that I’d park the car and help her check in. Now, to park at LAX is a minimum of three bucks for the first hour, but downstairs, at the arrival level, there are metered lots that take quarters, and I figured fifty cents would do me. Of course, this means that one has to enter the airport on the arrival level, which at 6 AM is almost empty since there are few arrivals that early. I cruised past an airport motorcycle cop, at the speed limit, or at least no faster than traffic. But he decided to pull out after me and turned on his flashers.
We pulled over, and he walked up to the car and informed me that we’d been pulled over because we didn’t have a front license plate. Now, I’ve been meaning to put it on, but the last time I tried, the screws that I bought at Pep Boys didn’t fit the holes on the front bumper. He took the license and registration (I’m a Wyoming resident, with a Wyoming drivers’ license), and took about ten minutes, presumably to run a check on this blatant and dangerous criminal. He finally came back with a ticket. It wasn’t a moving violation, and it could be dismissed, with a service fee, if I corrected the problem and drove to the DMV to get it signed off. Of course, because we’d pulled over into a side road heading away from our terminal, we had to backtrack to reenter the airport, costing even more time.
So to save a couple bucks, I now have to deal with the hassle of correcting a problem on a car that’s about to move to Florida, and we almost missed her flight. If I’d taken the upper level and parked up there, that cop wouldn’t have seen us at all, and there would have been much more traffic, resulting in many better things to do for whatever law enforcement was up there.
The coupe de grace, of course, was that, after all this, the metered lot ended up being closed.
Tomorrow I’m headed out to Madison for the biannual Innovative Confinement Concepts conference, so I may be offline for a while, possibly until Friday. They claim there’s WiFi at the conference center, so maybe I’ll be able to post from there. I’ll certainly post a summary of goings-on.
The conference is a meeting of researchers working on so-called innovative confinement concepts (hence the name of the conference :-). An ICC is basically any fusion concept that isn’t a Tokomak or an inertial confinement scheme. Tokomaks (and acronym from the Russian for “Toroidal Magnetic Chamber”) are the current leaders in achieving fusion-relevant parameters of temperature, density, and confinement time. Unfortunately they are inherently pulsed devices, and they have other technical features that make them undesirable for power plants. People are working to make Tokamaks power-plant friendly, but progress is slow (as in everything related to fusion). The other mainstream fusion scheme is Inertial Confinement Fusion. This uses a solid pellet of Deuterium and Tritium which is compressed and heated by external energy input from lasers, ion beams, or X-Rays. Currently only lasers and X-rays are used, ion beams having fallen out of favor (for reasons similar to those for the loss of favor of ion beam weapons for BMD – it turns out the beams are damn hard to point and focus accurately if they have any decent amount of energy). I don’t think anyone at this point honestly believes ICF is a real contender for power plants (though I could be wrong). The main reason ICF has solid funding is that the physics of the capsule implosion are exactly the same as the physics of the fusion stage of a thermonuclear weapon. In a weapon, X rays are generated by the detonation of a fission device, and passed via a carefully shaped reflector onto the surface of a Lithium Deuteride capsule, which implodes, fuses, and explodes. If you want to understand this process in detail, the ideal way to do it is to detonate small capsules under controlled conditions.
Anyway, the ICCs are the other guys, ranging in funding from ~$10 million down to ~$200K. They are the high-risk, high-reward segment of the fusion development portfolio. The designs range from minor variations on existing technology to outright Wile-E-Coyote designs. I personally believe that the ICCs are the best hope for getting fusion power on the grid in my lifetime, but that to really make things happen we need a fundamental paradigm shift in the fusion community. A lot of folks in the community don’t get basic economics, and have little idea about how technologies have historically come into the commercial sphere. That’s one of the things I’ll be talking to people about at the conference.
Anyway, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s what I’m up to. If I can get decent net access I’ll post on the goings-on.
Via SciTech Daily, a company called BioTime is making progress in freezing tissues and restoring them to life. They’ve taken tissue to below freezing and restored it to vitality for implantation, and revived whole animals after two hours of clinical death at 35 degrees Fahrenheit. I think that if cryosuspension ever becomes really practical it will emerge out of research like that conducted by BioTime. They are working on extending time under the knife for surgery, but the limiting case of that is days, and perhaps eventually weeks under the knife as the surgical team hunts down and fixes problems, perhaps maintaining different parts of the body at different temperatures so that some organs can heal after surgery while other areas are kept cryosuspended while being operated on. For pursuing really aggressive cancers this might be the way to ferret out the last little metastases.
I’m a little bit of a cryonics skeptic, but open minded to the possibility that revival of people from a natural death might be possible. Much more probable is that people near death can be cryosuspended while alive, and kept on ice until either a cure is found or some contractual criterion requires their revival. The obstacles to freezing a person while alive are currently regulatory (since the cryonicist would be charged with murder, even if it’s a whole-body thing as opposed to just the head). If it becomes clear that people can be frozen and then revived the legal obstacles to preemptive cryopreservation will be much lower. Sadly, there will always be busybodies who will try to interfere, but chances are good that they will be a minority once enough of the population are only a couple degrees of separation from someone who has had surgery while chilled to the point of (what we now call) clinical death. I just hope it happens before I catch anything really nasty 🙂
The 2004 Space Transportation Forecastsis now available. Link via RLV News.
Note the very cool cover art by Phil Smith, who AFAIK accepts commissions, so if you’re a startup looking for some artwork, drop him an email.
Jeff Foust, friend of TTM, blogger, and fellow-traveler in the alt.space underground also worked on the report.
Now this is a much more creative (and probably effective) way to herd errant asteroids than crude nukes.
Just a reminder, for those interested, that the Centennial Challenges Workshop is coming up the middle of next month in Washington, for anyone who wants to attend and influence the direction of NASA’s new prize program.
The New America Foundation has put together a cartoon guide to Federal Spectrum Policy. Quite apart from being a fan of cartoon guides to whatever, I’m a fan of rational technology policy, which the Federal policy towards spectrum allocation isn’t. I don’t know much about the New America Foundation other than what’s on their website, but the analysis of spectrum policy is basically right, if a little, um… cartoonish.
Hat tip: Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber
These guys are trying to stop a series of idiotic lawsuits which threaten to kill general aviation. Their opponents are the usual NIMBY morons who won’t get a link out of me because I refuse to move them up Google’s page ranking. Check out their quotes page for some astonishing statements by the NIMBYs. I’m sympathetic to concerns about noise, but there are ways to deal with it without stomping on other people’s liberties.
The Great Wall of China, a river, whatever…it’s all good.
ESA doesn’t seem to know the difference.