Nature takes its revenge ;-)

It's the only one we have. I'd tend to take care of it.

Besides, the current topic is Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. I submit they are cheaper, safer, and more reliable than the alternatives. Can you offer any proof otherwise?

The Slowmans and Obamas of the world will never buy it. IOW, it's not a technical issue, any more than is AGW. They're political problems.

I'm not sure it matters, it doesn't have any direct military applications so no infinite development budget and no magic bullet that cuts through all the red tape of "omg nuclear"

I just read a popular mechanics from the early 60's, they expected it take 20 years for nuclear to be commercially viable for power production and not just plants for making bomb material. It only took ~10 years, but since then very few have been build

-Lasse

to a change in heat input, you are generally better off if the time consta nt is long - external changes are kept well away from the area you are cont rolling.

emperature sensor is appreciably separated from your heating element, life get more complicated. If you are using a PID algorithm to control the tempe rature, the proportional gain then has to be kept pretty low to prevent osc illation, and you rely on the integral term to get decent regulation.

ern, but I don't have time to fix it.) Here are some pics of the heater.

dl=0

the heat has to go through the glass, then through the air, and then to the cell.

d I want to keep the Rb off of the front face of the cell... Rb on the glas s is a mirror and reflects the light. So I want the heat to go into the ce ll through the exposed front faces.

to the outside world... again kinda weakly.)

Yeah, I keep not giving you all the specs. The signal is very sensitive magnetic fields. The width of the signal is limited by the local AC B-field... typically 60Hz. I test them at home 'cause it's nice magnetically. I can see the permanent magnet rotor in my fish pump from ~8-10'. AC fields below 1 mG.

I was thinking I could make the RF coils smaller, And then make some metal thermal contacts. Are TEC's magnetic?

George H.

What signal are you measuring?

What do you mean by "width of the signal"?

Aren't Rubidium oscillators shielded against magnetic fields?

Are you running them in the open? Do you also get interference from fluorescent lighting?

Actually, I believe it is.

We should better control particulates, but that can be done at modest expense without keeping a billion people in darkness and poverty.

Sounds like you don't believe in evolution.

Sandy shows that people shouldn't build expensive houses on exposed beachfronts. There was nothing unusual about Sandy: storms happen now and then.

More like enviro-crazies hate nuclear. PG&E would be happy to build thorium reactors if they could.

Unless you live in Chicago or Detroit!

That may be causal or not, but it is a huge embarassment to the AGW-crazies.

I think it's a awfully nice planet. Better than we deserve.

No problem. Put the fan and heater in a separate box and run tubes up to the faces of the cell.

True. Hell still freezes over.

It's exactly the opposite of their predictions, though. It is hilarious.

In a green house, where every other nutrient is supplied to excess.

But with heavier snow fall. In Europe, ice-free Barrents and Kara Seas (north of Finland) make for early snow falls, further south than usual.

The paper - based on climate modelling - was actually distinctly prophetic, since we got snow in Normanding in December 2010, just after the paper was published.

Touch of feckless optimism there. Global warming isn't going to increase the number of hurricanes, but it is going to widen the area of ocean that can generate them, and make them - on average - more intense.

Hurricane numbers are pretty fickle, so "recent years" aren't much of a gauge.

Dream on.

Self-deluding optimists like krw and and John Larkin can choose to believe this kind of rubbish. Their kids may not appreciate the consequences of this sloppy non-thinking.

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Scarcely. The modeling suggests the same sort of numbers of - more intense

- hurricanes.

Tornado's aren't actually modelled by AGW people - they are weather, rather than climate, but that's a distinction that John Larkin can't get his head around. The rule of thumb is that AGW puts more water into the atmosphere over the oceans, which stores more energy in the atmosphere, and makes for more extreme weather. How much more "extreme weather" is already evident fr om the statistics - it's already significant.

How much more extreme the weather might get is anybody's guess.

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It would be fun if krw found an example of the relevant "prediction" and po sted a URL for it here. It isn't going to happen. Krw doesn't know what he' s talking about, and doesn't comprehend the idea of backing up your opinion s with "evidence". which seems to be another concept that he doesn't compre hend.

As far as I know AGW experts don't make predictions about tornadoes - they are weather - not climate.

They have made predictions about hurricanes - roughly the same number, but progressively more intense, which isn't "the opposite" of what krw claims i s going on.

Somebody has found a couple of potentially earth-like planets in the comfort zones of some red dwarf stars. You could rate it against them ...

Moving there might be tricky.

Since the only thorium molten salt reactor that ever ran was a purely exper imental device that ran from 1965 to 1969, your submission seems to be base d on rather thin evidence. I think I'll stick with solar and wind power unt il there's a bit more evidence about the techno-freak alternatives.

er

The technical problem is that one experimental thorium molten salt reactor than ran from 1965 to 1969 doesn't exactly trump the current installed base d of wind turbines, solar panels and thermal solar generating stations, whi ch are all generating power right now.

Krw is a half-witted techno-freak, with no capacity to construct or appreci ate logical arguments, and a correspondingly poor capacity to predict what less intellectually crippled people might "buy". \

Hi Tom, Yeah out in the open... the apparatus is here.

Fluorescent lights aren't much of a problem. They are ~electro-static and easy to shield. I once had a dream of trying to shield the entire thing in a steel 55 gallon drum. But never tried. Changing magnetic fields directly modulate the signal.

Re: Rb oscillators. Yeah they shield those, and they run them on what's called the Rb "clock" transition which is the one Zeeman level that is almost independent of the B field.

George H.

Thin-walled steel cans are useless to shield mag fields. Even a husky steel Hoffmann box can't hit 2:1.

Active shielding can work pretty well.

According to a chart on my wall the skin depth of iron is ~2mm at 60 Hz. But I'm not sure if the skin depth is the right thing to look at.

George H.