Friday, December 12, 2008

Prediction

That white paper got me thinking: what if the government made a bunch of other sensible decisions?
  • They might shut down Yucca Mountain, and require that all nuclear waste be stored on the site of the reactor for 300 years. Nah, won't happen. [Update: They did it!]
  • They might just have NASA cancel Ares-I and Ares-V, and leave it to SpaceX to provide a launcher. This might actually happen. All those folks in Florida and Utah that used to work for NASA contractors? Learn to build windmills. Some of you can learn to build Dragons and Falcons. [Update: Holy crap! They did it!]
  • They might require all air conditioners and heat pumps to have short-term demand management controls. As the newer air conditioners got deployed, we'd have a lot less need for online throttled-down combustion gas turbines to back up all these new wind farms. I've not seen any rumblings of this yet.
  • They might even standardize form factors for rechargable batteries... [Update: Um, they sort of did it! (Europe hsa standardized cellphone recharging plugs)]

2 comments:

  1. Instead of shutting Yucca Mountain, I guess we are going to have at least another 10 more mountains in the near future when peak oil theory comes to the fore.

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  2. I don't see why we need even one Yucca Mountain. There is no problem storing the waste on site at each nuclear powerplant. Why do you think we'd need 10?

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