Why are there no GTCC plants doing CO2 sequestration?

Rod Adams makes an excellent point here. Go down a bit. 11th paragraph:

If it is relatively easy to capture the CO2 from an IGCC [Integrated Gasification and Combined Cycle coal-burning plant], why wouldn't we start working to prove that assumption by capturing the CO2 from at least several of the existing GTCC (gas turbine combined cycle) plants that use natural gas as their heat source?

CO2 sequestration for coal-fired powerplants is held out as the major way that America will reduce it's CO2 emissions significantly over the next two decades. But, CO2 sequestration requires a lot of tinkering with the plant. An IGCC is nice for efficiency, but is not required. Several other really serious pieces of equipment are required, however:

• Sequestration costs big money. Since you really don't want to unnecessarily sequester 4 times as much nitrogen as CO2, you seperate that nitrogen and vent it. Since you don't want to seperate nitrogen from the exhaust gas (you'd have to cool it), you seperate it from the incoming airstream. Thus, the air filter on an ordinary plant is replaced with an expensive and energy-hungry plant with cryogenics, multiple turbines, and heat exchangers galore.
  
• The exhaust must be compressed and liquified to inject it into the ground. Most of the heat must be removed from the exhaust in order to compress it. In a normal coal-fired powerplant, a large fraction of the waste heat is rejected by simply venting the exhaust into the air. In a CO2 sequestrating facility, you need a big heat exchanger and a cooling tower to do that work. Oh, and a larger fresh water supply.
  

Rod is right, the economics of all this stuff could be proved out on an GTCC plant, or even a plain old combustion turbine fired by nearly anything. I think it's pretty obvious that the carbon-burning electricity producers (coal and gas) benefit from deferring the installation of CO2 sequestration equipment. And, no better way to defer installation than to defer development until after the development of a brand-new burner technology (IGCC) which will take a decade or two to roll out.

So, they talk about sequestration while they defer it as long as possible.

Interestingly, one of the side effects of concentrating the oxygen in the gas being burned is that the operating temperature increases, which could improve efficiency. Unfortunately, combustion turbines already run at temperatures higher than the melting point of the turbine blades... and probably cannot be run hotter. My guess is that exhaust CO2 will be cooled, recirculated and recompressed, and then used to dilute the oxygen in the incoming stream to lower flame temperature.

[Update: check the comments on this post. Harry Jaeger makes some nice points.]

Teddy Bear Tea

I took my daughter to the Ritz-Carlton's Teddy Bear Tea today. $184 for a few dried-out finger sandwiches and a bunch of chocolates, a teddy bear, some singing, and a chance to get pictures with... a person-sized teddy bear. I couldn't help but think of how tasty a $184 dollar dinner can be. Or how fun the local production of "'Twas the night before Christmas" had been the day before.

Children of all ages gather for a favorite family tradition at The Ritz-Carlton. Guests enjoy a fun-filled afternoon in festive surroundings featuring a storytelling Teddy Bear, a pianist, hot cocoa, tea, a selection of tea pastries and mini finger sandwiches, and a Christmas candy and sweets buffet table. Each child takes home a teddy bear and photo as souvenirs. $75 per guest, $65 for children 12 years and under, exclusive of tax and gratuity. For additional information or reservations, please call (650) 712-7040.

I could wonder how the Ritz-Carlton could end up serving crud for such an expensive lunch. Stories from Teddy may have happened before we got there, 10 minutes late. But why bother with these specifics? A more important question is: how did I ever end up in such a travesty?

I did ask, several times before going, what exactly this "tea" entailed. Martha was nonspecific. Since the other folks going were all in one of Martha's mother's groups, I knew essentially no-one. I'm antisocial as it is; dropping me into a mother's group without something to specifically contribute to the proceedings turns me into a stone wall. I went because I was led to believe that the event had already been paid for, Martha could not attend as she had a cold, so, I might as well see what we paid for. Instead, I got a 3-digit bill. I think the lesson here is to (a) ask for specifics beforehand, which I did, but then (b) refuse to go when specifics are not provided.

From Kathleen's point of view, there was: (a) nothing to climb on, (b) nothing to legitimately squish with her fingers, (c) nothing with which to draw on herself, nor stickers, fake tatoos, or dress-up clothes, (d) no pool, and (e) no kids singing or doing something else to be emulated. Even a desert wasteland would at least have had rocks to turn over.

If anyone from the mother's club reads this, let me get in a last word: it's not you, it's me. Given something specific to do and at least some semblance of DIY flair, I can have a great time with y'all. But I'm never going to convincingly pull off an hour of small talk.

ISS does not smell like old feet

I work with Ed Lu, who is a former astronaut who spent 6 months in the ISS, without taking a shower. I asked the obvious question, didn't you and everything else just stink?

No. Ed says that the air conditioning/purification system was ridiculously good, so much so that the only time you ever smelled anything was when you opened a food packet. Even then, the smell was whisked away pretty quickly.

I asked if there was problems with vapor from breathing condensing all over the interior of the spacecraft walls. Apparently not. The thing has hot spots as well as cold spots, and heat pipes to balance it all out, and lots of insulation over that. Apparently stuff doesn't freeze. Given that the thing is cold soaked in sub-liquid-nitrogen temps 45 of every 90 minutes, I'm amazed. I was expecting a story of two-inch-thick ice sheets on the interior walls.

The US is building more wind power than coal

I've just read this report from the DOE, and though it doesn't talk about windpower at all, I find it quite exciting for wind's prospects.

The conventional wisdom has been that the small size of the turbines (generally about 2 MW each) and the unreliability of both the wind and the turbines makes it improbable that the bulk of our power needs can be met with wind.

Meantime, the installed cost of windpower has been dropping, and is now at something like $1300/kilowatt of peak capacity, and coal-fired powerplants have been getting more expensive ($2200/kilowatt), and gas-fired powerplants have been getting more expensive to run (they remain cheap to build at $600/kilowatt). That doesn't explain everything, but check out this statistic from the DOE report:

From 2000 to 2007, the U.S. built an average of 293 MW/year of new coal-fired capacity. In that time, wind build rate went from essentially nothing to... about 4000 MW in 2007! Holy cow, that's an order of magnitude more build than coal!

Now I understand that, like the long Nuclear Pause, there has been something of a moratorium on new Coal for a (shorter) while. And, I'm told there are lots of coal-fired plants in planning right now. But just for scale, note that the EIA projects that the U.S. needs 6000 kW/year of new capacity for the next couple decades. Even assuming a 33% utilization rate, wind is within an order of magnitude of producing ALL of that new capacity, right now.

It's no longer a question of whether wind can ever dominate coal... it's a question of whether coal can come back! Look at figure 2 in the DOE report, and project a growth curve for windpower at 1300 MW/year in 2007 rising to 3200 MW/year in 2012. Why is my 2007 wind number small? Because you have to divide windpower by 3 to account for the wind not blowing much of the time.

Anyway, what you see is that wind will outpace coal again in 2008, but coal will win in 2009 and 2010. But after that, all this new wind capacity is going to meet most of the need for new capacity, reducing the need for new coal plants (and greatly increasing the need for long distance power lines at the same time).

And, by the way, there are about a dozen new nuclear plants in the works, perhaps half of which will come online in 2012 or thereabouts. They'll eat even more of the demand that would otherwise go to coal.

Here's a satisfying question to ponder: what year will U.S. coal production peak, not from lack of supply, but from lack of demand?

A Manhattan Project

Charles Cooper wants a Manhattan Project to fix our dependency on foreign oil. The Manhattan Project was a good deal for most folks (U.S. of course, but I'll claim Japanese too) because a bunch of people they never met toiled away and produced something they never had to interact with which eliminated the need for all these people to fight and die.

Trouble is, we need to be saved from ourselves. It can be done, but we're all going to have to do the toil.

The most obvious thing we can do is switch to plug-in hybrids for our cars, so that the energy comes from something domestic (coal, hydro, nuclear) rather than something imported (gasoline). But that's just not enough. Look at the numbers:

EIA Petroleum Imports

EIA Petroleum Usage

For the week ended 11/23/2007, we imported 13.4M of the 15.5M barrels of oil we used. We turned that into 9.0M barrels of gasoline, 4.3M barrels of diesel fuel, and 1.4M barrels of jet fuel.

Just converting our car fleet to plug-in hybrids won't cut it. Even plug-in hybrids burn gas, just not as much. If, starting today, all cars sold in the U.S. were plug-in hybrids, then in two decades you might eliminate the equivalent of 6M barrels of today's consumption.

What else could we do? How can we convert that diesel usage to electricity? We could electrify our frieght trains, and use trucks only for local hauling of cargo from business to frieght terminal and back. That might eliminate half of diesel usage, call it 2.2M barrels/week. Together with the plug-in hybrids, that get's us down from 13.4M to 5.2M barrel, every week. Not enough to ignore OPEC.

Carving into that remaining 5.2M barrels/week will be really hard. A rationalization of our transport network might move a lot of frieght and some people onto electric trains from planes. There is opportunity there: between parking and security, it takes two hours to get on a plane. If you can get on a 200 MPH train in 10 minutes vs 120 minutes for a 600 MPH train, it's faster for journeys shorter than 550 miles.

Mr. Cooper thinks we should be investing in nuclear energy. But nuclear doesn't help us break free from OPEC. Nuclear saves the environment from all that CO2. It's a seperate issue, also very important, and very interesting, really, since nuclear waste, even if it gets out, isn't really going to bother most birds and bees, but it's a problem for us bipeds who live to 70 years old and care about property values. If anything, nuclear transfers risk from the rest of the world back to us. Seems we don't like that, even if the total risk is reduced.

Geologic CO2 sequestration?

A friend of mine sent me a review of geologic CO2 sequestration in Australia and the United States. Quite interesting, very upbeat. I'm not buying it.

I think costs are a big problem here. Powder river basin coal costs $5/ton at the mine mouth, and by the time it gets to the various powerplants, it's anywhere from $9/ton to $30/ton. The coal burned is about 75% of the cost of electricity generated, if you believe these guys. That means, in summary, the costs of electricity in the U.S. are driven by the costs of transporting coal from mine to powerplant via rail.

Zoom on the loopy thing at the bottom, that's a friggin COAL TRAIN at the mine mouth for what I think may be the Black Thunder mine in Wyoming. These mines are operating at gigantic scale and are very efficient. Coal transport is handled by two competing train operators who are also efficient.


View Larger Map

Now for the problems with sequestration: CO2 weighs about 44/12 = 3.7x as much as the coal that it came from. Right there, big problem. More mass to move costs more.

Worse still, you can't just transport CO2 in an open coal car on a railroad. Instead, you have to cool it (costs energy, capital equipment, access to water or some heat sink, etc), compress it (this costs energy and some capital equipment), then pump it through a high pressure pipeline. That's going to cost more than moving the coal did.

So, if the CO2 is useful for something, like oil or gas extraction with a result worth $0.25/pound or more, then that value can cover a lot of transport costs for the CO2. But if not, the transport cost of the CO2 from powerplant to sequestration site will come to dominate the cost of electricity in the U.S. And I think that any fix for the coal addiction we have now will have to be something that makes electricity for less money, not more.

Anyone want to argue that CO2 pipelines are going to be at least 4x cheaper than coal trains, or that deep CO2 sequestration is going to be more conveniently located than coal mines?

P.S. Southern California's scheme of having a mine-mouth powerplant ship electricity to beautiful people far away from the black stuff is just stupid. Transporting electricity is way more expensive than transporting coal. The scheme only makes sense because beautiful people are willing to pay extra to have their powerplants well downwind and out of sight. It's only a matter of time before Mexico wakes up to this fact and builds a bunch of nuke plants in Tijuana to ship the power across the border.

Missing Iniki

Me with a months-old Iniki

A grown-up Iniki with our friend Carol.

Iniki was really gentle and had a very soft mouth. She could eat anything out of your hand without bothering you in the slightest. If the kids bothered her she would lick them until they stopped. She was more of a snuggler than Bailey.

When we were out walking, Iniki always greeted other dogs with a bark, a lunge, and her tail held high. Other dog owners didn't always interpret this as friendly, but Iniki certainly meant well.

I remember once hiking downhill from Schilling Lake with the two dogs and Martha. I think we had just Anya with us. Iniki disappeared over the edge of the trail. I looked over the drop and decided there was no way I was going to try that, so she'd have to make it back up on her own. We could hear her crashing around down there, and she wasn't coming back up, so we decided to walk along a bit, calling to her, to see if she could find a way back up.

About five minutes later there was this incredible thrashing sound that just went on and on, and Iniki eventually emerged up through the bushes, legs tearing into the soft ground, hauling the entire back end of a deer up the cliff with her. She looked absolutely as pleased as could be, tail high in the air, as if to say, "Look what I found! I swear, nobody was using it! It was just sitting there!" She dragged that carcass after us for a mile or so before we got her to let go of it.

---

We travelled to Mammoth when Anya was just learning to walk. One evening while there I went on a short hike with Anya and the dogs. During this hike, we travelled by a frozen lake. Bailey was timid about getting out on the frozen surface, but Iniki just charged right out. On her way back in, she got to some thin ice and fell through.

Her head and shoulders popped back up, and she started padding as best she could... back out into the middle of the ice. I think she knew she was in trouble, and she was trying to retrace her steps. Instead of going through 20 feet of thin ice directly to me, she plowed her way though a couple hundred feet of thick ice. The entire way, she would get her front paws up on the ice sheet, struggle to haul her upper body out of the water, only to crash back through the ice and into the freezing water. It took her 20 minutes or more to chop and grind a passage all the way through the ice back to the shore point where she'd first gotten onto it. Bailey and I waited there for her, me with my heart in my mouth wondering if she was going to freeze or drown. When she got out Bailey barked at her and then tackled her, as if to tell her, "You idiot! You scared the hell out of us!"

---

Another time, hiking above Schilling Lake, we found a recurring mudslide covering the path. Iniki smelled something in the mud, and pushed her nose into it, then her whole muzzle, and finally her whole head. I don't know what she found in there, but it was pretty funny to see this collar on the ground with a lab's body sprouting from it.

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Iniki loved water. When we were out walking around, if she found something even moderately damp, she sat on it or got into it. Here she is enjoying a puddle near Blue Oaks in Portola Valley.

Iniki is dead

On Sunday, I was hiking with the family at Ed Levin Park. Our two black Labradors, Iniki and Bailey, found a rattlesnake in the middle of the path. We called, Bailey came, Iniki didn't, the snake tried to warn her off and after about ten seconds bit her on the muzzle. I'm pretty sure she was dead by the time we got her to the parking lot.

We were probably a mile up the trail, the dogs were in front, off leash, when they found the snake. I had Kathleen on my shoulders and Ava in the pack, probably about 70 pounds all told, on a pretty steep part of the trail. When I saw what the dogs were barking at (a few seconds at most), I got Kathleen on the ground headed back to Martha. Martha heard me yell "snake", and called the dogs. Bailey took off back down the trail, Iniki pointed right at the snake, her muzzle about 5 inches from the thing, barking but not striking. It struck at Iniki repeatedly while I tried to maneuver behind Iniki to go for a grab. I grabbed her by her flanks and yanked. Martha thinks the snake made contact right then.

I should have dropped the backpack with Ava immediately, and then advanced on Iniki. Had I done that, I might have figured out that I could seperate Ava from the pack and then use it as a projectile. With Ava in the pack I was more awkward.

My brother-in-law says the snake's strike range is about 2/3 of their body length, so I was probably in range when I went for the grab -- not very smart. And I screwed around too long setting up the grab. I basically only asserted myself when the snake started striking.

Martha thinks Iniki might have left the snake if I had moved away from it. I don't think so -- 30 minutes earlier she was barking her head off at some dogs on the other side of a fence.

Iniki was a tough if gentle dog. She only whimpered a bit once I had her seperated from the snake. I had her over one shoulder within ten seconds of the bite, and headed back down the trail. At this point I was carrying over 100 pounds on a trail, and I could not run.

Again, I should have dumped Ava with Martha as I passed her. Also, there were several other people within 100 feet. I could have gotten a volunteer to run down the trail with me, trading the load. That would have made a run possible, and also made it possible to check Iniki's airway as she started barfing.

I think the snake bite was very serious. Iniki was barfing and pooping within 2 or 3 minutes, and was unconscious within 5 minutes. This site suggests that death comes from blood loss and then shock "within hours" -- and we just weren't on that schedule.

I made it about halfway down before my arms got seriously wobbly from holding Iniki's weight. Martha caught up, grabbed the dog and kept going. She got 100 feet before she was out of gas. We put Iniki in the baby carrier backpack and I took her the rest of the way down in that. Martha noted when we put her in the pack that her whole rear end was very stiff.

The pack was much easier -- the way to go from the start. I might have been able to run had I started this way. The trouble was I couldn't see Iniki, and I was trying to talk to 911 while walking, and couldn't do that while running either.

Iniki thrashed around a bit about 30 seconds from the parking lot, which I took as a good sign she was still alive. But when I put her hin the car a minute later, I'm pretty sure she was dead.

Later, when we got to the clinic, she doc told us she had aspirated vomit and choked to death. I now think she choked just as she got to the parking lot. I should have dumped the pack and checked her airway when I felt her bucking. I'm feeling seriously bad about this mistake right now.

That said, nobody seems to think she would have made it 25 minutes longer, so I'm not sure my mistake changed the outcome.

We were on an unfamiliar side of the Bay Area. I got someone from the dog park there to drive in front of me and lead me to a vet. Unfortunately, neither she nor the 911 operator I was talking with could find an after-hours weekend vet with anti-venin. It turns out there are only two in the Bay Area, one in San Leandro and one in Campbell. It took at least 25 minutes to drive to the one in Campbell. The doc pronounced her dead when I brought her in.

The biggest question in my mind is, what if it was one of the kids? Iniki was 7 years old, 65 pounds, and unable to control her own airway within 15 minutes. Anya weighs 38 pounds and Kathleen is more like 30. To even have a chance if they had been bitten, we would have had to have an ambulance meet us in the parking lot, maybe with anti-venin, and we would have had to run down the trail. I'm not sure the ambulance folks would have time to pick up anti-venin, and I don't think I could have run all the way down the hill. 911 would have worked better, of course, and there would have been a local hospital with the anti-venin, but it still seems pretty grim.

One big overall mistake here was that I fixed on the idea of getting the dog to emergency aid (and specifically anti-venin) as fast as possible, and neglected everything else. That'll work if aid is minutes away, but if not, it's critical to be able to maintain the basic body functions of the animal (or person!) until help arrives. After reviewing the literature, it seems that anti-venin is not a magic instant cure. Instead, snakebites seem like one more thing where most of what medical science has to offer is basic life support (oxygen, fluids) while one's body fixes the problem on its own.

In this context it is sort of irritating is that the 911 operator couldn't give me basic instructions: check airway, breathing, heartbeat. Perhaps they would have done this eventually; I don't know because I had no cellphone coverage in the parking lot.

I'm feeling sad now.

More Lunar Hopper

Here's a specific mission mass budget:

The goal on the lunar surface is to deploy three HDTV cameras with motorized zoom, pan, and tilt. The cameras shoot stills or video, record to flash, and then send their bits to the main transceiver over an 802.11b link. The radio links require line-of-sight and fairly close range, less than 1 km. The camera and radio are powered-down almost all the time, and the onboard battery has enough juice for perhaps five minutes of camera operation and maybe 20 minutes of radio time.

Each camera sits on a little post with three legs and an anchor that secure it to the lunar surface. The anchor is explosively shot a foot or so into the lunar dust, and then a spring-wound mechanism tensions the hold-down string. The hold-down string is to keep the rocket plume from blowing the post over when the lander jumps.

The mission is to land somewhere with a good view of the surrounding terrain, deploy one camera, look around a bit, upload pictures/video, and let mission control find somewhere interesting to hop, then jump there and deploy another camera. Then do that again. Then do a third jump, after which we just use the camera on the jumper. The idea is that the first and later second cameras can get video of the jumper taking off and landing, then send that video back to the jumper, which sends it to Earth.

The camera weight with zoom and pan/tilt sets the mission weight. I don't know anything about spaceflight-qualified hardware, but I've looked at the MSSS web site like many of you. A little Googling around makes it look like pan/tilt heads are pretty heavy, but these are designed for Earth weather and Earth gravity.

HD Video/still camera	500 g	4 watts
Zoom Lens	650 g	0.5 watts
pan/tilt head	500 g	0.5 watts
5 foot post and three legs	400 g
explosive anchor and spring reel	500 g
battery	200 g
radio/computer	250 g
total	3000 g

Two of these, plus a pan/tilt on the lander are going to be about 8 kg. My guess is that the lander's radio link will be about 4 kg, and the dry mass of the vehicle necessary to land all this will be another 18 kg for a total of 30 kg.

Descent from lunar orbit, landing, and two more hops will take 2000 m/s delta-V. If we're using a N2O4/UDMH hypergolic motor with 2500 m/s exhaust velocity, then we'll need 37 kg of propellant when in lunar orbit.

I think you want to do the earth exit burn, lunar orbit injection burn, and descent and hopping all with the same motor. You do it with drop tanks, which probably get blown off after the first lunar deorbit burn. This gets the mass in low earth orbit to around 400 kg, which is well inside what a Falcon 1 can lift from Omelek.

Lunar hopper?

So, yeah, I work for Google, but I have no specific knowledge of the Lunar X Prize. I just took a look at their home page, saw the brief summary of the rules, but didn't find a complete draft. It looks like they are going to revise the rules a bit after some feedback.

Here's what I've been thinking: if you want to land on the moon, look around, and then get close to something else and take pictures of it, you don't really need wheels, because you've already got a rocket that knows how to land.

In the moon's soft gravity, it takes fairly small amounts of delta-v to jump a long way. In the moon's 1.62 m/s^2 gravity, you can get 50 seconds of flight time with a 82 m/s delta-v. Use some more delta-v to go sideways, and a bit more to manoever for the landing, and you could cover 500 meters with about 100 m/s of delta-v.

Landing from a lunar orbit takes 1600 m/s of delta-v, so adding a few hundred for a few hops is not a huge increase. Yes, it's exponential, but if done with LOX/kerosene or hypergolics, a 2000 m/s total delta-v budget for the lander implies a very reasonable mass ratio.

Why hasn't it been done before? Multiple rocket hops would have been stupid for the manned mission, because the landing was the highest-risk portion of the mission. It's still the highest-risk portion, and the lunar hopper idea stands a very good chance of crashing one of it's landings. But that's okay, because after a few hops the thing will run out of gas and be dead anyway.

I blog to think

About 30% of the entries I write for the blog never get posted, because I cannot get my reasoning straightened out. There are some entries that I post, that I shouldn't have for the same reason.

I write these blog postings because when I try to figure out something complicated, it helps to write it down. When I started a company by myself (10x), I had to make progress with no coworkers for three years. There was no-one with whom to talk over complex ideas. I ended up writing essays to myself, each designed to take someone from the state I had been in before writing the essay (confused) to the state I was in after writing the essay (enlightened).

I've just discovered Paul Graham's site. He does a better job of saying the same thing here.

One of the problems with a Thorium-fuelled Molten Salt Reactor is starting it. Plutonium (and U-238) from reprocessed reactor waste is the most obvious start charge, but the problem is that it takes several tons of Plutonium (and thus a ton or more of U-238 that comes with it) to start the reactor, which will burn just one ton of actinides a year (which will soon be mostly the U-233 introduced from the blanket), and so it will be decades before the plutonium level is low enough not to be a problem in the waste stream.

The core geometry that David LeBlanc suggests is quite simple -- one big Hastelloy tube in a big unpressurized vat of blanket salt with no graphite. We could make it more complicated by having a three-fluid reactor, with two fuel salt tubes in a single big blanket. The first fuel salt would contain the start charge of Plutonium/U-238. The second fuel salt would be gradually charged with U-233 recovered from the blanket. Fission product seperation would run on the second fuel salt but not the first. The idea is that the fission product buildup in the first fuel salt wouldn't ever rise to a level that would kill the reactor completely, and by immersing the start charge in the neutron flux for decades, you could eventually burn all the transuranics.

One other advantage of this arrangement is that if you had a reactor with a breeding ratio of, say, 0.95, you could insert a small amount (70 kg/year) of reactor-grade Plutonium into the first fuel salt loop to make up for the insufficient breeding. The fission products from these later additions would never add up to the same level as from the initial Plutonium charge, and so they would not poison the reactor either.

There is one other point I'd like to make about reactors with less than unity breeding ratio: the reactor is quite insensitive to the actual fissile load it carries. It would be quite reasonable to have a big start charge and subsequent make-up charges of Plutonium breed an extra 50% or even 100% more fissile than needed, so that the reactor could go for one or two decades without any further make-up. During those decades, the actinides in the first fuel loop can burn down to nothing. After the third decade of operation, while you are replacing the radiation-damaged tubes in the core, you can seperate the Uranium and salt from the two fuel loops, dump the remainder as short-lived waste, and restart the reactor with the Uranium it stopped with, plus another, smaller start charge of Plutonium.

All this excess fissile material is a proliferation hazard in foreign countries. But the worst energy problem in the world is in the United States, where proliferation is not a problem -- we already have the Bomb. We do have to worry about diversion, but I frankly think that's a pretty small problem compared to the national security problem we face due to importation of oil.

Contrast beyond measurement

Part of the challenge of taking pictures outside is that the world has a lot of dynamic range, and our ability to capture that dynamic range is fundamentally limited by the flare in the lenses that we use. So, I've been working on reducing flare in my lenses for a few months.

It turns out there are some guys, Paul Boynton and Edward Kelley, at NIST who had a similar problem (here's the link). They were trying to measure the contrast of LCD displays. It turns out that customers demand higher contrast from their displays than a standard camera can directly measure, because of limitations of veiling flare in the camera. To reduce flare from air/glass interfaces, they built a camera with no air/glass interfaces by filling it with liquid. Totally cool. But also very geeky, not the kind of thing you'd expect to bump into in the day-to-day world.

This morning the DJ on the radio was reading an ad for a Pioneer LCD TV, and claimed that it had "contrast beyond measurement". The person writing that ad probably doesn't know what that means, but I wonder who he heard it from. I find it funny to think about that phrase working it's way from one of the few thousand people who actually care, through executives and ad campaigns and broadcast radio, to me, one of the other few thousand who actually know something of the back story.

Random disorganized blog thread: The high-contrast LCD TV thing raises two leading questions: how are broadcasters producing those high-contrast signals in the first place, if cameras can't capture that much dynamic range, and how is it that customers can discern contrast levels that cameras cannot?

I think the answer to the first question is that broadcasters are stretching image contrast before display, probably to make up for veiling glare on the air/glass interface at the front of the LCD.

The answer to the second is that the human eye probably has less veiling flare than a camera, because it has just one air/liquid interface. I wonder if the human eye has dichroic antireflection coatings/layers on the exterior air/solid interface? I know we've not yet evolved correction for longitudinal or lateral chromatic shift (achromatic and apochromatic lenses), which I think is odd, given the sharpness benefits.

PC sync output from Canon 1D Mark III

Recently I was faced with the problem of generating a TTL compatible pulse from the PC sync output of a Canon 1D Mark III digital SLR.

This ought to be pretty easy. The sync jack on the camera has two contacts: the center pin and the shield, normally disconnected. When the shutter fires, a switch momentarily closes between the two. My understanding is that older flash units would use this switch closing to discharge a capacitor through a xenon flash tube.

So the circuit is trivial: a 5V supply, a resistor from +5V to the TTL output, connect the grounds, and the PC sync goes between the TTL output and ground. When the shutter fires the camera pulls the TTL output low, otherwise it gets pulled high by the battery.

Except: the Mark III doesn't open the switch until the current has stopped flowing. That's not a bad thing; the camera thinks it is discharging a cap, and keeps going until the cap is drained or the arc in the xenon tube collapses. It does mean that I needed to build a one-shot instead of the single-passive circuit, but that's not really so bad.

The problem is that Canon hasn't documented this behavior anywhere. Worse still, their phone support folks told me the exact operation of the PC sync terminal is proprietary (after keeping me on the phone for over an hour). This is a standard interface! They already have a proprietary flash interface on the top of the camera -- there is hardly any need for another one.

Call me disgusted.

Buying a house -- lessons learned

We tried to buy a house without using a buyer's agent. We got the house, but ended up with a agent. Here are our lessons learned about the transaction itself:

1. Watch the language. The legal language is different, and more accurate, than the language used by the agents themselves. The "seller's agent" is legally called the listing agent, and the "buyer's agent" is legally called the selling agent. If you are buying a house, this is supposed to clue you in that "your" agent is really not acting in your interests.
   
2. Extract more money from the mortgage broker. The mortgage broker gets a huge kickback from the bank: 1.5% in our case. We had multiple mortgage brokers find us loans, and we told the ones that were more expensive to come up with a better offer. What we did not realize is the size of their kickbacks. We could have asked, for instance, for 1% of the loan amount to be paid back to us at closing by the mortgage broker. We also talked directly to banks, and were unable to get a better loan than what we got through a broker. This seems like stupid behavior on the part of the banks.
   
3. It's hard to avoid a selling agent. We found our own house, and told the listing agent that we did not want to use a selling agent. We figured we could save the 3% that the selling agent usually charges.
1. The listing agent reacted very negatively (as did everyone else in the real estate business to whom we suggested this idea) when she heard this. She said her sellers would not give us a fair hearing unless we had an agent. She had no sensible explanation why. I finally phoned the seller at home, and left a message saying I wanted to hear directly from him that he wanted us to have an agent. What I got was a vague message back from the listing agent hinting that we needed a selling agent. We really liked the house; I caved in. I suspect but don't know that if I had used the "listing/selling agent" terminology instead of "seller's and buyer's broker" terminology, I might have broken through.
   
2. We used Todd Beardsley as a selling agent. We found him in a posting at Mike's Lookout (Mike also used Todd). Todd charges 1% and rebates whatever extra the sellers are offering (typical selling agent commissions are 2.5% to 3%). He doesn't help you find the house, he just helps the negotiation. It worked, the listing agent accepted him immediately. I thought Todd was very professional, and would recommend him with one caveat: Like all selling agents, Todd is incented to (a) get you to buy the house, and (b) get you to pay as much as possible. He is a professional, but the incentive leaks through. For instance, as an opening strategy, Todd suggested that we figure out the maximum amount of money we would be willing to pay for the house, and offer that. No way!
3. A few years ago, we bought a plot of land without a selling agent. In that case, there were no competing bids and the sellers were motivated (the land had been dropping in value and they had been trying to sell it for two years). The way it worked was that the listing agent pretended to represent both buyer and seller, and changed his fees to the seller from 6% down to 3%. The Mike's Lookout post above suggests that it's unusual for the listing agent to renegotiate his commission like this. I don't think so. Another real estate agent that we have worked with has told us that the commissions get renegotiated all the time, for instance when selling agents are trying to close the last 1% of so between the buyer and seller.
4. Never counter-offer all of your bidders. When you counter-offer your highest bidder, you are rejecting their bid, placing the bird in hand back in the bush. In our case, I'm pretty sure we were the highest opening bidder of three. One other was a low-ball or nonserious bid. The sellers counter-offered all of us, basically trying to rachet us up. What they managed to do, instead, was tell me that I was the highest bidder. When I lowered my bid, they countered with my original bid, which told me the other bidder hadn't matched my lower bid. I should have gone lower still. Instead, I caved. Even so, the counter-offering everyone strategy resulted in us paying less.
5. Pay the selling agent directly, instead of allowing the listing agent to do it. In our case, Todd was able to negotiate this with the listing agent during escrow. It's worth a lot to the buyers, since they pay property tax on the amount paid to the agents for as long as they own the house. But it's also worth money to the sellers: they save transfer tax, and perhaps a few other items.
   
6. Try to pay the listing agent directly, instead of allowing the seller to do it. We didn't try this, because we couldn't figure out how to do it. You might phrase your offer as an amount for the house and a fixed amount for the listing agent. That way, the listing agent and seller can renegotiate their terms without involving you, and it doesn't appear that you are incenting the agent to sway his client, to whom he owes a theoretical professional obligation.

Eating their way to carbon neutrality

At work we got to talking about the incredible size of blue whales. The relevant stats are at http://www2.ucsc.edu/seymourcenter/PDF/2.%20Ms.%20B%20measurements.pdf

At the bottom of this document it talks about how much krill these things would have eaten. Krill live at the surface, perhaps 1 meter, so 15 billion cubic meters of ocean is something like 15000 square kilometers, which is the area of maximally krill-swarmed antartic water that the blue whale population would have filtered through each year, before we killed nearly all of them. I don't know how fast krill populations reproduce, but it seems like that's enough consumption to materially affect the local environment.

Compare 136 million metric tons of krill per year eaten by all those whales (blue, fin, humpback and sei) to about 700 million metric tons of oil a year consumed by the United States. Obviously krill don't have quite the energy content of crude oil, but the notion that the numbers are even comparable is just boggling.

The document suggests that krill have energy content of 3.8 MJ/kg, which is considerably lower than the approximately 25 MJ/kg of crude oil. Each day a blue whale would eat 3 tons of krill and gain 400 kg, so if the weight gain was mostly fat and not water, the whales would have to be converting nearly all the swallowed krill energy into fat. Later that would be burned off into CO2, so my guess is that these whales were gigantic hydrocarbon burners, consuming energy equivalent to 3% of U.S. oil consumption.

Almost all those animals are gone now, so I wonder what is happening to all those krill down near Antartica right now. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Fertilizing the ocean with iron

John Martin suggested seeding the South Pacific with iron ("The Iron Hypothesis") to increase the photosynthetic activity there. (Here's a clip of Richard Barber describing the idea.) If this increase is to sequester CO2, some of the carbon fixed from the atmosphere has to fall into the deep ocean rather than being respired by animals. Generally, live animals don't fall into the deep ocean, but excrement (referred to as "marine snow") does. So far as I know, nobody knows the carbon content or overall rate of this marine snow, and certainly nobody has any idea how it might change if you dumped a bunch of iron into the water.

One thing is clear though: dump iron into any of a number of spots in the ocean and you get a massive increase in biological activity. More phytoplankton, more zooplankton, and according to one report, more larger fish from surrounding areas swarming in to eat the bounty. This makes sense to me: these productivity spikes have probably been happening for millions of years from dust storms. Fish can probably smell the extra nutrients or some other related effect, and I'm sure the effect is like a temporary oasis in a desert.

What is less clear, but certainly possible, is that the increase in productivity at the base of the food chain leads to an increase farther up. That's interesting to me because I don't eat a lot of zooplankton myself, but I do enjoy tuna, salmon, and a number of other pelagic fish which are all under pressure from commercial fishing. I'd certainly support my tax dollars going to a study to find if iron seeding increased the productivity of a fishery. If it did, you'd think the commercial fishermen would be more than willing to take some iron fertilizer out with them on each trip.

Fishery fertilization might significantly improve the global human food supply, both in quantity and quality. If it works, you'd have fairly wide-scale and sustained fertilization, which would make the carbon sequestration (and other) effects of fertilization much easier to study. After a decade or two of that, you might have enough information to know whether more massive fertilization might help with the global warming problem.

Britain Prepares to Meet the Energy Challenge

International Herald Tribune has an article on Britain's white paper: Britain sets out plans to secure energy and fight warming. The British Government has done a good job studying and writing up their position, in order to inform their populace and encourage a better debate. So, why doesn't the article give the reader the link to the white paper itself? What is wrong with the people at Reuters?

As the government points out, conservation is a big idea -- some kinds work, some kinds don't. Overall, everyone would like to see their economies produce more wealth per energy expended.... Most folks would also like to see more wealth, too, so it's a horserace to see whether energy consumption goes up or down. If energy is coming from hydrocarbons, it's uncertain whether CO2 production will go up or down. (This kind of race can go the wrong way: Russia has seen it's CO2 production go down since the end of the Soviet Union, which is due to factories shutting down and overall economic slowdown, rather than increased efficiency.)

Nuclear is a well understood way to make a lot of low-carbon energy. If you build enough nuke plants, you can ensure that in any reasonable scenario, you can drive carbon emissions down, even if there is a boom.

Here is the British Government's Energy Review.

Here is the press release on the white paper.

Here is their nuclear energy paper, published as an addendum to their main paper. This is a logical structure for their presentation: the main paper deals with all the approaches to energy security and global warming, and the addendum deals with one of those approaches.

Read and Enjoy

I think this website is a parody, but even if not, it's just as much fun:

http://www.429truth.com/

The premise is that the tanker crash and fire which destroyed a freeway ramp in Oakland is part of some Al Queda-type attack. Some juicy quotes:

• The name “Macarthur Maze” has 13 letters. Element 13 is Aluminum, an ingredient in Thermite. Aluminum oxide was discovered all over the scene, indicating a massive thermal event involving large amounts of aluminum. Unlike hydrocarbon fire, aluminothermic reactions can fuse steel or destroy it entirely. The police refuse to question Custom Alloy, a pro-aluminum corporation based within easy artillery range of the overpass.
• We admit our mistakes openly and in good faith to preserve our credibility, advance the truth, and emphasize above all else that this website is not a joke.

I generally like my parodies to be a bit more obvious, like the Onion. This site is a bit edgier since it seems more sincere, but it's still pretty funny.

McCain's visit to Google

John McCain visited Google. My notes:

1. He said, energy independence is going to require nuclear power, and he referenced France generating 80% of their power from nuclear.
   

   I would say that mitigating global warming is going to require nuclear power. And not just "part of the mix", but a massive investment of a scale France has never needed to consider -- 500 new gigawatt reactors in 25 years. Energy independence, on the other hand, merely requires domestic energy, which is going to be coal before it's going to be nuclear. I think McCain's sense of this issue is not well nuanced yet. He admitted that 8 years ago he knew very little about global warming, and claimed he'd learned a lot since.
   

2. He said, America has to enforce its borders, evict illegal immigrants (put them at the back of the line behind everyone else waiting for a visa), set up a broader-scale temporary guest worker program, and let those who wish to study at our universities come.

   I agree that allowing foreigners to study at our universities, effectively subsidizing their education which they then take back home with them, is a good way to export America's core values, which makes the world a safer place. Sometimes I wonder if I should believe this, when it seems so many foreign tyrants studied at U.S. institutions (e.g. Idi Amin).
   

3. Some senator apparently said that America is losing the Iraq war, and McCain apparently claimed that if we lost, Al Queda won, and that's not acceptable. One Googler suggested that perhaps everyone lost. McCain had a lame answer for this, essentially that if someone loses, someone else must have won, that's just logic.

   It seems to me the big winners in Iraq are Iran and Al Queda. Iran managed to get the Great Satan to fight the war Iran was incapable of winning on its own. The Shi'ite majority in Iraq seems to lean towards Shi'ite Iran, and has clearly gone front oppressed underdog to presumed incumbent in the midst of a civil war.
   

4. I had never seen McCain in person before. He clearly enjoys talking with people. He liked taking questions from the audience. He appears spry. He also says a lot of things that would appear to be uncomfortable politically -- he said the folks in charge of Iran had some "cockamamie" (he used that word) idea that (I'm having trouble remembering the exact details) the 13th Imam was going to cause a holocaust wiping the nonbelievers off the earth. He then said that Iran had a large population of well educated people with more moderate views who wanted a less oppressive government. He also said, at another time in the talk, that he felt the neighboring governments around Iraq, Iran included, were going to want to help with Iraq's problems. He contrasted Iran with North Korea, where he implied that the people are not well educated, which seems unnecessarily frank.
   

   His description of Iran's leader's cockamamie ideas sounds nearly identical to those of our religious right. McCain toed the party line in 2004, and I wonder to what extent he is beholden to the kooks who took control of the Republican part in the 1990s.

5. McCain claimed the Republican party was the part of small government, but at the same time stood for several other expansive ideas, chief among them the idea that the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was something America should export to the rest of the world.
   

   I'm hopeful that McCain would attempt to be more cautious with the budget, but it's clear to me that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have any sense of frugality.

6. McCain said the Republican party was for minimal governmental regulation, but he failed to motivate what the minimum amount of regulation might be.

   It's clear to me that the free market is a game. The government sets the rules and keeps people from cheating, and the players optimize their return within those rules. The rules have to set carefully to allow creativity to blossom, while at the same time constraining the players not to destroy the community for their own benefit. It would be nice to hear someone espousing small government clarify the difference between small government and anarchy.

Anyway, I was very impressed. McCain seemed much more willing to commit himself to a vision of the future than Hilary Clinton was about a month ago when she visited.

McCain's vision seems a bit like mine. McCain might just love talking more than thinking. (One wonders what he is like talking to foreign, perhaps unfriendly, leaders.) I'm also concerned he opposes the right to abortion. Given that he'll face a Democratic congress, this won't deter my vote for him.

Clinton doesn't seem to have a vision except excessive rosiness and lots of what the government owes the people. Her attitude towards the Iraq war is that Bush started it, and he should finish it, and if he doesn't, she will. But that's really short on detail, and suggests she would prefer it wasn't there. McCain, on the other hand, seems abundantly clear on the implications of pulling out, and simultaneously clear on the mess we have now. I think he's likely to escalate our involvement in an honest attempt to salvage a positive outcome. And, I think he probably has a better sense than anyone else I've seen of how to handle it. And, I think the Iraq war and the larger security situation around it is the central issue of this election.

So long as his running mate isn't some religious wacko (e.g. G. W. Bush clone), I'm probably going to vote for McCain, and pray he stays healthy for four years.