Nuclear Power

I think we need a massive increase in the domestic production of nuclear power.

Oil and natural gas and coal and electricity are, to some extent, fungible. If we produce more electricity with domestic nuclear, we can import less oil. There is a short-term limit, of course, because there are only so many oil-burning powerplants that can be supplanted by nuclear plants. But if new supplies of electricity make electricity cheaper relative to oil, people will switch other things from oil to electricity -- things like cars (plug-in hybrids) and home heating (heat pumps instead of furnaces and oil burners).

Think of the advantages:

Oil is a major portion of our balance of trade deficit, so reducing our oil imports will improve our overall trade deficit. Our trade deficit is scary, because we pay for all these foreign consumables with domestic hard assets -- we are trading our land and buildings away for things that are thrown away in 15 years.

Numbers: 9,140,000 barrels a day at $22/barrel (the bottom of OPEC price range) is $73 billion a year. The real number is likely a fair bit higher than that. The entire 2003 trade deficit was $374 billion, so oil imports were at least 20% of that.

The money we pay for oil goes largely to corrupt governments in unstable parts of the world (and Norway and the UK :). If we buy less oil, less money will go to these governments. Other nations will certainly step in and buy more barrels of oil, of course, but if total demand is reduced then the total revenue will go down with it. As the U.S. is the world's largest consumer of oil, by far, a significant drop in U.S. oil imports will have a very real effect on world oil prices and revenue.

Those governments spend their massive oil wealth in ways that are not aligned with U.S. interests. Saudi Arabia funds schools which teach millions of children religious intolerance and the glory of death in battle. Iraq was funding a militaristic dictatorship. Reducing the money they have to spend is in our interests.

External oil supplies are a national security problem. Right now, the world's producers are pumping at close to capacity. There is not a great deal of slack in the system. That means that a single large country, like Saudi Arabia, halting exports of oil would make for a massive disruption of the world economy. This gives the oil-producing countries a large amount of negotiating power. That their own economies would be wrecked by such a move tempers that power.

But consider what would happen if the guy on the Saudi side of the table didn't care about the local Saudi economy. What if his priorities were religious and/or political?

Not just the rate but the total amount of oil is a long-term national security problem. The U.S. will use up its domestic reserves before foreign reserves are depleted. As U.S. domestic reserves are depleted, our reliance on and transfer of money to foreign sources will increase, and our independence of action in the world will decrease.

Shifting $73 billion a year into jobs which are almost entirely all in the U.S. directly employs about 730,000 U.S. residents, permanently. These people then consume services from others, and so there is some multiplier for the total number of jobs added to the U.S. economy. Though this is not going to solve our economic problems, it is enough to make a noticeable change in the unemployment rate.

There is some possibility the jobs could be moved to Canada or Mexico. Either one of those two countries could invest in large nuclear programs and become a major exporter of electricity to the U.S. Canada is already a major exporter of hydroelectricity.

The U.S. accounts for a healthy chunk of the world's CO2 output. A significant cut in our CO2 production would help towards reducing the rate of CO2 rise in the atmosphere. The science on global warming is still out, but I think it's clear that humans are responsible for most of the rise in atmospheric CO2 in the last century, and I find it reasonable to imagine that that rise is changing something.

But of course the problem with nuclear power is the waste and the security issues. These issues look unacceptable if you think that the alternative is to simply reject nuclear power. But that's not the alternative. The alternative is invading nasty foreign dictatorships because we can't afford oil supply instability. But worse, we have to keep those foreign nations stabilized over dozens of years to ensure oil stability. That effort claims the lives of our soldiers who will perish trying to suppress rebellions overseas against what those rebels (correctly) see as U.S. interference in their domestic politics.

So, I think we need to examine two propositions: Do we keep garrisons overseas in unstable nations for the next 100 years, and lose many soldiers every year to insurrection, in order to secure our overseas oil supply, or do we replace that oil supply with a domestic nuclear infrastructure that generates, uses, and discards enormously dangerous substances as part of its basic operation?

And my answer is, better the devil you know that the one you don't. Nuclear is an entirely domestic industry. Our government has the ability to regulate this industry. The regulation may not be perfect, but at least everyone involved is inside our borders. Nobody questions that the U.S. military and police forces have the right to secure nuclear facilities. There are no protests in the street from those willing to die to prevent the NRC from specifying standards to which the nuclear industry is accountable.

Of course, I would like to see some changes in the nuclear industry. Reactors are still built as if a major goal was the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The only way to reduce the amount of nuclear waste that must be separated from the environment forever is to reduce the interaction of radioactive stuff with the environment. This means that reactor cores should be sealed objects, built in the very crypts they will stay in for hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that ever comes out is heat. When the fuel in the core is "burned up", the core is irreversibly shut down and left to cool, essentially forever. New cores, with their own independent containment vessels, are built next to the old ones, and the power generation infrastructure is switched to these new cores as the old ones die.

NPRM 02-230

Hollywood is in the process of buying congress and the FCC (as well as other bits of the government). They want rules and laws passed which will give the small existing content cartel control over what people see, so that they can tax and shape the flow of information in our society. Here's the EE Times article. And here's my letter to the FCC:

I oppose NPRM 02-230.

It is unreasonable for the FCC to put restrictions on signals that I can receive. It is unreasonable for the FCC to put restrictions on how I may process a signal.

If content providers wish to deny me the ability to process their signal in any manner I please, they can choose not to transmit, or they can only transmit once we have entered a mutually beneficial contract. If this choice obliterates their business model, that is their problem, not mine, and especially not the FCC's.

The FCC does not have a mandate to sustain the existing business of existing transmitters. The FCC does have a mandate to encourage the development of new technology. Placing broad restrictions on entire classes of processing technology is a subversion of the FCC's reason for existence.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Hi Def isn't trying hard enough

George Lucas apparently shot most of Star Wars II on a 1920 x 1080 x 3 CCDs x 24 frames/sec. He's been arguing that Hi Def is just as good as film. If you look at 35mm DSLR vs 35mm SLR comparisons, it seems that Hi Def is almost as good as 35mm movie film. But I don't think that's the right thing to compare against.

The DSLR folks like to compare their digital pictures to 35mm film. The consensus: 6 megapixels is close to the resolution achievable with 35mm film, 11 megapixels is maybe a little better. Film has somewhat better dynamic range than the best CCDs.

The Sony F900 (that's George's $80,000 camcorder) has 3 CCDs, so it takes 3 color samples at each pixel location. So does the Foveon sensor in the Sigma SD9 digital SLR, except the Foveon sensor has 3 megapixels. DPreview says the Foveon 3 megapixel is about as high resolution as Canon's 6 megapizel D60. Apply the same scale factor to the F900 and you get a sensor equivalent to 4 megapixels -- about what you have in $700 prosumer digicams today..

35mm SLR film has images which are about 36mm x 24mm, with the short axis aligned to the width of the film strip. 35mm movie film has images which are about 24mm x 16mm, with the longer axis aligned to the width of the film strip. So 35mm movie film has about half the resolution of 35mm SLR film.

Put the two bits together, and the Sony F900 should capture about as much detail as 35mm movie film. But the best movies are shot and printed on 70mm film, with four times that much resolution. Digital sensors with that resolution exist -- the Canon 1Ds has 11 megapixels. The trick, of course, is to get the high-speed readout necessary to take 24 (or more) pictures every second. That requires a differently designed imaging chip.

I think the right spec for Hi Def should be 3840 x 2400 resolution, at 36 frames per second. This will look like 70mm film, and the higher frame rate will eliminate the irritating artifacts that make pans almost unwatchable in American movies. It will downsample to HDTV nicely, but the really interesting display is the PC monitor. 1920 x 1200 resolution 23" CRTs are available today for the price of a modest TV. 3840 x 2400 resolution 24" LCDs are available today for the price of a large HDTV. 36 frames/sec will look good on an LCD, and you can double it to match a CRT's refresh rate.

Curiously, the distribution format for such movies already exists. The pixel stream is about 40 times as fast as broadcast American TV, which MPEG-4 can currently compress into about 1 mb/s. Assuming no improvement in compression, 15 minutes of 3840x2400x36/s would fit on a DVD, and would be playable with an 8x DVD player.

But larger pictures generally compress better, even with no improvement in compression technology. If we suppose that for every factor of 4 pixels we increase the information by 3, then this big stream is about 20 times broadcast American TV, and a standard 4x DVD will supply 30 minutes of it.

Rockets

Remember model rockets when you were in middle school? The biggest engines I ever launched were Es. These guys started with Is and ended up using Os.

What strikes me as odd about this stuff, though, is why all these rockets are mainly subsonic. They go transonic or slightly supersonic at the end of the boost stage, but they really aren't getting into the many thousands of feet per second that even suborbital stuff would. And why not? These engines deliver around 200 seconds of impulse, which is a pretty serious amount of bang. If they could get their rockets down to less than the weight of the engine, they should be good for 4500 ft/sec in a vacuum. Surely a few seconds of air drag wouldn't wipe out 70% of this delta V?

What I'd really like to build would be a solid fuel ignited propane ramjet. The idea is to use Kelly Johnson's design for the back end of the Blackbird engine, but with gas pressurized propane for the afterburner and a solid rocket motor instead of the turbojet as an ignitor. Getting proper mixing of the exhaust, air, and fuel might be tough... I think it's significant that those SR-71 motors are so long.

...and you gotta love the web. Georgia Tech has a web-based design tool for just this kind of thing. They call what I want to do a Supercharged Ejector Ramjet. Can't handle a solid-fuel core, but what the hell, let's try a O₂-JP5 engine instead.

Work the specs:

C3H8 tank: 5cm dia 100cm long - 1900cc
  Energy:   48 MJ
  Fuel Mass: 1.1 kg
Solids: 200 seconds impulse, 2 kg fuel
  Burn time: 10 sec
  Thrust: 392 N  (4 G acceleration off the pad)
  Delta-V: 294 m/s
Rocket: 6.9 kg mass

Required thrust?   1000 N (about 10 G acceleration)
Inlet area?        45 cm^2
Cowl height?       3 cm
Nose to cowl?      100 cm
Compression angle? 10 degrees
Forebody friction? 0  (uh oh)

Primary Area ratio? 15
Chamber pressure?   6000 KPa  (Can't be as high as the swoopy stuff)
Fan pres ratio?     1 (no fan)

Defaults after this...

ALIVH

One of things that makes HPC (High Performance Computing, i.e. weather, aerodynamic, vehicle crash and nuclear bomb simulation) so expensive is the huge memory systems on these machines. There is an old saying in the field that latency is hard, bandwidth you just pay for. Anyway, the cost of a memory system isn't the memory itself -- Pricewatch puts a stick of 512MB of 200 MHz DDR memory at $137, or $274K for a terabyte. The cost has generally been in the plumbing necessary to connect that memory to the CPU(s)*. You need lots of very fast wires, which has historically required exotic packaging.

Things change. I just read that half of all cellphones are made on circuit boards with enough density to make an HPC architect drool. Chuck the unobtainium and use ALIVH -- this stuff is cheap! It makes me want to design a hobby HPC.

* Well, actually, the prices mostly come from market dynamics. You have consumers (big companies and government labs) with deep pockets and little ability or incentive to ensure they get real value for their money, and producers who try hard to lock their consumers into proprietary hardware and software to avoid real competition. The HPC money well is drying up as (a) defense budgets have been slashed and (b) many customers have realized that racks of commodity PCs will do the job just as well.

National Missile Defense

I watched a Frontline program on the National Missile Defense program recently, while waiting to feel tired enough to go to bed.

When Reagan started the Strategic Defense Initiative, the idea was to build a defense against nuclear missiles coming from the USSR. Frontline went over the history of SDI and NMD, but totally missed the fact that the insights and policy turnarounds during those two programs had all happened before. Summary: we've been trying to build ABMs ever since the 1950s. Every time we have a system ready to deploy, either the Congress or the President kills it, and then funds yet another system design. We actually had a working defense from 02-Oct-1975 to Feb-1976, about five months, before that last one, Safeguard, got killed.

Once again, after a few years everyone has realized that defending against incoming missiles is so hard that stopping thousands reliably, the first time, is impossible. Also, the USSR has evaporated. Russia still has the missiles, but we're buying their warheads from them slowly, and they seem less of a strategic threat somehow. So the folks in Washington have changed the emphasis, just as the Johnson administration did in the late 60s. SDI is now NMD, and the idea is to shoot down just a few incoming missiles from "rogue states". They're still trying to do it with "hit to kill" vehicles, basically, hit a warhead travelling 15,000 MPH with another missile travelling 15,000 MPH in the other direction.

Progress so far: since the mid-80s, they've spend $50 billion, they've decided they want to take out incoming warheads by smacking straight into them, but they can't quite hit the target, and they have no idea how to select the warhead from a cloud of decoys bursting from the same missile.

What bugs me most about all this waste is that now that the program goal has been changed, we could achieve that goal by redeploying the Safeguard system we had in 1975! Why screw around with entirely new research and development? I think we should do a cost reduction pass on the Sentinel system design, and then deploy the damn thing and be done with it. Yes, this means I think we should build more nuclear bombs. (The warheads on the Sprint and Nike Zeus missiles are thermonuclear, which gets rid of most of the accuracy and decoy selection problem.)

It would appear that policymakers in Washington have consistently concluded that it is important to do R&D on ABMs, but not important to actually have ABMs. Which makes you wonder if ABMs are supposed to shoot down warheads or keep a bunch of middle class voters in important districts employed.

If you want to find out how nuclear weapons actually work, check the Nuclear Weapons FAQ. It scared the piss out of me. I had previously assumed that nuclear weapons were a bit like a little piece of the Sun, but here. Nope. The Sun is a great big lazy ball of hydrogen with the odd thermal fusion reaction happening here or there. Nuclear weapons operate with an intensity that puts our Sun to shame. I find the notion of forcing reality so far away from it's normal course terrifying to read about.

Gas Guzzling

I just got back from a trip to the UK to show my new baby off to all the relatives. The highlight, perhaps, was driving around Northern Ireland with my parents, wife, and daughter, and having my parents point out where they got married, had their honeymoon, etc. I'm entering a stage in my life which is very analagous to the stage my parents were at when I first entered the world. Somehow I can relate better to their experiences of the late 1960s as newlyweds and new parents than I can to their experiences as children. And though getting older does have it's downsides (getting fatter, slower, and creakier), I'm enjoying my relationships with family even more than I did when I was young.

I got a ride in my uncle's new BMW 525d. My wife drives an older 525i, so it's interesting to compare the gasoline and diesel variants. Bottom line: that diesel rocks. Colin says he gets 34 MPG, equivalent to 27 MPG here (their gallons are bigger). Martha gets maybe 22 MPG, and I seriously doubt a new 525i does any better (probably worse: EPA says 18 / 26 MPG).

What I have wanted for a long time is a better minivan: The powertrain should be a 25 MPG front drive hybrid diesel, with electric low-speed RWD for getting around on steep, slippery roads that snowplows haven't visited recently. All I need is 10 HP on each wheel, but I need that at 5MPH. I'd like a suspension and transmission more like the 525i's automatic and decidedly less like that of the Dodge Caravan I have now. The rear seats should stow like the Odyssey, the roof rack should lever over the side so my wife can get skis off the roof, and a dog fence behind the middle seats that doesn't tear up the interior should be a dealer option. Oh, and that roof rack should be good for more than 200 pounds -- I tried putting four kayaks on the Caravan's rack and the thing just sagged down onto the roof!

(For my other car, I want an S2000R. :-))