Car Replacement Summarized

Since I dropped a link in the latest Gizmag post, I'm expecting an influx of international visitors.... welcome to my blog! I didn't want to put a bunch of links in my comment, so instead I'm going to weave them all together in this summary post.

When we consider what makes a vehicle energy efficient, two things are more important than anything else: weight and aerodynamics--the lower the weight and wind resistance, the lower the energy required to move. Consider the ratio of cargo weight to carrier weight (in kg): for me and the average sedan, that's about 72.6/1360.8 or 0.053; for me and my electric bicycle, 72.6/18.1 or 4.0; me and a racing bicycle, 72.6/6.8 or 10.7. It is clear that the bicycle represents one of the lightest forms of transportation, and it is thus also one of the most efficient. I am convinced that bicycles can save the world--the outline of my argument in support of this is found in my post titled A Radical Proposal (for any literature fans, yes this is a play on A Modest Proposal).

But the bicycle alone may not be enough, maybe in a sincerely fitness oriented culture, but that kind of mentality takes a long time to develop... technology develops much faster. For instance, the road I live on has a hill with a grade around 10%. In days past I was fit enough to ride my bicycle up worse, but in the time I've lived here I don't recall ever being able to make it up without feeling like I was about to keel over dead. Quite recently I added an electric motor to my bicycle, and despite more than doubling the weight I can haul up that hill in nearly my tallest gear, without even standing up--I've done this almost every day since I got the kit. Also, my legs look better than they have since shortly after I finished my trans-America tour; just because there's a motor doesn't mean I'm not doing any work! I'm going to do a very rigorous overview of electric bicycles at some point in the future, but until then this will have to suffice.

As I mentioned, weight is only part of the battle; the more significant part is wind resistance. The only way to significantly change the aerodynamics of a bicycle is to add a fairing, which generally necessitates the use of a recumbent tricycle. This vehicle is called a velomobile, which is discussed in my post Rise of the Velomobile.

The last part of the puzzle that I mentioned in my Gizmag comment is autonomous navigation and solar roadways. Autonomy is more a necessity for the very heavy and fast every day car, but the benefits of such a system would still be reaped by this ultralight human/electric hybrid. The concept of autonomous transportation and a few different perspectives on energy are covered in depth in the post Intelligent Transportation Systems. The danger caused directly by cars is covered in several posts, notably How Dangerous is the Road?, which also links to information about the very promising solar panel roadway. Solar roadways and roadway to vehicle power transmission are important because they enable significant weight reduction by reducing battery capacity requirements, which leads to further weight reduction by allowing for the use of a smaller motor.

There is still much to be covered (for instance, the average US citizen spends 17% of their income on car related expenses), but not enough time to cover it right now.

Thanks for visiting, please enjoy

Rise of the Velomobile

The velomobile will be the next great technology to reach ubiquity. 

(Assuming that everybody behaves in a perfectly rational manner, which is not a safe assumption, unfortunately)

Near the beginning of August the web was abuzz with news that obesity incidence in the US has continued to increase; more recently, it was suggested that obese people visit general practitioners more frequently than smokers and generally unfit folks. Obesity is bad, this is not news--with the distributed costs of public health care, obesity is even worse. Another bit that isn't news is that a moderate, sudden, and sustained escalation of petroleum prices, perhaps as a consequence of finite/dwindling supply, would likely lead to cataclysmic economic destabilization because of our profound reliance upon it--a point practically self evident in the most rudimentary economic perspective. Of course for whatever reason many more people have petroleum centric anxiety manifested as fear of global warming, for which the more dire consequences won't happen until a fair while after we've already run out of gas if we keep increasing our consumption.

But for a culture in which the automobile was supplanted by the velomobile, these problems amongst many others would be made irrelevant.

What is a velomobile? It's a pedalcar, resembling a grown-up soapbox racer with bicycle pedals. This is a velomobile:

The typical modern velomobile is little more than tricycle recumbent with a fairing, but these two things together make for something of an advanced vehicle. Here's what it looks like in the cockpit of a good DIY velomobile that was constructed for under $1500 (full flickr here):

Recumbents are increasingly popular as they can provide more comfort than the usual bicycle and also utilize the mechanical advantage from having lower back support while pedaling. The fairing adds the benefit of aerodynamics, a good thing as air is the principle force that slows a cyclist. But the fairing does more than that: by enclosing the tricycle, it is suddenly a vehicle equipped to ride in inclement weather; perhaps even more important, what was a bike now strikes the casual bystander as a car. Unfortunately the fairing adds weight... and with intuition it becomes clear that with the minor addition of a small electric motor, this vehicle is the most sensible form of transportation ever devised.

On flat terrain with no wind, an average person can sustain 25 MPH in a velomobile without much difficulty. With an electric motor I'd expect one would be able to sustain 25 MPH while going up a decent hill.

There are many exciting things about velomobiles--by my figuring they potentially represent the cheapest, safest, cleanest, healthiest, and most sustainable form of transportation ever conceived--but the most exciting thing about it all is that like bicycles there's already an international legal precedent for their use on public infrastructure. In the US a velomobile is classified as a moped, as long as it has pedals and doesn't exceed 20 MPH (varies by state). Because of this a velomobile can be piloted on public roads with all the rights of a cyclist, which tend to be more generous than the rights of motorists, no registration or insurance necessary. Newer velomobile designs incorporate headlamps, turn signals, and brake lights; with an electric motor you could drive with city traffic as though you were one of the internal combustion monstrosities. The biggest problem with velomobiles is that they haven't caught on yet, and as part of that, nobody has been able to produce one on a large scale for a price within reason.

This is an incredible custom velomobile, replete with water-filled airbag suspension (full flickr here):

This velomobile is somewhat commercially available, total price >$6000 (retail site here, worklog here):

With the widespread adoption of velomobiles our country could reap the benefits of increased general health with vastly reduced vehicle related expenditure, and thus an increase in overall prosperity. Perhaps even more important, we'd reduce our exposure to calamity by decreasing our extreme dependence on a steady (and foreign) supply of petroleum at a steady (and low, and further subsidized) price. Not that I think adoption should be limited to US.

Matter and Electromagnetism

With precisely 20 minutes of focus anybody can come to know a very significant portion of the foundation of our physical reality.

Demonstration of feasibility

I'm a bit too busy to give the normal glyphic flood, but as proof following my plea for autonomous vehicles this demanded mention. The Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) is planning to send an autonomous Audi up Pikes Peak at race speeds. Pikes Peak is a mountain road used as a rally stage, with surfaces varying from packed dirt to loose gravel. Actually an autonomous car has finished the course previously, but "only" at an average 25 mph. There is some reason to suspect the Stanford team will succeed in their intent, as they won DARPAs Grand Challenge and took 2nd place in their Urban Challenge; the car can at least drive 120 mph across the salt flats. I cannot wait to hear the results!

Intelligent Transportation Systems

In 2004 it took an estimated 6400 megajoules to build a typical computer, including 17" CRT. This works out to 1778 kilowatt/hours, or about the average consumption of a house in the US for two months. Based on the 2009 US average industrial rate of $0.07 per kwh, assuming that only electricity was used and at 100% efficiency, $124.46 of the cost of the computer went to energy alone. I reckon this would represent somewhere around 10% of the total cost.

A gallon of gasoline has about 1.3x10^8 joules or 138 mj, meaning the computer would require about 46.4 gallons of gasoline to build. Using a rough average of the current prices, $2.70, this means about $125 worth of gasoline. Note that 1 gallon of gasoline has about 36.6 kwh.

Alternatively, the current average residential rate for electricity is $0.12 per kwh, meaning the cost to build the computer would be $213.36. Notice that a mere change of 5 cents to the cost of a kwh nearly doubles the end cost of the energy, which would most likely be reflected in the purchase price. It's important to recognize that energy and the cost thereof, from, gasoline, electricity, or beyond, is extant in all facets of our modern lives. In other words, if the price of gasoline goes up, the price of everything goes up. Of course most of our electricity is generated from coal and natural gas, so the price of gasoline doesn't seem directly related to building a computer. Unfortunately that's rather short sighted, as gasoline is required in order to move the computer parts to and fro, not to mention to transport the coal to the power plant to begin with.

Clearly if the cost of both gasoline and electricity were to rise by a nickel, we should naturally expect everything we buy to become quite a bit more expensive. It isn't difficult to see that this in turn would most likely have dire economic consequences. This is why there's so much buzz about energy, it should be obvious that the extreme consequences of demand outstripping energy supply readily justify extreme evasive efforts.

Imagine it was discovered that a meteor sufficient to absolutely obliterate Earth was headed straight towards us with a 100% probability of collision. Our dependence on gasoline is kind of like that. Buying a Prius would be like building a large bomb shelter: it would show that you probably realize there's some kind of problem, but that you nonetheless have absolutely no understanding of its magnitude. Do you know how much energy it takes to turn bits of iron buried in the Earth into a shiny new Prius? According to an average figure per car, not the Prius specifically, given by Toyota, around 22,519 kwh or 22.5 megawatt/hours , the rough equivalent of 615 gallons of gas. This means that driving a Prius 31,000 miles uses about the same amount of energy as building the thing to begin with! 22.5 mwh would power the average house for over 2 years, it's quite a lot of energy.

One implication is that by buying a used car instead of a Prius you are preventing the use of the equivalent 615 gallons of gas--buying a used 15 mpg beast and driving it 9,000 miles uses less gas than a new Prius with 0 miles on it, making the beast more sustainable and conscientious up to that point. I realize I always pick on the Prius but I don't mean to be too disheartening, the Prius is one of the better options available, even if I think it's not as extreme as it should be. Anybody who buys a new Prius with legitimate environmental concern is now obligated to drive that car into the ground.

New cars aside, one Mythbusters experiment showed a 39% increase in fuel efficiency from drafting a big rig--driving 10 feet behind it. Assuming every car could always draft in such a manner and increase efficiency by 39%, well then the yearly consumption of gas would decrease by a monumental 39%. That's a big assumption, but there's one way it could be realized, and that's with autopilot.

We can't all draft all the time because it is very dangerous to drive at almost any speed 10 feet behind anything, and the reason is simply biological: it takes a measurable and substantive amount of time for information to traverse the nervous system, this phenomenon is commonly referred to as reaction time. When you see brake lights, the light must activate an action potential in your retina, which travels into the brain. Once processed, another signal is sent down the looong path (compared to microscopic neural cells, inconceivably long) to your foot, telling it to press the brake pedal. If a truck moving 60 mph slams on the brakes with you at 10 ft behind, that reaction time is simply way too slow and it's game over. On the other hand, with autopilot brake lights aren't even necessary, the computer in each vehicle would be in constant communication with the cars in front and behind; the vehicles could be 10 ft apart, 2 ft apart, even physically connected like a train without any problem. I imagine the optimum arrangement would be a physical connection for a number of reasons. Of course, if all drivers were computers, the brakes themselves would hardly be needed, especially on the freeway. If you know the status of every car around you, about their planned movements, power characteristics and beyond, less wasteful air friction could be used to decelerate as appropriate, perhaps to allow a car to enter the train, which is itself a task much easier for computers than humans.

It isn't hard to envision that traffic lights would disappear with irrelevance as well, indeed I doubt it would make much sense to sit at an intersection when precise control and rapid, traffic-omniscient computer communications would allow cars of all headings to pass through synchronously. Sure, it will take a while to get used to constantly missing that other car by inches, but abandoning the familiar start/stop/wait process will give tremendous fuel savings, as it is the most inefficient part of driving and why the distinction between city mpg and highway mpg exists. Accordingly, the pace of society will see a new and considerable boost as not only the time between locations diminishes, but we are also free to spend that time doing something other than driving. Not only will we get places fast, ambulances, police, and fire trucks will be able to reach their destinations in the maximum possible time. If that weren't enough, we should expect that we are all a noticeably wealthier as our expenditure on gas shrinks, car insurance disappears, and as mentioned above practically everything drops in price along with energy cost. It's such a win for everyone it feels like cheating, but all of that is just the start.

The first thing people say when they hear of computers or robots driving cars is "but that sounds So dangerous, it would never be safe enough, I would never trust it!" Well, the bleakness of reality readily illustrates the absurdity of such a thought. Think of it this way: the autopilot system could have 5 million accidents a year and that would still be a huge improvement over humans driving cars! There were around 6.4 million car accidents in 2005. 100 people could die every single day in a computer driven car and it would still be safer, because 115 people are dying every day in the current system. One hundred and fifteen people sure seems like a lot, doesn't it? Well, consider that 3,303 people died in car accidents in the month of September, 2001. That month is and always will be bitterly remembered solely for the terrorist attacks that fell the Twin Towers, acts that meant the death of 2,819 people. There is no doubt that 9/11 was a tragedy, but so was 3,303 car accidents. Death by car accident and terrorist attack are fundamentally similar in that the victims of either are generally no less expecting nor deserving the outcome--incidence is practically random. Just because the first figure elicits strong memories and the next is unfamiliar doesn't make the prior any more tragic! Personally I'm inclined to think that every person is more or less equally valuable (namely, invaluable) and thus that each person's death is equally tragic. That being the case, the 2,819 terrorism related deaths on 9/11 are quantitatively about 85.347% as tragic as those due to car accidents in that same month. Alternatively, if we were to assume that only the death of a relative or dear friend qualified as measurably tragic then the majority of people would see that 2,819 random strangers and 3,303 random strangers are pretty close to each other, and we might expect to estimate their relative tragedy as similarly near. Objectivity aside, you would have to be colder than cold to somehow consider 3,303 lives lost any less tragic than 2,819 lives lost regardless of the details, these are all people that could have been you or I, yearning to be alive just like you and I: husbands, daughters, mothers, brothers... neighbors, friends and mentors; they were real people!

So it's established, there were two significant tragedies in the US in September, 2001, now what? Perspective: the 3,303 fatal car crashes in September was actually fewer than that for the two months post and prior, which makes 5 tragic months in a row. If you figure that anything over 2,000 deaths is sufficient to be labeled tragic, every single month in 2001 was a tragedy considering car accidents alone... 37,862 people died. Every single year from 1994 to 2008 has been a tragic year, with an average 37,500 fatal car accidents per year. 1994 is the earliest data I have, but I'm willing to bet the numbers don't improve much by going back further. Over the 14 years that span 1994 and 2008 562,712 people died in car accidents. If instead of happening over 14 years it happened in one day, that day would be about 199.6 times as tragic as 9/11, like the events of 9/11 replayed 199.6 times in one day. 562,712 is 2.5 times the total number of people that died from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Know that those weren't the most devastating though--strategic firebombing of Japanese cities killed around 500,000 people, inconceivable yet still fewer.

Cars driven by people are as deadly, if not more, than world wars.

Then how dangerous would it be? Because an intelligent transportation system would need to be implemented everywhere all at once and thus a massive project, breadth and depth of testing at all stages is a certainty. To start, there has been decades of dedicated research on this specific issue, and the state of affairs is amazing (see DARPA's grand and urban challenges). Given the talent inevitably attracted to exceptional challenges (such as top engineers to NASA), a category for which this certainly qualifies, I presume each issue arising throughout development would be deftly handled. Finally, I would expect that some qualified organization would be intimately involved, dictating the requirements and governing the development to ensure safety and reliability, much as the FAA does with all things aerial. An autopilot system made properly as thus, I predict less than a hundred accidents per year from the very start, probably no deaths. With such a system the probability of dying in a car accident would go from frighteningly high to somewhere less than being struck by lightning. The current estimated yearly cost of car accidents is over $230 billion dollars, so... cha-ching! There's an extra $229.98 billion dollars floating around. Nonetheless we would expect the system to improve over time, transforming cars from most dangerous to safest form of transport.

Optimally the typical commuter car should be prepare for transition by being made small and ultra-light, with aerodynamics engineered in terms of chains of cars. The majority of cars should seat one passenger since most often a car carries only one person and any empty seats means wasted energy. With standardized interfacing and characteristics, other vehicle forms would fulfill the need for cargo haulers, high capacity vehicles, and so forth. Ideally vehicles would be public property, eliminating the need for a family to have multiple vehicles for commuting and family outings, but realistically this is the US and people want to own the things they use. Regardless, thanks to the reduced complexity and altogether more efficient vehicle design coupled with energy efficiency savings, a family could afford to own a number of vehicles which nonetheless add up to a fraction of the energy and materials cost of the present steel monstrosities, maybe able even to be stored in the same amount of space. Alternatively a sufficiently large platform could allow for modular passenger compartments; though the platform size would be less than optimum for single passengers, needing only one drivetrain would decrease materials consumption. The subsequent implication is that modular drivetrains could be used instead of modular passenger compartments.

The aforementioned efforts combined would make for an increase in efficiency so marvelous that domestic oil production would actually be sufficient for the first time since the 70's, when it peaked. Since we're making a whole new concept of car, it would make sense to complete the metamorphosis: ditch internal combustion for electrical, pave the road with solar cells, and oil becomes practically irrelevant for the first time since the second industrial revolution. Rather than carry around the really heavy main batteries, leave them stationary and build contact strips in the road so that cars can zip around like full scale slot cars. The relatively lightweight backup batteries would still be carried so that in the case of main power failure the vehicle could still maneuver and communicate safely. With the sum of these modifications, we should expect our busiest roads to give the impression of losing much of the normal traffic--in reality, the same road may have even more traffic, only seeming less because more cars fit in less space for less time. Each intersection would know about every car planning to traverse it from the earliest possible moment, and would assign each car a set of parameters with which it is to use for traversal, including possible alternate plans. Each car would then communicate with every other car assigned to the intersection around the same time to verify that everything works out, a sanity check independent of the intersection. For example, two chains of several cars each plan to travel east and north through the same intersection at the same time. The intersection may dictate that both chains enter the intersection moving 80 mph, the first at 5:00:00 and the other at 5:04:00. The chains verify together and find that they will pass within 6 inches of each other, but that this is an acceptable margin given the wind conditions and other factors. The plan is confirmed with the intersection and each car passes through, deviating a few hundredths of an inch from their predictions--these deviations would then be incorporated back into the prediction model which is distributed across the whole network. Suppose four very long chains travelling in every direction are approaching the same intersection. This time the intersection would probably dictate that the lead cars split and accelerate through such that at any moment there are 4, possibly 8 cars in the intersection, each one missing the other by a hair. Eventually it is expected that the traffic network will maximize efficiency of the whole system in unexpected ways. Maybe previously busy intersections will be used as though there were no crossing, or all but a handful of wide, long, straight thoroughfares will fall into relative disuse.

I am a driving enthusiast, I really love driving. Many days it seems my highest aspiration is to do laps around Laguna Seca in some kind of ultra performance four wheeled vehicle. But despite my pleasure in driving there is no way that I can call the present system workable. It's extremely dangerous, terribly slow, woefully inefficient, and absurdly expensive. The truth is that we have the technology to automate the roads, people have been working on it for decades and the resulting systems have proven reliable even in novel situations many humans might otherwise fail. It might not be perfect, but it's much better, and as I've shown we're so terrifically awful at driving that that's not saying much. The transition is ready to happen, and when it finally does our world will simply become safer, faster, better, and wealthier. The only downside is that it can't be done over night.



Once we finish automating our roads, what's the next revolutionary development? A space elevator. More on that some time.


some sources:

"Energy Intensity of Computer Manufacturing" by Eric Williams, United Nations University
  http://www.scribd.com/doc/4183/Energy-Intensity-of-Computer-Manufacturing
"How much does electricity cost? What is a kilowatt-hour?"
  http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html
"How much electricity do computers use?"
  http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html
Energy Content of Fuels (in Joules), other useful tables
  http://physics.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/ENERGY_POLICY/tables.html
"Weekly U.S. Retail Gasoline Prices, Regular Grade"
  http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html
"Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State"
  http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
"Energy to build a car?"
  http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18240
"Most and Least Fuel Efficient Cars "
  http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/bestworst.shtml
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatality Analysis Reporting System
  http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
Wikipedia - "Intelligent Transportation System"
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_transportation_system
U.S. Dept. of Transportation - "Intelligent Transportation Systems Benefits and Costs, 2003 Update"
  http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/jpodocs/repts_te/13772.html#4.0

Energy? Let's Keep it Real.

When I was in elementary school my dream was to make a perpetual motion machine, which are commonly referred to these days as "over-unity" devices. I'm all for other people trying to do it, but I no longer feel the need to waste my time with it. Of course, there are loads and loads of people lacking a strong scientific background trying to come up with these devices, and as such it is useful to know a bit of the scientific background so we aren't so easily deluded into believing their claims. Personally I'm a fan of innovative approaches and casting much doubt towards commonly held assumptions, but there are definite limits to this concept - at some point, you are just wasting time trying to come up with results that have already been long known (and which were discovered by geniuses who got lucky, something unlikely to happen again to any naive experimentalist).

Conservation of energy is the first law of thermodynamics and fundamental to every physical science, it's shown up in every one of millions of experiments and is about as established as a theory gets. Even more, the theory is one that makes a lot of sense and is descriptive to the extent that it has encapsulated and explained every single experimental observation yet made. Of course, science hinges on the precision of explanation, which implies that experimentation outside common conception--a theoretical dictum such as Thermodynamics--is not a threat but either 1. A chance of showing that common conception is accurate, or 2. A chance at showing it is incorrect and must be changed to accommodate new observations. Quality observation is very difficult to do, and it is easy to make mistakes in measurement that will lead to erroneous results, as was the case with the famed events surrounding cold fusion. Scientists as a community realize this difficulty and thus relies on an unofficial system called peer-review. In attempting to submit your results to a reputable source, a small group of individuals including some in the field of concern reviews the document for possible experimentation errors. Rather than publishing it outright, the expectation is that you receive your returned paper with questions and concerns to which you respond or preclude publication with that journal. This kind of process is often not enjoyed by scientists, but I'd say on the whole it is accepted as important when not disheartening. Thus, with proper background, it makes sense that there was some controversy over cold fusion, because the researchers went to the popular media which lacks peer-review or the knowledge to vet the material. As it became more clear that such technology would revolutionize the world, it was also with growing disappointment as other scrambling scientists failed to reproduce their results. Thus also we can see the importance of proper procedure with science, and the reason pseudosciences always have air-time on the local news but not space in reputable journals. This too is why anything related to emerging science in mass media should be taken with serious skepticism (though if I take my science pants off I'd also argue that all mass media content should be avoided at all cost).

Perpetual motion now acknowledged as very unlikely, the closest we're going to get to "free energy" in the real world/foreseeable future is going to be nuclear power. That's not to say nuclear power is anything less than enough; the process converts mass directly into energy, and there is an incredible amount of energy stored in mass. Einstein's famous and very proven equation shows this clearly: Energy = mass * speed of light^2 aka E=m*c^2 (the c is thought to stand for celeritas, Latin for speed or swiftness). Thus, even the slightest amount of mass stores an amount of energy proportional to the speed of light squared, which is an Incredible amount; the Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki was the result of just ~1 gram (the same mass as about half of a US dime) of mass being turned into energy.

This is actually really easy to calculate with the help of google's calculator, since google is just awesome like that. The wikipedia article says Fat Man released about 88 terajoules of energy. Since we know energy and c, rearrange to solve for mass:

E = m c^2
to
E / c^2 = m

and simply google "88 terajoules/(c^2)" (or clicky here).

So the whole bomb weighed over 4,000,000 grams... had all that mass been turned to energy there would probably no longer be a place called Earth. Likewise, my body mass (and I am a rather Skinny Man) converted directly into energy would be about 74,000 times more powerful than Fat Man. Thus, one could guess that the next greatest energy discovery be how to turn some "more stable" mass (as in not plutonium) into energy by nuclear fission, which is the idea behind cold fusion. Cold fusion is generally considered impossible, but some researchers continue to look into it.

Electromagnetism was discovered in the early 1800's, so it's pretty safe to say that any secret way to get free energy with magnets/electricity would've been figured out by now, particularly given that we have explored electromagnetism (EM) at the most fundamental (quantum) level; EM is one of four fundamental forces in physics: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, EM, and gravity. Since we're on a physics roll, connecting these four forces (referred to as unification) into a single theory is the holy grail of physics research today, and the person who figures it out will probably become the most famous scientist in history. String theory (actually theories) is an untestable proposal for the unified theory. Since they are untestable, they aren't considered scientific and thus not viable candidates until tests are developed.

Back to nuclear power: recently a story in the local paper had our new governor Gary Herbert saying much about the role of nuclear power in future infrastructure. This all stems from the current Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, pushing for nuclear reactors to be the future energy source for the USA. It has been suggested that the US has wasted the past 30 years by not developing energy infrastructure based on nuclear power, and this is true. Nuclear power is the cleanest, most sustainable and efficient way to get power. Likewise, there is a lot of opinion that the explosive growth seen in China over the past few decades has been fueled by nuclear power, and it isn't difficult to see that without this kind of powerful technology for power generation the rate growth couldn't have had such a pace.

There have been plans put forth for miniature reactors, termed "neighborhood nuclear reactors" or "nuclear batteries." Residing in a 10 foot cube of heavily reinforced concrete, the reactor can provide power for 20,000 homes for 10 years. Divided evenly between 10,000 households, the projected cost for a decade of electricity is $250. Backyard reactor sounds like a bad idea? Absolutely not. Even if a group were able to secretly reach the buried cube, they would need to penetrate several feet of reinforced concrete. Assuming they were able to do that, they would need to do it many times as each reactor contains a diminutive amount of nuclear material. They would be better off just buying some on the Internet, which anyone can do (I used to have a bookmark for an online store with plutonium available for purchase, but alas, no longer). Assuming these would-be idiot terrorists had secured enough nuclear material, they would then need the resources of a nation to refine it into something weapons-grade, not to mention the necessary detonation device. Thus, there is no risk of terrorism aided by nuclear batteries, QED.

What about catastrophic failure, as in Chernobyl or 3-mile island (which is when we stopped building reactors)? Not possible. First, nuclear power technology has come a Long way since the 1970's, just like Everything else. Second, the mini-reactors are closed systems with no moving parts, there is no way for them to catastrophically fail. Third, there isn't enough radioactive material in them to do much damage in the impossible case they were to fail.

Quick digression: radioactivity gets a bad rap because of a few common misconceptions, so it's re-education time! Everything you see is radioactive! Color is simply a form of electromagnetic radiation in the range of frequencies we happen to be able to see... in other words, light is radiation. Heat can also be radioactive, which is why something "glows red hot." In fact, there is a whole construct called the electromagnetic spectrum, on which all radioactive frequencies are described. On this spectrum resides color (light), micro waves, radio waves, gamma rays, X-rays, and so on. Thus there is an important distinction to be made with different types of radiation, and it's very simple: there is ionizing radiation, and there is non-ionizing radiation. Things like light and radio waves are non-ionizing, which means there is no risk of cellular damage. You can think of it in terms of light: light can't penetrate a piece of paper (otherwise it would be invisible) much less your skin, and neither can many other forms of radiation. On the other hand, there are very powerful forms of radiation that can ionize. These compact rays of energy are so powerful and concentrated that they literally knock atoms out of molecular bonds, and this is a bad thing for we cellular/molecular creatures. A small dose of ionizing radiation will probably not have major effects, which is why it is considered ok to have an X-ray done every once in a while. A large dose of ionizing radiation will completely disrupt the cellular processes that allow a living thing to live, thus able to cause extremely fast death. However it is not even necessarily to be considered a negative thing, ionizing radiation--Carl Sagan postulates in Cosmos that the occasional radioactive wave that manages to penetrate the ozone layer may have been critical in the role of evolution, by knocking apart random pieces of DNA with possibly beneficial side effects. By analogy, we might imagine a lucky hominid named Peter Parker getting hit by an interstellar wave in such a way that he gains super-human, spider like abilities, making him an exceptionally viable reproductive candidate (all the ladies know Spider Man is hawt). Thus evolution could depend on cosmic rays for random mutation, with similar albeit far more subtle results. Amazingly, simple forms of life have been found that can repair cellular damage due to radiation. For one, this opens the possibility of anti-radiation medications, but this also means that were humans to wipe out most life on Earth in a global nuclear war And the ozone completely wiped out, other forms of life would continue despite the heavily irradiated environment, ionizing and otherwise.

Nonetheless, nuclear power is the only viable energy source for the very near future. And it can't happen soon enough, when you consider the amount of pollution from coal and fossil-fuel power plants... which is so extensive that nearly every body of water is severely contaminated by mercury, a dangerous neurotoxin. In case you don't know the connection, coal fired power plants are by and far the greatest source of mercurial emissions, about 50 Tons released into the air each year according to EPA estimates from 2000. I would much rather have spent nuclear material buried in my literal backyard than be breathing mercury. Let's get the ball rolling, folks!