Posts by Jim84

UK funds flying broadband stations with power beamed from below

Re: Airships?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/no-propeller-no-problem-this-blimp-flies-on-buoyancy-alone

Uncle Sam aims to help nuclear energy find its sea legs

Re: Why?

Large container ships use large amounts of fuel. Having a small but powerful lead cooled reactor on board would save a lot of money and pollution in the medium term.

Lead cooling is looking like a winner as the corrosion problems with molten lead and stainless steel look to have been solved with aluminised steels that form a protective Al2O3 coating. Lead has very high boiling temperature, so it doesn't suffer from loss of coolant reactions like current water cooled reactors do where the coolant water boils off. They are also easier to cool passively as the fuel and coolant can run very hot without boiling off the coolant, so you can use air cooling in an emergency rather than requiring water cooling and electricity to run the pumps for the water.

https://www.kth.se/en/om/nyheter/centrala-nyheter/study-explains-why-new-kinds-of-steel-needed-to-build-lead-cooled-reactors-1.1445534

DARPA looking for battery that could power a laptop for months

Fusion gets all the love

I don't know why fusion articles get so much press, when advances in fission nuclear could provide the same outcomes much more feasibly (okay, its because fusion articles get eyeballs and clicks).

Advanced composite moderators (e.g. MgO-BeO composite) may enable high temperature gas cooled reactors without the reactor vessel being the size of a light water reactor reinforced concrete containment dome due to the thousand metric tonnes of graphite needed for moderation. They'd also enable better versions of any other type of reactor design currently using graphite as a moderator such as molten salt reactors, or thermal spectrum liquid metal cooled reactors.

Gas cooled reactors could allow very cheap electricity and high temperature output heat for sulphur iodine cycle thermal hydrogen production. Basically all the benefits of a fusion reactor without the (unsolvable?) problem of needing materials super resistant to very high energy neutron radiation.

News about the potential of composite moderators that work better than graphite in a fission reactor just doesn't get people's attention.

Investors are going nuclear to keep UK's AI datacenters fed

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

> If you look at the world's total battery manufacturing capacity, China dominates with 6 TWh/y "announced" capacity to be online by 2030. As of now it is more like 2 TWh/y for the entire world's production, and China is polluting swathes of its land and abusing its people to try to get to that 6 TWh figure.

The UK uses between 0.7 and 1 TWh of electricity per day, and does not produce any batteries, and certainly could not afford to buy half the world's yearly supply of batteries just to give it a couple of days' dunkelflaute protection

This is why the future of transportation is probably eFuels (methanol) produced by nuclear/renewables and burned in interanal combustion engines or fuel cells. It is why car manufacturers continue to investigate the technology.

Bolt Graphics unveils Zeus GPU built on RISC-V and path tracing tech

Plus I believe Nvidia is using "AI" to interpolate frames/pixels. It is upping the framerate to 120fps from 30fps by guessing what half to three quarters of the frames should look like, rather than actually calculating them fully. This has been divisive among gamers for a while now.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Acceleration vs Top Speed

The Chinese (and everyone else) would be better off engineering trains that can accelerate faster up to 250 or 300kph, rather than ones with a top speed of 400kph.

The Shanghai maglev could get people from one of the airports to the city centre (if it ran all the way) in about 10 minutes. You'll see lots of videos of the internal speedometer hitting 400kph, and people assume this is why the journey is so quick. But it is the fact that it gets up to this speed quickly that cuts the journey time. I think the French TGV takes 15 minutes for a train to get up to 320kph.

Putting a linear induction motor in the track of a train with regular steel wheels could enable much faster acceleration and deceleration. A bunch of metro trains such as the Skytrain in Vancouver already use this technology. However they use it to cope with steeper gradients rather than to achieve maglev like acceleration.

Small nuke reactors are really coming online by next year, US energy secretary insists

Interesting proposal

One interesting idea for a smaller modular reactor is the direct cycle gas turbine reactor where gas passes from a core driectly through a turbine. All other reactors pass the coolant through a steam generator which then powers a steam turbine.

Cost savings would emerge as gas only turbines (as used in natural gas power plants) have lower maintenance costs than water to steam turbines (as used in current nuclear and coal fired power plants).

https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/Updated-engines-20201224.pdf

Moderator problems

A lot of the problems with smaller reactors not being cost competitive, and needing HALEU, comes down the use of water as a moderator (and coolant). As it boils at 100 celsius (under standard temperature and pressure) it is easier for water based reactors to suffer a loss of coolant accident. Extensive layers of safety systems are needed to mitigate this risk, but then those same layers are needed on smaller water cooled reactors, driving up the overall cost. Nuscale kind of gets around this, but still requires construction of a massive underground swimming pool.

Non water cooled and moderated reactors often need HALEU because without it they don't have enough neutrons to maintain a chain reaction without also having a massive core (like the graphite moderated British Advanced Gas Reactors).

Yttrium Hydride moderator may be a solution to this conundrum, offering moderation as good as water, but not boiling away in an accident scenario. Yttirum hydride moderated reactors would enable the use of other coolants such as gas, molten salt, liquid lead without the penalty of having to use a worse moderator such as graphite, or more highly enriched U235 HALEU fuel.

Of course Yttrium Hydride is not yet ready to go into commercial reactors, and could with some more government funded science to get it there.

US DoE taps federal sites for fast-track AI datacenter and energy builds

Could be helpful

This could help nuclear power by allowing some experimentation again. There are a lot of ideas floating around for ways to make reactors better and cheaper, but nobody is allowed to build even small test reactors without massive regulatory costs and time at present.

Some ideas worth trying:

- rather than having a molten salt reactor where the fuel salt is also the coolant, put the fuel salt in standard nuclear pins, and have a separate non radioactive coolant salt that is pumped around.

- moderate the reactor with Ytrrium Hydride.

- cool the reactor using heavy nitrogen gas, and pass it directly through a turbine to produce power without needing a heat exhcanger.

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

Yttrium Hydride

One of the challenges of molten salt reactors up till now was that they don’t have water in them. The hydrogen in water is the best moderator, and outperforms the carbon in graphite and deuterium in heavy water. All non water cooled reactors such as gas cooled, sodium cooled, lead cooled faced this disadvantage, often needing HALEU fuel which is higher cost than LEU.

But defect free Yttrium Hydride has now been synthesised and is being tested in the Transformational Challenge Reactor. This would allow non water cooled reactors to compete on fuel costs.

My personal favourite reactor is the type proposed by Rod Adams of Atomic Insights, the Nitrogen Gas Cooled direct cycle reactor where the nitrogen gas passes directly through a turbine without needing to pass the heat through a heat exchanger.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

Direct Methanol Fuel Cells are advancing

https://greenbuzz.gatech.edu/news/finally-robust-fuel-cell-runs-methane-practical-temperatures

"Either exorbitantly expensive fuel or insanely hot temperatures have made fuel cells a boutique proposition, but now there's one that runs on cheap methane and at much lower temperatures. This is a practical, affordable fuel cell and a "sensation in our world," the engineers say."

Fusion eggheads claim modeling fix for particle escape - at least in stellarators

Fission the real path forward?

Whenever I see one of these fusion articles, I can't help thinking that advanced fission nuclear would be a much better bet.

Rod Adams (of Atomic Insights) has been promoting the idea of using fission heat to run a direct cycle gas turbine to produce electricity since the 90s. The key difference between this and current nuclear is that the gas passes through the reactor core then directly through a turbine, rather than using a heat exchanger as an intermediate step to heat a gas (steam) that then passes through a turbine.

Doing it with helium gas has proved impossible as you cannot go out and buy an off the shelf helium tubrine. But if heavy nitrogen (N15) was used instead, it could be used with the turbines currently used in gas fired power stations (with a closed cycle where the gas is collected on exit and cooled with sea or river water before being put back through the core).

This would cost decent money to develop, but doesn't seem to face the daunting challenges that fusion must overcome.

Some fusion heads seem hyper concerned about nuclear waste (probably because they don't want to think about fission and just want to get on with what they are interested in). But if you are worried about this you could nick Moltex Energy's idea of sticking molten salt fuel in fairly standard fuel pins, and stick them in this glass cooled reactor. Molten salt fuels enable simpler cheaper reprocessing of the fuel as no longer need to obtain ultra pure plutonium and uranium in order to make solid fuel cermaics or alloys. As a bonus molten slats are excellent at retaining fission products in any accident scenario.

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

Heavy Nitrogen

Rod Adams (of Atomic Insights) had a proposal to create a heavy nitrogen gas cooled direct cycle reactor. The key advantage being that the gas just flows straight into a natural gas plant style turbine, rather than heating water into steam at a heat ex-changer. It never got traction. Part of the problem was probably that it would have used pebble fuel, which is expensive, and contains HALEU to boot I think.

The problem with any non water moderated reactor is that nothing is as good a moderator as the hydrogen atoms in the water. The British AGRs (Advanced Gas cooled Reactors) used graphite as the moderator, and the Canadian CANDU reactors used heavy water. As carbon and deuterium and not as good a moderator as hydrogen these reactors had to be absolutely massive to contain enough moderator to produce a decent amount of heat and electricity (without resorting to expensive HALEU fuel). But being massive makes them difficult to build and expensive.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently testing Yttrium Hydride as a moderator as part of its Transformational Challenge Reactor program. If this works you could have a small but powerful gas, metal, or molten salt cooled reactor.

Personally I would like to see a nitrogen cooled, molten salt in fuel pins, yttrium hydride moderated direct cycle reactor.

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

Blimps vs fixed wing

Blimps that fly by varying their buoyancy might turn out to be a better bet for communications or ISR than unmanned fixed wing aircraft:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/no-propeller-no-problem-this-blimp-flies-on-buoyancy-alone

https://lynceans.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Phoenix_R1-converted.pdf

Indian official reveals 'plan' to build a national mobile OS

The Inidan government could slowly bring in a ban on android apps that use google play services, so that apps would work on AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and invest some money in improving open source android. This would get rid of the network effect where app developers only develop for Google Play Services because that is where the users are. But this is also a pretty extreme measure to take, and I don't know what unintended consequences it would have?

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Re: What about the operational costs?

If you had next generation molten salt reactors with strong inherent negative temperature coefficients (if the reactor heats up for some reason the rate of reaction slows) you wouldn't need a team of PhD's watching the reactor and holding its reactivity down with control rods. in fact Moltex energy has a 40MW electric output design with "No moving parts". They still move the fuel rods around, but there are no pumps.

Amazon, Games Workshop announce Warhammer 40k film deal

How long before Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf are pkced up by Amazon/Apple?

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

The real problem is that there are only 2 mobile OSes.

No one will use any OS other than iOS and Android because they cannot get all the apps they want on them, and the apps available don't stay up to date. And without larger userbases developers have no incentive to port and maintain apps.

This is what killed Windows Mobile and Blackberry OS.

If bureaucrats try to legislate about what Apple and Google can do with their OSes, I suspect the companies will always run rings around the legislators.

Is there any realistic way to provide incentives to app developers on alternative OSes such as AOSP without large userbases? Maybe a government could make payments to a developer when a popular app ported to AOSP is installed and then used for a certain number of minutes across a certain time period? And could a government fund a bug bounty program to keep them up to date?

This probably wouldn't dethrone iOS and Android, but might provide a space in which innovation in websites and programs that are delivered through a browser can thrive without Apple and Google throttling any competive threats before they become popular.

Halo Infinite ups the nostalgia factor for fans of the originals, but it's not without limits

Nemesis

If they've got a semi open world it would have been interesting to see them nick the Nemesis system out of Shasow of Mordor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm_AzK27mZY&t=442s

It would be cool to have Elites that beat you level up and become base comanders. But then you'd need to stick some story device into the game whereby master chief can come back to life.

Even better would be if the UNMC soliders also leveled up and remembered you and each other.

Senators urge US trade watchdog to look into whether Tesla may just be over-egging its Autopilot, FSD pudding

Re: I am kind of surprised...

Yes, most cities (in the US at least) struggle to maintain the roads in their masses of car dependent suburbia, as these places don't generate enough tax/property tax to cover the medium term cost of maintaining basic metal roads after the original private suburban developer has left laughing all the way to the bank "We'll build the roads, sewers, pipes, you (the municipality) just have to maintain it...".

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Re: "Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

I think governments could prehaps legislate so that phone makers (including Apple) have to provide an easy "few click" options for the phone user to swtich to other operating systems (such as AOSP or Fire OS, or easily switch to an "unsecure/admin" mode where they can download what they want outside of the official app store.

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Re: Proper Generation IV reactor design

"a molten salt heat bank is not lightning fast load following since it will still be used to generate steam for a turbine.. unless they use flash steam...which no other power station to my knowledge ever has.

It will ramp up and down as fast as a coal burner, maybe even a CCGT, but not as fast as hydro.

A well manged PWR is almost as fast."

The speed of the heat bank is not the reason they are building it. They are building the heat bank so that the reactor can vary it's output without being turned off or run at a lower power level that makes no use of the expensive built assets, raising the overall cost of electricity generated.

Re: Go for it

It's a Sodium cooled fast reactor, with a solar salt energy storage system borrowed from the concentrated solar energy sector. Moltex Energy are also planning to use a solar salt energy storage system to vary the output of their proposed molten salt reactor.

Starlink's latent China crisis could spark a whole new world of warcraft

Starlink vs Blimp net

While everyone seems to be looking at Musk's shinny keys, a dark horse may be approaching:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/no-propeller-no-problem-this-blimp-flies-on-buoyancy-alone

tl;dr - Companies like Softbank, Google, and Facebook have been trying to build an ISP using flying wing drones for over a decade, but unsucessfully as they have durability problems. Blimps that fly via changes in bouyancy and don't need propellers could be a solution. By being closer to the end users Blimps could allow mobile internet on people's mobile phones rather than requiring a small satellite dish.

Just let this sink in: Capita wins 12-year £1bn contract to provide training services to the Royal Navy and Marines

Top down vs Bottom up

Why give a £1 billion contract to one company for the entire navy's training in a top down way (well because Captia has mates in the government who will get cushy jobs at Captia after being MPs).

You would be off better giving each navy member a credit which they can spend at the training company of their own choice, but are then forced to pass standardised tests. That would allow actual competition and innovation in the delivery of training to navy members. There are plenty of Universities and companies around that are quite good at training and use quite modern IT to do so.

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

Re: It is not about home prices...

Yes it is. If it costs your employees X amount more to live where your head office is without living in a tent then you have to pay them the extra or else they won't work for you.

The companies and employees are not the bad guys here, it is the local landlords who vote for politicians who won't allow more housing development so that they can extract economic rents.

Megabucks in funding, 28 years of research, and Boston Dynamics is to be 'sold to Hyundai' for 1/40th of an Arm

Fuel cell quiet UAV

You'd be better off having a quieter (fuel cell) UAV carrying a couple of precision missiles that soliders can laser designate onto a target (an annoying infantryman in a "defilade" position behind a wall or rock). This would give the infantry their own precision squad level airforce. The US military tired to get a counter defilade smart gun into the hands of its infantry with the XM-25 smart grenade launcher, but this turned out to be to much extra weight to carry. Really this drone would be a "flying backpack" for mini missiles that the soliders would never have to carry, you'd just have several or dozens or hundreds of such drones flying over an operations area.

There are drones that do this currently, but both the drones and missles cost far to much. Hellfire missiles cost 100k each, and even the man carried Javelin anti tank missles (now used to hit dug in Taliban in Afghanistan) cost 50k each. Maybe with new manufacturing and off the shelf parts missle costs could get down to $150 each (or whatever price level would make their use sustainable).

To get around the problem of the UAV noise alerting the enemy to the presence of the soliders, maybe fly a lot more (cheap) UAVs over a large area of countryside.

Android without Google – and yes it has apps: The Reg talks to founder about the /e/ smartphone

If Huawei joined that would be a real threat to Google who would then find some way to break this system (probably frequent changes to google play services that a small outfit or even a large one like Huawei cannot afford to replicate and maintain profitability).

The Google guy saying he supports this project is basically trying to look nice because he doesn't actually feel threatened by it.

H₂? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

Re: Storing hydrogen is an absolute pain

Yes pumping radioactive salt around pipes is not a great idea, as they will always leak, and when they do you have an even more difficult cleanup problem than with a sodium cooled reactor.

However there are two proposed ways around this problem. Thorcon and Terrestrial Energy both propose to use a pool type reactor in a can that is replaced every seven years (this is possible with a molten salt cooled reactor vessel as they are unpressurized and are not housed in a steam explosion resistant steel and conrete containment dome.

Moltex Energy has possible an even simpler solution of putting the fuel salt (a Chloride salt) in vented steel pins*, controlling corrosion by having a lump of zirconium metal in the bottom (to make the salt strongly reducing), thenhaving these pins cooled by a flouride salt in a pool type reactor. This gets rid of the need for an online chemical processing plant as the fission products just remain in the fuel pins which are removed from the reactor every few years like standard uranium oxide ceramic fuel pins in today's pressurized water reactors.

*Today's standard uranium oxide fuel pins have to be removed somewhat prematurely due to the build up of Xenon gas (a fission product) in them that prevents the reactor from sustaining a chain reaction, another problem is that that gas in the tubes builds up to about 60 atmospheres (I think). The Dounreay fast sodium reactor experiment in Scotland tried to deal with these issues by having a uranium metal alloy sitting in vented fuel pins (the uranium sat in liquid sodium inside a steel fuel pin). You wouldn't want to try this in water cooled reactor as sodium and water react violently, but in a sodium cooled reactor it isn't a problem.However as radioactive fission products of Cesium, Iodine, and Strontium are produced, the metals (which are gases at reactor temperatures) vented out into the sodium coolant outside, making it highly radioactive. In Moltex's design the Iodine is still reduced to a non volatile Sodium Iodide salt that stays in the fuel pin, but the Cesium and Strontium are converted into Cesium Chloride and Strontium Chloride non volatile salts that also remain in the fuel pins (precipitating Zirconium metal ZrCl + Cs > CsCl + Zr).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qJpVClxzVM&t=1164s

Re: Storing hydrogen is an absolute pain

John Bucknell (former SpaceX engineer) is proposing to use the 700 degree heat output by future molten salt nuclear reactors along with helium turbo inductor pumps (originally proposed for nuclear rockets) to produce 1000 degree heat and methanol cheaper per MWhr equivalent of today's petrol:

https://youtu.be/Q1Fi3BnwL94

IBM: Our AI correctly predicts onset of Alzheimer’s 71% of the time, better than standard clinical tests

Leucadia Therapeutics are pursuing the hypothesis that ossification of the cribiform plate with aging is a cause of Alzheimers:

https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2018/08/undoing-aging-doug-ethells-presentation-on-the-leucadia-therapeutics-approach-to-treating-alzheimers-disease/

Finding people at risk of Alzheimer’s and treating them with Leuicadias solution and then seeing how many go on to develop full Alzhiemers May work better than trying it on already mentally stuffed individuals who may be too far gone.

Transport for London data pilot: We want to keep tabs on dockless bikes and e-bikes

Re: I think all transport needs looking at.

You're in a small tank, they are on a bike.

GPS for every hire bike and more docks solves the dumped bike problem

With GPS on every bike and many more bike docks you could just fine the people who dump these bikes where they please.

Fining the company just creates what is known in economics as a "tradegy of the commons", the benefit of being lazy and not returning the bike/scooter to a dock accues to the user, but the cost of the fine is born by the company, and is passed on to all users via higher fees.

Many more bike/scooter docks would also reduce the incentive to dump bikes as one would usually be handy. TfL could even tax ebike hire companies a small amount per bike trip to pay for expanded bike dock infastructure. The hire bike companies would probably do this themselves, but get tangled up in negotiating with councils on where to put the things, and might try to lock rival companies bikes out.

It seems like this is where TfL is going, so good on them!

It doesn't solve the problem of a lack of proper bike lanes in London, which is more down to Thatcher splitting the Greater London Council back in the 80s (although having a single London Mayor is starting to reverse and solve this problem slowly):

https://youtu.be/gohSeOYheXg

Gamers are replacing Bing Maps objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator with rips from Google Earth

Re: Not just lower quality but appalingly out of date

I think MS should also have added the ability to map and photograph your own house and neighbourhood and add them to "Bing maps MSFS", maybe with a user rating system and even cash rewards? I don't know how hard this is to do with standard smartphone cameras or even prosumer cameras and drones?

Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK

Re: Or

Yeah but over 50% of transport energy use is not in personal cars, it is in trucks, aeroplanes, and shipping. For all of which there are no good non liquid fuel solutions at present (according to John Bucknell in the youtube video at least).

So insisting that everyone use electric trains/cars to commute does not solve or really dent the transportation contribution to CO2 emissions unfortunately.

Re: Or

The real way to decarbonise the transport sector, use heat from a molten salt reactor boosted to 1000 degrees to produce methanol from sea water cheaper than most gasoline. Former SpaceX engineer John Bucknell explains how:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Fi3BnwL94&t=25s

It probably won't happen in the West, but there are plenty of energy poor asian nations that will be interested in this.

Whoa-o BlackBerry, bam-ba-lam: QWERTY phone had a child. 5G thing's newly styled

The sliders never had decent keyboards

The Priv and all other sliders suffered from having keyboards with very shallow keypresses, they were a forerunner of the hated butterfly keys on the mac laptops in some ways.

I don't know how you could solve this problem without having either a gap at the bottom of the phone, to allow enough key movement, or an annoyingly big "lip" at the bottom of the keyboard. Maybe there is some obvious way to do this that my brain can't figure out. A lip that folds down when the screen is slid up?

One potential advantage - if you could slide the screen down to reveal a selfie camera (as well as up to reveal a keyboard) 100% of the front of the phone could be screen.

Even then, I don't know if there is much of a market for physical keyboards. If you want productivity on the go you'd be much better taking a bag and a ultrabook laptop or 2in1. Phones with keyboards fall between the two stools of "light entertainment device" and "productivity device/laptop".

The Surface Duo isn't such an outlandish idea, but Microsoft has to convince punters the form factor is worth having

Blackberry Passport 2.0

I bought a Blackberry passport for on the go productivity. I quickly realised that if you want lightweight on the go productivity, just buy an ultrabook instead.

OnePlus Nord is surprisingly fixable compared to earlier stablemates, but common repairs require disassembly

Back to the old Nokia days

I really wish some mid range brand like Nokia would produce a smartphone with a replaceable glass or metal back, separate replaceable metal sides, and an easily replaceable screen. Like a modern version of those plastic cases their candybar phones used to have.

It can't be that difficult to do can it?

Microsoft runs a data centre on hydrogen for 48 whole hours, reckons it could kick hydrocarbon habit by 2030

Re: Hydrogen is a solution and its own worst enemy

The best way to store hydrogen is the traditional way - attached to carbon.

How to make methanol cheaper than the energy equivalent amount of gasoline from seawater and the CO2 disolved in it using molten salt nuclear heat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Fi3BnwL94&t=272s

Rental electric scooters to clutter UK street scenes after Department of Transport gives year-long trial the thumbs-up

Lifestyle change

These e scooters, like bikes, are a lifestyle change as you are exposed to any inclement weather. But not everyone is fit enough for a bike, so they could be a welcome addition.

Still the UK government could do some good by actually giving the mayor of London the power to override certain councils (Chelsea and Kensington) that continually block the building of any bike lanes. Forget the rows about e scooters, there is no reason that London could not be like Amsterdam other than local politics.

If they built more bike racks near stations, as well as bike lanes, that would reduce traffic.

The issue of people leaving scooters everywhere is that there is no penalty for it at the moment, I suspect because a few companies are burning through VC cash giving consumers subsidies in order to try and achieve "scale" and market dominance like Uber has supposedly done (we are yet to see if this lasts). Maybe a small fine on leaving these things lying around could fairly quickly sort this behaviour out (rather than outright bans, surely cheered on by black cab taxi drivers and other vested interests).

Personally I'm in favour of bikes and more bike lanes for trips of under 1km, but Personal Rapid Transit pods hanging off thin rails in the air to get people out of cars for medium to long trips around the city (buses and trains take to long due to continually stopping, it shouldn't take me ~1 hour to get from Putney to Covent garden). Slow transit due to congestion in cars or continual stops on buses and trains limits the economic benefits of living close to others in a city.

Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon

SkyTran’s maglev PRT seems close

SkyTran are promoting a system of maglev pods.

www.skytran.com

They are promoting them as a solution to intra city transport, but they are probably more useful as a replacement for intercity trains, as their “track” is much lighter are therefore cheaper than rails or roadway (all those bridges). They also have more utility than a train as each two person pod can travel direct to the destination without stopping everywhere like a bus or train, or missing out on serving all the towns and villages along the route like an express train. The cheaper track allows more of a network getting things away from the negatives of “transport corridors” (getting the train then having to get further transport to your final destination).

The big technological hold up till now has been the need for at least automated car self driving at level 3 (driving on highways in any weather conditions) at a reasonable price (no 70k sensor array). You can control a couple of dozen trains via a centralised computer and communications network, but probably not 1000s of vehicles. Level 3 self driving should become a solved challenge soon (I’m skeptical about car AI ever getting to level 5 and driving on suburban streets where it has to make judgements about what people will do next).

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

Re: Flying taxis = wrong solution to right problem

With hanging pods inclines and declines can be very steep, even vertical, as the arm can rotate.

This means that elevated stations with elevators aren't needed in low intesity areas, lowering the cost of the system. Have a read of:

http://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/2010/04/twisted.html

Flying taxis = wrong solution to right problem

Congestion in cities is caused because the road network is largely 2D, with crossroads, and it is incredibly expensive to put roads in the air or underground in tunnels.

Podcars hanging from steel beams are effectively running on "roads" that are cheap to put in the air. So they can avoid 2D congestion due to crossroads like flying taxis, but without the noise associated with moving 2 metric tonnes of air down per second to keep the flying taxi/helicopter airborne.

A GRT/PRT system could allow nearly the point to point mobility and privacy of cars, along with the lack of congestion of flying taxis. Yes trains or buses with dedicated buslanes have less congestion, but in a journey of greater than five stops the time spent stopping at every station becomes significant.

One big impediment to Personal Rapid Transit systems so far has been the lack of an autopilot that allows the PRT pods to travel quickly, however with this tech being developed for cars, the time of PRT might be about to arrive. Probably around some newly built airport in the developing world (note Heathrows podcars are neither fast nor hanging (still require mini roads)).

http://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/2008/06/its-roads-stupid.html

Whoa! Google to power Amazon's internet. Wait, oh, not that Amazon. The other one. The rainforest

Afghanistan

I read an article about the Taliban forcing the national phone operator there to turn off cellphone towers before the election to limit the information available to people.

This could possibly be a solution to internet denial by the taliban.

Of course a better solution would be to legalise drugs in the West to cut off the billion dollars plus of funding they get from heroin each year (yes if you legalise drugs in the west price will go down and quality will go up and more people will die, but you'll have more police resources to spend on other areas and less arseholes like the Taliban and FARC sustaining inusrgencies off drug profits).

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: @steelpillow and ImAlrightJack

What killed private railways as profitable enterprises was the advent of the diesel truck and better roads.

In the early days the government had to force railways to take paying customers as they wanted to focus on freight. The government nationalized the railways to keep some form of commuter service going.

Incidentally it wasn't railways that killed canals. Canals were used alongside railways up until the diesel truck. Railways have stuck around because they are the only (partial) solution to moving loads of people around in congested cities.

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

Using hydrogen from reformed methanol in fuel cells now possible

It is always worth noting that late last year in China a possibly very important fuel cell breakthrough was made. By adding iron oxide nanoparticles to fuel cell membranes, the poisoning effect of carbon monoxide was removed:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/fuel-cells/chinese-catalyst-keeps-fuel-cells-clean

Electric cars can't cut UK carbon emissions while only the wealthy can afford to own one

I think it is about time The Register interviewed Kirk Sorenson about molten salt reactors.

Just produce methanol from seawater cheaper than petrol using molten salt advanced modular nuclear reactors, burn than methanol in petrol engines (modifing an ICE to handle methanol cost about 100 USD).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Fi3BnwL94

Or in highly polluted cities crack that methanol into hydrogen and CO2 onboard the vehicle and run the hydrogen through a PEM fuel cell. Carbon Monoxide produced from the hydrocarbon would poison the platinum catalyst in the fuel cell stack, but last year scientists in China figured out that adding iron oxide nanoparticles to the catalyst prevented this damage:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/fuel-cells/chinese-catalyst-keeps-fuel-cells-clean