SciTechDaily: Atmospheric river causes devastating landslide and 56 ft. tsunami in an uninhabited area of Alaska. Before and after satellite images captured the significant alterations in the landscape.
Multifaceted writer Cliff Slater dies at 91 I will always remember fondly and with much appreciation my friend, mentor, advisor and neighbor Cliff Slater who passed on January 20. He had a full and most accomplished life. He survived Hitler's V2 bombs in his native UK, hurricanes while crossing the Pacific Ocean in his boat, cancer, and decades of Hawaii's antibusiness environment. He was a very successful businessman, author of transportation books and articles (including one in Transportation Research!), had a regular newspaper column, and was an active participant in Honolulu's civics. RIP.
"The Charles Pankow Foundation has funded a study to assess parking garage safety in light of the heavier weight of electric vehicles compared to traditional cars. Led by researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Massachusetts, the investigation will evaluate whether current design standards for garage live loads, set at 40 pounds per square foot , remain sufficient." A standard US parking stall measures 18x8.5 ft or 153 ft2. The standard parking stall area times the 40 lb/ft2 weight standard yields a maximum of 6,120 lb or 2776 kg. A large US parking stall measures 20x9 ft or 180 ft2. The large parking stall area times the 40 lb/ft2 weight standard yields a maximum of 7,200 lb or 3266 kg. The largest light duty EV sold on the US is the Hummer EV by General Motors. It weighs 9,640 lb. Clearly, many of them parked in the same parking deck of a parking structure will pose a problem. However, the rest of the EVs on sale, as of end of 2023, as shown in th...
My article on Nuclear Fusion was printed in the Reno Gazette Journal on September 6, 2024 ; it is copied below. Nuclear fusion energy is possible —the sun and the H-bomb prove it— but the engineering part for achieving commercial energy production is complicated. Proof of concept models are very expensive, but several exist by entities such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, First Light, Helion Energy, National Ignition Facility, Tokamak Energy and several others. Earlier this year the Joint European Torus tokamak reactor near Oxford, England produced enough fusion energy to power about 12,000 houses; but it was a five second spurt using a tiny amount of fuel. The primary fuel, deuterium, can be readily harvested from the oceans, and the radioactive waste of nuclear fusion plants has a life of 50 to 100 years, compared to thousands of years for the waste from our current nuclear fission reactors. Can nuclear fusion power be sustained and scaled for mass, affordable production of...
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