Blog Action Day

So, apparently today is something called “Blog Action Day“, and this year the topic of interest is anthropogenic forcing of the climate system, and mitigating the potential thereof.

So, OK, I thought I’ll write a blog post about it. The day is supposed to be about action, as the name suggests, so let’s talk about specific actions, with a view towards making a significant mitigation, in a realistic way, of Australia’s anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.

Australia’s brown coal (lignite) fired electricity generators have by far the highest specific carbon dioxide emissions intensity per unit of electrical energy generated, since they’re burning relatively high moisture brown coal. They are the most concentrated point contributors to the anthropogenic GHG output. Therefore, these are the “low-hanging fruit” – a very valuable target to look at first and foremost if we want to make the greatest realistic mitigation of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions in a practical way, followed by black coal-fired generators.

Australia’s total net greenhouse gas emissions in 2006 were 549.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

If we look at the three main sets of lignite-fired generators in the Latrobe valley in Victoria, they represent a very concentrated point source of CO2 output, so they’re a very good case to focus on specifically.

In 2006, Hazelwood generated 11.6 TWh of electrical energy, and 16,149,398 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

In 2006, Loy Yang A generated 15.994 TWh of electrical energy sent out to the grid and 19,326,812 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

I’ll exclude Loy Yang B from this list for the moment, since its numbers are eluding me.

In 2006, the Yallourn power station generated 10.392 TWh of electrical energy sent out to the grid and 14,680,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

If you look at the the total contribution of just those three brown-coal-fired plants combined, you’re looking at 9.12 percent of Australia’s total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. If you replace those with clean technology that can deliver an equivalent electricity output, you get a 9.12 percent reduction in Australia’s CO2 emissions. (When you include Loy Yang B, I think it’s approximately 11-12%.)

That’s not a bad target for Australia to implement for the relatively short term for a real reduction in CO2 emissions. It can actually be done, if the real political will exists to do it.

Now, I’m not interested in this “100% renewable energy by 2020″ business from the extremist any-excuse-for-a-protest Socialist Alternative set, because it is nonsense.

Replacing all the coal-fired and gas-fired generators in this country inside 10 years (and presumably only using wind turbines and solar cells, not nuclear energy of course since it doesn’t fit their para-religious ideology)? That’s complete bullshit, of course, because in the real world it cannot be done.

There’s a difference between setting a challenging target and setting a nonsense target. Unless you’re only trying to implement a political bullshit stunt instead of actually trying to hit your targets.

Of course, you don’t just close down the coal-fired generators. You’ve actually got to build their clean replacements first. So what do you use that can realistically replace a coal-fired power station? Nuclear power, of course.

Now, again, to be realistic, we probably can’t build LFTR/MSR, PBMR/HTGR, IFR/PRISM or any kind of nuclear fusion based generation capacity on a large scale to generate grid-connected energy right now. That’s not to say that pilot-scale research and development on those very cool technologies shouldn’t continue, but right now, getting more nuclear energy on the grid means advanced light water reactors – or maybe heavy water CANDU-type things, or conventional sodium-cooled fast reactors maybe. The most practical thing for serious deployment in the relatively short term is advanced LWR technology. In the slightly longer term, there is certainly a place to be encouraging both Gen. IV and fusion.

To get the same amount of energy as the total output from those coal plants, as above, which we’re talking about replacing, we need 4.56 GW of installed nuclear capacity, assuming a 95% capacity factor.

With 4 x 1154 MWe Westinghouse AP1000s, with a 95% capacity factor, you’ve got 4.62 GW, which is a little more than what’s needed.

You can easily have four nuclear power reactors integrated into one nuclear power plant.

Now, how much does it cost?

On March 27, 2008, South Carolina Electric & Gas applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a COL to build two AP1000s at the Virgil nuclear power plant in South Carolina. On May 27, 2008, SCE&G and Santee Cooper announced an engineering, procurement, and construction contract had been reached with Westinghouse. Costs are estimated to be approximately $9.8 billion for both AP1000 units, plus transmission facility and financing costs.

That gives you an idea of how much a nuclear power plant costs today, in the current financial environment, in the current regulatory environment.

If we double that figure of USD$9.8 billion, it’s AUD $21.4 billion. There will be some saving since we’re considering building four reactors at one plant, not two independent two-reactor plants.

How much that saving will be, quantitatively, I don’t really know. If the cost is reduced by 30%, we’re looking at 15 billion Australian dollars.

How long would it take? If the real political will exists to do it, 10 years is heaps of time. We could probably do even more in that timeframe if we really, really wanted to. AP1000 construction takes 36 months from first concrete poured to fuel load, if you ignore any political protest rubbish.

This is really just a base-line relatively achievable “base case”. After this decade, of course, the rate of nuclear power deployment – and related GHG emissions mitigation – could foreseeably accelerate.

What about the uranium input? About 600 tonnes of natural uranium per year total, for all four reactors. Australia’s present production, off the top of my head, is something like 10,000-11,000 tonnes. Australia’s present uranium production can very, very easily provide for Australia’s total electricity production even without expansion of uranium production – again, considering the inefficient once-through use of low-enriched uranium in conventional LWRs.

What about the so-called “waste”?
Roughly 80-85 tonnes of used uranium fuel per year. 96% of that is unchanged uranium, so that 76.8 tonnes of uranium can be seperated and re-used. It’s just uranium, so it’s not going to hurt you.

The remaining 3200 kg is made up of the valuable, interesting and unique byproduct materials from a nuclear reactor – unique resources with all kinds of different technological applications, which aren’t all radioactive, which you cannot get anywhere else.

Anyway, that’s one scenario which I happen to think has a lot of merit.

Maybe you don’t agree – but if you don’t agree, I’d love to see you elucidate an alternative scenario which can deliver the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions mitigation – shown to be accurate in a quantitative way – within a comparable timeframe and within a comparable cost.

It will not be inexpensive, and it will not happen overnight – but I have yet to see any scenario which can honestly do the same job faster and cheaper, when some real quantitative analysis is applied.

Rocket instrumentation project (v0.2)

Thanks to Mike, and Andy, and Jon, and our other fellow hackers for their inspiration and advice and ideas and everything else. I just laid out a board, but I can by no means take all the credit for the project idea.

Unless otherwise specified, you may consider the hardware designs linked here as licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License.

I know EAGLE isn’t FOSS, so if you’re eally principled about not using any software that isn’t open, unfortunately you won’t be able to open those files. I haven’t learned to use gEDA yet. If you want to, by all means, feel free to re-draw the board and schematic layouts in gEDA, using the PNG images provided.

Schematic (moderately large .png)

PCB layout (moderately large .png)

EAGLE schematic file.
EAGLE board file.

That board design has everything routed…. it’s complete. Yay :)

i) Temperature sensor.
Here I’ve just assumed that we can use a DS18B20 to measure temperature; pretty simple really, just one microcontroller pin, and a 4.7 k pull-up resistor. We could of course have multiple sensors throughout the rocket and just bus them all together, and connect them all back to the one connector on the main PCB. There are other sensors we could use in theory, but the DS18B20 is common, convenient to use, and there is heaps of experience and documentation with regards to using it in the Arduino community.

I didn’t have a part library for the DS18B20, so I just put a 3-pin 0.1″ pin header on the board. You can simply solder the TO-92 package through that footprint on the board quite easily, or alternatively, you can stick a pin header on the board, and wire up the DS18B20(s) off the board.

ii) GPS.
Here I’ve just picked LS20031 5 Hz GPS from SparkFun, since Jon mention that’s the one he has experimented with.
It’s a 3.3V device, so we simply have a 1:2 voltage divider on its RX line to interface it to the 5V microcontroller.
I’ve just used a standard 0.1″ pin header footprint here, so flying wires can be soldered on to connect to the pads
on the GPS board.

Since the microcontroller on the Arduino only has one hard UART, a virtual soft UART needs to be used, and the performance that you programming gurus could squeeze out of that code will be the factor that limits the speed at which the GPS could be read. It’s not my department :)

iii) Light sensors.
Just two LDRs connected to two microcontroller ADC inputs, connected with a couple of resistors as voltage dividers. Pretty simple, really. The resistor values might need to be tweaked depending on the typical resistances of the LDRs used, but they should be pretty flexible, and 100 k should be about right, since we really only want qualitative information from them anyway. The LDRs can of course be mounted off the board on long flying wires, and mounted whereever they have to be mounted.

iv) Real-time clock.
I’ve just assumed we’re using a DS1307 here, and this is really just a very simple schematic which is needed to support this device. There are a couple of 10 k pull-up resistors on the I2C bus. You could use any DS1307 prototyping or development board, as available, for example, from Sparkfun or Microzed or Futurelec, to develop code for this, they’re all the same chip, and they all have essentially identical hardware.

v) Flash memory.
Mike mentioned the AT45DB61B, and that looks like the perfect device.

It has heaps of storage, it’s fast, it’s easy to interface, and it’s inexpensive. There’s nothing not to like with this suggestion. This is a 3.3 V device, however, but the datasheet says that the communications signals are 5 V tolerant, so there shouldn’t be any trouble with interfacing it. 2 Mb ought to be enough for anything (touch wood) but if it isn’t, there’s no reason why another chip couldn’t be added on the SPI bus.

Rockby sells the device in the CASON package for $2.60 AUD, and Sparkfun sells the same device in the SOIC package for $3.60 AUD. Since the latter isn’t far more expensive, and the CASON package looks like it’s a bitch to solder by hand, I have used the SOIC package :)

vi) RF telemetry.
Here, just for the sake of drawing the schematic, I’ve assumed we might be using an XBee device, although if you wanted to change the design to use, say, one of the DR3100 devices there wouldn’t be much of a change, they’re still 3 V devices, using bidirectional serial comms back to the microcontroller, so there really isn’t much difference. The XBees have a couple of LEDs to indicate their status, eg. that they’ve got a communication link to another device, so I’ve just added these in, since a few blinkenlights don’t hurt :)

Note that the XBee is a 3.3V device, so I’ve just divided the data input from the microcontroller down with a 2:1 voltage divider, which should be fine.

vii) Microcontroller
Here I’ve just assumed that a standard Arduino Duemilanove board is used. I’ve especially chosen the pins allocated for the I2C and SPI buses to correspond to the AVR’s pins for those hardware interfaces, although if these interfaces were implemented in software, any other pins could be used, really. There’s a reset button included, since the shield board blocks the one on the Arduino itself.

viii) Accelerometer and ADCs.
I’ve just assumed we’re using an ADXL330, and the LTC1298s as Mike mentioned, which is a cool idea.

I chose the ADXL330 pretty much arbitrarily, since it’s the first one I could find an Eagle library for, it seems pretty common, and SparkFun stock it. It’s the same 3-axis accelerometer as used, for example, in the Arduino Lillypad accelerometer board.

The Analog Devices ADXL345, with A-D conversion built in to the IC with only an interface to the microcontroller’s SPI or I²C bus needed, looks very cool though, and the price difference, once the cost of ADC chips is included, doesn’t seem that large.

ix) Barometric pressure sensor.
This is just a Freescale MPX4115, which seems somewhat common in UAV, model aircraft and rocketry work for altimeter applications.

I’ve put a bit of low-pass RC filtering on the output from the barometric sensor, using the component values just as given from Freescale AN146. I’m currently working out the maths to read out the altitude from the output from the barometric sensor, which isn’t that trivial.

ix) Power supply
I’ve removed the LiPo battery and SMPS power supply from the previous version, since we need a 12V battery for the video downlink anyway.

I’ve just assumed that 12 V is plugged into the Arduino’s power supply jack, and 5 V is coupled to the daughterboard via the Arduino’s pin headers. There’s a 3.3V regulator on the board supplying the 3.3V for the XBee and accelerometer and DataFlash, an LM1117 at this point, although you could swap it for some other kind of device that is available. It needs to be a low dropout regulator, though, since you’re taking a 5V input to regulate down to 3.3 V.

The Vin pin on the Arduino is connected to one of the analog input pins via a voltage divider, so that battery voltage can be measured by the Arduino. (I know, those pins are right next to each other, and this seemed like something of a sweet hack.) With those resistor values chosen at the moment, 12 V on Vin corresponds to about 4.53 V on the ADC input, so you can read it straight off. Actually, Vin won’t be exactly equal to the battery voltage, because there’s a polarity protection diode on the Arduino power input before that Vin pin connection…. so there will be a little drop across that. I don’t know exactly how much, maybe about 0.2 V for a Schottky diode, I haven’t empirically measured it.

Now, what to call this thing? “That Arduino based rocket instrumentation/datalogger project” is too much of a mouthful. So, we need a name.

How about, say, ARTEMIS. That is, Arduino Rocket Telemetry and Instrumentation System.
(You can totally see the experimental physicist in me reflected in that name, can’t you?)

That’s just my idea for a name. I’ll let the Hackerspace crew mull over it and come up with a better idea if they want to.

Bill of materials… for the design as it stands at present.

Resistors: (All resistors 0805 SMD package)

R1      4.7 k
R2      100 k
R3      100 k
R4      750 R
R5      10 k
R6      10 k
R7      100 k
R8      100 k
R9      56 R
R10     100 k

R11     56 R
R12     100 k
R13     150 k
R14     91 k

Capacitors:

C1      10 uF 16 V tantalum, through-hole                                       Jaycar RZ-6648
C2      10 uF 16 V tantalum, through-hole                                       Jaycar RZ-6648
C3      100 nF, 0805 SMD package
C4      100 nF, 0805 SMD package
C5      100 nF, 0805 SMD package
C6      100 nF, 0805 SMD package
C7      100 nF, 0805 SMD package
C8      1 uF, 25 V tantalum, through-hole                                       Jaycar RZ-6627
C9      10 nF, 0805 SMD package
C10     330 nF, 0805 SMD package
C11     100 nF, 0805 SMD package
C12     100 nF, 0805 SMD package
C13     100 nF, 0805 SMD package

ICs:

I've specified some examples of parts suppliers that I know have the relevant items, though they may not be the only choices, or the best choices.

IC1     Linear LM1117-3.3 LDO 3.3 V voltage regulator, SOT-223 package          Digikey LM1117MP-3.3CT-ND
IC2     Dallas DS18B20 1-Wire temperature sensor, TO-92 package                 Sparkfun SEN-00245
IC3     Linear LTC1298 analog-to-digital converter, DIP-8 package               Futurelec
IC4     Analog Devices ADXL330 3-axis accelerometer, LFCSP-16 package           Sparkfun COM-00730
IC5     Freescale MPX4115A barometric pressure sensor, 867-H package            Digikey
IC6     Linear LTC1298 analog-to-digital converter, DIP-8 package               Futurelec
IC7     Dallas DS1307 real-time clock, SOIC-8 package                           Futurelec
IC8     Atmel AT45DB161B 16 MBit DataFlash memory, SOIC-8 package               Sparkfun COM-00301

IC9     Arduino Duemilanove board
IC10    XBee module (any, really)
GPS     LS20031 GPS module                                                      Sparkfun GPS-08975

B1      12 mm coin cell holder, SMD                                             Sparkfun PRT-07948
plus CR1225 3 V lithium coin cell                                       Sparkfun PRT-00337
Q1      32.768 kHz quartz oscillator crystal, TC-38 through-hole package        Sparkfun COM-00540
S1      Momentary tactile pushbutton switch, through-hole                       Jaycar SP-0600
LDR1    Standard cadmium sulfide photoresistor, through-hole 0.1"               Jaycar RD-3480
LDR2    Standard cadmium sulfide photoresistor, through-hole 0.1"               Jaycar RD-3480
LED1    Standard LED; 3 mm through-hole                                         Jaycar ZD-0120
LED2    Standard LED; 3 mm through-hole                                         Jaycar ZD-0120

2 x 10-pin 2 mm header sockets for XBee module                                  Sparkfun PRT-08272
Break-away 0.1" machined pin socket strip for mounting LTC1298 ICs              Jaycar PI-6470
28-pin break-away 0.1" pin header strip for mounting shield to Arduino          Jaycar HM-3211

This is your new computational god.

This is Wolfram Alpha. And it’s omg-shit-that’s-awesome.

It’s everything that Google Calculator could have been but never was.

Getting the facts about vaccination.

It has been often claimed by anti-science pro-disease morons such as the “Australian Vaccination Network” and the likes of Jenny McCarthy that “parents aren’t getting the facts” or that “the information isn’t being made available” to parents regarding paediatric vaccinations.

In response to them, I give you this detailed guide prepared by the Australian government in response to common concerns promulgated by the anti-vaccination lobby.

Whilst this guide is prepared for an intended audience of GPs and healthcare practitioners, there’s no reason at all why it can’t be made available to all parents and the general public today. It is packed with plenty of information to give anyone a good basic understandings of the realities of vaccines, and anti-vaccine myths. Sure, it does contain some technical medical language in places, but it’s mostly quite accessible – and if there’s anything in there you don’t understand specifically, just ask your GP or medical professional about it.

(Hat tip to Dr. Rachie for originally posting this :) )

Extraordinary Clocks and Watches.

This is really neat.

I love weird and unusual (mechanical or electronic) clocks and watches. Here are some more:

Nerdy clocks.

What the hell?

Cathode Ray Tube clock. It’s gorgeous.

An old badass-looking electromechanical binary register display from a Minuteman I missile guidance computer turned into a binary clock. Duck and cover!

The nixie tube watch. Apparently you get in trouble if you wear it at the airport.

I love this seven-segment bookshelf clock.

LED clock with individual digits. This is really cool, but it’s a shame each digit is tethered to a cable. With inexpensive 433 MHz digital transmitter/reciever modules and microcontrollers, you could make it completely wireless pretty easily.http://suck.uk.com/product.php?rangeID=79&showBar=1#

Finally, this post wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t put in a plug for the extraordinary Clock of the Long Now.

Not quite the zombie apocalypse after all.

“Swine Flu” death toll downgraded vastly; media clearly disappointed.

As the disease spreads around the world, the death toll in Mexico has been downgraded from over 100 to just 19.

“It would be good news for the world if this flu turns out to be less serious than originally feared,” Ms Roxon told reporters.

Nom noms :D

I cooked some garlic prawns the other day; good Friday is a nice time to laze around the house and do some cooking. Plus, on Thursday night, there were some fantastic bargains at the shop. These green prawn cutlets, already deveined and without heads, were $15/kg. Praise Jesus for his gift of heavily discounted seafood.

Unfortunately I didn’t get too many photos of these, since my camera was acting funny.

Along with a whole load of garlic, the prawns were marinated in olive oil and a little bit of chilli flakes prior to cooking, and garnished with a bit of parsley at the end of cooking.

Also, some lovely steak.

These steaks were marinated overnight in olive oil, plus a tiny bit of garlic and chilli and parsely left over from the prawns and a touch of red wine vinegar. Since they were uncovered in the fridge, they’ve gone a little bit brown on the top instead of red.

I’m not yet willing to risk trying this steaks-in-the-oven thing, because I’m not sure if my frypan would be compatible with that and I don’t have an oven pan.

I already ate one while cooking the sauce. :)

I tried cooking a pepper sauce; it wasn’t perfect. There were little bits of carbon burnt crap floating in the sauce, left over from cooking the steak, from the marinade juices caramelising I think.

I searched everywhere in the supermarket to try and find some green peppercorns, but I couldn’t find them, so I tried using regular black ones instead, which wasn’t as good, because they’re so hard.is

Get bent, you bigots.

Nobody I know has ever removed, vandalised or defaced any of the numerous things always posted up or chalked up all over the campus by the innumerable Christian and other religious groups. Not even the anti-abortion posters.

Yet, somehow, as soon as a small body of people who see things differently on the campus want to make themselves known, when there’s an entire week they’ve dedicated to religious proselytisation all over the campus, they seem to think that this behaviour is acceptable. Well, clearly we’ll just have to increase the number of quotations significantly, if that’s the way they’re going to behave. Theism and blind faith doesn’t have a monopoly over the campus.

“Faith” means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Do you doubt? Yes, I proudly do.

I’m not entirely sure what they were trying to say here.

More vandalism.

You don’t see the mean old intolerant skeptical secularists defacing this, now do you?

Just in case anybody was wondering…

It’s 139.38 meters.

Don’t you people have to go to class?

Those pesky National Union of Students lobbyists seem quite active on campus this week, much like gnats or mosquitoes, but with legs and you’re not allowed to smack them with a newspaper.

So, let me get this straight. They demand more government income support for students, less strict requirements with regards for independance assessment for Youth allowance and the like, right? OK, fair enough. But, at the same time as they’re suggesting that students are so hard off and living in poverty, they demand compulsory student unionism, which means very large compulsory fees for students, for minimal gains.

Now, I’m sorry, but that’s just complete bloody non sequitur.

They demand more events and activities for students, but at the same time, there won’t be any activities or bands provided by the MUSU activities department in semester 2*, because the radical leftists in the student union have taken the entire budget that was earmarked for those in semester 2… and decided to give it all to the NUS for them to squander it as they see fit, with no accountability to any of the students.

(* This is what I’ve been told by a credible, politically non-partisan source within the student union.)

And there’s those bloody Solidarity folks. Don’t get me started on the Trotskyites.

Amongst other things, they call for 100% renewable energy for Australia by 2020.

They really, really ought to stick to the literary criticism and feminism studies.

In 2007, Australia’s total electrical energy consumption was 242,864 GWh, of which 14,722 GWh (6.1 %) was from hydroelectricity, 6,240 GWh (2.6 %) was from solar, wind and geothermal combined and 221,902 GWh (91.4 %) was generated by burning fossil fuels. (That adds up to 100.1% because I’ve rounded the percentages to one decimal place, of course)

In order to accomplish the dreams of our Red friends, we’re going to need to deploy the new additional capacity for 221,902 GWh per year of energy generation from “renewable” sources, within 11 years. (Well, that is only 2.2 five year plans, I suppose.)

Suppose we build wind turbines. One wind turbine with a nameplate capacity of 2 MW and a capacity factor of 30 % generates 5.26 GWh per year. Therefore, we’d need 42,191 wind turbines. If we build 42,191 wind turbines in eleven years, we’d need to build and erect one new wind turbine… every 2.3 hours. For eleven years.