It is not surprising that there are delays because the 787 is Boeing's first aircraft made mostly of composite materials. The investment in new equipment and processes is huge.
Fusion will not solve our energy shortage problems in the short-term. The first fusion plant won't be ready until 2035 (assuming a stable economy still exists at that time).
I believe we will run up against the limits of fossil fuel production (specifically oil and natural gas) long before then.
Will the US electric grid support the added load of electrified transport? Recent deregulation of the power industry has left the transmission infrastructure starved for investment. Brownouts and blackouts may occur more often even without electric vehicles.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3934...
I hope the Masdar City project is successful. Oil wealth and energy has allowed population levels in the middle east to balloon to unprecedented levels (in one of the harshest environments on this planet), but sooner or later oil production will dwindle and they'll find it impossible to sustain...
With the Prius there is a technique where the accelerator is pushed only slightly, resulting in the IC engine staying off and the car running on electric only. It's also possible to install a switch to turn off the IC when desired.
Although the capacity of the Prius batteries is small, very...
Once we reach the stage where diesel fuel is no longer cheap, will we be able to afford a massive infrastructure changeover towards electric transport?
Diesel-electric locomotives dissipate braking energy as heat because there's no easy way to store it. There are many possible storage methods such as batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels, thermal storage using molten salt, etc., but given the relatively low cost of diesel it's much easier and...
"Fear of that nonsense being reapplied has pretty much stopped the industry from taking risks and new fields are not being discovered fast enough. Is it because we've decided that "it's too hard" to find new oil and gas in the GOM, North Slope, or Gulf of Guinea? Probably."
Oil prices are now...
The free GNU Octave is mostly syntax-compatible with MATLAB. Version 3.0 which is many years in the making was just released in December. There are binaries available for Windows, OS X and Linux among others.
