Ok. I like the concept….thermal mass as short term heat storage/release is a well established science.

Sadly calling bullshit when they claim converting electricity to heat is 100% efficient. Nothing is 100% efficient.
They also claim 98% efficiency “pulling the heat back out”…unbelievably high.
Noticeably missing were heat loss rates, both for capture and storage over time…both expected to be extremely high at temperatures of 1500C.

The second system boasting 80% efficiency (but why burning wood?) is more realistic, but the only 3% heat loss per day at 500C temperatures claim is not. No insulation I’ve ever heard of is that efficient.

Recycling industrial manufacturing heat seems smart, but I think they need to be honest up front about the real world expectations and uses. If it could cut the energy needed to bake limestone or melt steel in half, that’s great…please don’t imply it could cut it by anything approaching 97%. That makes me not trust it at all.

A car would be a perfect place to shelter:

1. The windscreen blocks UV light.
2. A car isn't going to collapse on you.
3. The car has actual shock absorbers to absorb the ground shock.
4. The car isn't innately flammable and even has a thermal barrier in the paint, metal and insulation.
5. The car has a radio.
6. The car is mobile and can (to whatever degree roads are passable) get you out of danger.
7. The car has a trunk to hold containers of water safely (double-safely if they're inside an ice chest inside the trunk)
8. You can sleep in a car.
9. In any circumstance in which a car was destroyed by the blast/heat, you were fucked anyway.

No.

What kind of tolerances do you need to seal the chambers created by those rotors and then what happens to those tolerances from thermal expansion when the engine heats up?

Now ask yourself how you lubricate all of that and then notice the oil literally pouring out of the front seals of that engine.

All of those numbers are made up. Maybe someone did some creative theoretical napkin calculations but those numbers aren't based on anything that engine is doing.

*promote
Not a silver bullet, but a useful system where it's feasible. I would like to see home systems designed that could store home solar/wind/thermal generation for later use. Batteries suck, are expensive, wear out relatively quickly, and are usually not "green". Micro pumped hydro could eliminate distribution issues (a big deal in California where they shut down the grid during wind storms now), and decentralizes power storage/generation, eliminating a major terrorist target, the power grid.

I guess I've always thought the Tesla was using thermal imaging.

When it comes to flying, if you get it wrong it mostly leads to death. This is not something you learn by just doing. Even the wright brothers had a fair grasp of aerodynamic, thermal dynamics, and if they took to the sky how they would get down before attempting their first flights.

Frankly getting into the air is the easy part, the landing is the hard part. Thankfully the plane was small light but rigged enough that it didn't crumple on a hard landing.

Y-40 "The Deep Joy" pool first opened on 5 June 2014 and was designed by architect Emanuele Boaretto. It is 40 metres (131 ft) deep, making it the deepest pool in the world. It contains 4,300 cubic metres (1,136,000 US gal) of thermal water kept at a temperature of 32–34 °C (90–93 °F).[4] The pool features underwater caves and a suspended, transparent, underwater tunnel for guests to walk through.

Interesting to see the thermal imagery - although I am well familiar with the outcome. It would have been more interesting if they had done a similar experiment mixing water into sulfuric acid: this is something that we teach students never to do because the heat of solvation is so high that it can boil water as it mixes with the acid.

Oh certainly, there are definitely glaring flaws with Rogue One.

The biggest problem for me was how every character conveniently dies IMMEDIATELY as soon as their narrative purpose is done with. And strangely, every character seems completely ready to die in a way that makes the deaths fairly laughable.

Saw: "I'm gonna stare out this window and not even try to escape."

Bodhi: "I'm gonna close my eyes and not even try to toss that thermal detonator back out of the shuttle."

Baze: "Welp, my best friend is dead so I'm just going to Leroy Jenkins those Deathtroopers."

They missed major dramatic opportunities for each character death. Think "Saving Private Ryan" where each character death is meaningful. Caparzo disobeys a command to do something decent and gets himself killed. Wade dies because Tom Hanks wanted to do the right thing and clear the machine gun nest. Fish dies because Upham is too cowardly to climb the steps and fight. And none of those guys resigned themselves to death--they all wanted desperately to live.

A couple of other things that bothered me about Rogue One:

Why did Admiral Raddus take Princess Leia--a Galactic Senators daughter--into a major battle with the Empire, one which most Rebels were convinced was a trap designed to draw out the fleet?

Why didn't Vader just Force pull the Death Star plans out of the escaping rebels before massacring them all?

Why did the Death Star "miss" Scarif base and hit the ocean instead despite them showing it had pinpoint accuracy when blowing up Jedha?

All that being said, TFA disappointed me big time. It was just trying waaaaaaaay too hard to evoke the original trilogy. If I wanted to watch the original trilogy again I'd, you know, watch the original trilogy. And don't even get me started on Kylo Ren. I haven't wanted to punch a character in the face so hard since whiny Anakin from Attack of the Clones.

EDIT: To keep this on topic, I'm annoyed that Plinket didn't point out the actual flaws in the movie and instead focused on the "they didn't explain the Force" bullshit.

*ban

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Fun fact, most thermal paper receipts (the vast majority of receipts you'll ever touch) are coated with BPA.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/10/27/receipts-expose-high-levels-bpa/

Looking at the water temps for N Cali, it's about 10 degress C (or ~50f) in winter?

That's cold, but not unmanageable. Get yourself a good semi-dry wetsuit (including booties, gloves and hood), pair it with some merino thermals and you'd be sweet as.

What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?

I'm obviously talking Swahili here... What part of "do not have a choice" don't you understand? I don't get to set the tariffs or when the sun comes up, and batteries enough to load shift significantly in Aus are still in the 20-30 grand area. You are fortunate you live in a place where the energy company still allows you a reasonable price for the energy you produce. The acceptance you talk about is the same acceptance a hostage gives it's kidnapper when they have a gun held to their head... Perhaps you're even lucky enough to have multiple energy providers competing for your custom. In Aus, it's almost entirely single provider in the realm of electricity supply.

However, that's neither fucking here nor there when it comes to energy returns... Energy returned on energy does not once mention the word "dollars" or "money"...

A simple analogy would be using a thousand 200 dollar bicycles to pull a load or 1 200 thousand dollar prime mover. The bikes are cleaner, certainly, but once you pay the wages of 1000 people to ride them/feed them, give them accomodation etc (vs 1 guy in the truck), and then work out just how long those people can continuously ride, the cost of the fuel in the truck etc, the truck becomes the obvious answer. That's why we use trucks instead of team pulled wagons, they are just better suited to the task. The same counts for energy generation, we need a clean prime mover, and we're going to have to suck up the cost to do it. If we're going to save the world, we're going to have to make sacrifices in the form of paying more until someone invents clean abundant energy generation that is also cheap.

Your "double the return on coal" is completely unsubstantiated.

Of course solar PV is cleaner than coal, but you need to expend far more energy to generate 1 KW/h of PV energy than you do to generate 1 KW/h of coal energy... It's part of the reason why coal is cheaper than solar and why so much of the world still relies on it. Because people cannot see past their wallet to the bigger picture.

I would love if PV on roofs were the answer, just like it would be awesome if everyone could farm their own vegetables in their backyard. But we moved beyond subsistence living to mass production a long time ago because people realised it was a huge effort that paid relatively small returns. Residential solar PV is a convenient foil to keep people thinking that it's making a difference when we could be investing public dollars in to wind (more viable), nuke (more viable), solar thermal (more viable), wave (more viable), hydro etc. And a lot of those techs are probably going to be more expensive than solar PV. What did that Native American fellow say? 'When it's all gone to shit, will you eat money?'

Money being the only concern is what got us to where we are at the moment ffs... =)

While I am 100% on board with the "carbon bad, not carbon good, global warming = real, made by man and a real prick of a problem" message, the biggest fault made by people like Maher etc in prosecuting their case to the "sceptics" is reliance on bad information.

For example, the sums have been done on solar and wind, and generally speaking, wind is only borderline viable for supporting a society (and that's only if you don't add the cost of some form of buffering/storage). Solar, particularly home roof grade, is fucking awful, and essentially a waste of time compared to tracking mass production arrays. In terms of energy to build/install/maintain/remove, it barely pays for itself. Solar thermal is also more efficient (helios arrays etc), but the two best bang for buck technologies for producing massive amounts of power at a very low carbon cost are nuclear and hydro.

And they are two technologies that people seem to want to get rid of. Germany shuttered it's nuke capability after Fukushima (and added more coal capacity). Italy's solar market has fallen in a heap, France is almost carbon neutral only because it is predominately nuke powered. One of the original climate change warriors, Dr. James Hansen of Nasa, is fully supportive of nuclear power, and get's constantly lambasted by green types because they do not want nuclear power to play a part.

Refutation of solid science and willful ignorance is not solely the province of people who deny climate change, and it's no less deplorable.