Dr. Paul C. Murray, PhD, Physics's Page
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- Are you interested in becoming an organizer in your area?
- Yes
- Tell us about your experience with alternative energy:
- Mr. Pickens has started a wonderful movement for our Country to follow. I am keenly interested in alternative energy.
I feel my best contribution and many others is to urge larger LOCAL facilities such as schools and municipal government complexes and larger commercial facilities to conserve energy. Urge CoGeneration for electricty, heat and A/C all in one, heat pumps, even changing bulbs to CFLs. etc. Many small contributions will add to lots of saved energy.
Paul
- What excites you about this campaign?
- What excites me most is Mr. Pickens has put forth a real plan which has the potential of significantly reducing our dependence on imported oil and coal energy. And he says he will not only propose but ACT on it!
- What do you want to do to help?
- Voice support for the Pickens plan. Urge local larger facilities to conserve energy by suggesting specific ways to decrease energy use.
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Thank you for your continued interest in ETT safety issues. You might benefit from reading the patent document on www.et3.com before making further guesses about imagined ETT risks, (as the patent has already disclosed many ways to mitigate such risks). For instance the patent document discloses ways to flood the entire tube with air if such an event is sensed. The air is admitted at such a rate that aerodynamically slows the vehicles at a high but survivable rate, and greatly cushions any collisions that might result from such an unlikely event. Our detailed analysis (not in the patent document) shows that the relative risk of ETT compared to HSR both operating at the same capacity, and design speed, show ETT to be less than 1/30th the lilelyhood of death as HSR.
Chances are that if you put your intellect to it you could discover risks that we have not yet addressed, AND also low cost ways to mitigate those risks that you might be able to imagine.
The bottom line is that ETT promises to be much less risk, AND much lower cost than other modes at the same level of service.
I am not concerned in the slightest about GW. There are far greater concerns. IMO, as proven over the last 23k years (since the last glacial period lasting 100k years) GW offers far more benefits than risks. The rate of GW was 15 times greater 15k years ago than today, AND the earth is about 2deg below the likely average of the last 4.5b years.
If GW, is AGW, i say that is fine, it is making the world a better place -- let's continue to cause GW. If it i not human caused, there is little we can do about changing it even if we wanted to.
Paul,
Thank you for your question, it often comes up. I suspect you are really concerned about safety instead of actual collision dynamics, so i'll address both issues.
In the first place, ETT removes almost all opportunity for collision. Most transportation collisions result from: failure to preserve the integrity of the right-of-way, and/or failure to properly control the vehicle of transport. Also secondary contributing factors are drastically reduced or eliminated -- ETT has no critically stressed moving parts, no reliance on electrical power supply for levitation, the tube isolates the vehicle from substantially all environmental variabilities and forces. Cargo transported through the thousands of miles of pipelines in the US prove that ton-mile losses for pipelines are less than 1/100th as much as for rail or truck transport of the same materials.
In the extreamly unlikely event of a sudden complete tube breach (by a metor for instance), the KE (kenetic energy) of a fully loaded ETT capsule at 350mph (the design speed target for initial ETT systems ) is about 3/8ths of the KE of a 40t truck traveling 70mph on the freeway. The KE of a capsule at 4k mph is about 50 trucks! So not much chance for survival "in the event of a collision" (just as with any vehicle moving sufficiently fast enough to have the potential for decelerations greater than can be survived.
The bottom line is that it can be reasonably shown that ETT safety will be at least an order of magnitude improvement in transportation safety.
I just finished watching the PBS program on Global Dimming. Rerun or update? In any case it's pretty scarry! Models say removing particulate polution, which cools the earth, can increase warming by 50%. Another reason for great urgency to promote the PickensPlan. I'm off to see your page.
TRANSPORTATION is the master key to basic survival, and the cornerstone of the economy. We all know that transportation presently depends on oil production, and oil production is peaking. We must focus first on transportation – it is the highest priority. The PickensPlan to transition vehicles to natural gas is a great start toward 100% energy independence, but is a stop-gap measure till we can transition to all electric transportation. Electric energy is strained without adding transportation demands; so we must focus on drastic efficiency improvement.
Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) is a patented technology where travel occurs without air friction or rolling resistance (like “Space Travel on Earth”); ETT can accomplish 50 times more transportation per kWh (or carbon credit) than electric cars or trains. ETT is silent, low cost, safe, faster than jets, and is electric so it can make maximum use of wind or PV power. I invite you to visit my page to learn more about ETT