Sunday, November 14th, 2021

Time	Event
8:34a	Could Electric Cars Save the Coal Industry? North Dakota has just 266 electric cars, the fewest of any state in America, reports the Washington Post. But the state's biggest booster for electric cars may be: the coal industry: The thinking is straightforward: More electric cars would mean more of a market for the [lower carbon] lignite coal that produces most of North Dakota's electricity, and if a long-shot project to store carbon emissions in deep underground wells works out, it might even result in cleaner air as well. "EVs will be soaking up electricity," said Jason Bohrer, head of a coal trade group that has launched a statewide campaign to promote electric vehicles and charging stations along North Dakota's vast distances. "So coal power plants, our most resilient and available power plants, can continue to be online...." In North Dakota, Wyoming, West Virginia — and in the nine other states where coal is the main fuel for electric power plants — electric cars will still rely on the combustion of ancient carbon-based deposits for their energy unless other sources of power come to the fore... [C]oal remains by far the main fuel for power plants worldwide, and a recent surge in its price suggests that demand is not waning. Without an intensive turn to carbon capture — a technically feasible but commercially unproven technology — electric vehicles may not be able to make that much of a difference in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... [A] carbon capture experiment at the Milton R. Young Generation Station adjacent to the BNI mine, devised by a partnership of scientists and the Minnkota Power Cooperative, could make coal more attractive in the clean-energy future — if it works. The idea, known as Project Tundra, is to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the plant's exhaust smoke, condense it and inject it into deep wells... Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil... If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, "it's opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite [coal] industry a way to survive." His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital... Clean-air advocates range from dubious to dismissive. The promise of electric vehicles wasn't that they would spur more coal mining — or oil extraction... And unproven though it may be, critics contend, the publicity surrounding carbon capture has created a false sense of complacency that world-changing solutions are just around the corner. The Post also reports that "the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture... " Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:34p	Cerebras Systems' WSE-2 Chip: 2.6 Trillion Transistors + 850,000 Cores = 'the Fastest AI Processor on Earth' SiliconANGLE reports on why investors poured another $250 million into Cerebras Systems Inc: Enterprises typically use graphics processing units in their AI projects. The fastest GPU on the market today features about 54 billion transistors. Cerebras Systems' chip, the WSE-2, includes 2.6 trillion transistors that the startup says make it the "fastest AI processor on Earth." WSE-2 stands for Wafer Scale Engine 2, a nod to the unique architecture on which the startup has based the processor. The typical approach to chip production is carving as many as several dozen processors into a silicon wafer and then separating them. Cerebras Systems is using a vastly different method: The startup carves a single large processor into the silicon wafer that isn't broken up into smaller units. The 2.6 trillion transistors in the WSE-2 are organized into 850,000 cores... Cerebras Systems says that the WSE-2 has 123 times more cores and 1,000 times more on-chip memory than the closest GPU. The chip's impressive specifications translate into several benefits for customers, according to the startup, most notably increased processing efficiency. To match the performance provided by a WSE-2 chip, a company would have to deploy dozens or hundreds of traditional GPU servers... With the WSE-2, data doesn't have to travel between two different servers but only from one section of the chip to another, which represents a much shorter distance. The shorter distance reduces processing delays. Cerebras Systems says that the result is an increase in the speed at which neural networks can run. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:34p	Can We Use Big Batteries to Power Our Trains? Research studying the possibility of electrifying rail-based freight "finds that the technology is pretty much ready," reports Ars Technica, "and under the right circumstances, the economics are on the verge of working out." It helps that the price of batteries have dropped 87% over the last decade: In the U.S., the typical freight car travels an average of 241 kilometers per day when in operation. So the researchers created a battery big enough to move that distance as part of a large freight train (four locomotives, 100 freight cars, and about 7,000 tonnes of payload). They found that lithium ferrous phosphate would let each of the four locomotives be serviced by a single freight car configured as a giant battery. The battery would only occupy 40 percent of the volume of a typical boxcar and would be seven tonnes below the weight limit imposed by existing bridges. Because of the efficiency of direct electric power, the train would use only half the energy consumed by an internal combustion engine driving an on-board generator... Using an economic measure called the "net present value," the researchers determine that switching to batteries alone would cost $15 billion. But taking the pollution damages into account turns the number into a $44 billion savings. Considering climate damages as well boosts the savings to $94 billion. Even if these damages are ignored, a rise in the price of diesel and allowing freight companies to buy power at wholesale rates come close to shifting the costs to neutral... [F]reight companies could use their capacity to provide grid stabilization services or sell back power when the price gets high. In extreme cases, this system could actually pay for the entire infrastructure. "Preliminary estimates of the most expensive 90 hours per year in the ERCOT [Texas] market, for example, show that batteries could be discharged at $200/kWh, potentially generating enough revenue to pay for the upfront battery cost in a single year," the study says. Special thanks to clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684) for the submission — and for also sharing "some general info about diesel-electric locomotives" and "some detail on the AC-DC-AC drive." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:34p	Have Scientists Disproven Google's Quantum Supremacy Claim? Slashdot reader AltMachine writes: In October 2019, Google said its Sycamore processor was the first to achieve quantum supremacy by completing a task in three minutes and 20 seconds that would have taken the best classical supercomputer, IBM's Summit, 10,000 years. That claim — particularly how Google scientists arrived at the "10,000 years" conclusion — has been questioned by some researchers, but the counterclaim itself was not definitive. Now though, in a paper to be submitted to a scientific journal for peer review, scientists at the Institute of Theoretical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said their algorithm on classical computers completed the simulation for the Sycamore quantum circuits [possibly paywalled; alternative source of the same article] "in about 15 hours using 512 graphics processing units (GPUs)" at a higher fidelity than Sycamore's. Further, the team said "if our simulation of the quantum supremacy circuits can be implemented in an upcoming exaflop supercomputer with high efficiency, in principle, the overall simulation time can be reduced to a few dozens of seconds, which is faster than Google's hardware experiments". As China unveiled a photonic quantum computer which solved a Gaussian boson sampling problem in 200 seconds that would have taken 600 million years on classical computer, in December 2020, disproving Sycamore's claim would place China being the first country to achieve quantum supremacy. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
9:34p	Increasingly Popular Ghost Guns Fuel an 'Epidemic of Violence', says NYT Untraceable "ghost guns" assembled from parts bought online "can be ordered by gang members, felons and even children," writes the New York Times. They call the guns "increasingly the lethal weapon of easy access around the U.S., but especially California," based on interviews with law enforcement officials in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco: Over the past 18 months, the officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes. The vast majority of suspects caught with them were legally prohibited from having guns. "I've been on the force for 30 years next month, and I've never seen anything like this," said Lt. Paul Phillips of the San Diego Police Department, who this year organized the force's first unit dedicated to homemade firearms. By the beginning of October, he said, the department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about double the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year. Law enforcement officials are not exactly sure why their use is taking off. But they believe it is basically a matter of a new, disruptive technology gradually gaining traction in a market, then rocketing up when buyers catch on. This isn't just happening on the West Coast. Since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide... There is a huge surfeit of supplies in circulation, enough to supply dealers who sell pre-assembled guns, via social media platforms or the dark web, for years. At the same time, the increasing availability of 3-D printers, which can create the plastic and metal components of guns, has opened a new backdoor source of illegal weapons for gangs and drug dealers who would otherwise have to steal them. "This isn't going away," said Los Angeles city attorney, Mike Feuer... Brian Muhammad, who works with at-risk young people in Stockton, said he recently asked a group of teenagers where they got their guns. "Did you drive to Vegas?" he asked, referring to Nevada's looser gun laws. They looked at him as if he were crazy. "Who would do that?" one of them replied. "You order them in pieces using your phone." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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