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The Navy does a lot of this. They funded a program to make biofuels from algae.

But don't forget that the stated purpose of funded research is often a lie[0] and this is not necessarily viable outside the lab.

[0] You get other benefits from the research including subsidizing your national industry, training your workforce, doing research you're interested in with a more politically palpable purpose.

Few though, and only the largest ones and they have incredibly complicated and long (and dangerous - imagine having to deal with refueling a cyrogenic liquid after every leg) fueling.

Most rockets use hydrocarbons for this very reason.

Its so bad that only the largest space rockets use liquid H2. All the others use kerosene or the like.

Either way, the Soviets tried gaseous fuels in the 80s - See Tu-155. They ran on liquid H2, CNG.

If I recall, the weight increase didn't make it practical. On the other hand it was a turbine powered plane. It might work out with fuel cells (although you'd need a big and heavy compressor to run it)

The idea is that the sovereign can do nothing illegal because by definition it is the fount of legislation. Lawful, therefore, is whatever suits the sovereign.

In the UK this is neatly seen by the Queen being immune, and not needing any documents. After all, why would she need a document asserting that she gives herself the right to drive? She can just say so to the cop that pulls her over. Except the cop cannot pull her over if he knows she's the driver.

Even the constitution is subject to the sovereign, if you think about it, since it is meaningless without the sovereign but the sovereign is not meaningless without the constitution. It's a bootstrapping problem, after all. Why is the constitution valid just because a bunch of blokes signed it and one you sign is meaningless? Because they, the winners of the Revolution, the folks in charge of the militias, the de facto sovereigns at the time, signed it.

I'm not in this field (university friends are), but reactors require triple redundancy for their power supply, including the grid.

A better question is, should we have nuclear power at all? I took classes in nuclear engineering, by friends are nuclear engineers, ect. but it's not obvious to me that cheap electricity is worth it.

"If he's doing grid protection he's probably in distribution engineering and they would be pretty involved with a black start drill from as in they or the line crews with their boots on the ground as not all of that procedure can be initiated remotely I'd imagine."

And has a nosy son ;)

"In the event that there's a phase mismatch, I assume that gets physically transmitted back to the generating device?"

In case of phase mismatch, you have a short circuit and the weakest element along the short gets fried.

"The user is probably a transmission level grid operator. "

Close. My dad's a power engineer, specifically grid protection.

Lol. I'm a computational material scientist, so take everything w/ a grain of salt.

My dad's a power (line protection) engineer, everything I know is from talking to him.

I don't understand why BsAs temperature would drop just because the e got knocked off, or why it ceases to be an analog function after the cut :S

It's winter in Argentina now, so they don't have AC loads. TVs are small by comparison (Although it's fascinating to see how load changes during large games: you can spot commercials, for example!)

It isn't really though. A cascading failure can knock out an entire grid. The Northeast blackout is an example.

  A line goes out. 
  while (there some lines are still live):
    The current redistributes itself among neighboring lines.
    Neighboring lines trip
  end
  BlackStart()

BlackStart() is fun. Having your plants and grid down is like having a dead battery (plants use ~30% of the electricity they gen on themselves) and no one to give you a jump.

Usually the hydroelectric plants are started first. Arg. is lucky, they have a lot of those. Otherwise you need to fire up diesel generators (which hopefully have been maintained).

You give power to the grid first so you can start another plant.

Then you feed hospitals and continue firing the thermal plants.

Throughout all of this you have to keep phase stability (no grid, no phase reference). I'd assume this would limit renewable's use-fullness for re-start (a thousand 5Mw turbines out of phase are best left idling)

As a last step you turn on your nuclear plants (Arg. has a few). These are last because of nuclear poisons that accumulate from decaying wastes that weren't burned while the reactor was off.

It's a bloody hard problem.

Kinda of.

The courts are generated, and therefore subject to, the executive. It's easy to see how an executive could stack a court (a la Roosevelt). Or simply denying the courts the ability to enforce their rulings and doing whatever (Jackson).

Constitutionally, they aren't. But congress passed laws waiving S.I. in some cases.

Of course, laws can be repealed.

If it's a state university then, yes, they could claim Sovereign immunity.