Via Silicon.com, “The Council for Science and Technology (CST) has named six technologies which should be in line for additional government funding. These are carbon capture and storage, disaster mitigation technology, low carbon electricity distribution, medical devices, e-health and plastic electronics.”

Let’s walk through the six and see if the IA components are strong enough to warrant their inclusion in Blindside.

Carbon capture and storage: It does not exist as yet, although the UK intends to pilot a project. The information element could be quite high–monitoring the state of whatever capture vessel is used will need to be accurate. A slow leak or a burst vessel could have high consequences. When they talk about the melting of the peat mass in Siberia (which would release large quantities of methane, 13 times more powerful than C02 as a greenhouse gas), nobody talks about the potential for a short-time frame release, which could have larger consequences than a gradual bleeding into the atmosphere. At any rate, carbon escape from a capture environment would kind of mean the whole project had been worthless. This would indicate a need for a SCADA system on steroids–assuming they sectioned off the capture area to minimise loss, monitoring pressure and inflows will need to be secure and accurate. I think this is a candidate for inclusion.

Hmm. I think I will tackle these in separate posts, to allow for separate commenting. Next up–Disaster mitigation technology.